Cashel decided he was awake. He lay in a tight-stretched hammock. Intricately carven gratings covered the room's windows, and the vines which were trained across the openings diffused daylight into a cool, green glow.
He sat up. Over him hung a fan of brilliantly colored parrot feathers. The servant who was supposed to be making the fan swing with a treadle noticed Cashel move and began pumping his legs enthusiastically.
"Where am I?" Cashel asked.
Sharina entered through one of the two doorways, smiling like sunrise when she saw that Cashel was awake. "Don't strain yourself," she said as she stepped to the side of the bed. "Here, hold on to me—or I can get servants, men?"
"I'm all right," Cashel said. He smiled shyly; that was the sort of thing you said, after all. "I mean, I really do feel all right this time."
Cashel gave Sharina his hand, though he didn't put any weight on it, and stood up. He was light-headed but only for a moment; his body felt tinglingly refreshed. He had a confused recollection of having held the sky up for what seemed a lifetime; but it wasn't the sky, and it hadn't been his muscles that were doing the work.
He grinned at Sharina's hand in his. She was a tall girl and not frail, but it still looked like he was holding a toy. She must have thought the same thing, because they laughed simultaneously as they stepped apart.
Sharina wore a beige linen tunic with a border of geometric blue embroidery. People in Barca's Hamlet usually wore the simplest sort of wool clothing, but Cashel had learned a good deal about fabrics and styles from living with his sister Ilna. Thinking about it, he supposed Ilna knew a lot about sheep, too.
He looked down at himself. He was in a similar tunic, but his showed signs of having been hastily pieced together from two garments. He smiled. Apparently people of his size weren't common here.
Wherever here was. "Are we on Pandah?" Cashel asked.
A monkey walked into the room on all fours. It stood upright and said to Sharina in a guttural voice, "Come on back. It's your move now."
"The monkey talks!" Cashel said.
The monkey drew its lips back in a sneer or a snarl. It was about as big as an average man, though its stumpy legs had deceived Cashel at first glance. The deep chest and arms layered with flat bands of muscle would make it a respectable opponent.
"Are all you humans too stupid to tell an ape from a monkey?" the beast said. "Maybe you should get Halphemos to raise this one's intelligence, Sharina. Though I think you'd do better to start with a dog. Or maybe an ox."
Cashel burst out laughing. "This is wonderful!" he said. "It really talks and thinks, then?"
"Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!" the monkey—the ape—shrieked. It leaped to a window and shook the grate in apparent fury.
Sharina was laughing too. "This is Zahag," she explained. "King Folquin of Pandah has kindly sheltered us after the—"
Sharina's frown was only a flicker, but her tone was marginally more subdued as she went on, "After the storm wrecked the ship. His court wizard, Master Halphemos, has given Zahag the mind of a human. We've been playing chess."
Zahag hopped down from the window. "Come!" he ordered, reaching for Sharina's hand. His fingers were grotesquely long and covered with coarse reddish fur. "It's your move!"
The ape's anger a moment before hadn't been playacting. The window grating was made of some hard wood. Zahag's teeth had torn deep gouges on the center rosette.
The wizard's art might have given the ape a man's intelligence, but the creature still had a beast's mind. A Sandrakkan wool merchant had once come to Barca's Hamlet with a pet monkey, but that was a little thing no bigger than a cat. A pet with fangs the size of Zahag's didn't seem a very good idea, and a smart, strong pet that flew into rages was an even worse idea.
"In a moment, Zahag," Sharina said, twitching her hand away. "Cashel, are you ready to be introduced to King Folquin? There's no rush if you're not."
The servant—was he a slave?—watched as he continued to work the treadle. To someone watching, the man seemed to have no more personality than the fan itself.
"Now!" Zahag cried. He crouched as though to leap on Sharina.
Cashel, moving as he always did when there was need—faster than almost anyone else—swept Sharina behind him. He faced the ape with the silent resolution of a cliff face, just as he'd faced demons in the past.
Zahag gave a chirp of terror. He hopped onto the servant, flinging the startled fellow backward, and jumped to the fan itself. The suspension cords thrummed at the extra weight; feathers torn from the frame fluttered about like the petals of a giant flower.
Cashel backed away, keeping between Sharina and the ape. She wasn't wearing the hermit's knife today, he nodded. He supposed the weapon'd be out of place in a palace.
Zahag dropped to the floor of polished, dovetailed planks. He scratched himself nonchalantly, though he still watched Cashel with sidelong care. He muttered, "Well, the game can wait, I suppose."
Cashel cleared his throat. "Sure, I'd like to thank the king," he said.
They walked out of the bedroom with Sharina leading by a half step and the ape capering behind. The servant was holding the treadle-rope firmly to stop the fan's flailing.
Zahag's emotional swings were more of a worry to Cashel; but so long as he was around, Sharina didn't have to worry at all.
"How do you tell time here?" Liane asked as Josfred led them along a trail away from the settlement.
Garric guessed he'd slept a full twelve hours for his muscles to have recovered so well from their straining during the storm. Nothing in the sky or forest had changed since he collapsed from exhaustion in the shelter of woven saplings to which Josfred had led the three of them.
The guide shrugged. "You outsiders always ask that," he said. "Time doesn't mean anything in the Gulf. We can't understand you, the ones of us who were born here."
The track had once been a broad avenue skirting the lagoon, but shrubs like wormwood (though soft-bodied) had begun to cover it. Garric didn't know how fast vegetation grew here in the Gulf, but the diminution in traffic must have come within the past year or two.
"There!" Josfred said. "There's a bunch of Ersa harvesting plums. I don't suppose we ought to go much closer, but they probably won't give us any trouble. You've got a steel sword, Master Garric."
Bitterness dripped from the guide's voice. Garric wasn't sure whether the rabbity little man envied him more possession of the sword or of Liane. Josfred didn't seem to have any conception of women as people. Garric had to assume that the guide's attitude was more or less representative of everybody here in the Gulf.
Though ... Lunifra wasn't anybody's chattel, not even Rodoard's.
A dozen lightly furred humanoids picked dark blue fruit from waist-high bushes planted in regular rows. The ones Garric had eaten before he and his friends went off with Josfred were fist-sized and neither looked nor tasted anything like real plums; even the color would pale in real sunlight. Human castaways had given familiar names to the vegetation of the Gulf, but nothing else about "the plums" was familiar.
The Ersa stopped working and unslung the baskets in which they'd been putting fruit. They moved together, their eyes on the humans, while the males took up spears and clubs. The wooden weapons had points and edges made of shells from the lagoon.
The largest of the Ersa—Garric's height but more lithely built—had a spear whose slender iron tip had been forged from a nail. He waved it at Garric and said, "Go away, men." His accent was easier to understand than Josfred's.
"We'd better leave," the guide said nervously.
"I need to talk with them," Tenoctris said. She entered the field, stepping carefully between the waist-high bushes.
Garric opened his mouth to protest, then started after the wizard. Liane caught his arm. "Take off your sword," she whispered.
"I should've thought of that myself," Garric muttered. If he strode forward armed, he'd look like a threat even though nothing could be further from his mind.
He undid the sword belt. That wasn't a simple task: the buckle had two hooks and the tongue, left deliberately long, was looped about the belt proper. It was the way King Carus had worn his sword....
"What are you doing?" Josfred said, his voice rising with concern.
Garric ignored him. He thrust the weapon into Liane's arms and hurried to join Tenoctris before she reached the scowling Ersa.
"This is our field," the leader of the Ersa said. "If you try to take our food, we will fight you."
From a distance Garric had thought the Ersa's features were catlike. Close up they didn't look like any animal he'd ever seen—nor did they look very much like furry humans. In fact, their gray-brown fur was one of the least unfamiliar things about the Ersa.
Their faces were round. Their ear openings were simple holes, but they signaled now among themselves with membranous external ears the size of a man's hand. Their mouths opened and closed sideways; and besides horny lids, nictitating membranes wiped their eyes in a quick, constant shimmer of motion.
"We aren't your enemies," Garric said. The Ersa looked alien, but they were clean and dignified—virtues in short supply in the human portion of the Gulf. "We mean you no harm."
"We've just come here," Tenoctris said. "Our ship was destroyed by a force that was new to me. Did you or your ancestors arrive in the Gulf the same way?"
The Ersa's eyes were closer to the sides of their skulls than a human's were. Like sheep, they could see in a broad arc behind them. Their ears fluttered in wordless speech like bunting in a windstorm.
"Our fathers made this place to escape enemies, the leader said at last. "We lived here alone for many generations. When the first men arrived, we let them stay. All was well for many generations more. Now new men have come with new weapons and take our fields. Humans, we are rulers here!"
He shook his spear in front of Garric. He had four fingers on each hand, two opposing two instead of fingers and a separate thumb.
"Go back now or we will kill you!" he shouted.
The stance of the whole group shifted slightly. King Carus was a presence in Garric's mind, analyzing the situation. An individual man would generally be a match for an Ersa, but a group of Ersa would fight in a united fashion that not even the most disciplined human army could manage.
"Thank you for speaking with us," Tenoctris said. She bowed low. "We will come and speak with you again."
Garric bowed also. Careful of the crops, he followed the old wizard back through the field.
"An Ersa wizard must have created this Gulf," Tenoctris said quietly to her companion. "There's no record of the Ersa, not even in the almagests of great wizards who searched all time for no better reason than to increase knowledge. Cadilorn and Mansel of Eyre; Uzuncu the Skull, too, if she wasn't just a myth like the Yellow King she served."
She smiled wanly at Garric. "I would have been one of that company if I'd had the power," she said. "Which of course I didn't. But because I'm with you, Garric, I'm learning things that not even Uzuncu knew."
Tenoctris laughed, a pure, cheerful sound that made the changeless day brighter for Garric. "Perhaps the folk who claimed it's better to be lucky than wise were correct," she added.
"I don't see that it's very lucky to have come here," Garric said. He was uneasy at the thought that their presence in the Gulf was because of him. "Especially if no one can leave once he's here."
"It's possible to leave," Tenoctris said with assurance that had nothing of bluster in it. "I don't know that it'll be possible for me to get us out, but I think I know how a sufficiently powerful wizard would be able to succeed."
They'd reached the others. Liane squeezed Garric's hand as she returned the sword.
Josfred had been shifting his weight from one leg to the other and back again. "You shouldn't have done that!" he blurted. "They might have killed you, and then what would Rodoard have said?"
"Nothing that would have been of any concern to Garric," Liane said, taking out some of her own previous nervousness on the guide. "And there's no point in talking about things that didn't happen."
Garric glanced over his shoulder. The Ersa had resumed gathering their crop. Since the Ersa were even more community-minded than humans, they had every reason to feel threatened by each member of a race which included the likes of Rodoard and Lunifra. Despite the threat with which the Ersa leader had ended the discussion, they seemed to accept that Garric and Tenoctris weren't personally hostile toward them.
"Josfred," Tenoctris said as they started back down the trail to the settlement, "you said you were born in the Gulf. How long have your ancestors lived here?"
The little man waved his arms in frustration. "I told you, the question doesn't mean anything!" he said. "We've always been here."
He paused as he suddenly realized that duration, even in the Gulf, could be punctuated in important ways. "Only we were slaves of the Ersa until the other men like you washed up on the outer shore with weapons. The outer shore was just mud before."
"Not in a thousand years, I'd venture," Tenoctris said with satisfaction. "Not since the previous time forces built to a peak. The Gulf is a closed world. I'm not sure that it was even part of our cosmos originally, because the Ersa exist only here in the Gulf."
"The cosmos is everything that was or will be," Liane said sharply. "Isn't it? There can't be anything more than that!"
"It generally seems that way from our human viewpoint," Tenoctris said. She smiled at Liane, taking the sting out of the implied rebuke.
Liane stopped on the trail and hugged the old woman. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't... I'm so afraid. Everything that I thought I knew is changing."
"Rodoard made us strong," Josfred said. "We aren't the Ersa's slaves anymore!"
Garric didn't need King Carus to tell him that Rodoard would be a very bad master indeed if he didn't have an external enemy like the Ersa to keep him in check. And even Rodoard's probable brutality would be better than the whimsical sadism that could be expected from Lunifra.
"Rodoard and six other men arrived together," Josfred said, reminiscing happily as they followed the trail back to the settlement. "They had steel weapons. One of the men thought he could give Rodoard orders, but Rodoard showed him."
Josfred chuckled like water dribbling from a cracked jug. "Rodoard cut his belly open, right there. And he squealed and squealed and then he died!"
"Was Rodoard this man's bodyguard in the outer world, Josfred?" Liane asked in an even voice. Garric looked at her, surprised both at the question and the calm fashion the girl asked it.
Josfred gasped. "Are you a wizard like Lunifra, woman?" he asked in horror. "How else would you know that?"
"Rodoard has the tattoos of a Blaise armsman," Liane said. In a tone of mild reminiscence she went on, "They often hire out to guard merchants. My father occasionally hired them."
In a terse, colorless voice she added, "And no, I'm nothing like Lunifra. Nothing at all."
"Lunifra is a skilled wizard," Tenoctris said. "Skilled, not just powerful, though she's respectably powerful as well."
She laughed. "More powerful than me, at any rate."
"Should you have let Lunifra know you're a wizard too?" Garric said quietly. Tenoctris usually kept her skills secret, so he'd been surprised when she openly displayed them by interfering with Lunifra's manikin.
"She already knew," Tenoctris said. "I saw it in her smile as she looked at me. She sees things instead of just forcing powers to her will. And she's quite intelligent."
Garric cleared his throat. If he understood what Tenoctris was implying...
"Tenoctris?" he said abruptly. The best way to get an answer to a question is to ask it. "Do you mean you want Lunifra to join us? To be our ally?"
Tenoctris halted in the middle of the trail. She put her hand on Garric's to cause him to face her. Josfred continued several steps farther, unaware of what was happening behind him, but Liane stopped and watched her friends with an expression of controlled concern.
"Garric," Tenoctris said, "when you look at Lunifra, what do you feel?"
"She turns my stomach," he said with his usual simple honesty.
"That's good," Tenoctris said. "Because I've never before in a long lifetime met someone who seemed so completely an assemblage of mindless evil. Lunifra isn't striving for power or doing any of the other human things that lead one to evil, toward Malkar. She's like lightning or a tidalwave: she smashes things just because she and they happen to come together."
"She's helping Rodoard now?" Liane said.
"He thinks she is," Tenoctris said. "When she's brought everything else down, she'll destroy him too."
Josfred had returned and was listening to the castaways in concern. "Lunifra came from the outer shore too," he said. "Not many women come from there. There've been over a hundred men since Rodoard, though, with steel and harder wood than what grows here in the Gulf."
The little man looked sidelong at Garric's sword. "The men who won't serve Rodoard all die," he whispered. "Everyone has to serve Rodoard so that we can be free of the Ersa!"
"Yes," Garric said. "I understand exactly what you mean."
Most of those swept into the Gulf would be sailors, men hardened by a brutally dangerous life. Humans born in the Gulf were stunted according to outside standards; the size and steel weapons of the recent castaways gave them unchallenged authority over the society they found here. The newcomers weren't necessarily bad men, but for most of them the Gulf would seem like Paradise; and some of them were bad men.
For those who wouldn't serve a thug like Rodoard, there was quick murder before the poison of decency took hold in the Gulf. Garric had been saved—thus far—because he'd reacted without hostility, but in a fashion that made him seem extremely dangerous if Rodoard insisted on trying conclusions.
From memory came an image of Carus dancing through a wall of enemies. His sword strokes had the speed and shattering power of so many thunderbolts.
A sailor wouldn't have had the presence to face down Rodoard, and a merchant wouldn't have the strength and skill to make the implied threat credible. Garric or-Reise, the peasant from Barca's Hamlet, couldn't have managed the act alone either, but—he touched the medallion on his breast—he hadn't been alone.
King Carus chuckled, unseen but always a presence now, even when Garric was awake and alert.
"We're going to finish off the Ersa," Josfred said, rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation. "Many of your people have come to us, with hard wood and metal for weapons. We'll have the Ersa for slaves as they had us—or maybe we'll kill them all!"
If you do, Garric thought grimly, Rodoard will show you what real slavery's like. Though even that would be better than what Lunifra would bring to the Gulf.
"I have a better idea," Tenoctris said mildly. "I think we can all leave this place—leave it to the Ersa, at least—and close it up behind us so that it doesn't trap other folk in the future."
"Leaving this place," Liane said with forceful sincerity, "is the best idea there could be. And it can't be too soon for me!"
Sharina touched Cashel's hand as she led him. The vines wreathing the colonnade were flowering, rich with perfume and alive with the deep hum of insects. It was an exotic setting to anyone raised in Barca's Hamlet, but it was peaceful in a reassuring fashion also.
"Hurry!" Zahag demanded. His arms were twice the length of his stubby legs. He skipped ahead as though he were playing leapfrog.
"We'll get there," said Cashel, stilling Sharina's reflexive desire to speed up because somebody had told her to. She giggled and dropped back the half step by which she'd been leading. It was reassuring to be around Cashel. He moved quickly when it was necessary but he never hurried.
"Fagh!" Zahag snarled in disgust. He jumped to the carved transom, then flipped onto the colonnade's roof. The thumps of the ape's leaping progress across the tiles faded.
King Folquin's palace was laid out as a square-bottomed U with on the outside a colonnade onto which each room opened. Corridors through both arms of the U led from the colonnade to the central court where the real business of the palace was conducted. Only the king's own apartments had an entrance directly onto the courtyard.
"It's nice of the king to help us like this," Cashel said. Another person might have let his doubt show in the initial statement. Cashel simply continued, "Why is he doing that?"
"Because...," Sharina said, just a sound to give her time to collect her thoughts on a difficult question.
"Whatever happened to our ship made a great spectacle from here. Flashes and thunder. Master Halphemos says that for a moment he saw a great disk like the night sky with stars. So they were very excited to find survivors, though I couldn't tell them much about what had happened."
The palace servants lived on the upper floor. Mothers called down to the children playing on the grounds beyond the vine-screened colonnade. Clothes dried in the sun on pole racks, while outside ovens spread the odors of cooking. People lived at closer quarters here in Pandah than they did in the borough, but they were people just the same.
The arched passage to the courtyard was lined by reed-shaped pilasters. The palace was built of stone, but on the way from the harbor Sharina had seen that the houses of common people were often made of tarred rushes.
"And also..." Sharina continued. The least she owed Cashel was complete honesty, even when it embarrassed her. "King Folquin is a romantic. Halphemos has told him that he'll marry a princess who comes to him as a result of wizardry. Folquin thinks that's me."
"Oh," said Cashel. He shrugged, an instinctive way to loosen his tunic about him. When Cashel flexed his huge muscles, he regularly'split his garments. "Who's Halphemos, then?"
"The court wizard," Sharina said. She'd deliberately slowed her pace, but they were coming to the end of the short corridor anyway. "He's a boy, really—a nice one. I think he'd have fit in back in Barca's Hamlet. But he is a wizard."
"Let's go meet him, then," Cashel said mildly. "And King Folquin."
Sharina had never seen Cashel angry, not even when he was fighting for his life and her own. A giant oak doesn't get angry either, but when it begins to fall the only choices are to get clear or be crushed.
They stepped into the courtyard. Folquin sat on a stool whose four legs ended in curved fishtails. He wore a linen tunic with only a plumed aigrette on his head to remind Sharina of the feathered state in which he'd rescued her. With him were several court officials—including Halphemos, who'd also discarded his formal robe. About a hundred citizens of Pandah and a scattering of foreigners stood at the open end of the court, either waiting to petition the king or simply watching the activities.
Three tumblers performed with a vaulting horse. They were skilled, but it seemed to Sharina that there was a desultory competence rather than real enthusiasm in their flips and handstands. They were present because court etiquette required entertainment. Waiting to follow the tumblers, a pair of trim young women with a xylophone chatted with a paunchy merchant and his secretary.
Folquin sat supporting his chin with a hand. A pair of women wearing baize shawls over their tunics argued a point of contention before him, each glaring as the other spoke. A court official stood beside each witness to keep her in check.
Zahag squatted near the chess table set up behind the king's stool, checking his fur for lice. Halphemos had been staring morosely into the distance. He brightened and hurried over when he saw Sharina and Cashel.
"Master Cashel!" he said enthusiastically. "Mistress Sharina tells me that you're responsible for preserving her from the event that engulfed your ship. I'm honored to meet a wizard of your power!"
He reached out to clasp forearms with Cashel, hand to elbow like a pair of dealers meeting at the Sheep Fair. Together they looked like a stalk of bamboo growing beside an oak tree.
"I'm not a wizard," Cashel said. He shrugged with honest embarrassment."I just... I don't remember really what happened. There was a big weight and I was trying to throw it off."
Cashel cleared his throat, turned to spit, and realized he was in a royal court. He swallowed instead.
Most of those gathered here were either watching the tumblers or talking to one another while they waited for the king to get around to their petition. An old woman with a cup in front of her told a story to a group at the back of the courtyard; a shabby-looking man in a corner was demonstrating a game involving three nutshells and a pea to a rustic.
The exception was a woman in a long white garment and tattoos on both cheeks. She squatted apart from the others, drawing with a pointed bone in the dust between her feet. Her eyes followed Cashel with the fixed intensity of a snake watching a vole. When she saw that Sharina had noticed her, she grinned inanely and looked down at the squiggles her bone stylus had made.
"Master Cashel," Halphemos said earnestly, "I'm not very learned in the art myself, but my friend Cerix understands everything there is about wizardry. Could I ask you to join us at our lodgings, perhaps tonight? He's been injured, so it's hard for him to get around."
The ape noticed them and came bounding over. He bumped Folquin's stool, drawing a black look from the king.
"Sharina!" Zahag said. "It's your move! Come!"
Cashel said, "Well, I don't mind meeting your Cerix, but what we really need is to find the friends who were on the ship with—"
The ape reached imperiously for Sharina's hand. Cashel stepped sideways to block him. Zahag hopped backward; a man would have collided with Cashel's massive form and recoiled.
Sharina glanced at the king. Folquin caught her eye and grimaced. He seemed determined to hear out this pair of complainants rather than start the whole business over again from the beginning.
"I'll finish the game," Sharina said with an apologetic moue to Cashel. "It shouldn't take long."
Sharina smiled as she trailed after the chortling Zahag. The ape was acting like an ill-tempered child, but he couldn't help it any more than the child could. A man—a man like Cashel, at any rate—was apt to react to bullying from someone of Zahag's size as if the ape were an adult who could control what he was doing. That wouldn't be appropriate.
Well, Sharina didn't think it would be appropriate. On the other hand, Cashel might be right in believing that if he once threw the ape over the roof of the palace, Zahag would find the ability to control his future behavior.
"That's part of the reason I'd like you to meet Cerix," Halphemos continued. "With his knowledge and your, well, our, strength, perhaps we can find your friends."
Sharina squatted before the low table. Pandah's court etiquette was fairly informal, but it forbade anyone to sit on a chair or stool while the king heard petitions. Squatting was no hardship to a girl from Barca's Hamlet.
She studied the board. Chess was a noble game which no one in the borough but Sharina and her parents, Lora and Reise, played. Lora had seen to it that Sharina learned chess as well as every other aspect of court procedure which could be taught in a rural inn.
Lora and Reise had been palace servants the night rioters killed the Count and Countess of Haft. Sharina grew into a willowy blonde who looked nothing like the solid, dark-haired natives of Haft, but was the very image of an Ornifal noble like Count Niard, ruler of Haft through his marriage. His wife, Countess Tera, sprung from the old line of Kings of the Isles. Lora had always been sure of what Sharina was told by the royal emissaries: Sharina was Tera's daughter, born the same night as Garric and fostered by Lora and Reise with their own son.
Lora was a bitter, sharp-tongued woman. All that sustained her was the hope that someday the child she raised would sit on a throne while Lora beamed from a seat one step below her. But when King Valence's emissaries took Sharina with them to what they claimed was her destiny, they left Lora behind—of no value to the king's plans, of no value to Sharina either. Sharina felt sorry for Lora, but she couldn't find any love in her heart for the woman she still thought of as mother.
Still, chess playing did seem to be a useful social skill here in King Folquin's court.
Sharina assessed the board's layout, then moved her gryphon out of the home row. Her pieces were carved from a deep red wood; Zahag's had been made from wood so pale that only by holding pieces at an angle could Sharina see the grain.
Pandah was the only major island in the heart of the shallow Inner Sea. There were many islets where a ship could be beached for the night, but few offered anything beyond a landing place. Food, good water, and all the entertainments of civilization were available on Pandah.
From being a general port of call, Pandah had grown into a major trading center where goods from all over the Isles were bought or bartered for transshipment. This chess set could have come from anywhere, though the grotesque carving made Sharina suspect the source was Dalopo.
Sharina eyed the crowd. The woman she'd noticed before was staring at Cashel again. Natives of Dalopo were supposed to tattoo themselves....
Zahag cawed with glee. He slid his remaining wizard diagonally to take Sharina's tortoise. "There!" he cried. "You didn't see that!"
Sharina had indeed seen the move. She'd played several games with Zahag, and she'd correctly judged from past experience that the ape would be too hasty to see anything else.
Beside her, Folquin had adjudged a goat to one of the parties and a money fine for damage the goat did to the other. Both women wailed in shrill disbelief. Cashel and Halphemos continued to talk. The young wizard was showing Cashel his athame, a blade of yellow walrus ivory.
Sharina hopped her gryphon forward again. "Check," she said. "And mate."
"Ah, Mistress Sharina!" King Folquin said. "Would you introduce me to your protector, please?"
Sharina turned, starting to rise. Zahag exploded in an enraged shriek as loud as metal tearing. He flung the table to the side in a hail of chessmen and grabbed Sharina with hands strong enough to crack walnuts.
Folquin shouted angrily. The guards relaxing against the palace wall leaped to their feet. Most ran toward Sharina, but one in flustered excitement started to string his bow.
Cashel moved without a word or wasted motion. His great hands caught Zahag's forearms, squeezing hard so that the ape couldn't tighten his own grip. Zahag released Sharina and tried to bite Cashel's hand. Cashel snapped his arms apart, still holding the ape. Zahag raked Cashel's belly with the stubby claws on his feet
The ape was frothing with rage; most of the spectators added their voices to the cacophony. Halphemos stood aside, chanting a spell with his eyes on the struggle. His athame beat the air. The wizard's mouth twisted to form ancient syllables; his face was pale.
Guards pushed through the crowd with their short, hook-bladed swords drawn. The leader's helmet had an erne-feather crest. Sharina stepped into their path, her hands raised. "Don't!" she cried. "Let Cashel handle it!"
She knew Cashel could hold Zahag until the ape's fury burned itself out. If nervous swordsmen got involved, there was no telling what would happen.
"Get out of the way!" the leader of the guards shouted, trying to thrust Sharina aside. She grappled with him, twisting his sword arm back. His brass helmet fell to the ground. The folk of Pandah were slightly built, and Sharina had fear as well as her native strength to aid her.
One guard dropped his sword and tried to pull Sharina away from his leader. The others hesitated, unwilling to act in a situation so confused.
Cashel raised Zahag overhead. He flexed to hurl the ape into the wall of the palace. Zahag was much stronger than a man of his size. He'd gotten a grip on Cashel's right wrist and wouldn't be shaken off. Cashel grunted and stepped toward the building, preparing to flail Zahag to jelly when he couldn't simply throw the ape.
"Meueri puripeganux!" Halphemos cried in the sudden stillness. His athame pointed.
The air surrounding Cashel and Zahag shimmered with a soap-bubble iridescence, then flashed red. Ape, man, and a section of the packed clay beneath Cashel's feet vanished.
Sharina and the gaping guards stepped apart. She looked at Halphemos in disbelief.
Halphemos stared horrified at the empty air. "I didn't do that!" he said. "By the Lady, I was just binding them!"
Behind Halphemos the tattooed woman stood up. The ball of her bare foot wiped out the signs she'd drawn on the ground. She walked away while everyone about her babbled in wonder.
The tenement where Ilna had a suite was so flimsily built that its foundations supported three stories rather the two to which walls of normal solidity would have limited the structure. Her rooms—one for her looms, the other for the normal business of life—were on the top floor. The roof above them didn't leak, and Ilna didn't consider that avoiding a walk up stairs was worth paying money for.
The walls and floor of Ilna's rooms were spotlessly clean for the first time in their existence: literally clean enough to eat from. The process had taken her a day and a half of scrubbing, and the odor of the lye she'd used still clung to the plaster.
Ilna thought about the past as her shuttle clattered back and forth across the double loom. She was weaving a thin fabric two ells across. It could be hung in the hall of a mansion—or over the light well of a tenement like this one. She hadn't decided which it would be: an object for sale to a noble who'd pay well for the benison the fabric brought his household, or a gift to some hundreds of people she didn't know and whose willingness to accept squalor disgusted her.
A debt was a debt, whether or not you liked or respected the creditor. The harm Ilna had done with her love charms had touched, directly or indirectly, every person in Erdin. The only present question was whether money or a gift in kind was a better means of repayment.
Ilna didn't think about the future. The past and the sores on her heart were bad enough.
Her instinct pressed the treadle to lift this or that grouping of warp threads into a shed for each pass of the shuttle. Because her mind was on the ship carrying Garric away from her, it was some moments before the subtle details of the pattern she wove reached her consciousness.
Ilna stopped, then ran her fingers over the closely woven cloth. The past, present, and future of the cosmos were a single fabric; and since Ilna os-Kenset came back from Hell, there was no pattern whose knots were hidden from her.
She snorted. During the days she'd been living in the Crescent, she'd managed to convince herself that people were better than she knew full well they were in reality. She'd still taken precautions, of course.
Ilna got up from the loom and put on a cape of dull blue wool. She'd woven the fabric herself; it had the consistency of warm milk. She took the noose made of the fine silk from its peg and concealed it under the cape. In a sense using silk for the purpose was a luxury, but Ilna had never been one to skimp on tools.
The windows were simply openings in the wall. Ilna didn't close and bar the shutters before she went out. The only reason she bothered to lock the door with its two-pin key was that it would seem suspicious if she didn't.
The tenement covered a square block with a light well in the center. There was a staircase in each corner, though the landings were usually choked with refuse.
A boy of ten or twelve loitered in the grubby hallway as Ilna locked her door. The rag wrapped over the boil on his left elbow had been filthy to begin with; now it was a mass of yellowish crystallized pus.
Ilna pretended to ignore the lookout as she strode to the nearer of the two stairwells. She was barely out of sight before she heard him give a piercing whistle.
The staircase was dank and stinking. Children played on it, shrieking excitedly as they jumped up and down over the gap where a tread was missing. They seemed happy enough, though Ilna couldn't imagine why.
Instead of going down to street level, Ilna got out on the second floor and walked to the stairs at the opposite end of the corridor. The passage had no windows of its own and most of the doors to either side were closed. It was like walking through a tunnel, lighted only by the glimmers around warped panels.
A couple were fondling on the landing. The man cursed as Ilna pushed by, climbing back to her own floor. She ignored them the way she ignored the excrement dried on the walls.
Ilna could change the world; she was doing so to the best of her considerable ability. But she couldn't change it all, and she couldn't change it all at once.
She stepped out into the corridor. Her door had been smashed open. The boy with the running sore stood beside the doorway, staring intently toward the stairwell by which Ilna had left. All the other doors on the hallway were shut: her neighbors were making sure that they saw nothing.
Ilna walked softly down the hall. The boy must still have heard the whisper of her bare foot on the boards, because he started to turn as her noose settled around his neck.
Ilna jerked the boy to her, choking the shout in his throat. With the free end of the rope she lashed his wrists and ankles together as though she were trussing a rabbit for market. The boy's eyes were terrified. His face was turning red, but he could still breathe if he pulled his head back to get a little slack in the noose.
Ilna touched an index finger to her lips in warning. Then she stepped to the door of her room.
One of the two husky men inside had his arms full of Ilna's yarn, two wicker hampers with loose-fitting tops. The other stood at the head of the double loom and said, "No, we'll get a lot more for this but we gotta get it apart—"
He saw Ilna in the doorway. "Sister take that useless kid!" he snarled. He pulled a cudgel from beneath his broad leather belt and started for her.
Ilna tugged the cord on the doorjamb, releasing the net of fine silk she'd fastened to the ceiling. It drifted over the thieves like mist on a meadow. Ilna stepped back.
"Sister bite your heart out!" cried the man as he swung his cudgel. The weapon tangled in the meshes, drawing other parts of the net closer about his head and shoulders. A sword would have done much the same: only the very keenest of blades could have cut the elastic fabric instead of being cocooned by it.
The men struggled like locusts caught in a spider's web. After a few moments, both of them fell over.
Ilna reached in carefully and drew out the cudgel which the owner had dropped when he tried to pull the net apart with both hands. He might as profitably have attempted to lift the building. Indeed, he was more likely to pick up this shoddy structure than he was to tear a net Ilna had woven....
"You came for my property," Ilna said, looking down on her captives in cold amusement. "And you're going to leave with some of it: the net. I want you to crawl to the window together and jump out."
"You stupid bitch!" snarled one of the men. "You'd better let us go or—"
Ilna rapped him on the forehead with his own cudgel. The seasoned oak toonked like a maul driving a wedge.
The man's eyes rolled up in their sockets. His body went as limp as an empty sack.
The blow had opened a pressure cut in the man's forehead. Ilna glanced with distaste at the blood on the cudgel, then said to the remaining thief, "All right, you'll carry your friend to the window and jump out with him. If you're skillful, you may be able to cushion your own fall. Understood?"
"Shepherd guard me!" the man whispered with his eyes shut. "Shepherd guard me!"
He maneuvered carefully onto his knees and managed to lift his companion. Ilna judiciously plucked individual meshes away from where they were tangled, choosing each time the point that would have held the thief as he shuffled to the window.
He balanced his companion on the narrow ledge and looked back. "Up and over," Ilna said pleasantly.
It was the expression on her face rather than the waggling cudgel which broke the would-be thief. He lurched forward and disappeared with a despairing cry. Ilna tossed the cudgel after him.
She walked to the doorway, straightening items disarranged by the thieves or their capture. If she'd given them a few minutes more, they'd probably have managed to break the frame of the big loom. Well, it could have been repaired.
Several of the doors on the hallway were open. Heads ducked back when Ilna stepped out, but one frumpish woman continued working at the knots which held the lookout.
"Get away before you manage to strangle him," Ilna snapped. The boy's face was close to purple now.
The woman looked up. "You can't do this to Maidus!" she said. "He's my nephew!"
"Get back into your filthy sty or I'll do a great deal worse to you," Ilna said with a smile as cold as a winter gale.
The woman flinched. She didn't move when Ilna lifted the boy to her shoulder like a sack of grain and carried him, head hanging down behind her to lessen the noose's tension, to her own room.
Ilna loosed the knots as swiftly as she'd tied them, then slipped the noose and coiled the rope in readiness for any further use. The boy, Maidus, lay sobbing on her floor, massaging his throat with his right hand.
A slotted wooden box in the other room kept flies from Ilna's food. She took out the flask of cheap wine she used for sauces and the bone-hilted knife she used for household tasks. With them she returned to the boy.
Maidus squealed in terror as Ilna put a swatch of coarse fabric under his left elbow for a pad. "This is going to hurt," she said as she cut away the foul bandage. She flipped it out the window on the knife point. "Hold still or it'll hurt more."
"What're you—," the boy said. Ilna gripped his arm above and below the elbow, then squeezed the boil empty with the even pressure of both thumbs.
Maidus gaped at her. He didn't scream though, rather to her surprise. She mopped the skin around the boil with a clean comer of the pad. The mass of congealed pus had left a flat-bottomed pit as wide as a fingernail and deep in the boy's flesh.
"This will hurt too," Ilna said. She dribbled acid wine into the wound. Maidus began to whimper. He patted at his tears with his free hand.
Working methodically, Ilna packed the boil with a roll of thin fabric. She left a tag hanging out, then bandaged the work with a ribbon she'd woven in a pattern that would speed healing. She had to search for it; the thieves had jumbled her belongings in a fashion that would take her an hour to reorganize.
Ilna stepped away. "You can get up now, Maidus," she said. "Go home, I suppose. Come back in three days and I'll jerk the tape out."
She smiled at the look in the boy's eyes. "Yes, that'll hurt too," she said "But it'll keep the boil from returning. This is one of those times when the hard way is really best."
Maidus stood up cautiously. There were voices in the hallway, neighbors speaking to one another in frightened whispers. "We didn't know you were a wizard, mistress," he said to Ilna.
"You don't know it now!" she replied. "But I hope your friends and all their friends realize Ilna os-Kenset isn't to be trifled with."
She sniffed. "And I suggest in the future you keep away from those two louts," she added. "Their incompetence should bother you even if their dishonesty doesn't."
Maidus nodded. He glanced toward the door. "I can...?" he said.
"Yes, you can go," Ilna snapped. "But I could use someone to run errands occasionally. If you'd care to do that, come see me in the morning."
"Yes, mistress!" the boy said as he sprinted into the hallway.
"It won't pay very much!" Ilna called after him.
She picked up her door panel, considering the best way to hang it for the time being until she could get a carpenter to replace the hinges.
Not the whole world, and not all at once; but she was making changes.