5

The portal was a perfect cerulean blue, the color of the eastern horizon from Barca's Hamlet on a spring evening. It hung in the air before Garric, a thing of light itself which didn't illuminate the floor or the ancient coffins around it.

Liane and Tenoctris sat on opposite sides of the circle Tenoctris had drawn around Garric in wax. The fresh vine shoot the wizard used for an athame bobbed with the words the women spoke alternately.

"—sterxerx!" Tenoctris cried, concluding the spell. Sword in hand, Garric stepped through the light and onto a forest path. He gasped with surprise and relief: he'd expected...

He didn't know what he'd expected. Something terrible, a lich waiting to seize him or a pit of lava that would swallow him if he moved a finger's breadth.

This wasn't home, exactly, because there were no pines; but the birch, hickory, dogwoods, and oaks were all familiar. Even the wrist-thick hairy stem of poison ivy climbing to open sky along the trunk of a oak was a friend because it was a commonplace of Garric's past.

Poison ivy lived its life and let you live yours unhindered, so long as you left it alone. It didn't come looking for you with fangs or a rusty cutlass. Garric sheathed his sword and felt King Carus recede deeper into his mind.

It was early fall in this place. The trees hadn't started to shed their leaves, but flushes of color marked the early-changing dogwoods and maples. The air had the pleasant coolness of a well-watered woodland on even the hottest summer day.

Garric knelt to examine the ground more closely. There were no tracks on the leaf litter nor other sign of what had worn the path through the undergrowth. It was wide enough for a man walking or for a horseman who didn't mind saplings brushing his knees with their branch tips.

He looked behind him. The portal hung in the air; through its shimmering surface Garric saw more forest, but he knew that if he stepped into the light he'd be in the bor-Benliman tomb again. Tenoctris had told him so. He trusted her.

He trusted her with his life.

Garric started down the path, resisting an urge to whistle. The sound would make him feel better, but he knew he shouldn't call attention to himself. Birds sang to one another, and tree frogs shrilled in the upper branches.

"Help!" a woman called on a rising note. "Oh help me please!"

Garric drew his sword, still his sword in his hand, though the laughing presence of King Carus was as close about him as fog is to a windowpane. Experience was teaching Garric how to retain control even when the ancient monarch's will surged over him with the emotions of danger.

But they both still knew that Garric was no swordsman. If it came to need, well, Carus would respond as no other man who'd ever lived.

The forest was relatively open; the ferns and saplings that grew among the larger trees were no barrier to a man in a hurry. Garric pushed them aside like a curtain.

The woman's voice rose in a scream. She was off to the left of where he'd expected and still some twenty yards away. You couldn't see far in a place like this. Young trees sprouted larger leaves than those of their adult kin, and they wobbled at eye height like so many pennons. They concealed everything more than a dozen feet away.

Garric stopped and held still except for his head and silently darting eyes. Nothing made a sound, not even a tree frog.

A woman laughed far away; she continued laughing musically until even that sound faded.

Garric turned, taking deep breaths through his open mouth as he returned the way he'd come. The forest's pale green light was no less friendly. He looked in every direction, glancing over his shoulders abruptly and scanning the canopy of branches for lurking dangers.

There was nothing wrong until Garric reached what should have been the path and found in its place a cobblestone road.

Birds fluttered among the tree branches; the flash of blue was an indigo bunting that had been picking for seeds between the pavers. The sky was a little darker now, but that was only natural since evening was wearing on.

Everything was natural except that the road shouldn't have been here. Garric's sense of direction was as sure as sunset and sunrise: he hadn't mistaken his way, but the ruts worn in the stones meant this road had been here for centuries.

Garric sheathed the sword. He thought of returning to see if the portal still waited for him, but he was afraid of what he'd find.

If not back, then onward. Garric resumed walking, whistling a pipe tune that he'd often played to the sheep he was watching. After a few steps on the hard, rounded cobblestones he moved aside and continued in the sod ditch to the left of the pavement.

The road curved back and forth as it proceeded, just as the path he'd been following had done. The ground sloped one direction or the other, or perhaps an outcrop of layered rock was easier to avoid than to excavate. All perfectly innocent, a natural landscape shaped minimally by the hand of man.

A quarter mile through the forest, Garric saw the stone wall. It was Old Kingdom work, or at any rate masonry like that of the Old Kingdom: layers of large, squared stones fitted tight without mortar. It was a good twenty feet high but if he'd had to he could have climbed it easily, even with the unfamiliar sword dangling behind him.

He wouldn't need to climb, because the road passed under a pointed arch in the wall. There wasn't a gate. Garric thought at first that the panels and their metal fittings had rotted away from the dense stone, but the sides of the archway showed no signs of ever being cut to accept hinges or other mountings.

The road on the other side of the wall looked the same as the cobblestone surface on which Garric stood. The forest beyond was so similar to what he'd just walked through that it might have been a mirror image, except there wasn't a tall youth on that side wondering what on earth he ought to do.

Garric laughed and stepped forward. There was a feeling of coolness; smooth black stones were above him and to either side. He took another step—

And the world was like nothing he'd seen through the arch.

He was in a water garden. Little streams purled as they ran along mossy channels or fell through rocks arranged in a studiously "natural" fashion. The sound of running water and bees working among the flowers was relaxing and much louder than it seemed at first: a man speaking in a normal voice couldn't be heard more than arm's length away.

Statues of women with smiling, kindly faces stood in wall niches. There were flowers in rich profusion: springing from still pools, growing in borders along the channels, climbing the walls in sprays of pink and blue and violet. Garric didn't recognize any of the varieties of plants.

From this side he couldn't see the top of the walls. He patted the stone. It was cool to the touch, darkened from long exposure to the air, and as solid as the flank of the mountain from which it had been hewn in ages past.

There was no archway or other opening. There never had been, on this side of the wall.

"Oh Garric, we've been waiting for you so long!" girls—two voices, maybe three—called.

Garric spun around. No one was there, but the ropes of white flowers cascading from a trellis wobbled as though somebody had just ducked behind them. Garric walked to the floral curtain and moved it gently aside with his outstretched left hand. The petals felt damp where they touched his bare skin; bees hummed with excitement, and the air was thick with an odor suggesting summer nights.

His right hand hovered over the hilt of his sword, but he didn't touch it. No one was on the other side of the trellis.

"Here we are, Garric!" a girl called.

He spun again and they were there, surrounding him as if they'd condensed out of the air. Six nude girls with pastel hair, laughing and plucking at his tunic with long, slender fingers.

"We're so glad to see you, Garric!" said the girl with blue hair that danced like a mountain stream. She took his right wrist between her hands. Her fingertips were delicate and cool.

Two other girls caught his left arm, their pink and green hair flowing over his skin like spray. "Come with us, Garric," they said in unison. "We're so glad you've finally arrived!"

"Please, I—" Garric said. He felt not a touch but an absence of weight—his sword was gone, the belt unbuckled by a girl with hair the color of bleached straw.

Garric turned and snatched unsuccessfully. The girl hopped away giggling and held the weapon in back of her.

Garric encircled her with his arms and groped for the sword. The girl unexpectedly kissed him and ducked out of his arms. Her hands were empty and the sword wasn't in the bed of gorgeous magenta flowers behind where she'd been standing.

All the girls laughed merrily.

At the corners of his eyes, Garric thought he saw the glint of fins and scales. "Give me my sword back!" he said, feeling a complete fool. What was he going to do with a weapon even if they did return it?

The girl with hair of dusty rose touched his hands with her own. "Come with us, then," she said. "We'll give you a much better sword than that."

"Come with us, Garric!" all the girls called. Their hair swirled like pools of colored oils as they moved.

Garric looked behind him at the vine-grown wall that had been the arch through which he entered this garden. The girls' touch was as light as summer raindrops. There really wasn't any choice.

"All right," said Garric. "I'll go with you."