Mistress of the Catacombs

11

As the councillors filed in from the other end of the big chamber, accompanied by their aides, Sharina saw many expressions go blank. She and Liane were seated to either side of Carus at the round table.

Liane always attended council meetings, but in the past she’d sat slightly back from the table in the capacity of Garric’s secretary; Carus had made her an open participant, over her own objection. Princess Sharina of Haft—Sharina smiled; she wouldn’t have minded the style of address she had to use in court if it weren’t for the hot, bulky garments that went with it—was sometimes present, but on those occasions she sat at the end of the table among lesser invitees rather than taking the place of honor at Garric’s right.

King Carus had placed her there, not Sharina herself. Sharina knew Carus needed the support of both women to carry off his impersonation of Garric, but there was more going on than that. Garric genuinely tried to get along with others; Carus was much more convinced of his own authority. If several of the noblemen found the presence of two young women at his council offensive—so much the worse for the noblemen!

Though Lord Waldron, head of the royal army, was seventy years old, he walked straight as a spearshaft and his mind was as hard as the spear’s steel head. He glared through Liane toward Carus as an aide drew out the chair to her left for Waldron to sit on.

Carus looked back at him. The king’s face was drawn with sleeplessness and frustration, and the anger in his eyes had nothing to do with matters of precedence. Waldron had proved often in his long life that he feared nothing in this world, but Sharina watched his expression grow more guarded now. He wasn’t afraid of Carus, but the king’s fury showed that this would be no ordinary council meeting.

Chancellor Royhas settled beside Sharina with a murmured, “Princess…” If he was disconcerted to find Prince Garric flanked by two women, he concealed the fact with his usual aplomb. Royhas was as wellborn as Waldron, but the soldier was a great landholder from the north of the island while Royhas came from the aristocracy of trade centered in Valles.

Liane leaned to whisper in Carus’ ear. The king gave a hard smile, and said in a normal voice—not loud, especially against the shuffle of feet and scrape of chairs, but loud enough all those around him could hear, “The aides need to be present, Liane. Even if we take precautions, what happens here won’t be a secret long. It’ll be the speed we act with that saves us.”

Waldron raised a hand above his shoulder and crooked a finger. An aide—a blond youth with the face of cherub but a swordsman’s thick wrists—bent his head close so that Waldron could whisper to him.

The boy nodded and nodded again, then set off for the doorway against the flow of those still entering. He started running as soon he reached the corridor.

Carus had been watching the byplay also. He turned, met Sharina’s eyes, and grinned broadly.

Lord Attaper stood just inside the door. He’d arrived for the meeting dressed as commander of the Blood Eagles in gilded cuirass and helmet, studded leather apron, and heavy boots. Attaper even wore his equipment belt, but his ivory-inlaid sword and dagger scabbards were empty.

“Your highness?” he called. He gestured to the doorway, empty now that the last entrants were sitting down. Each councillor’s aides stood against the wall behind their principal.

“Right, close us up,” Carus said, his raised voice covering the buzz of whispers. Chairs scuffed, but there was dead silence by the time the heavy panel slammed under the pull of Attaper’s arm.

Instead of taking the empty chair midway along the right-hand curve of the table, Attaper stood at parade rest beside the doorway. Carus looked at him and grinned again. The Blood Eagle, his feet spread and his hands crossed behind his back, had chosen a place outside the formal seating order to avoid giving superior status to his rival Lord Waldron.

Carus swept his gaze across the council. His eyes had the hard glint of a sea eagle viewing white foam on the wave tops, judging which flecks were wind and which might be made by the fins of fish just below the surface.

“We’re being attacked by rogues who call themselves the Confederacy of the West,” he said. “They’re using wizardry now, though they’ll be bringing swords out soon I shouldn’t wonder. We’re going to cut them off at the knees by moving on them immediately.”

Carus paused to let what he’d just said sink in. Aides scribbled in waxed notebooks or on sheets of smooth-planed white birch; the seated principals glanced around to check their colleagues’ reaction, but for the most part they kept silent.

Lord Angier, who held a rotating appointment as representative of the united guilds of Valles, was the exception. More puffed up by his presence in the council than daunted by awareness that he was far the most junior person in the room, he said, “What do you mean, ‘We’re being attacked by wizardry,’ your highness?”

Carus pointed his left index finger at Angier. In a voice that was no less terrible for being quiet, he said, “Guildsman, stupid questions wouldn’t amuse me even when time wasn’t as short as it is today. Shut your mouth and listen.”

Angier gaped, first at the king and then at the chancellor, who Sharina knew had acted as his patron. Royhas grimaced and jerked his head in a swift gesture of negation. Angier suddenly understood the enormity of what he’d done; he wilted visibly.

“Right,” said Carus softly.

If Garric had been chairing this meeting, there’d have been a babble of voices—some raised in shouts. With Carus at the head of the table, Sharina had a vision of these same men facing a lion in an enclosed space. A hungry lion.

“The Confederates’re gathering their forces at Donelle on the east coast of Tisamur,” the king said. “Donelle seems to be where the wizards in league with them have their den as well.”

Liane opened the parchment codex on which she’d written her notes on the Confederacy, summarizing information from a score of sources. Garric would have asked her to brief the assembly at this point. Carus didn’t bother—with an explanation or with Liane, either one.

“I’m going to take the fleet and the army to Tisamur,” he continued harshly, “land in the Bight of Donelle, smash the Confederacy’s army, and hang every wizard I can catch. Zettin and Koprathu—I’ll sail in three days. How many ships will you have ready?”

Zettin, the Admiral of the Fleet, was a nobleman in his late thirties—a former Blood Eagle who’d take any risk for success. Master Koprathu was the elderly Clerk of the Fleet Office responsible for outfitting Admiral Zettin’s forces. Both reacted with shock in their different ways.

“Three days?” said Koprathu. He opened a satchel, taking out an abacus and a series of accounts scratched onto potsherds with a stylus. “Oh, that’s much too soon, sir, we’ll need at least—”

“Your highness,” said Zettin, jumping to his feet, “I’m ready to go now with the ten ships of the guard squadron!”

“Koprathu,” King Carus said, “I didn’t ask for an opinion, I want a number: how many ships can you get ready in three days? Zettin—”

His glance shifted, his face grew harder.

“Lord Zettin,” he continued, “I could train an ape to caper and do tricks for me. What I need from you isn’t noble posturing but hard facts and the readiness to do as you’re told. I’ll ask you once more: how many ships can be ready to sail in three days?”

Zettin’s face didn’t change for a measurable instant; the look of noble insouciance remained long after it could possibly have any connection with what was going on in the admiral’s mind. Waldron leaned forward, watchful rather than hopeful—though he’d objected at the time, Garric gave the fleet command to Attaper’s protégé Zettin.

“There are seventy-six trireme hulls that I trust to swim,” Zettin said. “In the arsenal, the builders’ yards, and the squadron on duty downriver at the Pool. I have thirty-seven hundred men. That’s nominally, but I expect that a sweep of the harbor for sailors will about make up for attrition from sickness and desertion. So, eighteen to twenty ships fully manned, with more in proportion as space is used for cargo and passengers instead of oarsmen. Plus the phalanx, who train with us part of the time but aren’t under my command.”

“Good,” said Carus, gesturing Zettin back to his seat. Zettin sat quickly and gratefully. Without the king’s command, he’d have been in a quandary as to whether to sit or stand—and feeling a fool whichever he chose.

Master Koprathu turned over the yellow-glazed shard on which he jotted notes with a fine brush and started working on the back. The shards holding his accounts were spreading in a three-tiered arc before him, encroaching on the space belonging to the councillors to either side. They edged away from the clerk, not least because some of the low-fired pots were crumbling.

Koprathu must have been aware of Carus’ gaze—and that of everyone else in the room, drawn by the king’s eyes. He continued working with desperate animation, never looking up. Sweat beaded his forehead.

Carus nodded brusk approval. He turned. “Lord Waldron,” he said, “what’s the status of the army for deployment in three days?”

Another of Waldron’s aides, this one a grizzled fellow nearly the general’s own age, was trying to offer him a sheaf of paper. It probably held the morning reports of the regiments under his command. Waldron waved the man off impatiently.

“Of the phalanx, cross-trained as oarsmen,” Waldron said, “five thousand, three hundred and seventeen present for duty this morning. Heavy infantry, not cross-trained, two thousand, one hundred and twelve present for duty. Light infantry—”

The archers and javelin men; scouts and skirmishers for the main army and useful as marines in a sea fight.

“—one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-nine present for duty; but I think I can bring that number up by several hundred in three days. They’ll come running from their small-holdings if they hear there’s a chance for loot and a fight.”

Waldron and the king exchanged hard smiles.

“Cavalry,” Waldron continued, “only seven hundred and sixteen in and around Valles. Several thousand more if there were time to raise the household troops of my northern neighbors, but three days isn’t long enough for that.”

“Bring five squadrons south for security in Valles while we’re gone,” Carus said with a nod. “I doubt we’ll have bottoms to transport seven hundred horses anyway, let alone fodder for them.”

He paused, then added without raising his voice, “The horsemen will fight as infantry if I order it?”

“They will,” said Waldron in the tones a glacier would use if it were very angry. “Or they’ll crawl from my camp on their bellies as foresworn cowards.”

“My camp, Lord Waldron,” the king said with a gentle smile, “but I’m fortunate to have a commander who understands that real honor doesn’t depend on sitting in a saddle.”

He cleared his throat. “You sent your aide out before the council opened?”

Lord Attaper looked from Carus to Waldron sharply, then made his face blank. Placed where he was by the door, he’d missed the interaction between Waldron and the youth.

“I alerted the army for deployment in twenty-four hours,” Waldron said, beaming with satisfaction that had nothing soft about it. “If you’d called this council to announce a Founder’s Day parade, then the exercise would still have kept my men on their toes.”

Attaper grinned at his rival in grudging admiration.

Aides were hunching beside their principals’ chairs, whispering numbers and exchanging notebooks or whole files. Everyone at the table save for Liane and Sharina was waiting for the king’s hard gaze to spear them; waiting, and dreading the questions that would follow.

“Royhas, how many merchant ships are there in the harbor of, say, fifty tons’ burden or better?” Carus demanded.

Instead of looking up from the documents now spread before him on the table, Royhas stabbed a vellum notebook with his index finger and slid it through the litter in front of him. “Forty-seven in Valles, twelve more between Valles and the mouth of the River fields,” he said. “Some of them are outbound, but we can catch them with a mounted courier.”

He flipped back two pages in the notebook, then raised his eyes to meet the king’s. “We can expect seven to ten more vessels to arrive in the next three days,” Royhas added, smiling with his own tight satisfaction. “Based on normal traffic for this time of year.”

“Your highness!” Master Koprathu cried. “Your highness! I’ve blocks and cordage for forty-seven triremes and oar-sets for thirty-nine—but masts for only twenty-two. I’ve been trying to get an appropriation for more masts from the treasury, but—”

“Quit while you’re ahead, Koprathu!” Carus said before Lord Pterlion, the treasurer, could weigh in with an angry response. The clerk’s head jolted up with a look of horror.

Sharina laid her fingertips on Carus’ arm; not at all her brother’s arm, not at this moment. Carus jerked his head around to meet her eyes. His expression dissolved into a smile.

“Which you are, Master Koprathu, very much ahead,” Carus boomed over a bubble of incipient laughter. “If we strip the masts out of the merchantmen we’re not using for stores and cavalry mounts, can you get more triremes outfitted? Needs must, we’ll row the whole way, but if we can I’d like to save the phalanx for their other work when we land.”

“I—” said Koprathu. He was bug-eyed with amazement. “Well, well yes, of course, but I’ll need men—”

“Lord Zettin?” the king said with an eyebrow raised in interrogation.

“He can have two thousand men in an hour if he needs them,” the admiral said. “We’ll have every ship you point out down to a bare hull if that’s what you want.”

Zettin blinked, suddenly aware that he was posturing again. In a rush of decision he blurted, “No, by the Lady! We really can! I mean it!”

Carus nodded dismissal. “Is the City Prefect here?” he demanded. “Lord Putran, isn’t it? Where’s he?”

A middle-aged, balding, terrified man in a gray robe stood against the wall in a corner; he had a large document case at his feet. He raised his hand, and squeaked, “Milord?” before slapping a hand over his mouth in horror.

“Don’t worry about the bloody form of address!” Carus roared. “What have you got to say? Where’s Putran?”

Sharina reached for his arm again, but there was no need. The king’s sinewy left hand closed over hers affectionately, gave her a pat, and released her while his attention remained centered on the man in gray. Several of the aides along the wall goggled at the way Prince Garric showed his affection for his sister.

“I’m Lord Putran’s chief clerk, your highness,” the fellow said. “The lord is, well, we’re not sure where his lordship is. He, ah, doesn’t come to the office very frequently. But I usually handle…”

Carus turned his head to glare past Sharina toward the chancellor. Royhas gestured curtly. “I’ll take it in hand, your highness,” he said. “There’ll be three possible candidates for the post before you tomorrow morning.”

“Not before me,” Carus snapped. “Give them to Liane. But that isn’t the business for now anyway.”

He crooked a finger toward the clerk. “All right, how much grain is there in the city now? Enough to feed fifteen thousand men for ten days?”

“Not in government warehouses, your highness,” the clerk said. His eyes bobbed up and down toward the document case. He wanted to open it, but if he squatted to do so he’d drop out of the king’s sight over the table.

He paused, then went on, “Even if we add rye and barley to the stores of wheat, there’d only be full rations for four days.”

Carus smiled grimly. “I didn’t say ‘government warehouses,’” he said, but he didn’t snarl. Competence counted with this king, and the clerk’s answer had put him on a plane with Lord Waldron. “I said the city. For this emergency, I’ll let the residents of Valles eat rats for a week if that’s what it takes to supply my troops.”

“Oh!” the clerk said. “Well, in that case…Yes, that easily, even by the tax declarations. And I know for a fact that those are low, disgracefully low!”

His face grew worried. “But milor…ah, but your highness,” he said, “these are private property and—”

“Royhas, draft an emergency decree,” Carus interrupted. “We’ll promulgate it when we leave here.”

“Done, your highness,” the chancellor said. The aide who’d been kneeling at his side as Royhas whispered hopped back to the wall, scribbling with a blunt stylus on a waxed board.

“Pterlion, they’ll be issuing chits on the treasury,” Carus continued, turning his attention to the treasurer. “These will be honored. Do you understand?”

Lord Pterlion, a diminutive man with the manner not of a mouse but a shrew, glared across the table. His lips were pursed into a beak. He dipped his head twice, nodding agreement, but he obviously didn’t trust what would come out if he opened his mouth.

“But if there’s undeclared goods in the warehouses,” Carus added, no longer eyeing his treasurer as a possible next meal, “then the chits come due in a quarter, not at the month. All right?”

Pterlion smiled, an expression his face hadn’t practiced often. “Much better, your highness,” he said. “If I can’t find the money in ninety days, then you need another man in this ministry.”

“Waldron, they’ll need escorts,” Carus said. The way his head turned disconcerted Sharina; it was like watching a weathercock in a gusty storm. “Provide—”

He looked at the clerk again. “What is your name, anyway?” he snapped. “You from the prefect’s office?”

“Hauk, your highness!”

“Right, provide Hauk with however many men he thinks he’ll need.”

“I am going to use the four regiments of heavy infantry to carry the grain,” Waldron said, meeting the king’s eyes. Liane, seated between them, leaned back in her chair with the look of someone who’d found herself between duelists. “It’ll give them exercise, and it’ll show me how they’ll react to an order they don’t like. Especially their officers.”

For a moment Carus was bowstring taut, reacting to the “I am,” rather than “May I?” in Waldron’s statement. Sharina and Liane reached out simultaneously, their mouths open in fear of the king’s reaction.

Carus shrugged them aside, almost angrily, but he said in a growl, “Aye, a good plan, milord. A fine plan.”

“Your highness?” chirped Hauk. “I wonder—will you be wanting dried vegetables, wine, and cheese as well? Because we could get those supplies at the same time.”

Liane gasped with relief; Sharina felt herself relax blissfully. She’d been poised to grab the king’s arm if he started to slap his army commander, but she didn’t think she was either fast enough or strong enough. She wondered what sort of reward would be suitable for the clerk who’d accidentally prevented a crisis.

King Carus laughed with the booming joy of a man who loves life and lives it fully. He rose to his feet, putting his hands on the shoulders of the women seated beside him.

“Yes, Master Hauk,” he said, “we’ll want those other supplies as well. And by the way”—his gaze, sword-edge hard again, stabbed Royhas—“you’ve just become City Prefect. Royhas, I won’t need those names, but take care of it if Hauk has to be ennobled or some such nonsense. Eh?”

Royhas nodded. Faces—noble faces—around the table showed shock, and some of the aides looked worse than that, but nobody objected aloud. Which was just as well….

“I…” said Hauk. He looked like a carp sucking air. “I…I…”

“Your highness?” said the grizzled aide who’d offered Waldron the morning reports. “Normally the troops wouldn’t carry their supplies, they’d—”

He stopped, suddenly aware of what he was saying and who he was saying it to. The man facing him might have a youth’s body, but the soul looking out through the eyes wasn’t one which had to be told how an army moved.

“Aye, normally we’d land every night on a major island and buy food for the next day,” the king said. “We’d reach Tisamur some time next year that way.”

He smiled, not a gentle expression, as he swept the room with his eyes.

“Maybe a little sooner?” he went on. “But we’re not going to do that. We’re going to strike straight across the Inner Sea, overnighting on islets where nobody lives and nobody can warn that we’re coming. We’ll carry enough food to get us to Tisamur.”

He pointed across the table to a plump man in an immaculate blue robe, his fingers tented before him. Lord Tadai had no formal appointment at the moment, but his presence in the council had surprised no one. He was wealthy, powerful, and extremely intelligent.

“Lord Tadai,” Carus said, “I want you to go to Pandah and embargo the shipping there.”

“Go ahead of the fleet, you mean, your highness?” Tadai said, laying his hands flat on the table. Pandah, the only large island in the Inner Sea, was a stopping point for much of the traffic between distant islands.

“The fleet’s not going by way of Pandah,” Carus said with a broad grin. “We’re striking straight to the Sidera Atoll north of Shengy to regroup. You’ll send all merchantmen with cargoes of food to join us there, or stage on to Tisamur if we’ve left already. I don’t care who they are or where they’re bound, they’re supplying the royal army now.”

“For which they’ll be paid?” Pterlion asked.

“For which they’ll be paid,” Carus agreed, nodding, “but Zettin will make sure Lord Tadai has enough marines with him to put a squad aboard every ship he sends south. To remind the citizens of outlying parts of their duty to the Kingdom of the Isles.”

Lord Waldron snorted. Like most landowners from Northern Ornifal, he regarded himself and his peers as the upholders of the kingdom and its only real citizens. Everyone else, even the merchant nobility of Valles, were on a lower plane. As for the status of mere sailors from other islands—well, indeed!

“Three galleys to Pandah, your highness?” Lord Zettin asked.

Carus frowned. “Four, I think,” he said. “Under an officer who’s a seaman himself—”

“Because I assuredly am not,” said Tadai, smiling comfortably, with his fingers tented again. His oval nails were gilded. “As I’ve proved, I’m afraid.”

The king set his balled fists on the table and leaned onto them. “If anybody doesn’t know his job, come to me,” he said. “If anybody’s trying to do his job and runs into somebody who’s getting in the way of that, come to me.”

He grinned like a really happy leopard. “But I give extra credit to the folks who don’t bother me,” he added, “because I have my own job to do. Does everybody understand?”

There was no sound save the rustle of documents and the whicker of sandals on the tiled floor as councillors prepared to rise.

“Then, gentlemen, go do your jobs!” the king thundered. “And know by my oath on the Lady that I will do mine!”

He gestured to the door. Attaper hauled it open, barely in time to let the first of the hastening councillors out unimpeded.

Carus watched them go. In a voice that only Sharina and Liane could hear, he said, “I sent Ilna into trouble. By the Lady! My sword will get her out again—or I’ll die trying!”

Garric awoke to the pressure of a hand on his shoulder. He sat upright, rousing Tint; she whuffed at his feet.

Garric half smiled, half frowned at memory of the time he shared his mind with King Carus. In those recent days he’d have come out of his sleep with a drawn dagger in his hand. Carus wasn’t with him now, and an innkeeper’s son doesn’t have reflexes honed by slaughter and assassination.

The ancient king’s experiences might have been a better preparation for the life Gar the Bandit was leading now.

Vascay had wakened him. Moonlight trickling through chinks in the wattle-and-daub walls provided the only illumination, but Gar’s eyes saw clearly by it.

The other bandits lay sprawled on the straw, snoring or not as their habit was. Alcomm alone seemed wakeful, huddling in a corner and squeezing the biceps of his severed arm with his remaining hand.

“The wizard went out a little bit ago,” Vascay whispered. “I waited till he was away before I got you up. I thought you’d want to follow him just to see what’s going on. He looks to be heading back to the boathouse, but I guess your ladyfriend—”

He nodded toward Tint. His tone was matter-of-fact, with nothing of a sneer in it.

“—could track him wherever he went, right?”

Garric got to his feet and pulled on the outer tunic he’d been using for a bedcover. He didn’t have boots or sandals to worry about. Gar hadn’t worn footgear since the seawolf chewed on his skull, so the soles of his feet were as tough as oxhide.

“Yes, all right,” Garric said. “Are you coming too?”

Vascay snorted a quick laugh. “It’s not worth me putting my leg on, lad,” he said. “Not when I’ve got you to take care of things.”

The chieftain grimaced, stroking the stump with hard hands. He’d have been sitting cross-legged if he’d had both legs.

“Clamping to a horse’s flank makes the stump swell worse than if I’d hiked the way on the peg all these miles,” he said. “Cursed if I know why. One of the mysteries of life, I suppose.”

Garric nodded. He glanced at his sword belt, hanging from a tack hook in the empty stall where he and Tint had bedded down. He drew the dagger and thrust the bare blade under the sash of his tunic, then said to Vascay, “I’ll borrow a javelin. All right?”

“Aye,” said Vascay in a subdued voice. He didn’t look up. His hands continued to knead his stump.

The valves of the stable’s double door were ajar; Garric glanced through them. Metron was out of sight, and the night was silent. He slipped out with the beastgirl following as smoothly as a stream of oil.

“I want to follow the wizard, Tint,” Garric said. “Can you take me the way he’s gone?”

Tint ambled off on all fours. “We kill Metron, Gar?” she asked.

Garric lengthened his stride to keep up with the beastgirl, though she wasn’t really in a hurry. “No, Tint,” he said. “Metron’s on our side. Or we’re on his. He likes us.”

“Metron like Gar?” Tint said. She made a sound with her teeth. “Metron like Gar for food, maybe.”

That was pretty close to Garric’s own judgment on the wizard, but he didn’t say so in case Tint misunderstood it. Garric had known even before he became Prince of the Isles that sometimes you had to ally with people you’d rather not have met.

Metron might not be a trustworthy friend, but the Intercessor was a deadly enemy. If Tint’s long jaws tore Metron’s throat out, it was hard to see how Garric and his new colleagues would survive the efforts of Protectors of the Peace guided by wizardry.

The trail Tint followed led around the back of the U-shaped villa, past outbuildings and a litter of broken vehicles and equipment. Geese, roosting for the night, quacked nervously awake. Garric expected a watchman to appear, but the only response from the house was the squeak of a shutter being eased open enough for an eye to peer out.

Garric frowned, wondering if the noise would warn Metron. He snorted. No, of course not. The wizard was neither a countryman nor—from what Garric had seen—interested enough in anything but his own desires.

Besides, Garric had nothing to apologize for even if Metron learned he was being watched. The wizard was the one who needed to explain where he was sneaking off to.

The track led toward the boathouse in the grove as Vascay had guessed. Garric saw a flicker of light through the willows. It could have come from a fire, but he thought there was the peculiar rosy tinge of wizardlight.

Maybe that was just nervousness. He grimaced and checked the javelin’s balance.

Tint rose to a half crouch and sniffed the air, then dropped back on all fours to enter the grove. Wizardry didn’t seem to bother the beastgirl the way it did many men.

Garric’s concern wasn’t so much for what Metron intended to do—which for the moment at least could be expected to advance the plans that the bandits had agreed to—but rather for what the wizard might do if he blundered. In Garric’s experience, most wizards had more power than judgment; they were like blind men swinging swords.

He thought of Tenoctris and smiled. Tenoctris used the slight power she had to carve minute changes into the cosmos. The Kingdom of the Isles stood in his day because of the consummate skill with which Tenoctris worked.

Garric walked cautiously after Tint. The path wasn’t overgrown, but branches had encroached from either side, narrowing it to the width of a single person. The woods of the borough where timber was a valuable commodity were never so ragged as this. This undergrowth would’ve been pruned back, for kindling and to prevent it from crowding the roots of the great trees whose dead branches were the hamlet’s major source of firewood.

Tint clicked her teeth and halted. She stood with a hand on the trunk of the beech that had been planted to shade the boathouse. Garric looked past her.

Metron knelt on the dock where Garric had pulled him up from the water. He chanted in time to the motions of his ivory athame, but his words of power were muted by the distance.

A ball of red light formed in the air over the dock. It shrank down to a vivid pinpoint but didn’t vanish as Garric expected. For a moment the light waxed and waned like a candleflame with the athame’s rhythm; then it steadied, angry and bright.

Metron stopped chanting and sagged. Tint growled deep in her throat. Garric placed his left hand on her shoulders, the way he’d have calmed—steadied, at least—a dog.

At first Garric thought that Metron had finished his business when he ceased chanting, but after a pause the wizard gave a sigh of exhaustion and brought something out of the purse hanging around his neck. Distance kept Garric from being sure, but he guessed it was the ring he’d watched Metron place there when Vascay handed it over.

Instead of resuming his incantation, Metron held the ring out between thumb and forefinger. Garric’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement.

Light winked from the outstretched hand. Metron was positioning the ring so that his bead of wizardlight shone through the tiny sapphire, casting the pattern of its facets onto the pond’s still surface. He adjusted the jewel carefully, looking onto the water beside him.

“We go now, Gar?” Tint asked. “Catch goose and eat, maybe?”

Her voice shocked Garric, though it probably didn’t carry to the wizard. Without thinking, Garric pinched the beastgirl’s long muzzle closed. She jerked away with a snarl, baring her fangs.

Garric stepped back, putting the big beech between him and the wizard. He raised his left hand empty and held the javelin out to the side. He’d treated the beastgirl with disrespect; she’d responded as she’d have done to a member of her tribe who overstepped proper bounds.

But Garric’s body wasn’t as sturdy as those of the beastgirl’s siblings. Tint would be very sorry if she nipped off Gar’s finger, but it could happen regardless.

Horrified at what reflex had made her do to her dominant male, Tint flung herself on the ground and squirmed to Garric’s feet. “Tint sorry!” she moaned. Misery kept her voice low, though she’d obviously forgotten that Garric wanted silence. “Gar hold Tint? Tint sorry!”

Garric knelt and stroked her. “Hush, now, Tint,” he whispered. “Stay quiet for now, then we’ll go back to the stable.”

The beastgirl continued to whimper quietly, but the sound was no more disturbing than her belly rustling on the dry leaves. Garric leaned past the tree trunk again to watch Metron.

The wizard still held the ring. The pond stirred where its patterned light fell. A head and then its torso as well rose from the water. Metron spoke in a voice like the squeal of a hinge binding.

The chitinous figure chirped back in reply. It had four arms and a triangular head that seemed too small to hold a brain. Garric knew that slender, deadly praying mantises wreaked havoc with fellow insects who devoured garden plants, but he’d always found them frighteningly alien. This creature looked like a mantis the size of a man.

Tint watched also, crouched on all fours. Garric felt her body tense; he put his hand on her shoulder again, gripping this time lest his mere touch not be enough to restrain her. She growled like ice sliding from roof slates in the dead of winter.

Metron and the creature continued to converse. The wizard’s screeches were unpleasant, but the replies were worse. It was as though a star had chosen to speak from the night sky.

The creature raised its lower pair of arms in a signal; the upper set were edged and toothed for weapons. Metron bowed and swiped his athame through the bead of wizardlight.

It winked out. Metron lowered his hand, then dropped the ring back into his pouch.

Garric expected the creature to sink into the water the way it had risen; instead it went translucent and lost structure as it vanished. It was like watching a dust cloud disperse. For a moment a shadow showed on the still water; then it too was gone and with it the last sign of the thing that Metron had summoned to him.

The wizard remained where he was, drained by his art. When Metron got his strength back, he’d return to the stable and the bandits with whom he had allied himself.

Garric let out the breath he found he’d been holding. “Let’s go, Tint,” he murmured. He stroked the coarse fur of her back. “Let’s go back to our friends.”

He guessed he’d let her snatch a goose on the way. It wouldn’t be theft: Ceto’s purse had enough copper in it to stand the cost of the bird, and Garric figured the beastgirl had earned more than that today.

Besides, Garric wanted somebody to be pleased about the events of this night.

“Nosabao steseon phontaueella…” Alecto chanted, using the flat of her athame’s blade as a mirror to direct firelight into the branches of the cedar tree she and Ilna sheltered under. “Aiphno ohtikalak….”

Ilna squatted primly, watching Alecto blank-faced but with a feeling of distaste…which made her angry at herself. She’d watched other wizards work and had aided them. The only reason this business bothered her was that she intensely disliked the woman who was performing it.

“Chphuris on sankiste…” said Alecto.

What if Chalcus were here with them? How would he get along with this wild girl?

Ilna snorted. Well enough, no doubt. Far too well for her own comfort, that she was sure of.

“Lampse seison souros!” Alecto cried. She made a final flourish with her knife, an intricate pattern in the air. There was a rustle from above.

The fire was a small one, built from the stems and branches of a wild olive which had sprung up at the base of the great cedar. The wood was green but oily; it caught quickly when Ilna struck sparks from the back of her knife into the wad of milkweed fluff Alecto provided.

The milkweed wasn’t ripe either here—wherever “here” was—or in Valles when Ilna went into her trance. Alecto came from a place distant in time; by a season at least, but very likely from farther than that. She eyed Ilna’s steel knife with as much fear as envy.

A dove toppled end over end to the ground. It hit with a thump, its beak opening and closing slowly. Alecto snatched the bird’s head and broke its neck with a quick jerk.

A second dove flopped down, like the first, stunned but not dead. Ilna killed it, then slipped her paring knife from its case of yellowed bone and began to skin the bird. If they’d had a pot to scald the doves, she’d have plucked them instead, but this would do. Alecto was proceeding in the same fashion, gripping her athame by the end of the blade with a careful gap between the edge and the heel of her hand.

“I was in Valles on Ornifal when I came here,” Ilna said, keeping her eyes on her work. “Where did you come from, mistress?”

Alecto shrugged. “I was at home, outside of Hartrag’s village,” she said. “I put myself into dreamworld to find a nightmare to send to Brasus.”

She chuckled. “He said he was leaving me to go back to his wife and sons,” she said. “So I thought fine, I’ll let him dream about the bitch and her whelps too—with their guts around their necks and their eyes gouged out. See how he likes that!”

Ilna spilled the offal on the bird’s skin, then threaded the giblets on a long splinter that she set over the flames. They’d grill more quickly than the rest of the bird, small though it was. Her empty stomach was already twitching in anticipation of the hot morsels.

Alecto shook her head in mingled disgust and disbelief. “I’d never’ve troubled the Pack,” she said. “Oh, sure, I knew I was going into territory close by theirs, but that didn’t matter unless they’d already been roused. Who’d’ve imagined that?”

Ilna thrust a peeled withe the thickness of her little finger through the squab and set it on the supports she’d prepared while Alecto called the birds down. She’d bound straight sticks in a pair of X-frames instead of bothering to find forked twigs of the proper size and angle.

“Yes, Hartrag’s village,” Ilna said, for the sake of information but also to get her mind off her companion’s casual boasts. “But what island are you from? And who’s the King of the Isles in your time?”

“Island?” Alecto repeated. “I don’t live on an island. I told you, I’m just a bowshot north of Saller’s hut, on the path to Queatwa’s village.”

Ilna’s lips tightened in anger. Then she looked at herself with her mind’s eye and snorted in disbelief at her foolishness.

A year ago she herself had been only vaguely aware that she lived on the island of Haft. She’d had no idea that there was a King of the Isles and had known little more of the Count of Haft in Carcosa. If Alecto now was as ignorant as Ilna had been so recently, that was no reason to scorn her.

Ilna had much better reason than that to scorn Alecto.

“Ah…” she said, thinking about the connections Barca’s Hamlet had with the greater world. She turned her spit a notch. She’d squared the withe where it rested on the supports, then beveled the corners to double the number of faces to give her precise control of the way the bird faced the fire. “Do priests come to your village in the spring to collect tithes for the temple in—”

Not in Carcosa, surely.

“—whatever place has the chief temples of the Lady and the Shepherd?”

“I’ve heard of priests,” Alecto said. “Somebody paid to pray for you, you mean? Not in Hartrag’s village! Sometimes a hermit comes through and some folks give him a meal. Mostly hermits had better be able to knock over a rabbit or a squirrel for themself, though.”

She’d butterflied her squab with twigs and was holding the skewer in her hand instead of using a frame as Ilna did. The firelight threw harsh shadows onto the planes of her face; despite that she looked tired and, to Ilna’s mind, perhaps a little less bestial. Calling doves down to the ground by art was work as surely as climbing the tree to fetch them would have been. Besides, the stress of hiding in the temple must be telling on her muscles as well as Ilna’s.

The reason Ilna so disdained Alecto…the real reason did Ilna no credit, and she was far too honest to hide the truth from herself.

“I was lucky to meet you, I don’t mind saying,” Alecto said, rubbing her eyes with the back of her free hand. She shifted her legs slightly, then reached under the front of her skirt to scratch herself. “I could run, but I couldn’t have run much farther. And the Pack never stop when they’ve taken up a trail.”

“Do you know anything about the people we watched there in the temple?” Ilna said. “If I’m correct, they may call themselves Moon Wisdom and this may be Tisamur. The island of Tisamur.”

“Never heard of them,” Alecto said. She yawned. “Either one.”

She glared at the fire. Ilna turned her squab again, then took the skewer of giblets from the fire and waved it to cool the meat.

“You know it wasn’t just the ones we saw in the room who raised the Pack, don’t you?” Alecto said unexpectedly, looking directly at Ilna. Her eyes winked like beads of polished chert. “They were just focusing it. There were people outside praying with them, too.”

In a softer voice, she added, “More people than I’d ever thought there were. All together.”

“I didn’t know there were other people,” Ilna said. She thought back on the day not so very long ago when she’d entered Carcosa. There were tenements in the city that held more people than lived in all of Barca’s Hamlet. “I’m not a wizard, you know.”

“Don’t give me that!” Alecto snapped. “You wouldn’t be here—you wouldn’t have been where I found you!—if you weren’t a wizard.”

“Believe what you please!” Ilna said. She bit the dove’s gizzard from the skewer and chewed it. The tough muscle, only half-cooked, gave her an outlet for her irritation.

Alecto lapsed back to staring at the fire. “I suppose they think they control the Pack because there’s so many of them,” she said morosely. “They’re wrong, though. If they keep doing it, eventually they’ll let something slip. And then…”

She shook her head. In Alecto’s voice Ilna heard the tone she herself would have used in describing the craftsmanship of another weaver, one who’d attempted more than her skill would permit her to succeed with. Ilna looked at her companion with new interest.

“The Pack doesn’t quit,” Alecto said to the fire. “The people we saw, they think they’re the Pack’s masters. The Pack doesn’t have a master. All it has is hunger. And if you let the Pack loose, before long it’ll come back to feed on you.”

Ilna chewed the dove’s liver. She said nothing.

She wasn’t thinking about the Pack or the nearer dangers of this place in which she found herself. She was thinking about another sort of pattern altogether, a pattern and perhaps a duty.

Chalcus has asked me in every fashion but words, Ilna thought, and I’ve pretended that I didn’t hear him. This girl, this woman, would’ve said yes to Chalcus before she was even asked.

And for that I hate her.

“What’re you looking at me that way for?” Alecto said in sudden alarm. The keen-edged athame was suddenly in her hand.

“What?” said Ilna. “Sorry, I wasn’t looking at you at all. I was thinking about a conversation that I’m going to have when I get home. As I expect to do.”

Alecto grinned like a snarling dog. “The guy you’re planning to talk to isn’t going to like it,” she said approvingly. “Or is it a woman?”

“He’s a man,” Ilna said. “And I think you’re wrong.”

She bit down on the dove’s heart. “More fool him, perhaps,” she added. “But I think he’ll be very pleased.”

“Dawn!” whispered Tilphosa. “Oh, Mistress, You’ve blessed us with the return of light!”

Cashel staggered. He was just as glad as Tilphosa to have daylight again, but the change from dusk to sunrise caught him in mid-step. Ousseau muttered in the crook of Cashel’s left arm, but he didn’t wake up.

A waterfall drummed nearby. When he looked for it, Cashel saw edges of white spray through the leaves. That’d be water, which they all needed badly by now.

“Oh!” Tilphosa repeated. She looked at Cashel. Now that there was real light, her face looked almost as gray as it had in the twilit woods they’d come from.

“Ah…?” she said. “Would it be all right to rest now, Cashel?”

He hadn’t realized Tilphosa was so close to being done in. She’d kept plodding along beside him, not saying much but never complaining.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll be glad to stop myself.”

Cashel turned to look over his shoulder. Hook and Captain Mounix were a stone’s throw behind. They seemed to be managing all right. Anyway, they had enough energy to complain, though they stopped it quick enough when they saw Cashel’s eyes on them.

“We’re stopping?” Mounix croaked. “By the Lady, I can’t go on any farther! Unless”—his expression grew guardedly hopeful—“you want to give me a hand instead of Ousseau. He’s had ease enough, I’d say!”

Cashel squatted expressionlessly and laid Ousseau on the ground. The injured sailor did seem to be doing well. The swelling in his hand and forearm below the bandage was down, and his breathing seemed normal. The touch of cold leaf litter awakened him with a snort.

“You did a good job bandaging Ousseau up,” Cashel said to Tilphosa as he rose. “He was lucky to have you around.”

Tilphosa smiled and laid her fingers on Cashel’s elbow for a moment. “I think we’re doing well,” she said. Her smile tightened as she looked back at Mounix and Hook. She added, “Even them. For what they are.”

The woods back the way the party’d come were still in shadow. The dawn breaking ahead had to do with more than just the time of day.

Cashel shrugged, working stiffness out of his back muscles. He gave his staff a trial spin, mostly to feel the smooth wood shifting among his practiced fingers. It reminded him of home. That was always a good thing; at times like this, the memory of home was one of the best things there could be.

Mounix and Hook had caught up. Ousseau got to his feet and joined them, standing a staff’s length back from Cashel and the girl.

Cashel dipped a ferrule toward where he heard the waterfall. “We’ll head that way and likely camp,” he said. “We need water, and I figure we ought to walk a ways and get a look at what things’re like around here before we bed down.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Hook said, worried rather than belligerent. His eyes moved nervously. “I thought it looked fine.”

“There’s nothing wrong that I know about,” Cashel said patiently. “It’s different, is all, and I thought we best take a look while we’re awake.”

There hadn’t been anything bad even about the woods they’d finally walked out of, but Cashel hadn’t recognized a single one of the trees in the whole long time. Around him now were maples and sourwoods, well leafed out. They were well spread apart, maybe because the clay soil was so stony.

Tilphosa drew herself up like a queen. “Come, Cashel,” she said. “I’m thirsty.”

Her hand on Cashel’s arm, she set off toward the sound of water falling. Cashel, warned by the pressure of her fingers, stepped off when she did. He didn’t know where Tilphosa had picked up her skill, but he guessed she’d be better than fair at driving a yoke of oxen.

Cashel grinned at the thought as they strode along, but as they got closer to the falls the smile left his face because his skin had started to prickle again. Oh, there wasn’t anything dreadful about that; he’d felt it, kind of an itching like when he’d had too much sun, all the way through the woods they’d just left.

It meant wizardry, or anyway it seemed to. Cashel’d gotten used to being without the feeling for the little while he’d been free of it. He didn’t guess he could complain, given the way they’d come to this place. He thought of home again and thought of herding sheep.

“Let me go ahead,” he murmured to Tilphosa, taking the quarterstaff in both hands. The sailors were far enough back that they wouldn’t be getting in his way.

Tilphosa stopped and knelt. She’d been carrying the half-rotted stick ever since she picked it up. She worked at the clay now with the end of it, digging out a stone the size of her foot. It had a fractured edge.

Good girl. A really good girl.

The water draped a sheet of itself over a smooth cliff maybe three times Cashel’s height; it pooled, then drained away to the side. A stand of yellow birches grew on the near side of the pool. Cashel stepped through them, his eyes on the water. Because of how the falls roiled the surface, anything could hide in the pool and not be seen till it wanted to be.

“Hello there,” said a slurred voice behind him.

Cashel spun, the staff crosswise and his right arm cocked to slam the end forward in a blow that’d bend iron. His mouth was open, but he’d managed to avoid—barely—a shout of surprise. He couldn’t see who’d spoken.

“Ooh, he’s quick, too,” said another voice, again from behind. It was a little clearer than the first. “And so—”

Cashel whirled.

“—big!”

The bark of the nearest birch was stained at head height. You could imagine a face there if you tried…and as Cashel watched in amazement, it was more and more a face. The knot that had squirmed during the last word was now a pair of pouting lips.

“Cashel?” Tilphosa shouted. She’d gotten the rock out of the ground. She held it edge first in her right hand as she ran toward the grove. “I’m coming!”

“Oh, my, he’s gorgeous, isn’t he?” called another voice. “Oh, it’s been so long!”

All the trees were changing. It wasn’t fast, nothing you really saw happening. It was more like the water was going down and uncovering the thing that’d been underneath. In place of bark the trunks showed tawny skin and human features.

“Cashel!” Tilphosa said. She put her back to his. “Are they dangerous?”

“Hey, there’s girls in there!” Hook said. He trotted into the grove, holding his sword up beside his ear like he wasn’t sure if he’d need it or not. The other sailors joined him, Ousseau a step before the captain.

The birches laughed, a musical sound but with something catlike about it. Their faces were continuing to form, taking on human roundness instead of being outlines that might have been drawn on bare wood.

“Dangerous?” said the one who’d spoken first. She had high cheekbones and lips now the color of leaves just before they turn brown. “Not to you, girlie. We’re not interested in you.”

“They shouldn’t be interested in her either,” said a face whose eyes slanted upward at the corners the way the eyes of Serians did. She winked at Ousseau. “We’re much nicer than she is, boys. And she’s so skinny!”

Hook touched the cheek of the birch beside him. “It’s real!” he said. “It’s not wood, it’s a real girl!”

The face shifted slightly, and the lips pursed. They kissed Hook’s fingertip.

“Of course we’re real,” the face said. “Real in every way, for a handsome man like you.”

“Cashel, I think we ought to go,” Tilphosa said in a small voice. “Sometimes nymphs can be…”

Cashel glanced at her. Her left hand gripped the crystal lens on her necklace, trying to find comfort in the God she’d been raised to worship. She’d stopped speaking, but her lips continued to move in silent prayer.

Mounix caressed a tree with an expression of wonder and delight. Not only were the faces growing clearer, hinted torsos were beginning to appear on the trunks. Ousseau stood openmouthed, listening to what a nymph whispered into his right ear.

“Come on!” Cashel said in sudden decision. “Drink as much as you can and I’ll fill my bottle. Then we’ll go on back to sleep where the maples were.”

“Leave?” Captain Mounix said. He was fondling the trunk as the face above moaned softly with pleasure. “Not just yet. Look at this!”

Cashel grabbed Mounix by the arm and turned him about. “Now,” he said. “Now.”

Hook looked over his shoulder as if to protest. Cashel said nothing, but Tilphosa made a curt gesture. “Bring him too,” she said, nodding to the wounded sailor.

The carpenter gave her a stricken look but touched Ousseau’s elbow. Ousseau ignored him until Hook seized his bandaged upper arm.

“Hey!” Ousseau screamed. He slapped Hook away with his good hand, then glared at Tilphosa with the expression of a child about to cry. “What’s it to you?” he demanded.

“Come on,” Cashel said bruskly. He shifted Mounix in the direction he wanted him to go and gave him a shove; not hard, but hard enough to get him moving. “We’ll go to where the water comes out downstream and get our drink.”

Cashel and Tilphosa followed the sailors out of the grove stone-faced. Behind them laughed the bright, cruel chorus of the birches.