David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

"A section of Lord Attaper's troops will follow us-"

She hadn't said, "the bodyguards" or "the Blood Eagles," but Lord Attaper's bleak-faced nod made that explicit.

"-with the remainder of that unit following the Prince and yourself. Lord Rosen's regiment will bring up the rear. They'll be billeted in buildings adjacent to the palace, I understand."

Lord Rosen himself appeared, accompanied by a senior noncom whom Garric had met before. He waited to the side while Garric was meeting with the Earl. His men were drawn up across the narrow slips to either side of this one.

"We figured that-" Earl Wildulf began, scowling like a thundercloud.

"Ornifal nancyboys!" somebody shouted from the crowd. The breeze carried the words clearly over the royal contingent.

The noncom with Rosen-Serjeant Bastin, that was the man's name!-raised his shield up beside his face to form a sounding board. "I'm a Blaise armsman!" he bellowed back at the crowd. "And I'd rather prong one of my daddy's pigs than what passes for men in Erdin! Or women too!"

Garric gasped to keep from laughing out loud. That would've been partly hysteria, he supposed, but the sudden relief of tension was a wonder and a delight.

"Lord Wildulf," he said, ignoring what were probably going to be arguments over the order of march, "all that needs to be said here has been said. Let's get to your palace and we can continue matters there."

He reached forward, offering Wildulf his arm. Wildulf, by reflex or perhaps out of equal relief, clasped it.

"Right," he said. "The horses are back with my guards, your highness."

It wouldn't have been quite right to say that seeing the boxwoods up close took Ilna's breath away, but the mass of dark green let her know how much she'd been worn by a day of hiking on gritty soil through sere vegetation. She'd taken grass and trees for granted in Barca's Hamlet.

She smiled, wryly but without the bitterness she might have felt in the recent past. If her life had followed the course she'd expected, she'd never have known how many places there were that she liked less than she did Barca's Hamlet.

This country seemed to have a general slope from the southern cliffs northward, but no terrain is perfectly flat-not even the surface of the sea. The vegetation they'd seen at dawn had been out of sight for most of the past several hours. Now it appeared directly before them, an interwoven wall of branches reaching from the ground to several times a man's height.

"It's been planted!" said Chalcus. "There's never a chance that those trees grew together naturally."

"It's a maze," said Ilna. The entrance wasn't on this side, but she knew it existed as surely as she knew which warp threads to raise when she ran her shuttle through. "It's a maze of more than bushes."

"This is a barrier too," Davus said, indicating a fist-sized chunk of porphyry with the big toe of his right foot. It was lying on the crest of the rise they'd just walked up. "Of sorts. See there-"

He pointed, still using his foot. "And there?"

Now that he'd pointed them out, Ilna saw other rocks, some basalt and some porphyry, scattered in a wide arc to either side of the first. There was a distance of several paces between rocks, and they were of course-Ilna smiled as the words formed in her mind-just rocks.

"They circle the grove," Davus said. "They're to keep trolls out."

Chalcus stepped forward and paused, frowning angrily. He touched his sword hilt.

"Just a moment," said Davus, bending to lift away the stone he'd first indicated. "Now go through."

Chalcus stepped past him and nodded thankfully. Ilna followed, standing to the side as Davus backed after them and set the stone precisely where it'd been before.

"It was like stepping into warm blood," Chalcus said quietly. "A pool of warm blood. I could've gone on, but-I thank you, Master Davus."

"This way, I think," Ilna said, taking the lead without thinking about it. Seeing patterns was her work, herlife; that was the skill they needed at present. She crunched over the ground, keeping just beyond arm's length of the hedge so that she didn't brush the boxwoods by accident. It probably wouldn't matter, but she didn't care to take the chance.

The weather appeared to follow the ridge they'd just crossed. The country Ilna saw to the north must be better watered, as it was grassy instead of being sparsely sprinkled with vegetation.

"Dear one?" said Chalcus, a few steps behind her with Davus. "What would happen if we were to cut a path through the branches here?"

"Nothing good," said Ilna. She usually plaited patterns in yarn as she walked along, a way to occupy her hands while her mind was elsewhere. Now she put the hank of yarn away because she needed that part of her to deal with the maze. "It isn't only brush, as I say. In fact, I suspect the trees were planted to conceal the real barrier."

The entrance was on the east side of the circle. It was a simple gap, wide enough that two could walk down it abreast if they didn't mind their shoulders touching the dense green branches.

Without looking at the men behind her Ilna said, "Follow me in line. Don't touch the branches, and on yourlives don't go down any path except the one I lead you on."

She didn't bother to add, "Do you understand?" because they did understand. And if they'd been the sort of people who didn't, a few more words from her weren't going to prevent them from killing themselves.

Ilna stepped into the maze. The air was noticeably more humid, and she no longer felt the wind that'd been so constant since they'd arrived. The path was shaded even more than the tall boxwoods explained, and the light had a bluish cast. The changes from the arid waste outside weren't unpleasant in themselves, but they made Ilna think of bait in a trap.

She smiled. If the person who'd built the maze trapped her, then she deserved to die. It was a perfectly fair wager so far as she was concerned. She'd regret what happened to her companions, of course; if she had any time for regrets.

At the first turning Ilna took the left branch, but as she stepped past the fork she felt a surge of hopeful warmth, of longing even, to turn the other way. She looked down the narrow corridor. When she held her head justso, the green walls to either side vanished and she was instead peering into a deep well. At the bottom something waited, holding its raised tentacles close against the stone walls where they were ready to enwrap anyone who fell into its lair. Waiting, wanting more desperately than any young lover…

Ilna walked on, grimacing. She wanted to go faster, but though she trusted her instincts she was too careful a craftsman to increase the risks even marginally. There was always the chance that one of her companions, hurrying to follow, would make a mistake thathis instincts wouldn't warn him against.

She turned left again at the next fork. If space within the maze were the same as that outside it, she and her companions would've been back on the windswept waste… but it wasn't, of course, and they continued down another boxwood aisle.

There was nothing down the other fork: gray, palpable nothing, stretching on forever; a Hell of emptiness, without hope or end.

Ilna's face was set. She wouldn't show fear, even to herself; but she knew that some day she would die, and she wondered/suspected/fearedthat the same endless gray waited for her when she did.

She couldn't control that, nor was it her present concern. Her task, her duty, was to bring her companions through the maze to where they could expect to find food and water better than the brackish trickle they'd sucked from the underside of a limestone outcrop not long after noon.

The next branching puzzled her: neither path was the right one. Then somethingshifted and she stepped through on the right, calling over her shoulder, "Quickly, now. It'll change back shortly."