Crown Of The Isles 02 The Mirror of Worlds-ARC

by David Drake

  "Buroth, meneus, io!" Tenoctris said, her voice rising to the final syllable. Though her arm and sword hadn't bobbed around even half the imaginary circle, scarlet wizardlight suddenly formed a wall around her and Cashel.

  The grass and brambles vanished into a rosy haze. Cashel could see Tenoctris the same as always, but it was just him and her now. She held the sword down by her side and looked out at the sheets of flickering red. Her lips smiled, but it was a hard smile.

  Cashel heard distant screaming. First off thought he thought it was steam coming from under a heavy pot-lid. It kept going on, though, and after a while he wasn't so sure.

  The scream cut off short, and the wizardlight was gone. Wind howled, driving flecks of foam from the gray sea hard enough to sting. It was night but too overcast to have stars; if the moon was up, the curtain of clouds hid it.

  Cashel's tunics whipped his legs. If he'd been watching his flock in weather like this, he'd have wrapped his sheepskin robe around him . . . unless the storm'd blown up unexpectedly, of course, which'd happened more than once. Then all you could do was to keep moving.

  He forced himself to squint out to sea. Trouble travels downwind in a storm like this. Now there was nothing but surf as slow and sullen as dripping sap, but the wedge-shaped head of a sea wolf might slither into view any time.

  There could be worse things than sea wolves in this place. He didn't know where Tenoctris had brought them, but it didn't feel like anyplace good.

  The beach was broken shells and coarse sand. Driftwood including barkless, salt-bleached treetrunks straggled along the tide line; beyond was low forest. The trees were mostly beech and cedar as best Cashel could tell, but none of them were more than four or five double-paces high.

  Tenoctris glanced at the sea. "Is it ebbing, do you think?" she asked.

  "I think so," said Cashel. "But it can't be much short of the turn."

  "We won't need long," Tenoctris said. "A few minutes would probably be enough, but we'll wait an hour before we come back."

  She drew in the sand with the point of her sword, twisting the blade now to make now a thin line, then a broad flourish. She was writing words of power in letters each as high as Cashel's middle finger.

  Cashel looked at the tree line and stepped a safe distance away from Tenoctris to set his quarterstaff spinning slowly. He was getting the measure of the wind, the way it licked the hickory and tried to twist it out of his control.

  "There's somebody watching from the woods, Tenoctris," he said quietly. "I can't tell who, but I think there's more'n one."

  The beach stretched as far as he could see to left and right. Nothing moved but what the wind blew.

  "Yes, there should be," Tenoctris said. She paused and gazed critically at what she'd written. There were as many words as fingers on one hand. The sand was still damp from the retreating tide; the breeze wouldn't fill in the gouged letters for a long time yet, probably till the tide returned to wipe it all out.

  Tenoctris reached into the wallet she'd begun wearing on a sash over her shoulder. She brought out the key they'd found at the Tomb of the Messengers, holding it up between her thumb and index finger.

  Inside, clamped against her palm by the other fingers, was an ordinary quartz pebble. Cashel could see it from where he stood, but nobody watching from the forest could.

  Tenoctris bent down so her hand was right against the beach, behind where she'd drawn the words. She folded the key into her palm and set the pebble onto the sand, then rose with the same hard smile as before.

  "This will do, I think," she said. Her voice was a younger, fuller version of the way the old Tenoctris used to speak, but it made Cashel think again that he wouldn't want her for an enemy. "We'll wait on our own world, then return here in an hour."

  "Yes, ma'am," Cashel said, bringing the staff upright to his side. "Ah—then what, Tenoctris?"

  She laughed. She still held the key concealed in her hand. "Then we finish our negotiation with the Telchines," she said. "On our own terms."

  Grinning harshly, Tenoctris began to chant. She was reversing the order of the words of power which had brought them to this bleak shore.

  Chapter 14

  Cashel felt the wind even before the curtain of wizardlight faded, leaving him and Tenoctris again on coarse sand. The beach was the same as it had been, save that the sea had begun to creep back.

  Creatures as gray as the sky were hunched over the words Tenoctris'd drawn on the ground. They were smaller than men, and there were more of them than Cashel could count on both hands.

  Tenoctris trilled a laugh. She touched the crook of Cashel's elbow with her free hand—she held the sword in her right—and said, "Oh, Cashel! Can you imagine you'd been an old man and suddenly you were you, as strong as you are now? Do you see? That's what's happened to me!"

  She sounded like a happy child; well, a happy young woman. Cashel started to think, "Well, everybody's a happy child once," but then he remembered his sister. Ilna'd gotten most of the brains for both of them, but she'd missed her share of being happy. It'd been different while she was with Chalcus, but since he'd been killed she was probably worse off than ever.

  It'd been a good while since he last saw Ilna. Cashel hoped he'd see her again soon, and that she'd be in a better place than she'd been when she left.

  "What's wrong, Cashel?" Tenoctris said. He realized that he'd been frowning, or anyway hadn't been as cheerful as he usually felt.

  "I was just hoping my sister's all right," he said apologetically. Because he didn't want to talk any more about that, he bobbed his staff toward the gray figures and said, "Who are they, Tenoctris?"

  "These . . .," she said, sauntering toward them. She crossed her right wrist on her left to share the weight of the sword on both arms. " . . . are the Telchines. They've been exiled here because they're a nasty, treacherous lot, but they know certain things. In particular, they know the way to the Fulcrum of the Worlds."

  Close up Cashel saw that the creatures wore peaked robes that covered them all the way to the ground. He wasn't sure how they saw out. Maybe the cloth over their faces was woven thinner, but it didn't seem so when he looked at them now.

  Tenoctris walked along the straggling line of the Telchines, looking hard at each one as she passed. At the end, she turned and walked back, smiling impishly.

  "We've done well, Cashel," she said brightly. "You bring me luck."

  Tenoctris patted his arm again; then, without a change in expression, she leaned forward slightly. Using the breadth of the blade, she smoothed away one line of the symbols she'd drawn when they were on this beach the first time.

  "You tricked us," whined the creature standing nearest the word Tenoctris had changed. "We came to trade, and you trapped us."

  Its voice sounded like that of an injured fox, weak and angry and utterly vicious. Its body didn't move; Cashel couldn't see its lips to tell whether they did or not.

  "You're a treacherous liar, Telchis," Tenoctris said coldly. "All your people are. You'd have robbed me and returned to the world from which you were exiled for faithlessness."

  "We have kept faith!" the creature protested. "Folk leave goods on our beach and we offer goods in return. They take our goods, or they take back their own if they do not accept our offer."

  When he stood this close, Cashel noticed the Telchines' distinctive odor. It was a mixture of old parchment and the acid dryness of dead beetles.

  Tenoctris laughed harshly. "I offered the Key," she said. "What did you intend to pay me for the Key, Telchis?"

  Cashel held his quarterstaff upright, but his hands were spread at fighting distance on the hickory. He wouldn't insult Tenoctris by placing himself between her and these gray creatures; but if a Telchis did or said anything that Cashel read as threatening, he wouldn't wait for direction before striking. They reminded him of maggots writhing in a possum's corpse.

  "Anything," the creature wheezed.

  "Anything-g-g . . .," the troupe choru
sed. They sounded like feeding time in a fox's earth . . . .

  "You would take the Key," Tenoctris said in the cold voice she'd used toward the Telchines from the beginning. "And you would return to your plane, where I could not follow you. And you would pay me nothing. Therefore I caught you here with words of power, and you will tell me the way to the Fulcrum as the price of your lives."

  "Not the Fulcrum!" said the creature who'd spoken first.

  "Anything but the Fulcrum," his fellows whined softly. "Anything-g-g . . . ."

  Cashel looked at the eastern horizon. He thought it'd gotten brighter than it'd been when they arrived, but that might be a trick his mind was playing. He'd like it to be dawn, and he'd like to be out of this place; but he'd stay for as long as Tenoctris wanted him to stay.

  "Do you think I'm here to negotiate?" Tenoctris said. "I have no reason to love you, Telchines! The One who exiled you showed more mercy than you can expect from me. Tell me the way to the Fulcrum, or you will stand here till you die and your bodies waste to dust!"

  "From the Fulcrum you could shift the worlds," said the chief of the Telchines.

  "She could smash the worlds," his fellows echoed. "She could smash our world, even ours . . . ."

  "You won't have a world!" Tenoctris said. "You'll freeze and die and your dust will blow across this beach. The Telchines will be only dust and a memory, and at last even your memory will vanish from the cosmos!"

  "Tell her . . .," a Telchis said. Cashel couldn't be sure which one had spoken.

  "Tell her the way to the Fulcrum," whispered the chorus like aspens rustling in the darkness.

  "I will tell you the way to the Fulcrum," the leader said. His voice was as thin as the cold, cutting wind from the sea. "I must tell you the way . . . ."

  For a moment, there was no sound but the wind and the cry of a distant seabird. A voice behind Cashel thundered, "Lonchar tebriel tobriel!" A word in the curving Old Script wrote itself in purple flame in the air between Tenoctris and the Telchis.

  The sound didn't come from either the leader or all the Telchines together. Despite not trusting the hunched gray figures, Cashel risked a glance over his shoulder.

  "Riopha moriath chael!" boomed the voice, and it was the sea itself speaking. The sluggish waves puckered into a lipless mouth. Cashel turned to face it, bringing his staff around in a quick arc. Both butt caps trailed snarling blue sparks of wizardlight.

  "Mor marioth!" and the mouth blurred and vanished. The sea remained dimpled for a moment as though oil'd been spilled onto it; then that was gone as well. A moment later the surf resumed its slow march up the beach.

  "Yes . . .," said Tenoctris softly. Cashel looked at her. Her profile was as pale and sharp as a cameo. The words of power were already fading from the air before her. As Cashel watched, the writing shimmered from purple to orange and back very quickly.

  Using her foot instead of the sword blade, Tenoctris rubbed out the words she'd written in the sand. The Telchines twisted into the forest like skinks writhing for cover.

  Tenoctris reached into her wallet and brought out the quartz key from the Tomb of the Messengers. She held it up to the eyes watching from the trees, then dropped it deliberately beside the pebble she'd left as a decoy.

  "Now, Cashel," she said. "We must go to the Fulcrum of the Worlds. It will be very difficult to get there even now that I know the way, and—"

  She laughed again like a happy child.

  "—it'll be far more difficult to return!"

  * * *

  A belt of thorny brush fringed the stream Garric and his companions were following toward the mountain. Even mounted on Kore's back Garric couldn't see the water, but there was no escaping the sound of its tumbling violence. Ordinarily it must've been a seasonal trickle across a parched landscape, but it was clearly in spate now.

  "The glacier filled its valley during winter and retreated a hundred yards in the course of a hot summer," Shin said. "Since the Change, the ice has melted faster than ever before. The valley'll be clear in another year except for shaded crevices; and even there before a second year is out."

  He skipped ahead of Garric and Kore, idly nibbling foliage from a branch he'd broken from the brush. Garric couldn't imagine that the small gray-green leaves tasted any better than pine bark, but he'd seen goats strip the bark from pine saplings. Apparently aegipans were equally catholic in their tastes.

  Shin chuckled. "You're fortunate that it's melting," he said. "The ice used to cover the entrance to the Yellow King's tomb. Though no doubt a true champion could've dug his way down through the glacier."

  "Horses don't dig tunnels in ice," the ogre said austerely. "If you were wondering, noble master."

  "I wasn't," Garric said, "but thank you anyway."

  The mountain rose like a wall from the plains. Garric cleared his throat and went on, "How much farther is it, Master Shin?"

  "Not far," said the aegipan. "We're almost to the mouth of the valley, and it's no more than half a mile beyond."

  The strait they'd crossed in Lord Holm's barge the night before was less than three miles wide; by daylight, they might've been able to see the far shore before they set out. After they'd landed, Shin—the only one who knew anything about the terrain—told the laborers to row westward where they'd find the considerable settlement within twenty miles. That was where Holm had sold his produce.

  The aegipan had led Garric and Kore directly inland across a barren landscape, taking their bearings from the multi-spired peak he pointed out on the horizon. Before midday they'd met the stream and followed it thenceforth.

  They hadn't tried to fight through the dense curtain of brush. The barge had been provisioned. Garric had taken half the total in a sling of cargo net, including a cask of water. The rescued laborers were headed for a settlement with food and water; he and his companions were not.

  The mountain was a wedge of volcanic rock with a faint greenish tinge. It'd emerged from a surrounding plain of shale which weathering had broken into a loose soil. From the luxuriance of the brush along the creek banks, it was apparently very fertile when it got enough water.

  Shin climbed a spur, his hooves sparkling. Kore grunted. "Steep, I would say," she said. "For a horse . . . but let it pass."

  She followed the aegipan up the slope. Garric leaned over her shoulder to keep his weight as far forward as he could, much as he would've done if she'd really been a horse. The ogre hadn't stopped grumbling since they took leave of the barge on shore, but she'd kept going despite the added burden of food and thirty gallons of water.

  On the other side of the spur was a valley hollowed by the slow force of the glacier. The rock was completely sterile, scoured clean by ice and the stones which its massive weight shoved along with it. At the bottom tossed the creek. The melt water was white with material dissolved out of the rocks.

  Shin laughed merrily. "Are you ready, Garric?" he said. "Perhaps you think that the rest will be easier than what you've faced to get here?"

  "I'll dismount, now," Garric said. The ogre had already begun to kneel. "Shin, just lead and I'll follow you the way we've been doing. Word games were never to my taste, and this wouldn't be a good place to play them even if they were."

  Kore stood again and settled the cargo net. It'd be a wrench to go back to riding horses which didn't read his mind. Though that was only an issue if he survived.

  The creek didn't fill the valley which the glacier'd hollowed over the years, but the steep slope to either side was complicated with the scree of loose rocks which the ice had dropped when it melted. The aegipan sprang down to the edge of the water, touching the slope three times.

  "He places his feet like he was thrusting with a sword," Carus said, watching in delight. "If he was very, very good with a sword, I mean. As good as me."

  "Hmpf!" Shin said, grinning up at Garric and the ghost in his mind. "Swords are a waste of good metal . . . but if they weren't, warrior, I might show you something."

  Caru
s laughed and appeared to stretch. The ghost had only the memory of a physical body, but that body had been so much of his personality that its presence remained a thousand years after he'd died.

  "Oh, aye, lad," Carus agreed with a wry smile. "I could take a man's head off without thinking about it. Unfortunately, I generally should've thought more about it."

  Smiling faintly, Garric climbed into the ravine with his back and his spread arms to the rock wall. He twisted his belt so that the sword lay in front of his right leg where it was less likely to get in the way.

  If he'd had to jump the way the aegipan had, he'd have done it. The drop was less than twenty feet here at the mouth of the valley, though the slope was steep enough that you might not hit the side on the way down if you tripped.