"Do you think we can trust Kakoral?" Cashel said as he climbed the slope, stepping sideways because it was so steep. Every so often he switched so the other foot led; otherwise he'd likely get a cramp in the leg that'd been higher. Cashel figured this was a place he'd best be in good shape.
"Trust him?" said Evne, riding on Cashel's left shoulder. She could've been in his wallet or in a fold of his tunic, but he'd thought this way was most companionable; she'd seemed satisfied with the suggestion. "Trust him to use us and deceive us and cast us away when it suits him, the way males generally do? Is that what you mean?"
"Well, no," said Cashel. 'Companionable' wasn't the word everybody'd have used about Evne, but because he'd grown up with Ilna, the toad's manner made him feel right at home. "I meant, would this red line-"
The dots of wizardlight climbed the slope ahead of them, faint but as visible now against the bright sun as they'd been when they first appeared at night. Cashel'd found that the track the light plotted either sloped less or had firmer footing than any of the alternatives nearby.
"-take us to the nearest water, like he said?"
The toad snorted. Her hoarse voice was louder than Cashel would've expected from a little toad, but she seemed to talk normally from her lipless mouth. Her throat sack fluttered as she spoke.
"Oh, that he has no choice about," she said. "You bested him, didn't you? You're his master, just as you're mine. But he's not your friend, Cashel. The demon serves you because he must and because it suits him; don't ever imagine that he helps because it suitsyou."
Cashel thought about it. After a moment he said, "I guess that's true for most people, Evne. It's true for me, anyway. If I help somebody, it's because I feel better for doing it than I would if I didn't help."
"Faugh!" said Evne. "It's nothing like that. You're a fool. Most men are fools; but they aren't most of them fools the wayyou are, master."
Cashel chuckled. It really was like being home with his sister.
The track had actually been more down than up, but there'd been a lot of both. They'd hiked-well, Cashel had-from morning to mid-afternoon in getting from where Bossian put him out to where they were now. This was the steepest rise of the trek so far.
Evne didn't know how much farther they had to go either; Cashel figured they'd just keep on till they got there. It was pretty much the way he did most things in life, by putting one foot in front of the other till the job was done.
He gripped one of the dwarf birches rooted in the rock to help him up the last step to what he thought was a broad ledge. It was a flat-topped ridge instead. Filling the broad valley beyond was a jumble of shattered marble. From it grew pines, cottonwoods, and clumps of spiky silkgrass waving stalks of yellow-white flowers.
"Oh!" he said. "I guess we're here."
"Brilliant," said the toad. "Do you guess the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, too?"
Cashel smiled broadly as he surveyed the vast ruins. Portmayne must have been as large as Manor Bossian, but its walls had been built of vari-colored marbles instead of crystal. There'd been a central tower whose stone was brilliantly white with a blue undertone. It must've been higher than any tree gets, because when it toppled it reached almost to where Cashel stood.
He eyed the fragments carefully. The tower had shattered when it hit the stony ground, but it seemed to have been all one piece till then-like an eggshell rather than a building constructed from carved blocks. Lightning had burned a ragged line down the side of the tower, turning the stone a powdery white like a leper's skin. The bolt had torn its way from the battlements to the ground; maybe that was what threw the tower down.
"The tank is there to the north," Evne said. "Just beyond where the travertine wing collapsed."
It wasn't just the tower, of course: the whole manor was flattened as thoroughly as a stomped-on ant hill. He'd done that when he was younger; stepped on anthills…
"Yes, ma'am," Cashel said. "Where the sedges are growing, you mean. I just wanted to get a look at things before I went wandering down into them, you know; in case."
He gave his quarterstaff a spin, then reversed its direction. It felt good to swing the iron-shod hickory, Duziknew it did. Cashel wasn't a lazy man, but he walked from necessity rather than pleasure. It seemed like walking was most of what he'd been doing since Kotia brought him to this place, so using his arms and shoulders for a bit was a special treat.
"Far be it from me to tell my master what to do," the toad said tartly. "Though I did consider that there might be insects around the tank, and that it's been some while since I last ate."
"Right, we'll head on now," said Cashel, suiting his action to his words by starting down the slope with long strides. The soil was different on this side of the ridge; instead of being red clay, it was more of a yellowish brown with shiny, silvery chunks of galena ore in it.
"Don't let me put you out," said the toad, but she didn't say it very loudly. "After all, I've waited at least seven thousand years; what difference would another few weeks make?"
Cashel wondered about the utter ruin, how it'd happened. Lightning might've struck a high tower easy enough, but that didn't explain all the rest of the buildings. Well, that'd been a long time ago. He didn't guess it mattered any more.
Birds chirped and fluttered in short hops among the trees. Cashel saw a wren with fluff in its beak and a number of other little gray fellows he might not have identified for sure even if they'd been flitting in a hedgerow back in Barca's Hamlet where the animals were familiar.
Sheep wouldn't have been happy in this country. There was too much stone, and the silkgrass would cut their lips as they grazed. Goats would've done well enough, but Cashel didn't like goats. They had minds of their own, more than sheep did; but they weren't really any smarter than sheep. Being contrary, they managed to get into more trouble as well as not being as nice to be around.
Cashel grinned and spun his quarterstaff overhead for the fun of it. There were plenty of people who reminded him of goats, too.
He wished Garric was here to play his pipes as they walked through the rubble of the fallen manor. Or Sharina; either of his friends could've told Cashel things about the broken stones, what the buildings'd looked like originally and what the reliefs cut into them meant..
"Or you could ask me," said the toad unexpectedly. Had he spoken aloud? "I'd tell you that the frieze we just passed shows the first Lady Portmayne receiving eternal wisdom from figures representing Sky, Earth, and Sea. Those folks shown ankle height around her are her adoring subjects."
"Oh!" said Cashel. "I hadn't been thinking about you, Evne."
"Given how rarely you seem to think of anything, I won't feel insulted," the toad said. "And as for those adoring subjects, I daresay they or their equally adoring descendents wished Lady Portmayne had received some other form of eternal wisdom-perhaps that of cabbage worms. Because what she did receive didn't help the folk of Portmayne in the least when the Visitor arrived and threw down their walls."
Cashel walked past a fallen colonnade; the shafts were of deep red stone with white seashells embedded, but the bases and capitals had been black and had green veins. It must have been lovely, once upon a time.
"Would cabbage worms have been able to stop the Visitor, Evne?" he asked.
"Faugh, you're a fool!" she said. Then in a different tone-a tone very like the one that Ilna used when she was being careful to say no more than she was sure of, "The Visitor would claim, I believe, that no one and no thing could stop him. Thus far he's had no reason to change his opinion."
The tank was of white marble, carved all around with columns that were part of the same block as the rest of the structure. A gently-sloped mound raised the bottom some distance above the surrounding plain. The slope must originally have been sodded-a few tufts of real grass still grew there-but now dark green sedge covered it. Sedges need a lot of water, and if they were getting it around here the tank must leak.
Cashel stood at the base of the mound and eyed the structure. It was as broad as he could've thrown a stone and more than twice as long. The marble sides were sheer and double Cashel's height, which could be a problem. He figured he'd climb onto the base and see if he could lift himself from there to get a grip on top of the cornice. If that didn't work, well, he'd try something different.
"You think the hardest part of this business will be to get to the top of the tank?" the toad said quietly.
"Well, yes, but it shouldn't be too hard," Cashel said. "I think I can-"
"You're wrong about that being the hard part," the toad said. "There was a dragon sleeping in the tank. It's awakened now, and it plans to eat you."
"Oh," said Cashel, looking up again. A broad snout rose over the cornice; above it were a pair of wide-set eyes, staring at Cashel through slit pupils.
The dragon's head was not only bronze colored, it had the sheen of metal in the afternoon sun. It lifted out of the marble tank and began to flow down toward Cashel like a river of dark honey. The head looked a little like a crocodile's, but the snakelike body walked on more pairs of short, bowed legs than Cashel had fingers to count them on. It was as thick as he was through the chest, and he couldn't be sure how long it was because it was still coiling out of the tank. Water gleamed on its bronze scales.
"Evne," Cashel said. He scooped the toad into his cupped left hand and put her down in a patch of grass. "I'm going to move to the right, I think. You go the other way so you don't get trampled, all right?"
"You could run, Master Cashel!" the toad said.
"I don't think I could," said Cashel. "Anyway, I'm not going to try."
He knew what the little image of Kakoral had meant about being sorry if they didn't hike down to the river instead of searching for the water here at Portmayne; though Cashel wasn't sure that was true. In a place like this, there'd likely have been trouble waiting at the river too; and anyway, how would he have gotten a decent reflection from flowing water?
Anyway, he'd made his choice and he'd live with it. Or not, he supposed.
Cashel started moving to his right the way he said he'd do. He eased back a little from the base of the mound also. No point in letting the dragon use the higher ground to spring on him. Not that it looked like springing was part of its usual act, but you could never tell.
As Cashel sidled backward, he began spinning his quarterstaff. It made a low thrum, a familiar sound and a soothing one.
He wondered what the creature ate when people didn't come along. He hadn't seen any animals bigger than the few doves, and there weren't buzzards circling in the pale blue sky either. If there wasn't food here for a buzzard, he didn't see how you could feed a dragon that seemed to be the size of a trireme.
The slope had been backfilled with clean dirt, but when the dragon's forequarters reached the natural soil its claws began to click on stones. Once Cashel saw a spark when a claw ticked a half-buried chunk of quartz.
Cashel swept his surroundings with quick jerks of his head, never losing the dragon from at least his peripheral vision. A sprawled jumble of pink marble-the remains of a tower once nearly as tall as the manor's central spire-would shortly keep him from retreating any farther. That meant he'd either have to wait or attack himself, and he figured attacking The dragon, three double paces distant, lifted its head on a sinuous curve of its forebody. Cashel, spinning the quarterstaff sunwise before him, strode forward. The dragon struck down. Cashel met it with his staff end-on; the dragon recoiled in a flash of blue wizardlight.
Cashel's body tingled; he couldn't hear anything but the whirring in his ears. He reversed the staff and struck with the other ferrule-half a swing, half a battering ram punch with his shoulders behind it. There was another flash. The dragon rolled away from the blow, its scales black and dinted where the iron had smashed them. The air stank of brimstone.
The dragon opened its mouth and roared like a mill grinding without grain between the stones, a rasping, terrible sound. Each canine tooth was as long as Cashel's whole hand, and the interlocking sideteeth weren't much smaller.
Cashel stepped forward again and struck with his left hand leading. A blast of azure light blinded him; he couldn't feel anything. He struck again, right hand foremost. He was moving on instinct and the skill of long practice, swinging a staff he couldn't feel into an enemy he couldn't see.
Light flared, piercing him bone deep. This shock threw his surroundings into focus in stark black and white. The dragon's left eyetooth spun into the bright heavens. Hot fog surrounded the beast: the water slicking its scales boiled off like drops from the sides of a heated cauldron.
The dragon roared again, a sound Cashel felt though he still couldn't hear. Its jaws were big enough to swallow a man in one gulp, even a man as big as Cashel. The creature's breath stank like a smithy, not a slaughterhouse.
He stepped forward and rammed the quarterstaff like a spear into the dragon's palette, crushing through the light bones. The creature jerked back, lifting its forebody while Cashel still clung to the staff deep in its skull. He could see the ground as clearly as he could the ridged grain of his quarterstaff: every pebble, every sprig of sage, every bird track. It seemed to be far below him.
The dragon writhed into a tight knot. Blue-white flames jetted from its maw and outlined the individual scales of its squirming body; sedge sizzled and blackened at the creature's touch.
Cashel was flying free. He held his quarterstaff.
Nothing else in the world mattered.
Sharina faced the archers above her, hesitating when the answer was obvious to anybody. Scoggin tossed his spear onto the shingle at his feet and looked at her with a desperate expression.
"Throw down the axe, woman!" he cried. "Throw it down or they'll kill us all!"
Sharina didn'tlike Beard, and she'd lived all her previous life without owning a talking axe… but that didn't mean anybody had a right to take it away from her. She wondered what Cashel would do, or her brother Garric?
The truth was that they'd drop the axe without question. They didn't need to prove their courage to anybody And neither did she. She bent over and set Beard down gently. As a fine tool alone she owed the axe better than to be tossed onto hard stone.
"Wait, mistress!" the axe cried. "We're being attacked! I promised I'd warn you!"
"I know we're being attacked!" Sharina said in fury. "They're standing all around us with bows aimed. I'm giving you up."
"Not them, mistress," said Beard. His metal voice was as pure and piercing as the note of a bell. "The men are no danger, now that the fauns have come back!"
"What?" said Alfdan, looking over his shoulder. He gave a cry of angry wonder and pointed his staff in the direction of the hamlet. He began to chant in a high singsong voice, then choked to a halt. He swayed, on the verge of collapse. He must be exhausted from the wizardry involved in keeping his ambush concealed until Sharina walked into it.
"I can fight them, mistress!" Beard said. "I can drink their blood too, just like men's."
Sharina couldn't see anything from where she stood at the base of the seawall. One of Alfdan's men shot toward the new danger. He gave a shout of horror, tried to nock another arrow, and dropped it in nervousness.
"Come on!" Sharina cried, running up the steep slope more easily than she'd descended it. Emotions fired her now; emotions and the delighted, shrieking bloodlust of the axe in her hands.
Four or five archers were shooting; the others either scuttled down the seawall or stood in terror with their bows half-drawn. Sharina reached the top; Franca was with her but Scoggin hadn't followed.
Five creatures covered in lustrous blue fur were coming from the ruins of Barca's Hamlet. They were in a line spread from north to south, converging on Alfdan's band. They were somewhat taller than men, but much more of their height was in their legs; their thighs were as hugely muscled as a grasshopper's. Tiny curling horns grew at the top of their foreheads, and their faces had the calm majesty of ivory statues.
The creatures were male. Their genitals were pony-sized and erect, in obscene contrast to their saintly expressions.
The archers were shooting at the nearest of the five, the one in the middle of the line. Several arrows stuck out of his chest; one was through his calf; and one protruded from the socket of his left eye. He walked with high, mincing steps.
"I'll drink the blood of fauns!" chuckled Beard. His helve quivered in Sharina's hands; for the moment the weapon weighed almost nothing. "Oh, mistress, you're so good to Beard!"
"To the ship," Alfdan wheezed. "We can't-"
The nearest faun raised his edged club of dense bone over his head. He trilled like a frog in springtime, hideously magnified, and leaped thirty feet onto the wizard.
Sharina stepped forward, swinging Beard in a downward slant. The axe sheared off the faun's raised left arm and sank into his neck, severing the spine. The creature spurted steaming, sulfur-colored blood and made a spastic leap. It landed well out on the dry sea bed.
Alfdan sprawled where the faun had thrown him. Another of the creatures sprang onto the man to the left. He tried to fend off the attack with his bowstaff. The faun swung his club overhand, striking straight down and pulping the man's head. A man nearby thrust with his short sword. The blade left a steaming gash in the faun's hide but skidded off the ribs.
Sharina brought Beard around backhand and sank the spike in the faun's temple. This one sprang straight in the air, its limbs flailing wildly like bits of twine caught in a high wind. Sharina kept her grip on the axe handle, knowing it would be certain death if she lost her weapon.
"Behind you, Sharina!" Franca cried.
She spun, swinging the axe in a horizontal arc that ripped the full depth of its blade through a faun's ribs and breastbone. The creature's gushing blood burned where it spattered her forearms. The creature toppled down the seawall, holding the club it hadn't had time to use.
Sharina paused, gasping through her open mouth. The axe slobbered joyfully. Its edge was keen enough to split a ray of light, but the effort of jumping and whirling still took all Sharina's strength.
The two remaining fauns approached her from opposite sides, more circumspect now than their fellows had been. They walked on their toes; though their feet weren't really hoofs, the four lesser toes were on the way to growing together.
Scoggin had crawled up to the edge of the seawall, clutching his spear. He thrust into the ankle of the faun to Sharina's right, tripping it over on top of him.
Sharina met the other faun's descending blow, lopping its long bony fingers off against a club made from a sea-beast's shoulderblade. That was what she'd been trying to do, but she'd felt Beard twitch in her hand at mid-stroke; the axe was adding its own increment to her strength and athleticism.
The bone club smashed into the top of the seawall and leaped out of the creature's maimed hands. The faun screamed musically and reached for Sharina with its thumbs and stubs of fingers. She drove Beard into the creature's forehead and heard the steel gurgle, "So much blood! Rich blood!"
The faun did a backflip to thrash like a dying beetle. Sharina jerked the blade free. Her arms felt swollen and her vision was blurred. The faun Scoggin had disabled lay on the ground with a dozen men on him, holding down his rangy body and stabbing. One of Alfdan's archers used a broken arrow as a poniard, punching it again and again into the faun's throat. Each thrust brought a spurt of searing blood, but the faun continued to struggle.
Sharina staggered over to the melee. She was afraid she'd hit one of the men if she swung normally.
"Give me room," she gasped, only half able to hear her own voice. Nobody in the surging mass reacted. Short-gripping Beard, she turned the axe over and pushed the spike through the faun's upper chest as though it were a dagger blade.
The creature arched its back violently, flinging away the men holding it. It continued to convulse until it rolled over the seawall to lie on the shingle not far from the glowing crystal ship.
Sharina rested on all fours. She didn't know whether her eyes were open or closed; she couldn't see anything through the roaring white fire that consumed her lungs and throat.
Voices coalesced out of the sea of noise. Men were talking, apparently to themselves rather than each other; nobody seemed to be listening to anybody else. Sharina heard prayers and curses and long half-coherent babbling about how close death had come-and passed by.
"There it is," Alfdan said. He spoke in a heavy, breathy voice, forcing out each syllable between his wheezing. "Take the axe from her and bring it to me."
Sharina heard the words, but they hung as if in a vacuum that was wholly separate from her and the world in her mind.
"Take it!" Alfdan said. "Faugh, I'll get it myself."
She felt a tug and suddenly was alert again. She held Beard in both hands; the steel was crooning in an undertone punctuated by sucking sounds and giggles. Alfdan had just tried to pull the axe away from her.
Sharina jerked back and rose to a kneeling position. Dizziness washed over her, but it was gone as quickly as it came. She braced the butt of the axe on the ground and used the helve as a cane as she rose to her feet.
"Oh, he's an enemy, mistress," Beard said. "Let's finish him too, a little dessert for Beard after the luscious fauns you fed him!"
"Kill her!" Alfdan shouted, jumping back. He stumbled, tangling his feet with his carved staff. "Quickly, shoot her down!"
Scoggin raised his spear; Franca fitted an arrow to the string of the bow he must have taken from a man the fauns slew. The youth's eyes were open and staring, but there was no more intellect behind them than there was in those of a rat cornered by a weasel.
"Stop!" said Sharina. She put a hand on Franca's shoulder and shifted her body so that she stood between Scoggin and the wizard. "There'll be no more killing of men by other men, not here. There's few enough of us left as it is."
A faun sprawled on the ground beside her, its complexion turning from blue to purplish as the blood drained out of it. Its hands were shockingly long, its palm and fingers both twice the length of a human being's.
"She's right," a man said. "Lady help me, it would've broke my neck in the next heartbeat if she hadn't killed it when she did. Alfdan, let 'er be."
The wizard had lost his cap though he still wore the black cape. Sharina couldn't tell what the material was; it seemed to absorb light without having a color of its own.
He looked about the circle of his men. "All right," he said, trying to sound as if he were still in control. "But she must hand over the axe. Then she can do as she likes."
"Beard is-" Sharina said. She almost said, "mine," but her thought was quicker than her tongue. "-my companion. You will not take him from me, Master Alfdan."
"I will have it!" Alfdan shouted, his face transfused with fury.
"Drink his blood!" shrilled the axe.
"No!" said Sharina. "Both of you, be silent! There will be no more killing!"
"Alfdan," said the man who'd spoken a moment before, a big fellow with auburn hair and a beard that was nearly brunet. "She saved our lives, yours too. If we need the axe, ask her nice to come along with us. And if she doesn't want to, well, that's all right too. We don't, andyou don't, force her to do nothing."
"That's right, Alfdan," said another man. "Neal's speaking for me."
Alfdan suddenly relaxed. "Yes, I see the sense of that," he said. He managed a weak-kneed bow; he was as wrung out as Sharina herself. "Pardon me, mistress, this has been…"
He gestured around him with a trembling left hand. "I'm not myself. None of us are ourselves. Will you come sit with me in the Queen Ship so that we can discuss the future?"
Sharina looked at the shimmering crystalline vessel that had drawn her into Alfdan's trap in the first place. "Yes," she said. "Let's do that."
With Beard muttering in her hand, she walked down the seawall again. This time she didn't brace herself with a hand.
Garric was dreaming…
He and Carus walked into the garden they'd entered the previous night. It was the same location but a different age; the stonework was sharper and beds of carefully-tended flowers lined the paths.
"The moon isn't right," Carus said, locking his palms together to keep from fidgeting with his swordhilt. In this dream the king was dressed as he often did in Garric's mind, wearing a short blue tunic over breeches and knee-high cavalry boots. His sword hung from the left side of his broad leather belt, its weight balanced by the dagger and traveller's wallet on the right.
Garric looked at the full moon through the branches of a fruit tree. The orb seemed bigger than he was used to, but it also had a deep golden cast as though there were more than distance between it and him.
"Nothing right's here," he said. "We're dreaming."
Did ghosts dream? Was the Carus beside him only a dream himself?
The trees were in bloom. Garric thought they were pears, though there'd been only apple orchards in the borough so he wasn't sure. The perfume of their white blossoms was faint but noticeable in the moonlight.
Garric walked toward the altar in shadow at the back wall, but as he moved he felt his consciousness swirl away. He was being lifted by a pair of figures so faint that the stars twinkled through them, so huge that their presence filled the cosmos.
There was no Garric, no seeing or hearing; time wasn't the same. There was warmth and water and eventually surging excitement as he/itgrew.
Sunlight flooded and faded; moon and stars had no meaning any more. Rain fell and the soil dried again; and fell and dried, and fell… Always there were the Presences, tending and protecting him/it.
The days became shorter, the sunlight weaker. Garric felt his leaves slough away. He'd been only vaguely aware of them, the way a man might be aware of his skin. The cold came, as painless as a cloud covering the sun for a moment. He felt his young limbs being trimmed; the Presences flowed about him, as omnipresent as the breeze.
Spring followed andgrowth; richer and fuller than before, and wholly engaging. His/its limbs were being trained. His/its leaves unfolded, soaking in sun and converting nutrients, processes too complex for a human mind to fathom but utterly a part of the mindless being he/it now was. His/its buds bloomed in lustful profusion and the bees brought fulfillment which flowed through every vein and rootlet. He/itwas.
Sun and rain, warmth and cold; and always the Presences were there to guard and guide him/it. Every year brought growth, every spring meant blossoms. Life was good, joy was eternal, and always the Presences…
He/it felt a tugging. He/it resisted, but he had no strength to change what was happening. His existence flowed out and upward, bodiless for an uncertain time.
For an instant, Garric or-Reise stood in the moonlit garden again. King Carus was at his side, his face twisted in a look of fury.
The ancient pear tree beside them no longer curved its gnarled branches into a ragged oval. The trunk had been stunted to knee height, and its two remaining limbs were trained in a cordon which ran parallel to the path. Great white blossoms bloomed on stubs like miniature trees which grew upward from the horizontal limbs.
Garric's consciousness roared on. He sat up with a shout. His sword hung from a rack at the head of the bed. He'd half-drawn its watered steel blade when he realized where he was-and that it was reallyhim again, not a dream phantasm.
"Garric?" said Liane, her voice so sweetly modulated that it all but concealed her fear.
A footed lamp in the form of a three-headed dragon stood in a niche across the room; one wick burned as a night light. Garric shot his sword back home in its sheath and padded over to the lamp. His hands were shaking. He tried to light the other wicks from the first, but he couldn't even get the scrap of tow he intended for a spill to catch from the existing flame.
Liane took the tow from his trembling fingers and lit the wicks. She glanced at a second lamp, but instead of lighting it also she crushed the spill out on the bottom of the niche. She faced Garric and put her hands on his shoulders without speaking further. He hugged her hard against him.
"I was a tree," he said. He closed his eyes tightly. "They made me grow exactly where they wanted me to grow."
He drew in a deep breath. "I don't know who they are, Liane," he said. "But I know what they intend."
"They won't succeed," Liane said, her voice calm but her heart hammering like a bird's. "You won't let them, Garric. None of us will let them do that."
"Read to me," Garric whispered into her hair. "I don't care what-just civilized words, my love. Because what they are isn't civilized. It isn't even human."
Obediently Liane lifted the lamp out of the niche with one hand. With the other she guided Garric back to the bed and sat him beside her on the edge. She set the lamp on the nightstand and opened the book she'd been reading earlier in the evening.
"'I know my own language only from letters,'" she read aloud, her voice a glow of amber in the darkness. "'If I could not write, I would be mute…'"
She paused with a look of horror. Garric started to laugh. His choked giggles built quickly to bellowing guffaws just this side of hysteria. She'd been reading Pendill'sLetters from Exile, and because of her nervousness she hadn't remembered the subject matter when she picked it up in haste at Garric's direction.
After a moment, Liane began to laugh also. She set the book back on the table and embraced him. "Oh, Garric, wewill win this, you know," she gasped between gusts of laughter.
"Aye," growled the king in Garric's mind. "And when it's time to split skulls, we'll do that too, lad; you and me!"
Ilna awakened in her bedroll on the stern an instant before the lookout's cry roused everybody aboard theBird of the Tide. The sky to the north rippled and flared crimson.
"Get the oars out," Chalcus ordered calmly from the door to the tiny deckhouse. "Nabarbi and Tellura to port, Shausga and Ninon starboard. Kulit-"
Kulit was on watch; he'd sounded the alarm.
"-stay there in the bow to conn us through the passage."
In a break from his usual blithe cheerfulness, Chalcus added in a snarl, "Sister take those bloody rocks, and may they not takeus before we're even out of this harbor!"
Ilna glanced at the stars; it was past midnight. The moon was waxing and not yet visible in Terness Harbor, though on the open sea it would probably be above the horizon.
The weapons were stored in the deckhouse, sheltered from the weather. Chalcus took out a bow, set one end on the deck, and leaned his weight on the other until the staff curved; then he slipped the bow cord into its notch. Bowstaves cracked if left with the cord taut, so an archer only strung his weapon when he was about to use it.
Night lay on the drystone huts built up the hillside; the town was dark as only a peasant village or the deep forest can be. No lights gleamed from the fishing boats. A muted clang came from theDefender, moored across the harbor. The narrow-hulled patrol vessel rocked even in the still water of the harbor; the hammer hanging beside the alarm gong in the stern occasionally brushed it as they both swung.
"What's it that's happening out there, captain?" Hutena asked as he took the first bow as Chalcus began to string the next. The four crewmen told off to row were fitting their long oars onto the thole pins. They worked with their usual skill, never wasting a motion, but there was a silent tension to the task tonight.
"Ah, that's what we're going out to learn, lads," Chalcus said. He passed the second bow to the bosun who gathered it with the first in his right hand. He held them by their tips. "Wizards' work, that we know from the sky."
He nodded as he strung the third bow, a particularly stiff one. Its core of black wood from Shengy was laminated between a layer of whalebone on the face and a backing of ox sinew. "Which wizards those would be, and what their intent is-those things we need to be closer to learn."
Chalcus grinned broadly at Ilna. "Not so, dear heart?" he asked.
"I can't tell anything from here," Ilna said. Smiling faintly because the situation really did amuse her, she added, "Of course I may not be able to tell anything when we're in the middle of whatever unpleasant business is going on, either."
"Indeed, we may not," Chalcus agreed equably. "And we may all have our heads taken for trophies in the airy halls of the birdmen. If any of you lads would stay ashore tonight, the dock's a short step now but a very long one if you wait."
"We're with you," Hutena grunted. He reached for the third bow.
"This bow is for me, I think, Master Bosun," Chalcus said mildly. He straightened, surveying the crew. "Does Hutena speak for you all, then?"
Nobody replied. Hutena said, "Cast off the bow line, Kulit. I've already gotten the stern."
Kulit loosed the line, then took a boat-pike from the mast rack and joined the bosun in shoving theBird of the Tideaway from the quay. The rowers took up the stroke, falling into a rhythm without external command.
The bosun set a bow between each pair of oarsmen while Chalcus brought out bundles of arrows. Ilna thought about the attack on the fishermen; if the Rua chose, they could drive theBird 's crew into the hold as easily as they'd cleared the decks of the open boats. But she was increasingly less convinced that the winged men had anything to do with the attacks on merchantmen in the Strait.
TheBird of the Tidemade for the harbor entrance. Kulit called low-voiced bearings from the bow, but the oarsmen needed little correction. Their faces had the set, unhappy expressions of men about to go out in a drenching rainstorm. They didn't look frightened; and perhaps they weren't.
That there were no lights in the village of Terness was only to be expected; Ilna would've been surprised if any fisherman had been wasting lamp oil at this time of night. The castle was equally dark, though, and that was another matter. She'd seen enough palaces and noblemen's mansions to know that there should be the gleam of a lantern in the guardroom, the glow of fires beneath the ovens where bread for the company was baking.
She smiled tightly again. In this particular place, she didn't suppose the lord would be reading far into the night; but it was likely enough that the wink of a rushlight through a shutter would indicate that a clerk had been late finishing his accounts.
The stars shone as bright points undimmed by a haze of wizardlight. Whatever had awakened her was over now. That part of it, at any rate.
Chalcus distributed short cutlasses to the crew, all but Hutena who had his own broad-bladed hatchet thrust through his belt. The short, curving cutlasses looked clumsy to Ilna, but they were as keen as Chalcus thought they should be-working edges rather than being sharpened chisel-thin and sure to break at the first hard stroke. They must have suited the men using them or else they'd have had something different. Blades were no business of hers, anyway.
Another gush of wizardlight stained the sky as theBird of the Tide negotiated the last of the narrows. The cliffs on either side of the vessel stood out starkly against the scarlet glare above them. Ilna felt the hairs on the backs of her arms rise; her nose wrinkled in irritation at her body's inability not to react.
"Dead ahead on the horizon," Kulit called, his voice strong but just a half tone higher than Ilna had heard it on other occasions. "I saw a mast when the… when the sky was bright, you know?"
Chalcus hopped to the top of the deckhouse, the highest vantage on theBird since they'd unstepped the mast and left it back on the quay. "Row on, lads," he said in a tone of quiet excitement. "That's theQueen of Heaven or another so like her it makes no never mind. There's lights aboard her, and it's more lights than any captain would burn while anchored in calm weather. We'll learn something soon or I'll know the reason why."
He dropped beside Ilna again and crossed his hands before him. "Had I left the mast up," he said, "we'd have a better view as you doubtless are thinking. But we'd have been visible from farther out as well, and that concerned me more than whatwe could see."
"I wasn't thinking anything of the sort," said Ilna tartly. "I assumed you knew your business; and I certainlydon't know your business."
She was knotting and loosing patterns as she spoke. She'd taken the cords out of her sleeve almost as soon as she awakened, and she'd been working-and unworking-them ever since. She saw Chalcus glance at the latest version and quickly cupped it between her palms. He couldn't have gotten a clear enough look anyway, but "That wouldn't be a good thing to see," Ilna said without letting her voice display her terror at what had almost happened. "I'm nervous, you see, and when I'm nervous my mind calms itself by thinking of dark places to send my enemies."
"Ah!" said Chalcus. "I can understand how that might be." He laughed merrily and hugged her with his left arm, though his eyes continued to scan the sea ahead of them.
TheBird of the Tide drove over the slow swells. The steering oar was raised and lashed to the rail where it didn't drag against the vessel's progress. Ilna knew there was a current because of what the sailors had told her and from the way bubbles of foam slowly drifted right to left, but Nabarbi and Tellura on the portside oars were compensating for it by taking longer strokes than their shipmates to starboard.
"There's theQueen or her twin…," said Chalcus, pitching his voice just loud enough to be heard over the faint squeal of the rowlocks. The crew had tallowed them just after nightfall, before they opened their bedrolls to sleep. "And there's boats in the water beside her, low ones. Hutena, were any of the fishing boats missing from the harbor tonight?"
"They were not," said the bosun, standing with a hand on the tiller and a hand on his axe head, ready at instant need to drop the steering oar into the water. "Every boat that went out this morning came back to harbor, saving the one you say the demons took. And every boat that came back was there in her berth as we put out."
"My thought as well," said Chalcus with a smile. "And there's more and bigger vessels by theQueen than one poor fishing boat that was left for the Rua."
Wizardlight pulsed in the deep sea, spreading outward like a ripple on a pond. It silhouetted the merchantman, now little more than a bowshot away, and two long, low barges moored to it. An instant later theBird of the Tide was suspended in crimson purity. Fish, caught in the same clarity, hung lower in the light-shot void, and arrowing through the sea toward the merchantman was the great seawolf Ilna had glimpsed from the deck of theDefender.
The flash spread on and vanished. It hadn't affected Ilna's night vision.
"Dear one, do you know what it was that just happened?" Chalcus asked in a voice all the crew could hear. He held his bow in his left hand with an arrow between his fingers, but his right hand wasn't on the cord. The light had shown everything nearby; the air was empty of Rua and of every other thing beneath the clouds.
"Beyond the obvious, that there's a wizard working," Ilna said, "I know nothing at all."
She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. She realized that the crew, brave men though they were, needed or at least deserved reassurance, so she had to be willing to offer it.
A question formed in Ilna's mind and resolved itself; she chuckled, but she didn't explain the reason when Chalcus raised a quizzical eyebrow. She'd thought, How can telling the men that we're completely ignorant be reassuring? And the answer came as swiftly: We've told them they're as well off as the people putting them to this risk; and that's not what they'd assume if we failed to tell them.
"A hard pull and we'll come up alongside the barge at the stern," Chalcus said. "Hutena, have you seen ships like that before?"
"Grain scows on the River Erd," Kulit answered in the place of the silent bosun. "A hundred feet long and forty broad, but they'll swim in water that won't come to your waist."
"There's marshes on the west side of the castle where you could land a barge," said Shausga. "I sailed the Carcosa run when I was a lad. Though why you'd want to berth there with Terness Harbor so good, I don't see."
"Indeed, a marsh?" said Chalcus. "It'd conceal your barges from an agent of Prince Garric with his eye on theDefender, would it not?"
"They're not hidden now," said Ilna. "Wherever they land and sail from, we can see the barges as soon as they're used."
"Aye, my love," said Chalcus. "And so could anyone else who put out when he saw wizardry in the sky at night. But would, do you think, every agent choose to do that? And if he did, or she did-would their crew obey the orders to put out?"
Chalcus laughed, but quietly. They were coming up on theQueen of Heaven and her attendant barges. In a conversational tone he went on, "Conn us around, Kulit, starboard to starboard with the barge. Not that I think they'll try to chase us down, this lot, but for the craftsmanship of the thing."
He grinned at Ilna. She smiled back, touched by the humor but aware also of the patterns that formed and scattered under the play of her fingers.
There were many lights on the merchantman's deck, more than Ilna could count with both hands. She heard men's voices, often that of Commander Lusius himself, shouting angry orders.
"Won't they see us coming?" she asked in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. "Don'tthey see us?"
Things splashed into the sea, followed moments later by a swirl of water and theclop of great jaws. Ilna'd seen the seawolf; now she knew why it followed whenever Lusius put out to sea.
"Not this lot," Chalcus murmured. "Not till we tread on their toes, and maybe not even then."
"We're going aboard, captain?" asked Hutena as theBird of the Tide slipped toward the barge with a soapy ease. Shausga and Ninon shipped their long oars; crewmen on the port side backed water to kill the vessel's remaining momentum. "We know who the pirates are already, don't we?"
"I think we know who," said Chalcus. "But not how, and just possibly not who either-since our Lusius wouldn't be one to leave a derelict with a full hold. You and I will board her, Hutena, while the others will wait ready to cast off."
"And I'm coming, of course," said Ilna. She'd made a choice of the pattern to have in her hands; she'd chosen or her fingers had, either one. She sometimes thought that her hands had not only more skill than her conscious mind but more wisdom as well. If she'd been wise, she'd be rich and powerful beyond all other folk-but she wouldn't be Ilna os-Kenset any more, and that was a greater price than she was willing to pay for anything in the world or beyond it.
"Of course you are, my heart," said Chalcus, striding forward to hand his bow and the bundle of arrows to Kulit. "Of course you'll come with us, or there'd be no reason for us to be here at all."
Thick hawsers at bow and stern lashed the barge to the merchantman. A coarse swatch of rope netting draped the bigger ship's side provided a ladder which several at a time could climb. A few worked on the barge by the light of several lanterns, stowing bales which the larger number who'd gone aboard threw over the merchantman's railing.
The men were Lusius' Sea Guards, though for the most part they were in tunics rather than linen cuirasses and only a few wore their swords. That was a factor Chalcus would have noticed from the moment theBird of the Tide drew within bowshot; it explained why he was blithely taking theBird 's handful into the midst of the much greater number of Lusius' men.
The Sea Guards used many lamps, more than the work itself required, on theQueen of Heaven and the pair of barges. Lamp light illuminated only a small circle around each flame, and by doing so hid whatever was beyond those circles more thoroughly than the darkness itself. Lusius his men so feared what might be lurking aboard the merchantman that they ignored the possibility another ship might slip up on them.
TheBird thumped alongside the barge. Shausga and Ninon looped ropes around two of the oarlocks that lined the other ship's gunwales. Though the barge was by far the larger vessel, its deck was actually lower than theBird 's. Ilna and Chalcus hopped aboard together.
"Hey!" cried a Sea Guard as he and his fellows turned to see what had struck them. "Com-"
Ilna saved his life by spreading the pattern she'd knotted. She held it out so that lanternlight fell squarely on its seemingly effortless artistry.
The man who'd spoken doubled up, spewing vomit which appeared to be mostly wine. Those nearby retched and covered their eyes. A man who'd been at a distance so that he'd gotten only a slanted view of the pattern called, "What? What?" in the voice of one waking from a nightmare.
Hutena cracked him hard over the head with the peen of his axe. "Tie these scuts up while we're gone!" the bosun ordered over his shoulder. He grabbed the boarding net a moment after Chalcus and Ilna had started up.
Ilna's eyes watered. She sneezed fiercely, smothering the sound in the shoulder of her tunic. TheQueen of Heaven reeked of brimstone. Had it been a grain ship, it might have been fumigated before setting out on this voyage, but there was no call to worry about rats seriously damaging a cargo of tapestries. Besides, the smell hadn't clung to the timbers when they'd boarded the ship with Commander Lusius.
The netting was made from the same sword-leafed desert plant as the rope Ilna had handled earlier. It had a clean, dry feel, and the strands had been twisted by a careful workman who knew her business. There was nothing so simple that there wasn't a right way to do it-or for most people in Ilna's experience, a wrong way.
"Hey, what's going on down there?" a man called from theQueen 's railing. "Stop playing the fool or we'll tip this bloody tapestry on your bloody heads!"
Chalcus vaulted the railing, using his left arm as a pivot. He hadn't drawn his inward-curving sword, but Ilna knew how quickly the weapon could appear in his hand when he wished.
The Sea Guard screamed and stumbled back, crossing his hands before his face as if to keep from seeing his own oncoming doom. There'd been four of them lugging a rolled hanging, a full weight for them all together. Silk with gold and silver wires on a wool backing; valuable no doubt but journeyman's work, exceptional only in the value of the raw materials… The others jumped away also, and one started to draw his sword.
"Gently, lad, there's no need for that," Chalcus said, taking the man's sword wrist with fingers which Ilna had seen bend iron nails. The Sea Guard gasped in pain; then Hutena mounted the railing behind him and quieted him with another rap from the axe.
"Who are you?" demanded the Sea Guard who'd first spoken. He wasn't armed, which may have been the reason his tone changed from hectoring to merely inquisitive in the course of a short sentence. "Sister take you, I didn't see you when I looked over the side, and I thought…"
He didn't bother to explain what he'd thought. Ilna could've guessed closely enough, even without a pair of Sea Guards coming out of the deckhouse hauling a corpse between them.
Part of a corpse: a man's head and shoulders, with the torso below that ending in a ragged slant at mid-chest. Ilna believed that the victim was the chief of the Blaise armsmen.
The men dragging the torso had sour expressions, and their minds didn't take in the things their eyes glanced over. They walked past the group around Chalcus and tossed the fragment into the sea between the two barges.
"We're guests of the Commander, don't you recall?" Chalcus said. "Now, where is it he would be, friend? For we've business for his ears only."
"You're…?" the Sea Guard said. He shook his head in puzzlement. "Well, I don't know, in one of the holds, I suppose, but-"
"Hoy, Commander!" Rincip bellowed, striding out of one of several open doors on the side of the deckhouse. He held a lantern high in his left hand. "There's a strongbox but there's money bags all over-hey!"
His eyes fell on Chalcus, then Ilna. "Where'dyou come from!"
"In a crisis like this, all men must stand together," said Chalcus, stepping toward Lusius' second in command. "Not so, Master Rincip?"
Rincip touched his sword pommel but didn't let his fingers close around its shagreen grip. After only a moment's thought he pointedly lifted his hand away.
"Civilians have no business here!" he snarled, but he didn't try to keep Chalcus and Ilna from entering the cabin he'd just left.
A lighted candle burned in a free-swinging holder hung from the ceiling. It threw a pale tallow illumination over the interior of the cabin, sufficient to see by even before Rincip followed them back in with the lantern.
A bedframe was folded out from the wall. The mattress was a common one of waxed linen filled with straw, but the bedclothes-now mostly tumbled on the floor-were silk. Instead of an ordinary sea chest roped to floor bitts so that it didn't skid around the cabin in bad weather, the wealthy occupant's large chest was cross-strapped with iron and padlocked to the bitts. The lid had a hasp and staple also, but the padlock which should have secured it was missing.
Three heavy leather moneybags closed with lead seals lay on the floor. Beside them was a document case and several thick codexes. Ilna recognized those last as ledgers, though she couldn't have read them even if they weren't in cipher-as they almost certainly were.
On the floor, half-covered by the bedding, was a man's hand and wrist. The hook-bladed sword it'd been holding lay beside it. One of the long bones of the forearm was still attached, broken off at the elbow end. The muscles had been stripped away, but some tendons still dangled.
Smiling in friendly innocence, Chalcus gripped the hasp of the strongbox in his left hand and tugged. The lid didn't rise; it was fastened even though the external lock was missing.
"What's this about money?" said Lusius, stepping into the cabin with a Sea Guard holding a lantern. "There should be a specie chest-you!"
Four men and Ilna crowded the cabin. Hutena remained on deck, very possibly overlooked in darkness and the confusion. Chalcus had a way of drawing eyes to him, which-given the bosun's demonstrated ability to think and act quickly-could be the key to escaping a situation that was literally-Ilna smiled-getting tighter by the moment.
"Aye, Commander," Chalcus said. "We saw the trouble in the sky and came to it, like good citizens of the Isles. And what should we find but you and your men?"
"It's my job to be here!" Lusius said. He didn't reach for his sword; the cabin was too cramped for sword work, and he'd seen what Chalcus' dagger could do in less time than a victim could blink. "You don't claim that I did this, do you?"
The commander thrust his boot under the bunk and hooked out the severed hand. "We saw the light, same as you did, and came to it as quick as possible. We were too late to save the crew, just as I warned the fools would happen if they didn't take my guards on board."
He didn't mention that his troops were looting the merchantman's holds. In all fairness, Ilna didn't suppose she'd met ten men in her lifetime who'd have passed up a valuable cargo whose owners had been reduced to a scatter of body parts.
"And your wizard Gaur?" Chalcus asked. "Where would he be, Commander?"
Lusius shrugged. "Back in his bed, I suppose," he said. "Gaur doesn't leave the castle often, and he never goes aboard a ship."
Ilna stood silent with her hands cupped over the fabric of cords that she would display if she needed to. Getting out of the cabin would be possible if not easy; getting down the side of theQueen of Heaven with a troop of hostile soldiers above them… that would be another matter, a problem to solve when they must.
The Commander's look hardened and he drew himself up. "Now, Captain," he said, "there's the matter of howyou came to be here. For the time being I'm willing to accept your story, though many folk would find it unlikely that any man went unbidden into wizardry unless his duty required him. What I say is this: get back to your ship, and get back to Terness-now. By my order as Commander of the Strait."
Ilna sneezed again from the brimstone in the air. Bits of a pattern connected in her mind. While Lusius spoke in an increasingly louder voice and Chalcus faced him with his hands on his hips, Ilna bent forward and grasped the sword on the floor of the cabin.
"Watch her!" Rincip shouted, grasping Ilna's shoulder; she wriggled free. Chalcus caught Rincip's neck in one hand and jerked him away.
Ilna used the sturdy sword as a pry bar, her left hand reversed on the grip and her right on the pommel. She rammed the point into the seam of the strongbox' latch, then levered upward. After a moment's resistance the lid flew open.
The supercargo, Pointin, crouched like a hare in her forme within. He leaped up screaming, blind with fear. The iron straps protecting the chest were held on with large rivets. Pointin had used a silk sleeve from his sleeping tunic to tie together mushroomed rivet-heads on the side and lid of the chest.
"By the Sister!" Lusius swore.
"Don't!" cried Chalcus, holding Rincip back with his right hand, his left poised.
The Sea Guard who'd come in with Lusius grasped his sword hilt. Ilna brought the Blaise sword around in a short arc. The back of the blade wasn't sharpened, but it broke the soldier's wristbones with a crunch. He screamed and dropped the lantern in his other hand. Oil spilled but didn't catch fire for the moment.
"You're human!" Pointin cried. He'd been shoving away the air; now he lowered his hands. "Wha… where are the demons? Have they gone?"
Chalcus punched Rincip in the stomach, then kneed him in the jaw as he doubled up. Lusius' deputy thumped to the floor and lay still, groaning and bleeding from the mouth.
"Now, Commander Lusius…," Chalcus said. His eyes hadn't moved from the Commander's during the moments it'd taken him to put Rincip out of the way. "We'll leave theQueen of Heaven to you and your fellows to deal with, as you demand. But for safety's sake, you'll come as far as the deck of theBird of the Tide with us. We'll climb down the netting with you on the side of my dagger hand."
Chalcus spoke pleasantly enough, but Ilna noticed he hadn't worded the statement as a question even for the sake of conventional politeness. Lusius glared, gathering his thoughts for a response.
Before he could make one, Ilna said, "No, the Commander will climb down after you so that if anything's thrown over the side it'll land onhis head."
Chalcus opened his mouth for a protest. "And as he climbs," Ilna said, loosing the silken rope that served her for a sash, "he'll have my noose around his neck-"
She tossed the running loop. Lusius bellowed in surprise and jerked his head back. The noose slipped over his head anyway and settled to his shoulders. Ilna tugged the soft rope tight-but not stranglingly tight-before Lusius got his hand up to throw it off. His lips twisted in a snarl, but he was smart enough to take his hand away before Ilna choked him to the floor, gasping and helpless.
"-to remind him that his duty is to escort us clear."
"Right," said Chalcus with the quick decisiveness that was the difference between life and death when time was short and the risks uncertain. "Pointin, going out of the cabin you'll follow Mistress Ilna and the Commander, and I'll bring up the rear."
Ilna put a finger's weight of pressure on the noose. Lusius grimaced and started for the cabin door.
"But where are you taking me?" the supercargo demanded in a tone that started high and ended as a falsetto.
"Some place other than the belly of a seawolf with what's left of your friends," Ilna snapped. "If that's not reason enough, I've got enough cord here to put a loop in the other end too and drag you along with the Commander!"
Pointin's face registered shock; he didn't respond for a moment. Chalcus took him by the shoulder and headed him toward the door. Pointin raised his feet high enough to clear the side of the box in which he stood, but he moved in a slack-mouthed daze.
Ilna curled her lips under in irritation with herself. She had years of experience in telling people unpalatable truths, and never once had it seemed a good idea afterwards. If she kept doing it nonetheless, she must be as great a fool as most of the rest of humanity.
The air outside was cool enough to be a surprise. She'd expected to see the Sea Guards waiting with their weapons drawn, but the interplay inside the cabin had gone unnoticed by most of those aboard. They had their own concerns, hauling heavy fabrics from the ship's several holds and disposing of the remnants of the vessel's crew.
Splashes and the swirling attacks of Our Brother sounded unabated. Whatever had killed the crew was a messy eater. The scattered fragments reminded Ilna of what was left of a chicken devoured by rats-feathers and feet and perhaps the head after the back of the skull was gnawed open to lick out the brain.
"Hutena, you lead," Chalcus said. "Quickly, man."
The bosun was over the railing like a great, squat spider. He continued to hold the hatchet instead of slipping the helve through his belt to free the other hand.
"Say, Commander, how many of these rolls are we supposed to bring up?" asked a soldier who'd seen Lusius and hadn't noticed anything wrong. "We'll never empty her in one night-nor three if I'm a judge."
Ilna smiled tightly and pulled with the care she'd have taken to place a thread in her weaving. "Later!" Lusius growled.
"But look-"
"Later, Dover!" Lusius shouted. "Do you want to feed Our Brother, is that it?"
The Sea Guard snarled a curse and backed away. Chalcus prodded Pointin to the railing; when the supercargo simply stood there, Chalcus lifted him one-handed and dangled him over the side. Only then did Pointin grasp the ropes and begin descending, clumsily but with increasing speed.
Ilna climbed the rail, paying out a little more line as she did so. The boarding net was an old friend by now, a brief transport to a dry place without the slurp/clop! of a seawolf gobbling human tidbits. Lusius followed with the speed of long practice.
When the Commander was well over the side and unable to change his mind, Chalcus dropped like an ape leaping from a tree. He caught the net halfway down, swung himself beneath Ilna, and dropped the rest of the way to the barge to join Hutena and Pointin.
The crew of the barge had recovered from the shock Ilna'd given them, but they weren't ready for more. One of them cried out when he saw her; all of them backed into the relative darkness of the bow.
"What did you do to them, mistress?" Hutena murmured wonderingly as he gripped the Commander's shoulder.
Ilna whipped off her noose as easily as she'd caught Lusius in it. "I made their heads spin," she said, doubling and redoubling the rope before she looped it back around her waist. "That's all."
And if she'd wanted, she could've knotted another pattern that would make those who viewed it leap into the sea to quench the flames they felt blazing from their eyesockets… but there'd been no need, and Ilna was trying to learn a sense of proportion in the punishments she paid out to those who opposed the right as she saw it.
But it was very hard. They all deserved to die; and Ilna os-Kenset deserved to die also, as she well knew…
She hitched up the drape of her modestly-long tunic and jumped aboard theBird of the Tide. Some day she'd receive the justice she deserved; but until then she'd live and continue to make amends in the best way she could.
"Cast off!" Chalcus ordered, but the crew was already shoving them clear of the barge. Lusius stood glaring after them. "You're free to return to your investigations, Commander. And no doubt we'll meet again in good time, after you've returned to Terness, not so?"
Chalcus laughed as the oarsmen pulled hard for the harbor. Ilna did not. The sound of the seawolf slapping the water again and again as it leaped for morsels could be heard for miles against the quiet sea.
'There's some wine in the cup here," said a voice in Cashel's ear. "You'll feel better if you can drink it."
Cashel opened… well, no, his eyes were already open. They suddenly focused, though. He blinked twice, clearing them, and thought about getting up. He tried to raise his head first, then thought better of moving at all for at least a little while.
It was late evening. He could tell that because he faced west as he lay on the mound at the base of the marble tank, and so he saw the sun setting. If he hadn't been looking that direction, he'd have just had to guess about the time of day.
Evne waddled around Cashel's head to face him. "Of course if you prefer to lie here feeling sorry for yourself…," she said.
Cashel started to laugh. It was just what he needed to do, though the first wracking gulps of air almost killed him, His bruised chest bounced again and again on the ground, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
He finally got his laughter enough under control to sit up. It was a good thing he'd landed on the mound rather than digging a trench with his nose across the stony plain. He felt dizzy for a moment and closed his eyes, then realized that was a bad idea and opened them again. When he didn't have the horizon to look at, he got vertigo.
"You knew I'd get mad if you said I was feeling sorry for myself," Cashel said. "And then I'd see how you'd fooled me, so I'd laugh and that'd bring me around. You're really smart, Evne."
"Yes, I am," the toad said. "Now the wine."
Cashel looked down at her affectionately. "I don't like-" he said.
"I didn't ask if you liked it," the toad said. "I said you'd feel better for drinking it. Though of course-"
Cashel took the cup waiting beside where his right hand had been holding the quarterstaff. Duzi, he'd really bruised the knuckles; though he didn't suppose that was such a terrible thing, given what might've happened when he came down.
The cup was crystal and as clear as the air around it. He drank the pale green liquid in three gulps. There weren't any bubbles in it, but it prickled like there were.
"Oh!" he said wonderingly. "That's wine, Evne? It doesn't taste like any wine I've had before."
"No," said the toad. "I don't suppose it does."
Cashel looked around him, which saved him asking where the wine-and the cup-came from. There were any number of folk, both in bright clothing and in servants' garb, standing among the ruins below the tank and staring up at Cashel. Near each handful of people was a curvy, boatlike thing with a long stem and sternpiece-sort of milkweed pods grown to giant size.
"Where didthey come from?" he asked amazed. And as rough as the slopes had been even for him, how did this lot of soft-living folk from the manors manage to get here near as quick as he had and carry those boats with them besides?
"Some are from Manor Bossian, I believe," said the toad, "but mostly they fled from Manor Ansache when the Visitor destroyed it. And there may be a few-"
She moved her head in a series of short twitches rather than a smooth arc as she eyed the crowd below them.
"-from other places as well, running before they're forced to run."
The toad paused, rubbing the back of her own neck with her long right leg. She added, "They flew here in their airboats when they learned you'd killed the dragon. They're afraid, you see, and they're looking for somebody strong to protect them."
"I'm not…," Cashel said. He didn't know how to continue the sentence, so he let his voice trail off. "Should I do something, Evne? I mean, about them?"
The toad sniffed. "You're not required to do anything," she said. "And at the moment, master, I don't see that you'reable to do very much. Including stand up."
Cashel cleared his throat. "Yeah, that had better wait for a time," he agreed. Because he didn't want to think aboutall those people watching him and expecting him to do-something, whatever-he turned his head to the side and saw the dragon for the first time since he'd awakened after the fight.
"Duzi!" he said. The little herdsman's God of Barca's Hamlet didn't seem a grand enough deity to name as he looked on the thing he'd been fighting, so he added, "May the Shepherd help me, Evne. I couldn't have beatenthat!"
"Really?" said the toad. "Then my eyes must have gone bad while I was imprisoned in that block of coal. It's not surprising after seven thousand years, I suppose, but I very distinctly saw you hammering the creature to death."
The dragon was a long sagging bronze tube. Some of the scales had dropped off, leaving gaps through which Cashel saw what seemed to be a web of wires. The body stretched from the top of the mound to well out into the plain, plus however how much of its length was still in the tank. Black smudges on pedestals of rocky soil showed where tufts of silkgrass had burned when the creature rolled over them during its flaming death throes, and it'd seared a broad wedge of the slope's juicier vegetation as well.
"Evne," Cashel said, "I couldn't have stopped it any better than I could've stopped a herd of oxen if they'd stampeded at me. It's just too big, itweighs too much. I'm strong, sure, but nobody's that strong."
"That might have been so if it'd been a real snake," the toad said, "but it wasn't-it was wizard's work. So you fought it as one wizard to another, and you were the stronger. It certainly gives the lie to those who claim intelligence and erudition are prerequisites for wizardry, doesn't it?"
Cashel sighed. He didn't know what either erudition or prerequisites were, but intelligence was a word he understood. He could figure out what the toad meant easily enough.
He ran the quarterstaff through his hands, letting his fingertips check the hickory for damage that his eyes couldn't see. The iron buttcaps were now rainbow colored from the energy they'd channeled during the battle, but the staff itself was unmarked. It remained the same straight, smooth friend as it'd been since he turned it out of a branch.
The closest spectators to Cashel were well-dressed folk in a group at the bottom of the mound. One of them was Syl, the woman who'd sat at Bossian's table during dinner, though the men didn't include the Farran who'd been with her. Cashel didn't recognize the others, which wasn't surprising; but seeing Syl made him wonder uneasily about Kotia.
"I told the refugees that I'd summon them in the event you deigned to grant them an audience," Evne said in a cool tone. "Otherwise they should keep their distance or it'd be the worse for them."
Cashel grinned. "They took orders from a little toad?" he said.
Evne rotated her head to put him in the middle of her two bulging eyes. "They may have thought," she said, "that so great a wizard as yourself would have a familiar who could herself blast them to ashes. And they may have been right."
Two of the men were arguing with Syl; one put a hand on her shoulder, turning her so that she faced the mound "Lord Cashel?" she called.
"Shall I order them away?" the toad said with no emotion at all.
"No, no," Cashel muttered. "That's all right."
Loudly to Syl he said, "Mistress, you can come up if you like. But I don't think I can help you."
He hadn't meant for the whole group of them-six, a handful and the thumb of his other hand-to come, but they all did. That was maybe a good thing: two of the men carried a crystal hamper between them. More of that wine and some food-Cashel's stomach rumbled in excitement-would go down a treat.
Manor Ansache destroyed, the toad had said, and Syl here from Manor Bossian. Well, it wasn't his world and these folksure weren't his friends.
Their clothing was just as fine as it'd been at the banquet the night before, but it'd now seen harder use than it was meant for. The tall, blond man who'd been most insistent about Syl calling to Cashel had lost the sleeve of his tunic; there was even a scratch on his bare shoulder. The rest were tousled looking, and the long aquamarine gown of the other woman-older than Syl by quite a lot-was seared across the train.
"My master will accept your gift of further viands," Evne said. Listening to her voice you'd think she was looking down her nose as spoke, but she didn't have a nose. "And scraps of chopped meat for his loyal servant wouldn't come amiss… though the pair of damselflies that fell my lot as he rested will suffice if they must."
The men with the hamper immediately set it down; it started to slide. Cursing, the blond man blocked it with his foot and jerked the lid open.
"Lord Cashel…," Syl said. She hadn't been injured, but she looked like she'd been dragged through a drain pipe. Her eyes flicked nervously, and there was nothing in her expression to remind Cashel of the haughty, elfin girl she'd been when he met her. "We didn't realize that Lord Bossian had summoned you to destroy the Visitor. If we seemed less than attentive previously-"
"If you seemed like a nitwit who was more worried about the shade of her hair ribbon than the fact her world was ending, you mean," said Evne. "As of course you were."
Syl instinctively reached up to touch her hair. The ribbon was a green so faint it might have passed for white. She realized what she'd done and grimaced.
"Whatever," she muttered. ''Anyway, we've come to say that we'll put everything we've managed to escape with at your service."
Which was different from, "ourselves at your service," thought Cashel as he took a flat loaf from the hamper while one of the men refilled the crystal cup. He couldn't imagine any service this lot could be, of course; to him or to anybody, themselves included.
"Ma'am…," he said as he bit down and found to his surprise that the loaf was meat or anyway tasted like meat instead of being bread. Duzi! but he was hungry. "Ah, what I meant to say is that Bossian didn't summon me anywhere. He helped me some but that was because he wanted to be shut of me."
Cashel paused, both to swallow what he'd been chewing and to collect his words. He knew what he meant, now and most times, but often he had a hard time finding the right words.
"It was Kotia who brought me here," he said carefully. "To your world, I mean. And now I'm going back."
"But milord…," said the blond man. His face twisted up in a funny way; Cashel thought for a moment that he was going to spit at him. That had happened to Cashel before, though it'd never turned out to be a good idea for the fellow spitting…
Instead the blond man sank down on his knees and started to cry, and it was absolutely the first time in Cashel's life thatthat had happened. If he'd had to pick between the experiences he guessed he'd have taken the spitting, because then he knew exactly what to do.
"Milord, milord, please," the fellow blubbered. "You slew the dragon, surely you can slay the Visitor also. Milord, if you abandon us we have nothing, no one."
The others weren't crying but they looked like they were ready to, all but Syl who patted her hair ribbon with a distant expression. Shuving or-Gansel had that kind of look on his face when the oak he'd been felling split partway up the trunk and leaped back on him. It didn't change even when he died, an hour or so after Cashel and Shuving's son had gotten the tree off him.
Cashel gulped the wine; it tingled all the way to his toes. Pretty soon he'd be ready to stand up; Duzi, he was probably ready now. He said, "Sir-"
Before he could come up with a way to continue, the fellow grabbed Cashel's knees with soft, clammy hands. Cashel jumped to his feet, spilling the refill of wine that another of the locals was pouring from a bottle with a serpent neck.
"Don'tdo that," Cashel said. He slammed his staff into the dirt, holding it vertically in front of him like a narrow wall.
The blond man jerked back. Now the older woman started to cry, a little soft, "Whoop, whoop, whoop," through the hands covering her face.
"Kotia brought me here," Cashel went on. He had a flash of dizziness, but nothing worse than what generally happened if he stood up quickly after squatting. "She saved my life, I guess-"
The place he'd been before Kotia took him out wasn't somewhere he'd have wanted to live much longer, even if he'd been able to.
"-and I paid her back by bringing her safe to Lord Bossian to marry. She and I are quits, now, and for the rest of you…"
He shook his head, wishing he could find a better way of saying what he felt. "Look, I'm sorry about your troubles, but I can't fix everything. Even if I could fight your Visitor, which I don't see that I could."
Cashel bent down. He set his cup on the ground-the slope wasn't quite too steep for it to stand on its base-and turned his palm up before the toad.
"Come on, Evne," he said. "We'll be leaving now. I think you'd best ride inside my tunic while I climb onto the tank."
The toad didn't hop into his palm as he expected. Syl looked at Cashel, her face as calm as a corpse's, and said, "Lady Kotia won't be marrying Lord Bossian. The Visitor came to Manor Bossian after he'd destroyed Manor Ansache. He destroyed the Crimson Tower and demanded Kotia or else he'd destroy the whole manor."
"He…," Cashel said, trying to get his mind around what he'd just heard. "What… what did Lord Bossian do?"
The blond man had gotten to his feet again. "What did he do?" he repeated in a shrill, half-mocking tone. "What could he do? He sent the girl to the Visitor, of course!"
Cashel didn't speak. He'd been stroking his quarterstaff with his left hand, but he stopped that too. The felt a vein in his throat throbbing.
"She didn't object," Syl said. She was no longer detached; she watched Cashel closely. "She was walking toward the Visitor's ship even before Bossian sent to bring her."
"Yeah," said Cashel at last. He couldn't have recognized his own voice. "She'd have done that."
He licked his lips; they were very dry. "Lord Bossian's a wizard. Why didn't he stop the, the Visitor?"
"He couldn't!" crowed the blond man, coming closer to being hammered into the ground like a tent peg than he probably realized. "Nobody can stop the Visitor!"
"Then why didn't he try!" Cashel shouted and they all but one stumbled back; all of them except Syl, and she was smiling now.
"The Visitor stays in the middle of the Great Swamp when he's on this world," said Evne, sounding like a teacher. "All the streams on this side of the hills drain into it, and there's no outlet."
"I can't fix everything," Cashel said, starting to get his normal voice back. He reached down again and this time Evne hopped into his palm. He straightened.
"I can't fix everything," Cashel repeated, "but there's things Iwill fix regardless. Now-"
He eyed the group of locals without affection.
"-how do I get to the Great Swamp?"