7

"Who are you?" Garric asked as the girls led him around a pool that jutted out from the wall. The coping was a soft volcanic stone, smoothed and darkened by age. Lotus flowers bloomed above pads floating on the still water.

"We're your friends, Garric!" said the girl with violet hair.

"We live here!" another girl chorused. He wasn't sure who spoke; maybe Pink-Hair. Only rarely were all six of the girls in sight at the same time, though he never saw one vanish or reappear.

Bright-colored fishes swam in reflection on the surface of the pool beside him.

"You're water nymphs, aren't you?" Garric said.

The girls giggled. "Come along, Garric, it's only a little farther!" Green-Hair said as she skipped along with him.

They'd left the water garden for a rocky olive grove. Garric couldn't tell exactly where or how the change had occurred. The trees were ancient; their gnarled trunks were as thick as Garric's own torso. Black fruit hung from their branches. The roots must drive deep in this forbidding soil to find water and nourishment.

He was hungry. He thought of snatching a few of the ripe olives as he ducked under a branch, but after a moment's consideration he decided he wasn't that hungry.

"Where are we going?" Garric asked. He didn't think the nymphs meant him harm, but he knew they weren't his friends either. They didn't care what he wanted.

"We're already there!" Blue-Hair trilled. With two nymphs playfully holding either of his wrists and Blue-Hair leading, Garric stepped through a columned doorway. The pillars were of stuccoed stone, oddly wider at the top than at the base. They were painted harsh primary colors with red and blue predominating, though for the most part the walls were creamy white.

"Where are we?" Garric said. He was more frustrated than frightened at the moment, but fear was growing too.

The nymphs skipped with him down a corridor. There were pillars on one side and a frescoed wall on the other. The painted images were of men battling monsters whose legs twisted like snakes. The background was a dark landscape picked out by lightning that leaped from cloud to cloud and erupting volcanoes.

"Don't you know?" Rose-Hair said. Garric wasn't sure if she was playing with him or if she really did expect him to recognize his surroundings. "This is the palace, silly. Malkar's palace!"

Garric stopped dead in his tracks. The courtyard on the other side of the colonnade was open to the sky, but that sky was dark with night or storm clouds. He couldn't tell where the corridor's soft gray light came from.

"Why are you taking me to Malkar?" Garric asked quietly. He knew by now that if he turned and ran back the way he'd come that it be anything like the way he'd come. All flight would do was cost him his dignity. He had little enough of that left, allowing six giggling girls to lead him to death or worse.

"Oh, we aren't taking you to Malkar!" Saffron-Hair said in horror. For an instant all her sisters had vanished, though they were staring aghast at Garric before he could have blinked. "Oh, Garric, we wouldn't do that!"

"We're taking you to the sword," Green-Hair said. "You wanted the sword, Garric."

"We don't have anything to do with Malkar," Pink-Hair said. "That would be awful!"

"Come, let's get the sword," Blue-Hair said.

In a reproving tone Violet-Hair added, "You've frightened us by being so silly, Garric!"

Garric jogged along the corridor with the nymphs. He was sure they'd regret it if anything happened to him, the way a child would regret her kitten's death for a day or two. He wondered if this place he'd been lured into even had time.

He'd been wrong about the frescoes: they really showed monsters battling men, not the reverse. Snake-legged creatures exulted in the ruins of human cities, brandishing their torches and weapons triumphantly. Garric tried to avoid seeing the images as he passed them.

The nymphs led him into a room with a high ceiling and bands of geometric designs across the walls. From wall pegs hung huge shields of an unfamiliar type: they were shaped like figure eights and covered with the hides of piebald oxen, hair-side out. A long bronze-pointed spear was racked beside each shield.

"This is the guardroom," Pink-Hair said in what seemed to Garric a loud voice.

Blue-Hair pointed to the coffered wooden door at the other end of the room. It was the first doorway Garric had seen in this palace that wasn't open. "That's the throne room through there," she said. "But we won't go there."

"Oh, no!" several of the nymphs said together.

"But here's the sword, Garric," Green-Hair said, pointing to the weapon hanging from a peg on the right doorpost. "Just as we promised you."

"Don't you recognize it?" asked Rose-Hair, reaching back with both hands and combing her fingers through her marvelous mane. "It's King Carus' sword."

It was King Carus' sword!

"Well, take it, silly!" said Saffron-Hair.

Garric stepped forward and lifted the sword and belt. He gripped the leather-wrapped hilt and drew the blade a few inches from its sheath. A lifetime of images cascaded through his mind—images of Carus' life, not his own. It was like walking from a darkened room into sunlight: everything Garric or-Reise had done paled by contrast.

"Touch the metal, Garric," Violet-Hair said. "You can't be enchanted if you're touching this iron."

The straight blade was longer than that of the sword Benlo provided, though perfectly balanced and not uncomfortably heavy. The hilt and cross guards, quillons, were forged from the same billet of steel; Garric looked at the hilt closely to be sure, but there was no line indicating that the pieces had been made separately and welded together.

A ring for the index finger was part of one of the quillons, so that the user would always be in contact with the metal. Garric slid his finger through the ring. The hilt fitted his hand perfectly.

Fish with pastel fins floated in the air about him. He jerked his finger out of the ring.

"Let's go out now, Garric," Green-Hair said. "We don't want to stay here too long."

They went through the door by which they'd entered; the nymphs surrounded him like ripples about an oarblade. Outside was a cobblestone courtyard with a fountain in the center. A bronze girl held a pair of geese from whose open beaks streamed water into the basin below.

The six-sided courtyard had at least twenty arched doorways on every face. The architecture was nothing like that of the palace Garric had entered minutes before.

The belt wrapped around the sheathed sword was heavy leather and wide enough that the buckle had two tongues. Garric wondered if he ought to put it on.

"Mistresses?" he said, feeling awkward. "Thank you for the sword, but I need to get back now. I have people waiting for me, ah, where I came from. Can you show me the way out?"

The nymphs laughed merrily. Blue-Hair put her hands on his as she had when she first appeared to him.

"Oh, silly!" she said. "We've given you what you wanted, Garric, so you have to give us what we want!"

"And we want you!" the other nymphs trilled in chorus.