Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  Mab held the cup out in her right hand and stroked the air with her left index finger. Cashel could've repeated the pattern himself—he was good with those things, just as good as Ilna, though he didn't have his sister's feeling for fabrics.

  He couldn't have described what he saw in words, though, and he wasn't sure that even somebody who really knew words like Garric and Sharina could've done that thing. Mab's tracery was something that you had to feel, not hear about.

  The water flashed red. A skim of ice appeared on the top. For just an instant the veins in the ice were the same as the figure Mab had drawn. The bad smell vanished like thistledown in a flame.

  Mab handed the cup to Cashel, smiling archly. He took it and sipped; the ice had melted to a rind even before his lips touched it.

  He wasn't sure what the water'd taste like, not that it really mattered. On hot summer days while plowing he'd drunk ditchwater, kneeling beside his oxen. In fact it was cool and sparkled, as refreshing as a long draft of bitters from Reise's inn. His eyes met Mab's; her smile had grown wider like she knew what he'd been wondering.

  "Really good, ma'am," he said, turning to hand the cup to Herron.

  "You've only had a mouthful," Mab said. "Drink more."

  "Ma'am, there's a lot of us," Cashel said. "And it's not a big cup."

  "Nor has it gone down any from the drink you've taken, you might notice," Mab replied tartly. "Drink your fill, then pass it on."

  Cashel couldn't help looking into the cup, but that was just reflex: if Mab said he could walk over the edge of this gallery without falling, it'd be the truth. He drank more, not his fill but three big swallows taken slowly. Then he passed the cup to Herron, saying, "Don't drink too much the first time, any of you. We'll pass it around again, after the first settles in our stomach."

  The Sons drank deeply, ignoring his advice. Well, he'd thought they would. It shouldn't matter.

  "When we start down...," Mab said as the cup went to Orly, the last. "Be careful of what you may meet. And of course don't fall. The paths are solid, but the railings may not be. They weren't part of the King's plan, and the citizens who added them after the King's exile weren't able to build for the ages the way he'd done."

  "Why did you tell us not to wear our armor if we're going to be meeting the Made Men?" Stasslin said. Cashel wouldn't have used that tone to anybody, let alone the lady who was helping them.

  Cashel had one butt of his quarterstaff on the floor by his right foot. He leaned the staff forward and said in a loud voice, "I'll have another drink now, Orly, if you're done with the water."

  Orly had paused with the cup halfway to his lips. Instead of handing it to Cashel, he said, "She didn't say we'd be fighting Made Men, Stasslin. She said to be careful."

  "Yes," said Mab. She looked at Stasslin with a cold expression much more threatening than Orly's anger. "If you're going to put words in someone's mouth, make them pleasant ones; boy."

  The deliberate pause before 'boy' made Stasslin flush. "Look, I just meant...," he began; and stopped, probably because he couldn't think of where to go from there.

  Cashel took the cup from Orly's hand, mostly to cool things off a bit. He drank and said, "Stasslin, I learned when I was a boy that if you're stupid, you're best off keeping your mouth shut. I try to live by that."

  Cashel offered the cup to Herron, who waved it away. "Anybody want more?" he said. Nobody spoke.

  "Then we're ready to start down," Mab said. She gestured to a path, one of the wider ones, that slid into the cavern some fifty double-paces away on the other side of the little creek. With her left hand she lifted the cup from Cashel's hand and folded it flat again. Though she didn't pour out the water first, nothing splashed on the pavement.

  There was a hump-backed bridge over the creek, but Cashel jumped the channel since it wasn't as wide as he was tall. He glanced back as Mab followed, then frowned in surprise. She didn't jump, exactly; at least it didn't look like she had. She scissored her legs and she was across, that was all.

  The Sons were all going to the bridge, so Cashel and Mab walked to the path alone. "Who told you you were stupid, Cashel?" she asked.

  "Lots of people, ma'am," Cashel said. He let a slow grin spread over his face. "Not after I got my growth, though. Not twice, anyhow."

  "Sometimes people need to have their errors beaten out of them," Mab said in a quiet voice trembling over fury. "I'm afraid there aren't enough of us to do all the necessary beating, but we have to try."

  Cashel looked at her in concern, but her face was calm enough. They'd reached the walkway before the others, so he paused.

  Mab nodded. "Yes,we'll wait," she said. Pointing down she added, "Do you see the fish hanging in the air below that broad catwalk? Midway to the surface."

  Cashel squinted to see better. "I think so, yes," he said. It was fish-shaped, anyway, but as far down as it was it must've been bigger than he was. It was moving, squirming furiously and rising headfirst toward the path. That wasn't just a trick of the bad light.

  He puzzled the question through in his mind and said, "Ma'am, do fish fly in this place?"

  "No, though we may well see stranger things," Mab said. "There!"

  A spider dropped along a strand of silk unseen in the dimness, scrabbled at the fish for a moment with its four front legs, and climbed quickly out of sight again beneath the walkway. The fish resumed its jerky upward journey, but it'd stopped wriggling.

  "The King's influence has leaked into these lower levels during the millennium of his exile," Mab said. "The way filth drains into the bilges of a ship. Neither the King nor his creations have entered Ronn, not yet; but here in the lower levels the insects and plants and the fish in the ornamental pools have changed. In the directions that the King would've wished."

  The Sons had caught up to them again. They'd been whispering among themselves as they crossed the bridge, but now they fell silent as they listened to Mab and Cashel.

  Cashel looked at them, feeling his face grow harder than usual when his eyes fell on Stasslin. The burly Son frowned for an instant but then looked away.

  What good would your breastplate be if that spider grabbed you? Cashel thought, but he didn't say anything. The spider and the prey it'd netted in one of the pools were out of sight, and scaring the Sons worse than they already were wouldn't help anything.

  Cashel smiled in sudden warmth. Aloud he said, "You fellows aren't used to this sort of thing. You're doing real good."

  "Watch yourselves," Mab said again, nodding to the Sons as a group, then to Cashel. She stepped onto the walkway. It spiraled down for quite some distance, then split into three separate paths that slanted off. Cashel put himself a half step ahead of her, where he could move fast without having to worry about friends being in the way of his staff.

  "Mistress Mab?" said Orly. He seemed to be the one who did the most thinking. "You said the lower levels are turning into the way the King would have them. But the King built Ronn, didn't he? And he didn't build it like this."

  "The King was a very great wizard," Mab said. "Was and is. Greater than the Queen in many ways: he could create what she could only maintain. But the King had to change things in order to live, and eventually he changed himself. He couldn't turn himself back, any more than an addled egg can become fresh again. And so the Queen ousted him, for the sake of Ronn and the citizens of Ronn."

  Cashel saw movement on a distant catwalk. He thought it was water flowing till it raised its head and tasted the air with its tongue. After a moment it slithered out of sight among the trees of a hanging garden.

  Well, he'd seen snakes before. Never one that size, though, as far as he could remember.

  "The King came from the earth and created Ronn," Mab said. Her voice was clearer than it should've been with this huge emptiness around them to drink the words. "But the Queen came from Ronn itself."

  "And the Queen's gone," said Herron harshly. "It's up to us, now."

  "It's up to us," Mab repeated
in the same flat, clear voice as before. Cashel wasn't sure she was agreeing, exactly.

  Stepping out a little farther ahead, Cashel began to spin his quarterstaff slowly to loosen his muscles. Something passed overhead. He heard Enfero gasp in surprise, but Mab didn't speak. He continued to spin, a little faster each time he crossed his wrists.

  He guessed Mab would warn them if there was going to be a fight. And though Cashel wasn't sure about the Sons beyond figuring that they'd try, he knew what to do in a fight.

  Smiling, content as he usually was, Cashel began feeding his spinning staff before and behind him in a careful, complicated pattern like what Mab had done to clear the water.

  Oh, yes. Cashel was certain sure he knew about fights.

  * * *

  "There's people on the sand spit," Ilna said, speaking in a low voice. The creek they'd been following much of the afternoon forked here. Though the shallow channels weren't real protection, the freshly-deposited sand at the upstream end would be more comfortable than a camp hacked out of the willows and sedges on lining both banks. "Making supper, it seems."

  "I don't smell smoke," Chalcus said. His hands weren't on his sword and dagger, but his voice had the peculiar lightness that meant the blades would be clear at the first hint of a threat. "There's four of them; and a dozen donkeys—one's strayed downstream."

  "They're not people," Davus said, cold and hard and certain. "Not any longer, at least. The New King's been this way."

  Instead of relaxing, Chalcus rose onto his toes and looked about them. They were on an animal trail that came into sight of the water only at fords: the vegetation was much heavier at the streamside than a double-pace back from it. Even so Ilna doubted that her friend could see anything that'd been hidden while he stood flat-footed.

  She understood why Chalcus was—in his way—nervous, though. What use was a sword against a creature that turned its victims into stone?

  Davus splashed through the stream. He held a chip of patterned obsidian in his left hand, but as a talisman rather than a weapon. His thumb rubbed the smooth stone, and his face was set in lines as hard as those of the statues on the sand.

  Chalcus nodded Ilna across; she waded over quickly. The water was only knee deep, but the strong current made her tug up her tunic. She didn't mind the hem being wet, but the fabric might give the stream purchase enough to pull her down.

  Chalcus waited till Ilna was on the sand, then followed. He watched their backs with a faint false smile. If Davus was right, mere sight of the creature and its jewel was enough to turn the victim to stone, so it didn't seem to Ilna that keeping a close lookout was a useful defense. There were other dangers in this land, of course.

  And perhaps Chalcus thought that if he were turned to stone, it would give her warning to escape. Her lips tightened at the thought. As if she'd run!

  The Citadel—the tall basalt spike whose crystal crown flared and twisted into fanciful shapes—loomed not very far away. Ilna hadn't learned to judge distances, growing up as she did in a small hamlet which she'd never expected to leave. The New King's victims hadn't been looking that way, however.

  Something had come down the creek from the west. The wayfarers were preparing supper. Two men had risen, their hands on a sword hilt in the one case, a spear too heavy for easy throwing in the other. A third had gone to settle the tethered donkeys which must've become restive, while the last had remained squatting by the fire.

  And so they were now, figures of coarse black stone. Their clothing had rotted off, all but a few tatters where the cloth was doubled, and the blades of their weapons were lumps of rust.

  Chalcus dug his bare toe into the hearth. Sand half-covered the ring of stones and the feet of the man who'd been watching the fire, but Chalcus turned up a layer of ash beneath. It'd burned itself out, whenever the thing happened. Years ago.

  Davus knelt by a pile of flat black boulders near the stone donkeys, running his fingertips over them as Ilna might have done with a complex tapestry. Ilna frowned at the blocks, puzzling as to where they came from. They were basalt, not the limestone that cropped out of the brush in this—

  Oh. They were leather packsaddles, turned to stone by chance or whim at the same time the creature had petrified the men who owned them.

  "Ilna, dear heart?" Chalcus said, looking about them with a smile as bright and hard as the glint of faceted diamond. "You brought Master Davus back from the black, stony place that these poor fellows are in now. Might it be that you could do the same for them?"

  The statues—they'd been merchants, Ilna supposed—were utter strangers; and though Chalcus was no longer the red-handed pirate he'd once been, she'd seen him viewing a bloody shambles with no greater concern than a sawyer has for cut timber. The difference here, the reason there was a real plea in his falsely cheerful voice, was that he knew the victims weren't dead. They were living men, inside a prison that had been their own flesh.

  "I'm sorry," Ilna said. "The vines around Davus told me where to cut. I can't see the patterns here. Not in stone."

  Davus poised his chip of obsidian like a writing stylus, then tapped once on the uppermost packsaddle. There was a slight click, no more, and the thin slab that'd been the flap cracked away in a single sheet. A shower of wheat kernels spilled out, golden in the sunlight and far more welcome now than bullion would've been. Ilna's belly growled in anticipation.

  Davus rose and faced his companions. He wasn't smiling but he seemed satisfied. "They've been sealed better than any storage jar," he said. "Mistress, if you can manage flat-bread, I'll take a handful—"

  So speaking, he bent and scooped up a little of the bright grain.

  "—and see if I can't bait some quail in for a meat course, eh?"

  "Yes, of course," Ilna said, looking for stones she could use to grind the grain. She was hungry enough that she didn't think she'd take the time to parch it first. A packsaddle would do fine for the lower stone....

  Chalcus began gathering brush for the fire, his face immobile. Occasionally he had to use his knife, a crudeness that the fine steel didn't deserve; but these were hard times, for people as well as for blades.

  Davus spread grain at several places where the bank was open and in sight of the sand-spit; then he crossed back. Pausing, he looked up at the spire of black and crystal not far to the north.

  "I don't know why the creature would come down from his Citadel," he said musingly. "The Old King walked the land at intervals to mete out justice."

  He gave his companions a lopsided smile. "His version of justice, of course. Perhaps the New King does the same. These poor devils may have offended in a fashion that no human being could understand."

  Ilna had expected the broken flap to be uselessly brittle, but on trying she found it quite sturdy enough to grind the hard kernels against the block beneath. Davus must have tapped with the skill of a diamond cutter to split it so easily.

  "How will we enter the Citadel, friend Davus?" Chalcus asked, feeding fuel to the fire he'd just sparked. "If we're to climb that wall of rock, I'll say that it's a task that lay beyond me."

  "And it's certainly beyond me," Ilna said. "Though I'll try if I must, of course."

  "Of course," Chalcus murmured. "Though you hate stone; and if there were a thing you feared beyond your own self, dear one, that would be stone as well."

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. He was hard and knew very well how hard she too was; but Ilna's breath still caught with the warm certainty that this man, this man, loved her.

  "There's an internal passage from the base to the crown," Davus said. "A natural vent originally, I'm told, but improved over the years. The route shouldn't be a problem in itself."

  "Is it guarded?" Chalcus said, his voice returning to its natural lilt. Ilna smiled to hear the tone. There might shortly be better work for his blades than willow stems.

  "There'll be someone there," Davus said, standing with his hands together at his waist, looking down the trail. "It won't be
easy dealing with her."

  Ilna looked at the tree lying in the streambed. It'd been a palm, but the fronds jad long vanished and the trunk was crumbling. Originally it must've fallen across the path, but travellers like the ones frozen here had wrested it out of the way of their donkeys.

  On it, looking back at her with sightless eyes, was a lizard. Like the humans, it'd been turned to stone.

  "We'll deal," said Chalcus with bloody cheerfulness.

  "It depends," said Davus, "on just how skillful we are."

  As he spoke, he flung a pebble sidearm. Not one but two decapitated quail shot into the air in a scatter of feathers, dust, and their own spouting blood.

  "It depends...," Davus repeated. This time there was no doubt of the satisfaction in his voice.

  * * *

  Sharina wasn't sure that she and Tenoctris had any business thrusting themselves into a group of armored men rushing to assault a building. Tenoctris obviously felt otherwise: she was trotting toward the temple at the best speed her old legs could manage.

  Sharina threw the older woman's left arm over her own shoulders and grabbed her around the waist with her right hand. If she was that determined, there was no choice for a friend but to help.

  Stretching herself, Sharina was able to join the second line of soldiers as they ran up the temple steps. Five Blood Eagles formed an arc in front of them with Lires watching their backs. Ascor seemed to view his job as protecting Princess Sharina while she went about her business instead of preventing her from doing that business.

  A squad of regulars had paused to wrench the hearthstone from the altar; they started up the steps with it. The slab was a thick piece of fine-grained limestone, blackened in the center and burned slightly concave. It weighed as much as any four of them put together.

  The troops chopping at the temple door with their swords backed away at a shout from their commander. The soldiers carrying the block of stone staggered onto the porch, paused to organize, and lunged forward on command. They smashed the square stone battering ram corner-first into the door where the leaves joined.

  The doors sprang partway open but caught on the crossbar and staples which the blow had bent but not broken. The altar top slipped from the hands of the men wielding it, dropping to the porch edgewise before toppling to the left. The troops shouted warnings and jumped in various directions, one of them tripping on his own feet. He slipped beneath the falling slab, but another soldier grabbed his belt and jerked him clear just in time.