Cashel didn't know what had awakened him. It was a warm night and quiet except for the ape beside him. Zahag snored. Also his lips flapped each time he breathed out. Aria still complained about the noise, though it no longer kept her from falling asleep.
To Cashel it was a homey sound. Dantle—Dantle Longleg, not Dantle Squint at the other end of the borough—had a sow who snored just the same way while she slept under the wagon shelter beside the sheepfold. Many a time Cashel had heard that snore as he helped Dantle shear.
He got to his feet. Though he moved quietly, he was still surprised that Zahag didn't wake up. Cashel had seen the ape jump from midsnore to grab a scorpion crawling across the pebbles an arm's length from his head.
Zahag had swallowed the scorpion, then looked up to check whether his companions had seen him bolt the tidbit. Cashel wouldn't even have smashed the creature with his bare hand, let alone eaten it, so he'd pretended he hadn't been watching.
They were out of the swamp, and the landscape, though dry, wasn't the desert they'd found when they first escaped from Aria's prison. Cashel wouldn't have wanted to pasture sheep here, but goats shouldn't have a problem. He'd seen squared stones near the path today, the first sign they'd had of people since the causeway.
Of course, he couldn't be sure "people" was quite the word.
A fox whooped in the distance, sounding like something much bigger. Cashel slid the quarterstaff between his hands, reminding himself of how it felt. He still missed the hickory staff he'd left in Folquin's palace, but this one was serviceable.
He didn't like goats. They were smart, but brains weren't high on Cashel's list of virtues. Goats had nasty, peevish temperaments and were prone to doing things out of pure cussedness. A sheep would walk through an open gate to browse a garden. Goats would crawl through a fence that looked proof against mice and nibble the greens to the ground, even if there was plenty of proper fodder available.
Protecting Aria reminded Cashel powerfully of the times he'd had to tend goats.
The coals of the brushwood fire flared suddenly, then sank to their previous dull glow. Flames rose again, but this time they were a blue as pale an autumn sky. There was no sound at all.
"Zahag," Cashel said. He didn't exactly shout, but even Aria—who slept like a seal—should have jumped to her feet. "Princess."
His companions didn't awaken. Their chests were still. The only movement in the night was the fire's unnatural flickering.
Cashel heard the soft crunch of feet on dry soil. He looked into the darkness but saw nothing. Crossing his staff before him he called, "Who's there?"
Three women, not quite giants but as tall as Cashel could reach at full stretch, came into the firelight holding hands. Though they went barefoot like peasants, they wore tiaras and their robes were of silk so fine that it flowed like water.
"We've been waiting for you, Cashel," the woman in the middle said. Her hair must have been ash blond because its present color was the same ghostly blue as the firelight. "Come dance with us."
The woman on the left had black hair and white skin. "We should be four when we dance, Cashel," she said in a voice as melodious as a distant trumpet.
They were beautiful. They moved with as much natural grace as Sharina did. When Cashel looked at them, he found it difficult to remember Sharina's face.
"Where do you live?" he said. He stretched his leg out and prodded Zahag in the ribs. It was like toeing a rock. The ape's hairy side was as hard and cold as a statue's.
"We don't live here, Cashel," the third woman said. She beckoned him with her free hand. He felt a pull like the current of a brook at flood. "We came to visit you."
"Dance with us," the women said together. They began to circle slowly, stepping with the majesty of rams preparing to fight.
"No," Cashel said. He tried to speak, anyway. He wasn't sure the intention made it as far as his lips.
The women joined hands as they danced, then parted. Each in succession pirouetted, but all the time they continued the common sunwise circle. Each gestured to Cashel as she turned. Dance with us....
Cashel couldn't see the moon, or the fire behind him when he tried to turn his head. The dance was quicker now. Over the calm, lovely women lay a pale light that cast no shadows.
Cashel held the quarterstaff before him as though it were a rail overhanging a pit. The dance was approaching its climax. Motion continued but the three women were still and imperious in his mind's eye. They gestured to him.
Join us, Cashel. We should be four for the dance. Join us....
Cashel forced his head away. Aria was curled in the bowl of earth he'd scraped for her beside the fire, sleeping like the dead. He didn't like Aria, but she was in this place because Cashel or-Kenset had brought her here.
Sharina was a faint memory. His other friends and the struggle against Malkar's agents were empty names like fragments from an epic Garric read to him as they tended sheep in Barca's Hamlet.
Duty remained.
"I can't," Cashel whispered. "I'm needed here."
The dance accelerated. There were no figures any longer, only a pillar of indistinct light.
The light expanded slowly, enveloped Cashel, and lulled him into dreamless sleep.
"We've done as you asked," Royhas said. "Over a hundred of our agents are coming into the city with the rumor. By this time tomorrow, there won't be a soul in Valles who hasn't heard that King Carus is returning to put paid to the queen."
He laughed cynically. "They'll believe it too, the mob will. And they're the ones we need."
The bell on a barge riding at anchor rang nearby. They were walking along the River Beltis, down which goods from the interior reached Valles. Royhas didn't understand why Garric had insisted on meeting this way rather than in his mansion or at least a carriage. The noble's bodyguards were a dozen paces behind and not happy with the situation; though even unguarded, two sober men with swords would probably be safe enough from the low-class footpads who frequented the river path.
To Garric's right, an embankment supported the rear of a temple to the Lady of Abundance. The Beltis flooded in early spring; the great limestone blocks of the retaining wall were mud-stained for twenty feet above the roadway. This temple and the other public buildings to either side of it faced Merchants' Plaza—the center of Valles when it was a village.
"Some of them will believe," Garric said. "More will believe when I appear. And eventually—"
He looked at his companion. He didn't speak for a moment to draw Royhas' eyes.
"—everyone on Ornifal and across the Isles will believe and join us, I hope. I don't believe in golden ages, Royhas. But I do believe in a government that tries to give everyone justice, and a King of the Isles who rules."
Royhas was both intelligent and active; there wouldn't have been a conspiracy without him, though none of the others would have granted him primacy. His foot hesitated for a heartbeat; then he resumed walking.
Garric and the noble didn't have a linkman to light their way. The moon was sufficient here along the river, since the sky wasn't blocked by buildings rising shoulder to shoulder.
"You don't talk like a peasant from Haft," Royhas said. His eyes were on the road in front of him. The hood of his cape hid his face from Garric. "You haven't from the beginning, as a matter of fact. I wonder if I should simply have had you buried in the woods, as I swore to Valence that I did?"
Garric chuckled. At least the sound came from Garric's throat. The memories were those of Carus. A sword that flickered until it clanged on bone; a cloak wrapped around the left forearm in place of a shield. Enemies too close to understand what was happening, gaping in surprise at wounds opening so suddenly that they died before they knew they'd been struck....
Bats chittered as they coursed the insects above the surface of the river. Occasionally a splash and heavy wingbeats indicated a larger predator. The rural boy in Garric had already noticed Ornifal's night-fishing owls.
"No," Garric said. "You shouldn't have given that order, Royhas."
The nobleman gave a humorless bark of laughter. He'd understood the distinction between the question he'd posed and the answer that Garric gave. There'd have been slaughter in the forest if Royhas had ordered Garric's death, but it might not have been Royhas who walked away from the result.
Voices rose in singsong argument on the temple platform above. A bowl or bottle smashed. One speaker shouted louder recriminations; the other subsided into drunken sobbing.
The vaults that supported public buildings in Valles provided shelter for vagrants. On nights when the weather allowed, the denizens sat on the monumental steps to eat, drink, and fantasize in a society of their peers.
And how were they different from folk like Royhas bor-Bolliman and Garric, late of Barca's Hamlet on Haft, who dreamed of being King of the Isles?
Garric laughed. He couldn't even be sure that his dreams were greater than those that came out of wine bottles on the temple steps.
"What do you want?" Royhas said. "What do you want? I swear, you're as uncanny as the queen herself!"
"But I'm not evil," Garric said, hoping that was the truth. He smiled again. It must be true: he wouldn't have friends like Liane and Tenoctris if he were a creature of Malkar.
"Lord Royhas," he continued softly. "I intend to be King of the Isles. All of the Isles, ruling and serving all peoples of the Isles."
Garric knew this was the moment he'd been waiting for. He'd maneuvered Royhas into a place where the noble felt alien and alone, despite being in the center of the city where he was born.
"I'm not going to do that because my ancestor was King of the Isles—though he was, just as Silyon told you," Garric said. "I'm going to do it because if I don't, our whole world is going to sink into mud like the bottom of this river."
He and Royhas continued walking; if they stopped, the guards would be on them in an instant, silently questioning. The two men, the noble and the youth with the insights of an ancient king, stared at each other, disregarding the stones missing from the pavement and garbage that had floated up from the river.
"Why are you telling me this?" Royhas said. He sounded unsure, perhaps even frightened. Garric represented something that the noble didn't understand, in a situation where ignorance was dangerous and the known risks for the conspirators were overwhelming.
"Because I want you to believe," Garric said. "I want everybody to regain belief in the Kingdom of the Isles. The Old Kingdom fell because people stopped believing when Carus disappeared. If people can believe again in something more important than the size of their own money chest or the number of troops they can put in the field, then we can have real unity and peace."
"Waldron will never serve you," Royhas said. That was more proof he was the man King Carus had judged him to be: quick-minded, decisive, and brave in a way that had nothing to do with willingness to draw his sword. "My family are merchants for twenty generations. Waldron and the other northern landholders, though—their honor's the only thing that really matters to them. They'll never bow to a shepherd from Haft."
By implication, Royhas was saying that he—and the city nobles like him—would bow or might bow. Garric smiled faintly.
"Will they bow to the crown of the Isles?" he said. "They acknowledge Valence, don't they?"
"Oh, yes," Royhas agreed. "Valence is one of theirs, after all: his estates in the north and west are bigger than some islands, after all. And they fought for him at the Stone Wall, because whatever they might have thought of Valence as a man, he wasn't a pirate from Sandrakkan."
"I want the Isles to be united in peace," Garric said. He smiled. "Well, as much peace as humans are likely to have. As I said, I don't believe in golden ages. Bad as the queen is—and bad as the thing Valence serves, as you know—"
"I don't know!" Royhas said, his voice jumping unintentionally louder. "I don't know anything about Silyon or whatever they're doing!"
"As you know," Garric said, "for all your attempts not to know, because you wouldn't have preserved me unless you did know... All of that, I tell you, is minor compared to what we really need: a united Isles. Not everybody can be expected to help, especially at the beginning; but those who try to stop us out of local pride or personal honor or any of the other words people use when they mean they don't care about anything except their own will—they're just as much of a problem as the queen, Royhas."
There were lights ahead of them. They were approaching a ferry landing serving the suburbs on the other side of the river. A bridge and causeway crossed the Beltis south of here where marshes split the channel into three streams, but there was a good deal of water traffic even at this time of the morning.
"I'm not a soldier," Royhas said.
Though you're a good judge of them, if your guards are anything to go by, Garric thought. Aloud he said, "We'll have soldiers. What we'll need are people who can organize, who understand money and supplies, and who can make hard decisions fast when there's no time to refer to, say, the King of the Isles."
Royhas laughed in open amazement. In a voice that still held a tinge of self-mockery he said, "You're asking me to be your chancellor, King Garric? What about Papnotis bor-Padriman, who wears the seal now? Quite apart from the fact his family can raise a thousand men with half-armor or better, he's rather good at the job. Considering what he has to work with."
Royhas and Garric wore tunics with striped hems and light capes, nondescript clothing for a merchant out at night. The scabbard of Garric's long sword was unusual; Royhas wore a slim-bladed court sword that was as much statement of rank as weapon. Garric might have been an off-duty soldier, though.
They were close enough to the ferry landing to see the faces of the half-dozen people waiting for the next boat. At this time of the morning most traffic was inward—farm families bringing produce to the city's markets on donkey-back or their own.
Garric continued at his previous slow pace. He'd timed things well, or Carus had.
"Papnotis is chief administrator for Ornifal," he said. "That's as much as the present kingdom governs, after all—on a good day. Ornifal will need an administrator in the future too."
He hadn't known the chancellor's name until this moment; there hadn't been time. Carus' silent urgency drove Garric as surely as the king's measured advice guided him in moments of reverie. If Garric took the time to learn everything he needed to know before he acted, nothing would happen—except the complete and irrevocable end of civilization and perhaps of life in the Isles.
Royhas laughed quietly. "I think we've gone as far as we need to tonight," he said. "After all..."
He made a hand gesture before turning on his heel. The guards stopped, dividing three and three to either edge of the path. They waited for their employer to pass before falling in behind again.
"After all," Royhas resumed, "it's all moot if a fire wraith incinerates you tomorrow, isn't it? If you don't mind my saying, the survival of the man who led the uprising against the queen wasn't a major concern of ours when we were planning events."
"If you're suggesting your priorities have changed tonight," Garric said dryly, "then I'm particularly glad we've had this discussion. Tenoctris says the wraiths can't be formed quickly and can be quenched if you have enough water handy. You can even run away from one if you have room. And if you don't panic."
"My personal experience," Royhas said, looking straight ahead as he walked, "is that wizards generally aren't to be trusted."
"I trust this one," Garric said. "I trust her with my life. As I have before."
Royhas nodded, as though he'd been discussing the menu for tomorrow's dinner.
"As for the defenses of the queen's mansion more generally," Garric said, "Tenoctris says it's mostly a matter of not losing our way. The individual effects aren't very complex."
"Your Tenoctris is the queen's equal, then?" Royhas said mildly.
Garric laughed wryly. "Tenoctris says she's not sure anyone is the queen's equal. Any human, that is. Tenoctris isn't sure the queen is human."
Royhas looked at him. "You're serious, aren't you?" he said. "You're not just vilifying an enemy."
"Tenoctris doesn't do that," Garric said. "She believes that the ... person claiming to be Princess Azalais is really a changeling—a demon in human semblance."
He shrugged. "Tenoctris wants to understand her enemy so that she can counter her," he said. "All I want to do is to lead the risen populace against the queen's mansion and remove the queen from Valles and from our world."
Garric grinned. "And also to survive," he said. "I'd like to do that."
He sobered. "So long as civilization can survive too."
The men walked on in silence. Above on the temple steps, men and at least one woman were singing about the vintage. Grapes weren't grown on Haft, but Garric had played the same tune at dances after the shearing.
"I'd appreciate the loan of a couple of your men to stay close to me tomorrow," Garric said. "If they're willing to volunteer, that is. I suppose you'll be well out of the city yourself."
"That was certainly my intention," Royhas said easily. "No point in the five of us making ourselves targets for the queen's vengeance should you fail, after all. It's not as though we, the principals so to speak, would make much difference in a mob of thousands."
Garric looked at him. "But...?" he said.
"But I suppose the duties of a chancellor involve some risk," Royhas said. "Realistically, if you fail there won't be safety for anyone in the Isles before long. I've lived these past two years afraid of what the queen might do to me when it suits her whim, and afraid of what Valence's creature would do otherwise. My men and I will be with you tomorrow. King Garric."
Garric touched the medallion on his chest. The words "King Garric" echoed through his mind. With them came the boisterous laughter of the last and greatest King of the Isles.
"Not the last, King Garric," Carus' voice whispered. "And as for greatest, well, we'll see, you and I!"
Hanno paused among the palms growing from the base of the cliff, leaning on the shaft of his spear. He looked so much like Cashel, watching the flock from a vantage point in the meadows south of Barca's Hamlet, that Sharina's throat swelled with longing.
She missed Cashel and she missed her home. She missed having a home.
"Well, I'll be," Hanno said in a tone of mild surprise. He scratched his neck idly with a fingertip.
Sharina stepped to the side of the big man to see what he'd been looking at. Because the context was unfamiliar, it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.
A shipwreck, she thought. Storms threw debris onto the steep gravel shore of Barca's Hamlet: driftwood but also ships' timbers and sometimes deck cargo washed or cast from a vessel as the waves broke over it.
Once at dawn Reise had found a body on the black shingle. They'd buried it in the community graveyard. Every year at the Solstice Ceremony they'd fed meal and beer to the sailor's spirit along with the borough's dead. Perhaps other communities cared in the same fashion for fishermen who'd never returned to Barca's Hamlet.
"Them little beggars," Hanno said wonderingly. "If I didn't know better, I'd say they'd got brains. There's never been a Monkey with brains!"
"Oh," Sharina said, feeling her stomach congeal into a lump of cold lard. She was looking at the wreckage of the dory. The Hairy Men had dragged it onto the corniche and methodically smashed to bits. At first she hadn't associated the fragments with the dory because there wasn't a piece remaining as long as her forearm.
For hammers they'd used head-sized lumps of rock, which now lay among the wood and scattered supplies. Hanno touched one of the rocks with his spearbutt; Sharina had already noticed that the hunter used his weapon the way a mouse tests the shape of the world with its whiskers.
"They're strong little beggars when they get worked up," he said musingly. "They sure did a job here, didn't they?"
Sharina squatted to examine the end of a shattered thwart. The dory had been built of oak. As the hunter implied, destroying the vessel so thoroughly with crude tools had required enormous strength.
"The phantasm leading them probably told them what to do," she said. By focusing her mind on little questions, she was able to avoid the huge doubt from which she shied away trembling.
Could they get off Bight, now? Would bands of Hairy Men and the accompanying creatures of wizardry hunt them to eventual death through these wilds?
"Well, I figure there's two ways for you, missie," Hanno said as he turned to face her. He was calm, nonchalant even. "First choice is I build you a raft and you float to Ornifal, because that's how the currents trend. Now—"
He raised a hand the size of a bear's paw to forestall the protest she'd had no intention of making. Hanno had peeled off the blistered skin; the layer beneath looked healthy though tender. His ointment smelled like tar rather than the lanolin Sharina was familiar with from the borough, but it seemed to work.
"—I know that don't sound like much, but I know for a fact it'll work if there's not a storm. We can salvage enough food so you can eat, and there's fish to catch besides."
He shrugged. "I can't tell you it won't storm, but a bad storm here in spring would be the first one since I been on Bight, and that's past eighteen years."
The hunter smiled. His remaining teeth—one of his upper canines was missing—were yellowish and as strong as a mule's. "Of course," he added, "the Monkeys getting together this way, that's a first too. So you have to decide for yourself."
"What are you going to be doing?" Sharina said. Hanno had offered only one option, but she thought she could guess what the other was.
"Well, I figure if the Monkeys are so fond of me they'd bust up my boat to keep me here," he said with a grin as hard as the blade of his great spear, "I'd give'em reason to know I'm here. Beside that, Bald Unarc had his territory a couple days north of here. Unarc's boat is cypress and he sinks it in a creek's mouth to keep it safe between times he needs to use it."
Hanno prodded a fragment of gunwale with his spearbutt, then flipped it high enough in the air for him to catch it with his free hand. The hunter moved with remarkable economy, just enough to accomplish the task he set himself.
"I always thought Unarc was a donkey who wouldn't trust the sun was going to rise in the east," he said, shaking his head in wonder at the plank. Not only were the ends splintered, the whole length of the piece was dented and cracked from additional blows. "Just goes to show, don't it?"
He grinned again. "Mind, I don't figure Unarc was so careful that he's going to be around for me to ask his permission formal-like."
Sharina wasn't afraid of the sea. This jungle's sounds and smells were as alien to her as the world beyond the sky, while in the past she'd spent weeks adrift in a dugout almost as crude as the raft Hanno said he'd build.
If Nonnus were here, he'd be searching for the answer to the puzzle of what was happening on Bight. Unless Sharina misread the man's character, the hunter was doing the same thing.
And for Sharina to drift away seemed—
"Cowardly" might not be quite the word, but it was close enough to stand until she could convince herself there was a better one.
"I'll go with you," Sharina said, her voice steady. "If you'll have me."
Hanno chuckled. "I'd move faster if it was me by myself, that's true," he said. "But I wouldn't be moving much at all if you hadn't fixed that fire-thing. I'll tell the world! So I'd admire to have you along."
"I'm glad you feel that way," Sharina said. She felt better for the decision even though it was against her own deep wishes.
And she knew that so long as she survived, a part of Nonnus was present in her.
Ilna had been dozing. When her eyes snapped open, she saw that the full moon had risen. The cratered face was much the same as hung over Barca's Hamlet, but it was three times as large and as red as the coals of a dying fire.
The vessel was sailing between towers of rock. The islands were little more than bowshot to either side, closer than Ilna had seen them by what passed for daylight in this place. Pits and crevices marked the shafts. She didn't see how rock so soft could support the mushroom tops that swelled hundreds of feet above. They should have crumbled under their own weight.
The Scaled Men grunted in fear-muted voices. They were armed again. The ship drove on, the sail still filled by a wind Ilna could not feel. One of the sailors crouched at the steering oar, but the others scanned the sky instead of paying attention to the vessel or its course.
Something flew past the moon.
The crossbowman capered in a clumsy circle, his weapon lifted as he tried to find his target against the stars. The others waved cutlasses and a spear, shouting in guttural panic.
The flyer had looked like a man to Ilna. A man with bat wings.
The sail blocked much of the view from the deck. The sailor with the striped headband started to climb the rigging; there was a bucket fixed to the masthead for a lookout to stand in. He paused midway in an agony of indecision, looking over first one shoulder, then the other.
The flyer swooped up from sea level to skim the starboard railing. Clawed fingers sprouted from the joint at each midwing. They clutched at the man on the rigging. He gave a hoarse cry and slashed with his cutlass.
The flyer lurched away and down. The broad wings were of membrane so thin that Ilna could see the moon's face through it.
The crossbowman leaned over the railing and squeezed his trigger. The bowcord cracked loudly as it released. Scaled Men hooted in delight, hugging one another and stamping their feet on the deck.
The sailor who'd started toward the masthead jumped down. He was holding his right shoulder with his left hand. Across his back were three long slashes that looked black in the unnatural moonlight. He called out to his fellows.
Two of the others put down their weapons and examined him, clicking and muttering. The shoulder wound was a deep one. When the sailor took his hand away, blood quickly spread down his arm. If the wound wasn't closed quickly, the victim would die as surely as sunrise.
In this place, perhaps more surely yet.
A Scaled Man gave a cry like that of an ox dying. He pointed his cutlass upward. The towering island to port now overhung the vessel. From rookeries in the pitted rock, winged men like the first were launching themselves into the air.
There were scores of them. Ilna thought of mayflies swarming in the moonlight.
The sailor at the steering oar shouted to his fellows. One leaped toward Ilna with his cutlass raised. He chopped, severing the rope that bound her to the stanchion.
For a moment Ilna thought the Scaled Men were about to free her. Two more sailors were unlacing the canvas cover that held the hatch grating in place. They lifted it; the sailor who'd cut Ilna loose dragged her toward the opening like a sack of millet.
She smiled faintly. It would have complicated her future actions if she felt her captors had begun to behave decently.
A flyer dived, showing a birdlike mastery of the air. It slid between the mast and the forestay, its right wing up and the tip of the left pointing almost straight down toward the deck.
The thing's mouth was open. Its face was human—handsome, even, in a high-boned hollow-cheeked fashion—but the teeth were pointed and unnaturally long. The moonlight stained them red.
The flyer bit at the Scaled Man pulling Ilna. The fellow screamed and threw himself across her. His right ear was missing and there two long gouges across his scalp.
As the flyer banked away, the sailor with the spear thrust upward. The rusty point missed the torso, as thin and muscular as that of a skinned squirrel, but it pierced the fabric of the creature's wing and tore a four-pointed star. The material was as tough as fine parchment. The flyer flapped free, climbing with labored strokes.
The sailor who'd lost his ear rose, holding his scalp with one hand and waving his cutlass with the other. The pair crouching for safety behind the grating took Ilna by her bound ankles and neck of her tunic, then dropped her unceremoniously through the opening.
She hit hard. For a moment all she was aware of was numbing pain and the sight of a man silhouetted as he tried to squirm up through the open hatch without using his arms. A Scaled Man kicked him in the face. He fell back into the hold with Ilna; the grating slammed above them.
Through the ventilation slots, Ilna saw the red moon. Across its face more and more winged humanoids flew.
Like mayflies swarming...
Ilna began working on her remaining bonds. The man with her in the hold shuffled over on his knees. His arms were tied behind his back and there wasn't height enough below the grating for him to stand.
"Sister take me!" he said. "It's a girl!"
"It's a woman," Ilna said. "And if I were you, whoever you are, I'd be careful what names I was speaking right now. It may be soon enough that you'll be answering to the Sister herself for them."
She had a hand loose. She'd kept her frustration buried as long as she was bound, but with freedom all the emotions welled up and a wave of fierce triumph shook her.
"Well, you're better than nothing," the man said. "Can you maybe chew my knots loose with your teeth? If my hands were free, I'll bet I could figure a way to get the cover off. They didn't lace it down proper after they threw you down here."
He turned awkwardly as he spoke. The hold was half-filled with what felt to Ilna like sacks of gravel. The moonlight coming through the grating wasn't bright enough for her to see details, even if she'd cared.
"Get back and I'll untie you after I've gotten myself free," she said. "Who are you?"
Ilna twisted onto her other side to get a better purchase on the remaining wrist. The Scaled Men had tied her limbs individually and then together. Their knots were hard and expert, as was to be expected from sailors. The knots weren't of types that she had come across before, though; and knots were to Ilna as weather was to a husbandman.
"Captain of this ship, that's who I am," the man said. "Cozro or-Laylin of Valles on Ornifal. I'm to have an eighth share of her as my pay for this voyage—or I was."
He spat in disgust. "The scum above are my crew, at least before they got the plague or whatever happened."
The grating crashed with the weight of a winged man landing on it. The creature's big toes hooked back to grip against the other four on each foot. The claws tore splinters out of the hardwood grating as the flyer struggled with someone on the deck. Its flapping vans concealed all details of the battle.
Cozro bellowed in surprise and flung himself prone. "Sister drag me to her cave! What's going on up there?"
Ilna had her left wrist free, though a tag of rope still dangled from it. The ship's cordage was woven from spar grass, but to bind her the Scaled Men had used a well-carded flax. She supposed she should be thankful, but the coarser, stiffer rope would have been easier to untie.
She sat up. "Your ship is being attacked by bats with the bodies of men," she said succinctly. "We aren't in the world we were born in, though I have no idea where we are."
She smiled coldly as her fingers worked on the knots binding her ankles. "Your suggestion that we're in the Underworld is as likely as any other. Certainly I've seen nothing to disprove that."
The flyer lifted, then slammed chest-down onto the grating. The spear and at least one cutlass blade hacked through its wings, slicing great gares out of them.
The creature's teeth gnashed wildly, tearing finger-sized bits from the wood. In a final dying convulsion it writhed off the hatch cover and mostly out of sight. One foot continued to clamp and release with the regularity of the surf coming in.
"Lady preserve Your servant Cozro," the captain muttered with breathy sincerity. "Also preserve the Bird of the Waves, and cause Mistress Arona to deed over the eighth share of the vessel as she agreed—the skinflint!"
Ilna loosed her ankles. She scissored her legs sideways and back, luxuriating in the pain of stretching her cramped thigh muscles.
"The Bird of the Waves?" she said. "You're the ship that brought the Scaled Man to Erdin. I suppose that explains it. Your crew drank the liquor that the body had soaked in."
"I had nothing to do with that," said Cozro, suddenly defensive. "I didn't put a body in the cask, and I don't know that there was any cider in with it from the first."
"Turn around and hold your hands out as much as you can," Ilna ordered. The binding ropes would make a satisfactory weapon once she'd spliced the pieces into a single noose, the work of only minutes for her skilled fingers.
The crossbow released again on the deck above. There was a high-pitched cry like steam lifting a tight lid. She didn't know whether it came from one of the Scaled Men or their winged attackers. She'd never heard its like from the throat of a living creature.
"Sister take me, that might be how it happened, though," Cozro said. He gave a low growl at the memory. "I told Mistress Arona that carrying cider royal was more trouble than it was worth, but would she listen? What do you expect sailors to do? Do you think saints crew a vessel that pays no better wages than Arona does?"
"Hold still," Ilna snapped. "I wouldn't need your help even if you were capable of helping."
"We were on the way back to Valles with a cargo of oil nuts," Cozro mused. "I could tell there was something wrong with the crew. Oh, the first day out they were still hungover from port leave, I could understand that. But they kept getting quieter. Wouldn't say a word to me, and when they talked to each other I couldn't figure out what they were saying."
There seemed to be a lull in the fighting on deck. Ilna heard the sailors' grunted speech. One of them sobbed with pain or desperation. The Scaled Men's stiff, froglike features didn't fit with openly expressed emotion.
"Every night when we anchored," Cozro said, "they'd go off together. Sometimes we tied up to a spit of land so small I could watch them. They'd all kneel facing toward Valles. I thought they was praying, but I don't know. I swear, it was like they was listening to something. Every night."
"There," said Ilna, coiling the rope into a neat hank like the others and placing it in her tunic sleeve. "Now turn your feet toward me and I'll free them."
Cozro clapped his hands with delight. Ignoring Ilna's direction, he hunched forward to work on his ankle ties himself.
"If you like, I'll have you loose in a few minutes," Ilna said, each syllable as edged as a shard of broken glass. "Otherwise you can continue what you're doing—and keep wasting your time like a fool until the ship sinks or you die of old age, whichever comes first."
Cozro jerked his head around. "What did you say?" he demanded.
"If you were capable of untying these knots by moonlight, you'd have done so days ago," Ilna said. "But it's your choice."
She took a length of cord from her sleeve. The Scaled Men had taken her knife when they captured her, but her fingers alone easily spread the rope-end for plaiting.
"All right, you do it," Cozro said in a sulky voice. He rotated and leaned backward so that Ilna could reach the knot.
The flyer's foot clenched on the grating for a final time. The claw on the big toe was by itself as long as a man's thumb.
Ilna bent to work. She didn't need even the light that penetrated to the hold; the pattern and its solution were in her fingertips.
"They did their work," Cozro said. "I can't say they were taking orders, but they were sailors all of them. They didn't need me to tell them how to trim the sail. Their skin got rough and the color, well ... Sister, they were turning blue! I knew it though I pretended I didn't. I was afraid of catching it myself, you know."
Scaled Men croaked in fear. The crossbow whacked. Something struck the ship.
"Hold still," Ilna said as the captain twisted to look at the other corner of the grating.
The ship rocked the way a pond stirs when the first heavy drops of a thunderstorm hit and call down thousands more. Dozens, scores of the flyers were landing, on the deck and in the rigging. Their thumping impacts drowned the sailors' cries.
"Three days out from Valles," Cozro said, his face tight with fear, "they lined up in the bow to pray like before. I didn't say anything. I'd pretty well stopped talking to them anyhow. Then they turned around and came for me."
There was a choked shriek above; a sailor fell spread-eagled across the grating on his back. Winged men covered him, their bodies writhing like grubs in a week-dead rabbit. The killers blocked the light as their jaws crunched on and through bone. Blood dripped into the hold, and there was a charnel stench.
"There wasn't a thing I could do," Cozro said. He was shouting as much to conceal the sounds from above as so that Ilna could hear him. "I thought they were going to kill me. They argued and I think that's what it was about. Finally they tied me and threw enough oil nuts out of the hold so there was room for me."
The deckhouse door slammed. The flyers shifted away from the sailor's body, permitting a little moonlight to enter the hold. Only disarticulated bones and tags of cartilage remained of the corpse; that, and the fluids still dripping through the grate.
"There," Ilna said. "You're free."
"Lady save me," Cozro muttered. "Please Lady save me."
Ilna took out a second hank of linen rope and frayed the end for splicing. She heard the rasp of teeth on wood; the flyers' fangs weren't meant for gnawing through a ship's timbers, but she had no doubt they'd succeed before long.
"There's a butt of water forward in this hold," Cozro said. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. He refused to look up. "I stove the end in and let me tell you, that was a job with my hands and feet tied!"
A flyer thrust the remains of the corpse aside and pressed its face against the grating. Its nose wrinkled like that of a horse scenting water. With increasing fury it began to bite the wood, all the time making a mewling sound.
"I don't understand what's happening!" Cozro said. "I don't understand!"
From the deckhouse came the sound of hoarse chanting. A whiff of bitter smoke drifted through the grating. The Scaled Men were at their rites again.
More of the flyers dropped onto the grating. It was like watching foxes chew their way into a chicken coop—from the viewpoint of the chicken.
Ilna sniffed. Her fingers spliced a third length of cord onto the growing noose. It wasn't the perfect weapon for tight quarters like this, but it would serve for a time.
That's all you could say of anything or anyone, after all.
Cashel sat up, stretched mightily, and grinned at his companions. "Umm!" he said. "I haven't felt this good since I don't remember when. Guess I needed that sleep."
Aria and Zahag were staring at him like—
Like he was a ghost.
Cashel stood, absently brushing gritty soil from his quarterstaff. "Look, I slept a little late," he said defensively, "but I'm usually the first one up."
He glanced toward the horizon. The sun was still pretty low. "It's not like I slept half the morning—"
The sun was low on the western horizon. He'd slept for the whole day.
"Oh," Cashel said. He shifted his posture, working all his muscles enough to know that he didn't have any stiffness. "Well, I don't know how that happened."
"You're all right?" Aria said. She continued to kneel near where he'd lain, some distance from the hole he'd scraped for his hipbone. "You're sure?"
The princess held a wet rag—another scrap torn from her fluffy gown. She looked like a dandelion head after a thunderstorm, so bedraggled had the journey left her.
"I'm fine," Cashel said. He touched his forehead; it was damp. Aria had been mopping his brow to bring him out of what must been a deep stupor. He wouldn't have thought the girl had it in her. She must really have been afraid that he'd, well, left them.
"We thought you were dead," Zahag said, uncharacteristically subdued. "Your heart didn't beat but once in a great while. We couldn't rouse you any way we knew."
Cashel rubbed his right cheek, then his left. He'd been slapped hard—and pinched, he shouldn't wonder. Well, he might have done the same if it'd been Aria unconscious. The two of them sure weren't going to carry him like he carried Aria when she couldn't walk.
He smiled broadly at the thought of him dangling over the princess's shoulder as she trudged up the mountain they had ahead of them. "Well, I'm all right now for sure," Cashel said.
His mood sobered. His image of the princess had brought to mind the three women of the night before. Any of them could have carried him as easily as he did Aria.
"There's water close by here," Zahag said, getting up on all four limbs and pacing a slow circle. "I guess we're not in a hurry, so another day isn't—"
"The water tastes awful!" Aria said. She was still kneeling. "Oh, I thought something terrible had happened. I thought you were..."
She couldn't get the word out. "Yeah, we both did," Zahag said. "Dead as a stone. Your heart was going to stop the rest of the way and bing! you'd start to rot."
The ape shrugged, a gesture which the length of his arms amplified. "I didn't know what was going to happen next."
"Zahag?" Cashel said. "When you woke up, did you see tracks around the fire?"
He waved a hand toward the patch of ground where he remembered the women dancing. Was that in a dream? "Over there, maybe?"
"Huh?" said the ape. "What kind of tracks? I didn't see anything except you were sprawled on your back instead of your side like usual. And you wouldn't wake up."
Cashel walked into the brush in the direction from which the dancers had come. His legs pushed crackling stems aside. He didn't recognize the bushes, though they seemed pretty normal. He didn't suppose there was rain enough here to water the sorts of plants that grew near Barca's Hamlet.
"Where are you going?" Aria cried on a shrilly rising note. "Cashel!"
She started after him. This dry brush would catch on the gauzy remains of her dress and strip her start naked if she wasn't careful.
"I'm not going far," he called. "I just want to see something."
It was closer than he'd imagined—a circle of pitted stone that might have been a well curb, only two or three double paces from the edge of the trail. If there was a shaft, windblown dirt had choked it long ago.
"What are you doing, Cashel?" Aria said from just behind him. It was the first time he remembered her showing interest in what somebody else was doing except as it involved her.
Come to think, she was probably worried he was going off and leaving her. He wouldn't do that. Of course, he'd never slept the sun around before either.
"I'm just looking at, at this," Cashel said. "I thought there might be something."
"Oh," said Aria, moving around to his side. "It's a sacred precinct."
Cashel looked at her in puzzlement.
"She means a temple!" Zahag snarled from across the little ruin. He muttered something else that might have been, "Strong back, weak mind!"
"They're not statues," Aria said. "They're caryatids. They held up the roof instead of columns."
The temple's roof had been tiled; at any rate, fragments of curved red tiles poked out of the soil nearby. The statues, the caryatids, had toppled, but the square bases were still in place on the curb.
Cashel walked closer. Two caryatids lay on their backs. The marble had weathered to the point that all he could tell for sure about them was that they'd been women in flowing robes.
The statue between those two lay facedown. Wind and rain had eaten the upper side as badly as it had those of the others, but the face was unmarked when Cashel rolled it over.
He recognized the blond dancer's features from his dream the night before.
Cashel laid the figure back the way he'd found it, then straightened. It was getting dark. When he looked up the slope ahead of them, he saw pale blue light wink.
"Cashel?" the princess said in a subdued voice. "What are we going to do now?"
Cashel thought he saw a light, anyway. There were a lot of illusions in this place.
"I know it's late," he said to his companions. "I think maybe I'd like to go on some tonight anyway. I, well ... Maybe I see something."
"Nothing to keep us here," Zahag said, sounding unusually agreeable. He clambered over the stone curb on his way back to the trail.
Cashel and Aria followed him. Cashel glanced over his shoulder once.
There were four bases but only three statues on the ground. He sort of wondered what had happened to the fourth one.