David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

"Oh!" said Protas with more enthusiasm than Cashel's comment warranted. He'd probably read books the way Garric and Sharina did, all full of wonderful things that hadn't really happened or didn't happen much.

Sometimes they did happen, though, so Cashel was staying where he was. A shepherd learns to be careful. There's nothing so unlikely that some ewe, some day, won't manage to get herself in trouble doing it.

"Yes!" said the man with the lantern. He was as tall as Cashel but thin as a rail. "There's two of you, then. Well, come along, we mustn't waste time outside. It's quite dangerous, even this close to my dwelling. And we can't possibly try to go on at night, that would be hopeless, completely hopeless! I don't know why you came here at this time of day!"

"Who are you, sirrah?" Protas said sharply, making his voice seem to come out of his nose in that way he had. "I am Protas, son of Cervoran, and my companion is Master Cashel, the great wizard. We are not men to be ordered about by some nameless flunky!"

"What?" said the guide, drawing himself up full-height and holding the lantern closer to Protas' face. It was just a candle, likely tallow, behind horn lenses and didn't do much to aid the low moon. "I'm Antesiodorus, that's who I am. A scholar and a man who deserves respect even from ill-mannered boys."

"I don't mind standing here," said Cashel. "But if you've got water in your place, Master Antesiodorus, I'd appreciate a drink."

Cashel was smiling, more on the inside than with his lips. He'd been ordered around by no end of angry little people who thought they were more important than the world thought. He didn't make a fuss about it; he didn't fuss about much of anything. If Protas wanted to bring somebody up short for being impolite, though, that was all right with with him. The boy was being a lot nicer about it than Ilna would've been, that was for sure.

Protas raised his left hand and touched the topaz crown.

"I'm not afraid," said Antesiodorus, this time with a kind of stiff dignity. "I have my duty and I'll do it. If you'll come with me, sirs, I'll provide such hospitality as I have available."

Cashel heard rustlings around them as they traced a winding path between the cutaway mounds, but it didn't seem there was anything big or anything particularly interested in them, either one. What he thought at first was a bird swooped close, but it flew more like a bat as he watched it flutter away.

A low house was built between a couple of miniature buttes ahead of them. Light, probably from a single candle, winked through chinks in the walls.

"Are those logs?" Protas asked. "Where did you find trees so big here, sir?"

"They are not logs, they are bones," said the guide. "I didn't find them, they were found by those persons who built the dwelling I am forced to occupy. And while I can only conjecture, it seems reasonable that they dug the bones out of the hills. Similar ones are weathering out even now."

The house was long and rambling. Instead of going through the doorway covered with fabric pinned to the transom, Cashel walked to the southwest corner to look at the place in the moonlight. They were bones all right, thighs mostly but with big shoulder blades slid in sideways between layers and chinked with mud. The roof trusses were ribs, covered with sod. Well, dirt anyway, and Antesiodorus must keep it wetted down because coarse grass grew all over it instead of just tuffets here and there like the landscape in general.

"Sir?" Cashel said. He tapped a bone with his knuckle; it made aclock ing sound like well-cured oak. "What did these come from? Giants? Because there's never been an ox so big."

"They came from mastodons," Antesiodorus said, pausing with the door curtain lifted. He looked sour, but Cashel guessed he was the sort of fellow who looked sour more times than he didn't. "Are you any the wiser, Master Wizard? They're animals and they're obviously bigger than oxen; or they were, because so far as I know they've been dead for more ages than there've been men. At any rate, all I've seen around here are bones."

"Thank you," said Cashel quietly. "And I'm not really a wizard, sir."

Antesiodorus cleared his throat in embarrassment. "Now, if you're quite done out here," he said, "would you care to come in? The bones look much the same from this side, and the things that might decide to eat you can't get through the walls."

"Sorry," Cashel said. straightening. "I've never seen a house built like this."

He nodded Protas inside and followed the boy; Antesiodorus pulled the curtain across the door behind them. The walls were solid enough to keep out wolves or whatever it was the guide worried about, but just a cloth hanging in the doorway didn't seem like much.

It was a cloak of black velvet, covered in symbols embroidered in silver thread. Cashel felt the hairs on the back of his hand tremble when he touched it.

Antesiodorus was looking hard at him. The lantern in his hand and the yellow-brown tallow candle on the table lighted the long room surprisingly well.

"You recognize it, then?" Antesiodorus said in a challenging tone. "The Cape of Holla?"

"No sir," Cashel said. "But I see why you don't worry about things coming through the door to get you when it's hanging here. My sister could probably tell you more, but I see that much."

"Then youare a wizard," Antesiodorus said, putting just a hair of emphasis on "are". He sounded puzzled.

"Not like people mean," Cashel said, embarrassed to talk about what he didn't understand. He looked around for a place to sit and didn't see a good one. "Ah?" he added. "If I could have a mug of water-or beer if you have it-I'd find it welcome."

"I don't have beer and the water's alkaline," said Antesiodorus, shuffling to the corner that seemed to be his pantry. He was barefoot and his clothing, a tunic and a short cape, was of some coarse vegetable fiber that wasn't much better than sacking. "It suffices for me, and I'm afraid it'll have to suffice for you."

Cashel didn't answer. Antesiodorus wasn't the old man he'd thought him when they were outside. Oh, sure, he must be forty-but Lord Attaper was forty, and he could give a fight to most men half his age. The guideacted old, though, and very tired. That was what was in his words, age and tiredness this time rather than anger.

Protas was stepping briskly around the room, looking first at this thing and then at that. The only real furniture was the table, a slab of yellow limestone that might've been local supported on either end by a tusked skull with huge eye sockets. The top was piled high with books and scrolls, some of them open.

The bone walls of the house wouldn't keep out a driving rain, but here in the center of the long room was probably safe. The roof wouldn't leak; or anyway, wouldn't leak quickly. Cashel knew storms in this climate could be fierce, but he didn't imagine that they'd last long.

Protas glanced at the books, but mostly he was looking at the things along the walls. They'd been put on trays made by sticking bones from smaller animals end-on into the cracks between the mastodon thighs. There were boxes of shell and alabaster, and one little casket was made of some purple metal like Cashel had never dreamed of. There was a rusty iron helmet that looked like scrap to be turned into horseshoes, and a dagger with a moonstone the size of a baby's fist in the pommel. The boy was fascinated.

"Here," said Antesiodorus, offering Cashel a cup. "I have flat bread and goat cheese if you're hungry."

Instead of being terra cotta or a simple wooden masar, the sort of thing people who dressed like Antesiodorus generally drank out of, this was glass clearer than the water that filled it. Gold-filled engraving on the inside showed hounds chasing an antelope, a nice picture and very well drawn-except that the antelope had six horns, not two.