by David Drake
“Yes, Tenoctris,” Cashel said. He thought for a moment, then hung the chain around his neck.
Tenoctris hopped to the bench, then stepped into the coffin—the sarcophagus—by herself. She seemed brighter, stronger than she had been.
“Now, Cashel,” she said as she laid herself flat in the stone box, “all you have to do is wait and watch while I sleep.”
With her head on the stone bolster carved in the bottom of the coffin, Tenoctris began to chant softly. The words had the rhythm of words of power, though Cashel couldn’t make out the separate sounds.
He walked to the door to the chamber and stood there, watching the sky turn darker. He rubbed the shaft of his quarterstaff, but the familiar touch of the hickory didn’t settle him.
Cashel didn’t mind not understanding what was going on around him; he was used to that. But this time he was pretty sure he did understand, and that worried him a lot.
“YES, I’M SURE I’d rather deal with a wyvern alone, Master Asion,” Temple said. He gave “sure” just a hint of emphasis. “None of you are equipped to fight the beasts at close quarters, and I’m unable to fight them any other way.”
He bowed slightly to Ilna and added, “This is your first experience with wyverns. You’ll find the three of you have enough to do with the beast which doesn’t go after me, I believe.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Ilna said. To the hunters she added, “Come along.”
Dew congealing out of the clear air made the morning dank. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, however. The day’d shortly be hot enough and dry, for those who survived the next few hours.
The villagers were up but silent save for whispers as they watched the strangers prepare to fight the monsters. They stood on the slope above their shanties as if to make clear that they weren’t part of the business in case it went wrong. Occasionally a child wailed.
Ilna didn’t think about whether Temple and the hunters were accompanying her. They were, of course; but once she’d set out to do this thing, the choices other people made no longer mattered.
If she attacked two wyverns by herself, they’d kill her as surely as sunrise. She could freeze one in its tracks, but the other’d snap her up like a caterpillar in a wren’s beak. That would end the problem to which Ilna saw no solution: how she could kill all Coerli, wipe out the beasts to the last kit and gray-maned ancient?
The hunters began to angle out in front of her, one to either side. “No,” Ilna said firmly; she wouldn’t get angry if they obeyed immediately. “I have to lead. It’s necessary that the brute comes straight at me.”
Temple was well to the right, heading toward the abandoned village. His long strides gave the impression of being languid until you noticed how much distance each one covered. The wyverns had torn the thatch roofs off several houses and the front wall of another had collapsed inward, so it didn’t seem to Ilna that the buildings brought much safety.
She shrugged mentally. The big soldier had the confidence of a man who knew his business. Often enough that meant very little, but Temple had proved to be an exception in the past.
The wyverns lounged beside the altar in front of the temple. They’d made a kill during the night and brought it back to eat; by now they’d torn the carcass to a scattering of bloody bones. The mottled wyvern was lying on its right side. It lifted the stripped remains of a thigh to its jaws with the talons of its left leg, then bit; the bone cracked in half.
“I guess that’s a goat?” Karpos said.
“I guess,” said his sharper-eyed partner. “It’s past caring, whatever it was.”
The pale wyvern had been following Ilna and the hunters with its eyes. It got to its feet without haste. Its claws folded up against its ankles so that the points stuck out forward; that was how they stayed sharp when the creature walked.
Ilna had knotted her pattern of yarn before she started into the valley. That was the sensible thing to do, of course, but she’d have preferred to have the task yet before her to keep her fingers busy. The thought irritated her because it showed weakness.
She smiled minusculely. She wasn’t weak enough to allow discomfort to affect her reactions, of course.
The pale wyvern raised its head to the sky and shrieked, vibrating its black tongue. Its mottled partner sprang to its feet in a single motion and started downhill. The knob of the bone it’d been eating sailed high in the air, flung away unnoticed. The beast was striding toward Temple, who’d just started up the north slope toward the village.
The pale wyvern crouched, vibrating like a plucked lute string. Ilna continued forward at the deliberate pace she’d set herself to begin with. She kept her eyes on the creature she intended to kill, ignoring the stones and sharp leaves her bare feet touched as she walked. There’d be time enough for lotions and poultices after the job was done; if she missed some foreshadowing of the beast’s intentions, however, it might be her thigh that it cracked tomorrow.
A woman came out of the shrine. She stood on the porch to watch what was happening. Her hair was dark blond and tangled, and her only tunic had a stiff, russet stain down the right side.
Temple began to run uphill, moving easily. He hadn’t drawn his sword, and he held the buckler close to his body. The sky was bright enough to show color, but the sun hadn’t risen to wink highlights from the polished metal.
The pale wyvern launched itself toward Ilna like a stooping hawk. Its wings stuck out from its shoulders, tilting like the pole of a rope-walker as they and the tail balanced the creature’s downward career.
This early in the year, the creek at the bottom of the valley was still running. Ilna walked through the water, grimacing at the feel of pebbles washed smooth and slimed with cress. She started up the north slope, holding the pattern folded between her clenched hands. She heard the whirr of Asion’s staff sling, and the corner of her eye told her Karpos had raised and half-drawn his bow.
The wyvern shrieked as it kicked off from an outcrop of grayish limestone. Each leap took the beast twice its own length toward Ilna and her companions. One more and it would be on them.
Ilna opened the pattern between her hands and raised it overhead.
The oncoming wyvern stiffened in the air. Instead of skimming toward Ilna and the hunters, it tripped and crashed to the ground. After skidding nose-first for a moment in a spray of coarse dirt, it rolled over on its left side. Its frozen muscles couldn’t correct for the angle it’d been leaning at when Ilna’s pattern struck through its eyes like a thunderbolt.
The wyvern had small ears. The right one vanished in a splash of blood, shot away by a sling bolt that’d just missed crushing the skull. Karpos’ broadhead buried itself to the fletching at the base of the creature’s right wing.
The wyvern continued to slide, its powerful hindquarters slewing ahead of its half-open jaws. A pall of yellow-gray dust rolled downhill ahead of it. Ilna turned to keep her pattern toward the beast. Its eyes were a brilliant blue and had vertical slits for pupils.
Karpos shot the wyvern in the throat; Asion’s second bullet punched a dimple in the fine gray scales of the creature’s chest. Blood splashed, but the impact didn’t shatter the wyvern’s breast keel as Ilna’d hoped it would.
She continued to turn as the beast slid past. Asion straightened to shoot again, putting his torso between Ilna’s pattern and the wyvern’s eyes. It sprang uphill toward the hunter as though it hadn’t been wounded at all.
Asion threw himself aside. As the wyvern snatched at him, an arrow snapped between its open jaws and banged out the base of its skull.
The beast bent double, its head almost touching its long, tendon-stiffened tail. The legs kicked violently, the right one clawing a divot the size of a bushel basket from the soil; Ilna closed her eyes reflexively as the grit sprayed her. The wyvern thudded downslope, then rolled till its head lay in the stream. Blood trickled from its mouth. The right leg continued to twitch, but its eyes didn’t react to the fine dust that was drifting over th
em.
Ilna knelt and breathed deeply. The dust was still settling; she sneezed and covered her face with the sleeve of her inner tunic. It was just luck the wyvern’s momentum hadn’t carried it straight ahead, plowing through her and the hunters. Even if the impact didn’t finish them, she’d seen how quickly the beast had reacted when her pattern no longer held it. She’d made a mistake….
“That was too bloody close,” Asion said quietly. He wiped the palm of his right hand on his tunic, then gripped the sling-staff again.
Karpos looked down at the wyvern; it spasmed violently. “I’ll never get those arrows back,” he said. There was a red patch on his left wrist where the bowstring had stung it. “It’d take all day to cut ’em out, and long odds the shafts’re split anyhow.”
“I’ll help you turn new ones,” Asion said. “That was too close.”
Ilna got up and dusted her tunic where she’d been kneeling. She held the pattern bunched in her left hand; she wouldn’t pick out the knots until she knew what’d happened to the other monster.
“Come,” she said, angling now toward the abandoned village. “I’ll lead. We’ll find Temple.”
The houses mostly trailed along either side of the track leading into the valley, but at the upper end they spread in a skewed checkerboard below the wall around the shrine. Dust was settling there, but nothing else moved.
Karpos had an arrow nocked. He glowered at the drystone hut on his side of the narrow street and muttered, “This is too tight for comfort. It’s bad as going after a tiger in brush.”
“I don’t hear the brute,” Asion said. “It called a couple times when it took after Temple, I heard that. I wasn’t paying much attention, though. They could run down deer, it seemed like, the way the gray one was coming at us.”
The street kinked around a house bigger than most of those in the village. It was built on three sides of a courtyard. There was a brushwood fence across the front to pen goats at night. Asion’s staff whirred, and Karpos drew the string back to his ear.
Ilna raised the pattern before her and stepped around the corner.
The blue-mottled wyvern lay in the ruins of another courtyard house, its head buried in fallen stone. The beast must’ve lunged forward when it got its deathblow, demolishing the thick wall. Temple’s sword had pierced the wyvern’s chest just below the right wing, leaving a gash as wide as Ilna’s palm. The wound had stopped bleeding, but judging from the blood covering the street and neighboring buildings it must’ve spurted like a millrace.
Temple sat on a feed trough in the courtyard, polishing his sword with a tunic the householders had left behind when they fled. His back was to Ilna and the others, but he watched them in the mirrored face of the buckler which leaned against the wall.
“Greetings, Ilna,” Temple said, sheathing his sword. He draped the cloth over the trough. “I’m glad you three are all right.”
Ilna bunched her pattern and started immediately to pick it back to strands of yarn. It would’ve worked on Temple also, if he’d been facing her directly.
“By the Lady, friend!” Karpos said in amazement as he relaxed his bow. “How did you do that? How did you kill the brute by yourself?”
Temple turned and slung his buckler again by its strap. “They’re quick, as you saw for yourself,” he said calmly, “but they don’t think more than one step ahead. I dodged around walls until I was in a place where the step it took was past where I was hiding.”
Asion lifted one of the wyvern’s claws with the butt of his sling-staff, then let it drop flaccidly. The middle claw on each foot was as long as a man’s hand, thick, and as sharp as one of Karpos’ arrows.
The little hunter looked at Temple. “That was a good job,” he said, but his tone sounded harsh to Ilna. “Putting the blade between two ribs the way you did. If you’d hit bone, you’d have had a problem, wouldn’t you?”
Temple shrugged as he stood up. “I told you I had experience,” he said.
He looked across the valley. Ilna followed his eyes and saw villagers streaming toward the homes they’d abandoned when the wyverns came.
Ilna looked at the yarn in her left hand. “There’s still the woman, Bistona,” she said. Sharply she added, “I don’t intend to kill her.”
Asion grimaced; Karpos gave an unconcerned nod. Temple smiled and said, “Of course, but we’d best be with her when her neighbors arrive. They may be less charitable than we are.”
Karpos looked puzzled and said, “She’s crazy, isn’t she? And the Lady protects crazy people. They wouldn’t hurt her.”
Ilna sniffed. “It’s possible Master Breccon and his fellows are less religious than you are, Karpos,” she said. “Yes, let’s see to Bistona now.”
The main street led directly to the archway into the temple enclosure. There was no gate and the posts were stuccoed wood with a wicker trellis to form the arch. The grapevines planted at the base of each column were only beginning to leaf out. In summer when the foliage had spread, broad leaves would hide the wicker.
Ilna smiled faintly. That’d be a pity, because whoever’d woven the willow shoots into an arch had been quite skillful. Her craftsmanship—Ilna touched the wicker for a fleeting image of the maker, a woman well into her sixties with gnarled fingers—was of more interest to Ilna than the artless twistings of vines.
Bistona stood between the two pillars of the shrine’s porch. They were wood also and had been carved as statues, though the paint and details had weathered off. Ilna couldn’t tell if they were meant to be men or women.
Or both, she supposed. She’d seen statues in Erdin that were women from the waist up and men below; Liane had called them hermaphrodites. Ilna had better reasons to dislike Erdin than a few statues, but the statues had disgusted her.
The compound was littered with the stinking remnants of the wyverns’ meals. Their jaws were strong enough to shear the largest bones, but they were messy eaters. For a month, bone splinters and bits of flesh, now rotted to pools of liquid, had been flung in all directions.
There was no clear path to the steps of the shrine, so Ilna tramped through the filth. Initially her face was set with distaste, but it suddenly struck her that only a few minutes ago it’d seemed likely that her own corpse would be contributing to the mess.
“You’re smiling, mistress?” said Asion in surprise. The little hunter was walking almost beside Ilna. She’d intended to lead.
But she was in a good humor, so she merely said, “I prided myself on neatness when I kept house for my brother and me. It’d have been very unpleasant to become part of this garbage midden.”
Asion blinked but didn’t speak further. Temple, walking behind them with Karpos, chuckled.
Bistona stood like a third statue across the front of the porch. Close up she looked much younger than Ilna had thought from across the valley; her wild hair was blond, not white. She was probably only a few years older than Ilna herself.
Bistona’s staring eyes looked generations’ old. Well, so did Ilna’s own, she supposed.
Ilna walked up the first of three steps to the porch, then paused on the second. She held a pattern, this time a gentler one, knotted in her hand, but instead of opening it, she said, “Mistress Bistona? We’ve come to help you.”
Is that a lie? Well, we’ve come to save her from being burned alive by her neighbors, at least.
Bistona shuddered; her eyes focused on Ilna. The irises were bright blue, disconcertingly similar to those of the wyverns.
“My sons are dead,” she said. Her voice cracked; perhaps she hadn’t spoken since the Change. “I thought they were still alive, but I was wrong.”
Bistona was filthier than the wyverns because unlike them, she didn’t lick herself clean. Ilna kept from sneering only because she had a great deal of experience in holding her tongue. That would’ve surprised many of those who knew her, but they couldn’t see what was going on in her head.
“I’m sorry about your sons,” Ilna said. “We’ve kil
led the animals responsible.”
After thinking for a moment—the priest’s house was close by, but it was probably as squalid as the shrine’s compound—she added, “Mistress, let’s go to your home. You need to lie down, I’m sure.”
The villagers had returned. Most of them were going first to their own houses, but Breccon, Graia, and the elder with the mutilated hand had entered the compound. The men were muttering bitterly about the disorder.
Bistona turned and reentered the shrine. Something inside croaked harshly.
Ilna frowned but walked in behind the woman. She was mad, just as Asion had said, and it was possible that her seeming normalcy would vanish into murderous rage at any instant. Still, they’d determined to help her, so Ilna didn’t have any choice.
The interior of the shrine was lighted only through the front doors, but that was enough for the small room. A mosaic of the Lady spreading her hands was set into the back wall; it was made with bits of colored glass, not stone, and She wore the broad smile of a simpleton.
There wasn’t a statue, however. Where it should’ve been was a couch. It looked real, but even the bolster and the tucks in the mattress were carved from marble. Bistona lay on it as though it was stuffed with goose down.
Open trusses supported the roof. The raven perching on the end beam croaked again, startling Ilna. She hadn’t noticed the bird in the shadows.
“No!” she said sharply to Karpos, but he was already relaxing the bow he’d drawn in surprise. She smiled: it hadn’t been just her.
The shrine’s interior smelled like a snake den in winter, though the wyverns hadn’t fouled it with their droppings. The plastered walls had been painted deep red, but the beasts had worn much of that off. Scratching themselves, Ilna supposed. Sheep did the same.
“Have you found the demonspawn Bistona?” Breccon demanded.
Ilna turned. Breccon stood on the porch with his wife and the other elder. They might’ve tried to follow her and the hunters in, but Temple had drawn his sword and slanted it across the doorway.
