Mistress of the Catacombs (19 page)

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CHAPTER NINE

Ilna glared reflexively at the newcomer. The Great Gods weren't a part of Ilna's world; the only truths she knew were those formed on her loom and in her heart. For those who did believe and worship, though, a sacrifice to the Queen of the Underworld meant they had turned in directions Ilna did not.

"You're still in the waking world, aren't you?" said the girl. Her voice was thin and hollow as if she was speaking up through the pipes feeding a cistern. "You can't hide from me so you needn't try. I can't see you clearly, but you won't be able to get away now that I've found you."

She was no more than Ilna's modest height, but her large breasts and broad hips meant the two women were unlikely ever to be confused. Open in the newcomer's hand was a bronze knife with a long, leaf-shaped blade.

Ilna glanced at the cords she held and deliberately placed them back in her sleeve. "Can you hear me?" she asked in a cold voice. "If you can, then hear me when I say that I'm Ilna os-Kenset and I'm not in the habit of running away. Who are you and what do you want with me?"

The girl squatted on her haunches beside the wagon and began to draw on the hard-baked dirt with her dagger-point. "I'm Alecto," she said without looking up. "And what I want from you is to get away from the Pack."

Ilna's eyes narrowed, first at the tone and then still further as she took in the girl's appearance. Alecto's clothing was savage beyond doubt, but it wasn't crude. The short wolfskin cape, the only cover for her torso, was well-sewn and closed at the throat with a pin of gold and garnets, and the ivory pins in her hair were subtly carved. Her kilt was of deerhide, tanned and bleached to the shade of cream. Judging from the way it bunched over the girl's knees, the leather was butter soft.

The kilt had a sinous line of decoration made with porcupine quills, chosen for thickness and color. Ilna didn't remember ever seeing a more able piece of embroidery, though the pattern—or rather, what the pattern suggested to her—made her lip curl.

Alecto had sketched a many-pointed star and was now drawing words around the outer angles. It didn't take someone with Ilna's eye for patterns to make the connection between this wizard and whatever was attacking Garric. "The Pack you're afraid of," she said. "You loosed them and they've turned on you?"

The girl leaped to her feet, switching her grip on the dagger so that she held it as a weapon rather than an awkward stylus. "That's a lie!" she shouted. "I was just trying to frighten Brasus. I didn't let the Pack out! Brasus wasn't worth that, and besides I'm not such a fool."

Her face changed. "Fagh!" she said, shaking her head as she squatted again. "I can't imagine anybody letting the Pack out, but somebody did... and I came across them because of what I was looking for."

She resumed drawing. Ilna could hear the skritch of Alecto's bronze on the hard soil, though like the girl's voice it was muted by a distance not of space.

"And all right, I took more of a risk than I should've for Brasus, I see that now," Alecto muttered as she wrote. "I should just've laughed and let him go back to his wife. I can find men, the Sister knows!"

Ilna's nose twitched again. She wondered if Alecto could see her expression. Well, it wasn't Ilna's place to correct the tramp....

"You expect the Pack to come here after you, then?" she asked instead. Without Ilna noticing what they were doing, her hands had brought the hank of cords out of her sleeve again.

Alecto looked up from her work with a cruel sneer. "Worried?" she said. "Well, you needn't be. They won't touch you while you're in the waking world, not unless they're set on you. I came too close to their lair, though, because I didn't realize that anybody'd be stupid enough to let them loose... but they had."

"I didn't say I was worried," Ilna said, wishing that this slut didn't have such a remarkable talent for irritating her. "I asked if this Pack was coming after you. Coming here, that is, since this is where you are."

"I won't be for long, thanks to you, Ilna os-Kenset," the girl said. "Never fear, we'll be in the waking world long before they arrive. I couldn't get back by the portal I'd made because that'd mean going through the Pack. I wouldn't have made it."

Alecto looked up with an expression that Ilna had seen once before on a rabbit paralyzed by a serpent's gaze. "Nobody'd make it!" she said. "But it doesn't matter, because it's not going to happen."

Alecto sliced carefully into the ball of her thumb and squeezed a drop of blood into the circle. "No choice in this desert," she muttered.

She began chanting, tapping out the words of power with the point of her dagger. Unlike most of the athames Ilna had seen in the hands of wizards, Alecto's was a perfectly serviceable weapon and had obviously been used as such.

Ilna looked into the cauldron again. The scene had changed. The temple's interior was empty, now. The rectangular pool in the center reflected the sun which must be squarely overhead, streaming through a roof opening that Ilna couldn't see.

She wondered if she was visible to someone in the temple looking upward. Probably not, since her own reflection didn't appear in the pool.

Alecto's voice was growing louder; it seemed to be coming from all directions. Ilna straightened and glared at the wild woman. Dust devils began to spin around the wagon, six of them sunwise and the seventh widdershins.

Ilna sniffed. It was time she returned to the palace and Tenoctris. She could describe the temple and the chorus of priests; there didn't seem any further benefit to hanging around here. She supposed if she followed the schism in the same fashion as she'd come to this place, it would bring her back.

She tried to step down from the wagon. Her body didn't move. Her muscles weren't paralyzed, but they strained uselessly as though her limbs were stuck in blocks of stone.

Ilna's fingers twisted cords into a pattern. It was desperately hard work, but not even the power that held her now could prevent her from working her own art.

The bright baking sky grew darker. Alecto's voice thundered from the heavens. Ilna could no longer see the dust devils. She felt a wind tugging at the sleeves of her tunic.

"Alecto!" she shouted, but she couldn't hear her own voice over the scream of the wind.

Ilna's world dissolved into a flow of downward-rushing color. Alecto stood before her, her face triumphant and the bronze dagger raised skyward. They whirled together, then landed feet first on a stone floor hard enough to send them both sprawling.

Ilna rose to her hands and knees. It was night, and she was at the edge of a pool in a circular room. A double row of columns supported the domed ceiling; above the pool was an opening, an oculus as she'd heard Liane refer to a similar structure.

She and Alecto were in the place Ilna had viewed in the cauldron. They were in the temple from which a nightmare had been sent to trouble Garric's sleep.

Alecto had dropped her dagger when she hit the floor. She snatched it into her hand again before she stood up.

"You utter fool!" Ilna said.

Chanting voices echoed through the temple's entrance passage, the only way in or out of the room. The priests were returning.

* * *

Sharina tried to concentrate on the mural. Before her was a scene of herdsmen with long poles driving brindled cattle back from mountain pastures in autumn; the trees had already begun to lose their leaves.

Barca's Hamlet was sheep country. They raised cattle in the highlands of Northern Haft, but those regions had been as far away as the moon when Sharina was growing up.

Merchants and drovers came to the borough from Sandrakkan, Blaise, and even Ornifal during the Sheep Fair. Nobody came from the north of the island, though. The folk there had their own markets and their own customs. If they bought wool, they did so from factors in Carcosa when they drove their herds to market in the capital.

Sharina thought about Ilna lying on the bed in waxen silence, of Cashel vanished without a trace and Garric's body walking and talking under the control of a mind not his. She hugged herself and wondered if she were going to cry.

She turned, planning to ask Tenoctris—again—how long it'd been since Ilna had gone into her trance. The old woman sat on her backless chair, reading from a small parchment codex. She looked up with a smile when she felt Sharina's eyes, but Sharina waved her back to her book.

There wasn't anything to say. It had been however long it had been—not really very long; and it would be however long it was. Tenoctris couldn't say more, and if she was managing to lose herself in reading, all the better.

Garric would have had a book also, though Sharina doubted whether he'd have been able to concentrate on his beloved Celondre. What was the man who wore Garric's flesh doing now? King Carus wasn't a reader, of that she was sure.

The mural's next panel was of men piling hay on a wagon with long forks. Two oxen waited in the traces, grazing contentedly on the tufts a small girl held out for them. Women with double-sided rakes—the wooden pegs extended above and below the crossbar, an unfamiliar style to Sharina—gathered more hay from among the stubble. The mower sat in the shade of an apple tree, sharpening his scythe with a wooden rod dipped first in tallow and then in sand, just as mowers did in the borough.

Half the scene was familiar, half as strange to Sharina's childhood as the customs of townsfolk here in Valles. Either way she felt alien and alone; out of place and unable to help her threatened friends.

Sharina stroked the black horn scales of the Pewle knife she'd inherited from Nonnus. Today for her there was more comfort in that weapon than in pictures of happy peasants or in all the great literature she and Garric had been introduced to by their father. That was a terrible thing.

But still, she had the knife. She smiled faintly.

The outer door opened. Sharina whirled; Garric—not Garric, Carus—entered and slammed it shut behind him. Now by daylight Sharina noticed that the panel's covering of blue-dyed leather was tooled in delicate floral patterns. She'd been sleeping in the outer room for two nights now and she hadn't previously noticed the door's decoration.

Carus entered the main room. Garric was as graceful as any athletic young man; the man in his body walked like a great cat.

He nodded to the figure on the bed. "How is she?" he asked in a tone that could be mistaken for calm. He hooked his thumbs under his swordbelt.

Tenoctris closed her codex without marking the place. She set it back within the satchel standing open on the floor beside her.

"The preparations went well," she said. She braced her hands on the chair arms as if to rise; Carus waved her back with a hard face that was just short of exasperation. This wasn't a man who had any interest in form or what he considered foolishness.

Tenoctris sank down gratefully again. She said, "The rest is up to Ilna. I expect her to succeed if that's within human abilities."

She paused and smiled. "Or even if it isn't," she said.

"I expect that too," said Carus tonelessly. His hand reached for the pommel of his sword but jerked back again as if the polished steel knob were hot. Instead he paced.

"I thought I'd stay away till it was all over," he said in a conversational voice. "Maybe not see her even then. Let her go to Tisamur with Merota and with her pirate and never think of her any more. Except that I couldn't."

Faster than Sharina could see, Carus slammed the base of his fist into the wall. The thump wasn't loud—the concrete masonry was a hand's-breadth thick, even here on the second floor—but the plaster sheathing flaked off in a radius of several inches from the center of the blow.

"If you like...," Tenoctris said carefully, "I can arrange for us to see what Ilna herself is seeing. Ah, not clearly that is, but—"

"Can you?" cried the king, no longer even pretending to be calm. "That is...."

He caught hold of himself, flashed Sharina his old smile, and knelt to rest his big hands on the wizard's, crossed in her lap. "Of course you can do what you say, Tenoctris," Carus said. "But can you do it without effort that might unfit you for work you have to do in the near future? Because I'm well aware I'm being foolish, and I needn't be coddled by my friends."

The old wizard's laugh reminded Sharina that Tenoctris had once been a girl, and that Garric was a handsome youth. She smiled and corrected herself: Garric was a handsome youth. The same flesh around Carus' soul was no longer quite youthful but was handsome in a very different fashion.

"Effort yes," said Tenoctris, "but not a serious risk in these days when the weakest wizard has powers that only the great ones of a generation before could manage. We'll need something shiny. Can we send out for a mirror?"

Carus stood and grinned. He drew his dagger and held it so that the long polished blade sent sunlight dancing across the room. "Will this do?" he asked.

"Admirably!" Tenoctris said, taking the weapon by the hilt. She examined it, cocking the blade at an angle. To Sharina the edge looked sharp enough to cut the very light.

"Especially for Ilna, I believe," the wizard murmured in satisfaction. "I think she'd appreciate the symbolism."

She stood without difficulty and bent over the figure on the bed, holding the dagger down at her side. She laid the tips of her right index and middle fingers against Ilna's throat, then nodded.

"Yes, all right," Tenoctris said, straightening. "Sharina, will you... no. Your highness, will you hold this so that the surface reflects Ilna's eyes toward the wall there?"

She gestured. "Above the painting, I mean," she said. "Hold the blade so that if Ilna were looking, she'd see wall reflected in the blade. That's what I mean."

Carus nodded. He took the dagger back and brought it into position with only a glance at the girl's still form. "Go ahead," he said.

Tenoctris seated herself on the floor. "It's really quite simple," she murmured, tugging a split of bamboo from the small bundle she carried in her satchel. "I don't need a figure for the incantation, the rosette here will do. The portal's already open, after all...."

She closed her eyes momentarily and settled her breathing. Then, stroking her temporary wand over the eight-sided figure joining four cartouches of the mosaic, she said, "Basumia oiakintho phametamathathas!"

A face sprang into life on the blank wall. Sharina hadn't expected anything to happen so suddenly. She'd been watching her friend on the bed, but the change at the corner of her eye made her whip her head around.

The face was a woman's, blurred but recognizable like a fresco painted while the plaster was too wet. She was probably young and certainly savage, whether or not the spots on her cheeks were the tattoos they appeared to be. Her mouth moved to shout.

The image of light vanished. Carus cried out in a voice of despair and fury.

"What...?" said Sharina, turning.

And knew what had caused the king to shout. The bed was empty. Ilna's slight weight had dimpled the coverlet; nothing more remained of her in this room or this world.