Mistress of the Catacombs (9 page)

Through the last screen of tree ferns, Cashel heard several men shouting. One called, "Captain Mounix! Everybody! Get over here now!"

"What's the matter?" Tilphosa said in a tense, controlled voice at Cashel's shoulder.

"Stay close," he muttered. He held his staff crossways before him and crushed down the feathery fronds as he stepped onto the sand.

Three sailors stood around a fourth figure sprawled at the tideline. More crewmen were clambering over the rocky spine of the headland to join them; the captain was among the newcomers.

"What is it?" Mounix called. "Sister take you if you're just shouting to exercise your lungs!"

He carried a short, curve-bladed sword unsheathed. Costas accompanied him with a bow, while Hook had a cudgel made from a length of spar.

"Well, look for yourself then!" snarled the sailor.

A quick glance showed Cashel all he needed to see of the torn corpse. It'd been a girl Tilphosa's age or thereabouts before something clawed her chest open and devoured her heart and lungs.

Tilphosa gasped but didn't scream. She had a right to scream. "That's my maid Matone!" she said. "I thought she'd drowned."

"No," said Cashel. The girl had been alive when she was ripped open; otherwise there wouldn't have been so much blood. It must have happened during the night, though: the carrion was already starting to smell.

"What did this?" Mounix bellowed. "What hellspawn lives on this accursed island?"

Cashel turned to face the wall of vegetation. Unless they were luckier than he expected, they were going to learn the answer to the captain's question the hard way.

CHAPTER FIVE

Fingers closed on the pattern Ilna was knotting. She jerked back, confused by the contact and not really aware of her immediate surroundings.

The fingers were stronger than her own. They snatched the cords from her, crumpling the half-done curse... for curse it was, certain condemnation to the bleakest levels of Hell for the victim and for Ilna herself.

Her mind opened onto present existence. Chalcus faced her, holding her eyes as his fingers picked apart her knots with a seaman's skill.

"Don't do this thing, dear one," Chalcus said calmly.

With the fury of a hornet, Ilna shouted, "Do you wish to spend forever with crows pecking your liver, little man! Do you doubt I can do that?"

"I well know what you're capable of doing; to me or to any man, dear heart," Chalcus said. He reduced the pattern to individual cords and stroked them alongside one another on his callused palm. "In good time you'll be able to do whatever you choose; but not just now. And not, I hope, in this way."

He tilted his hand and dropped the hank of cords back into hers.

Merota had joined them, still wearing the single thin tunic in which she took her lessons. Ilna frowned. The girl knew better than to come out in public in such a scandalous state of undress!

Ilna breathed deeply. Her legs were trembling; for a moment she wasn't sure the big muscles of her thighs would continue to hold her. Chalcus held out his left forearm for her to grab the way she would have gripped a railing. She took it and felt her body return to normal.

"You saw what he did to me," Ilna said, her eyes on the ground. Seeing Merota had grounded her again in a world where duty constrained Ilna os-Kenset more straitly than ever chains did a prisoner. It was a safe world, a world she knew well enough to feel comfortable in. There was nothing Ilna feared more than herself and the things she might do if unconfined.

And there was nothing she regretted more than the things she had done when she put her skills at evil's service and was governed only by anger and her own cold logic.

"I heard him," said Chalcus. "I've left men lying in their guts for less, dear one. But not you, not that way."

"I'm sorry," Ilna whispered. "I was so angry that I wasn't...."

She laughed, surprising herself but not—from his expression—Chalcus. "I was so angry that I was myself," she corrected herself. "And that's a thing I try not to be very often."

Ilna reached toward the silent Merota and, holding the girl, hugged Chalcus as well. There was as little give to his flesh as there was to a brick wall. Merota squeezed back fiercely.

They stepped apart. Chalcus eyed the small building now ringed by Blood Eagles, the conference room into which Garric had disappeared with the three women. The other women.

"Dearest...?" he said in a bantering tone. At any other time Ilna would have snapped at him for the word, but not now. "Don't ever use your art to kill someone you care for. Use that little knife you carry, if you must. Or better—"

He grinned at her. There was no expression at all in his gray eyes.

"—use me. It's a thing I've a talent for."

The crowd of civilians across the watercourse was beginning to break up into lesser groupings. Each pair or handful chattered among itself as people went off to tell others about the wonders they'd witnessed—and likely, from Ilna's experience of human beings, telling about many things they hadn't witnessed.

Ilna brushed the thought aside, angry at herself for what she'd tried to do. "No," she said. "I'm not so great a fool as that; at least when my friends see to it that I've time to think. Garric's a clever man and a wise one. He'll have had a good reason for whatever he chose to do."

"Ilna?" Merota said, perfectly the lady now despite her garb and hair tousled from running. "You saw Garric being threatened, and now he's acting funny. Couldn't that be because of the danger you saw?"

Ilna looked at the girl coolly. "You were listening to me and Chalcus when you should have been about your lessons," she said. She paused, then continued, "And a good thing, too, since you've obviously got better sense than I do."

Her eyes met those of Chalcus again. "You both do," she said.

"Do you care to wait here, Mistress Ilna," Chalcus said. "Or shall we—"

The door of the conference room opened. Tenoctris shuffled out, looked across the narrow stream, and said, "Ilna? Would you help me with a task, please? It may help us find your brother."

"Of course," said Ilna, hiking up her tunic skirts and jumping the channel. Spectators still in the neighborhood watched with renewed interest.

Garric came out of the building with Liane on his arm. Liane stepped away, glancing toward Ilna. Ilna froze where she'd landed.

Garric acknowledged Ilna with a nod, then put his fists on his hips and stood arms akimbo.

"Master Chalcus?" he called. "Will you talk with me now? Liane can take care of Lady Merota, for neither our business nor that of Tenoctris and Mistress Ilna is anything they should trouble themselves with."

Chalcus looked at Merota. "Go on, Chalcus!" the girl said. "Liane and I will sit in the bower there—"

She nodded to the ivy-covered frame of withies near the terrace of fountains.

"—and discuss Celondre's poetry."

She giggled, suddenly a child again. "Or something."

Ilna gave the sailor a brief lift of her chin in assent. She didn't know what was going on, but that wasn't a new experience for her.

"I'll be right glad to join you, prince," said Chalcus, hopping the stream without seeming to prepare for the leap. "Indeed, I think we've matters to discuss."

He sauntered toward Garric, grinning broadly when he saw the Blood Eagles tense at his approach. The officer in command leaned toward Garric, who waved him away with a curt syllable. Garric held the conference room door for Chalcus, then entered behind him and closed it.

Ilna sighed. Part of her wanted to squat here on the turf and see what her patterns told her, but no doubt she'd learn in good time. For now she'd help Tenoctris.

She smiled coldly. It was her duty, after all.

* * *

Tint crept up to the fallen structure, pausing midway to turn and stroke Garric nervously. He grimaced but didn't let reflex jerk him back in disgust. The beastgirl had been frightened even before the snake; she was proceeding now only because Garric demanded that she do so. It wasn't much to ask that Garric let her take a little reassurance in his presence.

The palms and jagged-leafed philodendrons which shaded the boggy clearing were so motionless in the still air that Garric had the feeling he'd stepped through the frame of a painting rather than being part of a real setting. There was a chittering and sudden swift motion behind him; his heart leaped. A flock of bright yellow finches burst through the foliage and wheeled away again as suddenly.

"Stone and ring here, Gar," Tint said, pointing to a corner of the ruin. "Under wall. You dig from side, not touch mushrooms."

She hadn't started at all when the birds fluttered past. They were harmless, after all....

Garric smiled faintly and patted Tint's shoulder; she licked his hand. That was disconcerting, but it no longer irritated him.

He looked at the fallen wall. The orange puffballs grew only on the stones, bright blotches that punctuated the mosses and the original gray surface. If the builders had buried a statue as part of a foundation course to keep the new structure from sinking into the bog, Garric ought to be able to reach it by tunneling into the soft soil.

If it was there. And if it had the ring.

"Tint," Garric said, "how do you know the statue you smell is the one that has the ring?"

The beastgirl shrugged. "Men find stone feet," she said, gesturing back the way she'd brought Garric. "Writing on stone. Vascay say, 'Find rest of statue.' Stone under there smell same as stone feet."

She scratched the middle of her back absently, a multi-jointed motion that startled Garric almost as much as the finches had. "Gold with stone," Tint added. "Maybe ring, maybe not ring."

Garric probed the ground with his finger. Water gleamed in low spots in the soil, drowning even the moss. He didn't see how Tint could actually smell objects through that, let alone discriminate between particular veins of marble and types of metal.

But it was easier to believe that than to imagine the beastgirl either wanting to lie to him or having enough intelligence to carry it off. "Then I'll dig," Garric said.

It struck him suddenly that he had no tools or clothing whatever. Granted the ground was soft....

Garric looked around, chose a palm sapling whose trunk was only two fingers broad, and pulled it upward. It came easily, but the mat of surface roots at the end would make a better broom than a digging implement. Maybe he could chop or crush the staff into some sort of point?

"Tint," he said, "do you see a rock with a sharp edge? I want to cut the roots off this tree."

Instead of answering, Tint took the sapling and put the end in her mouth; her lips curled back. The beastgirl's eyeteeth would have shamed any dog Garric had seen, but now he realized that her long jaw held the molars of a horse besides.

She crunched down hard, twisted the stem with her hands, and spat out a wad of fibers. "Tint fix," she said proudly as she handed back the staff.

"Thank you, Tint," Garric said. He bent to his task, thrusting his pole into the soil at a flat angle and scooping it aside. His new body—Gar's body—was stronger than Garric's own had been when he was in top shape at the end of harvest and threshing.

But he wasn't stronger than Tint, for all that the beastgirl weighed barely half what he did. Gar's memories were too chaotic to tell Garric how he and Tint had met. It seemed that the bandit gang had gathered them up separately, but Garric wasn't sure the brain-damaged youth could have survived without Tint's sharper senses and clear, if limited, intellect.

The palm trunk was too flexible to be a perfect dibble, but the ground was so soft that Garric made good headway nonetheless. The end of the pole almost immediately rapped stone beneath the lowest visible layer. He kept prodding inward and thrusting the spoil sideways. Tint, though she wouldn't help dig, scooped the muck out of his way with her long hands.

This piece of the foundation was a statue's torso, all right. The raised right arm was now broken off. The left rested on the figure's waist. When Garric saw the hand, he set the pole aside and rubbed the marble clear with a philodendron leaf.

The fourth finger had been carved in the round; it was broken at the first joint. On the stub, under a layer of mud and corroded stone, was a gold ring set with a small sapphire. Garric twisted it free without difficulty.

He sloshed off the dirt in a puddle, then rubbed off the rest of the lime crust with his thumb before holding the ring up to a shaft of light. Tint leaned against him, trembling and making little clicking noises with her teeth. She didn't seem to be frightened, just excited.

Garric tried the simple band on his little finger; it would have been loose, but not very loose. The jewel, though small, had been faceted with great skill.

"I wonder who the fellow was," he said. The statue's face was too worn to have features; without the carven swordbelt, Garric wouldn't even have been sure the subject was male.

"Thalemos," said Tint unexpectedly.

Garric looked at her in surprise. She edged sideways, afraid he was going to hit her. "Gar?" she said nervously.

"I'm just curious how you know who he was," Garric said. The name wasn't one he remembered hearing before. "I'm not angry, Tint."

He hoped the sudden hardness of his lips didn't frighten the beastgirl further. Her reaction reminded him of the life she'd lived with the bandit gang... and brought back some of Gar's memories as well.

Tint crouched close again, rubbing Garric with her hands and neck. "Vascay see stone feet by house," she explained. "Rub stone with finger, then shout, 'Thalemos! Find rest of statue!' Men dig around house, but no smell stone. Tint smell stone!"

Sure, the bandits had found the base of the statue carved with the name of the subject portrayed. They'd have looked nearby and even dug in the ground, but even if they'd guessed that later comers had carried the torso off they couldn't possibly have found it here under a later ruin.

She looked up at Garric. "Gar like Tint?" she said.

"I like you very much, Tint," Garric said. "Without you, we wouldn't ever have found the ring."

He patted her shoulder while he thought. "I guess," he said, "we need to find Master Vascay. To meet Master Vascay, though he may not think so at first."

Garric considered carrying the ring on his finger, but he decided not to. It wasn't so much that the ring gave him a bad feeling, but there was something odd about it. Garric didn't understand a lot of what had been happening; he didn't care to increase his contact with strangeness.

Besides, he'd never worn jewelry, either as peasant or as prince. Holding the ring between his left thumb and forefinger, Garric said, "You'll have to lead me, Tint. I don't know the way."

The beastgirl twisted her head up and back to look at Garric in concern. "It's all right," he said reassuringly. "I'm fine, Tint. I just don't know some of the things I used to know before I fell in the water."

Tint dropped onto all fours, her normal travelling position. As she did so, a tall man with his beard bound into three tails stepped through the palm thicket. He wore a leathern jackshirt studded with rivets for additional protection; from his bandolier hung three daggers and a long, curved sword.

Tint hunched and bared her teeth. Gar's memory gave the man a name: Ceto. He was a swaggerer who thought himself a handsome fellow despite a scarred cheek and the two toes missing from the left foot visible through his hobnailed sandals.

Ceto was the sort of man you sometimes met among the bodyguards whom merchants brought to Barca's Hamlet for the Sheep Fair. Garric smiled with one side of his mouth. He'd met the type, and he'd occasionally had to throw one out of the inn. He could do something similar with Ceto if he had to.

"What are you monkeys doing here?" Ceto demanded. He sounded angry, but angry the way you'd be to find a dog sniffing the stew pot. "You're supposed to be foraging! Heigh yourselves up those nut trees by the camp!"

"We're headed back to the camp, Ceto," Garric said, speaking with the insouciant precision of an educated man dealing with an inferior. "We have something to show Vascay."

Light winked from the sapphire. Ceto, striding toward Garric and Tint, noticed the ring and stared. He hadn't listened to Garric, let alone noticed a change from Gar's demeanor.

"What do you have there?" he demanded. "By the Sister! Let me have that!"

"I think it'll be safe with—" Garric said. Ceto hit him in the pit of the stomach.

Garric doubled up, his lungs paralyzed and his brain screaming for air. All he could hear was Tint's terrified chirps and the white roar of pain.

Ceto kicked him in the head with a hobnailed foot. White drained to blackness, taking Garric's mind with it.