by David Drake
Chalcus shifted his stance to face the wizard. Gaur was unarmed, but so big a man could be dangerous regardless. He’d sent a ship and crew from this world to another, though. That would be exhausting for even a very powerful wizard, and from the look of him Gaur hadn’t had time to fully recover.
Ilna dropped her knotted pattern back into her sleeve. There wasn’t enough light down here for her to trust its effect.
Chalcus sidled toward the wizard, his sword advanced and his left hand not far from the hilt of the slender dagger. Gaur hunched, his eyes fixed on the swordsman. He growled louder, then—
Gaur’s body slumped inward, not shrinking as Ilna first thought but changing: the face flattened into long jaws, the chest grew deeper, and the arms formed into forelegs. For a heartbeat Gaur crouched on his bed of skins as a huge black-furred wolf; then he sprang at Chalcus’ throat.
Ilna arched her noose over the thick beast neck, tightening as she pulled with all her strength. The wolf outweighed her by twice or more, but even so she jerked its head around even as the beast snatched her off her feet.
Chalcus’ sword slipped in behind the wolf’s shoulder blade, grating on ribs as it sliced through and out the other side. Gaur crunched sideways onto the stone floor. Chalcus tugged his blade free; there was a gush of blood.
Ilna’d fallen onto her knees and left hand. She started to rise, still holding the noose tight. The beast was twitching.
The wolf rolled, getting its legs under it again. This time it glared at Ilna. The wound through its chest had closed, though a flag of blood still matted the dark fur.
Gaur snarled and leaped. Ilna threw herself backward, knowing there was no escape. Chalcus caught the wolf’s hind leg with his left hand and hacked at the beast’s neck, using his edge rather than the point this time.
Gaur twisted in the air and slammed onto the floor again. The inward-curving sword had cut deep into his spine. Still holding the wolf’s ankle, Chalcus lifted his sword to repeat the blow; a line of blood drops curled off the blade.
The gaping wound started to close as soon as the steel withdrew. Gaur turned his head toward Chalcus and snarled loud enough to make the stone mirrors vibrate.
Ilna lunged backward, pulling on the noose with both hands. She tripped over the basalt slab and sprawled, doubling her knees up to her chest.
Gaur leaped at her, his beast strength pulling his hind leg through Chalcus’ grasp. Chalcus gave a cry of fury and stabbed, driving his point up through the wolf’s diaphragm into its chest, but the beast completed its pounce. Its forepaws, each the size of Ilna’s hands with the fingers spread, jolted her shoulders down on the basalt.
The pattern was complete.
Ilna kicked upward as she rolled in a backwards somersault. She couldn’t have lifted Gaur’s weight but she didn’t have to: the wolf’s own inertia carried him over and past her, through the sheet of agate sullen with the light of another world. The growl turned midway into a scream.
Ilna looked into the agate window. Gaur, his head and torso again a man’s, plunged into the pool of boiling sulfur. The thick fluid plopped as it closed over the body and then blasted outward. The wizard’s flesh had cooked to vapor in an instant.
Ilna ducked as a blob of molten sulfur spat from the pool to splash over the basalt. It hardened into a thin sheet whose dry reek cut through the stench of old blood.
Ilna straightened, breathing hard. The agate was a smooth mirror again; only from one narrow angle was it a gateway to Hell.
“I lost my noose,” she said in a shaky voice. “I’ve had it for a long time.”
“Dear heart, dear love,” Chalcus said. He was ignoring Gaur’s blood drying on his sword, though he usually kept the steel as scrupulously clean as the bright curve of the waxing moon. “There’ll be a thousand cords, there’ll be all the silk on the island of Seres now that you’re safe. I almost lost you.”
Ilna walked around the upper end of the slab, wiping her hands on her tunic. “I didn’t think...,” she said. “All the strands had to be placed just so....”
She smiled weakly at Chalcus. “That’s true of any pattern, of course. But when it’s yarn, the strands don’t fight your placement.”
As Ilna stepped past the sheet of blue topaz, she caught the hint of movement again. She glanced to the side. What she’d thought was clear stone had shadows in it: man-sized, growing—
Chalcus shouted. She tried to draw back but she was too late. The clawed fingers of a pair of Rua, fine-boned but strong as steel, closed on her upper arms, pulling her toward them into the topaz mirror.
As Ilna fell, she heard Chalcus shout again.
Chapter 21
“I’ll take over here, your highness!” said Lord Waldron, glancing back over his shoulder to judge how many troops had arrived. It looked to Garric like several score, a mix of Blood Eagles and regular infantry from Lord Mayne’s regiment; the passage from the palace garden was packed with more men. “One quick charge’ll sweep these scum away!”
“By the Shepherd, lad!” Carus snarled in Garric’s mind. “Don’t let that bloody cavalryman throw them away!”
Nor shall I, Garric thought. Aloud he said, “No, milord. I haven’t time to explain my strategy here—”
Carus guffawed. Garric’s only strategy was to keep from spreading his force into a maze of corridors where the unknown numbers of enemies would have all the advantages. Simple though the plan was, it was a considerable improvement on Lord Waldron’s notion of hurling his troops at the enemy in heroic disregard of what might be in ambush behind these gleaming walls.
He stepped in front of the soldiers and turned his back to the army of monsters. “Soldiers of the Isles!” he shouted. “Form ranks five abreast. We’ll advance at a walk. The front two ranks will throw spears on my command, the rest of you keep yours till we know more about the situation.”
Things would’ve been disorganized even if all the men had been from the same unit. As it was, besides the Blood Eagles and Mayne’s regiment, there were members of half a dozen other commands who’d been in the palace for one reason or another. They’d rushed to follow their prince when it looked like action.
This was exactly what good soldiers should do, of course, but it turned confusion into chaos. Every man in earshot of Garric, some thirty or forty of them, pushed forward to get into the front rank.
“Fellow soldiers!” Garric bellowed. “Save your shoving for the enemy or you’ll be cleaning latrines for the rest of your army careers! If any of us live long enough to have careers, which we won’t if you don’t stop acting like schoolboys. There’ll be plenty of fighting for all of us this day, as sure as I love the Isles.”
The commotion settled into a reasonable array, though Garric noticed that there were six men, not five, in each rank. That’d be a hindrance for good sword work, but with the enemy channeled straight ahead by the ice walls it might be as well as not to have more weight up front.
Waldron laid his hand on a Blood Eagle’s shoulder to move the man back and take his place. “Milord!” Garric said, stepping between Waldron and the soldier. “I need you to stay here where the, the passage enters this ice world. Make sure everyone coming through knows to follow the men in front of them and not go down other corridors. They can fight if they’re attacked from the flanks, but they’re not to leave the path that I’ve chosen.”
The path that Tenoctris had chosen, of course, but there was no need for technicalities. The old wizard’s thin crimson line continued to stretch back to Carcosa and the sunshine of late spring. A similar trace of blue wizardlight now curled from the triangle also and gleamed down the corridor filled with oncoming beastmen.
“No, your highness,” Waldron said with an angry wave of his left hand to brush the notion away. “Mayne can handle that, or—”
“No, Lord Waldron!” Garric said, with King Carus’ iron in his voice. “My army commander will take charge of the matter. For the moment that means you. Are you resigning r
ather than take an order framed for the kingdom’s good?”
“Faugh, you’re a boy!” Waldron shouted. He slammed his long sword back in its scabbard. “But you’ll never say a bor-Warriman didn’t do his duty!”
He stalked back to where the passage through nothingness opened into the ice world, every inch a man. “And a soldier besides, rather than just a warrior,” said Carus thoughtfully. “Which is a harder task than many realize, and a task I failed at more often than I care to remember.”
Officers were bellowing the troops into order as they stepped onto the ice. Invariably the men’s set expressions warmed into relief as they left the passage. These corridors weren’t like home—Garric smiled with black humor; at least not home to anybody in the royal army—but ice was a natural thing compared to the glowing nothingness they’d crossed to get here.
Garric and the king in his mind both blinked in a surge of pride. In training and discipline, these were the best troops the Isles had seen in a thousand years; and in courage they were the equal of any men who’d ever lived!
Garric pushed his way toward the front of his force as it tramped up the corridor, filling the corridor as a piston does the cylinder of a pump. Men cursed when he bumped them, but they let him by when they realized who he was. Lord Mayne was in the front rank; Garric halted behind him, squeezing between two veterans—both of them noncoms from Mayne’s regiment.
One man muttered, “You hadn’t ought to be here, sir.”
The other nodded but said, “Aye, though it’s an honor to see your highness this way. Wait till I tell my grand-nephews that I stood beside Prince Garric hisself when we sent all them demons back to Hell!”
“They’re a bit beforehand on that,” said the image of Carus with a gust of laughter. “But a soldier who thinks that way’s generally worth two of the other kind!”
“By your leave, your highness?” called Lord Mayne, cocking his head but keeping an eye on the squadrons of monsters ahead. “We’ll shortly be in javelin range.”
Mayne was a pudgy fellow, the younger son of a family of wealthy Valles merchants. He hadn’t been raised to hunting and other rural sports like the nobles from Northern Ornifal who provided most of the officers in the royal army. Bringing his regiment double-time from the camp had winded him, whereas Lord Waldron—twice Mayne’s age and more—had run back and forth between the palace and the Temple of the Shepherd without signs of effort.
But Mayne was in the front rank, thinking about the practical questions of war instead of his fears or hope of honor. He held his rank by Lord Tadai’s recommendation; for which Tadai deserved the thanks of his prince and the kingdom.
The hostile army wasn’t of demons, but it looked a formidable enough crew regardless. Garric wasn’t sure any two of the enemy were the same, nor were any of them human. He saw something that looked like a stork, but it stood ten feet tall and had two heads with long bills. Beside it tramped a squat figure wearing half-armor and a closed helmet; it had four arms, each holding a double-bitted axe, and it walked on a pair of legs like a sow’s. Beside that was a goat with the head of a great cat. Beside that—but it didn’t matter: they’d all die, or Garric would die and the Isles with him.
“You may give the order, milord!” Garric said.
The leading ranks canted back the eight-foot spears in their right arms. Some of the soldiers were probably left handed. In this as in all other things, the needs of the army overrode personal preference: the shield must be on the left arm to keep an even front in closed ranks, so the spear and sword were always in the right.
“Leading ranks, ready spears!” Mayne said, his voice suddenly a cricket chirp. The troops had prepared when they heard Garric, but discipline required that their own officer give the command. “Loose!”
The army of monsters was a hundred and fifty feet away, much closer than usual for the volley of javelins that opened a battle. The corridor’s ribbed ceiling—though high for a building—prevented the soldiers from arching their spears high for maximum range. Even so, the missiles crashed into the beasts and halfmen with devastating effect.
The goat-lion spun, biting and kicking in mad fury at the spear wobbling in its haunches. Other creatures fell under the beast’s sudden onslaught or slashed in response when their instinctive rage overwhelmed the control of the wizard directing them.
While the troll in half-armor was in mid-stride, a spear clanged on his helmet. He toppled and the chaotic rush of his fellows swept over him. The troll’s axes chopped mindlessly, lopping pieces off the creatures stumbling past him.
The legs of the two-headed stork kicked in the air, occasionally visible over the throng of its fellows. A spear had punched through the base of its double neck and thrown the creature over on its back.
The creatures that met the swordsmen of Garric’s first line were already bleeding from wounds their fellows had inflicted. The Blood Eagle on the right edge of the line thundered, “Gut’em, boys!” an instant before contact.
“Haft and the Isles!” Garric cried. Everybody in the royal army was shouting, but the sum of their voices was a wordless snarl more terrible than the screams and whistling that came from the mob of monsters.
Claws tore at heavy shields, while short swords cut and thrust through flesh in a score of inhuman forms. A manlike figure with a two-handed sword and the head of a blue-feathered hawk shrieked as he went down under quick chops by a pair of soldiers; their hobnails trampled the body as they passed on. The creature’s big sword had notched a shield but done no other damage.
Lord Mayne, who didn’t have a shield, was battling what looked like a lizard on its hind legs wielding butcher knives in both hands. Mayne held the thing’s right wrist in his free hand, but the other knife was blocking his sword and the long jaws were reaching for his throat. Garric judged his moment and thrust over Mayne’s right shoulder, piercing the lizard’s brain through an eye socket. His blade sparkled; the creature’s scales were iron or something equally hard.
A scorpion the size of an ox scrabbled down the corridor. In place of eyes it had a curved crystalline bowl from which two wizened manlike figures peered. The beast’s pink body was gashed and dripping ichor from the ruck of injured, maddened monsters it’d had to fight through to reach its intended enemy.
A pincer with jaws the length of a forearm reached for Garric over the wall of shields. He brought his long sword in an overhead arc, his left hand on the pommel to add strength to his right arm. His blade crunched through chitin, severing the pincer’s hooked upper jaw. The muscle within was bright yellow.
The scorpion’s weight hit the human line. Garric, off-balance from the sword stroke, lost his footing when the soldiers ahead staggered backward. He fell onto the ice, holding his dripping sword straight up. All he could see was bulging calf muscles and the metal-studded leather kilts of men slashing at a horrific enemy.
A spear flew overhead. Garric wasn’t in a position—literally—to say it was a bad idea, though by the Shepherd! it seemed like a bad one.
The struggle with the scorpion ended. Garric regained his feet as fresh troops from the rear ranks pushed forward to take the place of the men who’d killed the creature. Swords had chopped off the scorpion’s pincers and four pairs of legs, then repeatedly driven through the body’s hard pink casing.
The crystal head was shattered. There was no sign of the two miniature figures Garric had glimpsed.
The mob of beasts had become a pile of corpses, more untidy even than the wrack of battle usually was. Blood and ichor of a score of shades stained both the twitching bodies and the equipment of the troops who’d cut them to bits.
There’d been human casualties too, some of them fatal even though the troops wore heavy armor. Lord Mayne was dead, his throat torn out by the barbels of a creature that looked like a catfish on six legs. A Blood Eagle captain had taken the legate’s place, reforming the front ranks with men whose swords hadn’t been dulled by battle.
“Here sir, we
’ll get you up there!” growled one of the noncoms who’d flanked Garric a moment before. He grabbed Garric firmly by the left biceps and pulled him forward.
“Make way for his highness, you bloody fools!” shouted his fellow, using his spear butt as a baton to separate the men in the rank ahead. The veterans had not only survived, they’d retrieved spears from the slaughtered monsters. The irons were straight though smeared with purple ichor. The two seemed to have adopted Garric
“Not the worst thing that could happen to a commander, lad,” said Carus. Because the ghost lacked a physical presence he hadn’t felt the dizzy wave of exhaustion that’d swept over Garric, but a lifetime of remembered battles left his image as tense as Garric had ever seen him. “Nothing against your Blood Eagles, but soldiers who’ve gotten as old as those fellows have in the front ranks know something about more than being brave.”
The royal army was advancing again; the corridor ahead was empty. Soldiers grunted as they speared monstrous bodies that already looked dead. These men were veterans, and they knew a quick thrust was the cheapest insurance there was.
Garric squirmed through the second rank. “Captain—” he said.
“Degtel,” said Carus, filling in the name that Garric must’ve heard but hadn’t remembered.
“—Degtel,” Garric continued, as smoothly as if the name had been on the tip of his tongue. Carus chuckled in his mind. “We’ll proceed, following the line of light. Keep the pace down to that of a route march as you’ve been doing. Hurrying’s likely to get us somewhere we want to avoid.”
They’d reached a rotunda from which seven corridors branched. The walls quivered: some with crimson light, others with azure. Tenoctris’ gleaming guide bent to follow a red one. Garric knew he should be glad of any illumination, but his heart would’ve preferred blackness to this wizardlight.
