Mistress of the Catacombs

13

“That will do for now,” Ilna said, turning over to dry the large pottery vessel she’d just scrubbed clean—judging “clean” with her fingertips. The sun had been down for hours, and the innkeeper believed the cookfires gave enough light to work by without the expense of lamp oil.

“Hey!” snarled the cook, the innkeeper’s younger sister. “I didn’t tell you you could go!”

Cooking for an inn was a hot, brutal job at the best of times, and the huge influx of guests had made it worse. Ilna didn’t suppose the woman’s temper had ever been good, however.

“No,” Ilna said. “I told you I was going, back to my bed in the stable for some rest before the ceremony tonight. I’ve done enough work this day for a week’s keep, as you know well.”

Thoughtfully she took one of the round loaves of bread which the baker’s boy had just delivered. Ilna had been snacking throughout the day’s labor, but she didn’t know how Alecto was making out in the stables.

Besides, the loaf would be a handy thing to have if she and the wild girl needed to flee.

The cook opened her mouth to snarl but thought better of it. Normally she’d have bullied a girl like Ilna without mercy, but the slim stranger had an air about her that the cook didn’t care to push. Instead she said, “If you see Arris, tell him to get his lazy butt in here.”

The kitchen was a separate structure at the back of the inn yard, built of stone with a tile roof. The main building, two full stories and a dormer, was half-timbered under shingles, because there wasn’t as much risk of fire. Ilna and Alecto were to lodge in the stable loft in return for their labor, though the cook had seemed willing enough to keep Ilna at work till daybreak.

The inn yard was full of coaches, their tongues lifted against the walls to make as much room as possible. The drivers and some of the passengers slept in the vehicles, but all ate food prepared in the inn’s kitchen.

The cook’s cousin, the ostler, had been glad to hire Alecto. Space for animals in Donelle was as tight as that for humans: a touch and a murmur from the wild girl had calmed a pair of horses restive at being squeezed into the same stall. One beast knowing another, Ilna had thought; but whatever the reason, Alecto’s skill with animals was remarkable.

“Hey, girl, have a drink with us?” a man called from the group clustered against the oven in the yard for warmth on a cool evening.

Ilna ignored the comment, picking her way between wagons parked so that the wheels nearly interlocked. The man let it drop. Despite Donelle’s crowded conditions, there was very little disorder—and less fun. The men packing the inn yard acted like castaways from a shipwreck, not the boisterous, cheerful strangers who filled Barca’s Hamlet during the Sheep Fair.

Though the stable door was open, an overflow of horses kept the interior much warmer than the night outside. The animals whickered and occasionally made timbers creak by leaning against the sides of their stalls, but overall Ilna got a feeling of peace when she entered.

The door of the small office and tack room was closed. Snores through the panel proved the ostler was present and undisturbed. Unexpectedly, the light of an oil lamp wavered from the half-loft where Ilna and Alecto were to sleep.

“Alecto?” Ilna called. She didn’t speak loudly, afraid to rouse either the horses or the ostler. He wouldn’t be pleased to see an open flame in his hayloft; Ilna wasn’t happy with her companion’s idiocy either. Didn’t the folk of Hartrag’s village know that dried grass burns?

There wasn’t an answer, but Ilna heard the rhythms of a voice chanting. Face set, she took the cords out of her sleeve and began knotting them as she climbed the simple ladder pegged to the stable wall.

The lamp hung from a truss in a loose web made from a bridle and a cord twisted from rye straw. Alecto had placed it so that it gave her the angle she wanted both on the figure she’d scribed on the wooden floor and the blade of the athame she used to reflect the gleam into the eyes of the man clumsily undressing before her.

Alecto was nude. Sweat from wizardry and the stables’ warmth dripped down the valley between her breasts. She continued to chant, giving no sign that she saw or cared about Ilna’s presence.

She’ll run to fat in a few years! Ilna thought. And perhaps she would, but for the time being Alecto’s body had a muscular lushness that Ilna could only envy.

The man was Lord Congin, the fellow they’d stopped on his way into the city. He’d given Alecto a look of disgust when he came out from under the spell she’d cast on him. Apparently she’d taken that as a challenge.

Ilna understood the wild girl’s reaction. She’d have felt the same way under similar circumstances, not that the circumstances could possibly ever be similar.

“Let him go!” Ilna said. Seeing Alecto do this brought back memory of the lives Ilna os-Kenset had destroyed in Erdin in that way, using the skill a demon had taught her in Hell.

The lithe, sweating wild woman stopped chanting and looked at Ilna past Lord Congin’s arm. She smiled, breathing hard. “Get your own, girl!” she said. “Or wait till I’m done with this one.”

“No,” said Ilna. She stepped forward, her hands forming a hollow before her. “Take however many men you want, but I won’t let you use your art to do it.”

Alecto laughed like a cat wailing. “Fool!” she said. “How will you stop me?” She shifted the athame, sending the lamp’s reflection across Ilna’s face.

Bronze walls clanged around Ilna’s mind. Every surface mirrored Alecto’s cruelly laughing face. The walls slid closer, squeezing down on Ilna’s selfhood.

She’d expected that from the wild girl, that or worse. Ilna no longer had conscious control of her actions, but her fingers were free. They opened, displaying to Alecto the pattern they’d knotted as Ilna climbed the stairs.

Ilna heard the scream. She tried to open her eyes and found they were already open, peering through a dissolving bronze haze.

Alecto’s dagger clattered to the loft’s plank floor. She pawed at her groin with both hands, shrieking, “What did you do? I’ve grown shut! I’m not a woman!”

“What?” bellowed Lord Congin. “Where am—what’s going on here?”

He tried to walk and tripped over the linen breeches he’d been taking off when the power of the spell left him. His arms flailed. Only Ilna’s quick grab kept Congin from knocking the lamp into the hay still baled around them.

“You—” Alecto cried.

Ilna slapped her, and said, “Be silent!”

Alecto flopped back. Her eyes were open, but she said nothing. She seemed stunned; not so much by the blow as by realizing that Ilna’s power had easily overmastered hers.

“Get your clothes on and get out,” Ilna to Lord Congin. “No, on second thought, get out and take your clothes with you. Now!”

The half-dressed noble gaped at her, then stumbled to the ladder with his breeches and outer tunic dragging behind him. Ilna thought he was going to plunge headfirst to the stable floor, but he managed to get his feet under him after all. Small loss if he had broken his neck, of course.

“As for you,” she said to Alecto, “you’ll be all right. Listen to what I say next time.”

“You said you weren’t a wizard,” the wild girl whispered. She pressed the back of her hand against her cheek where Ilna had slapped her.

“I said you’re not to use your art for that purpose,” Ilna snapped.

She was breathing hard and her right hand stung. Her fingers picked apart the knots of the pattern she held in her left hand. Her eyes held Alecto’s; neither spoke.

“The moon’ll be up soon,” Ilna said at last. “We’ll watch where the leaders, the priests, go when they leave the temple tonight.”

“You said you weren’t a wizard…” Alecto repeated, but her whisper was little more than the movement of her swollen lips.

Garric waited, smiling faintly and controlling his breathing in order to keep the other bandits calm. A cousin of Hame’s was a watchman for this district of Durassa. He’d provided a key to this vacant shop and made sure he was nowhere around when the gang arrived after dark.

A single lamp wick burned in the side room where Metron made his final preparations and Vascay waited. The litter of flaking plaster, packing materials, and unglazed potsherds here in the front of the shop gave no hint of the business which had once been carried on in it.

“The Protectors’re probably waiting for us to come out to grab us all,” Ademos said, glaring around the circle of his fellows. “If they could wait for us when we didn’t know where we were going to land the boat, they’ll sure know we’re sitting here beside the Spike!”

“Metron said he was going to hide us from the Intercessor,” Hame said. He held four equal-sized lengths of bamboo, the ends coned male and female to lock into a continuous rod twenty feet long. He’d loosened the cord binding them so that his fingers could shift one rod over another repeatedly, as though he were plaiting cords into a rope.

Hame was as brave as the next man even in this company, but he knew his cropped ears marked him for execution if he were caught for a second time. That fear was working on him, though he’d volunteered to be one of the pair who waited at the base of the wall for Garric and his companions to return

“Metron said,” Ademos sneered. “Metron! You trust him?”

Garric reached out. Ademos tried to jerk back but wasn’t quick enough: Garric grabbed him by the throat.

“It could be that the world will end in the next moment, Ademos,” Garric said pleasantly. At his side Tint growled like a saw cutting stone.

Garric wasn’t squeezing hard, but he knew the red-haired bandit could feel the fingers around his throat trembling with the emotions in Garric’s blood. “It will surely end for you if you mouth any more silliness about what the Intercessor will do, or what Metron can do, or any other things of which you know absolutely nothing. Do you understand?”

Ademos nodded, his eyes wide. Garric released him.

“We Brethren don’t fight amongst ourself,” Halophus muttered toward a wall from which the shelf pegs had been pulled.

“Shut up, Halophus,” Toster said; not angry, but not expecting an argument either.

Halophus didn’t give him one. He forced an embarrassed smile and buffed the curve of his signal horn with a piece of cloth.

“By the Shepherd, I wish we was done with the business,” Hakken said. As he spoke, his fingers checked the knots of the rope ladder to have something to do.

Red wizardlight bloomed, faded, then vanished in the side chamber. The flash seemed bright for the moment, but it didn’t dim the vision of Garric’s dark-adapted eyes. Vascay came out of the room, holding Metron’s pendant by its silver chain.

“Here it is,” Vascay said. Garric couldn’t see his face with the light behind him, but his voice sounded tired. “You’d better get moving.”

Garric stepped forward and took the pendant. Within the crystal was the tiny figure of Metron. He held his athame in one hand; with the thumb and forefinger of the other, he pinched what could only be the sapphire ring.

“Quickly!” squeaked a voice that Garric heard only in his mind. The image of Metron gestured with his athame. “I can only remain conscious outside my body for a limited time!”

Garric hung the chain around his neck, his face impassive. The mount was in the shape of a spider whose legs encircled the crystal. The design repelled Garric, but he wasn’t wearing it for the looks of the thing.

“Yes, let’s go,” he said.

Mortised shutters gripped by interlocked iron rods closed the front of the shop. Toster at the pedestrian door put his hands to his mouth and squalled like a cat. Prada, on watch from the rooftop, squalled back a moment later.

Hame slipped out, carrying his rods in one hand and a hog’s bladder of narcotic dust in the other. Garric followed with Tint pressing close to his side. In the street he glanced over his shoulder. Beyond Toster and Hakken, he saw Vascay waiting before he returned to watch over the wizard’s soulless body in the other room. The chieftain bent slightly forward to massage his stump above the wooden leg.

The shop faced a well-travelled street, but only an alley separated the side from the Spike’s ten-foot outer wall. The spot Garric and Vascay together had chosen looked the same in reality as it had when Metron formed the image. The stonework was still solid, but the stems of the wisteria climbing it were strong enough to allow even a clumsy man to reach the top. The vines couldn’t hide a man by daylight, but at night they’d break up the outline of Hame and Toster as they waited for Garric’s party to return.

Toster laced his hands into a stirrup. Garric stepped into the cup. Toster straightened like a catapult arm, lofting Garric knee high to the top of the wall. He caught himself by his hands, then curled his feet under him and waited.

Tint sprang to Garric’s side with a rustle of foliage. She sniffed the garden below, and said, “Bad place, Gar. We leave now?”

Garric heard the piping voice of the wizard in his amulet, chanting words of power that rang as cold as starlight in his mind: “Dabathaa soumar soumarta max….”

Hakken came up the wisteria, without Toster’s boost but not as easily as Tint had. He looked over his shoulder, then lifted the bladder and bamboo rods by the thin cord tied to his leather belt.

The moon wouldn’t rise for another quarter of the night, but stars in the clear sky gleamed from the tower and outlined the garden’s varied plantings. Tint gripped Garric’s shoulder with her right hand. With the other startlingly long arm she pointed into the clump of giant bromeliads directly beneath them. Her fingers gripped like a stonemason’s tongs.

“Gar!” she said. “Gar! There, teeth!”

A funnel of red wizardlight formed in the air, pointing down into the bromeliads. For a moment Garric thought the light was the threat Tint warned of; then he realized it was Metron’s wizardry duplicating what the beastgirl’s nostrils and keen ears had already uncovered.

“A creature waits there,” Metron squeaked. “It heard you on the other side of the wall. Strike it down before you enter the garden.”

Garric reached over his shoulder and touched the hilt of his sword. He wore it across his back tonight, the scabbard’s upper set of rings fastened to the top of a bandolier and the lower set lashed tightly to his belt. It was the way Carus had worn his blade on raids and in sea fights, where a scabbard hung in the ordinary fashion might have tangled with his legs….

“Don’t be a hero, Gar,” Hakken said sourly. He was fitting the bamboo rods together, balancing the whole on his knees as he squatted. “That’s what we got this along for.”

“Gar go?” Tint said.

Garric lifted her fingers from his shoulder. He’d have bruises in the morning. “We’re going to climb that tower, Tint,” he said. “We can’t go till we’ve gotten Lord Thalemos out of the tower.”

He’d have bruises if he were alive in the morning. What would happen to the soul of Garric or-Reise if the body of Gar the Monkey Boy died here this night?

“Help me hold this,” Hakken directed. He’d put the four rods together and now was binding the hog’s bladder onto one end with a twist of sinew. “I’ve never used this from up in the air like this. It’s not heavy, but the length makes it seem more.”

“Where do you get the poison?” Garric said, holding his right arm out like a branch for Hakken to lay the bamboo across. The thin tube’s leverage made it feel like a tree bole.

“Dust from cave mushrooms on the east of the island,” Hakken muttered as he adjusted the weapon. “Bloody rare, and bloody dangerous to gather, let me tell you. We took this bag from a District Commander of the Protectors. What he used it for I don’t know, but he didn’t need it after Hame cut his throat.”

“Get on with it!” Metron’s attenuated voice demanded.

Hakken looked at the crystal. He raised his eyes to Garric’s. “Shut him off, will you? Or by the Sister—”

Garric gestured with his free hand. “Get on with it,” he said curtly. “And Metron, don’t make pointless noise.”

Hakken grimaced and sighted along the rod, bringing the free end directly under the cone of light. His eye still close to the slowly wobbling tube, he reached back with his left hand to the bladder and gave it a sharp squeeze.

Nothing seemed to happen. Garric frowned and opened his mouth to speak.

“Don’t move!” Hakken snapped. “With the tube this long, it takes—”

A puff of dust, colorless in the starlight, spurted from the far end of the tube. It spread as it sank into the bromeliads.

“All right, let it go,” Hakken said, dropping his end of the bamboo. “And by the Lady’s mercy, don’t stir the stuff up when we get down.”

The bromeliads’ sword-shaped leaves were so long the points curved back to the ground. They thrashed violently. Garric snatched at his sword hilt.

A creature lurched out. It was the size of a man and walked on two legs, but its lizard tail balanced a head with a seawolf’s long jaws. Garric felt Gar’s fearful spirit cringe as the boy remembered the fangs that had pierced his brain.

The creature flopped forward. Its hind legs slashed the ground for a moment with claws like sickles; then it was still.

“Don’t waste time!” Metron said. “Get me to the ground at once so that I can scry a path for you!”

In miniature, the wizard’s voice had the tone and self-importance of an angry wren. Nasty little birds, wrens; egg-thieves and bullies when they could get away with it, though amusing to have around at times.

Hakken grimaced as he set the rope ladder’s hooks on the face of the wall. Garric nodded and jumped to the ground without bothering to lower himself by his hands first. The turf was springy, and the modest drop wouldn’t have mattered even with rock at the bottom. They didn’t need the ladder to enter the garden—or for themselves, to leave it, unless one of them was badly injured—but there was no telling what condition Thalemos would be in if they freed him.

Garric grinned as Tint landed beside him, so lightly that she scarcely seemed to bend the grass. When they freed Thalemos; he’d chastened Ademos for negative speculations.

Hakken walked down the wall, gripping the ladder with his hands to fix the hooks properly. “Now what?” he whispered, looking around them.

Metron was already chanting. “We wait for him,” Garric said, curving his left index finger toward the crystal on his breast.

He drew the sword he’d sharpened carefully before the band left Thalemos’ villa for the city. He’d wanted to go over it again as they waited in the shop, but he knew the blade was already as keen as he could make it. Further passes on the whetstone would only remove metal that he might need in the coming hours.

The grass curling over his bare feet had a warm, dry texture that surprised him. It didn’t seem to be harmful—Tint would have reacted before now if it were—but it was an unpleasant contrast to the coolness he’d expected. Hakken didn’t seem to notice, though the sailor’d worn a look of sour worry since they’d set off from the villa at dusk.

Tint rose on her hind legs and sniffed, then lowered her head and snuffled in a narrow arc across the grass. Garric watched her for a moment, then made his own assessment of the garden.

It wasn’t the same place as it had seemed from above. A clump of what might be a kind of yucca—spiked heads on smooth woody trunks—nodded slightly. There was no wind that Garric could feel.

To his left, easily within length of his sword, was a plant with drooping sword-shaped leaves in a low stone coping. Huge white flowers grew within the curtain of foliage, but because the bells hung downward it was only now that Garric noticed them.

Were they turning? Surely they were turning, the bells lifting slightly on their stems like some many pale faces rising to stare back at the intruders.

Tint noticed Garric’s interest. She jumped upright and caught him by both shoulders, pressing him hard. Her head was turned back to watch the flowers.

“Bad, Gar!” she said. “They lie, they hurt Gar!”

“What do you—” Garric began.

A rank odor made him choke in surprise. Something changed, in his nostrils or in his mind itself. He drew in a deep breath and felt himself relax utterly.

Garric couldn’t compare the smell with anything he’d known before. Images cascaded from his memory, every joy he’d known in life. Triumphs, kindnesses done him, friendships, and flashes of insight come upon him from all sides: the day he first opened a volume of Celondre, the evening the sky to the east was ablaze with three keystones of rosy light bleeding from the sun setting on the opposite horizon, the moment he took Liane in his arms for the first time…

Tint bit his chest.

“Hey!” Garric shouted. If the lizard had heard them coming over the wall, then there wasn’t much hope that whispering would hide their intrusion, but Garric still would’ve kept his voice down if he’d remembered where he was.

That was the point—he hadn’t remembered. The flowers’ perfume, now a stench like that of eggs rotting, had carried him into a reverie that would have ended…

Hard to tell where it would’ve ended. It wasn’t likely to be a place Garric wanted to be, though.

Hakken, his eyes glazed and drool hanging from his mouth, walked slowly toward the clump of flowers. Garric stepped in front of the sailor and slapped his face left-handed. Hakken staggered back, gasping angrily as he groped for the short-handled axe in his belt.

His nose wrinkled. “By the Lady!” he said. “By the Lady! I’ve not smelled anything that stunk so bad since we raised the Erdin Belle with all the rats that’d drowned in the hold when she foundered!”

“Bad!” repeated Tint. The flowers were slumping back on their stems and starting to close. The odor dissipated as suddenly as it had appeared. If it hadn’t been for the beastgirl…

Garric hugged Tint to his side, her shoulder against the point of his hip. She purred like a big cat. “Thank you, Tint,” Garric said. “You saved our lives.”

A moth of red wizardlight flew out of the crystal on Garric’s breast. It went arm’s length ahead of him, just above the grass, then paused to flutter in a tight figure-eight.

“Follow the guide!” Metron squeaked. “Follow it precisely and don’t waste time. The Intercessor’s enchantments will react to your presence. What was safe before may close in on you.”

Hakken drew his axe and looked at Garric. Garric said, “We’re going to walk exactly where the moth flies, Tint.” He stepped off, suiting his conduct to his words.

Instead of going directly toward the tower through the loose line of yucca-looking plants, the moth led them to the left around the circuit of the outer wall. The course took them close to the lizard—dead or just unconscious?—and the clump of bromeliads where it had hidden.

Hakken, closely behind Garric, hesitated. “The dust…?” he said. “If we stir—”

“Go on, go on!” piped the wizard. “Do you think I can hold this forever?”

Tint padded past Garric on all fours, glancing to either side but showing no concern about the residue of the spores. Her attention was focused primarily on the yuccas to her right. They quivered, but the beastgirl stayed beyond the trunk’s height from the base of the nearest. Garric followed, more reassured by Tint’s nonchalance than he was by Metron’s wizardry.

The moth’s quivering path took it over a bed of flowers that looked like red fangs with spiky black tips. Garric hesitated for a moment. Tint, pacing forward nonchalantly, saw his doubt and stopped also.

“Go on!” Metron said. “I’ve told you, time—”

The moth circled back like a dog trying to lead its master. Tint, her mind never far from the thought of food, tried to snatch it out of the air. Her fingers slipped harmlessly through the creature of light; she opened her hand and peered at its emptiness with a puzzled expression.

“—is short!”

Garric nodded Tint forward and walked on, reminding himself that things weren’t always what they seemed. His feet sank into the loose earth of the bed, finding moisture below; the flowers brushed his shins harmlessly.

The moth jogged to the right, following the flower bed for two paces—for the first time directly toward the tower. The building loomed above, a presence in Garric’s peripheral vision though his eyes were trained on the ground.

At the end of the flower bed grew a tree whose swollen trunk lay parallel to the ground for most of its length. Only the finger-thick upper stem was vertical, terminating in a spray of whiplike tendrils. They stiffened as the trio approached; Tint shied back.

The moth turned aside, bobbing over lush turf in the direction of a clump of rushes growing in a crystal-edged pool. Again Tint recoiled. She laid the side of her head on the ground, then hopped back and held Garric.

“Bad!” she said. “Teeth, Gar!”

She stroked his thigh and added pleadingly, “Gar, this bad place. We go away, Gar? Go now?”

Garric looked at the empty lawn. There were no bushes big enough to hide another of the lizards, nor was there any other evident danger. The moth circled and returned, insistently.

“Go on!” Metron said. “Follow the guide, and there’s no danger. But quickly, quickly!”

“Tint?” Garric said, his sword held low to the side so that the beastgirl wouldn’t accidentally fling herself onto its gleaming edge. “Where’s the animal? Where’s the teeth?”

“Go on, you fools!” said Metron. “The monkey knows nothing!”

“Gar, what are we going to do?” Hakken said. “Because I don’t think we oughta just stand here, you know?”

“There, there!” Tint said, pointing furiously at the unmarked grass. Her long face turned quickly back and forth from Garric to the danger only she could see. “Teeth, Gar, bad!”

Garric stepped forward and swiped his sword in an arc at arm’s length. The beastgirl’s concern was so persuasive that he expected his edge to thoonk! into a monster where he saw only empty air. The blade whistled, meeting nothing.

“Must I drive you with my art?” Metron shrilled. “Shall I raise a wall of flame to sear the flesh from your bones if you will not obey?”

Hakken, muttering a curse, leaped onto the lawn with his axe held up in both hands. The moth danced ahead of him, leading him safely to a bed of Dead-Man’s Fingers or some similar translucent fungus. “For the Lady’s sake, Gar!” he said. “Come on, won’t you?”

Garric stepped forward. Two more steps and—

Tint grabbed Garric by the waist and jerked him backward. Small she might be, but the beastgirl’s strength was equal to Garric’s own. Two pairs of interlocking fangs, each the length of a man’s hand, sliced up through the turf and clashed together where Garric’s foot had rested a moment before.

Tint shrieked in terror, hopping up and down. Garric lunged, stabbing into the ground with all his weight behind the thrust. Though the blade curved, its point was directly in line with the hilt. It grated along bone, then sank deep.

The turf shivered. The fangs pulled back with the same silent suddenness as they’d slashed upward. Garric gripped his hilt with both hands to keep the force beneath the ground from twisting the sword away from him.

The blade flexed, then sprang free. The tip was wet with blood turned black by the moonlight. Garric straightened. A line of dimples shivered across the sod as the creature thrashed its escape along the tunnel by which it had attacked.

Metron was yammering something; Garric hadn’t time to wonder what. Hakken hopped from one foot to the other, gawping down at the ground in fear that another of the creatures was closing on him unseen. If he wasn’t careful, he’d lop his own leg off and save the garden the trouble of killing him.

Garric stepped to the sailor’s side and grabbed the axe helve above where Hakken gripped it. “Calm down!” he said.

Hakken tried to pull free. Garric had a weapon in either hand; he shouldered Hakken on the point of the jaw. That brought the sailor around; he relaxed and forced a smile to show Garric that it was safe to let him go.

“This place is part of the Sister’s realm!” Hakken said, as Garric eased back. He massaged his axe wrist with his free hand, looking around with an expression of renewed disgust.

“You can reach the wall now,” said Metron’s image. He’d had put aside his haughty manner, at least for the time being. “Wait there while I prepare you for the next stage.”

They were within a sword’s length of the tower, though a quarter of the way around from where they’d faced it when they entered the garden. Garric had been concentrating on each small stage of the moth’s course, so it was a surprise to find they’d actually reached their goal.

Because of Tint, they’d reached their goal.

Garric put his arm around the beastgirl again, and said in a mild voice, “Metron? If you call my friend Tint a monkey again, when I next see your physical body I’m going to beat it within a hair of its life. Understood?”

“Please, Master Gar,” squeaked the image. “Time is short.”

“Let’s get it over with,” Garric said to Hakken. The wizard was right, of course, but Garric didn’t choose to say that in so many words.

They stepped to the tower, cautiously but without further incident. Plants with huge glossy leaves on soft stems grew against the wall. Nowhere did Garric see vegetation actually climbing the stone.

Metron began to chant again. Garric lifted the crystal from his breast to watch for a moment—the angle at which the amulet hung didn’t affect the image within it. The wizard sat cross-legged, his athame dipping and rising to the rhythm of the spell. His other hand held the ring over the figure he’d drawn on the blurred surface before him.

Tint squatted beside Garric, rubbing her shoulder against his thigh and purring. She didn’t seem concerned, but she remained fully aware of her surroundings. Her hand shot out unexpectedly and snatched a beetle from the wall to her mouth.

Garric looked at his sword. With a reflex gained during the months King Carus had shared his mind, he broke off one of the great leaves left-handed and folded it between his thumb and fingers. With that for a wiping rag, Garric rubbed the smear of blood from the upper hand’s breadth of the steel. He kept the back of the blade to his hand and was careful not to slice his fingertips while getting close to the keen edge.

“Abrasax,” said Metron. “Rayasde belhowa hiweh….”

Hakken turned from eyeing the tower wall. “What do you think, Gar?” he said. “Is he going to float us up there with, you know, his words? Because it doesn’t look to me like there’s any other way.”

“Sukoka nuriel gatero…” said Metron. The crystal was filled with rosy color, but it didn’t shine onto the tunic of muddy blue that Garric wore for this assault.

Garric touched the wall. There was no need for his sword now, so he sheathed it while he thought.

Like the outer wall, the tower was built of banded gneiss. The striations between layers were the stone’s only marking. Though Garric ran his fingers up and down for as high as he could reach, he couldn’t feel separate courses. There were no interstices, not even so much as a crack he could have driven a needle into. Either the Spike was really pottery cast to look like stone, or it had been carved whole from a solid outcrop.

“Naveh!” Metron cried. “Badawa! Belhorwa!”

Garric’s skin tingled as though he’d just stepped out of salt water. Hakken must have felt the same and been frightened by it, because he gave a shout, flailing his arms to shake something off him.

“Start climbing,” Metron ordered. He sounded tired and his voice was even more distant than usual. “Just put your feet against the wall. But hurry, please hurry.”

Garric lifted his right leg and set the sole firmly against the stone as if he were pushing off from it. His balance changed. He started to fall forward until he threw up his left foot as well.

“Duzi!” he gasped. He was standing on the tower’s side, his body parallel to the ground below. The Spike stretched before him like the trunk of a felled tree, sloping to either side but an easy passage to a youth who’d walked fence rails for fun.

He wasn’t sticking to the stone; it was as if the Spike had turned onto its side so that gravity held Garric and all his equipment in the normal way. Hakken cried out and fell against the tower. He rose onto his hands and knees, still against the stone, looking at Garric in wonderment.

“Gar!” Tint cried. She leaped to the wall beside him. Her nails scratched for purchase, but the stone was too smooth even for her. She slipped to the ground. “Gar, come back!”

“Wait, Tint!” Garric said.

He turned the crystal up to look at the wizard. “Metron,” he demanded. “Why isn’t Tint able to climb?”

“Do you think I’m the Mistress herself?” Metron snarled shrilly. “Do you know how much power it takes to shift the cosmos for the weight of just two of you? Get on with it! Don’t keep delaying, please!”

Garric felt clammy. He thought his bare skin glowed with red wizardlight. The color was too faint for certainty, and it wasn’t something he wanted to think about anyway.

He shivered. “Let’s go, Hakken,” he said. “Tint, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Wait here for me, all right?”

“Gar!” the beastgirl cried. She poised to jump.

“No, Tint!” Garric said, but she leaped onto the smooth stone anyway. When she slipped, she tried to catch Garric’s leg. He strode ahead to avoid her grip.

“Come on, Hakken!” he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the wail as Tint slid to the ground. He jogged up—along—the sheer tower, keeping his eyes focused on the sky to avoid seeing that the ground was increasingly far behind him.

Tint continued to jump and wail. There’d been no sign of human guards, but Garric still found the noise disconcerting.

The top, two hundred feet in the air, was as smoothly rounded as a sword pommel. Garric paused, wondering what would happen if he stepped over the end—down, as it felt to him now. Hakken joined him, walking carefully. The tower was broad enough that the two men could have safely stood side by side, but the business was already too uncanny to take further chances.

Metron was chanting. Hakken held his axe in both hands, his elbows close to his sides. His face was set in a rictus, beyond fear and probably beyond hope as well.

Tint still shrieked; the distance wasn’t great enough to mute the nerve-wracking cries. Garric felt a surge of anger, which he suppressed in embarrassment. Anger at the beastgirl’s inability to understand was as foolish as getting angry at a rainstorm…and in this case, a rainstorm that had repeatedly saved his life.

He turned his head to the side and looked out over the darkened city of Durassa. A few yellow glows moved slowly through the streets, lanterns lighting partygoers to their homes. Most of those out at this hour either couldn’t afford the price of a linkman or would prefer the dark for their business.

The call of a rattle showed that at least one watchman was alert. Did Hame’s cousin wait in a doorway, looking up at the Spike?

Light outlined a score of shuttered windows; the folk in other rooms might be awake as well, staring into the night. Any of them could see Garric and Hakken on the tower, completely exposed.

It probably didn’t matter. Human danger wasn’t of immediate concern, not now….

“Chermarai!” Metron cried. A wedge of the dome’s curve turned black and dissipated like mist struck by the full sun. Perfumed air puffed out, warm and damp and green-smelling.

“Inside quickly!” the wizard said. “I’m holding it until you’re inside, but hurry!”

“It’s dark as arm’s length up a hog’s ass!” Hakken protested.

“I’ll light it after you’re in,” Metron said. “Please!”

Garric didn’t like the dark interior any better than the sailor did, but it seemed to him that this time Metron was doing the best he could. He stepped forward; gravity changed again. Hakken, more afraid of being alone than of what might be waiting inside, jumped after him.

The wedge of sky vanished, at last silencing the beastgirl’s cries. For an instant Garric was in darkness that breathed lush odors. The crystal on his breast crackled. Metron’s image stood with its left arm outstretched, its fist balled. Azure wizardlight shot from the sapphire ring, spreading into an ambiance which lit a corridor bent into the organic curves of a muskrat’s burrow.

Hakken looked about in silent wonder. Though it appeared to have been chewed from the rock rather than being built, the corridor was luxurious beyond the halls of any palace Garric had seen.

Tapestries of thick, lustrous silk hung the walls, showing different pictures depending on the angle Garric’s eye fell on them. Between each pair of hangings was a patch of blank wall, a sconce, and a velvet rope attached to the top of the wall.

Metron spoke a word. The sconces lighted one after another, throwing up pale flames like those of the purest olive oil. The blue glow of moments before sucked back into the ring. Wavering lamp flames made the shadows beneath the cords writhe as if they were alive.

The corridor split twenty feet from where Garric stood. Each of the two branches curved off in its own direction; one of them climbing, the other seeming to slope slightly downward.

“Lord Thalemos will be in one of the cells,” said Metron. His voice was broken, but the sound of panting didn’t reach Garric’s mind the way the words did. “I can’t tell which. Open the viewslits one at time and look in, but be careful.”

“What viewslits?” said Hakken. “I don’t see—”

“The cords!” Metron snapped, angry at his own failure to communicate and taking it out, as people generally did, on those they’d failed. “Pull the cords, you fool!”

Garric pulled the nearest cord, a braid of gold-and-scarlet plush. It dipped easily; as it did, the section of wall beside it became transparent. Garric touched the space. He felt stone though his eyes told him there was nothing there. He looked in.

A child of no more than six sat on the floor playing with a pull toy, a painted pottery duck on clay wheels. The room was appointed with an ornate gilt bronze table and a chair inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. There was no bed.

“Go on, go on!” Metron squeaked. “We have to find Thalemos.”

“Why—” said Garric.

The child turned to look in his direction. There were pits of orange hellfire where its eyes should have been. Garric dropped the velvet cord and backed away. The stone was again unmarked.

“Hakken, you check the other side of the corridor,” Garric said. His voice was hoarse for the first few words. “I’ll take these.”

He walked quickly to the next pull, this one purple with an ermine tassel on the end. He had to force himself to take the cord in his hand. He tugged it down fiercely to get it over with.

The cell on the other side of the window looked like the interior of a cave covered with the pearly translucence of flow rock. Garric couldn’t tell where the light came from. Nothing moved, nothing in the room seemed to be alive. He lowered the cord and moved on.

There were four cells on Garric’s side of the entrance corridor. Having gotten his breathing back to normal from the shock of the child’s eyes, he opened the third window. Hakken was doing the same across from him.

A demon glared at Garric. It opened long jaws and hissed, its forked tongue quivering only a hand’s breadth away. Garric jumped back, snatching at his sword hilt. When the cord slipped from his hand, the demon was a blank stone wall again.

Smiling wryly at his fright, Garric opened the next window. His belly was tight, but nobody watching him would have known how ready he was to flinch. Still, he kept his face as far back from the wall as he could and not be obvious in his fear.

Within, a man lay stretched on a rack. His limbs were taut, but as yet he hadn’t quite been disjointed. His body was spare, his face ascetic. His eyes were wide-open, and his expression was patiently resigned despite what must be singeing agony. His gaze met Garric’s with neither hope nor fear.

“Metron?” Garric said. “Can we let this fellow out along with Thalemos?”

“This one?” the wizard said. “This one? Boy, if I freed him, you would pray the Intercessor to lock him up again—and you would be too late!”

Garric grimaced but closed the window. He started to open the first cell down the left-hand branch but turned to check on Hakken first. The sailor stood transfixed at the window to the second cell on his side.

“Hakken?” Garric said. Hakken seemed paralyzed; only the throb of a vein in his throat proved he wasn’t a statue.

Garric walked back and grabbed the man by the shoulder. “Hakken!” he said, glancing through the window as he spoke.

The woman inside was as searingly beautiful as the sun. Garric thought she was nude, but he couldn’t be certain even of that. Lust hammered him, crushing his volition.

Reflex was his salvation. He wrenched at Hakken with all his strength, pulling the sailor back. The velvet cord broke; the attached end flopped like a live thing as the window closed.

Garric blinked and rubbed his eyes with his hands. “Duzi help me!” he muttered, still dizzy from the experience. “Hakken, are you all right?”

The sailor had fallen to the floor. He had a stunned look. Rising, he reached again for the broken cord.

Garric caught Hakken’s wrist, and said, “Leave it alone! Go on to the next one. We’ve got to find Thalemos and get out of here!”

“I warned you to be careful,” Metron said. “The ones the Intercessors have imprisoned here over the ages are those dangerous to them, but some are dangerous to the cosmos.”

“Let me go,” the sailor snarled. His eyes were wild with passion. He tried to pull his arm free. When he couldn’t, he raised the axe in his other hand.

Garric punched Hakken hard in the pit of the stomach, then wrenched the axe away as the man doubled up. “Check the cells on your side!” Garric said. “Shout if you find Lord Thalemos. And don’t make me come back for you, Hakken.”

The sailor glared at him. He jerked at the next pull in line, glanced within, and let it go. He shambled to the fourth, gave the cell’s interior a cursory glance, and looked back over his shoulder at Garric before starting down the branch corridor. Hakken’s expression was furious, but he seemed to have recovered from the compulsion he’d felt moments before.

Garric shoved the axe helve under his belt and strode to the branch corridor he’d claimed. He’d return the weapon when they left the prison, though he’d watch his back until he was sure the sailor had buried his wrath. There hadn’t been a lot of choice, though.

Garric opened the next window. Unlike previous cells, the only light in this one was a sullen red glow. He thought he saw something flutter within, but as he squinted for a better view he heard Hakken shriek.

“Hakken!” Garric shouted, drawing his sword. He rounded the junction and almost collided with the sailor.

Hakken’s face was contorted. He held his right arm out as if he were trying to point. There was nothing in the corridor beyond him. His mouth opened and spewed yellow froth.

Hakken’s spine suddenly curved. He pitched backward, dead and rigid before his head hit the floor.

“Metron, what did it?” Garric said, looking behind him and then again down the corridor where Hakken died. There was nothing save for the flaring sconces.

“How would I know?” Metron piped. “It wasn’t wizardry, that I swear. Wait and I’ll draw the image from his eyes. But it wasn’t wizardry!”

Hakken’s right arm stuck stiffly into the air. His balled fist and forearm were already black and swollen. There were two raised punctures on the underside of his wrist.

“Don’t bother,” Garric said tightly, advancing in a shuffle with his sword raised at his side. “I’ve got it.”

The cord that Hakken would have pulled to open the next window was of red-and-black bands separated by thin yellow rings. It hung as still as any of the others—now. Only close examination showed that the two black beads on the end were eyes.

Garric’s sword whistled, taking off the serpent’s head without touching the stone against which it hung. Fangs glittered in the light of the sconces as the tiny jaws yawned in death.

The body twitched and knotted harmlessly. Garric pulled it, clearing the stone. The reptile continued to squirm, wetting his left palm with its blood.

A young man in silk tunics sat inside the cell, playing with a set of ivory game pieces on a board of inlaid wood. Unlike some of the other prisoners, he showed no awareness of being watched through the solid wall.

“That’s him!” Metron said. “Don’t move, now!”

The wizard paused, then resumed in a singsong, “Triskydin amat lahaha….”

Thalemos—even without Metron’s statement, Garric would have recognized the youth from the statue he’d disinterred on Serpent’s Isle—rolled an ebony dice cup, checked the throw, and moved a piece. His face was drawn and resigned.

“Genio gidiba,” Metron chanted. “Loumas!”

The blank wall between the hangings dissolved in a vanishing sparkle. Thalemos jumped up, spilling the game board. He grabbed the stool he’d been sitting on but fumbled as he tried to lift it as a weapon.

“Come on!” Garric said, grabbing the youth’s sleeve. In terms of years lived, Thalemos was probably older than Garric himself. In all ways that mattered, though, he seemed younger and as malleable as wax. “We’re getting out of here!”

“Yes!” Metron chirped. “I’ve rescued you, Lord Thalemos!”

Which was only one way of putting it, but this wasn’t the time to argue. Tugging the boy along with him, Garric sprinted down the corridor. A flash of blue wizardlight touched the curved section of the roof dome at the end. It went black and was gone without the delay and chanting which Metron had required when he won entry.

Hakken’s stiff corpse lay behind them. All men die, and the flesh doesn’t matter…. But Garric would have brought the sailor along if he possibly could have.

“You’ll have to carry Lord Thalemos,” the wizard said. “I don’t have time or the power to prepare him. Quickly, quickly!”

“What?” said Thalemos.

Garric caught the youth around the shoulders, knelt to put his left arm behind Thalemos’ knees, and toppled him backward. There was no point in explaining; mere action was sufficient. “I’ve got him.”

“Belhorwa!” Metron said, only that. Garric felt gravity shift again. He stepped out onto the tower, ignoring Thalemos’ cry and clutching fear.

The city was still in night, but the moon had begun to rise. Garric jogged toward the bushes at the base of the tower, no longer nervous to see the ground so far below. Tint was where he’d left her. She was as still as a statue, now; and, thank Duzi, silent.

“Quickly!” Metron pleaded. No longer was the wizard pretending to be unfazed by the work of wizardry. “Even with the ring I won’t be able to hold very much longer.”

The bushes quivered. Something rose out of the foliage. A man’s been hiding there, Garric thought; but as the shadow continued to extend up the wall of the tower, he knew he was wrong.

It was a snake. From the size of the head rising toward him, it was a snake as long as the tower was high.

“Metron!” Garric said. “Stop that thing!”

He tried to draw his sword and almost dropped Thalemos. The youth cried out again and wrapped his arms tightly around Garric’s neck. That took care of the problem of dropping him, but trying to fight the creature while burdened with this terrified weight would be an exercise in futility.

Terrified. Garric remembered the effect the viper on Serpent’s Isle had on Tint. No wonder she was silent: she was paralyzed with fear!

“Quickly!” the wizard wheezed. “I’m losing you!”

“Gar!” Tint screamed despairingly, and leaped. She touched the sheer wall twenty feet above the ground and got enough purchase from it to spring another dozen feet upward. She grasped the serpent behind the head with all four limbs and bit viciously into the neck.

“Quickly!” said Metron.

Garric felt the beginning of another shift, of down preparing to become a plunge of fifty feet to the base of the tower. He sprinted forward, clearing his sword. If Thalemos couldn’t hold on by himself, Thalemos was going to have to learn how to fly.

The snake twisted like a straw touched by flame. It couldn’t reach Tint, but it battered her against the side of the tower. She hung on at the first impact, but the second flung her loose. She sailed through the air, already balling her limbs beneath her for a safe landing.

The snake struck, snatching the beastgirl out of the air. Her bleat ended in a crunch of bones. The snake curled its forebody to the ground, lifting its head slightly. It tossed the frail corpse and caught it again, headfirst this time for easy swallowing.

Garric felt the ground rising to meet him. He jumped, flexing his knees, and fell the last ten feet without harm. The shock pulled Thalemos away from him, but that was a side benefit. Garric stepped toward the snake.

“Get over the wall!” Metron was saying. “It won’t climb the wall!”

The snake’s jaw hinge dislocated, letting its mouth open still wider. Its left eye glittered at Garric beneath spike-scaled brows. A membrane slid sideways, wiping the cornea. Only Tint’s feet were still visible.

Garric slashed as though he were splitting wood, striking the small scales on the back of the snake’s neck; bone grated beneath his edge. A spasm rippled down the whole long body, throwing distant plantings about as if a tornado had struck the garden.

The snake twisted onto its back, exposing its broad, pale belly scales. Its midbody struck the tower with a whack like cliffs meeting. Someone in the street shouted.

Tint’s feet vanished. The slight bulge of the beastgirl’s body shivered farther down the serpent’s throat, drawn by reflexes inexorable even in death. Garric paused with his sword lifted for another blow; he shot the blade home in its scabbard instead.

He turned. Thalemos was watching aghast. Garric caught his arm.

“Follow me!” he said as he started back the way he’d entered the garden. “Put your feet where I do!”

As Garric ran, he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. If he missed his path for the tears, then Tint would have died for nothing.

Though Sharina stood beside the flutist who blew time for the sailors launching the nearby trireme, even she could scarcely hear the notes over the bedlam of the fleet loading. Either the sailors had better hearing or, more likely, they could have kept pace in their sleep by virtue of their repetitive training.

Across the U-shaped Arsenal, another trireme splashed into the water. The men who’d launched her with block and tackle gave over to a separate crew on tow ropes, drawing the ship to the boarding quay. There most of the hundred-plus crewmen waited, holding their oars upright like a thicket of blighted saplings. Only the helmsman and a dozen rowers were aboard, ready to fend the lightly built vessel away from trouble.

Pulleys squealed; pine keels shrieked in a chorus against the polished limestone draw-ways, despite the buckets of water passed hand to hand up the ramps and poured at the top for lubrication; petty officers snarled commands at men who weren’t where they were supposed to be or were sloppy in getting there; and louder than all the rest, the huge crowd of watching civilians chattering provided a deafening susurrus of excitement.

King Carus broke away from his circle of advisors and walked the short distance to where Sharina stood. He wore the field uniform of this day: short tunic, shoulder cloak with hood, and sandals laced to mid calf. He’d wanted to don the breeches and high boots in which he’d campaigned when he was in his own flesh, but Liane had pointed out that the best that would do was puzzle people. Other possibilities started at, “Prince Garric has gone mad,” and went downward from there.

“Are you impressed?” Carus said, bending his lips to Sharina’s ear.

She didn’t know what he expected her to say, so she told the simple truth: “It’s confusing. And it’s not just me; lots of people are confused, so it’s taking a long time.”

She didn’t point, but the clot of soldiers on the boarding quay across the harbor was self-evident. The two banks of oarsmen had boarded smoothly, but the heavy infantry who’d be riding as passengers in the inboard banks tripped angrily over their fellows and the oarlooms as they tried to reach places in the center of the vessel.

A flash of light made Sharina squint, then shade her eyes with a hand to see better. Lord Waldron himself was on the boarding dock, using his bare sword as a pointer. After she’d seen him, Sharina could even make out the rumble of the old soldier’s furious commands.

“Right,” said Carus approvingly. “Though they’re doing better than I’d expected. If efficiency were all that mattered, I’d have taken the ships downriver with just their crews and boarded the infantry off temporary stages at the Pool.”

An officer was trying to get past the Blood Eagles screening Carus; his breastplate was not only gilded but picked out with six very respectable jewels. The fellow’s voice was rising.

Carus paused in what he was saying to Sharina and turned his head, glancing toward the guard commander and the irate officer beyond him. The latter cried, “Prince Garric—”

“Lord Ghosli,” Carus said, thundering above the general noise, “get aboard the Lady of Valles now or surrender your command—and surrender your honor as well, so far as I’m concerned! Do you hear me, milord?”

Sharina blinked. Lord Waldron across the harbor could hear that order. Ghosli looked aghast, then furious. He turned and stamped away.

Carus shook his head in disgust. “Shouldn’t have said that, should I?” he muttered to Sharina. “Ghosli wants to take his horse aboard, can you believe that? But he uses his own money to buy extras for his men, and his regiment’d follow wherever he led them because of that. I shouldn’t have snapped his head off.”

Sharina cleared her throat; she didn’t have to repeat what Carus had already said, so instead she put her hand on his elbow, and remarked, “It’s my duty to remind you to be Prince Garric, your highness, so the fault’s mine.”

As she’d expected, Carus looked stricken at the thought his outburst had hurt her. Quickly, Sharina went on, “Why aren’t you boarding at the Pool then?”

The just-loaded trireme moved away from the quay on short strokes by a dozen oarsmen. The slender hull wobbled badly as the infantrymen seated themselves on the cramped inner benches, but the noncoms were sorting matters out. A tow crew slid another vessel into place.

Carus didn’t answer for a moment. Instead he put his fists on his hipbones and stood arms akimbo as he viewed the scene. A broad grin spread across his face. Though his laughter didn’t boom out the way Sharina half expected, she knew it wasn’t far beneath the surface.

Two vessels moving downstream on the push of the current started to converge; their officers’ attention was turned to the disorder inboard. The crowd pointed and began to shout at increasing volume. The starboard trireme heeled as its helmsman leaned into the tiller of his steering oar; bellowed warnings from that ship woke the crew of the second to the danger also. Men in the bows of both vessels used oars as poles to fend off the other hull.

An oar cracked under the misuse, but the ships steadied on their separate courses with no greater damage than that. The crowd’s concern turned to cheers.

“That’s why I’m doing it, Sharina,” Carus said, pitching his voice to carry to her but not beyond. “I’m letting everybody, pikeman and swordsman, soldier and civilian, see that it’s one army and one kingdom.”

He gestured with a sweep of his left arm, fingers straight. “There’s men from Haft and Shengy and Seres aboard these ships,” he said. “They’re going off to deal with a danger that threatens every citizen of the Isles—whether or not they can afford to pay taxes. The people here can see that, and they’ll tell the story to others. We’re rebuilding the kingdom at this moment.”

Carus put his great hand on Sharina’s shoulder, steadying himself against a sudden surge of emotions. “When I was king in my own name, girl,” he said, his voice and arm trembling, “I talked about my army and my kingdom. As the Shepherd knows, I smashed every foe I faced, smashed them and ground their bones into the mud—until the day I died and the kingdom died with me.”

Sharina put her hand flat on the hand of the dead king. She kept her eyes on the harbor so she wouldn’t embarrass him with her concern.

“Garric knows better than that, and I know better than that now,” Carus said. “It’s the army and the kingdom of everybody in the Isles. Kings who remember that don’t have to rule with their fists and their swords. And when they die, it doesn’t mean chaos for all.”

Carus laughed, shakily but still a gusty release of tension. “Mind, girl,” he went on, “this skin is a borrowed suit. I intend to return it to your brother with no worse than a scar or two that he might’ve gotten tripping into the cutlery when he got up from the table. Eh?”

A trumpet blew; the last trireme from the opposite arm of the Arsenal now floated in the harbor, ready to begin boarding. Only The King of the Isles remained under the shed roof on the near side, the great five-banked flagship that Sharina and Tenoctris would board along with Carus.

“But until Garric comes back,” Carus said, letting his voice rise more than he probably realized, “while I’m watching the kingdom for him—”

His hand gripped his sword and drew it in a shimmer of sunlight. The crowd bellowed in delight.

“Until then,” Carus shouted to his immediate companions over the sound of thousands of throats, “by the Shepherd! the kingdom’s enemies will die in the mud as surely as they did in my day!”

Cashel stretched, enjoying the light which dappled the ground beneath the tall bushes. He’d awakened at sunrise, but he’d been tired and Tilphosa was worn down to a nub of the girl he’d helped ashore during the storm a seeming lifetime ago. This grove of giant blueberries had been a good place for them to catch up on their rest.

Tilphosa had never been plump, but it bothered Cashel to see the way the girl’s cheeks had sunk inward in the time he’d known her. Her alert interest in all around her concealed her condition while she was awake, but she looked like a victim wasted by the flux now when her head was pillowed on springy branches covered by a corner of her cloak.

Cashel rose quietly and began shaking fruit from low-hanging branches. He stretched out the skirt of his tunic as a basket. To avoid the noise he didn’t rap the limbs with his staff, but the rustle of leaves woke Tilphosa anyway. She jumped to her feet, her teeth clenched. She was holding the broken sword close to her body ready to stab whatever threat was approaching.

“Oh!” Tilphosa blurted as she lost her balance. She toppled backward, trying to grab a tree for support.

Cashel let the berries spill and lunged to catch her. He caught her all right—when he needed to move, he was a lot faster than people expected—but the jerk he gave her right arm might have hurt as bad as the scrape she’d have gotten on the tree bark.

Tilphosa straightened, and he released her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d been having a dream.”

She smiled wryly, massaging her right elbow with the other hand. Without meeting Cashel’s eyes she continued, “A nightmare, I suppose. About a snake trying to swallow me.”

She looked up at him finally, still forcing a smile. Her left hand caressed the crystal disk on her necklace. “I don’t think it was sent by the Mistress.”

Cashel squatted, thinking he’d pick up the fruit he’d lost when he grabbed for the girl. He had to give it up as a bad job, because most of them had sailed out of the grove when he jumped. He rose and brushed his staff through the tips of the nearest branches. The twigs were heavy with ripe berries; they dropped like a soft hailstorm about Cashel and the girl.

“I haven’t seen any snakes about here,” he said, popping blueberries into his mouth by the handful. Tilphosa was more ladylike, nibbling each berry individually, but she was hungry too. “There aren’t any birds, either, and that’s funny. I’d think these trees’d be thick with daws and magpies, but I don’t hear a single one.”

Tilphosa had put the broken sword—the dagger, you could call it; the blade had snapped into a point of sorts—under her sash, but at Cashel’s comment her fingers toyed with the brass hilt again. “Cashel?” she said. “Do these bushes just grow, or were they planted?”

Cashel eyed the grove carefully. “I’d guess somebody was keeping them up, whether or not they planted them,” he said. “There’s no fruit on the ground except what I knocked down.”

He cleared his throat. Blueberries, even very big ones, don’t form a solid canopy; the ground should’ve been covered in grass. Instead he saw ivy and wildflowers. The soft leaves weren’t being browsed by animals, neither domestic goats nor voles and rabbits.

“I guess we could get on, now,” Cashel said. The sun was halfway to zenith, time and past to be moving; not that there was any clear place to be moving to. “If you’re up to it, I mean?”

Tilphosa smiled broadly around a mouthful of blueberries; juice trickled from a corner of her mouth, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “I’m fine, Cashel,” she said. “I was just dizzy from jumping up the way I did.”

Cashel wasn’t sure that was the truth or, anyway, the whole truth, but if it was what Tilphosa wanted to say, then he wasn’t about to call her a liar. “Walking toward the east has got us here,” he said, “and it’s a better place than some we’ve seen. I guess we should keep on going.”

Tilphosa nodded with determination, her mouth again full of berries. She held the skirt of her outer tunic up awkwardly to carry a further supply. Cashel wondered if the girl—if Lady Tilphosa—had ever used her tunic that way before he demonstrated the method a few moments earlier.

She set off quickly, apparently to show that she was in good shape. Cashel smiled. All it proved was that Tilphosa had a good heart, which he’d known before now. “If you’ll slow down, mistress,” he said, “I’ll be able to keep up with you. I’m used to following sheep, remember.”

“Oh,” Tilphosa said, looking back in concern. She saw his smile and blushed. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“We’ll get there,” Cashel said, as they fell into step together. “Wherever there is, I mean.”

Tilphosa turned to look at him as they walked. “Where do you want it to be, Cashel?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”

He shrugged as he popped another berry into his mouth. “Well, the way home,” he said, his words a little slurred at the beginning. “I’ll get there. I’ve always had a good sense of direction.”

He smiled broadly at Tilphosa. “But I guess I’ll see you safe to your Prince Thalemos, first, mistress,” he added. “We’ll find the place you want to be, never fear.”

“The place I want to be,” Tilphosa repeated without emphasis. Her eyes were on the ground. When she looked up again her expression was hard. Her voice rang as she said, “Cashel, I can’t trust Metra. I’m not even sure I can trust…”

Her face worked like she’d bitten something sour—or something worse than that. She continued firmly, “I’m not even sure I can trust the Mistress. What if we reach Prince Thalemos and find he’s in league with the Archai? They aren’t friends to human beings, whatever Metra seems to think!”

Cashel shrugged again. “I guess things’ll work out,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. This was the sort of conversation that other people liked to have but he’d never seen much use for.

“Do things always work out for you, Master Cashel?” the girl said. “Because I haven’t been so lucky myself!”

He’d finished the berries, so he had both hands free again. He wiped his left palm on his tunic and let his fingers find their places on the smooth hickory of his quarterstaff.

“Things pretty much work out, yes, mistress,” Cashel said. He started the staff in a slow spin off to his left side to keep it clear of Tilphosa. “Maybe not at first, but after a while I generally find a way.”

Tilphosa made a sound, a funny kind of whoop. He looked over in concern, but she waved her left hand at him for reassurance. She was laughing, he guessed, though it still bothered him because he didn’t see why.

“It’s all right, Cashel,” Tilphosa said through her laughter. “I’ll just trust things to work out, you see? So long as I’m with you, I’ll trust things to work out.”

Maybe because Tilphosa had asked if the blueberries had been planted, Cashel began noticing signs of cultivation immediately as they resumed their way eastward. There was nothing overt, no stone walls nor grain growing from plowed furrows, but a mixture of tulips and periwinkles wandered like a stream of red and blue across the landscape in a fashion that Cashel couldn’t imagine without cultivation. The boxwoods beyond them, though not trimmed into a hedge, still grew too tightly for nature.

“Cashel—” the girl said. Then, frowning, she went on, “No, I guess not. I thought I saw somebody behind those little trees, but there isn’t room to hide.”

Cashel looked. “They’re pears, it looks to me,” he said. The trees were off to the right of the course he’d been setting, but there was no reason not to bend a trifle in that direction. He angled toward them, stepping behind Tilphosa.

“Pear trees that small?” she asked. She fell in with him again, this time on his other side. He noticed her hand rested on the dagger hilt.

The trees were no taller than his shoulder, but they were perfectly formed and full of ripe fruit. The soil had been lightly turned and composted around each one in a circle that would just contain the branches, about where the rootlets would reach. There was somebody here who knew trees, no doubt about that, and who used what he knew.

“I haven’t seen them like this before,” Cashel said, “but the fruit’s full-sized. Here—the juice’ll be good till we find a stream to drink from.”

He twisted a pear from its branch and handed it to Tilphosa. As he did so, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He jerked his head around quickly, but even so he saw only a motion rather than a shape.

“Cashel, what was it?” Tilphosa said, her voice clear. She’d drawn her dagger.

“I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “It ran into the hollies there. I don’t guess it could’ve been bigger than a rabbit and slip through them like that, but it seemed…”

He picked a pear for himself without looking down at the tree. “Well, anyway…” he said. “Let’s keep on going. I’d like to find water, and chances are there’ll be a path or something we can follow.”

Cashel looked about them and frowned. He wiped his fingers clean of sticky pear juice on his tunic before he took the quarterstaff in both hands again.

“I don’t think there’s a tree or bush I can see that people aren’t caring for,” he said as he considered the landscape. “There must be quite a village close around here. I’ve seen more wildness in the palace gardens in Valles.”

“It doesn’t look like a garden to me,” Tilphosa said, frowning as well. She wasn’t so much arguing as making a comment.

“It’s a different sort of taking care,” Cashel explained. “It’s doing the things the plants want, do you see? Feeding the roots and trimming off dead limbs, but not making things look like people want in a garden.”

He cleared his throat. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “I mean, if you—”

“Yes, of course,” Tilphosa said, stepping off briskly. She didn’t put her dagger away, though Cashel didn’t feel anything hostile in the setting. He’d have been hard put to imagine a more peaceful place.

The ground rose slightly; as soon as they came over the rounded crest they saw the village. It was laid out in a circle, more huts than Cashel could have counted on his fingers twice over. They looked like straw beehives, though they were woven of leaves instead of proper straw thatching.

“Have you seen any grass since we woke up this morning?” Cashel asked.

“I don’t remember,” Tilphosa said. “Does it matter?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen any myself—nor any grain or reeds either. It’s just…well, different from what I’m used to.”

He cleared his throat. “That’s probably why it bothers me,” he said. That was true enough: “different” generally meant “bad” to a peasant, whether it was the weather or the way a neighbor offered to pay you for the work you’d done for him last season.

There weren’t any animals bigger than bugs in this place either. Not except for the folks who’d built the huts, and he hadn’t seen them yet except for maybe a flash in the pear orchard.

He and Tilphosa walked toward the village. There was no sound of people and no woodsmoke either, which was surprising too. Smoke always lingers, especially since Cashel hadn’t been around a fire in some days and his nostrils were primed to notice it.

The huts were side by side, as close together as rooms in a city. Houses in Barca’s Hamlet weren’t big, but there even the poorest people had more space between them and their neighbors than the way these folks lived. There were no windows. The doorways were small—even for the size of the huts—and faced the empty courtyard in the center.

Cashel walked around the curve of the village. The only passage into the courtyard was on the eastern side.

“Is anybody here?” Tilphosa asked. She held her elbows close to her sides as she looked about herself, like she was worried that she’d bump something nasty if she wasn’t careful.

Cashel frowned, then let his face smooth. Tilphosa wasn’t asking a fool question: she was saying that the silence worried her and that she’d like Cashel to say it was all right…which it was, as far as he could tell.

“Somewhere close, I’d guess,” he said. He pointed to the drying racks fixed to the back of the huts. They held fruits and vegetables of all sorts, though he didn’t see any meat. “Some of those apple slices haven’t been cut more than an hour.”

Cashel eased through the alley into the courtyard, brushing the hut to either side though he moved sideways. He held his staff high, to clear the domed roofs and just possibly so he could swing it if he needed to.

“Given the size they are,” he said, “and the size we are—”

He smiled slightly to the girl following him, for she too was a giant compared to the folk who’d built these huts.

“—I don’t blame them for being nervous about whether we’re friends.”

Tilphosa knelt to look into a hut’s open doorway. She must not have seen anything to interest her, because she rose with a dissatisfied expression and faced Cashel. Her mouth started to open for another needless question, then spread in a smile instead.

“Those are willows further on the way we’ve been going,” Cashel said, matching her smile with one of his own. He dipped his staff toward the east; not far away a line of trees rose above the shrubbery. “There’s likely a stream there; open water anyway. Maybe when the folks here see we’re not doing any harm, they’ll come out to see us.”

They started off again. He hadn’t yet seen a path, not even the little tracks that voles made running through a meadow.

“What if they don’t, Cashel?” Tilphosa said. “Come out and see us, I mean.”

Cashel shrugged. “Then we keep going, like we’ve been doing anyhow,” he said. “It doesn’t look to me that they’d be able to give us anything we can’t get for ourselves. They don’t cook their food, even, that I can see.”

Tilphosa smiled cautiously “I’d like a roof if it rains,” she said. “But sky’s clear, and I don’t think those huts would be much shelter. They’re just dead leaves sewn to a frame of a few sticks.”

“I’ve seen bird nests that were built better,” Cashel agreed. Squirrels made that sort of ragged pile, of course. He started to grin at the notion of a village of big squirrels…and then sobered, because he couldn’t be sure that wasn’t just what he’d seen.

He chuckled.

“Cashel?” the girl asked.

“I don’t guess it was squirrels that made the huts after all,” he said. “A squirrel couldn’t keep quiet the way the folks around here’re doing.”

Tilphosa gave him a puzzled look, but she didn’t try to follow through on the thought.

Most of the trees ahead were willows the way Cashel had said, but the one in the center of the line had darker foliage than a willow’s pale green. It was huge, its branches spreading to cover as much ground as the village they’d just left. The branches dipped close to the ground like the necks of cattle drinking; from some of them hung huge pods.

“Cashel, there’s a man,” said Tilphosa, pointing with her left hand. Then, her voice rising, she said, “Cashel, he’s caught! Cashel, it’s—”

“Right!” said Cashel, but he didn’t say it loudly because he was already moving and concentrating on what he was going to do next. His staff was crosswise at mid-chest, slightly advanced.

The strange tree had small, rounded leaves, more like an olive’s than what belonged on a tree as big as this one. The pods hanging to the ground from the tips of many limbs were bigger than those of any locust or catalpa, though.

Almost big enough to hold a man, Cashel had thought when he first saw them; but he was wrong about the “almost” because he hadn’t appreciated quite how stunted the residents of this region were.

Most of the pods were closed and brown. A still-open one off to the right side was the same dark green as the foliage. Cashel could see from the ribbed interior that it was really just a giant leaf, not a seedpod as he’d thought.

A child-sized man, naked and almost hairless, stood as the leaf slowly closed around him. His skin was the color of polished bronze; his eyes glinted like those of a rabbit Cashel had once come upon in the jaws of a black rat snake.

A heavy odor, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, hung in the air. Cashel sneezed as he stepped cautiously closer to the victim, ready to dodge if a limb slashed down at him. He heard leaves rustle or maybe something rustling in the leaves, but the tree didn’t move.

Though the little man’s eyes no longer focused, a blood vessel throbbed in his throat. The leaf continued to fold, closing from his feet upward. Its deeply serrated edges meshed like the fangs of a seawolf.

It was obviously tough. Cashel’s crude knife might cut the pod while it was still green and flexible, but not, he thought, without carving the victim as well.

He paused, letting the range of his senses expand beyond the silent man. Because of the way the branches curved down as they spread from the trunk, he had the feeling of being in a dimly lit vault. He judged the thickness of the limb which kinked where the pod attached, then raised the quarterstaff over his right shoulder.

He punched the staff forward with all his weight behind the blow. If it’d been an oak—or worse, a dogwood—even Cashel’s strength could have done no more than bruise the bark. This tree, though, had brittle wood like a pear’s; it shattered at the impact of iron-shod hickory.

The tip and half-engulfed victim fell to the ground; the stump of broken branch sprang upward. From the low shrubbery nearby came a many-throated keening like the wind blowing across chimney pots.

Cashel bent and grabbed the little fellow by the shoulder with his left hand. That hand had been leading on the staff and was now in a state of prickly near-numbness. The pod was unfolding the way a cut intestine gapes as its own muscular walls pull it apart. When Cashel threw the man away from the tree, the pod and the scrap of attached branch fell off him.

Cashel scrambled out from under the tree. Tilphosa had come toward him, but she’d carefully stayed beyond the tree’s possible reach, where she wouldn’t get in Cashel’s way. She faced sideways, keeping Cashel in the corner of one eye while the other scanned the bushes around them.

The rescued victim sucked in deep, gasping breaths as though he’d been underwater during the time the leaf wrapped him. He blinked; awareness started to return to his eyes.

“I’ll take care of him!” Tilphosa said, kneeling at the fellow’s side. She lifted his head with the hand that didn’t hold her dagger.

Cashel straightened and surveyed their surroundings for the first time since he’d seen the man being eaten. The limbs of the strange tree were drawing up like the petals of a lotus at nightfall. The odor he’d noticed when he ran close had dissipated and remained only in his memory.

He looked at the stump of the branch; it leaked dark sap. On the ground, the unfolded leaf was crinkling like leather dried near a flame. The bark of the attached bit of limb had already sloughed away.

From a line of viburnum and lilac bushes that couldn’t possibly have hidden them, people of the same stunted race as the victim rose into plain view. They were nude, both males and females, the latter often holding babies no bigger than six-week puppies. There were no weapons or tools of any sort in their raised hands as they came toward Cashel and Tilphosa.

Cashel slid his hands apart on the staff as he faced the newcomers. There were a lot of them. If they all came from the village just to the west, then they must crowd more than a handful of themselves into each hut.

“Great lord and lady!” cried an age-wrinkled male. “We Helpers greet you! Welcome to the Land!”

“Welcome to the Land!” chorused all his fellows like frogs in the springtime. Cashel remained tense for a moment, but even he relaxed when the whole mob threw itself down on the ground before him and the girl.