The Fortress of Glass (31 page)

"Leave it open," Sharina said. "In case I need to say something to my friends."

"Your highness?" Tadai announced from the door to the foyer. "If you're ready?"

"Yes," said Sharina, settling on a backless stool in front of a table arranged as a barrier between her and the enthusiasm of those who wanted, needed, something from the regent. "Send them in."

Three clerks took seats to the right and slightly behind her, ready to write or locate information as needed. All together they probably weren't the equal of Liane, but Liane was better placed with the army.

Sharina felt a sudden twist of longing. She hoped Cashel was where the kingdom most needed him to be also, but she desperately missed his solid presence. Lady, she prayed silently, let my Cashel serve the kingdom as he best can; and let him come back safe to me.

The first petitioner was a middle-aged female clerk, part of the financial establishment under Tadai. She had a series of cost estimates for damage done in the course of Liane's lime-burning operation. The figure was astoundingly high-fees for stone, transport, and particularly the fuel which Liane had ordered to be gathered with minimum delay. That meant tearing apart buildings for the roof beams in some cases, and cutting down orchards that would take over a decade to grow back to profitable size.

Sharina suspected Tadai wanted her to rescind some of Liane's more drastic measures. Instead she signed off on them. The cost was very high, but the cost of failure would be the lives of every soul in the kingdom. Liane thought speed was of the first importance, and nothing Sharina'd seen made her disagree.

"Oh, look at this one, Chalcus!" Merota called happily. "It's a unicorn!"

Her voice was as high-pitched as Cervoran's, but Sharina found it as cheerful as birdsong. It wasn't a surprise to realize that timbre wasn't why she found the wizard-and his double-unpleasant.

The second petitioner, an officer with the blue naval crest on the helmet he held under his arm, opened his mouth to speak. In the next room Merota screamed, "Chalcus, I'm-"

"What're ye-" the sailor cried. His voice cut off also.

Sharina was on her feet and through the connecting door, slipping by the guard who'd turned at the shouts. The table she'd bumped with her thigh toppled over behind her.

Chalcus was a flicker of movement, reaching for something with his left hand and the curved sword raised in his right. She didn't see Merota, and as Chalcus lunged his body blurred into the tapestry on the wall. Then he was gone also.

"Ilna!" Sharina shouted, running toward the tapestry. "Ilna, come here!"

* * *

Double stood on the parapet chanting words of power, his face to the sea and his pudgy arms spread out to the sides. He'd thrust an athame from Cervoran's collection under his sash, an age-blackened blade carved from a tree root, but he wasn't using it for the spell.

If there really was a spell. Ilna, standing to the side as Double had ordered her, felt if anything angrier than usual. She couldn't understand the words the wizard was using-of course-but she did understand patterns. Double's chant was as purposeless as a snake swallowing its own tail.

She grinned slightly. Double reminded her of a snake in more ways than that. But if the fact she disliked a person doomed him, the world would have many fewer people in it. It wouldn't necessarily be a better place, but it'd be quieter.

From here Ilna could see the waves beyond the harbor mouth. Double'd said they were coming to the roof to do that, to watch the waves, but she suspected that was a lie. Certainly his incantation wasn't affecting the sunlit water, and yet....

And yet there was a pattern in the waves. Ilna couldn't grasp the whole. It was far too complex, for her and perhaps any human being, but it was there. Perhaps she was seeing the work of the Green Woman spreading from the shining fortress on the horizon, but Ilna thought it was greater even than that.

Ilna's smile spread a little wider; someone who knew her well might've seen the triumph in it. She was glimpsing the fabric of the cosmos in the tops of those few waves. She saw only the hint of the whole, but no one she'd met except her brother Cashel could've seen even that. That didn't make life easier or better or even different, but she granted herself the right to be proud that she almost understood.

She felt herself sliding deeper into contemplation of the waves, following strands of the cosmos itself. Things became obvious as she viewed them from nearer the source. Double had brought her here: not to work a spell but to trap her the way a clover-filled meadow traps a ewe. The sheep could leave, but the pleasure of her surroundings holds her for a bite, and another bite, and just another—

Merota screamed.

Ilna's concentration was a knife blade, smooth and clean and sharp. The pattern of the waves and the cosmos was for another time or another person. She jumped from the parapet to the stairs directly below her, though that meant dropping her own height to the bricks. To start down the stairs where they opened onto the roof, she'd have had to go past Double.... He stopped chanting, but he didn't try to restrain her.

Chalcus called something, his voice blurring with its own echo. He sounded as if he'd stepped into a vast chamber.

Ilna reached the marble landing and the entrance to the king's suite; the guards there jumped back to let her by. Her hands were empty. If she needed knife or noose or the cords whose knotted patterns could wrench any animate mind to her will, she would take that weapon out. First she had to learn what the threat was.

"Ilna!" shouted Sharina. "Ilna, come here!"

The entrance to the room where Cervoran did his wizardry was by a full-length window. The casement was open. Ilna stepped through, looking not at Sharina but to the tapestry on which Sharina's eyes were focused.

It was a panel as tall as she was and half again as long. Warp and weft both were silk; they'd been woven with a sort of soulless perfection.

Normally a room's rugs or hangings would've been the first thing Ilna examined, but this piece had been an exception. Bad workmanship merely made her angry, but the coldness of this undoubtedly artful tapestry had caused her to avoid it the way she would've stepped around the silvery pustulence of a long-dead fish.

If she'd looked at the panel carefully, Chalcus and Merota might be at her side right now. If.

Sharina and some soldiers were speaking, explaining that the child and Chalcus had vanished into the tapestry. Ilna ignored them, concentrating instead on the fabric itself.

The design was of a garden maze seen from three-quarters above. Greens and black shaded almost imperceptibly into one another, just as foliage and stems do in a real hedge. There were fanciful animals: here a cat with a hawk's head, there a serpentine creature covered in glittering blue scales, many others. They were what Double had sent Chalcus and Merota to count, but Ilna realized that they didn't really matter. What mattered was—

The maze had no exit: the outer wall formed a solid cartouche around the whole. The inner hedges twisted and bent, creating junctions and dead ends which seemed to blur from one state to the other as Ilna shifted her attention. In the center was a lake fed by tiny streams that zigzagged from the corners of the fabric; in the lake was an island, reached by a fog-shrouded bridge; and on the island was a circular temple whose roof was a golden dome with a hole in the middle.

But the temple was only the end. Ilna needed the beginning, and she found it in the shape of the hedges. Their twists gripped the mind and souls of those who looked hard at the tapestry, making them part of its fabric. Ilna could've stepped back, but she knew now what had happened to her family, her real family, and she had no choice but to join them.

"Double, what do you know about this?" Sharina shouted in the near distance. "Chalcus and Lady Merota walked into the wall! I saw it happen!"

"Why do you ask me?" said the wizard's double, a wizard itself.

Ilna had no time for Double at the moment. He'd laid a clever snare. He'd known he couldn't catch her in it, but he'd known also that she'd follow those she loved. Loved more than life, some would say, but Ilna'd never loved life for its own sake.

She saw the pattern. She took a step forward, not in the flesh but between worlds that touched at a level beyond sight.

"Ilna!" Sharina said.

As Ilna's fingers brushed the prickly branches of densely-woven yew, she heard the wizard pipe from a great distance, "I was Double. Now I am Cervoran."

And then very faintly, "I will be God!"

* * *

Garric remembered how depressing he'd found this land when he first arrived in the rain. It was raining again, generally a drizzle but off and on big drops slashed across the marsh. Nonetheless his spirits were as high as he ever remembered them being.

He laughed and said, "Donria, we're free. That's better than being an animal on somebody's farm in sunlight, even if we're kept as pets rather than future dinners."

Donria gave him a doubtful smile, then looked at the Bird fluttering from stump to branch ahead of them as a bright moving road sign. "Where are we going, Garric?" she asked.

"We are returning to Wandalo's village where Garric has friends," the Bird said in its dry mental voice. "The Coerli will track us, but not soon. Smoke blunts their sense of smell and anyway, fire disconcerts them. It will be days before they pursue."

And what next? Garric thought, suddenly feeling the weight of the future again. It'd felt so good to escape that he hadn't been thinking ahead.

A tree had fallen beside the route the Bird was choosing. A dozen spiky knee-high saplings sprang from its trunk. As Garric trotted past, he became less sure that it wasn't simply a tree which grew on the ground and sent its branches upward. Several blobs-frogs? Insects?-slid from the bole into the water. If they hadn't moved, Garric would've thought they were bumps on the bark.

"Bird?" Garric said aloud. "Where do you come from?"

"I come from here, Garric," the Bird said. "My people are coeval with the land itself, created when the rocks crystallized from magma. We lived in a bubble in the rock, all of us together. When the rock split after more ages than you can imagine, we continued to live in what was now a cave. We could have spread out but we did not, because that would have meant being separated from our fellows."

He laughed, the audible clucking sound Garric had heard before. It sounded like a death rattle in this misty wilderness.

"Was the cave near here?" asked Garric. He didn't care about the answer; he'd spoken instinctively because of the sudden rise in emotional temperature. He was asking what he hoped was a neutral question to give the Bird the opportunity to change the subject. Garric would've done the same out of politeness if he were speaking to a human being he didn't know well.

"I was the different one," the Bird said, apparently ignoring the question. "The daring one, a human might call it; but we are not human. To my people and myself, Garric, I was mad."

The rain had stopped and the sun was a broad bright circle in a dove-gray sky. The Bird fluttered above a creek too wide to jump. The water was black and opaque. Garric tried it with his foot; Donria simply strode across.

Garric followed feeling a little embarrassed. The water was mildly cool and only ankle deep. Well, I didn't know what might be living in a stream like that.

"I went into the depths of the cave," the Bird continued. "This is the shape I wear now-"

It fluttered its gauzy wings.

"-but I can take any shape I choose. I followed the fracture into the rock until I was a sheet of crystal with granite pressing to either side. I wanted to experience separation, you see. I was mad."

Garric's lips shouldn't have been dry in this sodden air. He had to lick them anyway.

"I could barely feel my people," the Bird said. "They missed me, but they did not object to my choice. My people did not coerce: they were part of the cosmos and lived in their place and their way. They had no power because using power would have been out of place and therefore mad. As I am mad."

"Were," Garric said. He didn't amplify the word or put any particular emphasis on the way the Bird had used the past tense in referring to his people.

"Before I decided to return to the bubble and my fellows, my birthmates, my other selves," the Bird said, "two wizards arrived. My people ignored them, continuing to contemplate the cosmos and their place in it. The wizards killed them and took away their bodies to use in their art."

Garric licked his lips again. "I'm very sorry," he said. When you're told of a horror, words may not be any real help to the victim; but words, and the bare truth, were all there was. "Who were the wizards?"

"They were not of this world," the Bird said. "They were not human; they were not even alive as humans judge life. They came and they killed my people, then they left with our crystal bodies. I wanted to sense separation. For five thousand years now I have known only separation."

He gave his terrible rattling laugh again. "Is it a wonder that I am mad?" he asked.

A breeze bringing a hint of cinnamon rippled the standing water to either side, clearing the air briefly. Ahead was a solid belt of cane waving ten or twelve feet in the air. The stems were as thick as a big man's finger, and the bark had scales. We'll have to go around, Garric thought; but the Bird fluttered into the cane, weaving between the closely spaced stems.