Lord of the Isles (55 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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T
he 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.”
L
iane leaned back against the wall, coughing to clear her throat. She was already hoarse, and the cloying odor of candle smoke turned her stomach. Across the circle, Tenoctris took up the litany in a low voice: “
Phanoibikux petriade kratarnade …”
The blue plane of the portal hung in the air between them. They'd run through the spell three times, each speaking it individually to give the other a chance to get her voice back and chew her tongue to encourage the flow of saliva. Tenoctris was starting her fourth reading; then it would be Liane's turn again.
“Arthu lailam semisilam …”
They should have brought food or at least something to
drink into the tomb with them before they opened the portal … but Tenoctris said haste was important, Garric was ready to go, and Liane had been in the most hurry of all in order finish the task and have Garric back safe.
If anything happened to Garric, it was Liane's fault for bringing him into this danger.
“Bachuch bachaxichuch menebaichuch …”
It had grown dark outside. They'd left the door of the tomb slightly ajar, but light no longer seeped past the edges to supplement the candle burning beside the coffin of Liane's mother. The portal
was
light but gave no light.
Liane and Tenoctris would remain here repeating the spell until Garric returned or they fainted from effort. If the sequence of words lapsed for more than a minute or two, the portal would close and trap Garric forever in the plane to which he'd gone because of Liane and Liane's father … .
“
Raracharara anaxarnaxa achara
…”
The door of the tomb swung open.
Liane looked up, thinking it was a groundskeeper or one of the owners of the house. She was on her own property and there was gold in her girdle to ease matters if the City Patrols were called in. The spell
had
to be chanted!
“
Belias belioas—
”
The man who stepped into the tomb had empty eyes. Liane screamed and snatched up the bronze stylus she kept within the hinges of her writing tablet. The intruder caught her by the wrist.
Time stopped. There was no longer sequence, only a plane on which all things existed at once.
Liane sprawled over the intruder's shoulder. He was a heavy man, not so much wearing a sheet as merely wrapped in it. He struck Tenoctris, knocking her against a rack of coffins. The bottommost, the oldest, crumbled with the force of the impact.
The portal faded. The intruder walked around the blue glow, placing his feet with the weight and caution of a draft horse on ice. Tenoctris lay where she had fallen.
Mazzona's bronze casket weighed at least five hundred pounds, perhaps a thousand. The intruder lifted it with one arm and turned. The ends of the metal container crushed the wooden caskets it touched.
The intruder walked out into the night, carrying both Liane and the casket of her mother. A blue glare popped and rippled about him even as the portal vanished forever.
“
W
ho 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
wouldn't
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.

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