D
erg pointed one long blue arm toward the ruined castle. “There,” he said. “We've reached the place where I'll grant your wish.”
Cashel rubbed the cuts healing on his chest. At first he'd thought they were approaching a natural hill. He could see squared stones now beneath the foliage but trees grew even on portions of the wall that roots hadn't pried to rubble.
“All right,” he said. “What do I do?”
Cashel didn't see much in this ruin worth looking for, but he trusted Derg. And of course Mellie would tell him if anything was wrong ⦠.
He smiled at the sprite. It was vaguely disconcerting that Mellie was normal size now. She smiled back, but there was
none of the usual joy in her expression; she reached out and squeezed his hand in reassurance.
“It's inside,” the demon said, leading the way around the circuit of the wall. “One of the towers still has its roof, and what you want is there.”
From on top of a block of masonry, a spotted deer no larger than a goat stared at the three companions. Tree roots wrapped the stone the way water flows about a boulder. For a moment the deer's jaws continued to work, drawing in the remainder of a large leaf with the russet tinge of young vegetation; then it snorted, tossed its tiny spike horns, and leaped deeper into the forest.
Cashel wondered what he
did
want. Not money, certainly. The weight of his purse was already enough to make the thong cut his neck. He'd tied it instead around his waist, outside the breechclout to which he'd reduced his shredded tunic. No one was going to steal his silver in this jungle; and if they did, Cashel wouldn't much care.
If Derg was leading him to a chest of gold or jewels ⦠he'd take them, he supposed, but for sake of courtesy. It wouldn't be polite to refuse a gift, even one he didn't need.
The gate had collapsed, though the posts and lintel were three of the largest worked stones Cashel had ever seen. The wall was built of fine-grained sandstone with a faint bluish cast, a dense stone that had weathered very little despite the untold ages it had lain exposed. There'd been nothing wrong with the castle's workmanship. Time had simply defeated it, as time defeated all things.
They climbed the ruin of the gateway. Mellie hopped lightly from one bit of bare stone to another. Some of her footholds were upturned corners, still square despite their age. It was like watching a bluebird perch on the spike of the mill's lightning rod.
What do I want?
Derg knew better than Cashel himself did, Mellie had said. That wouldn't be hard. Cashel couldn't think of anything, any object at least. People talked about happiness but he didn't know what that could be, not really.
Nor did other people, most of them, from what he'd seen.
Mellie moved with all her usual grace, but she hadn't been skipping and playing with the world about her since, well, since they'd come to this place, really. It was as if when she'd grown to full sizeâor Cashel had shrunk, he wasn't sure whichâshe'd gotten staid like ordinary people.
If anybody'd asked him before they came to this place, he'd have said the sprite was happy. Now he didn't know.
The castle's courtyard had been paved with blocks of the same hard stone as formed the walls, but they lay in a jumble among the trees. Roots had found cracks between the pavers, then expanded to lift them.
People thought that rocks were eternal. Life, with all its changing cycles, that's what was really eternal. Rock was all well and good, but Cashel'd take a seasoned hickory pole any day ⦠.
He thought about the sword Garric was wearing when they met in their dream. It looked like it belonged with him, belted around his waist.
“Derg?” Cashel said. “Are you taking me to a sword? Because really, I wouldn't wantâ”
Derg and even Mellie dissolved in laughter, the first real joy Cashel had heard in the sprite's voice in far too long. “Oh, silly!” she said. “What would you do with a sword? You!”
“It's right over here,” Derg said. “Inside.”
The stables within the courtyard had fallen in or been buried by the collapse of the outer wall. The building across from the gateway still stood, or at least the walls did. Judging from the vacant window openings there had originally been three stories. Roofing tiles were a ruddy litter on the ground inside and out of the structure, and the floors hadn't long survived the roof.
At the left end of the houseâthe palace?âstood a tower two levels higher than the rest of the structure. Its sharply peaked roof remained, though many of the tiles had dropped away. Birds, not the swallows Cashel would've expected back
home, flew in and out of the windows on quick, twittering courses.
Derg led the way, going as often on all fours as he did on his hind legs alone. When the demon put his hands down he walked on his knuckles with the claws tucked up into his palms. Mellie skipped like a bird; and Cashel walked as he always did in bad terrain, choosing his footing carefully because a rock that seemed solid might well turn under his weight. He wished he had his staff, but he wasn't too proud to dab a hand down.
He didn't guess there was much of anything he was too proud to do if that's what it took.
Derg led them up a pile of rubble to the door that must originally have been entered from the second floor of the main building: the tower's whole base was a foundation course.
Cashel laughed. Derg and Mellie looked at him. “I was thinking it was a good thing the rubble made a pile for us to reach the door,” he explained. “But then I thought, if the roof hadn't fallen in like that we'd have gotten in the regular way. Things have a way of working out, don't they?”
Derg looked puzzled. The sprite smiled at Cashel. “Yes they do, Cashel,” she said. “For some people.”
The staircase leading to the top of the tower was made of stones sticking out from the inside of the wall. A passionflower vine ran up the long circuit, sending spiky purple blooms out each slit window and the hole in the roof besides.
Against the tower's curved inner wall, protected by the staircase as well as what remained of the roof, hung a tapestry. It seemed as out of place here as it would have been on the wall of the mill where Cashel and his sister grew up.
“Oh ⦔ he said, touching the edge of the fabric with one careful finger. “Ilna would love to see this.”
The light in this nook wasn't good, but the woven scene was nevertheless alive. A city of fairy towers rose from the forest in the middle distance. Walkways of crystalline delicacy leaped from tower to tower or sometimes spiraled down
into the treetops. The sky was a dome of pastel beauty in which great birds sparkled.
“I dreamed about this!” Cashel said. “I saw this hanging, only I was living in it!”
Derg raised an eyebrow in question, but he was looking at Mellie. The sprite hugged Cashel and said, “Yes you did. But it was only a dream, remember.”
The foreground at the bottom of the tapestry was meadow separated from the forest by a broad river. A bridge spanned the swirling water. At the near end the piers were stone with timber decks like the bridges Cashel had seen on his way to Carcosa, but at midstream the span became shimmering glass and swept into the city with no further support.
He couldn't tell what fabric the tapestry was made of. He didn't think it was silk, and even the threads that shimmered gold and silver had a translucence that meant they couldn't be metal.
“Am I to take this to my sister?” Cashel asked. A gift for Ilna, that
was
something he'd like to have.
“No,” said Derg. “Step through the doorway behind it. That will lake you where you want to be.”
Cashel kept his face expressionless. He lifted the hanging a little ways out and found behind it more smooth, slightly curved sandstone blocks like the rest of the the tower's wall.
He looked at his companions.
The demon's long jaws smiled. “The doorway is there,” Derg said. “When you step behind the hanging, you'll find it there.”
“He's right, Cashel,” Mellie said. Her smile was nothing like the cheerful grin he'd grown used to. “That will take you to the place you want most to be.”
Cashel shrugged and clasped arms with the demon. “I don't suppose you're coming with us,” the youth said. “I'm glad to have met you, Derg. I like you better for a friend than I do an enemy.”
The demon's grip was firm on Cashel's biceps; his muscles moved like heavy ropes.
“Friend?” Derg said. “Well, you're human, you understand those things better than I do. May you have success in all your other fights, Cashel.”
He stepped back.
“I'm not going either, Cashel,” Mellie said.
Cashel frowned. He didn't understand what she'd just said. That happened to him a lot, being told things he didn't understand by people who assumed he would ⦠.
“You've brought me to a place where I can go home safely,” Mellie said. “I could never have gotten here myself, Cashel. You're very strong.”
“I didn't think you'd leave, Mellie,” he said. “I've ⦔
He didn't know how to put it. He hadn't
gotten used to the sprite,
that made her sound like the ache in his left knee every time the weather changed, a relic of a tree that fell the wrong way when he was twelve.
“I'll miss you,” he said.
Mellie stepped close and kissed him. She felt like a rabbit, all softness and hard muscle in the same form. “May you have success with others as you've had with me,” she said.
“Mellie,” Cashel said as she backed away.
“Go!” the sprite said. “Go now! It's what you really want!”
Cashel turned quickly because her tears embarrassed him. He lifted the hanging aside and stepped forward as if there wasn't a stone wall before him.
There
wasn't
a stone wall, only darkness. He took another stride. He'd started this course, so there was nothing for him to do but finish it.
T
he gate to the bor-Benliman tomb was chained and padlocked: the new owners had decided to bar intruders, even though they didn't own this corner of the property.
Garric felt fierce indignation fill him. “They had no
right,”
he whispered as he reached for his sword hilt. With this sword on his waist, his anger was no longer a frustrated, inwardturning thing. If someone wronged him, they'd learnâ
Tenoctris touched his sword hand.
Garric looked at the old woman in embarrassment. He let the sword's weight slide it back into the scabbard. “I was just going to cut the chain,” he muttered in embarrassment. “It's soft iron. This sword can ⦔
“I think we can do with less noise,” Tenoctris said. That was all that reached her lips, but there were questions in her eyes. She lifted the padlock in her cupped palms.
Garric blushed, wondering how much of that outburst was him and how much was the king who laughed in his mind. He'd never thought of himself as someone who threw his weight around; but then, he'd never
had
any weight. He wasn't sure what had changed, but the sword he now wore wasn't the only factor.
Tenoctris murmured a spell while still holding the lock. Cold blue light gleamed from the padlock's interior. Metal pinged musically; the hasp fell open.
“I said I wasn't a very powerful wizard,” Tenoctris said as she removed the lock. “I didn't say I wasn't a wizard at all.”
Garric unwrapped the chain from around the iron gate and post, being particularly careful not to clank the metal together. Now that he was using his senses rather than reacting to provocation
by a fat landowner who didn't believe the law affected a rich man's prerogatives, he could hear low chanting. The air rumbled as though stirred by a distant surf.
Garric thought he saw blue light flicker at the corners of his eyes. He glanced at Tenoctris. She nodded, grim-faced, and walked into the fenced enclosure ahead of him.
Garric thought of drawing the sword; he kept his hands at his sides instead. The only use for the sword at this moment was to be a crutch for his spirit. If Garric couldn't be a man except when he held a sword, he wasn't a man he'd have wanted to know.
The window on this side of the groundskeeper's lodge was round and eight inches in diameter. Crossbars divided the unglazed opening into four, and ivy grew across it as well.
Garric brushed back leaves so that he and Tenoctris had a clear view of the interior. Some moonlight entered by the similar window on the other side, but the real illumination was the haze of blue fire in which stood a plump, balding man who chanted in Benlo's voice.
The bronze casket lay empty against the crosswall separating the lodge from the tomb in the other half of the building. The lid hung open, showing the white satin liner.
The chanting wizard wore a burial shift. On the floor beside him was the mummy of a woman, her cheeks sunken and the tendons of the interlaced fingers standing out like ropes. There was no sign of overt decay.
The other bodies in the family tomb weren't preserved any better than Benlo's own; Garric had spent enough time among the crumbling caskets to know that. It must have been while on his travels that Benlo learned the embalming technique he applied to his late wifeâamong the Isles, or perhaps on the other planes to which his wizardry took him.
Liane lay on the wizard's other side. She was as still as her dead mother.
Benlo raised the pudgy arms of the body he wore. He spoke, but Garric no longer heard the words of the incantation.
The cosmos pulsed, growing alternately tighter and looser with the movements of Benlo's lips.
A thread of blue light as dense as a sword edge bound Mazzona's forehead to that of her silent daughter. The thread grew thicker and even brighter as the wizard chanted.
“Can you distract him?” Tenoctris whispered. “Otherwise I don't have enough power to ⦔
Garric nodded. The door of the groundskeeper's lodge was wood rather than metal, but he could see through the window that it was closed by a bar as thick as his arm. He couldn't kick his way in, and hacking the door down with the sword would take longer than he wanted to delay. Besides, there was another locked gate between him and the doorway.
He stepped away from the window. This was the sort of problem Garric understood. Wizardry and monsters had been no part of his life until he met Tenoctris, but he had plenty of experience with making holes in solid objects.
Garric judged the balance of the stone bench planted in front of the tomb. He knelt and used the strength of his legs to lift the seat off its two supports. He didn't know what the slab weighed. Enough, he expected; and if the wall took more than one blow, well, it'd get whatever was required.
Tenoctris stepped out of the way as Garric waddled forward with his battering ram. The old woman looked impressed as she watched him.
Garric took a last step, swinging the bench with the strength of his shoulders in addition to his forward momentum. The blunt stone hammer hit squarely over the window opening. The frame and wall disintegrated in an avalanche of smashed bricks and old mortar.
The crashing destruction was muted by the soundless weight of Benlo's invocation. The wizard's lips continued to move without missing a beat.
The bench stuck halfway through the crumbling wall. Garric shoved the end sideways, levering bricks away. He jerked the slab clear, then crawled into the room shimmering with azure magic.
The wizard's silent thunder paused, though the pressure of unseen forces continued to squeeze Garric. He couldn't imagine how they felt to Tenoctris, who understood them the way Garric understood a towering storm-tossed wave.
Benlo turned his head. All the strength left Garric's limbs. He sprawled on the pile of shattered rubble, choking on mortar dust but unable even to override reflex and hold his breath. His outflung hand touched Liane's arm. Her flesh was as hard as the bricks beneath him.
Benlo extended his hand toward Garric's head. His thumb and fingers were spread like a crab's pincer. Blue flame crackled between the fingertips.
Mazzona sat up behind the wizard. Her chest swelled and she screamed, “Help! Help!”
Benlo turned. “Mazzona!” he said.
Still seated, the mummy backed awkwardly to the far wall. There was a look of horror on Mazzona's pinched face. “Help!” she screamed again. “This monster's killing my daughter! Help!”
“Mazzona my love,” Benlo said. He reached out toward his wife. Garric still couldn't move, but he felt the hidden pressure draining from the tomb.
“Monster!” Mazzona cried. She was trying to stand, but there wasn't quite enough strength in her mummified arms to lift her up the wall. “Loathsome monster!”
“My love ⦔ Benlo said in a liquid voice that blurred out on the final syllable. The blue radiance faded quickly, like water draining through a hole in a bucket.
The mummified woman stiffened, then slumped sideways. Her right hand broke off as her body fell.
The corpse Benlo wore remained standing for a few moments more. Patches of blue mold spread across the cheeks like fire in dry grass; a stench of corruption filled the narrow room. Weeks of deferred dissolution were taking place in a matter of seconds.
His eyeballs began to drip. The corpse fell onto its face,
no longer animated by Benlo's soul. The flesh squelched wetly as it hit the floor.
“May the Shepherd guide him safe,” Garric whispered. He knew he was physically able to get up now, but he wasn't mentally ready.
He hadn't much cared for Benlo when he was a living man. As a dead soul inhabiting another man's corpse, the wizard was terrifying. Garric had been able to function only because he
had
to function, had to act to save Liane and probably Tenoctris despite his fear. To save his friends.
But no human being really deserved the fate that Benlo had brought on himself.
Liane's arm quivered. Her chest rose and fell again.
She was alive.
Garric scrambled to his feet. His muscles prickled as though he'd been sitting in a way that cut off circulation, but full feeling was coming back.
“He was going to transfer his wife's spirit to Liane's body,” Tenoctris said softly. She was still outside the tomb. “That's why he had to have Liane. The link between mother and daughter was necessary, even for a wizard as powerful as Benlo. Even for the part of Benlo that remained.”
Liane murmured as if she were having a bad dream. Her hands opened and closed.
Garric looked at the old woman. “Don't tell her that,” he said. The steel in his voice surprised him. “She doesn't need to know.”
“No,” Tenoctris said. “She doesn't need to know.”
Garric unbarred the door and opened it, then picked up Liane. He needed to get out of this room. He needed to get away from the stench, both physical and spiritual, of what had happened here.
“He was so powerful,” Tenoctris said. “It was all I could do just to redirect the forces he'd raised. To nudge them aside by the slightest degree. It was like standing in a millrace ⦠.”
She touched the lock on the wicket gate; it clanked open. The door of the groundskeeper's shed gave onto the grounds
of the main property, not the alcove of which it was a part. Garric carried Liane into the ivy-bordered alley, leaving both gates ajar behind him. A watchman holding a halberd crosswise at waist height eyed them from near the house. Tenoctris bowed to the man and followed Garric out.
Liane stirred. The old woman put her hand on the girl's forehead. Garric couldn't tell whether the gesture was wizardry or normal human kindness.
Liane opened her eyes and said, “Garric? Am I alive?”
Garric set Liane on her feet, keeping his hold around the girl's shoulders until they were both sure her legs would support her. “I guess you are,” he said. “There was a while I wouldn't have bet on it.”
“Who was the man who attacked us?” Liane asked. Her voice had a distant quality. Either the girl was still feeling the effects of her captivity or the cool demeanor was her conscious attempt to keep from screaming.
Garric looked toward Tenoctris for an answer. The old woman was staring intently at the sky to the south of them.
“Oh!” she said in embarrassment. “The creature that attacked you, Liane ⦠that was a ghoul of sorts, haunting tombs. He's dead now, gone forever.”
She shook herself, then sighed. “Something is happening near the palace,” she said. “Something very serious.”
She gave Liane a smile of tired affection. Garric realized that his lifting the stone bench was nothing compared to the effort this frail old woman must have expended to defeat the greater wizard.
“Liane,” Tenoctris said, “the creature who attacked you was acting on his own, at least there at the end. The activities of the Hooded One and those of a rival of his are separate; and one or both are going on nearby.”
Liane forced a smile. “Those are what we came to deal with,” she said. She noticed Garric's frown and added with a touch of anger, “I'm all right! It's there we'll learn who sent my father to Haft and his death, won't we?”
“We may indeed,” Tenoctris said. She put her arm around
Liane's and began walking toward the climax of forces which her wizard's mind saw reflected in the sky.
Garric walked on Liane's other side; glad of the presence of his sword, gladder still to have his companions.