The Gods Return Read online

  He tapped the staff lightly, clicking its iron butt cap on the tower’s stone floor. To his surprise, a sizzle of blue wizardlight spat away from the contact.

  Rasile noticed the spark also. Her grin bared a jawful of teeth that were noticeably sharper than those of a human being.

  “I told you the fight was not over, Warrior Cashel,” she said. “I felt but I did not say that Chief Garric would be wise to keep me by him. I cannot do as much as his Tenoctris does, but I can do some things; and he will need many things done if he and his kingdom, our kingdom, are to survive the coming struggle.”

  Cashel nodded without speaking. From this vantage he could see birds fishing the pools that now dotted the plains where the Inner Sea had rippled before the Change. Most were the white or gray of seagulls, but there were darker shapes which flashed blue when they caught the sun right: kingfishers, he was sure.

  “Would you mind staying here a little longer, Warrior Cashel?” the Corl wizard said. “I would like to work a small spell. Both our height above the ground and your presence will aid me, I believe.”

  “Whatever you want, ma’am,” Cashel said. “And I’d appreciate you just call me Cashel. I’m not a warrior, you know. I’m just a shepherd.”

  Rasile snorted mild laughter as she squatted on her haunches. She took a handful of yarrow stalks out of a bag woven from willow withies, so fine and dense that Cashel thought it would shed water. The cat men were good at weaving; even Ilna said so.

  “You see what you see, shepherd,” Rasile said. “But I see what the world sees. If you do not want me to say ‘Warrior,’ I will not say the word. But the truth does not change, Cashel.”

  She tossed the yarrow stalks into a pattern on the stone, then began mumbling words of power. Cashel didn’t pay much attention to her. He kept watching the sky and the land beneath, the directions that danger might come from.

  He was a shepherd, after all.

  SHARINA LOOKED AROUND the apartment in which Tenoctris lived and worked. She hoped her shocked dismay didn’t show in her expression. The small room had been let into the outer wall of the citadel. The walls wept condensate, and the only window was the small one in the iron-braced door. In all, the place would’ve been suitable for a prison cell—and had probably been used as one in the past.

  Besides being a friend of Prince Garric and Princess Sharina, Tenoctris was the wizard who through advice and skill had done as much to preserve mankind as had any other single person. Though Pandah’s population was increasing by the day, she could have any quarters she wanted.

  “Oh, dear,” Tenoctris said in obvious dismay. She looked like a woman of twenty-two or three, pert and pretty without being beautiful. Apparently Sharina hadn’t kept her face blank. “I’m sorry, dear. I chose this room because it’s what I’m used to. I didn’t mean to suggest that you wouldn’t give me better or, well, anything. You have to remember that for most of my life—”

  She shrugged. Tenoctris had been a woman of seventy when she’d washed up on the shore of Barca’s Hamlet, flotsam flung a thousand years forward in time by the cataclysm which ended the Old Kingdom. She now appeared to be the woman she’d been in her youth, but that was true only physically. She’d gained both knowledge and wisdom over a long life. She retained those virtues and had now added power that few wizards ever could have claimed.

  “—I was considered rightly to be a wizard of very little power. I prided myself on my scholarship, again I think rightly, but—”

  Tenoctris grinned. Her cheerfully wry expression would’ve been enough by itself for Sharina to identify her, no matter what features she was wearing.

  “—scholars aren’t lodged or fed as well as wizards who can split mountains with an incantation and a gesture.”

  “Well, speaking as an innkeeper’s daughter rather than as Princess Sharina,” Sharina said, keeping her tone light, “I’d rather a friend of mine had better lodging. But I understand the attraction of the familiar. I wish I had the same freedom in what I wear.”

  She tweaked her silk robe. It was a relatively simple garment compared with full court dress weighing as much as a cavalryman’s armor, but contrasted with the tunic she’d ordinarily worn in Barca’s Hamlet—both an inner and an outer tunic for unusually formal occasions—it was heavy, hot, and confining.

  A squad of soldiers talked in low voices as they waited outside in the passage. They were Blood Eagles, members of the royal bodyguard. Sharina had come to accept that, because she was a princess and regent in her brother’s absence, she would always have guards.

  She grimaced. It wasn’t that she wanted to be alone—nobody in a peasant village expected privacy, especially in the winter when even a wealthy household heated only one room. She wasn’t used to people actually caring what she did, however, day in and day out. Well, there was no help for it; and the dangers were real enough.

  Sharina smiled faintly. Though she doubted men with swords would be any help against the wizardry which had been the worst danger to the kingdom these past two years.

  “What’s your opinion of Rasile, Sharina?” Tenoctris asked abruptly. She fluttered her hands, also familiar—though it seemed odd to see a young woman making the gesture an old woman used to make. “I know she’s a powerful wizard; that I can judge. What sort of person was she to work with?”

  Sharina took time to frame her reply. The room’s low-backed chair was stacked with codices. The bed likewise, though there was room enough for a slim person to sleep along the outer edge. And the three wicker baskets of scrolls, though of a height to be sat on, struck Sharina as too flimsy for that to be a safe option.

  There was room to squat, however. She squatted, just as she would’ve done back home while popping open peapods for dinner.

  “Rasile doesn’t waste words,” she said. She grinned. “Or mince them. Which I actually appreciate. She’s brave, calm, and good company.”

  Sharina met the gaze of the old/young wizard who’d seated herself on the edge of the low bed, putting their eyes on a level. “She wasn’t you, Tenoctris,” she said. “But you couldn’t have left me with a better helper.”

  “No, she isn’t me,” Tenoctris said with a quirk of her lips, a smile that wasn’t quite humorous. “She’s a great deal more powerful than I ever was. And equally precise, which is why she hasn’t precipitated a cataclysm the way so many powerful wizards have done in the past. Also, I don’t think she cares much about her power.”

  “She isn’t as powerful as you are now, though?” Sharina said carefully. She wasn’t trying to be flattering, but she needed to understand the tools that preserved the kingdom. Tenoctris and Rasile were among those tools, just as surely as she and her brother and all those who took the side of Good were.

  She was Princess Sharina. She had to think that way if she was to do the best possible work in the struggle with evil, and there was no margin for anything but the best possible work.

  “Cashel is accompanying Rasile at this moment,” Tenoctris said, looking squarely at Sharina. “I thought that might be a good pairing for the future, if the kingdom’s safety required a wizard with suitable protection to act at a distance from the palace and army.”

  Sharina didn’t mean to turn away, but she found her eyes were resting on the top codex of the pile on the chair. It’d been bound with the pebbled skin of a lizard. There was no legend on the cover, but on the edge of the pages was written Hybro in vermilion ink. The word didn’t mean anything to her.

  She pursed her lips. “You mean the sort of thing you and Cashel did just now, while I led the army against Pandah,” she said without emphasis. She looked at the wizard again. The young, pretty, very powerful wizard. “That went very well, I believe.”

  “Yes,” said Tenoctris flatly, “it did.”

  She paused. “I always found Cashel impressive,” she said. “I find him even more so now that I have—”

  She twisted a lock of hair to call attention to her gleaming, sandy-red curls.
/>
  “—more capacity for appreciation.”

  This time it was Tenoctris who looked away. She cleared her throat and continued, “Sharina, I have powers that I wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, dreamed of in the past.”

  She smiled wryly. “In a very long past life. I hope that this power hasn’t caused me to lose my judgment, however. Specifically, it hasn’t caused me to miss what Cashel is: a rock which will stand though the heavens fall.”

  “I never doubted you, Tenoctris,” Sharina said. She didn’t know if that was true. Her lips were dry.

  “If you’re wise,” Tenoctris said, smiling again, “then you never doubted Cashel. You never should doubt Cashel, Sharina. Though the heavens fall.”

  Sharina rose, feeling a trifle dizzy. That was common after squatting, after all. “I’m sure Rasile will find him a good companion and protector,” she said. “If there’s need, of course.”

  There would be need. Sharina was as sure of that as she was that there would be a thunderstorm. She didn’t know when or how violent it would be—

  But she knew that the storm was coming.

  ILNA’S FINGERS KNOTTED short lengths of cord as she looked at the four people across the desk from her. She was angry, but that—like the fact the sun rises in the east—wasn’t unusual enough to be worth comment.

  Directly before her were a pair of plump young women, Carisa and Bovea, foster nurses employed by the Lady Merota bos-Roriman Society for Orphans; they were crying. A man of thirty named Heismat, originally from Cordin, sat to their left. He’d wanted to stand, but he’d obeyed when Ilna ordered him onto the third low stool. Despite his bluster and the angry red of his face, Heismat’s eyes were cold with fear.

  Ilna smiled, though nobody could’ve mistaken the expression for humor. Heismat knew he was in trouble, though as yet he didn’t understand how serious the trouble was. It was hard to convince some people that they shouldn’t knock children around, and even more people thought a Corl kit was an animal rather than a child.

  Mistress Winora, the manager of the Merota Society, stood beside the door with her hands crossed at her waist; her face was expressionless. Winora was fifty, the widow of a merchant from Erdin who’d been killed in the chaos that followed the Change. She’d kept the books and managed the Erdin end of the business while her husband traveled, so she—unlike Ilna—had the skills required to run the day-to-day operations of the Society.

  Carisa and Bovea were among the many other women who’d lost their spouses recently. There were even more orphans than there were widows, so it’d seemed perfectly obvious to Ilna to put the two together to the advantage of both, paying each pair of nurses a competence sufficient to care for a handful of children. She’d done so in the name of Merota, who’d been an orphan also until Ilna and Chalcus took charge of her.

  Ilna’s fingers knotted, forming a very complex pattern. It calmed her to knot and weave, but she had a specific purpose this time. She was very angry.

  Merota and Chalcus had died during the Change. If you believed in souls, then Ilna’s soul had died with them—with her family. Ilna didn’t believe in souls or gods or anything, really, except craftsmanship. And she believed in the death that would come to all things, though perhaps not as soon as she would like.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Heismat snarled. He glared at his knotted hands. He’d been a laborer before the Change and had come to Pandah to work in the building trade. “I said I was sorry, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to do it!”

  “Mistress,” blubbered Carisa. Heismat was her boyfriend. “It was only because he was drinking, you know. He’s a good man, a good man, really.”

  “Mistress Winora, how is the kit?” Ilna asked. Her voice was thin and as cold as the wind from the Ice Capes.

  “She’ll live,” Winora said. Her face was bleak, her tone emotionless. Winora regarded this as failure on her part. “She’ll probably limp for the rest of her life, but we may be lucky.”

  Ilna nodded. “Worse things happen in this world,” she said.

  It wasn’t Winora’s fault. It was the fault of Ilna os-Kenset, who’d created a situation which allowed a child to be injured instead of being protected as was supposed to have happened.

  Worse things happened, as she’d said. She’d done far worse things herself. But this particular thing wouldn’t happen again.

  “There were other instances of Master Heismat hitting the kit,” Winora said. “They weren’t as serious, and I didn’t learn about them until after this event. I’m sorry, mistress. I wasn’t watching as closely as I should have done.”

  “People make mistakes,” Ilna said quietly, her eyes on Heismat; he fidgeted under the cold appraisal. She thought, At least you’re aware that it was a mistake. If Winora had said the wrong thing—and it wouldn’t have had to be very wrong, because Ilna was extremely angry—she’d have been next in line as soon as Ilna was done with Heismat.

  “Mistress, please,” Carisa said, mumbling into her kerchief wadded in both hands. “Heismat’s a good man, only the cats killed his whole family. Please, mistress.”

  The rhythmic ching! ching! of iron on stone sounded from the courtyard. A mason was carving letters and embellishments for the lintel with strokes of a narrow-bladed adze. Ilna had been angry to learn that money was being spent on what she considered needless ornamentation when a painted sign would do.

  She’d checked her facts before she acted, though; someone who got as angry as Ilna did learned to check the facts before acting. Lady Liane bos-Benliman, the fiancée of Prince Garric and, less publicly, the kingdom’s spymaster, had ordered the carving. Liane was paying for the job from her own funds.

  Ilna still thought the carving was an unnecessary expense, but she’d learned a long time ago that what she thought and what the world thought were likely to be very different. And Ilna also knew that she made mistakes.

  Sometimes it felt like she made only mistakes, though of course that wasn’t true anyplace but in Ilna’s heart. She’d thanked Liane for her generosity.

  “Mistress,” said Heismat, glaring at his hands. “I didn’t mean it, only I come home and there the beast—”

  “Cloohe, mistress!” said Bovea. “Little Cloohe, and it’s my fault, I’d shut her up when we saw it was getting on and Heismat wasn’t home yet, but she must’ve slipped out while I was dozing.”

  “I seen the, the cat, and I thunk of my own three that the cats kilt and I couldn’t stop myself, mistress,” Heismat said brokenly toward his knotted fists. “I’d drunk a bit much. I knowed I shoulda kept away, but I wanted to see Carisa and, and I didn’t think. I seed the, the kit, and I just flew hot.”

  “Mistress, it was the drink,” Carisa said. “It’s my own fault not to keep Cloohe locked up better when it got so late and Heismat not back.”

  “I’ve already split the women up and put them with stronger partners, mistress,” Winora said in the same dry tone as before. “They’re among the best caretakers we have. Though of course I’ve warned them that you may choose to dismiss or otherwise punish them.”

  Ilna shrugged. “I’m concerned with preventing a recurrence,” she said, “not vengeance. I tried vengeance long enough to determine that it wasn’t a satisfactory answer.”

  How many of the Coerli did I kill after they’d slaughtered Chalcus and Merota? Many, certainly. More than even Merota, who counted any number you pleased without using tellers, could’ve kept track of.

  Ilna smiled. Bovea, who happened to be looking at her, stifled a scream with her knuckles.

  “Mistress, I’m sorry,” Heismat said, stumbling over the words in his fear. “I swear by the Lady it’ll never happen again. Never!”

  “It were just the drink, mistress,” Carisa pleaded. “He’s a good man.”

  Ilna looked at the girl; without expression, she’d have said, but from the way Carisa cringed back there must’ve been something after all. “As men go,” Ilna said quietly, “as human beings go, I suppose you’re right.
Though I’m angry enough as it is, so I don’t see what you think to gain by emphasizing the fact.”

  Carisa blinked. Her hand was over her mouth. “Mistress, I don’t understand?” she mumbled.

  Ilna grimaced. There were sheep with more intelligence than this girl—who was Ilna’s age or older in actual years.

  Still, Carisa was a good mother to orphans, which is more than Ilna herself could say. While Ilna was caring for Merota, a cat man with a stone mace had dashed the child’s brains out.

  “Master Heismat, look at me,” Ilna said.

  Heismat’s face twitched into a rictus. His eyes slanted to Ilna’s left, then above her; he knuckled his balled fists.

  “Master Heismat,” Ilna said. She didn’t raise her voice, but her anger sang like a good sword vibrating. “I’m offering you an alternative to being hanged and your body dumped in a rubbish tip, but I assure you that I will go the other way if you don’t cooperate.”

  “Mistress, I’m sorry,” the laborer said. Tears were dribbling into his sandy beard and the rank stain darkening his gray pantaloons showed that he’d lost control of his bladder, but he was looking directly at Ilna as she’d demanded. “It’ll never happen again, I swear!”

  Ilna raised the pattern she’d knotted. It was quite a subtle piece of work, though no one else in the world would’ve understood that. Her patterns generally affected everyone who looked at them. That was true here as well, but only Heismat had the background to be affected. His memories were the nether millstone against which Ilna’s fabric would grind out misery and horror.

  She smiled because she was very angry, then folded the pattern into itself and placed it in her left sleeve. She’d pick the knots out shortly.

  “All right,” Ilna said, rising. “Mistress Winora, you’ll have business to go over with the nurses.”

  She looked at Heismat, who was blinking in surprise. “Master Heismat,” she said, “you’re free to go also.”

  She considered adding, “And I hope I never see you again,” but that would’ve been pointless and Ilna tried to avoid pointless behavior. Given that all existence struck her as fairly pointless, the whole business was probably an exercise in self-delusion, another thing that she’d have said she tried to avoid. The train of thought made her smile.