Maurunus led two pages carrying a helmet and cuirass into Royhas' crowded stableyard where Garric and his immediate entourage were readying to attack the queen. "We've brought Master Garric's armor, sir," the majordomo said to Royhas.
Garric looked at the equipment winking in the early dawn. The pieces were silver-plated and decorated with scenes from the mythical founding of Valles: on the breastplate the Shepherd guided Val and his band of survivors from sunken Xadako to the mouth of the River Beltis, whose personification bowed to the newcomers. The helmet was chased with battles between Val and the autochthonous giants of Ornifal; on the crest, the Lady waved Her blessing over the carnage, an image Garric found blasphemous.
Besides, the reliefs could catch a spearpoint. Not to mention that he'd feel like a poncing courtier wearing that gear.
"It's beautiful," said Liane, looking up from the slanted writing desk moved into the yard. She was checking off the messengers coming in from each district of the city. A pair of servants with short swords stood to either side of the small strongbox, but Liane paid each new arrival herself as soon as he'd given his information.
"I can't wear that!" Garric blurted.
"We've had it sized by eye," Royhas said. "The straps have enough play in them that it ought to fit."
The nobleman was keyed up, but he wasn't peevish or frantic as somebody else in his place might have been. With the rebellion—attack, anyway—being launched from his town house, he'd at best be a fugitive if they didn't defeat the queen. Given the stories about the queen, death was by no means the worst possible result of failure.
"Look," Garric said. "If I've got to wear something, get me a proper set of battle armor."
Everyone in the stableyard looked at him: the six guards with dawning respect, most of the others in surprise.
Royhas was simply irritated. "This isn't about a battle," he snapped. "As you said last night when you were thinking more clearly, we can get people to do the fighting. Your job is to lead, and for that you have to be seen."
"Ah," said Garric. Carus, very close to the surface of Garric's mind in these preliminaries to chaos, understood and agreed; though the disdain for the ornate gear had been as much his as Garric's own. "Yes, I see."
He unbuckled his broad sword belt without being asked. The cuirass rode on the flare of his hipbones as well as his shoulders. It wouldn't be a problem to wear the belt over the armor, because the long tongue had plenty of excess. The mind that had guided Garric as he chose his equipment was that of a consummate man of war.
A guard took Garric's sword so that the pages could put the cuirass on him. The shoulder straps were riveted to the backplate and fitted onto hooks with pin closures on the front.
As the pages started to lace the sides together, Garric said, "I'll do that myself. How can you decide how I want it to ride?"
Liane gave him a tiny smile. Royhas frowned slightly and said, "Of course. We didn't realize you knew how to adjust armor."
Garric did up the leather laces—tight at the bottom but increasingly looser up the sides, trading the risk of a spearpoint through the gap for the greater flexibility the rig gave him. His fingers moved in practiced reflex—not his practice, but his reflex now.
He smiled. Since Garric had begun wearing the medallion of King Carus, he'd had no privacy. No matter what he did, he'd had an awareness of another figure standing closer than his shoulder, watching through his own eyes.
But there wasn't any real privacy for a boy growing up in a rural village anyway, so Garric didn't feel he'd lost much. He'd gained a world of knowledge and abilities.
His fingers paused. His face must have changed, because Royhas said in concern, "Is there a problem with the armor?"
Garric tied off the lace with a double knot. "No," he said. "I was just thinking about the number of things I wouldn't need to know if I'd stayed the rest of my life in Barca's Hamlet."
"If you'd done that," said Tenoctris, sitting on the cushion of the sedan chair in which she would ride, "there wouldn't have been a Barca's Hamlet for very long. Not that the parties who brought you into the wider world would have let you stay."
She smiled. "I'm afraid I'd have prodded you myself, if I'd had to."
Garric's laugh was an echo of Carus' own. "Well, what's already happened doesn't matter now," he said. "There's enough in the future to worry about, of that I'm sure."
Royhas spoke to a groom with a mustache whose tips drooped below the level of his chin. The man bowed and disappeared into the stone-built stables behind them.
Garric took the helmet from the page, though for the moment he tucked it under his arm instead of putting it on. Helmets were miserably uncomfortable to wear. Carus had often gone into battle with only a diadem on his head, leaving the helmet in his tent.
"I took risks I didn't have to, lad," a voice murmured at the edge of Garric's consciousness.
"Sometimes there're risks you do have to take," Garric said aloud, looking around the company that was waiting for him to lead them. The others thought he was speaking to them; and so he was, in part. "Liane, how are things looking?"
"We've had at least one report from all the districts but Fourteen and Sixteen," she said. "The rumors have gotten around. People are out in the streets, and several of the queen's officials have been attacked."
Districts Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen were across the Beltis, cut off from the general business of the city. The queen's presence was light there anyway.
The mustached groom came out of the stables, leading a tall gelding whose coat was colored a gray so pale that only a purist would refuse to call it white. It carried a parade saddle; the high pommel and crupper were covered in chased silver plates.
Garric started to open his mouth, then caught his words and laughed again. He didn't need to be told twice. "Royhas, is that my mount?" he said.
"Yes, ah...," Royhas said. "Ah, have you ridden a horse before?"
"I'll ride the horse," Garric said. "I understand. But get that rig off him—indeed, I'll be safer bareback."
"This—," the nobleman said.
"That's designed to keep me from falling off a horse's back," Garric said, overriding the explanation. "It'll keep me from jumping off in a hurry if something panics the horse, too."
"Ah," Royhas said. "Yes, I can imagine a horse being less steadfast than you, Master Garric."
He gave the groom a curt nod. The man shouted something incomprehensible into the stable and uncinched the parade gear. A boy staggered out of the building carrying a saddle designed for light city use, perfectly satisfactory for the present tasks.
"That may mean horses have better sense than men do, Lord Royhas," Garric said. Somewhere close, King Carus was grinning broadly.
There were at least fifty people in the stableyard: guards, servants, bearers for Tenoctris' chair—the effort of wizardry would be bad enough without the old woman trying to run over cobblestones in the midst of a jostling crowd—and the principals themselves. Garric frowned when he noticed that not only stablehands but also the house servants, even pudgy Maurunus, carried wooden cudgels.
"They're to defend the house while we're gone?" Garric said in Royhas' ear. He lifted his chin slightly to indicate the majordomo.
Royhas snorted. "The house can burn," he said. "I won't need it if we fail. Every man in Valles who owes me service will be with me this morning to make it less likely that we will fail. This is neck or nothing, Master Garric."
Garric clapped the nobleman on the shoulder. Royhas wore a cuirass also, plates of blackened iron riveted to padded leather backing. The cap he held was brown plush, but it had an iron cup under the soft exterior. It was excellent equipment for an urban riot: good protection without making the man wearing it stand out from the crowd.
Standing out was Garric's job, after all.
"This isn't a fight about who calls himself king," Carus whispered. Garric could almost see his ancestor standing on the dream balcony, looking down on the courtyard with his face as calm as a boulder but his right hand playing with the hilt of his sword. "This is about having a chance to live in peace and die in your own home; and it isn't only for people with 'bor' or 'bos' in front of their names."
Female servants were coming out of the house also; not all of them but most. Some carried kitchen knives, and a woman's arm could fling a cobblestone.
Garric grinned at Tenoctris and Liane. The younger woman had folded her account book and put it in her sleeve. She took the silver water bucket that she insisted on carrying herself and nodded to Garric.
As for Garric, well, his horse was resaddled.
The people of Valles were the key to success or failure. Liane had sensibly suggested they wait till midmorning so that the populace would be up and dressed; it was midmorning now, or close enough to make no difference.
Garric took the reins from the page who'd intended to hold the gelding's head, put his foot in the left stirrup, and swung himself into the saddle. His technique was flawless, but a twinge in his thigh muscles reminded him that riding a horse—like swordsmanship—was a matter for the body as well as for a mind that understood the process at a reflexive level.
"All right!" Garric said in a voice that rang from the walls surrounding the stableyard. "Let's go show the people in the Customs House that there's no room in Valles for anybody who serves the queen!"
A pair of guards walked the heavy gate-leaves open. Garric rode into the alley. It wasn't the most inspiring start, but it was the only practical one unless they'd wanted to prepare an insurrection in the porticoed formal entrance to Royhas' town house.
"Valence and the Isles!" Garric shouted as he led his entourage from the alley into one of Valles' major boulevards; this portion was called Harmony Street, but it became Monument Avenue half a mile west in the vicinity of the queen's mansion.
Garric drew his sword. Despite its size, the gelding was of a more phlegmatic disposition than some of the thoroughbreds Garric had cared for in his father's stables. He obeyed Garric's reins, and his hooves didn't slip as they clashed over the cobblestones.
Garric was the only one mounted. A horse for Liane or Royhas would have put them at risk without helping the endeavor. They were far better off on their own legs.
"Valence and the Isles!" Garric cried. He waved his sword toward the row of expensive houses across the street. The faces of householders as well as servants were peering from windows.
"King Carus and Freedom!" bawled the nomenclator who normally announced visitors at the levees where Royhas accepted petitions from his clients.
"King Carus and Freedom!" the rest of the entourage shouted at the tops of their lungs. Liane and Royhas marched on either side of the horse. If not as loud as the frog-voiced nomenclator, they were still clear and easily audible.
Garric walked his mount forward. People came out of houses farther down the street to see what the commotion was about. The helmet flare cut off Garric's peripheral vision, and he didn't want to turn his head to look over his shoulder. That might send the wrong signal to those watching.
"They're coming!" said Liane. "They're joining us, Garric!"
"Carus and Freedom!" Garric shouted. The noise was making the horse restive; he swayed his head and stutter-stepped. Garric jerked the reins hard to straighten the beast's line.
Emotions rushed through Garric's blood. He wanted to thud his heels into the gelding's ribs and rattle down the street at a canter. He fought that instinct and the horse as well: they had to move slowly so that enough ordinary citizens could join the mob to give it unstoppable weight.
"They're coming!" Liane repeated exultantly.
Harmony Street bent to the left at an intersection and narrowed slightly; a block of three- and four-story apartments replaced the noble residences of Royhas' immediate neighborhood. Even so these were dwellings of prosperous or at least comfortable citizens, not tenements.
People spilled out of the arched entranceways, joining the march. Some newcomers were actually ahead of Garric, though most of them swelled the crowd that followed.
"King Carus!" shouted part of the growing mob. Other throats screamed, "Death to the queen!" and "Burn her alive!" The slogans merged into a sound more like the snarl of a huge beast than anything from a human throat.
Rumor and sometimes the conspirators' paid agents had readied the ground, but universal hatred of Queen Azalais did more for the response than plotting had. Garric's presence was the spark in this district, but trumpet calls and occasionally smoke plumes from elsewhere in the city showed that riots had broken out at dozens of other points as well.
A squad of the City Guard with polished brass helmets and gorgets trotted from a side street into the triangular plaza twenty paces ahead. The leader carried a spontoon with a broad, filigreed blade as a rank insignia. He called an order. Four of his men spread to the sides, raising their long, knob-headed staves to receive the mob, while the cornicene raised his coiled horn to summon support.
"Down with the queen!" the nomenclator shouted. Garric swept his sword in an arc, pointing to the street branching toward the Customs House.
The squad leader grabbed the cornicene before the man could blow; the staff-bearers looked uncertainly at one another and their commander. Garric, seeing the hesitation, waved his sword in a broad flourish as though he had a signal flag in his hand.
"Down with the queen's lackeys!" he cried, and rode past the Guards. They didn't try to stop him.
"Down with the queen!" the squad leader said as he and his men joined the mob.
The Customs House was a monumental gateway standing where the main north-south road entered the esplanade around the harbor's margin. The structure was a square of red sandstone with a twenty-foot arch on each side. For the most part the inspectors worked on the surrounding pavement, but for paperwork and storage there was a second story served by inside staircases. Swags and pillars of colored marble decorated the walls, and on the crenellated roof stood a gilded bronze statue with a scepter in one hand and a stalk of rice in the other, symbolizing Valles.
The customs officials wore linen tabards over their tunics. Instead of red and black, the royal colors, these were in shades of orange—as close as dyes made from pollen and red earth could come to the hue of fire.
A grotesquely fat man on top of the gateway shouted an order as he saw Garric approach at the head of the mob. There were a dozen officials on the pavement. They drew the swords they carried but wavered back into the shelter of the building when they appreciated the numbers they were facing. A second mob spilled into the plaza from the slums to the south.
The air before Garric congealed into a gray shape with glowing eyes. The gelding shied with a scream of terror. Garric swung his leg over the saddle and pushed himself away from the animal. He hit the cobblestones hard and might have fallen if Royhas hadn't supported him. He was glad for once that he was wearing boots.
The phantasm drifted forward. Its face was a demon's, and its clawed hands reached toward Garric's eyes.
Garric had seen the phantasms in Tenoctris' scrying mirror, but this was his first direct experience of them. He walked forward with his sword raised.
"It's an illusion!" he said. His voice was a frightened squeal in his own ears—but he kept walking.
The phantasm's jaws opened; its very silence made it the more frightening. From the corner of his eye Garric could see that the other mob had halted before a similar creature.
"It's an illusion!" Liane said in a clear, melodious voice as she advanced at his side.
Even so, Garric couldn't force himself to walk straight through the phantasm. He reached out with his left hand instead.
His skin tingled. For an instant he stood on a barren plain. All around him were the bodies of his friends and kin, impaled on stakes of rough-hewn cedar. Their dead eyes cursed him.
"Illusion!" Garric shouted. He stumbled forward. He could see again. The phantasm had vanished. Garric ran across the cobblestones with a thousand screaming citizens at his back. The queen's officials threw down their weapons; some knelt begging for mercy, others fled northward up the plaza.
Royhas' guards cut a pair of the queen's men down with quick sword strokes. Stones dropped those running; citizens, some of them wearing expensive clothing, pounded the fallen to death with clubs and their feet.
"We don't have to kill them!" Garric shouted, but he knew no one would listen. The slaughter made him sick to watch, but he'd known when he agreed to the plan that a mob is a beast with an appetite for blood.
He ran under the gateway. "To the queen's house!" he called. The plan was for the mobs to converge on the queen's mansion, but only after they'd swept her minions out of every district of the city. King Carus had recommended that course, so that those involved would be flushed with victory before they reached the place where resistance would be more than will-o'-the-wisps and a handful of thugs.
Garric was hot and already panting. Sweat soaked his armor's padding, and he felt the impact of each stride over the cobblestones. He wondered what the horse was doing—and laughed at the thought, because the muscles of his inner thighs ached from even the short ride he'd had.
There was a scream from above, then an enormous wet impact like nothing Garric had ever heard. He turned. People who'd passed under the monumental gateway looked up, waving their fists and shouting curses.
Garric lifted his helmet with his left hand so that the silvered brim didn't get in his way when he looked up. Men—and a few women—leaned over the ornamental battlements, laughing at those below.
Because the crowd had scattered, Garric could see what had happened when he lowered his eyes again. Citizens had climbed to the top of the gateway and flung the queen's customs chief to the pavement forty feet below. The impact had crushed the fat man so completely that his clothes were sopping red with blood.
Liane looked at the garbage which had recently been human. Her face had no expression. "To the queen's house!" she cried, trotting up what was now Monument Avenue. Royhas and his guards fell in alongside.
Garric and his fellows were no longer leading the mob. The citizens who'd chased the fleeing officials were well ahead, and another limb of the insurrection had joined three blocks up the broad expanse.
A large crowd had broken into an imposing residence with lions carved in low relief to either side of the front door. Garric glanced at what was going on. A bed burst through a third-floor window casement from the inside, fell, and shattered into splinters of ivory and exotic woods when it hit the stone planter below.
Garric supposed the house was owned by one of the queen's officials. Before long, though, there'd be looting and death without any political excuse, let alone reason. There was nothing to be done about it—except to finish the queen as quickly as possible so that order could be restored.
"Worse things happen in wartime, lad," the king's voice murmured; but there was no joy in the words, only grim acceptance of what couldn't be changed.
Statues of statesmen of former days stood on plinths to either side of the avenue. Some were so old that verdigris had eaten holes in the bronze.
Garric remembered scenes his own eyes had never beheld in the Voting Field in the center of Carcosa. Since the day when Comus had imposed a monarchy on the oligarches of ancient Haft, statues and other monuments had filled the plaza. Now it was weeds and rubble. Modern Carcosa hadn't rebuilt the area after pirates and dynasts sacked the city repeatedly when the Old Kingdom fell.
The queen's mansion was directly ahead. A mob already surrounded it, though the black walls and flame-wrapped windows were unharmed.
Garric looked behind him; he had to turn his whole body, because the cuirass prevented him from twisting to glance over his shoulder the way he normally would have done. Tenoctris looked composed as she sat in her sedan chair. The four bearers moved at a sliding trot that made the vehicle sway but didn't jounce the passenger significantly.
Garric and Liane reached the back of the crowd around the mansion. At a command from Royhas, the guards jogged ahead of Garric with their spears reversed.
"Make way for King Carus!" the nomenclator shouted. His lungs were so powerful that he could actually be heard over the mob's noise. Spearbutts or an armored shoulder moved folk out of the way if they didn't take the hint.
The guards halted just short of the queen's perimeter. Their commander, a stolid veteran named Enger whose short beard was the same iron gray as his eyes, nodded Garric and Liane forward. Tenoctris dismounted to join them a moment later, but Royhas remained with his guards in an armored semicircle behind the three.
The ground cover across the sharp demarcator was the pale yellow of light-starved grass, but the hairlike leaves weren't flattened into blades. The cherry tree nearby was in bloom; the petals were black. A twisted branch beckoned to Garric like a diseased whore.
Tenoctris seated herself on the cushion a bearer slid between her lanky buttocks and the pavement. Another bearer handed Tenoctris the length of pine board they'd carried lashed to the chair's back. She'd already scribed it with a circle inside a six-pointed star.
Thirty feet to their right, a muscular young man who'd shaved the back of his scalp bare stepped across the margin between cobblestones and wizardry. He waved a staff taken from a City Guard and shouted, "Come on, anybody who's a man!"
Several other fellows with their hair cut like his followed him. After a moment's pause twenty-odd men and a few women plunged after the leaders crying, "Death to the queen!" in loud, drunken voices.
Tenoctris took a bronze stylus from her sleeve. With the pointed end, she began to scratch words in the Old Script around the edge of the circle she'd prepared. The stylus marked the soft wood easily, but it was intended for wax tablets: the other end flared like a fishtail for smoothing over mistakes.
She seemed oblivious of the people running toward the mansion. Everyone else outside the perimeter, Garric and Liane included, watched them in fearful anticipation.
The half-shorn men were members of a street gang. Very possibly they'd worn the queen's colors in the past, but the lure of disorder had caused them to revert to their old ways this morning—and thereby saved their lives, because it was very unlikely that anyone caught wearing orange in public had fared better than had the customs officials.
Their lives were forfeit now, along with those of the ordinary citizens the gang members had drawn across the perimeter with them.
The intruders had lost their way already. From drunken bravado, their demeanor had changed to confusion and fear. They stopped running. Their voices grew thinner, as though they were at a great distance, and they obviously couldn't hear the directions shouted by friends outside the zone of wizardry.
"Can't we...?" Liane said, looking down at Tenoctris. She caught herself before Garric could hush her.
No, they couldn't disturb Tenoctris in order save a score of people guided by wine rather than sense. Garric and Liane knew the only hope for the insurrection was that it succeed before the queen could marshal her enormous, scattered powers to deal with them, the three of them. He, Liane, and Tenoctris were the only present opponents with knowledge enough to be dangerous to the queen's power.
Those who'd entered the garden had drawn into a tight group. A statue that was half-man, half-woman stepped from its base. Its face was perfect but inhumanly cold. It walked toward the interlopers at the measured pace of an officiating priest.
A man flung down his stoneware bottle and threw himself on the ground beside it, kicking like a child having a tantrum. He covered his head with his hands. The remainder of the interlopers bolted away from the androgyne as a group—
With one exception. The husky fellow who'd led the others into the garden now swaggered toward the oncoming statue.
"Kaias," Tenoctris murmured. "Saseri tayam...."
The bravo's staff had a fist-sized knob on the end of a six-foot shaft, a murderous weapon if used with that intent. He swung it into the androgyne's head with a sharp whock.
The dense wood cracked and a few chips flew away. The staff rebounded, quivering like a lute string. The bravo screamed curses but kept his grip despite the numbing vibration.
The statue came on. Its expression, a faint smile, did not change.
"Day a quayamta alista...," said Tenoctris. A wisp of light spiraled slowly from the center of her circle. It looked like the shaving that rises when an auger bores soft wood.
The group trying to flee the garden was twenty yards from the man they'd left crying behind them. The ground gaped beneath them.
Victims screamed. Those closest to the collapsing edges tried to climb to safety, but the turf crumbled like wet sand when their hands clutched it.
An athletic youth took a running leap. His fringed tunic, popular among the fashionable elite, fluttered behind him. He'd have cleared the trap except that a cedar tree's root squirmed from the soil to grip his ankle. It flipped him into the cavity with a motion much like that of a man tossing tidbits to his dog.
The earth closed. There was no sign that it ever had opened, nor of the score of humans it had swallowed down.
The bravo with the staff stood his ground, laughing in a cracked, high-pitched voice. He swung again. The knob shattered. He flailed at the androgyne with the shaft, splitting it the long way.
The statue caught the laughing man's wrists. He continued to struggle, but flesh was no match for stone. The arms encircled him.
The bravo's spine cracked in the embrace; his legs flailed to the sides, then hung limp as burlap sacks. Ribs splintered through his skin and tunic. The arms continued to close until the victim's torso fell in two pieces.
The smiling androgyne walked back toward its base.
"Horan," said Tenoctris, "elaoth!"
The helix was faintly blue. It bent at right angles and began extending itself over the perimeter of the queen's domain.
Tenoctris set the board on the stones in front of her. When she started to rise, Garric and Liane quickly offered their arms for support. The tight coil of light continued to bore its way slowly toward the mansion.
"Now it's up to us," Tenoctris said quietly. She gave her companions a smile.
Black petals from the cherry tree covered the man who'd thrown himself to the ground in panic. There was no sound or movement from within the somber mound.
"Right," said Garric. He drew his sword and led the way in the direction the helix pointed.
"I need another pellet first," Cerix said. They'd slid the table with his paraphernalia against the wall to make more room for the circle of power on the floor. He gripped his wheels to roll the chair toward it.
"Cerix?" Halphemos said. He laid his hand over the cripple's. "I think we'd better do the spell now. We need the moon at zenith, and..." The air of the small room was gray with cloying residue from the drug the cripple had smoked while he transcribed the words from the cloth to the floor they'd whitewashed for the purpose. The container had been full when the wizards began their preparations; only half a dozen pellets remained. The older man's fragile control had broken under the weight of the spell they were attempting.
Though rural labor had given the younger man considerable wiry strength, Cerix's arms did the work of other men's legs. From the waist up, he could wrestle down youths half again his size. He batted away Halphemos' hand with childish fury and gripped his wheels again to spin himself forward.
"Cerix?" Halphemos said.
The cripple didn't move. He closed his eyes; tears crawled down his cheeks. "You don't know what it's like!" he pleaded. "I can feel the demons gnawing on my legs. Every day, every breath, every moment. You don't know!"
"Cerix," Halphemos said softly. "We owe it to Ilna and her brother. We have to do this."
Cerix gave a shuddering sigh. "So you say," he said in a savage whisper. He shook himself, then wiped his face with his sleeve. He looked at his friend with a forced smile.
"Well, I suppose you're right," he said. "I'll be needing something to steady me afterwards, won't I? Sure, let's get this over with."
Halphemos clasped hands with Cerix. They took their places beside the circle of power, Halphemos squatting and the cripple beside him in the chair. The lamp hanging from the wall bracket behind them shone on the parchment which Cerix held in his left hand.
"Can you read it?" he asked. He tapped the sheet with the length of rye straw he was using as a pointer.
"Yes," Halphemos said. He cleaned the athame he used for private incantations by running his left thumb and forefinger over the blade of walrus ivory. As a showman he used a narwal's tusk for the broad motions of his public displays. "You've taught me well, Cerix. I won't fail you."
The cripple grunted. "I'm not worried about you," he said. He touched his pointer to the first of the syllables he'd written on the parchment in the blocky modern script which Halphemos could read.
The younger wizard tapped the corresponding symbol drawn on the floor in cursive Old Script. "Phasousouel," he intoned, his voice strong but laboring against the power of the word he spoke. "Eistochama, nouchaei...."
The circle and the words around its rim were written in soot congealed with olive oil. Each time the athame touched the floor, the symbols rotated to bring the next in front of Halphemos. Cerix, his face stiff and gray, drew his straw along the parchment at the rate the chant itself set.
"Apraphes einath adones..." Halphemos said. He flexed his torso unconsciously as though he were shouldering a heavy weight, but his voice remained firm. "Dechochtha iathenouion."
What had been a circle on the floor opened slowly into a pit with white sides whirling like a maelstrom. The syllables in Old Script stood stark and black against blurred chaos. Cerix continued to deacon out the chant, but even he could no longer be sure of the words on the parchment. Halphemos didn't miss a beat.
"Chrara!" he shouted. "Cherubin! Zaaraben!"
The room had vanished. A hot, violent wind roared from nowhere, and the pit was a corridor before them.
There was no floor or existence except for the shimmering tunnel beyond their world. Against its blazing white light, objects were forming.
"Namadon!" Halphemos shouted.
The wind was a hurricane, an unstoppable torrent. The parchment flashed from Cerix's hand, shredding into fragments as it disappeared down the tunnel.
The wind whirled the wizards after the parchment. Halphemos continued to shout the incantation.
Cashel eyed the bulge of rock above them as best he could by the light of a few stars. It didn't look very high. At least it wasn't as high as it was steep. "Zahag, you go up and I'll hand Aria to you," he said.
Something was chuckling in the darkness to their right. It went on the way a brook runs, mindless and gurgling.
The chuckling thing had been keeping parallel with Cashel and his companions all the way up the slope. It could've been any distance away, from miles to close enough to hit if Cashel spat into the encircling night.
"Well, I don't know," the ape said in a subdued voice. He was hunched at Cashel's feet—literally: he pressed his coarse-furred flank against Cashel's shin. "I don't think I want to lead."
"Get up there," Cashel said. He wasn't going to raise his voice, but his hands squeezed his quarterstaff hard. "Or go your own way, Zahag. And may the Shepherd forsake me if I have any more to do with you!"
Well, maybe he'd raised his voice a little after all. The chuckling stopped briefly while the echoes died away.
"Yes, chief," the ape said. He clambered up the rock face as easily as he'd have walked the same distance on the flat. His arms covered an amazing span. With his short legs gripping also, Zahag looked like an enormous crab spider.
"Send the female up!" he called from close above. An arm reached down; the ape's hand was half again as long as Cashel's own.
"I'll show you that I'm worthy, Cashel," the princess said in a tiny, frightened voice.
Instead of making a stirrup with both hands, Cashel put his left palm against the rock and said, "Hop onto the back of my wrist, Princess. Then grab Zahag's hand, all right?"
"Whatever you say, Cashel," Aria piped in a desperate and completely failed attempt to sound cheerful. She stepped on his arm in a gingerly fashion and waved her right arm overhead until Zahag caught it. She must have closed her eyes.
Cashel didn't blame her for being frightened. He hadn't been willing to lean his staff against the rock so he had both hands free to lift her.
Besides, she didn't weigh anything. Purple finches sometimes landed on Cashel's shoulder while he waited to turn the oxen at the end of a furrow. Aria didn't seem much heavier.
"I can see the light!" Aria cried. "It's right ahead of us. It's coming from a cave but there's a rock in the entrance!"
The moon came out from behind the high clouds in which it'd hidden for most of the night. Cashel didn't have any great affection for the moon. When it was full, the animals got restless.
Cashel had never thought of moonlight as being hostile before, though. Maybe it was the things it shone on in this place.
The slope had been a succession of crags, each a barrier but no single one so high that Cashel couldn't climb it. Even Aria could manage with help. The path they followed was barren, but on either side scrub pines found soil enough in crevices to grow.
Among the pines below Cashel stood hulking, two-legged figures. He couldn't tell their numbers in this light; some of what he saw were probably the shadows of misshapen trees.
There were likely a dozen of them, anyhow, and any one of them bigger than Cashel was himself. Like Zahag their legs were much shorter than their arms, but they had long skulls and were as hairless as so many eggs.
"Do you want us?" Cashel shouted. His back was to the crag; he held the quarterstaff across his body and a little advanced, ready for use. "Come and get us, then!"
One of the figures stepped into the full moonlight, half a dozen paces below. It resumed its gurgling chuckle. None of the others advanced.
"Cashel!" the princess cried. "Please come up! Please!"
Goodness, she must be scared to say please like that. And surely she had a right....
Cashel turned to the crag. He butted his staff firmly so that it wouldn't slip, put his left foot about knee-height up the rock face, and lifted himself on the quarterstaff.
Zahag had one arm stretched back to hang on to a knob of rock. With the other he caught the crook of Cashel's left elbow. The ape's flat grip was as strong as a hook of strap iron. Cashel flung himself to the top of the outcrop, drawing his staff up after him. The cap of bronze cutwork gave him a better grip than the polished iron ferrules of the staff he'd left in Folquin's palace.
The moon went back into the clouds. The chuckling seemed louder, but that might have been Cashel's imagination.
"Quickly!" Zahag said, tugging Cashel along by the hand still holding his arm. "Maybe you can snap their chief's neck, I don't say you can't, but what if the rest of them come for us?"
Cashel shook his elbow free. "Right," he said. "We're almost to what we were seeing."
It was a night for first times. Zahag had just included Aria in his band, or whatever it was that apes had.
The blue light Cashel had seen the night previous was up a last slope, no more than forty paces long and gentle enough that even the princess could walk it unaided. Crawl it, maybe, but Cashel didn't intend to take a hand away from his staff just to keep Aria from skinning her knees.
The glare was so fiercely bright that the air around it glowed. It seeped past the irregular surface of the great boulder crammed into the mouth of a cave. Cashel heard a faint whine like that of a distant mosquito. It made his skin tingle.
He looked over his shoulder. He couldn't see the huge not-men who were following, but he'd have known they were there even without the continuing chuckle. Why did only one of them make a sound?
Zahag and Aria were scrambling ahead. Cashel lengthened his stride, leaning well forward to keep his balance without having to dab a hand down. The slope's weathered surface gave his feet a firm grip.
His companions had reached the cave mouth. Aria was weeping from fear. She leaned against the boulder, trying to move it. "I'm worthy!" she said. "Oh please Mistress God, I'm worthy!"
Cashel didn't laugh. He didn't remember ever seeing anything so silly as this: the princess struggling to move a boulder that Cashel knew was beyond his own strength.
But she was trying. Cashel didn't think he'd ever come to like the princess, but it wasn't hard to respect her.
"Zahag, keep an eye behind," Cashel said, running his left hand over the seam where the boulder was wedged against the cave wall. "Let me know if I need to..."
He didn't finish the thought. It'd have bothered Aria still worse; and truth to tell, Cashel didn't much fancy seeing a dozen or more of those brutes hoisting themselves over the lip of rock himself.
He wondered what they were called. He'd have to ask Tenoctris when next he saw her. When.
The boulder's fit was closer than Cashel had seen between house beams in the past. He tried the weight, pressing one palm against the boulder just in case it was balanced to shift at a touch.
Well, he hadn't figured it would be.
Cashel itched all over, he supposed from the glare. He'd felt this way when he spun his staff as he and Zahag had gone through the wall of flame to rescue the princess.
Who didn't want to be rescued—then. She sure did now. Since Cashel had taken the job, he guessed he'd better get on with it.
He set the butt of his staff into the seam and leaned against it cautiously. As he'd expected, the lever flexed without any effect on the boulder. This fir staff might not have quite the strength of the hickory he was used to, but Cashel was pretty sure that even an iron bar as thick as his arm would bend without doing a blind bit of good.
Zahag began to jump back and forth, shrieking at the night in ape language. Cashel could pretty well guess what he was saying. Prayers might be a better choice, but who knew? Maybe swearing would keep the others off for a little longer.
Cashel set the quarterstaff beside the cave. He spread his arms to grip the boulder well around the curve on both sides. He knew he couldn't lift something so heavy, but he had to try.
Cashel braced himself and started to pull. His grip on the rough surface stayed firm, but the boulder didn't move. He kept leaning his weight back. His pulse was singing in his ears.
"I'm worthy!" Aria screamed over the ape's gibbering curses. "I'm worthy of a king!"
She must have picked up his staff. Cashel couldn't see it any longer in the corner of his eye, even before the red haze of blood filled his vision.
The boulder didn't move. The boulder would never move.
"Duzi, save my flock!" Cashel shouted. His world exploded into crackling blue fire.
By using the spear as a balance pole, Sharina was able to dance across the fallen tree to keep up with Hanno ahead of her. The bark beneath the layer of wet moss had rotted enough that sheets of it threatened to slide away beneath her; Hanno, twice her weight, seemed to have no difficulty.
The bottom of the gully was rock-strewn and forty feet down. Sharina didn't really expect to slip off... and as much at home as Hanno seemed in this rain-drenched world, he'd probably reach back and grab her before her feet had left the trunk.
"Unarc keeps a snare or two down there," Hanno said as he hopped to the solid ground. His spearbutt gestured into the gully. "The hornbacks travel the easy way, so once they've made a trail you can take them from the same snares till you're old and gray."
He laughed. "Not that Unarc's got hair enough to get gray," he added. "Don't expect he's been getting older this past while neither, not the way the Monkeys are cutting up."
Sharina stepped to the ground instead of jumping; she was afraid that the bark would slough and spill her if she put that extra strain on it. The hunter's balance must be perfect, because she knew that though her own was quite good she couldn't equal the big man's ease on dangerous footing.
A beetle with a jeweled carapace droned between her and Hanno. It moved slowly with its wings blurring to support a body the size of a man's fist.
The forest floor squished, but Sharina's toes could find a hard substrate not far beneath the leaf litter. They'd passed stands of giant horsetails in particularly wet sections but the trees here were araucarias, conifers whose trunks were visibly conical and whose branches started horizontal but bent up sharply on the tips.
"Are the animals you hunt dangerous?" Sharina asked, as much to show interest in her companion's life as because she cared about the answer. She'd been raised to keep an inn. If the customer thought of you as a friendly peer, he was more likely to pay his scot without objection than if he considered the inn staff to be surly menials.
Although some interest was justified. The Hairy Men might be a new danger, but Sharina was pretty sure they weren't the only threat to hunters—and castaways—on Bight.
"No, not unless you happen to be standing in the place a hornback's bound and determined to go," Hanno said. He carried what he'd described as a light pack: it nonetheless weighed at least fifty pounds, mostly of grain and dried fruit. "They don't have no more brains than a cockroach, but they weigh a ton or better, some of them. But that's like felling a tree on yourself: if you pay attention to what you're doing, it won't happen but maybe one time in a thousand."
"And predators?" Sharina asked. They were paralleling a body of water shallow enough that horsetails of ordinary size grew most of the way across its fifty-foot width. If there was a current, it was a sluggish one. That a pond—or marsh—should stand so close to a deep ravine proved that the underlying soil was an impermeable clay.
"There's lizards that run on their hind legs," Hanno said. "Half a ton each and they've got a righteous mouthful of teeth, but they rush straight on. You just butt your spear against your right boot and let them run right up it. Anyhow, they ain't common."
"I'll keep that in mind," Sharina said. She grinned, trying to imagine herself awaiting the charge of a half-ton monster with a mouthful of teeth. Well, since she'd left Barca's Hamlet, she'd done other things she'd never have expected she could.
"We cross the lagoon up here," Hanno said. "There's a ford. And then—"
A lizard—a baby crocodile, all scutes and bony plates, Sharina decided—splashed from the horsetails into the water as they approached. It swam with strong, sinuous curves of its flattened tail; its clawed feet were against its sides.
"Anyhow," the hunter continued, "Unarc's place is just over the rise. He's got a hide in a hollow tree that I figure you can lay up in while I check on the boat alone."
"Well," Sharina said. "If you—"
Water roared. The little crocodile vanished in a whirlpool. A flat-headed monster with eyes bulging on the top of its skull swept to the surface, turned, and vanished again into the tannin-dark water. It was huge. Its skin was the slimy black color of a rotten banana.
Sharina stopped. "What was that?" she snapped.
"Oh, they're no danger neither," Hanno said. "Not to something our size. They're salamanders, I reckon. They lie on the bottom of a pond. When something swims overhead, well, you saw what happens. I don't recall I ever saw one leave the water except when a pond dried up. Even when they have to they can't walk far."
His spear pointed. "Here's the ford," he said, and strode into the water without concern.
Sharina followed, keeping close. At least the salamander had just gotten a meal. That salamander had, at least.
"I'm wondering about heading for Sirimat after I get you back to Valles," Hanno said. He strode into a tangle of roots and tree boles on the other side of the lagoon. There wasn't anything Sharina would have recognized as a path without him, but the big hunter slid between obstacles instead of forcing his way against them. "If the Monkeys are acting up—"
He shrugged, then moved his spear in a serpentine arc. It threaded through a knot of upturned roots that Sharina had thought was completely impervious to an object so long.
"—well, I can't work my trap lines and fight Monkeys every night. So I need to find another place I can hunt."
Sharina blinked, then giggled. Hanno wasn't inventing little concerns because he was afraid to face the major question of survival. He took survival as a given and was puzzling over how he was going to make a living in the future.
That wasn't a little concern, come to think—if you assumed there was going to be a future. She wasn't sure Hanno had good judgment, but he was better company than a realist would have been.
"I don't know much about Sirimat," she said. A week ago she hadn't known much about Bight. "Rigal—the poet—says trees walk and the people there don't worship the Lady, but he wrote two thousand years ago."
Spiky roots like the teeth of a snake faced her from both sides of the trail. She shoved her way through, wondering how the hunter had managed not to disturb them.
"On Sirimat there's trees with jewels at the heart," Hanno said, "or so I hear. Well, I'll see what I can learn in Valles. There's always somebody along the Valles waterfront who's been any place you please, though the trick is staying sober enough to remember what they tell you."
They were on an upward slope distinct enough that Sharina's feet twice slipped on matted leaves. The soil beneath was bright red. High on the branches Sharina caught glimpses of flowering air plants and the occasional brilliant flutter of birds, but color, other than shades of green, was the exception in this portion of the forest.
Hanno halted and stepped aside for Sharina to join him. He was looking into the clearing before them. "Well, that's where Unarc's cabin was," he said. "I'd have bet we'd find him under that slate roof he always strutted when he talked about, but I'd have lost my money."
A few charred logs stuck out from the pile of rock slabs at the edge of a spring. Lowering trees, one of them a baobab that must have been twenty paces in circumference, bounded the clearing.
Hanno glanced at Sharina. He grinned and added, "We'd still smell him if he was under that. It takes a good month, even in this climate, before you can't smell a dead man."
"Oh," Sharina said quietly. She walked into the clearing.
Underfoot was a shale outcrop unusual in a landscape which was mostly forms of coarse limestone. Apparently the local vegetation found the surface uncongenial: the leaf canopy hundreds of feet in the air was at least as thick as that anywhere in the forest, but the saplings and lesser plants that elsewhere created a second and third layer beneath the main blanket were absent. Sharina felt as though she were in a room of enormous height.
"It's very peaceful," she said.
Hanno nodded. "Unarc felt that way about it," he said. "Me, I like hearing the water when I'm lying there at night."
He chuckled. "I guess Unarc's finding it pretty peaceful wherever it is he's at now."
Hanno glanced upward. There wasn't enough sky visible at any point through the leaves that a fingernail wouldn't have blocked it, but darkness was already leaching the hues from the trees.
"Unarc's hideout was in that baobab," he said, pointing the spearbutt. "There's a crack in the trunk you can slide through, and inside it's a regular cave. I'll leave you with the pack."
"You're not coming in with me?" Sharina said, careful not to put any particular weight in the question.
The hunter slipped off his pack and held it by the straps in one hand as he strode across the clearing. "I'm going to check on Unarc's boat," he said. "I know the way well enough to go there now, though I'll lay up there till the morning."
He stopped at the side of the baobab where the pale bark gaped in a seam. Sharina would have assumed the scar closed deeper in the trunk had she not been told otherwise.
"You going to be all right?" Hanno said.
"Yes," said Sharina, holding her spear point-forward so that she could enter the narrow gap. "Of course."