David Drake - The Mirror of Worlds

"Well, maybe a little from vanity too. Just a little." Cashel smiled again, but he didn't say anything. She was joking; she wasn't any more vain that he was. Sure, Cashel was a good judge of what he could do, so he knew he could do a lot. He didn't go around bragging to other folk, though, and all the same things were true for Tenoctris. She lay in the coffin and started murmuring her words of power. Cashel turned toward the entrance. His job was to make sure nobody came in while she was in a trance. Cashel thought about the man who'd been buried here, if he was a man and not the demon his shadow made him. He took his left hand from his quarterstaff and touched the locket from Tenoctris.

He wasn't sure why he was keeping it, but there was bound to be a good reason. Tenoctris always had good reasons. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck lifted. Bright wizardlight lit the tomb with a crackle like lightning ripping down an oak tree. The iron ferrules of his quarterstaff spun off whirling blue whiplashes. Cashel turned, his hands spread on the shaft so he could strike right or left as need required. Tenoctris lay in a tube of pure blue light, her hands crossed peacefully on her chest. Her lips moved, but Cashel couldn't hear her words over the tearing sound of wizardry. He backed slightly; the cocoon of light made his chest prickle, like being too close to a blacksmith's fire. He could stand it if he had to, but he didn't see any need. The coffin glowed with the wizardlight that leaked from Tenoctris. As Cashel watched, the figures on the side got fuzzy and began to flake, the way marble does when it's left in the weather a long time. Patches of rotten stone shelved out like fungus, then dropped away. The light cut off, again lightning-quick. Cashel blinked and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. If something came at him now while he couldn't see- His brief blindness gave way to shadows, then real shapes in the twilight. For a moment Cashel wondered if he should've lit a lamp after all, but then he could see Tenoctris sitting up with a smile on her face. Then things really fell into focus. "Wow!" Cashel said. He was looking at Tenoctris because the lines of her face were the same, but this Tenoctris was his age.

Shecouldn't 've been more than 20 years old. "Tenoctris, it worked!"

The young Tenoctris got to her feet. She bumped the coffin and the whole front of it crumbled like a wall of sand in the tide. Laughing merrily, she stepped down from the bench. "So…," she said. "Do you like me, Cashel?" Raising her arms overhead, palms out so the fingernails touched, Tenoctris pirouetted. She was so small that she didn't touch the ceiling, even on tiptoe. Cashel blinked. This was really amazing. Tenoctris still had fine bones, but her face was rounder than it'd been when age wrinkled her cheeks. He couldn't tell the color of her hair, but it fell in long curls instead of being in a tight bun on top of her head. "That's really good, Tenoctris," he said. "That's really you, then? I mean, it's not just changing how you look?" "A glamour, you mean?" she said. "No, no-this is how I looked when I was twenty-one. If you'd like a glamour, though…" She turned her palm toward her face and murmured. Part of it was,

"… brimo maast," or something like it. Scarlet wizardlight twinkled. When Tenoctris lowered her hand, she had lustrous black hair, full lips, and a bosom that noticeably bulged her silk brocade robes. "Do you like this better?" she said. The voice was still Tenoctris, but nothing of the woman Cashel'd known so well for two years was there in the features. Smiling, she lifted her hand again.

"Or this?" The dusting of wizardlight was blue again this time, mild compared to the glare that'd dissolved the stone coffin but still bright enough to leave afterimages on Cashel's eyes. Tenoctris lowered her hand. Cashel's mouth opened in amazement. Sharina, tall and blond and as perfect as she'd been when he saw her a few hours before, smiled back at him. "You're really something to do that!" he said. "I think we'd best get back to the gig, though. We're losing the light, and there's some bad potholes till we get back to the main road."

"So…," said Tenoctris. "You don't find me attractive, Cashel?" He couldn't have said how the change happened, but what hadn't been Tenoctris slumped away or soaked in or something. She was back to being herself, only young. "What?" said Cashel. "Sure I do. You're really pretty, as yourself or any of the other ways. But I don't want us to break a wheel on the way out." He smiled. "Though I guess we could walk back if we had to now," he said. "Since you're young again." Tenoctris gave a funny little laugh. "Yes," she said. "That was the point, after all, wasn't it? And you're right, we need to get started. We have a great deal to do, my friend." She picked up the satchel herself and walked out of the tomb. Her strides were quick and birdlike, and her back was very straight. *** The three men would've been more than happy to open the mound themselves, but Ilna insisted on joining with the digging stick which Karpos had cut for her from a cedar as thick as his wrist. The fresh cedar oozed sap so her hands were now sticky, but that just gave her a better grip. She stamped the wedge tip into the dirt and levered upward. Asion's mattock clinked on rock; he worked it sideways. "I've got something here," he said. "It's not pebbles, it's fitted stones!"

"Here," ordered Ilna. "Let me." They'd carved down to the depth of her forearm through the turf at one end of the mound. It was certainly artificial, made of topsoil instead of changing quickly to the yellowish clay that underlay the surrounding meadow. That didn't prove the truth of what Merota'd said, that the Youth who'd sucked Ilna into that dream world was buried here, but it made that more likely. Had it really been Merota? And Chalcus, his arms as strong and supple as they'd been before the cat beasts'd swarmed over him slashing and stabbing…? "What is it you expect to find, Ilna?" asked Temple.

They'd been piling loosened earth onto Ilna's outer tunic. The big man had lifted each bundle out of the excavation and dumped it well from the mound where it wouldn't get in the way later. Ilna chopped fiercely at the dirt, opening a crevice between two large rocks. She didn't have to spare her implement the way Asion did the mattock: if she broke the end off the stick, Karpos would simply sharpen it again.

"I don't know," she said. She didn't look around, concentrating instead on the task she had in hand. As usual, of course; as she'd done all her life. "Perhaps bones, perhaps nothing." The chest-sized stones under the layer of turf hadn't been shaped by tools, but they'd been laid with a good deal of care. She drove the digging stick into a crack she'd cleared, then put her weight against it. The cedar was too supple to make a good crowbar, but she lifted the upper stone enough to notice those around it crunch and grate. This wasn't simply a heap: the individual rocks were wedged together into a dome of sorts. "What will you do when you find what you're looking for, Ilna?" Temple said.

Ilna jerked out the digging stick and turned. "I don't know that either!" she said. The sun shone from directly behind Temple's head, turning his blond hair into a cloud of blazing light. The hunters stood back slightly. Their expressions showed they were afraid that no matter what they did or didn't do, Ilna was going to flay the skin off them. Ilna glared and opened her mouth; they cringed. She closed her mouth again. She'd been about to snarl at them simply for existing, which was precisely what they'd been afraid she was going to do. Ilna barked a laugh. It wasn't a very good laugh, but she didn't have much experience with the process. "We're going to have to lift the rocks off carefully before I can see what's inside," she said in a calm voice. "Otherwise the dome will collapse into a worse mess." "I can lift this stone, Ilna," Temple said. He leaned forward and tapped the block whose edge she'd cleaned with her stick. "Then you can look inside." Ilna felt her anger returning. There was something soassured in the man's tone that it made her want to snap at him-or worse. She placed the yarn back in her sleeve. She'd started to knot a pattern that would've doubled the big man over retching; nobody could sound self-assured while vomiting his guts up. "All right," Ilna said.