Lord of the Isles (23 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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T
hunder boomed. It seemed to come not out of the permanent overcast covering Tegma but from the high tower to which Meder had climbed. The wizard's voice drifted down to the battlements where Sharina stood watching the Archai prepare to attack the citadel.
“They're like ants,” she said to Nonnus, pleased to note that her voice remained steady throughout the observation.
The hermit looked over the chest-high stone coping. There were no arrow slits as there would have been in a human defensive wall.
“If you really watch ants you'll see that they aren't very well organized, child,” Nonnus. said. “Certainly not as organized as those folk are.”
The stone slab had blocked the mindless assaults up the citadel's entrance passage. A few sailors remained on duty there to make sure the Archai didn't dislodge the massive
altar top, but six inches of hard stone prevented actual fighting.
In the courtyards surrounding the citadel, Archai mustered in battalions. Labor crews wound their way into the city from the mist-shrouded forest, bearing with them the trunks of tall trees.
The trees were tall enough to reach the upper levels of the citadel—to reach even the platform on which Meder practiced his art. The Archai waiting in tawny masses were the assault troops who would climb the trunks, using the coarse bark as a nonskid surface for their clawed limbs.
“You see?” Nonnus said. “They'd have built the city itself the same way. There's no need of magic to move heavy things. Just a lot of hands and good coordination.”
Thunder rolled. Sharina looked at the tower and said bitterly, “Do you think he's trying to bring down lightning on the insects?”
Nonnus shrugged. “Lightning usually starts at the highest point around,” he said.
Sharina smiled despite herself. “Do you think we might be that lucky?” she said.
The hermit laughed, then sobered immediately. “The problem isn't that Meder doesn't know what he's doing,” he said. “None of us do, after all. We can only hope and pray. The problem with Meder is that he doesn't
realize
how little he knows. And he's very powerful.”
Sharina and Nonnus stood on the citadel's third level with only the tower above them. Most of the surviving humans hadn't bothered to come so high: the Archai had no projectile weapons, so until the pole-mounted assault began the windowless concourse on the ground floor was perfectly safe.
No one would be safe when the assault began.
“Will you watch these for me, child?” Nonnus said. He handed Sharina his javelin, then undid the double knot that attached the sheath of the Pewle knife to his belt. “Things should be quiet for a little while longer.”
“I—” Sharina said. “Yes, of course.”
The javelin was heavier than she would have guessed. It was perfectly balanced, which meant that the butt end must be invisibly thicker than the other to match the additional weight of the steel head. She held it in one hand and the sheathed knife in the other along with her own axe.
“
Abonicticis eristhemia phalasti …”
Meder's voice droned. Words in a language known only by wizards and demons; and perhaps not really known by all the wizards who used it.
Sharina grimaced. Nonnus had gone to an angle of the building. He traced a design on the stone with a bit of charcoal. Sharina deliberately looked over the battlements again so that she wouldn't seem to be spying on her protector; on her friend.
The citadel could hold ten times the number of occupants without crowding, but there was no real privacy because there were no doors or material to make any kind of barricade. Everything but gold and the stone walls themselves had rotted to dust and less than dust during the ages Tegma lay beneath the sea. The trireme's crew and passengers had no means of defense or construction except the altar and the exiguous belongings they'd brought with them while fleeing from the unexpected attack.
On the open spaces of the citadel's battlements, a sailor with a knife and an Archa's slashing forelimbs were roughly equal; but there were thousands of Archai and only a few score crewmen. The double handful of armored soldiers couldn't affect the outcome significantly.
Murmured sound drew the girl's eyes reflexively. Nonnus was praying to a sketched outline of the Lady. Sharina turned her head in embarrassment.
Asera entered the battlements with a Blood Eagle following her; not Wainer. The soldier's right arm was bound against his chest with strips of his own tunic; his face was sallow beneath its tan.
The procurator glanced at the tower, then saw Sharina standing alone nearby and strode over to her. When Asera
appeared her hands were clasped in front of her, but she straightened and took on a look of authority as she approached the girl.
“Has he made any headway?” she demanded, nodding in the direction of the tower. As if in answer, angry thunder rocked the sky.
“I don't know,” Sharina said curtly. “I'm not interested in that.”
“Not interested in saving your life, you mean?” Asera said. “You know we've no other hope—thanks to what the fool did to begin with. Wizards!”
“Not interested in saving my life that way,” Sharina said.
The procurator was too nervous to pay attention to anything but her preoccupation of the moment. “He did save us from the storms,” she muttered. “He just has to find the right formula.”
She noticed Nonnus and said, “What's he doing there?”
She stepped toward the squatting hermit. Sharina's hands were full, so she couldn't just grab the procurator. She moved in front of Asera and checked her solidly with her shoulder. Sharina's flash of anger felt good after the hours of formless dread as she watched the Archai preparing to overwhelm the citadel.
The soldier yelped in surprise and tried to intervene. He collided with Asera as she jerked back angrily. “Idiot!” she snarled at the hapless man.
“My friend's praying,” Sharina said in a husky voice, embarrassed at the way she'd reacted. What would her father have said if she'd done that to a guest of the inn? “Just let's leave him alone to pray.”
“Well, maybe prayer will save us,” Asera said in frustration. “I doubt it, but its getting late to depend on wizardry.”
Nonnus suddenly stood at Sharina's side. He took the Pewle knife from her hand. “Actually,” he said in a voice as light as his fingers' brushing contact, “I wasn't praying for victory. I like to think that fighting is men's business, not the Lady's.”
He held the sheathed knife by the hilt in one hand and began fastening the ties to his belt with the other. The knots would have been an easier task for both hands together, but he wouldn't have been quite as ready to clear the knife in an emergency.
“I was praying to the Lady that the souls of those I've killed find peace in Her,” Nonnus added as he finished the knots. He took the javelin from Sharina now that his hands were free.
“Killed?” the procurator repeated. “Who did you kill? Only insects that I've seen!”
Nonnus shrugged. “Insects, then,” he said. “Killed by my hand nonetheless.”
Wainer and seven more soldiers came through the doorway. The Blood Eagles looked worn; only three of them carried spears as well as their swords. They'd wiped the blood from their armor, but darkening purple stains stiffened their tunics and the soft leather backing.
“But they're not human!” Asera said.
Nonnus smiled faintly. “Perhaps,” he said. “And if they're not, then it's better for one like me rather than a holy man to pray for their peace.”
“Mistress?” Wainer said in a tone that combined diffidence with impatience. “The bugs are starting their attack. If you'll come with us into one of the inner rooms, we can best protect you there.”
Sharina touched the hermit's arm and looked over the battlements. Crews of Archai were lifting the tops of the half-dozen giant tree trunks she could see. There were doubtless several times as many more on all sides of the citadel.
The creatures worked without machinery, using the slopes of buildings across the courtyard as hundreds of jointed limbs levered the boles to each next stage where hundreds more waited. Every surface Sharina could see was covered with tawny, chitinous bodies.
When the Archai had the trunks vertical, they would topple them onto the citadel. There weren't enough human defenders
to shove away a single slanting bridge before the waiting warriors swarmed up it to attack; and there would be a score of simultaneous assaults.
“Nonnus, you're human,” Sharina muttered in the hermit's ear. “No holy man was ever better than you!”
“Mistress Sharina!” Meder called. By squinting through the mist, Sharina could just make out the wizard's figure leaning over the coping of the high platform. “Mistress Asera! Come up! I've succeeded! I'm going to succeed!”
The procurator's expression turned to one of professional approval. “Come along, girl,” she said crisply, tugging the sleeve of Sharina's tunic.
“I don't—” Sharina said.
Nonnus touched her between the shoulder blades, a fingertip pressure little greater than the legs of a butterfly lighting to drink sweat. The hermit's face wore a neutral smile, but his eyes were on the nine armed soldiers.
“Yes, all right, we'll go,” Sharina said. She reached back with her free hand, the one that didn't hold an axe. Holding Nonnus firmly, she followed Asera to the winding ramp that climbed the tower.
“
D
uzi help me!” Cashel said. He spread his fingers wide. “Forgive me, mistress!”
The tiny girl grabbed his thumb to keep from being accidentally spilled onto the ground. She giggled merrily.
“Oh, I'm so glad to have company again!” she said, swinging on his thumb like an acrobat. “It's been so
very
long.”
She tossed herself up in a full somersault that landed her again in Cashel's palm. He had to override the reflex that told
him to close his hand when he caught something.
“I'm Mellie,” she said. She spoke in a melodious soprano, not loud but certainly not the piping bat-squeak he'd have expected for the voice of someone so small. She grinned up at him. “What's your name?”
“Ah?” said Cashel. “I'm Cashel or-Kenset. Mistress? You're a
sprite
.”
She nodded, looking critically down at her shoulder. She flicked away a strand of spiderweb she'd picked up in the bluebird nest. She was really quite pretty; indeed, beautiful if you ignored the fact that she wasn't any bigger than his middle finger.
“That's right,” she said nonchalantly. She fluffed her hair with both hands. It was red—not the orange-red of human hair but a true deep red that would have suited a tulip better than a flame.
“But sprites are just stories,” Cashel said. “They're not real, I mean. I thought.”
Mellie stood and climbed his arm with the effortless speed of a squirrel. She seemed to weigh almost nothing—even less than a being her size ought to weigh. “Well, there aren't very many of us,” she said. “I wonder if you have sprite blood yourself?”
Cashel laughed. “Oh, mistress—” he said.
“Mellie!” she corrected tartly. “You're Cashel and I'm Mellie.”
“Mellie,” he agreed. He couldn't focus on the sprite when she was seated as now on his shoulder. That actually made it easier to carry on a conversation, since he wasn't distracted by the competing realizations that
this girl is only four inches tall! and this girl is stark naked!
“The difference in our size means, well, we couldn't very well be related.”
Maybe sprites didn't understand human reproduction? Cashel felt a blush rising at the mere thought of trying to explain to someone who at least
looked
like a pretty girl.
Mellie's liquid silver laughter trilled across the moonlight.
“Oh, Cashel!” she said. “Someone with your powers should know better than that!”
He felt her touch his earlobe. She was standing, her body a friendly warmth against the side of his neck.
“We used to come and go from your plane all the time,” she said. Her tone was studiously indifferent to the meaning of her words, as though none of it was of any real importance. “This plane is so exciting—very different from our own.”
She chuckled, but the infectious humor of moments ago was gone from the sound. “After a thousand years, though, ‘excitement' isn't quite the word I'd use to describe it. Especially recently when I've been alone.”
Cashel raised his hand. She got into his palm without urging; he brought Mellie in front of him where she could meet his frowning gaze. “You're a thousand years old?” he said in wonder.
“Much older than that, Cashel,” Mellie said. She looked as though she might be eighteen; might
possibly
be as old as eighteen. “We don't age, you see. Though on this plane we can die. We can be killed, I mean. And eventually that's happened to all of us that I know of; all of us here on Haft, at least.”
The sheep had settled down; Cashel's presence and the sound of his soft voice probably did as much for their mood as his shooing off the fox had. He glanced skyward, uneasily aware that a screech owl which ordinarily ate grasshoppers could make a meal from the tiny woman in his palm.
“Why don't you just go home?” he asked. “You said you could.”
“The fox was very insistent,” Mellie said, answering Cashel's thought rather than his spoken words. “Thank you—but I hope she's all right?”
“I hurt her vanity,” he said with a shrug. “Nothing worse than that. She'd have given up and gone away pretty soon anyway, I expect.”
He didn't believe anything of the sort, though the paddock
post was hickory that the vixen couldn't have chewed through easily.
“Still,” Mellie said, patting his palm with her own minuscule hand. Without changing expression she went on, “I said we used to be able to come and go. A thousand years ago when islands sank and the kingdom died, the paths got …”
She shrugged her tiny, perfect shoulders. “Twisted, I guess you'd say. The paths are still there and maybe they still reach my own plane, but in between they go through places that I wouldn't be able to go
through.”
“Yole sank,” Cashel said, remembering Tenoctris' story. Should he talk to Tenoctris about seeing Mellie?
The sprite nodded. “Yole was one of them,” she agreed. She went on, “Most people can't see us, but animals can. The fox was
very
insistent. I thought, well, that it might be over. And instead—”
She beamed at Cashel, a pixie in all senses of the word.
“—I met a friend!”
Cashel cleared his throat. He wanted to set Mellie back on the post or perhaps on the ground. Some place there wouldn't be a risk that he'd drop her.
“You know,” he said, “you really ought to have a sword. Some kind of weapon at least. You could carry a thorn?”
She patted his palm again. “We don't use weapons,” she said simply. “And as for a sword—we can't touch iron.”
“Ah,” Cashel said, feeling embarrassed. He'd turned down the sword Benlo offered, but only because he didn't think he'd be any use with it. The quarterstaff was a better weapon for him. If the drover had offered a big axe Cashel would've taken it. He'd used an axe many times, and a bandit would be no harder to hew than an oak tree.
“Well,” he went on. “I need to be up in the morning—”
It was already getting close to first light.
“—and I guess you've got things to do too.” Whatever did a sprite do? Did they even eat or sleep? “Would you like me to put you somewhere in particular?”
Mellie's face clouded. “Cashel?” she said. “I've been very lonely. Alone for the last hundred years, except for animals that … well, are animals. If you wouldn't mind terribly, could I ride along with you on your shoulder? I won't be any trouble. Your friends won't see me.”
“Oh,” Cashel said. His future a moment before had been a series of shutters through which darkness oozed. The shutters were flapping open, and light if not solid images lay beyond.
“I'd be very glad of your company, Mellie,” Cashel said. “I understand what it means to be lonely.”

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