by David Drake
The other girls murmured softly to each other. Ilna continued to stroke the cloth. She was aware of the world around her, but for the moment she wasn't part of it. There was a bustle at the door. Tenoctris and the men were returning all three talking at once in the greatest excitement.
Liane's personality illuminated the fabric as the sun did the surface of the sea. She was calm, steadfast, and kind, with a spirit that could never be broken so long as life was there to sustain it. Everything Liane bos-Benliman seemed, so she was in fact.
Ilna stepped away from the loom and shuddered.
“We found a creature in a cask on the docks!” Garric said with keyed-up enthusiasm. “It was shipped here from Valles, but—”
He paused, his eyes on Ilna.
“Do you need to sit, Ilna?” Tenoctris said. Cashel, silent but more direct, had already hooked a stool closer with one hand as the other guided his sister onto it.
“I'm all right,” Ilna said, though she allowed Cashel to seat her. It was pointless to resist when her brother decided that you needed to move.
She smiled at Garric, then Liane. “I'm quite all right,” she repeated. “What did you find at the docks?”
Not that she cared. Not that she would have cared if the Isles and every soul upon them sank straight into the sea.
Garric would go far. He had strength, a fine mind, and—thanks to his father—an education equal to that of any noble from Valles. Besides all that, Tenoctris had said that Garric, not Sharina, was the real descendant of the ancient Kings of the Isles.
Fabric didn't lie to Ilna, and Ilna didn't lie to herself. She could no longer imagine that the rich, well-educated Liane bos-Benliman wasn't a fit companion for Garric.
As an illiterate peasant like Ilna os-Kenset could never be.
Garric looked at his companions, aware that there was one more person present than eyes could see: King Carus watched intently from somewhere between reality and dream. Carus grinned, as he generally did; but one hand generally rested on the hilt of his great sword also.
“The Scaled Men inhabit a separate plane of the cosmos,” Tenoctris said quietly. “One so distant from ours that there was only once contact between them and humans. And even that contact is myth rather than history.”
She smiled. “Was myth. I'm learning a great deal about things I used to think were myth. Including Good and Evil, I suppose.”
“They're demons?” Cashel said, leaning minusculely forward. It was like seeing a boulder tilt. “Scaly men are demons?”
Cashel asked the question with anticipation. His huge hands flexed the way a wrestler loosens up for a bout. He'd fought a demon with his bare hands, Sharina said. Cashel hadn't talked to Garric about that or anything else which could be considered bragging.
The room's furnishings were of Serian style—spider-legged stools only inches off the floor, placed around a low table. Liane and Tenoctris used the stools, Liane more comfortably than the old woman, but the quartet from Barca’s Hamlet squatted on their haunches.
They were used to that. Reise's inn and the ancient millhouse where Ilna and Cashel lived had chairs, but many peasant huts had only a stone bench along one wall as furniture.
“No, they're not demons,” Tenoctris said. “They're men, nearly enough, with no more powers than men have. But the story, the myth—”
She smiled again, her way of poking fun at herself for her former certainties.
“—was that a wizard in the time of the Yellow King brought the beast-god of the Scaled Men here. He thought the god, the Beast, could help him seize the Throne of Malkar. The Yellow King destroyed the wizard and bound the Beast in a prison of living fire.”
Liane's lips pursed. “According to Ethoman, the Yellow King reigned for ten thousand years,” she said. Her tone was dry and factual, letting the absurdity of the legend display itself without any help from her. “When he died, the waters rose and formed the Isles where before there had been a single continent.”
“Yes, I said it was a myth,” Tenoctris agreed, nodding.
“The Throne of Malkar isn't a myth,” Garric said. Nor was it a myth that King Lorcan, the founder of the royal line of Haft, had concealed the Throne in a place that only his descendants could find. Wizards who sought power through Malkar, through evil, had hunted Garric and Sharina for that reason.
“The scaly man isn't a myth either,” Cashel said. “I guess it's still lying where I tipped it onto the bricks. Though maybe somebody's dumped it in the river by now.”
Tenoctris had said the Scaled Man wasn't important for itself, only in what it represented. Some traveling mountebank would probably claim the creature for an exhibit. Though...
The Scaled Man was so very nearly human that it disturbed Garric even now to think about it. Perhaps Cashel was right, and the River Erd was already tumbling the body toward the Inner Sea.
“The thing that concerns me is that if Scaled Men exist again in our world...” Tenoctris said. She straightened a pleat in her tunic while her mind considered distant matters. “Then the Beast they worshipped may exist too. If he's escaped from his prison, then this world has a serious problem. Because I'm quite sure...”
She smiled like the sun, though her words were grim enough.
“...that the Yellow King isn't here to put him back.”
“We're here,” Garric said. “You can do something, can't you, Tenoctris? And we can help you.”
“I don't know that I can do anything,” the old wizard said, “but I may have to try. And I would certainly appreciate help.”
“We'll need to go to Valles?” Liane said. “I have money left from my father's funds.”
Garric noted with a feeling of quick pride that Liane simply assumed that she'd be part of the endeavor. Courage was to be expected in a noble, but Liane knew from past experience that she was letting herself in for dirt and nastiness as well as danger. In a girl brought up with all the advantages of wealth and position, that willingness was rare indeed.
“I think I should mention something else,” Tenoctris said. “It may be that the corpse of the Scaled Man was sent here to bring us to Valles. That it's a trap set by someone of great power. Or something of great power.”
“It doesn't really matter, does it?” Cashel said. “I mean, we want to get close to him. If he wants to get close to us too, well, we'll see who was right about being stronger, won't we?”
It didn't seem to Garric that all planning should be boiled down to the philosophy of a wrestling match: you bring the parties together and one slams the other to the ground. But despite doubting the theory of what Cashel had said, it really seemed that he was right this time. If the source of the threat wasn't in Valles, at least it had sent this missive through Valles. Therefore, that was the place they needed to start their search.
“And Valles is the throne of the Isles, now, lad,” a voice chuckled at the back of Garric's mind.
“When I left home,” Sharina said, “I thought I was going to Valles. Father raised us to finish what we started, didn't he, Garric?”
She gave her brother a wistful smile. Deliberately, she put her hand, on Cashel's shoulder. Cashel gave no sign of the contact except to become very still, even more like a rock than he usually seemed.
“I became wealthy from what I was doing here in Erdin,” Ilna said, her hands folded on the table before her. “Evil's quite profitable. I haven't seen my business manager in the few days since I stopped ruining people's lives, but I'm sure I can provide you with funds in any amount you need.”
She looked at Liane, then to Garric. Her gaze and voice were perfectly steady, as always. The passionate self-loathing in the cold words was evident to anyone who knew Ilna; but only to those few.
Garric reached across the table. Ilna jerked her hands back. She gave him a curt shake of the head.
“As I said,” she continued, “I'll help in any way you request. I won't be leaving Erdin myself, though. I'm not such a fool as to believe that I can undo all the harm I'v
e done—there were suicides as well as lives ruined from the work I sold here. But I need to try.”
Garric stood. You didn't argue with Ilna when she'd made up her mind. He didn't understand her. He'd known Ilna all his life and he still couldn't guess what she'd do—except to know that Ilna os-Kenset would do exactly what she said, or die in the attempt.
“I'll look into buying our passage to Valles,” Garric said. “Passage for five.”
“Ilna, I wish you'd come with us,” Liane said. She touched Ilna’s hands with her own, as Garric would have done if she'd let him.
Ilna looked at the other girl. “Yes,” she said, “I know you would. Well, I suppose without people like me for the background color, good people wouldn't stand out so clearly. Thank you anyway, but three would be a crowd. For the third one at least.”
Cashel got up with the deliberate grace of a bear stretching to mark a tree with his claws. “I'll come with you, Garric,” he said. “I never liked walls around me, even when there's as much room inside them as Master Latias has here.”
They were all rising. Sharina offered her hand to Tenoctris.
“And I,” said Ilna, closing the discussion, “will finish the fabric I started this afternoon. I want to have it done—”
She nodded toward Liane.
“—before you leave.”
The 3rd of Heron
Even tied bow and stern to the quay, the Lady of Mercy quivered slightly as Garric stepped out of the cabin where he'd stowed the women's luggage. Reise's inn trembled in similar fashion during the worst of winter's easterly storms. Though harmless, the motion was vaguely disquieting.
The Lady was eighty feet long and probably carried about a hundred tons of cargo in her two holds. The roof of the three-cabin deckhouse was the platform on which the helmsman worked the steering oars. Liane and Sharina had one cabin; Tenoctris and the luggage were in another; and the captain himself would probably sleep in the third. Garric and his friends were the only passengers. He'd thought he and Cashel would share the third cabin, but when Cashel said he'd bunk on deck with the sailors Garric decided he would too. He'd liked the thought of the snug cabin; it reminded him of his garret room in the inn, but he was embarrassed at the thought of having the space to himself when the girls had to share.
“Tenoctris?” he said. “Does everybody do things because it'd look bad if they didn't, even though it's silly?”
The wizard ran her index finger along the pine decking. She looked up at Garric. “Well, in my day people wore clothes in public no matter what the weather was like,” she said. “They did in my family's social circle, at least.”
Garric laughed. “It is pretty common, isn't it? Anyway, I suppose we'll mostly lay up on little islands at night anyway, instead of running in the dark.”
Tenoctris touched the beam again. “I didn't expect the ship to be so old,” she said. “I'd say it was older than I am, but of course it's only older than I was a thousand years ago.”
“Do you mean it isn't safe?” Garric said in surprise. He'd hired passage on the Lady of Mercy simply because she was leaving for Valles on the evening tide. She'd seemed solid enough...
“Goodness, I don't know anything about ships,” Tenoctris said in surprise. “I don't know anything about much of anything outside of what's in books. I just meant...”
She gestured around them. “These timbers are over a hundred years old except where they've been patched. The sea prints itself on the things men put in it. I could feel that in your father's inn, because the main beams there were timbers taken from ships wrecked on your coast.”
So quietly that Garric understood the words only because he was looking at the wizard as she spoke, Tenoctris added, “I'd much rather think about the ports this ship has seen in its lifetime than about what we're going to find in Valles. And what may find us there.”
The Lady of Mercy's mainmast was squarely in the center of the vessel. Sharina sat on the yard with her bare feet resting on the furled sail of coarse linen dyed the color of rust. From here, fifty feet above the deck, she could see all the way across the city.
Because Erdin was built in the river's floodplain, the buildings weren't more than two stories high, or three at the most. For a building of real height to be stable on this site, it would need impossibly deep pilings.
Barca's Hamlet had no harbor, so only fishing dinghies which could be pulled up on the gravel strand normally landed there. The sea was a presence just beyond the inn's east windows, though. When she was this high, Sharina could smell the familiar salt air rather than the river harbor's own mudflats, stinking with the very richness of the nutrients they contained.
Sharina had left Barca's Hamlet because emissaries of King Valence told her that she was the daughter of Countess Tera, murdered during the riots in Carcosa seventeen years before. Tera had been of the old royal line of Haft, the lineage of Carus, the last king of the united Isles. It was Sharina's destiny, the emissaries said, to take her place in the palace in Valles.
She didn't suppose she'd had a day of complete happiness since then, but it wasn't possible to go back to a world in which the emissaries had never arrived. Besides, Tenoctris said that forces were rising to a crescendo that could tear the Isles apart.
It wasn't merely that evil wizards turned toward Malkar to gain his Throne and temporal dominion. The forces of good were waxing as well, and they could be equally destructive of the present world. The world of men had never been of unmixed evil or good.
Barca's Hamlet couldn't escape the forces which shaped the entire cosmos. Sharina knew it was better for her to take a hand in the struggle instead of letting it sweep her away helplessly.
And if no day since she left home had been of unmixed happiness, then there were nonetheless moments of triumph...and the wholly unexpected awareness that her friend Cashel was a force in the greater pattern and a rock to whose strength Sharina could trust herself.
Cashel stood on the dock now, leaning on his staff as he chewed a blade of grass that he'd plucked from the margin of one of the canals that carried much of the city's heavy traffic. He seemed completely relaxed; unafraid and unconcerned. He'd faced enemies of this world and other worlds as well and had always defeated them.
Cashel turned and tilted his broad-brimmed shepherd's hat so that he could look up at her. He smiled as he waved.
Sharina waved back, feeling a tide of comfort. She couldn't return to the stable life of Barca's Hamlet, but she'd brought stability with her into the chaotic world in which she found herself.
She touched the horn hilt of the unladylike weapon she wore. The Pewle knife and Cashel might not be enough to defeat every danger she faced in the future; but between them, they'd been enough for everything she'd met thus far.
Water Street wandered along the River Erd. Its broad pavement served both for traffic and as open storage for the vast quantities of cargo passing through the port, unloaded from recently docked ships or hauled here from warehouses to fill the holds and decks of outward-bound vessels. Cashel watched the traffic around him, finding in it the same fascination that he felt in the sky as summer clouds built and changed over Barca's Hamlet.
Cashel couldn't guess where all the goods came from or where they were going. For seventeen years the borough had bounded his life. In the fall the Sheep Fair brought drovers and wool merchants to Barca's Hamlet to buy; the Tithe Procession in the spring brought bored priests from Carcosa to collect the due of the Great Gods, the Lady and the Shepherd. That was all.
Cashel's mouth spread slowly into a grin. He didn't know much about this wider world in which he found himself, but that had been true for him even in the borough. Garric and Sharina read and ciphered, their parents had served in great palaces, and Ilna with her weaving was only one of many residents who knew something that was completely beyond Cashel's experience.
But Cashel or-Kenset knew to do the task facing him, whatever that task was. That had been enough in Barca's Hamlet, and he gues
sed it would be enough for all the rest of his life.
The mate was on his way back to the Lady of Mercy, accompanied by one of the missing crewmen and half-supporting, half-dragging the second, who was still too drunk to walk by himself. The falling tide dragged the vessel hard against her mooring. They'd be under way shortly, Cashel knew.
He didn't look up to the masthead again, but his grin grew broader as he chewed the stalk of marshgrass. Now his task was to keep Sharina safe; and he would do that until the day he died.
“Ilna?” said Liane to the girl beside her on the dock. “Are you sure you won't...?”
Ilna grimaced in irritation. She'd never had much use for people who nattered, even when their intentions were of the best. Perhaps the rich girl was used to folk who changed their minds frequently. There were enough of those in the world, the Lady knew.
“I have my own business to attend,” Ilna said, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You and...and the others, you have things to do. Before you leave, though, I want to...”
What Ilna really wanted to do was apologize. She couldn't say that, not because she was afraid of the words but because Liane wouldn't understand them. Liane was too decent a person to understand how bad other folk really were. She'd argue, and the last thing Ilna needed was that sort of argument.
Liane's eyes flicked to the side. The Lady of Mercy's deck had been above the quay when the five passengers and Ilna arrived. Now the river had fallen on the tide so that the vessel's railing was level with the brick surface. Ilna didn't need to see Garric watching them with ill-concealed concern to know that it was time for Liane to board also.
“This won't take long,” Ilna said crisply. “It won't take any time at all. I want you to have this. Wear it if you like, but at any rate try to keep it with you.”
She handed Liane the sash she'd finished just as they left Master Latias' compound. It was of naturally colored wool, woven in an open pattern of brown on cream, recalling the gently rolling hills in which Barca's Hamlet nestled. Ilna wore its mate, woven as the same length of fabric and separated only when it left the loom.
