The Mirror of Worlds

by David Drake

  “If you say so,” Sharina muttered, looking out at the night again. The thought of being blind still chilled her. “Ah…. When will we do this?”

  Rasile repeated her throaty laugh. “Not until the morning, Princess,” she said. “I must sleep and replenish my strength. And even then, I will be able to accomplish the spell only because of what the Last have created, this strong pillar that I will climb.”

  Sharina nodded. “I’ll get to sleep also, then,” she said.

  And in her mind, she whispered, Oh, Cashel. Please come back tonight.

  But she knew in her heart that she would sleep alone.

  THE TAR LAKE was a jumble of blocks broken upward as monsters crawled out of it, and the air was thick with the stench of bitumen. Garric would’ve felt queasy if he hadn’t been so angry at being carried like a baby through the chaos. He’d managed to twist in Kore’s arm so that he was at least facing forward, but he couldn’t pretend he was in control of what was happening to him.

  The snarls of beasts rising from the lake were as loud as the howl of a winter storm. Torches were alight on the spit of hard ground ahead, twitching in agitation. No doubt Lord Holm’s retainers were shouting, but mere human racket couldn’t be heard in this cacophony.

  A hairy elephant stood facing them at the end of the causeway. It was much larger than the others Garric’d glimpsed in this place, easily twelve feet high to the top of its humped shoulders. It curled its trunk between its great tusks and lowered its head to meet the oncoming ogre. To either side of the monster the surface glistened with pools of liquid tar; there was no way around.

  “Drop me!” Garric shouted.

  He’d made the demand repeatedly during Kore’s run for the shore, but now the ogre had no choice. She skidded to a sparkling halt and decanted Garric to the ground, surprisingly gentle despite the necessary haste.

  Shin was skipping down the causeway ahead of them. He turned a double somersault in the air, landed on his hooves, and sprang skyward like a stone flung from a trebuchet.

  The elephant’s trunk uncoiled to swat him—but too late. The aegipan landed on the beast’s bulging forehead, then backflipped to its shoulders. He grinned at Garric and Kore as he pointed toward the asphalt.

  Blue sparks shot from Shin’s index fingers. Where each struck the tar, the surface bubbled. Saber-toothed cats hunched upward from both pools. The elephant started backward, swinging its head to one side and then the other.

  The cats sprang simultaneously, gripping the elephant’s shaggy withers with their claws as their long fangs slashed into its neck. Laughing, Shin sprang free.

  The elephant screamed and stepped to its left, twisting as it tried to gore the cat on that side. Prey and hunters splashed into the gleaming asphalt with a burp; a wave surged onto the causeway. Garric jumped over the clinging blackness, reaching the gravel shore before Kore could gather him in her arms again.

  “This way, champion!” Shin called. The aegipan’s tiny horns shone like sunstruck diamonds. “To the boat!”

  “What have you done, damn you?” cried Leel. Holm’s henchman stood with an asphalt torch raised high in his left hand and his sword bare in his right. “Have you raised demons?”

  Shin pointed. A shaggy creature the size of an ox shambled past Garric and swiped Leel out of the way with a forepaw. Its claws were black and longer than a man’s fingers, but it wasn’t a bear as Garric first thought: the beast’s narrow face and long tongue were those of a leaf-eating sloth.

  “This way!”

  Garric followed the bounding aegipan. A wolf with massive jaws loped toward them. Garric struck with Carus’ reflexive skill, feeling the keen edge bite through bones as heavy as a lion’s. The wolf sprang into the air, landed on its feet again, and stumbled into the darkness with its head hanging between its forelegs. Its eyes had glazed.

  They’d reached the southern edge of the gravel spit. The air smelled of salt instead of asphalt, and the moon picked out touches of foam on the slow surf.

  A barge with a rounded bow and stern was tied up on the end of a timber jetty. Shin darted up the planks well ahead of Garric and the ogre. He hopped to the vessel’s railing and perched like a rooster on a fence, calling out in an amazingly loud voice. Garric didn’t recognize the language.

  Lord Holm and a guard carrying a long-hafted axe reached the jetty. Holm snapped an order. The heavyset guard raised his weapon. Kore grabbed him by the back of the neck and snapped the body outward like a housewife killing a chicken for dinner.

  Lord Holm squawked and turned with his thin-bladed sword. The ogre smashed the dead man into him. Holm and the guard fell into the water and sank. Neither came up again.

  Shin continued to call from the railing. Garric jumped onto the barge. It rode high; the open hold was empty. There were four sweeps on either side, swung inboard while the vessel was at dock. The looms were long enough to be worked by two or three oarsmen apiece, standing on the port and starboard catwalks.

  Kore stood at the end of the jetty, facing the shore. She leaned forward and spread her arms with the claws extended. From the front she’d be terrifying.

  People ran toward the barge. The ogre gave a hacking roar, bringing the oncoming mob to a halt.

  Garric was trying to get one of the sweeps loose. They’d been lashed to the railing with willow splits and he couldn’t figure out the knot in the darkness. He heard children crying.

  “Kore!” he shouted. “Let ’em pass!”

  “Yes, let them come aboard, Mistress Kore!” Shin said. “They’re our crew!”

  “Faugh!” Kore said in a thunderous murmur. “I’d rather share with a flock of chickens…and they’d be better eating than these swarthy runts, too.”

  Despite the ogre’s complaints, she stepped backward onto the barge without looking. Garric’d realized as Kore carried him down the causeway that her balance was as good as Shin’s. He’d always thought of himself as well-coordinated, but he was a toddler compared with his present companions.

  The crowd piled aboard the barge. All of them were laborers who’d been working in Lord Holm’s orchards. The aegipan harangued them in their own language. The males untied the sweeps with none of the trouble that Garric’d had, while the women settled in the hold. Those with infants clutched them to their breasts.

  A pair of long-horned bison lumbered down the beach, kicking gravel. One lifted its head and bellowed like the wind blowing through a hollow log. No more refugees came toward the jetty, and the only torches Garric could see were blobs of tar lying motionless on the ground.

  There’d been hundreds of laborers in the camp; fewer than fifty had managed to board the vessel. Perhaps others had escaped to east or west along the strand. Regardless, there was nothing more Garric could do about the situation.

  The barge’s ragged bow rope was looped around a bollard at the end of the jetty. Garric tried to twitch it clear. When that failed the second time, he cut it with the sword as easily as he’d split the wolf’s spine as he ran.

  “Push off!” he said. Shin called something, perhaps relaying the order in the laborers’ language. At any rate, those at the landward sweeps shoved them against the jetty. It probably wasn’t proper procedure—one of the blades split—but the vessel wallowed out from the shore.

  A guard ran toward the jetty. He carried a bow and looked back over his shoulder in terror.

  “Come back!” he shouted to Garric. “Come back and take me!”

  The barge was a dozen feet from the jetty and the oarsmen were beginning to swing the bow seaward. “Swim to us!” Garric called. “We’ll pick you up, but you’ve got to swim out to us!”

  “May the Sister suck your marrow!” the man shrieked. Perhaps he couldn’t swim. He nocked an arrow and began to draw his bow.

  “Get down!” Garric warned.

  The barge rocked as Kore sprang from the railing, smashing the archer to the gravel. Grasping him by the neck and one thigh, she bit into his lower chest. Blood sp
rayed.

  A pair of wolves loped toward her, then paused as they judged her size. The ogre’s arms flexed and tore the corpse apart. Laughing, she threw half the body to each wolf.

  “Shin, hold the rowers!” Garric said. “We have to wait for—”

  Kore loped down the strand on all fours, licking her bloody lips. After the third long stride, she turned seaward.

  “Kore, you can’t jump this far!” Garric shouted. “Swim—”

  The ogre leaped with the momentum she’d gathered. She caught the stern. Though her grip splintered a section of railing, she held and swung herself into the hold. The refugees sheltering there surged toward the bow, silent except for the whimpering of some of the children.

  “Swim indeed!” Kore said. “I could’ve waded, noble master; the water isn’t deep here. But why should I get wet?”

  The ogre’s tongue snaked out to get the last of the blood that splashed her long face. And as the barge glided southward across the sound, the laborers at the sweeps began to chant a cheerful cadence.

  THE HAIR ON the back of Cashel’s neck rose. Tenoctris held the sword they’d taken from the Last. She pointed it toward a wooden burial marker and called, “Rathra—”

  She lifted and dipped the blade, marking a segment of an arc. She hadn’t bothered to draw anything on the ground before she started chanting.

  “—rathax!”

  Wizardlight flared, as rich and saturated as a sheet of red glass. It hung in the air between the two points, shimmering and distorting the nighted slope beyond.

  “Bainchooch, damne, bureth!” Tenoctris said. She slashed the sword down at each word, throwing another panel of wizardlight into the sky.

  As Tenoctris sang the incantation, she turned. Cashel stepped sideways to keep his back always to hers. He held his quarterstaff before him, gripping it a trifle more firmly than he’d have done if he’d been happier about what the wizard was doing.

  “Astraleos chreleos!”

  They stood on a hillside where short lengths of cane sprouted like a stunted grove. Originally a split in the top of each marker had held a slip of paper with the name of the person whose ashes were buried beneath it, but storms quickly shredded and dispersed those diplomas. The canes could last for years, but when they finally rotted away there’d be a new burial on top of the cremated bones of the earlier ones.

  “Buroth, meneus, io!” Tenoctris said, her voice rising to the final syllable. Though her arm and sword hadn’t bobbed around even half the imaginary circle, scarlet wizardlight suddenly formed a wall around her and Cashel.

  The grass and brambles vanished into a rosy haze. Cashel could see Tenoctris the same as always, but it was just him and her now. She held the sword down by her side and looked out at the sheets of flickering red. Her lips smiled, but it was a hard smile.

  Cashel heard distant screaming. First off, he thought it was steam coming from under a heavy pot lid. It kept going on, though, and after a while he wasn’t so sure.

  The scream cut off short, and the wizardlight was gone. Wind howled, driving flecks of foam from the gray sea hard enough to sting. It was night but too overcast to have stars; if the moon was up, the curtain of clouds hid it.

  Cashel’s tunics whipped his legs. If he’d been watching his flock in weather like this, he’d have wrapped his sheepskin robe around him…unless the storm’d blown up unexpectedly, of course, which’d happened more than once. Then all you could do was to keep moving.

  He forced himself to squint out to sea. Trouble travels downwind in a storm like this. Now there was nothing but surf as slow and sullen as dripping sap, but the wedge-shaped head of a sea wolf might slither into view any time.

  There could be worse things than sea wolves in this place. He didn’t know where Tenoctris had brought them, but it didn’t feel like anyplace good.

  The beach was broken shells and coarse sand. Driftwood including barkless, salt-bleached tree trunks straggled along the tide line; beyond was low forest. The trees were mostly beech and cedar as best Cashel could tell, but none of them were more than four or five double paces high.

  Tenoctris glanced at the sea. “Is it ebbing, do you think?” she asked.

  “I think so,” said Cashel. “But it can’t be much short of the turn.”

  “We won’t need long,” Tenoctris said. “A few minutes would probably be enough, but we’ll wait an hour before we come back.”

  She drew in the sand with the point of her sword, twisting the blade now to make a thin line, then a broad flourish. She was writing words of power in letters each as high as Cashel’s middle finger.

  Cashel looked at the tree line and stepped a safe distance away from Tenoctris to set his quarterstaff spinning slowly. He was getting the measure of the wind, the way it licked the hickory and tried to twist it out of his control.

  “There’s somebody watching from the woods, Tenoctris,” he said quietly. “I can’t tell who, but I think there’s more’n one.”

  The beach stretched as far as he could see to left and right. Nothing moved but what the wind blew.

  “Yes, there should be,” Tenoctris said. She paused and gazed critically at what she’d written. There were as many words as fingers on one hand. The sand was still damp from the retreating tide; the breeze wouldn’t fill in the gouged letters for a long time yet, probably till the tide returned to wipe it all out.

  Tenoctris reached into the wallet she’d begun wearing on a sash over her shoulder. She brought out the key they’d found at the Tomb of the Messengers, holding it up between her thumb and index finger.

  Inside her hand, clamped against her palm by the other fingers, was an ordinary quartz pebble. Cashel could see it from where he stood, but nobody watching from the forest could.

  Tenoctris bent down so her hand was right against the beach, behind where she’d drawn the words. She folded the key into her palm and set the pebble onto the sand, then rose with the same hard smile as before.

  “This will do, I think,” she said. Her voice was a younger, fuller version of the way the old Tenoctris used to speak, but it made Cashel think again that he wouldn’t want her for an enemy. “We’ll wait on our own world, then return here in an hour.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cashel said, bringing the staff upright to his side. “Ah—then what, Tenoctris?”

  She laughed. She still held the key concealed in her hand. “Then we finish our negotiation with the Telchines,” she said. “On our own terms.”

  Grinning harshly, Tenoctris began to chant. She was reversing the order of the words of power which had brought them to this bleak shore.

  Chapter

  14

  CASHEL FELT THE wind even before the curtain of wizardlight faded, leaving him and Tenoctris again on coarse sand. The beach was the same as it had been, save that the sea had begun to creep back.

  Creatures as gray as the sky were hunched over the words Tenoctris’d drawn on the ground. They were smaller than men, and there were more of them than Cashel could count on both hands.

  Tenoctris trilled a laugh. She touched the crook of Cashel’s elbow with her free hand—she held the sword in her right—and said, “Oh, Cashel! Can you imagine you’d been an old man and suddenly you were you, as strong as you are now? Do you see? That’s what’s happened to me!”

  She sounded like a happy child; well, a happy young woman. Cashel started to think, Well, everybody’s a happy child once, but then he remembered his sister. Ilna’d gotten most of the brains for both of them, but she’d missed her share of being happy. It’d been different while she was with Chalcus, but since he’d been killed she was probably worse off than ever.

  It’d been a good while since he last saw Ilna. Cashel hoped he’d see her again soon, and that she’d be in a better place than she’d been when she left.

  “What’s wrong, Cashel?” Tenoctris said. He realized that he’d been frowning, or anyway hadn’t been as cheerful as he usually felt.

  “I was just hopin
g my sister’s all right,” he said apologetically. Because he didn’t want to talk any more about that, he bobbed his staff toward the gray figures and said, “Who are they, Tenoctris?”

  “These…,” she said, sauntering toward them. She crossed her right wrist on her left to share the weight of the sword on both arms. “…are the Telchines. They’ve been exiled here because they’re a nasty, treacherous lot, but they know certain things. In particular, they know the way to the Fulcrum of the Worlds.”

  Close up, Cashel saw that the creatures wore peaked robes that covered them all the way to the ground. He wasn’t sure how they saw out. Maybe the cloth over their faces was woven thinner, but it didn’t seem so when he looked at them now.

  Tenoctris walked along the straggling line of the Telchines, looking hard at each one as she passed. At the end, she turned and walked back, smiling impishly.

  “We’ve done well, Cashel,” she said brightly. “You bring me luck.”

  Tenoctris patted his arm again; then, without a change in expression, she leaned forward slightly. Using the breadth of the blade, she smoothed away one line of the symbols she’d drawn when they were on this beach the first time.

  “You tricked us,” whined the creature standing nearest the word Tenoctris had changed. “We came to trade, and you trapped us.”

  Its voice sounded like that of an injured fox, weak and angry and utterly vicious. Its body didn’t move; Cashel couldn’t see its lips to tell whether they did or not.

  “You’re a treacherous liar, Telchis,” Tenoctris said coldly. “All your people are. You’d have robbed me and returned to the world from which you were exiled for faithlessness.”

  “We have kept faith!” the creature protested. “Folk leave goods on our beach and we offer goods in return. They take our goods, or they take back their own if they do not accept our offer.”

  When he stood this close, Cashel noticed the Telchines’ distinctive odor. It was a mixture of old parchment and the acid dryness of dead beetles.