David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

Garric didn't ask how much clearance he'd had; it didn't matter, after all. There wasn't any other choice.

The remaining warriors milled uncertainly in the water. Garric stood on the branch, no longer exhausted and perfectly confident. He pointed his dagger at the cat men and shouted, "Begone, interlopers or I will loose the rest of my minions on you!"

A Corl gave a hacking cry and thrust his stabbing spear beneath him. Blood bubbled to the surface. He called out again and went down. From the roiling water rose a corpse-white creature with an oval head and a tail as fat as the body proper. It rolled under again and disappeared.

The surviving cat men paddled back the way they'd come. When they reached the shore, they scrambled up and vanished into the forest. They hadn't said a word after Garric had called his empty threat.

"I see what you mean about big salamanders," Garric said. He wasn't feeling pain, but his whole body was trembling from reaction. "That was a good six feet long, including the tail."

"That was a small one," said the Bird. "Normally they wouldn't come close to their larger fellows for fear of being eaten themselves, but when they smelled the blood they were too excited to keep away."

"Oh," said Garric. His blood. The Coerli themselves had been taken too recently for their blood to have spread far. "Just as well I scraped myself, I suppose."

"Yes," said the Bird. "Now to the cave. It's not far. I hope we won't have any more difficulties before we get there."

Garric lowered himself by hanging from the limb with both hands, then dropped to the ground. His knees flexed but didn't buckle as he'd thought they might, especially the left one.

"Yes," he said. "I hope that too."

"'Now some of these days and it won't be long,'" sang Chalcus, his voice soft in the still air. "'You'll call my name and I gonna be gone.'"

"I hear water close," said Merota, walking a step behind Ilna with her hands pressed tightly together in front of her. She was obviously very frightened, but she was trying in every way she could to hide the fact. "I hope we're near the lake."

Ilna pursed her lips. The child was talking because she was afraid, not because the words would do any real good at all. It made Ilna angry Because Ilna was afraid also, afraid that she wouldn't be able to get Merota and Chalcus out of the trap they were in because of her. Which made her want to snarl at whoever was closest to let out the anger and fear churning inside of her.

With a tiny smile of self-mockery, she said, "It's just the other side of the hedge to our left, I believe, but it may be some way before I find a passage through-"

The aisle kinked to the right. She stepped around it, her back straight and a knotted pattern closed in her hands ready for need. White mist rolled through the gap in the hedge, clean-smelling and the first thing in this garden that had felt cool.

The mist was as thick as a feather pillow. Ilna couldn't see through it.

Chalcus joined her in the opening, keeping Merota between them. He reached over the child's head and stroked Ilna's cheek as lightly as a butterfly's wing.

Merota knelt and thrust a hand down into the mist. "I can feel the water!" she said excitedly. "It's running really fast!"

"Stand up, dear one," Chalcus said. "We're not swimming out into that without being able to see more than I can now. Not unless we have to."

"There'll be a way across," Ilna said. "I just need to follow it through in my mind."

She sounded grim, even to herself, because she was frustrated that she hadn't already found the way to cross. That was the path she'd been following, the one that would take them to the temple. She was sure of it!

"'I wish I was a rich man's son…,'" Chalcus sang and let his voice trail off. To Merota he said, "I came from honest folk. Honest but poor as the dirt they scrabbled in to earn enough to eat, or almost enough. I swore to myself that I'd never be poor the way my parents were."

Ilna stared at the mist. She couldn't see through it, but there were currents as surely as there were in the stream she heard purling beneath its concealment. She followed a whorl, dense white on dense white but forming a pattern in her mind.

"I haven't always been honest, child," Chalcus said. He tousled Merota's hair, but it seemed to Ilna that he was speaking as much to his own younger self as he was to the girl. "And often enough I haven't had money. But I've never had to beg the straw boss for something to buy a crust for my family. Nor sent my wife to beg him when he wouldn't grant it to me."

Merota put her hand in the sailor's. He squeezed it, then released it and edged aside. He was carefully not looking toward Ilna.

Ilna's fingers were taking apart the pattern she'd knotted for defense-or attack, if you wanted to call it that. Defense to Ilna had never meant riding with the other fellow's blows.

There were probably ways to puff air or wave her arms in the mist to change the way it flowed, but there were other ways too. If she matched the rippling white on white with the right sort of links in the yarn she carried, it would She held up the pattern she'd created. There was movement in the mist.

"Ilna, I can see something!" Merota cried. "It's a bridge! I see a bridge!"

"Aye, a bridge," said Chalcus in a quiet, neutral voice. "And where, dearest Ilna, would you say it'd come from, eh? This bridge."

"It was there all the time, Master Chalcus," Ilna said. It was a humpbacked affair with a floor and railings of pink stone on a gray stone frame. The supports were carved with leaves and flowing stems, but the pink slabs which feet or hands might touch were mirror smooth.

"Heart of mine," Chalcus said, not testy but with a hint of restraint in his gentle tone. "The fog is thick, I'll grant you, but Lady Merota paddled her little fingers in the place where the abutments now rest, gneiss and granite and each harder than the other."

"It was always here, Master Chalcus," Ilna repeated. "I had to turn it so that we could see and touch it, that's all."

She smiled faintly, wondering if a person who had more words in her tongue could've explained what she'd done. Perhaps, but it might be that a person with more words couldn't have wrapped the mist in just the right way to wring the bridge into sight.

"Ilna?" Merota said. "Who's the lady?"

For a moment Ilna didn't know what the child meant: there was only the bridge arching its back to mid-stream before falling into the mist in the direction of the central island and the temple. On the railing, though, slouched and then straightening with the grace of a cat waking, was a woman.

Wearing silk, Ilna thought, but it wasn't silk. The woman was dressed in her own flowing hair; her hair and the mist. She looked at them but didn't speak.

"I'll lead, then, shall I, darlings?" Chalcus said. He made the words a question, but he was swaggering up the pink stone before they were out of his mouth. Though his hands were empty, Ilna knew he could have a blade through the woman's throat before she had time to suck in a breath.

Merota started to follow the sailor; Ilna put a hand on the child's shoulder and held her back. Merota sometimes needed guidance, but she never objected when matters were serious.

Everything in this garden was serious, to Merota's mind even more than to her guardians.

While Chalcus was still a double-pace away the sinuous woman smiled and said, "Welcome, strangers. Have you come to use my bridge?"

Her voice was musical but pitched a little higher than even a slender woman's normally would be. Her face and mouth were both narrow, but her smile was welcoming.

"Your bridge," Chalcus said easily, letting the words stand without emphasis. "Would there be a toll for that use, milady?"