by David Drake
The four Scaled Men arrayed themselves in front of the deckhouse. They were apparently waiting for the cross-bowman to cock his weapon so that they could either shoot their escaped prisoners or threaten them into surrender.
“I can't swim either!” Ilna said. If the two of them rushed now, they might overcome the sailors; but it had to be both of them together. The Scaled Men were wounded to a greater or lesser degree, but she and Cozro were weak from days of hunger and tight bondage.
“Then I'm sorry for you!” the captain said. He turned and scattered the brazier's burning contents into the sail. The parched linen flared like tinder.
Cozro dived over the side. The Scaled Men shouted in guttural fear. Ilna was between the sailors and the roaring heat of the sail. The mast, cracked by long exposure to salt and sun, was beginning to burn also.
The sailor with the spear stepped forward. Ilna's noose settled about his neck and pulled tight. She'd acted on reflex rather than according to a plan. The only options that swine Cozro had left her were drowning or burning alive; she supposed she preferred to drown, but she wasn't quite ready to make that decision.
She kicked the spear free of the Scaled Man choking on the deck at her feet. Another sailor came for her with his cutlass raised; she whipped the free end of her rope across his bulging eyes. He jumped back with a blat of despair.
The air beyond the ship's port rail congealed into a disk of blue radiance, intensely cold.
Ilna looked at the disk over her shoulder. She kicked again, this time at the Scaled Man's crotch. She could see figures moving within the disk of light.
Without hesitation, Ilna stepped onto the railing and hurled herself into the blue glare. The disk might mean death, but staying with the Bird of the Waves was certain death.
Ilna regretted leaving her noose behind; but she'd had many regrets in her lifetime and she'd learned to live with them.
Cashel could see his bones through the crackling blue radiance that suffused the night. He continued to concentrate on the boulder. It was moving, and any other considerations could wait till Cashel had finished the job at hand.
Zahag and the princess were shouting but their voices only buzzed like distant wasps over the roar of Cashel's pulse. He had the boulder over his head. He shouldn't have been able to lift it.
He rotated his body carefully. A load that was safe while it was poised could tear your back and knees apart if you shifted the wrong way. It was all a matter of balancing forces...
When Cashel had turned just enough that the boulder wouldn't fall back on him and his companions, he rolled it off his spread fingers. It bounced away as he staggered forward.
Cashel's legs were too weak to support him; when he put a hand to the ground to steady himself, his elbow started to buckle. Aria grabbed his arm, but he didn't know if she was trying to hold him up or merely clinging out of fear.
The mountainside below them shook as though wracked by an earthquake. Blue fire crackled, splitting the rocky soil as far down the slope as Cashel could see. A skeleton bathed in sizzling light humped up from the long trench like a horse rising to its feet. It had the body of a lizard, but it stood on two legs the size of the largest oaks in the borough.
The creature turned with a dancer's grace, each joint sparkling with azure lightning. The tail of stiffly articulated bones swung, balancing the weight of the monster skull. It roared, shaking the heavens; then the jaws snapped shut on the nearest of the trolls who had pursued Cashel and his companions.
“Is is yours, chief?” Zahag cried. The ape was hopping up and down as the ground shook. “Did you call it up?”
“I didn't...” Cashel said. “I don't know...”
“Please!” Aria said. “Please, can't we go now?”
The creature stepped across the trench from which it had risen. Its tail was a whip of savage light. Clawed forelimbs snatched a troll, splintering his club and casting the mangled whole into a mouth easily able to hold him.
“My staff,” Cashel mumbled. He tried to stand. He wondered if he was dreaming that he was helpless while fantastic things went on around him.
The creature of stone and light followed the fleeing trolls, snapping with the precision of a serpent hunting mice. The saw-toothed plates along its spine waved from side to side.
“I have the staff!” Aria said. She did, too, though she'd just now picked it up. “Please! Please!”
His companions couldn't lift him, but they weren't willing to leave him behind. That was all right. He could walk. He could!
Cashel turned on all fours and began to crawl toward the cave mouth. The creature that had risen from the rocks shook the earth every time its foot came down. Like Cashel himself, it controlled its weight with a graceful delicacy that belied the strength involved.
Trolls bawled in helpless terror as the creature hunted them down the slope. Its strides were thunder against which the trolls' deep voices sounded like the cheeping of tree frogs.
The monster didn't seem to be hostile to Cashel and his companions. There wasn't much he could have done about it if it were.
Cashel chuckled at the thought of waving his quarter-staff at a creature hundreds of feet long. The laughter washed some of the fatigue from his muscles. He tried again and this time he did stand up. Zahag ran ahead but paused at the blazing entrance to the cave.
“Oh thank you Mistress God!” the princess babbled, stumbling along at Cashel's side. “Oh thank you!”
Cashel lurched into the cave. His companions were behind him; he could feel their presence though he didn't turn his head to make sure. His skin sizzled and crawled with immense power. He went on, feeling as though the skin and not the flesh it covered moved his limbs and drove him unstoppably forward.
He could see forms ahead through a cascade of blue fire. King Folquin sat in his court, flanked by courtiers as he listened to a petition.
Cashel stepped toward them, but the cave branched suddenly. To the right Ilna stood on the deck of a ship, fighting with monsters like the corpse Cashel had poured out of a barrel on Erdin's waterfront.
“Ilna!” he cried. He couldn't hear his own voice over the cave's own pulsing thunder. “Ilna, I'm coming!”
Ilna turned away from him. She jumped toward a pair of men Cashel saw vaguely in the air beyond her, a cripple he didn't recognize and the gangling youth who'd been Folquin's court wizard. “Il—”
Ilna vanished. The ship disintegrated in a flash of azure lightning that rent fiber from fiber and plucked apart the scaly men like flies in a boy's hands.
The cave walls opened. Cashel and his two yammering companions fell into a sunlit sea whose foaming surface tossed with body parts and splintered wood.
The 26th of Heron
“Let me say right now that I won't have anything to do with harming King Valence!” Pitre said. “If you're going to talk about that, I'll leave the room until you're finished.”
Garric sat at one end of the dining table they'd moved from the servants' refectory into the vast circular room that had been the queen's private suite. He looked at Pitre in expressionless amazement, wondering what went on in the mind of a person who could mouth those words.
“There were more cowards than brave men in my day, lad,”said the voice in his mind. “I wouldn't expect that to change in the next thousand years either.”
“We needn't hurt Valence,” Waldron said curtly. The conspirators were undisguised and the members of their entourages present wore their colors openly. “Not if he'll listen to reason, anyway. I won't even demand that he abdicate immediately, though of course we'll appoint a regent. Valence's line still has a lot of respect among the lower orders, and I don't see any call to borrow trouble before we've consolidated the real power in our own hands.”
Before Garric and his companions had reached the queen's sanctum, members of the mob had pushed the tourmaline mirror over on the stone floor, cracking it across. Tenoctris had nodded approval at the result, saying that destroying the
mirror had been her first priority.
The large room was under a dome in the center of the one of the five wings. There were no tapestries on the granite walls, and no furniture save for the great mirror and an empty circular table standing waist high. The queen had existed without chairs, wardrobes, or even a bed.
It was a little past midnight in Valles. Outside, the sea breeze had blown clouds over the sky and only a few stars managed to sparkle down. Inside, the windowless room would have been equally dark with the sun at zenith.
Garric remembered that the scene he viewed in Tenoctris' scrying mirror was suffused by soft light. The conspirators' servants had brought in lanterns, but their smoky flickering accented the gloom they were intended to dispel.
“Appointing a regent might lead to the mistaken impression that one of us was somehow superior to the others, Waldron,” Lord Tadai said, holding his hands before him as though he were examining his perfect manicure. “I think we'll call ourselves the Council of Noble Advisors and avoid the sort of awkward discussions that would otherwise result, don't you?”
Waldron flushed. Besides their aides and advisors—nobles like themselves—each conspirator was accompanied by his personal bodyguards. Waldron himself might be the only real man of war among the five, but all the liveried soldiers looked tough and competent. Whoever started a fight under these circumstances guaranteed his own slaughter by the combined forces of his former allies.
Garric smiled faintly. He drew his long sword down the whetstone he'd set on the table before him.
“Does he have to make that noise?” Sourous said loudly. The young noble rubbed his hands over themselves as though he were washing. He indicated Garric only by a sideways tic of his goatee.
“Yes he does, Sourous,” Royhas said, speaking for the first time since the conspirators convened in the queen's suite at his insistence. “While I stood in the crowd here and the rest of you hid in your town houses, Master Garric single-handedly slew the giant whose skeleton you passed to enter this mansion. He's readying his sword for the next time he needs to use it.”
In truth, the blade was in better shape than Garric—or Carus within him—had expected after the vicious fight. The cyclops' bones hadn't dulled the edge significantly. More important, the blade had snapped back straight after the brutal twisting it got while levering the monster's ankle apart.
All eyes were on Garric. He smiled, reversed the sword, and drew it down again with a sliding motion which in its course passed the whole length of the edge across the stone.
There'd been a tiny nick in the tip where the blade had lopped off the cyclops' armored finger. A few strokes on the stone had restored the steel's smooth line.
“I have servants to do that!” Waldron snarled, speaking to Royhas rather than Garric. Garric was still beneath Waldron's consideration, but the northern landowner knew Royhas to be his most serious rival among the conspirators.
“The presence of our young associate does raise an interesting possibility,” Tadai said, turning slightly to include Garric in his comment. “King Garric, the true heir of Carus and the Old Kingdom, might look better on the throne than Valence. Under a Council of Noble Advisors—”
Tadai smiled thinly.
“—of course.”
“Valence is insane,” Sourous muttered. “Completely mad!”
Garric found his bitter tone surprising. He hadn't realized the young man was capable of anything but fear for his own person—though something, come to think, had brought Sourous into the conspiracy. Garric realized again that he could never know all he'd like to know about those with whom his fate was now twined—even about Liane and Tenoctris.
Garric wiped his blade with a coarse woolen rag, then glanced over his shoulder. Behind his chair Liane and Tenoctris filled the place of the dozen retainers assisting each of the noble conspirators.
Garric grinned. He'd trade the two women and Carus, closer yet, for a hundred times their number of the sort of advisors the others had in their service.
“No, no,” Pitre said. He twisted and untwisted a silk handkerchief as he spoke, a replacement for the wooden puzzle he'd spilled across Royhas' floor. “Valence will stay king, but we'll get rid of that wretched wizard Silyon. Now the queen's gone, and when Silyon's gone too everything will go back to normal.”
“I say—” Waldron said.
Garric stood. He shot the sword into its long sheath with a zing/tunk as the crossguard slid home against the mouth of the scabbard. Everyone in the room stared at him again. Though in fact Garric had put up his weapon instead of drawing it, the action had clearly been aggressive.
“We aren't rid of the queen, gentlemen,” he said. His mouth spoke his own thoughts, but King Carus' experienced direction gave Garric's tone and stance their present assurance. “We've bought time by driving her from Valles, but the first thing the revived Kingdom of the Isles needs to do is to meet the queen's counterstroke and crush her utterly.”
Tadai raised an eyebrow—half-mocking, but only half. Pitre looked at Garric in amazement, Sourous looked at his hands, and Royhas smiled faintly as he sat in a posture of apparent relaxation. His ankle was crossed on his knee and his right arm sprawled languidly on the table.
“Yes, of course,” Waldron said with a dismissive flick of his hand. To his fellow nobles he continued, “I'll take charge of mustering the royal forces, of course. We can decide later whether my title will be—”
“Gentlemen,” Garric said. He deliberately didn't raise his voice, though he noticed Tadai's gaze flick appraisingly from Waldron to him.
“—warlord or regent,” Waldron continued. The chief of his guard contingent, a craggy man whose hair, beard, and eyes were all the hue of cast iron, ignored his master and watched Garric intently. “Now—”
“Gentlemen!” Garric said in the voice that had called sheep from distant hills.
Waldron's hand gripped his sword hilt. His guard commander laid fingers on Waldron's wrist, preventing him from drawing the weapon. The other nobles, even Royhas, started in their seats. A secretary dropped his handful of ledgers on Tadai's feet.
“Gentlemen,” Garric continued, pitching his voice to carry but no longer at threatening volume. “You can't trust any one of yourselves with supreme power or what looks like it might become supreme power. You can trust me.”
He grinned, a wolfish but not unfriendly expression. “Trust me not to be in the pocket of another of you, at any rate.”
“This is absurd!” Waldron said; his tone showed that he realized that the suggestion was by no means absurd. He made a quick, angry gesture, brushing his guard away, but didn't put his hand back on his sword.
“I don't think it is,” Tadai said judiciously. “Though—”
“What of Valence?” Pitre said. He met Garric's eyes, making the youth wonder if possibly Pitre had a backbone after all.
“He's not an evil man,” Garric said. Tenoctris couldn't speak at this gathering, but she and Liane had coached Garric on how to handle a question that was certain to arise. “There's no need to supplant him—once we've removed his wizard, who is an evil man or at least one who does evil willingly.”
He paused, sweeping his eyes across the nobles at the other end of the long table. It was a measure of the authority Carus' spirit gave Garric that none of them interrupted him.
“Valence has no issue,” Garric continued. “He can adopt me as his heir, uniting the old royal line of Haft with the present line of Ornifal.”
“Ho!” said Tadai, clapping his hands as if at a keenly struck blow at a cockfight.
Pitre snapped his handkerchief out. “Yes,” he said, nodding with sudden enthusiasm. “Yes, Valence is a good man. The trouble's none of his doing, not really.”
Waldron went livid but he didn't speak. His right hand clasped and opened, clasped and opened.
“It seems to me,” Royhas said, still affecting a languid appearance, “that in the short run this solves all our problems. Master Garric's
fame has already spread over the city as the man who slew the giant. Indeed, much of the populace probably sees him as King Carus reborn rather than merely the descendant of the old line.”
“That's right!” said Sourous with unexpected animation. “We'll give the mob a hero, while we run the kingdom as it should be run!”
Even Waldron looked at Sourous in amazement. Liane drew in a hissing breath at the young noble's effrontery. Garric simply laughed. How could he get angry at a fool who was so dismissively insulting to a man standing well within the reach of his just-sharpened sword?
“Lord Sourous,” Garric said. He nodded with a slight, friendly smile toward Waldron and the blank-faced guard commander at Sourous' shoulder. “Friends all, I hope. You gentlemen know more of Ornifal than I could ever hope to. Your lineage, your wealth, and the patriotism that led you to act when your king would not—these all mark you as the sort of advisors any ruler would wish to have.”
Tadai's plump face wore a watchful expression in place of its usual mocking humor. Pitre looked expectant, and Sourous showed a degree of startled-bunny fear; his guards had moved close to the table on either side of the young man, and the reason for their concern had apparently dawned in Sourous' limited brain.
“You must realize, though,” Garric continued, speaking the words an ancient king whispered in his mind, “that though I'll listen willingly to your advice and that of other wise and noble folk throughout the kingdom, I will not be taking your orders. You'll be taking mine.”
Waldron until that moment had held himself tense as a bent spring. He leaped up, kicking .over his chair.
“In this room,” Waldron said, “you see some of the oldest blood on Ornifal.”
He looked at the cowering Sourous. In a snarl he added, “Sadly decayed though some members may be! But not even Sourous is fool enough to take the orders of a shepherd from Haft!”
Garric stepped around the corner of the table and walked deliberately toward Waldron. Pitre, seated between the two standing men, jumped to his feet and backed away. His guards formed a hedge in front of him.
