Mistress of the Catacombs

17

Cashel set one end of his staff down, not banging it but letting the ferrule rap loudly enough to call attention to him and Tilphosa. The floor was of puncheons, logs halved and set edge to edge instead of being fully squared. The design saved labor and drained better than proper carpentry; in this wet land, the latter virtue might be important. There were rushes on the floor, but they should’ve been replaced weeks ago.

“We’d like food and a room,” Cashel said, as the eyes of the handful of men in the common room turned toward them. There was a small fire on the hearth and a billet of lightwood stuck up on a firedog for the only illumination.

“Food and a bed, you can have,” said the woman behind the bar to the left. Cashel hadn’t noticed her in the dimness as he entered. “If you can pay for it. Three Reeds for a bed for the two of you. A Reed apiece for porridge, and another Reed if you want it soaked in fish broth.”

“How much for a separate room, mistress?” Tilphosa said, her tone that of one demanding rather than begging. Her chin lifted slightly.

The landlady was a largish woman who took care of her looks even though she must be forty years old. She reminded Cashel of Sharina’s mother, Lora; though Lora was small and pretended to be “a lady,” while this woman was of a much earthier disposition. Instead of an ordinary tunic she wore a sleeved doublet with vertical stripes and the neckline scooped deeply onto her ample bosom.

“I don’t have a separate room for anybody but myself, missy,” she said, eyeing Tilphosa with disdain. “If you’ve got a problem with that, you can go back out in the street.”

“He looks like a good prospect, Leemay,” said one of the men sitting in the fireplace nook with a masar of beer. “Maybe you could find him private room, hey?”

Leemay lifted the gate in the bar and came out into the common room. She wore baggy linen trousers, gathered above the ankles; her feet and those of the men in the room were bare.

“You’ve got money?” she asked Cashel, no longer hostile. She walked to the hearth where an iron pot hung on a spider.

“Yes,” Tilphosa said. She touched Cashel’s wrist to silence him. “We’ve got silver, I mean, and I suppose copper pieces too. It’s not stamped with reeds or whatever, though.”

Leemay paused, then bent to swing the kettle out to where she could dip from it. She straightened and took one of the wooden bowls hanging from the mantel by riveted leather straps.

“You’ve got silver?” she said, speaking again to Cashel. “You don’t look it, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“We’ve been shipwrecked,” Cashel said. He moved his staff so that it stood vertically before him; the butt rapped the puncheons again, this time a little harder.

Leemay dipped porridge into the bowl, set it on the mantel, and took down a second. “You needn’t worry about being robbed here,” she said as she filled it also. “And if you didn’t have money, well, I’ve been known to help a likely young man who’s down on his luck.”

“With the broth,” Tilphosa said sharply. “And as I told you, we have money.”

The two men at the end of the bar were laughing and nudging one another. Cashel looked at them, just curious. They calmed down immediately, but they still giggled into the cups they quickly lifted to their mouths.

Leemay set the second bowl on the mantel, thrust horn spoons into both, and reached past the seated local to take a pewter cruet from the warming niche in the hearth. She poured a thin fluid into the first bowl and a more generous portion onto the second. After replacing the cruet, she held the first out to Tilphosa, and said, “Come get it, girl—or are you crippled?”

Cashel reached for the bowl. Leemay shifted so that her soft hip bumped him away. Her eyes held Tilphosa’s. Tilphosa sniffed and took the bowl.

When the landlady took the second bowl from the mantel, Cashel reached out again. Leemay touched his extended hand with her free one, and said, “Come over to the bar and eat. You’ll want ale, won’t you?”

She walked across the room, leading Cashel. He shook his hand loose.

“Yes, we’ll want ale,” Tilphosa said, raising her voice more than the quiet of the inn required. The men at the bar were chuckling among themselves again.

Leemay walked to the other side of the bar but didn’t bother to lower the gate again. She set the porridge down and started to draw beer from a tun under the counter.

“Hey, Leemay?” called one of the men warming at the hearth. “You going to do your tricks tonight?”

“I might,” said the woman. She eyed Cashel speculatively and smiled. “I just might.”

She set full masars in front of Cashel and Tilphosa, then paused and deliberately spilled a little of Cashel’s ale on the bar between them. “Eh?” he said.

“I’ll show you,” Leemay said, still smiling. “Later.”

To have an excuse for looking away, Cashel lifted his mug and drank quickly. The beer was all right, though it had an oily aftertaste that’d take some getting used to. He was thirsty, though—thirstier than he was hungry, he found—and he drained it quickly.

Tilphosa opened her sash and took a crescent-shaped silver piece from the purse she carried in its folds. “For our food and lodging,” she said crisply. “You’ll need to weigh it, I suppose?”

Leemay reached down between her breasts. Grinning, she brought out a wash-leather purse which she opened one-handed.

“ ’Atta girl, Leemay!” cried one of the local men.

She set a thin silver coin stamped with a ship’s prow on the bar beside Tilphosa’s Crescent. She balanced one in either hand, then slipped both into her purse.

“I guess it’ll run about the same as a Boat,” she said to Cashel. “That’s fourteen Reeds to a Boat.”

From a cash box under the bar she produced darkened copper coins and put them on the bar where Cashel’s left hand had been resting, one for each finger. “There’s your change,” she said.

She took his masar and refilled it without being asked. “This is on the house,” she said. She nodded toward the pool of beer on the smooth, dark wood. “For what I shorted you.”

“Just make sure you don’t short her tonight, boy!” called the man in the chimney corner.

“Shut up, Halve!” Leemay said, forcefully though without real anger. She nodded toward Cashel’s porridge, and went on, “Eat up, boy. You look peaked.”

“Aye, and Leemay wouldn’t want that,” someone said. Cashel grimaced and took a spoonful of the porridge.

It was a thick mixture of pease and a grain which Cashel hadn’t eaten before. The broth was pungent, but it merely added to the bowl’s flavors instead of overriding them.

He scooped and chewed steadily, keeping his eyes on his food. Leemay drew beer for others and dished up porridge for the man in the chimney corner, but she kept coming back to the bar across from Cashel.

“Show him, Leemay,” said one of the men at the bar. “She’s a wizard, boy, and I do mean that.”

Tilphosa had been dipping with the corner of her broad spoon instead of taking full gulps as Cashel did, so she’d made only a start on her porridge while he was finishing. Now she leaned back to look at the speaker.

“Oh, don’t worry, girlie,” he said. “What’s a slice off a cut loaf, hey?”

“Here, I’ll work with this,” Leemay said. Before Cashel could respond, she’d reached up and plucked out a single long hair from where he parted it in the center. She set it on the bar and pinched out one of her own, then twisted the two together. The landlady’s hair was black, thick and straight as a spearshaft; Cashel’s brunet strand looked thin and light beside it.

“What’s your name, lad?” she asked. She set the porridge bowl to the side and began tracing a design about the twined hairs, painting the wood with lines of spilled beer.

“We don’t have to tell you our names!” Tilphosa said, clutching her crystal amulet in her left hand.

“My name’s Cashel or-Kenset,” he said. The landlady’d been free with her own name, and, besides, he didn’t care what she knew or didn’t about him. “Ah, Mistress Leemay, I know it’s early for you, but we’ve had a hard few days and we’d like to get some sleep. Is there a place my friend and I could bed down now?”

“I may decide to close up early tonight,” Leemay said, concentrating on the symbols she’d just drawn. “Wait a bit and we’ll see.”

She reached under the bar and brought up what Cashel first thought was a stalk of grass, then a splinter of cowhorn…and then decided he didn’t know. It was no longer than his outstretched hand, slender and grayish green.

Leemay began chanting under her breath. Using the splinter as a wand, she worked her way around the symbols surrounding the entwined hairs. Cashel couldn’t hear her words any more than he could see what she’d drawn.

He didn’t think anybody could see them, Leemay included. The only light was from the hearth across the room, and the ale had slid back into pools following the wood’s natural valleys. The important thing was that she had drawn them.

Cashel held his staff upright in his right hand, glad of its feel. He tried not to squeeze the hickory till his knuckles stood out white.

The stool in the chimney corner creaked; the local men were moving to where they could watch also. None of them spoke.

Flecks of wizardlight, both red and the blue that made eyes tingle, appeared above the bar. The snapped alive so suddenly that Cashel’s mind supplied a crackle to the sparks’ silence. Paling, they swelled into interlinked figures the size of a child’s straw poppet.

“Hey, good job, Leemay!” a local said.

Cashel felt hot. The images were so sharply detailed that he didn’t have any difficulty in recognizing his face on the blue figure and Leemay as the red one. There wasn’t any doubt about what the images were doing, either.

Tilphosa threw the rest of her beer in Leemay’s face. The landlady jerked backward, and the illusion vanished.

Tilphosa picked up the twined hairs, wet with ale, and stuffed them into her purse. “Your exhibition insulted me!” she said in a ringing voice.

Leemay stared at her silently. It’d been a long time since Cashel saw the face of anybody so mad.

“We’ll be going now,” he said. “We won’t trouble you further.”

Putting his arm around Tilphosa so he knew where she was, he started backing toward the door. The locals who’d watched the funeral were gone, so worst case Cashel was going to throw the girl out into the street while he and his quarterstaff took care of business in the common room.

None of the men looked like they wanted a problem, though. Three of them crouched, their hands ready to turn the tables over as shields if anything started happening. The two fellows at the bar had backed to the wall, from which they watched Cashel with the expression of rabbits trapped by a fox.

The landlady put down her wand. “My mistake!” she said. “The lady was right to show me that I’d made a mistake. Go if you want—”

She pointed to the door. One panel was closed again; that was going to be a problem for haste.

“—but the nights are dark here in Soong. I’ll give you my room.”

Nobody spoke. Leemay shrugged, then smiled. “To make up for what happened a moment ago. Shall we be friends?”

We’ve already paid, Cashel thought. He knew it didn’t matter anymore, but three coppers was more than he’d earned most weeks when he was a boy.

“Cashel?” Tilphosa said in a small voice. He glanced at her. She looked white, and her cheeks were hollow. “Can we stay? I’m really…”

She was almost dead on her feet, was what she was trying to say. It’d been a long day, even for Cashel, and he was used to them as Tilphosa was not. Her burns and the hike and now this, the sort of fuss that swallows up all the energy you’ve got even if it doesn’t come to blows at the end after all…

“Sure,” Cashel murmured. To the landlady he went on, “We’ll take your offer, mistress. I, I’m sorry about the mess.”

Not that a little splashed beer was going to change this place a lot, but it was polite to say something. Cashel always tried to be polite, especially when it looked like he might be knocking heads in the next instant. That way spectators didn’t feel they maybe ought to pile in on the other fellows’ side.

Leemay took the stick of lightwood from the firedog, then went back behind the bar. “It’s this way,” she said to Cashel.

“Hey, don’t leave us in the dark,” one of the men complained.

“Light another billet, then!” snapped Leemay. She unlatched the door in the end wall. Cashel motioned Tilphosa ahead of him—his body would shadow her if he was in front—and they followed along after the landlady.

Beyond the door was a storage room. Tuns of beer stood along one wall, and lesser items in crates and storage jars were stacked on the other. The aisle between was a tight squeeze for Cashel. He frowned, then realized that Soong was so low-lying that the buildings couldn’t have cellars the way Reise’s inn did back in Barca’s Hamlet.

Leemay opened the door at the far end, then lit the candle in a wall bracket just inside. She gestured Tilphosa through, saying, “There you go, missy. If it suits your ladyship’s tastes, I mean.”

Tilphosa glanced up at the landlady’s renewed hostility, but she didn’t rise to the bait. Tilphosa’d seen men killed now, and she was smart enough to understand that she might’ve seen more die because she’d flown hot at Leemay.

“Thank you, mistress,” she said as she entered. “This will be very satisfactory.”

Cashel glanced past the landlady and agreed beyond a doubt. The wooden bed frame was big enough for three people Cashel’s size, with pillows and at least two feather beds as well as the straw mattress. Tilphosa tested the softness with a hand, less in doubt than as an acknowledgment of the fine bedding.

“Sleep well, then,” Leemay said. She started back. Cashel turned sideways and thumped his staff in front of him so it was what the landlady had to squeeze by.

She did that, giving a throaty chuckle as she passed. Cashel didn’t hear much humor in the sound, though.

Cashel waited till the door to the common room had closed, then said, “Give me one of those comforters, will you, Tilphosa? Ah, unless you need them both?”

“No, of course not,” the girl said. Her face was unreadable. “What do you intend to do, Cashel?”

“I’m going to lie down in the doorway here,” he said, nodding. “We’ll leave it open, but I don’t guess anybody’s going to get to you without me waking up. Just in case.”

“But the floor’s hard,” Tilphosa said.

He laughed. “Every night I wasn’t out in the pasture back home, I slept on the floor of the mill,” he said. “That was stone. Don’t worry about me, miss—Tilphosa, that is.”

She turned her head away. Cashel spread the feather bed on the floor. He’d lie at an angle with his head out in the storage room and his legs slanted past the foot of the bedframe. Now, should he pinch out the candle or—

“Cashel?” Tilphosa said, still looking away. “I don’t have any claim on you, you realize. If you did want to see that woman tonight…?”

“Huh?” said Cashel. He thought hard, trying to fit the girl’s words together in a fashion that made sense. “Sleep with Leemay? Duzi, mistress! What do you take me for?”

“I’m sorry,” Tilphosa said, though she sounded more relieved than apologetic. “Ah, let’s get some sleep.”

She turned quickly and blew out the candle. Cashel heard the bedclothes rustle as she pulled them over herself.

“Right,” he said, settling into his bed as well.

He didn’t have any trouble getting to sleep, but he had bad dreams during the night. He kept hearing someone chanting, and Leemay’s face hovered over him like a gibbous moon.

Ilna dreamed that she stood on a hilltop as a storm howled about her. Thunderbolts struck close, filling the air with a sulfurous stench. She felt the wind tug her legs and knew that in a moment it would carry her away, rending her apart in the lightning-shot darkness. She opened her mouth to scream but her swollen throat wouldn’t allow sounds to pass.

Something flung her violently. She didn’t know where she was. There was rock all around her. Moonlight through a transom showed her sharp angles and something thrashing, but her eyes wouldn’t focus, and she couldn’t get her breath.

Alecto was shouting. She jerked the crossbar out of the staples holding it and shoved the temple doors open to let in more light. Ilna sucked gulps of the fresh, cool air that flooded in with it. Her throat relaxed, and she could see clearly again.

A creature half out of the cave twisted and flailed four legs that seemed too small for a body the size of a cow’s. It slammed the temple walls in its convulsions. Besides the eyes bulging on either side of its huge blunt skull, it had a third orb in the center. The hilt of Alecto’s dagger stood up from that middle socket.

Ilna pulled herself onto the temple porch with her hands and elbows, dragging her legs behind her. She had a burning sensation in her right calf, though she thought she’d be able to stand in a moment when the dizziness passed.

People were coming out of the houses scattered along the valley slope. Somebody in each group carried a torch or a rushlight, a pithy stem soaked in grease to burn with a pale yellow flame.

They’ve been expecting this, Ilna thought. They wouldn’t have been able to rouse so quickly at Alecto’s shout if they hadn’t been waiting for it.

She twisted her legs under and sat up, though she wasn’t yet ready to squat or stand. She brought the hank of cords out of her sleeve and began plaiting them. No pattern she wove in the light of torches and a partial moon would dispose of all those approaching, but you do what you can.

Alecto shouted, this time in surprise. She jumped out the doorway. An instant later the creature hurled itself onto the porch also, then rolled onto its side. Each of its legs and its thick tail twitched in a separate rhythm. The final lunge had been as mindless as the running of a headless chicken.

The local people’s approach had slowed. Ilna took the time to view the monster instead of just reacting to its presence. It was a lizard or—

She prodded the thick neck with one hand. The skin was slick and moist, that of a salamander rather than a lizard. The lolling jaws were edged with short, thornlike teeth.

Ilna rubbed her right leg, noticing now the line of punctures. Her fingers smeared the drops of blood welling from the holes. Her injuries wouldn’t be serious, though, unless the bite was poisoned.

Alecto poised as though steeling herself to snatch coins from a fire. She reached out, gripped the hilt of her dagger, and yanked back with enough strength to have lifted a millstone. The creature’s head jerked upward, then slammed against the limestone so hard that bones crunched. It slid a bit farther out so that its head hung off the porch.

“You shouted and woke me up,” Alecto said, breathing hard. She tore her eyes away from the quivering monster and scanned the villagers. They’d resumed their approach, though cautiously.

“I woke you up?” Ilna said. She was trying to remember what had happened before she crawled out into the air. She’d been dreaming, she knew, but she didn’t remember what the dream was.

“Yeah,” the wild girl said. “You were staring at it. The air stank so bad it made me dizzy, but I think the eye there in the middle was doing something to you too.”

She looked at her dagger; the blade was covered with translucent slime. She swore, and wiped it on her leather kilt, then hurled the garment away.

“Thank you,” Ilna said. She lurched to her feet; her right leg felt as though somebody was running a branding iron up and down the calf, but it held her. “For saving my life.”

Alecto grunted, her eyes now on the villagers. The priest, Arthlan, had waited till a group of his fellows reached his hut before starting toward the temple with them. The women and children were coming also, mixed in with the adult men. They whispered among themselves, but none of them called to the strangers.

The pain of Ilna’s leg subsided to a dull ache. She faced the torchlight coming toward her, expressionless. Alecto had saved her, yes; but the wild girl had waited to strike until the monster was locked onto Ilna’s leg and couldn’t turn its numbing gaze on her.

Ilna understood the logic. As with much of what her companion did, she didn’t care for it.

“Do you suppose we’re in trouble for killing their God?” Alecto muttered. “That’s what it was, right?”

“I suppose it was,” Ilna agreed. “And I, at least, am in less trouble than I’d be if you hadn’t killed the thing.”

“Are you safe, great wizards?” Arthlan said in a quavering voice from the foot of the porch. He was wearing his diadem and robe of office.

“No thanks to you!” Ilna said. “You put us here to die, didn’t you?”

“No, no!” said a woman; the priest’s wife Oyra, Ilna thought, but it was hard to tell in the torchlight. Her vision was blurring occasionally besides, probably as an aftereffect of the salamander’s third eye or its poisonous breath. She hoped the problem was temporary.

“Mistress wizard,” Arthlan said, spreading his hands before him, “we couldn’t trouble God, do you see? For many generations He was content with an occasional goat or the cony we smoke out of their lairs. But recently…”

“He took my baby ten months back,” called a young woman. She held a torch, and her tears glittered in its light. “Came into the hut and tipped him out of his cradle. We were getting ready to name him the very next day, and he was gone!”

“And my wife!” said another man. He’d carried an axe when Ilna and Alecto arrived in the village, but he held only a rushlight now. “I woke up when our daughter screamed, but God already had her by the leg. All we could do was watch.”

“What do you mean, all you could do was watch?” Alecto snarled. She stood with her arms down but a little out from her sides. The muscles of her legs and bare torso were corded with tension. “You could’ve took its head off with your axe, couldn’t you?”

“Couldn’t you have blocked the cave?” said Ilna. She wasn’t really angry; the business was too puzzling for a normal emotion like that. “Six or eight of you could slide a slab of rock into the narrow part that this thing couldn’t push out again.”

She kicked the huge corpse with her bare foot, then regretted the contact. One of the children shrieked in excited horror.

“Mistress wizards,” Arthlan said, bowing deeply. “God is God. We couldn’t act against Him, do you see? But if He chose to bring your powerful selves to the gateway, then—His will be done.”

“His will be done!” cried all the villagers in a ragged chorus. Their voices echoed from the slopes in a diminishing whisper.

“His will?” shouted Alecto. “How about my will, Sister take you?”

Jumping down like a cat, she grabbed Arthlan by the throat and punched the dagger just beneath his breastbone, striking upward for the full length of the blade. The priest gasped and remained standing for an instant as Alecto withdrew the bronze.

Only those closest could see what had happened. Oyra screamed and clawed at Alecto’s face. Alecto gave the woman a backhand slash across the eyes.

“They’ve killed Arthlan!” cried a man. He swiped at Alecto with his torch. “Don’t let them get away!”

Torches glittered in all directions. There were villagers on the slope both above and below the temple.

“Inside!” Ilna cried. She jumped over the God-thing’s corpse. The shock of her right foot coming down on stone was like a bath in fire, but that didn’t matter.

Alecto was inside with her. Together they slammed the panels shut.

“Here’s the bar!” Alecto cried, banging it through the staples despite the bad light.

“There!” she added. “That’ll hold them.”

“Yes,” said Ilna. She didn’t add, “And then what?” because the question wouldn’t have done any good.

At this point, she wasn’t sure anything would do her and her murderous companion any good.

Garric was saying, “Lord Thalemos, before you met Metron did you—”

The driver jumped to its feet and began screeching like a tortured cricket. Instead of guiding with gentle touches on the millipede’s neck, the Archa jabbed the creature violently with the solid end of the rod.

Garric ran forward, though he wasn’t sure what he intended to do there. He had his hand on the sword hilt, but he didn’t draw the weapon. Vascay trotted with him, as lightly as a one-legged canary.

Thalemos came also. He might as well; there’d be as much safety with Garric and Vascay as there was anywhere in this place.

Metron didn’t stand, but he lowered his book and craned his neck to see past the driver’s leaping form. The Archa’s movements looked wildly spastic to Garric, but they were apparently proper for a six-limbed creature. At any rate, the driver looked to be in less danger of falling from the millipede’s back than the seated wizard was.

A pool gleamed through the great grassblades off to the right side. Water, Garric thought, catching the sun….

And then knew he was wrong, because the pale, pearly glow wasn’t sunlight—and because water wouldn’t slosh itself out of its basin and flow in the direction of the millipede.

“It can’t have been the Intercessor!” Metron said, opening the case which held the instruments of his art. He dropped his scroll carelessly inside and snatched out a small flask; he didn’t bother to close the case. “It’s chance! It’s bad luck!”

The millipede ambled on at its same steady, ground-devouring pace, though it was turning slightly but noticeably leftward. The terrain became furrowed. The creature climbed without difficulty, but the angle and rocking motion made Thalemos wobble.

Garric grabbed the youth and steadied him. They took the millipede’s movements the way Garric had learned to ride a ship’s storm-tossed deck.

Vascay bent so that he could grip the linked gold netting with his left hand, but he kept his eyes turned to the right. From where Garric stood, the liquid from the pool had disappeared in the trees; perhaps, perhaps there was a distant gleam as the millipede started down the far side of the furrow.

Metron’s flask was of clear glass with gold-filled etchings on the inside. It held a yellowish powder, too pale to be sulfur. As the wizard spread the contents in thin lines to form a hexagram, the powder darkened to the angry red of dying embers.

The driver squatted again but kept turning its triangular head to look back the way they’d come. Its sharp-edged upper limbs twitched out and in, folding like shears, as if the Archa were slashing something only it could see.

The millipede’s foreparts were on level ground; ahead another furrow loomed. Vascay released the safety net and straightened.

“Any notion what the excitement’s about, boy?” he asked Thalemos in seeming nonchalance. He gave a minuscule nod toward the crest behind them; the millipede’s segmented body was still crossing it.

The youth shook his head vehemently. “I don’t know any more about this place than you do!” he said. Then he managed a wry smile, and added, “And I don’t like it any better than you do either.”

Vascay chuckled. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe so.”

“Chief?” Hame called from the midst of the other men on the third segment. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing we need worry ourselves about,” Vascay replied in a cheerful tone. “Though I’ll tell the world I’m going to be glad to get back to a place I’ve been before, even if there’s Protectors in it!”

Turning his face away from the bandits, Vascay added under his breath, “Nothing we need worry about, because there’s not a single damned thing we can do about it, eh?”

Metron began chanting in time with the motions of his athame. He’d stoppered the flask again. Around the hexagram the wizard had drawn words in the Old Script, using the brush and bottle of cinnabar as previously. In the center of the figure glittered the sapphire ring.

“Maybe the…the glow, maybe it can’t get over the hill that we just crossed?” Thalemos suggested.

Garric shrugged, looking toward the rear. The ground was less heavily forested here, but now that they were on the level he’d lost sight of the crest behind them.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that if it were that simple, your advisor there wouldn’t be working so busily at…”

He nodded toward Metron, chanting words of power over the hexagram.

“Sadly true,” said Vascay calmly. He bobbed his javelin’s head off to the right. Light glimmered through the trees in that direction, stretching well back the way they’d come.

Driven by a grim need to know the worst, Garric turned his head and looked to the left. As he’d expected—as he’d known, for he had known as soon as he saw the gleam coursing them to the other side—the light showed in that direction as well. The pool must have been very deep to be able to form horns about the millipede in the fashion it was doing.

The pearly liquid slid over the ground like beer spilled on a polished bar top. It had no depth, rising only a finger’s breadth as it flowed around the giant grassblades and dead vegetation littering the dirt. The horns began to draw in, preparing to circle the millipede.

“Here it comes…” Garric said.

“Get ready, boys!” Vascay called. The Brethren had seen the fluid also and held their weapons poised. “I figure our best bet is to cut through it on our own if we lose our ride the way it looks like we’re going to.”

There’s no chance at all, Garric thought. There’s nothing to cut and there’ll be nowhere to run.

He drew his sword, smiling at himself and at mankind’s unwillingness to surrender. He wondered what it’d feel like when the glowing liquid flowed over him.

Metron shouted in a crackling voice, “Akramma chammari!”

Garric’s head jerked around by reflex. The athame poised motionless above the ring. A red spark spat from the ivory tip, merging midway with a blue one from the sapphire.

There was a flicker of white light. The hexagram caught fire with the rushing sound of flame flooding a pool of oil.

Metron jerked his hand and athame back. Saffron fire leaped toward the heavens, then paled and spread outward soundlessly. Ademos cried out.

Garric felt a constriction in his chest as the flash passed through him; then it was gone and he drew in a normal breath again. Vegetation shimmered as if reflected on a wind-ruffled pond.

The yellow tinge had faded so that it was barely distinguishable from air by the time it reached the glowing fluid. Red and azure wizardlight sizzled at the line of contact, dulling the pearly gleam like frost on a silver mirror. Cracks appeared in what had been a surface as smooth as the sky; the rushing encirclement shuddered to a halt.

Metron collapsed over the figure, which had become no more than ash on the purple-black chitin. Garric knelt at his side and held him steady.

“He did it!” Thalemos cried. “Master Metron, you’ve saved us!”

Vascay didn’t speak. Like Garric, he continued to look back at the thing which had pursued them. Before they passed out of sight, Garric saw that the cracks were widening and beginning to leak glowing liquid. The fluid came on again, tentatively at first.

Garric massaged the wizard’s cheeks. “Wake up, Master Metron,” he said. “We’re going to need you again soon.”

To Sharina, the walls of Donelle two furlongs away didn’t look formidable compared to those of Erdin, Valles, and Carcosa—the latter mighty even in ruin, having served forty generations of builders as a quarry for dressed stone. Donelle’s were about twenty feet high, originally built of stone but over the years repaired with brick or even cemented rubble.

Carus, Lord Waldron, their aides, and a dozen Blood Eagles rode up on horses and two mules captured from citizens of Tisamur. Their circuit of the siege works had taken hours. Donelle wasn’t large compared to the capitals of major islands, but having to stay out of bowshot of the walls added considerably to the circumference.

Sharina stood up in the shelter of what was now a mantlet; it’d been one wall of a farmer’s shed not long ago. A score of officers involved in building the entrenchments, supplying the troops, and goodness knew what all else, descended on the commanders like vultures on a dead ewe. Carus and Waldron didn’t even get a chance to dismount.

Sharina relaxed again, looking at Donelle. She didn’t need to speak to the king, and his officers did. Her only purpose on Tisamur was to help Carus rein in his temper. Even if she could fight her way to the king through the crowd of armed soldiers, she couldn’t restrain him in so confused a setting.

The city’s garrison was raising additional towers at intervals along the wall, giving archers on the upper platforms greater range and adding impact to stones flung on those beneath. The new structures were built of wood, wicker, and bull hides. They’d stop an ordinary arrow, but Sharina didn’t need a professional soldier to tell her that the heavy missiles from the fleet’s catapults and ballistae would shred the towers and everyone inside them.

Carus broke through the mob, shouting orders over his shoulder as he strode toward the mantlet. His bodyguards scrambled to keep up with him, elbowing officers aside with little consideration for rank.

With Lord Attaper and his Blood Eagles as a screen, Carus joined Sharina. He lifted the helmet he’d worn on the tour of inspection and used it to shade his eyes as he surveyed Donelle from this angle.

“Not much, is it?” he said conversationally. “I was half-minded to storm it when we arrived. The trouble is, I don’t trust the troops—yet—to stay disciplined when they’re not under their officers’ eyes. If I’d sent them over the wall—”

His left index finger pointed: here, there, a third spot. The first where the foundations had shifted, forming a crack which, though filled, was a staircase to the battlements. Another where olive trees grew up to the stone as though espaliered; the fruit was ripe. The last the main gate itself, closed but obviously too rotten to withstand the impact of one of the roof beams ripped from a wealthy residence outside the walls and converted to a battering ram.

“—in an hour they’d have been all through the city in packets of half a dozen. And I’d have lost half of them before nightfall, from getting turned around in somebody else’s twisting streets and burned when the fire started, as it surely would.”

He shook his head with a grimace. “There’s always a cookfire kicked over,” he said, “or somebody just can’t help tossing a lantern onto a thatched roof to prove that they’ve got a sword in their hand and they can do anything they please. Which, of course, they can.”

“What will happen now, your highness?” Sharina asked, smiling deliberately as she looked at her companion.

He’d come to Sharina because only with her and Tenoctris—who was back in camp with the ships—could he talk freely. The Blood Eagles were keeping everyone else at bay by the prince’s orders. If they heard what Carus said or Sharina answered, they wouldn’t pass it on.

“Siege,” Carus said. He shrugged. “It won’t take long. The town’s packed with people, and prisoners say the whole south end of the island’s inside. There can’t be enough food within the walls to last for three days, and in six there won’t be a rat or a scrap of harness leather to be found.”

Soldiers were digging a trench at a bare bowshot from the walls of Donelle; a little closer yet, Sharina suspected. The defenders weren’t trying their luck, though, probably because Carus had brought some of his artillery up from the ships already. The catapults and ballistae were cocked and ready to reply to anything the city’s bowmen chose to start.

“They’ll surrender when the food runs out?” Sharina asked. She looked away from the city, then turned her head quickly so that she wouldn’t have to think about what she’d see there.

The countryside around Donelle had been pleasant and prosperous, a mixture of successful farms and the country houses of wealthy townsfolk. In less than a day, the royal army had transformed it into a devastated wasteland.

“The people in control, these Children of the Mistress,” Carus said grimly, “they’ll have some food. So will the mercenaries they’ve hired. They’ll keep the gates closed for a while yet. But it won’t be long, it can’t be long.”

“And your dreams?” Sharina asked quietly.

“I can stand the dreams longer than the people inside can live on air!” Carus said, though his face went gray at the thought. He added, looking at the city instead of his companion, “I thought about that when we arrived and I was deciding whether to storm the walls. I could’ve said, ‘Kill everybody wearing the black-and-white robe.’ I could’ve said, ‘Kill everybody who might have worn the black-and-white robe.’”

His right hand clenched on his sword hilt; the blade rustled against the iron reinforcement at the mouth of the scabbard.

“I could have said, ‘Kill everybody!’” Carus said, “and they’d have done it. My men would have done it because I said so. Not every man in the army, but enough; and when they were done, the dreams would have stopped.”

“Carus?” Sharina said, touching the king’s sword hand. He stiffened, then took a deep breath and relaxed at least his body.

The ruin of the countryside wasn’t vandalism. Wood is the first thing a siege requires: wood for mantlets, wood to shore trenches and earthen walls, wood for the heavy siege engines to batter through stone. Orchards, sacred groves, beeches planted to shade a house or a bower—all of them fall in a flurry of axe chips, then slide toward the entrenchments behind teams of men and captured oxen.

The quickest sources of finished timber are existing buildings. On the short march from the harbor, Sharina had seen hundreds of houses torn down in a few minutes apiece by squads of troops who’d quickly learned the swiftest ways to convert a home into beams and a pile of rubble.

“I killed people when I wore my own flesh,” said the ancient king softly. “Killed them myself and had them killed. I never killed everybody in a city, though.”

He knuckled his eyes, then his temples. Sharina had never seen anyone more obviously weary.

Carus lowered his fists and gave her a wry smile. “If I don’t get some sleep soon,” he said conversationally, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. But Donelle’ll surrender soon enough.”

A trumpet called. The army’s first action on reaching Donelle had been to raise a spindly watchtower, a tripod supporting a laddered mast. The basket at the peak put the lookout a good hundred feet in the air. From there he could see most of what went on in the city as well as in the surrounding countryside.

He blew another attention signal, holding the trumpet to his lips with one hand while the other arm pointed south. The eyes of besiegers and those on the city walls both turned in that direction, toward the fleet’s encampment.

Sharina glanced at the mantlet. The wattling was of thumb-thick branches woven about saplings of twice the diameter. The hut’s corner posts, trimmed cedar trees, now held the mantlet upright against any arrows that got this far.

“What in blazes—” Carus wondered aloud.

Sharina half jumped, half climbed to the top of the mantlet and stood barefoot on its edge. She kept her arms out for balance while her eyes searched the western horizon.

“There’s a horseman coming,” she said. Nearby soldiers looked up at her. “He’s got a red pennant. He’s one of our messengers, your highness!”

“Is he, by the Lady!” Carus said. “So what’s Nitker got that’s so important he sends a mounted courier?”

In the excitement, several archers on the nearer gate tower sent arrows toward Carus and Sharina. “Down!” bellowed a Blood Eagle. He grabbed Sharina’s ankle and jerked her toward him.

If he hadn’t let go, Sharina might have hit badly—on her back or even her head. The bodyguard was satisfied merely to get her down where she didn’t draw attention. She landed on her toes and flexed knees, just as the flight of arrows whistled into the ground. The nearest was twenty feet away.

A ballista fired from an earth mound thirty yards behind Sharina. The bow arms slammed forward to their padded stops, sending a bolt screaming overhead to strike in a shower of sparks on the side of a firing slit. The iron projectile glanced through without hitting any of the defenders. Chips the bolt’d shattered from the battlements sprayed stingingly across the platform.

The archers were Tisamur militiamen, not hired professionals. They threw themselves down, then as one rose to look out at the ballista which wouldn’t be recocked for another five minutes at the quickest.

The sailors crewing a catapult well down the curve of the siege lines had horsed their weapon around to bear on the gate tower. While the defenders looked in the other direction, the catapult’s head-sized stone hit and smashed a section of the battlements inward. The archers went down again; some screaming, the rest unable to. No one showed himself on that tower again while Sharina watched.

The courier charged into the siege lines and slid from his saddle while his horse was still moving. He was a short man, lightly built—a natural jockey in size and with the bantam feistiness of so many little men. Ignoring Lord Waldron and the senior officers around him, he made straight for Carus.

Blood Eagles hunched, lifting their shields into position. Their job was to doubt the goodwill of others—and institutional suspicion aside, a Confederacy assassin could find a pennon to mimic a royal courier.

“Let him through!” Carus ordered.

Attaper turned to eye the king sidelong while keeping the courier in sight. “Stay as you are,” he snapped to his men. “You, messenger? You can tell your news from where you are!”

The black-armored guards took their commander’s orders, not the king’s. The courier made as if to push through; the curve of a shield butted him back. Lord Waldron, glowering like a thundercloud, and the other nearby officers came crowding closer.

“Yes, go on!” Carus said, frustrated but philosophical about it. “What word do you bring from Admiral Nitker?”

“Your majesty…” the courier said. “The Count of Blaise has landed with his whole army in the bay west of us. Admiral Nitker says there’s at least fifteen thousand men, and that he’s sure from the equipment that some of the regiments are from Sandrakkan! The admiral is awaiting your orders.”

“May the Lady show us mercy!” cried a gray-bearded officer, the adjutant of the regiment building this section of siege works. “They knew we were coming, and they’ve trapped us! We’ll die here as sure as—”

Carus, as swiftly as a stooping hawk, pushed two Blood Eagles aside in his rush. He grabbed the old soldier by the throat and slapped him, forehand and then backhand. His callused hand cracked like the ballista’s cord.

“Your highness!” Sharina screamed, grabbing Carus’ right arm from behind and clinging with all the strength of her supple young body. “Not this! Not here!”

Looking dazed, Carus released the adjutant; he fell as though heart-stabbed. Two of the old man’s juniors caught him under the shoulders and drew him back out of sight.

Carus looked around at the shock and fear filling the eyes of the watching officers. He shook himself, then clenched and unclenched his right hand to work feeling back into the numbed fingers.

“No,” the king said, “we’re not going to die here—and we’re not going to give up the siege of Donelle either. Lord Waldron, I’m leaving you here with half the heavy infantry to continue the siege. I’ll take the other half, the skirmishers, and the phalanx back to the fleet and size up the situation. And then”—he looked at the gates of Donelle, then around the arc of his officers again—“I’ll teach Count Lerdoc what it means to rebel against the King of the Isles. I’ll teach him, or the Sister take my soul!”

A few of those listening started to cheer. All Sharina could think of was that the Sister might very well have Carus’ soul soon—and the souls of every man of his army as well, if the king’s haste led him into yet another misjudgment.