"-darkness, whatever, it is-is it a wizard, then? Did it make this place?"
"It?" the chimaera said. "Oh, certainly not. The One created the Garden and placed us in it. The other that you refer is a resident like the rest of us Princes. Like yourselves, that is."
"Not, I think," said Chalcus, "like ourselves; but we'll let that pass. Is there a way out of this garden, friend cat?"
"Out?" the chimaera repeated in a puzzled tone. "Why, no. The One sealed the Garden for his perfect pleasure, or so they say. Anyway, why would you want to leave it? The weather is perfect and there's plenty of Prey. It's a paradise."
"Chalcus?" Merota said primly, her hands folded before her. "Ilna? I don't like the way he talks."
Then the child cried, "They aren't Prey, they're people! Real little people!"
"Yes," said Ilna. "I think they are too. Master Chimaera, you said you were leaving when I called you back. I won't trouble you further."
"Well, you know that I have just as much right to-" the creature said.
Chalcus stepped in front of Ilna, his blades out. Her fingers were knotting yarn, visualizing the shimmer of the wing in her mind's eye and shifting the sequence of her fabric in ways that only she could understand. Even her understanding was at the muscle level, not in her conscious mind.
"All right!" cried the chimaera. Its hind legs hunched as it turned, then launched itself into the air. Its gossamer vans spread and stroked, driving a gust backward. The great creature vanished over the tops of the hedges.
"This garden isn't so bad a place," said Chalcus judiciously. "But barring present company, I don't much care for the neighbors I'm sharing it with. I'll be glad when you find us a way out, dear heart."
"Yes," said Ilna. "So will I."
Her nostrils flared as she breathed out. "So will I!" she repeated.
* * *
Cashel held Protas and his quarterstaff firmly as the void coalesced into a world beneath their feet again. He looked around quickly. Midges rose in a cloud from black water. They'd come from an upland forest to a swamp.
Cashel sniffed: a tidal swamp. The air had a salty sharpness in addition to the usual smell of decay.
The air was also full of the midges. He'd breathed in a flock of them, and he'd doubtless breathe more before he was gone from this place. They tickled the back of his throat but at least they didn't seem to be the biting kind.
"There isn't anywhere we can go, Cashel," Protas said, taking his hand down from the topaz crown. "It's all mud and water. Do you think a boat will come for us?"
A boat couldn't through this, Cashel thought. Cattails grew all about, but he could see the roots spreading over the surface of the mud. There's not a hand's breadth of water in any direction from us.
Aloud he said, "We may have to get muddy, Protas. You'd best take your slippers off now, because-"
A figure came through the cattails toward them. Rose up from the cattails, it seemed to Cashel, though the fellow was hunched and maybe could've walked this close unnoticed. Not really-but Cashel could tell himself it might've happened.
"You're the ones with the gem," the fellow said. He raised a lens of rock crystal in a gold frame and through it studied first Cashel, then Protas and the topaz. "I'm to guide you to the next stage. Yes, I am...."
He was a little fellow with no hat and a head that'd been shaved bald except for a thin circle of fine brown hair just above his ears. He carried a heavy book in his left hand; it had a medallion on the spine and iron clasps to lock the covers closed. His jaw was long, too long for a man's, and the nostrils in his little flat nose were perfectly round.
Cashel cleared his throat. "Ah," he said, "we're pleased to meet you. I'm Cashel and that's Prince Protas."
"Yes," said their guide. He wore a fine red robe with sleeves, though the hem was muddy as any garment must get in this place. Over it was a cape of gray satin covered with sequins. "Protas. And the gem."
His eye, swollen through the crystal lens, focused again on the boy. "So, Prince," he said softly, drawing out the ess sounds in a way Cashel didn't like. "You have the gem; do you know how to use it?"
"I'm not here to use it, sir," Protas said. He spoke calmly but he stood very straight at Cashel's side. "Master Cashel and I are carrying the amulet to where we're going, and I don't believe we've yet reached that place."
"Believe what you want, boy!" their guide said with a nervous titter. "Things are or they aren't regardless of what you believe; and sometimes they are and they aren't.'
"Time to be going, I'd judge," Cashel said. He didn't say how he judged that: it was by deciding that every heartbeat of time he spent in this place was one longer than he'd have been here if he'd had his choice. The sky was blue and clear, but thick fog had wrapped his mind ever since he and Protas arrived.
"Do you think you can give me orders because you're a big man?" their rat-faced guide said, slipping into anger with the suddenness of an icicle cracking off the slates in winter.
"You're here to guide us," said Cashel, adjusting his hands slightly. "If you're not willing to do your job, then just say so and point us the direction we're to go. But you're not much of a man if you do that."
"Not a man?" said their guide. He gave out a screeching sound. Cashel recognized it as laughter, but not until his hands had tightened on the staff. "Not a man, do you think? Well, perhaps so, but I'll guide you nonetheless."
He walked past them, splashing in the muddy water. From behind Cashel saw that the fellow's back had been cut open, likely with an axe. The ends of the ribs stuck out the gash. Inside, the organs pulsed in a general red mess, but a loop of sliced intestine oozed black liquid in a smear down the lower part of the cloak.
Protas walked straight off after their guide. His eyes were glazed in the short glimpse Cashel got of the boy's face, but he didn't hesitate. Two steps into the swamp, he'd lost both of his fine slippers with the toes curled up in tassels.
Cashel reached down and retrieved them even before Protas realized the mud had pulled them off. He sloshed them through a tongue of deeper water that reached up toward the ankle-deep path they were following, then handed them back to the boy.
"Oh!" said Protas when he realized what Cashel was reaching over his shoulder to give him. He took the slippers and said in embarrassment, "I'm sorry, Cashel. I forgot what you said."
"Keep them for later," Cashel said. "I don't think they'd do much good in this mud anyway."
"Cashel?" said the boy without turning around again. "Did we die? Is this the Underworld where we're being punished for our sins?"
"I don't think so, Protas," Cashel said. "But I'll be glad to be another place too."
"So you say!" said their guide, turning his narrow rat face to look back over his shoulder at them. "So you say, as though you knew already where you were going."
He laughed, not in a nice way. "But maybe you're right at that," he added. "No matter what place it is you're going to!"
The cattails to the left of the path shuddered. Cashel eyed them as he strode past. Something smooth and rounded rose through the black water. A bubble, he thought; the mud belching out decay.
It continued to rise, gray and gleaming above the surface: a huge fish, its head alone the size of a brood sow. The bulging eyes stared at Cashel with a malevolence that he thought was more than his imagination. He shifted his staff slightly as he passed, but the fish remained where it was: half out of the mere, but only half.
"Follow me and you won't be harmed," the guide said. "Unless I've made a mistake, of course."
It sounded to Cashel like the fellow was taunting them instead of being reassuring. This wasn't a place for a decent man to be. Whatever their guide had started as, living here for a long time would make the best man peevish.
"Carry out your duties, Master Guide," said Protas in the haughty tone Cashel'd heard from him before when he was afraid. "We understood there'd be risk in our undertakings."
The cattails were behind them. Nearabout in all directions were sloughs of dark water and mudflats mottled with slimy green algae. The only other plants were ferns whose fronds curled to knee height like feathers. Many of them were a deep maroon. On the horizon were mountains, but in this steam-hazed air Cashel couldn't guess how far away they were.
He looked behind. On bare ground their footprints were filling with water and smudging away even as he watched. When they'd stepped in the black water, they'd swirled the mud beneath, but that was settling as quickly.
Eyes watched them. Sometimes Cashel could see the head and back of the fish also, sometimes not.
He turned and cleared his throat. "Protas?" he said. "I have some bread and cheese in my wallet, and there's a bottle of ale besides. Would you like something to eat?"
This wasn't a good place for it, but none of the places they'd been were any better. They'd been a long time since standing in the room with Cervoran, and Cashel didn't know when the boy'd last eaten anyway.
"I'm not hungry, Cashel," Protas said carefully. "But, ah, thank you."
He's scared to death but too much a man to say so, Cashel thought, smiling inside. Aloud he said, "Well, maybe later then, after we've gotten where we're going."
Then because it was his nature, he added, "Ah, Master Guide? Would you care for something yourself? It's coarse fare, but it keeps me going on the road, I've found."
"Eat your food?" the fellow said, turning his long face with a sneer. "No, not that. But perhaps you'd like to share my meals? Shall I offer you that? That would be in keeping with my obligation as your fellow man, wouldn't it? Shall I offer you food?"
"Carry out your duties, sirrah!" Protas said sharply. "We want no more of you than that!"
There was a deep rumble through the ground, then in the air as well. The surface of the water ahead of them puckered. Their guide stopped, his face frozen into a half-snarl.
"Come along!" he said, splashing onward at a quicker pace than before. His feet left narrower tracks than those of Protas following behind him, though the mud was so soft that Cashel couldn't be sure of the details.
"What's that sound?" said Protas. "Is it thunder?"
A second shock trembled across the landscape ahead of them. This time the ground lifted ankle high, whipping the ferns violently. A line of shattered white foam burst over the water.
"Come along!" the guide shrieked, raising the hem of his tunic in order to run. The book in his left hand rocked and wobbled, but it didn't fall into the muck as Cashel thought it might.
Cashel started running also. He didn't like it and he wasn't any good at it either, but for a lot of reasons he didn't want to fall too far behind the others. Fortunately the guide setting the pace was even less of a runner than Cashel.
Over these flats Cashel could follow the wave as it lifted on the horizon and spread toward them at the speed of a galloping horse. He judged his time, then jumped to have both feet in the air when the ground rose beneath him.
The ground settled with a gelatinous quiver as the wave passed on. Cashel landed and sank in deep. Protas had tangled his feet and gone down, while the guide had fallen forward with a despairing shriek. His cloak and tunic had flown up; he smoothed the garments back over his tail with his right hand before rising and turning to glare at the humans he was guiding.
Cashel helped Protas to his feet. The boy's face had gone into the mud, but he'd clutched the crown to his temples with both hands.
"It's not done," said Protas in a small voice. He pointed with his right hand.
Cashel looked ahead. The third wave spreading toward them across the flats was taller than he was.
With the staff vertical in his right hand, Cashel wrapped both arms around Protas and lifted him. He kept his own legs slightly flexed. He thought of telling Protas to keep hold of the crown, but the boy'd been doing that fine the whole while he'd been carrying it. Telling him to be careful would be slighting him, and Protas didn't deserve that.
The wave threw Cashel in the air with a roar as deep and loud as a building falling. If his balance hadn't been perfect the shock would've spun him head over heels like a pinwheel. Cashel had jumped across streams from one wet rock to the next while carrying a ewe on his shoulders; he didn't tumble this time either, just rode the wave up and came down again as smoothly as if he'd stepped from a bank onto soft ground.
Very soft ground. The shock'd shaken the mud to nearly a liquid, like well-sifted flour only more so. Again Cashel sank in, this time almost to his knees.
He set Protas down, then pulled his legs out-the right and then the left. He looked around first to see if there was a rock or a log or something he could butt the quarterstaff against to push on; but there wasn't, not anywhere in this world that he'd seen so far.
The thunder of the wave rolled off in its wake. Ahead, the direction it'd come from, there was a wasteland even more barren than it'd been when Cashel first saw it. The smears of algae were now mixed unrecognizably with the mud they'd covered, and the shallow roots of the ferns had been ripped up as the plants were flung in windrows like seaweed at the tide line.