David Drake - The Gods Return

Yellow-green light, the color of a will-o'-the-wisp or the mold on a corpse, crawled out the opening. With it came the dying echoes of a sound Ilna had never imagined, a rustling that was initially louder than any thunderclap. "Come, Ilna," Usun said. "We must go in." He knows more about this than he's telling me, Ilna thought; and smiled.

She wasn't one to discuss her plans either, and the little man had shown himself to be a friend at every past occasion where it mattered.

If Usun had worn clothing, she could have stroked its fabric with her fingers and learned a great deal about him. She doubted that she'd have learned anything to change her belief that he was skilled, determined, and completely trustworthy; all the virtues she saw and cultivated in herself. Ilna strode into the green glow. The door closed behind her. The scale of the chamber was beyond her eyes' ability to grasp immediately. Faces turned toward her. The only time she'd seen so many people together was in great plazas when Garric was addressing the whole city. Their clothing was of all manner of styles, many that she'd never seen before, but their expressions were uniformly dull and empty. They-mostly men but some women, and a mixture of ages from children to doddering oldsters-stood around the edges of the chamber, rubbing the walls. "Is Hervir or-Halgran here?"

Ilna called. She raised her voice with each syllable till by the end she was shouting, but even so she could scarcely hear her own words in the vast chamber. So many people breathing in an enclosure made a sound like the rage of a windstorm. "I am Hervir," replied a middle-aged man standing not far from the entrance. He lowered his hands; they held a rounded block of stone which was about half the size of his head. He walked deliberately toward Ilna and Usun. The big room had been cut out of the living rock. It was granite here, just as it had been on the higher levels through which the stairwell descended; Ilna could tell that from the speckles of quartz and other things mixed with the basic material. It was a dense, supremely hard mass. The granite itself was the source of the glow whose shadowless presence filled the chamber. Ilna set her lamp on the floor. She might need it again, but at present she wanted her hands free to knot a pattern. She'd have pinched out the wick, but she hadn't brought a flint and steel to light it again. The oil would either last or it wouldn't; she was concerned with more important things now. "What are you doing in this place?" she demanded. A thought turned her face stiff; she reached behind her to the massive iron door and pushed. It shifted noticeably: it would be as easy to open from the inside as it had been from the anteroom. "We are building the throne room for the King of Man," Hervir said with mild unconcern. He lifted his stone slightly to call attention to it. "Expanding the room, that is.

Rubbing away the walls to make room for more worshippers until the King of Man becomes the God of All. Have you come to join us?" "I've come to take you back to your family," Ilna said, thinking, And how am I going to manage that even now that I've found him alive? "But why haven't you escaped yourself? All of you? Why do you stay down here?"

"It's necessary that we enlarge the throne room," Hervir said. "Though there may be enough of us now worshipping the King of Man; the time is near." He looked toward the center of the circular room. A granite pillar with steps circling it like the threads of a screw stood there, looming over the crowd. Because of the green light filling the stone, Ilna saw it clearly. "The King has been gathering worshippers for many ages, waiting for this moment," Hervir said in a musing tone. "I was the last to join him, till you came. I thought perhaps it was my destiny to be the final worshipper, the one who brought him to godhead, but that was not to be." "I'm not a worshipper!" Ilna said.

"And you're not staying here. None of you should stay here!" "But it's our duty," said Hervir with a faint smile. "Some of us have worshipped the King for millennia, but the time wasn't right until now. Until after the Change." Ilna looked at the assembly. Some had been sleeping while others ground at the walls or swept powdered rock into sacks of sisal fiber. They too were awakening to stare at her and Usun. "Don't you die?" she said. "There can't be people thousands of years old!"

"No one dies here, mistress," Hervir said, smiling again. "The King of Man must be worshipped, and the dead can't do that." "What do you eat?" Usun said. He was twirling his staff slowly through the fingers of his right hand; the iron point winked each time it came around.

Hervir looked down and frowned in puzzlement. "What a strange little man," he said. "I saw pigmies on Shengy in the days, in the days before… But they weren't so small as you." "What do you eat?"

Usun repeated. "The King's servants bring us wine and rice," Hervir said. "It's a wondrous vintage. Like nothing I'd ever drunk before I came to worship the King." "A drug in the wine, wouldn't you say, Ilna?" Usun said, turning his head toward her. She shrugged. "I suppose," she said, "but that doesn't explain people living forever.

Or anyway, for however long." She looked sharply at Hervir. "Come along," she said. If her hands had been free, she'd have gripped him by the shoulder. "You're coming with us. And when we have you safe in the waking world, perhaps Master Usun and I will return to find this King of Man." "You needn't look for the King, mistress," Hervir said with his gentle smile. "He's here now." The swirl of air warned her.

She turned quickly to see the tall door opening on its silent hinges.

Perrin and Perrine came in, holding hands. They gaped in surprise.

"Mistress Ilna!" the princess blurted. "We thought you'd left the Valley of the King!" "I thought I'd failed," said Perrin. The bleak horror of his tone suggested what failure would mean. Two liveried apes entered in single file; Ingens walked between them. His face tightened when he saw Ilna. "Have you come to worship the King of Man also, mistress?" he said. "No," Ilna said. "I've come to dispose of him and free the lot of you!" Her fingers were knotting again at the pattern she'd already formed, adding to it as the situation changed and became clearer. "Will you indeed?" said a great voice. A huge ape paced into the chamber on his knuckles, then stood upright. He was dressed in crimson silk and wore a golden crown set with rubies; a silken strap passed beneath his brutal chin. He was several times as massive as the ape servants. "The King!" whispered the assembly thunderously. "The King of Man has come!" *** Cashel looked at the squat, angry-looking wizard advancing toward him along the shimmering bridge. The fellow's elbows were out and he held his crystal wands like knitting needles. Skeins of scarlet wizardlight spun from them, forming a pattern beyond the tips. "Sir?" said Cashel. "I don't wish a problem with you. I just need to get the pledge coin on the other side." He put his quarterstaff into a slow spin. Duzi! there was a lot of room. He couldn't see anything to right or left except a black horizon, and there was nothing overhead. Below, pale blue flames licked across the bottom of the chasm and gave the air the dry rasp of brimstone. The wizard kept weaving his spell like Cashel hadn't spoken. He was chanting words of power, too, which was pretty much to be expected. A snake of plaited wizardlight curled slowly toward Cashel the way a honeysuckle vine stretches along a pole. Cashel stepped forward and thrust one tip of his staff to where the strands of ruby light wrapped together and formed the snake. There was a bright blue flash and the aircrack ed like nearby lightning.

"Hoy!" the wizard shouted. His arms flew apart and he staggered back.

He'd been angry before, but now he looked like he was ready to chew rocks. Nothing remained of the pattern he'd been weaving. Cashel took an easy step forward. This crystal bridge might look narrow to some, but it was a lot wider than some of the logs he'd crossed in thunderstorms, often enough carrying a ewe who'd gotten bogged. "Sir," he said, "I'll give you a fight if you want one, but that's not whatI want." The wizard wore flowing silver robes with symbols in black around the hem and the cuffs. Cashel couldn't read those markings-or anything else-but he knew from the shapes that they weren't the Old Script or the New Script either one. The wizard got his composure and began weaving his wands into the same pattern as before. He went back to mumbling words of power, too. He hadn't said a thing except to chant. Past the wizard's head, the gleaming bridge stretched farther than Cashel's eyes could follow. He wondered what he'd see if he looked over his own shoulder. The same thing, he guessed, but only for as long as it took the wizard to knock him into the fiery abyss because he hadn't kept his attention on the fight. Maybe that was it: maybe the only ways off the bridge were through the other fellow or down into the brimstone. Well, Cashel hadn't made this place. Chances were the man trying to knock him off the bridge had more than a little to do with why it was like it was, though. The snake of wizardlight crawled toward Cashel again. He'd struck high the first time, his left hand leading on the quarterstaff. This time he brought the staff up from below with his right hand forward; again there was a flash and acrack! The wizard jolted back in startled fury. Cashel felt a faint tingle all the way up to the bunched muscles of his right shoulder; he worked that out with a few more spins of his staff. The ferrules had glowed when they hit the wizardlight, but that faded in no time. The iron wasn't burnt through, as sometimes happened. He'd had to replace the butt-caps several times after fighting wizards, but that didn't matter so long as the hickory he'd shaped with his own hands remained.