David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Scowling, she added, “Tint not like other men!”

Garric stood, looking around him again. Not only were these ruins old, they’d been long in use before the forest re-covered them. There was nothing remarkable about the architecture to connect the ruins with any description he’d read in an ancient author. He could be on Ornifal, though he doubted it; or even somewhere on Haft.

“Gar, we hunt lizards?” Tint repeated, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “Only—snakes in stones too.”

She shuddered. “Snake Island!” she said. She hugged herself and looked longingly at Garric. “We go away! We take ring to other men and go away, Gar?”

Garric looked at her sharply. “What other men?” he asked. “How did we come here, Tint?”

She shrugged again. “Vascay’s tribe,” she said. “Our tribe. They take us on hollow log to Snake Island, hunt for ring for wizard. Other men not smell ring and not hear Tint.”

She dropped to all fours again and turned her head quickly from side to side, taking in her surroundings. “Bad place,” she said. “Many snakes!”

Garric thought about Tint’s words as he listened to the forest. Besides the chirps and trilling that would’ve passed unnoticed in the borough’s common woodland, something shrieked every few minutes like a cat in a bonfire. Garric supposed it was a bird, but it’d get on his nerves if he had to listen to it for long.

He could guess from Gar’s hazy memories what the beastgirl meant by “Vascay’s tribe”: a band of twenty or more men, all armed beyond what was normal for honest folk. Some had eye patches and several were missing limbs.

Most of the gang had cuffed or kicked Gar in the past. A few of them seemed to have done so every time the half-witted youth came within reach.

“Tint,” he said, “can you show me where the ring is? If we find the ring, maybe we’ll be able to leave this island.”

At the moment the only thing Garric was sure of was that his relationship with the tribe—the gang of bandits, he supposed—was going to be different from the one that they’d had with Gar. Bringing in the object the gang was searching for would be at least a good start toward that change.

“Tint show,” the beastgirl said with another shrug. “Stone wears ring. Tint smell stone.”

Tint set off through the forest, moving roughly parallel to the watercourse. Garric started after her. He caught at once in a kind of bamboo with back-curved hooks on the edges of the leaves.

“Gar come?” Tint called, already hidden by the foliage. “Come, Gar!”

“Wait!” Garric snapped. The leaves’ grip left dotted rows of blood, on his forearms and along his ribs. He had to get down onto all fours to pass the bamboo; he didn’t dare try circling the stand because it seemed to cover the whole area of a courtyard building which had collapsed into a mound of brick and stone in past ages.

He sighed. He’d wondered what the calluses on Gar’s knuckles came from. Now he knew.

Most of Gar’s fuzzy memories were of fears and beatings, not the ordinary business of his days. As best Garric could determine, Tint and the half-wit served Vascay’s band as something between unpaid servants and ill-treated pets. They carried water, fed the fire, and were allowed to eat scraps from the gang’s own meals as well as scavenge for themselves.

It wasn’t a bad life, really—for an animal. Garric’s face hardened at the thought.

Tint came back to Garric before he reached where she’d been waiting. The beastgirl’s irritation had become renewed solicitousness: she couldn’t imagine what had caused the change in her friend.

Garric smiled with a touch of humor. He couldn’t imagine either, though he guessed that the Intercessor of Laut could explain it.

When at Echeus’ direction Garric had looked into the pool, he’d seen something in the instant before Gar’s reflection appeared in place of his own. A pattern had formed in bits of glittering flotsam carried down on the stream from where Echeus had knelt. Tint’s calling this place Snake Island had helped Garric identify the remembered objects: they’d been snake scales.

The ruins, though extensive, appeared to be of a palace complex rather than a city. The buildings had ornamental façades, and the walls were sheathed with marble over brick cores. Much of the damage was deliberate: time and the forest had only buried the ruin brought by human assault.

Tint brought Garric to ruins that were both cruder and more recent. Blocks and column barrels from the original palace had been piled into a wall which had enclosed a dozen huts or so.

Fire had swept this later hamlet as well, blackening the stones before they fell again to rubble. The mound was now covered by moss and a fungus that sent up small orange balls, ready to puff out their spores if touched.

There’d only been the one patch of bamboo, but pine trees of some sort branched frequently into hedges of spikes hidden in the softer-leafed vegetation. The soil around this later settlement was too soggy to support brush above knee height, let alone trees. Garric straightened from the crouch he’d been in most of the way through the forest and strode toward the jumbled ruin.

Tint shrieked and bounded in front of him, baring her teeth in terror. “No, Gar!” she said, hopping up and down on all fours. “Gar die! Gar die!”

Garric froze, splaying his hands at his side to calm his companion. “I’m not moving, Tint,” he said quietly. “Tell me what the danger is.”

“Mushroom kill!” Tint said. She pawed at Garric, not really trying to move him back but miming a further signal of danger. “Gar touch mushroom, Gar die!”

The beastgirl made a theatrical sweep of her hand, indicating the puffballs’ bright nodules. Her arm, covered in coarse reddish-gold hair, was as long as Garric’s own.

Garric nodded his understanding. Even in the borough there were poison mushrooms. This was the first time he’d run into a species whose spores were dangerous, but already he trusted the beastgirl’s woodcraft as implicitly as he did Tenoctris’ judgment on wizardry.

“How do we—” he said.

Beneath Tint’s pointing hand was a vine with leaves as broad as a watermelon’s. A stem suddenly rustled. The beastgirl glanced at the ground, then froze.

“Tint?” said Garric. He touched her shoulder. She was trembling like a tuft of goosedown. He looked past her, bending forward to bring his eyes to the angle of hers.

A snake coiled beneath the vine. Its head was a wedge as broad as Garric’s fist, its mottled body as thick as his forearm. He couldn’t tell how long the serpent was: ten feet, twelve feet, perhaps even longer. Certainly it was long enough to strike Tint where she stood in frozen panic.

The snake’s tail quivered, making a dry rustle against the leaves. Its head rose minusculely, weaving slightly with the tension of muscles compressing. The beastgirl whimpered, “Hoo…hoo…hoo…”

“Jump back, Tint,” Garric whispered. He’d seen her spring fifteen feet from a standing start; that would carry her clear of the snake before it could strike.

But not this time: Tint was too frightened to move. Garric wasn’t sure she even heard his voice. His right hand, concealed behind the beastgirl’s body, tugged loose the knot of his breechclout.

The snake’s tail blurred again. Most serpents slither away if given the opportunity; not this one. Its ridged underside was the color of hot sulfur. As its fangs unfolded, a drop of venom glinted on the tip of each.

Garric leaped past Tint’s left side, carrying the fluttering length of his breechclout with him. If he’d had time to tie a stone in the cloth for weight, he’d have thrown it instead; there wasn’t any time.