The Mirror of Worlds (37 page)

Nothing was. The wheat moved only to wisps of breeze that even on the hairs on the back of Ilna's arms couldn't have felt.

But another sun was in the sky, a dim, red orb midway toward the western horizon. The air had an unfamiliar texture that wasn't quite a smell. A gray gauze began to curtain the ridge from which Ilna and her companions had first seen the valley, and on it was the outline of a door.

A Corl warrior, then two more, slipped through that outline like light glancing from polished metal. They raced down the slope, spreading out as the Coerli always did while hunting. They carried the usual weapons: small axes, throwing lines with weighted hooks, and spears with springy double points.

Another trio of catmen, then another, raced from the outlined doorway. The red sun was too dim to cast their shadows, but their rippling fur shone as they moved. They were agile as well as quick, sometimes making leaps down slope that no man could've equaled.

"We must shut the door!" the ginger-haired local man said desperately. "Come in or we must close you out!"

"Not yet," said Ilna as her fingers told the knots in the pattern they'd woven. "I have to see more."

A clot of catmen came from the distant outline, more than the total of the groups who'd come through before.

"I'm closing—" the local said, his voice rising.

"No," said Temple. He didn't speak loudly, but the syllable could've been chipped out of quartz.

"We have to—"

"
No
," Temple repeated.

The catmen were coming very swiftly. They were all warriors without the chieftain who'd normally have been leading a band so large.

Ilna's fingers worked, searching for the answer her conscious mind wouldn't have been able to arrive at. There
was
an answer, she was sure . . . .

"Ilna," said Temple softly. "We will do as you choose we should do. But for myself, I would rather fight the Coerli at a later time."

She had it!

Ilna stepped inside the doorway. Temple himself slammed the panel closed behind her; it was as massive as the gate of a border fortress.

Ginger-hair and his fellows slid the bar into place, Ilna heard the pattering of the catmen's light axes on the outer door. It was no more dangerous than hail tapping the slate roof of the mill Ilna had grown up in. The catmen shrieked in frustration.

"I've found the way to what I'm searching for," Ilna said, speaking to the blurred figures around her. There were lamps farther back in the cave, but it was taking a moment for her eyes to adapt to them. "Finally."

"Mistress?" said Karpos. "Which direction is that?"

"Through the door that the cat beasts opened to come here," said Ilna. "Of course, we'll have to kill all of them first."

She felt her lips tighten like the blade of a curved knife.

"But we'd want to do that anyway," she added.

Chapter 11

From the ogre's back Garric could see through the tops of thorn hedges on either side of the rutted red dirt track, but for the most part Kore herself wasn't visible to the peasants working in the fields. They were startled to see a man looking down at them from fourteen feet in the air, but they didn't drop their tools and run screaming.

The pair of chattering women who saw Kore as they stepped through a gap in the hedge
did
run screaming, tossing away the leaf-wrapped bundles they'd been carrying on their heads. Their bright cotton robes fluttered like parrot wings behind them.

Shin sniffed appreciatively. "A paste of chick-peas, potatoes and tomatoes in a wrapper of flatbread," he said. "
Very
nicely seasoned, including a touch of saffron. But—"

He grinned at Garric—or possibly at Kore.

"—it would be wrong to deprive hardworking farmers of their dinner."

"I suspect you'd be depriving stray dogs of unexpected bounty," said Garric as the ogre trotted on, "but yes, it'd be wrong. We'll purchase dinner in normal fashion when we stop for the night."

"And may I hope for a nice haunch of beef, dear master?" said Kore. "This is cattle country, I scent."

Calling this 'cattle country' was stretching the point. A few of the farmers were plowing behind a single bullock, obviously adult but no bigger than a young bull of the breed folk in Barca's Hamlet gelded into oxen. Even those were rare: most of the folk Garric saw in the fields were breaking ground for seed with a hoe or a dibble.

Kore's comment made him wonder how much of what she said was joking and how much was true. He suspected both were the case: that the ogre whimsically stated things which were in fact true—including that she'd eaten humans in the past and was looking forward to doing so again when she ceased to be under Garric's control.

Which in turn made Garric wonder about the morality of
his
position. Could he in good conscience release a ravening monster on the world after he'd completed his embassy to the Yellow King?

The king in his mind chuckled grimly. "
If you're worried about that, lad
," he said,
"there's some troops in your army you'd better be worrying about too. And not the worst troops either, when there's hard fighting to do
."

Shin trotted beside the ogre, occasionally leaping into a somersault to vary his routine. Now he laughed and said, "A more cautious person might've said, "
If
he completed his embassy.' But you're obviously a sanguine young man as well as a great champion."

"Tsk, Shin, he's merely a logician," Kore protested. "If he's torn to bits or devoured or any of the other likely fatal results of this journey, then his moral quandary vanishes. You should rather worry about how his faithful mount will fare after the probable disaster."

"Ah, but
I
am not a philosopher," Shin said. "In such an event, my first concern must be to avoid becoming your next meal."

"A good point!" Kore said. "Now that you call my mind to the matter, I don't believe I
have
as yet tasted aegipan. Indeed, I'll keep that in mind for the future."

Surely they're joking
 . . . .

Garric cleared his throat and said aloud, "There's forest not far ahead. Hardwoods, and some of them pretty tall."

"There are men waiting for us where the road enters that forest," the ogre said, snuffling deeply. Her nose was flat, little more than a ridge with two vertical slits, but it was obviously very sensitive. "I think twelve . . . . Yes, twelve men, one of them wearing what I believe is patchouli. The others smell mostly of muck and their own sweat."

"
A squad of soldiers under an officer
," Carus said. "
I don't imagine they'll be much in the way of troops, but twelve's still a good number. And I'd guess they have bows
."

"We'll hope for the best," said Garric equably.

"
And we'll keep our sword loose in the scabbard, I trust
," Carus said, but his image was grinning. It'd take more courage—and bloody-mindedness—than Garric or his ancestor either one expected from local militiamen to start a fight with a swordsman on an ogre.

They passed beyond the last field. With no hedges to block the view, Garric saw a belt of scrub a furlong wide and then the trees themselves. Some rose nearly two hundred feet in the air.

"
Teak
," said Carus with the satisfaction of a man sure of an identification. "
I ran into it on Sirimat. A bloody hard wood for a stockade, and it didn't burn the way I'd expected. We had to go over the walls.
"

A soldier wearing the same clothing as the farmers in the fields—a straw hat, a loincloth, and a loose cotton vest—stood at the base of one of the nearer trees. He shouted with excitement and grabbed what Garric thought was a crooked bamboo spear leaning against the bole of the tree. It was a bow taller than he was, and the stone-pointed arrow he nocked was five feet long.

More men, as like the first as so many peas, jumped up from where they'd been sitting or sleeping in the shade. Some did have spears, but there were several more bows. The weapons were crude, but as Carus had noted—there were a lot of them.

"Greetings, friends!" Garric called, waving cheerfully with his left hand. His right wasn't
on
the sword hilt, but he could get it there in a hurry if he needed to. "Please pardon my mount. She's harmless! We're merely travellers passing through your country and ready to pay for food and lodging."

"Harmless!" the ogre sniffed, but she kept her voice down. She even slowed to an amble, though even that pace wasn't enough to quell the soldiers' nervousness. One half-drew his bow, then slacked it. Garric wondered what the range of the long arrows might be.

The officer stood. He must've been putting on his breastplate, an arrangement of shiny disks on chains. It struck even Garric as useless; Carus burst out laughing. It was sparkly, though, and that was obviously all the fellow had in mind.

"Stop!" the officer cried in a high-pitched voice. He had a moustache so thin it might've been drawn with a brush; the ends stuck straight up in the air like the horns of the local bullocks. "You must not come closer or my men will assuredly destroy you!"

To demonstrate his determination, he drew his curved sword—on the second try, and then only after gripping the scabbard with his left hand. When it came out, Garric saw that the blade had rusted to the mouth of the scabbard. "Do not come closer!"

Garric pulled back lightly on the straps; if Kore'd been a horse he'd have been sawing on the reins, but all the ogre required was a hint. Assuming she was willing to obey, of course; which fortunately she was in this instance.

Garric wondered if he ought to dismount. He said, "Your worship, we're peaceful travellers."

"That's rather a stretch to believe from a man on ogre-back, wouldn't you say?" Shin commented cheerfully.

"
If they weren't afraid, they'd be dangerous
," Carus said, looking out through his descendant's eyes with cold contempt. "
If you were a trader leading a pack mule, they'd rob you. And if you were travelling with your wife, so much the worse for her. Oh, I know this sort
."

"You must not come closer!" the officer shouted, spraying spittle. He was terrified. "You must not!"

"Hold up," Garric murmured to Kore, fifty feet from the squad. If he continued to approach, it was a toss-up whether the soldiers'd scatter like sparrows or if they'd blindly attack. Maybe the choice really was to draw his sword and charge, hoping to push them toward flight . . . .

"Let's see what a little mummery can do, shall we?" the aegipan said. He picked up a handful of the red dust and minced toward the men calling, "Who wishes to see marvels? I'm a great wizard! I'll open to you secrets undreamt by mortal men!"

He tossed the dust into the still air. Instead of settling back, it formed into the image of a big-hipped, buxom woman. He continued forward while the image danced above him, gyrating violently and sometimes bending backward so that her head was at the level of her ankles.

That can't be possible!
Garric thought. But though a figure of dust needn't be any more realistic than what an ordinary sculptor carved, he got the feeling that Shin had created not only
a
dancer but a
particular
dancer.

"Walk up slowly," Garric said to the ogre in a quiet voice. "Stop behind Shin and I'll dismount."

"Do you find her pretty?" Shin said, pausing a double-pace from the edge of the forest, into which the soldiers had retreated at his approach. The officer was the only one who hadn't moved, perhaps because his back was to a young tree already. He didn't have the concentration to spare to slip around one side or the other of the thigh-thick trunk.

"Would you like me to walk on my hands, master?" asked Kore as she started forward.

"No," said Garric. He frowned and asked, "Could you?"

"That's Laila," the officer said in a choking voice, staring at the dancing image. His mouth opened and he looked at the aegipan again. "That's
Laila
!"

"Is it indeed?" Shin said. His voice was always melodious, always cheerful. He picked up more dust.

"It might be an unexplored talent of mine," Kore replied archly. "But of course if you prefer that I conceal my creative spirit beneath a mask of dull conformity, I will."

Garric laughed out loud, which startled the soldiers but also relaxed them. One had been poising his flint-pointed spear to throw, then easing it forward again. He lowered its butt to the ground.

Which maybe was just what the ogre had intended, Garric thought as she knelt for him to step out of the straps. It wasn't the kind of help he'd have gotten from the gelding.

"Tasty though the gelding was, I should in fairness remark," Kore said.

Shin tossed up the second handful of dust. It too swirled and shimmered into a full-sized figure. The small amount of material shouldn't have more than hinted at the outline, but she looked as solid as the dancer: heavy-bodied, heavy-featured; waddling rather than spinning.

The officer cried in horror and closed his eyes. He slashed twice across nothingness, then dropped his sword and ran off at an angle to the woodline. He was sobbing.

Shin moved out from under the images. They collapsed as quickly as they'd formed, settling onto the plants on the floor of the open forest.

The aegipan laughed and said, "I shouldn't wonder if he imagined he saw his wife in that second figure. Perhaps he was afraid that she'd notice his mistress, do you think?"

Most of the common soldiers had melted away, hunching through the scrub to gain the fields rather than retreating into the teak forest. A few had remained, however, watching the strangers with dumb resignation.

Garric took a few bronze pieces from his belt purse. He displayed them in his left palm as he walked toward the nearest soldier, a bowman.

"As I said, my good sir, we're peaceful travellers," Garric said. "Can you tell me if we'll find an inn as we follow this road?"