I
lna saw the crowd in the street in front of the Red Ox. Something was wrong and it involved Garric. She stumbled for the first time since she'd left the Captain's Rest at a near run.
She'd finished the duties she'd bargained against her room and board: all the chickens killed, plucked, and cleaned for the next day's dinners. The cook had been delighted with the neat dispatch with which she worked, though Ilna herself was scornful of the number of usable feathers she'd wasted in her hurry.
Nobody else faulted her for sloppy workmanship, but Ilna os-Kenset had never cared what others thought.
She
knew the true facts.
If Ilna had been able to, she'd have returned to the Red Ox with Garric. He and Tenoctris left not long before Ilna finished her duties; they'd had no idea she wanted to come with them or they'd have waited for her. It wasn't Ilna's style to feel beholden to anyone: she'd hastened along after, without guide or lantern. The twisting streets that were to others a maze were a childishly simple pattern for a mind trained to weave complex perfection on a loom.
Ilna had used her own bone-handled knife to clean and joint the chickens, good steel worn thin with years of service. The last thing she'd done before leaving the kitchen of the Captain's Rest was to touch up the blade on the smooth limestone lintel.
She pushed her way into the crowd. Folk were looking toward the graveyard across the street from the inn, talking excitedly among themselves. A few even sat on the wall, though they leaned instinctively back toward the street, tempering
bravado with caution. It needn't have anything to do with Garricâ
But Ilna knew it did. She could feel the pattern forming.
Benlo's guards stood together beside the wall, looking into the graveyard and talking through scowls of concern. Icy with purpose, Ilna joined them and said, “Master Raid? Where's Garric?”
Raid reached for hilt of the sword he wasn't wearing as his head jerked around to see who had spoken. It was her tone rather than her words, she knew, but she was no mood for mincing delicacy, not now or ever.
“Sorry, mistress,” the chief guard muttered in embarrassment. The men had gotten to know and respect, if not exactly like, Ilna during the drive from Barca's Hamlet. He bobbed his helmet toward the moonlit tombs. “He's in there and the old lady with him. And Master Benlo and his daughter, I suppose.”
“Then why are you here?” she said. “What else happened?”
She wanted to climb over the wall immediately but there was more to learn before she acted. Ilna determined the pattern even before she strung the warp. Those who wove freehand were fools and worse: they were bad craftsmen.
“There was a light from there not long after your friend went over the wall,” Raid said. “A flash, like; and it wasn't lightning, it was red as ⦠it was bright red.”
Red as blood.
The guard's voice was neutral but the expression on his grizzled face was uncomfortable. Even without the girl's cold disapproval he must have felt that a better man would ignore orders and go look for his employer. But when you knew your employer was a wizard, some things took a different sort of courage than that of a man who thought he'd been hired to face swords ⦠.
“Somebody screamed,” another guard said without looking in Ilna's direction. “Could've been any of them. And I guess somebody shouted too.”
“Has anybody gone to see what happened?” Ilna said. “Since Garric went in, I mean.”
The second guard turned and glared into her cold eyes. “No,” he said, “nobody's been that great a fool. Maybe by daylight somebody'll go but it won't be me. And nobody's come out, either!”
“Then it's time for someone to play the man, isn't it?” Ilna said disdainfully. She gripped the wall coping with both hands and set her right toes between the second and third course of masonry from the ground.
A guard, probably Raid, tried to brace her heel. She kicked back in anger, then found the toehold again and lifted herself onto and over the wall unaided. Conversation picked up excitedly behind her; those near where she'd climbed the wall called fanciful explanations to friends farther away. She didn't hear anyone following her, though; and thirty paces from the wall the sound of the spectators was no louder than the buzz of insects and nightbirds.
Ilna had an invisible thread to follow; she couldn't have described or explained her feeling, but she trusted it implicitly nonetheless. That thread didn't light a path for her, however, and the open stone boxes littering the ground among the larger tombs tripped her again and again. Stone had never been a friend; but it wouldn't stop her, either.
She thought she heard something ahead, but she wasn't sure the seeming sound reached her through her ears. It was a rhythmic pulse like that of waves being swallowed in a cavern. Not voices, she thought; or at any rate not human voices.
Ilna stepped beneath a thick-trunked cedar; birds exploded into flight above her head. She ducked in reflex, ashamed of her weakness even before the rattle of wing feathers identified the roosting pigeons that her presence had disturbed.
The kitchen knife was in its case of sheep femur thrust under her belt; she'd tucked it there when she joined the crowd outside the graveyard. Rather than draw the knife, Ilna uncoiled the length of rope she carried around her waist. It
was the halter she'd picked up at Stroma River; of no particular use to her now except that holding it between her hands calmed her.
She'd reached a pair of tombs in contrasting stone. The pale one to the right was wreathed in flowers redolent of recent death. The entrance of its black basalt companion was ajar; candlelight shone from within and Ilna heard voices.
Ilna started toward the door. Light that throbbed like a volcano's heart filled the tomb. She stepped inside and saw silhouetted the figures of Garric and old Tenoctris hand in hand.
Benlo lay dead and Liane had vanished.
Garric and Tenoctris stepped together into a portal of hellfire. It began to shrink.
They had to be going after Liane. Garric was going after Liane.
“She
won't
have him,” Ilna said; and leaped into the light in which the others had vanished.
T
he wave broke on the shore of the island and ran well up the gentle slope, splashing and spuming as it crossed each deeply weathered channel. “Is the Outer Sea always this calm?” Sharina asked.
The dugout slid a few feet inshore on the lift of the swell. Nonnus gave the hawser another wrap around the pair of long spikes he'd hammered into the rock: the four humans didn't have the strength to drag the heavy dugout above the tide line, so the hermit had taken other measures to prevent it from floating away during the night.
Panting slightly with exertion he said, “Until today, child, I'd have said it's never this calm. This journey has been many kinds of education for me.”
Asera and Meder were carrying personal effects up the hill to where they'd camp, out of reach of the spray. The island was about a half mile in diameter, solid rock, and only fifty feet above sea level at the top of the central ridge. There hadn't been time yet to explore, but Sharina didn't expect they'd find fresh water. Barnacles and a dozen species of seaweed clung to the rocks as high as she could see; waves had to wash over the island regularly to permit such marine life to flourish.
There were no trees, bushes, or land animalsâeven insects. Crabs scuttled in the flat-bottomed ravines, raising their claws defiantly if a human came close.
Sharina didn't care for crabs: they always seemed angry, reminding her of her mother. They'd make a change of diet from fish and grain, she supposed.
“Do you have any idea where we are, Nonnus?” she asked, lowering her voice even though the nobles were too distant to hear anything less than a shout.
He sighed and shook his head. “I've never seen anything like it,” he said. “All rock but not volcanic; and in a part of the sea I'd have said you could go a thousand fathoms straight down and not touch bottom.”
“Are we in the part of the world we came from?” Sharina asked. She remembered Tegma and the sky of another time that covered what the trireme's crew had found when they crossed those reefs.
“Oh, yes,” Nonnus said. He laughed. “The currents are right, the water tastes right; the sun rose where it ought to, and the gulls were the same gulls that've stolen scraps from me a thousand times when I sailed these seas. The only thing that's wrong is there's an island where there never was before.”
The rock had the smooth, slippery feel of a pebble washed for generations in a quick-flowing stream. The broad ravines were its only physical feature. They formed a mosaic covering the entire domed surface, at least on this side of the island. Sharina hadn't seen any gravel; for all she could tell, the
whole island was a single reddish-brown mass.
“It's ancient,” she said quietly. The feeling of age was almost overwhelming. Tegma had been alien; this island was simply
old
.
“Yes,” Nonnus said. “But it didn't grow old here.”
The surge swept up the shelving beach again, wetting Sharina's ankles and spitting spray as high as her bare knees. Though the dugout shivered, its keel remained solidly fixed.
“Well, we're not going to grow old here either, child,” the hermit said. “I don't mind having solid ground underfoot again, but if the breeze holds we'll cast off at dawn.”
He looked out to sea, then shaded his eyes with his hand to peer eastward toward the crest of the hill. Asera and the wizard seemed determined to climb all the way to the top. They slipped frequently. The stone and slick weed made the going difficult. The ravines, though generally only a few feet deep, had occasional deeper pits from which seawater crept to wet the surrounding rock.
“I'll look for driftwood,” Sharina said. “It'd be nice to have a fire.”
Nonnus nodded. “Yes ⦔ he said with the slow agreement of someone who didn't expect success but didn't see any harm in trying. “I'll gather seaweed. We can eat some of these kinds.”
He looked up the hill again with the grim smile that Sharina by now found familiar. “Our companions will complain about the taste, but it may keep their teeth from falling out.”
He looked at her. “And I'll build a little shrine to the Lady,” he said, “to thank her for our deliverance thus far.”
“Nonnus?” Sharina said. “Where will you and I camp?”
“Just above the spray line,” he said, nodding up the rock's hummocky surface. “Fifty feet should do. I set these spikes deep, but our pig of a boat weighs tons and the sea has a sense of humor. Especially this sea, it appears.”
He patted his big toe on the stone.
Sharina started clockwise around the shore. She'd seen no sign of driftwood or other debris when they beached the dugout,
but there could be a limb or trunk lying in one of the ravines. Besides, it felt good to be able to walk for the first time in days.
“Child?” Nonnus called.
She turned.
“Be careful, please,” he said. “I think we'll leave at dawn whatever the wind is doing. This isn't a place where we belong.”
He smiled and Sharina smiled back; but the hermit's hand was on the hilt of his Pewle knife as surely as she was touching the hatchet she carried on her belt.
T
he sun was black in a red sky. The heat was the worst Garric had felt since haying last August, but with this difference: there was no moisture in the air. No moisture at all.
Garric touched the hilt of the borrowed sword. The grip was a dowel of hazelwood with shallow finger grooves. That was well enough, but the filbert-shaped pommel and the crossguard were silvered bronze that would soon grow hot enough to burn in this black light. With a reflex not his own, Garric tugged an additional fold of tunic up over his belt and let it flop to cover the metal parts of the hilt. Otherwise he might flinch when he gripped the weapon at a time when there was no room for mistakes.
The figure in the back of Garric's mind knew swords; oh, yes, he knew swords.
“Is it always like this, mistress?” Garric said. He looked around at desolation in shades of red and black alone. There was no wind, and his voice was the only sound in this world. “Is this where demons live?”
“This is where Strasedon lives,” Tenoctris said. “As for planes inhabited by other demonsâGarric, nobody's ever done this before. Not and come back to leave a record, at least.”
“Oh,” said Garric. “Well, I don't guess it matters.”
Tenoctris settled to the ground with her legs crossed beneath her and began to draw symbols with her boxwood twig. The soil had the texture of sandy loam. When the heat seeped through his callused soles Garric reflexively moved into a dark patch that past experience told him was shadows.
It was like stepping on live coals. He hopped instantly back to ground that shimmered red.
Reflex could hurt him here. Reflex could kill him.
Tenoctris had drawn the stick figure of a man and placed unfamiliar symbols between the four limbs and head. Now she was encircling the image with words in the Old Script.
Garric resumed surveying the landscape. It looked unappealing but not bizarre if he allowed for the reversal of light and darkness. This was a place of weathered badlands, banks that climbed hundreds of feet in a series of eroded steps. Cones and plateaus stood out against the red sky.
There was no vegetation. Whenever Garric turned his head he sensed tiny, scampering motion just beyond the range of his vision. His fingertips lay on the covered pommel of his sword.
Tenoctris finished writing on the soil and looked up with a kind of smile. “I need to wait a few minutes before I read the spell,” she said. “Noon will be the best time and that's almost on us.”
Garric fluffed the sweat-soaked tunic away from his chest and tried to echo the old woman's smile.
I wish I'd worn a hat against this sun
. He supposed he was thinking about that to keep his mind off real problems.
“The spell is to take us to Strasedon?” he asked, wondering how much it hurt to die the way Benlo had. The broken landscape would give no warning of the demon's presence. Runnels of earth reached into this valley from a dozen places
in either direction; a seawolf or a demon could be waiting behind any one of them. Ravines crosscut the ground, bright red streaks of shadow that were yards across, shelter for monsters to hide.
Benlo had screamed, but not for very long.
Tenoctris shook her head. “Strasedon is the whole plane that we see,” she said. She picked up a pinch of gritty soil and let it trickle away again. “I'm going to find Liane because she's the only variation in perfect uniformity.”
She looked around her. “This is ⦔ She smiled ruefully at her own foolishness. “I find this a wonderful experience, something I never dreamed I'd see. So much power is resident here that it's
solid.”
She waggled her hand at the air as if patting an invisible wall. “It's pure, not the mix of forces one finds on our plane, what you call the real world,” she went on. “The very intensity is what may save us: Strasedon's own strength limits its ability to work
through
itself.”
The back of Garric's throat was dry from breathing and his lips were already beginning to crack. “Do you mean there isn't a demon here like the one that met Benlo?” he said. Killed Benlo. “We just find Liane and take her back with us?”
“There's a demon,” Tenoctris said. “And until it dies, it won't release Liane.”
She lifted her free hand to end the conversation. “It's time now,” she said. Ignoring Garric, the old woman dipped her twig wand and began murmuring the words of her spell.
Garric nodded, and touched his sword hilt, and wondered.
The center of Tenoctris' crude circle popped with a sound like a knot cracking in the fire. A streak of white light extended: at first slowly, then with the gathering momentum of a stone dropping from a sheer cliff toward the sea. The line rippled across the soil and finally raced up the side of a flat-topped knoll to vanish. Remembrance of the light's purity settled Garric's nerves and warned him how keyed up he'd been an instant before.
“That way, then,” he said aloud. He offered Tenoctris his left hand to help her rise. The sides of knoll were steep, but cracks and gullies formed paths in the friable soil.
A thought struck Garric. He looked around again and said, “Mistress? The doorway we came by doesn't show from this side. How do we get back?”
“Time enough to worry about that after we've killed Strasedon, Garric,” Tenoctris said. “Otherwise it really won't matter.”