Lord of the Isles (56 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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C
ashel leaned over the
Golden Dragon'
s bow railing, looking down into the phosphorescent spume that rolled past. A sailor near the mast played a lute whose neck was kinked back in a right angle; several of his fellows sat at his feet, their torsos swaying in time with the music.
“I love your stars,” Mellie said, lying on the rail beside Cashel with her fingers laced into a cushion behind her head. “They're just like you humans—they move and then they come back just the way they were.”
She raised her right leg and extended her foot in line with it as though she was sighting at the waxing moon. “You're always doing the same things, you know,” she said to Cashel with a grin. “Building cities and then tearing them down and killing everybody. Do you suppose it's because you use iron?”
Cashel looked at the sprite and tried not to frown. He was never sure when she was joking. He wasn't sure that she ever joked the way people did.
The breeze was light and visibility good, but the ship proceeded with only two brails of the mainsail clewed down from the yard because the captain believed Erdin was just over the horizon. Navigation out of sight of land was more of an art than a science. An error of a hundred miles was possible, especially on this passage that the crew had never made before. A far smaller mistake could run the
Golden Dragon
onto
the shore of Sandrakkan if the captain clapped on sail in darkness.
“Iron's good for a lot of things,” Cashel said, looking into the water again. “I like the feel of hand-rubbed wood, sure, but for a wagon tire or a plow blade there's nothing like iron.”
A Highlander played a bamboo flute from the stern gallery where the skiff swung in davits. He wasn't playing the same tune as the lutist—or any tune at all, it seemed to Cashel—but despite that, the instruments managed to create between them a melody that suited the sea very well.
The sigh of waves passing the hull stilled as Cashel peered into them. It was as though the water had vanished and the vessel floated on air. A fish glowing with its own rosy light swam beneath them. It was thirty feet long and had a simple tailfin, not the flaring tail of the fish Cashel was familiar with.
“What's that?” he said in surprise.
“Umm?” Mellie said, rolling onto her stomach and sticking her head over the railing to look down.
The fish vanished into the immensity of the vanished sea. People danced around an altar on a hillside, executing complicated steps and countersteps. The figures were tiny, but Cashel saw every detail of their features and dress. Their faces were pinched-looking, as though they danced with fear rather than joy.
“Oh, they're worried about their harvest,” Mellie said. She cocked her face up toward Cashel with the first frown he'd seen from her. She added, “You should keep away from them, Cashel. They're nobody's friends though they like to pretend they are.”
Cashel stared downward. Was he seeing the bottom? The lookout on the mast head didn't seem to notice anything wrong with the sea.
“Who
are
they?” Cashel said. The hillside had passed under the keel, dancers and all. He couldn't understand what he was seeing.
“Oh look!” Mellie said, pointing. She drummed her legs
up and down in excitement. “It's your friend Garric, Cashel! Oh, the nymphs have got him!”
She giggled at Cashel. “He should have known better,” she said. “He's nice enough as humans go, but he isn't strong the way you are.”
“Garric?” said Cashel, craning his torso over the railing. “What's he—”
It
was
Garric, looking just as he had when Cashel last saw his friend in Carcosa. Garric stood in a great courtyard surrounded by merry girls, turning his head from side to side with an anguished expression.
“What's he doing under the sea?” Cashel said, finishing his question after the moment's pause.
“The nymphs caught him,” Mellie repeated in a patient voice. “Why ever did he go to them, do you suppose? They'll never let him go.”
The
Golden Dragon
's square teak bow slid onward. Cashel had to lean still farther outward to see the courtyard. “Can't we help him?” he asked desperately.
“Well, of course you can,” Mellie said. She hopped from the railing and danced monkeylike up Cashel's mighty arm. “Just jump over the side.”
She pointed.
With no more hesitation than he would have showed if a seawolf came out of the surf to attack his flock, Cashel raised his right foot to the ship's rail and went over the side in a clean dive. He didn't feel the water as the
Golden Dragon
vanished into the sky above him.
B
lue-Hair said “Oh!” in surprise. The nymphs looked at something behind Garric. He turned and saw Cashel walk trough one of the many doorways onto the courtyard.
There was a tiny girl on his shoulder, perfectly formed and quite normal except for her size and hair of an inhumanly red color.
“Cashel!” he said. “What are you doing here? And what's that on your shoulder?”
The nymphs drifted closer to Garric. Blue-Hair placed herself between Garric and the newcomers. She and her sisters seemed apprehensive but determined.
Cashel glanced at his shoulder. “Oh, this is Mellie,” he said. “I didn't think you could see her. I guess I'm dreaming.”
“You've got to let him go, Cyane,” said Mellie to the blue-haired nymph.
“Garric's ours!” Blue-Hair insisted. “You have one of your own, Mellie! Why are you coming here?”
Cashel seemed to ignore the women's argument. “Mellie says we can help you leave,” he said to Garric. “Though if this is a dream, I don't know. Have you been keeping well?”
“Well enough,” Garric said. “It's all pretty confused.”
He laughed and added, “It was confused before now. I think I must be dreaming too, but I'd like to wake up.”
It was good to see Cashel again. He projected a sense of solidity that nothing in this place and perhaps nothing else in the waking world could match. You could always trust Cashel not to do the wrong thing even if there might be many right things that he didn't bother himself about.
“Cashel wants you to turn his friend loose,” said the tiny girl on Cashel's shoulder. “He's even stronger than you think. You have to do what he says, Cyane, or …”
She fluttered her little hands in a gesture that was somehow as threatening as the way a storm surge humps as it approaches the shore.
“I dreamed I dived over the side of the ship,” Cashel said. He frowned, trying to organize the details of his memory. “But there wasn't any water. I just walked through the door.”
“I was following a path but I went off it and got lost,” Garric said. “I found this—”
He looked at the sword and wondered again if he ought to belt it around his waist.
“—but I wasn't looking for it. At least I don't think I was.”
He frowned too.
“It's not fair!” the nymphs chorused. Green-Hair looked ready to cry with the frustration of having her wishes balked.
“Show Cashel's friend the way out,” Mellie said with cruel nonchalance, “or Cashel will make a way for him. You know he will.”
“I met Mellie on the way to Carcosa,” Cashel said vaguely. “I didn't say anything then because I didn't think you could see her. I guess you only see her in dreams?”
Garric shrugged. He buckled the sword belt. There were five sets of tongue holes; the set tighter than those the previous owner had normally used felt most comfortable on Garric.
“Not fair,” Green-Hair whimpered as she took Garric by the hand and tugged gently. He hesitated, looking from the nymph to Cashel.
“Go along with Prasina,” Mellie said. Garric heard her voice as clearly as if she'd been the size of a normal woman. “And you should be more careful about what you get yourself into. My Cashel may not be around to help you the next time!”
She put her hands on her hips, leaned forward, and stuck her tongue out at Garric.
“Mellie!” Cashel said in embarrassment. The girl burst into laughter and patted his earlobe with one hand while waving to Garric with the other.
Prasina tugged again. Her sisters had gone somewhere while Garric wasn't looking. He followed the green-haired nymph toward one of the archways.
“Goodbye, Cashel!” he called over his shoulder. “Good to see you again, even this way.”
Whatever way that was …
Prasina stopped at the archway. “This will take you back,
Garric,” she said. “The way you came is blocked, but this is shorter anyway.”
He smiled awkwardly at the nymph. Cashel and his tiny friend were no longer in the courtyard. Garric was afraid to say anything in case it meant he wouldn't get free after all, so he ducked into the corridor beyond.
“Goodbye, Garric!” a nymph's voice called behind him. “Don't get off the path!”
The corridor was paneled in yellow pine with many knots. The way grew darker with each step Garric took, but patches of fungus on the wood gave off a pale light to which his eyes adapted after a time. Until then he kept his right fingertips against the wall.
He jogged, holding his scabbard with his left hand to keep it from flopping as he moved. It felt natural to do that, instinctive even, though he supposed it was a habit Carus had had to learn a thousand years before.
A hundred yards from the entrance, another corridor crossed the one Garric was following. There were lights burning in the branch to the right; he heard cheerful music coming from that direction.
There was no chance at all that Garric would leave the path he was on this time. If he saw his sister being murdered down another corridor, he'd treat it as an illusion and keep on going.
Keep on going and pray to the Shepherd that he was right.
He came to a place where part of the ceiling had fallen in; he clambered over the debris. A bronze helmet and the gold hilt of a sword lay among the masonry, but the blade and the bones of the man who'd carried it had rotted away in long ages past.
A slime of glowing fungus now covered walls of bare stone. Garric jumped a crack in the floor several feet wide; the air that puffed up from it was hot and sulfurous. The corridor was by now a tunnel through living rock. At one point a metal pipe crossed from one wall to the other. It was cold and hummed when he touched it.
Garric saw light ahead of him. He sucked in his lips and
continued at his previous deliberate pace instead of breaking into a dead run. Something small squealed and crunched beneath his callused foot; it felt like bare bones without a sheath of muscles and fur.
The tunnel ended in a circular room hundreds of feet across. The ceiling was a harsh white blaze. Garric couldn't guess how high it was, but the light itself was a pressure on his shoulders.
He stopped and released the scabbard. His palm ached; he hadn't realized how hard he'd been holding the weapon.
Machinery whose purpose Garric couldn't imagine was bolted to the floor. Most of it had slumped into piles of rust from which poked tubes of a crystalline substance, some of them broken.
The exit was a quarter of the way around the circle. Garric let out a deep breath. Until he saw the rectangular opening in the wall he'd feared that there was no way out of his nightmare after all. He strode to the exit, letting the sword swing and feeling almost jaunty.
The passage grew larger beyond the opening, but it was nearly blocked by the skeleton of the giant who'd crawled as far as he could before he stuck. His right hand was extended: the finger bones lay in the tunnel just short of the circular room.
Garric squeezed past the skull, four feet across through the temples. There was a single eyesocket where the bridge of a man's nose would be. Garric didn't know whether that was a deformity or the way all the creature's kin were born. The giant's bones were relatively heavier than those of a human.
The rib cage was still articulated. Spiders the size of Garric's palm hung from webs marked with a Z-pattern of silk. The creatures scurried to hiding places among the spiky processes of the spine.
The spiders' hairy bodies were dirty yellow; their eight eyes glittered in the light seeping past Garric and the skull behind him. He pushed through the webs, pretending they
were thin cloth, pretending that he wasn't afraid of fat yellow bodies dropping on his neck in the darkness.
This was the way out of his nightmare. He was going back to his friends. He was going home, and fear wasn't going to stop him.
The passage kinked. It was pitch dark. Garric felt his way over a pelvis more massive than an elephant's. He stepped down, his right hand on a great thighbone, and there was no floor beneath his feet.
Garric shouted. He clutched at the bone but his fingers slipped from the smooth surface. He dropped through darkness, flexing his legs by reflex. Hitting the stone surface was as great a shock as the fact of it being ten feet below where he'd expected it, but he landed on his feet.
He stood in the center of the circle Tenoctris had drawn on the tomb floor. The candle on the empty shelf had fallen over but still burned in a pool of wax. The door was open, and the night was dark outside.
Tenoctris lay on the floor unconscious, and of Liane there was no sign.

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