The Fortress Of Glass

by David Drake

  “Where do you propose to take the diadem?” Liane said. She sounded calm, but her fingers were hidden in a fold of her sash where Cashel knew she carried a little knife.

  “What does it matter where this flesh is?” Cervoran said with obvious contempt. “I will use it here if you like. It is necessary.”

  “Yes, that will do,” Liane said, her expression unchanged. She nodded to the assistant sitting with a velvet-wrapped bundle on his lap.

  That fellow hopped to his feet and offered the package to her. “Give it to Lord Cervoran,” she said sharply. She was generally polite as could be, but it seemed the things going on were affecting her too.

  The clerk twitched. Cashel stepped forward, took the bundle, and handed it to Cervoran. The velvet dropped to the floor; Cervoran stared at the yellow stone as if he was trying to see through it to the veins of the rocks beneath the palace.

  “Milady?” said the assistant timidly. “Does he have to be here?”

  “Be silent!” Liane snapped.

  Cervoran looked up. “Are you afraid, fool?” he said. His swollen lips spread in a minute grin. “Shall I tell you how you will die?”

  The assistant’s face went white. He opened his mouth to speak, then toppled forward in a dead faint. Cashel caught him and carried him back to the couch where he’d been sitting.

  That was the first really human thing he’d seen Cervoran do since he walked off the pyre. It was a nasty thing to do to the poor clerk, but it was human.

  When Cashel turned, Cervoran was looking at the stone again and standing like a wax statue. Tadai and his clerks talked in muted voices, and the spy was whispering to Liane. Nobody was paying Cashel any attention, maybe because he was standing close to Cervoran who nobody wanted to notice.

  “Well, I’ll go…,” Cashel said. “Ah, outside.”

  Liane nodded as Cashel stepped into the courtyard again, but nobody said anything. He was used to being ignored, of course, though this was a different business from what’d happened in the borough because he was a poor orphan. Everybody here was afraid, and they were afraid to learn anything that they didn’t already know.

  The bustle around the hellplant was getting organized now. Lord Waldron was giving orders while Sharina looked on at his side and Tenoctris bent over the smoking remains. Ilna was helping the old wizard, prodding layers of sodden greenery apart with the blade of her paring knife.

  Cashel would’ve gone to join them, but his eye caught Prince Protas standing forlornly to the side. The boy’s face was formally calm, but he looked awfully lonely. Cashel walked over to him.

  “Lord Cashel!” Protas said, suddenly a frightened boy again in his enthusiasm. “Oh, sir, I heard you defeated the monster!”

  “Your father knew to burn it,” Cashel said. “I just carried the jar. I’ll grant it was a big jar.”

  He spoke quietly, but he knew he sounded proud. He had a right to be proud, but it was true the real credit went to Cervoran.

  Though Cashel wasn’t completely sure “your father” was quite the right thing to call him now.

  “Where did the monster come from, milor—” Protas said. He caught himself and finished, “Cashel, I mean.”

  Cashel grinned. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ll bet if we follow that—”

  He pointed the spear shaft toward the hole in the courtyard wall. He wasn’t much of a woodsman—picking squirrels off a branch with a hard-flung stone was about as much hunting as he did—but the hellplant’s root-like legs had left a track of slime on the ground behind them. It smelled of salt and sour vegetable matter.

  “—we can learn for ourselves. You want to come?”

  “With you?” said the boy. “Yes sir!”

  He sobered and said, “My tutor hid in a clothes chest when he looked out of the window and saw the thing here in the courtyard. When he comes out, he’ll want me to get back to my mathematics lesson.”

  Cashel thought for a moment. He cleared his throat.

  “I guess mathematics is important to know,” he said. He wasn’t sure exactly what mathematics was, though he thought it meant counting without having to drop dried beans in a sack. That was how Cashel did it when the number got more than his fingers. “But I think this afternoon you can miss a lesson without it being too bad. What with, you know, the trouble that happened.”

  Cashel looked at the spear shaft waggling in his hand while he thought. “But before we do that,” he added, “let’s get my quarterstaff back. Just in case.”

  He and the boy went into the west wing of the palace, through the kitchens and the crowd of clerks and servants chattering there. Protas looked around with real interest. Cashel couldn’t understand why till the boy said, “I’ve never been here before, you know. Is this where the food comes from?” “I guess it is,” Cashel agreed. “It’s fancier than I’m used to.”

  It must be funny to be a prince. When you’re just a boy, anyway. Garric seemed to be taking to it fine but he had his growth. Though Garric as a boy would probably have gotten out more than Protas seemed to’ve done.

  Two servants were in the pantry. The woman looked down into the cellars through the open trapdoor, but the man had picked up the quarterstaff and was turning it in his hands.

  “I’ll take that!” Cashel said, tossing the spear away. He hadn’t meant to’ve shouted but he wasn’t sorry that he had. The woman shrieked like she’d been stabbed; the man dropped the quarterstaff and turned so quick that he got his feet tangled.

  Cashel stepped forward, grabbing the hickory with his right hand and the servant’s arm with his left. The fellow screamed near as bad as the woman had. Cashel guessed he’d gripped as hard with one hand as the other, so there’d be bruises on the man’s biceps in the morning. That wouldn’t be near as bad as what he’d have gotten by toppling headfirst into the cellars the way he’d started to do, though.

  “What were you doing with Lord Cashel’s property, sirrah?” Protas said. His voice sounded a lot like King Cervoran’s, though the boy being twelve was at least some of the reason.

  “What?” said the servant, blinking as he realized it was the prince speaking. “May the Shepherd save me, I didn’t mean—I mean we saw it and didn’t know—that is—”

  “It’s all right,” Cashel said, stroking his staff’s smooth, familiar surface. The poor fellow was getting hit from all sides, it must seem like to him. “You ought to close that cellar door before somebody breaks his neck, though.”

  He led Protas back out through the kitchen. The folks there had been looking at the pantry and whispering. One woman got down on her knees and said, “May the Lady bless you, your lordship, for saving us from that terrible monster!”

  “Ma’am, I just carried the jar,” Cashel muttered. Goodness, she was trying to grab the hem of his tunic! He pulled away, striding out much quicker than he normally chose to do. The boy kept up, but he had to run to do it.

  The sun was getting low in the sky, but it was still an hour short of sundown. They skirted the soldiers, who probably had a job here in the courtyard; and the civilians, who were mostly just gawking.

  As they neared where the back gate had been a voice behind them called, “Your highness? Prince Protas?”

  Cashel turned; Lord Martous was bearing down on them from the other wing of the palace. “He’s with me, sir!” Cashel said loudly.

  To his surprise, the chamberlain bowed low and backed away. Cashel muttered to the boy, “I thought he’d tell me you had to go off with him anyhow.”

  “Oh, no, Cashel,” Protas said in amazement. “Why, I’ll bet even Prince Garric would have to do what you said if you told him something.”

  “I don’t guess he would,” Cashel said, blushing in embarrassment. “Anyway, I wouldn’t do anything like that!”

  Close up, what’d happened to the back wall looked pretty impressive. The edge courses were squared stones fitted together, and the rest of the wall was rubble set in concrete which’d cured long enough
to be pretty near stone-hard itself. The plant had pushed until it cracked off full-height slabs to either side of the gateway. Besides that it’d broken the transom, a squared oak timber two hand-spans on a side.

  “Are there more of the monsters, Cashel?” the boy asked as they followed the hellplant’s track back down through the alley. Local people—town dwellers and country folk both, standing in separate groups—talked in low voices and watched as Cashel and Protas walked past “I don’t know,” Cashel said simply. He thought for a moment. “I guess we’d hear shouting if there were more of them close by, though.”

  The alley led straight to a notch in the seawall; it’d let you back a wagon all the way into the water if for some reason you wanted to. There was no question the hellplant had come up that way: the crushed limestone roadway was still dark with slime.

  Two sailors had been talking on the seawall. They went quiet and watched when they saw Cashel and the boy walking straight toward them.

  “May the Lady smile on you, good sirs!” Protas said, surprising Cashel. He’d been trying to figure how to open a conversation with strangers who didn’t look very trusting. “This is Lord Cashel and of course I’m Prince Protas. Can you tell us how the creature appeared here? Did it come by boat then?”

  The pair looked at each other nervously. “We didn’t bring it!” said the man whose right arm was so tattooed he looked like he had a long-sleeved shirt on that side.

  “Of course not, my good man!” the boy said scornfully. “But you saw it land, did you not? How did it arrive on First Atara?”

  “I thought it was seaweed,” said the little fellow with three gold rings in his right ear and the lobe of the left one missing. “Just drifting up, you know. And then it come to the wall and started to climb. And I took off running, I don’t mind to tell you.”

  “There’s no current could’ve drifted it to shore that quick,” the tattooed man protested. “It had to be swimming, Goldie.”

  “I don’t know what kinda currents there might be!” Goldie said angrily. “What with the Shepherd’s Sling Stone whamming into the sea the way it did. Why, the one wave nigh cleared the seawall, and I’ve never seen that to happen no matter how bad a storm it is.”

  “That was this morning!” his companion said. “The sea was calm as calm all the past six hours.”

  “But you’re sure the thing didn’t come on a boat?” Cashel said, looking out along the track the low sun plowed glowing on the water. “It just swam?”

  “Swam or drifted,” Goldie said. “Swam, I guess. But I thought it was just something washed up from when the stone hit the sea.”

  Cashel looked out to the southwest, through the jaws of the harbor and down the sun’s track across the open sea to where the meteor had landed. “You might be right at that,” he said at last.

  Though fire had devoured the outer layers of the hellplant, it seemed to Sharina that what remained was shrinking further the way frost-killed vine-leaves sink into a foetor and ooze away. There was nothing obviously unnatural about this mass, but it was certainly foul and ugly. So was much of peasant life, of course.

  Tenoctris had moved from examining the plant to looking at the corpse of one of the three scorpions from inside it. Now she turned and got up, partly supported by Ilna. Sharina smiled at them, hoping Tenoctris had learned something useful—and getting a wan look and shrug that made it clear she hadn’t.

  Chalcus stood nearby but didn’t burden his hands with the weight of an old woman. His lips smiled but his eyes did not, skipping over everything around him. Chalcus’ gaze didn’t rest any longer than the late sunlight glinting on the edge of his drawn sword. If his eyes had found danger anywhere they danced, that sword would strike with a speed and precision that were themselves just short of magical.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Tenoctris said, nodding slightly in the direction of the hard-shelled creature. “It’s meant to live in water: its legs are paddles and it seems to have gills instead of lungs. But it’s a scorpion and not a crab or lobster.”

  “Master Chalcus?” Sharina said. “You’re a sailor. Do you know where such things come from?”

  “Nowhere in the parts of the world I’ve travelled before now, milady,” Chalcus said. He turned his face and his smile toward Sharina, but his eyes continued their restless search. “Which is a good deal of the world. I’d as lief that Mona here had been without the small demons as well, though I wouldn’t mind them so much without the mount they rode in on… which is new to me as well, I’m thankful to say.”

  “And new to me,” Tenoctris said with a slight nod; she seemed completely wrung out. “Perhaps later, tomorrow…”

  “There’s nothing of immediate concern that you can see at the moment?” Sharina said. She raised the pitch of the final word to make it a question, but she knew that Tenoctris would’ve said so if she’d seen something. “In that case, why don’t you get some food and rest? I’ve watched you do five separate divination spells, and I know how much effort that requires.”

  She smiled at the wizard with real warmth. Tenoctris was one of the strongest pillars on which the kingdom rested, but she was also a friend. In Sharina’s mind, that was the more important thing of the two.

  “We need you, Tenoctris,” she said. “And we need you healthy.”

  “I did seven spells, not five,” Tenoctris admitted with the same wan smile as when she’d risen to her feet. “And as for resting, I might’ve been asleep in bed for anything useful I gained from any of them. But yes, I’ll see if I can’t do better in the morning.”

  She dipped her chin in the direction of the plant’s remains. The gesture was as quick and businesslike as a hatchet stroke. She added, “Don’t allow this to be removed, if you will.”

  “Lord Waldron,” Sharina said in a tone that was about as crisp as the wizard’s nod. “Place a guard on this mess, if you please. Don’t let anyone but Lady Tenoctris come near it.”

  The army commander barked a laugh. “As your highness wishes,” he said. “Though I wouldn’t worry about thieves myself. And if any of the palace staff are devoted enough to their duties to clean it up, that’ll surprise me too.”

  “One of your own officers might’ve taken care of it, milord,” said Attaper. His brief smile rang like a hammer. “Or mine, of course. Better safe than sorry.”

  Waldron snorted as he gave the orders. The two senior officers were in a surprisingly good mood. A creature that was physical if not exactly flesh and blood had attacked; the creature had been destroyed. That was how things were supposed to work in the soldiers’ world, and by now the fact that something was unusual didn’t bother them so long as it wasn’t wizardry.

  Soldiers tended to take a sharply limited view regarding what was their business, too. In the present case, that permitted both men to ignore the question of how a giant plant could’ve come to walk into the palace without wizardry. Sharina found that puzzling, but they were very good at their jobs.

  A Blood Eagle, one of the squad Garric had detailed to guard Tenoctris, picked up the satchel in which the old wizard kept the paraphernalia of her art. He tramped along beside her, offering his free hand if she needed support on the way to her room and bed.

  Most of the troops—like most civilians—were uncomfortable dealing with wizardry. There were a few, though, who didn’t mind. All the Blood Eagles were ready to guard Tenoctris with their lives; this particular trooper was also happy to carry a bag filled with spells and potions, and to treat the wizard as though she were no more than an old lady with a pleasant personality.

  Sharina was suddenly tired also, though she hadn’t done any serious work today. It was the tension, she supposed. She giggled.

  “Milady?” said Chalcus with a hard smile. “If there’s a joke in all this business, I’d be pleased to hear it.”

  “When I got up this morning,” Sharina said, “I was worried that my tongue would get tangled when I offered the hand of fellowship to Marquess Pro
tas on behalf of the citizens of Haft. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried since the coronation didn’t take place. So many of our fears are empty.”

  She shook her head, grinning wryly. She looked around and added, “Does anyone know where Lady Liane’s gone?”

  “Not gone but stayed,” said Ilna. “In the conference room Master Chalcus took me to when I proved useless here.”

  She glanced at the knotted pattern she held between the fingers of both hands, then grimaced and looked up again. Ilna was short and dark and slim; pretty or at least handsome, but likely to be overlooked when she was in the company of her friend Sharina, a lithe blond beauty. If Ilna resented that, she kept the feeling well hidden—even from Sharina herself.

  “Then let’s go talk with Liane,” Sharina said, offering Ilna her arm and starting toward the council chamber. “She may know something about this even if Tenoctris doesn’t.”

  The chamber was unexpectedly dim. The sky wasn’t dark yet, but it didn’t send much light through the clerestory windows. Nobody’d lighted the lamps in the wall sconces. The guards hadn’t let servants in to do that, Sharina realized.

  Sharina stepped back outside. The guards had a lighted lantern dangling from the edge of the portico. The hook supporting it normally held a polished marble ‘sparkler’ that threw sunlight onto the interior as it rotated.

  Sharina lifted down the lantern. “I’ll borrow this if I may,” she said, twisting the base away from the barrel to expose the burning candle. She walked into the council chamber with it.

  “Your highness?” said the puzzled officer behind her. Of course nobody objected to Princess Sharina taking a lantern if she wanted to, but he was probably surprised that she knew how to take it apart.

  Sharina knew how to light lamps too. She walked from sconce to sconce, holding the candle flame just below the wick of each oil lamp in turn. The Lady only knew how many winter evenings she’d done this same thing at the inn, though generally using a splinter of lightwood instead of a candle.