David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

The wind screamed. For an instant Cashel thought he heard Sharina call his name, but the gale carried her voice away.

Cashel’s left hand caught fabric and closed on it. A lightning bolt lit the sky and reflected from the white frothing surf in which he struggled. More lightning slashed cloud to cloud. The shore was fifty double paces ahead of him, and an undertow was trying pull him out.

Cashel didn’t know where he was, but that could wait till there was more leisure. The person he dragged with him wasn’t Garric; when the white flashes quivered from an upturned face, he saw he held a girl of more or less his age. Her expression was set but not panicky. She grabbed his sash with both hands.

Cashel set his quarterstaff on the firm holding behind him, then lumbered several steps forward on the thrust of the next wave. The girl managed to get her feet down and help, though when the water started to stream back she fluttered like a flag in a windstorm.

Cashel dug his staff in and waited, then resumed his march as a comber boiled over him and his burden. He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew what he had to do; that was all that mattered.

The reversing wave twisted him sideways. Over his left shoulder he saw a ship breaking up in the lightning-lit darkness. The surf sprang as high as the mast trucks from the fangs of a reef. More human figures struggled in the water, though it was hard to tell them from other flotsam in the blue-white glitter from the sky.

The current released him. Cashel and the girl strode forward, moving faster because the sea was no more than knee deep now. The girl lost her footing at the ebb, but Cashel continued to plod on. She pulled herself up on his sash, then scrambled the last few steps without his support.

Cashel heard a long, deep cry from out to sea. He turned, feeling wobbly. The effort of the last minutes had caught up with him now that he had time to be exhausted. He thought the sound was wind howling in the cavity of the ship as a hatch carried away and gave it passage; but he was wrong.

A reptile raised its wedge-shaped head from the breakers beyond the reef. Lightning gave its wet scales the sheen of opals. Then, with a sideways lurch seaward, the long body vanished again.

The girl had collapsed on the sandy beach. Cashel picked her up by an arm and staggered a few steps farther inland to where they’d be beyond even the strongest of the waves.

Cashel spat the ring into the wash-leather purse he wore on a cord around his neck. His fingers were numb. His whole body was numb.

He’d build an altar to the Shepherd in thanks for his safety; but later. A little later.

Garric hit the water facefirst. He wasn’t unconscious, just numb, as though he’d been drugged.

The shock and splash freed him. His throat had tightened for a shout when he looked into the pool; the sound turned into a choking gurgle from a mouth filled with water and leaves.

By reflex Garric’s arms brought his head up with a breaststroke. He and Sharina both swam like otters, a skill that few of their neighbors in Barca’s Hamlet had learned—not even the fishermen who took their dories out beyond the sight of land and every day risked an unexpected storm.

Leaf mold stained the water black. Great branches interlaced overhead, their lush foliage hiding all but speckles of the bright blue sky. He’d fallen from a ruined building into a meandering stream; the bank before him was completely overgrown.

His body didn’t feel right!

A female figure leaped to the cornice from which he’d fallen, shrieking, “Gar! What happen?”

He could understand her, but he shouldn’t have been able to because she wasn’t human. Not fully human, at any rate: she was one of the hairy half-men of Bight. “Tint save you!” she cried, and she dived into the water beside him.

“I’m all right!” Garric said, but that wasn’t true—though he wasn’t at risk of drowning, he could swim as well as he ever could. His arms were a deeper tan than they’d ever been except at the end of a summer’s plowing; these last few months of living as a prince rather than a peasant had left him as pale as someone with a swarthy Haft complexion ever got.

He was alone; King Carus no longer shared his mind as a constant companion and advisor. Garric clutched for the ancient coronation medal that should hang around his neck. There was nothing, not even a tunic; he was naked except for a breechclout of fabric as coarse as sacking.

Memories flooded in. They weren’t Garric or-Reise’s memories. Wedge-shaped jaws the size of a bread oven closing on his head—

There was a moment of disorientation as stunning as the shock that had paralyzed Garric on the bridge railing. His face slipped into the water.

Fingers strong enough to bend iron gripped his right shoulder and lifted him. “Tint save you!” the beastgirl screamed in his ear. “Tint save you!”

Tint paddled strongly for the bank from which he’d fallen. Garric stroked with his left arm, but he didn’t try to break the beastgirl’s grip on the other. He wasn’t sure he could.

The stream’s current was sluggish, but it had carried them past the ruins as Garric spluttered. The ornate building had ten feet of frontage on the water and was about that height despite the ruined condition of the cornice where he’d been standing, but it was only five or six feet wide. It was an altar, or perhaps a monument, where statues had once sheltered beneath porches at either end. Thick vegetation hid any structures that might have been placed nearby.

A root was twisted over the bank. Tint caught it with her free hand and brought a gnarled, hairy leg up so that a prehensile foot could double her grip.

Garric put his legs down, expecting to touch bottom. Instead he stubbed his toe on the channel’s masonry wall. He’d have gone under again had not the beastgirl raised him up like a sack of grain and deposited him on the bank.

She sprang up beside him and squatted on all fours. Her legs bent more naturally into that posture than they did when she stood upright.

“Tint save ,” she announced proudly. “Gar safe.”

“Thank you, Tint,” Garric said. The image of jaws closing on his head was still the most vivid of the new memories, though unfamiliar human figures also shuffled hazily through his mind. Most often the figures were shouting at him, striking at him, or kicking him the way some men would kick a dog.

Garric’s belly muscles tensed over a cold lump. He wouldn’t kick a dog; and nobody would kick him, unless they were trying to learn whether Garric could break their leg with his bare hands. Garric figured he probably could, if he were angry enough.

But the jaws…

Seawolves, giant marine lizards whose legs were little more than flippers to steer the beasts through the water, sometimes came ashore near Barca’s Hamlet to prey on the flocks. Garric had killed seawolves, and once a seawolf had seized his leg and very nearly killed him.

He touched his calf. His body would bear the scars of those long fangs for the rest of its life, but this body did not. The muscles were rock hard, if anything stronger than Garric’s own, but he no longer wore the form to which he had been born.

“Gar?” said the beastgirl nervously, sensing Garric’s feeling of trapped horror.

“It’s all right, Tint,” he said, hoping he sounded reassuring. He stood up. There was nothing wrong with this body; it just wasn’t his own.

There was nothing wrong with this body , but the mind that had used to wear it—

Garric raised his index fingers to his temples, probing gently. He found what he expected: a line of indentations on either side where the jaws of a huge seawolf had closed, driving its fangs deep into the bone. Into the bone, and into the brain beneath.