The Mirror of Worlds

by David Drake

  Normally a servant would sleep in the alcove off the bungalow’s pantry. Sharina was fairly sure that there’d be a mutiny among the palace servants if she ordered one of them to enclose herself for the night with a man-eating Corl. The Blood Eagles—whom Attaper had insisted on to control Rasile rather than to protect her—would do.

  “Aren’t you going to argue with me about ignoring Vorsan?” Rasile said.

  “What?” said Sharina, wondering what she’d missed in her tiredness to have brought such a question. “No. Tenoctris told me I could trust you.”

  “And you trust Tenoctris?” the Corl said. She got to her feet with a degree of controlled grace which was more impressive to watch than mere quickness would’ve been.

  “Yes, of course,” said Sharina. “Rasile, my duties are hard enough without me doubting my friends.”

  “I see,” said the Corl. She stepped to the couch and tossed the bolster on the floor, then prodded it with her foot.

  She looked at Sharina and chuckled, adding, “This will do, I believe. It’s softer than I’m used to, but my bones are old enough without sucking cold into them from the stones.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning, then,” Sharina said, putting her hand on the door latch.

  “Yes, in the morning,” said the Corl. “It will be best if you come with me while I talk to those who can tell us where the greatest danger from the Last may be.”

  “All right,” Sharina repeated. She had various duties, but it appeared to her that Rasile’s request was indeed the most important business she had in hand. “Who are the people we’ll be talking with?”

  “Who were they, rather, Sharina,” Rasile said. Her lips drew back from teeth which were impressive despite being worn and discolored. “I will call up the humans whom the Last killed three nights ago when they attacked Tenoctris.”

  She laughed again. Perhaps the idea was more humorous to a Corl than it was to Sharina.

  THE INN WAS half a mile down the valley in a grove of trees. Garric probably wouldn’t have noticed it immediately if the whitewashed walls hadn’t gleamed in the late sun.

  “This one’s built of sawn boards,” he said to Shin and Kore. “I wonder if they’ll have straw mattresses rather than corn shucks?”

  “I could pull apart a stable built with boards,” said the ogre musingly. “It’s my own bad judgment that’s reduced me to being a beast of burden. Had I but controlled my hunger and traveled south for a day, I’d be the free-living creature that the Fates intended me to be.”

  “Or you could’ve caught a wild pig,” said Shin, “and saved yourself the effort of pulling down a stable as well.”

  “I had a whim for horsemeat,” Kore said in a tone of dignified rebuke. “A splendid being like me has a right to her whims.”

  “Which in this case means the right to carry the human champion as an alternative to having your heart cut out,” Shin commented. “I’d expect a true philosopher to be considering whether the taste of pork was really so bad.”

  The track was wider here along the river bottom than it’d been on the granite slope they’d just come down. Tree stumps sprang from the undergrowth. They’d been saw-cut, Garric noted with interest, rather than axed or simply ringed and left to fall over in a windstorm after years of decay.

  Weather—perhaps flooding, but a bad frost could’ve done it—had blasted two oaks just above on the ridge. Their branches stood out, seeming to writhe in silent horror.

  A woman wearing a red jumper strolled from the inn, holding a child by the hand. Garric lifted off his broad hat and waved it. “Halloo!” he cried.

  “Can she hear you, do you think?” Kore wondered aloud.

  The woman screamed, snatched up the child, and rushed back into the building. Garric didn’t have any trouble hearing her, at least.

  “Did Orra not tell them I was coming?” Garric puzzled aloud. “Well, we were coming. I don’t think …”

  He glanced at Shin and found the aegipan looking up at him. “No,” Shin said, “I don’t think that folk who were warned that you were arriving on an ogre would be terrified to learn that an aegipan was part of the group also. Though I’m flattered that you’d consider such a possibility.”

  He vaulted onto his hands, then backflipped onto his hooves again. He grinned sardonically up every time he was facing in Garric’s direction.

  “I’ve never noticed that humans were notably trustworthy,” said Kore. “Do you consider it unlikely that this Orra would have forgotten to tell or chosen not to tell the innkeeper that you were arriving on so marvelous a mount as me? Were you friends with Orra?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Garric admitted. “Though I wouldn’t have said we were enemies either. Though …”

  “Aye,” said King Carus. “We don’t know what Orra’s business is. If he thought you were a rival, that’d be reason to make your path a little harder.”

  “He might even have told folk that a great and terrible ogre was coming to eat all their horses,” Kore said. Garric couldn’t be sure from her tone whether or not she was being serious. “Indeed, I wonder what is in the stable tonight?”

  Three men tumbled out the front door of the inn. Two of them wore leather clothing and carried short, powerful bows; the third was older and held a double-bitted axe. It was a woodsman’s tool rather than a weapon, but the man’s arms and shoulders looked impressive even if the belly bulging his apron was heavier than it’d probably been in his prime.

  As Kore continued to jog forward, another man ran from the stables with a wooden pitchfork, closely followed by a little boy who’d been sent to fetch him. One of the archers raised his bow and sighted past the arrowhead, though the range was still too great to chance a shot with a hunting weapon.

  “Hold up!” Garric said to the ogre, pulling back on the reins. Well, the straps. “I’ll go talk to them.”

  Kore stopped by spreading both clawed feet in the rutted track. Garric swayed forward and banged his breastbone against the back of her head.

  Carus smiled ruefully. His trained reflexes ordinarily made Garric as sure a rider as any cavalryman from northern Ornifal, but Carus didn’t have any more experience riding an ogre than his descendant did.

  “Now here’s an ethical question, Shin,” Kore said. “If my master is shot full of arrows by yokels he walks up to, am I bound to pine over his corpse till I starve as a noble steed in the ballads would, or am I permitted to wander off looking for fillies?”

  Garric stepped down. “You’re replacing a gelding,” he said. “Fillies are out.”

  He unbuckled his belt and handed it with both sword and dagger to the ogre. “But you can hold this, if you will,” he added. “In hopes that if I look peaceful enough, the sturdy yeomen hereabouts won’t fill me with arrows.”

  Garric strode forward, waving his hat in his right hand. “Hello the house!” he cried. “I’m a friend!”

  He’d come within half a furlong, a clout shot even with a short bow if the archer knew his business. Which these fellows might not: people tended to think of hunters as dead shots, but it wasn’t true. Often enough they made their kills by waiting in patient silence till the target was close enough to spit on.

  “But you’d sooner not learn,” said Carus. “I’ve had three arrows cut out of me, and the cane one some savage on Dalopo put through my left calf almost finished me when it started to fester. This pair is using cane too.”

  “Pardon me my steed,” Garric called. “He’s strange, I know, but just as harmless as a pony. It’s a long story, and I’ll willingly recite it when I buy the house a round of ale.”

  The older man rubbed the axehead on his apron. “We drink cider in these parts,” he said argumentatively. “Bloody good cider, if I do say so myself.”

  “Then won’t you all join me in a cider?” said Garric, walking up to the group, by now all four men and the boy. The woman and child were peering down from a second-floor window.

  Garric brought out a silver pi
ece, a grapeleaf from Ornifal with the worn face of Valence II on the other side. He spun it up from his thumb to sparkle in the light, caught it, and handed it to the tapster. The latter frowned, rang the coin on his axehead to judge the silver content, and said, “All right, then.”

  “Are them two coming in?” said one of the hunters, bobbing his bowstaff in the direction of Kore and the aegipan. A patch of his scalp was pink scar tissue; he’d tried to grease the remainder of his black hair over the injury to hide it.

  Garric turned, partly to give himself time to decide on an answer to the question, and waved to Kore and Shin. “You can come forward, now!” he called. “The gentlemen know that we’re friendly travelers with money for lodgings.”

  The men staring at him weren’t convinced yet, but phrasing things that way could help disarm their suspicions. Garric smiled at the innkeeper, the least hostile of the group, and said, “I’m not surprised at your concern, of course. An earlier traveler had promised to bring word of my coming and my companions, a Master Orra. Did he not mention that?”

  The innkeeper frowned. “Orra?” he said. “We’ve seen no one of that name. When was he to arrive?”

  “He should’ve been here earlier today,” Garric said. Shin and Kore were approaching, the aegipan walking on his hands ahead of the ambling ogre. “Riding a flea-bitten gray. Ah—we traveled at a good pace, but we didn’t pass him on the way.”

  “No white horse been by here since a year ago my birthday,” growled the stablehand in a scarcely intelligible accent. “And that was afore the Sister dragged everything down t’Hell and spit it back up again.”

  “Not a bad description of the Change,” Carus remarked. His image wore an engaging smile, but Garric felt a cool undercurrent as his ancestor’s mind judged how best to move if everything went wrong: snatch the axe, punch the helve into the temple of the hunter on the right, bring the blade back around to eliminate the tapster and the other hunter in the same stroke….

  The ancient warrior’s reflexes weren’t needed now; they were almost never needed. But they were available, and sometimes that’d saved Garric’s life and perhaps the kingdom.

  Shin hopped upright; the ogre knelt, dipped her head, and offered Garric’s sword back to him on her upturned palms. Garric nonchalantly buckled his weapons on, silently amused by Carus’ background calculations of how best to kill everyone around them now that he had the sword. Just in case, of course.

  “Thank you, Kore,” Garric said. “You may rise.”

  Looking at the local men again, he went on, “My jester, Shin, will—”

  The aegipan bowed low.

  “—share the room with me. You do have private rooms, do you not?”

  “Here?” the innkeeper said. The silver piece had wiped away his initial truculence. “Why, no sir, there’s no call for that here at the Notch House.”

  “You got the lean-to out back for a pantry, Noddy,” the scalp-scarred hunter said. “You could put ’em in there.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Garric said quickly. “The common room will do very well. As for my mount—”

  Kore curtsied, cleverly throwing her left foot back rather than her right foot forward—which might’ve given the impression she was lunging at the locals.

  “If you have a dry outbuilding, I think that would be better than the stables. Kore’s quite harmless—”

  If Carus’d had a physical body, his laughter would’ve been ringing from the steep sides of the valley.

  “—but her presence might spook the other animals.”

  “No way it’s going to be spending the night with me!” the stablehand said. He hopped backward, bringing the pitchfork down tines-foremost in a posture of defense.

  “There’s the grain shed, I guess,” the innkeeper said, rubbing his chin with his knuckles. “He, ah … Does he eat grain?”

  “I assure you your grain is safe from me, Master Noddy,” Kore said. “Though I trust you won’t object if I rid the building of some of its rats?”

  One of the hunters looked at the other and said quizzically, “What is he, then?”

  “Why do you suppose he’s asking his partner, Kore?” the aegipan said in an arch tone. “Surely it’s obvious that any of the three of us would be the proper party.”

  “To begin with, I’m not ‘he,’ gentle sir,” Kore said. She gestured to her upper, then her lower, set of dugs. “And appearances are deceiving. On the face of it, I’m a perfectly proportioned female ogre in the prime of life, scarcely three hundred years old. In reality, however, I am a beast of burden, bearing Master Garric with a modest deportment rarely to be met with in a horse—no matter how good that horse might taste.”

  “Gentlemen,” Garric said, “I’m very thirsty, and I could use supper as well.”

  “As could your jester, dear master,” said Shin. To Noddy, he added, “I don’t suppose you have asparagus at Notch House, do you?”

  The innkeeper stared at the aegipan, then raised his eyes to Garric’s. “What might asparagus be, sir?” he asked.

  “Shin will settle for porridge and some fruit,” Garric said. Seeing Noddy frown he added quickly, “Or vegetables. At least some onions?”

  “We might run to onions,” the innkeeper allowed. “Leest, run back quick and tell your mistress to throw some porridge on to warm. Now!”

  The boy sprinted for the frame building. He wouldn’t have raced off like that to carry out a task, but he was excited at the chance to tell his mother what he’d learned—little though that was in fact.

  “And a lamb, perhaps?” said Kore. The men walking toward the house stopped and turned, wide-eyed. “No? Well, a haunch of mutton?”

  “We’ve ham,” said the innkeeper. “And sidemeat.”

  The ogre gave a theatrical sigh. “It’s fitting,” she said to the sky, “quite fitting. I will gnaw my hog femur and think deeply philosophical thoughts about the advantages of a diet of pork.”

  Garric cleared his throat and started the procession on into the house again. The scarred hunter unstrung his bow, though his partner still kept an arrow nocked.

  “Is there a side trail Master Orra could’ve taken between the Boar’s Skull Inn and here?” Garric asked.

  “There’s game tracks,” said one hunter. “Hogs and deer. I guess he could’ve gone off down one a those if he wanted.”

  “Why’d he want to?” the other hunter said. “If he could afford a horse, he wasn’t hunting for meat and hides.”

  “We passed a peel tower, I believe the name is,” Shin said as he trotted up the three steps to the front door. His hooves clacked on the boards. “Who is it that lives there, if I may ask?”

  “Well, I can’t rightly tell you, ah, Master Jester,” said the innkeeper, opening the door for his guests. “It wasn’t here before the Bad Time, you see.”

  “I wish they wasn’t there now, I do,” said the stablehand, frowning as he picked bits of horse manure from the tines of his fork. He glared at the innkeeper with a fierceness that surprised Garric. “It’s all right for you, you get the profit. But it’s me drives the hogs there and I don’t half like it!”

  “Now, Cayler, you needn’t act so put upon,” Noddy said, bowing Garric ahead of him into the common room of the inn. “Don’t I give you all the cider you can drink each time you come back? And don’t you drink it?”

  “Excuse me, Master Noddy,” Garric said, wondering as he spoke whether that was the innkeeper’s birth name or merely a nickname. “Does your stablehand go to the tower regularly, then?”

  Noddy cleared his throat. “Rabanda!” he called up the stairs in the corner. “Come down here and help me with our guests!”

  He set the axe on the bar in some embarrassment, then turned to face Garric again. “Well, a servant comes from the castle every ten days or so—”

  “Oftener!” the stablehand said.

  “Well, it’s been oftener recently, that could be,” Noddy admitted. “And maybe there’s two different se
rvants, but if it is they’re as like as two peas. They don’t talk, but the first time he brought a potsherd with PIGS written on it—”

  “Can you read, Noddy?” said the scarred hunter in surprise.

  “I most certainly can,” the innkeeper said, tilting his head so that he looked down his nose at the hunter. “Regardless, he brought the note with silver shaved off a block, nineteen parts out of twenty pure. So I sent Cayler back with him to lead six hogs. Since then they’ve been back—or the one has, I can’t say, as I told you. They don’t bother with a note now, just bring more silver.”

  “There’s no pigs in the tower now,” said Kore.

  Everybody turned quickly. The ogre squatted on her haunches outside. She could probably have gotten through the open doorway, but she wouldn’t have been able to stand or even squat without tearing a hole in the ceiling.

  “Which she could easily do, of course,” said Shin, replying to the unvoiced observation.

  Garric grinned. “I smelled hogs,” he said, thinking back to when they’d jogged past the tower. At the time he’d ignored it, because the fact hadn’t concerned him; the information was still in his mind when required, though.

  “The freshest pig droppings in the road were seven days old,” the ogre said, her long face exaggerating the solemn precision of her speech. “The smell from the tower itself was somewhat more recent, I grant—but I would’ve heard pigs if they’d been present.”

  A woman—the one Garric’d seen when he rode into the valley—crept down the stairs; she’d left the child on the upper floor. She slipped through the back door to the outside oven, casting nervous glances over her shoulder. By contrast, the men in the common room seemed to have relaxed.

  “I did, however, hear a horse,” Kore added. “Though muffled, as if it’d been snaffled.”

  Garric looked hard at the innkeeper. Noddy grimaced in discomfort. “I don’t know anything about who lives in the castle!” he insisted.

  “Except that their silver assays nineteen parts pure,” Garric said without inflection.