The banners of the two heralds riding at the head of the procession bore the black eagle of Ornifal, but against a blue ground instead of the red of the present royal line. The soldiers, a mixture of armed retainers provided by all five conspirators, wore tabards with the same device.
"King Carus!" the crowds cheered as they saw Garric. "Long live Carus!"
At the back of Garric's mind, a normally cheerful presence glowered at the flags. Garric turned to Liane, being carried in a sedan chair which put her head almost level with him on horseback, and said, "We ought to use the Gold Ring of the Old Kingdom. It symbolized both the diadem of kingship and the whole circuit of the Isles, not just one island."
Liane looked at him. "Did it?" she said. "I didn't know that. Where did you learn it?"
Garric coughed. "I think it's in Aldebrand's Dinner Party," he muttered.
It probably was somewhere in Aldebrand's massive collection of bits and pieces of information from the literature of the Old Kingdom—which had fallen four hundred years before Aldebrand compiled it in the form of conversation at a dinner party of savants of the former age. Because Aldebrand had the run of the vast temple library at Wist on Cordin, long-since burned and dispersed, he provided information which had survived nowhere else. Unfortunately Aldebrand was also a superstitious fool and a careless copyist, so his information was as likely as not to be wrong.
In truth, Garric had learned about the Gold Ring while watching a priestess of the Lady instruct Carus in the spiritual underpinnings of kingship a decade before Carus donned the diadem. Had anybody tried to teach Valence about kingship? If all being King of the Isles meant was privileges and politics, alliances and bribes ... who could expect anything better than the upheaval and injustice of the present day?
"But you know better," a voice whispered through the ages.
The crowd had been cheering all the way from the queen's mansion in the center of the city. Many of the people who'd seen the procession passing had fallen in behind it; as many more were already gathered here at Garric's destination. Their shouts and the morning sunlight were dazzling.
One of the heralds rode to the gate of the royal compound and rapped the butt of his flagstaff on the iron-bound oak. "Open for Prince Garric!" he called in a voice like a silver trumpet.
The complex was on what had been the northern edge of Valles five centuries before. The city had overgrown the district, but the buff stone walls enclosed several acres of gardens and widely spaced buildings.
Royhas ordered his eight-bearer palanquin up on Garric's right side. Tenoctris, in a sedan chair behind Liane's, caught Garric's eye when he glanced around but continued whispering an incantation. On her lap was a lime-wood board chalked with symbols in a triangle. The line of spear-carrying footmen on either side were to keep enthusiastic spectators from seriously impeding the progress of Garric and his companions.
Garric looked down onto his chancellor, reclining on the palanquin's cushions. "I wish Pitre had come," he said. "Since he was so close to Valence."
Normally the gates of the royal compound would have been open with a squad of Blood Eagles on display in the archway. Today and for the past week, the compound was guarded like a fortress.
"Don't wish that," Royhas said. "The best he'd do is dither. It's just as likely he'd break down and cry here in front of the mob."
Royhas couldn't ride a horse in the normal way because of his long robes of state. The choices had been a palanquin or a sidesaddle; sedan chairs were for women or images of the Gods at religious festivals, and arriving at the palace in a carriage would break both the law and—more important—tradition.
Garric looked at Liane and they exchanged smiles. He'd like to have squeezed her hand, but he didn't suppose that was fitting. He didn't suppose it was what he ought to be thinking about, either.
The viewport on the right gate-leaf opened. The man inside said something to the herald in a voice Garric couldn't hear over the crowd noise. The herald replied.
Garric wondered what the purpose of Tenoctris' incantation was. She was using a swan quill rather than the bronze stylus to strike the symbols as she mumbled them out. An object gathered power with each use and thereby became harder to control with the precision that safety demanded. Tenoctris couldn't do as much as many wizards, but she never did anything beyond what she intended. No power was truly uncontrolled; what the user didn't control was left to the cosmos to decide, and the cosmos was no friend to humankind.
The herald turned his bay mare and rode back between Garric and Tenoctris. "Your Majesty?" the man said. He came from Waldron's household. "They say you can enter, but it has to be alone."
"I'll talk to them," Garric said curtly. He dismounted—he needed Carus' reflexes for better things than keeping his seat on a horse—and strode to the gate, brushing past the herald before the man could back his horse out of the way.
Royhas started to protest, then ordered his bearers to put down the palanquin so that he could join Garric. Out of the corner of his eye, Garric saw Liane's chair also lower; Tenoctris continued to concentrate on the words of her incantation.
They four were the only principals present. Waldron was organizing the first units of household troops arriving from the north of the island, and Tadai said he neither needed nor wanted to meet Valence under these conditions. Tadai's refusal gave Sourous an excuse and Pitre the opportunity to stay away as well.
Because Royhas knew the king's advisors, he could provide Garric with a viewpoint from within the ruling elite. At base, though, success or failure would be up to Garric himself.
He grinned. It was always nice to know where the blame lay if things went wrong.
The eye of a man wearing a nose-guard helmet watched from the other side of the thick panel. Garric was dressed in red breeches, high boots, and a short blue tunic cinched by his sword belt. That was flamboyant garb which had more to do with Carus' taste than it did with that of Garric's upbringing, but it didn't threaten violence.
"I'm Master Garric from Haft," Garric said, trying to be more diplomatic in addressing the king's men than the herald had been. "My advisors and I have a meeting with the king and his chancellor."
"Chancellor Papnotis has gone back to his estates," said the guard. "You can come in, but only alone."
"I'll come with Lord Royhas, whom you know," Garric said. His voice took on a grating edge, like ashlars slipping over one another. "Also two women. And I'll enter now, as agreed. I keep my oaths, and I assure you I have a short way with oath-breakers!"
Threats of violence wouldn't work against the Blood Eagles. Men who'd remained with Valence this long weren't going to blanch because a boy threatened them with death or torture. But calling them oathbreakers, that was another matter, even though the arrangement had been with the chancellor who'd already fled.
Garric couldn't see what Royhas was doing. "Open!" the soldiers accompanying Garric shouted. "Open! Open!" The crowd bellowed with wordless anger.
Garric turned and raised his hands for calm. Tenoctris, still chanting, stood above all those around her.
Only those in the front of the crowd could see Garric; they continued to shout anyway. That was fine. The whole gesture was playacting to convince the guards that Garric was a force for moderation.
Facing the viewport again, Garric said, shouting to be heard, "Your duty is to keep King Valence safe from attack. Your few swords can't accomplish that. Letting me and my advisors in to speak with His Majesty is the only way to save him."
The man at the viewport turned to talk to someone who'd arrived behind him. The wicket in the other panel opened abruptly. It was only large enough for one person to enter at a time, which also was fine. The last thing Garric wanted was for the main gates to swing back. They'd draw an uncontrollable mob into the palace grounds like a bass sucking in prey by opening its jaws.
Garric stepped through, ducking to clear the iron-strapped transom. He was ready to hold the wicket by main force if the guards tried to close it before Tenoctris, Liane, and Royhas could follow.
"Let them by!" ordered an officer in gilded armor.
The officer looked Garric over. "I'm Attaper bor-Atilan," he said. For all the richness of his accouterments, the ivory hilt of Attaper's sword showed the wear of real use. "Legate of the Blood Eagles."
He nodded to Royhas, entering last behind Tenoctris, then gave Garric a grin of disgust. "My men and I appear to be the entire palace staff, as well. Everybody else ran when Papnotis scuttled away last night. The wizard Silyon comes and goes, so it's probably wishful thinking to believe he's gone for good now."
A troop of forty Blood Eagles was drawn up at the gate. There were three hundred in the regiment at full strength, not enough to guard the compound's long perimeter if it came under real attack. Garric could see squads stationed at intervals among the plantings and walkways. They wore half-armor that was no less functional for being buffed to a high polish.
"I mean our king no harm, Lord Attaper," Garric said, speaking words that were only partly his. "And as for you and your men—no kingdom has so many honorable citizens that I would permit those under my control to harm such."
He grinned, a wolfish expression, veteran to veteran, that took the legate aback to see on Garric's youthful face. "Not that I believed you were afraid. The Blood Eagles stood at the Stone Wall."
Attaper's left index finger absently traced a scar that ran from the jaw hinge down the side of his neck. "That was a long time ago," he said. "A lot of things have happened since then."
Harshly, though the anger didn't seem directed at Garric, the legate continued, "Come along, then. I'll take you to His Majesty."
"Shall I...?" Garric said, putting his hands to the buckles of his sword belt. Royhas in court robes wasn't wearing a sword. For anyone but his guards to enter the king's presence armed was an insult even when it wasn't a threat. Either was punishable by death.
Attaper looked at Garric. In a voice that quavered with a disdain shared between equals he replied, "I choose to believe that you're a man of honor, Master Garric. In the event that you're not, you'd scarcely need a weapon to dispatch His Majesty in his present condition."
Garric looked over his shoulder and asked, "Are you all right, Tenoctris?" He knew what wizardry could take out of the old woman, and he had no idea how difficult was the incantation she'd performed on the way to the meeting.
She smiled and said, "Quite all right, thank you." Her voice was pert enough. She turned to twist off a forsythia twig to replace the quill she must have abandoned when she got down from the sedan chair. Liane took the older woman's arm in a comradely gesture.
Attaper led Garric and his three companions down a walk paved with slabs of soft, yellow limestone, worn by centuries of use. The remainder of the guard detachment stayed at the main gate. Grape vines that had leafed out but hadn't yet set fruit covered the trellis overhead.
Liane missed a step, then skipped over the slab before her. Garric looked back. Frozen in the limestone was the coiled shell of an ammonite. It was small, no larger than a clenched fist, and its dozens of waving arms had rotted away long ages since. This ammonite hadn't been one of the house-huge monsters Garric had seen often in nightmares and once in a storm-tossed sea.
But he noticed that Tenoctris, walking alongside Liane, avoided the fossilized creature also.
Attaper turned into a one-story bungalow with a fanciful roofline and outer walls decorated with blue-figured Serian tilework. It looked new compared with most of the buildings nestled among the gardens. Although the taste that designed the structure was more delicate than Garric's own, he found attraction in the fact that it was designed to an individual's taste rather than as some sort of monument to posterity.
Two Blood Eagles stood at the front door; another peered around the back corner when he heard people approaching, then withdrew when he saw his legate leading the newcomers. The guards stiffened to parade rest, but they'd been attentive even before their commander appeared.
"Any change, Melus?" Attaper asked.
"Nothing to report, sir," one of the guards said. He and his partner exchanged quick glances. "Ah...," Melus added. "The situation at the gate is...?"
"Is under control," Attaper said. He grinned crookedly at Garric. "For the moment."
The guards stepped aside so Attaper could open the door of tiger-striped wood. "Your Majesty," he said, "I've brought some citizens to see you."
"What?" said a querulous voice from the interior. "What are you talking about? And where's Papnotis?"
Attaper gestured Garric and his companions inside, then closed the door behind them. His face was perfectly expressionless.
Valence III, King of the Isles, was younger than Garric's father. He looked ancient: thin and gray-faced, with wine stains on his goatee and the cerulean silk tunic he wore.
"Who are you?" he demanded. His eyes glanced over Royhas with a flicker of recognition, but they focused on Garric's sword. "Who sent you?"
He looked at the nobleman and continued on a rising note, "Royhas, who sent you?"
"The people of the Isles sent us, Your Majesty," Garric said. "We're here to save the kingdom, for you and for all citizens."
Valence turned away with a cracked laugh. This large room was fitted as a council chamber with tables, couches, and a bare wall against which aides could stand while ministers discussed matters of state. Two doors led off it: one of burl walnut standing ajar, through which Garric glimpsed a bed; and a discreetly curtained portal which probably led to servants' quarters and a kitchen, unless that was in a separate building.
The king appeared to have been sleeping on one of the couches here. Fruit stood untouched on a sideboard, but empty wine flasks lay on the floor. One of them, ticked by the opening door, was still rolling.
The king opened the lower cabinet of the sideboard and peered inside. "Oh, Lady help me," he moaned. Straightening, he shouted to the world at large, "Bring me wine! How dare you leave me without wine?"
Tenoctris walked to the king's side and brushed his forehead with the twig she'd plucked. "Sit with me, Your Majesty," she said in a gentle voice. "You'll feel better."
Valence let Tenoctris lead him to a couch covered in the hide of an antelope with soft taupe fur, but he began to cry. Tenoctris held the twig against his forehead and whispered words Garric couldn't hear. A faint rose glow formed over the king's head like fuzz on a peach.
"I'm going to die," Valence said. "I was supposed to feed the Beast three days ago, but the servants ran away because of the riots. The queen will come for me or the Beast will come for me—it doesn't matter which. I'm going to die!"
"We've driven the queen from Ornifal," Garric said. "Tell us about the Beast."
"It has all power, Silyon told me," Valence said. His eyes were open but he spoke like a sleepwalker. "It would save me from the queen, he said, and nothing else could. But if it was so powerful, why do I have to feed it? Why couldn't it find girls for itself? It isn't fair!"
Garric saw Liane's face go very still. He hoped he kept his own expressionless, because the disgust he felt wasn't the proper emotion to display to the man whose assent was necessary to Garric and the kingdom.
"Where is he?" Garric said aloud. "The man you call the Beast?"
"Man?" Valence repeated, then cackled another burst of mad laughter. "It, not he. And I don't know where it is, but we speak to it through a well in the ruins of the Tyrants' Palace. There's nothing there if you look down, but Silyon shows me the Beast in his mirror. And the girls, it finds the girls we lower down to it."
Valence tried to rise to his feet. Tenoctris' touch, gentle as a kitten's, thrust him back onto the couch. "Oh, dear Lady help me," he said. "Please give me wine. Please."
"Tenoctris?" Garric said. "Is there anything else we need to know about the Beast?"
The old wizard continued to whisper her incantation. She shook her head minusculely in negation.
"Your Majesty," Garric said, "for your own sake and for the kingdom, you must go out to the gate with us and tell the citizens that I am your son and successor. Then we can keep you safe from the queen and from other enemies. Even the Beast."
"Nothing can save me!" Valence shouted. "Are you a fool? You don't understand: the Beast has all power! I thought it would save me, but now I know it never meant to do that. But if only I could feed it, perhaps it would eat me last. Do you see? It would eat me last!"
"I see, Your Majesty," Garric said. He held his hands open in front of him, but in all truth he had no wish to grip his sword. He felt toward Valence as he would feel toward a roach scuttling across the floor of his mother's pantry.
"Come, Your Majesty," Royhas said, offering Valence his hand. "Prince Garric will save you. You'll tell the people that you've adopted him as your son and heir, and then we'll take care of all the rest."
"What?" the king said in a return of his original peevish tone. "Who is he, anyway? And why is he wearing a sword! I'm King of the Isles!"
"Indeed you are, Your Majesty," Garric said, taking Valence's other hand. Gentle pressure from the two men brought the king to his feet like a child learning to walk between its parents. "My sword is here to defend you against all enemies. Tell the people to obey me in your place, and we'll do the rest."
"There's riots," Valence said as they walked him slowly forward. "They'll kill me! They know I couldn't protect them from the queen!"
Liane silently opened the door. Tenoctris followed behind the three men, still chanting softly but no longer stroking the king's forehead. The glow had faded to what might have been a flush on Valence's skin.
"We've dealt with the queen in your name, Your Majesty," Garric said. "We'll keep you safe."
He found he couldn't hate so abject a coward. Males are formed to react to challenges—and a broken reed like Valence was no challenge to anyone, however much evil the king might have done in his weakness.
Attaper led them. At his signal the four guards followed, their eyes scanning for threats in the plantings to either side.
"Loyalty can't be bought or even earned, lad," a voice whispered in Garric's mind. "It has to be given. And it really doesn't matter that Valence is unworthy of it. As the Gods know he is!"
They reached the gate and the larger detachment of Blood Eagles. The crowd rumbled through the masonry and thick wood, like a nearing storm.
"Let me out the wicket," Garric said to Attaper. "I'll order them to stand back. Then open both leaves wide and bring His Majesty through to make the announcement."
"Make it so," Attaper said to the soldier with his hand on the wicket's separate crossbar. Garric noticed that the legate hadn't so much as glanced at Valence for confirmation.
Garric stepped into the street. The noise was deafening. The guards from the conspirators' households stood two deep. Their spears were crossed before them to bar the press of people.
Garric hopped onto Tenoctris' sedan chair and said to the bearers, "Lift me up so that I can be seen!"
When Garric rose into general sight, barely wobbling, he raised both arms. The crowd roar redoubled, then fell away slightly. He'd never seen so many people in one place before—except in the memories he had from King Carus, similar gatherings and similar occasions.
"Citizens of the Isles!" Garric shouted. Some of the people could hear him. They would tell others, and anyway the most important thing was to be seen. "Your king has an announcement to make!"
The main gates opened. Garric motioned the other sedan chair to the side of his, then risked a look backward.
The Blood Eagles were drawn up five ranks deep and eight files wide, filling the archway with their armored bodies. Between the fourth and fifth file tottered Valence, wearing the circlet of gold Royhas had brought for him: they hadn't been sure they'd have time to find the ornate crown of the present dynasty. Tenoctris followed the king, leaning on Liane. She continued to chant the words that kept Valence from collapsing in blubbery incapacity.
Attaper helped Valence onto the chair, then gripped the king's thigh with a powerful hand to steady him as the bearers lifted him into full sight of the crowd.
"Citizens of the Isles!" Garric shouted. "His Majesty King Valence the Third has adopted me as his son. He has proclaimed me regent of the Kingdom of the Isles!"
Valence was gaping like a hooked perch. He trembled dangerously despite the legate's support. Liane stepped to the king's other side and added her help, but Valence was likely to buckle at the knees at any moment.
Garric lifted the diadem and put it on his own head. He'd tried the circlet on when Royhas brought it to the queen's mansion, to make sure it would fit without looking ridiculous. Then it had been no more than a band of metal, heavy despite being so thin, and vaguely uncomfortable. Now—
Golden light suffused Garric's mind. In it sparkled images—not from his memory or even that of Carus alone, but from scores of generations of kingship. All the rulers of the Old Kingdom were with Garric momentarily, united like the facets of a diamond.
His vision cleared. The crowd shouted like a god trumpeting. Through the joyous sound Garric heard Tenoctris' voice.
He turned. Liane looked around also. Neither of them could understand Tenoctris' words, but Garric from his higher vantage point could see over the heads of the Blood Eagles.
A scrawny man wearing a robe embroidered with symbols in the Old Script had come up the path from the bungalow where Valence had hidden himself away. He had bones in his earlobes. Through the open gateway he saw Garric crowned and Valence beside him.
Garric pointed. "Stop that man!" he cried. "Stop Silyon!"
But the wizard, doffing his heavy garments, had vanished into the shrubbery in his loincloth before the Blood Eagles could turn to see him.
Halphemos wore a garment of gold. It weighed less than gossamer, but because each strand scattered light like an invisibly thin mirror, the youth was as modestly clothed as if he'd been wearing his own robe of silk brocade.
Cerix wore nothing at all. The older wizard was too delighted with his regenerated body to cover any part of it. The hair on his legs from mid-thigh was fine and blond in contrast to the black curls on his arms and torso, but the bones and musculature were complete. In the middle of a comment, Cerix was likely to lose his train of thought as he watched his toes stretch.
Ilna wore the tunic she'd woven in Erdin, cinched with the twin of the sash she'd given to Liane. Watching the men prance in what they'd gotten from the Beautiful People—Cerix no less than Halphemos—offended her, though of course she didn't interfere in the way her companions chose to act. Besides, she knew in her heart that she was a fool to feel the way she did.
So be it. Ilna os-Kenset didn't want to change.
Ilna swallowed the slice she'd cut from a strawberry the size of her head, juicy and meltingly delicious. She looked at the two wizards and the three People of Beauty who'd greeted her when she awakened here, then said, "I intend to return to the world from which I was kidnapped by the Scaled Men. If there was a way into this garden, there's a way out of it. Which I will find."
"But mistress," Wim said in puzzlement. "Why do you want to leave? Is there anything you need that we haven't offered you?"
Halphemos looked distressed; he fidgeted with the cuff of his vaporous tunic rather than meet Ilna's eyes. Cerix glared at her angrily, knowing where the discussion was going to go and furious about what it would mean to him.
Ilna's nose wrinkled. Cerix could see the right of it as clearly as she did, but he was letting personal considerations prevent him from acting.
"My brother's gotten into trouble," she said to Wim. Glancing aside toward Halphemos she added, "Or been put into trouble by others. I'm going to try to help him, and for that I need to be back in my own world."
"The boy wasn't responsible for what happened to your brother!" Cerix said.
"It doesn't matter," said Ilna; and it really didn't. She didn't believe Halphemos had harmed Cashel or anyone else deliberately. "Can you help me, Master Wim, or must I find the path myself?"
A slim girl passed, playing a twin-necked theorbo to half a dozen youths who walked with her entranced. Ilna marveled at the girl's intricate fingerings—but though the lute strings vibrated, they made no sound.
"We can show you the path you seek," Bram said. "But mistress, there's no place on that plane as full of joy and contentment as the Garden."
Ilna almost laughed at the humor of it. "I daresay you're right," she said, "but I can't imagine what bearing you think that has on me."
She stood. She'd eaten her fill of the huge strawberry, but most of it still remained. The waste disturbed Ilna, as much as anything because it underscored the Garden's vast abundance, but there was nothing she could do. Perhaps the deer-footed unicorn walking slowly through the nearby orange grove would finish the fruit.
"Will you lead me, then?" Ilna said to Bram. The harshness of her voice and manner was out of place. The world didn't provide something for nothing. This place, this Garden, did. Therefore so far as Ilna was concerned, the Garden didn't and couldn't exist.
As a matter of faith, Ilna os-Kenset couldn't believe in a place so obviously good.
"I'll take her, Bram," Cory said to the troubled-looking youth.
"We'll all go," the bearded Wim decided, rising with the grace of a cat stretching. The People of Beauty reclined on the grass rather than sitting. The sward felt as soft and springy as a sack of wool beneath Ilna's bare feet. "We don't spend much time in that grove, Mistress Ilna."
"It's cruel to remind ourselves how wretched the existence of others is compared to our own," Bram said. He lowered his eyes from the horizon to look straight at Ilna again. "I really wish you'd reconsider."
He reached out to take Ilna's hands. He was as tall as Garric. Though slimmer, he had a supple strength as all the People of Beauty did. Bram's features were as perfect as those of the image that the Shepherd's priests brought to Barca's Hamlet for the Tithe Procession.
Ilna stepped back quickly. "Good day to you, then," she said to Halphemos and Cerix.
Halphemos stood. "I'm coming with you," he said. He looked at the ground as he spoke.
"Sister take you, boy!" Cerix said as he too jumped to his feet. "You're not responsible! You didn't harm her brother!"
"Please," said Cory. "We're all friends here and the trouble—"
Halphemos raised a hand to silence her. He faced the older wizard, his mentor, with a steadiness that wasn't a boy's expression. "Cerix," he said, "I spoke an incantation to hold Zahag and her brother. They vanished instead. Neither of us believe that was coincidence."
"But..." said Cerix. There was a tear in the corner of his left eye, and another running down his right cheek. "Alos—"
"And even if I didn't think I was responsible," Halphemos said, "I'd go with her. As she would go to help us, even though I don't think she likes us—"
He gave Ilna a wry grin.
"—very much."
Cerix shook his head in frustration and sadness. "Yes, of course we'll go," he said.
He glared at Wim. The People of Beauty had drawn back from the strangers, the way sensible folk do from a dogfight. "You said you were going to lead us," Cerix snapped. "Let's get it over with, then!"
Ilna looked at her companions, suddenly disgusted with herself. She'd maneuvered Halphemos and Cerix into a decision she and they knew they were fools to make. Because they were men of honor, despite the flaws they had because they were human, it had been easy.
"For what it's worth," she said, "I like both of you better than I like myself. Though that isn't much of a recommendation."
"Of course we don't want to prevent you from making your own decisions," Wim said uncomfortably. "I ... But of course, we'll take you to the grove."
He gave a hand each to Bram and Cory. Without looking back to see if the strangers were following, the three People of Beauty set off toward a nearby hill. Its perfectly rounded aspect looked as artificial as the bridge which crossed the stream at its foot.
Though not particularly tall, the trees on the hill's crown were thick-trunked. That made them unique in this place, where everything else Ilna had seen, plants and animals including humans, was willowy and graceful.
"There aren't any birds in the trees," Halphemos said. "They don't fly overhead either."
"It's the first place I've seen here that looks natural," Ilna said. Cory glanced over her shoulder, just enough to see Ilna out of the corner of her eye. She didn't speak.
"What do you think, Cerix?" Ilna said deliberately.
"I don't think," Cerix said. The slope was gentle; they'd almost reached the grove. The trees were oaks of many varieties. Some of them already carried budding acorns. "If I thought, I wouldn't be doing this."
The People of Beauty stopped beside a pin oak and murmured among themselves. The younger pair stepped back. Wim turned to Ilna and said, "I'll take you the rest of the way, mistress and masters. There's no danger, and I don't suppose you'll even find it particularly unpleasant."
Ilna gave him a curt nod. Bram looked at her imploringly as she passed, but she didn't turn her head. She could hear the feet of her companions rustling the dry leaves as they followed her.
Vertical cavities as high as a man split the trunks of each tree. Though light dappled the bark and the forest floor, the openings were swirls of dark mist.
"There's something inside here!" Halphemos said in excitement. Ilna glanced back. The young wizard tugged Cerix's arm to show him the landscape of gleaming metal shapes that formed if you focused on the mist in the cavity of a burr oak. Wim paused, his expression resigned.
Cerix refused to turn his head. He and Ilna exchanged glances. She resumed walking, stepping over a surface root writhing through the litter. Wim nodded gravely and went on.
Ilna had seen that image and all the rest, one at the heart of each tree they passed. For the most part the worlds inside didn't affect her: they were as inhuman as the interior of a flint nodule just cracked by a mason's hammer.
Some of the images were unspeakably foul. Ilna didn't let her expression change, but now she understood their hosts' reluctance to enter the grove.
"How much farther?" she asked.
"Not far," said Wim. He looked over his shoulder. "You're sure...?" he said.
"Yes," Ilna replied, but her tone was softer than it had been when she was first driving the People of Beauty to guide her. Perhaps they couldn't see any real difference between the world where Ilna had been born, and a world in which a monster with two legs and a spiked tail looked up from the human infant it was devouring in the ruins of a mansion.
Ilna smiled without humor. She knew there were places in her world where that scene, or scenes very like it, was just as real as the mud streets of Barca's Hamlet. Perhaps the People of Beauty were correct.
It didn't matter, of course. Ilna's duty wasn't in the Garden; and she would do her duty.
"This one," Wim said, gesturing to the bole of a white oak not very different from one that grew on the western outskirts of Barca's Hamlet, a tree that lightning had struck long before Ilna was born. The thunderbolt had torn off a branch and ripped a serpentine path down the bark to the ground. Here, instead of weathered sapwood, haze curled in the tear.
"If you don't mind," the bearded man said, "I'll take my leave of you now. But I'd rather that you come back with me."
Ilna nodded curtly, intent on the pattern in the mist, glimpses of a street in an unfamiliar city. She could see steeply pitched shingle roofs and downspout decorations in the shape of fanciful animals.
"Thank you," Halphemos said earnestly. He gripped Wim's hand and wrung it. "For your hospitality, and especially for what you did for my friend Cerix."
Wim hurried off, striding as though to escape an unpleasantness. The wizards watched him go and faced Ilna only when he was out of sight.
"You don't have to come," Ilna said. "I suppose you shouldn't come."
Without a word, Halphemos stepped past her and vanished into the mist. "Sister take—" Cerix said in surprise and anger.
Ilna stepped into the heart of the tree. There was no sensation except the touch of a cool breeze blowing down the street between wooden buildings. She stumbled.
The street was dirt, though there was a stone-lined open sewer in the middle. A dust devil curled around the corner, then dissipated.
A woman stood halfway through the doorway of the house to the left, holding buckets of slops which she was carrying to the sewer for the next rainstorm to flush away. She'd stopped, staring in horror at Ilna and Halphemos.
"There's nothing wrong!" Ilna said. She glared at the woman, holding her by sheer force of will. She noticed that Halphemos was wearing his own robe, not the one the People of Beauty had given him.
"What is this town, mistress?" Halphemos asked in a pleasant, worried voice. "Here, let me help you with your pails."
"Why, this is Divers on Third Atara," the woman said. She held the cypress buckets for a moment, then let the youth lift them away and walk to the sewer. Halphemos was simply being his natural self. That was more calming than anything Ilna could say.
The street wasn't busy, but a handcart rolled across the intersection two doors down. "Where did you come from?" the woman asked. "You weren't there, and then—"
Cerix appeared out of nowhere and tumbled into the street in front of her. His ragged tunic was black with the silt of an ancient sea bottom. He clasped the stumps of his legs and began to scream.
At that, the Ataran woman screamed also.
Cashel stared at the straight-trunked tree, considering how it would fit into the raft he was building. Zahag sat nearby, crunching red seeds he'd excavated from a fruit he'd found. The pulp was tasteless, but apparently the seeds were delicious—at least if you had molars like Zahag's.
A soft-leafed cactus curled up the tree bole. Several of the multipetaled white-and-crimson flowers dangled flaccidly, like cuttlefish hung to dry. The blooms only lasted for a few hours, but last night their spicy perfume had drifted across the inlet to where the castaways slept beside the dinghy.
Cashel looked over to the camp. Cozro lay in the shade on a mattress of withies while Aria tried to plait narrow leaves into a hat for herself. She was absolutely useless at the task, but at least she was trying.
The princess had even let Cashel show her the basics of rowing this morning before the sun got too high. She had something of a talent for that, though of course she'd have rubbed her soft palms raw on the oarlooms if they'd kept at it for more than a few minutes.
No doubt about it: the Princess Aria had changed a lot since Cashel first met her. Maybe someday she'd even forgive him for rescuing her.
Cashel pushed through undergrowth to the next tree inland, a eucalyptus of some sort. The trunk divided about four feet up. He guessed he'd be better off to use it as two poles than to take the tree down at ground level as he'd intended.
Kneeling, Cashel swiped the cutlass through brush that would otherwise get in the way of his cutting strokes. It was bad enough having to use a cutlass instead of a proper axe, but he'd make do.
Zahag hopped onto the latticework stems of a strangler fig. The tree which the fig had used for support during its first decade of life had rotted completely away, leaving no sign of its presence save the woody vine that had murdered it.
"What was wrong with the first tree?" the ape asked. His words slurred around the seeds he continued to munch.
"The cactus that grows on it," Cashel said, feeling vaguely embarrassed. "There's—"
He paused. Numbers were a problem for him.
"Well," Cashel said, "there's more buds on it than there ever was sheep in a flock I was tending. I figure most of them are going to bloom tonight."
He wiped the cutlass blade with a palm frond, cleaning the steel of juices that might be corrosive. It wasn't a particularly well made weapon even if you liked swords—which Cashel didn't, not even a little bit—but it had a full tang and wasn't going to snap during the tough work of cutting trees.
Zahag turned to look at the cactus, wrinkling his long, expressive face in concentration. "So what?" he said.
"Well," Cashel muttered, "I liked the smell last night. And in the moonlight the flowers were pretty as can be."
He didn't want to talk to the ape about why he liked flowers. He didn't know why, he just did. Most of the people in Barca's Hamlet would have been as amazed to hear him say that as Zahag was.
He drew the cutlass back, using one hand over the other on the stubby hilt so that he could get the strength of both arms into the blow. Aria screamed.
Cashel stuck the cutlass point-first in the hard soil and left it as he lurched back to the edge of the beach. He didn't think of it as a weapon. It would just get in the way of using his quarterstaff, now leaning against the cactus-covered tree.
He didn't know what he'd see when he looked across the embayment toward Aria: maybe seawolves, great carnivorous lizards, squirming out of the water; maybe some sort of land predator, though they hadn't found any traces of one during the days they'd been on the island; maybe even a demon sent by Ilmed or some other wizard to snatch the princess away.
What Cashel saw was Aria holding an oar like a club and Cozro picking himself up from the sand. It wasn't hard to figure back to what had gone on during the time Cashel couldn't see his two companions.
Cashel's one companion. Cozro had just become a problem Cashel was going to solve very shortly. "Cozro!" he bellowed across the water. "Touch her again and I won't leave enough of you for the fish to finish!"
Cozro turned to look at Cashel. They were less than two hundred paces apart, but the water separating them was deeper than a man was tall. Cashel could swim, more or less, but if he tried to swim this distance he had a much better chance of winding up on the bottom of the inlet than he did of reaching Aria in time to be of service.
It was several times as far to the princess around the curving shoreline as it was across the water. Cashel started running.
Cozro shook his head to clear it. Blood dripped from the pressure cut over his left temple. If he'd heard Cashel, he'd ignored the threat. He started after Aria again, his arms spread wide.
Because Cashel intended to go out clamming in the inlet later, he hadn't dragged the dinghy up the beach after he and Aria returned from rowing practice. Instead of running as Cashel expected her to do, or fighting as a man might have done, Aria leaped into the little boat and flipped away the mooring line.
Cashel saw at once that she was right. Cozro wasn't fast, but he was a lot stronger than the princess. If she ran inland, the island's vegetation would tangle her before she'd gotten twenty steps. Cozro was between her and Cashel, and running the other way down the beach would take Aria to the giant nest at the tip of the cape with nowhere to go but into the water.
Cozro roared angrily and stumped into the sea after the dinghy. Aria teetered in the stern as she pushed the boat deeper into the inlet, using the oar like a barge pole. Cozro could swim: his third splashing breaststroke brought him almost close enough to grab the gunwale.
Aria whacked his head again with the oar. Cashel, using the staff for balance as he ran—he ran better than he swam, but it still wasn't a talent he was known for—shouted in triumph.
If the princess had known to use the oar's edge like a wooden sword, she might have put Cozro down for good. As it was, a swat with the flat didn't do the captain serious damage but it did convince him there was no future in trying to climb aboard the dinghy. Cozro scrambled out of the water again.
"I'm coming, Princess!" Cashel cried with what breath he had left over from running through soft sand. He really hoped Cozro would try to fight him. Otherwise Cashel was going to have a moral problem about what to do with a man who'd proved he was too dangerous to live with on the same small island.
Cashel's first guess was that the captain was going back to shore to get a pole to fend off Aria's swipes. Aria must have thought the same thing, because she settled both oars in the rowlocks and clumsily stroked farther out. If she got beyond the jaws of the inlet, she might not be strong enough to get back....
Cozro continued to run up the beach. Cashel wondered if there wasn't something in the captain's punch that ate his brain away. Cozro might be able to finish his business with Aria before Cashel caught him, but he couldn't expect to escape except possibly by rowing an empty dinghy out into an empty sea. That was an end as final as facing Cashel, and a good deal more unpleasantly slow.
Cashel had his stride, now. He wasn't fast, but he could keep going as long as he had to. Aria had found her rhythm too and was pulling with both arms together. Cashel tried to imagine what the princess would be like if she'd been born a fisherman's daughter in Barca's Hamlet. He couldn't get his mind around the thought. It was too much like imagining the sun rising in the west.
Zahag chattered enthusiastically, watching events from high in the strangler fig. Cashel knew the ape couldn't either swim or run well enough to reach Cozro before Cashel did, but it gnawed him that it wouldn't even have occurred to Zahag to try. Zahag would probably say that the tribe's females were the chief ape's business, not his.
Cozro ran off the tip of land into the sea. Well, if the captain wanted to drown himself that was just fine with—
The dinghy grounded. The shock tipped Aria backward into the bow. Her legs waved in the air for a moment before she could clamber onto the thwart again. Cozro shouted in triumph. He was well out from the shore, but the water was only ankle-deep.
Cashel stopped. Pounding over the sand didn't help him think, and he knew he had to grasp what was going on before he could do anything about it.
Though it was simple enough, really. Aria got out of the boat and tugged at it without success. She was standing on a firm surface just beneath the water. Cozro was certainly drunk and possibly mad, but he was a sailor. He'd noticed, as Cashel had not, that there was a bar between the jaws of the inlet. Even the shallow dinghy would ground on it when the tide was low.
The princess turned and splashed toward the shore where Cashel had been working. Cozro was gaining on her. Cashel had gotten almost to the base of the inlet, about as far away as he could be. If he'd just stayed where he was...
Cashel didn't even sigh as he started back. He'd made a mistake and not for the first time. He'd do what he could, even though he could see that he wouldn't get to Aria in time for anything but revenge.
Which he would take.
Zahag started to shriek pulsingly like a wagon wheel spinning on its hub while a smith tries to balance it. The ape clung to the fig's woody stems with both hands and thumped his feet up and down on lower strands, setting the whole tall lattice to vibrate. He was staring out to sea.
"Help Aria!" Cashel bawled. If Zahag put himself between Cozro and the girl, he could hold the captain off until Cashel arrived to finish matters.
If; but Zahag wasn't human and he surely didn't think like Cashel. He continued to call, letting go with one long arm so that he could point out to sea.
The princess was fifty feet from shore; Cozro was twenty feet behind her and gaining. She looked over her shoulder and froze where she was. Cozro shouted, "Now you'll learn, you little tease!"
Cashel thought Aria had panicked when she saw how close her pursuer was. He shouted, "What are you—"
His attention was so wholly focused on Cozro and the princess that he didn't see the long toothed heads coming in from the sea until the captain did. Cozro turned screaming. He splashed three steps back toward the dinghy before the monsters reached him.
Only when they slid onto the bar did Cashel realize that the creatures were birds—or their forefathers had been birds, at any rate. Their belly feathers were creamy, while those of their upper surfaces were slate gray speckled with white. The only traces of wings were tiny stubs that stuck out as the birds reared upward.
Tip to tail, the creatures were twenty feet long, and each toothy orange beak measured a yard by itself.
Cozro bawled in terror and raised his arms to cover his face. The Sister only knew what he thought that would accomplish. The birds struck simultaneously. They grabbed Cozro at the knees and shoulders, then jerked apart, shaking their heads like a pair of hens struggling over a worm. Blood splattered the foam.
After a time, Cozro stopped screaming.
Cashel continued to run along the shore. He understood now why Aria had stopped where she was. She stayed still and the captain was moving: the birds landed on Cozro like black on coal.
A smart girl, smart and quick-witted besides. Nobody was going to call Cashel either of those things, but he knew his job didn't mean hiding in the bushes while the princess was stuck out there in the water, as plain as a boil on your bum.
Cashel reached the strangler fig, twenty paces or so from where Aria would come to dry land when she next could move. Zahag had dropped to the ground and was hunching like a fur-covered rock. His bulging eyes stared at what was happening in the inlet. Cashel paused also, breathing through his open mouth and leaning forward slightly so that his diaphragm could expand his chest more easily.
The birds had just about finished with Cozro. They rose, chest to chest, hissing like water on hot rocks as they both tried to gobble down the last tidbit. Their feet were huge and orange. Scales projected from both sides of their toes in place of the skin webs that helped the geese of Barca's Hamlet swim.
One of the great birds overbalanced the other with a sly twist of the neck, a maneuver that Cashel, a wrestler, could well appreciate. Both birds slipped sideways with a great splash, but the one who'd thrown the other swallowed Cozro's leg as they fell. Fragments of the shattered dinghy flew out from under the squirming bodies.
Simultaneously and in apparent good humor, the birds flopped into the deeper water of the inlet and swam to the opposite shore where their nest stood. They slid along with their heads and long necks raised, making contented hissing sounds.
Aria began to crawl toward land. Behind her, the wreckage of the boat floated in water whose bloodstains were being quickly diluted. A small fish leaped with a bit of something in its mouth.
Cashel started toward the point where she'd arrive, moving stealthily so he wouldn't draw the birds' attention to this side of the inlet. Zahag mewled as he crept along at Cashel's side, more afraid to be alone than he was afraid to move.
The birds slid up on the beach beside their looted nest. Their cries of rage were like nothing Cashel had ever heard: high-pitched, penetrating, and louder than should come from anything alive. They dipped their heads into the pillaged mass of leaves and seaweed, lifting out each remaining egg for examination. The beaks that had ripped Cozro to bloody fragments were mother-gentle with the softly gleaming ovoids.
Aria reached the shore. Her mouth was open and her eyes stared. She was terrified, but not too terrified to think and even act. Cashel felt a surge of warmth toward a girl he hadn't imagined he'd ever like, let alone respect.
Cashel held out his free hand to her. Tags of skin dangled from her oar-scraped palms, though the saltwater had sluiced away the blood.
A bird hooted. Aria turned her head and screamed. Both the huge creatures dived into the water with sinuous grace.
Cashel swung the princess behind him; there wasn't time to be dainty about it. "Stay close but don't get in my way!" he said. "Zahag, you too!"
His wrists set the quarterstaff spinning. The brass endwraps blurred into a gleaming, golden circle as the staff speeded up with each twist.
If there'd been one bird, and if Aria and Zahag stayed squarely behind him, Cashel thought there might have been a chance. He'd seen what the beaks could do. The teeth were like a seawolf's and the very length of the gape meant it clopped shut like the door of a fortress slamming.
One bird alone, though, would have run into a barrier of spinning fir-wood every time it tried to peck through to the delectable flesh beyond. The birds each weighed as much as a dozen plow oxen. One could squirm on through despite Cashel's defense—but there'd have been pain for it on the way, and maybe a broken beak besides. They would have had a chance, Cashel and those he defended.
Two birds working together as this pair had proved they could, well, it would be over in moments. Aria and the ape would be gone in two snaps, and the birds would quarrel over Cashel's fragments at only slightly greater length.
Blue light crackled in the circle of spinning brass. Cashel felt the world around him starting to fade. He thought Aria was saying something, but he couldn't be sure.
The birds had crossed the inlet beneath the surface. Now they lurched up from the water. Their beaks were open and their pink tongues vibrated, but Cashel didn't hear their hissing cries. His quarterstaff was a disk of sizzling blue fire, roaring and popping and filling the world. He could see figures on the other side of it, but the giant birds thinned into shadows.
The disk was an open pit before Cashel. He fell through it; Zahag and the princess were tumbling after him.
Cashel lay in the dust of King Folquin's palace on Pandah. "Guards! Guards!" someone screamed. Cashel felt his vision blurring.
Zahag was gibbering, Aria wailing for the Mistress God, and King Folquin kept shouting for his guards. A woman with Dalopan tattoos bent and stared into Cashel's face. He recognized her from the crowd of petitioners the morning he and Zahag had been flung out of this world into the first of the places they'd trudged through before this return. Now the Dalopan was wearing a robe of silk brocade embroidered in silver thread with astrological symbols.
The woman straightened. "Stand back!" she said. "I have need of this one for my art!"
The blackness of utter exhaustion spread over Cashel like the surface of the sea.
Something in the forest canopy went ka-ka-ka-ka as Sharina and Unarc passed below. She didn't bother to look up. She knew by now that she wouldn't be able to see anything; and anyway, she didn't have the energy to spare for sightseeing.
Sharina had been following the wounded hunter for ... she couldn't be sure. It probably hadn't been many miles, but it had been longer, harder work than she was used to.
Unarc moved like a ghost. Only occasionally did the hunter remember to look back to see that the girl was keeping up with him. It was a matter of fierce pride to Sharina that she always was there when Unarc checked.
She hadn't seen Hanno since the three of them set off this morning. She hadn't expected to. Unarc could guide the girl, while the big hunter scouted unseen for anything that lay in wait or followed them. Nonnus would have done the same.
Sharina smiled. Indeed, perhaps Nonnus was doing the same.
Unarc paused in a grove of elephant-ear plants and raised his knife in warning. The wicked hook caught enough light to wink like a snake's eye.
Sharina stopped in place. She opened her mouth to breathe silently, then turned her head to watch their back-trail.
Nothing. She felt no hint of danger. Thanks to Nonnus, she was sure she could trust her instincts—not that she wouldn't continue to use her conscious senses the best ways she could.
Sharina looked at Unarc, then crept to his side when he nodded her forward. The knife gestured into the tangle of mangrove roots growing out into a great river. They'd been paralleling the water for most of the day, but this was the first time Sharina had seen rather than merely heard it.
A strikingly ugly animal waddled into sight through the mangroves. It was probably the weight of an ox but it was built more along the lines of a giant hedgehog, broad and low to the ground. Horny spikes stuck out along both sides of the creature, with particularly long ones projecting from the shoulders. It was munching the last of a cycad frond as it ambled along, drawing in more of the tough vegetation with each front-to-back motion of its broad jaws.
"That's where we get the horn," Unarc whispered. Once the bald hunter came to believe that the slaughter at the baobab tree was Sharina's doing, he'd treated her with respect—but no longer as a source of the crippling embarrassment with which he viewed women. "And you might know, we'd run across one as fine as I've seen in seven years on Bight right now when I'm outa the horn business."
The browser vanished into foliage on the other side of the root maze. It amazed Sharina that something so large and apparently clumsy could move unhindered through the dense mass.
She whispered, "Its armor looks—"
Ugly as tree bark was the phrase her tongue started to form.
"—dull."
Unarc nodded. "Likewise tortoiseshell," he said. "You take the outer rind off and polish her up and in the sunlight you never seen anything so pretty. Which we don't do, since it'd get scratched to hell in the shipping, like enough, but you take it from me that was a first-quality critter."
]Sharina jerked around, grasping the Pewle knife's hilt. Hanno, emerging from between a pair of ginger bushes without disturbing any of the dew-dripping pink flowers, grinned in wry approval. "Good thing you got her along, Unarc," he said. "If I'd been a Monkey, I guess you'd be dinner now unless they decided to cook you first."
"Sister take you, Hanno!" the bald man said. "I knowed it was you all the time!"
Sharina took her hand away from the knife. She didn't know if Unarc's statement was true. Anyway, she was glad to see the big hunter again.
"There's no Monkeys up or down the river," Hanno said, setting aside his humor. "I figure we can get to the top while there's still daylight. Sister take me if I don't think every Monkey on the island's walked this way in the past month! And no tracks going back."
Unarc shook his bald head. "Well, something had to be happening or—"
His knife waggled in the direction of his strapped arm.
"—I wouldn't be sporting this. Let's go see what it is."
"The top of what?" Sharina said. She didn't need her hand held, but the two hunters were so used to acting alone and with similar uncommunicative men that they didn't tell her things that she might need to know for all their sakes. The men were apt to speak in a monosyllabic code that an outsider lacked the background to break.
Hanno nodded to indicate he understood and approved of the question. Under other circumstances Sharina would have liked to throttle the hunter—but she was here by his sufferance and free because of the risks Hanno had taken in the same unthinking way that he sometimes treated her as a dim-witted girl-child.
"This whole north end of the island is volcanoes," he said aloud. "The bay where it seems the Monkeys're headed, that's one too, only the north wall's been eat away by the sea. We're going up a cone on the side of that one, and we're going up in style where the critters won't see us coming."
Unarc nodded solemnly and said, "The lava came up the top and made a tube when it ran down the side. The outside froze to rock and the inside run on till it hit the river and the water carried it away. I seen it happen—not here, I mean, this is old, but the other side of the island the first summer I come to Bight."
It struck Sharina forcibly that though she thought of the hunters as unsophisticated—even by her own rural standards—they'd seen things with their own eyes that the scholars of this and former times had never dreamed of. They were savage—she'd seen proof enough of that in Hanno's collection of teeth—but they weren't savages, and they were neither of them stupid. Even before this change in the Hairy Men's conduct, the forests of Bight would have shown little mercy for fools.
"We go into the river," Hanno said, "duck underwater to get into the tube, and then we just climb. Hope you don't mind getting a little wet."
He grinned at the joke. A bath in the river wouldn't make Sharina any wetter than the daily rainstorms did.
Sharina grinned back. "Looks like there's enough mud in the current," she said, "that I won't get nearly as wet as when it rains. My friend Cashel would want to plow it."
Cashel's name gave her a pang. She'd let a wizard's false semblance lead her away from searching for her friend. What had happened to Nimet later didn't change the fact of Sharina's own faithlessness.
"You hold on to my spear while I find the entrance underwater," Hanno said. "It's black as a yard up a pig's—"
He caught himself and cleared his throat. "Well, you can't see a thing in the water. Though come to think, why don't you hold on to my belt instead. And Unarc'll follow us."
The bald man nodded agreement. "You can't see nothing when you're inside neither," he said. "Not till you get most of the way up where there's holes. But it's not like you can lose your way once you get started."
Sharina wondered what sort of creatures might lair in the utter darkness of the lava tube. She smiled faintly. Nothing nearly as terrible as Hanno and his great spear, of that she was certain.
"I'm ready," she said aloud. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the hunter's lizardskin belt.
They stepped into the river. The unexpectedly fierce current pushed Sharina's stiffened left arm against Hanno until she could catch herself and lean backward against the flow. The hunter didn't seem to notice.
They walked twenty yards downstream at a deliberate pace. The water rose to Sharina's mid-chest and once—briefly—to her neck, but she was never in danger of going under. They passed the intruding mangroves. If Sharina had been alone she'd have picked her way hand over hand, clinging to the roots in the same fashion she'd have used a similar web on a vertical climb if it were available.
Beyond was a mass of palms whose trunks sprang three and four together from a common center, but between the mangroves and the palms was a hump of black rock to which only ferns and lesser growth clung. It climbed the slope to vanish in the taller vegetation.
"Here we go, missie," Hanno warned. He walked deeper into the stream, then—as Sharina's head started to go under—deliberately ducked. She followed, trying to keep her feet on a slick clay bottom scoured by the current's rush.
The water seeping between Sharina's tight lips had a brackish tang. She closed her eyes, gripped the hunter's belt, and kept her other hand on the pommel of the Pewle knife for the comfort the contact gave her.
She couldn't be sure, but she thought Hanno had changed direction. The current lessened. The bottom became rock and rougher, a good surface for the feet of a girl from Barca's Hamlet.
Sharina's head broke surface again. "Lady, I thank you for Your blessings!" she said. Her shout echoed as a trembling chorus up the lava pipe in darkness.
She let go of Hanno's belt and walked up the slanting path. The slap of the tiny waves her motion stirred grew into the mutterings of a crowd. Even Sharina's breath and that of her companions swelled like the winter wind.
"Nothing keeping us here," Hanno said. His soft leather boots squelched as he began walking. Sharina followed, and behind she heard Unarc.
The roof of the lava tube was too high for Sharina to reach with her fingers outstretched; the floor was a boulevard on which the three of them could have walked abreast if they'd chosen to do so. Sharina kept track of her companions by cues she couldn't have put precise names to. Sound was one of them, of course, though the echoes and counterechoes of her own feet would have made that alone a treacherous guide. Sometimes she thought she could feel the warmth of the hunters' bodies; and sometimes she just knew.
She smiled. Nonnus would have understood. She could feel his nearness in this physical darkness as she had in the spiritual darkness when she waited for death in the baobab's heart.
The way upward was no steeper than the meadows where the sheep of the borough grazed. The companions didn't speak to one another, but Sharina became aware of both the soughing of wind that blew across the open mouth of the tube and the subtle changes in pressure on her eardrums as the river swelled and sank below them.
It didn't matter that they couldn't see. "Up" was a direction as good as any their eyes could have given them. Occasionally there was a pothole where a deep-rooted tree had survived long enough that, burned to carbon and powdered by the following ages, it left its mark in the rock. Sharina learned to avoid those also, though she couldn't have told how.
She became aware of light. At first she thought it was a trick like the flashes that traced sometimes across her closed eyes. This was a gray paleness, though. Hanno's body was a powerful silhouette against it. They were nearing openings into an outer world that she'd almost forgotten.
Early in its course down the mountainside the lava had splashed over the roots of a pine. When the organic remains decayed, they left holes through the tube. Sharina might have been able to stick her arm through a hole and waggle her fingers in the outer air, but neither of the men could do even that.
Hanno got down on his belly to look through a hole just above ground level. Unarc squatted and peered through another. "As I hope for the Lady's grace!" he said. "Hanno, what're them crazy Monkeys doing down there?"
"I know what it looks like," the other hunter muttered. Without speaking further, he got to his knees and edged sideways, gesturing Sharina to the viewport.
She rotated her belt so that the sheathed knife wasn't between her and the rough lava surface. She was looking down on a bay some five hundred feet below. Felled timber of all sizes and descriptions covered the water's surface. Vast numbers of Hairy Men clambered over the floating debris, guided or directed by phantasms like the one leading the Hairy Men who'd attacked her and Hanno.
She couldn't guess how many of the brute men she saw. Their squirming reminded her of the day early each Heron when the termites came out of the ground in swarming profusion, preparing to fly to new homes while the crows and jays gorged themselves on the sudden bounty.
"Has there been a storm?" Sharina asked, lifting her face from the opening to meet Hanno's eyes. "To wash all those trees into the bay?"
"That's not storm-swash, missie," Unarc said as he also straightened. "They've been felled. All of them. You see the branches but there's no root balls like a storm would've done. Besides, there's been no storm."
Hanno nodded. "The Monkeys did it," he said. "They—"
"Monkeys couldn't do that!" Unarc said. "They don't have the brains!"
"They had the brains to cut you good and mash both our boats!" Hanno said. "Things ain't the same, Unarc. The fuzzy ghosts down there talk to them. Put fear of the Gods in them, from what it seemed when they came after me!'
He grinned reminiscently. "Though not so bad as me and missie there put the fear to them later on. Such as were left."
"There are thousands of Hairy Men down there," Sharina said. "Tens of thousands."
She looked again down into the natural harbor. A mass of timber was sliding toward the mouth of the bay. The trees must have been tied together as well as bound by their entangled branches.
"They must've cleaned both banks of the East River for leagues to get all that wood," Unarc said. "I noticed some trees down when we followed the West River too—"
Sharina hadn't noticed any cut trees. The river itself was merely a thrum in her consciousness for most of the day's journey.
"—but I didn't think much about it."
Over the raft swarmed many hundreds of Hairy Men. They were—
"They've built rafts," Sharina said as she rose again to a squat. "They're pulling themselves out to sea by ropes or something. More Hairy Men at the jaws of the bay are holding the other ends of the ropes. I think there's more rafts in the open sea already."
Hanno dropped so suddenly that Sharina almost fell as she squirmed clear. "Well I will be fricasseed in a pot!" the big hunter said. "That's what they're doing, missie. That sure is."
Unarc's brow wrinkled. "They're drownding themselfs?" he said.
"Hanno?" said Sharina. "You said the current carried west all the way to Ornifal. Could they...?"
"There goes another lot," Unarc said from his viewport. "May the Shepherd shear my bum if they don't!"
"Yeah, it might be that," Hanno said as he got to his feet. "I don't know what they'd figure to do on Ornifal."
"There's a powerful lot of them," the bald man said reflectively. He rose to a kneeling position, but he checked the edge of his hooked knife in the light before he stood completely.
Hanno nodded. Both hunters resumed climbing the steep slope. Sharina, caught by surprise, took long strides to fall in between them again before the light faded.
Breathing was easier now. A breeze past the tube's unseen mouth higher up the mountain drew air in through the root holes. Sharina recognized the mustiness of the tube's stagnant lower level only now that she was past it. Any air after being submerged in the mud-black water had left her lungs too grateful to complain about the quality of what was available.
At first Sharina thought the sound she heard, felt, was the crosswind reverberating in the depths of the tube. Garric played a shepherd's pipe of reeds stoppered at the bottom with wax so that each different length vibrated at a graduated note.
Sharina climbed higher. She began to hear unintelligible words in the pulses of sound. Light seeped from above. The rush of molten rock had drawn striations down the lava tube while the walls were still plastic. Hanno held his spear crossways. His right hand was at the balance and his left just below the broad head, prepared to thrust or throw.
Sharina could see the opening above them. The lava had poured from a notch in the lip of the volcano, cooling as it plunged downward. The eruption that formed the tube must have been a later one since it had engulfed full-sized trees that grew from the existing cone. The walls were thinner at the top of the tube than they became by the time they reached the river. They'd crumbled away for a distance of twenty feet below the lip, but the notch had weathered deeper also.
Sharina drew the Pewle knife. Without looking around, Hanno gestured her and Unarc to wait.
The big hunter crept to the tunnel mouth. His limbs didn't seem to move at all; it was like watching a snake climb a tree. He glanced around, then slithered fully into the open to peer over the edge of the notch.
He signaled the others forward. The air throbbed with the sound of the huge voice chanting, but Sharina still couldn't understand the words.
She stepped out of the sheltering lava, bending low but not attempting to crawl because the porous surface would scrape her to the bone. Hanno must have some technique that even Unarc lacked, because the bald hunter hunched out just as Sharina did. Though they were at the top of the volcano, part of the cone now blocked their view of the harbor.
Sharina looked over the lip of rock, expecting to see a hollow filled with bubbling magma. Instead, the volcano had been dormant so long that grass covered the bottom of the crater. The walls were weathered to the color of rust.
"Oh...," Sharina whispered. She squeezed her knife hilt for the comfort it gave her.
A fifty-foot outcrop had remained in the center of the basin when the surface around it slumped back into the earth. Someone had shaped it into the form of a Hairy Man with a ball in his right hand.
"It wasn't like that six months past," Unarc whispered. "Hanno, what are the Monkeys up to?"
Sharina swallowed. The idol's eyes and mouth were carved deep. Wisps of colored smoke drifted from the openings to form a cloud like faded rags above the brutish head.
The sound of chanting came from the huge effigy. Though the words were still meaningless, Sharina now recognized the rhythms of wizardry.
"There's no Monkeys down there now," Hanno said. "Except for whoever's inside the statue making that noise. I guess they're all gone to the harbor."
"The cloud," Sharina whispered. "It's shaped like a demon."
She should have recognized the smoke image immediately: the cadaverous body; the limbs like wires knotted at the joints; the long skull and undershot jaw. The phantasms directing the Hairy Men were in the same mold and of similarly insubstantial fabric, but the scale of this semblance had deceived her.
"I don't see any point in—" Unarc said as he started to back toward the concealing tube.
The smoke-demon moved. Drifting in the breeze, Sharina thought, but there suddenly was no breeze.
The smoke stared at them with yellow eyes.
"Run!" Hanno shouted as he jumped to his feet. When Sharina paused to let him lead as before, the big hunter grabbed her and half-shoved, half-flung her toward the mouth of the tube.
Sharina ran through the darkness in exaltation. The crisis had so taken her out of herself that she wasn't aware of her footing, let alone concerned. In Sharina's present state she was as much a part of her world as a fish swimming; and as with the fish, she instinctively knew the environment through which she moved.
She'd sheathed the knife. The sturdy blade would be useless against the present dangers and she didn't need the feel of the grip to remind her of Nonnus.
She reached the light diffusing from root holes across the passage and leaped it in the same gazelle-like bounds that she'd been making in the pitch blackness above. The two hunters padded along at their own best speed, but for once they seemed noisy and slow compared to the girl they'd sent ahead of them.
Sharina wasn't thinking about what she would do when she reached the river. Did religious folk ever reach the sort of closeness to Godhead that she felt now? All existence was one, and she was one with all existence!
The lava walls began to glow with red light as though she were running through a cloud lit by sunset. She heard Hanno and Unarc shout in surprise from far away. They must see the light also.
Sharina took another leap. Ahead of her the walls of light bulged inward. A huge clawed hand, smoky but still more substantial than the rock it penetrated, reached through and began to close.
Hanno shouted again. Sharina would have liked to stop, but the momentum of her spirit no less than her body carried her forward.
She was trying to draw the Pewle knife when the demon hand clamped shut, squeezing Sharina into darkness again as it drew her back the way it had come.