Lord of the Isles (24 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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T
he platform on top of the tower was oval, not round, and about seven feet through the slightly longer axis. It gave Sharina an even better view of the insects' preparations than she'd had from the battlements fifty feet below.
The preparations were over. She was viewing the Archan assault.
“Quickly, quickly!” Meder cried. “We have very little time! Get inside the circle at once, every part of your body!”
The circle was one he'd scribed on the gneiss; with the athame, Sharina assumed, but the line stood out in pulsing red as though the stone itself were on fire. It enclosed most of the platform; a double row of internally glowing symbols was written around its outside.
Meder knelt within, the squirming sack beside him. Pale blood already spattered the stone, and a salamander's drained corpse lay on the low coping. Its jaws lolled open to display the white membranes within.
Sharina felt her diaphragm tense. She started to turn back. Nonnus touched her again between the shoulders.
“Quickly!” the wizard cried.
The climbing poles had sprung up from the city's courts and the roofs of adjacent buildings like a sudden forest. They wavered in the windless air as hundreds of Archai, with the mindless precision of a school of fish, thrust with limbs and long poles to tilt them toward the citadel.
Warm mist blurred the workers' outlines, changing them from individuals into a force of nature as certain and inexorable as waves pounding the shore. Assault battalions waited in massed ranks to take up the task from the work crews.
Sharina stepped into the circle, careful not to put her foot on the line or the Old Script characters surrounding it. Salamander blood felt tacky on her bare soles but she was a girl from the countryside; blood didn't bother her.
What the blood stood for … that bothered her very much.
“You,” Meder said. He pointed with the athame. “Nonnus. Come here and cut the lizard open when I tell you to. Squeeze it so that all the blood falls in the center of the circle.”
Sharina hadn't been sure Meder knew the hermit's name. The air around the platform had a sullen tinge that wasn't quite a color. She was sweating profusely from the climb, but her heart was cold.
The severed trees tilted toward the citadel with glacial slowness. Workers set wedges beneath the base of each tree as the outer edge lifted. All twenty-odd vertical poles trembled inward together.
How did the Archai communicate? Sharina hadn't heard them make a sound except for the high-pitched wheeze as they died.
There was room for four people within the circle, but if they all knelt the way the wizard was doing their knees would be in contact. The circle's glowing boundary was a warning like the black and yellow bands of a hornet, and Sharina had the feeling that to be
outside
the circle might be more dangerous yet.
“No sir,” said Nonnus calmly. “I don't work magic. Especially this kind of magic.”
He turned his back on Meder, eyeing the tree which had been lifted to the roof of a two-story building to the north of the citadel. From its height and closeness, the tree could touch the platform on which the four of them stood; and since it still appeared to be vertical, Sharina knew it was slanting directly toward her.
“You ignorant savage!” the wizard screamed. “I need the athame as a pointer! You
must
do this if we're to survive!”
“Let's go back down, Nonnus,” Sharina said in a cold voice. “I think we can find an easier place to defend.”
“May the Sister drag you both down!” Asera said. “Give me the accursed animal, Meder. If I get out of this, I'll never have any truck with wizards again!”
As the procurator spoke, she fumbled in her writing case of black silk under a cutwork bronze sheath. She brought out a knife with a short steel blade, intended for sharpening quill pens.
The poles were toppling, all of them together like the feathers of a bird's wing—individual units acting in perfect uniformity. Nonnus stepped back very slightly and put a hand on Sharina's wrist to steady her.
Meder reached into the sack and brought out its remaining contents, a salamander with a black body, a tail flattened vertically for swimming, and an eye on either horn of the crescent-shaped wings of its skull. The beast moved feebly; its skin was meant to be immersed in water at all times, so the creature was dehydrated even in Tegma's humid atmosphere.
Meder bent over his symbols; Asera took the sacrifice with a look of disgust, holding it around the body just behind the forelegs. Neither noble could see the falling tree.
A dozen of the poles crashed down simultaneously, whacking the stone like a giant's drumsticks. The sound was lightning sharp; it squeezed blocks of stone hard against one another. Sharina flinched; Asera shouted in surprise and
dropped her knife. Meder's lips moved, intoning a spell that the crackling chaos smothered.
So close was the Archan timing that the remaining dozen trees struck within the next half-second. The pole aimed at the tower platform was one of them. Bark and fibers of shattered wood sprayed like sand in a windstorm. The tree, four feet in diameter even here two hundred feet up the trunk, flattened noticeably and bounced high from the coping. The noise shocked Sharina into an unmeant scream, but the touch of Nonnus' hand prevented her from lurching out of the circle and perhaps off the platform itself.
Nonnus poised; for a heartbeat he must have been thinking of throwing his weight against the end of the tree before it came slamming down again to rest solidly on the platform coping. Sharina held him back. Despite the hermit's strength, even if he expended it with the perfect timing of which she knew he was capable, the tree's enormous mass would crush him like a bug.
The hermit relaxed. The tree hit again, flexed, and settled. Only two feet of the length projected onto the platform, but that was enough. The end was chipped square as neatly as a skilled man could have done with a broadaxe and unlimited time, but Sharina had seen the Archai use no tools save their own forelimbs.
“Now, woman, now!” Meder cried. “The blood now or it'll be too late!”
Warriors were already climbing the trunk. They moved like a yellow stain being absorbed up the coarse brown surface of the bark.
“
lakoub-ia ai bolchoseth iorbeth—
”
Asera fumblingly picked up the quill knife. She looked shaken. Bark and splinters covered the back of her tunic and hung in her hair. She drew the blade down across the salamander's abdomen.
Meder hadn't moved even when the huge tree struck beside his head and made the very fabric of the tower shiver. His fearlessness proved his utter concentration. Even Nonnus had
let the impact shock his mouth open in an unvoiced cry.
“Neuthi iao iae—”
The salamander curved its body away from the knife. The procurator, her senses numb from fear and the tree's crashing impact, slashed wildly. She opened the little creature in a spill of internal organs, but she cut into the inside of her thumb as well. Pale amphibian blood mixed with drops of bright scarlet splashed to the stone.
“Io sphe io io—”
The chitinous warriors were only halfway to the tower platform, but those directed up other poles toward the lower battlements were already locked in combat with the handfuls of human defenders. Tawny masses spread over the stone, their edged forelimbs held high.
“
Abraoth!
” Meder shouted.
Red light curled like smoke from where the blood had spilled. The stone seemed to bubble, but Sharina could see that the block's smooth surface was really unaffected beneath the seething light.
The Archan warriors walked rather than climbed up the side of the pole. Their feet had sharp edges that bit like climbing spurs into the bark. The nearest of the attackers was only twenty feet below; Nonnus readied his javelin to stab, not throw.
The coil of light from the incantation continued to rise, but it remained a narrow corkscrew rather than the spreading bubble which had enveloped Tegma and returned its inhabitants to life. At its top the helix turned the clouds overlying the mist into a pulsing ruddy blur.
“I need more blood!” the wizard cried. “Squeeze it! Squeeze it!”
He flung the sack inside out, proving what its flat folds had made obvious before: he'd used all the sacrificial animals. When Meder tried to grasp the flaccid corpse on the coping beside him, his haste bumped it over the edge instead. He'd completely drained the body anyway.
The leading Archa stepped onto the coping. Nonnus thrust
it through the upper torso. The creature grasped the javelin shaft with its middle pair of limbs, trying to twist the weapon from Nonnus' hands.
Sharina leaned forward and struck with the hand axe, chopping through what would have been the ankle joint in a human. The Archa toppled sideways from the pole. Gravity dragged the javelin out of its grip and pulled the blade from the gaping wound in the creature's thorax.
“Don't cross the circle!” Meder cried in desperate terror.
The second warrior cut at Sharina's head but struck the interposed javelin instead. She swung the axe backhand because she didn't have time to raise it for a proper blow. The creature's abdomen thumped like a struck log. An upward slash of the Pewle knife opened it in a purple spray. The Archa-curled backward in a convulsion which spread the wound even wider.
Asera had fallen to her knees, covering her face with her hands. Meder snatched the dead salamander from her and wrung it like a towel. The ruby spiral continued to rise; it rotated faster than before, but it was still a narrow tendril into the clouds.
Six sailors fought for a moment on the battlements immediately below. The tide of Archai swept over them; the warriors' forelimbs rose and fell alternately, hacking their victims apart. Drops of scarlet blood spattered twenty feet in the air.
“Get back!”
Nonnus reached around Sharina's waist with the hand that held his big knife, drawing her back as she raised the axe to strike the next Archa. The creature poised to jump into the midst of the group of humans.
Meder's spinning red column filled the magic circle. The light was like that of the heart of a furnace, but there was no heat at all. Sound stopped, even the screaming of the men being killed in the Archan assault.
As suddenly as a shutter falling, the circle was clear and lightless. The fiery glow spun from the outer edge, enveloping
all beyond at the speed of a wind-driven brush fire.
The nearest Archa shriveled, twisting away like a stick figure of itself drawn with charcoal. The creatures following up the pole in close succession flailed their limbs or tried to jump aside as the flame-red light swept toward them. Contact was death as surely as a candle devours the moth it draws within.
Hideous human screams came from within the citadel. The light destroyed not only the Archai it engulfed.
The pole was untouched, but roaches and other insects prowling crevices in the bark blackened and died just as the Archai did. The wizard's spell affected only living animals; but
all
living animals were affected.
Were killed. Except for the four humans sheltering within the magic circle.
The light poured out like blazing lava, reaching the outer walls of the city and continuing to flow unchecked. Despite the mist, Sharina could follow the spell's progress over stone and through the forest as though she were watching in a ruby mirror.
Every creature she saw was dying. Every single creature.
The fiery doom paled and finally vanished. Memory of it lingered in Sharina's mind, especially when she shut her eyes. The sun was low in the western sky.
Tegma was as silent as a tomb.
Meder lay sprawled on the corpse of the sacrificed amphibian. His face was as pale as carven ivory, but his breath stirred the layer of powdered bark on the stone.
The procurator rubbed her slimy, bloody hands over one another as if washing. She probably wasn't aware of what she was doing. Her lips moved in silent entreaty, perhaps praying to the gods she was too sophisticated to believe in.
Sharina looked down at the wizard. Part of her wanted to leap off the platform and fall to a clean death on the stones below. Another part wanted to bury her axe in Meder's skull before she flung herself into oblivion.
The hermit's face was without expression. He wiped the
blade of his knife on his black wool tunic, then sheathed the weapon again.
“It'll be easier to finish the dugout now,” Nonnus said, “since we'll be able to take what we need from the trireme's fittings.”
T
he Gravel Ford Inn on the Stroma River was eighteen miles, two days' drive for a flock of sheep, from the outskirts of Carcosa. In the common room Garric's body slept with a score of other men: Benlo's guards, wagoners bringing produce into the city, boys going to seek their fortune.
There was always traffic this close to the capital. The innkeeper had an income that Reise would have envied, though Reise would never have allowed rushes so filthy to lie on the floor of
his
inn.
Garric's dream self watched King Carus climb the escarpment of Ladera Castle on a bright spring day. Fifty men followed him, using the fingers and toes of three limbs to grip while the other limb rose to a new hold as slowly as a snake stalks a field mouse.
“We couldn't wear armor, not even helmets,” Carus said. He and dream Garric leaned on a rail, but the structure to which the railing was attached blurred at the edges of vision. The landscape, the castle, and the forlorn hope creeping up its walls were in a different time and place. “If anybody'd looked down from the walls, they could have wiped us out by dropping handfuls of gravel off the battlements.”
He laughed with rollicking joy. “I was only a few years older than you then, lad,” he said. “Just ascended to the throne and too young to know what the risks were. But I was
right: it had to be done or the kingdom would have crumbled right then instead of in twenty years, after we sailed for Yole … .”
The king's voice sobered as he continued speaking, not into sadness but with a kind of steely anger. If anything his tone grew lighter, flexing like a bowstaff coming to full nock.
In the sea below Ladera Port and the castle at its western end was a fleet of over a hundred war galleys, bow-on to the shore. Their oars moved sluggishly, just enough to hold station against the ebbing tide. Bronze rams dipped and lifted with the swell. Troops were winding back the arms of the catapults on the vessels' foredecks.
“Because of the weight?” dream Garric asked. He'd climbed the fangs of rock off the shore north of Barca's Hamlet every nesting season since he was twelve, coming down with a basket of green, tangy guillemot eggs in his teeth. It made his fingertips ache to watch the climbing soldiers. At least they didn't have salt spray drenching them as their friends waited below at the oars of a small boat.
“Because of the noise,” Carus said, his voice soft and cheerful once more. “One clink of steel on stone and Count Rint of Ladera would have been King of the Isles—at least until one of fifty more usurpers cut him down.”
Men stood on the castle's battlements, even here on the south side, but all the guards were looking toward the sea and the threatening fleet. Carus, his dark hair restrained by a golden fillet, wore his long sword in a sheath strapped to his back where it was out of the way until needed.
A catapult fired from the castle wall, the arms slapping loudly against their stops as the head-sized missile sailed toward the ships in a flat arc. The stone splashed into the sea among the oarblades of the quinquireme whose gilded prow marked her as the royal flagship. Iridescent water spouted higher than the mast of a ship under sail.
“Wouldn't it have been safer to attack at night?” Garric asked. The figure of the young king was only a few feet below the lip of a tower on which a pair of Laderan guards craned
their necks to see the fleet over the castle's opposite walls.
The older Carus shook his head. “It had to be by daylight so that they'd be watching the ships,” he said. “They never dreamed that I'd landed the night before with fifty men and crept to the scrub at the back of the castle in the dark.”
The young king came over the battlements in a twisting leap that an acrobat would have envied. The guards turned. The long sword was in Carus' hand, striking right and left like twin strokes of lightning. More men swarmed onto the walls, overwhelming the handful of guards on this less-threatened sector before they could even give the alarm.
“And with your help, lad,” Carus said again in a voice like sun quivering on a sword edge, “I'll settle things yet with the Duke of Yole.”
“Sir, he's dead,” the dream Garric protested. “Dead a thousand years!”
Carus shook his head, his eyes on troops running to complete the capture of Ladera Castle. Defenders were already leaving the walls, throwing away weapons and their armor to surrender as unarmed civilians.
“All times are one time, lad,” he said. “Later is as good as sooner.”
The troops were shouting as they flooded into the castle. The shouts grew louder.
“Attack! Attack!” a man cried.
Someone stumbled over Garric sleeping in the darkness. He lurched to his feet in the Gravel Ford Inn, fully awake but still blinking with the bright dream daylight of a moment before.
“Attack!” the man outside warned. It was Cashel shouting.
Garric groped for the weapons lying beside his bed of woven straw. The bow would be useless at night. He grasped the hilt of the sword the drover had given him and ran for the door along with Benlo's guards.
As Garric's hands started to draw the sword, he felt the laughing form of King Carus merge with him.

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