The Fortress of Glass: Chapter Eleven

    Torag’s keep loomed like a gray lump out of the green/gray/black marsh. The sun had been up for two hours and it wasn’t raining.

    Garric grinned. In this land it passed for a bright morning. He’d wanted to arrive promptly at dawn to have the full day for their business with the Coerli, though.

    “I hope we’ve got enough time to finish the job in daylight,” he said to Metz as they came out of a grove of trees whose foliage dangled like sheets of moss from the spreading branches. “If we don’t, we’ll none of us survive the night to come. Torag isn’t much of a general, but even he’s smart enough to know that he has to kill any Grass People who’ve learned to fight before the danger spreads.”

    “The Coerli kill without being smart,” Metz said in a distant tone. “They only have to think if they don’t intend to kill.”

    He looked at the sky. “There’s enough time,” he said. “If we can do it at all.”

    Every adult in the village was with them. Everybody whom Garric’d judged was capable of making a seven mile march, that is. There were about fifty in all, as many women as men. They were burdened with bundles of brush, every fishing net in the community, and the rolled-up wall of a house. Unrolled, the wicker mat would let them cross the bog surrounding Torag’s keep without sinking knee-deep at every step.

    Then the hard part would begin.

    The Corl in the watchtower finally saw them and blew a warning on his trumpet. After a moment he blew twice more, nervous blats of sound that were as much fright at the unexpected as an attempt to rouse his fellows.

    “With the cat beasts,” King Carus said, “now is better than right at dawn.”

    The ghost’s voice was calm and analytical, but underneath it was the leaping delight of a warrior about to enter battle. He went on, “Their own folk wouldn’t attack in daylight, and till now there’s nobody else in their minds who might. The guard wasn’t alert, and the rest of the animals have had time to go to sleep.”

    “All right, everybody!” Garric called. He raised his voice by reflex, though he knew the Bird would project his words to the villagers at heightened volume regardless. “Keep close to each other but not so tight you can’t move. Be ready to raise the nets when I say so. Just keep marching on. And remember—this world is for humans!”

    He’d hoped for a ringing cheer in response, but apparently that wasn’t part of the political process among the Grass People. He grinned wryly. At least they didn’t freeze in panic where they stood. That might’ve happened if they’d been a little more sophisticated and thus knew what they were getting into.

    “Metz?” Garric said as he and the scarred hunter strugged through the belt of furze bushes around the bog. Coerli raiders had passed back and forth often enough to mark a path, but the cat men moved with such delicacy that the path wasn’t wide enough for human beings. “It’s time for you to go to the rear like we planned. We’ll need a leader back there if they get around us.”

    “You planned,” Metz said. All the villagers wore broad-brimmed hats of linen stretched on a wicker frame. They were meant for rain covers, but they ought to give reasonable protection against overhead blows. “My uncles can take care of the back. I’m staying where I am.”

    Turning, he said, “Get that mat up to the gate, Kimber! Come on, you kin of Wandalo! Remember what the cat people did to our chief!”

    The four men and two women carrying the house wall staggered toward the bog. They dropped the loose wicker roll sooner than they should have, starting to unroll it a good ten feet back on firm ground. Garric judged that the mat wasn’t going to reach all the way to the walls unless—

    “Fill in the last with firewood!” Carus ordered. His practiced eye had measured the gap with a certainty Garric couldn’t match. “And move it! You’ll need it sooner than you can get the wood-carriers up from where they’re marching!”

    “Bring up rolls of brush!” Garric shouted. “Quick, before they figure out what they’re going to do!”

    Torag and half a dozen of his warriors mounted the step inside the wall and looked down on the attacking humans. The chief himself seemed stupefied by the event, unable to grasp it even though he watched it happening. One of his warriors gave a rasping shriek, a sound of wordless anger that the Bird couldn’t and needn’t translate.

    The walls of Torag’s keep—even just the part the Coerli themselves inhabited—were far too long for fifty humans to encircle, even if they’d all been trained soldiers. The alternative was to keep the attacking force together and smash through the stockade at a single point. The cat men could come at them from any direction, or they could flee beyond any chance of human pursuit.

    “If Torag were smart enough to run now, lad,” Carus said, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword, “then he’d have been smart enough to’ve chased you down the night you escaped. No, lad; it’ll be a fight.”

    He spoke with the cheerful satisfaction of a gambler about to collect his winnings. The sword on the ghost’s hip was merely an image like every other physical attribute of the king today, but the enthusiastic readiness to fight was just as real as it’d been a thousand years before.

    Sometimes a mind like that is a good thing to have on your side and the kingdom’s side. Right now it was a good thing to have on the side of the Grass People....

    The crew—the family group—pushing the matting got to the end of the roll and rose from their stooped posture. They were still a dozen feet from the base of the wall.

    “Go on back!” Garric ordered, walking just behind them with the axe in his right hand and a minnow net spinning overhead in his left. “Get the firewood up here now!”

    The flattened wall wobbled underfoot, but it didn’t sink out of sight in the muck. Not only did it spread the weight of the people standing on it, the buoyant wicker resisted being forced under the surface.

    The shrieking warrior leaped from the wall onto Garric. Garric did the only thing he had time for in the second it took the Corl to drop: release the thread-fine net already spinning in his hand. The pebble-weighted mesh wrapped the warrior, binding the barbed blade of his outthrust stabbing spear to his right thigh.

    The warrior crashed into Garric, knocking him off his feet. The Coerli weighed no more than half-grown human children, but that was still a solid mass hitting from twenty feet up. Garric rolled, trying to raise the axe that he’d managed to drive straight into the bog when he went down.

    The warrior dropped his tangled spear and drew a flint knife from his harness. The movement was a single blur.

    Duzi they’re fast! but Garric’s left hand closed on the cat man’s wrist. The ghost in Garric’s head had started his arm moving well before the Corl had decided to act. The warrior’s thin bones crunched like chalk breaking. He shrieked in pain and tried to bite; Garric slammed him back against the matting.

    Metz brought down his stone-headed mace. He’d aimed the blow at the Corl’s head but the blow landed at the base of the creature’s throat instead, crushing the collarbones and windpipe both. The cat man’s nostrils sprayed blood as he spasmed into death.

    “Raise your nets!” Garric screamed. He grabbed his axe hilt with both hands to pull it out of the muck, but his left hand threatened to cramp. The hysterical strength he’d used to crush the Corl’s wrist came with a price. “Raise your nets!”

 

---

 

    The gate started to open inward. Garric glanced up. Torag and his warriors weren’t looking down from the wall any more. Duzi! Are they going to sally straight out the main gate? Are they that stupid?

    The gate jerked the rest of the way open; sure enough, the wicker bridge was there, ready to be spread over the bog. The Coerli were that stupid, or at any rate they were that ignorant. The Grass People didn’t know what war was, but neither did their enemies. The Coerli were hunters and raiders, not soldiers, and they’d just met a soldier....

    Garric got to his feet. He smelled smoke. Villagers back in the line must’ve started a fire already. Garric’d meant to burn a gap in the stockade when they got up to it, but what were they thinking of to start one now?

    The mat was crowded. Villagers with brushwood were coming forward. They got tangled with the nets their fellows stretched high on fishing spears whose springy, two-pronged heads were ideal for lifting the mesh.

    The nets were supposed to form a barrier on both sides of the mat. That was more or less how it worked, but inevitably some of those holding the nets managed to tilt their spears inward, narrowing the walkway from its original six feet or so. There wasn’t enough space for all the people and their gear unless everybody was careful—which would’ve been a greater marvel under the circumstances than the Lady coming down from the sky and declaring peace.

    “Throw the—” Garric began but caught himself. “Throw the wood into the bog to get it out of the way,” he’d meant to say, but that wouldn’t work with the nets in place. He hadn’t thought it through. The plan was falling apart and it was his fault!

    The cat men’s wicker bale lurched forward awkwardly, pushed by warriors rather than by their human slaves. They weren’t used to the work, and their narrow pads didn’t grip as well as human feet on the wet ground churned by past traffic; the roll jammed in the gateway.

    Torag gave a great snarling roar and vaulted over the bridge. Warriors followed him in quick succession, each spanning the gap like a pouncing leopard.

    Metz spun the minnow net he carried. Torag twisted in the air, avoiding the fine mesh but bowling the hunter over with his feet instead of braining him with the wooden mace as he’d intended to do. Metz fell back into the woman holding up one end of a heavy gill net, one of those the villagers used to drag their ponds; Torag tumbled on past into the bog.

    Garric brought his axe around in a swift, slashing diagonal. Carus’ instinct told him he couldn’t miss the warrior leaping at him—but he did; it was like trying to cut a wisp of smoke. The Corl’s long legs rotated away from the stroke; still in the air, the creature stabbed Garric through the right shoulder. His spear had barbs on the end of a stiff wooden point. It burned like a hot wire as it pierced the muscle.

    The creature landed on its feet. Garric grabbed the Corl’s right elbow so it couldn’t bound away as it’d thought to do. He drove his right fist at the long cat face, using the butt of the axe helve because they were too close for him to swing the weapon normally. His whole right arm was afire, but the Corl’s skull deformed at the blow and it lost its grip on the spear.

    Garric hurled aside the twitching corpse and lifted his axe to strike again. Several humans were down, but besides the warrior he’d killed there were three more struggling in the bog and a fourth tangled on the inside of the gill net. Two women were methodically beating that one to death with their loads of firewood. The individual sticks were too light to make effective clubs, but the women were using their whole bundles end-on like giant pestles on the cat man’s ribs.

    “Throw them!” shouted Donria. A shower of burning brands spun over the fighters to land in the gateway. They’d been cut from an oily brush that lit easily and burned even when green, though with low, smoky flames. They were only sticks, not dangerous as missiles, but the Coerli, already uncomfortable to be fighting in broad daylight, feared and hated fire.

    A warrior poising to leap from the wicker hurdle instead sprang backward with a howl. Those behind him shoved the rolled wicker out of the way and began pushing the gate leaves closed.

    “Get’em!” Garric cried. He jumped forward and tripped to splash at the end of the villagers’ own mat; his foot was tangled in a net.

    The butt of the spear wobbling from Garric’s shoulder hit the ground end-on, driving the point all the way in till the thicker shaft stopped it. He lost his grip on the axe and shouted in fury.

    Torag dragged himself onto the matting; the strength in his shoulders was remarkable. He’d lost his mace. Metz cut at him with a sword edged with jagged teeth of shell. Torag avoided the blow easily and drew his hardwood knife. Donria stepped forward, swinging a torch in a smoky arc.

    The Corl chieftain let out a despairing wail that was nothing like the other sounds Garric had heard from his throat. Instead of finishing Metz, he vaulted back through the gates of the stockade as they closed.

    Garric looked around, trying to get his breath. His eyes blurred in and out of focus.

    Three warriors were half submerged in the bog. Villagers, the ones who’d been holding up the net barriers, were now using the long spears to worry the Coerli to death. The springy fishing points weren’t very suitable for the purpose, but enthusiasm and trapped victims were accomplishing the task. There’s nothing neat about a battle....

    Someone gripped Garric’s arm from behind. He started to turn.

    “Hold still!” Donria ordered. With her free hand she held the spear shaft firmly where it touched his shoulder. She bent and he felt her cheek against his back.

    “What in the Lady’s name are you—” he said. As he spoke, Donria twisted the shaft; he heard a crunch behind him.

    Donria drew the spear out of his flesh almost painlessly. She brandished it in triumph: she’d bitten off the barbs and now spat them into the bog.

    Garric took a deep breath. The gates were closed and the surviving cat men weren’t showing themselves on the step of the stockade; the fighting was over for the moment.

    “Now,” said the ghost in Garric’s mind, “we finish them!”

 

---

 

    Ilna followed her companions onto a stretch of wet meadow, not very different from the tidal marsh near the mouth of Pattern Creek. She recognized many of the flowering plants—turtleheads, the great blooms of rose mallow, and sprays of Joe-pye weed. All the flowers were rose pink. It wasn’t a color that much appealed to her, though—

    She smiled at evidence of her own vanity.

    --that might be because she’d never found a lightfast dye that would match it. Well, she didn’t care for dyes anyway, even the best indigo. In Ilna’s ideal world everyone would wear natural browns and grays and blacks; and whites too, white fleeces were natural, though white wasn’t a favorite of hers personally.

    She smiled again, amused at herself.

    “Ilna, what time is it?” Merota asked in a small voice. “I’m getting tired.”

    Ilna glanced at the sun. At this season—late summer, judging by what was in flower—it should be about the second hour of the afternoon.

    It’d been about the second hour of the afternoon when the three of them arrived in the garden, quite a while ago. She glanced at Chalcus.

    “Aye,” he said. “Not a bad time of day as such things go, though I might’ve chosen a later hour if I’d been asked. At least—”

    He smiled to make the bald truth sound like a jest.

    “—we needn’t worry about things creeping up on us in the darkness, eh?”

    He turned and jabbed his left hand into the hedge behind him with the speed of a striking cat. Quick as the sailor was—and Ilna had never seen a man quicker—his fist closed on air; the slender brown figure melted like liquid through the holly branches.

    Chalcus sighed and drew back his hand. The spiky leaf-tips had clawed narrow trails the length of his forearm, but he hadn’t jabbed the end of a twig through himself.

    “Master Chalcus, what would you have done with it if you had caught it?” Ilna asked tartly. “I’m certainly not that hungry.”

    “Asked the little fellow some questions, is all, dear heart,” Chalcus said. He gave her a broad grin and added, “And to be truthful as behooves the honest sailor that I am today, it gripes my soul that the little demons think they can snoop and scamper and spy on us and we can do nothing to let or hinder them.”

    “Can they really do that, Chalcus?” Merota said doubtfully.

    “They can indeed, my darling girl,” said the sailor. “Did I not just prove it?”

    Ilna took a few steps out into the narrow meadow, looking about her. The vegetation was soft enough to make a good couch, but her bare toes squished water up from the soil. They’d best find a drier spot to rest.

    “There’s one!” called Merota, pointing with her right forefinger. A brown figure quivered from the east side of the meadow to the shaded hedge on the west, merging the holly as easily as the breeze that faintly ruffled the garden.

    Ilna made a sour face. The little people were harmless, but so were the midges fluttering around her face and landing at the edges of her eyes. The insects tickled and distracted her. If there’d been a way to make them all vanish, she’d have—

    The little brown man screamed like a leg-snared rabbit. He tried to leap back into the meadow, but the shadowed interior of the hedge closed about him. He screamed again, but faintly. His body was becoming misty. He turned his large eyes on Ilna in a look of desperate entreaty—

    What does he think that I can do to help?”

    --and faded completely away. For a moment Ilna thought she saw the little man’s bones, as delicate as those of a dead goat picked clean by ants; then the skeleton too vanished. The knotted stems of the holly remained unchanged.

    A cat the size of a horse stalked into the meadow from the aisle at the other end. Gossamer wings were folded tightly on its back; they were marked like oil-patterned paper and gave the impression of being feathered.

    Growing from the cat’s neck were a pair of viper heads on an arm’s length of serpent body. They looked small compared to the cat, but Ilna didn’t recall ever seeing another snake as big as these were.

    Her fingers were knotting a pattern that instinct told her would be effective. She brought her hands up. The great cat spread a wing before its eyes. Soft pastel smudges distorted the creature’s appearance to Ilna’s eyes, and and they would also distort the effect of Ilna’s pattern of mastery.

    “Wait!” the cat said in a deep rumble. “I have no quarrel with Princes! If you wish to hunt in this meadow, you’re welcome to it. Though—”

    It sounded not so much hostile as aggrieved.

    “—it’s been part of my territory since the One brought me here.”

    “It’s not hunting we’re after doing, friend cat,” said Chalcus in a lilting challenge. The dagger in his left hand drew fanciful little curlicues in the air. The glitter of the point drew an opponent’s eye away from the sword in his right, rock steady and ready to thrust. “But it’s not prey that we are either, do you see?”

    “I think he’s a chimaera, Chalcus,” Merota said in a tiny schoolgirl voice. She was terrified and therefore going back to the routines of normalcy, of tutors and knowlege from books. “Only not exactly.”

    “I know you’re not Prey,” the cat—the chimaera?—said with a touch of irritation. “I’ll back away and leave the meadow to you, if you like. What could be clearer than that?”

    “Wait,” said Ilna, folding the knotted fabric into her left hand. She walked forward, past where Chalcus had stationed himself. He frowned but wisely held his tongue. “If you’ve lived here for a time, then you can answer a question.”

    For an instant she’d been considering ways to modify her fabric so that the effect would pass the creature’s veiling wing. That was merely a competitive reflex, a desire to prove to the chimaera that it couldn’t escape Ilna os-Kenset by a trick like that.

    And perhaps it couldn’t, but life had brought Ilna enough real enemies that she didn’t need to fight something which didn’t want to fight her. The chimaera was ugly and probably dangerous if it wanted to be, but if it didn’t threaten her or hers, then it could live or die without Ilna’s involvement.

    “Perhaps,” the chimaera said. “We Princes owe one another courtesy. For the sake of quiet lives, if nothing else.”

    It partially folded its wing. Ilna wondered if the creature could really fly. Was it possible to fly out of the tapestry?

    “One of the little people just ran into the hedge there,” she said, gesturing—not quite pointing—with her left hand. She kept her eyes on the great beast.

    “Yes, the Prey,” the chimaera said. “Are you having trouble catching them? I’ll willingly help fellow Princes, of course.”

    “That won’t be necessary,” Ilna said. Her voice sounded grim in her own ears; but then, it generally did. “What concerns me is that the little man vanished. Seemed to dissolve. There was nothing there that I could see, but....” She shrugged.

    “Ah!” said the chimaera. Its head jerked toward where Ilna indicated, and it started sideways into the opposite hedge. “Ah. You saw that, did you? Well, it’s safe enough now. It doesn’t stay around after it’s fed... or it doesn’t seem to, anyway.”

    “Yes, but what was it?” Ilna said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice but not succeeding especially well. “I didn’t see anything, just the man disappearing.”

    “We call it the Shadow,” said the chimaera, “but....”

    The big creature made a rumbling sound deep in its chest, apparently the equivalent of a man clearing his throat before he was ready to speak.

    “It never comes for Princes,” the chimaera went on, “or almost never. But most of us, certainly myself... we prefer not to use the name. Sometimes you call something to yourself by naming it, you know. Or they say so.”

    “They say a lot of things,” said Ilna tartly, but her irritation was more at the situation than this great cat’s fearful mumbling. “Is the—”

    She waved her left hand in a quick circle. Using the word ‘Shadow’ wasn’t going to help in getting information from the cat; and anyway, the concern might be correct. She knew very little about this place, and she knew nothing about the Shadow save that she didn’t want to meet it. There was no point in using a name that could be harmful to herself and her friends.

    “—darkness, whatever, it is—is it a wizard, then? Did it make this place?”

    “It?” the chimaera said. “Oh, certainly not. The One created the Garden and placed us in it. The other that you refer is a resident like the rest of us Princes. Like yourselves, that is.”

    “Not, I think,” said Chalcus, “like ourselves; but we’ll let that pass. Is there a way out of this garden, friend cat?”

    “Out?” the chimaera repeated in a puzzled tone. “Why, no. The One sealed the Garden for his perfect pleasure, or so they say. Anyway, why would you want to leave it? The weather is perfect and there’s plenty of Prey. It’s a paradise.”

    “Chalcus?” Merota said primly, her hands folded before her. “Ilna? I don’t like the way he talks.”

    Then the child cried, “They aren’t Prey, they’re people! Real little people!”

    “Yes,” said Ilna. “I think they are too. Master Chimaera, you said you were leaving when I called you back. I won’t trouble you further.”

    “Well, you know that I have just as much right to—” the creature said.

    Chalcus stepped in front of Ilna, his blades out. Her fingers were knotting yarn, visualizing the shimmer of the wing in her mind’s eye and shifting the sequence of her fabric in ways that only she could understand. Even her understanding was at the muscle level, not in her conscious mind.

    “All right!” cried the chimaera. Its hind legs hunched as it turned, then launched itself into the air. Its gossamer vans spread and stroked, driving a gust backward. The great creature vanished over the tops of the hedges.

    “This garden isn’t so bad a place,” said Chalcus judiciously. “But barring present company, I don’t much care for the neighbors I’m sharing it with. I’ll be glad when you find us a way out, dear heart.”

    “Yes,” said Ilna. “So will I.”

    Her nostrils flared as she breathed out. “So will I!” she repeated.

 

---

 

    Cashel held Protas and his quarterstaff firmly as the void coalesced into a world beneath their feet again. He looked around quickly. Midges rose in a cloud from black water. They’d come from an upland forest to a swamp.

    Cashel sniffed: a tidal swamp. The air had a salty sharpness in addition to the usual smell of decay.

    The air was also full of the midges. He’d breathed in a flock of them, and he’d doubtless breathe more before he was gone from this place. They tickled the back of his throat but at least they didn’t seem to be the biting kind.

    “There isn’t anywhere we can go, Cashel,” Protas said, taking his hand down from the topaz crown. “It’s all mud and water. Do you think a boat will come for us?”

    A boat couldn’t through this, Cashel thought. Cattails grew all about, but he could see the roots spreading over the surface of the mud. There’s not a hand’s breadth of water in any direction from us.

    Aloud he said, “We may have to get muddy, Protas. You’d best take your slippers off now, because—”

    A figure came through the cattails toward them. Rose up from the cattails, it seemed to Cashel, though the fellow was hunched and maybe could’ve walked this close unnoticed. Not really—but Cashel could tell himself it might’ve happened.

    “You’re the ones with the gem,” the fellow said. He raised a lens of rock crystal in a gold frame and through it studied first Cashel, then Protas and the topaz. “I’m to guide you to the next stage. Yes, I am....”

    He was a little fellow with no hat and a head that’d been shaved bald except for a thin circle of fine brown hair just above his ears. He carried a heavy book in his left hand; it had a medallion on the spine and iron clasps to lock the covers closed. His jaw was long, too long for a man’s, and the nostrils in his little flat nose were perfectly round.

    Cashel cleared his throat. “Ah,” he said, “we’re pleased to meet you. I’m Cashel and that’s Prince Protas.”

    “Yes,” said their guide. He wore a fine red robe with sleeves, though the hem was muddy as any garment must get in this place. Over it was a cape of gray satin covered with sequins. “Protas. And the gem.”

    His eye, swollen through the crystal lens, focused again on the boy. “So, Prince,” he said softly, drawing out the ess sounds in a way Cashel didn’t like. “You have the gem; do you know how to use it?”

    “I’m not here to use it, sir,” Protas said. He spoke calmly but he stood very straight at Cashel’s side. “Master Cashel and I are carrying the amulet to where we’re going, and I don’t believe we’ve yet reached that place.”

    “Believe what you want, boy!” their guide said with a nervous titter. “Things are or they aren’t regardless of what you believe; and sometimes they are and they aren’t.’

    “Time to be going, I’d judge,” Cashel said. He didn’t say how he judged that: it was by deciding that every heartbeat of time he spent in this place was one longer than he’d have been here if he’d had his choice. The sky was blue and clear, but thick fog had wrapped his mind ever since he and Protas arrived.

    “Do you think you can give me orders because you’re a big man?” their rat-faced guide said, slipping into anger with the suddenness of an icicle cracking off the slates in winter.

    “You’re here to guide us,” said Cashel, adjusting his hands slightly. “If you’re not willing to do your job, then just say so and point us the direction we’re to go. But you’re not much of a man if you do that.”

    “Not a man?” said their guide. He gave out a screeching sound. Cashel recognized it as laughter, but not until his hands had tightened on the staff. “Not a man, do you think? Well, perhaps so, but I’ll guide you nonetheless.”

    He walked past them, splashing in the muddy water. From behind Cashel saw that the fellow’s back had been cut open, likely with an axe. The ends of the ribs stuck out the gash. Inside, the organs pulsed in a general red mess, but a loop of sliced intestine oozed black liquid in a smear down the lower part of the cloak.

    Protas walked straight off after their guide. His eyes were glazed in the short glimpse Cashel got of the boy’s face, but he didn’t hesitate. Two steps into the swamp, he’d lost both of his fine slippers with the toes curled up in tassels.

    Cashel reached down and retrieved them even before Protas realized the mud had pulled them off. He sloshed them through a tongue of deeper water that reached up toward the ankle-deep path they were following, then handed them back to the boy.

    “Oh!” said Protas when he realized what Cashel was reaching over his shoulder to give him. He took the slippers and said in embarrassment, “I’m sorry, Cashel. I forgot what you said.”

    “Keep them for later,” Cashel said. “I don’t think they’d do much good in this mud anyway.”

    “Cashel?” said the boy without turning around again. “Did we die? Is this the Underworld where we’re being punished for our sins?”

    “I don’t think so, Protas,” Cashel said. “But I’ll be glad to be another place too.”

    “So you say!” said their guide, turning his narrow rat face to look back over his shoulder at them. “So you say, as though you knew already where you were going.”

    He laughed, not in a nice way. “But maybe you’re right at that,” he added. “No matter what place it is you’re going to!”

    The cattails to the left of the path shuddered. Cashel eyed them as he strode past. Something smooth and rounded rose through the black water. A bubble, he thought; the mud belching out decay.

    It continued to rise, gray and gleaming above the surface: a huge fish, its head alone the size of a brood sow. The bulging eyes stared at Cashel with a malevolence that he thought was more than his imagination. He shifted his staff slightly as he passed, but the fish remained where it was: half out of the mere, but only half.

    “Follow me and you won’t be harmed,” the guide said. “Unless I’ve made a mistake, of course.”

    It sounded to Cashel like the fellow was taunting them instead of being reassuring. This wasn’t a place for a decent man to be. Whatever their guide had started as, living here for a long time would make the best man peevish.

    “Carry out your duties, Master Guide,” said Protas in the haughty tone Cashel’d heard from him before when he was afraid. “We understood there’d be risk in our undertakings.”

    The cattails were behind them. Nearabout in all directions were sloughs of dark water and mudflats mottled with slimy green algae. The only other plants were ferns whose fronds curled to knee height like feathers. Many of them were a deep maroon. On the horizon were mountains, but in this steam-hazed air Cashel couldn’t guess how far away they were.

    He looked behind. On bare ground their footprints were filling with water and smudging away even as he watched. When they’d stepped in the black water, they’d swirled the mud beneath, but that was settling as quickly.

    Eyes watched them. Sometimes Cashel could see the head and back of the fish also, sometimes not.

    He turned and cleared his throat. “Protas?” he said. “I have some bread and cheese in my wallet, and there’s a bottle of ale besides. Would you like something to eat?”

    This wasn’t a good place for it, but none of the places they’d been were any better. They’d been a long time since standing in the room with Cervoran, and Cashel didn’t know when the boy’d last eaten anyway.

    “I’m not hungry, Cashel,” Protas said carefully. “But, ah, thank you.”

    He’s scared to death but too much a man to say so, Cashel thought, smiling inside. Aloud he said, “Well, maybe later then, after we’ve gotten where we’re going.”

    Then because it was his nature, he added, “Ah, Master Guide? Would you care for something yourself? It’s coarse fare, but it keeps me going on the road, I’ve found.”

    “Eat your food?” the fellow said, turning his long face with a sneer. “No, not that. But perhaps you’d like to share my meals? Shall I offer you that? That would be in keeping with my obligation as your fellow man, wouldn’t it? Shall I offer you food?”

    “Carry out your duties, sirrah!” Protas said sharply. “We want no more of you than that!”

    There was a deep rumble through the ground, then in the air as well. The surface of the water ahead of them puckered. Their guide stopped, his face frozen into a half-snarl.

    “Come along!” he said, splashing onward at a quicker pace than before. His feet left narrower tracks than those of Protas following behind him, though the mud was so soft that Cashel couldn’t be sure of the details.

    “What’s that sound?” said Protas. “Is it thunder?”

    A second shock trembled across the landscape ahead of them. This time the ground lifted ankle high, whipping the ferns violently. A line of shattered white foam burst over the water.

    “Come along!” the guide shrieked, raising the hem of his tunic in order to run. The book in his left hand rocked and wobbled, but it didn’t fall into the muck as Cashel thought it might.

    Cashel started running also. He didn’t like it and he wasn’t any good at it either, but for a lot of reasons he didn’t want to fall too far behind the others. Fortunately the guide setting the pace was even less of a runner than Cashel.

    Over these flats Cashel could follow the wave as it lifted on the horizon and spread toward them at the speed of a galloping horse. He judged his time, then jumped to have both feet in the air when the ground rose beneath him.

    The ground settled with a gelatinous quiver as the wave passed on. Cashel landed and sank in deep. Protas had tangled his feet and gone down, while the guide had fallen forward with a despairing shriek. His cloak and tunic had flown up; he smoothed the garments back over his tail with his right hand before rising and turning to glare at the humans he was guiding.

    Cashel helped Protas to his feet. The boy’s face had gone into the mud, but he’d clutched the crown to his temples with both hands.

    “It’s not done,” said Protas in a small voice. He pointed with his right hand.

    Cashel looked ahead. The third wave spreading toward them across the flats was taller than he was.

    With the staff vertical in his right hand, Cashel wrapped both arms around Protas and lifted him. He kept his own legs slightly flexed. He thought of telling Protas to keep hold of the crown, but the boy’d been doing that fine the whole while he’d been carrying it. Telling him to be careful would be slighting him, and Protas didn’t deserve that.

    The wave threw Cashel in the air with a roar as deep and loud as a building falling. If his balance hadn’t been perfect the shock would’ve spun him head over heels like a pinwheel. Cashel had jumped across streams from one wet rock to the next while carrying a ewe on his shoulders; he didn’t tumble this time either, just rode the wave up and came down again as smoothly as if he’d stepped from a bank onto soft ground.

    Very soft ground. The shock’d shaken the mud to nearly a liquid, like well-sifted flour only more so. Again Cashel sank in, this time almost to his knees.

    He set Protas down, then pulled his legs out—the right and then the left. He looked around first to see if there was a rock or a log or something he could butt the quarterstaff against to push on; but there wasn’t, not anywhere in this world that he’d seen so far.

    The thunder of the wave rolled off in its wake. Ahead, the direction it’d come from, there was a wasteland even more barren than it’d been when Cashel first saw it. The smears of algae were now mixed unrecognizably with the mud they’d covered, and the shallow roots of the ferns had been ripped up as the plants were flung in windrows like seaweed at the tide line.

    Their guide got to his feet. His dirty brown eyes had a look of fear, like a dog who’d been kicked often and expects to be kicked again, only harder.

    “I can’t help you now,” he said. Then, angrily, “It isn’t my fault! Even if I’d known she was going to act, what could I have done? If I had that power, would I be here?”

    ‘We’re all right,” Cashel said. He nodded in the direction they’d been heading. “It’ll be harder walking with this muck all stirred up, but we can do it. I’ll carry you if I must. And anyway, it’s settling already.”

    Their guide’s feet were narrow so they might sink in worse than Cashel’s, but the main trouble was that hauling your feet through a bog was work about as hard as anything Cashel remembered doing. But he had done it, and he was ready to do it again if he had to.

    “You don’t understand!” the guide said. “She’s cut the path to the portal, I’m sure of it! And I’ll be punished even though there was nothing I could do, nothing!”

    “Let’s go on and see what things look like,” Cashel said quietly. He didn’t really doubt what the rat-faced man was saying, but he’d learned long since that there could be a big difference between what people thought’d happened and what’d really happened. “Then we’ll decide what to do.”

    “There’s nothing to do!” the guide shouted. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m doomed!”

    “You are our guide,” said Protas in a funny tone that Cashel hadn’t heard from him before. The boy had his left hand on the jewel even though nothing was going to jiggle him just now. “Guide us as you’re compelled to do.”

    “I know my duty!” the guide said peevishly. “All right, since you’re so sure of yourself.”

 

---

 

    The mud was shaking down inside itself, just as Cashel’d figured it would. A skim of water formed on top and drained sluggishly toward the inlets on either side. He could see fish lifting their heads from the muddy water every once in a while. Occasionally one took a gulp of air before sinking out of sight.

    The guide set off at a good pace. The sun was brighter, burning through the haze as a distinct disk instead of being a smear of light beyond the overcast. The flats reeked before the earthquake, but the shocks had stirred them to worse. Death, very old death, was so present that Cashel thought he ought to be able to see it.

    Protas stumbled along with his arm over his face so that his sleeve covered his nose. Cashel doubted that helped, but the boy wasn’t complaining.

    The guide didn’t seem to notice the smell, which was about what you’d expect. Cashel tried not to look at the tear in the fellow’s back, but he couldn’t avoid seeing the gnats curling from the wound and back like a cloud of smoke.

    “I see something,” said Protas, lowering his arm to speak. “Cashel, I see a rock!”

    “Yes, a rock and on it the portal that would take you to where you’d trouble me no more!” said their guide. “And the water that cuts you off from it, do you see that too? You’ll never reach it, and you’ve doomed me by your failure!”

    Cashel didn’t say anything till he’d reached the new shore. The shocks that’d stirred things up came from the land slipping here to let the water through. The channel wasn’t terribly wide, no more than a bowman could span with a good chance of hitting his target on the other side... but it could’ve been the whole Inner Sea and not been a worse barrier.

    “Cashel, I can’t swim,” said Protas in a small voice.

    “Nor can I, lad,” said Cashel. “So we’ll have to find another way.”

    He turned to their guide and gestured toward the channel. He said, “Is there a way around this?”

    “How would I know?” the guide snarled. “It just appeared, didn’t it? But even a louse should be able to guess that if She cut the pathway once, She can do it again—if that’s even necessary.”

    Cashel smiled. The little fellow had a right to be sarcastic. Besides, it reminded Cashel of his sister. He thought about how Ilna was doing, and especially he thought about Sharina; but he had other things to deal with before he was back with them.

    There wasn’t anything to build a raft out of. They could maybe make floats out of their clothes and buoy Protas up, but Cashel knew from experience that he himself’d sink like a stone without more than that. People tended to think a lot of his bulk had to be fat, not muscle; but they were wrong.

    Of course if the new channel was shallow enough to wade—

    A fish lifted its head from right in the middle, where the path to the rock must’ve gone before the land sank. It was the biggest fish Cashel had seen in this place; apart from whales, it was the biggest fish he’d seen ever.

    Its mouth gaped open, showing a long arched tunnel with the bright red pillars of the gill rakers to either side at the back. The mouth closed. The fish sank back slowly, leaving a swirl of water that lapped at Cashel’s feet.

    The fish didn’t have teeth. If it hadn’t been the size of a good-sized ship and had a mouth that could swallow a wagon, that might’ve been reassuring.

    “Master Guide?” said Cashel, his lips pursed as he thought. Ordinarily he’d have said “friend” when he didn’t know a fellow’s name, but not here. “Is there a place anywhere around that we can find trees to build a raft?”

    The forest might be a month away and besides, that wouldn’t solve the problem of the fish, but—

    “There are no trees here,” said their guide. “There are cattails and there are ferns; and there is mud, that is all.”

    “Well, we’ll gather cattails, then,” Cashel said, nodding as he worked the business out in his head. “They’ll float, and with enough of them we can—”

    “That would take too long,” said Protas in his funny voice. His left hand was back on his head again. He stretched out his right arm with the fingers tight together.

    “It’s the quickest way I can come up with, Protas,” Cashel said, not loud but making it clear to anybody listening that he wasn’t looking for an argument. “The fish is another thing, but maybe if we set the raft on fire at one end—”

    The boy’s lips didn’t move, but somebody started chanting words of power in a voice like a cicada shrilling. Cashel couldn’t hear the sounds as words, but the rhythms were unmistakable to anybody who’d heard wizards in the past. He looked at Protas in surprise and started to speak.

    He shut his mouth again. Whatever the boy was doing and however he was doing it, interrupting him wasn’t going to change things for the better.

    Their guide stared in wide-eyed horror. Cashel had wondered if maybe he was doing the chanting, but the expression on the fellow’s nasty little face proved that wasn’t so.

    “Do you know what’s happening, then?” Cashel asked. The guide didn’t seem to have heard the question.

    Wizardlight as bright and blue as a sun-struck glacier shivered over the surface of the channel. The water stirred and humped as the great fish started to rise again. The keening insect voice shouted a syllable that Cashel almost could hear.

    A blue flash lighted the channel to its muddy bottom, showing the fish as a shadow with its bones as darker shadows. It was even bigger than Cashel had guessed. It dove toward the bottom with a convulsive flip of its serpentine tail.

    The water was opaque for a moment. Then it froze into yellow ice.

    Protas swayed; Cashel caught him in the crook of his left arm. He’d had a lot of experience with the way wizards wore themselves out with their art, but he hadn’t had a hint of Protas being a wizard himself....

    The boy opened his eyes. “What happened, Cashel?” he said. Hard as he tried to hide it, he sounded scared.

    “We’ve got a way across the channel now, Protas,” Cashel said. He looked at the guide. Try as he might to be charitable, he loathed the foul little man. “That’s right, isn’t it?” he demanded.

    “You didn’t tell me you could control the talisman,” their guide whispered. “You should’ve told me. I didn’t think anyone could....”

    Cashel’s expression was getting harder. “Yes, I heard you,” the guide said. He licked his lips; his tongue was forked. “Yes, you can cross. We must cross, yes.”

    He walked onto the ice without speaking further. Cashel patted the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Protas,” he said. “We’ve got our path.”

    “Yes, Cashel,” said the boy. “Ah—is it safe?”

    “Safer than staying around here, I’d judge,” Cashel said, stepping onto the cold, hard surface. The ice was a maze of cracks, not slippery and not even unpleasant to walk on after the warm mud.

    Protas winced as he followed. His feet didn’t have Cashel’s calluses, but this short hike wouldn’t give him frostbite. They walked across quickly. Cashel glanced over his shoulder to make sure nothing was following them; the mud flats were the same steaming wasteland they’d been before.

    The rock was just that: one rock, a spike of basalt sticking up like a fingertip from the mud on the other side of the ice bridge. It was chest high on Cashel and a little above the boy’s head. There was a symbol on the top of it, but this time it had one more angle than a hand has fingers.

    “We’re to get up on this?” Cashel said politely, pointing.

    “Yes, unless you plan to stay here,” snapped the rat-faced man. Then he wrinkled his short nose and said, “Get up there, of course! Leave here before you cause me even more trouble.”

    Cashel lifted the boy onto the rock. He prodded the ground with his big toe to find a suitable spot to butt his staff. It was firmer here than it’d been anywhere on the other side of the channel.

    Their guide looked back. The ice was already turning to slush, and bits were breaking off the edges.

    “I don’t know how I’ll return,” he said. “And I don’t care! You’ll be gone, that’s all I ask!”

    “That’s all we ask too, Master Guide,” Cashel said. With his left hand on top of the stone and his right braced on his quarterstaff, he lifted himself to sit beside Protas, then got to his feet.

    “You should have told me you commanded the talisman,” the guide whispered. He held out the book in both hands. “Methan meruithan man!” he boomed in a voice whose resonance didn’t seem to come from his narrow, broken chest.

    The points of the figure lit like rubies and the light spread rapidly through the lines connecting them. Protas clung tightly to Cashel’s belt with one hand and the crown with the other

    “You should have told me...,” the guide’s voice came as a ghostly murmur. The stone underfoot vanished.

 

---

 

    Sharina kept her right arm around Tenoctris as the convoy jerked and squealed up track into the hills surrounding Calf’s Head Bay. A Blood Eagle officer drove the gig this time. Tenoctris had protested at first, but she’d agreed when Sharina pointed out that her strength was better conserved for her art.

    “Lord Waldron planned to have his soldiers improve the road,” Sharina said as the gig jounced around a particularly bad switchback. It’d be a wonder if all the wagons behind them made the corner without losing a wheel or overbalancing. “I suppose he needed them too badly against the plants.”

    As much as anything, she was speaking to take her mind off the thoughts that swirled about in her mind. The last minutes before dawn could be a bad time. Sharina’s fears didn’t have faces or even forms, but in the gray dimness they were all too real.

    “I wish there were more I could do,” Tenoctris said. “The forces Cervoran and the Green Woman are arraying are....”

    She turned to Sharina. The lantern held by the groom leading the gig threw just enough light back for Sharina to see her friend’s wan smile.

    “They’re like the Outer Sea,” Tenoctris said. “Each of them is. I find it hard to imagine two such powerful wizards being perfectly balanced in strength, and yet that’s their weakness as well. Because I can see their structures while I remain outside them, I could undercut either one and bring him down.”

    She grinned, this time with her natural good humor. “Or her down, I suppose,” she added. “Though I’m not sure gender is really a valid concept with Cervoran and the Green Woman.”

    “While they both exist,” Sharina said, filling in what Tenoctris had left unsaid, “they control one another. But if one destroys the other, we have nothing but our own devices to oppose the remaining wizard.”

    They’d reached the top of the ridge. The new track led north and west along the curve of the hills; their wheels bumped over stumps. The crest had been wooded a few days ago, but the trees had been cut for fuel during the fighting. In the darkness to their left, soldiers were putting on their armor and forming ranks with muted grumbles and clanking.

    “Yes,” said Tenoctris. “And while Cervoran claims to be our only defense against annihilation by the Green Woman, I don’t trust his good faith so far that I’d choose to be the instrument of giving him unbridled power.”

    In the gig ahead, Double pointed toward a place on the summit of the final hill of the range. The ground beyond sloped raggedly toward the sea, visible now as lines of foam picked out by the graying sky. The driver, a Blood Eagle who never let his eyes rest directly on his passenger, obediently pulled up. Sharina noticed with a smile that he immediately jumped out of the vehicle, almost certainly without direction.

    “Pull in beside them,” Sharina said to their own driver, raising her voice as the wheels bounced them noisily over rock from which the soil had been worn by recent traffic. To Tenoctris, more quietly as they swayed together with the gig, she said, “You say Cervoran, Tenoctris. You mean Double, don’t you?”

    The gig rocked to a halt; the women waited. Their horse backed a step as Double lurched in their direction as he got down from the other vehicle.

    “Double is Cervoran,” Tenoctris said in a dry undertone. “Is Cervoran or is the mirror image of Cervoran. I don’t know whether or not another Cervoran exists, but I’m sure of what’s in our presence now.”

    The six heavy wagons following the gigs pulled in one by one, guided by Double’s imperious gestures. Five carried long posts, most of which had until the previous day been the roof trusses and ridgepoles of houses in Mona. Many of the city’s residents now lived in stunned misery under tarpaulins in the ruins of what had been their dwellings. After the crisis was over they’d be paid compensation and perhaps they’d understand the necessity of what’d happened to them; but perhaps they wouldn’t understand even then.

    If matters went the wrong way, the army of hellplants would destroy them in those same ruined houses and it wouldn’t matter if they understood why. Sharina didn’t understand why herself.

    “Tenoctris?” she said. “The plants, the Green Woman... Cervoran even, all the things that have threatened the kingdom over the past two years. Surely there’s someone behind them, some thing behind them. Something that hates Mankind. Doesn’t there have to be?”

    “Because human beings are so uniquely important?” Tenoctris said. “Because anything that happens in the cosmos has to be directed by men or at Mankind?”

    “I don’t mean that,” Sharina said, flushing. The wizard’s smile took some of the edge off the words, but it was there nonetheless. “I know it’s not that, but so many things are happening....”

    Tenoctris gestured toward the sea below them to the south. The sky to the east was orange, slanting color across the wave tops.

    “How many waves would you say there are?” Tenoctris asked. “Too many to count, at least. And they keep coming.”

    Crews of laborers, civilians who’d hiked up with the wagons, were lifting the materials out of the beds. The last wagon had an escort of soldiers. In it were rolls of sailcloth and the silver service from the royal palace.

    “Yes,” agreed Sharina. “But they always did. That’s nothing to do with—”

    She waved her hand, indicating not the sea but the mass of hellplants beginning to stir as the sky brightened. Around them were ripples in the marshy ground. The scorpions were returning to the reservoirs in the barrels of the plants where they sheltered while the sun was up.

    “—those things. Wizards. Monsters!”

    “No, dear,” Tenoctris said. “But if a storm struck this coast, the waves would be a thousand times stronger. They’d eat away the shoreline, they’d flood the fields. Ships would be swamped, people drowned, and it’d all be normal. Nobody would think anything was wrong, except that it was a bad storm; perhaps the sort of storm that arises only once in a lifetime.”

    She nodded down at the fields and the ranks of hellplants starting to advance again. “What we’re seeing here, what we’ve seen in the past two years and will see for another year still, happens only once in a millennium. But it’s just as natural as the waves and the storms. Only very much worse.”

    Sharina put her arms around herself and hugged them tight. She wished Cashel were here. She wished—

    Tenoctris laid her hand over Sharina’s. Neither woman spoke, but the touch was a reminder that Sharina had friends and that the kingdom had defenders.

    Horns and trumpets were signalling. The troops were in place behind earthworks and trenches; the day before some units had built stockades, but all the wood had been burned in the course of the fighting.

    Waldron had sited the catapults and ballistas just below the hillcrest. Sharina guessed there were forty or fifty of them all told. They were high enough on the slope to shoot over the infantry positions, but they weren’t on the ridge where they’d block the road. The army artillery was on wheeled carriages, but the naval weapons were mounted on bases that’d obviously been knocked together quickly, generally from house beams. The crews of the larger weapons were cranking back their levers against springs made from the neck sinews of oxen.

    Captain Ascor commanded the company guarding Sharina this morning. He was going from one man to the next, checking equipment and talking quietly to his troops. If everything went as it should, the Blood Eagles were above the battle and would have nothing to do but watch. If matters went badly wrong, they might not be able to save the Princess’ life—but they would certainly die before she did. They had their duty.

    Sharina smiled: Princess Sharina had her duty also, to stand on the battlefield as a symbol to the royal army of what it was fighting for. The kingdom couldn’t watch the army’s sacrifice, but the regent would.

    The sun wasn’t quite above the horizon, but the sky was bright and the hellplants were moving forward on the plain below. Their smooth, slow progress reminded Sharina of slime oozing down an incline. The plants were actually moving uphill, but the comparison to slime was still valid. Behind the earthworks, officers called orders to their men in hoarse voices.

    The workmen on the ridge line were digging in the posts at intervals of ten or a dozen feet, tamping earth in around them to hold them upright. They looked like the stakes of a crude fence running generally east to west along the hilltop. Other men were carrying bolts of sailcloth and dropping them between pairs of posts, but what that was in aid of was beyond Sharina.

    “Do you know what they’re doing?” she said quietly in Tenoctris’ ear.

    “I do not,” said the older woman. Her attention was on Double, though he seemed simply to be standing with his head bowed. He held the wooden athame point down before him. “I will say that at the moment there’s a... a gap, a hole almost. Surrounding Cervoran. There’s a stupendous concentration of forces here, and none of it is touching Cervoran.”

    Sharina licked her lips and glanced down at the plants. They were spreading slightly apart as they advanced toward the fortifications. She looked back at Tenoctris and said, “Why? Why isn’t he—defending himself?”

    “I think he’s conserving his strength,” Tenoctris said simply. “And he has strength, dear. He’s a very powerful wizard.”

    An artillery officer bawled an order; his subordinate jerked the lanyard of a big catapult. The slip-hook flew back, clanging on the frame, and the long vertical arm crashed forward into the padded bar. A missile shot down toward the plain.

    The nearest plants were still a quarter mile from the breastworks and farther than that from the artillery on the ridge. Sharina frowned; she knew a big catapult could throw its ball that far, but she didn’t think it could hit a target as small as an individual plant.

    The projectile, a sealed jar, was light-colored and easy to track against the black fields. It snapped out in nearly a straight line, quite different from the high arc that Sharina’d expected a catapult projectile to describe.

    The missile smashed squarely into the body of a hellplant and shattered into pale fragments. It took a noticeable length of time for the sound of the impact, a hollow whop, to reach the top of the hill. An instant later the quicklime burst into snarling, spitting tendrils of white fire, shrivelling the plant’s dark bulk.

    “How did they do that?” Sharina said in amazement. “How did they hit a target so far away?”

    She was speaking toward Tenoctris, but of course she didn’t expect an answer. To her surprise an artilleryman, part of the crew of a small ballista which wasn’t powerful enough to shoot yet, turned and called out, “We set range stakes last night, your highness. The ground-pounders, they got smoked good when they attacked, but we went along behind ‘em putting white spears in the field every fifty paces. For this morning, you see.”

    “Oh!” said Sharina. “I’d seen them. I didn’t know what they were.”

    In fact she’d thought the white poles were stripped saplings or some vestige of the farms that’d been in the bay before the plants invaded. She looked down to her left to where Lord Waldron had planted his standard. The army commander was narrow-minded, stubborn and a stiff-necked aristocrat... but he was either smart enough to have made preparations to use the artillery accurately, or he was smart enough to listen to a junior officer who’d come up with the idea.

    The kingdom was well served by its army in more ways than the fact its soldiers were willing to die for the civilians who paid their wages. But it was well served in that as well.

    More weapons, catapults and ballistas both, were shooting now. The crash of their arms against the stops echoed around the bowl of hills. Crewmen grunted as they bent to the bars of the windlasses that slowly recocked their weapons.

    Not all the jars of quicklime hit plants, but many did. The hiss of lime slaking in plant tissue, devouring both the hellplants and the scorpions swimming in their central tanks, became a noticeable backdrop to the shooting and human voices.

    Even the missiles that missed splashed long fiery smears across the wet fields. They caused advancing plants to hesitate and raising the spirits of the soldiers watching. Men who’d been crouching nervously behind the breastworks began to cheer.

    The sun was throwing the plants’ shadows onto the hills to the northwest. By its light, Sharina saw fresh forms humping up out of the surf. More of the creatures were arriving on the beach. Sharina swallowed. The troops would fight hard, but....

    As the sun climbed, mist rose from the fields. That was more disconcerting to Sharina than the fact that plants were walking. Every clear cool morning in Barca’s Hamlet she’d seen mist form over standing water, but then it burned away as the sun rose higher. Here in Calf’s Head Bay she watched the opposite: it was as if the sun were wringing water from the soil and spreading it as a shroud over the advancing monsters.

    The Green Woman had formed her creatures by wizardry. At least here within the half-circle of hills, her art ruled the weather also.

    The hellplants had come within range of the smaller ballistas which began to fire with sharp cracks. They were loaded with quarrels whose usual square bronze heads were replaced by small jars of quicklime. Sharina had wondered how effective they’d be, but she saw a missile from the weapon just below her plunge into the barrel of a hellplant. For a moment there was no response; then the creature’s body ripped open in a gush of steam, and the remainder sank into a smoking pile.

    “That’s what he’s doing with the silver!” Tenoctris said.

    She was probably speaking to herself, but the delight in her tone jerked Sharina’s head around to look. The last of the posts had been dug in on the ridgeline and the crews had almost finished hanging the sailcloth between them. It formed a long canvas screen across the north side of the bowl. It wouldn’t stop a galloping horse, let alone a plant that weighed more than an ox, so it had to have something to do with Double’s wizardry. Whatever his ultimate purposes, Sharina’d be glad to see him to unleash something against the army of plants right now.

 

---

 

    Workmen were carrying loads of silver—urns, salvers, ewers, and in one case a huge bowl for mixing wine with water—from the wagon and placing it on the ground in front of the canvas screen. Each load went more or less between a pair of support posts.

    A soldier followed each laborer, guarding him and more particularly guarding the silver. Was anybody likely to run off with a cup now, when on the plain below men and monsters battled for the fate of the world?

    Sharina grinned. Yes, of course somebody was likely to do that. Given half a chance the workmen might abscond with all the silver, even if they were told it was the only thing standing between mankind and the inhuman army advancing on them. Many people took a very short-term view of things—and prospered.

    Short-term thinking wouldn’t work this time, though, but Lord Tadai or whoever’d turned the silver over to Double had taken precautions. Soldiers weren’t notably more honest than civilians, but they were disciplined.

    “Tenoctris?” Sharina said. “I see what they’re doing with the silver, but I don’t understand why.”

    “It’s a contagion spell, dear,” Tenoctris said. She probably thought she was explaining. “The wood and cloth simply create a material framework by which Cervoran will form the silver.”

    The last of the plate had been arranged in front of the screen and the workmen were walking back to the wagons. The soldiers gathered under their officer, talking in quiet, worried voices and looking toward the plain. They’d carried out their orders by delivering the silver, but there were obviously places where they’d be more useful now than standing on the hillcrest. Volunteering themselves into the carnage below would take a great deal of moral as well as physical courage, though, and they were hesitating.

    The sun was a flattened orange ball on the eastern horizon. The artillery continued to shoot, but the missiles were aimed at the second wave of hellplants just arrived from the sea. At least a hundred plants had been reduced to smoldering corpses on their march to the hills, but twice that number were now too close for the catapults and ballistas to strike.

    The plants that’d spent the night in the fields, all those that’d survived the rain of quicklime, had reached the human fortifications. Spears, billhooks, and torches on pike shafts stabbed over the earthworks—and still they came on.

    Double, standing at the east end of the screen, roused from his trance. He gave Tenoctris a thick-lipped smile, then pointed his athame toward the nearest pile of plate: a large serving dish and a pair of goblets set with tourmalines.

    “Eulamon,” Double chanted. “Restoutus restouta zerosi!”

    The air about the dishes went rosy with a fog of wizardlight. The silver blurred.

    “Benchuch bachuch chuch...,” Double called. His voice was thin but so piercing that Sharina had the feeling that everyone around Calf’s Head Bay could hear the words. “Ousiri agi ousiri!”

    The haze thickened. A thin shimmering sheet spread above it, orange with the reflected light of the sunrise.

    “Eulamon,” Double chanted, shifting his black wooden dagger so that it pointed at the next pile of silver. The salver and cups of the initial pile had vanished; the tourmalines lay on the ground. “Restoutus restouta zerosi!”

    At a dozen places in the trenches dug in front of the line of breastworks, soldiers threw torches to ignite the piles of brush prepared for the purpose. There hadn’t been enough fuel to fill the entire frontage, but where the fires rose to full life, the plants trapped in them struggled and died. Green bodies ruptured, pouring salt water onto the flames which then gushed out white steam.

    The flames damped temporarily, but the fires were too hot for a few barrels-full of water to put them out. They blazed again, shrinking still further the blackened remains of the dead hellplants.

    “They don’t back away or try to escape,” Sharina said. What she’d just seen made her queasy. “They throw themselves into the fires.”

    “They’re seaweed, dear,” Tenoctris said quietly. She continued to watch Double, chanting as he formed the final piles of silver into a gleaming wall in front of the canvas screen. “They have no minds of their own. The wizard who controls them cares no more about their feelings than you do about those of a leaf of lettuce.”

    More plants came on, moving with the slow certainty of clouds drifting across the summer sky. The thickening mist had turned them to dark lumps; they began to lap upward to cover the earthworks on the higher ground.

    Where there weren’t prepared fire-sets, the hellplants swayed down into the trenches and wallowed there for a moment. Picked soldiers, generally light infantry who ordinarily fought with javelins and didn’t wear armor, stood on the breastworks and hurled bags of quicklime into the open reservoirs in the plants’ bodies.

    Sharina had heard Liane discuss the plan with Lord Waldron and his aides, but she’d doubted whether the soldiers would throw their small missiles accurately in the stress of the attack. In general, they did: the bags splashed into the water and exploded in fire-shot steam.

    But the plants came on, bubbling and sizzling. They drew themselves out of the trenches with their tentacles, then reached for the human defenders. Ignoring the fire inside them, they snatched the spears and billhooks being driven into their green flesh.

    Supported by the plants behind them, the leaders half climbed, half tore down, the breastworks. Light ballistas slashed at them as artillerymen risked hitting their own comrades in the hope of stopping the monsters which the infantry alone couldn’t. Bolts which punched their charge through a hellplant’s body walls usually tore the creature apart even though the same amount of quicklime thrown into the reservoir from above wasn’t effective.

    Some of the soldiers ducked low and thrust their swords into the tendrils on which the plants crawled. For the most part the men died in vain, seized by tentacles and either torn apart or flung to their deaths in the plain below. One plant toppled and couldn’t rise again, though its massive body crushed the man who’d crippled it.

    Sharina licked her lips. While her mind was elsewhere, her hand had reached unnoticed for the horn hilt of the Pewle knife she wore under her cloak. She wouldn’t need the weapon today—the Blood Eagles would see to that—but soon, perhaps....

    “Tenoctris,” she said. “I think they’re going to break through shortly. At the very worst I can outrun any plant so I’m going to stay with the army, but you’d better—”

    “Wait,” said Tenoctris. She raised her left hand without taking her eyes from Double. “Hush please, dear.”

    “Kato katoi...,” Double said, pointing his athame at the center of the long film of silver shimmering in the air beside him. “Kataoikouse neoi....”

    The silver film rippled and seemed to stiffen. Tenoctris gripped Sharina’s wrist and walked with quick determination to the right. Toward Double, Sharina thought, but that was only incidentally true. Tenoctris was leading her to the side where they wouldn’t be standing between the mirror and the battle at mid-slope.

    “Abriao iao!” Double shouted.

    The silver twitched, changing in smooth lines that Sharina couldn’t have described though she watched it happen. Because the film formed a perfect mirror, Sharina saw not the thing itself but a subtly distorted image of the battlefield below.

    The mirror caught the rising sun and threw it back as a point of white fury at nearly right angles to its position in the sky. The beam sawed across the hellplants climbing the breastworks at the northern edge of the half-bowl. Double continued to chant.

    A plant exploded in steam, then a second, and after a slight delay a third. The point of light touched also the head of a soldier lunging forward behind his spear. He had time to scream as his helmet melted in spatters of bronze; then he fell backward. The plant in which his spear wobbled collapsed inward and sank down into the trench from which it’d heaved itself.

    “Sound recall!” Sharina shouted. “Captain Ascor, sound recall! Now! Get the men out of the way of this wizard’s work!”

    She’d drawn the big knife and stepped toward Double when she saw the soldier die at the mirror’s focus... but the wizard was doing no more than the ballista crews had done, risking their fellows for the chance of saving the kingdom. She would pray to the Lady for that man and for all the brave men who’d died today, but first she must survive the day.

    Ascor looked from her to the battlefield, then barked an order to the cornicene standing beside him. The signaller put his curved horn to his lips and blew the five-note recall signal: a long, three short, and a final long.

    Sharina’d thought Ascor might protest: Princess Sharina was acting ruler of the Isles, but she had no authority on the battlefield except to issue commands to Lord Waldron himself. Ascor obeyed her anyway, perhaps because the bodyguard regiment considered it self separate from—and above—the army as a whole, but also because here on the hillcrest it was obvious that getting the troops out of the way immediately was the best way to save their lives.

    That wasn’t obvious from Lord Waldron’s position in the center of the fortifications further down the slope. A courier left the Waldron’s entourage, obviously heading for the signaller blowing the unauthorized call. The man slipped and stumbled on the hillside; he’d lost at least his helmet in the fighting.

    Sharina took off her cloak and waved it toward Lord Waldron. He wouldn’t understand what she meant, but it might be enough to convince him that there was a good reason for what probably had seemed to him mutiny.

    The cornicene continued the call; other signallers took it up, horns and trumpets both. From where she stood Sharina could see troops abandoning their positions and streaming up the slopes. The men who’d survived this long probably thought the recall was the hand of providence, saving their lives at a time when they were sure they were doomed.

    Many troops hadn’t survived; Sharina could see that too. Close combat with the hellplants was a sentence of death, particularly now that most of the fuel had been burned.

    The soldiers close to where the mirror’s deadly beam struck were already retreating. They were fleeing, more accurately, throwing down weapons and equipment, but it was wizardry that’d panicked them rather than the enemy—even this unnatural enemy.

    The silver bowed and shivered under Double’s chanted commands; its point of focus cut like a fiery razor everywhere it touched. The hellplants’ sodden flesh burst and blackened, leaving behind only masses of stinking compost as the light moved on.

    Twice Sharina saw a fleeing man step into the directed blaze. Neither was at the focus, but they were close enough to it that one died screaming and the other’s steaming flesh oozed through the segments of his armor as his body toppled backward.

    Lady, cover them with the cloak of Your protection. Lady, may their spirits dwell with You.

    The mirror shifted, drawing its light along hellplants bunched at the line of the fortifications. Even when the troops had abandoned their positions, the works delayed the massive, sluggish attackers. The mere touch of the light did as much sudden damage as the heaviest jars of quicklime hurled by the artillery

    Waldron must finally have seen what was happening. He and the knot of cavalrymen around him, his personal retainers, backed out of their redoubt with their faces toward the plants; his four signallers joined the general chorus of Recall. The courier, halfway between the command group and Sharina on the northern crest, stopped in puzzlement and looked back toward the army commander.

    Sharina had expected cheering; there was none. The troops who’d been fighting the hellplants were too exhausted for enthusiasm even at a miracle that’d saved their lives for the time being.

    The mirror continued to warp and shimmer. It’d initially faced nearly due south, catching the sun in the southeast. As the sun rose higher and the mirror’s focused light grew even more devastating, Double drew it around the whole smooth curve of the bay. There was no escaping its beam, but the plants didn’t bother trying. They continued to waddle up the slope, oblivious of the shrunken, smoldering carcasses of their fellows.

    The line of fortifications was clear of living plants. Where there was motion, it was a wisp of steam lifted by the breeze or a numbed soldier crawling out of the pile of corpses which had concealed him.

    Double moved his ravening light onto the squadron of hellplants which had come out of the sea since sunrise. The dank miasma that’d half hidden the plain now burned away in swirls. Wet fields steamed, the stubble burning and the soggy furrows crumbling into arid dust as the light swept over them.

    Calf’s Head Bay was again free of the monsters which had swarmed over it. The tide washed in, bringing only the normal wrack of foam and flotsam.

    “Mekisthi!” shouted Double. The film of silver, sun-struck and brilliant, vanished like the dew. A shining track on the rocky soil marked where it’d fallen when the spell suspending it had ceased.

    Sharina looked at her shadow in amazement; it slanted sharply eastward. The battle had gone on from daybreak to well after noon, when she would’ve guessed that less than an hour had passed.

    The stench of burned flesh and rotted vegetable matter had risen even to the hillcrest; a score of fires were burning on the plain. Nothing now moved but the smoke.

    “I am Cervoran!” Double screamed triumphantly; and, screaming, fell backward, drained by the exertion spent in his art.

    “A very powerful wizard,” Tenoctris repeated quietly.