He was going to get his hands on Leemay. Then she’d undo whatever it was that she’d done to Tilphosa, or…
The crowd milled between him and the innkeeper. More people were coming through the door every moment, but Cashel didn’t care about that. The men in front of him struggled, but they could as well have wrestled with an ox as try to stop Cashel in his present rage. He plowed forward, his shoulders hunched.
Leemay backed a step and another step. She was against the wall, now, still holding up the lamp, her flat face passionless.
Somebody threw a net smelling of river mud onto Cashel. Men shouted, twisting it over his torso. It was only a fishnet, but the openwork fabric of tough cords flexed when he pulled at it. It gave against him, never releasing and never allowing his strength a way to break it.
Cashel forced himself another pace onward. An overturned table tripped him; wrapped in the net, he couldn’t throw an arm out to keep his balance. He fell, smashing a stool under him.
“I’ve got a net!” a man cried. “Let me—”
Cashel kicked violently, trying to twist up onto his knees. Several locals shoved him down, and a second net fell over his legs. Willing hands wrapped it tight, trussing Cashel like a hen for market.
Leemay stared down at him. “Don’t hurt him,” she said, not that anybody seemed disposed to do so. They were just decent citizens, restraining a stranger who’d gone berserk. “He’s upset! He’ll come to his senses later.”
“You killed her!” Cashel shouted.
He squirmed across the puncheon floor, still trying to reach the innkeeper. Cashel wasn’t sure he’d even be able to bite her ankles through the fishnet, but at least he was going to try.
Men grabbed the casting ropes and hauled back. The net was made to hold heavy, fiercely struggling prey; it worked as well on land as it would’ve done with a catch of eels.
“Tie him to the pillar,” Leemay said calmly, nodding toward the roughly shaped tree trunk which supported the main roof beam. “Let him sleep off the madness.”
Experienced hands slid Cashel across the floor, then lifted his torso upright against the pillar. He twisted, but they were fishermen and used to muscling a writhing netful.
“There you go, lad,” one of them said. “Just calm down, and we’ll let you loose.”
The front door’s other panel opened deliberately. The crowd quieted from the back forward as everyone turned to look at the doorway.
Everyone but Leemay. She glanced at the door momentarily, then looked across the room to Tilphosa’s still form. She smiled faintly and became expressionless again.
A hooded figure, skeletally thin despite its billowing robes, entered the common room. It had to bend to clear the doorway, but the ceiling between the beams was high enough for it to straighten again.
“Where is the departed?” said a voice. It had to come from under the hood, but it had no more direction than it had life or humanity. It sounded like the wind wheezing through rotten thatch.
“Here,” said the man who’d sat in the chimney corner when Cashel and Tilphosa arrived. He gestured toward the bar top.
“You can carry her on one of my tables,” Leemay said. “She may have had something contagious, so we need to be quick about taking care of her.”
“Tilphosa wasn’t sick!” Cashel shouted. “You killed her, woman! You!”
Men took the table that was already upended and knocked out the pins attaching the trestle legs. They carried it to the bar, where two more men lifted Tilphosa’s still form onto it. They worked efficiently but with a degree of respect which Cashel noted, though anger was a fire in his throat.
The hooded figure nodded, then bent again and left the inn. Even as close as Cashel now was to the member of the Nine, he couldn’t see any sign of legs moving beneath the robe.
The men carrying Tilphosa on the table shuffled out after the priest. The other locals bowed their heads; then, when the impromptu procession was well clear, they began to return to their own homes for the remainder of the night.
Leemay closed the door again; the three guests in the common room muttered quietly as they found their bedding and crawled into it.
Leemay looked at Cashel once more before she pinched out the wick of her lamp. He couldn’t see her features through the red rage in his heart.
Ademos, not a man Garric had suspected of being devout, knelt on the millipede’s third segment and prayed loudly: first to the Lady, then to the Shepherd, and then back to the Lady. His voice was so loud that Garric—standing with Vascay, Thalemos, and the wizard just behind the creature’s head—could hear every word clearly.
The only pause between prayers was however long it took Ademos to draw breath. The other Brethren listened without complaint; indeed, Halophus looked as though he might join in.
Metron lay on the millipede’s armor, drained white by the effort of forcing back the pursuing liquid a second time. He was either asleep or comatose; occasionally he snorted like a seal as he struggled to breathe.
“It’s catching up with us again,” said Thalemos in a tone of aristocratic calm. Indeed, the only hint of the youth’s nervousness lay in the fact that he’d bothered to state something so blindingly obvious in the first place.
The living fluid shimmered through the trees to either side. Garric remembered that he’d thought at first it was sun-struck water; he smiled, wishing that he were still so ignorant.
Not long before, a beetle the size of a house had lumbered past the millipede and into the pearly glow. The fluid crawled up the creature’s legs like oil soaking a wick. Lines of cobweb-gray traced across the shiny black wing cases; bits of the wings fell away, and the beetle’s legs turned to powder also.
The beetle’s fat body continued to writhe for as long as Garric’s eyes could follow it. The fact that the agony was silent made it all the worse.
“I can’t say I’m looking forward to the thing eating me,” Vascay remarked conversationally. He glanced sidelong at Garric. “Eh?”
“If you need somebody to kill you now so that doesn’t happen,” Garric said forcefully, “then look for somebody else.”
The chieftain smiled. “I said I wasn’t looking forward to it, lad,” he said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t man enough to face it.”
“It’s coming toward us now,” Thalemos said. His voice was still calm, but fear stretched his cheeks tight over the bones.
To the right, a thin tendril slanted from the edge of the liquid sheet. The same would be happening on the millipede’s other side. The creature’s technique—was it even a creature? Was it as mindlessly destructive as a windblown fire?—never changed.
Nor did it need to change. Perseverance was sure to carry the day, if not on this attempt then on the next.
“Time to wake our learned friend,” Vascay said, kneeling at Metron’s side. He shook the wizard by the shoulder.
He was increasingly firm, but only to rouse the man. Several of the Brethren stared at Metron with obvious hatred, but Vascay knew as Garric did that the wizard was no more responsible for their plight than was any other member of their group.
They’d gambled and apparently lost. The forfeit wouldn’t come from a Protector’s sword or the gallows in the main square of Durassa, but they’d all known there were risks. Metron would be paying the same price as the rest of them.
“Wakey, wakey,” Vascay said, shaking still harder. “Time for your party piece again, Master Metron.”
The wizard’s eyelids fluttered. He lay with his cheek on his arm. He didn’t—or couldn’t—lift his head, but he looked at the three men beside him.
“There’s no use,” he croaked. “I used the last of my True Mercury. You saw that the phial was empty.”
“You opened a gate for us into this place from Durassa,” Garric said. “Can you open it again so we go back?”
Metron sat up with sudden animation, then gasped with pain. Vascay supported him by the shoulders as if the wizard were a comrade with cracked ribs.