Queen of Demons (63 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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Waldron had something more vivid than that: the old warrior had been with King Valence at the Stone Wall on Sandrakkan. There, when the Ornifal militias panicked, only the Blood Eagles' steadfast courage and the atrocious ruthlessness of Pewle mercenaries who butchered women and children within the Sandrakkan camp had saved the throne for Valence. Waldron had no intention of allowing indiscipline in the forces
he
commanded.
Matoes looked toward the drilling troops. At first Garric thought the envoy was simply staring into the distance while his mind worked, but Matoes' eyes were really focused.
“I'll carry your message,” he said to Garric at last. “I don't know how the admiral will respond. He's quite rightly confident in the strength of his position … for the time being, that is.”
“Lord Matoes,” Garric said, fixing the envoy with his eyes, “I'm not nearly as concerned about the time being as I am about the entire future of the Kingdom of the Isles. The future, or the lack of future.”
He turned and pointed to the troops going through their exercises. “Tell the admiral,” he said, “that it isn't about rank, his or mine or anyone at all's. It's about the survival of civilization. And very shortly he'll realize that there aren't any neutrals.”
Matoes nodded. “I'll tell him,” he said. “But I'm very much afraid—”
He laughed without humor. “I believe you, Prince Garric,” he said, “though I can't imagine why I do. And I really can't hold out much hope that I'll be able to convince the admiral, but I'll do what I can.”
Matoes turned and nodded to the commander of his escort. The envoy and four marines started briskly down the quay. The other two stood where they were long enough for the envoy to reach the steps to the skiff.
“We all have to try,” Garric whispered. The setting sun painted the clouds piling up on the eastern horizon into a wall of blood.
“And this time,”
said the king in Garric's mind,
“we're going to succeed, lad.”
“
I
'm sending an extra bank of oarsmen, seventy-eight instead of fifty-two, Master Cashel,” King Folquin said. He sounded both pleased with himself and defensive at the same time. “That way you'll be able to change half the crew every time the glass is turned and keep up full cruising speed all the way to Valles.”
Cashel considered the trim warship and the men wearing only kilts or breeches who boarded her. There was surprisingly little confusion despite the crowding. He tried to imagine the sailors as sheep so that he could better
judge their numbers, but men moved too quickly for that trick to work either.
Fifty-two and seventy-eight were just words to Cashel. When he counted above five, he notched a tally stick or—for preference—dropped pebbles or dried peas into a pan. Garric and Sharina could count to any number, and Garric had even showed Cashel how he could measure the height of a tree by taking sights from the ground.
“There won't be room enough to scratch your bum,” Zahag said, considering the bireme. As he spoke, he scratched his bum. “Well, I guess anything that gets us back on dry land quicker is a good choice.”
He rotated his head to look at Cashel. “Of course, some of the dry land you've taken me to, chief, isn't much to brag about either. You're not going to do that again, are you?”
“No,” Cashel said. “Well, I don't think so.”
“It does look very squeezed,” said the Princess Aria, her eyes narrowing as she regarded the vessel. The ship's name was the
Arbutus
and Cashel was willing to believe the king when he said that she was the finest vessel in the squadron which kept pirates out of the waters surrounding Pandah. “Perhaps—”
“Master Cashel is in great haste to rejoin his Sharina in Valles, my dear,” Folquin said. A tinge of desperation had entered his voice. “I'm sure that he'd prefer minor discomfort in order to reach Valles in a single stage. He'll be with his beloved before morning dawns.”
It made Cashel acutely uncomfortable to hear Sharina referred to as his beloved. She was, right enough—he certainly wasn't going to correct the king—but it wasn't something he talked about.
Cashel gripped his quarterstaff harder. He'd
sure
never used the word to Folquin. Did everybody in the world see what to Cashel was the most private feeling there was?
“Yes, I appreciate exactly how you're looking after my friend Cashel, Your Majesty,” Aria said. Judging by her
tone, she didn't think much of Folquin's word choice either.
Aria turned to Cashel and put her fingertips on the backs of his hands. “Cashel,” she said, “I know you'll succeed in whatever you set out to do. You brought me here where I belong. No one else could have done that.”
She looked to the side for a moment as if collecting her thoughts. Without meeting Cashel's eyes again she continued, “Still, I'll pray to the Mistress God for your well-being. And you know—”
Aria faced him squarely. She was a tiny little thing but by Duzi! he'd seen weasels that weren't half so fierce as the princess when she was in the mood.
“You
know
that you'll always be welcome on Pandah,” Aria said. She looked at Folquin. “Doesn't he, dear?”
“Yes, absolutely,” the king said, staring at the pattern the toe of his sandal was tracing on the brick quay. “Ah, I think the captain is ready to cast off now, Master Cashel.”
“Right,” said Cashel, thankfully turning away from his hosts. The gangplank creaked and the ship rubbed her bumpers of coir matting against the quay as Cashel's weight shifted it. “May the Lady keep you well, Princess. And you too, King.”
Crewmen bow and stern had already singled up the lines. The piper seated cross-legged in the far stern blew a shrill note; all the oarsmen along the right side shoved the vessel away from the dock with the ends of their oars.
Cashel looked for a place to sit; there was barely space to stand on the narrow deck with the extra rowers all squeezed aboard. Zahag hopped onto the sternpost which curved up over the steersman and captain. The former yelled in surprise, but the captain shushed him with a snarl.
The piper began a two-note call, changing it by fingering the stops in his single reed pipe. The oarsmen fell into
a rhythm, though their strokes were short ones until the ship began to slide forward.
Cashel waved once toward the figures on the quay, then eased his way back to stand beside the piper. There wasn't really room, but by gripping the sternpost with his free hand he could sit on the gunwale and lean out safely enough.
Zahag was still looking shoreward. “Except for being so scrawny, Aria isn't bad at all,” the ape said. “I'll be interested to see what this Sharina's got that Aria didn't.”
Cashel looked up. “Don't say anything like that again,” he said, “unless you want to swim to wherever you're going. Understand?”
The ape hunched to the post as tight as a barnacle. The water was already hissing past the bireme's hull. “You bet I do, chief,” he said. “No, no, never again.”
Princess Aria was wearing a layered white dress as much like what she was used to as the seamstresses on Pandah could make. It was funny how far away Cashel could see that white speck in the sunlight, still waving.
 
 
Ilna paused to get a closer look at where her guides were taking her. The afternoon sun slanted across an entrance porch set into the face of a limestone hill. The delicate carvings on the roof were thrown into sharp relief despite the effect of long weathering.
One of the six pillars supporting the porch had fallen into the road leading up to it. Ilna's eyes narrowed when she noticed that the shaft had split at an angle instead of falling into separate stone barrels.
“This whole place was cut out of the front of the hill,” she said. And very ably cut, too. No one could fault the craftsmanship of Third Atara's stonemasons.
“Yes, that's right,” Hosten said. He and his troops had become more and more taciturn as they approached the tomb. “The Elder Romi had it built before he died.”
“It was finished the very hour he died,” one of the
soldiers said. “He'd foretold his death that close.”
“That's a legend,” Hosten said sharply. “It may have happened, it may not.”
He looked at Ilna and added, “There are many stories about the Elder Romi both before and after he died, mistress. If I were you, I'd go back to Divers immediately and find a ship.”
“That's
if
he died,” muttered another of the soldiers. This time Hosten didn't rebuke him.
“It hasn't been such a pleasant jaunt that I'd care to have had it for nothing,” Ilna said as she strode toward the entrance. “Besides, I said I'd do it.”
They'd come most of the two miles from the palace by carriage. Hosten had offered her a horse, but Ilna had never ridden an animal before and didn't think that making a fool of herself by falling off during the journey was going to improve her mood.
They'd walked the last hundred paces. Earthshocks like the one that threw down the pillar had broken the roadway into tilted blocks. The jumble was hard enough for humans to traverse, let alone a horse or the wheels of a carriage.
“It's a natural cave,” Hosten explained as he followed a short distance behind her. “Only the entrance was shaped. People say that it goes all the way down under the sea.”
The Inner Sea wasn't visible from where Ilna stood, but she could hear the whisper of waves on the shore now that it was called to her attention. She wasn't concerned about the cave extending underwater. If the stone walls had lasted this long, it wasn't likely that the sea would rush in just in time to drown Ilna os-Kenset.
She smiled slightly. That event would end her responsibility to Halphemos and Cashel and all the people she'd wronged in the past year, of course. Well, if the Gods existed, she doubted that they were going to let her off so easily.
“The coffin was ice cold,” a soldier said. “They—”
“That's enough!” Hosten snarled.
Ilna turned her head. “Let him speak,” she said. “Legend or not, I want to hear it.”
Hosten turned his back, his hand squeezing and releasing the hilt of his sheathed sword as he tried to work off tension and anger. “Go on,” Ilna said to the soldier who'd spoken.
The man cleared his throat. His hair was a carrot-colored tangle that stuck out to all sides beneath the rim of his simple iron helmet. “The story …” he said. “It was my uncle who told me when I was a little boy. They put Romi in a silver coffin.”
“He didn't have any friends,” volunteered another soldier. “All he had was servants and they were none of them from Third Atara. None of them human, some said.”
“Anyway, the coffin got cold as cold could be,” the first man continued. “They carried him down in the cave, all the way to the end, and there was a pool of water there. They put the coffin in the pool of water and it started to boil. They all ran back out of the cave, and the steam was coming up after them all the way to the surface again.”
“And who told this story that your uncle told you, Digir?” Hosten said in an angry voice. “Was it one of those servants who weren't human, is that it? It's all legend!”
“Did you go down in the cave, Lord Hosten?” said the man who'd talked of Romi's servants. “When you were a boy, I mean; on a dare?
I
did.”
Hosten turned to face the others. The afternoon sun shone on him, but his skin looked sallow. “Once. I went to the first bend, where it starts to slant down steeply. My torch went out. I ran back as if the Sister herself was snatching at my heels.”
He looked squarely at Ilna. “Don't go in there, mistress,” he said. “Maybe there's nothing really down there, but it's the coldest feeling on earth. Don't go.”
Ilna shrugged. To the man who'd brought the lantern with him she said, “If you'll light that, I'll take care of
my business and the rest of you can go home.”
The men looked at their commander. “We'll wait for you, mistress,” Hosten said. “We'll wait till the moon sets. Midnight, that is.”
The soldier opened a little shutter on the back of the lantern's brass frame. He inserted the glowing punk which he carried in a tube on his belt, then blew gently. Here in the sun it was barely possible to tell that the wick had caught. He handed the lantern to Ilna.
“I'll hope to see you, then,” Ilna. said as she turned and walked up the three shallow steps to the entrance. One of the soldiers muttered a response—or he might have been talking to his fellows.
Only the first short distance of the cave had been squared by the hand of man. That was as far as light from outside penetrated as well. Though the lantern glowed, it illuminated little except its own horn lenses so far as Ilna was concerned. Her eyes seemed slow adapting to changes in the light; perhaps it was her recent diet.
“Down” was an easy direction, anyway. There were no obstacles except a leather cap lying on the ground twenty paces or so from the entrance. Ilna remembered her escorts' tales of boys daring one another to enter the Elder Romi's tomb. Girls had better sense than that sort of nonsense.
She smiled faintly. Though what was she doing here, unless it was accepting Baron Robilard's dare?
Ilna found she could see better as she proceeded. The walls of the cave were damp. Beneath the moisture was a layer of flow rock, limestone dissolved and redeposited in opalescent layers. Both reflected the lantern light in a bright haze that hid details.
Here and there symbols and perhaps names were carved into the rock. For almost a thousand years the folk of Third Atara had been trying prove that they were braver than a dead man—and proving instead that they were fools and destructive fools besides. Not that this island or any island had a monopoly on fools.
Ilna reached the bend Hosten had mentioned. The cave twisted left. The rock was grubby from the hands of youths gripping it as they peered around the corner and down the steep descent beyond. There were no deliberate markings here, though; visitors hadn't lingered long enough to make them.
Water gurgled in the far distance. Ilna felt a gust from the depths. Did the cave rise again to the open air?
As Hosten had said, it was very cold. Probably because of the damp rock … and anyway, Ilna had been cold before. She started down the slope.
Ilna didn't like stone, and stone didn't like her. The path's wet slickness made her feet slip. She caught herself by slapping her left palm against the rounded sidewall.
She smiled again. Dislike—her own or that of others for her—wasn't a new experience. She didn't let it bother her, either way.

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