The Gods Return

by David Drake

  He grinned at the skirmishers. “Even if they did think I was just another cavalry puke.”

  “Sorry if, ah . . . ,” said the standing man. “Some of those javelins came a bit close.”

  “Not as close as the rats were going to come if you hadn’t been around,” Garric said.

  The other skirmisher stood. “I think your leg’s going to be fine, B-B-Prince,” he said. “But the surgeon’ll want to stitch it up when you get back to camp.”

  “Yes, he bloody well will,” snarled Attaper. He was panting and red-faced from running a good half-mile, obviously expecting a worse result than he’d found when he reached his prince. “And we’re going to get you back there as soon as somebody drags a horse down here for you, Your Highness.”

  Garric looked up the valley. The prisoners had disappeared with their guards, and the only rat men visible were the hundreds of furry corpses.

  “All right, we’ll head back,” Garric said. Much as he hated it, he had to agree with King Carus’ cold logic: he couldn’t go after the prisoners with the troops he had available. Cavalry was obviously useless, and the skirmishers had taken casualties also. If there were a thousand rat men concealed around the dogleg, they’d massacre their pursuers.

  He looked at the carnage, the bloody, stinking carnage, around him.

  “Well,” said Carus. “I wouldn’t call it a victory, but I’m glad to have learned this before we tried a cavalry charge in a major battle. Because odds are, we’d have been leading it ourself. Right, lad?”

  Right.

  Chapter

  10

  WHILE SHARINA WAS in meetings, she had only the others present to deal with. In between, however, she had to run a gauntlet of clerks, courtiers, and petitioners as she moved through the halls and passages.

  It was no different this time. The fact Sharina was leaving her final appointment of the day—on road improvements which were absolutely necessary but either a huge financial drain or a political disaster if forced labor was used—and hoping to have a light meal in her suite before getting some sleep, just meant that she was more tired and hungry than she’d have been at midmorning. Though she’d been hungry and very tired at midmorning, too.

  “Your Highness, about the canal project/the new barracks/the position for my nephew?”

  She strode past them in a cocoon of Blood Eagles. Her escort made sure nobody actually touched Princess Sharina, but they couldn’t shut off the voices unless they simply clubbed everybody out of her way. History said tyrants like Hawley the Seneschal and King Morail One-Eye had done just that.

  Sharina sighed. The reality of being princess gave her a different and altogether more positive appreciation of men whom she as a scholar had regarded as brutes.

  There was usually a dense clot outside the door she would next enter. That was true this time also, but all but one of those waiting were fit, very sturdy-looking men in identical neat tunics and identical grim expressions. The exception was Master Dysart.

  The agents parted when the Blood Eagles arrived; they weren’t here to fight, just to hold a prime location and to keep everybody else at a discreet distance from their superior while he talked to the princess.

  “Your Highness, if you could sign these tonight . . . ?” the spymaster said, waving a sheaf of documents on vellum. Sharina doubted whether there was anybody in the palace who didn’t know that Dysart was Lady Liane’s deputy, but the colorless little man kept up the pretense that he was a senior clerk in the chancellery.

  “Yes, of course,” said Sharina, narrowly avoiding another sigh. Secret intelligence was part of her present duties, but experience had already taught her that the details of road construction were likely to be more interesting. “We can take care of that inside, Master Dysart.”

  Sharina opened the door herself. Burne sat upright on a table in the reception area as Diora fed him a round of hard bread. The rat was perfectly capable of feeding himself, but Sharina had noticed that the maid was more comfortable thinking of Burne as a smart pet than she might’ve been if she’d appreciated what he really was.

  Sharina grinned. Whatever that was, of course, but Burne was certainly more than a smart pet.

  “A late night, Your Highness,” Diora said as she turned to greet Sharina. “What—oh!”

  Dysart closed the door firmly behind him, then shot the bolts. Diora hadn’t realized her mistress wasn’t alone when she greeted her with what many would consider scandalous informality from a maid. She was obviously embarrassed.

  “I have some papers to go over with Master Dysart,” Sharina said nonchalantly. “Set out my nightgown, Diora. And shut the door behind you, if you please.”

  The bedroom was already prepared—of course—but it was a quiet excuse to prevent awkwardness with the spymaster. Dysart probably was scandalized by Sharina’s friendly relationship with her maid, but the chance of him talking to another living soul was less than that the huntsmen and stags painted on the sidewall would.

  On the other hand, Dysart would refuse to speak in front of Diora however much Sharina said she trusted the maid. Perhaps he was right.

  Burne jumped down from the table and padded over to them. “I’m coming up,” he warned, then hopped to Sharina’s sash for a foothold and finally to her shoulder.

  “There haven’t been any scorpions in the suite all day,” he said in a conversational voice. “I’m not sure whether they’re giving up or just planning something more subtle . . . but for now at least, I think we have privacy.”

  Dysart waited, watching Diora till the bedroom door thumped shut. He grimaced—whether at the maid or the rat, Sharina couldn’t tell—and said, “We’re going to raid a gathering of Scorpion worshippers at midnight, Your Highness. We’ll be using men from my own department and a company of soldiers in civilian dress. You’d said you wanted to be kept informed of progress, so—”

  He shrugged.

  “—I came to tell you.”

  A servant watching the water clock in the square outside the palace rang the hour with a mallet and a set of chimes. It lacked a half hour of midnight, which was time enough.

  “Right,” Sharina said. “Master Dysart, send a messenger to Captain Ascor and tell him to report to me immediately. He’s to be without equipment and wearing a blue cloak to cover his sword.”

  “Your Highness,” Dysart said in concern, “Lord Tadai has already provided for soldiers. I don’t believe adding Blood Eagles is advisable.”

  “I’m not adding Blood Eagles,” Sharina said, tugging at her laces. “I’m—”

  This wasn’t doing any good! She needed help.

  “Diora, come help me get out of this!” she called. “And bring the Pewle knife!”

  “Your Highness?” said Dysart, his eyes widening.

  “I’m coming with you, Master Dysart,” Sharina said. “And while Captain Ascor won’t like it, at least with Lord Attaper’s deputy present, I won’t have to sneak out of this room to prevent the whole squad on guard from tramping along with me in their full gear!”

  GARRIC STOOD WITHIN a coarse brushwood fence, watching as Tenoctris examined the dead rat man that they’d brought back to the camp. All the screen did was permit the soldiers not to watch wizardry if it made them uncomfortable—as it did almost all laymen.

  They’d strapped the corpse to a lance carried by pairs of skirmishers who traded off the burden. Lord Waldron had thought there’d be at least one horse that didn’t mind the rats’ smell, but he’d apparently been wrong.

  Master Ainbor—who’d chuckled to be referred to as “Master”—had volunteered that his men wouldn’t mind carrying one of the rats they’d killed. He’d been quite obviously twitting Waldron, but Garric—and Waldron, from his sour nod—figured Ainbor had a right to do that. His skirmishers had saved the lives of scores of the cavalry, not to mention the life of Prince Garric.

  “We might’ve fought our way clear, lad,” Carus muttered.

  Right, the way you swam to sh
ore when a wizard drowned your fleet a thousand years ago, Garric thought. No, I’m pretty clear on why I’m standing here, and it’s not because I have a strong sword arm.

  As it was, Garric’s left thigh throbbed as though a horsefly had bitten him. Master Daciano, the Blood Eagles’ surgeon, had sewn shut the lips of the wound and then bandaged over it a poultice of lettuce which was supposed to numb the pain. Maybe that was true, but if so it would’ve been very uncomfortable without the drug.

  Tenoctris had said she’d do something for him as soon as she had a chance. Right now, both she and Garric thought that the first priority was learning as much as possible about the rat army of Palomir.

  “That’s odd,” Garric said. “The rat isn’t as big as it was when it was alive. As any of them were. Can it be shrinking, Tenoctris?”

  Instead of answering, Tenoctris murmured a spell of which Garric caught only a few snatches:“ . . . sethri saba . . .” Blue light sparkled over the corpse and around the edges of the pentagon the wizard had drawn on the ground with corn meal.

  For a moment wizardlight drew an image of the rat man as it had been when a javelin took it through the throat: half again as tall as the present figure and several times the bulk. Garric said, “Yes, that’s—”

  The image became different instead of changing. The sparkling azure shell of a young man with big bones and a vacant expression swelled about the furry corpse. He looked ordinary, a farm laborer or a common soldier. Garric had never met him, but he’d met the type a thousand times.

  The dusting of light dissolved into the air. Garric found himself blinking away orange afterimages: the blue shimmer had been brighter than he’d realized until it vanished.

  Tenoctris rose and turned to face him. The spell she’d cast hadn’t completely drained her the way it would’ve done the Tenoctris whom Garric had first met: an old woman with a great deal of wisdom but limited power. Nonetheless the tightness at the corners of her eyes hinted that what she’d just done had required effort, even for the demon her will had bound within her.

  “They’re not shrinking, exactly,” she said. The weariness was evident in her voice also, though it gained strength with every syllable. “They’re returning to what they’d been before the rite that turned them into warriors.”

  “An incantation, you mean?” Garric said. “A wizard enchanted ordinary rats and made them as big as men?”

  “Not a wizard,” Tenoctris said. “And not a priest either, except that as a priest he summoned the God. It was the God Franca who turned rats into rat men, Garric. A very evil God.”

  “Ah,” said Garric. He started to speak further, then swallowed the words.

  “Of course we can fight a God, lad,” said the ghost, answering the unvoiced question. Carus smiled with grim insouciance. “I don’t see any way we can win, but that doesn’t stop us trying.”

  Garric looked at the corpse again; it was smaller yet. From the way it stank, the extra bulk was being lost in the form of noxious gases.

  Garric grimaced. He said, “Tenoctris, do you need this further? Because if you don’t . . . ?”

  “What?” she said, looking over her shoulder with a critical expression. “Oh, yes, you can bury it. And I have no more incantations for the present, so I suppose we can go outside—”

  She nodded to the screen of brush.

  “—this.”

  It struck Garric that Tenoctris, though born to an aristocratic family, paid almost no attention to her surroundings except as they had bearing on something she wanted to accomplish. A peasant might have ignored the stench because he was used to worse; Tenoctris had simply been oblivious of the fact the corpse stank.

  The fence curled past itself like the coils of a snail’s shell. Garric stepped out the open end and said to his aide, “Lerdain, have a detail burn the offal outside the camp. They can use this—”

  He patted the screen they no longer needed.

  “—for fuel if they like.”

  The camp was crowded and though as sanitary as possible—by Carus’ order through Garric’s lips, the latrines were dug before the troops were released to build personal shelters—it was a trampled, barren waste. It would’ve been far worse if it’d been raining.

  “A soldier lives in dust or mud,” Carus said. “Unless the winter’s particularly cold and there’s ice instead. Even then it’s mud inside the tents and around cook fires. If he’s got a tent and a cook fire.”

  Garric laughed and said aloud, “Who’d be a soldier, eh?”

  Tenoctris looked at him. “Who indeed?” she said. “But why do you mention it now?”

  “Because . . . ,” Garric said, answering both the rhetorical question and the real one. “A soldier is told where to go and who to fight. He doesn’t have to think about anything, so he’s without responsibility for the result. Even if he’s killed, he’s not responsible for it. Whereas—”

  He looked into the wizard’s eyes. “—I’m responsible for defeating an empire that turns rats into soldiers. And I know how fast rats breed.”

  “Your Highness, if I might have a moment with you,” said Lord Acer, newly appointed to the command of an Ornifal cavalry regiment. There was no question whatever in his tone. “The food—”

  “Master Acer!” Garric said. He was angry and frustrated at the greater situation. It was probably a good thing that this young fop was providing a legitimate outlet, though Garric wouldn’t release his feelings—

  King Carus laughed at the thought.

  —with a sweep of his sword, the way his ancestor had been known to do.

  “I am in conference with Lady Tenoctris, on whom the survival of mankind depends. Report to Lord Waldron, if you will, and inform him that you’re to be reassigned to an infantry regiment at Pandah as of this moment!”

  Acer’s mouth dropped open. Other aides, waiting to talk to the prince when he was free, stifled laughs—or didn’t, in the case of Lord Lerdain, a husky youth and the son of the Count of Blaise. If Acer wanted a duel, Lerdain was very much the boy to give him one.

  Acer went pale and stumbled blindly away. He’d have tripped over a tent rope if another officer hadn’t guided him around it.

  “That was excessive,” Garric muttered.

  Tenoctris shrugged. “My mother always told me that high birth doesn’t exempt one from basic courtesy,” she said. “I’m inclined to agree with her, though it’s not something I worry about a great deal.”

  She cleared her throat and resumed, “You’re right that we can’t attack the problem by preventing Palomir from finding rats. That’s only one aspect of what’s going on, though. The rats provide a physical core around which the priest and his God can form a warrior. He also needs human souls to animate the forms. Otherwise they’d still be rats—large ones, but no more dangerous or disciplined than so many wolves.”

  “We’ve heard that the priests are sacrificing everyone they capture,” Garric said. His lips moved as though he were sucking on a lemon. “That’s why, then? To make an army of rats?”

  They were standing in the middle of the camp, close to the headquarters tent. The location was about as private—and comfortable—as anything available. The guards kept everyone else out of earshot, which a tent’s canvas walls would not. Not that it seemed to matter whether anybody overheard them. . . .

  “Not in the way you mean it,” Tenoctris said. “The blood sacrifice increases Franca’s ability to affect events in the waking world, but the souls themselves are those of the dead.”

  She grinned. Tenoctris had always had a bright smile and a whimsical sense of humor. “The innocent dead, I suppose you might say,” she said. “Though I don’t know that any human being is completely innocent. The dead weren’t worshippers of Franca and His siblings, at any rate.”

  She nodded back to where they’d been. Lord Lerdain watched proprietarily as a Blaise file-closer and a squad of armsmen under his command tramped toward the main gate, carrying the remains of the rat man on the
mat of brush that had concealed it.

  “Any more than the rats who supplied the physical form were Franca worshippers, you see,” she concluded.

  Garric nodded. “All right,” he said. “I understand the situation. What can we do to change it?”

  “We need to prevent the priest behind this,” Tenoctris said, “from haling souls out of the Underworld. We need to close the Gate of Ivory. And that will require a very particular hero.”

  Garric lifted his sword slightly and let it slide back, unconsciously checking to be sure that it wouldn’t bind in the scabbard if he needed to draw it quickly. “Well, I don’t know that I’m particular enough,” he said. “But I’ll try.”

  The wizard laughed merrily, making those waiting beyond the line of Blood Eagles look up eagerly.

  “Garric, in most respects you’d be ideal for the task,” she said. “You lack one necessary attribute, however: you’re not dead. The late Lord Munn is therefore a better choice.”

  “I, ah . . . ,” said Garric. “Can I help you reach Lord Munn, then?”

  “If you mean, ‘Can I help you go to the place where Lord Munn’s body rests,’ ” Tenoctris said, “no; I’ll get us there. But Lord Munn won’t accept orders from a woman, not even a woman who’s a wizard—”

  She smiled, but the harshness of her expression was very unusual for Tenoctris.

  “—and who has the power to plunge his soul beneath the deepest Hell. Of course, if Lord Munn did not have such a strong, ah, will, he wouldn’t be any good to us. That will require the presence of a warrior-king.”

  Garric grinned and stretched. “Then take me to him, milady,” he said.

  Tenoctris nodded. “There’s a sacred grove within a mile,” she said. “It focuses a useful amount of power. We’ll go now, if you’re ready.”

  “Lord Attaper!” Garric called. “Lady Tenoctris and I are leaving the camp immediately, and I suspect you’ll want us to have an escort.”