The double Cervoran'd made before he went off with Cashel and Protas stumped toward them. Both wizards held athames, but Double's was of old oak instead of a rib bone.
Tenoctris stood with an expression Cashel couldn't read, wary and reserved. She was looking out to sea. On the horizon, glittering brighter than it should've been even in this sunlight, was the Fortress of Glass. As Cashel followed the old wizard's eyes, he saw blue wizardlight flash from the crystal mass.
* * *
Sharina felt herself relaxing for the first time in days, safe within the circuit of Cashel's muscular arms. His presence made her feel as if she stood in a stone-walled castle. It wasn't just protection-though Cashel with his quarterstaff was protection enough-but also a feeling of solidity, of permanence.
Lords Waldron, Attaper and Zettin-the admiral of the fleet-were talking simultaneously to Garric; their aides stood in a ring about the commanders, looking eager but keeping silence in the presence of their superiors. If Lord Tadai hadn't been back in Mona, he and his clerks would be part of the scrum pressing Garric too....
Sharina squeezed Cashel's hand and stepped back from him. Aloud she said, "I felt sorry for my brother when I saw the way he was pestered before. Now that I've been regent myself, I pity him with the benefit of experience."
"I should be inside the Fortress!" said Cervoran, facing Double and glaring with his bulbous eyes. Double glared back, a mirror image on a slightly smaller scale. "Did you drag me here, you fool?"
Cervoran pointed his athame toward Ilna. "Come here, you!" he snarled. "I will teach this puny simulacrum what it means to thwart my plans. I will crush it! I am Cervoran!"
"I am Cervoran!" piped Double, tone and diction identical to those of the wizard who'd made him. "You cannot rule me now. No one can rule me!"
"No, by Duzi!" Garric said, blasting the words out like thunderclaps. "This will wait!"
He pointed to a junior officer, one of Admiral Zettin's aides. "Lord Dalmas, I'll take your sword if I may," he snapped. "If I may" was a polite form but the tone was an order. "Until I can get my own back. This-"
He held out what Sharina first thought was a tent peg, then recognized as a wooden knife of some sort.
"-was well enough when there was nothing better to be had, but I'll feel less naked with the weight of steel on my hip again."
Sharina touched Cashel again. Garric was her brother, but he was no longer the child of a rural innkeeper-and neither was she. Perhaps that was one of the reasons she so needed Cashel's presence: he hadn't changed from the solid, imperturbable youth she'd grown up with.
Dalmas and three other soldiers started to unbuckle their sword belts. Garric gestured curtly to the others, then took the gear-waist belt, shoulder strap, sword, and dagger sheathed on the other side for balance-from the named aide and put it on with remarkable ease. Moments like this reminded Sharina that Carus, the warrior-king, shared her brother's mind.
The commanders had moved back slightly. "A man's at a disadvantage without his clothes on," Cashel murmured to her. "And the clothes this lot cares about is a sword. Garric's really smart."
Sharina glanced at him. Yes, my love, she thought. And in this way and so many ways, so are you. You don't miss the things that go on between any kind of animals, people included.
Cervoran and his Double stood arm's length from one another, no longer speaking verbally but from the look of it communicating in some other way. Their expressions reminded Sharina of dead carp glaring at one another.
In the bustle and excitement of Garric's reappearance, Ilna continued to stand alone. Sharina stepped over to her friend and hugged her. Ilna was never demonstrative, but today Sharina felt as if she were embracing a marble statue. Something was badly wrong....
"Haven't you been able to find Chalcus and Merota yet?" Sharina said.
"I found them," said Ilna. Her voice was clear and precise, as always; and there was anger underneath it for a friend to recognize, again as always: this was Ilna os-Kenset.
But Sharina had never heard anger as cold and consuming as what was in these clipped, simple words.
"I wasn't quick enough," Ilna said. "They were both killed by things that looked like cats the size of men, on their hind legs. I wasn't good enough to save them."
"I-" said Sharina. She fell silent with her mouth still open, backing a step away. She felt as if she'd been drenched in ice water.
"The cat men attacked you?" Garric said, breaking away from the officers to stride over Ilna and Sharina. "The Coerli, they're called. Were you in the Land too, swamps and rain all the time?"
Sharina stared in horror: Garric was a prince, a leader, but this wasn't the time—
Garric's hard expression melted. He put his arms around Ilna and held her. For a moment she remained the same block of frozen anger that Sharina had held; then her arms went around Garric and she clung like a drowning woman to a float. Her face didn't change, except that she closed her eyes for just a moment.
Liane had followed Garric. She held a wax tablet and a writing stylus; a soldier walking behind carried her travelling desk. She looked at Sharina and mouthed the word, "Killed?"
Sharina nodded. She sucked her lower lip between her teeth and bit it hard.
Liane turned and started to walk away. The soldier with the collapsible desk couldn't get out of the way in time; Liane bumped into him. She hurled her writing instruments at the ground, put her hands over her face, and began sobbing. Ilna watched her dry-eyed.
Cashel stiffened. He shifted his hands on his quarterstaff, spreading them as they'd be at the start of a fight.
"Master Cervoran?" he said. His voice trembled. Cervoran and Double remained where they were, locked in a silent staring match.
Garric glanced at Liane but he continued to hold Ilna. His eyes were anguished, but his lips were in a tight line.
"Cervoran!" Cashel shouted. "Look at me or I'll tear your head off!"
Cashel doesn't shout. Cashel doesn't threaten.
Garric put Ilna behind him and turned, facing the wizards but keeping Cashel in the corner of his eye. He flexed his arms. He had a wound all the way through the muscle of his right shoulder, but you'd never guess that by the way his sword arm swung.
Nearby soldiers were bracing themselves. Some of them touched their weapons but took their hands quickly away lest they precipitate what they felt in the air.
Cervoran and Double both looked at Cashel. Their heads turned slowly, as though they were swimming in honey.
"There were cat people where we were," Cashel said. He wasn't shouting now, but it was hard to tell the words because of the way they slurred out through his stiff lips. "Then I saw Ilna and they were gone. Where did you send those cats, Cervoran?"
"This body must live," said Double.
"Nothing else matters," said Cervoran.
"I am Cervoran!" said both wizards together.
"Cervoran died a week ago," said the bird on Garric's shoulder. "The creatures you see before you are one of a pair of wizards from a place and time too distant to imagine. They fell here. This one animated the corpse of Cervoran."
Everyone stared at the bird. Its beak didn't move, but Sharina was as certain as she was of the sun that the words in her mind came from the shining creature.
"Its former partner fell into the sea," continued the bird. "Having taken for itself alone the treasure the two had stolen together-the bodies of my race, all but me."
"Look," said the mirrored wizards together. They pointed toward the sea.
The Fortress of Glass had risen higher from the sea on three crystalline legs. It took a step toward the land with the deliberation of a stalking mantis.
"The Green Woman is coming," said the wizards. "But I will crush her!"
* * *
Garric's shoulder had been throbbing as though a mule'd kicked him there. Now he didn't notice it.
"It's always like that in a fight, lad," said Carus, his eyes focused on something far away in time. "There's time enough to hurt afterwards; or there isn't, and it doesn't matter either way."
"Master Cashel," said the Bird. As usual, every mental syllable seemed to have been cut from hard steel. "Did you think the one called Cervoran took you with him for protection?"
"Yes sir," Cashel said, polite to a stranger-even an inhuman stranger-even now that he was as close to blind rage as Garric had ever seen him. "I was to protect him and Prince Protas, I thought. Wasn't that it?"
"Not in the way you think, Master Cashel," the Bird said. "That one needed a twin present so that he could through his art shift danger from himself to the other twin. To your sister and her companions, that is."
"It was necessary," the wizards said. "Any price you humans pay to preserve me is cheap. Look!"
They pointed again to the Fortress of Glass pacing toward land. Garric knew the water that far offshore was at least a thousand feet deep. The glittering mass was larger than he'd realized, far larger than the cave the Bird and its people had occupied.
"What you see is thin as a soap bubble," the Bird said with its usual dispassion. "But it exists in many universes at once, so nothing in this world alone can harm it."
"Only I can defeat the Green Woman," the wizards said. Their paired voices were slightly apart in timbre, creating a shrill dissonance more unpleasant even than those voices separately. "The two humans who died do not matter. No number of dead humans matter. I-"
Garric drew the borrowed sword, a long horseman's weapon like the one Carus had carried in life and Prince Garric had learned to use under the tutelage of his ancient ancestor. It came out of the scabbard smoothly, despite the blinding jab of pain when the blade came clear and Garric's right arm rose above the shoulder.
Cashel was already moving, the staff out like a battering ram. His left hand led and the whole strength of his massive body was behind the blow. The iron ferrule was within a hand's breadth of Cervoran's swollen, smiling face when it stopped.
Cashel froze as though turned to stone; his shout of effort ended with a smothered grunt. Ruby light dusted the air.
Garric brought his sword around in a whistling arc. His body tingled as it had an instant before lightning blasted a tree nearby when a summer storm had swept the pasture while he watched the flock. The blade stopped above Double's head; he couldn't make the blade move any farther. Garric felt as though he'd been buried in hot sand, the grains individually yielding but together a weight beyond the ability of even his strong young body to force through.
"-will crush the Green Woman!" the wizards said. "I will be God!"
They turned to face the oncoming Fortress, raising their athames. "I alone matter!" they shrilled. "I will be God!"
Ilna watched the Fortress of Glass walking toward them. It was easily the most complex-and therefore lovely-pattern she'd encountered in the waking world, though when she entered her reveries she glimpsed the threads of the cosmos itself. Occasionally Ilna had even followed those threads far enough to imagine the existence of the Weaver through Her work.
Considering herself as a thread in another's pattern, Ilna felt her lips twist in a wry smile. To her surprise, quite a number of things now struck her as amusing. That in itself amused her.
Everyone was talking but almost nobody seemed to be listening. Because Ilna was silent, no one paid attention to her. She was used to that, and indeed it was the state that she preferred.
The wizards who'd been responsible for the deaths of her family had set a fallen brazier upright on its tripod legs and lighted the charcoal with a spark of wizardlight. They were chanting, ignoring the humans about them.
Ilna looked at their dead, puffy features. Only the bodies were dead, of course. The inhuman spark within them used the flesh merely for transportation, no more a part of the real being than a sailor is part of his ship.
A sailor.... Well, Chalcus had never doubted that he'd die someday. Merota would've said the same thing if she'd been asked, though she was probably too young to understand just what that meant. Perhaps not, though: she'd been a clever child, and she'd stood beside Ilna and Chalcus in places where death was a more likely outcome than life for all of them.
As Cervoran chanted with his Double, Ilna remembered the feel of the cold, waxen flesh as she'd dragged the wizard off the pyre which would otherwise have consumed him. What would've happened if she'd let the fire have its way? Certainly that flesh, that form, wouldn't have loosed the Coerli on Ilna and her family; but would that have changed the result? As the thing of crystal marched toward them from the sea, it was easy to imagine a being of fire facing it and the whole island beneath a blackened waste.
The pattern was beyond Ilna's comprehension. What she knew, with a clarity that none of her friends could imagine, was that a pattern existed.
Sharina gripped Cashel's left wrist in both hands and tried to move it. He remained frozen, as motionless as the sun at its peak in the pale sky. Sharina turned, caught Ilna's eye, and cried, "Ilna? Can you do something? Tenoctris says she can't."