David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

The cloud had boiled to the trusses of the sanctum's high roof. "The Sister and all Her demons!" Wilfus said. He flung the bottle against the floor, shattering it. He took a step backward.

Sharina snatched Wilfus' dagger out of its belt sheath. Wilfus turned, reaching for her throat with both hands. He shouted, "I'll kill you, you-"

Sharina stabbed the thug at the base of the neck. He fell backward with blood spraying from his mouth and nostrils.

"Sharina, get through the Mirror!" Tenoctris called. Mogon struck the old woman in the face with his clenched fist. Sharina drove the bloody dagger under Mogon's raised arm and across the width of his chest. He spasmed backward, pulling the dagger out of her hand.

Sharina caught Tenoctris as the older woman crumpled, then carried her through the portal. Sharina's leap was as graceful as a deer's, but she overbalanced on the other side and sprawled full length. By landing on her elbows she kept from battering Tenoctris again. The sod felt cool and soft.

The men around Sharina were shouting, but none of them paid any attention to her. She looked back the interior of the temple through the square-edged window in the air. The roiling smoke sucked down with a rush, forming a shape that could've been Valgard modeled from purple shadow.

The dark image reached out and gripped both Hani and Valgard by the throat. Valgard stood quiescent for a moment. There was an audible snap and his head lolled on its neck. Pink, wholesome flesh slumped off the way sand washes from a clamshell. What remained were the bones and rotting muscles of a long-dead corpse. Its features were still recognizably those of the bor-Torials.

"I have use for her bones…," Hani had said about Sharina. He'd already used the bones of Valence Stronghand to form a counterfeit heir for the dead king.

The wraith of Stronghand smiled as it continued to squeeze the throat of the wizard who'd stolen its body. Hani's tongue stuck out; his face flushed almost as dark as the thing of smoke that was strangling him. His right eye popped out to hang from the nerve; then the spine cracked. The portal in the air broke into shards like those of the shattered bottle, then vanished.

Sharina lay on a hillside, cradling Tenoctris in her arms. Across a valley to the south she saw Lord Waldron's army flying the standards of Ornifal and the bor-Warrimans. In the distance beyond them were the walls of Valles, and from the nearest gate the People were advancing in close order.

"Go up, " Davus said as he bent over the fireset he'd laid just in front of the passage upward into the Citadel. "Your friend Merota's there, Ilna, if she's anywhere; and there's no one better than you to find her."

He struck a chip of quartz against the golden pyrites crystal in his other hand, showering sparks into the tinder. When he blew softly, flames licked up to wrap the kindling he'd bruised into loose fibers between a pair of large stones.

"Why do you need a fire, Master Davus?" Ilna said. Chalcus was already within the tunnel, just in sight as he waited for her. She thought/felt that she should understand what their guide and companion was doing, though, before they left him behind.

Davus smiled gently as he rose, holding the branches that he'd feed in when the fire had grown to the point it could sustain more fuel. "The passage draws serpents, mistress," he said. "Now that Arrea isn't here to bar them, many will come. Trying to replace her, you see."

"I hate snakes," Chalcus said softly. "I hate them all."

"They're like people, Chalcus," Davus said. He squatted and held the ragged end of a branch into the flames though without yet letting it sit on the kindling. "Some good, some bad but-"

He smiled at Ilna. He seemed a different man since he'd lured the echidna to destruction.

"-some would be very bad to have crawling up behind Mistress Ilna while she's otherwise busy. And I thought I should be the one to bar them here before they enter the passage. Not that I think you're afraid of them."

"Iam afraid," Chalcus said. "It wouldn't keep me from acting, but… you're a clever fellow to have noticed that, Davus; and a friend."

A snake came out of the underbrush. It was black with a faint chain pattern on its scales; heavy bodied for being no longer than Ilna's arm. It was quite harmless, the sort of lodger a housewife likes to have in her thatch to keep the mice down.

But some people fear snakes as others fear spiders. Far better that Davus spread hot coals across the tunnel entrance than that Chalcus have to deal with things he feared and hated-though Ilna had no doubt that he could do that, just as he said.

Ilna feared and hated stone.

She walked around Davus and entered the stone tunnel that should take her to a creature whose glance would turnher to stone. "Very well," she said. "Master Chalcus, will you lead or shall I?"

"And am I not leading already, dear heart?" the sailor said as he started up the passage. He'd drawn his sword and dagger. He held the shorter blade forward like the cane a blind man uses to tap his way through darkness, but the long curved sword was back to thrust at the first hint of danger.

The tunnel was a rising coil, moderately steep but not dangerously so. Ilna'd expected the interior to be pitch black, but the entrance behind her lighted the lower portion. As they climbed higher the air remained faintly gray-not bright, but at least bright enough to distinguish space from stone.

But stone-dense, black basalt-was on all sides. This is very unpleasant, Ilna thought; and grinned. If she'd spoken those words to strangers they'd have been taken as a mild complaint, no more than another person saying, "I've drunk better ale than this."

In fact, the comment was as damning as Ilna could make. She didn't choose to raise her voice when she was complaining, that was all. And of course shehadn't spoken the words aloud.

Chalcus didn't speak either as they went up. That was natural caution since they were entering the lair of a creature which would kill them or worse if it caught them, but it wasn't just the stone that made Ilna draw into herself as she did in times of stress.

Davus had said that the tunnel was a natural formation which'd been improved over the years. Now that she was in it, she wondered whether the improvements had anything to do with human beings. The coil was perfectly regular, the sort of pattern a worm might've made gnawing through the rock.

A worm, or something less familiar than a worm. Perhaps the sort of thing that grew in the living corpse of an echidna after eating its host's brain.

Ilna smiled. Arrea'd gotten what she'd demanded, and the world was better for that happening. Ilna was getting what she'd demanded also, passage into the Citadel of a monster greater by far than the echidna. If things went badly, there'd be no lack of people who'd say that too made the world a better place.

The not-darkness ahead of them was becoming actual light. There were even hints of color, the trembling hues of a rainbow. Chalcus hesitated for a few heartbeats as a silent warning to Ilna, then continued.

She followed, still smiling faintly. Generally when Ilna went into a dangerous situation her hands would knot patterns in twine, less for use than to settle her mind. Now Chalcus' hands were full, so if anybody was to snatch Merota and run off it had to be Ilna herself. It wasn't likely she'd get the opportunity, but that slight chance was the only reason she and Chalcus had come here.

Ilna was becoming more sure with every step up the curving slope that Davus had different reasons for guiding them, though. She was beginning to understand the pattern of events, though it wouldn't make any difference in how she acted.

Chalcus stopped. Beyond his poised figure was brilliant light, colors split and rejoined by the facets of the Citadel's crystal crown. The only sounds were the deep whisper of air breathing up the tunnel behind them and the rapid beat of Ilna's heart. Chalcus stepped into the structure, and she followed.