The Mirror of Worlds-ARC Page 31

  "Would you like me to walk on my hands, master?" asked Kore as she started forward.

  "No," said Garric. He frowned and asked, "Could you?"

  "That's Laila," the officer said in a choking voice, staring at the dancing image. His mouth opened and he looked at the aegipan again. "That's Laila!"

  "Is it indeed?" Shin said. His voice was always melodious, always cheerful. He picked up more dust.

  "It might be an unexplored talent of mine," Kore replied archly. "But of course if you prefer that I conceal my creative spirit beneath a mask of dull conformity, I will."

  Garric laughed out loud, which startled the soldiers but also relaxed them. One had been poising his flint-pointed spear to throw, then easing it forward again. He lowered its butt to the ground.

  Which maybe was just what the ogre had intended, Garric thought as she knelt for him to step out of the straps. It wasn't the kind of help he'd have gotten from the gelding.

  "Tasty though the gelding was, I should in fairness remark," Kore said.

  Shin tossed up the second handful of dust. It too swirled and shimmered into a full-sized figure. The small amount of material shouldn't have more than hinted at the outline, but she looked as solid as the dancer: heavy-bodied, heavy-featured; waddling rather than spinning.

  The officer cried in horror and closed his eyes. He slashed twice across nothingness, then dropped his sword and ran off at an angle to the woodline. He was sobbing.

  Shin moved out from under the images. They collapsed as quickly as they'd formed, settling onto the plants on the floor of the open forest.

  The aegipan laughed and said, "I shouldn't wonder if he imagined he saw his wife in that second figure. Perhaps he was afraid that she'd notice his mistress, do you think?"

  Most of the common soldiers had melted away, hunching through the scrub to gain the fields rather than retreating into the teak forest. A few had remained, however, watching the strangers with dumb resignation.

  Garric took a few bronze pieces from his belt purse. He displayed them in his left palm as he walked toward the nearest soldier, a bowman.

  "As I said, my good sir, we're peaceful travellers," Garric said. "Can you tell me if we'll find an inn as we follow this road?"

  The local stared at the money, seemingly oblivious of all else. He didn't reach out to take it, though.

  "Here, fellow, it's yours," Garric said, jingling the coins in his palm.

  He didn't want to drop the money on the ground—it'd be demeaning, though he doubted the local man would care—so he took the fellow's right hand in his, opened it, and poured the coins into it. "Is there an inn on this road?" Garric said.

  A second soldier had been watching the whole event silently. Now he burst out, "There's nothing on this road but Lord Holm's domains."

  He spat on the ground and added, "Much good may you do each other!"

  * * *

  Cashel put his hand on the trunk of the nearest tree in the grove, just to feel the familiar springiness in the plates of bark. Even city folk could identify a shagbark hickory, at least if they'd ever seen one before. Which they wouldn't have if they'd spent all their lives on Ornifal, Cashel would've said—until just now when Tenoctris halted the gig beside this grove on the west side of the palace compound.

  "Tenoctris," he said, "did these trees come here because of the Change? Because I'd never seen hickories on Ornifal before, and these are old ones."

  "They were planted by a young woman," Tenoctris said, continuing to mark a five-sided figure as she spoke. "She was a bor-Torial—a princess, in fact. Her lover was the emissary of the Count of Haft. He was lost at sea on his return to Carcosa."

  Her scriber was the sword he'd taken from the Last. Cashel guessed she knew what she was doing.

  She paused and looked at him. "That was the story, at least," she said. "I think I might learn something else if I looked into the matter, but it was three generations ago, and it wouldn't help defeat the Last. In any case, she planted this grove."

  Cashel pursed his lips in thought. "Is she buried here?" he asked.

  Tenoctris was writing words around the edges of her completed figure. Besides the leaf litter, a mixture of ivy and honeysuckle snaked across the ground. It'd be hard even for the person who wrote the words on a surface like that to read them, but from what Cashel'd seen, wizards thought it was important just that the words be there. They didn't have to be visible, at least to the eyes.

  She looked toward Cashel again with a soft expression that he wasn't used to seeing on her face. "No, Cashel," she said. "She asked to be, but propriety wouldn't permit it. She's buried with the rest of her family in the great bor-Torial tomb west of the city walls. But her . . . heart, if you will, her hopes are buried here. Her longing created a concentration which will help what you and I are going to do now."

  She patted her thigh. "Come closer," she said; and with Cashel standing beside her, she began to chant.

  Instead of listening to the words which were only nonsense syllables anyway, Cashel looked at the trees. The leaves had unfurled, though they hadn't reached their full size.

  Cashel didn't miss Barca's Hamlet, exactly, but he'd been pretty much content with his life there. He smiled: other people might've thought it was hard, but it'd suited him. That was what mattered.

  Smiling wider, he let his palms slide on the hickory quarterstaff just to feel the polished wood. It was good to think about Barca's Hamlet.

  And as he smiled, the tall gray trunks began to spin about him. They started swiftly, but they slowed till they stood frozen without even the normal tremble of a breeze ruffling leaves or an insect drifting past.

  The grove vanished. Cashel and Tenoctris stood at the base of a flat-topped hill. Around them stretched a plain of rust-colored oat grass, spotted here and there with acacia trees and low but equally thorny bushes. The vegetation moved in the dry breeze; in the high sky a single vulture wheeled on tipping wings.

  Tenoctris looked up the steep-sided mound, then turned to Cashel. The wind fluttered her hair into her eyes. She didn't wear it in a bun since she got young again. She swept it back with a look of irritation, then laughed like the girl she appeared to be.

  "That's what I get for vanity, I suppose," she said. "Well, I think I'll simply accept the punishment."

  She nodded to the hill and went on, "This is the Tomb of the Messengers. Supposedly two messengers were sent to guide Mankind out of darkness, but instead they became corrupted and were imprisoned beneath this escarpment."

  Cashel's lips pursed again. "Who sent them, Tenoctris?" he asked. "And who buried them here?"

  Tenoctris shrugged with a mocking smile. "Every religion has an answer to that question," she said, "but no two answers are the same. Your priests in Barca's Hamlet would say that the Lady sent the Messengers and that the Shepherd imprisoned them when they turned to sin. I'm not sure anybody really sent them, and I'm not certain that they're imprisoned; but they're here, and they teach arts of great power to wizards who can wrest the knowledge from them."

  There weren't priests in Barca's Hamlet, except in the Fall when they came from Carcosa for the Tithe Procession. They pulled the images of the Lady and the Shepherd through town and collected the money due the Great Gods for the year.

  Cashel didn't correct Tenoctris, though, since the mistake didn't matter; instead he looked at the long hill. It was layered sandstone without many plants growing on it. Where there were bushes, they grew in dirt the wind blew into crevices, he was pretty sure. Some sandstones weren't too hard, but even so it was going to be a job if they had to dig any distance into it.

  "Is there a tunnel already?" he asked. "Or do we make one?"

  Cashel wasn't worried. He guessed that if they needed tools beyond what they usually carried, Tenoctris'd have told him to bring them. And if for some reason she expected him to bash a hole in rock with other rocks that'd weathered off already, well, that's what he'd do.

  The wizard had been lookin
g for something within her satchel. She looked up with a hint of humor, then let her face soften before she said, "We won't be entering the tomb, Cashel, though there is a way. Everything the Messengers teach is evil, whether or not it seems that way on the surface."

  She paused, looked into the satchel again, and raised what was either a scriber or a thin wand; it was no longer than Cashel's hand. It glittered the way only a diamond can. She set it back with a funny expression.

  "Cashel," she said, "I was never tempted to visit the Messengers. I knew my capacities, and therefore knew I couldn't possibly force them to give me the knowledge I might seek. Now, though—I actually could do that. It's odd, isn't it, that power itself leads to temptation?"

  Cashel thought about the question. "No, ma'am," he said. "It's always that way, any kind of power. Of course if you're a decent sort of person, it's not a problem. You just know that you don't go around starting fights, and if the other fellow's too drunk to have sense, you try to keep out of his way."

  Tenoctris looked like she might be going to laugh; instead she stepped close and patted his wrist. She hopped back again before he could do anything—he wasn't sure what he'd have done if he'd had time to think, to tell the truth—and said, "I believe I'm going to have you work the oracle yourself instead of me doing it."

  She gestured to the oat grass in which they stood, "Strip one of the seed-heads into your hand, if you would," she said with the sort of courtesy people use when they don't expect any answer except, "Yes, ma'am."

  "Yes, ma'am," Cashel said. Shifting the quarterstaff to his left hand alone, he pulled his right thumb and forefinger up the nearest stem and collected the seeds in his palm. The grass head was sharp and hairy, but it wasn't going to harm his calluses.

  "Yes, ma'am?" he repeated, this time to tell Tenoctris he was ready for whatever she had in mind for next. The ground here was rocky, so even the hardy oat grass was sparse. It looked like a solid field when you looked across the tops, though, because the plain rolled so far into the distance.

  "Throw the seeds up in the air," she said. She tented her fingertips together, a gesture Cashel remembered from when she'd been old. "They'll fall pointing to the object I've come for."

  "Just throw them up?" Cashel said, thinking he'd heard wrong. In a breeze this stiff, they were going to scatter to the south at an angle away from the hill.

  "Yes, up," Tenoctris said. "Now, if you please."

  Cashel obeyed. After the way she'd snapped at him, he wasn't surprised that the seeds formed a triangle in the air like geese before settling to the ground. He was willing to bet that they'd stayed in order, despite the stems of other grass plants hiding the pattern.

  "Can you follow the direction that pointed, up the hill?" Tenoctris said. "Follow it exactly, I mean?"

  "Yes, ma'am," Cashel said. "That's what I'd mean too."

  He held out his staff at arm's length to sight along, not so much because he needed to but to show Tenoctris that he understood. Now that she was young, she didn't seem to trust people quite the way she had when she was older.

  A wormwood bush grew from the rock maybe a furlong up the slope at the angle they'd want to travel. Above that, on the horizon along the way the arrow pointed, was a spike of rock like a nose.

  Both markers were like any number of other places on the hill, but they weren't the same. Cashel wouldn't have any trouble keeping his bearings.

  "Then lead me, please, Cashel," Tenoctris said. She smiled apologetically. "Because I certainly couldn't do that."

  Cashel smiled. He didn't say anything as he started along the slope, but he felt better that Tenoctris was sorry for the way she'd spoken. Everybody got snappish now and again—well, almost everybody did. But when you knew you'd done it, you at least could try not to do it again.

  "We aren't interested in the Messengers," Tenoctris said from behind him as he picked their way over the rock. "But their presence has drawn other things here. It's one of those things I need, a key of sorts."

  "Does it really look like a key?" Cashel asked. He paused.

  There was an acacia in front of him, no bigger than a sapling. Knowing how slow things grew in this dry climate, though, it was probably as old as he was.

  "I don't know what it will look like or what it'll be made of," Tenoctris said. "Though it might be quartz."

  Cashel decided to mark his line and go around instead of trampling straight on. Breaking the tree flat for Tenoctris to follow wouldn't be hard, but—well, it'd put in a lot of effort to get this old. It wouldn't hurt them to walk around.

  On the other side, a nub of quartz poked out of the red soil among the acacia's roots. Cashel drew his knife, a peasant's tool with an iron blade and horn scales, and scraped around the quartz. He took his time about it, careful not to nick the roots any more than he had to. If he'd flattened the little tree, chances were he wouldn't have noticed the glint of white stone.

  Tenoctris moved around to where she could watch. She didn't interfere, though, not even to ask why he thought this was what they were looking for. He didn't know; it'd just caught his eye.

  When he had the end of the milky stone dug clear, he wiped his knife and put it back into its wooden sheath. He squatted over the scraped-out cone, gripped the quartz between thumb and forefinger—just like he'd stripped the oat grass, he thought with a smile—and used his knees to pull straight up. It was only about the length of his little finger. When he pulled, it came out in a spray of red soil.

  He rubbed dirt off the quartz on his tunic, then held it out to Tenoctris. "Is this what you were looking for, ma'am?" he said.

  "Yes, Cashel," she said with a broad smile. "I believe it is. Now, let's return to our own world."

  Tenoctris turned and started down the hill to where they'd appeared in this sun-baked landscape. "We're going back to the grove, then?" Cashel said as he followed her carefully.

  "No," said Tenoctris. She glanced over her shoulder at him with another of the odd looks she'd been giving him ever since she got young again. "I think we'll join the army on the march for Pandah. Sharina is with the army, you see."

  * * *

  Sharina's foot slipped in wet clay the leading regiments had trampled to slick mud. Trooper Lires, the bodyguard to her left, swore and grabbed her arm. She hadn't been likely to fall, though, and even that would've meant nothing worse than a wetting.

  The scouts had charted the best route for the army's march to the southwest, but that didn't mean it was an entirely good one. Here rocky hills sloped near the edge of a lake fed by glaciers melting out of the valleys. The line of march necessarily narrowed, causing congestion and some confusion. Not even Princess Sharina could depend on firm footing.

  She'd chosen to walk rather than ride a horse or be carried in a litter. This provided a good example to the troops, all of whom except Lord Waldron himself were on foot. That would've been a good enough reason to do it—

  But that military reason simply gave Sharina an excuse to follow her own preferences. She hadn't learned to ride when she was growing up in a peasant village to which horses were rare visitors, and she hadn't liked the animals when as a princess she'd perforce become better acquainted with them.

  Walking also permitted Sharina to wear practical garments instead of the court robes which propriety would otherwise have forced her into. She could shrug off what the palace servants thought about her garb, but the common soldiers too would be shocked if Princess Sharina appeared in public wearing a short cloak, a pair of tunics, and sturdy sandals like a peasant woman. The sacrifice she was making to hike alongside them was ample justification for her to wear comfortable, practical clothing instead of silk brocades.

  Sharina walked beside Rasile to make it clear to the army that the Corl wizard was a trusted advisor rather than a dangerous alien. Rasile could no more have made the journey on her on legs than Tenoctris could've, so she was being carried.

  It wouldn't be uncommon for a noblewoman going on a long journey to
ride in a hammock slung between two bearers. Rasile couldn't comfortably lie on her spine, however, so she sat on a sedan chair from which the back had been removed.

  The two men carrying her were ordinary Valles chairmen who wouldn't ordinarily have left the city streets. They weren't having any difficulty with the route, however. Apparently cobblestone streets and dirt alleys covered with all manner of garbage were good training for muddy tracks and rocky gorges.

  Lord Tadai and the woman who was in charge of the logistics, Lord Hauk's senior clerk, were carried in litters. There were no wheeled vehicles: neither wagons nor carriages would've survived the first fifty miles of this expedition. Pack animals—horses, mules, and donkeys alike—carried the food and minimal baggage of the troops. The Kingdom of the Isles had depended largely on barges and cargo ships for its trade, so the size of the army marching to Pandah had been dictated by the number of animals available in Valles.