Mistress of the Catacombs (42 page)

"Oh, the name's drilled out of the wood below, Cashel," Tilphosa said. "See? Though it's backwards from this way."

She pointed again. He'd taken the design for a cutwork border, not a word.

"I see, mistress," he said. "But I can't read letters either way round."

"I'll read for us, Cashel," the girl said, squeezing his arm again. "You take care of all the other things. And Cashel?"

He met her eyes again.

"Remember that I'm Tilphosa, not mistress. All right?"

"Right," he agreed, giving her a shy smile.

The inn had double doors, but the left panel was latched closed. A pair of men stood in the opening, watching the riverfront as they drank from elmwood masars.

Cashel shrugged, loosening his shoulder muscles as he considered how to tell the fellows that he planned to enter through where they were standing. He'd be polite, of course, and the chances were that they'd respond politely as well; but there was just the least chance that they wouldn't.

"Cashel!" Tilphosa said as she caught his arm.

For a moment Cashel thought she was telling him not to start a fight—which meant walk away from a fight that somebody else had started, and that wasn't going to happen to Cashel or-Kenset. Then he followed the line of her eyes out to the river road and saw what she and the men in the doorway both were looking at. Calm again, Cashel watched too.

A tall, hooded figure walked at the head of a procession of men rolling a two-wheeled hand-truck. The corpse on the truck was wrapped in coarse wool. The accompanying men wore peaked hats with black-dyed feathers standing up around the brims, apparently a sign of mourning; the pair of bare-headed females bringing up the rear stroked tambours with muffled sticks.

The figure in the lead was a good seven feet tall. It—Cashel wasn't going to guess sex, not after his mistake with the shopkeeper—wore a robe that was pale green in the glow of the lanterns carried by some of the mourners. The hem brushed the mud, and a veil covered as much of the face as the cowl itself didn't hide. The figure moved as smoothly as the images of the Great Gods brought from Carcosa to outlying boroughs in wheeled carts during the Tithe Processions.

The funeral turned onto the causeway leading to the temple in the river. Cashel saw the click of a spark from the hand-truck's iron tires: the causeway was paved with hard stone.

"Excuse me, gentlemen," Tilphosa said unexpectedly to the men in the doorway. "We're strangers here. Who is that, please?"

The men turned to look at her; the fellow nearer to Cashel jumped back, much as he might have done if he'd glanced up from his drink and found a bull standing at his side.

"By the Shepherd!" he muttered, brushing with his free hand the beer he'd sloshed on the front of his tunic.

The procession reached the temple; its doors opened with only the faintest squeal. Somebody must keep them well-greased in this soggy atmosphere. The men pushing the truck stepped back expectantly, and the female musicians redoubled their muted drumming.

"Well, I believe it's Tadbal Bessing's-son the cobbler, mistress," the other man said. "Leastways I'd heard he'd died last night, so if it's not Tadbal, he'll be along shortly."

"No," said Tilphosa in a noticeably sharper tone. "I mean the tall fellow leading them, not the departed. Is he a priest?"

The men looked at each other. Partly to explain Tilphosa's ignorance, and partly to remind the locals to be polite when they spoke to a girl who had a friend Cashel's size, Cashel said, "We're strangers here, you see."

"Right," said the fellow who'd spilled his beer. "That's one of the Nine, you see. They take care of the dead."

"It's the custom here in Soong," the other man agreed.

A figure which could have been a mirror image of the leader came out of the temple. While the mourners stood back, the two of them lifted the corpse from the hand-truck and carried it inside. The temple doors closed behind them.

"There's nine priests?" Tilphosa said.

Cashel consciously kept from frowning. Local customs were no business of his, unless they involved feeding him to a tree or the like. In Barca's Hamlet people buried their dead in the ground in winding sheets, if they could afford the wool, but every place Cashel had been since he left the borough had a different way of dealing with death. If the people of Soong wanted priests to slide corpses into the river for the catfish to eat, well, that was their business.

"I don't rightly know, mistress," the first speaker said. "Nobody's seen more than three of them together, not that I've heard about. Maybe Nine's just a name."

"Tilphosa, I think we ought to see about food and a place to sleep," Cashel said firmly.

All three looked at him. The man leaning against the closed panel reached down and lifted a pin so that he could pull that half open as well.

"There you go, master," he said with a sweep of his hand and a friendly smile. "That'll save you having to turn sideways, I guess."

"Yes, of course," said Tilphosa. She stepped into the taproom with her head high; every inch a queen.

* * *

Sharina stood at the base of the flagship's forward fighting tower, looking toward the beach two furlongs away. The great quinquereme proceeded along the shore under the thrust of only one bank of oars, giving her just enough way on that she didn't wallow in the surf. The balistas on the bow and stern towers were cocked and loaded with thick-shafted arrows whose square iron heads could smash a ship's hull at short range or an archer's scantlings half a mile inland.

Carus had transferred from The King of the Isles to one of the lightest warships in the fleet, an eighty-oared bireme that had been in service as a revenue cutter before Garric became regent of the kingdom. Under the previous reign of Valence III, the Kingdom of the Isles had controlled little more than port duties and the fishing within dory-haul of Ornifal, but even that slight reach had required enforcement vessels.

The bireme swept toward the beach at a slight angle, watched by Sharina and every other person who could get a view of the proceedings. A score of triremes sculled along beside The King of the Isles—closer than safety permitted—each with its single balista or catapult aimed shoreward against a threat as yet invisible.

Admiral Nitker in the stern of the flagship looked carved from granite; Lord Waldron on the Lady of Sunrise, a broadbeamed sailing ship that transported his staff and three days' rations for the whole army, flicked his bare sword in small, furious arcs at his right side. Everybody in the fleet was terrified at the idea of Carus—of Garric, as they thought—making the initial landing on Laut with only a company of Blood Eagles. It was a comment on the force of Carus' personality—and on the raging fury he'd frequently blazed with in the days since he began to wear Garric's flesh—that none of the strong-minded men of his army had seriously tried to prevent him from doing this.

The bireme slid up the beach, first grating and then grinding slowly to a halt with twenty feet of her bow on dry land. The little vessel didn't have a ram, so her curving stem had acted like a sled runner under the rowers' final efforts.

The bireme tilted to its starboard, inland side. The men, bodyguards acting as oarsmen only for this last short run-up, were leaping to the sand even before the hull thumped down. The first man off, splendid in a silver breastplate and a gold diadem instead of the helmet every officer had begged he wear, was King Carus.

A line of Blood Eagles, still juggling the shields on their left arms, formed in front of him and trotted toward the straggle of fishermen's huts that were the only buildings visible. A woman stood in the doorway of one, holding a pot in one hand and covering her mouth with the other. She threw down the pot and ran inland screaming.

The cornicene at Carus' side put his horn to his lips and blew a lowing call. A score of triremes, already stern-on to the beach, began backing in. They were moving faster than their hulls could accept without straining when they hit the sand, but the immediate threat was the real Confederate army, not a hypothetical fleet that might sally to attack the royal force.

Tenoctris came out of her little enclosure under the fighting tower, holding the bamboo splint she'd been using as a wand. She walked to the rail and deliberately tossed it into the sea. "Are things going well, Sharina?" she asked.

Horns and trumpets blared as nearly a hundred vessels jockied for position. Officers on The King of the Isles screamed at crewmen and one another. The flagship needed to turn seaward or she'd run aground on the western jaw of the broad bay, and there was more confusion than Sharina would've expected about just how she should avoid that in the shoal of other vessels. Admiral Nitker jumped onto the stern rail to bellow at the captain of the trireme within stone's throw to port; a white-faced aide clung to the admiral's belt with one hand and a bollard for the mast stays with the other.

"All right, I guess," Sharina said. She found herself smiling. "The Confederacy of the West seems to be conspicuous by its absence, but right now it looks like half the royal fleet is in danger of sinking the other half unless we're lucky."

She paused to watch the shore fill with armed men climbing out of the triremes, forming under the harsh commands of noncoms, and then advancing in pike-fanged blocks to the perimeter Carus and his company of Blood Eagles were marking out. The troops aboard the following ships would throw up earthworks behind the armed line, building both a base camp and a refuge for the emptied vessels. For now the fleet's defense lay in the spearheads and sword blades.

Which would be sufficient, even if the Confederates managed to mount an attack. The ancient king who now led the Isles was a hasty man capable of ignoring everything but his own will—as witness his actions just now—but the time Sharina had spent with Carus had convinced her that the world would never know his equal as a warrior. When he determined the forces for the first wave that might have to fight its way ashore, his analysis was as certain as Ilna's choice of yarn for a fabric.

"I guess it's always as confused as this in a war," Sharina said quietly. "When I read about battles, I couldn't understand how armies could blunder about, slaughtering each other almost by accident it sometimes seemed. But I see now."

There was no sign the enemy headquartered three miles away in Donelle was even aware of the royal invasion. They'd learn soon, but in an hour the camp's fortifications would be complete—

And within four hours, according to the king's plan, the royal army would advance to begin the siege of Donelle. The only thing that could change Carus' timetable would be for the Confederate army to march out of the city to face him in the field.

Sharina shivered at the thought.

"Is something wrong?" Tenoctris said.

"I was thinking that the war might be over before nightfall if the enemy commander's a fool," Sharina said. "But—have you ever seen a pig butchered, Tenoctris?"

The wizard shook her head minutely. "My education was in books, dear," she said.

"I'm just thinking about twenty thousand pigs being slaughtered at the same time, is all," Sharina said. "All the blood, and the mud; and the way the pigs squeal...."

Tenoctris put her hand on arm Sharina's arm.

Twenty more troop-carrying warships backed toward shore farther to the east. The first squadron, lighter by the weight of a hundred men apiece, struggled to get under weigh and clear the beach for later-comers. They'd wait offshore until the earthworks were up and there was leisure to fit the ships of the fleet as tightly together as they'd been in the Arsenal.

The King of the Isles slowed noticeably. Oarsmen to port had reversed stroke so that the bow swung seaward under the thrust of the starboard oars. The trireme on the port side was pulling forward at full power, giving the flagship searoom. The oars of the smaller ship slanted back along her hull in perfect synchrony before lifting to surge forward; they spilled chains of diamond-glittering droplets into the foam alongside.

"Was your work successful?" Sharina asked, giving a slight emphasis to the possessive. She nodded toward the tower's curtained base where the wizard had been.

"I learned that none of our missing friends are in Donelle," Tenoctris said. She offered a minuscule smile, more sad than not. "Though I think Ilna may have been there recently. If I've read the indications correctly. I'm not—"

The smile broadened.

"—a very powerful wizard, as you know."

Sharina moved to the opposite rail so that she could continue to watch the beach. The ships of the squadron that had landed the initial troops were crawling seaward again, all but one trireme whose officers stood knee-deep in the water to examine the keel and planking; the captain apparently thought she'd strained her hull when she grounded. More ships were backing shoreward, maneuvering with difficulty to avoid the stranded vessel.

Sharina hugged Tenoctris. "I've met powerful wizards," she said. "They're all dead, thank the Lady. And thanks to you, the kingdom still stands."

King Carus balanced at the peak of a tripod made by lashing small trees together. From there he could survey both the shore behind him and the hostile countryside beyond the ditched wall his troops were already digging. An aide ran from Carus toward the damaged vessel. The king watched with his hands on his hips, his look of fury visible even at this distance.

"I hope the captain has sense enough to get off the beach before Carus decides to come back personally," Sharina said.

"Yes," said Tenoctris. "They'll do better to take their chance on sinking than what will happen if they disobey the king."

Sharina had been smiling; her face went suddenly grim. "Carus might kill the captain, mightn't he?" she said quietly. "Cut his head off, the way he did the Intercessor's."

Tenoctris nodded. She didn't speak.

The aide and the captain exchanged shouts. The officers began to return to the trireme's deck by climbing oar looms. The danger was past—this time.

"Tenoctris, he can't behave that way and keep the kingdom together," Sharina said, desperation in her voice. "He knows that, but when he's angry he lashes out at whoever's responsible."

"It's always the real cause, though," the wizard said. "Carus doesn't kick his servant because he doesn't like something the Earl of Sandrakkan has done."

"In the long run it doesn't matter," Sharina said. "It's worse! Oh, I know justice is a wonderful thing, but he'd be better off to kick a servant than to knock down a nobleman because he was slow obeying an order. He'd be better off, and the Kingdom would be better off."

"He isn't sleeping because of the dreams," Tenoctris said, looking at the king who'd now resumed his survey of the landscape beyond the rising wall. "I suppose he was always hasty, but even a saint who gets no sleep...."

More ships shuttled toward the beach. A pair of triremes fouled one another, their oars interlocking as the men on deck screamed curses. It would be sorted out, though. For all the seeming chaos, the process continued toward its planned conclusion as inexorably as a storm sweeping onto the land.

"Maybe his way will work," Sharina said softly. "Perhaps Carus will end the dreams and the rebellion with his sword-edge. He did that many times in the past, after all."

"Yes," said Tenoctris. "I think I'll...."

Her voice trailed off. She walked toward her shelter to resume practicing her art. The old wizard looked so worn already that Sharina almost called her back.

Almost. Because Sharina knew—as Tenoctris did—that the last place haste and reliance on his sword had brought Carus was the bottom of the sea. Without Tenoctris' wizardry to at least warn of such threats, a similar result would occur this time.

And slight though Sharina knew Tenoctris' powers were compared to those to their enemies, it was in those powers rather than the king's flashing sword that the kingdom's best hope lay.