Servant of the Dragon (43 page)

"Come," said Ilna, but Merota was already scurrying after Chalcus. He looked down the beach to southward.

"There they are," Chalcus said. "Just rounding the headland."

Ilna shaded her eyes with her right hand. The ships were moving with minute, jerky motions. One was still fully visible, while only the curved sternpost of the other showed around the edge of the high cliffs south of the landfall.

"I don't see anyone on deck," Ilna said, wondering if only her ignorance made the vessel's appearance seem so wrong. "And the oars aren't moving."

"Look at the color around the hulls, dear one," said Chalcus. "That's not the sun on waves, you know."

"Ah," said Ilna. "No, it's the shells of the Great Ones. And they're towing the ships."

* * *

Cashel wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. The green light didn't come from any sun, so he couldn't say the sun was hot today; but
he
was hot, he'd tell the world!

A poppy grew, goodness knew how, from a crack in the stony soil. Cashel guessed the petals'd be bright red under normal light, but here they were mostly brown. It was still a treat to see them.

He'd first thought he saw a half dozen dark-skinned men in a circle up ahead, waiting for him. Closer up he could tell they were trees, though the spindly limbs didn't look as big as the gnarled trunks should support. There was a knob right above where the branches sprayed out, too.

"Those trees really do look like people," he said to Krias, just being friendly. Cashel talked to the sheep he was tending also. He wasn't sure they understood him, but the sheep seemed to like being noticed; and he wasn't sure they
didn't
understand, either.

"Well, they ought to," said the ring demon, "since that's what they are. What they were till they didn't hold their tongues when they should've, that is.
That
was a mistake they won't be able to make again!"

Cashel sighed to hear the gusto in the demon's voice. Those fellows—were they women as well as men? Cashel decided he didn't want to know—might have deserved what they got, but it wasn't something you ought to be pleased about. Well, he guessed the world had as much right to have a Krias as it did a Cashel.

There was a flat gleam in the middle of the trees. Cashel didn't want to get his hopes up, but if that was water it'd be welcome indeed. He'd been eating the shaved root of the tree that attacked him. It had an oily richness, but plain water would go down a treat.

Rather than ask about the maybe-water, Cashel said, "Did those fellows get on the wrong side of a wizard, then, Master Krias?"

"That might have happened," the demon replied with a tart smugness that made Cashel think of Sharina's mother Lora; not a woman he or anybody else he knew had ever cared for. "Or it might have been a God, because in the Underworld more things visit than any sheep-boy could imagine. Or it just possibly was a demon who wasn't
always
trapped in a sapphire on a fool's finger, you know."

"Ah," said Cashel. Well, he didn't want to get into the rights and wrongs of a business that'd probably happened longer ago than even Garric had read about. Especially not with Krias doing the telling.

He cleared his throat. "That looks like a pool of water," he said.

"Oh, there's water there, all right," Krias said. "You won't like the taste, but it won't kill you. Getting it out of the middle of the tar it lies on,
that
may kill you."

Cashel stopped a few paces out from the trees. The water shimmered—green with the sky's reflection and pretty awful to look at—in the middle of a greater expanse of tar. That had crusted in a coating of dust, but Cashel knew chances were it was soft underneath and Duzi knew how deep.

He thought for a moment, then said, "Master Krias? Are the trees going to attack if I go near them?"

"Worried, sheep-boy?"

"No," Cashel said truthfully. "But I like to know what's going on before I get into it."

Krias sniffed. "Them? No, they won't attack anybody. Least of all somebody wearing me."

"I'm glad to hear that," Cashel said, walking to the edge of the tar. The pool of rainwater was still a long double pace, left heel to left heel, beyond where he stood.

Cashel thought he'd heard one of trees sigh as he passed through them, but that could've been imagination. They weren't a familiar kind, but their spines and horny bark were a lot like what he'd seen in dry country elsewhere.

The light was fading; it'd be pitch dark soon. There wasn't a moon down here any more than there was a sun, nor was there anything that'd pass for moonlight.

"It's going to get cold tonight, I shouldn't wonder," Cashel said as he unreeved the strap that bound his water bottle to his belt. Even empty it was a sturdy piece of stoneware, sealed with a pale cream glaze. He uncorked it.

"So build a fire!" Krias said. "And if you've forgotten how since last night, I'll light it for you. Just break off some branches."

Cashel wound the strap around one end of the quarterstaff. He looked at the nearest trees. They were ugly things for a fact.

"I don't guess I'll do that," he said. "I've been cold often enough before."

Cashel backed a little from the edge of the tar and lay flat. He moved with cautious deliberation, as he always did unless he saw a need for haste. Cashel saw the need for haste so rarely that many folk assumed he
couldn't
move fast. Those who presumed on such a belief often had broken bones or worse to pay them for their mistake.

He slid his staff forward and held the mouth of the water bottle under the surface of the shallow pool. He didn't need Krias to tell him it'd taste awful, but it had been a hot day and there was no reason to expect a change tomorrow.

"You could burn chunks of dried tar, I suppose," Krias muttered. "You'd want to sleep upwind, but I guess you'd do that anyhow. Of course if you're too sensitive to use the dead twigs lying around for kindling, you'll never get the asphalt to light without my help."

Cashel lifted the staff and filled bottle, then got to his feet with his usual slow grace. He looked down at the sapphire. "Thank you, Master Krias," he said. "I wouldn't have thought of that."

"Of course you wouldn't, sheep-boy!" the demon shrilled. "Of course you wouldn't!"

The water was just as foul as Cashel'd expected. He hoped he'd be able to wash the bottle clean when he next found a clear spring. He grinned.

"What do you have to laugh about?" Krias demanded.

"I'm getting ahead of myself," Cashel said. "I should've been hoping I'd
find
a clear spring, not wondering whether I could wash my bottle in it."

He took another swig and added, "But this will do."

He wondered what Sharina was drinking now. He'd be able to ask her soon enough, he supposed.

Still grinning, Cashel used the side of his foot to scuff clear an arc of ground not far from the pool. The hard soil was covered with stones, mostly flat and about the size of a duck-egg sliced the long way. They were all right to walk on—they didn't have sharp edges—but he'd prefer not to sleep on them since he had the choice.

Duzi, the soil
was
hard. Cashel drew his knife and used the broad point for a mattock to break up a patch big enough to cradle his hip bone.

"I can do that," Krias said. "
I
can make you a feather bed to sleep on, sheep-boy."

"This is fine," Cashel said, scooping the dirt away with his palm and the back of the knife blade. He didn't like anything soft under him when he slept. He'd heard feather beds were warm, but so were the wool blankets his sister wove.

Krias muttered. Cashel couldn't make out the words, but he could guess them. Pretty much the same sort of words the demon used most times and most places, which you'd think would get old after a while. It didn't seem to, though; not with demons nor that sort of people either one.

Cashel made a little fireset from fallen wood on the inside of the arc he'd cleared. The twigs wept a sap that hardened clear, and some of them had dead leaves still attached.

The pool's surface cracked when it hardened. Cashel levered fist-sized chunks loose, then put them close to the wood. He was as careful as he could not to get the sticky blackness underneath onto the blade of his knife. The trees' coarse bark would clean the iron a treat, but he didn't think he'd do that do that either. There'd be other trees farther on, he figured. Trees that were just trees.

Cashel used one of the desert stones to tick sparks from the back of his knife into a bed of punk. He carried a small flint in his wallet, but the local rocks were plenty hard enough and a better size to use. The punk lit the twigs into a quick, hot flame which in turn got the tar going.

The tar burned deep red with a lot of oily smoke. The air had cooled off fast when it got dark. Cashel was glad of the warmth, but the whiff he'd gotten when he lit the fire made him hope the mild breeze didn't change direction while he was sleeping.

"Good night, Master Krias," he said. He settled himself with the crook of his right arm for a pillow and his left hand grasping his quarterstaff at the balance.

"
Good
night indeed!" Krias said. "Or any other kind of night. I hope you don't think that
I
care whether it's dark or light outside?"

Cashel wondered what the demon did care about. Something, that was for sure. Krias wouldn't be so prickly if there wasn't something bothering him. Asking wouldn't bring anything more than an insult, though; and it wasn't Cashel's habit to go prying into other people's affairs.

The ring's mutterings were a lot like cicadas chirping when you got used to them. Smiling and thinking of Sharina, Cashel drifted off into sleep.

He wasn't sure what waked him or how long he'd slept. The fire was burning much the way it had been when it first fully caught; the chunks of tar grew smaller, but they didn't form ash that smothered the open flame the way wood did.

Cashel wasn't alone any more. The trees from around the pond now stood close together across the fire from him.

"Ah," Cashel said, rising onto his elbow. He didn't jump to his feet nor lift the quarterstaff. Krias had said they wouldn't attack him; and they hadn't, after all, when they walked past him sleeping.

Clearing his throat, Cashel said, "It's a cold night, sure enough. Would you like me to put some more wood on the fire? Fuel, I mean."

The trees didn't move or make a sound. He'd have thought they'd grown right where they were if he didn't know better.

"Do you expect them to answer you, sheep-boy?" Krias said.

"Well, I wasn't sure," said Cashel. To the trees he went on, "Good night to you, sirs. And ladies, if, you know; if you are."

Somewhere in the distance he thought he heard Elfin singing. It could have been the wind, though. It was a pretty sound, whatever it was.

Cashel turned himself end for end, putting his left side down this time. It was a cold night for fair!

When the sky brightened at what would have been dawn in the upper world, the fire had burned out and the trees were back where he'd first seen them. It might have been a dream.

Cashel refilled his water bottle. Before he walked on in the direction Krias indicated, he tapped his forelock in salute to the grove.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"Please," said Merota as the ships disappeared around the point of land. She looked from Ilna to Chalcus with pleading eyes; very young, very controlled, and very frightened. "What should we do?"

The chanteyman laughed. "I'd be inclined to say that you've as much judgment on the matter as I do, child, but I won't lay that burden on your young shoulders."

He glanced at Ilna and raised an eyebrow. "Mistress?"

"Can we sail a ship off this island by ourselves?" she asked crisply. "Can you sail us off by yourself, that is? I know nothing of the business."

"Build a boat and sail it off, that'd be," Chalcus said, frowning toward the horizon as he considered the question. "Yes, if I had long enough and I knew that our lives depended on just that thing; but I think the better choice is that we leave on the
Terror
with enough others aboard to crew her. Even if the others are Vonculo and the widdifus who believed his tales of treasure."

"Then let's follow," Ilna said. "Back up on the ridge, I think; the waves are washing that headland, and the cliff looks too steep for me to climb."

They had very little information; that meant weaving it into a plan was simpler. Standing on mud to stare at an empty sea was as complete a waste of time as Ilna could imagine, and the chances were that she and her companions had only a little time.

"Well said," said Chalcus. "But I'll lead, I think."

The chanteyman walked as fast as he could, though his legs were more at home on shipboard than on land. Merota had to scramble to keep up, but she didn't complain. Indeed, the child would probably have been treading on Chalcus' heels out of nervousness if he'd not been pressing.

Ilna followed without difficulty. She was used to walking quickly; and if she didn't have the stride of her long-legged friend Sharina, she could certainly match that of a sailor!

Merota was red-faced when they reached the ridgeline again, but that was more excitement than exhaustion. The child was glad simply to be moving when she was frightened. She hadn't learned that blind action was as likely to take you into hidden danger as out of it.

Ilna did know that; but she felt better for stretching her legs as well. She grinned. Another proof that she was human, she supposed. It was a pity that usually when she thought that, she also thought she was being foolish.

With Chalcus continuing in the lead they followed the ridge to the left, southward. The harvesters were still at work in the barley, but the wizard and his procession of corpses were by now out of sight.

Ilna heard the clicks and buzzing of insects rubbing their wing cases together. Birds hopped silently among the brushwood. The ground south of the orchard and field became a bog. In it frogs dived with a plop at the approach of humans—but they didn't croak, shrill, or peep.

Most of the birds flitting through the reeds had lost their feathers, and a few were little more than frameworks of fine, hollow bone. Merota watched a crow scud past low, watching the humans with an empty eyesocket. The child lowered her eyes to the ground, but she didn't cry or even gasp.

Chalcus whistled a dance tune as he walked, his gaze shifting as quickly as a butterfly's wings. There wasn't a path for them to follow, but he found a route of sorts a short way down from the edge. Here the ground was dry enough that their feet didn't sink in but too wet for woody plants to grow into an impenetrable tangle. The risen sun boiled a miasma from stagnant water. A light breeze blew inland, but within bowshot of the ridge the reeds and horsetails became wan forms among whorls of gray.

"Now I would judge," said Chalcus, "that the headland is there—"

He stretched out his left arm. They'd had to bear inland because of the footing or lack of it. Ilna saw nothing where the chanteyman pointed but solid brush, at least as tall and solid as what they'd climbed through from the shore. If Chalcus thought they'd come the correct distance down this blinkered path, though, she was confident he was right.

"Now, getting to where we can see again...," he said. "Still, I think...."

Even as the chanteyman spoke, he stepped into the unappealing wall of vegetation. Blackberry canes which grew amid the general mass of weeds and shrubs crackled beneath the soles of his horny feet.

"Follow him closely, child," Ilna said. "Don't worry if your clothing catches. I can mend tears."

Which assumed a number of things, not least that she and Merota would live long enough for mending clothes to be a worthwhile occupation; but Ilna
did
assume that. She smiled wryly. Perhaps she was more of an optimist than most of those who knew her would have guessed.

"Ah, who would not be cheerful with heroes like you and me protecting them?" called Chalcus without turning his head. "Not so?"

Is the man reading my mind?

"We'll hope that's so," Ilna said aloud.

Merota's hem hung on a blackberry. Before Ilna could reach down and loose it, the girl jerked the cloth free.

Ilna smiled in silent approval. The child took direction as few adults seemed able to do, and the embroidered fabric hadn't ripped after all. Ilna liked to see evidence of good craftsmanship... which, like the ability to take direction, wasn't something she met with every day.

"There we are," said Chalcus, sounding pleased though not triumphant. "Nothing but lichen and a pine wedged in the rock ahead."

Ilna wondered what the chanteyman would think was worth him feeling triumphant about. It might be that she'd learn before long.

The headland was a wedge of dense gray sandstone which remained like a doorpost when tides wore away the walls of softer rock to either side. Ilna thankfully followed Merota out of the brush and onto bare stone. Though vertical—even undercut—on the seaward edge, as Ilna had seen from their original landfall, this side of the slab lay at a shallow slope that she could walk up with ease.

Chalcus already lay at the top with his legs spread, leaning far out into the air. "Come look at this," he called.

Merota paused at the bottom of the slope. "Ilna," she whispered. "I don't like heights. I really don't...."

"Yes, all right," Ilna said. She understood the difference between the fear that everyone felt about one thing or another, and the blind, clutching terror that she saw in the child's eyes. "Wait for us here."

Ilna crawled up the slope on all fours. She could have walked to the chanteyman's side, but since she was going to lie down on the rock anyway she saw no point in doing so. It wasn't as though she had anything to prove to Chalcus; or to anyone in the world if it came to that.

By looking straight down—not an experience Ilna liked, though it didn't freeze her heart the way it might have Merota's—she could see the stern of a trireme being worked around the rock. The water must be deep, because the vessel was very close inshore.

"Nobody on the deck," Chalcus observed. "And the water full of those devils."

The sea was in direct sunlight. The ammonites shimmered and rippled around the vessels like maggots in a rotting corpse.

The trireme slowly disappeared beneath the overhang, edging forward much as it had when Ilna watched it being launched by pulleys from the shiphouse in Valles. She wondered why the vessel didn't reappear around the other face of the headland. The warships were so long that she should see the prow of the second, and the first should be completely in sight.

"Now where do you suppose the ships are going, my dear?" Chalcus said, rising to his feet with a nonchalance that Ilna could never have equalled when perched so high above a sheer drop. "Wizards' work, do you think?"

"I know as little of wizards' work as you do," Ilna said—tartly and perhaps not quite truthfully, if she let herself think about it. "My first guess would be that there's a hole in the cliff, and they're being drawn inside it."

The chanteyman slapped his left palm with the fingers of his right hand, callus cracking on callus with a sound like sudden lightning. "Yes!" he said. "Now, how shall we get a look at this tunnel, as it may be?"

He leaned out again; the second ship had disappeared as completely as the first. To Ilna's shock and surprise, Chalcus sheathed his sword and swung himself over the lip of the rock.

"I can't come with you!" Ilna said. It wasn't that she was afraid—though she certainly had a healthy fear of plunging a distance sure to be fatal—but that she simply didn't have the physical ability to hold herself by her toes and fingertips on a face so sheer. Garric and Cashel gathered eggs when the seabirds nested on the spires of rock off the coast of Haft, but even they would have found this hard sandstone daunting.

Well, Chalcus probably couldn't weave anything more complex than a rope splice. And she wasn't competing with him!

"One's enough for the task," Chalcus said. He pitched his voice normally, but Ilna could hear the strain in it. This wasn't a time to bother him. "You just keep an eye on Mistress Merota till I'm back, hey?"

Ilna looked over her shoulder. She hadn't been thinking about the—

The girl was gone.

"Merota!" Ilna said.
The child couldn't have been carried off without sound! Unless the wind over the rock was
louder than—

"I'm all right!" Merota called from the bushes just below the bare rock. "Please, I just want some privacy!"

Oh. Well, I can scarcely blame the poor child. All these days on the ship with fifty men watching everything—

"Ah!" Chalcus cried. "I've found something indeed!"

Merota screamed. The brush crackled as though an ox was charging through it. Ilna, flicking her supple noose open in her hands, sprang toward the sound. Bushes and the crowns of saplings quivered as something raced through the thicket, headed away from her.

Merota's scream stopped as if her throat had been—

As though someone had clapped a hand over the child's mouth. Laughter, the horrible cackling laughter that they'd heard when the
Ravager
's skiff landed, filled the sunlit air.

Ilna shouted over her shoulder, "I'm going after the girl!" as she plunged into the brush. She didn't know if Chalcus heard her or not, but he couldn't possibly get up the cliff soon enough to help.

Ilna didn't suppose she could do anything useful either, but she had to try.
This is my fault....

If she'd thought about it, Ilna would have expected the thick vegetation to delay her. In fact she slipped between trunks that seemed too close to pass her and around brambles that she barely noticed as she went by. There wasn't time to think or worry; the same instincts that guided her weaving chose Ilna's path now.

The maniac laughter still drew away from her. Ilna heard splashes, then a final trill of hideous joy.

She reached the edge of the bog where woody shrubs gave way to reeds and mud. A door thumped, or perhaps it was a bubble of mephitic vapors bursting on the surface.

Ilna paused. The bog was astir with ripples and counter-ripples reflected from the stems of the soft-bodied plants. The water showed no tracks, and there was no obvious path across it.

But there
was
a path, to the thing that had taken Merota and to Ilna os-Kenset as well. She walked into the bog. Her feet sank ankle deep on the first step, to mid-shin on the second—

And the third step was onto the top of a stone pillar hidden just beneath the surface of water dark with mud and the black effluvium of rotting vegetation. Ilna strode on, her smile more terrible than a snarl on most faces.

The rope flowed between her fingers; she caressed the noose the way an old spinster pets her cat. Ilna didn't know what she was going to meet at the end of her trail, but she knew that it, whatever it was, would meet her.

Walking as though she was in her own kitchen, Ilna wove a winding course among the tussocks. Each support was a long stride from the one nearest and no bigger than was sufficient to hold the ball of a person's foot. She never slipped. The black water gurgled as if in sullen anger to be balked of its prey.

The mist wrapped her. Occasionally Ilna could see as much as twenty feet in one direction or the other, but more often her hands would have faded from sight if she'd stretched them out.

Ilna grinned with at least a morsel of humor. She'd been in worse places than this. She wasn't sure that was a recommendation, but it was something
.

A shape loomed ahead of her. At first Ilna thought she was seeing another phantasm of mist, but this held its form despite the surrounding whorls and caracoles of gray. It was an island, and there was a hut near the edge of it.

She stepped onto firm, dry soil. There was grass, though the blades had the yellowish pallor of vegetation covered almost long enough to kill it completely. What she'd taken for a building was a boulder the size of a building. There was a bronze door let into its face.

Ilna looked around, not that she'd be able to see much unless it came charging through the fog. She doubted the island was of any great extent, though she couldn't be sure under the present conditions. Bubbles and perhaps frogs plopped; nothing moved but the mist. There was no sign of Merota or whatever it was that had taken the child.