by David Drake
“Master Leel?” Garric called. “Is that a palace out in the lake there?”
The leader’s feathered bicorn jerked around. “Just shut your mouth, fellow!” he said in a tone of desperate anger. “Anything you want to know, keep it to ask Milord, you hear?”
Garric didn’t reply. Leel was obviously frightened; there was no point in taking offense at what he blurted.
“He’s not a man I’d judge to be easily frightened either,” Carus said. “Well, it could be he doesn’t like the dark. Some folk are that way.”
The ghost laughed again. Neither he nor Garric thought Leel was afraid of the dark; but a sword and the will to use it could get you through a lot of situations, frightening and otherwise.
They’d come close enough to see that the lights were pots hanging from poles and leaping with smoky, deep red flames. “Faugh!” growled Kore. “It’s tar they’re burning.”
Garric hadn’t doubted her, but the breeze curled smoke toward him and he coughed uncontrollably. Even after he was clear of the wisps, the back of his throat felt flayed.
“Milord!” Leel cried. “We’ve found travelers! It may be one’s the man you seek!”
It was fully dark, now. The flares stretched a furlong both east and west along the shore of the tar lake, though only those toward the middle were hung from poles. People, primarily men but some women and a few children, passed in partial silhouette against the low flames.
The men beneath the hanging lights were armed, several of them carrying shields as well as wearing bits of armor. The man they clustered about wore a striped cape of thin silk and a helmet decorated with the tail plumage of some flightless bird.
“Milord, he rides on a giant!” Platt cried, obviously trying to curry favor. “I guess that proves he’s the one you’re looking for, right?”
“Milord,” said Garric, walking toward the man in the plumed helmet. He bowed, low enough to show deference without cringing. “I’m Garric or-Reise, a traveler from the north and just passing through your remarkable domain.”
“Bring him up into the light where I can see him,” Holm grumbled. He stepped back to make room, his gauzy cape fluttering. It was obviously for ornament rather than warmth in this steamy bowl.
Garric had thought Holm’s apparent height was a trick of the plume and perhaps buskins, but even in thin silk slippers the fellow stood a hand’s breadth taller than Garric. He was thin as well, though not particularly healthy: his cheeks were puffy and his hand trembled where he gripped his crossbelt.
Holm’s eyes moved from the ogre—squatting placidly on the ground, a coarse mix of gravel and bits of clamshell—to Shin, and finally to the hilt of Garric’s long sword. He looked up abruptly and said, “I’m a wizard, you know!”
“Master Leel had mentioned that,” Garric said easily. The situation wasn’t dangerous yet, but it could very quickly get that way. From the look of Holm’s retainers, the fellow supplemented the income of his groves with banditry. The tar lake with its hidden paths would be as safe a lair as any mountain crag. But Holm appeared to have a use for him….
“Leel also said I might be able to do you a favor of some sort,” Garric continued. “While my companions and I are merely passing through, we’re certainly willing to show our gratitude to you for passage.”
“You’ll need more than gratitude, you know,” Holm snapped. “Unless you can swim the strait—”
He pointed behind him. Garric could smell salt in the air, and waves sounded faintly on a strand.
“—and that’s three miles wide. The only ship that can cross it is mine. You see your position, fellow?”
The tossing flames from the tar pots lighted hard faces and weapons close at hand. Lord Holm had twenty or thirty bodyguards—
“Twenty-seven,” interjected Carus. “And Holm himself, if you want to count him.”
—probably as much to control the laborers—the grabbies, Wagga had called them—who tended his orchards as to loot his neighbors. From beyond the ring of armed men, those laborers watched. They were slight folk wearing minimal garments and seemed the same type as the farmers Garric had seen north of the teak forest.
“I’ve already told you, milord,” Garric said, keeping his voice pleasant but making his control obvious, “that I’m willing to do you a courtesy. If you’ll ask politely, we can settle the matter and proceed—I hope—to my purchasing food for me and my companions.”
Under normal circumstances life for the laborers under Holm wouldn’t be much different than the living they scratched for landlords of their own race. Now, from what Wagga’d said, they were risking the guards’ wrath to run away.
“Yes, a goat would be very welcome,” Kore said, startling those standing near her. A spearman jumped sideways, tangled his feet, and crashed to the ground in a storm of curses.
“Courtesy, you say?” Holm said. He shot a glance at Leel, then glared at Garric. “Very well. My palace—the palace of my family for seven generations—is out on the lake. Perhaps you saw it when my men guided you across?”
“A fort made of bitumen blocks?” Garric said. “Yes, we did.”
“It’s a palace,” Holm said with a flash of irritation. “It’s very well appointed. If the walls are asphalt instead of stone, what of it?”
He cleared his throat. “But that’s neither here nor there,” he continued. “My laborers are a superstitious lot. They’ve gotten it into their minds that the shapes which wind twists the fog into are ghosts, so they refuse to go out to tend the orchards. And I must admit—”
Holm made a sour face and looked around him. Guards dropped their eyes rather than meet his glance.
“—that they’ve infected some of my retainers. What I want as price of your passage across the strait—”
He stared at Garric. He looked something like a dyspeptic owl.
“—is for you to spend the night in my palace. That will break the spell. The, ah, rumor, that is. No more than that. If you refuse—”
Garric curtly waved Lord Holm to silence. If the fool kept on, he was going to say something that couldn’t easily be ignored.
“Milord,” he said. “I have your promise of passage for me and my companions if we spend the night in that black palace? On your life, you swear?”
“I do,” said Holm. “That’s all you need do, and I’ll give you every help.”
“And a goat,” said ogre. “A goat tonight. And other food, no doubt, as my master wishes.”
“Yes, a goat!” said Holm. The quivering light increased his look of agitation. “Do you agree, fellow? Do you?”
“And one other thing,” said Shin, his first words since they’d crossed the tar lake. “We will need a guide. Which of your brave men will guide us, milord?”
“There’s no need of that,” said Leel. “There’s a causeway from here on the south shore straight to the palace. The lake shifts some. They built a causeway so’s it couldn’t be cut off. Long ago. Long, long ago.”
Garric looked at his companions. The aegipan was smiling; Kore rose to her feet.
“Then we agree,” Garric agreed. “Master Leel, will you lead us to this causeway, if you please?”
“After they bring the goat, dear master,” said the ogre. “I feel a meal should be a good one if it might be my last, don’t you think?”
She began to laugh in a booming voice. In Garric’s mind, King Carus laughed also with the joy of bloody anticipation.
ILNA STOOD IN the mouth of the cave, looking toward the valley’s slope. The sun behind her must be down, but she couldn’t yet see stars above the shadowed land.
“We ought to be out there!” Asion muttered from within the cave. “Karpos, you know we should.”
A child whimpered. Its mother crooned, “Hush little baby…,” but Ilna could hear fear in the woman’s voice also. All the men in the village were far from the cave and safety, certain victims if Temple’s plan didn’t work.
“If we were all visible, we might d
raw some of the Coerli to us,” Temple said calmly. “They won’t come after Ilna alone in the doorway, not with easy prey elsewhere. She’ll tell us when it’s time for us to come out.”
The air grew hazy but brightened. In the high sky the alien sun formed the way blood seeps from a pinprick. Four lines of red wizardlight quivered on the hillside, outlining a doorway, and a trio of hunters bounded from their world into that of humans.
A villager beneath the dam at the far end of the valley began winding a bull-roarer through the air, making a rhythmic drone that echoed from the slopes. The leading Coerli had started toward the cave in their usual pattern, but the sound drew their attention to the men of the community gathered in the open. A Corl began spinning his hooked cord, although he was nearly a mile from his intended prey.
A warrior gave a yipping howl and bounded toward the men. More Coerli sprang from the door of light. Those and the further cat men following spread to the flanks of the initial trio, widening the living net.
More Coerli appeared in threes; then the final clot, the younger warriors, chasing after their elders as a rabble. The total number was beyond Ilna’s ability to count on the fingers of both hands, but she identified the pattern of the hunters as being the same as what she’d seen the previous night when all of the beasts had left their lair.
“All right,” she said to her companions. She didn’t look back into the cave. “They’re all here. They’re running toward the head of the valley.”
Temple raised the clumsy trumpet he’d borrowed from the villagers. It was a wooden cone as long as his outstretched arm, fitted with a mouthpiece carved from a goat’s thighbone. He blatted a harsh call toward the men beneath the dam.
The bull-roarer stopped with a brief moan. The villager spinning it—Gressar’d been carrying the device when they hiked to the dam this morning—must’ve just let go of the cord when Temple signaled.
Ilna watched for a moment further to be sure the trumpet call hadn’t affected the pack of Coerli. Then she said, “All right, they’re still focused on the men.”
Temple set the trumpet upright on the ground. He and the two hunters swung out of the cave and started toward the outlined portal, letting Ilna set the pace. Behind them the women of the village dragged the heavy door closed. One had begun to sob.
Ilna disliked running—and ran poorly, the main reason she disliked it—but it was necessary now. She’d learned that her legs and lungs wouldn’t actually fail her if she was willing to keep on despite the pain. She couldn’t imagine circumstances in which she’d permit pain to dictate her behavior, so she simply trotted along with an angry look on her face. The expression wasn’t a new one for her, of course.
The dam collapsed with a series of hollow Klocks. Stones knocked against one another as they fell out of alignment and water pressure pushed the whole structure into ruin.
Temple had arranged the project this morning, showing Gressar and his fellows where to place their levers. Ilna hadn’t been sure the villagers would be able to execute the plan, but neither had she seen a practical alternative. If the villagers failed, of course, the cat men would kill them.
She smiled faintly. And then they’d kill Ilna and her companions, whose lives also depended on the river’s sudden return to the valley it’d been diverted from. She should be able to do for a few more Coerli even in that case, though. Since she neither expected nor desired to live forever, being slaughtered now rather than later didn’t concern her greatly.
The planted fields were even more unpleasant to cross going uphill than they’d been when Ilna’d run down them when she’d arrived in the valley. She couldn’t say it was pleasant to get to the end of the furrows—she was still jogging uphill, after all—but it was less unpleasant. That was as much as Ilna expected from life, after all.
Her lips twitched in another tiny smile. “Less unpleasant” was more than she expected from life.
She glanced over her right shoulder. Pent-up water frothed and curled as it poured through the displaced stones. The flow built up as it ate away more and more of the dam that’d diverted it, shoving out blocks from both edges, but even so the volume wasn’t enough to fill the valley as a solid wall. The cat men howled in surprise and anger, but they had no difficulty in bounding up either slope to avoid the oncoming water.
The villagers who’d ripped the first hole in the base of the dam would’ve been surely drowned if they hadn’t had the raft of massive timbers to clamber onto. Half the houses in the village were in ruins even before the water reached them and undermined their walls: the roof trees had supplied the materials to make the raft.
There were thirty-one in the labor party, Temple had said: thirty adult males and the woman Stuna. She’d insisted on coming even though she wasn’t strong enough or heavy enough to add much to the task. The raft was big enough to hold them all, but the coiling, bubbling water rocked it so violently that several fell off as Ilna watched; they clung to grass ropes which she’d braided from roof thatch while Temple prepared the dam for destruction and the hunters built the raft itself.
“We’re here!” said Asion, halting at the gate of light. Close up, Ilna saw a shimmering membrane within the brighter rectangular outlines. “Mistress, what do we do?”
Temple looked at Ilna and raised an eyebrow. She shrugged. He understood the situation better than she did; she’d be a fool to give orders simply to prove that she could. She’d felt the impulse, but at least she’d fought it down before she proved herself a fool. This time.
“We wait here and kill the warriors as they try to return,” Temple said to the hunters. “When we’ve killed the last of them, we enter the world on the other side of the portal and finish the job.”
Asion looked toward Ilna doubtfully. “Yes,” she said, as she determined the pattern she’d use this night. “It’s not a complicated problem.”
Ilna had time to knot an unusually large pattern this time, though she had only the short lengths of yarn from her sleeve to work with. They’d do.
The raft wallowed and began to float downstream, rotating slowly in the current. The villagers who’d lost their footing crawled back aboard, saved by the ropes. It’d been unexpectedly satisfying to weave something for a solely physical purpose, a task that had no tinge of wizardry or compulsion.
Ilna smiled like a serpent, a tight-lipped, cruel expression. Whereas the fabric she knotted now had everything to do with compulsion. It would draw the warriors to their deaths as surely as a hangman’s rope.
The river poured into the valley in a smoother, deceptively calm fashion now that it’d swept away the last of the dam that’d bounded it for so long. Half the Coerli were on the east side, across the broad channel from Ilna and her companions. As if on a signal, they waded together into the water and began swimming toward the raft and its cargo of villagers. The remaining cat men started toward Ilna’s party.
Ilna decided her pattern was complete. It was slightly too long for her to stretch it by herself with her arms extended.
“Temple?” she said, handing him one end of the sketchy fabric. “Take this, if you will. When I say to, pull it tight with me.”
“We’ll change sides then, Ilna,” the big man said with a friendly grin. “So that I can hold it in my left hand rather than with—”
He drew his sword. The bronze blade hummed softly.
“—my right.”
“Yes,” said Ilna, walking behind him and swapping the end she’d been holding for the one she’d offered him.
The river continued to rise, though now slowly. It lapped to the edge of the portal; Ilna felt water bathe her feet, noticeably cool. The loose soil melted and squelched between her toes. She’d wondered if it’d leak into the other world, but she found she could see the panel of light gleaming even through the thin mud.
The door—the membrane of light—behind them made the hair rise on the nape of Ilna’s neck. She glanced at her companions to see if they felt it. Karpos probably misinter
preted her gesture, because he said to Temple, “So you’re sure they can’t come at us through this window from behind, then?”
“If the Coerli enter the portal from the back, Karpos…,” Temple said with a deep chuckle. “They’ll go to a place neither in our world nor in theirs. They don’t know what that world is, but they fear it is a bad one.”
He laughed again with honest amusement. “The truth,” he went on, “is far worse than they imagine it could be.”
Ilna sniffed. “I’d as soon we killed them ourselves anyway,” she said.
The cat men who’d leaped into the water were nearing the raft. They swam like dogs, their heads out of water and all four limbs paddling. Perhaps ordinary cats swam that way too—Ilna’d never seen one take to the water.
The beasts didn’t seem to mind the swim, but that didn’t help them now. Gressar aimed his bow and arrow at the nearest of them. The beast ducked under the water but bobbed to the surface a moment later.
Gressar shot. The bow was crude and short—a farmer’s weapon of plain wood, shooting a stone-pointed arrow. It was good enough for the purpose, though: the arrow drove a hand’s breadth into the cat man’s neck. Blood spouted; the beast thrashed in a circle and sank.
A Corl dived under water and came up to grasp the edge of the raft. Three villagers struck at it together with spears and a club. One of the blows must’ve gotten home, because the brute drifted away in a spreading red curtain.
A panicked villager flung his spear at a swimming warrior. The weapon wasn’t balanced to throw and the man had no skill at the business anyway; the cast missed by an arm’s length as the target bobbed beneath the surface. Another man spun out his pebble-weighted minnow net, which settled over the beast’s head and shoulders as it rose again. The fisherman dragged his catch toward the raft where another spear, thrust this time, skewered it.
Smiling faintly, Ilna looked up from the pleasant drama about the raft. She and her companions had their own tasks to perform now: the Coerli on the west of the river were in better order than their swimming fellows had managed.
