The Fortress of Glass: Chapter Six

    Chalcus snatched a boat pike from one of the stern racks; the shaft was half again his height. Using it for a balance pole, he jumped to the rail. Looking out, he called, “Hard aport!” sharply. The steersman leaned into the tiller of the port steering oar.

    The Heron heeled toward the oar, making the blade cut deeper into the water and tightening the turn. Chalcus shifted his footing slightly, leaning further for a better view past the hull; the pike in his hands moved inboard to balance him.

    The show was as good as any troupe of the acrobats who’d entertained at palace dinners, but here it was in dead earnest. The rail was the only place where Chalcus could both conn them through the gauntlet of swimming monsters and be sure the steersman could hear his orders instantly in the likely tumult of the next minutes.

    “The plants ahead of us must’ve been going to attack the palace,” Tenoctris said, pursing her lips. She spoke loudly enough for to be heard, but it seemed to Ilna that she was organizing her own thoughts rather than informing her friends. “The person, the thing in the fortress must really control them to send them against us instead.”

    “The Green Woman,” Ilna said, though the name was only a sound without meaning. Did even Cervoran know what she was?

    “Tenoctris, can you do something?” Cashel said. “To fight the plants, I mean.”

    He gave the staff a trial spin overhead where he wasn’t going to hit anybody, then lowered it. They’d all seen the plant attacking the palace. A quarterstaff wouldn’t be much good against more creatures of the sort.

    Ilna’s fingers had been busy with the cords while her mind was on other things, hopeless things. When she looked at what she’d knotted, her lips pursed with surprise. She knew her patterns were useless as weapons against the hellplants, but this was no weapon.

    “I’ll try,” Tenoctris said. She grasped the railing with one hand and lowered herself to the catwalk. “I don’t have a great deal of power, though.”

    Cervoran was extremely powerful. He hadn’t been able to destroy the fortress in the depths, but saving the Heron from the creatures attacking was surely a smaller thing.

    “Cashel, let me by,” Ilna said. “To get to Cervoran.”

    Cashel stepped aside with the powerful delicacy of an ox lowering itself onto the straw. He didn’t ask what she planned to do; he knew she’d tell him whatever she thought he needed to know.

    Ilna smiled, though the expression barely reached her lips. Her brother had more common sense than most of the people who thought they were smarter than he was. In fact, thinking Cashel was stupid proved you didn’t have common sense.

    There was a sucking thwock from forward; the Heron staggered. A swatch of vegetation spurted up from the ram’s curve before falling back into the sea.

    “Stroke, lads!” Chalcus shouted. “A cable’s length and we’re through the devils!”

    Ilna squatted at Cervoran’s head and spread her knotted pattern before his staring eyes. For a moment nothing happened; then a shudder trembled the length of the wizard’s body. The design had penetrated to his stunned consciousness and wrenched him back to the present.

    Cervoran closed, then opened his eyes again. His irises were muddy and stood in fields of pale gold. The swollen lips moved, but no sound came out.

    “Stroke!” Chalcus shouted. As the word rang out, oars on the port side clattered together and the ship slewed toward them.

    Ilna glanced to the side, continuing to hold the tracery of fabric in front of the wizard. The Heron’s hull had cleared the nearest hellplant, but the creature grasped an oarblade as the ship drove past. The tentacle held, dragging the oar back into all those behind it in the bank.

    “Overboard with it!” Chalcus bellowed, springing from the deck to the outrigger. “Shove it out, we don’t need the bloody oar!”

    Chalcus’ dagger, curved like a cat’s claw, flashed; he bent and cut through the twist of willow withie that bound the oar to the rowlock. The rower pushed his oar through the port, but the hellplant’s tentacles had grabbed more blades. The Heron wallowed: the starboard oars were driving at full stroke, but half those on the other side were tangled. The hellplant’s bulk tugged at the ship like a sea anchor.

    Cashel stood amidships. He’d picked up the pike Chalcus dropped when he jumped from the deck railing. Some of the shepherds in the borough carried a javelin instead of a staff or bow, but Ilna didn’t recall having seen her brother with a spear of any sort in his hand before.

    Cashel cocked the pike over his shoulder, then snapped it forward as though it was meant for throwing instead of having a shaft thick enough to be used to fend the ship’s fragile hull away from a dock. The pike wasn’t balanced: the rusted iron butt-cap wobbled in a wide circle.

    The point and half the long shaft squelched into the hellplant, tearing a hole the size of a man’s thigh. The barrel-shaped body quivered, but the plant continued to pull itself up the oarshafts toward the ship.

    Half a dozen more oars slid through the ports as crewmen jettisoned anything the plant’s tentacles had caught. The Heron was under way again, limping but moving forward. The steersman had his starboard oar twisted broadside on, fighting the ship’s urge to turn to port where the hellplant lashed the water in a furious attempt to renew its grip.

    “Where is the jewel?” demanded a voice that drove into Ilna’s mind like a jet of ice water. “I must have the topaz from the amber sarcophagus.”

    Ilna looked at Cervoran, whom she’d forgotten for a moment. He’d raised his swollen body onto one elbow. His eyes had returned to the febrile brightness that’d been normal for them at least since she brought him off the pyre.

    “I’ll get it,” Ilna said. She put her knotted pattern in her left sleeve; it’d served its purpose by bringing the wizard out of his coma. Now the question was whether Cervoran would serve his purpose, and they’d know the answer to that before long.

    Tenoctris had set down the crown when she started her own spell. Ilna leaned past the three-cornered figure her friend had drawn in charcoal on the pine decking. Grabbing the wire band she drew it to her, trying not to disturb Tenoctris.

    The stone was awkwardly heavy; she couldn’t imagine wearing such a thing herself. Nobody was asking her to, of course. She gave the crown to Cervoran with a cold expression.

    Oars rattled. The Heron twisted, then shuddered to a stop. Two more hellplants had swum close enough to grab the leading oars on either side, binding the ship to them hopelessly. A third creature, the one that they’d struggled clear of moments before, swam up in the Heron’s wake and would catch the stern in a matter of seconds.

    “All right, lads!” Chalcus cried. “Swords out and show these vegetables what it means to play with men!”

    Cervoran rose to his feet. The great topaz winked on his forehead as if it was alive too. He picked up the silver-mounted skullcap that lay where he’d dropped it after the earlier spell froze the sea into yellow ice.

    A sailor screamed. A flat green tentacle started to lift him from the ship. Chalcus scampered down the outrigger like a squirrel, slashing with his incurved sword. The slender blade slit the tentacle neatly, leaving only the leafy fringe remaining. The sailor twisted with desperate strength and tore that apart also, tumbling back aboard the Heron.

    “Master Cashel!” Cervoran piped. “I have need of you!”

 

---

 

    Cashel was frowning, not because of the situation but because there didn’t seem to be anything for him to do. The quarterstaff was no use on plants, though it felt good in his hands. It reminded him of the days he sat with his back against a holly tree, watching the sheep on the slope below him and listening to Garric play a pipe tune. Cashel couldn’t sing or make music himself, but he loved to hear it when others did.

    Feeling good wasn’t going to beat these plants nor would happy memories. The spear he’d thrown didn’t seem to have done much good either. Besides, the plant that’d attacked the palace had looked like a pincushion from the soldiers’ spears by the time he and Cervoran came up from the cellars, and it didn’t even slow down till the fire got burning good.

    Regretfully, Cashel laid his staff on the catwalk. The wicker mat hanging from the rail would keep it there unless the ship sank. Until the ship sank likely enough, but the crew‘d fight till then and Cashel sure would be fighting.

    A sword’d really be the best thing, but Cashel was hopeless with them. He hadn’t seen any call to learn to use one despite not liking them the way he’d done with other things.

    A broad-bladed hatchet with a square pein stood in a hole in the mast partner—the piece where the mast would be stepped. Cashel drew it out. He’d rather have a full-sized axe, but the hatchet would do. The haft was short but it’d let him grip with both hands; if he had to get close, well, he’d get close. He’d been in fights before.

    Hellplants pulled themselves toward the bow from either side, using their grip on the leading oars like men crossing a span hand-over-hand by a pole. It wouldn’t have done any good for the crew to cast the oars loose the way they’d done before, since this time the monsters were in front of the ship. Backing water wouldn’t help either, since the plant they’d gotten past was swimming up in the wake.

    The one behind was the one Cashel’d probably try to deal with, seeings as Chalcus was in the bow—one foot on the outrigger, the other on the ram—waiting for whichever of the front pair came in range of his sword first. Cashel stayed where he was for the time being. He figured his job was to protect Ilna and Tenoctris the best way he could, and just now he wasn’t sure what that’d be.

    You didn’t win fights by being too hasty. Of course this time Cashel didn’t expect to win, but he wasn’t going to change ways that’d served him well so far.

    “Master Cashel!” Cervoran said. That high voice was as nasty to hear as a rabbit screaming, but like the rabbit it sure did get heard. “I have need of you!”

    Cashel hadn’t thought about the wizard since he’d carried him aboard. Cervoran was holding out that piece of skull again. “Fill this with sea water,” he said when he saw Cashel was looking at him.

    Ilna nodded agreement, but Cashel hadn’t been going to hesitate anyhow. Nothing he’d come up with for himself to do was going to be much good. The first plant he got close to would’ve known it’d been in a fight, but the monsters were the size of oxen. They didn’t have a head or a heart you could split with an axe, either.

    Cashel took the cup and dropped it down the front of his tunic. He could climb down one-handed, but just now he figured the other hand had better be holding the hatchet.

    He swung over the railing, pushed a couple standing crewmen aside with his feet, and dropped. The bench he came down on creaked angrily and threatened to split; he’d landed heavier than he’d meant.

    The Heron dipped like a lady doing a curtsey: a hellplant had grabbed the outrigger with more tentacles than a hand has fingers and was pulling its huge body out of the water. Chalcus slashed, his sword twinkling like lightning in the clouds. Feathery tufts of green fluttered up.

    The ship’s bow lifted, but another tentacle snaked around Chalcus’ ankle from behind. Without seeming to look, the sailor jerked his leg up against the plant’s strength and flicked his dagger across. The plant’s tough fibers parted, and the curved sword whirled in an arc of its own through a couple more gripping tentacles.

    The plant behind them had reached the stern. Crewmen there started hacking at it. Most used swords, though one fellow shoved in a pike. He was still holding the shaft when two tentacles lifted him screaming into the air and pulled his limbs off one by one.

    In the bow, chips flew from the outrigger as oarsmen swung their swords with more enthusiasm than skill. Somebody was bound to cut a friend’s hand off the way they were acting, though Cashel didn’t suppose it’d matter much in the long run.

    Cashel fished the cup out, then dipped it full. He turned to lift it to Ilna’s waiting hand. His sister was one of those people who didn’t wait around wondering what was going to happen next. Cashel could never figure why there were so few folk like her, but that made him happier for the ones he did meet.

    With one hand on a deck support and the other holding the hatchet against the top railing, Cashel lifted himself up to where the women were. Tenoctris chanted over her little triangle on the decking. Cashel could see an occasional rosy gleam of wizardlight in the air, but anything else happening was beyond him.

    Ilna had her paring knife out. Its blade was good steel, not like the knives forged from strap iron that every man back home in the borough carried. Cashel figured the tricks Ilna did with twine didn’t work on the hellplants or she wouldn’t have taken the knife from her sleeve. That was too bad, though he didn’t doubt she’d give as good an account of herself with the little knife as any of the sailors would with their swords.

    He grinned at her. She sniffed, looking peevish but resigned to a world that didn’t work the way it ought to. That was so much his sister’s normal expression that Cashel guffawed loudly. It took more than a whole army of plants to change who Ilna was.

    Cervoran held the cup over his brazier and started chanting again. The charcoal hadn’t gone out with all the tossing around it’d gotten, though the sticks were just ghosts of what they’d been, nested in a mound of white ashes.

    Cashel couldn’t figure how the wizard stood the heat that rippled the air above the cup in his hand. Maybe he just didn’t have any feeling in his fingers.

    Cashel looked down at the fight. He was itching to mix into it, but he knew there’d be time aplenty. They’d all get their bellies full of fighting today....

    Timbers were crackling and the Heron rode way deep in the water, but it was next to impossible to make wood really sink. Chalcus cut like a very demon. He was bloody in a dozen places and’d lost his leather breeches; pulled clean off by a tentacle, Cashel supposed, but it hadn’t slowed him a mite. Ilna’d found herself a man and no mistake.

    From the height of the deck Cashel saw plants in all directions. There was a lot of seaweed floating in the Inner Sea. Once back home when the winds and currents were just right, he’d seen the whole bay on the other side of the headland from Pattern Creek filled with slowly turning greenness. This was the same, only the green swam toward them.

    Cervoran’s eyes were open but they weren’t focused on anything, as best Cashel could tell. Thinking about previous times he’d seen the wizard, he wasn’t sure there was a difference. Cervoran was alive, no question about that; but Cashel got the feeling he was riding in his body instead of living in it the usual way.

    A hellplant dropped away from the starboard bow. Chalcus had hacked its tentacles off, however many there were. That was a wonderful thing, but the plant on the port side was struggling with the crewmen there. Chalcus sat on a bench with his head bowed forward to make it easier for him to drag breaths in through his open mouth.

    Cashel knew better than most what fight took out of you, even when you won. Chalcus’d be back in it soon, but nobody could keep up for long what he’d been doing.

    Cashel looked critically at his hatchet. The blade was straight and as broad as his palm; it had a good working edge, put on with a stone some time since it was last used. Rust flecked it, which pleased him. Steel rusted quicker than iron did, he’d found.

    The haft was hickory like his quarterstaff. He grinned. Hickory was a good wood for tools, hard but with more spring to it than cornelwood or elm. Besides, he liked the feel of it.

    The sea around the Heron was solid green, a mass of waving fronds and bodies like fat barrels. There were more plants than Cashel could count with both hands, many more. Chalcus was back in the fight. Men cut and screamed and died in the grip of arms stronger than any animal’s.

    A hellplant had grabbed the outrigger to starboard. It’d driven the sailors back, and now a tentacle waved toward the raised deck. Cashel couldn’t wait any longer. Instead of cutting at the arm—the plant had who knew how many more?—he lifted one foot to the railing. He’d leap on top of the plant and with the hatchet—

    “Phroneu!” Cervoran cried, his voice stabbing through the ruck of noise. Cashel glanced instinctively toward the wizard. The water in the skull was at a rolling boil, frothing over the silver lip.

    Cervoran’s case was open at his feet. In his free hand he held a small velvet bag, the sort of thing a woman used to store a fancy ring or broach. Cervoran shook the contents, a dancing and glittering of metal filings, into the water. They burned with a savage white glare, and around the Heron the sea burned also.

    Cashel slitted his eyes and turned to cover Tenoctris. The brightness was beyond imagining; it was like being put next to the sun. Beyond imagining....

    The blaze—it wasn’t flames so much as hot white light—mounted higher than the mast would’ve been, higher than the tallest tree of Cashel’s memory. Hellplants shrivelled. Bits of them lifted and spun into the air, black ashes disintegrating into black powder and vanishing.

    The hammering glare stopped abruptly. Cashel opened his eyes and lifted his body off Tenoctris. He’d supported most of his weight on the railing, but he was still glad when she looked up and him and said, “Thank you. Thank you. Are you all right, Cashel?”

    While the light blazed Cashel hadn’t been aware of any sounds, but now people were screaming or praying or just blubbering in terror and pain. The air stank with a combination of wet straw burning and cooked meat. The sea as far as he could tell was black with drifting ash.

    Men who’d reached over the side of the ship had burned too. Most of them’d been dead already or next to it, snatched out of the Heron by a plant’s crushing tentacles. Some had probably been pushing forward to fight, though.

    Well, it’d been quick. And it was done, so that was good.

    Tenoctris was all right. Ilna was down in the bow, wrapping a bandage over the torn skin on Chalcus’ right forearm. Cashel looked at Cervoran, not exactly his business the way the women were, but maybe Cervoran too.

    The wizard stood like a wax statue, neither smiling nor concerned. The empty velvet sack was in his left hand, but he’d dropped the skull to the deck again.

    Cashel bent and picked up the cup. There was no telling when they’d need it again.

 

---

 

    Garric’s head hurt. The blinding surge of pain every time his heart beat was all his universe could encompass just now. He wasn’t sure how long he lay like this, he wasn’t sure of anything but the pain.

    Then he noticed that other parts of his body hurt also.

    “It means you’re alive,” noted the ghost in Garric’s mind with amused dispassion. “There came a time I couldn’t say that, so be thankful.”

    I’m not sure I’m thankful, Garric thought, but he knew that wasn’t true as the words formed. He grinned and immediately felt better. Carus, who during a lifetime of war had been hurt as often and as badly as the next man, grinned back in approval.

    Garric opened his eyes. He was being carried under a long pole, lashed by the elbows and ankles. His head hung down. Two women from the village had the back of the pole; when he twisted to look forward he could see two more in front. It was raining softly, and there was only enough light for him to tell there were people in the group besides the women carrying him.

    A Corl warrior bent close to peer at Garric, then raised its head and yowled a comment. Other Coerli answered from ahead in the darkness. The women supporting the front of Garric’s pole stopped and looked over their shoulders.

    The cat man slashed the leading woman with his hooked line, held short and jerked to tear rather than hold. The woman cried out in pain and stumbled forward again.

    Two Coerli walked toward Garric from farther up the line, a female wearing a robe of patterned skins and the maned giant who’d knocked him unconscious. The male was twice the size of the ordinary warriors, taller and about as heavy as the humans in this land. The female was as big as the warriors but unarmed. A crystalline thing sat on her right shoulder. It was alive.

    “Can he walk?” the big male asked. Garric’s ears heard a rasping growl, but the question rang in his mind.

    “You!” said the female Corl, looking at Garric. She had four breasts, dugs really, under the thin robe. “Can you walk?”

    “I can walk,” Garric said. He wasn’t sure that was true, but it seemed likely to get him down from the pole. With his legs freed and maybe his hands as well, who knew what might happen? “How is it you can speak my language?”

    “We can’t,” the female said. “The Bird speaks to your mind and to ours.”

    The crystal thing on her shoulder fluffed shimmering wings. Well, they might’ve been wings. It wasn’t really a bird, but Garric supposed that was as good a name as any.

    “Where do you come from, animal?” the big male demanded.

    “My name is Garric,” Garric replied. “I’ll answer your questions as soon as you’ve let me down from here to walk on my own. Otherwise, there’s not much you can do to me that’ll hurt worse than I feel already.”

    “That’s not entirely true,” noted Carus. “But a little bluster at a time like this can be useful. It’s the best you can do till you’ve got a hand loose, anyway.”

    Now that Garric was fully awake, the jouncing ride was excruciatingly painful. The Coerli must have better night vision than humans; they moved with complete assurance, avoiding puddles and trees fallen across the trail. The women carrying Garric couldn’t see much better than he did, though. Somebody slipped at every step, and once both of those in front fell to their knees. The jerk on Garric’s elbows made his mind turn gray.

    “All right, put him down,” the big male said. “But keep him tied. Nerga and Eny? Walk behind the big animal and kill him if he tries to run.”

    “Female animals, put the male Garric down,” the female Corl said. She looked at Garric and added, “I am the wizard Sirawhil, beast Garric.”

    The carriers stopped abruptly. Presumably they’d heard the big male just as Garric had, but they hadn’t reacted till they got a direct order from the wizard. Now they more dropped than lowered Garric onto the muddy ground.

    The big male glared at Garric, fondling the knob of his wooden club. “I am Torag the Great!” he said. A warrior cut Garric’s ankles away from the long pole. “No other Corl can stand against me!”

    A flint knife sawed Garric’s elbows free. His wrists were still tied in front of him by thin, hard cords, but one thing at a time. He rolled into a sitting position and looked at his captor.

    Let me get my hands on you and I’ll show you what a man can do, he thought. Aloud he said, “Why have you attacked me, Torag? I was not your enemy."

    Torag looked at him in amazement. He turned to Sirawhil and snarled—literally from his own mouth, and the tone of the words ringing in Garric’s mind was equally clear, “What is this animal saying? He’s a beast! How can he imagine he’s an enemy to the greatest of the Coerli?”

    “You hit him on the head,” Sirawhil said with a shrug. “Perhaps he’s delusional. Though—”

    She glanced back; Garric twisted to follow the line of her eyes. Women from the village carried the bodies of two warriors. The cat men’s corpses were light enough that a pair of bearers sufficed for either one.

    “—while he’s only an animal, he’s a dangerous one.”

    “Resume the march!” Torag ordered. In a quieter though still harshly rasping voice he added to Sirawhil, “We can’t get back to the keep by daylight, but I’d like to put more distance from the warren we raided. Just in case.”

    He prodded Garric with the butt of his club. “Get up, beast,” he said. “If you can’t walk, I’ll break your knees and have you dragged. Maybe I ought to do that anyway.”

    Garric rolled his legs under him, rose to his knees, and then lurched to his feet without having to stick his bound hands into the mud to brace him. He wobbled and pain shot through his body—ankles, wrists and a renewed jolting pulse in his head—but he didn’t fall over. He began plodding after the Corl warrior who was next ahead in the line. Torag and the female wizard fell in beside him.

 

---

 

    “He’s not a great thinker, this Torag,” Carus said. “He’s too stupid to hear a good plan even when it comes out of his own mouth.”

    He’s not really afraid of me, Garric thought.

    Carus laughed. The king’s good humor was real, but it was as cold and hard as a sleet storm.

    “Why are you so big, beast?” Torag said. “Are there more like you back in the warren where we captured you?”

    “Its name is Garric,” Sirawhil said to her chief. “Sometimes using their names makes them more forthcoming.”

    Garric looked at the Corl in amazement. Didn’t they realize that he could hear what they said to one another?

    “The Coerli think only what they say directly to you will be translated,” said an unfamiliar voice in Garric’s mind. “It’s never occurred to them to test their assumption. They’re not a sophisticated race.”

    Neither of the Coerli had spoken. The Bird on Sirawhil’s shoulder fluttered its membranous wings again.

    “I don’t come from around here,” Garric said. “I’m a visitor, you could say. All the members of my tribe are as big as me or bigger.”

    Torag looked at Sirawhil, his face knotting in a scowl emphasized by his long jaw. “Is the beast telling the truth?” he demanded.

    “I don’t know,” Sirawhil said. “Usually they’re too frightened to lie, but this one does seem different.”

    In a sharp tone she added, “You beast women! Is the male Garric a stranger in your warren?”

    “I know where he comes from,” called one of the woman carrying the dead warriors. “My husband Marzan brought him. Make somebody else take the pole and I’ll tell you all about him.”

    Garric turned. He understood the words only because the Bird translated them in his mind, but the tone of the speaker’s voice identified Soma more clearly than he could see through rain and darkness.

    “Nerga, discipline that one,” Sirawhil said off-handedly to the nearest warrior. Nerga lashed out with his line. Soma tried to get her hand up, but the Corl was too quick: the hooked tip combed a bloody furrow across her scalp.

    Soma wailed in despair but didn’t drop the pole. Head bowed and her left hand clasped over the fresh cut, she stumbled on.

    “Speak, animal,” Sirawhil demanded with satisfaction.

    “My husband sent men out to find the stranger,” Soma said in a dull voice, no longer bargaining. “The stranger is a great warrior and was supposed to protect us.”

    She raised her head and glared at Garric. “Protect us!” she said. “Look at me! What protection was the great warrior?”

    “Does she tell the truth, animal?” Torag said to Garric. He wore a casque of animal teeth drilled and sewn to a leather backing. As he spoke, he rubbed them with his free hand.

    From the chief’s tone he was trying to be conciliatory, but he hadn’t taken the wizard’s suggestion that he call his prisoner by name. Indeed, not a great intellect... and the fact Torag rather than somebody smarter was in charge of the band told Garric something about the Coerli.

    “I told you the truth, Torag,” Garric said. “I’m a visitor here. Why did you attack me? My tribe has many warriors!”

    Walking had brought the circulation back to Garric’s legs. That hurt, of course, but he’d be able to run again.

    If there’d been anywhere to run to. And he knew from seeing the Coerli move that at least in a short sprint they could catch any human alive.

    “Where does he come from, Sirawhil?” Torag asked, scowling in concern. “If there’s really many like him....”

    “I can do a location spell,” Sirawhil said. “We need to stop soon anyway, don’t we? It’s getting light.”

    “I’d like to go a little farther...,” Torag grumbled. Then he twitched his short brush of his tail in the equivalent of a shrug. “All right, if he’s alone. If there was a whole warren full of them close, I’d keep going as long as we could.”

    “I’m hungry, Torag,” whined Eny, the second of the warriors told to guard Garric specially.

    The chief spun and lashed out. He used the butt of his club rather than the massive ball, but it still knocked the warrior down. Eny wailed.

    “You’ll eat when I say you can eat, Eny!” Torag said. “Watch your tongue or I won’t even bother to bring your ruff back home to your family!”

    Eny rolled to his feet almost before his shoulders’d splashed on the muddy ground, but he kept his head lowered and hid behind Nerga. Torag snorted and called, “All right, we’ll camp here till it gets dark again.”

    He looked at Sirawhil. “Learn where the animal comes from,” he said forcefully. “And learn how many there are in his warren. That could be important.”

    “Sit here, Garric,” Sirawhil said, pointing to a hummock: a plant with fat, limp leaves spreading out from a common center. “You and I will talk while the warriors make camp.”

    It looked a little like a skunk cabbage. The best Garric could say about it as a seat was that it wasn’t a pond. He didn’t have any reason to argue, though, so he squatted on one edge facing the Corl wizard squatting opposite him.

    “If they call this light,” said King Carus, viewing the scene through Garric’s eyes, “then they must see better in the dark than real cats do.”

    Garric nodded. The eastern horizon was barely lighter than the rest of the sky, but even full noon in this place had been soggy and gray. Dawn only meant it was easier to find your footing between ponds.

    Warriors began trimming saplings for poles and stripping larger trees of their foliage. The Coerli hands had four fingers shorter than a human’s; the first and last opposed. They looked clumsy, but they wove the mixed vegetation into matting with swift, careless ease.

    After staring silently for a moment, Sirawhil opened her pack of slick cloth and took out a bundle of foot-long sticks polished from yellow wood. They were so regular that Garric thought at first they were made of metal.

    “Don’t move,” she said. She got up and walked around the hummock, dropping the sticks into place as she went. Only once did she bend to adjust the pattern they made on the ground, a multi-pointed star or gear with shallow teeth.

    The Bird shifted position slightly on her shoulder to keep its place. Its eyes, jewels on a jeweled form, remained focused on Garric as Sirawhil made her circuit.

    Garric watched for a moment, then turned his attention to what the rest of the party was doing. He wondered how the warriors were going to build a fire on this sodden landscape. Perhaps there was dry heartwood, but most of the trees he’d seen were pulpy. They’d be as hard to ignite as a fresh sponge.

    “The Coerli don’t use fire,” said the Bird silently. Its mental voice was dry and slightly astringent. “They don’t allow their human cattle to have fires either. In the villages the Grass People keep fuel under shelter to dry out and light their fires with bows.”

    “Do you come from here, Bird?” Garric asked. He flexed his legs a little to keep the blood moving. He was used to squatting, but being trussed to the pole had left the big muscles liable to cramping.

    Sirawhil looked up as she finished forming her pattern. “We captured the Bird when we first came here to the Land,” she said. “Torag and I are the only ones who have such a prize. The other bands can’t talk to the Grass Animals they capture, so it’s a great prize.”

    “I am Torag the Great!” the chieftain roared, looking over at Garric and the wizard. “I’ve torn the throats out of two chiefs who thought they could take the Bird from me!”

    Nobody moved for a moment. His point made, Torag surveyed the camp. The warriors had raised matting around a perimeter of a hundred and fifty feet or so. Though the sun still wasn’t up, it’d stopped raining and the sky was light enough for Garric to count a dozen Coerli and about that number of captive humans. All the latter were females.

    Torag gestured toward a plump woman. She’d been one of those carrying Garric when he was tied to the pole. She moved awkwardly; she seemed to have pulled a muscle in the course of the raid and march.

    “That one,” Torag said.

    The woman looked up, surprised to be singled out. Eny grabbed her by the long hair and jerked her into a blow on the head from his stone-headed axe. The woman’s scream ended in a spray of blood. Her arms and legs jerked as she fell.

    Eny and two more warriors chopped furiously at her head for a moment, sending blood and chips of skull flying. The rest of the band growled in delight. The Bird didn’t translate the sound; it was no more than hunger and cruelty finding a voice.

    The three killers stepped back. Another warrior threw himself on the twitching corpse, his flint knife raised to slash off a piece. Torag roared and lifted his club. The warrior looked over his shoulder but hesitated almost too long. He leaped sideways with a despairing snarl; the chief’s club hissed through the air where the warrior’s head had been. It made a sound like an angry snake.

    Torag knelt, raised the dead woman with his left hand, and tore her throat out without using a weapon.

 

---

 

    Garric stared at Sirawhil to keep from having to look at the butchery. “You eat people?” he said in disgusted disbelief. He saw it happening, but part of his mind didn’t want to believe what was perfectly clear to his eyes.

    “Torag doesn’t usually let the warriors have fresh meat,” Sirawhil said nonchalantly. “They begin to mature if they do, and he’d have to fight for his position. In the keep they eat fish or jerky. Here on a raid, though, there’s no other food so he’ll share the kill.”

    The big Corl leaned back. His muzzle was red and dripping. He stared around the circle of longing warriors with a grin of bloody triumph, then took a flint knife from his belt. He stabbed it into the woman just below the left collarbone, drawing the blade the length of the chest. The edge ripped through the gristly ends of the ribs where the joined the breastbone. Placing one furry hand on either side of the incision, he tore the chest open.

    “Flint’s sharp, that’s true,” Carus said, grim-faced. “But he’s a strong one, Torag. I wouldn’t mind showing him how much stronger I was, though; or you are, lad.”

    In good time, thought Garric. He’d seen women and children killed by beasts—and by men, which was worse. There was a particular gloating triumph to the way Torag tore out pieces of the victim’s lungs and gulped them down, though. In good time....

    Sirawhil squatted on the hummock opposite Garric, within the figure of sticks. She began chanting. The sounds weren’t words or even syllables in human terms, but Garric recognized the rhythms of a wizard speaking words of power.

    The spell helped to muffle the crunches and slurping from the other Coerli. Torag had eaten his fill and allowed his warriors at the victim. The sound was similar to that of a pack of hunting dogs allowed the quarry of their kill, only louder. The captive women huddled together, whimpering and trying not to look at what was happening to their late companion.

    Garric closed his eyes, feeling a wash of despair. A lot of it was physical: he was wet and cold, and his body’d been badly hammered. But this was a miserable place and situation. He didn’t see any way to change it, and especially he didn’t see any way out. What had brought him here?

    “The wizard Marzan summoned you,” said the Bird’s voice. Garric’s eyes flew open. “Summoned one like you, that is. He knew the Grass People, his race, can’t stand against the Coerli, so he used his art and the power of the crystal to bring a hero to help them.”

    I haven’t done much good thus far, Garric thought; but the weight of hopelessness had lifted. He’d killed two cat men, and so long as they kept him alive there was a chance of doing better than that. Ideas were forming below the surface of his mind. His experience and that of his warrior ancestor were blending to find solutions to a very violent problem.

    “Where do the Coerli come from?” Garric asked. He spoke aloud though he obviously didn’t have to. It didn’t seem natural to look at something, someone, close enough to touch and talk to him without moving his lips.

    “This place,” the Bird said. “This Land. But from the far future. There’s a cave in a chasm some fifteen miles from where we are now. It’s a focus for great power. Coerli wizards have learned to use it to carry them back to this time to hunt.”

    “They’re trying to conquer their own past?” Garric said, hoping to gather enough information that he’d be able to make sense of it... which the fragments he’d heard thus far certainly didn’t permit him to do.

    “The Coerli don’t make war,” the Bird said. “They skirmish over boundaries with neighboring bands, and they hunt. They’ve hunted out their own time, so they come here for game. Torag and other chiefs have built keeps in this time. Many more will follow as their own world becomes more crowded, but they don’t think of it as conquest the way your people would.”

    Torag wiped his muzzle with a hand which he then licked clean. He and the other cat men were lost in their own affairs, though some of the captive women watched in puzzlement as Garric talked. Unless the Bird translated them, his words were as meaningless to them as to the Coerli.

    “They have no reason to overhear,” the Bird said. “Don’t think that because you’re the same species that your fellow slaves are your friends.”

    It stretched one wing, then lowered it and stretched the other. They were small, no bigger than Garric could span with one hand, but when he looked into the light that shimmered through them he had a momentary vision of infinite expanses.

    Garric grinned. “I’m not a slave,” he said quietly.

    He lifted his hands slightly to indicate his bound wrists. “For the moment I’m a prisoner,” he said. “But they’ll never make me a slave, Bird.”

    Sirawhil stopped chanting and slumped forward. Garric was so used to helping Tenoctris that he reflexively reached out to catch the exhausted wizard. Even without full use of his hands, he kept her from rolling off the hummock as she’d started to do.

    The motion drew Torag’s attention. He was on his feet, raising his club with the sudden snapping movement of a spring trap releasing.

    “I’d wondered what would happen if we jumped him while he was full of food and relaxed,” Carus observed with a wry smile. “Your knees broken is what’d have happened, I suppose.”

    In good time, Garric thought. Aloud he said, “Your wizard worked a great spell, Torag. Should I have let her drown in a puddle?”

    The warriors looked up also. They’d finished their meal for the most part, though one was still gnawing a rib. The corpse was reduced to scattered bones and a pile of offal on a patch of bloodstained ground.

    Instead of replying to Garric, Torag growled, “You, Sirawhil! What have you learned?”

    The wizard lifted herself upright, but she splayed her legs on the hummock instead of making the greater effort to squat. She rubbed the back of a hand over her eyes and tried to focus on the chieftain.

    “I’m not sure, Torag,” she said. “He comes from very far away. There’s a great deal of power involved in his presence.”

    “There’s no chief in the Land more powerful than I!” Torag said.

    “It’s not that kind of power,” Sirawhil said wearily. “It’s wizardry, Torag, and it’s greater wizardry than I can fathom. It isn’t—”

    She glanced toward Soma, who tried to burrow out of sight behind the other captives. The women had learned what it meant to be singled out in this company....

    “—anything that the wizard in the warren we raided could’ve done by himself. I think we should take him back home for the whole Council of the Learned to examine.”

    “Are you mad, Sirawhil?” Torag said. He sounded more amazed than angry, the way he had when Garric treated him as an equal. “If I leave here, some other chief will take my keep. Or—”

    And here the growling threat was back in his tone.

    “—do you think I’ll let you and the Bird go back without me? And take a valuable animal?”

    “Torag,” said the wizard, “this thing is too big for me. We need to take this Garric to someone who can understand him, even if there’s a risk.”

    “It’s not too big for me,” Torag said complacently. “We’ll go back to my keep and I’ll decide later.”

    He looked at Garric, his ruff lifting slightly. “Nerga and Eny, tie him up again. Tie all the females too, just in case. I’m not taking any chances till I have him in the pen with the other animals.”

    You’re taking a big chance, Garric thought as the warriors came toward him with coils of hard rope. You’re taking the last chance you’ll ever take. But in good time....

 

---

 

    Sharina stood on the sea wall of Mona harbor, watching the Heron ease toward the quay on the stroke of ten oarsmen. The trim bireme that’d rowed off at mid-morning was now a shambles, the outriggers broken in several places and the hull scorched by the sky-searing blaze Sharina had seen leap from the sea about the ship.

    She’d been ready to die when she saw the fire, but it’d vanished as suddenly as it’d appeared and the Heron, though at first wallowing, still had figures on her deck. Cashel, big and as solid as a rock, was obvious among them, and Sharina’d breathed again.

    Admiral Zettin had manned and led out ten ships as soon as he saw something was happening to the Heron. They now passed back and forth at the harbor mouth.

    You couldn’t keep warships at sea for long periods—there wasn’t room for the crews to sleep aboard, let alone food storage and a place to cook. For now, though, it was important to Zettin to be seen to be doing something; a notion that Sharina understood perfectly. She only wished there was something she could’ve done besides wait and pray to the Lady—silently, because it wouldn’t do for the Princess Sharina to show herself to be desperately afraid.

    She smiled. Attaper, leading her personal guard at this dangerous moment, saw the expression and grinned back. Did he realize that she was smiling at the fact her duty was to be seen to be unconcerned? Perhaps he did; but maybe even that experienced, world-wise soldier thought Princess Sharina really had been confident, no matter how confusing and dangerous the situation seemed to others.

    Lady, make me what I pretend to be, Sharina prayed in her heart; and smiled more broadly, because she seemed to be fooling herself as well.

    Cashel used his staff to jump ashore while the Heron was still several feet out from the quay. It was a graceful motion but completely unexpected, though Sharina’d seen Cashel clear gullies and boggy patches that way frequently in the borough. Here it called attention to him, which Cashel never liked to do; but Sharina stepped toward him and he folded her in his arms. At last she could fully relax for at least a few moments.

    “Tenoctris is all right,” Cashel said in a quiet rumble. “Ilna’s sitting with her on the deck because she’s so, you know, tired; and maybe you couldn’t see with the wicker matting in the way.”

    “I knew they were all right,” Sharina said, simply and honestly. “Because you are.”

    She stepped back and gave the battered bireme a real examination. The crew was climbing out, some of them helped by their more fortunate fellows or by men waiting on the dock. The benches and hollow of the ship were splashed with blood—painted with blood on the port bow where the fighting must’ve been particularly intense. It seemed to Sharina that nearly half the crew was missing, and many of the survivors had been injured.

    Cervoran was trying clumsily to get down from the deck. He held his wooden case in one hand.

    “Your pardon, mistress,” Cashel said with impersonal politeness. “I better get that.”

    He jumped from the quay to the Heron’s outrigger and took the case in his left hand. “Careful or you’ll fall,” he said to Cervoran. “Would you like me to lift you—”

    Sharina supposed he was going to say “down,” but the former corpse simply let go of the railing and dropped. He landed on his feet but toppled forward. He didn’t raise his arms to catch himself, but Cashel shifted to put his body in the way as a living cushion.

    Cervoran steadied himself, then stumped to the ladder up to the quay without speaking. Several sailors who’d been waiting to climb up made way for him, though with respect rather than the frightened hostility Sharina’d seen in their expressions previously.

    “Plants like the one that came here yesterday attacked us,” Cashel said, looking from Cervoran to the crewmen, then back to Sharina. “There was any number of them, swimming all over the sea. Master Cervoran made the water burn and saved us.”

    The Heron hadn’t been backed onto the beach in normal fashion: the surviving sailors were too few and too tired to accomplish that. A replacement crew was boarding to handle the job. Ilna’d started to help Tenoctris down from the deck, but fresh men under Chalcus’ direction grabbed the old wizard and passed her hand-over-hand to their comrades on the quay.

    Sharina’s face stayed calm, but her first notice of Chalcus since the Heron left harbor explained why he hadn’t carried Tenoctris to land himself in the sort of flashy, boastful gesture he was used to making. He’d lost most of his clothing in the fight, and the hooked tendrils that’d torn it off him had gashed runnels across the many existing scars. He must’ve bathed himself in the sea since the fight because otherwise he’d have been completely covered with blood, but many of the fresh wounds were still leaking. The worst’d been bandaged with swatches cut from Ilna’s own tunics, but the wool was now bright scarlet.

    Chalcus hadn’t bothered replacing his trousers, but he’d twisted a length of sailcloth around his waist for a sash. That gave him a place to thrust his sword and dagger. He’d lost the sheath for the latter, and the point of patterned steel winked like a viper’s eye.

    Tenoctris, looking weary but determined, joined Sharina. She nodded to the glitter on the horizon and said, “That’s the Fortress of Glass that I was wondering about. What you see looks like crystal, but it’s really the intersection of many planes of the greater cosmos.”

    She took a deep breath. “I’ve never seen such a nexus of power, Sharina,” she added. “I never imagined that anything like it could exist. I’ve seen so many marvels since I was ripped out of my time and brought to yours.”

    Sharina took the older woman’s hand in hers. “If you keep saving the world as you’ve done in the past,” she said, “I’m sure we’ll be able to show you still more wonders.” Her tone was affectionately joking but the words the simple truth.

    Cervoran had climbed the short ladder, moving one limb at a time instead of lifting a leg and an arm together. He walked toward Sharina with the awkward determination of a large insect. Cashel, who’d followed the wizard off the ship, now stepped past him. His presence forestalled the pair of Blood Eagles who’d otherwise have put themselves between Cervoran and Princess Sharina.

    “Princess,” Cervoran squeaked. “In her fortress, the Green Woman is too strong for me. I will enter by another path, but to do that I must take her attention off me. At dawn tomorrow I will go to the charnel house when they bring the fresh corpses and pick the one that best suits my needs.”

    Liane stood at Sharina’s elbow. She’d stayed at a discrete distance while Sharina was praying for Cashel’s safe return. Liane, better than most, understood what it meant to wait for the one you love....

    “People of property here cremate their dead,” Liane said, speaking to Sharina with the same unobtrusive precision that she’d used to inform Garric in the past. Her finger marked a passage in a slender codex, but she didn’t need to refer to it. “The poor in Mona are placed in a cave at the eastern boundary of the city. In rural districts they throw the bodies into the sea with stones to weight them.”

    “It is necessary,” Cervoran said. “She is too strong in her fortress, so I must deceive her.”

    Ilna and Tenoctris joined them, the older woman leaning on the arm of the younger. “Tenoctris?” Sharina said. “Master Cervoran wants to use a fresh corpse for, for his art.”

    Tenoctris looked at her fellow wizard with the sharp, emotionless interest that she showed for any new thing. “Does he?” she said.

    Cervoran didn’t look around or otherwise acknowledge the newcomers’ presence. Tenoctris shrugged and gave Sharina a smile tinged with sadness. “I’ve practiced necromancy myself, dear,” she said. “When it was necessary. When I thought it was necessary.”

    “Yes, all right, Master Cervoran,” Sharina said. “Tenoctris will accompany you on behalf of the kingdom.”

    She raised an eyebrow at the older woman, since she hadn’t actually asked if she was willing to go. Tenoctris nodded agreement.

    “She may go or stay,” Cervoran said. He took off the diadem he was wearing and concentrated again on whatever he saw in the depths of the topaz. “It makes no difference. She has no power.”

    Tenoctris nodded. “That’s quite true,” she said, “in his terms.”

    Her voice was pleasant, but there was the least edge in the way she spoke the words. Tenoctris was both a noblewoman and the most accomplished scholar Sharina had ever met. There were various kinds of power, but knowledge was one kind—as Sharina knew, and as Tenoctris certainly knew.

    Chalcus, limping slightly but wearing his usual expression of bright insouciance, sauntered up from the ship. He’d tied a portion of sail into a linen breechclout, and he’d found a red silk kerchief to twist into a replacement for the headband he’d lost in the fighting.

    Cervoran looked up from the topaz. He pointed a fat white finger at Cashel. “You will come with me, Cashel,” he said. “At dawn, as soon as the night’s dead have been brought in.”

    He rotated his head toward Ilna, though his pointing hand didn’t shift. “And that one, your sister,” he said. “Your name is Ilna? You will come, Ilna.”

    Chalcus didn’t seem to move, but the point of his curved dagger hooked into Cervoran’s right nostril. “Now I wonder,” Chalcus said in a light, bantering voice, “what there is about common politeness that’s so hard for some folk to learn? There’s places a fellow’d get his nose notched for treating Mistress Ilna in such a way, my good fellow... and you’re in one of those places now. Would you care to try again?”

    Ilna smiled faintly and placed her fingertips on the hand holding the dagger. “I sometimes fail to be perfectly polite myself, Captain Chalcus,” she said. “But I appreciate your concern.”

    “Master Cervoran?” said Sharina. When the wizard spoke, she’d had an icy recollection of white fire enveloping the sea where the Heron was floating. “You don’t give orders to my associates.”

    She paused to consider, then went on, “Nor, I think, do you give orders in the kingdom I administer in my brother’s absence. Your ignorance has already cost the lives of citizens and endangered the lives of all those accompanying you on the Heron. I’ll arrange for an escort of soldiers—”

    “That’s all right, Sharina,” Cashel said. He was rubbing the shaft of his quarterstaff with a wad of raw wool, working the oils into the pores of the wood. “I don’t guess that thing—”

    He dipped the staff toward the glitter on the horizon, the Fortress of Glass.

    “—was Master Cervoran’s fault. And anyhow, he was a big help out to sea. We wouldn’t’ve got back without him.”

    “Master Cervoran was the reason we were at sea in the first place,” Ilna said waspishly. “Still, I see no reason why I shouldn’t go with Tenoctris and Cashel in the morning. I can’t imagine what I could do that would be more useful.”

    She looked out at the fortress also. “And it’s obvious,” she added, speaking as crisply and precisely as she did all things, “that something has to be done.”