Master of the Cauldron (58 page)

Pure crimson light danced, cascading down through the rock in brilliant majesty. Ilna's hair stood on end. Merota cried out, but only once; standing then as a lady should. Chalcus said nothing. His sword and dagger were out and his eyes were trying to look in every direction at once.

As the wizardlight descended, brush and coarse grasses sloughed off the granite. With a crackling roar, the hunching troll began to straighten. Waves danced away from Volita's shores in expanding ripples as though the island itself had just dropped into the sea.

Davus squatted, keeping his spread hand against the stone. Though he continued to smile, Ilna saw a hint of tight concentration in the lines of his face. The jewel hovering over him pulsed brighter, dimmed, and grew brighter still.

The troll stepped forward, crushing the ruins of shoreside buildings thrown down by time or whatever it was that'd happened a thousand years ago. The movement was jerky but slow. Ilna's first instinct was to fall flat on what she supposed was the troll's scalp, but dignity made her stand since she
could
stand. She held out her hand to Merota, who gratefully took it.

The odd thing was that the troll remained stone, a granite outcrop with only the roughest suggestion of a creature that walked on two legs. Yet it
did
walk, swinging its arms alternately. Their motion balanced the movements of the legs; never far from the torso but shifting in a different rhythm from the larger mass.

The troll didn't speak, but the rock of its body squealed so loudly that the splash as it stepped into the sea was lost in the greater sound. Spray shot as high as the creature's armpits, spattering a few salt droplets onto Ilna. Chalcus wiped his sword quickly dry on his sleeve.

The troll took another step, throwing the sea into fiercer motion. At rest the water would come only to where the troll's knees should've been, though its legs bent in arcs rather than angles.

Paired, dazzlingly intense bolts of wizardlight ripped the black sky: crimson followed in a heartbeat by azure. More daylight flooded down, lighting a crater in the heart of the city. Foul white parodies of men crawled from the basin, spilling to every side like froth from an overheated
kettle. A ring of human soldiers stood against them, but already some of the creatures were penetrating into the wider city through gaps worn in the defenders' line.

Ilna leaned slightly as the troll took its third step. They'd reached the midpoint of the channel now, and still the water didn't come to the troll's waist. Davus murmured gentle encouragement in the tone Cashel used when his oxen were starting a heavy haul.

Davus' real communication with the troll was through the touch of his hand. His fingers shifted with greater or lesser pressure, much as a lute player's did on the neck of his instrument.

A wizened figure in black stood on a platform in the middle of the crater. Ilna might not have noticed him except for the haze of wizardlight about him like a ball of red gauze. He pointed his athame. Black smoke/soot/vapor shot from it and filled a rip in the overcast. An instant later another pair of bolts tore the blackness open even wider to the light.

The troll stepped forward again. It moved with jerky deliberation: every stride was a separate thing instead of all being part of the motion of walking. The harborfront was crowded with ships. Some had already been swamped by waves the troll threw up, but people—from the look of them, civilians rather than proper sailors—were trying to launch one of those remaining. They suddenly broke and fled like lice from a corpse in either direction down Harbor Street.

A female wizard stood between a pair of fallen pillars as she tore the black sky open; her back was to the sea. She was younger than Tenoctris, but that was as much as Ilna could see from behind.

The broad,
solid
man who stood between the wizard and the pit could be no one but Cashel. His quarterstaff moved in circles as lazy and powerful as those of a whale herding fish before gulping them.

The wizard in the crater began to move, but not under his own power. His creatures raised him on an open litter and carried him toward the back edge, away from the river and the oncoming troll.

Soldiers in the boulevard from the harbor turned from the next wave of pallid monsters. Their heads rose as they stared at the troll. One man started to run, then caught himself or was caught by the unheard command of an officer. They faced the crater again, waiting to meet the onrush of creatures they might stop and ignoring the thing they could not.

Ilna didn't like soldiers or what soldiers did: a life spent killing other
people wasn't a fit life for a human being, in her view. But she'd always done her duty, and she respected people who did theirs. Not even Ilna os-Kenset had anything to teach
these
men about duty.

“Get out of the way, Prince Garric!” Davus shouted.

“Get out of the way, Prince Garric-c-c!”
the troll said, his voice the thunder of an avalanche shouting.

“Let me by to end this for good and all/
Let me by to end this for good and all-l-l
!” Davus and his minion shouted.

The female wizard lowered her arms and touched Cashel's right shoulder. He slowed the quarterstaff and brought it upright on his left side, glancing back at the woman, then letting his gaze rise to the oncoming troll.

The boulevard was wide enough that even something the size of the troll could pass down it without hitting buildings. Cashel didn't run; he shifted slightly to put himself between the woman and the mountain walking toward them.

Ilna looked at him and smiled, then glanced at Davus with her face growing still again. “Easy,” he murmured as his fingers caressed the stone. “Easy, easy…Now!”

The troll's leg came up with a sucking sound and a bloom of silt lifted from the bottom. The strait's current drew the mud westward, away from the creature's step. The troll didn't have feet; the ends of its legs spread slightly when its weight eased onto them. Its hands were fingerless paddles with outcrops to the side that worked as thumbs.

The troll lowered its right leg toward the mainland of Sandrakkan, shaking the ground. The tremor lifted an expanding ring of dust from the city. His foot touched a pair of warships; they flew to splinters, though Ilna on the troll's head hadn't noticed the contact.

“Gently,” Davus said to his charge. “Gently, give them a little time. Time doesn't matter to us….”

The soldiers defending the broad street were moving aside: grudgingly, haltingly; several of them helped by their comrades. They'd been standing in the path of the monsters from the pit; but barely standing, too battered and exhausted to have run even if their courage had finally failed them.

The white creatures stumbled/crawled/slithered toward the gap. Sunlight scoured them unmercifully. Ilna heard a moan of inhuman agony
even over the crackling thunder of the troll's body, but still they came on.

The creatures had carried their leader, the wizard on the litter, over the rim of the crater. He'd continued to work spells, but his gouts of darkness could no longer blot out the sun even though his female rival watched arms akimbo instead of clawing further rents in the overcast.

“Now, my mighty one,” Davus said, his voice rising. He was fixed to the troll like a hummingbird on a high twig. “Now, my bold fellow, three strides and we'll have them!”

The troll stepped forward, its left leg coming out of the sea. The limb heaved through the air with the inevitability of a swelling thundercloud drizzling seawater and lowered to the street.

The contact seemed delicate, but a shock wave rippled through the city, and the pavement buckled. A row of four-story tenements several furlongs away swayed and fell into a geyser of smoke and shattered plaster.

The troll's right leg lifted. The soldiers were battling the edges of the column of monsters that filled the entire street and spilled beyond it, scrabbling over the ruins of fallen buildings. The troll's leg came down, crushing masses of the white creatures with a squelching sound. Black blood sprayed to every side. It was like seeing a horse step on a gorged tick, only on a much, much greater scale.

The street was of flagstones over concrete set on a gravel base thicker than Ilna was tall. It shattered. Men and monsters fell, then rose to continue their battle.

Davus crooned to the troll, then glanced aside to his human companions. He blinked as though surprised to see them, then smiled, and said, a little awkwardly, “I get so caught up I could forget to breathe. It's time that we part, my friends. Ilna and Chalcus, it's been an honor and a pleasure. Lady Merota—”

The troll halted in the wreckage between the edge of the pit and the humans who stood as a barrier against the creatures swarming from that pit. Below, the battle continued. Farther into the city, the streets were choked with civilians fleeing earth shocks and rumors of a disaster whose reality they couldn't have imagined in their worst nightmares.

“—again, I regret that you were caught in trouble from which your innocence should've protected you. You comported yourself with the grace I would expect from one who associates with Ilna and Chalcus.”

As Davus spoke, the troll's left arm rose in a series of tiny increments
like sand sliding down a slope. The paddlelike palm spread. A seam of mica in the granite caught the sunlight and shimmered.

Chalcus sheathed his dagger and bent forward on one knee. Davus touched/gripped the troll with his right palm, so Chalcus extended his left arm for the king to clasp.

“I've had a few good comrades over the years,” Chalcus said. “I've never had a better one.”

Davus laughed. “Aye,” he said. “Hard times, but they had to do. Now, join your friends while I pay my debt to Mistress Ilna for freeing me and mine.”

The troll's palm, a granite shelf with dips and hillocks, touched the gray stone scalp beside them. It was flat only in the sense that Ilna could hold her own hand flat.

Ilna laughed also. “It was a pleasure,” she said, marvelling at life and at herself. “As much pleasure as I find in life.”

She stepped onto the stone hand. Merota darted across beside her, and Chalcus followed an instant later.

What Ilna'd said was true: striking down the new king had given her a rush of fierce joy. Ilna hadn't believed that the past could be retrieved, but the thought
Never again!
had warmed the soul that her loss of her friends had turned to ice.

The troll bent at the waist, lowering them toward the ground. Ilna examined the stone creature as she dropped past it. It didn't look human or even alive. Its head was a lump on its clifflike torso; its right arm hung at its side and seemed a part of the greater mass. Eyes, nose, and mouth were smudges in the rock, no more facial features than the whimsies a child invents while watching summer clouds.

But the troll lived and moved. There was no doubt about that.

Davus waved his free hand to them. The way the troll was bending put him head down, but he showed no sign of strain or discomfort. He seemed a part of the stone, a flesh-colored statue carved from the underlying granite.

The troll's hand stopped. The silence as the stone arm halted its grinding progress was more noticeable than the fact they'd stopped moving down. They were in what had been a courtyard before the surrounding building had collapsed.

Sulfur and windblown grit made Ilna sneeze; her eyes filled with tears.
The troll's hand was so thick that she'd expected to climb down rather than jump and risk a broken leg, but the rubble to every side was much the same height as the stone palm. The gap was arm's length or less, no more of a strain than hopping a mud puddle.

“Quickly!” Ilna said, because Davus had sent them away for a purpose. Merota stayed with her; Chalcus already stood on the piled masonry, watching out for his female companions and checking for their closest enemies.

The troll straightened again in the same nonliving motion. Ilna withdrew the hank of cords from her sleeve, but a swatch of wizard-made cloud plunged her into shadow for the length of a long, slow breath. She put the cords away and uncoiled the silken rope from her waist. Her art wouldn't work on anyone who couldn't see her patterns clearly, but a noose around an enemy's neck was almost invariably useful.

“Ilna,” Merota said, trying very hard to be a stern-faced lady and not a frightened child. “What shall we—”

A pair of creatures with human heads and torsos climbed the rubble pile. One had two legs and the other six. Chalcus' incurved blade made a single diagonal stroke, through the rib cage of the first and the neck of the second.

He danced aside. The six-legged thing turned and sprang like a grasshopper back in the direction from which it'd come, but the almost manlike monster strode forward despite its lungs spilling out. It turned toward Ilna, holding a broad-bladed axe overhead in both hands. Before she could toss her noose, Chalcus cut the creature's spine from behind. It collapsed in its tracks, its head toppling forward. Chalcus had slashed the tendons as well as the nerves.

Ilna saw soldiers fighting in the ruins closer to the crater, but the solid wall of defenders had been breached even before Garric withdrew his troops to give the troll passage. The creatures boiling from the pit would spread throughout the city and the Isles unless something stopped them—as men could not.

The troll bent toward the crater. White creatures continued to spill out, unaffected or even unaware of the mass of granite lowering over them. Their wizard stood beyond the lip of the pit, his arm pointing. Crimson bolts—bright, brighter, and finally hotter than the sun—spat from his athame. They vanished into the troll's broad chest.

Davus laughed through the stone lips, a sound as joyfully terrible as the
howl of a tornado. The troll thrust its hands into the ground to either side of the crater. Its thumbs gripped the inner edge of the cavity, crushing some of the white creatures. Others continued to crawl away, squirming into the city over whatever obstacle stood in their way.