David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

"There'll be more of those hellplants?" Sharina asked sharply. Waldron and Attaper with their aides had entered the chamber behind her; the soldiers' faces were taut with the instinct to attack or flee.

"There will be many more!" Cervoran said. His fingers moved over the topaz like maggots crawling on a yellow corpse. "But I will prevail!"

Ilna looked at the man she'd saved from death on his own funeral pyre. If he was still a man, of course; and if she'd saved him.

"A meteor struck the sea yesterday," Cervoran said. "We must find it. The Green Woman is there, and I will defeat her."

"The sling stone struck, right enough," said Chalcus with cheerful bravado, the backs of his wrists against his hipbones and the fingers turned outward like flippers. "And I or anybody who was with the fleet can show you where, easily enough; any sailor, at least. But it won't do you any good, I fear."

Cervoran looked at him. Ilna had begun picking apart the pattern she'd knotted from lengths of twine as the hellplant slithered across the courtyard.

"Take me to the meteor," Cervoran said. Only his squeaky voice and the muffled breaths of the others in the room could be heard. "It is necessary. I will defeat her!"

The pattern would've frozen a man in his tracks. A man's eyes don't see: they gather patterns that his mind turns into sight. The patterns Ilna wove in fabric had a greater reality in the minds of those who saw them than a mountain or the blazing sun above.

"I can take you there right enough, my friend," Chalcus said. He feared the Gods-he didn't worship but hefeared. He feared no other thing in this world as far as Ilna could tell, beast or man or wizard. "But the place I'll take you is the deepest trench in the Inner Sea. A full league down a wizard said, or so the rumor has it. If your Green Woman's on the bottom of that, then you'll not be going to her unless you're a fish, not so?"

Ilna's pattern hadn't stopped the plant. Now she was beginning to wonder what effect it would have on the recent corpse.

"Do you think to mock me, little man?" Cervoran said. It was odd to hear so shrill a voice speaking as slowly as a priest praying while the villagers came forward with their offerings during the Tithe Procession. "Take me to the place. It is necessary!"

"Your highness?" Chalcus said, looking past Cervoran to Sharina. "This is a thing I can do well enough in theHeron, should you wish it. But…?"

"It is necessary!" Cervoran repeated shrilly.

Cervoran, king or man or corpse, took Cashel out of this room and brought him back with a jar of oil in time to destroy the hellplant-which nobody else had been able to do, Ilna herself included. That didn't make Cervoran a friend to the kingdom and its citizens, but at least it made him an enemy of their enemies.

"Master Chalcus…?" said Sharina. From the set look on her face she was thinking the same way as Ilna was. "Would a larger ship be better? I could send him out on theShepherd or one of the triremes."

Chalcus snorted. "And what could a fiver do that my handy littleHeron could not, eh, milady?" he said. 'We can turn twice around in the time it'd take a cow like theShepherd to change course by eight points only. We'll take him."

"At once," said Cervoran.

"Indeed not," said Chalcus. "In the morning. I'll find the spot by the angles on the Three Sisters east of here and Mona Headland itself, but I can't do that till sunrise."

"In the morning, then," Sharina said, giving an order rather than commenting. "And Master Chalcus? Don't set out until I've had a chance to learn Lady Tenoctris' opinion on the matter."

"Master Cervoran?" Ilna said. She'd reduced the knotted pattern to the cords it'd started as. She held them in her right palm and stroked them with the fingers of her left hand. "There was a sling stone, a meteor, hitting the sea as we approached the island yesterday."

"Yes," said Cervoran. "But I will go to her and defeat her."

"There was a second stone, meteor, this morning," Ilna said. She had the odd feeling that she was standing outside herself and hearing someone else speak. "During your funeral. It burst in the air above us. What did that meteor mean?"

"It means nothing," said Cervoran, his voice becoming even more shrill.

"It exploded in the air," Ilna repeated, "and then you rose from your bier. What does that mean?"

"I am Cervoran!" the former king cried. He lowered his eyes to stare into the topaz again.

"What?" said Ilna.

But Cervoran remained as motionless as a statue; and when Chalcus murmured, "We'll be up betimes, dearest. Best to get some rest now," Ilna left the chamber with him.

"There's a pattern too big for me to see the ends of it," Ilna whispered. Chalcus listened, but she wasn't so much speaking to him as to the cosmos itself. "But we're part of it, like it or not. And Idon't like it at all!"

Sharina awakened in shocked awareness that something was wrong. She sat bolt upright, hearing low-voiced chanting nearby. She didn't know where she was, and the sun was already up behind the shutters.

She was out of bed, gripping the hilt of the Pewle knife with her right hand and its sealskin sheath with her left, when she remembered. She relaxed with a sigh, then giggled at what a fool she'd have looked if there'd been anyone to see her.

There wasn't, of course. Sharina had been an inn servant herself too long to want anybody serving her when she didn't need it.

The bedroom of the Queen's suite where Sharina slept had a door to Cervoran's

Chamber of Art. Tenoctris had that room now, sleeping on a simple cot and rising at intervals in the night to browse Cervoran's collection of books and objects by lamplight. That's what was happening now.

Sharina shot the knife back in its sheath, but she didn't hang it on the bedpost before she walked to the connecting door and opened it. Tenoctris sat on the floor, chanting over a flattened bead of green glass that'd been in the late king's curio cabinet.

Cashel stood close by, his quarterstaff planted firmly on the floor. He'd turned his head when he heard the door open. He didn't speak because that might've distrubed Tenoctris, but his smile was as warm as sunlight on the meadow.

A sparkle of blue wizardlight dusted the air above the glass bead, then vanished like a puff of warm breath on the polished face of a mirror. The old wizard sagged, setting down the split of bamboo she'd used for a wand. She disposed of each sliver after she'd used it once, because she said otherwise the influences it'd absorbed from previous spells would affect later ones in directions she couldn't foresee.

Most wizards made wands and athames, dagger-shaped implements of art, from materials chosen to concentrate power; then they covered the tools with symbols of art to increase the effect still further. Those folk could perform far greater wizardry than Tenoctris could… but as Sharina herself had seen, eventually they did something they hadn't intended. A very great wizard had brought down the Old Kingdom a thousand years past-and was drowned in a reaction to his spell which he hadn't predicted and couldn't control.

Tenoctris' smile had a hint of fatigue. She put her right hand on the floor to brace her as she rose, but Cashel instantly squatted and supported her. For the most part Cashel ambled along at the pace of the sheep he'd spent most of his life caring for, but he moved with amazing speed when he needed to.

"This comes from the moon," Tenoctris said, dipping a finger toward the glass bead she'd left within the five-pointed star drawn in powdered charcoal. She wasn't using the figures Cervoran had inset in the floor any more than she was using an athame carved from a dragon scale. "It'd fallen into the sea, struck off the moon's surface by a meteor. Cervoran located it through his art and sent divers to bring it up for him."