The Fortress of Glass: Chapter Five

    Garric awakened in shocked awareness that something was wrong. Somebody shouted! he thought.

    Somebody screamed, but Garric was already worming his way out from under Marzan’s house. The dog was gone and an angry yapping sounded from the direction of the village gate. That was where the scream’d come from, too.

    It was dark: cloud-wrapped, moonless, starless dark. Even so the house had a presence in the darkness.

    Garric reached up the sidewall, groping. The fishnet hung where he remembered it. He jerked it down, pulling a wall peg out in his haste. The size of the house showed that Marzan was a great man for this village, but that didn’t save him or his wife from having to catch their own fish. He wondered if they had to work in the raised fields as well, or if wizardry at least saved them from that back-breaking drudgery.

    Heartbeats after the scream, a dozen or more things shrieked from around the whole eastern circumference of the village. They weren’t human and they weren’t in pain: they were beasts, hunting.

    “Coerli,” the ghost of Carus said in Garric’s mind. “They looked very quick.”

    Neither he nor Garric had any doubt about what was going on, though thus far they’d only seen the cat men in silent topaz visions. This must be a larger band than the five who’d raided the field before, though.

    Garric stepped to the fence, moving by memory and instinct. He felt along the top rail to an upright and gripped it firmly. The railings were cane, but the support posts were wrist-thick and of a dense wood probably chosen to resist rot.

    Garric half-squatted, then straightened his knees and pulled the post up with a squelch of wet clay. The railings were bound on with cane splits. A quick shake right and left snapped them free.

    A sword’d be better, but even that probably wouldn’t be good enough. The Coerli were inhumanly quick, impossibly quick; but you did what you could.

    Marzan’s door opened and fanned out light, shocking in the previous darkness. Garric risked a glance over his shoulder. Soma stood in the doorway with a rushlight: a reed stripped to the pith, dried, and soaked with oil or wax. It lit quickly and wasn’t as easy to blow out as a candle, though the flames didn’t last long either. In her right hand was a knife made of horn or ivory.

    There were more screams in the night, all of them human. A pair of yellow-green eyes flared in the rushlight’s circle, ten or a dozen feet from Garric. He spun the net out as though he were casting for minnows, keeping hold of the drag. He couldn’t reach the Corl with it, but he saw the spinning meshes bell as the cat man’s own hooked line tangled with them.

    Garric pulled his left arm back hard while swinging the sturdy post outward, a crushing blow directed at the empty air in front of him. He felt the weight as the slack came out and the net brought the Corl with it.

    The beast shrilled in startled fury. Like the cat men Garric had watched in the topaz, this one had wrapped the end of its casting line around its wrist for a more secure grip. Racing charioteers regularly did the same thing with their reins—and were regularly dragged to their deaths when they fell or their vehicle broke up beneath them.

    The cat creature was lithe and muscular, but its slight frame weighed less than a human female; Garric’s furious strength could’ve overmastered an opponent twice as heavy. When this one realized it couldn’t resist the pull, it twisted in the air and leveled its delicate spear at Garric’s face. Garric’s club brushed the light shaft out of the way and smashed the Corl’s left arm and ribs.

    The cat man slammed to the ground, instantly curling face-up despite its injuries. Garric kicked at its face with his heel. He missed because the Corl ducked its head aside faster than a human could’ve thought.

    Garric spun the net widdershins. Despite its speed, the wounded creature couldn’t completely avoid the spreading meshes. It yowled again and—Gods! it was fast—stabbed Garric in the thigh with its spear. His club stroke had broken the flint blade straight across, but this thrust was a strong one and tore into the muscle.

    Garric swung the club a second time. The Corl would’ve dodged but Garric scissored his arms, tugging the net toward him at the same time he brought the club down. The cat man’s skull was large to give the strong jaw muscles leverage, but the bones were light and crunched beneath the powerful blow. The creature’s saw-edged scream died in the middle of a rising note.

    There were glowing eyes to right, left and center. Garric flattened and heard the spiteful bwee! of a thorn-barbed line arcing through the air above him.

    He started to roll. A Corl landed on his back and looped his neck with a garrote.

    Garric’s throat was a ball of white fire. He gripped the Corl’s calf with his left hand, then swung the creature like a flail into the ground beside him. It bounced with a moan of pain, losing both ends of the garrote.

    Garric stabbed with his pole, using it as a blunt dagger instead of a club. Ribs cracked under the Corl’s brindled fur.

    Garric’s arm went numb; he saw the post drop from his hand though he couldn’t feel his fingers release. The Corl standing above him raised its stone axe for a second blow like the one that’d already stunned his right shoulder.

    Garric kicked sideways. The Corl leaped over the swift attack with no more difficulty than Garric would’ve made in hopping from rock to rock in crossing a stream. Garric had saved his skull for a few moments, but perhaps only that.

    Soma threw her rushlight at the Corl in a blazing whirl. The cat man wailed, its eyelids blinking closed and its arms crossing in front of its face. The pithy stalk bounced away in a shower of sparks.

    Garric lunged upward, still seated but his torso straight and his left hand spearing out to grab the Corl by the throat. It struck clumsily with the axe, but he jerked its face down onto the anvil of his skull. A fang gouged Garric’s forehead painfully, but the Corl’s nose flattened with a crackling of tiny bones.

    Garric tried to lift his right hand to twist its neck like a chicken’s; the muscles of his bruised arm didn’t respond. He shook the Corl one-handed, showering blood from its ruined face for the instant before the world flashed in negative: charcoal shadows on a sepia background becoming white on pearl.

    I’ve been hit on the head....

    Garric turned and rose like a whale broaching from the depths. His world was silent and without feeling but he could move, did move. A Corl half again the size of the others faced him with a ball-headed baton lifting for another blow. This creature had a lion’s mane and prominent male genitalia. Behind him Soma was being born down by another cat man.

    Garric lurched toward the big Corl, stumbling from weakness. The club’s shaft rather than the knobbed end cracked him across the head.

    Light flashed. Garric saw the mud rushing up, but he didn’t feel the smack of it against his face.

    Then there was nothing at all.

    The Heron passed between the jaws of the harbor and into open sea. The surface was a bit choppier, but the rowers had the beat and the short hull didn’t pitch. Chalcus walked forward, whistling a snatch of the chantey he’d sung to launch the ship.

    “Milady Tenoctris,” he said with a bow that was affectionate rather than mocking. “I have them on an easy stroke, one the boys could keep up all day needs must—which they won’t, given how close the thing is.”

    He nodded toward the plume of vapor off the bow. A light breeze bent the column eastward to thin and vanish, but already Cashel could tell it was rising from a single patch of surface.

    “A volcano under the sea, do you think, milady?” Chalcus added in what somebody who didn’t know him well might’ve thought was a nonchalant voice.

    “I don’t know,” Tenoctris said simply. She smiled for fellowship, not because there was anything funny. “I don’t think so, but I really don’t know.”

    “Ah, well,” said Chalcus, putting his arm around Ilna’s waist and hugging her close for a moment. She didn’t respond, but she smiled and didn’t pull away either. “We’ll all know shortly, will we not?”

    Cashel followed his eyes, not toward the vapor this time but to Cervoran standing motionless in the bow.

    “That one knows, though he won’t tell us, eh?” Chalcus said.

    Ilna continued working her knots as she looked at Cervoran. She looked coldly angry, but for Ilna that didn’t mean a lot.

    “He thinks he knows,” Ilna said. “For most wizards, that isn’t the same thing as knowing.”

    Chalcus nodded curtly. He set his hands on his hips and stood arms-akimbo. “Master Cervoran!” he called. “I’m going to halt a bowshot short of the smoke and bring us around.”

    Cervoran turned, giving Cashel again the feeling that the bits and pieces of the wizard’s body weren’t working together quite the way they ought to. “I must be close,” he said. “It is necessary.”

    “You’ll be as close as I’m willing to come and pretend the ship’s safe,” snapped Chalcus. “Which is a bowshot out!”

    He walked back to the stern, moving more like a cat than a cat does. Cervoran didn’t do anything for a moment. His eyes remained fixed on where Chalcus’d been instead of following the sailor away.

    The cloud of steam was getting close. It covered a considerable patch of the sea, enough to swallow the Heron if they’d gone into it. Cashel was just as glad they weren’t going to, but he’d trust Chalcus on something like that if he’d said it was all right—or Tenoctris did, of course.

    Tenoctris hadn’t argued with Chalcus.

    Chalcus shouted an order that didn’t mean anything to Cashel. The stroke oars on both levels called something too, and the flute player changed his rhythm. The rowers all lifted their oars together; then the ones on the port side backed water with a measured stroke while those to starboard pulled normally. The ship began to slow and turn like a fishhook.

    “That isn’t steam,” Ilna said. “The water’s not boiling, and besides the color’s too yellow.”

    They had a good view of the column now. Cashel could even see it wobbling up from the depths, twisted by currents but curling back like a corkscrew for as far down as he could follow it. Far below even that was a speck of light. It must be really bright and big to be seen, but it didn’t have any more detail than a star does.

    Cervoran opened his oak case. First he placed the topaz crown on his head, then he brought out a small brazier made of filigreed bronze. He pointed at the brazier and spoke an unheard word. A scarlet spark popped from his finger, striking the sticks of charcoal instantly alight.

    Cashel moved a trifle to put himself between the two women and the man in the bow. Cervoran took a bowl out of his case and held it out to Cashel. “Fill this with sea water,” he said. “At once.”

    Cashel glanced at Tenoctris; she nodded. Cervoran opened his mouth again as Cashel handed his staff to his sister to hold. He didn’t often speak sharply, but this time he said, “Don’t say that, if you please, Master Cervoran. I don’t care if it’s necessary or not, I’m coming t’ do it!”

    Cashel took the cup. It was bone, mounted in silver but the top of a human skull beyond doubt. He’d handled dead men’s bones, and he’d cracked bones to kill men if it came to that; but Cervoran having such a thing for a toy wasn’t a thing to make Cashel warm to the man, that was a fact.

    He gripped the railing and swung himself over, feeling the narrow hull rock. Chalcus shouted in a voice like a silver trumpet, “Bonzi and Felfam, get to port now!” The two men closest the bow on the starboard outrigger jumped from their benches and shifted to the other side as Cashel let himself down where they’d been.

    Only a few men on either side were rowing now, slow strokes to keep the ship from drifting back into the column of smoke. It smelled like brimstone. There were fish floating on their sides around it, a lot of them kinds Cashel had never seen before. There should’ve been gulls and all kinds of seabirds, but the sky was empty.

    He bent over the outrigger and dipped the skull full. The sea looked pale green, but the water in the cup was just water, nothing different to the eye from what bubbled up in the ancient spring-house where most of Barca’s Hamlet fetched its water.

    Cashel stood and raised the cup in his hand. Cervoran had taken the crown off and was looking into the topaz again. His lips were moving, but no sound came out.

    “Master Cervoran?” Cashel said. He couldn’t climb up holding the cup, not without spilling the most of it. Didn’t the fellow see—

    Tenoctris took the skullcap from Cashel and held it out to Cervoran. He didn’t react until she raised it so that it was between the topaz and his eyes; then he took the cup and replaced the crown on his head. As Cashel lifted himself onto the catwalk—the sturdy railing squealed and the Heron bobbed violently—Cervoran held the cup over the charcoal fire and chanted, “Mouno outho arri....”

    Cashel took his staff. He didn’t exactly push the women back, but he kept easing toward them and they in turn moved down the catwalk to the middle where the mast’d have been. They could hear Cervoran chanting there, but as a sound instead of being words.

    “Do you know what he’s doing, Tenoctris?” Ilna asked. She seemed curious, not frightened, and she spoke like she didn’t have a lot of use for the fellow she was asking about. Pretty much normal Ilna, in fact.

    “He’s gathering power to him,” the older woman said. “And channelling it onto the surface of the sea. I don’t know why or what he intends by that. And I don’t know what the thing in the abyss is, though it’s more than a simple meteor.”

    She smiled. “We knew that before we came, I suppose, didn’t we?” she added.

    “Could you say a spell yourself and learn, ma’am?” Cashel asked. He kept his face half toward the women, but he made sure he could watch Cervoran out of the corner of his eye.

    The water in the cup was bubbling, which it shouldn’t’ve been without the bone charring—which wasn’t happening. No man Cashel knew could’ve kept holding the cup like that close above a charcoal fire. No matter how brave you were, there was a time that the heat was too much and your fingers gave way. Cervoran’s seemed to be sweating yellow fat.

    “Perhaps I could,” Tenoctris said, her eyes on the other wizard, “but I think I’m better off seeing what my colleague is doing. If I concentrate on my art, I’d be likely to miss things. I’m also concerned that—”

    She met Cashel’s eyes. “I’m afraid that if I sent my mind down to that light,” she said, “either I wouldn’t be able to get back or I’d bring something back with me. Cervoran may not be our friend, but I’m quite sure that the thing he’s fighting, the Green Woman, is our enemy and mankind’s enemy.”

    “Kriphi phiae eu!” Cervoran shouted. The sea was suddenly glazed with red light. The ship jolted upward. When the light faded, the surface had frozen to ice the hue of the wizard’s topaz crown.

    The rowers shouted in terror and jumped from their benches. The Heron trembled as the floor of an inn would when men were struggling on it, but it didn’t heel and pitch: the hull was set solidly in the ice.

    Cervoran dropped the skullcap. Still chanting, he lifted himself over the railing and slid down the bow’s outward curve to the ram. He landed like a sack of oats, but he got up immediately and stepped onto the ice.

    “Iao obra phrene...,” he chanted as he walked stiffly toward where the smoke had risen.

    The light in the depths shone through, despite the thickness of the ice.

    While Ilna watched the former corpse stumping across the yellow ice, her fingers knotted lengths of twine and her mind danced along the vast temple of connections that her pattern meant. People thought that things stood apart from each other: a rock here, a tree here, a squalling baby here.

    They were wrong. Everything was part of everything else. A push at this place meant a movement there, unimaginably far away; without anyone knowing that the one caused the other.

    Ilna knew. She saw the connections only as shadow tracings stretching farther than her mind or any mind could travel, but she knew. And she knew that the pattern of action and response centered on this point - on Cervoran, on the thing beneath the sea, and on Ilna os-Kenset - was greater and more terrible than she could have imagined before this moment

    Cervoran stood in the near distance with his hands raised; the jewel on his brow pulsed brighter than the pale sun hanging at zenith. The rhythm of his chant whispered over the ice like the belly scales of a crawling viper.

    The frightened oarsmen shouted angrily. Ilna could see the men brandishing swords they'd taken from beneath their benches. One fellow jumped out of the ship and began hacking at the ice. He'd have done as much good to chop at a granite wall; the ice was thicker than the Heron was long. The oarsmen couldn't tell that, but Ilna knew.

    Chalcus spoke to calm his crew, then asked Tenoctris a question with a flourish of his hand. She answered and Cashel said something as well, calm and solid and ready for whatever came.

    Ilna's ears took in the sounds, but her mind was focused outside the ship, outside even the universe. She saw the shadows merge and link. The light in the depths swelled and wove its own pattern across the cosmos. She understood what Cervoran was doing, and she understood that he would fail because what he faced was more powerful than he knew or could know.

    Ilna understood. Cervoran was a part of the pattern created by the light and the thing within the light. Very soon it would be complete.

    She couldn't block the play of forces any more than Cashel could stand between two mountains and push them apart. She and her brother were powerful in their own ways, but the present battle was on a titanic scale. All Ilna could do was protect herself, wall herself off from the struggle.

    She raised the pattern her fingers had knotted, holding it before her eyes. Then...

    A flash of blue wizardlight penetrated the sea and sky, clinging to and filling all matter. Motion ceased, and the universe was silent except for the voice of Cervoran shrilling, "Iao obra phrene...."

    He was trapped in his own spell, weaving the noose to hang him and hang all the universe with him. Everything was connected....

    Ilna tucked the cords into her sleeve and climbed over the railing. The pattern was fixed in her mind, now. She no longer needed the physical object, and she didn't have time to pick out the knots.

    The oarsmen stood like a jumble of statues, frozen by the spell and counterspell. Ilna hung on the outside of the railing for a moment to pick a spot to fall. She dropped to the outrigger between a man caught shouting desperately to Chalcus and one praying to the image of the Lady he held in his hands. She touched stepped down to the ice.

    "Akri krithi phreneu...," Cervoran said.

    Ilna walked toward him, taking short paces on the slick footing. The ice humped and cracked the way the millpond in Barca's Hamlet did during a hard winter.

    "Ae obra euphrene...," Cervoran said.

    The ice groaned in an undertone that blended with the wizard's voice. He'd been a fool to match himself against the thing beneath, but Ilna had been a fool herself many times in the past... and perhaps now. She loathed fools. All fools.

    As the light flooding up through the ice grew brighter, the sky blurred gray and the scattered clouds lost definition. Ilna wasn't sure whether the spell had formed a cyst in time around Cervoran and those with him, or if the whole world was being changed by the pattern woven in words of power.

    "Euphri litho kira...," cried Cervoran or at least Cervoran's lips.

    Ilna was wearing suede-soled slippers because city custom, court custom, demanded that she not be barefoot. Nobody could've ordered her to wear shoes, but people might have laughed if she hadn't.

    Part of Ilna would've said that she didn't care what other people thought, but that wasn't really true. The truth was that she'd do what she thought right no matter what anyone said or thought; but it was true also that if it was simply a matter of wearing shoes needlessly or being laughed at, she'd wear shoes.

    That was a fortunate choice now. She'd walked barefoot on ice in the past when she had to, but the layer of suede was less uncomfortable. She hadn't dressed for deep winter this morning.

    The light beneath the sea throbbed in the rhythm of a beating heart. As the syllables fell from Cervoran's lips it glowed brighter, faded, and grew brighter yet.

    "... rali thonu omene...."

    Ilna reached the chanting wizard. She was a weaver, not a wizard. She could do things with fabric impossible for anyone else she'd met, perhaps impossible for anyone else who'd ever lived. But any bumpkin in the borough could slash across one of Ilna's subtle patterns, destroying it and its effect completely.

    Ilna grasped the golden wire and twisted the topaz diadem off Cervoran's head.

    The wizard shrieked like a circling marsh hawk. His hands fell and his body went limp. She caught him as he slumped, then pulled his arms over her shoulders and turned, dragging him with her toward the ship. Cervoran was silent and a dead weight, but she'd done this before.

    Breaking the spell had freed the crew of the Heron. Ilna heard the men shouting and praying, all at the top of their lungs for the joy of being able to speak again. Someone called her name, but she saved her breath for what she had to do.

    The ice was breaking up, crackling and groaning underfoot. A great slab tilted vertical close by Ilna's left side, then slipped back with a moan. Salt water shot up from the fissure in a rainbow geyser; the whole ice sheet undulated in a web of spreading cracks.

    Water as warm as blood sluiced ankle-deep across her feet. She paused, then stamped onward when the flow ceased. The ice, already slick, now glistened mirror-bright and smooth. She paced on because there was no choice and no other hope.

    The snapping grew to a roar and the ice began to shiver. A chasm was opening, rushing toward Ilna faster than she could walk away from it. She didn’t run because she couldn’t run with Cervoran’s weight to carry; and if she tried she’d fall; and if she fell, she’d fail.

    She was blind with effort. Her breaths burned as she dragged them in through her open mouth.

    Ilna had no God to pray to because she didn’t believe in the Gods, and no one to curse because her own choice had brought her to this. Curses would be as empty as prayers, and anyway she wouldn’t curse.

    Cervoran lifted away from her. Her eyes focused. Cashel was beside her, striding for the ship again with the once-dead wizard over this shoulder. Chalcus caught Ilna around the waist and snatched her overhead with an acrobat’s grace and a strength that belied his trim body. Together the men ran the last few steps back to the ship and handed their burdens aboard. A burly crewman took Ilna and lowered her to the hollow planking beneath the outrigger.

    She turned. The ice sheet was pulling apart in a torrent dancing with great yellow chunks. The split reached the Heron, lifting the ship and shaking it like a dog before dropping it to wallow freely in open water.

    “To your benches, buckos!” Chalcus shouted. “Panshin, give us the stroke on your flute! On your lives, my lads!”

    Ilna stepped up to a bench and jumped, catching the railing around the raised deck. Chalcus was mounting in a single smooth motion, swinging his feet over with a twist of his shoulders. Ilna wasn’t an acrobat or a sailor, but she heaved herself onto the rail, balanced, and rotated her body to stand upright. Tenoctris was beside her, holding the quarterstaff vertical in both hands.

    Cashel, methodical as always, lifted Cervoran to the deck like a sack of grain and pulled himself up. The ship pitched and yawed, but that always happened when oarsmen shifted back to their places.

    Cashel took his staff with a smile and a murmur of thanks. He looked past Cervoran toward the island.

    Tenoctris said, “May I look at the diadem, Ilna?” In a warmer tone she added, “You saved our lives, you know. At least our lives.”

    Ilna looked down in surprise. She was holding the crown in her right hand, the gold wire twisted into a knot by her grip. The big topaz winked, reminding her of the ice now shattered about the Heron.

    “I...,” said Ilna. She wasn’t sure what to say next so she just handed the crown to Tenoctris. It wasn’t really damaged. Pure gold was nearly as flexible as silk, so the band could easily be bent back into its original shape.

    The ship was getting under way. Only half the oars pulled water on the first stroke, but the remaining rowers were sliding onto their benches and picking up the rhythm. Chalcus called, “Aye, lads, your backs or your necks. Put your backs in it, sailors!”

    Tenoctris was examining the crown, turning it by the band but eyeing the play of light in the heart of the stone. Ilna wondered if she should’ve thrown the jewel into the sea, but if she’d done that.... It must’ve had something to do with Garric’s disappearance, so it was the best chance they had for returning the prince to his kingdom and Garric to the friends who needed him just as surely as the kingdom did.

    Cashel kept his back to the two women; his quarterstaff stood upright like a supporting pillar. Cervoran sprawled ahead of him on the catwalk, his eyes open but unseeing. He might have been dead, Ilna thought; and smiled grimly. Dead again, that is.

    The sea leaped with violent ripples centered on the place in the near distance where Cervoran had stood to chant. Violent blows hammered the Heron’s keel. Oars clattered as a few of the rowers lost the stroke, but they picked it up again almost instantly. When Ilna looked down on the benches she saw faces set in fear and stony determination.

    Water bubbled, mounded, and finally climbed to the sky in the Heron’s wake. The rowers faced backward, so all of them could watch. This time they kept the rhythm, taking themselves farther from what was happening behind them with every stroke.

    The roar filled the sky and flattened the chop. The sea mounded in a huge circle, spreading outward from the rising dome. Fish and flotsam and yellow foam danced in the churning water.

    A gleaming, turreted crystal mountain rose from the surface, throwing shattered sunlight back in as many shards as the stars of a winter night. The sea heaved, exposing or distorting three legs that shimmered into the depths.

    The deepest trench in the Inner Sea, Chalcus had said. And this thing came out of it.

    “The Fortress of Glass,” Tenoctris said wonderingly. Ilna remembered the words from Cervoran’s mouth as he rose from his trance in the depths of the topaz. “There’s nothing in any of my records, but here it is.”

    Ilna put an arm around the older woman’s waist and gripped the railing with her other hand; Cashel knelt and grasped a handful of Cervoran’s collar. The spreading wave lifted the ship and flung it forward, but neither wizard went overboard.

    There was confusion on the benches but at least half the crew kept their oar looms and at least a semblance of the rhythm. Blades cracked together, but not badly; the men who’d been thrown down returned to their seats and their duty. They were trained men, picked men; men fit for a leader like Chalcus.

    The Heron drove back toward harbor. Chalcus gestured to Panshin; the flute-player increased his tempo. They were drawing away from the fortress, but it was high enough to be seen even from the island’s shore.

    Things slipped from the crystal battlements and splashed into the sea. Flotsam, Ilna thought. Scraps of seaweed and muck from the abyss, lifted when the fortress rose.

    Instead of bobbing at the base of the crystal walls, the blobs moved outward. They were hellplants like the one that had attacked the palace, and they were swimming in the Heron’s wake.

    “Captain Chalcus!” Cashel called. He’d gotten to his feet again and was looking over the bow. “Look ahead of us, sir!”

    Ilna bent outward to look also. Ahead of the ship, rising from the depths like foul green bubbles swelling from a swamp, were more hellplants. They moved toward the Heron on strokes of their powerful tentacles.