Ten donkeys with wicker panniers of cloves plodded just ahead of Cashel and Zahag; a similar train was not far behind. Traffic into the city was already brisk, though the sun was still a whisker's breadth beneath the cloudless eastern horizon. Local travelers looked at Cashel and the ape with friendly interest.
Cashel smiled. The pair of them probably looked like buskers planning to entertain in the city's squares. "The strong man and his trained monkey," he murmured to his companion. "Maybe we could earn the price of a meal while we get our bearings."
"Right," the ape said. The breadth of his lips emphasized his sneer. "You can lift a donkey over your head while I explain that you're a rare two-legged ox I captured on a distant island."
Cashel chuckled. "Sorry," he said. "My trained ape."
The limestone gates were twenty feet high. Carvings commemorated something or other, but they were low relief and the stone was too weathered for Cashel to make out more than the fact that they showed figures. The walls were plaster over mud brick. Where the plaster had cracked, crumbled brick dribbled out in rich brown fans.
Fields of cloves and other spices came up close to the city walls. Folk of both sexes tended the crops; leaves bruised during harvesting filled the air with a heady odor.
The scene was wholly alien to Cashel. It didn't make him uncomfortable, but he'd have liked to see...
"Do they have sheep here?" he asked Zahag. "Well, did they have sheep on the Pandah we came from?"
"What do you want with a sheep?" the ape said in amazement. "I've known frogs with more brains than the smartest sheep ever born!"
"I'm used to them, is all," Cashel said apologetically.
Zahag blatted his lips. "That figures," he said. "Well, I never saw a sheep since Halphemos took me from Sandrakkan, and I can't say I'm sorry about that."
All the traffic this early in the morning was toward the city: peddlers carrying garden trucks to markets within the walls, and larger-scale growers bringing spices to the docks for export. The gates constricted the flow, but the guards, wearing kilts and leather caps, appeared ceremonial rather than arrayed against a real threat.
The road bent to pass along the shore for the last fifty paces. Cashel glanced into the harbor as he waited for the congestion ahead to clear. There was an island, a low jut of rock, in the center of the harbor basin. On it was a windowless tower of pink stone that looked more like a confection than it did a real building. Red flames rose from the surrounding water.
"That's a funny thing," Cashel said. "What is it?"
"What's what?" the ape said. He followed Cashel's gesture and shrugged mightily.
"Well how would I know?" he said. "There isn't one like it in the other Pandah. No tower, no island. It's a stupid place for an island anyway. See how the boats have to work around it?"
Traffic shuffled forward. Cashel continued to look at the island. He supposed there was an entrance on the side he couldn't see, but that didn't explain the lack of windows. And where did the flames come from?
A figure appeared on top of the tower—a girl with auburn hair. She was a little thing, a doll of a girl, though pretty enough if you liked dolls. Sharina was slender, but she was nearly as tall as Cashel....
The last of the donkeys clopped over the stone threshold. Cashel started to follow. He could see the houses within, narrow-fronted and three or four stories high. Wooden balconies jutted out from walls covered in pastel plaster.
Cashel eyed the houses uneasily. Streets built as narrow as this one made him feel like he was entering a cave, and he'd always preferred the open air.
"It's them!" said a guard in excitement. He put his lips to the mouthpiece of a set of bagpipes and wheezed a three-note call. Civilians looked surprised, and a donkey brayed a near equivalent to the bagpipes' sound.
Other guards came running, some of them were settling helmets on their heads or refastening sword belts they'd loosened for comfort while seated.
Cashel stopped and set his feet. He missed his quarter-staff. He'd like to hold it crossways in front of him to warn people that he didn't intend to be pushed.
Zahag bared his teeth, snarled, and tried to turn. Guards surrounded them. If Cashel had to fight, he'd grab one of the lightly built local men and use him as a club on his fellows....
An officer with a fish-shaped tin medallion on his leather helmet appeared from a cookshop just up the street, sloshing the last of the wine from the drinking bowl he still held. "Sir!" he cried when he saw Cashel. He noticed the bowl and tossed it down in the street "Sir! Oh, the Mistress God has answered our prayers after all!"
Cashel looked over his shoulder to see if the fellow was talking to somebody on the road behind. Guards were blocking traffic so that the following train of donkeys didn't crowd him and Zahag. One of the men caught Cashel's eye and bowed in salute.
"What's all this about?" Cashel asked. Zahag had calmed; he sat on the packed dirt and searched his fur for fleas. Cashel himself was even more ill-at-ease than before when he'd thought they were being attacked. In a fight he knew how to behave.
The officer, a pudgy little man, was giving instructions to a subordinate. That man ran down the street shouting to be given right-of-way. The officer turned, knelt, and dipped his head to Cashel. "Sir," he said, "our court diviner Tayuta said that a great wizard accompanied by a monkey would appear to rescue Princess Aria."
"I'm not a—" Cashel began.
"I'm not a monkey!" Zahag shrieked. He leaped at the officer.
Cashel caught Zahag by the neck and jerked him back. "Behave!" he thundered. "I'll not have you embarrass me like this!"
Zahag hunched up, chastened. Cashel set the ape down and said, "I'm sorry," to the gaping officer. "He isn't really a man, you see."
"I see indeed," the officer said. He drew himself up—facing Cashel he looked like a sheep trying to be a plow ox—and went on, "Today is the last day before Ilmed comes to claim Aria as his bride. Please, if you'll come with us quickly to the palace? There's very little time."
"I—" Cashel said. He didn't have the faintest notion what the man was talking about. Certainly they couldn't have been waiting for him and Zahag because they'd—
The illogic of what Cashel was thinking froze his tongue. The fellow said some girl was in danger, and it sounded like time was short.
"Let's go," he said.
The officer trotted off with only a hand signal to his men. When the guards ahead and behind pushed the pace, Cashel scooped up Zahag—the ape wasn't built for running—and jogged with him along the narrow streets. Residents of the city crowded to either side of the narrow way, watching them go by with expressions of hope. A little girl and her mother even threw chrysanthemums plucked from a window box.
The streets of Pandah were a mixture of dirt and animal droppings. Cashel was glad of that, because walking—let alone running—on cobblestones or bricks jarred his joints all the way to the base of his skull.
The buildings here probably didn't last very long. The few that were stone-built and genuinely old—temples, all of them; one was circular with pillars on the outside—sat several feet down from the surface of the street and the surrounding structures. The whole city was raising itself on a mound of the last generation's ruins.
Zahag rode on Cashel's back, gripping his waist with feet as flexible as human hands and shifting his weight from side to side as he viewed the city. "Nothing like where we came from," the ape said. He didn't sound concerned, just interested. "The people look pretty much the same, but not the houses or anything else."
Cashel heard bagpipes and trumpets blare ahead of them. The street doglegged to the right—it'd never been much wider than a sheep track—and entered a paved square. There were stone buildings on either hand and a colonnade across the front to join them. At the far end of the pavement was another colonnade, this one on the harborside.
Guards and functionaries wearing bright silk and cotton were spilling from the buildings. They began to cheer when they saw Cashel.
A stately woman came out of the building on the right, wearing a fanlike headdress made of rainbow silk to match her gown. Two handmaids, dressed well but less expensively, attended her. A step behind was a fourth woman in a severe black woolen robe.
The officer of the gate guards, puffing and blowing from the run, saluted her and managed to cry, "Lady Sosia! Your daughter is safe!"
The handmaids babbled in theatrical joy. The woman in the headdress—Sosia, beyond reasonable question—turned and hugged her black-clad companion.
"Pray!" that woman said. Cashel judged her to be older than Sosia by a half a dozen years, though both were middle-aged. "Give thanks to the Mistress God that She sent us both a true sign and a champion!"
Together they sank to their knees. The handmaids threw themselves down on the flagstones as well. It looked awfully uncomfortable to Cashel, who'd stopped at the edge of the pavement.
"Come forward!" the officer said, trembling between deference and haste. "Please, sir! The evil Ilmed may take the princess away at any moment!"
Cashel set the ape down and snarled, "Behave!" Zahag had become his responsibility when he said the ape could join him. Sheep were stupid, right enough, but you didn't have to worry about your ewe biting the queen....
"Sir," said the officer, still struggling to get his breath, "may I have your name? Then I can present you to Sosia, Successor and descendant of She to whom the Mistress God entrusted Pandah when She returned to the heavens."
"There's no need of formalities, Gason," Sosia said. She'd risen with her companion but now bowed to Cashel's increasing embarrassment. "I'm a mother today, not the Successor."
She took Cashel's hands and continued, "Will you come within the palace, sir? We'll get you anything you require for your activities."
"I'm Cashel or-Kenset," Cashel said. "Please don't call me 'sir.' Please, I'm Cashel."
He wanted to jerk his callused hands away from Sosia's amazing delicacy. Nobody in Barca's Hamlet had skin as soft as the Successor's.
The woman in black touched the arms of both Sosia and Cashel. "Come inside please," she said. "I'm Tayuta, Master Cashel. Not a wizard like yourself, but the diviner who foretold your arrival."
They entered the building from which the women had come. Zahag ambled along behind. Cashel supposed that it was best that Zahag be inside where he could keep an eye on him. Now he had to worry about the ape climbing expensive draperies, though—or worse.
The thick double doors were pieced together from small sticks, none of them bigger than Cashel's arm. Pandah must not have big trees, or maybe the folk here just liked the look of cabinetry. Over the wood was bronze filigree, a single pattern repeated over and over again. If Sharina were here, she'd know if it was writing.
Thought of Sharina made Cashel's chest tighten. He'd find her, though.
All the servants must have left the palace at the announcement of Cashel's arrival. Now the pair of handmaids and at least a dozen servants of the ordinary sort rushed in after their mistress and bustled with furniture.
The main part of the building was a single room whose walls and ceiling were painted with geometric patterns in red and blue over a background of brilliantly white lime plaster. There were no tapestries or fabrics, but Cashel thought Ilna would like the interwoven symmetries of the walls.
Sosia sat on a high-backed chair of gilt wood. Tayuta stood behind and whispered in her ear. Cashel looked in confusion at the chair a servant offered him—styled like the Successor's but less ornate and without the gold leaf.
Zahag didn't have Cashel's instincts for politeness. The ape hooted in laughter and said, "Are all you humans stupid? Or do you just need kindling for a fire? That's all you'll have if my chief sits on that flimsy toy!"
"I'll stand," Cashel said. "I, ah... Look, what do you want me to do? So I can do it and go find my friend. Friends."
Sosia and Tayuta exchanged glances. "My daughter Aria was born eighteen years ago," Sosia said without further delay. "Eighteen years ago this evening. Three days later a man who called himself Ilmed appeared in my chamber. And I mean appeared; the usher swore he didn't enter by the doorway."
"I wasn't on Pandah at the time," Tayuta said. She stroked Sosia's hair below the splendid fan of Silk. "Poor dear Sosia didn't have anyone skilled in the art to help her."
Cashel grunted. He didn't much like the airs Tayuta was giving herself. Also he couldn't help wondering who Aria's father was—and where he'd been when wizards were walking into the palace.
"So, you're a wizard?" he said to Tayuta with no more expression than a stone wall has.
Tayuta's lips tightened. She clasped her hands at her waist. "No," she said in a steady voice, "I'm not. I've studied the art, but my only ability is to divine the future. I foretold your arrival, Master Cashel, but I can be of no direct help to the Successor."
Cashel scowled at his own behavior. He hadn't any business getting his back up just because Tayuta had a good opinion of herself. "Look, I'm just Cashel," he said. "I herd sheep."
A pair of servants entered the room with trays of fruit and drinks. Zahag bounced toward them by leaping through his long arms. He reached up and began cramming his mouth with refreshments from both trays simultaneously.
The servants goggled. One of the handmaids cried "Stop that!" and stepped toward the ape.
"That's quite all right, Ivris!" Sosia said. "I'll tell you when I need someone to decide how food should be served in my presence."
The handmaid looked, stricken. She ran out of the room, blubbering into her hands.
Cashel stood a little straighter. The girlhad been wasting time when there wasn't much to waste, but Cashel didn't like to see one person treat another like a fool even though it was deserved. He knew folks would do that to him if it wasn't that he was so big.
"Ilmed said he'd decided my daughter was to be his bride," Sosia continued as though nothing had happened. "They'd be betrothed at once, but the marriage wouldn't be performed until Aria became eighteen. He was a powerful wizard, so we should feel honored—he said."
She smiled coldly at the memory. "I was in a bad temper from the pain," she said—and Cashel could imagine she had been, three days after giving birth. "I told the servants to flog Ilmed within an inch of his life and throw him into the harbor. Instead he disappeared. Into thin air."
Zahag shambled between Cashel and the women, slurping white fluid from a glazed cup. The contents were too thin for milk, even if it had been skimmed. Some sort of sap or juice, Cashel guessed.
"That night at full moon," Sosia continued, "Ilmed returned. I watched him but I couldn't move. None of us could move. He had several monsters with him."
"Scaled Men," Tayuta said. "They're the size of normal men, but—"
"I know the scaly men," Cashel said. "They took the baby, then?"
The diviner fell silent. For the first time her expression was ringed with surprise as well as respect for the power she hoped Cashel could wield.
"Yes," said Sosia. "They took Aria. When we could move again, there was an island in the middle of the harbor and a tower on it. The flames surrounding the island come out of the water, but they burn anything they touch—wood, metal; stone even. And flesh. We've tried everything over the years, but we can't pass through the flames to rescue Aria."
"As the child grew older," Tayuta said, "we saw her sometimes on top of the tower. At first with one of the Scaled Men, but more recently alone."
"Nowadays she comes out very rarely," Sosia said. "I saw her today, but only for a moment. I'm afraid that after today I'll never see my daughter again."
A tremble broke through Sosia's wall of control, though she didn't let emotion wholly defeat her. Ilna would understand this woman....
And with that realization, Cashel understood Sosia as well.
"I'd help you if I could," he said. "But mistress, I don't know what I can do. I'd—"
He turned up his big hands. "Mistress, if it was a demon to fight, I'd, well, I've done that. But I can't wrestle a fire."
"You spun your wand," Tayuta said, her eyes focused on a memory. "I saw you in the water of my bowl. Your wand carved a path through the wall of fire. It closed behind you and I could see no more."
"A wand?" Cashel said in surprise. "Do you mean my quarterstaff? But I don't have it with me here, it's back with Sharina."
He frowned. Had it been lost when the Lady of Mercy disappeared?
He was shocked to realize that he was more concerned about a piece of wood than he was for Sharina and his other friends, but he was sure they would be all right. The staff was a thing he'd shaped himself when he was only a boy; and in a real sense, creating that solid tool was also the creation of a man named Cashel or-Kenset.
Zahag fluttered his lips in mockery. "Do you think they don't have trees on Pandah big enough for you to wave?" the ape said to Cashel. "Use the mast of a ship, then! That ought to be your size, shouldn't it?"
The women looked at one another. The handmaid who'd run out of the room had returned, her eyes dry though a little reddened.
"Oh," said Cashel. "I didn't think of that. There'd be a flagstaff that balances right, I guess. Sure."
He laced his fingers together and hunched his shoulders, loosening his muscles for use. "Well, mistress," Cashel said, "I'll try what I can do."
He wondered whether this Ilmed would be in the tower or just the princess alone. A fellow who'd steal a little baby, well, he deserved whatever happened to him, didn't he?
Zahag scrambled back in sudden fear as he saw the expression on Cashel's face.
The guard rattled back the sliding door for Sharina, causing the two prisoners within to blink in the light of the setting sun. The prison's pair of tiny windows were in the east wall, behind the men.
"There he is, mistress," the guard said. "The other one's old Demito. Watch out that he don't upchuck last night's wine on you. He's usually lost it by this time of the morning."
"Mistress Sharina?" Halphemos said in surprise. "Oh, you shouldn't have come here, mistress. This is a foul place."
And so it was, though Sharina had seen worse. A girl brought up in a country hamlet doesn't get squeamish about filth, at least not after she's helped butcher a hog for the first time. She ducked her head and stepped inside.
The prison was a brick shed whose interior had been dug down several feet to rock. A stone bench ran the length of the long side opposite me door. There were leg irons in the floor and manacles set into the wall above the bench.
"Mostly we just get sailors from the foreign ships," the guard said apologetically. "Local people, they work off their crime to the victim. Or they're chopped, of course, if it was a man-killing and they can't pay the fine."
The prisoners—a drunk sagging against one end wall and Halphemos on the other—sat on the bench. Their left wrists were clamped to the wall and both ankles hobbled to the floor. They could feed themselves with their free hands, but their only possible movement was to slide a few inches to one side or the other along the bench.
"Master Halphemos," Sharina said in a cool voice, "your friend Cerix has sent you a scroll of hymns to the Lady. I suggest you use it while I share a skin of wine with your warder. He's kindly allowed you to read until sunset for your soul's sake."
Halphemos looked dumbfounded, as well he might. In Barca's Hamlet people were conventionally religious. Folk might not put much faith in the mealtime sprinkle of cheese and beet at the household shrine, but almost everybody did it—and though people muttered about the tithe to the Great Gods, they paid that also when the priests from Carcosa came through the borough once a year.
Cerix had a fierce disbelief in the gods. It was as much a matter of faith for the crippled wizard as a hermit's simple piety had been for Nonnus—and for Sharina now, in memory of the man who had died to protect her. Cerix was the least likely of anyone on Pandah to offer Halphemos a roll of hymns.
The guard had been friendly enough—as he should be, since Sharina had handed over the skin of wine she'd brought. He nonetheless watched to make sure that Sharina didn't pass the prisoner a file or a lockpick in addition to the parchment scroll. He'd opened the scroll, not to read—though the first ten columns were hymns to the Lady, just as Sharina said—but to make sure there was nothing concealed inside the parchment.
Nodding curtly to the prisoner, Sharina squelched up the three steps to ground level. The guard slammed the door shut behind her and set the pin in the heavy bar.
She'd wash her feet in the sea when their vessel got under way with the evening tide. "Have you sampled the wine?" she asked the guard brightly.
"Not yet, mistress," the man said. "Let's sit down and be comfortable in my hut."
The guard didn't have the keys to the prisoners' irons. If most of those held were sailors, there was an obvious risk that crewmates would attack the guard and use any keys he held to release their fellow. The leg irons in particular were so sturdy than any attempt to smash the locks open would be likely to crush the ankle as well.
Cerix had erased the text from the inner spindle of the scroll, creating a palimpsest on which he'd written an incantation in both Old Script and the square modern forms of the letters. Halphemos couldn't read Old Script, but he could copy the symbols onto the bench's slimy surface and speak the syllables as given in their phonetic equivalent.
Cerix wrote with a clean, legible hand even when he was in haste and in pain. Sharina wondered if he'd been a copyist before he became a wizard and a drug-sodden cripple.
The guard's kiosk beside the prison shed had a stool, a table, and a small brazier for heating food or mulling wine, but no bed and very little space. Sharina supposed another man took over, possibly at nightfall, but she hadn't wanted to risk a direct question that might seem suspicious.
The guard offered Sharina the stool and unstoppered the wine. It was a strong vintage from Shengy, laced with resin for travel. Sharina had crumbled a pellet of Cerix's drug into it. "You first," Sharina said to the unspoken question.
The guard took a long drink, his throat wobbling, then lowered the skin. "Ah!" he said with approval, handing the wine to Sharina. He frowned and with different emphasis said, "Ah? I don't have mugs, mistress. We could maybe...?"
He looked doubtfully down the street. The lockup was among the warehouses on the harbor south of the residential parts of the city. There were a number of laden donkeys and human bearers even this late in the evening, but Sharina hadn't seen a tavern or cookshop when she made her way here.
"No, this is fine," she said, lifting the wooden mouthpiece to her lips. She plugged the opening with the tip of her tongue and pretended to drink as deeply as the guard had.
"What do you care about this fellow in there?" the guard asked as he gratefully retrieved the wineskin. He leaned forward and added conspiratorially, "I hear he tried to murder the king by wizardry!"
"I think it was an accident," Sharina said calmly. A bat fluttered low around the eaves of a nearby warehouse, then vanished into the night. The sky was still bright, but she doubted that Halphemos could see to read inside the prison anymore. "Anyway, it was my companion who vanished. And I doubt he was really harmed. Just sent away until I can find him again."
She gave the guard a false smile. In her mind she prayed, Lady, Mistress of Heaven, be with Cashel. Shepherd, Protector of All Life, protect Cashel as he protected his flocks.
The wineskin gurgled like a hungry man's belly as the guard drank again. He belched in satisfaction before he returned the skin to Sharina.
In the stillness Sharina heard, "...esmigaddon maarchama kore..." The shed's walls were thick, but Halphemos was shouting to force the words out against the inertia of the cosmos.
"Your job seems so exciting to me!" Sharina twittered in a bright voice. She hoped she wasn't overdoing it, but she had to say something quickly to conceal the young wizard's chanting. "Do you often have traitors to watch in your jail here?"
"Traitors?" the guard repeated in puzzlement. "Oh, you mean like this one, trying to murder the king. No, we don't—I mean, not very often. But we get lots of dangerous sorts here, you're right."
A rosy glow emanated through the bricks of the prison shed. Inside, the wards of the hand and leg irons clinked into alignment.
"You're very brave," Sharina said. She tried to pass back the wineskin though she hadn't mimed another drink. "I—"
The pin locking the prison door clanged to the ground. The drunk sharing the bench with Halphemos bellowed in terror. The guard leaped to his feet, also shouting. He snatched up his weapon, a club with a spiked iron collar around the end.
The crossbar crawled sideways. Nothing touched it except a tremble of magenta light. It slipped out of its staples and fell.
The door panel began to open. The guard raised his club and faced the door, though his face was twisted in a rictus of fear. Sharina picked up the stool by one leg and stepped behind the man, ready to club him senseless before he could strike Halphemos.
A figure of red light shambled up from the cell. It had the shape of the ape Zahag, but it was as large as an ox. Through the glowing semblance Sharina could see the jail and Halphemos himself. The wizard chanted, gesturing with the closed scroll in place of a proper wand.
The guard gave a great bawl of fear. He tried to run but his feet tangled and he toppled backward, losing his club.
The figure of light expanded like a smoke ring thrown out when a knot cracks in a fire. Sharina stood for an instant in a rosy ambience which then vanished.
Halphemos climbed the steps, wobbling with exertion. He tried to slide the scroll within the neckline of his tunic but be missed his intent; Sharina snatched the falling parchment with one hand and supported Halphemos with the other. It was reflex: a book was too valuable a thing to lose, even though as a tool it had already fulfilled its purpose.
"Quickly!" she said; half-guiding, half-pulling the exhausted wizard in the direction of Dock Street. Cerix had booked passage on a ship leaving for Erdin. There was nothing important about the destination, only that the vessel was leaving on the evening tide.
Sharina glanced over her shoulder as they turned the corner. The guard still lay on the ground, supporting his torso with his arms. He stared at the open prison door and bleated wordlessly.
The mist over the lagoon reminded Garric of those he'd seen rise on a thousand still mornings from swales in the meadows of the borough; but this was changeless. The sun would never brighten to burn off the haze, nor would a breeze come in from the sea to tear it to rags and wisps.
Wraithlike figures stood on floats made of bundled reeds to fish in the lagoon. Even Garric's keen eyes found it hard to tell whether individuals were human or Ersa if they were more than a hundred yards away. The Gulf had fixed limits, but at least for now there was room for both races to live without conflict.
"Maybe it's this place," Liane said quietly. Either she'd understood the thought behind Garric's glance and grim expression, or the same thing had occurred to her. "This green light makes me feel cold all the way to my bones. When we get people back to the real world, then they'll be..."
Garric looked at her, wondering what word Liane would settle on. Better? Happier? Decent?
Instead she grinned sadly. "Well, we can hope they will," she said, unable to complete the thought any better than Garric could have.
"The Gulf was created for a group of Ersa by one of their own kind," Tenoctris said. She looked at the roofless shanties of the human community with the same dispassionate interest that she showed for the forest's unique vegetation. "It should suit them better than it does humans, but I'm not sure it suits them perfectly either. The older I get—and at this point that's over a thousand years—"
She grinned. Liane hugged her.
"The older I get," Tenoctris resumed, "the more convinced I become that no wizard who had understanding equal to his power would do anything through wizardry. That was probably true of the Ersa who created this place, too."
Folk sitting in front of their shelters turned their faces away as Garric walked by with his companions, but they watched covertly from behind. Garric waved to a pair of women crushing roots in a mortar cut from a large tree trunk. They bent their heads and pounded faster, losing their previous rhythm and fouling each other's pestle strokes.
"How about yourself?" Garric asked. "You haven't made things worse. Not that I've seen."
Tenoctris laughed. "While I don't claim complete understanding," she said, "my powers as a wizard are so trivial by comparison to what I know that I suppose I'm a special case. I hope I am, at any rate."
They were nearing Rodoard's compound. The gate was closed, but a messenger had run ahead when Garric and his companions came in sight of the community.
The dwellings to either side of Rodoard's own belonged to his henchmen, toughs who'd arrived recently and had been allowed to live. They were alert, standing in their doorways with their weapons in hand. They met Garric's eyes but glared back in stony silence to his smiles.
Infants who'd earlier been playing in the mud peered now through the interstices of their woven shelters. Their mothers watched also, occasionally shadowing the palings as they moved.
When Garric's hand closed on his sword hilt, be felt King Carus swell in his mind until there were two of them, Garric and his ancestor, filling the same skin. He drew the blade with the liquid sring! of good steel flexing minutely. Othelm, the former sailor who'd have tried to take the sword on the beach if he dared, raised his huge club but jumped back.
Garric struck the gong with his pommel. The bronze bonged a deep bass note about which the swordblade whispered a descant.
"I have good news, Rodoard!" Garric called to the king's closed gate. "We can escape from here after all!"
He turned and waved to the community at large. The signal was bringing folk from their shelters and the nearby forest. Those born in the Gulf wouldn't look directly at the three newcomers, but they moved closer in a process as gradual as that of syrup soaking into coarse cloth.
Garric struck the gong a second time. "Come on out!" he said, knowing that his voice could be no more than a modulation of the metallic clangor.
One leaf of the gate jerked inward. Rodoard stood in the opening wearing helmet, breastplate, and his sword. He held the demi-guisarme at the butt and balance of its short shaft.
Rodoard's face was bleak with fury.
Garric stepped back. Rodoard swung his weapon in a high arc, past Garric rather than at him. The heavy blade sheared the crossbar as well as the cords holding the gong to it. The disk spun away and splashed to the ground. Mud quickly choked the quivering bronze to silence.
"I let you live, boy," the king said in an expressionless voice, "because I thought you might be useful. Maybe I was wrong, do you think?"
Colored smoke began to rise from the compound. Lunifra hadn't appeared, but Garric heard her voice from behind the palings as a chanting rhythm. At each syllable the smoke swelled, then compressed, as though it were the membrane of a beaten drum.
"This is good news, Your Majesty," Garric said. "My friend Tenoctris has found the key that opens the door out of the Gulf. The Ersa will let us use it to return to the waking world. All of us!"
Garric had known there was risk in taking a strong line with Rodoard, but the depth of the king's anger was unexpected. Still, if he'd gone to Rodoard pleadingly, Rodoard would have bullied him instead of listening to his proposal. By arriving with a sword in his hand, Garric forced Rodoard to treat him as an equal.
"So," said Rodoard, so close to Garric that either of them could reach out and pull the other's nose. "You've been dealing with the Ersa, have you? What did you offer the animals, Garric or-Reise?"
People were easing closer. The Gulf-born folk kept to the back so that they could scamper away if fighting started. Rodoard's henchmen were uncomfortably near. A part of Garric's mind remembered whirling, slashing melees in which the King of the Isles had cut his way out of similar presses, but the King of the Isles had never had to guard a girl and an old woman....
Garric threw his head back and laughed. He couldn't save Liane and Tenoctris from so large a crowd of enemies. Therefore he wouldn't try: he'd strike off Rodoard's head and then hew his way into the mob of brutes and thugs until they brought him down.
You did what you could. Leaving fewer of such folk in the world was a benefit to everyone else.
Garric lowered his sword crosswise and pinched the tip of the blade between his left thumb and forefinger in order to look a little less threatening—without sheathing the weapon. His laughter had surprised Rodoard.
"All I offered the Ersa was the chance to be shut of us," Garric said, pitching his voice to be heard to the back of the crowd. "What I offer you—"
He turned to sweep the folk behind him with his eyes.
"All of you!" he cried. "All of us! Is the chance to see the sun again, the chance to feel a breeze and to be free! As nobody in this green underworld can ever be free."
Tenoctris had knelt and was drawing in the mud with her left index firiger. She held a pulpy twig for a wand.
Liane stood between Tenoctris and the crowd. Her arms were crossed before her, the hands within the opposite sleeves. Three of Rodoard's henchmen were almost—but not quite—so close they touched her.
"So," said Rodoard. His voice was high-pitched for so big a man. He sounded peevish. Unlike Garric, he hadn't called sheep across the rolling dales and learned the trick of projecting his words. "Othelm, are you in a hurry to go back to Erdin? And Bassis? Do you suppose they've forgotten about you in Valles? Not to mention what you've done here!"
Fishermen whom the gong had called from the lagoon poled their floats up on the muddy shore. In some of the wicker creels flopped bottom-dwelling fish with armored heads. The men used wooden gigs with springy jaws that clamped to either side of their target rather than spitting it. With little metal and no stone to work with, these were better tools than true spears would be.
"How about the rest of you?" Rodoard cried. He'd regained his good humor, but there was a layer of enormous menace beneath his shouted banter. "Josfred, do you want to go to a place where the sun will burn the hide off you and you'll freeze in the winter—if you live that long?"
Tenoctris whispered as her wand flickered over the circle of power she'd drawn. To anyone else, even those who, like Garric and Liane, could read the Old Script, the symbols were no more than wormtracks in the mud.
"I've made you kings of the Ersa who enslaved you!" Rodoard said. "I've put your feet on their beast necks! Do you want—"
A child screamed inside the compound, a knife of sound that cut through his harangue. Rodoard didn't look around, though his face set in a scowl of anger at the interruption.
"Do you want—" he repeated.
The gate behind Rodoard was still open. A child of three or four years ran out, streaming blood from wounds in throat and abdomen. The child collided with Rodoard's legs and flopped onto the ground, thrashing as its heart pumped its body completely dry. Lunifra stood in the doorway, bathed in dark blood that had spurted from the child's carotid arteries.
Lunifra was naked. She held a knife of volcanic glass, and her smile was the gate to the Underworld. Because of the way the child had been mutilated, Garric couldn't tell which sex it had been.
Garric cut at Rodoard's ankles. The king leapt back as he tried to clear his demi-guisarme, but his feet tangled with the child's corpse. His mouth opened in a shout of disbelief as Garric's blade crunched through with the sureness of a hand used to jointing roasts for the inn's kitchen.
The cold fury that strengthened Garric's stroke would have taken the edge through Rodoard's thighbone as certainly as it cut the ankles' cartilage. This pair would kill no more children for their blood magic!
Othelm squealed, clasping both hands over the wound beneath his ribs. Liane flicked her bloody dagger toward the face of the other thug trying to grapple with her. He dodged the jab. Garric's blade lifted the thug's scalp and a disk of his skull beside.
The palisade sank into a mass of writhing fibers. The wood formed into a serpent three feet in diameter and as long as the stockade had been. Lunifra laughed hysterically. The wooden tail to Garric's left squirmed. The other end rose from the ground, gaping like a lamprey's circular mouth.
The crowd, Rodoard's henchmen as well as the Gulf-born folk, scrambled back in horror. Garric raised his sword, using the extra length of his hilt to add the strength of both arms to a cut that he knew would be useless.
The jaws of splintered wood engulfed Lunifra, then flexed closed. Because the jagged teeth were rotating, they flung her right and left feet in opposite directions. She screamed briefly.
Tenoctris collapsed from the effort of her incantation. Garric scooped her up in his left hand, in his haste holding Tenoctris more like a swatch of wet drapery than a cherished friend. All the community's residents were running. The thing of wood and wizardry writhed like an earthworm on hot stone.
"This way!" Liane said, pointing toward the lagoon. A coil of the wooden serpent swept toward her mindlessly. She leaped it with no more hesitation than a child playing a game.
Garric followed Liane, holding his sword high so that he didn't accidentally stab himself. He thought of his father shouting the day he'd seen Garric run with a sickle in his hands. This was far more dangerous, but there wasn't time to wipe and sheathe the bloody weapon.
The snake of animate wood clamped its jaws on its tail and began to swallow itself. Brown and yellow shreds spun from the mouth's rim. A network of strengthening fibers wove through the pulp of vegetation here in the Gulf, very different from the division of heart and sapwood Garric was used to.
Liane climbed aboard the largest of the fishing floats, three long bundles of reeds bent up at the ends and lashed together. She lifted the pole that propelled the vessel.
Garric dropped Tenoctris in the hollow of the float, checked to make sure no one was immediately behind him, and thrust his sword through the side of the outer bundle to keep it from slashing anybody. As soon as he had a moment he'd clean and dry the blade, then use the whetstone in the scabbard to bring the tip back to a working edge. Rodoard's ankles wouldn't have dulled the good steel, but the bone of the other thug's skull was another matter....
Garric leaned his weight against the stem of the float. His feet slipped in the mud; he dug his toes in and lifted, then pushed again. The float slid into the lagoon, bobbing much lower in the water than it ought to do. It was made for a single slight-bodied resident of the Gulf. Liane and Tenoctris together were more than its safe capacity.
Garric waded out, pushing the float, until his feet came off the slimy bottom. He began to kick, pushing the tiny vessel as Liane thrust with her pole over the stern past him.
"Make for the other side!" he said. He paused to spew out the muddy water he'd splashed into his own mouth, then added, "We've got to reach the Ersa before these humans get organized!"
One of the king's henchmen waded a few steps into the lagoon and threw his spear. It splashed within arm's reach of Garric. He continued to kick, ignoring everything but the need to cross the lagoon to temporary safety.
Tenoctris spoke to Liane. Garric heard her voice but his thrashing feet overwhelmed the words. The wizard was coming around again, thank the Shepherd. Garric knew that Tenoctris could never have raised a monster like the one devouring itself on the shore, but even the effort of redirecting Lunifra's powerful incantation must have brought the old woman to the boundaries of her strength.
When Garric raised his head he could see that Ersa on triangular floats were putting out from the other shore. The figures aboard them carried spears that he didn't think were fishing implements.
The Ersa were taking precautions, but nothing they could do would be sufficient if the human settlement got organized enough to attack. Garric could only hope that it would be days or at least hours for that to—
"Go wipe out the beasts now!" Rodoard screamed, his voice piping even higher with the pain of his amputated feet. A cut with a sharp edge, especially at a joint, was likely to clamp shut instead of bleeding the victim's life quickly on the ground. Garric realized he should have—
A murderously rational mind at the back of Garric's own slammed silence on that train of thought. "There wasn't time to do anything but what was necessary—and you did that, no one better."
"Kill them all!" Rodoard keened. "Kill them all before they work their wizardry against us!"
Garric kicked, concentrating on only what was necessary. And as soon as he reached shore he'd do the next necessary thing: he'd clean and sharpen his sword.