by David Drake
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.”
Chapter 7
Torag roused his band and their captives at dusk. It’d rained at least three times during the day, and the shelter of twigs and brush the warriors’d woven was meant for shade, not to shed water. Part of Garric’s mind doubted that he’d slept at all, but he knew he was probably wrong. The pain of his injuries, the drizzle, and the growing discomfort of his tight bonds kept him from enjoying rest, but there’d doubtless been some.
Growling among themselves—Coerli voices sounded peevish to a human, even when they weren’t—four warriors set off in the lead. Torag and Sirawhil paced along beside Garric, with Eny and Nerga on guard immediately behind him. The women, bound together by the necks, followed. Two warriors were with them, more to guide than to guard them: they obviously weren’t a danger to anyone.
That left four warriors. Garric supposed they were the rear guard, though he was well out of sight before they’d have left the temporary camp.
“What are they worried about, do you suppose?” Carus wondered mentally. “I didn’t see anything in the village that’d concern me—nobody even able to lead a rescue attempt except maybe Scarface. Do these cat-creatures prey on each other?”
The Bird on Sirawhil’s shoulder turned its glittering eyes toward Garric. “Every band is a potential enemy of every other band,” it said silently. “They only attack if they have an overwhelming advantage, which isn’t likely when every band is always on their guard against every other.”
You hear my ancestor, then? Garric asked, this time silently. As well as hearing my thoughts?
The Bird said nothing. Garric grimaced. That’d been a stupid question, but he wasn’t in good shape.
They slogged on in the sopping darkness. Garric’s wrists had been tied since capture, and when they camped the Coerli had lashed them to his waist as well. Garric worked at his bonds for want of anything better to do, but apart from wearing his wrists bloody he didn’t accomplish anything.
Because he couldn’t throw out his arms for balance as he instinctively tried to do, he stumbled frequently and occasionally fell. The Coerli didn’t help him. Once when he was slow getting up—he’d braced his hands on a log which collapsed to mush, skidding him on his face again—one of the warriors kicked him with a clawed foot.
Garric heard the captured women whimper occasionally, but they seemed to be having less trouble than he did even though they were tied together. They couldn’t have night vision like the Coerli, but at least they were used to starless nights and constant overcast.
“That makes these cat beasts easy meat in daylight, lad,” Carus noted. His image had a quiet smile. “Even what passes for daylight in this bloody bog.”
Meat, perhaps, Garric amended, but he smiled too. Perhaps he and Carus were being wildly optimistic, but it was better than resigning himself to a gray future ending in butchery.
A plangent Klok! Klok! rang across the marsh. Torag lifted his great maned head and roared a coughing reply.
“Are we being attacked?” Garric asked Sirawhil sharply.
Too sharply, apparently. A guard slapped him across the head with the butt of his spear and snarled, “Silence, beast!”
It wasn’t a serious blow—the spear shaft was no more than thumb-thick—but Garric’s head still throbbed from the stroke that’d captured him. He staggered, dropping to one knee in a blur of white light; his skin burned. With an effort he lurched forward and managed to keep going so that the Corl didn’t hit him again.
In its own dry voice, the Bird said, “We’re approaching Torag’s keep. The warriors left as a garrison have given the alarm, and Torag has announced himself in reply.”
“The Coerli can see any way in this?” Garric said. He spoke aloud but without the harshness that’d gotten him swatted a moment earlier. He couldn’t be sure of the distance, but the gong note was dulled by what seemed like several hundred yards of drizzle and darkness.
“The distance is close to a quarter of one of your miles,” the Bird said, answering both the question Garric had asked and the one he’d only thought. “While the tower guard might have seen movement, it’s more likely that he heard the party returning. The Coerli have keen hearing, and you humans make a great deal of noise in the darkness.”
I can’t argue with that, Garric thought. I wonder if I’ll get to be at least as good as the Grass People are?
“I hope we’re not here long enough to learn, lad,” said the ghost in his mind. Carus grinned, but there was more than humor in the expression.
Garric heard a gate creak, followed by the scrape and slosh of people doing something in the bog. The ground here was wetter than most of what they’d marched through on the way from Wandalo’s hamlet; the Coerli were sinking to their fetlocks because there were no firm patches to step on.
Instead of a stockade, a high wicker fence loomed out of the night. A number of warriors were pushing what Garric first thought was a fascine, a roll of brushwood to fill a gully. In fact they were unrolling a coil of wicker matting to cover the ground up to the open gate. It served the same purpose as a drawbridge.
“There’s six of them,” Carus noted, always professionally detached in assessing an enemy. “That’s sixteen warriors we know about, plus Torag. And Sirawhil, I suppose, though I don’t count her as much.”
“Torag left six warriors to guard the keep and control the existing slaves,” the Bird said. “He has three sexually mature females in his harem as well, but female Coerli do not fight.”
Garric looked at the Bird. There was a great deal about the situation that he didn’t know and which he suspected Torag hadn’t even wondered about.
“The Coerli are not a sophisticated species,” the Bird said, repeating an early comment. It turned its sparkling eyes toward the compound without speaking further.
Torag led the procession through the gate. Garric glanced at the wall as he entered, expecting to find it was double with the interior filled with rock. Well, filled with dirt: he’d seen no stone bigger than Marzan’s topaz in this whole muddy world. In fact the wall was a single layer of heavy basketry, sufficient for a house but certainly not a military structure in human terms.
“It’s to keep animals out, I’d judge,” said Carus. “Cat beasts like the ones that built it. They wouldn’t know what a siege train was if it rose up and bit them on their furry asses. Which we may be able to arrange, lad.”
He chuckled and added, “In good time.”
Torag raised his muzzle into the air and sniffed. The interior of the compound was ripe with the sharp stench of carnivore wastes, but that was only to be expected.
“Ido!” said Torag. “You’ve butchered an animal while I was gone!”
Five of the six warriors who’d been left to guard the keep edged away from their chief. The remaining one, taller and visibly bulkier than the others, straightened. He held a spear, but he kept its bone point carefully toward the ground as he growled, “We were hungry, Torag. We didn’t know when you were coming back.”
Torag snarled and leaped, swinging his club. Ido hesitated for a fraction of a second between thrusting and jumping away. The knot of hardwood crushed his skull, splashing blood and brains across the surviving members of the garrison. They scattered into the interior of the compound with shrill cries; some of them dropped their weapons as they fled.
Torag roared, a hacking, saw-toothed challenge that echoed through the night. The Coerli warriors hunched, their long faces toward the ground. Sirawhil stood silent, and the captive women huddled together. Several were blubbering in despair.
Garric got down on one knee, keeping his eyes on Torag’s short, twitching tail. He hoped his posture looked submissive, but he’d chosen it to give him the best chance of grabbing Torag if the chieftain swung around in fury
to strike again.
Breathing in short, harsh snorts, Torag did turn, but he lowered his blood-smeared club. The fighting was over—to the extent there’d been a fight.
“Sorman, Ido was your sibling,” the chief growled. “Throw his carrion into a pond where the eels will eat it.”
A warrior, bending almost double, squirmed from the fringe of the gathering and gripped the corpse by the ankles. The victim had stiffened instantly when his brain was crushed; one arm stuck out at right angles. Sorman dragged the body through the gate and into the darkness. He didn’t lift his gaze from the mud, at least until he was out of Torag’s sight.
Torag raised his head and roared, but this time he was just sealing the reality that everybody around him accepted. Garric half-expected him to urinate on the gatepost, but apparently the Coerli were a little less bestial than that.
When Torag turned, he’d relaxed into his usual strutting self. Licking the head of his club absently, he said, “Get the fresh catch into the pens. And see to it that they’re fed and watered. I don’t want them dying on me after they cost me so much.”
“What about the big one?” Sirawhil asked as the escorting warriors used spear butts to prod the captives toward the back of the compound. “I’ll need to examine him further. Though I wish you’d let me take him home to the Council.”
“Faugh, the Council,” Torag said. “I don’t care what happens at home any more. This is my world, Sirawhil. Put him in the same pen as the rest of them.”
He looked at Garric, the club rising slightly in his hand. Garric kept his eyes on the leather belts that crossed in the middle of the chief’s chest; he didn’t move.
“If he breaks out,” Torag said after obvious consideration. “he’ll give us good sport. That’s probably the best use for him anyway.”
“Torag, he’s important,” the wizard said, then cringed away before the chieftain even raised a hand to strike her. In a less forceful tone she went on, “He could be valuable. We need to know more about him before, before…”
