Crown Of The Isles 02 The Mirror of Worlds-ARC Read online

  THE MIRROR OF WORLDS-ARC

  by David Drake

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  The Mirror of Worlds: Copyright 2007 by David Drake

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover art by Donato

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Tor Books on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  First Edition: July 2007

  ISBN 10: 0-7653-1260-3

  ISBN 10: 978-0-7653-1260-0

  Library of Congress Card t/k

  Printed in the United States of America

  DEDICATION

  To Lucile Carter

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dan Breen continues as my first reader, catching the sort of grammatical errors which creep in when I'm writing fast or heavily editing chunks that just didn't come out right the first time. (Or the second time and third time, often enough. My roughs are often a mass of arrows, brackets, scribblings and overstrikes by the time they get to Dan.) He's also very good on size issues. As an aside, he was hugely amused when he saw that the counterpart in the Isles of Saxo Grammaticus was the Scribe of Breen.

  My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, and Dorothy Day archived my texts in widely separated parts of the country. If an asteroid destroys the Triangle region of North Carolina, it will still be possible to reconstruct my drafts. (I won't be the person reconstructing them in that event, of course.)

  In addition, Dorothy acted as my continuity person (for example, "What the dickens was the name of the Minister of Supply?") and Karen provided research on all manner of questions that cropped up while I was writing (for example, "I need more information on the Great Tar Lake of Jamaica." Which, lest anyone be misled, turned out to be the Great Pitch Lake of Trinidad.) Their efforts made the book better and my life easier.

  It's traditional that each of my novels involves a computer problem. This time the power supply of my desktop unit (hooked up to my laser printer) went out as I started the first-pass edit. Mark L Van Name diagnosed the problem, my son Jonathan fixed it, and his facility manager Bill Catchings allowed Jonathan to borrow a power supply from stores to keep me operating until the new unit came in. This kind of skill and expertise is commercially available (from Mark, Jonathan, and Bill, among others), but I personally don't know enough about computers to have found it on my own.

  I dedicated this book to Miss Carter, my first Latin teacher (Junior and Senior years of high school). I wasn't particularly interested in languages at the time, and I certainly didn't apply myself in her classes. She was nonetheless a good enough teacher that she instilled a love for Latin which I wasn't aware of until I switched to German when I went off to college. I returned to Latin and haven't been very far from it since that day.

  I can scarcely overstate Latin's importance to my life generally and to the Isles series in particular. Without Miss Carter, I might be without the language and all the benefits it's brought me.

  This past summer has been difficult. My wife Jo has been enormously supportive throughout.

  Every time I create an acknowledgments page I'm reminded of how much my novels are collaborative projects, even though I'm doing all the writing myself. The book wouldn't be nearly as good without my family and friends. Losing a close friend, as I did this summer, drives home how very important my circle of family and friends is to my me generally.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  I've based the religion of the Isles generally on that of Sumer: the sacred triad of Inanna, Dumuzi, and Ereshkigal. The words of power, however, are the voces mysticae of the documentary magic common in the Mediterranean Basin during classical times. This was the language spoken to the demiurges who would in turn intercede on behalf of humans with the Gods.

  I have no personal religious beliefs, but many very intelligent people believed that these voces mysticae were effective in rousing spiritual powers to affect human endeavors. I prefer not to pronounce them aloud. Readers can make their own decisions on the subject.

  As usual in the Isles series, the literary allusions in this novel are to classical and medieval writers of our own world. I won't bother to list the correspondences here, but the reader can rest assured that they exist.

  I'll mention one further point. I almost always have a photograph or a painting beside me while I work on a scene. That helps me give touches of reality to the fantasy worlds I'm creating. As one example among many, this time I used a copy of Les Tres Riches Heures of the Duke de Berry, an illuminated manuscript from around 1411 ad.

  Readers familiar with horses will know that sidesaddles now put the rider's legs to the left. If those persons will check August of Les Tres Riches Heures, they'll see that two of the three women riding have their legs to the right.

  While I do make mistakes, I suggest that this shouldn't be the first assumption readers make when they find something that surprises them.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  Chapter 1

  Ilna looked down the valley to the gray limestone temple and the slaughtered bodies around it. There were many corpses, though she didn't know precisely how many: when a number was higher than she could count on her fingers, she had to tell it with beans or pebbles . . . if she cared.

  Mostly she didn't care. These folk, the humans and the catmen who must've killed them and been killed in turn, were all dead. The dead didn't matter.

  Ilna had loved her family, Chalcus and Merota. They didn't matter either because catmen had killed them also.

  "It can't've happened long ago," said Asion, the small, dark man who cropped his hair and beard with a knife at long intervals. Ilna'd known the hunter for nearly a month, and she hadn't seen him trim it in that time. "I don't smell them in the breeze."

  "There's no breeze," said Karpos, his ginger-haired partner, equally unkempt. He crushed a pellet of dry soil between the thumb and finger of his right hand, letting the dust drift to the ground. It fell straight, so far as Ilna could see. "You're just pretending you feel one."

  "There's a breeze," said Asion crooking his left index finger without taking his eyes off the valley. "The fuzz on my ears feels the wind even when dust won't drift. There's breeze enough that I'd smell them if they'd started to stink."

  Karpos' left hand held a short, very stiff wooden bow with an arrow nocked; its point was bronze, thin but with broad wings that'd require only a few heartbeats to bleed out the life of whatever he hit fairly. Asion had a sling with a short staff and linen thongs. For ordinary hunting he shot smooth pebbles, but he carried a few pointed lead bullets in a pouch; one of those was in the pocket of molded leather now.

  A word was cast into the metal of the bullets. Asion seemed to think it was a valuable charm, though he wasn't sure because the hunters couldn't read any better than Ilna did.

  Ilna didn't believe in charms of that sort. From what she'd seen since the hunters joined her, the strength of Asion's shoulders would be sufficient for most purposes.

  Ilna glanced at the strands of yarn in her hands, ready to be woven into a pattern to freeze the mind or stop the heart of anyone who saw it. She could instead knot the yarn into a simple oracle to answer the question, "Does an enemy wait for us below?"

  She did something similar every morni
ng to choose the direction for the day's travels . . . but such care wasn't required now. She trusted the long, fine fur growing on the top of Asion's ears, and she trusted her own instinct to tell her if something ahead wasn't right, was out of place in a peaceful valley. She didn't feel that here.

  Ilna'd lived in a hamlet on the east coast of Haft until she was eighteen. Two years ago a wizard named Tenoctris had washed up on shore and everything had changed. She and her brother Cashel had left home forever, accompanied by their childhood friends, Garric and Sharina. And now—

  Garric was ruler of the Isles; his sister had become Princess Sharina of Haft; and Cashel had the only thing that'd ever mattered to him, Sharina's love. He could be Lord Cashel if he'd wanted, but the title meant no more to him than it would've to Ilna.

  Ilna's lips were as hard as knife edges. At one time she'd have said she didn't want anything beyond what her skill at weaving brought her. Then she met Chalcus and Merota, a man and a child who loved her . . . until they were killed.

  Ilna smiled. Death was the greatest and perhaps the only peace she could imagine. Until then, she'd kill catmen.

  "We'll go down," she said, standing and stepping out of the brush without waiting to see whether the hunters agreed. That was their business; they'd joined her, rather than Ilna os-Kenset clinging to a chance-met pair of strong, confident men for protection. The skills Ilna had learned in Hell were far more lethally effective than the hunters' weapons and muscles. Though—

  Ilna knew that meeting Asion and Karpos wasn't really chance. Her oracle had directed her over a ridge and into a valley to the east of the one she'd been following for the first week after she left the royal army and her friends. Her surviving friends. The smell of a fire had led her to the hunters, smoking thin-sliced venison on a rack of green twigs.

  Asion and Karpos followed her because they were confused and fearful, while Ilna had purpose. The Change, the mixing of eras by wizardry, had turned the Isles into the single great continent which had existed in its far past. The hunters—Ilna assumed they were from a much earlier time; she and they struggled occasionally with each other's dialect, though they understood one another well enough—had been completely disoriented by what had happened.

  Ilna didn't understand the Change any better than the hunters did, but that was simply one more thing that didn't matter to her. She lived to kill the catmen, the Coerli, because they'd killed the man and the child who'd given her life meaning.

  The hunters would've been willing to do things they found difficult to be allowed to accompany Ilna. All she asked them to do was to kill, and at that to kill animals rather than men. That Asion and Karpos found as natural as breathing.

  Karpos went down with Ilna, angling a little out from her left side and letting his long legs carry him enough ahead that he could be said to be leading. His right thumb and forefinger rested on his bowstring, ready to draw it back to his ear and loose in a single motion. Karpos was a raw-boned man with beetling brows. He looked slow and awkward, but he'd shown that he was neither.

  Ilna smiled. The oracle of her cords wouldn't have led her to Karpos and his partner if they hadn't been the sort of men she needed as helpers.

  Asion waited on the ridge, watching the back-trail as Ilna and Karpos walked down the gentle slope. The men had hunted dangerous game together for a decade, so they were naturally cautious. That was good, though the great scaly herbivores they'd hunted on Ornifal in their own day weren't nearly as deadly as the Coerli they preyed on at Ilna's direction.

  The valley'd been planted in barley or oats—the shoots were too young for Ilna to be sure; ancient olives budded in gnarled majesty among the furrows. Ilna gave a tight smile: the trees appeared to be randomly spaced, but they formed a pattern so subtle that she would've said no one but herself or her brother Cashel could see it.

  Almost no one, perhaps. Ilna didn't like pride, in herself least of all, and she especially disliked learning that she'd arrogantly assumed she was uniquely skilled. She smiled a little wider: since she disliked herself at most times, having a particular cause didn't make a great deal of difference.

  A goat bleated on the far side of the valley. There was a sizable herd, cropping the grass growing among the rocks on that slope. No one had kept goats in the borough around Barca's Hamlet where Ilna grew up. Goats were hard on pastures, though Ilna'd been told they gave better milk than sheep. Sheep's milk and brick-hard whey cheese had been good enough for Ilna and her brother when they were growing up as orphans; good enough when they could afford them, that was.

  "They aren't straying into the crops," she remarked, her eyes narrowing as she watched the herd. The goats were aware of her and Karpos, but they didn't appear skittish or even much interested. "Though there's nobody watching them."

  The hunter shrugged. "All dead, I reckon," he said. "There's no fires burning and nothing to hear but the birds. And the goats, I mean. Do we have goat meat tonight, mistress?"

  "I'll tell you when I decide," Ilna said curtly. The hunters didn't appreciate how well trained the goats must be that they didn't stray into the crops.

  There'd been a time when Ilna took certain things for granted. Oh, not in her speech the way most people did, but still in the back of her mind: the sun would rise, the wind would blow, and Chalcus and Merota would go through life with her.

  So far the sun continued to rise and the wind to blow, but those might change in a heartbeat; and if they did, that would matter less to Ilna than the loss of her family had. Still, for now there were Coerli to kill.

  Three bodies lay just ahead, two middle-aged human males and a catman. They'd been hacked savagely by swords or axes: one man had been disemboweled and the Corl's head clung to his shoulders by a scrap of skin—its spine was cut through. No weapons were in evidence, but the catman's muzzle was bloody.

  "We don't have to worry about what's behind us, now," Karpos said. "Hold up before we check on what might be waiting inside, right?"

  Without taking his eyes off the temple and sprawled bodies, the hunter raised his right arm and waved to his partner. Before returning his fingertips to the nocked arrow, Karpos wiggled his long dagger in its sheath to make sure it was free.

  Ilna didn't think they needed to wait for Asion, but she didn't argue the point. If it'd mattered, she'd have done as she pleased—and seen to it that the hunters did as she pleased also. She didn't need to prove her power; that was for weak people.

  She considered for a moment, then put the hank of yarn back in the sleeve of her outer tunic. She'd woven the cloth herself, and she'd also woven her cloak of unbleached wool that shed water like a slate roof.

  Karpos and his partner wore breeches and vests of untanned deerskin with the flesh side turned out. The packs that they'd left back on the ridgeline included fur robes for cold weather, though the season had advanced so that they were no longer necessary even at night.

  Ilna suspected the men continued to carry the robes because the town to which they'd previously hiked every Spring to sell packloads of lizard gall didn't exist in the world after the Change. They were unwilling to give up the few aspects of their past life which still remained.

  The hunters had decorated their vests by sewing on the scalps of Coerli they'd killed since joining Ilna, a double-handful each. Ilna didn't object, but of course she didn't take trophies herself.

  All that mattered to Ilna was the killing. When she'd killed all the catmen in this world, she didn't know what she'd do. Die, she hoped, because her life would no longer have purpose.

  Asion joined them, holding the staff of his sling in his right hand and cupping the pocket and bullet in his left. "Have you guys noticed the pond?" he said with a frown in his voice. "Why did they do that, d'ye think? Throw the plants in?"

  The little temple was set up three steps from the ground. Forsythias grew around both it and the small, round pool in front of the building. Several bushes had been pulled up by the roots and thrown into the water. The men who
'd done that had mortal wounds, clearly. One of them lay on the curb with a yellow-flowered branch clutched in a death grip.

  "What do they have a pond there anyway?" said Karpos. "Are they raising fish? It's too small."

  "I don't know," Ilna said. She didn't add to the statement, because there was nothing to add and she saw no point in wasting her breath. "Let's go on, then."

  The pool surprised her as well, though she didn't bother saying so. Ilna hadn't seen a temple till she left Barca's Hamlet some two years—or a lifetime—before, but there'd been plenty of them in the cities she'd passed through since then. Ilna didn't pay particular attention to buildings, but she had an eye for patterns. She'd certainly have made note of a temple facing a pool if she'd seen one. This was the first.

  Karpos knelt and placed his right index and middle fingers to the throat of the first corpse, a man lying on his back. The fellow's hair was white, as much of it as was left; his forehead rose to the peak of his scalp. His face was as calm as if he'd been praying, though the wounds that'd killed him—three deep stabs in the lower body and a slash that'd broken the bone of his upper right arm—must've been extremely painful.