5

"I wish you'd gotten some sleep," Cashel said, clasping arms with Garric at the edge of the room. They'd taken up the grass mats so that Tenoctris could draw a circle ten feet in diameter on the floor of terra-cotta tiles. The circle and the Old Script characters around it, also drawn with powder, took up much of the floor space.

"I wish I'd been able to," Garric said. "Well, I don't guess being tired when I get there is going to be the worst trouble we'll have."

He wondered if Cashel would've been able to sleep in the six hours it took Tenoctris to prepare the incantation. Maybe he would. Garric knew Cashel too well to doubt that Cashel had an imagination, but he didn't let it bother him the way most people did.

Cashel stepped back. "Garric?" he added. "Don't trust that sword. Trust yourself, all right?"

Garric nodded, though he wasn't sure exactly what his friend meant. He'd killed a demon with his hands, Sharina said; Cashel hadn't talked about that himself. But Garric doubted that he meant anything simple.

Tenoctris was within the circle, checking for one last time the symbols she'd drawn. The powders differed from one character to the next and sometimes within individual characters. They included minerals; the hair, horn, and bone of various animals; and vegetable products like wood and dried leaves. All were finely divided and laid with the same care the old woman used when drawing with a brush or a scriber.

Sharina hugged Garric. Her height was a subconscious surprise to him after being around Liane and Tenoctris the past while. Not that Liane was short, he didn't mean that....

"Take care of yourself, brother," she said. "Nonnus told me that he wasn't as good at charity as he thought he should be. I don't have any charity at all. If you find the person responsible for Nonnus dying—kill him, Garric. Kill him like a roach in the pantry."

Garric wasn't surprised by his sister's tone. He'd never doubted that Sharina had the same inner hardness as their mother, though without Lora's peevish bitterness.

Tenoctris had completed her check of the circle of power. She picked up the wrapper from one of the packets and rolled it into a spill.

Liane offered Garric her hand rather than clasping him forearm to forearm in masculine fashion. Her smile was false, but the goodwill behind it was certainly real.

"Ah," he said. "Goodbye, Liane. I mean—"

Liane kissed him firmly on the mouth. It wasn't what he'd expected. Of course, that just added it to a long list of recent occurrences that he hadn't been expecting.

She stepped back. Her smile was real now. "Go do what you think is right, Garric," she said. "That's what you've been doing ever since I met you. And come back to me."

Tenoctris cleared her throat. Garric nodded. He wasn't sure whether he was responding to Liane or Tenoctris. Maybe to both of them. He turned and stepped over the circle of gleaming gray powder, careful not to disturb it.

A blue spark popped in the air, igniting the tip of the paper spill in the old woman's hand. Garric expected Tenoctris to begin chanting a spell. Instead she touched the flame to the point in the circle where she'd piled powder into a cone.

The powder spluttered for a moment. The flames from the spill sank to a blue rim at the paper's edge, punctuated by an occasional crackling white spark.

The powder caught with a snarl and a gush of gray smoke.

Tenoctris straightened, checked to make sure that the process was fully under way, and tossed the burning spill out onto the tile floor beyond the edge of the circle. She smiled grimly at Garric.

Flames tracked quickly in both directions around the circle, burning with a white glare that leaped and capered through veils of smoke. The Old Script characters burned also, starting at the bottom where they touched the circle. Their flames were lower and lacked the sparkling violence of the protective circuit. Several-colored light flickered like the aurora borealis, reflecting in pastel blurs from the room's white walls

Garric saw his friends watching still-faced within the smoke. Over the continuing angry hiss of the fire he heard what first was a pulse like that of distant thunder. It resolved into words being chanted in an enormous room. The sound reverberated with the power of those syllables.

Tenoctris stood like a post, smiling with the same sort of quiet pride Cashel had worn when he referred to what he'd accomplished for Latias. This wasn't the end of all tasks, but it was a task well done.

Garric's friends had vanished and the walls of the room were growing dim. He could still see beyond the gray veil of smoke, but his surroundings had changed.

For a moment he was in a forest. The trees were evergreens, pines or spruce; snow was piled high up their trunks and blew in swirling eddies around the roughness of their bark.

Smoke and flurries blended, blurred. When the curtain thinned again Garric saw beasts grazing in a meadow. Deer, he thought, but one raised its head to look toward him and he saw horns not only on its brow but also in the middle of its long snout.

Smoke from the spluttering fires rolled across the scene and drew back. A violent storm slashed through a bamboo grove without touching the fires or the protective circle. Lightning struck nearby. In the flash Garric saw a dozen creatures with cat faces and the bodies of human dwarfs, dancing around a pole to which a terrified girl was tied.

One of the dwarfs gestured to Garric. Smoke mercifully blotted the scene.

The fire consumed itself, cooling into a circle of gray ash with craters where an element had burst violently. The characters beyond burned to the top and went out also. When the colored flames ended, so did the echoing power of the ancient words Tenoctris had written.

The smoke dissipated, leaving a bitter aftertaste. Garric and Tenoctris stood on a sandy beach. The air was warm with a light breeze to riffle the palm fronds.

It was night. The moon was full and more than twice as large as it should have been. Its angry reddish light flooded the sand and rumbling surf.

Behind Garric was a wall on which was carved a scene in high relief. Life-sized figures formed a tableau of the sinking of the royal fleet a thousand years before Garric was born. In the center King Carus raised his fist to heaven as the deck of his flagship plunged beneath the sculptured sea.

In front of Garric and Tenoctris was a figure seated on a black throne at the edge of the shore. It laughed; louder than the ocean, louder than anything liv- ing.

"Come closer, humans," the Hooded One said. "I've been waiting for you."