Mistress of the Catacombs (14 page)

There was more than humor in Vascay's smile; but there was humor also.

"If no one can enter Laut...," said Garric, weighing cautiously the words he'd listened to. "Then how did Thalemos' advisor get here from Tisamur? Metron."

"Aye, Metron," Vascay said. "With a purse full of gold and a tongue full of promises. His art brought him, I suppose."

"Could he be an agent of Echeon's?" Garric pressed. "Tricking you and others like you into coming out where he can snap you up?"

Vascay laughed bitterly. "You're a prince indeed, aren't you, friend Garric?" he said. "You think like a prince, at any rate."

The bandit's face hardened. "Aye," he said. "That could be; I've thought it, though it's not a thing I'd say to the other Brethren, you understand. But I took the chance regardless, because it's the only chance on offer that might bring down the tyrant."

Garric nodded. "I see," he said.

What would Carus do in this place? Take the risk of supporting Thalemos, probably. And yet, how much of a risk was that compared to the other choices? What else could he do but wander Laut as a lone vagabond... with a beastgirl in tow?

Garric glanced at Tint. She felt his eyes and met them, still shivering with fear of the snakes all about her. He couldn't very well leave Tint to her fate, any more than he could stay here on Serpent's Isle as an alternative to trying his luck on the mainland of Laut.

Garric smiled at the bandit chieftain. The expression warmed him, so he let it spread more broadly across his face.

"All right, Master Vascay," he said. "This past year I've found myself filling many jobs I wasn't raised to. For a time, at least, I'll try my hand at being a bandit and a rebel."

Vascay leaned forward and clasped forearms with Garric. "Be a good enough rebel, my friend," Vascay said, "and we can all of us give up being bandits. Welcome to the Brethren!"

* * *

Cashel shielded his eyes with a hand and squinted besides; the noon sun gave the bay a brassy sheen that'd make the back of his head hurt if he wasn't careful. The water was so still that the reef formed a ragged black line instead of tossing spray.

"It'll be a good time to go out," he said to Tilphosa who sat beside him. Her legs were crossed, right knee over left knee, and her hands were clasped over them tightly. "Past the reef, I mean."

They'd have to row, of course; the sail the crewmen had rigged to the new mast—the wreck's former mainspar—hung as limp as the fronds of the palms at the tideline. That didn't matter to Tilphosa one way or the other, of course.

Cashel dried his hands on his tunic. "I wouldn't mind doing some real work," he said. "Rowing would feel good."

Metra was working her art in a space Cashel had cleared among the ferns. The sailcloth screen she'd used earlier was now part of the pinnace's kit. Metra didn't want the sailors watching her and maybe getting in the way—and the sailors, like most people, didn't like to be around wizardry.

Cashel didn't mind wizardry, but he was just as glad not to have to see Metra. He didn't like her or trust her, either one.

"But you lifted that huge rock," Tilphosa said, drawn out of her brown study by Cashel's words. "Surely that was work, even for you."

"That was a job, all right," Cashel said. He paused while his mind sifted words to find the ones that'd explain. "But all that, killing the cannibal in its coffin... that's kinda what I'd like to clear out of my mind, do you see?"

He gave her a smile. He didn't suppose Tilphosa would understand, but she wasn't the sort to sneer because 'nothing that dumb ox Cashel says is worth listening to' like some folks in the borough whispered.

Tilphosa smiled back, but her expression chilled suddenly. She lowered her eyes to the ground and hunched her shoulders.

"I want to be off this island," the girl whispered. Her clasped hands trembled, and for a moment Cashel was afraid she was going to cry. "I'd start swimming if I didn't think they were going to have the boat ready soon. They will, won't they?"

Tilphosa raised her eyes to the dinghy. A dozen sailors clustered about it, putting on what Cashel too thought were the finishing touches under Hook's direction. They'd raised the sidewalls with boards from the wreck's decking and had fitted the mast, turning a boat into a pinnace.

"Right, it shouldn't be long," Cashel said. He didn't try to sound especially hearty; if Tilphosa hadn't learned by now that Cashel meant the things he said, there wasn't much point into tricking her into believing him. Funny that she'd been so, well, solid when it really was dangerous. Now that the thing in the gold coffin was dead—and it surely was dead—she was letting her nerves get to her.

Tilphosa resumed staring morosely at the ground. The sailors were rigging a rudder—the dinghy had been steered with the oars—and hadn't started loading the stores of food and water yet, so it'd be a while longer.

Cashel cleared his throat and said, "Can you tell me about this Thalemos you're going to marry, mistress? I don't know anything about Laut. I, ah, come from Haft."

The truth was, up to a few months ago Cashel hadn't known any more about Count Lascarg in Carcosa, the capital of Haft, than he had about whoever ruled Laut. Folks from Barca's Hamlet didn't travel much, and the merchants who came to buy sheep and wool didn't give much idea of the wider world they moved in.

Tilphosa looked at him and smiled unexpectedly. "Thanks," she said. "For trying to distract me. But if you really want to hear about my marriage...?"

"Sure," Cashel said, watching a speck above the western horizon. "Now that I'm getting a chance to learn new things, I figure I oughtn't to waste it."

The speck was an albatross, he figured, though he couldn't be sure at this distance. Even the seagulls seemed to keep away from here. He'd never guessed that gulls cared about anything but finding the next beakful to send down to a belly that was never full.

"There's really some mystery about it," Tilphosa said, lowering her voice slightly. The sailors by the pinnace were too far away to hear anyway, but it was toward the jungle where Metra was working that the girl's eyes turned. She grinned at Cashel, already herself again. "A mystery from me, at any rate. I think Metra...."

She shrugged. Cashel nodded understanding.

"My parents died when I was too young to remember even their faces," Tilphosa said. "They were lost at sea. I... well, I've never liked the sea, but there wasn't any choice if I was to get to Laut, was there?"

"Some day maybe you'll meet my sister Ilna," Cashel said. "You'd get along, I guess. You'd get along with all my friends."

Tilphosa frowned. "Because they're afraid of the sea?" she said.

"Not that," said Cashel. "Because they do things whether they're scared to do them or not."

He smiled softly, remembering Ilna and Garric and especially Sharina, lovely Sharina with her musical laugh.

"But what about you, Cashel?" Tilphosa asked. "You do things even if you're afraid, don't you?"

Cashel shrugged. "I guess I would," he said. "But the only things I've found to worry about are, you know, not doing a good enough job."

His lips pursed. He wondered if he sounded like he was bragging. It wasn't like that, he was just trying to explain how he felt.

"Well, anyway," Tilphosa went on, "I became a ward of the Temple of Our Lady of the Moon in Donelle. The priests saw to it that I was educated as a proper lady. They didn't make me a priest myself, though. I know no more about the rituals of the Mistress than any householder on Tisamur does."

Cashel nodded to show that he'd heard. On Haft the priests chanted hymns to the Great Gods on major festivals; ordinary folk just bowed and paid their tithes; paid a tithe of what the temple officials could prove in their assessment rolls, anyhow. It sounded like things were different on Tisamur. At least—

"You always say 'the Mistress,'" Cashel said, turning to meet the girl's eyes. "It is the Lady you mean, right?"

Tilphosa frowned slightly. "Well...," she said. "It's hard to explain, Cashel. The Mistress, the lunar aspect of the Lady, is real. I mean...."

She looked over her shoulder with a hooded expression, checking to be sure that Metra was still at her work out of sight. "We don't have an image of the Mistress in our temple in Donelle," Tilphosa said in a lowered voice. "She comes in the visions when worshippers gather in the sanctuary at night to pray; and she comes in dreams to the specially devout. The Mistress isn't a statue of wood or stone like the Lady in other temples."

Captain Mounix was satisfied with the way the rudder hung, though Hook had taken a rasp from his toolchest and was softening the edges of the hinge-pin. The rest of the men began loading the pinnace from the stores piled to either side.

Mounix glanced toward Cashel, but he didn't call. Most times Cashel would've gone to help without thinking about it, but there were too many sailors for the job already: three full handsful of them, besides Mounix himself and Hook. They worked like they were as ready to leave this place as Tilphosa was.

Cashel smiled. He wouldn't mind getting away himself, though he wasn't sure he was going to like Laut any better. Well, by now he'd been a lot of different places and he'd managed to do all right in all of them.

"And that's what happened, you see," Tilphosa continued, watching the final preparations with greedy eyes. "The Mistress told Her Children in dreams that I should marry Thalemos of Laut so that She can return to rule the world. So, well, here we are."

She smiled at Cashel, then looked over her shoulder again. Her expression became guarded again.

"I've never met Prince Thalemos," she said softly. "And I'm not even sure he knows I'm coming to Laut to marry him. But the Mistress knows all; Her will be done."

"Girl!" called Captain Mounix, though his eyes were on Cashel rather than Tilphosa. "You better bring your wizard if she expects to leave with us!"

"Let her stay!" shouted a sailor from the other side of the pinnace, mostly hidden by his fellows.

"I'll get her," Cashel said quietly, but Tilphosa stood with him as he rose.

They started off toward Metra's clearing. Before they entered the trees, Cashel glanced back to make perfectly certain that the sailors wouldn't be able to launch the pinnace before he and the women could return. There were farmers in the borough who'd cheat you of anything they thought they could get away with; they'd trained Cashel so he was ready to deal with Mounix and his men.

"Did you have any say in the business, mis..., ah, Tilphosa?" Cashel asked. "Mistress" was what he'd ordinarily call a woman when concern made him formal, but he didn't like the sound of the word here.

Bent fronds marked the trail, but enough of the vegetation had sprung straight again that he walked in front of the girl. "I mean, what you're doing doesn't sound like, like something I'd want to do."

Tilphosa laughed and touched his shoulder from behind. "I appreciate what you're saying, Cashel," she said, "but you don't understand what it is to have a real God, the Mistress herself, order you to do something."

Through the foliage ahead Cashel heard Metra's voice hoarsely chanting. His skin prickled.

"Mistress Metra!" he called to give warning. "We're coming to fetch you back to leave!"

Then, softly over his shoulder, he added, "No, Lady Tilphosa, I don't know what it would be like to have a real God order me to do something."

Cashel wasn't sure that Tilphosa knew either, though she thought she did. Well, he'd deal with his part of the job the best way he could, whatever it turned out to be.

He pushed through the ferns; Metra was trying to rise, but wizardry had robbed her legs of strength. "You take her gear, Tilphosa," Cashel said. He shifted his staff to his left hand and bent to pick Metra up whether she wanted that or not.

Cashel wasn't one to waste time arguing when a job had to be done.

* * *

"Chalcus is coming!" Merota said, hopping up from where she sat opposite Ilna on the horseshoe bench under a grape arbor. She started to run toward the conference room but caught herself before her legs moved. "Ilna, can I...?"

Ilna felt a thrill of anticipation. It didn't reach her face, of course, and her fingers continued the knot-work she was using to busy them.

"Yes, of course," she said. The words weren't fully out of her mouth before Merota was racing across the lawn toward Chalcus. He'd just passed through the cordon of guards with a joke and laughter.

Ilna's almost-smile—about as close as she ever came to a smile, she supposed—hardened before it reached her lips. Though Chalcus moved with his usual lithe grace, Ilna recognized the tension beneath the grin he flashed her.

Tenoctris waited just outside the cordon of Blood Eagles, resting some of her weight on Liane's arm. Garric spoke from the doorway; the two women joined him and Sharina in the conference room. Just before closing the door, he gave Ilna a look she couldn't read.

She continued to knot wool into fabric on her lap. Ilna didn't carry a loom with her, but she always had skeins of yarn. Work didn't occupy her mind, but the rote exercise provided a foundation of support that settled her when otherwise she would....

Would be unsettled, leave it at that. Not even Ilna os-Kenset could in perfect calm view the gray web-draped Hell Tenoctris had drawn from Echeus' mind.

Ilna thought of the spiders whose unwinking multiple eyes stared as if they saw her through the curtain of wizardry. Well, let them stare; she had her work.

The fabric lengthened. Ilna didn't have to look at it to know that anyone who did would feel the touch of sunlight on the ancient stonework of the mill in Barca's Hamlet. There was hard work and hard living in the borough, as there was everywhere in this world for a poor orphan. But the sun endured, and the mill endured, and Ilna had endured also.

It wasn't the most cheerful gift to offer those viewing the fabric, but Ilna didn't believe there was a better one. Especially for a viewer whom spiders might be watching.

Ilna didn't need to be in the conference room; Tenoctris alone could tell Garric what they'd seen in the dead man's eyes. Perhaps the old wizard could even explain it, though she'd seemed as much at a loss as Ilna was.

Ilna's fingers continued to knot the yarn, turning the vision of Hell into a pattern of repose and gentle pleasure. She was making the world a better place by that much; a trivial thing in the long run, but—Ilna grinned coldly—in the long run they'd all be dead.

Merota flung herself toward the sailor; he scooped her up in his arms. Ilna had expected that, but she was surprised when—instead of striding directly over to the bench where Ilna waited—Chalcus set the girl on the platform of a sundial several paces away. He stood before Merota, holding her hands and talking earnestly.

Ilna deliberately turned her head and studied the grape leaves behind her. Small ants tended herds of aphids along the curling shoots.

Ilna felt a surge of bitter desperation: she had as much kinship with those insects as she did with the human beings around her. Garric had turned her away, and now Chalcus chatted with the child instead of—

"Mistress Ilna...?" he said, unexpectedly close.

Ilna spun around, flustered despite herself. She'd grown accustomed to Chalcus announcing himself with a whistled tune; and of course his soft-soled boots made no sound on the turf....

Merota remained standing beside the sundial, wide-eyed and nervously stiff as she watched them. "She won't wander," Chalcus said, half-turning his head to indicate the girl. "I told her you and I must talk without her, mistress—"

He smiled, though not as broadly as at most times.

"—and she agreed, though without pleasure. So that now I can speak with you about matters that give me no pleasure either."

Ilna folded the knot-work ribbon and put it in her sleeve. She took out a few lengths of twine to occupy her fingers in its place.

"Speak, then," she said. Her own smile was as cold as the winter sky.

"Your friend Garric's mind was raped away by the wizard you saw killed," the sailor said baldly. He squatted so that she needn't look up to meet his eyes. "The fellow who looks through his eyes now says he's a friend to the Isles and to Garric... which I believe. But he's a very hard man, that one, my dear. There's nothing he wouldn't do if he thought the choice were failure."

"A change indeed from Garric," said Ilna calmly. She took Chalcus' words as fact, the way she'd have expected hers to be accepted in a similar case. "Not so very different from present company though, perhaps."

"Aye," said Chalcus with a flash of the old humor. "Not different at all. But when he asks you and me to go to Tisamur with young Lady Merota to conceal our purpose, then you must know that it isn't Garric who weighed the risks to the child before he spoke."

"I see," said Ilna. With a flash of relief she understood why Chalcus had paused to chat with Merota before he came to where she sat. "The girl has agreed, of course?"

"The girl thinks she'd be safe in the heart of the Underworld with you and me to guard her, dear one," the sailor said softly. "She would not, and I've told her she would not; but she won't believe me."

"What does the one who isn't Garric expect us to do on Tisamur?" Ilna said, filing the response to consider later if at all. She suspected that Merota understood more than Chalcus thought she did, but she didn't suppose that mattered.

"There's wizardry besides rebellion there, he thinks," Chalcus said. "That one—"

He'd never given a name to the one in Garric's body.

"—doesn't need help with rebels and sword-strokes, but wizards are another matter. A matter for you, he thinks."

"And you think, Master Chalcus?" Ilna said with a faint smile.

"I've seen that one use his sword, dear one," he said. The term didn't grate on her ears as it sometimes had. "I trust his skill as I would trust my own. And I've seen you work as well. None will stand against you, of that I'm as sure as I'm sure—"

Chalcus laughed; fully alive, fully himself again. "As sure as I am that I'll stand by you," he concluded.

Ilna sniffed. "Yes," she said, "that at least I'm sure of."

Tisamur was only a name to her. She'd woven for buyers trafficking to the powerful islands of the north: Sandrakkan, Blaise, and even as far as Ornifal. All of them based their fashions on the mode in Valles.

Ilna's lips twisted in a grim smile. The nobles of other islands might not recognize Prince Garric as their overlord, but Garric's court formed their taste in dress.

She looked at Chalcus, watching his face settle into a neutral expression as he waited for her to speak. Merota remained the set distance away, shifting from foot to foot because she was too young to have learned how to hide her nervousness. The child was afraid that Ilna would refuse to let her voyage to Tisamur because of the danger.

"Yes, all right," Ilna said, pleased by the flicker of surprise in Chalcus' eyes. She'd thought of questioning him about Tisamur first, letting him wait and worry about her response the way he and Garric and all of them had forced her to wait.

That would have been petty. Ilna wasn't petty—when she caught herself and mastered her nature, at least. Mastering her nature allowed her to avoid being so many other things, worse things. On a good day.

"I'd thought—" said Chalcus; and stopped himself, for they both knew what he'd thought. There was nothing to be gained by going over that ground. "I'll tell the chancellor—or would you care to, mistress? That one—

A quick nod toward the closed conference room.

"—says he's transferring properties to Lady Merota, which she'll be visiting to take stock."

"A reasonable plan," Ilna said calmly. "I'll let you talk to Royhas. I've found that people don't listen to me unless...."

She smiled, an expression as grim as a set of manacles. "Until, I should say," she continued, "I force them to."

She glanced down at the pattern her fingers had just tied in the twine. She picked it out again. "And on a good day," she said, "I don't like to do that."

"Aye, I'll do that," said Chalcus. He rose as though about to summon Merota; again he paused and said, "The coasts of Tisamur are much like what you'll find anywhere in the Isles. Fishing villages, coasting ports; a little more clannish and reserved than Shengy, say, but not in a bad way. Donelle's the only real city, and maybe Brange on the north coast. Inland...."

Chalcus' left index finger stroked the place the horn hilt of his incurved sword would ride if he were wearing it. "Inland," he said, "away from the river valleys... there's stories that come out."

He laughed, but the sound wasn't wholly convincing. "There's stories everywhere," he said, "stories about the place I grew up even, and they're mostly as empty as the foam on a jack of ale."

"But sometimes the stories are true," Ilna said, completing the thought Chalcus was skirting.

"Aye, that's been my experience," he said, grateful for the interjection. "I know nothing about Moon Wisdom, dearest, but in the hills of Tisamur they're said to worship many things besides the Great Gods. It may be that Moon Wisdom is one of those, come down to the coasts and the cities."

Ilna's eyes narrowed slightly. She'd seen Chalcus face wizards with no more fear than he'd have shown for so many swordsmen... but for all his profane irreligion, he feared the Gods.

"I see," she said aloud. "I gather the plan is that we travel as Merota's servants?"

"Aye, if you're willing," Chalcus said, clearly more comfortable with the change of subject.

"And why wouldn't I be willing?" Ilna snapped. "I'm not too good for any honest work!"

She heard the outrage in her voice, paused, and gave Chalcus a wry smile. "Sorry," she said. "With so much in the world to be upset over, that was a foolish concern. Even for me on what seems to be a foolish day. And if you'd asked me were I willing to have a servant, then you'd have gotten a different answer."

She stood. "I'll see to packing," she said. "My own clothing won't take long, but Lady Merota bos-Roriman will no doubt have greater requirements."

"Dear one?" Chalcus said, saw her face harden and went on, "Mistress Ilna, then. A question before we part, if you please: why did you agree so easily?"

Ilna quirked a smile. "Why am I not worried about the danger to Merota?" she asked. "I am, Master Chalcus; I'm very much afraid."

The smile faded. "But I saw a thing in a dead man's eyes just now, and I'm more afraid of that."

She stretched out an arm in summons. Merota, bubbling with excitement came racing toward her two protectors.

"Because if that vision comes to pass," Ilna said quietly, "there'll be no safety, for a child or for anyone, in all this world."