The Fortress of Glass (42 page)

"Eulamon," Double chanted. "Restoutus restouta zerosi!"

The air about the dishes went rosy with a fog of wizardlight. The silver blurred.

"Benchuch bachuch chuch...," Double called. His voice was thin but so piercing that Sharina had the feeling that everyone around Calf's Head Bay could hear the words. "Ousiri agi ousiri!"

The haze thickened. A thin shimmering sheet spread above it, orange with the reflected light of the sunrise.

"Eulamon," Double chanted, shifting his black wooden dagger so that it pointed at the next pile of silver. The salver and cups of the initial pile had vanished; the tourmalines lay on the ground. "Restoutus restouta zerosi!"

At a dozen places in the trenches dug in front of the line of breastworks, soldiers threw torches to ignite the piles of brush prepared for the purpose. There hadn't been enough fuel to fill the entire frontage, but where the fires rose to full life, the plants trapped in them struggled and died. Green bodies ruptured, pouring salt water onto the flames which then gushed out white steam.

The flames damped temporarily, but the fires were too hot for a few barrels-full of water to put them out. They blazed again, shrinking still further the blackened remains of the dead hellplants.

"They don't back away or try to escape," Sharina said. What she'd just seen made her queasy. "They throw themselves into the fires."

"They're seaweed, dear," Tenoctris said quietly. She continued to watch Double, chanting as he formed the final piles of silver into a gleaming wall in front of the canvas screen. "They have no minds of their own. The wizard who controls them cares no more about their feelings than you do about those of a leaf of lettuce."

More plants came on, moving with the slow certainty of clouds drifting across the summer sky. The thickening mist had turned them to dark lumps; they began to lap upward to cover the earthworks on the higher ground.

Where there weren't prepared fire-sets, the hellplants swayed down into the trenches and wallowed there for a moment. Picked soldiers, generally light infantry who ordinarily fought with javelins and didn't wear armor, stood on the breastworks and hurled bags of quicklime into the open reservoirs in the plants' bodies.

Sharina had heard Liane discuss the plan with Lord Waldron and his aides, but she'd doubted whether the soldiers would throw their small missiles accurately in the stress of the attack. In general, they did: the bags splashed into the water and exploded in fire-shot steam.

But the plants came on, bubbling and sizzling. They drew themselves out of the trenches with their tentacles, then reached for the human defenders. Ignoring the fire inside them, they snatched the spears and billhooks being driven into their green flesh.

Supported by the plants behind them, the leaders half climbed, half tore down, the breastworks. Light ballistas slashed at them as artillerymen risked hitting their own comrades in the hope of stopping the monsters which the infantry alone couldn't. Bolts which punched their charge through a hellplant's body walls usually tore the creature apart even though the same amount of quicklime thrown into the reservoir from above wasn't effective.

Some of the soldiers ducked low and thrust their swords into the tendrils on which the plants crawled. For the most part the men died in vain, seized by tentacles and either torn apart or flung to their deaths in the plain below. One plant toppled and couldn't rise again, though its massive body crushed the man who'd crippled it.

Sharina licked her lips. While her mind was elsewhere, her hand had reached unnoticed for the horn hilt of the Pewle knife she wore under her cloak. She wouldn't need the weapon today-the Blood Eagles would see to that-but soon, perhaps....

"Tenoctris," she said. "I think they're going to break through shortly. At the very worst I can outrun any plant so I'm going to stay with the army, but you'd better-"

"Wait," said Tenoctris. She raised her left hand without taking her eyes from Double. "Hush please, dear."

"Kato katoi...," Double said, pointing his athame at the center of the long film of silver shimmering in the air beside him. "Kataoikouse neoi...."

The silver film rippled and seemed to stiffen. Tenoctris gripped Sharina's wrist and walked with quick determination to the right. Toward Double, Sharina thought, but that was only incidentally true. Tenoctris was leading her to the side where they wouldn't be standing between the mirror and the battle at mid-slope.

"Abriao iao!" Double shouted.

The silver twitched, changing in smooth lines that Sharina couldn't have described though she watched it happen. Because the film formed a perfect mirror, Sharina saw not the thing itself but a subtly distorted image of the battlefield below.

The mirror caught the rising sun and threw it back as a point of white fury at nearly right angles to its position in the sky. The beam sawed across the hellplants climbing the breastworks at the northern edge of the half-bowl. Double continued to chant.

A plant exploded in steam, then a second, and after a slight delay a third. The point of light touched also the head of a soldier lunging forward behind his spear. He had time to scream as his helmet melted in spatters of bronze; then he fell backward. The plant in which his spear wobbled collapsed inward and sank down into the trench from which it'd heaved itself.

"Sound recall!" Sharina shouted. "Captain Ascor, sound recall! Now! Get the men out of the way of this wizard's work!"

She'd drawn the big knife and stepped toward Double when she saw the soldier die at the mirror's focus... but the wizard was doing no more than the ballista crews had done, risking their fellows for the chance of saving the kingdom. She would pray to the Lady for that man and for all the brave men who'd died today, but first she must survive the day.

Ascor looked from her to the battlefield, then barked an order to the cornicene standing beside him. The signaller put his curved horn to his lips and blew the five-note recall signal: a long, three short, and a final long.

Sharina'd thought Ascor might protest: Princess Sharina was acting ruler of the Isles, but she had no authority on the battlefield except to issue commands to Lord Waldron himself. Ascor obeyed her anyway, perhaps because the bodyguard regiment considered it self separate from-and above-the army as a whole, but also because here on the hillcrest it was obvious that getting the troops out of the way immediately was the best way to save their lives.

That wasn't obvious from Lord Waldron's position in the center of the fortifications further down the slope. A courier left the Waldron's entourage, obviously heading for the signaller blowing the unauthorized call. The man slipped and stumbled on the hillside; he'd lost at least his helmet in the fighting.

Sharina took off her cloak and waved it toward Lord Waldron. He wouldn't understand what she meant, but it might be enough to convince him that there was a good reason for what probably had seemed to him mutiny.

The cornicene continued the call; other signallers took it up, horns and trumpets both. From where she stood Sharina could see troops abandoning their positions and streaming up the slopes. The men who'd survived this long probably thought the recall was the hand of providence, saving their lives at a time when they were sure they were doomed.

Many troops hadn't survived; Sharina could see that too. Close combat with the hellplants was a sentence of death, particularly now that most of the fuel had been burned.

The soldiers close to where the mirror's deadly beam struck were already retreating. They were fleeing, more accurately, throwing down weapons and equipment, but it was wizardry that'd panicked them rather than the enemy-even this unnatural enemy.

The silver bowed and shivered under Double's chanted commands; its point of focus cut like a fiery razor everywhere it touched. The hellplants' sodden flesh burst and blackened, leaving behind only masses of stinking compost as the light moved on.

Twice Sharina saw a fleeing man step into the directed blaze. Neither was at the focus, but they were close enough to it that one died screaming and the other's steaming flesh oozed through the segments of his armor as his body toppled backward.

Lady, cover them with the cloak of Your protection. Lady, may their spirits dwell with You.

The mirror shifted, drawing its light along hellplants bunched at the line of the fortifications. Even when the troops had abandoned their positions, the works delayed the massive, sluggish attackers. The mere touch of the light did as much sudden damage as the heaviest jars of quicklime hurled by the artillery

Waldron must finally have seen what was happening. He and the knot of cavalrymen around him, his personal retainers, backed out of their redoubt with their faces toward the plants; his four signallers joined the general chorus of Recall. The courier, halfway between the command group and Sharina on the northern crest, stopped in puzzlement and looked back toward the army commander.

Sharina had expected cheering; there was none. The troops who'd been fighting the hellplants were too exhausted for enthusiasm even at a miracle that'd saved their lives for the time being.

The mirror continued to warp and shimmer. It'd initially faced nearly due south, catching the sun in the southeast. As the sun rose higher and the mirror's focused light grew even more devastating, Double drew it around the whole smooth curve of the bay. There was no escaping its beam, but the plants didn't bother trying. They continued to waddle up the slope, oblivious of the shrunken, smoldering carcasses of their fellows.

The line of fortifications was clear of living plants. Where there was motion, it was a wisp of steam lifted by the breeze or a numbed soldier crawling out of the pile of corpses which had concealed him.

Double moved his ravening light onto the squadron of hellplants which had come out of the sea since sunrise. The dank miasma that'd half hidden the plain now burned away in swirls. Wet fields steamed, the stubble burning and the soggy furrows crumbling into arid dust as the light swept over them.

Calf's Head Bay was again free of the monsters which had swarmed over it. The tide washed in, bringing only the normal wrack of foam and flotsam.

"Mekisthi!" shouted Double. The film of silver, sunstruck and brilliant, vanished like the dew. A shining track on the rocky soil marked where it'd fallen when the spell suspending it had ceased.

Sharina looked at her shadow in amazement; it slanted sharply eastward. The battle had gone on from daybreak to well after noon, when she would've guessed that less than an hour had passed.

The stench of burned flesh and rotted vegetable matter had risen even to the hillcrest; a score of fires were burning on the plain. Nothing now moved but the smoke.

"I am Cervoran!" Double screamed triumphantly; and, screaming, fell backward, drained by the exertion spent in his art.

"A very powerful wizard," Tenoctris repeated quietly.

'These look like grapes," said Ilna doubtfully, using her left thumb and forefinger to pluck one of a bunch of purple fruit. It hung from the large-leafed vine which wound about the Osage orange forming a stretch of the hedge on their right side.

"They are grapes, Ilna," Merota said in surprise.

"Indeed, dear heart," said Chalcus. "What else is it that they would be?"

"Oh," said Ilna, squeezing the fruit against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. "I thought grapes grew one by one; the ones I've seen in the borough. These are in bunches."

"Oh, muscadines," said Merota dismissively. "These are much better!"

And perhaps they were. At any rate, the skin wasn't as thick as what Ilna was used to and the juicy pulp was even sweeter than she'd expected. She'd have willingly accepted a tart mouthful to've avoided being embarrassed by not knowing something that "everybody knew". Everybody knew but Ilna os-Kenset, the peasant from Haft.

"Wild grapes are tasty things, to be sure," said Chalcus, twisting off a small bunch with his left hand alone. "These are the kind they grow for wine in great plantations, good as well. And it's no surprise that they'd be the planted sort here rather than the wild, not so?"

"We drank beer in Barca's Hamlet," Ilna said, her voice expressionless. "Bitter beer at that, since we brewed it with germander instead of hops."

If she'd never left home, she wouldn't have been constantly embarrassed by her own ignorance. She'd—

The anger swirling in her mind-but only her mind-subsided. If she'd never left home, she wouldn't have met Chalcus and Merota. It was hard to remember how life had felt before they'd come into it, because the only details in that gray expanse were the frequent flashes of blazing, frustrated fury.

"We've got our pick of fruits and nuts, surely," Ilna said aloud. "Perhaps if we continue searching we'll find a field of barley? I'd say 'wheat,' but as you know, I'm not an optimist."

"Or we could see what roast chimaera tastes like," said Chalcus. "Assuming we can build a fire, as I trust we could manage."

Ilna smiled faintly. The sailor was probably joking as she'd been joking-more or less-but the question of food did concern her. She didn't need meat-she'd almost never eaten it as a child-but bread or at least porridge would be good. Exploring the entire maze on their own would take months or years if it was even possible. The little folk who lived here should know its ins and outs....