Mistress of the Catacombs (11 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Garric's skin burned. He was bathed in white light and it buzzed. Consciousness returned with the suddenness of a casement closing; with it came pain.

That was all right. Garric had hurt before, and this time the anger coursing through him burned all other feelings to cinders. He opened his eyes.

The foliage of the palms from which Ceto appeared were still quivering; the bandit must just have brushed his way through on his way back to the camp. Garric was far too coldly angry to rush off after him; he needed to get control of himself first. Then he'd take care of Ceto.

Tint was jumping frantically, making clicking sounds with her teeth. She saw Garric move and started to lift him.

"Hey!" Garric gasped. "Don't do that!"

"Gar!" Tint cried, the first actual word that'd come from her mouth since he awakened. She sprang into a clump of hibiscus. Voice fading with the distance, she called, "Tint fix ear!"

Garric could breathe again, though the pit of his stomach was numb with a jagged circle of pain around it. Ceto's punch might have cracked a rib.

He dabbed his ear; his fingers came away bloody. The hobnails had caught the tip, though the damage didn't seem to be serious.

Garric knelt, then rose to his feet as the beastgirl reappeared with a wad of... of spiderweb! "Tint fix ear," she repeated, motioning him to bend down.

He obeyed, feeling a moment of vertigo that cleared at once. Instead of wiping his ear, Tint licked him with a tongue that seemed almost prehensile. Garric didn't jump away because the beastgirl was holding him by the shoulders. Only when the wound was clean did she press the spider silk over the wound.

"Tint fix!" she repeated. The silk stayed where she'd placed it, glued by its own adhesive.

Garric took a deep breath. His ribs still hurt, but nothing was broken.

He grinned at his companion. "All right, Tint," he said. "Now take me back to the camp. So that I can fix Ceto."

* * *

Sharina watched Chalcus leave the conference room; he moved with the grace of a dancer—which he might be—or a swordsman, which she knew he was. Captain Deghan relaxed visibly to see Carus standing in the doorway unharmed.

Carus glanced back at Sharina. "Shall we—" he said.

"Shut the door please," Sharina said. Her stomach was tight; mention of the Pewle knife and her memory of Nonnus made her able to ask a question when ingrained courtesy would have kept her silent. "For a moment."

Carus turned, nodded to Deghan, and closed the door again. When he faced Sharina he was expressionless, watchful. "All right," he said.

"Why won't you see Ilna?" she said.

"I told—"

"I heard what you told Chalcus!" Sharina said. "I can see the logic; so could Garric, and I think he'd have done the same—for all a sailor's doubts. People in Barca's Hamlet have to make hard choices every Fall if they expect to survive the Hungry Time the next Spring. But you haven't answered my question."

Carus' grin was brief and false. He walked to the sideboard and poured himself wine, using the carafe of red and the goblet closest to him—the one Chalcus had left behind. He didn't mix water with the wine.

"When I was...," he said to the far wall. "In the flesh, say; alive, I don't care what you call it."

He set the goblet down untasted and met Sharina's eyes. "When I was a man, Sharina, I knew a lot of women," he said. "I liked them well enough, and some I liked a good deal. But there was one..."

Carus reached for the wine, then snatched his hand back and snarled, "Sister take it! And may the Sister take me if I'm so great a coward that I won't talk about her!"

"Carus...?" Sharina said. She didn't know what she wanted to say next, except that she wished she hadn't spoken before. "I don't need.... You don't have to tell me anything."

The king's passing reference to the knife had opened an old wound, but he'd had a reason. Sharina no longer believed she'd had a reason for her question, at least not one that was worth the pain it gave her companion.

"Don't I, girl?" Carus said. He managed a gust of his usual laughter. "Perhaps not, but I'll tell you anyway. There was a girl, a woman, named Brichese bos-Brediman; from Cordin, noble of course but from a family no wealthier than yours in Barca's Hamlet despite the title."

He shrugged. "I loved her," he said. "And she died, because I didn't save her... or couldn't save her.... Or perhaps you could say because I didn't choose to save her. And that was all a thousand years ago. She'd be dead now in any case and none of that would matter. Except—"

Carus grinned. "You know," he said, "I sometimes think that the Lady... or Fate, if the philosophers are right when they say the Great Gods don't exist... that whoever rules men has a sense of humor. Your friend Ilna is as close to being my Brichese as ever twins were born. In body, but in spirit as well."

Sharina's face went blank. "Ah," she said. "I see now."

"It was hard enough when I watched through your brother's eyes and heard through his ears," the king said. He sipped the wine, drinking without the desperation that had driven his urge a few moments before. "Now that I'm wearing this body instead of being a guest in it, I thought...."

He laughed and finished the wine. "I thought it'd be best for everybody," he said, "if I put temptation out of the way."

"Yes," said Sharina. She breathed a sigh of relief. If Carus had been a different man, Ilna and the kingdom both would face a future that would be even more dangerous than what loomed today.

"Let's go out to the others," she said, crooking her arm to be taken by the man wearing her brother's body. "I want to see what Tenoctris has learned about Garric."

Fear twisted her gut. She immediately hid it beneath a smile.

"And Cashel," Sharina added; and then lied, "Though I'm sure Cashel will never meet any danger that he can't manage."

* * *

Tenoctris had decided to use the marble bench on one side of the artificial grotto as a table. Ilna watched while the wizard adjusted the strips of parchment that she'd written on and placed around the edges of two smoldering braziers. Along the grotto's back wall water trickled from lead pipes into a channel leading out into the garden, past the squad of Blood Eagles facing stolidly away from the wizard.

Beards of moss grew on the wall beneath the pipes. A similar dark smudge spread down the front of the bench. Echeus' severed head sat upright between the braziers. Blood still leaked from its neck.

Tenoctris stepped back, breathing quickly. "There," she said. "That should be all right. Now where did I put—"

"I have your wand," Ilna said, holding out the split of bamboo the wizard had chosen for this incantation. "And your stool is set up right here."

"Ah," said Tenoctris. "Yes, of course."

She sat carefully, gathering the hem of her robe so that it didn't collapse the folding ivory stool Ilna had placed facing Echeus. She glanced up at Ilna. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm nervous because of what I'm about to do."

Ilna shrugged. "But you'll do it anyway," she said. "That's all that matters, not what it costs."

She smiled wryly at the older woman. "That's what I tell myself, anyway," she added.

Tenoctris grinned. "Yes, of course," she said. "And I'm sure you're right."

She faced forward, focusing on a point in eternity rather than on the head in front of her. Echeus had died with his eyes open and a look of surprise on his face. The eyes had glazed and the stiffness of death was sharpening the expression into a demonic grimace.

The parchment crinkled in the slow fire; by becoming black ash, the words of power executed themselves in coils of smoke. Tenoctris tapped the air silently for a moment, then said in rhythm with her wand, "Oh maosaio naraeeaeaa...."

With every syllable Tenoctris spoke, the rising smoke quivered. Ilna saw hints of glowing color in the thin columns. There was a pattern to them, something her brain couldn't grasp but her soul almost could.

"Arubibao thumo imsiu...," the wizard said. "Oulatsila moula imsiu...."

Ilna, Tenoctris and the severed head were alone in a grotto carved out of the cosmos, not just a manmade hill. The entrance and the guards outside had vanished. The only light was from glowing smoke that wove new patterns in the fabric of space and time.

"Ae eiouo soumarta max akarba...." No longer words spoken by a human but rather the thunder of the cosmos.

Echeus' eyes were expanding, or else Ilna was looking into another world which those eyes had seen. Gray, softly gleaming... utterly evil.

"Chraie zozan ekmet prhe satra!"

A world: a world draped in gray silk, webs swathing rocks and trees—and everywhere those who had woven the webs, watching through jewel-hard unwinking multiple eyes. A world of spiders the size of dogs, the size of sheep. Spiders waiting: expressionless, emotionless; as cold as the void between worlds.

Spiders who had woven patterns of inhuman perfection, and who were weaving one further pattern that Ilna could almost understand. Indeed, she could under—

The gray hellworld shrank into itself, vanishing like a snowflake caught in an open hand. Ilna staggered, but the instinct of duty caused her to grab Tenoctris and hold the old wizard firmly before she could slip off her stool. She seemed skeletally frail within her silken robe.

The grotto stank of charred flesh: parchment was no more than sheep gut, after all. The strips had burned to ash and Echeus' head was only a body part, already flushing with the purple tinge of decay.

A haze of gray smoke filtered the sunlight entering through the entrance, but it still made a bright contrast to the place Ilna's mind had just visited. She lifted Tenoctris as she'd carry an injured child and stepped outside.

"Ma'am?" said the leader of the guards. "Is she—"

"She's all right," Ilna said.

"I'm all right," Tenoctris echoed weakly, "I'm just tired."

The Blood Eagles shifted their stance, uncertain whether they ought to be helping the women or simply preventing the approach of intruders. There was no one within fifty paces of the grotto except for the larger detachment of guards around the conference room where Garric and Chalcus spoke.

Ilna felt the older woman gather her strength, then straighten her legs. When Ilna was sure, she let go except to keep one arm crooked where Tenoctris could hold on to it.

"Tenoctris, did you see it?" Ilna whispered. "That place?"

Garric.... Ilna remembered she'd felt murderous passion when Garric turned his back on her less than an hour before. She was purged of that now. Nothing humans did was worth anger, not when one had seen Hell wrapped in webs of finest silk.

"Yes, I saw it," Tenoctris said. "I don't know what it means, but now that I have a starting place I think I can learn."

"That was what Echeus was trying to bring about?" Ilna said. She'd meant to whisper, but for once control failed her. She let her loathing loose in her rising tone. "That was why he attacked Garric?"

Tenoctris took a deep breath. Now at last she appeared to have recovered from the ordeal of her art—and perhaps from the shock of what her art had showed her.

She stepped back and managed a wan smile for Ilna. "No," she said. "Echeus wasn't trying to create that... world, that path for the future to follow."

Tenoctris drew in another breath; her smile failed her.

"What we saw was a vision of what Echeus feared most," the old wizard explained. "Echeus attacked Garric to prevent that future from occurring."

* * *

Cashel sat with his back to a coral head thrusting up from the beach. He made no more sound nor movement than the rock behind him, but he was fully alert.

The sailors' several driftwood campfires had burned down to coals. Occasionally a salt crystal spluttered into transparent pastel flame, but for the most part the fireglow sank slowly toward the darkness of the surrounding night.

Cashel waited the way he'd watched over flocks when he knew danger threatened. Captain Mounix had set guards, but Cashel didn't believe anybody had relieved the first watch. The shipwreck had disturbed the crew's structure, and the terrible slayings had put paid to what discipline remained.

There would be no more slayings. Cashel smiled. Not unless the killer got through him first, anyway.

The surf rumbled on the reef, drowning with its low note the many lesser night sounds. When Cashel took his place the tide had been going out; now it was returning. Occasionally waves splashed against the base of the coral head. Most of the survivors were sprawled on the sand up at the tide line. Cashel had chosen this location because he wanted to cover as much of the encampment as possible, though in darkness he couldn't see his companions.

Just inland of Cashel's position, Lady Tilphosa slept under a sailcloth shelter for privacy. Metra lay nearby but outside the shelter. Cashel hadn't asked them to stay close, though he would've done so if Tilphosa hadn't volunteered that she wanted to sleep nearby for protection.

Another wave hit the coral, spraying high enough that drops spattered Cashel. Arms of water reached around from both sides, hissing and foaming; one wet Cashel's tunic before sinking into the sand.

It'd be dawn soon. He'd move when the sky brightened, maybe even get some sleep of his own. Until then, well, he'd been wet before.

Cashel felt a presence in the night; he tensed.

It wasn't anything he could've described to another person, unless they were folks who'd felt this sort of thing themselves. Something was threatening his flock....

There was movement though not a shape against the palmettos and screwpines. It was at the head of the trail Cashel had broken, going uphill to the spring. That was what he'd expected, though he hadn't been conscious of his belief until the event confirmed it.

He rose in one silent, fluid motion. Cashel was deliberate in all things, but no one who'd seen him act during a crisis thought he was clumsy. He started toward the shadow. It was now drifting in the direction of a campfire which had settled to a shimmer of heat.

Cashel moved in a near shuffle, his feet lifting barely above the surface of the sand. He angled his approach to put himself between the intruder and the gap in the vegetation from which it had come.

It was very near to dawn, though the constellations were distorted enough that Cashel couldn't say if the sky would begin to lighten in one handful of minutes or two handsful. Certainly no more than two.

One of the sailors lay a little farther from the dead fire than his companions did. The intruder sprang the remaining distance to him while Cashel was just beyond his staff's reach.

"Hi!" Cashel shouted and jumped himself, whirling the quarterstaff in a full-armed slash.

Quick as Cashel was, the intruder proved quicker. It had snatched its chosen victim from the sand in the eyeblink before Cashel moved. Now it hurled the sailor away and ducked beneath the whistling blow.

The sailor was screaming. His companions sat up, shouting in fear; men at the other fires cried out also. Cashel skidded on the sand, recovering his staff with both hands at the balance to defend himself from the intruder's counterstroke.

Instead the shadow—it was still no more than a shadow, though Cashel was nearly on top of it—bounded for the jungle in a graceless, low-slung motion. It covered ground like a scorpion jumping. Cashel couldn't cut it off before it vanished into the vegetation.

That was all right. Cashel knew where it was going, or anyway thought he did.

A bow twanged from the direction of the southernmost campfire. Cashel didn't hear the whistle of an arrow, so maybe the archer wasn't aiming toward him after all.

Cashel plunged into the forest, slanting his staff before him to extend the line of his right forearm. His left hand was free to clutch or fend away.

"Cashel, wait!" Tilphosa called. "Wait for daylight!"

Cashel kept going. When he'd come this way during daylight he'd blundered into trees while watching his footing and had slipped if he kept his eyes on the trees. Now he moved through the darkness as easily as a puff of smoke. He had a countryman's feel for a path once trodden, but more than that was working tonight: he was on the trail of the creature which as long as it lived would threaten those under Cashel's protection.

Sure-footed Cashel might be, but he crashed through the undergrowth like a bull in a thicket. He couldn't hear the thing he was chasing, and there was at least a chance that it'd pick its spot and turn on him.

He wasn't worried. He wanted to get his hands on the thing—the sooner, the better. He couldn't in his heart believe that it was a real danger to a man who was alert and unafraid.

The sky grew paler through the broadly-splayed leaves of the begonias. It was still some minutes short of sunrise, but false dawn brightened the heavens if not the ground beneath. Cashel no longer needed to climb on instinct: gnarled trunks stood out from one another and from the background. He was close to the outcrop where the airship lay wrecked. He paused to decide how he'd negotiate the last dozen paces of steep hillside.

As he stood silent, he heard movement down the slope behind him. Was there a pack of them, surrounding him before they struck?

Farther back still he heard Metra call, "Lady Tilphosa! Stop!"

Cashel smiled. Tilphosa'd said she'd stay close to him for protection tonight. He hadn't expected her to follow him up here, but maybe she wasn't showing such bad judgment.

The chime of gold on gold rang softly through the night. Cashel sighed in relieved anticipation. He'd been afraid that his quarry would keep running instead of going to ground. A shepherd learns to get along in the woods, but he doesn't become a tracker.

He started climbing to the crag and spring, slipping a little on the slick, steep clay. Funny. It'd been easier to lope through the night than it was to make this last short way under a pink-gray sky. The immediacy was past, though the job that remained might be hard enough.

"Cashel?" Tilphosa called from not far below him. "I'm coming up! It's me, Tilphosa."

She was smart enough to know how Cashel might react to being startled just now. Tilphosa was smart enough, period.

After his breathing slowed, Cashel could hear water dripping down into the basin of the spring. Dawn had awakened creatures to squawk and warble, unseen because of distance and the foliage.

The airboat's skeleton lay as Cashel had left it. So far as he could see, Costas hadn't been able to mark the flint-hard gold. The sailor's body lay at the edge of the spring, his chest ripped open and emptied. Costas' eyes stared at the dawn.

"I'm coming, Cashel," Tilphosa said, blurting the words out between gasps. "It's me behind you."

The girl clambered onto the ridge as she spoke. Cashel turned slightly so that he could see her without losing sight of the wreck.

Thorns or a sharp branch had torn Tilphosa's tunic. A line of dried blood crossed her right cheek to the lobe of her ear. She didn't have Cashel's instinct for the darkness, but she'd come anyway.

In her right hand Tilphosa clutched a chisel she must have taken from Hook's toolchest. The shaft was hardwood, but the fluted blade was steel and sharp enough to shave with.

"You took a chance," Cashel said, but his tone was approving. "I guess there isn't anywhere a lot safer around here, though."

"Yes, well, I wasn't going to stay down there without you," Tilphosa said. Her quick breaths whistled, but she made a point of not opening her mouth to pant like a dog. "Did it get away?"

"I don't think so," Cashel said. He looked around him carefully to be sure that nothing, no thing, waited in ambush. Then he pushed into the lobelias with his staff slanted forward, this time in both hands.

"Cashel?" said the girl. She'd stayed far enough back to be clear if he and the quarterstaff had to spin suddenly. "Do you know what it is? Is it a man?"

"We'll know in a little bit," Cashel said, his voice a growl as he concentrated on what was in front of him.

Three larger swellings grew from the tubing like seedpods hanging on a trumpet vine. One was near the bow. The impact had crushed it open. Roots twisted about it and a line of ants crawled in and out of its protection.

Cashel moved on, each time testing the ground with his toes before putting his foot down. At any moment his legs might need to anchor a smashing blow of his quarterstaff....

He heard rustling and the crackle of a branch behind him. "Lady Tilphosa!" Metra wheezed. "Where are you, lady?"

"Keep her out of the way!" Cashel said. He trusted Tilphosa's judgment, but he didn't trust anything at all about her attendant wizard.

The two women talked in quick, irritated voices, but Cashel needn't worry about that now. He'd reached the second pod, this one about the size of a goatskin water bag. It dangled in the air, half-wrapped in the skein of tubes that supported it. The pod's weight had pulled the hard gold into a cat's cradle, folding and flattening the tubes without breaking them.

The third pod was egg-shaped and larger than a man. Loam, the detritus of centuries of leaves and fallen branches, mounded around it. The softly-gleaming upper surfaces reflected growing daylight; the smooth metal was not only untarnished but clear of the litter which covered the surrounding soil.

Cashel eyed the pod, watchful for any change in it. After a time—he couldn't have said how long, a length of time he found appropriate—he rapped the cold metal with the outstretched tip of his quarterstaff. It rang hollowly at the touch of the ferrule, a sweetly musical sound. It was the same note that Cashel had heard as he chased his quarry in this direction.

Cashel eyed his surroundings, sure now of what he needed but not quite certain he was going to find it here. Tilphosa waited, still-faced and obviously nervous, just back of the crumpled framework. She raised her eyebrows in question when Cashel glanced at her, but she didn't speak. Maybe she was afraid of breaking his concentration.

Metra sat behind Tilphosa, her athame bobbing like a chicken gobbling corn. She'd spread another silk square, this one black with symbols—different symbols from those of the other day, Cashel supposed—in red. Clever of the wizard to change colors so that she wouldn't grab the wrong pattern in haste.

Cashel saw what he needed, a torso-sized chunk of limestone separated from the rest of the outcrop. Moss outlined the fracture, probably the result of the airboat's crash.

Could the creature hear him? Could it understand speech even if it did hear?

"It's all right," he said to Tilphosa. He smiled. "Just keep that chisel ready. I'm going to have to put my staff down for a bit."

She probably thought he was being reassuring. He truly was glad she was here with a weapon.

Cashel backed, then sidled, carefully to the block. After watching the pod intently for some moments more—just in case it decided to open—he leaned his quarterstaff into the angle where two gold tubes joined seamlessly.

He squatted, gripping opposite sides of the block and shifting it slightly to make sure it would give. It did. Because the soil was so thin over the outcrop he didn't have to worry about trees. He didn't want to trip and lose his balance when he was carrying a stone as heavy as a young bull.

Cashel breathed deeply—once, twice, and again. "Now!" he shouted—to the stone, to himself, it didn't matter—and jerked the block free. As it crunched away from the outcrop, Cashel straightened his knees. Stiff-legged, his hands adjusting the block minutely to balance it as he moved, he walked toward the pod.

The blood roared in his ears. He couldn't hear outside sounds, not even the thump of his heels on the ground step after step, but he felt the words of Metra's incantation. Her art was affecting the cosmos through which Cashel moved....

He couldn't look down: his spine was perfectly vertical to accept the weight it now bore. The pod was a golden shimmer through the red haze throbbing with his pulse.

"Now!" Cashel repeated. He swung his missile down, tilting his whole body when the stone's path had slanted clear of him.

Cashel fell forward, following the missile. The block hit corner-foremost in the center of the smooth curve. Metal bonged, splitting before the massive stone rolled off to the left and wobbled crazily several paces downhill before a stand of lobelias halted it.

Cashel struggled to his feet. Tilphosa grabbed his arm to lift. She was more trouble than help, but he didn't have enough breath to send her away. Anyhow, he appreciated the thought.

Metra pushed through the brush, looking as wobbly as Cashel felt. She tried to slide her athame back under her sash, but the effort of her art had robbed her of the necessary coordination. Her eyes were fixed on the ruptured pod.

"Get her back," Cashel whispered hoarsely. Tilphosa handed him his quarterstaff—that was a help—and caught Metra around the shoulders. She held the wizard easily; and would, Cashel was pretty sure, even if the other woman weren't already exhausted.