The Gods Return

by David Drake

  The spectators were staring at the preacher with rapt attention. Dimly Sharina could see movement converging on Platt from the other directions. She stumbled and stumbled again. Around her soldiers cursed under their breath as they turned ankles or barked shins.

  “The enemies of God are around us!” Platt cried. “Flee, my brethren!”

  “Get him, boys!” bellowed a soldier in the group approaching from the opposite end of the cemetery. Everybody was lunging and crying out.

  As the preacher shouted his warning, he’d turned and jumped off the side of the altar. Sharina lost sight of him, but she ran toward where he had to be. The stone boxes and terrified spectators made it an obstacle course rather than a normal race, but as expected she saw Platt an instant later; the bleached robe stood out like a flame.

  “There!” shouted one of Dysart’s men, snaking between two soldiers and grasping the preacher by the arm.

  “Don’t hit him!” cried another of the civilian agents, grabbing the other shoulder and tucking Platt’s head under his own arm to keep the soldiers from clubbing the fellow.

  “We want him able to talk!” Dysart said, his hands raised to prevent more soldiers from piling on enthusiastically. “We’ve got him! Stay back out of the way!”

  “We’ve got him!” called someone from the other side of the large tombs. “Master Dysart, we’ve got him!”

  “Here he is, by the Shepherd!” shouted a soldier well along to the east end of the cemetery. “Tell Marshal Prester we got him!”

  Sharina jerked the captive’s white hood back. A soldier clacked open the shutter of the dark lantern he carried, throwing yellow candlelight over the prisoner’s face. He was an unremarkable man with a weak chin and high forehead.

  “Is this Platt?” Sharina demanded.

  “I’m Platt!” said the prisoner. “I’m the voice of Lord Scorpion!”

  “Well, I don’t know, Your Highness,” Dysart said, wringing his hands. “He matches the suspect’s description, but I’ve never seen Platt myself.”

  He obviously hated to make the admission, but he hadn’t hesitated. As Liane had said, he was a good man.

  “We got the man, Your Ladyship!” said Prester, patting a hardwood marshal’s baton into his left palm. The veteran looked like a section of oak root himself, old and supple and very tough. “We’ll need to carry him, I guess, but we didn’t mark the face any.”

  The man two soldiers were carrying behind Prester was shorter than the captive Sharina’s group had caught, but his face—allowing for the spasms of agony that transfixed it at intervals—would’ve fit the same verbal description. At least one of his knees had been broken.

  “No, I’m Platt!” said the man at Sharina’s feet.

  “Your Ladyship,” chirped Burne in a thin voice that nonetheless pierced the night’s confusion. The rat must’ve learned to project when he was with the troupe of mountebanks. “I have the real Platt here, but I can’t very well bring him to you.”

  “Who’s that?” said Prester, turning his head. “Did we grab the wrong one, then?”

  “If you did, you weren’t alone in your mistake,” said Sharina, clambering over a solid rank of loculi, many of them with broken lids or no lids at all. Dysart and Ascor were at her either side.

  A man in a dark blue cape had fallen between two of the sultans’ tombs. He was trying to crawl away. His right foot flopped loosely behind him: he’d been hamstrung.

  “He threw off the white robe,” said Burne, perched in an alcove of the dome-topped tomb, “and had the dark one on under it. He couldn’t change his smell, though.”

  The rat licked blood off his whiskers with apparent relish. Sharina suspected that was partly an act, but it was a very good one. The fallen man certainly thought so, because he twisted to snatch at Burne. The rat hopped away, then leaped to Sharina’s shoulder.

  “I think we’ve found the real priest,” Sharina said.

  “Tie his hands,” Dysart said brusquely to the squad of his men now gathered around him. “We’ll take him to my office in the palace.”

  Men quickly stepped to pinion the captive. Frowning, Dysart added, “And check his foot. We don’t want him bleeding out from a nicked artery before we question him.”

  “Lord Scorpion will infallibly smite you!” Platt cried. “The true God will avenge His prophets!”

  Burne laughed. “I quite like scorpions, Master Platt,” he said. “They taste even better than shrimp.”

  Chapter

  11

  THE BLUISH LIGHT in the burial cavern wasn’t good, but Ilna found it was good enough as her eyes fully adapted to it. Indeed, it seemed to be getting brighter as Usun found a route for them. She wasn’t willing to call it a track, let alone a path, but the fact the massive ghoul obviously came this way meant it was possible for a young woman in good health to do so as well.

  The little man paused to bend over a litter of fallen stalactites. “There’s been an earthquake recently,” he said. “Well, tremors anyway. It could be that even without us, our ghoul would have to make other arrangements than living in a cave.”

  “An earthquake brought the riverboat I was on to the shore of this island,” Ilna said. “What had been an island before the Change, anyway. I suppose there must’ve been some effect in Gaur and here in the cave, though I believe the quake itself was Brincisa’s work.”

  “Hutton always underrated her,” said Usun as he paced on ahead. “Still, she doesn’t have the power to cause solid rock to crack. There had to have been a weakness already. Or indeed, maybe it was the Change that smashed it all like this.”

  He laughed, though Ilna noticed that now that they were on the track of the ghoul the little man’s speech and laughter were muted. He had the trick of projecting his voice without raising it. It was barely a whisper, yet she could hear each word distinctly over the rustle and deep, directionless thrumming that filled the cavern.

  “And one landslip will bring more, like as not,” Usun said cheerfully. “Well, with luck we’ll be out of here before it matters. And the ghoul, he’ll be beyond worrying about anything now that we’re going after him.”

  Ilna’s lips tightened in distaste. The little man was bragging, and he was bragging on her behalf as well. Many people saw nothing wrong with that.

  The scowl became a wry smile. In this as in so many other things, the many were wrong and Ilna os-Kenset was right. But she didn’t think she was going to change their minds.

  Beyond the narrow throat leading to the burial cave, the cavern rose to heights that Ilna wouldn’t have been able to see by the light of a torch. The rocks’ own blue glow alone made them visible.

  Unnumbered broken stumps projected from the ceiling of smooth flow rock; some were again dripping the lime-charged water which had ages ago frozen into the huge stalactites whose shattered remains littered the floor of the cave. Many chunks were the size of tree trunks, fluted and ridged by the ages of their creation.

  The closest Ilna came to believing in the supernatural was to feel that stone had consciousness and that it hated her. Certainly her undoubted clumsiness in dealing with stone showed that if nothing else, its presence affected her mind. Usun could squirm under some of the columns that Ilna would’ve had to clamber over with difficulty, but instead the little man led by a circuitous route that required her to do nothing more difficult than stepping high or bending at the waist.

  It might’ve been wiser to have kept her hands free to grab or catch herself if her foot slipped on the slimy rocks, but Ilna instead knotted patterns. They weren’t weapons—there wasn’t light enough here for them to be effective—nor was she trying to predict the outcome of this or any endeavor.

  She tied a pattern that would bring a smile to the face of whoever saw it, then picked out the knots and worked one that would dull hunger pangs. Then a pattern which would leach away soul-searing pain but leave the injured person’s mind as sharp as it had been before they’d been hurt.

  Pe
aceful designs couldn’t be seen any better in this dim glow than patterns to freeze or terrify or madden; and anyway, Ilna turned each back into raw yarn for a moment before starting the next. Regardless, they were what her instincts told her to create, and she’d learned to trust her instincts.

  Ahead of them was a great chasm, visible as a black ribbon through the omnipresent blue glow. A waterfall plunged into it from the other side, and a tumbling stream at the bottom filled the cavern with its echoes.

  A natural bridge crossed the split in the cave floor. Flow rock blobbed on the upper surface of the arch like wax that had cooled, and from the underside hung a beard of stalactites.

  Instead of starting across, Usun hopped onto a broken stalactite which stuck slightly out over the gorge. It looked like a barrel from a column of a fallen temple, larger in diameter than Ilna’s body and thus much smaller than many relicts of the earthquake. Ilna knelt, putting her head on a level with his.

  “So, we’ve found our prey’s den or I miss my guess,” the little man said. “There, behind the waterfall. There’s a cave, and you can see the wear on the rock going up to it.”

  “I cannot,” Ilna said, primly careful not to claim more than her due even by silence. “But I take your word for it.”

  She had no idea how Usun saw a cave behind the thin sheet of water. Perhaps he heard a different echo? That seemed absurd, but she did things with fabric that others thought were impossible. The little man was a hunter beyond question.

  “Well, the cave’s there,” Usun said blithely, “and he’s there in it. We can’t get behind him, and I wouldn’t care to try the cave in hope that he’s asleep. I’m not sure that he does sleep any more; wizardry and his diet have changed him, I think.”

  “I don’t think we should walk straight into the creature’s lair,” Ilna agreed dryly. Though if Chalcus was here, he with his sword as sure as the sting of a hunting wasp and me with a silken lasso to tangle even a creature as big as this ghoul—

  Chalcus was dead. And Ilna wasn’t dead, not yet, so she had duties.

  “There’s another way, I think,” said Usun. “I know you’re a wizard, mistress, but wizardry won’t work on him. How are your nerves?”

  Ilna sniffed. He wasn’t trying to insult her. “Adequate,” she said. Saying more would be bragging.

  The little man giggled. “So I thought!” he said. “So I thought! Well then, Ilna, this is what we’ll do. . . .”

  THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in the world I’ll tell you freely,” Platt said, sitting upright on the couch in Dysart’s office. The desks at which several clerks would during the day transcribe documents had been moved into the hall, so there was room for the unusual number of people present. “Lord Scorpion is God. Worship Him or infallibly be destroyed!”

  “When did you leave your former position as priest of the Shepherd, Master Platt?” Dysart asked. He was quiet and polite, a clerk from the tips of his toes to his thinning hair. Sharina had directed—over the protests of Lords Ascor, Tadai, and Quernan of the Pandah garrison—that Dysart should handle the interrogation. She’d accept Liane’s judgment on most matters, and Liane had put Dysart in charge in her absence.

  “I didn’t leave the Shepherd,” Platt snapped. “The Shepherd is dead! All the old gods are dead. Lord Scorpion is Lord of the cosmos!”

  “Why, you puppy!” said Lord Quernan. He raised his hand and stepped forward. Two of Dysart’s agents grabbed him by the elbows and thrust him back.

  “Out,” said Sharina with a flick of her left index finger toward the door.

  “But that’s blasphemy!” Quernan protested. Other spectators made way for him; one of Tadai’s clerks even opened the door.

  “As well worship a dead donkey as your Lady!” Platt cried.

  Sharina had been afraid that other soldiers would protest, but instead of equally clueless aides, Quernan had brought Prester and Pont. They remained at attention, as if nothing important was happening.

  Knowing the two old soldiers, they might have brought themselves. They’d met Sharina in a hard place years ago. Because she’d performed to their approval, they seemed to have adopted her. She suspected that a number of junior officers over the years had had similarly good luck.

  Platt let out a broken laugh. “Do you think to frighten me?” he said. “The disciples of Lord Scorpion need fear nothing. I am assured of my salvation!”

  “But you were trying to escape us in the graveyard, weren’t you?” Dysart said. “Your Scorpion didn’t save you then, Master Platt. You’re obviously a clever man. You know in your heart that he’s not as powerful as what you preach to the rabble.”

  “Salvation is of the soul, not the body,” Platt muttered. He was sweating profusely. His thin hair was plastered down so that his pink scalp showed through.

  “Is your ankle comfortable?” Dysart asked. “I’m sorry about the injury, but we had no choice. For as long as you’re in my charge I’ll see to it that you receive medical care, though my department’s facilities are too limited for any but the most important prisoners. I can only hope that the city prefect will be able to manage something if you have to be transferred to the jail.”

  “Are you out of your mind, Dysart?” Tadai said in a deliberately affected voice as he inspected the curve of his fingernails. “My budget doesn’t stretch to doctors for a lot of drunks and vagabonds.”

  “How often to you meet with your fellow priests, Master Platt?” Dysart said as though the previous exchange hadn’t occurred. He sat in the chair behind his desk; the prisoner was in the couch beside him. Everyone else stood along the inside wall. Burne padded from door to window ledge and back, his whiskers twitching.

  “I don’t,” said Platt, squirming uneasily. He’d lost his bravado. “We don’t have to meet, I mean. We, ah . . . I do at least, I suppose the others. God speaks to me in dreams, through his acolyte Black. I’ve never met another priest, though I know there’s many of us. Preparing for the day!”

  “You claim to get detailed instructions from your dreams, Master Platt?” Dysart said. He didn’t raise his voice, but Sharina could hear the hint of a frown in it.

  “Yes, that’s true,” the prisoner said. He’d lost the defiance that’d begun to creep back into his tone. “Black tells me where to preach and when. But I know there are many of us, throughout the world.”

  As far as information reaching Sharina went—both from Liane’s clandestine service and the reports of regional governors—Pandah was the only center of Scorpion worship. It gave her a feeling of comfort to know that Black lied to his own acolytes—but he was real enough in her own dreams, and she was responsible for Pandah besides.

  “Do you send messengers to chalk notices on walls to let the worshippers know where you’ll be preaching?” Dysart said. “Or does somebody else do that? We’ve found the notices, you see.”

  “I . . .,” Platt said. He frowned in surprise. “I don’t know, I never wondered. Lord Scorpion speaks to me, that’s all. I suppose He speaks to others. People bring me food and hide me during the day, but I don’t know who they are. I’m not from Pandah, you see. I came here from Valles when Lord Scorpion called me in the night.”

  “We’ll need the names and lodgings of those who help you,” Dysart said. His hands were tented on his lap, but clerks in opposite corners of the room were making notes on waxed tablets. “They’ll already be in our records, but now they’ll be cross-referenced with you.”

  “I don’t know any of them!” Platt said in agitation. “It wouldn’t matter if I told you—Lord Scorpion rules the world. You can’t harm Him with your foolish opposition. Join Him!”

  He raised his eyes from Dysart and swept them across the faces of those watching the interrogation. Sharina had never before seen such terror in a gaze.

  “All of you!” Platt cried. “Worship Lord Scorpion! Worship the living God!”

  Burne leaped to the top of the window casement and came down with something squirming between his forep
aws. His chisel teeth clicked efficiently.

  Platt screamed and fainted.

  Dysart grimaced and used two fingers to check the pulse in the prisoner’s throat. “He’ll be all right when he comes around,” he said. “It can’t be helped, I suppose.”

  “No,” said Sharina, “it couldn’t be—unless we were willing to let Black’s agents hear the rest of the interrogation. I don’t think we were going to get any more of real value from him regardless.”

  “Surely he’s lying about how he communicates with the rest of his cult?” said Lord Tadai.

  “About Black and the dreams, you mean?” Sharina said. “I suspect that’s true.”

  “How does Your Highness wish to proceed?” Dysart said. His agents were tying Platt’s hands and feet again; he’d been loosed for comfort during the interrogation, but Sharina had seen how quickly Liane’s men could move when they had to.

  “I’m going to send him to Tenoctris,” she said, crystallizing murky thoughts into a plan of action. “I doubt that Platt knows any more than he’s told us, but I think Tenoctris can use him as a focus from which she can learn a great deal more. I hope she can help us.”

  She looked down at the unconscious prisoner. “The Lady knows we could use some help,” she said.

  Burne sat upright, cleaning his muzzle. Scraps of black chitin lay scattered about him.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Sharina,” the rat said. “We’re not doing so badly ourselves.”

  GARRIC WAITED WHILE Tenoctris dropped chips of white marble inside the ring of trees. They were bald cypress, their bases swollen. The roots which thrust knees up to breathe in the wet season crawled over dry ground, now; the waters which must sometimes turn this place into a marsh had receded.

  The regiment that’d escorted them the mile from the main camp murmured in the surrounding darkness. The troops weren’t within twenty double paces of the trees, but nothing could pass through the scores of encircling watch fires without being seen. Tenoctris and Garric had the privacy they wanted, and the laymen weren’t compelled to witness wizardry.