The Gods Return

by David Drake

  “It goes this far, Ilna,” the little man said. “We’ve arrived.”

  The stairs ended in a small anteroom, not a landing as Ilna had thought at first. She stepped out to stand beside Usun, facing an iron door. It was at least double her own height, but it was relatively narrow because it had a single valve instead of being double like most doors raised on this scale.

  She couldn’t see either latch or hinges; indeed, from the look of it this might be a panel set in the living rock as decoration or to be worshipped. A polished smear along the left edge at shoulder height suggested that it had been pushed open regularly, but how did you unlock it?

  Ilna frowned. With only the light of a single lamp wick, the details of the full-length design cast into the black iron weren’t very clear, but she could see enough to make her dislike it. A woman in closely fitted armor glared at them. Her face and form were strikingly beautiful, but the expression on the molded features was cruel beyond anything Ilna could recall. One iron hand was closed into a fist; the other held a short trident whose points were barbed.

  “That’s Hili, Queen of the Underworld,” said Usun. “A handsome wench, isn’t she?”

  He giggled. Ilna’s frown tightened into a grimace. “How do we open the door?” she said. “Since I presume we need to get to the other side.”

  “Just open it, Ilna,” said the little man. “Or here, I will.”

  He put his left hand on the edge of the massive iron panel and pushed. She knew the little man was strong beyond his size, but the way the door swung on hidden hinges was only possible if it had perfect balance.

  Yellow-green light, the color of a will-o’-the-wisp or the mold on a corpse, crawled out the opening. With it came the dying echoes of a sound Ilna had never imagined, a rustling that was initially louder than any thunderclap.

  “Come, Ilna,” Usun said. “We must go in.”

  He knows more about this than he’s telling me, Ilna thought; and smiled. She wasn’t one to discuss her plans either, and the little man had shown himself to be a friend at every past occasion where it mattered.

  If Usun had worn clothing, she could have stroked its fabric with her fingers and learned a great deal about him. She doubted that she’d have learned anything to change her belief that he was skilled, determined, and completely trustworthy; all the virtues she saw and cultivated in herself.

  Ilna strode into the green glow. The door closed behind her.

  The scale of the chamber was beyond her eyes’ ability to grasp immediately. Faces turned toward her. The only time she’d seen so many people together was in great plazas when Garric was addressing the whole city. Their clothing was of all manner of styles, many that she’d never seen before, but their expressions were uniformly dull and empty. They—mostly men but some women, and a mixture of ages from children to doddering oldsters—stood around the edges of the chamber, rubbing the walls.

  “Is Hervir or-Halgran here?” Ilna called. She raised her voice with each syllable till by the end she was shouting, but even so she could scarcely hear her own words in the vast chamber. So many people breathing in an enclosure made a sound like the rage of a windstorm.

  “I am Hervir,” replied a middle-aged man standing not far from the entrance. He lowered his hands; they held a rounded block of stone which was about half the size of his head. He walked deliberately toward Ilna and Usun.

  The big room had been cut out of the living rock. It was granite here, just as it had been on the higher levels through which the stairwell descended; Ilna could tell that from the speckles of quartz and other things mixed with the basic material. It was a dense, supremely hard mass. The granite itself was the source of the glow whose shadowless presence filled the chamber.

  Ilna set her lamp on the floor. She might need it again, but at present she wanted her hands free to knot a pattern. She’d have pinched out the wick, but she hadn’t brought a flint and steel to light it again. The oil would either last or it wouldn’t; she was concerned with more important things now.

  “What are you doing in this place?” she demanded. A thought turned her face stiff; she reached behind her to the massive iron door and pushed. It shifted noticeably: it would be as easy to open from the inside as it had been from the anteroom.

  “We are building the throne room for the King of Man,” Hervir said with mild unconcern. He lifted his stone slightly to call attention to it. “Expanding the room, that is. Rubbing away the walls to make room for more worshippers until the King of Man becomes the God of All. Have you come to join us?”

  “I’ve come to take you back to your family,” Ilna said, thinking, And how am I going to manage that even now that I’ve found him alive? “But why haven’t you escaped yourself? All of you? Why do you stay down here?”

  “It’s necessary that we enlarge the throne room,” Hervir said. “Though there may be enough of us now worshipping the King of Man; the time is near.”

  He looked toward the center of the circular room. A granite pillar with steps circling it like the threads of a screw stood there, looming over the crowd. Because of the green light filling the stone, Ilna saw it clearly.

  “The king has been gathering worshippers for many ages, waiting for this moment,” Hervir said in a musing tone. “I was the last to join him, till you came. I thought perhaps it was my destiny to be the final worshipper, the one who brought him to godhead, but that was not to be.”

  “I’m not a worshipper!” Ilna said. “And you’re not staying here. None of you should stay here!”

  “But it’s our duty,” said Hervir with a faint smile.

  “Some of us have worshipped the king for millennia, but the time wasn’t right until now. Until after the Change.”

  Ilna looked at the assembly. Some had been sleeping while others ground at the walls or swept powdered rock into sacks of sisal fiber. They too were awakening to stare at her and Usun.

  “Don’t you die?” she said. “There can’t be people thousands of years old!”

  “No one dies here, mistress,” Hervir said, smiling again. “The King of Man must be worshipped, and the dead can’t do that.”

  “What do you eat?” Usun said. He was twirling his staff slowly through the fingers of his right hand; the iron point winked each time it came around.

  Hervir looked down and frowned in puzzlement. “What a strange little man,” he said. “I saw pygmies on Shengy in the days, in the days before. . . . But they weren’t so small as you.”

  “What do you eat?” Usun repeated.

  “The king’s servants bring us wine and rice,” Hervir said. “It’s a wondrous vintage. Like nothing I’d ever drunk before I came to worship the king.”

  “A drug in the wine, wouldn’t you say, Ilna?” Usun said, turning his head toward her.

  She shrugged. “I suppose,” she said, “but that doesn’t explain people living forever. Or anyway, for however long.”

  She looked sharply at Hervir. “Come along,” she said. If her hands had been free, she’d have gripped him by the shoulder. “You’re coming with us. And when we have you safe in the waking world, perhaps Master Usun and I will return to find this King of Man.”

  “You needn’t look for the king, mistress,” Hervir said with his gentle smile. “He’s here now.”

  The swirl of air warned her. She turned quickly to see the tall door opening on its silent hinges.

  Perrin and Perrine came in, holding hands. They gaped in surprise.

  “Mistress Ilna!” the princess blurted. “We thought you’d left the Valley of the King!”

  “I thought I’d failed,” said Perrin. The bleak horror of his tone suggested what failure would mean.

  Two liveried apes entered in single file; Ingens walked between them. His face tightened when he saw Ilna. “Have you come to worship the King of Man also, mistress?” he said.

  “No,” Ilna said. “I’ve come to dispose of him and free the lot of you!” Her fingers were knotting again at the pattern she
’d already formed, adding to it as the situation changed and became clearer.

  “Will you indeed?” said a great voice.

  A huge ape paced into the chamber on his knuckles, then stood upright. He was dressed in crimson silk and wore a golden crown set with rubies; a silken strap passed beneath his brutal chin. He was several times as massive as the ape servants.

  “The king!” whispered the assembly thunderously. “The King of Man has come!”

  CASHEL LOOKED AT the squat, angry-looking wizard advancing toward him along the shimmering bridge. The fellow’s elbows were out and he held his crystal wands like knitting needles. Skeins of scarlet wizardlight spun from them, forming a pattern beyond the tips.

  “Sir?” said Cashel. “I don’t wish a problem with you. I just need to get the pledge coin on the other side.”

  He put his quarterstaff into a slow spin. Duzi! there was a lot of room. He couldn’t see anything to right or left except a black horizon, and there was nothing overhead. Below, pale blue flames licked across the bottom of the chasm and gave the air the dry rasp of brimstone.

  The wizard kept weaving his spell like Cashel hadn’t spoken. He was chanting words of power, too, which was pretty much to be expected. A snake of plaited wizardlight curled slowly toward Cashel the way a honeysuckle vine stretches along a pole.

  Cashel stepped forward and thrust one tip of his staff to where the strands of ruby light wrapped together and formed the snake. There was a bright blue flash and the air cracked like nearby lightning.

  “Hoy!” the wizard shouted. His arms flew apart and he staggered back. He’d been angry before, but now he looked like he was ready to chew rocks. Nothing remained of the pattern he’d been weaving.

  Cashel took an easy step forward. This crystal bridge might look narrow to some, but it was a lot wider than some of the logs he’d crossed in thunderstorms, often enough carrying a ewe who’d gotten bogged.

  “Sir,” he said, “I’ll give you a fight if you want one, but that’s not what I want.”

  The wizard wore flowing silver robes with symbols in black around the hem and the cuffs. Cashel couldn’t read those markings—or anything else—but he knew from the shapes that they weren’t the Old Script or the New Script, either one.

  The wizard got his composure and began weaving his wands into the same pattern as before. He went back to mumbling words of power, too. He hadn’t said a thing except to chant.

  Past the wizard’s head, the gleaming bridge stretched farther than Cashel’s eyes could follow. He wondered what he’d see if he looked over his own shoulder. The same thing, he guessed, but only for as long as it took the wizard to knock him into the fiery abyss because he hadn’t kept his attention on the fight.

  Maybe that was it: maybe the only ways off the bridge were through the other fellow or down into the brimstone. Well, Cashel hadn’t made this place. Chances were the man trying to knock him off the bridge had more than a little to do with why it was like it was, though.

  The snake of wizardlight crawled toward Cashel again. He’d struck high the first time, his left hand leading on the quarterstaff. This time he brought the staff up from below with his right hand forward; again there was a flash and a crack! The wizard jolted back in startled fury.

  Cashel felt a faint tingle all the way up to the bunched muscles of his right shoulder; he worked that out with a few more spins of his staff. The ferrules had glowed when they hit the wizardlight, but that faded in no time. The iron wasn’t burnt through, as sometimes happened. He’d had to replace the butt caps several times after fighting wizards, but that didn’t matter so long as the hickory he’d shaped with his own hands remained.

  “Are you frightened now, Allarde?” shrieked Milady from the chasm below. Her voice was as tiny and insistent as a mosquito in the night. “You should be, husband! You should be afraid!”

  She was still wrapped in blue fire. Cashel shouldn’t have been able to see her, let alone hear her voice from up on the bridge. She was as sharp to look at as a painted miniature he held in his palm, though.

  The wizard—Allarde, if that wasn’t a curse word in some language Cashel didn’t know; Milady had made it sound like a curse, for sure—backed a step and then another step. He started moving his wands again, though this time in a different pattern.

  Cashel supposed the wizard could retreat any distance on the bridge, though if you weren’t used to backing on a narrow track it wouldn’t be hard to go over. He stepped forward again, not rushing but making it clear that he was going to keep right on going to the other side unless Allarde managed to stop him—which he surely didn’t look like doing so far.

  “You’re doomed, husband!” Milady shrieked. “You were so clever, you thought. But I have you now!”

  Cashel frowned. He didn’t like it to sound like he’d hammer somebody just because Milady said to. It was sort of working out that way, sure, but only because Allarde wouldn’t let him fetch the pledge piece without a fight.

  Instead of stretching a stout braided tendril straight at Cashel, the wizard was curling a pair of threads like calipers from the tips of his wands. They spread into a circle wider than Cashel could’ve touched with one tip of his staff reaching out at the end of his arm.

  He frowned, rotating his staff in slow figure eights to keep his muscles loose. It looked like a crazy thing for Allarde to do, so it had to be a trap. Except—

  It was pretty clear by now that the wizard wasn’t used to people who fought back and who knew how to fight. No boy in the borough could grow up without knowing that, and a poor orphan who hadn’t got his growth yet was going to learn quicker than most. It must not be the same way with wizards.

  “Numa quadich rua!” Allarde shouted. The scarlet curls started to hook back in.

  Cashel strode forward, left foot and right foot, then lunged with staff out like a spear. Allarde crossed his wands before his chest to block the thrust. The ferrule smashed through them in a blue flash. Bits of crystal flew in all directions, blazing as they fell like sapphires in sunlight.

  The staff punched the wizard in the breastbone, flinging him back for a double pace. He bounced onto the bridge, then slipped off and dropped into the abyss. He screamed all the way down.

  Cashel recovered his staff. He felt like he’d fallen from a high cliff into the sea, shocked and stunned. He could still handle himself if push came to shove, though. He hadn’t planned what he was doing, just did what seemed right at the time.

  It had been right, but there’d been a cost. Well, it wasn’t the first time he’d been bruised and achy after a fight.

  “Join the halves of the coin, hero,” Milady called.

  She’d wrapped her arms around Allarde. Blue flames continued to lick from her mouth as she spoke and from the wizard’s as he screamed without end. “There’s a doorway in the back of the room you’re in. Give the coin to the man in the hut behind the castle. He’ll show you to Gorand.”

  Cashel spun the staff, sunwise and then widdershins; getting his balance, working the stiffness from muscles that’d felt like they’d been frozen when Allarde’s wands shattered. He was all right now, or close enough.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he called to the tiny figure laughing in the hellfire. He started toward the bridge ending in the far distance, wondering how long it would take him to get there.

  His foot came down on polished stone, black and white almost-squares laid in a swirl pattern that matched the floor of the anteroom where the busts were. The bridge was gone, the chasm was gone, and half a silver coin gleamed on the little table against the far wall. It was the room he’d seen through the doorway before he’d entered.

  Cashel looked over his shoulder. Liane and Rasile were walking toward him. The head, Milady’s fiery head, had vanished. His lips pursed.

  “Cashel, you saved me,” Liane said. “You and Rasile. Your expression, though . . . is there something wrong?”

  Cashel smiled. She was due an answer, though, so he sa
id, “Allarde wouldn’t have been a friend of mine, I guess, no matter what else was going on. But being yoked to Milady for, well, forever . . . seems pretty hard.”

  “He’s probably regretting not having considered that before,” Rasile said, her tongue laughing. “Before he mated with her and then betrayed her, that is. But we have work to do, companions.”

  She walked across the room and waited by the table till Cashel and Liane joined her. Gesturing to the bit of silver, she said, “This is your task, warrior.”

  Cashel fished the half coin Milady had given him out of his sash, leaned his staff into the crook of his arm, and picked up the rest of it. The edges mated with a dusting of blue wizardlight; the coin was whole again.

  “This way, I think,” Rasile said, walking toward the door in the wall to the left. It was heavy and cross-braced, but the bar had been withdrawn from the staples it rode in.

  “A moment,” Cashel said, folding the coin back into his sash. He hefted his quarterstaff, then stepped in front of the women and pulled the door open. He strode out into a sun-dappled forest.

  SHARINA RETREATED A step but bumped her heel into something. She leaped high, bunching her legs beneath her to keep from sprawling backward as the scorpion advanced on her.

  “On command!” Prester shouted. The nave of the temple had excellent acoustics. “Aim at the eyes!”

  Sharina landed on the squirming body of the priest Burne had hamstrung. He squealed shrilly. She hopped to the side now that she was upright again.

  “Loose!”

  Six javelins flickered into the monster’s headplate. Two clinked together in the air but penetrated anyway. Cracks spread in pale webs across the black chitin.

  The slender steel points obliterated the two large eyes set close together in the center of the plate, though when the scorpion shook itself Sharina saw that there were three more eyes along each side of the head. The wooden shafts rattled together.