Mistress of the Catacombs (12 page)

As Cashel himself was, but strength came flooding back now that he was on his feet again. His whole body had locked into a series of mortise and tenon joints in order to support the block of stone. Now he was himself again, Cashel or-Kenset, moving with the graceful deliberation of thick cream flowing.

The stone had dented the pod over a surface the size of a wash basket, but the split in the center was no longer than Cashel's hand and too narrow to reach through. The impact had sprung the hidden catch that locked the pod into a featureless whole, however: the top stood away from the bottom half over most of the oval seam.

Cashel shifted his grip on the quarterstaff, poising it so that he could punch a ferrule forward like a spear. He stretched out his right foot, then lifted the lid with a quick jerk of his toes.

In shadow the figure lying within could have passed for a man: the jaws were a little longer, the brow flat; the eyes set too far to the side and bulging more than a human's would. The creature's skin had a faint green cast and a pebbled surface with fine scales on the backs of the hands.

Faint though the morning light was, when the lid opened the creature gave a squeal of agony and covered its face with its four-fingered hands. It stank: the blood and bits of human tissue that smeared its head and clawed hands were rotting. A pendant hanging from a neck chain was the creature's only clothing or adornment.

Cashel stabbed his staff down, crushing the creature's hands and skull together. The ferrule rang with a muffled note on the bottom of the pod. The creature's back arched; it writhed, flinging its legs out of the capsule where it had laired.

Gasping more with revulsion than effort, Cashel stepped back. Tilphosa touched his arm, letting him know where she was. She peered past him to the interior of the pod.

"Duzi, stand at my side," Cashel whispered. A palm tree growing down the hilll leaned over him. He ripped a frond from it and scrubbed furiously, cleaning blood and brains from his quarterstaff. "Duzi, help the one who guards your flock."

Metra edged past. Tilphosa caught her arm. "Let her go," Cashel muttered. "I'm done with that now."

The almost-human body still twitched. It was smaller than it'd seemed in the darkness, the size of a girl in her early teens. The teeth were no more impressive than a man's, and the claws on the fingers were more like a dog's than the big cat Cashel had imagined from the corpses. Savagery and bestial strength, not weapons, had torn the victims apart.

That wouldn't happen again. Cashel didn't know what the creature was or why it killed the way it did—but he'd stopped it.

Metra bent over the corpse and lifted the pendant. Cashel had thought it was metal. Raised so that light fell on it, he realized it was transparent and shimmered like the fire opals which nobles from Shengy wore when they visited Garric's court.

"The Talisman of See-Char!" the wizard cried. "It wasn't a myth after all! Relonia really did see it in her questing dreams!"

"What is it, Metra?" Tilphosa said. Her voice was calm but a little louder than it need have been to be heard. She'd stuck the chisel under her sash, but as she spoke her fingers stroked the use-polished pommel.

Metra pulled the chain over the creature's shattered head. It didn't seem to bother her to touch the congealing ruin. She held the pendant out at arm's length and turned it to view from every angle.

"It's what kept him alive," she said. "He must have been a great wizard. Perhaps he was fleeing the cataclysm that wiped out the remainder of the Third Race when his vessel crashed here. The amulet is a thing of wonderful power."

"Did all of them kill this way?" Cashel asked. "All the Third Race, I mean."

As he spoke, the flesh blackened and soughed from the corpse. The shin bones separated, pulled from the thighs by their own weight; they fell to the leafmold around the pod. The bones themselves crumbled first to dust, then less than dust. A faint black slime remained to color the golden cavity.

"What?" said Metra with the angry irritation of someone interrupted by what they think is a stupid question. "No, of course not, they were more advanced than we are in many respects. The amulet could keep him alive, but it wouldn't dull his hunger. Over the years, the centuries...."

She smiled at Cashel, looking down on his peasant simplicity from the height of her sophisticated wisdom. "Well, after all," she said. "There wouldn't have been anything for him to eat except other castaways, would there?"

"Ah," said Cashel.

"Metra, put that amulet back in the coffin and leave it," Tilphosa said with a grimace of disgust. "I don't think it's a good thing to have, however valuable it may be."

"Don't act like a child!" snapped the wizard. "With the Talisman of See-Char we'll be able to—"

Cashel reached out and closed his fist over the dangling amulet. It felt greasy, as though the stone was a heavy liquid.

"Tilphosa's right," he said. "We're not going to have this around."

"Who are you to tell me what to do, you barbarian?" the wizard shouted. She held onto the chain. Cashel lifted his arm until Metra dangled by her hand.

"Metra!" Tilphosa said. "Let go at once!"

The chain didn't break, but Metra whimpered and let go when the thin metal had lacerated her palm beyond bearing. She tried to grab it again, but Cashel body checked her with a thrust of his hip.

"I'm the guy who killed the thing wearing it," he said in a low growl.

He dropped the amulet onto bare stone. Tilphosa caught the wizard as she crawled toward it. Cashel brought the butt of his staff down in a short, sharp blow, the same way he'd smashed the creature's skull. The amulet exploded into powder.

"Now," Cashel said. "Let's get back to the others."

* * *

Gar's senses were even sharper than the ones Garric was used to. He smelled the campfire fifty double paces before he reached their encampment, and he smelled the scattered garbage and human excrement almost as quickly.

Garric wrinkled his nose in disgust, less from the stench itself than what it said about the gang he was joining. The tanyard in Barca's Hamlet, where Halmat and later his son cured hides with dung, was downwind from the rest of the community. Vascay's band didn't bother with such niceties.

Garric stepped into the natural clearing where the band camped. Tarpaulins were strung for shelter from the frequent rains. Smoke from the cookfire clumped in the humid air. A pudgy fellow stirred the stewpot hanging from a rod placed between wooden forks.

Ceto stood in a midst of half a dozen men. One of them held a horn that had probably once belonged to a noble's coachman: the etchings on the curved brass tube were filled with silver and gold. He raised it and blew a long, deep note calling in other members of the band.

A pair of giant fig trees had shaded out all lesser growth save for ferns and seedlings with trunks only the diameter of a finger. The bandits had chopped away some of the palely-hopeful saplings and were using others as drying racks for soaked clothes and bedding.

"Gar?" chirped Tint, still in the clump of elephant ears growing at the edge of the clearing. "Gar not be hurt? Gar?"

Nobody noticed Garric until he whipped a canvas ground sheet off the bush it was draped on and wrapped it around his waist. Tunics hung not far away, but Garric needed to cover himself more than he cared about the style of his garment. He knew that being naked would put him at a greater disadvantage than being unarmed did.

"Hey, monkey-boy!" called the cook, sweating profusely despite being stripped to a breechclout. "Get some more wood, and make it dry this time! That punk you came back with last time isn't worth the trouble to toss it on the fire!"

Ceto didn't look around, but the peg-legged older fellow he was showing the sapphire ring to did. He carried too much of his weight around his waistline, but he still had the shoulders of a powerful man. The two knives thrust under his orange silk sash had simple, serviceable blades... but they'd been forged from steel, not iron, and their bone scales were yellowed by frequent use.

Garric would have recognized the leader, Vascay, even without Gar's memory. The other men were mostly bigger, younger, and more heavily-armed, but this fellow was in charge.

Garric noticed the glance; he nodded in response. Vascay made no overt reaction, not even a raised eyebrow, but his face tightened minusculely above his grizzled, short-cropped beard.

The brain-damaged Gar wouldn't have met another man's eyes. Garric shrugged mentally. Well, the whole band would learn shortly that things had changed.

"You've got my ring there, Ceto," Garric said in a clear voice. "I'll take it back now, if you please."

Ceto turned in amazement which changed swiftly to anger. He folded his right hand over the ring, protecting it at the cost of preventing him from drawing his sword. He reached for a dagger in his bandolier. Garric's left hand caught the bandit's wrist.

"Hey, what's got into Gar?" cried the fat cook. The horn was bringing more men out of the forest. They were calling too, curious about why they'd been summoned.

Ceto tried—vainly—to free his knife hand. He snarled, "Sister take you, you—"

Garric punched him in the pit of the stomach, between the flapping halves of his armored vest. Ceto's face went white; his legs wobbled and he sank to his knees.

Garric was breathing hard. His whole body shuddered with awareness of what he'd done and the dangers in what might come next.. Ceto had tensed his belly muscles against the blow he saw coming, but Gar's arm had the strength of a mallet.

"Watch he doesn't bite!" a bandit shouted. "Is he foaming at the mouth?"

Garric started to unfold the fingers of Ceto's right fist. Vascay touched the back of Garric's hand and said, "I'll take care of the ring."

Garric was ready to flare out in any direction. "I found—" he said, straightening in a surge of fury.

"Hold him," Vascay said. Men grabbed Garric's arms from behind. Tint was chattering on the edge of the encampment.

Garric hunched down and brought his arms forward, swinging the men holding him against one another. The fellow to Garric's left shouted as he lost his grip. Other bandits grabbed Garric, tearing away his makeshift garment. He went over backward in a pile of men.

"I said hold him, Sister take you!" Vascay shouted. "I didn't say kick him, Ademos! Now settle down all of you!"

Garric said, "All right, all right," and let himself relax. Two men were holding either arm. Several were on his legs though he couldn't see them because of the fellow sprawled across his torso.

Vascay looked down with a bland smile. He held the ring between thumb and finger of his left hand; the sapphire was a glitter too small to have color.

"Let him up, then," Vascay said to the men holding Garric. "He's ready to behave."

Ceto had put both his hands on the ground. He was trying to rise, but he still couldn't breathe properly. His face was twisted, and his lips formed curses that he lacked the strength to utter.

"But boss?" said the man with the horn, one of those on Garric's arms. "He's gone mad, hasn't he?"

Vascay glanced back at Ceto, his expression friendly in a mild fashion and his eyes as hard as chips of jasper. He'd hooked his right hand negligently into his sash where it half-covered a knife hilt.

"I'm not mad," Garric said, trying to get his breathing under control. "I'm just not in a good humor. But yes, I'll behave."

"What's going on?" asked one of a pair of late-comers just arrived from the forest.

His companion cried, "Hey, Vascay! Is that what we come for? The ring, I mean?"

Vascay thrust his boot out—not quite a kick, but a thump that got the attention of the man on Garric's torso. "I said, let him up, Halophus," he said. He didn't raise his voice, but the mild previous tone was beginning to congeal into something much harder. "Toster, Hame—all of you. Let him up."

The bandits released Garric, grunting as they got to their feet. The stubby redhead who'd been holding Garric's right ankle scrambled away. That would be Ademos. He was the one who'd just kicked Garric; a frequent sport of his when poor Gar wore this flesh.

That was a matter for another time. Garric sat up, set a foot behind him and stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest, a show of coordination that he correctly assumed Vascay would notice.

He bent to retrieve the ground sheet. Vascay stepped on a corner of the canvas, pinning it to the ground, and instead tossed Garric a tunic draped over a guy line anchoring an overhead tarp. "Try one of mine," Vascay said. "It ought to fit."

He grinned and added, "The way the weight's distributed is a little different, of course."

The tunic was close-woven linen with vertical stripes of brown and cream; a well-made, attractive garment which indeed did fit Garric as well as anything in the palace wardrobe. He raised it, bunched, above his head, then slipped it quickly down to cover him. Under the circumstances, he didn't want either to cover his eyes or bind his arms any longer than necessary.

Vascay chuckled. "Nobody's going to stick you while you're dressing, boy," he said.

"By the Sister!" snarled Ceto, finally on his feet. He reached for his sword. "I'm going to stick him any way he comes!"

"That's not how we do things here, Brother Ceto," Vascay said calmly. "We're civilized men, remember, driven to our present straits by a tyrant's exactions rather than our own vicious natures."

Ceto snarled a curse. Garric tensed to jump. The chine of Ceto's swordblade sang against the lip of the scabbard as he drew it.

"Ceto!" said Vascay.

His was smiling. His knives were in his hands: the left one held low with the edge upward for a disemboweling stroke, the right one beside his ear ready to throw, blade vertical and the hilt in Vascay's palm.

"Rules, Brother Ceto," Vascay said, mildly again. None of the other bandits had drawn their weapons; some were deliberately holding their hands out where they could be seen to be empty. "We don't fight among ourselves, remember?"

"Gar's not one of us!" Ceto snarled; he slammed his sword back in its sheath, however. "He's an animal!"

Garric took a deep breath. He didn't know what the situation he'd stepped into was, but he knew there was one. The politics of this band were probably less complex than those of the royal council, but the sanctions for mistakes were likely to be quicker and more final.

"Captain Vascay," he said, giving the leader a half-nod, half-bow. "Tint and I found the ring we're here searching for. Ceto robbed us."

Toster was nearly as tall as Garric and much heavier; only part of his weight was fat. "What is this?" he asked in puzzlement. "What's Gar doing talking like that?"

"When Ceto kicked me in the head...," Garric said, raising his finger to his bruised temple. It struck him that Gar's unkempt bush of hair might have prevented a cracked skull in all truth. "I regained my faculties."

"The animal tried to take the ring away from me after I'd found it," Ceto said. "I knocked him down—and I'll do it again, Vascay, whether you like it or not!"

Garric waited silently. In his experience, you didn't threaten a man like Vascay. If you wound up with that sort as an enemy, you'd best deal with him quickly—and not turn your back until you had.

Instead of speaking, Vascay stepped backward, a movement that allowed him to keep both Ceto and Garric in his field of view at the same time. His knives were back in his sash, but Garric had seen how quickly they appeared when Vascay chose.

"Well, Gar," the chieftain said cheerfully, "then you'll understand when I tell you that I'm not a captain. I'm merely Brother Vascay, a member of the band and its spokesman only so long as the majority wills it. Is that not so, brethren?"

"We all know that, Vascay!" Ceto said. "Sometimes I wonder if you remember it, though."

The others didn't speak. Their attention was uneasy; their eyes moved from Ceto to Vascay, sometimes pausing to consider the person who'd been Gar when he went into the jungle this morning.

"So, Gar," Vascay said calmly. "You say you found the ring—"

Which had vanished somewhere onto Vascay's person during the same series of movements that brought out the knives ready to kill. Conjurors came regularly to the Sheep Fair, but Garric had never seen one as quick with his hands as Vascay.

"—and Ceto took it from you?"

"Tint led me to the ring," Garric said, looking over his shoulder. "I dug it out."

Tint had come into the clearing when the shouting died down, but she ducked away from Garric's glance. He wouldn't have believed it was possible to hide behind the tuft of ferns into which the beastgirl disappeared.

"How come Gar's talking like that?" Toster repeated plaintively. "He can't be Gar."

Garric kept Toster at the corner of his eye. He and Vascay—who were probably opposite poles of the band's intellectual spectrum—were the only members who fully grasped the truth. Unlike the others, those two knew they weren't dealing with dim-witted Gar. The big man wasn't hostile and Vascay seemed more positive than not, but they were potentially dangerous.

"Why do you talk to that animal?" Ceto demanded. "It doesn't matter what Gar says, he's a—"

"Arguments between brethren," Vascay interrupted, "are judged by the Ball of Truth. We'll have the trial now."

He gestured to a wooden chest resting on blocks beneath the nearby tarpaulin. It looked to Garric like a sea locker, though its floral decoration was of a much higher order than the chip carvings of dolphins and mermaids that graced most sailors' chests.

"What do you mean a trial?" Ceto said.

"Hey, it's just Gar," said Ademos, as puzzled as Ceto and almost as worried about what was going on. "Trials are for brothers, not monkeys."

"Shall we cap each other's quotations from Celondre, Ademos?" Garric said in a cutting tone. "'The same chance that joins the wolf and the lamb....' Or do you have a different favorite poet?"

"What?" said Ademos. "What's he talking about?"

Garric smiled coldly, though maybe it was a shame that Ademos hadn't turned out to be a scholar. A contest of verses would be one way to prove to the band that Garric's claim wasn't the maundering of a monkey boy. In his mind he completed the tag, "... makes you my enemy."

But Vascay was preparing to prove matters in a different fashion. He squatted and opened the chest without using a key, keeping his eyes on Ceto. His left hand darted within and came out with a red ball the size of a hickory nut.

"Which will you have, Ceto?" Vascay asked as he stood upright again. "Will you tell your story first, or will you hold the Ball of Truth after Brother Gar has spoken his version?"

"He's not a brother, he's an animal," Ceto said, apparently hoping that repetition would give his statement an effect it'd so far lacked. "You can't make me go through a trial with an animal!"

A bird shrieked in the canopy, responding to Ceto's rising tone. Another of its kind answered from a distance.