The Fortress Of Glass

by David Drake

  Ilna stopped at the hump of the bridge, a polite distance from where Chalcus stood speaking to the woman. His voice came to her faintly, “…rising out of the sea, an island to look at save for its bulging eyes and its teeth as long as temple pillars…”

  “It’s hard to hear him, Ilna,” Merota said, frowning.

  “We have no need to hear him at all, child,” Ilna said severely. “He’s giving her a good story. When he’s finished, he’ll join us and we’ll go on together.”

  She deliberately turned her face toward the island. The temple was a simple one: round and domed instead of the usual square floor plan with a peaked roof, but she’d seen round temples occasionally in recent years.

  There weren’t any temples, round or square, in Barca’s Hamlet or in the borough beyond. People had shrines to the Lady and the Shepherd in their houses. There they offered a crumb of bread and a drop of ale at meals; most people did. On the hill overlooking the South Pasture was a stone carved into a shape so rough that only knowing it was an altar let you see that. The shepherds left small gifts on it to Duzi, the pasture’s god, at Midsummer and their own birthdays.

  Ilna refused to believe in the Great Gods, the Lady who gently gathered the souls of the righteous dead and the Shepherd who protected the righteous living. Ilna believed in Nothing, in oblivion, in the end of all hopes and fears. She’d had few hopes in life and those had been disappointed, every one. Death wouldn’t be a burden to her; quite the contrary.

  “You’re smiling again, Ilna,” Merota said.

  “I shouldn’t be,” Ilna replied, “but that doesn’t surprise me.”

  The mist was getting thicker; she could barely see the temple roof. She turned her head and found it moved glacially slow. Something was wrong.

  Chalcus continued to talk with animation to the woman on the bridge below. His lips moved but Ilna could no longer hear his voice, even faintly. The mist between her and Chalcus was very thick, smotheringly thick.

  Merota screamed, piercing the fog like a sword blade. The heaviness gripping Ilna’s muscles released. Merota pointed into the water, suddenly clear where it’d been dark as ink since the bridge appeared. In its depths were bodies of the Little People, the Prey. There were more than Ilna could count, preserved by the cold stream; and they were all male.

  Chalcus saw also. “By the sea-demon’s dick!” he shouted. His sword flicked from its sheath and toward the lounging woman.

  Swift as he was, the blade cut air alone. The woman—was she a woman?—slid into the stream like a water snake. For a moment she looked at Chalcus; then she trilled a musical laugh, gamboled for a moment among the drowned bodies, and vanished. Ilna couldn’t tell whether she’d gone up or down stream, slipped into a hole in the bank, or passed from sight in some other fashion.

  Chalcus joined them. His smile was forced and he dabbed his dry lips with his tongue.

  “So, my fine ladies,” he said. “Shall we cross the bridge as we planned?”

  “Yes,” said Ilna. “I’d like to get off it. I don’t like stone.”

  And she hadn’t liked the woman, either. She felt herself smile, this time because she’d had a better reason than mere jealousy to dislike and mistrust the creature.

  “ ‘Goodbye, pretty baby, I’ll be gone,’ ” Chalcus sang as he finally sheathed his sword.

  Although—

  “ ‘Goodbye, pretty baby, I’ll be gone.’ ”

  Because she was Ilna, she also had to admit that she’d been jealous.

  “ ‘You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.’ ”

  Cashel felt Protas grip him harder, then release as a new world formed around them. It felt as if the void had frozen into the shape of a mountain pass opening down into a circular valley.

  A woman with wings and a round, ugly face waited for them. Her hair was a mass of snakes. They twisted sluggishly, the way snakes do when they crawl out of the burrow where they’ve wintered and wait for sunlight to warm life into their scaly bodies. They were harmless sorts, snakes that eat grasshoppers and frogs and maybe a mouse if they’re lucky; anyway, Cashel didn’t expect to come close enough for one to bite him.

  “I am your guide,” said the woman. Her thick lips smiled. The only thing she wore was a belt of boars’ teeth; her skin was the color of buttermilk, thin with a hint of blue under the paleness.

  “Who are you?” Protas said. He had both hands on the crown; not, Cashel thought, to keep it on but because he felt better touching it. The way Cashel felt better for having the quarterstaff in his hands.

  The woman laughed. Her voice was much older than her body looked, but she couldn’t have been more ugly if she’d studied to do it for a long lifetime.

  “You can’t give me orders, boy,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter: a greater one than you commands me. I’m Phorcides, and I’m to take you to where you choose to go.”

  She laughed again and added, “Since you’re fools.”

  Cashel grinned. He’d been told that many times before and it wasn’t a judgment he argued with. But he knew too that the people, and not always people, who said that to him generally didn’t have much to brag about in the way they ran their own lives.

  Aloud he said, “Then let’s be going, Mistress Phorcides. Unless there’s reason we should wait?”

  Phorcides looked Cashel over carefully. He met her eyes and even smiled; she wasn’t challenging him, just showing curiosity for the first time since they’d met.

  “My name’s Cashel,” he said. “And this is Prince Protas. In case you hadn’t been told.”

  “Do you know what you’re getting into?” the woman said carefully. The snakes squirmed slowly on her forehead; doing a dance of some sort, it seemed.

  “No ma’am, I don’t,” Cashel said. He looked at Protas, but if the boy had different ideas he was keeping them to himself.

  “But you think that you’ll be able to bull through anything you meet,” Phorcides said. “Is that it?”

  “I think I’ll try, mistress,” Cashel said. “Now, should we be going?”

  “We’ll go now, which is what you mean,” Phorcides said. Her belt of curved yellow tusks rattled softly as she turned toward the valley. “As for whether we should—I have no idea. Perhaps you’ll come back and tell me after you’ve gotten where you’re going.”

  She started down the slope into the valley. Her wings were large and covered with real feathers, but Cashel didn’t see how they could possibly support a full-sized woman flying.

  There were real birds circling in the updrafts from the valley walls, though. They were high—higher than Cashel could even guess—but he could make out wings and bodies instead of them being just dots against the blue sky.

  The sides of the valley were pretty much raw rock with splotches of lichen, but there were a few real plants growing in cracks where wind-blown dirt had collected. Cashel didn’t recognize the most common sort, pretty little star-shaped flowers, but there were bellflowers too.

  On a distant crag, well above the pass the woman’d brought them in by, three goats with curved horns were staring at them intently. It made Cashel homesick for a moment, though “home” wasn’t so much Barca’s Hamlet as the life he’d led there. He and Ilna stayed in their half the mill; he’d tended sheep and picked up a little extra by doing whatever work required a strong man. There’d been nobody stronger than Cashel or-Kenset, in the borough or among the folk from distant places who came in the Fall for the Sheep Fair.

  Protas picked his way carefully, his face set. Cashel frowned but he couldn’t help. The path wasn’t bad but it was rocky; not so much a path at all as a way to get down the slope through a carpet of low plants. The boy had only slippers meant for carpeted palace floors on his feet.

  Cashel was barefoot, of course, but he was used to that. Even now that he wasn’t a shepherd any more, his soles were near as tough as a soldier’s boots.

  When Cashel lived in Barca’s Hamlet—when he was home—Sharina was the dau
ghter of the innkeeper, educated and wealthy as people thought of things in the borough. She’d been far beyond the hopes of a poor orphan boy who couldn’t so much as read his own name.

  Cashel smiled, embarrassed even to have that thought in the privacy of his own mind. The present where Sharina loved him was better than anything he’d ever dreamed of at home.

  They’d gotten down to where the rock was covered with grass and many little flowers—primrose, gentians, and buttercups. They made a nice mix of pink, blue and yellow in the green. There was hellebore too, though it was past blooming. Cashel wondered if Ilna would like the pattern the flowers made on the ground. She might, though she didn’t use colors much in her own work. This’d be a fine pasture, but there didn’t seem much in it to eat the foliage.

  A gray-backed viper sunned itself on an outcrop, turning its wedge-shaped head follow their progress. Cashel started toward it from reflex, readying his staff to crush the snake’s head; but then relaxed.

  The viper wasn’t close enough to hurt them, and Cashel didn’t have a flock of sheep he needed to keep safe. He’d kill in a heartbeat if he needed to, a snake or a man either one; but killing wasn’t a thing he did for fun.

  The valley floor was flat and broad, wide enough that an arrow wouldn’t carry to either side from where they walked in the middle of it. The walls were steep and gray; near as steep as the walls of the millhouse. At their base was a scree of rock that’d broken off the cliffs.

  “Why aren’t those sheep moving?” said Protas, nodding toward a lone pine under which three gray shapes clustered. “They haven’t moved even their heads since I saw them.”

  “They haven’t moved because they’re stone,” said Mistress Phorcides. “And anyway, they were ibexes, not sheep. Wild goats.”

  The boy opened his mouth to ask another question but glanced at Cashel before he did. Cashel shook his head slightly. Protas forced a smile, swallowed, and walked on without speaking further.

  There were plenty of things Cashel wondered about, but he didn’t think talking to the winged woman was a good way to get answers. The less contact they had with her, the better he’d like it.

  He didn’t doubt she’d take them to where they next were to go like the other guides had, but if they gave her the least opening there’d be something bad happening. Cashel trusted her the way he’d trust a weasel: you know exactly what a weasel’ll do if you give it the chance.

  Phorcides led them toward a rock face. Cashel thought the stand of beech trees concealed a cave or maybe even a bend in the canyon, but they came around the grove and found a sheer cliff. The rock layers were on end. A plate of mica that Cashel couldn’t’ve spanned with his outstretched staff gleamed in the solid wall.

  Phorcides turned and smiled again. Cashel didn’t like the smile, but that made it a piece with most other things about their guide.

  “I’ve brought you here,” she said. “I can’t take you any farther.”

  “Do we go through the rock, then?” Protas asked. He was using his adult tone and holding the crown in front of him with both hands.

  There was a man—the statue of a man—looking toward them around the trunk of a beech. Another—statue—was half-hidden in the stunted rhododendrons a stone’s throw away, and a third crouched behind a juniper. Cashel didn’t know if Protas had seen them. If the boy had, he was pretending he hadn’t.

  “Go through it?” Phorcides said. “That’s up to you. I can’t take you.”

  Her fat, pale lips spread even wider in a grin. “If I could,” she said, “I would have gone myself.”

  Protas turned toward the mica and raised the topaz crown slightly. Cashel shifted sideways so that he could keep an eye on the boy and the woman both at the same time.

  Phorcides opened her lifted hands toward Cashel like she was making an offering. The snakes on her brow were twining faster.

  “I’ve carried out my duty,” she said. “Now, Master Cashel—free me.”

  “I can’t free you,” Cashel said. His voice was harsh, surprising him. “I didn’t bind you, mistress, so I’m not the one to free you.”

  “Cheun…,” chanted Protas. It wasn’t his voice. All ten fingers gripped the topaz, but bright lights glittered deep inside it. “Cheaunxin aoabaoth momao.”

  “Free me!” Phorcides said. Her grin changed to an expression Cashel couldn’t describe. “Say that I am free, only that!”

  “Nethmomao…,” said whatever was speaking through the boy’s lips. “Souarmi.”

  “Leave us,” said Cashel in a growl. He lifted his staff. “Leave us now!”

  The snakes in Phorcides’ hair rose. She had a third eye in the middle of her forehead. It was closed, but the lid fluttered.

  “Marmaraoth!” the boy’s lips shouted. The cloudy mica was melting into the wall of a mirrored chamber that swelled to enclose Protas and Cashel too. There was a figure in the room already.

  Cashel stepped so that he stood between Phorcides and the boy, holding his staff vertical before him. She gave a shriek of baffled rage and whirled away, her middle eye still closed.

  The mirrored room closed about Cashel and the boy. In the entrance, the only opening, stood a creature the size of a man but with a cat’s long face. It gave a cry like a hunting panther and leaped, its stone-bladed spear aimed at Cashel’s throat.

  Chapter 15

  Sharina walked slowly back to where Tenoctris waited in her hedge of Blood Eagles. The old wizard was sitting up. A guard had found a shield for her to sit on, though her green silk robes were already probably beyond salvation from when she’d seated herself in the muck to work her incantation. She smiled to see Sharina and tried to rise.

  “Don’t,” called Sharina. “Just make room beside you.”

  She meant it as a joke, but she really was bone tired. She’d sheathed the Pewle knife, though she’d had trouble getting the tip into the mouth of the sheath. The muscles of her right arm were spasming so badly in reaction to her repeated chopping blows that she wouldn’t have been able to keep the heavy knife in her hand.

  The guards stepped aside to pass Sharina, then began chatting with the men who’d accompanied her in attacking the hellplants. She sat with an unexpected thump; her legs’d given way when she was halfway down.

  “Are you all right?” Tenoctris said with concern. “Your sleeve—”

  Sharina looked down in surprise. “Oh!” she said, remembering it. “I used the sleeve to wipe my knife. I couldn’t use the plants’ bodies.”

  She grinned. “That would be the traditional way to clean the blade, you see.”

  She leaned back and twisted so that she could see Double. He lay on his back in front of the ruins of his mirror. He didn’t move at all though his eyes were open; Sharina wasn’t sure whether or not he was conscious.

  “Tenoctris?” she said. “Did you make the swamp freeze?”

  The old wizard smiled in what Sharina decided was a look of shy triumph. “I made it possible for it to happen,” she said. “Yes, I suppose I did it. In a manner of speaking.”

  The sun was at zenith; the struggle with the hellplants had taken longer than Sharina’d thought while it was going on. The sheer scale of the business was staggering.

  The haze had burned off; the mud had thawed and now was drying. The hellplants had been reduced to stinking lumps, but the smell wasn’t any worse than Barca’s Hamlet when the first rains of springtime released the varied sourness frozen during winter. Besides, a strong sea breeze was cleansing the air, blowing inland without the arc of hills to constrain it.

  “How, Tenoctris?” Sharina asked. “Double there—”

  She nodded.

  “—is a great wizard, you said so yourself. How could you defeat the Green Woman where he couldn’t?”

  “Cervoran and the Green Woman are amazingly powerful,” Tenoctris said. “But they’re equals in strength. One might gain an advantage for the moment, but only for a moment. You saw how the struggle between them went. Saw wh
at a layman could see, at any rate.”

  “Yes,” agreed Sharina. “Although it seemed to me that the Green Woman was winning until you…”

  She didn’t know how to describe what’d happened, the sudden freezing and the clearing of the sky. She spun her index finger in a circle and said, “You did what you did.”

  “That was only a setback,” Tenoctris explained. “As the others had been. Cervoran—” She nodded toward the fallen wizard, now beginning to stir. She never called him Double.

  “—was gathering strength. And that was the key, you see. I’m almost powerless compared to either of those wizards, but I could see what they were doing. Possibly—”

  Tenoctris smiled, again in muted pride.

  “—better than either of them could see. And as they acted, I… linked their actions, I suppose you could call it. So that they neutralized one another instantly instead of stroke for stroke as they’d been doing. Everything stopped, all the wizardry. Leaving it a matter for men. And one woman.”

  Sharina hugged her older friend. “Leaving it to Mankind,” she said.

  Waldron was reorganizing his troops with Stand To signals and a tempest of swearing from officers of all ranks. A number of injured men were being carried to the rear by their fellows or walking while clutching their wounds. That surprised Sharina—the deep-chilled plants had been as sluggish as one expected plants to be—but only for a moment. No, the plants hadn’t been a danger, but the troops had cut themselves and their fellows in the wild slashing mêlée that’d swept the bay clear of the Green Woman’s minions.

  Double got to his feet with the jerky movements of a marionette. He looked around with a slack expression. He doesn’t know what happened, Sharina realized. She hugged Tenoctris again.

  Tenoctris looked puzzled. “Dear,” she said. She took a fresh bamboo split from the packet at her feet, but she didn’t attempt another spell for the moment. “Something is building.”