The Gods Return

by David Drake

  The last spin meant he was facing the canyon wall again, yellow-red sandstone with a surface that pretended to be crumbly. The corpse, really just the hide, of the dead demon was scrunched up against the rock where he must’ve kicked it. Or maybe the toad had? Did it really touch the ground when it flashed in and out of the air?

  “Behind you!”

  Cashel pivoted on his left foot; it meant a hair’s breadth longer of an arc but it got him planted solider and moved him a little out from the side of the canyon. Hitting rock with the back of his stroke would end this fight right quick. . . .

  Liane and Rasile were where they’d been. The wizard had spilled a figure of yarrow stalks on the ground in front of her. Where had she gotten the time?

  Cashel swung with his right hand leading. At the same time Rasile chopped down her athame of black stone.

  The toad was not/was—

  Red wizardlight flickered over the huge body. It was barely a color, like dust lying on the bare blade of a sword. The toad didn’t vanish.

  The quarterstaff banged the left side of the toad’s flat head. Cashel grunted; the heel of his right hand tingled as though he’d hit a full-grown oak tree.

  His blow would’ve dented the bole of an oak tree, and it was strong enough to crunch bones in the toad’s skull too. The creature staggered, throwing up arms so small that they looked silly on such a big body. Black blood dribbled from where the staff struck and also from the toad’s left nostril.

  Cashel spun the staff sunwise, pulling the stroke just a hair so that the ferrule would miss short if the toad jumped back. It did, just like Cashel figured it would. Instead of following through with the arc, he drove forward. His whole weight rammed the staff toward the creature like he was thrusting a spear. His leading butt cap slammed the base of the toad’s broad neck, crushing bones this time too.

  The toad was too big for the shock to throw it down, but it wobbled back a step and another step. Its tiny arms windmilled; the hands had sharp nails and only four fingers.

  Cashel gasped in another breath. He swept the quarterstaff widdershins, trying to break the toad’s left knee. The creature lurched toward him so the blow rapped its thigh instead. It had legs like an ox, so nothing happened aside from pain jetting through Cashel’s tingling palm.

  The toad’s broad mouth opened, but the tongue which had speared the little demon now tumbled out like a loosely coiled rope. The tip had a spike from which trailed three hollow bones, each about the size of a finger. It twisted along the ground toward Cashel. He stamped on it—his calluses were hard as hooves—and drove the staff into the toad’s face. He didn’t think the blow had landed squarely and maybe it hadn’t, but the toad went over on its back and started to thrash.

  Cashel was still standing on the tongue; he felt it squirming like a snake’s body. He took a full stride back so that the barbed end wouldn’t cut him if it flailed around as the creature died. He didn’t figure the toad was going to suck him dry like it’d done to the little demon, but Cashel had got banged and cut often enough in his life that he avoided it if there was a cheap way to.

  There wasn’t much thrashing, though. The toad’s arms and legs quivered and kept quivering, but it wasn’t in any kind of a pattern like when you took a chicken’s head off and it ran around.

  He guessed that straight jab to the throat must’ve crushed its windpipe. That wasn’t a good way to die; but if it was going to happen, he didn’t mind it happening to this creature. He didn’t look like anybody’s Lord, lying there on the gritty soil and trembling.

  Cashel kept his eyes on the dying toad, but he wouldn’t have been much of a shepherd if he hadn’t felt Liane and Rasile coming over to join him. By now he figured it was safe, but he still backed a double pace so there wasn’t any chance of the toad bouncing up and grabbing the women before he could stop it.

  “Thanks, Rasile,” he said, turning his head just a little bit to show he wasn’t being disrespectful. “For holding him like that. I don’t know how long I could’ve kept it up if he kept bobbing like he was doing.”

  “I think longer than he could have continued attacking, warrior,” Rasile said. “Tenoctris spoke of your strength. I did not doubt the judgment of so great a wizard as she, but . . . she did not exaggerate.”

  The demons were showing themselves, moving a bit out from the sandstone walls or just letting their hides change to the light blue-gray color that seemed to be what they were when they weren’t trying to hide. A few came closer, picking their way along like lambs who weren’t sure their legs would hold them up.

  “You have overcome the Lord?” piped the nearest. There was two on each side of him, a little behind. Cashel wondered if they were the same ones as before. Likely, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. Sheep didn’t change color the way these demons did.

  “Lord Cashel has killed the monster you allowed to prey upon you!” Liane said in a voice that rang from the rocks. The sulfur in this air had roughened it, but she still sounded like a queen. “Lord Cashel has freed you!”

  She swept her right arm back toward where the toad lay. Cashel obligingly stepped to the side so that the demons could all get a look at their Lord twitching there on the ground.

  “He is dead?” said the leader.

  “He is dead?” the four behind him said all together. It was like watching mummers playing when they came through the district.

  The five demons trotted toward the toad. Others were coming closer too, though they weren’t running. There was a lot of them, a ten of tens at least; more than Cashel had seen when they first arrived here.

  He moved farther out of the way. Stretching, he perched on his right leg to examine his left instep.

  He’d cut himself pretty good above the callus. There’d been something sharp in the soil, a shard of quartz he supposed, that he hadn’t noticed while he was moving fast. Squatting, he took out the little gourd of lanolin ointment out of his wallet and daubed it on the cut.

  “He is dead!” the demons shrieked. They started jumping up and down on the toad’s corpse, chopping with their little sharp hooves. “He is dead-d-d!”

  The whole herd of them came bouncing to the spot. Cashel rose quickly and stepped between the women and the oncoming demons.

  Rasile had been crouching on all fours, recruiting her strength after the work she’d done. Figuring where the toad was going to be next had taken wizardry. Holding the thing for Cashel to hit, well . . . The toad had obviously been strong. Cashel didn’t doubt that the strength went beyond the muscles under that coarse warty skin, but Rasile had held it.

  The demons swept past, to trample the corpse or anyway to try to. There were too many all to fit. It was like tossing meal into a pond and watching carp boil to the surface after it.

  “They could have done that when the wizard was alive,” Liane said. Her face was hard, which wasn’t the usual thing with her. “But they were afraid.”

  “Wizard?” Cashel repeated.

  “Yes,” Rasile said. She raised her voice a bit to be heard over the demons shrieking and hooting. “The Lord, as they called him, was a wizard. Here in the place he’d made his own, I couldn’t have defeated him.”

  The Corl let her tongue loll toward Cashel in a smile. “Tenoctris might have been powerful enough,” she said, “but I think she too would’ve been glad of your presence, warrior.”

  Cashel looked at the scrum again, then turned away. “I’m not sorry to’ve put paid to that toad,” he said. “But I can’t say I much like the folk he was eating, either.”

  Rasile stood upright; she seemed to be recovered from the work she’d done. She turned toward the milling demons and called, “Teliday!”

  Her voice was something between a shout and a screech. Cashel didn’t know what she meant by it.

  “Teliday!” she repeated.

  A demon pushed his way out of the tramping herd. Maybe he’d been trying to do that since the first time he was called; it wouldn’t have been
easy. He limped a little as he hopped over to Cashel and the women. There was a long double cut on his foreleg, plowed there in the brawl by the hoof of one of his friends.

  “Lady?” the demon said. Cashel was pretty sure he was the one who’d been doing the talking since they arrived in this brimstone-stinking hell. He didn’t sound more than barely respectful now, though these folks’ narrow, deerlike jaws and shrill voices meant Cashel might be misunderstanding.

  “We’ve freed your people from the wizard who preyed on you,” Rasile said briskly. “Now it’s time for you to give us a goat and to lead us to the tomb of the hero Gorand.”

  The demon made a curt bow. “I will take you to the place of Gorand,” he said. “Our goats are valuable. It will not be possible to give you a goat.”

  Rasile’s equivalent of a shrug was to fluff the fur on top of her shoulders. “Very well,” she said. “We don’t need a goat. One of you folk will do for the sacrifice.”

  She pointed her athame at the middle of Teliday’s narrow chest.

  “No!” the demon cried, throwing his arms up in the air. “There will be a goat provided!”

  “See to it,” said Rasile, lowering the stone knife. Her tongue’s wagging was just a smile, but from the way Teliday hobbled off he hadn’t taken the expression as friendly.

  Cashel cleared his throat. “Ma’am?” he said to Rasile. “I don’t hold with sacrificing people. I don’t like Teliday and his friends, but they’re people. I think.”

  “Yes,” said Liane, and you could’ve cracked walnuts on her tone. “They are.”

  “I agree, friends,” the wizard said, looking from one to the other and wagging fiercer. “Warrior Cashel, could you catch a goat yourself?”

  Cashel thought about it, eying a trio of goats on the cliff wall not far away. They weren’t used to him, and just the fact he was human would likely spook them some. He figured he could work close enough to get a halter—his sash would do—on one, though.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It might take a while, is all.”

  “So I believed,” said Rasile. “Therefore I spoke to Teliday in a fashion that would convince him to help us of his own free will.”

  “Oh,” said Cashel, embarrassed not to have seen she was bluffing. Liane sucked her lower lip in and nodded. She still didn’t look happy.

  Teliday minced back, leading a half-sized demon who in turn led a goat by a strand of coarsely braided vegetable fibers. The goat was scrawny, but even so it was bigger than the runt tugging it along.

  “The youth will guide you to the cave,” Teliday said. He turned on his hind legs to leave.

  Cashel laid his staff on the adult demon’s shoulder. It wasn’t a blow, just a tap, but it got Teliday’s attention just like it was supposed to do.

  “Sir?” said Cashel. “I think you better take us like you said. The boy can bring the goat, if you like.”

  “This way,” said Teliday, turning again without argument or even hesitation. “Lord.”

  Cashel didn’t have any special reason for saying what he did. He’d worked for a lot of crabbed, grudging farmers when he was a boy in the borough, though, and learned that you didn’t ever let them out of a hair of what they’d promised. If you gave them the least break, then before it was over they’d leave you without two coppers’ pay for a month’s hard work.

  Some people were just that way. And like he’d said to Rasile, these demons were people.

  The valley Rasile had brought them to had branches off it, though the pattern was more like jagged spears of hoarfrost than like anything water had carved. Teliday took them up one of the angles, then into a third that was narrower yet. There weren’t any demons or goats in that last branching, though there was more of the skimpy vegetation than there’d been till then.

  Cashel couldn’t figure what had made the valleys. There wasn’t any sight of a river or even a dry streambed so far as he could tell. The rocks weren’t worn, either, except by windblown sand.

  “The cave is just ahead,” Teliday said, pointing with both arms together.

  “Lead us,” Cashel said, shifting the quarterstaff slightly. The canyon here was narrow enough that he could’ve touched either wall with a ferrule if he’d wanted to stretch the staff out at arm’s length.

  The demon bobbed his torso. “Lord,” he said obediently as he walked on ahead. His hooves made slow click/click/clicks on the rocky soil.

  Cashel glanced over his shoulder. Rasile was close behind him, while Liane walked at the back. She still had her knife out, but with her free hand she clasped the little demon leading the goat.

  Cashel smiled at her and went back to watching what was ahead of them. Garric had found a good one, and Sharina had a good friend.

  “Lord,” said Teliday, bowing again and pointing his arms toward a jagged opening in the canyon wall. “This is the entrance.”

  Unexpectedly the demon splayed his four legs and sprawled flat on the ground. “Please, Lord!” he said. “I have brought you to this place at your request. Release me now.”

  Cashel felt uncomfortable. “Ma’am?” he said to Rasile.

  “This is the entrance,” she said. “The entrance to the entrance, I should say. I know of no reason why Teliday and this boy shouldn’t go back to where they’ll be more comfortable. Though we’ll need the goat with us.”

  “Lord?” Teliday begged.

  “I have the goat’s lead,” Liane said in a clear voice. “Because Rasile says we must.”

  “All right,” said Cashel, turning to speak to the little demon. “You two can go. Thank you—”

  Teliday went bounding past. The little fellow unexpectedly hugged Liane’s knee before trotting off himself.

  “—for your help.”

  Cashel cleared his throat again. The air in this place was fierce with sulfur, but he guessed he could stand anything a goat could. “Rasile, do you want me to lead?”

  “No,” she said, “I will. It shouldn’t be far.”

  So speaking, the old wizard stepped into the cave. It was big enough for Cashel to walk upright, though he had to be careful how he slanted the staff so it didn’t knock the walls. He wondered if he should’ve brought a torch, and wondered what he’d make one out of if he went back outside.

  Rasile paused; Cashel moved up beside her. The cave had opened out, though how far he couldn’t be sure in the dim glow from the entrance. Liane joined them, holding the goat’s harsh twine halter.

  “Together, now,” Rasile said. She stepped forward. Cashel waited just an eyeblink to make sure Liane was coming, but of course she was.

  Quarterstaff braced before him, Cashel strode into a forest of unfamiliar dark trees. Insects trilled in a night smelling of damp loam.

  In the moonlit clearing before him, sprites no taller than his ankle danced.

  ILNA WALKED DELIBERATELY onto the natural bridge. It wasn’t as slippery as it looked from a distance, because the ghoul’s great feet had worn a path through the flow rock which the drips of a thousand years had deposited in a thin, glassy layer. Though wet and fine-grained, the limestone beneath wasn’t quite as dangerous a surface.

  Still, it was stone and she—Ilna smiled minusculely—was stone’s enemy, at least in her own head. Regardless of whether or not stone really had an opinion.

  Ilna trailed the climbing rope behind her. It was only long enough to stretch a double pace onto the upward curve of the arch. For choice she’d have been able to pass the centerpoint of the bridge, but for choice she’d have been home in Barca’s Hamlet, weaving at her big loom on the porch while Chalcus and Merota chatted beside her.

  She didn’t have to like the reality of the world—she didn’t remember a time she had, save for the brief period when Chalcus and Merota were with her. No one had ever claimed that Ilna didn’t accept reality, however.

  She didn’t look over her shoulder at Usun. If things went as planned, he’d be out of sight anyway.

  Ilna smiled again. If things didn’
t go as planned, she’d be dead very shortly and probably buried in the belly of a ghoul. She supposed she could throw herself over the edge of the chasm to prevent that, but if suicide had had any attraction for her, she wouldn’t have survived this long.

  If things went wrong, she’d attack the ghoul with the bone-cased paring knife she carried in one sleeve of her tunic. From what Usun had said, its hide was so thick with bony nodules that the little blade probably wouldn’t be able to nick him. Still, it was something to do while the creature bit her face off.

  Ilna placed the loop precisely on the pathway and straightened. She rather liked the rope. It was of good quality linen, and it’d been wound tight and smoothly. A pity to dispose of it in this fashion, but all things end. The rope presumably didn’t care.

  She walked on, past the center of the span. The ghoul might be watching her through the falls, though there wasn’t any obvious reason why it would keep its attention a secret instead of rushing out to rend and devour her.

  “Ghoul!” Ilna shouted. How good was the creature’s hearing, anyway? This close, the water snarled as it tumbled down into the gorge. “Come out!”

  She had only Usun’s word that the ghoul was there. An almost-smile lifted the left corner of her lips. Indeed, she had only Usun’s word that there was really a cave behind the waterfall. Well, she’d done far more foolish things in the past than shouting insults at a solid stone wall.

  “You visited me!” Ilna said. She took another cautious step. Her eyes were on the waterfall, and to slip here would be more than embarrassing: the chasm was many furlongs deep. “Now I’ve come to see you, filth-eater!”

  The curtain of water shivered aside. The ghoul stepped out, a hulking blackness against the blue shimmer.