Lord of the Isles (61 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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T
he bed was of spun glass, soft and springy in a way that feathers never could be under Cashel's weight. He luxuriated for a moment in its caress, even though he knew he ought to be getting up.
At last he opened his eyes. The sun was a vast ruby dome on the western horizon. The clouds piling at intervals across the summer sky were streaked purple, maroon, and—in flecks at the highest levels—gold. Where the city's crystal towers rose through the forest, they reflected all the colors of the rainbow
.
Cashel sat up and stretched. He ached about every place a man could: a good feeling, a badge of honest work. Mellie walked onto the broad covered balcony where the bed lay, carrying a cup so clear that it looked as though the green liquor foamed in a blanket of air.
“How long did I sleep?” Cashel asked. He stood, careful but not shaky. His muscles weren't damaged but they needed to be coaxed into their duty.
“A long time,” the sprite said cheerfully. It didn't surprise Cashel that she was a full-sized woman—not as tall as Sharina but more fully curved than Sharina would ever be. “Here, drink this and you'll feel better.”
“I feel fine,” Cashel grumbled, though he wasn't sure if that was true. He didn't feel bad, exactly, but he wasn't ready to do anything harder than walking across the room either.
He drank the liquor in small sips, keeping the glass to his lips all the time, never gulping, never hastening. The bubbles tickled the back of his nose. The liquor itself was cool in his mouth and throat but spread through his body as pleasurable warmth.
Cashel looked down at his chest. The tears Derg had clawed in his skin were already half-healed. Only a few patches of scab remained.
“How long?” he repeated in amazement. “Mellie, you should have waked me up!”
Birds wheeled through the high heavens in a complex dance. The sun was almost wholly below the horizon by now, but occasionally a wing sparkled as it cut a beam of light.
Mellie giggled and put her arm around Cashel's waist. Her muscles were as hard and fiat as his own.
“You needed to sleep, Cashel,” she said. “I told you, Derg is very strong.”
He remembered the fight the way you always remember a fight: bits and pieces, a collection of shattered moments rather than a seamless whole. Fangs snapping a hairsbreadth from his throat, the sight of the stocky red body dripping with
ground water as it rose after an impact that should have been crushingly final …
“He was that,” Cashel said. “I hope I never meet anybody stronger.”
He touched his forehead. The cuts Derg's canines had made when he butted the demon were still tender, though they too had healed.
“Let's watch the moons rise,” Mellie said. She took the empty glass from Cashel's hand and set it on a table with legs like sapphire wires. They walked together, his arm over hers, to the bridge of glass arching off their balcony.
The air was charged and vibrant, though the only scents were those of the forest below: here a flower's perfume, there a whiff of fruit ripening; over all, the green power of life. Quick motions vibrated the canopy. Some of them must be birds roosting, but others were nocturnal animals coming out with the returning shadows, hopping along runways hundreds of feet in the air.
The bridge was six feet wide and had railings so delicate that they were only visible as the sheen of light bending through their structure. The slope was barely noticeable underfoot, but at zenith its rise completely hid the tower a quarter mile away at the other end. The surface had a pleasant, springy solidity, like a thickly sodded meadow.
Cashel had control of his muscles again if not his full strength. He lifted his arms overhead and flexed them, laughing in joy to be alive.
Mellie hugged him. “Yes,” she said, again responding to words he hadn't spoken. “Now you're only as strong as any two other people, Cashel!”
She giggled. Cashel put his right hand under her thighs and lifted her into a chair of his arm and shoulder. He walked on, carrying the sprite like a tuft of thistledown. Creatures hooted and whistled musically in the trees below.
They reached the center of the span. Fairy lights gleamed in towers across the darkened forest.
The moons were rising, the lesser one above, and separated
by only a degree of angle the greater moon as well. They were full, beaming silver light through a pastel haze of gold.
Cashel hugged Mellie to him with both arms; and hugging her, he awoke.
“Oh!” Cashel cried. He lay in the jungle clearing where he'd fought Derg. His head was pillowed on a bundle of springy branches. Mellie sat beside him with a concerned expression; the demon squatted on the other side. They were both full-sized. Cashel twisted upright, knowing that Derg had him at a hopeless disadvantage now.
Instead of attacking, the demon knelt and touched his forehead to the ground. “Master,” he growled.
“Here, Cashel,” Mellie said. She tossed a nut the size of a fist to Derg. “Drink this and you'll feel better.”
The demon set the stem of the nut between his long jaws and topped it neatly. He spat out the end as he handed the open nut to Cashel.
“I'm all right,” Cashel muttered. He didn't know when he'd ever ached in so many places at the same time. He sipped from the nut, expecting coconut milk and finding instead an effervescent green liquid. The drink warmed and loosened his muscles like a steambath as it spread through his body.
Cashel looked at the dog-faced demon. “You and me are all right, then?” he said. In the borough a fight was mostly over when one of the pair yielded, but there were times the loser didn't want to leave it at that.
Derg bowed again. “You are my master until I grant your wish, human,” he said. He grinned, a ferocious expression on a visage with jaws so long. “After that I will look for an enemy who is not so strong.”
Cashel laughed and clasped hands with the demon. “I guess I'll do that too,” he said.
He stood up, letting his muscles unknot slowly. He looked down at his chest. Mellie—Mellie or Derg—had smeared brown sap with an astringent odor over the claw marks. He
wrinkled his forehead, feeling the constriction of another daub of sap on the fang cuts.
“I had the strangest dream, Mellie,” he said. “I was somebody else.”
Derg plucked a purple flower dangling from an air plant on a branch high above. When the demon stood, his long torso made him about Cashel's height.
“The breath of these flowers gives dreams,” he said. His growling voice, like the expressions of his inhuman face, took a little getting used to.
The flower didn't seem to Cashel to have any particular smell, but he didn't hesitate to believe Derg. He could identify a ewe by her bleat at a distance so great that nobody else in the borough could tell the sound from the breeze sighing. A nose as long as the demon's should be able to smell things Cashel couldn't.
“What did you think about the dream, Cashel?” the sprite asked. If anybody but Mellie had spoken, Cashel would have thought there was tension in her voice.
He shrugged. “It was fine,” he said. “It was just funny, though—dreaming that I was somebody I wasn't.”
“The person in the dream,” Mellie said. “He couldn't have been you?”
“Oh, no,” said Cashel. He laughed, feeling embarrassed and wishing he hadn't brought it up. “No, that was somebody else entirely.”
The sprite gave a quick backflip onto her hands, then bounced upright again. Those were the first acrobatics Cashel had seen her perform since they entered this green jungle.
“We'll have to go some ways for Derg to grant your wish,” she said. “Shall we start now?”
“Huh?” Cashel said. “Sure, I guess. I'll need to take it slow till I loosen up a little, is all.”
“This way, then!” Mellie said brightly, striding off between a pair of man-high fern fronds.
Cashel thought he saw a tear wink on Mellie's cheek. It must have been a trick of the light.
“
N
o,” Nonnus said to the leader of the four horsemen escorting the carriage Asera had sent back for her companions, “I'll ride on the step, not inside.”
The guard scowled. Lantern light winked on his steel cap and breastplate. He wore a long curved sword that hung down by his left thigh and clanked when he moved.
“You'd best not slip, then,” he said. “If you fall, you'd better hope it's your head and not your belly that goes under the wheels, that's all I can say.”
The carriage was turning around in the inn yard. The box was a wooden framework covered with linen waterproofed with size which required only two horses to draw it. Inn servants waited to transfer the party's meager possessions from the cross-country coach to this lighter, handier city vehicle.
“Yes,” said the hermit, “I'll have to remember that.”
“Sarko!” the innkeeper cried, calling one of the stablehands who should have been helping him. He himself carried the rug Sharina used for a bedroll. “Brann! Where are you?”
The carriage completed its turn. The innkeeper and two maids handed the baggage to the coachman, who laid it within the low fence on top of the vehicle.
“Sarko!” the innkeeper called again. Sharina tried to remember the faces of the dead men, but all that remained was a moving blur. Even bad men deserved something better than gray oblivion.
“Come on, get aboard then!” the guard said. He twisted his horse in a tight circle and clopped out of the inn yard, shouting orders to his men.
Nonnus looked at Sharina, smiled faintly, and handed her into the vehicle. Meder followed, sitting on the bench opposite.
The carriage started to move immediately.
The hermit's left arm reached in through the window to grip the frame. His hard face was in silhouette. The step was small, meant only for the toes of a passenger entering or leaving the box, but Sharina didn't worry that Nonnus might fall.
Her dread was formless. Perhaps the ghosts of the dead stablehands rode her shoulders.
The seats were dark plush. She supposed the carriage was bor-Dahliman's property, but there was no crest or other mark of ownership. The guards weren't in livery either.
Meder was staring at her, though only occasionally did enough light sweep the interior for the wizard's face to appear as more than a vague outline.
“You don't realize how much you need me, mistress,” he said. The rumbling tires turned his voice into an iron whisper. “You will, though. Someday I'll save you when nobody else could, and then you'll appreciate me.”
Sharina turned her head away. She touched her fingertips to Nonnus' forearm. His lips smiled but he didn't look into the coach. His muscles were like carved bone.
Sharina didn't know how far they drove. The carriage never slowed, but sometimes she heard the escort bellowing threats ahead of them. Once iron clashed.
The noise and vibration of the wheels on brick pavers made her sleepy, but every time her eyes started to close she thought of the killings in the alley. Not the victims' faces, only the horror in their eyes as they died. She jerked upright again, her head buzzing.
Even bad men
…
The carriage pulled up so abruptly that Sharina swayed forward in her seat; the driver must have set his brake while shouting to the horses. Nonnus dropped from the carriage step and opened the door with his free hand, his left hand. He held his javelin at the balance in his right.
Sharina got out. They were under a porte cochere, a roof supported on one side by freestanding pillars to protect guests arriving in the rain, in front of a mansion. The air was salt and humid; they were near the harbor or more likely a canal
leading to it, since all the houses on this square were palatial rather than warehouses and tenements serving sailors.
There were no lanterns, but the rising moon was full. A tall woman in gray stood at the doorway; candlelight from the room behind her brushed long shadows across her cheek. “Get in quickly,” she said. “Before someone sees you.”
Sharina followed Meder into the entryway; Nonnus was a silent presence behind. The floor was laid in a geometric pattern of marble terrazzo; the ceiling was coffered with mythological paintings in the four sections. The single candle's light wasn't good enough for Sharina to see the details, but men rode dragons in one scene.
The woman closed the door and led them into the main hall. High windows let in wedges of chill, bright moonlight. Asera waited there with another servant, male this time but otherwise identical to the first.
The servants' faces were pale. Their hair lacked body or highlights; it lay on their scalps like carded flax.
Sharina heard the carriage and escort clatter away—down the street, not around to stables in the back. She looked about her. The hall was veneered in colored marbles; statuary looked out from wall niches, and the banisters supporting the rail around the mezzanine floor above were miniature statues as well.
Most of the corridors from the hall to other rooms were closed by tall doors of black wood, richly carved and mounted on hinges of gilded bronze. A double staircase faced the formal front door—not the side anteroom by which the trio had entered. Between the wings of the staircase a peaked passageway led straight back to a bronze grating like the portcullis of a castle. Sharina saw a marble dock gleaming in the moonlight beyond. The house had direct access to one of the city's canals.
The bor-Dahliman town house was a mansion of great luxury. There probably wasn't a building in Carcosa to match it. It was empty or nearly so.
Even by moonlight, Sharina could see the film that settles
inexorably over an unused room. The stickiness of salt air attracts dust, and there was no army of servants here to wipe it away. She wondered if the pale couple were the only people in residence.
“Where's the owner?” she demanded sharply. “Who is it we're meeti”
Asera's nose wrinkled with irritation at having her judgment questioned. “Regin bor-Dahliman is away. His servants will see to our needs until the morning, when I'll arrange our passage.”
Sharina heard faint movement from the upstairs. Nonnus heard the sounds also. There was no obvious change in his behavior—he'd been as tense as a mongoose in a snake pit ever since they arrived at the house—but she could follow his eyes assessing their surroundings.
The front door was barred, pinned, and locked. It would withstand a mob with a battering ram and would take several minutes to open even from the inside. The windows at mezzanine level were grated; any openings in the walls of rooms behind the black doors would be equally well protected. The portcullis onto the canal would have to be cranked up, a lengthy process even if they found the windlass that worked it.
The only way out in a hurry was through the door by which they'd entered. If this was the trap it seemed, the party responsible would have been aware of that also.
The female servant bowed to Sharina. “Mistress,” she said, “please come with me to the West Wing. There is a room prepared for you.”
“West Wing?” Asera said in puzzlement. “You said all the open rooms were in …”
“Let's go,” Nonnus said softly. His Pewle knife was in his left hand.
He and Sharina started for the anteroom. She drew her dagger and reached for the door latch with her free hand. The portcullis closing the canal entrance began to creak upward.
“Where are you going?” the procurator demanded. “Are you out of your minds!”
“Mistress,” said one of the servants. Their voices were indistinguishable, pale and empty like their gray eyes. Sharina jerked the door back.
The outside door was already open. Liches trailing seaweed filled the anteroom. They shambled forward, raising their dripping weapons.
Nonnus kicked the door shut before Sharina could move. “That way!” he shouted, giving her a nudge toward the closed door directly across the main hall.
Asera shouted in fear and anger. Liches lined the mezzanine railing and were starting down the stairs; more of the creatures came up the corridor from the canal.
The female servant wrapped her arms around Sharina. She had the strength of an octopus. Sharina stabbed upward, a clumsy blow because she'd been thinking of the liches as her only enemies.
The dagger had a needle point and a good edge. It grated through the woman's ribs—if she was even a woman. She continued to grip Sharina. Sharina twisted her broad blade desperately. They fell together and Sharina's head smacked the terrazzo.
The woman suddenly went limp. Her head rolled to the side; a thick, brownish fluid, not blood, oozed from the stump of her severed neck.
Nonnus dragged Sharina to her feet by the back of her tunic. Her eyes focused, but not both on the same point: all objects were haloed by their double. The male servant lay on his side with the hermit's javelin so far through his breastbone that half the blade stuck out from the middle of his back.
Meder already had the door open. Moonlight streamed through the clerestory windows of the room within, illuminating a black throne. Meder ran to it with a cry and caressed the carven arms. Nonnus carried Sharina inside, shoving the procurator ahead of them.
Sharina tried to get her bearings. Brown ichor was already beginning to corrode her dagger's blade.
The large room held only the ornate throne and an ebony table against the opposite wall with a pair of silver candlesticks, oxidized black like the furniture. The windows were too narrow to pass a human and were barred besides.
The only door was the one onto the main hall, filling with liches.
Nonnus glanced at the latch, a complex apparatus that shot two bronze bars into slots in the doorjamb. The bars and the door itself were sturdy, but scores of undead monsters could hack through them in a matter of minutes.
“Lock the door,” Nonnus said and stepped back into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him.
“Nonnus!” Sharina said as she staggered to her feet. Asera threw the double bolt. “Nonnus, no!”
Steel clashed. Something hit the other side of the door and bounced away.
“Pray for those I kill this day, child,” Nonnus called through the panel.
Because he wouldn't be alive to pray for them himself.
“No!” Sharina repeated as she grasped the locking wheel to open it. The procurator hit her from behind with a silver candlestick.
Sharina lost control over her limbs. She slumped bonelessly onto the floor, still able to see and hear. The dagger slipped from her fingers and clanked on the terrazzo.
Meder knelt on the floor before the great black throne. He was beginning an incantation, while outside the door the fight continued. Metal rang savagely but none of the combatants said a word.
Nonnus could buy only time, not safety, for the girl he'd promised to protect; but he was buying that time, with his Pewle knife and his life.

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