“It’s all right,” Gerin said urgently, before that mad gaze could light on him and decide he was the cause of whatever night terror Van faced. “It’s only a dream. Lie down and sleep some more.”
“A dream?” Van said in a strange, uncertain voice. “No, it couldn’t be.” He seemed to shrink a little as consciousness came back. “By the gods, maybe it was at that. I can hardly believe it.”
He set the knife back on the floor, sat down at the edge of the bed with a massive forearm across his eyes. Gerin understood that; now he noticed his own throbbing head, and Van’s had to be ten times worse. The outlander stood again, this time to use the chamber pot. Gerin also understood that. “Pass it to me when you’re done,” he said.
“I thought I was lost in a black pit,” Van said wonderingly. “Things were looking at me, I know they were, but I couldn’t see even the shine of their eyes—too dark. How could I fight them if I couldn’t see them?” He shuddered, then groaned. “I wish my head would fall off. Even the moonlight hurts my eyes.”
“I had a dark dream, too, though I don’t remember as much of it as you do,” Gerin said. Analytical even hung over, he went on, “Odd, that. You’ve drunk much more than I have, yet you recall more. I wonder why.”
“Captain, I don’t give a—” Van’s reply was punctuated by a frightened wail that came in through the window with the overbrilliant moonlight. The Fox recognized the innkeeper’s voice, even distorted by fear.
More than his headache, more than his own bad dream, that fear kept him from falling back to sleep. Van said nothing but, by the way he tossed and fidgeted, he lay a long time wakeful, too.
Breakfast the next morning was not a happy time. Gerin spooned up barley porridge with his eyes screwed into slits against the daylight. Van drew up a bucket of water from the well outside the inn and poured it over his head. He came back in dripping and snorting, but turned aside with a shudder from the bowl of porridge the innkeeper offered him.
The innkeeper did his best to seem jolly, but his smiles, although they stretched his mouth wide, failed to reach his eyes. Little by little, he stopped pretending, and grew almost as somber as his suffering guests. “I have some word of the Sibyl, good my sirs,” he said.
“Tell us,” Gerin urged. “You’ll give me something to think about besides my poor decrepit carcass.” Van did not seem capable of coherent speech, but nodded—cautiously, as if afraid the least motion might make his head fall off.
The innkeeper said, “I hear she still lies asleep in the bed where the priests put her, now and again thrashing and crying out, as if she has evil dreams.”
“I wonder if hers are the same as mine and Van’s,” Gerin said: “darkness and unseen things moving through it.”
“I saw—or rather, did not see—the same last night.” The innkeeper gave a theatrical shiver. His eyes flicked over to Dyaus’ altar by the fireplace. The king of the gods might hold the ghosts at bay, but seemed powerless against these more frightening seemings that came in the night.
Van made a hoarse croaking noise, then said, “I wonder what Aragis dreamt last night.” He didn’t quite whisper, but used only a small piece of his big voice: more would have hurt him.
“Are you sure you won’t eat something?” Gerin asked him. “We’ll want to do a lot of traveling today, to get beyond the wood and also past that peasant village where they hunted us in the night.”
“I’m sure,” Van said, quietly still. “You’d make a fine mother hen, Captain, but if I put aught in my belly now, we’d just lose time stopping the wagon so I could go off into the woods and unspit.”
“You know best,” the Fox said. The porridge was bland as could be, but still sat uncertainly in his own stomach, and lurched when he stood up. “I do think we ought to go upstairs and don our armor, though. However much we hurt, we’re liable to have some handwork ahead of us.”
“Aye, you’re right,” Van answered. “I’d be happier to sit here a while—say, a year or two—till I feel I might live, or even want to, but you’re right.” With careful stride, he made his way to the stairs and up them. Gerin followed.
The rasps and clangs of metal touching metal made the Fox’s head hurt and, by Van’s mutters, did worse to him. “Don’t know how I’m supposed to fight, even if I have to,” Gerin said. “If I could drive somebody away by puking on him, I might manage that, but I’m not good for much more.”
“I feel the same way,” Van said, “but no matter how sick I am, if it’s a choice between fighting and dying, I expect I’ll do the best job of fighting I can.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Gerin said. “If you think I’ll be looking for a fight today, though, you’re daft.”
“Nor I, and I’m a sight fonder of them than you are,” Van said. “The thing of it is, a fight may be looking for you.”
“Why do you think I’m doing this?” Gerin shrugged his shoulders a couple of times to fit his corselet as comfortably as he could, then jammed his bronze pot of a helm over his head. Sighing, he said, “Let’s go.”
“Just a moment.” Van adjusted the cheekpieces to his own fancy helm, then nodded. By his pained expression, that hurt, too. Anticipating still more future pain, he said, “And we’ll have to listen to the cursed wagon wheels squeaking all the rest of the day, too.”
Gerin hadn’t thought of that. When he did, his stomach churned anew. “We’ve got to do something about that,” he declared.
“Stay here a while longer?” Van suggested.
“We’ve stayed too long already, thanks to you and your carouse. Curse me if I want to spend another useless day here because you drank the ale jar dry—and I helped, I admit it,” the Fox added hastily. He plucked at his beard. Thinking straight and clear through a pounding headache was anything but easy, but after a few seconds he snapped his fingers. “I have it! I’ll beg a pot of goose grease or chicken fat or whatever he has from the innkeeper. It won’t be perfect, the gods know, but it should cut the noise to something we have hope of standing.”
Van managed the first smile he’d risked since he woke up. He made as if to slap Gerin on the back, but thought better of it; perhaps he imagined how he would have felt had someone bestowed a similar compliment on him in his present delicate condition. “By the gods, Captain, it can’t hurt,” he exclaimed. “I was thinking we’d have to suffer the whole day long, and no help for it.”
“No point in suffering if you don’t have to,” Gerin said. “And I can’t think of a better way to use wits than to keep from suffering.”
The innkeeper produced a pot of chicken fat without demur, though he said, “There’s a cure for a long night I never ran across before.”
“Aye, that’s just what it is, but not the way you mean.” The Fox explained why he wanted the fat. The innkeeper looked bemused, but nodded.
Gerin crawled under the wagon and applied a good coat of grease to both axles. When he came out and stood up again, Van said, “We’ll draw flies.”
“No doubt,” Gerin said. “After a while, it’ll go bad and start to stink, too, and somebody will have to scrub it off. For today, it’ll be quieter. Wouldn’t you say that’s worth it?”
“Oh, aye, you get no quarrel from me there.” Van’s laugh was but a faint echo of his usual booming chortle, but it served. “Thing of it is, I’m usually the one with no thought but for today and you’re always fretting about tomorrow or the year after or when your grandson’s an old graybeard. Odd to find us flip-flopped so.”
The Fox considered that, then set it aside. “Too much like philosophy for early in the day, especially after too much ale the night before. Shall we be off?”
“Might as well,” Van said. “Can I humbly beg you to take the reins for the first part of the go? I don’t think you hurt yourself as bad as I did.”
“Fair enough.” Gerin clambered onto the seat at the front of the wagon. The reins slid across the calluses on his palms. Van got up beside him, moving with an old man’s caution
.
“The lord Biton bless the both of you, good my sirs,” the groom said.
Gerin flicked the reins. The horses leaned forward against their harness. The wagon rolled ahead. It still rattled and creaked and jounced, but didn’t squeak nearly as much as it had. Van looked wanly happy. “That’s first rate,” he said. “With even a bit o’ luck, I’ll feel like living by noon or so.”
“About what I was hoping for myself,” Gerin said. He drove out of the stable yard and around to the front of the inn. The wagon wasn’t as quiet as all that, but it was enough quieter than it had been to satisfy him.
The innkeeper stood by the entryway and bowed himself double as the wagon passed him. “The lord Biton bless the both of you,” he said, as the groom had. “May you come again to Ikos before long, and may you recall my humble establishment with favor when you do.”
“They didn’t used to act like that before the Empire blocked the last pass through the Kirs,” Gerin murmured. “Then they had guests up to the ceiling and sleeping in the horses’ stables, and they hardly knew or cared whether they saw anyone in particular again.”
“Reminds me of a story, Captain, indeed it does,” Van said, a sure sign he was feeling better. “Have I told you how they get the monkeys to pick pepper?”
“No, I don’t think I’ve heard that one,” Gerin answered. “How do they—”
He got no further, for the horses gave a snort of alarm and reared in terror. Trying to fight them under control, Gerin thought their unexpected motion the reason the wagon swayed beneath his fundament as if suddenly transformed to a boat bobbing on a choppy sea. Then Van shouted “Earthquake!” and he realized the whole world was trembling.
He’d felt earthquakes once or twice before, years ago. The ground had twitched, then subsided almost before fear could seize him. This quake was nothing like those. The shaking went on and on; it seemed to last forever. Through the roar of the ground and the creaking of the buildings in the town of Ikos, he heard cries of fear. After a moment, he realized the loudest of them was his own.
A couple of inns and houses did more than creak; they collapsed into piles of rubble. And when the Fox looked down the street toward the temple of Biton, he saw with horror that the gleaming marble fane was also down, along with great stretches of the wall that protected the holy precinct.
When the earth finally relented and stood still, Gerin realized his hangover was gone; terror had burned it out of him. He stared at Van, who stared back, his usually ruddy face fishbelly white. “Captain, that was a very bad one,” the outlander said. “I’ve felt quakes a time or two here and there, but never any to compare with that.”
“Nor I,” Gerin said. The ground shook again, just enough to send his heart leaping into his mouth. He scrambled down from the wagon and ran toward the nearest fallen building, from which came pain-filled shouts. Van ran right beside him. Together they pulled away timbers and plaster until they could haul out a fellow who, but for a couple of cuts and a mashed finger, had taken miraculously little hurt.
“All the gods bless you,” the man said, coughing. “My wife’s in there somewhere.” Careless of his own injuries, he began clawing at the wreckage himself. Gerin and Van worked with him. Men and women also came running from buildings that had stayed upright.
Then someone screamed, “Fire!” Flames born in the hearth or on Dyaus’ altar or of some flickering lamp were loose and growing. Black smoke, thin at first but all too quickly thicker, boiled up to the sky—and not just from the downfallen inn where the Fox labored. Every wrecked building was soon ablaze. The shrieks of those trapped under beams rose to a new and dreadful pitch.
Along with everyone else, Gerin fought the fires as best he could, but there were not enough buckets, not enough water. Flames grew, spread, began to devour buildings the earthquake had not tumbled.
“Hopeless,” Van said, coughing and choking against the smoke that now streaked his face with soot. “We don’t get away, we’re going to cook, too, and the wagon and horses with us.”
Gerin hated to retreat, but knew his friend was right. He looked again toward Biton’s overthrown temple. “By the gods,” he said softly, and then shivered when, as if the gods were listening, the ground shook again. “I wonder if the Sibyl foresaw this when she prophesied yesterday.”
“There’s a thought.” Van’s face lit up. “And here’s another: with the wall down and the temple guards likely either squashed or scared to death, what’s to keep us from scooping a wagonload of gold out of the holy precinct?”
“You’re braver than I am if you want to chance Biton’s curse,” Gerin said. “Remember the corpses we’ve seen of those who tried stealing from the temenos?” By Van’s expression, first sulky and then thoughtful, he hadn’t remembered, but did now. Gerin went on, “But let’s head over there anyhow. We ought to see if we can do anything for the poor Sibyl. If I know those greedy priests, they’ll be so worried over the temple and their treasures that they’re liable to forget her—and she may not even be aware to remind them she’s alive.” The thought of her lying in the rubble, trapped and unconscious and perhaps forgotten, raised fresh horror in him: he could not imagine a lonelier way to die.
“Right you are, Captain.” Now Van got into the wagon and took the reins without hesitation; maybe the shock of the earthquake had made him forget his morning-after pains, too. Gerin scrambled up beside him. The horses snorted, both in fear and from the billowing smoke. The Fox counted himself lucky that they hadn’t bolted when the fires started. He was anything but sorry to get away from the flames himself.
Along with so much else, the gold-and-ivory statues of Ros and Oren had fallen in the earthquake—fallen and shattered into the pieces from which they were made. Oren’s head, its features plump and unmemorable but decked with a crown heavy with gold and sparkling with rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, had bounced or flown out beyond the overthrown marble wall that delimited Biton’s precinct.
Gerin and Van looked at each other, the same thought in both their minds. So much gold—Whispering a prayer of propitiation to Biton, the Fox leaped down from the wagon. He seized the image of the dead Emperor’s head, ready to cast it aside at the first sign of the curse striking home (and devoutly hoping that would be soon enough). Grunting at the weight of gold, he picked up the head and crown and chucked them into the back of the wagon.
“We won’t need to fret about money for a bit,” Van said, beaming, and even the abstemious Fox could only nod.
The quake struck so early in the day that hardly anyone had yet come in hope of hearing the Sibyl’s prophetic verse. Only one wagon and one chariot had their horses tethered out in front of the dwelling the Sibyl used as her own. The cottage still stood, while chunks of the marble wall around the temple precinct had come down with gruesome result on the priest who the day before had tended Gerin’s team.
Seeing the Sibyl’s dwelling intact made the Fox hesitate. “Maybe we should just head for home,” he said doubtfully. “Those fellows over there will be able to take care of her without violating ritual.” He pointed through a gap in the wall toward figures running around by the ruined temple.
Van looked that way, too. His eyes were sharper than Gerin’s, perhaps because, unlike the Fox, he spent no time peering at faded script in crumbling scrolls. He grabbed the mace off his belt. “Captain, you’d better look again. Whatever those things are, you don’t want ’em tending the Sibyl.”
“What are you talking about? They must be priests, and they—” Gerin’s voice broke off as, squinting, he did take another look. He saw priests, all right, but they were down on the ground, not one of them moving. Over them bent pallid shapes hard to make out against the white marble of the temple. They didn’t quite move or look like men, though.
One of them raised his head and saw the wagon. The bottom of his—its?—face was smeared with red. Gerin didn’t think the thing was hurt. The blood around its mouth likelier said it had been—feeding.
> As Van had seized the mace, so Gerin grabbed for his bow. The pale, bloodstained figure loped toward the wagon. The Fox remained unsure whether it was man or beast. It carried itself upright on two legs, but its forehead sloped almost straight back above the eyes (which were small and themselves blood-red) and its mouth was full of teeth more formidable than anything Gerin had seen this side of a longtooth.
Ice ran down his back. “The quake must have knocked down the underground walls, the warded ones,” he exclaimed. “And these are the things the wards held back.”
“Belike you’re right,” Van answered. “But whether you are or not, don’t you think you’d better shoot that one before it gets close enough to take a bite out of us? Whatever it was eating before doesn’t seem to have filled it.”
Staring at the pallid monster, Gerin had almost forgotten he was holding his bow. He pulled an arrow from his quiver, nocked, drew, and let fly in one smooth motion. The monster made no effort to duck or dodge; it might never have seen a bow before. The arrow took it in the middle of its broad chest. It clawed at the shaft, screaming hoarsely, then crumpled to the ground.
The scream drew the attention of a couple of other monsters. How many of them had lived underground? Gerin wondered. And for how long? Whatever the answer was, the things were above ground now, and looked to be out for revenge against the men who had forced subterranean life on them for so long—and on any other men they could sink their teeth into.
Before the monsters rushed the wagon, a charge by a squad of temple guards distracted them. They attacked the guardsmen with the ferocity of wild beasts. The guards had spears and swords and armor of bronze and leather. The monsters looked to be faster and stronger than anyone merely human.
Gerin got but a brief glimpse of the fight, which looked to be an even match. “If we mix ourselves up in that, all we’ll do is get killed,” he said to Van. “More of those cursed things keep swarming up out of what’s left of the temple.”
“Well then, let’s snatch the Sibyl and get out of here before they find her and figure she’d make a tasty snack,” Van said. In other circumstances, that would have seemed rough humor. Remembering the blood round the mouth of the monster he’d shot, Gerin thought the outlander was just stating a probability.
Prince of the North Page 14
