Mistress of the Catacombs

6

Garric’s skin burned. He was bathed in white light and it burned. Consciousness returned with the suddenness of a casement closing; with it came pain.

That was all right. Garric had hurt before, and this time the anger coursing through him burned all other feelings to cinders. He opened his eyes.

The foliage of the palms from which Ceto appeared were still quivering; the bandit must just have brushed his way through on his way back to the camp. Garric was far too coldly angry to rush off after him; he needed to get control of himself first. Then he’d take care of Ceto.

Tint was jumping frantically, making clicking sounds with her teeth. She saw Garric move and started to lift him.

“Hey!” Garric gasped. “Don’t do that!”

“Gar!” Tint cried, the first actual word that’d come from her mouth since he awakened. She sprang into a clump of hibiscus. Voice fading with the distance, she called, “Tint fix ear!”

Garric could breathe again, though the pit of his stomach was numb with a jagged circle of pain around it. Ceto’s punch might have cracked a rib.

He dabbed his ear; his fingers came away bloody. The hobnails had caught the tip, though the damage didn’t seem to be serious.

Garric knelt, then rose to his feet as the beastgirl reappeared with a wad of…of spiderweb! “Tint fix ear,” she repeated, motioning him to bend down.

He obeyed, feeling a moment of vertigo that cleared at once. Instead of wiping his ear, Tint licked him with a tongue that seemed almost prehensile. Garric didn’t jump away because the beastgirl was holding him by the shoulders. Only when the wound was clean did she press the spider silk over the wound.

“Tint fix!” she repeated. The silk stayed where she’d placed it, glued by its own adhesive.

Garric took a deep breath. His ribs still hurt, but nothing was broken.

He grinned at his companion. “All right, Tint,” he said. “Now take me back to the camp. So that I can fix Ceto.”

Sharina watched Chalcus leave the conference room; he moved with the grace of a dancer—which he might be—or a swordsman, which she knew he was. Captain Deghan relaxed visibly to see Carus standing in the doorway unharmed.

Carus glanced back at Sharina. “Shall we—” he said.

“Shut the door please,” Sharina said. Her stomach was tight; mention of the Pewle knife and her memory of Nonnus made her able to ask a question when ingrained courtesy would have kept her silent. “For a moment.”

Carus turned, nodded to Deghan, and closed the door again. When he faced Sharina he was expressionless, watchful. “All right,” he said.

“Why won’t you see Ilna?” she said.

“I told—”

“I heard what you told Chalcus!” Sharina said. “I can see the logic; so could Garric, and I think he’d have done the same—for all a sailor’s doubts. People in Barca’s Hamlet have to make hard choices every fall if they expect to survive the Hungry Time the next spring. But you haven’t answered my question.”

Carus’ grin was brief and false. He walked to the sideboard and poured himself wine, using the carafe of red and the goblet closest to him—the one Chalcus had left behind. He didn’t mix water with the wine.

“When I was…” he said to the far wall. “In the flesh, say; alive, I don’t care what you call it.”

He set the goblet down untasted and met Sharina’s eyes. “When I was a man, Sharina, I knew a lot of women,” he said. “I liked them well enough, and some I liked a good deal. But there was one…”

Carus reached for the wine, then snatched his hand back and snarled, “Sister take it! And may the Sister take me if I’m so great a coward that I won’t talk about her!”

“Carus…?” Sharina said. She didn’t know what she wanted to say next, except that she wished she hadn’t spoken before. “I don’t need… You don’t have to tell me anything.”

The king’s passing reference to the knife had opened an old wound, but he’d had a reason. Sharina no longer believed she’d had a reason for her question, at least not one that was worth the pain it gave her companion.

“Don’t I, girl?” Carus said. He managed a gust of his usual laughter. “Perhaps not, but I’ll tell you anyway. There was a girl, a woman, named Brichese bos-Brediman; from Cordin, noble of course but from a family no wealthier than yours in Barca’s Hamlet despite the title.”

He shrugged. “I loved her,” he said. “And she died, because I didn’t save her…or couldn’t save her…. Or perhaps you could say because I didn’t choose to save her. And that was all a thousand years ago. She’d be dead now in any case and none of that would matter. Except—”

Carus grinned. “You know,” he said, “I sometimes think that the Lady…or Fate, if the philosophers are right when they say the Great Gods don’t exist…that whoever rules men has a sense of humor. Your friend Ilna is as close to being my Brichese as ever twins were born. In body, but in spirit as well.”

Sharina’s face went blank. “Ah,” she said. “I see now.”

“It was hard enough when I watched through your brother’s eyes and heard through his ears,” the king said. He sipped the wine, drinking without the desperation that had driven his urge a few moments before. “Now that I’m wearing this body instead of being a guest in it, I thought…”

He laughed and finished the wine. “I thought it’d be best for everybody,” he said, “if I put temptation out of the way.”

“Yes,” said Sharina. She breathed a sigh of relief. If Carus had been a different man, Ilna and the kingdom both would face a future that would be even more dangerous than what loomed today.

“Let’s go out to the others,” she said, crooking her arm to be taken by the man wearing her brother’s body. “I want to see what Tenoctris has learned about Garric.”

Fear twisted her gut. She immediately hid it beneath a smile.

“And Cashel,” Sharina added; and then lied. “Though I’m sure Cashel will never meet any danger that he can’t manage.”

Tenoctris had decided to use the marble bench on one side of the artificial grotto as a table. Ilna watched while the wizard adjusted the strips of parchment that she’d written on and placed around the edges of two smoldering braziers. Along the grotto’s back wall water trickled from lead pipes into a channel leading out into the garden, past the squad of Blood Eagles facing stolidly away from the wizard.

Beards of moss grew on the wall beneath the pipes. A similar dark smudge spread down the front of the bench. Echeus’ severed head sat upright between the braziers. Blood still leaked from its neck.

Tenoctris stepped back, breathing quickly. “There,” she said. “That should be all right. Now where did I put—”

“I have your wand,” Ilna said, holding out the split of bamboo the wizard had chosen for this incantation. “And your stool is set up right here.”

“Ah,” said Tenoctris. “Yes, of course.”

She sat carefully, gathering the hem of her robe so that it didn’t collapse the folding ivory stool Ilna had placed facing Echeus. She glanced up at Ilna. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m nervous because of what I’m about to do.”

Ilna shrugged. “But you’ll do it anyway,” she said. “That’s all that matters, not what it costs.”

She smiled wryly at the older woman. “That’s what I tell myself, anyway,” she added.

Tenoctris grinned. “Yes, of course,” she said. “And I’m sure you’re right.”

She faced forward, focusing on a point in eternity rather than on the head in front of her. Echeus had died with his eyes open and a look of surprise on his face. The eyes had glazed and the stiffness of death was sharpening the expression into a demonic grimace.

The parchment crinkled in the slow fire; by becoming black ash, the words of power executed themselves in coils of smoke. Tenoctris tapped the air silently for a moment, then said in rhythm with her wand, “Oh maosaio naraeeaeaa….”

With every syllable Tenoctris spoke, the rising smoke quivered. Ilna saw hints of glowing color in the thin columns. There was a pattern to them, something her brain couldn’t grasp but her soul almost could.

“Arubibao thumo imsiu…” the wizard said. “Oulatsila moula imsiu….”

Ilna, Tenoctris, and the severed head were alone in a grotto carved out of the cosmos, not just a man-made hill. The entrance and the guards outside had vanished. The only light was from glowing smoke that wove new patterns in the fabric of space and time.

“Ae eiouo soumarta max akarba….” No longer words spoken by a human but rather the thunder of the cosmos.

Echeus’ eyes were expanding, or else Ilna was looking into another world which those eyes had seen. Gray, softly gleaming…utterly evil.

“Chraie zozan ekmet prhe satra!”

A world: a world draped in gray silk, webs swathing rocks and trees—and everywhere those who had woven the webs, watching through jewel-hard unwinking multiple eyes. A world of spiders the size of dogs, the size of sheep. Spiders waiting: expressionless, emotionless; as cold as the void between worlds.

Spiders who had woven patterns of inhuman perfection, and who were weaving one further pattern that Ilna could almost understand. Indeed, she could under—

The gray hellworld shrank into itself, vanishing like a snowflake caught in an open hand. Ilna staggered, but the instinct of duty caused her to grab Tenoctris and hold the old wizard firmly before she could slip off her stool. She seemed skeletally frail within her silken robe.

The grotto stank of charred flesh: parchment was no more than sheep gut, after all. The strips had burned to ash and Echeus’ head was only a body part, already flushing with the purple tinge of decay.

A haze of gray smoke filtered the sunlight entering through the entrance, but it still made a bright contrast to the place Ilna’s mind had just visited. She lifted Tenoctris as she’d carry an injured child and stepped outside.

“Ma’am?” said the leader of the guards. “Is she—”

“She’s all right,” Ilna said.

“I’m all right,” Tenoctris echoed weakly, “I’m just tired.”

The Blood Eagles shifted their stance, uncertain whether they ought to be helping the women or simply preventing the approach of intruders. There was no one within fifty paces of the grotto except for the larger detachment of guards around the conference room where Garric and Chalcus spoke.

Ilna felt the older woman gather her strength, then straighten her legs. When Ilna was sure, she let go except to keep one arm crooked where Tenoctris could hold on to it.

“Tenoctris, did you see it?” Ilna whispered. “That place?”

Garric…Ilna remembered she’d felt murderous passion when Garric turned his back on her less than an hour before. She was purged of that now. Nothing humans did was worth anger, not when one had seen Hell wrapped in webs of finest silk.

“Yes, I saw it,” Tenoctris said. “I don’t know what it means, but now that I have a starting place I think I can learn.”

“That was what Echeus was trying to bring about?” Ilna said. She’d meant to whisper, but for once control failed her. She let her loathing loose in her rising tone. “That was why he attacked Garric?”

Tenoctris took a deep breath. Now at last she appeared to have recovered from the ordeal of her art—and perhaps from the shock of what her art had shown her.

She stepped back and managed a wan smile for Ilna. “No,” she said. “Echeus wasn’t trying to create that…world, that path for the future to follow.”

Tenoctris drew in another breath; her smile failed her.

“What we saw was a vision of what Echeus feared most,” the old wizard explained. “Echeus attacked Garric to prevent that future from occurring.”

Cashel sat with his back to a coral head thrusting up from the beach. He made no more sound or movement than the rock behind him, but he was fully alert.

The sailors’ several driftwood campfires had burned down to coals. Occasionally a salt crystal spluttered into transparent pastel flame, but for the most part the fireglow sank slowly toward the darkness of the surrounding night.

Cashel waited the way he’d watched over flocks when he knew danger threatened. Captain Mounix had set guards, but Cashel didn’t believe anybody had relieved the first watch. The shipwreck had disturbed the crew’s structure, and the terrible slayings had put paid to what discipline remained.

There would be no more slayings. Cashel smiled. Not unless the killer got through him first, anyway.

The surf rumbled on the reef, drowning with its low note the many lesser night sounds. When Cashel took his place the tide had been going out; now it was returning. Occasionally waves splashed against the base of the coral head. Most of the survivors were sprawled on the sand up at the tide line. Cashel had chosen this location because he wanted to cover as much of the encampment as possible, though in darkness he couldn’t see his companions.

Just inland of Cashel’s position, Lady Tilphosa slept under a sailcloth shelter for privacy. Metra lay nearby but outside the shelter. Cashel hadn’t asked them to stay close, though he would’ve done so if Tilphosa hadn’t volunteered that she wanted to sleep nearby for protection.

Another wave hit the coral, spraying high enough that drops spattered Cashel. Arms of water reached around from both sides, hissing and foaming; one wet Cashel’s tunic before sinking into the sand.

It’d be dawn soon. He’d move when the sky brightened, maybe even get some sleep of his own. Until then, well, he’d been wet before.

Cashel felt a presence in the night; he tensed.

It wasn’t anything he could’ve described to another person, unless they were folks who’d felt this sort of thing themselves. Something was threatening his flock….

There was movement though not a shape against the palmettos and screw pines. It was at the head of the trail Cashel had broken, going uphill to the spring. That was what he’d expected, though he hadn’t been conscious of his belief until the event confirmed it.

He rose in one silent, fluid motion. Cashel was deliberate in all things, but no one who’d seen him act during a crisis thought he was clumsy. He started toward the shadow. It was now drifting in the direction of a campfire which had settled to a shimmer of heat.

Cashel moved in a near shuffle, his feet lifting barely above the surface of the sand. He angled his approach to put himself between the intruder and the gap in the vegetation from which it had come.

It was very near to dawn, though the constellations were distorted enough that Cashel couldn’t say if the sky would begin to lighten in one handful of minutes or two handsful. Certainly no more than two.

One of the sailors lay a little farther from the dead fire than his companions did. The intruder sprang the remaining distance to him while Cashel was just beyond his staff’s reach.

“Hi!” Cashel shouted, and jumped himself, whirling the quarterstaff in a full-armed slash.

Quick as Cashel was, the intruder proved quicker. It had snatched its chosen victim from the sand in the eyeblink before Cashel moved. Now it hurled the sailor away and ducked beneath the whistling blow.

The sailor was screaming. His companions sat up, shouting in fear; men at the other fires cried out also. Cashel skidded on the sand, recovering his staff with both hands at the balance to defend himself from the intruder’s counter-stroke.

Instead the shadow—it was still no more than a shadow, though Cashel was nearly on top of it—bounded for the jungle in a graceless, low-slung motion. It covered ground like a scorpion jumping. Cashel couldn’t cut it off before it vanished into the vegetation.

That was all right. Cashel knew where it was going, or anyway thought he did.

A bow twanged from the direction of the southernmost campfire. Cashel didn’t hear the whistle of an arrow, so maybe the archer wasn’t aiming toward him after all.

Cashel plunged into the forest, slanting his staff before him to extend the line of his right forearm. His left hand was free to clutch or fend away.

“Cashel, wait!” Tilphosa called. “Wait for daylight!”

Cashel kept going. When he’d come this way during daylight he’d blundered into trees while watching his footing and had slipped if he kept his eyes on the trees. Now he moved through the darkness as easily as a puff of smoke. He had a countryman’s feel for a path once trodden, but more than that was working tonight: he was on the trail of the creature which as long as it lived would threaten those under Cashel’s protection.

Surefooted Cashel might be, but he crashed through the undergrowth like a bull in a thicket. He couldn’t hear the thing he was chasing, and there was at least a chance that it’d pick its spot and turn on him.

He wasn’t worried. He wanted to get his hands on the thing—the sooner, the better. He couldn’t in his heart believe that it was a real danger to a man who was alert and unafraid.

The sky grew paler through the broadly splayed leaves of the begonias. It was still some minutes short of sunrise, but false dawn brightened the heavens if not the ground beneath. Cashel no longer needed to climb on instinct: gnarled trunks stood out from one another and from the background. He was close to the outcrop where the airship lay wrecked. He paused to decide how he’d negotiate the last dozen paces of steep hillside.

As he stood silent, he heard movement down the slope behind him. Was there a pack of them, surrounding him before they struck?

Farther back still he heard Metra call, “Lady Tilphosa! Stop!”

Cashel smiled. Tilphosa’d said she’d stay close to him for protection tonight. He hadn’t expected her to follow him up here, but maybe she wasn’t showing such bad judgment.

The chime of gold on gold rang softly through the night. Cashel sighed in relieved anticipation. He’d been afraid that his quarry would keep running instead of going to ground. A shepherd learns to get along in the woods, but he doesn’t become a tracker.

He started climbing to the crag and spring, slipping a little on the slick, steep clay. Funny. It’d been easier to lope through the night than it was to make this last short way under a pink-gray sky. The immediacy was past, though the job that remained might be hard enough.

“Cashel?” Tilphosa called from not far below him. “I’m coming up! It’s me, Tilphosa.”

She was smart enough to know how Cashel might react to being startled just now. Tilphosa was smart enough, period.

After his breathing slowed, Cashel could hear water dripping down into the basin of the spring. Dawn had awakened creatures to squawk and warble, unseen because of distance and the foliage.

The airboat’s skeleton lay as Cashel had left it. So far as he could see, Costas hadn’t been able to mark the flint-hard gold. The sailor’s body lay at the edge of the spring, his chest ripped open and emptied. Costas’ eyes stared at the dawn.

“I’m coming, Cashel,” Tilphosa said, blurting the words out between gasps. “It’s me behind you.”

The girl clambered onto the ridge as she spoke. Cashel turned slightly so that he could see her without losing sight of the wreck.

Thorns or a sharp branch had torn Tilphosa’s tunic. A line of dried blood crossed her right cheek to the lobe of her ear. She didn’t have Cashel’s instinct for the darkness, but she’d come anyway.

In her right hand Tilphosa clutched a chisel she must have taken from Hook’s tool chest. The shaft was hardwood, but the fluted blade was steel and sharp enough to shave with.

“You took a chance,” Cashel said, but his tone was approving. “I guess there isn’t anywhere a lot safer around here, though.”

“Yes, well, I wasn’t going to stay down there without you,” Tilphosa said. Her quick breaths whistled, but she made a point of not opening her mouth to pant like a dog. “Did it get away?”

“I don’t think so,” Cashel said. He looked around him carefully to be sure that nothing, no thing, waited in ambush. Then he pushed into the lobelias with his staff slanted forward, this time in both hands.

“Cashel?” said the girl. She’d stayed far enough back to be clear if he and the quarterstaff had to spin suddenly. “Do you know what it is? Is it a man?”

“We’ll know in a little bit,” Cashel said, his voice a growl as he concentrated on what was in front of him.

Three larger swellings grew from the tubing like seedpods hanging on a trumpet vine. One was near the bow. The impact had crushed it open. Roots twisted about it, and a line of ants crawled in and out of its protection.

Cashel moved on, each time testing the ground with his toes before putting his foot down. At any moment his legs might need to anchor a smashing blow of his quarterstaff….

He heard rustling and the crackle of a branch behind him. “Lady Tilphosa!” Metra wheezed. “Where are you, lady?”

“Keep her out of the way!” Cashel said. He trusted Tilphosa’s judgment, but he didn’t trust anything at all about her attendant wizard.

The two women talked in quick, irritated voices, but Cashel needn’t worry-about that now. He’d reached the second pod, this one about the size of a goatskin water bag. It dangled in the air, half-wrapped in the skein of tubes that supported it. The pod’s weight had pulled the hard gold into a cat’s cradle, folding and flattening the tubes without breaking them.

The third pod was egg-shaped and larger than a man. Loam, the detritus of centuries of leaves and fallen branches, mounded around it. The softly gleaming upper surfaces reflected growing daylight; the smooth metal was not only untarnished but clear of the litter which covered the surrounding soil.

Cashel eyed the pod, watchful for any change in it. After a time—he couldn’t have said how long, a length of time he found appropriate—he rapped the cold metal with the outstretched tip of his quarterstaff. It rang hollowly at the touch of the ferrule, a sweetly musical sound. It was the same note that Cashel had heard as he chased his quarry in this direction.

Cashel eyed his surroundings, sure now of what he needed but not quite certain he was going to find it here. Tilphosa waited, still-faced and obviously nervous, just back of the crumpled framework. She raised her eyebrows in question when Cashel glanced at her, but she didn’t speak. Maybe she was afraid of breaking his concentration.

Metra sat behind Tilphosa, her athame bobbing like a chicken gobbling corn. She’d spread another silk square, this one black with symbols—different symbols from those of the other day, Cashel supposed—in red. Clever of the wizard to change colors so that she wouldn’t grab the wrong pattern in haste.

Cashel saw what he needed, a torso-sized chunk of limestone separated from the rest of the outcrop. Moss outlined the fracture, probably the result of the airboat’s crash.

Could the creature hear him? Could it understand speech even if it did hear?

“It’s all right,” he said to Tilphosa. He smiled. “Just keep that chisel ready. I’m going to have to put my staff down for a bit.”

She probably thought he was being reassuring. He truly was glad she was here with a weapon.

Cashel backed, then sidled, carefully, to the block. After watching the pod intently for some moments more—just in case it decided to open—he leaned his quarterstaff into the angle where two gold tubes joined seamlessly.

He squatted, gripping opposite sides of the block and shifting it slightly to make sure it would give. It did. Because the soil was so thin over the outcrop he didn’t have to worry about trees. He didn’t want to trip and lose his balance when he was carrying a stone as heavy as a young bull.

Cashel breathed deeply—once, twice, and again. “Now!” he shouted—to the stone, to himself, it didn’t matter—and jerked the block free. As it crunched away from the outcrop, Cashel straightened his knees. Stiff-legged, his hands adjusting the block minutely to balance it as he moved, he walked toward the pod.

The blood roared in his ears. He couldn’t hear outside sounds, not even the thump of his heels on the ground step after step, but he felt the words of Metra’s incantation. Her art was affecting the cosmos through which Cashel moved….

He couldn’t look down: his spine was perfectly vertical to accept the weight it now bore. The pod was a golden shimmer through the red haze throbbing with his pulse.

“Now!” Cashel repeated. He swung his missile down, tilting his whole body when the stone’s path had slanted clear of him.

Cashel fell forward, following the missile. The block hit corner foremost in the center of the smooth curve. Metal bonged, splitting before the massive stone rolled off to the left and wobbled crazily several paces downhill before a stand of lobelias halted it.

Cashel struggled to his feet. Tilphosa grabbed his arm to lift. She was more trouble than help, but he didn’t have enough breath to send her away. Anyhow, he appreciated the thought.

Metra pushed through the brush, looking as wobbly as Cashel felt. She tried to slide her athame back under her sash, but the effort of her art had robbed her of the necessary coordination. Her eyes were fixed on the ruptured pod.

“Get her back” Cashel whispered hoarsely. Tilphosa handed him his quarterstaff—that was a help—and caught Metra around the shoulders. She held the wizard easily; and would, Cashel was pretty sure, even if the other woman weren’t already exhausted.

As Cashel himself was, but strength came flooding back now that he was on his feet again. His whole body had locked into a series of mortise-and-tenon joints in order to support the block of stone. Now he was himself again, Cashel or-Kenset, moving with the graceful deliberation of thick cream flowing.

The stone had dented the pod over a surface the size of a wash basket, but the split in the center was no longer than Cashel’s hand and too narrow to reach through. The impact had sprung the hidden catch that locked the pod into a featureless whole, however: the top stood away from the bottom half over most of the oval seam.

Cashel shifted his grip on the quarterstaff, poising it so that he could punch a ferrule forward like a spear. He stretched out his right foot, then lifted the lid with a quick jerk of his toes.

In shadow, the figure lying within could have passed for a man: the jaws were a little longer, the brow flat; the eyes set too far to the side and bulging more than a human’s would. The creature’s skin had a faint green cast and a pebbled surface with fine scales on the backs of the hands.

Faint though the morning light was, when the lid opened the creature gave a squeal of agony and covered its face with its four-fingered hands. It stank: the blood and bits of human tissue that smeared its head and clawed hands were rotting. A pendant hanging from a neck chain was the creature’s only clothing or adornment.

Cashel stabbed his staff down, crushing the creature’s hands and skull together. The ferrule rang with a muffled note on the bottom of the pod. The creature’s back arched; it writhed, flinging its legs out of the capsule where it had laired.

Gasping more with revulsion than effort, Cashel stepped back. Tilphosa touched his arm, letting him know where she was. She peered past him to the interior of the pod.

“Duzi, stand at my side,” Cashel whispered. A palm tree growing down the hill leaned over him. He ripped a frond from it and scrubbed furiously, cleaning blood and brains from his quarterstaff. “Duzi, help the one who guards your flock.”

Metra edged past. Tilphosa caught her arm. “Let her go,” Cashel muttered. “I’m done with that now.”

The almost-human body still twitched. It was smaller than it’d seemed in the darkness, the size of a girl in her early teens. The teeth were no more impressive than a man’s, and the claws on the fingers were more like a dog’s than the big cat Cashel had imagined from the corpses. Savagery and bestial strength, not weapons, had torn the victims apart.

That wouldn’t happen again. Cashel didn’t know what the creature was or why it killed the way it did—but he’d stopped it.

Metra bent over the corpse and lifted the pendant. Cashel had thought it was metal. Raised so that light fell on it, he realized it was transparent and shimmered like the fire opals which nobles from Shengy wore when they visited Garric’s court.

“The Talisman of See-Char!” the wizard cried. “It wasn’t a myth after all! Relonia really did see it in her questing dreams!”

“What is it, Metra?” Tilphosa said. Her voice was calm but a little louder than it need have been to be heard. She’d stuck the chisel under her sash, but as she spoke her fingers stroked the use-polished pommel.

Metra pulled the chain over the creature’s shattered head. It didn’t seem to bother her to touch the congealing ruin. She held the pendant out at arm’s length and turned it to view from every angle.

“It’s what kept him alive,” she said. “He must have been a great wizard. Perhaps he was fleeing the cataclysm that wiped out the remainder of the Third Race when his vessel crashed here. The amulet is a thing of wonderful power.”

“Did all of them kill this way?” Cashel asked. “All the Third Race, I mean.”

As he spoke, the flesh blackened and sloughed from the corpse. The shinbones separated, pulled from the thighs by their own weight; they fell to the leaf mold around the pod. The bones themselves crumbled first to dust, then less than dust. A faint black slime remained to color the golden cavity.

“What?” said Metra with the angry irritation of someone interrupted by what they think is a stupid question. “No, of course not, they were more advanced than we are in many respects. The amulet could keep him alive, but it wouldn’t dull his hunger. Over the years, the centuries…”

She smiled at Cashel, looking down on his peasant simplicity from the height of her sophisticated wisdom. “Well, after all,” she said, “there wouldn’t have been anything for him to eat except other castaways, would there?”

“Ah,” said Cashel.

“Metra, put that amulet back in the coffin and leave it,” Tilphosa said with a grimace of disgust. “I don’t think it’s a good thing to have, however valuable it may be.”

“Don’t act like a child!” snapped the wizard. “With the Talisman of See-Char we’ll be able to—”

Cashel reached out and closed his fist over the dangling amulet. It felt greasy, as though the stone was a heavy liquid.

“Tilphosa’s right,” he said. “We’re not going to have this around.”

“Who are you to tell me what to do, you barbarian?” the wizard shouted. She held on to the chain. Cashel lifted his arm until Metra dangled by her hand.

“Metra!” Tilphosa said. “Let go at once!”

The chain didn’t break, but Metra whimpered and let go when the thin metal had lacerated her palm beyond bearing. She tried to grab it again, but Cashel body-checked her with a thrust of his hip.

“I’m the man who killed the thing wearing it,” he said in a low growl.

He dropped the amulet onto bare stone. Tilphosa caught the wizard as she crawled toward it. Cashel brought the butt of his staff down in a short, sharp blow, the same way he’d smashed the creature’s skull. The amulet exploded into powder.

“Now,” Cashel said, “let’s get back to the others.”

Gar’s senses were even sharper than the ones Garric was used to. He smelled the campfire fifty double paces before he reached their encampment, and he smelled the scattered garbage and human excrement almost as quickly.

Garric wrinkled his nose in disgust, less from the stench itself than what it said about the gang he was joining. The tanyard in Barca’s Hamlet, where Halmat and later his son cured hides with dung, was downwind from the rest of the community. Vascay’s band didn’t bother with such niceties.

Garric stepped into the natural clearing where the band camped. Tarpaulins were strung for shelter from the frequent rains. Smoke from the cookfire clumped in the humid air. A pudgy fellow stirred the stewpot hanging from a rod placed between wooden forks.

Ceto stood in a midst of half a dozen men. One of them held a horn that had probably once belonged to a noble’s coachman: the etchings on the curved brass tube were filled with silver and gold. He raised it and blew a long, deep note calling in other members of the band.

A pair of giant fig trees had shaded out all lesser growth save for ferns and seedlings with trunks only the diameter of a finger. The bandits had chopped away some of the palely hopeful saplings and were using others as drying racks for soaked clothes and bedding.

“Gar?” chirped Tint, still in the clump of elephant ears growing at the edge of the clearing. “Gar not be hurt? Gar?”

Nobody noticed Garric until he whipped a canvas ground sheet off the bush it was draped on and wrapped it around his waist. Tunics hung not far away, but Garric needed to cover himself more than he cared about the style of his garment. He knew that being naked would put him at a greater disadvantage than being unarmed did.

“Hey, monkey boy!” called the cook, sweating profusely despite being stripped to a breechclout. “Get some more wood, and make it dry this time! That punk you came back with last time isn’t worth the trouble to toss it on the fire!”

Ceto didn’t look around, but the peg-legged older fellow he was showing the sapphire ring to did. He carried too much of his weight around his waistline, but he still had the shoulders of a powerful man. The two knives thrust under his orange-silk sash had simple, serviceable blades…but they’d been forged from steel, not iron, and their bone scales were yellowed by frequent use.

Garric would have recognized the leader, Vascay, even without Gar’s memory. The other men were mostly bigger, younger, and more heavily armed, but this fellow was in charge.

Garric noticed the glance; he nodded in response. Vascay made no overt reaction, not even a raised eyebrow, but his face tightened minusculely above his grizzled, short-cropped beard.

The brain-damaged Gar wouldn’t have met another man’s eyes. Garric shrugged mentally. Well, the whole band would learn shortly that things had changed.

“You’ve got my ring there, Ceto,” Garric said in a clear voice. “I’ll take it back now, if you please.”

Ceto turned in amazement which changed swiftly to anger. He folded his right hand over the ring, protecting it at the cost of preventing him from drawing his sword. He reached for a dagger in his bandolier. Garric’s left hand caught the bandit’s wrist.

“Hey, what’s got into Gar?” cried the fat cook. The horn was bringing more men out of the forest. They were calling too, curious about why they’d been summoned.

Ceto tried—vainly—to free his knife hand. He snarled, “Sister take you, you—”

Garric punched him in the pit of the stomach, between the flapping halves of his armored vest. Ceto’s face went white; his legs wobbled, and he sank to his knees.

Garric was breathing hard. His whole body shuddered with awareness of what he’d done and the dangers in what might come next. Ceto had tensed his belly muscles against the blow he saw coming, but Gar’s arm had the strength of a mallet.

“Watch he doesn’t bite!” a bandit shouted. “Is he foaming at the mouth?”

Garric started to unfold the fingers of Ceto’s right fist. Vascay touched the back of Garric’s hand, and said, “I’ll take care of the ring.”

Garric was ready to flare out in any direction. “I found—” he said, straightening in a surge of fury.

“Hold him,” Vascay said. Men grabbed Garric’s arms from behind. Tint was chattering on the edge of the encampment.

Garric hunched down and brought his arms forward, swinging the men holding him against one another. The fellow to Garric’s left shouted as he lost his grip. Other bandits grabbed Garric, tearing away his makeshift garment. He went over backward in a pile of men.

“I said hold him, Sister take you!” Vascay shouted. “I didn’t say kick him, Ademos! Now settle down all of you!”

Garric said, “All right, all right,” and let himself relax. Two men were holding either arm. Several were on his legs though he couldn’t see them because of the fellow sprawled across his torso.

Vascay looked down with a bland smile. He held the ring between thumb and finger of his left hand; the sapphire was a glitter too small to have color.

“Let him up, then,” Vascay said to the men holding Garric. “He’s ready to behave.”

Ceto had put both his hands on the ground. He was trying to rise, but he still couldn’t breathe properly. His face was twisted, and his lips formed curses that he lacked the strength to utter.

“But boss?” said the man with the horn, one of those on Garric’s arms. “He’s gone mad, hasn’t he?”

Vascay glanced back at Ceto, his expression friendly in a mild fashion and his eyes as hard as chips of jasper. He’d hooked his right hand negligently into his sash where it half covered a knife hilt.

“I’m not mad,” Garric said, trying to get his breathing under control. “I’m just not in a good humor. But yes, I’ll behave.”

“What’s going on?” asked one of a pair of latecomers just arrived from the forest.

His companion cried, “Hey, Vascay! Is that what we come for? The ring, I mean?”

Vascay thrust his boot out—not quite a kick, but a thump that got the attention of the man on Garric’s torso. “I said, let him up, Halophus,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice, but the mild previous tone was beginning to congeal into something much harder. “Toster, Hame—all of you. Let him up.”

The bandits released Garric, grunting as they got to their feet. The stubby redhead who’d been holding Garric’s right ankle scrambled away. That would be Ademos. He was the one who’d just kicked Garric; a frequent sport of his when poor Gar wore this flesh.

That was a matter for another time. Garric sat up, set a foot behind him, and stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest, a show of coordination that he correctly assumed Vascay would notice.

He bent to retrieve the ground sheet. Vascay stepped on a corner of the canvas, pinning it to the ground, and instead tossed Garric a tunic draped over a guyline anchoring an overhead tarp. “Try one of mine,” Vascay said. “It ought to fit.”

He grinned, and added, “The way the weight’s distributed is a little different, of course.”

The tunic was close-woven linen with vertical stripes of brown and cream; a well-made, attractive garment which indeed did fit Garric as well as anything in the palace wardrobe. He raised it, bunched, above his head, then slipped it quickly down to cover him. Under the circumstances, he didn’t want either to cover his eyes or bind his arms any longer than necessary.

Vascay chuckled. “Nobody’s going to stick you while you’re dressing, boy,” he said.

“By the Sister!” snarled Ceto, finally on his feet. He reached for his sword. “I’m going to stick him any way he comes!”

“That’s not how we do things here, Brother Ceto,” Vascay said calmly. “We’re civilized men, remember, driven to our present straits by a tyrant’s exactions rather than our own vicious natures.”

Ceto snarled a curse. Garric tensed to jump. The chine of Ceto’s swordblade sang against the lip of the scabbard as he drew it.

“Ceto!” said Vascay.

He was smiling. His knives were in his hands: the left one held low with the edge upward for a disemboweling stroke, the right one beside his ear ready to throw, blade vertical and the hilt in Vascay’s palm.

“Rules, Brother Ceto,” Vascay said, mildly again. None of the other bandits had drawn their weapons; some were deliberately holding their hands out where they could be seen to be empty. “We don’t fight among ourselves, remember?”

“Gar’s not one of us!” Ceto snarled; he slammed his sword back in its sheath, however. “He’s an animal!”

Garric took a deep breath. He didn’t know what the situation he’d stepped into was, but he knew there was one. The politics of this band were probably less complex than those of the royal council, but the sanctions for mistakes were likely to be quicker and more final.

“Captain Vascay,” he said, giving the leader a half nod, half bow. “Tint and I found the ring we’re here searching for. Ceto robbed us.”

Toster was nearly as tall as Garric and much heavier; only part of his weight was fat. “What is this?” he asked in puzzlement. “What’s Gar doing talking like that?”

“When Ceto kicked me in the head…” Garric said, raising his finger to his bruised temple. It struck him that Gar’s unkempt bush of hair might have prevented a cracked skull in all truth. “I regained my faculties.”

“The animal tried to take the ring away from me after I’d found it,” Ceto said. “I knocked him down—and I’ll do it again, Vascay, whether you like it or not!”

Garric waited silently. In his experience, you didn’t threaten a man like Vascay. If you wound up with that sort as an enemy, you’d best deal with him quickly—and not turn your back until you had.

Instead of speaking, Vascay stepped backward, a movement that allowed him to keep both Ceto and Garric in his field of view at the same time. His knives were back in his sash, but Garric had seen how quickly they appeared when Vascay chose.

“Well, Gar,” the chieftain said cheerfully, “then you’ll understand when I tell you that I’m not a captain. I’m merely Brother Vascay, a member of the band and its spokesman only so long as the majority wills it. Is that not so, brethren?”

“We all know that, Vascay!” Ceto said. “Sometimes I wonder if you remember it, though.”

The others didn’t speak. Their attention was uneasy; their eyes moved from Ceto to Vascay, sometimes pausing to consider the person who’d been Gar when he went into the jungle this morning.

“So, Gar,” Vascay said calmly, “you say you found the ring—”

Which had vanished somewhere onto Vascay’s person during the same series of movements that brought out the knives ready to kill. Conjurors came regularly to the Sheep Fair, but Garric had never seen one as quick with his hands as Vascay.

“—and Ceto took it from you?”

“Tint led me to the ring,” Garric said, looking over his shoulder. “I dug it out.”

Tint had come into the clearing when the shouting died down, but she ducked away from Garric’s glance. He wouldn’t have believed it was possible to hide behind the tuft of ferns into which the beastgirl disappeared.

“How come Gar’s talking like that?” Toster repeated plaintively. “He can’t be Gar.”

Garric kept Toster at the corner of his eye. He and Vascay—who were probably opposite poles of the band’s intellectual spectrum—were the only members who fully grasped the truth. Unlike the others, those two knew they weren’t dealing with dim-witted Gar. The big man wasn’t hostile, and Vascay seemed more positive than not, but they were potentially dangerous.

“Why do you talk to that animal?” Ceto demanded. “It doesn’t matter what Gar says, he’s a—”

“Arguments between Brethren,” Vascay interrupted, “are judged by the Ball of Truth. We’ll have the trial now.”

He gestured to a wooden chest resting on blocks beneath the nearby tarpaulin. It looked to Garric like a sea locker, though its floral decoration was of a much higher order than the chip carvings of dolphins and mermaids that graced most sailors’ chests.

“What do you mean a trial?” Ceto said.

“Hey, it’s just Gar,” said Ademos, as puzzled as Ceto and almost as worried about what was going on. “Trials are for brothers, not monkeys.”

“Shall we cap each other’s quotations from Celondre, Ademos?” Garric said in a cutting tone. “‘The same chance that joins the wolf and the lamb….’ Or do you have a different favorite poet?”

“What?” said Ademos. “What’s he talking about?”

Garric smiled coldly, though maybe it was a shame that Ademos hadn’t turned out to be a scholar. A contest of verses would be one way to prove to the band that Garric’s claim wasn’t the maundering of a monkey boy. In his mind he completed the tag, “…makes you my enemy.”

But Vascay was preparing to prove matters in a different fashion. He squatted and opened the chest without using a key, keeping his eyes on Ceto. His left hand darted within and came out with a red ball the size of a hickory nut.

“Which will you have, Ceto?” Vascay asked as he stood upright again. “Will you tell your story first, or will you hold the Ball of Truth after Brother Gar has spoken his version?”

“He’s not a brother, he’s an animal,” Ceto said, apparently hoping that repetition would give his statement an effect it’d so far lacked. “You can’t make me go through a trial with an animal!”

A bird shrieked in the canopy, responding to Ceto’s rising tone. Another of its kind answered from a distance.

“Unless we all vote to change our laws,” said Vascay, holding out the red bead, “that’s just what we’ll do, Brother Ceto. Which do you choose, that Gar takes the ball first or that you do?”

“He doesn’t talk like an animal,” Toster said. “He talks better’n me.”

“Yeah, the Ball of Truth,” said Hame, a short, bandy-legged fellow whose ears had been notched—for theft, Garric supposed; though, looking on the band with civilized eyes, they didn’t seem to be the illiterate bravos he’d expected. Several of them, Hame for one, were city dwellers by their appearance.

“All right, give him the ball and watch him spit his lies up!” Ceto snarled. “I don’t care!”

Gar might have been present at previous trials, but if so the experience had passed through his ruined brain like rain fallen on parched sand. Garric didn’t know what was going on—

But he did know he had Vascay on his side. The peg-legged chieftain touched his hands together, transferring the red bead from his left to his right. He held it toward Garric, and said, “Put the Ball of Truth under your tongue, Brother Gar. Speak your story, and if you lie the words will poison you.”

“I’m not lying,” said Garric.

“Then you’ll hand the ball to Brother Ceto, and he’ll do the same,” Vascay said equably. “A man who tells the truth has nothing to fear from the ball.”

He looked around the circle of watchful men. The whole band was present, twenty or so. Many of them were mutilated, like Hame and Vascay himself.

“I still don’t know about this truth stuff, Vascay,” Ademos muttered, his eyes jerking side to side without lighting on the man to whom he spoke. “I know what you say, but I don’t see how a little ball knows who’s lying.”

“With you, Ademos,” said Hame, “it’s whenever your mouth’s open.”

“Stuff it!” said Ademos. He kept his hands carefully clear of his weapons. “Stuff you, Hame!”

“I served a saintly hermit in my youth,” Vascay said, reinforcing the story he’d obviously told often in the past—and incidentally informing Garric for the first time. “The Ball of Truth was his legacy to me. Not wizardry but faith gives it the power to see men’s souls, Brother Ademos.”

“Get on with it,” Ceto snarled. “Just get on with it!”

“Yes,” said Garric. He took the red bead from Vascay. “Let’s do that.”

It was surprisingly light, more like wood than the stone he’d expected. The surface was hard but slightly pitted.

“Be brief, Brother Gar,” Vascay said. “And on your life, tell the truth.”

Vascay nodded expressionlessly. Garric put the bead under his tongue.

“I dug the ring out of the ground,” Garric said. The lump under his tongue slurred his words. He could feel the bead starting to dissolve. “Ceto sucker-punched me and stole the ring.”

He spat the bead into his left palm. He couldn’t see any change except the glister of saliva, but he knew it had begun to come apart.

“Your turn now, Brother Ceto,” said Vascay. “Give him the Ball of Truth, Gar.”

Garric’s belly muscles were tight. His tongue worked, trying to decide what the taste in his mouth was. It was dry, limy, and nondescript. Apparently harmless, but there was some trick connected with the business.

“Here, Ceto,” Garric said, stretching his left arm out to full length so that he didn’t have to approach the other man. The bead gleamed in the center of his upturned palm.

“I don’t have to do this!” Ceto said, turning his head side to side like a beast at bay.

“It’s your turn, Ceto,” Toster said. The big man carried an axe with a long helve, a weapon that in hands like his could smash through any armor a man could wear and still be able to walk. He raised the axe slightly, holding it slanted across his body. “Take the ball.”

“Sister drag you all down,” Ceto muttered. He snatched the bead from Garric, hesitated a moment, and popped it into his mouth.

“I found the ring myself and—” he said. His face went white, then flushed red. He spat the bead onto the ground, then gagged up a mouthful of phlegm and saliva.

“You tried to poison me, Vascay!” Ceto shouted. He whipped out his curved sword in a slashing arc. “I’ll send your soul to Hell!”

The other members of the band backed away. Ceto was a powerful man, and the long sword was a particularly dangerous weapon in the hands of somebody too angry to worry about self-preservation.

Instead of drawing his knives, Vascay hopped sideways to put the cookfire between him and Ceto. He nodded to Garric with a sardonic grin. “Brother Gar,” he said, “your opponent doesn’t accept the verdict of the Ball of Truth. What do you say?”

Ceto whirled toward Garric, raising his sword. Garric gripped the near end of the rod supporting the soup and jerked it toward him. The pot tipped into the fire, hissing and fuming. Garric backed a step, judging his new weapon’s weight and balance as Ceto came on.

The rod was iron, five feet long and thumb-thick beneath the scale and rust. By reflex Garric slid his left hand toward the center the way he would’ve gripped a quarterstaff.

A quarterstaff hadn’t been holding a stewpot over a fire for the past several hours. There was a sizzle and a greasy feeling in Garric’s fingertips. Grateful for Gar’s calluses, he jerked his hand back to the end where the iron was cool enough to be safe.

Ceto slashed down at Garric. Garric raised the rod crosswise, blocking the stroke in a shower of sparks. The blade bit deep enough not to skid, but it’d take a stronger man than Ceto to hack through so thick a rod with a sword.

Garric heaved the rod up, lifting Ceto’s sword arm with it. While Ceto was extended, Garric kicked him in the gut, near the spot where his punch had landed. Ceto woofed and doubled up, drawing both arms close to his sides.

Garric stepped back, judged his distance, and brought the rod around in a whistling sideways stroke. Ceto tried to raise his sword. The rod flung it away and thumped into the bandit’s skull.

Ceto sprawled onto his left side, bleeding brightly from the pressure cut in his scalp. The sword spun end over end—Ademos jumped out of the way with a squeal—and stuck in the ground. It sang angrily until it had damped itself to silence.

Garric stabbed his rod into the dirt at his feet and rested some of his weight on it. He sucked in great gasping breaths, wavering slightly because his blood still raced with readiness to fight or flee.

To fight: Garric or-Reise wasn’t running anywhere.

Smiling faintly, Vascay walked around the spluttering fire and pulled Ceto’s sword from the ground. He held it up at a slant, peering along the edge. Garric could see from where he stood that there was a dent where his rod parried the blade, but the edge hadn’t broken away. The smith had started with good steel, then cooled it slowly to a working temper instead of the brittle hardness suitable only for razors and fools.

Vascay swept his glance around the circle of his fellows, turning his body slightly so that he eyed each man squarely. Ademos and a few others looked away, but nobody spoke.

“Ceto didn’t accept the verdict of the Ball of Truth,” Vascay said; not shouting, but an open challenge to anyone who might disagree. He stared at Ademos, whose head was turned sideways as though he were fascinated by the bromeliads growing from the trunks of the great figs. “Does anybody want to take up where he left off?”

Garric had his breath back and his pulse under control. He straightened and lifted the rod again. The iron had cooled enough he could hold it by the balance now.

Tint came out of the ferns and crept to his side. She was whimpering. Garric reached down and rubbed her scalp, but he didn’t take his eyes off the gang’s leader.

“That’s what I’d hoped,” Vascay said with a broader smile. He walked to Garric and rotated the sword in his hand, offering him the hilt.

“Here you go, Brother Gar,” he said. “Finish the oath-breaker and take the scabbard as well.”

Garric took the sword. He’d never handled a curved blade before, so he was glad to find that this one, at least, balanced perfectly in his hand.

“He can live,” Garric said. Ceto was unconscious and breathing in a ragged snore. “I won’t kill a man in cold blood.”

“Well, that does credit to your upbringing, brother,” Vascay said. He bent and undid the two-tongued buckle of Ceto’s heavy belt, then jerked it clear and tossed it to Garric. “You and I will take a skin of wine to a quiet place and discuss matters now, shall we?”

“Yes, all right,” said Garric. Other members of the band nodded or murmured approval under their breath, even Ademos.

“Fine,” said Vascay. He bent again and cut Ceto’s throat from ear to ear. Blood like that of a slaughtered hog spewed out. There was no bowl of meal here to soak it up for black pudding….

“My upbringing, on the other hand…” Vascay said. He let out a full-throated laugh.