Lord of the Isles (21 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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W
hen Garric entered the common room he found his father standing at the bar, transferring the guests' accounts from tablets to a sheet of paper made from linen rags. There was still enough light through the west window to throw the waxed boards into shadowed relief, and the evening trade hadn't yet begun.
Only charges amounting to more than a silver anchor rated the formality of a paper tally, but Garric knew the total for Benlo, his daughter, his guards, and his animals would be well above that figure. The past week had been a uniquely profitable one for the borough in general and the inn in particular.
Reise turned when the door opened. He looked at Garric with inquiry.
“Ah, Father,” the boy said. “I thought that, well, things will be busy in the morning. So I ought to say goodbye today while it's, ah, quiet.”
Reise nodded approval. “You've always shown foresight,” he said. “In addition to your other virtues, of course.”
He looked down at the goose quill in his hand. He wiped the nib between thumb and forefinger so that the ink wouldn't dry and clog it, then met Garric's eyes again and continued, “We none of us know what the future will bring; in that sense tomorrow is no different from any other day. I expect you'll return here with a tidy sum in silver and experience of the
sort a young man with coins in his pocket can gain in a city.”
Reise smiled with the left side of his face, scarcely more than a nervous tic. “I expect you to be prudent,” he said. “But I'm not a fool, and you're not a charred old stick like your father. Have fun, but don't get in over your head.”
“Ah, I should be back in ten days,” Garric said. “I'll probably turn right around, but unless Tenoctris stays in Carcosa I'll still be traveling at her pace.”
He glanced at the sheet of accounts. Reise's handwriting was the best sort of professional script: each letter as clear as those of a book page, but without the embellishments and flourishes that concealed meaning in the name of beauty. Garric wrote as well as anyone else in the hamlet, but he knew that he'd never equal his father's elegant clarity.
“Yes, as I say, the future will be whatever it chooses to be,” Reise said.
He set the pen down on the edge of the bar, tented his hands, and resumed, “While I have no doubt of your ability to take care of yourself, Garric … and no illusions about
my
ability to take care of anything, least of all another human being. Still and all, you might at some point find yourself in need of some help that I could give you. I'll give you any help within my ability.”
Reise deliberately turned, picked up the pen in one hand, and with the other tilted a wax tablet better to the light. He dipped the nib again in his pot of oak-gall ink.
“Ah, thank you,” Garric said to his father's back. “I figure, you know … I'll be back in ten days.”
He started for the stairs, planning to decide which clothing to carry. Lora came to the open door of the kitchen and said, “Garric? Will you come in here? I have a few things to say to you.”
Garric felt his guts tense. His father didn't look up from his accounts. “Yes, Mother,” Garric said.
Lora held the door for Garric and closed it behind .him. They were alone in the kitchen: Lora could cook for Benlo and his entourage without additional help.
Garric stopped in the middle of the room and crossed his hands behind his back because he didn't know what else to do with them. Lora faced him. She looked like a bitter, angry doll.
“I've always loved you, Garric,” she said. “No mother ever loved a child more!”
Her harsh, defensive voice proved that in her heart Lora knew as well as Garric did that she was lying. To the extent that his mother had ever cared for any person beyond herself, that person was Sharina.
The door onto the courtyard opened. Ilna stepped into the kitchen. “I came to get the—” she began.
“It can wait!” Lora shouted. “I suppose because you didn't have a mother, nobody taught you to knock before coming through a door, is that it? I'm having a discussion with my son!”
Garric had turned his head when the door opened beside him. He saw Ilna's face go stiff in an expression that could have broken stones. Lora was a person who blurted out anything she pleased when she was angry. She seemed to think that other people forgot her words because she herself did. Ilna, and especially Ilna's anger, was of a very different sort.
The girl nodded with cold politeness and backed out of the kitchen, closing the door behind her. The panel didn't bang against the jamb. There was nothing hot or fleeting about Ilna's rage.
“You think your mother's an old fool who has nothing to say that you need to hear,” Lora said in a wholly different voice from the one with which she'd started the conversation. “Well, I'm old, all right. I don't need you to tell me that when I've got a mirror. But I know things about women, boy; and men too, even after all these years buried here.”
It struck Garric, and not for the first time, that his mother wasn't a fool. She couldn't have done as much harm as she had if she'd been stupid.
“Mother,” he muttered, looking at water stains on the plaster behind Lora, “I'll be back in ten days. Two weeks at the
outside. I'm just driving some sheep to Carcosa.”
Lora sniffed. “As if you'll come back here after you've seen a city,” she said. “As if anybody with sense would. And that girl Liane has her eye on you besides.”
“Mother!” Garric said. He was ready to crawl under the table in embarrassment.
“Well, that's what I want to tell you about, boy,” Lora continued. “Remember that you're in charge when you're dealing with that girl or any girl. Don't let their airs or their looks or the clothes they wear put you off. Don't whine, don't beg. Let them know that they have to come to you.”
She looked Garric up and down in cold appraisal, the way he might have judged the lines of a sheep. He wanted to sink into the stone floor. She nodded approval.
“They'll come,” she said. “Never fear that, boy. They'll come in droves.”
“I don't
want
droves of women!” Garric said. “Mother, I'm just driving sheep to Carcosa! And anyway—”
He heard his voice catch and drop into a husky lower register.
“—Liane's a fine lady. She wouldn't be interested in me.”
Lora shook her head in wonder and disgust. “Oh, I've raised a paragon, I have,” she said. “The sort of man a good girl dreams about and maybe one in a thousand might find.”
She stepped closer to Garric and lifted his chin with two fingers, forcing him to meet her eyes. “Listen, boy,” she said. “Always remember this: a lady is a woman first.”
It was odd to hear Lora speaking in a tone of authority, so different from the shrill boastfulness that was as much a part of her person as the careful hairdo.
She put her hand on the latch of the common-room door, but she continued to hold her son with her eyes. “I'm not telling you what to do with this Liane or any of the other fine ladies you'll meet. But I'm telling you to do it on your own terms or you're a fool.”
She pulled the door open and gestured Garric through it in dismissal.
“As great a fool as your father,” Lora added.
T
he last bend of the path to the Archan city kinked to avoid an outcrop of sheer, dense rock too hard for the roots of tree ferns and giant horsetails to seat themselves. Because there was no vegetation in the way, Sharina could see the ancient buildings as the spell's faint glow merged with the smooth pink stone.
A man shouted in hoarse fear from the undergrowth to the right of the path. Some of the Archai must have been in the forest, perhaps trying to hide from the disaster they knew was overtaking their island. Sailors looking for food found themselves prey for the sword-sharp limbs of monsters undreamed.
Sharina had thought—she'd hoped, she'd prayed—that the wizard's uncontrolled magic would reach its limits short of the city; that the walls when she and Nonnus gained them would be a barrier to their chitinous builders. Meder was a very powerful wizard, just as he'd claimed.
The fool
!
“I should have brought my chest,” Meder said in a breathless wail. “I can save us but I need my tools!”
“You fool!” Asera screamed. “You've killed us,
killed us!
”
Sharina's thigh muscles felt like molten lead. She'd been standing and working all day; climbing the hill twice, this second time at a run, would have been an effort even if she hadn't needed to help Nonnus.
The hermit had more strength in his upper body than most men twice his size, but those muscles had been formed while kneeling to paddle a flimsy boat through the waves of the Outer Sea. His legs were sturdy, but they weren't built for running. Sharina's hand on his upper arm had twice kept him
from falling because of the slippery footing and had transfused him with her youthful stamina.
But it was hard for her too. So hard that she didn't dare think of failure.
At the dogleg Sharina glanced over her shoulder. She hadn't meant to look back, but an instinctive need to know the worst drew her eyes. The two nobles were twenty feet behind. Asera had thrown off her beige robe and ran in a shift of white silk that the sun now painted red. Meder held his athame in one hand and flailed his left arm sideways for balance as though he were trying to swim through the humid air.
Four of the Blood Eagles struggled up the slope behind the nobles, turning frequently to fight a desperate rearguard action. Wainer carried a spear that he must have taken from one of his fallen men; both the blade and the conical metal buttcap were smeared with purple blood.
The Archai filled the pathway below in a straggling mass; a few filtered through the forest to head off the fleeing humans. A pair of six-limbed monsters came out of the trees with tiny, mincing strides to get between the soldiers and the nobles while Wainer and his men were focused on the Archai behind them.
Sharina screamed, “Wainer!” She missed her footing and slipped to one knee.
“Come!” Nonnus said in a voice like waves breaking. “Mind your own affairs!”
Men in and around the Archan city gaped at what they saw running toward them up the harbor path. Shouts echoing faintly from within the walls indicated that creatures there were already beginning to quiver back to life. Many of the sailors had wooden spears for hunting salamanders; all of them carried knives. They could clear at least one building for defense before the Archai within reached their full lethal vitality … .
Sharina and Nonnus rounded the last corner. The gneiss path straightened for the last hundred feet of its course to the city's tall gateway.
Three Archai stepped out of the trees in front of them. Their saw-edged forelimbs were raised like those of a preying mantis about to pounce.
Sharina was half a step ahead of the hermit because she'd been on the inside when they turned the corner. She didn't need to think: she lengthened her stride and brought the hand axe down in an overhead chop as though she were splitting a billet of firewood.
The iron blade was dull, but the girl's strength and desperation buried it to the socket in the creature's triangular skull. Purple blood spurted. It had an acid odor.
Sharina's momentum slammed her into the creature she'd just killed. The segmented chest plates had some give to them, like boiled leather. The Archa's limbs spasmed; the fingerlike cilia brushed like butterfly wings while the saws raked Sharina's back. The Archa toppled to the side of the path, almost wrenching the deep-sunk axe from her hand.
Nonnus thrust an Archa just below where the narrow neck joined the torso. The chitin broke in a fine star pattern where the steel entered. He used the javelin's barbs to jerk the creature sideways like a gigged frog, blocking with its thrashing body the third Archa's attack.
The Pewle knife was in Nonnus' left hand. He brought it up in a stroke that slashed a hand's breadth deep through the third creature's chest. Tough chitin parted like gauze to either side of the blade.
Nonnus vaulted the tangled, twitching bodies, clearing his spearhead in the same graceful motion. He and Sharina ran on, her left hand touching his shoulder.
The cold trickle down her back was blood, not sweat.
I
lna walked out of the millhouse carrying two bundles, neither of them very large, on a short staff which she balanced on her shoulder as she locked the door. The door and latch were more recent by nearly a millennium than the stone fabric of the building, but they were sturdy pieces in their own right.
Katchin the Miller was in the street in front of the inn, talking with Benlo. Liane os-Benlo stood with her back to the men. Her eyes were lifted as though she were scrutinizing the pattern of cirrus clouds to the north, making silently clear to the world that speaking to her would be an undesired intrusion.
Two of Benlo's guards were present; while they weren't precisely relaxed, nothing in their bearing suggested that they expected a sudden danger to appear. Their four fellows were with Reise in the courtyard, adjusting the packs and saddles of the animals.
A number of villagers watched nearby, but for the most part the varied excitement of the past week had jaded Barca's Hamlet to the point that a drover leaving town with a flock was no longer enough to draw folk away from their normal occupations. Mistress Kirruri noticed Ilna locking her door and nudged her neighbor; the two of them whispered, viewing Ilna out of the corner of their eyes.
The men didn't pay any attention to Ilna as she walked toward them. Katchin was describing his plan to turn Barca's Hamlet into a port rivaling Carcosa. It was an utterly ludicrous notion even if he found a backer with unlimited wealth: storms across the Inner Sea almost invariably came from due
east, making east-coast ports impossible to enter if they provided real shelter in bad weather.
Benlo “listened” with a fixed expression. His mind was clearly on matters that had nothing to do with Katchin; grim matters, if Ilna was any judge of a man's face.
Cashel and Garric were bringing the flock down from the corral in a slow line. The tail of it, where Garric gently chivied the complaining ewes, was still visible on the slope. Cashel at the head hadn't yet appeared around the bend at the hamlet's north end.
“Good day, Uncle Katchin!” Ilna said, loudly enough to break into even the miller's self-absorbed monologue. “Since you're my nearest relative remaining in the hamlet, I'm giving you this for safekeeping.”
She held out the four-pin key. When Katchin goggled at her, she took his hand firmly in hers, turned it palm-up, and pressed the key into it.
“In case of emergency, of course,” she went on, holding him with her eyes. “I don't expect to find mine and my brother's goods ransacked in our absence.”
“What are you talking about, girl?” Katchin said in growing amazement. “Where would you go? You've never left the borough and you couldn't afford to if you wanted to!”
Ilna untied a corner of one bundle. Within the linen cover was a panel of wool in black, white, and subtly patterned gray shades. “I'm carrying the wall hanging I've just finished to market in Carcosa,” she said. “It'll fetch three times as much there as a peddler who comes to Barca's Hamlet would pay me.”
She glanced toward the north end of the street. The flock wasn't in sight yet but she could hear Cashel calling to the sheep, conditioning them to obey his voice on the road.
“I've never been able to do this before because I had to stay home and take care of my brother,” she said. She'd lowered her voice when she had the undivided attention of
everyone nearby, but her each syllable still rang like a hammer blow. She looked at Liane as she continued, “Boys have absolutely no sense. No sense at all.”
Liane turned to meet Ilna's gaze with one of cool appraisal. She raised an eyebrow minusculely but said nothing.
“These are unsettled times,” Benlo said with a frown. His tone became oily. “I don't think a pretty young girl like you should pick this as her first time to leave home.”
“I'm aware that the times are unsettled,” Ilna said with a cold disdain that anyone in Barca's Hamlet would have warned would be her reaction to being patronized by a man. “I saw the lich myself, as you may remember. But I rather think that the problems may leave as suddenly as the strangers who brought them here.”
Katchin moaned in embarrassment, though he'd heard worse from his niece's tongue, and with less justification in his opinion.
Benlo colored. “I had nothing to do with the lich,” he said in a husky voice. He turned as if to look up the street. “Are those boys here with the sheep yet?”
“You're welcome to travel along with us to Carcosa, mistress,” Liane said unexpectedly. “You'll be safe in our company. But have you given thought as to how you'll return to your little home here?”
The women looked at one another. “It's very kind of you to be concerned, mistress,” Ilna said. “I assure you that someone like me who's been raised without your advantages has to think about all aspects of her own welfare—and the welfare of friends who may not have any sense at all.”
She smiled. In her mind she visualized Liane bound with a series of complex knots, screaming as she turned over a slow fire.

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