David Drake - The Mirror of Worlds

"You're leaving us!" Sharina said. "Yes, dear," said the old wizard.

"We'll come back frequently, but I can't promise to be available to answer your questions in a timely manner." She gave Sharina a lopsided smile and added, "Unless I fail tonight, that is. If that happens, it won't really matter what else I do. I don't see any hope for mankind if I fail tonight." "I see," said Sharina, though she didn't see. Her head was filled with buzzing whiteness; she wondered if she were about to faint. "I'll pray for you." I'll pray for all of us. Tenoctris went to the door and opened it. "I think we'd best leave now, Cashel," she said. "I'd like to have everything prepared at the tomb before sunset." "Yes, ma'am," Cashel said, walking back into the room.

Sharina threw her arms about Cashel again and kissed him hard. He was too shy to've taken the initiative, but he held her firmly and kissed her back. For what may be the last time. *** Tenoctris looked down the hillside with a satisfied expression, then took three brisk steps to the right. Cashel followed, carrying the satchel with the books and powders she used in her wizardry. Instead of taking something out it, however, Tenoctris pointed at the ground. "Here," she said to the officer commanding the soldiers. "There should be a sloping trench leading southwest for about fifteen feet. Lay it open, please, and remove what I expect will be a stone blocking the doorway at the far end." "You heard the lady, lads!" the officer bellowed. "Make me proud of you or you'llnever get off latrine duty!" The double handful of soldiers were already at work with mattocks and shovels. Theyhad heard Tenoctris, after all; they were close enough to touch her and she'd spoken in a normal voice.

Cashel didn't understand why soldiers-and sailors-seemed to shout whatever they were saying, but it was one of the things that made him glad he'd been a shepherd instead. He'd followed Tenoctris back so they weren't in the way of the digging. The men were good at it, no question; it was a treat to watch how one fellow broke ground with his mattock and the next shoveled the dirt into a wicker basket, all without getting in each other's way. They had nice tools, too, with metal blades. In Barca's Hamlet, most shovels were shaped from wood with only a shoe of iron over the cutting edge. Lots of folks used digging sticks, even. Cashel looked at Tenoctris. She'd taken a gold locket from under her silk robe and held it as she watched the soldiers. She looked, well, not as cheerful as usual, so he said, "I thought you might have to do a spell to find what you wanted." "Not here, I'm afraid," Tenoctris said, smiling though she didn't look around. "It's rather like saying, 'What sort of device do you need to discover a forest fire?' Graveyards often hold a great deal of power, but here it's not just death and reverence. The man buried there-" She nodded to the trench. The soldiers had cleared the layer of dirt and were now digging out the slot cut in the rock beneath. It was porous volcanic tuff, as easy to carve as the chalky limestone of the hills around Barca's Hamlet. "-was a very powerful wizard. I don't ordinarily care to work in a place where power is so concentrated."

"What was the wizard's name, Tenoctris?" Cashel asked. It only seemed polite to know a fellow's name when you were digging up his grave. She smiled again and this time met Cashel's eyes. "I don't know, I'm afraid," she said. "I don't even know how long ago he lived. Though I'm sure he was male; that I can tell from what remains." Her eyes drifted across the slope spotted with small cedars and outcrops of tuff. It wasn't much to look at, it seemed to Cashel. There were potsherds in the coarse grass; he turned one over with his toe and found it'd been painted on the underside. "That was a grave marker,"

Tenoctris said. "On Ornifal in my day, people were buried standing. An urn with a hole in the bottom put over the grave. On the anniversary of the death, relatives and friends dropped wine and food into the mouth of the jar." Cashel frowned, looking harder at the bit of pottery. He couldn't guess what the painting might've shown when it was whole: all he had left to judge by were the parallel strokes of blue and blue-green against the earthenware background. "If they were dead, it didn't matter, did it?" he said. "It mattered to the relatives and friends, Cashel," the old woman said. "And they were the ones doing it." "Ah," Cashel said, smiling at himself for not thinking of that. He was pretty good at figuring out what people'd do once he'd been around them a while, but not always about why they did it. Ilna was worse, of course: she got mad when folks didn't do things the way she thought they should. Ilna was smart, no mistake. Sometimes Cashel thought that he and his sister had about two people's amount of brains between them, but they'd mostly gone to her. He loved Ilna, but he was glad most people in the world didn't think the way she did. He was pretty sure Ilna was glad of that too, whatever she might say aloud about how most people behaved. "Here, we got a stone!" called the soldier at the far end of the trench. He and his partner were down over their heads; other soldiers from where the cut was shallower had been carrying away baskets of dirt and emptying them for some while now. The man who'd spoken dragged the pick on the other end of his tool into the crevice between the block and a doorway cut in the tuff bedrock. "Hey, it's two stones," he said. His partner shoved the handle of his shovel-not the blade, which would've bent-into the opposite crack. They levered the stone out alternately, working like a perfect team and all without needing a word between them. The officer looked up. Cashel smiled at him, then nodded toward the soldiers now lifting the top block up for two more men waiting at the lip of the cut to take it. The officer beamed, pleased that somebody who understood the work was watching his men do it. The lower block was twice the size of the upper stone that'd wedged it in place. "Hey, Top?" the man with the mattock called. "I think we're going to need ropes for this one." "Let me try it," said Cashel. "Tenoctris, will you hold this?" He gave her his quarterstaff. He could've laid it on the ground, but he'd rather give it to a friend when he couldn't hold it himself. It was just a length of straight-grained hickory, but he'd had it a long time. It'd been a friend when he needed a friend. "Let me try," Cashel repeated as strode over to the cut. The soldiers had ignored him the first time. That didn't bother him; it was the sort of thing you got when somebody new tried to join a group that'd been together for a while. It happened just the same with sheep. The trench was three double-paces long and sloped down to the depth of a man's head at the doorway end. Cashel squatted, looming over the men there.

"I can maybe lift that without ropes and people pulling from up here," he said. "He might at that," one of the soldiers muttered. "What d'ye think?" Instead of answering, his partner called, "Top, is that all right?" "Yes, of course it's all right," said Tenoctris testily. "I'll tell Lord Waldron that haste was important, if you like. Or I'll ask Princess Sharina to tell him. I'd like there still to be natural light when I enter the chamber!" "Right!" said the officer. The men beneath Cashel were already moving away to give him room. "If you want to try, sir, go ahead. But it looks like a load even for somebody as big as you." "Well, I'll try," Cashel said. He dropped into the trench with his left hand on the lip so that he didn't come down with his full weight on his toes. He touched the block. It'd been chipped from the same soft stone as the trench was cut out of. Cashel wasn't one to brag, but this wasn't even going to hard. He rocked the block forward a little to make sure it was loose; it was. He squatted, placed his hands, and then straightened up from the knees. Everything was smooth as you please till the block was at the top of trench and Cashel started to fling it down the slope. "Get out of his way!" Tenoctris shouted. Cashel didn't understand what she was talking about till he realized four soldiers had stepped into what'd been an empty space.