The Mirror of Worlds (30 page)

Sharina's mind went blank for an instant. Over the years, she'd had many men tell her what she must or couldn't do because she was a woman. She'd never liked it, and tonight she was very tired.

She smiled. "You can't allow it, you say?" she said. "Well, then you can sit in the corner and chat with the spirits of all the people you've killed in your life. You do realize that Rasile is a wizard, don't you? Or instead of the spirits, maybe we'll bring back the bodies."

Sharina felt her smile widen, though the expression was no deeper than her lips. She said, "Have you ever talked to a man who's been dead for six years, Under-Captain? I have. It's not an experience
I'd
want to repeat, but if you really have to come inside with us while we perform an incantation . . .?"

The officer had begun backing away from the instant Sharina said "wizard." His troops were studiously looking in other directions, pretending not to hear the confrontation.

Sharina took a deep breath. She was trembling. She'd been cruel to the man, behavior which she disliked as much in herself as when she saw it in others, but—

She shut the door between her and the soldiers before she started to giggle. The look of horror on the under-captain's face had been
so
funny! And he
was
a pompous twit. Though he doubtless had her best interests at heart, he was too stupid—too narrow, at least, which could be the same thing—for her to trust his discretion.

Sharina turned to face the room. Rasile was watching her intently. "So, Sharina," she said. "You are a wizard too?"

"No," Sharina said. She shrugged. "I suggested a possibility to make the guards leave us alone. I was confident that the under-captain wouldn't call my bluff."

Rather than take the couch or one of the chairs, Rasile squatted on the mosaic floor. It was laid in a garden pattern with caged birds at the corners. The Corl positioned herself carefully so that she appeared to be sitting under the pear tree in the center of the room.

She gave a growl of humor again and said, "I was wondering, you see. I could make that warrior see the faces of his victims, but to bring the actual bodies would be difficult. I would be impressed if you could do that, Sharina. And I think even your friend Tenoctris would be impressed."

Sharina sat on one of the chairs; its bronze feet clicked against the stone. "Tenoctris said I should ask you about a . . . ."

She gripped her lower lip with her teeth while she wondered how to phrase the request.

"A problem," she decided at last. "A man named Vorsan, Prince Vorsan, watches me from mirrors. I've seen his face several times, generally only for a moment. He drew me in with him once, though. He says he's a wizard, well, a scientist, from before the Great Flood. He wants me to join him in his world because the Last are going to destroy this one."

Rasile's pupils were vertical slits like those of a real cat; they made her fixed stare even more disquieting than it'd otherwise have been. "So, Sharina . . .," she said. "How did you escape from this Vorsan?"

Sharina grimaced. "He didn't try to hold me," she admitted. "But I'm not comfortable knowing that any time he could take me back with him. Can you drive him away?"

Rasile shrugged again. "Perhaps," she said. "But tell me, Sharina—can you see into the future?"

"No, of course not!" Sharina said. "Why do you ask?"

"I can not either," the Corl said, "at least not clearly. But I believe you would be better off letting Vorsan be."

"All right," Sharina said. She felt a wash of regret, though she know that Vorsan was at most an irritation. Perhaps she'd been focusing on him because so many of the greater problems facing her seemed completely intractable.

She stood. "Is there anything more you need?" she asked. "There should be food in the larder, but it may not be to your taste."

She grinned and added, "For example, I'm pretty sure that the steward didn't include garbage. If there's a problem, tell a guard—there'll be two of them outside—and he'll find someone to correct the situation."

Normally a servant would sleep in the alcove off the bungalow's pantry. Sharina was fairly sure that there'd be a mutiny among the palace servants if she ordered one of them to enclose herself for the night with a man-eating Corl. The Blood Eagles—whom Attaper had insisted on to control Rasile rather than to protect her—would do.

"Aren't you going to argue with me about ignoring Vorsan?" Rasile said.

"What?" said Sharina, wondering what she'd missed in her tiredness to have brought such a question. "No. Tenoctris told me I could trust you."

"And you trust Tenoctris?" the Corl said. She got to her feet with a degree of controlled grace which was more impressive to watch than mere quickness would've been.

"Yes, of course," said Sharina. "Rasile, my duties are hard enough without me doubting my friends."

"I see," said the Corl. She stepped to the couch and tossed the bolster on the floor, then prodded it with her foot.

She looked at Sharina and chuckled, adding, "This will do, I believe. It's softer than I'm used to, but my bones are old enough without sucking cold into them from the stones."

"I'll see you in the morning, then," Sharina said, putting her hand on the door latch.

"Yes, in the morning," said the Corl. "It will be best if you come with me while I talk to those who can tell us where the greatest danger from the Last may be."

"All right," Sharina repeated. She had various duties, but it appeared to her that Rasile's request was indeed the most important business she had in hand. "Who are the people we'll be talking with?"

"Who
were
they, rather, Sharina," Rasile said. Her lips drew back from teeth which were impressive despite being worn and discolored. "I will call up the humans whom the Last killed three nights ago when they attacked Tenoctris."

She laughed again. Perhaps the idea was more humorous to a Corl than it was to Sharina.

* * *

The inn was half a mile down the valley in a grove of trees. Garric probably wouldn't have noticed it immediately if the whitewashed walls hadn't gleamed in the late sun.

"This one's built of sawn boards," he said to Shin and Kore. "I wonder if they'll have straw mattresses rather than corn shucks?"

"I could pull apart a stable built with boards," said the ogre musingly. "It's my own bad judgment that's reduced me to being a beast of burden. Had I but controlled my hunger and traveled south for a day, I'd be the free-living creature that the Fates intended me to be."

"Or you could've caught a wild pig," said Shin, "and saved yourself the effort of pulling down a stable as well."

"I had a whim for horsemeat," Kore said in a tone of dignified rebuke. "A splendid being like me has a right to her whims."

"Which in this case means the right to carry the human champion as an alternative to having your heart cut out," Shin commented. "I'd expect a true philosopher to be considering whether the taste of pork was really so bad."

The track was wider here along the river bottom than it'd been on the granite slope they'd just come down. Tree stumps sprang from the undergrowth. They'd been saw-cut, Garric noted with interest, rather than axed or simply ringed and left to fall over in a windstorm after years of decay.

Weather—perhaps flooding, but a bad frost could've done it—had blasted two oaks just above on the ridge. Their branches stood out, seeming to writhe in silent horror.

A woman wearing a red jumper strolled from the inn, holding a child by the hand. Garric lifted off his broad hat and waved it. "Halloo!" he cried.

"Can she hear you, do you think?" Kore wondered aloud.

The woman screamed, snatched up the child, and rushed back into the building. Garric didn't have any trouble hearing
her
, at least.

"Did Orra not tell them I was coming?" Garric puzzled aloud. "Well,
we
were coming. I don't think . . . ."

He glanced at Shin and found the aegipan looking up at him. "No," Shin said, "I
don't
think that folk who were warned that you were arriving on an ogre would be terrified to learn that an aegipan was part of the group also. Though I'm flattered that you'd consider such a possibility."

He vaulted onto his hands, then back-flipped onto his hooves again. He grinned sardonically up every time he was facing in Garric's direction.

"I've never noticed that humans were notably trustworthy," said Kore. "Do you consider it unlikely that this Orra would have forgotten to tell or chosen not to tell the innkeeper that you were arriving on so marvelous a mount as me? Were you friends with Orra?"

"No, I wasn't," Garric admitted. "Though I wouldn't have said we were enemies either. Though . . . ."

"
Aye
," said King Carus. "
We don't know what Orra's business is. If he thought you were a rival, that'd be reason to make your path a little harder
."

"He might even have told folk that a great and terrible ogre was coming to eat all their horses," Kore said. Garric couldn't be sure from her tone whether or not she was being serious. "Indeed, I wonder what
is
in the stable tonight?"

Three men tumbled out the front door of the inn. Two of them wore leather clothing and carried short, powerful bows; the third was older and held a double-bitted axe. It was a woodsman's tool rather than a weapon, but the man's arms and shoulders looked impressive even if the belly bulging his apron was heavier than it'd probably been in his prime.

As Kore continued to jog forward, another man ran from the stables with a wooden pitchfork, closely followed by the little boy who'd been sent to fetch him. One of the archers raised his bow and sighted past the arrowhead, though the range was still too great to chance a shot with a hunting weapon.

"Hold up!" Garric said to the ogre, pulling back on the reins. Well, the straps. "I'll go talk to them."

Kore stopped by spreading both clawed feet in the rutted track. Garric swayed forward and banged his breastbone against the back of her head.

Carus smiled ruefully. His trained reflexes ordinarily made Garric as sure a rider as any cavalryman from Northern Ornifal, but Carus didn't have any more experience riding an ogre than his descendent did.

"Now here's an ethical question, Shin," Kore said. "If my master is shot full of arrows by yokels he walks up to, am I bound to pine over his corpse till I starve as a noble steed in the ballads would, or am I permitted to wander off looking for fillies?"

Garric stepped down. "You're replacing a gelding," he said. "Fillies are out."

He unbuckled his belt and handed it with both sword and dagger to the ogre. "But you can hold this, if you will," he added. "In hopes that if I look peaceful enough, the sturdy yeomen hereabouts
won't
fill me with arrows."

Garric strode forward, waving his hat in his right hand. "Hello the house!" he cried. "I'm a friend!"

He'd come within half a furlong, a clout shot even with a short bow if the archer knew his business. Which these fellows might not: people tended to think of hunters as dead shots, but it wasn't true. Often enough they made their kills by waiting in patient silence till the target was close enough to spit on.

"
But you'd sooner not learn
," said Carus. "
I've had three arrows cut out of me, and the cane one some savage on Dalopo put through my left calf almost finished me when it started to fester. This pair is using cane too
."

"Pardon me my steed," Garric called. "He's strange, I know, but just as harmless as a pony. It's a long story, and I'll willingly recite it when I buy the house a round of ale."

The older man rubbed the axe-head on his apron. "We drink cider in these parts," he said argumentatively. "Bloody good cider, if I do say so myself."

"Then won't you all join me in a cider?" said Garric, walking up to the group, by now all four men and the boy. The woman and child were peering down from a second-floor window.

Garric brought out a silver piece, a Grapeleaf from Ornifal with the worn face of Valence II on the other side. He spun it up from his thumb to sparkle in the light, caught it, and handed it to the tapster. The latter frowned, rang the coin on his axe-head to judge the silver content, and said, "All right, then."

"Are them two coming in?" said one of the hunters, bobbing his bow staff in the direction of Kore and the aegipan. A patch of his scalp was pink scar tissue; he'd tried to grease the remainder of his black hair over the injury to hide it.

Garric turned, partly to give himself time to decide on an answer to the question, and waved to Kore and Shin. "You can come forward, now!" he called. "The gentlemen know that we're friendly travellers with money for lodgings."

The men staring at him
weren't
convinced yet, but phrasing things that way could help disarm their suspicions. Garric smiled at the innkeeper, the least hostile of the group, and said, "I'm not surprised at your concern, of course. An earlier traveller had promised to bring word of my coming and my companions, a Master Orra. Did he not mention that?"

The innkeeper frowned. "Orra?" he said. "We've seen no one of that name. When was he to arrive?"

"He should've been here earlier today," Garric said. Shin and Kore were approaching, the aegipan walking on his hands ahead of the ambling ogre. "Riding a flea-bitten gray. Ah—we travelled at a good pace, but we didn't pass him on the way."

"No white horse been by here since a year ago my birthday," growled the stable hand in a scarcely intelligible accent. "And that was afore the Sister dragged everything down t'Hell and spit it back up again."

"
Not a bad description of the Change
," Carus remarked. His image wore an engaging smile, but Garric felt a cool undercurrent as his ancestor's mind judged how best to move if everything went wrong: snatch the axe, punch the helve into temple of the hunter on the right, bring the blade back around to eliminate the tapster and the other hunter in the same stroke . . . .