Mistress of the Catacombs (8 page)

* * *

Sharina followed as Garric entered the meeting room; he moved like a caged cat, still holding the sword bare in his hand.

She'd been concerned since he fell into the pool. Now she was beginning to feel a sick horror.

Garric paced to the other side of the round table, only then turning to face the three women he'd summoned. Liane was helping Tenoctris; Sharina met his eyes directly.

Garric swiped the wad of silk again over the tip of his blade; the steel was already spotless. In an odd tone he said, "The way he jumped, I was afraid I'd caught him in the jaw. Nothing bites a sword edge as bad as hacking at a fellow's teeth."

"Garric," said Sharina. "What's wrong?"

Garric shot the sword home into its scabbard without looking at what he was doing. That smooth, ringing motion took as much skill as threading a needle in the dark.

"What's wrong?" he said. "I'm not Garric, milady—that's what's wrong! That wizard—"

His face contorted; he snarled out the word as though it were 'father-slayer' or a worse term yet.

"—snatched away your brother's mind and replaced it with the mind of some drooling moron from the Sister knows where!"

The man who looked like the brother Sharina had known for eighteen years glared at the birds frescoed in a band between the ceiling moldings and the lowered casements, then met her eyes. Again Sharina had the feeling she watched a trapped animal.

Tenoctris slid from her backless ivory chair and settled onto the terrazzo floor. With the writing brush and a small inkhorn she'd taken from her sleeve, she was drawing a six-sided figure.

"This so-clever Intercessor thought he'd leave the Isles leaderless because the prince's body was barely able to feed itself," the man said, grinning at Sharina in a way that could've been Garric after all. "What he didn't know...."

He reached under his tunics and came out with his fist around the medallion hanging there from a neck thong. He went on, "... is that Garric hadn't been alone in his skull. There's a half-wit boy whimpering in here with me, wondering what's going on; but I'm the one wearing Garric's body, not him."

Smiling still broader, he opened his hand to display his own image on the worn gold disk. "My name is Carus," he said. "A thousand years ago, I was King of the Isles."

A spark of blue light, vivid but minute, glittered in the center of the figure Tenoctris had drawn over the irregular pattern of the stone chips. It snapped with the quick certainty of a gadfly toward the man speaking, but vanished before it touched him—and before his hand had more than gripped the sword again.

Tenoctris swayed. Liane was closer; she reached out to steady the old woman before Sharina could bend to do the same. Wizardry was hard work, especially for someone whose knowledge was much greater than her power.

"Yes," Tenoctris said as she rose with Liane's help. She smiled faintly. "You are Carus."

The man—Carus—let out a long, shuddering breath. "Lady Tenoctris...," he said. He paused, averting his eyes for a moment. He squeezed the pommel of his great sword so fiercely that his knuckles mottled white and red.

"Lady Tenoctris," Carus resumed, looking down at her with an utterly humorless smile, "I would do, will do, everything I can to preserve the kingdom until my descendent Garric returns to his rightful place. I will even take a wizard as my advisor and confidant, though I'd prefer to thrust my hand in the fire."

He released his sword hilt and worked the incipient cramp out of it, his grin this time an honest one if wry.

"But milady?" he resumed with an undertone of earnestness beneath the banter. "Please don't strain my determination again. I'd regret the reflex that took the head off your shoulders if you sent another of your spells at me when I wasn't expecting it."

To Sharina's surprise, Tenoctris offered a curtsey. "Your majesty," she said, "I'm an old woman who's spent much time with books and none until recently with men of war. I treated you as a question to be answered, not a person; I apologize for the disrespect. If it happens again, you have my leave to behead me."

Carus bellowed with laughter and stepped around the small table. Liane jumped, but not quickly enough; Carus caught her by the shoulders and lifted her out of the way with a cheerful lack of ceremony.

He offered Tenoctris his hands, palms up. "I watched through Garric's eyes ever since you came ashore in this age," he said. "I saw you—"

He glanced around, including Liane and Sharina in his statement.

"—all of you save the kingdom when it would otherwise have gone down to a worse smash than in my day, for all Garric and I alone could have done to save it. I know your goodness; and more, I know you're necessary. But... by the Shepherd, milady, please don't startle me if you can avoid it. Eh?"

Tenoctris laid her delicate hands on those Carus now wore: large and long-fingered, with calluses on the right palm from Garric's sword practice. "Done," she said.

"Your highness?" said Liane, her voice calm but her expression wholly unreadable. "Why would the Intercessor of Laut have wished to remove Garric? Sandrakkan and Blaise might think they could rival Ornifal for the kingship, but surely not Laut."

Carus shrugged, then grinned broadly as he stepped away from Tenoctris. "He had some wizard reason, I'd suppose," he said. "Nothing that a man like me could fathom. But Liane, all of you: in the past you said, 'Garric' when you spoke to the fellow wearing this flesh, and 'your highness' only on formal occasions. When we're alone together, I'm just Carus. And you're Liane, Tenoctris, and Sharina. All right?"

"All right, Carus," Sharina said, and Tenoctris echoed, "Yes, yes, of course."

Liane nodded instead of speaking. Her expression remained guarded for a moment. At last she forced a smile and said, "Yes, of course. I'm sorry, this has been a...."

Liane's mood broke in a trill of laughter. "I was going to say it was a shock to me," she said. "But not so great as it was to you, I realize. I'll be all right."

"Right, then, right," Carus said. He'd become less tense after blurting his real identity, but this was a man who preferred the open air to the inside of a building. "To business, then."

He looked at the women, grinning. He wasn't her brother, but Sharina found him as easy to trust as she did Garric and Cashel.

"The business is," Carus said, "that the kingdom needs Garric to hold it together. The Ornifal nobles will follow him—and the common people, they'd walk over a cliff if he told them to, the most of them."

"Ornifal isn't the Isles," Liane said; quietly, but speaking to hear the king's response.

"No, and it never will be," Carus said with enough edge to his tone to show that he knew he was being tested. "King Garric will rule the united—the reunited—kingdom, though—on my honor!"

He paused, relaxing his face into the smile of moments before. Nobody looking at Carus could doubt that this was an older man than the youth who'd worn the flesh only minutes before. "The rulers of the other islands won't bow to Garric yet, but even now they respect him enough to be careful. The way Lerdoc's using the Confederacy of the West for a stalking horse proves that. Not so, milady?"

Carus leaned across the small table. He'd have chucked Liane under the chin if she hadn't jerked back in amazement. Tenoctris watched the byplay with the mild interest she might have shown for finches fluttering about a sunflower.

Carus straightened and continued, "So long as all but a few think Garric's hand is still on the reins of the kingdom, we'll have time—you'll have time, w-wiz... Tenoctris, that is. Time to bring him back in all truth."

"You can pass for my brother," Sharina said. "You are Garric, in body at least."

"Aye, and I've looked through Garric's eyes in the months since he began wearing this," Carus said. He waggled the medallion, then dropped it back beneath his tunics. "I have Garric's memories besides."

"You know everything Garric knew?" Sharina said.

"No," said Carus. "But I know everything he remembered. He's forgotten a lot of things, everybody does. But I'm not going to be tripped up because somebody greets me on the street and I don't know he's Cog or-Varsel who had the goose that followed him into the tavern every evening at sundown. Where the problem's going to be, though...."

Carus grimaced. He touched the wall where painted birds perched on a painted trellis in the painted sunshine. He looked like a trapped cat again.

"You see," he went on softly, "it's not what Garric's done that'll trip me up, it's the things he'll be asked to do. I'll have to make the choices a king makes, handle usurpers in the kingdom and quarrels in the council. I've been king, ladies; friends, I mean."

He slammed his balled right fist into his left palm with a crack! like nearby lightning.

"Been king and failed at it!" Carus said. "I thought all virtue lay in quickness, but sometimes I should have waited; I flew hot when things happened that I should've let pass, the first time they happened anyhow."

He grinned, an expression as common to Carus' spirit as it was to Garric's face—but forced this time, almost tentative. "And I hated wizards the way some men hate spiders," Carus said. "Hated wizards and feared them, my friends, and so I let wizardry bring the kingdom down. I had no one to help me against the dangers that my sword couldn't cure."

Sharina put her hand on Tenoctris' shoulder. "You've a wizard to help you now—"

Tenoctris nodded crisply. "For what my help is worth," she said.

"It's been worth the kingdom's salvation in the past," Carus said. He touched his cheekbone with his finger. "As I've seen through these eyes."

"And I know my brother relied on Liane's advice regarding both the court and the kingdom," Sharina went on. "In addition to what the royal council suggested."

"Liane's advice and your own," Carus said. "Yes, I know that and I'm relying on you to help me as well. But your first business, friend Tenoctris, must be to retrieve Garric so that I can go back to being only another of the prince's advisors."

He shook his head ruefully and added, "Echeus isn't the first man whose head I took off in anger when he might better have lived to answer some questions. I regret that stroke, for all that I wish somebody'd taken him out of this world a few hours earlier and saved me trouble."

Tenoctris stood. "I think the Intercessor will give me some idea of what he was about," she said. "His brain's still fresh, you see. If I may be excused, ah, Carus?"

The ancient king winced as though the reference to necromancy had been a knife in his stomach. "Yes, milady, do what you must do," he said. "So long as I don't have to watch—"

His face hardened. "Though I'd do that if I must," he said. "For the kingdom's sake, even that."

"There'll be no need," Tenoctris said as she started for the door. "Though perhaps Ilna will help me?"

She made the words a question. Carus nodded. He was neither smiling nor grim but... something. "Yes," he said, "and I've business with her Master Chalcus next. Pray get Ilna to help. And whoever else you wish—that has the stomach for it!"

Sharina and Liane rose to go out with Tenoctris. Carus raised a finger for attention. "Sharina?" he said. "I'd like you to stay during my interview with Chalcus. I think... it will be a more quiet affair, perhaps, with a young woman present."

Sharina smiled. "Yes," she said as she settled back on the ivory stool. "I can see that it might be."

Liane was fiddling with a latch of her travelling desk so that she had an excuse not to meet Carus' eyes. She said, "Ah... your, that is Carus, you said that you watched everything that Garric...?"

"If I said that," Carus said, "then I lied, milady. Anything that may have passed between you and Prince Garric privately remains private. And you'll hear no other story from these lips though I die for it."

With a great laugh he added, "Dying's a matter I've experience with too, you'll remember," he said. "And in the end, I proved better at it than I did at kingship."

Still laughing, he escorted Liane and Tenoctris to the door, one on either arm.

* * *

The morning sun was so low behind Cashel that the island shadowed the reef on which Tilphosa's ship had broken up. The wind had dropped still further; foam outlined the rocks, but there was no high-dashing spray as he'd seen at the height of the storm.

Barca's Hamlet was on the east coast of Haft. Until a few months ago, it wouldn't have crossed Cashel's mind that you could look at the sea and not be looking east.

"Master Cashel?" Tilphosa said. "What are we going to do now?"

Cashel turned, frowning. It was a good question, one he'd been turning over in the back of his mind, but he didn't see why the girl seated on a lava block would be asking him.

"What's your wizard say?" he said. He frowned still deeper. Personally, he wouldn't trust Captain Mounix' judgment much farther than he would that of sottish Kellard or-Same back in the borough, but Tilphosa had boarded the fellow's ship. Maybe she felt otherwise. "Or the captain, I suppose."

"Metra's doing an incantation," Tilphosa said, gesturing toward a stand of palms where a piece of salvaged sailcloth was rigged as a screen. A puff of orange smoke rose above the fabric and dissipated in the breeze. "She wants to learn whether our wreck was chance or if Echea struck at us from beyond the grave."

She didn't mention Mounix; her opinion of the captain must be pretty close to Cashel's own.

"That big snake wasn't a common thing," Cashel said, looking seaward again. The water shimmered like jewels now that the sun had risen further. "Not where I come from, anyway."

Tilphosa shrugged. "In these times it could have been chance," she said. "The forces that turn the cosmos are peaking, you see. That's why I'm being sent to wed Prince Thalemos now and bring about the return of the Mistress to rule the world... but Chaos has power also, and creatures of chaos can be met anywhere."

Cashel noticed the matter of fact way Tilphosa discussed wizardry and the powers wizards controlled or tried to control. She sounded like a peasant discussing the risk of a bad winter: potentially disastrous, but nothing unnatural in her scheme of things.

About two double handsful of the crew had survived the wreck. They were combing the black-sand beach sullenly, dragging the more interesting bits of flotsam above the tideline to where tree ferns grew among lobelias and geraniums the size of shrubs.

When the sailors looked toward the screen around the wizard, they scowled. Occasionally Cashel caught them looking at him and Tilphosa with much the same expression—until his eye fell on them.

Cashel smiled. He guessed he'd be doing something wrong if this lot liked him.

Captain Mounix was examining the ship's dinghy, still keel-up on the beach. With him were two of his particular cronies: a tall but cadaverous fellow named Costas, and a runt with a fringe of red hair who went by 'Hook', probably because he'd lost the outer three fingers from his left hand.

Cashel had done enough woodworking that he might have had something useful to say about the dinghy's condition, but he didn't suppose the captain wanted his company any more than Cashel wanted the captain's. Joining the beachcombers was an even less appealing prospect.

"I guess I'll take a look around the island," Cashel said. "I'd like to find a stream or a spring, anyway."

Rain had pooled in a basin of rock just above the tide line. Cashel had drunk from it—Tilphosa was more squeamish than thirsty, at least while the darkness was still cool—but found the water brackish from windblown spray. The lush vegetation inland meant there was likely better available.

"Ah...," Cashel added, balancing his quarterstaff as he thought. He'd just as soon not leave the girl alone with these sailors—or with her wizard Metra, if it came to that. "Would you like to come?"

Cashel felt responsible for Tilphosa the way he'd feel for anybody who needed the sort of help he could give them. Folks in the borough stuck together, pretty much. A peasant's life was hard enough even when neighbor helped neighbor.

Tilphosa nodded curtly. "Yes," she said. "When I look at the sea, I remember the dragon coming toward us. Metra's wizardry kept it from pulling the ship under, but it drove us onto the rocks. I thought I was going to drown."

She flashed Cashel an embarrassed grin.

"You weren't going to drown," Cashel muttered. He looked at the captain, then toward the screen around the wizard and her dealings. Smoke rose from the enclosure again, this time a soft magenta. "Right, the ground rises enough to be worth following. We can always find our way back by striking for the shore."

He started into the tree ferns—a mistake. It was easy to push through the shoulder-high fronds, but they hid from sight the frequent head-sized chunks of lava littering the ground. The second time Cashel tripped, he shifted their route into the mixture of gnarled shrubs. There were woody-stemmed varieties of geraniums, violets, and even buttercups.

Cashel had taken to wearing sturdy sandals to walk the stone pavements of Valles. They came in handy here; the soil, though obviously rich, was thickly sown with sharp-edged pebbles from the same volcanic rock that the sea had ground to sand to form the beach.

"Who's this Echea you're worried about?" Cashel asked. He was curious; and besides, it was better for the girl to talk than brood. Because he was using his staff to hold vegetation aside, Tilphosa could follow closely without being slapped by stems that he'd released.

"A great wizard," Tilphosa said. "An enemy of the Mistress. She cut a jewel—or two jewels, rather, into patterns which combined will bring back the Mistress."

Cashel slipped through a gap between the stems of a tree begonia. Another man, certainly another man Cashel's size, would have needed an axe to hack through the tangles. Cashel got along well with wood. He'd always been able to judge the grain of the branch under his shaping knife or where he should cut to drop a tree in a particular line. The same talent helped him here.

In his mind he moved around the girl's words the way he'd handle chunks of fieldstone for a wall. Not every piece would fit in every place, but generally if you shifted slabs this way and that you'd come up with something that looked as tight as mason's work.

A lot of times Cashel could also puzzle through a statement that didn't make sense when he first heard it. This wasn't one of those times.

He said, "If Echea was against your Mistress—"

When he first met her, Cashel had thought Tilphosa meant 'the Mistress' the way Sharina would say 'the Lady': the Queen of Heaven whose mate was the Shepherd. He wasn't sure of that any more.

"—then why did she make jewels that will, ah, help her?"

He could hear water, but in forest like this you couldn't get any direction from sound. The trunks twisted the gurgling around till it could've come from anywhere. Still, if he hadn't heard it before and he did now, then they were likely getting closer.

"The pattern only exists once in all eternity," Tilphosa explained. "By forming it and then hiding the pieces, Echea keeps the Mistress from returning."

Climbing through this undergrowth was hard work for her, even with Cashel choosing the path and holding aside the big stems. After each few words, Tilphosa whooshed out a breath and drew in a fresh one before continuing.

"But when Thalemos and I marry, our rings will hold the two jewels. The Mistress will reenter the world!"

"Ah," said Cashel. He didn't believe that or disbelieve it. The Great Gods didn't have much to do with the world Cashel lived in. "I guess you've got books that tell you this?"

They'd reached a beech tree whose base was farther across than Cashel's own height. The trunk had split a generation ago; half had fallen, but the remainder was sprouting new growth.

Wings the length of a child's arm clattered as creatures roosting in the upper branches launched themselves into the sky. The girl cried out, but the fliers were going the other way. They weren't birds, and peering through the small leaves, Cashel wasn't sure they were bats either.

"Let's hold here for a bit," Cashel said, not that he was winded. Tilphosa hadn't complained, but he saw now that the soles of her high-laced shoes were thin suede. They were meant for carpeting, not this pebble-strewn soil.

She nodded gratefully, sinking onto the fallen half of the trunk to take the weight off her feet. The spongy, mushroom-covered wood couldn't do much to harm tunics that had come through a shipwreck.

"The Mistress sends dreams to her worshippers," Tilphosa said when she'd gotten her breath. "The priests see them most clearly, of course, but we all can feel her will. I know the truth of what I've said, because I've felt it myself."

"Ah," Cashel said, nodding. He didn't have anything to say about that. He'd learned young that you'd do better to argue with a sheep than with somebody who knows the Truth.

Another stand of ferns nearly concealed a limestone outcrop. He'd thought shadows thrown by the fronds caused the faint shimmer on the stone. Now, maybe because he was sitting still and looking in any direction except Tilphosa's face, Cashel saw the water he'd been looking for was seeping between rock layers.

"We've found—" he said, rising from the log.

"Cashel, what's that?" the girl asked sharply. Then she said, "That's gold!"

She pointed to a bed of plants with sword-shaped leaves and feathery crimson flowers. Twisted among their thin stems was a tracery of metal—gold, just as Tilphosa had said.

The water could wait. Cashel checked his quarterstaff with his right, then his left hand, reflexively making sure that the shaft hadn't gotten splinters or sticky patches while helping him through the foliage. He moved forward, holding the staff slantwise before him.

"Are these pipes?" Tilphosa said. "No, they can't be—it's just a framework, isn't it?"

"I don't know what it is," Cashel said. "What it was."

The forest's trunks and branches wove through a fabric of tubes ranging from thumb-sized to as thin as Sharina's blonde hairs. Cashel pushed into the vegetation with careful deliberation, measuring the length of the thing: a handful of double paces, four times as long as Cashel was tall. The tubes connected several pods of the same shining metal. The largest of them was the size of a small canoe, smooth-skinned and featureless.

The thing had hit the ground crushingly hard. The impact wrapped the nearer end around the outcrop, even gouging the rock in a few places. The top and back had flexed forward on their own inertia, warping the structure out of its original spindle shape.

Cashel looked up. It'd fallen here; fallen from where, he couldn't guess. Waves could pick a boat up and fling it inland. Or again....

Whatever the cause, it had happened a very long time ago.

"I guess it could be a frame," Cashel said aloud. "Gold lasts when other things rot away or rust."

Tilphosa had followed Cashel along the crumpled tracery. With a careful lack of emotion she said, "Then it would be quite old."

With the end of his staff, Cashel tapped a tube broken at the impact. His ferrule woke a musical chime from the gold. "See the root?" he said.

"Oh," said the girl. "Of course."

Another fallen beech, larger even than the half-ruined one, had sent surface roots over the tube. In human terms the lifespan of a tree like that would be measured by generations.

Cashel looked again at the tube and frowned. His iron butt cap hadn't scratched the metal. As soft as gold was....

He knelt and drew his knife from its wooden sheath. It had been made with ram's horn scales and a straight, single-edged blade by Akhita the Smith, travelling through the borough on his circuit; Barca's Hamlet was too small to support a resident blacksmith.

Akhita had forged the blade from the same iron he used to shoe horses, but he'd hardened it with a fast quench. It wasn't fancy, but it did well for digging a stone from an ox's hoof, slicing bread at dinner, and all the scores of other tasks a peasant needed a knife for.

The edge should have notched gold. It didn't; not this gold.

"Let's get back to the others," Cashel said, straightening. He put his knife away so he had both hands for his quarterstaff. He didn't think of a knife as a weapon; not that he needed a weapon here, not for any reasons he could point to. "We'll tell them about the water."

And they'd learn about the gold, too; but Cashel wasn't sure he'd mention that.

He and Tilphosa started back the way they'd come, moving faster from familiarity with the route and because they knew where they were going. Both of them wanted to be away from whatever it was that had smashed up there on the knoll.

"In ancient times, there were beings whose ships flew through the air," Tilphosa said. "The scriptures say."

"I wouldn't know about that," Cashel said grimly. He wondered what scriptures she meant, but he didn't ask. "I can't read."

He led on the descent as he had on the climb: if the girl slipped, he was there to catch her... and if he slipped, well, she wasn't in the way to get hurt.

"Cashel?" she said. "Are you sure we're going the right direction?"

"We're a little to the side of how we came up," he explained. "The clay here doesn't have so many chunks of lava in it to trip over. We'll come out on the other side of the point south of where we started, but we can walk along the beach to get back."