David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

A pine tree grew within a furlong of the escarpment, silhouetted against the brighter sky. Dead limbs thrust straight out from the sides all the way up the trunk, but at the top sprays of needles formed a flat brush. The troll stumbled into the tree-literally, it seemed to Ilna. The creature walked with the rolling gait of a sailor on land, and the ground's slight slope nudged it toward the tree in a slow curve.

The troll's right arm lashed horizontally at the thick trunk. Splintered wood sprayed outward. The stone hand smashed through the tree so swiftly that the top portion hung for a moment, then fell straight down onto the stump instead of being flung outward by the blow.

The troll staggered on. It'd destroyed the pine tree in no more than the time it'd take to sneeze. The severed bole wobbled, then toppled sideways onto the creature's head.

Wood splintered on stone. The tree rolled off and crackled into the ground, shedding branches. The troll didn't seem to have noticed the impact. Ilna could hear the wheeze of rock bending and thethud of heavy footfalls long after the creature was out of sight in the darkness.

"There's no danger now," the stranger said, rising into sight beyond a patch of wormwood whose white-dusted leaves glowed in the light of the quarter moon. He was nude; as the statue had been, of course, but it was still a surprise to see what had been a crude carving reformed in tightly muscled flesh. "Not for us, at least. If it stumbles across a village in the night, it'll treat the huts and the people in them just as it did the tree."

Ilna got to her feet, patting the grit off her tunic. Chalcus rose also. His sword drew a figure in the moonlight, then slipped back into its sheath as quickly as it'd appeared. He stepped over to Ilna and hugged her fiercely-but only with his left arm, as his eyes continued to dart about the landscape.

He stepped away from her. "My name is Chalcus, friend," he said to the stranger, "and the lady is Mistress Ilna."

His tone was friendly, but the quick dance his blade had made a moment before was as much threat as anyone with eyes needed. "Who would you be, then? If you don't mind my asking."

"I'm Davus," the man replied. "And since you must be the ones who freed me, then you have my thanks and my sincere regrets that the backlash brought you to this place also when it snatched me home."

Davus picked up a pebble, caressing it with the thumb of his other hand. Chalcus was poised to move with what Ilna knew was lethal speed, but Davus dropped the stone by his side instead of throwing it. He seemed to have wanted nothing more than contact with the pitted surface.

"When we saw you," Ilna said carefully, "you were a statue. Were you alive, then?"

Davus laughed. "That I can't say, milady," he said. "I wasn't aware, that I can tell you with certainty. I was in a garden, a lovely green place. A wizard had brought me there, pulled me there, I think. And then the garden was a ruin. I saw you bending over me and I was slipping back here. I didn't know anything in between."

He chuckled. "Time will have passed, I'm sure. Likely a good deal of time."

"Tenoctris said the buildings on Volita were destroyed a thousand years ago," Ilna said. She tried to imagine a thousand years. She couldn't. All it meant was a time long enough to throw down the walls of Carcosa, that were still a mountain range in their ruin.

"Then a thousand years," Davus said, shrugging. "It doesn't seem to matter when you're stone. Though I wouldn't mind having clothing again, for the nights here near the rim can be chilly and the sand the wind blows stings me."

"Here," said Ilna, loosing the redoubled silken noose she wore in place of a sash. She lifted off her outer tunic and tossed it to him. "This may be a little short for you and you may feel that the pattern doesn't suit, but perhaps it will serve for the time being."

Davus held the tunic to the moonlight and let his thumb trace the swirls woven into the hem of the garment's sleeve. Ilna'd used gray fleece from three ewes. The shades were so subtly different that she hadn't thought anybody else would notice the distinctions. She'd been wrong about that.

"I'm honored, Mistress Ilna," Davus said. "This is your workmanship?"

"Yes," said Ilna, letting the syllable stand for itself.

"Honored indeed," Davus said, and shrugged the garment over his head. It was a little tight at the shoulders until he loosened the neck laces, but otherwise there was nothing to complain about in the fit.

Ilna started to tie the rope around her waist, then thought again about it. In daylight she usually depended on her knotted patterns for defense. Now with only the doubtful light of the moon to display her work to an enemy, she supposed the running noose in the silken cord was the better weapon. She held the coil in both hands, ready to cast if necessary.

Animals too small to see clearly scurried in the shadows, movements rather than shapes. Quail called, and once she heard was thewhit-whit-whit of an owl. The landscape wasn't familiar, but it seemed normal enough.

Apart from the fact that pieces walked away from cliffs.

Chalcus stretched his arms up, then back, without ever ceasing to scan his surroundings. "So, Master Davus," he said. "Are these trolls a common thing we'll meet here?"

"That was a small one," Davus said easily. "I once saw one hundreds of feet tall."

He scooped up pebbles, a handful of them this time, and began to juggle with the same unthinking skill as Chalcus sometimes spun his dagger while his mind was working. "There's a good deal of power in this place," he went on. "The sort of power wizards use, I mean. But you'll have known that, I suppose, since the way you freed me shows that you're-"

He nodded first to Chalcus, then to Ilna.

"-wizards yourselves."

Chalcus said nothing. There was enough light for them to see one another's features but not enough to read them.

"I see patterns," Ilna said harshly. "I broke the pattern I saw in the vines that were holding you, Master Davus. I'mnot a wizard."

"No offense meant, mistress," Davus said contritely. He gave her a small bow. "But there's power in this land, as I say; in the earth more than in the air or the water. When it builds, or a spell like the one you broke pours itself over the landscape, the rocks can come alive. As you saw."

Ilna stared in the direction the troll had taken. She couldn't hear it any more, though she thought she felt its tread through the soles of her bare feet.

"I hate rocks," she said, musing aloud rather than intentionally talking to her companions. "They're bad enough when they lie still like they're supposed to, but walking around like this…"

Davus laughed, tossing his pebbles one at a time over his shoulder. They fell to the ground in a tight group. "There's good rocks and bad rocks, mistress," he said. "Like everything else."

He walked a little way out on the plain and turned to view the escarpment. It curved for as far as Ilna could see in either direction.

"The king who ruled in my day," Davus said, "was a great wizard. He ordered trolls back into the cliffs here, then turned them again to rock. But that hasn't happened for a long time."

He gestured. "See the niches in the cliffs? And at the bottom of each there's the chips that fell where the overhang weathered out after the troll walked away."

Ilna dutifully turned and looked. Chalcus gave only a quick glance before he resumed scanning the brush and sparse trees of the plain into which the troll had gone. The sloping cliffs were notched, right enough, and there were spills of pebbles and larger rocks at the base of them. That was nothing that would've seemed unusual if Davus hadn't called her attention to it. He seemed to be an expert, though.