Metron closed his eyes, then opened them with a look of resolution. “Not back, no,” he said. “But it may be we’re close enough that I can open the passage to, to our destination. We’ll need a lamp, a flame—”
“Toster, come here with your lighter!” Vascay ordered. “And Ademos, you’re still wearing those clogs. Bring ’em here. I’ve got a better use for those wooden soles than you walking on them!”
Ademos turned to look, but he didn’t get up from his appearance of piety. “What better use?” he demanded.
“Burning them to get us out of this place!” Vascay said. “Move it, Brother Ademos!”
“I don’t—” Ademos began.
Toster gripped him by the neck. “Somebody get the shoes and come on,” the big man said in a hoarse voice. Calm though he was to look at, Toster was close to the edge also.
Ademos didn’t struggle. Halophus snatched off the clogs and followed Toster to the chief.
Metron had moved slightly so that he had an unmarked patch of armor before him. He began to draw, using the brush and pot of vermilion instead of the yellow powder he’d called his True Mercury.
Garric looked into the forest. The glowing liquid lapped alongside, close enough that Vascay could have skewered the tendril with a cast of his javelin. No point in that, of course. It no longer slanted toward them; rather, it was drawing slightly ahead of their course. When the filament gained enough that it could merge with the horn on the other side, there’d be no escape for the millipede or the men riding it.
Vascay trimmed slivers from the wooden shoes; Halophus laid them in a tiny fireset in the middle of the hexagram the wizard had drawn on the purple-black armor.
Metron placed the ring on the tip of his ivory athame. At his muttered instruction, Toster struck the plunger of his fire piston. When he opened the end, a smolder of milkweed fluff spilled onto the fireset and blazed up at the touch of open air.
“Pico picatrix sesengen…” chanted Metron, holding the sapphire ring up beside the fire. The gem’s facets glinted in hard contrast to the muted blur of these forest depths.
The tendrils of fluid slid toward one another again, this time well in front of the millipede. The creature paced forward on its many legs, unperturbed by what was about to happen. The Archa driver stood with a fluting cry. Hurling its wand to one side, it leaped toward the ground in the other direction. It must have fallen under the millipede’s pincered feet, but Garric didn’t suppose that made much difference in the long run.
Vascay glanced at Garric, though the knife in his hand kept trimming slivers from the clog like a cook peeling a turnip. “Can’t say I’m sorry to be shut of him,” he said, transferring a palmful of shavings for the waiting Halophus to feed to the fire.
Garric smiled as his ancestor Carus would have smiled, an expression as hard as diamond millstones. There probably wasn’t a long run, for the Archa or for the rest of them.
“Baphar baphris saxa…” Metron intoned, adjusting the angle at which he held the ring. The jewel refracted the firelight as well as reflecting it, bending some of it back to dance on the next segment of armor.
“Nophris nophar saxa…” said Metron.
The arms of glowing liquid met with a gush of pearly light. The thin tendrils broadened swiftly, the way water spreads from a breached dike. The millipede stumped on without hesitation, closing on the fluid as it swelled inward.
“Barouch baroucha barbatha…” Metron said. He didn’t stop chanting, but his right hand beckoned to the Brethren desperately. A keyhole of light quivered on the second segment of the millipede’s back.
“Come on, boys!” Vascay said. “This is it!”
Ademos scrambled to his bare feet. The bandits started forward but stopped in a group, staring at the pattern quivering on the armor.
Vascay’s eyes met Garric’s. They both knew the dangers: certain death if they stayed here, unknown and perhaps worse horrors on the other side of Metron’s passage.
“Lead!” Garric said. “I’ll bring up the back like before!”
Vascay leaped into the doorway of light and vanished. Hame and Halophus jostled one another to be next through. Garric touched Thalemos’ arm and gestured him forward. The youth hesitated, then followed Prada into nothingness.
Garric stood at an angle, watching Metron with the gateway in the corner of his right eye. He held his sword bare, though he didn’t recall drawing it. The Brethren jumped and disappeared, some of them muttering prayers. Toster remained at Garric’s side.
The millipede suddenly twisted back, making Garric sway. Metron tried to stand. Garric put his swordpoint at the wizard’s throat to hold him where he was. “Toster!” Garric shouted. “Go!”
Toster turned. He jumped toward the ground, his axe swinging.
“I’ll kill you!” the big man cried, but then he began to scream. The scream continued, but it no longer sounded like anything that might come from a human throat.
“Please!” Metron said. The fire was burning down. Only an occasional sputter woke glints from the sapphire’s facets. “Please, it’ll be—”
Garric put his left arm around the wizard. He lunged forward, taking them together into the freezing maelstrom of Metron’s gateway.
There was no sound in the passage, but Toster’s screams still echoed in Garric’s mind.
He supposed they always would.
“Well, my lords—and princess,” said Carus, bowing to her as they stood on the ridgeline viewing both the royal fleet and the vast assembly in the bay beyond to the west. “I did Admiral Nitker an injustice in not believing that Lerdoc could raise fifteen thousand men. He’s got that many and more besides, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Hundreds of ships were grounded on the open coast to the west of the royal encampment. Most of them were sailing vessels, round-bellied merchantmen which could carry some hundreds of men apiece, albeit in great discomfort. Only a score of triremes escorted them; the Blaise fleet was no larger than the royal fleet had been before Garric—guided by Carus—began to rule the kingdom.
You could command an island with soldiers. To command the Isles, you had to have a fleet.
“You didn’t say that you doubted him, your highness,” said Lord Attaper. Nitker was a former officer of the Blood Eagles, Attaper’s friend and protégé. “Not in my hearing, at least.”
“Didn’t I?” mused Carus. “Maybe I learned something in the time since—”
Sharina reached out to touch Carus’ cheek. The gesture must have looked odd to the high officers standing close and scowling as they gazed at the rebel army, but was better than having the ancient king blurt some variation on “—since I drowned a thousand years ago.”
The king’s face was warm but as stiff as sun-washed marble. He patted Sharina’s fingers, and said, “Since I first came to Valles. I thought Nitker was wrong, though.”
If the royal triremes had met the Blaise merchantmen at sea, only surrender could have saved the rebel army from drowning to a man. If. Luck or more likely wizardry had given Count Lerdoc perfect weather, perfect timing, and perfect secrecy for his sweep across the Inner Sea. Someone was weaving a plot as complex as one of Ilna’s tapestries.
Sharina and the command group were mounted, but Lord Attaper had flatly refused to allow Carus to gallop back to the harbor with only a troop of Blood Eagles to guard him. All four regiments of javelin-armed skirmishers had jogged along with the high officers, the horsemen adjusting their pace to that of their escort. They couldn’t fight the whole Blaise army, but they could delay any desperate thrust by the rebels long enough for the rest of the royal army to arrive.
“We could attack them now,” said Lord Dowos, previously commander of a cavalry regiment which had remained behind to guard Valles. He pointed at the confused mass of ships and men. “Before they get organized, why, we’ll slaughter them!”