David Drake - The Mirror of Worlds

The barge was a dozen feet from the jetty and the oarsmen were beginning to swing the bow seaward. "Swim to us!" Garric called.

"We'll pick you up, but you've got to swim out to us!" "May the Sister suck your marrow!" the man shrieked. Perhaps he couldn't swim. He nocked an arrow and began to draw his bow. "Get down!" Garric warned.

The barge rocked as Kore sprang from the railing, smashing the archer to the gravel. Grasping him by the neck and one thigh, she bit into his lower chest. Blood sprayed. A pair of wolves loped toward her, then paused as they judged her size. The ogre's arms flexed and tore the corpse apart. Laughing, she threw half the body to each wolf.

"Shin, hold the rowers!" Garric said. "We have to wait for-" Kore loped down the strand on all fours, licking her bloody lips. After the third long stride, she turned seaward. "Kore, you can't jump this far!" Garric shouted. "Swim-" The ogre leaped with the momentum she'd gathered. She caught the stern. Though her grip splintered a section of railing, she held and swung herself into the hold. The refugees sheltering there surged toward the bow, silent except for the whimpering of some of the children. "Swim indeed!" Kore said. "I could've waded, noble master; the water isn't deep here. But why should I get wet?" The ogre's tongue snaked out to get the last of the blood that splashed her long face. And as the barge glided southward across the sound, the laborers at the sweeps began to chant a cheerful cadence. *** The hair on the back of Cashel's neck rose. Tenoctris held the sword they'd taken from the Last. She pointed it toward a wooden burial marker and called, "Rathra-" She lifted and dipped the blade, marking a segment of an arc. She hadn't bothered to draw anything on the ground before she started chanting. "-rathax!" Wizardlight flared, as rich and saturated as a sheet of red glass. It hung in the air between the two points, shimmering and distorting the nighted slope beyond. "Bainchooch, damne, bureth!" Tenoctris said. She slashed the sword down at each word, throwing another panel of wizardlight into the sky. As Tenoctris sang the incantation, she turned. Cashel stepped sideways to keep his back always to hers. He held his quarterstaff before him, gripping it a trifle more firmly than he'd have done if he'd been happier about what the wizard was doing. "Astraleos chreleos!" They stood on a hillside where short lengths of cane sprouted like a stunted grove. Originally a split in the top of each marker had held a slip of paper with the name of the person whose ashes were buried beneath it, but storms quickly shredded and dispersed those diplomas. The canes could last for years, but when they finally rotted away there'd be a new burial on top of the cremated bones of the earlier ones. "Buroth, meneus, io!" Tenoctris said, her voice rising to the final syllable. Though her arm and sword hadn't bobbed around even half the imaginary circle, scarlet wizardlight suddenly formed a wall around her and Cashel. The grass and brambles vanished into a rosy haze. Cashel could see Tenoctris the same as always, but it was just him and her now. She held the sword down by her side and looked out at the sheets of flickering red. Her lips smiled, but it was a hard smile. Cashel heard distant screaming.

First off thought he thought it was steam coming from under a heavy pot-lid. It kept going on, though, and after a while he wasn't so sure. The scream cut off short, and the wizardlight was gone. Wind howled, driving flecks of foam from the gray sea hard enough to sting.

It was night but too overcast to have stars; if the moon was up, the curtain of clouds hid it. Cashel's tunics whipped his legs. If he'd been watching his flock in weather like this, he'd have wrapped his sheepskin robe around him… unless the storm'd blown up unexpectedly, of course, which'd happened more than once. Then all you could do was to keep moving. He forced himself to squint out to sea.

Trouble travels downwind in a storm like this. Now there was nothing but surf as slow and sullen as dripping sap, but the wedge-shaped head of a sea wolf might slither into view any time. There could be worse things than sea wolves in this place. He didn't know where Tenoctris had brought them, but it didn't feel like anyplace good. The beach was broken shells and coarse sand. Driftwood including barkless, salt-bleached treetrunks straggled along the tide line; beyond was low forest. The trees were mostly beech and cedar as best Cashel could tell, but none of them were more than four or five double-paces high.

Tenoctris glanced at the sea. "Is it ebbing, do you think?" she asked.

"I think so," said Cashel. "But it can't be much short of the turn."

"We won't need long," Tenoctris said. "A few minutes would probably be enough, but we'll wait an hour before we come back." She drew in the sand with the point of her sword, twisting the blade now to make now a thin line, then a broad flourish. She was writing words of power in letters each as high as Cashel's middle finger. Cashel looked at the tree line and stepped a safe distance away from Tenoctris to set his quarterstaff spinning slowly. He was getting the measure of the wind, the way it licked the hickory and tried to twist it out of his control. "There's somebody watching from the woods, Tenoctris," he said quietly. "I can't tell who, but I think there's more'n one." The beach stretched as far as he could see to left and right. Nothing moved but what the wind blew. "Yes, there should be," Tenoctris said.

She paused and gazed critically at what she'd written. There were as many words as fingers on one hand. The sand was still damp from the retreating tide; the breeze wouldn't fill in the gouged letters for a long time yet, probably till the tide returned to wipe it all out.

Tenoctris reached into the wallet she'd begun wearing on a sash over her shoulder. She brought out the key they'd found at the Tomb of the Messengers, holding it up between her thumb and index finger. Inside, clamped against her palm by the other fingers, was an ordinary quartz pebble. Cashel could see it from where he stood, but nobody watching from the forest could. Tenoctris bent down so her hand was right against the beach, behind where she'd drawn the words. She folded the key into her palm and set the pebble onto the sand, then rose with the same hard smile as before. "This will do, I think," she said. Her voice was a younger, fuller version of the way the old Tenoctris used to speak, but it made Cashel think again that he wouldn't want her for an enemy. "We'll wait on our own world, then return here in an hour."

"Yes, ma'am," Cashel said, bringing the staff upright to his side.

"Ah-then what, Tenoctris?" She laughed. She still held the key concealed in her hand. "Then we finish our negotiation with the Telchines," she said. "On our own terms." Grinning harshly, Tenoctris began to chant. She was reversing the order of the words of power which had brought them to this bleak shore.

Chapter 14 Cashel felt the wind even before the curtain of wizardlight faded, leaving him and Tenoctris again on coarse sand. The beach was the same as it had been, save that the sea had begun to creep back. Creatures as gray as the sky were hunched over the words Tenoctris'd drawn on the ground. They were smaller than men, and there were more of them than Cashel could count on both hands. Tenoctris trilled a laugh. She touched the crook of Cashel's elbow with her free hand-she held the sword in her right-and said, "Oh, Cashel! Can you imagine you'd been an old man and suddenly you wereyou, as strong as you are now? Do you see? That's what's happened to me!" She sounded like a happy child; well, a happy young woman. Cashel started to think, "Well, everybody 's a happy child once," but then he remembered his sister. Ilna'd gotten most of the brains for both of them, but she'd missed her share of being happy. It'd been different while she was with Chalcus, but since he'd been killed she was probably worse off than ever. It'd been a good while since he last saw Ilna. Cashel hoped he'd see her again soon, and that she'd be in a better place than she'd been when she left. "What's wrong, Cashel?" Tenoctris said.