C
hallis had gone as the runner. Now he sat with the driver on the box of the closed carriage approaching the lockup. Behind him were a pair of postilions with dark faces and eyes whose pupils looked almost yellow in the light from the lamps on the front of the box. The wheels roared even though the vehicle was slowing to a halt.
Challis hopped down and said, “Garric goes with these guys, the old woman goes free. She isn't part of the deal.”
The lockup was an open cage in front of the Patrol hut. The corporal's courtesy had extended to ejecting the half-dozen drunks who'd expected to spend the night in the cage, instead of throwing Garric and Tenoctris in with them. The smell and pool of vomit remained, but it hadn't been very long.
And besides, conditions in the lockup weren't the real problem.
The corporal unlatched the door. Tenoctris gave Garric a tiny smile of encouragement as they left the cage under the patrolmen's watchful eyes, but she didn't know what was happening either.
The carriage opened. Two dark, husky men of the same race as the postilions got out and stood to either side of the door while a pale-looking fellow followed. He looked at Garric and nodded. “Yes, he's the one. Get in, sir.”
“Here's what he was carrying,” the corporal said. The pale man accepted Garric's sword, purse, and wallet and handed them up to the nearer postilion.
Garric had expected the patrolmen to help themselves to his silver; that hadn't happened. Something about the situation worried them enough that they remained scrupulously honest in dealings with their prisoners.
“Get in, I said,” the pale man repeated. His voice was like the popping of a spark, sharp but lifeless.
Tenoctris had vanished into the shadows, getting clear before the Patrol or this civilian changed their mind. She'd murmured she had a plan, but there hadn't been any real discussion with the patrolmen always nearby.
“Yes, all right,” Garric said, and climbed into the coach. Two more guards were inside. Garric sat on the bench facing them. The other pair reentered and seated themselves to either side, wedging Garric tightly so that he couldn't jump out a door while the vehicle was moving.
The coach started off as soon as the pale man sat down
across from Garric. The only light inside was the glow of the front lamps through panels of thin horn in the coachwork. The pale man's face and the yellow eyes of the guards beside him seemed to hang in the air.
“Where is Liane bos-Benliman?” the pale man asked over the thunder of the wheels. “You told the Patrol that you were in her service.”
“Sure, I'm in her service,” Garric said. “I left her at the Ram and Ewe. She's still there, I guess.”
That was mostly a lie, but it'd stand up. The truthâ“Liane's dead father carried her off”âwouldn't be believed and would probably make the situation worse.
Whatever the situation was.
“Why did you arrest me?” he demanded. The shade of King Carus paced across the back of his mind like a caged cat; restive but not nervous, waiting only for the moment Garric would release him. “Who are you working for?”
The pale man smiled. “You'll not be harmed,” he said. “No doubt you'll have the answers to all your questions very shortly.”
The coach pulled up with a creak of harness and leather springs. They hadn't driven very long, but the busy sound the tires made on the bricks gave the impression they were traveling faster than Garric guessed was actually the case.
A postilion opened the door. They were in front of a large mansion; lights were on behind the curtained windows. Two of the guards got down and waited watchfully.
“Go on in,” the pale man said. “I'm told you'll be treated well.”
His face moved in what was either a smile or a nervous tic. “She doesn't lie. That may be the most frightening thing about her. She does exactly what she says she'll do.”
“Who?”
Garric said as he climbed out of the vehicle. “Who are you working for?”
“Go in, Master Garric,” the pale man said. “It doesn't do any good to fight her. You can't, you see.”
Garric turned and walked up the three steps to the front
door. Two guards preceded him; the other pair and the postilions were directly behind. One of them carried his sword and other effects.
The coffered hardwood door opened before Garric reached it. He looked over his shoulder as he heard the coach driving away. Four men with yellow eyes stared at him; the pale man was gone.
The doorman was another of the yellow-eyed breed, as large and as silent as the others. Garric wondered if they spoke his language or could speak at all.
A woman waited in the foyer with the doorman. “There's a washbasin and fresh clothing waiting for you, Master Garric,” she said. Like that of the pale man, her voice was as soulless as a plate of glass.
Candles in mirrored holders hung on the walls, more candles than Garric had ever before seen in one place. The panels were limewood with gilt edging.
Garric blinked.
Bright as day
, he thought, but he knew it wasn't. For all the glitter and whiteness, this building was as surely a tomb as the one in which Liane's ancestors lay.
“Come,” said the woman. Garric followed her, because he knew she'd lead him to her mistress; and only the mistress of this place could answer his questions.
A room off the foyer was covered in marble veneer. In it were an alabaster washstand and basin, and in one corner a great copper bath. The room was larger than half the huts in Barca's Hamlet, though it seemed small compared with the mansion of which it was a part.
The woman had withdrawn; a male attendant waited at the open door. The staff, though discreet, would surely appear in time to prevent Garric from running away now.
The bath was half full of steaming water. Garric ignored it and filled the basin from the waiting copper pitcher instead. He scrubbed at his face and arms with a sponge.
A mirror of silvered bronze hung over the washstand. Garric cleared the cobwebs from his hair with the comb provided among the other bath implements. He thought of the spiders
in the tunnel through which he'd finally escaped his dream.
Dreams don't leave cobwebs on waking; nor swords.
He had no intention of running. The owner of this house was one of the people trying to control Garric's life. He was going to learn why that was happening.
A fresh tunic and a pair of sandals hung from wall pegs. Garric's own tunic had been clean this morning, but that was a long day past. He didn't change, though: the garment was his, and the only thing of his that remained to him with the exception of his soul.
“You can take me to your mistress now,” he said to the attendant.
The yellow-eyed man stepped aside. The thin female waited in the foyer. She said, “Follow me, please,” and led Garric down a corridor into the mansion's west wing. The hall was brightly lighted, but all the polished wooden doors opening off it were shut.
The woman tapped on the door at the end. A voice within said, “Yes.” She opened the door and closed it softly behind Garric.
The room was darker than the remainder of the mansion, though the pair of three-branched candleholders provided a great deal of light by the standards of the borough. There was a couch opposite the door and a wardrobe chest between the tall, curtained windows on the right-hand wall.
A woman stood with her back to Garric, examining the sword lying on top of the chest with the rest of Garric's effects. The candles on the wall above her threw her figure into shadow.
“The interesting thing about this sword isn't that it's sharp or strong,” she said in a conversational, familiar voice. “Though it's obviously that too in the natural sense. Its real virtue is that to touch the metal is to be free of all enchantment. The smith who forged it must have been as skillful as I am.”
That was what the nymphs said when they offered him the sword. “Who are you?” he asked.
The woman turned, smiling. “Have you forgotten me, Garric?” she said. “I haven't forgotten you.”
She was Ilna.
“Ilna!” he said. He stepped toward her to hug her in greeting, then paused. “Were you arrested too? We didn't even know you were on Sandrakkan!”
She continued to smile. It was that expression which had stopped him. “Not at all, Garric. The house is mine. Sandrakkan nobles pay well for love.”
She gave a short laugh. “For lust, at any rate. It's much the same thing, I believe.”
Ilna's voice made Garric afraid for her. He felt as if he were watching her climb out onto a high cliff. He remembered his dream of a spike of rock a thousand feet above a foaming maelstrom ⦠.
“Ilna?” he said. “What's wrong with you? Is it something I can help?”
She took a packet of fabric from the top of the chest. It was no larger than a folded handkerchief, but Ilna shook it out into a cape of cloth finer than spiderweb. Garric saw the candlelight through the fabric undimmed, but it distorted solid objects in ways he couldn't describe.
Ilna swung the cape over her shoulders and closed the throat with a ribbon tie. Garric felt his chest constrict.
She reached out to him. “Nothing's wrong, Garric,” she said. “You aren't ignoring me now, are you? Come.”
A fire hotter than a smith's forge swept over Garric's soul, burning away all personality and volition. He couldn't speak. He took a step forward, conscious of himself only as he might be conscious of a statue in a distant room.
Ilna laughed like ice crackling in the dead of winter. She lifted her cape's hood; the peak flopped down over her face in a transparent veil. “Come,” the cosmos repeated in a voice as cold as moonlight.
Garric came to her arms. He could no more have refused than water could refuse to run downhill.
Shouts and the clang of weapons sounded in the hallway.
The thunder of Garric's pulse was louder in his ears. He touched Ilna's cheeks through the gossamer fabric.
The windows shattered inward. Curtains fluttered as figures climbed through the transoms. The door burst open.
“Garric!” Ilna shouted. She stepped back. Garric followed her, aware of his surroundings but not affected by them.
A pair of liches stood in the doorway. One held a spear, the other a cutlass red with rust and blood. More of the skeletal creatures were entering through the windows. The air stank like rotting marshes.
The liches stepped forward with their weapons raised. They were already dead. Ilna's magic had no effect whatever on them.
“
G
arric!” Ilna cried, afraid for him as she would never fear for herself. The liches came on, smiling skeletally through their translucent flesh.
In the crisis Ilna didn't think of the knife she'd brought from Barca's Hamlet, sharp as a sunbeam within its bone case under her sash. The noose was her weapon, the one she'd die with.
She snatched off her cape, twisting the thin fabric into a rope. It was light as spidersilk, but it was that strong also.
Garric, freed from the enchantment, moved as Ilna had never seen a man move before.
He drew the sword, gripping the hilt in one hand and the chape of the simple, sturdy scabbard in the other. The same motion sheared the skull of the lich coming through the right-hand window.
He spun, blocking an axe with the scabbard while the long sword decapitated a lich with a cutlass. The slash became a
thrust so quick that it was through the eyesocket of the creature with the axe while sparks the axeblade had struck from the scabbard's iron mountings still glowed in the air.
Ilna crossed her arms, then snapped them back, catching a lich's sword in the temporary loop. The blade was too corroded to sever the silk that held it. The creature struggled briefly to pull the blade out of Ilna's grip before Garric topped its skull like a soft-boiled egg.
Garric stepped chest to chest with a lich, too close for the creature to spear him. He struck with the sword pommel, turned, and cut a pair of liches across at midchest with a single sweeping motion.
The strength and speed of Garric's sword arm splashed jellylike flesh across the walls and ceiling. The bones of some of the creatures powdered like rotten sticks when struck; others sheared cleanly with a fresh, yellow color and traces of marrow at the core.
There had been at least a dozen liches; all were down but two. That pair came on as fearlessly as logs rolling. Garric struck low, under the kite-shaped shield one carried, and split the other lich to midchest with an overhand stroke.
Ilna picked up the axe. She smashed the head of the lich whose legs were severed at the knees, then did the same to one whose rusty sword flailed wildly even though its pelvis lay to one side of the upper body.
Garric turned. His body sagged with exhaustion; his complexion was gray. Bits of stinking gray gelatine darkened and liquesced, dripping from his limbs and torso.
“Garric!” Ilna said, herself suddenly exhausted. Her cape lay wrapped about the blade of a lich's sword, torn and soaked in the filth of the creatures' dissolution.
Garric's eyes focused at the sound of her familiar voice. The smile that started to form on his wide, strong mouth froze in horror and disgust. In a flash of sudden rapport, Ilna saw herself in the mirror of Garric's eyes:
Foulness stained her thin tunic. A point had thrust through it waist-high, front to back, ripping the fabric without touching
her flesh; she hadn't even been aware of the danger.
Behind her, wrapping her in branches whose tips thrust into her ears and eyesockets, was a tree with leprous white bark. The leafless limbs caressed her like maggots crawling over flesh. The trunk and branches wove and swayed in a pattern more disgusting than the flesh dripping from the liches' rotting bones.
Ilna screamed. She grasped the branches filling her eyes, but she might as well have tried to tear down the doorposts.
Garric stepped forward, bringing his sword around with both hands on the hilt. His face was cold, his strength and grace that of a youth who had felled many trees without a missed stroke. The sword's heavy blade sheared through the trunk just below the knot of writhing branches.
The cosmos tore apart with a scream of dying fury. A void spread between Ilna and Garric, between her and everything but a chasm of ashen gray. She slid into the abyss.
But she was free. Ilna os-Kenset was free for the first time since she stepped through the portal in Carcosa, and her soul smiled.