by David Drake
“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 desire 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 wizard might 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, her clay 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: of course 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 knotted 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.
Waldron definitely 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, but 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’t lead 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 guess how 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.”
Sharina glanced at Tenoctris who sucked her lips in and shrugged. “I can’t judge what Lord Cervoran can do or should be permitted to do, your highness,” she said with quiet formality. “I’m trying to follow the various currents of power about us, but I haven’t been able to do so as yet.”
“You have no choice, fools,” Cervoran squeaked. “The Green Woman has sent her servants against one place at present. She will attack other places, all the places on this island. Unless they are stopped, her creatures will advance until they have killed me. Then they will conquer this island and all islands. Only I can stand against the Green Woman, and I must have my chamber of art!”
“Yes, all right,” said Sharina calmly. She didn’t like Cervoran’s tone, but she didn’t see any useful result from trying to teach him manners. Whatever he’d been in his earlier life, since Ilna dragged him off the pyre he’d acted less like an adult than like a child—or perhaps like a storm, howling and whistling and sizzling with ungoverned power.
“Cashel must help me,” Cervoran said. “And Protas, who is clay of this clay.”
“Prince Protas?” Ilna said, the words coming out clipped and hard. “Your son, the child?”
“It is necessary,” Cervoran said. “His clay, his flesh is of this flesh.”
All the time Cervoran was speaking, the near copy of him stared at the original with cold black eyes. Sharina wondered what the double’s voice would sound like if he spoke.
Aloud she said, “I won’t order a child to help in wizardry. I won’t order anybody to help your wizardry!”
She looked at Cashel, opening her mouth to repeat her words in a more personal fashion, but Cashel was already giving her a slow grin. “It’s all right, Sharina,” he said quietly. “If I can do something to help, I will. And I guess Lord Protas feels the same way. He’s a good boy, though he’s, you know, younger than I was or Garric was.”
“Find him and ask him, then,” Sharina said, suddenly tired from making decisions for other people that meant life or death; for them, perhaps for everyone in the kingdom. “But I won’t order him!”
She knew Protas would go anywhere that Cashel was willing to take him: the boy would’ve accompanied the group to the charnel house if Tenoctris had permitted it. And Sharina understood that more than the life of one boy hung on Cervoran’s wizardry. The child who’d been watching the field at Calf’s Head Bay had been younger than Protas was when he fell victim to the hellplants.
But as she watched Cashel leave with Cervoran and the lesser copy of Cervoran, she was glad Liane wasn’t here to listen. Liane wouldn’t have allowed Cervoran to use Protas, no matter how critical the boy’s presence might be to the survival of the kingdom.
Liane’s father had been a wizard too; and in the end, he’d been ready to sacrifice his daughter’s life to complete an incantation.
Chapter 8
Cashel opened the door of the chamber and stepped through first. He held his staff at the balance in his right hand. He wasn’t exactly poised to bash anybody waiting inside to attack them, but—Well, if somebody inside was waiting to attack them, Cashel would bash him. There were people who jumped at shadows and that was silly, but recently some shadows had been doing the jumping. Cashel wasn’t going to let anything happen to his friends because he hadn’t watched out for them. That’s what a shepherd did, after all.
There was pretty much nothing inside, just the cases of books and oddments along the back wall. The windows were shuttered and the door to the rest of Sharina’s suite was closed. Light bled through the cracks, but not enough to properly see the figures laid into the floor. The tapestry on the west wall was a square of shiny blackness.
While the others came in, Cashel walked across the room to throw back the shutters. Protas had scooted up right beside him, which was all right now. The boy’d had the good sense to stay out of the way when Cashel got ready to open the door, though, which not every adult would’ve done.
“Leave the windows as they are!” Cervoran said. His voice didn’t get any deeper in here, but it echoed in a funny way. “There is light enough for my art.”
Cashel didn’t say anything, just turned. “Light enough” he’d grant; but that was different from saying more light would be a bad thing. Creatures that scuttled when light fell on ‘em generally weren’t good company in darkness, either.
He didn’t like this room. There wasn’t anything specific wrong, it just felt like all sorts of things were pushing for space. Which was funny since it was near as empty as a barn in springtime, but Cashel guessed that meant there were more things here than his eyes were seeing. That stood to reason.
Sharina came in with Attaper and a double handful of guards standing so close that Cashel could scarcely see her through all the black-armored bodies. What did they think they were going to do that I couldn’t of?
But Cashel held his tongue. That was somethi
ng he’d learned young and never forgotten, even after he’d got his growth and pretty much could say what he pleased.
Cervoran raised his hand. He wasn’t holding the athame, but the topaz crown winked in a way that made him look bigger than he had in full sunlight.
“Stop!” he said. “No one may be present while I build a portal. I and Cashel and the clay will perform the rites without interference.”
“What does he mean, ‘the clay,’ Cashel?” Protas whispered.
Cashel touched a hand to the boy’s shoulder to reassure him, but he kept his eyes on Cervoran. The way the wizard talked wasn’t much to Cashel’s taste, but words weren’t enough to get upset over.
“Lord Cervoran?” Tenoctris said quietly. A couple of the soldiers were probably her guards, but they gave her more space than Attaper did Sharina. “I would—”
“No one!” Cervoran said. He always sounded angry or at least out of sorts, but there was more than usual of it now. “I and Cashel and the clay Protas, no one else!”
Sharina must’ve said something testy to her guards, because a couple of them moved sideways to let her step between them and face Cervoran directly. “Milord,” she said, “I remind you again: you do not give orders in this kingdom.”
She looked at Cashel. He drew himself up another fingertip of straightness. Sharina was so very beautiful. His Sharina…
“Cashel,” she said. “I know you’re willing to do this. I want your opinion as a friend: should I allow the ceremony to go ahead with only the three of you present? I’m asking because I trust your instinct.”
Cashel thought for a moment. “Ma’am,” he said, formal because it was a real question she was asking. “I don’t see how it could hurt. I mean, it may go wrong but nobody else being near could help, right Tenoctris?”
Tenoctris gave a quick dip of her chin. “I agree,” she said simply.
“We must be alone,” Cervoran said shrilly. He didn’t bother to turn to look at Cashel behind him. “It is necessary!”
