David Drake - Master of the Cauldron

Garric nocked an arrow from the fallen man's quiver. It had a head like a knitting needle instead of the flaring barbs of a hunting arrow: the archer had thought he might have to shoot through a breastplate, so he'd come with bodkin points instead of broadheads.

Garric held the bow cord to his right ear. He no longer heard the shouts and screams filling the square. He was in a world of his own, his eyes focused on his arrowhead, silhouetted against the scarlet blur of Lord Tawnser's tunic. He threw his weight onto his left arm, bending the bowstaff instead of drawing the cord as easterners were taught to do; he loosed as part of the same smooth motion.

The stiff cord snapped painfully against Garric's left wrist-he wasn't wearing a bracer. He reached to his belt to draw out the next arrow, then remembered that he wasn't shooting at a predator back in the borough; that that wasn't his bow and that he wasn't a shepherd any more.

Tawnser had almost reached the roof; men were leaning over the coping to pull him the last of the way to safety. He flung his hands in the air and dropped backward into the square.

Garric threw down the bow; he swayed for a moment. He'd acted by instinct, and only now was he able to understand exactly what he'd done.

"You got him, your highness!" Attaper shouted beside him. "Good shot, your highness, a shot worth everything else that's happened today!"

A man who was alive is now dead, thought Garric, suddenly sick. A man whom I killed.

"We've got to get to him before the body's stripped!" Liane cried from Garric's other side. "He may have important documents!"

The three of them ran together toward where the rebel leader had fallen. The rioters who could move under their own power were out of the square by now. Sections of Blood Eagles who'd chased them a little way down the connecting streets were now returning. Their officers weren't going to let them disperse in a city which, if not wholly hostile, certainly wasn't friendly to them.

Lord Tawnser lay on his back with a surprised expression. The arrowpoint glittered a hand's-breadth out of his breastbone. There wasn't much blood, but the arrow had broken his spine when it struck.

"That was too quick for a man like him!" Attaper said as Liane undid the clasp of Tawnser's purse.

Garric looked down. "Milord," he said, "for the sake of the kingdom I'm glad he's dead. But I'm sorry I killed him or ever killed a human being; and the kingdom isn't served by even bad man dying slowly."

"Here, Garric!" Liane said, holding up a slip of parchment. "It's as we thought!"

Garric forced his mind from the memory of a dead man falling down the side of a building. The note read, Garric who calls himself your prince will be at the Temple of the Shielding Shepherd tomorrow morning with a few soldiers. If you're a man and a patriot, serve him as he deserves. There was no signature, but the broken wax closure had been sealed with a stamped design.

"That's two intertwined serpents," Liane explained. "It's Dipsas' seal."

"Lord Attaper," Garric said, steadying his voice as he spoke. "We'll return to the palace with all deliberate speed. And then we'll discuss what happened here with a wizard named Dipsas."

He couldn't keep another wave of bloodlust from trembling across the surface of his mind as he thought about the woman responsible for this.

Cashel opened his eyes. He'd gotten barely a glimpse of the cave as he fell into it backwards, but he knew he couldn't be there now.

He was in a hall whose sharply peaked ceiling was higher than any place he'd been in. A line of stone-framed windows just below the roof trusses flooded light onto the tapestries along the walls. The hangings on the west were brilliant, and even those in morning shadow gleamed with threads of gold and silver shot through the silk. Ilna wouldlove to see those.

"Come join us," said the eldest of the six men on the other side of a table long enough to seat many, many more than those present. It ran down the center of the hall beneath the ridgepole, nearly end to end of the big room. The men sat mid-way along the table's length. The speaker gestured toward the short bench across from him.

"Yes sir," Cashel said. He wore his tunics but he didn't have his quarterstaff with him. The lack didn't bother him as much as he'd have expected it to. "Sir, where am I?"

He didn't ask who the men were, because he already knew that. He'd seen their images walking the battlements of Ronn when he was with Mab.

Virdin, the first of Ronn's champions, had spoken. To his right were the twins Menon and Minon, laughing at some joke between them as they watched Cashel over their winecups. At that end of the row was Valeri, lanky and glaring as fierce as a seawolf at Cashel.

The images of the two warriors on Virdin's left hadn't come by before the Made Men attacked, but Hrandis had to be the squat man, broader even than Cashel. That made the man beside him Dasborn, who had long limbs and a swordsman's wrists.

"You're in the Cavern of the Heroes, Cashel," one of the twins said. Cashel couldn't tell them apart, and he doubted their mother could've done that either.

"The real Cavern," his brother said, grinning broadly. "Not the hole in the rock that people see beneath Ronn."

Big Hrandis poured wine from a ewer into the rock crystal cup waiting in front of Cashel. "You had a hard trip here, I'll warrant," he said in a voice that rumbled like distant thunder. "Have some of this."

Cashel touched the cup. It felt solid, but… "Is it real?" he asked.

"It's as real as we are," said Dasborn with a sardonic grin that made Cashel think of Garric's father Reise. Reise had more education than just about anybody, but there was a sadness under even the jokes he told. "Or as real as you are in this place, if you prefer."

Valeri looked at Virdin and said with a sneer, "She sent us a talky one, didn't she? I'd have thought she could do better."

"If you've got a problem with talk, Valeri," the twin nearest him said with a hard grin, "then you can stop making so much empty talk yourself."

Cashel drank to separate himself from the bickering. He supposed these fellows had been together a long time. Folks can get on each other's nerves, even when they're all heroes.

Because he was thinking about something else, Cashel gulped down more wine than he'd meant to. It prickled; he hunched forward and made a muffledwhuff!

Duzi, he'd barely kept from sneezing the wine back out his nose! That'd have given Valeri something to sneer at, wouldn't it?

Virdin leaned back on his bench. He had a full white beard, but the lean face it framed looked like that of somebody younger by far. "What do you think of the men you came with, Cashel?" he asked.

"The boys, you mean, Virdin," Valeri said. "By Ronn, what a litter of puppies!"

"You were young yourself once, Valeri," Dasborn said, looking down the table with a deliberately blank face. Now that he'd met the Heroes, Cashel didn't doubt they were all their reputations said they were; but Dasborn was the one he'd watch closest if Fate put him on the wrong side of them. Dasborn was the sort who made up his mind without any sign at all-and then acted, quick and cold as a housewife wringing the neck of the chicken for dinner.

"I was young," said Valeri, "but I was never like that. If I'd been like that, I'd have hanged myself!"

Cashel drank again, then cleared his throat loudly. The wine was well enough, he supposed; but he preferred beer, and the cup had a gold rim besides. Cashel didn't like the taste of metal with his drink. Even the tarred leather jacks he and Ilna used at home would be better, if he couldn't get a wooden masar instead.

"They're a good lot," he said, looking straight at Virdin so it wouldn't seem like he was picking a fight with Valeri. He wasn't afraid of Valeri, mind; but it wasn't in Cashel's nature to quarrel if he could avoid it. "They're young, sure, but they're braver than it maybe seems just to come down here when it's all so different from anything they know. They're willing, I guess I mean."