David Drake: The Fortress of Glass

Cashel doesn't shout. Cashel doesn't threaten.

Garric put Ilna behind him and turned, facing the wizards but keeping Cashel in the corner of his eye. He flexed his arms. He had a wound all the way through the muscle of his right shoulder, but you'd never guess that by the way his sword arm swung.

Nearby soldiers were bracing themselves. Some of them touched their weapons but took their hands quickly away lest they precipitate what they felt in the air.

Cervoran and Double both looked at Cashel. Their heads turned slowly, as though they were swimming in honey.

"There were cat people where we were," Cashel said. He wasn't shouting now, but it was hard to tell the words because of the way they slurred out through his stiff lips. "Then I saw Ilna and they were gone. Where did you send those cats, Cervoran?"

"This body must live," said Double.

"Nothing else matters," said Cervoran.

"I am Cervoran!" said both wizards together.

"Cervoran died a week ago," said the bird on Garric's shoulder. "The creatures you see before you are one of a pair of wizards from a place and time too distant to imagine. They fell here. This one animated the corpse of Cervoran."

Everyone stared at the bird. Its beak didn't move, but Sharina was as certain as she was of the sun that the words in her mind came from the shining creature.

"Its former partner fell into the sea," continued the bird. "Having taken for itself alone the treasure the two had stolen together-the bodies of my race, all but me."

"Look," said the mirrored wizards together. They pointed toward the sea.

The Fortress of Glass had risen higher from the sea on three crystalline legs. It took a step toward the land with the deliberation of a stalking mantis.

"The Green Woman is coming," said the wizards. "But I will crush her!"

Garric's shoulder had been throbbing as though a mule'd kicked him there. Now he didn't notice it.

"It's always like that in a fight, lad," said Carus, his eyes focused on something far away in time. "There's time enough to hurt afterwards; or there isn't, and it doesn't matter either way."

"Master Cashel," said the Bird. As usual, every mental syllable seemed to have been cut from hard steel. "Did you think the one called Cervoran took you with him for protection?"

"Yes sir," Cashel said, polite to a stranger-even an inhuman stranger-even now that he was as close to blind rage as Garric had ever seen him. "I was to protect him and Prince Protas, I thought. Wasn't that it?"

"Not in the way you think, Master Cashel," the Bird said. "That one needed a twin present so that he could through his art shift danger from himself to the other twin. To your sister and her companions, that is."

"It was necessary," the wizards said. "Any price you humans pay to preserve me is cheap. Look!"

They pointed again to the Fortress of Glass pacing toward land. Garric knew the water that far off-shore was at least a thousand feet deep. The glittering mass was larger than he'd realized, far larger than the cave the Bird and its people had occupied.

"What you see is thin as a soap bubble," the Bird said with its usual dispassion. "But it exists in many universes at once, so nothing in this world alone can harm it."

"Only I can defeat the Green Woman," the wizards said. Their paired voices were slightly apart in timbre, creating a shrill dissonance more unpleasant even than those voices separately. "The two humans who died do not matter. No number of dead humans matter. I-"

Garric drew the borrowed sword, a long horseman's weapon like the one Carus had carried in life and Prince Garric had learned to use under the tutelage of his ancient ancestor. It came out of the scabbard smoothly, despite the blinding jab of pain when the blade came clear and Garric's right arm rose above the shoulder.

Cashel was already moving, the staff out like a battering ram. His left hand led and the whole strength of his massive body was behind the blow. The iron ferrule was within a hand's breadth of Cervoran's swollen, smiling face when it stopped.

Cashel froze as though turned to stone; his shout of effort ended with a smothered grunt. Ruby light dusted the air.

Garric brought his sword around in a whistling arc. His body tingled as it had an instant before lightning blasted a tree nearby when a summer storm had swept the pasture while he watched the flock. The blade stopped above Double's head; he couldn't make the blade move any farther. Garric felt as though he'd been buried in hot sand, the grains individually yielding but together a weight beyond the ability of even his strong young body to force through.

"-will crush the Green Woman!" the wizards said. "I will be God!"

They turned to face the oncoming Fortress, raising their athames. "I alone matter!" they shrilled. "I will be God!"

Ilna watched the Fortress of Glass walking toward them. It was easily the most complex-and therefore lovely-pattern she'd encountered in the waking world, though when she entered her reveries she glimpsed the threads of the cosmos itself. Occasionally Ilna had even followed those threads far enough to imagine the existence of the Weaver through Her work.

Considering herself as a thread in another's pattern, Ilna felt her lips twist in a wry smile. To her surprise, quite a number of things now struck her as amusing. That in itself amused her.

Everyone was talking but almost nobody seemed to be listening. Because Ilna was silent, no one paid attention to her. She was used to that, and indeed it was the state that she preferred.

The wizards who'd been responsible for the deaths of her family had set a fallen brazier upright on its tripod legs and lighted the charcoal with a spark of wizardlight. They were chanting, ignoring the humans about them.

Ilna looked at their dead, puffy features. Only the bodies were dead, of course. The inhuman spark within them used the flesh merely for transportation, no more a part of the real being than a sailor is part of his ship.

A sailor… Well, Chalcus had never doubted that he'd die someday. Merota would've said the same thing if she'd been asked, though she was probably too young to understand just what that meant. Perhaps not, though: she'd been a clever child, and she'd stood beside Ilna and Chalcus in places where death was a more likely outcome than life for all of them.

As Cervoran chanted with his Double, Ilna remembered the feel of the cold, waxen flesh as she'd dragged the wizard off the pyre which would otherwise have consumed him. What would've happened if she'd let the fire have its way? Certainly that flesh, that form, wouldn't have loosed the Coerli on Ilna and her family; but would that have changed the result? As the thing of crystal marched toward them from the sea, it was easy to imagine a being of fire facing it and the whole island beneath a blackened waste.

The pattern was beyond Ilna's comprehension. What she knew, with a clarity that none of her friends could imagine, was that a pattern existed.

Sharina gripped Cashel's left wrist in both hands and tried to move it. He remained frozen, as motionless as the sun at its peak in the pale sky. Sharina turned, caught Ilna's eye, and cried, "Ilna? Can you do something? Tenoctris says she can't."

Tenoctris stood with a quiet expression. She held one of her slender bamboo wands, but she appeared to have forgotten it as she looked at the bird. It turned its head, unaffected by his paralysis, but it'd stopped talking.

"I can't grasp the pattern, Sharina," Ilna said, speaking in a normal voice. She was picking out the knots of the fabric she'd made to return herself from the tapestry garden. "It's far too complex for me. Even for me."

"Then there's nothing," Sharina said, despair giving way to resignation. "Nothing any of us can do. If those two-"