The Fortress of Glass (25 page)

* * *

Ilna watched Cervoran draw a knife from his box and turn toward her. She knew it was an athame, a wizard's tool used to tease out incantations. The curving symbols cut into the blade were words written in what educated people like Garric called the Old Script. Ilna could recognize them as patterns, though she couldn't read them any better than she could the blocky New Script folk used today to write in.

Wizard's tool it might be, but this athame was a real knife also. The hilt and blade were forged from a single piece of iron, and the double edges were raggedly sharp.

"You, Ilna," Cervoran said. He stepped toward her, raising the athame. "I must have a lock of your hair for the amulet which controls my double."

Chalcus flicked his sword out and held it straight. The point didn't touch Cervoran's right eye, but if it would run the wizard through the brain if he took another step forward.

"Let's you take a lock of somebody else's hair, my good friend," the sailor said in his falsely cheerful voice. "A lock of your own, why not? You'll not want to pay the cost of raising that ugly blade of yours to Mistress Ilna."

"Do you think your steel frightens me, man?" Cervoran said. His head turned toward the sailor. "There must be a lock of my hair in the amulet to animate the simulacrum. The hair of Ilna is to control it. Do you think to build a double of me and free it uncontrolled?"

"Why hers, then?" Chalcus said. "Take hairs from my head if you like!"

He was angry in a way Ilna'd rarely seen him. Normally anything that disturbed the sailor as much as this did would've given him the release of killing something. The humor of the situation struck Ilna, though nobody seeing her expression was likely to know she was smiling.

"The clay was female, therefore the control must be female," Cervoran said. "And there are other reasons. If the clay had been male, I would have used Master Cashel as my control."

His tone was always peevish, but perhaps it was a little more so just at the moment. Despite the way the wizard had sneered at the sword, Ilna noticed that he hadn't tried to move past it.

"Tenoctris, is this true?" Chalcus demanded. He flicked his eyes toward the old woman, then locked them back on Cervoran. "Does he need Mistress Ilna's hair as he says?"

"It may be true, Chalcus," Tenoctris said carefully. "To be sure of that, I'd have to be a much greater wizard than I am."

"You'll do," said Ilna. She stepped forward and plucked the athame from Cervoran's pulpy fingers. He tried to keep hold when he realized what she was about, but she had no desire to let Cervoran's hand hold an edge that close to her throat. She shook him free easily and raised the blade to her head.

Ilna pinched a lock of hair from in front of her ear with the other hand, then sawed the athame through it. Though the iron hilt had been in Cervoran's hand, it remained icy cold. She didn't like the feel of the metal, but she used the athame rather than her own paring knife because it might have a virtue she didn't understand herself.

Ilna's mother Mab had been a wizard or something greater than a wizard, her mother and Cashel's. Ilna'd never met Mab, only seen her at a distance, and she wouldn't have understood much more-about Mab or about the things she herself did with fabric-even if they'd spoken, she supposed. But as Tenoctris said, there were reasons a wizard might use Ilna or her brother to increase the power of his spell.

"Ilna?" said Tenoctris. "I'm sure you realize this, dear, but there are dangers to the person whose psyche controls the simulacrum of a wizard."

"Thank you, Tenoctris," Ilna said. It felt odd to realize that she had friends, that there were people who cared about her. "There's danger in getting up in the morning, I'm afraid. Especially in these times."

She handed the pinch of hair to Cervoran; he took it in the cup of his hand instead of between thumb and forefinger as she offered it. Ilna rotated the athame to put the point up and the hilt toward the wizard, and he took that also.

Ilna watched Cervoran use the athame to draw an oval around the corpse, leaving more space at its feet than at its head. His point scored the soft stone only lightly, but he never let it skip.

She was glad to be shut of the athame; she'd rather put her hands in the stinking muck of the charnel house than to touch that cold iron again. But she'd do either of those things and worse if duty required it.

Ilna smiled and, without looking, reached out to the back of Chalcus' wrist. He'd sheathed his blades again, but the hilts were never far from his hands. She wouldn't pretend she was happy, but she was glad to be the person she was instead of somebody too frightened or too squeamish to do things that had to be done.

Cervoran stepped into the figure he'd drawn, standing at the corpse's foot. He pointed the athame at the woman's face. Someone had closed her eyes, but her mouth sagged open in death. She'd lost her front teeth in both upper and lower jaws.

"Ouer mechan...," Cervoran said. Azure wizardlight, a blue purer than anything in nature, sparkled on the point of the athame. "Libaba oimathotho."

Ilna looked dispassionately at the woman's corpse, wondering what her name had been. Cities were impersonal in a way that a tiny place like Barca's Hamlet never could be, but Mona wasn't large as cities go. People on the woman's street, in her tenement, would have known her by name.

Now she had nothing. Even her corpse, her clay as Cervoran put it, was being taken for another purpose. It was that or the maggots' purpose, of course, but perhaps the maggots would've been better.

"Brido lothian iao...," Cervoran chanted. The topaz on his brow flamed with more light than the sun struck from it; his athame sizzled and chattered as though he'd pent a thunderbolt in its cold iron form.

Ilna's fingers were working a pattern. She didn't recall taking the yarn from her sleeve, but for her it was as natural as breathing. The dead woman had no name, and shortly there would be nothing at all left of her....

"Isee!" Cervoran said. A crackling bar of wizardlight linked his athame to the bridge of the corpse's nose. "Ithi! Squaleth!"

The dead woman's features slumped. Melting away, Ilna thought, but instead they were melting into the shape of Cervoran's own face. Wizardlight snarled and popped, molding flesh the way a potter's thumbs do clay. The clay is female, the wizard told Chalcus, and he'd meant the words literally.

Cervoran's mouth moved. Perhaps he was still chanting but Ilna couldn't hear words through the roar of the wizardry itself. The woman's mouth, now Cervoran's mouth, closed. The eyes blinked open, filled momentarily by a fire that was more than wizardlight. The corpse folded its hands and sat up slowly as the spluttering light spread down through its changing body.

The blue glare cut off so abruptly that for an instant the sun seemed unable to fill its absence. Cervoran staggered, out of the oval he'd scribed. He might've fallen if Cashel-Ilna smiled: of course Cashel-hadn't put a hand behind his shoulders.

What had been the corpse of an unknown woman stood up with the deliberation of a flower unfolding. It was no longer dead, it was no longer female, and in every way but size it looked exactly like Cervoran. He was a bulky man though of only average height, while the corpse-the clay he'd molded his double from-had been both shorter and slighter.

The only thing the double wore was the bag hanging from its neck. Cervoran had put the locks of hair and probably other things into it, to judge from the way it bulged. Both the bag and cord were linen rather than wool. Ilna was far too conscious of the powers that fibers held to think the choice of vegetable rather than animal materials was chance.

Ilna turned and pulled the door of the charnel house open a crack; she tossed the pattern she'd just knottted inside, then pressed the doors closed.

It was a monument, of sorts; a distillation of the woman's presence. It wasn't much, but it was what Ilna could do.

Chalcus cursed savagely under his breath. His cape was sewn from red and yellow cloth in vertical stripes. He unfastened the gaudy garnet pin clenching it at his throat and laid it over the double's shoulders.

"Cover yourself, damn you!" he snarled, his face turned away from the creature and the wizard who'd created it.

"We will return to my palace now," Cervoran said. "I have work to do."

Ilna couldn't be sure, but she thought there was a smirk on his purple lips.

* * *

A horse takes up as much room on shipboard as a dozen men, so when Garric embarked the royal army he didn't take horses. The courier panting in front of Sharina had run the whole distance back from the battle. He'd stripped off his armor and weapons before setting out, but he still wore military boots. He was bent over with his hands on his knees, shuffling slowly to keep from stiffening as he sucked air into his lungs.

The tablet's wax seal was impressed with a bunch of grapes: the crest of Liane's family, the bor-Benlimans, not Lord Waldron's two-headed dragon. Sharina broke the tablet open, unsurprised. That's why she'd sent Liane along with the army, after all; or better, allowed Liane to accompany the army. Lord Waldron regarded reporting back to be somehow demeaning, and in the present instance he probably had his hands full.

Waldron definitely had his hands full. The note inked on white birch in Liane's neat uncials read: APPROXIMATELY 300 HELLPLANTS ASHORE IN CALF'S HEAD BAY SEVEN MILES WEST OF MONA. NO MORE APPEARING AT PRESENT. ATTEMPTING TO FIGHT PLANTS WITH FIRE BUT WEATHER DAMP. LBB FOR LD WALDRON.

"Your highness?" said Attaper. "Lord Cashel and the others're back."

He'd formed the available Blood Eagles around Sharina in the palace courtyard. That was about a hundred and fifty men, scarcely a 'regiment' even with the addition of the troop in Valles guarding King Valence III and the troop who'd escorted Cashel, Ilna and Tenoctris to the charnel house. The royal bodyguards had taken heavy casualties ever since they'd begun accompanying Prince Garric. There was no lack of volunteers from line regiments to fill the black-armored ranks, butt selection and training took more time than Attaper'd had free.

Sharina looked up. Her brush was poised to reply on the facing page of the tablet, using red ink because she was the acting ruler of the kingdom whether she liked it or not. She'd been so lost in organizing a response to what was happening miles away that she hadn't noticed the return of Cashel with Tenoctris and the others. Things had been happening so fast....

Her friends were coming toward her one at a time through the narrow aisle the guards had opened for them. Cashel was in front. Seeing him made Sharina feel calmer than she had since the woman ran into the palace screaming that something had happened to her boy. The child, a nine-year-old, had been chasing crows out of the family barley plot. When hellplants crawled out of the sea and began crushing their way across the field, he'd tried to stop them by flinging stones.

The boy's mother had come out of their hut in time to see the boy snatched by a tentacle. Fortunately she'd been too far away to comprehend what Sharina knew must've happened next, and she'd run to Mona for help instead of going out into the field to join her son.

Sharina'd dispatched Lord Waldron with the three regiments billeted in the city to deal with the attack. She hadn't gone herself because she wasn't a warrior like her brother. She couldn't lead an attack the way Garric might well have done, so rather than being in the way of the fighting men, she'd stayed in the palace to command the whole business.

The rest of the army and fleet was scattered across First Atara so that no district was completely overwhelmed by the numbers of strangers it had to feed and house. Those units had to be alerted, and somebody had to make decisions if a second attack occurred while Waldron was involved with the first.

It was possible that a second or third or twentieth attack would occur. Sharina knew their enemy was powerful, but not even Tenoctris could guess how powerful.

Cashel smiled as warmly as an embrace, but instead of putting an arm around her he stepped to the side and let those behind get through also. Tenoctris followed, then Ilna and Chalcus with his usually cheerful face looking like a thunderhead ready to burst forth in hail and lightning. Cervoran was the last.

Sharina's eyes widened in surprise. The person immediately behind Chalcus wasn't Cervoran-it was a slightly smaller copy of Cervoran, dressed in a rag breechclout and the short cape that Chalcus had worn when the group left in the morning. Cervoran, the real Cervoran, was in back of his double.

"I will create the necessary devices in my chamber of art," Cervoran said. The other members of the party were tensely silent, but the soldiers who'd escorted them talked in muted voices to colleagues who'd stayed at the palace. "I cannot breach the Fortress of Glass directly, so I will enter it from another place."

Sharina glanced at Tenoctris who sucked her lips in and shrugged. "I can't judge what Lord Cervoran can do or should be permitted to do, your highness," she said with quiet formality. "I'm trying to follow the various currents of power about us, but I haven't been able to do so as yet."

"You have no choice, fools," Cervoran squeaked. "The Green Woman has sent her servants against one place at present. She will attack other places, all the places on this island. Unless they are stopped, her creatures will advance until they have killed me. Then they will conquer this island and all islands. Only I can stand against the Green Woman, and I must have my chamber of art!"