The Gods Return (7 page)

The thought was so close to what Liane had said a moment ago that Garric barked a laugh. Neither of them were going to retire while the kingdom needed them, though; or anyway, needed somebody to do the jobs they were doing well at present.

"I kept off the main road for the first half mile or so," Aberus said. He hadn't opened his eyes since he collapsed on the bench. "I cut through the orchards mostly. I thought there might be guard posts, but there wasn't any so I got back on the road. Funny not to have guards if they were really worried about monsters in the jungle, but I hadn't believed about the monsters anyway."

Daciano, the staff surgeon of the Blood Eagles, entered the garden with his pair of young female assistants. "Are you all right, your highness?" he asked.

"This is the man you were called for," said Garric peevishly. He gestured toward Aberus, though the surgeon should've been able to see the fellow's condition already.

"And I'll get to him," Daciano said, smiling pleasantly at Garric as he stepped into the arbor, "now that I know your highness is all right."

The ghost of Carus chuckled. "
He's gotten more from serving with the Blood Eagles than just experience stitching up holes in people
," he said.

That was quite true. Lord Attaper commanded the bodyguard regiment. He'd made it clear to his troops that if they kept safe the people they were guarding, he'd stand between them and anybody who complained about the way they went about their job—most certainly including Prince Garric himself.

The Blood Eagles' rigid priorities frequently exasperated Garric, but he'd finally decided that a real craftsman was always going to put his task first. He couldn't very well object to that when he was pretty much the same way himself.

"I wasn't far along the road before I heard a lot of people coming the other way," Aberus said. Daciano had eased Liane aside, but he knelt to look at the agent before touching him. "I thought people, anyhow. Only some of them were, but I didn't know that. So I got off the road again and watched."

Daciano murmured to his assistants. One began to dab the wound with a sponge soaked in sour wine, while the other handed the surgeon a pair of tweezers. They were bronze with silver inlays, and the knob at the end was a finely modeled sheep's head. Despite the tweezers' decoration, they were a fully functional instrument with which Daciano began to clear threads, vegetable debris, and clots of dried blood.

Aberus whimpered deep in his throat, but then he resumed, "They came by, about a hundred of them. They didn't carry lanterns but there was a half-moon. Where trees didn't shade the road, I could see them clear. Mostly they were prisoners, neck-roped to poles by tens. They were all ages, grouped just by how tall they were because of the poles. Two coffles were kids but with a short woman in front to set the pace. Which was a shuffle, that's all it could be."

Garric could see bone now that the cut was clear. Aberus was a brave man beyond question, but even so it seemed remarkable he hadn't screamed and fainted; perhaps there was more than vinegar in the assistant's sponge.

"The guards were rats," Aberus said. "I couldn't mistake it, I was so close. I could smell them. I don't know why they didn't smell me; I could see their noses twitching, twitch twitch twitch all the time. Maybe because of the prisoners. There were plenty humans around. They were rats, only they were as tall as men. Tall as women anyway, and they had swords."

Daciano began trimming the edges of the wound with a pair of shears. Like the tweezers, they were bronze instead of steel. The assistant with the satchel of tools held another pair ready, and a third was laid out with a range of scalpels and probes on the leather pad at her side.

"Alongside there was a man who wasn't tied," Aberus said. "He was riding, but he was on an ox instead of a horse or mule. Slow as the prisoners could go, it didn't matter; an ox was fast enough to keep up. A sheep could've kept—
oh!
"

The surgeon growled at the woman with the sponge; she immediately reversed it and squeezed so that fluid dripped along the blade of the shears. When Daciano resumed his careful cutting, the assistant traded the sponge she'd been using for another of those soaking in a shallow bowl.

"I knew the fellow, I'd talked to him when I arrived," Aberus said. His voice was thin; he wasn't whispering, but he didn't have enough breath to give power to the words. "He was a junior priest named Salmson. The high priest was Nivers, but him I only saw on a balcony of his palace. It was all falling to pieces and he didn't seem in much better shape. And Salmson was talking to the prisoners. He had a skin of wine with him, and I think he'd drunk a lot from it already."

Daciano set down his shears and took the needle his assistant held out in her left hand. It was strung with a glistening strand of gut. The wound looked horrible, worse than it would've done when it was curtained by a wash of blood.

"Salmson was shouting, 'The gods have returned,'" Aberus said. "I told you, he sounded drunk. He said, 'You are honored to be among the first subjects of Franca and his siblings Fallin and Hili. You will help prepare the way for them to rule the whole world. Praise Franca whom your blood serves!'"

The surgeon began sewing, starting deep in the muscle instead of at the lips. The assistant continued to dab with her sponge, but now she held a linen cord ready to place where it could drain the wound.

"The prisoners didn't seem to be listening," Aberus said. "They were walking dead; I don't know how far they'd come already. They're really dead now, I suppose. Well, everybody dies, don't we, Lady?"

Garric wasn't sure whether the agent was praying or speaking to Liane. Of course he might be delirious and think that Liane
was
the Lady. It didn't prevent him from reporting, however.

"One of them saw me," Aberus said. "Or scented me, maybe it was that finally. It squealed just like a rat and jumped. I wasn't expecting it but I was ready, I'm always ready. I put my dagger through its throat and ran, but others came after me. I don't know how many, but there were two more I killed; maybe the rest turned back. They cut me, I couldn't help that, but I kept on going. All the way here, I kept going. All the way."

Daciano was on the upper layer of stitches now, closing the wound. Aberus' forehead was beaded with sweat, but he didn't flinch from the needle. The surgeon was impassive, but his assistants' faces were warm with compassion.

"Franca and His siblings will rule the world!" the agent shouted.
Was he quoting or had he come to believe that himself
?

"I'm calling an immediate council meeting," Garric said to Liane. "I'll need you."

"Of course," she said. To Daciano she added, "Do whatever's possible for him, regardless of cost. I'll pay for it."

"No," said Garric. He took the handle of the travelling desk in his left hand rather than leave it for Liane to carry. "The kingdom will pay."

"The Gods of Palomir rule all!" Aberus cried.

"Not while
I
live!" muttered Garric, stepping onto the staircase.

Which of course didn't, he knew, mean that it wouldn't happen.

* * *

Cashel had noticed long since that the actual words a wizard chanted didn't seem to matter. It was the rhythms they got into that told you what they were doing.

Rasile had laid a pattern of yarrow stalks around the floor of the tower. She sat in the center of it, making sounds that were nothing like the words of power Tenoctris used. They weren't anything like the catmen's ordinary speech, either. Even so, Cashel would've known what was going on even if he hadn't been able to watch her.

The air flickered. It looked a bit like heat lightning, but the only clouds today were horsetails in the high heavens. It must've been the sky itself, twisted by Rasile's power so that sunlight didn't slip through it the way it ought to.

A deafening crackle spread outward from the star pattern. Cashel wasn't sure it was really a sound. It wasn't his ears or even the soles of his feet that noticed; it was more something that prickled inside his head.
The whole world's breaking apart around us!
Spreading his legs a little wider on the tower's floor and gripping his staff midway to either side of the balance, he waited to deal with whatever happened next.

Cashel's feet didn't move. The air cleared. He hadn't known that he and the wizard were in a smoky gleam until it was gone again. They were right where they had been, but the tower was gone and the city was gone. He and Rasile were in the midst of armed civilians and a few soldiers, looking from stone battlements toward a ragtag army on the plains below.

"Begone, you thieves and vagabonds!" cried a man not far from Cashel. He was using a megaphone. The three fellows next to him were older, fatter, and wore gold chains for ornament, so the herald was probably speaking their words. "If you're not gone in three minutes by the sand glass, we'll shoot you all down like the dogs you are!"

They were on top of a gatehouse. There was a socket where a catapult was probably meant to pivot, but there wasn't one in place now. Several soldiers had bows, though, and the folks below were only a furlong away. That was in range of a good bowman.

Rasile was getting to her feet. Cashel put out his arm for her to grab. A man wearing a molded breastplate meant for somebody much thinner strode through them on his way to the group around the herald. Cashel didn't feel the contact, and it didn't seem like the local fellow had either.

"I think we're seeing something that occurred recently," Rasile said. Her tongue clucked against the side of her long jaw in a Corl equivalent of a grin. "Or perhaps something that will occur shortly. I do not know
where
it is, however."

Cashel thought about the way the people around couldn't see or touch him and Rasile, but there wasn't any point in talking about something that the wizard knew a lot better than he did. He said, "We're on Ombis on Telut, I think. I've never been here, but the colors the servants of the envoys from there wore in Valles are the same as—"

He pointed to the cloth hanging down from the herald's megaphone. It was orange around the edges and slashed green on black inside the border.

"—that is."

Cashel noticed shapes and patterns without having to think about them. Sheep might all look alike to city folk, but a shepherd knows each of his flock by name even if he can't count above ten without a tally stick. Heraldry was nothing at all to somebody tuned to little differences in the brown/black/gray/white markings of Haft sheep.

"The fellow in the green robe there," he said as the tallest of the three men in fancy dress turned so Cashel could see his face, "he's the one who was the envoy himself last spring."

There were folks on the wall as far around as Cashel could see from the gate tower. The city wall was only twice his height—the tower was half that again—but that was still a huge advantage.

The defenders weren't well armed. Besides the soldiers, some of the better-dressed civilians had swords and maybe even metal armor, but the rest carried spears of a simple pattern that'd probably come from the city armory. They were in leather caps and breastplates.

That was probably good enough, though, because the attackers outside the walls were just what the herald had called them: vagabonds and thieves. Some were armed with swords as good as those of Ornifal nobles. The gold inlays and ivory hilts didn't mean much in a fight, but Cashel knew that fancy touches like those were often put on the best steel by the best craftsmen.

But there weren't many with swords, and even those few didn't go in much for armor. Some carried boat pikes, long-shafted weapons with a hook below the point to catch rigging or the rail of a ship trying to keep clear. Cashel guessed they were pirates. Even without better weapons, it would've looked hard for the city if the whole army had been that sort.

But all beyond a couple double handsful of pirates were escaped slaves, farm laborers, and the sort of thing you'd find if you emptied out prisons. Some had been branded or were missing hands. They had clubs, pitchforks, and poles with a knife tied to the end.

And there were women. Cashel knew women could fight: he'd seen Sharina joint enemies with her Pewle knife, and even Garric's delicate Lady Liane carried a blade that could—and had—cut deep enough to open the big blood vessels. Some of the slatterns below would be dangerous in an alley or a crowded taproom.

But they weren't going to batter through stone walls. There were plenty of women on the walls too, ready to throw cobblestones and pour down boiling water. Ombis shouldn't have had anything to fear from its attackers—

But Cashel knew that Rasile wouldn't here unless there was more going on than they'd seen thus far. His hands polished his quarterstaff. He guessed that if the city folk passed through him without touching, so would a pirate sword; but just in case.

"That's funny," Cashel said to Rasile. He pointed. "Those people down there don't have any more ranks than a flock of sheep would, but they're making sure to leave a big space back from the chief."

The leader of the pirates was a tall man who'd braided scraps of cloth-of-gold into his blond beard. He was husky too, though not as big as Cashel; there weren't many people who were as big as Cashel. He two long swords and many daggers dangling from his cross-belts, but they were all in their scabbards while he lifted something small and shiny in his left hand.