* * *
The great bird stroked out of gray limbo. Sharina's nose wrinkled at the stench of sulphur. She sneezed, bruising her ribs against the inexorable grip of the talons. They sailed over a darkness lit by volcanoes on the horizon and lines of bright lava seeping across the plain below where armies battled.
Swordsmen wearing horned helmets and carrying iron shields fought giants with writhing snake-like legs and four arms, each bearing a club. Club-strokes rang on shields like a raucous knell.
Occasionally a monster went down, shrieking and squalling. Men stood about the victim, hacking with the fury of automatons. Sometimes their swords fouled one another, throwing red sparks into the night.
Men fell too, their brains dashed out or their torsos crushed when a club battered through their defenses. They made no sound either in triumph or agony.
The lava continued to spread, forcing the combatants inward from the cracks that fractured the plain. When molten rock lapped over the fallen, hair burned sullenly and the flesh popped and sizzled. In a few days all the plain from horizon to horizon would be a sea of bright lava, but those fighting seemed to have no thought for the future.
Sharina closed her eyes. She felt the wings of the great bird rise and stroke downward with the majesty of a celestial event. This time the transition from reality to a place beyond reality was a blessing. She closed her eyes until dry air bathed her skin.
The terrain over which the bird flew was arid and stony. There was no sign of the sea in any direction, but Sharina saw the glitter of ice cliffs across the whole northern horizon.
Winds and freshets had carved the landscape into knobs. On the flanks of the buttes, bands of yellow, magenta and even purple soil set off the brown and dun Sharina found more familiar.
Though dry, this world was no desert. The north slope of each hillock was terraced with the retaining walls raised high enough to protect the narrow fields from wind. Any rain that fell would seep down three levels or four, watering a separate crop at each terrace. That and the dew squeezed from the air each morning was enough to support barley and several types of bean.
There were no houses or other buildings. A nude woman carrying a woven satchel turned when the bird's great shadow fell across her. She gave a piercing call, somewhere between a whistle and a trumpet blast, and hurled herself head-first into the hole beside her.
Warning cries echoed from every hilltop across the barrens. The human forms—they
were
human, beyond question—blended so well with the landscape that Sharina hadn't seen them as figures, only as motion as they vanished into the ground.
The bird's wings lifted, unconcerned with the panic it had sown on the world beneath. It cared as little for its route through the cosmos as a sandal does for the stones over which it treads. A gray that was neither light nor lightless replaced the badlands and their scurrying human dwellers.
How far could the bird carry her? Would she starve in limbo interspersed with scenes from worlds not her own?
Sharina started to laugh. She knew as much about her own future as anyone else did about theirs: nothing at all. She'd go on, doing her best and knowing that her friends were doing the same. If the Gods were with them, that would be enough; and if not, well, nobody would say that they hadn't tried.
* * *
The room which Lord Tadai had taken for his office in the palace had been intended as the bedroom of a richly-appointed suite. From it a pillared loggia looked out over a pond which, now that gardeners had thinned the mimosa and removed the choking weeds, was quite lovely by daylight.
The pond still made its presence known in darkness by the croaks and piping of frogs in and around it. Garric smiled faintly. To him that was at least as good as a glimpse of pink flowers lifting in the sun above the lotus pads. There hadn't been lotuses back home, but there had been frogs.
Being king, well, prince, meant Garric had to do a lot of things that he didn't like; but it also meant he didn't have to live in multi-story buildings standing side by side the way most people in Valles did. It wasn't exactly compensation: Garric wouldn't have been here at all if he hadn't been told the Isles needed him—
"And I'll tell you again if you don't choose to believe what you've seen yourself!"
interjected Carus in a tart whisper.
"I believe it," Garric said, smiling faintly. And he did. What he
didn't
really believe was that Garric or-Reise was the person whose life he seemed to have been living since he left Barca's Hamlet.
"What's that, your majesty?" said Tadai, who'd risen from a desk lighted by multi-branched oil lamps when his pair of guards ushered Garric into the office.
"I was thinking that having trees and frogs around me keeps me sane," Garric said, letting his smile widen slightly and feeling the king within him do the same. "More or less sane, I suppose."
"I'm a city man myself," Lord Tadai said. He was as slick and soft to look at as if molded of butter. Even now, well past midnight on a day he'd been working since dawn, Tadai was perfectly attired in a blue silk robe and gilt sandals whose straps were picked out in enamel that matched the cloth. "I've thought of ordering wagons to drive around the building while I'm working here, but I suppose that won't be necessary."
He looked at the two aides present: one young and of noble birth, the other much older and probably not. "Aradoc and Murein, you can go home now. Tell the guards to turn away any further visitors."
Smiling with a bitterness Garric had never seen on his face before, Tadai added, "Any visitors for me, that is."
The younger aide stared at Garric transfixed. Garric was pretty sure he'd seen the fellow before, waiting against the wall behind Tadai during meetings of the council, though he couldn't have put a name to the face with better than an even chance of being correct.
The older man jerked the youth's elbow, keeping his own eyes averted. They scurried together out the door by which Garric had entered. The guards closed the panel—from the outside.
"I was expecting you, of course," Tadai said, standing as straight as a rabbit lured by a lamp. He looked a little silly; and in this as in many things about Lord Tadai, looks were deceiving. "You or a detachment of Blood Eagles."
Tadai's chairs were of ivory cut in sweeping curves and fretted into traceries that looked as delicate as spiderweb. Spiderwebs trapped remarkably large prey on occasion, and Garric knew his about-to-be-former treasurer didn't let his love of artistry completely stifle his pragmatic core.
Garric lifted a chair from against the wall, set it in the center of the room facing Tadai, and sat down... carefully. He pointed to the silver urn resting in a ceramic bowl filled with damp moss or, just possibly, moss over a bed of ice preserved at great expense from last winter. "I'd take a glass of wine, if it were offered," he said, crossing his ankle over his knee.
Tadai gave an embarrassed cough. "It's sherbet, actually," he said as he turned and dipped one, then two, of the tiny matching silver goblets into the urn. "If I drank wine while I was working, I'd have much shorter days. The parts I'd remember, at any rate."
Garric took the goblet and sipped while Tadai turned around the chair at his desk and reseated himself. The sherbet was tart and cool, an unfamiliar flavor but one Garric could come to like. He didn't think he'd ever get used to tasting metal while he was drinking, though, no matter how skilfully the artist had etched a scene from the life of the wine-god Fis on the silver.
"And you didn't really imagine I was fool enough to send troops instead of coming myself," Garric said as he lowered the goblet. "Besides, you'd have had more than two guards here if you thought that might happen."
Tadai sneered. "Would more guards have made any difference?" he said.
"If you'd misread the situation that badly," Garric said, letting an edge of anger show in his voice for the first time, "you'd have been stupid enough to think your men could fight the Blood Eagles, yes! Now, let's act like two of the men on whom the safety of the Isles depends, shall we?"
Tadai stiffened. He gave Garric a tiny nod. "I apologize, your majesty," he said quietly. "I've been under a good deal of strain recently."
"I prefer 'Garric,'" Garric said, mildly again. He met Lord Tadai's eyes over the edge of the cup he was lifting. "When I stop feeling that way, it'll be time for me to muck out stables for a while to remind myself of who I am."
Tadai laughed. "No one else in this room is in doubt as to who you are, Garric," he said. "Though I have no doubt that you're quite capable of cleaning stables as well. You have the advantage of me on both ends of the range of endeavor."
"I want you go to Earl Wildulf," Garric said, "and bring Sandrakkan back into the kingdom on the terms you think best. We can break him, but I would prefer any other reasonable choice. I will be bound by your decision."
Garric set the cup down beside his chair. It was a tiny little thing, emptied in two sips. He gestured. "I'll give you documents saying that to show the earl, with seals and ribbons all over them. But I'm giving you my word, now."
"Ah," said Tadai, without inflection. His own goblet remained poised in his hand, midway to his lips.
"I planned for my sister to go to Blaise on a similar mission," Garric continued. "A bird took her away tonight, a bird or a monster. I'd welcome your recommendation of a replacement to send as envoy to Count Lerdoc."
He was using what happened to Sharina—
whatever
had happened to Sharina, capture or death or just possibly worse—as a tool to get Tadai's sympathy. The part of Garric that had been raised in Barca's Hamlet hated the words his tongue was speaking; but the king within him, and the king Garric had to be if the Isles were to survive, knew that kings did many worse things out of duty.
"The lady Sharina?" Tadai said. A series of emotions crossed his face, disbelief followed by anger at being duped—and then as quickly, real affection and concern. "A monster has taken Lady Sharina?"
Everybody liked Sharina. She was polite, beautiful, and smart. And perhaps most important, Sharina never had to give orders that other people didn't want to hear.
"Yes, and that's something I'll have to deal with later," Garric said; not angrily, but with a crispness that had a lot to do with the number of things he was going to have to deal with, and Duzi help him if he knew how. "But it's not why I'm here, Lord Tadai."
"Yes, I see," Tadai said musingly. "Waldron has a younger brother, a half-brother, actually: Warroc bor-Warriman. He's at least as intelligent as Waldron, and he's far more clever in political terms. Rather too clever, in fact. He'd make an excellent envoy."
Garric frowned. "You wouldn't be concerned that he might think making common cause with Count Lerdoc would be a better bargain for him?" he said.
"If anything," Tadai said, "Warroc is more of a chauvinist than his brother is. Hard though you may find that to believe. He wouldn't do anything that would hurt his standing with the only people he really regards as people—the great landholders of Northern Ornifal. Becoming Count of Blaise himself wouldn't repay him for that."
Tadai rose and dipped a fresh goblet in the urn. "On the other hand, my friend Garric,
you
should watch your back if Warroc returns a hero for the arrangement he's managed with Blaise."
He held the goblet to Garric, adding, "Though clever as Warroc is, I rather doubt he'll make a better job of it than I will in Erdin. I know things about the Earl of Sandrakkan's finances that he probably doesn't know himself. And he really needs to, for reasons that I'll make quite clear to him in our private discussions."
And to think he'd been secretly afraid Tadai would turn down the offer! Garric gave a bellow of laughter of a sort that probably wasn't often heard in chambers as delicately appointed as these. Well, maybe it should be!
"Lord Tadai," he said, "you'll know better than I do what the requirements for your mission will be. Give me a list and I'll see to it that it's filled."
Garric took the sherbet from Tadai's steady hand and tossed it down. He was acting more unconsciously than not, but the astringence and tiny portion shocked him into awareness of what he'd just done.
"I'll bid you good night, then," he said. "I have—"
He and King Carus laughed together. "Right, we all have a great deal to do. The kingdom is fortunate to have a minister as resourceful and intelligent as you, Tadai."
"And fortunate to have a prince of your quality, Garric," Tadai said, taking the empty goblets and setting them on the table for a servant to clear when the room was empty. "Quali
ties
, rather; remarkable ones in a man of any age, I should have said, let alone someone of your youth."
As Garric turned with a smile toward the door, Tadai added to his back, "And you've certainly managed to make my life more interesting than if you'd never appeared in Valles!"
* * *
The bird's wings stroked. A frozen plain shivered into reality with the speed of a tropic dawn. The sun far to the south was bright but tiny, and the wind cut Sharina marrow-deep.
The bird glided parallel to the face of a glacier stretching from horizon to horizon. Dirt and boulders lay on the white surface of the broad ice-river, but through cracks in its face Sharina could see crystal as pure and blue as the finest sapphire.
The ice was receding, if slowly. A coarse scree covered the plain south of ice face, the debris of past millennia released when the glacier carrying it dissolved. Tunnels at the base of the ice oozed meltwater. It meandered in braided streams through the rocks and gravel that finally vanished in the emptiness.
Occasionally the sun glinted on metal—a gilded helmet, the silver boar's-head boss of a round shield; an ivory swordhilt wound with electrum wire. Verdigris had concealed the blade in the blue-gray shadows stone until Sharina's eyes caught the rich mountings and traced the weapon's full lines.
There was clothing, too; brocades and fabrics embroidered with gold and silver. Metal cups sewn to the fabrics held jewels. Light winking from them woke counterfeits of life in the bleak expanse. Wind-driven grit had shredded furs and woven goods.
Occasionally Sharina caught a glimpse of wood: a broken spearshaft, an axe helve sticking vertically from the gravel where the head moldered. Nowhere did she see a body or even a scrap of bone.
The bird continued its swift progress, the huge left wing tilted minisculy higher to catch the updraft from the escarpment of ice. Sunlight shining through the lifted van showed unexpected mottling in scales on the skin stretched between elongated fingerbones.
This was the longest the bird had remained in a single reality since it snatched Sharina from among her friends. Did it nest here in this lifeless—
There was life after all. A shape hunched out of a tunnel and stood, staring at the bird with faceted eyes. Despite the foreshortening from Sharina's vantage point, she could see that it was big: eight feet tall, perhaps ten. The creature had an exoskeleton like an insect and six limbs, but it was standing upright on the back pair.
The other four limbs held human bodies, long-dead soldiers it had dug from the ice. They wore rich accouterments, and the hands of one were frozen to a cross-staff holding a a silver boar's head on a red field.
When the creature saw the great bird, it dropped the corpses and spread its four upper limbs. The hands had crab pincers, toothed to mesh like a crocodile's jaws. Its mandibles swung sideways and gave a rasping cry.
Similar creatures shambled from nearby tunnels. They projected a mindless malevolence, a desire to feed at any cost.
The bird's wings stroked again and the scene dissolved. In the empty grayness Sharina continued to think of the frozen world she had just escaped.
It had been like watching worms writhe in hog manure....