Master of the Cauldron (53 page)

Lord Waldron, with an official from the City Provost's office whom Sharina didn't know by name and another officer carrying the truce flag, had waited between the armies for several minutes. Now they rode slowly toward the rebel army.

“Look, your highness…,” Lord Lattus said awkwardly. “We've taken arms against Prince…, well, against your brother. And marched on Valles. We have no choice now but to go through with it. Or hang, that's all.”

“What do you mean, ‘No choice'?” Sharina objected, sweeping her gaze around the circle of eyes watching her all up and down the hillside. Most of the army couldn't hear the discussion, but they could see her imperious posture and the deference the rebel nobles gave her. “You have the choice of following Princess Sharina of Haft against monsters like those your grandfathers routed forty-nine years ago. There's that choice, or there's sitting on your hands while real men save the Isles! Which will it be for you?”

“Sister take it!” said Lord Luxtus. “We came here to fight. And I for one won't be sorry if I'm not fighting my own sister's son, as I see carrying Waldron's banner!”

Bolor nodded, and muttered, “Yes, all right.” He turned to face the commander of the royal army, now close enough to touch with a lance.

“Uncle Waldron!” he said in a deep, carrying voice. “Princess Sharina summoned us to come to your support. May I request that you place me on the right flank against the People?”

Lord Waldron, as lean and hard-featured as a hawk, glared down from his saddle at Bolor. Just as Sharina opened her mouth to speak, Waldron said, “You can request anything you please, nephew, but I'll not be giving up the place of honor in an army I command, to you or to anybody else. Apart from that, though, I'm glad of your loyal support. The kingdom”—his eyes flicked to Sharina; he nodded, as close as he could come to making a full bow from horseback—“has always been able to depend on the bor-Warrimans.”

A trumpet signalled from the royal army. The ranks of People had begun to advance like a long bronze wave.

“And now is the time we prove it,” said Bolor. “Gentlemen, tell your regimental guides that we'll be marching obliquely to the left, putting our right on the left of my uncle's forces—which I trust will shortly be facing around.”

Sharina dropped the mace and took the reins of the horse. A former rebel opened his mouth to object, then subsided without speaking.

“Tenoctris,” Sharina said, “I'm going to mount, then pull you up behind me. We'll be rejoining Lord Waldron for the battle.”

And not coincidentally rejoining Undercaptain Ascor and his squad of Blood Eagles. They were the only troops in this army who considered it of the first importance to keep Tenoctris alive. The past few hours had convinced Sharina once again that if anything happened to the old wizard, the kingdom wouldn't long survive her.

 

Trumpets had started sounding from the battlements as soon as the citizens of Ronn had returned from a field piled with the bodies of the Made Men. Their brassy tunes skirled over city and plain alike, joyously triumphant. Cashel could hear them faintly even there in the stone-cut cellars of the city.

The sun had been rising over the eastern mountains when Cashel, Mab, and the Heroes entered the shaft that dropped them to the city's lowest level. Mab said that this time they didn't need to walk the last half of the way down. All danger to Ronn ended when the king let down his defenses to deal with Cashel, allowing Mab to blast him as though he never was.

Mostly Cashel liked to hear music, but right now he'd sooner that the trumpeters would just stop. It wasn't right to be happy when so many fellows were freshly dead or were missing limbs. Sure, it was good that Ronn was safe and the king wouldn't trouble its citizens anymore—but that didn't bring the dead back to life.

Light wicking from the city's roof and walls brightened the depths also, now that black algae no longer curtained the crystal windows in the ceilings. The slimy growths covering everything when Cashel first came there had dried to fine powder that swirled away through the ventilation system. When Cashel stirred up a pinch of dust that'd hidden in some cranny, it had a pleasant sharpness that made him sneeze the way he did when Ilna grated ginger into a stew.

“In a few days the streams here will be running clear again,” Mab said. “The plantings will take longer to regrow, but not much longer. And very shortly people will return to these levels.”

She grinned at Cashel. Since the battle Mab had gone back to looking like she had when Cashel first met her on the hillside where he followed the ewe: a woman in her thirties, good-looking but too queenly to be called pretty. She added, “Not everybody likes to have only clear crystal between them and the outside, you know.”

Cashel shrugged though he didn't speak. He knew what Mab said was true, but he didn't understand how it could be. He'd sooner sleep on an open hillside than in a thatched hut, and these rock caverns made him uncomfortable just to visit—let alone live there. But there was no accounting for taste, in sheep or people, either one.

The Heroes hadn't spoken since they entered the shaft with Mab and Cashel. Now the surviving twin, holding the left arm of his dead brother over his shoulders, said, “I thought the first time I made this trip would be my last.”

“It would've been,” said Dasborn, supporting the corpse's right arm, “if you'd finished the job you started. And if you'd done that, I wouldn't have failed in turn and raised Valeri to fail.”

He laughed. It was hard to tell with Dasborn if he really thought all the things he laughed at were funny, but Cashel guessed he probably did. That was true of a lot of soldiers, it seemed. Garric had gotten that way since he left Barca's Hamlet and started wearing a sword.

The doors of the temple were open. It looked different by daylight than it had when Cashel was here first, fighting his way through a fog of evil that was cruel and determined and angry at its own existence. Now the doors' surfaces were bright. Their carvings showed all manner of people living happily, city folk on the right valve and on the left countrymen. One big fellow watching sheep on a hillside could've been meant for Cashel himself.

“Well, we're done with it now,” Valeri said harshly. “And not before-time!”

He and Virdin carried Hrandis' body on a stretcher made from two spears and a blanket. A sword stroke had torn off Valeri's helmet; blood soaked the left side of the bandage around his head. Virdin limped from the wound in his right thigh, and the blow that'd dented his breastplate must've bruised ribs if it hadn't broken them.

Cashel had offered to replace either of them on the stretcher—or carry the corpse alone; Hrandis was a heavy weight, but the task wasn't beyond Cashel's strength. “You're a stout lad,” Valeri had replied, his tone just short of sneering. “But this isn't for you.”

Mab stopped at the temple entrance. Cashel placed himself at her side, holding the staff upright and close in to his body. He figured his job now was to keep out of the way. He'd figured that when he offered to carry the dead Hero, too, but he'd offered help anyway because courtesy required him to. It wasn't the first time he'd gotten snapped at for being polite.

Virdin paused before entering. He said in a soft voice, “I wonder what it's going to be like to rest? Others have done it, so I suppose I can learn; but…”

“You've earned it, Virdin!” Mab said harshly. “Never has anyone earned his rest more than you have!”

Virdin looked at her. He had the features of a young man, though Mab said he'd been old when he came down to the temple the first time. The look in his eyes was older even than that: it was older than the rock of this mountain.

“It hasn't anything to do with what's earned or not earned, mistress,” he said, his tone that of a mother to her sleeping infant. “It's granted or it isn't granted. And if there's any justice in the decision, then it isn't justice as men see it. As you know well.”

“Yes,” said Mab. She smiled, an expression that took Cashel's breath away for its mixture of love and sadness and cold, bright certainty. “But sometimes there's man's justice also, if only by chance. You have your rest now, Heroes; and the thanks of one who used you hard in the past.”

“Come on, Menon,” Dasborn said to the living twin paired with him. “The lady has much to do; and unlike us, she'll have no more rest than she's had the past thousand years. Not so, milady?”

Mab's smile became a mere twitch at the corners of her mouth. “Not for a time,” she agreed. “Ronn uses her servants hard. But perhaps even for me, one day.”

The Heroes walked into the temple, three and then three. The living men set their dead comrades against the sidewall, then began stripping off their own equipment. Dasborn's right arm dangled from a broken collarbone. Cashel hadn't noticed the injury while the sardonic Hero wore his armor.

“Well, Cashel,” Mab said as they waited. “You've done as much to save Ronn as anyone has, myself included. What would you like as your reward?”

“Reward?” Cashel said, genuinely surprised. The word took his mind out of here-and-now immediacy to a world where people made plans and agreements. “Oh, ma'am, I have everything I need and more. Just take me back to my friends and, and Sharina.”

Mab gave him a funny expression. It was a smile, he supposed, but there was more to it than that.

“Ah, ma'am?” he added. “You said when you brought me here that my mother needed help. Was that really true, or were you just saying that to get me to come along? I guess that wouldn't be a lie the way most people look at lies.”

“Wouldn't it be?” Mab said tartly. “
I'd
call it a lie.”

She smiled, and in a gentler voice, went on, “Your mother was in the worst sort of danger, but when you saved Ronn you saved her as well.”

She looked like she might say something else, but in the end she didn't. Cashel waited a moment longer, then said, “Ma'am, it'd have been all
right. I guess Ronn has better folks and worse ones, same as anyplace does; but the things the king made weren't…ma'am, they shouldn't've
been
. The king had the power to make them, and he made them, but they hadn't any more reason than that. I'm sorry so many folks got hurt wiping the earth of them—”

He glanced at the Heroes returning their gear to the racks it'd come from. The temple's interior had a soft glow of its own, not sunlight brought down to the cellars through crystals.

“—but it had to be done; and I'm glad for anything I did to help.”

Mab nodded, but she was frowning at thoughts a long distance from the present. She looked sharply at Cashel, and said, “Cashel, how well did you know your father Kenset?”

He shrugged, frowning in turn. “Ma'am, not real well,” he said. He let his eyes drift off because the talk embarrassed him, but he went on, “He was around, but he didn't have much to do with me and Ilna. Sometimes he got a little money ahead and gave something to our grandmother, but more likely he came by to cadge the price of ale from her—and got sent away with a flea in his ear.”

Cashel cleared his throat. “We weren't ashamed of him,” he went on. “Only he made it clear he didn't want to be around us, and we didn't have any call to be around him.”

Mab didn't speak for a moment. Her face had the stillness of a statue's, a poised but emotionless expression. “Yes,” she said. “I can see that. Though it was his own choice!”

Suddenly fiery, she looked at Cashel. “What did Kenset say about where he'd been?” she said. “Where he'd been, and who your mother was!”

“Nothing, ma'am,” Cashel said. “Not to Grandmama, not to me and my sister. Not to anybody.”

“What's happened to us?” said Herron—not Virdin but Herron, who'd just set Virdin's sword on the rack from which he'd taken it a day or a lifetime before.

He and his friends walked out of the temple uncertainly. “What's—Orly, the queen's back!”

“Yes,” said Mab. “You brought me back. You and your fellows”—she turned her head back toward Cashel—“and Cashel here. Now it's time to return to the Assembly Hall, fellow citizens, and give thanks for the city's survival.”

“But…,” Herron said, his face white. He was limping worse than Virdin had when the Hero wore Herron's flesh, and he leaned sideways to favor the bruises on his chest.

“Manza's dead,” said Enfero, looking back at his friend's corpse, laid out in front of the twin Minon's gaudy armor and equipment. “Manza's
dead.
And Stasslin!”

“Yes,” said Mab, “and many others as well. But Ronn and her people are safe, today and in the future, because of their sacrifice and of yours.”

“It's not worth it!” Orly said. He was clutching his right arm to his chest with his left to keep it from swinging and making the pain of his broken collarbone worse. “I thought it was when we were playing at heroes, but it isn't!”

Mab shrugged. “I don't know whether it's worth it or not,” she said. “It's done, for now and forever.”

She nodded to the bodies on the temple floor. “It's fitting for them to remain in the shrine,” she said. “They earned the right.”

She made a glittering azure gesture with her right hand; the temple doors swung closed with the smooth assurance of a wave climbing the shore.

“If I'd known…” Orly said, his body turning but his face cast down to the pavement of living rock.

“It was worth it for men,” said Cashel. He stepped over to Herron and offered the wounded man his arm. “It was worth it for you and your friends. You proved you were men when you came down here. Your city's lucky to have you in it.”

“Thanks, but I can make it,” said Herron, forcing himself to straighten. He touched Cashel's shoulder but then released it to shuffle along on his own.