David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

It was a wonder that Gar’s body had survived a mauling like that. His mind had not survived.

“Gar, what wrong?” Tint said, standing also. Fully erect, she only came to the middle of Garric’s chest. She began grooming him with her fingers. His scalp was as shaggy as a ram’s fleece in winter, and now he had an unkempt beard as well.

“Nothing’s wrong, Tint,” Garric said, staring in bleak despair at the jungle of palmetto and larger trees choking the landscape around him. He saw squared stones under the network of surface roots supporting a large magnolia; as he’d guessed, there were extensive ruins in the vicinity.

“Nothing’s wrong that you can help with,” he added.

And very possibly no one could help. No one in whatever world this was.

As he sat above the tide line, Cashel ran a swatch of raw wool slowly over his quarterstaff. In part he was polishing the hickory, but mostly he used the familiar task to settle his mind. He carried the pad of wool under his belt. It’d sloshed through the breakers with him, but the fibers’ coat of lanolin kept them free from salt water.

The girl was coming around. Cashel had wrung out his sodden outer tunic and rolled it into a pillow for her. The beach was mostly sandy, but there were rocks in it.

“Mistress…” the girl murmured. Her left hand closed on the amulet hanging from her neck by a silver chain.

The storm had broken up; the remaining clouds scudded across expanses of clear sky. Cashel had already looked at the amulet by the light of the stars and the waxing moon: a lens of rock crystal whose silver mounting mimicked a spider lying on the disk and encircling it with her legs.

It wasn’t something Cashel would have wanted to wear; but then, nobody was asking him to.

The girl sat up sharply. “Are we safe?” she said, peering at Cashel. She knuckled her eyes, trying to rub away the salt that blurred her vision. “Are you one of the sailors?”

“I think we’re safe enough,” Cashel said. He sounded hoarse, and his stomach felt queasy; he must have swallowed seawater while he was fighting the surf, though he didn’t remember it now. “I’m not a sailor, but there’s other fellows here with us. I guess some of them may be sailors.”

The light wasn’t good enough to tell much, and Cashel didn’t have the energy to go about meeting strangers in a place so new to him. Debris from the ship, human as well as cordage and timber, littered the beach. Not all the bodies were alive, of course, but some of them were starting to move.

“Ah,” Cashel said. “My name’s Cashel or-Kenset.”

The girl was quickly regaining her composure. She touched the ground lightly, apparently judging whether her muscles had recovered enough from her struggle to shore that she could stand up again.

They hadn’t; she didn’t try. “I’m Lady Tilphosa bos-Pholial,” she said with dignity. “Are we on Laut, Master Cashel?”

Cashel frowned. “Laut?” he said. “I don’t think so, ah, Lady Tilphosa. But I’m not from around here either.”

Up the beach had grounded a great wooden lump, either the ship’s dinghy or a portion of the hull; one end rose and sank in the pull of the surf. A ball of blue light flickered beside the wreckage, then rolled a ghostly course down the sand toward Cashel and the girl.

Cashel hadn’t been planning to move for a while yet. He decided he would after all, rising to his feet in a smooth motion. He gave his quarterstaff a trial spin. Funny how something like that brought his strength back better than a day’s rest.

“Master Cashel!” the girl called. “What’s the matter?”

“The light coming this way,” Cashel said. “That’s wizard’s work.”

He stepped forward to keep Tilphosa clear of the staff if he had to move quickly. Cashel and his seven feet of iron-shod hickory took up a lot of room.

The ball of light was the size of a man’s head. It half floated, half bounced; never quite touching the ground, but never rising a hand’s breadth above it. It was a blue haze just bright enough to show the texture of the pebble-strewn sand it crossed.

“It’s all right, Cashel,” the girl said. She grunted softly as she stood. “That’s just Metra trying to find me.”

“Lady Tilphosa!” called another female voice from the shelter of the wreck. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, Metra!” the girl said. She started up the beach, wobbling for the first few steps but then getting full control of her legs. The glowing ball dissolved like a shadow in sunlight.

Cashel followed, grimacing because he’d been worried about something that wasn’t a threat after all. Still…he slanted his quarterstaff across his chest instead of leaning it on his shoulder as he walked. Metra might not be a danger, but there was danger enough in this place: the great serpent writhing out beyond the breakers for one.

Coming toward them was a youngish woman, in her early twenties perhaps. She was plump, dark-haired, and wore a black robe slashed white across the front. The garment was much the worse for the abuse it had taken during the wreck.

Cashel’s eyes narrowed. The light wasn’t good, but the woman looked a lot like the fellow who’d set the workmen on him this morning.

“Lady Tilphosa!” the woman said. “Thank the Mistress you’re safe!”

Tilphosa embraced her, and said, “Yes, She saved me through the agency of Master Cashel here. Cashel, this is Metra, Daughter of the Mistress. She’s an acolyte at the Temple of the Lady, Mistress of the Moon, in Donelle—and accompanies me as advisor until the marriage.”

“I’m Lady Tilphosa’s guardian,” Metra said in a distinctly cool tone as she appraised Cashel. “Who are you, sir?”

“I’m Cashel,” Cashel responded, setting his feet a little wider. His voice was growing hoarse again, but his bath in seawater was no longer the cause. “I’m from Barca’s Hamlet. Do you have an older brother, lady? The sort of guy who thinks if he can’t buy what he wants, he’ll buy toughs to take it for him?”

“What?” said Metra in surprise. “I have three sisters, two stillborn and one died as an infant. What are you talking about?”

She held a knife-shaped thing covered with symbols in the Old Script. It was a wizard’s tool, an athame. Well, Cashel already knew Metra was a wizard, even if she claimed to be a priestess besides.

“I met a man in Valles,” Cashel said, still harsh but now embarrassed again; this time by the women’s identical expressions of puzzlement. “He looked like you. And he was dressed like you, too.”

Metra lifted her chin in a gesture of denial. “I know nothing of Valles,” she said curtly. “As for my robe, it’s what the Children of the Mistress wear. Perhaps another of us has journeyed to Valles, but he wasn’t a relative of mine.”

Her eyes locked with Cashel’s again. “Now, sir,” she said, “tell us what you’re doing here.”

“I’m not sure,” Cashel said, wishing that he didn’t feel so defensive. Other survivors were moving in groups. Light winked; not wizardry this time but an honest bonfire kindled with handfuls of dry grass and fed with pandanus stems. “I went to help a friend who’d fallen into a pond, and then I was here.”

“Where is ‘here’?” Metra demanded. “Are we on Laut?”

One of the men around the fire stood up. In a loud voice he called into the darkness, “Did the priestess get to shore? Get her over here if she did! I want to talk to her.”

One of his companions called in an equally loud voice, “ I don’t want to talk to her. If there’s any justice, she’s feeding that demon snake that wrecked us. You know it was because of her!”

Metra turned toward the fire, her lips forming a hard line. Her expression reminded Cashel again of the fellow who’d tried to take the statue from him in Valles. She didn’t speak.