Garric?" Royhas called, his voice already attenuated.
Garric looked over his shoulder. The crowd seemed half a mile distant, though Garric knew he'd only taken two steps into the garden. The air was warm and still, with an odor like that of overripe fruit.
"I'll send the men with you," the nobleman said. His face was distorted with the effort of shouting. "I'll lead them if you like!"
Tenoctris shook her head minusculely. "I couldn't protect them," she
said. "My powers won't cover more than three people at once. That is, I very much hope..."
The three of them grinned at one another. They all knew what Tenoctris meant, though it was Liane who actually finished the thought aloud: "We'll all hope that three people aren't more than you can protect. Anyway, we're with friends."
"I'll keep that in mind when the stone tiger swallows me," Garric said. He cupped his left hand and his right fist around the sword hilt to his mouth for a crude trumpet. "Wait as we agreed!" he called. "Nobody enters until we've made it safe!"
They walked on, side by side. Their glowing guide, a helix outside the perimeter, was a dot of blue light here. It bumbled through the air with the aimlessness of a crane fly in the twilight, passing between a pair of planters in the shape of dragon heads. Hostas grew out of the stone mouths, looking like green flames.
"That way?" Garric said. He felt his helmet wiggle as he frowned. He'd have given the planters a wide berth if the decision were his.
"Yes," Tenoctris said crisply. "Ilna could pick a pathway through these illusions better than my wizardry can, but I think my abilities are sufficient."
Garric strode ahead, resisting his instinct to slash at the hostas as he passed them. He'd been raised not to trouble those who didn't trouble him. That was a good plan for life. Striking out because he was scared—which he surely was, scared even by the plants in this terrible place—was a bad one. He wasn't going to let fear drive him.
Garric couldn't see the queen's mansion. He turned to look for the spectators he knew were watching the scene, but they were gone too. Shrubs whose stems twisted in groups of six or seven from a common base waved tiny leaves at him. He didn't remember having seen them as he entered the garden with his companions.
"We'll bear to the left here," Tenoctris said in gentle reproof. She gestured. Garric noticed that she still held the stylus in her right hand.
"Sorry," Garric said contritely. "I won't let my attention wander again."
The dot of light had curved to avoid a bed of purple daffodils at the foot of a small magnolia and a boulder. The tree was in flower; its perfume had a heady attraction that made Garric think of women wearing brass spangles and little else.
He obediently followed the guide through sedums whose flowered heads humped like giant toadstools in his path. The outcrop lifted itself onto short forelegs. Knobs opened into eyes which watched with toadlike malevolence as the human intruders kept beyond its reach.
Liane still carried the pail of water. Her eyes darted about their surroundings, but her face showed only aristocratic unconcern.
"Pretending you're not afraid is a good way to keep going on, lad," murmured King Carus. Ever since Garric entered the garden, the king's tall, sturdy form had been with him. "But if she's really that brave, she's more of a man than I ever was."
Garric smiled. He wouldn't bet against Liane being truly fearless, but neither did it matter. Garric knew that Liane would go on no matter how frightened she was.
And so would he.
The guiding light drifted past the statue of a three-headed ogre. The creature moved on its plinth, making a grating sound. "Wait," Tenoctris said. She knelt and plucked a fern crosier which sprang from the crack between two skull-shaped rocks.
The ogre's three single eyes glared at the humans. It began to step down, lifting the saw-bladed sword in one hand and the axe in the other.
"Thesta," Tenoctris said. "Eibradibas!"
She struck the crosier's stem sharply with her bronze stylus. The fern broke.
The ankle still supporting the ogre on its base snapped loudly. The statue toppled forward and hit the ground, shattering into a dozen major pieces and a pile of gravel. Garric wouldn't have expected so much damage from stone hitting soft turf.
The old woman wiped fern juice from her stylus with a satisfied smile. Liane helped her rise.
"Quite a simple effect," Tenoctris said. "All the queen's effects are, really. But what amazing power she has to project so many presences at once, and over such distances!"
Garric's boots crunched on bits of the broken statue. One of the heads was upturned. He saw the stone eye swivel to follow him. His mouth twitched in an involuntary grimace.
The bead of light turned at right angles from what looked like a smooth, stone-bordered path and crossed instead a stream gurgling noisomely through reeds. Garric didn't ask this time, but his stomach tightened as he followed. He remembered very clearly what had happened to Gothelm at a watercourse that might well be this one.
Garric splashed through the creek. Water soaked through the uppers of his boots almost instantly. It felt clammy and his feet squished for the next few steps, but none of the horrors he'd imagined—none of the horrors he'd watched—occurred.
The light skirted a pair of weeping cherry trees, neither of them twenty feet high. Their flowing blossoms weren't the usual white or magenta but rather a red as bright as arterial blood.
Trailing branches shivered as the humans passed just beyond their reach. Garric felt a wave of dry, bloodless hatred directed at him.
"Ah...," Liane whispered.
Garric had been watching the light. He raised his eyes slightly, following Liane's line of sight. On the slight rise ahead of them, he could see the queen's mansion. Its windows fluttered baleful flames.
"We're there," Garric said. He restrained his instinct to run forward. The king in his mind feared covered pitfalls, sharp stakes hidden in the ground, iron caltrops forged so that one of the four spikes was up no matter how the object fell—all the material traps that a wily general strews in front of a hostile army.
But the queen wasn't a general and didn't fight on a material battlefield. Besides, the guide would warn them of—
The light vanished. It was gone with none of the lingering glow that a candle wick offers as it smokes itself cold. Tenoctris whispered what Garric thought was an incantation; he couldn't be sure.
"The door is opening," Liane said. Her voice had the emotionless timbre of rigid control.
The high door leaves creaked inward; the iron hinges sounded like the souls of the damned. Garric expected a gush of flame-colored light as the windows above showed, but for the moment there was only darkness.
"We've penetrated the queen's illusions, so she'll send her living gatekeeper," Tenoctris said. She seated herself on the pale-leafed grass. "This won't be an illusion."
"I didn't think it would be," Garric said quietly. He was two persons now, a peasant and an ancient king. Carus no longer displaced Garric from his own body at times of violent crisis, but the king's knowledge and reflexes were intertwined with the youth's own. As with a rope, the whole was far stronger than the separate strands.
With his left hand Garric unclasped his red velvet cape and snapped it twice around his forearm. The cloth would be some protection; slight, perhaps, but sometimes the difference between life and death is no wider than the thickness of the stabbing blade. He moved forward on the balls of his feet, waiting for the thing that would come through the doorway.
Tenoctris' lips were moving; Liane stood beside her, holding a bucket of water in one hand and a dagger with a blade as sharp as a snake's fang in the other.
The queen's gatekeeper hunched to pass beneath the twenty-foot archway. When it straightened it was manlike save for its size and its single eye.
The cyclops wore a corselet and greaves of black iron. The armor was molded with images of demons rending human victims. The shield on the cyclops' left arm had a dragon-head boss; its eyes gleamed. A crested helmet added to the height of a monster already thirty feet high.
Garric laughed with a glee that was just this side of hysteria. He'd seen a cyclops before, that one a prehuman corpse which a wizard had reanimated for his protection on a beach beyond the waking world.
That wizard was dead, and the queen would die also.
The cyclops came toward him, striding with the heavy inevitability of a river flooding. Its legs were relatively thicker than a man's, vast pillars that made the giant appear pyramidal despite the breadth of its chest and shoulders. It held a spear all of iron over its right shoulder, poised to stab down; the scabbard of a sword half again as long as a man clanged at its side.
"Haft and the Isles!" Garric cried as he broke into a run. That war cry from a former time was drowned in the monster's hooting bellow, louder than that of the long trumpets coastwatchers in Carcosa blew to guide mariners in time of fog.
"Haft and the Isles!"
Garric unrolled his cloak again for a better use. A man couldn't carry armor that would be proof against the thrust of the cyclops' spear, but the brain within the thick bones of the creature's skull should be no bigger than a lemon. It was a beast, not a warrior.
Garric fluttered the cloak through the air to his left. His body shifted right. The iron spear, flashing like a thunderbolt, spiked the velvet to the ground; Garric, slashing right and left, drove between the massive legs.
His sword hit bone with the forestroke, cartilage with the back. A huge foot kicked out, catching Garric in the ribs as he tried to slide clear. He flew twenty feet from where he'd intended to land. He'd lost his helmet. Half the studs holding the right seam of his cuirass together were broken as well.
A creature so large hadn't a right to be quick besides....
Garric rolled to his feet. There was blood on his swordblade and more blood gushing from the cyclops' right ankle. The blow had severed a small artery; what Garric wanted, needed, was to cut the Achilles tendon.
In time the monster would bleed out. Garric, already gasping with effort, didn't believe he had the time.
The cyclops stabbed the cloak repeatedly with the single-minded determination of a mother smashing the viper she'd spilled out of the cradle. Garric took two deep breaths, glad the cuirass had loosened and wishing he could fling the useless burden away. He took a step toward the monster. It turned to face him, pivoting on its left heel.
Garric paused. The cyclops turned, bent, and stabbed down at him. Garric stepped sideways. The point of his long sword clashed against the monster's right gauntlet as the spear plunged deep in the soil.
The monster's index finger spun away in a dance of sparks. The gauntlets had to be thinner metal so that the sections could slide over one another at the joints. The good steel of Garric's blade had sheared like a cold chisel to the spearshaft beneath.
The cyclops hooted on a sustained note that made Garric's bowels quiver. It came toward him with its shield advanced and the spear rising again to thrust.
Garric backed quickly. The monster was deceptively fast because the strides, though taken with deliberation, were each as long as several paces by a human being.
"Garric!" Liane cried. "Your helmet!"
Garric hopped back, past rather than onto the headpiece of silvered bronze. He hooked the tip of his long sword between the neck flare and earpiece, then flipped it in a glittering curve over the cyclops' head.
The creature shied like a man attacked by a hornet. The spear licked out but missed the tumbling helmet. Garric rushed in, using his left hand on the pommel this time to add force as he chopped the outside of the advanced right leg. The blade crunched, sinking its own width in the cyclops' ankle.
The cyclops roared. It swung its shield downward as a weapon. Garric dived under the blow instead of trying to back away from it. He'd cleared his sword with a jerk; bits of cartilage and vascular bone clung to the edge, as sometimes happened when he jointed a roast with a cleaver in his father's inn.
He was between the monster's legs. It raised its right foot to stamp him into the ground. He stabbed deep into the left ankle as he twisted his body back.
The hobnailed boot slammed down. It missed Garric, but he had to leave his sword behind as he scrambled free.
The cyclops paced toward Garric, step by titanic step. Garric was gasping, his lungs a furnace. His hands were free because he'd lost his sword. He clutched at the half-opened seam of his cuirass, trying to wrench the armor completely loose.
The laces resisted him. The right side of his chest was still numb from the kick.
Garric backed away. He couldn't turn and run, because then he wouldn't be able to see if the cyclops threw its spear. Even facing the monster, Garric wasn't sure he'd be able to dodge the huge missile.
He was going up the gentle slope. When he reached the mansion, the cyclops would crush him like a bug against the pilastered stone wall.
Because Garric was concentrating on the monster's eye, a truer predictor of its intentions than the point of its weapon, he didn't see Liane until the girl grasped the sword projecting from the cyclops' ankle. Holding the hilt in both hands, she pulled back with all the considerable strength of her small body. The blade rotated through the joint like a knife slicing into a head of cabbage.
The cyclops shrieked. It turned, poising its spear. Liane tumbled backward, still holding the sword hilt. Blood gushed from the wound.
"Here!" Garric shouted, running toward the monster and waving his arms to distract it. The cyclops couldn't have heard him over the sound of its own cry. Shreds of red velvet fluttered from the spearpoint. "Look at me!"
The monster lunged forward. Its left foot twisted out from under it, still attached to the leg by glistening tendons that stretched under the creature's weight.
The cyclops fell, missing Liane by so little that Garric's heart stopped till he saw the girl still scrambling away. She held the sword. She stabbed inexpertly with it at the gauntleted hand as the creature flailed in her direction. The iron spear was rammed two yards deep in the soil.
The cyclops was howling. Blood fountained over the foot that stuck sideways from its leg. On the other side of the creature from Garric, Tenoctris mouthed an incantation.
Liane stumbled uphill, holding the sword in both hands. Her face was white except where blood spattered it; her arms were drenched in the creature's gore.
Garric turned. The mansion doors were open. A sparkle of purest blue dusted the gap between the leaves, though the air within was orange flame.
"The gate!" Liane gasped as she pushed the sword hilt into Garric's hand. "Tenoctris says take iron through the gateway!"
Garric strode toward the curtain of fire. The basalt threshold was hot to step on, even with his thick boots. He thrust his sword as if stabbing for the eyes of an enemy he could not see.
He felt a tingle, no more. In place of the flame was a brooding entry hall lighted by windows on the upper level. It was empty save for suits of armor that hadn't been designed for humans.
Garric looked over his shoulder. The cyclops' huge skeleton lay in a pool of its liquescent flesh, and the mob, thousands of Valles' citizens, ran across the cobblestones shrieking for the queen's blood.
Garric tried to stand aside. He wanted to make sure Tenoctris was safe, but first he had to get his breath. He saw everything as a blur of color and motion.
A man clasped Garric's free hand and slapped the backplate of his cuirass enthusiastically. "King Carus!" he cried. "Hail Carus!"
A woman old enough to be Garric's mother threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. She wore a perfume of heliotrope and her layered garments were silken.
"Please!" Garric said. Most of the crowd was pouring into the mansion, but an increasing number of people pressed about him. He tried to move away. Liane had squeezed to his side. She stood with her fists raised to either side of her jaw.
Two of Royhas' guards forced their way through the crowd. The nobleman himself and Tenoctris joined a moment later, protected by the other four guards. The armored spearmen forced citizens away from Garric and Liane the way a froe splits shakes from a cedar log.
"The other members of our group will be with us shortly," Royhas said. His mouth quirked in a wry smile. "Here at the mansion, I told them. They weren't very pleased, but they didn't have a great deal of choice, did they?"
Shouts echoed inside the mansion. From the brief glimpse Garric had gotten of the interior, the mansion was constructed around a courtyard. The style was familiar to King Carus, but it hadn't been used in Valles either in the present day or during the Old Kingdom.
Liane held Tenoctris' hands and talked, her face close to that of the older woman. Tenoctris looked tired, but she smiled warmly when she felt Garric's gaze on her.
Royhas noted the exchange of glances. His smile tightened and he went on, "I should have offered my congratulations first, Master Garric. No one who watched you—and that's much of the populace of Valles—could doubt that you're a returned hero of former times."
"The heroes of former times failed," Garric heard his lips say. "We—you and I and all the rest—need to do better, Royhas. And so we shall."
Smoke belched from a mansion window. It was the natural gray-white billowing of wood and cloth because some idiot had set furnishings alight.
"Can you stop that?" Garric said to Royhas. "Do you have enough men that we can restore order?"
The nobleman shrugged. "We can try," he said.
"Where's the queen?" Liane demanded. "Is she—"
Screams of terror came from within the mansion, though it wasn't until the many thousands of citizens outside joined that the sound reached Garric's awareness.
The sun darkened. He looked up.
The thing lifting from the mansion roof had translucent gray vans that spread to the size of small clouds. The body, relatively small, was soot-colored and shaggy. It reminded him of cobwebs hanging in the common room of an ill-kept inn.
On the creature's back was a woman of coldly perfect beauty. She looked at Garric without expression as she swept no more than fifty paces overhead.
"If I had my bow..." he muttered.
All around the mansion, people fell to their knees. One of Royhas' guards chanted a hymn to the Lady in a childish singsong, a vestige of the last time he'd prayed.
"It would take much more than an arrow," Tenoctris said quietly. "But now that we've driven her from her lair, we may have time to find a permanent solution."
The winged creature rose gradually as it flew out over the sea. Its wings rippled like those of a stingray, not a bird. It was visible for miles as it continued on toward the southeast.
Sharina felt the strangers' presence before she heard them. She held still, wondering if her heartbeat echoed as loudly as it seemed to her to do.
The acoustics within the great tree were remarkable. The narrow, twisting passage through the trunk led sound in the way a human ear does; she feared it might also, like a human throat, amplify any noises she made.
"She's in there," a voice whispered. It was the false Nonnus.
The baobab's interior was faintly lighted when Sharina first entered. The cavity opened to the sky somewhere high in the canopy, though the amount of illumination even at midday was less than that of the stars on an open meadow. It had been enough for Sharina to get a sense of her surroundings.
The cavity was twenty feet in diameter and unfurnished except for the sleeping bench Unarc had hacked into the spongy wood of one side. Since there was ventilation, Sharina had been surprised not to see a flat rock for a cooking fire.
A moment's reflection reminded her that this was a refuge, not a home. The hunter wouldn't have risked giving away his location by even a hidden fire.
Besides, the wooden interior with its narrow crack for ingress and egress made Sharina's stomach tighten as she thought of being trapped by a blaze; though she didn't imagine the real danger was as great as that of a wattle-and-daub hut in Barca's Hamlet. There'd been disastrous fires during several winters within Sharina's memory. Families had died before they could escape.
"Sharina?" said the false Nonnus. He'd raised his voice and was probably standing near the entrance. "I've come to rescue you, child. You can come out now."
"She's not coming," another man muttered. Sharina thought she recognized the voice as one of the dispatch vessel's crew, but she couldn't put a name or face to the speaker. "If she's even there."
In all likelihood, the false Nonnus and his fellows didn't realize how well the girl within could hear them, but that was no help to her. There was only one way out of the baobab: into the arms of her pursuers. The upper opening was probably too small for even a supple human to squirm through, and it was completely inaccessible besides. Sharina guessed she could climb ten or a dozen feet using main strength and splits in the wood, but the cavity's inward slope would prevent even a monkey from reaching the peak hundreds of feet above.
"Come out, child," the false Nonnus said in a cozening voice that made Sharina's skin crawl. "The wild man who captured you won't return till tomorrow night, if then."
Sharina squeezed her hands against the hilt of the Pewle knife. "Lady, cast your cloak about me," she whispered. "Lady—"
She realized that she was calling on the Lady of Peace while she gripped a weapon. She snatched her hands away, then froze.
With a tiny smile, Sharina drew the big knife and held it ready. She'd pray later, if she was able to.
"She's not coming out!" the second voice repeated. "I say we go in and get her if she's there."
"I say, Crattus," said the false Nonnus in a tone of menace the hermit had never ever used, "that'll you'll obey me or regret that you did not."
The voice became bantering as the impostor continued, "But if you want to enter, go ahead. It'll be pitch dark unless you hold a torch in one hand, and the girl had a knife the last time I saw her."
"What do you want to do, then?" a third man asked. He sounded tired and vaguely angry. Sharina wondered how many men altogether were in the band.
"We'll camp here and wait for daylight," the false Nonnus said easily. "At dawn, I'll be able to illuminate the interior through my art. You shouldn't have much difficulty subduing our runaway safely."
"That's easy to say for somebody who won't be in there facing the knife," a man rumbled.
"Yes, Osan," the impostor hissed, false again to the mind of the man whose face he wore. "And easy for you to accomplish, or you shouldn't have taken the queen's gold. Do you want to explain to her that you were less afraid of her wrath than you were of a peasant girl?"
"I'll do my job," Osan said. "I always have, haven't I?"
"We'll camp here," the false Nonnus said briskly. "Crattus, make sure two men guard the opening at all times. In the morning we'll take care of the matter and get off this foul island."
A hand rasped the outer lip of the opening. "We can block this hole with a couple spears rammed into the sides," Crattus said. "Even if she's got the strength to pull them out, they'll squeal loud enough to wake the dead."
"Yes, a good idea," the false Nonnus agreed. "Do that as well."
A spear thunked into the wood. Echoes shivered about Sharina. Moments later a second spear struck and a human grunted loudly.
"That'll hold her!" said a voice Sharina hadn't heard before.
"What about the big guy she was with?" the third man asked.
"I told you, we'll be long gone before he returns," the impostor said. "I'm a wizard, remember?"
"I'm not bloody likely to forget that," Osan muttered. Sharina suspected he was facing the opening into the tree and that she heard more than his companions did. "I'm not bloody likely to work for another wizard, neither!"
"Osan, you and Denalt watch until moonrise," Crattus ordered. "Bies and Seno, you take over till the moon's a quarter up, and then Bayen and I take the last watch."
"Say, what if I can't see the moon?" Osan demanded. "It's as dark as a yard up a pig's backside here!"
"Then watch till dawn!" Crattus said. "The rest of you, get as much sleep as you can."
The men bedded down with only a scatter of further mutterings. They were obviously professionals, though this jungle seemed as foreign to them as it was to Sharina. The false Nonnus said nothing; perhaps he'd gone off to work his wizardry alone.
Sharina didn't know what to do. The tree soughed with the breath of the forest, moist and faintly tinged with decay. She walked across the cavity in darkness and lay down in the alcove.
She considered the possibility that Hanno would return during the night, then rejected it. If the false Nonnus was wizard enough to track Sharina down in this jungle, he was also wizard enough to determine the hunter's whereabouts.
She was physically and emotionally exhausted, as much from the preceding weeks as from the events of the day just ending. Morning would come. Her only choices then would be capture or suicide.
The Lady turned her face from those who took their own lives. And yet...
Sharina began to doze. The blade of the Pewle knife was beneath her cheek like a steel pillow. In a dream she saw herself stand and walk through the door that opened for her into a woodland like that of home.
A hut stood by a stream whose bed had been scooped deeper to create a basin for filling pots and washing. The man who'd been planting in the garden knocked dirt from the tip of his dibble and walked toward her.
"Nonnus?" Sharina said.
"Such of me as there is since I died, child," the stocky, smiling man said. "Sit down, please. It's all the hospitality I can offer you here. That and my company."
Sharina squatted on her haunches as she'd done hundreds of times beside the hermit's hut. Nonnus sat across from her.
"I watch you always, child," he said. "I hope you know that even when you can't see me."
On the ground beside them, colored pebbles from the creek picked out the Lady's image. In the woods near Barca's Hamlet Nonnus had carved the Lady on the trunk of a great tree. Though he wore his familiar black goat-hair tunic, the Pewle knife Nonnus had taken off only while praying was nowhere to be seen.
Sharina looked at the knife she held, then met the hermit's eyes again. He smiled again. "I don't have any need for it here," he said. "Besides, it's in good hands."
Sharina slid the blade back into its sealskin sheath. "There's a man outside who...," she said. She swallowed. "Who claims to be you. He's a wizard."
Nonnus nodded. "He's Nimet or-Konya," he said. "And for perhaps the first time in my life I'm thankful for a wizard's work, child. I doubt we'd have been able to visit if it weren't for the magic Nimet and his mistress used to borrow my semblance. They made the barrier thinner than I suspect they knew."
He chuckled with grim humor. "Wizards aren't the only ones to neglect the side effects of their actions, of course," he added. "If I'd understood that when I was younger, I might have less to beg forgiveness for now."
Sharina leaned forward and caught the hermit's powerful, sinewy hands. She was crying. "Nonnus," she said, "can I stay here with you? Please!"
He held her with the delicacy of a mother with her infant. "This isn't your place, Sharina," he said softly. "When the time comes, and I pray to the Lady that it will be a long time, you'll have another home."
"Nonnus, what shall I do?" she cried. She squeezed his hands, knowing she could no more hurt this man than she could a hickory tree. "I'll fight them, but I don't think I can..."
"Kill six soldiers and Nimet himself as well?" Nonnus said. He detached one hand and put it on top of the other, sandwiching Sharina between. "No, I don't suppose you could. Which I think may be why you're here."
Sharina mopped her face on her tunic sleeve. She met the hermit's eyes and smiled. Trying to control her tremble of relief, she said, "Will you come back and help me, Nonnus? Can you?"
"I don't have flesh, child," Nonnus said. "But you do. If you permit me, I can use your flesh in ways you yourself could not."
He gave her a smile as hard as the crags that broke the seas off Pewle Island. He said, "I've repented of many of the things I did when I was young. But I haven't forgotten how to do them."
They stood, still holding hands and laughing at the pleasure of each other's company. "I knew you'd help me, Nonnus," Sharina said. She didn't know why she'd ever felt alone.
The hermit sobered and withdrew his hands. "This isn't a small thing for you to do, child," he said. "This is a violation like no other you'll ever feel. You might be better off to go with Nimet to his mistress, the queen."
"Nonnus," she said. "I need your help. Do whatever your conscience permits you to do. I'll do the same. And may the Lady shelter us."
Nonnus smiled; this time the expression was as gentle as a snowflake's touch. "For the last eighteen years of my life, Sharina," he said, "the only thing besides mercy that I wanted was to be able to help you. I think the Lady has just granted me both."
He touched the girl's cheek with the fingers of his right hand. "Go and sleep, child," he said. "And we'll see what happens when the dawn comes."
The Scaled Men's chanting rose to a grunted crescendo; Ilna felt a ripple shiver through not the ship alone but also the world it rode in. Cozro shouted and the flyer which gnawed the grating inches from Ilna's face turned with an angry snarl to look over its shoulder.
The Bird of the Waves fell out of the twilit world and splashed jarringly as it landed. The hatch cover broke loose from the quick-and-dirty lashings the crew had applied after they flung Ilna into the hold. Sunlight lanced through the grate and around the frame lying askew on the coaming.
The winged creatures twisted upward like seared leaves. Their flesh turned black and sloughed away. The cartilage that articulated their bones shrank, knotting the skeletons into tight masses like the indigestible casts vomited beneath an owl's perch.
Ilna put her hands and right shoulder to the grating to shove sideways. Cozro simply flung it up, though without Ilna's direction the heavy cover might have toppled back again: the captain hadn't allowed for the weakness of muscles bound for days.
Ilna stepped out of the hold with the noose loosely coiled in her hands. The brazier, still dribbling the last of its varicolored smoke, sat in front of the deckhouse. The Scaled Men had set their fire and left it before they retreated to the poorly ventilated deckhouse. The flyers, beasts for all the humanity of their features, hadn't known or cared to quench the brazier as they swarmed over the craft.
The creatures in desiccated profusion hung from the rigging and littered the deck. Like mayflies, Ilna thought again, smiling grimly. The corpse of the sailor she'd seen devoured lay beside the hatch where it slid when Cozro raised the grating. It had been chewed to red bones. The skull was very broad and flat, and the remainder of the skeleton differed more from that of a normal man than the Scaled Man had when alive.
The door to the deckhouse rattled as the crossbar was withdrawn inside. Cozro freed a cutlass that a desperate blow had driven into the mast.
The sky was a pale, cloudless blue. The sun was near the western horizon, but it still hammered the sea and the ship rocking on it.
The sail hung limp, its deep belly empty of the wizard-wind that had filled the linen across the sea of that other world. An island, small but heavily overgrown, broke the surface half a mile to starboard. A flock of seabirds startled by the vessel's splashing entrance rose into the air above.
The Scaled Men had to force the door open against the flyers piled before it. The shrunken corpses stuck to the decking as though melted into the wood. Cozro snatched up the brazier in his left hand.
Ilna had been ready to noose the first of the sailors while the captain dealt with the next. "Take the one on the right!" she said. She was furious that she'd so nearly committed herself by assuming that other people thought the same way she did in a crisis.
The first two Scaled Men out of the deckhouse had cutlasses. They were bleeding from deep bites but both looked well able to fight. Behind them came a third sailor with the spear; last was a heavily bandaged fellow struggling to cock his crossbow.
"None of this scum could swim when they were men!" Cozro shouted. "We'll hope they haven't learned since they changed. The dinghy's still astern. Swim to it and we'll paddle to that island with our hands."
The four Scaled Men arrayed themselves in front of the deckhouse. They were apparently waiting for the crossbowman to cock his weapon so that they could either shoot their escaped prisoners or threaten them into surrender.
"I can't swim either!" Ilna said. If the two of them rushed now, they might overcome the sailors; but it had to be both of them together. The Scaled Men were wounded to a greater or lesser degree, but she and Cozro were weak from days of hunger and tight bondage.
"Then I'm sorry for you!" the captain said. He turned and scattered the brazier's burning contents into the sail. The parched linen flared like tinder.
Cozro dived over the side. The Scaled Men shouted in guttural fear. Ilna was between the sailors and the roaring heat of the sail. The mast, cracked by long exposure to salt and sun, was beginning to burn also.
The sailor with the spear stepped forward. Ilna's noose settled about his neck and pulled tight. She'd acted on reflex rather than according to a plan. The only options that swine Cozro had left her were drowning or burning alive; she supposed she preferred to drown, but she wasn't quite ready to make that decision.
She kicked the spear free of the Scaled Man choking on the deck at her feet. Another sailor came for her with his cutlass raised; she whipped the free end of her rope across his bulging eyes. He jumped back with a blat of despair.
The air beyond the ship's port rail congealed into a disk of blue radiance, intensely cold.
Ilna looked at the disk over her shoulder. She kicked again, this time at the Scaled Man's crotch. She could see figures moving within the disk of light.
Without hesitation, Ilna stepped onto the railing and hurled herself into the blue glare. The disk might mean death, but staying with the Bird of the Waves was certain death.
Ilna regretted leaving her noose behind; but she'd had many regrets in her lifetime and she'd learned to live with them.
Cashel could see his bones through the crackling blue radiance that suffused the night. He continued to concentrate on the boulder. It was moving, and any other considerations could wait till Cashel had finished the job at hand.
Zahag and the princess were shouting but their voices only buzzed like distant wasps over the roar of Cashel's pulse. He had the boulder over his head. He shouldn't have been able to lift it.
He rotated his body carefully. A load that was safe while it was poised could tear your back and knees apart if you shifted the wrong way. It was all a matter of balancing forces....
When Cashel had turned just enough that the boulder wouldn't fall back on him and his companions, he rolled it off his spread fingers. It bounced away as he staggered forward.
Cashel's legs were too weak to support him; when he put a hand to the ground to steady himself, his elbow started to buckle. Aria grabbed his arm, but he didn't know if she was trying to hold him up or merely clinging out of fear.
The mountainside below them shook as though wracked by an earthquake. Blue fire crackled, splitting the rocky soil as far down the slope as Cashel could see. A skeleton bathed in sizzling light humped up from the long trench like a horse rising to its feet. It had the body of a lizard, but it stood on two legs the size of the largest oaks in the borough.
The creature turned with a dancer's grace, each joint sparkling with azure lightning. The tail of stiffly articulated bones swung, balancing the weight of the monster skull. It roared, shaking the heavens; then the jaws snapped shut on the nearest of the trolls who had pursued Cashel and his companions.
"Is it yours, chief?" Zahag cried. The ape was hopping up and down as the ground shook. "Did you call it up?"
"I didn't...," Cashel said. "I don't know... ."
"Please!" Aria said. "Please, can't we go now?"
The creature stepped across the trench from which it had risen. Its tail was a whip of savage light. Clawed forelimbs snatched a troll, splintering his club and casting the mangled whole into a mouth easily able to hold him.
"My staff," Cashel mumbled. He tried to stand. He wondered if he was dreaming that he was helpless while fantastic things went on around him.
The creature of stone and light followed the fleeing trolls, snapping with the precision of a serpent hunting mice. The saw-toothed plates along its spine waved from side to side.
"I have the staff!" Aria said. She did, too, though she'd just now picked it up. "Please! Please!"
His companions couldn't lift him, but they weren't willing to leave him behind. That was all right. He could walk. He could!
Cashel turned on all fours and began to crawl toward the cave mouth. The creature that had risen from the rocks shook the earth every time its foot came down. Like Cashel himself, it controlled its weight with a graceful delicacy that belied the strength involved.
Trolls bawled in helpless terror as the creature hunted them down the slope. Its strides were thunder against which the trolls' deep voices sounded like the cheeping of tree frogs.
The monster didn't seem to be hostile to Cashel and his companions. There wasn't much he could have done about it if it were.
Cashel chuckled at the thought of waving his quarterstaff at a creature hundreds of feet long. The laughter washed some of the fatigue from his muscles. He tried again and this time he did stand up. Zahag ran ahead but paused at the blazing entrance to the cave.
"Oh thank you Mistress God!" the princess babbled, stumbling along at Cashel's side. "Oh thank you!"
Cashel lurched into the cave. His companions were behind him; he could feel their presence though he didn't turn his head to make sure. His skin sizzled and crawled with immense power. He went on, feeling as though the skin and not the flesh it covered moved his limbs and drove him unstoppably forward.
He could see forms ahead through a cascade of blue fire. King Folquin sat in his court, flanked by courtiers as he listened to a petition.
Cashel stepped toward them, but the cave branched suddenly. To the right Ilna stood on the deck of a ship, fighting with monsters like the corpse Cashel had poured out of a barrel on Erdin's waterfront.
"Ilna!" he cried. He couldn't hear his own voice over the cave's own pulsing thunder. "Ilna, I'm coming!"
Ilna turned away from him. She jumped toward a pair of men Cashel saw vaguely in the air beyond her, a cripple he didn't recognize and the gangling youth who'd been Folquin's court wizard. "Il—"
Ilna vanished. The ship disintegrated in a flash of azure lightning that rent fiber from fiber and plucked apart the scaly men like flies in a boy's hands.
The cave walls opened. Cashel and his two yammering companions fell into a sunlit sea whose foaming surface tossed with body parts and splintered wood.