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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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In a softer voice, one meant as much for herself as for the ears of her companions, the old wizard added, “I sometimes wish that I could believe in the Great Gods myself. All I see are powers, and it's only because of my human weakness that I even call them Good and Evil. I'm sure that the cosmos doesn't put any such labels on the forces that move it.”
“The cosmos may not care if people serving Malkar sink the Isles into the sea,” Garric said as he fingered the medallion he wore under his tunic. “But we care, and we're not going to let it happen.”
“I believe in the Lady and the Shepherd,” Cashel said without anger. “I believe that Duzi watches over the flocks of Barca's Hamlet … not that the sheep didn't need me as well, silly beasts that they are.”
Tenoctris was a good woman, and a smart one who was even better educated than Garric. She could believe whatever she pleased. But the truth for Cashel was usually a simple thing, and what other folk believed didn't change that truth.
Cashel was big. He moved with deliberation because he'd learned early that a man of his size and strength broke things by being hasty. He counted on his fingers, and the only reason he could write his name was that Garric had spent days teaching him to laboriously draw the letters.
A lot of people thought Cashel was stupid. Well, maybe he was. But a lot of people thought an ox was stupid too because it was strong and slow and did its job without the shrill temperament of a horse.
The people who thought an ox was stupid were wrong.
The three of them skirted a stack of hardwood being unloaded from an odd-looking twin-hulled freighter. The logs had a pronounced ring pattern that would stripe boards like lengths of Ilna's fancy weaving.
“Tigerwood from Kanbesa,” Garric said in wonder. “Brought here, all the way across the Inner Sea to panel some merchant's house. Erdin's certainly grown since the Old Kingdom fell.”
Cashel eyed the wood with critical appraisal. Pretty enough, he supposed, but he'd take oak—or hickory, like the quarterstaff he carried here in Erdin just as he had in the pastures back on Haft.
Cashel didn't carry the quarterstaff just for a weapon. He'd shaped the tough wood with his own hands. It was a part of Haft and a part of Cashel before he left Barca's Hamlet to wander the Isles. The smooth, familiar hickory made him feel more at home among these close-set buildings and a crowd as thick as fishflies in spring. Why shouldn't he carry it?
“Doesn't Sandrakkan have forests?” he asked. He found Garric's comments about the Old Kingdom odd. Cashel understood when Tenoctris said something about
the world of a thousand years ago: she'd lived in it, after all. Sometimes Garric sounded as though he had too.
“There're a lot of forests, especially in the north,” Garric said, “but they don't grow fancy species like tigerwood. It's just for show, so that a rich man can brag that he brought wood a thousand miles to cover his dining hall.”
Cashel frowned as he planned what he wanted to say. A merchant passing in the other direction gave him a startled look. The man's bodyguard gripped the hilt of a sword that certainly wasn't for show. Cashel took no notice.
“There're goods from just about everyplace here,” he said. He grinned slowly, the even-tempered youth from Barca's Hamlet again. “Bags of wool from Haft, I shouldn't wonder. People seem happy enough. It's peaceful and they get on with their lives.”
Tenoctris nodded, waiting for Cashel's point. Garric, was listening intently also.
“But if it turns to fights and demons and dead things walking, they all lose,” Cashel said forcefully. “Why do they let that happen? Why do people
make
that happen?”
The old wizard shook her head. “Partly it's the way people are, Cashel,” she said. “Not you and certainly not me. I never wanted any kind of power, just quiet in which to study.”
She smiled broadly, shedding a decade with the expression. “I avoided power, all right, but it looks as though I'm not going to have the quiet study because we're trying to keep the world from going the way you describe.”
She sobered instantly. “But that's the other thing: forces reached a peak a thousand years ago, and before they subsided they'd brought down the kingdom—what your age calls the Old Kingdom. The powers from outside don't cause disaster in themselves, but they amplify tiny imbalances, petty anger and ambition and jealousy.”
Tenoctris looked out over the river. Cashel guessed she
was really viewing things more distant than the barges crawling down the brown Erd and the larger vessels that brought cargoes from all across the Inner Sea.
“Wizards with some power find that they have many times that power now,” the old woman continued softly. “They can sink islands or raise demons who have the strength to wreck cities. But the wizards don't have any better understanding than they did before.”
She looked at Garric, then Cashel, with eyes as fierce as an eagle's. “And they understood nothing before, though they thought they did. Because they were fools!”
“But you understand,” Garric said, placing his big tanned hand on Tenoctris' shoulder. “And we won't let Malkar win this time. Evil isn't going to win.”
Cashel scratched the back of his left ear, thinking. Sharina had left Barca's Hamlet; forever, it seemed. She hadn't known how Cashel felt about her because Cashel hadn't had—and wouldn't ever have had—the courage to tell her.
So Cashel had left home also, going no particular direction—just away from the place where so many memories tortured him. In the end he'd found Sharina again, and he'd saved her when nobody else could have. Nobody but Cashel or-Kenset.
“I think things will work out all right,” Cashel said aloud. “Things pretty much do if you work at them.”
The others looked at him in surprise. Cashel smiled slowly. Garric and Tenoctris were smart people who read all sorts of things in books. Cashel had nothing but the life he lived himself to base his judgments on. Other folks could believe whatever they wanted to, but that didn't change the things Cashel knew in his own heart.
They walked on, passing men who unloaded spices from a square-bowed Serian ship. Slim, brown-skinned sailors brought the sturdy chests up from the vessel's multiple holds, but local men loaded the goods on handcarts to be wheeled to a warehouse. A Sandrakkan factor oversaw the business. The cargo's owner, a silk-robed upper-class
Serian who was taller and much fleshier than the sailors, stood impassively while at his side a secretary jotted the count onto a tablet of bamboo sheets.
“If the Isles were really united again,” Garric said, “there'd be even more trade. Maybe that's just a dream.”
It was Cashel's turn to look with curiosity at his friend. Not the sort of dream that came to Haft peasants, he'd have thought.
“The forces turned toward Malkar aren't in league with one another,” Tenoctris said. Her train of thought didn't flow directly from what had been said before, but it fit well enough with Cashel's musings. “Evil people hate one another as bitterly as they hate what I suppose we may as well call the good. That's the real advantage good has over evil.”
She smiled wryly. “Unfortunately,” she went on, “there's very little that's purely anything. Including good.”
They were passing a ship of moderate size whose deck cargo, dried fruit in pitch-sealed baskets, had already been unloaded. The crew was using the mast and yard as a crane to bring casks up from the hold one at a time, then swing them onto mule-drawn wagons.
A tin plate nailed onto the vessel's stem showed a gull and a name in cut-out letters. The captain was a red-bearded man as stocky as Cashel but not as big. He directed his sullen crewmen from the deck, while the merchant receiving the goods waited with the first in the line of wagons.
Cashel paused. His skin felt prickly as though sunburnt, something that almost never happened to him since he spent most of his time outdoors in all seasons. He stared intently at the ship.
“She's the
Bird of the Waves
,” Garric said, thinking his friend was trying to cipher out the nameplate.
“There's something about it …” Cashel said. He slid his left hand slowly up his quarterstaff.
Garric started to speak but closed his mouth again instead.
Tenoctris knelt on the brick quay and picked up a piece of straw that had been used to cushion cargo.
“Hey!” a carter shouted angrily. “Get out of the way or I'll drive over you!”
Cashel stepped between Tenoctris and the lead oxen. He set one of his staff's iron ferrules on the ground in front of him and stared at the carter.
“Ah, go back to your farm!” the carter said; but he swung his team to the side. Popping his whip he went around the trio with his load of grain packed in terra-cotta storage jars.
Tenoctris had drawn words in the grime of the street. Now she murmured a spell, touching each syllable in turn with the piece of straw. At the climax she released the straw, which spun away as though in an unfelt breeze. It landed on the cask being lowered to the lead wagon.
“I think …” she said in a shaky voice. She started to rise but would have fallen if Garric hadn't steadied her; the powers a wizard set in motion came with a price. “I think we should learn what's in that barrel.”
“Right,” said Cashel. He took a fresh grip on his quarterstaff. With Garric beside him, he walked toward the merchant.
They were going to learn what was in the cask. Like most other things, that should be pretty simple to manage.
 
 
Sharina paused to watch Ilna twist the shed stick, feed through a warp thread, and beat it flat in less time than it would have taken Sharina—or Liane on the third loom—just to make the shed. “You make it look so simple,” she said ruefully.
Ilna looked up with a hard smile. Her fingers continued to feed warp threads from both sides of the loom frame with a speed and precision that would have been unnatural in any other weaver.
“It is simple,” she said. “I've just got more practice than you do.”
Which was true in a way. Any village girl on Haft learned to weave the same as she learned to cook, but in Barca's Hamlet for the past eight years or so Ilna os-Kenset did all the serious weaving. Most of the other women merely spun thread for her.
Ilna's fabric was tighter, her designs cleaner, and her rate of production ten times higher than that of her nearest rival in the borough, old Chantre os-Chulec. Even Chantre admitted that on the nights when she'd had more than her share of the beer in the taproom of Reise's inn.
But practice wasn't the whole answer, and the skill Ilna had when she left Barca's Hamlet was nothing compared to the genius she showed now. Something had changed, and from the look in Ilna's dark eyes more had changed than the way her fingers moved over a loom.
During the months Ilna and Sharina had gone their separate ways, Sharina had faced death and a demon. From the story Ilna's eyes told, she had seen far worse—and been worse as well.
“Ilna,” said Liane, the girl Sharina had met at Garric's side here in Erdin three days before. “My father traveled the world. He brought Mother and me gifts when he returned. I've seen cloth from all over the Isles and beyond, but I've never seen workmanship to equal yours.”
She called herself Liane os-Benlo, but Garric had told Sharina in a private moment that Liane was born to the noble house of bos-Benliman. Her father, a wizard, had died in a fashion that Garric didn't choose to discuss.
Liane's hair was as black as Ilna's, but she had the pale complexion of the Sandrakkan nobility whereas Ilna—like Garric—was tanned to the color of walnut heartwood. Either girl would pass as beautiful, but Liane was doll-like and delicate to look at, while Ilna … No one would ever call Ilna plain, but “severe” would be the first word a stranger used to describe her.
“Yes, well,” Ilna said. “Perhaps it's compensation for my not being able to read books the way you and Garric do, do you think?”
Liane blushed.
“I'll teach you to read, Ilna,” Sharina said sharply. “You know how many times I've offered before. You always said you didn't have enough time.”
She didn't know Liane, but she knew Garric liked the girl and had gone through a lot with her. Sharina knew Ilna very well. She wasn't about to let her friend begin working on an undeserving Liane with a tongue as sharp as the bone-handled knife Ilna used for household tasks.
Thought of knives drew Sharina's mind to the weapon that was now hers, hanging behind her from a wall hook meant for cloaks in colder weather. The scales of the hilt were black horn riveted to a full tang, and the heavy single-edged blade was as long as her forearm.
It was a sealhunter's knife from Pewle Island in the Outer Sea, well north of the main circuit of the Isles. The man who'd carried it, Nonnus, had come to live as a hermit in the woods outside Barca's Hamlet before Sharina was born.

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