David Drake - The Gods Return

Sharina demanded. "I'm Platt!" said the prisoner. "I'm the voice of Lord Scorpion!" "Well, I don't know, your highness," Dysart said, wringing his hands. "He matches the suspect's description, but I've never seen Platt myself." He obviously hated to make the admission, but he hadn't hesitated. As Liane had said, he was a good man. "We got the man, your ladyship!" said Prester, patting a hardwood marshal's baton into his left palm. The veteran looked like a section of oak root himself, old and supple andvery tough. "We'll need to carry him, I guess, but we didn't mark the face any." The man two soldiers were carrying behind Prester was shorter than the captive Sharina's group had caught, but his face-allowing for the spasms of agony that transfixed it at intervals-would've fit the same verbal description.

At least one of his knees had been broken. "No, I'm Platt!" said the man at Sharina's feet. "Your ladyship," chirped Burne in a thin voice that nonetheless pierced the night's confusion. The rat must've learned to project when he was with the troupe of mountebanks. "I have the real Platt here, but I can't very well bring him to you." "Who's that?" said Prester, turning his head. "Did we grab the wrong one, then?" "If you did, you weren't alone in your mistake," said Sharina, clambering over a solid rank of loculi, many of them with broken lids or no lids at all. Dysart and Ascor were at her either side. A man in a dark blue cape had fallen between two of the sultans' tombs. He was trying to crawl away. His right foot flopped loosely behind him: he'd been hamstrung. "He threw off the white robe," said Burne, perched in an alcove of the dome-topped tomb, "and had the dark one on under it.

He couldn't change his smell, though." The rat licked blood off his whiskers with apparent relish. Sharina suspected that was partly an act, but it was a very good one. The fallen man certainly thought so, because he twisted to snatch at Burne. The rat hopped away, then leaped to Sharina's shoulder. "I think we've found the real priest,"

Sharina said. "Tie his hands," Dysart said brusquely to the squad of his men now gathered around him. "We'll take him to my office in the palace." Men quickly stepped to pinion the captive. Frowning, Dysart added, "And check his foot. We don't want him bleeding out from a nicked artery before we question him." "Lord Scorpion will infallibly smite you!" Platt cried. "The true God will avenge His prophets!"

Burne laughed. "I quite like scorpions, Master Platt," he said. "They taste even better than shrimp."

Chapter 11 The bluish light in the burial cavern wasn't good, but Ilna found it was good enough as her eyes fully adapted to it. Indeed, it seemed to be getting brighter as Usun found a route for them. She wasn't willing to call it a track, let alone a path, but the fact the massive ghoul obviously came this way meant it was possible for a young woman in good health to do so as well. The little man paused to bend over a litter of fallen stalactites. "There's been an earthquake recently," he said. "Well, tremors anyway. It could be that even without us, our ghoul would have to make other arrangements than living in a cave." "An earthquake brought the riverboat I was on to the shore of this island," Ilna said. "What had been an island before the Change, anyway. I suppose there must've been some effect in Gaur and here in the cave, though I believe the quake itself was Brincisa's work." "Hutton always underrated her," said Usun as he paced on ahead.

"Still, she doesn't have the power to cause solid rock to crack. There had to have been a weakness already. Or indeed, maybe it was the Change that smashed it all like this." He laughed, though Ilna noticed that now that they were on the track of the ghoul the little man's speech and laughter were muted. He had the trick of projecting his voice without raising it. It was barely a whisper, yet she could hear each word distinctly over the rustle and deep, directionless thrumming that filled the cavern. "And one landslip will bring more, like as not," Usun said cheerfully. "Well, with luck we'll be out of here before it matters. And the ghoul, he'll be beyond worrying about anything now that we're going after him." Ilna's lips tightened in distaste. The little man was bragging, and he was bragging on her behalf as well. Many people saw nothing wrong with that. The scowl became a wry smile. In this as in so many other things, the many were wrong and Ilna os-Kenset was right. But she didn't think she was going to change their minds. Beyond the narrow throat leading to the burial cave, the cavern rose to heights that Ilna wouldn't have been able to see by the light of a torch. The rocks' own blue glow alone made them visible. Unnumbered broken stumps projected from the ceiling of smooth flow rock; some were again dripping the lime-charged water which had ages ago frozen into the huge stalactites whose shattered remains littered the floor of the cave. Many chunks were the size of tree trunks, fluted and ridged by the ages of their creation. The closest Ilna came to believing in the supernatural was to feel that stone had consciousness and that it hated her. Certainly her undoubted clumsiness in dealing with stone showed that if nothing else, its presence affected her mind. Usun could squirm under some of the columns that Ilna would've had to clamber over with difficulty, but instead the little man led by a circuitous route that required her to do nothing more difficult than stepping high or bending at the waist.

It might've been wiser to have kept her hands free to grab or catch herself if her foot slipped on the slimy rocks, but Ilna instead knotted patterns. They weren't weapons-there wasn't light enough here for them to be effective-nor was she trying to predict the outcome of this or any endeavor. She tied a pattern would bring a smile to the face of whoever saw it, then picked out the knots and worked one that would dull hunger pangs. Then a pattern which would leach away soul-searing pain but leave the injured person's mind as sharp as it had been before they'd been hurt. Peaceful designs couldn't be seen any better in this dim glow than patterns to freeze or terrify or madden; and anyway, Ilna turned each back into raw yarn for a moment before starting the next. Regardless, they were what her instincts told her to create, and she'd learned to trust her instincts. Ahead of them was a great chasm, visible as a black ribbon through the omnipresent blue glow. A waterfall plunged into it from the other side, and a tumbling stream at the bottom filled the cavern with its echoes. A natural bridge crossed the split in the cave floor. Flow rock blobbed on the upper surface of the arch like wax that had cooled, and from the underside hung a beard of stalactites. Instead of starting across, Usun hopped onto a broken stalactite which stuck slightly out over the gorge. It looked like a barrel from a column of a fallen temple, larger in diameter than Ilna's body and thus much smaller than many relicts of the earthquake. Ilna knelt, putting her head on a level with his. "So, we've found our prey's den or I miss my guess," the little man said. "There, behind the waterfall. There's a cave, and you can see the wear on the rock going up to it." "I cannot," Ilna said, primly careful not to claim more than her due even by silence. "But I take your word for it." She had no idea how Usun saw a cave behind the thin sheet of water. Perhaps he heard a different echo? That seemed absurd, but she did things with fabric that others thought were impossible. The little man was a hunter beyond question. "Well, the cave's there," Usun said blithely, "and he's there in it. We can't get behind him, and I wouldn't care to try the cave in hope that he's asleep. I'm not sure that he does sleep any more; wizardry and his diet have changed him, I think." "I don't think we should walk straight into the creature's lair," Ilna agreed dryly.