Godess of the Ice Realm loti-5 Page 6

  "Lady Estanel is next," a nomenclator said. "She entered the priesthood after the death of her husband, a major landowner to the south of Carcosa."

  The priestess of the Shepherd was short and round. The collar of her white silk robe was trimmed with sable, and her magnificent ivory combs were arranged to give the impression of a tiara.

  She curtseyed with supple ease; though fat, Lady Estanel was obviously in good health. "We servants of the Shepherd are delighted to greet you, Prince Garric," she said. "We look forward to discussing methods to reform the current religious situation with you."

  "Your discussions will be with my agent, Lord Tadai," Garric said; he heard his voice coming from a thousand miles away. "And milady? You'd best arrange matters so that Idon't have to get involved, because you'd like that result less than anything Lord Tadai tells you."

  Garric couldn't see the priestess' expression through the red haze that clouded his vision, but she passed on quickly. He felt a touch on his right elbow. He turned. Sharina was there. Though relief made him stagger, he could see clearly again.

  Attaper must have signaled to the guards, because the line of dignitaries in embroidered brocade stayed on the other side of the black shields. A good bodyguard observeseverything, and Garric didn't guess he'd ever meet anyone better than Attaper.

  "I'm a little dizzy from the voyage," Garric called with a cheerful smile toward the waiting nobles. "A moment, please, and I'll be with you."

  He turned again and muttered into Sharina's ear, "We weren't god-ridden in Barca's Hamlet, you know that. A pinch of meal and a sip of ale to the household altar at meals-for the people who could afford that. And we gave when the priests from Carcosa came around with the statues for the Tithe Procession every summer. But we worshipped thegods, and these people are just politicians. Politicians who think they'll make me one of them!"

  "Yes," said Sharina, holding his wrist as she scanned the nearby spectators with a harsh expression. "Well, they're not going to do that."

  Garric looked at the crowd also, really for the first time. He'd been too concerned with the dignitaries on the raised plinth to think about the rest of the folk waiting. Those close by were retainers of the nobles. They stood in discrete blocs of six to twenty-odd men-all men, of course-wearing their employers' colors as cockades. They weren't openly armed, but Garric knew their caps had metal linings and there were truncheons-if not swords-concealed under their tunics.

  He'd expected that; there'd have been similar men at a levee in Valles or Erdin or any other community in the Isles big enough to have a range of wealth and therefore rivalry. What he hadn't expected was that the two largest groups would be those of the priesthoods, big scarred men in white tunics. The Lady's gang carried censers on the end of three-foot metal rods, while their rivals held similar rods bent into the shape of a shepherd's crook.

  "If any of them saw a sheep in their life, it was as roast mutton," Garric grated under his breath.

  Then he straightened, smiled, and said, "Lord Attaper, I've recovered from my indisposition. I'll be pleased to meet the rest of those waiting to offer their respect to the kingdom."

  Still grinning, he added to Sharina in a voice only slightly less audible, "You know, sister, for the first time since I became…"

  He gestured with his palms upturned. Prince, regent; leader. It didn't matter what word he used or if he didn't bother to speak; Sharina understood.

  "Anyway, for the first time I'm really looking forward to making changes in the way a government works!"

  Garric laughed aloud. His sister laughed with him, squeezed his hand again, and then stepped aside so that the horrified nomenclators could resume their duties.

  ***

  "Look, you fine folk of Carcosa!" Chalcus called from the bow to the crowd filling the waterfront. "Come look at the dreadful monster which your prince vanquished without so much as mussing his hair! Ah, the kingdom is blessed indeed to have such a ruler as Prince Garric of Haft!"

  "Ilna?" said Merota with a troubled frown. She was shouting so that Ilna, holding her hand in the prow of theFlying Fish, could hear her. It was a measure of Chalcus' lungs that much of the crowd was able to understand him over the noise not only of civilians but from the crews and equipment of the royal fleet as it docked.

  "Yes, child?" said Ilna, turning to face Merota so that the girl could see her answer. Ilna didn't like either to shout or to be shouted at; a poor orphan gets enough of the latter early on.

  Chalcus now openly commanded theFlying Fish. Captain Rhamis huddled amidships with a cloak over his soaked garments; water dripped from the tip of his scabbard to pool on the deck beneath him.

  The harbor had scores of unoccupied docks, though many were only rubble cores which'd lost their facing stones. Instead of bringing the patrol vessel to one of them, however, Chalcus had anchored half a stone's throw out from the shore where more people could see it.

  The crew, released from the oarbenches, was hauling the great carcase alongside and lashing it to theFlying Fish with a second loop. The whale had begun to sink even before they'd entered the harbor; water was filling the body cavity through the hole the ram had smashed.

  Ilna smiled grimly. Chalcus was too fine a showman to lose his wondrous attraction because of inattention.

  "Is Prince Garric really as great a man as Chalcus, Ilna?" Merota asked in her high, piercing voice.

  The question so shocked Ilna that she burst out with a gust of loud laughter. Merota gaped: Ilna's reaction was almost as unusual for her as a fit of crying would have been.

  Ilna's expression settled. A fit of crying was the other alternative. She'd always considered showing emotion to be a sign of weakness; but she'd never denied that she was subject to weakness, either.

  Rather than raise her voice, Ilna lifted Merota to speak into the child's ear. Ilna was slightly built-all the bulk in the family had gone to her brother Cashel-but she did much of her work with double-span looms, which often as not she set up by herself. She took her physical abilities for granted.

  "Garric is a great man, child," Ilna said. "The kingdom is lucky to have so wise and strong a leader, and Garric's friends are lucky too. As for Chalcus…"

  She looked toward the bow. Chalcus stood on the railing, gesturing extravagantly as he described the way Prince Garric had winkled out the monster's brains with one thrust of his mighty sword and then had used his pommel to crush its ribs.

  Ilna smiled. It was a lie and shehated lies, but from Chalcus' lips it sounded like one of the ballads he and Merota sang. It was a pattern of the sort that Ilna wove into her fabrics, one that made the listeners a little happier and the world around them better by some small amount as well.

  "Chalcus is a great man also," she said. "But in a different way from Garric. As I am different from Princess Sharina, say."

  "But you don'tlove Garric, do you?" Merota demanded.

  Ilna laughed again. The choice is to cry, and that's not a choice . "I don't know what you mean by love, child," she said, squeezing Merota before she set her back on the deck.

  Because she was looking toward the city to avoid meeting Merota's eyes or those of anyone else nearby, Ilna saw the procession enter the harbor area and make its way toward the waterfront where Garric stood. The escort was a platoon of Blood Eagles. They moved forward despite the crowd, using their shields to push people aside and their knob-headed spears to convince those who didn't want to be pushed.

  Despite feeling miserable and empty, Ilna smiled wryly. The Blood Eagles had been set a task; they were doing whatever was necessary to get it done. Ilna could appreciate their attitude.

  The guards had been sent to Barca's Hamlet. There they'd waited for the arrival of a party from Ornifal to make landfall and come overland to Carcosa. Ilna couldn't see the people in the party who were on foot because the escort's plumed helmets blocked her view, but the two chief members rode horses.

  Could you carry a horse on shipboard all the way from Valle
s to Barca's Hamlet? But of course you could, if you were important enough; and this pair was important.

  The middle-aged man rode stiffly. Ilna recalled that he'd been clumsy with any physical task when he was Reise the Innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet. He was Garric's, Prince Garric's, father. He was coming to Carcosa at his son's call to direct the nobleman who'd have the title of Vicar of Haft and Agent for the Prince.

  The dark-haired woman beside Reise was supple and perfectly at ease. She looked about the crowd with the pleased smile of a goddess blessing her worshippers. Though she'd had a long voyage and a difficult trek across the across the island to reach Carcosa, she was more beautiful than any other woman Ilna had seen.

  She was Lady Liane bos-Benliman, the woman whom Prince Garric was to marry.

  I don't know what you mean by love, Ilna repeated in her mind; and hated herself for the lie.

  Chapter 4

  "Does it suit you then, mistress?" said Chalcus as Ilna's left hand gently explored the frame of the loom he'd had erected on the second floor of the building to which he'd brought her when they disembarked. "I chose a house close to the harbor where I could see the water, but if you'd prefer something inland…?"

  Ilna sniffed. It wasn't like Chalcus to sound so uncertain. Was she so terrible, then, with her whims and her anger?

  Grinning coldly-her anger was indeed a terrible thing, but so was that of the sailor-she said, "Every morning I looked out of my window in Barca's Hamlet and watched the sun rising over the sea, Master Chalcus. The view suits me well, and the building you've taken for us suits me better than I ever imagined."

  Her eyes narrowed and she added, " How did you come by it, then? Because a place like this-"

  It stood in a row of brick buildings with shops on the ground floor and the merchants' quarters above. There were two full stories, a garret, and a railed walk around the roof of sheet lead. In back was a walled courtyard behind with grape arbors.

  "-shouldn't have been empty for us to walk into."

  "Nor was it," Chalcus agreed with a touch of irritation, "till my agents rented it last month from the owner and ousted the business being conducted here at the time; which was a brothel, mistress, since you're so suspicious that you might think I'd put a whole flock of innocent orphans on the street in my arrogance. And as for the money I used for the purpose, the Children of the Mistress had amassed a fine collection of plate and jewels in the course of their child-murdering monster worship. When I left Donelle, some part of that left with me. Perhaps this offends you?"

  Ilna stood without expression. I've been a fool many times; but perhaps never so great a fool as I'm being now…

  Rather than speak-for she'd say the wrong thing, she always managed to say the wrong thing-she took two steps to Chalcus, put her arms around him, and squeezed as hard as she could. It was like hugging a tree till Chalcus put his arms around her also and held her as gently as if she were spun glass.

  "I'm sorry," she said. She wasn't crying because she never cried; or almost never. "If you'd cut the throats of everybody in the building I'd support you, I know you'd have had a good reason. I'm sorry."

  "Now mistress," Chalcus said lightly. She loosened her grip on his torso but didn't push away; his touch remained the same. "The pirate who might have done such a terrible thing as that is long dead, buried in southern waters and the past. I'm a simple sailor and a loyal supporter of Prince Garric."

  In the garret above, Merota caroled, "I never will marry, nor be no man's wife…" The child couldn't have been happier to have a house on the waterfront instead of being shut up in the palace as she'd expected.

  Merota was happy more times than not, but Mistress Kaline-who'd sleep in one garret room while her charge had the other-was bustling about in a good humor also. Ilna smiled faintly into the sailor's shoulder. Chances were that Mistress Kaline would've been cheerful in a dungeon, so long as it wasn't on shipboard.

  Ilna'd expected to be lodged in the palace-a suite or perhaps a separate bungalow if it was a sprawling complex like the royal palace in Valles. Where she lived-or what she ate and other questions most folk worried about-didn't matter a great deal to her, but here Chalcus had arranged a place where she wouldn't stumble unexpectedly into Garric, or Liane; or Garricand Liane. This was much better.

  Ilna squeezed Chalcus again before stepping back, embarrassed for half a dozen good reasons but refusing to show it in her expression. "We'll need to get cleaned up," she said. "There's to be a dinner with Garric tonight. And I'll need to tell my brother that Merota and I are-aren't in the palace as he'll expect."

  "Aye, the prince and all his chiefs and nobles," Chalcus said with an unreadable smile.

  He turned to play with the door latch, a heavy arrangement that could be locked from outside but not from within; probably something to do with a the building's former use as brothel. Ilna'd known many sorts of hardship and discomfort; but notall sorts, and if she'd believed in the Great Gods she'd have thanked them for that mercy.

  "Not an assembly I'd ever expected to be part of," Chalcus continued, now looking out the bank of casements facing east over the courtyard. He glanced sidelong at Ilna. "Of course if you're determined to greet all your friends and the new lot from Valles…?"

  Ilna's smile was grim. Did he think she was a child who knew nothing of his tastes? Chalcusloved gatherings of the great and powerful, as surely as he loved clothes that focused all eyes on his swaggering form. But he was trying to be kind, and that was no cause for anger.

  "I'll go to the dinner, Master Chalcus," she said, "and I'll go to Prince Garric's wedding when that's held in a few weeks time. There's nothing forcing me to be elsewhere, and I'm not afraid to recognize the truth. Any truth."

  "No, nobody'd be fool enough to think you were afraid, dear one," Chalcus said very softly to the open windows.

  He turned to meet her eyes and said, "Do you have regrets, Mistress Ilna?" His voice was flat, stripped suddenly of the lilt that was as much a part of him as the smile generally crinkling his eyes.

  "Chalcus," she said, " things are as they should be-for the kingdom, for Garric. For me as well! I wouldn't change a bit of it if I could."

  She smiled like a demon carved from ice. The skills she'd learned in Hell gave her powers beyond the imagining of anyone but Tenoctris of those who knew her. Shecould force Garric, and in time she could force the whole world, to her desire; but shewould not.

  "I'm glad for the way things are, Master Chalcus," she said. "Though because I'm often a fool, it tears my heart out to see them."

  Ilna opened her arms. Chalcus came to her and swept her up, kissing her; gentle as a cat with her kitten, for all the strength in his scarred body.

  Merota continued to sing as she came down the stairs. She'd reached refrain again, and her voice trilled like springwater, "I'll always be single, the rest of my life…"

  ***

  "Well, said Cashel, looking around the overgrown garden, "the palace seems a nice place, doesn't it, Tenoctris?"

  "It's quiet," the old wizard agreed. She was being agreeable, at any rate. "I'd hoped the building might have a library that would give me some guidance about the creature that was loosed on us, though."

  The palace of the Counts of Haft was brick and three stories high on the front where pillars rose from the ground to the roof. Back here in the private areas there were only two stories and all the rooms looked out on little gardens like this one. Sparrows and finches hopped about on the ground, picking at seeds; a pair of gray squirrels were chasing each other up and down the ancient dogwood tree by the back wall, changing places for no reason Cashel could make out; and in a basin filled by the shower earlier in the day, frogs chirped furiously.

  The garden wasn't home, exactly, but for Cashel it seemed more homelike than any place he'd been in Valles, let alone shipboard. He didn't mind ships, but he was glad to be on solid ground again.

  "Maybe the library's in the part where the count's still living?" he sa
id, nodding toward the back wall. Garric had taken over the front and east wing of the palace, but the count and his personal servants still occupied his private apartments in the west wing. The other side of the back wall here was also a garden-Cashel could see the tops of what he thought were redbuds and a huge weeping willow-but it was part of the west wing, with no entry from where Cashel stood.

  "No, I asked some of the older servants," Tenoctris said. "The library burned in the riots when Count Lascarg came to power. There were volumes in it dating back to the Old Kingdom, the chamberlain thought."

  She smiled wryly. "Volumes as old as I am," she added.

  The Old Kingdom fell when a wizard drowned King Carus-and drowned himself as well in the backlash of the forces that he couldn't control. An event so enormous had distant effects, the way a stone flung into a pond makes waves slap the far edges. One result had been to throw Tenoctris a thousand years into her future, to fetch up on the shore of Barca's Hamlet where Garric had found her.

  Cashel cleared his throat, letting the thought form fully before he spoke. Then he said, "I guess you were sent here for a purpose, Tenoctris. And I guess that means you're going to stay while you're needed. Which I guess is going to be a good long while yet."

  Tenoctris had lived a long life before the cataclysm scooped her up, but she'd already brought more to the present than she'd been allowed to give her own day. Without her wisdom and skill, Cashel knew that the present kingdom, reborn with Garric leading, would have vanished like chaff in a bonfire.

  The old woman sniffed as she knelt to look more closely at a stone bench. "I don't accept your notion of purpose, Cashel," she said. "I believe in chance, and I believe in the forces that I can see and sense; but I've never seen the gods you pray to."