Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  Carus gave a cry like a man stabbed through the heart; he pitched forward. Sharina tried to catch him, but the king's armored body weighed too much. They crashed together onto the cobblestones.

  In the temple, the screams grew louder.

  Cashel lowered his sister to the ground one-handed. It didn't worry him that she'd collapsed; Cashel knew what wizardry cost, and the thing Ilna did with her weaving was no less wizardry than the words and symbols Tenoctris drew on the ground.

  She weighed almost nothing, though. Ilna had never been big, but whatever she'd been through since last he saw her in Valles had worn her to a frame of skin and bones holding up her tunics.

  The ruby flared as bright as a crimson sun itself. Tilphosa screamed.

  Cashel looked over his shoulder as he rose. “Put it down!” he said. The blazing jewel hurt his eyes to look at. Discomfort made him speak louder than he'd otherwise have done. “Don't let the sun fall on it!”

  The walls of the cyst flowed like water over rocks, showing distorted images of what lay beyond. Cashel saw worlds he recognized and worlds he hoped would never be.

  “Cashel, I can't move it!” Tilphosa said. She sounded more angry than frightened, but some of both. “I can't move my arm!”

  Across the fiery barrier a feathered wizard looked up from its circle of power. It pointed a human thighbone at Cashel's face. Cashel raised his quarterstaff, but the image had blurred into a rocky glen with no animal life before either Cashel or the other acted further.

  Cashel cupped his big left hand over Tilphosa's and the ring. His palm exploded in pain worse than the time a gadfly stabbed him in the back of the neck.

  Cashel would've said that pain didn't control what he did—but this pain was different. If he'd had to stand it, maybe he could have... but here he had the choice of snatching his hand away. Cashel's body did that, and his mind couldn't force it not to.

  Tilphosa grimaced with anger and frustration. She kept trying to tug her arm down—knowing she couldn't, just the way she'd known she couldn't get away from the Archai who'd held her, but trying anyhow.

  “Metra told us that Echea made the ring,” she said. “She must have meant this to happen, but I don't know what!”

  “It's all right,” Cashel said, flexing his hand and finding the hurt was gone as soon as he'd taken it away from the ruby. It'd felt like molten rock boring through him, but there wasn't a mark on his callused palm. He took his staff in both hands, and added, “If it's taking us someplace else, well, we'll handle that.”

  A nearby patch of the flame-drenched boundary began to clear. Cashel adjusted his stance, ready to act if the lizard they'd seen devouring Metra waited on the other side. Instead they were in a cave lit only by the sunlight pouring from the opening through which Cashel peered.

  A young man stood on a pillar of rock. Water foamed about him, rising visibly by the moment. One wall of the cave had collapsed, and the sea was rushing to fill the cavity. Debris swirled on the current: driftwood, seaweed, and a huge mass that Cashel took at first for fabric but which was hairy skin of some sort when it passed directly beneath his vantage point. Trash rolled to the surface, then tumbled under again to reappear farther along the sweeping curve.

  The youth had been looking to all sides with the set expression of one who was badly frightened but determined not to show it. When light flooded the cave, he looked up and met Cashel's eyes with desperate hope.

  Cashel could hear the roar of the incoming sea, so he figured the stranger could hear him too. He thrust out his staff, gripping the butt with his right hand while his left braced him against the wall of this miniature world.

  “Right!” he shouted. The far end of the staff was well short of the pillar, but the fellow might be able ... “Jump for it and I'll pull you in. Jump!”

  There was a passage along the wall of the cave to the right. As Cashel shouted, a man in a tattered robe like Metra's came running down it. He stopped at the brink, his eyes and mouth all open with terror.

  The youth leaped from the pillar. He caught the end of the staff, though barely, and clung like a barnacle in the surf. He wasn't more than average size, but with seven feet of leverage he dragged down even Cashel's strong arm. He splashed waist deep, but he kept holding on. Cashel started to drag him in.

  A figure in bronze armor with the long face of a lizard came down the passage behind the man who wavered on the edge. The lizardman raised his curved sword to strike. The human gave a despairing cry and jumped into the water, striking for Cashel.

  Aided by the current he just might have made it, but just as he leaped the tentlike flaccid mass rolled to the surface... and rolled under again, taking the swimmer with it. The man's scream ended in a froth of bubbles, indistinguishable from the sea's own dirty foam.

  The youth climbed the staff as Cashel pulled When he was close enough, Cashel leaned back and jerked like he was landing a tuna.

  The fellow flopped onto the sun-struck, rocky soil. Sea-water sloshed and steamed from his wet robes. His feet, one bare and the other wearing a slipper of embroidered leather, still dangled above the rising water.

  “Cashel, I can move!” Tilphosa cried. She and Ilna both grabbed the stranger's hands and pulled him farther in. The ruby on Tilphosa's hand touched the sapphire the youth was wearing. A spark, brighter and whiter than the sun of this place, sprang from the paired jewels.

  Tilphosa cried out. The world began to fade, the ground becoming as transparent as the sky and the sun's substance melting away. Another world took shape around them.

  Ilna rose from her knees and looked at the scene with which they were about to merge. “That's Merota!” she said. If a voice could have a real edge, throats would be spewing blood. “In the temple in Donelle!”

  The noose Ilna'd worn about her waist flowed through her hands smoothly as cream floats on rich milk. She'd overcome the exhaustion that'd struck her down a few minutes before, but Cashel had seen axe blades with softer lines than the angles of his sister's face right now.

  Cashel looked out at a large room packed with people except for the long rectangular pool he and his companions hovered over. Those standing at the margin of the pool were cowled priests who wore white-slashed black robes like Metra and the man who'd drowned some moments and worlds apart.

  Cashel recognized the priest standing at the head of the pool holding a dagger of green volcanic glass: he was the same fellow who'd tried to take the statue and the ring away in Valles during what seemed now a distant lifetime. He poised the dagger over the throat of the child, whom two of his fellows held for the sacrifice.

  Most children would have screamed. Merota, Ilna's ward, waited with a closed mouth and eyes as hard as agates.

  Cashel rammed his quarterstaff into the transparent barrier still separating him from the scene he looked out on. Tilphosa and the youth were shouting, and Ilna's expression would have frozen the heart of the sun.

  The hickory flexed and the ferrule sparked on nothingness. The staff sprang back, numbing Cashel's hands.

  A blade shimmered like sunlight. The priest's head toppled from his severed neck, and the air was full of blood. Another of the robed figures had thrown back his cowl. He held a dagger in his left hand and in his right the long, incurved sword with which he'd beheaded the priest.

  He was Chalcus, and as he spun, slashing and stabbing, the walls confining Cashel and his companions dissolved completely. They plunged into a pool of salt water seething with fresh blood and the spastic motions of dying priests.

  Cashel bellowed when his feet didn't touch bottom in what he'd thought was shallow water. He grabbed the marble coping with his left hand and pulled himself out, his strength multiplied by the thought of drowning.

  Chalcus turned like a dancer. Cashel put his staff up to block the stroke, but the sailor had already switched his aim to a priest whose scream ended in a gout of bright blood from mouth and nostrils. Chalcus was as sure amid slaughter as a trout in the rapids.

/>   The worshippers who filled the big room were trying to get away. There was no place to flee, but Chalcus' blades and the staff in Cashel's hands cleared a space for themselves and their companions.

  This wasn't a time for finesse. Cashel struck great, sweeping blows, knowing that whoever the hickory touched would go down. The survivors were howling.

  The pool boiled like a surf-swept shore. A figure came out of the bloody water, an Archa whose forelimbs hacked at the nearest worshippers even before its legs and middle limbs had lifted it clear of the pool.

  More Archai followed. The midday sun shone through the eye in the center of the domed ceiling. Cashel crushed the head of the insect warrior who slashed at Tilphosa, but its fellows lurched into the crowd of worshippers. They were too surprised and terrified to resist.

  “The Mistress is dead!” a priestess screamed. “The Archai will slay all mankind!”

  If she'd planned to say more, the saw-edged forelimbs chopping into her back overruled her. There was blood everywhere: in the air and roiling water, and wetting the floor like roof tiles in a thunderstorm.

  Chalcus cut a path toward the chamber's rear wall. There was no way out, but at least there'd be safety in one direction. Cashel brought up the rear of the party, occasionally batting a terrified human away but more often smashing Archai limbs and torsos.

  Ilna's noose snagged a warrior. As she pulled it toward her, Tilphosa stabbed through the Archa's neck with the athame of some priest now sprawled in death. The youth from the cavern didn't have a weapon, but he held Merota tight as they climbed over twisting bodies which would have tripped a child's legs.

  The insects were turning the great room into a slaughterhouse, and still more crawled from the pool in the center.

  “They'll slay all mankind!” someone cried, or perhaps it was only an echo in Cashel's mind.

  Maybe. But he and the friends about him would take some killing yet.

  His left hand rubbed gritty cobblestones; his right was wrapped around the hilt of his sword. The sun beat on the back of his neck, and around him everybody in the world was gabbling like a flock of frightened chickens—Duzi fly away with them!

  He opened his eyes. He was Garric or-Reise. He'd just died in the darkness of a tomb—

  “Welcome home, lad,” said the voice of the ancestor smiling in his mind. “Tenoctris says they need us in the temple there, now or a little sooner than that. We're not to slaughter people, but I've never been one to tarry.”

  “Your highness!” Attaper was shouting. “What's the matter? Are you—”

  Garric got to his knees; hands lifted him with the desperate haste of bodyguards afraid of having failed the one they were sworn to protect.

  “I slipped!” Garric said. “Let's get into that temple and put a stop to whatever Moon Wisdom is planning to do!”

  He had slipped, after all. He vividly remembered falling backward into darkness as the Mistress's venom coursed through his body. Though the body was that of a boy named Gar... .

  “Garric, the sacrifice is already complete,” Tenoctris called. Two brawny Blood Eagles shoved their way through their fellows, each supporting the old wizard by an axter, “But the Archai mustn't be allowed to spread out from the building. Every human death will summon more of them!”

  “Don't kill any people!” Garric bellowed. “But there'll be bugs a-plenty for our swords!”

  He started up the hill lithely. His new body—his own body—didn't have the bone-deep legacy of hunger and abuse that brain-damaged Gar's did. He was supple and in balance; no stronger than the near-Garric whose form he'd inhabited, but healthy and far more at peace with his flesh.

  Lord Attaper clamped his hand on Garric's right shoulder, holding him back a half step. The leading rank of eight Blood Eagles closed in front of them.

  When the screams started, the civilians on the hill below had stopped chanting. Those at the back of the crowd turned and noticed the approaching army. Some tried to run, but the hill was so steep that there were as many stairs as ramps on the road to the top. There was no way to get off the pavement without the danger of a long fall.

  That wasn't Garric's problem or the Blood Eagles'. The troops used their spear butts as clubs and their shields as battering rams, slamming civilians down or aside. Those who fell on the roadway were trampled or kicked over the side. The troops weren't deliberately cruel, but there was a job to be done. The broken bones of hostile strangers didn't concern them.

  The civilians who'd climbed trees or found outcrops on the slopes beside the road began to flee also. The screams had broken the spell that had held a city chanting, and the feeling that replaced it was one of panic. People didn't know what they were running from, but they knew they had to run.

  From the volume of the shrieks, the folk inside the temple knew very well what the danger was. They didn't seem to be doing much about it, but that was the problem the royal army had arrived to solve... .

  Spear butts punched and pounded into the civilians who didn't clear the way of their own accord. Most did, scrambling and sliding down the hill. Some didn't even try to ease their route but simply leaped with their eyes closed, driven to desperation like people trapped on the roof of a burning building. They'd be all right, most of them. Broken limbs, sure; but their fellows inside were facing much worse than that.

  “What is it we'll find inside?” Attaper said, shouting into Garric's ear in order to be heard over the din. “Wizards?”

  “Maybe wizards,” Garric shouted back. “Tenoctris says Archai, bugs that think they're men.”

  “They'll die like men, anyway,” Carus said in Garric's mind.

  Garric looked behind him as he mounted the final flight of steps to the temple porch. The army squirmed back to where the city's overhanging roofs hid it, glittering with spearpoints and bronze helmets.

  He frowned: a separate column was climbing the south slope, a quarter of the way around Temple Hill from the royal forces. The breeze caught a drooping banner and spread it long enough for Garric to see the lion of Blaise.

  “Count Lerdoc's your ally now,” Carus said. “You've made his son your aide. The boy's right behind you in this crush.”

  I left the kingdom in good hands, then, Garric thought, half-amused. It'd been bad enough learning to be Gar; now he had to learn to be himself again.

  Carus laughed with the joy of a man who had lived to the full when he was alive. He said, “You left the kingdom in lucky hands, at any rate, lad. And I always told my captains that I'd rather they be lucky than clever.”

  The leading soldiers clashed onto the temple porch, their hobnails sparking on the mosaic of a spider clutching the full moon. The tesserae were harder than the limestone of the ramps and steps below.

  The last worshippers inside the temple's sanctum streamed through the bronze doors, their faces pale except for where blood splattered them. All were disheveled, and one middle-aged woman had lost her outer tunic.

  The last man down the passage wore priestly robes. “Kill him!” Carus ordered in Garric's mind.

  Garric wasn't sure what he'd have done if the Blood Eagles had simply knocked the priest out of the way. He'd killed when he had to, but the ease with which Vascay slit a man's throat for expedience was foreign to Garric's nature.

  The question didn't arise, because the Archa warrior following the priest caught him in the doorway. The insect's forelimbs chopped down, cutting the neck to the spine in both directions. The priest toppled, his head lolling loose.

  The Blood Eagles tried to stop, shocked by the sudden apparition. The man in front of Garric lost his footing. The soldier's legs skidded out in front of him, sending him crashing down on the pavement.

  The Archa bent at the joint between thorax and the bulbous abdomen below. A spearpoint glanced off its chitinous chest as the creature slashed at the fallen man's legs. Garric cut off the Archa's head, but its saw-edged fore-limbs continued to hack until another spear thrust brought the creature down.
>
  Garric drew his dagger. He leaped the fallen man and the decapitated monster, meeting face on the column of Archai coming up the passage from the sanctum. Attaper and three Blood Eagles were at his side. The warriors made a shrill chirping, so loud as it echoed that the stone walls quivered.

  “Leave it to the men, Sister take you!” Attaper shouted, cutting through the head and half an Archa's thorax with an overhand stroke. Neither he nor Garric carried a shield. “This isn't your job!”

  Garric stabbed an Archa through the junction of neck and thorax. It was good to use the straight sword he and Carus had trained with, though the curved blade he'd taken from Ceto had served well enough. His steel grated into the chitin, crushing it like eggshell.

  Pale ichor gushed, but the warrior's forelimbs hacked at him anyway. Garric blocked the right with his dagger, but the left arm clanged on his helmet's earpiece, then the shoulder plate of his cuirass. The saw teeth scarred the bronze, and the weight of the blow brought Garric to his knees. His arm was numb, and he wondered if the creature had broken his collarbone.

  Attaper sheared off the forelimb and cut deeply into the insect's thorax. It fell sideways. Garric stood, dragged his blade free, and lurched forward again.

  Carus wouldn't have let others fight this battle even if Garric had wanted to. The king, tortured every night since he'd taken Garric's place, grinned with a white rage that wouldn't be denied its offered revenge.

  But Garric had his own nightmares to appease. He remembered Metron screaming at him while Tint's bones crunched in the serpent's throat... . Killing Archai wouldn't give the beastgirl her life back any more than killing the serpent had; but it was something he could do, to help cushion the memory of the thing he could not change.

  The soldier to Garric's left went down. Another man took his place and fell immediately. The Blood Eagles had never fought the Archai before. They hadn't learned as Carus had in past ages that the insect warriors were much easier to kill than they were to stop.