David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

"-we can learn for ourselves. You want to come?"

"With you?" said the boy. "Yessir!"

He sobered and said, "My tutor hid in a clothes chest when he looked out of the window and saw the thing here in the courtyard. When he comes out, he'll want me to get back to my mathematics lesson."

Cashel thought for a moment. He cleared his throat.

"I guess mathematics is important to know," he said. He wasn't sure exactly what mathematics was, though he thought it meant counting without having to drop dried beans in a sack. That was how Cashel did it when the number got more than his fingers. "But I think this afternoon you can miss a lesson without it being too bad. What with, you know, the trouble that happened."

Cashel looked at the spear shaft waggling in his hand while he thought. "But before we do that," he added, "let's get my quarterstaff back. Just in case."

He and the boy went into the west wing of the palace, through the kitchens and the crowd of clerks and servants chattering there. Protas looked around with real interest. Cashel couldn't understand why till the boy said, "I've never been here before, you know. Is this where the food comes from?"

"I guess it is," Cashel agreed. "It's fancier than I'm used to."

It must be funny to be a prince. When you're just a boy, anyway. Garric seemed to be taking to it fine but he had his growth. Though Garric as a boy would probably have gotten out more than Protas seemed to've done.

Two servants were in the pantry. The woman looked down into the cellars through the open trapdoor, but the man had picked up the quarterstaff and was turning it in his hands.

"I'll take that!" Cashel said, tossing the spear away. He hadn't meant to've shouted but he wasn't sorry that he had. The woman shrieked like she'd been stabbed; the dropped the quarterstaff and turned so quick that he got his feet tangled.

Cashel stepped forward, grabbing the hickory with his right hand and the servant's arm with his left. The fellow screamed near as bad as the woman had. Cashel guessed he'd gripped as hard with one hand as the other, so there'd be bruises on the man's biceps in the morning. That wouldn't be near as bad as what he'd have gotten by toppling headfirst into the cellars the way he'd started to do, though.

"What were you doing with Lord Cashel's property, sirrah?" Protas said. His voice sounded a lot like King Cervoran's, though the boy being twelve was at least some of the reason.

"What?" said the servant, blinking as he realized it was the prince speaking. "May the Shepherd save me, I didn't mean-I mean we saw it and didn't know-that is-"

"It's all right," Cashel said, stroking his staff's smooth, familiar surface. The poor fellow was getting hit from all sides, it must seem like to him. "You ought to close that cellar door before somebody breaks his neck, though."

He led Protas back out through the kitchen. The folks there had been looking at the pantry and whispering. One woman got down on her knees and said, "May the Lady bless you, your lordship, for saving us from that terrible monster!"

"Ma'am, I just carried the jar," Cashel muttered. Goodness, she was trying to grab the hem of his tunic! He pulled away, striding out much quicker than he normally chose to do. The boy kept up, but he had to run to do it.

The sun was getting low in the sky, but it was still an hour short of sundown. They skirted the soldiers, who probably had a job here in the courtyard; and the civilians, who were mostly just gawking.

As they neared where the back gate had been a voice behind them called, "Your highness? Prince Protas?"

Cashel turned; Lord Martous was bearing down on them from the other wing of the palace. "He's with me, sir!" Cashel said loudly.

To his surprise, the chamberlain bowed low and backed away. Cashel muttered to the boy, "I thought he'd tell me you had to go off with him anyhow."

"Oh, no, Cashel," Protas said in amazement. "Why, I'll bet even Prince Garric would have to do what you said if you told him something."

"I don't guess he would," Cashel said, blushing in embarrassment. "Anyway, I wouldn't do anything like that!"

Close up, what'd happened to the back wall looked pretty impressive. The edge courses were squared stones fitted together, and the rest of the wall was rubble set in concrete which'd cured long enough to be pretty near stone-hard itself. The plant had pushed until it cracked off full-height slabs to either side of the gateway. Besides that it'd broken the transom, a squared oak timber two hand-spans on a side.

"Are there more of the monsters, Cashel?" the boy asked as they followed the hellplant's track back down through the alley. Local people-town dwellers and country folk both, standing in separate groups-talked in low voices and watched as Cashel and Protas walked past

"I don't know," Cashel said simply. He thought for a moment. "I guess we'd hear shouting if there were more of them close by, though."

The alley led straight to a notch in the seawall; it'd let you back a wagon all the way into the water if for some reason you wanted to. There was no question the hellplant had come up that way: the crushed limestone roadway was still dark with slime.

Two sailors had been talking on the seawall. They went quiet and watched when they saw Cashel and the boy walking straight toward them.

"May the Lady smile on you, good sirs!" Protas said, surprising Cashel. He'd been trying to figure how to open a conversation with strangers who didn't look very trusting. "This is Lord Cashel and of course I'm Prince Protas. Can you tell us how the creature appeared here? Did it come by boat then?"

The pair looked at each other nervously. "We didn't bring it!" said the man whose right arm was so tattooed he looked like he had a long-sleeved shirt on that side.

"Of course not, my good man!" the boy said scornfully. "But you saw it land, did you not? How did it arrive on First Atara?"

"I thought it was seaweed," said the little fellow with three gold rings in his right ear and the lobe of the left one missing. "Just drifting up, you know. And then it come to the wall and started to climb. And I took off running, I don't mind to tell you."

"There's no current could've drifted it to shore that quick," the tattooed man protested. "It had to be swimming, Goldie."

"I don't know what kinda currents there might be!" Goldie said angrily. "What with the Shepherd's Sling Stone whamming into the sea the way it did. Why, the one wave nigh cleared the seawall, and I've never seen that to happen no matter how bad a storm it is."

"That was this morning!" his companion said. "The sea was calm as calm all the past six hours."

"But you're sure the thing didn't come on a boat?" Cashel said, looking out along the track the low sun plowed glowing on the water. "It just swam?"

"Swam or drifted," Goldie said. "Swam, I guess. But I thought it was just something washed up from when the stone hit the sea."

Cashel looked out to the southwest, through the jaws of the harbor and down the sun's track across the open sea to where the meteor had landed. "You might be right at that," he said at last.

Though fire had devoured the outer layers of the hellplant, it seemed to Sharina that what remained was shrinking further the way frost-killed vine-leaves sink into a foetor and ooze away. There was nothing obviously unnatural about this mass, but it was certainly foul and ugly. So was much of peasant life, of course.

Tenoctris had moved from examining the plant to looking at the corpse of one of the three scorpions from inside it. Now she turned and got up, partly supported by Ilna. Sharina smiled at them, hoping Tenoctris had learned something useful-and getting a wan look and shrug that made it clear she hadn't.