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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“Josfred,” Tenoctris said as they started back down the trail to the settlement, “you said you were born in the Gulf. How long have your ancestors lived here?”
The little man waved his arms in frustration. “I told you, the question doesn't mean anything!” he said. “We've always been here.”
He paused as he suddenly realized that duration, even in the Gulf, could be punctuated in important ways. “Only we were slaves of the Ersa until the other men like you washed up on the outer shore with weapons. The outer shore was just mud before.”
“Not in a thousand years, I'd venture,” Tenoctris said with satisfaction. “Not since the previous time forces built to a peak. The Gulf is a closed world. I'm not sure that it was even part of our cosmos originally, because the Ersa exist only here in the Gulf.”
“The cosmos is everything that was or will be,” Liane said sharply. “Isn't it? There can't be anything more than that!”
“It generally seems that way from our human viewpoint,” Tenoctris said. She smiled at Liane, taking the sting out of the implied rebuke.
Liane stopped on the trail and hugged the old woman. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I shouldn't … I'm so afraid. Everything that I thought I knew is changing.”
“Rodoard made us strong,” Josfred said. “We aren't the Ersa's slaves anymore!”
Garric didn't need King Carus to tell him that Rodoard would be a very bad master indeed if he didn't have an external enemy like the Ersa to keep him in check. And even Rodoard's probable brutality would be better than the whimsical sadism that could be expected from Lunifra.
“Rodoard and six other men arrived together,” Josfred said, reminiscing happily as they followed the trail back to the settlement. “They had steel weapons. One of the men thought he could give Rodoard orders, but Rodoard showed
him.”
Josfred chuckled like water dribbling from a cracked jug. “Rodoard cut his belly open, right there. And he squealed and squealed and then he died!”
“Was Rodoard this man's bodyguard in the outer world, Josfred?” Liane asked in an even voice. Garric looked at her, surprised both at the question and the calm fashion the girl asked it.
Josfred gasped. “Are you a wizard like Lunifra, woman?” he asked in horror. “How else would you know that?”
“Rodoard has the tattoos of a Blaise armsman,” Liane said. In a tone of mild reminiscence she went on, “They often hire out to guard merchants. My father occasionally hired them.”
In a terse, colorless voice she added, “And no, I'm nothing like Lunifra. Nothing at all.”
“Lunifra is a skilled wizard,” Tenoctris said.
“Skilled,
not just powerful, though she's respectably powerful as well.”
She laughed. “More powerful than me, at any rate.”
“Should you have let Lunifra know you're a wizard too?” Garric said quietly. Tenoctris usually kept her skills
secret, so he'd been surprised when she openly displayed them by interfering with Lunifra's manikin.
“She already knew,” Tenoctris said. “I saw it in her smile as she looked at me. She sees things instead of just forcing powers to her will. And she's quite intelligent.”
Garric cleared his throat. If he understood what Tenoctris was implying …
“Tenoctris?” he said abruptly. The best way to get an answer to a question is to ask it. “Do you mean you want Lunifra to join us? To be our ally?”
Tenoctris halted in the middle of the trail. She put her hand on Garric's to cause him to face her. Josfred continued several steps farther, unaware of what was happening behind him, but Liane stopped and watched her friends with an expression of controlled concern.
“Garric,” Tenoctris said, “when you look at Lunifra, what do you feel?”
“She turns my stomach,” he said with his usual simple honesty.
“That's good,” Tenoctris said. “Because I've never before in a long lifetime met someone who seemed so completely an assemblage of mindless evil. Lunifra isn't striving for power or doing any of the other human things that lead one to evil, toward Malkar. She's like lightning or a tidal wave: she smashes things just because she and they happen to come together.”
“She's helping Rodoard now?” Liane said.
“He thinks she is,” Tenoctris said. “When she's brought everything else down, she'll destroy him too.”
Josfred had returned and was listening to the castaways in concern. “Lunifra came from the outer shore too,” he said. “Not many women come from there. There've been over a hundred men since Rodoard, though, with steel and harder wood than what grows here in the Gulf.”
The little man looked sidelong at Garric's sword. “The men who won't serve Rodoard all die,” he whispered. “Everyone has to serve Rodoard so that we can be free of the Ersa!”
“Yes,” Garric said. “I understand exactly what you mean.”
Most of those swept into the Gulf would be sailors, men hardened by a brutally dangerous life. Humans born in the Gulf were stunted according to outside standards; the size and steel weapons of the recent castaways gave them unchallenged authority over the society they found here. The newcomers weren't necessarily bad men, but for most of them the Gulf would seem like Paradise; and some of them
were
bad men.
For those who wouldn't serve a thug like Rodoard, there was quick murder before the poison of decency took hold in the Gulf. Garric had been saved—thus far—because he'd reacted without hostility, but in a fashion that made him seem extremely dangerous if Rodoard insisted on trying conclusions.
From memory came an image of Carus dancing through a wall of enemies. His sword strokes had the speed and shattering power of so many thunderbolts.
A sailor wouldn't have had the presence to face down Rodoard, and a merchant wouldn't have the strength and skill to make the implied threat credible. Garric or-Reise, the peasant from Barca's Hamlet, couldn't have managed the act alone either, but—he touched the medallion on his breast—he hadn't been alone.
King Carus chuckled, unseen but always a presence now, even when Garric was awake and alert.
“We're going to finish off the Ersa,” Josfred said, rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation. “Many of your people have come to us, with hard wood and metal for weapons. We'll have the Ersa for slaves as they had us—or maybe we'll kill them all!”
If you do
, Garric thought grimly,
Rodoard will show you what
real
slavery's like
. Though even that would be better than what Lunifra would bring to the Gulf.
“I have a better idea,” Tenoctris said mildly. “I think we can all leave this place—leave it to the Ersa, at least—
and close it up behind us so that it doesn't trap other folk in the future.”
“Leaving this place,” Liane said with forceful sincerity, “is the best idea there could be. And it can't be too soon for me!”
 
 
Sharina touched Cashel's hand as she led him. The vines wreathing the colonnade were flowering, rich with perfume and alive with the deep hum of insects. It was an exotic setting to anyone raised in Barca's Hamlet, but it was peaceful in a reassuring fashion also.
“Hurry!” Zahag demanded. His arms were twice the length of his stubby legs. He skipped ahead as though he were playing leapfrog.
“We'll get there,” said Cashel, stilling Sharina's reflexive desire to speed up because somebody had told her to. She giggled and dropped back the half step by which she'd been leading. It was reassuring to be around Cashel. He moved quickly when it was necessary but he never hurried.
“Fagh!” Zahag snarled in disgust. He jumped to the carved transom, then flipped onto the colonnade's roof. The thumps of the ape's leaping progress across the tiles faded.
King Folquin's palace was laid out as a square-bottomed U with on the outside a colonnade onto which each room opened. Corridors through both arms of the U led from the colonnade to the central court where the real business of the palace was conducted. Only the king's own apartments had an entrance directly onto the courtyard.
“It's nice of the king to help us like this,” Cashel said. Another person might have let his doubt show in the initial statement. Cashel simply continued, “Why is he doing that?”
“Because …,” Sharina said, just a sound to give her time to collect her thoughts on a difficult question.
“Whatever happened to our ship made a great spectacle from here. Flashes and thunder. Master Halphemos says that for a moment he saw a great disk like the night sky with stars. So they were very excited to find survivors, though I couldn't tell them much about what had happened.”
The palace servants lived on the upper floor. Mothers called down to the children playing on the grounds beyond the vine-screened colonnade. Clothes dried in the sun on pole racks, while outside ovens spread the odors of cooking. People lived at closer quarters here in Pandah than they did in the borough, but they were people just the same.
The arched passage to the courtyard was lined by reed-shaped pilasters. The palace was built of stone, but on the way from the harbor Sharina had seen that the houses of common people were often made of tarred rushes.
“And also …” Sharina continued. The least she owed Cashel was complete honesty, even when it embarrassed her. “King Folquin is a romantic. Halphemos has told him that he'll marry a princess who comes to him as a result of wizardry. Folquin thinks that's me.”
“Oh,” said Cashel. He shrugged, an instinctive way to loosen his tunic about him. When Cashel flexed his huge muscles, he regularly split his garments. “Who's Halphemos, then?”
“The court wizard,” Sharina said. She'd deliberately slowed her pace, but they were coming to the end of the short corridor anyway. “He's a boy, really—a nice one. I think he'd have fit in back in Barca's Hamlet. But he is a wizard.”
“Let's go meet him, then,” Cashel said mildly. “And King Folquin.”
Sharina had never seen Cashel angry, not even when he was fighting for his life and her own. A giant oak doesn't get angry either, but when it begins to fall the only choices are to get clear or be crushed.
They stepped into the courtyard. Folquin sat on a stool
whose four legs ended in curved fishtails. He wore a linen tunic with only a plumed aigrette on his head to remind Sharina of the feathered state in which he'd rescued her. With him were several court officials—including Halphemos, who'd also discarded his formal robe. About a hundred citizens of Pandah and a scattering of foreigners stood at the open end of the court, either waiting to petition the king or simply watching the activities.
Three tumblers performed with a vaulting horse. They were skilled, but it seemed to Sharina that there was a desultory competence rather than real enthusiasm in their flips and handstands. They were present because court etiquette required entertainment. Waiting to follow the tumblers, a pair of trim young women with a xylophone chatted with a paunchy merchant and his secretary.
Folquin sat supporting his chin with a hand. A pair of women wearing baize shawls over their tunics argued a point of contention before him, each glaring as the other spoke. A court official stood beside each witness to keep her in check.
Zahag squatted near the chess table set up behind the king's stool, checking his fur for lice. Halphemos had been staring morosely into the distance. He brightened and hurried over when he saw Sharina and Cashel.
“Master Cashel!” he said enthusiastically. “Mistress Sharina tells me that you're responsible for preserving her from the event that engulfed your ship. I'm honored to meet a wizard of your power!”
He reached out to clasp forearms with Cashel, hand to elbow like a pair of dealers meeting at the Sheep Fair. Together they looked like a stalk of bamboo growing beside an oak tree.
“I'm not a wizard,” Cashel said. He shrugged with honest embarrassment. “I just … I don't remember really what happened. There was a big weight and I was trying to throw it off.”
Cashel cleared his throat, turned to spit, and realized he was in a royal court. He swallowed instead.
Most of those gathered here were either watching the tumblers or talking to one another while they waited for the king to get around to their petition. An old woman with a cup in front of her told a story to a group at the back of the courtyard; a shabby-looking man in a corner was demonstrating a game involving three nutshells and a pea to a rustic.
The exception was a woman in a long white garment and tattoos on both cheeks. She squatted apart from the others, drawing with a pointed bone in the dust between her feet. Her eyes followed Cashel with the fixed intensity of a snake watching a vole. When she saw that Sharina had noticed her, she grinned inanely and looked down at the squiggles her bone stylus had made.

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