Mistress of the Catacombs (2 page)

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Cashel or-Kenset walked down the crowded street beside Tenoctris, protecting the birdlike little woman without really thinking about it. Tenoctris didn't seem frail any more than a wren does to somebody like Cashel who'd often watched those sprightly, tuneful little creatures. But she was old, seventy years or so; and small; and a woman.

Cashel himself was none of those things. People who watched where they were going didn't barge into him. In a busy city like Valles, there were always those who didn't watch. They bounced back from Cashel's shoulder or the arm holding his quarterstaff, placed for the moment in front of the old wizard.

"Huh!" said Tenoctris, stopping before the open front of a shop selling used metalwork. Nearest the street were bronze bedsteads with verdigrised statues further inside. Cashel knew that people paid good money for art, but time had eaten these figures to greenish lumps with here a torso, there something recognizable as a horse's head. Smaller—and therefore more easily stolen—items were racked against the back wall.

Tenoctris pointed to an octagonal pewter bowl, racked on its side so that passersby could see the niello symbols on the interior. She said, "Look at that, Cashel. I wonder how it got here?"

Cashel couldn't read or write beyond picking his own name out with care, but he recognized the flowing black marks as letters in the Old Script. Scholars, Garric and his sister Sharina included because their father Reise had taught them, could read the Old Script, but the only people who wrote that way now were wizards when they drew words of power for their incantations.

Cashel gripped his staff a little tighter. Wizards were just people. Tenoctris was a wizard, and she was a lot like the grandmother who'd raised him and Ilna when their father brought them home with no word—ever—of who their mother might be.

But there were wizards who thought their power let them push other people around. Cashel had met that sort too; and they'd all been wrong when they'd thought they could push Cashel or anybody Cashel happened to have put himself in front of at the time.

The shopkeeper noticed Tenoctris' interest and got up from his stool. He was a balding man with a wispy goatee who reminded Cashel far more of a weasel than anybody so fat should've done.

"You have excellent taste, madam," the fellow said He lifted the bowl from its place and brought it toward them through the maze of corroded metal. "This is a genuine Old Kingdom antique, the prized possession of a noble family here in Valles. Only their present distressed circumstances persuaded them to part with it."

"It's a great deal older than that," Tenoctris said sharply. "This came from the grave of a priest of the Mistress, either on Tisamur or just possibly on Laut. There would have been a lid as well."

"I'm sure I can find madam a craftsman who can make any sort of lid madam wishes," the proprietor said, still smiling. "The workmanship is quite exquisite, is it not? And such a remarkable state of preservation."

Cashel blinked. The fellow was responding to what Tenoctris said, but he wasn't listening to her.

Tenoctris backed and raised her hand as the proprietor offered her the bowl. "No, I don't want to touch it!" she said. "You wouldn't either, if you had good sense. It held the priest's brain. The sort of thoughts that a priest of the Mistress might have aren't for sane humans—or humans at all, I'd say. Melt it down! Can't you feel the power in it?"

Cashel couldn't see swirls of power the way Tenoctris said she did, tangles that clung to objects the way foam boils below the rocks in a fast-flowing stream, but he knew when they were there. Things used by wizards in their art held some of their power ever after; prayer permeated the stones of a temple; and scenes of blood and death held stains much deeper than those of the fluids that leaked from corpses.

The pewter bowl created a sort of pressure like that of air gone still before a storm. It didn't frighten Cashel any more than a storm would, but it was something to be wary of. Unconsciously he shifted his grip on the hickory quarterstaff that he'd shaped with his own hands as a boy and had carried ever since.

The shopkeeper blinked and looked at the bowl in his hands. Cashel wondered if the fellow really saw the object. More likely it gleamed in his mind like a stack of silver pieces or even gold Sheaf-and-Scepters.

"Well then," the man said in the same oily voice as before. "Perhaps madam would care to see some candlesticks from the palace of King Carus himself, preserved in the collection of a noble family linked by blood to the ancient royal house?"

"Come, Cashel," Tenoctris said, turning abruptly and continuing down the street with quick, short steps.

After a moment, she sighed and slowed to a pace more proper for an old woman and a youth accustomed to walking with sheep. She said, "In my own day I didn't get out into the world enough to realize how ignorant most people were, but I'm sure it was no better then."

Tenoctris had washed up on the shore of Barca's Hamlet one morning, thrown there by a storm not of wind but of wizardry. She said she'd been wrenched from the age a thousand years before, when King Carus ruled and the Isles were unified for the last time in their history.

"Well, people can't know about everything," Cashel said, calm as he usually was. "I don't know about much of anything at all, Tenoctris. Except sheep."

He grinned. He'd have given his quarterstaff a spin for the pleasure of it, except that the street was far too crowded. Seven feet of hickory take up a lot of room, especially when the hands of a youth as strong as Cashel were whirling them.

They passed a shop which sold new and used bedding: coarse wool covers to be stuffed with straw for folk with just enough money to sleep on a mattress rather than the rush floor; close-woven linen that their betters would fill with feathers; and blankets, coverlets, and bedcurtains to suit any taste or purse. Tenoctris didn't give the wares even a glance.

"Was the bowl what you were looking for?" Cashel asked. He was glad to escort Tenoctris through the city—though he didn't mind the palace, there wasn't anything for him to do there—but he was sure that the old wizard had more in mind than a change of scene for herself.

Tenoctris hadn't explained, probably because it hadn't crossed her mind to. Cashel was used to doing things simply because somebody asked him, but this seemed a good time to say something. He guessed he was about as curious as the next fellow, but he'd learned that a lot of times it was better to just keep his eyes open than to ask and be lied to—or be given a flip answer, the sort of joke people tossed at the dumb orphan kid.

Cashel's fingers tightened very slightly again. They hadn't laughed at him much since he got his growth, though.

"What?" said Tenoctris. It'd taken her mind a moment to come up from the depths of whatever mental sea it swam in. "Oh, dear, I don't think so, Cashel. But I'm not really sure. I did a guidance spell because there's something nagging at me, and it directed me here. I think."

She gave him an apologetic grin. "I'm not a very powerful wizard, you know," she said. "Even in times like these, when there's so much power everywhere."

Tenoctris had explained that every thousand years there was more of the sort of power that wizards used. In those times wizards could do far more than in the past, and generally far more than they'd intended. It was a peak like that which ended the Old Kingdom; and the forces were rising again.

Cashel and the wizard reached a building site from which the remains of the former brick and wattle structure had mostly been cleared. Though heavy construction wagons weren't allowed in Valles during daylight hours, the stacks of freshly-cut stone for the new foundation blocked part of the street.

Cashel paused, letting a group of housewives pass from the other direction with baskets full of greens bought in the produce market a little nearer the river. He could've pushed through the congestion easily enough, but he and Tenoctris weren't in any kind of hurry.

On the building site, men were already at work on the kiln which would provide lime for the cement; it was better to burn it here than to transport so dangerous a load through the city, with the chance of losing it to a sudden rainstorm besides. Piled as high as the quarried blocks was a load of broken limestone and marble to feed the kiln. Some of the bigger pieces had been ships' ballast at one time; those were dark and still slimy from bilge water.

The housewives passed; Tenoctris started forward, then stopped when she realized that Cashel was staring at the rubble. She said, "Cashel?"

Cashel's skin prickled, the same sort of feeling as when he got too much sun when plowing in early Spring. There was something about the stones.... Holding his staff out for balance in his left hand, he clambered onto the pile.

Several of the workmen glanced toward Cashel, but nobody shouted at him. He wasn't doing any harm by climbing around on a pile of rock, so only the urge of people to boss other people would've led them to speak. Cashel was too big for that to seem a good idea, even to a half-dozen burly workmen.

Tenoctris watched intently, but she didn't say anything that might have distracted Cashel from whatever he was doing. Cashel grinned. He didn't know what he was doing either, just that there was something about these chunks of stone that made his senses prick up. It was the way you could feel there was something wrong with your sheep, even before ewes ran out of the woods blatting because one of their sisters had managed to catch her neck in the fork of a sapling.

"Here!" Cashel said in triumph. He used his free hand and his staff's iron-shod tip to pry a piece of marble out of a litter of limestone gravel.

"Hey! What's that you're doing up there?" called the foreman of the building crew, a squat man of thirty with a bushy moustache and biceps that would've looked well on a man of twice the size. The other workmen watched in interest, glad for an excuse to stop work and hopeful that there'd be more entertainment to come.

"I'm looking at your rock," Cashel said. The crew wouldn't own the building materials, but he guessed they'd still be willing to sell a chunk for the price of a round of ale. "This piece here."

He hefted it, noticing the foreman's eyes narrow. It was the torso of a statue, meant originally for a woman, Cashel guessed, though he couldn't swear to much in the shape the piece was now. The marble had weathered and worse, been buried in a forest where rotting leaves had blackened it and eaten at the surface during every rainstorm. In some places white foam had boiled from cancerous pits in the stone. A soaking in a ship's bilge had added final indignities.

Though the block was of no obvious interest—even to Cashel, except for the tingling it raised in him—it was still stone and weighed as much as a man of ordinary size. The foreman knew that and understood what it meant that Cashel held it easily in one hand.

"I want to buy it from you," Cashel said. "I'll pay you a, a...."

He didn't know what name a silver coin had. In Barca's Hamlet there was mostly bronze and little enough of that, except during the Sheep Fair when merchants and drovers came down the road from Carcosa. Ornifal used different coins; and though Cashel now carried a purseful of them on a cord around his neck, they weren't something he paid a lot of attention to.

"A silver piece!" he said, getting the idea out well enough. That'd buy a jar of wine that the whole crew could share at any of the open-fronted cookshops in this quarter of the city.

"For what?" cried a workman in amazement.

"Let's see his money," said another, slipping his masonry chisel into a pocket in his leather apron.

"What is it you want it for?" The foreman said, scowling like thunder. He was confused and because of that a little angry. He walked forward.

Instead of answering—beause he didn't have an answer, just a feeling—Cashel said, "Tenoctris, will you pay the man for me? I, ah...."

To pull out his purse and open it, Cashel would have to use both hands. He didn't want to let go of either his staff or the piece of statue until he'd gotten to a place where he had more friends than he did here.

"Yes, of course," Tenoctris said. She carried a small purse in the sleeve of her silk brocade robe. She squeezed a coin through the loosened ties, then held it up so that sunlight winked on the silver in the sight of all the workmen; then she gave it to the foreman.

"Deal?" said Cashel from his perch above the others.

"Deal, by the Lady!" said one of the workmen. "For that you can carry off the whole pile and we'll tell the boss the rats ate it."

The foreman rang the coin against the head of the hammer in his belt. It sang with the bright note of silver rather than something duller and leaden.

"Deal," he said, still a little doubtful. He spat in his palm and held it out to Tenoctris. She stared at the man blankly.

Cashel stepped down from the mound of rubble with the care required by bad footing and the weight he carried. "Shake his hand on the deal, Tenoctris," he said. "Ah, if you wouldn't mind?"

"Of course," said the old woman, nodding to Cashel in gratitude for having explained how you sealed a bargain. Nobles probably did it different. Tenoctris was of a noble house; though from what she'd said, in her lifetime they hadn't had money even by the standards of Barca's Hamlet. Still, she took the foreman's hand gracefully like an adult humoring a child and let him shake hers up and down.