by David Drake
Tenoctris laughed harshly. “I offered the Key,” she said. “What did you intend to pay me for the Key, Telchis?”
Cashel held his quarterstaff upright, but his hands were spread at fighting distance on the hickory. He wouldn’t insult Tenoctris by placing himself between her and these gray creatures; but if a Telchis did or said anything that Cashel read as threatening, he wouldn’t wait for direction before striking. They reminded him of maggots writhing in a possum’s corpse.
“Anything,” the creature wheezed.
“Anything-g-g …,” the troupe chorused. They sounded like feeding time in a fox’s earth….
“You would take the Key,” Tenoctris said in the cold voice she’d used toward the Telchines from the beginning. “And you would return to your plane, where I could not follow you. And you would pay me nothing. Therefore I caught you here with words of power, and you will tell me the way to the Fulcrum as the price of your lives.”
“Not the Fulcrum!” said the creature who’d spoken first.
“Anything but the Fulcrum,” his fellows whined softly. “Anything-g-g….”
Cashel looked at the eastern horizon. He thought it’d gotten brighter than it’d been when they arrived, but that might be a trick his mind was playing. He’d like it to be dawn, and he’d like to be out of this place; but he’d stay for as long as Tenoctris wanted him to stay.
“Do you think I’m here to negotiate?” Tenoctris said. “I have no reason to love you, Telchines! The One who exiled you showed more mercy than you can expect from me. Tell me the way to the Fulcrum, or you will stand here till you die and your bodies waste to dust!”
“From the Fulcrum you could shift the worlds,” said the chief of the Telchines.
“She could smash the worlds,” his fellows echoed. “She could smash our world, even ours….”
“You won’t have a world!” Tenoctris said. “You’ll freeze and die and your dust will blow across this beach. The Telchines will be only dust and a memory, and at last even your memory will vanish from the cosmos!”
“Tell her…,” a Telchis said. Cashel couldn’t be sure which one had spoken.
“Tell her the way to the Fulcrum,” whispered the chorus like aspens rustling in the darkness.
“I will tell you the way to the Fulcrum,” the leader said. His voice was as thin as the cold, cutting wind from the sea. “I must tell you the way….”
For a moment, there was no sound but the wind and the cry of a distant seabird. A voice behind Cashel thundered, “Lonchar tebriel tobriel!” A word in the curving Old Script wrote itself in purple flame in the air between Tenoctris and the Telchis.
The sound didn’t come from either the leader or all the Telchines together. Despite not trusting the hunched gray figures, Cashel risked a glance over his shoulder.
“Riopha moriath chael!” boomed the voice, and it was the sea itself speaking. The sluggish waves puckered into a lipless mouth. Cashel turned to face it, bringing his staff around in a quick arc. Both butt caps trailed snarling blue sparks of wizardlight.
“Mor marioth!” And the mouth blurred and vanished. The sea remained dimpled for a moment as though oil’d been spilled onto it; then that was gone as well. A moment later the surf resumed its slow march up the beach.
“Yes…,” said Tenoctris softly. Cashel looked at her. Her profile was as pale and sharp as a cameo. The words of power were already fading from the air before her. As Cashel watched, the writing shimmered from purple to orange and back very quickly.
Using her foot instead of the sword blade, Tenoctris rubbed out the words she’d written in the sand. The Telchines twisted into the forest like skinks writhing for cover.
Tenoctris reached into her wallet and brought out the quartz key from the Tomb of the Messengers. She held it up to the eyes watching from the trees, then dropped it deliberately beside the pebble she’d left as a decoy.
“Now, Cashel,” she said. “We must go to the Fulcrum of the Worlds. It will be very difficult to get there even now that I know the way, and—”
She laughed again like a happy child.
“—it’ll be far more difficult to return!”
ABELT OF thorny brush fringed the stream Garric and his companions were following toward the mountain. Even mounted on Kore’s back, Garric couldn’t see the water, but there was no escaping the sound of its tumbling violence. Ordinarily it must’ve been a seasonal trickle across a parched landscape, but it was clearly in spate now.
“The glacier filled its valley during winter and retreated a hundred yards in the course of a hot summer,” Shin said. “Since the Change, the ice has melted faster than ever before. The valley’ll be clear in another year except for shaded crevices; and even there before a second year is out.”
He skipped ahead of Garric and Kore, idly nibbling foliage from a branch he’d broken from the brush. Garric couldn’t imagine that the small gray-green leaves tasted any better than pine bark, but he’d seen goats strip the bark from pine saplings. Apparently aegipans were equally catholic in their tastes.
Shin chuckled. “You’re fortunate that it’s melting,” he said. “The ice used to cover the entrance to the Yellow King’s tomb. Though no doubt a true champion could’ve dug his way down through the glacier.”
“Horses don’t dig tunnels in ice,” the ogre said austerely. “If you were wondering, noble master.”
“I wasn’t,” Garric said, “but thank you anyway.”
The mountain rose like a wall from the plains. Garric cleared his throat and went on, “How much farther is it, Master Shin?”
“Not far,” said the aegipan. “We’re almost to the mouth of the valley, and it’s no more than half a mile beyond.”
The strait they’d crossed in Lord Holm’s barge the night before was less than three miles wide; by daylight, they might’ve been able to see the far shore before they set out. After they’d landed, Shin—the only one who knew anything about the terrain—told the laborers to row westward where they’d find the considerable settlement within twenty miles. That was where Holm had sold his produce.
The aegipan had led Garric and Kore directly inland across a barren landscape, taking their bearings from the multi-spired peak he pointed out on the horizon. Before midday they’d met the stream and followed it thenceforth.
They hadn’t tried to fight through the dense curtain of brush. The barge had been provisioned. Garric had taken half the total in a sling of cargo net, including a cask of water. The rescued laborers were headed for a settlement with food and water; he and his companions were not.
The mountain was a wedge of volcanic rock with a faint greenish tinge. It’d emerged from a surrounding plain of shale which weathering had broken into a loose soil. From the luxuriance of the brush along the creek banks, it was apparently very fertile when it got enough water.
Shin climbed a spur, his hooves sparkling. Kore grunted. “Steep, I would say,” she said. “For a horse…but let it pass.”
She followed the aegipan up the slope. Garric leaned over her shoulder to keep his weight as far forward as he could, much as he would’ve done if she’d really been a horse. The ogre hadn’t stopped grumbling since they took leave of the barge on shore, but she’d kept going despite the added burden of food and thirty gallons of water.
On the other side of the spur was a valley hollowed by the slow force of the glacier. The rock was completely sterile, scoured clean by ice and the stones which its massive weight shoved along with it. At the bottom tossed the creek. The meltwater was white with material dissolved out of the rocks.
Shin laughed merrily. “Are you ready, Garric?” he said. “Perhaps you think that the rest will be easier than what you’ve faced to get here?”
“I’ll dismount, now,” Garric said. The ogre had already begun to kneel. “Shin, just lead and I’ll follow you the way we’ve been doing. Word games were never to my taste, and this wouldn’t be a good place to play them even if they were.”
&n
bsp; Kore stood again and settled the cargo net. It’d be a wrench to go back to riding horses which didn’t read his mind. Though that was only an issue if he survived.
The creek didn’t fill the valley which the glacier’d hollowed over the years, but the steep slope to either side was complicated with the scree of loose rocks which the ice had dropped when it melted. The aegipan sprang down to the edge of the water, touching the slope three times.
“He places his feet like he was thrusting with a sword,” Carus said, watching in delight. “If he was very, very good with a sword, I mean. As good as me.”
“Hmpf!” Shin said, grinning up at Garric and the ghost in his mind. “Swords are a waste of good metal…but if they weren’t, warrior, I might show you something.”
Carus laughed and appeared to stretch. The ghost had only the memory of a physical body, but that body had been so much of his personality that its presence remained a thousand years after he’d died.
“Oh, aye, lad,” Carus agreed with a wry smile. “I could take a man’s head off without thinking about it. Unfortunately, I generally should’ve thought more about it.”
Smiling faintly, Garric climbed into the ravine with his back and his spread arms to the rock wall. He twisted his belt so that the sword lay in front of his right leg where it was less likely to get in the way.
If he’d had to jump the way the aegipan had, he’d have done it. The drop was less than twenty feet here at the mouth of the valley, though the slope was steep enough that you might not hit the side on the way down if you tripped.
Carus chuckled and Garric grinned wider. Well, I’d have tried to do it. Since I don’t need to, I’m not going to break a leg or my neck showing off.
“I wonder, noble master…,” said Kore. To Garric’s amazement, the ogre executed a handstand at the edge of the ravine. “What physical act do you imagine you can perform that would impress me?”
So speaking she walked down the slope on her hands, pausing with her short legs quivering in between each of her three long “steps.” At the bottom, spattered by the stream, she curled her legs under her again and stood normally.
“Nothing, apparently,” Garric said, smiling because he made a point of smiling instead of letting his face slip into the grim lines of his warrior ancestor when receiving a challenge. “Though remembering the discussion we had when we met, possibly there are a few things, eh?”
The ogre bowed. Because her torso was so long, that brought her face within a hand’s breadth of Garric’s. For a mercy, she’d been eating the mixture of millet and lentils which the barge carried for its crew.
“As you say, noble master,” she said. “Will the noble master ride or walk now?”
“I’ll walk, thank you, Kore,” Garric said. “Though I hope that if I slip, you’ll catch me before I fall into the water.”
A hundred yards ahead the creek seemed to spew out of a solid wall. When they got closer—Shin dancing ahead while Garric picked his footing cautiously; he didn’t dare glance back to see how the ogre was faring—Garric saw that the valley bent sharply to the left. There was a ledge wide enough to walk on, but it was slick with cold spray.
Shin looked back and called, “It’s not much farther.” He disappeared behind the rock face.
Garric faced outward and sidled after the aegipan with his back to the rock. At home he’d crossed many a log bridge in the rain without thinking about it, but the cost of falling into this foaming meltwater could be much worse than a soaking in Pattern Creek.
It was only after the ledge widened enough for him to walk normally without knocking his left elbow on the slope that Garric looked up from his feet. A thick roof of ice covered the valley a hundred yards ahead. The creek poured from the opening beneath. There was light within, dim but probably sufficient for them to walk without torches. Garric couldn’t tell how far back into the valley the cave went, though.
Frozen into the face of the glacier just above the opening was a monster with wings and a snakelike head. Its leathery hide was a purple-red that made Garric think of maple leaves in the fall.
“A wyvern,” said Kore in a speculative tone. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one so big before. Have you, Master Shin?”
“Yes,” said the aegipan, “but not often. He’d easily be fifty feet from nose to tail if he stretched out.”
Any hope that the creature was dead vanished when the great head twitched. Shattered ice fell away with a roar. Some of the chunks which the creek tossed downstream were as big as a man.
“I’d say our timing was fortunate, wouldn’t you, Garric?” Shin said. “Rather than a half-hour later, I mean. But come along. We’re almost there, and I’m sure you’re looking forward to reaching your goal.”
He skipped onward, pirouetting every third step. The aegipan must dance simply for fun, because by now he certainly didn’t think Garric doubted his agility.
Garric entered the cave. The ogre tramped along behind him. She stood upright, though not much farther ahead she’d have to duck to clear the ceiling.
The creek was deafening in the enclosure, and the air was as dank as winter rain. Illumination through the thick ice had a bluish cast, and it didn’t show the loose rocks well. Garric stumbled, then stumbled again. He was glad he was wearing heavy boots.
Shin looked back. He seemed to be laughing, though Garric couldn’t hear over the roar of icy water.
They walked on.
RASILE’S CHANT SOUNDED different from the words of power human wizards used, but the cadence was the same. It made goose bumps quiver on Sharina’s arms the same way also.
The figure Rasile’d drawn around them, this time using fine white sand rather than yarrow stalks, had twelve sides. Sharina’d had plenty of time to count them while listening to the incantation. Occasionally she let two fingers rest on the hilt of her Pewle knife.
Outside the wicker screen Lord Waldron and his men fought the Last with the desperate courage of men who will die before they give up…which meant only that they would die. By now the most pig-stupid trooper in the royal army could predict the result of a battle in which the other side’s losses were constantly replaced.
“Lady,” Sharina prayed under her breath, “You are the Queen of Peace and my business is war; but if it be Your will, aid me so that Mankind not be destroyed.”
Rasile’s voice rose to a shriek like that of a cat in fury. Wizardlight glared blue above the figure, then vanished. All the world vanished.
Sharina was blind.
“Rasile?” she said. Did she hear terror in her own voice? It was her worst fear: not being able to see, not being able to read….
She reached out and touched the wizard’s bony arm. The Corl was unexpectedly warm beneath the layer of fur. “Rasile, I can’t—”
Before Sharina could finish the sentence, sight began to return…but she was looking herself in the face. The world had a grainier texture. Reds and browns were deeper and more subtle, and her own blue irises vanished into the whites.
“You have your task,” the wizard said. “Carry it out as quickly as you can, Sharina, because I am not your friend Tenoctris. There are limits to my power, even in this place.”
Sharina opened her mouth to ask questions: “Will you come with me? What happens if I become visible inside the nest of the Last? What if I can’t find the pool or the talisman, the First Stone, in the pool?”
That’d be a waste of time, which Rasile had just said was in short supply. Sharina smiled as she walked quickly from the shelter. Instead of a door, the troops’d extended one end of the wall over the other.
Sharina’s viewpoint moved with her, though she could still see herself. It took some getting used to, but after she’d brushed the side of the passage once—sharp ends of the wattling scratched like a cat’s claws—she didn’t have trouble.
The camp was quiet now in the sunlight. Off-duty soldiers were sleeping; the guards in the towers chatted in desultory fashion or simply stared in th
e direction of the Last’s stronghold. Sharina could hear a fatigue party working on the southern wall, but the troops’ shelters hid them from the eyes she was using.
She trotted briskly between the guy ropes and wicker walls. Her feet kicked up dust, but nothing that couldn’t pass for a whim of the breeze should anyone even notice; no one did.
Sharina’d been concerned about getting out through the main gate, but foragers were driving in a score of donkeys carrying panniers of grain. There were villages of the Grass People within practical distance, though the food this party brought back wouldn’t supply the army for very long.
She slipped through the gate. A donkey whickered angrily, but the humans didn’t see her. One way or the other, the army wouldn’t need supplies here for very long.
Waldron had laid out his siege lines a quarter mile from the eastern entrance to the black fortress. The parapet was manned, but all save three small ballistas had been moved to reinforce the other flank where the Last were active.
That was a calculated risk: it minimized human casualties unless the Last changed the direction of their attack. If they sallied from the eastern entrance, many men would die holding them for the time it took to bring the artillery back.
Waldron had explained and recommended the plan, but Sharina had made the final decision to adopt it. If things went wrong and a thousand brave men were hacked to death in a bloody hour, she’d blame herself.
“Lady, help me,” she whispered. Then, “Lady, bring my brother back so that he can make these choices!”
There was no gate in the siege lines. Every furlong, ramps sloped up to the guard walks eight feet above the ground, and there were simple ladders at intervals between them.
Sharina walked up a ramp to a salient which once’d held a large catapult; now a squad of infantry occupied it. The men wore cuirasses, but they’d taken off their helmets. Four were dicing while the rest looked toward the enemy and talked about food. They didn’t notice Sharina step carefully past them to the wall midway between the salient and the next pair of guards.
She gripped the vertical stiffeners of a basket, then climbed over the parapet. After hanging for a moment, she dropped into no-man’s-land and started for the alien fortress.
