The Gods Return (38 page)

"I didn't leave the Shepherd," Platt snapped. "The Shepherd is dead!
All
the old gods are dead. Lord Scorpion is Lord of the cosmos!"

"Why, you puppy!" said Lord Quernan. He raised his hand and stepped forward. Two of Dysart's agents grabbed him by the elbows and thrust him back.

"Out," said Sharina with a flick of her left index finger toward the door.

"But that's blasphemy!" Quernan protested. Other spectators made way for him; one of Tadai's clerks even opened the door.

"As well worship a dead donkey as your Lady!" Platt cried.

Sharina had been afraid that other soldiers would protest, but instead of equally clueless aides, Quernan had brought Prester and Pont. They remained at attention, as if nothing important was happening.

Knowing the two old soldiers, they might have brought themselves. They'd met Sharina in a hard place years ago. Because she'd performed to their approval, they seemed to have adopted her. She suspected that a number of junior officers over the years had had similarly good luck.

Platt let out a broken laugh. "Do you think to frighten me?" he said. "The disciples of Lord Scorpion need fear nothing. I am assured of my salvation!"

"But you were trying to escape us in the graveyard, weren't you?" Dysart said. "Your Scorpion didn't save you then, Master Platt. You're obviously a clever man. You know in your heart that he's not as powerful as what you preach to the rabble."

"Salvation is of the soul, not the body," Platt muttered. He was sweating profusely. His thin hair was plastered down so that his pink scalp showed through.

"Is your ankle comfortable?" Dysart asked. "I'm sorry about the injury, but we had no choice. For as long as you're in my charge I'll see to it that you receive medical care, though my department's facilities are too limited for any but the most important prisoners. I can only hope that the City Prefect will be able to manage something if you have to be transferred to the jail."

"Are you out of your mind, Dysart?" Tadai said in a deliberately affected voice as he inspected the curve of his fingernails. "
My
budget doesn't stretch to doctors for a lot of drunks and vagabonds."

"How often to you meet with your fellow priests, Master Platt?" Dysart said as though the previous exchange hadn't occurred. He sat in the chair behind his desk; the prisoner was in the couch beside him. Everyone else stood along the inside wall. Burne padded from door to window ledge and back, his whiskers twitching.

"I don't," said Platt, squirming uneasily. He'd lost his bravado. "We don't have to meet, I mean. We, ah . . . I do at least, I suppose the others. God speaks to me in dreams, through his acolyte Black. I've never met another priest, though I know there's many of us. Preparing for the day!"

"You claim to get detailed instructions from your dreams, Master Platt?" Dysart said. He didn't raise his voice, but Sharina could hear the hint of a frown in it.

"Yes, that's true," the prisoner said. He'd lost the defiance that'd begun to creep back into his tone. "Black tells me where to preach and when. But I know there are many of us, throughout the world."

As far as information reaching Sharina went—both from Liane's clandestine service and the reports of regional governors—Pandah was the only center of Scorpion worship. It gave her a feeling of comfort to know that Black lied to his own acolytes—but he was real enough in her own dreams, and she was responsible for Pandah besides.

"Do you send messengers to chalk notices on walls to let the worshippers know where you'll be preaching?" Dysart said. "Or does somebody else do that? We've found the notices, you see."

"I . . . ," Platt said. He frowned in surprise. "I don't know, I never wondered. Lord Scorpion speaks to me, that's all. I suppose He speaks to others. People bring me food and hide me during the day, but I don't know who they are. I'm not from Pandah, you see. I came here from Valles when Lord Scorpion called me in the night."

"We'll need the names and lodgings of those who help you," Dysart said. His hands were tented on his lap, but clerks in opposite corners of the room were making notes on waxed tablets. "They'll already be in our records, but now they'll be cross-referenced with you."

"I don't know any of them!" Platt said in agitation. "It wouldn't matter if I told you—Lord Scorpion rules the world. You can't harm Him with your foolish opposition. Join Him!"

He raised his eyes from Dysart and swept them across the faces of those watching the interrogation. Sharina had never before seen such terror in a gaze.

"All of you!" Platt cried. "Worship Lord Scorpion! Worship the living God!"

Burne leaped to the top of the window casement and came down with something squirming between his forepaws. His chisel teeth clicked efficiently.

Platt screamed and fainted.

Dysart grimaced and used two fingers to check the pulse in the prisoner's throat. "He'll be all right when he comes around," he said. "It can't be helped, I suppose."

"No," said Sharina, "it couldn't be—unless we were willing to let Black's agents hear the rest of the interrogation. I don't think we were going to get any more of real value from him regardless."

"Surely he's lying about how he communicates with the rest of his cult?" said Lord Tadai.

"About Black and the dreams, you mean?" Sharina said. "I suspect that's true."

"How does your highness wish to proceed?" Dysart said. His agents were tying Platt's hands and feet again; he'd been loosed for comfort during the interrogation, but Sharina had seen how quickly Liane's men could move when they had to.

"I'm going to send him to Tenoctris," she said, crystallizing murky thoughts into a plan of action. "I doubt that Platt knows any more than he's told us, but I think Tenoctris can use him as a focus from which she can learn a great deal more. I hope she can help us."

She looked down at the unconscious prisoner. "The Lady knows we could use some help," she said.

Burne sat upright, cleaning his muzzle. Scraps of black chitin lay scattered about him.

"Oh, I don't know, Sharina," the rat said. "We're not doing so badly ourselves."

* * *

Garric waited while Tenoctris dropped chips of white marble inside the ring of trees. They were bald cypress, their bases swollen. The roots which thrust knees up to breathe in the wet season crawled over dry ground, now; the waters which must sometimes turn this place into a marsh had receded.

The regiment that'd escorted them the mile from the main camp murmured in the surrounding darkness. The troops weren't within twenty double-paces of the trees, but nothing could pass through the scores of encircling watch fires without being seen. Tenoctris and Garric had the privacy they wanted, and the laymen weren't compelled to witness wizardry.

Tenoctris straightened. She'd placed only five pebbles, one between each pair of trees to mark the inner angles of a pentacle. The points were the trees themselves. "It's the Grove of Biltis," she said.

"Who's Biltis?" Garric said. He was fighting his instinct to lay his hand on the pommel of his sword. He knew—not because Tenoctris had told him, but because of the feeling of quiet sadness he felt in this grove—that it wasn't a place for weapons. His disquiet—and King Carus' universal response to anything unusual—kept drawing him to the blade, though.

"A very long time ago . . . ," Tenoctris said, taking items out of her satchel. Besides a codex and two scrolls, she began to unwrap what turned out to be the silver statuette of a wasp-slim woman. "Biltis was a God. Biltis was
the
God, in fact. Later she was revered as an oracle whose answers were given in the ripples of her sacred fountain. By the time this grove was planted—and that was before the dawn of the Old Kingdom—Biltis was a spirit of the night who eased childbirth. The cypress as a tree of the waters was thought to be a proper attribute for such a spirit."

Tenoctris let her fingertips drift over the curve of the figurine's molded hair. She met Garric's eyes again and smiled sadly. "It's a place of power," she said. "And it suited my sense of whimsy, if you will, to use a site created by ordinary women who had ordinary female concerns. Since both those things are utterly divorced from my own life."

Garric cleared his throat. "I had a pretty ordinary life myself before you arrived in Barca's Hamlet, Tenoctris," he said. "If you hadn't changed that, I guess I'd be dead by now. Along with all the other pretty ordinary people in the world. I'm glad you came."

Tenoctris chuckled. "I might as well complain that I was born a wizard instead of being a mighty warrior, I suppose," she said. "No doubt I'd have been far happier then."

"
Maybe until she drowned
," Carus said. "
Because she didn't have a clever wizard and the other fellow did. No, I'm getting used to things being the way they are now
."

Tenoctris looked at the books she'd taken out, then returned them unopened to her satchel. "They were crutches," she said apologetically. She seemed to be speaking to the figurine, not to Garric. "I don't need crutches any more."

Without further preamble she chanted, "
Basuma bassa
. . ."

The statuette bobbed in her right hand, a dip to each syllable. A wisp of violet flame shimmered from the center of the hinted pentacle, as pale as moonlight. Garric thought the first flickers were reflections thrown from the silver, but it mounted as quickly as real fire in dried vines. It was silent and gave off no heat.

"
Ashara phouma naxarama
. . . ," Tenoctris said.

"
Can the troops see the light or only us?
" said Carus. His expression was as bleak as a granite headland, concealing the discomfort he felt even as a ghost to be a part of wizardry.

Garric shrugged. The tempo of the guards' murmurs didn't change, nor did the sprightly galliard a musician among them picked out on a three-string lyre. If they'd noticed the flame, there'd have been silence or perhaps shouting.

Tenoctris was facing Garric across the fire. Her lips continued to move but he no longer heard the words of power.

The grove vanished. Instead of a fire, Garric and Tenoctris stood a pool of violet light. The statuette in her hand rose and fell to the rhythm of the unheard syllables.

The charged atmosphere shattered into planes. Garric felt a rush of vertigo: there was no up or down, but there were infinite numbers of universes from which he and Tenoctris stood apart.

A speck in one of the planes swelled. Everything shifted
again
. A blur of darker violet coalesced into a boat—a perfectly ordinary vessel, different from the dories fishermen had used in Barca's Hamlet but of similar size and utility. It had one mast, a tall triangular sail, and a single boatman in the stern.

The boatman brought the tiller sharply over and at the same time loosed a halyard, dropping the sail as the bluff bow grazed to rest on the shore. The beach beneath Garric's boots was sand, not the black volcanic shingle of Barca's Hamlet and certainly not the expanse of roots, leaves and sedges of the grove they'd been standing in.

The boatman stepped out, gripping the sides of his vessel to keep it from drifting away when his weight no longer held it onto the bottom. He was a slight man with thinning hair and ink-stained fingers; though he was obviously strong enough, he seemed incongruous in this job. He reminded Garric of his own father rather than the fishermen who drank in the inn of an evening.

Tenoctris curtsied. "Thank you for coming so promptly," she said.

The boatman smiled faintly. "You have the right to command me, your ladyship," he said in a quiet, cultured voice. "Where is it you wish me to take you?"

"To the Gate of Ivory," she said. "Can you do this?"

"I can take you to the edge of the lake," said the boatman. "But no farther. Is that sufficient?"

Tenoctris sighed and lifted her chin in assent. "I feared as much," she said. "But yes, if that's the reality, it has to be sufficient. We'll find our own way across, then. Are we free to board?"

"Yes, your ladyship," said the boatman, offering the wizard a hand over the gunwale. She seated herself primly on a forward thwart.

"Ah," said Garric. "Sir, would you like help shoving off? I've done that, well, often enough."

"That's won't be necessary, your highness," said the boatman. Neither Tenoctris nor Garric himself had told the man who his passengers were, but he clearly knew. "Though if you'll sit on the thwart just ahead of me, the boat will ride better. Whatever you please, of course."

Garric stepped aboard, placing his foot on the keelson so as not to rock the vessel any more than necessary. The hull settled slightly into the sand. He sat, facing the stern and the tiller rather than the mast.

The boatman strode forward, leaning into the vessel and bringing the bow around. Even on sand, that required great strength as well as skill.

Garric felt the hull bob free. The boatman took two more strides and clambered in over the transom. Keeping the tiller between his left arm and his body, he raised the sail of linen, tarred to hold the wind better. It filled with the breeze and drove the vessel into the seeming twilight.

Garric looked to port, then to starboard. The beach was vanishing into the horizon; he hadn't seen anything above the strip of sand

The sea lifted with the slow, powerful motions of a brood sow shifting in her sty. The water was gray with a hint of green where foam bubbled in the vessel's wake, but when Garric bent to look straight down over the side he thought he saw twinkles of the violet flame which Tenoctris had kindled.