Master of the Cauldron (43 page)

Ilna walked on. Some light still pierced the layer of water overhead, but it was a pale blue that made her hands look like those of a month-dead corpse. She smiled. That could be true, a month or so from this moment or the next….

Without warning she entered the larva's chamber. From the cliff above it'd looked like a spindle of yarn. Seeing it from the inside, she thought that somehow she'd taken a wrong turning that brought her to a place she'd never imagined. Only when her eyes absorbed the pattern did she understand the nature of the cocoon.

The interior was dimpled where lines attached to cables above and to rocks on the seafloor beneath pulled the skin outward. Otherwise, the weight of water would flatten the bag and its occupants.

The larva was the size of a building, the size of a ship: a smooth mass moving with the slow majesty of a summer cloud. In direct sun its skin would be white with brown mottlings, but here the background was the leprous color of fungus on a tomb.

It lay in a pool of its own wastes. Hard-shelled, eyeless creatures browsed the fluid, their hairlike legs stirring the surface.

The larva's movements were as slow as the pulse in a sleeping lizard's throat, but when its head lifted slightly Ilna caught the needle-sharp flash of the jewel she'd come for. The creature shifted again, hiding the jewel, but now Ilna understood why there were highlights reflected onto the curved silken surface at the far end of the chamber.

And naturally, it
would
be at the other end. Having come this far to
fetch the jewel, Ilna wasn't going to complain about walking another furlong—even if she had to do so over the back of a giant worm.

The first problem was getting
onto
the worm's back. It was easily twice, perhaps even three times, her height. From where Ilna stood the curve swelled out like the face of an undershot cliff. That meant she'd have to climb the cocoon and drop onto the creature.

Ilna turned her head, eyeing, then touching the silken wall. Immediately her stomach settled, though she hadn't been aware that she was queasy before then. The larva's movements made the whole cocoon undulate slowly. Ilna didn't like the feel of a ship at sea, and this was worse—more like being in the guts of a snake. Focusing on fabric, even a fabric woven by a worm, brought the universe into a perspective Ilna was comfortable with.

The bag had several layers, each formed from three different sizes of thread: thumb-thick lines that alone or in bundles provided strength; straw-thick cords that formed a close framework within the heavy supports; and finally sheets of gossamer to cover the framework and make the bag water-tight. Ilna thrust her left hand into the fabric, forcing the gossamer aside with her fingers to seize one of the heavy lines. When she was sure she had it, she reached a little higher and gripped with her right hand.

Kicking holds for her bare feet, Ilna walked and pulled her way up the side as if she was climbing a silk net. It wasn't especially difficult even when she got high enough that the bag's curve meant that she was hanging upside down. Ilna was a good deal stronger than she was heavy, and this was only for a brief time anyway.

She looked down, then pulled her feet free. Her toes dangled close to the larva's back. If she slipped off the slick, pulsing body when she let go—and she might—she'd still scarcely injure herself on the yielding surface below. Though it would be unpleasant.

Ilna's mouth formed into a hard smile again. She
wanted
to be punished when she made a mistake. It made it less likely that she'd do the same thing again. Falling into a pool of worm dung certainly qualified as punishment.

She dangled for a moment, then dropped. Her weight dimpled the worm's flesh. Slow ripples quivered out from her feet, reflecting and cancelling one another as they proceeded down the white surface.

The nearest brown blotch was only a double pace from Ilna. It shifted slightly and focused six glittering eyes on her. What she'd thought was a
skin discoloration was instead a flat parasite the size of a half cape. Its beak was driven deep into the worm's white flesh.

There were more parasites than Ilna could count on both hands. They formed a diamond pattern across the larva's back, as regular as the studs an artisan might hammer into a leather box for decoration. Here the reason for the spacing was a matter not of craft but of survival: the parasites were territorial as serpents, each claiming an expanse of the worm's flesh sufficient to feed it to breeding age.

The nearest parasite withdrew a beak the length of a man's forearm from the worm's flesh; a drop of clear fluid oozed up before the wound puckered shut. All down the worm's back other parasites were moving, restive because of the disturbance to their careful hierarchy.

Beak lifted, the nearest parasite squirmed toward Ilna, the human who'd invaded its territory. It moved on more tiny legs than she could count.

 

Sharina got up from the ground. She'd landed without the forward momentum she'd been braced for. She'd been as active as that of any boy in the borough before she became a princess, but the reflexes she'd developed running and jumping had played her false. The mechanism the ring used to bring her here wasn't bound by the laws of the waking world.

Men—People—were hoeing their way down every row of the broad field in which she'd landed. They were bent over their work, but the nearest were only twenty feet away. They came toward her a chop at a time.

Sharina looked for a weapon. The hoes had sturdy shafts and wedge-shaped bronze heads that could cut flesh as well as the roots of weeds. If she pretended to be submissive, she might have a chance to grab a hoe and—

The workers paid her no more attention than the corn and the peavines did. They worked forward, intent on their tasks and never looking above the earth they were cultivating. Sharina stepped aside cautiously, feeling the muscles of her abdomen tense. She expected that at any instant one or the other of the men passing her would turn and grab her.

They didn't. They hoed on with no sound except the
chk! chk!
of their tools and the occasional cling of bronze on a pebble.

A horn trilled a long, silvery note. It seemed to be far in the distance, but Sharina didn't know how sound travelled in this place. She looked at
the ring. If she began to read the legend on the bezel, would it take her back to Valles or…?

Sharina slipped the ring onto her left thumb, where she wouldn't lose it. “Or,” was too likely for her to take the risk just yet. She'd been many places, in the waking world and out of it, since leaving Barca's Hamlet. This island wasn't where she wanted to be, but experience had taught her that things could've been worse. Leaping somewhere at random might very well drop her into one of those worse alternatives.

Sharina looked around. From what she'd seen as she descended to the island, most of the surface was more or less the same as her immediate surroundings. Their fields ran between a pair of irrigation channels marked by the pale fronds of the weeping willows growing on their margins.

The land wasn't as dead flat as it'd seemed from above. The surface rolled enough that Sharina could see at most a couple furlongs to the right, the direction of the lake and building she'd seen in the center of the island. Her only choices other than the fields were that building or the shore. The latter'd looked like it was lapped by clouds, not a sea of water, but Sharina understood little enough about this island that she wasn't going to jump to conclusions—especially to one that made it more likely that she was trapped.

She smiled as she jogged down the row, passing through the line of workers. They gave her no more notice than they had before. Her being trapped was likely enough already.

At least she wouldn't starve: she snapped off a pea pod as she ran and popped it whole into her mouth, the way she'd have done as a child when she was cultivating the inn garden. The peas were ripe and crunched tastily. Pausing—the workers were far behind her already—she gathered a handful and trotted onward, eating them.

The horn called again. It seemed closer this time.

Sharina looked over her shoulder, but all she see were the green billows of the maize. She frowned, going over her choices as she continued to jog through the grain.

The field ended ten strides ahead in an irregular line of willows and mimosas, a natural watercourse instead of a man-made canal. The horn sounded, by now in the near distance; another replied from much farther away to Sharina's right.

She reached the creek. Its pebble bottom was clearly visible through
the turbulence caused by larger rocks breaking the surface of the water. The banks of the stream were low, though undercut, and the channel was never more than eight feet across.

Instead of leaping the creek and continuing on, Sharina lifted herself into the crotch of a willow and scrambled up one of steeply slanting main branches. It took her thirty feet into the air before it began to wobble dangerously from her weight. Gripping the slick bark with both hands, she paused, calming her quick breaths. By craning her neck she found an opening through which she could look back the way she'd come while remaining concealed behind the curtain of fronds hanging from higher branches,.

The laborers continued hoeing their way down the field in as good order as a rank of Garric's pikemen. They seemed to have no more minds than ripples on a pond did: and like the ripples, they moved forward in perfect unison.

The horn called. Sharina slitted her eyes, but there was nothing to see in the direction of the sound. She was about to drop to the ground and resume running when a man wearing a helmet and polished breastplate came over the swell of the earth.

He was mounted on a two-legged lizard with a tail twice the length of the torso to balance its neck and long skull. The beast raised its head and licked the air the way a snake does, scenting prey. Its jaws hung slightly open, baring a saw-edged mouthful of teeth.

The lizard whuffed, then strode forward again. It moved like a grackle, bobbing its head back and forth, but each stride was ten feet long. The man on its back raised a bronze trumpet to his lips and blew another trembling call.

Sharina found her hands gripping the branch tighter than she needed just to hold on. “Lady,” she prayed in a whisper, “if it is Your will, help me in this danger.”

She slid back down the tree, making her plans. Whether or not the Great Gods helped her, she'd be helping herself to the best of her ability.

“Ma'am?” Cashel said, meeting Mab's eyes. Softly crimson wizardlight wrapped her, like a tree in deep fog silhouetted against the sunrise. She looked like a middle-aged woman, pudgy but not fat. Her expression was coldly cynical like Ilna's on a bad day; which for Ilna had been more days than not.

“Wake them, Cashel,” Mab said. “That's what you were told to do, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” he said. He glanced at the equipment along the back wall, facing the door. “And to tell them to put on the armor there.”

The Sons slept more soundly than people sprawled on a stone floor ought to do. Cashel guessed something was going on with them besides just being tired and sleeping. Maybe they were having the sort of meeting he'd had with the Heroes, but he kinda doubted that.

In the Sons' minds, the Heroes were the next thing to Gods. Cashel knew enough about people to understand that real heroes were more apt to be men like Ilna's friend Chalcus than they were to be saints. These boys hadn't been out in the world enough to know that, and it might discourage them to meet those six hard men.

“Rise and shine!” Cashel said in a loud voice. The Sons stirred, but they didn't open their eyes.

Cashel frowned. He banged his quarterstaff against the inside of the door, noting with surprise that the ferrule struck sparks of blue wizardlight from the bronze.

“Wakey, wakey!” he said. Only by a heartbeat did he keep from adding, “You'll get no breakfast, you lazy woollies!” as he'd have done with a flock of sheep slow to leave their byre in the morning.

The Sons were alert now, sitting up or at least rolling to one arm. “How long have I been sleeping?” Enfero asked plaintively.

Cashel took out his wad of raw wool and began polishing his quarterstaff. People asked a lot of questions that didn't make any difference. That was all right, he supposed, but it didn't mean he needed to answer them.

Rubbing down the staff was more than just filling time. Cashel hadn't really done anything with the staff during the journey, just spun it through
the air in much the fashion he did most days for exercise. The air he was spinning it in was something he didn't like the memory of, though. If he cleaned nothing but the surface of his mind with the wool, then it was a good thing to've done.

Orly got to his feet, slowly and carefully. “We're up, Master Cashel,” he said. “What do we do now?”

“We were supposed to wake the Heroes,” said Stasslin. His voice started accusingly, but the peevish tone bled away as his eyes moved from Mab to Cashel, then settled between them. “There's nobody here to wake. Unless that's them.”

He gestured. “The bones.”

“You're to put the armor on,” Cashel said. “And the swords, I guess.”

He looked at the equipment, which hadn't interested him a lot until then. He'd never worn armor nor had any truck with weapons beyond a quarterstaff. The knife he'd carried all the years he could remember was a tool for trimming leather or picking a stone from the hoof of a plow ox, not something he'd ever thought of stabbing somebody with.

This was fancy stuff, though. Cashel didn't see much point in the engraving and gold inlays, but the quality showed in the falling-water sheen of the swordblades and the way the axe heads were shrunk onto the helves instead of just being wedged in place.

“It won't fit us,” Herron said. He glanced down at the sword belt he'd unbuckled when he curled up on the floor to sleep, then looked again to Cashel. “Will it, Master Cashel?”

“It will fit you,” Mab said. “Well enough. Put the armor on, Sons of the Heroes.”

Orly looked at her with an expression Cashel couldn't read. “Yes,” he said. “It's what we came here for. Isn't it, milady?”

“You came here to save Ronn from the king and his creatures,” said Mab. “For that you must put on the armor.”

“I thought we came to wake the Heroes,” Athan objected with a whine, but he stepped to the set of equipment on the right end of the line and began to examine it.

The gear varied in style and decoration. Each place had a helmet, but these ranged from the simple iron pot that Herron set carefully on his head to the ornately chased and gilded pair that Enfero and Manza chose.

Cashel stood uncertain as the Sons armed themselves. He glanced at
Mab. She crooked a finger to bring him silently to her side, then laid her free hand in the crook of his elbow as they watched together.

Five of the sets included shields. The last had instead two short-hafted axes; that had been Hrandis' equipment, Cashel supposed. Stasslin lifted Hrandis' cuirass of riveted iron bands from the rack on which it hung, muttering, “This'll never fit any of us….”

He closed the piece around him and it did fit, fit the way a scabbard fits the sword it was made for. Something had changed, but Cashel couldn't swear whether the difference was in the armor or the body of the man wearing it.

“Somebody help me with these laces,” Athan said. His cuirass had a sleeve of mail to cover the right arm. He was trying to do something with it one-handed and, of course, failing. “Dasborn, help me, will you?”

Cashel started forward. Mab gripped his arm to prevent him.

“Come on, Dasborn!” Athan said, but it wasn't Athan's voice. “I didn't come back so I could die of old age.”

“What would you know about dying of old age, Valeri?” Enfero—or was it Manza?—said.

“Maybe he's been talking to Virdin,” said…said his brother. Neither man was Enfero or Manza now.

Orly had slid on a coat of mail with a silver wash that made it shimmer like a moonlit lake. He finished buckling the crossed shoulder belts that held his long sword and dagger, then walked over to the man who used to be Athan.

“You'd be in a hurry on the way to your execution, Valeri,” he said, taking his companion's sleeve in one hand and reeving a thong through the rings above, then below, the elbow. He'd gathered the metal fabric so that it wouldn't bind if the man wearing it swung his sword violently.

“We all were, weren't we?” said Stasslin, wearing Hrandis' black armor. “What else did we ever get from being Heroes?”

“We got the eyes of every man in Ronn,” said one of the twins.

“And especially every woman in Ronn!” said his brother. “Oh, those were the days, weren't they?”

“We did our duty,” said Herron's body speaking in Virdin's calm, reasonable voice. “There isn't any pay for that—not the honor, not any of the rest. It was our job, and we did it. And we'll do it again.”

The swords were racked apart from their belts and scabbards. Athan
held Valeri's blade up in the shimmering light for examination, then sheathed it with the absently smooth motion Cashel had seen skilled swordsmen like Garric and Chalcus display.

Athan couldn't have handled a sword like that if he'd practiced all his life. It took more than work: you had to have the sort of understanding of what you were doing that Cashel did with his quarterstaff. The Sons of the Heroes were…gone, maybe dead; Cashel didn't know where the boys were now or if they'd ever come back. These men in armor were the Heroes themselves.

“So,” said one of the twins to Mab. “Who are you?”

“You know who she is,” Hrandis said. “Who else could she be in this place?”

“I've never seen her look like this,” the other twin said. He walked a few steps to the side.

“It doesn't matter what I look like,” Mab said, smiling faintly as she turned, keeping her face toward the twin who was trying to view her profile. “It doesn't even matter who I am, Menon. What matters—”

She swept the whole band with her glance. She'd been playing before. Now each word came out like the thump of a door closing, without music or doubt: “What matters is that none of you is a wizard, and Ronn will need a wizard's help as well as your own if the city is to survive.”

Dasborn laughed. “The citizens thought I was hard,” he said, looking around his fellows. “It must've been the same for all of you in your day. But they didn't know what hard really was, because they only saw surfaces.”

He bowed to Mab, and went on, “We didn't serve you, milady, we served Ronn and her people. But it was an honor to serve
with
you, and I'm pleased to be doing that again.”

“He speaks for all of us, I think,” Virdin said. “Anybody disagree?”

“We're here, aren't we?” Valeri snapped. He hunched, settling his cuirass to ride more comfortably on his shoulders. “Let's get on with it.”

“One thing first,” Virdin said, turning to Cashel. The Hero's features were those of Herron, but nobody could've mistaken the boy from sunlit Ronn for the man who faced Cashel now.

“You're a stranger, Master Cashel,” Virdin said. “You've done a man's duty to come to this place to wake us, but you have no business with what comes next. Go home with our thanks and the thanks of the city.”

“I've come this far,” Cashel said, facing the men in armor. “I guess I'll go the rest of the way with you.”

“This is Ronn's business,” Hrandis said, his eyes on Mab. “Ours and the citizens. He doesn't belong.”

“He belongs,” Mab said. “He's said he's willing to accompany us, and he doesn't say things he doesn't mean.”

Cashel smiled. “No ma'am,” he said, his voice husky. “I don't.”

“I want Cashel with me,” Mab said. “He's made it his business. He belongs with me, and with us.”

“All right,” said Valeri. “We've talked enough.”

He turned and touched the great bronze door where the valves met in the middle. It opened with the soundless majesty of sunrise. Drawing their swords and Hrandis lifting his two axes, the Heroes stepped from the temple.

Darkness fled before them.

 

Sharina knelt and picked up one of the larger stream-washed stones. It was some dense pinkish rock, about the size of both her fists clenched.

The lizard was hunting her by smell. She wasn't sure she'd gain by walking downwind with the stream, but it was something she
could
do. The water wasn't deep, but the bottom was dangerously slick, especially when cold water had numbed the soles of her feet. She'd like to have run, but that wasn't possible.

Sharina's silken inner tunic had long sleeves. As she paced over the smooth, algae-haired stones, she ripped the right sleeve off at the shoulder seam to create a fabric tube. She knotted the wrist end into a bag, then dropped the stone into it. That gave her a mace of sorts, easier to hold than the bare stone and much harder-hitting.

She continued on. The nearest horn called, followed at intervals by horns at a greater distance to either side.

The willows and mimosas were a good screen against anybody looking her way from the fields, but they wouldn't hide Sharina if the rider reached the creek and chose to follow it. That's what he
would
do almost certainly, if his mount lost the scent. The lizard's long legs could in a few minutes go farther up- and downstream than Sharina could walk before the hunter arrived.

She glanced through the mimosa stems toward the cultivated field. She'd reached the edge where an irrigation channel separated the maize and beans from a field of dark green rape. The rider wasn't in sight yet, but he would be soon.

The builders had stubbed the irrigation channel off just short of the creek so that the measured water didn't drain away. Trees must sprout along the channel's margin, but they'd been trimmed away; cattails grew from the muddy bottom, however. Without hesitating Sharina scrambled out of the creek and across the short stretch of waste ground, then threw herself into the channel. It was shallow, but she could wriggle down into the soft bottom to conceal herself among the cattails. The standing water was blood-warm and opaque with mud.

Sharina lay down full length and settled a mat of leaves from last year's growth over her head. She hoped she'd covered her blond hair completely, but she'd decided that she had to keep her eyes above water so that she could see. Settling her breathing again, she waited.

What would Cashel do if he were there with her? Hide in the ditch, she supposed, just as she was doing. There was no other choice, not against the band of hunters coursing her. She could hear the horn calls coming closer. She might escape the nearest rider, but she didn't see how she could get off the island without using the ring and taking her chances with where it sent her. Nothing Cashel could do would change that.

But she'd feel better with Cashel beside her. Things were never hopeless if Cashel was there with you.

Sharina grinned, the way Cashel'd expect her to do. She shifted to grip her mace's silken shaft with both hands. Things weren't hopeless now, either.

The horn sounded from where she'd entered the stream. After a brief pause, Sharina heard loud splashes mixed with the clack of stones being knocked together by the weight of the great lizard. Chance or instinct had caused the hunter to turn downstream, the correct direction.

Well, Sharina couldn't do anything until he'd come past her. That made his choice her good luck, didn't it?

And perhaps it did, but she wouldn't pretend that she really
felt
that way about it.

The hunter came closer, though Sharina still couldn't see him. There was a
Braaaa!
from the lizard's throat, a startled, “Ho! Ho!” from the rider, then a sloshing like a waterfall. The beast had slipped.

“Up!” the rider called. “Come, come up!”

The scene was
wrong,
but it took Sharina a moment to understand how. She was expecting a torrent of shouted curses. She'd never met a
human, no matter how saintly, who wouldn't have reacted excitedly to that dangerous fall. The People appeared to have no more emotions than dung beetles did.