Master of the Cauldron (57 page)

Prester eyed the men falling out of the detachment. He said, “And
don't
let me hear you embarrassed me, or I'll come back and piss on your worthless corpses, you hear?”

“From the left by ranks…” said Pont, who'd looked at the debris-choked street they'd be following as they went off to the right. “Form column of fours! Detachment,
march
!”

Liane jogged toward the courtyard of a mews just down the street, carrying the helmet that was now empty. She wasn't fleeing: Sharina could see a well curb in the courtyard of the mews.

The creatures from the cauldron were within twenty double paces of the human line. They didn't approach any faster than a man could walk, but they gave the impression of disgusting unity. They resembled less a formation of soldiers than the blotches on a slug's slimy body.

“You want these boys, princess?” Prester asked in a low tone, as the detachment marched off under Pont. He nodded to the four men who'd accompanied Tenoctris, still standing close by. “They're not half-bad, if I do say myself who trained 'em.”

Sharina shivered. Garric was spreading the reinforcements along the thin existing line. Yes, she did want Mallus and the others by her very much, but it wasn't her decision to make.

“No,” she said. “Thank you for your help, Marshal Prester, but you have your duties to carry out. And may the Lady guard you!”

Prester and the four troopers followed their fellows at a thudding run. Sharina grimaced, then glanced down at Tenoctris. The wizard was chanting words of power softly over the six-pointed star she'd drawn in yellow sulfur.
She's too close to the fighting here!

Sharina drew the Pewle knife Lires had handed her on Ornifal. They could use Lires and his fellow guards here. They could use all Waldron's five regiments, as a matter of fact, though it probably wouldn't make any difference in the long run….

The battle of wizards, bolts of light against jets of blackness, continued. The sky was becoming more open, but though sunlight seemed to hurt the white creatures, it didn't keep them from coming on.

There was a windrow of bodies where the most recent fighting had occurred, most of them monsters, but with a leavening of men. Garric had pulled his remaining troops slightly back to keep his enemies from leaping straight down on them from the pile. This next wave crawled up the corpses of their fellows, then slithered toward the humans with the mindless determination of leeches scenting blood.

A blue thread lifted from the center of Tenoctris' pattern. She continued to chant. The line of light rose arm's length from the ground, then twisted to the left and continued to grow longer.

The creatures met the line of soldiers. Garric stabbed, then struck overhand. His blows were quick as a snake's tongue; it was hard to believe that moments ago he'd seemed so weary.

A thing with a bronze mace swung at Garric from the side. He caught the blow on his shield but went down on one knee. A soldier coming from the river threw his javelin, skewering the fat, multilegged body of the creature with the mace. It curled in on itself like a broiled spider; Garric regained his feet.

Most of the reinforcements from the river joined the fighting as the monsters forced the line of defenders back. One of them strode stolidly toward Garric. He didn't have a javelin, but he'd drawn his sword. The thread of wizardlight from Tenoctris' hexagram extended till it touched the center of the soldier's breastplate and followed his progress.

Sharina looked sharply. The man was Memet, who'd brought her news of Cashel's disappearance. Or at least he wore Memet's face, as the creature forming in Hani's tank on the island had done.

“Garric!” she shouted. “Watch—”

A pair of monsters with three legs and three heads between them closed with Garric. He knocked one back with his shield as his blade blocked the other's axe. Memet raised his sword.

Sharina grabbed Memet's wrist with her left hand and stabbed the Pewle knife into the pit of the man's stomach. The keen steel point belled on the bronze cuirass, punching through to the depth of a hand's breadth.

Memet struck. Sharina's weight on his sword wrist couldn't prevent the blow, but she slowed it. Garric was dodging back after slashing through one throat of the creature attacking from his right. Memet's sword hilt rang on his helmet instead of the blade cutting his spine as it was intended to do.

The false soldier shook Sharina loose and raised his sword for another stroke. She fell back, dragging her knife from the wound. A gout of black decay squirted through the cuirass as the blade came free. The semblance of life washed from Memet's face, leaving behind a skull half-covered with rotten flesh. Memet had said his father'd died on Ornifal a few years previous….

Sharina got back to her feet. The latest attack was over, though new regiments of monsters were rising from the cauldron.

She looked around. Tenoctris swayed, apparently bewildered by the fact her spell had ended unexpectedly.

Sharina squatted and hugged the old woman, careful not to touch her with the Pewle knife. “It's all right, Tenoctris,” she said. “You've ended the danger.”

The earth shook violently. Dust lifted from the ground, and showers of roof tiles rattled down from apartment blocks that were still standing.

Sharina looked seaward. Something terrible was happening across the strait on Volita.

 

Davus stood on a wisp of crystal that stuck out from the Citadel's crown. His right foot was in front of his left because the slender beam wasn't wide enough for them side by side. The wind's whimsy snapped his tunic to and fro.

Ilna, on the crown also but well back from the edge, watched without emotion. Davus had known what he was doing throughout their past acquaintance, so she supposed he still did now that he was king again. And if Davus fell, well, he was an adult. She had enough difficulty living her own life not to want to get into the business of deciding what other people should so.

“Ilna, what if he falls?” Merota said. She didn't whine, but she was holding Ilna's right hand and Chalcus' left tight as oysters grip the rocks.

Chalcus chuckled with his usual cheerful ease. “Well, then, my dear girl,” he said, “the three of us will have to find our own way back to our friends. Which no doubt we'll do, though I'll admit at the moment I haven't decided how.”

He glanced at Ilna over the child's head. “Eh, love of my life?” he added.

Ilna sniffed. “I doubt most things, as you well know,” she said. She felt her tight, disapproving lips loosen into a smile. “But I don't doubt that the three of us would
try
to find passage home, until we succeeded or we…couldn't try anymore.”

Davus turned with a laugh of pure joy. He walked toward the three outlanders, as sprightly as a dancer at the Harvest Fest. “Oh, my friends,” he said, “I can't tell you how good it feels to be back in my land at last.”

“You've been back, I'd have judged,” Chalcus said, “for the week and more that it's taken us to walk from there”—he pointed to the south, where the cliffs of their arrival were a purple-brown line on the horizon—“to here.” His foot tapped the crystal, a sheet as smooth and broad as an iced-over pond. “Not so?”

“Indeed, not so,” said Davus. His smile was good-natured but as hard and certain as Ilna's own when she told people truths that didn't fit their understandings. “I was in this land, but it wasn't mine until Mistress Ilna made it mine. A deed I couldn't have accomplished myself, and one that puts me in her debt for so long as I live. A good long while, I would expect that to be.”

He threw his head back and laughed again, a man satisfied with the world and his place in it. The jewel hovered just above his scalp, softly scintillant despite the rainbow blaze from the mass of crystal on which he stood.

“Sir?” said Merota. “I'd really like to go home now.”

“Yes,” said Ilna, more tersely than she'd really intended. She understood Davus being pleased to recover the throne he'd been ousted from a thousand years before, but they too had been gone from their world longer than she cared to be. “I don't consider you to be in my debt, Master Davus; but as a matter of courtesy, I'd appreciate you sending us home as you said you would.”

“Aye,” said Davus. “You'll be in time, I promise you. But we can go now, if you like.”

“In time for what, my friend?” said Chalcus, his fingers playing almost forgetfully with the hilt of his sword.

“In time to watch, is all, my friend,” Davus said. “But I'll try to give you a proper show. It's my second trip to your world, you'll recall, and the first was memorable right up to the end.”

Instead of continuing, Davus paused to rub his bare feet on the ground in obvious pleasure. Ilna turned her head, looking out over the land she
hoped she was about to leave. It was much the same in all directions; some portions greener than others, some hilly. She could see the far shore of the body of water lapping the east of the Citadel, but it continued northward out of sight even from this high vantage.

There was nothing improper in what Davus was doing, but Ilna wasn't comfortable watching somebody else so wrapped in emotion. Ilna smiled faintly. She supposed being uncomfortable with emotion was a flaw in her, but she had enough other flaws that she didn't expect to have time to fix that one no matter how long a life remained to her.

“I'd never have built this myself,” Davus mused, his mind returning to the same world as his three companions. “The crown, I mean. It's a marvelous thing, a lens to focus the powers that the jewel controls over a much wider range. Perhaps if it were finished, it'd control the whole cosmos. Well, we'll never know that for sure.”

Chalcus detached his hand from Merota's, patted her on the head, and absently reached for the dagger in his sash. He was probably going to juggle it to settle him the way the cords Ilna plaited did her; but his conscious mind caught him.

He opened his hands, grinning wryly. “What did your pet do with his pretty palace, then?” he asked. “Not simply turn young ladies into statues, I suppose?”

“Not even that,” said Davus. “The jewel alone suffices for such matters. From what the stone's memory tells me—”

He grinned, pausing a moment to allow his audience to protest at the notion stone could remember. Ilna grinned back, her finger stroking the hem of her tunic. She returned in that touch to the meadow south of Barca's Hamlet where the sheep had been pastured.

“—the poor beast did nothing whatever with his creation, just prowled about it and built it higher. The creature had purpose, you see; but not a mind as we humans talk of minds.”

“It has less than that now,” said Chalcus, “for which I'm thankful. I'm not a vindictive man—”

He too paused, smiling. All of them, even Merota, understood that in the sailor's mind the righting of wrongs wasn't vengeance but rather a necessity of life; and they all agreed with him.

“—but if I were to stay here longer, I'd take a maul to what our Ilna turned the thing into. I wouldn't risk that on some black day it returned to life, the way I did and Lady Merota.”

“But I
don't
want to stay,” Merota said, hugging herself with one arm and holding Ilna even tighter with the other. “Please.”

Davus sobered. “Yes, milady,” he said. “You've been ill-treated because of my errors. I'll do my best to make that up to you—”

Ilna listened with her face stiff. There was no mockery in the king's tone; which was a good thing for all concerned.

“—and to your world. Chalcus, Ilna—friends. Join hands in a circle with me and Lady Merota, if you will.”

Davus extended his arms, palms up. Ilna's left hand was free. She took his right without hesitation. Chalcus took his left so quickly and smoothly that only someone who knew him as well as Ilna did would've recognized that he
did
hesitate. He grinned in wry apology to her over Merota's head.

Davus had the grip of a plowman—firm, with enormously strong muscles beneath the callused skin. “I'd expected this would require a degree more of ceremony,” he said calmly, “but thanks to the lens my predecessor built it'll be very simple. I hope you're properly thankful to him, as I'm sure I am.”

Chalcus laughed, and said, “So long as I don't have to—”

They were standing on a high rock, not the Citadel's crystal crown, though they were about as high as they'd been before. There'd been no feeling of change: they just
were
.

Far below the sea washed the shores of an island. A city was burning on the mainland across a narrow strait; the sky was a pattern of soot and streaks of bright sunlight like claw tears in a dirty blanket.

“We're on the Demon!” Merota said. “We're back on Volita! Oh, thank you, Master Davus!”

Ilna quirked a smile. She didn't have much interest in geography—she divided the world into places she could weave and places she couldn't—but even granting Ilna's own inadequacies, it was obvious that Merota had a very good eye for her surroundings. She didn't doubt that Garric would find a use for the child's talents once she was a little older. He and the kingdom through him used weavers and reformed pirates, after all…

“I need to be down there,” Chalcus said. His voice was controlled but very tense. “There's people fighting. I don't know who they are, but what they're fighting
isn't
people as best I can tell.”

“You'd only be in the way,” said Davus calmly. “They call this the Demon, you say, milady? In that they're wrong, for it's no demon. It's the”—he bent and laid his hand flat on the weathered stone surface—“troll that I brought here when Dromillac summoned me.”