Lord of the Isles (65 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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“
I
wish you'd gotten some sleep,” Cashel said, clasping arms with Garric at the edge of the room. They'd taken up the grass mats so that Tenoctris could draw a circle ten feet in
diameter on the floor of terra-cotta tiles. The circle and the Old Script characters around it, also drawn with powder, took up much of the floor space.
“I wish I'd been able to,” Garric said. “Well, I don't guess being tired when I get there is going to be the worst trouble we'll have.”
He wondered if Cashel would've been able to sleep in the six hours it took Tenoctris to prepare the incantation. Maybe he would. Garric knew Cashel too well to doubt that Cashel had an imagination, but he didn't let it bother him the way most people did.
Cashel stepped back. “Garric?” he added. “Don't trust that sword. Trust yourself, all right?”
Garric nodded, though he wasn't sure exactly what his friend meant. He'd killed a demon with his hands, Sharina said; Cashel hadn't talked about that himself. But Garric doubted that he meant anything simple.
Tenoctris was within the circle, checking for one last time the symbols she'd drawn. The powders differed from one character to the next and sometimes within individual characters. They included minerals; the hair, horn, and bone of various animals; and vegetable products like wood and dried leaves. All were finely divided and laid with the same care the old woman used when drawing with a brush or a scriber.
Sharina hugged Garric. Her height was a subconscious surprise to him after being around Liane and Tenoctris the past while. Not that Liane was short, he didn't mean that … .
“Take care of yourself, brother,” she said. “Nonnus told me that he wasn't as good at charity as he thought he should be. I don't have any charity at all. If you find the person responsible for Nonnus dying—kill him, Garric. Kill him like a roach in the pantry.”
Garric wasn't surprised by his sister's tone. He'd never doubted that Sharina had the same inner hardness as their mother, though without Lora's peevish bitterness.
Tenoctris had completed her check of the circle of power.
She picked up the wrapper from one of the packets and rolled it into a spill.
Liane offered Garric her hand rather than clasping him forearm to forearm in masculine fashion. Her smile was false, but the goodwill behind it was certainly real.
“Ah,” he said. “Goodbye, Liane. I mean—”
Liane kissed him firmly on the mouth. It wasn't what he'd expected. Of course, that just added it to a long list of recent occurrences that he hadn't been expecting.
She stepped back. Her smile was real now. “Go do what you think is right, Garric,” she said. “That's what you've been doing ever since I met you. And come back to me.”
Tenoctris cleared her throat. Garric nodded. He wasn't sure whether he was responding to Liane or Tenoctris. Maybe to both of them. He turned and stepped over the circle of gleaming gray powder, careful not to disturb it.
A blue spark popped in the air, igniting the tip of the paper spill in the old woman's hand. Garric expected Tenoctris to begin chanting a spell. Instead she touched the flame to the point in the circle where she'd piled powder into a cone.
The powder spluttered for a moment. The flames from the spill sank to a blue rim at the paper's edge, punctuated by an occasional crackling white spark.
The powder caught with a snarl and a gush of gray smoke.
Tenoctris straightened, checked to make sure that the process was fully under way, and tossed the burning spill out onto the tile floor beyond the edge of the circle. She smiled grimly at Garric.
Flames tracked quickly in both directions around the circle, burning with a white glare that leaped and capered through veils of smoke. The Old Script characters burned also, starting at the bottom where they touched the circle. Their flames were lower and lacked the sparkling violence of the protective circuit. Several-colored light flickered like the aurora borealis, reflecting in pastel blurs from the room's white walls
Garric saw his friends watching still-faced within the smoke. Over the continuing angry hiss of the fire he heard
what first was a pulse like that of distant thunder. It resolved into words being chanted in an enormous room. The sound reverberated with the power of those syllables.
Tenoctris stood like a post, smiling with the same sort of quiet pride Cashel had worn when he referred to what he'd accomplished for Latias. This wasn't the end of all tasks, but it was a task well done.
Garric's friends had vanished and the walls of the room were growing dim. He could still see beyond the gray veil of smoke, but his surroundings had changed.
For a moment he was in a forest. The trees were evergreens, pines or spruce; snow was piled high up their trunks and blew in swirling eddies around the roughness of their bark.
Smoke and flurries blended, blurred. When the curtain thinned again Garric saw. beasts grazing in a meadow. Deer, he thought, but one raised its head to look toward him and he saw horns not only on its brow but also in the middle of its long snout.
Smoke from the spluttering fires rolled across the scene and drew back. A violent storm slashed through a bamboo grove without touching the fires or the protective circle. Lightning struck nearby. In the flash Garric saw a dozen creatures with cat faces and the bodies of human dwarfs, dancing around a pole to which a terrified girl was tied.
One of the dwarfs gestured to Garric. Smoke mercifully blotted the scene.
The fire consumed itself, cooling into a circle of gray ash with craters where an element had burst violently. The characters beyond burned to the top and went out also. When the colored flames ended, so did the echoing power of the ancient words Tenoctris had written.
The smoke dissipated, leaving a bitter aftertaste. Garric and Tenoctris stood on a sandy beach. The air was warm with a light breeze to riffle the palm fronds.
It was night. The moon was full and more than twice as
large as it should have been. Its angry reddish light flooded the sand and rumbling surf.
Behind Garric was a wall on which was carved a scene in high relief. Life-sized figures formed a tableau of the sinking of the royal fleet a thousand years before Garric was born. In the center King Carus raised his fist to heaven as the deck of his flagship plunged beneath the sculptured sea.
In front of Garric and Tenoctris was a figure seated on a black throne at the edge of the shore. It laughed; louder than the ocean, louder than anything living.
“Come closer, humans,” the Hooded One said. “I've been waiting for you.”
G
arric stepped out of the circle. Ash from one of the words of power felt soft and warm under his bare heel. He knew he had to move immediately, before his growing fear froze him where he was.
The ash couldn't protect him any longer. He knew that, but he knew also that if fear mastered him he'd cower in the circle like a fool anyway.
“Come,” the Hooded One repeated. He gestured with the long rod in his hands; violet light gleamed from the tip. “Come to Malkar, humans.”
Tenoctris laughed. “I watched your false throne shatter on Yole, wizard,” she said. “The same will happen to this one, as you know.”
She stepped out of the circle of ash also. In her hands was another paper wrapper, which she deliberately rolled into a tube; a wand of power. Its crude simplicity implied scorn for the wizard she faced.
The surf rumbled in anger. This was an evil place, for all the quiet beauty of its setting.
“I'm surprised a hedge wizard like you even had the ability to bring the boy to me, old woman,” the Hooded One said. He didn't shout, but his voice echoed from the sea and sky regardless. “I appreciate your efforts though. Perhaps I'll kill you quickly as a favor for your help.”
Garric stepped forward, putting himself between Tenoctris and the throned figure. He drew the Sword of Carus. Ruddy moonlight washed its blade like a river of blood.
“We've come for Ilna,” Garric said. The sword felt as natural in his hand as the sand did beneath his toes, but
he
was speaking; the youth who'd grown up in Barca's Hamlet, not the king poised within him, grinning with a joy that wolves would recognize.
When Garric's fingers touched the steel, the throne and figure lost solidity to become as insubstantial as the moonlight itself. This was an illusion then; the Hooded One wasn't really in this place.
The ghost figure reached into his sleeve and came out with a mannikin he held in his palm. “This is your Ilna,” the Hooded One said. “What will you give me to have her back, human? Will you give me the Throne of Malkar?”
When Garric faced the choice, it was his personal reality that mattered. Not great questions of good and evil, empire and chaos, but the safety of the friends whose lives twined with his.
“I'll give you your life, human,” Garric said. “I'll take Ilna back to my own proper world and not trouble you so long as you don't trouble us.”
It was the truth—Garric's truth. Tenoctris wouldn't agree, nor probably would King Carus; but it was Garric's honest answer.
Not that it mattered. The Hooded One would never accept any terms but his own. This wasn't a fight Garric was provoking; but the fight would come nonetheless, and Garric wouldn't walk away from it now even if he could.
“You show no more intelligence than I expected from a Haft barbarian,” the Hooded One said. Neither of his opponents were cowering at his feet, and he was noticeably angry. “Old woman, tell him that he can't touch me here.”
Garric wasn't afraid anymore. It helped that he was pretending to be unafraid, because the image of courage tended to become reality. As for Tenoctris—she didn't seem to care enough about the material world for it to matter to her whether or not she remained in it herself.
“I know that you can't be harmed in this place save by a person from your own time, wizard,” Tenoctris said. “We haven't reached your real self yet.”
“I haven't permitted you to reach the plane on which I exist in a material sense!” the Hooded One thundered. He stood up and banged his staff on the base of the throne beside him. “I'm responsible for you being here, not your own efforts! Do
you
plan to attack me, old woman? Do you?”
“I don't have the physical strength, wizard,” Tenoctris said. Her voice was calm and almost playful, it seemed to Garric. She knew something he didn't, and the Hooded One didn't know it either.
Or she was bluffing, of course.
The Hooded One pointed his wand toward the sea. Water spouted as if on a rock at the edge of the breakers.
“You've met liches, I believe,” the Hooded One said. “Lesser wizards create them from the souls and bones of drowned sailors, but I have something special for the two of you.”
The sea foamed about an object rising a hundred feet from shore. A whale broaching … .
It stood up slowly; it was thirty feet tall and shaped like a man. Its legs were pillars, inhumanly thick to support the torso's enormous weight. The bloody moonlight gleamed from the great single eye in the middle of the creature's forehead.
It began walking in from the sea. Surf sprayed and spat as if the legs were stone breakwaters.
Garric had crawled through the rib cage of a giant like this when he'd escaped from the dreamworld. Now he faced another, clothed in gelatinous gray flesh. The creature carried a club, its shaft a young tree to which was lashed a head of gleaming jade as large as a horse's skull.
“A prehuman race,” the Hooded One said. He cackled with laughter. “But I've picked the soul of a great warrior to animate the form to my will. Do you remember him, hedge wizard?”
Tenoctris had knelt and was chanting over the symbols she'd drawn in the sand. Garric knew that the old woman didn't have the power to oppose the Hooded One directly, but he was glad to know that she hadn't given up. He took a firm grip on the sword hilt and started forward.
“This is the Duke of Yole!” the Hooded One said in triumph.
Lightning struck Garric. Colors and sound blazed about him, but he had no consciousness except of roaring conflagration. His flesh tingled with a shock as great as that of diving into the winter sea.
He was lying on the sand. King Carus, bearded and wearing the gleaming diadem of Garric's dreams, stepped out of the stone relief. His strong hands helped Garric rise. Carus unbuckled the sword belt and cinched it about his sightly fuller waist, then took the sword itself from Garric's willing fingers.
The Hooded One was a black figure on a black throne again, though Garric was too aware of the illusion to be frightened by its seeming solidity.
Carus smiled broadly at Garric and said, “You've brought me where I wanted to be, lad. Better late than never, hey? You take care of your end and leave Duke Tedry to me.”
Carus whirled the sword above his head. “Haft and the Isles!” he cried. With a peal of bloodthirsty laughter he charged the giant just striding heavily from the surf.
For a man to attack a creature so large should have been ridiculous, but there was nothing ridiculous about Carus. His
left hand held the scabbard to prevent it from flapping against his thigh, and his boots sprayed sand behind him.
Carus had waited a thousand years for this moment. The size of the body his enemy wore wouldn't change the outcome.
Garric threw back his head and laughed. Good might not triumph, but one evil man would receive the end he deserved even though it was delayed by a thousand years.
The figure on the black throne screamed and slashed his staff down. The cosmos tilted on more than three planes.
Everything was gray. Garric heard Tenoctris continuing to chant. His feet were down, but the direction of
down
shifted again and a third time without any material change. Garric extended his arms for balance and touched the old woman's tunic, though he couldn't see her in the shimmering gray blur.
The world changed a fourth time. Garric stood in a room of flaring torches and stone walls dripping with condensate. Water pooled on the floor, and there was a strong smell of the sea.
Ilna lay beside the black throne, on which sat a hooded figure no more than the size of a tall man. The wand he held was pulsing with angry amethyst light.
“He had the choice of facing your ancestor there, or bringing us here to his lair with him,” Tenoctris said at Garric's shoulder. “This is the Hooded One. This is the real man.”
Garric strode forward.
The Hooded One rose and struck his staff down again. The cosmos shifted around Garric.

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