David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

She laughed again and added, "Since you're fools."

Cashel grinned. He'd been told that many times before and it wasn't a judgment he argued with. But he knew too that the people, and not always people, who said that to him generally didn't have much to brag about in the way they ran their own lives.

Aloud he said, "Then let's be going, Mistress Phorcides. Unless there's reason we should wait?"

Phorcides looked Cashel over carefully. He met her eyes and even smiled; she wasn't challenging him, just showing curiosity for the first time since they'd met.

"My name's Cashel," he said. "And this is Prince Protas. In case you hadn't been told."

"Do you know what you're getting into?" the woman said carefully. The snakes squirmed slowly on her forehead; doing a dance of some sort, it seemed.

"No ma'am, I don't," Cashel said. He looked at Protas, but if the boy had different ideas he was keeping them to himself.

"But you think that you'll be able to bull through anything you meet," Phorcides said. "Is that it?"

"I think I'll try, mistress," Cashel said. "Now, should we be going?"

"We'll go now, which is what you mean," Phorcides said. Her belt of curved yellow tusks rattled softly as she turned toward the valley. "As for whether we should-I have no idea. Perhaps you'll come back and tell me after you've gotten where you're going."

She started down the slope into the valley. Her wings were large and covered with real feathers, but Cashel didn't see how they could possibly support a full-sized woman flying.

There were real birds circling in the updrafts from the valley walls, though. They were high-higher than Cashel could even guess-but he could make out wings and bodies instead of them being just dots against the blue sky.

The sides of the valley were pretty much raw rock with splotches of lichen, but there were a few real plants growing in cracks where wind-blown dirt had collected. Cashel didn't recognize the most common sort, pretty little star-shaped flowers, but there were bellflowers too.

On a distant crag, well above the pass the woman'd brought them in by, three goats with curved horns were staring at them intently. It made Cashel homesick for a moment, though "home" wasn't so much Barca's Hamlet as the life he'd led there. He and Ilna stayed in their half the mill; he'd tended sheep and picked up a little extra by doing whatever work required a strong man. There'd been nobody stronger than Cashel or-Kenset, in the borough or among the folk from distant places who came in the Fall for the Sheep Fair.

Protas picked his way carefully, his face set. Cashel frowned but he couldn't help. The path wasn't bad but it was rocky; not so much a path at all as a way to get down the slope through a carpet of low plants. The boy had only slippers meant for carpeted palace floors on his feet.

Cashel was barefoot, of course, but he was used to that. Even now that he wasn't a shepherd any more, his soles were near as tough as a soldier's boots.

When Cashel lived in Barca's Hamlet-when he was home-Sharina was the daughter of the innkeeper, educated and wealthy as people thought of things in the borough. She'd been far beyond the hopes of a poor orphan boy who couldn't so much as read his own name.

Cashel smiled, embarrassed even to have that thought in the privacy of his own mind. The present where Sharina loved him was better than anything he'd ever dreamed of at home.

They'd gotten down to where the rock was covered with grass and many little flowers-primrose, gentians, and buttercups. They made a nice mix of pink, blue and yellow in the green. There was hellebore too, though it was past blooming. Cashel wondered if Ilna would like the pattern the flowers made on the ground. She might, though she didn't use colors much in her own work. This'd be a fine pasture, but there didn't seem much in it to eat the foliage.

A gray-backed viper sunned itself on an outcrop, turning its wedge-shaped head follow their progress. Cashel started toward it from reflex, readying his staff to crush the snake's head; but then relaxed.

The viper wasn't close enough to hurt them, and Cashel didn't have a flock of sheep he needed to keep safe. He'd kill in a heartbeat if he needed to, a snake or a man either one; but killing wasn't a thing he did for fun.

The valley floor was flat and broad, wide enough that an arrow wouldn't carry to either side from where they walked in the middle of it. The walls were steep and gray; near as steep as the walls of the millhouse. At their base was a scree of rock that'd broken off the cliffs.

"Why aren't those sheep moving?" said Protas, nodding toward a lone pine under which three gray shapes clustered. "They haven't moved even their heads since I saw them."

"They haven't moved because they're stone," said Mistress Phorcides. "And anyway, they were ibexes, not sheep. Wild goats."

The boy opened his mouth to ask another question but glanced at Cashel before he did. Cashel shook his head slightly. Protas forced a smile, swallowed, and walked on without speaking further.

There were plenty of things Cashel wondered about, but he didn't think talking to the winged woman was a good way to get answers. The less contact they had with her, the better he'd like it.

He didn't doubt she'd take them to where they next were to go like the other guides had, but if they gave her the least opening there'd be something bad happening. Cashel trusted her the way he'd trust a weasel: you know exactly what a weasel'll do if you give it the chance.

Phorcides led them toward a rock face. Cashel thought the stand of beech trees concealed a cave or maybe even a bend in the canyon, but they came around the grove and found a sheer cliff. The rock layers were on end. A plate of mica that Cashel couldn't 've spanned with his outstretched staff gleamed in the solid wall.

Phorcides turned and smiled again. Cashel didn't like the smile, but that made it a piece with most other things about their guide.

"I've brought you here," she said. "I can't take you any farther."

"Do we go through the rock, then?" Protas asked. He was using his adult tone and holding the crown in front of him with both hands.

There was a man-the statue of a man-looking toward them around the trunk of a beech. Another-statue-was half-hidden in the stunted rhododendrons a stone's throw away, and a third crouched behind a juniper. Cashel didn't know if Protas had seen them. If the boy had, he was pretending he hadn't.

"Go through it?" Phorcides said. "That's up to you. I can't take you."

Her fat, pale lips spread even wider in a grin. "If I could," she said, "I would have gone myself."

Protas turned toward the mica and raised the topaz crown slightly. Cashel shifted sideways so that he could keep an eye on the boy and the woman both at the same time.

Phorcides opened her lifted hands toward Cashel like she was making an offering. The snakes on her brow were twining faster.

"I've carried out my duty," she said. "Now, Master Cashel-free me."

"I can't free you," Cashel said. His voice was harsh, surprising him. "I didn't bind you, mistress, so I'm not the one to free you."

"Cheun…," chanted Protas. It wasn't his voice. All ten fingers gripped the topaz, but bright lights glittered deep inside it. "Cheaunxin aoabaoth momao."

"Free me!" Phorcides said. Her grin changed to an expression Cashel couldn't describe. "Say that I am free, only that!"

"Nethmomao…," said whatever was speaking through the boy's lips. "Souarmi."

"Leave us," said Cashel in a growl. He lifted his staff. "Leave us now!"

The snakes in Phorcides' hair rose. She had a third eye in the middle of her forehead. It was closed, but the lid fluttered.

"Marmaraoth!" the boy's lips shouted. The cloudy mica was melting into the wall of a mirrored chamber that swelled to enclose Protas and Cashel too. There was a figure in the room already.