David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

What good would your breastplate be if that spider grabbed you? Cashel thought, but he didn't say anything. The spider and the prey it'd netted in one of the pools were out of sight, and scaring the Sons worse than they already were wouldn't help anything.

Cashel smiled in sudden warmth. Aloud he said, "You fellows aren't used to this sort of thing. You're doing real good."

"Watch yourselves," Mab said again, nodding to the Sons as a group, then to Cashel. She stepped onto the walkway. It spiraled down for quite some distance, then split into three separate paths that slanted off. Cashel put himself a half step ahead of her, where he could move fast without having to worry about friends being in the way of his staff.

"Mistress Mab?" said Orly. He seemed to be the one who did the most thinking. "You said the lower levels are turning into the way the King would have them. But the Kingbuilt Ronn, didn't he? And he didn't build it like this."

"The King was a very great wizard," Mab said. "Was and is. Greater than the Queen in many ways: he could create what she could only maintain. But the King had to change things in order to live, and eventually he changed himself. He couldn't turn himself back, any more than an addled egg can become fresh again. And so the Queen ousted him, for the sake of Ronn and the citizens of Ronn."

Cashel saw movement on a distant catwalk. He thought it was water flowing till it raised its head and tasted the air with its tongue. After a moment it slithered out of sight among the trees of a hanging garden.

Well, he'd seen snakes before. Never one that size, though, as far as he could remember.

"The King came from the earth and created Ronn," Mab said. Her voice was clearer than it should've been with this huge emptiness around them to drink the words. "But the Queen came from Ronn itself."

"And the Queen's gone," said Herron harshly. "It's up to us, now."

"It's up to us," Mab repeated in the same flat, clear voice as before. Cashel wasn't sure she was agreeing, exactly.

Stepping out a little farther ahead, Cashel began to spin his quarterstaff slowly to loosen his muscles. Something passed overhead. He heard Enfero gasp in surprise, but Mab didn't speak. He continued to spin, a little faster each time he crossed his wrists.

He guessed Mab would warn them if there was going to be a fight. And though Cashel wasn't sure about the Sons beyond figuring that they'd try, he knew what to do in a fight.

Smiling, content as he usually was, Cashel began feeding his spinning staff before and behind him in a careful, complicated pattern like what Mab had done to clear the water.

Oh, yes. Cashel wascertain sure he knew about fights.

"There's people on the sand spit," Ilna said, speaking in a low voice. The creek they'd been following much of the afternoon forked here. Though the shallow channels weren't real protection, the freshly-deposited sand at the upstream end would be more comfortable than a camp hacked out of the willows and sedges on lining both banks. "Making supper, it seems."

"I don't smell smoke," Chalcus said. His hands weren't on his sword and dagger, but his voice had the peculiar lightness that meant the blades would be clear at the first hint of a threat. "There's four of them; and a dozen donkeys-one's strayed downstream."

"They're not people," Davus said, cold and hard and certain. "Not any longer, at least. The New King's been this way."

Instead of relaxing, Chalcus rose onto his toes and looked about them. They were on an animal trail that came into sight of the water only at fords: the vegetation was much heavier at the streamside than a double-pace back from it. Even so Ilna doubted that her friend could see anything that'd been hidden while he stood flat-footed.

She understood why Chalcus was-in his way-nervous, though. What use was a sword against a creature that turned its victims into stone?

Davus splashed through the stream. He held a chip of patterned obsidian in his left hand, but as a talisman rather than a weapon. His thumb rubbed the smooth stone, and his face was set in lines as hard as those of the statues on the sand.

Chalcus nodded Ilna across; she waded over quickly. The water was only knee deep, but the strong current made her tug up her tunic. She didn't mind the hem being wet, but the fabric might give the stream purchase enough to pull her down.

Chalcus waited till Ilna was on the sand, then followed. He watched their backs with a faint false smile. If Davus was right, mere sight of the creature and its jewel was enough to turn the victim to stone, so it didn't seem to Ilna that keeping a close lookout was a useful defense. There were other dangers in this land, of course.

And perhaps Chalcus thought that if he were turned to stone, it would give her warning to escape. Her lips tightened at the thought. As if she'd run!

The Citadel-the tall basalt spike whose crystal crown flared and twisted into fanciful shapes-loomed not very far away. Ilna hadn't learned to judge distances, growing up as she did in a small hamlet which she'd never expected to leave. The New King's victims hadn't been looking that way, however.

Something had come down the creek from the west. The wayfarers were preparing supper. Two men had risen, their hands on a sword hilt in the one case, a spear too heavy for easy throwing in the other. A third had gone to settle the tethered donkeys which must've become restive, while the last had remained squatting by the fire.

And so they were now, figures of coarse black stone. Their clothing had rotted off, all but a few tatters where the cloth was doubled, and the blades of their weapons were lumps of rust.

Chalcus dug his bare toe into the hearth. Sand half-covered the ring of stones and the feet of the man who'd been watching the fire, but Chalcus turned up a layer of ash beneath. It'd burned itself out, whenever the thing happened. Years ago.

Davus knelt by a pile of flat black boulders near the stone donkeys, running his fingertips over them as Ilna might have done with a complex tapestry. Ilna frowned at the blocks, puzzling as to where they came from. They were basalt, not the limestone that cropped out of the brush in this Oh. They were leather packsaddles, turned to stone by chance or whim at the same time the creature had petrified the men who owned them.

"Ilna, dear heart?" Chalcus said, looking about them with a smile as bright and hard as the glint of faceted diamond. "You brought Master Davus back from the black, stony place that these poor fellows are in now. Might it be that you could do the same for them?"

The statues-they'd been merchants, Ilna supposed-were utter strangers; and though Chalcus was no longer the red-handed pirate he'd once been, she'd seen him viewing a bloody shambles with no greater concern than a sawyer has for cut timber. The difference here, the reason there was a real plea in his falsely cheerful voice, was that he knew the victims weren't dead. They were living men, inside a prison that had been their own flesh.

"I'm sorry," Ilna said. "The vines around Davus told me where to cut. I can't see the patterns here. Not in stone."

Davus poised his chip of obsidian like a writing stylus, then tapped once on the uppermost packsaddle. There was a slight click, no more, and the thin slab that'd been the flap cracked away in a single sheet. A shower of wheat kernels spilled out, golden in the sunlight and far more welcome now than bullion would've been. Ilna's belly growled in anticipation.

Davus rose and faced his companions. He wasn't smiling but he seemed satisfied. "They've been sealed better than any storage jar," he said. "Mistress, if you can manage flat-bread, I'll take a handful-"

So speaking, he bent and scooped up a little of the bright grain.