Mistress of the Catacombs

16

Alecto brightened visibly at sight of the straggling village. She stood straight and paused to adjust her wolfskin cape to show her breasts to better advantage.

People—women and children, as best Ilna could tell—were working in small plots of corn and vines scattered as widely as the houses. There hadn’t been any attempt to terrace the slopes, so the plantings were in whatever bits and pieces of soil that nature offered.

Goats browsing the steeper slopes were the first to notice Ilna and her companion. The animals raised their heads and stared, drawing the attention of a herdboy. He made a trumpet of his hands, and called, “Yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!”

His cry carried through the broad valley like a hawk’s piercing shriek. Everybody looked at the approaching strangers. Men appeared from the woods, some of them carrying tools. One ran into a house and came out with arrows and a bow, which he proceeded to string.

“Why don’t they have dogs?” Alecto wondered aloud. “Still, this is the way people are meant to live. Plenty of room between them, but not just wasteland like between here and that cursed city. We’ll be fine here.”

“Yes,” Ilna said, though the only thing she agreed with was the notion that she’d be able to handle whatever chanced to come up. The villagers looked wary of strangers—as who wouldn’t be, off as they were in a place that saw few visitors if any?—but they didn’t seem hostile. The bow was the only weapon she saw, though several of the men appeared with iron-headed axes that could split a skull if put to the purpose.

The stone temple was smaller than those Ilna had seen in cities, but the design was similar enough that she was sure of what it was. Four slender columns held up the low-peaked roof of a porch. The building itself was small and squarish, though only a sliver showed from the outside. The rest was carved back into the hillside.

A man came out of the adjacent house, wearing a red robe with gold embroidery and fringe. On his head was a tiara of mother-of-pearl in silver settings, and he was still trying to buckle a matching belt. It had been made for a slimmer man, and the attempt to lengthen it with cords hadn’t been very successful.

There was a real path here, though it was rocky and as steep as any other part of the trail they’d been following. Alecto took the lead and, when the trail forked, followed the branch toward the temple.

Ilna said nothing. One of them had to be in front on the narrow track. While the particular choice of leader wasn’t the one she’d have made, she didn’t have any real reason to object.

Three men, one of them with the bow and an arrow nocked though not drawn, joined the plump old man on the temple porch. That fellow, the priest, finished tugging at his belt and faced the strangers.

“Do you come from the Mistress?” he called. He was trying to be threatening; his voice was powerful, but his appearance wasn’t up to the job. “If you do, then go away now! We watch the Gate and want nothing to do with your false God!”

Alecto halted on the path and held up two flight feathers she’d saved from the wings of the grouse she’d charmed down for the past night’s dinner. She muttered a spell. There was a gleam of blue wizardlight.

A complete image of the grouse flapped out of her hand and flew toward a giant chestnut growing among the houses. It was an impressive proof of her skill, though Alecto lost control before the image reached a branch. There was another flash, and the two feathers fluttered slowly down.

Alecto staggered. Ilna stepped around her, and said, “We don’t worship any Mistress. Her priests were hunting for us. Our skills tell us we can find safety here.”

She gestured back to her companion. Alecto had recovered from the effort of her spell, but she didn’t try to push Ilna out of the way again.

“Help us, and we can help you!” Ilna said.

The four leaders held a quick conclave, looking down at the strangers and back to their fellows. The priest tried to meet Ilna’s eyes, but only for a moment.

More men had come out of the woods, though the whole population of the village couldn’t have been as great as that of Barca’s Hamlet. The younger children in the fields now stood close to their mothers; older ones had drifted into pairs and trios. All of them stared at Ilna and Alecto.

The priest turned to Ilna again. The bowman tucked the arrow he’d nocked through his sash, where he carried three others. The men beside him rested the heads of their tools, an axe and a maul, on the ground.

“Greetings, wizards!” the priest said. “We of the Gate are always glad to have visitors, so long as they behave as befits strangers in our land. We’ll feast on kid in your honor tonight, and you’ll sleep in the temple for as long as you stay with us.”

The man with the axe, a cadaverous fellow standing a head taller than anyone else in the village, frowned and muttered in the priest’s ear. The priest frowned back and snapped, “This is my decision, Pletnav!”

Bowing apologetically to Ilna, he explained, “Mistress wizard, some of us here at the Gate don’t believe in taking the life of any animal. I’m Arthlan or-Wassti, Gatekeeper and Priest of the God, though, and I decree that it’s perfectly proper to kill and eat a kid for you.”

Arthlan’s expression changed to something between concerned and hopeful. “Ah, that is—unless you wizard mistresses refrain from eating meat yourselves?”

“Refrain?” said Alecto with a delighted chortle. “You try me, Arthlan! And you’d better make it two kids if anybody else plans to get some. I’ve been hiking all day, and I’m not half-hungry!”

“Very well,” said Arthlan. “Oyra—”

He glanced over to the woman who’d come out of the house beside the temple. She was as plump as the priest but scarcely half his age.

“—take a kid from my own herd. One of the kids.”

The woman pursed her lips and spoke in a voice too low for Ilna to follow the words. The people here had a nasal accent quite different from the lilt of people in Barca’s Hamlet and different also from the clipped tones of Donelle.

“Yes, woman!” the priest said. “The whole village will share!”

He glared around at his neighbors. “After our guests and ourselves have eaten, of course,” he added, his tone becoming less agitated with each syllable. By the end of the short sentence, Arthlan sounded as smoothly cheerful as he’d been before the question of expense arose.

“I’m Ilna os-Kenset,” Ilna said, “and I’d prefer you call me Ilna in the future. My companion Alecto—

She wasn’t sure whether Alecto’s folk didn’t use the father’s name in their formal address or if the wild girl simply hadn’t bothered ever to tell her.

“—and I were driven from Donelle, as I said, by the priests of this Mistress. You’re offering to put us up in the temple?”

Maybe Alecto didn’t know her father.

The villagers were beginning to shift, not dispersing but rather clumping together in groups which whispered with animation among themselves, all the time watching the strangers. Occasionally someone would leave one gathering and trot over to another a furlong away. The scattered nature of the community meant there was no common meeting place like the square in front of the inn in Barca’s Hamlet.

“Why yes,” Arthlan said. “Would you like to see the building? It’s very comfortable, I’m sure you’ll find.”

“I’ll get bedding,” said the man with the axe. He shouldered it, and said to the bowman, “You too, Gorlan. You’ve got a coverlet extra since Magda moved in with Peese, haven’t you?”

“Sure, show us this place,” Alecto said, eyeing the temple with hesitation. “But it may be I’ll sleep in the woods again tonight. I don’t…”

Her voice trailed off. “I don’t like stone buildings,” might have been the way she’d planned to finish the sentence; though Ilna suspected that in truth the wild girl had never seen a building of dressed stone before she saw Donelle. “Anyway, maybe I’ll sleep in the woods.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” the priest said, gesturing them to follow as he waddled to the temple. The trail was broad enough for two people to walk abreast. Most of the other tracks had room for only one set of feet, and those had to be placed carefully to the side of the still-narrower trench goat hooves had worn in the middle over the decades. “You’ll see.”

“Who do you worship here?” Ilna asked. She didn’t believe in the Great Gods, but there were forces with power over men whether or not they were Gods. She’d known that long before she saw the congregation in Donelle raise the Pack. If these folk had similar rites, then she wasn’t going to stay to watch them.

“Who?” repeated Arthlan. “Well, God, mistress.”

The priest looked back over his shoulder at her with an expression of puzzlement. “God was placed here on Earth to guard the entrance to Hell, preventing the foul spirits of the Underworld from walking among mankind.”

The temple had a heavy wooden door with two outward-opening leaves. Both were swung back; they didn’t appear to have been closed in years or decades. The porch floor and the threshold slab were worn by the use of ages.

Arthlan stepped inside. The doorway was low; the priest didn’t duck, but Ilna—no taller than he but less familiar with the passage—did out of instinct. The only furnishings were the stone benches built into either sidewall. Instead of a back wall, a natural cave plunged into the depths of the hill. It narrowed swiftly, but Ilna couldn’t see the end of it as she bent to look in.

“Where’s your God?” she asked, doubtful and therefore suspicious. “Don’t you have a statue in here?”

Arthlan drew himself up with more dignity than Ilna had thought the plump little man possessed. “Mistress,” he said, “we don’t worship a statue. There’s no place for images here at the Gate of Hell. Our God is real.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ilna, folding her hands behind her. “I misspoke. It won’t happen again.”

She was sorry; furious with herself, in fact. She believed in very little, and most of that was negative, but she had no business discounting other people’s faith simply because she had none of her own.

Alecto entered, scratching her ribs under the wolfskin cape. She ran her left hand over the back wall, smiling at the feel of the natural rock. “Why didn’t you say it was a cave?” she said cheerfully. “I’ve slept in caves before.”

Like Ilna, she squatted to peer down the cave’s throat. Frowning, she pinched up dust from the floor and released it. The dust fell straight; there were no air currents, in or out of the cave.

“Has anybody gone down that?” Alecto asked the priest as she stood. “It’s big enough for a man back as far as I can see.”

“It’s not a place for men, mistress,” Arthlan said with the same stiff dignity. “Only God and demons can go through the Gate.”

“There’s water down there,” Ilna said, nodding toward the opening because she didn’t care to point. “I can smell it in the air.”

“Perhaps there is, mistress,” Arthlan said, “but I wouldn’t know that. We draw our water from the spring beside Taenan’s house. We’ll provide you with a bucket of it; more, if you’d like.”

Ilna stepped back onto the porch. A number of women were coming from both directions, struggling up the slope under loads of bedding and spruce branches.

Ilna frowned at the latter, then realized they must be meant for mattresses. People slept on feather beds in the palace, but what she’d expected here were leather cases stuffed with straw like those of Barca’s Hamlet. Springy boughs should be comfortable so long as the blanket over them was thick enough that the needles didn’t poke through.

Alecto kicked one of the side benches. The front of it was mortared stone, but the back was cut from the living rock. “Suits me,” she said. “Now, how about some of that food you were offering a bit ago?”

Arthlan bowed low. “We’ll eat at my house,” he said. He gestured the wild girl out of the temple ahead of him. “The goat won’t have seethed yet, but we can begin with porridge.”

Ilna paused to examine the temple doors. The panels were thick, made of mortised boards. The hinges were hardwood. They hadn’t been used in some time, but they were sturdy; so was the crossbar leaning against the interior wall.

She and Alecto should be able to sleep safely tonight, even if the villagers were more hostile than there was any reason to believe.

Garric rose from where he’d been sitting on the millipede’s head. The driver had given no signal that it was aware of Garric’s presence; neither did it show that it knew he’d left it to walk back past Metron to the second segment and the others waiting.

Thalemos would have joined him on the head, but Garric had wanted some time alone. He’d faced out over the creature’s course, but he was looking into his own mind.

The driver had no more intruded on Garric’s thoughts than the millipede itself had. The Archa’s middle arms occasionally touched either the spike or the feather of its wand to the thin, flexible chitin connecting the millipede’s head to its first body segment. Garric couldn’t see any change in the creature’s course, but presumably the driver knew its business. It knew better than Garric did, at any rate.

Metron was alert again, sitting cross-legged on the first segment. He looked up from his reading, this time a vellum scroll instead of the codex he’d had out before. His eyes met Garric’s; then, with a deliberate lack of expression, he went back to the scroll.

The snub angered Garric more than he’d have expected. Instead of walking past with a nod as he’d expected to, he stopped, and said, “Master Metron. How long are we going to be on this creature’s back?”

Metron looked up angrily. Fatigue and danger had taken their toll on the wizard’s temper. “That depends on matters I can’t be sure of without expending more effort than I choose to do,” he said. “I’ll inform you when we arrive.”

“That’s as may be,” Garric said, raising his voice slightly. “But since you’re ignorant, then we need to stop now to get water and perhaps food. Will you inform the driver, or shall I find a way to communicate with him myself?”

“Are you—” Metron said. He caught himself when Garric shifted his stance. The slight motion, not quite a threat, drew the wizard’s attention to the man he spoke to. A moment before he’d been taking everyone but himself as mere pawns to be moved at his will.

“That is…” Metron covered smoothly, letting the scroll slip closed in his lap. “Master Gar, I don’t know precisely how far we must proceed, but we should reach it in a few hours at most. I hope you and your colleagues can do without water for that long.”

He gestured with both hands. “I assure you, time is of the essence,” he added. “Not only for the success of our endeavors, but for our very survival. We’ve escaped one set of dangers, but this place has many others. The sooner we’re out of it, the better.”

Garric said nothing for a moment. Part of him wanted to hang the oily little worm upside down over empty air and listen to him beg for his life. That was pointless, though. It wouldn’t remove Echeon from the throne of Laut, and it wouldn’t bring back Tint….

“I’ll take it under advisement with my fellows and Lord Thalemos,” Garric said coldly, turning his back on the wizard. “We’ll inform you of our decision.”

It was petty to leave Metron worrying about something Garric had no intention of carrying through on, but Garric needed some release for his anger. He walked across the quivering, chitinous joint, then up onto the next broad hoop of armor to rejoin the watching Brethren.

Ten of the bandits had made it this far. None of the survivors had wounds that they seemed to regard as serious; not even Hame’s slashed arm was incapacitating. They watched Garric’s approach with a mixture of fear and hope.

“So, lad,” Vascay said. “Any news for us?”

Garric shrugged. “A few hours,” he said. “Perhaps less. That one”—he twitched his head back toward Metron—“wasn’t sure.” He paused, then added, “I think Metron is telling the truth that far, at least.”

Thalemos grimaced unhappily. “I’ve just been telling your, your Brethren, Master Gar,” he said, “that I have no more idea than you do about what Metron intends. He told me that I’d wed a noblewoman from Tisamur, and that she and I between us would overcome the power of the Intercessors. This, though…”

Thalemos looked momentarily hopeful. “Her name is Lady Tilphosa bos-Pholial,” he said. “Perhaps you gentlemen have heard of her?”

“How could we hear about somebody from Tisamur, when nobody’s been off Laut in the thousand years since the Intercessors took over?” Ademos said peevishly.

Vascay looked at Garric with a raised eyebrow.

“I’ve never heard of her,” Garric said, answering the unspoken question. “On any of the places I’ve been.”

“As it chances,” said Vascay carefully, “I may have heard the name. On Serpent’s Isle, where we were looking for the ring our wizard friend has now.”

“There wasn’t nobody on that place but us, chief,” Toster said. The big man furrowed his brow like a fresh-turned field. “And more snakes than the Sister’s dungeon has!”

“Yes, but there were statue bases, Brother Toster,” Vascay said. “One of them read Thalemos, Earl of Laut”—he nodded to the youth in friendly fashion—“and Brother Gar found the rest of the statue with the ring. Eh?”

“Yes,” said Garric, trying vainly to dredge detail from Gar’s fuddled memories. Garric or-Reise hadn’t been present when the base was found; to Gar it must have been no more than another block of stone in a place that had too many of them already.

“A statue of me on Serpent’s Isle?” Thalemos said in amazement. “But…I thought everything there was ancient and in ruins?”

“Aye, so it is,” Vascay agreed, “and the statue was of an age with the rest, judging by the way the marble was pitted. But that’s neither here nor there.”

Which wasn’t quite true, Garric thought, glancing in the direction of Metron. The wizard watched intently, obviously fearful that the bandits and his ward were planning to overturn his desires with brute strength. He gave Garric a broad, false smile when their eyes met.

Thalemos was genuinely surprised to hear what the ruins on Serpent’s Isle really were. That meant that he was as innocent—as ignorant—of Metron’s plans as he claimed to be. Knowing that didn’t change the way Garric felt about the wizard, but it gave him reason to trust Thalemos.

Vascay went on, “Across the porch from where we found the one of you—”

He grinned at Thalemos. Garric had seen enough of the bandit chief to realize there really was humor in his expression. In another world, Vascay would have been an excellent schoolteacher. Of course, in another world Garric or-Reise would be managing the family inn in Barca’s Hamlet.

“—was a second, the base and the legs besides; though the stone was rotted to a couple sticks. Enough of the base had been protected by clay that I could read the first part of the legend: T-i-l-p-h-o.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t bother worrying about the rest; it wasn’t what Master Metron had sent us to find, that’s all it meant to me. But it seems it might’ve meant something to you, eh, lad?”

Thalemos looked from Vascay to Metron, then beyond the wizard to take in the forest of giant grass and brambles through which the millipede paced.

“Yes,” the youth said, “it must. But may the Lady forsake my soul if I know what it is!”

“I don’t understand any of this!” said Toster; and Garric smiled, because he was so perfectly in agreement with the big man.

Tilphosa’s wrists were covered with a poultice of mashed comfrey, attached by dock leaves tied on with string twisted from a birch tree’s inner bark. It’d given Cashel an extra degree of pleasure to use vegetation the way men were meant to use it, knowing that the Helpers’d be in screaming despair if they could watch him.

Cashel had nothing against plants, any more than he had against the sky or the sea lapping the beach back home. But he knew what a tree’s place in the universe was, and he wasn’t bragging when he figured that his own place was higher than that.

Tilphosa bent and swept a pebble from between her right foot and her sandal. Cashel had stopped to make bark footgear for her as soon as he figured they’d gotten beyond where the Helpers might be willing to follow them. He wasn’t afraid of the little people any more than he was afraid of Meas or-Monklin’s kicking ox. They both could be nasty if you weren’t careful, though, so Cashel was careful in his dealings with either one.

“Want to hold up here for a while?” Cashel asked.

“No, no,” the girl said, skipping to put herself a half step in front to prove her ability to go on. “There’s another house just ahead, I see.”

“Right,” said Cashel, wishing he could put more enthusiasm into his agreement. They’d seen half a dozen huts since they reached this road at midday. Seen the huts and walked onward, at the insistence of the people living there.

“At any rate, they’re just folks,” Cashel said, going on with his train of thought aloud. He was used to being alone except for sheep most of the time. He’d gotten into the habit of talking to himself, because otherwise he mightn’t hear a human voice between sunup and sundown.

“That’s right,” said Tilphosa. “You can’t blame them for being wary of strangers. And the city’s right ahead, they say.”

She spoke with more enthusiasm than the Cashel guessed she felt, but they were both trying to put a bright face on a tiring day that didn’t want to end. It was late in the afternoon. They could sleep rough in this dank landscape if they had to, but it wasn’t something Cashel was going to do for choice.

The road was on top of a causeway, built up arm’s length above the surrounding land. It was wide enough for a cart to travel it, but Cashel doubted that any did: there were no wheel ruts in the clay surface, anyhow. Mats woven from the osiers growing in waste patches everywhere about held the sides in place, and pilings rammed down at double-pace intervals on either side anchored the mats.

This wasn’t a wasteland, though. The whole route was bordered by terraced fields where an unfamiliar sort of grain grew in neat rows from standing water. A heavy fog lay over the marshes, concealing the dwellings that Cashel was sure must lie on the other side of the fields. That probably didn’t matter, because he guessed those folks would’ve been at least as disinterested in helping travellers as the ones living in the huts he and Tilphosa had stopped at. Like this one, for instance.

It was built up on bamboo stilts to the height of the road a double pace away. The only connection between the two was a tracery of cords anchored to a piling and supporting a bamboo “floor” with spaces wide enough for a foot to slip through between each pair of rods. The hut walls were matting, and the roof was thatch.

In the marsh nearby was a circle of cut bamboo as big around as the hut itself. Cashel had thought of a fish weir when he’d seen one by the first place they’d passed, and that was almost what it was. A shoal of carp came to the surface mouth first when he stopped, hoping that the presence of humans meant somebody was about to throw them a handful of grain.

You couldn’t have chickens in a marsh like this: their feet would rot, and they’d die. But you could raise fish and train them to come to be slaughtered at need the same way farmwives back in the borough scattered grain to the hens at the dooryard.

“Hello the house!” Cashel called. Tilphosa waited beside him, balancing on one leg like a stork so she could rub the other foot some more. “We’re travellers who need a bite of food. We’ve got money to pay, but if you’d rather—”

Money wasn’t much used between local people in the borough. Many a time Cashel had taken his day’s pay in fresh bread or shearings that his sister would turn into finished cloth.

“—we’d be happy to work for it instead.”

“Go away!” screamed a voice. It was probably female and certainly angry. “We don’t have any work for you. Or food either!”

“Look, we need food!” Cashel said, changing tack from the dignified honesty he’d used before. That had gotten them nowhere in the past, and it obviously wasn’t going to work here either. “I’ll not harm anyone who treats me decent, but I won’t be kicked around like a stray dog!”

He reached down and plucked one of the ropes that acted as bridge stringers; it moaned in response. Now that he’d touched it, he wondered whether the flimsy structure would even take his weight. The cords were of some unfamiliar material, maybe bamboo fibers twisted together.

“Look, you can’t come in here!” the voice said. “Soong’s just up ahead, and there’s inns there. They’ll feed you and take your money besides.”

“Let’s go on, Cashel,” Tilphosa whispered. “I don’t want a fight.”

Cashel sighed and turned to the road again. He let the girl take his left arm; for support, he supposed, but anyway he let her take it.

“There wasn’t going to be a fight,” he muttered as they strode down the road at a faster pace than usual. Anger was prodding him. “All they had to do was cut the ropes from their side and then drop a storage jar on my head while I was trying to swim in mud.”

He cleared his throat, and added, “Besides, I guess it’s their house. If they don’t want visitors, well, there’s plenty people in the borough who’d act just the same.”

The mist pooled and streaked. Sometimes it gave a clear view for as much as a bowshot, then went so solid that Cashel put his staff out to bump along the side of the causeway. He didn’t suppose they’d drown if they fell in, but he’d been covered with muck often enough to know he didn’t like the experience.

“I hear a river,” Cashel said. “Soong’s on a river, the first fellow said when he ordered us away.”

Water has its own range of sounds, from the plink of drops falling from the eaves after a rain to the roar of a storm-driven surf. This was a sighing and slapping, slow but powerful. The evening air didn’t taste of salt.

A breeze, the first they’d had since midday, swept a channel in the fog. Cashel had taken the glimmers ahead for will-o’-the-wisps. Now they came into focus as lanterns, bright flames haloed by the damp air. Buildings stood out as darker shadows, and sometimes a human figure silhouetted itself against lamplight.

“The city doesn’t have walls,” Tilphosa noted. “That’s a good sign, don’t you think?”

Cashel blinked. He hadn’t thought about it at all, to tell the truth; he hadn’t grown up with fortifications. Since Cashel left Barca’s Hamlet he’d lived in places with walls to keep out enemies, but that wasn’t a part of the city he cared much about.

Sharina said mostly those walls dated from the very end of the Old Kingdom. She also said that they hadn’t kept chaos from destroying the places they were meant to protect.

“I guess it’s good,” he said. “Because it means that people here are peaceful, you think?”

“Yes, even if they aren’t very friendly to strangers,” Tilphosa said. She hugged his arm close, then separated with only the tips of her fingers on Cashel’s elbow to keep contact.

The road going down toward Soong wasn’t steep, but it had more of a slope than they’d seen before all day. The last two furlongs into the city were covered with squared tree trunks, not really paving but better than mud. Some of the trunks had tilted on their bedding, one end higher and the other lower than the pair before and beyond. Once Cashel’s weight squelched a raised trunk down like a sluggish teeter-totter, but there was no harm in that beyond his heart jumping in surprise.

A gust cleared the air, giving them a glimpse of a broad river which flowed so slowly that starlight could glimmer on its surface. There were quays along the near bank. On an island connected by a short causeway stood a temple whose short fat columns supported a tiled roof. Except for the façade, the building was as simple and unadorned as a stone barn.

Cashel looked at the sky; the constellations were unfamiliar. That was what he’d expected, but in his heart there’d been hope that he’d have at least the Byre or the seven blue stars of the Axletree to remind him of nights spent pasturing sheep.

They entered the city. The streets were muddy, but there were board sidewalks for pedestrians. A hunched man passed them, driving out of town in a wagon pulled by a single mule. The contents of the wagon bed rattled under a coarse mat.

“Excuse me, sir!” Cashel called. The man ignored him, except perhaps for touching the mule’s ear with his long bamboo switch.

“It’s quite a big city, isn’t it?” Tilphosa said. She was trying to sound cheerful, but Cashel noticed that she picked at her tunic in concern to minimize the dirt and damage of the past many days. She touched the dagger hilt, then put her left hand over it—for concealment, not because she was afraid of being attacked. She felt a weapon was out of place in civilized surroundings.

“Big enough to have shops that sell clothes,” Cashel said. “In the morning we’ll outfit ourselves and…”

He let his voice trail off. His mind had run to the planned end of the sentence, “…see if anybody can give us directions…” The foolishness of those words froze his tongue.

The stars above Soong were new to him. Nobody here would know how to get to Valles. Nobody here had heard of Valles.

“And we’ll decide where we want to go next,” Cashel concluded, but without the animation that he’d started the sentence with. He didn’t see any path to a place he or Tilphosa wanted to be, and he knew those likely wouldn’t be the same places anyway. The only reason he didn’t give up was that, well, he wasn’t the sort of person who gave up.

They were among the houses now, each of two or three stories. The vacant lots showed that the previous building had collapsed or been torn down. They were more substantial than the huts of the surrounding farms, but all were built of timber with shingle or thatched roofs. The temple out in the river was the only stone structure he’d seen.

Some of the sidewalk planks had rotted through; Cashel walked with a careful shuffle, the way he’d have done on a lake whose ice had begun to soften in the spring weather. Folk bustled by, dressed in baggy trousers and hooded capes. They looked sidelong at the strangers, but none of them spoke.

Cashel made up his mind with a sigh. A shopkeeper had set the bar across his shutters and was fastening it with a bronze padlock. Cashel touched him on the shoulder.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Can you direct us to an inn? We’re strangers here.”

“What?” said the shopkeeper in a female voice. “An inn?”

She raised her head to look them over from beneath her cowl. Judging from her grimace, she didn’t like what she saw. “Try the Hyacinth,” she said. “Down at the end of the street, where it meets the water.”

She wriggled away and disappeared into an alley. Cashel didn’t try to hold her. He looked at Tilphosa, and smiled as he said, “I guess even strangers can find the river, huh.”

She patted his arm.

Cashel wasn’t sure what the shopkeeper meant by “the street,” since three roads joined at an intersection close enough to touch with his quarterstaff. He picked the one that headed most directly toward where he knew the river was. That didn’t mean a lot in a place where the streets wandered like sheep paths across a pasture, but…

“If it doesn’t work,” Tilphosa said, “we’ll try another one. From the way the woman looked at us I’m not sure I’d regret missing the Hyacinth, but I suppose it’ll do until we’re dressed properly.”

She sounded cheerful again. Cashel looked at her and grinned. Tilphosa had adjusted her sash so that the brass hilt of the broken sword was out where anybody could see it. For a little while there she’d gone back to being Lady Tilphosa, concerned about her social position. Now she was Cashel’s companion again, the girl who’d come through shipwreck, battle, and anything else the Gods chose to throw at her.

They were getting close to the river. Besides Cashel being able to smell the mudflats, several of the shuttered shops had coarse tunics or ship’s stores of one sort and another on their signs.

Prostitutes waited in alley mouths, following Cashel with their eyes. He kept his gaze forward, but Tilphosa glared like a queen at each woman they passed.

Cashel kept his grin from reaching his lips. She was a queen, after all; or anyway she’d be the next thing to a queen after Cashel delivered her to Prince Thalemos.

Tilphosa pointed to the sign hanging from a building at the end of the street. “There it is,” she said. “The Hyacinth.”

Cashel glanced at her, wondering how she knew. Were her eyes that good? The wood was so warped and faded that he wasn’t sure he’d have recognized a bunch of purple flowers painted on it even in daylight.

It was an inn, all right, though. During the day there’d even be a counter facing the road, though it was shuttered now. It was on the corner of the street they’d followed and the one fronting the river, so it was the right place beyond question.

He said, “I couldn’t have told from the picture.”

“Oh, the name’s drilled out of the wood below, Cashel,” Tilphosa said. “See? Though it’s backwards from this way.”

She pointed again. He’d taken the design for a cutwork border, not a word.

“I see, mistress,” he said. “But I can’t read letters either way round.”

“I’ll read for us, Cashel,” the girl said, squeezing his arm again. “You take care of all the other things. And Cashel?”

He met her eyes again.

“Remember that I’m Tilphosa, not mistress. All right?”

“Right,” he agreed, giving her a shy smile.

The inn had double doors, but the left panel was latched closed. A pair of men stood in the opening, watching the riverfront as they drank from elmwood masars.

Cashel shrugged, loosening his shoulder muscles as he considered how to tell the fellows that he planned to enter through where they were standing. He’d be polite, of course, and the chances were that they’d respond politely as well; but there was just the least chance that they wouldn’t.

“Cashel!” Tilphosa said as she caught his arm.

For a moment Cashel thought she was telling him not to start a fight—which meant walk away from a fight that somebody else had started, and that wasn’t going to happen to Cashel or-Kenset. Then he followed the line of her eyes out to the river road and saw what she and the men in the doorway both were looking at. Calm again, Cashel watched too.

A tall, hooded figure walked at the head of a procession of men rolling a two-wheeled hand-truck. The corpse on the truck was wrapped in coarse wool. The accompanying men wore peaked hats with black-dyed feathers standing up around the brims, apparently a sign of mourning; the pair of bareheaded females bringing up the rear stroked tambours with muffled sticks.

The figure in the lead was a good seven feet tall. It—Cashel wasn’t going to guess sex, not after his mistake with the shopkeeper—wore a robe that was pale green in the glow of the lanterns carried by some of the mourners. The hem brushed the mud, and a veil covered as much of the face as the cowl itself didn’t hide. The figure moved as smoothly as the images of the Great Gods brought from Carcosa to outlying boroughs in wheeled carts during the Tithe Processions.

The funeral turned onto the causeway leading to the temple in the river. Cashel saw the click of a spark from the hand-truck’s iron tires: the causeway was paved with hard stone.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Tilphosa said unexpectedly to the men in the doorway. “We’re strangers here. Who is that, please?”

The men turned to look at her; the fellow nearer to Cashel jumped back, much as he might have done if he’d glanced up from his drink and found a bull standing at his side.

“By the Shepherd!” he muttered, brushing with his free hand the beer he’d sloshed on the front of his tunic.

The procession reached the temple; its doors opened with only the faintest squeal. Somebody must keep them well greased in this soggy atmosphere. The men pushing the truck stepped back expectantly, and the female musicians redoubled their muted drumming.

“Well, I believe it’s Tadbal Bessing’s-son the cobbler, mistress,” the other man said. “Leastways I’d heard he’d died last night, so if it’s not Tadbal, he’ll be along shortly.”

“No,” said Tilphosa in a noticeably sharper tone. “I mean the tall fellow leading them, not the departed. Is he a priest?”

The men looked at each other. Partly to explain Tilphosa’s ignorance, and partly to remind the locals to be polite when they spoke to a girl who had a friend Cashel’s size, Cashel said, “We’re strangers here, you see.”

“Right,” said the fellow who’d spilled his beer. “That’s one of the Nine, you see. They take care of the dead.”

“It’s the custom here in Soong,” the other man agreed.

A figure which could have been a mirror image of the leader came out of the temple. While the mourners stood back, the two of them lifted the corpse from the hand-truck and carried it inside. The temple doors closed behind them.

“There’s nine priests?” Tilphosa said.

Cashel consciously kept from frowning. Local customs were no business of his, unless they involved feeding him to a tree or the like. In Barca’s Hamlet people buried their dead in the ground in winding sheets, if they could afford the wool, but every place Cashel had been since he left the borough had a different way of dealing with death. If the people of Soong wanted priests to slide corpses into the river for the catfish to eat, well, that was their business.

“I don’t rightly know, mistress,” the first speaker said. “Nobody’s seen more than three of them together, not that I’ve heard about. Maybe Nine’s just a name.”

“Tilphosa, I think we ought to see about food and a place to sleep,” Cashel said firmly.

All three looked at him. The man leaning against the closed panel reached down and lifted a pin so that he could pull that half-open as well.

“There you go, master,” he said with a sweep of his hand and a friendly smile. “That’ll save you having to turn sideways, I guess.”

“Yes, of course,” said Tilphosa. She stepped into the taproom with her head high; every inch a queen.

Sharina stood at the base of the flagship’s forward fighting tower, looking toward the beach two furlongs away. The great quinquereme proceeded along the shore under the thrust of only one bank of oars, giving her just enough way on that she didn’t wallow in the surf. The ballistae on the bow and stern towers were cocked and loaded with thick-shafted arrows whose square iron heads could smash a ship’s hull at short range or an archer’s scantlings half a mile inland.

Carus had transferred from The King of the Isles to one of the lightest warships in the fleet, an eighty-oared bireme that had been in service as a revenue cutter before Garric became regent of the kingdom. Earlier in the reign of Valence the Third, the Kingdom of the Isles had controlled little more than port duties and the fishing within dory-haul of Ornifal, but even that slight reach had required enforcement vessels.

The bireme swept toward the beach at a slight angle, watched by Sharina and every other person who could get a view of the proceedings. A score of triremes sculled along beside The King of the Isles—closer than safety permitted—each with its single ballista or catapult aimed shoreward against a threat as yet invisible.

Admiral Nitker in the stern of the flagship looked carved from granite; Lord Waldron on the Lady of Sunrise, a broad-beamed sailing ship that transported his staff and three days’ rations for the whole army, flicked his bare sword in small, furious arcs at his right side. Everybody in the fleet was terrified at the idea of Carus—of Garric, as they thought—making the initial landing on Laut with only a company of Blood Eagles. It was a comment on the force of Carus’ personality—and on the raging fury he’d frequently blazed with in the days since he began to wear Garric’s flesh—that none of the strong-minded men of his army had seriously tried to prevent him from doing this.

The bireme slid up the beach, first grating and then grinding slowly to a halt with twenty feet of her bow on dry land. The little vessel didn’t have a ram, so her curving stem had acted like a sled runner under the rowers’ final efforts.

The bireme tilted to its starboard, inland side. The men, bodyguards acting as oarsmen only for this last short run-up, were leaping to the sand even before the hull thumped down. The first man off, splendid in a silver breastplate and a gold diadem instead of the helmet every officer had begged he wear, was King Carus.

A line of Blood Eagles, still juggling the shields on their left arms, formed in front of him and trotted toward the straggle of fishermen’s huts that were the only buildings visible. A woman stood in the doorway of one, holding a pot in one hand and covering her mouth with the other. She threw down the pot and ran inland screaming.

The cornicene at Carus’ side put his horn to his lips and blew a lowing call. A score of triremes, already stern on to the beach, began backing in. They were moving faster than their hulls could accept without straining when they hit the sand, but the immediate threat was the real Confederate army, not a hypothetical fleet that might sally to attack the royal force.

Tenoctris came out of her little enclosure under the fighting tower, holding the bamboo splint she’d been using as a wand. She walked to the rail and deliberately tossed it into the sea. “Are things going well, Sharina?” she asked.

Horns and trumpets blared as nearly a hundred vessels jockeyed for position. Officers on The King of the Isles screamed at crewmen and one another. The flagship needed to turn seaward or she’d run aground on the western jaw of the broad bay, and there was more confusion than Sharina would’ve expected about just how she should avoid that in the shoal of other vessels. Admiral Nitker jumped onto the stern rail to bellow at the captain of the trireme within stone’s throw to port; a white-faced aide clung to the admiral’s belt with one hand and a bollard for the mast stays with the other.

“All right, I guess,” Sharina said. She found herself smiling. “The Confederacy of the West seems to be conspicuous by its absence, but right now it looks like half the royal fleet is in danger of sinking the other half unless we’re lucky.”

She paused to watch the shore fill with armed men climbing out of the triremes, forming under the harsh commands of noncoms, and then advancing in pike-fanged blocks to the perimeter Carus and his company of Blood Eagles were marking out. The troops aboard the following ships would throw up earthworks behind the armed line, building both a base camp and a refuge for the emptied vessels. For now the fleet’s defense lay in the spearheads and swordblades.

Which would be sufficient, even if the Confederates managed to mount an attack. The ancient king leading the Isles was a hasty man capable of ignoring everything but his own will—as witness his actions just now—but the time Sharina had spent with Carus had convinced her that the world would never know his equal as a warrior. When he determined the forces for the first wave that might have to fight its way ashore, his analysis was as certain as Ilna’s choice of yarn for a fabric.

“I guess it’s always as confused as this in a war,” Sharina said quietly. “When I read about battles, I couldn’t understand how armies could blunder about, slaughtering each other almost by accident it sometimes seemed. But I see now.”

There was no sign the enemy headquartered three miles away in Donelle was even aware of the royal invasion. They’d learn soon, but in an hour the camp’s fortifications would be complete—

And within four hours, according to the king’s plan, the royal army would advance to begin the siege of Donelle. The only thing that could change Carus’ timetable would be for the Confederate army to march out of the city to face him in the field.

Sharina shivered at the thought.

“Is something wrong?” Tenoctris said.

“I was thinking that the war might be over before nightfall if the enemy commander’s a fool,” Sharina said. “But—have you ever seen a pig butchered, Tenoctris?”

The wizard shook her head minutely. “My education was in books, dear,” she said.

“I’m just thinking about twenty thousand pigs being slaughtered at the same time, is all,” Sharina said. “All the blood, and the mud; and the way the pigs squeal…”

Tenoctris put her hand on arm Sharina’s arm.

Twenty more troop-carrying warships backed toward shore farther to the east. The first squadron, lighter by the weight of a hundred men apiece, struggled to get under weigh and clear the beach for later comers. They’d wait offshore until the earthworks were up and there was leisure to fit the ships of the fleet as tightly together as they’d been in the Arsenal.

The King of the Isles slowed noticeably. Oarsmen to port had reversed stroke so that the bow swung seaward under the thrust of the starboard oars. The trireme on the port side was pulling forward at full power, giving the flagship sea room. The oars of the smaller ship slanted back along her hull in perfect synchrony before lifting to surge forward; they spilled chains of diamond-glittering droplets into the foam alongside.

“Was your work successful?” Sharina asked, giving a slight emphasis to the possessive. She nodded toward the tower’s curtained base where the wizard had been.

“I learned that none of our missing friends are in Donelle,” Tenoctris said. She offered a minuscule smile, more sad than not. “Though I think Ilna may have been there recently. If I’ve read the indications correctly. I’m not”—the smile broadened—“a very powerful wizard, as you know.”

Sharina moved to the opposite rail so that she could continue to watch the beach. The ships of the squadron that had landed the initial troops were crawling seaward again, all but one trireme whose officers stood knee deep in the water to examine the keel and planking; the captain apparently thought she’d strained her hull when she grounded. More ships were backing shoreward, maneuvering with difficulty to avoid the stranded vessel.

Sharina hugged Tenoctris. “I’ve met powerful wizards,” she said. “They’re all dead, thank the Lady. And thanks to you, the kingdom still stands.”

King Carus balanced at the peak of a tripod made by lashing small trees together. From there he could survey both the shore behind him and the hostile countryside beyond the ditched wall his troops were already digging. An aide ran from Carus toward the damaged vessel. The king watched with his hands on his hips, his look of fury visible even at this distance.

“I hope the captain has sense enough to get off the beach before Carus decides to come back personally,” Sharina said.

“Yes,” said Tenoctris. “They’ll do better to take their chance on sinking than what will happen if they disobey the king.”

Sharina had been smiling; her face went suddenly grim. “Carus might kill the captain, mightn’t he?” she said quietly. “Cut his head off, the way he did the Intercessor’s.”

Tenoctris nodded. She didn’t speak.

The aide and the captain exchanged shouts. The officers began to return to the trireme’s deck by climbing oarlooms. The danger was past—this time.

“Tenoctris, he can’t behave that way and keep the kingdom together,” Sharina said, desperation in her voice. “He knows that, but when he’s angry he lashes out at whoever’s responsible.”

“It’s always the real cause, though,” the wizard said. “Carus doesn’t kick his servant because he doesn’t like something the Earl of Sandrakkan has done.”

“In the long run it doesn’t matter” Sharina said. “It’s worse! Oh, I know justice is a wonderful thing, but he’d be better off to kick a servant than to knock down a nobleman because he was slow obeying an order. He’d be better off, and the kingdom would be better off.”

“He isn’t sleeping because of the dreams,” Tenoctris said, looking at the king who’d now resumed his survey of the landscape beyond the rising wall. “I suppose he was always hasty, but even a saint who gets no sleep…”

More ships shuttled toward the beach. A pair of triremes fouled one another, their oars interlocking as the men on deck screamed curses. It would be sorted out, though. For all the seeming chaos, the process continued toward its planned conclusion as inexorably as a storm sweeping onto the land.

“Maybe his way will work,” Sharina said softly. “Perhaps Carus will end the dreams and the rebellion with his sword edge. He did that many times in the past, after all.”

“Yes,” said Tenoctris. “I think I’ll…”

Her voice trailed off. She walked toward her shelter to resume practicing her art. The old wizard looked so worn already that Sharina almost called her back.

Almost. Because Sharina knew—as Tenoctris did—that the last place haste and reliance on his sword had brought Carus was the bottom of the sea. Without Tenoctris’ wizardry to at least warn of such threats, a similar result would occur this time.

And slight though Sharina knew Tenoctris’ powers were compared to those of their enemies, it was in those powers rather than the king’s flashing sword that the kingdom’s best hope lay.