THE FORTRESS OF GLASS

Book One of

The Crown of the Isles

by David Drake

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

 

The Fortress of Glass

Copyright 2006 by David Drake

 

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

 

Cover art by Donato

 

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

 

Tor Books on the World Wide Web:

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Tor(r) is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

 

First Edition: April 2006

ISBN 0-7653-1259-X

 

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 98-7132

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

DEDICATION

To Mark L. Van Name

 

Again, sort of.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dan Breen continues as my first reader, just as careful and crotchety as ever. He tends toward proper grammar (some might say pleonasm), and I tend toward the striking ellipsis (sometimes more striking than intelligible), so we make a good team.

Dorothy Day has been doing continuity checking for me on this on several previous books. That is, I'll need to know the name of (to pick a real example) Katchin the Miller's wife, and she'll tell me that it depends on which book I choose. (I've needed a continuity checker longer than I've had one.)

My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, has a skill at finding data which goes beyond craftsmanship. When I need a reference, it appears magically in my in-box within a couple hours.

Mark Van Name has been my friend for more than twenty years, and for that reason I dedicated a book to him back in 1990. Mark is a variety of things besides being my friend, however. Among them, he's a management and marketing consultant; in which capacity he advised me on the structure of The Crown of the Isles, the trilogy of which this novel is part.

Computers (two of them) Died in Making This Book. (Yes, I'm used to it by now.) Mark, my son Jonathan, and Jennie Faries got me out of holes.

My wife Jo bore with me, fed me superbly, and kept the house as clean as possible under the circumstances. (I'm really going to clean up my mess of paper now.)

My thanks to all those above, and to others who just by being nice people made my world brighter than it would've been otherwise.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

As before in the Isles series, I've based the magic on that of the Mediterranean Basin in Classical times. The voces mysticae (which I've called words of power) are taken from real spell tablets. Their purpose was to call the attention of demiurges (entities between men and Gods) to the wishes of the person casting the spell. I do not personally believe in Classical magic or any magic, but neither do I choose to pronounce the voces mysticae aloud: I've been wrong before.

In my writing I always use bits and pieces not only of history but of other fiction, scenes and phrases that made a strong impression on me. This time the plot was shaped in part by my study of Spawn, a story by P. Schuyler Miller. Those of you who haven't read Spawn can find it reprinted in the fat anthology The World Turned Upside Down, along with many other stories which the three editors found particularly memorable.

Another direct influence was Ovid, who can be amazingly evocative with a mere line or two. For an example of what I mean, compare (on my website; see below) my translation of the Perseus section of the Metamorphoses with the portion of Fortress involving Cashel and the Daughter of Phorcys.

Again as usual, I've translated scraps from real Latin poets into the fabric of this novel. While it's rarely a good idea to assume that a fictional character is expressing the author's real beliefs, I will note here that Garric's observations on O fons Bandusiae summarize the reasons I carried the OCT edition of Horace with me through my time in the army in 1969-71. There are times and places in which it's very important to have proof that civilization exists, or at least that it once existed.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

 

Chapter 1

Tenoctris the Wizard stood in the prow of the royal flagship, staring intently at the sky. "Sharina," she said, "we're suddenly in a focus of enormous power. There's something here. There's something coming here."

Sharina glanced upward also. "Is it good or bad?" she asked, but the wizard was lost in contemplation.

Cumulus clouds were piled over the island of First Atara on the northern horizon, but here above The Shepherd of the Isles there was only a high chalky haze. Whatever Tenoctris was looking at couldn't be seen by an ordinary person like Sharina os-Reise.

Sharina grinned: or, for that matter, seen by Princess Sharina of Haft. In preparation for meeting the ruler of First Atara, she was this afternoon wearing court robes garments of silk brocade stiffened with embroidery in gold thread. They were hot and uncomfortable in most circumstances; here on shipboard they were awkward beyond words. The Shepherd had five oar-banks and was as big as a warship got, but the deck of her streamlined hull was no wider than necessary to allow sailors to trim the yards when the vessel was under sail.

Sometimes Sharina wondered whether she'd feel more at ease in formal garments if she'd been raised wearing them. Liane bos-Benliman, her brother Garric's noble fiancée, certainly wore hers with calm style. On the other hand, Liane did everything with style. If Liane hadn't been such a good person and so obviously in love with Garric, even Sharina might've felt twinges of envy in thinking about her.

Sharina and Garric had been raised by their father, the innkeeper in the tiny community of Barca's Hamlet on Haft. No school for the wealthy could've educated them better in the literature of the Old Kingdom than Reise himself had, but they'd grown up in simple woolen tunics and had gone barefoot half the year.

Sharina grinned. She guessed she could learn to wear court robes more easily than even Liane could learn to wait tables in a common room packed with sheep drovers and their servants, many of them drunk.

Horns and trumpets were calling, slowing the hundred and more ships of the royal fleet to a crawl. A little vessel draped with gaudy bunting was coming out to meet them with a wriggle of oars.

One of the royal triremes, the swift and handy three-banked vessels which were the backbone of the fighting fleet, had already come alongside the stranger and passed it as harmless, though that didn't explain why the island's authorities felt a need to approach Garric-Prince Garric-at sea. No reasonable official would choose to negotiate on the wobbling deck of a warship, since even people who weren't seasick would find a conference table in the palace a better location for spreading documents and consulting ledgers.

"There seem to be five-no, six passengers," Sharina said, peering down at the deck of the twenty-oared barge bringing the Ataran delegation. She frowned and added, "And one of them's just a boy."

The island's present ruler called himself King Cervoran, and his ancestors for hundreds of years had claimed the title "king" also. They'd gotten away with it because First Atara kept to itself, never making trouble for its neighbors or for the King of the Isles in Valles... and because for generations the King of the Isles had ruled little more than the island of Ornifal and eventually had ruled nothing outside the walls of the royal palace.

That'd changed when the present King of the Isles, Valence III, adopted a youth named Garric, a descendent of the ancient line of Old Kingdom monarchs, as his son and heir apparent. It had to change. Unless there were a strong hand on the kingdom's rudder, the same forces that swept up Garric and his sister would smash the new kingdom. The second catastrophe would finish what that of a thousand years before had left.

It was all well to say that every man should live his life without being pestered by distant officials. That's the way things had been in Barca's Hamlet, pretty much, simply because the community was a tiny backwater on an island which had ceased to be important a thousand years before.

Most of those who said that now, however, were local nobles. What they meant by freedom was that nobody from Valles should tell them how they should treat their own peasants. A peasant given the opportunity generally prefers a bully on a distant island to a bully in the castle overlooking his farm. Even better: Garric's government didn't bully and it tried to protect its citizens.

Garric hadn't set out to conquer the other islands of the kingdom; rather, he was visiting thtem one by one in a Royal Progress-accompanied by a fleet and army that obviously could crush any would-be secessionist. As a result, the reunification of the Isles was taking place in conference rooms, not on battlefields.

Tenoctris clasped her hands and muttered in reaction to the pageant she alone saw in the sky. If there were proof that the Gods rather than blind chance ruled the world, it was in the fact that the same cataclysm that brought down the Old Kingdom threw Tenoctris forward from that time to this one.

Wizards used the powers on which the cosmos balanced. These waxed and waned in thousand-year cycles and were at a peak now. Because wizards remained for the most part as blind, clumsy, and foolish as they'd been when they'd conjured music and baubles from the air to amaze guests at a feast, disaster loomed over the New Kingdom as surely as it had wrecked the Old.

Even in these days Tenoctris could affect very little through wizardry, but she saw and understood the powers which greater wizards used in ignorance. Her knowledge and the strong hand of Prince Garric of Haft had so far been enough to reunify the kingdom; and the Isles to be unified if they were to face the threats, human and demonic, which had swollen as the underlying powers increased.

No one could look at the present world and doubt that Good and Evil existed. Those who thought they could remain neutral in the struggle had chosen Evil, even though they wouldn't admit it.

Sharina put her arm around Tenoctris for companionship. The old wizard had lived seventy years or more, and something of the weight of the ten centuries she'd been thrown forward seemed to lie on her shoulders also. Tenoctris didn't believe in the Great Gods and all she'd ever wanted from life was peace for her studies, but she was spending her life in the service of Good.

As were Garric and Sharina and their friends; as were all the members of the royal army and the royal administration. Individually they included better folk and worse, but all were on the right side in the greater struggle... or so Sharina believed.

She smiled again, broadly this time. She did believe that.

Sharina turned to watch the barge nuzzle the Shepherd's high, curving stern where Garric stood with Liane, a pair of aides, and a squad of black-armored members of the Blood Eagles, the bodyguard regiment. Garric's silvered breastplate made him look both regal and heroic-which was the purpose, of course; nobody expected fighting here on First Atara.

Sharina noticed he hadn't donned the helmet with the flaring gilt wings that completed the outfit, though he probably would before they landed. By the time her brother was fifteen he was already the tallest man in Barca's Hamlet, and the helmet added a full hand's-breadth to that height.

Garric was strong as well as tall, but there was a stronger man yet in the community: Cashel or-Kenset, an orphan raised by his twin sister Ilna after their grandmother died; a quiet fellow, gentle as a lamb and without a lamb's querulous self-importance. A man taller than most, broader than almost any, and stronger than anyone he'd ever met or was likely to meet.

He stood now behind the two women like a wall of muscle, his hickory quarterstaff an upright pillar in his right hand. Sharina, still touching Tenoctris with her left hand, put her right in the crook of his elbow. Cashel smiled because he usually smiled, and he smiled wider because Sharina touched him. It would've embarrassed him to take her hand in public, but nobody seeing the two of them together could doubt that they loved one another.

Sailors from the barge had thrown lines from bow and stern aboard the Shepherd; crewmen snubbed them to the outrigger that carried three of the flagship's five oar-banks. The sailing master was blasting the barge captain with remarkable curses, though, at the notion that the smaller vessel would be allowed to lie hull to hull where it'd scrape the flagship's paint. The barge captain swore back.

"We've been three months since the ships were overhauled in Carcosa," Sharina said, frowning. "I don't see that a few more scrapes are going to be noticed."

Sailors tended to carry out their business as though the officials travelling as passengers didn't exist. She and Garric had been taught to keep their affairs-the inn's affairs-secret from the guests. This slanging match the officers of the two ships offended Sharina's sense of propriety, though the curses themselves did not.

"I think what he's saying is that we're fine people from the palace in Valles," said Cashel, quietly but with something solid in his tone that wouldn't have been there if he were better satisfied with the situation. "And they're just nobodies from the sticks. Only we're not, not all of us; and I guess that fellow'd have been as quick to call me a nobody back before Garric got to be prince and it all changed."

"Not to your face, Cashel," Sharina said-and kissed him, surprising herself almost as much as she did her fiancé. It was the perfect way to break his mood; Cashel's face went the color of mahogany as he blushed under the deep tan. They were in the shelter of the jib boom, though, and everybody else was looking toward the stern where the delegation was swaying aboard on a rope ladder. Nobody was likely to have noticed.

"Do we know why these people are meeting us at sea?" Tenoctris said.

Sharina jumped. The older woman had been so thoroughly lost in her own thoughts that Sharina'd forgotten her presence.

"Ah, no," she said. "We could join them in the stern if you'd like, though. They're certainly an official delegation, so I guess it's our duty to be there."

"Right," said Cashel, turning and starting down the walkway stretching the length of the ship between the gratings over the rowers. There wasn't much room, but the sailors on deck would get out of his way though they might be so busy they'd ignore the women.

Sharina motioned Tenoctris ahead of her and brought up the rear. She didn't have Cashel's bulk, but her tall, slender body was muscular and she had reflexes gained from waiting tables in rooms crowded with men.

"They may have nothing to do with what I feel building around us," Tenoctris said quietly, perhaps speaking to herself as much as to her younger companions. "But their meeting us at sea is unusual, and the way the forces are building is very unusual; almost unique in my experience."

"'Almost unique'" Sharina said, delicately emphasizing the qualifier.

"Yes," said the wizard. "I felt something like this in the moments before similar I wwas ripped out of my time and the island of Yole sank into the depths of the sea."

* * *

One of Garric's guards gave his spear to a comrade so that he had a hand free to reach over the railing to the twelve-year-old climbing the swaying ladder ahead of five adults. "Here you go, lad," he said.

"Have a care, my man!" cried the puffy looking bald fellow immediately behind the boy. "This is Prince Protas, the ruler of our island!"

"All the more reason not to let him fall into the water, then," said Garric, stepping forward. "Since I'm told that right around here it's as deep as the Inner Sea gets."

He took the boy's right hand while the soldier gripped him under the left shoulder, and together they lifted him aboard. Protas tucked his legs under him so that his toes didn't touch the rail. Though he didn't speak, he bowed politely to Garric and dipped his head to the soldier as well, then slipped forward to get as much out of the way as was possible on the warship's deck.

The plump official reached the railing. Garric nodded a guard forward to help him but pointedly didn't offer a hand himself.

"That would be Lord Martous," Liane whispered in his left ear. "Protas is King Cervoran's son, but Cervoran was ruler as of my latest information."

Among Liane's other duties, she was Garric's spymaster; or rather she was a spymaster who kept Garric informed of events from all over the Isles, whether or not they took place on islands which had returned to royal control. Her father had been a far-travelled merchant. Liane of her own volition-Garric wouldn't have known what to ask her to do-had turned his network of business connections into a full-fledged intelligence service. It'd benefited the kingdom more than another ten regiments for the army could've done.

Lord Martous had an unhappy expression as he struggled aboard in the soldier's grasp. Garric shared his mind with the spirit of King Carus, his ancient ancestor and the last ruler of the Old Kingdom. Now the image of Carus grinned and said, "If I know the type, he looks unhappy most of the time he's awake. Being manhandled over the railing just gives him a better reason than usual."

Martous straightened his clothing with quick pats of his hands while he waited for the remainder of the delegation to climb onto the deck, aides or servants from their simpler dress. One of them carried a bundle wrapped in red velvet.

The delegates wore baggy woolen trousers and blouses, felt caps, and slippers whose toes turned up in points. Martous and Protas had long triangular gares of cloth-of-gold appliqued vertically on their sleeves and trouser legs; those of the other men were plain. The wool was bleached white, but it was clear that First Atara's society didn't set great store on flamboyant personal decoration.

Garric preferred simplicity to the styles of the great cities of the kingdom, Valles and Erdin on Sandrakkan or even Carcosa which now was merely the capital of the unimportant island of Haft. It'd been the royal capital during the Old Kingdom, and it remained a pretentious place despite its glory being a thousand years in the past.

Garric grinned at Lord Martous: a balding little fellow, a homely man from a rustic place who was incensed that he and the boy on whom his status depended weren't being treated with greater deference. That implied that pretentiousness was one of the strongest human impulses.

"Come along, Basto, come along," called Lord Martous to the aide struggling with the bundle. Then on a rising note, "No, don't you-"

The latter comment was to Lord Attaper, the commander of the Blood Eagles and a man to whom Garric's safety was more important than it was to Garric himself. Attaper, a stocky, powerful man in his forties, ignored the protest just as he ignored all other attempts to tell him how to do his job. He plucked the package from the aide's hands and unwrapped it while the aide came aboard and Martous spluttered in frustration.

"I'm sorry you had to scramble up like a monkey, Prince Protas," Garric said, smiling at the boy to put him at his ease. Protas was obviously nervous and uncertain, afraid to say or do the wrong thing in what he knew were important circumstances. "I'd expected to meet you-and your father, of course-on land in a few hours."

"King Cervoran is dead, sir," Protas said with careful formality. He forced himself to look straight at Garric as he spoke, but then he swallowed hard.

"Yes, yes, that's why we had to come out to meet you," Martous said, pursing his lips as though he were sucking on something sour. "His highness died most unexpectedly as he was going in to dinner last evening. Quite distressing, quite. He fell right down in his tracks. I was afraid the stewards had dropped something on the floor and he'd slipped, but he just-died."

"I probably could give you advice on housekeeping in a large establishment," Garric said, smiling instead of snarling at the courtier's inability to come to the point, "but I really doubt that's why you've met us here at the cost of discomfort and a degree of danger. Is it, milord?"

Martous looked surprised. "Oh," he said. "Well, of course not. But I thought-that is, the council did-that since you were arriving just in time, you could preside over the apotheosis ceremony for King Cervoran and add, well, luster to the affair. And of course we needed to explain that to you before you come ashore because the ceremony will have to be carried out first thing tomorrow morning. The cremation can't, you see, be delayed very long in this weather."

"Apotheosis?" said Liane. She didn't ordinarily interject herself openly into matters of state, but Lord Martous was obviously a palace flunky, and not from a very big palace if it came to that. "You believe your late ruler becomes a God?"

"Well, I don't, of course I don't," said Martous in embarrassment. "But the common people, you know; and they like a spectacle. And, well, it's traditional here on First Atara. And it can't hurt, after all."

"This doesn't appear to be a weapon, milord," said Attaper dryly. "Shall I return it to your servant, or would you like to take it yourself?"

The velvet wrappings covered a foiled wooden box decorated with cutwork astrological symbols. Inside was a diadem set with a topaz the size of Garric's clenched fist. The stone wasn't particularly clear or brilliant, even for a topaz, but Garric didn't recall ever seeing a larger gem.

Protas, forgotten during the adults' by-play, said in a clear voice, "We brought it to your master the prince, my man. He will decide where to bestow it."

Garric nodded politely to the young prince. "Your pardon, milord," he said in real apology. "We've had a long voyage and it appears to have made us less courteous than we ought to be."

He took the diadem. The gold circlet was thicker and broader at the back to help balance the weight of the huge stone, but even so it had a tendency to slip forward in his fingers.

Cashel had led Sharina and Tenoctris to the stern, butt now he stepped aside and let the women join the group of officials. When he caught Garric's glance over Tenoctris' head, he smiled broadly. Cashel stayed close to Sharina, but he wasn't interested in what the locals had come to discuss and didn't pretend otherwise.

Cashel wasn't interested in power. He was an extraordinarily strong man, and he had other abilities besides. If he wasn't exactly a wizard himself, then he'd more than once faced hostile wizards and crushed them. That alone would've gained him considerable authority if he'd wanted it. Add to that his being Prince Garric's friend from childhood and Princess Sharina's fiancé, and a great part of the kingdom was Cashel's for the asking.

But he didn't ask. Cashel wouldn't have known what to do with a kingdom if he'd had it, and anyway it wasn't something he wanted. Which of course was much of the reason he was Garric's closest friend: Garric didn't want power either.

"That may be," said Carus. "But the kingdom wants you; needs you anyway, which is better. Otherwise the best the citizens could hope for is a hard-handed warrior who knows nothing but smashing trouble down with his sword until trouble smashes him in turn. Somebody like me-and we know the bad result that leads to."

The ghost in Garric's mind was smiling, but there was no doubt of the solid truth under its lilt of self-mockery. Garric grinned in response; the delegates saw the expression and misread it.

Lord Martous stiffened and said, "The crown may seem a poor thing to you, milord, a mere topaz. But it's an ancient stone, very ancient, and it suits us on First Atara. We were hoping that you would invest Prince Protas with it following the ceremony deifying his father."

Garric glanced at the boy and found him chatting with Cashel. That probably made both of them more comfortable than they'd be in the discussion Garric and Martous were having.

Both the thought and the fact behind it pleased Garric, but he politely wiped all traces of misunderstood good humor from his face before he said, "I'll confer with my advisors before I give you a final decision, milord, particularly Lords Tadai and Waldron, my civil affairs and military commanders. That won't happen until we're on land."

"But you're the prince-" the envoy protested.

"That's correct," said Garric, aware of Carus' ghost chuckling at the way he handled this bit of niggling foolishness. "I'm the prince and make the final decisions under the authority granted by my father King Valence III."

Valence was so sunk within himself in his apartments in a back corner of the palace that servants chose his meals for him. He wasn't exceptionally old, but life and a series of bad choices had made a sad ruin of a mind which on its best day hadn't been very impressive.

"But I have a staff to keep track of matters on which I lack personal knowledge," Garric continued. "The political and cultural circumstances of First Atara are in that category, I'm afraid. I have no intention of slighting you and your citizens by acting in needless ignorance. We weren't expecting King Cervoran's death, and it'll take the kingdom a moment to decide how to respond."

"Well, I see that," said Martous, "but-"

"I'd have tossed him over the railing by now, lad," Carus said. "By the Lady! it's a good thing for the kingdom that you're ruling instead of me."

Garric looked into the big topaz. There were cloudy blotches in its yellow depths. The stone had been shaped and polished instead of being faceted, and even then it wasn't regular: it was roughly egg shaped, but the small end was too blunt.

It was a huge gem, though; and there was something more which Garric couldn't quite grasp. The shadows in its heart seemed to move, though perhaps that was an illusion caused by the quinquereme's sideways wobble. Only a few oars on the uppermost bank were working, so the ship didn't have enough way on to make its long hull fully stable.

Liane touched his wrist. Garric blinked awake; the eyes of those nearby watched him with concern. He must've been in a reverie....

"I'm very sorry," he said aloud. "It was a long voyage, as I said. Lord Martous, while I won't swear what my decision will be until I've consulted my council, I can tell you that I intended to grant the rank of marquess within the Kingdom of the Isles to the ruler of First Atara-whom of course we believed to be Lord Cervoran."

"King Cervoran," Martous protested quickly.

"King is a title reserved for Valence III and his successors as rulers of the Isles, milord," Garric said. He didn't raise his voice much, but his tone made his meaning clear. "That is not a matter King Valence or I will compromise on."

"Well, of course you can do as you please, since you have the power," Martous said unhappily to the deck plank which his gilt slipper was rubbing. In a tiny voice he added, "But it isn't fair."

Garric opened his mouth to snap out a retort. The grim-faced ghost in his mind would've backhanded the courtier for his presumption or possibly done something more brutally final. Perhaps it was that awareness that allowed Garric to catch himself and laugh instead of snarling.

"Lord Martous," he said mildly. "The kingdom is under threat from the forces of evil. The people, all those who live on all the scores of islands large and small within the circuit of the kingdom, are threatened. We and those whom we rule won't survive if we aren't united against that evil. I hope that in a few years or even sooner you'll be able to see that First Atara is better off as a full part of the kingdom than it would've been had it remained independent; but regardless of that-"

Garric made a broad gesture with his right arm, his sword arm; sweeping it across the long line of warships to starboard. As many more vessels were arrayed to port.

"-I'm very glad you understand that the kingdom has the power to enforce its will. Because we do, and for the sake of the people of the Isles, we'd use that power."

"We're not fools here," Martous said quietly, proving that he after all wasn't a fool. "We cast ourselves on your mercy. But-"

His tone grew a trifle brighter, almost enthusiastic.

"-I do hope you'll see fit to crown Prince Protas in a public ceremony. That will be quite the biggest thing that's happened here since the fall of the Old Kingdom!"

Garric laughed, feeling the ghost in his mind laugh with him. "I trust we'll be able to come to an accommodation, milord," he said, glancing toward the prince and Cashel. "I'm sure we will!"

* * *

Cashel or-Kenset prickled all over like he'd gotten too much sun while plowing. That could happen, even for a fellow like him who'd been outside pretty much every day he could remember, but it wasn't what he was feeling this afternoon.

This was wizardry. He'd known his share of that too, in the past couple years since everything changed and he'd left Barca's Hamlet.

Cashel held his quarterstaff upright in his right hand; one ferrule rested on the deck beside him. He crossed his left arm over his chest, letting his fingertips caress the smooth hickory.

In his tenth year Cashel had felled a tree for a neighbor in the borough and taken one long, straight branch as his price for the work. He'd cut the staff from that branch and had carried it from that day to this.

A blacksmith travelling through Barca's Hamlet on his circuit had fitted the first set of iron butt caps, but there'd been others over the years. The staff, though, was the same: thick, hard, and polished like glass by the touch of Cashel's calloused palms and the wads of raw wool he carried to dress the wood. It'd been a good friend to Cashel; and with the staff in his hands, Cashel had been a very good friend to weaker folk facing terrors.

Just about everybody was weaker than Cashel. He smiled a little wider. Everybody he'd met so far, anyway.

The little boy who'd come aboard with the puffed up fellow and the servants looked uncomfortable as he edged back from the adults talking politics. Getting up on their hind legs, really. The fellow from First Atara was trying to make himself big and Garric was pushing him back, showing him he wasn't much at all. With luck the fellow'd stop making trouble before he wound up with a headache or worse.

A shepherd didn't have a lot to learn about how people behaved in a palace. It was all the same, sheep or courtiers.

Being uncomfortable while folks talked about things he didn't know about or care about wasn't new to Cashel either, so he grinned at the boy in a friendly way. It was like he'd tossed him a rope as he splashed in the sea: the boy stepped straight over to Cashel and said, "Good day, milord. I'm Prince Protas. Are you Lord Cashel? I thought you must be because you're, well... you're very big. I've heard of you."

Protas spoke very carefully. He was trying to be formal, but every once in a while his voice squeaked and made him blush. Cashel remembered that too.

"I'm Cashel," he said, letting the smile fade so Protas wouldn't mistake it as mocking his trouble with his voice. "Not 'lord' though. And I've met bigger folk than me; though not a lot of them, I'll grant."

Protas nodded solemnly. He looked away from Cashel, facing in the general direction of First Atara. "My father King Cervoran died just yesterday," he said. "Lord Martous tells me that I'm going to be king now in his place, or whatever Prince Garric lets me be called."

"I'm sorry about your father, Protas," Cashel said, meaning it. Kenset, his father and Ilna's, had gone away from Barca's Hamlet and come back with the two children a year later. Kenset had never said where he'd been or who the twins' mother was. He hadn't said much of anything by all accounts, and he hadn't worked at anything except drinking himself to death. He'd managed that one frosty night a few years later.

The children's grandmother had raised Cashel and Ilna while she lived. After she died, leaving a pair of nine-year-olds, they'd raised themselves. Ilna always had a mind for things, and Cashel as a boy had a man's strength. When he got his growth, well, his strength grew too. They'd made out with Ilna's weaving and Cashel doing whatever needed muscle and care. Mostly he'd tended sheep.

"I didn't know my father very well," Protas said, continuing to look out to sea. Cashel guessed the boy really didn't want to meet Cashel's eyes, which meant either he was embarrassed or he figured Cashel'd be embarrassed by what he had to say. "He was very busy with his studies. He was a great scholar, you know."

"That's a fine thing to be," Cashel said. He meant it, but mostly he spoke to help the boy get to whatever it was that he really wanted to say.

Cashel'd learned to spell his name out or even write it if somebody gave him time and didn't complain that the letters looked shaky. He was proud of knowing Garric and Sharina because they read and wrote as well as anybody even though they'd come from Barca's Hamlet instead of a big city. Those weren't skills Cashel felt the lack of himself, though.

"My father King Cervoran was a wizard, lor-l... Master Cashel," Protas said, his voice squeaking three times in the short sentence. He glanced sideways, then jerked his eyes away like Cashel had slapped him. He kept talking, though. "You're a wizard too, aren't you? That is, I've heard you are?"

"I don't know where you'd have heard that...," Cashel said, speaking even more slowly and carefully than he usually did. He cleared his throat, wishing there was room so he could spin his quarterstaff. That always settled him when he was feeling uncomfortable, which he surely was right now. "Anyway, I'd as soon you just called me Cashel with no masters or lords or who knows what elses. It's what I'm used to being called, you see."

"I'm sorry, m-mas... Cashel," the boy said. He sounded like he was ready to start blubbering. "I didn't mean to say the wrong thing. I'm just so, so-oh, Cashel, I just feel so alone!"

Cashel squatted down so that his face was a bit lower than the boy's instead of staring down at him. He didn't look straight at Protas either, because that might be enough to push the boy into tears.

"I'm not a wizard like most people think of wizard," Cashel said quietly. He didn't guess anybody but Protas could hear him over the sigh of the light easterly breeze; and if they could, well, he wasn't telling any more than the truth. "I don't know anything about spells or the like. Only my mother...."

He paused again to figure just how to say the next part. Protas was looking at him straight-on now. He seemed interested and no longer on the verge of crying.

"I didn't know my mother till I met her just a little bit ago when we were on Sandrakkan," Cashel went on. He gripped the upright staff with both hands, taking strength from the smooth hickory. "She was a queen in her own land, and she was a wizard. Not the way Tenoctris is by studying and memorizing old books, but sort of born to it. Tenoctris says my mother is really powerful; and I guess she must be, from the things I saw her do."

He cleared his throat again, then made himself look up and meet the boy's eyes squarely. "I guess I picked up some of that from her," Cashel said. "I did and Ilna did too, only not the same way. Ilna can do things with cloth, weave anything and make a net that catches somebody's mind when they look at it. And Ilna's smart, too, like our mother."

He grinned broadly. "Not like me," he added. "I'm about smart enough to watch sheep, but that's all."

"King Cervoran wasn't a wizard in a bad way," Protas said. He was still facing Cashel but his eyes were fuzzy; looking back into the past, most likely. "He just used his art to learn things. That was the only thing that was important to him, learning things."

Cashel nodded. "There's people like that," he said carefully. It struck him as strange to hear Protas talking about his father so formally, but he wasn't the one to judge. He didn't talk about Kenset much at all.

But then, maybe Cervoran hadn't had any more to do with Protas than Kenset had with his children while they were growing up. The things Cervoran wanted to learn about didn't seem to have included his own son.

"I thought...," Protas said, then looked away again. "I thought when I heard about you that you were like my father. With your art, I mean. That you didn't use wizardry to hurt people. That's so, isn't it?"

"Well, I try not to hurt good people," Cashel said. "I've met my share of the other kind, though, and some of them got hurt. By me."

He understood what the boy was getting at now. Though he didn't want to be unkind to Protas, he didn't intend to let him think Cashel was going to be some kind of father to him.

He grinned broadly. "Look, Protas," he said, "being a, well, a wizard the way I am isn't anything to be proud of. It's like Sharina having blond hair: it's the way she was born and I was born. The way she reads things, though-that she worked to do. Sharina's a scholar and Garric too; that's something they did all by themselves. And I'll show you what I did and I am proud of."

Cashel looked both ways to make sure not only that there was room but also that nobody was about to step where he was going in the next instant; then he hopped to the railing. The ship heeled a trifle; Cashel was a solid weight, and The Shepherd of the Isles was both slender and perfectly balanced.

Master Lobon, the sailing master, turned and snarled, "Hey, you moron!" When he saw he'd shouted at Cashel, Lord Cashel the Prince's friend, he swallowed the rest of what he was going to say with a look of horror. Lobon's opinion of what Cashel was doing hadn't changed, but he wished he hadn't been quite so open with it.

Cashel was facing seaward on the stern rail. He crossed one bare foot over the other and turned so he could meet the eyes of everybody on the Shepherd's deck, then started his staff spinning slowly in a sunwise pattern.

He grinned. The sailing master was right about the foolishness, but it was in the good cause of lifting Protas' mind out of whatever bad place his father's death had put him in. Besides, Cashel needed the exercise after a day at sea.

The staff spun faster. The gentle sway and pitch of the ship wasn't a problem; Cashel was used to crossing creeks on rain-slicked logs, carrying sheep which were still muddy and kicking in terror from the bog he'd dragged them out of.

Everybody was looking at him now. Garric grinned with his hands on his hips; Sharina's expression was a mixture of pride and love. How amazing it was that she loved him! The ferrules blurred into a gleaming circle.

Cashel lifted the whirling staff overhead, feeling the tug of its rotation fighting the strength of his powerful wrists. He gave a shout and jumped from the railing, letting the hickory carry him around so that he faced seaward again; shouted, jumped, and faced the ship, the staff still in his hands.

Cashel jumped down to the deck, flushed and triumphant. The pine planking creaked dangerously at the shock; he'd hit harder than he'd meant too. He was making it look easy-that was half the trick, after all-but it'd taken a lot out of even his great muscles. After the strain, his judgment wasn't as good as maybe it ought to've been.

"There!" Cashel said to Protas, fighting the urge to suck in air through his mouth. "That's not something I was born to or given. That I can do because I worked till I could. That's something I'm proud of!"

But as he spoke, his skin itched like hot coals. Wizardry was building to the breaking point in the world about him.

* * *

Ilna os-Kenset squatted on the foredeck of the cutter Heron, a hand loom in her lap and her eyes on the sky. She was weaving a pattern that'd be abstract to the eyes of those who viewed it: blurred, gentle curves of grays and blacks and browns, the colors of a coast soon after sunset. All the hues were natural; Ilna didn't trust dyes.

She smiled faintly. She didn't trust most things. In particular she didn't trust herself when she was angry, and she'd spent far too much time being angry.

Though the plaque Ilna wove looked to be only an exercise in muted good taste, the pattern would work deep in the minds of those who glanced at it. They wouldn't be aware of the effect, not consciously at least, but they'd go away soothed and a little more at peace with the world and themselves.

Ilna smiled again. It even worked on her, and her disposition was a very stiff test.

"Give us a song, captain!" called the stroke oar, a squat fellow with his wrists tattooed to look like he was wearing bracers.

"Aye, give us The Ladies o' Shengy, Cap'n Chalcus!" agreed one of the rowers from the lower tier, sitting on deck now that the ship idled along with only the slow strokes of four oarsmen to keep her steady in the swell.

The Heron had a crew of fifty rowers in two tiers, with a dozen officers and deck hands for the rigging when her mast was raised. She was a stubby vessel, neither as fast nor as powerful as the triremes that made up the bulk of the royal fleet let alone the quinqueremes which acted as flagships for the squadrons and fleet itself.

For all that, the cutter was a warship. Her ram and the handiness of her short hull made her a dangerous opponent even to much larger vessels.

Ilna's smile, never broad, took on a hint of warmth. A fishing skiff would be a dangerous opponent if Chalcus commanded it.

"I will not sing such a thing and scandalize the fine ladies here with us," said Chalcus, but there was a cheery lilt in his voice. He bowed to the ten-year-old Lady Merota, seated on the stern rail like an urchin and not the heiress to the bos-Roriman fortune, then bowed lower yet to Ilna in the bow. "But I'll pass the time for you with The Brown Girl if there's a swig of wine-"

The helmsman lifted the skin of wine hanging from the railing by him where the spray kissed it. He slapped it into Chalcus' hand though neither man looked at the other as they made the exchange.

"-to wet my pipes," Chalcus concluded as he thumbed the carved wooden plug from the goatskin and drank deeply.

He was a close-coupled man, not much taller than Ilna herself. Chalcus looked trim when dressed in court clothing; he was hard as mahogany statue when he stripped to a sailor's breechclout, as he did often enough even now that Garric had made him the Heron's captain.

In a breechclout you saw the scars also. Several of the long-healed wounds should've been fatal. If one had been, Ilna would never have met him. It was hard to imagine what value she'd find in life at this moment were it not for Chalcus.

"'The Brown Girl she has houses and lands...,'" Chalcus sang in his clear tenor. His eyes continued to smile at Ilna till she leaned around to look at the sky again while her fingers wove. "'Fair Tresian has none....'"

Chalcus had sailed with the Lataaene pirates in southern waters. He didn't talk about those days or other days of the same sort he'd lived in the course of collecting the scars on his body. Ilna supposed Chalcus had as much on his conscience as she did on hers, though he carried the burden lightly as he did all things.

"'The best advice I can give you, my son...,'" Chalcus sang, his voice shining like a sunlit brook, "'is to bring the Brown Girl home."

Ilna didn't ask whether Chalcus was a good man or a bad one. He was her man, and that was enough.

Something rippled and seethed behind the sky's curtain of thin clouds. Ilna's fingers worked, weaving contentment for people she didn't know through ages she couldn't guess. Her patterns would last for the life of the wool, and that could be very long indeed.

Ilna'd always had a talent for yarns and fabric that went beyond mere skill. She could touch a swatch of cloth and know where the flax had grown or the sheep had gamboled; and she knew also what'd been in the heart of the one who wove it.

By the time she was twelve everyone in the borough knew that Ilna os-Kenset wove fabrics softer and finer than anyone else around. Before she left Barca's Hamlet at eighteen, two years past, merchants came from Sandrakkan and even Ornifal to buy her subtly woven cloth.

"'He dressed himself in scarlet red...,'" Chalcus sang. The Heron's crew, sailors as coarse as the hemp of the ship's rigging, listened to the lovely, lilting voice. Other men lined the near rail of The Shepherd of the Isles. "'He rode all o'er the town....'"

Ilna's road had led from Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa, the ancient capital on the other coast of Haft; and from Carcosa she'd gone to Hell where at the cost of her soul she'd learned to weave as no human could. She'd used her new skills in the service of Evil and in her own service, because she'd returned from Hell as surely an agent of Evil as any demon was.

Garric had freed Ilna from the darkness she'd sold herself to for love of him, but nothing-no deed, no apology, no remorse-could undo the things she'd done while she rejoiced in the power to make others act as she and Evil chose. So be it. She'd live the best way she could, helping the friends who'd been wiser and stronger and knew Evil only as an enemy. And whenever she could, she'd weave patterns that would make life a little less bleak for those who saw them.

The patterns helped even Ilna os-Kenset, who'd never forgive herself for the harm she'd done through anger and pride in her own skill. Her fingers worked, and her lips quirked wryly. She wasn't good at forgiving others either, if it came to that.

"'... they thought that he was the king," Chalcus sang, and Merota joined in on the harmony. Ilna glanced back. The child was clasping the sailor's left hand in both of hers, her face bright with delight.

It was remarkable the way the noble Lady Merota had taken to them, the peasant girl and the sailor who'd once been worse things. Merota had tutors, of course, and advisors to manage the properties and investments to which she'd fallen heir; but her parents were dead, and she'd never had anything like real friendship until she met Ilna.

Ilna knew how people treated an orphan girl without anyone to protect her. She couldn't change the whole world; but while she lived no one was going to use Merota as a stepping stone on their route to wealth and power.

The clouds on the eastern horizon had grown into an overcast smearing the heavens like lime wash over gray stone. The sun, barely past zenith, was a bright patch to the south. The sky wasn't stormy, and the sea moved as gently as ripe barley ruffled by a breeze. The threat, the lurking power, was no part of the natural world.

But it was present nonetheless.

"'What news, what news, Lord Thoma?' she said," sang Merota, taking the women's parts alone now. "'What news have you for me?'"

Sailors were hard men, and sailors willing to serve under Captain Chalcus were often harder still; some of the Heron's crew were little more than brutes. They listened to the girl with pleasure as innocent as her own.

It should come very shortly, Ilna thought, trying to read the pattern above the heavens.

"'I've come to ask you to my weddin','" Chalcus sang, and the heavens split with a continuing roar.

A blue-white glare hammered down, brighter than the sun in the first instants and growing brighter still. Ilna jerked her eyes away, but even the reflections from the wave-tops were so painfully vivid that she found herself squinting.

The clouds bubbled back like mud shocked by a thrown stone. Something was coming, and it was coming fast.

"Man your bloody benches!" Chalcus said. He was shouting, but even so the words were little more than a whisper over the sound of the sky tearing apart. "Get a way on, ye beggars, or the Sister'll swallow us down to Hell where we belong!"

As Chalcus spoke, he grabbed Merota by the back of her tunics and tossed her aft, under the rising curve of the stern piece where the helmsman stood. It wasn't a safe place, but there was no real safety on a cutter; and as for gentle, that could wait for when there was time.

Ilna unpinned her hand-loom, folding it with the warp and weft still in place and returning it to its canvas bag. She worked methodically, making the same motions at the same speed as she would if the Heron had landed in Mona Harbor and she was preparing to go ashore. She always moved as quickly as she could without error; and if putting away her loom was the last thing Ilna os-Kenset did, then it too would be done properly.

The roar pounded the sea and the ships, a weight like a storm-wind that made men flinch from its force. Not all the oars were manned but most were, and rowers were hauling back on their looms. Chalcus' orders were driving them, but reflex drove them also. Men try to do the thing they know in the midst of a chaos they don't understand.

Ilna slung the strap of the loom bag and rose to her feet. The blaze in the sky threw her shadow as a black pool at her feet. She didn't know why Chalcus had ordered the rowers to their posts; perhaps it was merely to give them a task and prevent panic. Another man might've been trying to get away, but the thunder raced too fast for the Heron or any other human device to escape.

Besides, Chalcus wasn't the sort to think first of running.

The object struck the sea with a cataclysmic flash, as far to the south of the royal fleet as the island was to the north. Steam and water spouted skyward. There was a moment of silence, broken only by ringing in Ilna's ears from the punishment they'd taken during the thing's passage.

"Port oars stroke!" Chalcus shouted. "Starboard back water! Bring us bow on, you dogs, or the fish'll kiss our bones!"

The Heron jumped as the sea slapped its keel, knocking Ilna and every standing man save Chalcus to the deck. The blast of sound through the air followed, noticeably later and less violent.

Water lifted in a mountain-high ring about the column of steam, racing outward at a pace beyond that of a galloping horse. The wave's height lessened as its circle expanded, but it'd still be of immense size and power when it reached them.

"It's the Shepherd's sling stone!" cried a sailor, weeping over his oar loom. "Ah, mercy on a poor sinner!"

"It's a meteor!" piped Merota, hugging the sternpost with both arms. "It's a stone from the sky and we've seen it! We've seen it!"

"All oars stop!" shouted Chalcus. "Now together boys, forward and put your backs in it. Stroke! Stroke! Stro-"

The squadrons to starboard, south of the Heron and the flagship, were in confusion, dancing like straws in a millrace. Ships lifted on the rising wave, then slid or tumbled off the back. Some capsized and one trireme, older or harder used than most, broke in the middle like a snake under a spade.

"Ship oars!" Chalcus cried. "Wait for it my buckos, my heroes, for-"

A wave washed the cutter's deck bow to stern. Ilna, caught unaware, grabbed a jib stay. She hadn't been consciously aware of it, but in the crisis her instinct went to a rope and saved her. The sea rushed past, bubbling and powerful, but a lifetime of working looms had given Ilna a grip and muscles equal to this test and worse ones.

The Heron lifted from the back of the wave and bucked onto an even keel. Here the cutter's short hull glided over what meant danger to a longer vessel.

Chalcus stood silent, surveying the whole situation while the officers under him sorted out their divisions. The crisis was over for the Heron. The wave-crest moved on, shaking ships like rats in a dog's jaws and leaving flotsam in its wake.

"Ahead slow!" Chalcus called. "Holpa, Rennon, Kirweke and Lonn-fetch yourselves lines and stand in the bow. There's men in the water as'll drown if we don't get them out!"

Ilna joined him. Merota, cautiously holding the rail, got up also and took the sailor's hand when he reached back for her.

"There's many that'll drown despite us, too," Chalcus said in a voice pitched for the pair of them. "We're one small ship and there's a dozen foundered or I miss my bet. But we'll do what we can."

"Chalcus?" said Merota. "That was a meteor, a really big one. Can we go see where it landed?"

"Where it landed, child...," Chalcus said, looking toward the pillar of steam now piercing the roiling overcast. "Is a trench deeper than any man's plumbed. There'd be nothing to see, whether it's your scholar's meteor or the Shepherd's sling stone as simple folk like me were raised to think."

"You don't believe in the Shepherd or the Lady, Chalcus," Merota said sternly.

"Aye, there you have me, dear one," said the sailor, but the banter was only in his tone and not his eyes. "Nor perhaps in the Sister who rules the Underworld. But if there was a Sister and a Hell for her to rule, I think we might find them in a place that looks much-"

Chalcus nodded toward the column of steam, still rising and now seeming to sparkle at the core.

"-as that one does."

"Yes," said Ilna, her eyes on the horizon. "And I've never found such a lack of trouble in this world that I needed to borrow it from the heavens."

Chapter 2

"This is the palace," Protas said, standing in the stern of the barge that was carrying Cashel with the delegation returning to Mona, the island's capital. He cleared his throat. "I suppose you've seen much better ones, though? Haven't you, Cashel?"

Mona had a good harbor unless the wind came from the southwest, but it wasn't big enough by half to hold the battered royal fleet. That wasn't a surprise: Cashel didn't guess there was a handful of places in all the kingdom that could. There'd be ships dragged up on every bit of bare shore for miles around the city tonight, trying to make good damage from the meteor.

At least the beaches of First Atara seemed to be sand, not the fist-sized basalt shingle that lay beyond the ancient seawall of Barca's Hamlet. That was hard on keels, and for all their size warships were built lighter than the fishing dories that were the only ships Cashel'd known while he was growing up.

"I've seen bigger places, palaces and temples and even the main market-building in Valles," he said. "I don't know I've ever seen a nicer one. Still, I'm not one to talk. I spend most of my time outdoors when people let me."

Cashel had thought about the question instead of just saying something. Sheep were better than people about waiting for you to think before you said something; people were likely to push you to answer right now. Cashel's mind didn't work that way, that quick, unless there was danger. Besides, it seemed to him that the folks who were quickest with words were likely to be the last folks you wanted beside you when danger came at you-out of the woods, up from the sea or maybe roaring down through the heavens like just now.

Lord Martous stood nearby. The barge wasn't so big that you could be on it and not be close to everybody else who was, but he was kind of pretending that he wasn't anywhere in shouting distance of Cashel and the prince. Martous hadn't been best pleased when Protas asked Cashel to come ashore with him, but whatever he'd started to say dried up when Protas gave him a look.

Chances were Martous had done pretty much as he pleased in the past, with Cervoran was off in his own world of studies and Protas a boy whose father didn't pay him a lot of attention. Things were different now, and Martous was smart enough to see that. Maybe Cashel standing behind the prince like a solid wall had helped the fellow understand.

Cashel didn't like bullies. Cashel particularly didn't like folks bullying children, even if they weren't being especially mean about it.

Sharina had said for Cashel to go along with Protas on the barge. He guessed it had something to do with the politics she and Garric and the others had been talking about to Martous, but Cashel couldn't be sure. She might've just been being nice to the boy.

Sharina was a really nice person-and smart too, smarter than a lot of people thought so pretty a woman could be. He'd seen it happen with fellows, treating Sharina like she didn't have anything behind her blue eyes except fluff and then bam! learning she'd been two steps ahead of them the whole way.

The palace sat on a platform built up from the edge of the harbor. Most of the frontage was a limestone seawall with statues-Cashel counted them out on his fingers: six statues-set up along it. The bronze was old enough to be green, but that didn't take long in salt air.

The barge was pulling up to where a ladder with broad wooden rungs was set into the wall. The big way had swept off the bunting and almost swamped the boat.

Cashel grinned, thinking about Martous huffing and puffing up the ladder to reach dry land. It wasn't a bad climb, not as much as a man's height, but chances were it wasn't a kind of exercise the courtier got very often.

The palace itself was a series of long buildings with colonnades facing the sea across a strip of lawn. Behind the ones on the seafront were other buildings with two or three stories; all the roofs were red tile. The lawn must've taken a lot of work to keep so smooth.

In the cities Cashel'd visited before, swatches of green were planted with flowers and fruit trees. Back in the borough, of course, anything that wasn't fenced off for a kitchen garden had been pecked and trampled to bare clay. It was all a matter of taste, Cashel knew, but so far as his taste went grass ought to be in a meadow with sheep grazing.

Lord Martous yipped little orders to the barge crew, which they seemed to be ignoring. Two of them tossed lines ashore to servants who snubbed them on bollards, then leaned into the ropes. That took the shock of stopping the barge in a few hand's breadths and sucked it against the seawall.

Cashel'd known what was coming. He spread his feet, butted his staff down on the deck, and put his free hand on Protas' shoulder. The boy swayed. Martous yelped as he fell forward and had to grab the ladder; the servant stumbling into his back didn't help his temper any either.

Protas turned and looked up at Cashel with wide eyes. "Could you lift me up to the ground, Cashel?" he said.

Cashel chuckled. He turned his staff crossways and said, "Sit on it, then, between my hands. No, face away from me."

"What are you doing?" said Lord Martous. "Oh my goodness, you mustn't-"

Lifting wouldn't have been enough unless the prince crawled onto the stonework. Instead Cashel launched him, lobbed him like a bale being offloaded. The boy cried in delight, but when he landed he overbalanced and went down on all fours. There was no harm done, though. Protas hopped to his feet again and turned, dusting his palms and grinning wider than he had since Cashel met him.

"Oh, Cashel!" he cried. "I wish I could be as strong as you!"

"You don't have your growth yet, Protas," Cashel said. "Anyhow, it was no great thing."

Nor was it; the boy was small for his age. Half the men in Barca's Hamlet could've done what Cashel just had, if not quite so easily.

He had to admit the praise from a nobleman pleased him, though. Granted, a young nobleman; but one born to the rank, not like he'd have been if he let people call him 'Lord Cashel'. It was funny that something he didn't want for himself looked like a big thing in another fellow.

"Let me show you around the palace, Cashel!" Protas said cheerfully. In a colder tone he added, "Lord Martous, kindly take yourself out of Cashel's way so he can join me."

Martous, still holding onto the ladder with a dumbfounded expression, opened his eyes wide in dismay and irritation. "I-" he said. "I don't-"

A servant touched him on the arm and eased him back from the ladder. Martous didn't fight the contact, but he didn't seem to know what was going on. This'd been a hard afternoon for the poor fellow.

Cashel climbed carefully, placing his feet near the ladder's uprights. Salt and sunlight ate the strength out of wood, and if he bounced his weight down in the middle of the rungs chances were he'd break them to kindling.

He could've set his staff on top of the seawall to wait for him, but instead he held it between his right thumb and little finger and used the other three to climb with. Nothing was likely to happen that he'd need the staff for; it was just a habit. Besides, 'not likely to happen' wasn't the same as 'couldn't happen.'

A dozen royal vessels were already hauled up on shore within the harbor. The crews had made room by tossing out of the way cargo waiting to be loaded on merchant ships and pushing down sheds.

That was inconvenient for the folks who lived in Mona, but travelling around with Garric had taught Cashel that it always was inconvenient to have an army come calling. It was just one of those things, like winter storms or your sheep getting scrapie. He figured the locals understood that, or anyway they knew better than to make too big a fuss about it.

Four wooden wharfs reached out a little way into the harbor. They were big enough for small merchant ships, tubs with one mast and a crew of half a dozen, but they were no good for warships that had to be brought up out of the water every night. Otherwise their thin hulls'd get waterlogged and rot before you knew it.

Mona didn't seem to be a very busy place; that fit in with Sharina saying that First Atara pretty much kept to itself. The goods Cashel saw were mostly salt fish in barrels and barley packed in burlap sacks instead of big terra cotta jars like grain came into Valles down canals from northern Ornifal.

The pottery packed in wicker baskets had likely been landed from other islands but not moved out of the way before the fleet arrived. The owners were probably moaning about it now, but they'd soon learn that Prince Garric paid for the damages he knew there'd be just as sure as the sun rose.

"Oh....," said Protas, looking about the harbor, his eyes wide. "Oh.... I don't think I've ever seen so many people. At one time."

Cashel grinned, following the line of the boy's eyes. Soldiers swarmed over the foreshore and more were packed aboard ships waiting to unload.

"I never saw a place with more houses together than you could count on your fingers and toes till I went the first time to Carcosa," he said. "That was like seeing the sea, only all the little wave-tops were people. I didn't know there could be that many people."

The ships that had landed first were starting to slide back into the water, making room for new arrivals. Protas frowned and said, "What's happening, Cashel? Why did these warships come in if they're just going to leave again?"

"Well, they're not warships exactly," Cashel said. "They're triremes, all right, but they're only rowed from one set of benches. The other two have soldiers on them-or they carry cargo, of course, but all of these have soldiers. They're putting them ashore to, well, in case there's something that'd be dangerous to G-, to Prince Garric. The rowers will haul them out again a little ways off so there's room for others to unload."

Two years ago Cashel hadn't seen a trireme or heard the word, but here he was talking about them like he was a sailor himself. Well, he wasn't; but he'd learned enough by being around Garric to answer the boy's question. He wasn't a weaver either, but Ilna's brother knew something about cloth.

"What danger could there be in Mona?" Protas said in puzzlement.

"Well, not from you folks," Cashel said. "But things do happen, that's so. It isn't that Garric worries; but you know, the people around him have their own ways of doing things and he's too polite to make a big fuss about it."

Lord Martous had gotten to the top of the ladder, helped by two of the servants who'd climbed up ahead of him. Protas glanced at the fellow and said, "Yes, I see that." He cleared his throat and added, "Well, come along, Cashel, and I'll show you the inside."

Protas set off for the nearest portico. Cashel paused just long enough to wave his left hand toward Sharina and his other friends on The Shepherd of the Isles, easing toward a wharf with a lot of angry shouting from the sailing master. Two sailors in the ship's bow held a long board covered with red cloth.

The aides and stewards with Garric didn't think it was right that the prince should climb over the side and splash to shore in the shallows. They'd made a gangplank, probably a hatch cover that they'd nailed a cloak onto or something of the sort. Like Cashel'd said, the folks around Garric had their own ways of doing things.

Soldiers milled around everywhere, but they were all part of the royal army who'd just landed. All the local people standing in the colonnades gaping at the fleet or hanging from the upper-story windows that overlooked the harbor were civilians. The women wore blouses and trousers same as the men did but they also had bonnets, some of them dangling with ribbons.

Nobody seemed to stand much on ceremony, even here in the palace. Cashel didn't feel at home, exactly-he never would with this many people around. But he didn't feel near so out of place as he did back in Valles.

Protas led Cashel through the portico and into the tall building on the other side. They were connected with a little covered walk; a dog-trot, Cashel would've called it back at home, but he supposed it had a fancier name if it was made of stone and the ceiling was painted with girls and bearded men with fishtails who swam with a sea serpent.

"King Cervoran's apartments are up on the top of this building," Protas said. A servant curtseyed to him as they walked through the central hall; there were stairs up on either side of the room. "My rooms are in the east wing. Where will they put you, Cashel?"

"Protas, I couldn't say," Cashel said. He thought about adding, "Close to Sharina is all that matters," but he decided he wouldn't. There wasn't much privacy either in a palace or a village like Barca's Hamlet, but Cashel wasn't one to talk about things that weren't anybody else's business.

They went right on through to the other side of the building. There was a big plaza here, bare dirt but with occasional clumps of tough grass managing to survive.

"This is where we hold the first-day markets every week," Protas explained. "The farmers come in from the fields with produce, and people in Mona sell what they've made too."

There were new-made bleachers along the south edge; the wood was still raw and some planks oozed sap. That was nothing compared to the three-layer pyramid in the middle of the plaza, though. It'd been built from brushwood hurdles covered with boards and bunting. On the very top was a chest or cabinet that'd been draped with cloth of gold. Something lay on it, but Cashel couldn't tell what from down below.

The boy stopped and looked at Cashel, apparently expecting him to say something. He didn't know what that should be, so he asked, "What's that, Protas?"

"That's the pyre," Protas said. "Tomorrow it'll be lighted and King Cervoran will rise to the heavens. He'll be a god, then."

The boy looked desperately unhappy. Cashel put an arm on his shoulder and turned them both back toward the building they'd walked through.

"Let's see if we can find Princess Sharina," he said quietly. It was the first thing he could think of that didn't involve looking at a wizard's corpse.

* * *

"This is the queen's suite, ah, princess," said Lord Martous. He pulled open the door to the left at the head of the stairs. "It hasn't been used in, well, twelve years since the late queen passed over in childbirth, but I directed that it be aired out and put in order as soon as we learned that.... I hope you find it...."

Sharina stepped into the suite. Tenoctris and Cashel, the latter carrying the satchel with the paraphernalia of the old wizard's art, followed her and Martous at a polite distance. Cashel was his usual calm, solid self, but Tenoctris was as silently tense as a cat sure there's a mouse hidding somewhere nearby.

The suite had a short entrance passage, three main rooms, and a curtained alcove for a servant; she and Cashel wouldn't be needing that last. There was a hint of mildew in the air, but the walls were freshly washed. They were age-darkened oak wainscoting below a waist-high moulding with frescoes of fanciful landscapes from there to the ceiling. The damp had lifted out patches of plaster, leaving white blotches.

Cashel smiled. "I like wall paintings," he said.

"I'm sorry about the water damage," Martous said in a tight voice, "but there wasn't time to order repairs. The funeral and coronation had to be the first priority, I'm sure you see."

"I like where the plaster's gone, too," Cashel said. "It looks kind of like clouds are drifting over the hills."

Sharina didn't let her smile reach her lips. Lord Martous almost certainly thought Cashel was being sarcastic. Cashel was never sarcastic. Moreover, he had the perfect innocence that protected him from other people's sarcasm. What somebody else would recognize as a cutting remark struck Cashel as praise, often from an unexpected quarter.

"Yes, this will be satisfactory," Sharina said in a coolly neutral voice. She knew the chamberlain's type well enough to be sure that he'd want to talk-and argue-longer than she'd want to be in his company. That meant the less said, the better.

Sharina'd been raised in a garret of her father's inn, and during her travels since leaving Barca's Hamlet she'd slept rough in hedges and on the bare stone floors of dungeons. She'd been in bigger, better appointed palaces than this one, but it was nonetheless a palace.

The central room was lighted by a glazed dome in the ceiling; the two smaller rooms on the north wall had beds, the only furniture in the suite. Martous probably assumed that the royal party travelled with complete furnishings. That wasn't correct: Prince Garric's expedition from Ornifal to the islands of the west and north was diplomatic, a Royal Progress rather than a military campaign-but it could become a military campaign in a heartbeat. Garric travelled as light as his ancestor King Carus had. While his aides and servants might complain about the simplicity, his sister didn't mind in the least.

"Where does that go?" Tenoctris asked, looking at the door in the west wall. With her fingers tented before her, she looked more than ever like a cat hunting.

"That leads to King Cervoran's apartments," Martous said heavily. "I've assigned them to Prince Garric, though I really wish he'd found time to approve the choice. Now, princess, I hope you'll come with me and-"

"In a moment, Lord Martous," Sharina said. She walked to the door and opened it, finding another door behind it. That wasn't locked either; she pushed it open. Beyond were royal servants arranging chests they'd brought up from the harbor. Trousered local people looked on and tried to help.

Sharina moved aside as Tenoctris stepped briskly past with Cashel at her elbow. He grinned at Sharina as he went by, as placid and unobtrusive as a well-trained pack pony. Of course if trouble arose, Cashel was more like a lion.

Ignoring Lord Martous' chatter, Sharina surveyed Garric's suite. She found herself frowning. There was nothing she could point to, but-

"I won't speak for my brother," Sharina said, "but personally I don't think that I'd be comfortable in these quarters. What other rooms can he use?"

At the moment Garric was with Liane and his chief military and civil advisors in what'd been a courtroom in an adjacent building; they were consulting with Ataran finance officials. Part of the reason Martous was peevish was that he had nothing useful to add to such an assembly. Lord Tadai had told him so in a tone of polished disdain that'd crushed his protests more effectively than the snarling ill-temper Lord Waldron had been on the verge of unleashing.

Sharina could've been present if she'd wanted to be. She hadn't, and seeing to living arrangements and plans for Lord Protas' coronation the next morning was a better use of her time from the kingdom's standpoint besides. Tenoctris had asked to accompany her, and Cashel had joined them after he handed Lord Protas off to his tutors. Cashel's own lack of education had made him more, not less, convinced of its value.

"I don't understand what you mean!" the chamberlain said. His horrified reaction was the first time Sharina recalled hearing something that could be described as high dudgeon. "Why, these are the finest rooms in the palace, the finest rooms in the kingdom! They were the king's rooms!"

"They were a wizard's rooms," said Tenoctris, seating herself cross-legged on the floor. Cashel set her satchel beside her, open; she took from it a bundle of yarrow stalks wrapped in a swatch of chamois leather. "The work Cervoran did here leaves traces behind which can be felt by people who aren't themselves wizards. It affects Princess Sharina, and it might very well affect Prince Garric."

The queen's suite had a floor of boards laid edgewise and planed smooth, solid and warm to the feet even without a layer of carpets over it. The king's side of the building had probably started out the same, but at some point a layer of slates had raised it an inch. Words and figures had been drawn on the floor in a variety of media: chalks, paints, and colored powders. The fine-grained stone retained them as ghostly images.

"Really!" said Martous. "It wouldn't be proper to place Prince Garric anywhere else. These are the royal apartments!"

"Protas said his father didn't use spells to hurt other people, Tenoctris," Cashel said. "Was the boy wrong, then?"

Tenoctris held the yarrow stalks in the circuit of her right thumb and forefinger. She cocked her head quizzically toward Cashel with a expression.

"No," she said, "I think Cervoran was interested in knowledge for its own sake rather than for any wealth or power it could bring him. I'm of a similar mind myself, so I can sympathize. Only... only I've gained most of my knowledge by reading the accounts written by greater wizards than I. Cervoran searched very deeply into the fabric of things himself. He gathered artifacts as well as knowledge-"

She nodded toward a rank of drawer-fronted cabinets against the west wall. Above them hung a tapestry worked mostly in green. It showed a garden in which mythical animals strutted among the hedgerows.

"-and stored them here. To me these rooms are a clutching tangle, like being thrown into briars. Even to laymen, at least to a sensitive layman like Sharina, I expect this would be evident and uncomfortable."

"It's like shelling peas in bed," Sharina said, speaking precisely to emphasize her point, "and then lying down on the husks. Milord, I've become quite sure that my brother will require other accommodations."

"This is very unfortunate," the chamberlain said, hugging himself in obvious discomfort. Sharina couldn't tell whether he was complaining about her decision or if he felt the whirling sharpness of ancient spells also. Martous might not know himself. "Very. Well. I'll give orders. There are rooms in the west wing, though that'll mean...."

He caught himself and straightened. "Be that as it may," he resumed in a businesslike tone. "Are you ready to go over the arrangements for the apotheosis and coronation, in lieu of the prince?"

"Tenoctris?" Sharina asked. The old wizard was looking into a drawer she'd just opened, holding her hands crossed behind her back as if to prove that she had no intention of touching the contents. The yarrow stalks lay on the floor where she'd been sitting. So far as Sharina could see, they'd fallen in a meaningless jumble.

Tenoctris pushed the drawer shut. She looked up and said, "I'm done for the moment. There's nothing acute to be dealt with, though-"

She turned her head toward the chamberlain with her usual birdlike quickness.

"-Lord Martous, I suggest you have these rooms closed until I've had time to go over the collection. There's nothing that I'd consider dangerous in itself, but there are a number of items which could be harmful if misused. Also there's a chance they could draw actively dangerous things to them."

The servants had stopped working and moved to the south wall when Cashel and Sharina entered. Sharina made a quick decision and said to the steward in charge, "Master Tinue, please move Prince Garric's impedimenta back out of here and carry it to the west wing. Lord Martous will give you specific directions. I'm ordering this on my authority."

"I'll take them!" one of the locals said eagerly. She looked at Martous and said, "You want them in the rooms over the old banquet hall, that's right, isn't it?"

"Yes, yes," said the chamberlain unhappily. The locals were already grabbing chests with far more enthusiasm than they'd showed previously. "If the princess insists, we have no choice."

He shook his head as the servants bustled out. "It won't be hard to keep them away from this suite if that's what you want," he said in a low, bitter tone, the first hint that Sharina'd heard that he had normal human emotions. "The problem was getting them to go in and clean the suite decently. And King Cervoran was no help, no help at all! He didn't seem to care if cobwebs and dust covered everything!"

"I can imagine that would be frustrating," Sharina said with honest sympathy. "Regardless, the real uncleanness was a result of your master's art rather than mere dirt, so the lack of ordinary cleaning didn't make much difference. There'll be time to correct the problem after Lord Protas becomes marquess."

Sharina'd been chambermaid in her father's inn while she was growing up. It was a job you could only do well if you convinced yourself that it mattered, that you were really making the world better instead of performing a meaningless ritual which the events of the coming night would completely undo. Martous didn't have her personal experience with the work of cleaning, but they could agree that it was a worthy end in itself.

"Yes, of course," the chamberlain said. He opened both hands in a gesture that was just short of shooing the visitors to the connecting door. "We'll do that now."

Tenoctris bent to retrieve her yarrow stalks; age asserted itself and the motion caught halfway through. Cashel touched her shoulder to indicate he was taking over, then swept up the spill with his left hand. He handed the stalks to Tenoctris, then lifted the satchel while she wrapped them again.

Martous opened and closed his mouth. He was obviously fuming, but he had enough control not to say something which, when ignored, would underscore his complete lack of importance.

"I thought a divination might direct me to the source of the power that surrounds us here," Tenoctris said, shaking her head wryly as she put the stalks away. "It completely overwhelms me. I can't determine a direction."

"You mean which object in Cervoran's collection is causing it?" Sharina said as they returned to the queen's suite. Her servants were opening the sole chest of clothing that accompanied her.

"Cervoran didn't have any talisman of such weight as this," Tenoctris said. Her voice was carefully emotionless, which probably meant that she was worried. "This is... a very serious business. I don't call it a threat, but the thing around us is so enormously powerful that we're in danger even if it isn't hostile."

She smiled cheerfully, breaking her own mood. "A hailstorm isn't hostile to the flowers in a garden," she added. "But it will flatten them anyway."

"You'll find a way out, Tenoctris," Cashel said calmly. It wasn't bravado when he spoke: it was the belief of a mind so pure and simple that no one listening could doubt the truth of the words. "And we'll help you, like we have other times."

Sharina gripped Cashel's left biceps and hugged herself to him. It wasn't the conduct expected of a princess in public, but it was what she needed just now.

"Not that way please," said Martous as Sharina and her companions moved toward the door to the stairs. He gestured toward the north facing room with the bed. "I can explain better from the balcony."

Sharina led. The chamberlain seemed to expect it, and Cashel as a matter of course brought up the rear-unless he thought there might be trouble ahead. It was the position from which he'd badgered flocks along the road. Sharina suspected Cashel felt much the same way about her and Tenoctris as he had for the sheep for which he'd been responsible back in the borough.

The balcony ran the full breadth of the room, but it was narrow front to back. It was plaster-covered, but the way it creaked under even Sharina's slight weight suggested that it was built from wattle and daub; the hollow clack she got from a rap of her knuckles confirmed the suspicion. An outside staircase led down to a plaza.

"Cashel?" she said doubtfully, looking over her shoulder as Tenoctris and the chamberlain joined her on the balcony.

Still standing in the solid-floored bedroom, he grinned. "I guess it'd hold me," he said. "But I don't see that it needs to now."

"I had a stand built for the gentlemen and ladies of the kingdom," Martous explained, gesturing toward the plaza. "Now that you're here, I suppose some of you Ornifal nobles will share it. And of course the two princes will be in the center of the lowest tier. I'm having another throne built for Prince Garric."

By 'gentlemen and ladies of the kingdom', he means the gentry of First Atara, Sharina translated mentally. She kept her lips neutrally together. It wouldn't be proper to snarl at the chamberlain's pretensions, but that might be less offensive than laughing at him as she'd come close to doing.

The plaza spread broadly, covering perhaps ten acres without permanent buildings. On three sides of it were tents and kiosks, and to the south were bleachers-the stand Martous referred to.

In the center of the plaza was a pile of brushwood nearly as big as the palace. On top of it, just lower than the eyes of those on the balcony, lay a corpse on a bier of gold cloth.

Despite the distance, Sharina could see that the dead man had been middle aged; he was balding though not bald, and plump without being really fat. His cheeks were rouged, but the flesh was already beginning to slump from them. Silver coins covered both eyes.

"When Lady Liane has a moment, she'll give you direction as to the seating arrangements," Sharina said firmly. "She has an excellent grasp of protocol, and I do not. She'll consult with Lord Attaper, the commander of the royal guard, and I advise you not to argue with the decisions they make."

She cleared her throat. "There will be provision for guards," she added. "Probably more guards than you think-" Or anybody not himself a bodyguard thinks, Sharina added in her heart "-is necessary or even conceivable."

"If you say so," the chamberlain said. He added fretfully, "Time is very short, you realize."

Sharina realized that perfectly well, so she didn't comment. It was proper that the chamberlain should have his own priorities, but those weren't the priorities of the Kingdom of the Isles as personified in Prince Garric and his closest advisors.

Tenoctris glanced at the corpse, then turned her attention to the shacks and tents around the edges of the plaza. Country folk had raised them for shelter, in some cases forming little hamlets of half a dozen families around a single cook fire. Peddlers and wine sellers moved through the crowd, either carrying their stores on their backs or accompanied by a porter or a donkey. The gathering had more the atmosphere of a fair than a funeral.

A fence of palings and rope picked out with tufts of scarlet wool marked off an area the width of a bowshot around the pyre. There were no guards to enforce the boundary. Either the peasants of First Atara were unusually obedient folk, or they understood just how big the blaze would be and had better sense than to come too close.

Tenoctris fixed the chamberlain with her quick eyes. "Do the ceremonies you've mentioned involve wizardry?" she asked.

"Oh, good heavens, no!" Martous said. "We're not that sort of people here on First Atara."

He paused, connecting what he'd just said with what he and the visitors knew of the late king. "Ah," he said. "Well, King Cervoran was, of course, but that was him. His father raised show rabbits, you know. My first job in the palace was as Page of the Rabbits. Ah. Really, there was no harm in the king, just, well, interest. And there's nothing of the sort in the apotheosis ceremony, not at all."

Patting his hands together to close the discussion in his mind, Martous continued, "The ceremony actually started before you arrived in Mona. A delegation of nobles carried the late king from the palace while choruses of boys and girls lined the path to the pyre, singing hymns to the Lady."

He frowned. "The boys' chorus might've been better rehearsed," he admitted, "and there was some difficulty with the staircase up the front of the pyre, but I think things went well enough given how short my time was. Quite well!"

Sharina smiled. The staircase Martous mentioned was a steep contrivance with notched logs for stringers and treads also fashioned from logs with an adze rather than a saw. Cloth runners-muslin dyed shades of red ranging from russet to pale pink-made the stairs presentable from a distance but also made them harder to climb.

Sharina supposed it hadn't seemed reasonable to waste effort on the details of something meant to burn in a day or two. The person making the decision-probably the chamberlain himself-might've considered the problem a group of out-of-condition country squires would have climbing the structure while carrying a laden bier, however.

"Tomorrow morning at the ceremony," Martous continued, "Prince Protas will light the pyre. I do hope it goes well. The brush had to be bundled while it was still green, I'm afraid. If only we'd had more notice about the king's health so that we could've started preparations sooner!"

"King Cervoran appears to have been very remiss," Sharina said. She was making a pointed joke to remind the chamberlain to think about what he was saying. He merely nodded agreement, too lost in his own concerns to have any awareness of the wider world.

"After the fire's been lighted," Martous said, "Protas will throw on a lock of his hair. I've already had one prepared by the palace hairdresser so that there'll be no problem there. The chief nobles will file across the front of the pyre and sprinkle incense."

He looked sharply at Sharina as though she'd sudden become interesting. "How many of you Ornifal nobles will be joining the procession? A rough number, if you please?"

"None," said Sharina. "And I must remind you that we're the delegation of the kingdom, not of the Island of Ornifal alone. I, for example, am Princess Sharina of Haft."

"Ah," said Martous. "Ah, yes."

He turned his face toward the plaza, pressing his lips out and in several times. At last he continued, "The choruses will perform during the ceremony. I do hope we won't have a repetition of the regrettable business with the boys singing that they're 'impure with vices' as they did during the presentation. Anyway, when nobles have finished casting incense and the pyre is burning properly, a dove symbolizing the late king's soul will be released from beside Prince Protas' throne-"

"From the throne rather than from the pyre itself?" Tenoctris asked. "When I've seen this sort of ceremony in the past...?"

"Well, there was a problem with the cage opening during the rites of the late king's father," the chamberlain admitted. "In fact, some of the... the more superstitious members of the populace ascribed King Cervoran's devotion to wizardry to, well, that problem. This is foolishness, of course, but I decided not to take a chance on having it happen again."

Tenoctris nodded. "My parents would've been glad of an excuse on which to blame my interests," she said. "In their hearts, I'm sure they were afraid it was their fault. Though so far as I've ever been able to tell, there's nothing more mystical about skill at wizardry than there is in preferring fish over mutton."

"As soon as the dove has flown...," Martous said. He was looking at Tenoctris as he spoke, his eyes wide, but he suddenly flushed and jerked them back to the pyre. "As soon as that's happened, I say, Prince Garric will stand and crown Prince Protas with the ancient topaz diadem-he'll be holding that through the rites. There'll be a general acclamation. I hope-"

He looked coldly at Sharina.

"-that we may expect the royal party to join in the acclamation?"

"You may," Sharina said in a neutral voice.

Lord Martous took a deep breath. "Then," he said, clasping his hands, "I believe we're ready for the ceremony. Except for the seating arrangements. If you don't mind, I'll take my leave now. I need to talk with the master of the boys' choir."

"I hope your discussions go well, milord," Sharina said, but the chamberlain was already halfway to the door.

She knew she should feel more charitable toward him. Only a fussy little fellow concerned with trivia could've made a good chamberlain. Given that, Martous was more than competent.

Tenoctris faced the pyre, but Sharina couldn't tell where the old wizard's mind was. "How do the arrangements strike you, Tenoctris?" she asked.

"What?" the wizard said, falling back into the present. "Oh. The arrangements seem perfectly regular. A little ornate for so-"

She smiled.

"-rural a place, but one finds that sort of thing in backwaters... if you'll forgive my prejudices. I've always been more comfortable in communities that value books over turnips."

"I'm glad to hear it's all right," Sharina said. "I was worried that something might happen."

"So am I, my dear," Tenoctris said. "The human arrangements are regular, as I said; but I'm by no means sure that we humans will have the final say in what happens tomorrow."

* * *

The combined signallers of the royal army, some fifty men with either straight trumpets or horns coiled about their bodies, stopped playing at a signal from Liane. It seemed to Garric that the plaza still trembled. Even so there was only an instant's pause before the combined signallers of the fleet, fifty more men determined to outdo their army counterparts, took up the challenge.

Garric groaned, looking down at the topaz crown resting on a pillow in his lap. The images in the heart of the yellow stone danced in the play of the sun. He hid a grimace and leaned to his left, bringing his lips close to Sharina's ear. He had to be careful because he was wearing his dress helmet, a silvered casque from which flared gilt wings.

"I should never have allowed them to do this," Garric said. "It was Lord Tadai's idea, a way that we could contribute something unique to the funeral ceremonies, but it's awful."

"The locals seem to like it," said Sharina. He more read the words on her smiling lips than heard them. "I'm sure they've never heard anything like it before."

Neither had Garric, though some really severe winter storms had been almost as deafeningly bad. The signallers were skilled beyond question, but they and their instruments were intended to blare commands through the chaos of battle. It was remarkable what they could do when grouped together and filled with a spirit of rivalry.

But as Sharina'd said, the islanders filling the plaza seemed to love it. That went for both country folk and the residents of Mona itself. City-dwellers on First Atara tended to sew bright-colored ribbons on their dress garments, but there wasn't as much distinction between urban and rural as there would've been on Ornifal or even Haft.

Sharina wore court robes of silk brocade with embroidery and a cloth-of-gold appliqué to make them even stiffer and heavier. Garric's molded and silvered breastplate wasn't comfortable, but at least it wouldn't prevent him from swinging a sword. The court robes were far more restrictive.

Normally Liane would be seated slightly back of his left side, formally his aide because she wasn't legally his consort. They'd planned the wedding over a year before-but events had prevented the ceremony, and further events had pushed it back again. The royal wedding would be an important symbol that the Kingdom of the Isles was truly united for the first time in a thousand years...

But before he claimed the symbol, Garric had to create the reality. He grinned. Kingship was much more complicated that it'd seemed when he read Rigal's epic Cariad. The hero Car had fought many enemies, both human and supernatural, in founding his kingdom, but he'd never had to settle a wrangle between the Duke of Blaise and the Earl of Sandrakkan as to the order of precedence of their regiments when the royal army was in full array.

"I could handle that for you, lad," said image of King Carus, shaking his head in rueful memory. "Nobody argued with me about anything to do with the battle line because they knew I'd take their head off if they did. Unfortunately I dealt with tax commissioners pretty much the same way, and I can't tell you how much trouble that caused."

Today Liane was in charge of the royal involvement in the funeral and apotheosis rites. She had an instinctive feel for protocol and precedence, what should or shouldn't be done in a formal setting. That was a better use of her talents than sitting beside Garric and calming him by her presence; but he half wished now that he'd left the arrangements to one of Lord Tadai's stewards.

The shrieking of horns and trumpets halted. Choruses of boys and girls came forward from behind the bleachers. The youngest singers were only six or so, and the choir masters and assistants trying to keep the lines in order looked more harassed than the children did. It was almost time to light the pyre.

Lord Protas was to Garric's right; Lord Martous was whispering to him. The boy looked stiff and uncomfortable, but that's how he'd looked ever since Garric met him on the Shepherd. Garric realized with a touch of sadness that a 12-year-old boy whose father had just died was an obvious subject for sympathy, but he-Prince Garric of Haft-had none to spare.

Protas seemed biddable. He could take over the government of First Atara with the 'advice' of a commissioner from Valles, leaving one fewer problem for Prince Garric to concern himself with.

"There's nothing wrong with sympathy," said King Carus, standing on the balcony of a tower that might never have existed. "And don't pretend that you lack it. The trouble comes from letting sympathy keep you from doing what has to be done. Anger does less harm than false kindness; and I've got plenty of experience of how much harm anger does."

Martous handed Protas a glass bowl in a filigreed framework; it held a pine torch lying on a bed of sand which'd been soaked with oil. Sluggish flames wobbled from the sand as well as the pine.

"Go, your highness!" the chamberlain snapped. "Don't delay the ceremonies!"

Garric put his right hand on the boy's shoulder and squeezed it, smiling at him. He didn't speak. Protas nodded appreciatively, then got up and started across the broad cleared space toward the pyre. His back was straight and his stride firm except for one little stumble.

"No sympathy!" repeated King Carus with a gust of laughter.

Tenoctris sat cross-legged on the ground beside the bleachers where she'd asked to be. A lifetime of studies with no servants and little money had made her adept at making do with what was available. There was almost always a floor, but chairs and stools were harder to come by; she'd gotten into the habit of drawing her words and symbols of art on the surface she sat on.

Garric glanced at the old wizard. She was muttering an incantation over a figure drawn on ground packed hard by the feet of generations of buyers, sellers, and spectators. The bundle of yarrow stalks lay by her left knee and a vellum scroll was partly unrolled to her right, but she didn't appear to be using either one.

The four Blood Eagles detailed to guard Tenoctris formed an armored U-shape on all sides of her but in front. They kept their eyes on the crowd and possible threats rather than looking at what Tenoctris was doing, but her wizardry didn't seem to worry them the way it would most laymen. Lord Attaper had learned to pick the wizard's guards from those who knew something about the art: men who'd had a nanny who worked spells or whose father's cousin was a cunning man back in their home village, that sort of thing.

Cashel stood behind Sharina's throne, as placid as a resting ox and as impressively big at a quick glance. When Garric's eye caught him, he smiled softly. He was unique among folk dressed in splashy finery: his tunics were plain except for a curling pattern in subtle browns that Ilna had woven into the hems.

Spectators who'd seen Cashel brought their eyes back to him, though. That was partly because of the simple elegance of the man and his costume, but also because of that woven pattern. No fabric that Ilna wove was only a piece of cloth.

Protas had covered most of the distance between his throne and the base of the pyre. Liane signalled the commanders of the ad hoc military bands; they in turn snapped commands to their units and raised the tools they used for directing. The fleet's music master had a slim silver baton, but his army counterpart used the long straight sword he carried as a cavalry officer. The musicians lifted horns and trumpets to their lips.

Light trembled over the instruments of brass and silver and even gold. Tenoctris glanced up; Garric followed her eyes. The sound of the second meteor, for now only a rasping undertone, reached his ears as he saw the fluctuating light and looked quickly away.

"May the Shepherd guard me!" a man called in a high-pitched voice.

The signallers blew together. For a moment, the shriek of their instruments filled the air, but the thunder of the oncoming meteor overwhelmed even that raucous blast. People throughout the crowd were shouting though their voices went unheard, and the ancient king in Garric's mind said, "Sister swallow me if it isn't coming straight at us!"

Protas didn't stop or look up. Lifting the torch from the bowl in which it rested, he touched it to the faggots. Yellow flames spread too swiftly for green wood: the bundled brush had been soaked with oil. Protas backed a step and paused, then hurled the burning bowl onto the pyre also. It shattered on the steps, igniting the red muslin.

The meteor exploded unthinkably high in the heavens. For a moment there was only the flash; then the sound reached the crowd, throwing everyone to the ground. Garric felt himself lifted, then slammed down hard. The crudely built throne cracked under his weight, and the casque bashed his forehead.

He stood up. His ears rang and he felt each heartbeat throb in his skull. There was a stunned silence over the plaza, relieved by the sounds of prayers and sobbing. The fire was beginning to bite on the funeral pyre. A crackling indicated that the olive oil and beeswax had ignited the wood.

Garric looked at the topaz crown in his left hand. His grip had twisted the soft gold circlet, but the big stone was more vividly alive than a diamond. The things moving in the brightness were no longer shadows but streaks of flame spinning sunwise around the white-hot heart of the stone.

Garric was spinning: not his body but his mind. He felt the suction and tried to throw down the topaz, but he couldn't open his grip. Voices cried wordlessly like a winter storm.

"Hold me!" Garric tried to say, but he couldn't make his lips move nor even form the words in his mind. The circles of light boring through his eyes wrenched his consciousness out of the waking world. He hovered for a moment above the plaza, watching his garments flatten on the ground where he'd been standing. His helmet bounced once and came to rest on its rim, the gilded wings shivering.

The plaza and the pyre were gone. Garric stood on a gray road, naked and alone, and fog swaddled his brain.

* * *

Ilna put her right arm over Merota's shoulders as what the girl called a meteor snarled like a landslide toward them through the bare sky. If it hit the plaza-and it certainly appeared that it was going to-there was nothing anyone could do that'd make a difference.

If Ilna'd been alone, she'd have taken lengths of yarn out of her left sleeve and begun knotting a pattern. She smiled wryly. Her powers were considerable but they didn't rise to ripping large rocks out of the sky, so that wouldn't have helped either.

The work made her feel more content, though.

She wasn't alone. She was responsible for Merota, and though the girl was putting a brave face on it she was understandably terrified. Ilna wasn't going to fill her last moments of life with the knowledge she'd just abandoned a frightened child.

She, Merota, and Chalcus had been seated on a middle row of the bleachers, down at the right end. The rows beneath them-three; she'd counted them off on her fingers as she stepped up-were the seats of the island nobility who were going to march up to the pyre and throw on incense. The rows above-two more-were nobles as well, but seated higher because they were less important and didn't have any duties during the funeral except to be part of the spectacle. They were rich farmers for the most part, judging by their talk and gaudy tastelessness.

Those folk were the problem now. They were trying to get to the ground, and in their panic they probably wouldn't have cared if that meant trampling a small woman and the ten-year-old girl in her charge.

They cared when Chalcus jumped onto his seat and faced them, though, sword and dagger drawn. One fellow tried to push through anyway; Chalcus' left hand moved too quickly to see. The panicked local clapped his hands to his face and sprang back, three long gold chains dancing as he fell on the bleachers. Blood from his slit nostril flickered in the air.

Ilna's smile grew minusculy wider: Chalcus understood duty also. If she was about to die, and it certainly seemed that she was, she was fortunate to do it at the side of a man in the best sense of the word.

The sling-stone-the meteor, since Merota was educated and doubtless knew the right word-exploded high in the sky. Ilna's face was bent down but she felt the flash on the backs of her hands. She braced herself because she remembered what'd happened when the earlier meteor hit the sea, but the shockwave this time was beyond anything she'd imagined.

Clutching Merota with one hand, Ilna turned an unintended cartwheel. The bleachers, raw wood beneath a drape of red muslin like the steps up the pyre-had flexed down and then sprung back again. She tried to grab Chalcus-for the contact rather than because it'd help in any material way-but he was spinning off in a different direction.

Ilna, Merota, and several handfuls of other spectators crashed down onto the bleachers together; boards broke. The whole structure collapsed in a tangle of splinters and torn cloth.

Ilna jumped to her feet. The back of her right wrist was skinned, but she wasn't really injured.

"Merota, are you hurt?" she said. The girl wrapped her arms around Ilna's torso and sobbed into the bosom of her tunic.

People were shouting and crying, but only a few of them had real injuries. A splinter as long as sword blade had run through a middle-aged woman's right calf. She stared at it in shocked amazement; Chalcus, glancing first to see that Ilna and Merota were all right, knelt at the victim's side. He sheathed the sword he hadn't lost in the tumult, then used the dagger to cut a length off his sash for a bandage or tourniquet.

Ilna looked around plaza. The troops who'd been formed by battalions in a semicircle around the bleachers had fallen like ten-pins, their armor and weapons clattering. Now they were picking themselves up and dressing their ranks. Some soldiers were gray-faced with fear, but instead of running they trusted their safety to discipline and their fellows just as they'd been trained to do.

Ilna supposed that sort of training was useful-for people who couldn't simply overcome their fears by will power. She was afraid of many things: afraid of failure; afraid of making a fool of herself; afraid of her own anger. She wasn't in the least afraid of death.

The locals weren't as fast to get to their feet as the soldiers were, and when they did they often stumbled away from the plaza. Ilna didn't blame them: the air had a metallic taste, unpleasant and rough on the back of her throat.

Her ears rang from the blast, but she could hear sounds again. A local screamed and pointed toward the pyre. Other islanders turned to follow the line of his arm, then screamed in turn. Their drift became a panicked stampede.

Ilna looked at the pyre also. The lowest level was burning, though the green brushwood made smoky flames. They crackled like sea ice breaking on the coast in an inshore gale.

The bier at the top of the third stage was disarranged. The corpse got to its feet, dragging away the cloth-of-gold drapery. It swayed, wax-pale except where it was rouged, and took a step by pivoting its whole leg at the hip. Its mouth moved, but any words it spoke were lost in screams and the sound of the fire. The corpse took another step to the muslin-covered staircase, then a third.

"Help...." it cried in a piping voice. It stumbled to its knees. "Me...."

The flames were rising higher. The fire had taken hold slowly, but before long the brush would dry and turn the structure into a dancing, orange-red incandescence.

"I'm coming, your highness," called a plump man whose tunic and trousers were decorated with silver gares. It was Martous, the chamberlain; the man who'd sent the boy prince to ignite the pyre. He tried to go forward but stopped, paralyzed by fear and indecision.

Ilna weighed the situation coldly, as she did all things. She patted Merota's shoulder reassuringly, then gave the girl a little push in the direction of Chalcus. "Go to Chalcus, milady," she said. "Quickly now!"

The corpse got up again. It tried to walk and fell immediately, rolling down the stairs to the broader second stage. Flames were already licking up the wood on the adjacent side.

Ilna gathered her tunics above her knees and ran toward the pyre. Cashel was watching over Sharina whose court dress hobbled her as effectively as leg-irons would. Chalcus was saving a woman who'd bleed to death without his help. That was slight recompense for the many lives he'd let out with his sword and less merciful means, but it was something-and besides, somebody had to watch Merota.

Garric was.... Ilna didn't know where Garric was. All she could see as she ran was his unique winged helmet lying on the ground near his broken throne, and beside it a tunic reeved through his ornate cuirass.

Where is Garric? But the question could wait for now. Ilna reached the side staircase and started up.

The steps were uneven, forcing Ilna to look down at her feet instead of keeping her eyes on the man she was rescuing. The corpse. She supposed she shouldn't complain. Only a desire for symmetry had caused the islanders to put steps on all four sides to begin with. The flight up the front had been sufficient for the procession placing the bier.

Ilna'd never seen the point of funerals in the first place. All that remained when a person died was meat, and human flesh was as useless as fallen leaves in autumn. For sanitary purposes it had to be disposed of-in a hole, in a fire, or simply by throwing it into the sea.

She glanced up as she reached the top of the first tier: the late King Cervoran had gotten to his feet again and was wallowing down the middle flight of steps. "Help...," he squeaked.

Ilna continued toward him. Apparently she'd been wrong about funerals. That wasn't her first mistake, but each one made her angry with herself.

She began breathing through her mouth. The wind shifted slightly and wreathed her in smoke; she felt the hair on the back of her neck shrivel.

"Me...," the corpse said.

Close up King Cervoran still looked like a corpse of several days, but he was quite obviously alive. The coins that'd covered his eyes were gone. The whites and irises both had a yellowish hue, but the pupils were feverish and bright; they focused on Ilna.

Cervoran's lips were violet under the smear of the undertaker's rouge; the tongue between them was black. He repeated, "Help... me...."

Peasants aren't squeamish. Ilna took Cervoran's left wrist in her hand and wrapped his arm over her shoulders. It was like handling warm wax which smelled of decay. She wondered if the arm would pull out at the shoulder; it didn't, at least not just now.

Heat hammered her as the fire roared to full life. A ball of flame flared at Ilna's side and vanished, an outrider of the main blaze. Before she started down, she pulled Cervoran along the tier to put the bulk of the pyramid between them and the fire. She could feel the back of her tunics searing and shrinking. The cloth would be brown and brittle after this, no use even for wiping rags.

Of course that assumed there was an after....

Cervoran didn't fight her, but he was barely able to keep his feet under him. She dragged him along. "Yes...," he said. His voice wasn't loud, but it pierced like a bradawl.

They reached the staircase down the north side, opposite where the boy'd lighted the fire which was now waving like a banner over the bier. Ilna was beginning to feel Cervoran's weight in her knees.

Because this was a formal event she wore sandals, which she wouldn't normally do in weather so warm. She caught her left heel stepping down and had to throw her right leg out to keep from pitching onto her face with the former corpse on top of her. Cervoran twisted, trying to help but unable to move his legs quickly enough. It was like carrying a desperately sick man.

They were midway down the middle tier, some twenty feet about the ground, when Ilna felt the pyre collapse with a roar behind them. A column of sparks shot skyward, then mushroomed and rained back.

The pyramid was a stack of hurdles with no internal structure. When the flames ate away the bundled brushwood on the south, the whole thing fell toward the bleachers.

Ilna felt the staircase tilting backward. The stringers were lifting from the ground, threatening to catapult her and Cervoran back into the flames.

Ilna leaped off at an angle, pulling Cervoran along with a strength that'd have surprised anyone who hadn't seen her work a heavy double loom with the regularity of a windmill turning. Her right shoulder brushed the top of the lowest stage. The impact rolled her and her burden so that the late king hit the ground sideways an instant before she did.

There was a shock and a smack like a bundle of wet cloth thrown onto stone. Ilna rolled reflexively and was up again before she knew whether she'd been hurt by the fall.

She hadn't. The pyre was still tumbling into a state of repose, bales of brushwood rolling onto the blazing coals of those that'd ignited earlier. Men were shouting. A soldier tried to grab Ilna, but she slapped his hand away.

The chamberlain and another palace official caught King Cervoran under the arms and began carrying him away from the fire. The fall didn't seem to have hurt him, but that was hard to tell. Cervoran's legs moved as well as they had before. Ilna walked along through eddies of soldiers and a scattering of local civilians, looking for someone she recognized.

"I am...," the late king said shrilly. "I am...."

"Your highness?" said the chamberlain, his own voice rising. "You're King Cervoran."

"I am Cervoran!" the corpse cried. "I am Cervoran!"

"Ilna!" Liane said, catching Ilna's wrists in her hands. Garric's fiancée was usually composed, but her features had a set, frightened look now. "Have you seen Garric? What's happened to Garric?"

* * *

Garric walked onward, certain only that he had to keep moving. He didn't feel his bare feet touch the gravel, but he supposed they must be doing so.

He was walking toward a goal. He didn't know what it was or how far away it was, but he knew he had to go on. His head buzzed and his vision was blurry, and he kept putting one foot in front of the other.

There was a figure beside him. He wasn't sure how long it had accompanied him. He turned to it and tried to speak; his tongue seemed swollen.

"Who are you?" the figure asked. It was a man, but Garric couldn't make out his features or clothing because of the spider web clogging his eyes.

"I'm Garric," he said, forcing the words past his dry lips. "I'm Prince Garric of Haft, Lord of the Isles."

"Prince Garric?" said the other figure. It was leaving him, fading into the hazy shadows the same way it had appeared. "Prince Garric was the last King of the Isles. He and his kingdom have been gone for a thousand years...."

Garric walked. There was light in the distance, but the foggy darkness was close beside and behind him.

Chapter 3

Garric took another step forward. The air was chill and humid, suddenly filled with the odors of life and decay. His foot splashed ankle-deep in muck, throwing him forward. His brain was too numb to keep him upright, but at least he managed to get his arms out. He landed on all fours instead of flopping onto his face.

Endless grayness had become fog-shrouded sunlight.

Something hooted mournfully beyond the mist. He couldn't tell how far away it was or even be sure of the direction. The sun was a bright patch in the thick clouds almost directly overhead.

Garric stood carefully. He was stark naked, but so far as he could tell he hadn't been hurt by whatever'd happened. He had a memory of falling into the cloudy heart of the topaz, but he also recalled seeing the diadem bouncing on the ground beside his helmet and tunics. Both those things couldn't be true.

"And maybe neither is, lad," said King Carus. "But we're not on First Atara now, nor anyplace I've been before."

The animal hooted again. It didn't sound especially dangerous, but it was certainly big. Even if it were vegetarian, whatever hunted it would be large enough to be dangerous to an unarmed man....

Garric made a more focused assessment of his surroundings, looking for a weapon. A branch stuck out from a fallen tree. He gripped it with both hands, but it crumbled instead of providing a club.

Trees three or four times Garric's height were scattered over open marsh. The trunks all tapered upward from thick bases, but their foliage varied from needles and fronds to long serpentine whips.

He generally couldn't see more than ten feet in any direction, but swirls and eddies in the mist gave him occasional glimpses out as far as a bowshot. The distant terrain was low-lying and muddy with patches of standing water, more or less identical to the patch on which Garric stood.

It was raining, though it'd taken him a moment to realize that because the air was already so sopping wet. He started to laugh. Aloud, though there was nobody around save the king in his mind, he said, "Well, I've been in worse places, but I won't pretend this is a good one."

"Keep your eyes open, because this is the sort of place that can get worse fast," said Carus. His image grinned in amusement. He and the blue sky above the rose-twined battlements where he stood were all created by Garric's imagination. "There's times I don't mind not having a body any more."

The breeze was from the south. Garric thought he smelled smoke, so he started walking in that direction for lack of a better one. It could've been a fire lighted by lightning, of course; or a meteor.

Or nothing at all; the air was thick with rot and unfamiliar plant odors, so he might be imagining the smell. But smoke would linger in a thick atmosphere like this.

A dozen pairs of small eyes watched him from the edge of the pond he was skirting. When he turned to face them, they disappeared in a swirl and a series of faint plops.

"I never cared for raw fish," said Carus, watching as always through Garric's eyes, "but it's better than starving. Unless peasants-"

He grinned again.

"-know how to build cook fires in a swamp?"

Garric smiled also. "This peasant doesn't," he said.

Thinking about raw fish, he stepped into a grove of a dozen or so stems sprouting from a common base. The trunks ranged from thumb thick to three fingers in breadth. He twisted one in both hands. It was springy and so tough that even his full strength couldn't bend it far out of line.

One of these saplings would make a good spear shaft or fire-hardened spear if he could cut it free. He hadn't seen any exposed rock, even a slab of shale or limestone he could use to bruise through the wood. Maybe there were clams whose shells he could-

A man in a cloth tunic, a cape, and a plaited hat stepped out of the mist on the other side of the grove. He was bearded; a scar ran down the left side of his face from temple to jaw hinge. He carried a spear with a barbed bone tip, and a fine-meshed net was looped around his waist.

"Wah!" the stranger cried. Other men were following him. The nearest carried a club. He stopped, but two spearmen spread out to either side.

Garric felt the king in his mind tense for action. Carus was judging weaknesses and assessing possibilities: grab the spear from Scarface and kick him in the crotch to make him let go of it; stab the man to the left with the spear point, then slam the butt into the face of the man on the right; back away and use the point again on the fellow with the club. Most people don't react quickly enough to instant, murderous violence....

Garric raised his empty right hand, palm forward, and said, "Good day, sirs. I'm glad to meet you."

"If only you had a sword!" King Carus muttered.

If only I had a breechclout, Garric thought.

The strangers halted where they were; the pair on the sides edged closer to their fellows. They began to jabber to one another, punctuating the words by clicking their tongues against the roofs of their mouths. The language was nothing Garric had ever heard before; nor had Carus, judging by his look of stern discomfort.

Garric lowered his right arm and laced his fingers before him, resisting the urge to cover his genitals. Maybe one of the strangers would loan him the short cape they all wore? Though for him to tie it around his waist might be seen as an insult....

Scarface kept his eyes on Garric while he talked to his fellows. He seemed to be the leader, though he was only in his mid-twenties and one of his fellows was easily a decade older.

The discussion ended. Scarface clapped his left palm on the knuckles of the hand holding his spear, then spoke slowly and distinctly to Garric. The other three men watched intently. The words were as meaningless as the rhythmic glunking of a frog.

Garric opened both hands at shoulder height. "I don't understand you," he said, smiling pleasantly, "but I'd like to go with you to your village. Perhaps we can-"

The strangers to either side dropped their spears, then walked forward and grabbed his wrists. One tried to twist Garric's arm behind his back while freeing the length of rope looped over his shoulder.

"Please don't do this!" Garric said, stepping backward to keep the strangers from surrounding him. He continued to smile, but he didn't need his ancestor's instincts to make him tense. He was half a head taller than the biggest of the four; but there were four of them.

The man gripping Garric's right arm snarled something and twisted harder. Garric had fought-and won-his share of wrestling matches in Barca's Hamlet. He let the stranger pull him to the right, then pivoted and lifted the fellow off the ground in a swift arc, using the man on his left as an anchor.

The stranger gave a bleat of fear. Garric let him go at the top of the arc and turned to watch him splash head-first in the nearby pond. A pair of fingerlings squirted out of the water and danced across the surface for a yard or more on their tails before diving back in. The man who'd been struggling with Garric's left arm backed away showing his teeth.

Garric smiled and raised his hands again. He was breathing hard and he was afraid his expression looked like a wolf's slavering grin, but he was trying to be friendly.

"I'd be pleased to go with you," he said. Obviously the strangers couldn't understand him any better than he could them, but he hoped his quiet tone would make an impression. "But I won't allow you to tie me up. You don't need to do that."

Scarface grimaced and called something to his companions. The older man at his side, standing with his club raised, looked at him in surprise and protested. Scarface repeated the command, this time in a growl.

The man Garric'd thrown into the water stood up, wiping the muck from his forehead with the back of his hand. He glared at Garric, but when Garric looked squarely at him he paused where he was with one foot raised instead of getting out of the pond.

Garric bowed to Scarface, then gestured back in the direction the strangers had appeared from. "Shall we go?" he said.

Scarface guffawed loudly, then broke into a broad grin. He called something to the man standing in the pond. That fellow scowled, but he undid the fishbone pin at his throat and tossed his cape to Garric. The others laughed.

Scarface made a fist with his left hand, then touched the knuckles to Garric's. He gestured southward and turned. Garric clasped the cape around his midriff and walked alongside Scarface, matching his strides to the other's shorter legs.

"Now for a sword," murmured King Carus; but his image was smiling.

* * *

Ilna wasn't impressed by the quality of the tapestries covering the council chamber's walls. Still, they were tapestries instead of wall paintings like she'd found in most of the cities she'd been to. She wondered vaguely who or what the council on First Atara might be, but that didn't matter much.

Ilna stood at the back, moving slowly sideways as she followed the woven patterns more with her soul than with her eyes. At the table in center of the room, members of Garric's court argued about what to do now that the prince had vanished. Everybody had an opinion and every opinion was different, which struck Ilna as absurd. There was only one possible answer to fit the present pattern.

Her face was hard. By virtue of the fact that Ilna os-Kenset was one of Prince Garric's oldest and closest friends, she could state her opinion; which everyone else would listen to politely and as politely ignore. None of these nobles, whether soldiers or civilians, cared what an illiterate peasant thought. Therefore Ilna looked at a marginally competent tapestry while her social superiors nattered pointlessly.

"It's not just food for the personnel," Admiral Zettin was saying forcefully. "If there's a serious storm-and in this season, we could get one at any moment-the ships aren't safe just drawn up on shore like they are. I won't answer for the losses if we don't return to Valles immediately."

Sharina was at one end of the table; Cashel sat at the corner to her left, the quarterstaff upright beside him and an expression of placid interest on his face. At this sort of event, Cashel looked like a well-trained guard dog, quiet and calm and not at all threatening unless someone did the wrong thing.

Ilna grinned faintly. Cashel was a well-trained guard dog. His silent bulk was the reason the others nattered instead of snarling, even the two military rivals seated across from one another at the opposite end of the table: Lord Waldron, the army commander, and Lord Attaper who commanded the bodyguards, the Blood Eagles. Without Cashel's presence, they'd have been bellowing at each other, ignoring the presence of Princess Sharina.

Several people began talking all together, disagreeing with Zettin in as many different fashions as there were voices. None of the questions really mattered, and they were dancing around the question that did matter: who would rule until Garric returned?

Who would rule if Garric never returned?

Ilna looked at the tapestry on which a peasant plowed behind a span of oxen. On a hill in the background rose a castle whose corner turrets had red conical roofs. It didn't look anything like this palace nor any building Ilna would expect to find on First Atara.

She touched the fabric-wool on a warp of linen-and felt a warm impression of the hills of Central Haft. She might well have passed close to where the tapestry'd been woven when she walked from Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa on the opposite coast a few years before.

She might've been physically close, but the tapestry'd been woven unthinkable ages before she'd been born. It was ancient, a relic of the Old Kingdom like some of the books Garric and Lady Liane read; Garric's fiancée, Lady Liane....

Ancient or not, the weaver hadn't been very skilled. First Atara must always have been the sort of backwater it was today, a quiet place where folk grew grain and minded their own business. Barca's Hamlet had been that sort of place, but then it all changed. That would happen on First Atara too, whether the folk here liked it or not.

Ilna smiled, this time without humor. It didn't matter what people or what threads, either one, thought of the pattern they were woven into.

"With all due respect-" said Lord Tadai. From the tone of his voice, that meant no respect at all. He stopped because he heard loud voices outside the door.

The soldiers at the table rose. So did Cashel, still placid but holding his staff in both hands.

It was Chalcus, though, standing at Ilna's side who murmured, "Stay, child," to Merota. He swaggered to the door and pulled it open with his right hand. Only someone who knew the man Chalcus was would have noticed that the movement put his hand very close to the hilt of his incurved sword.

The six guards outside were Blood Eagles. They'd backed to keep as far as they could from the pair of men coming toward them across the courtyard. Now there was no farther to retreat, so they'd lowered their spears. The men approaching would run themselves onto the points unless they stopped.

Ilna didn't care for soldiers as a class: a life spent in killing other men seemed to her at best unworthy. The Blood Eagles were the best of their sort, however, and she appreciated good craftsmanship in any line of work.

"Please, your highness," begged the chamberlain, Lord Martous, as he stood wringing his hands behind Cervoran. "Please, another time?"

Cervoran-King Cervoran-looked much as he had that morning when Ilna dragged him from the pyre. His garments'd been changed; the trousers and tunic he wore now weren't singed and smoke-stained. Nonetheless the same bluish cast underlay Cervoran's pallor, and his fingers looked like suet-stuffed sausages. He walked normally now, except for a slight hitch in his step of a sort common in old people and not unknown in younger ones.

"Sir!" the under-captain commanding the guards said to Attaper. "We told him to stop, but he just keeps coming!"

The Blood Eagles were brave men by definition: they'd volunteered to protect a warrior prince who regularly put himself in the hottest part of the fight. This officer and his men had watched Cervoran get up from his bier, though.

Wizardry was the only cause Ilna could imagine that would've allowed a dead man to rise. The guards were clearly of the same opinion, and the courage to face death didn't necessarily mean the courage to face wizardry.

Cervoran stopped just short of the spear points. Those in the council chamber watched him; some calmly, some not. The smile on Chalcus' face was probably genuine, but there was sweat on Lord Waldron's brow. The old warrior wouldn't run from what he feared, but his fear was no less real for his ability to master it.

Sharina looked past Cashel's left shoulder; the quarterstaff was a diagonal bar protecting her from anything that might come through the doorway. Cashel's expression was as placid as that of an ox in his stall, but Ilna could see the way the muscles tensed in her brother's throat and bare forearms.

Cervoran raised his right arm and pointed a doughy finger at Cashel. "You," he said, piping like a frog in springtime. "Who are you?"

"I'm Cashel or-Kenset," Cashel replied. His face didn't change. He didn't add a question of his own or put a challenge in his voice, the way a less self-assured man might have done.

"Come with me, Cashel," Cervoran said. "It is necessary."

Attaper stepped forward, his hand on his sword hilt. "Lord Cervoran," he said in too loud a voice, "you have no business here. This is a royal council!"

"Come with me, Cashel," the former corpse repeated.

"Sharina?" said Cashel. "Do you need me? Because I wouldn't mind going along with him, Lord Cervoran I mean. Since he says it's necessary."

"Yes, all right, Cashel," Sharina said. She put her right hand on his shoulder, squeezed, and released him. "I trust your judgment... and your ability to deal with any problems that arise."

Cashel grinned. "Let me by, please," he said to the guards, but they were already stepping sideways to let him past.

"It is necessary," Cervoran squeaked. He turned and started back toward the opposite wing of the palace-the servants' quarters and storage rooms. Cashel walked at his side, the quarterstaff slanted across his body; the chamberlain followed nervously behind them.

Ilna looked at the pattern her fingers had knotted during the tableau that'd just ended. "Close the door if you would, Chalcus," she said in a clear voice.

She turned and eyed the room, the gathering of the most powerful folk in the Kingdom of the Isles. "Now," said Ilna. "I think it's time to acknowledge Princess Sharina as regent until her brother the prince comes back."

* * *

Sharina was startled at Ilna's words, but it was very like her friend to speak her mind. Admiral Zettin-a good man, but one who didn't know Ilna as well as Waldron and Attaper had come to do-looked at her with an irritated expression and said, "I don't think-"

"That's nothing to brag about, milord," Liane broke in, emphasizing by her nasal, upper-class Sandrakkan accent that she was Lady Liane bos-Benliman. "If you did think, you'd realize-as we all do, I'm sure, in our hearts-that the kingdom needs someone in Prince Garric's place as regent if it's to function, and that the princess is the proper choice. If Garric could've done so, he'd have appointed his sister, as he's done when necessary in the past."

Sharina grinned, but only in her mind. She didn't want the job, but she knew Garric didn't want it either. He was the correct person to hold the mutually antagonistic nobles together-nobody's man, and therefore the man for everyone. While Garric was gone, Sharina was almost the only one who could take his place.

Almost the only one: Liane too had the knowledge and intelligence to rule. But Liane was from Sandrakkan, while the strength of the royal army and fleet came from Ornifal. Haft, where Garric and Sharina'd been born, had been unimportant since the fall of the Old Kingdom. The haughty rulers of Ornifal and Sandrakkan and Blaise could bow to someone from Haft as representating the Kingdom without losing face to a rival island.

Besides, Liane preferred to work behind the scenes. She sat quietly at Garric's elbow, ready to hand him necessary documents or whisper information; and she worked more quietly still in managing the kingdom's spies. When Liane spoke it was to the point- and occasionally very pointedly, as to Zettin just now-but that wasn't her usual style.

"I have the greatest respect for the princess," said Lord Waldron, making a half bow toward Sharina, "but Prince Garric's disappearance may mean there's a military threat looming. While the army will be loyal to whoever stands in the prince's place-"

"I'm sure Princess Sharina will be able to delegate military affairs," said Liane tartly, "as she and indeed her brother have done in the past. I consider it very unlikely that Prince Garric was snatched away by a hostile army, though, milord-if that was really what you were implying?"

"Well, I didn't mean that, of course...," Waldron muttered. He scowled, looking around the room angrily as if searching for a way out of his misstatement.

Lord Attaper opened his mouth, probably to gibe at his rival Waldron. Before he got a word out, Liane said, "I believe we're in agreement, then. Lord Attaper, are you ready to serve Princess Sharina loyally?"

Attaper stiffened as though slapped, then grinned at the way Liane had outmaneuvered him. "Yes," he said. "Princess Sharina is clearly the best choice to fill what we hope will be a short-term appointment. Ah, are we any closer to knowing just what did happen to the prince?"

Liane could've answered that, but it was properly a question for Sharina herself. She nodded to Attaper and said, "Tenoctris is searching the, ah, former king's library, which I gather is rather extensive."

She cleared her throat. She'd started to say, "the late king's library," and part of her still thought that might be the correct term.

"At any rate," Sharina continued, "Tenoctris will tell us if she learns anything useful. When she learns, as I hope and expect."

Cashel's presence had kept the previous discussions quiet but not calm. Much as Sharina appreciated having Cashel close to her, it was a good thing now that he'd left. The dynamic of the meeting had changed abruptly when Ilna spoke. Power had shifted from the males in the room to her, Ilna and Liane. If Cashel were still here, the tension between him and the three military men would've prevented that from happening.

"Ah, your highness?" said Zettin, glancing warily toward Liane. "The matter of the ships still remains. If we return to Valles in the next few-"

"We'll remain here until further notice," said Sharina with crisp certainty. "Garric, ah, departed from here. Unless Tenoctris says otherwise, I believe this is the place he's most likely to return to. I regret the risk to the ships, but Prince Garric is our first concern."

Lord Waldron glanced sidelong at Lord Attaper. He smiled slightly when their eyes met.

Lord Tadai touched together the tips of his well manicured fingers before him and coughed for attention. Tadai didn't have a formal title, but he carried out the duties of chancellor and chief of staff for Garric while the prince was travelling.

"Milords Waldron and Zettin?" he said in his butter-smooth voice. "I'd appreciate it if you'd direct your provisioning officers to meet with me as soon as we're done here. My staff has made preliminary contacts with local officials regarding our initial requirements, but I'll need more detailed information if we're going to remain on First Atara."

He bobbed his chin to Sharina.

"I believe we're done for now," Sharina said, glancing toward Liane and receiving a minuscule nod of agreement. "If each of you will leave a runner with me, I'll let you know as soon as I hear what Tenoctris has to say. I'm going up to see her now."

As the others present started to rise, a scream sounded outside. Heavy wood cracked, then masonry fell with a rumbling crash. A beam had broken-had been broken-and the pediment it supported had come down with a roar.

Chalcus threw open the door and slipped into the courtyard, his sword and dagger in his hands. The council's military officials followed, drawing their weapons also. Lord Tadai and the other civilians got up and eased toward the back wall.

Sharina's eyes met Ilna's. Ilna patted Merota's head and said something; the girl ran to Liane and took her hand. Together Ilna and Sharina, friends from earliest childhood, stepped into the courtyard behind the armed men to see what was going on.

The palace was built around three sides of the courtyard. Besides the portico where the palace clerks and laundrymen worked in good weather, there was an herb garden for the kitchen and benches shaded by nut trees for nobles. The eight-foot-high back wall had double doors opening onto an alley leading to the nearby harbor. Sharina supposed furniture and bulk foodstuffs normally came in that way. An innkeeper's daughter noticed things like that.

The thing coming through the wall now, having torn out the transom and burst the gate leaves, was green, barrel-shaped, and taller than the wall. It held a soldier in one of its feathery tentacles and folded another over his face. A twist tore the man apart in a gush of blood.

There were troops in the alley and others pouring into the courtyard from the palace. Everyone was shouting.

The under-captain at the door to the council chamber turned and saw Sharina. "By the Lady!" he cried. "Princess, you've got to get out of here!"

Because this had been a working meeting of Garric's closest advisors, Sharina'd been able to change out of court robes into double tunics not terribly different from what she'd have worn on very formal occasions back in Barca's Hamlet. The fabric was bleached instead of being the natural cream color of 'white' wool, and the sleeves had black appliqués of Ilna's weaving.

Ilna said the patterns were unconsciously soothing to anyone who looked at them. Sharina believed her friend, but given the rancor of some council meetings it was hard to imagine how they could've been much worse.

Between her outer and inner tunics Sharina wore a heavy Pewle knife, her legacy from the hermit Nonnus. He'd used it to save her life at the cost of his own. She didn't carry the knife as a weapon-though she'd used it for one-but rather because touching the hilt's black horn scales invoked the hermit's quiet faith, and that calmed her mind.

She reached through the slit disguised as a pleat in her outer tunic and brought out the knife. Right now it was both a weapon and a prayer.

Half a dozen spears sailed through the air and squelched into the monster, burying in every case the slim iron head and stopping only at the wooden shaft a forearm's length back of the point. The creature continued to advance. The spears wobbled like tubular wasp larvae clinging to the body of a squat green caterpillar.

A soldier just come from the servants' wing dropped his shield and charged with his javelin gripped in both hands. He twisted at the moment of impact to drive the point in, putting all his strength and weight behind the blow. Half the wrist-thick spear shaft penetrated; sludgy green fluid oozed out around the wood.

The soldier's wordless grunt of effort changed to a scream as tentacles wrapped him. The monster lifted him, pulling his limbs off with the same swift dispassion as a cook plucking a goose for dinner. The screams stopped an instant after the fourth bright flag of arterial blood spouted from the victim's joints.

"Use your swords!" an officer shouted. As he spoke, the monster gripped him. He slashed through one of the feathery tentacles, but another tentacle tossed him with seeming ease twenty feet in the air. He didn't scream until he started to fall back toward the alley. Three soldiers who'd started forward at his order backed instead and raised their shields.

The creature crawled forward on hundreds of cilia each no bigger than a man's foot. It was a plant-it had to be a plant; the tentacles were very like fern fronds though huge and hooked with thorns on the underside-but it was a plant from Hell.

Ilna had knotted a pattern from the cords she kept in her left sleeve. She held it up, facing the hellplant.

The creature squished onward, unwrapping a tentacle suddenly to grip a soldier's ankle. He slammed the lower edge of his shield down to cut the frond off against the pavement. Its tip uncurled, leaving a bloody patch above the soldier's heavy sandal. He retreated, his sword up but his face in a rictus of terror.

Chalcus put his left hand on Ilna's shoulder. She tried to shake him off. The sailor kept his grip and shouted, "Come away, dear heart, for you'll do no good here!"

Sharina found herself backing toward the doorway from which she'd entered the courtyard. The hellplant didn't move quickly, but it'd proved it could tear a passage through thick walls.

And thus far, there was no evidence than any human device could stop it.

* * *

"Lift that," Cervoran said to Cashel, pointing at the door set at a slant in the back of the pantry. The housekeeper hadn't been in when her visitors had arrived, and her two assistants had fled with looks of trembling terror when they saw their king.

Or whatever Cervoran was now. Did Protas go back to being a kid that everybody ignored because his father'd returned? There were worse things that could happen, Cashel knew.

"That leads to the bulk storage for liquids, your highness," Martous said in a chirpy voice. "We keep the large jars of wine and oil in the cellars so that they won't freeze during the winter as they might in a shed. But there's nothing down there which matters to you."

Whatever other people thought of the business, the chamberlain was sure determined to act as if nothing about Cervoran had changed. Maybe he was right.

"Lift that door," Cervoran repeated, but he could've saved his breath. Cashel had only paused to loosen his sash. He didn't want rip a tunic if the weight required him to bunch his muscles.

He bent, gripped the bar handle with his free hand, and lifted the panel in a smooth motion. The door was sturdy but nothing that required his strength. The air swirling out was cool at this time of year, but Cashel understood what the chamberlain meant. Folk in Barca's Hamlet had root cellars for the same reason, though none-even the inn's-was as large as this one. The darkness had a faint fruity odor.

"Ah, your highness?" Martous said. "If you're going down there, should I have a servant fetch a lantern? There are no windows, you see."

Cashel smiled faintly. Anybody looking down the steps into the cellar could see there were no windows; it was dark as arm's length up a hog's backside.

Cervoran started down, ignoring the chamberlain as he'd done ever since Cashel saw the two of them together this afternoon.

"Follow me," Cervoran said; echoes from the cellar deepened his voice.

'Leave the staff; you will need both hands."

Cashel had already started down the sturdy wooden steps behind the king. He paused, trying not to frown, and said, "Sir? I'd rather-"

"It is necessary," Cervoran said.

Whatever else he might be, Cervoran wasn't a fellow who talked for the sake of talking. Cashel sighed and set the quarterstaff against the back wall of the pantry. He'd come this far, so there wasn't much point in starting to argue now.

The cellar was what Cashel'd expected: brick pillars in rows, and big jars lined up against the masonry wall at the back. The ceiling was way higher than Cashel could reach and maybe higher than he could've reached with his staff stretched out above him.

The light that came down the pantry door was enough once Cashel's eyes had adapted. Cervoran seemed to get along all right too, moving at his usual hitching stride down the line of jars. They were two different kinds, Cashel saw, one with a wider mouth and a thickened ridge for a rope sling instead of double handles at the neck like the other.

As he followed, Cashel's eyes caught the least sliver of light from the ceiling in the depths of the cellar. That must be the trap door onto the alley where the jars'd be lowered down from wagons. A cart with solid wood wheels for shifting them here sat beside a pillar.

Cashel grinned with silent pride. If these jars were full of liquids, they'd be work for two ordinary men to shift.

"You highness?" Martous called from the pantry. The quiver Cashel heard in the chamberlain's voice wasn't just the echo. "I have a light here if you need one."

"Lift that jar and follow me," said Cervoran, pointing at the first of the wide-mouthed jars in the rank. His fingers were puffy and as white as fresh tallow.

"Yes sir," Cashel said. He looked at the jar and thought about the path he'd be carrying it by. The stairs wouldn't be a problem because the pantry door was hung at a slant, but if Cervoran took him back into the courtyard he'd have to lower the jar from his shoulder to clear the transom. "Is it wine?"

He rocked the jar to try the weight. It'd be a load and no mistake, but he could handle it. The base narrowed from the shoulder, but it still sat flat. The pointy bottoms of the other pattern of jars had to be set in sand to stay upright.

Cervoran walked toward the stairs, ignoring the question. His voice drifted through the dimness, "It is necessary...."

Cashel grinned as he squatted, positioning his hands carefully. He'd taken orders from his share of surly people before, and that'd never kept him from getting his own job done. The others hadn't had Cervoran's good excuse of having been dead or the next thing to it for a while, either.

When Cashel was sure he had the weight balanced, he straightened his knees and rose with the jar against his chest. He had to lean back to center it. There was enough air at the top of the jar for it to slosh as it moved, but he had it under control. It was tricky, but it was under control.

Cashel walked toward the stairs, not quite shuffling. He could only see off to his left side, the direction he'd turned his face when he lifted the jar. He'd had to pick one or the other, of course, unless he wanted to mash his nose against the coarse pottery. He'd be all right unless somebody put something in his way, and anyway he'd be feeling his way with his toes. It was under control.

Funny that Cervoran'd picked him for the job. As best Cashel could tell, the king hadn't set eyes on him till they saw each other through the doorway to the council room. Cashel didn't know another man in the army who could do this particular thing-fetch and carry a full wine jar alone-better than he could, though.

Cashel heard Cervoran climbing the stairs-skritch/thump; skritch/thump. A moment later he touched the bottom riser with his own big toe. Cashel slid the other foot upward, planted it, and then shifted his weight and the jar's onto it while he brought his right foot up and around to the next tread. He'd thought of leading with his left foot on every step, but he decided he'd be better off climbing with a normal rhythm. He took the steps with ponderous deliberation.

"Oh, my goodness, what's going on here?" the chamberlain chirped from close at hand. "Should I get somebody to help, or-goodness, is that a full jar?"

It certainly was a full jar. Cashel felt a jolt every time his heart beat.

Judging from the way it got brighter, he must be near the top of the staircase. He hunched forward slightly to make sure the jar was going to clear. It did and he could see the pantry, the shelves and bottle racks and then the chamberlain staring at him in amazement.

Cashel smiled. This jar was a weight, the Shepherd knew it was, but nobody was going to learn that from anything Cashel said or showed. Part of the way you won your fights was not letting the other guy know you were straining. Cashel didn't understand quite what was going on, but it was some kind of fight. Otherwise Cervoran'd be moving the jar by the usual fashion, a couple guys and a derrick up through the alley door.

A lot of people thought Cashel was dumb. He guessed they were right: he couldn't read or write or do lots of the other things Garric and Sharina did, that was for sure. But sometimes Cashel thought he saw things clearer than most folk did, just because his brain didn't put a lot of stuff in the way of the obvious.

"Follow me, Cashel," Cervoran said from right ahead. Cashel turned a little to his right so that he could see where he was going. The king was walking out of the panty with a brass-framed lantern in his white hand; he must've taken it from the chamberlain. Cashel wondered why he'd bothered now that they were upstairs. Light streamed in through the layer of bull's-eye glass set in the wall just below the trusses supporting the floor above.

Cashel had to turn straight on to get through the pantry door with his load, but he sidled again as soon as he was clear. Something was going on ahead of them, out in the courtyard he supposed; shouting and the clang of metal falling onto stone.

There was a scream too, so shrill that Cashel'd have said it had to be a woman if he hadn't heard men sound the same way when the pain was worse than anything they'd felt or dreamed of feeling. Red Bassin sounded like that the time the ox fell on him and thrashed, trying to get to its feet. It was while the ox was struggling that Bassin screamed; he stopped when his thighbone cracked and he fainted instead.

Cervoran led through the indoor kitchen. It was full of people jabbering, all of them looking out onto the courtyard through the big doors.

"Make way!" Cervoran piped. A pot-boy turned, saw the king with Cashel following, and bawled in terror. Cooks and other palace servants scattered to either side in fright, but they didn't run outdoors.

Cervoran, ignoring the panicked servants the way he seemed to ignore everything that wasn't part of his immediate purpose, marched through the doors to the courtyard. Cashel followed. He heard the battle clearly but he didn't see anything because he was concentrating on not banging the jar. The trusses supporting the portico sloped, so the lower edge of the roof tiles didn't have as much clearance as the kitchen ceiling.

When Cashel stepped off the edge of the pavement and his feet touched grass, he looked up at last. Soldiers stood all around something that was way taller than them and bigger than a full-grown ox.

The thing was green. Its barrel-shaped trunk, thicker than the widest Cashel could stretch with both arms, turned with the slow deliberation of a whale broaching. It started toward Cashel, moving on yellowish squirming roots covered with white hairs like a mandrake's.

"Master Cervoran!" Cashel said. He wasn't scared, exactly, but this wasn't a time he wanted to be standing around with a tun of wine in his arms and his staff somewhere back in the pantry. "Sir I mean! What is it you want me to do?"

The thing crawled toward them in the certainty of a honeysuckle twisting its way along a railing. Except for the fact it moved, Cashel'd have said it was a plant. He guessed watching it that he was going to have to admit it was a plant anyhow, even though it did move.

The ring of soldiers'd been keeping a good distance between themselves and the plant, though the blood and mangled bodies scattered over the ground showed that hadn't always been the case. Cashel didn't blame them for backing away a bit now.

"Throw the jar at the Green Woman's creature, Cashel," Cervoran said. He didn't shout, but his voice cut like bright steel through the noisy air.

The plant was definitely coming toward them. Coming toward Cervoran, anyhow, and Cashel stood just behind and a bit to the side of the revived corpse. He shifted the jar, feeling it slosh. He'd have to loft it with his body and right arm like a heavy stone, using his left hand only for balance.

Positioning the jar showed Cashel how much it'd taken out of him to get this far, but he could still manage the throw. He couldn't do it with the troops in the way, though.

"Give me room, you fellows!" Cashel called. "Give me a clear shot!"

One of the soldiers closest to Cashel turned his head back to see who was giving orders. The roots the plant crawled on moved no faster than earthworms, but a feathery tentacle uncoiled like a bird striking. It caught the top of the man's shield while he was looking the other way.

The soldier shouted as the tentacle jerked his shield toward the monster. He dropped the staple at the right rim, but his forearm was through the loop behind the shield boss. The plant slashed side to side, using the screaming man as a flail against the other troops.

"Throw the jar," Cervoran said, standing like a statue with the lantern in his hand. "It is necessary."

The third stroke flung the man loose to tumble onto the ground near the wing on the other side of the courtyard. He lay there moaning. The plant continued to wave the shield for a moment, then flipped it away and started toward Cervoran again.

The man's arm was broken, probably broken in several places, but the circle of ripped-off limbs around the creature showed that the fellow was lucky anyway. Sharina knelt beside him, cutting a bandage from his tunic with her Pewle knife.

Being thrown around that way had been hard on the soldier, but it'd given Cashel the clear path he needed. The plant was about twice his height away. He stepped toward it, bringing the wine jar up and around as he moved.

The strain drew a blood-red mask over Cashel's vision; then the jar was out of his hands and he was falling backward in reaction. He felt light-headed, barely aware of the tentacles uncoiling toward him from either side. His shoulders slammed the ground-if he'd landed on the edge of the pavement he might've broken his neck, but he hadn't-and as his legs rocked down he could see normally again.

The jar squelched into the center of the plant's body without breaking, then fell back to smash on the ground. It'd been filled with olive oil, not wine. The dent in the great body where it'd hit was bruised a darker, oozing green, but the creature resumed its crawl toward Cervoran.

Cervoran threw the lantern. It broke open, spreading its flames across the oil-sodden ground with a gradual assurance much like the way the plant itself moved. For a moment the plant continued to come on, now shrouded by a pale yellow column. The tiny rootlets burned away from its feet and the tentacles reaching toward Cashel shrivelled; the creature stopped.

Heat hammered Cashel's feet despite their thick calluses. He tried to get up but found he was still dizzy. He lifted his torso slightly and shoved himself backward with his hands. When his forearm touched the edge of the pavement, he set his palms on it and managed to lurch into a sitting position.

The flames were still too close. He crossed his left hand over his face to keep his lips from blistering, but he continued to watch even though he could feel the hairs on the back of his arm shrinking and breaking in the heat.

A blazing cocoon wrapped the plant. Blackened layers seared off, laying bare the green beneath that charred away in turn. Cashel thought he heard the plant scream, though maybe that was only the keen of steam boiling out of the shrivelling body.

Cervoran hadn't moved. Cashel stood and eased him back from the flames. The wizard obeyed with the waxen calm of a sleepwalker. The front of his clothing, the new set of tunic and trousers, was already singed brown.

Civilians had come out into the courtyard to join the soldiers, but more than the heat of the flames kept them at a distance from the dying plant. Sharina looked across to Cashel. Her face was set as she rose from her patient, but now it brightened into a smile. Two soldiers were leading off their injured comrade, his arm splinted with lengths of spear shaft.

The side of the plant's body ruptured, gushing more sea water than would've fit in the jar Cashel had thrown. It gushed onto the burning oil, stirring the flames for a moment into greater enthusiasm. Things slithered in the water, swimming or skittering on flattened legs; each held pincers high.

"Crabs!" shouted a soldier and jabbed his javelin at the thing that squirmed toward him through the dying flames. The point missed, sparking on a pebble in the soil. The soldier recovered his weapon, but the pallid creature ran swiftly toward him. He raised his foot to stamp on it, but it sprang upward to fasten its pincers on opposite sides of his ankles where the sandal straps crossed.

It isn't a crab, Cashel thought as he snatched up a javelin lying against the pavement with its slender iron head bent. It's got a tail, so it's a crayfish or-

The tail curled into a nearly perfect circle, burying its hooked sting a finger's length in the soldier's knee joint. He fell backward, screaming on a rising note.

Cashel whipped the spear butt around, snatching the flat-bodied scorpion away from the soldier's leg and squashing it on the ground. The yellow horn sting broke off in the wound.

No male peasant was ever without a knife for trimming, prying and poking, but Cashel wasn't carrying one at the moment because the simple iron tool wouldn't have looked right among all these folk in court robes and polished armor. He knelt and worked the sting out of the soldier's flesh with the point of the man's own dagger.

The knee had turned black and swelled up big as the soldier's head, and his body was thrashing in four different rhythms the way a beheaded chicken does. Well, you did what you could.

Cashel straightened. Sharina was standing beside him. He dropped the dagger and hugged her to him with his left arm. He still held the dripping javelin in his right hand, and his eyes searched the dying fire for any more scorpions that might dart from the charred ruin of the hellplant.

* * *

Several times Garric stepped into muck that would've sucked him down if he hadn't jerked back quickly, but he didn't have any real trouble keeping up with Scarface and his companions. The pasture south of Barca's Hamlet had marshy stretches, and there're some sheep that seem determined to bog themselves thoroughly every chance they got.

He grinned. Celondre, one of the greatest poets of the Old Kingdom and of all time, had given Garric a great deal of pleasure. His pastorals of shady springs and gambolling lambs never included the shepherd struggling out of a bog with a half-drowned ewe bleating peevishly on his shoulders, however.

A bird belled like an alarm and shot straight up, almost at the feet of the man who was leading. He cried, "Wau!" and jumped backward, tangling his legs and falling over. Garric was startled also, dropping into a crouch. His ancestor's reflex swung his hand to the sword he wasn't carrying.

Scarface at the end of the line was the only one who didn't react. He called a good-natured gibe at the man who'd fallen, then added something in a harsher tone to get the line moving again.

"That one's a hunter," Carus said, assessing the situation. "The others are fishermen, maybe, or just farmers. Scarface I'd pick for a scout."

Why isn't he leading, then? Garric asked silently. He wasn't arguing, exactly; just trying to understand what Carus saw and he did not.

"Because they all know where they're going, lad," the king explained. "I'd guess that means it's not very far. And it also means that they're more worried about what might be following them than they are about what's ahead, which is something to keep in mind."

As Carus spoke, the path wound around a clump of snake-leafed trees. Ahead rose a series of hummocks some four feet above the general level of the landscape. The hummocks stood in water and were edged with walls made from vertical tree trunks; pole-supported walkways connected them. The surrounding ponds must've been spoil pits from which the dirt had been removed to fill the raised beds.

A man on one of the hummocks saw Scarface's group coming. He waved a hoe and called, "Urra!"

The leading spearman raised his net and spun it in an open circle in response, then looped it back around his waist. Other figures cultivating the raised beds, men and women both, straightened and looked toward the newcomers. A few waved.

"There's the fort," Carus said. "Well, fortified village."

He snorted mildly and added, "It wouldn't be hard to carry, not unless the ones inside are better armed than anything we've seen thus far. And even then it wouldn't be hard."

It was raining again, but even without that Garric wouldn't have been able to differentiate the stockade from the smaller planting beds spaced in front of it. We aren't planning an attack, are we? he thought, amused by his ancestor's focus on the military aspects of any situation.

"No, but somebody is or the defenses wouldn't be there," Carus responded crisply. "And if that somebody knows what he's doing, those defenses won't be much good."

The group reached a walkway like those between the beds-and connected to them, Garric saw as he looked ahead in the mist. Scarface clucked something to Garric and took his arm, leading him to the front of the line. The bed, saplings lashed to stringers of heavier timber, was barely wide enough for them to walk abreast.

The gate in the stockade opened. A man standing on the platform above it raised a wooden trumpet to his lips and blew an ugly blat of sound. The people who'd been in the fields started trooping toward the village in response.

An old man wearing a headdress of black feathers stepped into the gateway, ccompanied by a much younger woman. She held the man's left arm, apparently helping to support him. In the old man's hands was a jewel which gleamed yellow even in this dull light.

"Wizardry!" muttered King Carus in disgust.

Well, we knew somebody brought us here, Garric thought calmly. Now we've got a good idea who it was.

The feathered wizard raised the giant topaz, a duplicate of the one in the crown of First Atara, and cackled in triumph.

Chapter 4

A dog ran out of the gateway and began yapping as Garric and Scarface approached. It was black with a white belly and paws, medium sized and non-descript. Scarface sent a clod of dirt at it, catching the dog neatly in the ribs. It yelped and bolted back into the village, brushing the wizard on the way. He staggered and might've fallen if the woman accompanying him hadn't tightened her grip.

"That's the first animal we've seen," Carus said with a frown. "There hasn't been a cow, let alone a horse. There hasn't even been a chicken!"

Garric grinned. His ancestor knew could order a battle or site an ambush, things that not even the most educated of peasants could've been expected to know. That didn't mean that peasants knew nothing, however.

Their feet'd rot, Garric explained. Back in the borough we couldn't pasture the flock in the bottomland for more than a week at a time or their hooves'd get spongy. The clothes here're fiber, not wool, and I'd guess they eat a lot of fish with their vegetables.

The two men on top of the gate came down a ladder inside the stockade. The trumpeter stepped out of the way, but the fellow wearing a feather robe joined the wizard and his woman. They exchanged brief glances; not hostile, exactly, but cold enough to imply rivalry rather than friendship.

When Scarface reached the mound on which the village stood, he touched Garric on the chest to halt him and stepped forward to talk to the chief. The wizard waited with the big topaz in the crook of his right arm, wearing a disdainful expression. The woman eyed Garric with frank appraisal.

"Well, that one likes what she sees or I miss my bet," Carus said with a chuckle. "And I don't, because I saw her sort often enough myself back in the days when I wore flesh."

Garric glanced at the woman, then looked away. He tried to hide his feeling of disgust, but he felt his lip curl despite him.

It wasn't that she was unattractive, but she had a dirty air that went well beyond the simple physical grime inevitable in a village on a mud bank. The woman Katchin the Miller, Cashel's uncle, had married was much the same sort. Katchin had been a boastful, grasping, unpleasant man, but over the years Garric had come to feel that the dance Katchin's wife led him was sufficient punishment for all the man's flaws.

After listening to Scarface for some while, the chief gestured him aside and glared at Garric in what was probably supposed to be an intimidating fashion. Since Garric was taller by half a head, that didn't work very well. The edges of the chief's cloak were worn, and the feathers seemed to be a jumble of anything that could be netted or trapped with birdlime.

The chief raised his hands high in the air and began a speech, his voice cracking repeatedly. He held an edged club the length of his arm, a sort of wooden sword. It could be a dangerous weapon, but the blade of this one was carved with a complex knotted pattern.

Lowering his arms, the chief tapped himself on the chest with his free hand and said, "Wandalo! Wandalo!"

There was a fair chance he was giving his name rather than saying, "It's a nice day, isn't it?" Garric touched his own chest and said, "Garric. My name is Garric."

The wizard spoke, then raised the topaz slightly. He gestured with it toward the chief, who backed a step with an unhappy grimace.

The wizard looked at Garric and said, "Marzan." He touched his own chest and repeated, "Marzan!" He then spoke imperiously to Scarface and turned.

Scarface shrugged uncomfortably. He made a little gesture with his free hand, indicating that Garric should follow the wizard who was stumping back into the village with the woman's help. She looked over her shoulder at Garric.

"This lot don't like wizards any better than I do," muttered the ghost of King Carus.

Fortunately, thought Garric as strode after Marzan, I don't have that prejudice myself. Because I can't imagine how we'll get back to our own place and time without the help of a wizard.

The village stockade was a single row of tree trunks sunk into the soil and sharpened on the upper end. An earthen platform on the inside gave defenders a two-foot height advantage over anyone attacking, but there were no towers or arrow slits. Garric realized he hadn't seen bows or any other missile weapon.

Carus snorted when he realized that the palings weren't pinned together. "With six strong men and a rope I can pull down a hole wide enough to roll wagons through!" he said. "I'm not sure I'd bother with anything beyond a straight rush by a company of my skirmishers, though."

There were about two dozen oval houses with shake roofs and walls of lime plaster on a wicker framework. Each was raised a foot or so on posts; the ground was sodden already, and in a bad storm there must be a serious risk of flooding.

The windows had shutters, but most of them were open. In some birds on long tethers chirruped at Garric, nervous at the sight of a stranger. Fine-meshed fishnets hung under the shelter of the eaves.

The streets-the paths that twisted between the buildings-were paved with clamshells. Shells were probably the source of the plaster too; nowhere since he'd arrived in this land had Garric seen outcrops of stone that could be burned for lime. The quality of the woodwork was impressive, particularly because the people didn't have metal tools, and he thought Ilna would've been interested in their skill with cords and fabrics.

Marzan and the woman led Garric to one of a pair of houses in the center of the village. Both were enclosed by waist-high openwork fences, adornments rather than meant for privacy or protection. Gnarled wisteria grew over one side of the fence around Marzan's compound, but it wasn't blooming at this time of year.

The woman opened the pole crossbar and stepped aside for the wizard to enter. As he shuffled past her into the compound, she looked at Garric and said, "Soma!" She touched her chest, then grinned widely and lifted the top of thin, waterproof cloth to show her breast before she followed Marzan.

Garric's face was set as he closed the bar after him. He heard Wandalo speaking at a distance and looked back. The top of the chief's head was just visible over the house roofs. He must be standing on the platform above the gate to harangue the villagers whom he'd called from the fields.

Garric wished he knew what Wandalo was saying. Though based on what he'd seen of the man and of rulers of Wandalo's type elsewhere, he probably wasn't missing much.

Garric had to duck under Marzan's doorway, but the hut's ceiling was generously high. Light came not only by the windows but through the roof itself: the shakes were placed in overlapping strips with air spaces between. The design wouldn't work in high winds, so the current vertical drizzle must be the normal state of affairs.

The floor was of planks fitted with narrow gaps between them to deal with roof leaks and tracked-in mud. There were couches on both long walls. In the center of the room a small fire burned on an open hearth of clay laid in a wooden framework. There was no chimney, just the louvered roof: the three of them disturbed the air when they entered, making Garric's nose wrinkle at the swirl of sharp smoke.

Marzan seated himself cross-legged near the hearth and motioned Garric down across from him. Garric squatted, the usual method of sitting in Barca's Hamlet when there weren't chairs. Soma went to the other end of the hut and took baskets from a pantry cabinet made of joined reeds.

The wizard placed his topaz carefully on the floor in front of him where strips of darker wood were inlaid into the planks. They formed a hexagon with the yellow stone in its center.

Marzan smirked at Garric and removed the longest of the three black feathers from his headdress. Using that as a pointer-as a wand-he touched it to the corners of the figure in turn as he chanted, "Nerphabo kirali thonoumen...."

The topaz glowed. The light at its heart was faint but brighter than the dimness of the rain-washed hut. Flaws in the stone became shadows that moved.

"Oba phrene mouno...," the wizard said. He was using words of power, addressing beings that were neither humans nor gods but formed a bridge between them. "Thila rikri ralathonou!"

Garric had always thought of the words of power as things which a wizard read. Marzan was illiterate-there was no sign of writing in this community-but he rattled off the syllables in the same sing-song voice as Tenoctris used to chant the spells she'd written in the curving Old Script.

The cultured, scholarly Lady Tenoctris was part of the same fabric as this savage who probably didn't understand the concept of writing. Different from them on the surface but at heart the same nonetheless were Cashel and Ilna. Their mother, a fairy queen or something stranger yet, had passed to them the ability to see the patterns which formal wizardry affected through spells and words of power.

Here in humid gloom lighted by the glow in the heart of a yellow stone, Garric had a brief glimpse of the cosmos interconnected and perfect. Do Ilna and Cashel always see this? he wondered; but there was no way to answer the question, and perhaps the question had no answer.

"Bathre nothrou nemil...," Marzan chanted. "Nothil lare krithiai...."

The shadows in the topaz moved faster. Garric felt them grip him the way they had when he stared into the diadem on First Atara. Instead of drawing him down this time, the motion sucked a face up from the yellow depths of the stone.

A cat, he thought, but the forehead was too high and the jaw was shorter than a beast's. The image opened its mouth in a silent snarl; the teeth at least were a cat's, the long curving daggers of a carnivore. The eyes were larger than a man's and perfectly round. The pupils were vertical slits.

"Corl," a voice in Garric's mind. The wizard's mouth continued to chant the words of power.

Marzan's chant was a barely heard backdrop, a rhythm outside the crystalline boundaries of the stone. The cat-faced image drew back to show Garric the whole creature: two-legged and as tall as a man, but lithe and as quick as light playing on the waves of the sea. It wore a harness but no clothing; a coat of thin, brindled fur covered its body. In its four-fingered left hand was a bamboo spear with a point of delicately flaked stone; in its right was a coil with weighted hooks on the end.

The cat man leaped onto a vaguely seen landscape from a fissure in the ground. Garric couldn't tell whether the fog shrouding the figure was real or a distortion of the stone which the wizard used for scrying. A second of the creatures followed the first, then three more. They loped across the sodden landscape, moving in quick short leaps rather than striding like men walking.

The cat men were armed with spears or axes with slim stone heads, along with the hook-headed cords. They formed a widely spaced line abreast as they vanished into the mist. The images faded.

"Coerli," said the voice in Garric's mind as Marzan chanted. "Coerli...."

Garric's mind had never left the boundaries of the crystal. A new image formed around him, a series of planting beds like those around this village. Oats grew on the nearest. The grain was still dark green, but it'd reached the height of the adults' chests and must be near its full growth.

It was late evening, and with their tools in their hands the villagers were moving toward the walkway that led to the walled community. A family-man, woman, and a quartet of children ranging from five to ten years old-had been cultivating the nearest bed. All carried hoes with clamshell blades, but the father had a spear as well.

Coerli came out of a grove of scale-barked trees, their long, narrow feet kicking up splashes of water. Their jaws were open and probably shrieking something, but Marzan's chant filled Garric's ears like the surf roaring in a heavy storm.

The youngest child was in the lead. She stopped transfixed and pointed; the hoe fell from her hand. Her mother clouted her on the side of the head and grabbed her wrist, dragging the girl with her along the narrow walkway.

The two boys and the eldest child, another girl, followed, their light capes flapping like bat wings. The walkway swayed but held, and the people running didn't slip on the wet wood.

The father ran toward the wider walkway the led from the village to the solid ground where the Coerli had been hiding. He got to it just as the cat men reached the other end. There were five of them, perhaps the same band Marzan had shown Garric in the first scene.

Terror drew the skin of the father's face taut over the bones. Villagers who'd been in the other planting beds continued running for the stockade; no one tried to help the family whom the Coerli had chosen.

The human waggled his spear, then hurled it. The leading Corl dodged, then leaped and batted the man into the pond with a swipe of his axe. The motion was swifter and smoother than the spear's wobbling flight.

As the father fell, the Corl made another great leap along the walkway and snapped out his weighted line. It curled over the heads of the older children to wrap the mother's throat, jerking her backward. Her left arm flailed wildly but her right hurled the little girl away from her and the cat men.

The child kept her feet and managed to run three steps before the last of the Coerli sprang onto her as the others were trussing the older children. Twisting her arms behind her back, the Corl thrust a thorn through both wrists to pinion them.

Fog rose to cover the images in the stone's heart. Garric felt a sucking sensation as his mind returned to his own control. His eyes felt gritty, even after he'd blinked several times.

Marzan slumped. He would've fallen across the topaz if Soma hadn't knelt beside him and reached an arm around his torso for support.

When Garric was a boy reading Old Kingdom epics, he'd thought wizardry was a matter of waving a wand and watching wonders occur. He'd seen the reality, now, the crushing effort needed to create visions like the ones Marzan had just shown him.

Garric grinned back at the ghost in his mind. Aye, he thought, the poets didn't give me much feel for how bone weary I'd be after a battle, either.

Soma held a drinking gourd to the wizard's lips, tilting it slightly as he slurped the contents. He laid his hand on hers; she lowered the gourd and shifted a little in preparation for lifting him to his feet.

Marzan said something to her, then looked at Garric. He began to speak, not loudly but with hoarse-voiced determination. The only words Garric could understand were his own name and one other: Coerli. He had no context, nor did it help when Marzan gestured or took Garric's hands in his own and raised them.

At last Marzan gave up. He muttered to Soma, who helped him to one of the couches. He was shivering in reaction to his wizardry. Soma tucked a blanket around him with surprising gentleness.

Garric stood, working the stiffness out of his legs. The sun was down. The only light in the hut was an oil lamp-a gourd on a hook near the closed door with a twist of fiber for a wick-and the dull red glow of the hearth fire.

Two terra cotta pots waited at the edge of the hearth; Soma had cooked a meal while Garric was entranced in the topaz. No wonder Marzan was exhausted!

"Garric," she said and gestured him to her. She sat down, using the hearth as a low table. He joined her, moving carefully. He was tired, not just stiff. It'd been a full day, if he could call it a day....

Soma broke off a piece of oat cake, dipped it into fish stew from one of the pots, and tried to feed Garric with it. He waved her away and took the remainder of the cake himself to dip. The stew was delicious, and so was the mixture of squash and beans that'd steamed in the other container.

"I've eaten harness leather," Carus observed wryly, "and thought it was fine."

Garric smiled and nodded to Soma in appreciation. She handed him a gourd of beer, thin but with a pleasant astringence. It cleared the phlegm from the back of his throat.

There was something in what Carus said, but this was a good meal. Garric had been unjust to the woman, assuming she couldn't cook just because Katchin's wife Feydra couldn't.

When Garric had finished eating, Soma rose and gestured him toward the other couch. She drew back another thin blanket. He rose, suddenly so tired that he was dizzy, and thankfully walked to the couch. It was covered with a pad of fine wicker rather than a stuffed mattress; it gave pleasantly when he sat down on the edge.

Soma sat beside him and reached between his legs.

"No," Garric said, jumping to his feet again. He made a wiping motion in the air as he'd done when he refused to let her feed him.

Soma tugged at his only garment, the cape he'd borrowed when he met Scarface and his band. The loose knot opened at the pull, but Garric snatched it out of her hand. "No!" he repeated forcefully as he backed away.

Soma stood and lifted her tunic over her head. Garric turned and scrambled out the hut, closing the door behind him. He heard an angry shout; then something hit the panel from the inside.

There were many reasons Garric wasn't interested in Soma's offer. The fact that Marzan was his best chance of returning to his own friends was only a minor one.

It was raining again. Well, that wasn't a surprise. No lights showed in the village and the sky was black. Garric thought of stumbling to Wandalo's compound next door, but nothing he'd seen when he'd arrived here suggested the chief would be a friend. Perhaps in the morning he could find Scarface.

For now, though.... Garric crawled under Marzan's hut. The clay was damp, but at least there wasn't standing water. Yet, of course.

As Garric turned, trying to find the least uncomfortable position, he heard a whine. A dog snuffled him, then licked his hand and curled up next to him. Back to back with the warm furry body, Garric slept.

He'd been in worse places.

* * *

King Cervoran turned toward Cashel. It was his first action since he threw the lantern. He moved with the deliberation of something much larger: a tree falling or the ice covering the mill's roof slipping thunderously when the winter sun warmed the black slates beneath it.

"Where is the diadem?" he asked in his odd, thin voice. "Where is the topaz?"

"You mean the crown?" Cashel said. "Lady Liane took it after Garric, well, Garric disappeared. I guess it's in the room we were in when you came and fetched me."

Without speaking further Cervoran started across the courtyard. The mess was worse than in Fall when sheep were slaughtered so there was enough fodder to winter the rest of the flock. There was blood and frightened bleats then too, but it was sheep, not men.

The oil flames had died, but the remains of the hellplant still smoldered; the air was hazy and rank. Green vegetation always stank when you burned it, but it seemed to Cashel that it wasn't just memory of what the thing was that made this worse'n usual.

Sharina was talking to Waldron and Attaper. Well, they were both talking at her, loudly and not paying attention to what each other said. Cashel started to go to her-but she was all right, he knew that. He wanted to go back into the pantry and fetch his quarterstaff, but that could wait too.

He knew in his heart what he ought to do, so he did it even though it was about the last thing he'd 've done for choice: he went after Cervoran, catching up with him in two quick strides and using the spear shaft to tap folks and make a passage. Anybody who saw Cervoran got out of the way, but in the noisy confusion people weren't paying attention to much outside their own frightened imaginations just now.

It wouldn't do to have the wizard trampled and maybe even killed. He'd been the only one who knew what to do when the plant attacked, and the fact he'd known what to do even before it happened was important too.

There were guards-again-at the door to the conference room, but they stepped out of the way with obvious relief when they saw Cashel. They'd have felt they had to stop Cervoran, and they really didn't want anything to do with a corpse. Maybe Cervoran'd just had a fit, but even now he looked dead.

"Good to see you, milord," said the officer, a man Cashel didn't know. "I didn't see how we were going to handle that thing till you took care of it."

"It was really King Cervoran here," Cashel said, but he opened the door and followed Cervoran into the room without trying to convince the soldiers. They'd believe what they wanted to believe, and they didn't want to believe a walking corpse had saved their lives.

Liane and civilians travelling with Garric were busy inside. Lord Tadai stood in the middle of a whole handful of clerks from his department. Several of Liane's assistants were waiting for a word too, but she was in a corner of the room talking to a fellow who was dressed like a servant here in the palace. He was a lot solider to look at than you generally saw carrying trays and announcing guests.

Liane had spies all over the Isles; this man must be another of them. The fact that she was talking with him right out in the open probably didn't please either her or the spy, but at a time like this you might have to do lots of things you weren't happy about.

Everybody looked up when the door opened. They kept on looking when they saw who it was who'd come in.

"Give me the topaz," Cervoran said. His eyes weren't really focused on anybody, but Cashel had the funny feeling that he saw everybody around him. "Give me the jewel Bass One-Thumb took from the amber sarcophagus. It is necessary."

"He wants the crown, ah, Liane," Cashel said in the immediate silence. "Ma'am, he was the one who knew to burn that creature outside."

"It is necessary," Cervoran repeated. His voice hurt to listen to, though it wasn't loud or anything. Cashel wondered if the king had always sounded like that.

"Where do you propose to take the diadem?" Liane said. She sounded calm, but her fingers were hidden in a fold of her sash where Cashel knew she carried a little knife.

"What does it matter where this flesh is?" Cervoran said with obvious contempt. "I will use it here if you like. It is necessary."

"Yes, that will do," Liane said, her expression unchanged. She nodded to the assistant sitting with a velvet-wrapped bundle on his lap.

That fellow hopped to his feet and offered the package to her. "Give it to Lord Cervoran," she said sharply. She was generally polite as could be, but it seemed the things going on were affecting her too.

The clerk twitched. Cashel stepped forward, took the bundle, and handed it to Cervoran. The velvet dropped to the floor; Cervoran stared at the yellow stone as if he was trying to see through it to the veins of the rocks beneath the palace.

"Milady?" said the assistant timidly. "Does he have to be here?"

"Be silent!" Liane snapped.

Cervoran looked up. "Are you afraid, fool?" he said. His swollen lips spread in a minute grin. "Shall I tell you how you will die?"

The assistant's face went white. He opened his mouth to speak, then toppled forward in a dead faint. Cashel caught him and carried him back to the couch where he'd been sitting.

That was the first really human thing he'd seen Cervoran do since he walked off the pyre. It was a nasty thing to do to the poor clerk, but it was human.

When Cashel turned, Cervoran was looking at the stone again and standing like a wax statue. Tadai and his clerks talked in muted voices, and the spy was whispering to Liane. Nobody was paying Cashel any attention, maybe because he was standing close to Cervoran who nobody wanted to notice.

"Well, I'll go...," Cashel said. "Ah, outside."

Liane nodded as Cashel stepped into the courtyard again, but nobody said anything. He was used to being ignored, of course, though this was a different business from what'd happened in the borough because he was a poor orphan. Everybody here was afraid, and they were afraid to learn anything that they didn't already know.

The bustle around the hellplant was getting organized now. Lord Waldron was giving orders while Sharina looked on at his side and Tenoctris bent over the smoking remains. Ilna was helping the old wizard, prodding layers of sodden greenery apart with the blade of her paring knife.

Cashel would've gone to join them, but his eye caught Prince Protas standing forlornly to the side. The boy's face was formally calm, but he looked awfully lonely. Cashel walked over to him.

"Lord Cashel!" Protas said, suddenly a frightened boy again in his enthusiasm. "Oh, sir, I heard you defeated the monster!"

"Your father knew to burn it," Cashel said. "I just carried the jar. I'll grant it was a big jar."

He spoke quietly, but he knew he sounded proud. He had a right to be proud, but it was true the real credit went to Cervoran.

Though Cashel wasn't completely sure "your father" was quite the right thing to call him now.

"Where did the monster come from, milor-" Protas said. He caught himself and finished, "Cashel, I mean."

Cashel grinned. "I don't know," he said, "but I'll bet if we follow that-"

He pointed the spear shaft toward the hole in the courtyard wall. He wasn't much of a woodsman-picking squirrels off a branch with a hard-flung stone was about as much hunting as he did-but the hellplant's root-like legs had left a track of slime on the ground behind them. It smelled of salt and sour vegetable matter.

"-we can learn for ourselves. You want to come?"

"With you?" said the boy. "Yes sir!"

He sobered and said, "My tutor hid in a clothes chest when he looked out of the window and saw the thing here in the courtyard. When he comes out, he'll want me to get back to my mathematics lesson."

Cashel thought for a moment. He cleared his throat.

"I guess mathematics is important to know," he said. He wasn't sure exactly what mathematics was, though he thought it meant counting without having to drop dried beans in a sack. That was how Cashel did it when the number got more than his fingers. "But I think this afternoon you can miss a lesson without it being too bad. What with, you know, the trouble that happened."

Cashel looked at the spear shaft waggling in his hand while he thought. "But before we do that," he added, "let's get my quarterstaff back. Just in case."

He and the boy went into the west wing of the palace, through the kitchens and the crowd of clerks and servants chattering there. Protas looked around with real interest. Cashel couldn't understand why till the boy said, "I've never been here before, you know. Is this where the food comes from?"

"I guess it is," Cashel agreed. "It's fancier than I'm used to."

It must be funny to be a prince. When you're just a boy, anyway. Garric seemed to be taking to it fine but he had his growth. Though Garric as a boy would probably have gotten out more than Protas seemed to've done.

Two servants were in the pantry. The woman looked down into the cellars through the open trapdoor, but the man had picked up the quarterstaff and was turning it in his hands.

"I'll take that!" Cashel said, tossing the spear away. He hadn't meant to've shouted but he wasn't sorry that he had. The woman shrieked like she'd been stabbed; the dropped the quarterstaff and turned so quick that he got his feet tangled.

Cashel stepped forward, grabbing the hickory with his right hand and the servant's arm with his left. The fellow screamed near as bad as the woman had. Cashel guessed he'd gripped as hard with one hand as the other, so there'd be bruises on the man's biceps in the morning. That wouldn't be near as bad as what he'd have gotten by toppling headfirst into the cellars the way he'd started to do, though.

"What were you doing with Lord Cashel's property, sirrah?" Protas said. His voice sounded a lot like King Cervoran's, though the boy being twelve was at least some of the reason.

"What?" said the servant, blinking as he realized it was the prince speaking. "May the Shepherd save me, I didn't mean-I mean we saw it and didn't know-that is-"

"It's all right," Cashel said, stroking his staff's smooth, familiar surface. The poor fellow was getting hit from all sides, it must seem like to him. "You ought to close that cellar door before somebody breaks his neck, though."

He led Protas back out through the kitchen. The folks there had been looking at the pantry and whispering. One woman got down on her knees and said, "May the Lady bless you, your lordship, for saving us from that terrible monster!"

"Ma'am, I just carried the jar," Cashel muttered. Goodness, she was trying to grab the hem of his tunic! He pulled away, striding out much quicker than he normally chose to do. The boy kept up, but he had to run to do it.

The sun was getting low in the sky, but it was still an hour short of sundown. They skirted the soldiers, who probably had a job here in the courtyard; and the civilians, who were mostly just gawking.

As they neared where the back gate had been a voice behind them called, "Your highness? Prince Protas?"

Cashel turned; Lord Martous was bearing down on them from the other wing of the palace. "He's with me, sir!" Cashel said loudly.

To his surprise, the chamberlain bowed low and backed away. Cashel muttered to the boy, "I thought he'd tell me you had to go off with him anyhow."

"Oh, no, Cashel," Protas said in amazement. "Why, I'll bet even Prince Garric would have to do what you said if you told him something."

"I don't guess he would," Cashel said, blushing in embarrassment. "Anyway, I wouldn't do anything like that!"

Close up, what'd happened to the back wall looked pretty impressive. The edge courses were squared stones fitted together, and the rest of the wall was rubble set in concrete which'd cured long enough to be pretty near stone-hard itself. The plant had pushed until it cracked off full-height slabs to either side of the gateway. Besides that it'd broken the transom, a squared oak timber two hand-spans on a side.

"Are there more of the monsters, Cashel?" the boy asked as they followed the hellplant's track back down through the alley. Local people-town dwellers and country folk both, standing in separate groups-talked in low voices and watched as Cashel and Protas walked past

"I don't know," Cashel said simply. He thought for a moment. "I guess we'd hear shouting if there were more of them close by, though."

The alley led straight to a notch in the seawall; it'd let you back a wagon all the way into the water if for some reason you wanted to. There was no question the hellplant had come up that way: the crushed limestone roadway was still dark with slime.

Two sailors had been talking on the seawall. They went quiet and watched when they saw Cashel and the boy walking straight toward them.

"May the Lady smile on you, good sirs!" Protas said, surprising Cashel. He'd been trying to figure how to open a conversation with strangers who didn't look very trusting. "This is Lord Cashel and of course I'm Prince Protas. Can you tell us how the creature appeared here? Did it come by boat then?"

The pair looked at each other nervously. "We didn't bring it!" said the man whose right arm was so tattooed he looked like he had a long-sleeved shirt on that side.

"Of course not, my good man!" the boy said scornfully. "But you saw it land, did you not? How did it arrive on First Atara?"

"I thought it was seaweed," said the little fellow with three gold rings in his right ear and the lobe of the left one missing. "Just drifting up, you know. And then it come to the wall and started to climb. And I took off running, I don't mind to tell you."

"There's no current could've drifted it to shore that quick," the tattooed man protested. "It had to be swimming, Goldie."

"I don't know what kinda currents there might be!" Goldie said angrily. "What with the Shepherd's Sling Stone whamming into the sea the way it did. Why, the one wave nigh cleared the seawall, and I've never seen that to happen no matter how bad a storm it is."

"That was this morning!" his companion said. "The sea was calm as calm all the past six hours."

"But you're sure the thing didn't come on a boat?" Cashel said, looking out along the track the low sun plowed glowing on the water. "It just swam?"

"Swam or drifted," Goldie said. "Swam, I guess. But I thought it was just something washed up from when the stone hit the sea."

Cashel looked out to the southwest, through the jaws of the harbor and down the sun's track across the open sea to where the meteor had landed. "You might be right at that," he said at last.

* * *

Though fire had devoured the outer layers of the hellplant, it seemed to Sharina that what remained was shrinking further the way frost-killed vine-leaves sink into a foetor and ooze away. There was nothing obviously unnatural about this mass, but it was certainly foul and ugly. So was much of peasant life, of course.

Tenoctris had moved from examining the plant to looking at the corpse of one of the three scorpions from inside it. Now she turned and got up, partly supported by Ilna. Sharina smiled at them, hoping Tenoctris had learned something useful-and getting a wan look and shrug that made it clear she hadn't.

Chalcus stood nearby but didn't burden his hands with the weight of an old woman. His lips smiled but his eyes did not, skipping over everything around him. Chalcus' gaze didn't rest any longer than the late sunlight glinting on the edge of his drawn sword. If his eyes had found danger anywhere they danced, that sword would strike with a speed and precision that were themselves just short of magical.

"I've never seen anything like that," Tenoctris said, nodding slightly in the direction of the hard-shelled creature. "It's meant to live in water: its legs are paddles and it seems to have gills instead of lungs. But it's a scorpion and not a crab or lobster."

"Master Chalcus?" Sharina said. "You're a sailor. Do you know where such things come from?"

"Nowhere in the parts of the world I've travelled before now, milady," Chalcus said. He turned his face and his smile toward Sharina, but his eyes continued their restless search. "Which is a good deal of the world. I'd as lief that Mona here had been without the small demons as well, though I wouldn't mind them so much without the mount they rode in on... which is new to me as well, I'm thankful to say."

"And new to me," Tenoctris said with a slight nod; she seemed completely wrung out. "Perhaps later, tomorrow...."

"There's nothing of immediate concern that you can see at the moment?" Sharina said. She raised the pitch of the final word to make it a question, but she knew that Tenoctris would've said so if she'd seen something. "In that case, why don't you get some food and rest? I've watched you do five separate divination spells, and I know how much effort that requires."

She smiled at the wizard with real warmth. Tenoctris was one of the strongest pillars on which the kingdom rested, but she was also a friend. In Sharina's mind, that was the more important thing of the two.

"We need you, Tenoctris," she said. "And we need you healthy."

"I did seven spells, not five," Tenoctris admitted with the same wan smile as when she'd risen to her feet. "And as for resting, I might've been asleep in bed for anything useful I gained from any of them. But yes, I'll see if I can't do better in the morning."

She dipped her chin in the direction of the plant's remains. The gesture was as quick and businesslike as a hatchet stroke. She added, "Don't allow this to be removed, if you will."

"Lord Waldron," Sharina said in a tone that was about as crisp as the wizard's nod. "Place a guard on this mess, if you please. Don't let anyone but Lady Tenoctris come near it."

The army commander barked a laugh. "As your highness wishes," he said. "Though I wouldn't worry about thieves myself. And if any of the palace staff are devoted enough to their duties to clean it up, that'll surprise me too."

"One of your own officers might've taken care of it, milord," said Attaper. His brief smile rang like a hammer. "Or mine, of course. Better safe than sorry."

Waldron snorted as he gave the orders. The two senior officers were in a surprisingly good mood. A creature that was physical if not exactly flesh and blood had attacked; the creature had been destroyed. That was how things were supposed to work in the soldiers' world, and by now the fact that something was unusual didn't bother them so long as it wasn't wizardry.

Soldiers tended to take a sharply limited view regarding what was their business, too. In the present case, that permitted both men to ignore the question of how a giant plant could've come to walk into the palace without wizardry. Sharina found that puzzling, but they were very good at their jobs.

A Blood Eagle, one of the squad Garric had detailed to guard Tenoctris, picked up the satchel in which the old wizard kept the paraphernalia of her art. He tramped along beside her, offering his free hand if she needed support on the way to her room and bed.

Most of the troops-like most civilians-were uncomfortable dealing with wizardry. There were a few, though, who didn't mind. All the Blood Eagles were ready to guard Tenoctris with their lives; this particular trooper was also happy to carry a bag filled with spells and potions, and to treat the wizard as though she were no more than an old lady with a pleasant personality.

Sharina was suddenly tired also, though she hadn't done any serious work today. It was the tension, she supposed. She giggled.

"Milady?" said Chalcus with a hard smile. "If there's a joke in all this business, I'd be pleased to hear it."

"When I got up this morning," Sharina said, "I was worried that my tongue would get tangled when I offered the hand of fellowship to Marquess Protas on behalf of the citizens of Haft. As it turned out, I needn't have worried since the coronation didn't take place. So many of our fears are empty."

She shook her head, grinning wryly. She looked around and added, "Does anyone know where Lady Liane's gone?"

"Not gone but stayed," said Ilna. "In the conference room Master Chalcus took me to when I proved useless here.."

She glanced at the knotted pattern she held between the fingers of both hands, then grimaced and looked up again. Ilna was short and dark and slim; pretty or at least handsome, but likely to be overlooked when she was in the company of her friend Sharina, a lithe blond beauty. If Ilna resented that, she kept the feeling well hidden-even from Sharina herself.

"Then let's go talk with Liane," Sharina said, offering Ilna her arm and starting toward the council chamber. "She may know something about this even if Tenoctris doesn't."

The chamber was unexpectedly dim. The sky wasn't dark yet, but it didn't send much light through the clerestory windows. Nobody'd lighted the lamps in the wall sconces. The guards hadn't let servants in to do that, Sharina realized.

Sharina stepped back outside. The guards had a lighted lantern dangling from the edge of the portico. The hook supporting it normally held a polished marble 'sparkler' that threw sunlight onto the interior as it rotated.

Sharina lifted down the lantern. "I'll borrow this if I may," she said, twisting the base away from the barrel to expose the burning candle. She walked into the council chamber with it.

"Your highness?" said the puzzled officer behind her. Of course nobody objected to Princess Sharina taking a lantern if she wanted to, but he was probably surprised that she knew how to take it apart.

Sharina knew how to light lamps too. She walked from sconce to sconce, holding the candle flame just below the wick of each oil lamp in turn. The Lady only knew how many winter evenings she'd done this same thing at the inn, though generally using a splinter of lightwood instead of a candle.

She turned, righting the candle in her hand. One of Lord Tadai's clerks stood at her elbow, looking nervous.

"Jossin here will take that back to the guards, your highness," Tadai said. "I was remiss in not dealing with the situation myself earlier."

"It's not part of your job, milord," Sharina said. "And it has been part of mine."

She turned her attention to Liane, saying, "Do any of your sources know where the creature might have come from, Liane? Or who sent it?"

Cervoran moved. He held the uncut topaz, and it threw foggy highlights across the room as he lowered his hands. He'd been so still that Sharina hadn't noticed him until then.

"Not yet," said Liane, "though-"

"The Green Woman sent it," Cervoran said. "She made it in her Fortress of Glass and sent it to attack me."

His voice was rising in pitch and volume. The oil lamps gave his complexion a yellow tinge and brought out blotches beneath the skin that daylight had concealed. Neither Sharina nor Liane moved away from the recent corpse as most of the others in the room did, but Liane had her right hand between the folds of her sash.

"She will attack me while she lives and I do," Cervoran said.

"There'll be more of those hellplants?" Sharina asked sharply. Waldron and Attaper with their aides had entered the chamber behind her; the soldiers' faces were taut with the instinct to attack or flee.

"There will be many more!" Cervoran said. His fingers moved over the topaz like maggots crawling on a yellow corpse. "But I will prevail!"

* * *

Ilna looked at the man she'd saved from death on his own funeral pyre. If he was still a man, of course; and if she'd saved him.

"A meteor struck the sea yesterday," Cervoran said. "We must find it. The Green Woman is there, and I will defeat her."

"The sling stone struck, right enough," said Chalcus with cheerful bravado, the backs of his wrists against his hipbones and the fingers turned outward like flippers. "And I or anybody who was with the fleet can show you where, easily enough; any sailor, at least. But it won't do you any good, I fear."

Cervoran looked at him. Ilna had begun picking apart the pattern she'd knotted from lengths of twine as the hellplant slithered across the courtyard.

"Take me to the meteor," Cervoran said. Only his squeaky voice and the muffled breaths of the others in the room could be heard. "It is necessary. I will defeat her!"

The pattern would've frozen a man in his tracks. A man's eyes don't see: they gather patterns that his mind turns into sight. The patterns Ilna wove in fabric had a greater reality in the minds of those who saw them than a mountain or the blazing sun above.

"I can take you there right enough, my friend," Chalcus said. He feared the Gods-he didn't worship but he feared. He feared no other thing in this world as far as Ilna could tell, beast or man or wizard. "But the place I'll take you is the deepest trench in the Inner Sea. A full league down a wizard said, or so the rumor has it. If your Green Woman's on the bottom of that, then you'll not be going to her unless you're a fish, not so?"

Ilna's pattern hadn't stopped the plant. Now she was beginning to wonder what effect it would have on the recent corpse.

"Do you think to mock me, little man?" Cervoran said. It was odd to hear so shrill a voice speaking as slowly as a priest praying while the villagers came forward with their offerings during the Tithe Procession. "Take me to the place. It is necessary!"

"Your highness?" Chalcus said, looking past Cervoran to Sharina. "This is a thing I can do well enough in the Heron, should you wish it. But...?"

"It is necessary!" Cervoran repeated shrilly.

Cervoran, king or man or corpse, took Cashel out of this room and brought him back with a jar of oil in time to destroy the hellplant-which nobody else had been able to do, Ilna herself included. That didn't make Cervoran a friend to the kingdom and its citizens, but at least it made him an enemy of their enemies.

"Master Chalcus...?" said Sharina. From the set look on her face she was thinking the same way as Ilna was. "Would a larger ship be better? I could send him out on the Shepherd or one of the triremes."

Chalcus snorted. "And what could a fiver do that my handy little Heron could not, eh, milady?" he said. 'We can turn twice around in the time it'd take a cow like the Shepherd to change course by eight points only. We'll take him."

"At once," said Cervoran.

"Indeed not," said Chalcus. "In the morning. I'll find the spot by the angles on the Three Sisters east of here and Mona Headland itself, but I can't do that till sunrise."

"In the morning, then," Sharina said, giving an order rather than commenting. "And Master Chalcus? Don't set out until I've had a chance to learn Lady Tenoctris' opinion on the matter."

"Master Cervoran?" Ilna said. She'd reduced the knotted pattern to the cords it'd started as. She held them in her right palm and stroked them with the fingers of her left hand. "There was a sling stone, a meteor, hitting the sea as we approached the island yesterday."

"Yes," said Cervoran. "But I will go to her and defeat her."

"There was a second stone, meteor, this morning," Ilna said. She had the odd feeling that she was standing outside herself and hearing someone else speak. "During your funeral. It burst in the air above us. What did that meteor mean?"

"It means nothing," said Cervoran, his voice becoming even more shrill.

"It exploded in the air," Ilna repeated, "and then you rose from your bier. What does that mean?"

"I am Cervoran!" the former king cried. He lowered his eyes to stare into the topaz again.

"What?" said Ilna.

But Cervoran remained as motionless as a statue; and when Chalcus murmured, "We'll be up betimes, dearest. Best to get some rest now," Ilna left the chamber with him.

"There's a pattern too big for me to see the ends of it," Ilna whispered. Chalcus listened, but she wasn't so much speaking to him as to the cosmos itself. "But we're part of it, like it or not. And I don't like it at all!"

Chapter 5

Sharina awakened in shocked awareness that something was wrong. She sat bolt upright, hearing low-voiced chanting nearby. She didn't know where she was, and the sun was already up behind the shutters.

She was out of bed, gripping the hilt of the Pewle knife with her right hand and its sealskin sheath with her left, when she remembered. She relaxed with a sigh, then giggled at what a fool she'd have looked if there'd been anyone to see her.

There wasn't, of course. Sharina had been an inn servant herself too long to want anybody serving her when she didn't need it.

The bedroom of the Queen's suite where Sharina slept had a door to Cervoran's

Chamber of Art. Tenoctris had that room now, sleeping on a simple cot and rising at intervals in the night to browse Cervoran's collection of books and objects by lamplight. That's what was happening now.

Sharina shot the knife back in its sheath, but she didn't hang it on the bedpost before she walked to the connecting door and opened it. Tenoctris sat on the floor, chanting over a flattened bead of green glass that'd been in the late king's curio cabinet.

Cashel stood close by, his quarterstaff planted firmly on the floor. He'd turned his head when he heard the door open. He didn't speak because that might've distrubed Tenoctris, but his smile was as warm as sunlight on the meadow.

A sparkle of blue wizardlight dusted the air above the glass bead, then vanished like a puff of warm breath on the polished face of a mirror. The old wizard sagged, setting down the split of bamboo she'd used for a wand. She disposed of each sliver after she'd used it once, because she said otherwise the influences it'd absorbed from previous spells would affect later ones in directions she couldn't foresee.

Most wizards made wands and athames, dagger-shaped implements of art, from materials chosen to concentrate power; then they covered the tools with symbols of art to increase the effect still further. Those folk could perform far greater wizardry than Tenoctris could... but as Sharina herself had seen, eventually they did something they hadn't intended. A very great wizard had brought down the Old Kingdom a thousand years past-and was drowned in a reaction to his spell which he hadn't predicted and couldn't control.

Tenoctris' smile had a hint of fatigue. She put her right hand on the floor to brace her as she rose, but Cashel instantly squatted and supported her. For the most part Cashel ambled along at the pace of the sheep he'd spent most of his life caring for, but he moved with amazing speed when he needed to.

"This comes from the moon," Tenoctris said, dipping a finger toward the glass bead she'd left within the five-pointed star drawn in powdered charcoal. She wasn't using the figures Cervoran had inset in the floor any more than she was using an athame carved from a dragon scale. "It'd fallen into the sea, struck off the moon's surface by a meteor. Cervoran located it through his art and sent divers to bring it up for him."

"What does it do, Tenoctris?" Sharina asked, looking at the vaguely greenish bead with greater interest. "Does it increase your powers?"

"It doesn't do anything at all, dear," the old woman said, smiling faintly. "But it's from the moon."

She gestured toward the shelves and bookcases which covered the workroom's outside wall. They were a hodge-podge of objects, codices, and (in pigeonholes) scrolls. None of the jumbled contents were labeled.

"That's generally the case with Cervoran's collection," she explained. "Many of the objects I've examined are quite remarkable, but they're not really good for anything. They're not important."

Sharina cleared her throat. "Tenoctris," she said, "King Cervoran wants to go out to where the meteor fell as we approached the island. Chalcus is ready to take him if I agree. Should I let him go?"

Tenoctris stood motionless for a moment; then she dipped her head three times quickly like a nuthatch cracking a seed. 'Yes, I believe so," she said. "But I'd like to go along."

"To see what Cervoran's searching for, Tenoctris?" Cashel said. "Or to watch Cervoran?"

Tenoctris chuckled. "A little of both, I suppose," she said. "He's a greater puzzle than any of the objects in his collection. The divinatory spells I've attempted haven't helped me to understand him better."

Sharina's right hand touched the Pewle knife. The cool horn scales settled the gooseflesh that was starting to spring up on her arms.

"I wonder if he was always like he is now?" she said. "I don't see how he could've been. I think he changed during the time he was, well, the time he seemed dead."

"I don't know, dear," Tenoctris said in a regretful tone. "The wizard who amassed this collection was of considerable power but no real focus. He was a scholar of a sort, one who preferred to use his art to learn things rather than to search them out in books as I've always done for choice. But he wasn't a man with interests beyond his studies, and he certainly didn't have an enemy who would send a creature like that plant to kill him.'

She gave Sharina one of the quick, bright smiles that took twenty years off her apparent age. "And before you ask, no, I don't know who the Green Woman is either."

"Maybe we'll learn today," said Cashel. He looked at Sharina.

"I know you have to stay here and, well, be queen," he said. "But do you mind if I go with Tenoctris? I think there ought to be somebody with her that was, well, hers."

"I think that's a good idea," Sharina said. She stepped quickly to Cashel and hugged him, careful to hold the knife out in her hand so that the sheath didn't prod him in the back. "We need Tenoctris. But Cashel?"

"Ma'am?" Cashel said, his voice a calm rumble like the purr of a sleeping lion.

"Be careful of yourself, too," Sharina said, still holding herself tight against his solid bulk. "Because I need you, my love."

* * *

Garric awakened in shocked awareness that something was wrong. Somebody shouted! he thought.

Somebody screamed, but Garric was already worming his way out from under Marzan's house. The dog was gone and an angry yapping sounded from the direction of the village gate. That was where the scream'd come from, too.

It was dark: cloud-wrapped, moonless, starless dark. Even so the house had a presence in the darkness.

Garric reached up the sidewall, groping. The fishnet hung where he remembered it. He jerked it down, pulling a wall peg out in his haste. The size of the house showed that Marzan was a great man for this village, but that didn't save him or his wife from having to catch their own fish. He wondered if they had to work in the raised fields as well, or if wizardry at least saved them from that back-breaking drudgery.

Heartbeats after the scream, a dozen or more things shrieked from around the whole eastern circumference of the village. They weren't human and they weren't in pain: they were beasts, hunting.

"Coerli," the ghost of Carus said in Garric's mind. "They looked very quick."

Neither he nor Garric had any doubt about what was going on, though thus far they'd only seen the cat men in silent topaz visions. This must be a larger band than the five who'd raided the field before, though.

Garric stepped to the fence, moving by memory and instinct. He felt along the top rail to an upright and gripped it firmly. The railings were cane, but the support posts were wrist-thick and of a dense wood probably chosen to resist rot.

Garric half-squatted, then straightened his knees and pulled the post up with a squelch of wet clay. The railings were bound on with cane splits. A quick shake right and left snapped them free.

A sword'd be better, but even that probably wouldn't be good enough. The Coerli were inhumanly quick, impossibly quick; but you did what you could.

Marzan's door opened and fanned out light, shocking in the previous darkness. Garric risked a glance over his shoulder. Soma stood in the doorway with a rushlight: a reed stripped to the pith, dried, and soaked with oil or wax. It lit quickly and wasn't as easy to blow out as a candle, though the flames didn't last long either. In her right hand was a knife made of horn or ivory.

There were more screams in the night, all of them human. A pair of yellow-green eyes flared in the rushlight's circle, ten or a dozen feet from Garric. He spun the net out as though he were casting for minnows, keeping hold of the drag. He couldn't reach the Corl with it, but he saw the spinning meshes bell as the cat man's own hooked line tangled with them.

Garric pulled his left arm back hard while swinging the sturdy post outward, a crushing blow directed at the empty air in front of him. He felt the weight as the slack came out and the net brought the Corl with it.

The beast shrilled in startled fury. Like the cat men Garric had watched in the topaz, this one had wrapped the end of its casting line around its wrist for a more secure grip. Racing charioteers regularly did the same thing with their reins-and were regularly dragged to their deaths when they fell or their vehicle broke up beneath them.