Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  The crabs had been stewed, though, and Ilna didn't see much way of building a fire in this place. The notion of raw cricket wasn't appealing.

  She snorted, almost a laugh. Very little in the situation was appealing.

  “Yes it is, by the Sister!” Alecto cried enthusiastically. She stood and turned, holding her dagger out in what Ilna momentarily thought was a threatening gesture.

  No: Alecto was using the flat of her blade as a spatula, demonstrating the dark spores she'd shaken from the gills of the mushrooms she'd been looking at. They meant nothing to Ilna. Old Allis fattened the living she scraped from the land in the north of the borough by selling cures to those who trusted her. She picked mushrooms, both spring and fall. Nobody else near Barca's Hamlet did, though. Most people thought any fungus was apt to poison the fool who ate it.

  “I've never seen them this big before,” Alecto said, “but these are Traveller's Balls as sure as I'm a woman!”

  “We can eat them, you mean?” Ilna said. She preferred to be on good terms with her companion instead of at the edge of violence, but she really couldn't understand what Alecto was talking about.

  And as for “never seen them this big...” Each of these nearly spherical caps was the size of a boar's head. No mushroom got that big in the borough.

  “Not travelling that way,” said Alecto, with a half sneer she was unwilling or unable to control in the cause of harmony. Obviously the wild girl felt power had shifted again in her direction. “Travelling like what brought me here. Through the dreamworld!”

  “I don't see how that's an improvement,” Ilna said. “According to what you told me, our spirits have to come back to our bodies, and they're still here ... oh.”

  “Right!” said Alecto in triumph. “I'll find another—”

  Her face changed as she realized what she was saying and who she was saying it to. “That is, I'll take you along and we'll both get back to, well, out of—”

  “We'll go to wherever the next innocent victim happens to be,” Ilna said coldly. “Don't bother. I have enough on my conscience without snatching some stranger into the place your luck and judgment puts them. I haven't been impressed by your past successes.”

  The wild girl's hot fury met the ice in Ilna's eyes—and backed away from it. “Do you think you're better than me?” Alecto shouted. “Do you think I don't know what you are?”

  “I don't think a spider is better than a weasel, no,” Ilna said, her hands on her noose. “But I think we're different.”

  “Do as you please!” Alecto said, turning away. “Stay here and die, then! But I'm going to get out.”

  Ilna forced herself to relax. She needed rest more than she needed food; perhaps after she slept she'd be better able to follow the strands of this pattern.

  And again, maybe she already knew where the pattern led. Maybe it wasn't simply chance that made the web-draped, spider-filled Hell she'd seen in a dead man's eyes quiver constantly at the fringes of her memory.

  Alecto had caught a cricket and was opening its body with the point of her knife. Do insects have blood? They must, Ilna supposed; and if her companion was determined to use blood magic—let her.

  Ilna lay down, resting her head on a clump of broad-capped mushrooms whose firm flesh cushioned her better than a rolled tunic would have done. She still hadn't wrung out her clothing... . Well, that could wait; had to wait.

  Alecto shook a mushroom cap over herself and the figure she'd scratched on the ground. She began to chant in an angry, hectoring tone very different from the quiet care Ilna was used to hearing in Tenoctris' voice.

  It wasn't just that Ilna was exhausted by the effort of worming through narrow tunnels and water almost cold enough to freeze. The rock itself, the whole living mass of it above and around Ilna, was forcing itself onto her soul though for the moment it couldn't crush her body.

  Ilna found every moment's existence in this place a battle. The rock wouldn't defeat her so long as she lived, but the struggle was a greater strain than anything her muscles had gone through.

  Spores from Alecto's mushroom drifted to where she lay. They had a sharp tang, but the smell wasn't really unpleasant.

  Ilna felt herself sliding. Instead of a cave floor as level as those of most houses in Barca's Hamlet, she was on a smooth, steep funnel. She wanted to crawl back, but her limbs didn't move, and nothing she did would make a difference anyway. At the bottom of the funnel was a hole, and she knew what was on the other side of the hole as well.

  Alecto chanted. Ilna would've smiled if she'd been able to move the muscles even of her face. She could see the pattern spreading from this point. The wild girl would follow her strand to its end, her end. No one could change that, no one could change any part of what was already woven.

  Ilna slid faster. Her eyes were open. They saw the world of the cave as motionless and unchanged: rock and lichen and the insects which ate the fungus and one another.

  On the domed ceiling over Ilna's head, a spider the size of a man's spread hand waited in her web for prey. She looked down at Ilna, as still and silent as the rock she gripped.

  As the world about Ilna vanished into gray darkness, she felt herself falling upward.

  Garric tumbled into sunlight on a landscape of rocks, flowering scrub, and stone boxes. The sea roared against a nearby coastline, and above him birds called.

  His face was buried in coarse grass, each stem topped with a tiny white bloom. If he'd come through Metron's passage a hand's breadth farther forward, the spiky leaves of something like a yucca would've been gouging his cheeks. He was too exhausted to feel relief.

  At that he was better off than Metron, who lay half under, half beside, Garric's body. The wizard couldn't have been more still if he'd been dead, though Garric found a pulse in his throat when he checked.

  He heard voices, Vascay's among them, as the Brethren assessed the situation. Garric braced his hands and levered his torso up so that he could look around. He wasn't quite ready to stand just now.

  “There you are, Brother Gar!” Vascay called, waving his javelin in greeting. “How about the wizard? I'd say I didn't care, but this time he brought us to a better place than some I've seen recently.”

  At a quick glance, it seemed that all the bandits on the millipede's back had made it here. Garric grimaced when he remembered Toster. All who'd dared the wizard's gateway, that is. Well, Toster had the right to make his own decision.

  “Metron's here with me,” Garric said. “He won't want to move for a while, but he's all right.”

  He stood carefully, finding as he usually did that he felt better when he started moving again after exertion. Small bees buzzed, trying the flowers. Even the spiky succulent sported orange starbursts that Garric would have guessed were giant asters if he'd seen them from a distance.

  Vascay and Thalemos started over to him. Rather than meet them halfway, Garric waited—smiling faintly and looking around to get his bearings. The passage Metron had opened for them twice now seemed to affect some men more than others—and Garric more than most.

  It was nearly noon here. Under the sun to the south ranged an arc of craggy hills: rugged, perhaps, but certainly nothing the band couldn't cross if it wanted to. In the middle was the notch of a pass. Garric thought the hills were less than two miles away, though that guess depended in part on how tall the trees sprinkling the slopes were.

  The sea battered the shore north of where Garric stood. Near land the water was green, becoming a deep purple-blue toward the horizon. The plain must be eaten away into a steep corniche rather than a sloping beach, but Garric couldn't be sure without getting closer.

  All around him, covered by flowers and grasses, were boxes hewn from the same coarse limestone that underlay the soil. Garric frowned as he recognized them: they were coffins.

  More precisely, they were ossuaries to hold the bones of the dead whose flesh had decayed during a year or two's exposure on the shelves of common mausolea. That had been the practic
e in Haft during the Old Kingdom, Garric knew from his reading; though in his own day, the dead were buried in the ground and honored in a general ceremony at the spring equinox.

  “We're in a graveyard,” he said to Vascay. Thalemos had halted a few paces away, bending to look at an ossuary of alabaster or marble. “All of this.”

  Gesturing broadly, Garric went on, “It must have served quite a large city, but I don't see any sign of buildings except crypts and these, well”—he touched an ossuary with his foot—“bone boxes.”

  Vascay shrugged, the gesture nonchalant but his expression guarded. “They might've built their houses of sticks and thatch but buried their dead in stone,” he said. “It's a matter of what your priorities are, after all. And this place—” He carried his glance around the sprawling plain; for as far as a man could see, ruined tombs and ossuaries dotted it. Flowers nodded in the slight breeze.

  “—is old, whatever it is.”

  Magenta flowers that looked like zinnias—they weren't; the plants' leaves were wrong—grew in great profusion where Thalemos knelt and shaded worn lettering with his hand. He looked solemn as he rose to join Garric and the chieftain.

  “That ossuary held a Magistrate of Wikedun on the north coast of Laut, washed by the Outer Sea,” Thalemos said. He wore a slight frown. “The city doesn't exist anymore.”

  “I've heard of the place,” Vascay said, frowning also. “The rebels of Wikedun fought the Intercessor Echea, back when the Old Kingdom fell two thousand years ago. She defeated the rebels and sank Wikedun under the sea.”

  “Well,” Thalemos said, “the Outer Sea ate away the land, but that was over ages instead of whelming the city suddenly. And the rebels were demon worshippers.”

  He paused, considering what he'd just said. He added, “According to Ascoin's History, they were demon worshippers, I mean. I suppose his stories may be false.”

  Vascay snorted. “Or they may not,” he said. “What I know for a fact”—he looked toward the range of hills—“is that the present Intercessor has half the Protectors on his payroll patrolling the marshes south of here. And they say other guards as well, to keep honest men out of here. Why is that, do you suppose?”

  All three men looked down at the wizard, snoring among the flowers at their feet. Presumably Metron knew the answer. He knew the same answer as Echeon did, at any rate.

  “I don't think he's faking,” Garric said morosely. “The spells Metron has been working would be impossible for anyone but a great wizard, and even then difficult.”

  “You know wizards, do you, Gar?” Vascay said mildly.

  “I've known some,” said Garric.

  “I'd as soon I never had,” Vascay said. He smiled. “But then, I'd as soon a lot of things that turned out differently.”

  He gestured toward the edge of the plain a furlong away. “Let's walk that way,” the chieftain said. “I'd like to take a look at the sea, since I don't think we're going back through Echeon's patrols. Regardless of what else might be waiting for us south of the hills.”

  Thalemos glanced down at the wizard with pursed lips. “He'll be fine,” Garric said. “He's just tired. There's nothing we can do beyond letting him sleep.”

  The remaining bandits were exploring their new surroundings with cheerful enthusiasm, mostly in groups of two or three. Hame stood alone on top of a ruin that might once have been a temple, shading his eyes with his hand searching the plain.

  Looking for Toster, Garric realized. They were friends... . He started to call to Hame, then decided that for the time being he wouldn't do that. For one thing, it'd force Garric to recall the big man's last moments with greater clarity than he wanted to.

  Halophus disappeared, then popped back into sight holding a broad armlet. He'd apparently jumped or fallen into a sub-surface tomb; this necropolis held burials of a wide variety of styles. From the bandit's caroling joy and the way sunlight winked, the armlet was made of gold.

  “We're all happy to be out of where we were before,” Vascay said without emphasis. “I am myself. I don't know that this is a good place—”

  He smiled knowingly at his companions.

  “—but I know the other was a bad one, at least there at the end.”

  “Yes,” said Garric grimly. They'd reached the edge of the cliff; the sea roared up at them, though it was a calm day. The waves didn't make enough noise against the crumbling rock to drown the screams in his mind, though.

  “I've had a lot more money over the past ten years with the Brethren than I did for the twenty before when I was a schoolmaster,” Vascay said, his voice barely loud enough for the others to hear him. “Had the money and had more of the things the money could buy. But one of the things I wish turned out differently is that I could've lived my whole life as an honest man.”

  The corniche was never more than twenty feet above the sea and generally only half that. Green water swirled and foamed about the scree of rocks broken away from the cliff face in the recent past. Garric had led his companions to a notch where the overhang had collapsed perhaps only hours before; the dirt showing at the edges of the fall was still moist and russet in contrast to the grayish yellow where the soil had dried. Standing anywhere else along the edge risked the weight of the spectators bringing down the overhang.

  “Doesn't Echeon have ships on patrol off the coast here?” Garric asked. He couldn't see anything but sunlit water all the way to the horizon, but there must be something to prevent interlopers. The gold Halophus had found in practically open sight proved nobody came here.

  Garric and his companions might still be able to escape by sea. Even with Echeon's art, the Protectors wouldn't be able to patrol effectively in the middle of a winter storm. Though ... with a homemade boat and a crew of landsmen, Garric thought he'd rather take his chances walking south through the hills.

  “I haven't heard of anything special on this coast,” Vascay said. “There's the regular ships watching to keep people here from going out beyond fishing distance and anybody else from getting to Laut. Nothing in particular about this bay or Wikedun, though.”

  He shrugged. “My gang stayed pretty much in the south and east, that being where we all of us came from,” he went on. “But I keep an ear out for what the Protectors're doing, and I'd guess I'd have heard about extra ships the same as I did about the patrols on the land side.”

  “What's that?” said Thalemos, suddenly pointing seaward.

  “That's just a—” Garric said. He shut his mouth on "—shadow on the water,” because there weren't any clouds in the sky.

  It broke surface, or at least several hundred feet of its length did. Its lizardlike head was blunter than that of a seawolf, nor did a seawolf ever reach the size of this creature. The kinship was close, though. Gar's soul, by now buried deep in Garric's mind, begin to whimper.

  The serpent looked at the three watching humans, then slid downward again with a sidewise shimmy of its whole long body. The green water covered all but memory of the creature.

  “Did it happen to appear now, or were we being warned?” Thalemos asked. He sounded calm, but his clasped fingers writhed like the snake he'd just watched.

  “Either way, we can save the effort of building a boat,” said Vascay.

  He turned. “Come on, lads,” he continued. “Master Metron ought to be well enough to speak by now, and I've got some questions to ask the gentleman!”

  “If we let you loose, Master Cashel...” said the fat, friendly fellow with ribbons dangling from his velvet cap. “Will you behave yourself?”

  He'd come into the Hyacinth with four other townsmen: beefy, younger men who carried fishnets like the ones Cashel was already trussed with. No one of the men was Cashel's size, but he was willing to agree that all together the four could handle him. The folk of Soong weren't what he'd call harsh—back home, men preparing to release a maybe-madman would have cudgels to use if the fellow got out of hand—but they didn't take silly chances either.

  Leemay ca
me out from the bar and stood beside the man in the fancy hat—the mayor or whatever they called the headman here. “Master Cashel,” she said, “I'm sorry about what happened here. There's free food and lodging for you in the Hyacinth this night or however long you want to stay.”

  She'd lit a lamp shortly before the mayor arrived, and two of the huskies had carried in lanterns of iron and horn. Daylight in this place was somber enough, but Cashel already knew how miserable and dank Soong became after the sun set... .

  “Let me go and give me what's mine,” he said to the woman. “After that, Duzi grant that you never see me again!”

  His voice came out in enough of a growl that the mayor flinched back, and his huskies stiffened as if they might have work to do. Leemay didn't move, just gave a little nod.

  “You may change your mind,” she said. “My offer remains.”

  The inn had been open for business during the day. Indeed, the stranger tied to a pillar had probably brought in half the trade. Cashel hadn't spoken to the locals, nor had anybody spoken to him, but all the folk who came through the front door had let their eyes linger on him. Several were still inside, an audience watching from the bar or the tables along the back wall.

  Cashel met the innkeeper's eyes, but he didn't speak. He didn't have anything to say beyond what he'd just said.

  “Let him go,” Leemay said to the mayor.

  He looked at her in concern. “Are you sure?” he said. “Maybe tomorrow would be—”

  “Let him go,” she repeated with an edge in her voice. Cashel had the feeling that though Leemay got along well enough with her fellow townsfolk, nobody wanted to cross her. He could see why that might be.

  “All right,” the mayor said sharply to the attendant on his right. “Cut him—”

  “Sister take you, Jangme!” cried the fisherman who jumped up from a table. “Not unless the Corporation wants to pay me and Long for two new nets!”

  He knelt beside Cashel and loosed the tie cords with strong, skilled fingers. Cashel didn't move while the work was going on; if he bunched his muscles in anticipation, it'd just take the fellow longer to finish his job. Cashel knew how to wait.