Master of the Cauldron Read online

  But they did. About the only thing these young officers were able to do was to stand on the quarterdeck, a target in dazzling armor for any missile the enemy wanted to launch, and look coolly unperturbed. For the most part they did that superbly, giving their own oarsmen something to think about besides the crushing disaster they might be rowing toward as a flutist blew time for their strokes.

  Garric followed the fellow's gesture. Lord Waldron stood with his head bent toward a younger man who was speaking earnestly to him. Waldron's own aides ringed the pair with worried expressions, but at the distance of a full double pace—too far to hear what was being said.

  "It's a verbal message," King Carus mused, and the thought had a grim undertone. "Something the sender wasn't willing to commit to writing, and he sent it to Waldron instead of you."

  "It's another omen!" somebody called in a cracked voice.

  Garric jerked his head around. Lord Morchan was speaking, his hands clenched against his cheekbones as he stared up at the empty sky. "The final days are surely here! The gods have deserted Sandrakkan!"

  "Morchan, you're a fool and a liar and a whining puppy!" Lady Lelor said, her face white with fury. "The Shepherd hasn't forsaken us and He won't, so long as we act like men!"

  "You say!" said Morchan. "You say, priestess! But monsters keep swallowing the sun. Sandrakkan is doomed!"

  "What's this all about?" Garric said. Morchan and Lelor were too caught up in their own argument to hear him. "Marshal Renold, what are they talking about? Has something like this happened before?"

  The Sandrakkan commander was red-faced and looked uncomfortable. He'd been gripping his sword hilt for much the same reason every other armed man on the island had. Two Blood Eagles noticed and immediately stepped between him and Garric.

  Garric grabbed the guards by the shoulders and pushed them to either side so that he could see Renold again. "Marshal Renold, what is going on?"

  "That I can't say, sir," Renold said awkwardly. "There's been clouds like this over Erdin, that's true; three or four times in the past ten days. They cover the sun and then they go away. Nobody knows what it means, nobody who I've heard anyway. Some people—"

  He looked at the priestess with a glumly speculative expression.

  "—say that it doesn't mean anything, but I doubt even they believe themselves."

  Garric thought for a moment. When he could, he'd discuss the business with Tenoctris. She'd been resting when he left her, guarded by a squad of Blood Eagles while Cashel wandered about Volita to loosen his legs and Sharina observed the negotiations. Right now, however—

  "Milady," Garric said to Lady Lelor in a voice loud enough to be noticed through her angry exchange with her fellow envoy. "Gentlemen! We're here to discuss the place of Sandrakkan in the kingdom. Let's return to the business at hand, if you will."

  The three Sandrakkan envoys near Garric turned and followed him back under the marquee; the priestess gave him a shamefaced nod of apology. Master Colchas hadn't left his seat. Not, Garric suspected on looking at the man's face, because the finance official was abnormally calm, but rather because he'd suspected what was happening and didn't want to watch it again.

  Tadai had walked to the edge of the marquee and looked up. He started back for his seat with a bland expression. The various aides and subordinates were returning to their places behind the negotiators. That left only Lord Waldron, who was still talking to the courier.

  "Lord Waldron?" Garric called.

  Waldron made a brusque gesture with his left hand, his eyes locked with those of the man who was speaking urgently to him again.

  Garric pursed his lips. "Admiral Zettin," he said calmly, "please take the seat to my right for the time being, if you would."

  Garric walked to the makeshift throne with an expression just as neutral as that of Lord Tadai. He'd disarranged the cloak when he jumped up, but a servant must've straightened it.

  Garric had expected the Sandrakkan negotiations to be the most important thing he'd have to deal with for the next days or even longer. Judging by the furious disbelief on the face of his army commander, though, he'd be hearing about something much worse as soon as Waldron was ready to tell him.

  * * *

  Ilna held the wax tablet in both hands in both hands. She was as tense as if it was red hot and burning her fingers. She took a deep breath.

  "Wood is...," she read. She grimaced. "Wood comes from the forest."

  "That's right, Ilna!" Merota said. They sat together on a stone slab that'd fallen when one of the three columns supporting it slipped sideways some time in the past thousand years. She held her hand out for the tablet. "Here, I'll write more."

  Their moss-covered seat had words carved on it. Ilna could follow the letters well enough to draw them, though to anybody else the tiny green tendrils were as featureless as a polished tabletop.

  But she couldn't read them, of course.

  Ilna let the tablet dip forward slightly and breathed deeply several more times, almost panting. She'd run long distances though running wasn't natural to her; she'd fought, for her own life and for the lives of others; she'd woven patterns that twisted the cosmos itself, warped it into the form that Ilna os-Kenset chose it to have. She'd done all those things and never had she been as utterly drained as she was now, shaking and—

  The realization struck her. She began to laugh, a reaction she displayed almost as rarely as she cried.

  Merota jerked her hand back with a startled expression. Chalcus, juggling as he sat on the back wall of the ruined garden a double-pace away, smiled pleasantly; only those who knew him well would've noticed that tension bunched the big muscles at the base of his jaw.

  "It's all right," Ilna said, reducing her laughter to a wry smile. "Chalcus, it's all right. I just realized that I'm frightened, simply terrified, of reading. That's why it's so hard for me. Most things—most of the things I do—aren't."

  "I think you're doing very well, Ilna," Merota said. She was still too young to know her forced earnestness made her lie obvious. She took the tablet and firmly closed its two waxed boards. "But we've done enough today. I'm tired from being on the ship."

  Chalcus chuckled. He'd been juggling three items while Merota gave Ilna her reading lesson. Now he let two of them, fist-sized chips of rock, mossy on one side, drop to the ground behind him; they landed within a finger's breadth of one another. Rising to his feet, he slid the third, his curved dagger, into the sheath stuck through the sash over his right hip.

  "Merota, dear child," he said, "there's an hour's wait till supper. Why don't you rouse Mistress Kaline—"

  Her governess and tutor, a severe woman with severe notions of propriety. To Ilna's mind, Mistress Kaline's only redeeming feature was the fact she in her way loved Merota as much as Ilna herself did.

  "—and resume your own lessons till Mistress Ilna calls you, eh?"

  "Please Chalcus!" the girl said, clutching the notebook before her. "Can I play in this garden while you talk to Ilna? You know Mistress Kaline's still going to be sick!"

  Ilna smiled. Merota was a natural sailor; no matter how much the ship rolled—and a long, narrow warship could roll a great deal, even in moderate weather—the child would scampered around with no more discomfort than Chalcus himself displayed. Ilna, who was not infrequently queasy, envied Merota her stomach at those times.

  But Ilna's problems were nothing compared to those of Mistress Kaline, who spent most of every voyage sprawled face down on a grating, close to the gunwale so that she could stick her head over the side whenever another spasm struck her. She couldn't keep even water or nibbles of dry bread down more than a few minutes. She lay in the shade of a tarpaulin now as usual after a voyage, with a damp cloth on her forehead.

  Chalcus looked at Ilna and raised an eyebrow in question. Ilna thought for a moment, then said, "Yes, all right. I'll watch the book. But don't go out of our sight!"

  "I won't!" Merota said, trotting toward the ruins of a stone gazeb
o. Over her shoulder she added, "But what could happen with all these soldiers around?"

  "Aye, indeed," said Chalcus in a very different tone as he seated himself where Merota had been. "And what couldn't happen, with things like that creature from the Sister's realm appearing in the sky?"

  "Yes," said Ilna, looking about them. Her expression was more than a little grim, but that was from habit rather than any particular concern about their surroundings. "Though so long as it stays in the sky...."

  They were in the extensive gardens of the mansion where Garric was meeting with the dignitaries from Sandrakkan. Buildings and gardens alike were in ruins: the walls shattered, colonnades thrown down, and briars choking the planters meant for exotic flowers. All around them soldiers were chopping brush, clearing places to sleep and at the same time providing themselves with firewood.

  Because the military surveyors hadn't had an opportunity to lay out the camp before the troops arrived, Ilna heard a number of heated arguments between officers of units competing for some desirable attribute: a stretch of level ground, a well that wasn't choked with rubble, or perhaps a large tree that offered both dignity and a vantage point to the troops who controlled it.

  A ewe bleated irritably from nearby. It'd come around the blunt finger of granite and found its path was blocked by soldiers cutting a drainage ditch to guide water around their campsite in case of a storm.

  Chalcus looked at the sheep and chuckled. "If she's not mutton stew by the morning," he said, "then our friend Garric will have good reason to congratulate himself on his army's discipline... and were I to bet, I'd say that she'll be wandering about being irritated at all these strange men till we take ourselves off."

  "It was your suggestion that we land on this island, wasn't it, Chalcus?" Ilna said, looking about her. She didn't much care about her surroundings so long as they allowed her to weave—or at least knot patterns—but she was aware of them.

  Sheep had grazed the slopes fairly clear, but the rock piles where buildings had been thrown down were overgrown with the wild descendents of ornamental shrubs. The few trees grew in places that were hard to get to. Woodcutters must visit the island regularly.

  The soil was trampled bare here in the back part of the garden, which a shepherd had used for his byre. Wool clung to stones and in the brush growing around them. Most of the tufts were unweathered; the fellow must've penned his flock here before taking them on barges to the mainland just ahead of the Royal Fleet's arrival. The handful of ewes still wandering on Volita were the ones who'd been too skittish to gather up quickly before the shepherd fled.

  "Aye, I did," the sailor replied, his tone guarded though not defensive. "When I heard the Prince—" he nodded toward the curved wall beyond which the conference was taking place "—wanted a spot where an army could wait without causing too much bother with the local citizens, I mentioned that nobody's spent the night on Volita in the past thousand years save shepherds and sheep. And—"

  Chalcus grinned engagingly, as though the next comment were of no great moment.

  "—maybe a few pirates, doing business with folk in Erdin who preferred their neighbors not know the sort of men they went to for cargoes at a good price."

  Ilna looked around again. She set the notebook on the moss and took the hank of cords from her left sleeve to give her fingers something to do. The lowering sun painted odd shadows on face of granite spike behind them.

  "The Demon, it's called," Chalcus remarked. "Though it was a quiet enough neighbor to the pirates, or so I believe."

  "You never saw anything wrong here?" Ilna said. She knew she sounded sharp, but she always sounded sharp. Chalcus understood her well enough not to take offense at a question asked without the ribbons and lace that people in general tied their words up in.

  "No, dear one, I did not," Chalcus said calmly. "Some of our folk heard sounds in the night, but that wasn't a marvel. They'd mostly done things that cause men troubles in the hours after the wine's worn off and before the sun rises. Eh?"

  Ilna shrugged. "I never thought drink would make the things I've done not have happened," she said. "And if it caused me to lose control—"

  She gave a tiny, metallic chuckle, then went on, "I was going to say, 'Who knows what I might do?' But in fact I know very well."

  Merota was peering at the waist-high crosswall which the shepherd'd built to separate his byre from the front portion of the extensive garden. He'd laid the wall with pieces of the ruins themselves: facing blocks, masses of cemented rubble from the cores of walls, and broken statues. It'd probably been a one-man job, since the only really heavy stones were column barrels which an individual could've rolled into place.

  Merota was staying in plain view as they'd told her to do. Ilna directed quick glances toward the girl, while Chalcus occasionally shifted to keep Merota in the corner of his eye. Though they were being careful, there wasn't any reason to expect more danger here than might have occurred back in the palace in Valles.

  "I was wondering, dear one...," Chalcus said, his eyes wandering to avoid meeting Ilna's. "Have you given thought to the future?"

  "Blaise is east of here, isn't it?" Ilna said, frowning to understand the sailor's point. "I suppose we'll go there, even though Count Lerdoc's friendly. And then we'll go back to Valles."

  Ilna'd known more about far places when she was growing up than most people in Barca's Hamlet did. Her weavings were luxury stuff even before Hell taught her how to let or bind the cosmos itself. Ilna hadn't learned geography, however, but rather what the tastes of the folk in Erdin and Piscine and especially in Valles on Ornifal were, the people who bought clothing to demonstrate their wealth and taste.

  "Prince Garric will likely visit the Count of Blaise, in the courteous fashion that the great and powerful of this world have with one another, that's true," Chalcus said with an edge to his voice. "But what I was wondering, dear one, was of our future, yours and mine together—for it will be together, you know that, for so long as you'll have me."

  Ilna sniffed. "Which will be as long as I live and you live," she said sharply. "What would you have me say? That I'll weave when I have leisure to and do such other business as will help my friends—that's what I think of the future."

  "And when you say help your friends...," Chalcus said. He'd taken out his dagger again and was flipping it from hand to hand. His eyes watched Merota squirm through a wisteria whose stems were as thick as her waist. "You mean help Prince Garric for the kingdom's sake, where it may be that your skills count for more than a squadron of ships, not so?"

  "Yes," said Ilna. "So. As I've done in the past. As we've done together in the past."

  She paused, trying to read meaning in the profile which the sailor kept resolutely toward her.

  "Is it wrong that I do that, do you think?" she went on. Her voice was growing harder, more clipped, despite her wish that it not. "For I'll tell you frankly, Master Chalcus, I don't think it's wrong!"

  Chalcus laughed easily, sliding the dagger back into its sheath. "It's not wrong at all, dear heart," he said. "Whoever rules the kingdom will always have a use for such as you; and for me as well, it may be. But if the kingdom uses us at the kingdom's need, there'll come a day when the kingdom has used us up."

  Ilna shrugged. She'd felt the tension drain away as soon as she learned that the questions weren't going in the direction she'd feared a moment previously.

  "I don't care about kingdoms," she said. "I've never met one. But if Garric wants my help, or Sharina or my brother...."

  She smiled, suddenly warm in a fashion that she never could've imagined until the past year changed most of the things she'd learned in the previous eighteen. "Or if you want my help, Master Chalcus," she said, "then you'll have whatever I can give. If that means being used up, then I can't say I care. I did enough harm to other people at one time in my life that I won't complain about the cost to me of making amends."

  "Well, dear heart," Chalcus said, grinning broadly again. "I'm
an honest sailor with nothing on his conscience. But a man who looked a good deal like me sailed in past years with the Lataaene pirates... and I shouldn't wonder if that man did terrible things in his time."

  "Chalcus?" Merota called. She was clinging to an ancient wisteria which grew where the rubble wall met the finished stones of the garden's original boundary, now half tumbled. "Why's this statue black? It's basalt! Nobody carves statues out of basalt, do they?"

  Chalcus squeezed Ilna's right hand with his left and rose to his feet. "I've never seen such, child," he said as he stepped toward the girl. "Basalt has too coarse a grain, I'd have said; though I suppose sculptors can be struck by freaks as surely as honest sailors who wake up with a girl's name tattooed over their heart and no idea who she might be."

  "I scarcely think you can stay that drunk long enough to carve a statue," Ilna said tartly as she followed Chalcus, setting the cords back in her sleeve.

  She didn't like stone, just as other people didn't like snakes or spiders; but there was a good deal of stone in the world, so she didn't cringe when she had to deal with it. Likewise there was a sufficient number of people in the world that Ilna didn't like, and she dealt with them too when that was required.

  The wisteria flowed upward into a mushroom of green tendrils. The curve of the shrub's three thick stems looked almost natural, but where they bound the black stone figure at the heart of their knot—

  "Merota, step back!" Ilna said. "Chalcus, you too. Let me look at this."

  In this warm weather Merota was wearing only her inner tunic—normal for a peasant but not up to Mistress Kaline's standards of what was proper for a young noblewoman in public. If the governess managed to get up, she'd be very testy; though of course she was usually very testy.

  The tunic was woven from a fine grade of wool, but it was sturdy enough that it didn't tear when Chalcus grabbed a handful and jerked Merota around behind him. His sword was a curved flicker in his right hand. Instead of looking at the wisteria as Ilna did, Chalcus kept his head turning to watch for dangers in all directions.