The Gods Return

by David Drake

  Ilna began to work. She smiled, remembering the secretary’s blithe offer to cut the box free. These knots bound far, far more than merely a wooden box. Some of what they controlled was harmless or even beneficial when properly treated, but even those aspects were dangerous if they weren’t respected.

  And they were only part of the greater fabric with the box at its center. The remainder could blast the world and beyond the world if freed by the drag of a blade.

  Mind, Ingens couldn’t possibly have cut the filament. Uniquely, Ilna didn’t know where the pale strand came from or what it was. All her fingers felt was sunlight, sweeping and dancing and flooding all things.

  Nothing but pure light could have bound the powers gathered here; but the work had been done for an evil man, by a thing that was the soul of Evil.

  Ilna was aware of that the same way she was aware that she was breathing in and out. None of it mattered now, because she had work to do.

  Brincisa had been right to believe no one but Ilna herself could unknot this shimmering fabric. If she’d therefore arranged the earthquake that brought Ilna to Ortran, that too was a matter for another time.

  The work came first. Nothing existed save the work. She was Ilna os-Kenset.

  She undid the last knot and paused, breathing deeply. She felt a vast crackling: the universe, bound by the pattern she’d untied, had broken free like a creek at the spring thaw. The filament lay about her like the sun spilled on crystal. It shone brighter than the feeble lantern that should have been the only light down here.

  “Mistress Ilna!” Brincisa called from above. “Have you succeeded? Tie the casket onto the end of the rope and I’ll bring it up.”

  The candle was little more than a smudge of wax. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had guttered out after Ilna began. Her eyes hadn’t—couldn’t have—guided her on a task like the one she’d just completed.

  “Mistress Ilna!” the wizard repeated. “Answer me!”

  Irritation brought Ilna out of the mood of soft accomplishment she’d been basking in. Well, softness was for other people.

  “I’ll be up shortly,” Ilna said. She deliberately didn’t raise her voice; that expressed her opinion of Brincisa daring to give her orders better than a shout would’ve done. “I assure you that I don’t want to stay down here longer than I have to.”

  She wished she had something to wet her throat. A pitcher of the bitters Reise brewed in his inn would be the best. It was one of the few things Ilna remembered about Barca’s Hamlet that had remained constant, utterly trustworthy. Even water would do, though.

  Ilna smiled coldly. A moment to breathe would be sufficient. She was used to making do with what she had, rather than having the things she wanted.

  “Just tie the casket onto the rope,” Brincisa said. “You can do that, can’t you? Then I’ll let the rope down again. You can bring up some of the grave goods. There must be a king’s ransom accumulated over the years in the cavern.”

  Ilna frowned. Does Brincisa really think that I care about baubles?

  Aloud she said, “I’ll bring the box up myself. It won’t be long.”

  She smelled decay. To her surprise, Hutton’s cheeks had fallen in and his eyes, gray and staring a moment ago, were covered by bluish fungus.

  Something moved in the depths of the cave. Ilna heard a dull clicking, the sound stones made when weight made them slide against other stones. She’d loosed more than the box, it seemed.

  “Send up the casket!” Brincisa said. “You mustn’t try to carry it. Send it at once!”

  Ilna had started to tie the box with her silken rope the way she’d carried the lantern when she came down. Something shifted slightly inside; it wasn’t particularly heavy. She paused and looked up at the opening. “Master Ingens!” she called. “Ingens!”

  “Mistress, I’m giving you a last chance!” Brincisa said. “Send up the casket alone. Otherwise you’ll stay down there and I’ll send one of my servants to fetch it at a later time.”

  “Nothing goes up until Master Ingens assures me that he’s standing by the rope and that it’s secure!” Ilna said. “I’ll bring the box up or it won’t come!”

  Heavy footfalls thudded closer from the darkness. She wondered how deep the cave was and what lived in it.

  The rope rustled down, flailing like an angry snake. Stone clacked above. Ilna didn’t recognize the sound until there was a second clack and a moment later something massive crunched, then settled. Brincisa had knocked the chocks out so that the roller returned to its resting position over the entrance.

  A massive shadow lurched toward the lantern’s faint circle of light.

  lnterlude

  HAIL, LORD ARCHAS!” the new recruits shouted raggedly. They were probably weak with relief not to have been executed. Or fed to the Worm, of course; they had to be thinking about that. “Hail, the Prince of the East!”

  “By the Shepherd!” muttered Tam, Archas’ deputy, as he watched the Worm writhe through the ruins of the fallen city. He rubbed his scalp with the knuckles of his right—and only—hand while gripping his helmet in his fingers. “I tell you, Archas, I wish you’d send it away.”

  “Members of the Army of the East!” Archas said. “You’ve sworn obedience to me on your lives and souls. Don’t think those are just words! It won’t be some lady or shepherd in Cloudcuckooland waggling a finger at you if you forswear me! Look and look well at what your oath means!”

  He gestured toward the Worm with a curved sword. In his other hand was the talisman wrapped in golden hair, the tool by which he raised and—thus far—dismissed the monster on which his power rested.

  A row of walls collapsed in powder. The Worm had destroyed the rear of those buildings as it squirmed through city previously, but Archas had learned it was best to let the creature completely raze the cities he loosed it on. Otherwise it resisted his efforts to send it back into the gray wasteland it had turned its home world into.

  “Go with the captains I’ve given you!” Archas said. His voice boomed over the terrified recruits, about two hundred survivors from the ruin which was now being ground into the bedrock. “Obey their every command.”

  Women had been saved as well, the younger, prettier ones. No children, though.

  “You’ll have wealth and power beyond your dreams, all the best of everything,” Archas said. “But—”

  He waggled the sword again.

  “—never dare disobey me!”

  The cities here on Charax had walls of brick instead of using stone over a rubble core like those of Telut. A furlong of wall—what was this city’s name? Archas wasn’t sure he’d ever heard—still stood, including one square tower. The Worm, moved by some impulse of its own, bent suddenly in a hairpin and advanced on the remaining section. Its circular maw pulsed open and closed. The creature’s body towered over the thirty-foot battlements.

  “You can send it away, can’t you?” Tam asked uneasily. “Archas! Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course I’m listening to you, Tam,” Archas said with false good humor. He bobbed the talisman in his left hand as if he were estimating its weight. “And of course I can send the Worm back. You’ve seen me do that a score of times already, haven’t you?”

  It was easy to underestimate his one-armed deputy. Tam wasn’t smart, exactly; nobody would say that. But he was perceptive in a way few smart people ever were. In the old days he’d twice noticed plots against Captain Archas—and had quashed them with strokes of his axe before anybody else knew what was going on.

  “I’m just giving a warning about what it means to try to fight us,” Archas said. “It’ll be easier yet if they open their gates when we arrive, the way places had started to do by the end on Telut.”

  Tam sighed. “I suppose,” he muttered. “I don’t like it, though. I’m no saint, Archas, but . . .”

  The last of the ramparts disappeared in a rumbling earthquake, partly crushed but also swallowed by the enormous mouth. Orange-red d
ust rose in a cloud that staggered forward like a line of cavalry advancing. It covered the foreparts of the creature that had worked the destruction, but hundreds of feet of gray horror continued to grind forward like an unending landslide.

  “Even if they surrender, it’s all the same for most of them,” Tam said. “You give the city to your, your thing. And all the ones who don’t join us. Who we don’t let join.”

  “Well, what do you care?” Archas shouted. “What did cities ever do for you, Tam? Why, if we’d tried to get in here a year ago, they’d have arrested us at the gate and likely hung us just for what we looked like!”

  And he and his men sure wouldn’t have attacked a place like this, whatever its name was. Archas had never had more than six ships under his command—three hundred men, maybe; certainly not more. They’d have had as much chance trying to gnaw through these walls—the walls that the Worm had just finished destroying—as they would assaulting them.

  Archas looked at the army he’d assembled in his march north, straggling across the landscape. There were several thousand men, now. Most were slaves and farm laborers who’d joined the band because the life was better than what they were used to. They weren’t very different from the pirates he’d commanded before the Change.

  The men Archas had taken from captured or surrendered cities were generally soldiers who came with their weapons and knew how to use them. Despite how they feared the Worm they might’ve been dangerous to him if there’d been more of them, but he saw to it there weren’t.

  The Army of the East had been attacked several times during its advance. Because it had proper scouts and flankers, only one of the ambushes had forced Archas to loose the Worm.

  He hadn’t been sure the creature was going back to its own world that time. Hill tribesmen had attacked in a rocky gorge. They were after loot, not trying to halt the column, though by luck they’d swept down on the carriage in which Archas rode in state. He’d had to bring out the Worm to save himself, but there hadn’t been much for it to destroy once it’d devoured the mountaineers’ meager village.

  The Worm had taken his orders at last, but he hadn’t been sure it would until the last moment. He’d allowed it to destroy the next city they reached, down to the last mouse and pebble. He hadn’t given the populace even a chance to surrender.

  “I know, Captain, I know,” said Tam with a sigh. “I never thought I’d have all the wine and all the women I wanted, all the time. We’ve got it good, I know we have. Only . . .”

  He’d turned his eyes toward the women. There were more of them than the men by now and almost entirely captives from the cities. Not all whores, either: there were councillors’ wives and priests’ daughters. They’d volunteered after they learned the alternative, too, because Archas’ men didn’t need to bother with the unwilling.

  Except for the men who liked a struggle, of course. The Army of the East had no few of those, but they generally discarded the women after they’d used them, picking out fresh companions when the next city fell.

  “Look, Tam,” Archas said. He was cajoling his deputy, but it was really his own heart that he was trying to convince. “They’re lucky we’re here, that’s the truth. If they waited for the rats to spread this far, you know what’d happen. They’d all be sacrificed, right? They’d ask us to capture them if they knew the truth.”

  There was nothing left of the walled city but a pall of dust which continued to churn as the Worm writhed through it. Archas held the talisman close. He’d use it shortly, but he needed to ready himself for what he knew would be a struggle.

  “Have another drink,” he said to Tam, offering the wineskin he’d slung over his left shoulder. It was almost empty, but there were others.

  Tam tossed his helmet to the ground to free his hand. He took the skin and drank deeply. Gesturing toward the helmet with his toe, he said, “Wouldn’t be much use against that thing, would it? And there’s nothing else I’m worried about here.”

  “You!” Archas shouted to a man standing nearby, staring transfixed at the Worm’s continued progress. “Find some wine and bring it here. Now!”

  Tam hadn’t needed to explain what “that thing” was.

  “I just keep thinking . . . ,” Tam said. He looked critically at the wineskin, then shook it; there was enough left to slosh. “Pretty soon the rats are going to swarm over the whole rest of the world, right? Everything’s going to be Palomir, except us. What’s going to happen then, Captain?”

  “Don’t worry about that, Tam,” Archas said with a confidence he didn’t feel. “As soon as we take Dariada, everything’s going to change. Everything’ll be all right as soon as we do that!”

  He touched his tongue with his lips. He was sure that things would change.

  But he wasn’t sure that they’d be all right.

  Chapter

  9

  CASHEL LOOKED AT the stele’s carvings again. Rasile, Liane, and the priest were doing that too.

  There must be half the city trying to watch Liane and the rest of them. If it hadn’t been for the company of soldiers making a half-circle to give them space, Cashel would’ve been pushing the crowd back with his staff to keep it from trampling the two women. It seemed like the people here had heard stories about the thing that was eating its way north toward them.

  Looking between him and Liane—Rasile was squatting on Cashel’s other side—Amineus said, “That’s the hero Gorand, Your Ladyship. He’s shown strangling the Serpent, as we thought.”

  He coughed in embarrassment. “We, ah, thought,” he continued in a lowered voice, “that the story was an allegory of a great military leader who defeated an attack of pirates from the Outer Sea. Because the sea encircles the Isles like a serpent swallowing its tail.”

  Liane looked at the priest. “It appears that before the Change, Archas and his men were pirates on the Outer Sea,” she said. “But no, I don’t believe the image is a serpent. Or an allegory.”

  “The face looks like the one in the tree,” Cashel said. “I think.”

  “How can you tell?” Amineus said. He wasn’t trying to sneer, but he wasn’t exactly trying not to either. “This is so small. And ancient.”

  Cashel shrugged. He moved to the other side of the stele, stepping carefully around Liane.

  “Master Amineus?” he said as he stared at the sand-smoothed stone. Kneeling, he began grubbing in the dirt at its base with his knife. “Was this always here? This stone?”

  “Well, there are no records about it being erected, I can tell you that,” the priest said. “Though that doesn’t prove it wasn’t set up or moved here from somewhere else without anybody bothering to mention it. Or the records could’ve been lost, of course.”

  “The reason I ask is . . . ,” Cashel said. Yes, it was there like he’d thought, a row of letters in the swirly Old Script and maybe another row beneath them. “There’s still some writing here where it got covered before the wind could smooth it away.”

  “Let me see!” Liane said, squatting beside him. “Ah—please, I mean. And ah—”

  “Ma’am, would you like my knife?” Cashel said politely, offering her the haft of the simple tool. A blacksmith had forged the iron blade and pinned wooden scales to it. It could do everything from carving at meals to picking stones out of ox hooves. Or digging dirt away from the base of a stele.

  “No, Cashel,” Liane said with a laugh. “I’d like you to finish clearing the inscription, as you were doing before I interrupted you. My pardon, please.”

  “It’s more my line of work,” Cashel said mildly. He scraped the back of the blade through the gritty earth like a plow breaking unpromising soil. He had to be careful not to snap the iron, because it might be hard to replace. City folks here didn’t wear knives any more than they did in Valles or Erdin, and he didn’t guess Liane and Rasile would want to traipse about the countryside looking for a smith with a sideline in knives.

  Liane rubbed the last of the dirt away with the hem of her cape.
The letters were worn, especially on top.

  But not so they couldn’t be read, apparently. “When the priests have carried out these rites,” Liane said in a clear voice, her finger tracing the line to keep her place along the faint letters, “they may summon Lord Gorand from his rest. Lord Gorand will defend the people of Dariada from the Devouring Danger—I think that’s what it is—as he defended them in the past.”

  She rose to her feet and turned. “The rites would’ve been on the upper part of the stone,” she said quietly to Rasile. “I think.”

  Rasile wagged her tongue in laughter. “Wait,” she said. “And read when you see.”

  The wizard settled herself arms-length from the stone and tossed the yarrow stalks onto the pavement. They fell—just fell as best Cashel could see—into a star with a hand plus two fingers of points.

  Rasile started to keen. Because Cashel had been around her, he knew the sounds were Coerli words of power instead of a bellyache.

  A column of wizardlight lifted slowly from the center of the star. It was as pure as the sun through a ruby. Folks watching from the other side of the guards shouted, some thrilled but the rest sounding scared.

  A soldier glanced back over his shoulder, saw the light, and dropped his spear. He fell to his knees crying. The crowd wasn’t pushing in the way it had been, though, so that didn’t matter except probably to him.

  The rod of red light twisted over slowly like a pine tree in a high wind. When the tip of it touched the stele, it spread across the sand-scoured face the way water soaks into a cloth. Instead of coarse gray stone, the background was a pink shimmer on which burned letters as sharp and solid as if they’d been cut from carnelian.

  “If the Devouring Danger threatens again,” Liane read, swinging into the business just like she’d been waiting for it, “the priests will speak the following words of power: ‘Abrio set alarpho . . . ’ ”

  Rasile yowled something that didn’t have a syllable in common with what Liane had said. Cashel didn’t think a human throat could even have made the sound. The cadence of the chant was the same, though.