Master of the Cauldron (49 page)

Men with swords and shiny armor were coming out of Ronn's other gates to left and right. Cashel could only see the ones closest to where he was, but he guessed each of the Heroes was leading the men of a district, just as they'd planned.

Cashel had seen flocks of sheep keep better step and look more soldierly, but the citizens of Ronn were trying. From the roof and the terraces lower down, silks and shining metal gauze were waving, and the men were down here on the plain—scared half to death and like enough to die in all truth. They were doing all they could; and Cashel was proud to stand with them, too.

The Made Men called out in a burbling gabble as they shambled along. The sound less resembled words than they did gulps of liquid leaking from a week-dead corpse.

Cashel stepped to the side for a little room and spun his quarterstaff overhead. Duzi, those white monsters weren't in any better formation than the citizens were, and besides that they didn't have shields or armor. If the people of Ronn kept their faces to the enemy, this might turn out all right after all!

The ground stepped downward from the city in a series of wide terraces. They'd been decorated with hedges and terra-cotta tubs, though by now everything was pretty well overgrown. Farther to the north the land started rising again into the black hills and gorges from which still more Made Men poured.

Virdin strode down the slope to the second terrace, carrying the boldest of the citizens with him. Mab halted well short of the break and drew in the air with her hands. Cashel took one pace forward and crossed his staff before him, putting himself a little to Mab's left. He wanted to keep her in the corner of his eye. With two mobs like these mixing, there was no telling what direction trouble'd come in.

A Made Man, slight-bodied but with spider-thin limbs so long that he was much taller than Cashel, charged Virdin, gobbling. The creature swung a curved bronze sword far out to the side, then brought it around to strike the back of the Hero's skull.

Virdin lopped the Made Man's arm off at the elbow. The forearm and blade together spun away like an elm seed. The Hero punched the boss of his shield into the creature's chest, crushing ribs and flinging the body back into the faces of other oncoming creatures.

The straggling front of armored citizens hit the straggling front of Made Men, both sides hacking furiously. Cashel waited, his legs spread into a good stance. His instinct when he saw a fight was to get into it. Not that he liked to fight, exactly, but the emotions that seeing a fight roused in him made him want to do
something
instead of just stand there.

But standing there was the right thing just then, so Cashel did it. He was used to doing hard things, even when that meant doing nothing till the right time came.

The lines of men and Made Men fighting didn't move much after the first contact midway down the second terrace. Neither side was any good at what it was doing. If the citizens'd been chopping trees, they'd have turned them all to wood chips instead of timber. For their part, the Made Men moved in great leaps and slashes like they were dancing for an audience instead of closing with enemies.

The difference was in the shields and armor the humans wore. The Made Men didn't have the skill to pick apart armored men the way Cashel'd seen Garric and Chalcus do when they faced better-equipped enemies. The citizens couldn't have landed two blows on the same spot if their lives'd depended on it—but one blow was enough every time, shearing through white skin and pale flesh. The sprays of blood were as red as what ran in the veins of real men.

Rows of Made Men went down. More citizens joined the line, taking the place of men whose arms were already weary with unfamiliar exercise, or whose stomachs were churning to see how the inside of a body looks when the heart's still beating and the guts spill out in writhing coils.

Ronn was a city. City folk don't know the things that every peasant child sees in the fall when the flock's thinned so that there's fodder enough to take the survivors through to new growth in spring.

But the citizens went on and fought—or anyway hacked at their enemies. Some of the strokes were so wild that Cashel suspected the fellows
were swinging their swords with their eyes shut, but they weren't running away.

They weren't advancing much either. By then enough of them had come out of the gates, this one and the ones to either side, that there was a solid line of citizens chopping at the king's cavorting monsters. More humans came from the city, but many more Made Men swarmed out of the distant hills. Cashel thought of soldiers facing the sea with their swords—and the tide sweeping on regardless, as the tide always will….

Three lances of red wizardlight stabbed from the king toward Mab, as quickly as heartbeats. Two exploded midway, a blast and a blast, pushing the fighters away from each other for a moment. Cashel rode the shocks the way he'd have ridden gusts of wind at the start of a storm.

Instead of exploding, the third bolt vanished a hand's breadth from Mab's forehead, then lashed back at the king. A fireball lighted the walls of Ronn and the slopes of the barren hills. The bone litter flew apart. The creatures carrying it flattened, and the king dropped out of sight behind the wall of his minions.

For a moment Cashel thought Mab had killed her city's enemy, but nearby Made Men threw down their weapons and lifted the king again on their bare shoulders. He'd been scotched but not finished. Well, that'd been a lot to hope; and anyway, the sky seemed brighter than it'd been before the exchange of bolts.

Because Cashel stood two double paces above the battle, he had a good view. The whole width of Ronn was lined with men in polished armor, with the Heroes each advanced slightly beyond the ordinary citizens.

Virdin had laid an arc of bodies before him and was building it into a wall with every further stroke or jab with his shield. Cashel was impressed by his skill, all the more remarkable for the clumsy butchery going on to his right and left. Virdin worked like an expert shearer stripping the wool from a sheep without wasting a motion.

Mab's face was raised. Her hands wove patterns, and her lips moved, but Cashel couldn't hear what she was saying. The shouts and crash of battle were deafeningly loud, but Cashel had the feeling that she wasn't really talking with her mouth.

The sky grew steadily brighter. The Made Men were giving way, not quickly but being pushed back nonetheless. Men were down—many men were down, when you looked both ways along the line of battle—but the king's creatures had fallen the way wheat does before the scythe.

Darkness swelled together in the sky like fog beading on cold glass, then dived at Mab on black wings. Cashel moved without thinking, bringing his quarterstaff up and around. His ferrule smashed into the attacker where its neck met the wings.

The blue flash more than the impact flung the creature up and back; it vanished as suddenly as it'd appeared. It'd been a crow the size of an ox, literally a thing of night whose destruction made the sky lighter.

Another image formed and sprang, a cat this time, with its claws spread and its fanged mouth open wide enough to swallow Mab's head and shoulders. Cashel shifted, stepping across Mab's front to meet the attack with the other butt of his staff. Iron crunched beneath the cat's eye socket. Blue wizardlight flashed across the whole huge form, lighting the sky and devouring the cat as though it'd never existed.

Cashel's hands were numb. He flexed them on his staff, knowing he might need them again shortly.

The sky continued to brighten. A spot appeared in the high sky, a white blur like the sun showing through overcast. Darkness ripped back like fabric tearing, turning the whole sky bright. It wasn't daytime any more than the shadow the king cast was true night;
this
was the opposite of black.

The Made Men seemed to shrivel individually as they broke and tried to run. They'd come in like the tide and now like the tide they were washing back. They left behind only blood-soaked ground and a wrack of bodies.

The citizens of Ronn surged after them. The men who'd fought in the front line stumbled, too exhausted to follow their routed enemies for more than a few steps. Other men poured through their lines, though—and women as well, come down from the parapet and balconies, wielding kitchen implements and hurling stones wrenched from the ornamental walkways meandering across the terraces.

The king squatted in a dome of ruby light, hunched like the pale, wizened pupa of a grasshopper that the plowshare turns up into daylight. He was mouthing words of power as he beat the air with his athame. His minions had fled or died, but the citizens of Ronn avoided him the way they'd have gone around a glowing oven.

Cashel glanced at Mab, expecting to see her looking triumphant. Mab's hands were the only part of her moving. Her body was as rigid as a statue's, and her face was twisted into a grimace of agony.

This is the real fight. Not the bumbling slaughter of men and not-men finishing in an equally bumbling race.

Cashel shrugged to loosen his tunic again, then strode down the slope onto the second terrace. There'd been a fountain there; fed by pipes coming out of Ronn, he supposed, but that must've ended when the king's influence oozed back into the rock-cut levels of the city. All that remained was a coping whose tiled roof had filled the basin when the four stone maidens supporting it fell.

Cashel felt a twinge of sadness for the statues. They'd never been alive, of course, but it still bothered him that pretty things meant to make people happy lay broken and covered by corpses. Well, maybe they'd be raised and repaired rather than replaced. It wasn't their fault what'd happened to them, after all.

At the place where the two lines had stood and fought the longest, there were enough bodies to make Cashel choose his footing with care. The Made Men's corpses squished underfoot and turned like bladders full of wet mud. Cashel tried not to step on real men, but sometimes he had to. He figured they didn't care anymore, or anyway that they understood that there are things that happen even when you'd rather they didn't.

Cashel approached from the side of the king in his shimmering dome. He didn't know what'd happen if he put himself between Mab and the king, but the best result of that was nothing. The worst…well, Cashel had seen enough of wizards that being blasted to bits wasn't at the bottom of what he thought
might
happen.

The king watched with tiny eyes as Cashel approached, but his athame kept stroking the air toward Mab on the higher terrace. Cashel thought he felt hatred through the protective red glow, but he guessed the king was one of those people who hated whatever it was he saw. It didn't make Cashel special, and it
sure
wasn't just wizards who acted that way.

Citizens were watching Cashel too. An overweight fellow who must have been sixty knelt on the ground in front of his helmet. Sweat gleamed on his bald scalp. He looked so tired that he couldn't move, even to sit down properly, but there was blood on the blade of the sword he still held. His eyes tracked Cashel.

So did those of the woman cross-legged on the ground not far away. She was probably as old as the exhausted man, but she was tall and slender and looked every inch a queen. Her robes were white, but whites of sev
eral different shades that swirled together into a pattern that Cashel knew would've impressed his sister.

Blood stained the garments and continued to drip from the open mouth of the young man whose head she cradled in her lap. Cashel guessed the fellow must've bitten his tongue in half when a Made Man thrust his barbed bronze sword through the human's visor. The wound itself wasn't bleeding. The woman looked like she'd cry when she'd had time for what'd happened to sink in. Mothers did that, even mothers who looked like queens.

There were more dead and many more wounded. There'd been too many of both, that day and in the years before. It was time to end the business.

Cashel stepped toward the king, keeping the length of his staff from the dome of wizardlight. The hairs on Cashel's arms and the back of his neck prickled the way they always did when he was around wizardry. He began to spin his quarterstaff sunwise in front of him, building speed.

The king glared at Cashel. He was a tiny little thing, shrunk with age till he was barely a child in size. Cashel didn't recall ever seeing hate quite that bright in anybody's eyes before.

The quarterstaff was spinning faster; the ferrules trailed sparks of blue fire. Cashel could feel power shivering through his limbs. It wasn't something in him or of him, it was a thing that wore his flesh the way he wore a tunic. It was almost time—

The king pointed his athame toward Cashel's face. His mouth was open to shout words of power.

The dome protecting the king collapsed inward, leaving nothing but a blue spark where he'd squatted. There was a thunderclap and a jet of azure light spiking through the pale heavens.

The shock wave threw Cashel onto his back, stunned and deafened. Above him shone the stars of a normal night, as brilliant as powdered jewels.

 

Valgard and the wizard Hani walked through the whirling ring together. Sharina hesitated.

“Go on, milady,” Bolor said, gesturing her toward the portal. In the temple cellar, Tenoctris reacted to the men's arrival with no more than a
smile of greeting. Valgard put one heavy hand on her shoulder. Sharina stepped through the ring, wincing as her left foot came down on the cellar's stone flooring.

Bolor and his two henchmen arrived a moment later. From this side Sharina saw only empty air until the men appeared. It was as if they'd walked from shadow into bright light. Their striding legs, their arms swinging forward—and then they were as solid as they'd been on the island a moment before.

“Let her go!” Sharina snapped at Valgard. “She's an old woman. She can't do you any harm!”