Mistress of the Catacombs (35 page)

* * *

Ilna thought the rhythmic clacking from the darkness summoned worshippers to the temple, so she touched Alecto's shoulder before sitting up in the straw. She frowned; the light slanting through the loading door at the end of the loft meant that the moon was still well short of zenith.

Alecto was on her feet with the dagger in her hand, as quickly and supplely as a cat waking. She didn't try to slash Ilna in half-wakened stupor; her weapon was simply ready if needed, and sheathed again quickly when the wild girl saw that it wasn't.

"What's going on out there?" she said with an undertone of harshness. Ilna bristled, reading into the question an implication that the confusion was somehow her fault. Or not, of course—but everything Alecto did seemed to grate on her.

"I thought it was the call to the temple," Ilna said, "but—"

"Hey!" bawled the stablemaster from the stalls below. "You girls up there! Don't you hear the summons? Get out here now or I'll come up with a whip!"

"If he likes to hear his voice so much," said Alecto in a deadly whisper as she started for the ladder, "then let's see how he'll sound as a soprano!"

Ilna caught the other woman's knife wrist. Alecto turned, still catlike, and tried to jerk her hand free. Ilna held her, smiling faintly.

"Hey!" the stablemaster repeated.

"We're coming!" Ilna said, her eyes holding Alecto's. "And watch your tongue when you speak to us!"

Alecto tossed her head and relaxed. "All right," she muttered. She gestured for Ilna to precede her down the ladder.

The stablemaster had already gone out into the night, leaving the door ajar behind him. The sharp rapping came again, closer. A horse whickered uncomfortably, as though awakened by the sound and nervous about it. With Alecto just behind her, Ilna stepped into the innyard.

A priestess in a white-on-black robe stood beneath the archway to the street. Several lower-ranking functionaries accompanied her—clerks, a lantern-bearer, and a brawny man with a flat hardwood block slung from a pole. He'd been hitting the block with a mallet as an attention signal. Ilna hadn't seen that method before, but the sound was distinctive and seemed to carry as far as the blat of the cowhorn trumpet her brother'd used while herding sheep in the borough.

There were half a dozen soldiers in the priestess' entourage. They looked more bored than threatening, but they held their weapons with professional ease. Ilna had seen enough troops to know that these men weren't a militia of shopkeepers and day laborers, armed for the emergency.

"Fellow disciples!" the priestess said. She was a hefty woman; judging by her voice, she might not be much older than Ilna herself. "Evil-doers entered Donelle during the past night and have profaned the Temple of the Mistress with the blood of a believer. The Mistress says they're still in the city. They must be caught and punished before they can do further harm."

All the windows facing the innyard were open. Faces, the staff and guests alike, leaned out to hear the announcement. The servants and hangers on who'd been in the yard to begin with were quiet and alert as well. Ilna had the impression that the respect they showed was real, not something frightened out of them by the soldiers' presence.

"In order to identify the evil-doers," the priestess continued, "the gates have been closed. Everyone in the city will join with at least three other people who have known them for a year or more. Each group will report to a Child of the Mistress who will mark each person's forehead."

"But I'm from Brange!" called a man who'd been sleeping in the box of one of the coaches. "I don't know ten people here in Donelle!"

"Those who've come as individuals into the city from other communities," said the priestess, "will report to the clerks with me. The Mistress has set gathering places here in the city for each region. Eventually everyone will have others to vouch for them—everyone but the evil-doers!"

Men—there were no women in the yard save for Ilna and her companion—shuffled and spoke to one another in low voices. The attendant with the wooden gong cried, "Come along, now! Do you think you've got all night? We have the whole Leatherworker's District to enroll!"

"Yes, and you inside the building come out as well," the priestess called, gesturing toward the faces watching from the windows. "Quickly. It won't take long, but you must get moving!"

"What do we do?" Alecto whispered hoarsely.

"Stand watch while I choose a route," Ilna replied. She eased back toward the stable door, then slipped inside. The bustle in the yard would keep her from being missed for a time, but she and Alecto couldn't hide for long.

The warmth of animal bodies and animal breath enfolded Ilna and calmed her. She wasn't in a panic, but these were dangerous straits. She squatted on the trampled floor, then pulled a handful of straw from a manger and began plaiting it. Ilna rarely used her skill to make decisions for her, but in this case she had no choice. She didn't know how the Mistress had learned the interlopers were still in Donelle, but there was more to it than mere intuition.

Ilna's fingers wove straws in and around their fellows with a swift competence that would have seemed magical to anyone watching. The darkness of the stable didn't affect the work: this was a business for Ilna's soul and hands, not her conscious mind.

Outside an attendant called , "Move along, now, do you hear me? Who's next!" The buzz of voices was louder, some of them now female. Someone shouted back into the inn proper. The words were blurred, but Ilna could identify the cook from her angry tone.

She rose again to her feet, certain that the pattern was complete though she couldn't see it. As she reached for the door, Alecto whispered hoarsely through the crack, "There's a flunky coming this way. The fat pustule of a stablemaster was talking to him!"

Ilna stepped back into the yard. She glanced at the rough straw mat in her hand, then showed it to the wild girl.

"North and then northwest," Alecto said. Her face wrinkled in a thunderous frown.

"How did you do this?" she demanded. "I can see the directions in it, but there's nothing here really!"

"Hush," said Ilna curtly.

The fat stablemaster had worked his way back through the crowd with a clerk and two soldiers in tow. "There's the other one!" he said to the clerk. "She was trying to hide in the stables!"

Under the gate arch, the inn's residents were giving their names to clerks while the priestess looked on. She pointed to the innkeeper, come from the main building in a nightshirt and cap. "I know Master Reddick by sight," she said. "Stamp him and then the ones he can vouch for."

"I went to get my outer tunic," Ilna said coldly, her eyes on the clerk as if the stablemaster were beneath her notice. "We have nothing to hide."

"Don't you?" the clerk sneered. "That's for me to decide, I think. Now, who are you?"

In his left hand was a notebook made of four thin leaves of birchwood bound with leather straps. The ink-filled tip of a cowhorn dangled from a hook in his tunic collar, and he held a short quill between his right thumb and forefinger.

"My name's Ilna," Ilna said. She tossed the straw back into the stable behind her; it had served its purpose, now that she'd read its message. "My kinswoman here is Alecto. We're from Barca's Hamlet."

The soldiers watched Alecto with more than causal interest. One of them shifted his left arm slightly, as if ready to throw his small, round shield in the way of any attack the wild girl made.

"Barca's Hamlet?" the clerk repeated. "I never heard of the place."

Ilna shrugged. The only thing she'd feared was that the fellow somehow had heard of Barca's Hamlet—and therefore knew it was on Haft.

"It's north and west of here," she said. "We came to Donelle at the Mistress' summons."

"North and...," the stablemaster said. A deep frown furrowed his forehead. He glared at Alecto. "You come from the Hills? You didn't tell me that!"

"You might've known by looking at her," the clerk said, his nose wrinkling. "They're mostly animals up there. And not—"

He turned his attention from Alecto back to Ilna.

"—many worship of the Mistress."

"There's some of us," Ilna said, making sure that her tone carried the cold contempt she really felt for this functionary. The Mistress' service had no monopoly on his sort, jumped-up little worms who felt their slight authority made them important people. "Do you object?"

The clerk must have heard a threat in the words—and felt it might be justified. "What?" he said. "Of course not. Well, you'll report to...."

He paused, flipping back to the outer leaf of his notebook, then realizing there wasn't enough light to read it by without a lantern. "Well, I know there isn't a gathering place for people from the Hills. You'll have to go the temple and ask them there. I'll give you an escort."

Ilna sniffed. "We can find the temple," she said curtly. "We have on past nights, after all."

Before the clerk could object, she added, "Come along, Alecto," and started for the gate across the innyard. She nodded respectfully to the soldiers as she passed. One of them nodded back, but the men kept their eyes primarily on Alecto.

Someone had lit a stick of lightwood from the oven and stuck its base through the iron harness loop of an upturned wagon tongue. The flame threw a flaring, yellowish light across the innyard.

A line had formed in the yard's forecourt. Clerks jotted information onto wax or wooden tablets, then divided the people into two groups. Those whose identity wasn't sufficiently guaranteed went out into the street, sometimes pausing first to don clothing for public wear. The others joined a separate group in front of the priestess herself in the gateway.

Ilna didn't want to call attention to herself by making eye contact, but as she neared the gate she saw the priestess touch a stamp to the cook's forehead, then press it into a pot of ochre again. The red pigment outlined a fat-bodied web spider whose forelegs spread in an encompassing arc.

Ilna started, then lowered her eyes and sidled past. She expected the cook to snarl something at her, but the woman wore a nervous expression and didn't seem to have noticed Ilna's presence. She looked as tense as if the mark on her forehead was a real spider.

The waiting soldiers didn't block the gateway, but they narrowed it considerably. Ilna waited for a pair of teamsters to go through ahead of her so that she didn't brush the cuirass of the man to the left. He gave her a speculative look, to which she responded coldly.

The disciples of Moon Wisdom seemed a strait-laced lot; in that at least Ilna felt kinship with them. The soldiers, however, weren't locals and apparently weren't followers of the faith either. They reacted to Ilna in the fashion she'd come to expect from young men with weapons or some other reason to feel full of themselves.

The lantern and burning pine knot hadn't made the innyard very bright but the street was darker still, especially where overhanging eaves shadowed the cobblestones. The teamsters turned to the right, the direction that Ilna wanted to go. She stepped away from the gate and paused, letting the others get farther ahead for privacy.

"Did you see that spider?" Alecto said. "Though I suppose it's what you'd expect from people who call out the Pack."

"I saw it," Ilna said without emphasis. She was interested to realize that the spider symbol had affected her companion as well. There was more to it than a smudge of ochre, though she couldn't have said what the added difference was.

In a less distant tone she went on, "I don't think we dare stay in Donelle if they're searching for us this way. We'll get out through the north gate and go on, the way the pattern indicated."

"I still don't know how you did that," Alecto muttered grudgingly. "All it was was a few wisps of straw, but when I looked at it I saw the road through the gates we left by last night."

"You don't need to know," Ilna said. The teamsters had disappeared beyond the jutting corner of the second building down the street. She set off after them.

"Faugh!" Alecto said, glaring at the pavement as she strode along beside Ilna. "The only thing worse would be crossing the lava barrens sunwise of Hartrag's village. The rock here doesn't cut like lava, I'll give it that, but half of it's covered with slime so slick we might as well be walking on ice."

Ilna sniffed. She almost asked what 'lava barrens' were, but she decided that she didn't want to give Alecto the satisfaction of knowing something Ilna herself didn't. Instead she said, "If the people in the hills don't worship this Mistress, then we can hope that they'll hide us if the disciples come searching. Though I don't think they'll bother looking for us if we're no longer in Donelle and a direct danger to them."

That left the problem of Ilna getting her information back to Carus and the others in Valles, but she'd learned long ago to take matters one at a time. First she had to avoid being caught and disemboweled by the disciples of Moon Wisdom.

Alecto muttered, out of sorts and perhaps frightened by the twisting streets and stone buildings. In a louder voice she said, "I've hunted in canebrakes where the paths were straighter! How can people live like this?"

Ilna, who hated stone so much that she'd almost have preferred to walk on knives than on these streets, smiled coldly. "We'll be outside soon," she said.