Master of the Cauldron

by David Drake

  "Bloody Hell!" Lord Attaper muttered. "Your highness, you shouldn't be here. Look, head back for the docks and stay there till—"

  "Enough, milord!" Garric snapped. "This is exactly where I belong."

  The sound of weapons and screaming rose into a dull crescendo from the east or northeast of the rambling building. A fire had broken out in that direction: smoke rose in swelling, rapid puffs. Garric couldn't tell whether the flames came from the palace or if the latest assault by the monsters of the pit had broken the cordon and the city proper was beginning to burn.

  Lord Renold rode around the southeast corner. He'd lost his helmet and there were collops cut from the rim of his slung shield. "Your highness!" he shouted. "We need support! You've ignored my couriers so I've come myself! The hellspawn's going to break through if you don't send reinforcements!"

  "Renold, I'll send you the next troops that arrive from the docks!" Garric said. "I haven't sent you any sooner because I don't have any to send."

  He looked over his shoulder, hoping to see another battalion clashing its way up the brick street. There weren't any soldiers in sight, but plumes of smoke showed there were fires that way too. Was it accident, or had the creatures managed to circumvent the cordon through tunnels that reached beyond the palace?

  Earl Wildulf and his cavalry arrived in a clash and rattle of horseshoes on brick pavers. Garric couldn't speak through the noise; he could barely think over it.

  The Earl himself and Lord Renold's professional cavalry were experienced in riding on pavement, but most of these horsemen were rural nobles with their retainers. As the squadron drew up, several horses slipped and hurled their armored riders to the bricks, adding to the cacophony. Wildulf bellowed a curse over his shoulder, then bent to glare at Garric.

  "Your lordship!" Garric said, getting the first word in. "You're just in time to hold these monsters back before the rest of my troops from Volita arrive. If you'll take your force to where Lord Renold directs you, we can prevent a breakout. The ground under the palace is a nest of them for the Shepherd knows how far down!"

  "Right, there's no time to lose!" said Renold. He tried to pull his horse around; it obeyed the reins sluggishly. "It may be too late already!"

  "Hold them back be damned!" Wildulf said. "You, boy—where's my wife? Where is she?"

  "Your lordship...," said Garric. He'd regained his voice but he was too tired to react, even mentally, to the Earl's discourtesy. "I'm sorry but the creatures her wizard called up—"

  Dipsas certainly hadn't called up the monsters and their ancient creator, but this wasn't the time to split hairs.

  "—killed the Countess in the tunnels before we could rescue her. The patrol I sent down—

  Again shading the truth, but Wildulf hadn't been rational about his wife even before the present cataclysm. Garric wasn't about to admit that he'd watched Balila die.

  "—was barely able to get up alive to bring a warning."

  "Wildulf, by the Lady, don't dally!" Marshal Renold said. He was the Earl's retainer but a noble in his own right, and he had a very good grasp of how desperate the situation was. "They were coming out of the servants' quarters when I left!"

  "Cowards!" Wildulf shouted. "You're all cowards!"

  He drew his sword. Attaper tried to step between Garric and the horsemen; Garric shouldered him back. The greater danger was that Wildulf would cut at Lord Renold—and the greatest danger of all would be for Garric to be seen to back down before a raving lunatic.

  A fresh wave of white monsters spilled from the palace entrance like corpse-fat bubbling from a cook pot. They mouthed syllables even more inhuman than they themselves were.

  Earl Wildulf wheeled his horse toward them. "Sandrakkan with me!" he shouted. "The Countess is in danger!"

  He and first the leaders, then the whole of his troop, crashed into the pallid swarm. This was a major outbreak, hundreds at least of the creatures, but the weight of the horses and armored riders rode them down with relative ease. For a moment the battle continued at the gate and gutted windows to either side; then Wildulf dismounted and with his men hacked their way into the palace itself. His voice drifted back, calling, "Sandrakkan with me! For the Countess!"

  Marshal Renold watched the troops pouring into the building with a look of amazement and horror. He hadn't seen Balila being clubbed to death, but he knew that the tunnels under the palace were a certain trap for anyone fool enough to enter them.

  "Attaper, give the Marshal ten men," Garric said tiredly. He wanted to vomit at what was about to happen, but Prince Garric had the survival of every human in the kingdom to ensure right now. The Earl and his followers were throwing themselves away, but Garric could give their deaths some purpose. "Those poor devils will take the pressure off here for a time. Renold, hold till I can get you reinforcements. There's some coming now."

  Wildulf had left the Sandrakkan infantry behind when he hurried to the palace with the horsemen. Best send a courier to make sure they were actually on their way....

  The last of the Sandrakkan troop had entered the building. They hadn't left horseholders; their mounts milled and stamped in the forecourt, excited and frightened by the stench of blood and eviscerated monsters.

  The ground quivered. "Bloody Hell, what's this—" Attaper said.

  The palace and nearby structures shook like a dog come in out of the wet. Garric and everybody in sight lost their footing. A long crack ripped down the middle of the street, lifting bricks to either side; then the three-story buildings to the east of the palace crashed down in spurts of pale dust which hung against the black sky like giant puffballs.

  The palace shivered inward a moment before the ground beneath it collapsed, swallowing the site whole. The ruin shuddered and fell a second stage, taking with it the surrounding plaza the way an undercut riverbank slips into the current.

  "Get back!" Garric shouted, scrambling on all fours until he could get to his feet again. He'd lost his shield but still gripped his sword. "Back! on your lives!"

  The ground continued to quake. Duzi, how long would the shocks continue? Would the whole city fall into the bowels of the earth?

  Liane was safe, most of Garric's troops were safe. The crater'd gulped down the corpses, those of men as well as the windrows of monsters they'd slain. At least one wounded soldier had dropped into the pit with a despairing cry.

  That man was dead now and others were dead now and maybe they'd all be dead soon, but for the moment Garric was alive. He'd fight for the Isles and his friends as long as he could.

  Gouts of night like black fire spewed from the pit, darkening the sky still further. In the cauldron beneath Garric saw the ancient, shrivelled wizard gesturing with his tourmaline athame.

  Around him, crawling toward the surface with their weapons and hatred of humanity, were thousands of white monsters. More of the same sort pushed upward behind them.

  Garric gripped his sword, leaning forward a little to make it easier to breathe. He waited, to fight and very likely to die.

  But until he died, to fight.

  * * *

  Ilna heard the New King pass on in the adjacent corridor, clicking and sizzling like a rain-soaked tree a moment after lightning struck it. The creature didn't cross from the outer track to the inner one where Ilna waited. Its motion shifted the light in the crystal fabric, turning a shimmer of green-blue-indigo momentarily into yellow-orange-red, but Ilna couldn't guess as to its shape or even size through the wall separating them.

  She had her cords out now; her fingers were plaiting a calm pattern. The creature's movements were as easy to predict as the next swing of a pendulum.

  This New King did certain complex things, but it did them by rote and therefore predictably. It had power through the jewel and it had enough cunning to supplant its human predecessor, but it was no more intelligent than the great black-and-yellow spiders whose dew-drenched webs dazzle those who see them on Autumn mornings.

  The New King had passed. It
would return, but not until a fixed future time; a time far enough in the future for Ilna to complete her preparations.

  She stepped into the other corridor and looked at the two basalt statues. She touched the back of Merota's hard stone hand, then walked a few paces on and ran her fingertips down the curve of Chalcus' throat. He'd had a lovely voice. It was the first thing she'd noticed about Chalcus, back in that bygone time when there'd seemed a reason for living.

  No matter. Ilna strode through the corridors of the Citadel, letting the cords in her hands direct her to a place she'd never been. She had a purpose, had work to attend to.

  To Ilna's surprise, there were other stone victims within the crystal halls. Three were men, but one was a child not much older than Merota had been. There was a dog as well, a mongrel with a sharp nose and a spine as sharp as a saw-horse. How had they come to be in this place where living things found only death?

  The dog was just down the corridor from what Ilna was looking for, the spine of a sunburst which ended in a point sticking out of the crystal crown. She went as far into the tapering spike as she could go without hunching, then sat and began to work.

  Ilna'd been picking yarn from the skirt of her tunic even as she walked. She'd clipped the hem with her bone-cased paring knife, but after that start she'd worked the threads loose by hand with the same quick skill as she'd used to weave the fabric. The lengths of yarn she carried in her sleeve for normal situations weren't adequate for this.

  She wouldn't be certain that anything was adequate until afterward, of course. She was tempted to say that it wouldn't matter if she failed, but that wasn't true. To Ilna os-Kenset, failure was never an acceptable choice.

  She sniffed. The world would be a better place if more people lived by the same standards as she did, but that wasn't going to happen in her lifetime. And besides, what other people did was none of her business.

  When Ilna had enough yarn, she began knotting it into the new pattern. She could've worked with greater subtlety if she'd had something to hold the knot-work, but there was nothing to make a frame; the Citadel's inner surfaces were as slick as ice on a roof slate. She'd have to stretch the pattern between her raised hands. The result would be crude, but there was no one to critique the work except the New King and Ilna herself.

  She heard the clicking/ticking again. Perhaps it'd been getting louder for some time but she'd ignored it, lost in her work and the pattern she was creating.

  The pattern was rather interesting after all, she found. It shrank into itself, level repeating level repeating level, each multiplying the pattern's effect....

  Yes, the sound was coming closer, and rapidly. Ilna tied a final knot and stood, holding the edges of the pattern together for the moment. The close, glittering walls pressed in on her unpleasantly, but she wouldn't have been able to do what was necessary in any other setting. She was used to discomfort; a little more wouldn't matter.

  The structure trembled at the creature's approach. Patches of color wriggled and shivered as the crystal flexed, twisting the light that passed through it. Ilna hadn't noticed such vibration the first time the New King passed close to her. It must be that now she was standing in a narrow passage with only a thin, taut layer between her bare feet and the ground furlongs below.

  She spread her arms, looking out through the pattern she held. It was a skeleton of fine wool, no denser than the interplay of elm twigs against a winter moon. A spider uses only a tracery to catch its prey. Ilna didn't even need to catch something, only—

  The New King rolled into sight, moving like a drunk who staggers but never loses his balance. The creature was of sparkling black glass, all points and angles; more like a sea urchin than like anything else of flesh and blood, but not especially like an urchin either.

  It moved by toppling forward, putting down points and shifting the rest of its edges and spikes over the new supports. The creature's total size with all the limbs and nodes added together might have been as much as a bellwether or even a young bull; Ilna couldn't be sure. It was like trying to guess how small a space would hold a dandelion's fluff if it was squeezed together.

  On top of the black spears and sheets, advancing but never dipping or rising from the perfect level it maintained, was a diamond-bright jewel like the egg Ilna had snatched from the cocoon under the sea. The Citadel's walls threw light of every color across it, but the jewel gleamed clear as a dew drop.

  The creature halted. It saw or sensed Ilna's presence, though it had no eyes on its shimmering black surface. Ilna's belly tightened, but she smiled at the thing that had killed the two people closest to her. She would join them now, or she would avenge them.

  The creature extended a limb toward Ilna in a series of jagged motions. It paused; then three bolts of wizardlight—blue, scarlet, and blue again—ripped from the point like lightning slashing off a high crag into the clouds.

  Ilna's filigree of yarn absorbed the blasts and flung them back reversed, red and blue and red. The shock stunned her. For a moment she swayed, blinded by the flaring light. Her skin prickled as if she'd been boiled in sea water, and her pulse was thunder in her ears.

  Her vision cleared. She was trembling, so she lowered her arms slowly. The yarn pattern remained rigid: the wool had been changed to basalt.

  Ilna shouted in disgust and flicked the pattern into the crystal wall, breaking it into a shower of pebbles. She regretted doing that almost immediately: because she'd lost control, but also because she'd smashed the fabric that'd saved her life. It deserved better of her, but what's done is done.

  The New King had been a smooth, shimmering thing of liquid obsidian, vibrant even when it was at rest. The corpse was still black, but it had become the dull black of basalt; silent and dead and opaque. The spell flung at Ilna had rebounded, killing the creature who'd killed so many in the past.

  Ilna sank to her knees. She wanted to cry but she couldn't, and tears wouldn't have brought Chalcus and Merota back anyway.

  The jewel on top of the stone corpse winked. Her eyes blurred, and she found that she could cry after all.

  She heard whistling, the clear notes of the ballad she'd heard in Barca's Hamlet as The House Carpenter but which Chalcus sang under a different name: Well met, well met, my own true love....

  Ilna wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then dried them properly with the shoulder of her tunic. Rising, she stepped around the frozen creature and looked down the corridor. Davus was sauntering toward her, his lips pursed as he whistled The Demon Lover. When he saw Ilna, he smiled.

  "Well met indeed, Mistress Ilna," he said. "And a deservedly ill meeting for the creature that thought to rule men, I'm glad to see."

  Ilna's face contorted. "Aren't you afraid that snakes will make this place their home, Master Davus?" she said, her voice echoing the sneer on her lips. "Now that you've left your post?"

  Davus chuckled. "There'll be no danger from snakes, Ilna," he said as he stepped past her. He lifted the gleaming jewel from the head of its last victim, careful not to prick himself on the hedge of black stone points. "The King is back, you see."

  Smiling, Davus placed the jewel on his head. It hovered, denting his brown hair without quite touching his scalp.

  "A wizard named Dromillac drew me to the world where you found me," he said calmly. "He forced me to set a troll on the enemies besetting that place."

  He laughed again. "Those enemies were no friends of mine nor of any man," he continued, "so I wasn't sorry to scotch them. Only when I'd done that and before Dromillac loosed the geas by which he'd bound me to his will, the creature whose egg I'd stolen for my tool—"

  Davus touched the jewel with the tips of his right fore and middle fingers, still smiling.

  "—caught me unaware and snatched my talisman. With which it turned me to stone and took my place."

  Ilna nodded coldly. "I thought as much," she said. "After I began to understand the situation, of course."

  She thought for a moment, then con
tinued, "Master Davus, you said that you'd allowed that creature—"

  She nodded toward the angled basalt corpse, unwilling to touch the thing even now that it was dead.

  "—to live because you'd taken its offspring and were unwilling to wrong it further. That's what you meant. at any rate. Is it not?"

  "Yes," said Davus, setting his feet slightly apart. "That's what I did. I suppose you're going to tell me I'd best change if I'm to resume the rule of the land, not so?"

  "Not so," Ilna said, as cold and formal as Davus—as the King—had become when he thought she was challenging his judgment. "Don't change. The land, as you call it, survived a thousand years of rule by a creature that didn't care about humans. I don't believe it would've survived a ruler like you if he didn't sometimes let mercy soften what reason told him was the sensible course. A ruler like you, or like me."

  Davus didn't speak or move for a moment, though fire pulsed in the heart of the great jewel above him. He chuckled again and said, "Well, no matter, girl. I'll go on the way I've been going because I'm too old to change."

  He bent over the statue of the mongrel dog. "What were you doing here, I wonder?" he said, stroking it behind the basalt ears.

  Light flooded the corridor, burning bone-deep through Davus and Ilna both. The dog gave a startled yelp. It turned, snapped at Davus' fingers—he jerked his hand back in time—and went running up the corridor trailing a terrified yi-yi-yi! behind it.

  Davus straightened and grinned at Ilna. "Shall we find Merota and our friend Chalcus, now, Ilna?" he said. "I've a thousand years of misrule to correct, but first things first."

  Ilna swayed, more stunned than she had been by the bolts the creature had flung at her. Then, blind with tears of joy, she began stumbling toward the statues of her family.

  * * *

  Tenoctris lifted herself from Sharina's lap. Mogon's blow hadn't hurt the old woman seriously, though the balas-ruby he wore in a gaudy ring had left a welt along her cheek.