Mistress of the Catacombs

7

Vascay settled on a boulder whose angles had been smoothed by the freshets that swept the channel during every heavy rain; he gestured Garric to a similar slab which sloped to face his own. The stream was now only a milky gurgle at their feet. Fern fronds and the hard green foliage of large-leaf philodendrons spread overhead.

Garric eased himself onto the rock. It felt clammy through his tunic, but everything in the forest was.

The seat Vascay had chosen for himself was less comfortable than Garric’s broader slab, but it was also a hand’s breadth higher. Garric grinned knowingly—upward—at the chieftain.

Vascay laughed and sucked wine from the stoneware bottle—a sip only, just enough to show it was safe. He offered the bottle to Garric. “Now, my friend,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me who you really are?”

Garric’s mouth had tasted foul ever since the fight with Ceto. He took a swig of wine, sloshed it over his cheeks and tongue, and spat it out. Then he bent and dipped a palmful of water from the stream. It had a milky tinge, but it tasted clean and cold.

He met Vascay’s waiting eyes. “Ceto kicked me in the head,” he said. “I regained my memory.”

“I see the bruise,” Vascay said pleasantly. “But Gar didn’t start remembering a poet dead for two thousand years. I was a schoolteacher before this”—he tapped his wooden leg—“and the rest of my problems with the Intercessor’s tax men, and I could only spout half a dozen tags from Celondre. I say again, who are you?”

Two thousand years! Celondre had been one of the greatest poets of the Old Kingdom—but that was only a thousand years before Garric’s day. Echeus had sent Garric’s mind not only to a strange place but to a distant time.

“I’m Prince Garric of Haft,” Garric said deliberately, watching for any change in Vascay’s expression. “If the ‘Intercessor’ you’re talking about is Echeus of Laut, then we share an enemy. I think he’s the one who…”

Garric flicked his free hand in a circle, searching for the right word. He couldn’t find it.

“Who sent me here,” he said, close enough for Vascay to understand as much as Garric himself did.

The camp was within easy bowshot if the jungle hadn’t intervened, but the rest of the band could have been on the moon for all the sign there was from where Garric sat. Every few steps in this green maze put you in a separate world.

Tint hunched on the bank nearby, shivering but otherwise motionless. She stared fixedly at a liana which trailed crookedly across the stream. Garric followed the line of her eyes in puzzlement till he realized that the liana was unusually thick for part of its length. A python mottled brown on green lay on the vine; perhaps sleeping, perhaps waiting for prey to pass beneath it.

“I’ll take the wine,” Vascay said. He drank, deeply this time, and rested the bottle on his thigh. His lips smiled very tightly as he looked Garric up and down.

“Prince Garric of Haft,” Vascay said musingly. “The last ruler of the New Kingdom. He died in battle on Tisamur, fighting the Count of Blaise. After his death and the destruction of both great armies, the Archai swept over the Isles. Only Laut was preserved, by the power of the Intercessor.”

He drank again. Handing the bottle back to Garric, he added with a wry grin, “That’s the way we tell the story on Laut, at any rate.”

Garric shrugged. “I don’t know how I came here,” he said. “I only know that I am Garric, though the body I’m in is Gar’s.”

He drank. Wine was an imported luxury on Haft. Reise kept bottles on hand for visitors during the Sheep Fair, but his family and the other residents of Barca’s Hamlet drank the bitter beer he brewed with locally grown germander.

This bottle had a wreath impressed into the clay before firing, showing that the vintner was proud enough of his product to make it identifiable. It was all a matter of what you were used to, though; to Garric the drink had a nasty aftertaste.

He wasn’t sure he was going to like being a member of a bandit gang a thousand years after his own time; but, like the wine, it was what he had at the moment.

Instead of responding immediately, Vascay pursed his lips and eyed the fabric of leaves overhanging the stream while he thought. After a moment he grinned again at Garric, and said, “The question now is what to do with you, eh?”

“That isn’t how I’d phrase the question,” Garric said, “but I’ll let it stand for now. Tell me how you worked the ball. Poisoning Ceto and not me, I mean.”

Vascay laughed. “You don’t believe I cared for a saintly hermit, my friend?” he said. “Indeed, I did just that.”

His face changed minusculely; Vascay’s lips still smiled, but he was no longer the jolly plump man. “That had nothing to do with Ceto, of course,” he said. “It wasn’t poison, just a wash of alum. Some beads have the alum on the outside, some under a thin layer of hard biscuit.”

Garric considered what he’d just been told. “You didn’t know that Ceto was lying,” he said. “You didn’t care whether he was lying or not.”

Vascay chuckled. “Well, friend,” he said, “let’s just say that I’ve had my eye on Ceto for some time. He was getting a little too big to wear the cap I’d given him, so when you came along, well…”

He turned his hands palms up in a gesture that only context made clear.

The buttress roots of the giant tree behind Vascay were wrinkled like a rooster’s wattles, brown and gray and gray-brown. One of the folds formed a cup large enough to hold a firkin of beer. Garric suddenly realized that the pair of specks glittering on the rim weren’t black-capped mushrooms but rather the eyes of another snake coiled in the hollow. There were a lot of snakes in this place.

“How did you know I’d be able to handle Ceto?” Garric said quietly. He already knew the answer; he was asking to hear the way Vascay responded.

“I didn’t, to be honest,” said Vascay—honestly, which was what Garric needed to know. “But I’d seen you face Ceto, and I’d seen the way you moved. I’d have bet on you, friend…and if I’d lost my money, well, you wouldn’t have been much good for the job, would you?”

“Go on,” said Garric. Snakes weren’t the only thing cold-blooded in this place, but Garric had learned how cold a prince had to be many times. He could imagine that was true as well for a bandit chief.

“If you’re a prince from another time,” Vascay said, crooking his finger for the wine again, “and even if you’re not—”

He smiled, but only partly in humor. The words were an open warning that Vascay was willing to accept Garric’s story, but that belief was a different thing from acceptance.

“—you may not understand our situation on Laut.”

“This is Laut?” Garric interjected. Neither he nor Carus in his own time had visited Laut. Liane would know more about the island, but—Garric felt his gut tighten—she wasn’t here.

“This is Serpent’s Isle, just off the south coast of Laut,” Vascay said. “A place no one ever goes by choice, eh? Unless they’ve a very good reason.”

He tapped his wooden leg again. “My reason, our reason,” he went on, “is that Lord Thalemos has hired us to find a ring of power on Serpent’s Isle. Thalemos has a wizard advisor who tells him that the ring will bring down Echeon the Tyrant and reopen Laut to the world beyond.”

Vascay closed his left hand into a fist. When he reopened it, the sapphire ring winked on his little finger.

“That ring?” Garric said. “The one I found.”

“So I hope and believe, my friend,” the chieftain agreed.

Vascay closed and reopened his hand; the ring vanished again. “I keep in practice,” he said softly. “You can never tell when you’ll need the skill. Today, for example.”

He met Garric’s eyes squarely. “There’s a lot I can do through sleight of hand,” he said, “and a few things I can do with my knives as well; but Ceto would’ve become a real problem for me if you hadn’t”—Vascay’s hand duplicated the questing circle that Garric’s had made a moment before—“appeared when you did.”

He held out the wine. When Garric’s hand touched his on the bottle, Vascay added, “I need someone like you as my deputy, Garric. The man I can trust to do what I’d do every time…only maybe better, some of the time, because he’s got the stronger arm.”

Garric drank, paused, and drank more. The wine’s astringency was what his mouth needed, and the aftertaste didn’t seem so unpleasant now.

“You think I’d make a good bandit, Master Vascay?” he asked. “Perhaps so, but I don’t have a taste for the work. We’ll part after we return to the mainland.”

Garric leaned forward very slightly. “Unless you have different ideas on the matter,” he said. He wondered whether he’d have been quite so ready to carry out the threat implicit in his words if his red-handed ancestor Carus hadn’t shared his mind for these past months.

Vascay burst into full-throated laughter. “Unless I choose to threaten the fellow I just watched use a rusty spit to put down the best swordsman among the Brethren, you mean?” he said. “No, no, I won’t do that, friend Garric.”

He gestured for the wine, but instead of drinking immediately he gave Garric a hard smile over the bottle. “And you’re right, we’re bandits,” he said. “But we wouldn’t have been, most of us, if honest men could live on Laut under the Intercessor. I wouldn’t have been.”

Vascay drank. His hands trembled slightly, and his smile when he lowered the bottle was sour with the thoughts behind it.

“We’re not saints, Garric,” he said. “We’ll rob anybody with money—but that’s pretty generally the Intercessor’s agents and his friends. We’re here now on Serpent’s Isle”—he too leaned forward, his face as hard as Garric’s had been shortly before—“which has the name of being cursed, and where Kelbat or-Haysa died of snakebite before we’d been ashore an hour. Not for the money Metron is offering but because of what he plans to do. Thalemos’ ancestors were Earls of Laut before the wizard Echeus set himself up as Intercessor before the end of the New Kingdom. The present Intercessor, Echeon, has ruled alone for the past hundred years; the greatest wizard and the worst tyrant of the line. But Metron says he can put Thalemos on the throne in Echeon’s place with the help of this—”

The stone on his little finger winked blue fire.

“—ring.”

Garric frowned. “Is Echeon immortal?” he asked.

The chieftain shrugged. “He hasn’t changed in a hundred years,” he said. “From the way he guards himself, no, he’s not immortal, but it may be that he’ll never die naturally. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I ever got within arm’s length of him, I promise you, or if any of the Brethren did.”

Vascay laughed again, relaxing visibly. “But as I said, friend,” he said, “we weren’t saints most of us to start out with, and our tempers didn’t change for the better when Echeon’s tax gatherers broke us. I could use—we Brethren all could use—your mind and your sword arm; and you’d be better to have family, let’s say, when you learn the realities of Laut. Even if your brothers are outlaws.”

“Fairly said,” said Garric, relaxing with a degree of surprise at how tense he himself had been a moment before. Vascay was too smart to want to be on the wrong side of Garric, fair enough. But Garric had seen Vascay—and Vascay’s knife—in action, and…

Garric grinned.

“Eh?” said Vascay.

“A friend of mine named Carus,” explained Garric, “would’ve said that close in a man with a knife had an advantage over a man with a sword. Might have. But I don’t guess I’ll ever learn for sure.”

Vascay spread his hands on his knees. “Listen, lad,” he said, grimly serious. “If you please, you can leave now or the moment the boat touches the shore of Laut, without my let or hindrance. But there’s no safety for any honest man on Laut, so unless you’re going to offer your services to the Intercessor…?”

He grinned, but there was a hint of real question in his eyes. It vanished when Garric shook his head in fierce denial.

“Right, I didn’t think so,” said Vascay. “If you’re not going to do that, then stay with us for at least a time. And if you stay long enough to help bring down the Intercessor…”

Fierce joy unexpectedly transfigured the bandit’s face. “If we can do that,” he said, “I’ll count my leg well lost.”

He slapped the peg leg with his hand with a sharp rap-rap: fingers against wood, and wood against the rock in which it rested.

“By the Lady, my friend,” Vascay said harshly. “If we can bring down Echeon, then I don’t mind if they hang me the moment after. Truly I do not.”

Garric frowned. “You talk as though there’s only Laut, Master Vascay,” he said. “I grant it’s your home, but if things are so bad—why don’t you leave for another isle?”

Vascay frowned in surprise that came close to anger; then his face cleared. “I forgot it was Prince Garric from the New Kingdom who was asking,” he said. “Echeon’s a wizard, you see. Those who venture into the seas at the horizon from Laut, coming or going, are run down by the galleys manned by Echeon’s Protectors of the Peace.”

He grinned harshly. “And sunk, and all drowned with no more trial than the crabs give them,” he added. “Nobody enters Laut or goes more than a league beyond the shore and lives. Some claim that the Intercessor uses his wizard arts to bring lightnings down on fleets too great for his Protectors to deal with, but I wouldn’t know. I doubt there’ve been any such fleets in the Isles since Prince Garric died and the Archai brought down the New Kingdom a thousand years ago.”

There was more than humor in Vascay’s smile; but there was humor also.

“If no one can enter Laut…” said Garric, weighing cautiously the words he’d listened to, “then how did Thalemos’ advisor get here from Tisamur? Metron.”

“Aye, Metron,” Vascay said. “With a purse full of gold and a tongue full of promises. His art brought him, I suppose.”

“Could he be an agent of Echeon’s?” Garric pressed. “Tricking you and others like you into coming out where he can snap you up?”

Vascay laughed bitterly. “You’re a prince indeed, aren’t you, friend Garric?” he said. “You think like a prince, at any rate.”

The bandit’s face hardened. “Aye,” he said. “That could be; I’ve thought it, though it’s not a thing I’d say to the other Brethren, you understand. But I took the chance regardless, because it’s the only chance on offer that might bring down the tyrant.”

Garric nodded. “I see,” he said.

What would Carus do in this place? Take the risk of supporting Thalemos, probably. And yet, how much of a risk was that compared to the other choices? What else could he do but wander Laut as a lone vagabond…with a beastgirl in tow?

Garric glanced at Tint. She felt his eyes and met them, still shivering with fear of the snakes all about her. He couldn’t very well leave Tint to her fate, any more than he could stay here on Serpent’s Isle as an alternative to trying his luck on the mainland of Laut.

Garric smiled at the bandit chieftain. The expression warmed him, so he let it spread more broadly across his face.

“All right, Master Vascay,” he said. “This past year I’ve found myself filling many jobs I wasn’t raised to. For a time, at least, I’ll try my hand at being a bandit and a rebel.”

Vascay leaned forward and clasped forearms with Garric. “Be a good enough rebel, my friend,” Vascay said, “and we can all of us give up being bandits. Welcome to the Brethren!”

Cashel shielded his eyes with a hand and squinted besides; the noon sun gave the bay a brassy sheen that’d make the back of his head hurt if he wasn’t careful. The water was so still that the reef formed a ragged black line instead of tossing spray.

“It’ll be a good time to go out,” he said to Tilphosa, who sat beside him. Her legs were crossed, right knee over left knee, and her hands were clasped over them tightly. “Past the reef, I mean.”

They’d have to row, of course; the sail the crewmen had rigged to the new mast—the wreck’s former main spar—hung as limp as the fronds of the palms at the tide line. That didn’t matter to Tilphosa one way or the other, of course.

Cashel dried his hands on his tunic. “I wouldn’t mind doing some real work,” he said. “Rowing would feel good.”

Metra was working her art in a space Cashel had cleared among the ferns. The sailcloth screen she’d used earlier was now part of the pinnace’s kit. Metra didn’t want the sailors watching her and maybe getting in the way—and the sailors, like most people, didn’t like to be around wizardry.

Cashel didn’t mind wizardry, but he was just as glad not to have to see Metra. He didn’t like her or trust her, either one.

“But you lifted that huge rock,” Tilphosa said, drawn out of her brown study by Cashel’s words. “Surely that was work, even for you.”

“That was a job, all right,” Cashel said. He paused while his mind sifted words to find the ones that’d explain. “But all that, killing the cannibal in its coffin…that’s kinda what I’d like to clear out of my mind, do you see?”

He gave her a smile. He didn’t suppose Tilphosa would understand, but she wasn’t the sort to sneer because “nothing that dumb ox Cashel says is worth listening to” like some folks in the borough whispered.

Tilphosa smiled back, but her expression chilled suddenly. She lowered her eyes to the ground and hunched her shoulders.

“I want to be off this island,” the girl whispered. Her clasped hands trembled, and for a moment Cashel was afraid she was going to cry. “I’d start swimming if I didn’t think they were going to have the boat ready soon. They will, won’t they?”

Tilphosa raised her eyes to the dinghy. A dozen sailors clustered about it, putting on what Cashel too thought were the finishing touches under Hook’s direction. They’d raised the sidewalls with boards from the wreck’s decking and had fitted the mast, turning a boat into a pinnace.

“Right, it shouldn’t be long,” Cashel said. He didn’t try to sound especially hearty; if Tilphosa hadn’t learned by now that Cashel meant the things he said, there wasn’t much point in tricking her into believing him. Funny that she’d been so, well, solid when it really was dangerous. Now that the thing in the gold coffin was dead—and it surely was dead—she was letting her nerves get to her.

Tilphosa resumed staring morosely at the ground. The sailors were rigging a rudder—the dinghy had been steered with the oars—and hadn’t started loading the stores of food and water yet, so it’d be a while longer.

Cashel cleared his throat, and said, “Can you tell me about this Thalemos you’re going to marry, mistress? I don’t know anything about Laut. I, ah, come from Haft.”

The truth was, up to a few months ago Cashel hadn’t known any more about Count Lascarg in Carcosa, the capital of Haft, than he had about whoever ruled Laut. Folks from Barca’s Hamlet didn’t travel much, and the merchants who came to buy sheep and wool didn’t give much idea of the wider world they moved in.

Tilphosa looked at him and smiled unexpectedly. “Thanks,” she said, “for trying to distract me. But if you really want to hear about my marriage…?”

“Sure,” Cashel said, watching a speck above the western horizon. “Now that I’m getting a chance to learn new things, I figure I oughtn’t to waste it.”

The speck was an albatross, he figured, though he couldn’t be sure at this distance. Even the seagulls seemed to keep away from here. He’d never guessed that gulls cared about anything but finding the next beakful to send down to a belly that was never full.

“There’s really some mystery about it,” Tilphosa said, lowering her voice slightly. The sailors by the pinnace were too far away to hear anyway, but it was toward the jungle where Metra was working that the girl’s eyes turned. She grinned at Cashel, already herself again. “A mystery from me, at any rate. I think Metra…”

She shrugged. Cashel nodded understanding.

“My parents died when I was too young to remember even their faces,” Tilphosa said. “They were lost at sea. I…well, I’ve never liked the sea, but there wasn’t any choice if I was to get to Laut, was there?”

“Someday maybe you’ll meet my sister Ilna,” Cashel said. “You’d get along, I guess. You’d get along with all my friends.”

Tilphosa frowned. “Because they’re afraid of the sea?” she said.

“Not that,” said Cashel. “Because they do things whether they’re scared to do them or not.”

He smiled softly, remembering Ilna and Garric and especially Sharina, lovely Sharina, with her musical laugh.

“But what about you, Cashel?” Tilphosa asked. “You do things even if you’re afraid, don’t you?”

Cashel shrugged. “I guess I would,” he said. “But the only things I’ve found to worry about are, you know, not doing a good enough job.”

His lips pursed. He wondered if he sounded like he was bragging. It wasn’t like that, he was just trying to explain how he felt.

“Well, anyway,” Tilphosa went on, “I became a ward of the Temple of Our Lady of the Moon in Donelle. The priests saw to it that I was educated as a proper lady. They didn’t make me a priest myself, though. I know no more about the rituals of the Mistress than any householder on Tisamur does.”

Cashel nodded to show that he’d heard. On Haft the priests chanted hymns to the Great Gods on major festivals; ordinary folk just bowed and paid their tithes; paid a tithe of what the temple officials could prove in their assessment rolls, anyhow. It sounded like things were different on Tisamur. At least—

“You always say ‘the Mistress,’” Cashel said, turning to meet the girl’s eyes. “It is the Lady you mean, right?”

Tilphosa frowned slightly. “Well…” she said. “It’s hard to explain, Cashel. The Mistress, the lunar aspect of the Lady, is real. I mean…”

She looked over her shoulder with a hooded expression, checking to be sure that Metra was still at her work out of sight. “We don’t have an image of the Mistress in our temple in Donelle,” Tilphosa said in a lowered voice. “She conies in the visions when worshippers gather in the sanctuary at night to pray; and She comes in dreams to the specially devout. The Mistress isn’t a statue of wood or stone like the Lady in other temples.”

Captain Mounix was satisfied with the way the rudder hung, though Hook had taken a rasp from his tool chest and was softening the edges of the hinge-pin. The rest of the men began loading the pinnace from the stores piled to either side.

Mounix glanced toward Cashel, but he didn’t call. Most times Cashel would’ve gone to help without thinking about it, but there were too many sailors for the job already: three handsful of them, besides Mounix himself and Hook. They worked like they were as ready to leave this place as Tilphosa was.

Cashel smiled. He wouldn’t mind getting away himself, though he wasn’t sure he was going to like Laut any better. Well, by now he’d been a lot of different places and he’d managed to do all right in all of them.

“And that’s what happened, you see,” Tilphosa continued, watching the final preparations with greedy eyes. “The Mistress told Her Children in dreams that I should marry Thalemos of Laut so that She can return to rule the world. So, well, here we are.”

She smiled at Cashel, then looked over her shoulder again. Her expression became guarded again.

“I’ve never met Prince Thalemos,” she said softly. “And I’m not even sure he knows I’m coming to Laut to marry him. But the Mistress knows all; Her will be done.”

“Girl!” called Captain Mounix, though his eyes were on Cashel rather than Tilphosa. “You better bring your wizard if she expects to leave with us!”

“Let her stay!” shouted a sailor from the other side of the pinnace, mostly hidden by his fellows.

“I’ll get her,” Cashel said quietly, but Tilphosa stood with him as he rose.

They started off toward Metra’s clearing. Before they entered the trees, Cashel glanced back to make perfectly certain that the sailors wouldn’t be able to launch the pinnace before he and the women could return. There were farmers in the borough who’d cheat you of anything they thought they could get away with; they’d trained Cashel, so he was ready to deal with Mounix and his men.

“Did you have any say in the business, mis…ah, Tilphosa?” Cashel asked. “Mistress” was what he’d ordinarily call a woman when concern made him formal, but he didn’t like the sound of the word here.

Bent fronds marked the trail, but enough of the vegetation had sprung straight again that he walked in front of the girl. “I mean, what you’re doing doesn’t sound like, like something I’d want to do.”

Tilphosa laughed and touched his shoulder from behind. “I appreciate what you’re saying, Cashel,” she said, “but you don’t understand what it is to have a real God, the Mistress Herself, order you to do something.”

Through the foliage ahead Cashel heard Metra’s voice hoarsely chanting. His skin prickled.

“Mistress Metra!” he called to give warning. “We’re coming to fetch you back to leave!”

Then, softly over his shoulder, he added, “No, Lady Tilphosa, I don’t know what it would be like to have a real God order me to do something.”

Cashel wasn’t sure that Tilphosa knew either, though she thought she did. Well, he’d deal with his part of the job the best way he could, whatever it turned out to be.

He pushed through the ferns; Metra was trying to rise, but wizardry had robbed her legs of strength. “You take her gear, Tilphosa,” Cashel said. He shifted his staff to his left hand and bent to pick Metra up whether she wanted that or not.

Cashel wasn’t one to waste time arguing when a job had to be done.

“Chalcus is coming!” Merota said, hopping up from where she sat opposite Ilna on the horseshoe bench under a grape arbor. She started to run toward the conference room but caught herself before her legs moved. “Ilna, can I…?”

Ilna felt a thrill of anticipation. It didn’t reach her face, of course, and her fingers continued the knotwork she was using to busy them.

“Yes, of course,” she said. The words weren’t fully out of her mouth before Merota was racing across the lawn toward Chalcus. He’d just passed through the cordon of guards with a joke and laughter.

Ilna’s almost-smile—about as close as she ever came to a smile, she supposed—hardened before it reached her lips. Though Chalcus moved with his usual lithe grace, Ilna recognized the tension beneath the grin he flashed her.

Tenoctris waited just outside the cordon of Blood Eagles, resting some of her weight on Liane’s arm. Garric spoke from the doorway; the two women joined him and Sharina in the conference room. Just before closing the door, he gave Ilna a look she couldn’t read.

She continued to knot wool into fabric on her lap. Ilna didn’t carry a loom with her, but she always had skeins of yarn. Work didn’t occupy her mind, but the rote exercise provided a foundation of support that settled her when otherwise she would…

Would be unsettled, leave it at that. Not even Ilna os-Kenset could in perfect calm view the gray web-draped Hell Tenoctris had drawn from Echeus’ mind.

Ilna thought of the spiders whose unwinking multiple eyes stared as if they saw her through the curtain of wizardry. Well, let them stare; she had her work.

The fabric lengthened. Ilna didn’t have to look at it to know that anyone who did would feel the touch of sunlight on the ancient stonework of the mill in Barca’s Hamlet. There was hard work and hard living in the borough, as there was everywhere in this world for a poor orphan. But the sun endured, and the mill endured, and Ilna had endured also.

It wasn’t the most cheerful gift to offer those viewing the fabric, but Ilna didn’t believe there was a better one. Especially for a viewer whom spiders might be watching.

Ilna didn’t need to be in the conference room; Tenoctris alone could tell Garric what they’d seen in the dead man’s eyes. Perhaps the old wizard could even explain it, though she’d seemed as much at a loss as Ilna was.

Ilna’s fingers continued to knot the yarn, turning the vision of Hell into a pattern of repose and gentle pleasure. She was making the world a better place by that much; a trivial thing in the long run, but—Ilna grinned coldly—in the long run they’d all be dead.

Merota flung herself toward the sailor; he scooped her up in his arms. Ilna had expected that, but she was surprised when—instead of striding directly over to the bench where Ilna waited—Chalcus set the girl on the platform of a sundial several paces away. He stood before Merota, holding her hands and talking earnestly.

Ilna deliberately turned her head and studied the grape leaves behind her. Small ants tended herds of aphids along the curling shoots.

Ilna felt a surge of bitter desperation: she had as much kinship with those insects as she did with the human beings around her. Garric had turned her away, and now Chalcus chatted with the child instead of—

“Mistress Ilna…?” he said, unexpectedly close.

Ilna spun around, flustered despite herself. She’d grown accustomed to Chalcus announcing himself with a whistled tune; and of course his soft-soled boots made no sound on the turf….

Merota remained standing beside the sundial, wide-eyed and nervously stiff as she watched them. “She won’t wander,” Chalcus said, half-turning his head to indicate the girl. “I told her you and I must talk without her, mistress”—he smiled, though not as broadly as at most times—“and she agreed, though without pleasure. So that now I can speak with you about matters that give me no pleasure either.”

Ilna folded the knotwork ribbon and put it in her sleeve. She took out a few lengths of twine to occupy her fingers in its place.

“Speak, then,” she said. Her own smile was as cold as the winter sky.

“Your friend Garric’s mind was raped away by the wizard you saw killed,” the sailor said baldly. He squatted so that she needn’t look up to meet his eyes. “The fellow who looks through his eyes now says he’s a friend to the Isles and to Garric…which I believe. But he’s a very hard man, that one, my dear. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do if he thought the choice were failure.”

“A change indeed from Garric,” said Ilna calmly. She took Chalcus’ words as fact, the way she’d have expected hers to be accepted in a similar case. “Not so very different from present company though, perhaps.”

“Aye,” said Chalcus with a flash of the old humor. “Not different at all. But when he asks you and me to go to Tisamur with young Lady Merota to conceal our purpose, then you must know that it isn’t Garric who weighed the risks to the child before he spoke.”

“I see,” said Ilna. With a flash of relief she understood why Chalcus had paused to chat with Merota before he came to where she sat. “The girl has agreed, of course?”

“The girl thinks she’d be safe in the heart of the Underworld with you and me to guard her, dear one,” the sailor said softly. “She would not, and I’ve told her she would not; but she won’t believe me.”

“What does the one who isn’t Garric expect us to do on Tisamur?” Ilna said, filing the response to consider later if at all. She suspected that Merota understood more than Chalcus thought she did, but she didn’t suppose that mattered.

“There’s wizardry besides rebellion there, he thinks,” Chalcus said. “That one—”

He’d never given a name to the one in Garric’s body.

“—doesn’t need help with rebels and sword strokes, but wizards are another matter. A matter for you, he thinks.”

“And you think, Master Chalcus?” Ilna said with a faint smile.

“I’ve seen that one use his sword, dear one,” he said. The term didn’t grate on her ears as it sometimes had. “I trust his skill as I would trust my own. And I’ve seen you work as well. None will stand against you, of that I’m as sure as I’m sure—”

Chalcus laughed; fully alive, fully himself again. “As sure as I am that I’ll stand by you,” he concluded.

Ilna sniffed. “Yes,” she said, “that at least I’m sure of.”

Tisamur was only a name to her. She’d woven for buyers trafficking to the powerful islands of the north: Sandrakkan, Blaise, and even as far as Ornifal. All of them based their fashions on the mode in Valles.

Ilna’s lips twisted in a grim smile. The nobles of other islands might not recognize Prince Garric as their overlord, but Garric’s court formed their taste in dress.

She looked at Chalcus, watching his face settle into a neutral expression as he waited for her to speak. Merota remained the set distance away, shifting from foot to foot because she was too young to have learned how to hide her nervousness. The child was afraid that Ilna would refuse to let her voyage to Tisamur because of the danger.

“Yes, all right,” Ilna said, pleased by the flicker of surprise in Chalcus’ eyes. She’d thought of questioning him about Tisamur first, letting him wait and worry about her response the way he and Garric and all of them had forced her to wait.

That would have been petty. Ilna wasn’t petty—when she caught herself and mastered her nature, at least. Mastering her nature allowed her to avoid being so many other things, worse things. On a good day.

“I’d thought—” said Chalcus; and stopped himself, for they both knew what he’d thought. There was nothing to be gained by going over that ground. “I’ll tell the chancellor—or would you care to, mistress? That one”—a quick nod toward the closed conference room—“says he’s transferring properties to Lady Merota, which she’ll be visiting to take stock.”

“A reasonable plan,” Ilna said calmly. “I’ll let you talk to Royhas. I’ve found that people don’t listen to me unless…”

She smiled, an expression as grim as a set of manacles. “Until, I should say,” she continued, “I force them to.”

She glanced down at the pattern her fingers had just tied in the twine. She picked it out again. “And on a good day,” she said, “I don’t like to do that.”

“Aye, I’ll do that,” said Chalcus. He rose as though about to summon Merota; again he paused, and said, “The coasts of Tisamur are much like what you’ll find anywhere in the Isles. Fishing villages, coasting ports; a little more clannish and reserved than Shengy, say, but not in a bad way. Donelle’s the only real city, and maybe Brange on the north coast. Inland…”

Chalcus’ left index finger stroked the place the horn hilt of his incurved sword would ride if he were wearing it. “Inland,” he said, “away from the river valleys…there’s stories that come out.”

He laughed, but the sound wasn’t wholly convincing. “There’s stories everywhere,” he said, “stories about the place I grew up even, and they’re mostly as empty as the foam on a jack of ale.”

“But sometimes the stories are true,” Ilna said, completing the thought Chalcus was skirting.

“Aye, that’s been my experience,” he said, grateful for the interjection. “I know nothing about Moon Wisdom, dearest, but in the hills of Tisamur they’re said to worship many things besides the Great Gods. It may be that Moon Wisdom is one of those, come down to the coasts and the cities.”

Ilna’s eyes narrowed slightly. She’d seen Chalcus face wizards with no more fear than he’d have shown for so many swordsmen…but for all his profane irreligion, he feared the Gods.

“I see,” she said aloud. “I gather the plan is that we travel as Merota’s servants?”

“Aye, if you’re willing,” Chalcus said, clearly more comfortable with the change of subject.

“And why wouldn’t I be willing?” Ilna snapped. “I’m not too good for any honest work!”

She heard the outrage in her voice, paused, and gave Chalcus a wry smile. “Sorry,” she said. “With so much in the world to be upset over, that was a foolish concern. Even for me on what seems to be a foolish day. And if you’d asked me were I willing to have a servant, then you’d have gotten a different answer.”

She stood. “I’ll see to packing,” she said. “My own clothing won’t take long, but Lady Merota bos-Roriman will no doubt have greater requirements.”

“Dear one?” Chalcus said, saw her face harden, and went on, “Mistress Ilna, then. A question before we part, if you please: why did you agree so easily?”

Ilna quirked a smile. “Why am I not worried about the danger to Merota?” she asked. “I am, Master Chalcus; I’m very much afraid.”

The smile faded. “But I saw a thing in a dead man’s eyes just now, and I’m more afraid of that.”

She stretched out an arm in summons. Merota, bubbling with excitement, came racing toward her two protectors.

“Because if that vision comes to pass,” Ilna said quietly, “there’ll be no safety, for a child or for anyone, in all this world.”

Sharina heard a shout from the king sleeping in the inner room of the suite. She got to her feet without stumbling and took the lighted candle from the alcove which shaded its gleam to a soft glow fanning across the floor. She was still half-asleep, but an innkeeper’s daughter learns to cope with crises in the darkness.

She pushed through the curtain of carved wooden beads across the doorway connecting to the master bedroom. Garric—Carus—thrashed on the bed, wrestling with the feather-stuffed mattress. His face was contorted. As Sharina entered he shouted again in wordless fury.

“Carus!” Sharina said, wondering if the guards could overhear them. There were Blood Eagles in the corridor and in the grounds below Garric’s second-story living quarters, she didn’t want them bursting in. She couldn’t guess what Carus might say in his nightmare. “Your majesty!”

The wall above the cherrywood wainscotting was frescoed with images showing the march of the seasons in the countryside. It was part of the room’s original decorations, though workmen had repaired the fallen plaster when Prince Garric chose the suite for himself.

Ordinarily the scenes were cheerful if a little idealized to someone who knew the realities of peasant life. The painted snow lay on the ground at the turn of the year; real snow drove down, with intervals of sleet which locked the stubble beneath a coat of ice that hooves couldn’t chip away. The painted dancers at the harvest festival were bright-eyed instead of logy with fatigue and beer. And in the painted world, the animals were clean, even the oxen who’d just come in from the field. Regardless, Garric and Sharina both had found them a pleasant reminder of a world they’d never be a part of again.

The candle had sunk to a blue glow about the wick as Sharina moved. Now it flared and guttered, distorting the frieze into presences worse than shadow. Almost Sharina could feel tendrils reaching for her from the spaces beyond the plastered wall.

Almost, or possibly…

“Carus!” she said. She dropped the candle onto the brass bedside tale and grasped the king’s wrist with her strong right hand. “Wake up!”

Carus lunged upward like a dolphin jumping, awake and seated upright in bed in the same instant. He gripped Sharina as though she were a spar he’d caught while drowning. His eyes were wide, and his jaws were set in a rictus of fury.

His breath slowed. “Thank you, milady,” he said in a husky whisper. His arms released her; his fingers had bruised her forearm when he’d twisted in her grasp.

He grinned faintly. “Call Tenoctris in while I get some clothes on, will you? Or I can—”

“No,” said Sharina, leaving the candle as she padded back through the anteroom where she’d been sleeping. She picked up a light cape and draped it over her tunic before she opened the door to the corridor.

The Blood Eagles on guard had heard, all right; several had drawn their swords. All looked tense, though two kept their eyes on the corridor in either direction while the others waited for Sharina to explain the reason for the cries.

“The prince had a bad dream,” Sharina said curtly. “One of you bring Tenoctris to us, please. She’s in the—”

“Chaigon, go get her,” said the officer in a breastplate with silvered engravings. A rangy swordsman padded off at a quick pace toward the adjacent suite where Tenoctris slept tonight. In deference to the sleep of those they protected, the Blood Eagles on interior guard wore soft-soled sandals rather than hobnailed boots.

“We know where the wizard is, princess,” the officer said, polite but not afraid for doing a thing quickly instead of waiting for needless elaboration.

“Yes, I see,” Sharina agreed. She turned back into the suite, saying over her shoulder, “Send her through immediately when she arrives. If you please.”

Carus had pulled on an outer tunic and the high boots he’d added to Garric’s wardrobe. As Sharina entered, the king was wrapping the double tongue of his sword belt around the belt proper. He saw her eye it.

“No, I don’t think I’ll be using a sword tonight,” he said with a smile of embarrassment. “But I decided that I liked the weight of it to…”

He shrugged.

Instead of finishing that thought, Carus looked at a corner of the room, and said in a quiet, rigidly controlled voice, “I knew I was dreaming, Sharina, but I wasn’t able to wake up. Until you pulled me up out of the dream. And even then I wasn’t sure I was going to reach the surface until I was there.”

“The room felt… I guess cold when I came in,” Sharina said. The temperature was normal now, and the frieze had returned to being flat and inoffensive. The young mother was fluffing the covers around her baby, not smothering it with a pillow as a trick of the light had made it seem a moment before….

The anteroom where Sharina’d slept was meant for a servant. Normally Liane would have been there while Sharina had her own separate bungalow, but for the time being the two of them had exchanged accommodation.

The change was at Carus’ suggestion, but Liane had leaped at it with an audible gasp of relief.

There was a bustle in the corridor. “Go on through, Lady Tenoctris,” the officer called in a loud voice. “We’ll close the door behind you.”

Carus stepped into the anteroom with his hands outstretched to greet the wizard and support her if she needed it. Sharina grinned at the care the soldiers took to communicate their intentions without giving offense. She sobered when she thought of the danger-filled void that those men—she didn’t know a single one by name—faced. The soldiers didn’t know whether indigestion or a monster from the deepest pit of Hell had caused the man they guarded to cry out.

Neither did Sharina, of course, but she and her friends at least had the chance to learn. The soldiers would remain in ignorance, most likely forever—but possibly until only an instant before some hellspawn struck them down.

Tenoctris, looking as sprightly as a sparrow, came in. She didn’t need the support of Carus’ arm, though he carried her satchel of paraphernalia. Behind them the outer door closed with heavy finality; the guards were putting a material barrier between themselves and the wizardry they expected—feared—would take place within.

“You said you had a nightmare,” Tenoctris said, surveying the room with quick jerks of her head instead of a sweeping glance. “What exactly did you see?”

She sat on the floor abruptly; Sharina caught and helped her the last of the way as the older woman paused in mid-motion. Carus passed the satchel to Sharina, who placed it before Tenoctris.

“I didn’t really see anything,” Carus said. He had control of himself again; he spoke reflectively, casting his mind back to retrieve the details of the experience. “I felt as if I was deep underwater. Something held me, pulled me down, but I couldn’t touch it when I tried to.”

He cleared his throat. “I was drowning,” he said. To Sharina’s amazement, there was real humor in the king’s smile. “Drowning again, I mean. Only this time I don’t think I’d have seen daylight again. Not even in a thousand years, through another man’s eyes.”

The floor was a woodland mosaic. In the slight present illumination the trees and creatures were shadows on shadow, with the only real contrast the splotches of white plaster: temporary patches filling places where the tesserae had fallen out.

Tenoctris took a writing brush and a pot of cinnabar from her satchel, then outlined a simple triangle over a stag with unlikely antlers. “Could you see anything?” she asked as she began writing words of power in the Old Script along the sides of the figure. “Or was it just blackness?”

“I couldn’t see anything,” said Carus. He scowled reflexively at what the wizard was doing, then caught Sharina’s glance and smiled in wry self-deprecation. “But it wasn’t black, it was gray.”

Tenoctris tapped the three sides of her figure with her bamboo sliver, then began to intone the words under her breath. Air within the triangle blurred the way it might over a field on a summer day.

“Gray like what Hordred saw,” Sharina said. “Didn’t see.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about while I was down there,” Carus agreed. “Wherever ‘there’ was. And after watching what happened to him, I can’t doubt that something really was after Hordred in that grayness.”

Tenoctris flung her wand aside and sagged. Sharina caught her before her head hit the floor.

“Wait,” Tenoctris said. She straightened, then deliberately smudged the symbols with the sleeve of her robe. Red pigment smeared into the fine silk brocade.

Sharina winced, wondering what Ilna would say if she’d seen that. Perhaps nothing: Ilna was ruthlessly pragmatic herself, and Tenoctris would have a good reason for whatever she did.

“I didn’t want to leave that where someone might accidentally pronounce it,” the wizard said, now allowing the younger woman to help her up. “It was a simple location spell, but it started to go deeper than I thought was safe.”

“Deeper?” said Carus.

“Spells have a weight of their own,” Tenoctris said, settling herself onto an ivory chair. Its legs crossed in an X before curving upward to form the arms. All the surfaces had been chased with a pattern of vines and snakes. “I thought it would point me to a place in the present, Laut, perhaps, or Tisamur. Instead it began racing toward an end so distant that I was afraid it might carry me with it.”

She quirked a smile, but the slight trembling of her hands was not merely from physical reaction. Carus squatted beside her, cocking his sword with one hand so that the scabbard’s chape didn’t rap on the floor. His other hand closed gently over those of Tenoctris.

“Carry you far in time?” Sharina asked. She thought of the cataclysm that had flung the old wizard a thousand years to this age.

“Carry me to the Underworld,” Tenoctris said. For a moment she didn’t move or even blink. “Carry me to Hell, Sharina.”

Carus rose, patting the old woman’s shoulder. “We can’t have that,” he said, his tone quietly cheerful. “If I need to sleep only in daylight, well—”

“Hordred was asleep in daylight,” Sharina said sharply. “The last time.”

“Then—” said Carus, louder yet and grasping his sword hilt.

“There’s another way,” said Tenoctris. The others looked at her.

“Go on,” said Carus, opening his right hand. Sharina felt a surge of relief; she hadn’t seen any good result coming from the desperation she knew the ancient king felt even more strongly than she did.

“If Ilna is amenable,” Tenoctris said, “I can put her in a trance and send her soul to follow the visitation back to its source. I don’t think it would even be difficult for her. Though of course there’s some danger.”

Sharina shrugged. “Ilna would do anything to help,” she said. “Any of us will.”

“Send me,” said Carus. His smile had a tinge of ruthlessness—if the expression wasn’t simple cruelty instead. “This is my fight, after all.”

“It’s all our fight!” Tenoctris said with unusual force. “It’s the fight of everyone alive and everyone who hopes to be born.”

Her expression softened. “Of course you’d all go,” she added, “but you’d never find the way. It’s not what you would do but what you can. Ilna can follow the pattern to its source, I’m sure.”

“And I’m sure,” said King Carus, “that I’ll know what to do when somebody shows me where to strike.”

He laughed in fierce anticipation, his right hand on his sword. The candleflame guttered at the violence of his joy.