Ilna paused at the head of the valley. She whispered, "Are you going to claim this wasn't the catmen's work, Temple?"
She scowled at herself. The pattern in her hand made it clear that the Coerli were well beyond the sound of her voice by now. Perhaps she was speaking quietly in respect for the dead—a thought that made her scowl even blacker.
"No, Ilna," Temple said calmly. "A band of Coerli killed them and did worse I suspect. There will have been children."
Asion was part-way up a tree for a better view of the valley than Ilna and Temple got from the ridgeline. Karpos, crouched several paces behind them watching their back-trail, said, "What will we do now, mistress?"
"What?" said Ilna. "We'll go down to the farm and see if we notice anything important from closer up. Then the two of you will track the beasts to their daylight lair—it's a bright day and early enough in the morning that you shouldn't be in danger. And when we know precisely what the situation is, we'll kill them. As usual."
She was surprised to hear the anger in her voice, though she supposed anger was never very far from the surface. The sight of three bodies below had scraped off the cover.
The three human bodies, that was. Ilna didn't care about the donkey butchered in the corral to the side of the main house, nor about the milch goat with her kid who'd run nearly a furlong from the kicked-over bucket and stool by the house. At another time she'd have been angry at the way the killers had deliberately torn the nanny's belly open and gripped her intestine so that she pulled it out as she ran, but they'd done the same to the woman who'd been milking her.
She rose to her feet. "I'll wait here," Karpos said. He was out of sight.
Ilna glanced at the cords in her hand, then began picking out the pattern. "There's no need," she said, but she didn't argue with Karpos as she started down the slope. He wasn't doubting her word, just continuing to do the things that'd kept him alive for however many years he'd been hunting dangerous animals. Temple and Asion, who dropped from the tree, joined her.
The farmstead had been neat-looking. Oh, not neat by the standards to which Ilna'd kept her quarters and Cashel's in their uncle's millhouse, but with animals and no doubt children as Temple had said, not even Ilna could've guaranteed perfect order.
The walls of the main building were logs trimmed with an adze and chinked with clay; they'd been touched up recently. Several roof shakes were brighter than their neighbors also, showing where rot and wind damage had been repaired.
And none of it mattered now to those who'd lived here, because a band of catmen had killed them all. Ilna lips moved, though no one watching would've recognized the expression as a smile. She couldn't help what was past, but she was as sure as she was of sunset that this particular gang of beasts wouldn't repeat their slaughter.
"Two days, I'd judge," Asion said, squatting by the corpse of the man who'd had time to snatch a sickle from the outbuilding. It had a wooden blade set with sharp flints, a dangerous enough weapon if he'd managed to strike anything with it; but of course he hadn't.
From the tear in the corpse's bearded throat and the rope burn on his right wrist, a beast had thrown his line around the fellow's arm and set its hooks in his neck so that his attempt to slash with the sickle only dug them deeper. Either the beast holding the line or one of his fellows had then jabbed a slender point through the man's diaphragm, leaving him to slowly suffocate or bleed out.
Helman, the butcher who slaughtered hogs when his circuit brought him through Barca's Hamlet, did so with equal cruelty, but Ilna herself didn't behave that way. She smiled again, though with no more humor than the expression of a moment before. If the hogs had trapped Helman some dark night on his rounds, she at least would've thought it a rare instance of justice being done.
She entered the house. The door, suspended on leather hinges, was open but the sturdy crossbar lay just inside where the catmen had dropped it when they left. There hadn't been time to close the window shutters, so the catmen had entered through a casement, tearing the covering of leather which'd been scraped thin to pass light.
Temple held his bronze sword before him, but his buckler was slung over his back to leave his left hand free. He knelt to touch a spatter on the floor of halved logs, puncheons. The blood was dry enough to flake away, as Ilna would've expected.
"How many do you think it was lived here?" Asion asked. A bed was folded up against the back wall; he prodded the frame with the point of his knife, gouging out a splinter. He seemed tenser than Ilna'd expected.
Ilna realized with a touch of amusement that it made the hunter nervous to be in a house. Had he and Karpos slept outdoors when they'd trekked into town to sell their lizard gall?
She snorted. Most likely they'd stayed drunk the whole time, or at least drunk enough to ignore the roof over them.
"The parents in the bed, with the infant in the cradle at the foot," Ilna said. As she spoke, she climbed to the half-loft above the single room. There was a real ladder nailed to the wall, not merely a young pine with the branches lopped short to form steps. "Up here . . . ."
She looked at the bedding, rolled neatly against the roof slope, and estimated the width of the portion of loft floor which wasn't being used for storage. "Three older children, probably. Though the tallest can't be more than a cloth-yard—"
A normal yard and a thumb's-span; she'd heard folk from Cordin call it an ell.
"—unless he sleeps doubled up."
There was no chance, none, but Ilna nonetheless crawled to the bedding and pulled it back to make sure that no child had hidden within it when the catmen came. That hadn't happened, but she didn't mind wasting a few moments to be sure she wasn't leaving an infant who'd fallen unconscious after an elder had concealed it. She had enough on her conscience already.
The blankets were goat wool, but they hadn't been loomed here. When Ilna touched the cloth, she got an image of stone-built farm buildings and a pair of old women murmuring as they worked their shuttles.
"And the other man?" Temple asked.
He isn't a peasant, Ilna remembered. Aloud she said, "A hired man; he's wearing the master's cast-off clothes. The tunic's too small for him. He slept in the outbuilding, I suppose."
She came down the ladder deliberately, stepping on every rung and holding the rails. She wanted to get away from the beds the children would never return to, get out of this house; but she wouldn't let dislike make her act in haste. Mental discomfort was merely one of those things, like pain and hunger and bleak hopelessness, that you avoided when you could and bore when you couldn't.
Temple gestured toward the fireplace; there was ash on his fingertip. "It's cold," he said. "All the way down to the hearthstone. At least two days."
The catmen didn't like bright light. They must've come at dawn, while the family was starting the morning chores. The pack would be sleeping in a the shade of a booth of woven branches at this time of day.
The Coerli showed real talent with wicker and bark cloth, though they didn't grow flax or raise animals for wool. They were beasts . . . .
The wooden chimney had been sealed with a thick coating of clay. Ilna frowned when she saw it, but there wasn't much free stone here; and the family hadn't died from a chimney fire, after all.
The folk who'd built the farm had come from a more settled region. Did it exist now, or had the Change torn this farmstead an unguessible distance in time and space from where it'd sprung?
That probably didn't matter. If it did, then she'd know soon enough.
Asion was tracing the simple carvings on the top of a wooden chest with his fingertip. "My, that's fine," he said. Looking toward Ilna, he went on, "Mistress, where'd the kids go if we didn't find them here? They couldn't 've run if the parents couldn't, could they?"
Ilna looked at Temple. The big man said, "The raiding party carried them off, Asion. They'll be more tender than the adults."
There was no expression in his voice. He turned to Ilna and said, "I'd guess there were four or five males, and there may be females and kits in their lair. They'll be hunting again soon."
"Yes," said Ilna. "Asion, take Karpos and locate the beasts. I wouldn't expect them to be very far away. I'll prepare matters here to receive them."
"Yes, mistress," the hunter said, slipping through the door and drawing his sling from beneath his belt from where he'd been carrying it. He seemed glad to get away.
Ilna looked around once more, then walked into the farmyard. Temple followed her. She'd hoped there'd be a loom, but that wasn't important; she could knot the necessary patterns by hand. She'd pick out yarn from the dead woman's tunic. The rip would make the task easier, and she could put the blood dyeing the wool to practical advantage.
"Ilna?" said the big man. "Have you a task for me?"
"I'll summon the beasts by lighting a fire on the hearth," she said. "I'll be waiting for them in front of the house, though. You might decide where the three of you should best be to act when they come to me."
Her lips quirked into a smile or a sneer. She said, "After all, you're a soldier, aren't you?"
She didn't like soldiers, men whose life was directed at killing other men.
"Something like that," Temple said equably. He glanced around. "Asion in the goat's byre, under the straw to hide his smell. Karpos in the manure pile for the same reason. I'll wait in the house, because the Coerli won't take time to separate my smell from the previous owners' before they attack."
"Yes, all right," said Ilna, taken aback by the speed with which he'd planned the business. The hunters would prefer to hide in filth for the hours before the catmen came rather than to be inside a house . . . and Temple noticed that, as I did. "I'll get to work, then."
"Ilna?" the big man said. "There's tools in the shed. I'd like to bury the dead. Since there's time."
"Yes," said Ilna. "If you wish."
She walked to the woman's corpse. She should've thought of that herself, but it wasn't her real job. Her real job was to kill catmen, and very shortly she'd have a chance to do more of that.
"But we don't have a completed survey for the route to Pandah," said a civilian named Baumo. "I'm sure it seems simple to people who don't have to do the work, but most of the residents in that direction are Grass People and don't speak a proper language!"
Cashel didn't know what Baumo's title was or what he did beyond—it seemed—make surveys. Indeed, Cashel didn't know what most of the government officials here at the meeting did; so far as he was concerned, they all sort of blurred together.
It wasn't that he couldn't have learned: inside of two days, he'd know the personality of every sheep in a flock of ten tens or more. But he was interested in sheep and not a bit interested in palace officials, no matter how important they were; and officials weren't his job.
"Well, surely there'll be enough food to supply one regiment," said Admiral Zettin. "I don't think we'll need more troops than that. There can't be more than a thousand or so of the pirates and they're disgusting perverts, after all. What we can't afford to do is wait!"
The meeting was in one of the bigger conference rooms and involved far more people than Cashel could count on both hands. Besides the important folk sitting at the table, there were all sorts of clerks and runners standing against the walls waiting for somebody to ask them or tell them something.
A bunch of people started talking, none of them seeming to agree with Zettin but none of them saying the same thing either. Garric hadn't arrived yet and Tenoctris didn't want to get into the business of the black men, the Last as she called them, till he did. Sharina was letting Zettin talk about his notion of attacking Pandah where Cashel'd been a long time ago. It wasn't the same place since the Change, it seemed.
Sharina sat in the middle of one long side, listening to the argument but not running things the way Cashel knew she could do if she wanted to. She was letting folks talk to keep them occupied while she waited for Garric and the real business.
Cashel let the smile spread across his lips. Sharina was so smart, and so beautiful; and she loved him, which he'd never dreamed could be when they were growing up together in Barca's Hamlet.
Tenoctris sat to Sharina's left, reading books and scrolls she took out of the satchel which held the things she wanted as a wizard. She didn't even pretend to care about Pandah. Mostly she'd put each book back when she'd looked at it but now and again she'd lay one on the table with a bamboo splint for a place marker.
When it was a scroll Tenoctris wanted to mark, she weighted it open with whatever came to hand, generally a codex. One time, though, she'd whispered to Sharina, who handed over the Pewle knife she wore hidden beneath her outer tunic.
The big knife appearing in Princess Sharina's hand made a lot of eyes bug out. One of Lord Tadai's clerks even started to say something, but the soldier standing next to him clapped a hand to the fellow's mouth and hustled him out of the room. From the look on Tadai's face when he turned to see the disturbance, the clerk was lucky somebody other than his chief had taken care of the business.
Cashel glanced at the gleaming knife. The blade was sharpened on one edge; you could hammer on the wide backstrap if you had to. The seal hunters of Pewle Island used their knives for whatever work came to hand: chopping wood, fixing dinner—or gutting an enemy with a quick upward slash. Pewlemen were often hired as mercenaries, because they weren't afraid of anything. They had no more mercy than the cold seas where they hunted seals in flimsy woodskins.
Sharina'd gotten her knife from an old hermit named Nonnus. He'd died to save her life, and maybe died also to make up for some of the things he'd done when he was a soldier. If Sharina wanted to carry the knife to remember Nonnus . . . well, Cashel figured he'd earned the memory, and there'd been times it was good that Sharina had a big blade.
Cashel looked around the room, his quarterstaff upright beside him. He stood behind Sharina and Tenoctris, not because he really had to worry about somebody bumping them in this gathering but because that was his proper place. Sharina'd told him he could have a seat at the table—that he could be Lord Cashel or Duke Cashel if he wanted . . . but what did a shepherd from Haft know about being a duke?
What Cashel knew was putting himself between trouble and things that couldn't handle trouble themselves. Once that'd meant sheep. Now it was people, especially Sharina and Tenoctris, and there was no work that could better satisfy him.
A couple soldiers were arguing about whether cavalry could get to Pandah quicker or if the ground was too wet since mostly the Grass People lived in swamps. Baumo was saying something about fodder and horses needing grain. It was all really important to them . . . and it wasn't anything to do with the real business of the kingdom as Sharina and Tenoctris saw it, and therefore as Cashel saw it too. It was just words, till Garric arrived and—
The door of the Council Chamber opened. "Prince Garric and Lady Liane bos-Benliman!" cried the fellow in command of the guards in the hallway outside, but Garric was already striding into the room. He looked worn but steadfast and really hard—much like the staff in Cashel's hand. He still wore the breeches he'd ridden back in, sopping with foam from the horses' shoulders.
Liane was behind him, quiet and perfectly composed the way she always looked in public. From her expression she could've come straight from the library, but the left half of her travelling skirt was soaked black too. She'd ridden just as hard as Garric—but side-saddle, of course.
"Milords," Garric said. He nodded across the table to Tenoctris as he drew out an empty chair, handing Liane into it. She sat but then scooted it a little back from the table to show everybody that she was the Prince's aide, not his equal.
"Tenoctris?" Garric said as he slid into the remaining chair. "Just who are these Last that you're concerned about?"
"If you please, your highness," said Admiral Zettin, sitting at Sharina's left. "Perhaps before we get to that we can conclude—"
"Be silent!" Garric shouted, his chair crashing backward as he shot to his feet again. It was like thunder after the lightning. "Zettin, that you insult me is neither here nor there; but that you insult the woman to whom the kingdom's owed its survival throughout this long crisis, that is unacceptable! Apologize at once to Lady Tenoctris or leave my court."
For an instant Cashel, watching from across the table, could scarcely recognize the friend he'd known all his life. Garric's face had flushed and the skin was tight-stretched over the bone. He's like an old knife, worn to where there's almost nothing left but sharpness . . . .
"Your highness," said Sharina in the stunned silence, "I apologize for my aide. His enthusiasm on the kingdom's behalf sometimes gets the better of him. Lady Tenoctris, will you please proceed?"
"Right," Garric muttered. He smiled wryly and sat back down. Liane had tipped his chair upright. Zettin hadn't spoken, and none of the flunkies along the wall had dared to move.
"The Last are men of a day not yet come," Tenoctris said, smoothing the margin of an opened scroll for a moment. "They're able to enter the Land on which we live since the Change; and unless they're stopped, the world will surely be lost for all save their kind."
She looked up, beaming at everybody she could see from where she sat. Tenoctris really was a cheerful person, a pleasure to be around; even though quite a lot of what she had to say was stuff nobody wanted to hear.
Zettin was opening and closing his mouth, looking like he'd just been punched in the pit of his stomach. Sharina'd been watching Tenoctris on her right with an expression of consciously polite attention, but she glanced over her shoulder at Zettin on the other side. She tapped two fingers toward him in a signal to be quiet.
Cashel beamed. My! but Sharina was a wonder. The way she'n Garric had taken back control of the meeting was as smooth as if they'd practiced it every day for a year.
It was too bad for Lord Zettin, who seemed to be a decent enough fellow. But he was pushy, too, and that meant he was going to run into folks who knew how to push back. Here in the palace you didn't get your skull cracked by a quarterstaff, but from the way Zettin looked right now he might've preferred that to the way Garric and Sharina'd hung him out to dry.
"Where are they coming from?" Garric said. "Because if they're going to pop out of any body of water, I'd rather go to their base and choke the raids off at the source."
"I don't think we can go to where the Last are coming from," Tenoctris said, "because I don't believe that's a place on our world. Though I'm guessing."
She grimaced and let her finger waver over the books she'd spread before her. "There's nothing very clear, you see," she said. "I'd meant to read you the passages I've marked, but only a few of you—"
She looked across the table at Liane and nodded. Liane blushed slightly and lowered her eyes.
"—would understand the way I'm putting references together and coming to where I am. And of course, I may be completely wrong."
"I doubt it," Garric said. "You haven't been in the past. But go on."
Tenoctris hadn't been fishing for a compliment; she really was that modest about the things she did. It was the only subject Cashel could think of where the old woman was likely to be wrong.
Tenoctris gave an embarrassed smile. "They're coming to a place far to the south, on what used to be the island of Shengy," she went on. She pulled a slender roll of vellum from her satchel and undid the ribbon that tied it closed. "I suppose it's still Shengy, even if it's not an island any more . . . ."
She'd let her voice trail off. Looking up while her fingers spread the fine white parchment on top of the books already covering the table, she resumed forcefully, "I'm going to show you that place. It's not that I doubt you'll believe my description, but perhaps you'll better understand what I feel."
She gave a tiny laugh. "Which isn't panic," she said. "But it'd be fair to call it great concern."
The vellum was already marked with a star having as many points as a hand and two fingers, seven. Tenoctris had drawn the figure in brown cuttlefish ink, but then she'd gone around the edges and written words of power in bright vermilion with a brush.
"Wizardry?" muttered somebody behind Cashel.
Garric looked up sharply. "Yes, wizardry," he said. "I'll swear on my hope for mankind that all Tenoctris' actions will benefit those opposed to evil, but I won't require anyone to watch a wizard work if he doesn't want to. Anyone who chooses can leave the room now. That includes—"
He looked over his shoulder at the underlings at the wall behind him. His lips smiled but the expression didn't go much deeper than that.
"—the juniors present. On my leave, whether or not the head of your bureau stays."
A clerk, and then another clerk and the boy who was Lord Zettin's aide, slipped out the door as quietly as they could. None of the important people at the table got up, but the plump old soldier who commanded the Valles garrison closed his eyes and leaned his face onto his hands.
"Go on, Tenoctris," Garric said quietly as the door closed behind the boy.
"Yes," said the old wizard. She'd taken books from the table to hold down three corners of the vellum; the Pewle knife weighted the last. She tapped a bamboo splint against the figure and began, "Bor phor barbo, bar phor baie . . . ."
Cashel made sure Tenoctris was well set, then resumed looking around the room. He'd never figured watching somebody else work was a good way to get his own job done.
"Mozo cheine alcheine . . .," Tenoctris said. Her wand bobbed from each word written around her figure to the next, though Cashel didn't guess she was reading them off the parchment. Some must be upside down, after all.
There hadn't been so much as a hedge wizard in the borough while Cashel was growing up. Conjurers had come through during the Sheep Fair, but they were just more entertainment like the jugglers and the troupe of mummers who acted out plays on a stage they folded out on top of their wagon.
What Tenoctris did was different but it wasn't scary. Other wizards had tried to kill Cashel or do worse, but he hadn't found them scary either. They were trouble, that was all, and at least so far Cashel'd managed to deal with whatever trouble came looking for him and the folk he watched out for.
" . . . kolchoi pertharo . . .," Tenoctris chanted.
The light in the big room was changing, though Cashel couldn't say exactly how. It wasn't brighter or dimmer, just kinda flat. For a moment he thought the horses and lions carved into the frieze at the top of the walls were moving, but that was probably just the way the shadows twitched.
"Basaoth!" Tenoctris cried. People all over the room blurted things. One clerk made a sound like a toad shrieking in the spring rain.
The Council Room had—well, Cashel didn't know what it'd done. He wasn't in Valles any more, he was hanging in the air looking down at a crater whose black walls sloped up from an icy wasteland that stretched out of sight in all directions.
The bowl of the crater was covered with ice too, but there was movement in the middle of it. For a moment Cashel didn't understand how big what he was seeing was, but then it seemed—he didn't feel that he was moving—that he was rushing downward. From close up he saw that the specks quivering in the center of the ice lens were the Last, a double handful of them, and that they were dancing in a circle. The crater's wall was a distant horizon all around.
"Oh-h-h . . .," somebody murmured. The sound didn't come from any direction. Maybe it wasn't even a sound, just the frightened thoughts of almost everyone watching.
The Last paced widdershins in a stately form, each gesturing with his shield and drawn sword at exactly the same time. It was like there was only one of them and the rest were mirrors. As they stepped and slowly pirouetted, blurs in the air within their circle congealed into another pair of the Last. The newcomers joined the dance, spreading the circle slightly; and as they danced, more appeared.
Cashel couldn't tell how long it went on. He was conscious of the sky growing brighter and dimmer, but that didn't touch him the way the passage of time should've.
Every time the Last completed the circuit of their dance they paused, faced south, and lifted sword and shield toward the white star blazing on the horizon. It was higher in their sky than it'd been in Valles, but Cashel knew it for the interloper he'd noticed in the south before the Last attacked from the pool.
The dance went on. The circle had spread to the crater walls. Still the Last wheeled, and more of their kind appeared in the center of the lens. A second round of dancers was forming; and another, and more than Cashel could count on both hands.
The Last filled the vast bowl; and still they danced, and still more appeared. There was no end to them, none. They spilled out of the crater in lines marching northward, more and more and no end . . . .
The bamboo wand dropped from Tenoctris' hand. It made a tiny patter on the vellum, no sound at all really, but the Council Room was back in focus and Cashel bent quickly to catch the wizard as she fell toward the littered table.
It was like holding a bird in his hand. Tenoctris weighed nothing; she was just a nervous fluttering of breath. She'd worn herself out doing this, showing others what she saw herself. Showing what all mankind had to fear.
"When will it end?" said Baumo, the fellow who worried about surveys. Sweat beaded on his forehead now and his cheeks were pasty. "When will they stop?"
"When we stop them, Master Baumo," said Garric. His face was tight again, but his voice was normal. "Which we will, on our lives."
He smiled, though most of the people in the room didn't understand that he'd made a joke.
Sharina returned her brother's wry smile as she walked back to her chair. One of the problems with being the ruler was that you had to remain calm and sensible while people around you ran in circles and shouted that the sky was falling.
The sky might very well be falling this time, but it might not—and regardless, running in circles wasn't going to improve the situation. You learned that when your family owned an inn, or owned a farm, or for that matter owned nothing at all like Cashel and Ilna. The only people who could afford not to learn it were those who knew somebody else would take care of them and their problems.
"Somebody else" in this case was Prince Garric, helped by the circle of those closest to him. Given that the threat to the kingdom was unquestionably real, Sharina was glad to be one of those helpers instead of another frightened twitterer.
"If you'll all be quiet for a moment, please!" said Garric as Sharina sat down again. He'd learned to call from one hilltop to another while pasturing sheep. In an enclosed room, even a big room like this, he could rattle the roof tiles when he was on his mettle. The present shout wasn't quite that loud, but it got everyone's attention. They rustled to silence.
"Cashel?" Garric went on, now in a normal tone of voice, "you've helped Tenoctris many times. How's she doing now?"
There were stone benches built into the sidewalls. None of the aides had been sitting on them, of course, not in the presence of the prince and princess, but one made a fine bed for Tenoctris while she was recovering. They'd laid a mattress of military cloaks, with Sharina's own half-cape rolled as a pillow. Sharina didn't know how the soldiers felt about it, but in so full a room she was more comfortable without the additional weight of heavy brocade on her shoulders.
"She'll be fine," Cashel said, planted like a pillar in front of the sleeping wizard. His staff was crossways in front of him, not threatening anybody but making sure nobody accidentally backed close enough to disturb his elderly friend. "All she needs is a bit of time, you know. To get over her tired."
"All right, we'll hope that Lady Tenoctris recovers quickly," Garric said. He gave the room a lopsided smile. His fingers were interwoven on the table. From where she sat directly across from her brother, Sharina saw them mottle briefly with strain.
"What we won't do," Garric continued with a hint of grimness, "is to press her beyond her capacity. We need her. Indeed, the kingdom needs Tenoctris more than it needs all the rest of us in this room. Does everyone understand that?"
There were a few mutters, but for the most part people let their silence stand for agreement. Nobody was going to badger Tenoctris when Cashel kept watch, but there was always a chance that somebody with more zeal than judgment would push into her quarters or lie in wait for her when she left them. Tenoctris had better get a full-time detachment of Blood Eagles, a practice that Attaper'd dropped when the regiment's numbers had become straitened and the need for guards had if anything increased.
Sharina smiled, but she didn't let the expression reach her lips. Not long ago she'd have feared Lord Zettin might have a scheme that he'd advance to Tenoctris beyond what others would've considered the bounds of courtesy and protocol. After this morning's rebuke, danger from his quarter had receded considerably.
"Now," Garric went on, "did anybody recognize the place Tenoctris showed us? Is it Shengy?"
Liane bent and whispered in his ear. With a rare flash of irritation, Garric said, "Duzi, Lady Liane! Say it to the group, if you please."
"There are volcanoes along the highlands of Shengy," Liane said, her voice cool and firm. She'd opened a book whose narrow pages were slats of bamboo, though she didn't look at it as she spoke. "Before the Change the whole island was covered with heavy jungle, however."
"Your highness, if that scene was Shengy, then there's nothing we can do anyway, is there?" said Lord Hauk, born a commoner but ennobled by Garric for his ability. "Even if we could find enough horses and oxen to transport an army travelling by land, the draft animals would consume all the fodder they could carry before they'd gone a fraction of the distance."
"Well, the troops can forage for themselves in an emergency like this, surely," said Chancellor Royhas. "I don't mean looting. The treasury can supply silver or if necessary issue scrip for the troops to buy food with."
"Can they, milord?" said Lord Tadai in a bland voice. "We don't have any idea what the terrain between here and Shengy is like. It may well be jungle—or desert."
Tadai and Royhas were rivals if not precisely enemies. Royhas had gained the initial advantage and forced Tadai out of the administration over a year ago, but as a result Tadai had been available to join the army as Garric's chief civilian administrator. He'd spent quite a lot of time in close company with the prince, and it was obvious that he hoped to parlay that association into an advantage over the Chancellor.
"We have reports for the region a hundred miles south of Valles," said Master Baumo, a senior clerk in the tax office. "Preliminary reports that is, and I must admit that these were surveys at three or four points only, not real coverage of the area."
He licked his lips and scowled at the blotched parchment in his hands. It was a palimpsest, a sheet being reused after the original writing had been scraped off with a pumice stone. Apparently it hadn't been erased as well as Baumo now wished.
"Still, the reports suggest small-holdings, scattered villages, and quite a good supply of timber for shipbuilding," he finally continued.
"What bloody use is shipbuilding to us now!" Lord Zettin shouted. "By the Lady, man, use your—"
He caught himself and closed his mouth. Sharina glanced sidelong at the former admiral; his face was pale and his eyes were fixed on the far wall. He must've been aware that she—as well as everybody else in the room—was watching him, but only the jump of a muscle below his right eye proved that he wasn't a statue.
"If what we just saw was a real scene and not a, an allegory . . .," Garric said quietly. "Which we won't know until Tenoctris is able to discuss the matter, of course. But if it was real and the Last are present in the numbers we saw, then they badly outnumber the whole royal army. Even if we could take the army to where the Last are appearing, in Shengy or wherever."
"Well, they can't get to us either then, can they?" said Lord Holhann, the commander of the Valles garrison, in a harsh voice. He'd been frightened by the wizardry and he was letting out that fear in the form of anger. "Let'em have Shengy! It was never part of the kingdom except maybe in name. If we can't reach them, then they can't reach us either."
Sharina glanced back to see if Cashel would speak. Seated as she was, she couldn't see him for the lesser functionaries standing in the way; and anyway, she knew Cashel wasn't the person to volunteer that sort of information to a group of educated people.
"What Lady Tenoctris said last night . . .," Sharina said. There was no point in explaining that Tenoctris had spoken to Cashel and he'd passed the information on to her. "Is that the Last don't need food in the sense we do. They won't be stopped by the lack of supplies along the route from Shengy to the north and western isles, what's now the settled rim of the continent. Though the sheer distance will delay them, of course."
Half a dozen people began speaking, none to any point Sharina could make out. The door at the end of the room opened. Nobody seemed to notice except Sharina, who caught movement at the right corner of her eye and turned to focus on it.
A figure the height of an adolescent boy stepped between the pair of Blood Eagles in the doorway. Sharina blinked. The guards were shoulder to shoulder; there wasn't space to walk or even to slide a napkin between them.
At first glimpse the figure seemed to be wearing a shirt and breeches of goatskin, but that was his own hide: he was a brown-furred aegipan, with hooves instead of feet and two tiny black horn buds peaking up from the tousled hair on his head. He carried a sheathed sword.
"Hey!" shouted Lord Attaper, shoving himself between Garric and the creature. "Keep him away from his highness!"
"I am Shin," said the aegipan in a musical tenor. "I am the emissary of the Yellow King."
One of the Blood Eagles tried to grab Shin from behind. The aegipan moved slightly, and the guard's hands closed on air. The other man drew his sword and cocked it back for a slash that would cut Shin in half.
Sharina had sprung to her feet. Even before her chair could topple to the floor, she seized the guard's sword arm.
"Wait!" she cried. "Didn't you hear? He said he's from the Yellow King!"
"The Yellow King's a children's story, a myth!" Attaper protested, his sword bare.
Sharina let go of the man she'd grabbed, but she continued to face the guards with her hands on her hips. They'd sooner have charged a phalanx of pikes than defied her.
"Gently, milord," Garric said, touching the back of Attaper's right hand to prevent an accident which the commander would deeply regret afterward. "So are aegipans, you know, but that doesn't prevent this one from seeming to be real."
He stepped past, which Attaper probably wouldn't have allowed if he hadn't been so taken aback by what was happening. There were guards outside the door who should've prevented any intrusion, let alone an intruder carrying a sword into the presence of Prince Garric . . . .
"Panchant's History of All Nature claims that aegipans inhabit the mountains of the Western Continent," Liane said primly. She was close to Garric, moving so perfectly in step with him that he'd been aware of her only as a blur since his vision was tightly focused on the aegipan. "Of course, there's no reputable evidence of a Western Continent and many geographers deny that one exists."
The aegipan—Shin—was grinning. Seen face-on he looked almost human, but when he turned to dart glances around the hall, his long-jawed profile was that of a beast.
"The Yellow King has awakened," he said. His voice seemed very full to come from so small a chest; but then, a bullfrog was louder still and a great deal smaller. "He's sent me with an offer to save the men of this day—if you have a true champion among you."
"Your highness," Attaper said, "please don't stand so close to the creature, not while he's got the sword." Harshly he added to Shin, "You then, give me the sword. No one but the prince's bodyguards go armed in his presence!"
"Take it and welcome, Lord Attaper," Shin replied, holding the sword hilt-first toward him. His tongue lolled out. Garric couldn't judge from the aegipan's unfamiliar face as to whether there was as much mockery in his expression as there would've been in a man doing the same thing. "I have no business with arms. I'm only a messenger."
Attaper snatched the sword away. A belt of heavy black leather was wrapped around the scabbard, but there wasn't a dagger or other equipment to balance the blade's weight on the wearer's right side. Though the grip was as rough as shagreen, to Garric's glance it seemed to be of the same dark gray metal as the cross guard and ball hilt.
"What sort of champion?" Sharina asked. Garric was amused at the way his sister's clear tones cut through the babble. It's as bad as the inn's common room during the Sheep Fair, though the accents here are more cultured. "Do you mean a soldier?"
The Yellow King whom Rigal and other poets of the Old Kingdom described was certainly a myth. During the Yellow King's blessed reign, men and women ate fruits that sprang from the soil without planting. There was no winter or blistering summer, only balmy days that mixed spring with early fall; all was peaceful and golden.
At the end of ten thousand years the Yellow King had departed, promising to return when mankind needed his help again. Before he left, he taught agriculture and writing that men might continue to exist and to record the Yellow King's great deeds. From then till this day, the lot of mankind has been ever harsher, ever more miserable, and men would not be saved from that decline until the Yellow King returned.
So much was myth; Garric knew that as clearly as Attaper did. But there had been a government of men before the first recorded government. There were legends about the Yellow King on every island of the archipelago, even among the Serians and the swarthy folk of Shengy whose languages were nothing like those of the remainder of the Isles.
Perhaps those who'd ruled in the days before the climate changed had all called themselves the Yellow King; the confusion of title might've concealed the details of their succession. The geographer Stane had thought so. As for Garric personally, it seemed to him that Stane or others with other guesses might be right. Certainly some truth underlay a universal pattern of belief.
Besides, Garric wanted to believe; and if every word of Rigal's myth was true and the Yellow King would return to save mankind in its greatest crisis—so much the better. He'd listen to Shin and hope.
Though the aegipan stood in place, his split-hoofed feet tapped a complex rhythm on the slate flooring. The tiny motions made his body seem to tremble, but there was nothing frightened in his hairy, grinning face.
"It's up to the men of this day to pick the champion they send to the Yellow King," Shin said. "The champion must surmount all the tests facing him, though, so it behooves you to choose well."
He lifted his legs as though he were jumping, but his head didn't move; the hooves clacked down together, hammering a period to his words. Had he made a visual pun?
Shin looked from Sharina to Garric. His brown eyes, as solid as chert, changed into caves that sank infinitely far into the earth. Garric felt himself stiffen; the ghost in his mind snatched at the hilt of his ghostly sword with a curse.
"So, Prince Garric?" the aegipan said. "Aren't furry myths from the Western Continent permitted to make puns?"
"What sort of champion?" Garric said, repeating Sharina's question in a tone of command. "What sort of tests will the Yellow King put to him?"
Shin sees my thoughts! And of course he did, but there was no point in saying that or worrying about it. Garric didn't try to deceive the people he dealt with, except by the sort of softening that made human relationships possible. There were generally ways to refuse requests that didn't involve saying, "No, you're too stupid for that post," or, "You'd turn the occasion into a disaster, you overbearing shrew."
"The Yellow King will not test the champion, Prince," said the aegipan, "but the way to the cave in which the Yellow King slept will be hard. Perhaps too hard for any human, eh?"
Shin's long black tongue waggled in silent laughter. Garric felt his face harden, not at the mockery but because of the evasion.
Before he could speak, Shin continued, "The Yellow King sent the sword Lord Attaper holds for a test. Its blade is sharp enough to shave sunlight and so hard it cannot be dulled or broken. The one who takes it from its sheath is the champion whom you must send."
"Done, by the Shepherd!" cried Attaper, one hand on the sword hilt and the other gripping the scabbard. His powerful forearms bulged. Nothing else moved.
Attaper's face flashed through shock, then anger, and finally to a grim determination that an enemy would find more daunting than rage. His hands blotched with strain and the cords of his neck stood out . . . and still he could not draw the sword.
Carus threw his head back and laughed with the joy of a passionate man seeing his dreams answered unexpectedly. "The Sister take me if he hasn't come for us, lad!" he chortled. "They'll none of 'em see what you and I see, you know that!"
Garric had to keep his face still though he wanted to laugh along with his ancient ancestor. Attaper would think he was being mocked—
But it was nothing like that. Garric ruled because it was his duty, but nothing could make him comfortable as a king. He relished the times when the safety of the kingdom required him to be a man, as he'd shown when he defeated the Corl champion in single combat.
And Carus was right: the others in the room wouldn't see it . . . .
Attaper's face was dark red. He swayed, and still the sword remained in its sheath. Suddenly he relaxed, bending slightly forward as he gasped for breath. His lips moved, but he couldn't manage audible words; he continued to hold the sword.
There was a chorus of pointless chatter. Several military officers tried to take the sword from Attaper; he shrugged them off angrily.
"Milord?" said Cashel. "May I try?"
Surprised, Garric glanced toward the back corner of the room and saw what he should've expected: Tenoctris was upright with Liane close by her side holding the quarterstaff. Cashel wouldn't have left his self-appointed post unless he were sure his presence was no longer necessary.
Attaper looked up, but the snarl in his eyes faded when he saw who'd spoken. It was no sign of inadequacy to own that Cashel or-Kenset was stronger than you were . . . .
"Aye, you're the man for it," said Attaper in a ragged voice. He straightened and held the sword out to Cashel. Those closest, all but Garric himself, backed away.
The aegipan didn't move either. He looked at Cashel and said, "Oh, a strong one, a very strong one."
The words were true enough and the tone was respectful, but Garric heard laughter—or thought he did. Shin's tongue waggled again. Yes, laughter beyond a doubt.
"Garric?" said Cashel, cocking an eyebrow at his friend.
"You'll pull it out if it can be," Garric said, feeling suddenly awkward. He didn't want to embarrass his friends; but if he'd understood what the emissary meant and the others didn't, then he was the right man, wasn't he? The champion? "If there's a trick, though, give it to me and I'll try."
"What sort of trick?" said Lord Holhann peevishly. He was talking toward a corner of the ceiling, apparently speaking simply to hear his own voice. "Is there a catch in the hilt, is that it?"
"All right," said Cashel without concern. He wiped his left hand on his tunic and grasped the scabbard just below the cross-guard; then he wiped his right hand the same way and closed it on the hilt. He began to pull.
The room was so nearly still that the guard muttering to his mate, "I seen him lift a whole shipping jar of—" boomed as though he were shouting. The Blood Eagles weren't picked for their social skills, but even so the fellow shocked himself silent before Lord Attaper could deal with the intrusion.
Nothing moved. Like an ox trying to pull an old oak from the ground, Garric thought, and for a moment he wondered if Cashel would succeed after all. When they were growing up together he'd known his friend was strong, but how very strong Cashel was had become a continuing source of amazement in more recent times.
Still, nobody'd seen Garric the innkeeper's son as a likely candidate for Lord of the Isles, either.
Cashel gave up, blowing his breath out like a surfacing whale. He breathed in great sobs.
"My, you are a strong one," Shin said, this time with no hint of mockery. "Are there many like you in the world of this time, Master Cashel?"
"There's no one like Cashel," Garric said harshly. Cashel bobbed the hilt toward him, still too wrung out to speak; he took it. "No one, Master Shin!"
Garric examined the sword. The rough metal hilt felt dry and only vaguely warm. The scabbard seemed an ordinary one of stamped tin decorated with a geometric pattern in black enamel. Presumably there were laths of poplar to stiffen the metal sheathing.
"A little room, if you will," Garric said, gesturing the guards away from the door with a flick of his left index finger; they hopped aside with instant obedience. Garric strode forward, swinging the sword from left to right in a hissing upward slash.
The stroke was burdened with the weight of the scabbard as well as the blade, but Garric was a strong man and on his mettle today. The tip crushed through the leather-covered wooden door and the belly of the blade struck the stone pilaster supporting the transom.
Splinters and stone chips flew. A man cried out in surprise and Attaper snarled, "By the Sister!"
Garric drew back his arm. His hand tingled but it wasn't numb, not yet. The ruins of the scabbard dangled from the blade. He'd sheared the tin and stripped much of it away with the wood splints.
The metal of the blade was the soft blue-gray of summer twilight. Its edge was a blackness too thin to have color; it was unmarked, even where it'd gouged deeply into the stone.
Garric looked at the grinning aegipan. The simplest way to remove the smashed scabbard would be to pull it off with his left hand, but sometimes a colorful demonstration is better than quiet practicality. He backhanded the blade against the other pilaster, flinging tin and bits of wood from another crash of powdered stone.
Breathing deeply, Garric turned to face his council. Guards in the outer hall called in alarm through the shattered door, but calming them could wait. Very deliberately he raised the gray-gleaming sword high over his head.
"People of this time!" said Shin, his voice golden and surprisingly loud. "You have found your champion!"
Temple came around from the back of the house with his shield slung behind him and, under his left arm, a bundle of poles trimmed from the white shadbush fringing the fields. Ilna turned on the stool where she was working. Before she could speak, the big man tossed the poles aside. With an odd sort of shrug he slipped the shield back into his grip and drew his sword, his eyes on the head of the valley.
By instinct Ilna glanced first at the pattern she was knotting rather than to what Temple had seen. Certain there was no danger she'd missed, she raised her eyes to the distant slope and saw Karpos coming toward them with ground-devouring strides that were just short of a lope.
His apparent haste didn't mean there was a problem: that was the hunters' regular pace when they weren't stalking or adjusting themselves to Ilna's shorter legs. Asion would be watching the back trail.
Temple slipped his sword back into its sheath. "I wasn't expecting them to return by that direction," he said softly. "They'll have doubled back on our trail to mislead the Coerli if they notice that humans have observed them."
"Yes," Ilna said, resuming her work of knotting yarn to the frame of previously gathered poles. "Chances are the beasts won't realize their camp's been found. If they do, though, we don't want to lead them straight here or they might wonder what was going on."
She rolled and set beside her the section she'd completed, so that it wouldn't affect her companions by accident. After a moment's consideration, she chose three of the poles Temple had just brought and resumed her work.
It was a complex task, the more so because the front of the house would be part of the pattern against which she'd lay her skeletal fabric. The gray and russet blotches of unpainted wood allowed subtlety that she couldn't have gotten from the wool alone, but using something other than fabric stretched her skills.
Ilna smiled. She liked learning new techniques. Besides, this was in a good cause, the best cause of all: killing catmen.
Karpos joined them. Before speaking, he braced the belly of his bow against his right knee and bent the upper tip down enough to release the loop of bowstring from the bone notches holding it. Rising, he let the yew staff straighten. Left strung, an all-wood bow would crack before long.
"They're not far," he said to Ilna. Asion was on his way down the track now also. "Maybe an hour ahead. No more than that, anyway. And they didn't try to hide their trail."
"Do they still have prisoners?" Ilna asked as she worked, judging where each strand must go without bothering to look behind her at the wall. The pattern was set in her mind; all she needed to do was to execute it according to that perfect truth.
"No," Karpos said. "Unless they'd gagged them. We'd have heard people if they'd made any sound. Well, Asion would've."
The two hunters believed that Asion's senses were sharper than those of his partner. Ilna accepted their judgment—because the men said so, and because she herself could discriminate between the shades of two threads which anyone else would've claimed were identical. So far as she was concerned, anything either of them said they saw or smelled or heard was as sure as sunrise.
"All right," Ilna said. "Lay the fire then, please. I've crossed two sticks where I want it. And set out half a dozen billets of light-wood for me to use when they come."
She'd almost said, "Good," when Karpos reported the catmen had already killed their captives. If the prisoners were alive, she and the men would have to attack the beasts in their camp. That could be done, she supposed, but it'd add a further complication to the business.
So . . . Ilna hadn't hoped the catmen had slaughtered the children they'd carried off, but since they had—they'd be hungry and looking for further prey. She was going to offer some: herself. And if the beasts managed to kill her, then they'd have earned their meal indeed.
"There's a breeze all the way from here to where the cats're camped, mistress," Asion said as he approached. "We had to swing way wide so we didn't wake 'em up early."
"All right," said Ilna as she wove her three poles together with strands of wool she'd picked from the tunic which a woman had died in. "Help Karpos with the wood, then. I don't want a large fire for now, but I need to have plenty of sticks ready so I can feed it as the night goes on. They may take their time coming."
"Not them, mistress," said the hunter as he passed his partner returning from the wood pile. An extension of the roof overhang sheltered it at the back of the cabin. "But I'll get more wood."
"Have you further directions for me, Ilna?" Temple asked pleasantly. He rested on one knee, polishing his dagger with a swatch of suede he'd brought from the hamlet where they'd found him. He'd used the short blade to cut and trim the lengths of brush; the sap oozing from the layer of inner bark smelled faintly acid.
"No," Ilna said, but she glanced around to be sure of her statement. "I have enough poles."
"Very well," he said, rising and sheathing his dagger. "Then I'll bury the goats."
Ilna frowned. After providing her with the first bundle of poles, Temple had dug a deep trench and buried the dead family. She'd been amazed at how quickly he worked with only the tools they'd found here at the farm: a dibble of fire-hardened oak, a pick made from goat antler, and a stone adze which he'd used as a mattock.
"We'll be leaving tomorrow morning at the latest," she said. "Probably tonight. If the smell disturbs you . . .?"
"No, Ilna," Temple said with his familiar slight smile. "The smell does not bother me. Animals deserve courtesy too, though, if we have time to grant it to them."
"We didn't kill the goats," Ilna snapped. "They're on the catmen's conscience, or they would be if the beasts had one!"
"All life is the same, Ilna," Temple said. "And we have time. But if you'd rather I not, I will not."
"Do as you please," Ilna said. She was furious with herself for having started an argument over nothing, an insane nothing. "As you say, we have time."
Temple gathered his tools and walked toward the dead animals. Ilna wound and knotted, seething inside.
Killing catmen was the only thing that mattered now. And she was about to kill a few more of the beasts.