Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  Echeus rose into view, step by step. He was an imposing figure: spare rather than powerful, but surrounded with an aura of enormous dignity. Garric had the impression of a person whose time scale was that of an oak, or possibly of the crag of a mountain.

  “Lord Echeus?” he said when they were within a double pace, right toe to right toe, of one another.

  Echeus stopped and bowed slightly. “Thank you for meeting me, Prince Garric,” he said in a thin, hoarse voice.

  Unexpectedly Echeus turned and looked over the bridge coping. “What is that in the water, do you suppose?” he said.

  Garric peered into the pool. A few leaves rotated slowly on the surface; at one stone edge glistened a mass of frog eggs. In the water directly under the central arch on which Garric stood—

  For a moment, Garric thought he saw his reflection and that of the bridge he stood on. The reflected stonework was covered with lush, broad-leafed vegetation like nothing that grew on Ornifal, though, and the figure looking at him from the pool was—

  “Get back!” King Carus shouted.

  Too late. There was a flash of vivid red light like nothing in the natural world. The reflected figure was toppling upward, and Garric was falling toward it.

  They merged at the surface of the water. There was a crash like the cosmos splitting—

  And Garric was alone in his mind.

  “Set it here,” Liane suggested, waving Cashel to the table under the pergola.

  He eyed the surface doubtfully before he set the statue there, but she was right about it being sturdy enough. Though small, the table was polished granite and at least as solid as the plinth the statue must originally have stood on. Cashel placed his burden with his usual care so that it didn't roll off; stone scrunched on stone.

  Sharina hugged him. “Cashel,” she said, “I was just thinking how lucky I am to have you. You make me feel safe.”

  Cashel blushed. In front of everybody! He was even prouder than he was embarrassed, but he was so embarrassed he couldn't breathe for a moment.

  “I'm all black from the stone,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  He raised his hands; they were smudged with the residue of decaying marble.

  “Cashel...” said Tenoctris, scrubbing at the block with the hem of her robe. Cashel was enough Ilna's brother to cringe at such a use of a fine silk garment. “Look at this! I hadn't noticed.”

  The statue's right arm, apparently raised, was broken off at the shoulder, but the left hand had been placed on its girdle. The marble fourth finger wore a real ring, a ruby on a simple gold band. While Cashel carried the statue, he'd flaked away the crust of corroded stone which had been covering the jewel.

  “It's a pretty little thing, isn't it?” Cashel said. He waited for Tenoctris to tell him what to do. Instead she turned away from the statue to stare abstractedly toward the fountains in the near distance.

  “Tenoctris?” he said.

  Ignoring him, she took a bamboo sliver from her right sleeve. She knelt and began to scribe on the gritty stone floor with it.

  Many wizards used athames of exotic materials for their spells; the tool gained power each time it twisted the forces of the cosmos to the wizard's will. Tenoctris instead picked a simple twig or split of wood, casting each makeshift wand away after one use. She said that no one could be sure of what they were doing if they practiced their art with an object in whose fabric they'd overlaid and braided past wizardry.

  Tenoctris claimed she wasn't a powerful wizard. Probably she was correct—it wasn't a matter Cashel could judge. But she was a very, very careful wizard; and in the past that care had saved her and the Isles as well, to Cashel's certain knowledge.

  Sharina and Liane were watching him expectantly. “Go on, Cashel,” Sharina said. “It's yours.”

  With a grin of acknowledgment, Cashel gripped the ring between his left thumb and forefinger and gave it a twist. He didn't expect it to come loose—not unless he used more strength than he planned to, anyway—but it turned easily.

  Still wondering, he pulled. The ring slipped free in a cloud of powdered lime; Cashel sneezed.

  “I wonder why someone put a ring on—” Liane said, bending slightly for a better look at the circlet in Cashel's hand.

  Tenoctris looked up from the simple triangle of words in the Old Script which she'd traced in the grit. “Garric!” she cried. “Cashel, stop him!”

  "Garric!” Cashel bellowed, but he was already in motion. Garric stood on the bridge arch near a well-dressed stranger, looking down at the pool. Tenoctris couldn't shout loudly enough for him to hear her.

  Cashel burst out of the pergola at a dead run, holding his staff crossways and close to his body. He didn't call again because he'd popped the ring in his mouth for safekeeping. In common with most poor folk, that's where he'd generally carried the few coins he came by until he paid them out again. Faced with a sudden crisis, he treated the ring the same way out of reflex.

  Red wizardlight flashed, unmistakable even in the bright sun. For a moment the ruby glare shone through the ancient stone of the bridge. Even after the initial flash, a rosy haze hung over the water.

  Garric toppled forward, over the railing and into the glow. He fell like a half-filled wineskin, limply unconscious. One of the Blood Eagles at the foot of the bridge immediately jumped into the pool—and sank.

  The water was a good deal deeper than landscaping required. From the way it clouded as the soldier flailed desperately, the bottom was gluey muck like that of a marsh. The man was in half-armor: thirty pounds of steel, leather, and blackened bronze since he hadn't even taken the time to unstrap his helmet. No amount of strength and goodwill was going to enable a man with no more fat than a rutting stag to swim while wearing that load.

  Cashel wasn't going to be able to swim either: he was afraid of the water, so he'd never learned how. He was still afraid; that didn't make any difference now.

  The distinguished-looking stranger who'd been talking to Garric raised his hands palms upward. Two Blood Eagles grabbed his wrists and forced him down on his knees. The fellow didn't resist, not that it would have done him any good.

  Cashel jumped as far out as he could get, the way he would've tried to cross a stream in spate. He landed feet first, legs pumping, as he sank through water and wizard-light. Holding his quarterstaff out to the side where he wouldn't slap Garric with it, he thrashed his way forward. He couldn't see properly. It had gotten dark, and salt stung his eyes.

  The staff was hickory and floated despite its iron ferrules. With luck it was long enough to touch bottom; if not, Cashel hoped to hold it out so that a soldier at the margin of the pool could seize it before he and Garric sank.

  And if not that either, well, he'd tried.

  The wind screamed. For an instant Cashel thought he heard Sharina call his name, but the gale carried her voice away.

  Cashel's left hand caught fabric and closed on it. A lightning bolt lit the sky and reflected from the white frothing surf in which he straggled. More lightning slashed cloud to cloud. The shore was fifty double paces ahead of him, and an undertow was trying pull him out.

  Cashel didn't know where he was, but that could wait till there was more leisure. The person he dragged with him wasn't Garric; when the white flashes quivered from an upturned face, he saw he held a girl of more or less his age. Her expression was set but not panicky. She grabbed his sash with both hands.

  Cashel set his quarterstaff on the firm holding behind him, then lumbered several steps forward on the thrust of the next wave. The girl managed to get her feet down and help, though when the water started to stream back she fluttered like a flag in a windstorm.

  Cashel dug his staff in and waited, then resumed his march as a comber boiled over him and his burden. He didn't know what was happening, but he knew what he had to do; that was all that mattered.

  The reversing wave twisted him sideways. Over his left shoulder he saw a ship breaking up in the lightning-lit darkness. The sur
f sprang as high as the mast trucks from the fangs of a reef. More human figures struggled in the water, though it was hard to tell them from other flotsam in the blue-white glitter from the sky.

  The current released him. Cashel and the girl strode forward, moving faster because the sea was no more than knee deep now. The girl lost her footing at the ebb, but Cashel continued to plod on. She pulled herself up on his sash, then scrambled the last few steps without his support.

  Cashel heard a long, deep cry from out to sea. He turned, feeling wobbly. The effort of the last minutes had caught up with him now that he had time to be exhausted. He thought the sound was wind howling in the cavity of the ship as a hatch carried away and gave it passage; but he was wrong.

  A reptile raised its wedge-shaped head from the breakers beyond the reef. Lightning gave its wet scales the sheen of opals. Then, with a sideways lurch seaward, the long body vanished again.

  The girl had collapsed on the sandy beach. Cashel picked her up by an arm and staggered a few steps farther inland to where they'd be beyond even the strongest of the waves.

  Cashel spat the ring into the wash-leather purse he wore on a cord around his neck. His fingers were numb. His whole body was numb.

  He'd build an altar to the Shepherd in thanks for his safety; but later. A little later.

  Chapter Three

  Garric hit the water facefirst. He wasn't unconscious, just numb, as though he'd been drugged. The shock and splash freed him. His throat had tightened for a shout when he looked into the pool; the sound turned into a choking gurgle from a mouth filled with water and leaves.

  By reflex Garric's arms brought his head up with a breaststroke. He and Sharina both swam like otters, a skill that few of their neighbors in Barca's Hamlet had learned—not even the fishermen who took their dories out beyond the sight of land and every day risked an unexpected storm.

  Leaf mold stained the water black. Great branches interlaced overhead, their lush foliage hiding all but speckles of the bright blue sky. He'd fallen from a ruined building into a meandering stream; the bank before him was completely overgrown.

  His body didn't feel right!

  A female figure leaped to the cornice from which he'd fallen, shrieking, "Gar! What happen?”

  He could understand her, but he shouldn't have been able to because she wasn't human. Not fully human, at any rate: she was one of the hairy half-men of Bight. “Tint save you!” she cried, and she dived into the water beside him.

  “I'm all right!” Garric said, but that wasn't true—though he wasn't at risk of drowning, he could swim as well as he ever could. His arms were a deeper tan than they'd ever been except at the end of a summer's plowing; these last few months of living as a prince rather than a peasant had left him as pale as someone with a swarthy Haft complexion ever got.

  He was alone; King Carus no longer shared his mind as a constant companion and advisor. Garric clutched for the ancient coronation medal that should hang around his neck. There was nothing, not even a tunic; he was naked except for a breechclout of fabric as coarse as sacking.

  Memories flooded in. They weren't Garric or-Reise's memories. Wedge-shaped jaws the size of a bread oven closing on his head—

  There was a moment of disorientation as stunning as the shock that had paralyzed Garric on the bridge railing. His face slipped into the water.

  Fingers strong enough to bend iron gripped his right shoulder and lifted him. “Tint save you!” the beastgirl screamed in his ear. “Tint save you!”

  Tint paddled strongly for the bank from which he'd fallen. Garric stroked with his left arm, but he didn't try to break the beastgirl's grip on the other. He wasn't sure he could.

  The stream's current was sluggish, but it had carried them past the ruins as Garric spluttered. The ornate building had ten feet of frontage on the water and was about that height despite the ruined condition of the cornice where he'd been standing, but it was only five or six feet wide. It was an altar, or perhaps a monument, where statues had once sheltered beneath porches at either end. Thick vegetation hid any structures that might have been placed nearby.

  A root was twisted over the bank. Tint caught it with her free hand and brought a gnarled, hairy leg up so that a prehensile foot could double her grip.

  Garric put his legs down, expecting to touch bottom. Instead he stubbed his toe on the channel's masonry wall. He'd have gone under again had not the beastgirl raised him up like a sack of grain and deposited him on the bank.

  She sprang up beside him and squatted on all fours. Her legs bent more naturally into that posture than they did when she stood upright.

  “Tint save” she announced proudly. “Gar safe.”

  “Thank you, Tint,” Garric said. The image of jaws closing on his head was still the most vivid of the new memories, though unfamiliar human figures also shuffled hazily through his mind. Most often the figures were shouting at him, striking at him, or kicking him the way some men would kick a dog.

  Garric's belly muscles tensed over a cold lump. He wouldn't kick a dog; and nobody would kick him, unless they were trying to learn whether Garric could break their leg with his bare hands. Garric figured he probably could, if he were angry enough.

  But the jaws ...

  Seawolves, giant marine lizards whose legs were little more than flippers to steer the beasts through the water, sometimes came ashore near Barca's Hamlet to prey on the flocks. Garric had killed seawolves, and once a seawolf had seized his leg and very nearly killed him.

  He touched his calf. His body would bear the scars of those long fangs for the rest of its life, but this body did not. The muscles were rock hard, if anything stronger than Garric's own, but he no longer wore the form to which he had been born.

  “Gar?” said the beastgirl nervously, sensing Garric's feeling of trapped horror.

  “It's all right, Tint,” he said, hoping he sounded reassuring. He stood up. There was nothing wrong with this body; it just wasn't his own.

  There was nothing wrong with this body, but the mind that had used to wear it—

  Garric raised his index fingers to his temples, probing gently. He found what he expected: a line of indentations on either side where the jaws of a huge seawolf had closed, driving its fangs deep into the bone. Into the bone, and into the brain beneath.

  It was a wonder that Gar's body had survived a mauling like that. His mind had not survived.

  “Gar, what wrong?” Tint said, standing also. Fully erect, she only came to the middle of Garric's chest. She began grooming him with her fingers. His scalp was as shaggy as a ram's fleece in winter, and now he had an unkempt beard as well.

  “Nothing's wrong, Tint,” Garric said, staring in bleak despair at the jungle of palmetto and larger trees choking the landscape around him. He saw squared stones under the network of surface roots supporting a large magnolia; as he'd guessed, there were extensive ruins in the vicinity.

  “Nothing's wrong that you can help with,” he added.

  And very possibly no one could help. No one in whatever world this was.

  As he sat above the tide line, Cashel ran a swatch of raw wool slowly over his quarterstaff. In part he was polishing the hickory, but mostly he used the familiar task to settle his mind. He carried the pad of wool under his belt. It'd sloshed through the breakers with him, but the fibers' coat of lanolin kept them free from salt water.

  The girl was coming around. Cashel had wrung out his sodden outer tunic and rolled it into a pillow for her. The beach was mostly sandy, but there were rocks in it.

  “Mistress...” the girl murmured. Her left hand closed on the amulet hanging from her neck by a silver chain.

  The storm had broken up; the remaining clouds scudded across expanses of clear sky. Cashel had already looked at the amulet by the light of the stars and the waxing moon: a lens of rock crystal whose silver mounting mimicked a spider lying on the disk and encircling it with her legs.

  It wasn't something Cashel would have wanted to w
ear; but then, nobody was asking him to.

  The girl sat up sharply. “Are we safe?” she said, peering at Cashel. She knuckled her eyes, trying to rub away the salt that blurred her vision. “Are you one of the sailors?”

  “I think we're safe enough,” Cashel said. He sounded hoarse, and his stomach felt queasy; he must have swallowed seawater while he was fighting the surf, though he didn't remember it now. “I'm not a sailor, but there's other fellows here with us. I guess some of them may be sailors.”

  The light wasn't good enough to tell much, and Cashel didn't have the energy to go about meeting strangers in a place so new to him. Debris from the ship, human as well as cordage and timber, littered the beach. Not all the bodies were alive, of course, but some of them were starting to move.

  “Ah,” Cashel said. “My name's Cashel or-Kenset.”

  The girl was quickly regaining her composure. She touched the ground lightly, apparently judging whether her muscles had recovered enough from her struggle to shore that she could stand up again.

  They hadn't; she didn't try. “I'm Lady Tilphosa bos-Pholial," she said with dignity. “Are we on Laut, Master Cashel?”

  Cashel frowned. “Laut?” he said. “I don't think so, ah, Lady Tilphosa. But I'm not from around here either.”

  Up the beach had grounded a great wooden lump, either the ship's dinghy or a portion of the hull; one end rose and sank in the pull of the surf. A ball of blue light flickered beside the wreckage, then rolled a ghostly course down the sand toward Cashel and the girl.

  Cashel hadn't been planning to move for a while yet. He decided he would after all, rising to his feet in a smooth motion. He gave his quarterstaff a trial spin. Funny how something like that brought his strength back better than a day's rest.

  “Master Cashel!” the girl called. “What's the matter?”

  “The light coming this way,” Cashel said. “That's wizard's work.”