The Mirror of Worlds-ARC Page 32

  "Good morning, your highness!" called Lord Waldron, watching from horseback in the midst of aides on foot as the army trudged past. He alone in the army was mounted. "Don't be surprised if there's a delay within the next three miles. The pioneers are corduroying a stretch where the bloody glacier run-off's turned the ground to quicksand, but I'm not sure they're going to reach the south end before the lead battalion comes up with them."

  "We can only expect the troops to accomplish what's humanly possible, milord," Sharina called back. "And I'm confident of that, since you're in charge."

  The horse wasn't merely a concession to Waldron's age—indeed, he'd have been the last man in the army to admit he couldn't march at the pace anybody else did. Attaper had told Sharina in private that the army commander would be running up and down the line of march the whole time, a task requiring that even a younger man be mounted.

  The advice was clearly good. The fact that Lord Attaper volunteered it to his rival's benefit was a positive comment on him—and on the spirit Garric had fostered among his officers.

  Waldron spoke to his aides and resumed his slow progress down the line, observing the dress of his troops and dealing out praise and correction as required. When he reached the rear guard—under Attaper's command—he'd start forward again. Waldron wasn't the most imaginative of officers, perhaps, but he was competent and utterly indefatigable in carrying out his duties.

  Sharina had originally wondered why her brother—and still more, King Carus—left Waldron in command of the army when he'd made it clear from the start that he didn't believe that anyone but a noble from Northern Ornifal like himself should be on the throne of the Isles. She'd come to realize what Carus had probably known instinctively, that Waldron's feelings would never affect the determination with which he carried out his duties, and that his oath was as firm as the mountains.

  As firm as Garric's oath, in fact; or Sharina's.

  The path broadened, though it was slushy with melt-water from the glacier melting out of the valley to the left. This range of hills had no name in Sharina's own time: the whole region was beneath the Inner Sea. The present valley was barren rock where it'd melted clear. The sun glinted blue from ice remaining in the deeper recesses.

  A monster was frozen into the face of the glacier. Indeed, the tip of a stubby wing already stuck out of the ice.

  "Rasile," Sharina said sharply. "What's that? What's the thing in the glacier?"

  The Corl wizard had been running sets of beads through her fingers, muttering quiet incantations. The beads were of varying sorts—wood, coral, and a string of stones seemingly picked at random out of a stream bed. She followed the line of Sharina's pointing arm, her muzzle twitching.

  "A wyvern," she said. She looked at the surrounding landscape as if for the first time. "This is a very old place. Very old indeed. But I do not think it extends very widely."

  "But what's the creature?" Sharina said. "Is it dangerous?"

  Rasile shrugged on her chair. "It would be if it were alive," she said. "The True People have legends of them. They're predators but not exactly animals; they have some ability to think."

  She gave her rasping laugh and added, "There were no wizards among them, though, so they can't be considered truly capable of civilization."

  "Will there be more wyverns?" Sharina asked. "Not caught in the ice, I mean."

  "I cannot say, Sharina," Rasile said. "But I do not think so. Legend claimed that Barrog, Wisest of the Wise, cleansed the world of wyverns—well, cleansed it of demons, because this is legend rather than history—and imprisoned them all in shackles of ice till the Final Days, when they will be released to fight against men and gods. The True Men, of course."

  "Time enough to worry about that when we've beaten the Last," Sharina said, realizing as she spoke that she was very tired. We're not going to beat the Last. The best we can hope at Pandah is to win a skirmish, and even that isn't assured.

  A trumpet called from farther up the line. An file-closer with the infantry company immediately ahead of Sharina turned and bellowed, "Hold up!"

  Captain Ascor spoke to the signaller at his side, a cornicine whose horn circled his body. That man repeated the call from the front of the line in the richer, less insistent, tone of his longer instrument.

  "Your ladyship?" said Lires. "We're halting again."

  Lires had never quite understood the forms of polite address. On the other hand, the trooper had twice been wounded to the point of death in saving Sharina's life. Neither she nor anybody else in her hearing was going to lecture him on the importance of using, "Your highness," instead of some lesser honorific.

  "Waldron told us that was likely," Sharina said mildly. She looked up at the hills. They'd left the wyvern behind, but she didn't doubt that there were other—and worse—horrors in the new world the Change had unleashed.

  Even without Waldron's warning, she'd have known by now to expect delays. Moving an army by sea was difficult. Ships were slow to get under way. They lost sight of one another and failed to tack on schedule even without storms to confuse matters further.

  An expedition by land was far worse. The column moved at the speed of the slowest element, and something was always going wrong at some point or several along the line. Sharina and the Blood Eagles were fairly close to the head of the march; the cumulative delays became worse the farther back in the column you were.

  The rear guard would be marching into camp after dark, just as had happened every day since the army set out. Waldron rotated the previous lead regiment to the rear every morning and moved the second regiment in line to the front in continuous motion.

  There was a great deal that the epics ignored about moving and supplying an army. The poets talked only of battle—and now that Sharina had seen battles, she knew that the reality wasn't much like the epics either.

  Rasile was telling her beads with her eyes closed, muttering in a raspy whisper. Was that a religious exercise, wizardry, or simply a means of relaxation? Of course the answer didn't matter; it was simply the sort of question Sharina's mind spun toward during these maddening halts. She should keep a codex with her to read, though her brother really had more taste for literature than she did.

  She looked at the ground. The melt water was noticeably blue, even in the shallow puddle at her feet. Her face in reflection looked wan, though the color of the water was probably responsible for some of—

  Prince Vorsan was standing beside her.

  Sharina instinctively braced her hands to push back against the empty air. That was no help at all. The mirrored surface turned and she was on the inside, in the hall of polished stone and reflections.

  "Why are you doing this?" she shouted at the man who faced her from across the rotunda. She did wear the Pewle knife today, as always when she was in the field with the army. There'd been times its heavy blade was the margin between life and death, for Sharina and for the kingdom besides.

  She didn't bother to reach through the slit in her outer tunic to touch the hilt now. She was too angry to need reassurance.

  "For your own sake, Sharina," Vorsan said. He wore robes of scarlet velvet today, perfectly matching the cabochon-cut ruby on his left middle finger. The ring winked with internal fire as he gestured soothingly. "Surely you must see by now that there's no hope for your world. Leave it and join me."

  Sharina stared at the wizard: a soft-looking fellow of average height, not unattractive physically but without the spark that would've made him interesting as a man. She didn't doubt that Vorsan was intelligent and able, but she couldn't imagine spending any length of time in his sole company. Spending eternity with him would be impossible: she'd rather die.

  As she probably would, since she did see that humans had no hope of defeating the Last.

  "Find another companion," Sharina said harshly. "Find somebody who's interested in you. I'm not!"

  "Sharina, you don't understand," Vorsan pleaded, taking a step forward. The slim metal servants stand
ing to his left and right moved when he did; Sharina gripped her knife.

  Vorsan raised his hands, palms forward. "Please, I only want to help you," he said. "Won't you at least have a little fruit or something to drink while we discuss this?"

  On cue, the servitors extended their trays, calling attention to the decanter and crystal glasses on one, and the pyramid of fruit on the other. The grapes and oranges were familiar, but there was also what looked like a rough-skinned pear and some bright green fruits which were the diameter of eggs but perfectly spherical.

  "I've said no!" Sharina said, drawing the Pewle knife. "You're a nasty little person! You follow me and you spy on me, and I'm sick of it! Stop!"

  The servitors stepped between her and Vorsan, protecting the prince. Despite their weird appearance, the notion of attack by a servant holding a tray of fruit was so incongruous that Sharina suddenly giggled.

  She was on the edge of hysteria, she suspected, but it was still took the tension out of the situation. She fitted the knife into its concealed sheath carefully, so that she didn't slice either the tunic or herself.

  "Prince Vorsan," she said formally. "I must ask you not to trouble me further. Your attentions are unwelcome. If you're a gentleman, you'll respect my wishes."

  Vorsan wrung his hands and turned sideways to her with an agonized expression. "I see that I'm a figure of fun to you, Princess," he said. "Well, I can't help that. As foolish as it no doubt seems to you, I who could have anyone, anyone I should have thought, with whom to share my paradise out of time . . . I want only you. In all the ages since the Flood, this is the first time I've met someone who was more than the whim of a moment."

  "You're trying to be flattering," Sharina said, "but this makes me very uncomfortable. Please leave me alone."

  She cleared her throat and focused on the mirror to her right. "I'm going to go now. I hope you'll have the decency to do as I request."

  "I only wish I had the strength to do that, Sharina," Prince Vorsan whispered.

  Sharina's eyes locked with those of her crystal-clear reflection. She felt the mirror start to shift again.

  "I only wish I did," came the whisper pursuing her back to her own time.

  * * *

  Ilna wondered if the cave had an opening besides the one closed by the heavy door: a hole for ventilation slanting out through the rock face above, perhaps, or a tail that looked like a fox's burrow miles away on the other side of the ridge. It probably didn't matter, because there weren't enough people and animals—a modest number of goats and a few pigs—to suck the virtue out of the air.

  The cave stank, of course, but so did the homes of all but a handful of the wealthiest peasants in the borough. Everybody else slept with their animals in earth-floored huts whose wattling and thatch slowly decayed.

  Gressar, the ginger-haired village chief, was speaking to Temple, who he seemed to think was the leader of the party. This irritated Ilna to a degree, but not quite enough for her to make a point of correcting the fellow.

  "We've always had the cave for shelter," Gressar said. A single lamp was pegged to the side of the cave at the height a tall man could reach. Originally the pearly flow rock covering the wall would've acted as a natural reflector, but over the years soot had blackened it. "We hadn't needed it, though, since my grandfather's day when the barons of Eaton and Bessing fought and both of them raided the valley."

  "Eaton and Bessing were destroyed on the Terrible Day," said another man. "There's no sign of either realm, nor of the free city of Brickkin a day's hike and a half to the south. I searched them out myself."

  "And I went with him!" said a third fellow. He nodded with enthusiasm. "I went, and they weren't there."

  "But when the barons were gone, the demons came," Gressar resumed, shooting a sour glance at the fellows who'd butted in on his recitation. The Change had probably weakened the village structure; and even before, if this valley was like Barca's Hamlet, no one man would've had the power to give orders unchallenged to his neighbors. "The first night they killed seven people—"

  "And a dozen goats," the second man said. "Three of them mine."

  "Sister take you, Kardon!" Gressar snapped. "If they'd killed you instead of your goats, perhaps you'd be able to keep your mouth shut while somebody's talking!"

  "Gently, friends!" said Temple. He didn't sound angry, but he raised his voice enough to give it authority. "We're here to help you out of your problem. Stay calm and it'll be right again before much longer."

  "Well, they did kill the goats," Kardon muttered, but he was at least pretending to be speaking to himself instead of interrupting.

  "The demons came back the three nights of the new moon after the Terrible Day," Gressar said. "We knew the signs this time, so we sheltered here in the cave. And we'd rebuilt the door, though not as well as we have since. Still, they didn't force their way in."

  "The cats are lazy brutes as well as vicious ones," Ilna said. "They won't go to any effort even to kill."

  Temple glanced appraisingly toward her. "The Coerli use their quickness rather than strength," he said. "And they try to avoid enclosures where they'd be at a disadvantage."

  He nodded to the villager and went on, "You're fortunate to have had this shelter, Master Gressar, and you've done a very good job strengthening it. But it's time to end the Coerli attacks once and for all."

  "It's past time," said a young woman in a savage voice. "It won't bring back my Mira, will it? And you and my worthless husband didn't do a thing to save her, Gressar!"

  "Now, Stuna, there was nothing to be done," said the headman with the sort of deliberate reasonableness that you use when you're trying to calm a child on the verge of a tantrum.

  It didn't work with children as Ilna knew from watching over the years, and it certainly didn't work with the distraught mother. She gave a wordless shriek and threw herself at Gressar with her hands clawed. He backed a step, then turned and hunched over to escape Stuna's nails.

  Two men took her by the arms, looking uncomfortable with the task. When she subsided into tears, they immediately let her go.

  "Mira wasn't but four," said a man who hadn't spoken before. "It wasn't her fault, she was just too young to know better. She couldn't find her puppy inside, so she slipped out again while we were closing the door. It's so heavy it swings slow, you seen that. And the demons were already on us, or nearly. There was nothing we could do!"

  He kept his face turned away from Temple as he spoke, which meant that Ilna got as good a view of his features as the dim light allowed. She'd spent time in one sort of Hell herself; this man was in a different place, but it was just as dark.

  "Temple?" Ilna said. "The way to my goal is through the place those beasts come from; that my pattern tells me. I don't know what that place is, but I intend to go there."

  "It's a cyst in time," Temple said, while the villagers listened in wonder. "A valley like this one—perhaps this very one—but in its own universe."

  He smiled with a touch of sadness. "It might be much like the one in which you found me, before the Change brought it back into the present world. At an unfortunate time, one might say, but the Last themselves may have been responsible for the timing. There must be a wizard, a Corl wizard that is, who formed the cyst. That wizard rules the hunting pack that comes out when the conditions are right here."

  "How do you recommend that we enter the beasts' world, soldier?" Ilna said harshly.

  Her fingers were knotting and unknotting yarn. Each pattern she created was more terrible than the last. She knew exactly how the girl Mira died, because she'd watched the beasts kill Merota. In this valley they'd survived long enough to eat the child, unlike the band which had only seconds to savor Merota's slaughter before Ilna took a vengeance more terrible than their cat minds could've imagined before it happened.

  Merota's killers had died, and these would die also. Not soon enough, as the child's mother had said; but soon.

  "We'll go through their doorw
ay," Temple said calmly. "But first we'll place ourselves in front of it while the warriors are at the far end of the valley. They have to get back into their enclave before the sun rises, so they'll come to us."

  He gestured to the hunters. "And when they do, we'll kill them," he said. "Since there's no other way to deal with this band."

  "There's no other way to deal with any of the beasts," Ilna snapped. "But why will they all be at the other end of the valley?"

  "Ah," said Temple, nodding. "That's where the men of the village come in. If they're willing to help, that is. Otherwise I'll have to handle that part of the business myself while the three of you block the warriors' way home."

  "Our men will help you," said Stuna. She gave a croaking laugh. "Or I swear by the soul of my Mira that I'll kill every one of them as he sleeps. Every one!"