Mistress of the Catacombs (3 page)

Cashel cleared his throat. "Ah, Tenoctris?" he said. "I'd like to be getting back to the—"

Cashel's tongue stuck. He'd dressed this morning as he would have back in the borough, in woolen overtunic and undertunic. The garments were peasant's wear, though smartly cut and of the best quaility—as they were bound to be, since his sister Ilna had woven and sewn the cloth. Nobody in the Isles, maybe nobody in all time, could do more with fabrics than Ilna could.

Tenoctris was in silk, but her robe was neither new nor stylish. The two of them would pass for a noblewoman fallen on hard times and the sort of rustic servant such a lady could afford. That was fine, but Cashel didn't want to use the word 'palace' here and cause all sorts of fuss and excitement.

"To go home, I mean," he said instead.

"Yes, of course," Tenoctris repeated. She turned, getting her bearings with a skill that a countryman like Cashel couldn't match in this warren of streets. "I think if we go...."

A few of the passersby had stopped to see what was going on. Cashel and Tenoctris weren't doing anything more exciting than hens did in a farmyard, but it was a little different from the usual. There were people in Valles—and everywhere Cashel had been in his life—who'd rather watch others work than do something themselves.

Through them came a clean-shaven heavy-set man, not a youth but still younger than his baldness made him appear. He wore a tunic of tightly woven wool, black with a stripe of bleached white slashing diagonally across the front. His face was set. He wasn't exactly angry, but he looked ready to snap into anger if something balked him.

"You there!" he said to the foreman. "Are you in charge? I want to buy this pile of stone. I'll pay—"

The workmen's eyes shifted from the newcomer to Cashel and Tenoctris. Cashel made a wry face, but he'd learned young that some days bad luck was the only kind of luck you were going to have.

Cashel squatted and set the block of stone between his bare feet rather than drop it on the cobblestones. Then he rose again, holding his staff with both hands and waiting for whatever might come next.

The newcomer's glance followed the workmen's; he looked at the piece of statue, then raised his eyes to Cashel's. "I believe you have some property of mine, my man," he said. His tone held a thin skin of politeness over fury. "I'll take it now, if you please."

"It's not yours," Cashel said. Tenoctris had stepped behind him, but he didn't know just where. He hoped she'd be clear if things started to happen, as they might. "I bought it, fair and more than fair."

"Yes, well," said the stranger, looking over Cashel appraisingly. He reached into the folds of his twisted silk sash. "I'll buy it from you, then."

"No," said Cashel, his voice husky. His hands were going to start trembling soon if he didn't do something, either spin the quarterstaff into the stranger's face or pick up the statue and run.

The stranger's hand came out of the sash with three broad, thin pieces of gold. He fanned them into the light between his thumb and two well-manicured fingers. "Look at this, my man," he said. "Yours for a bit of old stone."

"No," Cashel said. There was going to be trouble if Cashel didn't move away, but he couldn't leave the stone and he didn't want to be holding it if the stranger came at him with a knife.

Instead of attacking, the stranger swept the spread of coins under the foreman's nose. "Bring me the piece of marble," he said, pitching his voice so that all the workmen could hear, "and these are yours. Twice this, a gold piece for each man!"

The foreman scowled his forehead into even deeper ridges than before. The gangling, scarfaced workman beside him snatched a pole from the bundles of scaffolding and stepped forward. "Ansie, Blemm...," he called in a matter-of-fact voice. "All you guys. That's enough money to set us up for life."

"Right!" said the foreman, reaching for his hammer.

Cashel stepped forward, driving the tip of his quarterstaff into the foreman's gut. The fellow saw it coming and tried to jump back. He wasn't fast enough but the move may have saved his life. The iron-shod hickory flung him into the kiln, spewing his breakfast of bread sopped in wine lees, but it didn't punch through the muscle walls as it could've done if Cashel was really trying.

The stranger had ducked behind the stack of quarrystone. Cashel ignored him and the shouting spectators both. It might be that a section of the City Watch would arrive, but Cashel doubted that. He sure wasn't trusting his safety and Tenoctris to that hope.

The workman with the pole swung at Cashel. The bamboo would've made a decent weapon if the fellow'd known what he was doing, but he didn't. Cashel blocked the stroke with the ferrule nearer his body, then spun the other end into the workman's side. He heard ribs crack.

Two of the men who'd been hesitating when things started to happen now backpedaled. Another had pulled out his chisel to use as a sword; he flung it as a dart instead. The heavy bronze tool caught Cashel on the right shoulder, a solid blow but not a dangerous one because the edge was sharpened to split rock rather than to shave wood.

Cashel grunted with anger and stepped forward, recovering the staff so that both his hands gripped the wood at the balance. The workman squealed and dodged behind the partner who held a heavy maul up in the air like a torch.

The fellow with the maul couldn't have been more open to a stroke from the quarterstaff if he'd turned his back and begged to be hit. Didn't anybody in Valles know how to fight? Cashel rapped him where he gripped the helve, breaking fingers on both hands and flinging the maul into a cart hard enough to tip it over.

Cashel kicked the screaming man he'd just crippled out of the way and went after the fellow who'd thrown the chisel at him. That one was scrambling off by now. Most times Cashel would've left him be; but his shoulder throbbed, and he knew that except for the bulges of muscle there he'd have had a broken collarbone.

The workman tripped on his leather apron and skidded into the stack of scaffolding. Cashel raised his staff for a straight-arm thrust that would've been fatal—then grimaced and instead gripped the apron's neck loop with his right hand to jerk the fellow upright.

"You like to throw things, do you?" Cashel bellowed. The workman's eyes were screwed shut: he couldn't change whatever was coming, but he didn't have to watch it.

Cashel straightened his arm and put his shoulders in it too, hurling the fellow over the basement excavation to slide through debris at the back of the lot. The man's arms and legs were moving before his body came to a halt. He hopped over a mound of dirt saved for backfill and continued running.

There was a blue flash from the other side of the pile of quarrystone. The stranger who'd started the trouble sprang into view with a shriek. His robe was on fire. Instead of the grudging, half-hearted flames Cashel expected from wool, these were vivid and tinged with the same blue as the flash: wizardlight.

The stranger bolted down the street, tugging his garments off as he ran. Spectators lurched out of his way, pushing a path violently through their fellows the way they'd have done to escape a runaway horse—

Or maybe more violently yet. Wizardry scared lots of people worse than death did.

Tenoctris stood alone at the edge of the street, swaying and so weak she was about to fall over. Cashel, gasping with his own efforts, stumbled to his older friend and put his arm around her. His shoulder hurt as bad as it had the day Scolla's ill-tempered lead ox had flung its head around while Cashel was trying to yoke it.

"Are you all right, Tenoctris?" Cashel asked, speaking the words between one deep breath and the next. "You did a spell to send the fellow off, is that it?"

He'd split the back of his undertunic when his shoulders bunched; it looked like he'd broken his sash too. Well, it hadn't been a proper bout where he'd have had time to get ready.

"I interfered with his own spell," Tenoctris said, panting like a snared rabbit. Cashel had seen before now the wonders that wizards could do; but it took real effort to guide their powers, as sure as it did to use a quarterstaff the way Cashel used one.

Still clinging to Cashel's arm, Tenoctris hobbled around the stack of squared blocks. Spectators kneeling in the dirt there scattered like startled quail, looking over their shoulders at the old woman. Cashel guessed that the stranger had dropped the gold he'd offered. People in this district weren't going to let a gold coin go to waste, no matter how much wizards frightened them.

Tenoctris pointed to symbols drawn on the ground where the stranger had been hiding. "He was going to send dust into your eyes, Cashel," she said. "I just opened his circle of protection before he'd directed the stroke."

Cashel felt a surge of warmth for the old wizard. Tenoctris was quick to say that she had very little power; but she knew things, knew what she was doing and generally knew what other wizards were doing better than they did. Cashel trusted Tenoctris the way he trusted his own ability to put an axe into a treetrunk where he meant it to go.

Strength was fine, but control was a better thing if you had to have only one.

"What's this made of, do you suppose?" Tenoctris said in surprise. She bent closer to the greenish-yellow rod lying beside the symbol the stranger had drawn with it. It was his athame, abandoned like the coins when he fled—and to a wizard, far more valuable than that gold. "It looks like the shell of an insect. A very large insect."

Cashel reached toward it with a bare toe. He could see the blurred texture of the soil through the athame, as though it was a sheet of mica.

"No, I don't think we'd better touch it," Tenoctris said, moving her slippered foot to block Cashel's. She scuffed the athame sideways, onto the cobblestones. "The wagons tonight will grind it to powder; I suspect that's the best choice. And I'll burn this slipper when we've gotten home."

"Let's be doing that now," Cashel said, looking behind him for the chunk of statue he'd forgotten during the fight. Quite a fool he'd feel if somebody'd made off with it... but they hadn't, nobody would. It was an ugly, awkward piece of stone whose only use was for burning into the living white fire of quicklime; but it was Cashel's piece now for sure.

"Will you be able to carry it yourself?" Tenoctris asked. "I mean, you must be tired from...?"

Cashel grinned. "Guess I'll manage," he said as he lifted the block, using his knees instead of his back for leverage. "The harder thing's going to be figuring out what to do with it now that I've got it, but maybe Sharina will have an idea."

And because he was thinking of Sharina, he grinned even broader.

* * *

Ilna os-Kenset's fingers wove with a speed and skill that any woman on the island of Ornifal would have envied, but her mind wasn't on her work. In this fine weather she'd set her loom in the bungalow's courtyard, walled off from the rest of the palace. Bees buzzed about the flowers; birds chirped and pecked and fluttered for food among the plantings. Ilna didn't pay them much attention either, except to note that they were just as quarrelsome and snappish as they'd been back in Barca's Hamlet.

Not long ago Ilna had been the orphan girl who supported herself and her brother Cashel by skill and by working so hard even by the standards of a rural village that everyone marveled at her. She was a woman that everybody respected and nobody liked; nobody, or very few.

Sharina had liked her, even then; and she thought Garric liked her as well.

Ilna's fingers moved: opening the shed, feeding through the shuttle, and closing the shed again with the certainty of water pouring through the spillway of the ancient tidemill that had been her grandfather's. The pattern of the cloth she wove suggested a woodland at sunset, all buffs and browns and blacks shading into one another.

Today Ilna worked in naturally colored wools, her usual choice. She could have used silk, coarse hemp, or hard-drawn copper wire, and had the same effect on those who viewed the fabric. She'd always been a skilled weaver; since she returned from Hell, her skill had become inhuman.

Her fingers wove. She'd paid with her soul for the power to rule others in the way that evil would have her rule them. She'd been freed from the evil that came from outside her, but Ilna knew her heart well enough to be sure that the home-grown variety was sufficient to ruin more lives than even a city the size of Valles held.

If she let it; which she would not.

The garden was peaceful but not silent. At the quarter hour, criers called the time across the palace compound from the waterclock near the center. Occasionally servants laughed and chattered as they passed along the path on the other side of the back wall, and in the bungalow's atrium a music mistress was giving Lady Merota bos-Roriman her voice lesson.

The child—Merota was nine—had a clear voice and an instinct for craftsmanship. Ilna found her lessons as pleasant as a wren's warble, even when they involved nothing but repetitions of the scales.

Ilna was weaving a thin baize, almost a gauze. Even in its partial state it gave anyone who viewed it a sense of peace and tranquility. If Ilna wished—and once she had wished, had done—the same threads could have roused those who saw them to lust or fear or fury. The patterns of the cloth, the patterns of a man's life—the pattern of the cosmos itself—all were connected.

Anything Ilna wanted was hers for the taking. Anything at all; and she smiled with wry self-disgust because she didn't know what she wanted.

Once not so very long ago she'd wanted to be the wife of Garric, the innkeeper's son. He was Prince Garric now, but so great was Ilna's power that she could have him nonetheless.

The shuttle clattered across the loom; Ilna's smile grew harder still. She'd done things in the past that she'd be paying for throughout the future, no matter how long she lived; but she hadn't done that thing, and today she wasn't even sure she still wanted to.

Ilna os-Kenset, the orphan who couldn't read or write, didn't belong on a throne beside the King of the Isles; nor did Garric belong in a little place like Barca's Hamlet, for all that he'd been raised there with no reason to expect he'd ever travel farther than Carcosa on the other side of Haft. Garric was fit to be king, and a noblewoman like Liane bos-Benliman was a fit companion for him. As for Ilna—

Merota began Once There Was a Servant Girl—a song Ilna had heard before, but not from the child, and certainly not at the request of Lady Stolla, the music mistress. Ilna smiled, this time with a gentler sort of humor.

"Early one evening a sailor came to me," Merota sang, "and that was the start of all my misery."

Chalcus had a tenor voice every bit as fine as Merota's high soprano. He was a sailor when Ilna and the child met him, as skilled at that trade as any soul else on the ship—though Chalcus would've been the first to say it was no honor to be first among that crew of thumb-fingered nobodies.

"At sea without a woman for forty months or more...." Merota sang.

"Lady Merota!" cried Lady Stolla, a decayed gentlewoman; as prim as she was proper, and clearly horrified to realize the thrust of the child's performance.

"There wasn't any need to ask...," Merota continued. Her birth was better than Stolla's as those who cared about such things judged it, and she wasn't about to let the older woman decide for her what a lady might choose to sing.

"... what he was looking for!"

Ilna sniffed. She was Merota's legal guardian now—one orphan caring for another. Despite that, Stolla persisted in treating Ilna as a jumped-up governess or perhaps a maid; and if the music mistress chose to be embarrassed, well, Ilna wouldn't pretend to be sorry about that.

Her face grew harder. Ilna wouldn't pretend to anything.

Instead of going on with the next verse, Merota squealed cheerfully and cried, "Chalcus!"

"And how's one of the two most lovely ladies in all Valles?" replied the cheerful, lilting voice of the man who must just have arrived at the bungalow.

Ilna rose from her loom and went to greet her visitor: a man of middle height with a broad chest and muscles that appeared flat until effort made them bunch. There was generally a smile on Chalcus' lips, the curve of it echoing that of the inward-sharpened sword thrust through his sash.

Ilna herself smiled less often than Chalcus did, at least as an expression of good humor; but she was smiling now.