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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“—because if you don't, there won't be another chance. Not this time.”
“Land ho!” a voice called. The words cascaded into Garric's consciousness, though it was a moment before he realized that he leaned against the wooden rail of the
Lady of Mercy
rather than a balcony of weathered stone.
“I make Pandah three points off the port bow!” cried the lookout at the masthead.
Liane sat a few feet away with her back to the railing. She was reading a codex of Celondre's
Odes
. When she heard Garric stir, she looked up with a smile.
A green light quivered momentarily at the corner of Garric's eye, near the northern horizon. He decided it must be a last echo of his reverie.
 
 
Cashel stood on the bow rail, bracing his left hand on the foremast which slanted forward at forty-five degrees. From what Cashel had seen during the voyage, the small sail hanging in front of the bowsprit was used mostly for steering. He couldn't see Pandah yet, but he knew the clouds piling in the center of the clear sky must have formed on the updrafts from land still beneath the horizon.
“Won't it be nice to be on solid ground tonight instead of some sandy hill in the middle of the sea?” Sharina said. “And fresh water!”
“What's in the ship's jars tastes of tar, that's so,” Cashel agreed. He didn't mind being on shipboard. The motion didn't bother him, and he never felt confined so long as he had an open sky above him.
The lookout slid down the backstay of the mainmast, landing on the deck near Garric and Liane. Liane waved when she saw Cashel looking over his shoulder in her direction. Garric stared toward the northern horizon, shading his eyes with his left hand.
Sharina noticed her brother's interest. She ducked under the foremast and stood at the port bulwark; only the stern quarter had a railing. Cashel couldn't see in that direction because of the way the foresail was rigged.
“Cashel,” Sharina said. “Come look at this.”
Cashel stepped over the slanting mast instead of crawling through the cordage beneath. A sailor running to adjust the foresail bounced off his shoulder and shouted in anger. Cashel ignored him, watching the sea with a shepherd's eyes that were trained to spot hidden dangers.
The breeze moved the
Lady of Mercy
at a pace not much greater than that of sheep ambling to pasture. There wasn't enough wind to lift foam from the gentle waves.
A fish turned on the surface and flashed its silver flank before vanishing again into the sea. The scene was placid and practically identical to any other during the voyage.
The back of Cashel's neck prickled. He held his staff crossways at arm's length as though to form a barrier in front of him and Sharina. Nearby, sailors adjusted the sails under the captain's cheerful orders. They were eager to make port and unaware of any reason for concern.
“There was something in the sea,” Sharina said, speaking with the deliberate calm of someone keeping strict control of her emotions. “It seemed to be a mile away. It was gray or green and I can't remember its shape. But it isn't there anymore, and there's no sign that it ever was.”
Tenoctris came out of the cabin where she'd been resting. She glanced at Cashel, then looked off the port side.
“Maybe it was a whale or—” Sharina said.
A lens of gray distortion spread across sea and sky a hundred feet away. Cashel saw the waves and horizon through it, but they were shadowed and twisted out of their normal shapes. Lightning the color of rotten bronze leaped through the gray. A roar like bees swarming in unimaginable numbers smothered even the sudden screams of the sailors.
The lens swept down on the
Lady of Mercy
like a tidal wave.
 
 
Sharina gripped the gunwale with both hands as though she faced a storm. She didn't think of going inside. The lightly framed cabin would be no real protection, and even the ship's holds were unlikely to bring safety from this, whatever this was.
Cashel braced his legs apart, holding the staff as if he faced human opponents. He began to rotate it sunwise, crossing one hand over the other at increasing speed. Sparks skipped from the iron ferrules and hung in the air, forming a blue haze.
Ribbons hung from a crossjack on the stern to give warning of any change in the breeze. They slackened an instant before the sails also went limp in an unnatural calm.
The
Lady of Mercy
rocked violently. She entered the lens. Sunlight vanished.
Cashel continued to spin his staff. His face was calm, but he didn't look like the youth Sharina had grown up with. His visage now was one that might have looked down from the sanctum of a great temple, the Shepherd in His aspect of Protector rather than His more common depiction as the lithe, handsome Consort of the Lady.
Lightning spat from the grayness, then rebounded in a crash as it met the globe of blue light enclosing Sharina and Cashel. The gunwale shattered and the foremast flew out of the bitts. Cordage and the linen sail burned with wan red light until shadows swallowed them.
The
Lady of Mercy
was breaking up. The deck buckled and one of the great cross-timbers binding the sides of the hull together lifted vertically. The screams from sailors' open mouths were lost in the avalanche roar that followed the thunderclap.
Cashel and Sharina were in a cocoon of still air. Beyond them a gale ripped the mainsail. Sharina saw the captain fly from the top of the deckhouse, lifted by his billowing tunic.
Garric gripped the steering oar with one hand while he hacked at its rope pinions with his sword. Liane knelt beside him, tying herself and Tenoctris together with a brail from the shredded mainsail. The oar would float if Garric could get it free, but Tenoctris might be too frail to hold on to it alone until help could arrive from Pandah.
As for Sharina and Cashel—
The roar ceased abruptly. Sharina felt as though she were floating; perhaps she really Was. She could see nothing but Cashel and the sparkling blue globe that the quarterstaff wove around them.
Sunlight blinded her. Sharina splashed into the warm, salty water of the Inner Sea. Cashel struck beside her. He still gripped the staff, but he wore the slack expression of a man who has worked beyond human limits.
Cashel's face dipped underwater. Sharina lifted his head with one arm. The dinghy floated nearby with only a tag remaining of the heavy rope by which the ship had towed it. Sharina swam to the boat, stroking with her free arm and kicking. When she lifted her head to breathe she could see that a galley had put out from Pandah. It was approaching on the rippling motion of many oars.
There was no debris on the sea's calm surface; no sign at all of the
Lady of Mercy
.
T
he storm roared about them. Garric had cut the upper lashing, but he still couldn't get the steering oar loose. There must be a carrying rope deeper within the hull which he couldn't reach with the blade.
The wind pushed against him like the wall of a collapsing building. He braced his right leg against the rail, knowing the
Lady of Mercy
would break up soon. He sheathed the sword so he'd have both hands to wrench at the oar.
Carus must have been helping unnoticed: the swordpoint found the scabbard's narrow slot and shot home without hesitation. By himself Garric couldn't have managed that task one-handed, even without gusts tugging blade, sheath, and arm at different angles.
A split twisted halfway up the mainmast, following the grain of the wood. The mast parted just below the spar from which only scraps of cordage fluttered. Still linked by the lifts, the massive timbers spiraled off into lightning-shot darkness.
Garric leaned into the oarshaft. The gale roared from starboard, thrusting the
Lady of Mercy
into the gray maw. It was hard for Garric, facing in the opposite direction, to breathe. The carrying rope was bull sinew, elastic and enormously strong.
Liane had wound a rope under Garric's sword belt and through the brail that linked her and Tenoctris. She knotted the ends, drawing the heavy cordage as tight as possible. Tenoctris cuddled against the younger woman, gripping with all the strength of her frail arms.
Garric strained, using the whole strength of his body to
no avail. His eyes bulged, tendons stood out from his neck, and his triceps burned as though coated with blazing pitch.
Liane and Tenoctris should be all right so long as they hunched below the level of the deckhouse. Their tunics, longer and fuller than a man's, would snatch them away in a heartbeat if the wind—
There was a loud crash. Garric hurtled into the sea with the oar in his hands. He felt an instant's triumph when he thought he'd broken the carrying rope. The
Lady of Mercy
had disintegrated around him. Garric hit water whipped to froth by the storm, praying that the tug on his sword belt was the weight of Liane and Tenoctris.
The wind had been a burden, but the roiling water was the grasp of the Sister dragging dead souls to the Underworld. Garric wrapped both arms about the oar stock, shocked each time the heavy wood buffeted him as they rolled together in a maelstrom.
He didn't know when his face was above the water or if it ever was. He choked on saltwater every time he tried to breathe. His lungs burned, the tiller battered the side of his face numb, and he wasn't sure whether his leaden arms still held the oar.
Garric stopped moving. He supposed he was dead, but he didn't care anymore. There was soft green light all around him; and then there was nothing but black oblivion.
 
 
Garric's dream self stood on the marble balcony. Weathering had given the stone's exposed surfaces a gritty texture, though the undersides of carved moldings were mirror smooth.
He stared at his physical body sprawled unconscious on the muddy strand below. The steering oar lay beneath him, so he hadn't lost it after all. The women were beginning to stir. “I've got to get down there!” he said.
“Not yet,” King Carus said, his expression more tautly
eager than Garric usually saw in these reveries. “Your body needs as much time as they'll give you to recover, lad. You did more than any two men should have to do.”
The sky was sullen green. Half a dozen men were a hundred yards away, walking toward the castaways. They were armed with a mixture of clubs, axes, and spears. If any of them had come cadging around Barca's Hamlet during the Sheep Fair, he'd have been run out of the borough as a vagabond.
“There'll be time enough for them,” Carus said judiciously. He stroked the railing in a gesture Garric recognized as the king's way to keep his right hand from grasping the hilt of his sword. Carus knew the truth of what he was saying, but his emotions were just as impatient as Garric's own.
“Hey, there's a body!” one of the men called. “Hey, he's alive!
She's
alive or the Sister take me!”
Liane struggled with the knot in the rope by which she'd tied herself to Garric's belt. As the men broke into a shambling run toward her, she drew a dagger from beneath her tunic. Its point was sharp enough to cut sunlight.
“Watch the sticker!” a man said. The gang spread out as they advanced. Their feet splashed on the mucky ground.
“The other one's got a sword!” bellowed a man carrying a club shaped roughly from a broken spar. “The sword's mine! By the Lady, I'm due a sword! If Rodoard won't give me one I'll take it!”
The rope was thumb-thick sisal and salt-soaked besides. Liane parted it in three quick strokes of the keen steel. She helped herself up with one hand and faced the gang.
“Who-ee!” said a spearman. “You can have the sword, Othelm. There's what I want!”
“Maybe when Rodoard gets through with her,” another man sniggered. “If his bitch wizard doesn't decide to dispose of a rival first thing.”
“There's an old woman too,” said the man who carried
a short-hafted axe, part of a ship's tool chest. “We may as well knock her on the head here.”
“Now lad,” King Carus said in a voice as soft as the rustle of a sword being drawn. “Now it's time.”
 
 
The green sky wasn't as bright as it had seemed in Garric's reverie. He'd known as he looked down on his unconscious body how much every joint and muscle must hurt after the strain he'd put on them to survive, but
feeling
that pain was like hurling himself into a just-opened lime kiln.
Garric rose without stumbling. White fire flashed, blinding him at every heartbeat. He drew the sword, swinging it in a shimmering figure eight, and croaked, “Which of you wants to die first? Or shall I test the edge on the lot of you with one stroke?”
It was a good weapon. He'd bought it in Erdin, with King Carus nodding approvingly at the back of his mind. It wouldn't hack through six men at a stroke—or one either, the way Garric felt now. Though perhaps one …
“Sister take me!” a man shouted in terror. The whole gang leaped back as though burned. “I thought he was dead!”
Garric gripped the tip of his sword in his left hand and flexed the blade slightly. He wasn't sure he had the strength to hold the steel out with one hand; this gave him an excuse to use both.
Tenoctris whispered an incantation. Garric felt the spastic trembling of his muscle fibers calm. The old woman was giving him assistance from her own slight store of strength.
“You'll take us to Rodoard!” Liane said in a strong, clear voice; a noble, issuing commands as an instinctive right. She deliberately tucked the dagger away in its concealed sheath. “And you'll walk in front of us. Do you understand?”
The men looked at one another. None of them wanted
to take responsibility for the decision. After a moment the spearman turned without speaking and shambled off in the direction from which they'd come. The others joined him in a tight clot.
Garric and the women followed. Twice Garric would have fallen without Liane there to support him; but Liane was there.
 
 
Sharina sat in the bobbing dinghy, holding Cashel's head in her lap. His color was normal again, no longer the hectic flush it'd shown as he spun his quarterstaff against the lowering danger.
Sharina was exhausted. She'd not only towed Cashel to the dinghy, she'd had to lift him aboard. That meant standing in the boat while Cashel floated alongside, then pulling up his outside arm to roll him over the gunwale.
Sharina was a strong girl, but Cashel's sheer weight had almost been more than she could manage. Fortunately the dinghy was flat-bottomed and broad for its length, so she didn't capsize it during the process.
Sharina didn't know how Cashel had saved them. She suspected that Cashel himself didn't know either. But she was quite sure that without Cashel's action, the two of them would have been swallowed down with the
Lady of Mercy
and everything else aboard her.
The galley from Pandah had drawn close. It was a nobleman's barge, a lightly built craft with fifty oarsmen seated on open benches. A mast and a yard with the sail furled about it lay on deck parallel to the ship's axis. They could be pivoted up when the wind was favorable, but the oars were quicker for this short run from harbor.
In the bow a man of twenty-odd leaned eagerly on a rail of gilded bronze. His cloak of parrot feathers marked him as a noble. An older fellow, obviously a servant or aide, hovered close in order to catch the youth if he went over the side.
Beside the noble stood an even younger man who wore
a red velvet robe embroidered with silver astrological symbols. Neither velvet nor the feathers would have been Sharina's choice of garment for a sea voyage, but nobles and wizards seemed generally to feel a need to keep up appearances.
A large monkey clambered about the bow platform with the men; once it even hung nonchalantly from the railing and tried to dip a hand into the wave curling from the galley's bow. The rowers feathered their oars at an order from a helmeted officer in the stern. The monkey twisted up to stand between the men again. The beast spoke to the wizard; and, though the amazed Sharina couldn't make out the words of the exchange, the wizard replied.
“Back water!” the officer cried. The rowers rose from their benches, leaning forward to push their oarlooms instead of pulling them in the usual fashion. The galley halted twenty feet short of the dinghy. Around the hull swirled water spun by the perfectly judged oarstrokes.
Instead of the motley garb Sharina had seen on sailors from Sandrakkan and Ornifal, these rowers wore identical kilts with a saffron border around the hem. Their livery showed even more clearly than the feather cape did that the youth was the ruler of Pandah or the ruler's son.
“Throw them a rope, Tercis!” the youth snapped to the servant, whose utter amazement suggested he might as well be asked to fly.
“I'll do it, Your Majesty,” the wizard said. He seized a mooring line and spun the coil out with an underhand toss that brought it directly to Sharina. She wrapped the line about the forebitt and let the wizard pull the boats together. The dinghy's oars had been in the
Lady of Mercy
when she went down.
Cashel was still comatose. “My friend will have to be carried aboard,” Sharina warned as the dinghy thumped against the galley's port bow. It was disconcerting to be stared at by the ruler, his wizard, and the great brown
eyes of the monkey, who was now hanging upside down from the rail.
“Captain Lashin!” the ruler said. “Get the man aboard. We'll take him to the palace.”
He leaned even farther out to extend his hand to Sharina. “As we will you, mistress. I'm Folquin, King of Pandah. Someone as lovely as yourself must be of noble blood.”
Without further orders, four rowers boarded the bobbing dinghy while one of their fellows held the stern firmly against the galley's flank. Sharina climbed onto the bow platform to get out of the way as the sailors lifted Cashel, a respectable weight even for all of them, over the side. Other sailors placed him on the furled sail.
“I'm not—” Sharina said to Folquin. The bow platform was far too constricted for comfort among strangers.
“A pretty female as humans go,” the monkey said in a grating voice. “Is the big one her mate?”
“Zahag!” the wizard said. He was tall and gangling with the look of a colt who has yet to fill out. “You're not to disturb the lady.”
Clearing his throat he went on, “I'm Halphemos, King Folquin's wizard. Can you tell us about what made your ship vanish, mistress?”
“I don't know,” Sharina said. The galley was under way again. The rowers on one side backed while those on the other stroked forward, reversing direction in little more than the vessel's own length. “It just happened—like a storm, but it wasn't a real storm.”
She looked at the excited, concerned faces of these strangers; staring at her, wondering about things she couldn't answer. “I'm Sharina os-Reise,” she said. “I'm just …”
She didn't know how to go on. She wasn't a princess, but she wasn't just an innkeeper's daughter anymore either. She wasn't even Reise's daughter if what the royal emissaries had told her was true. “I'm …” she repeated.
And then, overwhelmed with worry, physical exhaustion,
and relief she blurted what was at least the truth: “I'm very glad you came to rescue me and my friend Cashel!”
 
 
Garric gained strength as he and the women followed the gang through a forest of trees like none he'd ever seen before. He knew that in a day or two he'd feel the racking stress of his struggle with the steering oar, but for the moment the gentle exercise of walking was just what he needed to keep his muscles from cramping.

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