David Drake - The Crown of the Isles 02 - The Mirror of Worlds

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cover
THE MIRROR OF WORLDS-ARC
by David Drake
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either
fictitious or are used fictitiously.
The Mirror of Worlds: Copyright 2007 by David Drake
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 attention had been so
focused on the statues that she hadn't heard the whisper of his deerskin-clad feet entering the temple
behind her.
"It's probably the Sister," Ilna said. "The Lady and the Sister, the Queen of Heaven and the Queen of the
Dead."
She looked at the image of the Corl again. "Or perhaps a demon. If there're any of these people left alive,
we can ask them."
"Not a soul," Karpos said. "Asion's looking around more, but we'd've heard something by now besides
the goats if there was anybody."
He didn't sound concerned. The hunters weren't cruel men, but they were hard and even in life the folk
of this community had meant nothing to them.
"Why'd they make the Sister a Corl?" Karpos added, scratching his left eyebrow with the tip of his bow.
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"I never seen that."
"Do I look like a priest?" Ilna snapped. "Anyway, I said it might be a demon."
She knelt, peering at the base supporting the Lady's statue. Her eyes had adapted to the dimness well
enough to see carved on it was an image of the Shepherd, the Lady's consort. He held his staff ready to
repel the hulking, long-armed ogres attacking from both sides. The base beneath the female Corl had a
similar scene, a Corl chieftain with a flaring mane who raised his knob-headed cudgel as winged,
serpent-bodied creatures threatened him.
The base from which the male statue'd fallen was plain. Ilna rose to her feet, frowning. "There's nothing
here," she said. "We'll check the living quarters before we decide what to do next. There's huts on the
other slope."
Someone groaned at Ilna's feet. She jumped back.
"Sister take me, mistress!" Karpos said, pointing his drawn bow at the figure on the floor. "That's not a
statue! It's a man!"
* * *
Garric, once ruler of the Isles, faced the largest city of the Coerli. The catmen called it simply the Place,
because its ten thousand residents made it unique among a race which generally grouped itself into
hunting bands of a dozen or two. When the Change merged eras, it'd wrenched the Place to within
twenty miles of Valles, the capital of the Isles.
"Coerli, send out your champion!" Garric shouted. He was the only human who was fluent in the
catmen's language, though he'd set scores of clerks and army officers to learning the patterns of clicks
and hisses. "Send him to fight me, or send your Council of Elders to surrender!"
"Or we could simply deal with the cat-beasts the way I would've in my time, lad," said the ghost sharing
Garric's mind: King Carus, his ancestor and advisor. "Burn the city down and slaughter any of the
animals who live through the fire. And go on to the next city and do the same."
Tenoctris says we need them, Garric thought. And if she'd said we needed to ally with apes in the trees
on Shengy, I'd be down there in the jungle waving bananas and chittering.
The image of the tall, tanned king in Garric's mind threw back his head and laughed. "Aye, lad," Carus
said. "And you'd be right to, of course. But sooner monkeys than cats who'd eat men if we let them."
If, Garric repeated with emphasis. His smile and the king's both widened grimly.
Ornifal and the other isles of the kingdom were now a chain of highlands surrounding a great continent.
The land hadn't risen in the sense that earthquakes and volcanoes sometimes lifted an island out of the
sea—or sank one to the depths with the cities upon it, leaving their doomed, screaming residents to
thrash in the boiling waves. The Change had welded the Isles of Garric's day in a ring which clamped
together periods in which the Inner Sea was dry land.
A better term would be fragments of periods. Tenoctris, the wizard whose arrival in the surf off Barca's
Hamlet had been the first of the events rushing Garric's quiet world toward catastrophe, said she thought
at least twenty eras had been thrown together, spanning at least that many thousands of years.
Tenoctris insisted she wasn't a powerful wizard, but her care and impeccable judgment had saved the
kingdom repeatedly where someone with greater strength and less wisdom would've added to the
looming disaster. Garric had more confidence in a guess by Tenoctris than he did in tomorrow's sunrise.
There'd been times in the past two years that the sun wouldn't have risen the next day, for Garric or the
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kingdom or for all mankind, if it hadn't been for the old wizard's skill.
Coerli warriors shrieked from the walls of the Place as the gates shuddered outward. The trumpeters and
cornicenes of the royal army brayed a brassy response, and the massed ranks of soldiers shouted and
clashed spears against their shields.
"We could cut right through the beasts," Carus mused regretfully. "Cut and burn and wipe them off the
face of the world. But we'll do as Tenoctris says."
And we'll kill this Corl, Garric thought. So that the rest believe me when I tell them they have no choice
but to obey the laws we humans set them.
Human slaves finished pushing the gate open; they scuttled back within the walls.
The Coerli used men the way men used oxen. Garric's eyes narrowed, but six naked slaves forced to
shove on gate leaves wasn't the worst injustice taking place in the world. Worse things were happening a
thousand times every day in human cities and on human estates.
But the Coerli ate men, just as surely as men ate beef. That would've been sufficient reason to handle the
problem in the fashion Carus wanted, if the catmen had balked at Garric's offer of trial by battle.
The Coerli shrieked louder. A Corl chieftain, the biggest catman Garric had thus far seen, swaggered out
of the city. He paused just beyond the open gate leaves and, raising his maned head, bugled a menacing
challenge of coughs and screams.
"I am Klagan!" the catman cried. Garric could hear the Corl even through the brazen cacophony of the
royal army. "No one can stand against me!"
"Wait and see, beast," said Carus with murderous relish. "You and your Council of Elders don't know
what you're in for!"
Carus'd been the ruler of Old Kingdom when it crashed into anarchy a thousand years before his distant
descendant Garric was born. There'd never been a warrior the equal of Carus. If generalship and a strong
sword arm could've preserved civilization, then the Old Kingdom would still be standing.
Kingship requires more than military might, though. The anger and furious drive that'd made Carus
unstoppable on the battlefield were as much the cause of his kingdom's collapse as the rebels and
usurpers springing up whenever the royal army was at a distance. Eventually a wizard had sucked Carus
and his fleet to their doom in the depths of the Inner Sea; and because the wizard's trust in his power had
been as deceiving as Carus' own, they'd drowned together in the cataclysm.
The wizard's death hadn't saved the kingdom, though. When death loosed the King's hand, chaos, blood,
and burning had followed for all the islands. It'd taken a thousand years for civilization to return—and
now the Change threatened to bring chaos in a different form.
The Elders know what's going to happen, Garric said silently as he stretched, feeling his mail shirt ripple
like water over the suede jerkin cushioning it. I offered them an excuse to permit them to surrender, and
they snapped it up. Otherwise every Corl in the Place will die, and they know that too.
He chuckled aloud, then added, Klagan may not know, of course.
"He will," said Carus. "Very soon he will."
Garric stood ahead of the front ranks of his army by a double pace, the distance from the toe of a
marching soldier's right foot to where that toe came down again—five feet by civilian measurement. The
timber walls of the Place were only a hundred double paces away, suicidally close if they'd have been
defended by humans with bows and catapults.
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Nieuwe%20map/David%20Dra...%20Isles%2002%20-%20The%20Mirror%20of%20Worlds.htm (10 of 247)16-9-2007 0:51:18
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