by David Drake
Garric’s shoulder had been throbbing as though a mule’d kicked him there. Now he didn’t notice it.
“It’s always like that in a fight, lad,” said Carus, his eyes focused on something far away in time. “There’s time enough to hurt afterwards; or there isn’t, and it doesn’t matter either way.”
“Master Cashel,” said the Bird. As usual, every mental syllable seemed to have been cut from hard steel. “Did you think the one called Cervoran took you with him for protection?”
“Yes sir,” Cashel said, polite to a stranger—even an inhuman stranger—even now that he was as close to blind rage as Garric had ever seen him. “I was to protect him and Prince Protas, I thought. Wasn’t that it?”
“Not in the way you think, Master Cashel,” the Bird said. “That one needed a twin present so that he could through his art shift danger from himself to the other twin. To your sister and her companions, that is.”
“It was necessary,” the wizards said. “Any price you humans pay to preserve me is cheap. Look!”
They pointed again to the Fortress of Glass pacing toward land. Garric knew the water that far off-shore was at least a thousand feet deep. The glittering mass was larger than he’d realized, far larger than the cave the Bird and its people had occupied.
“What you see is thin as a soap bubble,” the Bird said with its usual dispassion. “But it exists in many universes at once, so nothing in this world alone can harm it.”
“Only I can defeat the Green Woman,” the wizards said. Their paired voices were slightly apart in timbre, creating a shrill dissonance more unpleasant even than those voices separately. “The two humans who died do not matter. No number of dead humans matter. I—”
Garric drew the borrowed sword, a long horseman’s weapon like the one Carus had carried in life and Prince Garric had learned to use under the tutelage of his ancient ancestor. It came out of the scabbard smoothly, despite the blinding jab of pain when the blade came clear and Garric’s right arm rose above the shoulder.
Cashel was already moving, the staff out like a battering ram. His left hand led and the whole strength of his massive body was behind the blow. The iron ferrule was within a hand’s breadth of Cervoran’s swollen, smiling face when it stopped.
Cashel froze as though turned to stone; his shout of effort ended with a smothered grunt. Ruby light dusted the air.
Garric brought his sword around in a whistling arc. His body tingled as it had an instant before lightning blasted a tree nearby when a summer storm had swept the pasture while he watched the flock. The blade stopped above Double’s head; he couldn’t make the blade move any farther. Garric felt as though he’d been buried in hot sand, the grains individually yielding but together a weight beyond the ability of even his strong young body to force through.
“—will crush the Green Woman!” the wizards said. “I will be God!”
They turned to face the oncoming Fortress, raising their athames. “I alone matter!” they shrilled. “I will be God!”
Chapter 17
Ilna watched the Fortress of Glass walking toward them. It was easily the most complex—and therefore lovely—pattern she’d encountered in the waking world, though when she entered her reveries she glimpsed the threads of the cosmos itself. Occasionally Ilna had even followed those threads far enough to imagine the existence of the Weaver through Her work.
Considering herself as a thread in another’s pattern, Ilna felt her lips twist in a wry smile. To her surprise, quite a number of things now struck her as amusing. That in itself amused her. Everyone was talking but almost nobody seemed to be listening. Because Ilna was silent, no one paid attention to her. She was used to that, and indeed it was the state that she preferred.
The wizards who’d been responsible for the deaths of her family had set a fallen brazier upright on its tripod legs and lighted the charcoal with a spark of wizardlight. They were chanting, ignoring the humans about them.
Ilna looked at their dead, puffy features. Only the bodies were dead, of course. The inhuman spark within them used the flesh merely for transportation, no more a part of the real being than a sailor is part of his ship.
A sailor… Well, Chalcus had never doubted that he’d die someday. Merota would’ve said the same thing if she’d been asked, though she was probably too young to understand just what that meant. Perhaps not, though: she’d been a clever child, and she’d stood beside Ilna and Chalcus in places where death was a more likely outcome than life for all of them.
As Cervoran chanted with his Double, Ilna remembered the feel of the cold, waxen flesh as she’d dragged the wizard off the pyre which would otherwise have consumed him. What would’ve happened if she’d let the fire have its way? Certainly that flesh, that form, wouldn’t have loosed the Coerli on Ilna and her family; but would that have changed the result? As the thing of crystal marched toward them from the sea, it was easy to imagine a being of fire facing it and the whole island beneath a blackened waste.
The pattern was beyond Ilna’s comprehension. What she knew, with a clarity that none of her friends could imagine, was that a pattern existed.
Sharina gripped Cashel’s left wrist in both hands and tried to move it. He remained frozen, as motionless as the sun at its peak in the pale sky. Sharina turned, caught Ilna’s eye, and cried, “Ilna? Can you do something? Tenoctris says she can’t.”
Tenoctris stood with a quiet expression. She held one of her slender bamboo wands, but she appeared to have forgotten it as she looked at the bird. It turned its head, unaffected by his paralysis, but it’d stopped talking.
“I can’t grasp the pattern, Sharina,” Ilna said, speaking in a normal voice. She was picking out the knots of the fabric she’d made to return herself from the tapestry garden. “It’s far too complex for me. Even for me.”
“Then there’s nothing,” Sharina said, despair giving way to resignation. “Nothing any of us can do. If those two—”
She nodded unhappily toward Cervoran and his Double, dabbing their athames toward the brazier as they chanted.
“—can’t stop the Green Woman, then we’re doomed.”
“I didn’t say there’s nothing I could do,” said Ilna sharply. The only emotion she’d brought out of the garden was anger. She was back to where she’d been for the first eighteen years of her life, before she’d met Chalcus and Merota. “I said I couldn’t see where any action I took fitted into the whole fabric, but I’ve decided that doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with the part of the pattern that’s before me, and somebody else can worry about the rest.”
“I don’t understand?” said Sharina. She glanced from Ilna to the fortress, approaching with ponderous inexorability. It didn’t move fast, but it didn’t need to. She drew the Pewle knife from its belt sheath.
“The Green Woman hasn’t harmed me, Sharina,” Ilna said calmly as she drew the other knotted pattern from her sleeve. “I’m not fool enough to believe that makes her my friend, but I know very well who my enemies are.”
Ilna nodded toward Cervoran and Double. Smiling, she loosed a knot of the second pattern.
The short noon shadows beneath the wizards and their brazier broadened and deepened. For an instant, no one else noticed. Cervoran screamed, and a heartbeat later his Double screamed in near unison.
The Shadow swelled over them. They turned their heads to stare at Ilna. None of the other victims had been able to move even that much after the Shadow had gripped them.
Ilna smiled. Good. They must feel every hair-fine detail of what was happening to them.
They screamed. The flesh melted and the bones as well, but still the screams hung in the air as unseen portions of the wizards continued to dissolve; and Ilna smiled.
The Shadow dimmed and vanished. Cashel and Garric broke out of their trance, looking around with the startled expressions of men who’d taken a step that wasn’t there while climbing stairs.
“It was your choice, Mistress Ilna,” said the silent voice of t
he bird on Garric’s shoulder. “But if you hadn’t acted, I would have. They did to me what they did to you.”
“I’m sorry,” Ilna said. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
She stepped over to the brazier and threw the fabric into it. The yarn shrank, blackened, and finally burst into flame. The pungency of burning wool struggled with the general vegetable stench of this soggy wasteland.
“You are destroying the garden?” the bird said. “You know that most of the denizens will die when they’re freed back into their own worlds, do you not?”
Ilna shrugged. In the palace in Mona the ancient tapestry was smoldering to ash just as this fragment of her own making did.
“Everything dies eventually, bird,” Ilna said. “Even you. Somebody cruel made a menagerie, and I’ve ended it. That’s all.”
“Even I will die,” said the bird. “But not you, Mistress Ilna. Not for longer than you can now imagine.”
“No?” said Ilna. “Well, I’ve had other disappointments.”
She looked at the creature sharply and added, “Are you a wizard, bird?”
“No, mistress,” said the bird. “I am a mathematician. Usually I would say that means I understand things that wizards do not, but in this case I do not think that is true. Still, I believe I understand enough.”
All about them people were running, talking; praying, many of them. And to the south, the Fortress of Glass rose higher with every stride as the sea bottom shelved toward the bar closing Calf’s Head Bay. Its steps thundered, and waves came rolling in.
Sharina rested her left hand on Cashel’s shoulder; just for the stability, not for anything he could do or she even wanted him to do. Just because he was Cashel. The ground shook each time the fortress’ shining legs paced forward.
Horns and trumpets were calling the army to Stand To. Soldiers who’d scattered during the chaos of the past hour were now forming back behind the standards of their units. Most of them had only swords: their spears, useless against the hellplants, were stacked far to the rear with their baggage.
Spears wouldn’t be any use against the Fortress of Glass either. Nor would swords, of course.
Garric turned toward her and said, “Sharina? You’ve been regent while I was gone? Can you think of anything I should do? Because I’ve just fallen into this.”
Liane hovered at Garric’s side, face set but her eyes dry again. Had she been able to explain anything to him in the few minutes since he returned from wherever he’d been?
“No,” Sharina said. “It’s all—”
Suddenly the frustration gave way and she was again a girl talking to the brother she trusted completely. “Garric, it’s been like falling off a cliff. Liane and I—”
She looked at Tenoctris, standing nearby with a cheerful, intent expression.
“—and Tenoctris, of course, and everybody, we’ve been trying to do something, but mostly it was Cervoran and the Green Woman, and now there’s just her. It.”
At the corner of her eye, she caught Ilna standing alone with a faint smile. Her fingers were weaving yarn into a pattern that only she could understand. Garric had been in a place where there were marshes and rain—and murderous cat men…
Sharina’s fingers tightened on Cashel’s arm. Cashel is here. He’ll always be here. He won’t die and leave me.
“That’s what I guessed,” Garric said. “I’ll join Waldron, then. May the Shepherd protect you, sis. And you too, Cashel.”
“But Garric…,” Sharina said. She didn’t know how to go on. Her brother wore nothing but a sword belt and a ragged tunic that seemed to have been made from sacking. He was bruised and scraped, and his shoulder wound should’ve been disabling; perhaps it would be as soon as he stopped moving and his body got a chance to remind him of its presence.
She coughed. “I don’t think the army will be able to do much,” she said. “Do you?”
“All the more reason for the prince to stand with his troops, don’t you think?” Garric said, giving her a lopsided smile. He turned, gave Liane a quick hug with his left arm, and set off toward the royal standard. As he walked, he drew the borrowed sword again. Liane followed at his side, a half pace back.
The crystal bird hung in the air before Sharina. It was exactly where it’d been when Garric was talking to her. Its wings were motionless, but the play of light over and within the creature seemed to be more than merely sunlight on uncountable facets.
“Guess I’ll get limbered up,” Cashel said with a shy smile. He moved a few paces in front of her and began spinning his quarterstaff. As it rotated in slow circles, wizardlight trailed the ferrules in blue sparkles.
Sharina licked her lower lip; she’d drawn blood when she bit it. “Tenoctris?” she asked. “Will he be able to…?”
She nodded toward Cashel’s back. About anyone else that would’ve been a joke or a madman’s question, but Cashel’s powers went well beyond the strength of his great muscles.
“No, dear,” Tenoctris said. “The thing that you see—”
She nodded toward the oncoming fortress. Though it walked on its tripod of legs, rising increasingly high above the sea’s surface, it didn’t strike Sharina as a living thing. Watching it was like standing in the path of a vast landslide, swift-moving and terrible but not alive.
“—is only a surface. The real Fortress of Glass exists in many times. Nothing that happens to it in this world alone can affect any significant portion of the whole.”
The old wizard looked at the hovering crystal bird and said, “Isn’t that so, milord?”
“I am Bird, not a lord,” said the glittering creature. “I was one of many equals, and now I am one. But you are correct about the fortress, Tenoctris.”
It made a clucking, clicking sound with its body, then resumed in its mental voice, “Nothing I saw in the ages I lived with the Grass People suggested that I would meet humans who understood the equations that are my life.”
Tenoctris lifted her chin in the direction of the Fortress of Glass. Each step now sent the sea rolling onto the shore with a snarl.
“Those are the bones of your race, Master Bird,” she said. “Will you leave them in the hands of their slayer, to kill more beings as innocent as your people were?”
“I told Garric that I would return him to his world for his purposes and for mine,” said the Bird’s silent voice. “I will complete my purposes here. But Tenoctris—you know what that will mean for your world and your people?”
“I know,” said Tenoctris, nodding. “Forces must balance. But it must be done.”
“The sides of the equation must be equal,” said the Bird. “But I regret the cost to you and yours, for some human beings have treated me as one of their own.”
“Go,” said Tenoctris, pointing her bamboo wand toward the fortress towering against the clear sky. “There’s very little time.”
“There is enough time,” said the Bird. It rose into the air and headed seaward with jerky, fluttering motions of its wings. Faintly, as though from an unimaginable distance, the mental voice added, “There is all eternity.”
Cashel spun his quarterstaff in a simple circle before him, varying the movement with an occasional figure-8 to make sure he was working all his muscles. The rhythm was simple and soothing; his body could keep it up all day, leaving his mind free to watch the dance of universes on the surface of the Fortress of Glass.
He couldn’t follow the pattern, not really, but it was a delight to watch something more wondrously formed than anything in this world or any single world. Cashel’s eyes saw shimmering light, but his mind showed him the connections stretching through time in all directions. Ages rose and rolled and tumbled again into the depths, not of this universe but of the cosmos that was all universes. The Fortress of Glass was perfect, and because it was perfect there could be nothing more beautiful.
It was going to crush Cashel and everyone he loved. It was his duty to stop it. That was impossible but of course he’d try. Of course he
’d try.
“Cashel,” said Sharina behind him. “Stop spinning your staff and hold me. It’s all right. Hold me!”
Something flickered into Cashel’s line of vision. Because he was focused-eyes and mind both—on the fortress, for a moment it was just that: a flicker. Then—Cashel saw the bird that’d been on Garric’s shoulder. It was flying toward the Fortress of Glass, and like the fortress the bird’s shimmer held all worlds and all times.
“Cashel, it’s all right,” Sharina repeated. “Please—hold me. Something’s going to happen.”
This time Cashel brought his staff to a halt and held it upright. He stepped backward, putting himself beside Sharina and holding her in his free arm. He didn’t take his eyes off the fortress and the crystalline glitter that flew toward it.
The Fortress of Glass had a cold, perfect beauty, but Cashel or-Kenset was human and of one world. In Cashel’s world, Sharina was as close to perfection as there could be. He smiled shyly, his eyes on the looming fortress and the bird mounting so high in the air that it now looked like a mote wheeling in the sunlight.
Tenoctris said, “The fortress is bigger than it seems. I suppose you and your sister know that, Cashel?”
“Yes ma’am,” said Cashel. He was speaking for Ilna, but he didn’t have any doubt about it. It was all so clear that he sort of couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t clear to everybody. He knew it wasn’t his eyes that were seeing the fortress as it was, though.
Sharina nestled close to him. It was so wonderful…
“Whatever happens to the fortress,” Tenoctris continued, “happens in all the times that the fortress is part of. If the fortress vanishes, something will take its place. I think the times themselves will merge to balance what’s being taken away.”
“I don’t understand,” said Sharina.
Cashel didn’t understand either, but it wasn’t the sort of question he cared about. He couldn’t change whatever it was that Tenoctris was expecting, so he might as well wait to learn. He’d deal with whatever it meant when it’d happened, just like he always had in the past.
