David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

There might be anythinglurking in the foliage.

"Maybe we'll let our host lead, shall we, Master Davus?" suggested Chalcus, whose mind must've been turning in the same directions.

He tugged the wizard forward by the ear. Nergura yelped and cried and bent his face away from Chalcus to lessen the pain. "There's nothing here that can harm you!" he said in evident bitterness.

Davus must have agreed, for he sauntered up the path without waiting for Chalcus to push the wizard ahead of them. Ilna shrugged mentally. Davus seemed to know what he was doing-and anyway, Ilna had enough trouble making her own decisions. She wasn't about to start minding other people's business.

Davus reached the fork, rubbed the ball of his foot into the gravel, and turned to the right. Chalcus maneuvered the wizard in front of him so that he was sandwiched between the two men and let go of his ear. Gorgeous but unfamiliar flowers bordered the path. Beyond them were bushes with small leaves of a green so dark that an eye less well trained than Ilna's would've called them black.

They came to the tile-roofed shed Ilna'd seen from the door of the house. It was brick across the back with latticed end walls through which vines wound. The front facing the path was open. Tools leaned against the bricks on the left side or hung from pegs; drying racks reached from floor to ceiling on the right. Ilna heard a faint mewing sound and looked around for a cat.

"Yes, as I thought," Davus said, gesturing with one hand toward the vine. "How do you justify this, Master Wizard?"

"There's nothing to justify!" Nergura said, and the very violence of his tone proved he knew he was lying. Davus' face was hard; Chalcus smiled. Neither expression was one Ilna would've wanted directed at her.

The vine crawling up the lattice had a stem and leaves like a cucumber. Instead of simple sausage shapes the fruit was bulged and distorted till it looked like misshapen dolls of green clay. Ilna wondered if it was diseased. Certainly if a plant like that had come up in her garden, she'd have grubbed it out before Her skin flushed and then went cold. The lowest of the hanging poppets was moving its arms and legs.

"In my day, the King would've disagreed," Davus said. He lifted the topmost of the green homunculi. Touched, it began to squirm also. Davus gently set it back against the lattice and walked into the shed.

"The King is dead!" the wizard shouted. "It's every man for himself, now!"

"Ah, butwe're not dead, my friend," Chalcus said, stroking Nergura's cheek with a first and middle finger. The wizard jerked as though he'd been burned. "Nor are you, as things now stand."

Three dolls like those on the vine hung from hooks on the wall between heavy shears and a bronze trowel. These were better formed in the sense of being more complete, though their proportions were those of a dwarf and their faces looked indescribably ugly.

They mewed at Davus. He reached toward them. The nearest was formed like a female. She gripped Davus' index finger with both arms and tried to drag it toward her jaws to bite. He pulled his hand away.

"Every man for himself, you say, wizard?" Davus shouted. "Theseare men, as you well know. You hang them here till you're ready, and then you boil them down into an elixir which you drink for what you claim is wisdom. What sort of wisdom do you get by drinking the lives of men?"

"I had no choice!" Nergura said. "My safety depends on what the poppets' blood enables me to learn!"

"If you think you're safe now, wizard," said Ilna as she stepped between Davus and Nergura, "then you're a worse fool that I already believed."

She turned to Davus. "What now?" she said crisply. "Do we destroy the vines?"

"Or perhaps do we destroy the gardener?" said Chalcus. "For it seems to me that if we do that, no problem remains."

Davus sighed. In his anger he'd seemed a much bigger man, but now it drained out of him leaving a stocky, tired-looking fellow wearing a tunic that was cut a little too closely around his chest.

"No," he said, "we'll not kill him. We'll free these sad, vicious creatures, because they're men; and we'll free Master Nergura, because he's a man as well. And then we'll leave here, because I don't choose to spend the night in a place that was built by that kind of wisdom."

Ilna took the trowel from its peg and walked out of the shed with it. "Yes," she said as she knelt and thrust the bronze blade into the soil near the base of the vine. "I couldn't agree more."

"I've arranged a reception in the palace courtyard, your highness," Earl Wildulf said. "Unless you prefer to see to your apartments, of course. I've ordered the rooms on the west side of the ground floor to be cleared for you. They're, ah, able to be separated from the rest of the building and the outside."

They're easily defensible, Garric translated silently. "No, your lordship," he said aloud. "A levee is an excellent idea. My staff can meet the officials with whom they'll be working out details of Sandrakkan's integration with the kingdom."

King Carus chuckled as he viewed the palace of the Earls of Sandrakkan through Garric's eyes. Though on an impressive scale, it'd been built with an eye to defense rather than pomp. The main door was too narrow to pass three men abreast, and the ground-floor windows started six feet above street level; the gray stone walls below were solid. A few gleaming streaks remained on the sides of standing seams to indicate that the lead roof had once been silvered, but not in a generation. The swags and cartouches forming a frieze between the second and third stories were bird-daubed and beginning to crumble.

Humans as well as time had damaged the building. Some of the grills on the ground floor windows had been replaced with others of a different and heavier pattern, and the stones of the door alcove showed signs of burning. They were granite, though, and hadn't been seriously damaged. Liane had said that there'd been months of rioting in Erdin before Wildulf had claimed the throne vacated by the slaughter at the Stone Wall.

The crush at the palace entrance forced Garric and the Earl to halt in the street. Wildulf rose in his stirrups, snarling, "What's the hold up! Sister take the fools! I'll have the skin of somebody's back!"

"I think the fault's mine, milord," Garric said smilingly. In all truth, he'd have been more comfortable on his own feet rather than on horseback. Fortunately they'd barely ambled from the seafront, since the procession moved at the speed of the infantry. "Lord Attaper's men are making sure of the arrangements. They'll be in tents in the palace gardens to the rear, I believe."

"So I've been told," Wildulf agreed sourly, though he wasn't taking the situation as badly as Garric had feared he might. The Earl might have figured out that with a large army on Volita the negotiations were going to go the way the royal officials intended they should. The more easily they were concluded, the quicker Garric and that army would be out of his hair.

Lord Attaper approached, talking over his shoulder to one of his own officers and a palace official. He broke away from them and said to Garric, "Your highness, I believe everything's in readiness. You can enter any time you please."

Wildulf's expression quivered between fury and amazement before settling on the latter. "You let him talk to you that way?" he demanded as he and Garric dismounted.

"I'm ordinarily willing to listen to anybody who's polite and who's speaking in the course of his duties, milord," Garric said calmly.

He strode toward the entrance smiling faintly. He knew that Wildulf probably thought the Prince was weak because he didn't follow his own will without regard for his advisors' judgment. Well, you could find people of Wildulf's opinion in a peasant village, too; and the attitude didn't help them prosper.