Mistress of the Catacombs

9

Ilna glared reflexively at the newcomer. The Great Gods weren’t a part of Ilna’s world; the only truths she knew were those formed on her loom and in her heart. For those who did believe and worship, though, a sacrifice to the Queen of the Underworld meant they had turned in directions Ilna did not.

“You’re still in the waking world, aren’t you?” said the girl. Her voice was thin and hollow, as if she was speaking up through the pipes feeding a cistern. “You can’t hide from me so you needn’t try. I can’t see you clearly, but you won’t be able to get away now that I’ve found you.”

She was no more than Ilna’s modest height, but her large breasts and broad hips meant the two women were unlikely ever to be confused. Carried openly in the newcomer’s hand was a bronze knife with a long, leaf-shaped blade.

Ilna glanced at the cords she held and deliberately placed them back in her sleeve. “Can you hear me?” she asked in a cold voice. “If you can, then hear me when I say that I’m Ilna os-Kenset, and I’m not in the habit of running away. Who are you and what do you want with me?”

The girl squatted on her haunches beside the wagon and began to draw on the hard-baked dirt with her dagger point. “I’m Alecto,” she said, without looking up. “And what I want from you is to get away from the Pack.”

Ilna’s eyes narrowed, first at the tone and then still further as she took in the girl’s appearance. Alecto’s clothing was savage beyond doubt, but it wasn’t crude. The short wolfskin cape, the only cover for her torso, was well sewn and closed at the throat with a pin of gold and garnets, and the ivory pins in her hair were subtly carved. Her kilt was of deer hide, tanned and bleached to the shade of cream. Judging from the way it bunched over the girl’s knees, the leather was butter soft.

The kilt had a sinuous line of decoration made with porcupine quills, chosen for thickness and color. Ilna didn’t remember ever seeing a more able piece of embroidery, though the pattern—or rather, what the pattern suggested to her—made her lip curl.

Alecto had sketched a many-pointed star and was now drawing words around the outer angles. It didn’t take someone with Ilna’s eye for patterns to make the connection between this wizard and whatever was attacking Garric. “The Pack you’re afraid of,” she said. “You loosed them, and they’ve turned on you?”

The girl leaped to her feet, switching her grip on the dagger so that she held it as a weapon rather than an awkward stylus. “That’s a lie!” she shouted. “I was just trying to frighten Brasus. I didn’t let the Pack out! Brasus wasn’t worth that, and besides, I’m not such a fool.”

Her face changed. “Faugh!” she said, shaking her head as she squatted again. “I can’t imagine anybody letting the Pack out, but somebody did…and I came across them because of what I was looking for.”

She resumed drawing. Ilna could hear the skritch of Alecto’s bronze on the hard soil, though, like the girl’s voice, it was muted by a distance not of space.

“And all right, I took more of a risk than I should’ve for Brasus, I see that now,” Alecto muttered as she wrote. “I should just’ve laughed and let him go back to his wife. I can find men, the Sister knows!”

Ilna’s nose twitched again. She wondered if Alecto could see her expression. Well, it wasn’t Ilna’s place to correct the tramp….

“You expect the Pack to come here after you, then?” she asked instead. Without Ilna noticing what they were doing, her hands had brought the hank of cords out of her sleeve again.

Alecto looked up from her work with a cruel sneer. “Worried?” she said. “Well, you needn’t be. They won’t touch you while you’re in the waking world, not unless they’re set on you. I came too close to their lair, though, because I didn’t realize that anybody’d be stupid enough to let them loose…but they had.”

“I didn’t say I was worried,” Ilna said, wishing that this slut didn’t have such a remarkable talent for irritating her. “I asked if this Pack was coming after you. Coming here, that is, since this is where you are.”

“I won’t be for long, thanks to you, Ilna os-Kenset,” the girl said. “Never fear, we’ll be in the waking world long before they arrive. I couldn’t get back by the portal I’d made because that’d mean going through the Pack. I wouldn’t have made it.”

Alecto looked up with an expression that Ilna had seen once before on a rabbit paralyzed by a serpent’s gaze. “Nobody’d make it!” she said. “But it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen.”

Alecto sliced carefully into the ball of her thumb and squeezed a drop of blood into the circle. “No choice in this desert,” she muttered.

She began chanting, tapping out the words of power with the point of her dagger. Unlike most of the athames Ilna had seen in the hands of wizards, Alecto’s was a perfectly serviceable weapon and had obviously been used as such.

Ilna looked into the cauldron again. The scene had changed. The temple’s interior was empty, now. The rectangular pool in the center reflected the sun, which must be squarely overhead, streaming through a roof opening that Ilna couldn’t see.

She wondered if she was visible to someone in the temple looking upward. Probably not, since her own reflection didn’t appear in the pool.

Alecto’s voice was growing louder; it seemed to be coming from all directions. Ilna straightened and glared at the wild woman. Dust devils began to spin around the wagon, six of them sunwise and the seventh widdershins.

Ilna sniffed. It was time she returned to the palace and Tenoctris. She could describe the temple and the chorus of priests; there didn’t seem any further benefit to hanging around here. She supposed if she followed the schism in the same fashion as she’d come to this place, it would bring her back.

She tried to step down from the wagon. Her body didn’t move. Her muscles weren’t paralyzed, but they strained uselessly as though her limbs were stuck in blocks of stone.

Ilna’s fingers twisted cords into a pattern. It was desperately hard work, but not even the power that held her now could prevent her from working her own art.

The bright baking sky grew darker. Alecto’s voice thundered from the heavens. Ilna could no longer see the dust devils. She felt a wind tugging at the sleeves of her tunic.

“Alecto!” she shouted, but she couldn’t hear her own voice over the scream of the wind.

Ilna’s world dissolved into a flow of downward-rushing color. Alecto stood before her, her face triumphant and the bronze dagger raised skyward. They whirled together, then landed feetfirst on a stone floor hard enough to send them both sprawling.

Ilna rose to her hands and knees. It was night, and she was at the edge of a pool in a circular room. A double row of columns supported the domed ceiling; above the pool was an opening, an oculus as she’d heard Liane refer to a similar structure.

She and Alecto were in the place Ilna had viewed in the cauldron. They were in the temple from which a nightmare had been sent to trouble Garric’s sleep.

Alecto had dropped her dagger when she hit the floor. She snatched it into her hand again before she stood up.

“You utter fool!” Ilna said.

Chanting voices echoed through the temple’s entrance passage, the only way in or out of the room. The priests were returning.

Sharina tried to concentrate on the mural. Before her was a scene of herdsmen with long poles driving brindled cattle back from mountain pastures in autumn; the trees had already begun to lose their leaves.

Barca’s Hamlet was sheep country. They raised cattle in the highlands of Northern Haft, but those regions had been as far away as the moon when Sharina was growing up.

Merchants and drovers came to the borough from Sandrakkan, Blaise, and even Ornifal during the Sheep Fair. Nobody came from the north of the island, though. The folk there had their own markets and their own customs. If they bought wool, they did so from factors in Carcosa when they drove their herds to market in the capital.

Sharina thought about Ilna lying on the bed in waxen silence, of Cashel vanished without a trace, and Garric’s body walking and talking under the control of a mind not his. She hugged herself and wondered if she were going to cry.

She turned, planning to ask Tenoctris—again—how long it’d been since Ilna had gone into her trance. The old woman sat on her backless chair, reading from a small parchment codex. She looked up with a smile when she felt Sharina’s eyes, but Sharina waved her back to her book.

There wasn’t anything to say. It had been however long it had been—not really very long; and it would be however long it was. Tenoctris couldn’t say more, and if she was managing to lose herself in reading, all the better.

Garric would have had a book also, though Sharina doubted whether he’d have been able to concentrate on his beloved Celondre. What was the man who wore Garric’s flesh doing now? King Carus wasn’t a reader, of that she was sure.

The mural’s next panel was of men piling hay on a wagon with long forks. Two oxen waited in the traces, grazing contentedly on the tufts a small girl held out for them. Women with double-sided rakes—the wooden pegs extended above and below the crossbar, an unfamiliar style to Sharina—gathered more hay from among the stubble. The mower sat in the shade of an apple tree, sharpening his scythe with a wooden rod dipped first in tallow and then in sand, just as mowers did in the borough.

Half the scene was familiar, half as strange to Sharina’s childhood as the customs of townsfolk here in Valles. Either way she felt alien and alone, out of place and unable to help her threatened friends.

Sharina stroked the black horn scales of the Pewle knife she’d inherited from Nonnus. Today for her there was more comfort in that weapon than in pictures of happy peasants or in all the great literature she and Garric had been introduced to by their father. That was a terrible thing.

But still, she had the knife. She smiled faintly.

The outer door opened. Sharina whirled; Garric—not Garric, Carus—entered and slammed it shut behind him. Now by daylight Sharina noticed that the panel’s covering of blue-dyed leather was tooled in delicate floral patterns. She’d been sleeping in the outer room for two nights and hadn’t previously noticed the door’s decoration.

Carus entered the main room. Garric was as graceful as any athletic young man; the man in his body walked like a great cat.

He nodded to the figure on the bed. “How is she?” he asked in a tone that could be mistaken for calm. He hooked his thumbs under his sword belt.

Tenoctris closed her codex without marking the place. She set it back within the satchel standing open on the floor beside her.

“The preparations went well,” she said. She braced her hands on the chair arms as if to rise; Carus waved her back with a hard face that was just short of exasperation. This wasn’t a man who had any interest in form or what he considered foolishness.

Tenoctris sank down gratefully again. She said, “The rest is up to Ilna. I expect her to succeed if that’s within human abilities.”

She paused and smiled. “Or even if it isn’t,” she said.

“I expect that too,” said Carus tonelessly. His hand reached for the pommel of his sword but jerked back again as if the polished steel knob were hot. Instead he paced.

“I thought I’d stay away till it was all over,” he said in a conversational voice. “Maybe not see her even then. Let her go to Tisamur with Merota and with her pirate and never think of her anymore. Except that I couldn’t.”

Faster than Sharina could see, Carus slammed the base of his fist into the wall. The thump wasn’t loud—the concrete masonry was a hand’s breadth thick, even here on the second floor—but the plaster sheathing flaked off in a radius of several inches from the center of the blow.

“If you like…” Tenoctris said carefully, “I can arrange for us to see what Ilna herself is seeing. Ah, not clearly that is, but—”

“Can you?” cried the king, no longer even pretending to be calm. “That is…”

He caught hold of himself, flashed Sharina his old smile, and knelt to rest his big hands on the wizard’s, crossed in her lap. “Of course you can do what you say, Tenoctris,” Carus said. “But can you do it without effort that might unfit you for work you have to do in the near future? Because I’m well aware I’m being foolish, and I needn’t be coddled by my friends.”

The old wizard’s laugh reminded Sharina that Tenoctris had once been a girl, and that Garric was a handsome youth. She smiled and corrected herself: Garric was a handsome youth. The same flesh around Carus’ soul was no longer quite youthful but was handsome in a very different fashion.

“Effort yes,” said Tenoctris, “but not a serious risk in these days when the weakest wizard has powers that only the great ones of a generation before could manage. We’ll need something shiny. Can we send out for a mirror?”

Carus stood and grinned. He drew his dagger and held it so that the long polished blade sent sunlight dancing across the room. “Will this do?” he asked.

“Admirably!” Tenoctris said, taking the weapon by the hilt. She examined it, cocking the blade at an angle. To Sharina the edge looked sharp enough to cut the very light.

“Especially for Ilna, I believe,” the wizard murmured in satisfaction. “I think she’d appreciate the symbolism.”

She stood without difficulty and bent over the figure on the bed, holding the dagger down at her side. She laid the tips of her right index and middle fingers against Ilna’s throat, then nodded.

“Yes, all right,” Tenoctris said, straightening. “Sharina, will you…no. Your highness, will you hold this so that the surface reflects Ilna’s eyes toward the wall there?”

She gestured. “Above the painting, I mean,” she said. “Hold the blade so that if Ilna were looking, she’d see wall reflected in the blade. That’s what I mean.”

Carus nodded. He took the dagger back and brought it into position with only a glance at the girl’s still form. “Go ahead,” he said.

Tenoctris seated herself on the floor. “It’s really quite simple,” she murmured, tugging a split of bamboo from the small bundle she carried in her satchel. “I don’t need a figure for the incantation, the rosette here will do. The portal’s already open, after all….”

She closed her eyes momentarily and settled her breathing. Then, stroking her temporary wand over the eight-sided figure joining four cartouches of the mosaic, she said, “Basumia oiakintho phametamathathas!”

A face sprang into life on the blank wall. Sharina hadn’t expected anything to happen so suddenly. She’d been watching her friend on the bed, but the change at the corner of her eye made her whip her head around.

The face was a woman’s, blurred but recognizable like a fresco painted while the plaster was too wet. She was probably young and certainly savage, whether or not the spots on her cheeks were the tattoos they appeared to be. Her mouth moved to shout.

The image of light vanished. Carus cried out in a voice of despair and fury.

“What…?” said Sharina, turning.

And knew what had caused the king to shout. The bed was empty. Ilna’s slight weight had dimpled the coverlet; nothing more remained of her in this room or this world.

“By the Lady,” Hakken moaned as he rode along behind Garric and Vascay. “If the Protectors caught us, they wouldn’t hurt me worse ’n this saddle’s doing. If I had to do it again, I’d say tie me to the cursed nag’s tail and drag me along behind!”

“It’s not much farther,” Vascay said. “Pretty quick we’ll all have a chance to get outside a quart or two of Lord Thalemos’ wine, Hakken.”

They’d skirted Durassa proper to reach their employer’s estate northeast of the city. The past mile of road had been bordered to either side by vines growing in the shade of great elms whose leaves kept sunlight from blasting the tender grapes. So far as Garric could tell, the plantings were all part of a single estate. If Lord Thalemos owned it, he was a wealthy man indeed.

“They can curse the horses all they like,” Vascay murmured to Garric, “but going on four feet has gained us back the time we lost by not being navigators. There’s no way we’d have hiked this far before daylight.”

Tint vaulted onto Garric’s pillion again, making his mount whicker and bunch. Garric lifted the reins to keep the horse from bolting, though the beastgirl had startled him as well.

“Soon we sleep, Gar?” she said. “Sleep soon.”

“Not long, Tint,” Garric said. “Now stay quiet, do you hear? Just sit quiet.”

He was bone tired and the scrunch of his sword into that first Protector’s forearm still grated in his mind. His nerves were worn by the beastgirl’s refusal to ride a horse alone and her frequent jumping up and down behind him. There were extra mounts, so Garric—heavier than most men—could shift at intervals between horses. Even so, Tint’s additional eighty pounds were more than an animal should have to bear.

“Saved our lives, though, didn’t she?” said Vascay, correctly reading the anger in Garric’s stiff expression.

Garric smiled and relaxed. “So she did,” he said. “She’s like a child, but in some ways a very clever child.”

He reached behind him left-handed and patted the beastgirl’s shaggy buttock. She whimpered with pleasure.

Garric wasn’t the horseman his ancestor Carus had been, but the experience he’d gained during the past few months with the king in his mind had enabled him to ride the ten miles from the ambush site without difficulty. Vascay was almost as good—the peg leg didn’t handicap him in this any more than it did in any other fashion Garric had noticed—and others of the bandits were at least competent horsemen.

Half the band, though—well, Garric had seen grain sacks with as much business in the saddle. Still, as Vascay had said, they’d gotten where they were going. The stiffness—and bruises, for the men who’d repeatedly fallen—wouldn’t be a problem after a day and a few good meals.

“The entrance drive’s just beyond those willows,” Vascay said. “There’ll be a gatehouse and a watchman.”

He clucked and prodded his horse’s ribs with his iron-banded peg. It complained but quickened its pace slightly.

Garric grimaced and nudged his gelding with his heels. He wasn’t sure it’d obey—and loaded as it was, he wouldn’t blame the poor beast if it simply continued to plod along. To his pleased surprise the horse broke into a shambling trot, drawn by Vascay’s mount and perhaps hope of getting Garric off his back. He and the chieftain rounded the curve together.

The gatehouse was there, but empty. A real gate would’ve been pointless since the estate was unwalled, but there was a turnpike to halt those entering by road. The shaft lay on the ground, broken off at the post instead of being swung out of the way; intruders had chosen to emphasize their power and their hostility.

Vascay and Garric drew up, side by side in the moonlit road. The chieftain had slipped his javelins butt first down the top of the high boot on his remaining leg. He pulled one out and balanced it in his palm.

“Tint!” said Garric in a hoarse whisper. “Are enemies waiting for us?”

“No men here, Gar,” the beastgirl said. She slipped from the saddle. “House, Gar! We sleep in house?”

The rest of the gang was riding up behind them; though, judging from the cursing, Hakken had fallen off in the road again. Garric had touched the hilt of his sword; he deliberately released it.

“Not just yet, Tint,” he said. “We’ve got things to learn before we sleep tonight.”

“Hey, what’s going on?” Ademos demanded. “Isn’t this the place?”

“It’s the place,” said Vascay quietly, “but somebody’s been here before us. The Protectors, I’d judge. They were waiting for us to land, and they’d already been here.”

“Well, you knew the Intercessor was a wizard,” Garric said. He supposed his voice sounded cold, but the facts were obvious enough when he came to think about them. The time and place of their landing had been predicted, as only a wizard could do. But—

“Since you say Metron is a wizard powerful enough to enter Laut from Tisamur,” he continued aloud, “then he may have kept Lord Thalemos safe from the Intercessor’s men. Come on, let’s find out.”

He clucked to his horse. It whickered but refused to move. Angry and half-expecting to be shot down by a volley of arrows, Garric kicked his mount hard—harder than he meant to do. It stumbled badly but settled into a walk that took it over the fallen pike.

“Come on,” Vascay said gruffly. His horse clopped into motion to follow Garric.

“Hey, but what if they’re waiting for us?” Ademos objected.

“If you don’t shut your mouth, you’ll find the Sister waiting for you and soon!” Vascay snarled. “The monkey thinks it’s all right, doesn’t she? And by the Sister’s eyes, I’ll take her word for it after the business back where we landed!”

He cleared his throat. “Sorry, Gar,” he said. “Your friend Tint thinks it’s clear. And she’s all our friend, all of us who’re still alive.”

Three of the band had died in the ambush, and Alcomm’s left arm now ended at the elbow; he rode with his belt tied to the horn of his saddle. They’d have all been killed or captured without Tint’s warning, though.

The entrance drive had been gravelled, but grass grew thickly through it except where the feet and wheels of traffic kept the stone clear. The villa ahead had been built for show: its curving, colonnaded wings stretched to either side of a central section whose pillars rose the full three stories to an ornate pediment.

Later owners had converted the structure to more practical purposes. The openings between columns on the wings were bricked up, increasing the internal area considerably. The ornamental plantings on the north side had been removed to make space for ranks of great storage jars under a shed roof, and wagons were parked on the drive and in front of the building.

There were no lights in the villa or its outbuildings, but Garric saw shutters tremble as he and Vascay approached. He reined up fifty feet from the entrance; Vascay halted beside him.

Tint, who’d been ambling along on all fours, stood upright. “Men here, Gar,” she said. “Men scared.”

Then, hopefully, “We kill men, Gar? Be easy—they scared.”

“We’re not the Protectors come back!” Garric called. “We’re friends of Lord Thalemos. We need to talk to whoever’s in charge now, but there won’t be any trouble.”

He dismounted and walked toward the villa on foot; the gelding whickered thankfully. Garric didn’t need the height of a saddle to cow servants who were already terrified; indeed, that’d probably be counterproductive.

His thighs were on the verge of cramping anyway. Gar was exceptionally strong, but he’d never ridden a horse until Garric took over his body. The strain of staying in the saddle was different from anything Gar’s great muscles had been called on to do in the past.

Tint loped along beside him with the excitement of a just-unleashed dog. The beastgirl was too pleased to have Garric back on the ground to remember that she’d wanted to sleep.

Garric glanced behind. Vascay had dismounted but remained with the horses. The rest of the band—except for Hakken and an even more distant straggler, still coming down the drive—were climbing out of their saddles with varying degrees of skill and relief.

The horses were blown also. Bad riders were hard on their mounts, as surely as the reverse was true.

Garric stopped under the villa’s looming façade, uneasily aware that a nervous potboy on the roof could throw a tile—or a chamber pot—down to brain him. “Somebody come out!” he demanded. “We don’t mean any harm, but we need to know what’s happened here!”

“Come on out or we’ll smoke you out like badgers!” Toster called in his deep bass. “It’s been a long hard road getting here, and I’m not in the mood for nonsense!”

Light flared. Ademos had struck sparks into a fireset of straw matting snatched from a wagon. He stepped away from it. The yellow flames threw stark light over the bandits’ faces, making them look even harder and more desperate than Garric knew them to be.

The front door opened. The man who came out was middle-aged and heavy—but his weight was more muscle than not, very different from what Garric expected. He had a short beard and a truculent expression, though he hadn’t been foolish enough to meet the bandits armed.

“You’re the majordomo?” Garric asked.

“I’m Lord Thalemos’ stablemaster,” the man said. “My name’s Orphin. You want the majordomo, you’ll likely find him hiding in a clothespress in one of the storage rooms.”

He spat. “Not that I can see why you’d want the lazy coward,” he added conversationally.

“Who we want is Lord Thalemos,” Garric said, “or his advisor Metron. They sent us to find something for them. We’ve come back and need to talk to them.”

Vascay came to join him. He nodded affably to Orphin but didn’t intrude on the conversation. Tint scratched her spine with her toes, then yawned and curled up at Garric’s feet. Her back was a warm pressure against his left ankle.

“You want Lord Thalemos, you’re too late,” Orphin said, frowning in mild surprise as he took in the beastgirl’s presence. “A gang of Protectors came down on us at dusk and took him away with them. As for this foreign wizard”—he spat again, this time slapping a moth off one of the trumpet vines wrapping the adjacent pillar—“I’d’ve said he was the one who called the Intercessor’s heroes down on the master, but he didn’t go off with them. Metron hasn’t been around since the Protectors come riding up the drive. One of the girls said she thought it was him she saw running toward the boathouse right before the trumpet blew from the gate, but I don’t know. The Protectors searched there too, and they didn’t find him.”

The stablemaster’s grim visage melted into a look of despair. “Shepherd help me, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I guess they’ll send in an overseer from the Intercessor’s staff. Then what’ll happen to us?”

“They didn’t come out with officials?” Vascay asked. “It was just the Protectors?”

“That was enough, wasn’t it?” Orphin said. “There must’ve been fifty of ’em. We couldn’t do anything to stop them, not even if we’d been willing to hide in the woods the rest of our lives.”

He spat again, hitting another moth. “Which I’m not, seeing’s I’ve a wife and children, whatever you think about it.”

“I think if I had a wife and children,” Vascay said quietly, “I might have made the same choice. You’ll put us up for now—”

“They’ll be coming back!” Orphin said. “You can’t stay here, they’ll kill us all if—”

“You’ll put us up for now,” Vascay repeated, twitching the bundle of javelins to emphasize his words, “in the stables, and you’ll find us food. After you’ve done that, we’ll talk some more. But we’re not going anywhere till we’ve had some food and sleep.”

“And something to drink,” Hakken called in a frustrated, cracking voice. “A whole lot to drink!”

“Yeah, all right,” said Orphin. “Get out of sight in the stables. I’ll send over a hamper and a jug.”

He shook his head sadly. “Most likely I’ll bring the food myself,” he corrected himself. “Sister take ’em, they’re all scared to so much as lift their heads.”

A large death’s-head moth flew toward Orphin’s eyes, then away. The stablemaster scowled, then spat. His aim was as accurate as usual, but the moth hovered for a flickering instant instead of continuing its path uninterrupted. The gobbet sailed between Garric and Vascay, then splattered the ground near Toster’s foot.

“Sorry,” the stablemaster muttered. “Yeah, I’ll take you back to the stables. Otherwise, Pusta and Jelf’ll think you’re coming for them, and the Lady knows what they’ll do.”

The death’s-head moth flew toward Garric’s eyes. He threw an arm up, startled. It circled his head.

“Come on, brethren,” Vascay said over his shoulder. “We’ve got straw to sleep on and food coming.”

Tint, aroused by Garric’s sudden movement, came alert. Her head turned upward; her muscles bunched with the lethal certainty of a crossbow cocking.

“No, Tint!” Garric said.

She leaped, her arms outstretched to snatch the big moth. Garric, faster than he’d known he could be, grabbed the beastgirl’s throat and held her back.

“No, Tint,” Garric repeated as he relaxed his grip on the girl. The moth lifted a few feet higher, describing figure-eights between Garric and Vascay.

“Is she all right?” Orphin said uneasily. “She hasn’t got hydrophobia, has she?”

“Gar mad?” the beastgirl whimpered, rubbing against Garric’s leg. “Gar not mad, please?”

“She’s fine,” Garric snapped. “We’re all fine.”

He stroked Tint’s back, and in a milder tone said, “I’m not angry, but you’ve got to do what I tell you. All right?”

Ignoring her moans of appreciation, Garric swept Vascay and the stablemaster with his eyes. “Orphin,” he said, “take the men to the stables. Vascay and I have other business.”

He crooked a smile at the chieftain. “Brother Vascay,” he said. “You and I are going to follow that moth”—he gestured with a casual finger—“and see where it leads. All right?”

Garric knew he was on the verge of hysteria, but he had to keep going even though everything seemed ludicrously funny. His body was tired, and part of him wanted to break into peals of laughter. What was left of his reason told him that he couldn’t drown the scrunch of steel on bone that way, maybe no way….

Vascay frowned, then twitched his javelins toward the puzzled stablemaster. “You heard him, Orphin,” he said. “Get the Brethren bedded down.”

He turned his attention to his men. “Brother Hame, you’d be a good one to give orders when there’s no time to vote. Not so, Brethren?”

Ademos muttered, but the others nodded agreement.

Vascay looked up at the moth. It was lengthening its twisted loops toward the villa’s north wing. Moonlight threw the skull on the back of its wings into bright relief.

“Sure, let’s go,” he said, starting off in the direction the moth was indicating. “This something your friend—”

His javelin butts wagged toward Tint, frisking at Garric’s side.

“—told you about?”

“No,” said Garric. “Metron’s a wizard, though. If he was powerful enough to get away from the Intercessor’s men, then he’d find a way to bring us to wherever he’s hiding.”

“And you think this bug’s our guide?” Vascay said.

“I think I’ve never seen a moth act like this one does,” Garric replied quietly. “If it flies off into a redbud and ignores us, then we’ll look for some other way to find Metron.”

The moon gave good light for the moment, but he and Vascay would be in shadow if they went around the building. He supposed they’d manage.

The moth kept closer. It wasn’t worried about being eaten, Garric supposed; not that insects had brain enough to worry, but he remained certain that the mind animating this one wasn’t an insect’s. Moonlight turned the moth’s gray wing scales silver and darkened the brown ones to black.

“The Intercessor knew where we’d be landing,” Vascay said. He was favoring his left leg. He walked at his normal pace, but he hunched slightly every time the peg came down. “But he didn’t know we’d win through. And though the Intercessor knew Lord Thalemos was getting the ring that’d break his power, he didn’t know it until just before it happened.”

“Eh?” said Garric. Even the brief time he’d been effective ruler of the Isles had taught him that you don’t always act immediately on information you’ve received. Kingship is a complicated business. “He might’ve known long before he chose to move on Thalemos, mightn’t he? To see who’d join the rebel.”

“Aye,” said Vascay, glancing at Garric with a grin. “But he’d have sent an estate manager out with the troops if he’d been planning this for more than the time it took to alert a company of Protectors. Not so?”

Garric laughed. “So.”

Instead of curving back around the north wing of the villa, the moth’s flutters and curlicues were leading them through a tract that had once been an ornamental garden but hadn’t been kept up for a generation. The tightly planted clump of boxwoods, ragged but still retaining some of their original shape, must have been a maze.

“So,” said Vascay, “while I’d sooner not be fighting a wizard, I knew what Echeon was before I started out. It therefore pleases me that he’s got limitations despite all his powers.”

He looked at Garric, this time not smiling. “And it pleases me that you came to us when you did, Brother Prince,” he added. “Because however much help Metron’s wizardry may be to us, I put more trust in your wit and your sword.”

Garric forced a smile of acknowledgment; he felt embarrassed. “You’ve honored me with your trust,” he said.

As he spoke, he thought of all the others who trusted him, who needed him. One way or another, he would get back where he belonged.

“Where Gar go?” Tint asked. “Tint sleep soon?”

“It looks,” Garric said, “like we’re headed for that copse of willows. There must be something there besides trees or there wouldn’t be a path.”

“House there,” said the beastgirl. “Pond there too. We sleep in house, Gar?”

At least Tint didn’t seem to be as hungry as Garric himself was. Though he hadn’t let her eat the big moth, she’d been snapping down tidbits as they went along, like a boy walking through a berry patch. In her case it was mostly crickets, though.

“That’s the boathouse Orphin talked about,” Vascay said. “But he said the Protectors searched it, too. Can a wizard make himself invisible?”

Garric shrugged. “Some can, maybe,” he said. “But I don’t know why Metron would have to come out here instead of going invisible in the main house.”

Vascay nodded. He took the javelins one at a time into his right hand, checking their balance. Tint would’ve warned them if anybody was waiting for them in the copse, but Garric raised his sword a few fingers’ breadth and let it slip back in the scabbard. There was no harm in needless preparation, after all.

The boathouse was an open-sided structure with a peaked tile roof; two small skiffs were stored upturned on the roof trusses. A short dock led from the building into a pond that extended at least a bowshot to right and left; better light might have shown it to be even broader. The water was shallow, though; the moonlight shimmered through cattails well out from the soggy margins.

Vascay rapped a skiff with a javelin butt. The gesture was pointless, a mere placeholder while the chief’s mind tried to puzzle out the problem.

Tint leaped suddenly onto a truss. Vascay jumped back, cocking a javelin. Garric had his sword half-drawn before the men realized the beastgirl had just caught a tree frog. She popped it into her mouth.

The moth was fluttering in tight figures at the end of the dock. “Maybe he’s breathing through a reed.” Vascay said.

He walked onto the structure—it was less than six feet long—and knelt. At first he fished in the water with his bare hand; then he thrust a javelin butt first under the boards to extend his reach. He brought it up with mud streaming from the ferrule and lower shaft.

“Nothing,” Vascay said, rising heavily. “Maybe he was there and then moved when the Protectors had gone, but I don’t see them not checking it themselves. Those scum have a lot of experience looking for folks who’re trying to hide.”

But the moth wasn’t over the dock: it circled above the clear water beyond. Garric stepped past Vascay—the boards creaked but held—and walked to the end. All he could see on the water was moonlight.

“Gar?” Tint called. She hopped to the floor of the boathouse with a thump.

Garric lay flat and reached into the water. It was shockingly cold, spring-fed. He couldn’t touch the bottom.

He reached behind him. “Vascay, give me one of your—” he began and broke off, because Vascay was already laying a javelin in his hand. The missiles had bodkin points for penetration, so Garric didn’t have to worry about cutting himself with an edge.

Garric slid the shaft sideways through the water. It touched something and twisted back in his hand. Maybe a rock, of course: no hollow reed disturbed the pond’s surface here. If the wizard was hiding here, he wasn’t breathing….

But the moth drew tight circles over Garric’s probing arm, fanning his biceps with its great wings.

Garric laid the javelin beside him and rolled onto his back to unbuckle his sword belt. Vascay dried the missile on the hem of his outer tunic. “Find something?” he asked.

“Something,” said Garric. “I don’t know what.”

He swung himself feetfirst into the water. The cold knotted his belly muscles. He bent down and grasped a plump man lying on his back under four feet of water. He lifted, surprised at the effort. When the figure broke surface, Garric saw the fellow had crossed his arms over his chest and was holding an anchor in either hand.

“Got him!” Vascay cried, kneeling to help lift the wizard. “It’s Metron all right. That’s the clothes he wears!”

They were both strong men, but it was a struggle to flop Metron onto the dock. His dark robe was slashed white across the front. It weighed as much as the body did now that it was waterlogged, but initially the anchors on which his fingers were locked would’ve been necessary to keep him down.

“Is he dead?” Garric said, gasping in the pond for a moment before he heaved himself up. “I don’t see—”

Metron spluttered. His eyelids quivered open, then closed again as he turned his head sideways and vomited water.

Garric lifted himself with a splash; water continued to run from his tunics. He glanced over his shoulder.

The moth had fallen into the pond, lifeless. Its spread wings swirled slowly in the current.

Cashel’s skin tingled as the gout of red wizardlight washed him. For an instant he saw the world as a negative image of itself, the shadows bright but moonlight on the sea a streak of blackness.

A sailor cried out in terror, though none of the men Cashel could see were any more injured by the light than he himself was. The fellow screaming wasn’t afraid of any thing, he was just afraid.

Though there might be plenty of real reasons for fear, of course. Cashel knew that from his past experience with wizards.

The gush of light from the beach faded; the stones of the ruined temple now had a rosy glow, as if they’d been soaked with dye. Cashel sensed things happening at the corners of his eyes, but his focus was on the sailors before him.

“Come on, you cowards!” Captain Mounix shouted. “If we’re ever going to be safe, we’ve got to have the girl with us!”

He paused, probably hoping that his men would rush Cashel without him. A sailor threw his club at Cashel’s head. Cashel batted it back over the cliff edge with a quick twist of his left hand on the quarterstaff. The club missed Mounix by less than its own spinning width.

“Come on!” the captain screamed. To Cashel’s surprise he charged up the steps with his sword held out before him like a spear.

Cashel could’ve stopped Mounix with a straight thrust; with his full strength behind it, the blunt ferrule would’ve gone through the captain’s breastbone to smash his spine. Cashel killed when he needed to, but he couldn’t take the sailors as a serious danger despite their numbers. He spun his staff horizontally, swiping the sword out of Mounix’s hand.

The blade rang off a pillar and rebounded. Mounix gave a cry of horror and jumped back, gripping his numbed right hand with his left. Another sailor, drawn to attack with his wooden spear by the captain’s example, tried to backpedal also. Cashel reversed his spin and broke the man’s knee.

Two sailors pulled their screaming comrade off the temple porch. Cashel waited for the next attempt. He was panting, more to feed the emotions surging through his veins than because he’d really exerted himself.

The temple was changing. The red light didn’t just stain the walls, it was rebuilding them. The wear and fractures swelled with a liquid translucence that had the texture of stone when Cashel tested a pillar by brushing it with his elbow.

“Come on, move up,” Hook said. “All together, slow and steady. Possin, Ruttal, Wallach…with me, all together.”

The carpenter slid his right foot ahead a half step, his spear advanced. Instead of waiting this time, Cashel strode forward with his quarterstaff spinning over his head. Hook screamed and jabbed blindly. The quarterstaff cracked the spearshaft in half just ahead of where Hook’s left hand gripped it.

The rangy sailor who’d moved up also now tripped over Hook and sprawled toward Cashel. Cashel broke the man’s collarbone and stepped back.

“Who’s next?” he growled. They’d gotten his blood up by now. “Who wants his head cracked next?”

“Monsters!” shouted a sailor. “There’s monsters coming out of the sea!”

“Lady help us!” another man cried. “They’re all around! Lady save us!”

Cashel couldn’t see what they were talking about. The sailors he could see, however, were all turning to look behind them. Cashel took the opportunity to check how Tilphosa was keeping.

The clinging red glow of the temple walls lighted her from all directions, but even its softness couldn’t change the girl’s stark expression. Tilphosa still held the block of stone she’d taken for a weapon, but despair had subtly eroded her spirit.

“Metra’s raised the Archai,” she said. “I was afraid that was what she was doing.”

The pedestal for the God’s image remained empty, but the screening wall behind it, the reredos, had returned to its full majesty despite the fragments of the stone original littering the floor. The carving was complete in solid light: on it insect monsters battled lizard monsters, and in the center with Her arms spread stood the Lady crowned as the Moon. Cashel saw no mercy, no comfort in Her cold visage.

Cashel shrugged. “All right, then,” he said. “We’ll fight the Archai. Whoever they—”

Around the sides of the temple, pressing the sailors back from both directions, came one set of the monsters from the reredos. The Archai walked upright, and each was each was as tall as a woman, but they weren’t remotely human.

The Archai’s legs joined their bodies in the middle rather than at the lower end as with men. Their abdomens wobbled beneath, making the creatures look a little like praying mantises. The middle pair of their six limbs ended in fingers, which they now clenched tightly against their chests to keep them out of the way.

The Archai’s uppermost arms had sharp, saw-toothed edges with small pincers in place of hands. These were outstretched as they came on.

A sailor shrieked and charged the Archai, swinging his long club in both hands in a desperate attempt to break through. He crushed the wedge-shaped head of the first insect, but others leaped on him from both sides with their arms chopping.

Blood splashed in all directions. The sailor screamed; he continued to scream as his body sank under repeated blows. He must have been dead for some time before his slayers stopped hacking at the quivering corpse. Beside him lay the Archa he’d killed, its limbs twitching in six separate rhythms.

More Archai joined those already confronting the sailors. The men backed slowly. One jabbed his spear at an Archa. The point glanced from the creature’s chitinous chest. The Archa grabbed the shaft with its pincered forelimbs.

The sailor jerked back hard, dragging the Archa along with him. The sailor squealed and dropped his weapon, but another man smashed the Archa’s shoulder with his club and jumped away before the other monsters could respond. The wounded Archa collapsed and began worrying the spearshaft with its beak.

Shoulder to narrow shoulder, the insectile mass advanced without haste. The sailors backed up the temple steps, still rightly wary of Cashel’s quarterstaff.

“Tilphosa, have you got any ideas?” Cashel asked, his eyes on the closing ring of monsters. “Because you know these people, I mean.”

“Cashel, they’re not people,” the girl cried. “There’s no help for us now!”

Metra came up the track from the beach, swaying on a driftwood litter carried by four Archai. The wizard looked drawn, her plump features more washed out than moonlight alone could explain. Her eyes met Cashel’s over the heads of the frightened sailors.

“Barbarian!” she called, her voice cracking. “Master Cashel! Is Lady Tilphosa all right? Show her to me!”

“Tilphosa’s fine,” Cashel growled. “And she’s going to stay that way. You aren’t giving orders here, Metra.”

The ring of Archai continued its slow pressure, squeezing the sailors inward the way a blacksnake’s coils suffocate a vole. Friends had dragged the man with a broken shoulder back from the temple; he lay on the ground, unconscious from pain. As the sailors retreated, the Archai reached him on their spindly legs.

Two of the insects knelt; their legs bent backward like a sheep’s, not a man’s. Their forearms hammered like cleavers, reducing the victim to a bloody carcase.

A sailor wailed in furious despair as he hurled his club, hitting the chest and one arm of a kneeling Archa. Purple ichor leaked through the chitin, but the remaining forearm chopped three times more before the creature slumped dead over the body of its victim.

“Metra, you’ve gone mad!” Tilphosa called in a clear voice. “I won’t let the Archai take me! I’ll die first!”

And how will you manage that? Cashel wondered, because the girl’s only weapon was the chunk of stone, which didn’t seem like much of a way to commit suicide. Metra might not know that, of course; but it wasn’t clear to Cashel that the wizard would care, either. She’d made up her mind to crush everything in her way, and often people who got into that state forgot the goal they’d started out with.

Metra made a strident noise with her tongue close to her palate. Cashel hadn’t heard the Archai speak. They seemed to understand the wizard’s cry, however, because they stopped where they were.

The insects’ narrow chests expanded and shrank with a slight whistling as they breathed. A sailor was crying, and another whimpered in pain.

“Barbarian, I offer you your life!” Metra said in the near silence. “Turn Lady Tilphosa over to me, and I’ll spare you. I’ll spare the others too, if you like.”

Metra’s voice was stronger than before, but she still sat upright with difficulty. Raising this army of monsters had drained her badly, despite the assistance the powdered amulet had given her.

“The others are no business of mine,” Cashel growled. “Tilphosa is. She says she’s not coming with you.”

He heard the girl’s gasp of relief, though she must know as well as he did that he was no better than bragging. Oh, he’d fight the Archai till they brought him down; but they would bring him down, sure as sunrise, and they probably wouldn’t be very long about the business either.

What Metra and the Archai did with Lady Tilphosa then—well, Cashel or-Kenset didn’t have to worry about that.

Metra’s face contorted. She trilled like an angry cicada. A wave of Archai leaped forward, not the whole mass but only half the front rank. Spread out, the insect warriors had full scope to slash into the sailors. There was a bedlam of screams, crackling, and the soft choonk of axe-edged forelimbs slicing into meat.

For a moment Cashel poised. If he leaped into the struggle, his staff spinning, he could smash his way through…several Archai. Probably a dozen, possibly a score. Metra had raised an army of the monsters that not even a scholar could count.

Cashel turned into the nave of the temple. There was no darkness, because the walls themselves glowed. The Lady of the Moon glared down, merciless and implacable.

“Cashel?” cried the girl.

Cashel swung his quarterstaff butt first with all the strength of his arms and torso, smashing it like a battering ram into the reredos of light. Bolts of red and blue fire ricocheted about the room.

The stone screen had only been three fingers’ thick; Cashel’s blow would’ve shattered it. Its ghost in wizardlight stood the shock, numbing Cashel’s hands to the wrists. Metra trilled with desperate urgency.

Cashel didn’t drop the staff. He stepped back and spun the smooth hickory with the familiar hand-over-hand motion, working feeling into his muscles again. Tilphosa stood in a corner—her eyes open, her expression unreadable.

Cashel brought the staff around again, leading this time with his right hand and the other ferrule. The iron struck on the Lady’s sculptured face and headdress.

The reredos flew into shards like sunlight glancing from a windswept pond. Beyond was not the storage room but rather a swirl of pastel colors.

“Come on!” Cashel shouted, but Tilphosa was already jumping through. Cashel followed, his staff thrust out before him like a lance.

For an instant he thought he heard Captain Mounix’ voice. Then everything was brightness and a chaotic roar.