The Fortress Of Glass

by David Drake

  “They came from mastodons,” Antesiodorus said, pausing with the door curtain lifted. He looked sour, but Cashel guessed he was the sort of fellow who looked sour more times than he didn’t. “Are you any the wiser, Master Wizard? They’re animals and they’re obviously bigger than oxen; or they were, because so far as I know they’ve been dead for more ages than there’ve been men. At any rate, all I’ve seen around here are bones.”

  “Thank you,” said Cashel quietly. “And I’m not really a wizard, sir.”

  Antesiodorus cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Now, if you’re quite done out here,” he said, “would you care to come in? The bones look much the same from this side, and the things that might decide to eat you can’t get through the walls.”

  “Sorry,” Cashel said, straightening. “I’ve never seen a house built like this.”

  He nodded Protas inside and followed the boy; Antesiodorus pulled the curtain across the door behind them. The walls were solid enough to keep out wolves or whatever it was the guide worried about, but just a cloth hanging in the doorway didn’t seem like much.

  It was a cloak of black velvet, covered in symbols embroidered in silver thread. Cashel felt the hairs on the back of his hand tremble when he touched it.

  Antesiodorus was looking hard at him. The lantern in his hand and the yellow-brown tallow candle on the table lighted the long room surprisingly well.

  “You recognize it, then?” Antesiodorus said in a challenging tone. “The Cape of Holla?”

  “No sir,” Cashel said. “But I see why you don’t worry about things coming through the door to get you when it’s hanging here. My sister could probably tell you more, but I see that much.”

  “Then you are a wizard,” Antesiodorus said, putting just a hair of emphasis on “are”. He sounded puzzled.

  “Not like people mean,” Cashel said, embarrassed to talk about what he didn’t understand. He looked around for a place to sit and didn’t see a good one. “Ah?” he added. “If I could have a mug of water—or beer if you have it—I’d find it welcome.”

  “I don’t have beer and the water’s alkaline,” said Antesiodorus, shuffling to the corner that seemed to be his pantry. He was barefoot and his clothing, a tunic and a short cape, was of some coarse vegetable fiber that wasn’t much better than sacking. “It suffices for me, and I’m afraid it’ll have to suffice for you.”

  Cashel didn’t answer. Antesiodorus wasn’t the old man he’d thought him when they were outside. Oh, sure, he must be forty—but Lord Attaper was forty, and he could give a fight to most men half his age. The guide acted old, though, and very tired. That was what was in his words, age and tiredness this time rather than anger.

  Protas was stepping briskly around the room, looking first at this thing and then at that. The only real furniture was the table, a slab of yellow limestone that might’ve been local supported on either end by a tusked skull with huge eye sockets. The top was piled high with books and scrolls, some of them open.

  The bone walls of the house wouldn’t keep out a driving rain, but here in the center of the long room was probably safe. The roof wouldn’t leak; or anyway, wouldn’t leak quickly. Cashel knew storms in this climate could be fierce, but he didn’t imagine that they’d last long.

  Protas glanced at the books, but mostly he was looking at the things along the walls. They’d been put on trays made by sticking bones from smaller animals end-on into the cracks between the mastodon thighs. There were boxes of shell and alabaster, and one little casket was made of some purple metal like Cashel had never dreamed of. There was a rusty iron helmet that looked like scrap to be turned into horseshoes, and a dagger with a moonstone the size of a baby’s fist in the pommel. The boy was fascinated.

  “Here,” said Antesiodorus, offering Cashel a cup. “I have flat bread and goat cheese if you’re hungry.”

  Instead of being terra cotta or a simple wooden masar, the sort of thing people who dressed like Antesiodorus generally drank out of, this was glass clearer than the water that filled it. Gold-filled engraving on the inside showed hounds chasing an antelope, a nice picture and very well drawn—except that the antelope had six horns, not two.

  “I only have one cup,” Antesiodorus said. “I’ve never had visitors.”

  Then, angrily, “I shouldn’t have visitors! I should be left to my studies! I don’t ask for much, do I?”

  Cashel drank instead of answering. He wouldn’t have spoken anyway, since their guide wasn’t asking a real question. The water was all right, though it had an aftertaste that seemed to coat Cashel’s tongue and the back of his throat. He’d drunk worse, but it made him miss the days when he could walk down to Pattern Creek and fill his wooden bottle from the cold, clear current just above the stones of the bottom.

  The thought made him smile, and smiling made him think of Sharina; he smiled wider. He handed back the cup.

  “Thank you, Master Antesiodorus,” he said. “I’d like some of the bread and cheese you offered, if you would. And if you’ve got a few scallions, that’d be better still.”

  “Yes, of course,” said their guide, stepping back to the pantry. “And more water? It’s simple fare, but I believe it cleanses my body and helps me think.”

  “Water, please,” Cashel said. With a grin in his voice he added, “I don’t know how much this sort of food helps me think, but it’s what I’ve eaten pretty much all my life.”

  “Master Antesiodorus,” said Protas, holding what looked like a sand painting that’d been glued onto its backing. “Where did you get this? Where did you get any of these things?”

  The boy gestured at the wall he’d been walking along. From the bone core of a bison’s horn hung an amber necklace; one of the pieces was near as big as the topaz, and it had something inside. Beside the necklace was a wax tablet, and beside that was a set of doctor’s tools with gold handles and blades of bright sharp steel. There were more things than there’d been sheep in the largest flock Cashel had ever watched.

  “Would you like food also, Lord Protas?” Antesiodorus said, coming back with cheese and bread wafers on a silver tray.

  “My father had things like this,” Protas said, challenging and talking through his nose again. “Only not so many or so fine. You’re a wizard, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a scholar!” Antesiodorus said. “That’s all I ever wanted to be. Can’t we leave it at that?”

  “Only if you’re so great a wizard,” Protas went on, back to sounding like a nervous boy, “why is it you live this way, sir? We… we have to depend on you guiding us, you see.”

  Cashel broke a piece from the wafer and a piece from the hard, flat cheese, then munched them together. It seemed to him that the boy had a point, though it wasn’t one that he’d have thought of himself. There wasn’t anything unusual about the way Antesiodorus lived—by the standards of a poor boy from Barca’s Hamlet.

  “I choose to live like this,” Antesiodorus said. Cashel couldn’t read the emotion behind his expression, but it was a strong one. “I made a mistake. That’s all it was, just a mistake. I didn’t mean the other things to happen!”

  He lifted his hands in a broad gesture. “I’ve agreed to help someone in exchange for being allowed to live quietly,” he went on. “I find things for him. I’m a scholar, I can use the books and manuscripts I gather in ways that others could not. And he provides…”

  Antesiodorus gestured again. “I don’t need much, I don’t want much!” he said. “Just to be left alone with enough food to live and water drawn from the well I dug myself. Why can’t they let me have that and leave me alone?”

  “It’s good cheese,” said Cashel. “Thank you. Where is it that the goats are at, sir?”

  If Antesiodorus kept animals, Cashel would’ve smelled them. Besides, he didn’t see the scholar making any better of a goatherd than Tenoctris would. Talking to the wizard’s servant might tell them things that Antesiodorus himself wouldn’t.

  Antesiodorus looked
at him. “Yes, of course,” he said pettishly. “Why would you care about my troubles? The food is delivered to me. Sometimes the items I’ve located in my researchs are taken—I won’t say in exchange, just at the time the food arrives. Sometimes they’re not taken at all, as you see.”

  “I’m sorry for your troubles, master,” Cashel said. “But I don’t know how you came to be here or what it was you did. I couldn’t say much without knowing more.”

  He looked Antesiodorus in the eye and smiled again, not quite the same expression as before. Cashel didn’t look for people to fight, but he’d had plenty fights in his life and he guessed he’d have more.

  “What I can say,” he went on, “is that it’s good cheese and I appreciate you sharing it with me.”

  Antesiodorus swallowed and seemed to sink into himself, hunching and looking even thinner than he’d been. He picked up a little silver pin on a shelf beside him and looked at it hard; a fish, it seemed to Cashel, but mostly it was just a glitter in the candlelight.

  “I didn’t mean for the other things to happen,” he muttered. “I was young and it was just a mistake.”

  “Master Antesiodorus?” Protas said. The boy stood stiffly, formally, but he wasn’t putting on airs like he did when he was angry. “Are you here to work off a debt, or are you serving a sentence?”

  “Is there a difference, milord?” Antesiodorus said, smiling faintly. He held the pin against his chest, his fingers covering it completely. “If a debt, then it’s one I’ll never be able to pay; and if a sentence, it’s a life sentence. That was how I made the mistake, you see. I thought it was important to save my life.”

  He shrugged. “Have you both finished eating?” he said. “Then we’d best get some sleep. We’ll need to set out as soon as the sun comes up in the morning. I have some wall hangings that’ll have to do for bedding, though I’m afraid there’s nothing but the floor to sleep on.”

  Antesiodorus looked up. “Or my couch,” he added sharply. “But that’s stone.”

  “The floor will be fine,” said Cashel. “Won’t it, Protas?”

  But the boy was holding the topaz in his left hand, and his eyes were far away.

  “Your highness,” said Lord Tadai forcefully to Sharina, “you have no business being here. You should be in Mona where you can have proper control of the government.”

  The troops in the fortifications around Calf’s Head Bay were standing to arms. Reinforcements who’d been billeted on the north end of the island had arrived during the night, clanking and muttering. They’d cursed the mud and the darkness, called for the liaison officers who were supposed to guide them to their new positions, and argued among themselves over location and rations and who had precedence on the paths. Blood Eagles guarding Princess Sharina had prevented tired soldiers from stumbling over the guy ropes and bringing her tent down on top of her, but they couldn’t make the night quiet.

  That was all right; she’d seen what the troops had faced the day before. A disturbed night’s sleep was little enough to suffer by comparison.

  “Milord,” Sharina said, “I’m exactly where I need to be. Initially I thought as you did, that I’d be in the way. I’m not in the way. Messengers can reach me here, and I can sign documents just as easily as I could back in the palace.”

  “It’s a very inefficient way to rule, your highness!” said Tadai. “The clerks—”

  “The clerks will cope,” Sharina said. “You will cope. Because the soldiers out there—”

  She gestured to the south wall of the tent. Beyond the canvas wall was the slope to the battlefield and then to the sea from which they could expect more hellplants at sunrise.

  “—are coping with something much more difficult than a seven mile journey over a bad road. So long as they’re here fighting, I’ll be here too. Just as my brother would’ve been. As you know well.”

  “You can’t do anything, your highness,” Tadai said, but his protests had lost their fierce edge. He didn’t agree with her, but he knew by now that she wasn’t going to budge.

  “I can be seen, Tadai,” Sharina said. She smiled; it wasn’t something a man like Lord Tadai could understand. “The troops can see me watching them as they fight to save the kingdom.”

  Though salvation was in Double’s hands, at least for now. If the wizard failed, the army would at best delay the attacking plants.

  More wood, brush and heavier timbers as well, had been brought up during the night; it filled the trenches in front of the breastworks. That would hold for a time, and the soldiers’ swords would hold for a further time. The phalanx had marched across the island; perhaps its twenty-foot pikes would prove more useful than the shorter spears of the regular infantry.

  But after that, human resources were exhausted. Without Double, it was simply a matter of how fast the hellplants could walk and how many more would come out of the sea. Not that there was any reason to fear failure after the wizard’s triumph the previous day…

  “If you’ll excuse me, milord,” Sharina said, stepping out of the tent past the nobleman. “It’ll be dawn shortly, and I want to talk to Tenoctris beforehand.”

  She and Tadai had discussed everything there was to say about her location. In truth she didn’t have any important business with Tenoctris either, but the old wizard was a friend in a fashion that Lord Tadai—smart and skilled and completely loyal though he was—could never be to someone who never forgot she’d been raised as a peasant.

  Tenoctris was a noble also, but all she’d ever cared about was her studies. She’d spent much of her life in garrets and the dusty basements of libraries, oblivious of her surroundings and completely untouched by notions of birth and family. Tadai was plumply sleek and studiedly cultured. Like Waldron, a noble of a very different sort, Tadai was brave and hard working—but neither man could look at another person without first determining where that person ranked in the social order.

  Friends are equals. Sharina was no more comfortable with Tadai’s deference than she’d have been with with him ignoring her if she were waiting tables in her father’s inn.

  The tent didn’t have a charcoal brazier, but the dozen candles for lighting and the watchful Blood Eagles—present by Attaper’s order no matter who was talking to Sharina—must’ve warmed the interior more than she’d realized. The dank sea wind was stronger than she’d expected. She hugged herself and started back inside for a wrap.

  “Here you go, Princess,” said Trooper Lires, one of the guard detail. He swung the cape he must’ve brought from the wardrobe in the tent’s curtained anteroom. “I figured you’d want this, so I grabbed it.”

  “In the Lady’s name, my man!” Tadai protested. “Show some respect for your ruler.”

  “He’s keeping me warm, which is better,” Sharina said, letting the soldier help her on with the garment. Blood Eagle officers were noblemen, but even they weren’t courtiers. It hadn’t occurred to Lires that it wasn’t more important to give Sharina the cloak than to do so in a properly subservient way—And Sharina agreed.

  It was a formal garment, black velvet with a lining of crimson silk. That didn’t prevent it from blocking the chill breeze as well as cruder, cheaper fabric could’ve done. Sharina walked to where Tenoctris sat cross-legged on the ground.

  One of the wizard’s guards had spread his half-cape beneath her, though Sharina was sure Tenoctris hadn’t thought to ask for it. She’d drawn a figure in the dirt; in this light Sharina couldn’t describe its shape, let alone the words of power drawn around it. The older woman looked up as Sharina approached.

  “Have you learned anything?” Sharina asked, squatting beside her friend.

  “I feel like a mouse between a pair of granite mountains,” Tenoctris said with her usual cheerful humility. “I can see the—”

  She gestured with the bamboo split in her hand.

  “—structures, call them, which Cervoran and the Green Woman are preparing, but until they act I have no way of judging their intent.”

/>   She grinned. “Except that it’s unlikely that the Green Woman plans anything that will benefit humanity,” she added. “And I’m more than a little doubtful about Cervoran as well.”

  Sharina looked to where Double stood with his head down at one end of where he’d raised the mirror. The post-and-canvas form remained, shuddering in the wind, though the silver had vanished into the ground.

  “Has he moved since the battle yesterday?” Sharina asked quietly. Then she added, “I haven’t seen him eat.”

  “No,” said Tenoctris without being specific as to which comment she was replying to. “He’ll be rousing soon. It’s almost dawn, and I can—”

  She looked at the sky, faintly gray though the brightest stars were still visible.

  “—feel the balances shifting. I wish I could really describe what I see, Sharina, but I suppose it doesn’t matter since I don’t know what it means myself.”

  “Here they come!” a soldier bellowed. Horns and trumpets blew Stand-To in shrilly. So far as Sharina could tell the whole army was already in position behind the earthworks. She hugged her friend again and stood up.

  The tide was coming in and with it dark ugly lumps. More hellplants bobbed farther out to sea. They stretched so far into the distance that Sharina couldn’t tell the shapes from those of the waves. Spume flew inland, driven by the sea breeze.

  Double shook himself like a dog coming out of a high wind. He gave Sharina a fat-lipped grin, then pointed his athame at the ground.

  “Eulamon,” he said. “Restoutus restouta zerosi!”

  As the words of power sounded, blue wizardlight twinkled coldly along the ground before him. The wind, already strong, picked up. It drove dust and leaves and mist.

  “Benchuch bachuch chuch…,” Double chanted, the same words as on the day before. He lifted the point of his athame; silver rose from the soil into which it’d sunk at the end of the previous day’s battle. The sun, just above the horizon, flared red on the film of metal. “Ousiri agi ousiri!”