David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

There was a shuffle behind him. He kept the staff spinning though it felt as though he was turning millstones against all the force of the flume.

"Cashel, now!" Mab cried. But he couldn't take another step back. They had him in their power, the things he'd been fighting. They hemmed him before and behind and there was no way Brilliant bolts of wizardlight, blue and then red, flashed before him. The concussions threw him backward, face-up on a stone pavement. For a moment there was darkness again, but this time it was filled with the savage leering faces of white things that weren't men.

Then the bronze doors slammed shut, and Cashel's mind surrendered him to sleep.

Garric looked at the reading room's painted ceiling. On it a gorgeous fresco showed the Shepherd in a wolf-skin cape standing against the lightning-shot storm clouds in one corner. He carried a crook to help him lift bogged animals, rather than the simple staff that shepherds used on Haft. The rest of the painting was of vineyards and merchant ships, shops and a procession of city officials: all under the Shepherd's shielding presence.

"There's not a soldier in the whole picture," Carus observed from Garric's mind with a grin. "It must've been painted by a priest. Or a woman."

That depends on the woman, Garric thought, glancing at Liane as she turned pages quickly. Liane never hesitated to deal with reality. The realities of today, when the powers on which the cosmos turned were rising to their thousand-year peak, certainly included soldiers.

The stresses twisting the world affected ordinary people as well as wizards. Lust and greed and anger were never far beneath the surface of human interactions, but the membrane between those emotions and civilization was thinner now.

"The painting must've been cleaned recently," Garric said to Attaper, standing at his side. "The paint's very bright, though I'd imagine it dates from hundreds of years ago."

Attaper glanced up and grunted. He returned to glowering at the priests entering and leaving the room.

Garric smiled faintly. The Blood Eagle commander wasn't an art lover, and he'd been understandably nervous ever since Garric announced he was crossing to Erdin with limited forces. This trip added another level to Attaper's concern. The Temple of the Shielding Shepherd was a mile from the palace.

Attaper and Garric stood near the eastern reading table where Liane turned the pages of a vellum-bound codex. Across the room a squad of Blood Eagles guarded the trio of priest/librarians-two old men and an eager young woman with very short hair. They were fetching books Liane had asked for, either by name or more often by subject.

Some of the works were in the reading room's ceiling-high wall cases, but for the most part the priests had to go through the gilt-arched doorway to other portions of the library past more Blood Eagles. When they returned they set their finds on the west table, from which soldiers carried them to Liane.

The process seemed cumbersome and silly to Garric, but it didn't slow Liane's search and it made Attaper happy. Well, a little less unhappy. Besides, deep in a corner of Garric's mind was the recollection of the things in the semblance of men which'd attacked him and Liane in the night. Attaper was here to vouch for the identity of his troops, but who would know if a seeming librarian was human?

Liane read swiftly, a page half-lifted to turn against the moment she finished the one she was scanning. "No," she muttered. "No, not that-"

She flipped the page. Her face was set in stern lines. She didn't look so much angry as like a judge preparing to deliver deservedly harsh punishment. Even so it was disconcertingly different from any of Liane's normal expressions. Garric kept his eyes on other things instead of making himself uncomfortable by watching her.

"-either!"

Instead of glazed casements, the windows across the room's southern and northern walls were covered with vertical strips of bleached parchment sewn together at the edges. They lit the reading tables well but the illumination was softer than what glass would've provided.

Liane closed the book she'd been using. Though frustrated, she treated the volume with the respect due its age instead of banging it shut. She opened a waiting scroll. The temple librarians had already untied its cords of gold-colored silk for her.

Attaper cleared his throat. "Ah…," he said. "You're something of a scholar yourself, aren't you, your highness?"

Meaning, "Why are you standing here with your thumb up your ass instead of helping her?"Garric translated mentally. Aloud he said, "Yes, I am, but in this kind of research two people would just get in each other's way. Much of it's a matter of remembering what one writer said and connecting it with an item from somewhere else. All the information has to be in the same place."

He tapped his temple, smiling. "In the same mind, that is."

The image of King Carus chuckled at him. "Don't expect me to help you there," he said. "The best use I found for a book in my own day was to prop up a wobbly table leg."

"Ah!" Liane said. "Garric, read this."

She thrust the scroll she'd been reading toward Garric in her left hand while with her right index finger she worked down through the stack of codexes which she'd reviewed earlier in the morning. When Garric was hesitated a moment, Liane waggled the scroll impatiently. He took it, freeing her hands to lift the top three books off her pile and retrieve the second from the bottom.

Garric cleared his throat. Attaper was looking toward the door with the forced nonchalance of a man who was determined not to have seen or heard something that would otherwise be embarrassing.

"It's from the annals of a temple or possibly a city," Garric said to Attaper, holding the document by both winding sticks. A full two columns were open between them. "It's headed Sixteen, that'd be Year Sixteen of someone's reign-"

"Aguar the Fourth, Earl of Sandrakkan," Liane said as with forceful impatience she turned the pages of the book she'd chosen. "He acceded at about the time Carus became King of the Isles. And the document is theChronicle of Sandrakkan compiled at Kremsa, sixty miles east of Erdin. I'm looking for something I found in theChronicle compiled at Erdin during Aguar's reign."

Garric waited a moment to make sure Liane wasn't going to interject something more. She continued to page through the codex in silence. Catching Attaper's eye, Garric read, "'In this year a great pirate host came from the Outer Sea and took Erdin. They dwelt in the city for eleven months, and in the twelfth month Earl Aguar attacked them from the Island, that'd be Volita, with a great…'"

He paused, changing the angle of the document to the light. The ink was sepia and the parchment had yellowed over the centuries, making the contrast less than ideal. "'A great band of warriors,' I think this must be," Garric resumed, "'whom his advisor Dromillac had brought to him with his, that is, its leader, the band's leader, a man of great power. The band of warriors, the army, split the earth and cast the pirates into the Underworld.'"

"The priest who wrote the KremsaChronicle…," Liane said, relaxed again now that she'd found the place she was looking for and was marking it with her finger. "Was afraid to use the word 'wizard'. 'A man of great power,' is his code for wizard, I believe. Now here's a passage from the ErdinChronicle, 'And Earl Afrase died and his son Aguar succeeded. Aguar was a great warrior but an unlucky ruler, and he was too beholden to the wizard Dromillac who came to him out of Dalopo-or some said out of the Underworld, for they thought him a demon.'"

"What does that book say about the pirates, milady?" Attaper said, frowning as he considered what he'd just heard.