Mistress of the Catacombs (48 page)

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 didn't expect 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, Under-Captain 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 its 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 quarterstaffs?"

"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 under captain 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 blonde, 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.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The chill water clamped the muscles over Ilna's rib cage tightly and dulled her need to breathe. The water-filled tunnel wasn't quite as narrow as the passage between the pool and the outer world, but there wouldn't have been room enough to swim properly even if Ilna had known how. She pulled herself along by her hands with an occasional kick against the walls when her toes found purchase.

She didn't know if Alecto was following. She didn't even know if she hoped Alecto was following. Ilna had given her companion as good a chance at salvation as she herself had, but she couldn't pretend Alecto's death would trouble her any worse than the wild girl's continuing life would.

Ilna's fingers were numb and her lungs were a rolling fireball that seemed to be devouring everything around it. Eventually the blaze would absorb her brain and everything would stop, but until then she would keep on going.

Streaks of light pulsed across her eyes. How long could a salamander stay under water? For hours, certainly; possibly for days. Ilna wasn't sure if the tunnel was still going down; her body rubbed the slick stone, sometimes with her shoulders, sometimes with her hips. The only direction was forward.

Phosphorescence flooded over her—pinks and greens and yellows, all against a background of sickly blue. Ilna blew her lungs out, scarcely aware of what she was doing, and drew in a deep breath. The air didn't have odors in that first moment: it was life, as simple as that. She'd been good as dead, and now she breathed again.

Alecto surfaced noisily, flinging up a spray of rainbow droplets. "Sister take me!" she cried. Then, "May the Pack grind my bones if I'm not glad to breathe again!"

Ilna dabbed her feet down, touched rock, and felt the panic in her throat subside. While she could appreciate the irony of escaping all manner of dangers only to drown at the point of safety, that wasn't the story she wanted to be remembered for.

She bobbed—once, twice, and again—to reach the edge of the pool. She was smiling. I'm not sure I want to be remembered at all; and if I drowned here, there'd be precious little chance of anybody hearing the story anyhow.

Alecto, who could swim and who'd lost the cape, her only remaining garment, in the tunnel, squirmed up onto the shore with the litheness of a cormorant. She'd gripped her dagger in her teeth as she swam; now, ignoring Ilna's struggle to climb out of the pool, she took the weapon in her hand again as she looked around.

There was plenty of light to see clearly, at least for eyes adapted during the long, dark crawl to reach this place. It was a cave, but it was much larger than the one immediately beyond the temple. Ilna looked up. At some points the curving roof was as high as she could've flung a stone.

Mushrooms and lichens covered the cave floor and ran up the walls and ceiling as well. They glowed in muted shades; to Ilna's trained eye no two were precisely the same hue. The faded yellow of one mushroom lacked the green undertone of the otherwise identical bell sprouting beside it.

"How far back do you suppose this cave goes?" Alecto said, trying to keep concern out of her voice. She tapped a wall with her dagger butt; under a finger-thick coating of fungus, the bronze clacked on stone. "Is there a way out besides the way we came?"

"I have no idea," Ilna said, keeping her comments to the literal truth. She supposed—as no doubt the wild girl did—that there wasn't another way out; that there was no way at all now that Alecto's rockslide had buried the temple along with the rest of the village.

It wouldn't do any good to state the obvious, though. Besides, while it was superstition to believe the words might create the grim reality, when Ilna was trapped in a rocky tomb, she found herself closer to superstition than she cared to be.

A cricket scuttled through a grove of knee-high mushrooms, shaking clouds of white spores from the bells. The insect was as big as a mouse; its hind legs were in normal proportion instead of the outsize pair on which its smaller relatives jumped in the world outside the cave.

Ilna ran the coils of the noose through her fingers, squeezing moisture from the silk with firm pressure. She had to decide what to do with her soaked tunics as well. She supposed they'd dry more quickly on her body than if she hung them in the cave's dank atmosphere, but she could speed the process by wringing them out first.

"Well, it doesn't look to me like we're any better off than we were before," Alecto said in a challenging tone. Her words echoed, softened by repetition and the forest of fungus.

"We're a great deal worse off than we were before you murdered the priest," Ilna said. "We can't change the past, though, so I'll begin looking for a way out after I've taken time to rest."

Her voice as she met the wild girl's eyes was very calm, but she held the noose ready to throw. If Alecto chose to attack... Ilna didn't know what she'd do with her companion after disarming her, but she supposed she'd think of something.

"Faugh!" said Alecto. She turned and stalked deeper into the cave. Ilna thought the wild girl was simply walking away, but instead she knelt to examine a clump of ball-headed mushrooms.

Ilna grimaced and resumed her survey of the cave. The fungus forest crawled with insects, all of them much larger than similar forms in the upper world. Ilna wondered if there'd be more salamanders like the God-thing Alecto slew, but there was no sign of such. Perhaps now that the giant was dead his lesser kin would move toward the pool, like rams struggling for the flock's leadership after the bellwether dies.

Well, that would mean meat. The omnipresent fungus must be edible; insects at least were able to live and flourish on it. And Ilna supposed that she could eat giant crickets the way she'd eaten crabs caught off the shore of Barca's Hamlet.

The crabs had been stewed, though, and Ilna didn't see much way of building a fire in this place. The notion of raw cricket wasn't appealing.

She snorted, almost a laugh. Very little in the situation was appealing.

"Yes it is, by the Sister!" Alecto cried enthusiastically. She stood and turned, holding her dagger out in what Ilna momentarily thought was a threatening gesture.

No: Alecto was using the flat of her blade as a spatula, demonstrating the dark spores she'd shaken from the gills of the mushrooms she'd been looking at. They meant nothing to Ilna. Old Allis fattened the living she scraped from the land in the north of the borough by selling cures to those who trusted her. She picked mushrooms, both spring and fall. Nobody else near Barca's Hamlet did, though. Most people thought any fungus was apt to poison the fool who ate it.

"I've never seen them this big before," Alecto said, "but these are Traveller's Balls as sure as I'm a woman!"

"We can eat them, you mean?" Ilna said. She preferred to be on good terms with her companion instead of at the edge of violence, but she really couldn't understand what Alecto was talking about.

And as for 'never seen them this big....' Each of these nearly-spherical caps was the size of a boar's head. No mushroom got that big in the borough.

"Not travelling that way," said Alecto with a half sneer she was unwilling or unable to control in the cause of harmony. Obviously the wild girl felt power had shifted again in her direction. "Travelling like what brought me here. Through the Dreamworld!"

"I don't see how that's an improvement," Ilna said. "According to what you told me, our spirits have to come back to our bodies and they're still here... oh."

"Right!" said Alecto in triumph. "I'll find another—"

Her face changed as she realized what she was saying and who she was saying it to. "That is, I'll take you along and we'll both get back to, well, out of—"

"We'll go to wherever the next innocent victim happens to be," Ilna said coldly. "Don't bother. I have enough on my conscience without snatching some stranger into the place your luck and judgment puts them. I haven't been impressed by your past successes."

The wild girl's hot fury met the ice in Ilna's eyes—and backed away from it. "Do you think you're better than me?" Alecto shouted. "Do you think I don't know what you are?"

"I don't think a spider is better than a weasel, no," Ilna said, her hands on her noose. "But I think we're different."

"Do as you please!" Alecto said, turning away. "Stay here and die, then! But I'm going to get out."

Ilna forced herself to relax. She needed rest more than she needed food; perhaps after she slept she'd be better able to follow the strands of this pattern.

And again, maybe she already knew where the pattern led. Maybe it wasn't simply chance that made the web-draped, spider-filled Hell she'd seen in a dead man's eyes quiver constantly at the fringes of her memory.

Alecto had caught a cricket and was opening its body with the point of her knife. Do insects have blood? They must, Ilna supposed; and if her companion was determined to use blood magic—let her.

Ilna lay down, resting her head on a clump of broad-capped mushrooms whose firm flesh cushioned her better than a rolled tunic would have done. She still hadn't wrung out her clothing.... Well, that could wait; had to wait.

Alecto shook a mushroom cap over herself and the figure she'd scratched on the ground. She began to chant in an angry, hectoring tone very different from the quiet care Ilna was used to hearing in Tenoctris' voice.

It wasn't just that Ilna was exhausted by the effort of worming through narrow tunnels and water almost cold enough to freeze. The rock itself, the whole living mass of it above and around Ilna, was forcing itself onto her soul though for the moment it couldn't crush her body.

Ilna found every moment's existence in this place a battle. The rock wouldn't defeat her so long as she lived, but the struggle was a greater strain than anything her muscles had gone through.

Spores from Alecto's mushroom drifted to where she lay. They had a sharp tang, but the smell wasn't really unpleasant.

Ilna felt herself sliding. Instead of a cave floor as level as those of most houses in Barca's Hamlet, she was on a smooth, steep funnel . She wanted to crawl back, but her limbs didn't move and nothing she did would make a difference anyway. At the bottom of the funnel was a hole, and she knew what was on the other side of the hole as well.

Alecto chanted. Ilna would've smiled if she'd been able to move the muscles even of her face. She could see the pattern spreading from this point. The wild girl would follow her strand to its end, her end. No one could change that, no one could change any part of what was already woven.

Ilna slid faster. Her eyes were open. They saw the world of the cave as motionless and unchanged: rock and lichen and the insects which ate the fungus and one another.

On the domed ceiling over Ilna's head, a spider the size of a man's spread hand waited in her web for prey. She looked down at Ilna, as still and silent as the rock she gripped.

As the world about Ilna vanished into gray darkness, she felt herself falling upward.