The Fortress of Glass (36 page)

"Watch and learn, brave soldier," Double said in a deadpan sneer. He gestured with his athame like a pastry chef teasing icing into a delicate spire; the image in the lens shifted to the earthworks on the surrounding slopes. Soldiers climbed out from the defenses with their swords drawn. In ragged groups of six to ten they marched toward the plain. Generally one man of each group had a torch and the others carried faggots of brushwood to use when they reached the hellplants.

The torches were pinpricks of yellow light; fog swirled around the troops like the tide rising in a mangrove swamp. Sharina could see the men clearly, but from the way they splashed and stumbled they themselves were almost blind.

"They're sinking above their ankles," Sharina said, frowning. "I thought the valley was sown in barley. You couldn't plow ground that soft, let alone get crops to sprout in it."

"It wasn't that wet this morning," Liane said. "It kept getting boggier as the day went on. I think the tide may be rising, but there's the fog as well. Local people say they've never seen anything like it, even in the dead of winter with the wind from the southwest."

"The Green Woman's minions are reclaiming the land for her," Double said. "As they advance, the marsh will also advance."

He turned his white, swollen face slightly. Light from the lens glinted on his bulbous eyes.

"If you kill the hellplants, soldier," Double said, "will you then drain the soil with your sword?"

Attaper met the dead glare. "Creature," he said in a tight, controlled voice, "you have no friends in this room. Don't push your luck! The way I see it, it's not murder to cut apart something that's already dead."

Staggering, tripping; often grabbing one another so as not to fall in the muck, the soldiers pressed their attack. Sharina could faintly hear the angry, blasphemous murmur of the advancing army. A few of the men had kept their spears; they used them to probe the fog-blurred darkness.

The hellplants were as silent as a rank of haystacks. Sharina was tense, expecting the massive forms to rush forward now that they'd lured the troops close, but the men continued to advance against a motionless enemy.

A soldier screamed on a rising, piercing note. Twenty more soldiers echoed his cry with nearly identical ones.

Double pointed his athame and twisted it. The image shrank to a full-sized image of the marsh: a soldier's right leg stepping forward in muck in which half-grown barley lay matted. Though dismounted for the moment, the man was from a cavalry regiment; he wore knee boots instead of hobnailed sandals as the infantry did.

A scorpion like the ones that'd spilled from the hellplant in the palace squirmed through the gooey earth. Its pincers caught the man's calf and the tail arched up to strike.

The soldier shouted in terror and brought his long sword down sideways, crushing the scorpion against his boot. The creature's sting stayed in the leather, still twitching even though it'd been torn from the tail.

"Demons!" the soldier screamed. "Demons're coming out of the ground!"

He slashed wildly in front of him. Probably he'd imagined that a waterlogged furrow was moving, because the unnatural clarity of Sharina's vision didn't indicate any danger where the blade splashed muck.

Instead of assuming that his sword didn't kill another scorpion because there was no scorpion present, the soldier turned with a despairing cry. The bundle of brush on his back wobbled as he ran, forgotten in his panic.

"He's not a coward," Liane whispered in sick horror. "He's from Lord Waldron's personal regiment and they've been fighting all day. It's the darkness and the fog, that's all...."

She's probably right, Sharina thought. But conditions are never going to be better than they are tonight, and tonight is a disaster.

Double gestured with his athame, drawing back the apparent viewpoint so that his audience could see the panorama of the attack. Here and there a bonfire blazed, but it seemed to Sharina that some had been lighted at a distance from the hellplants instead of being laid up against the creatures as intended.

The troops were retreating in more or less order all across the plain. Generally less order. They couldn't see their attackers, and the paddle-legged scorpions were as agile as seals in the flooded field.

A circle of dismounted cavalry kept good discipline. Every other man had a torch made from the faggots they carried. With those for light, the other half of the squadron stabbed and cut at the scorpions curling toward them from any direction.

Lord Waldron was part of the defensive circle, not within it protected by his troops. His sword dripped with the ichor of at least one scorpion, and his chief aides stood to either side with torches.

But even these men were pulling back to the temporary safety of the hills from which they'd sallied. In the morning the hellplants would attack again, and more of the creatures would come from the sea, as surely as the tide and the sunrise.

The lens faded, then regained clarity as it shrank to half its size.

"Lamsucho!" Double said in a high-pitched snarl. He sliced his athame through the air, wiping the lens away. The oil lamp blazed, seemingly brighter than it'd been before the incantation darkened it to Sharina's eyes.

"You have seen!" Double said. The strain of his art must've greatly weakened him, but only those familiar with wizardry would've seen that beneath Double's bravado. "You have seen human strength against the Green Woman."

"What do you offer instead, milord?" said Liane. Her face was calm, her voice cool. She was poised lady to every hair's breadth of her body, and that too was bravado.

"In the morning I will show you," said Double. 'First I will destroy the Green Woman's minions, then I will destroy her. I will be God!"

"One thing at a time, Lord Wizard," Sharina said. Her mind was as hard as glass. "One thing at a time...."

* * *

Cashel stood on ground covered with leaf litter; the forest around him was silent. Winter had stripped the trees of foliage, but a swath of them had been blasted to dead gray stumps by something more sudden than the cold.

Protas let go of Cashel's belt and stepped away. He cleared his throat. Cashel guessed he was embarrassed to be frightened when the boulder they stood on seemed to fall away.

"It's cold here," Protas said formally. He took off the crown and polished the big jewel on his sleeve; just to have something to do with his hands, Cashel supposed. "Do we just wait, Cashel, or...?"

"I don't know which way we'd go if we walked on ourselves," Cashel said quietly. This landscape was nothing like the one they'd left. The shape of the land was different from where they'd been, not just one being sun-baked waste and this a forest late in the year.

The boy was right about it being cold, though for a matter of pride he hadn't hugged his arms around his thin tunic to cover himself from the wind. Above, the sky was gray with streaks of pale blue; a winter sky, promising worse in the future if not now, not quite now. A flock got restive and peevish in this weather, though you had to know sheep pretty well to realize they were in a bad mood.

Cashel tapped the ground with his bare toes. Leaves rustled slickly; the soil beneath was firm but not frozen. He and Protas were just standing here instead of there in the place where the trees were running toward them.

He focused on the forest as a whole again instead of the dirt at his feet, though he hadn't ever really lost track of the general landscape; a shepherd doesn't dare do that. These trees, even the ones that were still alive, weren't attacking anybody. It was a terrible waste of timber to smash so many trees this way and just leave them scattered about.

Something was jingling toward them through the trees. Cashel turned and faced the sound, his staff lifted. It wasn't loud, but it sure wasn't trying not to be heard.

Without being told, Protas stepped to where he wouldn't be in the way. "Is somebody driving a carriage through the woods?" he asked. "It sounds like harness, almost."

"Hello there!" Cashel called to the bare trunks. "I'm Cashel or-Kenset and I'm just passing through!"

From the sound being so slight he figured it must be far off, but around the shattered trunk of a chestnut came-

"That's a helmet!" said Protas. "It's rolling along the ground!"

That wasn't quite true: the helmet was walking on little jointed metal legs, and it had two short arms besides. One held a butcher knife, notched from cutting things it shouldn't have been used on.

"Hello?" Cashel said again, not so loud as before. He started spinning his staff, not hostile exactly but bringing it into motion in case he needed to use it suddenly.

He wasn't a bit surprised to see little dustings of blue wizardlight trail off behind the butt caps. His skin'd been prickling ever since he and Protas stood with Cervoran back in the palace.

"Hello yourself," the helmet said in a voice that seemed to come from the grating under the front of the flared brim. "Since you've been fool enough to come here, I'm the poor devil tasked to guide you out again."

It gave a nasty laugh and added, "Poor devil indeed!"

The helmet sounded angry but not angry at anything in particular. Cashel relaxed a little and smiled to find something familiar in this strange place. He knew a number of people who acted that way too, waving their ill temper like a flag they were proud of.

"Thank you, then," he said politely. "I'm Cashel and this is Protas. We'll be out of your way as soon as you show us how."

"Come along," the helmet said. It'd kept on walking as it talked, but it wasn't coming toward them Cashel realized. It trundled past, heading for a goal that they'd been standing in the path to. "And be ready to hide if I tell you to. It isn't far, but it could take your whole life to get there if we're unlucky."

Cashel motioned Protas ahead of him and walked along at the rear himself, a trifle to the left of the line their guide was taking. He didn't have to run to keep up but those little legs clinked and jingled along like a centipede's. The helmet covered ground faster than he'd figured it could.

There wasn't a path but the going wasn't too bad. In summer the trees shaded out undergrowth, so the saplings they came across were spindly and easy to push aside. The worst trouble was stones covered with leaves, slippery and easy to stub your foot on if you weren't used to it.

Protas wasn't used to it, but he never quite fell on his face and he didn't complain. The boy didn't know a lot of things, but he made a better companion than plenty of folk who might not've stumbled so much.

The helmet was muttering. To itself, Cashel figured, but then in a louder voice it said, "You, boy! You have the Great Talisman. Why have you come to this benighted Hell?"

"We're passing through, Master Helmet," said Protas easily. "Do you get many visitors to your world?"

He was the funniest combination of little boy and gracious prince. It was the prince who seemed to do most of the talking to strangers.

"Visitors!" grated the helmet. "No, we don't get many visitors, boy! No one comes here but fools and men who like to kill more than they want to live. Or those who want to die, of course. Which are you, eh?"

"I've been called a fool often enough," said Cashel, figuring it was time for him to take over. Their guide wasn't talking, he was pushing, and if there was pushing to be done then it wasn't for a boy to take it unaided while Cashel was around. "The folks who called me that maybe were right, but looking back on it they weren't themselves people I'd trust if they said the sun would rise."

He cleared his throat. "And we're not either of the other two things," he went on. "Though if somebody figures he just has to have a fight, I'll give him one."

"Faugh," muttered the helmet, suddenly tired and dejected instead of angry the way he'd been from the first. "I'm a fool myself, so why should I complain about what you two do?"

They'd been going more or less uphill ever since they met their guide, not steep but noticeable. Because of the slope there were more bare rocks poking out; the helmet's feet clicked and sparked on them, which set things ringing inside its body too. That was what Cashel and Protas'd heard coming toward them like a miniature carriage.

The trees in this stretch weren't knocked about like the ones were back where they'd met their guide. A lot of them were pines on this thin soil, but there were near as many chestnuts, some of them huge trees with boles thicker than Cashel standing with his arms spread straight out to either side.

Cashel heard a buzzing that seemed to come from the treetops. He looked up, trying to find the source. It was way too late in the year for bees to be swarming, and there wasn't anything else that—

The helmet turned lizard-quick and said, "Stand against a tree trunk and don't move! Don't hide, just get against a tree. They'll see movement, but you're all right if you keep still!"

Protas opened his mouth to ask a question. Cashel gripped him by the shoulder and backed against a big spruce whose branches didn't start till several times Cashel's own height up the trunk. He didn't know what was going on, but he didn't doubt that they'd be better off doing what they were told just now instead of arguing about it.

The helmet hunkered down among the rocks, drawing in its legs like a box turtle closing up. It held the blade of the butcher knife under its body.