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Authors: David Drake

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Nodding toward the room which she kept as living quarters, she continued, “Can I offer you something? I have bread, cheese, and some extremely bad wine. Also cistern water that a boy with a donkey brings by in the evenings. My major luxury. I haven't been able to bring myself to drink canal water yet—”
Her face hardened. “Though most of the people in this building have to.”
Voder nodded. “I've drunk my share of canal water,” he said. “I could say I miss the salt taste since I got some money, but that would be a lie.”
He turned his gray eyes directly on her brown pair. “I still sort of wonder what you were doing, mistress,” he said. “Before, I mean. I knew even then that you weren't in it for the money.” .
Ilna sniffed. “Let's just say I was making a fool of myself over a man,” she said. “Not a new story, I'm afraid. Or a particularly interesting one.”
Voder nodded. “Well, if you change your mind about Cerix and the other, let me know,” he said, switching the conversation back so smoothly that it seemed never to have left its original channel. “You can get me through the central office. Or at home, if you like. We've got a second floor on Rush Street. My wife'd be pleased to meet you, I think.”
He looked at a corner of the ceiling again and cleared his throat. “Speaking of work,” he said, “there a watch
captain here in the Crescent named Bonbo or-Wexes. He's told the chancellor that you're the mastermind of a gang of thugs who've half-killed a number of wealthy citizens while they were passing through the district in their sedan chairs. He didn't get much of a rise from the chancellor, but chances are Bonbo is going to keep trying until something happens.”
Ilna flicked her head in disgust. “Your Bonbo was paying upkeep on his mistress out of the profits of a child brothel in the next building. The establishment is out of business now. Some of the local people took care of that themselves.”
“Your doing?” Voder asked.
“I suppose,” Ilna said. “I'd like to think so, at any rate. I've provided fabrics for the light shafts of most of the tenements nearby. The residents seem to feel better about themselves, and they're willing to improve their surroundings further by their own efforts.”
She glanced out the window herself. “Some of the brothel's clients were roughed up when it went out of business,” she went on. “Not as badly as they should have been, in my opinion.” .
She looked at Voder like a hawk facing a wildcat. “If Bonbo is going to be a problem,” she said, “I'd best take care of him.”
“No,” said Voder. “No, you will
not
do that thing!”
He slapped the window frame for emphasis; his fingers were harder than the wood of the casement. “Look, woman,” he said. “If a brothel keeper in the Crescent gets mobbed, nobody who matters is going to care. Chances are the particular nobles who got caught in that business don't have a lot of friends either. But if you raise a mob against a watch captain, that's revolution. The earl will send in the army if the City Patrols can't finish you off ourself.”
“Well, somebody had better deal with Bonbo!” Ilna said. “Are you volunteering, then?”
Voder's anger vanished in a gust of loud laughter.
“Yeah, I suppose I am,” he said. “Bonbo is Central Office business, that's a fact.” .
He slid out his hickory baton, looked at it, and twirled it experimentally between the thumb and two fingers of his right hand. “Well, I didn't drop it,” he said musingly. “It's been a while, the Sister
knows
it has; but I guess not so long that I can't still teach Bonbo where he should've drawn the line.”
Ilna gave him a curt nod that was a salute. “Just a moment,” she said, walking to a wicker hamper near the door. She set aside the lid, considered the contents for a moment, and reached in with both hands to bring out a packet of considerable size, wrapped in black baize.
“Here,” she said, handing the cloth to Voder. “Master Beltar hasn't been by to pick up the Ten Days' weaving. If you give this to the chancellor, you may have less difficulty convincing him of why it was necessary to deal with Bonbo the way you did.”
Voder took the gift with the grin of one predator to another. “It might at that,” he agreed.
He put the baton back under his belt for the time being. “I'll go about my business, then,” he said. “You know, I'm pretty much looking forward to it.”
Voder opened the door, then paused and looked over his shoulder. “Mistress?” he said. “Does the fellow you mentioned know what he's walked away from?”
Ilna smiled. “He's a special man,” she said. “He'll be very important, one day. I think he's done better for himself.”
“I haven't seen much of the world,” Voder said. “I never left Erdin in my life. But I've met a lot of people and I'll tell you this, mistress: you're wrong. He couldn't have done better.”
Voder walked out of Ilna's room, leaving the door open as he'd found it. His feet didn't make a sound on the floor of the hallway, but he whistled a catchy tune about a milkmaid and her cat.
 
 
“This water tastes
awful,”
said the princess Aria. Her face screwed up as if she was about to cry.
“Well, what did you expect?” Zahag said. “Do you think we're back in the Successor's palace, is that it? I think I did pretty well to find anything to drink here!”
“I know I'm not in the palace,” Aria said. “Because of you! Oh, Mistress God, how could you be so cruel to me!”
And she did start to cry. Again. Cashel didn't know where she found the fluid to refill her tear ducts, but somehow she managed.
“Don't pick at her, Zahag,” Cashel muttered. “She's not used to this sort of thing.”
“Oh, and I suppose I am?” the ape snarled. “Well, you can find your own water the next time!”
Zahag flounced to the other side of the outcrop beneath which he'd located the pool dripping between two layers of limestone. He wouldn't go far, Cashel knew; and it was hard to blame the ape for finding Aria a difficult companion. He sighed.
If you looked toward the horizon, the landscape seemed to have a lot of greenery. That's because it was pretty much flat. Tiny leaves of the low shrubs merged with distance into a solid carpet that looked remarkably sparse at any place you came close to.
There was grass: dead, dry stems but in such profusion that Cashel supposed there must be rain now and again. He tried to imagine the terrain after a storm when suddenly everything was lush and green. He'd woven the straw into sunshades for the three of them to carry on poles of brushwood from which he'd knocked the thorns.
He chuckled.
“What is there to laugh about!” Aria said, looking up in real anger. She thought he was laughing at her.
“If I wanted green grass and plenty of water,” Cashel said quietly, “I should've stayed home in Barca's Hamlet.
And sometimes that's what I think: I
should've
stayed home in Barca's Hamlet.”
Aria looked at him like he was crazy. That was a change from her crying, at least. She stuck her head under the limestone and began to slurp more of the water they had no utensils to dip up.
“We could leave her here,” Zahag said. He'd made a circuit of the outcrop to squat at Cashel's side. “There's other females and anyway, this one isn't strong enough to be much use. She can't even pick berries!”
“I told her mother I'd bring her back,” Cashel said. He'd stopped trying to argue with the ape about helping people whether you liked them or not. Aria wasn't part of Zahag's band—or Cashel's, she'd made that clear as springwater—and Zahag didn't figure he owed her anything.
The bushes that grew every double pace or two across the landscape were of a dozen or more varieties when Cashel examined them closely. They were all low to the ground; all thorny and small-leafed; but for a wonder, many of them carried dark berries the size of a woman's little fingernail on the undersides of their branches. The berries didn't have much flesh, but the kernels inside were crunchy and edible as well.
Berries had kept the trio going during the three days they'd walked across this wasteland. You'd have thought that Aria, whose hands and wrists were far more delicate than those of her male companions, would have had the easiest time picking berries from among the thorns.
That was true, in a way, because the first time Aria tried she'd pricked herself. She'd flatly refused to try again. Cashel and Zahag had to forage for her as well as themselves.
Aria drew her head back from the brackish pool and straightened. She glared at Cashel and the ape.
“You didn't tell her mother you'd bring her back,”
Zahag said deliberately. “You said you'd get her away from Ilmed. And you did that, right?”
“If you'd just left me alone … ,” Aria said. Her tone started out angry, but it sank swiftly into bleak despair. “I would have married the most powerful wizard ever. limed would have made me queen of all the world! And instead …”
She turned to survey the surrounding wasteland. Her eyes filled with tears and she sank to the ground again, sobbing.
“If you challenge the chief ape,” Zahag said with gloating harshness, “then you'd better be stronger than him or able to run faster. Otherwise you get your neck cracked. I guess limed learned that a little before he died.”
Cashel cleared his throat. “Time we got moving,” he said. He'd have liked to travel by night, but the track was so faint that he figured they'd get lost in the darkness. There wasn't even a moon in this place.
He leaned over and touched the girl's elbow to make sure she knew he meant it. Her dress was a mass of fluff and tatters like the seeds starting to spill from a milkweed pod. Her feet weren't hardened for this trek either, though he'd plaited her sandals of a sort from the gray-green bark of the shrubbery. Cashel would never have his sister's touch with fabrics, but he could make out.
Aria continued to cry. She clamped her arm close to avoid Cashel's touch.
“And as for Ilmed … ,” Cashel said with a grating anger that he only half-regretted. Couldn't the girl even try? “He thought that because he had power, he could do anything he pleased. That's no way for a man to live, nor a woman either.”
He cleared his throat again. “Now get up, mistress,” he said. “I won't leave you here, but I might decide to drag you if you won't walk!”
“‘S
ilver hidden in the greedy soil,'” Garric read from the volume of Celondre, “‘has no luster, my wise friend Kristas. Only in wise use does the metal gleam.'”
He sat with his back to one of the four pillars across the front of the little temple. Inside, Tenoctris examined the carvings just below the roofline. If there had ever been a cult statue, it had vanished in the ages since the temple was built.
Liane sat cross-legged against the base of the next pillar over, facing Garric. She listened with a relaxed smile.
Garric believed Tenoctris that this land wasn't part of the world from which the Gulf had sucked them, but it obeyed the same rules. The sun rose and set, creeks ran downhill and breezes blew, and the tension he'd felt beneath the brooding green sky was absent. He was glad to have a few days of quiet; and glad also that he had someone with whom to share Celondre's
Odes
.
He was glad to know Liane. For most of Garric's life he'd never have dreamed of meeting a noblewoman. Now he was reading poetry to one, and she smiled at him.
“‘The man who masters his own appetites,'” Garric read, “‘has a kingdom greater than if he joined Haft to Bight and ruled far Dalopo besides.'”
In Garric's mind, King Carus laughed boisterously. Garric lowered the codex and grinned at his companion. “Of course,” he said, “it's easy to say that if you're a poet with a country house in Ornifal and nobody would ask you to command a single trireme after the way you botched things the first time you tried.”
“And if half the stories about Celondre's private life are true,” Liane agreed, “he wasn't notable for mastering his own appetites either. Naked women posing in every room of his house in case the whim struck him!”
She giggled. “Of course we weren't supposed to read the
Lives of the Poets,
” she added. “Mistress Gudea said each lyric should be appreciated for what was in its words alone. ‘To import other considerations undermines a poem's innate ethos.'”
“How can it be wrong to get as much information as you can in order to understand something?” Garric said in amazement. He grinned, wondering how much the next thought that drifted through his mind had to do with the ancestor in his mind. “Of course, it gets harder to decide when you know a lot. The easy choices are the ones you make when you don't know enough to see how complicated things are.”
Liane nodded, but the direction of her eyes led Garric to peer around the shaft of the column behind him. Graz had arrived, accompanied by the two females Tenoctris had sent as messengers to find him.
“Tenoctris?” Liane called as she rose gracefully. “Master Graz is here.”
There were human structures scattered throughout this landscape. None was particularly large—this fane, a rich man's private chapel rather than a community temple, was typical. All showed the lichens and weathering of great age. Tenoctris' art had led her to this particular site, but it was Liane who'd identified it.
Tenoctris came from the building with a smile of satisfaction just as the Ersa leader reached the slab on which the structure rested. The chapel had been modeled on a full-sized temple with a three-step base, each layer so high that it would be cut by several human-sized steps to the central doorway.
This was a toylike copy and, to Garric's untrained eye, it looked ill-proportioned. Part of his mind wondered if real aesthetics had anything to do with academic pronouncements
like the one Liane had just repeated.
He put the volume of Celondre away in his belt wallet and rose also. He smiled as King Carus would have done.
The humans bowed to Graz. Bowing didn't seem to be an Ersa custom, but the way Graz's ears flattened against his round skull was perhaps an equivalent.
“There was a connection between your First Place and the hillside where we entered the present world,” Tenoctris said with her usual lack of small talk before getting down to business. “The temple here has a connection to a known part of the world which my companions and I left. Known to Mistress Liane, that is.”
She nodded to the younger woman. Garric gave Tenoctris his hand and helped her to the ground as an excuse to step down himself.
There was an inherent challenge when an armed male stood above another, and the Ersa were inhumanly attuned to body language. Garric wasn't sure he'd have been quite so aware of that without Carus' guidance—but he
was
aware.
“The ruins of the palace of the Tyrants of Valles are outside the city of Valles,” Liane said to the Ersa leader. “My teacher, Mistress Gudea, took us on a day trip there. She said that the study of history was just as important as that of literature.”
She grinned. “Not as important as etiquette, of course, but very important. There was a temple exactly like this one in the grounds of the old palace, though the honeysuckle had grown over it.”
Tenoctris touched the sandstone pillar. “This is a node that leads back to my world, our world,” she said.
She gestured to Garric and Liane, but her eyes remained on Graz. “There are other nodes here also. I don't know where they lead. Some of them probably terminate in places which none of us would choose to see.”
With a smile as hard as sunlight winking from the edge of a stone knife Tenoctris added, “We wouldn't want to live there either, but in many cases survival wouldn't be
an option anyway. This is the only portal which I think it's safe to open.”
“Valles is the capital of our world,” Garric said. His words blurred over the chaotic political situation—there'd been no true King of the Isles since Carus drowned in a wizard's cataclysm a thousand years ago—but this was close enough for present purposes. “I won't say you'll be welcome there, but I don't know of any reason why you shouldn't be.”
As if people had ever needed reasons to hate or kill!
“Anyhow,” he concluded, knowing he sounded lame, “I don't know of a better spot you could come to. And the three of us will do all that we can to help you.”
“I will look inside this place,” Graz said. “There are more of them in your world?”
“Many,” Liane said. “We live in buildings like this and much bigger.”
Liane too was only hinting at a situation that was more complicated than words could explain. The Ersa had no concepts for what lay behind human descriptions of politics or artificial structures. Was the weather of the Ersa home world as changeless as that in the Gulf, or had they lost the knowledge of building when they exiled themselves into a place where the need was absent?
Graz and Tenoctris entered the little temple. The Ersa females walked silently to a nearby pine tree and began opening cones for the tiny nuts within.
“Mistress Gudea wanted us to remember that Valles had been a great city during the Old Kingdom,” Liane said to Garric in a low voice. There wasn't enough room in the nave to hold four with comfort, nor did the younger people have any reason to join the senior pair inside. “She was particularly determined to drive that home in me, since I was from the upstart island of Sandrakkan.”
She looked at Garric and added with a twinkle in her voice, “And unlike Carcosa on Haft, Valles had rebuilt after the Old Kingdom fell. Not that Mistress Gudea had any students from so backward as place as Haft.”
“The great men of Ornifal … ,” Garric said. The voice was his but the memories behind the words were not. “The landowners, the rich merchants—they didn't try to break the kingdom the way nobles did on some other islands. But they didn't help to hold the kingdom together, either.”
Liane looked at him, her face suddenly without expression. She didn't back away, but he knew the cold anger in his voice had surprised her.
Garric couldn't help it. He tried, but his control meant only that he trembled with emotions that he couldn't release in the physical action they demanded.
“The
great
men just wanted things to stay quiet,” he said. “They paid any shoeless usurper who demanded their support because they claimed it was cheaper than getting involved. Cheaper to stand aside and watch the Isles break up in chaos!”
Graz stepped out of the temple. His ears were extended so fully toward Garric that the Ersa looked as though he had three heads on his narrow shoulders. Tenoctris followed him.
Garric lifted his empty hands and managed a laugh. All the fury had washed out of him, but it left him weak with its passing.
“I was talking about ancient history,” he explained. “Nothing that's worth getting angry about at this late date.”
Graz fluttered his ears; they shrank to normal size. “My people will stay here,” he said. “We have shared a world with humans in the past. I think it is better that we not do so again.”
Tenoctris nibbled her lower lip. “Master Graz,” she said. “I can understand your decision, but I think you're making a mistake.”
She spread one hand in the direction of the meadow rolling away from the little temple. “This seems to be a lovely place and of course it is … but it's more than that
too. A location where so much power comes together isn't a proper home for living beings.”
“Nevertheless,” Graz said, “we will stay here. I wish you well on your journey, humans. But do not return.”
The Ersa leader walked away with his stiff-legged, mincing stride. His people wouldn't have an easy time on Ornifal or anywhere in a human world, Garric knew; but Garric knew also that when Tenoctris gave advice, the path of wisdom was to accept it. Still, the Ersa had the same right that humans did: to make their own choices, and to live or die by them.
“If you two are willing … ,” Tenoctris said. She plucked a twig from the pine tree and stripped the needles off between her fingers. “I think it'd be a good idea for us to leave immediately. Graz has drawn a lesson from what happened in the Gulf, but it led him to a belief that I regret.”
Garric and Liane exchanged glances. “Of course,” Liane said. “We're ready now.”
“You know …” Garric said, returning to the train of thought that he'd been following when Graz and Tenoctris returned. “The ordinary people on Ornifal wanted the Isles to stay united. They wanted to sleep safe in their beds and not have to take a spear with them when they went plowing for fear pirates would sweep the district. The people would've been willing to help hold the kingdom together, I think, if their leaders had let them.”
The two women watched him in concern. His left hand squeezed a fold of his tunic and the medallion hanging beneath it.
Garric laughed. “Well, maybe this time their leaders will have better sense,” he concluded in a voice shaky with emotion.
“Indeed they will, lad!”
echoed a voice in his mind.
“Even if we have to knock that sense into their heads!”
 
 
The false Nonnus crouched in the stern, talking with the steersman as they both eyed the shore forty paces off the dispatch vessel's port side. The oarsmen rested, adjusting their kit and swigging water from the basin the coxswain carried back between the pairs of benches.
One man stood and urinated on his left hand. A rower had told Sharina that urine toughened cracked skin so it healed as calluses.
She supposed the crewmen would know. They were a dour lot who didn't volunteer information and gave only short answers to direct questions, but they were skilled oarsmen.
This island was a shallow cone made of black basalt instead of the usual limestone or coral sand. It was bigger than most of the islets Sharina had noted as the dispatch vessel crossed the Inner Sea on the ceaseless labor of its oarsmen. The low sun illuminated occasional clumps of spiky grass, but most of the vegetation seemed to be groundsels shaped like huge cabbages, and giant lobelias whose shaggy flower columns stood taller than a man.
She stood in the bow as if to stretch. The vessel was designed for swift transit with no concession whatever to the comfort of its crew or passengers. The false Nonnus had landed the mast and sail, depending instead on the oars even when the wind might be fair. Sharina tried to visualize how crowded the ship would have been if the lowered mast and yard filled the narrow aisle between the benches.
“All right, we'll go on,” the false Nonnus said in a carrying voice. “I don't like the shore here.”
Oarsmen muttered and looked to the coxswain. He squared his shoulders and said, “
I
don't like being out at sea at night in a cockleshell like this.”
The false Nonnus didn't stand—he didn't have the Pewleman's sense of balance, Sharina realized. Scowling, he said, “There's a sandy beach on the horizon. We can reach it with the light we have left.”
The sun was fully down. The western horizon was still
pale, but stars were already visible in the direction the vessel was heading.

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