by David Drake
Asion turned and signalled to his partner. Karpos was less than a furlong behind, much closer than usual because the landscape they'd just crossed was too barren and dusty to conceal a stalking enemy.
"That's odd," said Temple. He pointed toward the southern end of the valley, where the creek spilled down from a notch in the rock wall. "Impressive, at least. That's a dam. If the watercourse on the other side of it flowed naturally, the whole valley would flood."
"How do you—" Ilna said, then scowled at her stupidity. She disliked stone so much that it was apparently robbing her of intelligence. "Yes, I see that the dam's high, and that the water spills over the top."
She returned her attention to the village on the other side of the creek. The walls were drystone, blocks laid without mortar, and the buildings were thatched with tussock grass. There were more houses than she could count on both hands; but not, she thought, twice that number. The line of shadow from the sun behind her was beginning to darken the tawny roofs as well.
"Seventeen huts," said Temple. "I'd judge they were of a size to hold six or eight family members each, wouldn't you guess?"
"Where's the people?" Karpos said as he joined them. "And where's the goats too? I don't see any."
Asion pointed. "There's a door," he said. "In the rock there."
It took Ilna a moment to realize that he wasn't pointing at a rock among the houses but rather to the side of the hill beyond. There was a door, braced like a city gate though not nearly as big. The man standing in it was far enough back in the shadow that she hadn't noticed him till he moved, but the hunter had.
She smiled slightly. There were many people in the world who had special skills. Asion and Karpos wouldn't have remained in her company had they not been among those people.
She glanced to her side. And Temple had skills as well. Temple very definitely had skills.
A different man came out of the door and waved toward them. He cupped his hands into a megaphone and shouted.
"He's saying, 'Quickly,'" said Asion, frowning. He looked at Ilna.
"Yes," she said. "There's no point in our staying here."
"I'll lead," said Karpos, moving down the slope at a swinging jog. He kept both hands on his bow with the nocked arrow slanting to his left. He didn't seem to hurry, but he covered the ground very quickly.
"And we'll move quickly," Ilna said, breaking into a trot. "Since the fellow calling us knows more about this valley than we do."
She wondered if she'd embarrass herself; running wasn't a skill she'd cultivated. On the other hand, there were worse things than falling on her face in front not only of her companions but also the locals. More of the latter had come out of the cave, a handful and one—six.
"Run!" they cried. They were shouting all together now. She could hear the words even over the pounding of her feet on the loose soil. "Run!"
Those worse things might be about to happen.
Ilna smiled. That would be all right. She wasn't good at running, but she knew how to stand and fight.
She took a handful of yarn out of her sleeve and knotted it as she jogged. It wasn't for a weapon against the unnamed Something that the locals were concerned about, it was just to occupy her with something she did well and found relaxing.
Ilna's stride fell into a pattern. She no longer worried about tripping or the way the bindle pounded her back. She should've tightened the straps before she started down, but it didn't really matter.
The wheat in the fields was flourishing; the soil here must be very good. She supposed that was why the villagers had gone to all the effort of damming the river: the silt that'd settled out of slow water over the years would be far richer than that of valleys that'd been sun-baked and wind-scoured for centuries.
She glanced over her shoulder. Temple smiled faintly when he caught her glance. He ran on his toes, holding his shield and scabbard to keep them from swinging. He could obviously keep up this pace—or a quicker one—for a very long time. Well, so could Ilna if she had to, but they'd reached the cottonwoods and Karpos had already crossed the creek.
She was glad of the wooden bridge. It wasn't necessary, but fist-sized stones in the streambed might've turned or slipped beneath her if she'd tried to splash across at a run. She didn't like stone.
The sun was below the horizon. The sky was still bright, but there'd been change. Ilna didn't look back again. There'd be time for that when she reached the cave. She could see the door now, even more massive than she'd thought at a distance. The staples on the inside would hold a bar as thick as her thigh.
Karpos had joined the locals. They seemed ordinary farmers, much like the people Ilna'd grown up with on Haft. Their tunics were goat wool rather than sheep's wool, but someone less familiar with fabric wouldn't have noticed the difference.
"Inside quick!" cried a burly man with a ginger beard. He held a simple spear. His fellows were armed with similar spears, save for the pair with clubs.
Ilna reached the villagers standing outside. Beyond them were women and children watching nervously from well within the cave. Karpos grimaced a question to her.
"Quick, before the demons get here!" cried Ginger-beard. Instead of obeying, Ilna turned to see what was pursuing them.
Nothing was. The wheat moved only to wisps of breeze that even on the hairs on the back of Ilna's arms couldn't have felt.
But another sun was in the sky, a dim, red orb midway toward the western horizon. The air had an unfamiliar texture that wasn't quite a smell. A gray gauze began to curtain the ridge from which Ilna and her companions had first seen the valley, and on it was the outline of a door.
A Corl warrior, then two more, slipped through that outline like light glancing from polished metal. They raced down the slope, spreading out as the Coerli always did while hunting. They carried the usual weapons: small axes, throwing lines with weighted hooks, and spears with springy double points.
Another trio of catmen, then another, raced from the outlined doorway. The red sun was too dim to cast their shadows, but their rippling fur shone as they moved. They were agile as well as quick, sometimes making leaps down slope that no man could've equaled.
"We must shut the door!" the ginger-haired local man said desperately. "Come in or we must close you out!"
"Not yet," said Ilna as her fingers told the knots in the pattern they'd woven. "I have to see more."
A clot of catmen came from the distant outline, more than the total of the groups who'd come through before.
"I'm closing—" the local said, his voice rising.
"No," said Temple. He didn't speak loudly, but the syllable could've been chipped out of quartz.
"We have to—"
"No," Temple repeated.
The catmen were coming very swiftly. They were all warriors without the chieftain who'd normally have been leading a band so large.
Ilna's fingers worked, searching for the answer her conscious mind wouldn't have been able to arrive at. There was an answer, she was sure . . . .
"Ilna," said Temple softly. "We will do as you choose we should do. But for myself, I would rather fight the Coerli at a later time."
She had it!
Ilna stepped inside the doorway. Temple himself slammed the panel closed behind her; it was as massive as the gate of a border fortress.
Ginger-hair and his fellows slid the bar into place, Ilna heard the pattering of the catmen's light axes on the outer door. It was no more dangerous than hail tapping the slate roof of the mill Ilna had grown up in. The catmen shrieked in frustration.
"I've found the way to what I'm searching for," Ilna said, speaking to the blurred figures around her. There were lamps farther back in the cave, but it was taking a moment for her eyes to adapt to them. "Finally."
"Mistress?" said Karpos. "Which direction is that?"
"Through the door that the cat beasts opened to come here," said Ilna. "Of course, we'll have to kill all of them first."
She felt her lips tighten like
the blade of a curved knife.
"But we'd want to do that anyway," she added.
Chapter 11
From the ogre's back Garric could see through the tops of thorn hedges on either side of the rutted red dirt track, but for the most part Kore herself wasn't visible to the peasants working in the fields. They were startled to see a man looking down at them from fourteen feet in the air, but they didn't drop their tools and run screaming.
The pair of chattering women who saw Kore as they stepped through a gap in the hedge did run screaming, tossing away the leaf-wrapped bundles they'd been carrying on their heads. Their bright cotton robes fluttered like parrot wings behind them.
Shin sniffed appreciatively. "A paste of chick-peas, potatoes and tomatoes in a wrapper of flatbread," he said. "Very nicely seasoned, including a touch of saffron. But—"
He grinned at Garric—or possibly at Kore.
"—it would be wrong to deprive hardworking farmers of their dinner."
"I suspect you'd be depriving stray dogs of unexpected bounty," said Garric as the ogre trotted on, "but yes, it'd be wrong. We'll purchase dinner in normal fashion when we stop for the night."
"And may I hope for a nice haunch of beef, dear master?" said Kore. "This is cattle country, I scent."
Calling this 'cattle country' was stretching the point. A few of the farmers were plowing behind a single bullock, obviously adult but no bigger than a young bull of the breed folk in Barca's Hamlet gelded into oxen. Even those were rare: most of the folk Garric saw in the fields were breaking ground for seed with a hoe or a dibble.
Kore's comment made him wonder how much of what she said was joking and how much was true. He suspected both were the case: that the ogre whimsically stated things which were in fact true—including that she'd eaten humans in the past and was looking forward to doing so again when she ceased to be under Garric's control.
Which in turn made Garric wonder about the morality of his position. Could he in good conscience release a ravening monster on the world after he'd completed his embassy to the Yellow King?
The king in his mind chuckled grimly. "If you're worried about that, lad," he said, "there's some troops in your army you'd better be worrying about too. And not the worst troops either, when there's hard fighting to do."
Shin trotted beside the ogre, occasionally leaping into a somersault to vary his routine. Now he laughed and said, "A more cautious person might've said, "If he completed his embassy.' But you're obviously a sanguine young man as well as a great champion."
"Tsk, Shin, he's merely a logician," Kore protested. "If he's torn to bits or devoured or any of the other likely fatal results of this journey, then his moral quandary vanishes. You should rather worry about how his faithful mount will fare after the probable disaster."
"Ah, but I am not a philosopher," Shin said. "In such an event, my first concern must be to avoid becoming your next meal."
"A good point!" Kore said. "Now that you call my mind to the matter, I don't believe I have as yet tasted aegipan. Indeed, I'll keep that in mind for the future."
Surely they're joking . . . .
Garric cleared his throat and said aloud, "There's forest not far ahead. Hardwoods, and some of them pretty tall."
"There are men waiting for us where the road enters that forest," the ogre said, snuffling deeply. Her nose was flat, little more than a ridge with two vertical slits, but it was obviously very sensitive. "I think twelve . . . . Yes, twelve men, one of them wearing what I believe is patchouli. The others smell mostly of muck and their own sweat."
"A squad of soldiers under an officer," Carus said. "I don't imagine they'll be much in the way of troops, but twelve's still a good number. And I'd guess they have bows."
"We'll hope for the best," said Garric equably.
"And we'll keep our sword loose in the scabbard, I trust," Carus said, but his image was grinning. It'd take more courage—and bloody-mindedness—than Garric or his ancestor either one expected from local militiamen to start a fight with a swordsman on an ogre.
They passed beyond the last field. With no hedges to block the view, Garric saw a belt of scrub a furlong wide and then the trees themselves. Some rose nearly two hundred feet in the air.
"Teak," said Carus with the satisfaction of a man sure of an identification. "I ran into it on Sirimat. A bloody hard wood for a stockade, and it didn't burn the way I'd expected. We had to go over the walls."
A soldier wearing the same clothing as the farmers in the fields—a straw hat, a loincloth, and a loose cotton vest—stood at the base of one of the nearer trees. He shouted with excitement and grabbed what Garric thought was a crooked bamboo spear leaning against the bole of the tree. It was a bow taller than he was, and the stone-pointed arrow he nocked was five feet long.
More men, as like the first as so many peas, jumped up from where they'd been sitting or sleeping in the shade. Some did have spears, but there were several more bows. The weapons were crude, but as Carus had noted—there were a lot of them.
"Greetings, friends!" Garric called, waving cheerfully with his left hand. His right wasn't on the sword hilt, but he could get it there in a hurry if he needed to. "Please pardon my mount. She's harmless! We're merely travellers passing through your country and ready to pay for food and lodging."
"Harmless!" the ogre sniffed, but she kept her voice down. She even slowed to an amble, though even that pace wasn't enough to quell the soldiers' nervousness. One half-drew his bow, then slacked it. Garric wondered what the range of the long arrows might be.
The officer stood. He must've been putting on his breastplate, an arrangement of shiny disks on chains. It struck even Garric as useless; Carus burst out laughing. It was sparkly, though, and that was obviously all the fellow had in mind.
"Stop!" the officer cried in a high-pitched voice. He had a moustache so thin it might've been drawn with a brush; the ends stuck straight up in the air like the horns of the local bullocks. "You must not come closer or my men will assuredly destroy you!"
To demonstrate his determination, he drew his curved sword—on the second try, and then only after gripping the scabbard with his left hand. When it came out, Garric saw that the blade had rusted to the mouth of the scabbard. "Do not come closer!"
Garric pulled back lightly on the straps; if Kore'd been a horse he'd have been sawing on the reins, but all the ogre required was a hint. Assuming she was willing to obey, of course; which fortunately she was in this instance.
Garric wondered if he ought to dismount. He said, "Your worship, we're peaceful travellers."
"That's rather a stretch to believe from a man on ogre-back, wouldn't you say?" Shin commented cheerfully.
"If they weren't afraid, they'd be dangerous," Carus said, looking out through his descendant's eyes with cold contempt. "If you were a trader leading a pack mule, they'd rob you. And if you were travelling with your wife, so much the worse for her. Oh, I know this sort."
"You must not come closer!" the officer shouted, spraying spittle. He was terrified. "You must not!"
"Hold up," Garric murmured to Kore, fifty feet from the squad. If he continued to approach, it was a toss-up whether the soldiers'd scatter like sparrows or if they'd blindly attack. Maybe the choice really was to draw his sword and charge, hoping to push them toward flight . . . .
"Let's see what a little mummery can do, shall we?" the aegipan said. He picked up a handful of the red dust and minced toward the men calling, "Who wishes to see marvels? I'm a great wizard! I'll open to you secrets undreamt by mortal men!"
He tossed the dust into the still air. Instead of settling back, it formed into the image of a big-hipped, buxom woman. He continued forward while the image danced above him, gyrating violently and sometimes bending backward so that her head was at the level of her ankles.
That can't be possible! Garric thought. But though a figure of dust needn't be any more realistic than what an ordinary sculptor carved, he got the feeling that Shin had cr
eated not only a dancer but a particular dancer.
"Walk up slowly," Garric said to the ogre in a quiet voice. "Stop behind Shin and I'll dismount."
"Do you find her pretty?" Shin said, pausing a double-pace from the edge of the forest, into which the soldiers had retreated at his approach. The officer was the only one who hadn't moved, perhaps because his back was to a young tree already. He didn't have the concentration to spare to slip around one side or the other of the thigh-thick trunk.
