The Gods Return (31 page)

Tam sighed. "I suppose," he muttered. "I don't like it, though. I'm no saint, Archas, but . . . ."

The last of the ramparts disappeared in a rumbling earthquake, partly crushed but also swallowed by the enormous mouth. Orange-red dust rose in a cloud that staggered forward like a line of cavalry advancing. It covered the foreparts of the creature that had worked the destruction, but hundreds of feet of gray horror continued to grind forward like an unending landslide.

"Even if they surrender, it's all the same for most of them," Tam said. "You give the city to your, your thing. And all the ones who don't join us. Who we don't let join."

"Well, what do you care?" Archas shouted. "What did cities ever do for you, Tam? Why, if we'd tried to get in here a year ago, they'd have arrested us at the gate and likely hung us just for what we looked like!"

And he and his men sure wouldn't have attacked a place like this, whatever its name was. Archas had never had more than six ships under his command—three hundred men, maybe; certainly not more. They'd have had as much chance trying to gnaw through these walls—the walls that the Worm had just finished destroying—as they would assaulting them.

Archas looked at the army he'd assembled in his march north, straggling across the landscape. There were several thousand men, now. Most were slaves and farm laborers who'd joined the band because the life was better than what they were used to. They weren't very different from the pirates he'd commanded before the Change.

The men Archas had taken from captured or surrendered cities were generally soldiers who came with their weapons and knew how to use them. Despite how they feared the Worm they might've been dangerous to him if there'd been more of them, but he saw to it there weren't.

The Army of the East had been attacked several times during its advance. Because it had proper scouts and flankers, only one of the ambushes had forced Archas to loose the Worm.

He hadn't been sure the creature was going back to its own world that time. Hill tribesmen had attacked in a rocky gorge. They were after loot, not trying to halt the column, though by by luck they'd swept down on the carriage in which Archas rode in state. He'd
had
to bring out the Worm to save himself, but there hadn't been much for it to destroy once it'd devoured the mountaineers' meager village.

The Worm had taken his orders at last, but he hadn't been sure it would until the last moment. He'd allowed it to destroy the next city they reached, down to the last mouse and pebble. He hadn't given the populace even a chance to surrender.

"I know, captain, I know," said Tam with a sigh. "I never thought I'd have all the wine and all the women I wanted, all the time. We've got it good, I know we have. Only . . . ."

He'd turned his eyes toward the women. There were more of them than the men by now and almost entirely captives from the cities. Not all whores, either: there were councillors' wives and priests' daughters. They'd volunteered after they learned the alternative, too, because Archas' men didn't need to bother with the unwilling.

Except for the men who liked a struggle, of course. The Army of the East had no few of those, but they generally discarded the women after they'd used them, picking out fresh companions when the next city fell.

"Look, Tam," Archas said. He was cajoling his deputy, but it was really his own heart that he was trying to convince. "They're lucky we're here, that's the truth. If they waited for the rats to spread this far, you know what'd happen. They'd
all
be sacrificed, right? They'd ask us to capture them if they knew the truth."

There was nothing left of the walled city but a pall of dust which continued to churn as the Worm writhed through it. Archas held the talisman close. He'd use it shortly, but he needed to ready himself for what he knew would be a struggle.

"Have another drink," he said to Tam, offering the wineskin he'd slung over his left shoulder. It was almost empty, but there were others.

Tam tossed his helmet to the ground to free his hand. He took the skin and drank deeply. Gesturing toward the helmet with his toe, he said, "Wouldn't be much use against that thing, would it? And there's nothing else I'm worried about here."

"You!" Archas shouted to a man standing nearby, staring transfixed at the Worm's continued progress. "Find some wine and bring it here. Now!"

Tam hadn't needed to explain what "that thing" was.

"I just keep thinking . . . ," Tam said. He looked critically at the wineskin, then shook it; there was enough left to slosh. "Pretty soon the rats are going to swarm over the whole rest of the world, right? Everything's going to be Palomir, except us. What's going to happen then, captain?"

"Don't worry about that, Tam," Archas said with a confidence he didn't feel. "As soon as we take Dariada, everything's going to change. Everything'll be all right as soon as we do that!"

He touched his tongue with his lips. He was sure that things would change.

But he wasn't sure that they'd be all right.

Cashel looked at the stele's carvings again. Rasile, Liane, and the priest were doing that too.

There must be half the city trying to watch Liane and the rest of them. If it hadn't been for the company of soldiers making a half-circle to give them space, Cashel would've been pushing the crowd back with his staff to keep it from trampling the two women. It seemed like the people here had heard stories about the thing that was eating its way north toward them.

Looking between him and Liane—Rasile was squatting on Cashel's other side—Amineus said, "That's the hero Gorand, your ladyship. He's shown strangling the Serpent, as we thought."

He coughed in embarrassment. "We, ah, thought," he continued in a lowered voice, "that the story was an allegory of a great military leader who defeated an attack of pirates from the Outer Sea. Because the sea encircles the Isles like a serpent swallowing its tail."

Liane looked at the priest. "It appears that before the Change, Archas and his men were pirates on the Outer Sea," she said. "But no, I don't believe the image is a serpent. Or an allegory."

"The face looks like the one in the tree," Cashel said. "I think."

"How can you tell?" Amineus said. He wasn't trying to sneer, but he wasn't exactly trying not to either. "This is so small. And ancient."

Cashel shrugged. He moved to the other side of the stele, stepping carefully around Liane.

"Master Amineus?" he said as he stared at the sand-smoothed stone. Kneeling, he began grubbing in the dirt at its base with his knife. "Was this always here? This stele?"

"Well, there are no records about it being erected, I can tell you that," the priest said. "Though that doesn't prove it wasn't set up or moved here from somewhere else without anybody bothering to mention it. Or the records could've been lost, of course."

"The reason I ask is . . . ," Cashel said.
Yes, it was there like he'd thought, a row of letters in the swirly Old Script and maybe another row beneath them
. "There's still some writing here where it got covered before the wind could smooth it away."

"Let me see!" Liane said, squatting beside him. "Ah—please, I mean. And ah—"

"Ma'am, would you like my knife?" Cashel said politely, offering her the haft of the simple tool. A blacksmith had forged the iron blade and pinned wooden scales to it. It could do everything from carving at meals to picking stones out of ox hooves. Or digging dirt away from the base of a stele.

"No, Cashel," Liane said with a laugh. "I'd like you to finish clearing the inscription, as you were doing before I interrupted you. My pardon, please."

"It's more my line of work," Cashel said mildly. He scraped the back of the blade through the gritty earth like a plow breaking unpromising soil. He had to be careful not to snap the iron, because it might be hard to replace. City folks here didn't wear knives any more than they did in Valles or Erdin, and he didn't guess Liane and Rasile would want to traipse about the countryside looking for a smith with a sideline in knives.

Liane rubbed the last of the dirt away with the hem of her cape. The letters were worn, especially on top.

But not so they couldn't be read, apparently. "When the priests have carried out these rites," Liane said in a clear voice, her finger tracing the line to keep her place along the faint letters, "they may summon Lord Gorand from his rest. Lord Gorand will defend the people of Dariada from the Devouring Danger—I think that's what it is—as he defended them in the past."

She rose to her feet and turned. "The rites would've been on the upper part of the stone," she said quietly to Rasile. "I think."

Rasile wagged her tongue in laughter. "Wait," she said. "And read when you see."

The wizard settled herself arms-length from the stone and tossed the yarrow stalks onto the pavement. They fell—just fell as best Cashel could see—into a star with a hand plus two fingers of points.

Rasile started to keen. Because Cashel had been around her, he knew the sounds were Coerli words of power instead of a bellyache.

A column of wizardlight lifted slowly from the center of the star. It was as pure as the sun through a ruby. Folks watching from the other side of the guards shouted, some thrilled but the rest sounding scared.

A soldier glanced back over his shoulder, saw the light and dropped his spear. He fell to his knees crying. The crowd wasn't pushing in the way it had been, though, so that didn't matter except probably to him.

The rod of red light twisted over slowly like a pine tree in a high wind. When the tip of it touched the stele, it spread across the sand-scoured face the way water soaks into a cloth. Instead of coarse gray stone, the background was a pink shimmer on which burned letters as sharp and solid as if they'd been cut from carnelian.

"If the Devouring Danger threatens again," Liane read, swinging into the business just like she'd been waiting for it, "the priests will speak the following words of power: "
Abrio set alarpho . . .
"

Rasile yowled something that didn't have a syllable in common with what Liane had said. Cashel didn't think a human throat could even have made the sound. The cadence of the chant was the same, though.

Liane read, "
Alar alarioth
. . ." She stood just as straight and calm as if she was talking to Sharina about how formal to dress for a meeting. As her words spilled out, Rasile sang them back in Corl fashion.

The air was turning red like the surface of the stone. The crowd and soldiers had all run off by now. Some had opened their mouths open to scream, but Cashel hadn't heard anything over a sound like the wind rushing through a stand of hemlocks.

Amineus was gone too; back into his office, Cashel supposed. If you hadn't seen it before, this sort of business was scary and no mistake.

"
Orthio!
" said Liane and there were more Coerli screeches. It seemed to Cashel that Rasile was responding even before she heard Liane, though he hadn't any real way to tell. He couldn't understand the words either one of the women were using.

The air glowed brighter than a ruby, as bright as pure flame. Cashel stood behind Rasile and Liane, his quarterstaff crossed before him. He wondered if he ought to turn to watch their backs, but this seemed the right choice just for now.

A flash of intense light swept everything else away. Dry heat engulfed Cashel and his companions.

* * *

Sharina could hear the click of tiny claws as Burne patrolled the mosaic floor. He was much more active at night, though he adapted to a human schedule as he had to.

She smiled against the pillow. A year ago—a week ago!—she'd never have believed that she'd feel soothed by the sound of a rat walking around her bed . . . but she did. Still smiling, she slept; and as she slept, she dreamed.

"Come to me, princess," the voice called. She didn't see Black this time. Perhaps he was below her on the blue world rotating slowly. "You have nothing to fear. Lord Scorpion exalts you over all women: He has chosen you for His priestess."

Land turned into view from the edge of the sphere, set off by a white border of surf. Sharina recognized the outline of the Isles against the Outer Sea: they'd been etched on the crystal floor of a room in the palace. Around the map cut by a great wizard of the Old Kingdom was written a legend added in the blocky New Script by a Duke of Ornifal before he seized the throne of the Isles: the navel of the cosmos.

That had been a lie, of course. It was doubly a lie now that the Isles no longer existed as an archipelago but had rather become the periphery of a great continent. Valles was becoming a ghost town, sinking into a swamp because the River Beltis had drained into an Inner Sea which no longer existed.

"You
will
submit, princess," Black said, cajoling her in a voice of thunder. "And even if you could resist, you would be mad to attempt it. From Lord Scorpion you will receive power and unexampled riches, but if the Gods of Palomir should take this world under Their suzerainty—"

The new continent had rotated so that it was directly beneath Sharina's vantage point. For the first time since she'd begun to dream tonight, she realized that she had a body. Pandah swelled in her awareness; not the real Pandah of mud and wicker around a core of ancient palaces but Pandah as rebuilt in black granite to honor Lord Scorpion.