David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Cashel bellowed when his feet didn’t touch bottom in what he’d thought was shallow water. He grabbed the marble coping with his left hand and pulled himself out, his strength multiplied by the thought of drowning.

Chalcus turned like a dancer. Cashel put his staff up to block the stroke, but the sailor had already switched his aim to a priest whose scream ended in a gout of bright blood from mouth and nostrils. Chalcus was as sure amid slaughter as a trout in the rapids.

The worshippers who filled the big room were trying to get away. There was no place to flee, but Chalcus’ blades and the staff in Cashel’s hands cleared a space for themselves and their companions.

This wasn’t a time for finesse. Cashel struck great, sweeping blows, knowing that whoever the hickory touched would go down. The survivors were howling.

The pool boiled like a surf-swept shore. A figure came out of the bloody water, an Archa whose forelimbs hacked at the nearest worshippers even before its legs and middle limbs had lifted it clear of the pool.

More Archai followed. The midday sun shone through the eye in the center of the domed ceiling. Cashel crushed the head of the insect warrior who slashed at Tilphosa, but its fellows lurched into the crowd of worshippers. They were too surprised and terrified to resist.

“The Mistress is dead!” a priestess screamed. “The Archai will slay all mankind!”

If she’d planned to say more, the saw-edged forelimbs chopping into her back overruled her. There was blood everywhere: in the air and roiling water, and wetting the floor like roof tiles in a thunderstorm.

Chalcus cut a path toward the chamber’s rear wall. There was no way out, but at least there’d be safety in one direction. Cashel brought up the rear of the party, occasionally batting a terrified human away but more often smashing Archai limbs and torsos.

Ilna’s noose snagged a warrior. As she pulled it toward her, Tilphosa stabbed through the Archa’s neck with the athame of some priest now sprawled in death. The youth from the cavern didn’t have a weapon, but he held Merota tight as they climbed over twisting bodies which would have tripped a child’s legs.

The insects were turning the great room into a slaughterhouse, and still more crawled from the pool in the center.

“ They’ll slay all mankind! ” someone cried, or perhaps it was only an echo in Cashel’s mind.

Maybe. But he and the friends about him would take some killing yet.

His left hand rubbed gritty cobblestones; his right was wrapped around the hilt of his sword. The sun beat on the back of his neck, and around him everybody in the world was gabbling like a flock of frightened chickens—Duzi fly away with them!

He opened his eyes. He was Garric or-Reise. He’d just died in the darkness of a tomb—

“ Welcome home, lad ,” said the voice of the ancestor smiling in his mind. “ Tenoctris says they need us in the temple there, now or a little sooner than that. We’re not to slaughter people, but I’ve never been one to tarry .”

“Your highness!” Attaper was shouting. “What’s the matter? Are you—”

Garric got to his knees; hands lifted him with the desperate haste of bodyguards afraid of having failed the one they were sworn to protect.

“I slipped!” Garric said. “Let’s get into that temple and put a stop to whatever Moon Wisdom is planning to do!”

He had slipped, after all. He vividly remembered falling backward into darkness as the Mistress’s venom coursed through his body. Though the body was that of a boy named Gar….

“Garric, the sacrifice is already complete,” Tenoctris called. Two brawny Blood Eagles shoved their way through their fellows, each supporting the old wizard by an axter. “But the Archai mustn’t be allowed to spread out from the building. Every human death will summon more of them!”

“Don’t kill any people!” Garric bellowed. “But there’ll be bugs a-plenty for our swords!”

He started up the hill lithely. His new body—his own body—didn’t have the bone-deep legacy of hunger and abuse that brain-damaged Gar’s did. He was supple and in balance; no stronger than the near-Garric whose form he’d inhabited, but healthy and far more at peace with his flesh.

Lord Attaper clamped his hand on Garric’s right shoulder, holding him back a half step. The leading rank of eight Blood Eagles closed in front of them.

When the screams started, the civilians on the hill below had stopped chanting. Those at the back of the crowd turned and noticed the approaching army. Some tried to run, but the hill was so steep that there were as many stairs as ramps on the road to the top. There was no way to get off the pavement without the danger of a long fall.

That wasn’t Garric’s problem or the Blood Eagles’. The troops used their spear butts as clubs and their shields as battering rams, slamming civilians down or aside. Those who fell on the roadway were trampled or kicked over the side. The troops weren’t deliberately cruel, but there was a job to be done. The broken bones of hostile strangers didn’t concern them.

The civilians who’d climbed trees or found outcrops on the slopes beside the road began to flee also. The screams had broken the spell that had held a city chanting, and the feeling that replaced it was one of panic. People didn’t know what they were running from, but they knew they had to run.

From the volume of the shrieks, the folk inside the temple knew very well what the danger was. They didn’t seem to be doing much about it, but that was the problem the royal army had arrived to solve….

Spear butts punched and pounded into the civilians who didn’t clear the way of their own accord. Most did, scrambling and sliding down the hill. Some didn’t even try to ease their route but simply leaped with their eyes closed, driven to desperation like people trapped on the roof of a burning building. They’d be all right, most of them. Broken limbs, sure; but their fellows inside were facing much worse than that.

“What is it we’ll find inside?” Attaper said, shouting into Garric’s ear in order to be heard over the din. “Wizards?”

“Maybe wizards,” Garric shouted back. “Tenoctris says Archai, bugs that think they’re men.”

“ They’ll die like men, anyway ,” Carus said in Garric’s mind.

Garric looked behind him as he mounted the final flight of steps to the temple porch. The army squirmed back to where the city’s overhanging roofs hid it, glittering with spearpoints and bronze helmets.

He frowned: a separate column was climbing the south slope, a quarter of the way around Temple Hill from the royal forces. The breeze caught a drooping banner and spread it long enough for Garric to see the lion of Blaise.

“ Count Lerdoc’s your ally now ,” Carus said. “ You’ve made his son your aide. The boy’s right behind you in this crush .”

I left the kingdom in good hands, then , Garric thought, half-amused. It’d been bad enough learning to be Gar; now he had to learn to be himself again.

Carus laughed with the joy of a man who had lived to the full when he was alive. He said, “ You left the kingdom in lucky hands, at any rate, lad. And I always told my captains that I’d rather they be lucky than clever .”

The leading soldiers clashed onto the temple porch, their hobnails sparking on the mosaic of a spider clutching the full moon. The tesserae were harder than the limestone of the ramps and steps below.

The last worshippers inside the temple’s sanctum streamed through the bronze doors, their faces pale except for where blood splattered them. All were disheveled, and one middle-aged woman had lost her outer tunic.