Master of the Cauldron (30 page)

Enfero suddenly laughed. “He's right,” he said. “We only need to worry about
our
task. The questions as to whether our task is impossible or even pointless—those matters aren't our concern. Master Cashel's logic is impeccable.”

“Are the Made Men in the lower levels?” Ather asked, unconsciously rubbing the bruises he'd taken when Cashel demonstrated what he could do with a quarterstaff. “You didn't answer that, milady.”

Mab whisked her brilliant blue fingernails through the air. “No,” she said. “We won't find Made Men. The king can't physically enter Ronn, except over the walls if he defeats Ronn's army. But his power influences
the growth of things already in the city, and that increases the deeper we go. We'll have more to deal with than bad dreams.”

For some minutes Cashel had been hearing chants and a sibilant ringing sound. Now a line of young people wound into the shady garden area, spinning and whirling as they followed one another. The men held tambourines, which they slapped overhead, while the women shook castanets to the same wild rhythm. As they danced they sang, “…
Our Mother Queen leads us to a seat and bids us sit, she gives us nectar in a golden cup
…”

Mab fell silent, following the dancers with her eyes till the last of them jingled his way out of sight again. Cashel didn't try to count them, but there were at least as many as he had fingers on both hands. Their cheerful voices faded slowly.

Mab turned again to face her companions. A cold smile spread across her lips. She said, “As you see, the citizens of our city depend on us…though they aren't aware of the fact. Unless we succeed in waking the Heroes, there'll shortly be no dancers waking the sun, and perhaps no sun at all for Ronn.”

Cashel got up with the smooth grace of a gymnast, holding his staff out before him to balance the weight of his body as his knees straightened. “Well, ma'am,” he said, smiling also. “We already said we were going to do that, right?”

“Yes,” said Herron, lurching to his feet more clumsily than Cashel had but with a frown of fierce determination. “We did. Because it's our job.”

Cashel smiled more broadly. It seemed like they'd understood what he was trying to tell them after all.

 

Sharina's first thought was that the wooded hill to the right of the road was steep-sided and oddly symmetrical. Then she realized it was artficial.

“That's the tomb,” said Undercaptain Ascor, riding alongside the carriage Sharina and Tenoctris shared. “We used to escort the king here on Commemoration Day to make sacrifices. Though he gave that up the last couple years before, you know, your brother took over.”

The Mausoleum of the bor-Torials, the family of the Dukes of Ornifal who'd for the past several generations claimed the kingship of the Isles as well, was a mound more than a hundred feet high. The plantings, cypresses interspersed with plane trees, were on four ascending terraces; at
the top was a statue that, though large, was beyond Sharina's ability to identify at this distance.

A brick wall separated the grounds from road traffic. There was a keeper's house and a barred iron gate through which Sharina saw neatly tended vines mixed with the olive trees that would shade the grapes from the direct summer sun.

The gates were open. The twenty-odd horsemen who'd ridden on ahead to prepare for Sharina's arrival were talking volubly to one another within, still mounted. Sharina's escort was a company Waldron had brought from Volita. They'd originally been cavalry but had converted to infantry when Prince Garric refused to take horses when he sailed west across the Inner Sea. They'd remounted as soon as they returned to Ornifal and were revelling in the experience.

The mausoleum was designed to receive royal parties as large or larger than Sharina's. Immediately inside the gate was a cobbled plaza. A flagstone path curved through the vineyard and up the mound; along it were statues of the dukes interred here. Stronghand, at the end of the line, was a powerful man whose features showed determination and a hint of cruelty.

A husky, grizzled civilian in his sixties stood at the door of the house, talking easily with the officer who commanded the troops. From a gable window, a much younger woman suckling an infant peered at the soldiers in obvious concern.

The carriage swung around in the plaza. Sharina reached for the door latch, but the postillion had already jumped off his horse to forestall her; a second servant was handing Tenoctris out on the other side. The civilian stepped forward and bowed deeply, watched intently by the squad of Blood Eagles who'd dismounted as soon as the carriage stopped.

“Your highness,” he said as he rose from his practiced bow, “I'm Master Madder. Madder the Master Gardener, if you'll allow me. Please accept this gift from your new ancestors.”

He handed Ascor a squat, narrow-necked bottle with a black glaze. “The finest wine on Ornifal,” Madder said proudly. “That was laid down fifty-one years ago, when your adoptive grandfather Valence the Second took the throne!”

“I'd like that, if you don't mind,” Tenoctris said unexpectedly. Ascor looked at her, then to Sharina—who nodded. If the wizard was making sense of this, she was in a better place than Sharina. Ascor gave her the wine bottle with a bow of deference.

“I've kept the burial precincts of the bor-Torials for forty-two years,” Madder continued, “through good times and the recent lean years as well. I want to express my joy, my
great
joy, that you and your royal brother are making the tomb of your adoptive family your own!”

“Ah…” said Sharina, taken completely aback. There was no doubt Madder's enthusiasm was real: the only time she'd seen a happier expression was on a young wife holding her firstborn. “That is, my brother hasn't made a final decision on our…ah.”

She cleared her throat. “Master Madder,” she resumed, forcing her mind back into the track it'd been following during the whole drive from the palace. “Lady Tenoctris—”

Sharina nodded toward the wizard, safely out of the vehicle. The servant was holding her satchel. She smiled brightly to Madder.

“—and I would like to view the burial chamber of Valence Stronghand. Will you guide us there, please.”

A habit of polite deference almost twisted Sharina's words into a question: “Might we see his tomb?” for example. In fact it didn't matter what the gardener's feelings were, and anything but a flat statement would dishonestly imply that Madder had a choice. Sharina'd arrived with a company of soldiers and the needs of the kingdom to tend to.

“I'd like to determine whether someone has worked a contagion spell,” Tenoctris explained, smiling again, “connecting the person posing as Stronghand's son with Stronghand himself. I'm not very powerful, so I'd like to be as close as possible to one terminus of the spell. If there's a spell, that is.”

Sharina cringed inside, thinking about how nervous wizardry made most ordinary people. Tenoctris was an unworldly person, a scholar rather than a public figure. Though she knew intellectually that people were squeamish, she had a tendency to explain things that might better have gone unsaid.

Madder merely nodded approvingly. “Yes indeed,” he said. “Tombs draw wizards, always have, and where in the Isles is there a finer tomb than the Mausoleum of the bor-Torials? Why, if I had a copper for every wizard I've chased out of here over the years, I'd be a wealthy man.”

“Well, you're not chasing Lady Tenoctris out,” said Ascor firmly. “And if you don't watch your tongue, you'll find it hard chasing anything because your legs'll be broken. Get moving, fellow!”

“What?” Madder said in surprise. “Oh, of course, of course.”

The gardener bowed again, to Tenoctris, then a second time to Sharina. “I didn't mean you, your highness and milady,” he explained. “Why, you're family, of course. My, my, I'll be happy to show you. That is, you'd like me to lead?”

“If you would,” Sharina said mildly, amused at Ascor's puzzled expression. He and the gardener had been talking at cross-purposes, but they were obviously both enthusiastic about helping Sharina do anything she wanted.

Madder trotted off along the path through the vineyard. “I remember Lady Indra,” he said over his shoulder with a chuckle. “She was a cousin of the Stronghand's wife, I believe, back when I was still an apprentice. Every week she'd arrive with a different wizard. Once there was a Dalopan with a bone through his nose, if you can imagine that. Mad about horse racing, Lady Indra was, and no hand at all at picking horses.”

He shook his head reminiscently. “No hand at picking wizards to help her either, it seemed,” he added. “But that never stopped her trying.”

Sharina looked about her as she followed the gardener. The plantings were very extensive, at least half an acre of grapes and olives. A workman pruning the lower limbs of an olive tree with a billhook paused and stared at the procession—a squad of soldiers; Madder, the two women, and the Blood Eagles; and the rest of the troops—then hurriedly lowered his eyes and went back to work. Madder was used to royalty visiting the mausoleum, but the younger staff obviously were not.

“I'm surprised at the type of plantings, Master Madder,” Sharina called to the man stumping along in front of her. “I'd have expected the tomb to be landscaped, but with flowers and funerary shrubs, yews and myrtle and the like. This is a working vineyard.”

“Oh, by the Lady, yes, your highness!” Madder said cheerfully. “You're from the west, aren't you? Haft, I believe? I've heard they do things different there, but on Ornifal we like our tombs to pay for their own upkeep. Our vintage is famous. What doesn't go for libations—or went in the days the family visited regularly, as I hope you'll do now that you're here—we sell for the staff's pay and the supplies we need.”

They'd reached the point the path began to curve up the mound proper. Lires put a hand on the gardener's shoulder and slowed him with a significant nod at Tenoctris, who was showing signs of strain.

The path curved as it climbed. Masonry arches were set into the mound. The doors hanging in the first two were of iron with a patina of rust; the third was iron-strapped wood. Cypress, Sharina thought, but even so decay had eaten into the lower edge of the panel. The bronze nameplate was too corroded to read.

“The twins Attistus and Porra,” Madder said, noticing Sharina's interest. “And both of Porra's wives, I believe, though I'd have to check the records on that. They were cousins of the reigning duke, that was Valbrun, but he adopted them as his heirs.”

The gardener chuckled. “Teaches you humility, this job does,” he went on. “Both of them died before Valbrun. It was his own son Valtor who succeeded. Yes sir, humble!”

“My experience,” Tenoctris said in a cheerful tone, “is that life by itself is sufficient to do that. The more I learn, the more wonderful and complex the universe beyond what I know becomes.”

“That pleases you, Tenoctris,” Sharina said; there was no mistaking the tone of the other woman's voice. “Why? I mean, you're pleased at your ignorance, that's what you're saying, isn't it?”

Tenoctris laughed. “Yes indeed, dear,” she said. “That means I'll never run out of things to learn, you see.
That
would be quite an awful business, don't you think?”

Sharina laughed also. “I never thought about it,” she said. “I suppose I never thought there was any risk of it happening.”

They were more than halfway up the side of the mound. When Sharina glanced outward, she found herself looking over the tops of cypresses planted on the level ground at the base. They were at the back of the tomb, with a view to the east toward the gymnasium built by a victorious general of several generations earlier. Men were running and vaulting in the courtyard, while a larger number lounged under the porticoes built on three sides of the open area. The two-story building forming the entrance had been faced with colored marble, but many slabs had cracked off without being replaced.

“The next alcove is Stronghand's,” the gardener said, looking over his shoulder toward the women. “I remember his funeral. My, that was a wonderful day. A splendid pageant!”

“This one's been broken open,” called the file closer who commanded the leading squad of soldiers. He and his men drew their swords, the long cavalry blades they'd retained when the regiment officially became infantry. “Woo-ie!
She
's been dead a while, I guess!”

“What!” Madder cried. “No, that can't be!”

The gardener pushed through the troops, oblivious of the risk that he'd slice himself on a bare blade. He gave a wordless cry, threw his hands in the air, and fell to his knees.

The Blood Eagles locked shields in front of Sharina and Tenoctris. “Let me by!” the old wizard said. She tapped the rim of Ascor's helmet with the bamboo sliver she'd taken from her sleeve. “In Wisdom's
name
, sir, you're preventing me from doing the one thing that may be of service!”

“Captain Ascor,” Sharina said in a tone of aristocratic command. “You and Trooper Lires will please escort us to the alcove immediately.”

“All right, soldiers!” Ascor snapped, placing his right hand on a horseman's shoulder and shifting him sideways. “Out of the way of her highness. Now!”

With the pair of Blood Eagles preceding them, Sharina and Tenoctris entered the burial alcove. The walls were covered with slabs of marble, probably a veneer over brick or concrete. Benches faced one another along the sidewalls; on each was a bronze coffin.

The old wizard frowned and half turned. “Please,” she said in what for her was a peevish tone. “Don't block the light.”

“You heard the lady!” Ascor snarled. In all likelihood the soldiers shuffling for a look inside hadn't heard Tenoctris, but they certainly heard Ascor. “Move it back
now
so her highness can see what's going on!”