The Fortress Of Glass

by David Drake

  Sharina looked southward, to where the Fortress of Glass gleamed on the distant horizon. “The Green Woman is attacking?” she asked.

  Double bent and picked up the athame he’d dropped when he fell. His face was no longer vacant, but he didn’t appear to be ready to resume the difficult business of wizardry.

  “I don’t know,” Tenoctris said. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”

  With sudden decision she went on, “Help me up, please, Sharina. I think I would rather be standing for whatever’s about to happen.”

  A recently fallen tree lay across the path. Its trunk was thicker than Garric was tall. He eyed it. He’d climb over if he were sure of his right arm, but…

  “The band of Coerli we escaped went around the root end,” the Bird said. “That’s to your left.”

  Garric took the implied direction; he could see the clawed footprints. “Will they clear the path?” he asked. The detour added at least fifty yards to the trip.

  “No,” said the Bird. “Stone tools aren’t satisfactory for cutting anything so large, and no band has more than twenty or so males to do the work. The trees are giant horsetails, and they don’t live long anyway. The Coerli find it easier to go around fallen trees than to maintain a straight route.”

  “An uncle of mine was a great hunter of wolves,” said the ghost in Garric’s mind. “There were wolves on Haft in my time. He covered his banquet hall with wolfskins instead of using tapestries. He’d have liked these cat beasts even better for sport.”

  Then he added, the musing humor gone from his voice, “I wouldn’t mind that either. We’d see how long it took to convince them that eating human children had been a bad idea.”

  Rain had washed the upturned roots clean of leaf mold. There wasn’t a tap root and the mat didn’t seem sufficient to support the massive trunk.

  “There is no wind here,” the Bird said. “The abyss was a very peaceful place when my people lived; and even now, compared to much of the world.”

  Garric didn’t reply. He tried to imagine how he would feel if everyone he cared about—if every human being—were suddenly killed, but he survived. He couldn’t begin to understand such a terrible thing. Even toying with that as a possibility made him very uncomfortable.

  “Do not be concerned, Garric,” the Bird said. “Grief is as alien to me as love would be. Besides, it will be over soon.”

  The cave was a smooth oval punched in the coarse black walls of the chasm. Garric paused when he saw the shadowed curve, staying close to the fallen horsetail so that the fan of roots would break up his outline to anyone watching from inside.

  “There are no Coerli in the cave,” the Bird said. “There is no one, Garric. Except in my memory.”

  “All right,” said Garric, uneasy again. Holding the wooden dagger in an underhand grip, he walked briskly to the cave through the undergrowth of knee-high mushrooms.

  For a moment he was in darkness. The Bird fluttered ahead with its usual jerking motion. Points of light appeared in the ceiling, floor, and walls, then spread into a glow that suffused all the surfaces. Garric’s foot trembled—not quite pausing, but almost—then came down. He walked the rest of the way into the inner chamber without hesitation.

  It was a half-sphere, covered entirely with mica. Apart from the oval entrance passage there was no distinguishing aspect to the interior. The muted light seemed to come from deep within the surrounding rock.

  Garric turned slowly. No matter where he looked, he caught reflections of himself in the corners of his eyes; it made him edgy. King Carus, watching through the same eyes with the reflexes of a warrior who’d lived his whole adult life by his quickness and his sword, became much more edgy.

  The Bird hovered in the middle of the inner chamber; the exact center, Garric guessed, though he couldn’t be objectively sure because of the wall’s curve and mirrored reflections. He looked toward the entrance passage, then back to the Bird. Its wings were still, but it hung in the air regardless. Lights glittered in sequence within its crystalline body.

  “Bird, what should I do?” Garric asked. He spoke to hear a voice in the charged stillness.

  “Wait,” said the Bird. “I will accompany you to your world. I must arrange the forces in a fashion that will serve your purpose and mine as well, that is all.”

  Garric turned away from his guide. The play of light in the Bird’s body disturbed him in fashions he couldn’t put words to. The rhythm was like the low vibration that heralded an earthquake. He thought he saw figures moving within the mirrored walls, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Are you a wizard?” he asked. Speaking to hear a voice, but he had to hear a voice in this inhuman, lifeless place! “Are you, Bird?”

  The Bird’s cluck of laughter broke Garric’s tension. “I am a mathematician, Garric,” it said. “I move points on a scale and adjust potentials. There is no mystery to what I do, and no art.”

  There were figures in the walls, but they weren’t identifiable; they weren’t necessarily even human. Some were superimposed on others the way a painted canvas may show ghosts of earlier pictures beneath the present surface.

  “How is what you do different from what Marzan does?” Garric asked. “Or Sirawhil?”

  “Marzan can achieve effects that I cannot,” the Bird said. He clucked again. “But then, I know what is really happening, and he does not.”

  Black spots appeared in the walls and floor. Garric thought they were where the points of light had first glittered. Beams of red and blue wizardlight, thin as spider web but of densely saturated color, spread to weave the spots together.

  Lines pierced Garric’s chest and left forearm. Moving put him in the path of other lines. He couldn’t feel any contact; if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t have known they were there.

  He transferred the dagger to his left hand for a moment and wiped his right palm on his tunic. The coarse cloth was sodden, but the touch helped somewhat. He flexed his right hand several times, then took the dagger in it again.

  “Prepare yourself, Garric,” the Bird said. “We will accomplish your purposes, and then I will accomplish mine.”

  The hair stood up all over Garric’s body; the web of wizardlight burned even brighter. The Bird clucked, louder than before.

  The mica walls vanished, plunging Garric into a plane of interweaving figures.

  Ilna followed Chalcus and Merota off the cold, polished stone of the bridge. The grass between her toes felt good by contrast.

  The round temple was in front of them, brightly sunlit in a grove of pines. The roof was gilded—or simply gold? She didn’t suppose it mattered—and had a circular window in the middle. There were tall columns around the outside and half as many thinner columns in an inner ring. Both numbers were too large for Ilna to count without a tally, but she was instinctively sure of the proportion.

  Merota looked back at Ilna but her eyes then drifted past. “Oh,” she said. “It’s gone.”

  Ilna glanced over her shoulder. The bridge, a solid mass of pink and gray, had vanished into the wall of curling white. Only here and there could Ilna see above the mist the top of a tree growing from the maze beyond.

  “There’s nothing in the hedges that we wanted, child,” said Chalcus, giving their surroundings a different sort of look from the ones he’d been shooting about him from before he stepped off the bridge. Instead of looking for dangers, he was now considering the island as a place where a young girl and her companions might want to be. “The sun’s clearer here. And should we wish to go back, why, our Ilna would have us there in a flick of her fingers. Would you not, dear love?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Ilna said austerely. She walked toward the temple, letting her mind drink in not only the shape but the reasons behind the shape of the building in every detail. She’d laid lengths of yarn parallel in her left palm and clamped them with her thumb, but she didn’t start tying them yet.

  The island had plenty of vegetation
—the pines surrounding the temple and the flowers and grasses covering the ground. It was all pretty enough, if you liked that sort of thing, and Cashel would doubtless tell her it’d make a fine pasture.

  There was nothing here for human beings to eat, though. Well, Ilna had no intention of staying on the island longer than it took to find their way back to their own world. She had business there with Double.

  She walked up to the temple. It stood on a platform of three low steps. The floor within was a mosaic of tiny stones in a pattern as delicate as the interlocking fibers of a bird’s feathers. From any distance the floor would’ve looked gray; in reality it was black and white, always one or the other. Only the eye of the viewer mixed the colors.

  Chalcus was taking Merota around the structure, keeping himself and the child out of Ilna’s way. It wouldn’t have mattered: when she focused on a difficult pattern, nothing intruded on her concentration.

  And this was a very difficult pattern. This was every leaf and rootlet of the tapestry garden, and it was more.

  Ilna began to knot her bits of yarn, using them to work herself through the greater pattern in the stone. She stepped into the sanctum proper and concentrated on a tiny segment: a piece small enough to cover with the palm of her hand.

  She looked up at the roof opening. It was the eye of the building, not only part of the pattern but the garden’s window onto the wider cosmos. The grating over it was woven from gold wire so fine that it blurred in sunlight like the sheen of oil on water. There could be stories in an oil slick, too, and the soul of the garden was in this golden eye.

  The beasts who called themselves Princes had spoken of the One who created the garden. If the One existed, he’d left his mark in this eye; but increasingly Ilna believed that the garden, the tapestry, had woven itself while the cosmos congealed out of chaos.

  There was danger here.

  Merota screamed. Ilna looked out from the light-shot complexity of her mind. Merota was screaming, probably had been screaming, but Ilna hadn’t noticed until the pattern she was visualizing warned her of what was going on in her immediate surroundings.

  Chalcus stood beside the building, in the curved shadow of the roof. His sword and dagger slashed in bright arcs—through nothing, dark shadowed nothing that formed about him. The Shadow was separate from what lay on the ground in normal fashion. His face was set and his lips were closed in a taut line.

  Ilna acted by instinct, sweeping off her outer tunic and spinning it to a part of the mosaic floor that no one—not even her with her eyes and intellect—could have told from any other part of the interwoven design. The soft wool fabric settled silently, blocking the pattern in stone from the pattern in the light streaming through the grill over the temple’s upturned eye.

  The Shadow vanished. Chalcus tumbled free. Only now did he shout: wordlessly, mindlessly—the bellow of a great beast loosed from a trap. His blades danced again, rippling the empty air and plowing razor-fine furrows in the soil. Grass and a dozen buttercups fell, yellow victims of the flickering steel.

  Chalcus looked at Ilna, his eyes wide and full of horror. “Dear one?” he said.

  “It’s all right,” said Ilna. “It’s a—”

  She nodded to her tunic. She’d woven the cloth herself, a simple fabric as fine and soft as the best silk.

  “I disrupted the pattern,” she said. “The Shadow’s a part of this temple, really. Part of the tapestry, a necessary part, I see. I can deal with it.”

  Ilna looked at the knotted pattern in her left hand. She hadn’t dropped it when she took off her tunic. She had no recollection of how she’d moved, just that she had. Her… her soul, she supposed. Her soul had known what to do and her body had done it, without her mind being involved.

  “While your tunic’s there, the thing’s trapped? Is that what you’re telling me, dear one?” Chalcus said. He jerked his head in a nod toward the garment she’d flung with deceptive ease to the pavement. “Is it then, we’re safe?”

  Merota stood silent, biting on the knuckles of her left hand and staring at Chalcus. She twisted her eyes for an instant to Ilna, then returned them to the sailor.

  “We’re safe, yes, I told you,” Ilna snapped. She walked to the tunic, picked it up, and shrugged into it with more trouble than she’d had taking it off. “Not because of this—”

  She tapped the pavement with her big toe. She disliked stone but she could use it. She could use the thing that laired in this pattern, too, though it was as cold and heartless as the tiny chips that gave it life. Gave it existence, at any rate.

  “—but because I see it whole. It won’t dare to bother us again.” Ilna started to smile but swallowed the expression; that would have been boasting. She went on quietly, “Another time I might have to cover another part of the pattern here in the pavement; but I could. It won’t be back.”

  “Then, dearest…,” Chalcus said. “Dear one, dear heart—let us go out of this place now, may we not?”

  “I want to leave,” Merota whispered. “Please. Please.”

  “If you’ll be quiet,” said Ilna sharply, “we’ll be able to leave that much sooner. The exit’s in the eye overhead. It shouldn’t take me very long to find a way to open it for us.”

  “I’m not afraid to die, dear heart,” Chalcus said. He smiled, but his face showed as much sadness as Ilna had ever seen him express. “The place that thing was taking me, though… If there’s a hell, my love, that’s where it was taking me.”

  “There’s Hell,” said Ilna, remembering infinite grayness and the voice that had whispered to her. She looked at Chalcus, then down to the yarn in her hand. She began to pick out the knots and rejoin the strands into a different pattern.

  “Master Chalcus,” she said, eyeing the interwoven mosaic as her fingers worked, “I think before I open the door for us, I’ll leash the Shadow. That way it won’t come back while I’m occupied with getting us out of this place.”

  “That would be…,” Chalcus said. His face spread into a rollicking smile. His curved sword and dagger slid into their sheaths over his left and right hips with the same liquid ease that Ilna showed while weaving. He stepped toward her, swept her into his arms, and kissed her hard.

  Ilna frowned in amazement when the sailor backed away, still smiling. “Master Chalcus,” she said, “this is scarcely the place for such.”

  “And what better place could there be, my dearest?” Chalcus said. “It’s where you are and I am, and both of us living. Life’s a chancy business, love; and what a fool I’d feel should I die in the next moment without having kissed the love of my life once more when I could have. Not so?”

  Ilna sniffed, but she didn’t snap back at his foolishness. He’d put it as a joke, but in her heart she recognized the simple truth of what he’d just said.

  She stepped to Merota, hugged her, and then held an arm out to Chalcus as well. The three of them stood tightly together for a moment; then Ilna backed away.

  “Now,” she said, “don’t disturb me. I can do this thing—”

  “You said you could, Ilna,” said Merota. “Of course you can!”

  “I can do this thing,” Ilna repeated, “but I can’t start and not finish.”

  She allowed herself a slight smile.

  “If that happens, the Shadow will finish me and I suppose all of us, because it will be very angry. Do you understand?”

  Chalcus nodded and grinned. Merota opened her mouth to speak—to agree, almost certainly—but Chalcus touched a finger to the girl’s lips before a sound came out. He moved with the grace of falling water and the speed of light itself…

  Ilna looked at the golden grating over the eye. That was where the key was, not in the floor itself but in what the grating’s shadow threw onto the mosaic. She began to knot her cords, making herself a part of the pattern.

  She could feel the Shadow’s strength. It was aware of what she was doing, but she had it now. There was no way it could escape unless she let it escape, and she
would die before she did that.

  Ilna’s lips were tight with concentration but she smiled in her mind: she would certainly die very shortly after the Shadow escaped, should that happen. From what Chalcus said—and more from what she’d seen in his eyes as he said it—that would be a very bad way to die.

  Chalcus and Merota had gone outside the temple. The child was picking flowers. The sailor watched her pick flowers and watched Ilna knot yarn and watched every other thing around them that might become an enemy or hide one.

  She was very close to completion; a few more knots and the fabric—yes, she was not only binding the Shadow but bending it to her absolute will. The tapestry was even more marvelously complex than she’d realized before she wove herself into it. Only a master could have created the Garden, and Ilna os-Kenset was that One’s equal to be able to reweave what He/She/It had—The domed roof of the temple shone and became unnaturally clear. The eye and the grating still existed, but not in the universe that was forming itself over the temple. Ilna continued to weave, her fingers carrying out the understanding of her mind.

  Merota cried out; Chalcus had drawn his blades. Cashel, Protas, and the dead-alive Cervoran were standing beside Ilna in the center of the temple.

  Cashel had his quarterstaff raised to strike. Rushing toward them were cats the size of men, snarling in fury with their weapons raised.

  Ilna wove.

  Cashel couldn’t move as quickly as his leaping opponent, but reflex honed in many fights jerked him back at the same time as the quarterstaff rose in his hand. He didn’t so much hit the cat man as lift the iron-bound hickory into a place the cat man leapt through. Leaped into, at any rate, because Cashel was arm’s length back from where the creature’d thought he’d be when it lunged.

  Air and blood whuffed from the creature’s mouth as the staff smashed its ribs. It flew upward into the mirrored ceiling, hitting hard enough to flatten its skull. It’d already been dead.

  Another cat man was bounding down the entrance passage toward Cashel. There was no other way in or out of the domed room. Cashel stepped forward, again confounding his attacker.