David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Over the chanting came the sound of screams from the temple. The crowd stilled in wonder.

Carus gave a cry like a man stabbed through the heart; he pitched forward. Sharina tried to catch him, but the king’s armored body weighed too much. They crashed together onto the cobblestones.

In the temple, the screams grew louder.

Cashel lowered his sister to the ground one-handed. It didn’t worry him that she’d collapsed; Cashel knew what wizardry cost, and the thing Ilna did with her weaving was no less wizardry than the words and symbols Tenoctris drew on the ground.

She weighed almost nothing, though. Ilna had never been big, but whatever she’d been through since last he saw her in Valles had worn her to a frame of skin and bones holding up her tunics.

The ruby flared as bright as a crimson sun itself. Tilphosa screamed.

Cashel looked over his shoulder as he rose. “Put it down!” he said. The blazing jewel hurt his eyes to look at. Discomfort made him speak louder than he’d otherwise have done. “Don’t let the sun fall on it!”

The walls of the cyst flowed like water over rocks, showing distorted images of what lay beyond. Cashel saw worlds he recognized and worlds he hoped would never be.

“Cashel, I can’t move it!” Tilphosa said. She sounded more angry than frightened, but some of both. “I can’t move my arm!”

Across the fiery barrier a feathered wizard looked up from its circle of power. It pointed a human thighbone at Cashel’s face. Cashel raised his quarterstaff, but the image had blurred into a rocky glen with no animal life before either Cashel or the other acted further.

Cashel cupped his big left hand over Tilphosa’s and the ring. His palm exploded in pain worse than the time a gadfly stabbed him in the back of the neck.

Cashel would’ve said that pain didn’t control what he did—but this pain was different. If he’d had to stand it, maybe he could have…but here he had the choice of snatching his hand away. Cashel’s body did that, and his mind couldn’t force it not to.

Tilphosa grimaced with anger and frustration. She kept trying to tug her arm down—knowing she couldn’t, just the way she’d known she couldn’t get away from the Archai who’d held her, but trying anyhow.

“Metra told us that Echea made the ring,” she said. “She must have meant this to happen, but I don’t know what!”

“It’s all right,” Cashel said, flexing his hand and finding the hurt was gone as soon as he’d taken it away from the ruby. It’d felt like molten rock boring through him, but there wasn’t a mark on his callused palm. He took his staff in both hands, and added, “If it’s taking us someplace else, well, we’ll handle that.”

A nearby patch of the flame-drenched boundary began to clear. Cashel adjusted his stance, ready to act if the lizard they’d seen devouring Metra waited on the other side. Instead they were in a cave lit only by the sunlight pouring from the opening through which Cashel peered.

A young man stood on a pillar of rock. Water foamed about him, rising visibly by the moment. One wall of the cave had collapsed, and the sea was rushing to fill the cavity. Debris swirled on the current: driftwood, seaweed, and a huge mass that Cashel took at first for fabric but which was hairy skin of some sort when it passed directly beneath his vantage point. Trash rolled to the surface, then tumbled under again to reappear farther along the sweeping curve.

The youth had been looking to all sides with the set expression of one who was badly frightened but determined not to show it. When light flooded the cave, he looked up and met Cashel’s eyes with desperate hope.

Cashel could hear the roar of the incoming sea, so he figured the stranger could hear him too. He thrust out his staff, gripping the butt with his right hand while his left braced him against the wall of this miniature world.

“Right!” he shouted. The far end of the staff was well short of the pillar, but the fellow might be able…“Jump for it and I’ll pull you in. Jump!”

There was a passage along the wall of the cave to the right. As Cashel shouted, a man in a tattered robe like Metra’s came running down it. He stopped at the brink, his eyes and mouth all open with terror.

The youth leaped from the pillar. He caught the end of the staff, though barely, and clung like a barnacle in the surf. He wasn’t more than average size, but with seven feet of leverage he dragged down even Cashel’s strong arm. He splashed waist deep, but he kept holding on. Cashel started to drag him in.

A figure in bronze armor with the long face of a lizard came down the passage behind the man who wavered on the edge. The lizardman raised his curved sword to strike. The human gave a despairing cry and jumped into the water, striking for Cashel.

Aided by the current he just might have made it, but just as he leaped the tentlike flaccid mass rolled to the surface…and rolled under again, taking the swimmer with it. The man’s scream ended in a froth of bubbles, indistinguishable from the sea’s own dirty foam.

The youth climbed the staff as Cashel pulled. When he was close enough, Cashel leaned back and jerked like he was landing a tuna.

The fellow flopped onto the sun-struck, rocky soil. Seawater sloshed and steamed from his wet robes. His feet, one bare and the other wearing a slipper of embroidered leather, still dangled above the rising water.

“Cashel, I can move!” Tilphosa cried. She and Ilna both grabbed the stranger’s hands and pulled him farther in. The ruby on Tilphosa’s hand touched the sapphire the youth was wearing. A spark, brighter and whiter than the sun of this place, sprang from the paired jewels.

Tilphosa cried out. The world began to fade, the ground becoming as transparent as the sky and the sun’s substance melting away. Another world took shape around them.

Ilna rose from her knees and looked at the scene with which they were about to merge. “That’s Merota!” she said. If a voice could have a real edge, throats would be spewing blood. “In the temple in Donelle!”

The noose Ilna’d worn about her waist flowed through her hands smoothly as cream floats on rich milk. She’d overcome the exhaustion that’d struck her down a few minutes before, but Cashel had seen axe blades with softer lines than the angles of his sister’s face right now.

Cashel looked out at a large room packed with people except for the long rectangular pool he and his companions hovered over. Those standing at the margin of the pool were cowled priests who wore white-slashed black robes like Metra and the man who’d drowned some moments and worlds apart.

Cashel recognized the priest standing at the head of the pool holding a dagger of green volcanic glass: he was the same fellow who’d tried to take the statue and the ring away in Valles during what seemed now a distant lifetime. He poised the dagger over the throat of the child, whom two of his fellows held for the sacrifice.

Most children would have screamed. Merota, Ilna’s ward, waited with a closed mouth and eyes as hard as agates.

Cashel rammed his quarterstaff into the transparent barrier still separating him from the scene he looked out on. Tilphosa and the youth were shouting, and Ilna’s expression would have frozen the heart of the sun.

The hickory flexed and the ferrule sparked on nothingness. The staff sprang back, numbing Cashel’s hands.

A blade shimmered like sunlight. The priest’s head toppled from his severed neck, and the air was full of blood. Another of the robed figures had thrown back his cowl. He held a dagger in his left hand and in his right the long, incurved sword with which he’d beheaded the priest.

He was Chalcus, and as he spun, slashing and stabbing, the walls confining Cashel and his companions dissolved completely. They plunged into a pool of salt water seething with fresh blood and the spastic motions of dying priests.