Mistress of the Catacombs (7 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

Sharina held back instead of plunging into the water ahead of Cashel as she could easily have done. There wasn't time to discuss plans, and having someone Cashel's size land on top of her flailing a quarterstaff wouldn't help the trouble. She knew Cashel couldn't swim, but she trusted him to do the right thing by instinct.

Now Cashel leaped with all his considerable strength, a graceful arc despite him lookng like a broad-jumper rather than a diver. Garric sprawled limp, sinking slowly on the weight of his sword.

Cashel should have landed next to him; Sharina paused on the mossy coping stones, waiting for a splash like that of a boulder dropping in the sea. Instead, Cashel vanished the way water soaks into hot sand.

The look of the pond changed. Sharina hadn't noticed the rosy haze over the water until now, when it disappeared.

Garric was still sinking. Several guards were dragging Echeus from the bridge. One had jumped into the pool, and others looked ready to follow him. Wearing armor, they wouldn't be able to swim any better than Cashel, and Sharina had no reason at all to trust their judgment.

Sharina made a clean dive. The water was shockingly cold—she'd forgotten that it had bubbled from the spring-fed fountains only fifty paces away. She reached under and caught the front of her brother's gold-embroidered collar. Her grip rolled Garric's face out of the water as they broke surface.

Sharina kicked despite her hampering garments and stroked for the shore with her free hand. She wished she'd taken a moment to remove the court robe, though it didn't matter much.

She didn't let herself think about Cashel. Tenoctris could explain or—

But anyway, Sharina couldn't let herself think about it now.

One of the soldiers on the margin held out his javelin so his fellow floundering in the water could grab it behind the point and be dragged to safety. Voices all around babbled. Several Blood Eagles lifted Garric away from Sharina with the care owed a priceless treasure; they laid him on the grass.

Sharina grimaced. She didn't need help getting out of the water, but she had to swim two paces down the coping to clear the out-turned hobnails of the soldiers bending over her brother. The pool was deeper than she was tall, and the several feet of mud on the stone bottom didn't help matters.

A few minutes ago this corner of the palace had seemed as sparsely inhabited as a stretch of plowland. Now scores of soldiers, servants and officials descended from all directions. Most of them were shouting.

Garric lay belly-down on the grass, his face to the side. Blood Eagles surrounded him; one was making a clumsy attempt at artificial respiration.

Sharina slipped between a pair of black-clad soldiers to her brother's side. A Blood Eagle grabbed her shoulder. She turned her head back and snarled, "No, you cur!" as though he'd touched her importunately as she served in her father's inn.

"Princess!" the soldier blurted. "My pardon!" He snapped his head around to face the gathering crowd.

"Here, let me have him!" Sharina said to the fellow massaging Garric's back muscles in apparent hope of restoring the victim's breathing. Garric's chest rose and fell without help, though the deep, shuddering nature of those breaths showed that something was wrong.

Garric's eyes opened. For a moment his expression was blank; then—

Sharina couldn't have said what the change was. She only knew that the soul behind those eyes wasn't her brother's.

Blood Eagles returned from the bridge to the circle of their fellows, holding Echeus. The Intercessor wore the expression of calm dignity appropriate to a gentleman buffeted by circumstances.

Garric put a hand on the grass and lifted his torso, coughing up a swallow of pond water. He looked at Sharina, saw her stricken horror, and smiled. "It's all right," he whispered. "It'll be all right."

Lord Attaper, the commander of the Blood Eagles, pushed through the crowd of jabbering civilians. His tunic was short—military-style—but it was embroidered in gold and purple, and he didn't wear armor.

"What's happened to the prince?" Attaper said in a tightly controlled voice. He asked the way he would have demanded word of a flanking attack sure to overwhelm his line. Attaper's left hand was on the ivory pommel of his sword, holding it tight for a charm.

"We got him!" said one of the guards holding Echeus. "This is the guy who—"

The soldier stopped. He didn't know what had happened; and since he'd been watching when Garric fell, he knew that Echeus hadn't been within arm's length of the prince.

Eyes turned to the Intercessor. "Prince Garric greeted me on the bridge," Echeus said. He spoke in a high tenor, not an unpleasant voice but thinner than the man's bearing suggested. "I replied, and his eyes suddenly turned up. I'm afraid the prince may have had a fit. Before I could catch him, he'd toppled into the water."

Garric reached toward Sharina; their eyes met again. She took his hand, supporting him as he rose dripping to his feet. A Blood Eagle tried to help; Garric angrily shook him away. He looked at Echeus.

"Are you all right, your majesty?" Attaper said. The guard commander had faced death a dozen times without quailing, but he was frightened now.

Sharina understood the grim logic in Attaper's mind. If Garric died, Attaper had failed in his duty. And if Garric died, the Isles would crash into ruin.

Echeus looked at Attaper and pitched his voice for the gathering crowd, as though Garric himself weren't present. He said, "From the expression I saw as the prince fell, I'm afraid he may have lost his mind. Occasionally even a youth like the prince may have a stroke and—"

"No, traitor," Garric said. The words came from his mouth, but they weren't in the voice of the brother Sharina had grown up with. Garric's right hand closed on the grip of his long sword. "I haven't lost my mind, despite your wizard tricks!"

"Your majesty?" Attaper said. The guards holding Echeus stepped back instinctively. Echeus opened his mouth but he seemed to be too startled to speak further.

Garric drew his sword with a smooth motion that continued as a long cut. Water danced from the shimmering edge.

"No!" the Intercessor shouted, trying too late to leap back. The sharp steel caught him on the right side of the neck and continued through. Echeus' head spun away, wearing a startled expression; his body crumpled where it stood.

Garric's powerful arm carried the blade on for another several feet of arc. Now it slung drops of bright blood.

* * *

Ilna watched Garric's arm and sword come around in a backhand stroke without a quiver or waste motion. The green-clad stranger's head leaped away; his vivid blood spurted higher than where his hair had been in the time his head was still attached.

"Now there's a man who knows his work!" said Chalcus, voicing Ilna's thought as well. She was too much a craftsman not to focus first on the skill of what she'd just seen, regardless of the act itself.

The act—the killing—didn't touch her. Ilna didn't know the man whose body sagged on the other side of the little stream, but she didn't worry that Garric would have killed someone who didn't need killing.

Ilna herself, on the other hand.... Well, she hoped she'd learned from the mistakes she'd made in the past, but that didn't change the fact she'd made them.

For a moment Ilna didn't understand Chalcus' posture. The sailor was poised in a near crouch, his hands slightly raised with the palms outward. He saw her glance and crooked a grin, still concentrating on the scene before him.

Chalcus is showing that his hands are empty. That he's not the next threat the killer across the water should deal with. A sign of respect, from one craftsman to another....

Garric knelt, his head raised and alert. He gripped the dead man's sleeve and jerked hard. Ilna knew Garric was strong, but not even he could tear silk brocade barehanded.

The shoulder stitching popped. Garric rose, wiping his swordblade with the swatch of lustrous fabric. Ilna winced.

The single swift blow had silenced the crowd, those on Garric's side of the stream as well as those near Ilna who'd gotten a better view of what had really happened. Garric looked around like a hawk on its kill, his eyes suddenly lighting on Ilna—across the channel but only a few paces away. For an instant her heart leapt at what she saw in his gaze—for an instant, no more.

"Garric?" said Sharina, motionless where she'd been when her brother stepped forward into his cut. To move would have been to risk not only being maimed but also getting in the way. Ilna had seen only danger in the pattern she wove, not this quick slaughter. Sharina and the others here in the garden knew even less of what was going on.

Tenoctris, healthy but hobbled by old age, made her way from the gazebo to where the others gathered about Garric and the corpse. The Blood Eagles of the wizard's escort had abandoned her at the threat to Garric; now, angrily abashed, they opened a path for her through the spectators. Garric saw her and nodded.

"Princess Sharina," he said in a ringing voice. "Lady Liane—and you, Lady Tenoctris, you for I must have you. We'll meet now in the small council room, we alone. Attaper, keep all others out!"

"Garric?" called Ilna.

She lifted her inner tunic knee high to jump the artificial stream. Chalcus, seeing more or sensing more, put a hand of restraint on her shoulder.

"Not her!" Garric snarled to his guard commander.

He looked at Ilna again. His sword, so sure a moment before when it took off the stranger's head, began to tremble in his hand.

"Mistress," Garric said in a voice that Ilna had never heard from her old friend's lips, "I will speak with you, I promise that. But not now, not yet."

He turned his back to Ilna and started to walk away.

Ilna brought out the hank of short cords she kept in her left sleeve against need. Her fingers started to knot them.

She felt nothing at all. Looking at herself from the outside, she saw her eyes focused on the back of the man she had grown up loving. They were pits of black hellfire.

* * *

Rainwater had pooled in a stone paver hollowed by the feet of men long dead. Garric used the natural mirror to examine the face he now wore. It was more familiar than not—the features he'd grown used to from birth, though framed with shaggy hair. The dark brunet locks had grown in white where the seawolf's fangs had punched dimples in his skull.

"Gar, we hunt lizards?" Tint asked. The beastgirl dabbed her hand out and back, clearly wishing to groom Garric but afraid to touch him in what she thought was his present strange mood. "Lizards in stones here."

Garric looked at his companion. "Tint, do you understand what I say?" he said. "When I talk like this?"

The beastgirl spoke in clicks and grunts. Though Garric—Gar—heard the sounds as speech, his tongue and palate could no more reproduce them than Tint's long, narrow jaw could form normal human words.

Tint shrugged and scratched the back of her scalp. "Tint hear," she said, sounding a little bored. "Tint hear other men too, but they not hear Tint."

Scowling she added, "Tint not like other men!"

Garric stood, looking around him again. Not only were these ruins old, they'd been long in use before the forest recovered them. There was nothing remarkable about the architecture to connect the ruins with any description he'd read in an ancient author. He could be on Ornifal, though he doubted it; or even somewhere on Haft.

"Gar, we hunt lizards?" Tint repeated, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. "Only—snakes in stones too."

She shuddered. "Snake Island!" she said. She hugged herself and looked longingly at Garric. "We go away! We take ring to other men and go away, Gar?"

Garric looked at her sharply. "What other men?" he asked. "How did we come here, Tint?"

She shrugged again. "Vascay's tribe," she said. "Our tribe. They take us on hollow log to Snake Island, hunt for ring for wizard. Other men not smell ring and not hear Tint."

She dropped to all fours again and turned her head quickly from side to side, taking in her surroundings. "Bad place," she said. "Many snakes!"

Garric thought about Tint's words as he listened to the forest. Besides the chirps and trilling that would've passed unnoticed in the borough's common woodland, something shrieked every few minutes like a cat in a bonfire. Garric supposed it was a bird, but it'd get on his nerves if he had to listen to it for long.

He could guess from Gar's hazy memories what the beastgirl meant by "Vascay's tribe": a band of twenty or more men, all armed beyond what was normal for honest folk. Some had eyepatches and several were missing limbs.

Most of the gang had cuffed or kicked Gar in the past. A few of them seemed to have done so every time the half-witted youth came within reach.

"Tint," he said, "can you show me where the ring is? If we find the ring, maybe we'll be able to leave this island."

At the moment the only thing Garric was sure of was that his relationship with the tribe—the gang of bandits, he supposed—was going to be different from the one that they'd had with Gar. Bringing in the object the gang was searching for would be at least a good start toward that change.

"Tint show," the beastgirl said with another shrug. "Stone wears ring. Tint smell stone."

Tint set off through the forest, moving roughly parallel to the watercourse. Garric started after her. He caught at once in a kind of bamboo with back-curved hooks on the edges of the leaves.

"Gar come?" Tint called, already hidden by the foliage. "Come Gar!"

"Wait!" Garric snapped. The leaves' grip left dotted rows of blood, on his forearms and along his ribs. He had to get down onto all fours to pass the bamboo; he didn't dare try circling the stand because it seemed to cover the whole area of a courtyard building which had collapsed into a mound of brick and stone in past ages.

He sighed. He'd wondered what the calluses on Gar's knuckles came from. Now he knew.

Most of Gar's fuzzy memories were of fears and beatings, not the ordinary business of his days. As best Garric could determine, Tint and the half-wit served Vascay's band as something between unpaid servants and ill-treated pets. They carried water, fed the fire, and were allowed to eat scraps from the gang's own meals as well as scavenge for themselves.

It wasn't a bad life, really—for an animal. Garric's face hardened at the thought.

Tint came back to Garric before he reached where she'd been waiting. The beastgirl's irritation had become renewed solicitousness: she couldn't imagine what had caused the change in her friend.

Garric smiled with a touch of humor. He couldn't imagine either, though he guessed that the Intercessor of Laut could explain it.

When at Echeus' direction Garric had looked into the pool, he'd seen something in the instant before Gar's reflection appeared in place of his own. A pattern had formed in bits of glittering flotsam carried down on the stream from where Echeus had knelt. Tint calling this place Snake Island had helped Garric identify the remembered objects: they'd been snake scales.

The ruins, though extensive, appeared to be of a palace complex rather than a city. The buildings had ornamental facades, and the walls were sheathed with marble over brick cores. Much of the damage was deliberate: time and the forest had only buried the ruin brought by human assault.

Tint brought Garric to ruins that were both cruder and more recent. Blocks and column barrels from the original palace had been piled into a wall which had enclosed a dozen huts or so.

Fire had swept this later hamlet as well, blackening the stones before they fell again to rubble. The mound was now covered by moss and a fungus that sent up small orange balls, ready to puff out their spores if touched.

There'd only been the one patch of bamboo, but pine trees of some sort branched frequently into hedges of spikes hidden in the softer-leafed vegetation. The soil around this later settlement was too soggy to support brush above knee-height, let alone trees. Garric straightened from the crouch he'd been in most of the way through the forest and strode toward the jumbled ruin.

Tint shrieked and bounded in front of him, baring her teeth in terror. "No Gar!" she said, hopping up and down on all fours. "Gar die! Gar die!"

Garric froze, splaying his hands at his side to calm his companion. "I'm not moving, Tint," he said quietly. "Tell me what the danger is."

"Mushroom kill!" Tint said. She pawed at Garric, not really trying to move him back but miming a further signal of danger. "Gar touch mushroom, Gar die!"

The beastgirl made a theatrical sweep of her hand, indicating the puffballs' bright nodules. Her arm, covered in coarse reddish-gold hair, was as long as Garric's own.

Garric nodded his understanding. Even in the borough there were poison mushrooms. This was the first time he'd run into a species whose spores were dangerous, but already he trusted the beastgirl's woodcraft as implicitly as he did Tenoctris' judgment on wizardry.

"How do we—" he said.

Beneath Tint's pointing hand was a vine with leaves as broad as a watermelon's. A stem suddenly rustled. The beastgirl glanced at the ground, then froze.

"Tint?" said Garric. He touched her shoulder. She was trembling like a tuft of goosedown. He looked past her, bending forward to bring his eyes to the angle of hers.

A snake coiled beneath the vine. Its head was a wedge as broad as Garric's fist, its mottled body as thick as his forearm. He couldn't tell how long the serpent was: ten feet, twelve feet, perhaps even longer. Certainly it was long enough to strike Tint where she stood in frozen panic.

The snake's tail quivered, making a dry rustle against the leaves. Its head rose minusculely, weaving slightly with the tension of muscles compressing. The beastgirl whimpered, "Hoo... hoo... hoo...."

"Jump back, Tint," Garric whispered. He'd seen her spring fifteen feet from a standing start; that would carry her clear of the snake before it could strike.

But not this time: Tint was too frightened to move. Garric wasn't sure she even heard his voice. His right hand, concealed behind the beastgirl's body, tugged loose the knot of his breechclout.

The snake's tail blurred again. Most serpents slither away if given the opportunity; not this one. Its ridged underside was the color of hot sulphur. As its fangs unfolded, a drop of venom glinted on the tip of each.

Garric leaped past Tint's left side, carrying the fluttering length of his breechclout with him. If he'd had time to tie a stone in the cloth for weight he'd have thrown it instead; there wasn't any time.

The snake struck. It was quicker even than Garric had feared, sinking its long fangs in the wool with an audible clop of air. Garric twisted, catching the snake beneath the head with both hands. He'd rather have run but he couldn't have gotten up from his sprawl before the snake struck again, this time into his thigh or torso.

Now Tint jumped, first away and then back like a toad bouncing between the walls of a ditch as it tries to flee a sudden motion. She screamed.

The snake's body writhed about Garric's right arm. The creature was strong, probably stronger than he was, but it couldn't get a fulcrum that would allow it to wrench itself out of his grasp. He could feel the scales' keel ridges cutting into his callused palms.

"Tint!" Garric shouted. He'd come down hard, slamming his left side on a chunk of rubble that bruised him badly if it hadn't broken a rib. Pain crackled through him like lightning hitting the sea. "Help me!"

The beastgirl capered and squealed. The snake was trying to stab its fangs down into Garric's forearm. Its long tail curled, slapping Garric across the eyes.

"Duzi!" he shouted, lashing hysterically. The snake's back popped. Garric flung the creature from him, horrified by the memory of his fear of a moment before.

The snake continued to twist, but now spasmodically. Its jaws opened and closed without force; its eyes were glazing.

Garric stood up slowly, rubbing his side. He'd have a bruise; nothing worse than that. He saw his breechclout among the vines where the struggle had flung it. Venom had soaked through a patch the size of his palm. He left the coarse woolen where it was; it hadn't been much of a garment to begin with.

"Gar good?" Tint said, creeping to his side and stroking him. "Gar good!"

Garric brushed the beastgirl's hand away. She couldn't overcome a fear like that any better than an effort of will would enable her to breathe water; but Garric remembered with revulsion how nearly the serpent had come to squirming its dry suppleness from his unaided grip....

"Show me where the ring is, Tint," Garric said in a husky voice. "That's all I want from you. Find me the ring.