Mistress of the Catacombs (46 page)

* * *

Tilphosa screamed. Cashel jumped to his feet, slanting the quarterstaff across his body. He kicked the bedding into the darkness. The shuttered windows blocked all the light that Soong's fog didn't smother to begin with.

Leaning forward, Cashel swept his left hand through the air above where Tilphosa should be lying. His right arm was cocked back, ready to ram his staff's ferrule through anybody he touched who wasn't the girl herself. Nobody was bending over her.

Cashel scooped Tilphosa up one-handed and started for the common room. Rather than strike a light in here, he'd take her to the hearth and blow the coals bright.

Tilphosa's body was as cold as a drowned corpse: colder than the air, colder than mere death.

The door at the far end of the passageway rattled open. Leemay stood back holding an oil lamp, while two of the men who'd slept in the common room stood in the doorway. One held a cudgel and the other, a fisherman, had a gaff with claws of briar root.

"Let me get her out into the light!" Cashel said. He'd let his staff drop in the aisle, but there still wasn't width enough for his haste. His right hip brushed down a hamper of spirits in stoneware bottles; they clattered among themselves without breaking.

"It wasn't a sound!" said one of the men in confusion. "I didn't hear her scream, I thought it!"

The trap door into the loft overhead was open at the back of the room. A proper ladder leaned against the molding. In Barca's Hamlet, most people used fir saplings trimmed so that the branch stubs provided steps of a sort....

"Get out of my way!" Cashel said, pushing into the common room. The fisherman jumped out of his way in time; the other fellow didn't and bounced back from Cashel's shoulder. Cashel laid Tilphosa on the bar, cradling her head with his left hand until he found a sponge to use as a pillow.

The fellow's comment about thinking the scream made Cashel frown. That's what it seemed to him, too, now that somebody'd mentioned it. He'd been asleep, though, and dreaming—

Leemay held the lamp so that its light fell on the girl's face. The innkeeper was expressionless, scarcely livelier than Tilphosa... and Tilphosa might have been a wax statue, her face molded by an artist whose taste was for art that showed bones and ignored the spirit.

"What'd you do to Tilphosa?" Cashel said. Anger deepened his voice. The two men flinched; Leemay did not.

The outside door was already ajar. The left panel opened fully and more people bumped their way in. Either they'd been summoned by the scream or somebody'd gone out to call them.

"How could I touch her?" Leemay said. "She was with you; I was up on the roof."

The lamp trembled in the innkeeper's hand. She was weary, weary from the spell she'd just woven on the roof.

The fishermen touched Tilphosa's cheek, then her throat, with the back of his fingers. "She's dead," he said. "Cold as ice. Somebody get the Nine."

"Do you suppose it's plague?" a man asked in concern.

Cashel grabbed for Leemay's throat. She leaned back, too quick for him and a perfect judge of how far he could reach with the bar between them.

"Watch him," she said to the local men around her. "He may have gone mad with grief."

The bar was of heavy hardwood, anchored to the walls and floor, but Cashel would've pushed it over if the girl hadn't been lying on it. He came out through the gate instead, tearing it away instead of folding it up and back.

Two men grappled him. Everyone was shouting; the only light was from Leemay's lamp, though a woman in the doorway held a lantern with lenses of fish bladder.

Cashel caught the two men in his arms and rotated his torso, hurling them both over the bar and into wall. Somebody grabbed his legs. He brought his right foot back, then kicked hard with his callused heel. The hands released. Cashel lunged forward with his arms outstretched.

He was going to get his hands on Leemay. Then she'd undo whatever it was that she'd done to Tilphosa, or....

The crowd milled between him and the innkeeper. More people were coming through the door every moment, but Cashel didn't care about that. The men in front of him struggled, but they could as well have wrestled with an ox as try to stop Cashel in his present rage. He plowed forward, his shoulders hunched.

Leemay backed a step and another step. She was against the wall, now; still holding up the lamp, her flat face passionless.

Somebody threw a net smelling of river mud onto Cashel. Men shouted, twisting it over his torso. It was only a fishnet, but the openwork fabric of tough cords flexed when he pulled at it. It gave against him, never releasing and never allowing his strength a way to break it.

Cashel forced himself another pace onward. An overturned table tripped him; wrapped in the net, he couldn't throw an arm out to keep his balance. He fell, smashing a stool under him.

"I've got a net!" a man cried. "Let me—"

Cashel kicked violently, trying to twist up onto his knees. Several locals shoved him down, and a second net fell over his legs. Willing hands wrapped it tight, trussing Cashel like a hen for market.

Leemay stared down at him. "Don't hurt him," she said, not that anybody seemed disposed to do otherwise. They were just decent citizens, restraining a stranger who'd gone berserk. "He's upset! He'll come to his senses later."

"You killed her!" Cashel shouted.

He squirmed across the puncheon floor, still trying to reach the innkeeper. Cashel wasn't sure he'd even be able to bite her ankles through the fishnet, but at least he was going to try.

Men grabbed the casting ropes and hauled back. The net was made to hold heavy, fiercely struggling prey; it worked as well on land as it would've done with a catch of eels.

"Tie him to the pillar," Leemay said calmly, nodding toward the roughly-shaped treetrunk which supported the main roofbeam. "Let him sleep off the madness."

Experienced hands slid Cashel across the floor, then lifted his torso upright against the pillar. He twisted, but they were fishermen and used to muscling a writhing netful.

"There you go, lad," one of them said. "Just calm down and we'll let you loose."

The front door's other panel opened deliberately. The crowd quieted from the back forward as everyone turned to look at the doorway.

Everyone but Leemay. She glanced at the door momentarily, then looked across the room to Tilphosa's still form. She smiled faintly and became expressionless again.

A hooded figure, skeletally thin despite its billowing robes, entered the common room. It had to bend to clear the doorway, but the ceiling between the beams was high enough for it to straighten again.

"Where is the departed?" said a voice. It had to come from under the hood, but it had no more direction than it had life or humanity. It sounded like the wind wheezing through rotten thatch.

"Here," said the man who'd sat in the chimney corner when Cashel and Tilphosa arrived. He gestured toward the bar top.

"You can carry her on one of my tables," Leemay said. "She may have had something contagious, so we need to be quick about taking care of her."

"Tilphosa wasn't sick!" Cashel shouted. "You killed her, woman! You!"

Men took the table that was already upended and knocked out the pins attaching the trestle legs. They carried it to the bar where two more men lifted Tilphosa's still form onto it. They worked efficiently but with a degree of respect which Cashel noted, though anger was a fire in his throat.

The hooded figure nodded, then bent again and left the inn. Even as close as Cashel now was to the member of the Nine, he couldn't see any sign of legs moving beneath the robe.

The men carrying Tilphosa on the table shuffled out after the priest. The other locals bowed their heads; then, when the impromptu procession was well clear, they began to return to their own homes for the remainder of the night.

Leemay closed the door again; the three guests in the common room muttered quietly as they found their bedding and crawled into it.

Leemay looked at Cashel once more before she pinched out the wick of her lamp. He couldn't see her features through the red rage in his heart.

* * *

Ademos, not a man Garric had suspected of being devout, knelt on the millipede's third segment and prayed loudly: first to the Lady, then to the Shepherd, and then back to the Lady. His voice was so loud that Garric—standing with Vascay, Thalemos, and the wizard just behind the creature's head—could hear every word clearly.

The only pause between prayers was however long it took Ademos to draw breath. The other Brethren listened without complaint; indeed, Halophus looked as though he might join in.

Metron lay on the millipede's armor, drained white by the effort of forcing back the pursuing liquid a second time. He was either asleep or comatose; occasionally he snorted like a seal as he struggled to breathe.

"It's catching up with us again," said Thalemos in a tone of aristocratic calm. Indeed, the only hint of the youth's nervousness lay in the fact that he'd bothered to state something so blindingly obvious in the first place.

The living fluid shimmered through the trees to either side. Garric remembered that he'd thought at first it was sunstruck water; he smiled, wishing that he were still so ignorant.

Not long before, a beetle the size of a house had lumbered past the millipede and into the pearly glow. The fluid crawled up the creature's legs like oil soaking a wick. Lines of cobweb-gray traced across the shiny black wing cases; bits of the wings fell away, and the beetle's legs turned to powder also.

The beetle's fat body continued to writhe for as long as Garric's eyes could follow it. The fact that the agony was silent made it all the worse.

"I can't say I'm looking forward to the thing eating me," Vascay remarked conversationally. He glanced sidelong at Garric. "Eh?"

"If you need somebody to kill you now so that doesn't happen," Garric said forcefully, "then look for somebody else."

The chieftain smiled. "I said I wasn't looking forward to it, lad," he said. "I didn't say I wasn't man enough to face it."

"It's coming toward us now," Thalemos said. His voice was still calm, but fear stretched his cheeks tight over the bones.

To the right, a thin tendril slanted from the edge of the liquid sheet. The same would be happening on the millipede's other side. The creature's technique—was it even a creature? Was it as mindlessly destructive as a windblown fire?—never changed.

Nor did it need to change. Perseverance was sure to carry the day, if not on this attempt then on the next.

"Time to wake our learned friend," Vascay said, kneeling at Metron's side. He shook the wizard by the shoulder.

He was increasingly firm, but only to rouse the man. Several of the Brethren stared at Metron with obvious hatred, but Vascay knew as Garric did that the wizard was no more responsible for their plight than was any other member of their group.

They'd gambled and apparently lost. The forfeit wouldn't come from a Protector's sword or the gallows in the main square of Durassa, but they'd all known there were risks. Metron would be paying the same price as the rest of them.

"Wakey, wakey," Vascay said, shaking still harder. "Time for your party piece again, Master Metron."

The wizard's eyelids fluttered. He lay with his cheek on his arm. He didn't—or couldn't—lift his head, but he looked at the three men beside him.

"There's no use," he croaked. "I used the last of my True Mercury. You saw that the phial was empty."

"You opened a gate for us into this place from Durassa," Garric said. "Can you open it again so we go back?"

Metron sat up with sudden animation, then gasped with pain. Vascay supported him by the shoulders as if the wizard were a comrade with cracked ribs.

Metron closed his eyes, then opened them with a look of resolution. "Not back, no," he said. "But it may be we're close enough that I can open the passage to, to our destination. We'll need a lamp, a flame—"

"Toster, come here with your lighter!" Vascay ordered. "And Ademos, you're still wearing those clogs. Bring 'em here. I've got a better use for those wooden soles than you walking on them!"

Ademos turned to look, but he didn't get up from his appearance of piety. "What better use?" he demanded.

"Burning them to get us out of this place!" Vascay said. "Move it, Brother Ademos!"

"I don't—" Ademos began.

Toster gripped him by the neck. "Somebody get the shoes and come on," the big man said in a hoarse voice. Calm though he was to look at, Toster was close to the edge also.

Ademos didn't struggle. Halophus snatched off the clogs and followed Toster to the chief.

Metron had moved slightly so that he had an unmarked patch of armor before him. He began to draw, using the brush and pot of vermilion instead of the yellow powder he'd called his True Mercury.

Garric looked into the forest. The glowing liquid lapped alongside, close enough that Vascay could have skewered the tendril with a cast of his javelin. No point in that, of course. It no longer slanted toward them; rather, it was drawing slightly ahead of their course. When the filament gained enough that it could merge with the horn on the other side, there'd be no escape for the millipede or the men riding it.

Vascay trimmed slivers from the wooden shoes; Halophus laid them in a tiny fireset in the middle of the hexagram the wizard had drawn on the purple-black armor.

Metron placed the ring on the tip of his ivory athame. At his muttered instruction, Toster struck the plunger of his fire piston. When he opened the end, a smolder of milkweed fluff spilled onto the fireset and blazed up at the touch of open air.

"Pico picatrix sesengen...," chanted Metron, holding the sapphire ring up beside the fire. The gem's facets glinted in hard contrast to the muted blur of these forest depths.

The tendrils of fluid slid toward one another again, this time well in front of the millipede. The creature paced forward on its many legs, unperturbed by what was about to happen. The Archa driver stood with a fluting cry. Hurling its wand to one side, it leaped toward the ground in the other direction. It must have fallen under the millipede's pincered feet, but Garric didn't suppose that made much difference in the long run.

Vascay glanced at Garric, though the knife in his hand kept trimming slivers from the clog like a cook peeling a turnip. "Can't say I'm sorry to be shut of him," he said, transferring a palmful of shavings for the waiting Halophus to feed to the fire.

Garric smiled as his ancestor Carus would have smiled, an expression as hard as diamond millstones. There probably wasn't a long run, for the Archa or for the rest of them.

"Baphar baphris saxa...," Metron intoned, adjusting the angle at which he held the ring. The jewel refracted the firelight as well as reflecting it, bending some of it back to dance on the next segment of armor.

"Nophris nophar saxa...," said Metron.

The arms of glowing liquid met with a gush of pearly light. The thin tendrils broadened swiftly, the way water spreads from a breached dike. The millipede stumped on without hesitation, closing on the fluid as it swelled inward.

"Barouch baroucha barbatha...," Metron said. He didn't stop chanting, but his right hand beckoned to the Brethren desperately. A keyhole of light that quivered on the second segment of the millipede's back.

"Come on, boys!" Vascay said. "This is it!"

Ademos scrambled to his bare feet. The bandits started forward but stopped in a group, staring at the pattern quivering on the armor.

Vascay's eyes met Garric's. They both knew the dangers: certain death if they stayed here, unknown and perhaps worse horrors on the other side of Metron's passage.

"Lead!" Garric said. "I'll bring up the back like before!"

Vascay leaped into the doorway of light and vanished. Hame and Halophus jostled one another to be next through. Garric touched Thalemos' arm and gestured him forward. The youth hesitated, then followed Prada into nothingness.

Garric stood at an angle, watching Metron with the gateway in the corner of his right eye. He held his sword bare, though he didn't recall drawing it. The Brethren jumped and disappeared, some of them muttering prayers. Toster remained at Garric's side.

The millipede suddenly twisted back, making Garric sway. Metron tried to stand. Garric put his swordpoint at the wizard's throat to hold him where he was. "Toster!" Garric shouted. "Go!"

Toster turned. He jumped toward the ground, his axe swinging.

"I'll kill you!" the big man cried, but then he began to scream. The scream continued, but it no longer sounded like anything that might come from a human throat.

"Please!" Metron said. The fire was burning down. Only an occasional sputter woke glints from the sapphire's facets. "Please, it'll be—"

Garric put his left arm around the wizard. He lunged forward, taking them together into the freezing maelstrom of Metron's gateway.

There was no sound in the passage, but Toster's screams still echoed in Garric's mind.

He supposed they always would.