Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  “Hey, what's got into Gar?” cried the fat cook. The horn was bringing more men out of the forest. They were calling too, curious about why they'd been summoned.

  Ceto tried—vainly—to free his knife hand. He snarled, “Sister take you, you—”

  Garric punched him in the pit of the stomach, between the flapping halves of his armored vest. Ceto's face went white; his legs wobbled, and he sank to his knees.

  Garric was breathing hard. His whole body shuddered with awareness of what he'd done and the dangers in what might come next. Ceto had tensed his belly muscles against the blow he saw coming, but Gar's arm had the strength of a mallet.

  “Watch he doesn't bite!” a bandit shouted. “Is he foaming at the mouth?”

  Garric started to unfold the fingers of Ceto's right fist. Vascay touched the back of Garric's hand, and said, “I'll take care of the ring.”

  Garric was ready to flare out in any direction. “I found—” he said, straightening in a surge of fury.

  “Hold him,” Vascay said. Men grabbed Garric's arms from behind. Tint was chattering on the edge of the encampment.

  Garric hunched down and brought his arms forward, swinging the men holding him against one another. The fellow to Garric's left shouted as he lost his grip. Other bandits grabbed Garric, tearing away his makeshift garment. He went over backward in a pile of men.

  “I said hold him, Sister take you!” Vascay shouted. “I didn't say kick him, Ademos! Now settle down all of you!”

  Garric said, “All right, all right,” and let himself relax. Two men were holding either arm. Several were on his legs though he couldn't see them because of the fellow sprawled across his torso.

  Vascay looked down with a bland smile. He held the ring between thumb and finger of his left hand; the sapphire was a glitter too small to have color.

  “Let him up, then,” Vascay said to the men holding Garric. “He's ready to behave.”

  Ceto had put both his hands on the ground. He was trying to rise, but he still couldn't breathe properly. His face was twisted, and his lips formed curses that he lacked the strength to utter.

  “But boss?” said the man with the horn, one of those on Garric's arms. “He's gone mad, hasn't he?”

  Vascay glanced back at Ceto, his expression friendly in a mild fashion and his eyes as hard as chips of jasper. He'd hooked his right hand negligently into his sash where it half covered a knife hilt.

  “I'm not mad,” Garric said, trying to get his breathing under control. “I'm just not in a good humor. But yes, I'll behave.”

  “What's going on?” asked one of a pair of latecomers just arrived from the forest.

  His companion cried, “Hey, Vascay! Is that what we come for? The ring, I mean?”

  Vascay thrust his boot out—not quite a kick, but a thump that got the attention of the man on Garric's torso. “I said, let him up, Halophus,” he said. He didn't raise his voice, but the mild previous tone was beginning to congeal into something much harder. “Toster, Hame—all of you. Let him up.”

  The bandits released Garric, grunting as they got to their feet. The stubby redhead who'd been holding Garric's right ankle scrambled away. That would be Ademos. He was the one who'd just kicked Garric; a frequent sport of his when poor Gar wore this flesh.

  That was a matter for another time. Garric sat up, set a foot behind him, and stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest, a show of coordination that he correctly assumed Vascay would notice.

  He bent to retrieve the ground sheet. Vascay stepped on a corner of the canvas, pinning it to the ground, and instead tossed Garric a tunic draped over a guyline anchoring an overhead tarp. “Try one of mine,” Vascay said. “It ought to fit.”

  He grinned, and added, “The way the weight's distributed is a little different, of course.”

  The tunic was close-woven linen with vertical stripes of brown and cream; a well-made, attractive garment which indeed did fit Garric as well as anything in the palace wardrobe. He raised it, bunched, above his head, then slipped it quickly down to cover him. Under the circumstances, he didn't want either to cover his eyes or bind his arms any longer than necessary.

  Vascay chuckled. “Nobody's going to stick you while you're dressing, boy,” he said.

  “By the Sister!” snarled Ceto, finally on his feet. He reached for his sword. “I'm going to stick him any way he comes!”

  “That's not how we do things here, Brother Ceto,” Vascay said calmly. “We're civilized men, remember, driven to our present straits by a tyrant's exactions rather than our own vicious natures.”

  Ceto snarled a curse. Garric tensed to jump. The chine of Ceto's swordblade sang against the lip of the scabbard as he drew it.

  “Ceto!” said Vascay.

  He was smiling. His knives were in his hands: the left one held low with the edge upward for a disemboweling stroke, the right one beside his ear ready to throw, blade vertical and the hilt in Vascay's palm.

  “Rules, Brother Ceto,” Vascay said, mildly again. None of the other bandits had drawn their weapons; some were deliberately holding their hands out where they could be seen to be empty. “We don't fight among ourselves, remember?”

  “Gar's not one of us!” Ceto snarled; he slammed his sword back in its sheath, however. “He's an animal!”

  Garric took a deep breath. He didn't know what the situation he'd stepped into was, but he knew there was one. The politics of this band were probably less complex than those of the royal council, but the sanctions for mistakes were likely to be quicker and more final.

  “Captain Vascay,” he said, giving the leader a half nod, half bow. “Tint and I found the ring we're here searching for. Ceto robbed us.”

  Toster was nearly as tall as Garric and much heavier; only part of his weight was fat. “What is this?” he asked in puzzlement. “What's Gar doing talking like that?”

  “When Ceto kicked me in the head...” Garric said, raising his finger to his bruised temple. It struck him that Gar's unkempt bush of hair might have prevented a cracked skull in all truth. “I regained my faculties.”

  “The animal tried to take the ring away from me after I'd found it,” Ceto said. “I knocked him down—and I'll do it again, Vascay, whether you like it or not!”

  Garric waited silently. In his experience, you didn't threaten a man like Vascay. If you wound up with that sort as an enemy, you'd best deal with him quickly—and not turn your back until you had.

  Instead of speaking, Vascay stepped backward, a movement that allowed him to keep both Ceto and Garric in his field of view at the same time. His knives were back in his sash, but Garric had seen how quickly they appeared when Vascay chose.

  “Well, Gar,” the chieftain said cheerfully, “then you'll understand when I tell you that I'm not a captain. I'm merely Brother Vascay, a member of the band and its spokesman only so long as the majority wills it. Is that not so, brethren?”

  “We all know that, Vascay!” Ceto said. “Sometimes I wonder if you remember it, though.”

  The others didn't speak. Their attention was uneasy; their eyes moved from Ceto to Vascay, sometimes pausing to consider the person who'd been Gar when he went into the jungle this morning.

  “So, Gar,” Vascay said calmly, “you say you found the ring—”

  Which had vanished somewhere onto Vascay's person during the same series of movements that brought out the knives ready to kill. Conjurors came regularly to the Sheep Fair, but Garric had never seen one as quick with his hands as Vascay.

  “—and Ceto took it from you?”

  “Tint led me to the ring,” Garric said, looking over his shoulder. “I dug it out.”

  Tint had come into the clearing when the shouting died down, but she ducked away from Garric's glance. He wouldn't have believed it was possible to hide behind the tuft of ferns into which the beastgirl disappeared.

  “How come Gar's talking like that?” Toster repeated plaintively. “He can't be Gar.”

  Garr
ic kept Toster at the corner of his eye. He and Vascay—who were probably opposite poles of the band's intellectual spectrum—were the only members who fully grasped the truth. Unlike the others, those two knew they weren't dealing with dim-witted Gar. The big man wasn't hostile, and Vascay seemed more positive than not, but they were potentially dangerous.

  “Why do you talk to that animal?” Ceto demanded. “It doesn't matter what Gar says, he's a—”

  “Arguments between Brethren,” Vascay interrupted, “are judged by the Ball of Truth. We'll have the trial now.”

  He gestured to a wooden chest resting on blocks beneath the nearby tarpaulin. It looked to Garric like a sea locker, though its floral decoration was of a much higher order than the chip carvings of dolphins and mermaids that graced most sailors' chests.

  “What do you mean a trial?” Ceto said.

  “Hey, it's just Gar,” said Ademos, as puzzled as Ceto and almost as worried about what was going on. “Trials are for brothers, not monkeys.”

  “Shall we cap each other's quotations from Celondre, Ademos?" Garric said in a cutting tone. “ 'The same chance that joins the wolf and the lamb... .' Or do you have a different favorite poet?”

  “What?” said Ademos. “What's he talking about?”

  Garric smiled coldly, though maybe it was a shame that Ademos hadn't turned out to be a scholar. A contest of verses would be one way to prove to the band that Garric's claim wasn't the maundering of a monkey boy. In his mind he completed the tag, “... makes you my enemy.”

  But Vascay was preparing to prove matters in a different fashion. He squatted and opened the chest without using a key, keeping his eyes on Ceto. His left hand darted within and came out with a red ball the size of a hickory nut.

  “Which will you have, Ceto?” Vascay asked as he stood upright again. “Will you tell your story first, or will you hold the Ball of Truth after Brother Gar has spoken his version?”

  “He's not a brother, he's an animal,” Ceto said, apparently hoping that repetition would give his statement an effect it'd so far lacked. “You can't make me go through a trial with an animal!”

  A bird shrieked in the canopy, responding to Ceto's rising tone. Another of its kind answered from a distance.

  “Unless we all vote to change our laws,” said Vascay, holding out the red bead, “that's just what we'll do, Brother Ceto. Which do you choose, that Gar takes the ball first or that you do?”

  “He doesn't talk like an animal,” Toster said. “He talks better'n me.”

  “Yeah, the Ball of Truth,” said Hame, a short, bandylegged fellow whose ears had been notched—for theft, Garric supposed; though, looking on the band with civilized eyes, they didn't seem to be the illiterate bravos he'd expected. Several of them, Hame for one, were city dwellers by their appearance.

  “All right, give him the ball and watch him spit his lies up!" Ceto snarled. “I don't care!”

  Gar might have been present at previous trials, but if so the experience had passed through his ruined brain like rain fallen on parched sand. Garric didn't know what was going on—

  But he did know he had Vascay on his side. The peg-legged chieftain touched his hands together, transferring the red bead from his left to his right. He held it toward Garric, and said, “Put the Ball of Truth under your tongue, Brother Gar. Speak your story, and if you lie the words will poison you.”

  “I'm not lying,” said Garric.

  “Then you'll hand the ball to Brother Ceto, and he'll do the same,” Vascay said equably. “A man who tells the truth has nothing to fear from the ball.”

  He looked around the circle of watchful men. The whole band was present, twenty or so. Many of them were mutilated, like Hame and Vascay himself.

  “I still don't know about this truth stuff, Vascay,” Ademos muttered, his eyes jerking side to side without lighting on the man to whom he spoke. “I know what you say, but I don't see how a little ball knows who's lying.”

  “With you, Ademos,” said Hame, “it's whenever your mouth's open.”

  “Stuff it!” said Ademos. He kept his hands carefully clear of his weapons. “Stuff you, Hame!”

  “I served a saintly hermit in my youth,” Vascay said, reinforcing the story he'd obviously told often in the past—and incidentally informing Garric for the first time. “The Ball of Truth was his legacy to me. Not wizardry but faith gives it the power to see men's souls, Brother Ademos.”

  “Get on with it,” Ceto snarled. “Just get on with it!”

  “Yes,” said Garric. He took the red bead from Vascay. “Let's do that.”

  It was surprisingly light, more like wood than the stone he'd expected. The surface was hard but slightly pitted.

  “Be brief, Brother Gar,” Vascay said. “And on your life, tell the truth.”

  Vascay nodded expressionlessly. Garric put the bead under his tongue.

  “I dug the ring out of the ground,” Garric said. The lump under his tongue slurred his words. He could feel the bead starting to dissolve. “Ceto sucker-punched me and stole the ring.”

  He spat the bead into his left palm. He couldn't see any change except the glister of saliva, but he knew it had begun to come apart.

  “Your turn now, Brother Ceto,” said Vascay. “Give him the Ball of Truth, Gar.”

  Garric's belly muscles were tight. His tongue worked, trying to decide what the taste in his mouth was. It was dry, limy, and nondescript. Apparently harmless, but there was some trick connected with the business.

  “Here, Ceto,” Garric said, stretching his left arm out to full length so that he didn't have to approach the other man. The bead gleamed in the center of his upturned palm.

  “I don't have to do this!” Ceto said, turning his head side to side like a beast at bay.

  “It's your turn, Ceto,” Toster said. The big man carried an axe with a long helve, a weapon that in hands like his could smash through any armor a man could wear and still be able to walk. He raised the axe slightly, holding it slanted across his body. “Take the ball.”

  “Sister drag you all down,” Ceto muttered. He snatched the bead from Garric, hesitated a moment, and popped it into his mouth.

  “I found the ring myself and—” he said. His face went white, then flushed red. He spat the bead onto the ground, then gagged up a mouthful of phlegm and saliva.

  “You tried to poison me, Vascay!” Ceto shouted. He whipped out his curved sword in a slashing arc. “I'll send your soul to Hell!”

  The other members of the band backed away. Ceto was a powerful man, and the long sword was a particularly dangerous weapon in the hands of somebody too angry to worry about self-preservation.

  Instead of drawing his knives, Vascay hopped sideways to put the cookfire between him and Ceto. He nodded to Garric with a sardonic grin. “Brother Gar,” he said, “your opponent doesn't accept the verdict of the Ball of Truth. What do you say?”

  Ceto whirled toward Garric, raising his sword. Garric gripped the near end of the rod supporting the soup and jerked it toward him. The pot tipped into the fire, hissing and fuming. Garric backed a step, judging his new weapon's weight and balance as Ceto came on.

  The rod was iron, five feet long and thumb-thick beneath the scale and rust. By reflex Garric slid his left hand toward the center the way he would've gripped a quarter-staff.

  A quarterstaff hadn't been holding a stewpot over a fire for the past several hours. There was a sizzle and a greasy feeling in Garric's fingertips. Grateful for Gar's calluses, he jerked his hand back to the end where the iron was cool enough to be safe.

  Ceto slashed down at Garric. Garric raised the rod crosswise, blocking the stroke in a shower of sparks. The blade bit deep enough not to skid, but it'd take a stronger man than Ceto to hack through so thick a rod with a sword.

  Garric heaved the rod up, lifting Ceto's sword arm with it. While Ceto was extended, Garric kicked him in the gut, near the spot where his punch had landed. Ceto woofed and doubled up, drawing both arms close
to his sides.

  Garric stepped back, judged his distance, and brought the rod around in a whistling sideways stroke. Ceto tried to raise his sword. The rod flung it away and thumped into the bandit's skull.

  Ceto sprawled onto his left side, bleeding brightly from the pressure cut in his scalp. The sword spun end over end—Ademos jumped out of the way with a squeal—and stuck in the ground. It sang angrily until it had damped itself to silence.

  Garric stabbed his rod into the dirt at his feet and rested some of his weight on it. He sucked in great gasping breaths, wavering slightly because his blood still raced with readiness to fight or flee.

  To fight: Garric or-Reise wasn't running anywhere.

  Smiling faintly, Vascay walked around the spluttering fire and pulled Ceto's sword from the ground. He held it up at a slant, peering along the edge. Garric could see from where he stood that there was a dent where his rod parried the blade, but the edge hadn't broken away. The smith had started with good steel, then cooled it slowly to a working temper instead of the brittle hardness suitable only for razors and fools.

  Vascay swept his glance around the circle of his fellows, turning his body slightly so that he eyed each man squarely. Ademos and a few others looked away, but nobody spoke.

  “Ceto didn't accept the verdict of the Ball of Truth,” Vascay said; not shouting, but an open challenge to anyone who might disagree. He stared at Ademos, whose head was turned sideways as though he were fascinated by the bromeliads growing from the trunks of the great figs. “Does anybody want to take up where he left off?”

  Garric had his breath back and his pulse under control. He straightened and lifted the rod again. The iron had cooled enough he could hold it by the balance now.

  Tint came out of the ferns and crept to his side. She was whimpering. Garric reached down and rubbed her scalp, but he didn't take his eyes off the gang's leader.

  “That's what I'd hoped,” Vascay said with a broader smile. He walked to Garric and rotated the sword in his hand, offering him the hilt.