Lord of the Isles (58 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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The gate closed behind her. She couldn't see much through her tears, but all she needed was a trench in soft manure. The fork's two remaining tines and the stumps of the others were adequate for the job.
“We wear black wool on Pewle Island …” Nonnus said between rasping intakes of breath. “Because it doesn't show blood. There's always blood when we slaughter animals. But
you'll have to bring me a bucket of water before anybody sees me, child, because my arms are red to the elbows. Just like old times …”
He laughed through his sobs.
T
enoctris drank greedily from the pitcher, giving no sign that the brackish taste of Erdin's water bothered her. She had a bruise on her right temple. By daylight in six hours, it would look terrible.
“Oh!” she said, setting the container down and taking a breath. Garric had brought her out to the pavement in front of the tomb when he went for the water.
Mosquitoes whined and settled in the darkness; occasionally Garric brushed a hand along his bare arms or over his forehead, but for the most part he ignored the bites. Insects were well down his present list of concerns.
Tenoctris looked at him. She smiled, an expression as dim as the moonlight illuminating her face. “Benlo came back for his daughter,” she said. “He was in another body, but his aura is unmistakable.”
Her smile grew lopsided. She added, “I thought I'd lost you too, Garric.”
“I got lost,” he said. “It wasn't your fault. Cashel brought me back.”
Tenoctris nodded as though there was nothing surprising in what Garric had said. “Cashel is a fine young man,” she said. “His instincts are so good that his lack of—”
She made a moue with her lips to devalue the word she was about to use.
“—education isn't the danger it would be in another wizard of his power. He has quite remarkably good instincts.”
“Cashel's a wizard?” Garric said. “
Cashel's
a wizard?”
“Yes,” Tenoctris said. She raised the pitcher and took a series of small swallows. When she lowered the pitcher she went on, “Indeed he's a wizard, though I suppose he'd be as surprised to hear it as you are.”
She shook her head and added, “I'm less puzzled by the things people don't see than I am about the things they do see, must see, but ignore. Where did you get the water?”
Garric's mind was still struggling with the ludicrous vision of his friend chanting in a dead language as he gestured over a pattern of mystic symbols. It took a moment before he realized that Tenoctris had asked him a question which was grounded in the world he understood.
“Oh!” he said. “Well, I went to the back entrance of the house and tried to buy water at the kitchen. They gave me the pitcher and some bread too, but they wouldn't take my money. I guess I looked …”
He laughed, thinking about his mother's reaction if a man with a long sword, wild eyes, and dusty cobwebs in his hair had appeared at her kitchen door.
“Well, I was pretty upset.”
If Liane was gone, so was her sash filled with gold coins. Garric still had the silver from his pay, more money than he'd ever seen in one place before he set out from Barca's Hamlet. Money wouldn't be a problem in the near future.
“How do we get Liane back?” he said bluntly.
Tenoctris nodded. “First we have to locate her,” she said. “We can't be certain that she's still on this plane, though I think that's the greater likelihood.”
She looked at Garric and added, “Benlo took his wife's mummy as well as Liane. This is … a matter that gives me concern for Liane. Benlo ceased to be her father at his death. The soul that remains is a very powerful entity, but it isn't fully human.”
Garric got to his feet, working out the stiffness and the bruises he'd gotten during his return from—wherever he'd gone. He retightened the belt when he stood. The sword's
weight was better distributed when the belt was firm.
“Should we get started now, then?” he said. “I mean, the longer we wait the more likely …”
He wasn't sure that was true. He didn't know what Tenoctris was afraid would happen to Liane, and he didn't think he wanted to learn.
“Yes, we should do it now,” the old woman said, rising with Garric's help and support from the fence beside her. “The
situs
, here, the tomb, is already prepared.”
She went into the darkness; the candle had burned out long before. Old smoke and the stench of corruption mingled in an odor that turned Garric's stomach.
Tenoctris found the satchel containing additional tapers. Garric brought out his flint and iron striker. The wood of one of the coffins had crumbled to punk which would make good tinder.
“Don't bother,” Tenoctris said. She murmured something under her breath. A blue spark jumped between her cupped hands, igniting the taper's wick.
Tenoctris set the light on the ledge where Mazzona's coffin had lain, then grinned. “This tomb would make anyone a wizard, Garric,” she said. “There's more power focused here than it took to sink Yole into the sea. It's all in balance, fortunately.”
She moved to the side of the previous circle and began sketching her symbols on a bare piece of floor. There was very little room. “Garric,” she added without looking up from her task. “Please remove Benlo's corpse from the burial jar and stretch it out on the slab. I'm afraid it's necessary.”
“Yes, all right,” Garric said. He drew his knife and began working its straight iron blade into the pitch the funerary workers in Carcosa had used to seal it. He hated the thought of what he was doing, just as he'd hated crawling among the huge spiders in the passage back to the waking world; but he hadn't been raised to back out of a job because it was unpleasant.
“Tenoctris?” he said as he worked. “Is this dangerous,
what we're about to do? I'm not worried for myself …”
Tenoctris chuckled. She continued to write for a moment, using the clear wax of an unburned candle for a crayon, but she began laughing so hard that she had to pause. She looked up at Garric.
“My dear friend,” she said. “My dear young friend. Have you ever started running down a hill so steep that you couldn't stop? And you had to run faster and faster or you'd fall?”
Garric nodded.
“That's what the three of us have been doing from the very beginning,” Tenoctris explained. “But no, I don't foresee any exceptional risk in the next step.”
Garric laughed also. It felt good; he'd been tense for too long, tense and lost and alone.
“I guess that was a pretty silly question,” he admitted. Being with a friend was the same as being home; and soon they'd have Liane back with them as well—or die trying.
He laid the corpse full length on the stone bench, ignoring the stickiness of his palms. Farm labor meant you found yourself up to your knees in most kinds of nastiness at one time or another. Garric hadn't moved a half-preserved human body before, but he'd dealt with worse things.
Tenoctris finished drawing her symbols and leaned back with a sigh. The wax characters were only a texture on the stone floor, a rippling reflection. Garric guessed that the words had to be written but that they didn't need to be visible to human eyes.
“Normally this would be a very long incantation,” she said, as much to herself as to Garric. “With the forces that are gathered here tonight, I doubt I'll need to repeat the spell more than once; probably not even that.”
She looked at Garric. “This is necromancy,” she said as if daring him to react in horror. “I'm calling the corpse to life so that it can answer questions.”
Garric nodded to show that he didn't object. Disturbing a
dead man's rest was a small price to pay for saving a girl's life. But—
“If Benlo's in another body,” he said aloud, “then how will you …” He turned up his palms in question.
“I'm summoning the spirit of the man whose body Benlo occupies,” Tenoctris said. “He'll still have a link with his former flesh, and I hope that will help us.”
She shook her head in wonder. “I find it hard to believe that I'm doing these things,” she said. “For
me
to control so much power.”
She smiled. “The important thing is ‘control,' of course. Not ‘power.'”
Her focus sharpened back to Garric and the job at hand. “I'll call on you to continue the incantation if it requires more repetitions than my throat can stand,” she said. “But I'd be very surprised if that were the case.”
Garric nodded. “I've been surprised often enough recently,” he said. “I'll do my best if you need me.”
He couldn't read the wax-written words. That shouldn't matter, because he'd be able to memorize the sounds if Tenoctris repeated them so often that she had to take a break.
Tenoctris bobbed the ivy sprig twice in her hand as though to loosen it, then said,
“Catama zauaththeie cerpho
…”
Garric laid a finger on his sword's iron pommel and felt Carus rise within him like a man stretching himself out of sleep. The sword, for all its weight and awkward length, felt
right
on his hip.
“
Ialada kale cbesi …
”
The hair on Garric's arms and the back of his neck prickled as though lightning were about to strike. He turned his head to look at the corpse. A blue nimbus surrounded it, slightly veiling features which decay had already begun to soften.
“Iaththa maradtha achilothethee chooo!”
Tenoctris concluded.
The corpse sat up slowly. Its arms remained folded over its breast. The white burial tunic was stained with fluids leaking through the terrible wound to the chest and abdomen.
“By the power of Phaboeai, tell me your name!” Tenoctris ordered in a steely voice.
“I am Arame bor-Rusaman,” Benlo's corpse said. Its voice had the timbre of wood blocks being rubbed together, a dry whisper. “I am dead.”
“Arame, are you aware of your own body?” Tenoctris said. Garric's hand was tightly gripping the sword hilt. He forced himself to release the weapon.
“Yes,” the corpse said. Its chest moved the way a bellows does, emptying and filling in long strokes that had nothing to do with the rhythms of human breath. “I am aware of my body. It is not moving.”
“Arame,” Tenoctris said, “why is your body not moving?”
“My body waits for the full moon,” the corpse said. Its lips moved with the slow deliberation of a snake swallowing an egg. “My body waits for tomorrow night.”
Garric expected Tenoctris to ask what the body—Benlo—would do at the full moon. Instead she said, “Arame, describe what your body sees.”
“My body sees a door,” the corpse said. A swatch of scalp slumped from the left side of the skull, baring the bone beneath. Movement was making the revivified body fall apart more quickly than decay alone would have caused. “The door is iron. The door is cold iron.”
The corpse's chest pumped up and down more quickly now, but air whistled from the chest cavity and the voice was weaker. The stitches were pulling out of the wound the embalmers in Carcosa had sewed up.
“There is a coat of arms on the door,” the corpse continued, wheezing like a runner on the verge of collapse. “A bunch of grapes over a skull. Over a skull. Over a—”
The whisper faded into a dry cackling: laughter, Garric would have said if it had been from a healthy man; a death rattle in a sick one. The corpse's lower jaw disarticulated from the socket. It continued to wobble for a moment until the
tendons gave way completely and it dropped into the creature's lap.
The corpse sank like a sand figure dissolving in a wave. The finger bones appeared as the flesh liquefied around them. The stench was overpowering.
“Benlo's in the mansion,” Garric said, trying to keep his stomach from throwing up the bread he'd eaten while Tenoctris was unconscious. “He had a secret room that the new owners don't know about.”
“We can leave,” Tenoctris said. She struggled to her feet, breathing hard. “Poor Arame can't tell us any more. And I think I can learn the rest from that hint.”
They stumbled into the clean night air.
“Hold it right there!” a voice shouted. A lantern threw their shadows unexpectedly onto the stone front of the tomb.
T
he
Golden Dragon
rubbed gently against the bumpers of old rope hanging between her hull and the stone dock. Mule-drawn wagons loaded with crates and bales and barrels clashed slowly down the street which fronted the river harbor. Erdin was a busy port, and the goods passing through it were packed in more fashions than Cashel could have imagined.
“They're talking about you,” Mellie said. She clung to Cashel's earlobe and leaned out, pointing toward Frasa and the Serian who'd come to the dock to meet the
Golden Dragon
. “They'll want you to do something for them.”
Cashel stood at the end of the line of Serian crewmen, whom Jen paid as they stepped from the vessel to the dock one by one. The Highlanders clustered on the foredeck around the Erdin customs inspector, apparently fascinated by the official's
tunic with its border of gold lace and purple. Cashel was sure the little killers didn't mean any harm, but the resplendent inspector had drawn himself up as though he were in the middle of a pit of poison snakes.
The vipers would have been a safer alternative than Highlanders in a hostile mood, of course.
“I guess that'd be Master Latias, the factor,” he said. The Serian was of the same physical type as the brothers. His robe was dark blue rather than brown, but it had the same silken luster.
“That's right,” Mellie agreed. “What are you going to tell them?”
Cashel wondered what Ilna was doing now. She'd like all this silk. There were bales of it in the holds, beautiful stuff, but Cashel knew he couldn't appreciate fabric the way Ilna did.
He sniffed the air. “You couldn't graze sheep around here,” he said, deliberately avoiding Mellie's question. “Their feet would rot.”
The sprite giggled and hugged his neck.
The sailor in front of Cashel received his pay and went to join the group of his fellows chattering with the entourage which accompanied Master Latias. The factor's servants weren't Serians, but they apparently spoke the language well enough to communicate the sort of information a sailor with pay in his purse wanted to know.
Frasa and Latias joined Jen and Cashel. “I told you,” Mellie laughed in Cashel's ear.
The brothers whispered together for a moment. Latias acknowledged Cashel with a polite bow; Cashel responded with an awkward smile and a nod.
Latias was probably in his late twenties, though the cool propriety common to all Serian nobles made him seem more mature at first glance. He stood with his hands clasped, waiting for the brothers to finish their discussion.
Frasa turned to Cashel again and said, “First your pay, Master Cashel.” He counted out silver coins into the youth's
palm—Haft anchors, not the bronze and Erdin silver in which the Serian crewmen had been paid. Without a tally stick, Cashel was lost after the tenth coin.
“They're giving you a bonus,” Mellie said. “Serians are nice people, for human beings.”
With laughter in her voice she added, “But they'll want you to do something that'll be really hard.”
“That's too much,” Cashel blurted as Frasa continued to add coins.
Jen and Latias exchanged glances. Within the limited range in which Serians displayed emotions publicly, the factor looked surprised and Jen wore a satisfied smirk.
“Latias has proposed a return cargo at very acceptable terms,” Jen said. “Since you negotiated the original transaction with him, we're adding a finder's fee to your wages.”
“Cashel,” Jen explained, “I've told Latias of the abilities you've demonstrated on our behalf. I believe you might be able to help him with a problem that has previously proven intractable.”
The factor made a full formal bow to Cashel. “Master Cashel,” he said. “If you would come with us to my compound and listen to my proposition, I'll double the amount you were just paid. If you accept the proposition, I'll pay you very much more.”
“Well, that's only if you survive, of course,” Mellie noted in the detached tone she used for things she deemed serious. “Whatever they want you to do will be a really hard thing, Cashel. Can you see it in his face?”
Cashel looked at the money in his palm. He didn't think he'd ever seen so many coins in one pile before, let alone
silver
coins.
“Well, I guess …” Cashel said. “It can't hurt to listen.”
Cashel accompanied the three Serians down one of the streets joining the frontage road. Part of the factor's entourage boarded the
Golden Dragon
to secure the cargo until it could be unloaded; coincidentally they freed the customs inspector from his jabbering audience. The rest of the entourage preceded
or followed the nobles, clearing a path through the traffic.
Cashel ran a hand slowly up and down his polished quarterstaff, trying not to think about the number of people crowded around him. It'd be different if they were sheep … .
They passed a two-story building with an arcade on the lower floor. “The Fellowship Hall,” Latias said, noticing Cashel's interest. “Many shippers and merchants in the overseas trade have offices there. The courtyard serves as a hiring hall for sailors. My family's office is combined with our living quarters so we have a separate compound nearby.”
His eyebrows indicated the blank brick wall just across the next street. An arched gateway formed the compound's near corner. Serian servants threw open the gate. Its panels were lacquered a blue indistinguishable from Latias' robe, and the servants' tunics bore a blue stripe also.
Cashel saw three and perhaps the roof of a fourth separate building within the compound, and there were probably more. Pillared archways ran between them, though it didn't seem to him that they'd be much protection from a blowing rain.
Near the Serian doorkeepers were two husky local men carrying knobbed cudgels. They watched Cashel with looks of professional reserve. Cashel figured he and his quarterstaff could handle both of them together—and they figured the same thing. Clearly Serians in Erdin didn't face the sort of hostility Cashel had seen in Carcosa.
The attendants led the party to a tile-roofed building whose windows were made of colored glass. The individual panes were almost as small as the chips used in a mosaic, and the leading between the bits was much finer than anything Cashel had seen in Carcosa.
The interior was a single large room. Folding panels concealed doors in the sidewalls; servants entered on silent feet with trays of varicolored juices and fruit sliced into tidbits.
There was a low table in the center of the room with a chair on one side and three chairs on the other. Strongboxes of metal and metal-strapped hardwood rested against the
walls; some of them were ornamented with fanciful moldings and painted designs.
Latias gestured his guests to the trio of chairs and took the one opposite. Cashel leaned his staff carefully against the wall and sat on the right end.
“Ooh …” Mellie said. She pointed toward a particularly garish chest on the back wall. A dog-faced demon in red enamel glared out from each of the iron panels. “Look at that one, Cashel. They'll want you to open it. Ooh, this
will
be hard!”
Servants, all of them women with long oval faces, knelt to offer refreshments. Cashel took a glass of pale green juice; it was tart and had a taste that he couldn't describe.
Latias tented his fingers. “Perhaps you already know why I would like to hire you, Master Cashel?” he said.
That was a test, a game. Cashel sensed Frasa stiffening in disapproval on the chair beside him. The factor's test reflected on the brothers' honesty as well as on the youth's.
Angered mainly by the insult to Jen and Frasa, who'd treated him well and paid him well beyond belief, Cashel put the juice glass on the floor. He stood. “If you wanted me to open that box there,” he growled, nodding his head toward the enameled chest, “then you could be man enough to say so. I guess I'll leave now.”
Latias gaped as if he'd been stabbed through the heart. He threw himself prostrate on the low table and laced his hands over the back of his neck in abject surrender.
Frasa and Jen rose to their feet. “Master Cashel,” Frasa said, “my countryman's youth is no excuse for his behavior, but the fate of an entire clan depends on the accomplishment of the task he faces.”
“Please,” Jen added, “accept the apologies of my brother and me for Latias' boorish behavior, but hear him out.”
Mellie laughed and clapped her little hands. “He'll know better than to play with my Cashel again!” she caroled. “Oh! That was just the thing!”
“Sir,” Latias said, pressing the table. “I offer you any amends you choose. I have lived so long among folk without honor that I have dishonored myself!”
“Oh …” Cashel said, blushing fiercely. “Look, just tell me what you want me to do, all right? I don't know why I got my back up like that anyway.”
Though he supposed he did know. People in Barca's Hamlet were as likely to lie and boast as people anywhere else, but nobody back home would think of doubting Cashel's word—or Ilna's either, if they knew what was good for them.
He wasn't home now. He'd likely never see Barca's Hamlet again. He had to get used to people calling him a liar, just as he'd gotten used to the fact that he didn't think very fast.
Latias stood but he kept his eyes cast down on the floor. “Master Cashel,” he said, “my father was head of our family in Seres. When he traveled, as he did recently to visit the holdings which I administer on Sandrakkan, he brought with him the clan images so that he could carry out the necessary sacrifices on the anniversary of our descent from the gods. That will be tomorrow.”
Frasa and Jen looked very solemn. Cashel nodded, because he was expected to do something. All he felt was a mild puzzlement, like when Garric read a passage from a book that really excited him and all Cashel could hear was words.
“I've never seen a god,” Mellie said, combing her hair with the teeth of a tiny burr as she sat cross-legged on his shoulder. She grinned. “Do you think they're something you humans see instead of seeing my people, Cashel?”
“My father died unexpectedly at sea,” Latias said. “He—”
“Oh!” Cashel blurted, more embarrassed than ever about the way he'd come down on the poor fellow. He didn't remember losing his own father, but he'd often seen how it hit sons and daughters in the borough. “I'm sorry about the way I acted. I didn't know you were upset.”
The three Serians looked at him in guarded puzzlement. After a moment Latias said, “All the obsequies were carried
out properly when the ship docked last week. There was no difficulty with that.”
“Oh,” Cashel said. He blushed again. He was missing something that the others thought was obvious. It wasn't a new experience, but Mellie rolling with laughter on his shoulder didn't help matters.
“My elder brother accompanied Father from Seres,” the factor continued. “He became head of the clan with Father's death, so three days ago he opened the chest to prepare the images for tomorrow's sacrifice. The demon which Father had set to guard the images tore my brother to pieces and closed the chest again.”
Mellie dropped down Cashel's side at her usual dizzying speed and trotted across the mats of woven grasses on the floor. Cashel hadn't seen cats around the Serians either here or back in Carcosa, but he still worried to see the sprite wandering that way.
“A demon
killed
your brother?” he said, trying to make sense of what the factor was telling him. He wished they were still sitting down; squatting, better yet. He thought best when his head was closer to the ground, it sometimes seemed.
“Yes, but we carried out his obsequies also,” Latias said. “There was some difficulty finding all the pieces for the funeral pyre, but fortunately it happened in a closed room. I am therefore head of the clan, but I can't remove the images from the chest.”
He smiled minusculely.
“Not and remain in condition to carry out the sacrifice, that is.”
“Your father and brother were killed and all you're worried about is a, a sacrifice?” Cashel said in amazement. He wondered if this was the room where Latias' brother was torn apart. Those could be recent stains on the ceiling, scrubbed but not quite removed … .
Mellie returned from her exploration of the iron chest. She did a backflip on the table, but her heart wasn't in the acrobatics.
“The demon's name is Derg,” she said nonchalantly. “Cashel, he's very strong.”
“My father and brother and all our ancestors can be assured of a peaceful afterlife,” Latias said, speaking with the care of a man answering a question that he hadn't fully heard, “so long as the annual rites take place as scheduled. There's no time to make and consecrate a set of replacement images, you see.”

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