Mistress of the Catacombs (45 page)

* * *

To Sharina, the walls of Donelle two furlongs away didn't look formidable compared to those of Erdin, Valles, and Carcosa—the latter mighty even in ruin, having served forty generations of builders as a quarry for dressed stone. Donelle's were about twenty feet high, originally built of stone but over the years repaired with brick or even cemented rubble.

Carus, Lord Waldron, their aides, and a dozen Blood Eagles rode up on horses and two mules captured from citizens of Tisamur. Their circuit of the siege works had taken hours. Donelle wasn't large compared to the capitals of major islands, but having to stay out of bowshot of the walls added considerably to the circumference.

Sharina stood up in the shelter of what was now a mantlet; it'd been one wall of a farmer's shed not long ago. A score of officers involved in building the entrenchments, supplying the troops, and goodness knew what all else, descended on the commanders like vultures on a dead ewe. Carus and Waldron didn't even get a chance to dismount.

Sharina relaxed again, looking at Donelle. She didn't need to speak to the king, and his officers did. Her only purpose on Tisamur was to help Carus rein in his temper. Even if she could fight her way to the king through the crowd of armed soldiers, she couldn't restrain him in so confused a setting.

The city's garrison was raising additional towers at intervals along the wall, giving archers on the upper platforms greater range and adding impact to stones flung on those beneath. The new structures were built of wood, wicker, and bullhides. They'd stop an ordinary arrow, but Sharina didn't need a professional soldier to tell her that the heavy missiles from the fleet's catapults and balistas would shred the towers and everyone inside them.

Carus broke through the mob, shouting orders over his shoulder as he strode toward the mantlet. His bodyguards scrambled to keep up with him, elbowing officers aside with little consideration for rank.

With Lord Attaper and his Blood Eagles as a screen, Carus joined Sharina. He lifted the helmet he'd worn on the tour of inspection and used it to shade his eyes as he surveyed Donelle from this angle.

"Not much, is it?" he said conversationally. "I was half minded to storm it when we arrived. The trouble is, I don't trust the troops—yet—to stay disciplined when they're not under their officers' eyes. If I'd sent them over the wall—"

His left index finger pointed: here, there, a third spot. The first where the foundations had shifted, forming a crack which, though filled, was a staircase to the battlements. Another where olive trees grew up to the stone as though espaliered; the fruit was ripe. The last the main gate itself, closed but obviously too rotten to withstand the impact of one of the roofbeams ripped from a wealthy residence outside the walls and converted to a battering ram.

"—in an hour they'd have been all through the city in packets of half a dozen. And I'd have lost half of them before nightfall, from getting turned around in somebody else's twisting streets and burned when the fire started, as it surely would."

He shook his head with a grimace. "There's always a cookfire kicked over," he said, "or somebody just can't help tossing a lantern onto a thatched roof to prove that they've got a sword in their hand and they can do anything they please. Which of course they can."

"What will happen now, your highness?" Sharina asked, smiling deliberately as she looked at her companion.

He'd come to Sharina because only with her and Tenoctris—who was back in camp with the ships—could he talk freely. The Blood Eagles were keeping everyone else at bay by the prince's orders. If they heard what Carus said or Sharina answered, they wouldn't pass it on.

"Siege," Carus said. He shrugged. "It won't take long. The town's packed with people, and prisoners say the whole south end of the island's inside. There can't be enough food within the walls to last for three days, and in six there won't be a rat or a scrap of harness leather to be found."

Soldiers were digging a trench at a bare bowshot from the walls of Donelle; a little closer yet, Sharina suspected. The defenders weren't trying their luck, though, probably because Carus had brought some of his artillery up from the ships already. The catapults and balistas were cocked and ready to reply to anything the city's bowmen chose to start.

"They'll surrender when the food runs out?" Sharina asked. She looked away from the city, then turned her head quickly so that she wouldn't have to think about what she'd see there.

The countryside around Donelle had been pleasant and prosperous, a mixture of successful farms and the country houses of wealthy townsfolk. In less than a day, the royal army had transformed it into a devastated wasteland.

"The people in control, these Children of the Mistress," Carus said grimly, "they'll have some food. So will the mercenaries they've hired. They'll keep the gates closed for a while yet. But it won't be long, it can't be long."

"And your dreams?" Sharina asked quietly.

"I can stand the dreams longer than the people inside can live on air!" Carus said, though his face went gray at the thought. He added, looking at the city instead of his companion, "I thought about that when we arrived and I was deciding whether to storm the walls. I could've said, 'Kill everybody wearing the black and white robe.' I could've said, 'Kill everybody who might have worn the black and white robe."

His right hand clenched on his swordhilt; the blade rustled against the iron reinforcement at the mouth of the scabbard.

"I could have said, 'Kill everybody!'" Carus said, "and they'd have done it. My men would have done it because I said so. Not every man in the army, but enough; and when they were done, the dreams would have stopped."

"Carus?" Sharina said, touching the king's sword hand. He stiffened, then took a deep breath and relaxed at least his body.

The ruin of the countryside wasn't vandalism. Wood is the first thing a siege requires: wood for mantlets, wood to shore trenches and earthen walls, wood for the heavy siege engines tobatter through stone. Orchards, sacred groves, beeches planted to shade a house or a bower—all of them fall in a flurry of axe chips, then slide toward the entrenchments behind teams of men and captured oxen.

The quickest sources of finished timber are existing buildings. On the short march from the harbor, Sharina had seen hundreds of houses torn down in a few minutes apiece by squads of troops who'd quickly learned the swiftest ways to convert a home into beams and a pile of rubble.

"I killed people when I wore my own flesh," said the ancient king softly. "Killed them myself and had them killed. I never killed everybody in a city, though."

He knuckled his eyes, then his temples. Sharina had never seen anyone more obviously weary.

Carus lowered his fists and gave her a wry smile. "If I don't get some sleep soon," he said conversationally, "I don't know what I'm going to do. But Donelle'll surrender soon enough."

A trumpet called. The army's first action on reaching Donelle had been to raise a spindly watchtower, a tripod supporting a laddered mast. The basket at the peak put the lookout a good hundred feet in the air. From there he could see most of what went on in the city as well as in the surrounding countryside.

He blew another attention signal, holding the trumpet to his lips with one hand while the other arm pointed south. The eyes of besiegers and those on the city walls both turned in that direction, toward the fleet's encampment.

Sharina glanced at the mantlet. The wattling was of thumb-thick branches woven about saplings of twice the diameter. The hut's corner posts, trimmed cedar trees, now held the mantlet upright against any arrows that got this far.

"What in blazes—" Carus wondered aloud.

Sharina half-jumped, half-climbed to the top of the mantlet and stood barefoot on its edge. She kept her arms out for balance while her eyes searched the western horizon.

"There's a horseman coming," she said. Nearby soldiers looked up at her. "He's got a red pennant. He's one of our messengers, your highness!"

"Is he, by the Lady!" Carus said. "So what's Nitker got that's so important he sends a mounted courier?"

In the excitement, several archers on the nearer gate tower sent arrows toward Carus and Sharina. "Down!" bellowed a Blood Eagle. He grabbed Sharina's ankle and jerked her toward him.

If he hadn't let go, Sharina might have hit badly—on her back or even her head. The bodyguard was satisfied merely to get her down where she didn't draw attention. She landed on her toes and flexed knees, just as the flight of arrows whistled into the ground. The nearest was twenty feet away.

A balista fired from an earth mound thirty yards behind Sharina. The bow arms slammed forward to their padded stops, sending a bolt screaming overhead to strike in a shower of sparks on the side of a firing slit. The iron projectile glanced through without hitting any of the defenders. Chips the bolt'd shattered from the battlements sprayed stingingly across the platform.

The archers were Tisamur militiamen, not hired professionals. They threw themselves down, then as one rose to look out at the balista which wouldn't be recocked for another five minutes at the quickest.

The sailors crewing a catapult well down the curve of the siege lines had horsed their weapon around to bear on the gate tower. While the defenders' looked in the other direction, the catapult's head-sized stone hit and smashed a section of the battlements inward. The archers went down again; some screaming, the rest unable to. No one showed himself on that tower again while Sharina watched.

The courier charged into the siege lines and slid from his saddle while his horse was still moving. He was a short man, lightly built—a natural jockey in size and with the bantam feistiness of so many little men. Ignoring Lord Waldron and the senior officers around him, he made straight for Carus.

Blood Eagles hunched, lifting their shields into position. Their job was to doubt the good will of others—and institutional suspicion aside, a Confederacy assassin could find a pennon to mimic a royal courier.

"Let him through!" Carus ordered.

Attaper turned to eye the king sidelong while keeping the courier in sight. "Stay as you are," he snapped to his men. "You, messenger? You can tell your news from where you are!"

The black-armored guards took their commander's orders, not the king's. The courier made as if to push through; the curve of a shield butted him back. Lord Waldron, glowering like a thundercloud, and the other nearby officers came crowding closer.

"Yes, go on!" Carus said, frustrated but philosophical about it. "What word do you bring from Admiral Nitker?"

"Your majesty...," the courier said. "The Count of Blaise has landed with his whole army in the bay west of us. Admiral Nitker says there's at least fifteen thousand men, and that he's sure from the equipment that some of the regiments are from Sandrakkan! The admiral is awaiting your orders."

"May the Lady show us mercy!" cried a gray-bearded officer, the adjutant of the regiment building this section of siege works. "They knew we were coming and they've trapped us! We'll die here as sure as—"

Carus, as swiftly as a stooping hawk, pushed two Blood Eagles aside in his rush. He grabbed the old soldier by the throat and slapped him, forehand and then backhand. His callused hand cracked like the balista's cord.

"Your highness!" Sharina screamed, grabbing Carus' right arm from behind and clinging with all the strength of her supple young body. "Not this! Not here!"

Looking dazed, Carus released the adjutant; he fell as though heart-stabbed. Two of the old man's juniors caught him under the shoulders and drew him back out of sight.

Carus looked around at the shock and fear filling the eyes of the watching officers. He shook himself, then clenched and unclenched his right hand to work feeling back into the numbed fingers.

"No," the king said, "we're not going to die here—and we're not going to give up the siege of Donelle either. Lord Waldron, I'm leaving you here with half the heavy infantry to continue the siege. I'll take the other half, the skirmishers, and the phalanx back to the fleet and size up the situation. And then—"

He looked at the gates of Donelle, then around the arc of his officers again.

"—I'll teach Count Lerdoc what it means to rebel against the King of the Isles. I'll teach him, or the Sister take my soul!"

A few of those listening started to cheer. All Sharina could think of was that the Sister might very well have Carus' soul soon—and the souls of every man of his army as well, if the king's haste led him into yet another misjudgment.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Alecto leaped onto a bench, then set one foot on the crossbar and braced the other against the sidewall so that she could look out through the small circular window in the transom. A villager shouted a warning.

The wild girl jumped down. A torch smacked the opening, knocking sparks into the temple. Alecto responded with an oath that Ilna—who didn't believe in the Great Gods or much of anything else—found disgusting. Ilna snatched the bedding clear, but the sparks burned out before they landed.

"They're not trying to break the door down," Alecto said quietly. "They're hanging back on the porch, looking at the lizard I killed."

"They probably don't see any reason to hurry," Ilna said, thinking through the pattern which connected the past to the future here at this point. "Hunger will bring us out before long—if they don't decide to block the door from their side"

She smiled with wintry humor. "A pity that the creature ran outside that way," she added. "We wouldn't have lacked for food if it'd died where you stabbed it."

Alecto gave her a look of irritation, apparently uncertain whether Ilna was joking. Since Ilna wasn't sure herself, the confusion was understandable.

Something thumped against the door. Ilna hesitated, deciding between her noose, the hank of cords in her sleeve, and the small bone-cased knife she carried in her sash for general utility. In the end she readied the silken noose. It wasn't a good weapon for these tight quarters, but she liked the feel of it. There wasn't light enough to expect their attackers to see a knotted spell.

Alecto hopped up to the transom again, then dropped back with a grim expression. This time the villagers didn't fling a torch at her.

"They're piling rocks in front of the door," she said. "They're going to block us in."

Ilna nodded without expression. "I'll see where the cave goes, then," she said. It led to somewhere big enough to hold a salamander the size of a horse, after all. And since there were no other options....

Alecto didn't seem to have heard her. Outside on the porch, villagers crunched another block of stone down beside the first. With the whole community working, the entrance would very quickly be blocked beyond the ability of the two women to clear.

"I'll kill you all!" Alecto screamed at the doorpanels. "I'll wipe you off the face of the Earth, you cowards!"

The wild girl knelt and began drawing on the floor with her athame. The blade was covered with the priest's blood, but it had mostly dried by now. She spat on the bronze to so that her point left thin red trails of dissolved gore on the stone.

Her face screwed into tight, sour lines, Ilna lay on her belly and crawled cautiously into the narrowing cave. The rock was slimy—from the salamander's skin, she now knew, not water sweating through the limestone as she'd thought when Arthlan first showed them the temple's interior.

Peasants got used to filthy jobs. Ilna smiled: the slime would wash off, if she lived long enough to reach a place with clean water. That didn't seem likely at the moment.

Her body blocked the little light that entered through the temple's transom. She regretted that, but Alecto's chanting also blurred into a dull murmur. Ilna didn't know what the wild girl was attempting, but it probably wasn't anything a decent person wanted to know about.

The tunnel narrowed further. The salamander was thicker through the body than Ilna, but it must be able to squeeze itself down to a degree that a human ribcage couldn't. If she became stuck in the throat of the passage—

Ilna laughed—and regretted it, because the stone didn't let her body shake with laughter as it should. If I get stuck, she thought, I die in a small stone box. Which is exactly what happens to me if I don't find a way out of the temple in the first place.

Ilna had her arms stretched out in front of her. She squirmed forward by twisting her torso while one elbow or the other anchored her against the stone. It was slow and unpleasant, but—she smiled—not as slow or as unpleasant as the alternative.

Tight places didn't especially bother her. Stone did, though, but there wasn't anything to do about the fact except ignore it and keep on going. In Ilna's philosophy, going on was the only choice.

The cave started to open up again—not much, but enough for Ilna to reach out with both hands against the stone and pull her hips through the narrowest point. She could smell water close; if nothing else, that meant she and Alecto would starve in three weeks instead of dying of thirst in three days.

She got up on all fours, then lifted her head carefully in hopes that there was room enough to stand. No, the ceiling was still just above her. At least she could keep her torso off the ground.

She reached forward with her right hand and shifted her weight onto it. Her palm slipped down a short, slimy slope into water as cold as charity. She jerked back and just missed lifting her head hard into the rock.

Ilna paused for a moment, tasting the water—good, though with a slight tang of iron—and getting her breathing back under control. Maybe I'm more nervous than I'd thought.... Because of all the stone, she supposed; but that was no excuse, there were no excuses.

Alecto's chant echoed down the tunnel, blended into a threatening rumble by its passage. Occasionally a word came clear: "... palipater patrima...," in one moment, "... iao alilamps...," in another.

Ilna explored the edge of the pool with her left hand, hoping she'd find something more promising on the other side than there was in the direction she'd come. There wasn't another side: when Ilna stirred the water, it lapped against a solid stone wall. The pool wasn't much bigger than the tunnel through which she'd crawled to reach it.

She felt as far as she could reach into the water without finding bottom. There was enough water somewhere to hold the salamander now dead on the temple porch; it was possible, probable even, that this pool was a tunnel like the one that led to the outside; but slightly lower and flooded.

"... nerxia...," echoed a voice, no longer identifiable as Alecto's or even as human.

Of course even if there was a larger cavern beyond, it too might be water-filled: an underground sea in which the monster slept motionless in the intervals between crawling to the surface to eat. It didn't come out often, from what Arthlan had said. The salamanders Ilna knew, hiding under the rocks of Pattern Creek or crawling across the leaf mold on damp evenings, had none of the eager liveliness of mice and birds.

She hiked up her tunic to keep it dry—drier than otherwise, at least—and lowered herself feet first into the pool. She felt the smooth stone channel curve, but again she didn't find an end. There was no point in trying to go further unless she was willing to go all the way.

Ilna pulled herself out of the water, a harder task than she'd expected. The monster had polished the rock over the ages of passing to and from the outer world, and Ilna's limbs were already numb from their immersion.

She breathed deeply on her hands and knees, then lay flat again and squirmed through the tunnel in the other direction. It was easier this time. She had a glimmer of moonlight to guide her, and she knew that there was an end.

As Ilna worked her way past the tunnel's throat, a flash of scarlet wizardlight blotted the moonglow. Alecto's voice rose into a high-pitched rant: "Brimo!"

Another flash, much brighter.

"Ananke!"

Ilna got her legs past the narrowest part of the cave. She thrust her feet hard at the rock walls, at the same time scrabbling forward with her arms. She didn't know why she was in such a hurry, but if the wild girl was bringing matters to a climax, Ilna wanted to be present for good or ill.

Present for ill, probably. Even at better times, Ilna didn't have much confidence in good things happening.

"Chasarba!" Alecto screamed.

Ilna squeezed out of the cave. Alecto knelt, holding her dagger-point in the center of the figure she'd scribed in human blood. Her face was a study in hellish triumph.

Wizardlight blazed from the blade, penetrating flesh and even rock. For an instant Ilna saw the villagers staring at the temple with expressions of stark horror. Wingless things flew between suns in the void beyond the sky, and creatures swam like fish in the lava beneath the mountains.

The light died, leaving a memory of itself in Ilna's eyes. Alecto laughed like a demon. The ground began to shake.

Outside the temple, villagers screamed. The first tremors were slight, but everyone who lives in a mountain valley knows the danger of landslides.

A violent shock threw Ilna off her feet. The mountainside crackled like sheets of lightning. Slabs of rock broke away, roaring toward the bottom of the valley and sweeping up more debris in their rush.

The tremors lifted dust from the temple floor; Ilna held her sleeve over her mouth and nose so that she could still breath. The slope was shaking itself like a dog just out of the water.

The temple porch collapsed, blotting out the sheen of moonlight through the transom. Ilna grabbed Alecto's shoulder and dragged her into the natural part of the temple, the funnel in the living rock. It might not survive the violence the wild girl had called down on the whole valley, herself included, but it might. Nothing made by men could possibly—

Cracks danced across the temple roof. "Come on!" Ilna screamed, pulling Alecto with her as far as she could. She couldn't have explained why she was trying to save her companion, except perhaps that their two lives were the only things Ilna thought she might save from the thunder of destruction.

Going on is the only choice....

The cave narrowed. Ilna slid into the throat. "Come on!" she repeated, but she couldn't hear her own voice against the shuddering terror of the earthquake.

The stone squeezed Ilna, battered her. It could close and chew her body like a grass stem in a boy's mouth. No one would ever know that Ilna os-Kenset was a smear of blood between layers of stone.

She worked through, pulling herself into the enlarged chamber. She felt triumphant for the instant before a greater shock threw her against the ceiling, numbing her shoulders and nearly stunning her.

She turned. Water from the pool sloshed across her in icy fury.

"Alecto!" she shouted, knowing she might as well save her breath. She reached back into the tunnel. Her companion's hand was stretched out, still gripping the bronze dagger. Ilna grabbed Alecto's wrist and pulled, dragging her hips through the narrows.

There was nothing to see, nothing to hear but the mountain destroying itself and all the world besides. Guiding Alecto by the hand, Ilna poised on the edge of the pool.

She dived in, head first. She couldn't swim, but her hands and feet against the smooth stone would take her as far down as she could go before she drowned or froze... or just possibly, she reached a place where a human could live, at least for a little while longer.

No choice....