by David Drake
“Yes, Sharina,” he said, smiling but too embarrassed to look straight at her. He stepped a little to the side, his hands spread on the shaft of his quarterstaff. “This is my business, I think.”
The net drew tighter. Franca shouted.
“There’s peace even for Him,” Sharina said. “If only—”
“No,” said Ilna; coldly, quietly. “Not this one. End it, brother.”
“She’s right, you know, Sharina,” Cashel said sadly. “She really is.”
“Death!” Franca cried. “Death and destruction and—”
Cashel rammed the quarterstaff home. All his strength was in the stroke. Franca disintegrated into dust motes swirling in eternal chaos.
Sunlight and flowers swept across the world. Sharina stood, linking hands with Her friends.
THE SHOCK OF the rain and scourging hail stunned Garric for an instant. He felt the soldiers around him hunch also; they were tired, bone tired, and the hammering cold tightened their bruised and strained muscles. It’s too much.
“Haft and the Isles!” Carus bellowed through Garric’s throat. Technically it wasn’t the right war cry, but it was the right one for this moment. “Let’s finish these bloody rats, troopers!”
Garric strode down the slope, swinging for the face of the leading rat man. The beast got its sword up in time, but Garric’s long wizard-forged blade sheared it and the rim of the rat’s bronze cap on its way to the brain beneath.
The rat fell. The royal army surged ahead—hacking, stabbing and shouting a variety of things. The former cavalrymen used the Ornifal war cry, “Forward the Ea gle!”
The storm vanished, driven back on a brisk north wind. In the clear air Garric saw that the slope ahead and the hills beyond to the horizon were covered with swarming rat men. There were too many to kill, too many even if they’d been a forest of birches and there was nothing to the business but chopping.
The wedge staggered forward, one sword stroke at time. Garric and the army would go on as long as they could. That was all that mattered. Scholars could discuss the battle in the future, if there was a future for human beings. This was soldiers’ work.
A rank odor swept southward on the breeze. Garric chopped backhand to crush a rat man’s skull with the pommel of his dagger. The blow missed, because the rat fled with a terrified squeak.
Garric stumbled, twisting left to keep from sprawling. He’d been counting instinctively on the stroke to balance him. He was wide open to the nearest pair of rat men. They could chop high and low, at his neck and his right ankle, and he could only block one.
But those rats and more rats in a wave spreading southward were running. All the rats were running. The dark-furred mass turned like barley bending away from a storm.
Garric fell to his knees. He’d kept going on willpower; his body had been played out long before.
He was gasping. He tried clumsily to push his helmet off without letting go of the dagger in his left hand. He’d forgotten about the chin strap. Even after he remembered, he couldn’t force himself to drop either of his weapons.
The rats fled in panic. Their swords lay where they’d stood, and they’d thrown away their helmets and breastplates as they ran. They littered the hillside with equipment all the way to where the Emperor of Palomir and his wizard stood.
Garric looked back. Tenoctris stood on the hilltop, chanting with her arms spread. The smoke mounting from her cart swirled above her into the figure of a giant weasel. The beast’s harsh musk swept across the battlefield.
The weasel opened its mouth in a rasping shriek. Despite Garric’s exhaustion, the sound brought the hair up all over his body.
He got to his feet. “Come on, troopers!” he croaked. “Let’s finish this now!”
Carus chuckled. “It’s never a bad idea to keep a sword in your hand,” he said. He was probably joking; but he was Carus, so maybe not.
Garric started up the hill. Once he got moving, it was bearable. This close to the end, it would’ve been bearable if he’d been barefoot and running over swords.
He grinned. It felt good to grin, though the rat-blood caking his face cracked and pinched his skin. It wouldn’t be long.
The Palomir wizard dropped his athame and turned to run. The emperor leveled his sword at him and said, “Stop them, Salmson! This isn’t supposed to happen!”
The wizard shouted, “Run, you fool, it’s all over!” He dodged past; the emperor stabbed him through the ribs from behind. He tumbled on his face, coughing bright blood.
“This isn’t supposed to happen!” the emperor repeated as he turned. “I am Baray, Emperor of Palomir!”
He wore full armor and he’d been merely watching while Garric and his men fought their way through a landscape of rats. But—
Carus laughed. Garric thrust over the shield and in through the open visor. Teeth clicked as the point drove through the brain of the late Emperor of Palomir.
The sun shone on the grass, and the scent of flowers washed the breeze clean.
Epilogue
ILNA WAS WEAVING in shades of gray. The pattern was subtle, perhaps too subtle for anyone but herself to really see, but everyone could feel it.
She smiled: it was attractive, very attractive. And if that was boasting, well, it was still very attractive.
“Dear heart,” said Chalcus, “you should put in some color. People like color.”
Ilna looked at him, though she continued to work. His smile waked a smile from her too, as it always did.
“There’s color enough in life,” she said. “Here there should be peace, which the living see little enough of.”
“Chalcus is right, Ilna,” said Merota, snuggling closer as she watched the fabric grow. “A little color.”
“Tsk!” said Ilna, but she thought about the problem. There were ways to keep the pattern whole but, yes . . . to add a little color. If you were good enough, of course.
“There’s never been a better weaver than you, dear heart,” said Chalcus.
The Sister smiled as she wove. Her fabric showed touches of color, now; just a little color.
CASHEL STOOD WITH his back to the ilex, watching his flock as it wandered. He rubbed his shoulders on the rough bark, then shifted so that he didn’t neglect any of his charges.
Duzi, but the silly things some of them got up to! But that was all right; that was what people did. A good shepherd didn’t meddle except when he had to. The flock wouldn’t thrive if you kept pestering it.
At the end of the day, there’d be Sharina. Cashel smiled wider. There was always Sharina.
Until then, if a sea wolf wriggled out of the waves, well, it’d find the Shepherd standing in its way.
SHARINA SMILED to think of Cashel as she checked the furnishings of the inn. They were already in order; or anyway, as much in order as they could be with people.
“I wouldn’t call it order,” said Burne critically. “Tumblers would break their necks if they were as sloppy as most people.”
Sharina laughed. “People aren’t statues to be set in place and polished,” she said. “But they deserve to be treated decently.”
She thought for a moment and added, “People ought to be comfortable, too.”
The rat sniffed. “Coddled, you mean.”
Sharina shrugged. “There might be other opinions on what’s a reasonable degree of comfort,” she said. “But mine is the one that counts here.”
“Well, I don’t say but you might be right,” admitted Burne. He hunched, then hopped to her shoulder.
Sharina looked the house over yet again, still smiling but with a critical eye. One more thing.
She spread her hand. Flowers sprang up, growing even from the walls. Cashel liked flowers. That would’ve been reason enough even if she hadn’t loved them herself.
The Lady smiled at Her house. She was well pleased.
THE SERIAN ENVOYS insist they must speak to His Majesty personally rather than through an intermediary,” Liane said in a carefully
neutral tone. “Even if that intermediary should be his consort Lady Liane or Lord Reise.”
The sun was barely up, but artisans were already at work on the new Temple of the Great Gods. They weren’t just the laborers constructing the temple itself, but also the skilled workmen erecting the three cult statues, which would be too big to bring in after the building’s shell was complete.
Each of the Great Gods was the responsibility of a separate sculptor. The three men were present, using lamps to make out the details of the armatures their subordinates were clamping together.
A section of Blood Ea gles stood nearby. The men were alert but not on edge. There could be trouble—
“There can always be trouble!” said Carus.
—but they no longer expected it.
Garric laughed. “The Serians are a polite people, as I recall,” he said. “We could tell them that they are being notably discourteous in presuming to dictate the actions of a monarch in his own capital. On the other hand, I could simply talk to them. What is it they want?”
Across the plaza, workmen walked up the steps on the outside of a crane’s twenty-foot wheel, using its leverage to sway a portion of the architrave into place. The crane’s beam squealed as it straightened with its load. The foreman of the specialists waiting on the transom to make the fine adjustments shouted directions to the crane operator.
“Unofficially, what they want is to remain independent,” said Liane, allowing herself a smile. “Though of course they can’t discuss the matter with anyone but you.”
Garric shrugged. “The Serians have never been a problem to their neighbors, not so far as I know,” he said. “I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t remain outside the kingdom. Do you?”
“There are questions of trading law,” Liane said.
“Particularly jurisdiction over mixed cases, that is where a Serian and a royal citizen are on different sides of the dispute.”
Garric looked up from his sheaf of architect’s drawings. “The Serians have been trading with the other islands for years,” he said in puzzlement. “Centuries, I suppose. Why should there be a problem now?”
“In the past, each island had its own arrangements with the Serians,” Liane said, taking a codex out of her traveling desk but not, of course, opening it. “There’s wide variation.”
Garric frowned and started to speak.
“Which will cause problems within the kingdom,” Liane continued firmly, as though she hadn’t noticed her prince and husband’s intent. “Now that there’s real unity.”
Smiling, Garric went back to the drawings. “Give it to Tadai to sort out and bring me a recommendation,” he said. “Royhas has his hands full with taxation.”
“A committee under Lord Tadai, you mean?” Liane said, knowing full well that he didn’t.
“I could sort it,” said the ghost in his mind, joking but not entirely. In life Carus had found administration frustrating, and death hadn’t given him patience.
“No,” said Garric. “But put in someone you trust—one of your father’s trading colleagues, perhaps—as Tadai’s deputy. I have full confidence in him, but like the rest of us, he’s capable of being self-willed.”
He grinned. “Tadai’s not,” he added, “as likely to lop somebody’s head off as some of my trusted advisors are, though.”
The sun fell across the rising temple. The proportions were strikingly right even in this incomplete state. “It’s going to be beautiful,” Garric said. “It’s beautiful now.”
“The Dalopans will insist on independence too,” Liane said. “They would have even if you didn’t grant that right to the Serians. Though nobody in Dalopo was orga nized enough to send envoys, of course.”
Garric snorted. “Freedom to a Dalopan means a chance to loot his neighbor. And then eat the prisoners as well, if he’s feeling peckish. Dalopo will have a military commissioner and enough soldiers to make sure the survivors learn to do what he says.”
Garric put his arm around Liane. They were in public, but at the moment he didn’t care. “It isn’t perfect,” he said. “But it’s pretty good. And with the help of the Gods, we’re going to make it better.”
He glanced down at the drawings of the statues as they’d be when completed in gold and ivory. The Sister was weaving, of course. In relief on the wall behind Her were the figures of a man and a young girl.
The Shepherd, solid as a mountain but smiling, stood in front of sheep cropping a pasture. His staff was upright in His right hand.
In the center was the Lady. Her right hand touched the Shepherd’s forearm, and Her left hand was outstretched in blessing. The rat which had recently entered Her cult gamboled on the ground at Her feet, and the wall behind Her was a mass of flowers.
“With the help of the Gods,” repeated King Garric, and kissed his queen.