The Fortress of Glass (49 page)

The ground trembled faintly but unmistakably. Sharina felt as though she were standing on the back of an ox, feeling the beat of its great heart through the soles of her feet. She turned to Tenoctris, but the old wizard's concentration was so fierce that Sharina didn't even start to ask the frightened question that instinct had brought to the tip of her tongue.

The fog over the plains below cleared. Everything within the bowl of hills was as clear as the facets of a jewel. The wind and the birds were silent, and the hair on the back of Sharina's neck rose.

The hills softened and slumped the way dunes collapse when the surge undermines them. Men shouted, losing their footing and dancing in desperate attempts to keep from sinking into what had been rock or firm soil. The violent shuddering sifted the breastworks back into the trenches from which they'd been dug and shook the emplaced artillery. A large catapult toppled onto its side, and several ballistas pointed skyward.

Double kept his feet, but the frame of posts and canvas twisted in tatters as the ground gave way beneath it. The silver film smeared the surface instead of sinking into the subsoil as it'd done in the past. Looking to the west, Sharina saw flat marshes for as far as her eye could travel. The ridge had vanished utterly, leaving mule-drawn wagons mired where there'd been rocky switchbacks up the hills.

The hellplants were advancing with renewed vigor. On soil this wet, they could move as fast as a man. Their tentacles writhed, ready to grip and rend.

* * *

Ilna stepped around an oak growing at a corner of the maze. The hedge down the aisle now before her was holly to the left and quickset to the right. Crouching in the middle was a three-headed dog as big as an ox.

She raised the pattern she'd knotted in anticipation of this meeting or one like it. She hadn't anticipated three heads, though: the great dog lunged toward her before stumbling and crashing onto its shoulder with a double yelp.

Chalcus shouted and drove past her with his sword and dagger out. He'd wanted to lead-but then, he'd wanted to guard the rear and also to fly over Ilna and the child so that nobody could approach from above. Ilna'd insisted on leading because she could capture rather than merely killing or chasing away whichever Prince they next met. That logic still held.

"Get out of the way!" Ilna said, making a quick change to the pattern-gathering a bight in the middle of the fabric because there wasn't time to do the job properly with an additional length of yarn. She was furious: with herself for not being better prepared and with Chalcus for assuming-well, acting as if-she wouldn't be able to recover from her error in time.

Mostly with herself. As usual.

Chalcus jumped aside as quickly as he'd come. The dog was already backing with the heads on either side turned away. The middle head was frozen in a look of slavering fury, like a trophy stuffed and nailed to the wall. The beast's right foreleg dragged and there was a hitch in the movements of the left hind leg as well.

"This is my territory!" snarled the left head.

"You have no right to-" began the right head.

Ilna spread her fabric. The dog took the new pattern through the open eyes of its middle head. It dropped where it stood.

"Now," said Ilna crisply. "You're going to answer the questions we ask or my friend Chalcus will cut pieces off you. I'm going to change my pattern enough to allow you to speak. If you choose not to help, we'll ask one of your fellow Princes, but we won't do that so long as you're alive."

The dog's breath stank of rotten meat. Knowing that the meat had been human wouldn't change Ilna's behavior, but neither did it dispose her to like the creature better. Instead of adjusting a knot of the pattern, she simply put the tip of her little finger over one corner.

The dog's left head jerked around to glare at them. "This is an outrage!" it snarled. "You-"

Chalcus stepped forward and flicked out his sword. One ear of the head that'd spoken spun into the quickset hedge. The dog yelped much louder than before; the head thrashed violently but the creature couldn't get away.

Merota gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth. Then she looked up with a distressed expression and said, "I'm sorry, Chalcus. He deserves it!"

"Ah, child," Chalcus said. He grinned broadly. "This one deserves far worse, I'm sure; and if he's stubborn I'll take pleasure in giving worse to him, that I will."

"We want to leave this tapestry," Ilna said, "this garden if you prefer. What is the way out?"

"I don't know-" said the dog. It jerked its head with a howl as Chalcus shifted minusculely.

"No!" said Ilna. "Not till I decide it's not answering. Dog, where do you think the exit is? You Princes talk to each other, don't you? You must talk about that!"

"We don't know," the dog said, speaking very carefully. Its tongue licked out of the narrow muzzle, trying to reach the blood slowly creeping from the severed ear. "No one has ever left the Garden. But some think...."

It licked again, this time swiping into the blood. The fur above where the tongue reached was matted and glistening.

"Some think, I say...," the dog continued. "That perhaps the One built the temple in the center of the Garden to Himself. And perhaps when He finished the building, He took leave from the Garden at that place."

"I saw the temple!" Merota said. "I was looking at it when I fell into the maze!"

"Aye," said Chalcus. He'd sheathed his dagger so that he could very deliberately wipe the tip of his sword clean with a folded oak leaf. "And I too. What does it look like inside, this temple, good beast?"

The dog's chest rose and fell as it breathed; Ilna had been careful to paralyze only the creature's conscious control of its muscles. It would be very easy to freeze all movements, though, and to watch the dog slowly smother. How many little people had gone down those three gullets over countless years?

"I've never been there," the dog said, its eyes rolling desperately. Perhaps it'd understood Ilna's expression. "None of us have! It's, well, we don't know, of course, but some think, some imagine, that the other lives in the temple when it's not hunting somewhere. None of us know, nobody knows, but if the other has a particular place, it could be there."

"The other," Ilna said. "The Shadow, you mean."

She'd spoken with deliberate cruelty, so furiously angry at her prisoner that she risked summoning the Shadow just to make the dog howl in terror. As it did, voiding a flood of foul-smelling urine on the ground and its own hindquarters. Like breathing, that was an unconscious reaction. Merota squeezed her hands together and stared at Ilna.

"Gently, Ilna, dear heart," said Chalcus, a look of concern in his glance. "If you want him killed, I'll do that thing without regret; but if it's answers we're after, then he's giving us those."

"Yes, all right," said Ilna coldly. "The other, then. What makes you think it lairs in the temple? Have you seen it there?"

"We don't see it anywhere else, that's the thing!" said the dog. "Except when it strikes. We've none of us been to the temple, I told you that! But there's nowhere else it could be, is there?"

Ilna sucked her lower lip between her teeth and bit it. She knew what to do-what she would do-and she'd almost stated her wish as an order. She had to remember that hers was only one opinion among three, now.

"Master Chalcus, what would you that we do?" she asked formally.

"The longer we stay here," said the sailor, "the likelier it is that we'll meet something we'd sooner leave to itself. If the way out's through this temple, then I'll gladly go to the temple whatever it may be that lives there. I'd sooner we met it at home at a time of our choosing than from behind at a time of its."

"Merota?" Ilna said. She could give orders to her companions and force them to agree as surely as she'd bound this three-headed dog to her will. She'd been that person once, in the days just after she'd come back to the waking world having journeyed to Hell.

Never again. No matter what.

"I want to leave, Ilna," Merota said in a small voice. "I'm not afraid. When I'm with you and Chalcus, I'm not afraid."

Ilna sniffed. "Aren't you?" she said. "Well, I'm certainly afraid."

But not for myself. If I was sure that I alone would die, I'd smile and go on.

"All right, then," she said. "We'll find the temple and then do as seems best."

Chalcus flicked his sword so that the tip brushed the dog's curling eyelashes before it could twitch its head away. "And this one?" he asked. "Shall we have him guide us, then?"

"I don't need a guide to find a pattern, Master Sailor," Ilna said in a tight, dry voice; her lip curled as if she'd swallowed vinegar. "There's nothing about this beast that'll please me as much as his absence. Stand back-and you, Merota."

Her companions edged aside. Chalcus was trying to keep Ilna, Merota and the great dog all in view at the same time-and to watch lest something come up behind them.

"I'm going to release you now," Ilna said to the panting dog. "I don't want to see you again. If I do, I'll kill you. Depending on how I'm feeling at the time, I may or may not kill you quickly. I hope you understand."

She folded the fabric between her hands and stepped back. The dog gave a spastic convulsion, its legs finishing the motions they'd started before Ilna's pattern cut them adrift. The big animal lurched to its feet and blundered sideways into the quickset hedge. Spiked branches crackled, but despite the beast's weight and strength the hedge held.

The dog got control of itself and backed away. "You belong with the other!" its middle head snarled. "The other has no honor and no courtesy. It's a monster that kills. You belong with it, monster!"

Ilna started to raise her hands, spreading the pattern again. The dog turned and bolted out of sight, its great paws slamming back divots of sod.

Ilna shrugged, trying to shake off memory of the dog and its stinking breath. "To the left here," she said, nodding to the junction of paths ahead of them. She sighed and began picking out knots to have the yarn ready for use the next time. "And to the left again at the next turning. Come! I have no wish to stay here."

Merota put her little hand on Ilna's arm as they strode off. "You're not a monster, Ilna," she said quietly.

"You're wrong there, I'm afraid," said Ilna. "But I'm your monster, child; and in this place, you need one."

* * *

Cashel heard the scholar get up, so he rose from his bedclothes also. It was still before dawn but light gleamed through the eastern wall where adobe hadn't perfectly sealed the chinks between mastodon bones.

He reached over and tousled the boy's short hair. "Wake up, Protas," he said quietly. "We're going off shortly."

"I'm tired!" the boy said screwing his eyes tightly shut, but a moment later he threw off the tapestry covering him and sat up. He kept his face bent down, until he'd scrabbled under the covers and come out with the topaz crown. When he'd set it firmly on his head, he grinned shyly at Cashel and stood.

Antesiodorus was placing objects from his collection on a rectangle of densely woven cloth-a saddlecloth, Cashel guessed. It was figured in geometric patterns of black and white on a wine-colored ground. The scholar had already packed several books and scrolls; now he was choosing among the phials and caskets scattered along the sidewall.

"I can carry that for you if you like, sir," Cashel said. The bindle would be pretty heavy over any distance at all, and Antesiodorus looked like a high wind'd blow him over.

"I would not like," the scholar snapped. "You have your duties, I'm sure. You can leave me to mine."

Cashel nodded and walked to the pottery water jar. It'd been glazed red over a black background; winged demons with female heads were tormenting a man tied to the mast of his ship.

"I'm sorry, Master Cashel," Antesiodorus said to his back. "I'm upset because of what I'm being required to do, but that's not your fault."

"It's all right," Cashel said, smiling deep within himself. "Prince Protas and me know we're strangers. We appreciate your help."

He refilled the cup and gave it to the boy, who gurgled the water down greedily. This air was dry as could be.

Antesiodorus paused, then took a wand with a tentacled head from its shelf. Cashel thought first it was a plant, then realized it must be a sea lily like the ones that weathered out of a limestone bluff on the road from Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa. Those were all turned to rock, though. The lily Antesiodorus slipped under his sash was dry, but it was fresh enough that Cashel could smell salty decay clinging to the hollow shell.

"Do you need something to eat?" Antesiodorus said, taking the cup from Protas and edging past Cashel to dip it full again. "It's not far. That is...."

The scholar drank, paused, and finished the water. He looked doubtfully at the jar, then set the mug down.

"We'll be there in at most two hours," Antesiodorus said, looking squarely at Cashel. "If we can reach it at all. I assume that since you've been sent to me, there may be those who wish to prevent your journey?"

He raised an eyebrow in question.

Cashel shrugged. "I don't know," he said truthfully. "I'm here to help Protas, but nobody told us what was going to happen."