Garric wanted to sleep, but he was too tired. He listened to Tenoctris while he focused his eyes on the sword he was sharpening with the small hand stone from his belt. When the emotions burned out of his blood and his mind re-formed from the shards of battle nickering through it in no particular order, then he might be able to sleep.

“When I'm myself again...” Tenoctris said. She managed a weak smile. Liane sat on one side of her with Sharina on the other. Cashel squatted behind the old wizard like a boulder.

“Such as that is, of course,” Tenoctris continued, “I can at least try to unlock the place where Ansalem sleeps. I can't do anything about Purlio, though. He may not return to our time or any time for thousands of years, but we can't stop him from returning when he chooses to. When it chooses to, I should rather say.”

Garric had sent Waldron and the bulk of the army back to Valles. Casualties had been light.

“Amazingly light,” agreed Carus. “Wizards are dangerous in their own way, but may we always be so lucky that the armies we fight have wizards for generals.”

The ghost in Garric's mind looked drained, though King Carus had no physical body to tire in the running, slashing chaos. Battle wears on more than muscles; and perhaps muscles least of all.

Garric and the remainder of his forces—the Blood Eagles and a company of javelin men, to honor the light troops for their initiative in dealing with the wizards—were camped in the overgrown medians of Klestis' boulevards. Garric didn't see need for any troops at all, but Attaper wouldn't have obeyed an order to take his unit back across the bridge, and for a change Waldron would've agreed wholeheartedly with his rival.

Garric and his friends still had work to do in Klestis.

“You sent me to Landure,” said Cashel in his usual slow rumble. “If you send me to where this Purlio is, I'll put him a place he won't come back from.”

Except for the perimeter guards, tents covered the soldiers in Klestis. The red dome over the city was harmless, but its light worked on men's nerves. Garric had thought of retreating to Valles until Tenoctris was strong enough for the incantation... but that would mean crossing the bridge twice, which would probably be worse for all concerned.

Garric's lips smiled. Himself included.

“Kill him, you mean,” Tenoctris said with a touch of irritation. They were all exhausted, but the old wizard had been through more than the rest of them. “Purlio is already dead. Purlio died the moment he surrendered to the Great One, though I suppose he thought that was a last chance to save himself. But because he's dead, he's safe from those who live.”

“With respect to your wisdom, mistress...” said Ilna's new friend. His name was Chalcus, and he was a sailor.

“A sailor?” King Carus snorted. “Then I was a jockey because I sometimes rode a horse!”

Chalcus squatted along one wall of the tent, with Ilna nearby and the child they'd appeared with sleeping between them. The girl—a niece of Lord Tadai, apparently—had absolutely refused to be separated from her companions, even though that meant staying in Klestis because Ilna had decided she was going “to see the business out.”

Whatever that meant to Ilna's chill, knife-edged mind.

“But it's been my experience that men are much less trouble to me after they're dead than before,” Chalcus went on. “If you wizard is dead, then so much the better.”

“It's dead,” Tenoctris said. Her voice sounded particularly reedy following Chalcus' honeyed tones. “Unfortunately it isn't a man. It's a thing that hasn't been alive as we understand it in more ages than you have years, Master Chalcus; but so long as it has a connection to our world, we'll never be safe from it.”

Garric had soaked his whetstone in whale oil to float the particles of steel from its surface as he drew it along his sword edge, one side and then the other. He'd cut into the root of a tusk when he severed the mammoth's trunk; ivory had nicked the metal.

The rhythmic scritch of stone on steel settled Garric's mind as little else could have done. A simple, precise task, repeated over and over. It was calming, even soporific.

A three-wick lamp hung from the tent's ridgepole. The light barely illuminated the faces of those within, but it served to conceal the red glow leaking through the seams. The troops had built bonfires, feeding them with brush cut from plantings that had become thickets, but they'd quickly found that firelight alone wasn't sufficient protection from the scarlet miasma. Leather tent walls and a lamp made it possible—almost—to imagine you were back in the waking world.

Garric let his eyes close. He tried to put the whetstone away, but after fumbling twice—more?—he let it slip to the rank grass. He wiped grit and excess oil from the blade with a rag that had come from the tunic of a soldier now dead, then sheathed the sword with an instinct gained from King Carus. Even if the king had been beheaded, his hands could have placed his blade where it needed to be.

The nearby conversation dulled to a buzz. Liane spoke. Garric's lips smiled in reaction, but the words didn't reach his conscious mind through the interwoven layers of fatigue.

He was vaguely aware of his friends rising and filing out of the tent. Liane was the last, and she carried the lamp with her.

Garric dreamed. He was in a deep forest. A storm rose, bending the trees and wrenching leaves, but the wind and rain were a protection. The fear that lay over Garric lessened during the violence. Lessened, though it never quite vanished.

The clouds cleared away. Stars in constellations that Garric didn't recognize glared down on him. There was a place that Garric knew he should be, but he couldn't remember where; and anyway, he couldn't move. He was a stone figure lying under an oak.

The moon rose. Garric thought the leafy branches would shield him, but light passed through as though the oak were transparent.

Tendrils from the moon's cold smile bathed Garric. His stone body began to crumble like gypsum in a furnace. Bits dissolved into powder and leaked into the ground. He watched and marveled as his form lost definition; became a mound, then merely a ripple, and finally merged with the grass as if he had never been.

The moon leaned down from the sky. It kissed the soil where once Garric had lain. Garric slipped through a barrier of light as chill as the dust between the stars. He felt nothing except the cold.

“Colva!” someone shouted in a world where Garric no longer had a place. He wanted to speak, but he didn't exist.

There was nothing but the cold.

 

Ilna ran the ivory comb through Merota's hair, taking only the width of a few teeth at each pass. The child's hair—and Ilna's—had gotten filthy during the days since the mutiny. Army soap was harsh, and Ilna hadn't waited for the brushwood fire to more than take the chill off the firkin of pond water, but the two of them were clean again. Grooming, the next project, was well in hand thanks to a comb borrowed from an officer.

“Will Uncle Tadai send me back to Erdin, now, Ilna?” Merota said in a small voice.

“I'm not a fortune-teller!” Ilna said before she thought about the question Merota was really asking; then she winced. The child hadn't complained at the fiery soap or the spurge bushes Ilna had used because she didn't have a proper loofa. The child hadn't complained about anything during all the time Ilna had known her.

“I'm not a fortune-teller,” Ilna repeated mildly, “but I don't expect you to be sent to Erdin to be married off, no. Because I won't let that happen. Unless you want it to.”

Merota twisted and hugged herself against Ilna's shoulder. “I don't want it to,” she said. She was crying. “I don't. I never did.”

Knucklebones rattled in the adjacent tent. The chanteyman's familiar voice cried, “The Lady! See how She forgives Her erring worshipper? Now, which of you fine soldiers will pay to prove that I can't make my point again?”

Cashel was sleeping the sleep of the just across the far end of the eight-man squad tent he shared with Ilna and the child. One of the soldiers pitching the tent had asked—innocently, Ilna now assumed—if the third blanket roll was for Chalcus. Ilna had come closer to throttling the fellow with her noose than he probably realized—but he did realize, babbling apologies as he backed away, that the suggestion hadn't been a welcome one.

She sniffed. She was Ilna os-Kenset, so she wouldn't lie to herself. The suggestion had been far too welcome; that was why she'd reacted as she did.

“Sit still and I'll plait your braids,” Ilna said, taking a hank of the girl's long, fine hair and running it through her fingers. Touch would tell her how to interweave the strands and—

Ilna froze as she let herself understand what the pattern was telling her.

“Cashel, get up!” she said as she rose to her feet. Flinging back the tent flap she called, “Garric! Prince Garric!”

The pair of Blood Eagles posted at the entrance looked at her in surprise. “Come!” Ilna called, trotting in the direction of the large, silk-walled tent where she'd left Garric asleep.

Merota was at her heels. That was a good thing, because Cashel struck the forepole—he wasn't used to tents—and broke it in half as he followed his sister. The tent collapsed behind him.

“Garric!” Ilna called again. The dome of light provided as much illumination as the full moon, but it distorted as much as it displayed. A cherry tree threw a shadow like a troll's across the side of the royal tent. The limbs seemed to squirm though the air was still.

The squad of Blood Eagles guarding Garric were rigid as statues. A lantern hanging from the extended ridgepole lighted the circle around them through its horn lenses, but the men themselves were in shadow. Their officer wore a silvered cuirass instead of the black enamel equipment of his troops.

“We have to see Prince Garric now,” Ilna said as she stepped up to him. She expected a refusal—and the pattern her fingers were knotting would be her response. The danger Ilna had seen, felt as Merota's hair wove into plaits, brooked no delay.

The Blood Eagles didn't blink. They were statues, locked into a frozen sleep as they stood.

“Get a light!” Ilna said. The lantern was too high for her. Chalcus leaped and came down with it in his left hand, holding it by its hot iron base. Chalcus pushed into the tent, bumping several of the guards aside with his shoulders. As the men toppled, they awakened with startled shouts.

Ilna followed her brother. Chalcus was beside her, holding the lantern now by its loop handle. He'd singed himself. The burned skin stank, but his rower's calluses were so thick that he probably hadn't felt the injury.

For an instant Ilna thought that Garric's body lay under a tent of cobweb in the corner. The web shifted, turned. It had the face of a spider.

“Colva!” Cashel shouted. He stepped forward, holding his quarterstaff in both hands like a battering ram.

The tendrils of webbing solidified. The face swelled into that of an attractive woman instead of a creature of nightmare. Ilna didn't recognize her.

“Cashel, my hero—” the woman said.

“Colva!” Cashel repeated. He struck her face with his staff. The hickory drove through as though she were smoke.

“Iron!” cried Tenoctris from behind them. “You have to use—”

Ilna's noose settled over the woman's neck and slipped through the liquid flesh instead of drawing tight. Cashel spun his staff end for end to bring the remaining ferrule forward. The staff caught on the tent roof. Silk tore, but it clogged his motion.

Colva laughed. As Chalcus came toward her she stepped through the wall of the tent.

And staggered back inside. A small dagger with its hilt wrapped in gold wire protruded from her chest, just to the left of her breastbone. She screamed during the instant she had before the chanteyman beheaded her, but she was already dying.

The thing that called itself Colva began to shrink in on itself like a meringue congealing. The creature looked less and less human as successive layers of illusion failed.

The bottom of the tent wall humped. Liane squirmed through, her face pale. She still held the gilded sheath of her little dagger in her left hand.

“Is he... ?” she whispered to Ilna.

Tenoctris knelt beside Garric. As Sharina supported her, the old wizard touched her fingertips to Garric's throat. She closed her eyes, then opened them and faced the others again.

“We're too late,” Tenoctris said. “I'm so sorry. Garric is dead.”

There was complete silence. Then, for the first time in her life, Ilna cried openly.

 

Garric strode down a boulevard of the dead city, unaffected by the darkness or the miles of water over him. Yole had returned to the depths, but that didn't matter to Garric.

Because Garric was dead.

Fish that walked on their fins felt Garric's presence. They turned, launched themselves from the bottom, and swam off stiffly.

“I failed,” Garric said. He'd gotten used to being with King Carus. In death he was completely alone, but he spoke anyway. “I died before I'd reunited the Isles. I failed.”

On either side of the street were houses where wealthy citizens had lived in the days when Yole itself lived. Shutters hung open; the panes had fallen from most of the casements when wizardry engulfed Yole.

Tiles shaken from the roofs lay over the cobblestones. Garric saw them as red, though there was no color at this depth.

He smiled faintly. He was dead, but he still existed in this dead place; and he still had work to do.

The palace of the Dukes of Yole, fortified and a stark contrast to the comfortable luxury of the houses around it, stood before him. The gates were open when the island sank. The outer barbican had collapsed in the final earthquake, and the portcullis across the inner passage had decayed to a scale of salt-eaten iron on a frame of spongy wood.

It wouldn't have stopped Garric anyway. Nothing was going to stop him.

Three huge ammonites filled the palace courtyard. They adjusted the air  trapped within their coiled shells to balance themselves just above the paving stones. As Garric approached, they waved their thickets of tentacles minusculely.

Garric laughed. “Do you think I fear you?” he asked. “I'm already dead!”

He bent to pick up a stone fallen from the facade. It was a gargoyle's nose, hooked and distorted. He would have shied it at the Great Ones, but his fingers slipped through the limestone.

The creatures lifted on lashing tentacles, moving as though parts of the same entity. When they'd risen above the courtyard walls, their siphons drove them backward and away. Their shells had the opalescent beauty of rainbows in the skies of Hell.

The last Garric saw of the Great Ones was their glaring, angry eyes.

He stepped into an anteroom which would have seemed dingy in the upper world. The thick walls and narrow windows required for defense meant a dark, narrow interior. The Duchy of Yole hadn't been rich enough to build on a scale that gave even this sort of architecture a stark majesty.

Light didn't matter to Garric any longer. He had one task remaining before he went down to the Sister's realm forevermore. Garric had failed the kingdom, but he would not fail to accomplish this thing.

He passed through a pointed archway; the curtain which once had closed it was a tangle of gold and silver wires, still clinging to a few of the linen warp threads. At the end of the high room beyond, a figure sat on the duke's throne.

“Greetings, brother,” the figure called. Its lips didn't move, for it had no lips. “Greetings Garric, King of the World and of All Time.”

Garric laughed. “Greetings, Purlio,” he said. “I've come to kill you.”

“No, brother, no,” Purlio said. The ammonite which replaced his head waved its tentacles in a subtle pattern. “You can't kill me, because I'm already dead. But—”

“I can kill you, liar,” Garric said.

He smiled as he might have done at a particularly fine roast before he started to carve. He didn't have a sword in this existence, but that wouldn't matter.

“I'm not responsible for your death, Garric!” Purlio said. “But I can give you life again. Together nothing can stand against us!”

“You can't stand against me now, Purlio,” Garric said as he continued to walk forward. He supposed movement was as much an illusion as the body he imagined himself wearing—but perhaps not. The drowned city seemed real, though the hand with which he'd tried to touch it was not.

The tentacles where Purlio's face should be grew agitated. “You wanted to be King of the Isles, really king. I can give you life and domination, brother. Garric, King of the World! Garric, Immortal!”

The throne stood in a bay framed on three sides by windows. It was intended to light the duke while his petitioners remained in shadow. Originally the casements had held colored glass, but only the twisted lead strips holding the pieces had survived the earthquake. Purlio looked as though he sat in a grape arbor after a killing frost.

“I'd have died before I became king on your terms, wizard,” Garric said. He laughed. “I did die. Now the only thing keeping me in this world is the chance to see you out of it forever. Goodbye, Purlio!”

Garric leaped. The tentacles of Purlio's face wrapped Garric's right hand and drew his fingers toward the crushing beak.

Garric flung the wizard sideways. To his amazement, the throne crumbled under the impact of Purlio's body. Flakes of ivory inlay and gold leaf separated from the sodden framework. Purlio—or the monster that had taken control of Purlio—existed in the realm of the dead where Garric could reach him, but a part of the wizard still had a connection to the waking world.

Garric laughed and broke free. That connection was Purlio's doom.

The Great One's tentacles writhed. Ilna would understand the spell of binding they were trying to weave, but the pattern was a thing for flesh and the living. Garric stepped forward unfazed.

He'd been trying to fight a man, but the man Purlio had been no longer mattered. Garric grabbed the wizard by the waist. A human would've countered by seizing Garric by the throat or shoulders, but Purlio still didn't move his arms. The wizard bent, trying to bring the tentacles close enough to grip Garric's face.

Garric stepped into his opponent, shifting his weight. Running and wrestling were boys' chief sports in the borough, and Garric had excelled at both of them.

The Great One screamed in Garric's mind like a saw cutting glass. Garric's vision blurred with agony, but he threw Purlio headfirst into the sandstone pillar beside the throne.

The ammonite shattered. Fragments of marcasite, eggshell thin and the color of burnished gold, fluttered up in the turbulence. The flesh within the shell dissolved into a rosy pulp, the constituents from which the Great One had molded its physical being.

Purlio lay dead. His dried muscles were as fragile as his brittle bones. Flakes of the wizard's flesh drifted out of his robes, sloughed as a result of the mishandling they'd received from Garric.

Garric felt a force drawing him. The ruined city lost color; then its gray forms blurred into the grayness of eternity.

With the last spark of something that cared about success and failure, Garric shouted, “You'll never touch my world again, Purlio!”

And there was blackness.

 

Sharina felt the head pillowed in her lap stir; she prayed silently to the Lady that it wasn't a spasm in dead muscles. “He's coming around!” she said aloud.

“Master Krias wouldn't lie to me,” Cashel said. “He said I'd need the fruit, after all, and he was right about that.”

Cashel squatted with his quarterstaff upright beside him, pointedly a little apart from the group tending Garric. Sharina didn't think Cashel's concern that he'd smash things by accident was justified, but it was no less real for that.

Dalar was on the other side of the tent, directly across from Cashel. He remained perfectly still in this gathering of tense humans.

Liane held the plum Cashel had taken from his wallet. She squeezed a last drop into Garric's open mouth. He spluttered and his eyelids twitched, though they remained closed.

“Oh, Lady,” Liane whispered. She'd remained dry-eyed, but now tears ran down her cheeks. “Thank You for Your mercy.”

Tenoctris sank back against the support of Ilna's arm. “I wish I could believe in the Gods,” she said, “so that I'd have someone to thank also. Perhaps you can pray for me, Liane.”

She looked at Cashel. “I don't doubt the honesty of your demon friend, Cashel,” she continued. “Not now, at least. But I don't understand why if the fruit was to work, it didn't work until now.”

Garric mumbled like a man coming out of a deep sleep. He was speaking words, but they were too slurred for Sharina to understand them.

“Because it wasn't yet time to work that thread into the pattern,” Ilna said, her eyes on Garric—and Liane. Ilna's smile meant as much as her smiles ever did: a great deal, but nothing that anyone else would be able to read. “Who do you suppose is at the loom, Tenoctris?”

“I would say rather,” said Ilna's scarred friend Chalcus. “that Master Garric delayed to finish his work. Which may be the same thing, do you think?”

He smiled at Ilna in a way nobody had ever smiled at Ilna; but Sharina had seen Chalcus' sword move. Of all people, that man knew what Ilna was in her heart.

Garric coughed. His eyes opened in amazement. Sharina felt her brother start to lurch upright, but another fit of coughing interrupted him. He turned on his side instead so that he wouldn't choke.

At last Garric straightened. Liane threw her arms around his neck. She was trying to speak but the words were lost in her sobbing. Sharina got up, feeling a little embarrassed, and settled again at Cashel's side.

Liane pulled away, red-faced and smiling. She dabbed with a lace handkerchief from her sleeve, then nodded thanks as Ilna silently handed her the square of tight-woven linen she carried.

“But I'm dead,” Garric said in wonderment.

“No,” said Tenoctris, “but you were.”

Garric held his hands out in front of him and flexed them, watching the play of muscles and tendons. He looked around the circle of his friends with a terrible smile.

“I see,” he said. “But Purlio is dead, Tenoctris. And he's going to stay that way.”