Garric swam up toward the lights glimmering on the surface of the black water. He could hear the breakers growling. His limbs were icy, but he forced them to move until—
"He's coming around!" Cashel said. "Back up and give him some room."
Garric's eyes were already open. They suddenly focused on the world in which his body lay on the hard ground of the inn's courtyard, his head in Cashel's lap. Scores of people stood around him, some of them holding lanterns or rushlights. Those had been the glimmers he saw in his dream state....
"What happened?" he said. "Did I faint?"
His body ached and his palms felt as though they'd been stepped on by a shod horse. He curled them up so that he could see them. The tough callus wasn't broken, but his flesh still bore the bloodless impressions of whatever he'd been holding in a death grip moments before.
Tenoctris knelt beside him with two fingers of her left hand on his throat. Garric guessed she'd been murmuring a spell, because now he realized the drone of her voice had stopped.
"A lich attacked you, Garric," she said. "You killed it with a log."
"The axletree from inside the stable," Cashel corrected automatically. "You swung it overhead."
"What lich?" Garric said. Had he really picked the axletree up by himself? That'd explain why his shoulder muscles felt like they'd been minced for sausage, all right. "What is a lich?"
His father and the visiting drover squatted between Garric and an object on the ground. Reise stood with a grim face. He tapped Benlo's shoulder, saying, "Let the boy see. Maybe he knows what it is."
Garric sat up cautiously. He wasn't dizzy, but in flashes he saw double: two different worlds through the same pair of eyes.
"I'm all right," he said, more to convince himself than Cashel. Reise held a tallow-soaked hemlock stem close so that its soft yellow light gave Garric a good view of the corpse.
It was human. The skeleton was, at least. The axletree lying nearby had crushed the skull and broken the left collarbone as well as several of the upper ribs. Garric could see the damage plainly because the flesh cloaking the bones was jellylike, translucent where it wasn't water-clear.
"I don't remember it," Garric said. He closed his eyes and touched his temples lightly with his fingertips. He wasn't sure what he did remember. He wasn't even sure who he was.
"I was sleeping in the stables," he said with his eyes still closed. "I was dreaming. I dreamed that King Carus called me to get up. He was pointing toward me. I walked out of the stables—"
He opened his eyes and looked around the circle of friends and strangers. Benlo's six guards stood close about the drover with their swords drawn, looking nervous and uncomfortable.
"That's all I remember!" Garric said. He lurched to his feet and looked down at the creature they told him he'd killed. "I've never seen this thing before. I've never seen anything like this thing before. I don't know what it is."
"It's a lich," Tenoctris repeated. "It's the skeleton and soul of a drowned man, clothed with ooze from the deepest trenches of the sea. It's the work of a powerful wizard."
"What wizard?" Benlo asked. He looked dazed and worried; Garric wondered if the drover also was feeling worlds balance in his mind. "Where?"
"I thought you might know, Master Benlo," Cashel said in a tone that made the drover's guards stiffen. Garric was so aware of his friend's gentle nature that he tended to forget how a huge strong man with a quarterstaff would look to strangers who didn't know him.
And the guards were right, of course. The shepherd is gentle with his flock; but the man who'd crushed the skulls of three seawolves in a matter of seconds wasn't gentle under all circumstances.
"No," Benlo said. "No, I have no idea." The statement was convincing because of the puzzled frustration with which the drover spoke. He was too distracted to be frightened by Cashel's obvious anger.
Liane moved to the front of the crowd, looking from Garric to her father in double concern. Very deliberately, Ilna stepped in front of the other girl and nodded when she caught Garric's eye.
Garric looked down at the axletree. He toed it, feeling the weight of oak shift only slightly. "I picked that up?" he said.
"Swung it like a feather," Cashel agreed. "And a good thing you did, because it was coming for you with a sword."
"I don't remember," Garric said. The flesh was already beginning to slump off the lich's bones. The smell of rot and the sea lay heavily in the air. "I just don't remember."
What part of Garric's mind did remember, though, was the feel of a long iron-hilted sword in his hand as he slashed through a band of liches very like the one he'd killed tonight.