Garric sneezed. The ruins of Torag's compound smoldered in a dozen places. Though the smoke hadn't affected him while the battle was going on, it did now.
Besides the sullen haze, there was the stench of bodies. The blackened corpses of the Coerli looked more human than the creatures had in life, but their wet fur smoldered with a unique pungency.
Soma lay on her back just inside the cross-wall. A warrior's barbed spear had entered below her navel and ripped upward, dragging her intestines with it. Her face was suffused with rage. Garric remembered what the Bird had said: that she'd thrust her torch through the mouth of the Corl who'd killed her.
"Shall we leave her here or throw her into a bog?" Metz asked. "Donria's told me how she tried to kill you."
"I'd like you to have her buried properly, or however you treat your dead here," Garric said. "The woman the Coerli killed was a valued ally to me and to all of us."
Metz shrugged. "I never had much use for her," he said. "But if you say so, Lord Garric."
"Lord Garric," said a woman's voice behind them. "Let me see your wound."
Garric turned; the movement made his shoulder flame as if somebody'd just run a hot plow-coulter through it. It hurt so much that his vision blurred and his knees wobbled.
"Stand still," said the woman-the girl who'd been helping Marzan. The wizard sat nearby, his back against the side of a bee-hive hut that'd housed some of the warriors.
The girl was chewing a cud of something; green juice dribbled from a corner of her mouth. She gripped Garric by the biceps and the top of his shoulder, bringing her face close to the puckered entrance hole. She spat a wad of fibrous paste onto the wound, then worked it into the hole with a prod of her thumb.
"Duzi!" Garric screamed. He tried to jump back, but the girl kept her hold on his forearm. She was ungodly strong.
"Stand still!" the girl repeated. She popped what looked like a piece of root into her mouth and began chewing it with enthusiasm. It'd been about the size of the last joint of her thumb.
"Lila's a good healer," Metz said approvingly. "People from other villages came to her mother for healing."
His uncle Abay, the one with the lacerated face, grinned horribly. "Marzan should've married her instead of Soma when his first wife died," he said. "Guess he figures that way too, eh Lila?"
The girl didn't reply, but juice squirted around the edges of her smile. "Turn around, Lord Garric," she said in a mushy voice.
Garric obeyed, steeling himself for another piercing jolt. Lila spat. This time the pressure of her thumb felt more like a hammer blow than a blade. A pleasant warmth was already spreading from the wad of paste she'd packed into the entrance wound.
"Are you ready to return to your own time, Garric?" asked the Bird.
Garric looked up in surprise. The Bird was perched on the cross-wall of the stockade. Though he was within twenty feet of Garric, smoke and the omnipresent mist blurred his glittering shape.
"Yes," Garric said. He wondered if the villagers had heard the Bird's question. "Of course I am."
"Are you going to leave us, Garric?" Metz asked. The hunter was trying to keep his face blank, but an expression of blind terror flickered on and off it. That answers the question of whether the villagers could hear…
"I have duties in my own time," Garric said. The day before he'd wanted nothing so much as to leave this miserable gray bog; now he felt pangs of guilt at abandoning people who trusted him. "I have to get back, Metz."
"But what will we do, Master?" said Horst, rubbing his heavy chin in concern. "We could never have beat the Coerli without you."
Garric felt his face harden as his mind shuffled through options. He wasn't angry, but he'd been a king long enough to understand the sort of decisions a king had to make if he and his people were to survive.
"You've had me," he said. "You've seen what I did, what you did yourselves when I showed you. You can do it again."
"But Lord Garric," said a woman Garric didn't recognize. She'd been one of the captives, he thought. "There are so many Coerli and we are few. This was only one keep."
"There's other keeps, sure," Garric said, "but there's many more human villages. Metz, uniting your neighbors is as important as attacking the Coerli. Youcan unite and the cat men never will. This-"
He gestured at the smoking ruins of the keep.
"-was a real fight for your village alone, but if there'd been three or four villages together Torag wouldn't have had a prayer. You've got booty for trade, Coerli tools and fabrics-"
"And excess women," Carus added. "There's many a chief whose opinion could change if you offered him the sort of young, healthy woman that the cat beasts picked for their own uses."
That was true, but it wasn't something Garric was going to say or even allow himself to think. He continued aloud, "-that'll help you convince other villages that this isn't a wild risk. And you've got Coerli weapons. They'll impress neighbors who aren't completely willing. It's theworld's safety at stake."
He took a deep breath. He felt oddly euphoric; the root that Lila'd pushed into his wound must have more than a simple healing effect.
"You've got to do it yourselves, Metz, all of you," he said, "but you can. And you should, because it's your world you're saving, not mine."
"Lord Garric?" said the woman who'd spoken before. "If you could stay with us for just a little while, then we'd be able to take over ourselves when you left. There's so much we don't understand!"
Carus watched through Garric's eyes with grim humor, his knuckles on his hips and his arms akimbo. "Just a little longer," was the most common plea a king heard…
"There'll always be things you don't understand," Garric said, speaking to Metz but pitching his voice so that all the villagers could hear. "There'll always be things that're new to me too. This isyour world. You're better off running it than I'd be-and if you're not, then you'll be leaving it for the Coerli. I hope and pray that's not what happens, but the choice is yours to make."
Donria whispered something in Metz' ear. The former hunter, now chief, straightened and said, "Garric? You've helped us. What can we do to help you?"
"By the Lady!" Carus said in delight. "That Donria'll be the making of this world. Thiskingdombefore long, I shouldn't wonder!"
"Bird, what must I do to get home?" Garric asked. His conscience still troubled him, but he knew what he'd said was the truth: there'd never be a time that he couldn't be of some benefit to the Grass People, but he really had given them sufficient tools to save themselves.
"We must go to the cave in the abyss from which the Coerli enter this time," the Bird said. "I am not a wizard, but I can analyze potentials and adjust them. We will be able to do what you wish and what I need. We will go alone."
"But Garric?" Metz said, frowning in consternation. "That place is full of monsters. And the cat people as well, going to and from. We never went near it, even before the cat people came to the Land. Things live there that live nowhere else, terrible things."
Garric held the axe he'd taken from the Corl he'd killed when escaping. He turned to get a little room, then swung it back and forth in a wide arc. His shoulder felt like glass was breaking in it, but the weapon moved smoothly nonetheless.
He looked down, expecting to see blood start from the entrance wound; it didn't. Lila was back at Marzan's side; she gave him a smirk of satisfaction.
"When I have to," Garric said, "I can be pretty terrible myself. If the Coerli can pass that way, so can I."
The Bird jumped/flew/fell onto Garric's left shoulder. "Then let us go now," it said. "You're tired, but time is critical."
"Yes," said Garric. "Metz, fellow humans-my heart will be with you as you reclaim your world from monsters."
"And I suspect it's time and past time to do the same for the Kingdom of the Isles," said Carus. "Because I don't believe the wizardry that brought you here didn't have more effect than that!"
Captain Ascor cleared his throat and said, "Your highness, it's best you and Lady Tenoctris start back for Mona now. Things are apt to get-"
He paused to look down to the fog-wrapped plain.
"-pretty busy here soon."
Sharina smiled despite herself. Those weren't the words Ascor would've used if he'd been talking to another soldier.
She drew the big knife from beneath her outer tunic. "Ascor," she said, "provide a detail-a section, I think-to escort Lady Tenoctris to Mona. I'm going to remain here with the army."
"Your highness, it's not safe!" the captain snapped.
"I know it's not safe," said Sharina, an edge in her voice as well. "That's why it's my duty to stay. With respect, Captain-precisely what do you think I could save by running away? Except my life, that is, which of course would be worthless if I were a leader who abandoned her troops."
"Oh, I'm not leaving, dear," Tenoctris said. "Apart from anything else, Cervoran hasn't been defeated yet. That was just a skirmish, another skirmish."
Sharina's eyes and the Blood Eagle's too shifted to Double, who'd arranged on the ground several objects he'd taken from his case. One was crinkled and amber. At first Sharina took it for a tortoise shell, but closer attention convinced her it was the husk of a cicada of remarkable size; her spread hand wouldn't have covered the thing.
Double bent and scribed a hexagram in the soil with his athame. He made the strokes separately instead of angling each side into the next in a combined motion as most people would've done. The amulet containing the lock of Ilna's hair wobbled on a silver neck chain.
One of the small ballistas released with a loudcrack, sending out a caustic-headed quarrel. It struck at the base of a hellplant's torso, just above the squirming legs. All down the line of catapults and ballistas, men with long wrenches were tightening the springs of their weapons. The artillery couldn't be left at full tension for very long without warping the frames and weakening the coiled sinews. This morning the crews hadn't started cocking the weapons until they realized Double's wizardry wasn't going to save them.
"Huese semi iaoi…," Double chanted, dipping his athame to a different angle of his hexagram with each syllable. "Baubo eeaei."
Thecrack s of more artillery-including a heavy catapult which must've had a picked crew-echoed around the bowl of the hills. Several plants ruptured and collapsed, already beginning to decay into the sodden ground. Another staggered in a wide curve to the right, gushing steam from its wounded side.
"Sope…," said Double. "San kanthare ao!"
The ground seemed to bubble. Tiny sharpnesses jabbed Sharina's feet between the sandal straps and up her ankles; she shouted in surprise. A guard jerked off his cape and began slapping it at his feet as though he were beating out a fire.
Locusts, some of them the length of a man's middle finger, were hatching out of the ground. That's all it was-locusts; but thousands upon crawling thousands of them.
"It's all right," Tenoctris called. Sharina doubted whether any of the soldiers heard her or if they'd have paid attention if they had. "This is Cervoran's doing. He's helping us!"
Crawling, fluttering, flying in slow, clumsy arcs, the locusts converged where the linked threads had crushed Double's mirror. The air was full of them and the ground for as far as Sharina could see shivered as still more insects dug up through it.
"Eulamon," Double chanted. "Restoutus restouta zerosi!"
Sharina held the Pewle knife in her right hand and clung to Tenoctris with her left. She knew she was reassuring herself instead of supporting the old wizard; though perhaps she was supporting Tenoctris as well.
The hump of smothering vegetable matter vanished under the insects' jaws, individually tiny but working in uncountable numbers. The hellplants had slowed their advance, but fresh threads swept up on a rising breeze. Locusts curved to intercept them, snatching the strands from the air like falcons stooping on doves.
"Benchuch bachuch chuch…," chanted Double. His puffy, waxen face showed strain, but a look of triumph suffused it as well. "Ousiri agi ousiri!"
The film of silver lifted again to catch the risen sun. For a moment the swarming locusts distorted it, but they hopped and flew out of the obstructing pile that had devoured the linked threads. White light glared on a hellplant, ripping it instantly apart. The claw of light shifted and destroyed the next plant in line.
Lord Waldron spoke to his signallers; horns and trumpets blew Retreat. Troops began thankfully leaving the earthworks even before their own unit signallers passed on the command. When Double's wizardry was ascendant, all humans could do was to get in the way.
"Lady, thank you for Your support," Sharina whispered. "Lady, I will build a temple here for the salvation You have worked for the kingdom and for mankind."
The wind died, dropping the threads which it'd lifted from the sea. The locusts continued to circle in swirls and clusters.
The sea's surface danced with foam. Birds rose from it, sweeping toward the ridge of the hills.
Not birds, fish! Fish flying!
They curled out of the water and flew low over the fields, leaving faint ruby trails in the dense fog. At the base of the hills they swooped upward, silvery bodies writhing and pectoral fins stretched out like sword blades. Their slender bodies reminded Sharina of mackerel, but their heads were things out of nightmare or the deep abysses: the eyes bulged, and the jaws hinged down into open throat sacks like those of pelicans.
When Sharina was a child, an earthquake had shaken the Inner Sea. Barca's Hamlet was protected by a granite sea wall built during the Old Kingdom. The shock had slammed great waves into it, kicking spume a hundred feet in the air. The next day the tide brought in fish with heads like these, their bodies burst when they were sucked up to the surface.
A fish dived toward Sharina, its open mouth fringed with ragged teeth. Sharina stepped in front of Tenoctris and brought her knife around in a quick stroke. The fish wasn't attacking. Rather, it'd swept through the cloud of locusts, gulping down a mass of them and then cocking up its rigid fins to bank away.
Sharina's blade sheared off half the right fin and the tail besides. The fish tumbled out of the air and slapped the hard soil, its body trembling as its mouth opened and shut. Wizardlight dusted the air around it scarlet, then vanished as the creature died.
Fish slashed and curvetted through the mirror. The silver film reformed after each impact like water pelted by raindrops, but the ripples robbed its surface of the perfect focus which alone could concentrate the light into a sword. The hellplants resumed their march.
"Tacharchen!" Double shouted, pointing his athame toward the sea; his film of silver collapsed again into the soil. Double turned and stalked back to his case of paraphernalia.
"Oh, my goodness…," Tenoctris said. Sharina glanced at her; the old wizard was staring raptly at what seemed empty sky.
Tenoctris was aware of-perhaps 'saw' wasn't the correct word-the play of forces with which all wizards worked. Sharina suspected from past experience that Tenoctris actually understood those forces better than did wizards who had greater ability to affect them.
"What's-" Sharina said, but she fell silent because her coming question-what's going on, what do you see?-was idle curiosity and Tenoctris was clearly busy with important things.
Using Sharina's arm as a brace, the old wizard seated herself on the ground and pulled out a bamboo split. She quickly drew a pentagram in the thin soil. As she concentrated, she muttered, "Don't let anyone disturb me, if you please."
"Captain Ascor!" Sharina ordered, much more sharply than she'd intended. "Put a ring of men around Lady Tenoctris. Don't let anyone or anything close to her, any one!"
A squad Blood Eagles shuffled about the old wizard, facing outward and lifting their shields as much by instinct as for cause. Sharina, glancing between the men's legs, saw Tenoctris scoop a shallow depression in the center of her pentagram. She filled it with what seemed to be water from an agate bottle with a stopper of cork.
Double took a spray of black feathers from his case. He crossed them on the ground into a six-pointed star, then began chanting. Sharina couldn't hear the high-pitched words over the whistle the fish made as their fins cut the air.
Tenoctris bent toward her image, mumbling words of power. If the guards heard her chanting, they kept that awareness out of their stolid faces.
Fish swooped and sailed, gulping down locusts but paying no attention to the assembled troops. Some soldiers batted at them with swords or spear shafts. They were harder to hit than they seemed, banking and curving more easily than such stiff-bodied creatures should've been capable of.
When a fish was knocked down, it flopped brokenly for a few moments, then died in a haze of escaping wizardlight. It didn't matter: there were thousands more flying, and a roiling sea from which any number could lift if the Green Woman found it necessary.
"Anoch anoch…," Double shouted, raising his athame like the staff of a banner. "Katembreimo!"
Though fog thick as a storm cloud darkened the basin of the hills, the sky overhead was blue and promised a hot day when the sun rose higher. Flecks speckled it suddenly: growing, diving; screeching like steel on stone. Each speck was a bird with a feathered serpent tail and its toothed beak open. They screamed as they tore into the fish. The birds had come from a clear sky and they continued to come, as many as raindrops in a summer storm.
The birds struck their prey with beaks, talons, and sometimes the hooked claws projecting from the angle of their stubby wings. They knocked the fish down with gaping wounds and flew on to kill more, never pausing to devour past victims. Sometimes locusts, freed from the torn bellies of falling fish, fluttered off dazedly.
Double was chanting again, his words barely audible through the chorus of his terrible birds. Familiarity made the spell ring in Sharina's mind, though: "…benchuch bachuch chuch…"
The mirror rose, catching the full sun and sending its blazing radiance onto the plain again. Light carved through the mist, spinning pale whorls to either side and striking a plant that was mounting the abandoned breastworks. It fell apart.
The birds dived and screamed and killed. Friends-allies, at least-though the creatures were, Sharina kept her knife ready in case one flew too close. Seemingly the birds avoided humans in their circuits, but they fouled the air with the stench of a snake den.
The sea was silent, almost glassy smooth, while the mirror licked another hellplant and the next. The plants moved sluggishly, lacking the inexorable certainty with which they'd begun their assault.
Double was chanting. The skin over his white forehead was tight but his lips were twisted in a grin and he stood as firm as a tree with deep-driven roots. Sharina knew how physically demanding wizardry was. She had no trust or affection for Double, but as Tenoctris had said from the beginning: his strength was remarkable.
The thought made Sharina glance at Tenoctris, who continued to mouth words of power. Though her bamboo wand tapped out the syllables, no flicker of wizardlight brightened the air above her figure. The water in her bowl shivered.
The ground trembled faintly but unmistakably. Sharina felt as though she were standing on the back of an ox, feeling the beat of its great heart through the soles of her feet. She turned to Tenoctris, but the old wizard's concentration was so fierce that Sharina didn't even start to ask the frightened question that instinct had brought to the tip of her tongue.
The fog over the plains below cleared. Everything within the bowl of hills was as clear as the facets of a jewel. The wind and the birds were silent, and the hair on the back of Sharina's neck rose.
The hills softened and slumped the way dunes collapse when the surge undermines them. Men shouted, losing their footing and dancing in desperate attempts to keep from sinking into what had been rock or firm soil. The violent shuddering sifted the breastworks back into the trenches from which they'd been dug and shook the emplaced artillery. A large catapult toppled onto its side, and several ballistas pointed skyward.
Double kept his feet, but the frame of posts and canvas twisted in tatters as the ground gave way beneath it. The silver film smeared the surface instead of sinking into the subsoil as it'd done in the past. Looking to the west, Sharina saw flat marshes for as far as her eye could travel. The ridge had vanished utterly, leaving mule-drawn wagons mired where there'd been rocky switchbacks up the hills.
The hellplants were advancing with renewed vigor. On soil this wet, they could move as fast as a man. Their tentacles writhed, ready to grip and rend.
Ilna stepped around an oak growing at a corner of the maze. The hedge down the aisle now before her was holly to the left and quickset to the right. Crouching in the middle was a three-headed dog as big as an ox.
She raised the pattern she'd knotted in anticipation of this meeting or one like it. She hadn't anticipated three heads, though: the great dog lunged toward her before stumbling and crashing onto its shoulder with a double yelp.
Chalcus shouted and drove past her with his sword and dagger out. He'd wanted to lead-but then, he'd wanted to guard the rear and also to fly over Ilna and the child so that nobody could approach from above. Ilna'd insisted on leading because she could capture rather than merely killing or chasing away whichever Prince they next met. That logic still held.
"Get out of the way!" Ilna said, making a quick change to the pattern-gathering a bight in the middle of the fabric because there wasn't time to do the job properly with an additional length of yarn. She was furious: with herself for not being better prepared and with Chalcus for assuming-well, acting as if-she wouldn't be able to recover from her error in time.
Mostly with herself. As usual.
Chalcus jumped aside as quickly as he'd come. The dog was already backing with the heads on either side turned away. The middle head was frozen in a look of slavering fury, like a trophy stuffed and nailed to the wall. The beast's right foreleg dragged and there was a hitch in the movements of the left hind leg as well.
"This is my territory!" snarled the left head.
"You have no right to-" began the right head.
Ilna spread her fabric. The dog took the new pattern through the open eyes of its middle head. It dropped where it stood.
"Now," said Ilna crisply. "You're going to answer the questions we ask or my friend Chalcus will cut pieces off you. I'm going to change my pattern enough to allow you to speak. If you choose not to help, we'll ask one of your fellow Princes, but we won't do that so long as you're alive."
The dog's breath stank of rotten meat. Knowing that the meat had been human wouldn't change Ilna's behavior, but neither did it dispose her to like the creature better. Instead of adjusting a knot of the pattern, she simply put the tip of her little finger over one corner.
The dog's left head jerked around to glare at them. "This is an outrage!" it snarled. "You-"
Chalcus stepped forward and flicked out his sword. One ear of the head that'd spoken spun into the quickset hedge. The dog yelped much louder than before; the head thrashed violently but the creature couldn't get away.
Merota gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth. Then she looked up with a distressed expression and said, "I'm sorry, Chalcus. He deserves it!"
"Ah, child," Chalcus said. He grinned broadly. "This one deserves far worse, I'm sure; and if he's stubborn I'll take pleasure in giving worse to him, that I will."
"We want to leave this tapestry," Ilna said, "this garden if you prefer. What is the way out?"
"I don't know-" said the dog. It jerked its head with a howl as Chalcus shifted minusculely.
"No!" said Ilna. "Not till I decide it's not answering. Dog, where do youthink the exit is? You Princes talk to each other, don't you? You must talk about that!"
"We don't know," the dog said, speaking very carefully. Its tongue licked out of the narrow muzzle, trying to reach the blood slowly creeping from the severed ear. "No one has ever left the Garden. But some think…"
It licked again, this time swiping into the blood. The fur above where the tongue reached was matted and glistening.
"Some think, I say…," the dog continued. "That perhaps the One built the temple in the center of the Garden to Himself. And perhaps when He finished the building, He took leave from the Garden at that place."
"I saw the temple!" Merota said. "I was looking at it when I fell into the maze!"
"Aye," said Chalcus. He'd sheathed his dagger so that he could very deliberately wipe the tip of his sword clean with a folded oak leaf. "And I too. What does it look like inside, this temple, good beast?"
The dog's chest rose and fell as it breathed; Ilna had been careful to paralyze only the creature's conscious control of its muscles. It would be very easy to freezeall movements, though, and to watch the dog slowly smother. How many little people had gone down those three gullets over countless years?
"I've never been there," the dog said, its eyes rolling desperately. Perhaps it'd understood Ilna's expression. "None of us have! It's, well, we don't know, of course, but some think, someimagine, that the other lives in the temple when it's not hunting somewhere. None of us know, nobody knows, but if the otherhas a particular place, it could be there."
"The other," Ilna said. "The Shadow, you mean."
She'd spoken with deliberate cruelty, so furiously angry at her prisoner that she risked summoning the Shadow just to make the dog howl in terror. As it did, voiding a flood of foul-smelling urine on the ground and its own hindquarters. Like breathing, that was an unconscious reaction. Merota squeezed her hands together and stared at Ilna.
"Gently, Ilna, dear heart," said Chalcus, a look of concern in his glance. "If you want him killed, I'll do that thing without regret; but if it's answers we're after, then he's giving us those."
"Yes, all right," said Ilna coldly. "The other, then. What makes you think it lairs in the temple? Have you seen it there?"
"We don't see it anywhere else, that's the thing!" said the dog. "Except when it strikes. We've none of us been to the temple, Itold you that! But there's nowhere else it could be, is there?"
Ilna sucked her lower lip between her teeth and bit it. She knew what to do-whatshe would do-and she'd almost stated her wish as an order. She had to remember that hers was only one opinion among three, now.
"Master Chalcus, what would you that we do?" she asked formally.
"The longer we stay here," said the sailor, "the likelier it is that we'll meet something we'd sooner leave to itself. If the way out's through this temple, then I'll gladly go to the temple whatever it may be that lives there. I'd sooner we met it at home at a time of our choosing than from behind at a time of its."
"Merota?" Ilna said. Shecould give orders to her companions and force them to agree as surely as she'd bound this three-headed dog to her will. She'd been that person once, in the days just after she'd come back to the waking world having journeyed to Hell.
Never again. No matter what.
"I want to leave, Ilna," Merota said in a small voice. "I'm not afraid. When I'm with you and Chalcus, I'm not afraid."
Ilna sniffed. "Aren't you?" she said. "Well, I'm certainly afraid."
But not for myself. If I was sure that I alone would die, I'd smile and go on.
"All right, then," she said. "We'll find the temple and then do as seems best."
Chalcus flicked his sword so that the tip brushed the dog's curling eyelashes before it could twitch its head away. "And this one?" he asked. "Shall we have him guide us, then?"
"I don't need a guide to find a pattern, Master Sailor," Ilna said in a tight, dry voice; her lip curled as if she'd swallowed vinegar. "There's nothing about this beast that'll please me as much as his absence. Stand back-and you, Merota."
Her companions edged aside. Chalcus was trying to keep Ilna, Merota and the great dog all in view at the same time-and to watch lest something come up behind them.
"I'm going to release you now," Ilna said to the panting dog. "I don't want to see you again. If I do, I'll kill you. Depending on how I'm feeling at the time, I may or may not kill you quickly. I hope you understand."
She folded the fabric between her hands and stepped back. The dog gave a spastic convulsion, its legs finishing the motions they'd started before Ilna's pattern cut them adrift. The big animal lurched to its feet and blundered sideways into the quickset hedge. Spiked branches crackled, but despite the beast's weight and strength the hedge held.
The dog got control of itself and backed away. "You belong with the other!" its middle head snarled. "The other has no honor and no courtesy. It's a monster that kills. You belong with it, monster!"
Ilna started to raise her hands, spreading the pattern again. The dog turned and bolted out of sight, its great paws slamming back divots of sod.
Ilna shrugged, trying to shake off memory of the dog and its stinking breath. "To the left here," she said, nodding to the junction of paths ahead of them. She sighed and began picking out knots to have the yarn ready for use the next time. "And to the left again at the next turning. Come! I have no wish to stay here."
Merota put her little hand on Ilna's arm as they strode off. "You're not a monster, Ilna," she said quietly.
"You're wrong there, I'm afraid," said Ilna. "But I'm your monster, child; and in this place, you need one."
Cashel heard the scholar get up, so he rose from his bedclothes also. It was still before dawn but light gleamed through the eastern wall where adobe hadn't perfectly sealed the chinks between mastodon bones.
He reached over and tousled the boy's short hair. "Wake up, Protas," he said quietly. "We're going off shortly."
"I'm tired!" the boy said screwing his eyes tightly shut, but a moment later he threw off the tapestry covering him and sat up. He kept his face bent down, until he'd scrabbled under the covers and come out with the topaz crown. When he'd set it firmly on his head, he grinned shyly at Cashel and stood.
Antesiodorus was placing objects from his collection on a rectangle of densely woven cloth-a saddlecloth, Cashel guessed. It was figured in geometric patterns of black and white on a wine-colored ground. The scholar had already packed several books and scrolls; now he was choosing among the phials and caskets scattered along the sidewall.
"I can carry that for you if you like, sir," Cashel said. The bindle would be pretty heavy over any distance at all, and Antesiodorus looked like a high wind'd blow him over.
"I would not like," the scholar snapped. "You have your duties, I'm sure. You can leave me to mine."
Cashel nodded and walked to the pottery water jar. It'd been glazed red over a black background; winged demons with female heads were tormenting a man tied to the mast of his ship.
"I'm sorry, Master Cashel," Antesiodorus said to his back. "I'm upset because of what I'm being required to do, but that's not your fault."
"It's all right," Cashel said, smiling deep within himself. "Prince Protas and me know we're strangers. We appreciate your help."
He refilled the cup and gave it to the boy, who gurgled the water down greedily. This air was dry as could be.
Antesiodorus paused, then took a wand with a tentacled head from its shelf. Cashel thought first it was a plant, then realized it must be a sea lily like the ones that weathered out of a limestone bluff on the road from Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa. Those were all turned to rock, though. The lily Antesiodorus slipped under his sash was dry, but it was fresh enough that Cashel could smell salty decay clinging to the hollow shell.
"Do you need something to eat?" Antesiodorus said, taking the cup from Protas and edging past Cashel to dip it full again. "It's not far. That is…"
The scholar drank, paused, and finished the water. He looked doubtfully at the jar, then set the mug down.
"We'll be there in at most two hours," Antesiodorus said, looking squarely at Cashel. "If we can reach it at all. I assume that since you've been sent to me, there may be those who wish to prevent your journey?"
He raised an eyebrow in question.
Cashel shrugged. "I don't know," he said truthfully. "I'm here to help Protas, but nobody told us what was going to happen."
With a broad grin he added, "I'm used to people not telling me things. I wish it didn't happen that way, but it does."
"Well, I don't suppose it matters," Antesiodorus said with an angry scrunch of his face that made the words a lie. "We'd best be going. The sun's up. That will keep the worst in their dens, but the more quickly we get the business over, the better off we are."
He gestured them through the doorway and followed. Outside the scholar fingered the cape over the opening. He frowned and straightened, turning his back on the long dwelling.
"We're going eastward," Antesiodorus said. "I know it's difficult to hold direction in these eroded gullies, but there's a white peak on the horizon. You can orient yourself by it."
Cashel grinned, thinking of what his sister would've said to a comment like that. "Yes, and I can breathe air, you city-bred fool," or perhaps something more insulting.
But that was Ilna. Cashel being Cashel, he said instead, "I thought you might wear the cape this morning, sir. Instead of leaving it over the door."
"Did you?" snapped Antesiodorus. He set off at a brisk pace among the rotting hills. Cashel could keep up, though he usually travelled at the rate a ewe ambled. Protas, walking ahead of him, wasn't having trouble either. Occasionally he touched the crown, but it was firmly seated.
After a moment, the scholar said in an apologetic tone, "The cloak would only protect one of us. Better that it stay where it is so that if I don't return, those who investigate can see that I was faithful to my trust."
He looked over his shoulder at Cashel. "Do you understand that?" he said.
Cashel nodded. "I guess I do," he said mildly.
The stretch of mounds and gullies gave way to short prairie. The grass was yellow-brown, but its roots were healthy enough to hold the soil. A small herd of browsers saw the three humans and fled northward in a gangling canter.
"Were those deer?" Cashel said. "They looked different from the deer I've seen before."
"They were camels," Antesiodorus said, "if it matters. You can be thankful if you see nothing worse."
"Are the birds dangerous?" Protas said. He was looking up at the sky where three dots circled slowly upward on the morning breezes.
"Not unless you're dead," Antesiodorus said. "Or until you're dead, perhaps I should say."
"They're buzzards, Protas," Cashel explained quietly. "Though I've never seen buzzards so big. If I'm right about the size, they'd weigh as much as a man."
The scholar had no need to snap at the boy that way, but he was obviously keyed up. People did that sort of thing.
"They'd weigh more than I do, at any rate," said Antesiodorus. He looked back at the boy and then Cashel. "But they don't kill prey themselves. There's plenty of others to do that, but perhaps we'll avoid them."
A mixed herd was grazing on the southern horizon. There were horses for sure but the other things could be… well, could be a lot of things, none of them familiar.
"Those deer have six horns, Cashel," Protas said.
"They're antelope," Antesiodorus said, correcting him.
The land to the north sloped down slightly. In the middle distance was the bed of a stream, probably dry in this weather. Bushy cottonwoods fringed both banks, and deeper in the gully grew alders. The trees pulled water from the currents flowing under the ground.
"There's a deer in the gully," Cashel said. "Three of them, I think. See, Protas? Under the cottonwood that still has some of its leaves?"
He didn't point; shepherds mostly didn't. If you pointed at a ewe, she was likely to run off in a blind panic. That hurt the meat and made her give less milk both, and that was if she didn't manage to tumble down a ravine and break her fool neck.
"Stand very still!" Antesiodorus ordered.
Cashel froze. "What-" said Protas, turning to Cashel in worried surprise. Cashel didn't move or even scowl, but the boy took the hint from his perfectly blank expression.
"I never wanted to be a wizard," Antesiodorus said softly, his face turned toward the watercourse. "I'm a scholar. I found things, that's all. Found them in space and even in time, but only to study them."
The three deer-headed humans stepped up from the gully to stand beside the big cottonwood. Two were men and one a woman. Like reindeer, she as well as the males had antlers. They were browsing the alders, plucking leaves off with their narrow muzzles.
"There were twelve of us in our sodality," Antesiodorus continued. "Our brotherhood, I suppose I should say if I want you to understand.'
"I know what a sodality is," Protas protested in an injured tone.
Cashel frowned. Hehadn't known, but could generally figure out what people meant from the way they said it. Anyhow, when their guide was telling them things they might need to know, they shouldn't interrupt.
The trio of deer-men stopped eating and stared intently in the direction of Cashel and his companions. After a moment they vanished into the gully so suddenly that there didn't seem to have been movement: they were on the bank and then they were gone.
Antesiodorus breathed out. "All right," he said, "we can go on now."
"Were they dangerous, sir?" Cashel asked, falling in behind Protas as he had in the past.
"No," said Antesiodorus. "But when something's hunting them, they're in the habit of leading the hunter across the trail of prey that can't run as fast as they do. And then running away."
"What a cowardly act!" said Protas.
"What do you know about it, boy?" Antesiodorus snarled. "Do you know what it's like to be hunted? Really hunted!"
"I'vebeen hunted, Master Antesiodorus," Cashel said. He didn't raise his voice or let any emotion into it, but his tone made it clear that he was stepping in front of the boy now. Protas had put a foot wrong, which was a pity, but it wasn't a thing he'd meant to do.
Their guide looked over his shoulder; his lean face was anguished. "Yes," he said, "I suppose you have. But you always knew you could fight, didn't you, Master Cashel?"
"Yes sir," said Cashel. "But I haven't known that I'd win every time. I just knew I'd rather die than live knowing that I'd handed my bad luck off to somebody else."
Antesiodorus faced front and shifted a little to the left of the line he'd been following; a faint buzzing and a glitter of wings in the air showed that they'd been about to walk over a yellow-jacket hole. He said, "Yes, that's the problem, isn't it? Being able to live with the person you find behind your eyes when you wake up in the darkness. But you haven't had that problem, have you?"
"No sir," Cashel said quietly.
There was a herd of big animals to the northeast, grazing in close company. There were more than Cashel could count on both hands. They acted like cows, but they were bigger and they had dark wool over their forequarters and horned heads. One of them watched the humans for a moment, then went back to its food.
"I knew somuch," Antesiodorus said. "So very much. And that's all I cared about. I never used the objects I found except to find more. I let my brothers use them, but that was their choice. I never wanted to do wizardry. It's not fair now that I should be forced to!"
"Who's forcing you, then?" said Protas. That was an honest question, but the boy asked it in a way that showed he'd been bothered more than a little by the scholar snapping at him.
Cashel kept watching the wooly cattle. A couple of them raised their heads; they were looking due north. One of the big beasts gave a snort; the whole herd jerked its heads up. After a moment they started moving southward slowly while a big bull stood braced and looking the other direction.
"I found things and gave them to my brothers," the scholar said. "I never used them, never, except to find more… things. They gained by my actions, not me. You see that, don't you?"
"You did what you wanted to do," Cashel said. He glanced in other directions too, especially straight behind them, but mostly he kept his eyes on where the bull was looking. "You and your friends both got what you wanted."
"I found a spell," Antesiodorus said as though he hadn't heard the comment. "No one else could've done what I did-no one, I'm sure. It was carved on a plate of gray jade as thin as parchment. It'd been broken into six pieces, every piece as necessary as the next for the spell to work, and I found all six. I alone!"
"What did the spell do, then?" asked Protas. He'd lost his testiness and become a curious little boy again.
Cashel saw movement on the other side of the cattle. The ground rolled and whatever it was kept down in the grass besides, but things were watching him and his companions.
"The spell?" repeated Antesiodorus. "It permitted the user to control a demon. I'd never have done such a thing myself, of course. Never!"
He cleared his throat. "I found the sixth piece," he continued. "It was no use alone, none. Only with the other five did it have meaning, and only I could have searched out the entire plaque. But the one who'd possessed the piece heard me take it and followed."
"The owner," Protas said. "The owner caught you."
"How can someone own a thing that was old before men and which had no value to the possessor?" Antesiodorus said, his voice cracking. "It wasn't his, it was just a thing he had! And he didn't catch me, no."
He looked back at Cashel, not Protas, and said, "He didn't catch me then, because I left the piece with my brethren, the members of my sodality, and fled while they examined the plaque. They were delighted, you see; they couldn't praise me enough. We were sworn to support one another in all ways, and they all spoke of what a valued brother I was. They didn't know."
"You saved yourself by setting a demon on your friends," Protas said. There was nothing at all in the boy's tone, just the words. It was as though all the feeling had been shocked out of him.
"No!" Antesiodorus said. He laughed brokenly. "Or perhaps yes, if you look only at the surface. It wasn't a demon, it was much worse than that. And they weren't my friends; they were brothers of my oath, but not friends."
"And you didn't escape," said Cashel. "It caught you anyway, and you serve it now."
"You think you're so smart!" the guide shouted.
"No," said Cashel. "I don't. I'm not."
"I think perhaps you're wrong, my simple friend," Antesiodorus said in a broken voice. "You're too smart to find yourself in my situation, at any rate. Now that I've had time to think about it, I believe the way the jade was broken and scattered was a trap for… someone like me. Someone who liked to find things. I've had a great deal of time to think about it, as you'll appreciate."
"Sir?" said Cashel formally. "Look to the north, please. On the little ridge there. They've been looking at us ever since the cattle started to move."
The things watching them had risen into sight. They looked like dogs but they were the size of horses, and they had the huge crinkled ears of bats. There were five of them, one for each finger on a single hand.
"Oh," said Antesiodorus. He kept walking but he stumbled on a tussock of grass and almost fell, slight though it was. "Oh. Oh."
He took a deep breath. "One moment, please," he said, kneeling on the prairie and opening out his bindle before him. "I'd thought that by going by daylight we'd avoid at least them, but it seems that I was wrong. Wrong again."
The bat-eared dogs were ambling down the hill, spreading out slightly as they advanced. They were a pale color like mushrooms that grow in a cave; what Cashel'd thought when he first saw them were stripes seemed now to be wrinkles on their bare skin.
Antesiodorus rose, clutching his bindle under his left arm. He had a book open in that hand with his thumb marking a place. "Come along!" he said. "Don't run, but keep moving steadily."
Cashel began to spin his quarterstaff as he walked. It worked his torso muscles and, well, it made him feel more comfortable.
He wasn't afraid of a fight, but the dogs were big and there were five of them. It would be hard to keep Protas safe, and that was what he was along to do.
Cashel smiled a little. If things went the way he expected them to, he wouldn't be around for anybody to complain to. Still, he'd give the dogs a good fight.
As the beasts walked on, a little faster now, their mouths dropped open into clown smiles. They had long, pointy teeth like snakes did, and their lolling tongues were forked.
"Go on ahead of me now," said Antesiodorus, drawing the sea lily from his sash; he must use it for a wand. He focused on the book in his hand, then called, "Dode akrouro akete!" and slashed the sea lily down.
Scarlet wizardlight danced and crackled across the prairie. Nettles and thistles rose, spread, and interlocked, growing into a hedge as dense and high as a range of mountains. The ground shook and there was a roar like cliffs falling into the sea.
Antesiodorus staggered backward, dropping the book and the bindle but continuing to grip his wand. "Come along," he whispered. Then, more strongly, "Come!"
He bent to pick up the bindle. Cashel took it and the book instead and handed them to Protas to carry.
"Yes, all right," said the scholar. "But come."
They set off at a shambling trot. Cashel would've offered to carry Antesiodorus if he hadn't thought it was better that he keep both hands on his quarterstaff. The scholar did all right, though, after the first few strides where he wobbled like a drunk on an icy road.
Cashel glanced over his shoulder. The high thorn hedge ran from horizon to horizon without a break. Antesiodorus'd said he wasa a scholar who wasn't interested in wizardry. Cashel'd thought that meant he was like Tenoctris: somebody smart and who knew a lot of things, but who wasn't strong enough to do much.
The fellow who'd raised that hedge with a stroke and a short spell was a powerful wizard, no mistake. That meant whoever had Antesiodorus by the short hairs was more powerful still.
A mixed herd of animals was running southward. Cashel could see horses and deer and more of the funny long-necked camels, but there were other things besides. It was like the way a grass fire drives animals.
Cashel grinned as he jogged. He'd met plenty of people who'd rather face a fire than wizardry. Even if neither one was aimed at you, they were likely uncomfortable to be around.
They were moving toward the tall white peak on the horizon. Cashel knew enough about distances under a sky like this to be sure that the mountain was days away and maybe weeks. Antesiodorus had said it'd only take a couple hours to get to where they were going. If they made it at all, that was.
Cashel looked back again. To his surprise he saw two of the dogs already on their trail again; the other three were squirming the final bit of the way through the thorns. They'd done it by brute strength, not wizardry: the leading dog had scratches on its bunched shoulders and it'd torn the lobe of its right ear to tatters, but it loped along easily. It had a tail like a pig's, short and curled and pointed toward the sky.
"They're coming again," Cashel said. He wasn't talking because he was afraid: he just wanted to let Antesiodorus know what was going on.
Protas looked over his shoulder. His mouth fell open and he stumbled, but he just turned around again and kept on running. He was really a good boy.
"It's not far," Antesiodorus said. He was gasping; Cashel thought he'd have shouted if he'd had enough breath. "Not far."
"Sir, neither's the dogs!" Cashel said. In another few strides-a couple double handfuls at the most-he was going to turn and see what he could do with the quarterstaff. He'd be willing to give himself even odds against the first dog, but the second wasn't but a few lengths behind it. If the other three caught up-and they would, no doubt about that-it was just a question of whether they worried his body for a while or killed him quick and went on to finish the others.
"Why me!" Antesiodorus said. This time he did manage to shout. He added in a gasp, "Pass me my equipment, boy. And in a moment we'll stop."
Protas trotted up alongside the scholar, holding the bindle out in both hands. Cashel for his part dropped back a little, moving to the side so that he could have both his companions and the dogs at the edge of his vision.
The lead dog ran a funny way, its hindquarters not quite tracking its forequarters so its body was slightly skewed. It seemed comfortable like that, and it didn't have to stretch to gain on its human prey. Its eyes were small and glittered like an angry shoat's.
"We're stopping!" the scholar wheezed.
Cashel slowed and turned. He'd planned to put himself well in front and squarely between the nearest dog and his companions, but that animal angled to its left while the one behind it was slanting right. They'd done this before…
Ofcourse they'd done it before. They hadn't gotten that big sucking at their mother's dugs.
Cashel backed so he was close enough to touch his companions, bad for a fight but his only chance to maybe keep one of the beasts from slipping behind to gobble up Protas and the scholar while the other was keeping Cashel busy.
And then there were three more.
Antesiodorus scattered the contents of a little alabaster box in a broad arc toward the dogs. It looked like sand, but it might've been tiny jewels for all Cashel knew. Even if it was sand, it wouldn't have been just sand. He pointed the sea lily at it and shouted, "Io gegegegen!"
This time the flash of wizardlight was as blue as a sapphire in bright sun. The roar and shudder threw Cashel off his feet though he'd thought he was ready to ride it out. Dust rose in a great pall, curling backward blindingly.
Cashel stood, his eyes slitted. He put his left arm over his face so that he could breathe through the sleeve.
For a moment he couldn't tell what was happening on the other side of the dust cloud, but at least there wasn't a dog bigger'n a horse lumbering through with its mouth open. He risked a glance back. Antesiodorus was slumped in a sitting position with Protas bracing him so he didn't fall flat.
The dust cleared a little, enough for Cashel to see that what'd been rolling plain between them and their pursuers was now a gaping chasm. Two of the dogs had reached the edge on their side. One hunched like it was getting ready to jump.
Cashel walked a few paces along his side of the gap to put himself where the dog would land if it made the leap. That didn't seem likely, though he wasn't taking any chances. The sudden gully was wider than he could toss a stone across; wider, he thought, than an archer could shoot and expect to hit a particular target, though he didn't doubt an arrow could fly to the other side if you didn't have anything in mind but sticking it somewhere in the ground there.
The dog must've had the same thought; it relaxed for a moment. The rest of the pack joined the two leaders. All together they went over the lip of the chasm, each scraping out a trail of dirt and pebbles in a high roostertail behind it. The wall was steep but not quite sheer, and the dogs didn't seem to be having any trouble with the slide.
Coming back up the other side would be a lot harder, but Cashel didn't figure they'd have started down if they didn't think they could make it up too. Given how big they were the dogs didn't have much of a turn of speed, but nobody could teach them anything about determination.
Antesiodorus had staggered to his feet; the boy did everything his little body could to help. The scholar muttered something; somehow he was still hanging onto the sea lily.
Protas turned to Cashel and called desperately, "He says to come on! It's close, he says!"
Cashel scooped Antesiodorus up in the crook of his left arm. "Bring the bindle!" he said. It'd take some time for the dogs to make it up the near side of the chasm; from the look of the scholar it'd be longer yet before he was able to walk on his own legs, let alone run.
Cashel didn't have a direction except the general one, toward the distant mountain, so he followed that. He held the staff out to his right side so it'd balance the scholar's weight. He didn't like to run and he wasn't good at it, but he could lumber along the way an ox did when unyoked after a long day and scenting water.
It was there in front of them, a square slab of granite flush with the ground. You had to be right on top of the stone to see it, and even then it was because there wasn't grass growing on it. A figure with more angles than a hand had fingers was carved onto the surface.
"Get on the heptagram!" Antesiodorus said. His breath was whooping in and out. "Please. Please, quickly."
Cashel placed himself in the figure and hugged Protas close; it was a tight fit for the two of them to stay inside the lines, which he figured they'd better do. But "Master Antesiodorus?" he called. "What about you?"
The scholar pointed his wand at the stone slab. "Choi…," he said. "Chooi chareamon…"
Blue light glittered briefly among the knotted arms of the sea lily. Protas had dropped the bindle before he stepped onto the marked stone, but Antesiodorus ignored it. The roll'd opened when it hit the ground, spilling a zebrawood baton and a pair of scrolls tied with red ribbon.
"Iao iboea…," Antesiodorus said. Again wizardlight, this time scarlet, danced on his wand. He was speaking the words of power from memory instead of reading them from one of the books he'd brought. His face was set in an expression of utter determination.
The head of one of the great dogs lifted above the rim of the chasm. It slipped back in a fresh cloud of dust and gravel kicked out by the beast's scrabbling claws, but two more dogs got their forepaws over the edge and bunched their shoulders to leap onto the plain.
"Sir!" Cashel shouted. "The dogs!"
"Ithuao!" Antesiodorus shouted. The dogs lurched up, got their hind legs under them, and galloped forward. Their slavering jaws were open.
Light, blue and red and then merging to purple, flared on the many-pointed symbol. Cashel felt the stone give way beneath him in a fashion that'd become familiar.
"I kept my oath!" Antesiodorus called as the dogs lunged.
The curtain of purple light thickened, blocking sight of the world Cashel was leaving with the boy. He heard the scholar's voice crying, "This time I kept my-"
The words ended in a scream, or perhaps that was only the howl of the cosmos as it whipped Cashel away in a descending spiral.