Mistress of the Catacombs (22 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Sharina's stomach knotted in cold horror.

"Where did she go, wizard?" shouted King Carus, his hand curved like a claw over his sword. He wasn't touching the sharkskin hilt, quite, but it was only by an effort of will that he held himself clear. "Where did you send Brichese? What—"

The king's volcanic fury loosed Sharina's muscles. She stepped toward him, her arms raised. In his present madness Carus could cut her down on his way to killing the wizard whom he blamed for what'd happened to Ilna, but Sharina was still thankful for a chance to act instead of standing frozen.

Carus sagged back against the wall, gasping with reaction. "Brichese is a thousand years dead," he whispered. "And I would to the Lady I were with her now!"

Tenoctris sat on the floor again without bothering to speak. She drew out a fresh wand and a stylus of lead pure enough to streak gray lines onto the polished stone.

Sharina knew the wizard would have done the same if Carus' sword were slicing down at her. Tenoctris focused completely on whatever task was before her. Whatever the limitations of her wizardry and the weakness of her frail old body, her mind was as strong and supple as Carus' blade of patterned steel.

"Your highness?" called the captain of the guards from the hallway. The door wasn't barred; it eased a finger's breadth open. "Shall we—"

"Get back where you belong!" Carus said. "One fool with a sword in here's a great plenty already!"

He banged his fist into the wall again, emphasizing his words and—to Sharina—the fact that his hand was empty. The door jerked closed.

"We need you, your highness," Sharina said. She lowered her hands. She'd thought of embracing the man in her brother's flesh, but this wasn't the time for that. "We need you now more than ever."

"Do you?" said Carus with a terrible smile. "Well, perhaps you do. More than Brichese does, that's for certain."

He looked around the room, still smiling. "What I would like," he added in a voice as light as a lute air, "is something to kill. I suppose that'll have to wait for a—"

There was a thump and quick rasping outside the open window. A guard on the ground below cried out.

"Don't throw your spear, you idiot!" another Blood Eagle bellowed. "Your highness, watch the—"

A left hand, tanned and as strong as a grappling hook, clutched the bottom of the casement. Sharina reached for her Pewle knife; Carus' great sword was in his hand with no more sound than a snake makes licking the air. Tenoctris continued her soft chant, tapping the figure with her bamboo split.

Chalcus lifted himself, squatting like an ape for an instant on the window ledge, then hopped to the floor. His curved sword was thrust through one side of his bright sash, his dagger through the other. His hands were empty, but his eyes were bright as hellfire.

"I've got it!" Carus shouted, slamming his sword home in its scabbard.

"But your highness...?" a guard below objected.

Carus stepped to the window, passing close to Chalcus. The men neither touched nor seemed to move to avoid one another; their motion was that of vinegar slipping through oil.

The king leaned out. "Did you not hear me? I've got it! Don't bother me again unless you want to go back to following a yoke of oxen!"

He pulled the casements closed as vehemently as he'd sheathed his sword, then walked to the center of the room. He and Chalcus eyed one another.

"So, soldier...," Chalcus said in a voice that held the music of swordblades ringing together. "At Ilna's house they told me that there'd been a summons, that her friend Sharina—"

Chalcus nodded toward Sharina. He was smiling, but though she'd always gotten on well with Chalcus she had at this moment the feeling that a viper was measuring the distance to strike her.

"—had called her to aid Prince Garric in a crisis. And so I came here, thinking to wait politely outside till Ilna had finished her business, not intruding on my betters—"

Carus flared his nostrils at the open scorn Chalcus put into the words 'my betters', but his lips continued to smile. His arms were crossed, each big hand on the opposite elbow.

"—until I heard you shout," Chalcus continued. "Where do you suppose I might find Ilna, soldier?"

"I don't know," Carus said, anger clipping the syllables. "Maybe the wizard—"

He gestured with a chop of his chin, then grimaced as though he'd bitten something sour.

"Maybe Lady Tenoctris, that is," he said in correction, "can tell us what I want to know as badly as you do, sailor. Ilna was here on the bed; then she vanished."

Azure wizardlight puffed above the five-sided figure Tenoctris had scrawled in lead over the mosaic. For a moment Sharina thought it was a tentacled creature, but there was no body—only a mass of lines intersecting like wormtracks. Several of them lengthened, then faded away; the whole image faded like the stars at dawn, then was gone.

Tenoctris dropped her wand and leaned forward, supporting her weight on her arms. Sharina squatted by the older woman and held her by her shoulders.

The men stared at the old wizard the way wolves sized up a flock: without hostility, but with a merciless desire that made nothing of the object's needs or wishes. They wanted an answer they hoped Tenoctris would give. That she was wrung out with the effort of this and earlier wizardry meant no more to them than their own wounds or weakness would have mattered if they felt they needed to do something themselves.

Tenoctris raised her head, looking from Carus to Chalcus. Her smile was weak, but it was one of understanding.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Ilna's—soul, I'll call it, Ilna's soul returned to the waking world at another point and drew her body to it. I don't know where she went, but I don't think she could have managed that by herself."

Chalcus raised an eyebrow. He was taut as the top string of a lute.

Tenoctris sniffed at the implied question. "Not because I doubt her strength," she said in something closer to irritation than Sharina had generally heard from Tenoctris' lips. "This is a matter of technique, Master Chalcus. Ilna could probably force her own way into the dreamworld, but returning to a place other than where her body lies... that I do not believe. Even for her."

"How then?" said Carus in a controlled voice. His left hand had slid down to grip his right, preventing it from drawing his sword as it so clearly wanted to do. "If she didn't do it, who did?"

"I don't know that either," Tenoctris said. "She met some one or some thing—a wizard, though, not a demon; whoever drew her down did so through art rather than power, but power as well."

Tenoctris struggled to get her feet under her; Sharina helped her rise and guided her back onto the stool. The lead symbols drawn on the floor had a dull sheen like the eyes of a landed fish.

"Now what I'm wondering...," said Chalcus, "simple man that I am—"

Sharina watched his expression. There was nothing simple about Chalcus. She wasn't sure that even his two eyes saw the same things when they looked out on the world.

"—is whether it might have been planned that Ilna go off to this dreamworld and not return to trouble the mind of the king who set her the task? Kings are used to dicing with the lives of lesser folk, or so I've heard—eh?"

Carus looked at the smaller man without expression. Chalcus was a cat, but the king was a wolf or mayhap a dragon.

"Once long ago," Carus said, "there were men who thought I'd do as they said if they took Lady Brichese as their hostage. They could do that, because they were her cousins."

He smiled. It was a terrible expression.

"I led the attack on their castle myself," Carus said. "Some of them I captured, and afterwards those lived much longer than they wanted to; but my Brichese died that day in the fire."

The men stared into one another's eyes. Their faces were cold as stone, but their eyes, those eyes.... Sharina would have shivered, except that she had the hilt of her Pewle knife to steady her.

"I'd have done the same thing again to save the kingdom," Carus said, smiling. "Perhaps I'd still do that. But I don't think that I am the kingdom any longer, do you see? And regardless, whatever's happened to Ilna is none of my plan nor my desire."

"So," said Chalcus mildly, liltingly. "So you say. But would you be lying to me, I wonder?"

Carus laughed like boulders slipping. "Don't flatter yourself, sailor!" he said.

Chalcus' lips twisted in a wry smile. "Aye," he said. "I was getting above myself, was I not?"

His expression drew back into its previous taut, feral lines. "So, soldier," he said. "We've a problem. Will our wizard here—"

He nodded to Tenoctris; she acknowledged his glance by raising her chin.

"—be able to solve it?"

"No," said Tenoctris calmly. "I may be able to find where Ilna has gone, but I won't be able to bring her back myself. That's far beyond my powers."

Carus snorted. "Wizardry's never done me much good," he said. "This time wasn't much different from other times. I'll fall back on a cure for the kingdom's ills that I know something about."

He drew his sword a hand's breadth from the scabbard, his thumb and index finger gripping the pommel; demonstrating, not threatening. He grinned at Chalcus. "This," the king said. "What would you like for a command, sailor?"

Chalcus' left index finger traced a scar barely to be seen against the tan skin of the opposite biceps. "I think...," he said, and the pause showed that he was thinking indeed, "that I'll carry on as before. Merota and I will go to Tisamur and see what's to be learned about Moon Wisdom."

Sharina thought she was keeping a strait face, but Chalcus must have read the surprise she felt. He grinned at her and said, "Long odds it was Moon Wisdom she was searching for when she vanished, not so? So it seems to me that other folk searching for Moon Wisdom may find themselves in the place Ilna has gotten to."

He laughed. "Not that she'll need me or Merota either one," he added. "But we'll be in a place to watch her deal with those troubling our good friend Carus and his kingdom."

"And perhaps," said Carus, "she'll need you. We none of us can have too many friends."

Chalcus merely grinned, but his finger toyed with the eared pommel of his sword. For him, that was a sign of nervousness.

"What help do you need from me, then?" Carus demanded, his thumbs hooked in his swordbelt.

"Need from you?" said Chalcus. "Don't flatter yourself!"

Whistling a lilting hornpipe, he swaggered to the hallway door. Looking back with a grin Chalcus said, "I'll see you in Donelle, soldier."

"Aye, or in Hell if we get there first," Carus replied. They were both laughing again until the closing door separated them.

* * *

Ilna got to her feet cautiously. Her mind still saw ghost images of Garric's room in the palace, the cracked plaster and her friends watching her worriedly on the bronze bed. That's where her mind knew she should have been.

But she wasn't, yet another example of reality being worse than what should have been. The polished marble floor beneath Ilna's bare soles reminded her of how much she disliked stone.

She smiled faintly. That was fair: stone didn't like her either.

The girl, Alecto, glared at the entrance. She was crouching, her athame held low for a disemboweling stroke. "Have you got a knife?" she demanded. "Maybe we can cut our way through them before they know we're in here!"

Ilna didn't let her sneer reach her lips. She did have a knife, a bone-cased sliver of steel that she used for everything from dressing chickens to trimming the selvage from the cloth she wove; she didn't see herself slashing her way through an army of priests and worshippers with it, though. When she'd looked down at the scene earlier, this big circular room had been full of people.

"No," she said looking upward. "We'll hide."

"You can't get out that hole up there unless you can walk upside down like a fly!" Alecto said, but she raised her eyes also.

No, the cast concrete dome curved up as high as the big room was wide. Though the inner surface was cross-ribbed, not even an acrobat—not even Chalcus!—could have crossed it against the pull of gravity.

The dome rested on pillars, each wider around than Ilna could span with both arms and separated from one another by about the distance of her arms spread. The pillars were only about five or six times a man's height.

A solid wall surrounded the colonnade set out at half the distance of the pillars' height, forming a corridor around the domed area in the center. Overflow from the crowd could stand beneath the corridor's sloping roof, hearing though perhaps not seeing what was going on above the reflecting pool.

Alecto glanced behind a pillar. Her frown showed that she thought—as Ilna did—that if the room filled there was little chance that the presence of the two interlopers wouldn't be remarked. She started to speak; before the objection reached her tongue she saw Ilna uncoil her sash into a noosed rope. "Ah!" she said instead.

Ilna cast the noose with the skill she displayed in every use of fabric. The heads of the columns mimicked vines growing through a loose wicker basket; complex and delicate for stonework, though nothing to the subtlety of a weaver's art. The silken loop settled over an extended tendril; Ilna pulled it tight.

"Will it hold me?" Alecto said. She took the blade of her dagger in her teeth instead of sliding the weapon back into its sheath.

"The cord will," Ilna said coldly, wondering if the wild woman thought she was going to climb it first. "You'll follow me up. The cord will hold an ox. I'm less confident about the stone, but there's nothing better available."

The chanting was growing louder. The interior of the temple was in shadow save for gray light blurring across the west half of the dome as the moon rose, but anyone on the floor would be in plain sight as soon the procession reached the rotunda.

Ilna tugged again, then climbed by the strength of her arms alone. Alecto muttered an objection, but Ilna already knew that Cashel or any other of the village boys who robbed seabird nests on the offshore islands would have used the grip of their feet on the rock as well. She made the choice not out of ignorance but from distaste for the stone.

Each time Ilna's arms hitched her up another level, her body swung against the column. Still, she wasn't deliberately touching the fluted marble.

Curves projecting from the column head gave Ilna somewhere to set her feet though they were too smooth to have held the rope. She laid her left arm flat along the vault's lowest rib, gripping as well as she could, and motioned Alecto to follow. The girl did, scrambling like a cat up a fir tree.

It would've been safer for Ilna to loop the cord around a second knob to spread Alecto's weight, but she decided against doing that. As soon as the wild girl saw the cord twitch upward the necessary foot or so, she'd have assumed that Ilna planned to abandon her to the incoming worshippers. She'd have come up in a flying leap that might well have sheared the stone when a more cautious approach did not.

Ilna smiled sourly. Leaving Alecto on the ground would surely lead to Ilna's own discovery as well as being a wholly pointless bit of spite. She'd seen before that what people feared in others generally showed how they'd choose to behave themselves.

Alecto reached the head of the column and braced herself from the side opposite to Ilna. There was at least a chance that anyone glancing upward would mistake them for a pair of statues; though the better hope—and the likelier one—was that nobody would bother to look.

Alecto glanced at Ilna, then took the dagger into her free right hand. The hard set of her mouth didn't change.

Ilna flipped the cord up to her hand, then cleared the noose with a twist that made Alecto's eyes widen. The wild girl had used ropes and snares, that was evident; but she'd never seen anyone use them with Ilna's ease and skill.

Acknowledging the unspoken praise with a slight smile, Ilna tossed the cord into a loop around the pillar, Alecto, and finally herself. The noose itself had been the only weight for the free end. Ilna tugged the cord tight, but instead of tying the loop, she kept the bight in her hands so that she could release it instantly at need.

Close up, Alecto had a strong animal odor compounded of fur and leather garments and her own intense femaleness. Ilna disliked it, but feeling dislike wasn't a new experience for her.

The inner door opened. The worshippers, led by a phalanx of priests in black and white robes, entered the cavity of the temple. Their hymn had the rhythms Ilna remembered from Tenoctris' incantations; and also during those of wizards she trusted far less than she did Tenoctris.

Ilna's eyes narrowed as she realized for the first time that there was no statue of the Lady in the great room. Was this a temple after all?

As best Ilna could tell looking down from her perch the priests, like the worshippers following them, were a mix of men and women in roughly equal numbers. They continued to sing as they filled the room. Two of the leaders carried covered wicker baskets.

The priests took their places around the margin of the reflecting pool, the white slashes of their robes showing up in the dim light like a row of slanting pickets. The laymen moved with solemnity but not precision to stand outside the ring of priests. They'd done this before, but they weren't a military unit marching in formation.

The room continued to fill. Ilna could no more count than she could read, but she was certain that there were more people below her in this room than there were in Barca's Hamlet. They stood at the base of the pillars and moved back into the corridor where Ilna couldn't see them from her perch.

Alecto watched with eyes like a hungry hawk. Her face, already hard despite its curves, grew taut.

The moon was near zenith, reflecting upward from the pool's surface. The last of the worshippers had entered the room. A husky man wearing a sword—a temple servant, distinct both from the priests and from the ordinary townsfolk who made up the worshippers—swung shut the great bronze door.

Priests—one at either axis of the reflecting pool—raised the lids of the round wicker baskets they'd carried in. Their fellows continued to chant. Ilna blinked and would have rubbed her eyes if she'd had a hand free; the rhythms of the hymn were beginning to disturb her balance.

The priests lifted rabbits out of their baskets, tied as though they were going to market. One of the animals was black, the other white. They bawled in terror, a penetrating sound so like a baby's cry that several of the female worshippers faltered in their chanting.

Ilna's lips tightened. She knew what was going to happen. She'd killed her share of poultry in the past with neither qualm nor hesitation; she'd kill more in the future if events spared her to cook more dinners.

Blood sacrifice, this, was a waste of meat and a perversion of what every peasant knew was a part—the last and greatest part—of nature. It disgusted Ilna almost as much as the folk performing the ritual disgusted her.

The chant deepened. Even at the first Ilna hadn't been able to make out individual syllables in the echoing cavity of this temple, but now the sound had the groaning weight of the millpond frozen in midwinter.

The kneeling priests held knives; they flashed together in the moonlight. Black blood gouted into the reflecting pool. The reflected moon seemed to swell across the surface of the stained water.

A man cried out, but the chanting of his fellows continued like hollow thunder. A moment before, light had entered through the eye in the dome's center and been reflected from the pool beneath throughout the temple; now the eye was dark and the moon blazed in full glory where before the water had been.

Ilna's limbs were tight with the strain of holding herself to the column, but her face grew rigid as well. She could see Alecto's lips moving, but she couldn't be sure whether the girl mouthed a curse or a prayer or a spell.

Something formed in the air above the moon. The worshippers' voices were growing hoarse, but the chanting continued with even greater desperation.

At first it was only a blue nimbus, a haze of wizardlight. As the assembly shouted words of power, the ring of priests brought out athames and waved them to the rhythm of the chant; some slashed their own arms. Droplets of blood arced through the air, sinking without trace into the moon's blazing face.

The nimbus shrank into three figures. They were no longer blue; they had no color at all, only a gray sheen as bleak as Ilna's thoughts when she woke in the hours after midnight. They swayed to the rhythm of the chant.

Alecto's face was stark with terror. Her tongue moved slightly, but the sound she made had no more meaning than a death rattle does.

The three creatures were as bonelessly supple as an ammonite's tentacles, but their heads were flat and reptilian. Their conical bodies tapered from two squat, folded legs to the narrow snout. Their arms waved; they ended in cilia rather than fingers or claws.

The creatures were neither evil nor good; they merely were, the way the sea is or the sun. They were terrible beyond anything Ilna had ever seen.

The chanting stopped. Its echoes rolled about the dome for long moments after, but even that finally stilled. In the silence Ilna heard her companion whisper, "The Pack! These are the ones...."

The three figures faded gradually like fish swimming downward through clear water. There was a crackling that Ilna felt rather than heard; the Pack was gone, and the moon—edging westward past zenith—streamed through the dome's eye again.

The pool was still clear, save for where the rabbits' corpses lay on the coping. The last drops of blood leaking from the severed throats now swirled in dark tendrils through the water.

Gasps, whispers and sighs of relief echoed through the domed hall. The tension had dissipated as soon as the worshippers below were sure the Pack was gone. The prayer had brought the creatures out of whatever place—whatever Hell—normally held them, but the worshippers were as frightened of the Pack as Alecto was.

Alecto had said only fools would loose the Pack. Ilna didn't see any reason to fault her companion's judgment on that point.

The guard threw open the door, sucking in a breeze to purge the warmth of enclosed bodies and the stench of fear. The worshippers drained from the room with a haste just short of panic, jostling at the doorway to the long entrance passage. They'd entered chanting, but there was no pretense of a recessional to put a solemn seal on the proceedings.

This wasn't religion: it was wizardry, and wizardry of a particularly unpleasant sort. Ilna's lip curled. Those who'd performed it were anxious to return to their homes and pretend they had no idea of what was going on.

The priests followed the layfolk, murmuring among themselves. They controlled their fears more carefully, but they too wanted to be gone. The pair—a man and a woman—who'd made the sacrifice carried away the dead rabbits in their baskets instead of leaving them for servants.

Did servants ever enter this room? Now that she thought about it, Ilna thought there'd been smears from previous slaughter on the pool's marble coping before the priests carried out the present sacrifice. This was truly a sanctum, perhaps the more so because it didn't hold the God's image.

Only initiates entered. If they didn't carry out menial tasks like scrubbing blood from the marble, nobody did.

The last of the priests passed from the hall; she didn't bother to close the inner door behind her. Ilna heard the sound of steps shuffling down the passage, fewer and fewer; then the clang of the outer door. The hall was silent, save for the wind sighing softly past the dome's open eye.

"All right, loose me!" Alecto said. She reached for her athame as she spoke, preparing to cut the rope if Ilna didn't release her instantly.

Ilna's hand twitched, curling the noose back around into her hand in a single motion. Manipulating the rope brought her to herself. Strength returned to muscles which her cramped position had reduced to trembling weakness.

Alecto spread her arms wide and gripped the column's flutings between thumb and fingers while her legs circled the shaft. She scrambled down the pillar without waiting for Ilna to snub the rope off for her. She probably couldn't have climbed without Ilna's help, but she could get down again swiftly and safely by herself.