6

Cashel awoke from dreamless sleep, his skin prickling. The warm, sweet smell of the flock filled the night; but the sheep were up and pacing too, and there was a faint odor which didn't belong.

He'd been sleeping beneath a wagon parked next to the sheep pen. The wagoner was glad of his presence, because it saved him the need to stay with the load of pottery on a night that looked like rain. Strangers rightly trusted Cashel or-Kenset the way they trusted the sun to rise in the east and the earth not to open beneath their feet.

"Cashel?" Mellie said in his ear. "Somebody's using powers very close by. I don't think they mean well."

A wagoner's ox lowed a nervous challenge from the adjacent cattle pen. The Gravel Ford Inn had separate enclosures for sheep and cattle, and a horse corral besides for those times when there were more riders and pack animals than the stables could accommodate under cover.

It was dangerous to enclose strange horses and oxen together. An energetic horse might kick and bite its neighbor out of nervous irritation; but an ox has horns as well as a temperament beneath its stolid exterior, and not infrequently the ox will finish the fight a horse started. Better to quarter the species apart.

Cashel rolled out from between the wheels, leaving his long traveling cloak on the ground where he'd been lying. He cinched his belt tight over his tunic and surveyed the night with the quarterstaff in his hand.

It wasn't rain Cashel smelled in the air, nor the Stroma River either. There was a salty tang that was out of place so far from the sea; and there as the smell of corruption, of things long dead.

"It's coming closer," Mellie warned. She didn't sound frightened; just alert, like a squirrel high on a trunk following the prowling dog with its eyes.

The inn was even older than the one in Barca's Hamlet. For centuries the Stroma River had been crossed by a bridge raised on pilings above the surface of the river even at flood stage, but the inn's name hadn't changed.

The abutments of the present bridge were Old Kingdom masonry, relics which survived the fall of the span they'd anchored and the civilization of which they were a part. The inn's outbuildings reused ashlars from the villas of wealthy folk of former times.

Nothing unusual seemed to be stirring. With the quarterstaff balanced in his hands, Cashel walked around the paddock toward the river. Water gurgled against a retaining wall that had been ancient when the Old Kingdom fell; the smell of salt and death was stronger.

"Cashel!" Mellie said. Figures rose from behind the retaining wall with a mechanical suddenness. Starlight glimmered on rusty metal and wetly gleaming flesh.

They were liches like the one which Garric killed in the inn yard, but there were many of them this time: more than Cashel could be sure of in this uncertain light. One had a shield which trailed strands of seaweed.

"Attack!" Cashel shouted. "Attack!"

His first thought was for the sprite on his shoulder, but he didn't dare take the time to put her in a place of safety. He stepped forward, using his staff as a spear. The iron ferrule crunched all the bones from wrist to elbow in a lich's arm.

The creature dropped its rusty sword, then picked it up in the other hand. It came on again unaffected, though jellylike flesh and bits of bone sloughed from the shattered limb.

"Attack!" Cashel cried, backing swiftly. Most of the liches ignored him and strode toward the inn, but he still faced three of the monsters.

He spun the quarterstaff overhead; when a lich thrust a spear at his midriff, the ferrule whacked the point aside; Cashel's overhead stroke with the other end crushed the creature's skull. That lich collapsed into a dripping pool and stayed down. The other two came on, inhumanly murderous, slightly flanking him from either side.

The first of Benlo's guards spilled out of the inn's door, hacked twice into the lich confronting him on the flagstone porch, and fell when another monster chopped him with a broad-bladed axe. The guard's sword still flopped from the chest of the lich he'd stabbed but not put down.

Cashel blocked a cut from the one-armed lich. The swordblade was corroded; there were even barnacles on the steel. Nonetheless the stroke was fierce enough to chip wood from the hard hickory staff.

More guards came out of the inn, shouting in hoarse amazement. Steel clanged and flashed red sparks as men met the liches' attack.

Cashel grunted as his heel hit the wall of the paddock. He'd backed as far as he was going to go.

He supposed Mellie would be all right. She'd lived a thousand years without him, after all.