“
A
full-sized stone makes sharpening easier,” King Carus said as he drew the small whetstone across the across the edge of the sword near the point. He was working on the reverse of the blade, the edge opposite the ring quillon: his spirit in Garric's body had backhanded the sword through an iron helmet. The metal had parted like wheat before the scythe, but it had left a nick in the blade as well. “This one will do, though.”
He grinned at Garric. “Just don't cut your finger offâand that's not a joke, lad, I've seen it happen.”
Dream Garric nodded. “When you're tired, you make mistakes,” he agreed. “I do, at least.”
“Everybody does,” Carus said, turning the blade over to work from the other side. With a bigger whetstone you'd move the blade across the stone to sharpen it, but this one, from the pouch attached to the frogs holding the scabbard, was too small for that to be practical. “And you'll never be so tired again as after a battle, but it's then you
must
care for your sword.”
He laughed with the joy of a man who finds humor in most of life, not least his own mistakes. “There's nothing worse than waking up to learn your enemy's counterattacking at night
and
your sword doesn't have the edge you'd like because you didn't bother to polish the dings out before you fell asleep.”
Carus held the sword to the light and sighted along its edge. “Only the dings, mind. And only a working edge, lad. You don't take a sword into battle with an edge so sharp it turns or cracks when it meets something hardâas it surely will.”
“I've sharpened knives,” Garric said. “And axes too.
Bone may be harder than the root of an old hickory, but not so very much harder.”
Carus laughed again. “And was your tree wearing armor, lad?” he said. “But I take your meaning.”
He sighed. “There's so much to know when you're king. Some of it I never learned, maybe never could learn. You'll do better.”
They sat at opposite ends of a curved marble bench in a garden. Roses climbed a long trellis on the other side of a circular pavement. The sky above was blandly neutral; nondescript clouds showed against a faint blue background.
Carus used a rag to wipe the grit of sharpening from the blade, smiled at the weapon, and shot it home again in its sheath. “A good sword,” he said. “It never let me down.”
“Did a wizard make it for you?” Garric asked. He knew that if he got up and looked through the rose hedge, there'd be nothing to seeâswirling grayness perhaps, the raw material from which his mind wove dreams. He didn't need to prove that to himself.
The king laughed. “One gave it to me, at any rate,” he said. “I don't think he forged it, though. Wizards know things, but that doesn't make them any good with their hands. The smith who created this swordâ”
He tucked the whetstone back into its pouch.
“âmust have been like your friend Ilna. I never had much use for wizards, but I can respect a man who makes things.”
Carus returned the sword to Garric, who stood and buckled it on again. The king remained seated, a pensive expression on his face.
“I hated wizards,” Carus said. “Because I didn't understand what they did, I suppose. That's wrong.”
He looked up, his features as sharp as a stamping die. “Don't make that mistake, lad; about wizards or anything else.”
Carus' face broadened into its familiar grin. “But also don't make the mistake the Duke of Yole made and trust somebody simply because he knows things you don't.”
King Carus got to his feet, his eyes exactly on a level with those of dream Garric. There was a sound in the background, a voice chanting words of power. The hues of the dreamworld brightened and faded with the pulse of every syllable.
“You need to go now,” Carus said. He patted the hilt of the sword. “Take care of her, lad. It won't be long now before I need this blade again.”
The garden dissolved into pearly light. Garric threw out his arms as he fell, but he was already lying on cool alabaster slabs in a room flooded by moonlight. Tenoctris smiled when she saw Garric's eyes open, but she continued chanting until he managed to sit up.
They were in the ruins of Ilna's drawing room. The bodies of liches lay where Garric's strokes had strewn them; some of the bones were already bare because the flesh had deliquesced in dark pools on the flooring.
A wild mace blow had smashed the walnut wardrobe chest. The destruction of that piece of fine cabinetry disturbed Garric at a deeper level than did the man slashed to death on the threshold, one of Ilna's yellow-eyed servants. He scowled, offended by his own priorities.
Ilna was gone.
“Ilna was here,” Garric said. “Have you seen her?”
He remembered the thing clutching the girl; the stroke that cut through the serpentine trunk was Garric's, not that of King Carus in his body. But that might have been a dream, a nightmare like so much else.
Tenoctris shook her head. “You're the only person alive in the house, Garric,” she said. “Can you stand up?”
She held out her hand. Garric braced his hands on the floor, avoiding the pools of spreading filth. He raised himself in a series of careful motions. He smiled at the notion that he needed the old woman's helpâphysical help, at least. He didn't doubt that the reason he
could
stand owed as much to the forces she'd called to his aid as to his own sturdy constitution.
“From the residue Ilna left behind,” Tenoctris said, answering
the question she'd avoided a moment before, “I'm afraid that she's in a place I'd rather she were not. A very bad place. But the same is true of Liane, and unless we rescue Liane before midnightâ”
Her eyes gestured toward the moon, already high in the heavens.
“âit will probably be too late.”
Garric glanced around the room instinctively, wondering what Tenoctris meant by “the residue Ilna had left.” He saw nothingârecognized nothing at leastâand it didn't matter anyway.
We can only do one thing at a time.
“Let's find Liane, then,” he said. “She's in the old family mansion?”
“She's in the groundskeeper's shed that's part of the family tomb,” Tenoctris said. “I didn't go there by myself. Not against Benlo.”
“You're not by yourself now,” Garric said. He stepped across, not onto, the dead servant as he led the way out.
A thought struck him. He paused and drew the long sword, then squinted at the edge in the light of candles still burning in the hallway.
Tenoctris might possibly have belted the sword around Garric's waist while he was unconscious, but she hadn't done this expert job of polishing the nick out of the tip of the blade.
T
hough her body slipped to the throne-room floor, Sharina's mind watched from a place in limbo as the entrance hall filled with liches. Nonnus backed against the door, seemingly at bay, then launched himself low into the figures of gray flesh before they could react to the change.
The Pewle knife winked in moonlight:
A lich fell, its spine split by the blade slicing in through its belly.
A lich fell, its skull crushed by the pommel hammering against the left temple.
A lich fell, its neck cracked when the hermit's blunt fingers jabbed into its eyesockets for a grip and jerked as if to finish a leg-snared rabbit.
Nonnus backed away. The surviving liches had no fear, no hesitation. Those in the center stepped laboriously over the bodies of their own kind; those to either side moved forward unhindered, their weapons raised and their cold gray faces set.
Nonnus breathed in great gasps. As well as the Pewle knife he now held the end of a boarding pike whose shaft was broken off thirty inches beneath the hooked point. He grinned to his right and jumped left, into the gray mass.
Steel sparkled on steel. From the melee spun a skull dead for centuries and now dead forever, losing bits of gelatinous flesh while still in the air.
Nonnus stepped back, but the door was there and no longer space for maneuver. The liches rolled over him from two sides and then the third. The pile of impassive faces and rusty weapons stabbing continued to move much longer than any human being could have lived to fightâ
But when the movement ceased, Sharina's mind returned in a wave of black emptiness to her body on the floor of the throne room.
“Phasousouel eistochama nouchael!”
Meder called. He and the procurator stood within the circle he'd scribed on the stone floor with Sharina's dagger. The embedded marble chips steamed and bubbled at the touch of the brown ichor remaining on the blade.
Asera looked cold-faced in the direction of the door, taking no part in the ceremony. She was probably afraid, but she was too much an aristocrat to let her fear show now.
“Apraphes! Einath! Adones!”
The door shook with another series of blows. The point of
a rusty boarding axe split the panel near the top and withdrew. A halberd head stabbed halfway through the wood lower down; the liches were using the long shaft as a lever to tear the door apart.
Sharina thought she could move again, though she wasn't sure that she wanted to. When the undead monsters in the hall killed her, they would end her responsibilityâand her guilt.
“Dechochtha iathennaouian zaarabem!”
Meder called. His voice lilted and his moonlit face held a fierce joy.
Sharina didn't know what the wizard was planning. Based on recent experience it would be something foul, something that a human being would rather die than be associated with.
A mace and the axe together smashed the center of the top panel to splinters. Hands of translucent jelly reached in to pull the broken wood out of the way. Splinters clung to the flesh.
Nonnus wouldn't want her to think of Meder as inhuman. Nonnus wouldn't expect the girl he'd died for to lie on the floor while evil triumphed.
The candlestick that had struck her down lay beside her. Sharina picked it up and stood, backing slightly away from the door and the gray, skeletal creatures who were completing its destruction.
“Namadon! Zamadon! Thestis!”
The door split top to bottom. The latch side sagged and fell into the throne room. Two liches pushed the rest of the door in on its hinges. There was a pile of their kind dismembered just outside the door, as Sharina had known there would be.
She braced herself, raising the heavy candlestick. The liches were already dead, but perhaps her own blood would give Meder the power he needed for his incantation.
“Sharina!” the wizard called. She glanced around by reflex at the sound of her name.
Meder seized Asera by the hair with his left hand. He cut her throat with the dagger.
The procurator's mouth opened wide, but she was too startled even to scream. Blood gouted over her beige robe, then vanished in the jet of red fire filling the protective circle and mushrooming off the ceiling above the black throne.
Even the liches paused. The wizard and his sacrifice both dissolved in the roaring flame. The dagger fell to the floor and bounced away, twisted and glowing. None of the inferno's heat touched Sharina, though she was only arm's length from the protective circle.
The flame vanished, flicked out as if a shutter had fallen. A red-skinned creature with leprous eyes stood in the center of the circle. It was seven feet tall, with shoulders so hunched that the claws on its long fingers brushed the floor.
“I'll save you, Sharina,” the demon said in a croaking parody of Meder's voice. He shambled forward, his claws scoring the stone.
Sharina stepped aside, still holding the candlestick. She was too shocked to be frightened.
Half the plastered ceiling dropped with a crash, covering the throne and the burned stone floor. A cloud of white dust spilled outward. Fire twinkled on the bared roofbeams.
Whatever animated the minds of the liches left no room for fear. The pair in the doorway lunged toward the greater monster, swinging their weapons. One's mace clanged from the red skull. The other's swordstroke didn't land because the demon caught the blade in one hand and crumpled the steel like a boy playing with a dandelion stem.
“I'll save you, Sharina,” repeated the monster that had been Meder. He squeezed the liches together. When he released them, the bones of their shoulders and upper chests were ground to powder suspended in the jelly of their flesh.
The demon waddled into the main hall on its short legs. There were scores of liches. They attacked with the single-minded fury of bees swarming over a nest-robbing bear, and to as little purpose. The demon pulled his opponents apart or crushed them. Neither the armor some liches wore nor the
blows they rained with a variety of weapons on Meder had any effect on his actions.
Sharina dropped to her knees in the pile of liches dismembered outside the door of the throne room. She clawed through putrescent flesh and bones, some of them so ancient that they snapped when she tugged at them.
Nonnus was on the bottom, the Pewle knife in his right hand. His face looked calm; but then, it always had.
“May the Lady cover you with Her cloak, my friend. May the Shepherd guide you to His fold.”
Sharina wrapped her fingers around the dead man's. She began to cry.
The demon flung aside fragments of the last remaining lich. He turned with a smile on his flat, lipless face.
“I've saved you, Sharina.” Meder said. “Now you're mine.”
He started toward her.