The Gods Return (45 page)

The red oak stretched out a limb thicker than most tree boles. It grew from a point on the trunk that was a little higher than Ilna could reach by stretching to her full height. From it hung a stone gong supported by two bronze chains.

Usun hopped from the crook of Ilna's arm but climbed onto a fallen limb to see over the fern. He sniffed deeply.

"Rabbits, squirrels, and a fox," he said. He giggled and added, "Mistress Brincisa hasn't put us in a tiger's den, at least. Or found another ghoul for us to dispose of."

"This is the grove where Princess Perrine came to us," Ingens said in a dull voice. He walked away, keeping his back to Ilna. The ferns he brushed through gave off a faint odor of fresh hay. "The gong there . . . ."

He gestured.

"Master Hervir tapped the center of it with his knuckles, and she came through the woods with four servants. The servants were apes but they wore clothes."

"Apes, now?" said Usun. He tested the air again. "Well, they haven't been here recently."

Ilna looked about. There was no sign of the way Brincisa had sent them to this place. The hair stretching from the coil in her hand vanished somewhere in the air behind her, but she couldn't be sure exactly what that point was.

"Do we agree that Brincisa has taken us where we asked her to?" she said to her companions. "And that there's no immediate danger?"

Ingens nodded, his back still turned. "Yes," he mumbled.

"No danger, certainly," Usun agreed. "But if you want to pull on the hair and take Brincisa's head off, then there won't be many mourners. Not even those servants of hers, I'll wager."

"What I want to do," said Ilna, "is to keep my word. Of course."

She gave the coil an underhanded toss in the direction the strand tended. It vanished in mid air, a golden flash in the leaf-filtered grove.

"All right," Ilna said. "I'll ring the gong, then. You said that I can ring it with a finger?"

"Before you do that, mistress," Usun said, "There's one thing we might check. There, midway between the two hickory trees. The ground's been disturbed."

"Has it?" Ilna said. She'd been walking toward the gong, but out of politeness she glanced where the little man pointed. So far as she could tell, the ferns grew in a feathery, unbroken surface across the floor of the glade. Cashel might've been able to tell more, but neither them had been a forester.

Oh
.

Ilna stopped. "Master Ingens," she said. "Face me."

The secretary buried his face in his hands. He didn't speak or look at her.

Ilna had taken yarn from her sleeve and was knotting it. That was more reflex than a conscious act, the way she'd have grabbed her weaver's sword if it slipped from her hand.

"Master Ingens," she repeated, "
face
me!"

The secretary turned slowly and lowered his hands. Tears streaked his cheeks, but his expression now was defiant.

"Hervir was completely healthy when I last saw him," he said. "I didn't kill him!"

Usun cackled. He stood arms akimbo on his low perch.

"Very well," said Ilna. She was coldly furious. She'd regarded Ingens as . . . not a friend, of course, but an ally who'd help to the limited degree he was able. It now appeared that—

Well, better to ask than to speculate. "Tell us what really happened to Hervir," she said. Her voice was calm. "Tell us everything. Or I will not only tear the information out of you, I will tear your eyes from their sockets."

"Yes, mistress," said Ingens. He sounded like a dead man. "I buried the money there."

He gestured.

"I was going to bury it beside a tree, but I couldn't because of the roots. I had only my stylus to break the ground and a wax tablet to scoop it away. I didn't plan to do this! It just happened."

"What happened to Hervir?" Ilna repeated, though this time without her previous anger. Ingens was weak, but almost everyone was weak. Ilna os-Kenset was weak at times, which she hated as she hated few other things.

"It was just as I told you," said Ingens, getting control of himself better. "Hervir met the princess and her apes. They talked. He told me he was going with her but that he'd be back in the evening. I was holding the money he'd brought to buy the saffron."

He took a deep, shuddering breath. He was looking at Ilna's feet, not her eyes, but he didn't try to turn away.

"The guards didn't know that," he explained. "Hervir always had me carry the money in a belt between my tunics. He didn't like the weight, and it chafed his hipbones."

"He trusted you?" said Usun, laughter not far beneath the surface of the words.

"He was right to trust me!" Ingens said. "I'd no more steal than I would have killed and eaten him!"

He licked his lips and grimaced, trying to wet them. "He went with Perrine, just walked out of the grove—"

He pointed with his full arm, toward the gong. "They were out of sight behind this big tree," he said, "so I walked around it to see where they were going. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see anything, and neither could the guards. Just as I told Lady Zussa. They were gone!"

"And then?" said Ilna. She could hold her pattern in front of the secretary's eyes and drag his very soul out, just as she'd said, but he seemed to be talking freely.

Ingens licked his lips again. "We waited till evening," he said. "Hervir didn't come back. Nobody did. We had a room in Caraman—rooms, one for the guards and I slept on a truckle bed in Hervir's room. In the night I came back to this grove—alone. I didn't plan to . . . I just came to see if Hervir had returned. It was moonlight."

He turned away. Ilna didn't jerk his head toward her. Ingens was talking; forcing him to meet her eyes would merely be punishment. That wasn't her business.

"Hervir wasn't here," Ingens said. "He might have been! But I thought . . . . And I buried the money belt here between the trees. I still had the travelling expenses, the guards' pay and food and lodging. But I hid the gold we'd brought to buy saffron."

"Why didn't you just carry it with you to Pandah?" Ilna said. "Or back to Valles, for that matter? Since you were stealing it anyway."

Ingens winced but looked up. "I thought if I had the gold with me on the journey back, the guards might have suspected. We'd have had a different relationship without Hervir."

He gave her a crooked smile.

"I was Hervir's dog, you see," he explained. "The guards believed that I thought I was better than a group of illiterate thugs with a modicum of skill at injuring people. If they decided to kick the dog in the absence of its master, they'd find the gold. Rather than lose both the gold and my life, I buried it here and planned to come back for it alone."

He started to cry. "I'm glad you caught me," he said. "I'm not a thief. I should never have thought I could get away with this, this . . . ."

Ilna shrugged. "It sounds to me," she said, "as if your main concern was saving your own life. And while I don't put a high value on that—your life or mine either one—it's not unreasonable that you'd disagree."

She took the remaining few steps to the gong. She studied it critically. It was made of greenish stone with gray veins crawling through it; at first glance, she'd thought it was corroded bronze.

Looking back at Ingens, she said, "Did you try ringing it yourself after your master disappeared?"

"Yes, mistress," Ingens said. "We came back on the next three days, the guards and I. I struck the gong in the morning when we arrived, then in the evening before we left. No one responded, so we hired Captain Sairg to carry us to Pandah to report."

"They may not come for me either," Ilna said, eyeing the stone disk. It was about three handspans across and as thick as her index finger. "Still, we'll try this first."

She raised her right hand.

"Mistress?" the secretary said in a desperate voice.

Ilna turned in irritation. She held strands of yarn in her left hand; before she caught herself, she'd started to knot them in a fashion that
would
silence the fool while she had work to do. "Yes?" she said.

"What are you going to do to me?" Ingens said. "About the money?"

"I have nothing to do with money!" Ilna snapped. Her mouth worked sourly. In a milder tone she added, "And I have nothing to do with Halgran Mercantile, either. If we find Hervir, you can give the money back to him. If we don't, I suppose you can take it back to Mistress Zussa. If you survive, of course."

"Thank you, mistress," Ingens said. "That's what I'd decided to do anyway."

He gave her the broken smile again. "I'm not cut out to be a thief, you see," he said.

"No," said Ilna, "you're not. Now, if you're done with your questions, I'll get on with the business that brought us here."

"Before you bring Princess Perrine and her little beasties . . . ," said Usun. His voice managed to sound mocking even when he didn't mean it to be. If there
were
times he didn't mean it to be. "Why don't you roll me up in your cloak so that they won't see me?"

Ilna looked at him, then knelt to open her slung cloak on the bed of ferns. "Yes," she said. "That's a good idea."

The wizened little man arranged himself on the densely woven wool. He'd somewhere found a hollow reed which he thrust toward the open edge, just as though he planned to hide under water.

"What do you expect to happen?" the secretary asked as he watched in puzzlement.

"I don't
know
what's going to happen," said Ilna, rolling the cloak again. "That's why Master Usun's idea is such a good one.

She hung the garment's strap over her shoulder. Usun was so scrawny that, even knowing he was there, she saw no change in its lines.

Adjusting her tunics, Ilna faced the gong again. Taking a deep breath, she tapped the center with her knuckles. Though she disliked stone, she had to admit that the gong's note was cool and melodious.

Before the tone had died away, she heard the rustle of feet approaching through the dogwood and birch leaves.

* * *

Garric walked deliberately toward the circular temple. He wasn't gripping his sword hilt, but his right hand was closer to it than it would've been during a meeting with his council.

The sky had a pearly radiance like nothing in his experience. The scattered clouds he'd seen through the trees while walking to the lake margin has been completely normal.

Tenoctris walked alongside him, looking somewhat worn. Now in a youthful body, she worked to conceal the effort she expended in her art just as she'd done when she wore all her seventy years. That didn't mean the effort wasn't real.

The temple had solid walls instead of a colonnade, set on a three-step base. It had been built from unblemished white marble, save for the gilded dome and the pair of golden caryatids supporting the simple transom over the entrance.

Garric walked into the lighted interior. The dome didn't have an oculus in its center: the light, the same soft rainbow majesty as the sky, streamed from the circle of wall opposite the entrance. It swirled and diffused and seemed to seep through the stone.

Garric frowned for a moment, then turned his attention to the marble bier in the middle of the room. It must have had velvet coverings once, but time had reduced them to greenish dust on the surrounding floor.

Lord Munn was a skeleton, but the skeleton of a man with bones as dense as a deer's. In life he must've been seven feet tall. His two-handed sword was the most massive weapon Garric had ever seen.

"
I've never seen anything like it either, lad
," said the ghost in his mind. "
I'd use it if I had to, but I'll tell the
world
I'd find it awkward
."

Garric grinned. If Carus had to—
when
he'd had to—he'd tear out throats with his teeth. The warrior king's standards for what constituted a practical weapon were broader than most people could imagine.

"Garric, come out here if you will," Tenoctris said. The request was polite in form but peremptory in tone. And why not? They were here by Tenoctris' skill and in furtherance of her plan; if she thought he ought to be doing something, she didn't need put frills on her direction.

"Yes, ma'am," Garric said, walking out to where the wizard stood examining the caryatids.

The women who'd modeled for the golden statues were similar but not twins. The one on Garric's left had fuller lips and a broader nose; her companion was taller by an inch or two, though their hair, bound with silver fillets, was piled to level the transom which they supported.

Each held a codex open to the viewer. The book on the left read ask in the fluid Old Script, while the other read and it will be given.

"What do you think of them?" Tenoctris said, gesturing.

The words or the statues?
Garric wondered. The caryatids were smiling; smiling mockingly, one might reasonably think. Aloud he said, "Is it a code, perhaps?"

"Perhaps," said Tenoctris, her tone meaning, "No." She looked from one statue to the other, then went on, "But I think . . . ."

She stepped back, motioning Garric with her. He was already following her lead. She bowed to each statue in turn, then said, "Mistresses, please help us in our trial."