David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“Metra’s doing an incantation,” Tilphosa said, gesturing toward a stand of palms where a piece of salvaged sailcloth was rigged as a screen. A puff of orange smoke rose above the fabric and dissipated in the breeze. “She wants to learn whether our wreck was chance or if Echea struck at us from beyond the grave.”

She didn’t mention Mounix; her opinion of the captain must be pretty close to Cashel’s own.

“That big snake wasn’t a common thing,” Cashel said, looking seaward again. The water shimmered like jewels now that the sun had risen farther. “Not where I come from, anyway.”

Tilphosa shrugged. “In these times it could have been chance,” she said. “The forces that turn the cosmos are peaking, you see. That’s why I’m being sent to wed Prince Thalemos now and bring about the return of the Mistress to rule the world…but Chaos has power also, and creatures of Chaos can be met anywhere.”

Cashel noticed the matter-of-fact way Tilphosa discussed wizardry and the powers wizards controlled or tried to control. She sounded like a peasant discussing the risk of a bad winter: potentially disastrous, but nothing unnatural in her scheme of things.

About two double handsful of the crew had survived the wreck. They were combing the black-sand beach sullenly, dragging the more interesting bits of flotsam above the tide line to where tree ferns grew among lobelias and geraniums the size of shrubs.

When the sailors looked toward the screen around the wizard, they scowled. Occasionally Cashel caught them looking at him and Tilphosa with much the same expression—until his eye fell on them.

Cashel smiled. He guessed he’d be doing something wrong if this lot liked him.

Captain Mounix was examining the ship’s dinghy, still keel up on the beach. With him were two of his particular cronies: a tall but cadaverous fellow named Costas, and a runt with a fringe of red hair who went by “Hook,” probably because he’d lost the outer three fingers from his left hand.

Cashel had done enough woodworking that he might have had something useful to say about the dinghy’s condition, but he didn’t suppose the captain wanted his company any more than Cashel wanted the captain’s. Joining the beachcombers was an even less appealing prospect.

“I guess I’ll take a look around the island,” Cashel said. “I’d like to find a stream or a spring, anyway.”

Rain had pooled in a basin of rock just above the tide line. Cashel had drunk from it—Tilphosa was more squeamish than thirsty, at least while the darkness was still cool—but found the water brackish from windblown spray. The lush vegetation inland meant there was likely better available.

“Ah…” Cashel added, balancing his quarterstaff as he thought. He’d just as soon not leave the girl alone with these sailors—or with her wizard Metra, if it came to that. “Would you like to come?”

Cashel felt responsible for Tilphosa the way he’d feel for anybody who needed the sort of help he could give them. Folks in the borough stuck together, pretty much. A peasant’s life was hard enough even when neighbor helped neighbor.

Tilphosa nodded curtly. “Yes,” she said. “When I look at the sea, I remember the dragon coming toward us. Metra’s wizardry kept it from pulling the ship under, but it drove us onto the rocks. I thought I was going to drown.”

She flashed Cashel an embarrassed grin.

“You weren’t going to drown,” Cashel muttered. He looked at the captain, then toward the screen around the wizard and her dealings. Smoke rose from the enclosure again, this time a soft magenta. “Right, the ground rises enough to be worth following. We can always find our way back by striking for the shore.”

He started into the tree ferns—a mistake. It was easy to push through the shoulder-high fronds, but they hid from sight the frequent head-sized chunks of lava littering the ground. The second time Cashel tripped, he shifted their route into the mixture of gnarled shrubs. There were woody-stemmed varieties of geraniums, violets, and even buttercups.

Cashel had taken to wearing sturdy sandals to walk the stone pavements of Valles. They came in handy here; the soil, though obviously rich, was thickly sown with sharp-edged pebbles from the same volcanic rock that the sea had ground to sand to form the beach.

“Who’s this Echea you’re worried about?” Cashel asked. He was curious; and besides, it was better for the girl to talk than brood. Because he was using his staff to hold vegetation aside, Tilphosa could follow closely without being slapped by stems that he’d released.

“A great wizard,” Tilphosa said. “An enemy of the Mistress. She cut a jewel—or two jewels, rather. Their patterns combined will bring back the Mistress.”

Cashel slipped through a gap between the stems of a tree begonia. Another man, certainly another man Cashel’s size, would have needed an axe to hack through the tangles. Cashel got along well with wood. He’d always been able to judge the grain of the branch under his shaping knife or where he should cut to drop a tree in a particular line. The same talent helped him here.

In his mind he moved around the girl’s words the way he’d handle chunks of fieldstone for a wall. Not every piece would fit in every place, but generally if you shifted slabs this way and that, you’d come up with something that looked as tight as mason’s work.

A lot of times Cashel could also puzzle through a statement that didn’t make sense when he first heard it. This wasn’t one of those times.

He said, “If Echea was against your Mistress—”

When he first met her, Cashel had thought Tilphosa meant “the Mistress” the way Sharina would say “the Lady”: the Queen of Heaven whose mate was the Shepherd. He wasn’t sure of that anymore.

“—then why did she make jewels that will, ah, help her?”

He could hear water, but in forest like this you couldn’t get any direction from sound. The trunks twisted the gurgling around till it could’ve come from anywhere. Still, if he hadn’t heard it before and he did now, then they were likely getting closer.

“The pattern only exists once in all eternity,” Tilphosa explained. “By forming it and then hiding the pieces, Echea keeps the Mistress from returning.”

Climbing through this undergrowth was hard work for her, even with Cashel choosing the path and holding aside the big stems. After each few words, Tilphosa whooshed out a breath and drew in a fresh one before continuing.

“But when Thalemos and I marry, our rings will hold the two jewels. The Mistress will reenter the world!”

“Ah,” said Cashel. He didn’t believe that or disbelieve it. The Great Gods didn’t have much to do with the world Cashel lived in. “I guess you’ve got books that tell you this?”

They’d reached a beech tree whose base was farther across than Cashel’s own height. The trunk had split a generation ago; half had fallen, but the remainder was sprouting new growth.

Wings the length of a child’s arm clattered as creatures roosting in the upper branches launched themselves into the sky. The girl cried out, but the fliers were going the other way. They weren’t birds, and peering through the small leaves, Cashel wasn’t sure they were bats either.

“Let’s hold here for a bit,” Cashel said, not that he was winded. Tilphosa hadn’t complained, but he saw now that the soles of her high-laced shoes were thin suede. They were meant for carpeting, not this pebble-strewn soil.

She nodded gratefully, sinking onto the fallen half of the trunk to take the weight off her feet. The spongy, mushroom-covered wood couldn’t do much to harm tunics that had come through a shipwreck.

“The Mistress sends dreams to her worshippers,” Tilphosa said when she’d gotten her breath. “The priests see them most clearly, of course, but we all can feel her will. I know the truth of what I’ve said, because I’ve felt it myself.”