David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

The ground continued to quake. Duzi, how long would the shocks continue? Would the whole city fall into the bowels of the earth?

Liane was safe, most of Garric's troops were safe. The crater'd gulped down the corpses, those of men as well as the windrows of monsters they'd slain. At least one wounded soldier had dropped into the pit with a despairing cry.

That man was dead now and others were dead now and maybe they'dall be dead soon, but for the moment Garric was alive. He'd fight for the Isles and his friends as long as he could.

Gouts of night like black fire spewed from the pit, darkening the sky still further. In the cauldron beneath Garric saw the ancient, shrivelled wizard gesturing with his tourmaline athame.

Around him, crawling toward the surface with their weapons and hatred of humanity, were thousands of white monsters. More of the same sort pushed upward behind them.

Garric gripped his sword, leaning forward a little to make it easier to breathe. He waited, to fight and very likely to die.

But until he died, to fight.

Ilna heard the New King pass on in the adjacent corridor, clicking and sizzling like a rain-soaked tree a moment after lightning struck it. The creature didn't cross from the outer track to the inner one where Ilna waited. Its motion shifted the light in the crystal fabric, turning a shimmer of green-blue-indigo momentarily into yellow-orange-red, but Ilna couldn't guess as to its shape or even size through the wall separating them.

She had her cords out now; her fingers were plaiting a calm pattern. The creature's movements were as easy to predict as the next swing of a pendulum.

This New King did certain complex things, but it did them by rote and therefore predictably. It had power through the jewel and it had enough cunning to supplant its human predecessor, but it was no more intelligent than the great black-and-yellow spiders whose dew-drenched webs dazzle those who see them on Autumn mornings.

The New King had passed. It would return, but not until a fixed future time; a time far enough in the future for Ilna to complete her preparations.

She stepped into the other corridor and looked at the two basalt statues. She touched the back of Merota's hard stone hand, then walked a few paces on and ran her fingertips down the curve of Chalcus' throat. He'd had a lovely voice. It was the first thing she'd noticed about Chalcus, back in that bygone time when there'd seemed a reason for living.

No matter. Ilna strode through the corridors of the Citadel, letting the cords in her hands direct her to a place she'd never been. She had a purpose, had work to attend to.

To Ilna's surprise, there were other stone victims within the crystal halls. Three were men, but one was a child not much older than Merota had been. There was a dog as well, a mongrel with a sharp nose and a spine as sharp as a saw-horse. How had they come to be in this place where living things found only death?

The dog was just down the corridor from what Ilna was looking for, the spine of a sunburst which ended in a point sticking out of the crystal crown. She went as far into the tapering spike as she could go without hunching, then sat and began to work.

Ilna'd been picking yarn from the skirt of her tunic even as she walked. She'd clipped the hem with her bone-cased paring knife, but after that start she'd worked the threads loose by hand with the same quick skill as she'd used to weave the fabric. The lengths of yarn she carried in her sleeve for normal situations weren't adequate for this.

She wouldn't be certain that anything was adequate until afterward, of course. She was tempted to say that it wouldn't matter if she failed, but that wasn't true. To Ilna os-Kenset, failure was never an acceptable choice.

She sniffed. The world would be a better place if more people lived by the same standards as she did, but that wasn't going to happen in her lifetime. And besides, what other people did was none of her business.

When Ilna had enough yarn, she began knotting it into the new pattern. She could've worked with greater subtlety if she'd had something to hold the knot-work, but there was nothing to make a frame; the Citadel's inner surfaces were as slick as ice on a roof slate. She'd have to stretch the pattern between her raised hands. The result would be crude, but there was no one to critique the work except the New King and Ilna herself.

She heard the clicking/ticking again. Perhaps it'd been getting louder for some time but she'd ignored it, lost in her work and the pattern she was creating.

The pattern was rather interesting after all, she found. It shrank into itself, level repeating level repeating level, each multiplying the pattern's effect…

Yes, the soundwas coming closer, and rapidly. Ilna tied a final knot and stood, holding the edges of the pattern together for the moment. The close, glittering walls pressed in on her unpleasantly, but she wouldn't have been able to do what was necessary in any other setting. She was used to discomfort; a little more wouldn't matter.

The structure trembled at the creature's approach. Patches of color wriggled and shivered as the crystal flexed, twisting the light that passed through it. Ilna hadn't noticed such vibration the first time the New King passed close to her. It must be that now she was standing in a narrow passage with only a thin, taut layer between her bare feet and the ground furlongs below.

She spread her arms, looking out through the pattern she held. It was a skeleton of fine wool, no denser than the interplay of elm twigs against a winter moon. A spider uses only a tracery to catch its prey. Ilna didn't even need to catch something, only The New King rolled into sight, moving like a drunk who staggers but never loses his balance. The creature was of sparkling black glass, all points and angles; more like a sea urchin than like anything else of flesh and blood, but not especially like an urchin either.

It moved by toppling forward, putting down points and shifting the rest of its edges and spikes over the new supports. The creature's total size with all the limbs and nodes added together might have been as much as a bellwether or even a young bull; Ilna couldn't be sure. It was like trying to guess how small a space would hold a dandelion's fluff if it was squeezed together.

On top of the black spears and sheets, advancing but never dipping or rising from the perfect level it maintained, was a diamond-bright jewel like the egg Ilna had snatched from the cocoon under the sea. The Citadel's walls threw light of every color across it, but the jewel gleamed clear as a dew drop.

The creature halted. It saw or sensed Ilna's presence, though it had no eyes on its shimmering black surface. Ilna's belly tightened, but she smiled at the thing that had killed the two people closest to her. She would join them now, or she would avenge them.

The creature extended a limb toward Ilna in a series of jagged motions. It paused; then three bolts of wizardlight-blue, scarlet, and blue again-ripped from the point like lightning slashing off a high crag into the clouds.

Ilna's filigree of yarn absorbed the blasts and flung them back reversed, red and blue and red. The shock stunned her. For a moment she swayed, blinded by the flaring light. Her skin prickled as if she'd been boiled in sea water, and her pulse was thunder in her ears.

Her vision cleared. She was trembling, so she lowered her arms slowly. The yarn pattern remained rigid: the wool had been changed to basalt.

Ilna shouted in disgust and flicked the pattern into the crystal wall, breaking it into a shower of pebbles. She regretted doing that almost immediately: because she'd lost control, but also because she'd smashed the fabric that'd saved her life. It deserved better of her, but what's done is done.