Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  Was that pride, bragging that she wasn't afraid? Well, there wasn't anybody here to blame her for pride.

  Ilna was afraid, of course. Not of death, exactly, but while being torn apart by fangs dripping amber poison might be quick, it certainly wouldn't be clean or painless.

  She'd failed in her mission for Tenoctris—and for Garric. That was a worse pain still, but it too would end with her death.

  Some might say she'd failed the Isles, the kingdom. Ilna had never met a kingdom, so she didn't know. She understood friendship, though, and duty.

  DRAIN HER TO A HUSK!

  Ilna's fingers wove and knotted, adding cords to a pattern already more complex than anything she'd attempted in the past. Above Ilna the barrier shifted as her fingers moved; and with every change, another layer became clear in her mind.

  The spiders picked their way toward her. Ilna frowned. She knew the creatures were clumsy on the ground, but she'd seen them stagger toward their victims a few minutes before. They were awkward, but because of their size and long legs they nonetheless moved as fast as a horse could run. Now ...

  For a moment Ilna thought the spiders were afraid of her. Her patterns could stun, could kill. Spiders whose skills were second only to hers would understand that—but they would also know that their size and numbers could overwhelm her.

  Besides, they could see that she wasn't weaving a weapon. They knew Ilna was tearing an escape route between their world and the wider cosmos.

  SHE MUST NOT ESCAPE! the chorus shrilled; and at last Ilna understood.

  For a moment her fingers paused. Oh, the spiders knew what Ilna was doing, all right: she was about to achieve the thing which they in the ages of their exile had never been able to do.

  She was going to show these monsters the way back to the world from which some ancient wizard had barred them. The way to Ilna's own world.

  Ilna looked up at the barrier. The eyes of her soul showed her the final pattern, the path for which she'd been searching.

  Yes, of course. I was right to trust Her craftsmanship.

  Ilna's fingers gathered and knotted, making the last adjustments to her linked cords. Above her the milky barrier cleared in response.

  A needlepoint of white light flashed on the hillside before Ilna. It spread jaggedly, a tear racing through the fabric separating the spider world from the greater cosmos.

  SHE HAS OPENED THE WAY!

  Ilna could close the gap again, but that wouldn't matter. The spiders couldn't create the pattern, but they could duplicate it now that they had seen Ilna's masterpiece.

  SHE HAS OPENED THE WAY!

  The giants stumbled up the slope, maddened by the thought of the warm blood that waited on the other side to slake their age-long thirst. Ilna thought of the future of webs and monsters she'd glimpsed in the Intercessor's mind. She understood now what he feared.

  Ilna stepped through the opening as giant spiders staggered toward her from all sides. She was smiling.

  The chamber in which Garric stood had been a burial place for the wealthy and powerful. Three deep niches were cut into either sidewall of an arched vault; in each of them was a sarcophagus of marble or porphyry. The ends of five had floral designs, but the last showed a man in flowing robes gesturing to a crowd which knelt reverently. Behind the central figure, holding a wreath and crescent moon with which to crown him, was a giant spider.

  Lord Thalemos followed Garric into the chamber, his hand stretching back to help Vascay. The chieftain's peg didn't grip as well on the slant of crumbling rock as a boot or bare sole.

  The three men stared at the delicate carving. “Here's the wealth Ademos and the others were looking for,” Garric said. “Think what carvings this fine would be worth in Valles or Erdin. If you could get them there.”

  “Would people pay for this?” Thalemos said. “A spider?”

  “People will pay for anything,” Vascay said, wheezing between his words. “Some people will, boy. After all, it wasn't sand crabs who carved that with their claws.”

  Metron, sliding and gasping, stumbled into the chamber. His torch waved wildly.

  Vascay cursed as the flames whisked close. He touched his javelin point to the wizard's throat. “I've left you alive when maybe I shouldn't have,” he said, “but don't push your luck!”

  “Lord Thalemos?” Metron said. He steadied the torch, but he gave no other sign that he'd heard Vascay's threat. “Here, take the ring. You have to wear it yourself now.”

  The wizard held out his left hand with the sapphire on the middle finger. He couldn't pull it off himself because he held the torch in his right, its oily red flames now licking the ceiling. The vault's fresco showed painted webs connecting the moon in the center to the six burial niches. Plaster blackened, and a piece fell off.

  “To reach Lady Tilphosa?” the youth said doubtfully. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Put the ring on or we'll all die here when the Intercessor comes for us!” Metron said. “It's our only chance!”

  Thalemos reached for the ring. Garric watched without expression; he didn't know what the right decision was. He wouldn't interfere with the wizard's direction, but—

  He took the torch from Metron's right hand. The wizard resisted momentarily, then gave it up. Garric started down the passageway at the back of the chamber, with Vascay following him closely.

  The passage had been used for burials, but in a much more economical fashion than the vault. Instead of niches large enough for a sarcophagus, the deep slots cut in the soft rock here were barely big enough to hold the corpse itself in a winding sheet. The passage was so narrow that Vascay had to walk sideways. To fit bodies into these six-high banks, they must have been bent at the waist and fed through like hawsers being coiled in a ship's hold.

  “It's a good place to defend,” Vascay observed.

  “Echeon would dig down through the roof,” Metron called from the end of the line. His voice echoed among graves which the ages had emptied. “He'll know where we are. We must go farther.”

  Garric continued forward, his sword in his right hand and the torch before him in his left. The passage sloped steeply downward. There were no frescoes in this portion of the catacombs, but prayers and eight-pointed stars scratched in the rock showed that the poor were as pious as their betters.

  Even in death they were segregated, though. It was the way of the world, he supposed.

  Garric stepped into another large chamber, this one circular and domed instead of being roofed with a barrel vault. From the end of the passage, a flight of seven steps led down to a tessellated pavement. Engaged columns carved from the living rock ornamented the walls; medallions were painted in the spaces between them. An arched doorway led off from the other side.

  Garric paused only a moment at the head of the stairs before stepping down to the sunken pavement. The scuff of his bare feet was syncopated by the thump/top of Vascay's boot and peg behind him. Lord Thalemos followed a moment later.

  “Yes, that's right!” Metron said. “Thalemos, stand in the center. Move yourself, boy! How long do you think we have?”

  Garric turned to eye his companions for the first time since entering the passage of the dead. The wizard had shown a febrile liveliness since his incantations on the cliff's edge. Now he put a hand forward as if to hasten Thalemos with a push.

  Garric thought of Ademos, gurgling his life out on the cliff's edge so that more monsters could rise from the sea. “No!” he said. “Don't touch him!”

  He raised his sword and strode back toward the steps. “No! by the Shepherd,” Garric said. “Thalemos, come here. Wizard, leave us. If you come near this boy again, I'll kill you!”

  “We'll go out the other way,” Vascay said, stumping past Garric and Thalemos. He held the javelin poised to throw in his right hand.

  Metron drew the bloody athame from his sash but remained where he was, midway down the stone stairs. Garric watched him for a moment, then turned to follow Vascay.

 
; “Master Gar?” Thalemos said. “I can take the light to free your hands. Ah, if you'd like?”

  “Right,” said Garric, grateful but a little irritated not to have thought of that himself without the youth suggesting it. He turned, and as he did so the pattern on the floor caught his eye. He paused, lifting the torch to illuminate the whole area.

  From the top of the steps Garric had thought the flooring of stone chips was laid in the matrix randomly. From his present angle these few feet lower, he saw that the polished gray tesserae formed a subtle pattern of radial lines with circular lines crossing them. Spaced at intervals—

  “The floor's a spiderweb,” Garric said. “There's words in the Old Script around the center. The whole room's been prepared for a wizard's spell.”

  “Then let's get out, shall we?” Vascay said, his voice loud with tension. His words echoed sullenly from the dome.

  Garric handed the torch to Thalemos. His movement shook a bead of sap from the burning wood onto his wrist; it stabbed like a stiletto, causing him almost to drop the torch instead of passing it.

  Vascay looked over his shoulder. “Hey!” he shouted, cocking the javelin to throw. Garric turned to see what the threat was. “Sister take that wizard!”

  “Aphre nemous nothii...” Metron chanted. Using the step for a dais, he gestured with the bloody athame. “Baphre neou nothii... .”

  Torchlight touched Thalemos' ring, waking the sapphire into blue fire. The facets flung brilliant reflections around the walls and dome. Garric's body turned to ice; he could neither move nor speak, though his senses seemed unnaturally acute, and his skin prickled.

  “Lari...” called the wizard. “Kriphii kriphiae kriphis!”

  The walls blurred into a smooth spinning expanse of blue. The floor was fading, becoming a tunnel that stretched toward infinite distance; overhead was the night sky of some other time. The three men stood like flies trapped on the web-marked stone. The wizard above them chanted triumphantly, “Phirke rali thonoumene!”

  Garric felt the ground beneath his feet give way. In a rush of gravel and powdered rock, he tumbled into a vaster room a dozen feet below the first. He could move again, but he'd lost his sword and couldn't breathe for the dust. He tugged the front of his tunic over his mouth and sucked air through the cloth.

  Vascay had fallen at the same time Garric did. Lord Thalemos had been standing in the center of the upper chamber; he was still there, supported by a pillar rising from the floor of this lower one. The wizardlight was gone, so the only illumination was from the youth's torch flaring through the dust clouds.

  “She is come!” Metron shrieked ecstatically. “The Mistress is come into Her kingdom!”

  Vascay stumbled over to Garric, breathing through his sleeve. The fall had broken his javelin, but he still held the half of the shaft with the point.

  “I'll lift you,” he said in a muffled voice. “We'll heap stones up at the far end, and then I'll lift you.”

  Garric nodded, his lungs on fire. He couldn't get enough air through his thick tunic. He had to restrain himself from gasping in an unfiltered breath that would suffocate him.

  Vascay started toward the mass piled against the wall opposite where Metron stood. Garric followed, feeling the rock shift under his bare feet. No piece of the previous floor bigger than a walnut remained, so why did it mound so high there in front of them? The dust and gravel should have slipped—

  The mass moved. It was alive, if barely.

  “Vascay!” Garric shouted. He was too late. Four huge, hairy legs traced a pattern in the air. Garric had seen Ilna's quickly knotted cords paralyze men bent on murder; now a similar power bound his body in bonds of fire.

  “She is come!” Metron repeated.

  The dust had settled. Thalemos was locked into a statue on his pedestal, gripped by the same compulsion as held Garric and Vascay. The torch in his hand lighted the scene below. The column under him shielded the wizard from the creature's spell.

  The legs shifted the rhythm of their movement slightly. Vascay dropped the javelin. His body stepped forward, controlled by a will not his own.

  The thing was a spider, huge beyond nightmare. Millennia of imprisonment left it desiccated, but still it lived. For ages it had spoken in dreams; and when the protecting walls of rock and wizardry had ruptured, it moved.

  The Mistress was calling the first of many meals to herself. When she had finished with the victims brought to her chamber here, she would return to the upper world and to lordship over all other life. She was not a god, for all that Metron and the others who lived her dreams thought otherwise, but her mastery over anyone who saw her conferred godlike power.

  Vascay walked toward the waiting jaws like a man already dead. The eight eyes glittering in the torchlight watched him. If extended, the Mistress's legs could have spanned Palace Square in Carcosa, where thousands had gathered to listen to the monarchs of the Old Kingdom. Now the limbs were crabbed close together, leaving only enough space for the victim they pulled toward them by their quivering power.

  Vascay stepped between the legs. When he could no longer see the pattern they drew, he shouted and managed to half turn before the Mistress sank her fangs in his back. His body stiffened.

  The spider's mandibles pumped up and down alternately; a fang stabbed out through the tunic over Vascay's ribs, withdrew, and then penetrated him again a hand's breadth higher than the first time. A drop of venom, orange in the torchlight, dripped to the floor. Powdered rock hissed and steamed.

  Garric watched Vascay's body empty like a slashed wineskin. Only when venom had wholly liquified the muscles did the frozen limbs collapse and the head loll forward. Vascay's features had blurred into shadows on the skin, but his skull still kept its shape.

  The Mistress flung aside the carcase of her first victim. Her forelegs played the same silent tune but with a greater verve, nourished for the first time in thousands of years. Garric felt his right leg move.

  He'd have held it back if he could, but his body was no longer his own. Compulsion pulled like white-hot wires. A step, then a second step.

  The waiting mandibles throbbed slowly, up and down. They weren't part of the spider's pattern but rather a sign of her bloodlust. Her hind legs extended with the creaking care of ancient machines beginning to work again.

  Garric's right leg took another step. The broken javelin rolled under his foot. His left leg started to move.

  Lord Thalemos screamed; reflex hurled the torch from his hand. It shed sparks in an arc that ended when it went out in the dust. Thalemos slapped at the sleeve of his tunic, burning where a drop of blazing sap had fallen onto the cloth. The chamber was again in total darkness.

  Garric picked up the javelin. He couldn't see for the Mistress to bind him, but her location was etched onto his mind. He lunged forward.

  She wasn't a god. She wasn't immortal. And though there'd be no one to write his epitaph, Garric knew he was about to die a man and for Mankind.

  His outstretched left hand touched the right mandible, just above the fang. The spider's hair was as coarse as the bristles of a boar's spine.

  The forelegs gripped him from behind. As the mandibles reached for him, Garric stabbed between them—up through the Mistress's mouth and into her brain.

  The giant spider's convulsions drove her fangs home. In the midst of the burst of fire that devoured all his nerves, Garric felt the poison-spewing points grate against one another in the middle of his torso.

  Then all was blackness.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Ilna stepped through the passage she'd opened, into another universe as tightly encysted as the world of the spiders' exile behind her. Sunlight blasted her, glaring from a point in the pale sky and reflected from the bare, rocky soil.

  Alecto's corpse lay at her feet. The flaccid skin had no shape but that of the bones it draped, but Ilna recognized the ivory pins still decorating the spill of lustrous black hair.

  Alecto's bronze athame gli
nted some distance away. The wild girl had run for the last time from the danger her anger had called to life.

  The Pack turned their heads to view Ilna. Their movements were like those of water or perhaps smoke, a drifting smoothness that seemed to lack volition.

  Ilna stepped forward. “You'll feast well today!” she called, bravado in her voice, and in her hands the knotted fabric with which she'd rent the wall between worlds.

  She smiled coldly. She'd created a masterpiece in the truest sense, a work which could be fully appreciated by only herself and the One whose craft had formed the fabric of which each universe was a part. To a degree the spiders could understand what Ilna'd done, but their appreciation would be tempered by other emotions.

  For a time. For the time remaining to them.

  The first spider through the opening was the black-and-silver giant. That was as Ilna expected, and as it should be. The others were allowing their leader to accept the reward she so richly deserved for the plan she had made.

  The brilliant sunlight must have blinded the spider's lidless eyes for a moment before they could adapt. When the giant saw what glided toward her and the gap beyond, her mental scream was as shrill as rock shearing. She staggered back, clambering over the bodies of her sisters who packed the hillside leading to the doom of their race.

  “Ilna!” called Cashel. He stood partway round the circuit of this world from her. The Pack were confined to a mere bead on the fabric of the cosmos, smaller even than the world which held the great spiders; but like the spiders, they had windows of sorts that allowed them to interact with the greater universe. “Get around behind me! I'll do what I can!”

  Ilna gestured toward the gap with her left hand, letting the fabric dangle from her right. She smiled at the Pack. She knew their tentacles would snatch her when they chose, no matter where she stood within the strait confines of their cell. She appreciated her brother's offer, but his strength and courage couldn't bring safety.

  Besides, Ilna probably wouldn't have scuttled like a roach caught in the light even if she had thought it could save her life. Life had never been that important to her.