Master of the Cauldron (42 page)

He picked up the bow. It was a simple weapon, a staff of seasoned yew without the layers of horn and sinew that would've made it more powerful but also more delicate. A compound bow might not have survived being trampled, but this self bow and its horsehair cord were none the worse for the experience.

It was a hunter's weapon. The staff was only four feet from tip to tip so that the man using it could slip through dense brush, but it was thick and a powerful weapon in the hands of an archer strong enough to use it.

Garric nocked an arrow from the fallen man's quiver. It had a head like a knitting needle instead of the flaring barbs of a hunting arrow: the archer had thought he might have to shoot through a breastplate, so he'd come with bodkin points instead of broadheads.

Garric held the bow cord to his right ear. He no longer heard the shouts and screams filling the square. He was in a world of his own, his eyes focused on his arrowhead, silhouetted against the scarlet blur of Lord Tawnser's tunic. He threw his weight onto his left arm, bending the bow-staff instead of drawing the cord as easterners were taught to do; he loosed as part of the same smooth motion.

The stiff cord snapped painfully against Garric's left wrist—he wasn't wearing a bracer. He reached to his belt to draw out the next arrow, then remembered that he wasn't shooting at a predator back in the borough, that it wasn't his bow, and that he wasn't a shepherd anymore.

Tawnser had almost reached the roof; men were leaning over the coping to pull him the last of the way to safety. He flung his hands in the air and dropped backward into the square.

Garric threw down the bow; he swayed for a moment. He'd acted by instinct, and only now was he able to understand exactly what he'd done.

“You got him, your highness!” Attaper shouted beside him. “Good shot, your highness, a shot worth everything else that's happened today!”

A man who was alive is now dead,
thought Garric, suddenly sick.
A man whom I killed.

“We've got to get to him before the body's stripped!” Liane cried from Garric's other side. “He may have important documents!”

The three of them ran together toward where the rebel leader had fallen. The rioters who could move under their own power were out of the square by now. Sections of Blood Eagles who'd chased them a little way down the connecting streets were returning. Their officers weren't going to let them disperse in a city which, if not wholly hostile, certainly wasn't friendly to them.

Lord Tawnser lay on his back with a surprised expression. The arrow-point glittered a hand's breadth out of his breastbone. There wasn't much blood, but the arrow had broken his spine when it struck.

“That was too quick for a man like him!” Attaper said, as Liane undid the clasp of Tawnser's purse.

Garric looked down. “Milord,” he said, “for the sake of the kingdom I'm glad he's dead. But I'm sorry I killed him or ever killed a human being; and the kingdom isn't served by even a bad man dying slowly.”

“Here, Garric!” Liane said, holding up a slip of parchment. “It's as we thought!”

Garric forced his mind from the memory of a dead man falling down the side of a building. The note read, G
ARRIC WHO CALLS HIMSELF YOUR PRINCE WILL BE AT THE
T
EMPLE OF THE
S
HIELDING
S
HEPHERD TOMORROW MORNING WITH A FEW SOLDIERS
. I
F YOU'RE A MAN AND A PATRIOT, SERVE HIM AS HE DESERVES
. There was no signature, but the broken wax closure had been sealed with a stamped design.

“That's two intertwined serpents,” Liane explained. “It's Dipsas' seal.”

“Lord Attaper,” Garric said, steadying his voice as he spoke, “we'll return to the palace with all deliberate speed. And then we'll discuss what happened here with a wizard named Dipsas.”

He couldn't keep another wave of bloodlust from trembling across the surface of his mind as he thought about the woman responsible for this.

 

Cashel opened his eyes. He'd gotten barely a glimpse of the cave as he fell into it backward, but he knew he couldn't be there now.

He was in a hall whose sharply peaked ceiling was higher than any place he'd been in. A line of stone-framed windows just below the roof trusses flooded light onto the tapestries along the walls. The hangings on the west were brilliant, and even those in morning shadow gleamed with threads of gold and silver shot through the silk. Ilna would
love
to see those.

“Come join us,” said the eldest of the six men on the other side of a table long enough to seat many, many more than those present. It ran down the center of the hall beneath the ridgepole, nearly end to end of the big room. The men sat midway along the table's length. The speaker gestured toward the short bench across from him.

“Yes sir,” Cashel said. He wore his tunics but didn't have his quarterstaff with him. The lack didn't bother him as much as he'd have expected it to. “Sir, where am I?”

He didn't ask who the men were, because he already knew that. He'd seen their images walking the battlements of Ronn when he was with Mab.

Virdin, the first of Ronn's champions, had spoken. To his right were the twins Menon and Minon, laughing at some joke between them as they watched Cashel over their wine cups. At that end of the row was Valeri, lanky and glaring as fierce as a seawolf at Cashel.

The images of the two warriors on Virdin's left hadn't come by before the Made Men attacked, but Hrandis had to be the squat man, broader even than Cashel. That made the man beside him Dasborn, who had long limbs and a swordsman's wrists.

“You're in the Cavern of the Heroes, Cashel,” one of the twins said. Cashel couldn't tell them apart, and he doubted their mother could've done that either.

“The real Cavern,” his brother said, grinning broadly. “Not the hole in the rock that people see beneath Ronn.”

Big Hrandis poured wine from a ewer into the rock crystal cup waiting in front of Cashel. “You had a hard trip here, I'll warrant,” he said, in a voice that rumbled like distant thunder. “Have some of this.”

Cashel touched the cup. It felt solid, but…“Is it real?” he asked.

“It's as real as we are,” said Dasborn, with a sardonic grin that made Cashel think of Garric's father Reise. Reise had more education than just about anybody, but there was a sadness under even the jokes he told. “Or as real as you are in this place, if you prefer.”

Valeri looked at Virdin, and said with a sneer, “She sent us a talky one, didn't she? I'd have thought she could do better.”

“If you've got a problem with talk, Valeri,” the twin nearest him said with a hard grin, “then you can stop making so much empty talk yourself.”

Cashel drank to separate himself from the bickering. He supposed these fellows had been together a long time. Folks can get on each other's nerves, even when they're all heroes.

Because he was thinking about something else, Cashel gulped down more wine than he'd meant to. It prickled; he hunched forward and made a muffled
whuff!

Duzi, he'd barely kept from sneezing the wine back out his nose! That'd have given Valeri something to sneer at, wouldn't it?

Virdin leaned back on his bench. He had a full white beard, but the lean face it framed looked like that of somebody younger by far. “What do you think of the men you came with, Cashel?” he asked.

“The boys, you mean, Virdin,” Valeri said. “By Ronn, what a litter of puppies!”

“You were young yourself once, Valeri,” Dasborn said, looking down the table with a deliberately blank face. Now that he'd met the Heroes, Cashel didn't doubt they were all their reputations said they were; but Dasborn was the one he'd watch closest if Fate put him on the wrong side of them. Dasborn was the sort who made up his mind without any sign at all—then acted, quick and cold as a housewife wringing the neck of the chicken for dinner.

“I was young,” said Valeri, “but I was never like that. If I'd been like that, I'd have hanged myself!”

Cashel drank again, then cleared his throat loudly. The wine was well enough, he supposed; but he preferred beer, and the cup had a gold rim besides. Cashel didn't like the taste of metal with his drink. Even the tarred leather jacks he and Ilna used at home would be better, if he couldn't get a wooden masar instead.

“They're a good lot,” he said, looking straight at Virdin so it wouldn't seem like he was picking a fight with Valeri. He wasn't afraid of Valeri, mind; but it wasn't in Cashel's nature to quarrel if he could avoid it.
“They're young, sure, but they're braver than it maybe seems just to come down here when it's all so different from anything they know. They're willing, I guess I mean.”

“Willing?” said Hrandis, filling Cashel's cup again. Cashel didn't realize he'd drunk as much as he had. It did seem to perk him up some. “Are they willing to die for Ronn, Cashel?”

Cashel took a drink and swirled it in his mouth while he frowned over his answer. He swallowed and met Hrandis' eyes again. “I think they are, sir,” he said. “They'd say they were, I know. But…”

He scrunched his face up over something he felt but couldn't point to. He couldn't say it so another person would believe him if they weren't disposed to.

“Sir, I don't think they know what that means,” he said.

Dasborn laughed in honest amusement. “When we were their age,” he said, “we didn't know either. But we know now.”

“Aye,” said Valeri. “We know a lot of things. Now.”

Hrandis shrugged. “Ronn needed us,” he said. “The citizens needed us. That's all that mattered.”

Valeri looked at him. “Is it?” he said harshly. “Do you believe that, Hrandis?”

“Yes he does,” said Dasborn. He smiled faintly, cruelly. “And so do you, Valeri, or you wouldn't be here.”

“They've agreed,” said one of the twins. “They're here, and they're agreed. It doesn't matter what they understand.”

“We didn't understand, but we're here,” said his brother. He looked at Virdin, and added, “Tell him the rest, Virdin. That's all that remains to do.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” the white-bearded man said. “Go back to what men think is the Cavern, Cashel. You'll find your companions sleeping there. They'll awaken when you arrive. Tell them to take up the arms they find in the chamber with them. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir,” Cashel said. He didn't know how he was supposed to go back to where the Sons were, but he supposed Virdin or whoever'd brought him here would take care of returning him also. “What do I do then?”

Dasborn laughed. “There's nothing more for you to do, Cashel,” he said. “You'll have saved Ronn for the last time—if the city can be saved.”

“You can go now, Cashel,” old Virdin said. He raised his hand in a salute.

The vast hall shrank down to the size of a pinhead, then vanished. Cashel lay on his back in a chamber.

He sat up. The room was lighted only by a rosy haze between Mab's left thumb and forefinger. The Sons slept on the stone floor.

Along the walls were six sets of armor. They stood as monuments to the skeletons lying beneath them.

 

Ilna kept her eyes on the horizon and let her feet choose a path down the lines anchoring the larva to the cliff. Usually silk carried the imprint of the tiny fingers of children who'd unwrapped the cocoons, then spun the long threads into yarn. Despite how thick the ropes were, they owed nothing to human involvement.

Spider silk carried with it a hunger as fierce as the noonday sun. Worms, though, both the little ones the Serians fed on mulberry leaves in the world Ilna knew and this huge one in the sea, had no desire save to exist. They and their silk were as bland as flour paste.

Ilna smiled. Worms had no personalities and no reason to exist—except that they created the most lustrous and beautiful thread in the world. That couldn't be of interest to the worms themselves. Only when Ilna felt whimsical—as now—did she imagine that there might be something in the universe greater than individual worms and sheep and humans.

More lines in bundles of three joined the ones she walked on. Sheets of steel-strong gauze bound the heavy strands together, twisting them into a trough that closed on itself near the surface of the water to become a tube. Ilna knew through the certain witness of her feet that the worm was no more intelligent than the silk it'd spun, yet how
could
the perfection of this creation not involve will and understanding?

She laughed again. There was no answer that her reason would accept. Therefore, there was no answer.

Because she was looking outward, not down, Ilna noticed that the bird had changed its pattern from the slow circuits it'd been making on the horizon. Its wings stroked the air in slow unison, like the oars of a great warship making the first efforts toward driving the vessel into motion from a wallowing halt. The bird was so far away that it didn't swell in size even though it was flying directly toward her.

She frowned, but the bird's actions no longer mattered. The anchor
cords and their wrapper of silk completed the tunnel. She entered, leaning against an outrushing breeze. It carried with it the ripeness of a plowed field fertilized with some indefinable manure. The light dimmed to that of an overcast morning.

Ilna walked downward. The footing was springy but agreeably firm. The light continued to dim, but her eyes adapted to it. The tube had a slight curve as it flattened from a slope to a plane, so she couldn't see the open sky when she glanced over her shoulder.

No matter. Her duty lay deeper, not up from where she'd come.

The wind soughed, rushing past her as if glad to be gone. Its odor was thick and unfamiliar but not anything a peasant woman found offensive. The tanyard in Barca's Hamlet cured hides with manure and lye. It was downwind of the houses when the breeze came from the sea, as it normally did; but sometimes the wind changed.