David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

At the nearby temple site, another section of wall toppled inward with a crash and a mushroom of debris. Men were shoveling broken stone and concrete into baskets, dumping them into oxcarts on the west side or giving them to porters to carry away by the steep slope to the east. Only a fraction of the temple’s massive sidewalls remained after a day of concentrated effort.

Tenoctris had been watching the work over her shoulder. She turned to her companions, and said, “I’m always amazed at what people can accomplish when they join together.”

She grinned, and added, “Not necessarily for good ends, of course. No single wizard could have opened a passage for the Mistress.”

Local civilians were carrying out the demolition. Garric had put Count Lerdoc in charge of the work, so there were a few Blaise officers present to oversee the business. They could’ve stayed in their billets without decreasing the enthusiasm with which the crews worked.

Lord Lerdain was one of the officers—by choice, Garric had no doubt. The youth strutted like a fighting cock, wearing the helmet that’d been hammered when he followed Garric—followed Carus—through the mass of Archai. The boy was lucky he’d been knocked silly at the start of the rush; otherwise, he’d probably have been killed. But he’d paid his dues, and now he displayed the damaged helmet with rightful pride.

Cashel watched with the professional interest of a man who’d done his share of heavy labor. “They’re trying to prove to you that they’re loyal,” he said, looking amused. “They don’t know the tricks of moving big rocks, but they’re as willing as any folk I’ve seen. They’ll be lucky if they don’t kill themselves, though.”

“Convincing me they’re loyal is pretty much a lost cause,” Garric said. His smile was more cynical than it would have been in the days before he became a prince. “What I do believe, though, is that Moon Wisdom’s as dead as the Children of the Mistress who were leading it.”

He nodded toward the workmen. “They’re at least making an effort to seem loyal.”

“The Children weren’t leading Moon Wisdom,” Tenoctris said, her eyes focused on a place beyond her present surroundings. “They were just its human face.”

Garric remembered the blackness of a cave and the hairy limbs, stiff with age but still living, which held him for the Mistress’s fangs. “Sure, that’s true,” he said.

But if any Children had survived the carnage in the temple, he’d have hanged them as soon as the fighting was over. People who gave themselves over to something so unutterably evil had no business walking the Earth in the company of decent folk.

“ Those people have their own reasons for tearing the temple down ,” Carus noted with a grim smile. “ Having their own allies hack hundreds of them apart for a blood sacrifice makes the rule of a king from Valles seem not such a bad thing .”

Another section of wall came down in a crackling roar that almost drowned the screams of the woman who’d been caught in it. Cashel winced.

“ I wouldn’t bet it was a woman, lad ,” Carus said, neither smiling nor frowning. “ When they’re hurt bad, anybody’s likely to sound that way. Even the brave ones, unless they go numb instead .”

A trumpet sounded in one of the squares below. Men shouted in cadence, then stepped off with a clash of hobnails on cobblestones.

Lord Waldron was re-forming his battalions, mixing four companies of the old royal army with two composed of the mercenaries who’d garrisoned Donelle during the rebellion. Most of the organization took place outside the city walls where there was more room, but…loyal or not, it was good for the people of Tisamur to see the highly trained royal army up close.

Garric looked at his sister, smiling faintly at how painful the simple movement was. Every muscle of his neck had been strained by the effort of holding his head straight while blows raining on one side or another of his helmet tried to twist it.

“Sharina, does Lord Tadai have things under control?” he asked. “I should’ve gone to see him myself, but…”

It felt remarkably good to sit with his friends. The days he’d been alone seemed like a lifetime…as indeed it had been, for Gar.

“When he arrived with the supply fleet, he went straight to the municipal palace,” Sharina said, smiling at the memory. “He didn’t even bother getting a night’s sleep before he and his aides started going over the accounts from both the city and the temple.”

“They had accounts?” said Cashel with a frown. “I thought they were wizards.”

“Wizards need to eat too,” Tenoctris said. “Though for some of us, that’s not much of a priority.”

“They were running a rebellion,” Garric said. “That means messengers, clerks, supply departments—and the mercenaries themselves, to be paid and billeted.”

“None of which happens at the wave of an athame,” Sharina agreed. “At any rate, I think Lord Tadai takes more pleasure in that sort of thing than he does in wine and dancing girls.”

Carus laughed with an amusement that spread to Garric’s own lips. As the others looked at him, Garric explained, “I don’t imagine going over financial records will ever replace reading Celondre as the way I like to relax. But my ancestor”—he lifted the cord holding the coronation medallion of King Carus to emphasize it—“was never really as much himself during peace as he was in the middle of a battlefield.”

“ And I saw more battlefields than I did days of peace, lad ,” the king’s spirit agreed. Suddenly sober, he went on, “ I was so afraid that I’d fail you this time, the way I’d failed the kingdom before in my anger and my arrogance. Thanks to your sister and the Lady, I did not do that quite .”

“They’re blocking the conduit that fed the temple pool?” Tenoctris asked suddenly. She’d been watching the workmen again. “Not that it was the water itself that…”

“Yes,” said Garric forcefully. “Blocking the tube and diverting the aqueduct that fed it. I told Waldron to get a squadron of cavalry out to trace the route. We’ll block the inlet too when we’ve found it.”

“It was salt water,” said Sharina. She nodded eastward over the city. “The sea’s well below our level here.”

“Yes,” said Tenoctris. “It is. And Garric, I’m not sure your men are going to find the inlet.”

She smiled. “Though I don’t think that really matters, because of what your army did here and what you did where you were.”

Garric started to nod toward the demolition work; the pain made him dizzy. Smiling ruefully at his weakness, he instead gestured with a hand. That hurt too, but not nearly as much.

“There’ll be a new temple built on the site,” he said. “A small one.”

“To whom will it be dedicated?” Tenoctris said, suddenly tense. “That is, I don’t believe…I’ve never believed in the Great Gods; but sites have power.”

“Right,” said Garric, “and for that reason I plan to build and endow a temple to the Restoring Shepherd. Whatever’s built here will be more than stones and frescoes, so I thought it was important to control where it started at least.”

Carus chuckled in Garric’s mind. Garric, smiling in harmony with his ancestor, went on, “I’d thought of dedicating it to Duzi, but I decided people wouldn’t understand.”

“Duzi doesn’t belong in a big stone temple,” Cashel said quietly. “Though I’ve called on him in worse places than that, I know.”

A platoon of Blood Eagles was marching up from the lower city to replace the detachment now guarding Prince Garric. Garric didn’t turn to watch them, but Carus cocked his head and smiled. They were keeping step despite most of them being wounded.