Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  A pale figure inside the temple tried to push the leaves closed. A soldier thrust his sword out to stop him. A javelin thrown by a man who'd just reached the porch glanced off the swordsman's helmet, knocking him silly but then catching its proper target in the throat.

  The troops who'd carried altar top hit the doors again with their boots or shoulders. They struck in near unison though they didn't have any formal coordination so far as Sharina could tell. The leaves flew back.

  Inside were three People, two in tunics with drawn swords. The third lay on his back, clutching at the spear that'd killed him. The first soldiers through the door chopped the People down. It wasn't a fight, even though the troops had dropped their shields to lift the hearth.

  As the leading soldiers entered, Sharina carried Tenoctris inside also. The ring of Blood Eagles, now shield to shield, kept them as safe from jostling as they'd have been in the middle of an empty plaza.

  The cult statue was wooden and only slightly greater than life size, an old image that hadn't been replaced when the temple was repaired. There was a door to the right of the statue, ajar when the troops burst in. A man came through it, another of the People. He was older than the others, unarmed, and wore a ring with a brilliant sapphire on his right index finger. When he saw the troops, he turned to flee.

  A thrown javelin caught the man in the middle of the back, flinging him down the stairs he'd come up. The blood that sprayed from his mouth was the bright orange-red like that of an ordinary man speared through the lungs.

  Soldiers charged into the cellars, sounding like a wagon full of old iron tipping even before one stumbled. He and half a dozen of those ahead of him crashed through the railing.

  Sharina halted in the middle of the sanctum, holding the older woman back. "Tenoctris, we can't go down now," she said.

  "But I want to see what they're doing there!" Tenoctris said. "I'm afraid it'll be smashed if we wait."

  "We'll be smashed if we don't wait," Sharina said. "I'm sorry, we can't."

  Ascor nodded strong agreement. "We'll get you there when things settle a bit, milady," he said, his lips close to the old wizard's ear to be heard over the racket.

  From the cellars came shouts, mostly unintelligible but one very clear, "Got'em got'em got'em! They's dead! The ones as was painting is dead!"

  "Oh!" said Tenoctris. "Oh, I did hope we'd capture living prisoners. That would have been helpful."

  Additional troops were still trying to force their way down the stairs. Are they insane? Sharina thought. And in a way they were: they were soldiers ignited by battle. Fear and bloodlust drowned their ability to think.

  Aloud she said, "Ascor, where's the commander? I need the commander."

  "Captain Rowning!" Ascor bellowed. "Here to the Princess! Now! Now!"

  Sharina couldn't see who he was shouting at. The Blood Eagles stood in a tight circle around her and Tenoctris, their shields raised to fend line soldiers away from them.

  An officer who seemed old for his modest rank stepped close to the circle of guards. "Your highness?" he said, peering between the shoulders of Ascor and Lires. "Your highness, you shouldn't be here! It's far too dangerous!"

  "The only danger at present is that we're going to be trampled to death by your men!" Sharina flared. "Get them out before they destroy information we need to save the kingdom!"

  Captain Rowning recoiled in shock. "Your highness!" he said.

  Sharina felt her gut knot in self-disgust at what she'd just said. Rowning's troops had reacted splendidly in an unexpected situation. She shouldn't have let her fear and anger cause her to lash out that way.

  "Captain," she said, "you've done very well, very well indeed. But please bring your men up from the cellars now."

  Rowning turned to the signaller at his side, a cornicene whose horn curved around his body instead of the trumpeter normally attached to an infantry unit. "Sessir," he said, "sound recall!"

  The signaller blew a long note followed by three quick ones, then repeated the call. His mouthpiece was bone, not brass like the horn itself: he might have to use it in the dead of winter. The horn calls rattled the rooftiles.

  Though Sharina didn't see how anybody could tell what the signal was supposed to be through the blurring echoes, troops stopped shoving forward. After a moment they began to back out of the sanctum. Men returned from the cellars, some of them helping along fellows who'd fallen under booted feet.

  The sanctum had nearly emptied, and the last of the soldiers were straggling up the stairs. "Ah, your highness?" said Captain Rowning, hesitant because of Sharina's snarl. "What would you like me to, ah, do? Now, I mean."

  "Leave a squad here and yourself accompany me into the cellars," Sharina said in quick assessment. "If you'd be so good."

  She didn't especially want the captain present, but he'd be pleased at the invitation. She owed him that and more for her outburst.

  "I'm honored, your highness!" Rowning said, his expression opening brightly like a lotus flower at dawn.

  "Hey troop!" Lires called to the last soldier coming up from the cellars. "What did ye do for light down there? There's lanterns?"

  "Huh?" said the soldier. "No, it's windows, like, in the ceiling. There's plenty light, though. No problem there."

  Rowning drew his sword and trotted down the steps, apparently worried that Sharina would withdraw her offer. Ascor raised an eyebrow to Sharina for instructions, then muttered, "Let's go," to his men.

  "Tenoctris, hold my shoulders," Sharina said, stepping in front of the wizard. The stairs were narrow and the soldiers rushing down them had ripped the railing away. It'd been a sturdy one, judging from how thick the upper bracket with its tag of broken pole was.

  Twenty steps led to a floor of poured concrete. Looking down as she descended, Sharina saw six troughs of bright gray zinc along the wall on the street side of the single room. Sealed storage jars, wide-mouthed and each big enough to hold several bushels of grain, stood opposite them, and in the middle was a long limestone table. The tabletop had originally been smooth and probably white, but now stains and blade scratches covered it. It'd been used for surgery—or butchering.

  The room was better lit than the sanctum above. Slabs of crystal around the edges of the coffered ceiling flooded down a cold, milky light. The panels on the south, the street side, were brighter than others.

  Tenoctris looked at them with interest. "That isn't wizardry," she said, "but it's quite clever. Sunlight's led down through blocks of glass from the roof, I suppose. I saw a device like that on Yole in my own day, in an underground chamber built by one of the Duke's ancestors."

  A corpse lay between the table's two slab supports. He'd been one of the lookouts pretending to be painting. His partner was huddled just behind him. They'd been hacked to pieces by soldiers who'd found no better way to slake their bloodlust.

  Tenoctris sighed. "Well," she murmured, "it can't be helped."

  "Captain Rowning?" Sharina said. "These are ordinary men, are they not? Not People, I mean."

  "Right," Rowning said. He'd sheathed his sword and was using his dagger to pry at the tar sealing the ceramic stopper onto a storage jar. "They couldn't put People out where they'd be seen, your highness. Once you get a look at them, it's like Serians—you don't have any trouble telling what they are the next time. And there's a lot of folk here in Valles who saw them after the Battle of the Tides. Or in it, for that matter, with all the militia who fought that day."

  Rowning popped the plug off the jar. He looked in, sniffed, and stuck his dagger down inside. The dagger point drew up a slab of flesh as broad and flat as a napkin. It was pink and fresh-looking but it didn't have bloodvessels.

  "By the Lady!" Rowning said. "What's this? Is it human? Is it?"

  He twitched the dagger, slapping the flesh against the wall. It slipped down with a sucking sound. Rowning's face had a look of horror. That struck Sharina as incongruous in the midst of slaughtered men who'd been human beyond question.
>
  Tenoctris knelt beside the third body, the member of the People whom the javelin had thrown down the stairs. A pair of Blood Eagles bracketed her to keep others from bumping the frail old woman.

  She looked over her shoulder at Rowning. "No more than the People themselves are," she said. Smiling wider she added, "But no less, of course. I think this is Hani's workroom. Here in Valles, of course. There'd have to be a much larger installation to create as many People as were in the army that invaded Ornifal before."

  Rowning jerked back from the jar, his dagger poised to slash at anything that came out of it to touch him. "Bloody Hell!" a Blood Eagle rasped under his breath.

  "Create?" Sharina said, staring at the People's leader. She edged back unconsciously, much as Rowning had done. "Then they're not human?"

  "Human?" Tenoctris repeated with a grimace. She lifted the corpse's hand and looked at the big ring on its finger. "Dear, I don't know how to answer that. What I'm sure of is that Hani or someone else, some wizard, builds the People from materials like those—"

  She nodded to the jars.

  "—instead of them being born the way you and I were." Tenoctris smiled with a vagary of thought, and added, "A very long time ago, in my case."

  Ascor glared at the dead leader of the People. "I suppose they could sneak into Valles without being noticed," he said grudgingly. "But what were they here for?"

  Tenoctris pulled the ring from the corpse's finger, twisting it one way and then back to loosen it. "I suspect they might have known something about the theft of Stronghand's body," she said, holding the ring to the light. "I'd have questioned them about it if I had a chance."

  "Sorry, milady," Captain Rowning muttered. He started to wipe his blade on the skirt of his outer tunic, then thought again. He turned and with a grimace of fury hurled the dagger point-first into the stairs. It drove deep into a tread and hummed for a moment with the violence of the stroke.

  Lires prodded the leader's corpse with his boot. "I'm not sorry they're dead," he said conversationally. "I guess you and her highness'll figure things out, milady."

  Sharina looked at Tenoctris, then at the soldier. She felt a rush of relief. "Yes, I agree with Trooper Lires," she said. "With both parts of what he said. What do we do now, Tenoctris?"

  Tenoctris rose to her feet, helped by one of the Blood Eagles. She smiled also.

  "Speaking as a human being," she said, "I don't think creatures like the People should exist, nor that humans should help accomplish purposes which certainly aren't meant to benefit Mankind. A scholar would have a more detached viewpoint, but one can't be a scholar always."

  She handed the ring to Sharina. The sapphire was as large as her little fingernail and seemed to be perfect. It was set in dense gray metal, lustrous but heavier than silver.

  "Sharina," the wizard said, "your eyes are younger than mine. Can you make out what's written around the bezel?"

  Sharina adjusted the ring against the angle of the light. There were tiny letters encircling the diamond; at first glance she'd taken them for brushed ornamentation.

  "It's in the Old Script," she said. "I think.... Ereschigal aktiophi—"

  "Sharina, stop!" Tenoctris cried. "Don't read—"

  But the Words of Power had already gripped Sharina's tongue. The stone's facets threw dazzling highlights across the cellars.

  " Berbiti baui—" Sharina shouted, her lips speaking the words despite her mind's desperate attempt to control them. Tenoctris covered the ring with her own hands, but the light burned through her flesh and through the fabric of the waking world.

  "Io!" Sharina shouted, spinning down into a vortex of adamantine light.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ereschigal aktiophi! thundered from no human throat. The Words of Power filled Sharina's mind as she whirled out of the cellars, out of Valles, out of the sidereal universe.

  Berbiti baui—

  She still held the ring. Tenoctris had vanished into the white mist. Everything had vanished except Sharina herself and the clothes she was wearing.

  Io!

  The ring couldn't have been a trap. It was a tool meant to carry the user from where he was, where she was, to another place. It was a tool but not Sharina's tool, and she didn't know how to use it properly.

  Ereschigi—

  Beneath Sharina a plateau rose through the white mist, an island lapped by a sea of clouds. Squared fields covered the rolling surface, and many of the gleaming watercourses feeding or fed by the lake in the center were laid out in straight lines also.

  Aktiophi—

  The island swelled quickly beneath her. A building of polished marble with a two-story colonnade lay beside the lake, embracing half the shore in its spreading wings. Sharina didn't see any other structures, but except wooded stretches along the canal margins the whole surface appeared to be under cultivation.

  Berbiti—

  The ground was a hundred feet below, fifty feet below, twenty feet below. Pale men bent over their hoes in fields of squash shaded by maize. The laborers didn't look up.

  Baui—

  The laborers weren't men. They were People, wizard-made creations. The People captured in the Battle of the Tides had said they came from a floating island....

  Io!

  Sharina landed so lightly that her sandals barely sank into the soft earth. Then she fell backward.

  A horn called.

  * * *

  Ilna stared at the Citadel, feeling impressed the way she'd been the first time she'd looked west over the Outer Sea from the heights above Carcosa. A thick growth of hardwoods and pine covered the base of the spire, but from midpoint the rock was bare and black and as sheer as a house wall.

  It was beyond her to judge how tall the thing was, but it was very tall. The crystal crown overhung the basalt, though from this angle Ilna saw only the glittering points and arcs which projected beyond the black shaft.

  Chalcus was standing arms-akimbo, leaning back from the waist to view the Citadel instead of just tilting his neck. He straightened and barked a laugh, "I'm happy that we're not going up the outside of that, dear heart," he said. "I've known a few men who could manage it—or could've, for the most of them are dead now—but I wasn't among them."

  Davus smiled and set down the three rocks he'd carried as weapons. He took the bit of snowflake obsidian from a fold of his sash, caressing it with his thumb.

  "Don't claim you're happy till you've seen what the choice is," Davus said in a voice as wan as his smile. "But it's the choice regardless, I'm afraid."

  He nodded to the right. "Time we get to it," he added as he started off in the direction he'd indicated.

  There wasn't a path, even an animal track, but because the ground was stony the undergrowth was too sparse to be a barrier. "I hear the sea," Chalcus called from behind Ilna, sounding surprised.

  "Aye," replied Davus over his shoulder. "A lake, more properly, but too broad to see the other side."

  "Well, perhaps we'll be able to do that from the top, eh my friend?" Chalcus said with a laugh. "We'll learn when we're there, shall we?"

  "Not even from the top," Davus replied. "Which I'll willingly prove to you, Master Chalcus, as soon as we have no greater demands on our attention."

  They came out of the woods onto rock bare even of leaf litter. The basalt was rippled like pond ice. It'd weathered into shades of lighter and darker grays, with patches of the original black where winter had cracked a flake loose. Ahead was the ragged edge of a cliff overlooking water which the sunlight turned a chalky ultramarine; to the left rose the chimney-straight shaft of the Citadel, splotched here and there with blue-gray lichen.

  In the basalt wall was an oval hole taller than a man. The lower half was blocked with squared stones set in mortar. Over the wall, her arms crossed before her, a bare-breasted woman watched the companions with a thin smile.

  "Did that come by nature or did someone, a wizard mayhap, drill it, eh?" Chalcus said as he surveyed what was clearly the nex
t stage on their journey. He grinned like a jester, his hands on his hips.

  "The hole's natural," Davus said, rubbing the obsidian again before slipping it back into his sash. "The lady there that we must treat with is another matter. The Citadel draws in a great deal of power. Part of it leaks back down this channel; and for that reason alone, she'd be uncanny. Her name is Arrea."

  "Is she human?" Ilna asked bluntly. Her fingers were knotting cords without any specific intent.

  "Less than many of us, I'm afraid," Davus said. "But we need her permission to go further."

  "Well, there's ways and ways of treating with a lady," Chalcus said, sauntering forward. Though his clothes were worn by the hard journey, he was every inch the gallant as he said, "So, Milady Arrea, you see before you travellers who want only your good wishes as we pass by to deal with the tenant above. I trust you'll grant us that slight boon."

  "For a price," the woman said. Her voice was clear with a pleasant sibilance. She shrugged her shoulders, sending waves down her long, coppery hair. "Everything for a price, traveller. And for that great thing you ask, a great price."

  Ilna walked forward also, keeping a little back from Chalcus and a double-pace to his left. She knew how wide a swathe a blade swept when wielded in the flashy, curving style the sailor favored.

  Davus, an equal distance to the sailor's right, tossed his obsidian point high in the air. "Arrea bargains from the certain knowledge," he said, "that killing her would close the passage. She'll bargain hard, of that I have no doubt."

  He turned up his other hand: the point dropped into it. His nonchalant gaze had been on Arrea the whole time, without so much as a glance to judge the trajectory of the bit of stone.

  Chalcus looked at his companion with a blank expression which hinted nothing of the fury Ilna was sure lay beneath it. Davus had blandly removed any chance they had to bargain. That would've disturbed Ilna also if she'd had only the words on the surface to go by, but she felt what she did not hear—a pattern weaving, subtle and deep.