"Ha-he!" Nonnus said as he stood on the edges of the dugout, his weight concentrated on his right leg. He swung the adze at the second syllable, sending back a spray of chipssome charred and some the natural ruddy white of the unburned wood.
"Ha-ho!" as he swung again, his weight centered. "Ha-hi!" and the adze made a third parallel stroke, completing the breadth of the hollow. Sharina knew that if she checked the work, she'd find it impossible to tell where the blade overlapped; the strokes were that well matched in depth. The hermit moved forward slightly, then bent to resume his cutting.
They'd borrowed the adze from the trireme's carpentry stores. The soldiers might have prevented Nonnus from taking the toolbecause they were irritated at their humid misery and because a military man finds it easier to say no than yes in any situation. The troops couldn't stop Sharina from taking the adze without involving Asera in the argument, however, and the procurator's equally short temper would probably have been directed at them. When Sharina chose to push the matter, everyone on the trireme treated her as a noble.
Everyone but Nonnus. Nonnus treated her as a friend.
The rain had stopped again; the sun was low in the western sky. Asera walked out of the shelter where she'd huddled, her face hard with rigidly controlled frustration. Thus far Meder's activities in the adjacent shelter had brought smoke, murmured chanting, and unexpected odors. One moment Sharina thought the air had the dry chill of an ancient tomb; at another she breathed perfumes that had nothing to do with the flowerless forests of Tegma.
But no results beyond those. The wizard hadn't even begun to slaughter the salamanders which the guards had gathered into a sack made from a dead man's tunic.
Sharina had continued to work through the rain, scraping clean the pole that would eventually be the dugout's mast. She didn't find the warm slow drops especially bothersome, at least in comparison with the general saturated humidity.
Nonnus ignored the weather also, smoothing the base and sides of the trough his fires had eaten in the log. Using fire alone would have risked the flames spreading through a crack to eat a hole in the bottom.
It was hard to imagine the weather affecting Nonnus one way or the other. As for Sharina, well, she'd been raised to do the work of a village inn. Her comfort had never been a priority for Reise if there was a job to be done.
Six Blood Eagles stood or sat nearby, talking to one another in a desultory fashion. They were bored and the need for them to beat least to appearon guard meant they couldn't get out of the rain or discard their armor. Even Wainer looked disgruntled. Sharina had already come to realize that contrary to the impression she'd gotten from the epics, a soldier's life was mostly a mixture of boredom and discomfort.
Asera glanced toward Meder, but she didn't go over the shelter in which he worked. He hadn't bothered to close the front of the three-walled stone structure this time: he needed the light, and the Blood Eagles kept their eyes rigidly averted from what was going on inside.
The procurator walked up behind Sharina as she removed bumps from the pole, using the hand axe as a plane. "What's this you're doing?" Asera demanded. Frustration soured her tone and she stood, probably deliberately, closer than any workman would like.
"Ha-he!" Nonnus said as he swung. He'd raised his voice minutely to underscore the fact that he existed in a world different from that of the nobles. "Ha-ho!"
"Something to pass the time," Sharina said. She paused and stretched. If she continued to work while Asera was so close, she'd get angry and make a mistake. That could mean a splinter through the hand or even a gash, though the blade's edge wasn't sharp enough to do real damage when she was short-gripping the axe for the present task. "We're building a boat."
Asera sniffed. "A waste of time is right," she muttered. She was angry at the situation and to a lesser degree at the wizard's failure to correct it. She'd look a fool to sneer at the sky, and sneering at Meder would be counterproductive. Sharina and the hermit were safe targets.
It wasn't a new experience for Sharina: her mother had displaced anger in the same fashion, though most often her shrill rages were directed at Reise rather than the children.
"Quick!" Meder shouted. His voice reverberated from the shelter's open side before he turned his head to look out himself. "Bring me the animals. Now! May the Sister snatch you all down! Do you want me to have to do this again?"
The soldiers stiffened. The lines of Asera's face smoothed into an expression of bright interest. She stepped quickly, almost trotting, toward the wizard. Her hand hooked in a gesture to bring Wainer with her, holding the writhing sack.
"Ha-ho!" the hermit said. "Ha-hi!"
For all her disgust at what the wizard was doing, Sharina walked to the other side of the pole before resuming her work. From her new location she could watch the activities in the shelter.
Meder was chanting and gesturing with his athame. He'd scribed a circle on the ground around the gold torque. When he nodded, Wainer slit the belly of a salamander so that its blood and internal organs spilled onto the metal. The soldier's face was as impassive as the smooth rock surrounding him.
Asera held another salamander, a small one with orange markings. She scowled with discomfort at the feel of the slimy skin. When Meder nodded again she dropped the little creature into the bowl in which the wizard burned his powders on a bed of charcoal. The hiss and desperate croaking made Sharina's nose wrinkle.
The air about Meder crackled as loudly as a tree limb breaking. Red mist swirled above the torque, expanding and becoming denser. Wainer stepped out of the shelter so quickly that he bumped his head as he straightened. The procurator edged backward slightly, but her attention remained riveted on the twisting red glow.
"Nonnus," Sharina said in a low voice. The hermit had already set the adze down. He hopped to the ground as she moved to his side. He took the javelin in his right hand; his fingers moved without a side glance from his eyes.
The glowing mist congealed into a spindle five feet high, darkening like a piece of iron cooling after it comes from the smith's hearth. The light took on features: limbs and a triangular head. A vaporous image of the torque encircled the figure's neck.
The figure had six limbs, not four. Two were splayed into jointed swordblades or toothed flails; two reached out, capable of manipulation with fingerlike cilia; two were legs, chitinous and insectile.
The creature wasn't even remotely human in anything but its upright posture.
"The Archai!" Meder shouted in delight. He scrambled from the shelter, clapping his hands. "The inhabitants of Tegma were what Cassarion's Manuscript calls the Archai!"
The Blood Eagles had turned to watch. Asera and Meder both moved sideways to change the angle from which they viewed the motionless image. The procurator's expression was a puzzled frown in contrast to the wizard's smile.
"How are you going to" Asera began.
The image expanded. For a moment the mist retained its shape; then it burst like a soap bubble. The rosy glow continued to spread outward, fading minutely. There was a noticeable boundary layer between it and the surrounding air.
"Step behind me, child," Nonnus said in a guttural voice, brushing Sharina back with his right arm and the shaft of the javelin. He drew the Pewle knife and held its heavy steel blade vertically between them and the oncoming glow.
The mist flowed past the sharp edge and over the two of them unaffected. Sharina felt nothing at the contact. The rosy color was less evident now that they were within it.
"What was that?" Asera asked sharply. She plucked at her cheeks to see if the glow had left anything clinging to them. "You didn't tell me it was going to touch me!"
Wainer had his sword out. His eyes searched in all directions.
"It's nothing," Meder said in dismissive irritation. "In order to get the information we need"
Something twisted in the shelter where the wizard had worked. At first Sharina thought a salamander had gotten out of the sack.
"I'll have to repeat the incantation"
A figure humped upward from the shelter's stone floor as if dust was coalescing back into the original shape from which it had crumbled. This wasn't an image of light: it was the solid form of a living creature.
"but it'll go faster this time because"
The ground along the whole foreshore trembled; along the path as well. The glow continued to expand at a walking pace; the dust of ages shifted behind it.
"Look!" Sharina said, pointing to the shelter. Everyone's eyes followed her gesture.
A creature, the tawny, chitinous original of the image Meder had raised, lurched to its hind legs. Asera shouted and jumped back, almost stumbling. The Archa slashed at her. Wainer lunged, driving his sword a hand's breadth deep in the creature's thorax.
The Archa collapsed, its limbs thrashing. An upper limb slashed Wainer's forearm. The tip of his sword dripped purple blood when he withdrew it.
The ground seethed like the liquid in a pot coming to a boil. There must have been hundreds, thousands, of Archai thronging the port at the time Tegma ceased catastrophically to exist. Blood Eagles thrust furiously, but they might as well have been trying to stab a fire with their spears.
"Run for the city!" Nonnus called, as always the first to react to unexpected danger. "Get ahead of the spell!"
He was speaking to Sharina but the two of them bolted up the path only a few steps ahead of the others, Meder included. Only Wainer's shouted command kept his men from trampling the nobles in panicked haste. Courage against human enemies was one thing; this uncanny threat attacked the Blood Eagles at an instinctive level and momentarily overcame their pride. Recalled to duty, they formed a rear guard.
There had been Archai on the zigzag path when Tegma died also, though the six-limbed figures Sharina dodged on the trampled leaf mold were slightly less developed than those rising behind her. The difference was the matter of seconds by which the glowing touch of wizardry passed.
Sharina skidded at the first dogleg bend. Nonnus grunted in concern, unable to catch her because he held a weapon in either hand. She didn't need help; she balanced by thrusting the hand axe as a counterweight and dabbing down the fingertips of her free hand.
An Archa hunched in front of her, almost fully formed. It started to rise. She leaped over the creature and continued to run.
"Should we cut straight uphill?" she cried.
"We don't know the land!" Nonnus said. "All it'd take is a gully in the wrong place."
Archai continued to coalesce on the path. Sharina heard behind her a clash of metal and a scream. She ran on.