by David Drake
"I'll get it," Cashel said, stepping past the two wizards and gripping the handle. The door didn't have a bar or even a latch; nobody was going to break in or out, after all.
Cashel pulled. The door was heavy and fit tightly, but it swung sideways with a squeal.
A flood of flies curled out of the cave and back, like sparks when the roof of a burning building collapses. The stink was the worst Cashel'd smelled since the summer the body of a basking shark cast up on Barca's Hamlet, so rotten that the lower jaw had fallen off, the cartilage of the gill rakers had rotted into what looked like a horse's mane. He was used to bad smells, but he stepped back by reflex because he hadn't expected this one.
Tenoctris threw a hand to her face, then turned and bent over. "Tenoctris, are you-" Cashel started to say, but right then the wizard opened her mouth and vomited. She retched and gasped and tried to throw up again. Cashel stepped toward her but his sister was already there, supporting Tenoctris by the shoulders so she didn't fall on her face from sheer weakness.
It didn't affect Cervoran. Well, Cashel hadn't expected it would. He stepped into the cave and said, "I will use this body. Remove it from the cave for me."
Cashel pulled the other panel open to give better light than there'd be if his body blocked the half the doorway that was already open. Flies were whirling around like anything, brushing Cashel's face and even lighting on him. It was pretty bad and the stink was still worse, but he didn't let any of that show in his face.
From the entrance the cave sloped down for as far as Cashel could see. The stone floor was covered with bodies, bones, and the slick, putrid-smelling liquids that a body turns into if you just let it rot. The corpses near the entrance weren't as far gone as the ones further in, which'd probably slid or leaked downward as they rotted. The one just inside the door was a middle-aged woman who might've been asleep if you didn't know better.
Cashel squatted beside the body, judging how best to pick it up. It'd stiffened since she died, which'd make it easier to carry. It was a good thing the carriage was open, though, because with her arms spread like this he'd need to break something to get her in through the usual little carriage doors.
"Where d'ye want me to set her, Master Cervoran?" he asked, looking over his shoulder.
It'd have been a side-panel of the carriage that got broken if it'd come to that. The woman wouldn't mind and what nature was going to do to her body shortly was a lot worse, but Cashel would still've broken the side-panel.
"Carry her outside and put her on the ground," Cervoran said. "The presence of so much death aids my work, but I need more room."
Cashel glanced toward Tenoctris; she lifted her chin just a hair's breadth in agreement. Her face was tight and would've been angry if she'd allowed it to have any expression.
"All right," said Cashel, sliding his hands under the shoulders and hips of the corpse and lifting it. The dead woman wasn't heavy, but she stuck to what'd soaked into the stone. He had to rock her back and forth carefully so that he could pick her up without tearing her skin. He stood, turned, and set her down just clear of the arc the doors swung through.
In the cave it didn't bother Cashel that all the bodies'd been stripped before being thrown there. The sun was high enough now to shine on the little entrance plaza, though, and the woman looked different. It made Cashel feel like a bully to treat her this way, even though she was dead.
He shrugged, but his expression didn't change. Well, it had to happen.
Ilna stepped past and swung the doors shut. She didn't have any difficulty moving the heavy doors, though some of that was just knowing how to use your weight. Still, she was stronger than most people would guess.
Cervoran followed her with his dull eyes. "There was no reason to close the cave," he said.
"I choose to close it," Ilna snapped. "Just as I chose to pull you off the pyre. You may call it my whim, if you like."
Cervoran looked at her for a further moment, then bent and opened his oak case. He had no more expression than a carp does, sucking air on the surface of a pond in high summer.
Cashel grinned. Ilna was a lot of things that most people wouldn't guess. She hadn't said, "Tenoctris is a fine lady, not a peasant like me'n my brother, so the smell bothers her." That might've embarrassed Tenoctris, and Ilna wasn't one to lay what she did on somebody else anyway.
Cashel was proud to have her for a sister. She felt the same way about him, which made it even better.
Cervoran put on the topaz crown, then took other things out of his case. He hadn't started chanting a spell, but Cashel could feel his skin prickle the way it always did around wizardry. That was what they'd come here for, after all.
Cashel looked at his friends: Ilna and Tenoctris and also Chalcus, who'd backed against the rock face so he could look all the other directions without worrying that somebody was coming up behind him.
The sailor flashed Cashel a grin in response, but he was tense and no mistake. Chalcus wasn't afraid of wizardry, exactly, but he was nervous because he knew his sword and dagger were no use against it.
Cashel checked to make sure he had space, then started his quarterstaff in a series of slow circles, first in front of him and then over his head. There was alot of power around this place. The ferrules on the ends of the hickory shaft twinkled with sparks of blue wizardlight.
Cashel smiled as he moved. This quarterstaff had saved him and those he was watching over lots of times; and some of those times he'd been facing wizards. *** Ilna watched Cervoran draw a knife from his box and turn toward her. She knew it was an athame, a wizard's tool used to tease out incantations. The curving symbols cut into the blade were words written in what educated people like Garric called the Old Script. Ilna could recognize them as patterns, though she couldn't read them any better than she could the blocky New Script folk used today to write in.
Wizard's tool it might be, but this athame was a real knife also. The hilt and blade were forged from a single piece of iron, and the double edges were raggedly sharp.
"You, Ilna," Cervoran said. He stepped toward her, raising the athame. "I must have a lock of your hair for the amulet which controls my double."
Chalcus flicked his sword out and held it straight. The point didn't touch Cervoran's right eye, but if it would run the wizard through the brain if he took another step forward.
"Let's you take a lock of somebody else's hair, my good friend," the sailor said in his falsely cheerful voice. "A lock of your own, why not? You'll not want to pay the cost of raising that ugly blade of yours to Mistress Ilna."
"Do you think your steel frightens me, man?" Cervoran said. His head turned toward the sailor. "There must be a lock of my hair in the amulet to animate the simulacrum. The hair of Ilna is to control it. Do you think to build a double of me and free it uncontrolled?"
"Why hers, then?" Chalcus said. "Take hairs from my head if you like!"
He was angry in a way Ilna'd rarely seen him. Normally anything that disturbed the sailor as much as this did would've given him the release of killing something. The humor of the situation struck Ilna, though nobody seeing her expression was likely to know she was smiling.
"The clay was female, therefore the control must be female," Cervoran said. "And there are other reasons. If the clay had been male, I would have used Master Cashel as my control."
His tone was always peevish, but perhaps it was a little more so just at the moment. Despite the way the wizard had sneered at the sword, Ilna noticed that he hadn't tried to move past it.
"Tenoctris, is this true?" Chalcus demanded. He flicked his eyes toward the old woman, then locked them back on Cervoran. "Does he need Mistress Ilna's hair as he says?"
"It may be true, Chalcus," Tenoctris said carefully. "To be sure of that, I'd have to be a much greater wizard than I am."
"You'll do," said Ilna. She stepped forward and plucked the athame from Cervoran's pulpy fingers. He tried to keep hold when he realized what she was about, but she had no de
sire to let Cervoran's hand hold an edge that close to her throat. She shook him free easily and raised the blade to her head.
Ilna pinched a lock of hair from in front of her ear with the other hand, then sawed the athame through it. Though the iron hilt had been in Cervoran's hand, it remained icy cold. She didn't like the feel of the metal, but she used the athame rather than her own paring knife because it might have a virtue she didn't understand herself.
Ilna's mother Mab had been a wizard or something greater than a wizard, her mother and Cashel's. Ilna'd never met Mab, only seen her at a distance, and she wouldn't have understood much more-about Mab or about the things she herself did with fabric-even if they'd spoken, she supposed. But as Tenoctris said, there were reasons a wizardmight use Ilna or her brother to increase the power of his spell.
"Ilna?" said Tenoctris. "I'm sure you realize this, dear, but there are dangers to the person whose psyche controls the simulacrum of a wizard."
"Thank you, Tenoctris," Ilna said. It felt odd to realize that she had friends, that there were people who cared about her. "There's danger in getting up in the morning, I'm afraid. Especially in these times."
She handed the pinch of hair to Cervoran; he took it in the cup of his hand instead of between thumb and forefinger as she offered it. Ilna rotated the athame to put the point up and the hilt toward the wizard, and he took that also.
Ilna watched Cervoran use the athame to draw an oval around the corpse, leaving more space at its feet than at its head. His point scored the soft stone only lightly, but he never let it skip.
She was glad to be shut of the athame; she'd rather put her hands in the stinking muck of the charnel house than to touch that cold iron again. But she'd do either of those things and worse if duty required it.
Ilna smiled and, without looking, reached out to the back of Chalcus' wrist. He'd sheathed his blades again, but the hilts were never far from his hands. She wouldn't pretend she was happy, but she was glad to be the person she was instead of somebody too frightened or too squeamish to do things that had to be done.
Cervoran stepped into the figure he'd drawn, standing at the corpse's foot. He pointed the athame at the woman's face. Someone had closed her eyes, but her mouth sagged open in death. She'd lost her front teeth in both upper and lower jaws.
"Ouer mechan…," Cervoran said. Azure wizardlight, a blue purer than anything in nature, sparkled on the point of the athame. "Libaba oimathotho."
Ilna looked dispassionately at the woman's corpse, wondering what her name had been. Cities were impersonal in a way that a tiny place like Barca's Hamlet never could be, but Mona wasn't large as cities go. People on the woman's street, in her tenement, would have known her by name.
Now she had nothing. Even her corpse, herclay as Cervoran put it, was being taken for another purpose. It was that or the maggots' purpose, of course, but perhaps the maggots would've been better.
"Brido lothian iao…," Cervoran chanted. The topaz on his brow flamed with more light than the sun struck from it; his athame sizzled and chattered as though he'd pent a thunderbolt in its cold iron form.
Ilna's fingers were working a pattern. She didn't recall taking the yarn from her sleeve, but for her it was as natural as breathing. The dead woman had no name, and shortly there would be nothing at all left of her…
"Isee!" Cervoran said. A crackling bar of wizardlight linked his athame to the bridge of the corpse's nose. "Ithi! Squaleth!"
The dead woman's features slumped. Melting away, Ilna thought, but instead they were melting into the shape of Cervoran's own face. Wizardlight snarled and popped, molding flesh the way a potter's thumbs do clay. The clay is female, the wizard told Chalcus, and he'd meant the words literally.
Cervoran's mouth moved. Perhaps he was still chanting but Ilna couldn't hear words through the roar of the wizardry itself. The woman's mouth, now Cervoran's mouth, closed. The eyes blinked open, filled momentarily by a fire that was more than wizardlight. The corpse folded its hands and sat up slowly as the spluttering light spread down through its changing body.
The blue glare cut off so abruptly that for an instant the sun seemed unable to fill its absence. Cervoran staggered, out of the oval he'd scribed. He might've fallen if Cashel-Ilna smiled: ofcourse Cashel-hadn't put a hand behind his shoulders.
What had been the corpse of an unknown woman stood up with the deliberation of a flower unfolding. It was no longer dead, it was no longer female, and in every way but size it looked exactly like Cervoran. He was a bulky man though of only average height, while the corpse-the clay he'd molded his double from-had been both shorter and slighter.
The only thing the double wore was the bag hanging from its neck. Cervoran had put the locks of hair and probably other things into it, to judge from the way it bulged. Both the bag and cord were linen rather than wool. Ilna was far too conscious of the powers that fibers held to think the choice of vegetable rather than animal materials was chance.
Ilna turned and pulled the door of the charnel house open a crack; she tossed the pattern she'd just knottted inside, then pressed the doors closed.
It was a monument, of sorts; a distillation of the woman's presence. It wasn't much, but it was what Ilna could do.
Chalcus cursed savagely under his breath. His cape was sewn from red and yellow cloth in vertical stripes. He unfastened the gaudy garnet pin clenching it at his throat and laid it over the double's shoulders.
"Cover yourself, damn you!" he snarled, his face turned away from the creature and the wizard who'd created it.
"We will return to my palace now," Cervoran said. "I have work to do."
Ilna couldn't be sure, but she thought there was a smirk on his purple lips.
***
A horse takes up as much room on shipboard as a dozen men, so when Garric embarked the royal army he didn't take horses. The courier panting in front of Sharina had run the whole distance back from the battle. He'd stripped off his armor and weapons before setting out, but he still wore military boots. He was bent over with his hands on his knees, shuffling slowly to keep from stiffening as he sucked air into his lungs.
The tablet's wax seal was impressed with a bunch of grapes: the crest of Liane's family, the bor-Benlimans, not Lord Waldron's two-headed dragon. Sharina broke the tablet open, unsurprised. That's why she'd sent Liane along with the army, after all; or better, allowed Liane to accompany the army. Lord Waldron regarded reporting back to be somehow demeaning, and in the present instance he probably had his hands full.
Waldrondefinitely had his hands full. The note inked on white birch in Liane's neat uncials read: Approximately 300 hellplants ashore in Calf's Head Bay seven miles west of Mona. No more appearing at present. Attempting to fight plants with fire but weather damp. LbB for Ld Waldron.
"Your highness?" said Attaper. "Lord Cashel and the others're back."
He'd formed the available Blood Eagles around Sharina in the palace courtyard. That was about a hundred and fifty men, scarcely a 'regiment' even with the addition of the troop in Valles guarding King Valence III and the troop who'd escorted Cashel, Ilna and Tenoctris to the charnel house. The royal bodyguards had taken heavy casualties ever since they'd begun accompanying Prince Garric. There was no lack of volunteers from line regiments to fill the black-armored ranks, butt selection and training took more time than Attaper'd had free.
Sharina looked up. Her brush was poised to reply on the facing page of the tablet, using red ink because she was the acting ruler of the kingdom whether she liked it or not. She'd been so lost in organizing a response to what was happening miles away that she hadn't noticed the return of Cashel with Tenoctris and the others. Things had been happening so fast…
Her friends were coming toward her one at a time through the narrow aisle the guards had opened for them. Cashel was in front. Seeing him made Sharina feel calmer than she had since the woman ran into the palace screaming that something had happened to her boy. The child, a nine-year-old, had been chasing
crows out of the family barley plot. When hellplants crawled out of the sea and began crushing their way across the field, he'd tried to stop them by flinging stones.
The boy's mother had come out of their hut in time to see the boy snatched by a tentacle. Fortunately she'd been too far away to comprehend what Sharina knew must've happened next, and she'd run to Mona for help instead of going out into the field to join her son.
Sharina'd dispatched Lord Waldron with the three regiments billeted in the city to deal with the attack. She hadn't gone herself because she wasn't a warrior like her brother. She couldn'tlead an attack the way Garric might well have done, so rather than being in the way of the fighting men, she'd stayed in the palace to command the whole business.
The rest of the army and fleet was scattered across First Atara so that no district was completely overwhelmed by the numbers of strangers it had to feed and house. Those units had to be alerted, and somebody had to make decisions if a second attack occurred while Waldron was involved with the first.
It was possible that a second or third or twentieth attack would occur. Sharina knew their enemy was powerful, but not even Tenoctris could guesshow powerful.
Cashel smiled as warmly as an embrace, but instead of putting an arm around her he stepped to the side and let those behind get through also. Tenoctris followed, then Ilna and Chalcus with his usually cheerful face looking like a thunderhead ready to burst forth in hail and lightning. Cervoran was the last.
Sharina's eyes widened in surprise. The person immediately behind Chalcus wasn't Cervoran-it was a slightly smaller copy of Cervoran, dressed in a rag breechclout and the short cape that Chalcus had worn when the group left in the morning. Cervoran, the real Cervoran, was in back of his double.
"I will create the necessary devices in my chamber of art," Cervoran said. The other members of the party were tensely silent, but the soldiers who'd escorted them talked in muted voices to colleagues who'd stayed at the palace. "I cannot breach the Fortress of Glass directly, so I will enter it from another place."
