David Drake - The Crown of the Isles 2 - The Mirror of Worlds

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THE MIRROR OF

WORLDS-ARC

by David Drake

Advance Reader Copy

Unproofed

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either

fictitious or are used fictitiously.

form.

Cover art by Donato

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web:

http://www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

First Edition: July 2007

ISBN 10: 0-7653-1260-3

ISBN 10: 978-0-7653-1260-0

Library of Congress Card t/k

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

To Lucile Carter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

^ »

Dan Breen continues as my first reader, catching the sort of grammatical errors

which creep in when I’m writing fast or heavily editing chunks that just didn’t come

out right the first time. (Or the second time and third time, often enough. My roughs

are often a mass of arrows, brackets, scribblings and overstrikes by the time they get

to Dan.) He’s also very good on size issues. As an aside, he was hugely amused

when he saw that the counterpart in the Isles of Saxo Grammaticus was the Scribe of

Breen.

My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, and Dorothy Day archived my texts in widely

separated parts of the country. If an asteroid destroys the Triangle region of North

Carolina, it will still be possible to reconstruct my drafts. (I won’t be the person

reconstructing them in that event, of course.)

In addition, Dorothy acted as my continuity person (for example, “What the

dickens was the name of the Minister of Supply?”) and Karen provided research on

all manner of questions that cropped up while I was writing (for example, “I need

more information on the Great Tar Lake of Jamaica.” Which, lest anyone be misled,

turned out to be the Great Pitch Lake of Trinidad.) Their efforts made the book

better and my life easier.

It’s traditional that each of my novels involves a computer problem. This time the

power supply of my desktop unit (hooked up to my laser printer) went out as I

started the first-pass edit. Mark L Van Name diagnosed the problem, my son

Jonathan fixed it, and his facility manager Bill Catchings allowed Jonathan to borrow

a power supply from stores to keep me operating until the new unit came in. This

kind of skill and expertise is commercially available (from Mark, Jonathan, and Bill,

among others), but I personally don’t know enough about computers to have found

it on my own.

I dedicated this book to Miss Carter, my first Latin teacher (Junior and Senior

years of high school). I wasn’t particularly interested in languages at the time, and I

certainly didn’t apply myself in her classes. She was nonetheless a good enough

teacher that she instilled a love for Latin which I wasn’t aware of until I switched to

German when I went off to college. I returned to Latin and haven’t been very far

from it since that day.

I can scarcely overstate Latin’s importance to my life generally and to the Isles

series in particular. Without Miss Carter, I might be without the language and all the

benefits it’s brought me.

This past summer has been difficult. My wife Jo has been enormously supportive

throughout.

Every time I create an acknowledgments page I’m reminded of how much my

novels are collaborative projects, even though I’m doing all the writing myself. The

book wouldn’t be nearly as good without my family and friends. Losing a close

friend, as I did this summer, drives home how very important my circle of family and

friends is to my me generally.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

« ^ »

I’ve based the religion of the Isles generally on that of Sumer: the sacred triad of

Inanna, Dumuzi, and Ereshkigal. The words of power, however, are the voces

mysticae of the documentary magic common in the Mediterranean Basin during

classical times. This was the language spoken to the demiurges who would in turn

intercede on behalf of humans with the Gods.

I have no personal religious beliefs, but many very intelligent people believed that

these voces mysticae were effective in rousing spiritual powers to affect human

endeavors. I prefer not to pronounce them aloud. Readers can make their own

decisions on the subject.

As usual in the Isles series, the literary allusions in this novel are to classical and

medieval writers of our own world. I won’t bother to list the correspondences here,

but the reader can rest assured that they exist.

I’ll mention one further point. I almost always have a photograph or a painting

beside me while I work on a scene. That helps me give touches of reality to the

fantasy worlds I’m creating. As one example among many, this time I used a copy

of Les Tres Riches Heures of the Duke de Berry, an illuminated manuscript from

around 1411 ad.

Readers familiar with horses will know that sidesaddles now put the rider’s legs

to the left. If those persons will check August of Les Tres Riches Heures, they’ll see

that two of the three women riding have their legs to the right.

While I do make mistakes, I suggest that this shouldn’t be the first assumption

readers make when they find something that surprises them.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

Chapter 1

« ^ »

Ilna looked down the valley to the gray limestone temple and the slaughtered bodies

around it. There were many corpses, though she didn’t know precisely how many:

when a number was higher than she could count on her fingers, she had to tell it with

beans or pebbles … if she cared.

Mostly she didn’t care. These folk, the humans and the catmen who must’ve

killed them and been killed in turn, were all dead. The dead didn’t matter.

Ilna had loved her family, Chalcus and Merota. They didn’t matter either because

catmen had killed them also.

“It can’t’ve happened long ago,” said Asion, the small, dark man who cropped

his hair and beard with a knife at long intervals. Ilna’d known the hunter for nearly a

month, and she hadn’t seen him trim it in that time. “I don’t smell them in the

breeze.”

“There’s no breeze,” said Karpos, his ginger-haired partner, equally unkempt. He

crushed a pellet of dry soil between the thumb and finger of his right hand, letting the

dust drift to the ground. It fell straight, so far as Ilna could see. “You’re just

pretending you feel one.”

“There’s a breeze,” said Asion crooking his left index finger without taking his

eyes off the valley. “The fuzz on my ears feels the wind even when dust won’t drift.

There’s breeze enough that I’d smell them if they’d started to stink.”

Karpos’ left hand held a short, very stiff wooden bow with an arrow nocked; its

point was bronze, thin but with broad wings that’d require only a few heartbeats to

bleed out the life of whatever he hit fairly. Asion had a sling with a short staff and

linen thongs. For ordinary hunting he shot smooth pebbles, but he carried a few

pointed lead bullets in a pouch; one of those was in the pocket of molded leather

now.

A word was cast into the metal of the bullets. Asion seemed to think it was a

valuable charm, though he wasn’t sure because the hunters couldn’t read any better

than Ilna did.

Ilna didn’t believe in charms of that sort. From what she’d seen since the hunters

joined her, the strength of Asion’s shoulders would be sufficient for most purposes.

Ilna glanced at the strands of yarn in her hands, ready to be woven into a pattern

to freeze the mind or stop the heart of anyone who saw it. She could instead knot the

yarn into a simple oracle to answer the question, “Does an enemy wait for us

below?”

She did something similar every morning to choose the direction for the day’s

travels … but such care wasn’t required now. She trusted the long, fine fur growing

on the top of Asion’s ears, and she trusted her own instinct to tell her if something

ahead wasn’t right, was out of place in a peaceful valley. She didn’t feel that here.

Ilna’d lived in a hamlet on the east coast of Haft until she was eighteen. Two

years ago a wizard named Tenoctris had washed up on shore and everything had

changed. She and her brother Cashel had left home forever, accompanied by their

childhood friends, Garric and Sharina. And now—

Garric was ruler of the Isles; his sister had become Princess Sharina of Haft; and

Cashel had the only thing that’d ever mattered to him, Sharina’s love. He could be

Lord Cashel if he’d wanted, but the title meant no more to him than it would’ve to

Ilna.

Ilna’s lips were as hard as knife edges. At one time she’d have said she didn’t

want anything beyond what her skill at weaving brought her. Then she met Chalcus

and Merota, a man and a child who loved her … until they were killed.

Ilna smiled. Death was the greatest and perhaps the only peace she could imagine.

Until then, she’d kill catmen.

“We’ll go down,” she said, standing and stepping out of the brush without

waiting to see whether the hunters agreed. That was their business; they’d joined her,

rather than Ilna os-Kenset clinging to a chance-met pair of strong, confident men for

protection. The skills Ilna had learned in Hell were far more lethally effective than the

hunters’ weapons and muscles. Though—

Ilna knew that meeting Asion and Karpos wasn’t really chance. Her oracle had

directed her over a ridge and into a valley to the east of the one she’d been following

for the first week after she left the royal army and her friends. Her surviving friends.

The smell of a fire had led her to the hunters, smoking thin-sliced venison on a rack

of green twigs.

Asion and Karpos followed her because they were confused and fearful, while

Ilna had purpose. The Change, the mixing of eras by wizardry, had turned the Isles

into the single great continent which had existed in its far past. The hunters—Ilna

assumed they were from a much earlier time; she and they struggled occasionally

with each other’s dialect, though they understood one another well enough—had

been completely disoriented by what had happened.

Ilna didn’t understand the Change any better than the hunters did, but that was

simply one more thing that didn’t matter to her. She lived to kill the catmen, the

Coerli, because they’d killed the man and the child who’d given her life meaning.

The hunters would’ve been willing to do things they found difficult to be allowed

to accompany Ilna. All she asked them to do was to kill, and at that to kill animals

rather than men. That Asion and Karpos found as natural as breathing.

Karpos went down with Ilna, angling a little out from her left side and letting his

long legs carry him enough ahead that he could be said to be leading. His right

thumb and forefinger rested on his bowstring, ready to draw it back to his ear and

loose in a single motion. Karpos was a raw-boned man with beetling brows. He

looked slow and awkward, but he’d shown that he was neither.

Ilna smiled. The oracle of her cords wouldn’t have led her to Karpos and his

partner if they hadn’t been the sort of men she needed as helpers.

Asion waited on the ridge, watching the back-trail as Ilna and Karpos walked

down the gentle slope. The men had hunted dangerous game together for a decade,

so they were naturally cautious. That was good, though the great scaly herbivores

they’d hunted on Ornifal in their own day weren’t nearly as deadly as the Coerli they

preyed on at Ilna’s direction.

The valley’d been planted in barley or oats—the shoots were too young for Ilna

to be sure; ancient olives budded in gnarled majesty among the furrows. Ilna gave a

tight smile: the trees appeared to be randomly spaced, but they formed a pattern so

subtle that she would’ve said no one but herself or her brother Cashel could see it.

Almost no one, perhaps. Ilna didn’t like pride, in herself least of all, and she

especially disliked learning that she’d arrogantly assumed she was uniquely skilled.

She smiled a little wider: since she disliked herself at most times, having a particular

cause didn’t make a great deal of difference.

A goat bleated on the far side of the valley. There was a sizable herd, cropping

the grass growing among the rocks on that slope. No one had kept goats in the

borough around Barca’s Hamlet where Ilna grew up. Goats were hard on pastures,

though Ilna’d been told they gave better milk than sheep. Sheep’s milk and

brick-hard whey cheese had been good enough for Ilna and her brother when they

were growing up as orphans; good enough when they could afford them, that was.

“They aren’t straying into the crops,” she remarked, her eyes narrowing as she

watched the herd. The goats were aware of her and Karpos, but they didn’t appear

skittish or even much interested. “Though there’s nobody watching them.”

The hunter shrugged. “All dead, I reckon,” he said. “There’s no fires burning and

nothing to hear but the birds. And the goats, I mean. Do we have goat meat tonight,

mistress?”

“I’ll tell you when I decide,” Ilna said curtly. The hunters didn’t appreciate how

well trained the goats must be that they didn’t stray into the crops.

There’d been a time when Ilna took certain things for granted. Oh, not in her

speech the way most people did, but still in the back of her mind: the sun would rise,

the wind would blow, and Chalcus and Merota would go through life with her.

So far the sun continued to rise and the wind to blow, but those might change in

a heartbeat; and if they did, that would matter less to Ilna than the loss of her family

had. Still, for now there were Coerli to kill.

Three bodies lay just ahead, two middle-aged human males and a catman. They’d

been hacked savagely by swords or axes: one man had been disemboweled and the

Corl’s head clung to his shoulders by a scrap of skin—its spine was cut through.

No weapons were in evidence, but the catman’s muzzle was bloody.

“We don’t have to worry about what’s behind us, now,” Karpos said. “Hold up

before we check on what might be waiting inside, right?”

Without taking his eyes off the temple and sprawled bodies, the hunter raised his

right arm and waved to his partner. Before returning his fingertips to the nocked

arrow, Karpos wiggled his long dagger in its sheath to make sure it was free.

Ilna didn’t think they needed to wait for Asion, but she didn’t argue the point. If

it’d mattered, she’d have done as she pleased—and seen to it that the hunters did as

she pleased also. She didn’t need to prove her power; that was for weak people.

She considered for a moment, then put the hank of yarn back in the sleeve of her

outer tunic. She’d woven the cloth herself, and she’d also woven her cloak of

unbleached wool that shed water like a slate roof.

Karpos and his partner wore breeches and vests of untanned deerskin with the

flesh side turned out. The packs that they’d left back on the ridgeline included fur

robes for cold weather, though the season had advanced so that they were no longer

necessary even at night.

Ilna suspected the men continued to carry the robes because the town to which

they’d previously hiked every Spring to sell packloads of lizard gall didn’t exist in

the world after the Change. They were unwilling to give up the few aspects of their

past life which still remained.

The hunters had decorated their vests by sewing on the scalps of Coerli they’d

killed since joining Ilna, a double-handful each. Ilna didn’t object, but of course she

didn’t take trophies herself.

All that mattered to Ilna was the killing. When she’d killed all the catmen in this

world, she didn’t know what she’d do. Die, she hoped, because her life would no

longer have purpose.

Asion joined them, holding the staff of his sling in his right hand and cupping the

pocket and bullet in his left. “Have you guys noticed the pond?” he said with a

frown in his voice. “Why did they do that, d’ye think? Throw the plants in?”

The little temple was set up three steps from the ground. Forsythias grew around

both it and the small, round pool in front of the building. Several bushes had been

pulled up by the roots and thrown into the water. The men who’d done that had

mortal wounds, clearly. One of them lay on the curb with a yellow-flowered branch

clutched in a death grip.

“What do they have a pond there anyway?” said Karpos. “Are they raising fish?

It’s too small.”

“I don’t know,” Ilna said. She didn’t add to the statement, because there was

nothing to add and she saw no point in wasting her breath. “Let’s go on, then.”

The pool surprised her as well, though she didn’t bother saying so. Ilna hadn’t

seen a temple till she left Barca’s Hamlet some two years—or a lifetime—before, but

there’d been plenty of them in the cities she’d passed through since then. Ilna didn’t

pay particular attention to buildings, but she had an eye for patterns. She’d certainly

have made note of a temple facing a pool if she’d seen one. This was the first.

Karpos knelt and placed his right index and middle fingers to the throat of the

first corpse, a man lying on his back. The fellow’s hair was white, as much of it as

was left; his forehead rose to the peak of his scalp. His face was as calm as if he’d

been praying, though the wounds that’d killed him—three deep stabs in the lower

body and a slash that’d broken the bone of his upper right arm—must’ve been

extremely painful.

“Dead since daybreak,” Karpos said, rising and touching the bowstring again.

“Maybe a little longer, but not much.”

Ilna looked into the pool, her face frozen into a deliberate lack of expression in

place of her usual guarded silence. The water was clear and so shallow that she

could see the narrow crevices between the stone blocks paving the bottom.

Forsythia stems cast jagged shadow, and there were smears where mud’d washed

from the roots of the plants.

“He was a tough bastard, I give him that,” Asion said, his voice oddly gentle. He

nodded to the corpse on the coping of the pool. “He had to crawl most a’ the way.

Look at the trail.”

“Yes,” said Ilna. “I noticed.”

All the corpses were at least middle-aged; this fellow was older yet. To look at,

he seemed soft if not precisely fat; the sort of man who did no more work than he

had to and was readier to lift a tankard than a hoe.

Perhaps that had been true. The man’s last living act, however, had been to pull a

full-sized bush out of the ground and drag it ten double-paces to the pool while his

intestines spilled out in coils behind him. He’d been laid open as if by a cleaver, but

he hadn’t quit until he was dead.

“Mistress?” Karpos said. He sounded puzzled and therefore worried; people who

accept great danger as a fact of life become concerned when faced with things they

don’t understand; they knew all too well what might be hiding within the unknown.

“The cat didn’t kill this fellow. It was a blade did this.”

“The Coerli had weapons,” Ilna said harshly. She turned from the body and the

pool. “The survivors took them away. There’s nothing amazing about that!”

“Then who was this cat chewing on?” the hunter said, pointing to the dead Corl.

“Look at his muzzle, the blood and—”

He saw Ilna’s face and swallowed. “Sorry, mistress,” he mumbled in a small

voice. “I guess it was the cats.”

“Mistress, who’s this fellow?” said Asion from the steps up the front of the

temple. Most of the bodies were there in a ragged pile. “What is he, I mean?”

Asion had stuck his sling beneath his belt to get it out of the way, drawing instead

his long steel knife; that was a better weapon for a close-in tangle with anything that

pounced on him from the temple. With his free hand he dragged a corpse out by the

ankle.

The corpse of a man, Ilna assumed; but its chest was abnormally deep, its belly

smaller and flatter than a corseted woman’s, and its skin had the smooth black gleam

of polished coal. Its genitals were very small.

The corpse was nude except for the round metal shield hanging from a neck

strap; its right hand death-gripped the hilt of a sword that looked serviceable for

either slashing or stabbing. It could easily have been the weapon which’d killed both

the white-robed humans and the Coerli … and the fellow’s throat had been worried

through by what were almost certainly a catman’s long jaws.

“There’s more blacks under here,” Asion said. “Three or four, I’d guess.”

“I don’t know who they are,” Ilna said coldly. She was angry at the hunter for

asking a question that she couldn’t answer, and even more angry with herself for not

having said so at once instead of forcing her companions to wait.

She walked toward the temple entrance, skirting the corpses. “And it appears that

the weapons were in the hands of the blacks, whoever they are,” she added, though

by this point she did so merely as a public admission of her mistake; the hunters

already knew she’d been wrong. “Not the Coerli.”

Ilna disliked stone. The rational part of her mind knew she was being silly to think

that stone disliked her as well; but not all of her mind was rational and she did think

that, feel it deep in her bones. She walked up the leveling courses and onto the

porch, smiling at the cool gray slabs beneath her feet.

I’m walking on you, she thought. And I’m fool enough to think you know that.

Despite being stone, it was a very attractive building. The porch extended on all

four sides, supported on fluted columns. The temple proper had solid sidewalls but

only two more columns at the front. Ilna walked between them and into the main

room. There were hints of intricate carvings just under the roof, but the only light

came through the entrance behind her.

At the far end were two statues on square stone bases: an inhumanly serene

woman and a female Corl. The round base between them was empty; the statue, a

nude man, had fallen forward onto the floor.

“Hey, why’re they praying to a catman?” said Karpos. His voice startled her; her

David Drake - The Crown of the Isles 2 - The Mirror of Worlds

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