The Fortress of Glass: Chapter Seven

    Torag roused his band and their captives at dusk. It’d rained at least three times during the day, and the shelter of twigs and brush the warriors’d woven was meant for shade, not to shed water. Part of Garric’s mind doubted that he’d slept at all, but he knew he was probably wrong. The pain of his injuries, the drizzle, and the growing discomfort of his tight bonds kept him from enjoying rest, but there’d doubtless been some.

    Growling among themselves—Coerli voices sounded peevish to a human, even when they weren’t—four warriors set off in the lead. Torag and Sirawhil paced along beside Garric, with Eny and Nerga on guard immediately behind him. The women, bound together by the necks, followed. Two warriors were with them, more to guide than to guard them: they obviously weren’t a danger to anyone.

    That left four warriors. Garric supposed they were the rear guard, though he was well out of sight before they’d have left the temporary camp.

    “What are they worried about, do you suppose?” Carus wondered mentally. “I didn’t see anything in the village that’d concern me—nobody even able to lead a rescue attempt except maybe Scarface. Do these cat-creatures prey on each other?”

    The Bird on Sirawhil’s shoulder turned its glittering eyes toward Garric. “Every band is a potential enemy of every other band,” it said silently. “They only attack if they have an overwhelming advantage, which isn’t likely when every band is always on their guard against every other.”

    You hear my ancestor, then? Garric asked, this time silently. As well as hearing my thoughts?

    The Bird said nothing. Garric grimaced. That’d been a stupid question, but he wasn’t in good shape.

    They slogged on in the sopping darkness. Garric’s wrists had been tied since capture, and when they camped the Coerli had lashed them to his waist as well. Garric worked at his bonds for want of anything better to do, but apart from wearing his wrists bloody he didn’t accomplish anything.

    Because he couldn’t throw out his arms for balance as he instinctively tried to do, he stumbled frequently and occasionally fell. The Coerli didn’t help him. Once when he was slow getting up—he’d braced his hands on a log which collapsed to mush, skidding him on his face again—one of the warriors kicked him with a clawed foot.

    Garric heard the captured women whimper occasionally, but they seemed to be having less trouble than he did even though they were tied together. They couldn’t have night vision like the Coerli, but at least they were used to starless nights and constant overcast.

    “That makes these cat beasts easy meat in daylight, lad,” Carus noted. His image had a quiet smile. “Even what passes for daylight in this bloody bog.”

    Meat, perhaps, Garric amended, but he smiled too. Perhaps he and Carus were being wildly optimistic, but it was better than resigning himself to a gray future ending in butchery.

    A plangent Klok! Klok! rang across the marsh. Torag lifted his great maned head and roared a coughing reply.

    “Are we being attacked?” Garric asked Sirawhil sharply.

    Too sharply, apparently. A guard slapped him across the head with the butt of his spear and snarled, “Silence, beast!”

    It wasn’t a serious blow—the spear shaft was no more than thumb-thick—but Garric’s head still throbbed from the stroke that’d captured him. He staggered, dropping to one knee in a blur of white light; his skin burned. With an effort he lurched forward and managed to keep going so that the Corl didn’t hit him again.

    In its own dry voice, the Bird said, “We’re approaching Torag’s keep. The warriors left as a garrison have given the alarm, and Torag has announced himself in reply.”

    “The Coerli can see any way in this?” Garric said. He spoke aloud but without the harshness that’d gotten him swatted a moment earlier. He couldn’t be sure of the distance, but the gong note was dulled by what seemed like several hundred yards of drizzle and darkness.

    “The distance is close to a quarter of one of your miles,” the Bird said, answering both the question Garric had asked and the one he’d only thought. “While the tower guard might have seen movement, it’s more likely that he heard the party returning. The Coerli have keen hearing, and you humans make a great deal of noise in the darkness.”

    I can’t argue with that, Garric thought. I wonder if I’ll get to be at least as good as the Grass People are?

    “I hope we’re not here long enough to learn, lad,” said the ghost in his mind. Carus grinned, but there was more than humor in the expression.

    Garric heard a gate creak, followed by the scrape and slosh of people doing something in the bog. The ground here was wetter than most of what they’d marched through on the way from Wandalo’s hamlet; the Coerli were sinking to their fetlocks because there were no firm patches to step on.

    Instead of a stockade, a high wicker fence loomed out of the night. A number of warriors were pushing what Garric first thought was a fascine, a roll of brushwood to fill a gully. In fact they were unrolling a coil of wicker matting to cover the ground up to the open gate. It served the same purpose as a drawbridge.

    “There’s six of them,” Carus noted, always professionally detached in assessing an enemy. “That’s sixteen warriors we know about, plus Torag. And Sirawhil, I suppose, though I don’t count her as much.”

    “Torag left six warriors to guard the keep and control the existing slaves,” the Bird said. “He has three sexually mature females in his harem as well, but female Coerli do not fight.”

    Garric looked at the Bird. There was a great deal about the situation that he didn’t know and which he suspected Torag hadn’t even wondered about.

    “The Coerli are not a sophisticated species,” the Bird said, repeating an early comment. It turned its sparkling eyes toward the compound without speaking further.

    Torag led the procession through the gate. Garric glanced at the wall as he entered, expecting to find it was double with the interior filled with rock. Well, filled with dirt: he’d seen no stone bigger than Marzan’s topaz in this whole muddy world. In fact the wall was a single layer of heavy basketry, sufficient for a house but certainly not a military structure in human terms.

    “It’s to keep animals out, I’d judge,” said Carus. “Cat beasts like the ones that built it. They wouldn’t know what a siege train was if it rose up and bit them on their furry asses. Which we may be able to arrange, lad.”

    He chuckled and added, “In good time.”

    Torag raised his muzzle into the air and sniffed. The interior of the compound was ripe with the sharp stench of carnivore wastes, but that was only to be expected.

    “Ido!” said Torag. “You’ve butchered an animal while I was gone!”

    Five of the six warriors who’d been left to guard the keep edged away from their chief. The remaining one, taller and visibly bulkier than the others, straightened. He held a spear, but he kept its bone point carefully toward the ground as he growled, “We were hungry, Torag. We didn’t know when you were coming back.”

    Torag snarled and leaped, swinging his club. Ido hesitated for a fraction of a second between thrusting and jumping away. The knot of hardwood crushed his skull, splashing blood and brains across the surviving members of the garrison. They scattered into the interior of the compound with shrill cries; some of them dropped their weapons as they fled.

    Torag roared, a hacking, saw-toothed challenge that echoed through the night. The Coerli warriors hunched, their long faces toward the ground. Sirawhil stood silent, and the captive women huddled together. Several were blubbering in despair.

    Garric got down on one knee, keeping his eyes on Torag’s short, twitching tail. He hoped his posture looked submissive, but he’d chosen it to give him the best chance of grabbing Torag if the chieftain swung around in fury to strike again.

    Breathing in short, harsh snorts, Torag did turn, but he lowered his blood-smeared club. The fighting was over—to the extent there’d been a fight.

 

---

 

    “Sorman, Ido was your sibling,” the chief growled. “Throw his carrion into a pond where the eels will eat it.”

    A warrior, bending almost double, squirmed from the fringe of the gathering and gripped the corpse by the ankles. The victim had stiffened instantly when his brain was crushed; one arm stuck out at right angles. Sorman dragged the body through the gate and into the darkness. He didn’t lift his gaze from the mud, at least until he was out of Torag’s sight.

    Torag raised his head and roared, but this time he was just sealing the reality that everybody around him accepted. Garric half-expected him to urinate on the gatepost, but apparently the Coerli were a little less bestial than that.

    When Torag turned, he’d relaxed into his usual strutting self. Licking the head of his club absently, he said, “Get the fresh catch into the pens. And see to it that they’re fed and watered. I don’t want them dying on me after they cost me so much.”

    “What about the big one?” Sirawhil asked as the escorting warriors used spear butts to prod the captives toward the back of the compound. “I’ll need to examine him further. Though I wish you’d let me take him home to the Council.”

    “Faugh, the Council,” Torag said. “I don’t care what happens at home any more. This is my world, Sirawhil. Put him in the same pen as the rest of them."

    He looked at Garric, the club rising slightly in his hand. Garric kept his eyes on the leather belts that crossed in the middle of the chief’s chest; he didn’t move.

    “If he breaks out,” Torag said after obvious consideration. “he’ll give us good sport. That’s probably the best use for him anyway.”

    “Torag, he’s important,” the wizard said, then cringed away before the chieftain even raised a hand to strike her. In a less forceful tone she went on, “He could be valuable. We need to know more about him before, before....”

    “As breeding stock, you mean?” Torag said. “Well, we’ll see. Get him in the pen and we’ll talk about it after I eat.”

    Either Nerga or Eny—the pair was indistinguishable to Garric—raised his spear as a prod. Garric stepped forward quickly, joining the coffle of women being marched through the compound by their escorts.

    A thought struck him. He turned and called, “Sirawhil? If you want me to settle in properly, you’d better come along with your Bird. I can’t speak the language of the villagers here.”

    By chance he was near Soma. She put her arm around him and called in a loud voice, “Garric is my man, you women! I will let you share him, but I am his first wife.”

    Garric shook her arm away. “Soma,” he said, speaking to be heard by the entire coffle. “I am not your man, and you will never be my woman. Your shamelessness disgusts me!”

    That was more or less true, but Garric had better reasons for speaking the words. He wanted allies for whatever plan he came up with, but Soma was the last person of those he’d met in this world whom he’d be willing to trust.

    Sirawhil joined them. She glanced over her shoulder to see that Torag was entering the longhouse and no longer looking at them, then whispered, “Garric, you must not run! Torag and his warriors will hunt you down easily. If you’ll stay quiet and not anger the chief, I’m sure I can get you home with me soon. Whether or not he agrees! You can live your life in safety, then.”

    “I don’t want trouble,” Garric said. That was a lie or the next thing to one. “If you’ll help me, Sirawhil, I’ll do what I can to help you too.”

    And that was a flat lie. Garric didn’t make the mistake of thinking the Corl wizard was his friend just because she wasn’t as likely to kill and eat him as her chief was.

    The longhouse had a thatched roof. Its walls were wicker, waist high for two thirds of its length but solid at the back except for small windows covered with grills of some hard jointed grass like bamboo. Three Corl faces were crowded at the nearest window, watching Garric and the other prisoners file past. That must be Torag’s harem.

    “Yes,” said the Bird’s silent voice. “If Torag allowed his warriors to eat fresh meat regularly, they’d become sexually mature and he’d have to fight every one of them. Just being close to females in estrus may bring males to maturity. That’s what was happening with Ido and why he risked killing meat for himself.”

    To either side of the longhouse were circular beehives big enough for two or three warriors apiece. Members of the raiding party split up among them, growling to one another and to members of the garrison who were coming out of hiding now that Torag’s temper had cooled.

    A single Corl climbed a tower supported on three poles, disappearing into the thick darkness. Garric couldn’t imagine how a watchtower was of any use in these conditions, but the fact the guard had called the alarm at Torag’s approach proved otherwise.

    Behind the Coerli dwellings was another woven fence, this one only half the height of the fifteen foot wall surrounding the compound. The gate could be barred, but at present it stood open. A human male and female stood in the gateway watching the newcomers. Patterns of deeper darkness behind the fence suggested others were looking out through gaps in the wicker.

    The man in gate was squat and burly; his arms were exceptionally long for his modest height. “I am Crispus!” he shouted. “I am the slave of great Torag! All other Grass Beasts are my slaves! Bow to me, all you who enter my domain!”

    The coffle of women stopped. Garric stepped forward. Sirawhil was speaking, but though the Bird translated the words in his mind, they were a meaningless blur.

    Garric had met his share of bullies at the borough’s annual Sheep Fair: merchants’ bodyguards, muleteers, and sometimes one of the badgers who’d drive off the sheep that a drover had purchased. He’d learned that you could deal with the bully immediately or you could wait, but waiting didn’t ever make the situation better. Therefore—

    “I’m Garric or-Reise,” he said, his voice rising. “I don’t need to be your master, but I’ll never be your slave!”

    Crispus raised the hand he’d held concealed behind the gatepost; he held a cudgel the length of a man’s forearm. Garric lunged forward and smashed the top of his head into Crispus’ nose. Crispus bellowed and staggered backward. Garric drove at him again, catching Crispus with the point of his shoulder and crushing him against the gatepost. Garric felt the air blast out of Crispus’ lungs, but he didn’t hear ribs crack as he’d hoped he might.

    Crispus went down. Garric kicked him twice in the face with his heel. He’d been wearing boots or sandals since he became prince so his feet weren’t as callused as they would’ve been when he still lived in Barca’s Hamlet, but the blows would’ve broken bones in a less sturdy victim. As it was, Crispus’ head lolled back and his body went limp.

    Garric was breathing hard. He hadn’t had anything to eat since the evening before he was captured; that was part of the reason he was suddenly dizzy.

    He bent and picked up Crispus’ cudgel. It wasn’t much good to him with his wrists bound together and tied to his waist on a short lead, but he didn’t see any point in leaving it for Crispus when he woke up.

    “Does anybody else think he’ll make me his slave?” he shouted into the darkness beyond the gateway.

    The woman who’d been standing with Crispus stepped forward and touched the cords binding Garric’s wrists. She held a hardwood dowel no thicker than a writing stylus. She thrust the point into the knots and worked them loose with startling ease.

    “I am Donria,” she said. She was young and shapely. “Until now there were no men here except Crispus.”

    She looked up at Garric and added, “Now that I’ve seen you, I don’t think there were any men here at all—until now.”

 

---

 

    Cashel figured the road to the charnel house wasn’t any worse than the one that led west out of Barca’s Hamlet, but nobody tried to take a carriage down that one. He, Chalcus, and Ilna had gotten out and were walking with the escorting soldiers, but Tenoctris stayed in the open vehicle of necessity.

    Cervoran stayed for reasons Cashel wasn’t sure about. Maybe Cervoran didn’t notice the bumping around.

    “Sister take this track!” said the Blood Eagle stumbling along beside Cashel. The guards had their equipment to carry besides watching out for enemies. “You can tell from the ruts how much traffic it gets. How come they don’t grade it smooth, hey?”

    As soon as the party’d got into the valley north of Mona, the road’d become limestone—living rock, not crushed stone laid over mud. That sounded better than it was: some layers were harder than others, so the carriage’s iron tires bounced and skidded from one swale to the next. It made a terrible racket and must’ve felt worse, though Tenoctris didn’t let it show and Cervoran, well, he was Cervoran.

    “I don’t guess it bothers most people who ride this way,” Cashel said after thinking about it for a little while.

    They came around a corner. The valley floor widened here, not much but enough to turn a wagon if you swung the outside wheels up onto the slope. The entrance to the cave was a man’s height up the east wall. A heavy wooden frame’d been built against the limestone to support a double-leaf gate.

    A slate-roofed hut stood above the cave mouth where the slope flattened into a ledge. An old man sat on the hut’s porch, cutting an alder sapling into a chain of wooden links. He must’ve heard the carriage far back down the route, but it wasn’t till he saw it was a carriage with the royal seal instead of a wagon carrying corpses that he jumped to his feet. He half-ran, half-scrambled down meet his visitors. He dropped the shoot he was whittling, but he was waving his short, sharp knife until one of the Blood Eagles stopped him and pried it out of his fingers.

    “May the Sister help me, dear sirs and ladies!” the fellow said. He spoke the name of the Sister, the Queen of the Underworld, as a real prayer rather than the curse it’d been in the mouth of the soldier a moment before. “Has something gone wrong? Was the delivery this morning not a pauper after all? Oh dear, oh dear!”

    “We’re here for other reasons,” Tenoctris said as Cashel helped her out of the carriage. “There has been a recent interment then?”

    “Why yes,” the caretaker said, backing slightly. “A woman, it was. I didn’t hear the cause of death. They found her dead in the night, was all I was told.”

    Cashel handed Tenoctris off to one of the soldiers and stepped quickly around the back of the vehicle to get Cervoran. The Blood Eagles knew Tenoctris well enough that they treated her like a friendly old woman instead of a wizard, but the recently dead man bothered them.

    Cashel didn’t blame them for feeling that way, but Cervoran’d showed how useful he was when he made the sea burn. Cashel wouldn’t say the fellow was necessary; nobody was so necessary that the world was going to stop without him. But Cervoran knew more about the present trouble and how to fix it than anybody else Cashel’d met, Tenoctris included by her own words.

    “I must have the body,” Cervoran said, tramping toward the gate. The slope’d been cut and filled into a ramp instead of a flight of steps. That’d make it easier for fellows carrying a body. The weight wasn’t much, not for two men, but you were likely to trip on steps for not seeing your feet.

    “Ah, may I ask why, sirs and ladies?” the attendant said. He stood stiffly, wringing his hands together. He wasn’t as old as Cashel’d thought first off, maybe no more than thirty. It was hard to judge with bald folks.

    Cervoran ignored him, not that, “It is necessary,” would’ve helped much if the fellow’d been what was for him talkative. Tenoctris followed on Ilna’s arm, with Chalcus behind looking as tense and alert as an eagle.

    “There are dangers to the kingdom, sir,” Tenoctris said. “Perhaps you heard about the fortress that rose from the sea? The body will help us, help my colleague that is, deal with the threat.”

    Cervoran turned on the platform at the top of the ramp. “The Green Woman’s creatures are landing even now,” he said. “Human weapons may delay their advance, but I alone can defeat the Green Woman.”

    He paused, then added at a pitch even higher than his usual squeak, “I am Cervoran!”

    The attendant looked at Tenoctris and blinked three times quickly, trying to get his mind around the thought. “King Cervoran?” he said in disbelief.

    “It seems so,” said Tenoctris, not putting any opinion into her tone. Cashel grinned. He’d probably have said, “I guess so,” and meant the same thing: that they weren’t sure.

    Cervoran took hold of one of the doors’ long vertical handles. The panel quivered when he tugged, but it didn’t open. Something buzzed a loud, low note.

    “I’ll get it,” Cashel said, stepping past the two wizards and gripping the handle. The door didn’t have a bar or even a latch; nobody was going to break in or out, after all.

    Cashel pulled. The door was heavy and fit tightly, but it swung sideways with a squeal.

 

---

 

    A flood of flies curled out of the cave and back, like sparks when the roof of a burning building collapses. The stink was the worst Cashel’d smelled since the summer the body of a basking shark cast up on Barca’s Hamlet, so rotten that the lower jaw had fallen off, the cartilage of the gill rakers had rotted into what looked like a horse’s mane. He was used to bad smells, but he stepped back by reflex because he hadn’t expected this one.

    Tenoctris threw a hand to her face, then turned and bent over. “Tenoctris, are you—” Cashel started to say, but right then the wizard opened her mouth and vomited. She retched and gasped and tried to throw up again. Cashel stepped toward her but his sister was already there, supporting Tenoctris by the shoulders so she didn’t fall on her face from sheer weakness.

    It didn’t affect Cervoran. Well, Cashel hadn’t expected it would. He stepped into the cave and said, “I will use this body. Remove it from the cave for me.”

    Cashel pulled the other panel open to give better light than there’d be if his body blocked the half the doorway that was already open. Flies were whirling around like anything, brushing Cashel’s face and even lighting on him. It was pretty bad and the stink was still worse, but he didn’t let any of that show in his face.

    From the entrance the cave sloped down for as far as Cashel could see. The stone floor was covered with bodies, bones, and the slick, putrid-smelling liquids that a body turns into if you just let it rot. The corpses near the entrance weren’t as far gone as the ones further in, which’d probably slid or leaked downward as they rotted. The one just inside the door was a middle-aged woman who might’ve been asleep if you didn’t know better.

    Cashel squatted beside the body, judging how best to pick it up. It’d stiffened since she died, which’d make it easier to carry. It was a good thing the carriage was open, though, because with her arms spread like this he’d need to break something to get her in through the usual little carriage doors.

    “Where d’ye want me to set her, Master Cervoran?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.

    It’d have been a side-panel of the carriage that got broken if it’d come to that. The woman wouldn’t mind and what nature was going to do to her body shortly was a lot worse, but Cashel would still’ve broken the side-panel.

    “Carry her outside and put her on the ground,” Cervoran said. “The presence of so much death aids my work, but I need more room.”

    Cashel glanced toward Tenoctris; she lifted her chin just a hair’s breadth in agreement. Her face was tight and would’ve been angry if she’d allowed it to have any expression.

    “All right,” said Cashel, sliding his hands under the shoulders and hips of the corpse and lifting it. The dead woman wasn’t heavy, but she stuck to what’d soaked into the stone. He had to rock her back and forth carefully so that he could pick her up without tearing her skin. He stood, turned, and set her down just clear of the arc the doors swung through.

    In the cave it didn’t bother Cashel that all the bodies’d been stripped before being thrown there. The sun was high enough now to shine on the little entrance plaza, though, and the woman looked different. It made Cashel feel like a bully to treat her this way, even though she was dead.

    He shrugged, but his expression didn’t change. Well, it had to happen.

    Ilna stepped past and swung the doors shut. She didn’t have any difficulty moving the heavy doors, though some of that was just knowing how to use your weight. Still, she was stronger than most people would guess.

    Cervoran followed her with his dull eyes. “There was no reason to close the cave,” he said.

    “I choose to close it,” Ilna snapped. “Just as I chose to pull you off the pyre. You may call it my whim, if you like.”

    Cervoran looked at her for a further moment, then bent and opened his oak case. He had no more expression than a carp does, sucking air on the surface of a pond in high summer.

    Cashel grinned. Ilna was a lot of things that most people wouldn’t guess. She hadn’t said, “Tenoctris is a fine lady, not a peasant like me’n my brother, so the smell bothers her.” That might’ve embarrassed Tenoctris, and Ilna wasn’t one to lay what she did on somebody else anyway.

    Cashel was proud to have her for a sister. She felt the same way about him, which made it even better.

    Cervoran put on the topaz crown, then took other things out of his case. He hadn’t started chanting a spell, but Cashel could feel his skin prickle the way it always did around wizardry. That was what they’d come here for, after all.

    Cashel looked at his friends: Ilna and Tenoctris and also Chalcus, who’d backed against the rock face so he could look all the other directions without worrying that somebody was coming up behind him.

    The sailor flashed Cashel a grin in response, but he was tense and no mistake. Chalcus wasn’t afraid of wizardry, exactly, but he was nervous because he knew his sword and dagger were no use against it.

    Cashel checked to make sure he had space, then started his quarterstaff in a series of slow circles, first in front of him and then over his head. There was a lot of power around this place. The ferrules on the ends of the hickory shaft twinkled with sparks of blue wizardlight.

    Cashel smiled as he moved. This quarterstaff had saved him and those he was watching over lots of times; and some of those times he’d been facing wizards.

 

---

 

    Ilna watched Cervoran draw a knife from his box and turn toward her. She knew it was an athame, a wizard’s tool used to tease out incantations. The curving symbols cut into the blade were words written in what educated people like Garric called the Old Script. Ilna could recognize them as patterns, though she couldn’t read them any better than she could the blocky New Script folk used today to write in.

    Wizard’s tool it might be, but this athame was a real knife also. The hilt and blade were forged from a single piece of iron, and the double edges were raggedly sharp.

    “You, Ilna,” Cervoran said. He stepped toward her, raising the athame. “I must have a lock of your hair for the amulet which controls my double.”

    Chalcus flicked his sword out and held it straight. The point didn’t touch Cervoran’s right eye, but if it would run the wizard through the brain if he took another step forward.

    “Let’s you take a lock of somebody else’s hair, my good friend,” the sailor said in his falsely cheerful voice. “A lock of your own, why not? You’ll not want to pay the cost of raising that ugly blade of yours to Mistress Ilna.”

    “Do you think your steel frightens me, man?” Cervoran said. His head turned toward the sailor. “There must be a lock of my hair in the amulet to animate the simulacrum. The hair of Ilna is to control it. Do you think to build a double of me and free it uncontrolled?”

    “Why hers, then?” Chalcus said. “Take hairs from my head if you like!”

    He was angry in a way Ilna’d rarely seen him. Normally anything that disturbed the sailor as much as this did would’ve given him the release of killing something. The humor of the situation struck Ilna, though nobody seeing her expression was likely to know she was smiling.

    “The clay was female, therefore the control must be female,” Cervoran said. “And there are other reasons. If the clay had been male, I would have used Master Cashel as my control.”

    His tone was always peevish, but perhaps it was a little more so just at the moment. Despite the way the wizard had sneered at the sword, Ilna noticed that he hadn’t tried to move past it.

    “Tenoctris, is this true?” Chalcus demanded. He flicked his eyes toward the old woman, then locked them back on Cervoran. “Does he need Mistress Ilna’s hair as he says?”

    “It may be true, Chalcus,” Tenoctris said carefully. “To be sure of that, I’d have to be a much greater wizard than I am.”

    “You’ll do,” said Ilna. She stepped forward and plucked the athame from Cervoran’s pulpy fingers. He tried to keep hold when he realized what she was about, but she had no desire to let Cervoran’s hand hold an edge that close to her throat. She shook him free easily and raised the blade to her head.

    Ilna pinched a lock of hair from in front of her ear with the other hand, then sawed the athame through it. Though the iron hilt had been in Cervoran’s hand, it remained icy cold. She didn’t like the feel of the metal, but she used the athame rather than her own paring knife because it might have a virtue she didn’t understand herself.

    Ilna’s mother Mab had been a wizard or something greater than a wizard, her mother and Cashel’s. Ilna’d never met Mab, only seen her at a distance, and she wouldn’t have understood much more—about Mab or about the things she herself did with fabric—even if they’d spoken, she supposed. But as Tenoctris said, there were reasons a wizard might use Ilna or her brother to increase the power of his spell.

    “Ilna?” said Tenoctris. “I’m sure you realize this, dear, but there are dangers to the person whose psyche controls the simulacrum of a wizard.”

    “Thank you, Tenoctris,” Ilna said. It felt odd to realize that she had friends, that there were people who cared about her. “There’s danger in getting up in the morning, I’m afraid. Especially in these times.”

    She handed the pinch of hair to Cervoran; he took it in the cup of his hand instead of between thumb and forefinger as she offered it. Ilna rotated the athame to put the point up and the hilt toward the wizard, and he took that also.

    Ilna watched Cervoran use the athame to draw an oval around the corpse, leaving more space at its feet than at its head. His point scored the soft stone only lightly, but he never let it skip.

    She was glad to be shut of the athame; she’d rather put her hands in the stinking muck of the charnel house than to touch that cold iron again. But she’d do either of those things and worse if duty required it.

    Ilna smiled and, without looking, reached out to the back of Chalcus’ wrist. He’d sheathed his blades again, but the hilts were never far from his hands. She wouldn’t pretend she was happy, but she was glad to be the person she was instead of somebody too frightened or too squeamish to do things that had to be done.

    Cervoran stepped into the figure he’d drawn, standing at the corpse’s foot. He pointed the athame at the woman’s face. Someone had closed her eyes, but her mouth sagged open in death. She’d lost her front teeth in both upper and lower jaws.

    “Ouer mechan...,” Cervoran said. Azure wizardlight, a blue purer than anything in nature, sparkled on the point of the athame. “Libaba oimathotho.”

    Ilna looked dispassionately at the woman’s corpse, wondering what her name had been. Cities were impersonal in a way that a tiny place like Barca’s Hamlet never could be, but Mona wasn’t large as cities go. People on the woman’s street, in her tenement, would have known her by name.

    Now she had nothing. Even her corpse, her clay as Cervoran put it, was being taken for another purpose. It was that or the maggots’ purpose, of course, but perhaps the maggots would’ve been better.

    “Brido lothian iao...,” Cervoran chanted. The topaz on his brow flamed with more light than the sun struck from it; his athame sizzled and chattered as though he’d pent a thunderbolt in its cold iron form.

    Ilna’s fingers were working a pattern. She didn’t recall taking the yarn from her sleeve, but for her it was as natural as breathing. The dead woman had no name, and shortly there would be nothing at all left of her....

    “Isee!” Cervoran said. A crackling bar of wizardlight linked his athame to the bridge of the corpse’s nose. “Ithi! Squaleth!”

    The dead woman’s features slumped. Melting away, Ilna thought, but instead they were melting into the shape of Cervoran’s own face. Wizardlight snarled and popped, molding flesh the way a potter’s thumbs do clay. The clay is female, the wizard told Chalcus, and he’d meant the words literally.

    Cervoran’s mouth moved. Perhaps he was still chanting but Ilna couldn’t hear words through the roar of the wizardry itself. The woman’s mouth, now Cervoran’s mouth, closed. The eyes blinked open, filled momentarily by a fire that was more than wizardlight. The corpse folded its hands and sat up slowly as the spluttering light spread down through its changing body.

    The blue glare cut off so abruptly that for an instant the sun seemed unable to fill its absence. Cervoran staggered, out of the oval he’d scribed. He might’ve fallen if Cashel—Ilna smiled: of course Cashel—hadn’t put a hand behind his shoulders.

    What had been the corpse of an unknown woman stood up with the deliberation of a flower unfolding. It was no longer dead, it was no longer female, and in every way but size it looked exactly like Cervoran. He was a bulky man though of only average height, while the corpse—the clay he’d molded his double from—had been both shorter and slighter.

    The only thing the double wore was the bag hanging from its neck. Cervoran had put the locks of hair and probably other things into it, to judge from the way it bulged. Both the bag and cord were linen rather than wool. Ilna was far too conscious of the powers that fibers held to think the choice of vegetable rather than animal materials was chance.

    Ilna turned and pulled the door of the charnel house open a crack; she tossed the pattern she’d just knottted inside, then pressed the doors closed.

    It was a monument, of sorts; a distillation of the woman’s presence. It wasn’t much, but it was what Ilna could do.

    Chalcus cursed savagely under his breath. His cape was sewn from red and yellow cloth in vertical stripes. He unfastened the gaudy garnet pin clenching it at his throat and laid it over the double’s shoulders.

    “Cover yourself, damn you!” he snarled, his face turned away from the creature and the wizard who’d created it.

    “We will return to my palace now,” Cervoran said. “I have work to do.”

    Ilna couldn’t be sure, but she thought there was a smirk on his purple lips.

 

---

 

    A horse takes up as much room on shipboard as a dozen men, so when Garric embarked the royal army he didn’t take horses. The courier panting in front of Sharina had run the whole distance back from the battle. He’d stripped off his armor and weapons before setting out, but he still wore military boots. He was bent over with his hands on his knees, shuffling slowly to keep from stiffening as he sucked air into his lungs.

    The tablet’s wax seal was impressed with a bunch of grapes: the crest of Liane’s family, the bor-Benlimans, not Lord Waldron’s two-headed dragon. Sharina broke the tablet open, unsurprised. That’s why she’d sent Liane along with the army, after all; or better, allowed Liane to accompany the army. Lord Waldron regarded reporting back to be somehow demeaning, and in the present instance he probably had his hands full.

    Waldron definitely had his hands full. The note inked on white birch in Liane’s neat uncials read: APPROXIMATELY 300 HELLPLANTS ASHORE IN CALF’S HEAD BAY SEVEN MILES WEST OF MONA. NO MORE APPEARING AT PRESENT. ATTEMPTING TO FIGHT PLANTS WITH FIRE BUT WEATHER DAMP. LBB FOR LD WALDRON.

    “Your highness?” said Attaper. “Lord Cashel and the others’re back.”

    He’d formed the available Blood Eagles around Sharina in the palace courtyard. That was about a hundred and fifty men, scarcely a ‘regiment’ even with the addition of the troop in Valles guarding King Valence III and the troop who’d escorted Cashel, Ilna and Tenoctris to the charnel house. The royal bodyguards had taken heavy casualties ever since they’d begun accompanying Prince Garric. There was no lack of volunteers from line regiments to fill the black-armored ranks, butt selection and training took more time than Attaper’d had free.

    Sharina looked up. Her brush was poised to reply on the facing page of the tablet, using red ink because she was the acting ruler of the kingdom whether she liked it or not. She’d been so lost in organizing a response to what was happening miles away that she hadn’t noticed the return of Cashel with Tenoctris and the others. Things had been happening so fast....

    Her friends were coming toward her one at a time through the narrow aisle the guards had opened for them. Cashel was in front. Seeing him made Sharina feel calmer than she had since the woman ran into the palace screaming that something had happened to her boy. The child, a nine-year-old, had been chasing crows out of the family barley plot. When hellplants crawled out of the sea and began crushing their way across the field, he’d tried to stop them by flinging stones.

    The boy’s mother had come out of their hut in time to see the boy snatched by a tentacle. Fortunately she’d been too far away to comprehend what Sharina knew must’ve happened next, and she’d run to Mona for help instead of going out into the field to join her son.

    Sharina’d dispatched Lord Waldron with the three regiments billeted in the city to deal with the attack. She hadn’t gone herself because she wasn’t a warrior like her brother. She couldn’t lead an attack the way Garric might well have done, so rather than being in the way of the fighting men, she’d stayed in the palace to command the whole business.

    The rest of the army and fleet was scattered across First Atara so that no district was completely overwhelmed by the numbers of strangers it had to feed and house. Those units had to be alerted, and somebody had to make decisions if a second attack occurred while Waldron was involved with the first.

    It was possible that a second or third or twentieth attack would occur. Sharina knew their enemy was powerful, but not even Tenoctris could guess how powerful.

    Cashel smiled as warmly as an embrace, but instead of putting an arm around her he stepped to the side and let those behind get through also. Tenoctris followed, then Ilna and Chalcus with his usually cheerful face looking like a thunderhead ready to burst forth in hail and lightning. Cervoran was the last.

    Sharina’s eyes widened in surprise. The person immediately behind Chalcus wasn’t Cervoran—it was a slightly smaller copy of Cervoran, dressed in a rag breechclout and the short cape that Chalcus had worn when the group left in the morning. Cervoran, the real Cervoran, was in back of his double.

    “I will create the necessary devices in my chamber of art,” Cervoran said. The other members of the party were tensely silent, but the soldiers who’d escorted them talked in muted voices to colleagues who’d stayed at the palace. “I cannot breach the Fortress of Glass directly, so I will enter it from another place.”

    Sharina glanced at Tenoctris who sucked her lips in and shrugged. “I can’t judge what Lord Cervoran can do or should be permitted to do, your highness,” she said with quiet formality. “I’m trying to follow the various currents of power about us, but I haven’t been able to do so as yet.”

    “You have no choice, fools,” Cervoran squeaked. “The Green Woman has sent her servants against one place at present. She will attack other places, all the places on this island. Unless they are stopped, her creatures will advance until they have killed me. Then they will conquer this island and all islands. Only I can stand against the Green Woman, and I must have my chamber of art!”

    “Yes, all right,” said Sharina calmly. She didn’t like Cervoran’s tone, but she didn’t see any useful result from trying to teach him manners. Whatever he’d been in his earlier life, since Ilna dragged him off the pyre he’d acted less like an adult than like a child—or perhaps like a storm, howling and whistling and sizzling with ungoverned power.

    “Cashel must help me,” Cervoran said. “And Protas, who is clay of this clay.”

    “Prince Protas?” Ilna said, the words coming out clipped and hard. “Your son, the child?”

    “It is necessary,” Cervoran said. “His clay, his flesh is of this flesh.”

    All the time Cervoran was speaking, the near copy of him stared at the original with cold black eyes. Sharina wondered what the double’s voice would sound like if he spoke.

    Aloud she said, “I won’t order a child to help in wizardry. I won’t order anybody to help your wizardry!”

    She looked at Cashel, opening her mouth to repeat her words in a more personal fashion, but Cashel was already giving her a slow grin. “It’s all right, Sharina,” he said quietly. “If I can do something to help, I will. And I guess Lord Protas feels the same way. He’s a good boy, though he’s, you know, younger than I was or Garric was.”

    “Find him and ask him, then,” Sharina said, suddenly tired from making decisions for other people that meant life or death; for them, perhaps for everyone in the kingdom. “But I won’t order him!”

    She knew Protas would go anywhere that Cashel was willing to take him: the boy would’ve accompanied the group to the charnel house if Tenoctris had permitted it. And Sharina understood that more than the life of one boy hung on Cervoran’s wizardry. The child who’d been watching the field at Calf’s Head Bay had been younger than Protas was when he fell victim to the hellplants.

    But as she watched Cashel leave with Cervoran and the lesser copy of Cervoran, she was glad Liane wasn’t here to listen. Liane wouldn’t have allowed Cervoran to use Protas, no matter how critical the boy’s presence might be to the survival of the kingdom.

    Liane’s father had been a wizard too; and in the end, he’d been ready to sacrifice his daughter’s life to complete an incantation.