Mistress of the Catacombs

23

Ilna stepped through the passage she’d opened, into another universe as tightly encysted as the world of the spiders’ exile behind her. Sunlight blasted her, glaring from a point in the pale sky and reflected from the bare, rocky soil.

Alecto’s corpse lay at her feet. The flaccid skin had no shape but that of the bones it draped, but Ilna recognized the ivory pins still decorating the spill of lustrous black hair.

Alecto’s bronze athame glinted some distance away. The wild girl had run for the last time from the danger her anger had called to life.

The Pack turned their heads to view Ilna. Their movements were like those of water or perhaps smoke, a drifting smoothness that seemed to lack volition.

Ilna stepped forward. “You’ll feast well today!” she called, bravado in her voice, and in her hands the knotted fabric with which she’d rent the wall between worlds.

She smiled coldly. She’d created a masterpiece in the truest sense, a work which could be fully appreciated by only herself and the One whose craft had formed the fabric of which each universe was a part. To a degree the spiders could understand what Ilna’d done, but their appreciation would be tempered by other emotions.

For a time. For the time remaining to them.

The first spider through the opening was the black-and-silver giant. That was as Ilna expected, and as it should be. The others were allowing their leader to accept the reward she so richly deserved for the plan she had made.

The brilliant sunlight must have blinded the spider’s lidless eyes for a moment before they could adapt. When the giant saw what glided toward her and the gap beyond, her mental scream was as shrill as rock shearing. She staggered back, clambering over the bodies of her sisters who packed the hillside leading to the doom of their race.

“Ilna!” called Cashel. He stood partway round the circuit of this world from her. The Pack were confined to a mere bead on the fabric of the cosmos, smaller even than the world which held the great spiders; but like the spiders, they had windows of sorts that allowed them to interact with the greater universe. “Get around behind me! I’ll do what I can!”

Ilna gestured toward the gap with her left hand, letting the fabric dangle from her right. She smiled at the Pack. She knew their tentacles would snatch her when they chose, no matter where she stood within the strait confines of their cell. She appreciated her brother’s offer, but his strength and courage couldn’t bring safety.

Besides, Ilna probably wouldn’t have scuttled like a roach caught in the light even if she had thought it could save her life. Life had never been that important to her.

The Pack slid toward her. Their size was deceptive—one moment mountainous, the next no more than three slender poplar trees which nonetheless towered above her. She wondered if the Pack had physical bodies at all. In looking up into their faces, Ilna thought she glimpsed worlds of ice and crystal, each as real as Barca’s Hamlet had been to her as a young girl.

Was the Pack triple or did her eyes see a single being in three aspects, none of them material in the sense that humans understood matter?

The girl behind Cashel raised her left arm to the white sun. The ruby on her finger sent fire from each facet, painting the otherwise-unseen boundaries of this cyst in the cosmos. It woke lambent flames beyond anything natural light could cause.

The leading member of the Pack leaned over Ilna—and bowed, and passed on through the passage she had torn for them to a larder that could last for ages if they husbanded their bounty.

The second bowed and also entered the world where terrified spiders fled in vain for their lives; then the third. The cell which had held the Pack was now empty, save for three human beings and the empty body of a fourth.

Unknotting her fabric, Ilna walked toward Cashel and the girl. The ruby shimmer fell on her and around her, seeming to pass through Cashel’s braced body as easily as it did empty air. Frowning, Ilna turned to look over her shoulder. The gap she’d opened was starting to close.

On the other side, in the world of vegetation and spiders, the Pack ravened like wolves in a sheepfold. The body of the spiders’ leader lay just inside the opening; the breeze ruffled the empty black-and-silver shell. A line of similar husks was scattered down the hillside. The Pack could stretch their enjoyment when victims like Alecto were scarce, but abundance drove it wild with bloodlust.

Ilna smiled without humor. And the Pack had spared her. In gratitude? Or did they think at some future time she would release them again to drown a world in slaughter?

She put the hank of loose cords to her sleeve. She might need the cords again, and perhaps she would need the Pack again someday also. The fabric of the universe was too subtle for even Ilna to read its pattern completely.

Cashel stopped spinning his staff and planted it before him. He took a deep breath. “I’m glad you came to rescue us, Ilna,” he said. “Because I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t see any way I was going to keep those things back from me and Tilphosa.”

The girl, Tilphosa presumably, nodded tightly. She kept her ring raised to the sun. The portals continued to close, the one Ilna had opened and also the one by which she and Cashel must have entered this place.

“Is she a wizard?” Ilna asked, with less warmth perhaps than she’d have shown if Tilphosa didn’t seem to think that her trick with the ring was somehow special. Didn’t she realize that Ilna could’ve closed the portal as easily as she’d opened it?

“No, she’s just a lady who’s been travelling with me,” Cashel said. He turned. “Tilphosa, this is my sister Ilna.”

Ilna glanced through the hole which slowly closed in back of her companions. On the other side was a city whose stones still dripped with the mud of a swamp.

A lizard covered with bony scutes waddled into view, shouldering massive walls into ruin whenever the way narrowed or twisted sharply. A black-robed woman turned but stumbled in exhaustion as she tried to flee.

The lizard’s long jaws slammed on the woman. It jerked its head upward, flinging the victim up to fall back into the waiting maw. Her right arm spun separately, severed by the first crushing impact. The opening winked completely shut.

“Now,” Ilna said, “we need to get out of…”

As she spoke, the world around her began to go dark. It was only as Ilna fell forward that she realized the dimness was in her eyes, not the sun searing down from above.

Tearing a hole in the cosmos hadn’t been easy, of course, even for Ilna os-Kenset. Her last thought before her mind shrank to a point and went black was, “But it never matters what the task costs, so long as I do it…”

“I want you both to stay well back, now,” Carus said to Tenoctris and Sharina as they entered the siege lines around Donelle together. “An archer on that gate tower can double the range he’d get on the flat.”

The Blood Eagles marched before and behind Carus and the two women; the section under Attaper immediately about them were mounted, as were the score of aides and couriers who followed closely. Tenoctris, who couldn’t very well have walked from the fleet encampment on her own feet, turned out to be an able rider.

That was a bit of a surprise in someone so devoted to scholarship, though Sharina knew it shouldn’t have been. Tenoctris’ father was a noble. He’d kept up his standards, though the horses may have eaten as well as the family on occasion.

The old wizard sniffed. “Precisely how will my death harm the Isles worse than yours, your highness?” she said. “And you’re planning to go right out under the walls!”

Behind the earthworks and mantlets, Lord Waldron and his officers waited to greet the prince and the returning army. The line of march stretched back to the fleet, even though Carus had left a strengthened garrison with the ships. Tenoctris had warned of danger out of the water, though she couldn’t be more precise despite her desperate efforts with an onyx scrying bowl.

“Well, I have to,” Carus muttered. “Anyway, there’s not much risk when the garrison sees Count Lerdoc’s army is with us. Mercenaries have to be willing to die, but that doesn’t mean they want to!”

“Yes,” Tenoctris said. “And I need to get to the Temple of Our Lady of the Moon whether it’s dangerous or not. The risk of a stray arrow isn’t nearly as serious as what will happen if we don’t hurry.”

The Blaise army had been slower to fall into marching order than the disciplined royal troops, so for the most part it followed the royal army. Count Lerdoc himself led the battalion which immediately followed the Blood Eagles in the order of march, however; his lion banner waved in the van. No one on the walls could miss the fact that the force investing Donelle was now twice the size of the royal army alone, nor that there was no chance of outside allies rescuing the city.

Sharina leaned closer to the old woman to speak without being overheard. “Tenoctris, are you feeling all right?” she asked. “You seem—”

“Snappish” was the word that suggested itself. The tendency was common in others, but Tenoctris was a model of gentle humility at most times.

“—worried,” Sharina finished. She’d also been raised to be tactful and pleasant.

Tenoctris laughed, suddenly her normal self again. “Dear, I’m quite terrified,” she said simply. “For some time I’ve been sure that these Children of the Mistress don’t understand the forces they’ve put in motion. Now that I’m sensing what it is behind them, using them like game counters, I’m…Well, whatever it is, it hasn’t the kingdom’s good at heart, and I don’t imagine that it’s thinking of humanity’s good either.”

Lord Waldron must have started shifting his artillery as soon as the courier informed him of the king’s plan. He’d placed in front of Donelle’s main gate all the catapults and ballistae he could move in the available time; the remainder of the heavy weapons were on the way also, hunching along the circuit of the walls on carts and sledges drawn by men as well as draft animals. The old noble knew he couldn’t prevent his monarch from exposing himself, but he intended to make the risk to an archer in Donelle obvious.

Sharina helped Tenoctris dismount behind the mantlets. Lord Waldron used his position as army commander to greet Carus alone. He didn’t try to force his way past the king’s guards, but none of his subordinates stepped forward with him.

“Your highness!” Waldron called between the shields of two Blood Eagles. “I’ve made what preparations I could, but I don’t think—”

“On the contrary, milord,” Carus said, tapping the guards unwillingly aside, “you’ve thought things through very well. But it’s still me who has to go out there.”

Taking off his helmet, he added, “They need to know who’s offering them their lives. Now, shift one of these mantlets so that I can get through.”

The pulleys which moved the city gate began to squeal. Both heavy leaves lurched open, hand’s breadth by hand’s breadth each time the men at the capstans took a step. Mercenaries tossed their shields from the gate towers and began to shout. It was a moment before they fell into unison so that Sharina could hear, “We surrender!”

“By the Lady!” Carus said. “It seems it’ll take even less to convince them than I’d thought!”

He shoved his way between mantlets which troops had just started to move. Sharina, slimmer and at least as quick, slipped through also before Attaper shouted, “Hey! Don’t let her—”

The dozen men coming out the city gate were mostly common soldiers, though a pair of officers in gilded breastplates followed at the end of the delegation. They didn’t carry shields or spears, and several had taken off their sword belts as well.

A burly soldier stepped ahead of his fellows to kneel before Carus and Sharina. “Your highness,” he said, his face close to the ground, “I’d say, ‘Give us terms,’ but I’ll tell you the truth—”

He looked up, his scarred face twisted in fear and misery.

“—the only thing we really care about is our lives. And if you execute us anyway, well, at least we’re out of that hellpit inside the walls!”

“What I planned to offer was to enroll you in the royal army if you’d surrender the city,” Carus said cheerfully. “You’ve already performed your part of the bargain, so you don’t need to worry about me keeping mine. But what is it you’re so determined to get away from?”

Squads of Blood Eagles were double-timing through the gap they’d torn in the siege works and taking position between the king and the mercenaries. Though they didn’t pick up the kneeling spokesman and hurl him back to a safe distance, Attaper and a junior officer planted their legs so close on either side of the man’s head that he looked as though he were crawling through a dense thicket.

“They’ve grabbed up a child,” the mercenary said. He hadn’t exactly relaxed, but he rose from prostrate to a kneeling position. “We figure they’re going to sacrifice her in their temple. It’s not like we’re a bunch of saints, but—”

“I don’t want any part of killing kids like a goose for a feast day,” said another soldier. His words were slurred because the same old wound that scarred his cheek had taken out the teeth on the left side of his jaw. “And I sure don’t want any part of whatever they plan to call up by killing kids!”

There was a general mutter of agreement. Some of it came from the Blood Eagles nearby.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” said Tenoctris. Sharina jumped. Tenoctris had hobbled up behind her, unnoticed in the noise of heavily armed troops pounding into the clear area around the city walls.

Tenoctris went on, “The spell’s been in place for hundreds of years, maybe for millennia. All that remains is to feed it with blood now that the planets are in conjunction. We must stop it.”

The Blood Eagles, Carus’ staff, and the first battalion of Count Lerdoc’s forces, came through the siege lines. As they did so, more mercenaries began to pour out of the city. The Blood Eagles were disarming those who hadn’t left their weapons behind, but nothing worse than a few harsh commands and complaints passed between the mingling armies.

“Aye, we must,” said Carus, drawing his sword. “Which I’d say about any wizards who think to work blood magic in reach of my blade—whatever their purpose for it!”

Raising his blade as a standard, he bellowed, “Lord Waldron, deploy the phalanx at all the gates. Nobody leaves the city till I’m sure we’ve dealt with all the wizards, the Children. Blood Eagles, skirmishers, and heavy infantry in that order—with me to the temple, where we’ll put a stop to whatever’s going on!”

Carus pointed to the mercenaries’ spokesman. “You’re our guide,” he went on. “Now!”

The soldier got to his feet. If he had qualms about returning to the city he’d just escaped, he didn’t show them.

“Right!” he said as he turned. He paused only to hand Attaper the dagger still in his belt sheath; he’d left his sword, the most expensive part of a soldier’s equipment, behind in the city.

“I need to be as close as possible!” Tenoctris cried. Carus and the black-armored bodyguards advancing to the gate ignored her.

Sharina bent, taking Tenoctris’ left arm over her shoulders and gripping the wizard around the waist with her right arm. It’d be easier if Cashel were here, but Sharina’s own strength had never failed her when she needed to accomplish something.

“I’ll help you, Tenoctris,” she said. “Just do what you can, and we’ll get there!”

Sharina trotted forward, her long legs easily matching the pace of men in armor. The old wizard was an awkward burden, but her weight wasn’t a problem yet. It might be later, especially since the temple was on the highest ground in Donelle, but they’d manage.

Cashel was where he was needed. Sharina had to believe that, and it had always been true in the past.

But she needed Cashel very badly herself just now, less for the strength of his arms than his strength of character. Cashel was solid as nothing else in Sharina’s world was solid. She supposed Cashel could be worn down, though she’d never seen anything she thought was capable of doing that.

But he wouldn’t break. Ever.

The streets of Donelle were eerily empty. The clashing hobnails and rattling equipment of running soldiers echoed because there was none of the usual city noise to blur and dampen it. Ahead of Sharina and Tenoctris were most of the Blood Eagles, with Carus and Attaper in their lead. Behind followed the rest of the army with the exception of the phalanx, whose long pikes were useless and dangerous in street fighting.

Not that there was any fighting yet, or any sign of a fight brewing.

The mercenary was taking them by a main street, but it twisted frequently and was never more than twenty feet wide. At an intersection, a well curb blocked half the pavement. The troops shouldered one another and snarled curses.

“Go around to the right!” Sharina ordered the armored men to either side of her and the wizard. “Don’t let anybody step on us!”

“Right,” said the brawny veteran beside Tenoctris. To the troops crowding him he bawled, “Room for the ladies, curse you!”

Sharina wasn’t sure he recognized them, but she’d spoken with authority. When men don’t know what’s going on—and only the section with Carus at the head of the guard regiment did have any idea of what was happening—there’s nothing they want more than somebody to tell them what to do.

Sharina opened her mouth to breathe more freely. Tenoctris was a weight on her arm, and though Sharina wore sandals with heavy soles, the shock of her feet against the cobblestones was sure to raise bruises by the morning.

Tenoctris gasped with each stride, her eyes open and her mouth staring. Sharina was taking her weight, but the effort of keeping her legs under her was a great one for the old woman. Occasionally she stumbled, but never did she fail to catch herself before Sharina had to pick her up.

A cat watched from a rooftop, then vanished silently as the troops hammered past. It was the only animal Sharina had seen since they entered the walls. Hunger would have bitten quickly in a city which had been packed with the whole population of the district even before the start of the siege.

The troops came out onto the avenue around the base of the steep hill at the heart of Donelle: the Citadel when the community was founded, but Our Lady’s Mount during the past centuries of relative peace throughout the Isles. Though this street was no wider than the one the army had been following, the buildings on the other side straggled up the slope instead of forming a solid wall.

For the first time, Sharina had a good view of the temple. She gasped. The grounds and the sparsely wooded hillside below were crawling with people: sitting on walls and roofs, packing the street that led up to the temple, and clinging to the trunks and branches of trees.

Sharina had never seen so many human beings gathered in one place. It reminded her of termites swarming in spring as a new colony prepared to take wing. The crowd chanted, but its very numbers turned the words into a threatening rumble like distant thunder.

King Carus had paused to assess the situation. The route to the temple was blocked by the vast number of civilians praying to their Mistress. Carus gave an order to the troops nearest to him. They locked shields, braced their spears in their right hands, and prepared to advance.

“Sharina!” Tenoctris cried, her voice clear despite the effort it must take the old woman even to breathe after their run through the city. “Stop the king! Don’t let them start killing now or it’ll be as bad as the sacrifice the Children intend! The spell feeds on blood, and it doesn’t matter whose blood it is!”

Sharina heard the urgency in her friend’s voice. She let go of her and sprinted forward. Tenoctris swayed but didn’t fall; that didn’t matter now.

An armored man couldn’t have moved against the press of other armored men. Sharina could and did, slipping through any gap and using her considerable slim strength to shove aside troops who didn’t expect to be pushed from behind that way.

King Carus raised his sword, preparing to give the signal for the butchery he considered an unfortunate necessity. He wasn’t a cruel man, but he must have been a hard one even before decades of campaigning inured him to slaughter.

Sharina grabbed his wrist from behind as she’d done before, swinging herself around the king’s torso to face him. Attaper raised his own blade in furious amazement before he recognized who she was.

“You mustn’t!” Sharina said. “No blood, or we’ll work the spell ourselves!”

Carus’ face cleared from the thunder of the moment before. He shouted, “Shields and spear butts, boys! Shove them out of the way—but no blood!”

Obedient though puzzled, a soldier’s usual state, the Blood Eagles reversed their spears and went on. The process was brutal, but it wasn’t massacre. The troops advanced, hammering through civilians who chanted and ignored the threat till they were struck down.

Over the chanting came the sound of screams from the temple. The crowd stilled in wonder.

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

In the temple, the screams grew louder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Archa bent at the joint between thorax and the bulbous abdomen below. A spearpoint glanced off its chitinous chest as the creature slashed at the fallen man’s legs. Garric cut off the Archa’s head, but its saw-edged forelimbs continued to hack until another spear thrust brought the creature down.

Garric drew his dagger. He leaped the fallen man and the decapitated monster, meeting face on the column of Archai coming up the passage from the sanctum. Attaper and three Blood Eagles were at his side. The warriors made a shrill chirping, so loud as it echoed that the stone walls quivered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Archai fell, they continued to slash at the soldiers’ legs below the studded aprons. A wounded Archa could be more dangerous than one still standing at shield height.

Garric struck the warrior in front of him, then jumped and was saved by a reflex his ancient ancestor had honed. A toothed limb whistled beneath him, the dying stroke of an Archa with a spearpoint all the way through its thorax.

Garric blocked a cut with his sword, brought the ball pommel of his dagger down in a hammerblow on a triangular skull, and then kicked. His hobnails and the thick leather sole of his boot took the stroke that would otherwise have severed his leg. His foot went cold to the ankle, but he could still walk on it.

“There’s no room in the world for these and men both!” Carus shouted in his mind. “They had their time. They will not have ours!”

Garric took another step. He was out of the passage, into the huge domed vault of the sanctum. For an instant, he and the three soldiers with him faced a score of slashing warriors.

Two men went down. A limb smashed Garric’s helmet, breaking the chin strap so that the rim slipped half over his eyes. He struck left and right by instinct, feeling his blades cut deep. Blood Eagles pushed past; Attaper dragged him back against the wall beside the passageway.

Garric gasped, bent forward to draw another breath, and would’ve toppled onto his face if he hadn’t stuck his dagger point down onto the floor to brace him like a steel cane. His cuirass constricted him; he couldn’t breathe as deeply as he needed to. A wave of dizzy nausea swept through his body…and passed as it always did, as it had many times before when he’d worked in the pride of his strength beyond what mere bones and muscles were meant to stand.

“Are you all right, your highness?” Attaper gasped. Like Garric, he was bracing his buttocks against the wall behind him. Soldiers crowded excitedly into the sanctum, their shields raised.

“They’re forcing the bugs back,” Carus observed critically, “but they shouldn’t be taking so many casualties. Archai are sword work, not for spears.”

Both Garric’s arms and the front of his cuirass were covered with the insects’ purplish ichor. It smelled like sour wine and made his skin prickle. When he moved, the dried slime pulled hairs from his arms like a coating of glue.

“I’m all right,” Garric muttered to Attaper. He straightened to give himself a better view of the battle. “I should’ve told the troops to leave their spears outside and go in with swords. Holes in these bugs don’t put them down quick enough.”

As he spoke, a spear flew from the oculus in the center of the dome. He looked up. The heads of a squad of Blaise armsmen peered down from the thirty-foot opening. One knelt on the edge as Garric watched. He flung a spear and took another handed him by a comrade out of sight.

“Sister take the fools!” Attaper fumed. “They’ll be hitting our boys if they keep that up! They’re a hundred and fifty feet up!”

A yard-square piece of gilt bronze sailed through the oculus: the soldiers on the roof were tearing off the metal sheathing for missiles. From the way the sheet fluttered, it could have been cloth—but it clanged like a dropped anvil when it hit.

“Hey!” cried a voice from above. “There’s people holding out on the back wall!”

“If it’s the priests who started this,” said Attaper, “the bugs can save us the trouble of killing them. Not that I’d mind the trouble.”

“It can’t be priests,” said Carus, his expression in Garric’s mind sharp with surmise. “Priests wouldn’t have survived this!”

“Hold me!” said Garric, no longer conscious of fatigue. He rammed his sword home in its sheath and used Attaper’s shoulder to lift his body, his right foot braced at waist height against the wall. The molding there was very slight, but the marble lip gave his hobnails purchase.

The vault was as wide as it was high, or at least it was too close to tell the difference without a chain. A seething mass of Archai was climbing out of the pool. On the opposite side of them was a wall of warrior bodies, spreading as more Archai climbed to the top and died there.

Even raised a few feet from the floor, Garric couldn’t see who was on the other side of the mounded corpses. But—

An Archa reached the top; a quarterstaff slammed it at the junction of thorax and abdomen, breaking off a leg. Garric only knew one man that strong.

He dropped to the mosaic floor, drawing his sword again. He knew what he had to do.

“Let me handle it, lad,” said the voice in his mind. The king sounded detached and very certain. “This is a thing I’ve done before.”

Then go, thought Garric, surrendering his body to his ancient ancestor. He watched like a man whose horse has taken the bit in its teeth. Save them, whatever it costs.

The incoming troops had expanded their hold on the sanctum into an arc wide enough for a dozen men to stand abreast. They fought until they fell and were replaced by fresh troops coming through the passage. The weight of the armored soldiers pushed the Archai back, but the twin forelimbs and suicidal tenacity of the insect warriors made them terrible opponents in a close-quarter fight like this one. The mosaic pavement was slick with blood as well as ichor.

Carus raised his ichor-smeared blade in the air like an oriflamme. “Follow me!” he shouted. He leaped through a space between two Blood Eagles—Garric hadn’t believed there was a space until it was behind them—and into a wall of Archai milling like ants from a dug-up nest.

Even watching like a spectator at a handball match, Garric couldn’t fully understand what happened next. Carus moved like a dancer, using his dagger and the pommel of his sword rather than the blade.

The Archai were quick with their chopping forelimbs; Carus was quicker yet, quicker than thought. He took strokes as he gave them, but even there the king’s instinct to duck or turn put his armor under the living blades.

The hammerblows on Garric’s helmet and breastplate dented the bronze, but chitin swords weren’t dense enough to pierce metal. Some of the strokes were as hard as the one that’d stunned Garric a few minutes before, but Carus operated on a plane in which his whole being was subordinated to the task he’d set himself before beginning.

Like a dancer, Garric thought again; but in Carus’ wake lay a swath of twitching bodies as broad as a man’s two arms could reach. The air about the king was a fog of ichor and blood, slung in droplets from steel blades and saw teeth.

“Blood Eagles to me!” Attaper roared as he followed Carus into the sudden gap. “Guard your prince or be ready to fall on your swords!”

What had been a battle turned into a sporting event of unbelievable savagery. The bodyguards slashed their way forward, no longer protecting themselves. Their only concern was to keep up with the king and their commander—

And they did keep up, more or less, sweeping their blades into the Archai with the same careless abandon that the insects showed. The insect warriors went down with heads, limbs, even their bodies severed. Men went down also; but not as many as in the opening minutes of the battle when instead of merely killing they’d tried also to protect themselves against unfamiliar dangers…and failed in both desires, as often as not.

More troops tramped into the sanctum. Regular infantry and even a few Blaise armsmen mixed with the last of the bodyguard regiment. The king’s advance across the floor had opened space for the human army to use its greater numbers, though Archai continued to clamber out of the central pool. The water was murky with blood.

A section of sidewall crashed inward with a cloud of shattered concrete. Iron cast into tight-curled horns to resemble a ram’s head poked into the sanctum, then withdrew to smash the hole bigger. Lord Waldron had brought one of the battering rams of the siege train up with his leading battalions.

A good man, Waldron, for all his hot temper and stiff-necked pride in his noble lineage. A flawed man but one who had few equals…much like Carus himself.

The king reached the mound of Archai bodies. All Carus saw as he climbed with crunching hobnails were targets and threats, but Garric watching through the same eyes had a better view of the battle than he’d gotten during his brief glimpse from the wall molding.

The troops pouring through the hole they’d battered in the sidewall were dismounted cavalrymen from the regiments of Northern Ornifal; Lord Waldron himself was at their head. There were more men than insect warriors in the sanctum, now.

A huge chunk of the dome fell inward, raggedly doubling the size of the oculus. It carried with it two of the Blaise soldiers who’d chopped it away as a more effective missile than the spears they’d exhausted. Half fell in the bloody pool, crushing several of the Archai who were just climbing out. The creatures still appeared, but in nothing like the numbers they had when the Mistress’s plans were being fed by the one-sided slaughter of the civilians she’d gathered as sacrificial animals.

Carus beheaded an Archa atop the mound of bodies. At the same instant, Chalcus’ curved blade severed both oddly jointed ankles and Cashel smashed its chest. Purple slime smeared the quarterstaff so thickly that its ferrules were indistinguishable from the hickory pole.

“We’re done, lad!” King Carus shouted in Garric’s mind. “But by the Lady, so are the bugs!”

It was Garric’s body again, but it was slipping away from him. Thalemos—what was Lord Thalemos doing here?—dropped the severed Archa forelimb he’d taken for a weapon. He, Ilna, and another girl braced themselves to catch Garric’s slumping figure.

“Prince Garric and the Isles!” someone shouted over the chaos.

“Prince Garric and the Isles!” bellowed the army. The shout grew louder with every repetition as the troops outside the building took it up also.

It was the last sound Garric heard before he sank into the blackness of total exhaustion.