Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  A sailor wailed in furious despair as he hurled his club, hitting the chest and one arm of a kneeling Archa. Purple ichor leaked through the chitin, but the remaining forearm chopped three times more before the creature slumped dead over the body of its victim.

  “Metra, you've gone mad!” Tilphosa called in a clear voice. “I won't let the Archai take me! I'll die first!”

  And how will you manage that? Cashel wondered, because the girl's only weapon was the chunk of stone, which didn't seem like much of a way to commit suicide. Metra might not know that, of course; but it wasn't clear to Cashel that the wizard would care, either. She'd made up her mind to crush everything in her way, and often people who got into that state forgot the goal they'd started out with.

  Metra made a strident noise with her tongue close to her palate. Cashel hadn't heard the Archai speak. They seemed to understand the wizard's cry, however, because they stopped where they were.

  The insects' narrow chests expanded and shrank with a slight whistling as they breathed. A sailor was crying, and another whimpered in pain.

  “Barbarian, I offer you your life!” Metra said in the near silence. “Turn Lady Tilphosa over to me, and I'll spare you. I'll spare the others too, if you like.”

  Metra's voice was stronger than before, but she still sat upright with difficulty. Raising this army of monsters had drained her badly, despite the assistance the powdered amulet had given her.

  “The others are no business of mine,” Cashel growled. “Tilphosa is. She says she's not coming with you.”

  He heard the girl's gasp of relief, though she must know as well as he did that he was no better than bragging. Oh, he'd fight the Archai till they brought him down; but they would bring him down, sure as sunrise, and they probably wouldn't be very long about the business either.

  What Metra and the Archai did with Lady Tilphosa then—well, Cashel or-Kenset didn't have to worry about that.

  Metra's face contorted. She trilled like an angry cicada. A wave of Archai leaped forward, not the whole mass but only half the front rank. Spread out, the insect warriors had full scope to slash into the sailors. There was a bedlam of screams, crackling, and the soft choonk of axe-edged forelimbs slicing into meat.

  For a moment Cashel poised. If he leaped into the struggle, his staff spinning, he could smash his way through ... several Archai. Probably a dozen, possibly a score. Metra had raised an army of the monsters that not even a scholar could count.

  Cashel turned into the nave of the temple. There was no darkness, because the walls themselves glowed. The Lady of the Moon glared down, merciless and implacable.

  “Cashel?” cried the girl.

  Cashel swung his quarterstaff butt first with all the strength of his arms and torso, smashing it like a battering ram into the reredos of light. Bolts of red and blue fire ricocheted about the room.

  The stone screen had only been three fingers' thick; Cashel's blow would've shattered it. Its ghost in wizard-light stood the shock, numbing Cashel's hands to the wrists. Metra trilled with desperate urgency.

  Cashel didn't drop the staff. He stepped back and spun the smooth hickory with the familiar hand-over-hand motion, working feeling into his muscles again. Tilphosa stood in a corner—her eyes open, her expression unreadable.

  Cashel brought the staff around again, leading this time with his right hand and the other ferrule. The iron struck on the Lady's sculptured face and headdress.

  The reredos flew into shards like sunlight glancing from a windswept pond. Beyond was not the storage room but rather a swirl of pastel colors.

  “Come on!” Cashel shouted, but Tilphosa was already jumping through. Cashel followed, his staff thrust out before him like a lance.

  For an instant he thought he heard Captain Mounix' voice. Then everything was brightness and a chaotic roar.

  Chapter Ten

  Sharina's stomach knotted in cold horror. “Where did she go, wizard?” shouted King Carus, his hand curved like a claw over his sword. He wasn't touching the sharkskin hilt, quite, but it was only by an effort of will that he held himself clear. “Where did you send Brichese? What—”

  The king's volcanic fury loosed Sharina's muscles. She stepped toward him, her arms raised. In his present madness Carus could cut her down on his way to killing the wizard whom he blamed for what'd happened to Ilna, but Sharina was still thankful for a chance to act instead of standing frozen.

  Carus sagged back against the wall, gasping with reaction. “Brichese is a thousand years dead,” he whispered. “And I would to the Lady I were with her now!”

  Tenoctris sat on the floor again without bothering to speak. She drew out a fresh wand and a stylus of lead pure enough to streak gray lines onto the polished stone.

  Sharina knew the wizard would have done the same if Carus' sword were slicing down at her. Tenoctris focused completely on whatever task was before her. Whatever the limitations of her wizardry and the weakness of her frail old body, her mind was as strong and supple as Carus' blade of patterned steel.

  “Your highness?” called the captain of the guards from the hallway. The door wasn't barred; it eased a finger's breadth open. “Shall we—”

  “Get back where you belong!” Carus said. “One fool with a sword in here's a great plenty already!”

  He banged his fist into the wall again, emphasizing his words and—to Sharina—the fact that his hand was empty. The door jerked closed.

  “We need you, your highness,” Sharina said. She lowered her hands. She'd thought of embracing the man in her brother's flesh, but this wasn't the time for that. “We need you now more than ever.”

  “Do you?” said Carus with a terrible smile. “Well, perhaps you do. More than Brichese does, that's for certain.”

  He looked around the room, still smiling. “What I would like," he added in a voice as light as a lute air, “is something to kill. I suppose that'll have to wait for a—”

  There was a thump and quick rasping outside the open window. A guard on the ground below cried out.

  “Don't throw your spear, you idiot!” another Blood Eagle bellowed. “Your highness, watch the—”

  A left hand, tanned and as strong as a grappling hook, clutched the bottom of the casement. Sharina reached for her Pewle knife; Carus' great sword was in his hand with no more sound than a snake makes licking the air. Tenoctris continued her soft chant, tapping the figure with her bamboo split.

  Chalcus lifted himself, squatting like an ape for an instant on the window ledge, then hopped to the floor. His curved sword was thrust through one side of his bright sash, his dagger through the other. His hands were empty, but his eyes were bright as hellfire.

  “I've got it!” Carus shouted, slamming his sword home in its scabbard.

  “But your highness ... ?” a guard below objected.

  Carus stepped to the window, passing close to Chalcus. The men neither touched nor seemed to move to avoid one another; their motion was that of vinegar slipping through oil.

  The king leaned out. “Did you not hear me? I've got it! Don't bother me again unless you want to go back to following a yoke of oxen!”

  He pulled the casements closed as vehemently as he'd sheathed his sword, then walked to the center of the room. He and Chalcus eyed one another.

  “So, soldier...” Chalcus said in a voice that held the music of swordblades ringing together. “At Ilna's house they told me that there'd been a summons, that her friend Sharina—”

  Chalcus nodded toward Sharina. He was smiling, but though she'd always gotten on well with Chalcus, she had at this moment the feeling that a viper was measuring the distance to strike her.

  “—had called her to aid Prince Garric in a crisis. And so I came here, thinking to wait politely outside till Ilna had finished her business, not intruding on my betters—”

  Carus flared his nostrils at the open scorn Chalcus put into the words "my betters," but his lips continued to smile. His arms were crossed, each big hand on t
he opposite elbow.

  “—until I heard you shout,” Chalcus continued. “Where do you suppose I might find Ilna, soldier?”

  “I don't know,” Carus said, anger clipping the syllables. “Maybe the wizard—”

  He gestured with a chop of his chin, then grimaced as though he'd bitten something sour.

  “Maybe Lady Tenoctris, that is,” he said in correction, "can tell us what I want to know as badly as you do, sailor. Ilna was here on the bed; then she vanished.”

  Azure wizardlight puffed above the five-sided figure Tenoctris had scrawled in lead over the mosaic. For a moment Sharina thought it was a tentacled creature, but there was no body—only a mass of lines intersecting like worm-tracks. Several of them lengthened, then faded away; the whole image faded like the stars at dawn, then was gone.

  Tenoctris dropped her wand and leaned forward, supporting her weight on her arms. Sharina squatted by the older woman and held her by her shoulders.

  The men stared at the old wizard the way wolves sized up a flock: without hostility, but with a merciless desire that made nothing of the object's needs or wishes. They wanted an answer they hoped Tenoctris would give. That she was wrung out with the effort of this and earlier wizardry meant no more to them than their own wounds or weakness would have mattered if they felt they needed to do something themselves.

  Tenoctris raised her head, looking from Carus to Chalcus. Her smile was weak, but it was one of understanding.

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “Ilna's—soul, I'll call it, Ilna's soul returned to the waking world at another point and drew her body to it. I don't know where she went, but I don't think she could have managed that by herself.”

  Chalcus raised an eyebrow. He was taut as the top string of a lute.

  Tenoctris sniffed at the implied question, “Not because I doubt her strength,” she said in something closer to irritation than Sharina had generally heard from Tenoctris' lips. “This is a matter of technique, Master Chalcus. Ilna could probably force her own way into the dreamworld, but returning to a place other than where her body lies ... that I do not believe. Even for her.”

  “How then?” said Carus in a controlled voice. His left hand had slid down to grip his right, preventing it from drawing his sword as it so clearly wanted to do. “If she didn't do it, who did?”

  “I don't know that either,” Tenoctris said. “She met someone or something—a wizard, though, not a demon; whoever drew her down did so through art rather than power, but power as well.”

  Tenoctris struggled to get her feet under her; Sharina helped her rise and guided her back onto the stool. The lead symbols drawn on the floor had a dull sheen like the eyes of a landed fish.

  “Now what I'm wondering...” said Chalcus, “simple man that I am—”

  Sharina watched his expression. There was nothing simple about Chalcus. She wasn't sure that even his two eyes saw the same things when they looked out on the world.

  “—is whether it might have been planned that Ilna go off to this dreamworld and not return to trouble the mind of the king who set her the task? Kings are used to dicing with the lives of lesser folk, or so I've heard—eh?”

  Carus looked at the smaller man without expression. Chalcus was a cat, but the king was a wolf, or mayhap a dragon.

  “Once long ago,” Carus said, “there were men who thought I'd do as they said if they took Lady Brichese as their hostage. They could do that, because they were her cousins.”

  He smiled. It was a terrible expression.

  “I led the attack on their castle myself,” Carus said. “Some of them I captured, and afterward those lived much longer than they wanted to; but my Brichese died that day in the fire.”

  The men stared into one another's eyes. Their faces were cold as stone, but their eyes, those eyes ... Sharina would have shivered, except that she had the hilt of her Pewle knife to steady her.

  “I'd have done the same thing again to save the kingdom,” Carus said, smiling. “Perhaps I'd still do that. But I don't think that I am the kingdom any longer, do you see? And regardless, whatever's happened to Ilna is none of my plan nor my desire.”

  “So,” said Chalcus mildly, liltingly. “So you say. But would you be lying to me, I wonder?”

  Carus laughed like boulders slipping. “Don't flatter yourself, sailor!” he said.

  Chalcus' lips twisted in a wry smile. “Aye,” he said. “I was getting above myself, was I not?”

  His expression drew back into its previous taut, feral lines. “So, soldier,” he said. “We've a problem. Will our wizard here—”

  He nodded to Tenoctris; she acknowledged his glance by raising her chin.

  “—be able to solve it?”

  “No,” said Tenoctris calmly. “I may be able to find where Ilna has gone, but I won't be able to bring her back myself. That's far beyond my powers.”

  Carus snorted. “Wizardry's never done me much good,” he said. “This time wasn't much different from other times. I'll fall back on a cure for the kingdom's ills that I know something about.”

  He drew his sword a hand's breadth from the scabbard, his thumb and index ringer gripping the pommel; demonstrating, not threatening. He grinned at Chalcus. “This,” the king said. “What would you like for a command, sailor?”

  Chalcus' left index finger traced a scar barely to be seen against the tan skin of the opposite biceps. “I think...” he said, and the pause showed that he was thinking indeed, “that I'll carry on as before. Merota and I will go to Tisamur and see what's to be learned about Moon Wisdom.”

  Sharina thought she was keeping a strait face, but Chalcus must have read the surprise she felt. He grinned at her, and said, “Long odds it was Moon Wisdom she was searching for when she vanished, not so? So it seems to me that other folk searching for Moon Wisdom may find themselves in the place Ilna has gotten to.”

  He laughed. “Not that she'll need me or Merota, either one,” he added. “But we'll be in a place to watch her deal with those troubling our good friend Carus and his kingdom.”

  “And perhaps,” said Carus, “she'll need you. We none of us can have too many friends.”

  Chalcus merely grinned, but his finger toyed with the eared pommel of his sword. For him, that was a sign of nervousness.

  “What help do you need from me, then?” Carus demanded, his thumbs hooked in his sword belt.

  “Need from you?” said Chalcus. “Don't flatter yourself!”

  Whistling a lilting hornpipe, he swaggered to the hallway door. Looking back with a grin, Chalcus said, “I'll see you in Donelle, soldier.”

  “Aye, or in Hell if we get there first,” Carus replied. They were both laughing again until the closing door separated them.

  Ilna got to her feet cautiously. Her mind still saw ghost images of Garric's room in the palace, the cracked plaster and her friends watching her worriedly on the bronze bed. That's where her mind knew she should have been.

  But she wasn't, yet another example of reality being worse than what should have been. The polished marble floor beneath Ilna's bare soles reminded her of how much she disliked stone.

  She smiled faintly. That was fair: stone didn't like her either.

  The girl, Alecto, glared at the entrance. She was crouching, her athame held low for a disemboweling stroke.

  “Have you got a knife?” she demanded. “Maybe we can cut our way through them before they know we're in here!”

  Ilna didn't let her sneer reach her lips. She did have a knife, a bone-cased sliver of steel that she used for everything from dressing chickens to trimming the selvage from the cloth she wove; she didn't see herself slashing her way through an army of priests and worshippers with it, though. When she'd looked down at the scene earlier, this big circular room had been full of people.

  “No,” she said looking upward. “We'll hide.”

  “You can't get out that hole up there unless you can walk upside down like a fly!” Alecto said, but she raised her eyes also.
>
  No, the cast-concrete dome curved up as high as the big room was wide. Though the inner surface was cross-ribbed, not even an acrobat—not even Chalcus!—could have crossed it against the pull of gravity.

  The dome rested on pillars, each wider around than Ilna could span with both arms and separated from one another by about the distance of her arms spread. The pillars were only about five or six times a man's height.

  A solid wall surrounded the colonnade set out at half the distance of the pillars' height, forming a corridor around the domed area in the center. Overflow from the crowd could stand beneath the corridor's sloping roof, hearing though perhaps not seeing what was going on above the reflecting pool.

  Alecto glanced behind a pillar. Her frown showed that she thought—as Ilna did—that if the room filled, there was little chance that the presence of the two interlopers wouldn't be remarked. She started to speak; before the objection reached her tongue she saw Ilna uncoil her sash into a noosed rope. “Ah!” she said instead.

  Ilna cast the noose with the skill she displayed in every use of fabric. The heads of the columns mimicked vines growing through a loose wicker basket; complex and delicate for stonework, though nothing to the subtlety of a weaver's art. The silken loop settled over an extended tendril; Ilna pulled it tight.

  “Will it hold me?” Alecto said. She took the blade of her dagger in her teeth instead of sliding the weapon back into its sheath.

  “The cord will,” Ilna said coldly, wondering if the wild woman thought she was going to climb it first. “You'll follow me up. The cord will hold an ox. I'm less confident about the stone, but there's nothing better available.”

  The chanting was growing louder. The interior of the temple was in shadow save for gray light blurring across the west half of the dome as the moon rose, but anyone on the floor would be in plain sight as soon the procession reached the rotunda.

  Ilna tugged again, then climbed by the strength of her arms alone. Alecto muttered an objection, but Ilna already knew that Cashel or any other of the village boys who robbed seabird nests on the offshore islands would have used the grip of their feet on the rock as well. She made the choice not out of ignorance but from distaste for the stone.