David Drake: The Fortress of Glass

For a moment he was in darkness. The Bird fluttered ahead with its usual jerking motion. Points of light appeared in the ceiling, floor, and walls, then spread into a glow that suffused all the surfaces. Garric's foot trembled-not quite pausing, but almost-then came down. He walked the rest of the way into the inner chamber without hesitation.

It was a half-sphere, covered entirely with mica. Apart from the oval entrance passage there was no distinguishing aspect to the interior. The muted light seemed to come from deep within the surrounding rock.

Garric turned slowly. No matter where he looked, he caught reflections of himself in the corners of his eyes; it made him edgy. King Carus, watching through the same eyes with the reflexes of a warrior who'd lived his whole adult life by his quickness and his sword, became muchmore edgy.

The Bird hovered in the middle of the inner chamber; the exact center, Garric guessed, though he couldn't be objectively sure because of the wall's curve and mirrored reflections. He looked toward the entrance passage, then back to the Bird. Its wings were still, but it hung in the air regardless. Lights glittered in sequence within its crystalline body.

"Bird, what should I do?" Garric asked. He spoke to hear a voice in the charged stillness.

"Wait," said the Bird. "I will accompany you to your world. I must arrange the forces in a fashion that will serve your purpose and mine as well, that is all."

Garric turned away from his guide. The play of light in the Bird's body disturbed him in fashions he couldn't put words to. The rhythm was like the low vibration that heralded an earthquake. He thought he saw figures moving within the mirrored walls, but he couldn't be sure.

"Are you a wizard?" he asked. Speaking to hear a voice, but hehad to hear a voice in this inhuman, lifeless place! "Are you, Bird?"

The Bird's cluck of laughter broke Garric's tension. "I am a mathematician, Garric," it said. "I move points on a scale and adjust potentials. There is no mystery to what I do, and no art."

Therewere figures in the walls, but they weren't identifiable; they weren't necessarily even human. Some were superimposed on others the way a painted canvas may show ghosts of earlier pictures beneath the present surface.

"How is what you do different from what Marzan does?" Garric asked. "Or Sirawhil?"

"Marzan can achieve effects that I cannot," the Bird said. He clucked again. "But then, I know what is really happening, and he does not."

Black spots appeared in the walls and floor. Garric thought they were where the points of light had first glittered. Beams of red and blue wizardlight, thin as spider web but of densely saturated color, spread to weave the spots together.

Lines pierced Garric's chest and left forearm. Moving put him in the path of other lines. He couldn't feel any contact; if he closed his eyes, he wouldn't have known they were there.

He transferred the dagger to his left hand for a moment and wiped his right palm on his tunic. The coarse cloth was sodden, but the touch helped somewhat. He flexed his right hand several times, then took the dagger in it again.

"Prepare yourself, Garric," the Bird said. "We will accomplish your purposes, and then I will accomplish mine."

The hair stood up all over Garric's body; the web of wizardlight burned even brighter. The Bird clucked, louder than before.

The mica walls vanished, plunging Garric into a plane of interweaving figures.

Ilna followed Chalcus and Merota off the cold, polished stone of the bridge. The grass between her toes felt good by contrast.

The round temple was in front of them, brightly sunlit in a grove of pines. The roof was gilded-or simply gold? She didn't suppose it mattered-and had a circular window in the middle. There were tall columns around the outside and half as many thinner columns in an inner ring. Both numbers were too large for Ilna to count without a tally, but she was instinctively sure of the proportion.

Merota looked back at Ilna but her eyes then drifted past. "Oh," she said. "It's gone."

Ilna glanced over her shoulder. The bridge, a solid mass of pink and gray, had vanished into the wall of curling white. Only here and there could Ilna see above the mist the top of a tree growing from the maze beyond.

"There's nothing in the hedges that we wanted, child," said Chalcus, giving their surroundings a different sort of look from the ones he'd been shooting about him from before he stepped off the bridge. Instead of looking for dangers, he was now considering the island as a place where a young girl and her companions might want to be. "The sun's clearer here. And should we wish to go back, why, our Ilna would have us there in a flick of her fingers. Would you not, dear love?"

"I don't think that will be necessary," Ilna said austerely. She walked toward the temple, letting her mind drink in not only the shape but the reasons behind the shape of the building in every detail. She'd laid lengths of yarn parallel in her left palm and clamped them with her thumb, but she didn't start tying them yet.

The island had plenty of vegetation-the pines surrounding the temple and the flowers and grasses covering the ground. It was all pretty enough, if you liked that sort of thing, and Cashel would doubtless tell her it'd make a fine pasture.

There was nothing here for human beings to eat, though. Well, Ilna had no intention of staying on the island longer than it took to find their way back to their own world. She had business there with Double.

She walked up to the temple. It stood on a platform of three low steps. The floor within was a mosaic of tiny stones in a pattern as delicate as the interlocking fibers of a bird's feathers. From any distance the floor would've looked gray; in reality it was black and white, always one or the other. Only the eye of the viewer mixed the colors.

Chalcus was taking Merota around the structure, keeping himself and the child out of Ilna's way. It wouldn't have mattered: when she focused on a difficult pattern, nothing intruded on her concentration.

And this was avery difficult pattern. This was every leaf and rootlet of the tapestry garden, and it was more.

Ilna began to knot her bits of yarn, using them to work herself through the greater pattern in the stone. She stepped into the sanctum proper and concentrated on a tiny segment: a piece small enough to cover with the palm of her hand.

She looked up at the roof opening. It was the eye of the building, not only part of the pattern but the garden's window onto the wider cosmos. The grating over it was woven from gold wire so fine that it blurred in sunlight like the sheen of oil on water. There could be stories in an oil slick, too, and the soul of the garden was in this golden eye.

The beasts who called themselves Princes had spoken of the One who created the garden. If the One existed, he'd left his mark in this eye; but increasingly Ilna believed that the garden, the tapestry, had woven itself while the cosmos congealed out of chaos.

There was danger here.

Merota screamed. Ilna looked out from the light-shot complexity of her mind. Merotawas screaming, probably had been screaming, but Ilna hadn't noticed until the pattern she was visualizing warned her of what was going on in her immediate surroundings.

Chalcus stood beside the building, in the curved shadow of the roof. His sword and dagger slashed in bright arcs-through nothing, dark shadowed nothing that formed about him. The Shadow was separate from what lay on the ground in normal fashion. His face was set and his lips were closed in a taut line.

Ilna acted by instinct, sweeping off her outer tunic and spinning it to a part of the mosaic floor that no one-not even her with her eyes and intellect-could have told from any other part of the interwoven design. The soft wool fabric settled silently, blocking the pattern in stone from the pattern in the light streaming through the grill over the temple's upturned eye.