Lord of the Isles (26 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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“
W
ho did it?” Garric demanded, hearing in his voice a barely suppressed echo of King Carus speaking in a tone that
would
be obeyed. “Who sent the liches against us, Benlo?”
The drover sat on an upturned feed trough beside the stables, working the tongue of his belt in and out of its loop as a way to occupy his hands. Garric stood in front of him; Cashel stood behind, looking more like a bank of storm clouds than anything human.
The inn yard glittered with torches, lanterns, and an occasional candle that was likely to gutter out in the breeze. Folk bent close to dead liches to be sure of what they were seeing, then rose with exclamations of horror and disgust. A wounded guard was moaning; men talked in high, nervous voices about what had happened and what might easily have happened.
“I don't know,” Benlo said. His tone wavered between anger and genuine concern. He glanced past Garric in momentary appraisal.
“Your guards want to know the truth more than they want to prevent us from forcing the truth from you,” Garric said in a low, dangerous voice. “The survivors do, I mean.”
Cashel grunted. Garric had never seen his friend so angry before. As soon as he was sure Ilna and Garric were all right, Cashel had walked Benlo to this seat out of the immediate way. When the drover tried to protest, Cashel had lifted his feet off the ground with the strength of the arm that didn't hold his quarterstaff.
“Why were you searching for Garric?” Tenoctris asked. She sat cross-legged in front of the drover with a blade of grass in her hand, as though she were a child playing in the
dust. If Garric squinted in just the right way, he saw faint trails of blue hanging in the air after the grassblade flicked through it.
“I can't answer that,” Benlo said. His voice hardened, “No, I can't. All I know is that I was asked to follow a certain trail and to bring back what lay at the end of it if I could. I've broken no laws. I've done no harm and I mean no harm.”
He pointed his hand imperiously, index and middle fingers extended together, in the direction of the road to Barca's Hamlet. “Go on back to your sheep pasture, boy,” he said, “if that's what you want to do. But I didn't bring the liches on you and nothing you do to me will make them leave you alone. I wouldn't even have known what to call them if your friend here—”
He nodded toward Tenoctris.
“—hadn't told me.”
Garric remembered the fight as a spectator, though it had been his body slashing liches down like ripe grain. He'd moved fast and struck with lethal assurance, though part of him was aware that the sword's style and balance made it inferior to any blade he'd have chosen for himself. The stool was both weapon and defense; he'd fought liches before and struck for their skulls with either hand, never making a false motion.
He'd been cut once, across the back of the right calf by a lich that one of Benlo's guards had put down without killing. Garric remembered kicking and being surprised when his bare heel instead of a hobnailed bootsole crunched hard against jelly-coated bone. He'd stabbed down then without bothering to look at the target. His sword rasped through the thin bones of the nasal cavity and into the vault that would have contained the brain of a living being.
With only that fractional delay, Garric had proceeded to dispatch the liches still on their feet. He'd seen it all, he remembered it all; but it hadn't been Garric or-Reise fighting.
He'd never held a sword in his hand till Benlo gave him one to carry.
He touched his tunic where the medallion of King Carus hung. He said, “Who sent you to find me?”
Benlo shook his head. He'd relaxed slightly, aware by now that the youths wouldn't harm him without reason and apparently confident that there was no reason why they should.
“I don't know,” he said. His eyes moved past Garric again, this time in the direction of his daughter. Liane stood alone but just within earshot, staring at her father with a face as still as marble.
Benlo winced with embarrassment but he continued, “I was given funds by a banker in Erdin with instructions to follow a particular trail. The banker certainly didn't know what I'd find at the end of it, and I doubt his principal—I have no idea who the principal was—knew either. Otherwise I'd have been told more.”
While Tenoctris murmured a spell, Liane had dressed the cut on Garric's leg. She said her teachers in Valles had been a renounced order of Daughters of the Lady; they'd taught their charges the practical skills of nursing as well as deportment and literature. The bandaged calf stung but even that was barely noticeable if Garric kept his weight off the leg.
“What kind of trail?” Cashel growled. He picked up a handful of straw and began wiping his staff clean of clinging matter. Garric knew Cashel had given the warning, but he had no recollection of what his friend had been doing during the fight.
Ilna stood beside Garric, her eyes on Benlo's daughter rather than the drover himself. She held a rope halter, running the fall in and out of the loop as she measured Liane's throat.
“It's a …” Benlo said. He fluttered his hands as though trying to churn words out of the air. “It has to do with a form of art. I can't explain it to you because you don't have enough knowledge to understand.”
“You can't explain it,” Tenoctris said with more of an edge than Garric had ever expected to hear in the old
woman's voice, “because you're too pig ignorant yourself to understand the forces you're putting in motion.”
“What?” said Benlo. Cashel pushed down on his shoulder.
Tenoctris turned to look up at Garric, smiling faintly. Perhaps she'd surprised herself with her tone. “This man certainly isn't responsible for the attack, and he's telling the truth about the other things as well. He's performing a task for someone he doesn't know, and facing opponents he doesn't know either.”
Tenoctris looked coldly at Benlo and said, “In simple words, he's a fool.”
She put a hand on the ground to rise. Garric reached out to help but froze when pain shot through the muscles of his back and chest. The battle hadn't been harder on his body than the rural labor that had been his whole previous life, but fighting used muscles in different fashions. They'd felt the strain and were letting him know it.
Liane bent over Tenoctris and supported the older woman as she stiffly got to her feet. Liane's face still held no emotion.
Benlo glowered and said, “Just who is this, Master Garric? You told me she was a castaway. Is she really your crazy aunt?”
“Tenoctris is a castaway,” Garric said. “More important, she's someone I trust.”
He didn't know how he felt about Benlo. In effect the fellow seemed to be exactly what he'd claimed in Barca's Hamlet: a drover carrying out an assignment for a backer on Sandrakkan. Benlo had concealed the fact that Garric, not a flock of sheep, was his real object; but he'd paid fair money for the sheep and fair money for Garric's presence as well.
Liane stepped away from Tenoctris. She looked at Garric, and for the first time her eyes were troubled.
“Liane?” the drover said. He stood, reaching toward his daughter. She edged back as though she hadn't seen the gesture. Cashel grunted but didn't thrust Benlo down on the trough the way Garric thought he might.
“Look …” Benlo said. He fumbled in his sleeve for a
handkerchief that wasn't there. The sudden attack had drawn him from bed in a pleated linen nightdress. Unlike his daughter, he hadn't snatched up a cloak as well before he ran outdoors.
“I don't know what's going on, I admit that,” Benlo continued. “I don't like these attacks any better than you do. When we get to Carcosa I'll be able to learn. I
will
learn, I promise.”
Tenoctris watched Benlo without expression. Garric rubbed his forehead with both hands. His fingers were stiff and tingly, on the verge of cramping from their grip on his weapons in the recent fight. He'd hammered the sword into a twisted bar with less remaining edge than a plowshare, and the oak stool was in splinters.
He didn't know what to think. He didn't know anything at all.
Tenoctris began to question Benlo. Her words lost form and became a buzzing in Garric's exhausted mind.
“I'm going back to bed,” he said. “I need sleep if I'm going to be fit to walk in the morning.”
Garric shambled toward the inn. He was so exhausted in the letdown after the battle that he knew he'd be able to sleep despite all that had happened.
And he knew that he'd have company in his dreams.
“
Y
ou should get some sleep too,” Mellie said. She lay on her back on Cashel's knee and looked up at him with a worried expression, her fingers laced behind her neck.
“I'll be all right,” Cashel said. “The flock's still nervous. They'll settle down better if they know I'm up and watching.”
Cashel sat on the wagon tongue, his face toward the paddock. He ran his right hand up and down the quarterstaff. He'd combed loose a handful of lanolin-rich wool from the flock, mixed in a pinch of sand, and used the wad as a gentle abrasive to smooth out the nicks and splinters from the fight.
When he reached Carcosa—or if he met a tinker at the next halt—he'd replace the staff's ferrules. One had a deep cut across it from when Cashel rammed through the sword and arm of the attacking lich; the other iron cap was battered out of shape on the skull of the creature slashing at Ilna when the first blow landed. One stroke with Cashel's full strength would have been enough. The sixth time he hit the creature, he stirred only dust because the bones had been utterly pulverized.
“Still, you should sleep,” the sprite said. “I'll warn you if there's danger, you know.”
Cashel smiled. It had only been a few days, but he'd already gotten used to talking to a beautiful naked woman the size of his finger. “I'll be all right,” he repeated. “I need to calm down too; and my staff needs work.”
One cut in the wood was fairly deep, but Cashel was sure he could buff it into nothing worse than a blemish. He couldn't imagine replacing the quarterstaff. He'd been nine years old the day he took the perfect, straight-grained branch as his price for felling the hickory for Taron, its owner. Cashel had seasoned the wood himself, shaped it, and buffed it to a wax-smooth finish. Only the ferrules had been stranger's work, and they'd been replaced three times already during the time he'd used the staff.
Mellie raised one slim leg and sighted along it toward the north star, then giggled. “Benlo is strong, isn't he?” she said.
Cashel frowned, though he continued to rub the wood with long, even strokes. “Benlo?” he repeated. “I wouldn't have said that, no.”
Raid, the drover's chief guard, was built like an oak stump and looked about as tough. Sarhad, another of the guards, might well have been even stronger but a lich's axe had cleft
him from shoulder to midchest. Benlo, though—
Mellie giggled again and did a backflip onto her feet. “Not strong compared to
you
, silly!” she said. “But pretty strong.”
Mellie glanced toward the inn building. A puff of breeze fluffed her radiant hair; she was so utterly
real
that Cashel couldn't believe other folks didn't see her just as he did.
“It was people like Benlo who twisted the path from this plane to mine,” she said. She didn't put any particular emotional weight on the words; but then, she'd sounded much the same when she discussed the possibility of the vixen tearing its way into the fencepost and eating her.
Cashel's mind worked over Mellie's words. When she said “strong” she meant a powerful wizard. He didn't doubt that; he'd seen Benlo raise the glamour to point out Garric.
“Maybe they'll open it this time,” he said, speaking to be companionable.
Mellie wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out at him. “If you drop an egg on the ground,” she said tartly, “it breaks. If you drop it again, do the pieces fly together again?”
“I usually think before I speak,” Cashel said. That was half true; the whole truth was that he usually thought instead of speaking. “Sorry, Mellie.”
She hopped into a handstand, scissoring her legs, and then lifted one arm to support herself entirely on the other. During the midwinter festivities some men in the borough danced and tumbled with curved ram's horns strapped to their feet; Garric was pretty good at it himself. The sprite's acrobatics were like nothing Cashel had ever seen before, though.
“I'd open the path for you if I could, Mellie,” he said awkwardly. He held the quarterstaff out at arm's length and rotated it slowly, letting the gleam of starlight show him where he needed to work more on the polish.
A quarterstaff was a dynamic weapon; it didn't have a point or edge to do the wielder's work for him. The hickory had to slip like glass through Cashel's hands; he couldn't afford to have his palm catch on a rough spot when Garric's life or Ilna's might depend on it.
Their lives and now maybe Mellie's.
“Cashel?” the sprite said, on her back again and watching him. “Where are you going to go after we reach Carcosa? Do you plan to stay with Benlo?”
“No,” Cashel said. “No, not with him. And not back to Barca's Hamlet either.”
He rubbed the hickory with a second handful of wool, this time without adding sand. He hoped never to replace the quarterstaff. It was more than a tool: it was the only real link Cashel would keep with what had been his whole existence all the years till now.
“Away, that's all I meant to do,” he continued. He thought of mentioning Sharina, then decided against it. Mellie was easy to talk to—the first time Cashel had felt that way about another person; the sprite
wasn't
a person, of course—but he really didn't know what to say. “Is there somewhere you want to go?”
“The things I've seen on your plane since the path closed,” Mellie said, “have mostly involved cats and foxes. I've never taken a sea voyage because of the rats. If I'm traveling with a friend like you, well, it's all new. New since a thousand years, at least.”
“I'll try to keep you safe, Mellie,” Cashel said. He resumed polishing his quarterstaff. It had to slip like glass …

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