The Fortress of Glass: Chapter Ten

    “Oh Chalcus!” Merota cried. “It’s all right! Ilna’s here!”

    It certainly isn’t all right, Ilna thought. Merota hugged her and she patted the girl’s shoulder, but she was ready to act if there was need.

    Which there didn’t seem to be. She’d stepped from the wizard’s chamber into a maze with broad aisles. The hedges, twice her height, were holly, but trees and fruiting bushes grew among the interwoven, spiky branches.

    Underfoot the grass was soft and curly. The ends were pointed so it hadn’t been cropped, but the blades were only high enough to brush Ilna’s ankles.

    Chalcus was a double pace away, as close as he could be to Merota and still have room to swing his curved sword with reflexive speed. He didn’t have his back to a hedge, either, which surprised Ilna till she noticed faint rustlings and the way leaves occasionally quivered in the still air.

    That might be ground squirrels, of course. It might also be a viper hunting ground squirrels, and it wasn’t hard to imagine worse things than vipers here.

    “I heard the child call,” Chalcus said. His mouth smiled but his cheeks were set in hard planes and his eyes went every direction in quick jumps like a bird hunting. “I tried to follow her, but I got dizzy. Do you know where it is we are, dearest?”

    “We’re in the tapestry Double set you to look at,” Ilna said. “It’s a trap, or at least Double used it as one. The pattern the hedges make draws you into it if you concentrate. Which of course you did.”

    Poking through the holly beside her was what looked like blackberry canes with the usual mix of purple, red, and pink fruit on them. She picked a ripe one and tasted it. It was an ordinary blackberry, tart and tasty.

    She looked at her companions. “It was my fault,” she said. She stood as straight as she’d have done if she was about to be hanged. She’d rather be hanged than to have made the mistake she had. “I should’ve looked at the tapestry myself. I would’ve known.”

    “Dear one,” said Chalcus with real affection, though his eyes continued to search. Under other circumstances he’d have touched her cheek with the back of his hand, but now each held a naked blade. “When I think I need you to scout before I look at a wall or a field or it may be a stretch of sea, I’ll drown myself. I’ll have lived too long to be a man.”

    He stepped toward the next angle of the maze; the path branched left and right. “What I don’t see...,” he said, looking down both paths. “Is why Double would want to catch me that way. I wasn’t a particular friend to him, but I wasn’t his enemy either. Not then.”

    He glanced back and gave the women a hard grin. “That will change when we return,” he added.

    “He didn’t care about us, Chalcus,” Merota said. She wasn’t looking at the ground or the hedges either, it seemed to Ilna. “He used us to draw Ilna here. He knew she’d follow us, don’t you think?”

    “He wouldn’t need to be a wizard to see that,” Chalcus agreed. “But how is she his enemy?”

    “The amulet,” Merota said. “Lord Cervoran set Ilna to control Double. Double sent Ilna away so that he isn’t under Cervoran’s mastery any more.”

    There was a tiny note of frustration in her voice. Merota was a courteous and respectful child, but this was a strain for her as surely as it was for the rest of them. She clearly felt that what was obvious to her ought to be obvious to other people, at least when she’d pointed it out.

    Ilna smiled coldly. The child might learn better, or she might not. Ilna’d never quite learned that lesson herself.

    “Ah,” said Chalcus with a wry smile. “I see, I’d been getting too full of myself, thinking I was the target. A flaw I’m prone to, milady, and I’m thankful to you for catching me.”

    He spoke lightly, but he wasn’t being ironic. Chalcus wasn’t the man to deny his faults. Now he turned to Ilna and said, “Is there a way out, then, dear one?”

    “Probably,” Ilna said. That was the first thing she’d considered, of course; the thing she’d been puzzling over even as she stepped into tapestry. “Almost certainly. It’s a complex knot, but there’s no knot without an end somewhere. I haven’t found it yet, is all.”

    She took another blackberry, realizing that she hadn’t eaten in longer than she wished was the case. Food wasn’t a great pleasure to her, but without it she was more apt to make mistakes. Lack of food, lack of sleep, cold weather or to a lesser extent hot weather—they all made her less effective than she liked. She regarded those requirements as weaknesses and disliked herself for them, but she wasn’t the sort to deny that she was weak.

    “Is it best we stay here, dearest?” Chalcus said. “Or is there a direction you think we should go?”

    “I don’t know anything about this place,” Ilna said, irritated to be asked questions she couldn’t answer. She’d known where they were, no more. “We’ll need food and there’s little enough here. Water too, I suppose. There were fountains and streams on the tapestry.”

    She cleared her throat. To take the sting out of her previous tone she added, “Though the blackberries are good. Will you have one?”

    Merota was standing primly with her hands tented together. Ilna glanced at her, then looked again: the child was terrified. Ilna reached into her sleeve for the twine she kept there. It’d be a simple thing, a few knots and a pattern to spread in front of Merota’s barely focused eyes to calm her....

    Ilna paused, put the twine away and instead hugged Merota. The child threw her arms around Ilna and squeezed hard before relaxing and stepping back.

    “Thank you, Ilna,” she said formally. “I’m all right now.”

    “There’s an apple tree to the right, Master Chalcus,” Ilna said, pretending nothing had just happened. “Since we have no better direction, let’s go that way. Perhaps we can see something from its branches, too.”

    Her cheeks were hot. She hated embarrassment, hated it, and being around other people was one embarrassment after another.

    “There’s little men in the hedges,” said Chalcus with a lilt as he led with his sword and dagger angled out in front of him like a butterfly’s feelers. “Brown and not so tall as my waist, short fellow though I am. But there’s a lot of them.”

    He sounded cheerful, and perhaps he was. Ilna smiled grimly. Chalcus wasn’t a cruel man, but he regarded the chance to kill something that deserved it as the best sport there was.

    What Ilna really hated was emotion. At least now she had some emotions besides anger, but a life spent suppressing anger left her uncomfortable with the softer feelings as well.

    Insects buzzed and fluttered in the foliage, but Ilna didn’t see birds. There were sounds that might’ve been bird calls, but she thought they were more likely insects also—or frogs. They could’ve been frogs.

    Her fingers began plaiting a fabric for occupation. Though she didn’t see the little men that the sailor had, she could feel movement in the way leaves trembled or the grass lay: everything was part of an interwoven whole.

    Including of course Ilna os-Kenset. She knew that another person in her place might’ve learned how to leave this tapestry before following her friends into it; but that other person wouldn’t have been Ilna and very probably wouldn’t have been able to see the patterns that Ilna saw.

    Ilna grinned to think what she’d never have said aloud: she hadn’t met anybody except for her brother who saw patterns as clearly as she did. Cashel would’ve gone bulling straight ahead just the way she’d done, if he’d known how to.

 

---

 

    They’d reached the ground beneath the apple tree’s spreaing limbs. The trunk was hidden within the hedge, but the branches reached out from above the holly.

    Apple cores lay scattered on the grass. Some were so fresh that though the flesh had browned it hadn’t started to shrivel. The mouths that’d nibbled the fruit were no bigger than a young child’s.

    “The little people eat apples,” said Merota, meaning more than the words.

    “So do we,” said Ilna tartly, “but that doesn’t mean we’d turn down meat.”

    She’d snapped at the child’s foolish hopefulness before she could catch herself--and regretted it as the words came out. Chalcus glanced at her with a hint of pain and probably irritation, completely justified. Of course the girl was being foolish, and of course the girl knew that as surely as Ilna herself did.

    “Merota,” Ilna said, “I’m nervous; I’m afraid, I suppose. This makes me more unpleasant to be around than usual. Even more unpleasant. I apologize.”

    “You’re not unpleasant, Ilna!” Merota said. She probably even meant it. She was a sweet child, truly nice, and she couldn’t understand what a monster her friend Ilna really was.

    Chalcus cleared his throat. “I might be able to jump to the lowest branch,” he said, looking at the tree above them. “But I don’t think I can get through the prickles without leaving more of my skin behind than I’d choose to. The little folk have skills I do not.”

    “I’ll go up,” said Ilna, slipping loose the silk rope she wore around her waist in place of a sash. “You stay with Merota.”

    You and your sword stay here, but there was no need to say that.

    She eyed the branches. The lowest, less than her own height above her, wasn’t as thick as she’d like but she’d try it for a start. She cocked the rope behind her, then sent it up in an underhand cast. It curved over the branch and dropped.

    “Ah!” cried Chalcus, sheathing his dagger to grab the dangling end in his left hand. He’d been frowning, obviously wondering what Ilna expected to catch with the loop. There was nothing for a noose to close over, but it’d weighted the throw nicely.

    Ilna scrambled up the rope with the strength of her arms alone: the silk cord was too thin for her feet to grip it well, but the present short climb didn’t require that. She pulled herself onto the branch, then stood and surveyed their surroundings.

    “It doesn’t help,” she called, keeping the disappointment out of her voice. “The hedges are as thick as they’re tall. I can’t even see into the next passage. And in the distance there’s fog.”

    The fog might be ordinary water vapor, but Ilna doubted it. She hadn’t imagined that they could get back to their own world by walking to the edge of the tapestry, but perhaps....

    Ilna smiled grimly. She hadn’t consciously allowed herself to hope for anything, but obviously the part of her mind she couldn’t control had been hoping. The human part of her mind.

    “No matter, dear one,” Chalcus called. “At least we’ve the apples.”

    The branch swayed gently, but Ilna was comfortable with its support. She lifted the skirt of her outer tunic into a basket. and plucked fruit from the branches above her into it. The apples were small but sweet; apparently they were fully ripe when half the skin was still green. Many were wormy, but she had no difficulty gathering sufficient for the three of them.

    Because the hedge was so thick, the branches in the interior had leaves only on the tips. Ilna’d walked some way out in that direction to complete her foraging. As she turned, she saw faces staring up at her from among the knotted gray stems.

    They were visible only for an instant, but she’d gotten a good look at a trio of naked brown-skinned people, adult in proportion but no bigger than a six-year-old. One was a woman. Their large dark eyes reminded her of rabbits, and they’d vanished like rabbits leaping into a brush pile.

    Ilna walked back to where her friends waited and spilled the apples onto the ground. She hung from the branch by one arm and dropped. While Merota picked the apples up, she looped the rope back around her waist.

    Chalcus continued watching in all directions. He hadn’t ceased to do that even when he was belaying the rope for Ilna to climb.

    “I saw the little people,” she said quietly. “They don’t seem to have weapons. Or any tools whatever.’

    “Aye,” said the sailor. “They’re a fleeting, fearful lot and likely harmless. But it strikes me, dear heart, that they wouldn’t be so fearful were there nothing here in this garden to fear, not so?”

    He stepped around the next corner of the maze, munching an apple in his left hand as his sword quivered like a dog scenting prey. Merota followed, holding the apples in her tunic with both hands, and Ilna brought up the rear as before.

    Several trees grew in the opposite wall of the hedge. One was a walnut, she thought. Nutmeats would be a good addition to the apples, though the capsules holding the nuts would stain her hands indelibly when she shucked them. Perhaps—

    A fat-bodied snake stepped on two short legs from the opposite end of the aisle. The creature was the size of a man, pale red in front and its back and tail covered with vivid blue scales. It raised a neck frill as Chalcus lunged forward.

    “Look away!” Ilna shouted, closing her eyes. Her fingers knotted a pattern that she understood perfectly though she couldn’t have described if her life’d depended on it. Words were for the world’s Lianes; Ilna had her own way of communicating.

    Merota’s scream muted into the desperate wheeze of someone drowning. Ilna lifted her pattern of cords and looked.

    A shock lashed her. It felt like what’d she’d gotten from touching metal after walking across wool in a dry day. Merota stood paralyzed with her mouth open; Chalcus had fallen as if his legs were wood. His sword was outstretched and his eyes stared in horror.

    Instead of a snake’s jaws, the creature had a blunt, bony beak like a squid’s. A forked blue tongue trembled from it in a high-pitched hiss. Ripples of blue and red played across its broad frill in a sequence as wonderfully perfect as a nightingale’s song. The pattern caught every eye that fell on it and gripped with the crushing certainty of a spider’s fangs.

    The creature, taking one clumsy stride forward, saw the open fabric in Ilna’s hands. The rhythm of color in its frill broke, bubbled, and subsided into a muddy blur.

    “Basilisk!” Merota shouted. She flung an apple at the creature. It bounced harmlessly away. The rest of the harvest fell to the ground.

    Chalcus rolled to his feet. The creature leaped backward. The sailor was still off-balance so his sword notched the frill instead of skewering the long snake neck.

    “My pardon!” the creature cried. It leaped onto a limb of the walnut tree; the stubby legs were as powerful as a frog’s. “My pardon, I didn’t realize you were Princes! The One hasn’t added new Princes in an age of ages!”

    Chalcus jumped upward, his sword flickering left to right. The creature sprang over the hedge and into the aisle beyond.

    “I beg your pardon, fellow Princes...,” it called, its voice trailing off behind its hidden flight.

    “It was a basilisk!” Merota said, staring at the scars the creature’s claws had left in the bark.

    “What did it mean by calling us Princes?” Ilna said, trying not to gasp.

    Chalcus shot his sword and dagger home in their sheaths. He leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees to breathe deeply.

    “What I’d like to know...,” he said to the ground in front of him. “Is who the One is?”

 

---

 

    It was so dark that Garric couldn’t see his own hand at arm’s length, but he knew they were being stalked. He didn’t hear the predator, but changes in the sounds other marsh creatures made showed that something was disturbing them.

    “Donria,” Garric said quietly. He slid the axe out from under the sash that was his only garment for the time being. He hoped that mud he’d splashed on the grip wouldn’t make it slippery. “Something’s moving up on us from behind. I want you to take the lead, but don’t make a fuss about it.”

    “You’d have made a good scout, lad,” Carus whispered in his mind.

    Perhaps, but what Garric had been was a shepherd. He’d learned to absorb his surroundings: the color of the sky and the sea, the way light fell on the leaves or the swirls of fog over the creek on cool mornings. Garric didn’t exactly look for dangers. He simply noticed things that were different a few minutes ago or yesterday or last year.

    He’d heard a shift in the pattern of trills, chirps and clicking. The little animals he and Donria’d disturbed were remaining silent after they were well past. Previously the chorus of frogs and insects had resumed as soon as they went on.

    ‘There’s a human following us, Garric,” said the Bird. “His name is Metz, but you think of him as Scar. He’s been lying in wait on the route Torag used to attack Wandalo’s village twice in the past.”

    Garric stopped and straightened. He couldn’t see a thing. Besides darkness, the rain was falling as it had more hours than not during the day. He and Donria’d been moving since they broke out of Torag’s keep, and fatigue was taking a toll of him.

    “Metz!” he called. “Scar! This is Garric! I’ve escaped from the Coerli and I’m here to help you!”

    He’d come back to join Wandalo and his people, at any rate. He might or might not be able to help, but he was going to try.

    Nothing happened for a moment; then Metz sloshed up from the darkness and came forward. He held what’d started as a fishing spear. A single hardwood spike now replaced the springy twin points intended to clamp a fish between them.

    “How did you learn to speak our language?” he asked, obviously doubtful. Then, frowning in real concern he added, “And how did you see me? Nobody could’ve spotted me, not at night!”

    “I listened to the frogs,” Garric said. “I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors too.”

    He didn’t say that he’d been a shepherd. That wouldn’t have meant anything to Metz, since the only large animals he’d seen here were humans and their dogs.

    The Bird landed on Garric’s shoulder. Its feet were solid pressures, but the glittering creature didn’t seem to weigh anything. “I am helping you speak to one another, but I can speak to you as well.”

    “Master Garric?” said Donria, “is this man the chief of the village?”

    “No, the chief’s named Wandalo,” Garric said. “This is the man who found me when I came here from my own land.”

    “Wandalo’s dead,” Metz said. It was too dark for Garric to be sure of the hunter’s features, but his voice sounded tired and worn. “Nobody’s really chief now.”

    He turned to look back in the direction Garric had come from. “My uncles and I decided we’d better watch the way the Coerli came from,” he continued. “Nobody else was willing to. If we don’t have any warning, they’ll keep snatching us up until nobody’s left. I said I’d watch nights; I’m better at it than Abay or Horst.”

    Garric had thought a club hung from Metz’ belt; it was actually a wooden trumpet. Garric looked at it and looked up at the man again. Metz might be able to hide from a raiding party as long as he kept silent, but as soon as he blew a warning on that trumpet the Coerli were going to kill him. Unless they captured him to torture at leisure at their keep.

    “Well, what else could I do?” Metz said angrily. “Somebody had to watch!”

    You could’ve done what the rest of the villagers did, Garric thought. Hide in your hut like a frightened rabbit till the cat men came to wring your neck for dinner.

    Aloud he said, “The village must be close, then. We’ll go there and call a town meeting. There’s a way to deal with the Coerli if we stay together and work fast.”

    “Torag won’t be coming tonight,” the Bird said. “Nor tomorrow night, I think; but soon he will come. Garric will act before then.”

    Metz led the way sure-footedly through the marsh to the village gate. Donria had never been this way before, but she had less trouble with the slick wood rods of the catwalk than Garric did.

    “Marzan said he was summoning a hero to destroy the Coerli,” Metz said. “That’s why my uncles and I were waiting for you—Marzan told us where you’d come. He’s a great wizard. But you didn’t seem....”

    “I can’t do much about the Coerli by myself,” Garric said quietly. “With your help—the help of everybody in the village—I think there’s an answer.”

    The village walls loomed up before them. Metz lifted the trumpet to his lips and blew a surprisingly musical tone, clear and wistful.

    “Open the gates, Tenris,” he called. “I’ve brought friends back with me.”

    “Is that you, Metz?” called a man from the gate platform. There’d been no sign that the guard had been aware of their presence, even though Garric thought he’d been slipping and splashing enough to wake the dead. “All right, I’m opening the gate.”

    “And call the villagers to assemble!” the Bird said in what would’ve been a tone of command if the words were audible. “We must prepare immediately.”

    “Who’s that?” cried the guard in sudden alarm.

    “Never mind, Tenris, it’s a friend,” Metz snapped. “And do as he says. The Bright Spirit knows we need all the friends we can get in these times.”

    Wood squealed on the platform and the bar shifted on the inside of the gate. There was apparently a lever and cord, a large-scale equivalent of the ordinary latch string. Metz pushed open one of the gate leaves, then lifted his trumpet and blew it again in harmony with the three blasts of the guard’s deeper horn.

    Lights, dim and yellow, began to wink through the fog. Villagers were lighting oil lamps from embers on their hearths. Garric heard a woman begin to wail in high-pitched despair.

    “There is no danger,” said the Bird, dropping down from the stockade to perch on Garric’s shoulder. “You are not being attacked. You must assemble and do as Garric orders, because the Bright Spirit has sent him to save you.”

    Garric frowned and started to turn his head, but the Bird was too close for him to focus on it with both eyes. He faced front again and said quietly, “How many of the people in the village can hear you?”

    “All of them,” said the Bird with a hint of satisfaction. “Every one of them. But they will not follow me, Garric. They will follow you.”

    That remains to be seen, Garric thought, but cynicism didn’t suit him. Natural optimism lifted his spirits as he saw villagers coming toward the gate with whatever weapons had come to their hands. Just maybe....

    The sky had brightened from pitch black to dark gray. That’d make it easier to address the villagers, though he still wasn’t clear about what he was going to say. He grinned: maybe he could claim his arrival at dawn was a good omen.

    “Get up on the platform where they can see you,” Carus directed. “And make sure Metz comes with you. It’ll work, lad.”

    It would or it wouldn’t, but Garric was going to try regardless. “Come along, Metz,” he said to the hunter. “We’re going to tell them how to defeat the Coerli.”

    “How are we going to do that?” Metz muttered, but he looked up and called, “Get down from there, Tenris. Me and the hero who Marzan brought us need the room.”

    Tenris dropped from the platform with real enthusiasm. “There’s no chief,” Metz had said; because nobody wanted the job in the face of inevitable disaster. The villagers were terrified, so anybody could become chief just by saying he wanted to lead.

    Which was different from saying anybody would follow him; but maybe....

    The ladder and platform were lightly built, but they weren’t as flimsy as Garric had expected. The Grass People lacked arts that everybody in the Isles took for granted, but they had very highly developed skills nonetheless. Woodworking, including the ability to weave withies into solid structures, was among the latter.

    “What’s going on, Metz?” called one of a pair of husky men in the growing assembly below. It wasn’t bright enough yet for Garric to be sure of faces, but the voice sounded like one of the men who’d met him—captured him—with Metz when he arrived in this land.

    “Garric escaped from the Coerli,” Metz said. “Nobody’s ever done that. He’s going to talk to us.”

    “He’s the hero I summoned to save us!” cried Marzan. A girl of seventeen or so had been helping him along the path from his house, but now the old wizard stood with only his staff to support him. The feathered crown waggled on his head. “See how my foresight has been repaid?”

    Well, not yet, thought Garric, but that was a good opening for him. In a loud voice he said, “People of the village. Fellow humans!”

    That was a nice touch. He’d given enough speeches by now that he was getting the feel of the task.

    “The Coerli can be defeated!” he said. “My return proves that. But we, the rightful owners of this world must act together and we must act now. We must arm ourselves. I’ll teach you the tactics I’ve used to kill cat men already. Instead of waiting for them to attack again, we’ll go to them. Tomorrow evening we’ll set out for Torag’s keep, the chief who’s been raiding you, so that we arrive at dawn. We will destroy Torag and free his human captives!”

    “You’re a demon, sent to destroy us all!” cried a woman. “Metz, come down here now! Better yet, throw that madman off the walls and close the gate!”

    “That is Opann,” said the Bird; to Garric alone, he supposed, though there was no way of telling. “She is Metz’s wife. Her father was chief before Wandalo.”

    “The chief of my village was Paltin!” called Donria from the base of the ladder. “I am Donria who was Paltin’s wife. Torag and his warriors came to us, snatching folk from the fields by day and entering our walls at night. At first they took a handful, then another handful. At the end we were only a handful, and they took all of us but those they slew. Listen to Lord Garric!” “Metz Scarface!” Opann said. “Get down here at once! The madman lies, and the foreign slut lies as well. Our only safety is to hide behind our walls. The cat men can’t be killed!”

    “I’ve killed them myself!” Garric said. “I killed two warriors the night they raided this village, and—”

    He brandished the axe he’d taken from the Corl guard.

    “—I killed another when I escaped to come here. Join me and together we can—”

    “He lies!” Opann said. Was she simply frightened, or was she ignoring the Coerli threat in her concern about Garric becoming her husband’s rival for leadership of the village? “No human can kill a cat man!”

    “Some of you saw me do it!” Garric said. That probably isn’t true in the darkness and confusion of the raid. And the Coerli carried off their dead.... “Together we can—”

    “You lie!” said Opann. “I—uhh!”

    Donria stepped away from her. Opann fell forward as though her joints had all given way. The hilt of a knife projected from just beneath her rib cage. From the angle, it’d been driven upward through her left kidney. Wooden knives couldn’t cut very well, but they’d take enough of a point to be good poignards....

    “Duzi!” said Garric aloud. “Donria killed her!”

    “What?” said Metz. Garric put his hand on his shoulder, but Metz didn’t seem so much angry as confused. “What? Did that really happen?”

    “Our only safety lies with Lord Garric,” Donria called in a ringing voice. “He will save us if we give him complete obedience. He tore his way alone out of captivity, bearing me on his shoulders, and with our help he will destroy the monsters entirely.”

    “I, Marzan the Great, brought the hero from the far future to save us!” the wizard said. “My power and the hero’s power will join to rout the cat men.”

    The old man’s cracked voice wasn’t loud, but the words were vivid and compelling in Garric’s mind. He didn’t doubt that the Bird was projecting them to the villagers as well.

    “You are correct, Garric,” the Bird said, adding an audible cluck of laughter.

    “Abay?” Metz said. “You and Horst, you’re with me, right?”

    “Why, sure, Metz,” one of the bulky men said. “You’ve always been able to see as far into a mudbank as the next fellow.”

    “Right,” said Metz with satisfaction. “Idway, Mone, Granta? You men trust me too, don’t you?”

    “Well, I guess,” a man said. “If you want to be chief, I’ll back you, but yesterday you said you didn’t. Didn’t you?”

    “I don’t want to be chief, that’s right,” Metz said. “But I want Garric here to be chief . He knows how to fight the Coerli and I sure don’t. Does anybody want to argue that?”

    The uncle who’d spoken before, Horst or Abay, turned to look back at the crowd. “You’re arguing with me if you do,” he said in a tone of low menace.

    Nobody spoke for a moment.

    Unexpectedly Donria’s clear voice called, “Chief Garric, I have a boon to ask of you. Grant me to your deputy Metz, the greatest of our warriors except yourself!”

    Garric froze with his mouth open. Then he cried, “To Metz, the first of my warriors, I give Donria, a wife fit for a warrior and a chief. May they be happy together!”

    Very quietly he added, “Metz, you may not always thank me, but you’re better off with her than you’d be against her.”

    “And that,” said the laughing ghost in Garric’s mind, “is the truth if truth was ever spoken!”

 

---

 

    Three-wick oil lamps hung from stands to Sharina’s right and left. Before her on the long table spread reports and petitions. These ranged from a ribbon-tied parchment scroll in which the high priest of the Temple of the Plowing Lady objected in perfect calligraphy to the destruction of a shrine to the Lady by lime-burners, to a note scratched by those same lime-burners on a potsherd. The shrine’s walls were brick and useless for their purpose, but the roof beams and the wooden statue itself had provided fuel to reduce lumps of limestone to fiery quicklime.

    Sharina tossed the parchment to a clerk. The Temple of the Plowing Lady was on the spine of hills in the middle of the island. It, rather than one of the temples in Mona, was the head of the cult on First Atara.

    “Request that they send a formal statement of damages to Lord Tadai for examination,” she said. “Add the usual language about sacrifices in this hour of the kingdom’s need.”

    Sharina slid the potsherd to a second clerk. “Noted and approved,” she said, then paused to rub her eyes.

    About a hundred documents remained. Long before she’d worked through them, messengers’d bring in that many more new ones. This was her third trio of clerks, but all they and the earlier shifts did was to transmit the decisions Princess Sharina alone could make. Sharina knew what Liane was doing now was necessary, but she remembered with wonder the smooth way in which this sort of task had vanished when Liane attended to it.

    Lord Attaper had been talking with a messenger at the door of Sharina’s suite. “Lady Liane’s back, your highness,” he said quietly.

    “Lady, you have blessed your servant,” Sharina whispered. The prayer was heartfelt and spontaneous. Then, louder, “Send her in please, milord.”

    She knew that Liane would be as tired as she was, but at least they could talk for a moment. The thing Sharina missed most in being regent was the chance to chat with equals. Garric was gone and Cashel was gone; and Ilna as well, though Sharina’d always felt restraint with Ilna.

    With Ilna you were always aware that you were talking to someone who judged herself by standards harsher than those of the most inexorable God. Sharina had to suspect that Ilna in her heart of hearts applied the same standards to everybody else as well, no matter how good friends they were.

    Liane looked worn. Her clothes were smudged and wrinkled, and the suggestion of fatigue in her posture would’ve been visible a bowshot away.

    Sharina embraced her friend, feeling a rush of sympathy. She was embarrassed to’ve complained—even silently—about the stream of work she herself faced.

    “The plants retreated to the plain as the sun set,” Liane said. “They’d carried the first line of earthworks and were starting to fill them in, but now they’re just standing in a circle. Waldron’s going to attack when the moon rises.”

    She slumped into a straight-backed chair beside the door. It was one of a set of four whose ornate bronze frames matched that of the bed. Sharina’d thought the chairs looked terribly uncomfortable. Perhaps they were, but Liane was too tired to mind.

    “More of them came from the sea after you left, Sharina,” she said. She pressed her fingertips together, then straightened with a noticeable effort of will. “More hellplants. Still, Waldron’s hopeful that tonight’s attack will destroy those already ashore, and if more appear tomorrow we should have the artillery with quicklime projectiles in position. So long as they become torpid at night, we should be able to contain the attacks for the time being.”

    Till the kingdom runs out of soldiers, Sharina translated silently. That would happen eventually, but not soon. Not for the time being.

    She’d planned to ask Liane to help with the petitions, but that was obviously impractical. Though Liane would try, she was sure.

    “You need sleep,” Sharina said. “Come, why don’t you use the servants’ chamber of the suite here? I’ll wake you if there’s anything that you should know about.”

    Particularly if Garric reappeared as unexpectedly as he’d vanished. Oh, Lady, bless me and the kingdom by returning my brother!

    “Yes,” said Liane, closing her eyes as she tensed her body to get up again. “I’ll sleep for—”

    “Do you wish to see the attack?” Double’s scraping, squealing voice called from the Chamber of Art. “I can show you what your human forces can do, better even than the generals leading them see. Then you can decide whether your powers are sufficient to scotch the Green Woman!”

    The door between the rooms was empty, but the pair of Blood Eagles on the other side hid Double from Sharina’s eyes. One of the men advanced his shield slightly, a psychological attempt to fend the wizard away.

    “Come into the chamber, Princess!” the wizard said. It giggled, a sound as unpleasant as the whistle of gas escaping from a bloated corpse. “Come and see how human might succeeds against the Green Woman!”

    “Your highness,” said Attaper forcefully. “We don’t know what happened to Mistress Ilna and her friends, but it happened in that room. It’s too dangerous for you to enter. And I don’t trust that one—”

    He nodded his helmet fiercely in the direction of the doorway and beyond it.

    “—a bit. Not a bit!”

    “If the Princess is afraid,” said Double, “let her send a lackey to observe and report to her. Is the great Attaper afraid of me also?”

    “I’ll go,” said Liane, rising to her feet. “I wanted to stay and watch the attack anyway, but Waldron said I’d only be in the way.”

    “We’ll both go,” said Sharina. She looked around the room. Clerks and guards and courtiers all watched her in silence. “Anyone who likes can come with Lady Liane and myself. Those of you who prefer to avoid wizardry stay here.”

    She grinned wryly. “And I won’t blame you. Believe me, I won’t.”

    Attaper took a deep breath. “Yes, I suppose...,” he said.

    He looked at Sharina with an expression of bleak humor that she didn’t recall seeing on the guard commander’s face before. “My father was sitting at table, no older than I am now,” he said. “He’d just reached for his cup of wine. He shouted, ‘Sister take me!’ and jumped up; and died right there. She did take him.”

    Attaper took a deep breath and forced a smile. “There’s no certainty in this life, your highness, except that we’ll die some day.”

    Sharina laid her hand on Attaper’s armored shoulder as they walked into the Chamber of Art together. “Perhaps, milord,” she said. “But I expect to live considerably longer because of your care than I would without it.”

    The room’s only light was a single oil lamp hanging from a central chain. Double had moved away from the door; he now stood beside one of the symbols inlaid in the flooring. Tenoctris joined Sharina with a nod and a crisp smile.

    Sharina glanced over her shoulder. Half the staff from her bedroom was joining them, far more than she’d expected.

    Double’s lips twisted in an oily sneer. The figure he’d chosen was a triangle with a circle of the largest possible radius drawn within it. Words of power were written along each side in yellow chalk, though Sharina couldn’t read them well enough to pronounce in the present light. A piece of cloth, probably a dinner napkin, lay over something slight in the center of the enclosed circle.

    “He has a length of seaweed there,” Tenoctris said quietly. “And a bone which I presume is human; I’m not an anatomist. He’s using them as a focus.”

    Nothing in the old woman’s dry voice suggested horror or disgust that Double was using human bone. Tenoctris was a wizard, and she’d used necromancy when that was the only way to get information which the kingdom needed. Sharina had asked her to use necromancy, though she’d been too squeamish to watch the incantation.

    Remembering that morning, not so long before, Sharina gripped Tenoctris’ hand and squeezed it. Friends did things you couldn’t or wouldn’t do for yourself. Tenoctris was a friend to the kingdom, and a friend to Good; and very certainly a friend to Sharina os-Kenset.

    Double drew the ancient athame from his sash and lifted it above the figure. “Watch, Princess,” he said, then chanted, “So somaul somalue....”

    At each slow-spoken syllable he dipped the black blade, shifting the point from one angle to the next. The lights dimmed or seemed to dim. “Zer ze-er zeruesi....”

    A clerk dropped her slate tablet with a clatter and ran sobbing from the room. Nobody else moved.

    “Lu...,” said Double. “Lumo luchresa!”

    The lamp went out completely. Instead of plunging the room into darkness, a circular lens as bright as the full moon appeared above the center of the figures. In it was a marshy landscape on which every object showed as sharply as they would if carved on a triumphal relief.

    Double stepped back. His hand trembled slightly as he lowered the athame, but he managed an oily smile and said, “You see my power, Princess. Now you will see the power your human forces have against the Green Woman.”

    Instead of staring into the lens as everyone else was doing, Tenoctris bent to peer at the words chalked around the figure. Sharina gave her friend’s hand a final squeeze and concentrated on the image Double had created. She supposed Tenoctris was more interested in details of another wizard’s art than she was of what was happening on a battlefield miles away. The first was her job, come to think of it.

    In the lens Sharina saw the hellplants wedged as close together as sheep in a blizzard. Their bulky green shapes formed an arc with both flanks anchored on the bay. Though a heavy mist blanketed the valley, she could see every detail of the creatures with a clarity that would’ve been impossible at arm’s length in bright sunlight.

    She frowned. Her subconscious mind was sure the image was real. She wondered if Double was bringing distant events close or if instead he was merely tricking the minds of those watching. She could get details from Lord Waldron after the battle and see how well they jibed with what she thought she’d seen.

    A trumpet called, thin and unimaginably distant. “Where’s that coming from?” said Attaper, looking around angrily. “That’s Charge! Are we hearing commands from Calf’s Head Bay?”

    “Watch and learn, brave soldier,” Double said in a deadpan sneer. He gestured with his athame like a pastry chef teasing icing into a delicate spire; the image in the lens shifted to the earthworks on the surrounding slopes. Soldiers climbed out from the defenses with their swords drawn. In ragged groups of six to ten they marched toward the plain. Generally one man of each group had a torch and the others carried faggots of brushwood to use when they reached the hellplants.

    The torches were pinpricks of yellow light; fog swirled around the troops like the tide rising in a mangrove swamp. Sharina could see the men clearly, but from the way they splashed and stumbled they themselves were almost blind.

    “They’re sinking above their ankles,” Sharina said, frowning. “I thought the valley was sown in barley. You couldn’t plow ground that soft, let alone get crops to sprout in it.”

    “It wasn’t that wet this morning,” Liane said. “It kept getting boggier as the day went on. I think the tide may be rising, but there’s the fog as well. Local people say they’ve never seen anything like it, even in the dead of winter with the wind from the southwest.”

    “The Green Woman’s minions are reclaiming the land for her,” Double said. “As they advance, the marsh will also advance.”

    He turned his white, swollen face slightly. Light from the lens glinted on his bulbous eyes.

    “If you kill the hellplants, soldier,” Double said, “will you then drain the soil with your sword?”

    Attaper met the dead glare. “Creature,” he said in a tight, controlled voice, “you have no friends in this room. Don’t push your luck! The way I see it, it’s not murder to cut apart something that’s already dead.”

    Staggering, tripping; often grabbing one another so as not to fall in the muck, the soldiers pressed their attack. Sharina could faintly hear the angry, blasphemous murmur of the advancing army. A few of the men had kept their spears; they used them to probe the fog-blurred darkness.

    The hellplants were as silent as a rank of haystacks. Sharina was tense, expecting the massive forms to rush forward now that they’d lured the troops close, but the men continued to advance against a motionless enemy.

    A soldier screamed on a rising, piercing note. Twenty more soldiers echoed his cry with nearly identical ones.

    Double pointed his athame and twisted it. The image shrank to a full-sized image of the marsh: a soldier’s right leg stepping forward in muck in which half-grown barley lay matted. Though dismounted for the moment, the man was from a cavalry regiment; he wore knee boots instead of hobnailed sandals as the infantry did.

    A scorpion like the ones that’d spilled from the hellplant in the palace squirmed through the gooey earth. Its pincers caught the man’s calf and the tail arched up to strike.

    The soldier shouted in terror and brought his long sword down sideways, crushing the scorpion against his boot. The creature’s sting stayed in the leather, still twitching even though it’d been torn from the tail.

    “Demons!” the soldier screamed. “Demons’re coming out of the ground!”

    He slashed wildly in front of him. Probably he’d imagined that a waterlogged furrow was moving, because the unnatural clarity of Sharina’s vision didn’t indicate any danger where the blade splashed muck.

    Instead of assuming that his sword didn’t kill another scorpion because there was no scorpion present, the soldier turned with a despairing cry. The bundle of brush on his back wobbled as he ran, forgotten in his panic.

    “He’s not a coward,” Liane whispered in sick horror. “He’s from Lord Waldron’s personal regiment and they’ve been fighting all day. It’s the darkness and the fog, that’s all....”

    She’s probably right, Sharina thought. But conditions are never going to be better than they are tonight, and tonight is a disaster.

    Double gestured with his athame, drawing back the apparent viewpoint so that his audience could see the panorama of the attack. Here and there a bonfire blazed, but it seemed to Sharina that some had been lighted at a distance from the hellplants instead of being laid up against the creatures as intended.

    The troops were retreating in more or less order all across the plain. Generally less order. They couldn’t see their attackers, and the paddle-legged scorpions were as agile as seals in the flooded field.

    A circle of dismounted cavalry kept good discipline. Every other man had a torch made from the faggots they carried. With those for light, the other half of the squadron stabbed and cut at the scorpions curling toward them from any direction.

    Lord Waldron was part of the defensive circle, not within it protected by his troops. His sword dripped with the ichor of at least one scorpion, and his chief aides stood to either side with torches.

    But even these men were pulling back to the temporary safety of the hills from which they’d sallied. In the morning the hellplants would attack again, and more of the creatures would come from the sea, as surely as the tide and the sunrise.

    The lens faded, then regained clarity as it shrank to half its size.

    “Lamsucho!” Double said in a high-pitched snarl. He sliced his athame through the air, wiping the lens away. The oil lamp blazed, seemingly brighter than it’d been before the incantation darkened it to Sharina’s eyes.

    “You have seen!” Double said. The strain of his art must’ve greatly weakened him, but only those familiar with wizardry would’ve seen that beneath Double’s bravado. “You have seen human strength against the Green Woman.”

    “What do you offer instead, milord?” said Liane. Her face was calm, her voice cool. She was poised lady to every hair’s breadth of her body, and that too was bravado.

    “In the morning I will show you,” said Double. ‘First I will destroy the Green Woman’s minions, then I will destroy her. I will be God!”

    “One thing at a time, Lord Wizard,” Sharina said. Her mind was as hard as glass. “One thing at a time....”

 

---

 

    Cashel stood on ground covered with leaf litter; the forest around him was silent. Winter had stripped the trees of foliage, but a swath of them had been blasted to dead gray stumps by something more sudden than the cold.

    Protas let go of Cashel’s belt and stepped away. He cleared his throat. Cashel guessed he was embarrassed to be frightened when the boulder they stood on seemed to fall away.

    “It’s cold here,” Protas said formally. He took off the crown and polished the big jewel on his sleeve; just to have something to do with his hands, Cashel supposed. “Do we just wait, Cashel, or...?”

    “I don’t know which way we’d go if we walked on ourselves,” Cashel said quietly. This landscape was nothing like the one they’d left. The shape of the land was different from where they’d been, not just one being sun-baked waste and this a forest late in the year.

    The boy was right about it being cold, though for a matter of pride he hadn’t hugged his arms around his thin tunic to cover himself from the wind. Above, the sky was gray with streaks of pale blue; a winter sky, promising worse in the future if not now, not quite now. A flock got restive and peevish in this weather, though you had to know sheep pretty well to realize they were in a bad mood.

    Cashel tapped the ground with his bare toes. Leaves rustled slickly; the soil beneath was firm but not frozen. He and Protas were just standing here instead of there in the place where the trees were running toward them.

    He focused on the forest as a whole again instead of the dirt at his feet, though he hadn’t ever really lost track of the general landscape; a shepherd doesn’t dare do that. These trees, even the ones that were still alive, weren’t attacking anybody. It was a terrible waste of timber to smash so many trees this way and just leave them scattered about.

    Something was jingling toward them through the trees. Cashel turned and faced the sound, his staff lifted. It wasn’t loud, but it sure wasn’t trying not to be heard.

    Without being told, Protas stepped to where he wouldn’t be in the way. “Is somebody driving a carriage through the woods?” he asked. “It sounds like harness, almost.”

    “Hello there!” Cashel called to the bare trunks. “I’m Cashel or-Kenset and I’m just passing through!”

    From the sound being so slight he figured it must be far off, but around the shattered trunk of a chestnut came—

    “That’s a helmet!” said Protas. “It’s rolling along the ground!”

    That wasn’t quite true: the helmet was walking on little jointed metal legs, and it had two short arms besides. One held a butcher knife, notched from cutting things it shouldn’t have been used on.

    “Hello?” Cashel said again, not so loud as before. He started spinning his staff, not hostile exactly but bringing it into motion in case he needed to use it suddenly.

    He wasn’t a bit surprised to see little dustings of blue wizardlight trail off behind the butt caps. His skin’d been prickling ever since he and Protas stood with Cervoran back in the palace.

    “Hello yourself,” the helmet said in a voice that seemed to come from the grating under the front of the flared brim. “Since you’ve been fool enough to come here, I’m the poor devil tasked to guide you out again.”

    It gave a nasty laugh and added, “Poor devil indeed!”

    The helmet sounded angry but not angry at anything in particular. Cashel relaxed a little and smiled to find something familiar in this strange place. He knew a number of people who acted that way too, waving their ill temper like a flag they were proud of.

    “Thank you, then,” he said politely. “I’m Cashel and this is Protas. We’ll be out of your way as soon as you show us how.”

    “Come along,” the helmet said. It’d kept on walking as it talked, but it wasn’t coming toward them Cashel realized. It trundled past, heading for a goal that they’d been standing in the path to. “And be ready to hide if I tell you to. It isn’t far, but it could take your whole life to get there if we’re unlucky.”

    Cashel motioned Protas ahead of him and walked along at the rear himself, a trifle to the left of the line their guide was taking. He didn’t have to run to keep up but those little legs clinked and jingled along like a centipede’s. The helmet covered ground faster than he’d figured it could.

    There wasn’t a path but the going wasn’t too bad. In summer the trees shaded out undergrowth, so the saplings they came across were spindly and easy to push aside. The worst trouble was stones covered with leaves, slippery and easy to stub your foot on if you weren’t used to it.

    Protas wasn’t used to it, but he never quite fell on his face and he didn’t complain. The boy didn’t know a lot of things, but he made a better companion than plenty of folk who might not’ve stumbled so much.

    The helmet was muttering. To itself, Cashel figured, but then in a louder voice it said, “You, boy! You have the Great Talisman. Why have you come to this benighted Hell?”

    “We’re passing through, Master Helmet,” said Protas easily. “Do you get many visitors to your world?”

    He was the funniest combination of little boy and gracious prince. It was the prince who seemed to do most of the talking to strangers.

    “Visitors!” grated the helmet. “No, we don’t get many visitors, boy! No one comes here but fools and men who like to kill more than they want to live. Or those who want to die, of course. Which are you, eh?”

    “I’ve been called a fool often enough,” said Cashel, figuring it was time for him to take over. Their guide wasn’t talking, he was pushing, and if there was pushing to be done then it wasn’t for a boy to take it unaided while Cashel was around. “The folks who called me that maybe were right, but looking back on it they weren’t themselves people I’d trust if they said the sun would rise.”

    He cleared his throat. “And we’re not either of the other two things,” he went on. “Though if somebody figures he just has to have a fight, I’ll give him one.”

    “Faugh,” muttered the helmet, suddenly tired and dejected instead of angry the way he’d been from the first. “I’m a fool myself, so why should I complain about what you two do?”

    They’d been going more or less uphill ever since they met their guide, not steep but noticeable. Because of the slope there were more bare rocks poking out; the helmet’s feet clicked and sparked on them, which set things ringing inside its body too. That was what Cashel and Protas’d heard coming toward them like a miniature carriage.

    The trees in this stretch weren’t knocked about like the ones were back where they’d met their guide. A lot of them were pines on this thin soil, but there were near as many chestnuts, some of them huge trees with boles thicker than Cashel standing with his arms spread straight out to either side.

    Cashel heard a buzzing that seemed to come from the treetops. He looked up, trying to find the source. It was way too late in the year for bees to be swarming, and there wasn’t anything else that—

    The helmet turned lizard-quick and said, “Stand against a tree trunk and don’t move! Don’t hide, just get against a tree. They’ll see movement, but you’re all right if you keep still!”

    Protas opened his mouth to ask a question. Cashel gripped him by the shoulder and backed against a big spruce whose branches didn’t start till several times Cashel’s own height up the trunk. He didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t doubt that they’d be better off doing what they were told just now instead of arguing about it.

    The helmet hunkered down among the rocks, drawing in its legs like a box turtle closing up. It held the blade of the butcher knife under its body.

    When Cashel was sure the boy wasn’t going to jump he relaxed his grip, though he didn’t move his arm away. Protas swallowed stiffly, but he didn’t so much as turn his head. There was lots of things the boy didn’t understand because he hadn’t been raised in places where those sorts of things happened, but he was a quick learner. That was certain sure.

    The noise was getting louder. Cashel didn’t move, just waited, and sure enough something high up in the air swam into sight. It looked a lot like a white bird, but it was the size of a ship and its stubby wings were rigged as sails. Black smoke oozed from the bird’s open beak, rising only with difficulty.

    Cashel couldn’t tell for sure—the bird was near as high as the clouds—but it looked like people in armor stood in stood in the open back half of the body. He thought about their guide. There was armor, anyway, and maybe it had people in it.

    As Cashel watched, the wings canted and the creature started to come about. The figures in the stern turned also, raising round metal shields. They shouted in ringing, angry voices, too thinned by distance for Cashel to understand the words.

    “Don’t move,” the helmet grated. “On your lives, don’t move!”

    The bird was silent except for the creaking of cordage and the cries of the crew. The buzzing didn’t come from it, so—

    Three saucers with silvery wings burred down from the clouds, curving toward the bird. In the belly of each saucer rode what looked like a man-sized frog holding a lance. The frogs were trying to point their lances toward the bird, but as they gestured their mounts wobbled awkwardly.

    The leading saucers almost flew into each other. As they jerked apart wildly, flame shot from the bird’s beak in a great, arching jet that briefly enveloped the third saucer that trailed the others. The wings melted like ice in a furnace.

    The saucer flopped onto its back and the frog tumbled out, blackened and burning. From its wide mouth came a scream like steam jetting from under a pot lid. The bird’s crew shouted in triumph.

    One of the surviving saucers dived away, but the other looped up over the bird. The rider was actually upside down when his lance sent a bolt of crackling lightning into the open back. Several armored crewmen flew apart, helmets and segments of limbs spinning away from the bird in smoking arcs.

    The survivors sent arrows sailing after their attacker. They didn’t hit the rider, but at least one stuck in the saucer’s glittering gossamer wing.

    The bird was rising. Its outlines blurred in the overcast, then faded entirely. For a time Cashel could still hear the buzzing sound, but the saucers didn’t come into sight again. At last the sky fell silent.

    “We can go on now,” the helmet said. “And quickly—we were lucky this time that they stayed high. You saw in the valley what happens when they fight closer to the ground!”

    “Aye, we did,” Cashel said. He understood the blasted trees, now.

    “You mean that we might have been hurt by accident if the ships had stuck the forest instead of each other, Master Helmet?” Protas said.

    The route they were following was steeper than it’d been. Sometimes it was simply steep, places where Cashel used the quarterstaff as a brace to lift him up to the next firm footing. The helmet flowed over whatever was in the way like a centipede climbing a wall, not slowing down a bit. Protas scrambled along right behind it, putting a hand down for a grip whenever he needed to.

    “No, I don’t mean that, boy!” the helmet said. “I mean if they’d been lower they might’ve seen us—and they’d have killed us if they had. You’re easier prey than their usual enemies, you see. Perhaps you think the talisman would save you—and perhaps you’re right, it would. But it wouldn’t help me!”

    Or me either, it sounds like, Cashel thought. Well, he hadn’t expected their guide was the sort who worried much about what happened to other people. “Other people” if you wanted to call a walking helmet a person, that is.

    The top of the ridge was a bald with only small plants clinging in crevices filled with leaf litter. Part of it was bare even of that: a blast of fire had scoured not only the surface but fused the rock to a glassy polish. Half caught in that but untouched by heat that’d melted dense granite on both sides of the line was a star with as many points as the fingers of one hand.

    “Stand in the pentacle,” the helmet ordered. “And be quick about it. There’s no cover here, and if they see me they’ll hunt me down even if I get back into the forest.”

    The wind whipping up the back side of the bald was fierce, strong enough that even Cashel had to lean into it to walk to the center of the star. Cashel put his left arm around Protas; the boy’d done all right with the wind, but his trouser legs and the hem of his tunic were flapping fiercely.

    “Master Helmet?” Cashel said. “What are they fighting about? The frogs and the folk in the bird?”

    “Fighting about?” said the helmet. “There’s no about. They fight to fight, that’s all. It’s the same as in your world.”

    “No sir!” said Cashel, surprised at how hot that made him. “There’s fighting on our world, that’s so; but there’s good and evil fighting at the bottom of it!”

    “Do you think so?” the helmet said. “Well, I’m a fool too, just as I said.”

    Laughing in a nasty, knowing way it pointed the jagged butcher knife toward Cashel and Protas. Light as red as a sunstruck ruby sprang from the blade. Again solid stone vanished from under Cashel’s feet, and he felt the illusion of falling through a starless void.