by David Drake
Zettin shrugged. “They manage somehow, I gather,” he said with a black scowl. “The cat men’re mostly young males, warriors that is, from keeps which surrendered to the army. They and the pirates they’re joining aren’t very different in attitude.”
He turned his head away, though inside the slowly rumbling carriage he wouldn’t have been able to see Sharina’s face any more clearly than she could see his. “From what those who’ve fled the area tell us,” Zettin said with a careful lack of emotion, “they’ve taken up eating men. The humans have, that is. If you want to call them human.”
Lord Zettin had been an officer of the Blood Eagles and a protégé of Lord Attaper. When Garric had restored the fleet as the only means of enforcing royal authority over the Kingdom of the Isles, Zettin had become its commander—in part because traditional army officers led by Lord Waldron had considered the fleet command beneath them. Now that the fleet had little value to a continental kingdom, Garric had appointed the former admiral as chief military aide to Sharina, who ran the civil administration while he was absent with the army.
“Ah,” Sharina said, realizing now why Zettin had been so insistent on bringing the business to her immediately instead of waiting for the morning. “That’s something we’ll need to deal with promptly, yes. But milord, I’m afraid my brother will make the decision as to precisely how that will happen. This is a strictly military matter, and I keep out of those except in an immediate crisis.”
“But Your Highness—”
“Milord!” Sharina said. “Garric—Prince Garric—should return the day after tomorrow at the latest. I’ll send the information to him at once, but I will not take the decision out of his hands.”
“Yes, of course, Your Highness,” Zettin said tiredly. “I see that this is … a proper way to proceed. But…”
He let his voice trail away as the carriage halted. Sharina peered through the slats, then opened her door before one of the guards acting as footmen hopped down to get it. They’d drawn up in front of the bungalow which Sharina used as her private quarters, one of scores of separate structures within the palace compound.
When Garric became regent and the first strong leader the kingdom’d had for over a generation, half the buildings within the walls had been empty and dilapidated. Valles was again the administrative capital of a thriving kingdom, so reconstruction of the palace had necessarily kept pace with the need for office space. What would happen now that Valles was far inland—well, that was a problem for another day if not a distant day.
“Milord …,” Sharina said. Zettin’s door jerked open, and a Blood Eagle took hers as well. “The situation you describe at Pandah is not only evil but disgusting. Nevertheless it may not be in my brother’s opinion the most serious threat the kingdom faces at this moment, nor the best use of the army. You and I and my brother will all put our personal feelings aside and work for the kingdom’s greatest good—as we’ve been doing.”
She got down from the carriage. She hadn’t told Zettin anything he hadn’t already known. He was a smart man, very possibly the cleverest of the high officers in the royal army, but he’d chosen to waste her time in this fashion because he was angry and appalled on a personal basis. There wasn’t any time for personal feelings!
Zettin walked around the back of the vehicle—to take his leave formally, she hoped, because the interview was closed. The door of her bungalow opened. Sharina looked from the officer to what she assumed would be the maid, her only servant, who’d stayed awake for her—
“Cashel!” she said. He stood solid as an oak in the light of the porch lantern, smiling a greeting. She’d been wrong about there not being time for personal feelings.
Sharina trotted forward as quickly as the robes permitted; they weren’t tight, but they were so long and heavy that they were likely to wrap around her ankles and trip her if she weren’t careful. Cashel strode down the steps to gather her in. He lifted her soul as well in a sudden flood of safety and contentment.
“Tenoctris is lying down inside,” Cashel said. “She had to do some hard things. And there’s a thing you need to see.”
Raising his head slightly, he said to Zettin, “Sir? You’d better come look at it too. Whatever it is, it’s something for soldiers to know about.”
“Yes,” said Sharina, squeezing Cashel once more before releasing him. She didn’t know what the problem was yet, but she knew that neither Cashel nor Tenoctris overstated dangers. Over her shoulder as she mounted the steps she said, “Lord Zettin? Will you call a courier from the duty room in the next building? It sounds like we’ll need to summon Prince Garric.”
“I’ve already done that, Sharina,” said Tenoctris, standing to the side in the doorway. “The officer in charge there thought Garric should be able to get back by midmorning if all goes well.”
“Fine,” said Sharina, embracing the older woman lightly as they passed. It’s good to have friends who’ll make the right decisions before you need to. “Then we’ll call a council meeting for the tenth hour. Now, let’s see what you’ve got.”
It was good to be a person who made the right decisions herself, too. Even when she was really tired.
Chapter
3
ILNA PAUSED AT the head of the valley. She whispered, “Are you going to claim this wasn’t the cat men’s work, Temple?”
She scowled at herself. The pattern in her hand made it clear that the Coerli were well beyond the sound of her voice by now. Perhaps she was speaking quietly in respect for the dead—a thought that made her scowl even blacker.
“No, Ilna,” Temple said calmly. “A band of Coerli killed them and did worse, I suspect. There will have been children.”
Asion was partway up a tree for a better view of the valley than Ilna and Temple got from the ridgeline. Karpos, crouched several paces behind them watching their back trail, said, “What will we do now, mistress?”
“What?” said Ilna. “We’ll go down to the farm and see if we notice anything important from closer up. Then the two of you will track the beasts to their daylight lair—it’s a bright day and early enough in the morning that you shouldn’t be in danger. And when we know precisely what the situation is, we’ll kill them. As usual.”
She was surprised to hear the anger in her voice, though she supposed anger was never very far from the surface. The sight of three bodies below had scraped off the cover.
The three human bodies, that was. Ilna didn’t care about the donkey butchered in the corral to the side of the main house, nor about the milch goat with her kid who’d run nearly a furlong from the kicked-over bucket and stool by the house. At another time she’d have been angry at the way the killers had deliberately torn the nanny’s belly open and gripped her intestine so that she pulled it out as she ran, but they’d done the same to the woman who’d been milking her.
She rose to her feet. “I’ll wait here,” Karpos said. He was out of sight.
Ilna glanced at the cords in her hand, then began picking out the pattern. “There’s no need,” she said, but she didn’t argue with Karpos as she started down the slope. He wasn’t doubting her word, just continuing to do the things that’d kept him alive for however many years he’d been hunting dangerous animals. Temple and Asion, who dropped from the tree, joined her.
The farmstead had been neat looking. Oh, not neat by the standards to which Ilna’d kept her quarters and Cashel’s in their uncle’s millhouse, but with animals and no doubt children as Temple had said, not even Ilna could’ve guaranteed perfect order.
The walls of the main building were logs trimmed with an adze and chinked with clay; they’d been touched up recently. Several roof shakes were brighter than their neighbors also, showing where rot and wind damage had been repaired.
And none of it mattered now to those who’d lived here, because a band of cat men had killed them all. Ilna’s lips moved, though no one watching would’ve recognized the expression as a smile. She couldn’t help what was past, but s
he was as sure as she was of sunset that this particular gang of beasts wouldn’t repeat their slaughter.
“Two days, I’d judge,” Asion said, squatting by the corpse of the man who’d had time to snatch a sickle from the outbuilding. It had a wooden blade set with sharp flints, a dangerous-enough weapon if he’d managed to strike anything with it; but of course he hadn’t.
From the tear in the corpse’s bearded throat and the rope burn on his right wrist, a beast had thrown his line around the fellow’s arm and set its hooks in his neck so that his attempt to slash with the sickle only dug them deeper. Either the beast holding the line or one of his fellows had then jabbed a slender point through the man’s diaphragm, leaving him to slowly suffocate or bleed out.
Helman, the butcher who slaughtered hogs when his circuit brought him through Barca’s Hamlet, did so with equal cruelty, but Ilna herself didn’t behave that way. She smiled again, though with no more humor than the expression of a moment before. If the hogs had trapped Helman some dark night on his rounds, she at least would’ve thought it a rare instance of justice being done.
She entered the house. The door, suspended on leather hinges, was open, but the sturdy crossbar lay just inside, where the cat men had dropped it when they left. There hadn’t been time to close the window shutters, so the cat men had entered through a casement, tearing the covering of leather which’d been scraped thin to pass light.
Temple held his bronze sword before him, but his buckler was slung over his back to leave his left hand free. He knelt to touch a spatter on the floor of halved logs, puncheons. The blood was dry enough to flake away, as Ilna would’ve expected.
“How many do you think it was lived here?” Asion asked. A bed was folded up against the back wall; he prodded the frame with the point of his knife, gouging out a splinter. He seemed tenser than Ilna’d expected.
Ilna realized with a touch of amusement that it made the hunter nervous to be in a house. Had he and Karpos slept outdoors when they’d trekked into town to sell their lizard gall?
She snorted. Most likely they’d stayed drunk the whole time, or at least drunk enough to ignore the roof over them.
“The parents in the bed, with the infant in the cradle at the foot,” Ilna said. As she spoke, she climbed to the half-loft above the single room. There was a real ladder nailed to the wall, not merely a young pine with the branches lopped short to form steps. “Up here….”
She looked at the bedding, rolled neatly against the roof slope, and estimated the width of the portion of loft floor which wasn’t being used for storage. “Three older children, probably. Though the tallest can’t be more than a cloth yard—”
A normal yard and a thumb’s-span; she’d heard folk from Cordin call it an ell.
“—unless he sleeps doubled up.”
There was no chance, none, but Ilna nonetheless crawled to the bedding and pulled it back to make sure that no child had hidden within it when the cat men came. That hadn’t happened, but she didn’t mind wasting a few moments to be sure she wasn’t leaving an infant who’d fallen unconscious after an elder had concealed it. She had enough on her conscience already.
The blankets were goat wool, but they hadn’t been loomed here. When Ilna touched the cloth, she got an image of stone-built farm buildings and a pair of old women murmuring as they worked their shuttles.
“And the other man?” Temple asked.
He isn’t a peasant, Ilna remembered. Aloud she said, “A hired man; he’s wearing the master’s cast-off clothes. The tunic’s too small for him. He slept in the outbuilding, I suppose.”
She came down the ladder deliberately, stepping on every rung and holding the rails. She wanted to get away from the beds the children would never return to, get out of this house; but she wouldn’t let dislike make her act in haste. Mental discomfort was merely one of those things, like pain and hunger and bleak hopelessness, that you avoided when you could and bore when you couldn’t.
Temple gestured toward the fireplace; there was ash on his fingertip. “It’s cold,” he said. “All the way down to the hearthstone. At least two days.”
The cat men didn’t like bright light. They must’ve come at dawn, while the family was starting the morning chores. The pack would be sleeping in the shade of a booth of woven branches at this time of day.
The Coerli showed real talent with wicker and bark cloth, though they didn’t grow flax or raise animals for wool. They were beasts….
The wooden chimney had been sealed with a thick coating of clay. Ilna frowned when she saw it, but there wasn’t much free stone here; and the family hadn’t died from a chimney fire, after all.
The folk who’d built the farm had come from a more settled region. Did it exist now, or had the Change torn this farmstead an unguessable distance in time and space from where it’d sprung?
That probably didn’t matter. If it did, then she’d know soon enough.
Asion was tracing the simple carvings on the top of a wooden chest with his fingertip. “My, that’s fine,” he said. Looking toward Ilna, he went on, “Mistress, where’d the kids go if we didn’t find them here? They couldn’t’ve run if the parents couldn’t, could they?”
Ilna looked at Temple. The big man said, “The raiding party carried them off, Asion. They’ll be more tender than the adults.”
There was no expression in his voice. He turned to Ilna and said, “I’d guess there were four or five males, and there may be females and kits in their lair. They’ll be hunting again soon.”
“Yes,” said Ilna. “Asion, take Karpos and locate the beasts. I wouldn’t expect them to be very far away. I’ll prepare matters here to receive them.”
“Yes, mistress,” the hunter said, slipping through the door and drawing his sling from beneath his belt where he’d been carrying it. He seemed glad to get away.
Ilna looked around once more, then walked into the farmyard. Temple followed her. She’d hoped there’d be a loom, but that wasn’t important; she could knot the necessary patterns by hand. She’d pick out yarn from the dead woman’s tunic. The rip would make the task easier, and she could put the blood dyeing the wool to practical advantage.
“Ilna?” said the big man. “Have you a task for me?”
“I’ll summon the beasts by lighting a fire on the hearth,” she said. “I’ll be waiting for them in front of the house, though. You might decide where the three of you should best be to act when they come to me.”
Her lips quirked into a smile or a sneer. She said, “After all, you’re a soldier, aren’t you?”
She didn’t like soldiers, men whose life was directed at killing other men.
“Something like that,” Temple said equably. He glanced around. “Asion in the goat’s byre, under the straw to hide his smell. Karpos in the manure pile for the same reason. I’ll wait in the house, because the Coerli won’t take time to separate my smell from the previous owners’ before they attack.”
“Yes, all right,” said Ilna, taken aback by the speed with which he’d planned the business. The hunters would prefer to hide in filth for the hours before the cat men came rather than to be inside a house … and Temple noticed that, as I did. “I’ll get to work, then.”
“Ilna?” the big man said. “There’s tools in the shed. I’d like to bury the dead. Since there’s time.”
“Yes,” said Ilna. “If you wish.”
She walked to the woman’s corpse. She should’ve thought of that herself, but it wasn’t her real job. Her real job was to kill cat men, and very shortly she’d have a chance to do more of that.
“BUT WE DON’T have a completed survey for the route to Pandah,” said a civilian named Baumo. “I’m sure it seems simple to people who don’t have to do the work, but most of the residents in that direction are Grass People and don’t speak a proper language!”
Cashel didn’t know what Baumo’s title was or what he did beyond—it seemed—make surveys. Indeed, Cashel didn’t know what most of the governmen
t officials here at the meeting did; so far as he was concerned, they all sort of blurred together.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t have learned: inside of two days, he’d know the personality of every sheep in a flock of ten tens or more. But he was interested in sheep and not a bit interested in palace officials, no matter how important they were; and officials weren’t his job.
“Well, surely there’ll be enough food to supply one regiment,” said Admiral Zettin. “I don’t think we’ll need more troops than that. There can’t be more than a thousand or so of the pirates and they’re disgusting perverts, after all. What we can’t afford to do is wait!”
The meeting was in one of the bigger conference rooms and involved far more people than Cashel could count on both hands. Besides the important folk sitting at the table, there were all sorts of clerks and runners standing against the walls waiting for somebody to ask them or tell them something.
A bunch of people started talking, none of them seeming to agree with Zettin but none of them saying the same thing either. Garric hadn’t arrived yet and Tenoctris didn’t want to get into the business of the black men, the Last as she called them, till he did. Sharina was letting Zettin talk about his notion of attacking Pandah, where Cashel’d been a long time ago. It wasn’t the same place since the Change, it seemed.
Sharina sat in the middle of one long side, listening to the argument but not running things the way Cashel knew she could do if she wanted to. She was letting folks talk to keep them occupied while she waited for Garric and the real business.
Cashel let the smile spread across his lips. Sharina was so smart, and so beautiful; and she loved him, which he’d never dreamed could be when they were growing up together in Barca’s Hamlet.
Tenoctris sat to Sharina’s left, reading books and scrolls she took out of the satchel which held the things she wanted as a wizard. She didn’t even pretend to care about Pandah. Mostly she’d put each book back when she’d looked at it but now and again she’d lay one on the table with a bamboo splint for a place marker.
