David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

Garric glanced at the woman, then looked away. He tried to hide his feeling of disgust, but he felt his lip curl despite him.

It wasn't that she was unattractive, but she had a dirty air that went well beyond the simple physical grime inevitable in a village on a mud bank. The woman Katchin the Miller, Cashel's uncle, had married was much the same sort. Katchin had been a boastful, grasping, unpleasant man, but over the years Garric had come to feel that the dance Katchin's wife led him was sufficient punishment for all the man's flaws.

After listening to Scarface for some while, the chief gestured him aside and glared at Garric in what was probably supposed to be an intimidating fashion. Since Garric was taller by half a head, that didn't work very well. The edges of the chief's cloak were worn, and the feathers seemed to be a jumble of anything that could be netted or trapped with birdlime.

The chief raised his hands high in the air and began a speech, his voice cracking repeatedly. He held an edged club the length of his arm, a sort of wooden sword. It could be a dangerous weapon, but the blade of this one was carved with a complex knotted pattern.

Lowering his arms, the chief tapped himself on the chest with his free hand and said, "Wandalo! Wandalo!"

There was a fair chance he was giving his name rather than saying, "It's a nice day, isn't it?" Garric touched his own chest and said, "Garric. My name is Garric."

The wizard spoke, then raised the topaz slightly. He gestured with it toward the chief, who backed a step with an unhappy grimace.

The wizard looked at Garric and said, "Marzan." He touched his own chest and repeated, "Marzan!" He then spoke imperiously to Scarface and turned.

Scarface shrugged uncomfortably. He made a little gesture with his free hand, indicating that Garric should follow the wizard who was stumping back into the village with the woman's help. She looked over her shoulder at Garric.

"This lot don't like wizards any better than I do," muttered the ghost of King Carus.

Fortunately, thought Garric as strode after Marzan, I don't have that prejudice myself. Because I can't imagine how we'll get back to our own place and time withoutthe help of a wizard.

The village stockade was a single row of tree trunks sunk into the soil and sharpened on the upper end. An earthen platform on the inside gave defenders a two-foot height advantage over anyone attacking, but there were no towers or arrow slits. Garric realized he hadn't seen bows or any other missile weapon.

Carus snorted when he realized that the palings weren't pinned together. "With six strong men and a rope I can pull down a hole wide enough to roll wagons through!" he said. "I'm not sure I'd bother with anything beyond a straight rush by a company of my skirmishers, though."

There were about two dozen oval houses with shake roofs and walls of lime plaster on a wicker framework. Each was raised a foot or so on posts; the ground was sodden already, and in a bad storm there must be a serious risk of flooding.

The windows had shutters, but most of them were open. In some birds on long tethers chirruped at Garric, nervous at the sight of a stranger. Fine-meshed fishnets hung under the shelter of the eaves.

The streets-the paths that twisted between the buildings-were paved with clamshells. Shells were probably the source of the plaster too; nowhere since he'd arrived in this land had Garric seen outcrops of stone that could be burned for lime. The quality of the woodwork was impressive, particularly because the people didn't have metal tools, and he thought Ilna would've been interested in their skill with cords and fabrics.

Marzan and the woman led Garric to one of a pair of houses in the center of the village. Both were enclosed by waist-high openwork fences, adornments rather than meant for privacy or protection. Gnarled wisteria grew over one side of the fence around Marzan's compound, but it wasn't blooming at this time of year.

The woman opened the pole crossbar and stepped aside for the wizard to enter. As he shuffled past her into the compound, she looked at Garric and said, "Soma!" She touched her chest, then grinned widely and lifted the top of thin, waterproof cloth to show her breast before she followed Marzan.

Garric's face was set as he closed the bar after him. He heard Wandalo speaking at a distance and looked back. The top of the chief's head was just visible over the house roofs. He must be standing on the platform above the gate to harangue the villagers whom he'd called from the fields.

Garric wished he knew what Wandalo was saying. Though based on what he'd seen of the man and of rulers of Wandalo's type elsewhere, he probably wasn't missing much.

Garric had to duck under Marzan's doorway, but the hut's ceiling was generously high. Light came not only by the windows but through the roof itself: the shakes were placed in overlapping strips with air spaces between. The design wouldn't work in high winds, so the current vertical drizzle must be the normal state of affairs.

The floor was of planks fitted with narrow gaps between them to deal with roof leaks and tracked-in mud. There were couches on both long walls. In the center of the room a small fire burned on an open hearth of clay laid in a wooden framework. There was no chimney, just the louvered roof: the three of them disturbed the air when they entered, making Garric's nose wrinkle at the swirl of sharp smoke.

Marzan seated himself cross-legged near the hearth and motioned Garric down across from him. Garric squatted, the usual method of sitting in Barca's Hamlet when there weren't chairs. Soma went to the other end of the hut and took baskets from a pantry cabinet made of joined reeds.

The wizard placed his topaz carefully on the floor in front of him where strips of darker wood were inlaid into the planks. They formed a hexagon with the yellow stone in its center.

Marzan smirked at Garric and removed the longest of the three black feathers from his headdress. Using that as a pointer-as a wand-he touched it to the corners of the figure in turn as he chanted, "Nerphabo kirali thonoumen…"

The topaz glowed. The light at its heart was faint but brighter than the dimness of the rain-washed hut. Flaws in the stone became shadows that moved.

"Oba phrene mouno…," the wizard said. He was using words of power, addressing beings that were neither humans nor gods but formed a bridge between them. "Thila rikri ralathonou!"

Garric had always thought of the words of power as things which a wizard read. Marzan was illiterate-there was no sign of writing in this community-but he rattled off the syllables in the same sing-song voice as Tenoctris used to chant the spells she'd written in the curving Old Script.

The cultured, scholarly Lady Tenoctris was part of the same fabric as this savage who probably didn't understand the concept of writing. Different from them on the surface but at heart the same nonetheless were Cashel and Ilna. Their mother, a fairy queen or something stranger yet, had passed to them the ability to see the patterns which formal wizardry affected through spells and words of power.

Here in humid gloom lighted by the glow in the heart of a yellow stone, Garric had a brief glimpse of the cosmos interconnected and perfect. Do Ilna and Cashel always see this? he wondered; but there was no way to answer the question, and perhaps the question had no answer.

"Bathre nothrou nemil…," Marzan chanted. "Nothil lare krithiai…"

The shadows in the topaz moved faster. Garric felt them grip him the way they had when he stared into the diadem on First Atara. Instead of drawing him down this time, the motion sucked a face up from the yellow depths of the stone.

A cat, he thought, but the forehead was too high and the jaw was shorter than a beast's. The image opened its mouth in a silent snarl; the teeth at least were a cat's, the long curving daggers of a carnivore. The eyes were larger than a man's and perfectly round. The pupils were vertical slits.