9

"Who did it?" Garric demanded, hearing in his voice a barely suppressed echo of King Carus speaking in a tone that would be obeyed. "Who sent the liches against us, Benlo?"

The drover sat on an upturned feed trough beside the stables, working the tongue of his belt in and out of its loop as a way to occupy his hands. Garric stood in front of him; Cashel stood behind, looking more like a bank of storm clouds than anything human.

The inn yard glittered with torches, lanterns, and an occasional candle that was likely to gutter out in the breeze. Folk bent close to dead liches to be sure of what they were seeing, then rose with exclamations of horror and disgust. A wounded guard was moaning; men talked in high, nervous voices about what had happened and what might easily have happened.

"I don't know," Benlo said. His tone wavered between anger and genuine concern. He glanced past Garric in momentary appraisal.

"Your guards want to know the truth more than they want to prevent us from forcing the truth from you," Garric said in a low, dangerous voice. "The survivors do, I mean."

Cashel grunted. Garric had never seen his friend so angry before. As soon as he was sure Ilna and Garric were all right, Cashel had walked Benlo to this seat out of the immediate way. When the drover tried to protest, Cashel had lifted his feet off the ground with the strength of the arm that didn't hold his quarterstaff.

"Why were you searching for Garric?" Tenoctris asked. She sat cross-legged in front of the drover with a blade of grass in her hand, as though she were a child playing in the dust. If Garric squinted in just the right way, he saw faint trails of blue hanging in the air after the grassblade flicked through it.

"I can't answer that," Benlo said. His voice hardened, "No, I can't. All I know is that I was asked to follow a certain trail and to bring back what lay at the end of it if I could. I've broken no laws. I've done no harm and I mean no harm."

He pointed his hand imperiously, index and middle fingers extended together, in the direction of the road to Barca's Hamlet. "Go on back to your sheep pasture, boy," he said, "if that's what you want to do. But I didn't bring the liches on you and nothing you do to me will make them leave you alone. I wouldn't even have known what to call them if your friend here—"

He nodded toward Tenoctris.

"—hadn't told me."

Garric remembered the fight as a spectator, though it had been his body slashing liches down like ripe grain. He'd moved fast and struck with lethal assurance, though part of him was aware that the sword's style and balance made it inferior to any blade he'd have chosen for himself. The stool was both weapon and defense; he'd fought liches before and struck for their skulls with either hand, never making a false motion.

He'd been cut once, across the back of the right calf by a lich that one of Benlo's guards had put down without killing. Garric remembered kicking and being surprised when his bare heel instead of a hobnailed bootsole crunched hard against jelly-coated bone. He'd stabbed down then without bothering to look at the target. His sword rasped through the thin bones of the nasal cavity and into the vault that would have contained the brain of a living being.

With only that fractional delay, Garric had proceeded to dispatch the liches still on their feet. He'd seen it all, he remembered it all; but it hadn't been Garric or-Reise fighting. He'd never held a sword in his hand till Benlo gave him one to carry.

He touched his tunic where the medallion of King Carus hung. He said, "Who sent you to find me?"

Benlo shook his head. He'd relaxed slightly, aware by now that the youths wouldn't harm him without reason and apparently confident that there was no reason why they should.

"I don't know," he said. His eyes moved past Garric again, this time in the direction of his daughter. Liane stood alone but just within earshot, staring at her father with a face as still as marble.

Benlo winced with embarrassment but he continued, "I was given funds by a banker in Erdin with instructions to follow a particular trail. The banker certainly didn't know what I'd find at the end of it, and I doubt his principal—I have no idea who the principal was—knew either. Otherwise I'd have been told more."

While Tenoctris murmured a spell, Liane had dressed the cut on Garric's leg. She said her teachers in Valles had been a renounced order of Daughters of the Lady; they'd taught their charges the practical skills of nursing as well as deportment and literature. The bandaged calf stung but even that was barely noticeable if Garric kept his weight off the leg.

"What kind of trail?" Cashel growled. He picked up a handful of straw and began wiping his staff clean of clinging matter. Garric knew Cashel had given the warning, but he had no recollection of what his friend had been doing during the fight.

Ilna stood beside Garric, her eyes on Benlo's daughter rather than the drover himself. She held a rope halter, running the fall in and out of the loop as she measured Liane's throat.

"It's a . . ." Benlo said. He fluttered his hands as though trying to churn words out of the air. "It has to do with a form of art. I can't explain it to you because you don't have enough knowledge to understand."

"You can't explain it," Tenoctris said with more of an edge than Garric had ever expected to hear in the old woman's voice, "because you're too pig ignorant yourself to understand the forces you're putting in motion."

"What?" said Benlo. Cashel pushed down on his shoulder.

Tenoctris turned to look up at Garric, smiling faintly. Perhaps she'd surprised herself with her tone. "This man certainly isn't responsible for the attack, and he's telling the truth about the other things as well. He's performing a task for someone he doesn't know, and facing opponents he doesn't know either."

Tenoctris looked coldly at Benlo and said, "In simple words, he's a fool."

She put a hand on the ground to rise. Garric reached out to help but froze when pain shot through the muscles of his back and chest. The battle hadn't been harder on his body than the rural labor that had been his whole previous life, but fighting used muscles in different fashions. They'd felt the strain and were letting him know it.

Liane bent over Tenoctris and supported the older woman as she stiffly got to her feet. Liane's face still held no emotion.

Benlo glowered and said, "Just who is this, Master Garric? You told me she was a castaway. Is she really your crazy aunt?"

"Tenoctris is a castaway," Garric said. "More important, she's someone I trust."

He didn't know how he felt about Benlo. In effect the fellow seemed to be exactly what he'd claimed in Barca's Hamlet: a drover carrying out an assignment for a backer on Sandrakkan. Benlo had concealed the fact that Garric, not a flock of sheep, was his real object; but he'd paid fair money for the sheep and fair money for Garric's presence as well.

Liane stepped away from Tenoctris. She looked at Garric, and for the first time her eyes were troubled.

"Liane?" the drover said. He stood, reaching toward his daughter. She edged back as though she hadn't seen the gesture. Cashel grunted but didn't thrust Benlo down on the trough the way Garric thought he might.

"Look . . ." Benlo said. He fumbled in his sleeve for a handkerchief that wasn't there. The sudden attack had drawn him from bed in a pleated linen nightdress. Unlike his daughter, he hadn't snatched up a cloak as well before he ran outdoors.

"I don't know what's going on, I admit that," Benlo continued. "I don't like these attacks any better than you do. When we get to Carcosa I'll be able to learn. I will learn, I promise."

Tenoctris watched Benlo without expression. Garric rubbed his forehead with both hands. His fingers were stiff and tingly, on the verge of cramping from their grip on his weapons in the recent fight. He'd hammered the sword into a twisted bar with less remaining edge than a plowshare, and the oak stool was in splinters.

He didn't know what to think. He didn't know anything at all.

Tenoctris began to question Benlo. Her words lost form and became a buzzing in Garric's exhausted mind.

"I'm going back to bed," he said. "I need sleep if I'm going to be fit to walk in the morning."

Garric shambled toward the inn. He was so exhausted in the letdown after the battle that he knew he'd be able to sleep despite all that had happened.

And he knew that he'd have company in his dreams.