Mistress of the Catacombs

12

“We could go off there somewhere,” Alecto said, gesturing toward the relatively open country to the west. “I don’t see why we have to hang around this, this—”

Her voice sank to a murmur.

“—city, you call it.”

“You don’t have to hang around,” Ilna said coldly as she surveyed the people entering through the gate near which she and the wild girl waited. “Go about your business, and I’ll take care of mine by myself.”

She didn’t—quite—say, “As I’d prefer,” because Ilna didn’t—quite—want Alecto to leave her. Alecto wasn’t the ally Ilna would have chosen, but she was the only ally Ilna had at present. But if the wild girl thought her whim could have the slightest effect on Ilna doing her duty, then she was a fool as well as several sorts of moral failure.

Alecto scuffed the dust with her big toe while muttering something that Ilna chose to ignore. Ilna was looking for a pattern in the traffic. The sun had been up for an hour, and the flow into the city was growing heavy. They didn’t close the gates at sunset here, but few chose to travel during the watches of the night.

“Why are there so many people?” Ilna mused aloud. “There wouldn’t be as many coming into Valles at this time in the morning.”

Well, the numbers coming though any one gate would have been less; but Valles was entered by three major highways plus a network of minor roads linked to the western suburbs across the River Beltis. Valles was many times the size of this place, however.

The track was bare dirt. The meandering ruts had been made by animals driven to the city, not wheels.

“I never knew there were this many people,” Alecto said, so morosely that Ilna glanced at her again.

She’s afraid, Ilna thought. Alecto was responsible for both of them being here, but she was far more out of place than Ilna was.

Even in the days Ilna expected to spend her whole life within a mile of Barca’s Hamlet, she’d been in some way a part of the wider world. Priests and merchants came into the borough, and Ilna sold her textiles for use in the great cities of distant islands. She couldn’t have described those cities, not ruined Carcosa and certainly not flourishing Valles, until she saw them; but she’d known they existed.

Alecto had never heard of a city. Ilna frowned in thought. Perhaps even if Alecto had travelled the length of the world of her time, she wouldn’t have found a city. A wild girl from a wild time; and for all her powers and ruthlessness, she was frightened of the place to which she had come.

“Look here,” said Ilna sharply. “Can you send me back into this dreamworld the way Tenoctris did? You’re obviously a powerful wizard, which Tenoctris claims she’s not.”

Alecto shook her head with a sour expression. “I don’t know how she did that,” she said. Her expression grew guarded. “Are you lying to me? Did you make the sacrifice yourself and draw the entrance in blood around you?”

“I did not,” Ilna said, momentarily so angry that she had the first knot in her cords before she caught herself. “Nor does anyone I’d associate with use blood sacrifice.”

She turned to the gate again. She’d hoped to learn something by watching the traffic, but all she’d seen was that it was surprisingly heavy. Well, back into the city, then, as a newly arrived visitor rather than the person who’d knifed the temple watchman in the night.

“If you like…” Alecto said. She sounded diffident, a little nervous. She was so afraid that Ilna would abandon her…. “I could get one of them to talk to you.”

Ilna looked sharply at the other girl. Alecto laughed, cheerful again. “No, not that way. Or that way too, if you like.”

“I don’t want that,” Ilna said primly. She felt the blush move into her cheeks and scowled with fury. “Go ahead, if you can do it without causing trouble for us.”

Ilna could weave a pattern that forced whoever saw it to answer her questions, but she’d intended to wait for greater privacy than this busy road provided. Besides, she was interested to see what Alecto would do—and only slightly concerned that it would end in another swipe of the bronze dagger, bringing this time a more difficult flight.

The soil where they stood was loose and barren, cropped and trampled by traffic which had spilled from the roadway proper. Alecto squatted and drew a five-sided pattern on the ground, using one of the twin horns of her dagger’s pommel for her scriber.

She drew other symbols around the pentacle’s edges. Though Ilna couldn’t read, her eye for patterns was unrivaled. These additions weren’t in the curving Old Script that Tenoctris used for her art. She suspected they were tiny pictures rather than writing, and that if Ilna tried, she could probably understand them.

She turned her head. It wasn’t something she wanted to understand.

“There!” Alecto said. “Stand in front of it so that they can’t see it from the path. It’ll take me a moment to set the charm. Then you just step out of the way when you see the fellow you want.”

She frowned. “It has to be a man,” she added. “You can manage that, can’t you?”

“Yes,” said Ilna, too icy cold to be angry. She turned her back on the other girl and watched the traffic again. Her inner tunic was ankle length, an adequate curtain for the symbols behind her.

Alecto began chanting. Her voice was ordinarily harsh, but when she worked her art it dropped an octave and gained a resonance that Ilna might have found pleasant if it had come from a different source.

Ilna and her companion had attracted less attention waiting by the roadside than she’d expected. For the most part the travellers walked in an aura of joyless purpose, glancing at Ilna as they might have done a milepost and then looking again toward the gate. None of them greeted Ilna or even offered a proposition.

Whole families were coming to the city; young children, mostly tired and restive, were the only exceptions to the general rule. Many were being dragged along screaming with no more ceremony than the occasional goat on a tether. Mothers looked more drawn than the men did, but all the adults shared an attitude of gray determination.

Ilna thought of the numbers whose prayers Alecto said had been aiding last night’s ceremony. Close proximity to the rites wasn’t necessary, but it seemed to be desired.

Flocks, herds, and pack animals carrying grain made up much of the traffic, but even so a city this size couldn’t sustain the increased population for long. The rites would climax shortly.

Ilna smiled coldly. The rites would climax one way or the other. She recalled what the wild girl had said about the Pack turning before long on those who had freed them.

Alecto was now repeating the words she’d used at the start of her chant. The sounds were nonsense to Ilna, but their repetition meant Alecto was ready to act. Ilna watched the travellers with a different intent.

A small flock of sheep ambled past. The beasts were more interested in her than the badger driving them, a solid young man whose full moustache must once have been his pride. There was nothing in his expression now but intent tempered with fear.

Ilna thought of choosing the badger, but following the flock was a welldressed horseman who seemed frowningly poised to ride either around or through the sheep. Someone garbed and mounted like him should have had attendants, but an impatient man might have pressed on ahead of his retinue.

Ilna stepped aside. “All right,” she said in an aside to the girl behind her.

Reflected light flickered across the horseman’s eyes. He straightened and stared in the direction of the flash. For a moment the reins slackened, and his body seemed on the verge of slumping from the saddle. Then he jerked his gelding’s head to the side and rode directly toward the pentacle.

The horse shouldered to the ground the old woman in its path. She squalled. Turnips spilled from the tapering basket on her back, but the rider paid her no heed. He dismounted in front of the grinning, sweating Alecto and stood with his hands loosely crossed in front of him.

“He’s yours,” Alecto said to Ilna in triumph. “Ask him anything you please.”

She got up shakily, trying to conceal the effort she’d spent in working her art. That was boasting, but it was the sort which Ilna preferred to that of those who’d claim whatever they did was hard beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

“What’s this city?” Ilna said crisply, starting with a question that might arouse suspicion but was innocent in itself. The gelding wasn’t trained to stand untethered. When it realized it was loose, it first edged, then walked toward the base of the wall where dew running down the stone watered rank grass.

“This is Donelle,” the man said. His eyes were downcast, fixed on the pentacle, and his voice had the slurred lifelessness of one talking in his sleep.

Donelle on Tisamur, much as Garric—probably Liane—had guessed. Ilna’s smile would have gone unnoticed except to those who knew her very well. This was where she’d meant to come. She’d just reached the place sooner and in an unexpected fashion.

“Why are you coming to Donelle?” she asked.

“The Mistress has called all Her servitors to Donelle,” the man said, “to help with the great work of returning Her to the throne of the world. We will join and pray at midday of the full moon, and She will reascend Her throne.”

Ilna frowned. The moon last night was near its first quarter. Seven days, as Garric would say; a handful of days and two days.

“How did the Mistress call you?” she said. “Did a priest tell you to come here?”

“Priest?” the man said. He blinked twice, slowly, as though his numbed mind was trying to find meaning in the word. “The Mistress called me. As I slept, She told me to come to Donelle to aid in the great work.”

Dreams, then; but more than just dreams, for the crowd of travellers was too large and too varied to be made up solely of religious fanatics. This fellow wore a cape embroidered in red, and his high leather boots were as well made as the slippers of courtiers in Valles. The band of his broad-brimmed hat was saffron silk and trailed behind him, and he wore a three-tiered gorget of gold and translucent stones.

A wealthy man might drop everything to follow God’s call, but Ilna very much doubted that a fop—who remained a fop—would do so.

“Who’s in charge of the, the great work?” Ilna said. She didn’t know how much help the names of the chief conspirators would be to Garric and the others, but she might as well ask.

“Lord Congin!” a man called from the road. “Where’s your horse, milord?”

“There it is!” another called, this time a woman. “Look, it’s over by the wall!”

“The Mistress is in charge of the great work,” the man said. “We are servitors doing the Mistress’s bidding.”

Three men and a woman wearing saffron ribbons from their shoulders trotted purposefully toward Ilna and their master. Several more men, coarsely garbed without the ribbon livery, continued to drive a train of packhorses toward the gate. They glanced only occasionally at their superiors.

Alecto wiped the pentacle away with a swift motion of her foot. Lord Congin looked wide-eyed first at her, then Ilna. He would’ve fallen backward if a retainer hadn’t caught him.

“What have you done to his lordship?” shrilled the female servant. “He has no business with an animal like you!”

Ilna caught Alecto’s wrist before it came up with the bronze dagger—as it surely would have done. To the servant Ilna said, “Go on your way. Now.”

She stepped in front of Alecto so that she could release the wild girl’s wrist and take the hank of cords into her hands instead. Her eyes met the servant’s. Lord Congin had his color back and was talking in puzzlement to the male retainers. The woman backed to rejoin them, and the whole party resumed their course to the gate.

“Can we leave this city now?” Alecto said.

“No,” said Ilna. “We’ll go in and see what more we can learn.”

She had no money, and Alecto probably didn’t know what money was, but it shouldn’t be hard to find work with all this influx to care for.

There might not be time before the full moon to get a message back to Garric and Tenoctris in Valles, but that didn’t mean Ilna’s presence here was useless. Not if this Mistress had a neck that a noose could wrap.

Only six of the bandits besides Garric, Vascay, and Hakken had come out to the boathouse to hear Metron describe his plan for releasing Thalemos from the Spike. The others preferred ignorance to being close to wizardry when they didn’t have to be.

Hakken wouldn’t have been present either if he weren’t one of those who’d be entering the prison.

Metron stood on the dock with the bandits facing him in a semicircle. Tint was splashing in the shallows nearby, pulling up cattails and stripping out the pith to eat. Garric looked around the willow-bordered lake. It was a sad place, even by daylight. He said, “Why here?”

It might be that the reason involved the creature Metron had been speaking to in the night. Garric wore his sword, and Hame carried the signal horn since Halophus was back in the stables.

The wizard shrugged. “To make my task easier,” he said. “I worked a great spell here when I hid underwater, and last night I came back while you all slept—”

Did Metron know he’d been watched? He didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

“—and worked another, gaining us allies for later in our quest. A place holds some of the power that’s evoked in it, so this little demonstration will take less effort.”

He seated himself cross-legged at the foot of the dock, his back to the lake’s reed-choked margin, and began scribing the planks with his athame. Vascay looked at Garric; Garric gave a brief nod.

Tenoctris had described power lingering at sites of previous wizardry—and at sites of death and slaughter—just as Metron said. The difference was that Tenoctris had warned it was a danger which could cause a wizard to act in unintended fashions with disastrous results; Metron was concerned only with increasing the power of his spells.

Garric smiled faintly, his hand on the ball pommel of his sword. That didn’t change anything; he hadn’t trusted Metron’s judgment from the first.

“You’ve got somebody else to break into the Spike so we don’t have to ourself?” Hakken said. There was hope in his voice, though he was obviously worried by Metron’s preparations.

Without lifting his athame from the soft wood the wizard had drawn a seven-pointed star, then bounded it with a circle. He worked freehand and with a skill that made Garric’s lips purse.

“My art will aid you,” Metron said. “But not that way.”

He sounded condescending to Garric, but Hakken probably found reassurance in the wizard’s delivery. “The allies I spoke of will join us after Lord Thalemos is free. They’ll help us to establish Lord Thalemos on the throne of Laut.”

Garric thought that something else had almost slipped off the wizard’s tongue. He was hiding something, though he might simply want to avoid frightening the unsophisticated bandits. Metron must be very tired from the wizardry he’d performed; and he must be a very powerful wizard indeed.

“Go on,” Garric said. There was no point in pressing Metron on questions where there was no way of telling what, or which, lies he was telling. “Show us what we’re to do.”

Metron looked up, meeting Garric’s eyes over the figures he’d drawn. The wizard smiled, but his expression only made Garric think about Tint’s warning: He like you for food, maybe.

Metron took the sapphire ring out of his pouch and set it in the middle of the symbol. The stone was a sparkle too small to have shape.

Without writing words of power around the circle as Garric expected, the wizard said, “Ammo ammonio hermitaris….” His athame dipped toward the ring at each syllable, making the ivory blade a suppliant to the jewel’s majesty. “Apa apalla apallasso….”

Fog lifted from the marshy ground beneath the dock. It grew darker, more solid. It tightened into a column as sinuous as a snake’s body, then coalesced in the form of a building in the air above Metron’s circle.

Metron’s voice sank as he murmured a few words more. His athame continued to beat a fixed rhythm in the air, but his mouth smiled triumphantly as he looked up at the arc of spectators.

“The Spike,” he said. “Built in the center of Durassa by the first Intercessor as her palace and workroom…and as a prison.”

Fog continued to condense into the image. The building, a cylindrical structure in a walled garden, took on texture and the streaky gray/pink color of banded schist. The sheer-sided tower had no doors or windows, but a covered passage ran from the gate in the enclosure wall to the base of the tower.

“The outer wall should be no difficulty for active men like yourselves,” Metron said with a greasy laugh. “Even less so for your companion, Master Gar.”

Coarse bushes, vines, and—along the low-lying side opposite the entrance passage—bamboo appeared on the image, clothing the outer circuit of the wall. Only the twenty feet or so to either side of the gateway was clear.

Metron’s left index finger indicated places where shrubbery completely concealed the stonework; his right hand continued to beat time with the athame. The wizard controlled his breathing carefully, but Garric could see strain in his face and the sweat beading at his hairline.

“They don’t keep it up,” Vascay said, nodding in recollection. “Occasionally Echeon sends out a squad of Protectors to cut back the worst of it, but he can’t hire groundskeepers in the usual way.”

“I don’t bloody blame them!” Hakken muttered.

“Inside the garden…” Metron continued, “are dangers that you could not pass without my art to help you.”

Vascay raised an eyebrow. Garric felt his own spirit quiver at the implied challenge.

He grinned at himself. What Metron said was probably true. The wizard might have been foolish to word the matter in quite that fashion in the midst of armed men whose lives had made them hard even if they didn’t start out that way; but Garric would be a much greater fool if he let himself react to empty words.

Metron gestured, filling the space between the outer wall and the tower with carefully manicured vegetation. Trees stood in rounds of bright-colored flowers; hedges snaked and branched like water running across flat ground, sometimes encircling more flowers; and one star-shaped bed was of translucent, bell-shaped plants that looked more like jellyfish than anything Garric had seen before on dry land.

Tint wandered back, cleaning her teeth with a fingernail and holding an opened cattail for Garric in case he was hungry. It was probably an exceptionally fine cattail….

Tint rubbed against his leg; he scratched the coarse fur between her shoulder blades in response. The more contact Garric had with the beastgirl the less human she seemed, but he’d have found his wizard-imposed exile much harder to bear without Tint’s presence.

“Is that really what the gardens look like over the wall?” Toster said. The big man knuckled his beard with a look of deep puzzlement.

“It is,” Metron said. “What I show you here is the thing itself, not an image of the thing.”

“Then who keeps them up?” Toster said bluntly. “That’s expert work, that is. My old dad would’ve been proud as could be to have Lord Kelshak’s maze come out so neat and no bare holly twigs.”

“The garden cares for itself,” Metron said. His smile looked strained under its superiority, but the wizard was too proud to suggest an end to idle questions. “No human enters it, nor could a human survive without the help of one such as myself.”

Garric didn’t speak, but it was one of the times he regretted no longer having Carus in his mind to share a silent comment. A man really confident in his power wouldn’t have gone to the lengths Metron did to pose before a gang of bandits.

The wizard cleared his throat, and resumed, “When I’ve brought you through the gardens—”

“You haven’t said just how you are going to bring us through the gardens,” Hakken said. “Are we supposed to haul you over the wall with us?”

“In a manner of speaking you’re correct,” Metron said. “I’ll provide you—”

His eyes met Garric’s.

“I’ll provide Master Gar…” he went on. He brought a crystal disk on a silvery neck chain out from under his robe. “With this. I will be within it, working my art as required.”

Everyone looked at Garric. He shrugged. “Go on,” he said.

He closed Gar’s callused right hand into a fist, wishing he didn’t feel so completely alone and adrift. He wondered how long it would be before he was back with his friends, in his proper world.

How long it would be, and whether it would ever be again.

“When we’ve reached the tower,” Metron said, letting the disk fall against his chest, “we will climb it.”

“It’d be easier to go through the wall, it seems to me,” Vascay said. “Not easy. But easier.”

“Easy, yes, but useless,” the wizard said. “The lower floor is a guardhouse. The floor above it holds the kitchen and is guarded as well. The two floors above that are the Intercessor’s private apartments and workroom…and Lord Thalemos is held in the prison levels still higher in the building. Shall we not start where we want to go, my good man?”

“You figure we can throw a line to the top and climb up it?” Hakken said. He squinted in consideration. “We might could at that, but it’d have to be a light grappling hook and a bloody thin line.”

“No matter how sharp the hook was, it would find no purchase on top of the tower,” Metron said. “There is no parapet, and the stone, as you will see, is smooth as glass.”

He tried to sound portentous, but the effort of wizardry was making him wheeze. “Nonetheless,” he continued, “my art will enable you to climb to the upper doorway, from which you will enter to release Lord Thalemos.”

“Are there jailers up there?” Vascay asked. “There must be.”

“There are no jailers,” Metron said. “No human enters the upper levels save for prisoners and the Intercessor himself…and the Intercessor is no longer fully human. Echea made allies who were not men, and over the centuries her line has swerved closer to the line of those the Intercessors’ power depends on.”

Vascay looked at his men, his gaze finishing with Garric. “Any more questions?” he asked.

“When do we go?” Garric said.

“Tomorrow at midnight,” said the wizard. He stuck his athame point down in the middle of the scribed figure. The image above it dissolved into a bucketful of water, splashing on the dock and draining through the slats.

“Tomorrow at midnight it is,” Vascay said. His eyes were still on Garric.

Garric nodded. He rubbed the knot of muscle between Tint’s shoulder blades. He wished he understood; but for now it would have to be enough to act.

The high-pitched shriek brought Cashel to his feet from a dream in which he explained to Sharina that he owned all the sheep on the hillside below. “Tilphosa!” he shouted, his staff crosswise before him.

If the sailors’d harmed the girl after he’d warned them, then they could pray to the Sister for mercy. They’d get none from Cashel or-Kenset.

Tilphosa jumped up also. She eeped and threw herself flat as an iron butt cap whistled past her ear. Cashel’d nearly knocked her silly on his way to rescue her.

It was bright day, not much short of noon. The light hadn’t kept Cashel from sleeping like an ox after plowing, but it made it easier for him to get his bearings now that he was awake. Tilphosa was fine, just flattened on all fours as she looked up cautiously to judge where the quarterstaff was. The sailors were gone, all three of them.

The scream repeated. Now Captain Mounix was bawling in terror besides. The noise all came from the direction of the waterfall—and the birches. No surprise there.

“Stay—” Cashel said as he started lumbering toward the cries. His mouth closed. Stay here alone, where who-knows-what might be waiting for a chance to grab you?

“Duzi!” he said in frustration. “Do as you like!”

Which, being Tilphosa, she was probably going do no matter what he said. She loped along at Cashel’s side, discreetly beyond where she’d be swiped by the staff. She held her chunk of rock up by her shoulder, ready to chop or throw.

Captain Mounix was in the grove, his back to them. He was tight up against a birch, hammering it with both fists and bellowing. The branches weren’t holding him or anything like that so far as Cashel could see.

“What’s the matter?” Cashel said. Ousseau and Hook were here too, clasping other trees. Hook was the one who screamed like a boar being gelded. “What’re—”

He grabbed Mounix by the shoulder and tried to pull him back. Mounix roared in pain and terror.

The nymph he’d been embracing trilled silvery laughter. She’d looked completely human at Cashel’s first glance, but her slender body was becoming wood and bark again even more swiftly than he’d watched her form when first he’d entered the grove the previous dawn.

“Don’t bother with her, big boy,” called the nymph from a nearby birch. Her fully human body stood out from the tree trunk. “She’s taken, but I’m not.”

She laughed with demonic cruelty. Cashel looked at her, then stared down at the captain, his tunic lifted and groin pressed closed to the bole of the tree.

Oh. It wasn’t the nymph’s arms that held Mounix; but he was held, and held beyond any easy way of freeing. The captain’s eyes closed, and his whole body was going rigid.

Cashel stepped away. He drew his knife while he thought things over. The quarterstaff wasn’t going to solve the problem, and even if he’d had a proper axe he wasn’t sure he could cut Mounix loose. Not safely, anyway.

Tilphosa stepped close to look. “Don’t—” Cashel said, but she paid him no more attention than he’d expected she would. She lifted her rock high in both hands and slammed it as hard as her strength allowed into where the nymph’s face had been.

The stone flew out of Tilphosa’s grip, bouncing from Mounix’s shoulder and falling to the ground. The captain paid no attention to the blow. His body shuddered, then froze; and shuddered again. The dent in the soft birchwood filled and began to re-cover itself with bark.

Cashel could see Hook in profile. He was silent now. His eyes were open but blank, and his arms were limp. The sword he’d taken from the captain lay beside him, its blade broken a hand’s breadth below the hilt. He must have been hacking at the nymph who’d trapped him, but any damage to the tree had healed completely. Bark covered the whole trunk and was beginning to grow over Hook as well.

“Cashel?” Tilphosa said in a small voice. “I think that must be Ousseau over there.”

She pointed toward the other side of the grove. Cashel could see cloth on the ground, maybe a torn tunic.

“He’s just a lump against the tree, now,” she said. She closed her eyes. “Cashel, can we leave?”

Cashel put his knife back in its horn sheath and walked over to Hook. He picked up the sword hilt and handed it to Tilphosa.

“Here,” he said. “It’s not much, but it’s better than what you had. Let’s get going.”

All of the birches had reverted to the look of simple trees, but Cashel heard a tinkle of laughter as he and the girl walked quickly back the way they’d come.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” Cashel said.

“I don’t care where we’re going,” Tilphosa said. “We’re going away, Cashel. We’re going away!”

“They put this up quickly,” Sharina said as she mounted the steps to the wooden platform built out over the south gate into the palace compound. “It seems as solid as the palace wall, though.”

The supports were bamboo tied into a lattice as strong and open as a huntsman’s net. Reise, Garric’s majordomo, had provided tapestries to give a look of luxury to the plank floors and railings. The covered treads made Sharina step carefully, but she couldn’t have seen her feet while wearing court dress anyway.

“Builders use the same sort of scaffolding to set keystones,” King Carus muttered. “I guess it ought to hold a few people who aren’t too badly overweight.”

He punched his stomach with the heel of his left hand. Despite Carus’ insistence on a daily hour of sword practice, he complained that the round of meetings filling the rest of his time had him as badly out of shape as a calf stalled to provide veal for a banquet.

“We need a proper stand for public announcements, though,” he added. “I don’t think a thousand people can see me from here, and a king ought to be seen!”

“Perhaps the Customs Tower in Harbor Square?” suggested Liane, the last of their party. “With the booths cleared from the square, most of Valles could gather there.”

Lord Attaper stood at the base of the stairs with a platoon of his men. The additional Blood Eagles in full armor outside the gate concealed the heads of their javelins with gilt knobs. They were a guard of honor unless something went wrong, whereupon the knobs would come off very quickly.

“You want to train people to think of me when they see the tax collector?” Carus said with a laugh. “Maybe not, hey? But some sort of tower down by the square might work.”

Chancellor Royhas, Lord Waldron, and four attendants already stood on the platform, facing the steps. The nobles bowed to greet the king. In past generations the servants would have knelt, but Garric had decreed that no man in his kingdom knelt to another in his public capacity. Today bows—rather deeper than those of the nobles—sufficed for the servants as well.

The crowd shouted and waved as Carus appeared. The cheers started with people sitting on the tiles and in dormer windows, but as quickly as flames crossed a field of stubble it passed to those packing the boulevard below. Ribbons, pennons, and kerchiefs painted with fanciful portraits of the royal household fluttered in hands and on staffs.

Carus might think the crowd was small compared to his memories of the public squares of ancient Carcosa, but then the Isles had been united for a thousand years and the capital’s facilities were built to serve the whole kingdom. It amazed Sharina, though, the numbers and the enthusiasm both. Many were crying, “Princess Sharina!” at the top of their lungs, and flailing the air with what they fondly imagined was her painted likeness….

The boulevard leading to the palace gate, and the street that crossed it paralleling the compound’s high brick wall, were full of spectators for as far as Sharina could see. The buildings were of two and three stories, with sloped tile roofs and occasionally a dome. Normally thatched or fabric awnings shaded merchandise on display in front of the shops, but these had been taken down—or torn down—when criers went through the city announcing that Prince Garric would speak at midday in front of the palace.

An usher in a black robe with scarlet sleeves stepped to the railing, raising his hands to the crowd. They cheered even louder. He chopped his hands for silence—and most people continued cheering.

Laughing with gusty good humor, King Carus put his left hand on the attendant’s shoulder and gently moved the embarrassed man back. Carus hopped onto the rail, balancing there on the balls of his feet.

Liane put her fist to her mouth. Royhas cried, “If you break your neck—”

“Relax, chancellor,” Carus called over his shoulder. His shout was barely audible over the shrieks of amazement from the crowd. “I’ve climbed more masts than many who call themselves sailors.”

Carus made a megaphone of his hands and bellowed, “Silence!”

Few if any could hear him, but they understood the pantomime. An active quiet, more like the hush of a forest than of a human gathering, fell over the crowd.

“Citizens of the Isles!” Carus shouted. “My people!”

The other three attendants on the platform were scribes, this at Liane’s insistence. They began scribbling madly when Carus started to speak, two on wax tablets and the third with an ink-brush on a roll of paper cleverly mounted on the bottom of a thin plank. By nightfall full copies of Carus’ speech would be on notice boards in every district of Valles.

The king stood with his fists on his hips, arms akimbo. Though Sharina stood behind him, she’d seen the ancient king’s expressions often enough now—so different from her brother’s, though wearing the same flesh—to imagine the broad reckless grin he would be wearing. His posture was relaxed. She suspected he could do handstands on the railing if he wanted to.

“There’s those who’d bring the kingdom down in blood!” Carus said. “They’ll not be permitted to. Lord Waldron—”

He reached his right arm back toward the army commander. Waldron was already as straight and stiff as a swordblade; he quivered noticeably at the recognition, however.

“—and I will see to that, at the head of the forces of the Isles. The kingdom has a sword, now. It’s your sons and brothers, not strangers from abroad, who man the fleet and the army.”

The crowd cheered again. Sharina suddenly understood where Garric had gotten the skill with which she’d watched him move groups of people since he came to Ornifal. Here was the man who’d taught him, using his voice and his posture with the same practiced ease that whipped his sword through a crowd of enemies.

Carus held his hands up for silence—and got it, while the scribes wrote madly to complete their shorthand accounts of his previous words. The usher on the platform with him, a middle-aged man, watched with undisguised envy.

“The government, under our monarch Valence the Third—”

Carus was as careful as Garric and his ministers to pay lip service to the fiction that Valence remained the King of the Isles. Officially the king’s adopted son Prince Garric merely handled day-to-day chores.

“—will remain in the capable hands of our council, headed by Chancellor Royhas.”

Again Carus reached back without looking behind him, this time gesturing toward Royhas with his left hand. The chancellor’s court robes of creamy silk brocade were hemmed with scarlet in token of his position. He remained almost impassive. The smile that lifted the corner of his mouth could only be seen by someone on the platform with him.

The crowd below was too thick for peddlers to work it. Trays of candies, water jars with cups of varied sizes, and bundles of cloth and metal trinkets were mired in the thick mass of spectators. There’d be time enough for sales when the assembly started to disperse.

Carus silenced the roars with another gesture. He half turned and, with a roguish smile, gestured Liane forward. She looked surprised, but she obeyed.

Carus stepped down backwards as easily as he’d hopped up. He took Liane’s right hand in his left and raised it. The crowd had already shouted itself hoarse, but people tried to outdo themselves until Carus lowered his arm and Liane’s.

Lord Royhas glanced sideways toward Sharina and lifted an eyebrow. She shook her head minutely. She had no more idea than the chancellor did—or Liane, either one—of what the man in Garric’s body intended to do next.

“My people!” Carus said. “My fellow citizens, my friends! There are decisions that only a person, not a government, can make. Here in your presence I announce my betrothal to Lady Liane bos-Benliman and her appointment as my surrogate in all matters that would otherwise have to wait for my return from campaign. Give her your honor and your obedience, for her sake and for my own!”

Liane’s mouth was open, but any words she’d intended to speak had dried in her throat. Carus caught her by the waist in both hands, kissed her, and then lifted her above him in a display of strength and agility while the crowd thundered.

He set Liane down. Sharina stepped to the couple’s side and embraced both of them. Liane’s body was rigid, and her expression was sheer horror.

“Don’t worry, child,” Carus said, grinning triumphantly. “This won’t make any difference to you till Garric comes back, save that you won’t have the trouble with the nobility you’d otherwise face when I made you my viceroy.”

“But…” Liane said, her eyes wide. “But when Garric does come back…”

“He’ll have to go through with the marriage,” Sharina said, completing the thought Liane was too embarrassed to articulate. “Which is just as well, I think.”

“So do I,” Carus said. Royhas and Waldron had hesitated; now both men stepped forward to offer congratulations. Carus waved them back, then bent to speak to the women in a voice no one else could hear over the crowd’s shouted joyfulness.

“A king must marry,” the ancient king said. “Your Garric”—he nodded to Liane—“is a brave fellow by any standards, but being raised by a she-wolf like his mother Lora would put anybody off marriage. I’m doing what a good regent ought to do, preparing the kingdom for the rightful ruler who’ll succeed me.”

Putting an arm each around Sharina and Liane, King Carus stood for a moment looking out over the ecstatic citizenry.

“Besides,” he added, barely audible even to Sharina. “I like the lad!”