Master of the Cauldron (10 page)

“And may the Lady grant that they never do!” Waldron said in gruff honesty. “I figure a wizard's throat cuts as easily as a decent man's, though, and I've got the sword to do it!”

“Very possibly,” Garric said. “But Tenoctris? I'd very much appreciate it if you would accompany Lord Waldron and Sharina. It's not that I don't want you here—and I may very well want your help, I know that. But I'll have the whole royal army, while on Ornifal—”

He didn't try to finish the thought, just shrugged. He didn't know what words he could've used. Images of numberless disasters kept whirling through his mind like the flakes of a snowstorm.

Tenoctris nodded agreement. “Yes,” she said. “I can be only one place at a time, of course. I just wish—”

She stopping, beaming with the familiar, transfiguring smile that took decades off her apparent age.

“I wish I had greater powers,” Tenoctris said, “but I'll use what I have for the sake of the kingdom, and for Good—which must be real, since Evil so obviously is. And we'll hope that's enough.”

Garric rose to his feet. “Well, friends and fellow soldiers,” he said. “Nobody can ask for more than the best we can give. Lord Waldron, you have matters to attend, I'm sure. Sharina and Tenoctris will inform you of their baggage requirements when you consider transportation. Lord Zettin, provide whatever Lord Waldron requests. Inform me after the fact, if you will, but you have my approval already.”

“Of course, your highness,” Zettin said, glancing toward the aides waiting outside the ring of Blood Eagles who were ensuring privacy.

“As for the rest of us,” Garric concluded, “I see the barge coming back from Erdin already. I doubt Earl Wildulf would be quite so prompt if he'd decided on war, so we'd best consider the procedure for crowning a loyal vassal. It's something I got very little practice at”—he grinned broadly, light-headed to have resolved the question of how to deal with events on Ornifal—“when I was living in Barca's Hamlet.”

Everybody laughed—even Lord Waldron, who burst out with a gust of laughter after he finally understood he'd really heard what he thought he had.

Garric watched Tenoctris leaving, helped by his sister. They'd have Cashel with them, of course. That was the next best thing to having a whole army….

 

Cashel stepped from the sunlit hillside onto the parapet of a huge palace in the minutes before sunrise. The haze of light that precedes the sun had already turned the eastern sky into liquid crystal bright enough to hide the stars. The hard, smooth surface beneath Cashel's feet was just as translucently pure as the air above.

“Oh!” he said, as much in delight as wonder. He'd poised his quarterstaff at a slant before him as he stepped through the portal, ready for whatever danger might be waiting. He shifted it to his side but held the ferrule a trifle above the ground. He didn't suppose the iron would mark the gleaming surface, but it still seemed wrong to be rough with something so beautiful.

Mab was beside him. He hadn't heard or felt her appear. She'd been with him on Volita and she was with him still; it didn't seem to matter that they weren't in the same place as before.

“This is Ronn,” she said, looking around with the gentle smile of a person seeing familiar wonders through the enthusiastic eyes of a stranger to them. “You can think of it as a city, if you like, or as a palace; but all the thousands of citizens live in the same splendor as their ruler.”

Cashel looked at her again. She
was
Mab, he was sure of that, but—

“Lady, your hair is dark now,” he said. “And you're younger, and you're, well, fuller.”

The woman shrugged dismissively. “Yes,” she said, “and very likely I'll change my tunics and sandals at some point as well. Does this concern you?”

Cashel blushed in embarrassment. “I'm sorry, lady,” he said. In truth, her clothes and the jewel-bright paint on her nails were the only parts of Mab's appearance that weren't subtly different from the woman he'd met on Volita. “I don't normally poke into other people's business. I won't do it again.”

Mab smiled. Cashel turned his attention back to his surroundings, where he wasn't so apt to make a fool of himself. He hadn't been prying, just surprised; but when you asked folks about how they looked, you
were
being personal whether you thought about it that way or not.

There was any number of people around, more than he'd guessed at first because he could see for such a long distance. He was standing near the southeast corner of a broad, curving terrace. It stretched for farther than Cashel could be sure of. To the west, across the ship-filled harbor far below, lights twinkled on the other end of the crescent.

Because the plaza was so broad, the people got lost in it until you really thought about how many there were. Cashel didn't suppose he'd seen so many folks in one place except when Garric was mustering his army. There were too many to see them all, really, even if the sun'd been fully up.

“It's like being up on a mountain, mistress,” he said. “And it's very beautiful.”

“Ronn was built to be beautiful,” Mab said, with a nod of agreement. “And it was a mountain, before the city was built. The foundations are carved into the rock to support these crystal levels reaching into the sky.”

Cashel glanced at those standing close by, showing polite interest but being careful not to stare. People stood in pairs and small groups; occasionally one would be alone. They were waiting for something, though they didn't seem to be tense.

They were an army in numbers, but nothing could be more peaceful than the folk themselves. Almost all wore a loose, flowing robe, thin as the finest silk, over an opaque, richly embroidered garment that covered them from feet to neckline as tight as a stocking. The women's fingernails were painted like Mab's, blue on one hand and red on the other, though nobody else's seemed to have the same inner shine as hers.

The people who weren't dressed in that fashion were probably foreigners like Cashel, though he guessed they'd come from the ships in the
harbor instead of stepping out of the air. There were more different kinds than he could've counted on both hands, ranging from small, dark men in wrappers of patterned cotton to a pair of hulking, red-haired fellows who wore furs. Those two were taller than Cashel—taller than Garric, even. They gave him the same kind of appraising looks that he offered them.

“Ah, did wizards build the city, mistress?” Cashel asked, rubbing the pavement with his bare toe to see if he could feel any sort of join between blocks. It was as slick as polished metal, all one piece and not even roughened by the feet that'd walked it over who knew how many years.

“One wizard did,” Mab said, turning toward Cashel. Her voice was calm, but there was something more in her eyes. “He built Ronn, and he ruled as the king for a thousand years.”

She gestured with her left arm and continued, “The plain from Ronn to the northern hills—”

Cashel could see the hills she meant in the far distance, an irregular darkness rising on the horizon. From where he stood on the southern edge of the broad terrace, the lowlands between city and hills were out of sight.

“—was planted in crops to feed the city's population and worked by the Made Men whom he'd created as he created Ronn. For a thousand years, till a thousand years ago.”

Cashel nodded to give himself time to decide just how to respond. He wouldn't want not to work himself, but he knew a lot of people didn't feel that way. After fitting the pieces together in his mind, he said, “That sounds, well, pretty good, mistress. Did something go wrong back a thousand years ago, then?”

Looking at the comfortable people, well fed and well dressed, it didn't seem like very much could've gone wrong. There had to be something he was missing, or Mab wouldn't have brought it up.

“Something went right,” Mab said. “The Made Men looked like real men except that they couldn't bear the light. They worked in darkness. At first they had windowless huts in the fields. Each dawn they went into their huts and hid from the sun. Little by little they began moving into Ronn, first in the lowest vaults but moving higher as time passed. They blocked the crystals that brought the sun and moon down from the sky to every level. And then a thousand years ago the people rose up behind a queen, and they drove the king and his creatures into the hills.”

Cashel looked at the other people waiting on the terrace. It was hard to imagine these folks driving anybody anywhere. All but the foreigners
looked as smoothly plump as so many palace servants back in Valles. It made him remember what Mab had said before, about Ronn being a palace where everybody lived like the ruler.

“Well, it seems like things are fine now,” he said aloud. He smiled at Mab. “People aren't starving, I can see that.”

Food was on his mind, he guessed. He'd brought bread and cheese in his wallet, figuring that there must be water on Volita since it pastured sheep. It was past time that he'd have eaten if he'd stayed on the island, but he guessed he'd wait a while longer since it was just dawn here.

“The queen was a wizard too,” Mab said. “She caused crops to grow inside Ronn, where the residents themselves could tend them without fear of the Made Men attacking during the night.”

The spectators—despite their total numbers, they were too spread out to call them a crowd—gave a spreading sigh like the murmur of doves in their cote. A group of men and women wearing high golden headdresses walked toward the eastern edge of the terrace. There were seven of them, a handful and two fingers of the other hand.

“That's the Council of the Wise,” Mab said in a quiet voice. The newcomers passed almost close enough for Cashel to have touched them with his quarterstaff. “They aid the queen with certain tasks, including this one.”

The Councillors reached the parapet and lined up along it. Together they turned westward, stretching both arms out as they began to chant.

“They're wizards?” Cashel asked, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Or just priests?”

“Wizards of a sort,” Mab said. “Useful in their way, but only candles in the sun compared to the king.”

She sniffed, and added, “Though ‘sun' is the wrong word to describe what the king's become in a thousand years of rule and a thousand more of exile.”

The Councillors murmured a final word, their voices slurring together so that even though they spoke louder Cashel couldn't have repeated it. Not that it would've meant anything except to another wizard, of course.

A man who must be at least a mile high appeared in the middle of the terrace, facing the eastern horizon. His whole figure shone slickly. Only the feathered cap on his head should have been catching sunlight, the way tall trees do while the ground beneath them remains in darkness, but his boots had the same gleam. He raised a golden trumpet to his lips and blew a long call.

As the sweet, rolling note died out, the sun rose above the horizon and threw the dawn's first real shadows. The trumpeter melted back into the air.

The spectators resumed their conversations in quicker, brighter tones. The foreigners were jabbering among themselves in wonderment; one of the tall, fur-clad men had half drawn a long sword before the spectral giant vanished.

“You're not afraid, Cashel?” Mab asked with a knowing smile.

“No, ma'am,” he said. “But it was a pretty thing.”

The Councillors were silent. They'd drawn together like sheep in a thunderstorm; a couple of them were so tired that others had to steady them. It'd been an impressive illusion, but for seven wizards working together, well, Cashel saw what Mab meant about them not being powerful.

“Yes, very pretty,” Mab said as she looked out toward the barren hills. The sunlight falling on them somehow made them seem all the darker. “There are many pretty things here in Ronn, but only the queen could withstand the king when he led his Made Men back from the hills.”

“The queen's a wizard too, Mab?” Cashel asked. People were dispersing, either going down broad staircases built onto the city's gleaming flanks or simply promenading along the terrace.

“The queen is a great wizard, Cashel,” Mab said, still looking northward. “For a thousand years she kept back the king, and her Heroes led the people of Ronn against the Made Men. But—”

She turned to face Cashel. For a moment he thought her eyes blazed with the same perfect blue as the nails of her right hand.

“—the Heroes all sleep in a cavern beneath Ronn…and yesterday, the queen vanished.”

 

Ilna felt momentarily as though her skin had been turned inside out and bathed in ice water. A flash of crimson light left her sitting on pebbly soil at the base of an escarpment. It was night, and blinking afterimages of the wizardlight filled her eyes.

There was another flash, silent but so vivid that Ilna's ears rang with the expectation of a thunderclap. Light rippled up a section of the rock face nearby.

“Don't move!” shouted a voice, unfamiliar but the same one that had warned them to get away in the ruined garden. Too late, of course, but Ilna
couldn't complain since the person speaking was the one who'd been transformed from a statue when she severed the spell binding him. “The troll can't hear, but it sees well even in the dark.”

What does he mean by “troll”?

A second flash outlined a section of the escarpment. It scaled off of the surrounding rock, crackling and popping like a much louder version of the sounds a tree limb makes when the weight of ice breaks it.

Landslide!
Ilna thought, but she was wrong. It was a stone
figure,
walking away out of the wall it'd broken free from. Her eyesight was returning, but from what she could see in the moonlight the creature was featureless—a lump of head on a squat torso with arms and legs as crude as a child's clay figure. It was easily four times her height, however.