Master of the Cauldron (37 page)

On it, looking back at her with sightless eyes, was a lizard. Like the humans, it'd been turned to stone.

“We'll deal,” said Chalcus with bloody cheerfulness.

“It depends,” said Davus, “on just how skillful we are.”

As he spoke, he flung a pebble sidearm. Not one but two decapitated quail shot into the air in a scatter of feathers, dust, and their own spouting blood.

“It depends…,” Davus repeated. This time there was no doubt of the satisfaction in his voice.

 

Sharina wasn't sure that she and Tenoctris had any business thrusting themselves into a group of armored men rushing to assault a building. Tenoctris obviously felt otherwise: she was trotting toward the temple at the best speed her old legs could manage.

Sharina threw the older woman's left arm over her own shoulders and grabbed her around the waist with her right hand. If she was that determined, there was no choice for a friend but to help.

Stretching herself, Sharina was able to join the second line of soldiers as they ran up the temple steps. Five Blood Eagles formed an arc in front of them, with Lires watching their backs. Ascor seemed to view his job as protecting Princess Sharina while she went about her business instead of preventing her from doing that business.

A squad of regulars had paused to wrench the hearthstone from the altar; they started up the steps with it. The slab was a thick piece of fine-grained limestone, blackened in the center and burned slightly concave. It weighed as much as any four of them put together.

The troops chopping at the temple door with their swords backed away at a shout from their commander. The soldiers carrying the block of stone staggered onto the porch, paused to organize, and lunged forward on command. They smashed the square stone battering ram corner first into the door, where the leaves joined.

The doors sprang partway open but caught on the crossbar and staples, which the blow had bent but not broken. The altar top slipped from the hands of the men wielding it, dropping to the porch edgewise before toppling to the left. The troops shouted warnings and jumped in various directions, one of them tripping on his own feet. He slipped beneath the falling slab, but another soldier grabbed his belt and jerked him clear just in time.

A pale figure inside the temple tried to push the leaves closed. A soldier thrust his sword out to stop him. A javelin thrown by a man who'd just reached the porch glanced off the swordsman's helmet, knocking him silly, but then catching its proper target in the throat.

The troops who'd carried the altar top hit the doors again with their boots or shoulders. They struck in near unison though they didn't have any formal coordination so far as Sharina could tell. The leaves flew back.

Inside were three People, two in tunics with drawn swords. The third lay on his back, clutching at the spear that'd killed him. The first soldiers through the door chopped the People down. It wasn't a fight, even though the troops had dropped their shields to lift the hearth.

As the leading soldiers entered, Sharina carried Tenoctris inside also. The ring of Blood Eagles, now shield to shield, kept them as safe from jostling as they'd have been in the middle of an empty plaza.

The cult statue was wooden and only slightly greater than life-size, an old image that hadn't been replaced when the temple was repaired. There was a door to the right of the statue, ajar when the troops burst in. A man came through it, another of the People. He was older than the others, unarmed, and wore a ring with a brilliant sapphire on his right index finger. When he saw the troops, he turned to flee.

A thrown javelin caught the man in the middle of the back, flinging him down the stairs he'd ascended. The blood that sprayed from his mouth was the bright orange-red like that of an ordinary man speared through the lungs.

Soldiers charged into the cellars, sounding like a wagonful of old iron tipping even before one stumbled. He and half a dozen of those ahead of him crashed through the railing.

Sharina halted in the middle of the sanctum, holding the older woman back. “Tenoctris, we can't go down now,” she said.

“But I want to see what they're doing there!” Tenoctris said. “I'm afraid it'll be smashed if we wait.”

“
We'll
be smashed if we don't wait,” Sharina said. “I'm sorry, we can't.”

Ascor nodded strong agreement. “We'll get you there when things settle a bit, milady,” he said, his lips close to the old wizard's ear to be heard over the racket.

From the cellars came shouts, mostly unintelligible but one very clear, “Got 'em got 'em got 'em! They's dead! The ones as was painting is dead!”

“Oh!” said Tenoctris. “Oh, I did hope we'd capture living prisoners. That would have been helpful.”

Additional troops were still trying to force their way down the stairs.
Are they insane?
Sharina thought. And in a way they were: they were soldiers ignited by battle. Fear and bloodlust drowned their ability to think.

Aloud she said, “Ascor, where's the commander? I need the commander.”

“Captain Rowning!” Ascor bellowed. “Here to the princess! Now! Now!”

Sharina couldn't see who he was shouting at. The Blood Eagles stood in a tight circle around her and Tenoctris, their shields raised to fend line soldiers away from them.

An officer who seemed old for his modest rank stepped close to the circle of guards. “Your highness?” he said, peering between the shoulders of Ascor and Lires. “Your highness, you shouldn't be here! It's far too dangerous!”

“The only danger at present is that we're going to be trampled to death by your men!” Sharina flared. “Get them out before they destroy information we need to save the kingdom!”

Captain Rowning recoiled in shock. “Your highness!” he said.

Sharina felt her gut knot in self-disgust at what she'd just said. Rowning's troops had reacted splendidly in an unexpected situation. She shouldn't have let her fear and anger cause her to lash out that way.

“Captain,” she said, “you've done very well, very well indeed. But please bring your men up from the cellars now.”

Rowning turned to the signaller at his side, a cornicene whose horn curved around his body instead of the trumpeter normally attached to an infantry unit. “Sessir,” he said, “sound recall!”

The signaller blew a long note followed by three quick ones, then repeated the call. His mouthpiece was bone, not brass like the horn itself: he might have to use it in the dead of winter. The horn calls rattled the roof tiles.

Though Sharina didn't see how anybody could tell what the signal was supposed to be through the blurring echoes, troops stopped shoving forward. After a moment they began to back out of the sanctum. Men returned from the cellars, some of them helping along fellows who'd fallen under booted feet.

The sanctum had nearly emptied, and the last of the soldiers were
straggling up the stairs. “Ah, your highness?” said Captain Rowning, hesitant because of Sharina's snarl. “What would you like me to, ah, do? Now, I mean.”

“Leave a squad here, and you accompany me into the cellars,” Sharina said in quick assessment. “If you'd be so good.”

She didn't especially want the captain present, but he'd be pleased at the invitation. She owed him that and more for her outburst.

“I'm honored, your highness!” Rowning said, his expression opening brightly like a lotus flower at dawn.

“Hey, troop!” Lires called to the last soldier coming up from the cellars. “What did ye do for light down there? There's lanterns?”

“Huh?” said the soldier. “No, it's windows, like, in the ceiling. There's plenty light, though. No problem there.”

Rowning drew his sword and trotted down the steps, apparently worried that Sharina would withdraw her offer. Ascor raised an eyebrow to Sharina for instructions, then muttered, “Let's go,” to his men.

“Tenoctris, hold my shoulders,” Sharina said, stepping in front of the wizard. The stairs were narrow, and the soldiers rushing down them had ripped the railing away. It'd been a sturdy one, judging from how thick the upper bracket with its tag of broken pole was.

Twenty steps led to a floor of poured concrete. Looking down as she descended, Sharina saw six troughs of bright gray zinc along the wall on the street side of the single room. Sealed storage jars, wide-mouthed and each big enough to hold several bushels of grain, stood opposite them, and in the middle was a long limestone table. The tabletop had originally been smooth and probably white, but now stains and blade scratches covered it. It'd been used for surgery—or butchering.

The room was better lighted than the sanctum above. Slabs of crystal around the edges of the coffered ceiling flooded down a cold, milky light. The panels on the south, the street side, were brighter than others.

Tenoctris looked at them with interest. “That isn't wizardry,” she said, “but it's quite clever. Sunlight's led down through blocks of glass from the roof, I suppose. I saw a device like that on Yole in my own day, in an underground chamber built by one of the duke's ancestors.”

A corpse lay between the table's two slab supports. He'd been one of the lookouts pretending to be painting. His partner was huddled just behind him. They'd been hacked to pieces by soldiers who'd found no better way to slake their bloodlust.

Tenoctris sighed. “Well,” she murmured, “it can't be helped.”

“Captain Rowning?” Sharina said. “These are ordinary men, are they not? Not People, I mean.”

“Right,” Rowning said. He'd sheathed his sword and was using his dagger to pry at the tar sealing the ceramic stopper onto a storage jar. “They couldn't put People out where they'd be seen, your highness. Once you get a look at them, it's like Serians—you don't have any trouble telling what they are the next time. And there's a lot of folk here in Valles who saw them after the Battle of the Tides. Or in it, for that matter, with all the militia who fought that day.”

Rowning popped the plug off the jar. He looked in, sniffed, and stuck his dagger down inside. The dagger point drew up a slab of flesh as broad and flat as a napkin. It was pink and fresh-looking but it didn't have blood vessels.

“By the Lady!” Rowning said. “What's this? Is it human?
Is
it?”

He twitched the dagger, slapping the flesh against the wall. It slipped down with a sucking sound. Rowning's face had a look of horror. That struck Sharina as incongruous in the midst of slaughtered men who'd been human beyond question.

Tenoctris knelt beside the third body, the member of the People whom the javelin had thrown down the stairs. A pair of Blood Eagles bracketed her to keep others from bumping the frail old woman.

She looked over her shoulder at Rowning. “No more than the People themselves are,” she said. Smiling wider, she added, “But no less, of course. I think this is Hani's workroom. Here in Valles, of course. There'd have to be a much larger installation to create as many People as were in the army that invaded Ornifal before.”

Rowning jerked back from the jar, his dagger poised to slash at anything that came out of it to touch him. “Bloody
Hell
!” a Blood Eagle rasped under his breath.

“Create?” Sharina said, staring at the People's leader. She edged back unconsciously, much as Rowning had done. “Then they're not human?”

“Human?” Tenoctris repeated with a grimace. She lifted the corpse's hand and looked at the big ring on its finger. “Dear, I don't know how to answer that. What I'm sure of is that Hani or someone else, some wizard, builds the People from materials like those”—she nodded to the jars—“instead of them being born the way you and I were.” Tenoctris smiled with a vagary of thought, and added, “A very long time ago, in my case.”

Ascor glared at the dead leader of the People. “I suppose they could sneak into Valles without being noticed,” he said grudgingly. “But what were they here
for
?”

Tenoctris pulled the ring from the corpse's finger, twisting it one way and then back to loosen it. “I suspect they might have known something about the theft of Stronghand's body,” she said, holding the ring to the light. “I'd have questioned them about it if I had a chance.”

“Sorry, milady,” Captain Rowning muttered. He started to wipe his blade on the skirt of his outer tunic, then thought again. He turned and, with a grimace of fury, hurled the dagger point first into the stairs. It drove deep into a tread and hummed for a moment with the violence of the stroke.

Lires prodded the leader's corpse with his boot. “I'm not sorry they're dead,” he said conversationally. “I guess you and her highness'll figure things out, milady.”

Sharina looked at Tenoctris, then at the soldier. She felt a rush of relief. “Yes, I agree with Trooper Lires,” she said. “With both parts of what he said. What do we do now, Tenoctris?”

Tenoctris rose to her feet, helped by one of the Blood Eagles. She smiled also.

“Speaking as a human being,” she said, “I don't think creatures like the People should exist, nor that humans should help accomplish purposes that certainly aren't meant to benefit mankind. A scholar would have a more detached viewpoint, but one can't be a scholar always.”

She handed the ring to Sharina. The sapphire was as large as her little fingernail and seemed to be perfect. It was set in dense gray metal, lustrous but heavier than silver.

“Sharina,” the wizard said, “your eyes are younger than mine. Can you make out what's written around the bezel?”

Sharina adjusted the ring against the angle of the light. There were tiny letters encircling the sapphire; at first glance she'd taken them for brushed ornamentation.

“It's in the Old Script,” she said. “I think…
Ereschigal aktiophi
—”