Lord of the Isles (16 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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C
ashel awoke, gasping and spluttering as though he'd been plunged into the depths of the winter sea. His skin was cold and it seemed as if iron bands around his chest released as he straightened on his straw mattress.
The millhouse kitchen was silent—too silent even for the dead of night. No cricket chirped, no dove cooed from the cote, and the still air was without a trace of the breeze that normally sighed across the hamlet. Through the window over
the indoor oven, the sky had a faint blue haze that wasn't starlight.
Cashel rose and took his staff from beside the door. Ilna slept in one of the two rooms upstairs, but Cashel liked to be on the ground floor where he didn't risk stumbling if someone called him for a late-night emergency. He went outside. The sky was a net of fine blue that concealed all but the brightest stars.
He'd never known the world to be so quiet. Nothing at all moved.
Guided by instinct, Cashel walked around the front of the millhouse. He didn't think he made a sound but Tenoctris, standing in the shelter of the great cypress-wood millwheel, turned and beckoned him urgently to join her. He moved to her side, careful not to rap his quarterstaff against the projecting paddles.
“Don't alert him,” Tenoctris whispered, speaking with exaggerated lip movements to make up for the near lack of sound. “I want to learn who he's interested in.”
Cashel peered past the rim of the undershot wheel. The spillway feeding the wheel from the tidal impoundment was dry since the millstones weren't turning. The drover, Benlo or-Willet, knelt in the trough. The murmur of his chanting was the first real sound Cashel had heard since awakening on this ominous night.
The ancient stones around Benlo dripped a blue phosphorescence, like that of the sky but more intense. The drover held a knife with which he tapped a circle around some small object on the floor of the spillway. Every time the knifepoint touched stone, a fat blue spark flashed soundlessly.
“He's invoking an identification spell,” Tenoctris mouthed to Cashel's ear. “He has an object—it could be hair, bone, anything—and he's summoning the glamour from it to lead him to its correspondent.”
“But that's wizardry,” Cashel said, trying to copy the old woman's technique of speaking without vocalizing.
“Yes,” Tenoctris said with a dry smile. “It is. Benlo is a very powerful wizard.”
Blue mist began to ooze from the thing over which the drover chanted. He continued to tap his dagger on the stone. The flashes grew brighter, flaring through the mist the way heat lightning silhouettes a summer cloud.
“The spell can be used on a single coin to find a missing purse,” Tenoctris whispered. “But I don't think that's what's going on here.”
The fog thickened above the object, then coalesced into the figure of a man. Cashel couldn't make out any distinguishing details, because the illumination was that of the glamour itself. There was no shadow detail as would normally mold the features.
The glamour lifted from the ground and drifted sideways at the rate of a man walking slowly. Its feet seemed to pass through the wall of the spillway. The drover clambered out to follow. He was awkward until he remembered to tuck the blade of his dagger under his belt. He didn't have a sheath for the weapon.
“It's his athame,” Tenoctris explained. Her hand was raised, but Cashel didn't need the warning not to move yet. He hunted small game and knew that motionless patience was the greatest key to success. “Forged it himself, I shouldn't wonder, and from
iron
. I doubt it's coincidence that two wizards of such power would visit a hamlet like this.”
The glamour's limbs didn't move: its motion was like that of the statues of the Lady and the Shepherd in the carts the priests from Carcosa pulled through the hamlet during the annual Tithe Procession. Benlo followed a few paces behind. His lips moved as though he was still chanting, but the words were inaudible. They passed the front of the millhouse and out of sight.
Tenoctris' hand was still raised. “Why is it so quiet?” Cashel asked. The sea smell was even stronger: salt and drying seaweed and the faint touch of death with an iodine sharpness that differed from that of a carcass on land.
“He put a spell of silence over the hamlet before he started his main enchantment,” Tenoctris said. “Most people within the circuit of the spell will sleep until it's lifted. For a wizard, even a poor wizard like me, the spell has the effect of an alarm instead.”
She lowered her hand and led Cashel carefully along the side of the millhouse to the corner where they could again watch Benlo and the thing he had raised. The glow saturating the stones of the spillway had dissipated. A bluish track, fading with time, marked the glamour's course the way slime gleams in the morning sun where a slug has passed.
Cashel's skin prickled as if he'd spent a day on a boat, where light burned both from the sky and in reflection from the water's surface. His quarterstaff felt like a wisp of straw. He imagined it would dance into the night if he let it go.
“I woke up too,” he mouthed to Tenoctris, “and
I'm
not a wizard.”
“Yes,” she said. “You awakened too.”
The glamour paused in front of the inn, turned and drifted through the open gates. The drover followed, disappearing into the courtyard.
Tenoctris started forward. Cashel touched her hand and led her to the side of the courtyard instead.
During the past winter Garric had cleared the ivy from the outside of the eight-foot wall and removed the bricks which the prying rootlets had loosened over a generation or more. The bricks were neatly stacked, waiting for Anan to burn lime for fresh mortar in the kiln where he also fired his pottery. Cashel pointed Tenoctris to one of the irregular gaps in the wall's fabric and positioned himself to look through a higher one. They had a perfect view across the courtyard, toward the stables on the opposite side of the inn building.
The glamour was motionless in the center of the courtyard, near the well. It rotated and extended its hand and arm toward the stables. One leaf of the stable door was ajar. Garric stepped out. His expression was blank and he moved like a sleepwalker.
Cashel tensed. Tenoctris touched his lips. “He's not in danger,” she whispered.
The front door of the inn banged open like a thunderclap. Garric staggered and cried out. The glamour dissolved into mist that flowed over him, merging with Garric's flesh and vanishing.
From the inn walked a creature with the shape of a man, carrying a cutlass dark with rust or blood. There were sounds again and the night stank of death and the sea.
Cashel shouted. He put his left hand on the wall coping and swung upward, using his quarterstaff to brace him. He balanced a moment in the air with his bare foot clawing to gain a toehold in the gap he'd been watching through.
When the blue glow vanished, Benlo toppled like a drunk walking into bright sunlight. The creature strode toward Garric, raising the cutlass to slash. The stars and the newly risen moon were visible.
Cashel found support for his foot and half-lunged, half-flopped onto the top of the wall. Garric twisted backward into the stable. Two of Benlo's guards ran out of the inn with swords bare in their hands. Liane's white face peered from an upstairs window.
Cashel rolled into the courtyard, landing heavily but on his feet. “Kill that thing!” he screamed to the drover's guards, knowing that he and his quarterstaff couldn't reach the stables in time.
Garric stepped out of the stable with an axletree that Cashel himself would have found a burden. “Haft and the Isles!” he shouted in a voice that waked echoes from all corners of the courtyard. He and the creature strode toward one another, each swinging his weapon.
The massive oaken axletree brushed the cutlass aside and crushed the creature itself with a squelch and a snapping of bones. The cutlass hilt flew toward the inn. The broken blade spun high and thunked point-down in the dirt at Cashel's feet.
Garric turned slightly, seemed to smile, and fell on his face beside the creature he had killed.
T
he trireme's oardeck was wet and dark and stinking. More rain than light came through the narrow ventilators between the main deck and the outriggers.
The ship swung almost on her beam ends in the troughs of the mighty waves that swept down on her with the storm. Sharina had followed the oarsmen below at Nonnus' direction. Many of them were still trying to reach their benches. When a particularly fierce sea caught the ship, oarlooms jerked from the hands of men holding them and flailed like quarterstaves in the darkness. Baggage stored in the lower hull flew about, tangling men wholly intent on not losing their grip on their oars.
The crew was trying to turn the vessel out of the wind: there was no possibility of putting her bow into a gale like this one. Rowers on the port side stroked normally while those to starboard backed their oars. Sharina couldn't imagine how the officers communicated their orders. She could barely hear the drummer beside her giving the stroke through the deeper thrumming of the storm.
She huddled in her cloak, trying not to be stepped on. Asera was somewhere ahead on the narrow aisle. Many of the Blood Eagles were with her, though the soldiers' awkwardness meant there was danger they'd crush the procurator when the ship rolled.
Because of the chaos, it was some minutes before Sharina realized that Nonnus hadn't followed her into the belly of the ship. She looked up. The hatch had been closed but not battened down in the confusion. One of the two hinged panels lay open to spray and the black sky.
Sharina stood, stepping over a soldier who lay curled bawling
in a fetal position. She gripped the ladder with one hand and tried to lift the other panel with her shoulder and remaining hand. A wave combed the deck, battering and smothering her with its weight.
Sharina continued to hold the ladder. When the green surge passed, she threw the hatch fully open. Before the next wave came over the stern, she'd gained the deck and grabbed the railing with both arms as her eyes tried to pierce the gloom.
Sailors crawled about the deck, trying desperately to hold on with one hand while the other did the business of the ship. The sail and yard were down in an untidy heap amidships, but the mast itself flexed dangerously.
There hadn't been time to strike the deckhouse, so the wind had taken off the roof and two sides. The remaining panels were jammed into a V shape that protected Meder in its lee.
A rosy glow surrounded the wizard. He held his copper athame and his mouth contorted with the spells he shouted inaudibly into the wind. Half a dozen Blood Eagles crouched nearby, either guarding Meder or unwilling to go down into the bowels of a ship they were sure would soon be overwhelmed.
Nonnus sat in the far bow, his feet clamped against the solid bulkhead to either side. Waves foamed over him waist high. He was at work on something; his knife reflected the cold white glitter of lightning. Sharina crawled toward him, pressing her whole body against the rail as she inched along.
The wind weighed against Sharina like a collapsing sandbank; its howl numbed her ears. A section of rail, replaced in Barca's Hamlet after the previous storm, creaked inward against the pegs fixing it to the original fabric. She waited for a minute lull, then scrambled past the weakened section.
She couldn't tell what the hermit was doing, nor did she really care. All she knew was that at this moment she didn't want to die with strangers.
Nonnus looked up and saw her coming. He started to rise. She screamed and waved him back. He remained tense, but he didn't leave the relative shelter of the prow bulkhead except
to bend forward and tug her the last of the way toward him with a grip like iron.
“Nonnus,” she shouted. “Is the ship going to sink?”
She wasn't afraid. Despite the question, in her own mind Sharina was quite sure that they
were
going to sink and that she was about to die. She was wet and cold. She flinched at each lightning bolt's
flash/crack
, preceding the longer ripping sound of the thunder itself; but death wasn't a fear, only a fact like the clouds that writhed by overhead as dark and textured as a gravel shore.
“I can't save the ship,” Nonnus said. He'd put away the big knife and was using the ship's cordage to tie sections of wooden pole into a triangle. “I think I can save you, though, child; which is what I swore to try.”
The hermit had lopped the jib pole into three sections and bound them together. Now he pulled the bundled jib sail from under him—he'd been sitting on it like a pillow to keep it from blowing over the side—and began to unfold it.
“You're making a raft!” Sharina said. She caught a corner of. the canvas to keep it from whipping violently before Nonnus was ready to tie it to the frame.
“A float, rather,” he said. His spread hands worked with the instinctive precision of spiders binding prey with their silk. Neither the wind nor the salt-stiffened cordage caused the hermit's fingers to fumble or have to redo a task. “I'm making loops of rope that we'll hold to while the float supports us.”
“But what about the seawolves?” Sharina blurted, then wished she could take the words back. The fang-jawed reptiles had been the first thought that sprang into her mind. She hadn't meant to complain about the efforts of the man who was doing everything humanly possible for her.
“Raw their meat feels like a jellyfish and doesn't taste much better,” the hermit said as he went on with his work. She thought he smiled. “I suppose we'll have to make do with it till we get to a place we can build a fire, though.”
Sharina laughed until an eddying gust splattered enough
salt water down her throat to choke her silent. He was serious. Doubting Nonnus would be like doubting the sky: it was simply there, night or day, storm or no storm.
She looked down the length of the vessel. The outriggers were alternately awash. A sailor caught Captain Lichnau by the shoulder and pointed over the starboard rail. Lichnau shouted something. Sharina couldn't hear the words, but Lichnau and the two men near him struggled forward toward the flexing mast.
“I wanted you sheltered below as long as you could,” Nonnus said, his eyes on his task. “I'm glad you came up, though. We're drifting faster than I'd expected. The current must have changed as well as the wind.”
Sharina held down flaps of cord and canvas, but she didn't try to help with the float's construction. The hermit knew what he was doing; she did not. Her involvement would waste time in circumstances where time was very short.
“Drifting where?” she said, leaning back against the wind so that Nonnus could turn the frame over.
“Look to starboard,” he said, nodding without turning his head. “I've been hearing them for some minutes now.”
Sharina raised her eyes, squinting. The storm threw her hair about her face like a thousand tiny whips; the braids and coil into which she'd bound them hadn't survived this wind.
A line of white separated the black of the sky and the sea's black beneath it. “The Reefs of Tegma,” Nonnus said as he tied and tucked and tied again.
An officer stood to grasp a line. His tunic flared in the wind and lifted him from the deck with his limbs flailing.
His feet didn't even touch the railing as he flew over it. The sea drank him down without a bubble.
Lichnau and the men with him were hacking at the mast with axes: even the bare pole caught the wind and accelerated the trireme's sideways drift. The reefs were a line of gnashing foam so close that Sharina could distinguish their rumble from the wind's howl.
The ball of red light surrounding the deckhouse expanded,
reaching the mast and the sailors around it. Its hue paled from rich magenta to the pink of high clouds when the sun still lingers on the horizon.
The mast cracked vertically, twisting against the wind. A dagger-sharp splinter sprang back. It gutted Captain Lichnau in a spray of blood.
The glow boiled up to envelope the whole ship, as fiercely red as a sunstruck ruby. Every hair on Sharina's body stood out. She tried to scream but her throat was a block of marble.
The trireme lifted with a roar louder than the breaking of the earth. The oars were in the air; the keel itself no longer touched the roiling sea. Wrapped in red flame, the vessel and those aboard her sailed over the slashing reefs and landed thunderously in the calm on the other side. Waves spouted higher than the mast had been, but the hull swam up from the trough of its arrival.
The air was gray with warm mist. Sharina struggled to her feet. The wind had died and the sound of the storm was fading in the distance.
The ship grounded softly on a sloping ramp. Lush jungle wrapped cyclopean stone structures on the shore.
The Isle of Tegma had risen from the sea.

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