Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  Each time Ilna's arms hitched her up another level, her body swung against the column. Still, she wasn't deliberately touching the fluted marble.

  Curves projecting from the column head gave Ilna somewhere to set her feet though they were too smooth to have held the rope. She laid her left arm flat along the vault's lowest rib, gripping as well as she could, and motioned Alecto to follow. The girl did, scrambling like a cat up a fir tree.

  It would've been safer for Ilna to loop the cord around a second knob to spread Alecto's weight, but she decided against doing that. As soon as the wild girl saw the cord twitch upward the necessary foot or so, she'd have assumed that Ilna planned to abandon her to the incoming worshippers. She'd have come up in a flying leap that might well have sheared the stone when a more cautious approach did not.

  Ilna smiled sourly. Leaving Alecto on the ground would surely lead to Ilna's own discovery as well as being a wholly pointless bit of spite. She'd seen before that what people feared in others generally showed how they'd choose to behave themselves.

  Alecto reached the head of the column and braced herself from the side opposite to Ilna. There was at least a chance that anyone glancing upward would mistake them for a pair of statues; though the better hope—and the likelier one—was that nobody would bother to look.

  Alecto glanced at Ilna, then took the dagger into her free right hand. The hard set of her mouth didn't change.

  Ilna flipped the cord up to her hand, then cleared the noose with a twist that made Alecto's eyes widen. The wild girl had used ropes and snares, that was evident; but she'd never seen anyone use them with Ilna's ease and skill.

  Acknowledging the unspoken praise with a slight smile, Ilna tossed the cord into a loop around the pillar, Alecto, and finally herself. The noose itself had been the only weight for the free end. Ilna tugged the cord tight, but instead of tying the loop, she kept the bight in her hands so that she could release it instantly at need.

  Close up, Alecto had a strong animal odor compounded of fur and leather garments and her own intense female-ness. Ilna disliked it, but feeling dislike wasn't a new experience for her.

  The inner door opened. The worshippers, led by a phalanx of priests in black-and-white robes, entered the cavity of the temple. Their hymn had the rhythms Ilna remembered from Tenoctris' incantations; and also during those of wizards she trusted far less than she did Tenoctris.

  Ilna's eyes narrowed as she realized for the first time that there was no statue of the Lady in the great room. Was this a temple after all?

  As best Ilna could tell looking down from her perch, the priests, like the worshippers following them, were a mix of men and women in roughly equal numbers. They continued to sing as they filled the room. Two of the leaders carried covered wicker baskets.

  The priests took their places around the margin of the reflecting pool, the white slashes of their robes showing up in the dim light like a row of slanting pickets. The laymen moved with solemnity but not precision to stand outside the ring of priests. They'd done this before, but they weren't a military unit marching in formation.

  The room continued to fill. Ilna could no more count than she could read, but she was certain that there were more people below her in this room than there were in Barca's Hamlet. They stood at the base of the pillars and moved back into the corridor where Ilna couldn't see them from her perch.

  Alecto watched with eyes like a hungry hawk. Her face, already hard despite its curves, grew taut.

  The moon was near zenith, reflecting upward from the pool's surface. The last of the worshippers had entered the room. A husky man wearing a sword—a temple servant, distinct both from the priests and from the ordinary townsfolk who made up the worshippers—swung shut the great bronze door.

  Priests—one at either axis of the reflecting pool—raised the lids of the round wicker baskets they'd carried in. Their fellows continued to chant. Ilna blinked and would have rubbed her eyes if she'd had a hand free; the rhythms of the hymn were beginning to disturb her balance.

  The priests lifted rabbits out of their baskets, tied as though they were going to market. One of the animals was black, the other white. They bawled in terror, a penetrating sound so like a baby's cry that several of the female worshippers faltered in their chanting.

  Ilna's lips tightened. She knew what was going to happen. She'd killed her share of poultry in the past with neither qualm nor hesitation; she'd kill more in the future if events spared her to cook more dinners.

  Blood sacrifice, this, was a waste of meat and a perversion of what every peasant knew was a part—the last and greatest part—of nature. It disgusted Ilna almost as much as the folk performing the ritual disgusted her.

  The chant deepened. Even at the first Ilna hadn't been able to make out individual syllables in the echoing cavity of this temple, but now the sound had the groaning weight of the millpond frozen in midwinter.

  The kneeling priests held knives; they flashed together in the moonlight. Black blood gouted into the reflecting pool. The reflected moon seemed to swell across the surface of the stained water.

  A man cried out, but the chanting of his fellows continued like hollow thunder. A moment before, light had entered through the eye in the dome's center and been reflected from the pool beneath throughout the temple; now the eye was dark, and the moon blazed in full glory where before the water had been.

  Ilna's limbs were tight with the strain of holding herself to the column, but her face grew rigid as well. She could see Alecto's lips moving, but she couldn't be sure whether the girl mouthed a curse or a prayer or a spell.

  Something formed in the air above the moon. The worshippers' voices were growing hoarse, but the chanting continued with even greater desperation.

  At first it was only a blue nimbus, a haze of wizardlight. As the assembly shouted words of power, the ring of priests brought out athames and waved them to the rhythm of the chant; some slashed their own arms. Droplets of blood arced through the air, sinking without trace into the moon's blazing face.

  The nimbus shrank into three figures. They were no longer blue; they had no color at all, only a gray sheen as bleak as Ilna's thoughts when she woke in the hours after midnight. They swayed to the rhythm of the chant.

  Alecto's face was stark with terror. Her tongue moved slightly, but the sound she made had no more meaning than a death rattle does.

  The three creatures were as bonelessly supple as an ammonite's tentacles, but their heads were flat and reptilian. Their conical bodies tapered from two squat, folded legs to the narrow snout. Their arms waved; they ended in cilia rather than fingers or claws.

  The creatures were neither evil nor good; they merely were, the way the sea is or the sun. They were terrible beyond anything Ilna had ever seen.

  The chanting stopped. Its echoes rolled about the dome for long moments after, but even that finally stilled. In the silence Ilna heard her companion whisper, “The Pack! These are the ones... .”

  The three figures faded gradually like fish swimming downward through clear water. There was a crackling that Ilna felt rather than heard; the Pack were gone, and the moon—edging westward past zenith—streamed through the dome's eye again.

  The pool was still clear, save for where the rabbits' corpses lay on the coping. The last drops of blood leaking from the severed throats now swirled in dark tendrils through the water.

  Gasps, whispers, and sighs of relief echoed through the domed hall. The tension had dissipated as soon as the worshippers below were sure the Pack were gone. The prayer had brought the creatures out of whatever place—whatever Hell—normally held them, but the worshippers were as frightened of the Pack as Alecto was.

  Alecto had said only fools would loose the Pack. Ilna didn't see any reason to fault her companion's judgment on that point.

  The guard threw open the door, sucking in a breeze to purge the warmth of enclosed bodies and the stench of fear. The worshippers drained from the room with a haste just short of
panic, jostling at the doorway to the long entrance passage. They'd entered chanting, but there was no pretense of a recessional to put a solemn seal on the proceedings.

  This wasn't religion: it was wizardry, and wizardry of a particularly unpleasant sort, Ilna's lip curled. Those who'd performed it were anxious to return to their homes and pretend they had no idea of what was going on.

  The priests followed the layfolk, murmuring among themselves. They controlled their fears more carefully, but they too wanted to be gone. The pair—a man and a woman—who'd made the sacrifice carried away the dead rabbits in their baskets instead of leaving them for servants.

  Did servants ever enter this room? Now that she thought about it, Ilna thought there'd been smears from previous slaughter on the pool's marble coping before the priests carried out the present sacrifice. This was truly a sanctum, perhaps the more so because it didn't hold the God's image.

  Only initiates entered. If they didn't carry out menial tasks like scrubbing blood from the marble, nobody did.

  The last of the priests passed from the hall; she didn't bother to close the inner door behind her. Ilna heard the sound of steps shuffling down the passage, fewer and fewer, then the clang of the outer door. The hall was silent, save for the wind sighing softly past the dome's open eye.

  “All right, loose me!” Alecto said. She reached for her athame as she spoke, preparing to cut the rope if Ilna didn't release her instantly.

  Ilna's hand twitched, curling the noose back around into her hand in a single motion. Manipulating the rope brought her to herself. Strength returned to muscles which her cramped position had reduced to trembling weakness.

  Alecto spread her arms wide and gripped the column's flutings between thumb and fingers while her legs circled the shaft. She scrambled down the pillar without waiting for Ilna to snub the rope off for her. She probably couldn't have climbed without Ilna's help, but she could get down again swiftly and safely by herself.

  Ilna knew her own limitations. She hung the noose over two separated stone acanthus flowers, drew it tight, and lowered herself hand over hand to the floor. Going down, her body twisted on the rope, but at least she didn't bang into the pillar as heavily as when she'd climbed.

  Alecto was already at the inner door. Instead of peering around it, she stood at the hinge side. Her nostrils flared as she sniffed at the gap between the jamb and panel. She held her dagger by her side, the bronze blade concealed against her bare tanned thigh.

  Ilna cleared her noose with a flick. She was a little piqued that Alecto didn't notice the trick, and much more irritated to realize that the wild girl's opinion mattered to her.

  Alecto looked around. “There's nobody in the hall,” she said, speaking in a low voice. She stared at Ilna appraisingly. “So,” she continued, “are you going to stick with me, then?”

  Ilna frowned despite herself. “If you mean am I willing for us to continue on together,” she said, “then I suppose so. For the time being. Do you know where we are?”

  “All I know is it's a place I want to be far away from,” Alecto said. She glanced back at the air above the reflecting pool, now empty except for moonlight. “Raising the Pack! They're insane!”

  She faced Ilna abruptly with her eyes narrowed. “What were you doing where I found you, eh?” she said. “Are you fooling with the Pack as well?”

  “Perhaps,” Ilna said, her hands shifting minusculely on the cord that she hadn't yet wrapped around her waist again. “I may have been sent here to drive these creatures back where they belong. If you mean did I have anything to do with raising them, no.”

  She suspected Alecto would be very quick and very deadly with her bronze dagger. If Ilna herself wasn't quick enough to catch the girl's neck and knife hand in her noose before the blade got home, well, then she deserved to die.

  Instead of lunging, Alecto snorted, and said, “You're going to drive the Pack? You're crazier than this lot!”

  She spat, then rubbed the gobbet into the marble with the ball of her bare foot. “Still, it's no business of mine—if you don't try anything so stupid when I'm anywhere around you. Agreed?”

  “I'll see to it that you're warned,” Ilna said. “Now, shall we leave? Or shall I leave?”

  The words were empty: Tenoctris had sent Ilna into the dreamworld to search. Ilna—and Tenoctris as well, most likely—had no idea of what to do to prevent those reptilian creatures from invading Carus' sleep. Still, the statement had the desired effect of making Alecto relax and turn her attention to the passageway outside. Ilna supposed that sometimes it was better to mouth foolishness than to have to strangle somebody.

  Alecto slipped into the passageway, moving with the silent grace of a cat. The passage was windowless. Some moonlight slipped past the inner door, but she hadn't bothered to swing it fully open.

  Ilna followed, wrapping the gathered noose back around her waist as an additional belt. Though... the temple faced south, into the full moon. There should be light enough outside the entrance for any guards present to see whatever design Ilna knotted. She took the hank of short cords out of her sleeve, smiling faintly as her fingers worked. “I'll deal with the guards,” she said.

  Instead of replying, Alecto merely looked back over her shoulder with an expression that was unreadable in the shadows. In a sharper tone Ilna said, “Don't attack them, I mean! I'll take care of anyone out there quietly.”

  The outer door was heavy, bronze or bronze-covered like the inner one. There were staples and a heavy crossbar to lock it from the inside, but for now all that held it was a spring catch at the upper edge. A drawstring was reeved through a hole in the panel to open it from outside.

  Alecto reached for the catch with her free hand. Ilna caught her arm. “I don't want you stabbing somebody,” she said, each syllable a needle point. “Put your knife away.”

  Ilna didn't know why it mattered to her. Perhaps because as she'd watched the rabbits butchered, she realized that her companion was just as quick to offer blood sacrifice as the priests had been.

  Alecto tossed her head dismissively. “All right,” she said, sheathing her blade with a quick motion. “I won't kill anybody if you're so squeamish.”

  She tripped the catch and put her shoulder against the door to ease it open. Ilna waited, suppressing her frown. She'd meant to go out first, but it probably didn't matter.

  Alecto stepped outside. Ilna couldn't see much except moonlight past the other girl's shoulder, but that meant there wasn't a covered porch that would keep a guard from seeing the pattern knotted into her cords.

  “It's clear,” Alecto said, stepping out of the building so that Ilna could follow. Then, “What is this place? These are houses!”

  They were on a hill from which two- and three-story buildings marched down to a harbor. Patches of lamplight, yellower than the moon, shone from windows onto the winding streets; music trembled on the breeze.

  Not long ago Ilna too would have been startled, but she'd seen far larger cities in the months since she left Barca's Hamlet. “Come on,” she said crisply to Alecto. “We don't want to stay around here.”

  She shoved the door closed. Its weight resisted her, but the hinges pivoted smoothly. Too late Ilna remembered the bell note with which it had closed behind the crowd of priests and worshippers. She grabbed the long horizontal handle; even so, the door, several times as heavy as she was, bonged against its jamb.

  Lamplight flared beside the steps leading down from the entrance. The caretaker's room was built under the staircase. “Who's there?” a man called as he stepped into view.

  It was the servant who'd opened and closed the doors for the ceremony. He held his belt in his left hand and was drawing his hook-bladed sword from its scabbard.

  “Hey, don't worry,” said Alecto, unpinning her wolfskin cape with her left hand. “There's room for you at the party too, handsome.”

  She swept the cape off her torso, twirling it in a quick figure-eight. Her breasts were full but firm, sta
nding out proudly from her hard-muscled chest. She sauntered down the steps, dangling the cape from the fingers of her left hand.

  Ilna was cold with fury, though not even she could have said whether she was angrier at herself or at her companion. The caretaker stared transfixed at the wild girl's naked chest. The spell Ilna had knotted into her cords was as useless as it would have been on a blind man. Of course, the fellow was frozen as rigid now as Ilna's pattern would have left him.

  Alecto glanced at Ilna, grinning in a mixture of mockery and open lust. “So, fellow, are you man enough to handle both of us?” she said to the caretaker.

  He swung his heavy sword up for a chopping blow.

  “Harlot!” he screamed. “Profaning the house of the Mistress! I'll—”

  Alecto was just as skilled with the knife as Ilna had expected; her right hand dipped to the ivory hilt and came up to thrust the long blade through the fellow's throat, choking the rest of the words in his blood. He'd only begun his own stroke.

  The caretaker stumbled backward, continuing to swing the sword. He was dead but his body didn't realize it quite yet.

  Alecto toppled with him, cursing; her dagger was caught in cartilage, and she didn't want to let go of it. Ilna's noose settled over the caretaker's wrist and jerked his arm harmlessly to the side. The sword, a clumsy thing better suited to pruning than war, clanged a sad note against the lowest step.

  Alecto set her left foot on the caretaker's chest and tugged her blade free. Blood gushed from both the wound and his mouth. His eyes stared at Ilna as she freed her rope.

  Alecto lifted the man's kilt to wipe her dagger. When he guarded the door during the service he'd worn a leather vest and cap as well, but he'd taken them off in his lodgings.

  “Too bad,” she said, grinning at Ilna again. “He's hung like a pack pony. I wouldn't have minded a little fun with him. First.”