The glow was fading to blackness. Sharina saw the half gourd with fire-making tools in the corner beside the oil lamp. With the last of the light she struck the steel against the flint, spraying sparks into dried milkweed fluff twisted on a twig. When the tinder blazed up, she touched it to the lamp wick.
“Thanks,” said Carus with a kind of smile. “I do better with a flame than with the other kind of light.”
The smile grew broader and real. To Tenoctris he added, “Mind, I was glad of anything at all right then, mistress. And I’d guess Sharina was even more pleased to have it.”
“Very glad,” Sharina said as she hooked the lamp onto the wire hanger attached to a roof strut. She managed to grin so that her face wouldn’t give away the fact that she’d thought in the moment Carus seized her that she was about to die.
“More dreams, your highness?” Tenoctris asked. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, looking worn. The wizard had saved Sharina’s life—perhaps—by lighting the tent’s interior when she did, but the effort required to do that out of a sound sleep had been considerable.
“The same dream,” Carus said, quietly but with a murderous scowl. “I thought it was as bad as it could be when it started, but it wasn’t.”
His smile was real while it lasted, but it slumped after a moment into a blank expression that was without hope or any other emotion.
“There isn’t as much of me left as there was before the dreams started, I’m afraid. And the moon’s still waxing.”
Tenoctris drew a square in the tent’s sand floor with her index finger. Sharina couldn’t read the words the old woman wrote around the four sides—the white coral sand filled in the marks as she drew them—but the crescent moon in the center of the figure was unmistakable.
She looked up at Carus apologetically. “Your highness?” she said. “Would you rather I go out—”
The king swept the offer away with his left hand. “Do what you need to do here,” he said. “It’ll take more than a friend’s spells to bother me tonight.”
Tenoctris looked around her, realizing that her satchel of paraphernalia was outside the tent. Sharina understood her need and offered the spill she’d used to light the lamp. Tenoctris nodded gratefully. Using the burnt twig as her wand, she tapped the four directions, chanting as she did so, “Nerxiarxin morotho thoepanam iothath….”
Stabbing the wand down into the crescent she concluded, “Loulonel!”
Nothing happened.
Carus frowned. “Did something go wrong?” he asked. He spoke calmly, but Sharina had seen the muscles of his throat and cheeks draw up as Tenoctris intoned her spell.
Tenoctris smiled wearily. “Not at all,” she said. “You can go to sleep again, your highness. Nothing more will trouble you tonight.”
“Can I?” Carus said. He chuckled. “I think I’ll leave the lamp lit, though. Till this is over, I’d better sleep with the lamp lit.”
He looked at the two women. His expression was drawn and very tired.
“I wouldn’t run if I could, you know,” Carus said. “I never did. When somebody made himself my enemy, it was always going to be him or me. I never tried to talk things out, I just went for his throat. And in the end, of course, I met somebody who was better at that game than I was…and I drowned, and the kingdom died.”
Sharina touched the back of the king’s left hand. “You’re not going to lose this time, your highness,” she whispered.
“No, I’m not,” said the ancient king. “Because if I lose this time, dears, I’ll spend all eternity in the hands of those gray things in my nightmare. I don’t know that I could stand that.”
Carus laughed loudly, as though he’d made a joke. To her horror, Sharina found herself laughing also. It was funny, if you were the sort of person who found it so.
The millipede’s motion was remarkably soothing. The relatively tiny legs weren’t visible from the creature’s back. They worked so smoothly that Garric couldn’t guess what the two pairs supporting the segment he stood on were doing at any given moment.
The long body curved around obstacles, but its general course was as straight as that of a ship on the open sea. An Archa seated between the compound eyes guided the beast by touching a golden rod to the joint between the head and the first body segment. One end of the rod was spiked, while the other was a stiff fan.
Metron and Thalemos were immediately behind the driver. The wizard sat cross-legged; he’d chalked a pattern on the millipede’s calcified armor, but at the moment he was reading in a palm-sized codex instead of working an incantation. Thalemos viewed the moving landscape in silence and with a noble unconcern, but even at this distance Garric could see that the boy was tense.
Vascay was with the remainder of the band several segments up the body from Garric, checking Hame’s wound. Finishing there, the chieftain walked carefully back. His peg didn’t have as good a grip on the smooth, sloping surface as the bare feet of his Brethren.
The score or more of Archai riding the millipede had strung a lacework of gold chains across the creature’s back, pegging it at intervals to the body armor. A man could grab the chains if he started to slide, but that would be undignified. Vascay couldn’t expect to lose his dignity and still retain his position as chief.
The forest wove its patterns above them. The sky was almost never visible, but the giant grasses filtered down much of the light which the leaves and needle-thick limbs of normal trees would have absorbed. Occasionally Garric saw the waggling antennae of an insect on a high stem; and once there was a spider, built on the same scale as the millipede, which watched motionless as they wound their way past.
“So,” said Vascay in a normal speaking voice. He and Garric were the only humans on this body segment, though a trio of Archai worked with some golden apparatus of uncertain purpose beside them. “What do you think, lad? Of where we are and what we’re doing?”
Garric grinned. “What we’re doing,” he said, “is waiting for Master Metron to tell us what the next stage is. I can’t say I find that a comfortable business, but neither do I see an alternative. And as for where we are—”
He looked around. A beetle bigger than any ox in the borough stared at them through the myriad facets of its eyes.
“—I’d rather it were elsewhere. Though as you said when we arrived here, it’s healthier for us than Durassa with a regiment of Protectors trying to lift our heads.”
Vascay chuckled. He turned to look toward Metron at the front of the millipede. With a smile as cheerful as if he were sharing a further joke, the chief said, “I’ve been wondering what we’d learn if we staked out our wizard friend and started touching him up with a hot iron. Eh?”
“We wouldn’t learn anything I’d be willing to trust,” Garric said. He didn’t allow his distaste for the thought of torture to creep into his tone. “And I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t learn how to get out of where we are now.”
The millipede was crossing low ground; standing water reflected the creature’s pale belly plates and the blur of its legs. The color of the forest had become the darker green of sedges. Though the millipede was so steady that it scarcely seemed to be moving, it covered the ground quickly.
“Aye, that’s probably so,” Vascay agreed. “And of course there’s our hard-shelled companions to consider as well—”
He turned his bland smile on the Archai sharing the segment with him and Garric. They’d erected a machine on spiderlike golden legs. One of the creatures turned a lever with its middle pair of arms; the other two watched intently as gears whirred in apparent pointlessness.
“—but if it were no more than that, I’d be willing to take the risk.”
“What’s that sound?” Ademos called. He was among the dozen or so bandits standing on the third segment forward of Garric and Vascay. Some men were looking around in obvious concern; others just seemed puzzled.