Master of the Cauldron (5 page)

The sky darkened. It had been a brilliant morning before the conference started, but Garric had been under the marquee long enough that clouds might've blown in from the sea. It wasn't until he heard the shouts of fear and anger from everybody who could see the sky that he realized something was wrong.

He was up from his stone seat and running outside before he thought about what he was doing. That was partly a reflex of King Carus, but shepherds as well as warriors are faced with sudden crises. The reflex that drew the horseman's sword slung on his left side,
that
was from Carus alone.

“Sister take him!” Lord Attaper bellowed. It was an improper thing to say about his prince, but understandable under the circumstances. “Don't let anybody knife his highness in this crowd!”

There were men coming the other way, getting under cover of the marquee while they looked back over their shoulders. Garric shoved them aside. Before he reached the open air, there were Blood Eagles battering a path for him with their shields and breastplates.

The shape of a filthy black giant hung over Erdin. It was a sooty mass rather than the slate gray of even the darkest rain clouds, covering the sun and perhaps a third of the sky. The air all the way around it remained bright. It was monstrously unnatural.

As Garric stared up at the giant's eyes and gaping mouth, he understood why men had run beneath the marquee to avoid looking at the hideous thing. Logically a double layer of sailcloth wasn't much protec
tion, and for all its unpleasantness, the thing seemed to be only a cloud. Logic didn't have much to the feelings the image aroused, though.

“Stand to!” Lord Waldron bellowed from the other end of the marquee. “Form on the standards, Ornifal! Cold steel's the remedy for all the kingdom's enemies, phantoms or not!”

Garric wasn't sure how much good swords would be against a cloud, but the image was already breaking into tatters that drifted eastward like smutty spiderwebs. He looked around him.

After the first frightened shouting, the troops had reacted pretty well. Squads were standing closely together, less formations than clumps but organized nonetheless. Most of the men wore only bits and pieces of armor, but they'd grabbed their shields and spears when the alarm came.

You couldn't train soldiers to deal with everything that might happen, but men whose response to panic was to find weapons and stand with their buddies were going to survive the shocks of war a lot better than other people did. Their commander was likely to survive longer too….

The image in the sky had completely dissipated.
Had it blown in from the sea or just appeared in the clear sky like a meteor?

Liane was beside him, holding her closed traveling desk against her chest. There were undoubtedly secret documents in it, but Garric suspected it was her equivalent of his bare sword: the desk was a tool familiar from other difficult situations, though inappropriate in this one.

He looked toward the mast of the
City of Valles
; no signal flags were flying. He hadn't expected an answer there, but it'd been worth checking. A trireme was beached beside Zettin's flagship, though, between it and the
Shepherd
. When had that happened?

“What Sister-cursed fool landed
there
?” snapped Admiral Zettin, who'd been with the support staff behind Garric during the negotiations. His sword was drawn, and at a quick glance he looked like any of the other officers looking into the sky or around at their fellows. Then in a different voice he added, “Say—isn't that the
Spiteful
?”

Zettin was the former Deputy Commander of the Blood Eagles. He'd known nothing about naval affairs when Garric put him in charge of the fleet, but he understood training, discipline, and the unit pride that'll often carry a nominally weaker force through a stronger opponent. All those things had been in short supply in the force that Valence the Third had allow to decay. That'd changed abruptly under Zettin.

“Is there a problem, milord?” Garric said, sliding his sword back into the scabbard. At times like this he always felt embarrassed to have drawn the blade, but the one time in a thousand he might
need
a sword was worth slight blushes the hundreds of times it hadn't been required.

“What's that?” the admiral snapped before he turned his head enough to realize who'd spoken to him. “Ah! Ah, I'm not sure, your highness. You see, I left the
Spiteful
with the squadron on guard in Valles. If it's here—”

“Sir?” said a junior officer with a sparkling helmet and gold-chased scabbard mountings. “The
Spiteful
's brought a courier to Lord Waldron personally. They're talking now.”

The young officer was one of the noblemen Zettin had brought into the fleet to lead, rather than one of the mariners who were responsible for ship-handling. It'd disturbed Garric, raised a peasant even if his lineage did go back to the Old Kingdom monarchs, to think that sailors might perform better under the command of lisping young snots of the nobility than they would for professionals of their own class—

But they did. About the only thing these young officers were able to do was to stand on the quarterdeck, a target in dazzling armor for any missile the enemy wanted to launch, and look coolly unperturbed. For the most part they did that superbly, giving their own oarsmen something to think about besides the crushing disaster they might be rowing toward as a flutist blew time for their strokes.

Garric followed the fellow's gesture. Lord Waldron stood with his head bent toward a younger man, who was speaking earnestly to him. Waldron's own aides ringed the pair with worried expressions, but at the distance of a full double pace—too far to hear what was being said.

“It's a verbal message,”
King Carus mused, and the thought had a grim undertone.
“Something the sender wasn't willing to commit to writing, and he sent it to Waldron instead of you.”

“It's another omen!” somebody called in a cracked voice.

Garric jerked his head around. Lord Morchan was speaking, his hands clenched against his cheekbones as he stared up at the empty sky. “The final days are surely here! The Gods have deserted Sandrakkan!”

“Morchan, you're a fool and a liar and a whining puppy!” Lady Lelor said, her face white with fury. “The Shepherd hasn't forsaken us and He won't, so long as we act like men!”

“You say!” said Morchan. “You say, priestess! But monsters keep swallowing the sun. Sandrakkan is doomed!”

“What's this all about?” Garric said. Morchan and Lelor were too caught up in their own argument to hear him. “Marshal Renold, what are they talking about? Has something like this happened before?”

The Sandrakkan commander was red-faced and looked uncomfortable. He'd been gripping his sword hilt for much the same reason every other armed man on the island had. Two Blood Eagles noticed and immediately stepped between him and Garric.

Garric grabbed the guards by the shoulders and pushed them to either side so that he could see Renold again. “Marshal Renold,
what
is going on?”

“That I can't say, sir,” Renold said awkwardly. “There's been clouds like this over Erdin, that's true; three or four times in the past ten days. They cover the sun, then they go away. Nobody knows what it means, nobody who I've heard anyway. Some people—”

He looked at the priestess with a glumly speculative expression.

“—say that it doesn't mean
anything,
but I doubt even they believe themselves.”

Garric thought for a moment. When he could, he'd discuss the business with Tenoctris. She'd been resting when he left her, guarded by a squad of Blood Eagles while Cashel wandered about Volita to loosen his legs, and Sharina observed the negotiations. Right then, however—

“Milady,” Garric said to Lady Lelor in a voice loud enough to be noticed through her angry exchange with her fellow envoy. “Gentlemen! We're here to discuss the place of Sandrakkan in the kingdom. Let's return to the business at hand, if you will.”

The three Sandrakkan envoys near Garric turned and followed him back under the marquee; the priestess gave him a shamefaced nod of apology. Master Colchas hadn't left his seat. Not, Garric suspected on looking at the man's face, because the finance official was abnormally calm, but rather because he'd suspected what was happening and didn't want to watch it again.

Tadai had walked to the edge of the marquee and looked up. He started back for his seat with a bland expression. The various aides and subordinates were returning to their places behind the negotiators. That left only Lord Waldron, who was still talking to the courier.

“Lord Waldron?” Garric called.

Waldron made a brusque gesture with his left hand, his eyes locked with those of the man who was speaking urgently to him again.

Garric pursed his lips. “Admiral Zettin,” he said calmly, “please take the seat to my right for the time being, if you would.”

Garric walked to the makeshift throne with an expression just as neutral as that of Lord Tadai. He'd disarranged the cloak when he jumped up, but a servant must've straightened it.

Garric had expected the Sandrakkan negotiations to be the most important thing he'd have to deal with for the next days or even longer. Judging by the furious disbelief on the face of his army commander, though, he'd be hearing about something much worse as soon as Waldron was ready to tell him.

 

Ilna held the wax tablet in both hands. She was as tense as if it was red-hot and burning her fingers. She took a deep breath.

“Wood is…,” she read. She grimaced. “Wood
comes
from the forest.”

“That's right, Ilna!” Merota said. They sat together on a stone slab that'd fallen when one of the three columns supporting it slipped sideways sometime in the past thousand years. She held her hand out for the tablet. “Here, I'll write more.”

Their moss-covered seat had words carved on it. Ilna could follow the letters well enough to draw them, though to anybody else the tiny green tendrils were as featureless as a polished tabletop.

But she couldn't
read
them, of course.

Ilna let the tablet dip forward slightly and breathed deeply several more times, almost panting. She'd run long distances though running wasn't natural to her; she'd fought, for her own life and for the lives of others; she'd woven patterns that twisted the cosmos itself, warped it into the form that Ilna os-Kenset chose it to have. She'd done all those things and
never
had she been as utterly drained as she was now, shaking and—

The realization struck her. She began to laugh, a reaction she displayed almost as rarely as she cried.

Merota jerked her hand back with a startled expression. Chalcus, juggling as he sat on the back wall of the ruined garden a double pace away, smiled pleasantly; only those who knew him well would've noticed that tension bunched the big muscles at the base of his jaw.

“It's all right,” Ilna said, reducing her laughter to a wry smile. “Chalcus, it's all right. I just realized that I'm frightened, simply terrified, of
reading. That's why it's so hard for me. Most things—most of the things I
do
—aren't.”

“I think you're doing very well, Ilna,” Merota said. She was still too young to know her forced earnestness made her lie obvious. She took the tablet and firmly closed its two waxed boards. “But we've done enough today. I'm tired from being on the ship.”

Chalcus chuckled. He'd been juggling three items while Merota gave Ilna her reading lesson. Now he let two of them, fist-sized chips of rock, mossy on one side, drop to the ground behind him; they landed within a finger's breadth of one another. Rising to his feet, he slid the third, his curved dagger, into the sheath stuck through the sash over his right hip.

“Merota, dear child,” he said, “there's an hour's wait till supper. Why don't you rouse Mistress Kaline—”

Her governess and tutor, a severe woman with severe notions of propriety. To Ilna's mind, Mistress Kaline's only redeeming feature was the fact that in her way she loved Merota as much as Ilna herself did.

“—and resume your own lessons till Mistress Ilna calls you, eh?”

“Please, Chalcus!” the girl said, clutching the notebook before her. “Can I play in this garden while you talk to Ilna? You know Mistress Kaline's still going to be sick!”

Ilna smiled. Merota was a natural sailor; no matter how much the ship rolled—and a long, narrow warship could roll a great deal, even in moderate weather—the child would scamper around with no more discomfort than Chalcus himself displayed. Ilna, who was not infrequently queasy, envied Merota her stomach at those times.

But Ilna's problems were nothing compared to those of Mistress Kaline, who spent most of every voyage sprawled facedown on a grating, close to the gunwale so that she could stick her head over the side whenever another spasm struck her. She couldn't keep even water or nibbles of dry bread down more than a few minutes. She lay in the shade of a tarpaulin now as usual after a voyage, with a damp cloth on her forehead.

Chalcus looked at Ilna and raised an eyebrow in question. Ilna thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, all right. I'll watch the book. But don't go out of our sight!”

“I won't!” Merota said, trotting toward the ruins of a stone gazebo. Over her shoulder she added, “But what could happen with all these soldiers around?”

“Aye, indeed,” said Chalcus in a very different tone as he seated himself where Merota had been. “And what
couldn't
happen, with things like that creature from the Sister's realm appearing in the sky?”

“Yes,” said Ilna, looking about them. Her expression was more than a little grim, but that was from habit rather than any particular concern about their surroundings. “Though so long as it stays in the sky…”