Master of the Cauldron (52 page)

She stepped into the other corridor and looked at the two basalt statues. She touched the back of Merota's hard stone hand, then walked a few paces on and ran her fingertips down the curve of Chalcus' throat. He'd had a lovely voice. It was the first thing she'd noticed about Chalcus, back in that bygone time when there'd seemed a reason for living.

No matter. Ilna strode through the corridors of the Citadel, letting the cords in her hands direct her to a place she'd never been. She had a purpose, had work to attend to.

To Ilna's surprise, there were other stone victims within the crystal halls. Three were men, but one was a child not much older than Merota had been. There was a dog as well, a mongrel with a sharp nose and a back as sharp as a sawhorse. How had they come to be in this place where living things found only death?

The dog was just down the corridor from what Ilna was looking for,
the spine of a sunburst that ended in a point sticking out of the crystal crown. She went as far into the tapering spike as she could go without hunching, then sat and began to work.

Ilna'd been picking yarn from the skirt of her tunic even as she walked. She'd clipped the hem with her bone-cased paring knife, but after that start she'd worked the threads loose by hand with the same quick skill as she'd used to weave the fabric. The lengths of yarn she carried in her sleeve for normal situations weren't adequate for this.

She wouldn't be certain that anything was adequate until afterward, of course. She was tempted to say that it wouldn't matter if she failed, but that wasn't true. To Ilna os-Kenset, failure was never an acceptable choice.

She sniffed. The world would be a better place if more people lived by the same standards as she did, but that wasn't going to happen in her lifetime. And besides, what other people did was none of her business.

When Ilna had enough yarn, she began knotting it into the new pattern. She could've worked with greater subtlety if she'd had something to hold the knotwork, but there was nothing to make a frame; the Citadel's inner surfaces were as slick as ice on a roof slate. She'd have to stretch the pattern between her raised hands. The result would be crude, but there was no one to critique the work except the new king and Ilna herself.

She heard the clicking/ticking again. Perhaps it'd been getting louder for some time, but she'd ignored it, lost in her work and the pattern she was creating.

The pattern was rather interesting after all, she found. It shrank into itself, level repeating level repeating level, each multiplying the pattern's effect…

Yes, the sound
was
coming closer, and rapidly. Ilna tied a final knot and stood, holding the edges of the pattern together for the moment. The close, glittering walls pressed in on her unpleasantly, but she wouldn't have been able to do what was necessary in any other setting. She was used to discomfort; a little more wouldn't matter.

The structure trembled at the creature's approach. Patches of color wriggled and shivered as the crystal flexed, twisting the light that passed through it. Ilna hadn't noticed such vibration the first time the new king passed close to her. It must be that now she was standing in a narrow passage with only a thin, taut layer between her bare feet and the ground furlongs below.

She spread her arms, looking out through the pattern she held. It was a
skeleton of fine wool, no denser than the interplay of elm twigs against a winter moon. A spider uses only a tracery to catch its prey. Ilna didn't even need to catch something, only—

The new king rolled into sight, moving like a drunk who staggers but never loses his balance. The creature was of sparkling black glass, all points and angles; more like a sea urchin than like anything else of flesh and blood, but not especially like an urchin either.

It moved by toppling forward, putting down points and shifting the rest of its edges and spikes over the new supports. The creature's total size with all the limbs and nodes added together might have been as much as a bellwether or even a young bull; Ilna couldn't be sure. It was like trying to guess how small a space would hold a dandelion's fluff if it was squeezed together.

On top of the black spears and sheets, advancing but never dipping or rising from the perfect level it maintained, was a diamond-bright jewel like the egg Ilna had snatched from the cocoon under the sea. The Citadel's walls threw light of every color across it, but the jewel gleamed clear as a dewdrop.

The creature halted. It saw or sensed Ilna's presence, though it had no eyes on its shimmering black surface. Ilna's belly tightened, but she smiled at the thing that had killed the two people closest to her. She would join them now, or she would avenge them.

The creature extended a limb toward Ilna in a series of jagged motions. It paused; then three bolts of wizardlight—blue, scarlet, and blue again—ripped from the point like lightning slashing off a high crag into the clouds.

Ilna's filigree of yarn absorbed the blasts and flung them back reversed, red and blue and red. The shock stunned her. For a moment she swayed, blinded by the flaring light. Her skin prickled as if she'd been boiled in seawater, and her pulse was thunder in her ears.

Her vision cleared. She was trembling, so she lowered her arms slowly. The yarn pattern remained rigid: the wool had been changed to basalt.

Ilna shouted in disgust and flicked the pattern into the crystal wall, breaking it into a shower of pebbles. She regretted doing that almost immediately: because she'd lost control, but also because she'd smashed the fabric that'd saved her life. It deserved better of her, but what's done is done.

The new king had been a smooth, shimmering thing of liquid obsidian, vibrant even when it was at rest. The corpse was still black, but it had become the dull black of basalt; silent and dead and opaque. The spell flung at Ilna had rebounded, killing the creature who'd killed so many in the past.

Ilna sank to her knees. She wanted to cry, but she couldn't, and tears wouldn't have brought Chalcus and Merota back anyway.

The jewel on top of the stone corpse winked. Her eyes blurred, and she found that she could cry after all.

She heard whistling, the clear notes of the ballad she'd heard in Barca's Hamlet as “The House Carpenter” but which Chalcus sang under a different name:
Well met, well met, my own true love
…

Ilna wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then dried them properly with the shoulder of her tunic. Rising, she stepped around the frozen creature and looked down the corridor. Davus was sauntering toward her, his lips pursed as he whistled “The Demon Lover.” When he saw Ilna, he smiled.

“Well met indeed, Mistress Ilna,” he said. “And a deservedly ill meeting for the creature that thought to rule men, I'm glad to see.”

Ilna's face contorted. “Aren't you afraid that snakes will make this place their home, Master Davus?” she said, her voice echoing the sneer on her lips. “Now that you've left your post?”

Davus chuckled. “There'll be no danger from snakes, Ilna,” he said as he stepped past her. He lifted the gleaming jewel from the head of its last victim, careful not to prick himself on the hedge of black stone points. “The king is back, you see.”

Smiling, Davus placed the jewel on his head. It hovered, denting his brown hair without quite touching his scalp.

“A wizard named Dromillac drew me to the world where you found me,” he said calmly. “He forced me to set a troll on the enemies besetting that place.”

He laughed again. “Those enemies were no friends of mine nor of any man,” he continued, “so I wasn't sorry to scotch them. Only when I'd done that and before Dromillac loosed the geas by which he'd bound me to his will, the creature whose egg I'd stolen for my tool”—Davus touched the jewel with the tips of his right forefinger and middle fingers, still smiling—“caught me unawares and snatched my talisman. With which it turned me to stone and took my place.”

Ilna nodded coldly. “I thought as much,” she said. “After I began to understand the situation, of course.”

She thought for a moment, then continued, “Master Davus, you said that you'd allowed that creature”—she nodded toward the angled basalt corpse, unwilling to touch the thing even now that it was dead—“to live because you'd taken its offspring and were unwilling to wrong it further. That's what you meant, at any rate. Is it not?”

“Yes,” said Davus, setting his feet slightly apart. “That's what I did. I suppose you're going to tell me I'd best change if I'm to resume the rule of the land, not so?”

“Not so,” Ilna said, as cold and formal as Davus—as the king—had become when he thought she was challenging his judgment. “
Don't
change. The land, as you call it, survived a thousand years of rule by a creature that didn't care about humans. I don't believe it would've survived a ruler like you if he didn't sometimes let mercy soften what reason told him was the sensible course. A ruler like you, or like me.”

Davus didn't speak or move for a moment, though fire pulsed in the heart of the great jewel above him. He chuckled again, and said, “Well, no matter, girl. I'll go on the way I've been going because I'm too old to change.”

He bent over the statue of the mongrel dog. “What were you doing here, I wonder?” he said, stroking it behind the basalt ears.

Light flooded the corridor, burning bone deep through Davus and Ilna both. The dog gave a startled yelp. It turned, snapped at Davus' fingers—he jerked his hand back in time—and went running up the corridor trailing a terrified
yi-yi-yi!
behind it.

Davus straightened and grinned at Ilna. “Shall we find Merota and our friend Chalcus, now, Ilna?” he said. “I've a thousand years of misrule to correct, but first things first.”

Ilna swayed, more stunned than she had been by the bolts the creature had flung at her. Then, blind with tears of joy, she began stumbling toward the statues of her family.

 

Tenoctris lifted herself from Sharina's lap. Mogon's blow hadn't hurt the old woman seriously, though the balas-ruby he wore in a gaudy ring had left a welt along her cheek.

“Graveyards focus even more power than temples do,” she said with a smile of gentle pride. “Hani knew it, of course, but I don't think he understood that when he raised Stronghand's body he was also calling back Stronghand's spirit. When wine bottled from grapes grown on Stronghand's tomb was uncorked at a portal that Hani'd used his great power to open…well, I'd hoped something helpful would occur, but the result was beyond my expectations.”

Horns called among Lord Waldron's regiments. In the rebel army there were shouts but no proper signals because the commanders were arguing. Bolor and the cousins who'd been with him on the island were talking with Lord Luxtus and his officers. Sharina noticed the courier who'd brought warning of the rebellion to Lord Waldron on Volita.

Sharina touched her scalp. Her hair had begun to grow back, but it'd be years before the present soft fuzz became the blond banner she'd had a few weeks ago. The courier's vessel had made a good passage to return to Ornifal so quickly without the aid of nymphs…

“Here, help me up,” Tenoctris said, but she'd rolled onto all fours before Sharina could react. They rose together, the old woman smiling brightly—and Sharina smiling also, a little to her surprise.

This was a bad situation and might well become a fatal one, but Sharina was back among human beings. Bolor and his confederates were rebels and her enemies, but compared to a monster like Valgard—well, there were worse things than death.

Three horsemen under a white flag rode out from the royal lines. Sharina's lips pursed when she realized that Waldron himself was one of the envoys. They'd presumably intended to meet a party from the rebels midway between the armies, but Bolor's return—and what had come with it—had thrown the parley awry.

A lance with a white napkin tied to it for a flag was butted into the ground near the rebel nobles, but they were too lost in their own discussion to take notice. Calran seemed to have forgotten he still held his sword in his right hand; his excited gestures would've looked like threats to anyone at a distance.

The rebels had forgotten other things as well. It was time for Princess Sharina to remind them. A mace dangled from the pommel of the nearest of the drop-reined horses. Sharina lifted the loop of the weapon free, then rapped the butt against the boss of a shield leaning against a lance. The din
cut through the argument and jerked around the heads of all the rebel commanders.

“Well, milords,” she said, holding the mace head and patting the butt into her left palm. “Are you going to fight for mankind against monsters today, or do you intend to leave all that for Lord Waldron? I'd say—”

She pointed the reversed mace toward the lines of People marching from the city gate in perfect order. Their bronze armor was unadorned, but every piece shone like a curved mirror. In the sunlight their ranks were a brilliant golden dazzle.

“—that there're enough wizard-made monsters to give
every
human somebody to fight, but if you lot prefer to watch instead of playing the man, I'm sure Lord Waldron will take care of the matter himself. Or die trying, of course.
He's
a credit to the bor-Warrimans!”

Bolor scowled in red-faced embarrassment. “Milady, we don't recognize your brother as the rightful King of the Isles!” he said. “He's, well—”

“Whom do you recognize, then?” Sharina said, speaking loudly but pitching her voice deeper than normal so that she didn't sound shrill. The men around her would take that as a sign of fright, which neither she nor the kingdom could afford. “A moment ago you bowed to the glamour a wizard hung on a corpse! Now the wizard's dead and the corpse is dead again—and there's an army of monsters preparing to swarm over Ornifal and the Isles beyond. Which side are you on, man or monsters?”