Mistress of the Catacombs

19

The chill water clamped the muscles over Ilna’s rib cage tightly and dulled her need to breathe. The water-filled tunnel wasn’t quite as narrow as the passage between the pool and the outer world, but there wouldn’t have been room enough to swim properly even if Ilna had known how. She pulled herself along by her hands with an occasional kick against the walls when her toes found purchase.

She didn’t know if Alecto was following. She didn’t even know if she hoped Alecto was following. Ilna had given her companion as good a chance at salvation as she herself had, but she couldn’t pretend Alecto’s death would trouble her any worse than the wild girl’s continuing life would.

Ilna’s fingers were numb, and her lungs were a rolling fireball that seemed to be devouring everything around it. Eventually the blaze would absorb her brain and everything would stop, but until then she would keep on going.

Streaks of light pulsed across her eyes. How long could a salamander stay underwater? For hours, certainly; possibly for days. Ilna wasn’t sure if the tunnel was still going down; her body rubbed the slick stone, sometimes with her shoulders, sometimes with her hips. The only direction was forward.

Phosphorescence flooded over her—pinks and greens and yellows, all against a background of sickly blue. Ilna blew her lungs out, scarcely aware of what she was doing, and drew in a deep breath. The air didn’t have odors in that first moment: it was life, as simple as that. She’d been good as dead, and now she breathed again.

Alecto surfaced noisily, flinging up a spray of rainbow droplets. “Sister take me!” she cried. Then, “May the Pack grind my bones if I’m not glad to breathe again!”

Ilna dabbed her feet down, touched rock, and felt the panic in her throat subside. While she could appreciate the irony of escaping all manner of dangers only to drown at the point of safety, that wasn’t the story she wanted to be remembered for.

She bobbed—once, twice, and again—to reach the edge of the pool. She was smiling. I’m not sure I want to be remembered at all; and if I drowned here, there’d be precious little chance of anybody hearing the story anyhow.

Alecto, who could swim and who’d lost the cape, her only remaining garment, in the tunnel, squirmed up onto the shore with the litheness of a cormorant. She’d gripped her dagger in her teeth as she swam; now, ignoring Ilna’s struggle to climb out of the pool, she took the weapon in her hand again as she looked around.

There was plenty of light to see clearly, at least for eyes adapted during the long, dark crawl to reach this place. It was a cave, but it was much larger than the one immediately beyond the temple. Ilna looked up. At some points the curving roof was as high as she could’ve flung a stone.

Mushrooms and lichens covered the cave floor and ran up the walls and ceiling as well. They glowed in muted shades; to Ilna’s trained eye no two were precisely the same hue. The faded yellow of one mushroom lacked the green undertone of the otherwise identical bell sprouting beside it.

“How far back do you suppose this cave goes?” Alecto said, trying to keep concern out of her voice. She tapped a wall with her dagger butt; under a finger-thick coating of fungus, the bronze clacked on stone. “Is there a way out besides the way we came?”

“I have no idea,” Ilna said, keeping her comments to the literal truth. She supposed—as no doubt the wild girl did—that there wasn’t another way out; that there was no way at all now that Alecto’s rockslide had buried the temple along with the rest of the village.

It wouldn’t do any good to state the obvious, though. Besides, while it was superstition to believe the words might create the grim reality, when Ilna was trapped in a rocky tomb, she found herself closer to superstition than she cared to be.

A cricket scuttled through a grove of knee-high mushrooms, shaking clouds of white spores from the bells. The insect was as big as a mouse; its hind legs were in normal proportion instead of the outsize pair on which its smaller relatives jumped in the world outside the cave.

Ilna ran the coils of the noose through her fingers, squeezing moisture from the silk with firm pressure. She had to decide what to do with her soaked tunics as well. She supposed they’d dry more quickly on her body than if she hung them in the cave’s dank atmosphere, but she could speed the process by wringing them out first.

“Well, it doesn’t look to me like we’re any better off than we were before,” Alecto said in a challenging tone. Her words echoed, softened by repetition and the forest of fungus.

“We’re a great deal worse off than we were before you murdered the priest,” Ilna said. “We can’t change the past, though, so I’ll begin looking for a way out after I’ve taken time to rest.”

Her voice as she met the wild girl’s eyes was very calm, but she held the noose ready to throw. If Alecto chose to attack…Ilna didn’t know what she’d do with her companion after disarming her, but she supposed she’d think of something.

“Faugh!” said Alecto. She turned and stalked deeper into the cave. Ilna thought the wild girl was simply walking away, but instead she knelt to examine a clump of ball-headed mushrooms.

Ilna grimaced and resumed her survey of the cave. The fungus forest crawled with insects, all of them much larger than similar forms in the upper world. Ilna wondered if there’d be more salamanders like the God-thing Alecto slew, but there was no sign of such. Perhaps now that the giant was dead his lesser kin would move toward the pool, like rams struggling for the flock’s leadership after the bellwether dies.

Well, that would mean meat. The omnipresent fungus must be edible; insects at least were able to live and flourish on it. And Ilna supposed that she could eat giant crickets the way she’d eaten crabs caught off the shore of Barca’s Hamlet.

The crabs had been stewed, though, and Ilna didn’t see much way of building a fire in this place. The notion of raw cricket wasn’t appealing.

She snorted, almost a laugh. Very little in the situation was appealing.

“Yes it is, by the Sister!” Alecto cried enthusiastically. She stood and turned, holding her dagger out in what Ilna momentarily thought was a threatening gesture.

No: Alecto was using the flat of her blade as a spatula, demonstrating the dark spores she’d shaken from the gills of the mushrooms she’d been looking at. They meant nothing to Ilna. Old Allis fattened the living she scraped from the land in the north of the borough by selling cures to those who trusted her. She picked mushrooms, both spring and fall. Nobody else near Barca’s Hamlet did, though. Most people thought any fungus was apt to poison the fool who ate it.

“I’ve never seen them this big before,” Alecto said, “but these are Traveller’s Balls as sure as I’m a woman!”

“We can eat them, you mean?” Ilna said. She preferred to be on good terms with her companion instead of at the edge of violence, but she really couldn’t understand what Alecto was talking about.

And as for “never seen them this big…” Each of these nearly spherical caps was the size of a boar’s head. No mushroom got that big in the borough.

“Not travelling that way,” said Alecto, with a half sneer she was unwilling or unable to control in the cause of harmony. Obviously the wild girl felt power had shifted again in her direction. “Travelling like what brought me here. Through the dreamworld!”

“I don’t see how that’s an improvement,” Ilna said. “According to what you told me, our spirits have to come back to our bodies, and they’re still here…oh.”

“Right!” said Alecto in triumph. “I’ll find another—”

Her face changed as she realized what she was saying and who she was saying it to. “That is, I’ll take you along and we’ll both get back to, well, out of—”

“We’ll go to wherever the next innocent victim happens to be,” Ilna said coldly. “Don’t bother. I have enough on my conscience without snatching some stranger into the place your luck and judgment puts them. I haven’t been impressed by your past successes.”

The wild girl’s hot fury met the ice in Ilna’s eyes—and backed away from it. “Do you think you’re better than me?” Alecto shouted. “Do you think I don’t know what you are?”

“I don’t think a spider is better than a weasel, no,” Ilna said, her hands on her noose. “But I think we’re different.”

“Do as you please!” Alecto said, turning away. “Stay here and die, then! But I’m going to get out.”

Ilna forced herself to relax. She needed rest more than she needed food; perhaps after she slept she’d be better able to follow the strands of this pattern.

And again, maybe she already knew where the pattern led. Maybe it wasn’t simply chance that made the web-draped, spider-filled Hell she’d seen in a dead man’s eyes quiver constantly at the fringes of her memory.

Alecto had caught a cricket and was opening its body with the point of her knife. Do insects have blood? They must, Ilna supposed; and if her companion was determined to use blood magic—let her.

Ilna lay down, resting her head on a clump of broad-capped mushrooms whose firm flesh cushioned her better than a rolled tunic would have done. She still hadn’t wrung out her clothing…. Well, that could wait; had to wait.

Alecto shook a mushroom cap over herself and the figure she’d scratched on the ground. She began to chant in an angry, hectoring tone very different from the quiet care Ilna was used to hearing in Tenoctris’ voice.

It wasn’t just that Ilna was exhausted by the effort of worming through narrow tunnels and water almost cold enough to freeze. The rock itself, the whole living mass of it above and around Ilna, was forcing itself onto her soul though for the moment it couldn’t crush her body.

Ilna found every moment’s existence in this place a battle. The rock wouldn’t defeat her so long as she lived, but the struggle was a greater strain than anything her muscles had gone through.

Spores from Alecto’s mushroom drifted to where she lay. They had a sharp tang, but the smell wasn’t really unpleasant.

Ilna felt herself sliding. Instead of a cave floor as level as those of most houses in Barca’s Hamlet, she was on a smooth, steep funnel. She wanted to crawl back, but her limbs didn’t move, and nothing she did would make a difference anyway. At the bottom of the funnel was a hole, and she knew what was on the other side of the hole as well.

Alecto chanted. Ilna would’ve smiled if she’d been able to move the muscles even of her face. She could see the pattern spreading from this point. The wild girl would follow her strand to its end, her end. No one could change that, no one could change any part of what was already woven.

Ilna slid faster. Her eyes were open. They saw the world of the cave as motionless and unchanged: rock and lichen and the insects which ate the fungus and one another.

On the domed ceiling over Ilna’s head, a spider the size of a man’s spread hand waited in her web for prey. She looked down at Ilna, as still and silent as the rock she gripped.

As the world about Ilna vanished into gray darkness, she felt herself falling upward.

Garric tumbled into sunlight on a landscape of rocks, flowering scrub, and stone boxes. The sea roared against a nearby coastline, and above him birds called.

His face was buried in coarse grass, each stem topped with a tiny white bloom. If he’d come through Metron’s passage a hand’s breadth farther forward, the spiky leaves of something like a yucca would’ve been gouging his cheeks. He was too exhausted to feel relief.

At that he was better off than Metron, who lay half under, half beside, Garric’s body. The wizard couldn’t have been more still if he’d been dead, though Garric found a pulse in his throat when he checked.

He heard voices, Vascay’s among them, as the Brethren assessed the situation. Garric braced his hands and levered his torso up so that he could look around. He wasn’t quite ready to stand just now.

“There you are, Brother Gar!” Vascay called, waving his javelin in greeting. “How about the wizard? I’d say I didn’t care, but this time he brought us to a better place than some I’ve seen recently.”

At a quick glance, it seemed that all the bandits on the millipede’s back had made it here. Garric grimaced when he remembered Toster. All who’d dared the wizard’s gateway, that is. Well, Toster had the right to make his own decision.

“Metron’s here with me,” Garric said. “He won’t want to move for a while, but he’s all right.”

He stood carefully, finding as he usually did that he felt better when he started moving again after exertion. Small bees buzzed, trying the flowers. Even the spiky succulent sported orange starbursts that Garric would have guessed were giant asters if he’d seen them from a distance.

Vascay and Thalemos started over to him. Rather than meet them halfway, Garric waited—smiling faintly and looking around to get his bearings. The passage Metron had opened for them twice now seemed to affect some men more than others—and Garric more than most.

It was nearly noon here. Under the sun to the south ranged an arc of craggy hills: rugged, perhaps, but certainly nothing the band couldn’t cross if it wanted to. In the middle was the notch of a pass. Garric thought the hills were less than two miles away, though that guess depended in part on how tall the trees sprinkling the slopes were.

The sea battered the shore north of where Garric stood. Near land the water was green, becoming a deep purple-blue toward the horizon. The plain must be eaten away into a steep corniche rather than a sloping beach, but Garric couldn’t be sure without getting closer.

All around him, covered by flowers and grasses, were boxes hewn from the same coarse limestone that underlay the soil. Garric frowned as he recognized them: they were coffins.

More precisely, they were ossuaries to hold the bones of the dead whose flesh had decayed during a year or two’s exposure on the shelves of common mausolea. That had been the practice in Haft during the Old Kingdom, Garric knew from his reading; though in his own day, the dead were buried in the ground and honored in a general ceremony at the spring equinox.

“We’re in a graveyard,” he said to Vascay. Thalemos had halted a few paces away, bending to look at an ossuary of alabaster or marble. “All of this.”

Gesturing broadly, Garric went on, “It must have served quite a large city, but I don’t see any sign of buildings except crypts and these, well”—he touched an ossuary with his foot—“bone boxes.”

Vascay shrugged, the gesture nonchalant but his expression guarded. “They might’ve built their houses of sticks and thatch but buried their dead in stone,” he said. “It’s a matter of what your priorities are, after all. And this place—”

He carried his glance around the sprawling plain; for as far as a man could see, ruined tombs and ossuaries dotted it. Flowers nodded in the slight breeze.

“—is old, whatever it is.”

Magenta flowers that looked like zinnias—they weren’t; the plants’ leaves were wrong—grew in great profusion where Thalemos knelt and shaded worn lettering with his hand. He looked solemn as he rose to join Garric and the chieftain.

“That ossuary held a Magistrate of Wikedun on the north coast of Laut, washed by the Outer Sea,” Thalemos said. He wore a slight frown. “The city doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’ve heard of the place,” Vascay said, frowning also. “The rebels of Wikedun fought the Intercessor Echea, back when the Old Kingdom fell two thousand years ago. She defeated the rebels and sank Wikedun under the sea.”

“Well,” Thalemos said, “the Outer Sea ate away the land, but that was over ages instead of whelming the city suddenly. And the rebels were demon worshippers.”

He paused, considering what he’d just said. He added, “According to Ascoin’s History, they were demon worshippers, I mean. I suppose his stories may be false.”

Vascay snorted. “Or they may not,” he said. “What I know for a fact”—he looked toward the range of hills—“is that the present Intercessor has half the Protectors on his payroll patrolling the marshes south of here. And they say other guards as well, to keep honest men out of here. Why is that, do you suppose?”

All three men looked down at the wizard, snoring among the flowers at their feet. Presumably Metron knew the answer. He knew the same answer as Echeon did, at any rate.

“I don’t think he’s faking,” Garric said morosely. “The spells Metron has been working would be impossible for anyone but a great wizard, and even then difficult.”

“You know wizards, do you, Gar?” Vascay said mildly.

“I’ve known some,” said Garric.

“I’d as soon I never had,” Vascay said. He smiled. “But then, I’d as soon a lot of things that turned out differently.”

He gestured toward the edge of the plain a furlong away. “Let’s walk that way,” the chieftain said. “I’d like to take a look at the sea, since I don’t think we’re going back through Echeon’s patrols. Regardless of what else might be waiting for us south of the hills.”

Thalemos glanced down at the wizard with pursed lips. “He’ll be fine,” Garric said. “He’s just tired. There’s nothing we can do beyond letting him sleep.”

The remaining bandits were exploring their new surroundings with cheerful enthusiasm, mostly in groups of two or three. Hame stood alone on top of a ruin that might once have been a temple, shading his eyes with his hand searching the plain.

Looking for Toster, Garric realized. They were friends…. He started to call to Hame, then decided that for the time being he wouldn’t do that. For one thing, it’d force Garric to recall the big man’s last moments with greater clarity than he wanted to.

Halophus disappeared, then popped back into sight holding a broad armlet. He’d apparently jumped or fallen into a sub-surface tomb; this necropolis held burials of a wide variety of styles. From the bandit’s caroling joy and the way sunlight winked, the armlet was made of gold.

“We’re all happy to be out of where we were before,” Vascay said without emphasis. “I am myself. I don’t know that this is a good place—”

He smiled knowingly at his companions.

“—but I know the other was a bad one, at least there at the end.”

“Yes,” said Garric grimly. They’d reached the edge of the cliff; the sea roared up at them, though it was a calm day. The waves didn’t make enough noise against the crumbling rock to drown the screams in his mind, though.

“I’ve had a lot more money over the past ten years with the Brethren than I did for the twenty before when I was a schoolmaster,” Vascay said, his voice barely loud enough for the others to hear him. “Had the money and had more of the things the money could buy. But one of the things I wish turned out differently is that I could’ve lived my whole life as an honest man.”

The corniche was never more than twenty feet above the sea and generally only half that. Green water swirled and foamed about the scree of rocks broken away from the cliff face in the recent past. Garric had led his companions to a notch where the overhang had collapsed perhaps only hours before; the dirt showing at the edges of the fall was still moist and russet in contrast to the grayish yellow where the soil had dried. Standing anywhere else along the edge risked the weight of the spectators bringing down the overhang.

“Doesn’t Echeon have ships on patrol off the coast here?” Garric asked. He couldn’t see anything but sunlit water all the way to the horizon, but there must be something to prevent interlopers. The gold Halophus had found in practically open sight proved nobody came here.

Garric and his companions might still be able to escape by sea. Even with Echeon’s art, the Protectors wouldn’t be able to patrol effectively in the middle of a winter storm. Though…with a homemade boat and a crew of landsmen, Garric thought he’d rather take his chances walking south through the hills.

“I haven’t heard of anything special on this coast,” Vascay said. “There’s the regular ships watching to keep people here from going out beyond fishing distance and anybody else from getting to Laut. Nothing in particular about this bay or Wikedun, though.”

He shrugged. “My gang stayed pretty much in the south and east, that being where we all of us came from,” he went on. “But I keep an ear out for what the Protectors’re doing, and I’d guess I’d have heard about extra ships the same as I did about the patrols on the land side.”

“What’s that?” said Thalemos, suddenly pointing seaward.

“That’s just a—” Garric said. He shut his mouth on “—shadow on the water,” because there weren’t any clouds in the sky.

It broke surface, or at least several hundred feet of its length did. Its lizardlike head was blunter than that of a seawolf, nor did a seawolf ever reach the size of this creature. The kinship was close, though. Gar’s soul, by now buried deep in Garric’s mind, begin to whimper.

The serpent looked at the three watching humans, then slid downward again with a sidewise shimmy of its whole long body. The green water covered all but memory of the creature.

“Did it happen to appear now, or were we being warned?” Thalemos asked. He sounded calm, but his clasped fingers writhed like the snake he’d just watched.

“Either way, we can save the effort of building a boat,” said Vascay.

He turned. “Come on, lads,” he continued. “Master Metron ought to be well enough to speak by now, and I’ve got some questions to ask the gentleman!”

“If we let you loose, Master Cashel…” said the fat, friendly fellow with ribbons dangling from his velvet cap. “Will you behave yourself?”

He’d come into the Hyacinth with four other townsmen: beefy, younger men who carried fishnets like the ones Cashel was already trussed with. No one of the men was Cashel’s size, but he was willing to agree that all together the four could handle him. The folk of Soong weren’t what he’d call harsh—back home, men preparing to release a maybe-madman would have cudgels to use if the fellow got out of hand—but they didn’t take silly chances either.

Leemay came out from the bar and stood beside the man in the fancy hat—the mayor or whatever they called the headman here. “Master Cashel,” she said, “I’m sorry about what happened here. There’s free food and lodging for you in the Hyacinth this night or however long you want to stay.”

She’d lit a lamp shortly before the mayor arrived, and two of the huskies had carried in lanterns of iron and horn. Daylight in this place was somber enough, but Cashel already knew how miserable and dank Soong became after the sun set….

“Let me go and give me what’s mine,” he said to the woman. “After that, Duzi grant that you never see me again!”

His voice came out in enough of a growl that the mayor flinched back, and his huskies stiffened as if they might have work to do. Leemay didn’t move, just gave a little nod.

“You may change your mind,” she said. “My offer remains.”

The inn had been open for business during the day. Indeed, the stranger tied to a pillar had probably brought in half the trade. Cashel hadn’t spoken to the locals, nor had anybody spoken to him, but all the folk who came through the front door had let their eyes linger on him. Several were still inside, an audience watching from the bar or the tables along the back wall.

Cashel met the innkeeper’s eyes, but he didn’t speak. He didn’t have anything to say beyond what he’d just said.

“Let him go,” Leemay said to the mayor.

He looked at her in concern. “Are you sure?” he said. “Maybe tomorrow would be—”

“Let him go,” she repeated with an edge in her voice. Cashel had the feeling that though Leemay got along well enough with her fellow townsfolk, nobody wanted to cross her. He could see why that might be.

“All right,” the mayor said sharply to the attendant on his right. “Cut him—”

“Sister take you, Jangme!” cried the fisherman who jumped up from a table. “Not unless the Corporation wants to pay me and Long for two new nets!”

He knelt beside Cashel and loosed the tie cords with strong, skilled fingers. Cashel didn’t move while the work was going on; if he bunched his muscles in anticipation, it’d just take the fellow longer to finish his job. Cashel knew how to wait.

The fisherman stood, lifting one of the nets with him. Cashel stood also, kicking his legs free of the other net now that the tension was off it. He stretched his arms, over him and out to the sides, arching his back at the same time. The mayor and his attendants watched nervously.

“If you’ll give me back my staff,” Cashel said, slurring the words because of the anger that he otherwise concealed, “then I’ll take myself out from under this roof.”

“Ah, Master Cashel,” said the mayor, “I think we’d best wait till you leave Soong—in the morning, I suppose?—before we give you that again. While I trust—”

“When I came out last night with the friend the woman there murdered…” Cashel said. He spoke slowly, taking a deep breath between each burst of words. “And you tied me up because you thought I’d gone crazy…. Then I didn’t want to hurt anybody but her”—he nodded to Leemay, who stood impassively—“because the rest of you hadn’t hurt me.”

Cashel looked around the room. Only one of the mayor’s companions would meet his eyes.

“But if you don’t give me my staff,” Cashel continued in a growl like thunder over the horizon, “then you’re all of you no better ’n a gang of robbers. And I’ll pull that—”

He pointed to the bar.

“—out of the wall and use it on you before you can stop me.”

“What?” said the mayor. He looked around at his attendants. “He couldn’t do that! It’s pegged top and bottom!”

Cashel stepped over to the heavy hardwood plank. Two of the attendants danced aside instead of trying to stop him.

“Give him his bloody stick!” said the fisherman. “You weren’t wrestling him this morning, Jangme.”

“All right, all right…” the mayor said, letting his voice trail off as he turned away. “I just think…”

“When did you ever think about anything but how important you are?” the fisherman said.

Leemay stood for a moment, then stepped behind the bar through the open gate. She reached down and brought up the quarterstaff; it must have been lying all day where Cashel dropped it when he carried Tilphosa out of the bedroom.

He took the hickory. Leemay stroked her fingertips over the back of his right hand. She smiled at him as he jerked away.

“Come back when you decide you want my hospitality, Master Cashel,” she said. She laughed from deep in her throat, a sound more like a cat purring than anything Cashel had heard from a human before. “I’ll make you very welcome.”

The mayor and his huskies were leaving the inn. Cashel had to wait for them to clear the doorway or else shove through; and it was only a lifetime of good manners that kept him from doing that second thing.

When Cashel was finally outside, he banged the double door shut after him. Leemay was still laughing, and he didn’t like the sound.

He breathed deeply. It seemed like he hadn’t been able to take in a real breath since Tilphosa’s cries woke him up this morning. The locals hadn’t tied him tight, and there wasn’t anything wrong with the air of the inn; but…

Well, that was over. If he were his sister instead of himself, Leemay and the whole town would pay more than they might’ve believed possible in revenge. Cashel wasn’t like Ilna in that way or many ways. Funny how different twins could be.

He crossed River Street to the wharfs along the bank. There were still people out, but they seemed to be hastening home. Though Soong was a big place, it pretty much shut down at nightfall the same as country villages did. In Valles the traffic didn’t stop from dawn to daybreak, hooves and iron-tired wagons crashing along the cobblestone streets.

Wooden piers reached out into the sluggish river from a stone-faced embankment which ran the length of the waterside. Some of the boats had places for more oarsmen than Cashel had fingers, but most were relatively small—flat-bottomed and blunt on both ends.

A man was untangling his nets in the belly of a skiff midway down a nearby pier. Cashel walked out, keeping his feet over the stringers. Even so his weight made the structure sway and squeal.

The fellow looked up—and up—when Cashel stopped beside him; the water was a double pace below the level of the pier. “Yeah?” he said.

“Sir, I’d like to rent your boat for the night,” Cashel said. “You don’t know me—”

“You’ve got that right!” the local man said. “And I’m not going to rent you the boat I need to put food on my family’s table. Maybe—no, I don’t know anybody who’d rent a boat to a stranger.”

As the man talked, Cashel tugged out the purse he wore on a neck thong. “Sir,” he said, “could you buy another boat for three silver pieces?”

“Huh?” said the fisherman. “Three Ships? You don’t mean three coppers?”

“These don’t have ships on them,” Cashel said, holding up the coins so they’d gleam in what wan moonlight filtered through the fog. “There’s a man on a horse, I think. But they’re silver, and I’ll pay them to you for the use of your boat tonight.”

The fisherman clambered onto the pier like a monkey. He snatched the coins and held them close to his eyes. Cashel didn’t guess the fellow could see much—in this light you couldn’t even tell the coins were silver—but they were coins and metal of some kind for sure.

“A deal?” Cashel said.

The fisherman clutched the coins close to his chest. That was fine with Cashel; he didn’t want the money back, and if the fellow turned and ran away with it—well, he’d leave his boat behind, wouldn’t he?

“You just want the boat?” the man said. “You aren’t going to take my net and tackle?”

“The boat and the oars,” Cashel said, figuring he’d better make it clear about the oars. “And I hope to give them back when I’m done, but you may have to go search where I left them.”

The fisherman nodded in excitement. He hopped into the skiff—water sloshed out to all sides, but his aim and balance were perfect—and grabbed his gear up with one hand, using his left arm as a pole to drape the net on. His left hand wasn’t going to let go of the coins for any reason.

Cashel had guessed that values here were the same as back home, where twenty coppers would buy a dory fit to fish out of sight of the land. Thirty coppers—only a few people in Barca’s Hamlet would have the amount in silver, even in a good year—was enough to make the owner want to close the deal fast before the buyer came to his senses.

The fisherman climbed to the pier again and started for the quay. “A good evening to you, sir,” Cashel called to his back. If the fellow replied, Cashel didn’t hear it.

He stepped down into the skiff. It was small, but the way its owner jumped in and out proved it was sturdy and well designed. Cashel slipped his quarterstaff under the single thwart, laying it over where the keel would’ve been if the flat-bottomed vessel had one. He set the oars into rowlocks of willow root, untied the frayed painter, and shoved the skiff out into the river with his hand against a piling.

The moon gave Cashel light to row by. There were enough snags drifting down the river that he hoped he’d pass unremarked in the fog, but that was a chance he had to take.

He was going into the Temple of the Nine to find Tilphosa. He wasn’t sure what he’d do then, but he knew he wasn’t going to leave the girl to be fed to the fish or whatever they did in Soong. By going in by the back he hoped to avoid trouble; but he was going in.

A peasant without land of his own does a little of everything to keep body and soul together. Cashel had rowed dories in bad weather; he wouldn’t call himself a good oarsman, but he could make this skiff serve his purposes easily enough.

A fish slapped the water, nearby but unseen. Apart from that, he seemed to have the river to himself. A few lamps glimmered on shore; Soong must stretch quite a way up and down the river. The lights were blurs in the fog, and an occasional bay of deep laughter was the only human sound that reached him.

Cashel deliberately went out into mid-channel before he angled the skiff back toward the island on which the temple stood. He checked over his shoulder regularly as he rowed, but the lightless temple was completely hidden. Cashel trusted his sense of direction. He figured that if he had to, he could find the place blindfolded.

The skiff grounded sooner than expected. Cashel probed with an oarblade to be sure that he’d actually reached the island instead of colliding with a floating tree. A sheet of mud, glistening a little brighter than the river proper, stretched a long stone’s throw up to a dimly glimpsed low wall.

Cashel stepped out and hauled the skiff its own length to a stump around which he wrapped the painter. The muck squelched ankle high, an unpleasant sensation but not a new one. He took his staff into his hands and started toward the wall.

Apparently the temple had an enclosed court behind it. That might even be better for concealment…. There was a gate in an archway, but Cashel didn’t bother to try it. He set his staff firmly at the base of the wall and reached up with his left hand. He could reach the top, and it was smooth stone with no spikes or sharp flints set into the coping.

He swung himself up, his right arm thrusting against the staff and his left lifting by the wall itself. On top he paused, listening intently. Something plopped in the river behind him, but he heard nothing from the garden. The temple beyond was completely dark. Moonlight showed a tall, narrow door, but there were no windows.

The garden was planted with unfamiliar broad-spreading shrubs, though Cashel couldn’t tell a lot in the foggy darkness. A path meandered through them, going from the gate in the wall to the temple’s back door.

Cashel swung his staff around, butted it inside the wall, and let himself down by reversing the motion that took him atop the wall. He thought he heard something from the river again, but it didn’t matter now.

The ground inside the courtyard was much firmer than the mudflats. Cashel started for the temple, following the path as it wove between the trees. Nuts hung in clusters at the tips of the spiky branches. If Cashel had gone straight ahead, he’d have had to hunch, but the path followed living arches that would have let someone even taller walk upright.

He smiled; well, of course. The Nine were much taller than he was.

In the center of the garden was a large, mossy clearing. The path led to it and then away toward the temple on the other side. He stopped, stretching out his right foot to touch the moss with his big toe. The surface beneath quivered like jelly; it was neither soil nor water.

Cashel grinned. Things had been too easy thus far. He couldn’t believe he was the first man to wonder what really went on in the temple, nor that the Nine were so innocent that they had nothing to hide. If he hadn’t found a trap, it just meant that the trap was still waiting for him.

As another trap might be, of course.

Cashel backed two steps, then sprang forward. He slammed his staff into the firm ground at the edge of the bog and vaulted with seven feet of hickory as his pivot. He bent over as he came down on the other side so that he wouldn’t tumble back. He’d cleared the trap by more than arm’s length.

Still smiling but still careful, Cashel made his way to the temple’s high, narrow door. It was bronze but had only a simple latch rather than a lock of some kind.

Thinking it might be barred on the other side, Cashel lifted the latch gently, then pulled the door ajar. A pale greenish radiance marked the crack between the panel and its stone jamb; if there were sounds from within, they were lost in the river’s faint gurgle.

Cashel opened the door the rest of the way and stepped inside, his shoulders brushing both jambs. He didn’t close it behind him.

He was in a shallow room which ran the full width of the temple. It was for storage, he’d have guessed, except that nothing was stored here.

He looked up. Bars crossed the room the short way, spaced along the width. They were thick bronze, polished in the center by wear. Dark robes hung from hooks on the inside wall, one beneath each bar.

Cashel counted them: all the fingers of one hand, and the other hand except for the thumb. Nine.

There was a passage a little longer than a man is tall in the center of the room. Carefully, walking left side forward with his staff slanted across his chest ready to strike, Cashel moved down it toward a light, just bright enough to have color.

There were faint sounds from the room beyond. It wasn’t people talking, more like the clicks and slurps of dogs at the carcase of a—

“Duzi!” Cashel shouted. He leaped out of the passage, his quarterstaff raised. The chamber beyond was large and the height of the temple’s peaked roof. The ceiling glowed the hue of pond scum in the summer.

The Nine looked up from the corpse they were devouring. Without their robes Cashel couldn’t imagine he’d ever thought they were human. Their chitinous bodies had no color but that of the squamous light, and their beaked jaws were toothless.

Cashel stepped forward, spinning the staff. He wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out, but he was going to try. The Nine didn’t have weapons, and their spindly limbs would shatter under iron-shod hickory.

The Nine curled their abdomens forward beneath the two pairs of legs on which they stood. From their tails squirted sticky fluid that hardened as it splashed over Cashel’s head and torso.

Cashel strode forward, willing the staff to spin but feeling the thick hickory bend under the pressure of his arms. The ferrules were glued to his body; the staff couldn’t move.

Three of the creatures sprayed Cashel’s legs. He tried to take another step. Like swimming through molasses…and then not even that. Cashel toppled to the stone floor, as helpless as a trussed hen.

The Nine bent over him, chittering among themselves. One of them reached up delicately with a pincered forelimb and pushed a fragment of flesh back into its beak.

Sharina sucked in her stomach as the dory lifted over the crest of an incoming wave. Unatis, the boatman, feathered his left oar and pulled hard with the right one. The rowlock squealed like a rabbit in a hawk’s talons.

“Sister take it!” said Carus, sitting in the bow. “You’ll wake Lerdoc in his tent with a racket like that!”

“We will not,” said Unatis calmly, leaning into both oars now that he had the dory straightened to his satisfaction. “But if the lady would take the tallow block from the basket under my thwart and grease the pin with it, that would quiet the oars.”

He grinned at Sharina, facing him from the stern. Unatis was an old waterman from Carcosa harbor; it took more than an angry prince to worry him.

Sharina found the container easily, but in the bad light it took her a moment to open the lid; it was pegged on through loops in the wicker. The tallow was in a wooden block; a screw base drove the column of grease up as it was used. It was a clever device, and a bit of a surprise to find here in a waterman’s kit.

Carus laughed. “Aye,” he said, “I’m worrying about silly dangers I could change instead of the big ones that I cannot. That’s always the way while I’m sitting with nothing to do but wait.”

“We’ll be to where you told me soon,” Unatis said calmly, spacing his speech between strokes of his oars. “A mile off the shore where the Blaise fleet is anchored. After that you’ll have no waiting, unless you change your mind and have me take you back to dry land to sleep in a warm bed.”

Carus snorted. “That’s the last thing I want to think about,” he said. “When we’ve settled this matter, though, I’ll sleep for a week.”

Sharina had tallowed the port thole pin. She twisted the screw and leaned to her right to daub the other too; if one squealed, the other might soon.

The dory lifted onto another swell. Unatis put the bow into it, then brought them back to the previous heading as they started down the trough.

“There’s a westerly current tonight,” he said. “Not strong, but a knot or two. If the prince doesn’t mind taking a waterman’s advice, you’d best start from here unless you plan on swimming to Cordin.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Or I could take you and the lady closer inshore,” he said. “A mile is a long swim for a lady.”

“I’ll tell that to the next lady I meet,” said Sharina. She’d already loosed her sash; now she ducked to pull off the tunic she’d worn for the long pull seaward from the royal encampment. “I’m from Barca’s Hamlet, where the only Lady is the one we pray to.”

Which I’ll be doing tonight, that She may preserve me for the kingdom’s sake and my friends’ sakes, she thought with a wry smile.

Sharina lifted the oilcloth bundle holding the clothes she’d change into when they reached shore. Wrapped in the center of the silk tunics and embroidered cape was her Pewle knife. In part she’d brought it as a talisman, but the big knife was used to hard strokes and so was the woman who carried it now.

“Ready?” she said to Carus.

The boatman shipped his oars. His bushy moustache fluttered for a moment as he took in Sharina’s slim, moonlit body; then he averted his eyes as if from an unexpected horror.

“Aye,” said the king, raising his own much larger bundle. He’d stripped off his tunic also, but around his waist was a fabric belt and a dagger enclosed in sheath of leather boiled in wax and lanolin. “Now?”

Sharina slipped over the side, holding her bundle out in front of her. She’d picked her time well, with the dory sliding sideways into a trough that carried it away when she thrust for the shore.

Stretching her body out behind the bundle, Sharina kicked like a frog. Her legs alone would do the work. She could use the clothing to buoy her up if she needed to rest, but unless the current changed unexpectedly, she doubted that would be necessary.

Unatis had been right about the current—of course. The pressure of the water on Sharina’s right side was worrying, but her conscious mind knew that it was taking her to where she wanted to be. The awareness she was in the grip of a power greater than her own still made her uncomfortable.

She giggled, snorted seawater, and giggled again.

“Is everything all right, girl?” Carus called. The king was on her left side; she couldn’t see him so with her head cocked to the right to breathe, but he sounded close.

“Everything’s fine,” she said, raising her voice. She was a natural righthander, so turning onto her right side would be uncomfortable. “I apparently just realized that the sea is bigger than I am. That doesn’t say much for my perception, does it?”

Carus laughed—and choked silent on seawater in his turn. They kicked on in companionable silence.

Bonfires and lamplight gleamed for the full arc of the bay holding Count Lerdoc’s vessels and army. The fires weren’t large enough individually to silhouette a ship, but as Sharina slanted toward the coast she got a feel for the anchorage. Lights vanished and reappeared as her angle to this hull or that one changed.

The camp’s size staggered her. From the land, by daylight, she hadn’t appreciated just how big it was. She knew that Blaise discipline was loose, so the number of fires was relatively greater than it would’ve been in the royal army; but she knew also that the count’s forces were very great.

The moon was nearly full, gleaming on the swells and turning foam to silver. A watchman in the stern of a moored transport blew his trumpet. He didn’t see Sharina and the king; he’d been blowing the same long note at intervals since sundown. What he thought he proved, other than that he was awake, escaped Sharina.

The shore was coming closer. Sharina wasn’t tired, but it was time to get a better view. She stopped kicking and lifted her chest onto the buoyant sack of clothing. For a moment she saw nothing but upward-slanting water; then she went over the crest and took in the shoreline less than three furlongs away.

Some of the biggest ships were anchored even farther from the beach than she and Carus—twenty feet to her left—had already penetrated. The shoreline here shelved more gradually than that of the smaller bay just north where the royal fleet had landed, so vessels too large to draw up on land had to stay well out.

Carus came over to her with kicks and three fierce sweeps of his right arm. “They can lighter the cargo and passengers ashore…” he said, nodding to the nearest of the thousand-tun vessels. “Those ships won’t have a chance if a storm breaks, though.”

Sharina glanced up at the clear sky, and said, “Do you think the wizards of Moon Wisdom are still controlling the weather?”

Carus chuckled. “I think Count Lerdoc’s a neck-or-nothing madman who’s praying a storm won’t wreck him if the danger even crosses his mind,” he said. “The problem with an enemy who takes risks is that sometimes he gets lucky.”

His moonlit smile was wry, as he added, “Which my enemies have often learned.”

The trumpet called again. The tock! tock! tock! of wood on wood sounded from the western arm of the bay. Sharina couldn’t guess if it were a signal or just late-night carpentry to repair a shelter or a ship.

Carus pointed with his whole arm. “There, we’ll come ashore where those boats are beached. The bigger ships might have somebody on board, but those lighters won’t have anything but a watchman, if that.”

“If there is a watchman?” Sharina said, kicking occasionally to keep her at arm’s length upcurrent of the king.

“Then we’ll deal with him,” Carus said. “One good thing about a beach is we don’t have to worry about how to get the blood off.”

Sharina ducked and resumed kicking her way toward shore. In a peasant village, you slaughtered most of the herd at the first touch of frost. That way the remainder would be able to winter over on the fodder you’d stored. In a war it was men you killed, in order that the kingdom itself survive.

Maybe in another age it wouldn’t have to be that way. Sharina had enough to do simply trying to save this age and the myriads of innocent people who lived in it. If a few rebels died, well, that was the way of the world.

Sailors on watch shouted to one other from ship to anchored ship. Sharina passed close enough to a vessel with a high, rounded stern that she could’ve thrown a pebble to it; Carus was closer yet. A lantern burned on the deckhouse. Its light didn’t illuminate the water, but it would blind a watchman to the blotches on a swell that were swimmers instead of driftwood or flotsam lost when the army disembarked.

The ships’ boats were pulled up at the tide line and fastened to oars driven blade first into the sand. Sharina lowered her head and, with her left hand, gripped the cords tying her bundle. She used her right arm and both legs to drive her the rest of the way ashore. The bonfire higher up the beach silhouetted the men around it and the boats below, but if there was a watchman, he was asleep in the belly of one of them.

Sharina’s left elbow touched sand. She hunched over her bundle and let the receding surf ground her. When it did, she ran in a crouch to where the bows of a large dory and a smaller boat formed a sheltering V.

Carus was already there, untying his clothing with his left hand. He grinned at her.

At the nearby fire a sailor was shaking time on a tambourine while a comrade sang, “…just another fatal wedding, just another broken heart…” No one was on watch at the boats.

That was just as well for him. In the king’s right hand, shimmering in the moonlight, was a dagger. Its blade of polished steel would open a man like a trout before he even had time to gasp.