Mistress of the Catacombs (60 page)

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' 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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When Garric sat very still, the sunlight felt good. The sun was well down in the western sky, though, and 'very still' meant without swelling his lungs to breathe. None of his wounds was serious, but there wasn't a palm's breadth of his legs which hadn't been covered by his studded leather apron, or of his arms, which didn't have a slash or a puncture. His chest was bruised front and back, and his face was so battered that he looked out through tunnels in swollen flesh.

"Being around your ancestor...," Sharina said, smiling at Garric as she spoke. "Was a lot like leading a leopard on a chain. It's a very lovely creature with many virtues, but—"

She snuggled against Cashel in a kittenish fashion that Garric had never expected of his sister.

"You see your sister," said Carus, his image grinning as it lounged against a parapet in Garric's mind. "Speaking as the man she was close as a shadow to this past week—she's a woman, lad, and I'd guess enough woman for any man she chooses."

"—it made me even more pleased to have someone whose strength isn't quite so... flashy."

Cashel put his arm around her shoulders. He didn't look at Sharina or say anything, just smiled a little broader than he'd been doing. Cashel no longer blushed at times like this, but you wouldn't say he was perfectly comfortable with it either.

Garric had decided it was important for his troops and the populace of Tisamur to see him up and moving, but he didn't have any intention of tending to real business until he'd recuperated for another day yet. He sat on a terrace of the Citadel, looking down over Donelle to the sea beyond. Cashel, Sharina, and Tenoctris were with him; Ilna was welcome to join them if she cared to; and a line of Blood Eagles kept everybody else at a distance.

All of the bodyguards were battered, and several looked as if they must hurt as much as Garric did. A Donelle aristocrat had been insistent about his need to see Prince Garric. Two Blood Eagles had hurled him twenty feet back, across the terrace. The fellow was lucky they hadn't tossed him over the railing instead.

At the nearby temple site, another section of wall toppled inward with a crash and a mushroom of debris. Men were shoveling broken stone and concrete into baskets, dumping them into oxcarts on the west side or giving them to porters to carry away by the steep slope to the east. Only a fraction of the temple's massive sidewalls remained after a day of concentrated effort.

Tenoctris had been watching the work over her shoulder. She turned to her companions and said, "I'm always amazed at what people can accomplish when they join together."

She grinned and added, "Not necessarily for good ends, of course. No single wizard could have opened a passage for the Mistress."

Local civilians were carrying out the demolition. Garric had put Count Lerdoc in charge of the work, so there were a few Blaise officers present to oversee the business. They could've stayed in their billets without decreasing the enthusiasm with which the crews worked.

Lord Lerdain was one of the officers—by choice, Garric had no doubt. The youth strutted like a fighting cock, wearing the helmet that'd been hammered when he followed Garric—followed Carus—through the mass of Archai. The boy was lucky he'd been knocked silly at the start of the rush; otherwise he'd probably have been killed. But he'd paid his dues, and now he displayed the damaged helmet with rightful pride.

Cashel watched with the professional interest of a man who'd done his share of heavy labor. "They're trying to prove to you that they're loyal," he said, looking amused. "They don't know the tricks of moving big rocks, but they're as willing as any folk I've seen. They'll be lucky if they don't kill themselves, though."

"Convincing me they're loyal is pretty much a lost cause," Garric said. His smile was more cynical than it would have been in the days before he became a prince. "What I do believe, though, is that Moon Wisdom's as dead as the Children of the Mistress who were leading it."

He nodded toward the workmen. "They're at least making an effort to seem loyal."

"The Children weren't leading Moon Wisdom," Tenoctris said, her eyes focused on a place beyond her present surroundings. "They were just its human face."

Garric remembered the blackness of a cave and the hairy limbs, stiff with age but still living, which held him for the Mistress' fangs. "Sure, that's true," he said.

But if any Children had survived the carnage in the temple, he'd have hanged them as soon as the fighting was over. People who gave themselves over to something so unutterably evil had no business walking the Earth in the company of decent folk.

"Those people have their own reasons for tearing the temple down," Carus noted with a grim smile. "Having their own allies hack hundreds of them apart for a blood sacrifice makes the rule of a king from Valles seem not such a bad thing."

Another section of wall came down in a crackling roar that almost drowned the screams of the woman who'd been caught in it. Cashel winced.

"I wouldn't bet it was a woman, lad," Carus said, neither smiling nor frowning. "When they're hurt bad, anybody's likely to sound that way. Even the brave ones, unless they go numb instead."

A trumpet sounded in one of the squares below. Men shouted in cadence, then stepped off with a clash of hobnails on cobblestones.

Lord Waldron was reforming his battalions, mixing four companies of the old royal army with two composed of the mercenaries who'd garrisoned Donelle during the rebellion. Most of the organization took place outside the city walls where there was more room, but... loyal or not, it was good for the people of Tisamur to see the highly-trained royal army up close.

Garric looked at his sister, smiling faintly at how painful the simple movement was. Every muscle of his neck had been strained by the effort of holding his head straight while blows raining on one side or another of his helmet tried to twist it.

"Sharina, does Lord Tadai have things under control?" he asked. "I should've gone to see him myself, but...."

It felt remarkably good to sit with his friends. The days he'd been alone seemed like a lifetime... as indeed it had been, for Gar.

"When he arrived with the supply fleet, he went straight to the municipal palace," Sharina said, smiling at the memory. "He didn't even bother getting a night's sleep before he and his aides started going over the accounts from both the city and the temple."

"They had accounts?" said Cashel with a frown. "I thought they were wizards."

"Wizards need to eat too," Tenoctris said. "Though for some of us, that's not much of a priority."

"They were running a rebellion," Garric said. "That means messengers, clerks, supply departments—and the mercenaries themselves, to be paid and billeted."

"None of which happens at the wave of an athame," Sharina agreed. "At any rate, I think Lord Tadai takes more pleasure in that sort of thing than he does in wine and dancing girls."

Carus laughed with an amusement that spread to Garric's own lips. As the others looked at him, Garric explained, "I don't imagine going over financial records will ever replace reading Celondre as the way I like to relax. But my ancestor—"

He lifted the cord holding the coronation medallion of King Carus to emphasize it.

"—was never really as much himself during peace as he was in the middle of a battlefield."

"And I saw more battlefields than I did days of peace, lad," the king's spirit agreed. Suddenly sober, he went on, "I was so afraid that I'd fail you this time, the way I'd failed the kingdom before in my anger and my arrogance. Thanks to your sister and the Lady, I did not do that quite."

"They're blocking the conduit that fed the temple pool?" Tenoctris asked suddenly. She'd been watching the workmen again. "Not that it was the water itself that...."

"Yes," said Garric forcefully. "Blocking the tube and diverting the aqueduct that fed it. I told Waldron to get a squadron of cavalry out to trace the route. We'll block the inlet too when we've found it."

"It was salt water," said Sharina. She nodded eastward over the city. "The sea's well below our level here."

"Yes," said Tenoctris. "It is. And Garric, I'm not sure your men are going to find the inlet."

She smiled. "Though I don't think that really matters, because of what your army did here and what you did where you were."

Garric started to nod toward the demolition work; the pain made him dizzy. Smiling ruefully at his weakness, he instead gestured with a hand. That hurt too, but not nearly as much.

"There'll be a new temple built on the site," he said. "A small one."

"To whom will it be dedicated?" Tenoctris said, suddenly tense. "That is, I don't believe... I've never believed in the Great Gods; but sites have power."

"Right," said Garric, "and for that reason I plan to build and endow a temple to the Restoring Shepherd. Whatever's built here will be more than stones and frescoes, so I thought it was important to control where it started at least."

Carus chuckled in Garric's mind. Garric, smiling in harmony with his ancestor, went on, "I'd thought of dedicating it to Duzi, but I decided people wouldn't understand."

"Duzi doesn't belong in a big stone temple," Cashel said quietly. "Though I've called on him in worse places than that, I know."

A platoon of Blood Eagles was marching up from the lower city to replace the detachment now guarding Prince Garric. Garric didn't turn to watch them, but Carus cocked his head and smiled. They were keeping step despite most of them being wounded.

A cheerfully-whistled tune drew Garric's eyes and those of his companions. The young Lady Merota approached the line of Blood Eagles, flanked on one side by Ilna and the other by Chalcus.

"So fare you well, my own true love," Merota sang, caroling the chorus of the tune Chalcus whistled. "So fare you well a while...."

The sailor wasn't wearing his own weapons, but he carried a long silk-wrapped bundle; the guards stiffened at the sight of it. A reflex Garric borrowed from his warrior ancestor made him reach for his sword.

The sword was gone, missing since healers from both the bodyguard regiment and Lord Waldron's staff cut Garric's armor and equipment away in their haste to get at his wounds. Realizing that, Garric relaxed and started to chuckle. That was very bad for his cuts and strains, but the laughter did wonders for his state of mind.

"I'm goin' away but I'm comin' back...."

"Let them pass, Captain Lancar," Garric said, glad he remembered the name of the officer in command of the guard detachment.

The captain turned. He was an old soldier, promoted from the ranks because of courage distinguished even in the company of this regiment of chosen men.

"Yes, all of them," Garric said. "And Master Chalcus can bring his package through as well."

"No, your highness," Lancar said. "He can't bring the sword he's got in that wrapper any closer than where I stand."

Ilna snapped, "If I didn't know better, I'd say none of you were older than Merota here. But I suppose being a male and being a child are much the same thing."

Merota looked between her guardians instead of finishing the chorus, "If I go ten thousand miles."

Chalcus laughed and handed the packet to Lancar balanced on two fingers of his left hand. "Here you go, captain."

"These three can pass," Lancar said, motioning his men to step aside.

If the captain was concerned about what Garric would do, or about anything other than his duty, his stolid face gave no sign of it. He waited for Merota to lead the adults into the guarded area, then walked around Chalcus and gave the package to Garric.

Chalcus grinned past Lancar's shoulder and said, "Let him be, your highness. He's a good soldier doing his job, and who can have too many of them?"

"Not me," Garric said, struck grim by the thought. "Not now especially. Attaper's interviewing volunteers to fill at least fifty places in the Blood Eagles, and it may well be a hundred and fifty depending on how lucky we are with gangrene."

"How's Attaper himself?" Sharina asked. "Do the healers think they can save his arm?"

"Yes, they will," said Ilna, drawing eyes to her. Lancar himself looked over his shoulder in surprise, then locked his gaze to the front again.

Ilna drew the hank of cords from her sleeve just far enough to acknowledge them.

"I don't often do fortunetelling," she said. Embarrassment turned her voice unusually cold, even for her. "In this case I thought it might help Attaper if I could truthfully tell him he'd not lose the arm, so I checked."

"She wove a pattern for the warehouse where all the wounded are, too!" Merota said. "They're all going to get better!"

Chalcus tousled the girl's hair. "No child," he said, "they're not all going to get better. But more will, I think, than otherwise. Though it's not as a healer I speak, but from the other end of the business."

Garric finished unwrapping his sword and dagger. He'd wondered why Ilna hadn't joined him and the others now that things had settled down. There could have been other reasons, but with Ilna you were usually safe in guessing that duty had determined whatever she was doing.

He pulled the sword an inch from the sheath, saw what he expected, and drew it clear. When he held the blade at a slant to the light, a serpent seemed to squirm up and down the layered steel of the blade.