David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

His mobile, laughing face was briefly that of a man dead for a month. "I've done worse, truth to tell; though those days are behind me now. Or so I hope."

He patted her hip gently. "Go help Davus with the fire, and I'll be along in a little bit with the makings of ash cake, as we have no pot for porridge."

Ilna touched Chalcus on the cheek, then rejoined Davus who waited a little way along. Meeting Davus' still, observant eyes she blurted, "He's agood man." She knew she sounded defensive, and she hated the weakness that had driven her to speak.

"Yes," said Davus, seeming to transfer his attention to the three chips of quartz he was juggling. "And if the truth were known, it might be that a wrathful man like myself has more on his conscience than Master Chalcus does-"

He met Ilna's eyes.

"-black though the sins of his former life may have been."

He understands, Ilna thought. And because Davus understood, it was just possible that what he said was literally true; as it might have been for Ilna herself-black though the sins of Chalcus' former life undoubtedly were.

"What's there to be done about a creature that did this?" Ilna said, nodding toward the ruin as they passed its northern edge. "What can be done to a troll?"

"By ordinary folk?" Davus said, quirking a smile. "By you or me? Little enough, I fear. Run away, for it's not quick. Lure it off and hide, as the folk here might've done; for trolls aren't bright either."

The pine's branches for a man's height up the trunk were dead. Davus eyed them, then gripped one at mid-point and snapped it cleanly. He squatted and with a frost-split hammerstone began pounding the wood to kindling.

"But the Old King…," Davus continued as Ilna examined the spring. There was a basin under the seepage, a quite adequate one as soon as she cleaned out the leaf litter. "He had a jewel over his forehead. It gave him power over stone, control of all sorts: power to direct and to loose and to bind."

He looked up and added, "The Old King would've changed the troll back to a boulder. If it hadn't gotten far from the cliffs-and trolls generally didn't get far in his day-he'd have sent it back to those cliffs first. Letting it be with its kind, you see, so long as it couldn't harm men."

"What happened to the jewel?" Ilna said. The slaughter that'd happened here, massacre of the village, must've bothered her more than she cared to realize. When she heard her words, she knew the answer and spoke it: "The New King has it. The creature, Nergura said it was."

Davus struck sparks expertly into his pile of tinder, using a flint and a thumb-sized crystal of fool's gold that he must've found unnoticed along the way. He smiled in satisfaction at the smoke twisting from his fireset, then looked at Ilna and said, "Yes, the creature. In a manner of speaking I suppose it's only fair. The jewel is the creature's own egg, you see."

"Egg?" Ilna repeated sharply. "Then it's going to hatch into more of the things?"

Davus bent over, feeding larger fragments of the branch to the wood fibers that he'd used for tinder. He chuckled. "No," he said, "not that one, any more than the hen's egg you boil for dinner is going to start clucking. The power is there regardless, but trying to use it with the egg still alive is-"

The chuckle returned, deeper and grim as a death-knell.

"-a good way to guarantee that you'll not live to the end of the spell yourself. Or at least that was the story that people told in my day."

Ilna looked over her shoulder. Chalcus was leaving the hamlet with a jaunty step and a basket balanced on his left shoulder.

"Ah, we'll feast like lords and ladies tonight, my friends!" the sailor called when he found Ilna's eyes on him. "Wheat and beans andhoney, a whole comb, wrapped in a palm frond and fit for the greatest king in all this fine world, I'm sure!"

"Perhaps the Old King spared the mother because he'd slain her child, the egg," Davus said softly as he built up the fire. "That's the sort of thing a man might do but a king should not, allowing sentiment to affect his rule. Who knows what's in a man's heart?"

"Who indeed," Ilna said. "He was a sentimentalist, your Old King?"

"Him?" Davus scoffed. "Not him! He was a choleric fellow with a quick tongue and a hard hand. But justice mattered to him, and perhaps his sense of what was just led him into the error of sparing an enemy."

"If that's what happened," said Ilna, "then his choice had a bad result; but not so bad, I think, as the result of deciding to ignore justice."

She rose to her feet smiling-broadly for her-and took the basket of scavenged foodstuffs from Chalcus. She had to believe in justice, because without a sense of justice there was no difference between the Ilna os-Kenset of today and the woman who'd come back from Hell, bringing that Hell along with her.

If that was the case, then Ilna and all the world besides were better off dead.

Garric, bending over the pile of clean linens folded on the handbarrow, followed Liane along the corridor. Though it was still an hour short of dawn, most of the hall lamps had burned to glows.

Garric was surprised to see that lamp above the door to his own suite was as dim as the others. The Blood Eagles were usually much more punctilious about their duties-and lighting the faces of those approaching Prince Garric's room was very much a part of their duties.

"This isn't right," said Carus, quizzical and mildly irritated at a failure of discipline. Then, in a voice without any emotion at all, he said, "It's an ambush, but don't run, on yourlifedon't run, they've got javelins and you've only got a dagger."

But my sword's in the anteroom of the suite, Garric thought. Using the linens for cover as he continued to pace forward, he slid the dagger out from under his tunic and held it flat beneath the left pole of the barrow. Perhaps they'll wait for us to enter instead of attacking in the corridor where they might be interrupted.

The eight guards were twenty feet away and, as Carus noted, all but the under-captain commanding the squad had javelins. If Garric and Liane turned to run, they'd be spitted like chickens for roasting before they got three steps toward safety at the turn of the hallway.

"When you get the door unlatched," Garric muttered, hoping that Liane could make out his words, "get in and get clear."

"All right," Liane whispered back. Her pace, a sullen shuffle, didn't change.

The watch would've changed at midnight, so the features beneath the black helmets properly weren't those of the Blood Eagles on duty when he and Liane went out. Garric, watching as best he could with his face bent down, didn't recognize any of them.

"They're none of them men I've ever seen before. The uniforms are right, but they're not Blood Eagles," Carus said, seeing through Garric's eyes. That put the seal on what Garric had known in his heart-in the pit of his stomach-already.

The guards were all watching him. That wasn't right: two men should've been looking the other way down the corridor in case the 'servants' were a deliberate distraction.

Garric had expected to be recognized on his return tonight-well, this morning-despite the proper pass stamped with the wax bulla of his personal secretary, Liane bos-Benliman. Being identified now wouldn't have mattered much. Attaper would probably hear about it and complain in forceful terms about what Garric had done, but he couldn't stop what'd already happened. Garrichadn't expected the guards to be waiting for him, though. But of course these weren't guards.

Liane held out the pass, a palm-sized potsherd with the information brushed in ink on the inner side. She bent her head away with the shy propriety of a modest girl meeting a group of men.

The man wearing the white horsehair crest of an officer grunted, "Go on," He didn't touch the pass or demand that Liane and Garric look him in the eye.