The Fortress of Glass: Chapter Four

    A dog ran out of the gateway and began yapping as Garric and Scarface approached. It was black with a white belly and paws, medium sized and non-descript. Scarface sent a clod of dirt at it, catching the dog neatly in the ribs. It yelped and bolted back into the village, brushing the wizard on the way. He staggered and might’ve fallen if the woman accompanying him hadn’t tightened her grip.

    “That’s the first animal we’ve seen,” Carus said with a frown. “There hasn’t been a cow, let alone a horse. There hasn’t even been a chicken!”

    Garric grinned. His ancestor knew could order a battle or site an ambush, things that not even the most educated of peasants could’ve been expected to know. That didn’t mean that peasants knew nothing, however.

    Their feet’d rot, Garric explained. Back in the borough we couldn’t pasture the flock in the bottomland for more than a week at a time or their hooves’d get spongy. The clothes here’re fiber, not wool, and I’d guess they eat a lot of fish with their vegetables.

    The two men on top of the gate came down a ladder inside the stockade. The trumpeter stepped out of the way, but the fellow wearing a feather robe joined the wizard and his woman. They exchanged brief glances; not hostile, exactly, but cold enough to imply rivalry rather than friendship.

    When Scarface reached the mound on which the village stood, he touched Garric on the chest to halt him and stepped forward to talk to the chief. The wizard waited with the big topaz in the crook of his right arm, wearing a disdainful expression. The woman eyed Garric with frank appraisal.

    “Well, that one likes what she sees or I miss my bet,” Carus said with a chuckle. “And I don’t, because I saw her sort often enough myself back in the days when I wore flesh.”

    Garric glanced at the woman, then looked away. He tried to hide his feeling of disgust, but he felt his lip curl despite him.

    It wasn’t that she was unattractive, but she had a dirty air that went well beyond the simple physical grime inevitable in a village on a mud bank. The woman Katchin the Miller, Cashel’s uncle, had married was much the same sort. Katchin had been a boastful, grasping, unpleasant man, but over the years Garric had come to feel that the dance Katchin’s wife led him was sufficient punishment for all the man’s flaws.

    After listening to Scarface for some while, the chief gestured him aside and glared at Garric in what was probably supposed to be an intimidating fashion. Since Garric was taller by half a head, that didn’t work very well. The edges of the chief’s cloak were worn, and the feathers seemed to be a jumble of anything that could be netted or trapped with birdlime.

    The chief raised his hands high in the air and began a speech, his voice cracking repeatedly. He held an edged club the length of his arm, a sort of wooden sword. It could be a dangerous weapon, but the blade of this one was carved with a complex knotted pattern.

    Lowering his arms, the chief tapped himself on the chest with his free hand and said, “Wandalo! Wandalo!”

    There was a fair chance he was giving his name rather than saying, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” Garric touched his own chest and said, “Garric. My name is Garric.”

    The wizard spoke, then raised the topaz slightly. He gestured with it toward the chief, who backed a step with an unhappy grimace.

    The wizard looked at Garric and said, “Marzan.” He touched his own chest and repeated, “Marzan!” He then spoke imperiously to Scarface and turned.

    Scarface shrugged uncomfortably. He made a little gesture with his free hand, indicating that Garric should follow the wizard who was stumping back into the village with the woman’s help. She looked over her shoulder at Garric.

    “This lot don’t like wizards any better than I do,” muttered the ghost of King Carus.

    Fortunately, thought Garric as strode after Marzan, I don’t have that prejudice myself. Because I can’t imagine how we’ll get back to our own place and time without the help of a wizard.

    The village stockade was a single row of tree trunks sunk into the soil and sharpened on the upper end. An earthen platform on the inside gave defenders a two-foot height advantage over anyone attacking, but there were no towers or arrow slits. Garric realized he hadn’t seen bows or any other missile weapon.

    Carus snorted when he realized that the palings weren’t pinned together. “With six strong men and a rope I can pull down a hole wide enough to roll wagons through!” he said. “I’m not sure I’d bother with anything beyond a straight rush by a company of my skirmishers, though.”

    There were about two dozen oval houses with shake roofs and walls of lime plaster on a wicker framework. Each was raised a foot or so on posts; the ground was sodden already, and in a bad storm there must be a serious risk of flooding.

    The windows had shutters, but most of them were open. In some birds on long tethers chirruped at Garric, nervous at the sight of a stranger. Fine-meshed fishnets hung under the shelter of the eaves.

    The streets--the paths that twisted between the buildings--were paved with clamshells. Shells were probably the source of the plaster too; nowhere since he’d arrived in this land had Garric seen outcrops of stone that could be burned for lime. The quality of the woodwork was impressive, particularly because the people didn’t have metal tools, and he thought Ilna would’ve been interested in their skill with cords and fabrics.

    Marzan and the woman led Garric to one of a pair of houses in the center of the village. Both were enclosed by waist-high openwork fences, adornments rather than meant for privacy or protection. Gnarled wisteria grew over one side of the fence around Marzan’s compound, but it wasn’t blooming at this time of year.

    The woman opened the pole crossbar and stepped aside for the wizard to enter. As he shuffled past her into the compound, she looked at Garric and said, “Soma!” She touched her chest, then grinned widely and lifted the top of thin, waterproof cloth to show her breast before she followed Marzan.

 

---

 

    Garric’s face was set as he closed the bar after him. He heard Wandalo speaking at a distance and looked back. The top of the chief’s head was just visible over the house roofs. He must be standing on the platform above the gate to harangue the villagers whom he’d called from the fields.

    Garric wished he knew what Wandalo was saying. Though based on what he’d seen of the man and of rulers of Wandalo’s type elsewhere, he probably wasn’t missing much.

    Garric had to duck under Marzan’s doorway, but the hut’s ceiling was generously high. Light came not only by the windows but through the roof itself: the shakes were placed in overlapping strips with air spaces between. The design wouldn’t work in high winds, so the current vertical drizzle must be the normal state of affairs.

    The floor was of planks fitted with narrow gaps between them to deal with roof leaks and tracked-in mud. There were couches on both long walls. In the center of the room a small fire burned on an open hearth of clay laid in a wooden framework. There was no chimney, just the louvered roof: the three of them disturbed the air when they entered, making Garric’s nose wrinkle at the swirl of sharp smoke.

    Marzan seated himself cross-legged near the hearth and motioned Garric down across from him. Garric squatted, the usual method of sitting in Barca’s Hamlet when there weren’t chairs. Soma went to the other end of the hut and took baskets from a pantry cabinet made of joined reeds.

    The wizard placed his topaz carefully on the floor in front of him where strips of darker wood were inlaid into the planks. They formed a hexagon with the yellow stone in its center.

    Marzan smirked at Garric and removed the longest of the three black feathers from his headdress. Using that as a pointer—as a wand—he touched it to the corners of the figure in turn as he chanted, “Nerphabo kirali thonoumen....”

    The topaz glowed. The light at its heart was faint but brighter than the dimness of the rain-washed hut. Flaws in the stone became shadows that moved.

    “Oba phrene mouno...,” the wizard said. He was using words of power, addressing beings that were neither humans nor gods but formed a bridge between them. “Thila rikri ralathonou!”

    Garric had always thought of the words of power as things which a wizard read. Marzan was illiterate—there was no sign of writing in this community—but he rattled off the syllables in the same sing-song voice as Tenoctris used to chant the spells she’d written in the curving Old Script.

    The cultured, scholarly Lady Tenoctris was part of the same fabric as this savage who probably didn’t understand the concept of writing. Different from them on the surface but at heart the same nonetheless were Cashel and Ilna. Their mother, a fairy queen or something stranger yet, had passed to them the ability to see the patterns which formal wizardry affected through spells and words of power.

    Here in humid gloom lighted by the glow in the heart of a yellow stone, Garric had a brief glimpse of the cosmos interconnected and perfect. Do Ilna and Cashel always see this? he wondered; but there was no way to answer the question, and perhaps the question had no answer.

    “Bathre nothrou nemil...,” Marzan chanted. “Nothil lare krithiai....”

    The shadows in the topaz moved faster. Garric felt them grip him the way they had when he stared into the diadem on First Atara. Instead of drawing him down this time, the motion sucked a face up from the yellow depths of the stone.

    A cat, he thought, but the forehead was too high and the jaw was shorter than a beast’s. The image opened its mouth in a silent snarl; the teeth at least were a cat’s, the long curving daggers of a carnivore. The eyes were larger than a man’s and perfectly round. The pupils were vertical slits.

    “Corl,” a voice in Garric’s mind. The wizard’s mouth continued to chant the words of power.

    Marzan’s chant was a barely heard backdrop, a rhythm outside the crystalline boundaries of the stone. The cat-faced image drew back to show Garric the whole creature: two-legged and as tall as a man, but lithe and as quick as light playing on the waves of the sea. It wore a harness but no clothing; a coat of thin, brindled fur covered its body. In its four-fingered left hand was a bamboo spear with a point of delicately flaked stone; in its right was a coil with weighted hooks on the end.

    The cat man leaped onto a vaguely seen landscape from a fissure in the ground. Garric couldn’t tell whether the fog shrouding the figure was real or a distortion of the stone which the wizard used for scrying. A second of the creatures followed the first, then three more. They loped across the sodden landscape, moving in quick short leaps rather than striding like men walking.

    The cat men were armed with spears or axes with slim stone heads, along with the hook-headed cords. They formed a widely spaced line abreast as they vanished into the mist. The images faded.

    “Coerli,” said the voice in Garric’s mind as Marzan chanted. “Coerli....”

    Garric’s mind had never left the boundaries of the crystal. A new image formed around him, a series of planting beds like those around this village. Oats grew on the nearest. The grain was still dark green, but it’d reached the height of the adults’ chests and must be near its full growth.

    It was late evening, and with their tools in their hands the villagers were moving toward the walkway that led to the walled community. A family—man, woman, and a quartet of children ranging from five to ten years old—had been cultivating the nearest bed. All carried hoes with clamshell blades, but the father had a spear as well.

    Coerli came out of a grove of scale-barked trees, their long, narrow feet kicking up splashes of water. Their jaws were open and probably shrieking something, but Marzan’s chant filled Garric’s ears like the surf roaring in a heavy storm.

    The youngest child was in the lead. She stopped transfixed and pointed; the hoe fell from her hand. Her mother clouted her on the side of the head and grabbed her wrist, dragging the girl with her along the narrow walkway.

    The two boys and the eldest child, another girl, followed, their light capes flapping like bat wings. The walkway swayed but held, and the people running didn’t slip on the wet wood.

 

---

 

    The father ran toward the wider walkway the led from the village to the solid ground where the Coerli had been hiding. He got to it just as the cat men reached the other end. There were five of them, perhaps the same band Marzan had shown Garric in the first scene.

    Terror drew the skin of the father’s face taut over the bones. Villagers who’d been in the other planting beds continued running for the stockade; no one tried to help the family whom the Coerli had chosen.

    The human waggled his spear, then hurled it. The leading Corl dodged, then leaped and batted the man into the pond with a swipe of his axe. The motion was swifter and smoother than the spear’s wobbling flight.

    As the father fell, the Corl made another great leap along the walkway and snapped out his weighted line. It curled over the heads of the older children to wrap the mother’s throat, jerking her backward. Her left arm flailed wildly but her right hurled the little girl away from her and the cat men.

    The child kept her feet and managed to run three steps before the last of the Coerli sprang onto her as the others were trussing the older children. Twisting her arms behind her back, the Corl thrust a thorn through both wrists to pinion them.

    Fog rose to cover the images in the stone’s heart. Garric felt a sucking sensation as his mind returned to his own control. His eyes felt gritty, even after he’d blinked several times.

    Marzan slumped. He would’ve fallen across the topaz if Soma hadn’t knelt beside him and reached an arm around his torso for support.

    When Garric was a boy reading Old Kingdom epics, he’d thought wizardry was a matter of waving a wand and watching wonders occur. He’d seen the reality, now, the crushing effort needed to create visions like the ones Marzan had just shown him.

    Garric grinned back at the ghost in his mind. Aye, he thought, the poets didn’t give me much feel for how bone weary I’d be after a battle, either.

    Soma held a drinking gourd to the wizard’s lips, tilting it slightly as he slurped the contents. He laid his hand on hers; she lowered the gourd and shifted a little in preparation for lifting him to his feet.

    Marzan said something to her, then looked at Garric. He began to speak, not loudly but with hoarse-voiced determination. The only words Garric could understand were his own name and one other: Coerli. He had no context, nor did it help when Marzan gestured or took Garric’s hands in his own and raised them.

    At last Marzan gave up. He muttered to Soma, who helped him to one of the couches. He was shivering in reaction to his wizardry. Soma tucked a blanket around him with surprising gentleness.

    Garric stood, working the stiffness out of his legs. The sun was down. The only light in the hut was an oil lamp—a gourd on a hook near the closed door with a twist of fiber for a wick—and the dull red glow of the hearth fire.

    Two terra cotta pots waited at the edge of the hearth; Soma had cooked a meal while Garric was entranced in the topaz. No wonder Marzan was exhausted!

    “Garric,” she said and gestured him to her. She sat down, using the hearth as a low table. He joined her, moving carefully. He was tired, not just stiff. It’d been a full day, if he could call it a day....

    Soma broke off a piece of oat cake, dipped it into fish stew from one of the pots, and tried to feed Garric with it. He waved her away and took the remainder of the cake himself to dip. The stew was delicious, and so was the mixture of squash and beans that’d steamed in the other container.

    “I’ve eaten harness leather,” Carus observed wryly, “and thought it was fine.”

    Garric smiled and nodded to Soma in appreciation. She handed him a gourd of beer, thin but with a pleasant astringence. It cleared the phlegm from the back of his throat.

    There was something in what Carus said, but this was a good meal. Garric had been unjust to the woman, assuming she couldn’t cook just because Katchin’s wife Feydra couldn’t.

    When Garric had finished eating, Soma rose and gestured him toward the other couch. She drew back another thin blanket. He rose, suddenly so tired that he was dizzy, and thankfully walked to the couch. It was covered with a pad of fine wicker rather than a stuffed mattress; it gave pleasantly when he sat down on the edge.

    Soma sat beside him and reached between his legs.

    “No,” Garric said, jumping to his feet again. He made a wiping motion in the air as he’d done when he refused to let her feed him.

    Soma tugged at his only garment, the cape he’d borrowed when he met Scarface and his band. The loose knot opened at the pull, but Garric snatched it out of her hand. “No!” he repeated forcefully as he backed away.

    Soma stood and lifted her tunic over her head. Garric turned and scrambled out the hut, closing the door behind him. He heard an angry shout; then something hit the panel from the inside.

    There were many reasons Garric wasn’t interested in Soma’s offer. The fact that Marzan was his best chance of returning to his own friends was only a minor one.

    It was raining again. Well, that wasn’t a surprise. No lights showed in the village and the sky was black. Garric thought of stumbling to Wandalo’s compound next door, but nothing he’d seen when he’d arrived here suggested the chief would be a friend. Perhaps in the morning he could find Scarface.

    For now, though.... Garric crawled under Marzan’s hut. The clay was damp, but at least there wasn’t standing water. Yet, of course.

    As Garric turned, trying to find the least uncomfortable position, he heard a whine. A dog snuffled him, then licked his hand and curled up next to him. Back to back with the warm furry body, Garric slept.

    He’d been in worse places.

 

---

 

    King Cervoran turned toward Cashel. It was his first action since he threw the lantern. He moved with the deliberation of something much larger: a tree falling or the ice covering the mill’s roof slipping thunderously when the winter sun warmed the black slates beneath it.

    “Where is the diadem?” he asked in his odd, thin voice. “Where is the topaz?”

    “You mean the crown?” Cashel said. “Lady Liane took it after Garric, well, Garric disappeared. I guess it’s in the room we were in when you came and fetched me.”

    Without speaking further Cervoran started across the courtyard. The mess was worse than in Fall when sheep were slaughtered so there was enough fodder to winter the rest of the flock. There was blood and frightened bleats then too, but it was sheep, not men.

    The oil flames had died, but the remains of the hellplant still smoldered; the air was hazy and rank. Green vegetation always stank when you burned it, but it seemed to Cashel that it wasn’t just memory of what the thing was that made this worse’n usual.

    Sharina was talking to Waldron and Attaper. Well, they were both talking at her, loudly and not paying attention to what each other said. Cashel started to go to her—but she was all right, he knew that. He wanted to go back into the pantry and fetch his quarterstaff, but that could wait too.

    He knew in his heart what he ought to do, so he did it even though it was about the last thing he’d ‘ve done for choice: he went after Cervoran, catching up with him in two quick strides and using the spear shaft to tap folks and make a passage. Anybody who saw Cervoran got out of the way, but in the noisy confusion people weren’t paying attention to much outside their own frightened imaginations just now.

    It wouldn’t do to have the wizard trampled and maybe even killed. He’d been the only one who knew what to do when the plant attacked, and the fact he’d known what to do even before it happened was important too.

    There were guards—again—at the door to the conference room, but they stepped out of the way with obvious relief when they saw Cashel. They’d have felt they had to stop Cervoran, and they really didn’t want anything to do with a corpse. Maybe Cervoran’d just had a fit, but even now he looked dead.

    “Good to see you, milord,” said the officer, a man Cashel didn’t know. “I didn’t see how we were going to handle that thing till you took care of it.”

    “It was really King Cervoran here,” Cashel said, but he opened the door and followed Cervoran into the room without trying to convince the soldiers. They’d believe what they wanted to believe, and they didn’t want to believe a walking corpse had saved their lives.

    Liane and civilians travelling with Garric were busy inside. Lord Tadai stood in the middle of a whole handful of clerks from his department. Several of Liane’s assistants were waiting for a word too, but she was in a corner of the room talking to a fellow who was dressed like a servant here in the palace. He was a lot solider to look at than you generally saw carrying trays and announcing guests.

    Liane had spies all over the Isles; this man must be another of them. The fact that she was talking with him right out in the open probably didn’t please either her or the spy, but at a time like this you might have to do lots of things you weren’t happy about.

    Everybody looked up when the door opened. They kept on looking when they saw who it was who’d come in.

    “Give me the topaz,” Cervoran said. His eyes weren’t really focused on anybody, but Cashel had the funny feeling that he saw everybody around him. “Give me the jewel Bass One-Thumb took from the amber sarcophagus. It is necessary.”

    “He wants the crown, ah, Liane,” Cashel said in the immediate silence. ”Ma’am, he was the one who knew to burn that creature outside.”

    “It is necessary,” Cervoran repeated. His voice hurt to listen to, though it wasn’t loud or anything. Cashel wondered if the king had always sounded like that.

    “Where do you propose to take the diadem?” Liane said. She sounded calm, but her fingers were hidden in a fold of her sash where Cashel knew she carried a little knife.

    “What does it matter where this flesh is?” Cervoran said with obvious contempt. “I will use it here if you like. It is necessary.”

    “Yes, that will do,” Liane said, her expression unchanged. She nodded to the assistant sitting with a velvet-wrapped bundle on his lap.

    That fellow hopped to his feet and offered the package to her. “Give it to Lord Cervoran,” she said sharply. She was generally polite as could be, but it seemed the things going on were affecting her too.

    The clerk twitched. Cashel stepped forward, took the bundle, and handed it to Cervoran. The velvet dropped to the floor; Cervoran stared at the yellow stone as if he was trying to see through it to the veins of the rocks beneath the palace.

    “Milady?” said the assistant timidly. “Does he have to be here?”

    “Be silent!” Liane snapped.

    Cervoran looked up. “Are you afraid, fool?” he said. His swollen lips spread in a minute grin. “Shall I tell you how you will die?”

    The assistant’s face went white. He opened his mouth to speak, then toppled forward in a dead faint. Cashel caught him and carried him back to the couch where he’d been sitting.

    That was the first really human thing he’d seen Cervoran do since he walked off the pyre. It was a nasty thing to do to the poor clerk, but it was human.

    When Cashel turned, Cervoran was looking at the stone again and standing like a wax statue. Tadai and his clerks talked in muted voices, and the spy was whispering to Liane. Nobody was paying Cashel any attention, maybe because he was standing close to Cervoran who nobody wanted to notice.

    “Well, I’ll go...,” Cashel said. “Ah, outside.”

    Liane nodded as Cashel stepped into the courtyard again, but nobody said anything. He was used to being ignored, of course, though this was a different business from what’d happened in the borough because he was a poor orphan. Everybody here was afraid, and they were afraid to learn anything that they didn’t already know.

    The bustle around the hellplant was getting organized now. Lord Waldron was giving orders while Sharina looked on at his side and Tenoctris bent over the smoking remains. Ilna was helping the old wizard, prodding layers of sodden greenery apart with the blade of her paring knife.

    Cashel would’ve gone to join them, but his eye caught Prince Protas standing forlornly to the side. The boy’s face was formally calm, but he looked awfully lonely. Cashel walked over to him.

    “Lord Cashel!” Protas said, suddenly a frightened boy again in his enthusiasm. “Oh, sir, I heard you defeated the monster!”

    “Your father knew to burn it,” Cashel said. “I just carried the jar. I’ll grant it was a big jar.”

    He spoke quietly, but he knew he sounded proud. He had a right to be proud, but it was true the real credit went to Cervoran.

    Though Cashel wasn’t completely sure “your father” was quite the right thing to call him now.

    “Where did the monster come from, milor—” Protas said. He caught himself and finished, “Cashel, I mean.”

    Cashel grinned. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ll bet if we follow that—”

    He pointed the spear shaft toward the hole in the courtyard wall. He wasn’t much of a woodsman—picking squirrels off a branch with a hard-flung stone was about as much hunting as he did—but the hellplant’s root-like legs had left a track of slime on the ground behind them. It smelled of salt and sour vegetable matter.

    “—we can learn for ourselves. You want to come?”

    “With you?” said the boy. “Yes sir!”

    He sobered and said, “My tutor hid in a clothes chest when he looked out of the window and saw the thing here in the courtyard. When he comes out, he’ll want me to get back to my mathematics lesson.”

 

---

 

    Cashel thought for a moment. He cleared his throat.

    “I guess mathematics is important to know,” he said. He wasn’t sure exactly what mathematics was, though he thought it meant counting without having to drop dried beans in a sack. That was how Cashel did it when the number got more than his fingers. “But I think this afternoon you can miss a lesson without it being too bad. What with, you know, the trouble that happened.”

    Cashel looked at the spear shaft waggling in his hand while he thought. “But before we do that,” he added, “let’s get my quarterstaff back. Just in case.”

    He and the boy went into the west wing of the palace, through the kitchens and the crowd of clerks and servants chattering there. Protas looked around with real interest. Cashel couldn’t understand why till the boy said, “I’ve never been here before, you know. Is this where the food comes from?”

    “I guess it is,” Cashel agreed. “It’s fancier than I’m used to.”

    It must be funny to be a prince. When you’re just a boy, anyway. Garric seemed to be taking to it fine but he had his growth. Though Garric as a boy would probably have gotten out more than Protas seemed to’ve done.

    Two servants were in the pantry. The woman looked down into the cellars through the open trapdoor, but the man had picked up the quarterstaff and was turning it in his hands.

    “I’ll take that!” Cashel said, tossing the spear away. He hadn’t meant to’ve shouted but he wasn’t sorry that he had. The woman shrieked like she’d been stabbed; the dropped the quarterstaff and turned so quick that he got his feet tangled.

    Cashel stepped forward, grabbing the hickory with his right hand and the servant’s arm with his left. The fellow screamed near as bad as the woman had. Cashel guessed he’d gripped as hard with one hand as the other, so there’d be bruises on the man’s biceps in the morning. That wouldn’t be near as bad as what he’d have gotten by toppling headfirst into the cellars the way he’d started to do, though.

    “What were you doing with Lord Cashel’s property, sirrah?” Protas said. His voice sounded a lot like King Cervoran’s, though the boy being twelve was at least some of the reason.

    “What?” said the servant, blinking as he realized it was the prince speaking. “May the Shepherd save me, I didn’t mean—I mean we saw it and didn’t know—that is—”

    “It’s all right,” Cashel said, stroking his staff’s smooth, familiar surface. The poor fellow was getting hit from all sides, it must seem like to him. “You ought to close that cellar door before somebody breaks his neck, though.”

    He led Protas back out through the kitchen. The folks there had been looking at the pantry and whispering. One woman got down on her knees and said, “May the Lady bless you, your lordship, for saving us from that terrible monster!”

    “Ma’am, I just carried the jar,” Cashel muttered. Goodness, she was trying to grab the hem of his tunic! He pulled away, striding out much quicker than he normally chose to do. The boy kept up, but he had to run to do it.

    The sun was getting low in the sky, but it was still an hour short of sundown. They skirted the soldiers, who probably had a job here in the courtyard; and the civilians, who were mostly just gawking.

    As they neared where the back gate had been a voice behind them called, “Your highness? Prince Protas?”

    Cashel turned; Lord Martous was bearing down on them from the other wing of the palace. “He’s with me, sir!” Cashel said loudly.

    To his surprise, the chamberlain bowed low and backed away. Cashel muttered to the boy, “I thought he’d tell me you had to go off with him anyhow.”

    “Oh, no, Cashel,” Protas said in amazement. “Why, I’ll bet even Prince Garric would have to do what you said if you told him something.”

    “I don’t guess he would,” Cashel said, blushing in embarrassment. “Anyway, I wouldn’t do anything like that!”

    Close up, what’d happened to the back wall looked pretty impressive. The edge courses were squared stones fitted together, and the rest of the wall was rubble set in concrete which’d cured long enough to be pretty near stone-hard itself. The plant had pushed until it cracked off full-height slabs to either side of the gateway. Besides that it’d broken the transom, a squared oak timber two hand-spans on a side.

    “Are there more of the monsters, Cashel?” the boy asked as they followed the hellplant’s track back down through the alley. Local people—town dwellers and country folk both, standing in separate groups—talked in low voices and watched as Cashel and Protas walked past

    “I don’t know,” Cashel said simply. He thought for a moment. “I guess we’d hear shouting if there were more of them close by, though.”

    The alley led straight to a notch in the seawall; it’d let you back a wagon all the way into the water if for some reason you wanted to. There was no question the hellplant had come up that way: the crushed limestone roadway was still dark with slime.

    Two sailors had been talking on the seawall. They went quiet and watched when they saw Cashel and the boy walking straight toward them.

    “May the Lady smile on you, good sirs!” Protas said, surprising Cashel. He’d been trying to figure how to open a conversation with strangers who didn’t look very trusting. “This is Lord Cashel and of course I’m Prince Protas. Can you tell us how the creature appeared here? Did it come by boat then?”

    The pair looked at each other nervously. “We didn’t bring it!” said the man whose right arm was so tattooed he looked like he had a long-sleeved shirt on that side.

    “Of course not, my good man!” the boy said scornfully. “But you saw it land, did you not? How did it arrive on First Atara?”

    “I thought it was seaweed,” said the little fellow with three gold rings in his right ear and the lobe of the left one missing. “Just drifting up, you know. And then it come to the wall and started to climb. And I took off running, I don’t mind to tell you.”

    “There’s no current could’ve drifted it to shore that quick,” the tattooed man protested. “It had to be swimming, Goldie.”

    “I don’t know what kinda currents there might be!” Goldie said angrily. “What with the Shepherd’s Sling Stone whamming into the sea the way it did. Why, the one wave nigh cleared the seawall, and I’ve never seen that to happen no matter how bad a storm it is.”

    “That was this morning!” his companion said. “The sea was calm as calm all the past six hours.”

    “But you’re sure the thing didn’t come on a boat?” Cashel said, looking out along the track the low sun plowed glowing on the water. “It just swam?”

    “Swam or drifted,” Goldie said. “Swam, I guess. But I thought it was just something washed up from when the stone hit the sea.”

    Cashel looked out to the southwest, through the jaws of the harbor and down the sun’s track across the open sea to where the meteor had landed. “You might be right at that,” he said at last.

 

---

 

    Though fire had devoured the outer layers of the hellplant, it seemed to Sharina that what remained was shrinking further the way frost-killed vine-leaves sink into a foetor and ooze away. There was nothing obviously unnatural about this mass, but it was certainly foul and ugly. So was much of peasant life, of course.

    Tenoctris had moved from examining the plant to looking at the corpse of one of the three scorpions from inside it. Now she turned and got up, partly supported by Ilna. Sharina smiled at them, hoping Tenoctris had learned something useful—and getting a wan look and shrug that made it clear she hadn’t.

    Chalcus stood nearby but didn’t burden his hands with the weight of an old woman. His lips smiled but his eyes did not, skipping over everything around him. Chalcus’ gaze didn’t rest any longer than the late sunlight glinting on the edge of his drawn sword. If his eyes had found danger anywhere they danced, that sword would strike with a speed and precision that were themselves just short of magical.

    “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Tenoctris said, nodding slightly in the direction of the hard-shelled creature. “It’s meant to live in water: its legs are paddles and it seems to have gills instead of lungs. But it’s a scorpion and not a crab or lobster.”

    “Master Chalcus?” Sharina said. “You’re a sailor. Do you know where such things come from?”

    “Nowhere in the parts of the world I’ve travelled before now, milady,” Chalcus said. He turned his face and his smile toward Sharina, but his eyes continued their restless search. “Which is a good deal of the world. I’d as lief that Mona here had been without the small demons as well, though I wouldn’t mind them so much without the mount they rode in on... which is new to me as well, I’m thankful to say.”

    “And new to me,” Tenoctris said with a slight nod; she seemed completely wrung out. “Perhaps later, tomorrow....”

    “There’s nothing of immediate concern that you can see at the moment?” Sharina said. She raised the pitch of the final word to make it a question, but she knew that Tenoctris would’ve said so if she’d seen something. “In that case, why don’t you get some food and rest? I’ve watched you do five separate divination spells, and I know how much effort that requires.”

    She smiled at the wizard with real warmth. Tenoctris was one of the strongest pillars on which the kingdom rested, but she was also a friend. In Sharina’s mind, that was the more important thing of the two.

    “We need you, Tenoctris,” she said. “And we need you healthy.”

    “I did seven spells, not five,” Tenoctris admitted with the same wan smile as when she’d risen to her feet. “And as for resting, I might’ve been asleep in bed for anything useful I gained from any of them. But yes, I’ll see if I can’t do better in the morning.”

    She dipped her chin in the direction of the plant’s remains. The gesture was as quick and businesslike as a hatchet stroke. She added, “Don’t allow this to be removed, if you will.”

    “Lord Waldron,” Sharina said in a tone that was about as crisp as the wizard’s nod. “Place a guard on this mess, if you please. Don’t let anyone but Lady Tenoctris come near it.”

    The army commander barked a laugh. “As your highness wishes,” he said. “Though I wouldn’t worry about thieves myself. And if any of the palace staff are devoted enough to their duties to clean it up, that’ll surprise me too.”

    “One of your own officers might’ve taken care of it, milord,” said Attaper. His brief smile rang like a hammer. “Or mine, of course. Better safe than sorry.”

    Waldron snorted as he gave the orders. The two senior officers were in a surprisingly good mood. A creature that was physical if not exactly flesh and blood had attacked; the creature had been destroyed. That was how things were supposed to work in the soldiers’ world, and by now the fact that something was unusual didn’t bother them so long as it wasn’t wizardry.

    Soldiers tended to take a sharply limited view regarding what was their business, too. In the present case, that permitted both men to ignore the question of how a giant plant could’ve come to walk into the palace without wizardry. Sharina found that puzzling, but they were very good at their jobs.

    A Blood Eagle, one of the squad Garric had detailed to guard Tenoctris, picked up the satchel in which the old wizard kept the paraphernalia of her art. He tramped along beside her, offering his free hand if she needed support on the way to her room and bed.

    Most of the troops—like most civilians—were uncomfortable dealing with wizardry. There were a few, though, who didn’t mind. All the Blood Eagles were ready to guard Tenoctris with their lives; this particular trooper was also happy to carry a bag filled with spells and potions, and to treat the wizard as though she were no more than an old lady with a pleasant personality.

    Sharina was suddenly tired also, though she hadn’t done any serious work today. It was the tension, she supposed. She giggled.

    “Milady?” said Chalcus with a hard smile. “If there’s a joke in all this business, I’d be pleased to hear it.”

    “When I got up this morning,” Sharina said, “I was worried that my tongue would get tangled when I offered the hand of fellowship to Marquess Protas on behalf of the citizens of Haft. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried since the coronation didn’t take place. So many of our fears are empty.”

    She shook her head, grinning wryly. She looked around and added, “Does anyone know where Lady Liane’s gone?”

    “Not gone but stayed,” said Ilna. “In the conference room Master Chalcus took me to when I proved useless here..”

    She glanced at the knotted pattern she held between the fingers of both hands, then grimaced and looked up again. Ilna was short and dark and slim; pretty or at least handsome, but likely to be overlooked when she was in the company of her friend Sharina, a lithe blond beauty. If Ilna resented that, she kept the feeling well hidden—even from Sharina herself.

    “Then let’s go talk with Liane,” Sharina said, offering Ilna her arm and starting toward the council chamber. “She may know something about this even if Tenoctris doesn’t.”

    The chamber was unexpectedly dim. The sky wasn’t dark yet, but it didn’t send much light through the clerestory windows. Nobody’d lighted the lamps in the wall sconces. The guards hadn’t let servants in to do that, Sharina realized.

    Sharina stepped back outside. The guards had a lighted lantern dangling from the edge of the portico. The hook supporting it normally held a polished marble ‘sparkler’ that threw sunlight onto the interior as it rotated.

    Sharina lifted down the lantern. “I’ll borrow this if I may,” she said, twisting the base away from the barrel to expose the burning candle. She walked into the council chamber with it.

    “Your highness?” said the puzzled officer behind her. Of course nobody objected to Princess Sharina taking a lantern if she wanted to, but he was probably surprised that she knew how to take it apart.

    Sharina knew how to light lamps too. She walked from sconce to sconce, holding the candle flame just below the wick of each oil lamp in turn. The Lady only knew how many winter evenings she’d done this same thing at the inn, though generally using a splinter of lightwood instead of a candle.

 

---

 

    She turned, righting the candle in her hand. One of Lord Tadai’s clerks stood at her elbow, looking nervous.

    “Jossin here will take that back to the guards, your highness,” Tadai said. “I was remiss in not dealing with the situation myself earlier.”

    “It’s not part of your job, milord,” Sharina said. “And it has been part of mine.”

    She turned her attention to Liane, saying, “Do any of your sources know where the creature might have come from, Liane? Or who sent it?”

    Cervoran moved. He held the uncut topaz, and it threw foggy highlights across the room as he lowered his hands. He’d been so still that Sharina hadn’t noticed him until then.

    “Not yet,” said Liane, “though—”

    “The Green Woman sent it,” Cervoran said. “She made it in her Fortress of Glass and sent it to attack me.”

    His voice was rising in pitch and volume. The oil lamps gave his complexion a yellow tinge and brought out blotches beneath the skin that daylight had concealed. Neither Sharina nor Liane moved away from the recent corpse as most of the others in the room did, but Liane had her right hand between the folds of her sash.

    “She will attack me while she lives and I do,” Cervoran said.

    “There’ll be more of those hellplants?” Sharina asked sharply. Waldron and Attaper with their aides had entered the chamber behind her; the soldiers’ faces were taut with the instinct to attack or flee.

    “There will be many more!” Cervoran said. His fingers moved over the topaz like maggots crawling on a yellow corpse. “But I will prevail!”

 

---

 

    Ilna looked at the man she’d saved from death on his own funeral pyre. If he was still a man, of course; and if she’d saved him.

    “A meteor struck the sea yesterday,” Cervoran said. “We must find it. The Green Woman is there, and I will defeat her.”

    “The sling stone struck, right enough,” said Chalcus with cheerful bravado, the backs of his wrists against his hipbones and the fingers turned outward like flippers. “And I or anybody who was with the fleet can show you where, easily enough; any sailor, at least. But it won’t do you any good, I fear.”

    Cervoran looked at him. Ilna had begun picking apart the pattern she’d knotted from lengths of twine as the hellplant slithered across the courtyard.

    “Take me to the meteor,” Cervoran said. Only his squeaky voice and the muffled breaths of the others in the room could be heard. “It is necessary. I will defeat her!”

    The pattern would’ve frozen a man in his tracks. A man’s eyes don’t see: they gather patterns that his mind turns into sight. The patterns Ilna wove in fabric had a greater reality in the minds of those who saw them than a mountain or the blazing sun above.

    “I can take you there right enough, my friend,” Chalcus said. He feared the Gods—he didn’t worship but he feared. He feared no other thing in this world as far as Ilna could tell, beast or man or wizard. “But the place I’ll take you is the deepest trench in the Inner Sea. A full league down a wizard said, or so the rumor has it. If your Green Woman’s on the bottom of that, then you’ll not be going to her unless you’re a fish, not so?”

    Ilna’s pattern hadn’t stopped the plant. Now she was beginning to wonder what effect it would have on the recent corpse.

    “Do you think to mock me, little man?” Cervoran said. It was odd to hear so shrill a voice speaking as slowly as a priest praying while the villagers came forward with their offerings during the Tithe Procession. “Take me to the place. It is necessary!”

    “Your highness?” Chalcus said, looking past Cervoran to Sharina. “This is a thing I can do well enough in the Heron, should you wish it. But...?”

    “It is necessary!” Cervoran repeated shrilly.

    Cervoran, king or man or corpse, took Cashel out of this room and brought him back with a jar of oil in time to destroy the hellplant—which nobody else had been able to do, Ilna herself included. That didn’t make Cervoran a friend to the kingdom and its citizens, but at least it made him an enemy of their enemies.

    “Master Chalcus...?” said Sharina. From the set look on her face she was thinking the same way as Ilna was. “Would a larger ship be better? I could send him out on the Shepherd or one of the triremes.”

    Chalcus snorted. “And what could a fiver do that my handy little Heron could not, eh, milady?” he said. ‘We can turn twice around in the time it’d take a cow like the Shepherd to change course by eight points only. We’ll take him.”

    “At once,” said Cervoran.

    “Indeed not,” said Chalcus. “In the morning. I’ll find the spot by the angles on the Three Sisters east of here and Mona Headland itself, but I can’t do that till sunrise.”

    “In the morning, then,” Sharina said, giving an order rather than commenting. “And Master Chalcus? Don’t set out until I’ve had a chance to learn Lady Tenoctris’ opinion on the matter.”

    “Master Cervoran?” Ilna said. She’d reduced the knotted pattern to the cords it’d started as. She held them in her right palm and stroked them with the fingers of her left hand. “There was a sling stone, a meteor, hitting the sea as we approached the island yesterday.”

    “Yes,” said Cervoran. “But I will go to her and defeat her.”

    “There was a second stone, meteor, this morning,” Ilna said. She had the odd feeling that she was standing outside herself and hearing someone else speak. “During your funeral. It burst in the air above us. What did that meteor mean?”

    “It means nothing,” said Cervoran, his voice becoming even more shrill.

    “It exploded in the air,” Ilna repeated, “and then you rose from your bier. What does that mean?”

    “I am Cervoran!” the former king cried. He lowered his eyes to stare into the topaz again.

    “What?” said Ilna.

    But Cervoran remained as motionless as a statue; and when Chalcus murmured, “We’ll be up betimes, dearest. Best to get some rest now,” Ilna left the chamber with him.

    “There’s a pattern too big for me to see the ends of it,” Ilna whispered. Chalcus listened, but she wasn’t so much speaking to him as to the cosmos itself. “But we’re part of it, like it or not. And I don’t like it at all!”

 

---

 

    Sharina awakened in shocked awareness that something was wrong. She sat bolt upright, hearing low-voiced chanting nearby. She didn’t know where she was, and the sun was already up behind the shutters.

    She was out of bed, gripping the hilt of the Pewle knife with her right hand and its sealskin sheath with her left, when she remembered. She relaxed with a sigh, then giggled at what a fool she’d have looked if there’d been anyone to see her.

    There wasn’t, of course. Sharina had been an inn servant herself too long to want anybody serving her when she didn’t need it.

    The bedroom of the Queen’s suite where Sharina slept had a door to Cervoran’s

    Chamber of Art. Tenoctris had that room now, sleeping on a simple cot and rising at intervals in the night to browse Cervoran’s collection of books and objects by lamplight. That’s what was happening now.

    Sharina shot the knife back in its sheath, but she didn’t hang it on the bedpost before she walked to the connecting door and opened it. Tenoctris sat on the floor, chanting over a flattened bead of green glass that’d been in the late king’s curio cabinet.

    Cashel stood close by, his quarterstaff planted firmly on the floor. He’d turned his head when he heard the door open. He didn’t speak because that might’ve distrubed Tenoctris, but his smile was as warm as sunlight on the meadow.

    A sparkle of blue wizardlight dusted the air above the glass bead, then vanished like a puff of warm breath on the polished face of a mirror. The old wizard sagged, setting down the split of bamboo she’d used for a wand. She disposed of each sliver after she’d used it once, because she said otherwise the influences it’d absorbed from previous spells would affect later ones in directions she couldn’t foresee.

    Most wizards made wands and athames, dagger-shaped implements of art, from materials chosen to concentrate power; then they covered the tools with symbols of art to increase the effect still further. Those folk could perform far greater wizardry than Tenoctris could... but as Sharina herself had seen, eventually they did something they hadn’t intended. A very great wizard had brought down the Old Kingdom a thousand years past—and was drowned in a reaction to his spell which he hadn’t predicted and couldn’t control.

    Tenoctris’ smile had a hint of fatigue. She put her right hand on the floor to brace her as she rose, but Cashel instantly squatted and supported her. For the most part Cashel ambled along at the pace of the sheep he’d spent most of his life caring for, but he moved with amazing speed when he needed to.

    “This comes from the moon,” Tenoctris said, dipping a finger toward the glass bead she’d left within the five-pointed star drawn in powdered charcoal. She wasn’t using the figures Cervoran had inset in the floor any more than she was using an athame carved from a dragon scale. “It’d fallen into the sea, struck off the moon’s surface by a meteor. Cervoran located it through his art and sent divers to bring it up for him.”

    “What does it do, Tenoctris?” Sharina asked, looking at the vaguely greenish bead with greater interest. “Does it increase your powers?”

    “It doesn’t do anything at all, dear,” the old woman said, smiling faintly. “But it’s from the moon.”

    She gestured toward the shelves and bookcases which covered the workroom’s outside wall. They were a hodge-podge of objects, codices, and (in pigeonholes) scrolls. None of the jumbled contents were labeled.

    “That’s generally the case with Cervoran’s collection,” she explained. “Many of the objects I’ve examined are quite remarkable, but they’re not really good for anything. They’re not important.”

    Sharina cleared her throat. “Tenoctris,” she said, “King Cervoran wants to go out to where the meteor fell as we approached the island. Chalcus is ready to take him if I agree. Should I let him go?”

    Tenoctris stood motionless for a moment; then she dipped her head three times quickly like a nuthatch cracking a seed. ‘Yes, I believe so,” she said. “But I’d like to go along.”

    “To see what Cervoran’s searching for, Tenoctris?” Cashel said. “Or to watch Cervoran?”

    Tenoctris chuckled. “A little of both, I suppose,” she said. “He’s a greater puzzle than any of the objects in his collection. The divinatory spells I’ve attempted haven’t helped me to understand him better.”

    Sharina’s right hand touched the Pewle knife. The cool horn scales settled the gooseflesh that was starting to spring up on her arms.

    “I wonder if he was always like he is now?” she said. “I don’t see how he could’ve been. I think he changed during the time he was, well, the time he seemed dead.”

    “I don’t know, dear,” Tenoctris said in a regretful tone. “The wizard who amassed this collection was of considerable power but no real focus. He was a scholar of a sort, one who preferred to use his art to learn things rather than to search them out in books as I’ve always done for choice. But he wasn’t a man with interests beyond his studies, and he certainly didn’t have an enemy who would send a creature like that plant to kill him.’

    She gave Sharina one of the quick, bright smiles that took twenty years off her apparent age. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know who the Green Woman is either.”

    “Maybe we’ll learn today,” said Cashel. He looked at Sharina.

    “I know you have to stay here and, well, be queen,” he said. “But do you mind if I go with Tenoctris? I think there ought to be somebody with her that was, well, hers.”

    “I think that’s a good idea,” Sharina said. She stepped quickly to Cashel and hugged him, careful to hold the knife out in her hand so that the sheath didn’t prod him in the back. “We need Tenoctris. But Cashel?”

    “Ma’am?” Cashel said, his voice a calm rumble like the purr of a sleeping lion.

    “Be careful of yourself, too,” Sharina said, still holding herself tight against his solid bulk. “Because I need you, my love.”