Lord of the Isles (2 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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Searing blue light surrounded Tenoctris. The stars spun above her for a thousand years, wiping her memory the way pumice grinds a manuscript clean for another hand to write upon the surface.
Unimaginably far from her in time and space, ocean roiled above the fresh grave of Yole.
W
hen she looked at the game board in the first light of dawn, she saw that a new piece had been added. She grew very still.
The game board was a vast slab of moss agate, its patterning natural but precisely chosen by the wizard who had cut and polished it in the ages before mankind. She kept the board secret, not behind bars and locks but on a plane of its own from which she alone could summon it for meditation.
To an untrained eye the pieces were assorted pebbles of precious tourmaline, uncarved or barely carved by some barbaric gem-cutter with crude vigor but little skill. To a trained eye, to a careful eye … to a wizard's eye like hers, the pieces displayed all the subtle differences of the living creatures on whom her will worked; the human pawns that she moved and her unseen opponent moved, and whose movements in turn shifted the pieces on the board.
She had put infinite time and art into studying the tourmaline pieces so that she could perfect her strategy in dealing with the living beings they mimicked. There were hundreds of them on the board, all of some value; but the skill of the game lay in identifying these few pieces which controlled the path to victory. Last night there had been four.
Two were pieces of great power. The hard, brittle stone of which they were shaped was sea green on one end, red with the fire of ruby on the other. The form of the crystals differed from top to base, and in aspect from one piece to the other.
They were Halflings: the offspring of a human and a creature human only in shape, hybrids who had abilities which neither parent shared. They were not wizards, but they could
work with forces no human wizard could shape however great her skill and power.
The Halflings would be dangerous if her opponent directed them, but they had no art of their own. If she was unable to turn them to her own ends, she could at worst set them out of play.
The other two pieces were spirals twined as though the pair had been carved from the same tourmaline prism … which they had not been, could not have been. One piece had the brown metallic hue of a crystal with a large admixture of iron in its structure. It was darkly translucent, and shapes swam in its depths. The other helix was water-clear, though like water it had the least tinge of color; in this case the gleam of dawn's first rosy figurings.
She touched her fingertip to the twin spirals. They felt cold or hot, but she could not be sure which; in all the time she had spent studying the pieces, some of their aspects remained an enigma. She must separate and examine them individually, for one was
the
key: the piece that would uncover the Throne of Malkar where Lorcan of Haft had hidden it a thousand years before.
All the power in the cosmos lay with that piece, and the piece could be controlled. It would move as she directed or to the direction of her opponent, the hooded figure she sensed but never saw. There was no third player in the game!
And yet …
This night between dusk and dawning a spike of blue tourmaline had appeared on the board in conjunction with the four pieces of power. She must learn what it meant, that slim piece, and still more the fact that the piece was
here.
She tossed a thin silken coverlet over the board and strode to the outer door. The only apparent bolt was a wisp of spiderweb, but anyone attempting to force the panel from the outside would find himself in a place other than where he intended—and very little to his liking.
She opened the door. The cold-faced servitor nodded obsequiously.
“I'm not to be disturbed for any reason,” she said. She nodded toward the tray of covered salvers waiting on the small table beside the door. “I'll be fasting, so get that away.”
The servitor nodded again. “As you wish, milady queen,” he said.
She closed and sealed the door. Her hooded opponent could not have placed the new piece on the board … .
And if not him, who?
G
arric or-Reise tossed in his bed in the garret of his parents' inn, dreaming of a maelstrom.
The water was icy and so thick it seemed solid. Strings of dirty-white foam marked spirals like the bands of an agate. Garric's head and right arm were lifted from the swirling currents but the rest of his body was caught like that of a fly frozen in amber.
“Help me!” he cried, but roaring currents smothered his voice. The pressure squeezing his chest prevented him from drawing in a further breath.
Other creatures were trapped in the maelstrom's slow gyrations. Most were monsters.
A seawolf struggled almost directly across the funnel of water from Garric's dream viewpoint. Seawolves had raided the pastures around Barca's Hamlet several times during Garric's lifetime, but this beast was twenty feet long—twice the length and many times the mass of any that he'd ever heard of. The beast's skull alone was as long as Garric's arm, and the yellow teeth could shear a man's body in half if they closed on it.
Higher on the spiral was a segmented creature whose flattened,
chitinous body was longer than a fishing boat. Its scores of paddle legs trembled in vain effort against the gelid water. It had two pincers like those of a nightmare scorpion, and the facets of its bulbous eyes shimmered in the wan light.
Far below was a tentacled ammonite whose shell was the size of a farmhouse. Its yellow eyes glared up at Garric with unreasoning hatred, but it too was a prisoner in the maelstrom's grip.
On the bottom of the sea, infinitely distant, a human figure stood casting a hooked line of quivering violet fire. The figure wore a long black robe with a cowl that hid its face. The crackling purple fire arched upward, ever closer to Garric as the figure laughed louder than the maelstrom. Closer …
Garric woke up with a shout trapped in his throat to choke him. He was twisted into his sweat-soaked bedclothes, not bound by the coils of a whirlpool. The glass of his smallpaned window was pale with the half-light of the hour before dawn.
“May the Lady and Shepherd protect me,” Garric whispered as he waited for his heart's pounding to slow. “May Duzi who watches our flocks watch over me also.”
He pulled the window sash open to let the air cool him. The bull's-eye glass of the panes distorted images too greatly to show anything but changes in the general level of light. When Garric looked through the opening he saw a robed figure sprawled on a raft just short of the shoreline.
Garric pulled himself free of the linen sheet and light blanket he'd been sleeping under; the storm had brought cool nights even this late in the spring. He didn't bother to cinch a belt over the tunic he slept in, and like everyone else in Barca's Hamlet he went barefoot as soon as the ground thawed.
He swung from his window and dropped to the ground a few feet below. He didn't call out to rouse the others, because he was afraid he was still dreaming. Garric's first thought was that the figure in the surf was the hooded fisherman of his nightmare. If there was a real person floating offshore on a
raft, Garric wouldn't need help to carry him to solid ground. If his imagination was tricking him, then he didn't want other people to know about it.
He ran easily down the retaining wall to the gravel beach, his tunic flapping around his legs. Garric was big for a seventeen-year-old, though he was rangy and hadn't filled out. His sister Sharina was tall also, but with a willowy suppleness that matched the curls of her long blond hair, while their friend Cashel was built like an oak tree. Cashel was so thick and solid that he looked squat despite being almost as tall as Garric.
Fishermen had dragged their six-oared cutters to the top of the wall, but the surge of yesterday's storm had flung them farther. Three were overturned, and the other two were stacked like a couple cuddling—the upper one smashing the thwarts of the lower.
The Inner Sea rubbed against the beach with its usual hiss. The sound was louder than you realized until you went far enough inland that the first line of hills finally blocked it. Wavelets slapped against the raft as well. It and the woman lying facedown on it were as real as the knee-high water Garric splashed through to reach them.
The raft had grounded on a bar of shells and gravel so slight that at low tide you could miss it on the generally flat strand. To Garric's surprise the raft was part of a building, not a ship's hatch cover as he'd assumed.
The woman moaned softly as he lifted her; at least she was alive. She was older than Garric's mother, though he couldn't be sure quite how old in the dim light. She weighed very little in his arms, although seawater washing over the raft's low edge had soaked her robe's thick brocade.
Garric turned and plodded up the sea-washed slope, careful not to lose his footing and dunk the poor victim again. A wave tugged the hem of his tunic as if in a spiteful attempt to bring him down.
“Here's a castaway!” he bawled at the top of his lungs. He couldn't expect anyone to hear him until he reached the
inn, though there might be a fisherman looking over damage from the terrible storm of the night and day before. “Get a bed ready and water!”
Garric couldn't imagine where she'd come from. There wasn't another island with heavy-timbered buildings on it within fifty miles of Haft's east coast. If the storm had driven the makeshift raft—and it must have done so—it was a wonder that the castaway had the strength to cling to a flat wooden platform for so long in the worst weather to flail the Inner Sea in a generation.
“Help, I've got a castaway!” He climbed the sloped wall with long, supple steps. Garric had pulled a full-grown sheep from a bog and carried it up a steep bank on his shoulders. This old woman was nothing by comparison.
Garric had done most of the jobs in Barca's Hamlet at one time or another. He and Sharina would own the inn together someday—their father, Reise, had made that clear. Garric didn't know that he wanted to be an innkeeper, though, and as for Sharina—who knew what Sharina wanted? The way their mother, Lora, treated her, Sharina was too good for anything on this earth!
Reise didn't seem to care whether or not his children kept the inn when he was gone. It was his duty to teach them to run the property he left them; what they did with their lives after he gave them that start was no concern of his.
Reise or-Laver never did less than his duty. He was an educated man who'd come from the royal capital of Valles on Ornifal to become a clerk in the court of Count Niard in Carcosa here on the great island of Haft. When Niard and Countess Tera died during the riots seventeen years before, Reise came to Barca's Hamlet with two infants and his wife, Lora, a local girl who'd gone to Carcosa to serve in the count's palace. The folk of Barca's Hamlet still treated Reise as a foreigner, but he'd bought the run-down inn and made it into a paying proposition.
Reise had provided for his children and personally taught them literature and mathematics, not just the ability to read
their names and count on their fingers. He worked without complaint and paid his debts without whining. Everybody in Barca's Hamlet respected him—
But Reise was a pinched, angry man whom no one really liked; not even his own son.
The ordinary houses of Barca's Hamlet were simple ones—two or three rooms below a half-loft, with a shed and perhaps a summer kitchen in the yard outside. Their walls were made of wicker woven around vertical posts and chinked with clay and moss, then plastered over for waterproofing. The roofs were steeply thatched, and the fireplace chimney might be either stone, brick, or—for the poorer folk—sticks and clay with a constant hazard of disastrous fire.
The inn was a centuries' old two-story building, built of tawny yellow brick. Wisteria vines as thick as peach trees climbed the western side; in May they dangled sprays of bell-shaped purple flowers. The enclosed courtyard could hold several coaches at the same time, and there were stalls for twenty horses in the stables on the north side. Garric had never seen more than half of them filled, even at the Sheep Fair, when merchants came to buy wool and drovers purchased the excess of the flock that couldn't winter over for lack of fodder.
The hamlet's other large building was the grain mill next door to the inn. The inn was old; the mill was ancient, a structure built of close-fitting stones during the Old Kingdom. Sluices filled the mill's impoundment pool at high tide; gates then drained the pool into the spillway to drive the wheels whenever the miller chose.
Tidal power was far more certain and controllable than wind or a running stream, because the tide came and went regardless of drought or the whims of the atmosphere; but only the strongest constructions could withstand the rush of spring tides when the sun and moon were in conjunction. No one on Haft in a thousand years had dared to build a similar mill.
“Where am I?” the castaway said. Her voice was so
cracked and thin that Garric only heard the words because he'd rested the woman's head on his shoulder to keep it from dangling as he carried her.
The back door of the inn opened. Reise stood there with a lighted hemlock stem soaked in fat to give a hasty yellow illumination.
“You're in Barca's Hamlet,” Garric said. “We'll have you in bed in a moment, mistress. And some milk with a whipped egg.”
“But where's Barca's Hamlet?” the woman whispered. “Am I on Yole?”
Reise threw the door fully open and stepped aside. Lora was in the central corridor, and Sharina leaned over the balustrade to see what was happening.
“Yole?” said Garric. “What's Yole?”
“Yole?” his father repeated in a questioning tone. “Yole sank into the sea a thousand years ago!”

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