Magister

* * *

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mistress Auta," said Chalcus with a sweeping bow. "Who is it that you're to be saved from, if I may ask?"

The sailor's gestures were always excessive by anybody else's standards, but somehow he carried off what would've made a courtier look absurd. If I made the world, Ilna thought, gray and brown would be all the colors needed, and people would behave as if they too were gray and brown. There'd be no Chalcus in that world... and very little for me, despite that's what I think I'd want.

"Why, from the Princes!" said another little man. He'd edged into plain sight, sitting cross-legged on a holly branch near where Ilna'd caught and released his fellow. There were differences among the little folk: this one's hair rose in a pronounced widow's peak, for example. Because they were so small and quick, distinguishing marks were hard to catch.

"From the other Princes!" Auta said instantly, shooting the man a fierce glance. "Prince Ilna, did the One bring you here to rid the garden from those who have preyed on us from time out of mind?"

"We're here because someone wanted us out of his way," Ilna said. "I doubt he intended to help you or anybody besides himself. He may not even know that you exist."

She hadn't snarled, but she'd probably frowned as she considered the situation. She hadn't meant anything by it; she generally frowned when she considered the world and the things that happened in it. Auta'd taken the expression personally, though, so she'd shrunk back toward the hedge.

"Our main concern's to get out of this place and back to the world of our friends, that's so, little lady," said Chalcus. "We're glad to meet you, but no one sent us to be saviors."

Ilna walked to a birch tree growing out of the Osage orange, taking out her paring knife. She hadn't seen the little people use tools, but there were rocks in the soil of the hedges. Even without skill the little people could hammer stones together till they chipped an edge on one.

"Is Dee all right?" Merota asked, squatting on the grass. "Really, we weren't going to hurt him."

Two of the little people, a man and a woman, dropped to the ground instead of watching from the hedges. Their heads were just on a level with the kneeling child's.

Ilna pulled down a branch and nicked it. She peeled away the papery outer covering-it was of no use to her-and stripped off four strands of the fibrous brown inner bark.

"Dee, come show yourself!" Auta called commandingly. "Our Princes think they've hurt you. Come out!"

Ilna could understand the little people's language, but besides having very high-pitched voices because they were small, they had an accent that reminded her of the clipped way people spoke on Cordin. She wondered who'd woven the tapestry and how long ago that had been. Perhaps when she got back to the room where it hung in Mona, she'd have time to examine it properly.

The couple who'd left the hedge minced over to Merota. The woman reached out with one hand, holding her male companion's wrist with the other. More of the little people stepped onto the grass.

"Go ahead," Merota said soothingly. "You can touch me, little person."

Ilna wiped the blade of her knife and slid it again into its bone case. She returned to the gathering, now crowded around Merota like doves feeding on grain beneath their cote. The woman who'd first come forward was running her fingers through the child's fine hair while the others watched admiringly.

"Prince Merota," Auta said, though Ilna noticed that her eyes were really on Chalcus. "Can you not help us, great Prince? The Princes, the other Princes, take us one at a time or several together. We who escape hear screams and then the bones of our friends breaking. We are helpless, but you are strong and can save us."

"You can save yourselves," Ilna said sharply, moving to Merota's side. The little people skittered away, again like doves; their behavior made her angry. Unreasonably angry, she knew, but she felt the flush regardless. She held out the four ribbons of bark. "Watch what I do with these."

As Ilna spoke, she began to knot the strips into a grid. She forced herself to let her fingers move slowly and deliberately so that the little people could see exactly what she was doing. When she'd completed the demonstration, she had a neatly woven net no bigger than the palm of her hand.

Ilna held it out to Auta; after a moment, the tiny woman took it and bent close to puzzle over the joinings. They were simple reef knots, easy for even the untutored to make.

"But what is this, Prince Ilna?" said the man sitting on the holly branch.

"It's a net," Ilna said. "A very small one, of course, but there's trees enough in this garden to make a net any size you please. Now, how many of your folk are there? All of you together."

Auta looked at the circle of her folk in consternation. "Great Prince," said the seated man, "we are simple folk. We couldn't answer such a question."

"Many and many," said Auta. "The Princes prey on us every day, but still we remain."

"So I thought," said Ilna with a crisp toss of her head. "Well, it's time for you to prey on Princes. I've seen you crawl through the hedges like fish swimming. You can hang nets before and behind these so-called Princes, then drop another net on top of them. Catch them one at a time."

"Oh-h-h!" said the crowd, gasping as a single tiny person.

"There's rocks here," Ilna continued, grim-faced. "You can kill the creatures with rocks."

"Aye," said Chalcus with grinning animation. "And as a hint, tying a thong the length of your arm onto a rock for a handle'll give enough speed to your blow that you'll break bones instead of just bruising the devils when you hit them."

"Oh, we could never do that, great Princes!" said Auta. She dropped the net and backed as if it was soaked in filth. "You're so brave and strong, but we are small."

"You'll save us, Prince Merota," cooed the woman stroking the child's hair. "You're great and strong. It would be nothing to you to save us from the other Princes. You'll save us, won't you, great one?"

"So many of us are gone," said a little man, his head bowed low. "A pounce and a crunch and then gone, nothing but a splotch of blood on the grass."

Merota looked at the sailor. "Chalcus?" she said. "We could, couldn't we? You and Ilna could, I mean?"

Chalcus laughed, but Ilna saw the veil go up behind his eyes. Talk of killing brought not only wariness to his expression but also a degree of professional calculation: Chalcus had always been a sailor, but for part of life he'd been one of the Lataaene pirates. He had a great deal of experience with killing, and from the scars on his body he'd repeatedly come close to learning about being killed as well.

"We're not here for hunting, dear lady," he said with his tongue and his lips; not with his eyes, though, not so that Ilna couldn't tell the truth. "We're here only till we leave; and the sooner we leave, the better for ourselves and our friends back home. Though perhaps if Mistress Auta can tell us where the way out of the garden may be, we could do her and her friends a favor or two before we left, eh?"

Chalcus grinned broadly. "And who knows?" he added. "Would Garric like a chimaera pelt to stuff for a throne cushion? That'd be a fine thing for the King of the Isles to sit on, would it not?"

"There's no way out of the Garden, Prince Chalcus," said a little man.

"No way at all," said another. "Except...."

He looked around, frightened to have spoken-though he hadn't really spoken.

"Except?" repeated Ilna, her voice harshly insistent. Hearing people talking around a problem, refusing to face it baldly, angered her more than a personal attack would. "What is the way out?"

"Prince Ilna?" Auta said. The little woman laced her hands together, then held her arms out from her body and wriggled the fingers while looking down. The shadow of her hands hirpled on the grass as Ilna remembered another shadow-the Shadow-doing while one of the little folk screamed and vanished.

Auta clenched her fists when she saw that Ilna'd understood the gesture. "That way only, Prince Ilna," she said in a small voice. "No way except for that: death or worse than death."

The man in the holly hopped down and gripped Merota's knees. "Mighty Prince Merota," he cried, "please! Of your goodness save us, for we cannot save ourselves."

"Chalcus?" the child said, her voice a mixture of pleading eagerness. "We could, couldn't we? It wouldn't take so very long. And we're here anyway, you know."

Chalcus drew out his dagger, probably without thinking about it. The little people gave a collective gasp, but they didn't flee.

Chalcus spun the dagger up in the air and caught it by the hilt when it dropped, without ever looking at the bright steel. His eyes were on Merota and the little people; and at last on Ilna.

"So," he said. "What is it that you think, heart of my heart? There's something to what the child says, don't you think? We are here for the time being, and it wouldn't hurt me to do a bit of hunting in a good cause."

"They will save us," Auta whispered. Her assembled fellows sighed a wordless prayer of thanks.

"We will not save you," said Ilna. She bent and picked up the miniature net she'd knotted as an example. "You can save yourselves. Look at this!"

"Oh, no!" said Auta. Around her echoed no-no-no-no in piping whispers.

"We cannot do that, Prince Ilna," said the man still bowed before Merota. "You will save us. Great Merota, tell your-"

"No!" said Ilna in a fury. The little people scattered back from her like children frightened when a banked fire suddenly flares. "People who won't try to save themselves don't deserve to be saved. The world isn't meant to be safe for those who don't care!"

Chalcus sheathed his dagger with a motion as smooth as the sun on still water. "Aye," he said. "I take your point, dear one."

He made a sweeping gesture. "Since our little friends here don't know the way out," he went on, "and we've no other business with them, we'll take our leave. My sincere best wishes, Mistress Auta, to you and your fellows."

The little people vanished, leaving the three of them were alone in the clearing. Ilna smoothed the net between her palms, then set it on the grass in case someone, some day, came back to look at it. People can learn; sometimes at least. Ilna os-Kenset had learned certain things, about people and about herself, in the course of her life.

They weren't always things she was happier to know, but that couldn't be helped.

"It seems to me," said Chalcus as he sauntered toward the next turning of the maze, "that though the little people don't know the way out of this place, those who prey on them may. At least if we put the question to them the right way."

"Yes," said Ilna. Her face was rigid and her mind was a pit of burning rock. "I wouldn't mind convincing some of these Princes to tell us things they prefer to hide."

Chapter 13

Garric sneezed. The ruins of Torag's compound smoldered in a dozen places. Though the smoke hadn't affected him while the battle was going on, it did now.

Besides the sullen haze, there was the stench of bodies. The blackened corpses of the Coerli looked more human than the creatures had in life, but their wet fur smoldered with a unique pungency.

Soma lay on her back just inside the cross-wall. A warrior's barbed spear had entered below her navel and ripped upward, dragging her intestines with it. Her face was suffused with rage. Garric remembered what the Bird had said: that she'd thrust her torch through the mouth of the Corl who'd killed her.

"Shall we leave her here or throw her into a bog?" Metz asked. "Donria's told me how she tried to kill you."

"I'd like you to have her buried properly, or however you treat your dead here," Garric said. "The woman the Coerli killed was a valued ally to me and to all of us."

Metz shrugged. "I never had much use for her," he said. "But if you say so, Lord Garric."

"Lord Garric," said a woman's voice behind them. "Let me see your wound."

Garric turned; the movement made his shoulder flame as if somebody'd just run a hot plow-coulter through it. It hurt so much that his vision blurred and his knees wobbled.

"Stand still," said the woman-the girl who'd been helping Marzan. The wizard sat nearby, his back against the side of a bee-hive hut that'd housed some of the warriors.

The girl was chewing a cud of something; green juice dribbled from a corner of her mouth. She gripped Garric by the biceps and the top of his shoulder, bringing her face close to the puckered entrance hole. She spat a wad of fibrous paste onto the wound, then worked it into the hole with a prod of her thumb.

"Duzi!" Garric screamed. He tried to jump back, but the girl kept her hold on his forearm. She was ungodly strong.

"Stand still!" the girl repeated. She popped what looked like a piece of root into her mouth and began chewing it with enthusiasm. It'd been about the size of the last joint of her thumb.

"Lila's a good healer," Metz said approvingly. "People from other villages came to her mother for healing."

His uncle Abay, the one with the lacerated face, grinned horribly. "Marzan should've married her instead of Soma when his first wife died," he said. "Guess he figures that way too, eh Lila?"

The girl didn't reply, but juice squirted around the edges of her smile. "Turn around, Lord Garric," she said in a mushy voice.

Garric obeyed, steeling himself for another piercing jolt. Lila spat. This time the pressure of her thumb felt more like a hammer blow than a blade. A pleasant warmth was already spreading from the wad of paste she'd packed into the entrance wound.

"Are you ready to return to your own time, Garric?" asked the Bird.

Garric looked up in surprise. The Bird was perched on the cross-wall of the stockade. Though he was within twenty feet of Garric, smoke and the omnipresent mist blurred his glittering shape.

"Yes," Garric said. He wondered if the villagers had heard the Bird's question. "Of course I am."

"Are you going to leave us, Garric?" Metz asked. The hunter was trying to keep his face blank, but an expression of blind terror flickered on and off it. That answers the question of whether the villagers could hear....

"I have duties in my own time," Garric said. The day before he'd wanted nothing so much as to leave this miserable gray bog; now he felt pangs of guilt at abandoning people who trusted him. "I have to get back, Metz."

"But what will we do, Master?" said Horst, rubbing his heavy chin in concern. "We could never have beat the Coerli without you."

Garric felt his face harden as his mind shuffled through options. He wasn't angry, but he'd been a king long enough to understand the sort of decisions a king had to make if he and his people were to survive.

"You've had me," he said. "You've seen what I did, what you did yourselves when I showed you. You can do it again."

"But Lord Garric," said a woman Garric didn't recognize. She'd been one of the captives, he thought. "There are so many Coerli and we are few. This was only one keep."

"There's other keeps, sure," Garric said, "but there's many more human villages. Metz, uniting your neighbors is as important as attacking the Coerli. You can unite and the cat men never will. This-"

He gestured at the smoking ruins of the keep.

"-was a real fight for your village alone, but if there'd been three or four villages together Torag wouldn't have had a prayer. You've got booty for trade, Coerli tools and fabrics-"

"And excess women," Carus added. "There's many a chief whose opinion could change if you offered him the sort of young, healthy woman that the cat beasts picked for their own uses."

That was true, but it wasn't something Garric was going to say or even allow himself to think. He continued aloud, "-that'll help you convince other villages that this isn't a wild risk. And you've got Coerli weapons. They'll impress neighbors who aren't completely willing. It's the world's safety at stake."

He took a deep breath. He felt oddly euphoric; the root that Lila'd pushed into his wound must have more than a simple healing effect.

"You've got to do it yourselves, Metz, all of you," he said, "but you can. And you should, because it's your world you're saving, not mine."

"Lord Garric?" said the woman who'd spoken before. "If you could stay with us for just a little while, then we'd be able to take over ourselves when you left. There's so much we don't understand!"

Carus watched through Garric's eyes with grim humor, his knuckles on his hips and his arms akimbo. "Just a little longer," was the most common plea a king heard....

"There'll always be things you don't understand," Garric said, speaking to Metz but pitching his voice so that all the villagers could hear. "There'll always be things that're new to me too. This is your world. You're better off running it than I'd be-and if you're not, then you'll be leaving it for the Coerli. I hope and pray that's not what happens, but the choice is yours to make."

Donria whispered something in Metz' ear. The former hunter, now chief, straightened and said, "Garric? You've helped us. What can we do to help you?"

"By the Lady!" Carus said in delight. "That Donria'll be the making of this world. This kingdom before long, I shouldn't wonder!"

"Bird, what must I do to get home?" Garric asked. His conscience still troubled him, but he knew what he'd said was the truth: there'd never be a time that he couldn't be of some benefit to the Grass People, but he really had given them sufficient tools to save themselves.

"We must go to the cave in the abyss from which the Coerli enter this time," the Bird said. "I am not a wizard, but I can analyze potentials and adjust them. We will be able to do what you wish and what I need. We will go alone."

"But Garric?" Metz said, frowning in consternation. "That place is full of monsters. And the cat people as well, going to and from. We never went near it, even before the cat people came to the Land. Things live there that live nowhere else, terrible things."

Garric held the axe he'd taken from the Corl he'd killed when escaping. He turned to get a little room, then swung it back and forth in a wide arc. His shoulder felt like glass was breaking in it, but the weapon moved smoothly nonetheless.

He looked down, expecting to see blood start from the entrance wound; it didn't. Lila was back at Marzan's side; she gave him a smirk of satisfaction.

"When I have to," Garric said, "I can be pretty terrible myself. If the Coerli can pass that way, so can I."

The Bird jumped/flew/fell onto Garric's left shoulder. "Then let us go now," it said. "You're tired, but time is critical."

"Yes," said Garric. "Metz, fellow humans-my heart will be with you as you reclaim your world from monsters."

"And I suspect it's time and past time to do the same for the Kingdom of the Isles," said Carus. "Because I don't believe the wizardry that brought you here didn't have more effect than that!"

* * *

Captain Ascor cleared his throat and said, "Your highness, it's best you and Lady Tenoctris start back for Mona now. Things are apt to get-"

He paused to look down to the fog-wrapped plain.

"-pretty busy here soon."

Sharina smiled despite herself. Those weren't the words Ascor would've used if he'd been talking to another soldier.

She drew the big knife from beneath her outer tunic. "Ascor," she said, "provide a detail-a section, I think-to escort Lady Tenoctris to Mona. I'm going to remain here with the army."

"Your highness, it's not safe!" the captain snapped.

"I know it's not safe," said Sharina, an edge in her voice as well. "That's why it's my duty to stay. With respect, Captain-precisely what do you think I could save by running away? Except my life, that is, which of course would be worthless if I were a leader who abandoned her troops."

"Oh, I'm not leaving, dear," Tenoctris said. "Apart from anything else, Cervoran hasn't been defeated yet. That was just a skirmish, another skirmish."

Sharina's eyes and the Blood Eagle's too shifted to Double, who'd arranged on the ground several objects he'd taken from his case. One was crinkled and amber. At first Sharina took it for a tortoise shell, but closer attention convinced her it was the husk of a cicada of remarkable size; her spread hand wouldn't have covered the thing.

Double bent and scribed a hexagram in the soil with his athame. He made the strokes separately instead of angling each side into the next in a combined motion as most people would've done. The amulet containing the lock of Ilna's hair wobbled on a silver neck chain.

One of the small ballistas released with a loud crack, sending out a caustic-headed quarrel. It struck at the base of a hellplant's torso, just above the squirming legs. All down the line of catapults and ballistas, men with long wrenches were tightening the springs of their weapons. The artillery couldn't be left at full tension for very long without warping the frames and weakening the coiled sinews. This morning the crews hadn't started cocking the weapons until they realized Double's wizardry wasn't going to save them.

"Huese semi iaoi...," Double chanted, dipping his athame to a different angle of his hexagram with each syllable. "Baubo eeaei."

The cracks of more artillery-including a heavy catapult which must've had a picked crew-echoed around the bowl of the hills. Several plants ruptured and collapsed, already beginning to decay into the sodden ground. Another staggered in a wide curve to the right, gushing steam from its wounded side.

"Sope...," said Double. "San kanthare ao!"

The ground seemed to bubble. Tiny sharpnesses jabbed Sharina's feet between the sandal straps and up her ankles; she shouted in surprise. A guard jerked off his cape and began slapping it at his feet as though he were beating out a fire.

Locusts, some of them the length of a man's middle finger, were hatching out of the ground. That's all it was-locusts; but thousands upon crawling thousands of them.

"It's all right," Tenoctris called. Sharina doubted whether any of the soldiers heard her or if they'd have paid attention if they had. "This is Cervoran's doing. He's helping us!"

Crawling, fluttering, flying in slow, clumsy arcs, the locusts converged where the linked threads had crushed Double's mirror. The air was full of them and the ground for as far as Sharina could see shivered as still more insects dug up through it.

"Eulamon," Double chanted. "Restoutus restouta zerosi!"

Sharina held the Pewle knife in her right hand and clung to Tenoctris with her left. She knew she was reassuring herself instead of supporting the old wizard; though perhaps she was supporting Tenoctris as well.

The hump of smothering vegetable matter vanished under the insects' jaws, individually tiny but working in uncountable numbers. The hellplants had slowed their advance, but fresh threads swept up on a rising breeze. Locusts curved to intercept them, snatching the strands from the air like falcons stooping on doves.

"Benchuch bachuch chuch...," chanted Double. His puffy, waxen face showed strain, but a look of triumph suffused it as well. "Ousiri agi ousiri!"

The film of silver lifted again to catch the risen sun. For a moment the swarming locusts distorted it, but they hopped and flew out of the obstructing pile that had devoured the linked threads. White light glared on a hellplant, ripping it instantly apart. The claw of light shifted and destroyed the next plant in line.

Lord Waldron spoke to his signallers; horns and trumpets blew Retreat. Troops began thankfully leaving the earthworks even before their own unit signallers passed on the command. When Double's wizardry was ascendant, all humans could do was to get in the way.

"Lady, thank you for Your support," Sharina whispered. "Lady, I will build a temple here for the salvation You have worked for the kingdom and for mankind."

The wind died, dropping the threads which it'd lifted from the sea. The locusts continued to circle in swirls and clusters.

The sea's surface danced with foam. Birds rose from it, sweeping toward the ridge of the hills.

Not birds, fish! Fish flying!

They curled out of the water and flew low over the fields, leaving faint ruby trails in the dense fog. At the base of the hills they swooped upward, silvery bodies writhing and pectoral fins stretched out like sword blades. Their slender bodies reminded Sharina of mackerel, but their heads were things out of nightmare or the deep abysses: the eyes bulged, and the jaws hinged down into open throat sacks like those of pelicans.

When Sharina was a child, an earthquake had shaken the Inner Sea. Barca's Hamlet was protected by a granite sea wall built during the Old Kingdom. The shock had slammed great waves into it, kicking spume a hundred feet in the air. The next day the tide brought in fish with heads like these, their bodies burst when they were sucked up to the surface.

A fish dived toward Sharina, its open mouth fringed with ragged teeth. Sharina stepped in front of Tenoctris and brought her knife around in a quick stroke. The fish wasn't attacking. Rather, it'd swept through the cloud of locusts, gulping down a mass of them and then cocking up its rigid fins to bank away.

Sharina's blade sheared off half the right fin and the tail besides. The fish tumbled out of the air and slapped the hard soil, its body trembling as its mouth opened and shut. Wizardlight dusted the air around it scarlet, then vanished as the creature died.

Fish slashed and curvetted through the mirror. The silver film reformed after each impact like water pelted by raindrops, but the ripples robbed its surface of the perfect focus which alone could concentrate the light into a sword. The hellplants resumed their march.

"Tacharchen!" Double shouted, pointing his athame toward the sea; his film of silver collapsed again into the soil. Double turned and stalked back to his case of paraphernalia.

"Oh, my goodness...," Tenoctris said. Sharina glanced at her; the old wizard was staring raptly at what seemed empty sky.

Tenoctris was aware of-perhaps 'saw' wasn't the correct word-the play of forces with which all wizards worked. Sharina suspected from past experience that Tenoctris actually understood those forces better than did wizards who had greater ability to affect them.

"What's-" Sharina said, but she fell silent because her coming question-what's going on, what do you see?-was idle curiosity and Tenoctris was clearly busy with important things.

Using Sharina's arm as a brace, the old wizard seated herself on the ground and pulled out a bamboo split. She quickly drew a pentagram in the thin soil. As she concentrated, she muttered, "Don't let anyone disturb me, if you please."

"Captain Ascor!" Sharina ordered, much more sharply than she'd intended. "Put a ring of men around Lady Tenoctris. Don't let anyone or anything close to her, anyone!"

A squad Blood Eagles shuffled about the old wizard, facing outward and lifting their shields as much by instinct as for cause. Sharina, glancing between the men's legs, saw Tenoctris scoop a shallow depression in the center of her pentagram. She filled it with what seemed to be water from an agate bottle with a stopper of cork.

Double took a spray of black feathers from his case. He crossed them on the ground into a six-pointed star, then began chanting. Sharina couldn't hear the high-pitched words over the whistle the fish made as their fins cut the air.

Tenoctris bent toward her image, mumbling words of power. If the guards heard her chanting, they kept that awareness out of their stolid faces.

Fish swooped and sailed, gulping down locusts but paying no attention to the assembled troops. Some soldiers batted at them with swords or spear shafts. They were harder to hit than they seemed, banking and curving more easily than such stiff-bodied creatures should've been capable of.

When a fish was knocked down, it flopped brokenly for a few moments, then died in a haze of escaping wizardlight. It didn't matter: there were thousands more flying, and a roiling sea from which any number could lift if the Green Woman found it necessary.

"Anoch anoch...," Double shouted, raising his athame like the staff of a banner. "Katembreimo!"

Though fog thick as a storm cloud darkened the basin of the hills, the sky overhead was blue and promised a hot day when the sun rose higher. Flecks speckled it suddenly: growing, diving; screeching like steel on stone. Each speck was a bird with a feathered serpent tail and its toothed beak open. They screamed as they tore into the fish. The birds had come from a clear sky and they continued to come, as many as raindrops in a summer storm.

The birds struck their prey with beaks, talons, and sometimes the hooked claws projecting from the angle of their stubby wings. They knocked the fish down with gaping wounds and flew on to kill more, never pausing to devour past victims. Sometimes locusts, freed from the torn bellies of falling fish, fluttered off dazedly.

Double was chanting again, his words barely audible through the chorus of his terrible birds. Familiarity made the spell ring in Sharina's mind, though: "... benchuch bachuch chuch...."

The mirror rose, catching the full sun and sending its blazing radiance onto the plain again. Light carved through the mist, spinning pale whorls to either side and striking a plant that was mounting the abandoned breastworks. It fell apart.

The birds dived and screamed and killed. Friends-allies, at least-though the creatures were, Sharina kept her knife ready in case one flew too close. Seemingly the birds avoided humans in their circuits, but they fouled the air with the stench of a snake den.

The sea was silent, almost glassy smooth, while the mirror licked another hellplant and the next. The plants moved sluggishly, lacking the inexorable certainty with which they'd begun their assault.

Double was chanting. The skin over his white forehead was tight but his lips were twisted in a grin and he stood as firm as a tree with deep-driven roots. Sharina knew how physically demanding wizardry was. She had no trust or affection for Double, but as Tenoctris had said from the beginning: his strength was remarkable.

The thought made Sharina glance at Tenoctris, who continued to mouth words of power. Though her bamboo wand tapped out the syllables, no flicker of wizardlight brightened the air above her figure. The water in her bowl shivered.

The ground trembled faintly but unmistakably. Sharina felt as though she were standing on the back of an ox, feeling the beat of its great heart through the soles of her feet. She turned to Tenoctris, but the old wizard's concentration was so fierce that Sharina didn't even start to ask the frightened question that instinct had brought to the tip of her tongue.

The fog over the plains below cleared. Everything within the bowl of hills was as clear as the facets of a jewel. The wind and the birds were silent, and the hair on the back of Sharina's neck rose.

The hills softened and slumped the way dunes collapse when the surge undermines them. Men shouted, losing their footing and dancing in desperate attempts to keep from sinking into what had been rock or firm soil. The violent shuddering sifted the breastworks back into the trenches from which they'd been dug and shook the emplaced artillery. A large catapult toppled onto its side, and several ballistas pointed skyward.

Double kept his feet, but the frame of posts and canvas twisted in tatters as the ground gave way beneath it. The silver film smeared the surface instead of sinking into the subsoil as it'd done in the past. Looking to the west, Sharina saw flat marshes for as far as her eye could travel. The ridge had vanished utterly, leaving mule-drawn wagons mired where there'd been rocky switchbacks up the hills.

The hellplants were advancing with renewed vigor. On soil this wet, they could move as fast as a man. Their tentacles writhed, ready to grip and rend.

* * *

Ilna stepped around an oak growing at a corner of the maze. The hedge down the aisle now before her was holly to the left and quickset to the right. Crouching in the middle was a three-headed dog as big as an ox.

She raised the pattern she'd knotted in anticipation of this meeting or one like it. She hadn't anticipated three heads, though: the great dog lunged toward her before stumbling and crashing onto its shoulder with a double yelp.

Chalcus shouted and drove past her with his sword and dagger out. He'd wanted to lead-but then, he'd wanted to guard the rear and also to fly over Ilna and the child so that nobody could approach from above. Ilna'd insisted on leading because she could capture rather than merely killing or chasing away whichever Prince they next met. That logic still held.

"Get out of the way!" Ilna said, making a quick change to the pattern-gathering a bight in the middle of the fabric because there wasn't time to do the job properly with an additional length of yarn. She was furious: with herself for not being better prepared and with Chalcus for assuming-well, acting as if-she wouldn't be able to recover from her error in time.

Mostly with herself. As usual.

Chalcus jumped aside as quickly as he'd come. The dog was already backing with the heads on either side turned away. The middle head was frozen in a look of slavering fury, like a trophy stuffed and nailed to the wall. The beast's right foreleg dragged and there was a hitch in the movements of the left hind leg as well.

"This is my territory!" snarled the left head.

"You have no right to-" began the right head.

Ilna spread her fabric. The dog took the new pattern through the open eyes of its middle head. It dropped where it stood.

"Now," said Ilna crisply. "You're going to answer the questions we ask or my friend Chalcus will cut pieces off you. I'm going to change my pattern enough to allow you to speak. If you choose not to help, we'll ask one of your fellow Princes, but we won't do that so long as you're alive."

The dog's breath stank of rotten meat. Knowing that the meat had been human wouldn't change Ilna's behavior, but neither did it dispose her to like the creature better. Instead of adjusting a knot of the pattern, she simply put the tip of her little finger over one corner.

The dog's left head jerked around to glare at them. "This is an outrage!" it snarled. "You-"

Chalcus stepped forward and flicked out his sword. One ear of the head that'd spoken spun into the quickset hedge. The dog yelped much louder than before; the head thrashed violently but the creature couldn't get away.

Merota gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth. Then she looked up with a distressed expression and said, "I'm sorry, Chalcus. He deserves it!"

"Ah, child," Chalcus said. He grinned broadly. "This one deserves far worse, I'm sure; and if he's stubborn I'll take pleasure in giving worse to him, that I will."

"We want to leave this tapestry," Ilna said, "this garden if you prefer. What is the way out?"

"I don't know-" said the dog. It jerked its head with a howl as Chalcus shifted minusculely.

"No!" said Ilna. "Not till I decide it's not answering. Dog, where do you think the exit is? You Princes talk to each other, don't you? You must talk about that!"

"We don't know," the dog said, speaking very carefully. Its tongue licked out of the narrow muzzle, trying to reach the blood slowly creeping from the severed ear. "No one has ever left the Garden. But some think...."

It licked again, this time swiping into the blood. The fur above where the tongue reached was matted and glistening.

"Some think, I say...," the dog continued. "That perhaps the One built the temple in the center of the Garden to Himself. And perhaps when He finished the building, He took leave from the Garden at that place."

"I saw the temple!" Merota said. "I was looking at it when I fell into the maze!"

"Aye," said Chalcus. He'd sheathed his dagger so that he could very deliberately wipe the tip of his sword clean with a folded oak leaf. "And I too. What does it look like inside, this temple, good beast?"

The dog's chest rose and fell as it breathed; Ilna had been careful to paralyze only the creature's conscious control of its muscles. It would be very easy to freeze all movements, though, and to watch the dog slowly smother. How many little people had gone down those three gullets over countless years?

"I've never been there," the dog said, its eyes rolling desperately. Perhaps it'd understood Ilna's expression. "None of us have! It's, well, we don't know, of course, but some think, some imagine, that the other lives in the temple when it's not hunting somewhere. None of us know, nobody knows, but if the other has a particular place, it could be there."

"The other," Ilna said. "The Shadow, you mean."

She'd spoken with deliberate cruelty, so furiously angry at her prisoner that she risked summoning the Shadow just to make the dog howl in terror. As it did, voiding a flood of foul-smelling urine on the ground and its own hindquarters. Like breathing, that was an unconscious reaction. Merota squeezed her hands together and stared at Ilna.

"Gently, Ilna, dear heart," said Chalcus, a look of concern in his glance. "If you want him killed, I'll do that thing without regret; but if it's answers we're after, then he's giving us those."

"Yes, all right," said Ilna coldly. "The other, then. What makes you think it lairs in the temple? Have you seen it there?"

"We don't see it anywhere else, that's the thing!" said the dog. "Except when it strikes. We've none of us been to the temple, I told you that! But there's nowhere else it could be, is there?"

Ilna sucked her lower lip between her teeth and bit it. She knew what to do-what she would do-and she'd almost stated her wish as an order. She had to remember that hers was only one opinion among three, now.

"Master Chalcus, what would you that we do?" she asked formally.

"The longer we stay here," said the sailor, "the likelier it is that we'll meet something we'd sooner leave to itself. If the way out's through this temple, then I'll gladly go to the temple whatever it may be that lives there. I'd sooner we met it at home at a time of our choosing than from behind at a time of its."

"Merota?" Ilna said. She could give orders to her companions and force them to agree as surely as she'd bound this three-headed dog to her will. She'd been that person once, in the days just after she'd come back to the waking world having journeyed to Hell.

Never again. No matter what.

"I want to leave, Ilna," Merota said in a small voice. "I'm not afraid. When I'm with you and Chalcus, I'm not afraid."

Ilna sniffed. "Aren't you?" she said. "Well, I'm certainly afraid."

But not for myself. If I was sure that I alone would die, I'd smile and go on.

"All right, then," she said. "We'll find the temple and then do as seems best."

Chalcus flicked his sword so that the tip brushed the dog's curling eyelashes before it could twitch its head away. "And this one?" he asked. "Shall we have him guide us, then?"

"I don't need a guide to find a pattern, Master Sailor," Ilna said in a tight, dry voice; her lip curled as if she'd swallowed vinegar. "There's nothing about this beast that'll please me as much as his absence. Stand back-and you, Merota."

Her companions edged aside. Chalcus was trying to keep Ilna, Merota and the great dog all in view at the same time-and to watch lest something come up behind them.

"I'm going to release you now," Ilna said to the panting dog. "I don't want to see you again. If I do, I'll kill you. Depending on how I'm feeling at the time, I may or may not kill you quickly. I hope you understand."

She folded the fabric between her hands and stepped back. The dog gave a spastic convulsion, its legs finishing the motions they'd started before Ilna's pattern cut them adrift. The big animal lurched to its feet and blundered sideways into the quickset hedge. Spiked branches crackled, but despite the beast's weight and strength the hedge held.

The dog got control of itself and backed away. "You belong with the other!" its middle head snarled. "The other has no honor and no courtesy. It's a monster that kills. You belong with it, monster!"

Ilna started to raise her hands, spreading the pattern again. The dog turned and bolted out of sight, its great paws slamming back divots of sod.

Ilna shrugged, trying to shake off memory of the dog and its stinking breath. "To the left here," she said, nodding to the junction of paths ahead of them. She sighed and began picking out knots to have the yarn ready for use the next time. "And to the left again at the next turning. Come! I have no wish to stay here."

Merota put her little hand on Ilna's arm as they strode off. "You're not a monster, Ilna," she said quietly.

"You're wrong there, I'm afraid," said Ilna. "But I'm your monster, child; and in this place, you need one."

* * *

Cashel heard the scholar get up, so he rose from his bedclothes also. It was still before dawn but light gleamed through the eastern wall where adobe hadn't perfectly sealed the chinks between mastodon bones.

He reached over and tousled the boy's short hair. "Wake up, Protas," he said quietly. "We're going off shortly."

"I'm tired!" the boy said screwing his eyes tightly shut, but a moment later he threw off the tapestry covering him and sat up. He kept his face bent down, until he'd scrabbled under the covers and come out with the topaz crown. When he'd set it firmly on his head, he grinned shyly at Cashel and stood.

Antesiodorus was placing objects from his collection on a rectangle of densely woven cloth-a saddlecloth, Cashel guessed. It was figured in geometric patterns of black and white on a wine-colored ground. The scholar had already packed several books and scrolls; now he was choosing among the phials and caskets scattered along the sidewall.

"I can carry that for you if you like, sir," Cashel said. The bindle would be pretty heavy over any distance at all, and Antesiodorus looked like a high wind'd blow him over.

"I would not like," the scholar snapped. "You have your duties, I'm sure. You can leave me to mine."

Cashel nodded and walked to the pottery water jar. It'd been glazed red over a black background; winged demons with female heads were tormenting a man tied to the mast of his ship.

"I'm sorry, Master Cashel," Antesiodorus said to his back. "I'm upset because of what I'm being required to do, but that's not your fault."

"It's all right," Cashel said, smiling deep within himself. "Prince Protas and me know we're strangers. We appreciate your help."

He refilled the cup and gave it to the boy, who gurgled the water down greedily. This air was dry as could be.

Antesiodorus paused, then took a wand with a tentacled head from its shelf. Cashel thought first it was a plant, then realized it must be a sea lily like the ones that weathered out of a limestone bluff on the road from Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa. Those were all turned to rock, though. The lily Antesiodorus slipped under his sash was dry, but it was fresh enough that Cashel could smell salty decay clinging to the hollow shell.

"Do you need something to eat?" Antesiodorus said, taking the cup from Protas and edging past Cashel to dip it full again. "It's not far. That is...."

The scholar drank, paused, and finished the water. He looked doubtfully at the jar, then set the mug down.

"We'll be there in at most two hours," Antesiodorus said, looking squarely at Cashel. "If we can reach it at all. I assume that since you've been sent to me, there may be those who wish to prevent your journey?"

He raised an eyebrow in question.

Cashel shrugged. "I don't know," he said truthfully. "I'm here to help Protas, but nobody told us what was going to happen."

With a broad grin he added, "I'm used to people not telling me things. I wish it didn't happen that way, but it does."

"Well, I don't suppose it matters," Antesiodorus said with an angry scrunch of his face that made the words a lie. "We'd best be going. The sun's up. That will keep the worst in their dens, but the more quickly we get the business over, the better off we are."

He gestured them through the doorway and followed. Outside the scholar fingered the cape over the opening. He frowned and straightened, turning his back on the long dwelling.

"We're going eastward," Antesiodorus said. "I know it's difficult to hold direction in these eroded gullies, but there's a white peak on the horizon. You can orient yourself by it."

Cashel grinned, thinking of what his sister would've said to a comment like that. "Yes, and I can breathe air, you city-bred fool," or perhaps something more insulting.

But that was Ilna. Cashel being Cashel, he said instead, "I thought you might wear the cape this morning, sir. Instead of leaving it over the door."

"Did you?" snapped Antesiodorus. He set off at a brisk pace among the rotting hills. Cashel could keep up, though he usually travelled at the rate a ewe ambled. Protas, walking ahead of him, wasn't having trouble either. Occasionally he touched the crown, but it was firmly seated.

After a moment, the scholar said in an apologetic tone, "The cloak would only protect one of us. Better that it stay where it is so that if I don't return, those who investigate can see that I was faithful to my trust."

He looked over his shoulder at Cashel. "Do you understand that?" he said.

Cashel nodded. "I guess I do," he said mildly.

The stretch of mounds and gullies gave way to short prairie. The grass was yellow-brown, but its roots were healthy enough to hold the soil. A small herd of browsers saw the three humans and fled northward in a gangling canter.

"Were those deer?" Cashel said. "They looked different from the deer I've seen before."

"They were camels," Antesiodorus said, "if it matters. You can be thankful if you see nothing worse."

"Are the birds dangerous?" Protas said. He was looking up at the sky where three dots circled slowly upward on the morning breezes.

"Not unless you're dead," Antesiodorus said. "Or until you're dead, perhaps I should say."

"They're buzzards, Protas," Cashel explained quietly. "Though I've never seen buzzards so big. If I'm right about the size, they'd weigh as much as a man."

The scholar had no need to snap at the boy that way, but he was obviously keyed up. People did that sort of thing.

"They'd weigh more than I do, at any rate," said Antesiodorus. He looked back at the boy and then Cashel. "But they don't kill prey themselves. There's plenty of others to do that, but perhaps we'll avoid them."

A mixed herd was grazing on the southern horizon. There were horses for sure but the other things could be... well, could be a lot of things, none of them familiar.

"Those deer have six horns, Cashel," Protas said.

"They're antelope," Antesiodorus said, correcting him.

The land to the north sloped down slightly. In the middle distance was the bed of a stream, probably dry in this weather. Bushy cottonwoods fringed both banks, and deeper in the gully grew alders. The trees pulled water from the currents flowing under the ground.

"There's a deer in the gully," Cashel said. "Three of them, I think. See, Protas? Under the cottonwood that still has some of its leaves?"

He didn't point; shepherds mostly didn't. If you pointed at a ewe, she was likely to run off in a blind panic. That hurt the meat and made her give less milk both, and that was if she didn't manage to tumble down a ravine and break her fool neck.

"Stand very still!" Antesiodorus ordered.

Cashel froze. "What-" said Protas, turning to Cashel in worried surprise. Cashel didn't move or even scowl, but the boy took the hint from his perfectly blank expression.

"I never wanted to be a wizard," Antesiodorus said softly, his face turned toward the watercourse. "I'm a scholar. I found things, that's all. Found them in space and even in time, but only to study them."

The three deer-headed humans stepped up from the gully to stand beside the big cottonwood. Two were men and one a woman. Like reindeer, she as well as the males had antlers. They were browsing the alders, plucking leaves off with their narrow muzzles.

"There were twelve of us in our sodality," Antesiodorus continued. "Our brotherhood, I suppose I should say if I want you to understand.'

"I know what a sodality is," Protas protested in an injured tone.

Cashel frowned. He hadn't known, but could generally figure out what people meant from the way they said it. Anyhow, when their guide was telling them things they might need to know, they shouldn't interrupt.

The trio of deer-men stopped eating and stared intently in the direction of Cashel and his companions. After a moment they vanished into the gully so suddenly that there didn't seem to have been movement: they were on the bank and then they were gone.

Antesiodorus breathed out. "All right," he said, "we can go on now."

"Were they dangerous, sir?" Cashel asked, falling in behind Protas as he had in the past.

"No," said Antesiodorus. "But when something's hunting them, they're in the habit of leading the hunter across the trail of prey that can't run as fast as they do. And then running away."

"What a cowardly act!" said Protas.

"What do you know about it, boy?" Antesiodorus snarled. "Do you know what it's like to be hunted? Really hunted!"

"I've been hunted, Master Antesiodorus," Cashel said. He didn't raise his voice or let any emotion into it, but his tone made it clear that he was stepping in front of the boy now. Protas had put a foot wrong, which was a pity, but it wasn't a thing he'd meant to do.

Their guide looked over his shoulder; his lean face was anguished. "Yes," he said, "I suppose you have. But you always knew you could fight, didn't you, Master Cashel?"

"Yes sir," said Cashel. "But I haven't known that I'd win every time. I just knew I'd rather die than live knowing that I'd handed my bad luck off to somebody else."

Antesiodorus faced front and shifted a little to the left of the line he'd been following; a faint buzzing and a glitter of wings in the air showed that they'd been about to walk over a yellow-jacket hole. He said, "Yes, that's the problem, isn't it? Being able to live with the person you find behind your eyes when you wake up in the darkness. But you haven't had that problem, have you?"

"No sir," Cashel said quietly.

There was a herd of big animals to the northeast, grazing in close company. There were more than Cashel could count on both hands. They acted like cows, but they were bigger and they had dark wool over their forequarters and horned heads. One of them watched the humans for a moment, then went back to its food.

"I knew so much," Antesiodorus said. "So very much. And that's all I cared about. I never used the objects I found except to find more. I let my brothers use them, but that was their choice. I never wanted to do wizardry. It's not fair now that I should be forced to!"

"Who's forcing you, then?" said Protas. That was an honest question, but the boy asked it in a way that showed he'd been bothered more than a little by the scholar snapping at him.

Cashel kept watching the wooly cattle. A couple of them raised their heads; they were looking due north. One of the big beasts gave a snort; the whole herd jerked its heads up. After a moment they started moving southward slowly while a big bull stood braced and looking the other direction.

"I found things and gave them to my brothers," the scholar said. "I never used them, never, except to find more... things. They gained by my actions, not me. You see that, don't you?"

"You did what you wanted to do," Cashel said. He glanced in other directions too, especially straight behind them, but mostly he kept his eyes on where the bull was looking. "You and your friends both got what you wanted."

"I found a spell," Antesiodorus said as though he hadn't heard the comment. "No one else could've done what I did-no one, I'm sure. It was carved on a plate of gray jade as thin as parchment. It'd been broken into six pieces, every piece as necessary as the next for the spell to work, and I found all six. I alone!"

"What did the spell do, then?" asked Protas. He'd lost his testiness and become a curious little boy again.

Cashel saw movement on the other side of the cattle. The ground rolled and whatever it was kept down in the grass besides, but things were watching him and his companions.

"The spell?" repeated Antesiodorus. "It permitted the user to control a demon. I'd never have done such a thing myself, of course. Never!"

He cleared his throat. "I found the sixth piece," he continued. "It was no use alone, none. Only with the other five did it have meaning, and only I could have searched out the entire plaque. But the one who'd possessed the piece heard me take it and followed."

"The owner," Protas said. "The owner caught you."

"How can someone own a thing that was old before men and which had no value to the possessor?" Antesiodorus said, his voice cracking. "It wasn't his, it was just a thing he had! And he didn't catch me, no."

He looked back at Cashel, not Protas, and said, "He didn't catch me then, because I left the piece with my brethren, the members of my sodality, and fled while they examined the plaque. They were delighted, you see; they couldn't praise me enough. We were sworn to support one another in all ways, and they all spoke of what a valued brother I was. They didn't know."

"You saved yourself by setting a demon on your friends," Protas said. There was nothing at all in the boy's tone, just the words. It was as though all the feeling had been shocked out of him.

"No!" Antesiodorus said. He laughed brokenly. "Or perhaps yes, if you look only at the surface. It wasn't a demon, it was much worse than that. And they weren't my friends; they were brothers of my oath, but not friends."

"And you didn't escape," said Cashel. "It caught you anyway, and you serve it now."

"You think you're so smart!" the guide shouted.

"No," said Cashel. "I don't. I'm not."

"I think perhaps you're wrong, my simple friend," Antesiodorus said in a broken voice. "You're too smart to find yourself in my situation, at any rate. Now that I've had time to think about it, I believe the way the jade was broken and scattered was a trap for... someone like me. Someone who liked to find things. I've had a great deal of time to think about it, as you'll appreciate."

"Sir?" said Cashel formally. "Look to the north, please. On the little ridge there. They've been looking at us ever since the cattle started to move."

The things watching them had risen into sight. They looked like dogs but they were the size of horses, and they had the huge crinkled ears of bats. There were five of them, one for each finger on a single hand.

"Oh," said Antesiodorus. He kept walking but he stumbled on a tussock of grass and almost fell, slight though it was. "Oh. Oh."

He took a deep breath. "One moment, please," he said, kneeling on the prairie and opening out his bindle before him. "I'd thought that by going by daylight we'd avoid at least them, but it seems that I was wrong. Wrong again."

The bat-eared dogs were ambling down the hill, spreading out slightly as they advanced. They were a pale color like mushrooms that grow in a cave; what Cashel'd thought when he first saw them were stripes seemed now to be wrinkles on their bare skin.

Antesiodorus rose, clutching his bindle under his left arm. He had a book open in that hand with his thumb marking a place. "Come along!" he said. "Don't run, but keep moving steadily."

Cashel began to spin his quarterstaff as he walked. It worked his torso muscles and, well, it made him feel more comfortable.

He wasn't afraid of a fight, but the dogs were big and there were five of them. It would be hard to keep Protas safe, and that was what he was along to do.

Cashel smiled a little. If things went the way he expected them to, he wouldn't be around for anybody to complain to. Still, he'd give the dogs a good fight.

As the beasts walked on, a little faster now, their mouths dropped open into clown smiles. They had long, pointy teeth like snakes did, and their lolling tongues were forked.

"Go on ahead of me now," said Antesiodorus, drawing the sea lily from his sash; he must use it for a wand. He focused on the book in his hand, then called, "Dode akrouro akete!" and slashed the sea lily down.

Scarlet wizardlight danced and crackled across the prairie. Nettles and thistles rose, spread, and interlocked, growing into a hedge as dense and high as a range of mountains. The ground shook and there was a roar like cliffs falling into the sea.

Antesiodorus staggered backward, dropping the book and the bindle but continuing to grip his wand. "Come along," he whispered. Then, more strongly, "Come!"

He bent to pick up the bindle. Cashel took it and the book instead and handed them to Protas to carry.

"Yes, all right," said the scholar. "But come."

They set off at a shambling trot. Cashel would've offered to carry Antesiodorus if he hadn't thought it was better that he keep both hands on his quarterstaff. The scholar did all right, though, after the first few strides where he wobbled like a drunk on an icy road.

Cashel glanced over his shoulder. The high thorn hedge ran from horizon to horizon without a break. Antesiodorus'd said he wasa a scholar who wasn't interested in wizardry. Cashel'd thought that meant he was like Tenoctris: somebody smart and who knew a lot of things, but who wasn't strong enough to do much.

The fellow who'd raised that hedge with a stroke and a short spell was a powerful wizard, no mistake. That meant whoever had Antesiodorus by the short hairs was more powerful still.

A mixed herd of animals was running southward. Cashel could see horses and deer and more of the funny long-necked camels, but there were other things besides. It was like the way a grass fire drives animals.

Cashel grinned as he jogged. He'd met plenty of people who'd rather face a fire than wizardry. Even if neither one was aimed at you, they were likely uncomfortable to be around.

They were moving toward the tall white peak on the horizon. Cashel knew enough about distances under a sky like this to be sure that the mountain was days away and maybe weeks. Antesiodorus had said it'd only take a couple hours to get to where they were going. If they made it at all, that was.

Cashel looked back again. To his surprise he saw two of the dogs already on their trail again; the other three were squirming the final bit of the way through the thorns. They'd done it by brute strength, not wizardry: the leading dog had scratches on its bunched shoulders and it'd torn the lobe of its right ear to tatters, but it loped along easily. It had a tail like a pig's, short and curled and pointed toward the sky.

"They're coming again," Cashel said. He wasn't talking because he was afraid: he just wanted to let Antesiodorus know what was going on.

Protas looked over his shoulder. His mouth fell open and he stumbled, but he just turned around again and kept on running. He was really a good boy.

"It's not far," Antesiodorus said. He was gasping; Cashel thought he'd have shouted if he'd had enough breath. "Not far."

"Sir, neither's the dogs!" Cashel said. In another few strides-a couple double handfuls at the most-he was going to turn and see what he could do with the quarterstaff. He'd be willing to give himself even odds against the first dog, but the second wasn't but a few lengths behind it. If the other three caught up-and they would, no doubt about that-it was just a question of whether they worried his body for a while or killed him quick and went on to finish the others.

"Why me!" Antesiodorus said. This time he did manage to shout. He added in a gasp, "Pass me my equipment, boy. And in a moment we'll stop."

Protas trotted up alongside the scholar, holding the bindle out in both hands. Cashel for his part dropped back a little, moving to the side so that he could have both his companions and the dogs at the edge of his vision.

The lead dog ran a funny way, its hindquarters not quite tracking its forequarters so its body was slightly skewed. It seemed comfortable like that, and it didn't have to stretch to gain on its human prey. Its eyes were small and glittered like an angry shoat's.

"We're stopping!" the scholar wheezed.

Cashel slowed and turned. He'd planned to put himself well in front and squarely between the nearest dog and his companions, but that animal angled to its left while the one behind it was slanting right. They'd done this before....

Of course they'd done it before. They hadn't gotten that big sucking at their mother's dugs.

Cashel backed so he was close enough to touch his companions, bad for a fight but his only chance to maybe keep one of the beasts from slipping behind to gobble up Protas and the scholar while the other was keeping Cashel busy.

And then there were three more.

Antesiodorus scattered the contents of a little alabaster box in a broad arc toward the dogs. It looked like sand, but it might've been tiny jewels for all Cashel knew. Even if it was sand, it wouldn't have been just sand. He pointed the sea lily at it and shouted, "Io gegegegen!"

This time the flash of wizardlight was as blue as a sapphire in bright sun. The roar and shudder threw Cashel off his feet though he'd thought he was ready to ride it out. Dust rose in a great pall, curling backward blindingly.

Cashel stood, his eyes slitted. He put his left arm over his face so that he could breathe through the sleeve.

For a moment he couldn't tell what was happening on the other side of the dust cloud, but at least there wasn't a dog bigger'n a horse lumbering through with its mouth open. He risked a glance back. Antesiodorus was slumped in a sitting position with Protas bracing him so he didn't fall flat.

The dust cleared a little, enough for Cashel to see that what'd been rolling plain between them and their pursuers was now a gaping chasm. Two of the dogs had reached the edge on their side. One hunched like it was getting ready to jump.

Cashel walked a few paces along his side of the gap to put himself where the dog would land if it made the leap. That didn't seem likely, though he wasn't taking any chances. The sudden gully was wider than he could toss a stone across; wider, he thought, than an archer could shoot and expect to hit a particular target, though he didn't doubt an arrow could fly to the other side if you didn't have anything in mind but sticking it somewhere in the ground there.

The dog must've had the same thought; it relaxed for a moment. The rest of the pack joined the two leaders. All together they went over the lip of the chasm, each scraping out a trail of dirt and pebbles in a high roostertail behind it. The wall was steep but not quite sheer, and the dogs didn't seem to be having any trouble with the slide.

Coming back up the other side would be a lot harder, but Cashel didn't figure they'd have started down if they didn't think they could make it up too. Given how big they were the dogs didn't have much of a turn of speed, but nobody could teach them anything about determination.

Antesiodorus had staggered to his feet; the boy did everything his little body could to help. The scholar muttered something; somehow he was still hanging onto the sea lily.

Protas turned to Cashel and called desperately, "He says to come on! It's close, he says!"

Cashel scooped Antesiodorus up in the crook of his left arm. "Bring the bindle!" he said. It'd take some time for the dogs to make it up the near side of the chasm; from the look of the scholar it'd be longer yet before he was able to walk on his own legs, let alone run.

Cashel didn't have a direction except the general one, toward the distant mountain, so he followed that. He held the staff out to his right side so it'd balance the scholar's weight. He didn't like to run and he wasn't good at it, but he could lumber along the way an ox did when unyoked after a long day and scenting water.

It was there in front of them, a square slab of granite flush with the ground. You had to be right on top of the stone to see it, and even then it was because there wasn't grass growing on it. A figure with more angles than a hand had fingers was carved onto the surface.

"Get on the heptagram!" Antesiodorus said. His breath was whooping in and out. "Please. Please, quickly."

Cashel placed himself in the figure and hugged Protas close; it was a tight fit for the two of them to stay inside the lines, which he figured they'd better do. But-

"Master Antesiodorus?" he called. "What about you?"

The scholar pointed his wand at the stone slab. "Choi...," he said. "Chooi chareamon...."

Blue light glittered briefly among the knotted arms of the sea lily. Protas had dropped the bindle before he stepped onto the marked stone, but Antesiodorus ignored it. The roll'd opened when it hit the ground, spilling a zebrawood baton and a pair of scrolls tied with red ribbon.

"Iao iboea...," Antesiodorus said. Again wizardlight, this time scarlet, danced on his wand. He was speaking the words of power from memory instead of reading them from one of the books he'd brought. His face was set in an expression of utter determination.

The head of one of the great dogs lifted above the rim of the chasm. It slipped back in a fresh cloud of dust and gravel kicked out by the beast's scrabbling claws, but two more dogs got their forepaws over the edge and bunched their shoulders to leap onto the plain.

"Sir!" Cashel shouted. "The dogs!"

"Ithuao!" Antesiodorus shouted. The dogs lurched up, got their hind legs under them, and galloped forward. Their slavering jaws were open.

Light, blue and red and then merging to purple, flared on the many-pointed symbol. Cashel felt the stone give way beneath him in a fashion that'd become familiar.

"I kept my oath!" Antesiodorus called as the dogs lunged.

The curtain of purple light thickened, blocking sight of the world Cashel was leaving with the boy. He heard the scholar's voice crying, "This time I kept my-"

The words ended in a scream, or perhaps that was only the howl of the cosmos as it whipped Cashel away in a descending spiral.

Chapter 14

Lord Attaper sloshed toward Sharina. The Blood Eagles who'd been with him-all those but the section with Sharina and Tenoctris-followed in a ragged wave.

"Ascor, you idiot!" he shouted in a voice loud enough to be audible over the general tumult. "Get her highness out of here! What are you standing around for?"

Attaper'd compromised between his duty and the desire of a warrior to be part of the battle instead of standing out of it as an observer: he'd placed the hundred or so men of the bodyguard regiment in the earthworks directly between the ridge where Princess Sharina stood and the direction of the hellplants' attack. At the time, of course, he'd assumed that her highness would be able to flee if the struggle went badly....

"No!" Sharina said-to Ascor, but then turning to Attaper she cried, "Milord, we have to defend Lady Tenoctris! She's our only hope!"

The guard commander probably couldn't hear her, but Ascor did. He hesitated. His orders came from Attaper, not from a princess who, though exalted, wasn't in his chain of command.

Sharina wasn't sure what Ascor would've decided if he'd made up his own mind, but Trooper Lires chuckled and said, "Don't you worry, Princess. The captain remembers how you'n Lady Tenoctris saved things back in Valles. He got promoted that time, and I guess maybe they'll make him deputy commander this time, hey cap'n?"

"That's if we survive, Lires," Ascor said in a taut voice. With a smile almost as sharp as his words he added, "Which I doubt we'll do, but you're right-I doubted it in Valles too."

Double had fallen with everyone else when the hills flattened. He got up slowly, as though he had to consider each separate movement, then staggered to his box of equipment. It lay on its side, half sunken in the mud.

The two trumpeters with Lord Waldron blew the quick, ringing notes of Stand To, halting the retreat. The cornicenes took it up, then signallers throughout the army. The soldiers Sharina could see-she didn't have the vantage point of the ridge to look down from-slowed and looked behind them, milling in indecision.

Lires chuckled. "Look at 'em," he said. "It's a bloody good thing that it's all gone to muck underfoot, ain't it, cap'n?"

Sharina looked from the trooper to Ascor in surprise. She'd heard all the words, but they didn't mean anything to her.

"Your highness," Ascor said, looking out at the advancing hellplants. "If the ground was firm, well...."

He shrugged. "Nothing against the line regiments, your highness," he continued, "but once troops start to run, it's next to impossible to turn them. Even good troops."

Lires stamped. His boot slurped ankle-deep in mud. "They couldn't get to running in this, you see?" he said. "Nothing to do but stand the way the trumpets tell'em to do."

Attaper was within ten yards, slogging on in silent fury. He'd widened the gap between himself and the soldiers who'd been with him, even though most of them were younger than he was. In the morning, if Attaper lived that long, he'd be in agony with pulled muscles in his thighs, but he didn't allow pain or the mud stop him now.

Thinking of what she was going to tell the commander made Sharina look back at Tenoctris. The old wizard continued to chant within the fence of soldiers' legs. How long will it take to-

With a sudden convulsive movement, Tenoctris stabbed her bamboo split into the center of the scooped basin in front of her. She cried, "Sabaoth!"

The air sparkled faintly blue. The water in the basin froze.

Ice spread outward in jagged curves from the basin, crackling and forming a white rind over the marsh. The soldiers guarding Tenoctris were taken by surprise. They leaped up and stamped, breaking their boots free of frozen mud.

Sharina saw the ice sweeping toward her. She tried to jump over the oncoming change, but she hadn't allowed for her fatigue. She stumbled forward and felt the mud congeal about her feet as the broad swathe slid past her and on. It left the rime behind it gleaming like a slug's track.

She tried to pull free, twisting against the soil's cold grip. Lires drove the butt of his spear into the ground beside her left foot, smashing the thick crust and allowing her to lift her feet out of it.

All around Sharina soldiers shouted in fear and amazement. As Tenoctris' spell spread outward, its effect speeded up. The soil froze to the edge of the bay, turning windblown foam into a coating of rime.

Men hopped up and down, freeing themselves, but the hellplants stopped where they were as if suddenly rooted to the ground. Their tentacles moved sluggishly, no faster than the blooms of the heliotrope following the circuit of the sun. Plants don't like cold any better than they like darkness....

"Lord Attaper!" Sharina said as the guard commander struggled to her side. "Now's the time to attack, while we can move and the plants cannot. Can you give the signal?"

Attaper looked first shocked, then puzzled. Then the meaning behind the words dragged his mind out of the set, angry rut in which it'd been running and he saw that she was right.

"You, cornicene!" he shouted to the signaller from a line regiment standing a few yards away. "Sound Charge!"

He turned. "Blood Eagles, follow me!" he bellowed. "Sharina and the Isles."

Sharina waved her Pewle knife in the air. "The Isles forever! Attack, attack, attack!"

The Blood Eagles turned around. Nobody else was paying attention to Princess Sharina; indeed, the Blood Eagles probably weren't either, but they saw their commander slant his sword toward the enemy. That was enough for them.

Sharina could've stayed where she was; should've stayed where she was, she knew, because there were ten thousand male swordsmen in the regiments assembled here. Every one of them was better for the purpose than a woman with a knife, even a healthy young woman with a big knife..

She advanced on the hellplants anyway, with Lord Attaper at her left and Lires on her right. The trooper had loosened his shield strap so that he could hold it out in front of the Princess if he needed to.

Lires wasn't a great thinker, but he knew battle and he knew his job. He had the ability many smarter men lacked, the knack of connecting his experience with the situation he'd be facing in the immediate future. Thus the shield strap.

The ground had occasional patches of greasy slickness, but the soil had been gritty enough that even frozen it gripped the soles of Sharina's sandals well enough. The soldiers' hobnails dug in; the texture of the ground was like that of the first hard freeze of winter, not the surface of a glacier.

Tenoctris had collapsed over her symbol and basin. One of the guards had lifted her head off the ground and was placing his rolled cloak under it; the rest of the squad stood around her as they'd been ordered to do, looking unhappy.

Seeing them allowed Sharina to relax slightly. If they hadn't been there, she'd have had to go back and stay with her friend; but then, if they hadn't stayed where they'd been ordered to, Attaper would've dismissed them from the Blood Eagles and very possibly had the squad leader executed. A princess has the right to determine for herself where duty lies. A soldier does not.

Lord Waldron was trying to reorganize his forces after the multiple disruptions caused by wizardry; his subordinate commanders had even more basic objectives, to halt men on the verge of panic and to get them to listen to commands again. Nobody had time for or interest in a single signaller sounding Charge on the horn wrapped around his body.

They noticed the bodyguard regiment, though-a hundred and some big men in black armor, advancing toward the enemy in a reasonably compact mass. Sharina's bright blonde hair hadn't regrown to the splendor it'd been before she'd had to shave it a few months earlier, but it still stood out like a banner in a sea of soldiers.

And even troops who couldn't see the Princess among her guards were drawn by the attack. Often it's easier to move toward danger than it is to wait patiently for imminent danger to come to you.

Once men looked in the direction the Blood Eagles were advancing, they saw that the terrible enemies they'd feared as even brave men fear were frozen andn motionless. They were no more dangerous now than so many cabbages.

The hellplants were ripe for revenge.

Sharina jogged and skidded over ground that was more solid than the week before when it'd been plowed fields. It was better footing this way too, since the furrows had slumped closed when the farm'd turned to marshland. It was tricky to run across furrows and almost impossible to run along them without stumbling in a soft spot or where a clod turned underfoot; Sharina knew....

Tenoctris couldn't have done this! To undo the work of the Green Woman would've required a wizard of equal power, and only Double-

Sharina looked over her shoulder. The whole army was returning sluggishly to the attack; that was gratifying. But Double was where Sharina'd last seen him, standing beside his case of paraphernalia and wearing a look of blank incomprehension. She didn't think his legs had moved since the spell took effect; was he frozen to the ground?

Tenoctris had done something. Perhaps she'd summoned Cervoran? But she'd claimed that Double was Cervoran!

A hellplant had advanced a few yards ahead of its fellows; perhaps it'd crossed the earthworks at a place where the rampart had slumped. Three Blood Eagles and a line soldier fell on it just ahead of Sharina. One guard had come from a cavalry regiment and still carried his long sword; he thrust it deep into the hellplant's barrel and twisted as it jerked it back.

A crinkle of ice followed the steel; the reservoir in the creatures' bodies had frozen along with the fields. No wonder the plants had stopped advancing!

Four men hacking at one object, even an object as large as a hellplant, were enough. More blades without careful coordination meant the attackers would cut one another, and Sharina had seen too many battles by now to imagine that 'careful coordination' was possible in the midst of one.

She ran to the next plant. Attaper and Lires flanked her as before. She half expected Attaper to object, but instead he saved his breath for better uses.

The score of tentacles fringing the top of the hellplant's barrel were blackening from the cold already. One moved feebly toward Sharina; she sheared it with a side-stroke, then bent. As the soldiers slashed at the plant's vast body, she began methodically to chop off the white, wormlike tendrils on which the creature walked.

Each blow crunched the blade through into the ground beneath. She'd have to sharpen it after the battle, but there was no time for finesse. Nonnus would've understood that.

Lady, bless the soul of my friend and protector. Lady, make me worthy of the life he sacrificed for me.

"Back, your highness!" Attaper said. Before he had the last syllable out, he'd grabbed Sharina by the shoulder and dragged her away. There's no time for finesse.

The plant slumped like a mass of snow sliding off roof slates, a quiver building to a rush until it crashed into the hard ground. The green body burst at every point a blade had cut it. A slush of half-frozen seawater oozed out, smelling of iodine.

A javelin stood up from the mass, then fell free as the remains rotted with the usual suddenness. The spear hadn't been there when Sharina and the guards attacked the creature: one of the soldiers behind them had thrown it while they fought, missing the humans by the Lady's grace and doing no significant harm to the plant, as any idiot should've known by now!

Sharina started to laugh. She took two steps toward the next hellplant, but there was already a squad of men around every one of the creatures in the immediate vicinity. She stopped, her laughter building hysterically. She knelt and set the Pewle knife flat on the ground; she was afraid she'd cut herself as she laughed uncontrollably.

"Your highness?" Attaper said. "Your highness!"

"I've read the Old Kingdom epics, Attaper!" Sharina said. Concentrating to speak helped her to regain self control. "They've all got battles in them. Sometimes they're mostly battles."

"Your highness?" Attaper said, this time in confusion instead of building concern.

"Not once in an epic, milord," Sharina said. "Not once. Is the king killed when one of his own men accidentally sticks a spear through him from behind. I'm beginning to think the poets aren't trustworthy guides to the reality of battle!"

She dissolved into laughter again, resting her palms on the hard ground. Around her rang the triumphant cries of her men as they cleared Calf's Head Bay of living hellplants.

* * *

Garric paused at the lip of the abyss. He'd been expecting a narrow canyon-for no particular reason, he realized. It was just an assumption he'd made.

A foolish assumption, he saw now: the abyss was more or less circular as best he could tell through the mist. The walls were steep, crumbled back slightly around the rim but close to vertical in many places further down as Garric's eye tracked it. He heard water roaring over the cliff somewhere though he couldn't see the falls themselves. They were probably the reason that the depths of the abyss were even foggier than the general landscape.

"Is it a sinkhole?" Garric asked the Bird on his shoulder. He bent and rubbed the rock exposed on the track leading downward. "It can't be! This is hard, basalt I think. Sinkholes are in limestone that the water's eaten away."

"There was a bubble in the flow of a great volcano," the Bird explained. "The top wore away. That took longer than you can imagine-longer than this world has known life. But it happened."

It clucked audibly, then added, "There's an hour left of daylight. We should start down. It'll be more dangerous after sunset."

"All right," said Garric. "Ah-I won't be able to see any farther than my hand outstretched when we get anyway down in that, even now."

He wasn't complaining, just making sure the Bird understood the situation.

"A little farther than that," the Bird said. "But yes, I'll guide you. We'll keep to the trail as long as we can, but if we meet a party of Coerli we'll have to move to the side. The other creatures have generally learned to avoid the trail themselves, but even that isn't safe."

Garric chuckled as he started down. It was too narrow for a pack animal, even an unusually sure-footed donkey, but it was only moderately steep.

"Safe was when I was tending sheep back in the borough," he said quietly. He thought of the afternoon the pack of sea wolves had squirmed out of the surf, great marine lizards. "And even that had its moments," he added.

The dense basalt was slick with spray condensed on its surfaces. Though the path wasn't particularly regular-the footing humped and sagged, and at some points the track was undercut so that the side of the cliff bellied out above it-it certainly wasn't natural.

And it showed considerable wear. That would've taken a long time in rock so hard.

"Did men cut this, Bird?" Garric asked. Part of him felt silly to vocalize the question when he knew the Bird heard his thoughts, but he found it more comfortable to pretend this was a normal conversation. "It's too worn for the Coerli to've done it if they just arrived here a few years ago."

"A normal conversation with a crystal bird," Carus said, grinning. "In a land of swamps and shadows, with one really deep hole."

"Others than men built the path, Garric," the Bird said. He'd taken to flying ahead and perching on an outcrop or a tree just at the edge of Garric's vision; a dozen feet or so away. "The cave in which my people lived has drawn visitors since before there was intelligent life in this land, though those who made the path were intelligent."

Garric thought of asking more, then decided not to. The Bird had shown itself a friend. If it didn't volunteer information, there was probably a reason for its reticence.

"I am not your friend, Garric," the Bird said in a tone of dry disapproval. "Our purposes happen to coincide, that is all. But I will not harm you or yours by my own choice."

I wish I could be sure that was true for all the people who say they are my friends, Garric thought. And particularly those who say they're friends of Prince Garric. He grinned but he didn't speak aloud.

The walls of the cliff were covered with ferns and air plants, some of which draped broad gray-green streamers like tapestries far down over the rocks. When Garric saw tree tops jetting out from a central stem, he thought he must be nearing the bottom of the gorge. By the time he'd clambered down far enough to be among them, he saw that he'd been wrong: the trunks were dim pillars vanishing far below.

"The trees at this level are three hundred feet high," the Bird said. "It will be some time before we reach the floor. Unless you slip."

"Was that a joke, Bird?" Garric asked.

"No," said the Bird. Then it clicked two body parts together-not its beak-and said, "Stop. I hear something. A band of Coerli has started up the path."

As Garric climbed and slid down the cliff path, he'd heard occasional noises over the background thrum of the falls: a booming croak, a bell-like chiming, and once a shriek like a child being torn limb from limb. He'd left his axe and knife in his sash because he needed both hands free to move safely; even so he'd twitched toward the weapons when he heard the scream.

Now, hunching where a crevice the width of his palm crossed the path, he heard nothing. "What do you recommend?" he asked, moving his lips without letting any sound pass them.

"Get at least twenty feet off the trail and stay very still," the Bird said. Then it added in emotionless apology, "The Coerli have no fixed time to use the portal in the cave. Whether we met a party or did not was purely a matter of chance."

"You didn't tell me it was going to be easy," Garric mouthed as he crept sideways over the edge of the trail.

The slope here was more gradual than in many places, less than one to one, but the rock had a slick covering of hair-fine moss. He found a crack to stick his right big toe into, then settled his weight onto it as he reached down with his left hand. There was nothing better than a handful of moss to grip, short and slippery, but he clung to it as best he could.

"There is a root on your right side," the Bird said, fluttering in the air beside him. "It's narrow, but it will hold you."

Garric swept his hand over the rock and found the root, crawling up the rock from a plant lower down. It was no thicker than a piece of twine, but its suckers held it to the stone like ivy on a brick wall. He pinched the root between his thumb and forefinger, afraid to wrap his whole hand around it lest he pull it away from the cliff.

Garric could hear the Coerli now, the rasping rhythms of their voices. He couldn't tell how many there were, but he doubted he'd be able to handle one healthy warrior in his present condition.

"Though we'd try," cautioned the ghost in his mind; and of course he'd try and die trying. But better to avoid the problem.

"There are five warriors and their chief, Grunog," the Bird said. "Grunog has no females, but he hopes to gain enough prestige in this new land to make himself powerful in two years, or perhaps three."

Garric had stuck the axe helve under his sash, but when he squeezed himself to the rock face the blade gouged him over the hipbone. He'd have been all right if he'd shifted the axe before he left the trail, but he hadn't thought of the problem until it jabbed him.

Supporting himself by his hands alone, Garric removed his right foot from the crack and felt below him for another toe-hold. He was sure the axe was drawing blood. As soon as he got another safe foothold, he'd-

His right arm spasmed in response to the shoulder wound. Garric lost his grip and tore through plants as he crashed down the cliff side. He bounced from rocks to the bottom fifty feet below where he'd started. Above him the Coerli were calling excitedly.

My fault! Garric thought. Intellectually he knew it really wasn't anybody's fault: he was pushing himself to the limit, and if that sometimes meant he went over the edge-literally, in this case-that was inevitable.

But he still blamed himself.

"This way!" the Bird said, fluttering around the nearest tall trunk. Garric got to his feet and followed.

He'd lost the axe but the knife was stuck hilt-deep in the ground beside him. He snatched the weapon, a single piece of polished hardwood, as he ran. He'd probably been lucky not to put it the long way through his thigh.

It didn't strike Garric till he'd started running that he might be badly injured by a fall like that. Duzi, he could've been killed... and he'd known that, but he hadn't let himself think about it because that might've made it so. That was superstitious nonsense!

"And the soldier who isn't superstitious has the brains of a sheep!" said Carus. "No matter who you are, bad luck can kill you. You may pray to the Great Gods or trust your lucky dagger that you wore in your first battle, but there's going to be something."

Garric could see better than he'd expected. His eyes seemed to be adapting to the greater than usual dimness, but mostly it was the phosphorescent fungus coating patches of the trees and ground. The soil was loamy and damp with a thick layer of leaf litter. Many of the fallen fronds had been eaten away into blue, yellow, and vaguely red skeletons that would've been gray if there'd been even a little more ambient light.

Roots spread around the base of each massive trunk as though the tree had been flung straight down and had splashed. Instead of bark they were covered in scales, though Garric noticed that the patterns varied from slants to curves. One tree-otherwise no different from the others for as high as Garric could see-had flowers growing in the middle of diamonds of lighter scales, set off from the rest of the trunk.

Garric could hear the Coerli calling to one another as they pursued. They must've come down the side of the chasm also, though probably under better control than he'd managed. In the maze of trees he couldn't tell how close his pursuers were or even the exact direction their voices were coming from, but he didn't doubt they'd catch up with him soon.

"Can you swim?" the Bird asked.

"Yes," said Garric.

At least he hoped he could. Though he'd gotten up immediately and begun running, he was feeling the effects of his fall. Nothing was broken, but the bruises on his right ribs and the side of his left knee hurt worse than stab wounds. The chilliness of his right buttock almost certainly meant it was oozing blood that cooled in the air.

Working bruised muscles was the best thing he could do for them, and you don't really lose much blood from a scrape. Besides, if he was going swimming, that'd clean him up.

The Bird swooped in a jangle of light around the biggest tree Garric'd seen in the Abyss yet; at the height of his head above the ground, it must be twenty feet across. On the other side of it was a pond on which pads of fungus floated. There was enough current to keep the center of the broad channel clear of the scum of spores that covered both shorelines, but he couldn't see anything actually moving.

Garric started for the shore, a band of faintly glowing muck. "No!" the Bird said. "Not there-follow!"

It angled to the right and fluttered ten or a dozen yards to what seemed to Garric to be an identical piece of fungus-covered mud. "Here!" the Bird said, flying out over the water. "Cross it as fast as you can."

As I planned to do, Garric thought. In a manner of speaking it wouldn't have made any difference if he'd said the words aloud-the Bird heard him the same either way-but consciously at least he wasn't trying to win stupid verbal games in the middle of a real life-and-death struggle.

He thrust the wooden dagger under his sash and ran into the water. He didn't dive since he didn't know how deep it was. The far shore was about a hundred feet away; the only reason he could see it in this mist was that the pond was black, while rosy phosphorescence dusted the mud of the shore.

Garric splashed two steps in to reach knee height, then threw himself forward and began swimming. The water was warmish and had a cleansing feel, unlike the tidal millpond in Barca's Hamlet where he'd learned to swim.

He felt a flash of white pain when he stretched out his right arm for the first time in a crawl stroke, but then he settled into a rhythm. He supposed he hadn't stuck his arm straight overhead since he'd gotten the shoulder wound.

Stretching's good for it, he thought, his mind grinning though his mouth was too busy sucking in air. Of course if I'd fainted and drowned, that wouldn't have been so good; but it might not make a whole lot of difference. Unless maybe the cat men can't swim?

"They swim better than you do," the Bird said in its dry mental voice. "Get out of the water quickly. Run!"

Stagger rather than run was the word for the way Garric left the pond, but at any rate he got out as quickly as he could. Every muscle hurt and it felt as though his feet were sinking in deeper on this side than they had in the forest on the other side.

Maybe they were; certainly they were cutting ankle deep through the mud and leaving swirls in the fungus on the surface. Unless the cat men were blind, they'd be able to track him easily.

"Even if they were blind they could follow your scent," the Bird said. It landed in the crotch of a tree that branched like a candelabrum. "Can you climb to here?" it asked, fluttering its wings to call attention to itself. "It will help some if the Coerli manage to cross."

The crotch was only fifteen feet in the air, and the rough trunk provided a good grip. Ordinarily Garric would've been up it with a few quick hunches of his shoulders and kicks of his tight-clamped legs.

In the present circumstances it was much harder, but it was necessary regardless. If the cat men had to climb to get at him, it gave him a chance to kill one or two that he wouldn't have on the ground surrounded by creatures so lethally quick.

Garric made it, throwing himself into the crotch and letting his tensed abdomen hold his weight. He whooped for breath through his open mouth as the Coerli came like lithe ghosts from the trees on the other side of the pond.

The maned leader followed the tracks to the water with his eyes, then up the far bank to the tree where their prey sat wheezing. "There's the animal!" he cried. "The heart and lungs to the warrior who drags him down!"

Instead of depending on his warriors to do the job, Grunog leaped into the pond and started across. He moved as smoothly as an otter despite holding his wooden mace out in front of him. His warriors arrowed into the water to either side of their leader.

To Garric's surprise, he hadn't lost the knife in swimming. The Coerli didn't have bows and didn't throw their spears. They'd use their hooked lines at first, but by keeping close to the trunk he'd be able to keep from being wrapped by them and dragged down.

The hooks would probably pull off chunks of flesh, but pain didn't matter much now. The Coerli were going to kill and eat him before the business was over, after all.

The warrior on the right side of the line disappeared, thrashing all four limbs. The other cat men didn't appear to notice. They'd reached the middle of the slow stream.

"Bird?" Garric began.

Grunog let out a scream like skidding rocks. He twisted and raised his mace to strike. Before he could, he sank straight down. A moment later the mace bobbed to the surface; the wood was dense and floated very low in the water.

"Large salamanders live in the lake," said the Bird. It was clinging to the tree sideways, just above the level of Garric's head. "You crossed at the boundary between the territories of two of the largest. The splashing drew them to investigate, but they're sluggish. You'd reached the shore before they arrived."

Garric didn't ask how much clearance he'd had; it didn't matter, after all. There wasn't any other choice.

The remaining warriors milled uncertainly in the water. Garric stood on the branch, no longer exhausted and perfectly confident. He pointed his dagger at the cat men and shouted, "Begone, interlopers or I will loose the rest of my minions on you!"

A Corl gave a hacking cry and thrust his stabbing spear beneath him. Blood bubbled to the surface. He called out again and went down. From the roiling water rose a corpse-white creature with an oval head and a tail as fat as the body proper. It rolled under again and disappeared.

The surviving cat men paddled back the way they'd come. When they reached the shore, they scrambled up and vanished into the forest. They hadn't said a word after Garric had called his empty threat.

"I see what you mean about big salamanders," Garric said. He wasn't feeling pain, but his whole body was trembling from reaction. "That was a good six feet long, including the tail."

"That was a small one," said the Bird. "Normally they wouldn't come close to their larger fellows for fear of being eaten themselves, but when they smelled the blood they were too excited to keep away."

"Oh," said Garric. His blood. The Coerli themselves had been taken too recently for their blood to have spread far. "Just as well I scraped myself, I suppose."

"Yes," said the Bird. "Now to the cave. It's not far. I hope we won't have any more difficulties before we get there."

Garric lowered himself by hanging from the limb with both hands, then dropped to the ground. His knees flexed but didn't buckle as he'd thought they might, especially the left one.

"Yes," he said. "I hope that too."

* * *

"'Now some of these days and it won't be long,'" sang Chalcus, his voice soft in the still air. "'You'll call my name and I gonna be gone.'"

"I hear water close," said Merota, walking a step behind Ilna with her hands pressed tightly together in front of her. She was obviously very frightened, but she was trying in every way she could to hide the fact. "I hope we're near the lake."

Ilna pursed her lips. The child was talking because she was afraid, not because the words would do any real good at all. It made Ilna angry-

Because Ilna was afraid also, afraid that she wouldn't be able to get Merota and Chalcus out of the trap they were in because of her. Which made her want to snarl at whoever was closest to let out the anger and fear churning inside of her.

With a tiny smile of self-mockery, she said, "It's just the other side of the hedge to our left, I believe, but it may be some way before I find a passage through-"

The aisle kinked to the right. She stepped around it, her back straight and a knotted pattern closed in her hands ready for need. White mist rolled through the gap in the hedge, clean-smelling and the first thing in this garden that had felt cool.

The mist was as thick as a feather pillow. Ilna couldn't see through it.

Chalcus joined her in the opening, keeping Merota between them. He reached over the child's head and stroked Ilna's cheek as lightly as a butterfly's wing.

Merota knelt and thrust a hand down into the mist. "I can feel the water!" she said excitedly. "It's running really fast!"

"Stand up, dear one," Chalcus said. "We're not swimming out into that without being able to see more than I can now. Not unless we have to."

"There'll be a way across," Ilna said. "I just need to follow it through in my mind."

She sounded grim, even to herself, because she was frustrated that she hadn't already found the way to cross. That was the path she'd been following, the one that would take them to the temple. She was sure of it!

"'I wish I was a rich man's son...,'" Chalcus sang and let his voice trail off. To Merota he said, "I came from honest folk. Honest but poor as the dirt they scrabbled in to earn enough to eat, or almost enough. I swore to myself that I'd never be poor the way my parents were."

Ilna stared at the mist. She couldn't see through it, but there were currents as surely as there were in the stream she heard purling beneath its concealment. She followed a whorl, dense white on dense white but forming a pattern in her mind.

"I haven't always been honest, child," Chalcus said. He tousled Merota's hair, but it seemed to Ilna that he was speaking as much to his own younger self as he was to the girl. "And often enough I haven't had money. But I've never had to beg the straw boss for something to buy a crust for my family. Nor sent my wife to beg him when he wouldn't grant it to me."

Merota put her hand in the sailor's. He squeezed it, then released it and edged aside. He was carefully not looking toward Ilna.

Ilna's fingers were taking apart the pattern she'd knotted for defense-or attack, if you wanted to call it that. Defense to Ilna had never meant riding with the other fellow's blows.

There were probably ways to puff air or wave her arms in the mist to change the way it flowed, but there were other ways too. If she matched the rippling white on white with the right sort of links in the yarn she carried, it would-

She held up the pattern she'd created. There was movement in the mist.

"Ilna, I can see something!" Merota cried. "It's a bridge! I see a bridge!"

"Aye, a bridge," said Chalcus in a quiet, neutral voice. "And where, dearest Ilna, would you say it'd come from, eh? This bridge."

"It was there all the time, Master Chalcus," Ilna said. It was a humpbacked affair with a floor and railings of pink stone on a gray stone frame. The supports were carved with leaves and flowing stems, but the pink slabs which feet or hands might touch were mirror smooth.

"Heart of mine," Chalcus said, not testy but with a hint of restraint in his gentle tone. "The fog is thick, I'll grant you, but Lady Merota paddled her little fingers in the place where the abutments now rest, gneiss and granite and each harder than the other."

"It was always here, Master Chalcus," Ilna repeated. "I had to turn it so that we could see and touch it, that's all."

She smiled faintly, wondering if a person who had more words in her tongue could've explained what she'd done. Perhaps, but it might be that a person with more words couldn't have wrapped the mist in just the right way to wring the bridge into sight.

"Ilna?" Merota said. "Who's the lady?"

For a moment Ilna didn't know what the child meant: there was only the bridge arching its back to mid-stream before falling into the mist in the direction of the central island and the temple. On the railing, though, slouched and then straightening with the grace of a cat waking, was a woman.

Wearing silk, Ilna thought, but it wasn't silk. The woman was dressed in her own flowing hair; her hair and the mist. She looked at them but didn't speak.

"I'll lead, then, shall I, darlings?" Chalcus said. He made the words a question, but he was swaggering up the pink stone before they were out of his mouth. Though his hands were empty, Ilna knew he could have a blade through the woman's throat before she had time to suck in a breath.

Merota started to follow the sailor; Ilna put a hand on the child's shoulder and held her back. Merota sometimes needed guidance, but she never objected when matters were serious.

Everything in this garden was serious, to Merota's mind even more than to her guardians.

While Chalcus was still a double-pace away the sinuous woman smiled and said, "Welcome, strangers. Have you come to use my bridge?"

Her voice was musical but pitched a little higher than even a slender woman's normally would be. Her face and mouth were both narrow, but her smile was welcoming.

"Your bridge," Chalcus said easily, letting the words stand without emphasis. "Would there be a toll for that use, milady?"

The woman laughed. "My, so formal?" she said. "A small toll, stranger-a very small one. Few people visit me here and I never leave. If you would tell me a story, any story you choose, that would give me a pleasure I could revisit in the long days when I'm alone. But if you can't or won't-"

She shrugged, a graceful movement that shimmered down her whole covering of hair.

"-then what could I do to block a strong man like you from crossing with your companions? No, a story if you choose to tell a lonely woman a story, and free passage regardless of your courtesy."

The mist was clearing. Ilna saw the wooded island beyond the moat. In the middle of the woods gleamed a temple with a golden roof.

Chalcus glanced back, careful to keep the woman in the corner of his eyes. "Ilna, dearest one...?" he said.

"I'll never be known for courtesy," Ilna said, sounding harsh and angry in her own ears. The woman on the bridge was very beautiful, and her voice was as pure and lovely as a bird's. "Still, I've always paid my debts. Give the lady a story, Master Chalcus, and we'll cross her bridge."

The woman looked at her and smiled sadly. "You don't trust me," she said in a tone of regret. "You've had a life of disappointment. I see that in your eyes."

She gestured up the bridge beyond her and toward the island. "You and the child are free to pass, mistress," she said. Every gesture, every syllable, was a work of art and beauty, though there was nothing studied about her. "All three of you may pass freely, as I said."

"Come along, Merota," Ilna said. She hated herself-well, hated herself more than usual-for her jealousy and lack of trust. "Master Chalcus will tell the lady a story to pay our way."

Ilna walked briskly up the smooth surface. The slope was noticeable, but she didn't slip even though the mist had coated the gneiss.

She could've held onto the handrail, but that would've meant touching stone with her fingers as well as her feet. Ilna hated stone. Even if she hadn't, she'd have hated every part of the bridge that this lovely, graceful woman claimed.

"Well then, milady," Chalcus said in a cheerful, lilting voice. "If you'll not think me immodest, I'll tell you of the time in my travels that I found a woman chained to the face of a cliff at the seaside. She was more lovely than any other, saving your own good self and Ilna, my heart's delight."

He nodded to Ilna and Merota as they passed. Ilna nodded back; coldly she supposed, but she couldn't help that. Merota squeezed his hand as she went by.

The girl was grinning happily; to be reaching the center of the maze probably, but Ilna didn't ask. If she spoke to Merota, it'd sound as though she was saying, "What do you have to smile about?" And that's what she would probably be saying, so she kept her mouth shut.

"Why are you smiling, Ilna?" Merota asked.

"Am I?" said Ilna in surprise. "Yes, I was. At myself, I guess you'd say. I was thinking that I'm never going to learn to be a nice person, but I'm getting better at not saying what I think."

Ilna stopped at the hump of the bridge, a polite distance from where Chalcus stood speaking to the woman. His voice came to her faintly, "... rising out of the sea, an island to look at save for its bulging eyes and its teeth as long as temple pillars...."

"It's hard to hear him, Ilna," Merota said, frowning.

"We have no need to hear him at all, child," Ilna said severely. "He's giving her a good story. When he's finished, he'll join us and we'll go on together."

She deliberately turned her face toward the island. The temple was a simple one: round and domed instead of the usual square floor plan with a peaked roof, but she'd seen round temples occasionally in recent years.

There weren't any temples, round or square, in Barca's Hamlet or in the borough beyond. People had shrines to the Lady and the Shepherd in their houses. There they offered a crumb of bread and a drop of ale at meals; most people did. On the hill overlooking the South Pasture was a stone carved into a shape so rough that only knowing it was an altar let you see that. The shepherds left small gifts on it to Duzi, the pasture's god, at Midsummer and their own birthdays.

Ilna refused to believe in the Great Gods, the Lady who gently gathered the souls of the righteous dead and the Shepherd who protected the righteous living. Ilna believed in Nothing, in oblivion, in the end of all hopes and fears. She'd had few hopes in life and those had been disappointed, every one. Death wouldn't be a burden to her; quite the contrary.

"You're smiling again, Ilna," Merota said.

"I shouldn't be," Ilna replied, "but that doesn't surprise me."

The mist was getting thicker; she could barely see the temple roof. She turned her head and found it moved glacially slow. Something was wrong.

Chalcus continued to talk with animation to the woman on the bridge below. His lips moved but Ilna could no longer hear his voice, even faintly. The mist between her and Chalcus was very thick, smotheringly thick.

Merota screamed, piercing the fog like a sword blade. The heaviness gripping Ilna's muscles released. Merota pointed into the water, suddenly clear where it'd been dark as ink since the bridge appeared. In its depths were bodies of the Little People, the Prey. There were more than Ilna could count, preserved by the cold stream; and they were all male.

Chalcus saw also. "By the sea-demon's dick!" he shouted. His sword flicked from its sheath and toward the lounging woman.

Swift as he was, the blade cut air alone. The woman-was she a woman?-slid into the stream like a water snake. For a moment she looked at Chalcus; then she trilled a musical laugh, gamboled for a moment among the drowned bodies, and vanished. Ilna couldn't tell whether she'd gone up or down stream, slipped into a hole in the bank, or passed from sight in some other fashion.

Chalcus joined them. His smile was forced and he dabbed his dry lips with his tongue.

"So, my fine ladies," he said. "Shall we cross the bridge as we planned?"

"Yes," said Ilna. "I'd like to get off it. I don't like stone."

And she hadn't liked the woman, either. She felt herself smile, this time because she'd had a better reason than mere jealousy to dislike and mistrust the creature.

"'Goodbye, pretty baby, I'll be gone,'" Chalcus sang as he finally sheathed his sword.

Although-

"'Goodbye, pretty baby, I'll be gone.'"

Because she was Ilna, she also had to admit that she'd been jealous.

"'You're gonna miss me when I'm gone.'"

* * *

Cashel felt Protas grip him harder, then release as a new world formed around them. It felt as if the void had frozen into the shape of a mountain pass opening down into a circular valley.

A woman with wings and a round, ugly face waited for them. Her hair was a mass of snakes. They twisted sluggishly, the way snakes do when they crawl out of the burrow where they've wintered and wait for sunlight to warm life into their scaly bodies. They were harmless sorts, snakes that eat grasshoppers and frogs and maybe a mouse if they're lucky; anyway, Cashel didn't expect to come close enough for one to bite him.

"I am your guide," said the woman. Her thick lips smiled. The only thing she wore was a belt of boars' teeth; her skin was the color of buttermilk, thin with a hint of blue under the paleness.

"Who are you?" Protas said. He had both hands on the crown; not, Cashel thought, to keep it on but because he felt better touching it. The way Cashel felt better for having the quarterstaff in his hands.

The woman laughed. Her voice was much older than her body looked, but she couldn't have been more ugly if she'd studied to do it for a long lifetime.

"You can't give me orders, boy," she said, "but that doesn't matter: a greater one than you commands me. I'm Phorcides, and I'm to take you to where you choose to go."

She laughed again and added, "Since you're fools."

Cashel grinned. He'd been told that many times before and it wasn't a judgment he argued with. But he knew too that the people, and not always people, who said that to him generally didn't have much to brag about in the way they ran their own lives.

Aloud he said, "Then let's be going, Mistress Phorcides. Unless there's reason we should wait?"

Phorcides looked Cashel over carefully. He met her eyes and even smiled; she wasn't challenging him, just showing curiosity for the first time since they'd met.

"My name's Cashel," he said. "And this is Prince Protas. In case you hadn't been told."

"Do you know what you're getting into?" the woman said carefully. The snakes squirmed slowly on her forehead; doing a dance of some sort, it seemed.

"No ma'am, I don't," Cashel said. He looked at Protas, but if the boy had different ideas he was keeping them to himself.

"But you think that you'll be able to bull through anything you meet," Phorcides said. "Is that it?"

"I think I'll try, mistress," Cashel said. "Now, should we be going?"

"We'll go now, which is what you mean," Phorcides said. Her belt of curved yellow tusks rattled softly as she turned toward the valley. "As for whether we should-I have no idea. Perhaps you'll come back and tell me after you've gotten where you're going."

She started down the slope into the valley. Her wings were large and covered with real feathers, but Cashel didn't see how they could possibly support a full-sized woman flying.

There were real birds circling in the updrafts from the valley walls, though. They were high-higher than Cashel could even guess-but he could make out wings and bodies instead of them being just dots against the blue sky.

The sides of the valley were pretty much raw rock with splotches of lichen, but there were a few real plants growing in cracks where wind-blown dirt had collected. Cashel didn't recognize the most common sort, pretty little star-shaped flowers, but there were bellflowers too.

On a distant crag, well above the pass the woman'd brought them in by, three goats with curved horns were staring at them intently. It made Cashel homesick for a moment, though "home" wasn't so much Barca's Hamlet as the life he'd led there. He and Ilna stayed in their half the mill; he'd tended sheep and picked up a little extra by doing whatever work required a strong man. There'd been nobody stronger than Cashel or-Kenset, in the borough or among the folk from distant places who came in the Fall for the Sheep Fair.

Protas picked his way carefully, his face set. Cashel frowned but he couldn't help. The path wasn't bad but it was rocky; not so much a path at all as a way to get down the slope through a carpet of low plants. The boy had only slippers meant for carpeted palace floors on his feet.

Cashel was barefoot, of course, but he was used to that. Even now that he wasn't a shepherd any more, his soles were near as tough as a soldier's boots.

When Cashel lived in Barca's Hamlet-when he was home-Sharina was the daughter of the innkeeper, educated and wealthy as people thought of things in the borough. She'd been far beyond the hopes of a poor orphan boy who couldn't so much as read his own name.

Cashel smiled, embarrassed even to have that thought in the privacy of his own mind. The present where Sharina loved him was better than anything he'd ever dreamed of at home.

They'd gotten down to where the rock was covered with grass and many little flowers-primrose, gentians, and buttercups. They made a nice mix of pink, blue and yellow in the green. There was hellebore too, though it was past blooming. Cashel wondered if Ilna would like the pattern the flowers made on the ground. She might, though she didn't use colors much in her own work. This'd be a fine pasture, but there didn't seem much in it to eat the foliage.

A gray-backed viper sunned itself on an outcrop, turning its wedge-shaped head follow their progress. Cashel started toward it from reflex, readying his staff to crush the snake's head; but then relaxed.

The viper wasn't close enough to hurt them, and Cashel didn't have a flock of sheep he needed to keep safe. He'd kill in a heartbeat if he needed to, a snake or a man either one; but killing wasn't a thing he did for fun.

The valley floor was flat and broad, wide enough that an arrow wouldn't carry to either side from where they walked in the middle of it. The walls were steep and gray; near as steep as the walls of the millhouse. At their base was a scree of rock that'd broken off the cliffs.

"Why aren't those sheep moving?" said Protas, nodding toward a lone pine under which three gray shapes clustered. "They haven't moved even their heads since I saw them."

"They haven't moved because they're stone," said Mistress Phorcides. "And anyway, they were ibexes, not sheep. Wild goats."

The boy opened his mouth to ask another question but glanced at Cashel before he did. Cashel shook his head slightly. Protas forced a smile, swallowed, and walked on without speaking further.

There were plenty of things Cashel wondered about, but he didn't think talking to the winged woman was a good way to get answers. The less contact they had with her, the better he'd like it.

He didn't doubt she'd take them to where they next were to go like the other guides had, but if they gave her the least opening there'd be something bad happening. Cashel trusted her the way he'd trust a weasel: you know exactly what a weasel'll do if you give it the chance.

Phorcides led them toward a rock face. Cashel thought the stand of beech trees concealed a cave or maybe even a bend in the canyon, but they came around the grove and found a sheer cliff. The rock layers were on end. A plate of mica that Cashel couldn't 've spanned with his outstretched staff gleamed in the solid wall.

Phorcides turned and smiled again. Cashel didn't like the smile, but that made it a piece with most other things about their guide.

"I've brought you here," she said. "I can't take you any farther."

"Do we go through the rock, then?" Protas asked. He was using his adult tone and holding the crown in front of him with both hands.

There was a man-the statue of a man-looking toward them around the trunk of a beech. Another-statue-was half-hidden in the stunted rhododendrons a stone's throw away, and a third crouched behind a juniper. Cashel didn't know if Protas had seen them. If the boy had, he was pretending he hadn't.

"Go through it?" Phorcides said. "That's up to you. I can't take you."

Her fat, pale lips spread even wider in a grin. "If I could," she said, "I would have gone myself."

Protas turned toward the mica and raised the topaz crown slightly. Cashel shifted sideways so that he could keep an eye on the boy and the woman both at the same time.

Phorcides opened her lifted hands toward Cashel like she was making an offering. The snakes on her brow were twining faster.

"I've carried out my duty," she said. "Now, Master Cashel-free me."

"I can't free you," Cashel said. His voice was harsh, surprising him. "I didn't bind you, mistress, so I'm not the one to free you."

"Cheun...," chanted Protas. It wasn't his voice. All ten fingers gripped the topaz, but bright lights glittered deep inside it. "Cheaunxin aoabaoth momao."

"Free me!" Phorcides said. Her grin changed to an expression Cashel couldn't describe. "Say that I am free, only that!"

"Nethmomao...," said whatever was speaking through the boy's lips. "Souarmi."

"Leave us," said Cashel in a growl. He lifted his staff. "Leave us now!"

The snakes in Phorcides' hair rose. She had a third eye in the middle of her forehead. It was closed, but the lid fluttered.

"Marmaraoth!" the boy's lips shouted. The cloudy mica was melting into the wall of a mirrored chamber that swelled to enclose Protas and Cashel too. There was a figure in the room already.

Cashel stepped so that he stood between Phorcides and the boy, holding his staff vertical before him. She gave a shriek of baffled rage and whirled away, her middle eye still closed.

The mirrored room closed about Cashel and the boy. In the entrance, the only opening, stood a creature the size of a man but with a cat's long face. It gave a cry like a hunting panther and leaped, its stone-bladed spear aimed at Cashel's throat.

Chapter 15

Sharina walked slowly back to where Tenoctris waited in her hedge of Blood Eagles. The old wizard was sitting up. A guard had found a shield for her to sit on, though her green silk robes were already probably beyond salvation from when she'd seated herself in the muck to work her incantation. She smiled to see Sharina and tried to rise.

"Don't," called Sharina. "Just make room beside you."

She meant it as a joke, but she really was bone tired. She'd sheathed the Pewle knife, though she'd had trouble getting the tip into the mouth of the sheath. The muscles of her right arm were spasming so badly in reaction to her repeated chopping blows that she wouldn't have been able to keep the heavy knife in her hand.

The guards stepped aside to pass Sharina, then began chatting with the men who'd accompanied her in attacking the hellplants. She sat with an unexpected thump; her legs'd given way when she was halfway down.

"Are you all right?" Tenoctris said with concern. "Your sleeve-"

Sharina looked down in surprise. "Oh!" she said, remembering it. "I used the sleeve to wipe my knife. I couldn't use the plants' bodies."

She grinned. "That would be the traditional way to clean the blade, you see."

She leaned back and twisted so that she could see Double. He lay on his back in front of the ruins of his mirror. He didn't move at all though his eyes were open; Sharina wasn't sure whether or not he was conscious.

"Tenoctris?" she said. "Did you make the swamp freeze?"

The old wizard smiled in what Sharina decided was a look of shy triumph. "I made it possible for it to happen," she said. "Yes, I suppose I did it. In a manner of speaking."

The sun was at zenith; the struggle with the hellplants had taken longer than Sharina'd thought while it was going on. The sheer scale of the business was staggering.

The haze had burned off; the mud had thawed and now was drying. The hellplants had been reduced to stinking lumps, but the smell wasn't any worse than Barca's Hamlet when the first rains of springtime released the varied sourness frozen during winter. Besides, a strong sea breeze was cleansing the air, blowing inland without the arc of hills to constrain it.

"How, Tenoctris?" Sharina asked. "Double there-"

She nodded.

"-is a great wizard, you said so yourself. How could you defeat the Green Woman where he couldn't?"

"Cervoran and the Green Woman are amazingly powerful," Tenoctris said. "But they're equals in strength. One might gain an advantage for the moment, but only for a moment. You saw how the struggle between them went. Saw what a layman could see, at any rate."

"Yes," agreed Sharina. "Although it seemed to me that the Green Woman was winning until you...."

She didn't know how to describe what'd happened, the sudden freezing and the clearing of the sky. She spun her index finger in a circle and said, "You did what you did."

"That was only a setback," Tenoctris explained. "As the others had been. Cervoran-"

She nodded toward the fallen wizard, now beginning to stir. She never called him Double.

"-was gathering strength. And that was the key, you see. I'm almost powerless compared to either of those wizards, but I could see what they were doing. Possibly-"

Tenoctris smiled, again in muted pride.

"-better than either of them could see. And as they acted, I... linked their actions, I suppose you could call it. So that they neutralized one another instantly instead of stroke for stroke as they'd been doing. Everything stopped, all the wizardry. Leaving it a matter for men. And one woman."

Sharina hugged her older friend. "Leaving it to Mankind," she said.

Waldron was reorganizing his troops with Stand To signals and a tempest of swearing from officers of all ranks. A number of injured men were being carried to the rear by their fellows or walking while clutching their wounds. That surprised Sharina-the deep-chilled plants had been as sluggish as one expected plants to be-but only for a moment. No, the plants hadn't been a danger, but the troops had cut themselves and their fellows in the wild slashing melee that'd swept the bay clear of the Green Woman's minions.

Double got to his feet with the jerky movements of a marionette. He looked around with a slack expression. He doesn't know what happened, Sharina realized. She hugged Tenoctris again.

Tenoctris looked puzzled. "Dear," she said. She took a fresh bamboo split from the packet at her feet, but she didn't attempt another spell for the moment. "Something is building."

Sharina looked southward, to where the Fortress of Glass gleamed on the distant horizon. "The Green Woman is attacking?" she asked.

Double bent and picked up the athame he'd dropped when he fell. His face was no longer vacant, but he didn't appear to be ready to resume the difficult business of wizardry.

"I don't know," Tenoctris said. "I don't think so, but I don't know."

With sudden decision she went on, "Help me up, please, Sharina. I think I would rather be standing for whatever's about to happen."

* * *

A recently fallen tree lay across the path. Its trunk was thicker than Garric was tall. He eyed it. He'd climb over if he were sure of his right arm, but....

"The band of Coerli we escaped went around the root end," the Bird said. "That's to your left."

Garric took the implied direction; he could see the clawed footprints. "Will they clear the path?" he asked. The detour added at least fifty yards to the trip.

"No," said the Bird. "Stone tools aren't satisfactory for cutting anything so large, and no band has more than twenty or so males to do the work. The trees are giant horsetails, and they don't live long anyway. The Coerli find it easier to go around fallen trees than to maintain a straight route."

"An uncle of mine was a great hunter of wolves," said the ghost in Garric's mind. "There were wolves on Haft in my time. He covered his banquet hall with wolfskins instead of using tapestries. He'd have liked these cat beasts even better for sport."

Then he added, the musing humor gone from his voice, "I wouldn't mind that either. We'd see how long it took to convince them that eating human children had been a bad idea."

Rain had washed the upturned roots clean of leaf mold. There wasn't a tap root and the mat didn't seem sufficient to support the massive trunk.

"There is no wind here," the Bird said. "The abyss was a very peaceful place when my people lived; and even now, compared to much of the world."

Garric didn't reply. He tried to imagine how he would feel if everyone he cared about-if every human being-were suddenly killed, but he survived. He couldn't begin to understand such a terrible thing. Even toying with that as a possibility made him very uncomfortable.

"Do not be concerned, Garric," the Bird said. "Grief is as alien to me as love would be. Besides, it will be over soon."

The cave was a smooth oval punched in the coarse black walls of the chasm. Garric paused when he saw the shadowed curve, staying close to the fallen horsetail so that the fan of roots would break up his outline to anyone watching from inside.

"There are no Coerli in the cave," the Bird said. "There is no one, Garric. Except in my memory."

"All right," said Garric, uneasy again. Holding the wooden dagger in an underhand grip, he walked briskly to the cave through the undergrowth of knee-high mushrooms.

For a moment he was in darkness. The Bird fluttered ahead with its usual jerking motion. Points of light appeared in the ceiling, floor, and walls, then spread into a glow that suffused all the surfaces. Garric's foot trembled-not quite pausing, but almost-then came down. He walked the rest of the way into the inner chamber without hesitation.

It was a half-sphere, covered entirely with mica. Apart from the oval entrance passage there was no distinguishing aspect to the interior. The muted light seemed to come from deep within the surrounding rock.

Garric turned slowly. No matter where he looked, he caught reflections of himself in the corners of his eyes; it made him edgy. King Carus, watching through the same eyes with the reflexes of a warrior who'd lived his whole adult life by his quickness and his sword, became much more edgy.

The Bird hovered in the middle of the inner chamber; the exact center, Garric guessed, though he couldn't be objectively sure because of the wall's curve and mirrored reflections. He looked toward the entrance passage, then back to the Bird. Its wings were still, but it hung in the air regardless. Lights glittered in sequence within its crystalline body.

"Bird, what should I do?" Garric asked. He spoke to hear a voice in the charged stillness.

"Wait," said the Bird. "I will accompany you to your world. I must arrange the forces in a fashion that will serve your purpose and mine as well, that is all."

Garric turned away from his guide. The play of light in the Bird's body disturbed him in fashions he couldn't put words to. The rhythm was like the low vibration that heralded an earthquake. He thought he saw figures moving within the mirrored walls, but he couldn't be sure.

"Are you a wizard?" he asked. Speaking to hear a voice, but he had to hear a voice in this inhuman, lifeless place! "Are you, Bird?"

The Bird's cluck of laughter broke Garric's tension. "I am a mathematician, Garric," it said. "I move points on a scale and adjust potentials. There is no mystery to what I do, and no art."

There were figures in the walls, but they weren't identifiable; they weren't necessarily even human. Some were superimposed on others the way a painted canvas may show ghosts of earlier pictures beneath the present surface.

"How is what you do different from what Marzan does?" Garric asked. "Or Sirawhil?"

"Marzan can achieve effects that I cannot," the Bird said. He clucked again. "But then, I know what is really happening, and he does not."

Black spots appeared in the walls and floor. Garric thought they were where the points of light had first glittered. Beams of red and blue wizardlight, thin as spider web but of densely saturated color, spread to weave the spots together.

Lines pierced Garric's chest and left forearm. Moving put him in the path of other lines. He couldn't feel any contact; if he closed his eyes, he wouldn't have known they were there.

He transferred the dagger to his left hand for a moment and wiped his right palm on his tunic. The coarse cloth was sodden, but the touch helped somewhat. He flexed his right hand several times, then took the dagger in it again.

"Prepare yourself, Garric," the Bird said. "We will accomplish your purposes, and then I will accomplish mine."

The hair stood up all over Garric's body; the web of wizardlight burned even brighter. The Bird clucked, louder than before.

The mica walls vanished, plunging Garric into a plane of interweaving figures.

* * *

Ilna followed Chalcus and Merota off the cold, polished stone of the bridge. The grass between her toes felt good by contrast.

The round temple was in front of them, brightly sunlit in a grove of pines. The roof was gilded-or simply gold? She didn't suppose it mattered-and had a circular window in the middle. There were tall columns around the outside and half as many thinner columns in an inner ring. Both numbers were too large for Ilna to count without a tally, but she was instinctively sure of the proportion.

Merota looked back at Ilna but her eyes then drifted past. "Oh," she said. "It's gone."

Ilna glanced over her shoulder. The bridge, a solid mass of pink and gray, had vanished into the wall of curling white. Only here and there could Ilna see above the mist the top of a tree growing from the maze beyond.

"There's nothing in the hedges that we wanted, child," said Chalcus, giving their surroundings a different sort of look from the ones he'd been shooting about him from before he stepped off the bridge. Instead of looking for dangers, he was now considering the island as a place where a young girl and her companions might want to be. "The sun's clearer here. And should we wish to go back, why, our Ilna would have us there in a flick of her fingers. Would you not, dear love?"

"I don't think that will be necessary," Ilna said austerely. She walked toward the temple, letting her mind drink in not only the shape but the reasons behind the shape of the building in every detail. She'd laid lengths of yarn parallel in her left palm and clamped them with her thumb, but she didn't start tying them yet.

The island had plenty of vegetation-the pines surrounding the temple and the flowers and grasses covering the ground. It was all pretty enough, if you liked that sort of thing, and Cashel would doubtless tell her it'd make a fine pasture.

There was nothing here for human beings to eat, though. Well, Ilna had no intention of staying on the island longer than it took to find their way back to their own world. She had business there with Double.

She walked up to the temple. It stood on a platform of three low steps. The floor within was a mosaic of tiny stones in a pattern as delicate as the interlocking fibers of a bird's feathers. From any distance the floor would've looked gray; in reality it was black and white, always one or the other. Only the eye of the viewer mixed the colors.

Chalcus was taking Merota around the structure, keeping himself and the child out of Ilna's way. It wouldn't have mattered: when she focused on a difficult pattern, nothing intruded on her concentration.

And this was a very difficult pattern. This was every leaf and rootlet of the tapestry garden, and it was more.

Ilna began to knot her bits of yarn, using them to work herself through the greater pattern in the stone. She stepped into the sanctum proper and concentrated on a tiny segment: a piece small enough to cover with the palm of her hand.

She looked up at the roof opening. It was the eye of the building, not only part of the pattern but the garden's window onto the wider cosmos. The grating over it was woven from gold wire so fine that it blurred in sunlight like the sheen of oil on water. There could be stories in an oil slick, too, and the soul of the garden was in this golden eye.

The beasts who called themselves Princes had spoken of the One who created the garden. If the One existed, he'd left his mark in this eye; but increasingly Ilna believed that the garden, the tapestry, had woven itself while the cosmos congealed out of chaos.

There was danger here.

Merota screamed. Ilna looked out from the light-shot complexity of her mind. Merota was screaming, probably had been screaming, but Ilna hadn't noticed until the pattern she was visualizing warned her of what was going on in her immediate surroundings.

Chalcus stood beside the building, in the curved shadow of the roof. His sword and dagger slashed in bright arcs-through nothing, dark shadowed nothing that formed about him. The Shadow was separate from what lay on the ground in normal fashion. His face was set and his lips were closed in a taut line.

Ilna acted by instinct, sweeping off her outer tunic and spinning it to a part of the mosaic floor that no one-not even her with her eyes and intellect-could have told from any other part of the interwoven design. The soft wool fabric settled silently, blocking the pattern in stone from the pattern in the light streaming through the grill over the temple's upturned eye.

The Shadow vanished. Chalcus tumbled free. Only now did he shout: wordlessly, mindlessly-the bellow of a great beast loosed from a trap. His blades danced again, rippling the empty air and plowing razor-fine furrows in the soil. Grass and a dozen buttercups fell, yellow victims of the flickering steel.

Chalcus looked at Ilna, his eyes wide and full of horror. "Dear one?" he said.

"It's all right," said Ilna. "It's a-"

She nodded to her tunic. She'd woven the cloth herself, a simple fabric as fine and soft as the best silk.

"I disrupted the pattern," she said. "The Shadow's a part of this temple, really. Part of the tapestry, a necessary part, I see. I can deal with it."

Ilna looked at the knotted pattern in her left hand. She hadn't dropped it when she took off her tunic. She had no recollection of how she'd moved, just that she had. Her... her soul, she supposed. Her soul had known what to do and her body had done it, without her mind being involved.

"While your tunic's there, the thing's trapped? Is that what you're telling me, dear one?" Chalcus said. He jerked his head in a nod toward the garment she'd flung with deceptive ease to the pavement. "Is it then, we're safe?"

Merota stood silent, biting on the knuckles of her left hand and staring at Chalcus. She twisted her eyes for an instant to Ilna, then returned them to the sailor.

"We're safe, yes, I told you," Ilna snapped. She walked to the tunic, picked it up, and shrugged into it with more trouble than she'd had taking it off. "Not because of this-"

She tapped the pavement with her big toe. She disliked stone but she could use it. She could use the thing that laired in this pattern, too, though it was as cold and heartless as the tiny chips that gave it life. Gave it existence, at any rate.

"-but because I see it whole. It won't dare to bother us again." Ilna started to smile but swallowed the expression; that would have been boasting. She went on quietly, "Another time I might have to cover another part of the pattern here in the pavement; but I could. It won't be back."

"Then, dearest...," Chalcus said. "Dear one, dear heart-let us go out of this place now, may we not?"

"I want to leave," Merota whispered. "Please. Please."

"If you'll be quiet," said Ilna sharply, "we'll be able to leave that much sooner. The exit's in the eye overhead. It shouldn't take me very long to find a way to open it for us."

"I'm not afraid to die, dear heart," Chalcus said. He smiled, but his face showed as much sadness as Ilna had ever seen him express. "The place that thing was taking me, though.... If there's a hell, my love, that's where it was taking me."

"There's Hell," said Ilna, remembering infinite grayness and the voice that had whispered to her. She looked at Chalcus, then down to the yarn in her hand. She began to pick out the knots and rejoin the strands into a different pattern.

"Master Chalcus," she said, eyeing the interwoven mosaic as her fingers worked, "I think before I open the door for us, I'll leash the Shadow. That way it won't come back while I'm occupied with getting us out of this place."

"That would be...," Chalcus said. His face spread into a rollicking smile. His curved sword and dagger slid into their sheaths over his left and right hips with the same liquid ease that Ilna showed while weaving. He stepped toward her, swept her into his arms, and kissed her hard.

Ilna frowned in amazement when the sailor backed away, still smiling. "Master Chalcus," she said, "this is scarcely the place for such."

"And what better place could there be, my dearest?" Chalcus said. "It's where you are and I am, and both of us living. Life's a chancy business, love; and what a fool I'd feel should I die in the next moment without having kissed the love of my life once more when I could have. Not so?"

Ilna sniffed, but she didn't snap back at his foolishness. He'd put it as a joke, but in her heart she recognized the simple truth of what he'd just said.

She stepped to Merota, hugged her, and then held an arm out to Chalcus as well. The three of them stood tightly together for a moment; then Ilna backed away.

"Now," she said, "don't disturb me. I can do this thing-"

"You said you could, Ilna," said Merota. "Of course you can!"

"I can do this thing," Ilna repeated, "but I can't start and not finish."

She allowed herself a slight smile.

"If that happens, the Shadow will finish me and I suppose all of us, because it will be very angry. Do you understand?"

Chalcus nodded and grinned. Merota opened her mouth to speak-to agree, almost certainly-but Chalcus touched a finger to the girl's lips before a sound came out. He moved with the grace of falling water and the speed of light itself....

Ilna looked at the golden grating over the eye. That was where the key was, not in the floor itself but in what the grating's shadow threw onto the mosaic. She began to knot her cords, making herself a part of the pattern.

She could feel the Shadow's strength. It was aware of what she was doing, but she had it now. There was no way it could escape unless she let it escape, and she would die before she did that.

Ilna's lips were tight with concentration but she smiled in her mind: she would certainly die very shortly after the Shadow escaped, should that happen. From what Chalcus said-and more from what she'd seen in his eyes as he said it-that would be a very bad way to die.

Chalcus and Merota had gone outside the temple. The child was picking flowers. The sailor watched her pick flowers and watched Ilna knot yarn and watched every other thing around them that might become an enemy or hide one.

She was very close to completion; a few more knots and the fabric-yes, she was not only binding the Shadow but bending it to her absolute will. The tapestry was even more marvelously complex than she'd realized before she wove herself into it. Only a master could have created the Garden, and Ilna os-Kenset was that One's equal to be able to reweave what He/She/It had-

The domed roof of the temple shone and became unnaturally clear. The eye and the grating still existed, but not in the universe that was forming itself over the temple. Ilna continued to weave, her fingers carrying out the understanding of her mind.

Merota cried out; Chalcus had drawn his blades. Cashel, Protas, and the dead-alive Cervoran were standing beside Ilna in the center of the temple.

Cashel had his quarterstaff raised to strike. Rushing toward them were cats the size of men, snarling in fury with their weapons raised.

Ilna wove.

* * *

Cashel couldn't move as quickly as his leaping opponent, but reflex honed in many fights jerked him back at the same time as the quarterstaff rose in his hand. He didn't so much hit the cat man as lift the iron-bound hickory into a place the cat man leapt through. Leaped into, at any rate, because Cashel was arm's length back from where the creature'd thought he'd be when it lunged.

Air and blood whuffed from the creature's mouth as the staff smashed its ribs. It flew upward into the mirrored ceiling, hitting hard enough to flatten its skull. It'd already been dead.

Another cat man was bounding down the entrance passage toward Cashel. There was no other way in or out of the domed room. Cashel stepped forward, again confounding his attacker.

This cat man carried a spear whose springy double point was barbed on the inside to grip and hold. A fishing spear Cashel would've said, but bigger and stouter; this was meant to catch men. He couldn't dodge the spear-thrust so he stepped into it, knowing that a head like that wouldn't stick him too badly.

The twin cane points burned like hot coals as they gouged Cashel's chest, but that didn't slow him. The cat man easily avoided the straight thrust of the quarterstaff, but it wasn't expecting the side-stroke that crushed it against the wall of the passage. The lithe body slipped to the gleaming floor, flat as a discarded rag.

Cashel backed, breathing through his open mouth. Additional cat men filled the passage, more than he could count. They stayed two double paces back, warned by what'd happened to their fellows.

Cashel had room to move, while the attacking cat men were bound by the passage. Soon one would get past him, though, and it'd all be over. They moved like light glinting from silver, too quick for thought.

The mirrored walls let Cashel see Protas standing with the topaz crown in both hands. The boy's face was set in a death mask. This would be a good time for wizardry....

To Cashel's surprise, Protas hurled the crown against the floor. The great yellow jewel shattered-not the way a stone breaks, but rather like a soap bubble vanishing. Where it struck, the wizard Cervoran stood-wearing the same garments and the same sneer as he had when Cashel last saw him in his room in Mona. He pointed his bone athame toward the cat men and chanted, "Nain nestherga!"

A cat man with a short-hafted stone hammer in one hand and a wooden dagger in the other sprinted toward Cashel, ducked low, and sprang. It easily avoided Cashel's lifted staff, but it hadn't expected him to kick upward with his left foot.

Cashel's soles were hard as a horse's hooves, and he'd put as much muscle in the blow as an angry mule could've. The cat man's cry became a startled bleat. It hit the passage ceiling, then the floor, and was thrashing in its death throes as it bounced back toward its fellows.

The remaining cat men paused. There were many of them, too many.

"Drue," Cervoran said. "Nephisis."

Protas was staring at his father, not paying any attention to Cashel. That was all right, since there wasn't a lot the boy could do regardless.

A cat man twice the size of any other bulled his way to the front of the group filling the passage. He was snarling at them, just noise to Cashel but words to the other cat men, that was sure. The big leader sorted them out, mostly by growling but once with a slap with the hand that didn't hold a wooden mace; his fingers had real nails and drew streaks of blood across a smaller cat man's scalp

Three of the creatures poised. Their big leader was right behind them, his mace lifted as much as it could be in the passage. It was easy enough to figure how things would go: one springing high, one low, and one straight up the middle.

Experience and strength had saved Cashel this far, but he knew he'd had good luck besides. His luck was bound to run out and anyway, he couldn't stop three of the creatures coming at him all at once; especially not with the big one following to finish the business with his mace while one or two of the little fellows chewed on Cashel's throat.

"Stherga!" Cervoran shouted. Cashel lunged forward, trying to catch the cat men off balance. They were too quick, launching themselves at him like so many arrows.

The chamber and passage vanished. For an eyeblink, Cashel was in a circle of pine trees. Ilna was there, grim-faced as her fingers tied bits of yarn that went on forever at the corners of Cashel's eyes. The cat men were coming at him and-

Cashel was alone in a flash of red wizardlight. He was blind, but he could feel each of his bones and muscles.

The light vanished. Cashel was back in the domed chamber with Protas and Cervoran.

Cervoran continued to chant, his face a mask of puffy triumph. The circle of trees and the cat men, living and dead, were gone. Figures formed in the mirrored walls.

Chapter 16

Chalcus moved like a wraith, facing the cat men. His sword licked out. A leaping cat man somehow managed to get its spear up in time, but the slender wooden shaft couldn't block the steel: the edge sheared through the spear and throat both.

Two others were springing toward Chalcus at the same time. He kicked at one. The cat man dodged in the air like a hawk striking but the thrust of its stone-pointed spear missed also.

The third had leaped high. The sailor's dagger blocked the swing of the cat's stone hammer, but the wooden poniard in its other hand plunged home. It was withdrawing from Chalcus' chest when his return stroke swiped a bloody smile the width of its furry throat.

Ilna was gathering the threads of this garden, of this small universe, into her mind; the knots of her pattern fastened them. Everything was connected: every stone, every flower, every life. To stop now would be to fail; to loose the Shadow on herself, which didn't concern her, and to loose it on her friends, which she would not do.

She'd never doubted that she would die one day. She wouldn't willingly die because she'd failed, though.

The cat men ringed Chalcus and Merota. The big one, the leader, ducked past the curved sword like water curling around a bridge piling, but Chalcus caught the creature's mace on his dagger and kicked it in the groin. Two cat men speared the sailor in the back as his sword beheaded their maned leader.

Merota screamed and grappled with one of the cat men as Chalcus turned. Another crushed her skull with a stone hammer. Chalcus stabbed the killer through the heart, put his dagger point through the temple of the creature which the child continued to hold as she convulsed in death, and then thrust behind him to kill the cat man clinging to the spear whose thin flint point poked through the front of the sailor's tunic.

I never imagined they would die, Ilna thought. I would die, but not them. She finished the task she'd set herself; too late, of course, but that couldn't be helped now.

Chalcus opened his mouth to speak. Blood came out but no words. He smiled, though, before the light went out of his eyes and he fell over Merota's small corpse.

There were still as many cat men as Ilna could count on the fingers of both hands. They'd paused, perhaps doubting that Chalcus was really dead, but now they eyed Ilna.

You should have killed me first, she thought, and she opened a knot of her pattern.

Darkness formed around the cat men. They looked startled, then began to howl. They must've been trying to move, but their limbs wouldn't obey them. It was like watching them dissolve in acid, flesh melting from the bones and then the bones themselves dissolving.

Ilna retied the last knot and put the fabric in her sleeve. She was smiling. Odd. I didn't think I'd ever smile again.

Chalcus and Merota lay where they'd fallen. The dead cat men remained also, but the Shadow had taken its prey out of this universe.

Ilna carried the bodies of her family into the temple and placed them under the golden screen. Chalcus weighed more than she did, but it wasn't a difficult task. She was quite strong. People in Barca's Hamlet had commented on that, how strong the little orphan girl Ilna was.

She knelt beside her family and thumbed their eyelids closed. After kissing them for the last time, she rose.

Chalcus' blood was on her lips. She licked it carefully away and took out more yarn.

Looking upward to the eye of the temple, Ilna began to tie another pattern. Everything was clear to her, now. Everything except for the question of why she was still alive.

* * *

The cat men were gone, even the musky smell of them. Cashel turned his head slightly so that he wasn't trusting the reflection in the walls to tell him what was happening behind in the chamber.

Protas was staring at Cervoran, who chanted, "Iao iboea ithua..," with strokes of his bone athame. Ruby light flooded the world at the final syllable. Cashel felt himself squeezed-not in his body or his mind either one, but some third way that he couldn't explain.

The pressure released. He wasn't in the domed chamber any more; neither were his companions. Protas and Cervoran shimmered in the mica walls, gray and as dim as if Cashel was seeing them through morning mists. Ilna was in the mirror also, and Garric with something on his shoulder that looked like a bird made of quartz.

"Sal salala salobre...," piped Cervoran's voice though his lips didn't move. His body was as stiff as a painting on the shining wall, but he and Cashel and the others in the mirror spun around a dimly-glimpsed dirt field where the center of the chamber had been.

Sharina stood there beside Tenoctris. A shield lay on the ground nearby. Sharina's there! The women looked up, frowning like they saw something nearby and couldn't be sure what it was.

"Sharina!" Cashel called, but his lips didn't move; he couldn't even feel his heart beating. Though the cry sounded only in his mind, he thought he saw Sharina smile in dawning understanding.

"Rakokmeph!" Cervoran shrilled, though his image in the mirror was as frozen as Cashel's own.

Red wizardlight, searingly cold, divided Cashel's body into atoms and reformed him on mud thawing under a bright sun. He staggered, paused to be sure of his balance, and took a single step forward to enfold Sharina in his arms. He held his staff clear so that it didn't rap her on the back of the head.

"Cashel," she murmured against his chest. "Cashel, thank the Lady you've come back!"

They were on a flat wasteland. Garric was holding Liane, both of them talking. Garric looked like he'd been between the millstones, but Cashel guessed whoever'd been making trouble for him looked worse. The bird on his shoulder was alive, turning its head quickly like a wren hunting dinner.

Soldiers, maybe the whole army, stood in noisy formations across the plain; the air stank of salty mud and rotting vegetation. There was Ilna, a knotted fabric in her hands and her face as thin and hard as an axe blade.

Cervoran looked around with dazed incomprehension. "Where...?" he said. "Why am I here?"

The double Cervoran'd made before he went off with Cashel and Protas stumped toward them. Both wizards held athames, but Double's was of old oak instead of a rib bone.

Tenoctris stood with an expression Cashel couldn't read, wary and reserved. She was looking out to sea. On the horizon, glittering brighter than it should've been even in this sunlight, was the Fortress of Glass. As Cashel followed the old wizard's eyes, he saw blue wizardlight flash from the crystal mass.

* * *

Sharina felt herself relaxing for the first time in days, safe within the circuit of Cashel's muscular arms. His presence made her feel as if she stood in a stone-walled castle. It wasn't just protection-though Cashel with his quarterstaff was protection enough-but also a feeling of solidity, of permanence.

Lords Waldron, Attaper and Zettin-the admiral of the fleet-were talking simultaneously to Garric; their aides stood in a ring about the commanders, looking eager but keeping silence in the presence of their superiors. If Lord Tadai hadn't been back in Mona, he and his clerks would be part of the scrum pressing Garric too....

Sharina squeezed Cashel's hand and stepped back from him. Aloud she said, "I felt sorry for my brother when I saw the way he was pestered before. Now that I've been regent myself, I pity him with the benefit of experience."

"I should be inside the Fortress!" said Cervoran, facing Double and glaring with his bulbous eyes. Double glared back, a mirror image on a slightly smaller scale. "Did you drag me here, you fool?"

Cervoran pointed his athame toward Ilna. "Come here, you!" he snarled. "I will teach this puny simulacrum what it means to thwart my plans. I will crush it! I am Cervoran!"

"I am Cervoran!" piped Double, tone and diction identical to those of the wizard who'd made him. "You cannot rule me now. No one can rule me!"

"No, by Duzi!" Garric said, blasting the words out like thunderclaps. "This will wait!"

He pointed to a junior officer, one of Admiral Zettin's aides. "Lord Dalmas, I'll take your sword if I may," he snapped. "If I may" was a polite form but the tone was an order. "Until I can get my own back. This-"

He held out what Sharina first thought was a tent peg, then recognized as a wooden knife of some sort.

"-was well enough when there was nothing better to be had, but I'll feel less naked with the weight of steel on my hip again."

Sharina touched Cashel again. Garric was her brother, but he was no longer the child of a rural innkeeper-and neither was she. Perhaps that was one of the reasons she so needed Cashel's presence: he hadn't changed from the solid, imperturbable youth she'd grown up with.

Dalmas and three other soldiers started to unbuckle their sword belts. Garric gestured curtly to the others, then took the gear-waist belt, shoulder strap, sword, and dagger sheathed on the other side for balance-from the named aide and put it on with remarkable ease. Moments like this reminded Sharina that Carus, the warrior-king, shared her brother's mind.

The commanders had moved back slightly. "A man's at a disadvantage without his clothes on," Cashel murmured to her. "And the clothes this lot cares about is a sword. Garric's really smart."

Sharina glanced at him. Yes, my love, she thought. And in this way and so many ways, so are you. You don't miss the things that go on between any kind of animals, people included.

Cervoran and his Double stood arm's length from one another, no longer speaking verbally but from the look of it communicating in some other way. Their expressions reminded Sharina of dead carp glaring at one another.

In the bustle and excitement of Garric's reappearance, Ilna continued to stand alone. Sharina stepped over to her friend and hugged her. Ilna was never demonstrative, but today Sharina felt as if she were embracing a marble statue. Something was badly wrong....

"Haven't you been able to find Chalcus and Merota yet?" Sharina said.

"I found them," said Ilna. Her voice was clear and precise, as always; and there was anger underneath it for a friend to recognize, again as always: this was Ilna os-Kenset.

But Sharina had never heard anger as cold and consuming as what was in these clipped, simple words.

"I wasn't quick enough," Ilna said. "They were both killed by things that looked like cats the size of men, on their hind legs. I wasn't good enough to save them."

"I-" said Sharina. She fell silent with her mouth still open, backing a step away. She felt as if she'd been drenched in ice water.

"The cat men attacked you?" Garric said, breaking away from the officers to stride over Ilna and Sharina. "The Coerli, they're called. Were you in the Land too, swamps and rain all the time?"

Sharina stared in horror: Garric was a prince, a leader, but this wasn't the time-

Garric's hard expression melted. He put his arms around Ilna and held her. For a moment she remained the same block of frozen anger that Sharina had held; then her arms went around Garric and she clung like a drowning woman to a float. Her face didn't change, except that she closed her eyes for just a moment.

Liane had followed Garric. She held a wax tablet and a writing stylus; a soldier walking behind carried her travelling desk. She looked at Sharina and mouthed the word, "Killed?"

Sharina nodded. She sucked her lower lip between her teeth and bit it hard.

Liane turned and started to walk away. The soldier with the collapsible desk couldn't get out of the way in time; Liane bumped into him. She hurled her writing instruments at the ground, put her hands over her face, and began sobbing. Ilna watched her dry-eyed.

Cashel stiffened. He shifted his hands on his quarterstaff, spreading them as they'd be at the start of a fight.

"Master Cervoran?" he said. His voice trembled. Cervoran and Double remained where they were, locked in a silent staring match.

Garric glanced at Liane but he continued to hold Ilna. His eyes were anguished, but his lips were in a tight line.

"Cervoran!" Cashel shouted. "Look at me or I'll tear your head off!"

Cashel doesn't shout. Cashel doesn't threaten.

Garric put Ilna behind him and turned, facing the wizards but keeping Cashel in the corner of his eye. He flexed his arms. He had a wound all the way through the muscle of his right shoulder, but you'd never guess that by the way his sword arm swung.

Nearby soldiers were bracing themselves. Some of them touched their weapons but took their hands quickly away lest they precipitate what they felt in the air.

Cervoran and Double both looked at Cashel. Their heads turned slowly, as though they were swimming in honey.

"There were cat people where we were," Cashel said. He wasn't shouting now, but it was hard to tell the words because of the way they slurred out through his stiff lips. "Then I saw Ilna and they were gone. Where did you send those cats, Cervoran?"

"This body must live," said Double.

"Nothing else matters," said Cervoran.

"I am Cervoran!" said both wizards together.

"Cervoran died a week ago," said the bird on Garric's shoulder. "The creatures you see before you are one of a pair of wizards from a place and time too distant to imagine. They fell here. This one animated the corpse of Cervoran."

Everyone stared at the bird. Its beak didn't move, but Sharina was as certain as she was of the sun that the words in her mind came from the shining creature.

"Its former partner fell into the sea," continued the bird. "Having taken for itself alone the treasure the two had stolen together-the bodies of my race, all but me."

"Look," said the mirrored wizards together. They pointed toward the sea.

The Fortress of Glass had risen higher from the sea on three crystalline legs. It took a step toward the land with the deliberation of a stalking mantis.

"The Green Woman is coming," said the wizards. "But I will crush her!"

* * *

Garric's shoulder had been throbbing as though a mule'd kicked him there. Now he didn't notice it.

"It's always like that in a fight, lad," said Carus, his eyes focused on something far away in time. "There's time enough to hurt afterwards; or there isn't, and it doesn't matter either way."

"Master Cashel," said the Bird. As usual, every mental syllable seemed to have been cut from hard steel. "Did you think the one called Cervoran took you with him for protection?"

"Yes sir," Cashel said, polite to a stranger-even an inhuman stranger-even now that he was as close to blind rage as Garric had ever seen him. "I was to protect him and Prince Protas, I thought. Wasn't that it?"

"Not in the way you think, Master Cashel," the Bird said. "That one needed a twin present so that he could through his art shift danger from himself to the other twin. To your sister and her companions, that is."

"It was necessary," the wizards said. "Any price you humans pay to preserve me is cheap. Look!"

They pointed again to the Fortress of Glass pacing toward land. Garric knew the water that far off-shore was at least a thousand feet deep. The glittering mass was larger than he'd realized, far larger than the cave the Bird and its people had occupied.

"What you see is thin as a soap bubble," the Bird said with its usual dispassion. "But it exists in many universes at once, so nothing in this world alone can harm it."

"Only I can defeat the Green Woman," the wizards said. Their paired voices were slightly apart in timbre, creating a shrill dissonance more unpleasant even than those voices separately. "The two humans who died do not matter. No number of dead humans matter. I-"

Garric drew the borrowed sword, a long horseman's weapon like the one Carus had carried in life and Prince Garric had learned to use under the tutelage of his ancient ancestor. It came out of the scabbard smoothly, despite the blinding jab of pain when the blade came clear and Garric's right arm rose above the shoulder.

Cashel was already moving, the staff out like a battering ram. His left hand led and the whole strength of his massive body was behind the blow. The iron ferrule was within a hand's breadth of Cervoran's swollen, smiling face when it stopped.

Cashel froze as though turned to stone; his shout of effort ended with a smothered grunt. Ruby light dusted the air.

Garric brought his sword around in a whistling arc. His body tingled as it had an instant before lightning blasted a tree nearby when a summer storm had swept the pasture while he watched the flock. The blade stopped above Double's head; he couldn't make the blade move any farther. Garric felt as though he'd been buried in hot sand, the grains individually yielding but together a weight beyond the ability of even his strong young body to force through.

"-will crush the Green Woman!" the wizards said. "I will be God!"

They turned to face the oncoming Fortress, raising their athames. "I alone matter!" they shrilled. "I will be God!"

Chapter 17

Ilna watched the Fortress of Glass walking toward them. It was easily the most complex-and therefore lovely-pattern she'd encountered in the waking world, though when she entered her reveries she glimpsed the threads of the cosmos itself. Occasionally Ilna had even followed those threads far enough to imagine the existence of the Weaver through Her work.

Considering herself as a thread in another's pattern, Ilna felt her lips twist in a wry smile. To her surprise, quite a number of things now struck her as amusing. That in itself amused her.

Everyone was talking but almost nobody seemed to be listening. Because Ilna was silent, no one paid attention to her. She was used to that, and indeed it was the state that she preferred.

The wizards who'd been responsible for the deaths of her family had set a fallen brazier upright on its tripod legs and lighted the charcoal with a spark of wizardlight. They were chanting, ignoring the humans about them.

Ilna looked at their dead, puffy features. Only the bodies were dead, of course. The inhuman spark within them used the flesh merely for transportation, no more a part of the real being than a sailor is part of his ship.

A sailor.... Well, Chalcus had never doubted that he'd die someday. Merota would've said the same thing if she'd been asked, though she was probably too young to understand just what that meant. Perhaps not, though: she'd been a clever child, and she'd stood beside Ilna and Chalcus in places where death was a more likely outcome than life for all of them.

As Cervoran chanted with his Double, Ilna remembered the feel of the cold, waxen flesh as she'd dragged the wizard off the pyre which would otherwise have consumed him. What would've happened if she'd let the fire have its way? Certainly that flesh, that form, wouldn't have loosed the Coerli on Ilna and her family; but would that have changed the result? As the thing of crystal marched toward them from the sea, it was easy to imagine a being of fire facing it and the whole island beneath a blackened waste.

The pattern was beyond Ilna's comprehension. What she knew, with a clarity that none of her friends could imagine, was that a pattern existed.

Sharina gripped Cashel's left wrist in both hands and tried to move it. He remained frozen, as motionless as the sun at its peak in the pale sky. Sharina turned, caught Ilna's eye, and cried, "Ilna? Can you do something? Tenoctris says she can't."

Tenoctris stood with a quiet expression. She held one of her slender bamboo wands, but she appeared to have forgotten it as she looked at the bird. It turned its head, unaffected by his paralysis, but it'd stopped talking.

"I can't grasp the pattern, Sharina," Ilna said, speaking in a normal voice. She was picking out the knots of the fabric she'd made to return herself from the tapestry garden. "It's far too complex for me. Even for me."

"Then there's nothing," Sharina said, despair giving way to resignation. "Nothing any of us can do. If those two-"

She nodded unhappily toward Cervoran and his Double, dabbing their athames toward the brazier as they chanted.

"-can't stop the Green Woman, then we're doomed."

"I didn't say there's nothing I could do," said Ilna sharply. The only emotion she'd brought out of the garden was anger. She was back to where she'd been for the first eighteen years of her life, before she'd met Chalcus and Merota. "I said I couldn't see where any action I took fitted into the whole fabric, but I've decided that doesn't matter. I'll deal with the part of the pattern that's before me, and somebody else can worry about the rest."

"I don't understand?" said Sharina. She glanced from Ilna to the fortress, approaching with ponderous inexorability. It didn't move fast, but it didn't need to. She drew the Pewle knife from its belt sheath.

"The Green Woman hasn't harmed me, Sharina," Ilna said calmly as she drew the other knotted pattern from her sleeve. "I'm not fool enough to believe that makes her my friend, but I know very well who my enemies are."

Ilna nodded toward Cervoran and Double. Smiling, she loosed a knot of the second pattern.

The short noon shadows beneath the wizards and their brazier broadened and deepened. For an instant, no one else noticed. Cervoran screamed, and a heartbeat later his Double screamed in near unison.

The Shadow swelled over them. They turned their heads to stare at Ilna. None of the other victims had been able to move even that much after the Shadow had gripped them.

Ilna smiled. Good. They must feel every hair-fine detail of what was happening to them.

They screamed. The flesh melted and the bones as well, but still the screams hung in the air as unseen portions of the wizards continued to dissolve; and Ilna smiled.

The Shadow dimmed and vanished. Cashel and Garric broke out of their trance, looking around with the startled expressions of men who'd taken a step that wasn't there while climbing stairs.

"It was your choice, Mistress Ilna," said the silent voice of the bird on Garric's shoulder. "But if you hadn't acted, I would have. They did to me what they did to you."

"I'm sorry," Ilna said. "I'm very sorry to hear that."

She stepped over to the brazier and threw the fabric into it. The yarn shrank, blackened, and finally burst into flame. The pungency of burning wool struggled with the general vegetable stench of this soggy wasteland.

"You are destroying the garden?" the bird said. "You know that most of the denizens will die when they're freed back into their own worlds, do you not?"

Ilna shrugged. In the palace in Mona the ancient tapestry was smoldering to ash just as this fragment of her own making did.

"Everything dies eventually, bird," Ilna said. "Even you. Somebody cruel made a menagerie, and I've ended it. That's all."

"Even I will die," said the bird. "But not you, Mistress Ilna. Not for longer than you can now imagine."

"No?" said Ilna. "Well, I've had other disappointments."

She looked at the creature sharply and added, "Are you a wizard, bird?"

"No, mistress," said the bird. "I am a mathematician. Usually I would say that means I understand things that wizards do not, but in this case I do not think that is true. Still, I believe I understand enough."

All about them people were running, talking; praying, many of them. And to the south, the Fortress of Glass rose higher with every stride as the sea bottom shelved toward the bar closing Calf's Head Bay. Its steps thundered, and waves came rolling in.

* * *

Sharina rested her left hand on Cashel's shoulder; just for the stability, not for anything he could do or she even wanted him to do. Just because he was Cashel. The ground shook each time the fortress' shining legs paced forward.

Horns and trumpets were calling the army to Stand To. Soldiers who'd scattered during the chaos of the past hour were now forming back behind the standards of their units. Most of them had only swords: their spears, useless against the hellplants, were stacked far to the rear with their baggage.

Spears wouldn't be any use against the Fortress of Glass either. Nor would swords, of course.

Garric turned toward her and said, "Sharina? You've been regent while I was gone? Can you think of anything I should do? Because I've just fallen into this."

Liane hovered at Garric's side, face set but her eyes dry again. Had she been able to explain anything to him in the few minutes since he returned from wherever he'd been?

"No," Sharina said. "It's all-"

Suddenly the frustration gave way and she was again a girl talking to the brother she trusted completely. "Garric, it's been like falling off a cliff. Liane and I-"

She looked at Tenoctris, standing nearby with a cheerful, intent expression.

"-and Tenoctris, of course, and everybody, we've been trying to do something, but mostly it was Cervoran and the Green Woman, and now there's just her. It."

At the corner of her eye, she caught Ilna standing alone with a faint smile. Her fingers were weaving yarn into a pattern that only she could understand. Garric had been in a place where there were marshes and rain-and murderous cat men....

Sharina's fingers tightened on Cashel's arm. Cashel is here. He'll always be here. He won't die and leave me.

"That's what I guessed," Garric said. "I'll join Waldron, then. May the Shepherd protect you, sis. And you too, Cashel."

"But Garric...," Sharina said. She didn't know how to go on. Her brother wore nothing but a sword belt and a ragged tunic that seemed to have been made from sacking. He was bruised and scraped, and his shoulder wound should've been disabling; perhaps it would be as soon as he stopped moving and his body got a chance to remind him of its presence.

She coughed. "I don't think the army will be able to do much," she said. "Do you?"

"All the more reason for the prince to stand with his troops, don't you think?" Garric said, giving her a lopsided smile. He turned, gave Liane a quick hug with his left arm, and set off toward the royal standard. As he walked, he drew the borrowed sword again. Liane followed at his side, a half pace back.

The crystal bird hung in the air before Sharina. It was exactly where it'd been when Garric was talking to her. Its wings were motionless, but the play of light over and within the creature seemed to be more than merely sunlight on uncountable facets.

"Guess I'll get limbered up," Cashel said with a shy smile. He moved a few paces in front of her and began spinning his quarterstaff. As it rotated in slow circles, wizardlight trailed the ferrules in blue sparkles.

Sharina licked her lower lip; she'd drawn blood when she bit it. "Tenoctris?" she asked. "Will he be able to....?"

She nodded toward Cashel's back. About anyone else that would've been a joke or a madman's question, but Cashel's powers went well beyond the strength of his great muscles.

"No, dear," Tenoctris said. "The thing that you see-"

She nodded toward the oncoming fortress. Though it walked on its tripod of legs, rising increasingly high above the sea's surface, it didn't strike Sharina as a living thing. Watching it was like standing in the path of a vast landslide, swift-moving and terrible but not alive.

"-is only a surface. The real Fortress of Glass exists in many times. Nothing that happens to it in this world alone can affect any significant portion of the whole."

The old wizard looked at the hovering crystal bird and said, "Isn't that so, milord?"

"I am Bird, not a lord," said the glittering creature. "I was one of many equals, and now I am one. But you are correct about the fortress, Tenoctris."

It made a clucking, clicking sound with its body, then resumed in its mental voice, "Nothing I saw in the ages I lived with the Grass People suggested that I would meet humans who understood the equations that are my life."

Tenoctris lifted her chin in the direction of the Fortress of Glass. Each step now sent the sea rolling onto the shore with a snarl.

"Those are the bones of your race, Master Bird," she said. "Will you leave them in the hands of their slayer, to kill more beings as innocent as your people were?"

"I told Garric that I would return him to his world for his purposes and for mine," said the Bird's silent voice. "I will complete my purposes here. But Tenoctris-you know what that will mean for your world and your people?"

"I know," said Tenoctris, nodding. "Forces must balance. But it must be done."

"The sides of the equation must be equal," said the Bird. "But I regret the cost to you and yours, for some human beings have treated me as one of their own."

"Go," said Tenoctris, pointing her bamboo wand toward the fortress towering against the clear sky. "There's very little time."

"There is enough time," said the Bird. It rose into the air and headed seaward with jerky, fluttering motions of its wings. Faintly, as though from an unimaginable distance, the mental voice added, "There is all eternity."

* * *

Cashel spun his quarterstaff in a simple circle before him, varying the movement with an occasional figure-8 to make sure he was working all his muscles. The rhythm was simple and soothing; his body could keep it up all day, leaving his mind free to watch the dance of universes on the surface of the Fortress of Glass.

He couldn't follow the pattern, not really, but it was a delight to watch something more wondrously formed than anything in this world or any single world. Cashel's eyes saw shimmering light, but his mind showed him the connections stretching through time in all directions. Ages rose and rolled and tumbled again into the depths, not of this universe but of the cosmos that was all universes. The Fortress of Glass was perfect, and because it was perfect there could be nothing more beautiful.

It was going to crush Cashel and everyone he loved. It was his duty to stop it. That was impossible but of course he'd try. Of course he'd try.

"Cashel," said Sharina behind him. "Stop spinning your staff and hold me. It's all right. Hold me!"

Something flickered into Cashel's line of vision. Because he was focused-eyes and mind both-on the fortress, for a moment it was just that: a flicker. Then-

Cashel saw the bird that'd been on Garric's shoulder. It was flying toward the Fortress of Glass, and like the fortress the bird's shimmer held all worlds and all times.

"Cashel, it's all right," Sharina repeated. "Please-hold me. Something's going to happen."

This time Cashel brought his staff to a halt and held it upright. He stepped backward, putting himself beside Sharina and holding her in his free arm. He didn't take his eyes off the fortress and the crystalline glitter that flew toward it.

The Fortress of Glass had a cold, perfect beauty, but Cashel or-Kenset was human and of one world. In Cashel's world, Sharina was as close to perfection as there could be. He smiled shyly, his eyes on the looming fortress and the bird mounting so high in the air that it now looked like a mote wheeling in the sunlight.

Tenoctris said, "The fortress is bigger than it seems. I suppose you and your sister know that, Cashel?"

"Yes ma'am," said Cashel. He was speaking for Ilna, but he didn't have any doubt about it. It was all so clear that he sort of couldn't imagine that it wasn't clear to everybody. He knew it wasn't his eyes that were seeing the fortress as it was, though.

Sharina nestled close to him. It was so wonderful....

"Whatever happens to the fortress," Tenoctris continued, "happens in all the times that the fortress is part of. If the fortress vanishes, something will take its place. I think the times themselves will merge to balance what's being taken away."

"I don't understand," said Sharina.

Cashel didn't understand either, but it wasn't the sort of question he cared about. He couldn't change whatever it was that Tenoctris was expecting, so he might as well wait to learn. He'd deal with whatever it meant when it'd happened, just like he always had in the past.

He smiled. Sharina didn't think that way, or Garric or most people. The kingdom needed shepherds as sure as it did princes.

"Things will move in time rather than space," Tenoctris said. "I can't guess how great an area will be affected, but the fortress is very large. Very large."

One leg of the Fortress of Glass settled onto the bar at the mouth of Calf's Head Bay; the earth shook itself like a wet dog. The crystalline mass of cliffs and peaks was so nearly overhead that it seemed a fiery cloud, and the legs that'd looked slender when the fortress started walking were each thicker than the gate towers in Valles. The legs shifted the way sand pours through a timekeeping glass rather than by bending like snakes.

"There," Sharina said. She pointed upward. "The Bird flew into the other. Did you see it, Tenoctris?"

"I trust your young eyes, dear," the older woman said. "And that's what he would do, of course. Return to his people."

The next step the fortress took would put a huge foot onto the mainland. Cashel didn't know how much the Green Woman saw from wherever she was inside the crystal, but he figured she saw enough to make sure the foot landed where it'd do the most good. If the legs shortened and brought the body down onto the ground, it'd easy cover the whole muddy plain and all the people standing on it.

Cashel held Sharina a little tighter instead of bringing his staff around again. That was what she'd said she wanted, and he wasn't about to refuse Sharina anything in these last moments.

The back leg of the fortress rose and started to swing forward. It stopped as suddenly as iron hardens as it flows from the smelting pot. A flash of-

Cashel couldn't describe it. It wasn't light, it was not-light, penetrating blackness.

-flooded the world. For an instant the Fortress of Glass wasn't visible. The sky was empty, but inside it there was an infinite blackness.

The crystal mass reappeared, shifting from the shape the Green Woman had formed it into. "The Bird!" Sharina cried, and it was the Bird, now the size of the fortress it replaced.

A voice screamed the way Cervoran and his Double had screamed in Ilna's net of shadow. Cashel's fingers tightened on the hickory staff, then relaxed. Ilna hadn't needed help to pay back the ones who'd taken Chalcus and Merota from her; the Bird didn't need help either.

The glittering wings fluttered, but there was no sign of the violent wind they should've fanned across the bay. The Bird lifted, but not into the air or not only into the air. The Bird shrank as it moved away from the world of men.

There was a rumble too deep and loud to be sound. Everything flowed, earth and sea and air. Cashel held Sharina tight.

Nothing else mattered. Nothing else in the cosmos mattered.

* * *

Garric clung to Liane, watching realities tumble around and through him. Lord Waldron stood as stiffly as if he'd been tied to a post as an archery target, but many of the troops in his personal regiment had knelt with their hands flat before them in an attitude of prayer.

"It's not an earthquake!" Liane said. "The ground isn't shaking!"

Rock and earth and sea and once the trunk of a gigantic tree wavered before Garric and were replaced. He could breathe normally and his feet remained firmly set as Liane had said, but a fog of other worlds half-concealed his world and blurred the figures of the people about him.

The enveloping sound was like the whisper of leaves as wind rustles a forest ahead of a violent storm. It was so loud that Garric could hear Liane's words only because she shouted, and even then he was reading much of the meaning from the shape of her lips.

Near Cashel and Sharina was Tenoctris, looking about with her usual bright curiosity. Liane followed Garric's gaze and said, "Does she know what's happening? She seems to, don't you think?"

No, Garric thought. She's Tenoctris and she'd show the same interest in runes on the blade of an axe brought to behead her.

But he'd heard the carefully controlled hope in Liane's voice. He didn't think she was afraid, exactly; but Liane defined herself by the things she knew. What was happening now was beyond her understanding. Probably beyond human understanding, but if anybody knew, Tenoctris would.

"We'll ask," Garric said, and with Liane clinging to him started toward to his sister and friends. It was like walking across the flats when the tide is in, pulled and twisted at the whim of forces whose full strength would've been beyond human imagination.

King Carus was a silent presence in his mind. Carus had drowned a thousand years before when a wizard had split the sea bottom with his art and sucked the royal fleet into it. If this was a similar disaster, the result would be worse than the centuries of chaos which had followed Carus' death. The Isles hadn't really recovered from the fall of the Old Kingdom; a second collapse would end civilization forever.

Garric's skin tingled. Patches of air cleared momentarily, but once Garric saw clearly a two-legged creature which held a jeweled athame and stared back at him through faceted insect eyes.

"Tenoctris!" Garric said. He had to shout to be heard, but tension would've raised his voice anyway unless he'd fought the tendency very hard. "Do you know what's going on?"

Tenoctris turned her head and smiled to acknowledge their presence, but she didn't respond to the question; either she didn't have an answer or she simply couldn't hear him. Garric grinned: probably both, since if Tenoctris had heard she'd have shaken her head out of natural politeness.

The sound ceased so gradually that even after it was gone Garric heard echoes in memory. Around him reality shifted, flowed, and at last stiffened like grain shaking down in a measure.

He looked southward, blinked, and looked again: the Inner Sea was gone. In its place was a forest of unfamiliar trees. On the horizon lifted mountains, purple and misty with distance.

Liane bent and plucked a bell-shaped purple flower. There were scores of them, growing among the knee-high grass covering what had been a mud flat when the Fortress of Glass marched toward them.

Men shouted. A Corl warrior bounded from a grove of straight-stemmed shrubs with feathery leaves. The only weapon he carried was a flint dagger with a bone hilt, but his leather harness was beaded in a complex design.

"Watch him!" Garric shouted. He still held his naked sword, but he had no illusions about being able to outfence a Corl in open country. "They're quicker than you can believe!"

The warrior bounded straight toward Garric, but it wasn't attacking. Its eyes were wide and desperate. It wailed, "Who are they? So many!"

I understand him! thought Garric as the Corl changed direction at the last instant-and flew headlong as Ilna's noose, spun out in perfect anticipation, tightened about his right ankle. The Corl gave a despairing shriek and slammed the ground. Before Garric could get to him, Cashel had rapped the cat man behind the ear with his quarterstaff.

"Is he still alive?" Garric said, sheathing his sword. "Good, tie him and mind his teeth if he comes around. I need to question him. Apparently I can still understand Coerli speech even though the Bird's gone."

He glanced toward the empty sky to the south. Was the Bird gone? He didn't see the crystalline creature or hear its voice, but it might have left a legacy of its presence. The Bird had been more than a helper: it had been a friend.

Tenoctris watched as Garric tied the Corl's wrists behind its back with his sword belt. He looked back and asked her, "Do you know where we are?"

"Garric, nobody knows this place," the old woman said quietly. "This is a land that's never been before. It's many times, mixed together. It has no history; none."

Garric thought of the dream figure he'd met when Marzan summoned him to help the Grass People. "The Kingdom of the Isles?" that one had said. "The Isles have been gone for a thousand years...."

"We'll give it a history," Garric said. "It'll have the history that we make now."

Ilna had retrieved her noose. She knelt beside the trussed Corl and twisted his harness up.

"Careful," said Garric. "They're fast and they're really dangerous."

"This one won't be," Ilna said calmly as she slid the warrior's dagger from its sheath. The flint blade was so thin that light wavered through it within a finger's breadth of both edges.

"Wait!" said Garric. "We need-"

Ilna gripped the Corl by the topknot and slit his throat with a quick, firm stroke. Blood spurted arm's length, a hand's breadth, and finally the width of a finger as the cat man died thrashing.

Ilna straightened, leaving the dagger on the ground. She wiped the back of her right hand on the Corl's harness; she'd managed to avoid most of the spraying blood with her usual foresight.

"Ilna," Garric said, trying to understand what'd just happened. "We needed the prisoner. There must be more Coerli here, and he didn't look like those I saw hunting the Grass People. This may be the Coerli home, or part of it. There may be thousands of them!"

"Good," said Ilna in a voice that rustled like a snake's scales. "Then there's a reason for me to live after all. I'm going to kill all the Coerli."

"Ilna," said Liane. "Please. You can't do that?"

"No?" said Ilna. She shrugged. "Perhaps you're right."

Something huge and hungry bellowed from the depths of the great forest. The sound echoed, bringing swords to the hands of the soldiers who didn't already carry their steel bare.

"But I can try," Ilna said, and her smile chilled Garric in a fashion that the monster's cry had not.

An unfamilar bird wheeled high in the heavens. In Garric's mind the ghost of Carus repeated, "... the history that we make now...."