Mistress of the Catacombs

18

Alecto leaped onto a bench, then set one foot on the crossbar and braced the other against the sidewall so that she could look out through the small circular window in the transom. A villager shouted a warning.

The wild girl jumped down. A torch smacked the opening, knocking sparks into the temple. Alecto responded with an oath that Ilna—who didn’t believe in the Great Gods or much of anything else—found disgusting. Ilna snatched the bedding clear, but the sparks burned out before they landed.

“They’re not trying to break the door down,” Alecto said quietly. “They’re hanging back on the porch, looking at the lizard I killed.”

“They probably don’t see any reason to hurry,” Ilna said, thinking through the pattern which connected the past to the future here at this point. “Hunger will bring us out before long—if they don’t decide to block the door from their side”

She smiled with wintry humor. “A pity that the creature ran outside that way,” she added. “We wouldn’t have lacked for food if it’d died where you stabbed it.”

Alecto gave her a look of irritation, apparently uncertain whether Ilna was joking. Since Ilna wasn’t sure herself, the confusion was understandable.

Something thumped against the door. Ilna hesitated, deciding between her noose, the hank of cords in her sleeve, and the small bone-cased knife she carried in her sash for general utility. In the end she readied the silken noose. It wasn’t a good weapon for these tight quarters, but she liked the feel of it. There wasn’t light enough to expect their attackers to see a knotted spell.

Alecto hopped up to the transom again, then dropped back with a grim expression. This time the villagers didn’t fling a torch at her.

“They’re piling rocks in front of the door,” she said. “They’re going to block us in.”

Ilna nodded without expression. “I’ll see where the cave goes, then,” she said. It led to somewhere big enough to hold a salamander the size of a horse, after all. And since there were no other options…

Alecto didn’t seem to have heard her. Outside on the porch, villagers crunched another block of stone down beside the first. With the whole community working, the entrance would very quickly be blocked beyond the ability of the two women to clear.

“I’ll kill you all!” Alecto screamed at the door panels. “I’ll wipe you off the face of the Earth, you cowards!”

The wild girl knelt and began drawing on the floor with her athame. The blade was covered with the priest’s blood, but it had mostly dried by now. She spat on the bronze so that her point left thin red trails of dissolved gore on the stone.

Her face screwed into tight, sour lines, Ilna lay on her belly and crawled cautiously into the narrowing cave. The rock was slimy—from the salamander’s skin, she now knew, not water sweating through the limestone as she’d thought when Arthlan first showed them the temple’s interior.

Peasants got used to filthy jobs. Ilna smiled: the slime would wash off, if she lived long enough to reach a place with clean water. That didn’t seem likely at the moment.

Her body blocked the little light that entered through the temple’s transom. She regretted that, but Alecto’s chanting also blurred into a dull murmur. Ilna didn’t know what the wild girl was attempting, but it probably wasn’t anything a decent person wanted to know about.

The tunnel narrowed further. The salamander was thicker through the body than Ilna, but it must be able to squeeze itself down to a degree that a human rib cage couldn’t. If she became stuck in the throat of the passage—

Ilna laughed—and regretted it, because the stone didn’t let her body shake with laughter as it should. If I get stuck, she thought, I die in a small stone box. Which is exactly what happens to me if I don’t find a way out of the temple in the first place.

Ilna had her arms stretched out in front of her. She squirmed forward by twisting her torso while one elbow or the other anchored her against the stone. It was slow and unpleasant, but—she smiled—not as slow or as unpleasant as the alternative.

Tight places didn’t especially bother her. Stone did, though, but there wasn’t anything to do about the fact except ignore it and keep on going. In Ilna’s philosophy, going on was the only choice.

The cave started to open up again—not much, but enough for Ilna to reach out with both hands against the stone and pull her hips through the narrowest point. She could smell water close; if nothing else, that meant she and Alecto would starve in three weeks instead of dying of thirst in three days.

She got up on all fours, then lifted her head carefully in hopes that there was room enough to stand. No, the ceiling was still just above her. At least she could keep her torso off the ground.

She reached forward with her right hand and shifted her weight onto it. Her palm slipped down a short, slimy slope into water as cold as charity. She jerked back and just missed lifting her head hard into the rock.

Ilna paused for a moment, tasting the water—good, though with a slight tang of iron—and getting her breathing back under control. Maybe I’m more nervous than I’d thought…. Because of all the stone, she supposed; but that was no excuse, there were no excuses.

Alecto’s chant echoed down the tunnel, blended into a threatening rumble by its passage. Occasionally a word came clear: “…palipater patrima…” in one moment, “…iao alilamps…” in another.

Ilna explored the edge of the pool with her left hand, hoping she’d find something more promising on the other side than there was in the direction she’d come. There wasn’t another side: when Ilna stirred the water, it lapped against a solid stone wall. The pool wasn’t much bigger than the tunnel through which she’d crawled to reach it.

She felt as far as she could reach into the water without finding bottom. There was enough water somewhere to hold the salamander now dead on the temple porch; it was possible, probable even, that this pool was a tunnel like the one that led to the outside; but slightly lower and flooded.

“…nerxia…” echoed a voice, no longer identifiable as Alecto’s or even as human.

Of course even if there was a larger cavern beyond, it too might be water-filled: an underground sea in which the monster slept motionless in the intervals between crawling to the surface to eat. It didn’t come out often, from what Arthlan had said. The salamanders Ilna knew, hiding under the rocks of Pattern Creek or crawling across the leaf mold on damp evenings, had none of the eager liveliness of mice and birds.

She hiked up her tunic to keep it dry—drier than otherwise, at least—and lowered herself feetfirst into the pool. She felt the smooth stone channel curve, but again she didn’t find an end. There was no point in trying to go farther unless she was willing to go all the way.

Ilna pulled herself out of the water, a harder task than she’d expected. The monster had polished the rock over the ages of passing to and from the outer world, and Ilna’s limbs were already numb from their immersion.

She breathed deeply on her hands and knees, then lay flat again and squirmed through the tunnel in the other direction. It was easier this time. She had a glimmer of moonlight to guide her, and she knew that there was an end.

As Ilna worked her way past the tunnel’s throat, a flash of scarlet wizardlight blotted the moonglow. Alecto’s voice rose into a high-pitched rant: “Brimo!”

Another flash, much brighter.

“Ananke!”

Ilna got her legs past the narrowest part of the cave. She thrust her feet hard at the rock walls, at the same time scrabbling forward with her arms. She didn’t know why she was in such a hurry, but if the wild girl was bringing matters to a climax, Ilna wanted to be present for good or ill.

Present for ill, probably. Even at better times, Ilna didn’t have much confidence in good things happening.

“Chasarba!” Alecto screamed.

Ilna squeezed out of the cave. Alecto knelt, holding her dagger point in the center of the figure she’d scribed in human blood. Her face was a study in hellish triumph.

Wizardlight blazed from the blade, penetrating flesh and even rock. For an instant Ilna saw the villagers staring at the temple with expressions of stark horror. Wingless things flew between suns in the void beyond the sky, and creatures swam like fish in the lava beneath the mountains.

The light died, leaving a memory of itself in Ilna’s eyes. Alecto laughed like a demon. The ground began to shake.

Outside the temple, villagers screamed. The first tremors were slight, but everyone who lives in a mountain valley knows the danger of landslides.

A violent shock threw Ilna off her feet. The mountainside crackled like sheets of lightning. Slabs of rock broke away, roaring toward the bottom of the valley and sweeping up more debris in their rush.

The tremors lifted dust from the temple floor; Ilna held her sleeve over her mouth and nose so that she could still breathe. The slope was shaking itself like a dog just out of the water.

The temple porch collapsed, blotting out the sheen of moonlight through the transom. Ilna grabbed Alecto’s shoulder and dragged her into the natural part of the temple, the funnel in the living rock. It might not survive the violence the wild girl had called down on the whole valley, herself included, but it might. Nothing made by men could possibly—

Cracks danced across the temple roof. “Come on!” Ilna screamed, pulling Alecto with her as far as she could. She couldn’t have explained why she was trying to save her companion, except perhaps that their two lives were the only things Ilna thought she might save from the thunder of destruction.

Going on is the only choice….

The cave narrowed. Ilna slid into the throat. “Come on!” she repeated, but she couldn’t hear her own voice against the shuddering terror of the earthquake.

The stone squeezed Ilna, battered her. It could close and chew her body like a grass stem in a boy’s mouth. No one would ever know that Ilna os-Kenset was a smear of blood between layers of stone.

She worked through, pulling herself into the enlarged chamber. She felt triumphant for the instant before a greater shock threw her against the ceiling, numbing her shoulders and nearly stunning her.

She turned. Water from the pool sloshed across her in icy fury.

“Alecto!” she shouted, knowing she might as well save her breath. She reached back into the tunnel. Her companion’s hand was stretched out, still gripping the bronze dagger. Ilna grabbed Alecto’s wrist and pulled, dragging her hips through the narrows.

There was nothing to see, nothing to hear but the mountain destroying itself and all the world besides. Guiding Alecto by the hand, Ilna poised on the edge of the pool.

She dived in, headfirst. She couldn’t swim, but her hands and feet against the smooth stone would take her as far down as she could go before she drowned or froze…or just possibly, she reached a place where a human could live, at least for a little while longer.

No choice….

Tilphosa screamed. Cashel jumped to his feet, slanting the quarterstaff across his body. He kicked the bedding into the darkness. The shuttered windows blocked all the light that Soong’s fog didn’t smother to begin with.

Leaning forward, Cashel swept his left hand through the air above where Tilphosa should be lying. His right arm was cocked back, ready to ram his staff’s ferrule through anybody he touched who wasn’t the girl herself. Nobody was bending over her.

Cashel scooped Tilphosa up one-handed and started for the common room. Rather than strike a light in here, he’d take her to the hearth and blow the coals bright.

Tilphosa’s body was as cold as a drowned corpse: colder than the air, colder than mere death.

The door at the far end of the passageway rattled open. Leemay stood back holding an oil lamp, while two of the men who’d slept in the common room stood in the doorway. One held a cudgel and the other, a fisherman, had a gaff with claws of briar root.

“Let me get her out into the light!” Cashel said. He’d let his staff drop in the aisle, but there still wasn’t width enough for his haste. His right hip brushed down a hamper of spirits in stoneware bottles; they clattered among themselves without breaking.

“It wasn’t a sound!” said one of the men in confusion. “I didn’t hear her scream, I thought it!”

The trapdoor into the loft overhead was open at the back of the room. A proper ladder leaned against the molding. In Barca’s Hamlet, most people used fir saplings trimmed so that the branch stubs provided steps of a sort….

“Get out of my way!” Cashel said, pushing into the common room. The fisherman jumped out of his way in time; the other fellow didn’t and bounced back from Cashel’s shoulder. Cashel laid Tilphosa on the bar, cradling her head with his left hand until he found a sponge to use as a pillow.

The fellow’s comment about thinking the scream made Cashel frown. That’s what it seemed to him, too, now that somebody’d mentioned it. He’d been asleep, though, and dreaming—

Leemay held the lamp so that its light fell on the girl’s face. The innkeeper was expressionless, scarcely livelier than Tilphosa…and Tilphosa might have been a wax statue, her face molded by an artist whose taste was for art that showed bones and ignored the spirit.

“What’d you do to Tilphosa?” Cashel said. Anger deepened his voice. The two men flinched; Leemay did not.

The outside door was already ajar. The left panel opened fully, and more people bumped their way in. Either they’d been summoned by the scream, or somebody’d gone out to call them.

“How could I touch her?” Leemay said. “She was with you; I was up on the roof.”

The lamp trembled in the innkeeper’s hand. She was weary, weary from the spell she’d just woven on the roof.

The fishermen touched Tilphosa’s cheek, then her throat, with the back of his fingers. “She’s dead,” he said. “Cold as ice. Somebody get the Nine.”

“Do you suppose it’s plague?” a man asked in concern.

Cashel grabbed for Leemay’s throat. She leaned back, too quick for him and a perfect judge of how far he could reach with the bar between them.

“Watch him,” she said to the local men around her. “He may have gone mad with grief.”

The bar was of heavy hardwood, anchored to the walls and floor, but Cashel would’ve pushed it over if the girl hadn’t been lying on it. He came out through the gate instead, tearing it away instead of folding it up and back.

Two men grappled him. Everyone was shouting; the only light was from Leemay’s lamp, though a woman in the doorway held a lantern with lenses of fish bladder.

Cashel caught the two men in his arms and rotated his torso, hurling them both over the bar and into wall. Somebody grabbed his legs. He brought his right foot back, then kicked hard with his callused heel. The hands released. Cashel lunged forward with his arms outstretched.

He was going to get his hands on Leemay. Then she’d undo whatever it was that she’d done to Tilphosa, or…

The crowd milled between him and the innkeeper. More people were coming through the door every moment, but Cashel didn’t care about that. The men in front of him struggled, but they could as well have wrestled with an ox as try to stop Cashel in his present rage. He plowed forward, his shoulders hunched.

Leemay backed a step and another step. She was against the wall, now, still holding up the lamp, her flat face passionless.

Somebody threw a net smelling of river mud onto Cashel. Men shouted, twisting it over his torso. It was only a fishnet, but the openwork fabric of tough cords flexed when he pulled at it. It gave against him, never releasing and never allowing his strength a way to break it.

Cashel forced himself another pace onward. An overturned table tripped him; wrapped in the net, he couldn’t throw an arm out to keep his balance. He fell, smashing a stool under him.

“I’ve got a net!” a man cried. “Let me—”

Cashel kicked violently, trying to twist up onto his knees. Several locals shoved him down, and a second net fell over his legs. Willing hands wrapped it tight, trussing Cashel like a hen for market.

Leemay stared down at him. “Don’t hurt him,” she said, not that anybody seemed disposed to do so. They were just decent citizens, restraining a stranger who’d gone berserk. “He’s upset! He’ll come to his senses later.”

“You killed her!” Cashel shouted.

He squirmed across the puncheon floor, still trying to reach the innkeeper. Cashel wasn’t sure he’d even be able to bite her ankles through the fishnet, but at least he was going to try.

Men grabbed the casting ropes and hauled back. The net was made to hold heavy, fiercely struggling prey; it worked as well on land as it would’ve done with a catch of eels.

“Tie him to the pillar,” Leemay said calmly, nodding toward the roughly shaped tree trunk which supported the main roof beam. “Let him sleep off the madness.”

Experienced hands slid Cashel across the floor, then lifted his torso upright against the pillar. He twisted, but they were fishermen and used to muscling a writhing netful.

“There you go, lad,” one of them said. “Just calm down, and we’ll let you loose.”

The front door’s other panel opened deliberately. The crowd quieted from the back forward as everyone turned to look at the doorway.

Everyone but Leemay. She glanced at the door momentarily, then looked across the room to Tilphosa’s still form. She smiled faintly and became expressionless again.

A hooded figure, skeletally thin despite its billowing robes, entered the common room. It had to bend to clear the doorway, but the ceiling between the beams was high enough for it to straighten again.

“Where is the departed?” said a voice. It had to come from under the hood, but it had no more direction than it had life or humanity. It sounded like the wind wheezing through rotten thatch.

“Here,” said the man who’d sat in the chimney corner when Cashel and Tilphosa arrived. He gestured toward the bar top.

“You can carry her on one of my tables,” Leemay said. “She may have had something contagious, so we need to be quick about taking care of her.”

“Tilphosa wasn’t sick!” Cashel shouted. “You killed her, woman! You!”

Men took the table that was already upended and knocked out the pins attaching the trestle legs. They carried it to the bar, where two more men lifted Tilphosa’s still form onto it. They worked efficiently but with a degree of respect which Cashel noted, though anger was a fire in his throat.

The hooded figure nodded, then bent again and left the inn. Even as close as Cashel now was to the member of the Nine, he couldn’t see any sign of legs moving beneath the robe.

The men carrying Tilphosa on the table shuffled out after the priest. The other locals bowed their heads; then, when the impromptu procession was well clear, they began to return to their own homes for the remainder of the night.

Leemay closed the door again; the three guests in the common room muttered quietly as they found their bedding and crawled into it.

Leemay looked at Cashel once more before she pinched out the wick of her lamp. He couldn’t see her features through the red rage in his heart.

Ademos, not a man Garric had suspected of being devout, knelt on the millipede’s third segment and prayed loudly: first to the Lady, then to the Shepherd, and then back to the Lady. His voice was so loud that Garric—standing with Vascay, Thalemos, and the wizard just behind the creature’s head—could hear every word clearly.

The only pause between prayers was however long it took Ademos to draw breath. The other Brethren listened without complaint; indeed, Halophus looked as though he might join in.

Metron lay on the millipede’s armor, drained white by the effort of forcing back the pursuing liquid a second time. He was either asleep or comatose; occasionally he snorted like a seal as he struggled to breathe.

“It’s catching up with us again,” said Thalemos in a tone of aristocratic calm. Indeed, the only hint of the youth’s nervousness lay in the fact that he’d bothered to state something so blindingly obvious in the first place.

The living fluid shimmered through the trees to either side. Garric remembered that he’d thought at first it was sun-struck water; he smiled, wishing that he were still so ignorant.

Not long before, a beetle the size of a house had lumbered past the millipede and into the pearly glow. The fluid crawled up the creature’s legs like oil soaking a wick. Lines of cobweb-gray traced across the shiny black wing cases; bits of the wings fell away, and the beetle’s legs turned to powder also.

The beetle’s fat body continued to writhe for as long as Garric’s eyes could follow it. The fact that the agony was silent made it all the worse.

“I can’t say I’m looking forward to the thing eating me,” Vascay remarked conversationally. He glanced sidelong at Garric. “Eh?”

“If you need somebody to kill you now so that doesn’t happen,” Garric said forcefully, “then look for somebody else.”

The chieftain smiled. “I said I wasn’t looking forward to it, lad,” he said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t man enough to face it.”

“It’s coming toward us now,” Thalemos said. His voice was still calm, but fear stretched his cheeks tight over the bones.

To the right, a thin tendril slanted from the edge of the liquid sheet. The same would be happening on the millipede’s other side. The creature’s technique—was it even a creature? Was it as mindlessly destructive as a windblown fire?—never changed.

Nor did it need to change. Perseverance was sure to carry the day, if not on this attempt then on the next.

“Time to wake our learned friend,” Vascay said, kneeling at Metron’s side. He shook the wizard by the shoulder.

He was increasingly firm, but only to rouse the man. Several of the Brethren stared at Metron with obvious hatred, but Vascay knew as Garric did that the wizard was no more responsible for their plight than was any other member of their group.

They’d gambled and apparently lost. The forfeit wouldn’t come from a Protector’s sword or the gallows in the main square of Durassa, but they’d all known there were risks. Metron would be paying the same price as the rest of them.

“Wakey, wakey,” Vascay said, shaking still harder. “Time for your party piece again, Master Metron.”

The wizard’s eyelids fluttered. He lay with his cheek on his arm. He didn’t—or couldn’t—lift his head, but he looked at the three men beside him.

“There’s no use,” he croaked. “I used the last of my True Mercury. You saw that the phial was empty.”

“You opened a gate for us into this place from Durassa,” Garric said. “Can you open it again so we go back?”

Metron sat up with sudden animation, then gasped with pain. Vascay supported him by the shoulders as if the wizard were a comrade with cracked ribs.

Metron closed his eyes, then opened them with a look of resolution. “Not back, no,” he said. “But it may be we’re close enough that I can open the passage to, to our destination. We’ll need a lamp, a flame—”

“Toster, come here with your lighter!” Vascay ordered. “And Ademos, you’re still wearing those clogs. Bring ’em here. I’ve got a better use for those wooden soles than you walking on them!”

Ademos turned to look, but he didn’t get up from his appearance of piety. “What better use?” he demanded.

“Burning them to get us out of this place!” Vascay said. “Move it, Brother Ademos!”

“I don’t—” Ademos began.

Toster gripped him by the neck. “Somebody get the shoes and come on,” the big man said in a hoarse voice. Calm though he was to look at, Toster was close to the edge also.

Ademos didn’t struggle. Halophus snatched off the clogs and followed Toster to the chief.

Metron had moved slightly so that he had an unmarked patch of armor before him. He began to draw, using the brush and pot of vermilion instead of the yellow powder he’d called his True Mercury.

Garric looked into the forest. The glowing liquid lapped alongside, close enough that Vascay could have skewered the tendril with a cast of his javelin. No point in that, of course. It no longer slanted toward them; rather, it was drawing slightly ahead of their course. When the filament gained enough that it could merge with the horn on the other side, there’d be no escape for the millipede or the men riding it.

Vascay trimmed slivers from the wooden shoes; Halophus laid them in a tiny fireset in the middle of the hexagram the wizard had drawn on the purple-black armor.

Metron placed the ring on the tip of his ivory athame. At his muttered instruction, Toster struck the plunger of his fire piston. When he opened the end, a smolder of milkweed fluff spilled onto the fireset and blazed up at the touch of open air.

“Pico picatrix sesengen…” chanted Metron, holding the sapphire ring up beside the fire. The gem’s facets glinted in hard contrast to the muted blur of these forest depths.

The tendrils of fluid slid toward one another again, this time well in front of the millipede. The creature paced forward on its many legs, unperturbed by what was about to happen. The Archa driver stood with a fluting cry. Hurling its wand to one side, it leaped toward the ground in the other direction. It must have fallen under the millipede’s pincered feet, but Garric didn’t suppose that made much difference in the long run.

Vascay glanced at Garric, though the knife in his hand kept trimming slivers from the clog like a cook peeling a turnip. “Can’t say I’m sorry to be shut of him,” he said, transferring a palmful of shavings for the waiting Halophus to feed to the fire.

Garric smiled as his ancestor Carus would have smiled, an expression as hard as diamond millstones. There probably wasn’t a long run, for the Archa or for the rest of them.

“Baphar baphris saxa…” Metron intoned, adjusting the angle at which he held the ring. The jewel refracted the firelight as well as reflecting it, bending some of it back to dance on the next segment of armor.

“Nophris nophar saxa…” said Metron.

The arms of glowing liquid met with a gush of pearly light. The thin tendrils broadened swiftly, the way water spreads from a breached dike. The millipede stumped on without hesitation, closing on the fluid as it swelled inward.

“Barouch baroucha barbatha…” Metron said. He didn’t stop chanting, but his right hand beckoned to the Brethren desperately. A keyhole of light quivered on the second segment of the millipede’s back.

“Come on, boys!” Vascay said. “This is it!”

Ademos scrambled to his bare feet. The bandits started forward but stopped in a group, staring at the pattern quivering on the armor.

Vascay’s eyes met Garric’s. They both knew the dangers: certain death if they stayed here, unknown and perhaps worse horrors on the other side of Metron’s passage.

“Lead!” Garric said. “I’ll bring up the back like before!”

Vascay leaped into the doorway of light and vanished. Hame and Halophus jostled one another to be next through. Garric touched Thalemos’ arm and gestured him forward. The youth hesitated, then followed Prada into nothingness.

Garric stood at an angle, watching Metron with the gateway in the corner of his right eye. He held his sword bare, though he didn’t recall drawing it. The Brethren jumped and disappeared, some of them muttering prayers. Toster remained at Garric’s side.

The millipede suddenly twisted back, making Garric sway. Metron tried to stand. Garric put his swordpoint at the wizard’s throat to hold him where he was. “Toster!” Garric shouted. “Go!”

Toster turned. He jumped toward the ground, his axe swinging.

“I’ll kill you!” the big man cried, but then he began to scream. The scream continued, but it no longer sounded like anything that might come from a human throat.

“Please!” Metron said. The fire was burning down. Only an occasional sputter woke glints from the sapphire’s facets. “Please, it’ll be—”

Garric put his left arm around the wizard. He lunged forward, taking them together into the freezing maelstrom of Metron’s gateway.

There was no sound in the passage, but Toster’s screams still echoed in Garric’s mind.

He supposed they always would.

“Well, my lords—and princess,” said Carus, bowing to her as they stood on the ridgeline viewing both the royal fleet and the vast assembly in the bay beyond to the west. “I did Admiral Nitker an injustice in not believing that Lerdoc could raise fifteen thousand men. He’s got that many and more besides, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Hundreds of ships were grounded on the open coast to the west of the royal encampment. Most of them were sailing vessels, round-bellied merchantmen which could carry some hundreds of men apiece, albeit in great discomfort. Only a score of triremes escorted them; the Blaise fleet was no larger than the royal fleet had been before Garric—guided by Carus—began to rule the kingdom.

You could command an island with soldiers. To command the Isles, you had to have a fleet.

“You didn’t say that you doubted him, your highness,” said Lord Attaper. Nitker was a former officer of the Blood Eagles, Attaper’s friend and protégé. “Not in my hearing, at least.”

“Didn’t I?” mused Carus. “Maybe I learned something in the time since—”

Sharina reached out to touch Carus’ cheek. The gesture must have looked odd to the high officers standing close and scowling as they gazed at the rebel army, but was better than having the ancient king blurt some variation on “—since I drowned a thousand years ago.”

The king’s face was warm but as stiff as sun-washed marble. He patted Sharina’s fingers, and said, “Since I first came to Valles. I thought Nitker was wrong, though.”

If the royal triremes had met the Blaise merchantmen at sea, only surrender could have saved the rebel army from drowning to a man. If. Luck or more likely wizardry had given Count Lerdoc perfect weather, perfect timing, and perfect secrecy for his sweep across the Inner Sea. Someone was weaving a plot as complex as one of Ilna’s tapestries.

Sharina and the command group were mounted, but Lord Attaper had flatly refused to allow Carus to gallop back to the harbor with only a troop of Blood Eagles to guard him. All four regiments of javelin-armed skirmishers had jogged along with the high officers, the horsemen adjusting their pace to that of their escort. They couldn’t fight the whole Blaise army, but they could delay any desperate thrust by the rebels long enough for the rest of the royal army to arrive.

“We could attack them now,” said Lord Dowos, previously commander of a cavalry regiment which had remained behind to guard Valles. He pointed at the confused mass of ships and men. “Before they get organized, why, we’ll slaughter them!”

Dowos was Lord Waldron’s cousin. When he’d demanded to accompany the expedition to Tisamur, Waldron appointed him adjutant of the royal army. Since he and Waldron thought alike, Dowos was a good choice to ride with the king while Waldron sorted out the sudden disruption of the siege.

“No!” said Lord Attaper, to Dowos’ right. “That’d be slaughter, all right, but not—”

“Who are you to—” Dowos shouted. He jerked his mount’s head to face Attaper. The captured horse, unused to being ridden and too small for the big cavalryman anyway, stumbled to its knees. Dowos jumped clear and reached for his sword.

“If you draw that, Dowos,” Carus said in a voice of thunder, “then you’ll be the first rebel I kill on Tisamur. Depend on it!”

“Wha—?” said Dowos, turning in amazement at the violence of the words. “Your highness, I’m no rebel! I only—”

“Silence!” Carus said.

Sharina sat transfixed on the king’s other side, afraid that any action she took would spark his barely restrained fury. Carus was angry beyond reason at the situation he’d created by bringing the royal army to Tisamur, where the kingdom’s enemies could trap it. If Dowos, if anyone, did the wrong thing now, the king would unload that anger lethally on an undeserving victim.

Attaper kneed his mount between Dowos and the king. He caught the reins of the loose horse, and said in a neutral voice, “Let me help you back into the saddle, my lord.”

Now Sharina could touch the king’s cheek again. “Your highness,” she whispered.

Carus threw his head back and laughed. Sharina knew the humor was honest, but at this juncture it disturbed the nearby officers as much as the anger a moment before had done.

“Your suggestion wouldn’t be a worse blunder than the way I brought us all to the present pass, Lord Dowos,” he said, “but one bad mistake is quite enough for a campaign.”

He nodded toward the rebel force. Lerdoc had brought mounts for his cavalry, trusting his wizard advisors for fair winds—if he weren’t simply being a nobleman and therefore a fool on the question. At least a squadron of horsemen were with the skirmishers, moving out as the regiments of heavy infantry tried to form on the beach. On the ships stranded when the tide backed, men swarmed like bees from an opened hive.

“Next thing to chaos, isn’t it?” the king said with a wry smile. His expression hardened. “How good do you suppose our formation’s going to be after we go charging down into them, hey? Especially when their archers start shooting at us from the ships’ decks! Every one of those ships is going to be a little fort with its own moat of seawater.”

“Your highness…” Dowos said, but his voice trailed off. Abruptly he added, “Lord Attaper, my apologies. And my thanks for your assistance with my horse.”

Sharina looked over her shoulder. The skirmishers, savage-looking men with bundles of javelins and a broad knife or a hand axe, were spreading into a loose screen on the forward slope of the ridge. Most of these men were hirelings from islands less settled than even the rural parts of Ornifal: hunters, goatherds, nomads of one sort and another. A few wore hide garments, and many were in dressed leather rather than cloth. They were men well used to a hard life, and used also to killing.

In the far distance Sharina could see the leading ranks of the phalanx, moving more slowly because they needed to keep formation if they were to be ready to fight at sudden need. Eighteen-foot pikes waved upright in the air above them like the spines of a poisonous caterpillar. The phalangists wore bronze caps and carried flat, round shields; their real protection came from their tight formation and the hedge of spearpoints that kept enemies from closing with them.

The traditional heavy infantry would be bringing up the rear, but from where Sharina stood they were still out of sight. Those regiments were recruited from Ornifal’s yeoman farmers and provided their own equipment, considering themselves socially superior to the oarsmen who formed the phalanx and were the core of Garric’s new tactics. They’d be on their mettle to prove themselves better than the phalangists in battle as well as birth.

“Attaper,” the king said, “how long do you think it’ll take them to get organized enough that Lerdoc would engage of his own accord?”

“Not today,” said the Blood Eagle commander. “He’s a rash man—he wouldn’t be here if he weren’t—”

Carus smiled like a curved knife. “True of more than him,” he said.

“—so he may not wait to fortify a proper camp, but he’ll want to get all his troops ashore and marshalled.”

“That’s what I’d judge as well,” Carus said, nodding. “So…What do you suppose he’ll do if I withdraw Waldron and those last regiments from Donelle…and I bring the whole army together here on this ridge?”

The royal officers looked at one another, dumbfounded by the king’s question. “Surely you’re joking, your majesty?” said the first who dared speak; Lord Muchon, a former officer of the Blood Eagles and now in command of a division of the phalanx.

He didn’t sound sure. Like many of the other officers present, Muchon knew little of Prince Garric beyond the rumor that he’d been a shepherd on Haft a few months before.

“The regiments still in the lines around Donelle are holding ten times their numbers of rebels, mercenaries as well as local militia,” Attaper said cautiously. His contact with Garric had been close and of the sort that cements trust. “If you withdraw them, then the rebels will combine their forces and attack us with…”

He turned up his palms in a deliberately vague gesture. “Twice our numbers. At least.”

There was a general murmur of assent from the command group. The other men looked relieved that Attaper had stated what they all thought was obvious: obvious even to a priestess, let alone to the prince commanding their army.

“Aye,” said Carus with a smile like a striking viper’s. “The rebels’ll march out of Donelle, and we’ll hit them while they’re marching. Kill the most of them and scatter the rest. If things work well, we’ll take the city gates while some of the survivors’ try to get back inside, but that can wait if it needs to.”

Lord Dowos had been trying to avoid calling attention to himself, choosing to stand holding his horse’s bridle instead of remounting. Carus’ latest proposition shocked him to speech again.

“But Count Lerdoc!” he said. “It’s only three miles to Donelle. Lerdoc’ll attack us from behind while we’re fighting the troops from Donelle and, and…”

“We’ll hold the ridgeline here with two regiments of heavy infantry,” the king said briskly. “Waldron will. The phalanx has to be moving to be effective. The phalanx to slice through the locals fast, the rest of the heavy infantry to watch the flanks, and the javelin men to keep the survivors running far enough that they can’t regroup when we turn to deal with Lerdoc.”

He slammed his right fist into his left palm. “Crush them!” he repeated. “And then crush Lerdoc, while he’s stuck here fighting Waldron.”

“May the Lady cast Her cloak about me!” blurted a regimental commander. Nobody else spoke for a moment.

Sharina felt cold. Crush and slice were metaphors when applied to armies, but they and other words—gut, butcher, tear, and every similar term of violence were literal descriptions of what would happen to thousands of the individuals who made up those armies. Twenty thousand hogs, being slaughtered in a morning, squealing and spewing blood on ground already soaked with the blood of others….

“Your highness,” said Lord Attaper, his expression agonized from the effort of what he felt he had to say for the kingdom’s sake. “My prince…Count Lerdoc is a traitor to you and the Isles, but he’s an able general. When he realizes Waldron has only two regiments, he’ll bypass them and rush to take the rest of us in the rear.”

“We’ll have to hope he doesn’t move fast enough to do that,” Carus said, his tone dismissive but a dangerous glint in his eyes. “It’s hard to get an army moving when it doesn’t expect to, you know that.”

“He’s got cavalry,” Lord Dowos said, fully animated again. “Maybe not all his infantry at first, but his horse and skirmishers will reach us. They’ll hold us long enough for him to get the heavy regiments up too.”

“I’ll lead my phalanx against anybody you show me, your highness,” Lord Muchon said forcefully. “But you said yourself that we have to be attacking. We can’t defend against somebody behind us while we’re already engaged!”

“Silence!” the king said. His right hand gripped his sword hilt, and it was with an obvious effort of will that he managed to release it.

No one spoke. The disbelief of the men around Carus was changing to sullen anger.

“We’re going to carry out the plan I’ve outlined,” Carus said in a tone of quiet, deadly fury. “Because there’s no other choice. Do any of you see an alternative that has a chance of success?”

“Given where we are,” said Master Ortron, a commoner and former mercenary leader promoted to command of the other division of the phalanx, “no, there’s no chance of anything else working. May the Sister swallow my soul!”

He snorted. With a humor that he might not have been willing to show openly if he’d expected to survive the coming battle, he added, “As she doubtless will.”

“See to it, then!” Carus snapped to his officers. He jabbed his mount into a trot in the direction of the fleet encampment.

“Your highness!” Sharina called, prodding her own horse as well. She wasn’t a good rider; the only horses in Barca’s Hamlet had been those brought by wealthy visitors.

Carus didn’t slow down. Attaper, with a face of grim death, gestured forward the platoon of Blood Eagles who formed the king’s immediate escort.

“Brother!” Sharina cried.

Carus looked over his shoulder, then reined back so sharply that the hastening bodyguards almost rode into him. The slope was a mixture of brush and turf, but loose rock was exposed on the trail proper; pebbles danced downhill ahead of the king.

“Let me talk privately with my brother,” Sharina said as she rode past Attaper.

The Blood Eagles’ commander eyed her speculatively. He nodded with the hint of a grim smile. “First section, lead his highness by fifty paces!” he ordered. “Second section, we’ll follow at the same interval.”

Carus waited for Sharina, then walked his horse down the track beside her. “It isn’t what I want, girl,” he said quietly, looking at the camp half a mile ahead instead of meeting her eyes. “But there’s no choice, the way things are.”

He grimaced. “The way I’ve made things, I’ll admit.”

The king’s eyes swept his surroundings with a sort of wakeful energy that proved to anyone who’d grown up with Garric that some other spirit now animated his form. Garric was an observant youth, but Carus had been a warrior. To him a glint in the forest suggested ambush and slaughter rather than a neighbor cutting wood.

“What’s that?” he said, as two Blood Eagles trotted a sedan chair out of the camp. Then, recognizing Tenoctris—who else could it have been?—he added, “If she’s found something that couldn’t wait till we reached her, then I don’t suppose it’s good news.”

Four more black-armored Blood Eagles accompanied the two with the chair. The squad leader’s helmet was marked with a horsehair crest. He kept a cautious eye on the nearby Blaise forces, but Lord Attaper still snarled a loud, angry curse.

Attaper believed he and his regiment had the duty of keeping safe those they were detailed to guard. The fact that the people they guarded might have other priorities—the kingdom’s salvation, for example—didn’t matter to Attaper, and he was furious that Tenoctris seemed to have convinced some of his men to take a needless risk.

“Carus,” said Sharina, speaking so that she would be heard before the wizard arrived. “Even if you win the battle, the battles—”

“I will, girl,” the king said in a tone that wouldn’t brook argument. “I’ve watched the phalanx training. It all depends on the phalanx going through the mercenaries without a stumble, then turning and double-timing back to face Lerdoc…but they’ll manage, you watch!”

“Carus, winning that way will be as bad as losing,” Sharina said; her expression calm, her voice clear but not raised. “Even if nobody dies tomorrow but rebels—”

Which was as likely as the sun rising in the west.

“—that’ll be enough blood shed to drown the kingdom in it. Slaughter like that will fragment the Isles, as surely as it did in your own time.”

Carus said nothing. His face showed less emotion than the portrait struck on a coin.

Letting a little of the fear she felt tremble in her voice, Sharina added, “Garric wouldn’t do it, your highness. My brother wouldn’t choose that way!”

“Sister take you, girl!” the king said. “I didn’t choose it myself! There is no choice, now that we’re here and they’re—”

He took his right hand off his sword pommel and swept it through an arc starting with Count Lerdoc’s forces and continuing around to point back at the rebel stronghold of Donelle. His face went sour.

“And don’t say I should withdraw by sea,” he added. “Lerdoc would attack as soon as I started to do that. I’d sacrifice half the army trying to save the rest, and from the moment I’ve been chased off Tisamur bloody there’ll be no kingdom left.”

Tenoctris in her sedan chair had reached the contingent of Blood Eagles preceding the king. They’d stopped her and her guards—their colleagues—with as little ceremony as they’d have shown a troop of tattooed savages waving bows.

Carus swore and trotted his horse forward. “If you delay my advisor a moment longer, Undercaptain Atonp,” he said pleasantly to the section’s commander, “I’ll have you mucking out mules for the rest of your life. Which, of course, may not be long, given the circumstances we’re in now.”

He dismounted and bowed to Tenoctris, motioning her down into her seat when she started to rise. Sharina reached them and slid from her saddle also. It felt remarkably good not to clamp a horse’s ribs with her thighs.

The bodyguards were obviously concerned, but Attaper positioned them at a polite distance from Carus and the two women instead of pressing the king to ride the rest of the way to the camp. They were near enough to reach the earthen walls before Lerdoc could organize a force large enough to be dangerous…and speaking of dangerous things, the king’s mood was obvious to anybody.

“I’m sorry to come rushing to you this way,” Tenoctris said, “but there isn’t much time. If I’m correct.”

The old wizard smiled with a self-deprecating shrug. Her face was pale, and her tongue slurred as she spoke. She looked as though she should be in bed with nurses in attendance.

“I think there’s a trap being set for you, your highness,” she said. “For all the Isles.”

Carus straightened with a frown. “Aye, there is indeed,” he said, his voice a little colder than it usually was in speaking to Tenoctris. “There’s a Blaise army landed this day already. I’m afraid your warning is late.”

His face hardened further. Hatred for wizardry overwhelmed a mind already aflame with frustration. “As you might have seen, were your eyes not so set on your books and spells!”

“What my books and spells have shown me, your highness…” said Tenoctris in a tone that reminded Sharina that the old woman had been raised a noble “is that there are three springs to the trap. The city you came to take; the army brought from the north to confuse you—”

The king’s face blanked at the word “confuse.” Its possible accuracy had taken him aback.

“—and the third, the most dangerous, which I cannot see.”

Aristocratic pique had animated Tenoctris during the past brief exchange, but now she slumped against the chair. Her eyelids fluttered but did not close, and she managed a weak smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s a great wizard against us, but that’s all I’ve been able to learn. He or she or it is so powerful that my spells show me nothing beyond the fact that there’s something to be seen—were I strong enough.”

There was commotion at the north gate of the fleet encampment, only a long bowshot distant from where Sharina and her friends were talking. Carus looked up, and muttered, “Nitker’s coming out to see me, since I’m not going to him.”

“Not a wizard but all the Children of the Mistress together, Tenoctris?” Sharina said. “Couldn’t that be what you’re seeing?”

The old woman shook her head. “No, child, there’s a single mind behind this,” she said. “One who’s weaving a pattern as subtle as anything our friend Ilna could manage. These Children and their Moon Wisdom are only threads. So are the Confederacy and the Count of Blaise. Human threads.”

Carus snorted and put his left foot back in the stirrup, preparing to mount. “I’ll bet on Ilna if it’s weaving to be done,” he said. “And as for those threads you’ve named—by this time tomorrow they won’t be a danger to us or to anybody else!”

“Gar—” Tenoctris began, showing how very tired she was. “Carus, you mustn’t act while the third threat still hides. That’s what our enemy wants.”

“I’ve never been one to sit on my hands and let the other fellow hit first!” Carus said, turning from his horse with a look of cold fury. “I’m not going to try to learn how to waste my time that way now!”

“Garric wouldn’t—”

“Your brother wouldn’t do a lot of things!” Carus said. “Your brother is a peasant! What do you want me to do? Challenge Lerdoc to a bout with quarterstaves?”

“I want you to be the King of the Isles,” Sharina said, standing straight with her hands clasped behind her back. “Instead of being a petulant boy who throws his book in the fire because he thinks it’s too hard for him to understand!”

The Blood Eagles on guard stiffened. They kept their backs to the royal party, but Attaper and the undercaptain turned so they could watch from the corners of their eyes.

Carus could have been carved from an oak tree. Continuing to meet his eyes, her tone still deliberate, Sharina added, “Besides, Lerdoc is old and fat. It wouldn’t be a fair bout.”

The king stepped forward and hugged Sharina, then lifted her in the crook of his left arm and snatched up Tenoctris with his right. It reminded Sharina of just how strong her brother really was.

“Well,” Carus said, laughter bright behind his words, “may the Lady forfend that a King of the Isles should be seen to act unfairly.”

He whirled the women in a full circle, then set them down and stepped back so that he could see both together. “The count is a fat old man, as you say, sister,” Carus said with continuing good humor. “But he has a son, Lerdain, a likely enough youth from all accounts. The apple of his father’s eye.”

“I’ve heard that,” Sharina said carefully. “Though Liane is the one who’d have the details.”

“I don’t need details,” said the king. “I need a pretty girl who can swim. Can you swim, sister?”

“Like a fish,” said Sharina. She spoke with same flat certainty that she’d have said her hair was blond, if that had been the question.

“Then between us,” King Carus said, “we may be able to save the Isles a battle.”

He handed Tenoctris into her sedan chair and gestured Sharina to her horse. As Carus himself mounted, he began to laugh with the amazed jollity of a prisoner just offered a passage to freedom.