David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“Yes,” said Ilna tightly. “That was Cashel. I—”

She’d been about to ask to be left alone to study the sky—study the barrier—without distraction. Before she got the words out, her guide had opened another window onto the world Ilna had left. She saw the real Garric clambering through torchlit gloom with his sword lifted. Ahead of him—

Ahead of Garric was whirling blackness, not the thing itself but a cloak which concealed the thing from Ilna’s eyes. All she could be sure of was that the creature was powerful, and that it was hostile to Garric and to all life except its own.

Her guide’s legs moved, closing the barrier again. This time the closure was permanent: she bent a hind leg forward, carrying the wad of silk to her mouth. Her jaw-plates chewed the silk methodically before she swallowed it again.

YOUR FRIENDS NEED HELP, ILNA, said the voice in her mind.

“Yes,” she said grimly. She held her hank of cords, but her fingers were knotting and unknotting them to settle her mind rather than with any considered purpose. Purpose would come.

“Mistress,” she said. What do you call a giant spider? “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me to my own devices for a time. I think it’s possible to open the barrier from this side, but it’s going to require some thought. Is that agreeable to you?”

WHATEVER YOU WISH, ILNA, said her guide. YOUR SKILL IS GREATER THAN OURS.

Ilna seated herself on the basalt, looking up at the sky. The black-and-silver giant stepped away, picking her path down toward her web.

WE ARE YOUR DISCIPLES, chorused the denizens of this world. WE WILL LEARN FROM YOU.

By the time the sun had risen a finger’s breadth above the horizon, the fog had burned off. Cashel looked over his shoulder and for the first time saw the other bank of the river. He chuckled.

Tilphosa, curled in the stern of the boat, jerked awake at the sound. “What?” she said. “Cashel, is everything all right?”

“I don’t know about everything,” Cashel said with a shy grin. “But better off than a little bit ago, sure. See the land, Tilphosa?”

“Yes,” she said, squinting into the low sun. She sounded doubtful. “It looks marshy, doesn’t it?”

“Right,” said Cashel, “but it’s land. I’ve been rowing all night. I was beginning to think it wasn’t a river at all but a lake that I wasn’t going to get across in this lifetime.”

“Oh!” said Tilphosa. She turned and looked west, toward where Soong ought to be. The city was still there, Cashel supposed, but it was long out of sight in their wake. “Cashel, you’ve been rowing all night ? What do your palms look like?”

She leaned forward and unwrapped the fingers of his right hand from the oarloom. “I’m fine, mistress,” Cashel said in embarrassment. “I’m used to this sort of thing.”

That was true enough. His calluses had faced worse than a night of rowing, and the same was true of his shoulder muscles. Even so, Tilphosa looked at him with mingled anger and sympathy.

“Well, stop right now!” she said. “It isn’t right that anyone be worked like that!”

“It isn’t somebody making me do it, mistress,” Cashel said calmly. “It’s me doing it. I choose to.”

“Well, then choose—” the girl said sharply.

“Mistress,” said Cashel, loudly enough to be heard. “I don’t want to float here in the middle of a river till we starve. It’s that or else me rowing us the rest of the way to land. All right?”

Tilphosa’s eyes flashed; then she lowered them, and quietly said, “All right, Cashel. Are you going to take us to the city there?”

“Huh?” said Cashel, looking over his shoulder again. The buildings rising out of the mud and mists were several stories high, gleaming as sunlight struck their wet stone. Granted that the fog was still clearing, he’d have thought he’d have seen them….

“That’s funny,” Cashel said. “But sure, we’ll head for the city. You guide me if the current pulls us off course, all right?”

He resumed rowing. That last was just a way to be friendly to the girl after he’d told her to stop mothering him. The chance of this river’s sluggish current drifting him downstream unnoticed was about the same as Cashel sprouting wings and flying to the city.

He smiled at Tilphosa. He’d had his sister to mother him, and Ilna wasn’t one to claim hard work was a bad thing for a man—or a slip of a girl like herself, either. Tilphosa was tough and in her way strong, but she didn’t have any notion of what was normal for peasants like Cashel.

“I lost my dagger,” the girl said suddenly. “I don’t have…”

She had the tunic she’d worn to bed, period. Well, there hadn’t been any time since then to do more than to keep moving.

“Maybe you won’t need it,” Cashel said calmly. When you really didn’t know what was going to happen next, there was no point in deciding it was going to be bad. “Anyway, I’ve still got my staff.”

Tilphosa smiled vividly again, the first time Cashel had seen that expression since they went to sleep in the Hyacinth. “Yes you do, Cashel,” she said. “And I’ve got you.”

“Till we get you home,” Cashel agreed. His arms and upper body moved with the steady grace of a mill wheel, long pulls that sent the water swirling away each time he withdrew his oarblades. Dimples of foam marked the surface behind them, staying where they were while the wake made a V outward across them. “The Shepherd granting, of course.”

“There was a time I’d have said, ‘The Mistress granting,’ Cashel,” Tilphosa said in an odd tone of voice. “Now I think I’ll just depend on you. You haven’t failed me yet.”

She cleared her throat, and went on, “We’re getting very close to the quays along the bank. But I suppose you know that.”

“Thank you, m-mis…” Cashel said. “I mean, thank you, Tilphosa.”

He looked over his shoulder, picking the point where he’d land. There were steps down into the water squarely ahead of them. If there’d ever been bollards, they’d rotted away, but he could haul this little skiff up the stairs easily enough. It wouldn’t hurt the flat bottom to bump a little.

He had known the bank was close, of course. Tilphosa was smart in people ways, not just out of books. Cashel himself was always being surprised by what people did and said, because mostly it didn’t make any sense. The best Cashel could do was learn to deal with surprises.

He braked the skiff by reversing his stroke, then turned them so that they drifted stern first to the stairs on the last of their momentum. Mud, poisonously bright with river algae, was slumping away from the stone. Where the sun had dried it, it turned a sickly gray-green.

“If you’ll just hop—” Cashel said, but Tilphosa had already judged her time. She stepped lightly to the stone tread, then bent to hold the boat’s transom.

Smiling approval, Cashel paddled the skiff broadside and got out himself. Despite his care, water sloshing from beneath the hull soaked Tilphosa’s feet. She didn’t appear to notice.

Cashel pulled the skiff up the few steps and set it on the drying mud of the quay. He’d told the fisherman he’d leave the boat when he was through, but now he didn’t imagine the fellow would ever see it again. That’s what the fisherman had expected, but it still bothered Cashel to reinforce somebody’s bad expectations.

A different thought struck him; he grinned. “Cashel?” Tilphosa said.

“The fellow I got the boat from knew how wide the river was even though I didn’t,” Cashel explained. “I guess when I said I’d leave it for him, he thought I was a fool but not a crook.”