David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

The fog over the plains below cleared. Everything within the bowl of hills was as clear as the facets of a jewel. The wind and the birds were silent, and the hair on the back of Sharina's neck rose.

The hills softened and slumped the way dunes collapse when the surge undermines them. Men shouted, losing their footing and dancing in desperate attempts to keep from sinking into what had been rock or firm soil. The violent shuddering sifted the breastworks back into the trenches from which they'd been dug and shook the emplaced artillery. A large catapult toppled onto its side, and several ballistas pointed skyward.

Double kept his feet, but the frame of posts and canvas twisted in tatters as the ground gave way beneath it. The silver film smeared the surface instead of sinking into the subsoil as it'd done in the past. Looking to the west, Sharina saw flat marshes for as far as her eye could travel. The ridge had vanished utterly, leaving mule-drawn wagons mired where there'd been rocky switchbacks up the hills.

The hellplants were advancing with renewed vigor. On soil this wet, they could move as fast as a man. Their tentacles writhed, ready to grip and rend.

Ilna stepped around an oak growing at a corner of the maze. The hedge down the aisle now before her was holly to the left and quickset to the right. Crouching in the middle was a three-headed dog as big as an ox.

She raised the pattern she'd knotted in anticipation of this meeting or one like it. She hadn't anticipated three heads, though: the great dog lunged toward her before stumbling and crashing onto its shoulder with a double yelp.

Chalcus shouted and drove past her with his sword and dagger out. He'd wanted to lead-but then, he'd wanted to guard the rear and also to fly over Ilna and the child so that nobody could approach from above. Ilna'd insisted on leading because she could capture rather than merely killing or chasing away whichever Prince they next met. That logic still held.

"Get out of the way!" Ilna said, making a quick change to the pattern-gathering a bight in the middle of the fabric because there wasn't time to do the job properly with an additional length of yarn. She was furious: with herself for not being better prepared and with Chalcus for assuming-well, acting as if-she wouldn't be able to recover from her error in time.

Mostly with herself. As usual.

Chalcus jumped aside as quickly as he'd come. The dog was already backing with the heads on either side turned away. The middle head was frozen in a look of slavering fury, like a trophy stuffed and nailed to the wall. The beast's right foreleg dragged and there was a hitch in the movements of the left hind leg as well.

"This is my territory!" snarled the left head.

"You have no right to-" began the right head.

Ilna spread her fabric. The dog took the new pattern through the open eyes of its middle head. It dropped where it stood.

"Now," said Ilna crisply. "You're going to answer the questions we ask or my friend Chalcus will cut pieces off you. I'm going to change my pattern enough to allow you to speak. If you choose not to help, we'll ask one of your fellow Princes, but we won't do that so long as you're alive."

The dog's breath stank of rotten meat. Knowing that the meat had been human wouldn't change Ilna's behavior, but neither did it dispose her to like the creature better. Instead of adjusting a knot of the pattern, she simply put the tip of her little finger over one corner.

The dog's left head jerked around to glare at them. "This is an outrage!" it snarled. "You-"

Chalcus stepped forward and flicked out his sword. One ear of the head that'd spoken spun into the quickset hedge. The dog yelped much louder than before; the head thrashed violently but the creature couldn't get away.

Merota gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth. Then she looked up with a distressed expression and said, "I'm sorry, Chalcus. He deserves it!"

"Ah, child," Chalcus said. He grinned broadly. "This one deserves far worse, I'm sure; and if he's stubborn I'll take pleasure in giving worse to him, that I will."

"We want to leave this tapestry," Ilna said, "this garden if you prefer. What is the way out?"

"I don't know-" said the dog. It jerked its head with a howl as Chalcus shifted minusculely.

"No!" said Ilna. "Not till I decide it's not answering. Dog, where do youthink the exit is? You Princes talk to each other, don't you? You must talk about that!"

"We don't know," the dog said, speaking very carefully. Its tongue licked out of the narrow muzzle, trying to reach the blood slowly creeping from the severed ear. "No one has ever left the Garden. But some think…"

It licked again, this time swiping into the blood. The fur above where the tongue reached was matted and glistening.

"Some think, I say…," the dog continued. "That perhaps the One built the temple in the center of the Garden to Himself. And perhaps when He finished the building, He took leave from the Garden at that place."

"I saw the temple!" Merota said. "I was looking at it when I fell into the maze!"

"Aye," said Chalcus. He'd sheathed his dagger so that he could very deliberately wipe the tip of his sword clean with a folded oak leaf. "And I too. What does it look like inside, this temple, good beast?"

The dog's chest rose and fell as it breathed; Ilna had been careful to paralyze only the creature's conscious control of its muscles. It would be very easy to freezeall movements, though, and to watch the dog slowly smother. How many little people had gone down those three gullets over countless years?

"I've never been there," the dog said, its eyes rolling desperately. Perhaps it'd understood Ilna's expression. "None of us have! It's, well, we don't know, of course, but some think, someimagine, that the other lives in the temple when it's not hunting somewhere. None of us know, nobody knows, but if the otherhas a particular place, it could be there."

"The other," Ilna said. "The Shadow, you mean."

She'd spoken with deliberate cruelty, so furiously angry at her prisoner that she risked summoning the Shadow just to make the dog howl in terror. As it did, voiding a flood of foul-smelling urine on the ground and its own hindquarters. Like breathing, that was an unconscious reaction. Merota squeezed her hands together and stared at Ilna.

"Gently, Ilna, dear heart," said Chalcus, a look of concern in his glance. "If you want him killed, I'll do that thing without regret; but if it's answers we're after, then he's giving us those."

"Yes, all right," said Ilna coldly. "The other, then. What makes you think it lairs in the temple? Have you seen it there?"

"We don't see it anywhere else, that's the thing!" said the dog. "Except when it strikes. We've none of us been to the temple, Itold you that! But there's nowhere else it could be, is there?"

Ilna sucked her lower lip between her teeth and bit it. She knew what to do-whatshe would do-and she'd almost stated her wish as an order. She had to remember that hers was only one opinion among three, now.

"Master Chalcus, what would you that we do?" she asked formally.

"The longer we stay here," said the sailor, "the likelier it is that we'll meet something we'd sooner leave to itself. If the way out's through this temple, then I'll gladly go to the temple whatever it may be that lives there. I'd sooner we met it at home at a time of our choosing than from behind at a time of its."

"Merota?" Ilna said. Shecould give orders to her companions and force them to agree as surely as she'd bound this three-headed dog to her will. She'd been that person once, in the days just after she'd come back to the waking world having journeyed to Hell.

Never again. No matter what.

"I want to leave, Ilna," Merota said in a small voice. "I'm not afraid. When I'm with you and Chalcus, I'm not afraid."