David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

Mab made an angry gesture with her left hand: red sparks danced angrily in the air.

"Natural," she repeated, "but very unfortunate. Because the Queen was exhausted from the battle-and I have to say, arrogant with her victory-she failed to wipe Ronn clean of contamination when she could've done so with relative ease. She didn't, and by that she failed her duty and failed the city."

"The Queen's a great wizard and a greatperson," Orly said in glowering discomfort. "She's kept Ronn safe for a thousand years. You shouldn't talk about her that way!"

"If she hadn't vanished," Herron said, "then we'd still be safe."

"You weren't safe while the Queen was present, Master Herron," Mab said with a dismissive snort. "Or she wouldn'thave vanished, would she? If you're afraid of straight talking, then how do you expect to face the things you'll meet on the way to the Shrine of the Heroes?"

Cashel smiled though he knew he shouldn't have. Right now Mab looked like she was a girl no older than the Sons themselves. She had blue eyes and fluffy blond hair, just as cute as you could ask for. Her tongue and her temper hadn't changed from what they'd been earlier, though.

Herron grimaced and hung his head. "I just meant…," he muttered; but what he'd meant was obvious- "The Queen didn't fail us!" -and obviously false. Herron had sense enough to swallow the remainder of his words.

"The armies of Made Men are a spectacular threat, but perhaps not the most dangerous one," Mab resumed in a softer tone. "The King's power has been increasingin Ronn ever since he was driven out. The Heroes have defeated his creatures repeatedly, but those defeats don't change the way darkness and night have slowly spread upward from the living rock beneath the city. By now they lurk at the edges of the crystal plazas open to the sun."

"Mistress?" said Enfero. His head was bandaged from where Cashel'd smacked him with the quarterstaff. "How can we fight that? How can we fight things that I don't even see?"

Mab twisted her face toward him like a hawk sighting prey; then the cold anger in her eyes melted. "You can't fight a fog, Master Enfero," she said mildly. "The Queen will have to burn that away after she returns. Perhaps she'll have learned to do it properly this time, to sear the very rock clean of the taint of evil. But before the Queen can return, the citizens of Ronn must defeat the army of Made Men massing on the plain outside. And to do that you six, and Master Cashel, and I, must wake the Heroes."

Cashel cleared his throat. "What's to stop us going down to this cavern, ma'am?" he asked, concentrating really hard on the wad of wool he rubbed along the smooth length of his quarterstaff. "Just bad feelings, like you were saying? Or are the Made Men going to be waiting for us when we get lower down?"

Mab looked at him and laughed, though the sound didn't have much joke to it. "You don't believe in bad feelings, in a miasma of evil, is that it, Master Cashel?" she said.

Cashel shrugged. "I believe, I guess," he said, "if you tell me it's so, ma'am. But I don't-"

He raised his eyes to meet hers.

"-figure it's going to stop me."

Cashel looked down the line of the Sons, all of them staring at him. "Look," he said, then paused to frown. It wasreally important that they understand what he was about to tell them, but he'd never been good at words. "A lot of times it's really hard. The sun's hot and you ache all over, and it doesn't seem like anybody really cares anyhow. But you've got to go on and finish it anyway, just slogging on."

He shrugged, his hands spread on the quarterstaff. "You've got to finish it," he repeated, "because otherwise it's still there to do. For you or anyway for somebody, and you're the one whose job it was. Right? Because we've told everybody this is our job, going down to wake the Heroes."

"If there's any such thing!" Orly burst out. "If the Heroesare sleeping, if there's even a cavern! Nobody of all the people alive in Ronn today has seen it, you know."

"We don't need to worry about that," Cashel said.

"Don't worry?" Stasslin sneered. "Of course it's a worry! If there aren't any Heroes, then we can't wake them!"

"Wedon't need to worry," said Cashel, raising his voice just a little more than he had to so that they could all hear him clearly, "because that's not our job. Our job is to go down and do what we can. If there's no cavern or no Heroes, that's not our fault. So we don't need to worry about it."

Enfero suddenly laughed. "He's right," he said. "We only need to worry aboutour task. The questions as to whether our task is impossible or even pointless-those matters aren't our concern. Master Cashel's logic is impeccable."

"Are the Made Men in the lower levels?" Ather asked, unconsciously rubbing the bruises he'd taken when Cashel demonstrated what he could do with a quarterstaff. "You didn't answer that, milady."

Mab whisked her brilliant blue fingernails through the air. "No," she said. "We won't find Made Men. The King can't physically enter Ronn, except over the walls if he defeats Ronn's army. But his power influences the growth of things already in the city, and that increases the deeper we go. We'll have more to deal with than bad dreams."

For some minutes Cashel had been hearing chants and a sibilant ringing sound. Now a line of young people wound into the shady garden area, spinning and whirling as they followed one another. The men held tambourines which they slapped overhead while the women shook castanets to the same wild rhythm. As they danced they sang, "…Our Mother Queen leads us to a seat and bades us sit, she gives us nectar in a golden cup…"

Mab fell silent, following the dancers with her eyes till the last of them jingled his way out of sight again. Cashel didn't try to count them, but there were at least as many as he had fingers on both hands. Their cheerful voices faded slowly.

Mab turned again to face her companions. A cold smile spread across her lips. She said, "As you see, the citizens of our city depend on us… though they aren't aware of the fact. Unless we succeed in waking the Heroes, there'll shortly be no dancers waking the sun, and perhaps no sun at all for Ronn."

Cashel got up with the smooth grace of a gymnast, holding his staff out before him to balance the weight of his body as his knees straightened. "Well, ma'am," he said, smiling also. "We already said we were going to do that, right?"

"Yes," said Herron, lurching to his feet more clumsily than Cashel had but with a frown of fierce determination. "We did. Because it's our job."

Cashel smiled more broadly. It seemed like they'd understood what he was trying to tell them after all.

Sharina's first thought was that the wooded hill to the right of the road was steep-sided and oddly symmetrical. Then she realized it was artificial.

"That's the tomb," said Under-Captain Ascor, riding alongside the carriage Sharina and Tenoctris shared. "We used to escort the king here on Commemoration Day to make sacrifices. Though he gave that up the last couple years before, you know, your brother took over."

The Mausoleum of the bor-Torials, the family of the Dukes of Ornifal who'd for the past several generations claimed the kingship of the Isles as well, was a mound more than a hundred feet high. The plantings, cypresses interspersed with plane trees, were on four ascending terraces; at the top was a statue which, though large, was beyond Sharina's ability to identify at this distance.

A brick wall separated the grounds from road traffic. There was a keeper's house and a barred iron gate through which Sharina saw neatly-tended vines mixed with olive trees which would shade the grapes from the direct summer sun.

The gates were open. The twenty-odd horsemen who'd ridden on ahead to prepare for Sharina's arrival were talking volubly to one another within, still mounted. Sharina's escort was a company Waldron had brought from Volita. They'd originally been cavalry but had converted to infantry when Prince Garric refused to take horses when he sailed west across the Inner Sea. They'd remounted as soon as they returned to Ornifal and were revelling in the experience.