by David Drake
"What're they afraid of?" Hutena said, frowning with anger and frustration.
The same thing you are, Ilna thought, but instead of that she said, "They don't know what's going to happen any better than we do. The difference is that they've decided to hide and let it happen to them, whereas we're choosing to deal with it on our own terms."
"Yeah, I guess so," the bosun muttered. He gave her an appreciative smile and hefted the maul. "I'd rather be us."
"Yes, me too," said Ilna with a wintry smile of her own. Perhaps she was learning to tell the truth in a way that other people didn't find offensive. That'd be a useful skill, though she'd use it to supplement her instinctive responses rather than replace them.
The street grew steeper and switched back; the only buildings this high up the hill were three-story structures whose upper floors were laid back along the slope. The castle loomed like part of the crag. The outer gate was open.
"Do you know, 'The Single Girl,' Master Bosun?" said Chalcus cheerily, his right middle and index fingers touching the nock of the arrow on his bow string. "When I was single, I went dressed so fine…"
"Aye, I know it," said Hutena. "But we'll sing another time if you please, sir."
Chalcus laughed. They'd reached the gate. Nothing moved but the wind.
Chalcus slipped through the gateway, drawing the bow to his cheek in the same sweeping motion. A cat yowled and sprang from a trash pile. The bow string went back to Chalcus' ear; then he relaxed with a gust of embarrassed laughter.
"I'm not the man I once was if a little cat makes me jump," he said as Ilna and the bosun joined him. He was smiling, but the comment wasn't altogether a joke.
"We're none of us the people we wish we were," Ilna said, sharply because she understood perfectly the thing Chalcus hadn't been willing to put in words. "We never were. As for what matters-you'll do for this."
She smiled, coldly because in a crisis she was always cold; but with enormous affection. "And you'll do for me."
Chalcus set the bow against the inner side of the curtain wall, dropped the arrow back into his quiver, and set the quiver beside the bow. He drew his sword, keeping his left hand free. "I think from here on I'll not worry about what there might be beyond the reach of my blade," he said with a grin.
The buildings around the ancient watchtower were empty-abandoned, not just closed around their cowering inhabitants. "I figured there'd be servants still," Hutena said. "Are they that scared of us?"
"It's not us they're worried about," Chalcus said. "It's what they think we'll let loose that scares them, eh?"
Ilna sniffed. "Then we'll have to be careful not to let it loose," she said.
The tower's outer door was closed. Hutena raised his maul in anticipation, but when Chalcus pulled on the great iron ring, only its weight resisted. The interior was dank and spartan, a military post whose thick walls filled most of what seemed from the outside to be interior space.
A stone staircase ran around the walls. Every fifth step-the thumb of Ilna's hand-was broader and had an arrow slit. The only light came from the slits and from the open trap door that gave onto the roof platform.
Set into the base of the staircase was a small, heavy door with a peaked arch. Chalcus tried it with his left hand; the panel had no more give than the stone jambs that held it. Chalcus moved back and nodded to the bosun.
Hutena stepped to the side of the doorway and eyed it for a moment as he waggled the maul to work his shoulder muscles loose. The panel was hung to open inward. There were staples for a bar on this side from the days the cellars were a dungeon, but they'd rusted to nubs.
"Huh!" the bosun said as he swung, stepping into the blow so that his whole body drove the massive oak head. It crashed into the lock, smashing the plate loose and splintering the internal bolt out of the panel.
Hutena backed away, breathing hard. Chalcus shoved the door open with the toes of his left foot. Air puffed out, chill and stinking of ancient slaughter. The stairs leading down were lighted faintly from below.
"I'll lead," Chalcus said, speaking quietly. He drew his dagger.
Ilna looked at Hutena. The bosun had leaned the maul against the jamb and was trying to slide the short axe from his belt. His hands trembled and his eyes were fixed on a damp patch of wall across the circular room.
"Master Hutena," she said crisply. "I'd like you to wait here and keep people from coming at us from behind. I don't like stone walls, and I certainly don't want to be blocked into this place while I'm busy with-"
She smiled with about as little humor as she felt; she wasn't joking about her dislike of stone.
"-other matters."
"Sir?" the bosun said. He tried to keep a strait face, but his relief was obvious to anyone.
"Aye, and I should've thought of it myself," Chalcus said, shaking his head in feigned irritation. "Indeed, that's all we'd need-locked in a dungeon with no company but a dead wizard."
To Ilna, in a faintly thinner voice, he went on, "Ready, dear heart?"
"Yes," she said; and she followed her man down the narrow steps.
The staircase was steep, but its flights were straight and reversed at landings instead of spiralling like those of the tower above. The treads had been cut from the rock of the hillside, and they were so old that the feet of those passing up and down them had worn them concave.
Ilna couldn't imagine what would have justified such an amount of traffic. Perhaps these steps were much older than the tower built over them, though it dated to the Old Kingdom of a thousand years ago.
There were two handsful of steps in each flight. Looking over Chalcus' shoulder as she turned onto the third flight, Ilna saw a doorway at the bottom. The iron door hung askew; the upper hinge had rusted away, and the lower one was a red mass which would've crumbled if anybody tugged hard enough to swing the door closed.
Chalcus paused three steps up from the bottom. Ilna could hear the wind whispering, and a slight breeze traced her ankles.
"Eh?" murmured Chalcus. He didn't turn his head.
"Go on," said Ilna, also in a quiet voice. Smashing down the door'd made enough noise to wake the dead, but it still didn't seem right to talk loudly.
The pattern Ilna'd woven was in her left hand, the silk lasso in her right. She didn't know which she'd need-or if either would help-but she was as ready as she could be.
Chalcus jumped a double pace into the room below, as smooth as water flowing down the steps but much, much faster. He poised, motionless except for quick movements of his head.
"I'm behind you!" Ilna said sharply, halting an arm's length back of Chalcus. Her eyes swept the circular room beyond.
Its width was four or five times her height. Its illumination came from slots in the upper walls which must've been cut through the crag on which the tower stood. Ilna wouldn't have guessed that any useful amount of light could trickle through such long narrow passages, but in what otherwise would've been total darkness her eyes quickly adapted to see shapes if not colors. Nothing was moving.
The ceiling had been hollowed into a natural dome. The builders had trusted the strength of the living rock without adding supporting pillars. Ilna smiled faintly. Given how old this room must be, they'd been right.
There was no furniture except chests of wood and metal around the walls. Some were covered with animal skins to make adequate benches, and other furs and skins were heaped in several places on the floor.
The room stank like a tanyard. The light slits ventilated it, but even so the stench of death and rotting blood squeezed Ilna's lungs like a pillow over her face. More than just the smell went into the oppressive atmosphere; foul things had happened here. Utterly foul.
Chalcus started edging sunwise around the periphery, the sword in his right hand waggling like a snake's questing tongue. Ilna remained where she was, waiting for the pattern to change.
A slab of basalt lay in the middle of the room. Crude tools had shaped it more or less into a rectangle. There was
a groove down the center and a hole in the stone floor beneath it for a drain. Blood coated the slab and the floor both. The latest outpouring gleamed in the faint light; it looked fresh enough to be tacky to the touch, which Ilna had no intention of testing.
She saw no sign of the bodies of the sacrificial animals. Human sacrifices, she supposed.
Two thin, mirror-polished sheets of stone-one of banded agate, the other something bluish and translucent, perhaps topaz-stood upright on either side of the basalt. Ilna frowned, trying to determine what waswrong with the stone mirrors. She felt there was movement in them, but her eyes saw them only as stone.
Chalcus neared one of the piles of furs. He was grinning faintly. His right foot slid forward in another slow step. Without warning he lunged instead, his curved sword stabbing down like the sting of a spider-killing wasp. The point clicked against the stone floor and withdrew as smoothly as it had gone in.
Chalcus shook his head, still smiling. He resumed his slow shuffle.
Ilna had turned her head minusculely when Chalcus thrust; she saw the change in the agate mirror at the corner of her eye. From this slightly different angle she was looking at the hellworld theBird of the Tide had dropped into. A pool of molten sulfur, yellow as bile, bubbled beneath the window of stone; she thought she could see one of the pincer-armed monsters hunch between spikes of rock in the near distance.
"Chalcus," she said in a quiet voice. "These plates are doors of some kind. Gaur may not be-"
Gaur stood up from the heap of furs and bullhides to her right, across the room from Chalcus. The wizard was taller than she'd remembered, raw-boned and powerful. For an instant she thought he was wearing animal skins hair-side out, but that was a trick of the dim light: Gaur was nude and covered with fur like a beast. He growled softly.
Chalcus shifted his stance to face the wizard. Gaur was unarmed, but so big a man could be dangerous regardless. He'd sent a ship and crew from this world to another, though. That would be exhausting for even a very powerful wizard, and from the look of him Gaur hadn't had time to fully recover.
Ilna dropped her knotted pattern back into her sleeve. There wasn't enough light down here for her to trust its effect.
Chalcus sidled toward the wizard, his sword advanced and his left hand not far from the hilt of the slender dagger. Gaur hunched, his eyes fixed on the swordsman. He growled louder, then Gaur's body slumped inward, not shrinking as Ilna first thought but changing: the face flattened into long jaws, the chest grew deeper, and the arms formed into forelegs. For a heartbeat Gaur crouched on his bed of skins as a huge black-furred wolf; then he sprang at Chalcus' throat.
Ilna arched her noose over the thick beast neck, tightening as she pulled with all her strength. The wolf outweighed her by twice or more, but even so she jerked its head around even as the beast snatched her off her feet.
Chalcus' sword slipped in behind the wolf's shoulder blade, grating on ribs as it sliced through and out the other side. Gaur crunched sideways onto the stone floor. Chalcus tugged his blade free; there was a gush of blood.
Ilna'd fallen onto her knees and left hand. She started to rise, still holding the noose tight. The beast was twitching.
The wolf rolled, getting its legs under it again. This time it glared at Ilna. The wound through its chest had closed, though a flag of blood still matted the dark fur.
Gaur snarled and leaped. Ilna threw herself backward, knowing there was no escape. Chalcus caught the wolf's hind leg with his left hand and hacked at the beast's neck, using his edge rather than the point this time.
Gaur twisted in the air and slammed onto the floor again. The inward-curving sword had cut deep into his spine. Still holding the wolf's ankle, Chalcus lifted his sword to repeat the blow; a line of blood drops curled off the blade.
The gaping wound started to close as soon as the steel withdrew. Gaur turned his head toward Chalcus and snarled loud enough to make the stone mirrors vibrate.
Ilna lunged backward, pulling on the noose with both hands. She tripped over the basalt slab and sprawled, doubling her knees up to her chest.
Gaur leaped at her, his beast strength pulling his hind leg through Chalcus' grasp. Chalcus gave a cry of fury and stabbed, driving his point up through the wolf's diaphragm into its chest, but the beast completed its pounce. Its forepaws, each the size of Ilna's hands with the fingers spread, jolted her shoulders down on the basalt.
The pattern was complete.
Ilna kicked upward as she rolled in a backwards somersault. She couldn't have lifted Gaur's weight but she didn't have to: the wolf's own inertia carried him over and past her, through the sheet of agate sullen with the light of another world. The growl turned midway into a scream.
Ilna looked into the agate window. Gaur, his head and torso again a man's, plunged into the pool of boiling sulfur. The thick fluid plopped as it closed over the body and then blasted outward. The wizard's flesh had cooked to vapor in an instant.
Ilna ducked as a blob of molten sulfur spat from the pool to splash over the basalt. It hardened into a thin sheet whose dry reek cut through the stench of old blood.
Ilna straightened, breathing hard. The agate was a smooth mirror again; only from one narrow angle was it a gateway to Hell.
"I lost my noose," she said in a shaky voice. "I've had it for a long time."
"Dear heart, dear love," Chalcus said. He was ignoring Gaur's blood drying on his sword, though he usually kept the steel as scrupulously clean as the bright curve of the waxing moon. "There'll be a thousand cords, there'll be all the silk on the island of Seres now that you're safe. I almost lostyou."
Ilna walked around the upper end of the slab, wiping her hands on her tunic. "I didn't think…," she said. "All the strands had to be placed just so…"
She smiled weakly at Chalcus. "That's true of any pattern, of course. But when it's yarn, the strands don't fight your placement."
As Ilna stepped past the sheet of blue topaz, she caught the hint of movement again. She glanced to the side. What she'd thought was clear stone had shadows in it: man-sized, growing Chalcus shouted. She tried to draw back but she was too late. The clawed fingers of a pair of Rua, fine-boned but strong as steel, closed on her upper arms, pulling her toward them into the topaz mirror.
As Ilna fell, she heard Chalcus shout again.
Chapter 21
"I'll take over here, your highness!" said Lord Waldron, glancing back over his shoulder to judge how many troops had arrived. It looked to Garric like several score, a mix of Blood Eagles and regular infantry from Lord Mayne's regiment; the passage from the palace garden was packed with more men. "One quick charge'll sweep these scum away!"
"By the Shepherd, lad!" Carus snarled in Garric's mind. "Don't let that bloody cavalryman throw them away!"
Nor shall I, Garric thought. Aloud he said, "No, milord. I haven't time to explain my strategy here-"
Carus guffawed. Garric's only strategy was to keep from spreading his force into a maze of corridors where the unknown numbers of enemies would have all the advantages. Simple though the plan was, it was a considerable improvement on Lord Waldron's notion of hurling his troops at the enemy in heroic disregard of what might be in ambush behind these gleaming walls.
He stepped in front of the soldiers and turned his back to the army of monsters. "Soldiers of the Isles!" he shouted. "Form ranks five abreast. We'll advance at a walk. The front two ranks will throw spears on my command, the rest of you keep yours till we know more about the situation."
Things would've been disorganized even if all the men had been from the same unit. As it was, besides the Blood Eagles and Mayne's regiment, there were members of half a dozen other commands who'd been in the palace for one reason or another. They'd rushed to follow their prince when it looked like action.
This was exactly what good soldiersshould do, of course, but it turned confusion into chaos. Every man in earshot of Garric, some thirty or forty of them, pushed forward to get into the front rank.<
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"Fellow soldiers!" Garric bellowed. "Save your shoving for the enemy or you'll be cleaning latrines for the rest of your army careers! If any of us live long enough to have careers, which we won't if you don't stop acting like schoolboys. There'll be plenty of fighting for all of us this day, as sure as I love the Isles."
The commotion settled into a reasonable array, though Garric noticed that there were six men, not five, in each rank. That'd be a hindrance for good sword work, but with the enemy channeled straight ahead by the ice walls it might be as well as not to have more weight up front.
Waldron laid his hand on a Blood Eagle's shoulder to move the man back and take his place. "Milord!" Garric said, stepping between Waldron and the soldier. "I need you to stay here where the, the passage enters this ice world. Make sure everyone coming through knows to follow the men in front of them and not go down other corridors. They can fight if they're attacked from the flanks, but they'renot to leave the path that I've chosen."
The path that Tenoctris had chosen, of course, but there was no need for technicalities. The old wizard's thin crimson line continued to stretch back to Carcosa and the sunshine of late spring. A similar trace of blue wizardlight now curled from the triangle also and gleamed down the corridor filled with oncoming beastmen.
"No, your highness," Waldron said with an angry wave of his left hand to brush the notion away. "Mayne can handle that, or-"
"No, Lord Waldron!" Garric said, with King Carus' iron in his voice. "My army commander will take charge of the matter. For the moment that means you. Are you resigning rather than take an order framed for the kingdom's good?"
"Faugh, you're a boy!" Waldron shouted. He slammed his long sword back in its scabbard. "But you'll never say a bor-Warriman didn't do his duty!"
He stalked back to where the passage through nothingness opened into the ice world, every inch a man. "And a soldier besides, rather than just a warrior," said Carus thoughtfully. "Which is a harder task than many realize, and a task I failed at more often than I care to remember."
