Mistress of the Catacombs (25 page)

Cashel smiled as they trudged on. This one wasn't a girl to get on the wrong side of. He was used to that, of course, since you could say the same thing about his sister Ilna. Despite her being a lady and all, Tilphosa made Cashel feel pretty much at home.

"Cashel?" the girl said. "Are the lights a kind of window that you created when you broke down the barrier around us in the temple?"

Cashel shrugged. He didn't like that sort of question. It was partly that he didn't know the answer, and partly that he was afraid the answer was yes. Like he'd told Tilphosa, he'd always been careful with the strength of his arms because he knew the damage he'd do otherwise. If he was doing things that he didn't know about, then Duzi alone knew the harm he might cause.

"I don't know, mistress," he said. "I didn't mean to, but I don't know."

As they got closer to the pale blur. Alone of the images he'd seen since they came to this place, this was in a real clearing. It hung in the air, in the middle of six straight-trunked trees whose branches wove a kind of arbor overhead.

Cashel hadn't felt anything around the other images. No reason he should, of course, since he'd found that they were only there to his eyes, or maybe to his mind's eye; but this one—

This one didn't frighten Cashel; but he guessed the feeling he got would have frightened a lot of other people.

Tilphosa looked around with a set expression, then picked up a fallen branch and raised it as a club. The wood had rotted to punk, but it seemed to make her feel better to hold something she could at least pretend was a weapon. She must feel something here too.

There was only blackness inside the ball of light. Cashel squinted, then twisted his head to one side and the other, waiting for the image to appear.

"I don't see anything," he said.

"It's dark wherever it is," Tilphosa said. Her voice had a studied firmness. "Whatever it is. But it's there. It's watching us, Cashel."

"Yeah, I think it is," he said.

He turned. The sailors had stopped some distance back; they were watching him.

"Come on," he said. "We're not going to stay here after all."

They resumed walking. "Do you think the sky ahead is getting lighter, Cashel?" the girl asked.

"Maybe," he said. "We'll know before long."

Cashel felt the eyes on him long after the blur had vanished from sight behind them.

* * *

"Can't we have a fire?" asked Metron, shivering on an bucket upturned in the middle of the stable floor. He wore an ostler's tunic, filthy but dry, while water pooled beneath the stall door from which his own robe of silk brocade hung. "It's not just the cold water, you see. I shut my whole body down when I sent my soul out of it."

Garric smiled. Several of the bandits went grim-faced at the mention of wizardry, but others laughed outright at the absurdity of what they'd just heard.

"Can we have a fire in a barn full of straw?" Vascay mused aloud. "No, we can't. Anyhow, with all the horses in here you'd warm up quick enough even if it were cold out. Which it's not."

He coughed to clear his throat. Garric, sitting beside Vascay, glanced at him to judge his expression.

Vascay's face gave nothing away. He opened and closed his left fist; at each movement, the sapphire ring appeared on or disappeared from his little finger. He didn't speak.

"That's the ring I sent you for, isn't it?" said Metron. He'd obviously been taken aback by Vascay's attitude but decided to deal with it by bluster. He held out his hand. "Well done. Now we have to release Thalemos before we can topple the Intercessor."

Tint lay in the straw at Garric's feet, watching Metron intently. At first Garric thought the tremble of her ribcage against his ankle was purring, but after a moment he realized it was an inaudible growl.

"We'll listen to your proposal, wizard," Vascay said nonchalantly. "But right at the moment, I'd say what my brethren and I have to do is get out of this district by dawn... and Thalemos, I'd say, could take care of himself."

"I've been saying that!" Ademos said loudly. "This whole business was a bad idea from the first. We're lucky we didn't all die on Serpents' Isle instead of just Kelbat and Ceto, and now that the Intercessor knows what's going on, well!"

Other men openly agreed with him. From the expressions around the circle, Garric thought more would've called, "Right!" and "The quicker, the better," if they hadn't disliked Ademos too much to willingly identify themselves with his position.

The wizard nodded to the Brethren, his expression bland. If the situation were what Vascay baldly stated, the gang would be gone already and Metron would still be on the bottom of the pond. Vascay was using the legitimate threat to restructure the relationship between him and Metron. If Metron called his bluff....

Except that Garric wasn't sure Vascay was bluffing; and if Garric wasn't sure, then Metron would be a fool to take the risk.

Metron wasn't a fool. He spread his hands and said, "I'm sorry, Master Vascay, I got ahead of myself. This isn't the catastrophe it must seem to your good selves, arriving as you have on the tail of the Intercessor's troops. Echeon is flailing about, but he can't overcome foreordained fate."

"Is fate going to keep the Intercessor's knife from cutting Lord Thalemos' throat?" Vascay said bluntly. "Why won't he do that, Metron?"

"If Echeon kills Thalemos," the wizard said, leaning forward to seem more earnest, "then the real Thalemos will appear somewhere else. Echeon has seen the future, or at least a portion of it. He knows that Lord Thalemos becomes Earl of Laut, so his only hope is to bend him to his will first. When we rescue Thalemos, we'll be able to proceed with the plan."

"Seems to me," Hame said slowly, "that if it's as simple as that, we all oughta go back east where we come from and wait for the happy day. Eh?"

Metron spread his hands again and nodded gravely, his expression studiedly reasonable. "Lord Thalemos will become Earl of Laut," he said. "But he'll surely do so as the Intercessor's puppet if we don't intervene. Echeon is a great wizard, I assure you; but with Thalemos and the power of the ring—"

He gestured toward Vascay's hand, at the moment empty. He wasn't demanding the ring as he had been before.

"—we can overturn him and return Laut to freedom and prosperity."

Metron cleared his throat and added, "I wonder if you'd be good enough to tell me how you found the ring, Master Vascay? I'm sure it was a difficult task."

Vascay glanced at Garric and raised an eyebrow. The tiny sapphire winked on his finger.

"I found the statue of Thalemos," Garric said. He saw more value in learning where Metron would go with the information than he did in hiding it from him. "It'd been dragged a distance from its plinth and built into a later wall. The ring was on its finger, as you'd said."

Metron's eyes narrowed minisculely. "There was no guardian, then?" he asked.

Instead of answering, Garric let his lips smile. He said, "Why did somebody put up a statue of Lord Thalemos hundreds of years before he was born, wizard?"

Metron's eyes were wary but he reflected Garric's smile with an unctuous one of his own. "The statue was carved two thousand years ago, sir, not mere centuries. This was done by the command of the Intercessor Echea, every bit as powerful a wizard as her distant descendant of today. They both and all of their line wish to bind the fate they know they cannot change."

The wizard turned his hand up; his smile a little harder, a little more real. Answer for answer....

"There was no guardian," Garric said. "There was a poisonous snake, but there's a lot of snakes on the island. And there were puffballs growing near the site, which I avoided."

"Did you indeed?" Metron said. "A foolish question, of course: you wouldn't be here otherwise. You're a very clever young man, sir; very clever indeed."

He returned his gaze to the chieftain. "Master Vascay," he said, "Echeon will have placed protections of art over Lord Thalemos; these I can overcome. But there will be physical barriers as well, and against them my arts are useless. Will you help me, knowing that the risk is great but that on the other side of danger is freedom for yourself and your compatriots?"

Men murmured to their neighbors, but for a moment nobody responded directly to the wizard. Vascay kept his eyes on Metron, his own face impassive. At last he said, "So. We'd have to find Lord Thalemos first, I suppose?"

"Lord Thalemos is in the prison in the center of Durassa," Metron said. "The Spike, it's called. It's a tower."

"We bloody well know what the Spike is," Ademos muttered, staring blackly at the pounded earth floor.

Metron raised a bead of clear quartz, one of several score round beads of various stones which he wore around his neck. "Thalemos had a similar necklace. Echeon took it from him when he arrived at the prison, but this—"

He wriggled his necklace slightly, causing light to cascade from the highly-polished beads.

"—has stored all the images it received before that moment."

"He could've been moved," Ademos said.

"To where?" Prada snapped. "Where is there that'd be harder to get into than the Spike, let alone out of? It's all over if Thalemos is in there!"

"I think not, sir," said Metron courteously. The ragged tunic handicapped him, but he still managed to project a degree of dignified authority. "If two of you men are expert climbers and if you all have the courage of patriots, it will assuredly be possible to rescue Lord Thalemos."

Vascay looked around the circle. Each of the bandits fell silent as his gaze crossed them. "What do you say, brethren?" he asked in an almost teasing tone.

"What do you say, chief?" Hame said fiercely.

Vascay tapped his peg leg with an index finger as he paused. "Hakken, you can climb, can't you?" he said to the little ex-sailor.

"Yeah, all right," Hakken said. He didn't look happy about it. "But—oh, Sister take all wizards, I'll go."

Vascay's eyes met Garric's. "Gar," he said, "you used to be able to climb like a monkey. Can you still?"

Garric grinned with anticipation. "I can climb," he said. Regardless of the abilities Gar's muscles remembered, Garric knew that the skills he himself had honed robbing gallinule nests off the coast of Haft would take him any place a sailor could go.

Tint sat up abruptly and clamped a possessive hand on Garric's knee. "Gar?" she growled. "Me go!"

Garric smiled wider, though his stomach was twitching now. "But there'll be three of us, Vascay," he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As the Councillors filed in from the other end of the big chamber accompanied by their aides, Sharina saw many expressions go blank. She and Liane were seated to either side of Carus at the round table.

Liane always attended council meetings, but in the past she'd sat slightly back from the table in the capacity of Garric's secretary; Carus had made her an open participant, over her own objection. Princess Sharina of Haft—Sharina smiled; she wouldn't have minded the style of address she had to use in court if it weren't for the hot, bulky garments that went with it—was sometimes present, but on those occasions she sat at the end of the table among lesser invitees rather than taking the place of honor at Garric's right.

King Carus had placed her there, not Sharina herself. Sharina knew Carus needed the support of both women to carry off his impersonation of Garric, but there was more going on than that. Garric genuinely tried to get along with others; Carus was much more convinced of his own authority. If several of the noblemen found the presence of two young women at his council offensive—so much the worse for the noblemen!

Though Lord Waldron, head of the royal army, was seventy years old, he walked straight as a spearshaft and his mind was as hard as the spear's steel head. He glared through Liane toward Carus as an aide drew out the chair to her left for Waldron to sit on.

Carus looked back at him. The king's face was drawn with sleeplessness and frustration, and the anger in his eyes had nothing to do with matters of precedence. Waldron had proved often in his long life that he feared nothing in this world, but Sharina watched his expression grow more guarded now. He wasn't afraid of Carus, but the king's fury showed that this would be no ordinary council meeting.

Chancellor Royhas settled beside Sharina with a murmured, "Princess...." If he was disconcerted to find Prince Garric flanked by two women, he concealed the fact with his usual aplomb. Royhas was as well-born as Waldron, but the soldier was a great landholder from the north of the island while Royhas came from the aristocracy of trade centered in Valles.

Liane leaned to whisper in Carus' ear. The king gave a hard smile and said in a normal voice—not loud, especially against the shuffle of feet and scrape of chairs, but loud enough all those around him could hear, "The aides need to be present, Liane. Even if we take precautions, what happens here won't be a secret long. It'll be the speed we act with that saves us."

Waldron raised a hand above his shoulder and crooked a finger. An aide—a blond youth with the face of cherub but a swordsman's thick wrists—bent his head close so that Waldron could whisper to him.

The boy nodded and nodded again, then set off for the doorway against the flow of those still entering. He started running as soon he reached the corridor.

Carus had been watching the byplay also. He turned, met Sharina's eyes, and grinned broadly.

Lord Attaper stood just inside the door. He'd arrived for the meeting dressed as commander of the Blood Eagles in gilded cuirass and helmet, studded leather apron, and heavy boots. Attaper even wore his equipment belt, but his ivory-inlaid sword and dagger scabbards were empty.

"Your highness?" he called. He gestured to the doorway, empty now that the last entrants were sitting down. Each councillor's aides stood against the wall behind their principal.

"Right, close us up," Carus said, his raised voice covering the buzz of whispers. Chairs scuffed, but there was dead silence by the time the heavy panel slammed under the pull of Attaper's arm.

Instead of taking the empty chair midway along the right-hand curve of the table, Attaper stood at Parade Rest beside the doorway. Carus looked at him and grinned again. The Blood Eagle, his feet spread and his hands crossed behind his back, had chosen a place outside the formal seating order to avoid giving superior status to his rival Lord Waldron.

Carus swept his gaze across the council. His eyes had the hard glint of a sea eagle viewing white foam on the wave tops, judging which flecks were wind and which might be made by the fins of fish just below the surface.

"We're being attacked by rogues who call themselves the Confederacy of the West," he said. "They're using wizardry now, though they'll be bringing swords out soon I shouldn't wonder. We're going to cut them off at the knees by moving on them immediately."

Carus paused to let what he'd just said sink in. Aides scribbled in waxed notebooks or on sheets of smooth-planed white birch; the seated principals glanced around to check their colleagues' reaction, but for the most part they kept silent.

Lord Angier, who held a rotating appointment as representative of the united guilds of Valles, was the exception. More puffed up by his presence in the council than daunted by awareness that he was far the most junior person in the room, he said, "What do you mean, 'We're being attacked by wizardry,' your highness?"

Carus pointed his left index finger at Angier. In a voice that was no less terrible for being quiet, he said, "Guildsman, stupid questions wouldn't amuse me even when time wasn't as short as it is today. Shut your mouth and listen."

Angier gaped, first at the king and then at the chancellor whom Sharina knew had acted as his patron. Royhas grimaced and jerked his head in a swift gesture of negation. Angier suddenly understood the enormity of what he'd done; he wilted visibly.

"Right," said Carus softly.

If Garric had been chairing this meeting, there'd have been a babble of voices—some raised in shouts. With Carus at the head of the table, Sharina had a vision of these same men facing a lion in an enclosed space. A hungry lion.

"The Confederates 're gathering their forces at Donelle on the east coast of Tisamur," the king said. "Donelle seems to be where the wizards in league with them have their den as well."

Liane opened the parchment codex on which she'd written her notes on the Confederacy, summarizing information from a score of sources. Garric would have asked her to brief the assembly at this point. Carus didn't bother—with an explanation or with Liane, either one.

"I'm going to take the fleet and the army to Tisamur," he continued harshly. "Land in the Bight of Donelle, smash the Confederacy's army, and hang every wizard I can catch. Zettin and Koprathu—I'll sail in three days. How many ships will you have ready?"

Zettin, the Admiral of the Fleet, was a nobleman in his late thirties—a former Blood Eagle who'd take any risk for success. Master Koprathu was the elderly Clerk of the Fleet Office responsible for outfitting Admiral Zettin's forces. Both reacted with shock in their different ways.

"Three days?" said Koprathu. He opened a satchel, taking out an abacus and a series of accounts scratched onto potsherds with a stylus. "Oh, that's much too soon, sir, we'll need at least—"

"Your highness," said Zettin, jumping to his feet, "I'm ready to go now with the ten ships of the guard squadron!"

"Koprathu," King Carus said, "I didn't ask for an opinion, I want a number: how many ships can you get ready in three days? Zettin—"

His glance shifted, his face grew harder.

"Lord Zettin," he continued, "I could train an ape to caper and do tricks for me. What I need from you isn't noble posturing but hard facts and the readiness to do as you're told. I'll ask you once more: how many ships can be ready to sail in three days?"

Zettin's face didn't change for a measurable instant; the look of noble insouciance remained long after it could possibly have any connection with what was going on in the admiral's mind. Waldron leaned forward, watchful rather than hopeful—though he'd objected at the time Garric gave the fleet command to Attaper's protege Zettin.

"There are seventy-six trireme hulls that I trust to swim," Zettin said. "In the arsenal, the builders' yards, and the squadron on duty downriver at the Pool. I have thirty-seven hundred men. That's nominally, but I expect that a sweep the harbor for sailors will about make up for attrition from sickness and desertion. So, eighteen to twenty ships fully manned, with more in proportion as space is used for cargo and passengers instead of oarsmen. Plus the phalanx, who train with us part of the time but aren't under my command."

"Good," said Carus, gesturing Zettin back to his seat. Zettin sat quickly and gratefully. Without the king's command, he'd have been in a quandary as to whether to sit or stand—and feeling a fool whichever he chose.

Master Koprathu turned over the yellow-glazed sherd on which he jotted notes with a fine brush and started working on the back. The sherds holding his accounts were spreading in a three-tiered arc before him, encroaching on the space belonging to the councillors to either side. They edged away from the clerk, not least because some of the low-fired pots were crumbling.

Koprathu must have been aware of Carus' gaze—and that of everyone else in the room, drawn by the king's eyes. He continued working with desperate animation, never looking up. Sweat beaded his forehead.

Carus nodded brusk approval. He turned. "Lord Waldron," he said. "What's the status of the army for deployment in three days?"

Another of Waldron's aides, this one a grizzled fellow nearly the general's own age, was trying to offer him a sheaf of paper. It probably held the morning reports of the regiments under his command. Waldron waved the man off impatiently.

"Of the phalanx, cross-trained as oarsmen," Waldron said, "five thousand, three hundred and seventeen present for duty this morning. Heavy infantry, not cross-trained, two thousand one hundred and twelve present for duty. Light infantry—"

The archers and javelin men; scouts and skirmishers for the main army and useful as marines in a sea fight.

"—one thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine present for duty; but I think I can bring that number up by several hundred in three days. They'll come running from their small-holdings if they hear there's a chance for loot and a fight."

Waldron and the king exchanged hard smiles.

"Cavalry," Waldron continued, "only seven hundred and sixteen in and around Valles. Several thousand more if there were time to raise the household troops of my northern neighbors, but three days isn't long enough for that."

"Bring five squadrons south for security in Valles while we're gone," Carus said with a nod. "I doubt we'll have bottoms to transport seven hundred horses anyway, let alone fodder for them."

He paused, then added without raising his voice, "The horsemen will fight as infantry if I order it?"

"They will," said Waldron in the tones a glacier would use if it were very angry. "Or they'll crawl from my camp on their bellies as foresworn cowards."

"My camp, Lord Waldron," the king said with a gentle smile, "but I'm fortunate to have a commander who understands that real honor doesn't depend on sitting in a saddle."

He cleared his throat. "You sent your aide out before the council opened?"

Lord Attaper looked from Carus to Waldron sharply, then made his face blank. Placed where he was by the door, he'd missed the interaction between Waldron and the youth.

"I alerted the army for deployment in twenty-four hours," Waldron said, beaming with satisfaction that had nothing soft about it. "If you'd called this council to announce a Founder's Day parade, then the exercise would still have kept my men on their toes."

Attaper grinned at his rival in grudging admiration.

Aides were hunching beside their principals' chairs, whispering numbers and exchanging notebooks or whole files. Everyone at the table save for Liane and Sharina was waiting for the king's hard gaze to spear them; waiting, and dreading the questions that would follow.

"Royhas, how many merchant ships are there in the harbor of, say, fifty tons burden or better?" Carus demanded.

Instead of looking up from the documents now spread before him on the table, Royhas stabbed a vellum notebook with his index finger and slid it through the litter in front of him. "Forty-seven in Valles, twelve more between Valles and the mouth of the River Beltis," he said. "Some of them are outbound, but we can catch them with a mounted courier."

He flipped back two pages in the notebook, then raised his eyes to meet the king's. "We can expect seven to ten more vessels to arrive in the next three days," Royhas added, smiling with his own tight satisfaction. "Based on normal traffic for this time of year."

"Your highness!" Master Koprathu cried. "Your highness! I've blocks and cordage for forty-seven triremes and oar-sets for thirty-nine—but masts for only twenty-two. I've been trying to get an appropriation for more masts from the treasury, but—"

"Quit while you're ahead, Koprathu!" Carus said before Lord Pterlion, the treasurer, could weigh in with an angry response. The clerk's head jolted up with a look of horror.

Sharina laid her fingertips on Carus' arm; not at all her brother's arm, not at this moment. Carus jerked his head around to meet her eyes. His expression dissolved into a smile.

"Which you are, Master Koprathu, very much ahead," Carus boomed over a bubble of incipient laughter. "If we strip the masts out of the merchantmen we're not using for stores and cavalry mounts, can you get more triremes outfitted? Needs must we'll row the whole way, but if we can I'd like to save the phalanx for their other work when we land."

"I—" said Koprathu. He was bug-eyed with amazement. "Well, well yes, of course, but I'll need men—"