David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“Ah,” Cashel said, nodding. He didn’t have anything to say about that. He’d learned young that you’d do better to argue with a sheep than with somebody who knows the Truth.

Another stand of ferns nearly concealed a limestone outcrop. He’d thought shadows thrown by the fronds caused the faint shimmer on the stone. Now, maybe because he was sitting still and looking in any direction except Tilphosa’s face, Cashel saw that the water he’d been looking for was seeping between rock layers.

“We’ve found—” he said, rising from the log.

“Cashel, what’s that?” the girl asked sharply. Then she said, “That’s gold!”

She pointed to a bed of plants with sword-shaped leaves and feathery crimson flowers. Twisted among their thin stems was a tracery of metal—gold, just as Tilphosa had said.

The water could wait. Cashel checked his quarterstaff with his right, then his left hand, reflexively making sure that the shaft hadn’t gotten splinters or sticky patches while helping him through the foliage. He moved forward, holding the staff slantwise before him.

“Are these pipes?” Tilphosa said. “No, they can’t be—it’s just a framework, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what it is,” Cashel said. “What it was.”

The forest’s trunks and branches wove through a fabric of tubes ranging from thumb-sized to as thin as Sharina’s blond hairs. Cashel pushed into the vegetation with careful deliberation, measuring the length of the thing: a handful of double paces, four times as long as Cashel was tall. The tubes connected several pods of the same shining metal. The largest of them was the size of a small canoe, smooth-skinned and featureless.

The thing had hit the ground crushingly hard. The impact wrapped the nearer end around the outcrop, even gouging the rock in a few places. The top and back had flexed forward on their own inertia, warping the structure out of its original spindle shape.

Cashel looked up. It’d fallen here; fallen from where , he couldn’t guess. Waves could pick a boat up and fling it inland. Or again…

Whatever the cause, it had happened a very long time ago.

“I guess it could be a frame,” Cashel said aloud. “Gold lasts when other things rot away or rust.”

Tilphosa had followed Cashel along the crumpled tracery. With a careful lack of emotion, she said, “Then it would be quite old.”

With the end of his staff, Cashel tapped a tube broken at the impact. His ferrule woke a musical chime from the gold. “See the root?” he said.

“Oh,” said the girl. “Of course.”

Another fallen beech, larger even than the half-ruined one, had sent surface roots over the tube. In human terms the life span of a tree like that would be measured by generations.

Cashel looked again at the tube and frowned. His iron butt cap hadn’t scratched the metal. As soft as gold was…

He knelt and drew his knife from its wooden sheath. It had been made with ram’s horn scales and a straight, single-edged blade by Akhita the Smith, travelling through the borough on his circuit; Barca’s Hamlet was too small to support a resident blacksmith.

Akhita had forged the blade from the same iron he used to shoe horses, but he’d hardened it with a fast quench. It wasn’t fancy, but it did well for digging a stone from an ox’s hoof, slicing bread at dinner, and all the scores of other tasks a peasant needed a knife for.

The edge should have notched gold. It didn’t; not this gold.

“Let’s get back to the others,” Cashel said, straightening. He put his knife away so he had both hands for his quarterstaff. He didn’t think of a knife as a weapon; not that he needed a weapon here, not for any reasons he could point to. “We’ll tell them about the water.”

And they’d learn about the gold, too; but Cashel wasn’t sure he’d mention that.

He and Tilphosa started back the way they’d come, moving faster from familiarity with the route and because they knew where they were going. Both of them wanted to be away from whatever it was that had smashed up there on the knoll.

“In ancient times, there were beings whose ships flew through the air,” Tilphosa said. “The scriptures say.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Cashel said grimly. He wondered what scriptures she meant, but he didn’t ask. “I can’t read.”

He led on the descent as he had on the climb: if the girl slipped, he was there to catch her…and if he slipped, well, she wasn’t in the way to get hurt.

“Cashel?” she said. “Are you sure we’re going the right direction?”

“We’re a little to the side of how we came up,” he explained. “The clay here doesn’t have so many chunks of lava in it to trip over. We’ll come out on the other side of the point south of where we started, but we can walk along the beach to get back.”

Through the last screen of tree ferns, Cashel heard several men shouting. One called, “Captain Mounix! Everybody! Get over here now!”

“What’s the matter?” Tilphosa said in a tense, controlled voice at Cashel’s shoulder.

“Stay close,” he muttered. He held his staff crossways before him and crushed down the feathery fronds as he stepped onto the sand.

Three sailors stood around a fourth figure sprawled at the tide line. More crewmen were clambering over the rocky spine of the headland to join them; the captain was among the newcomers.

“What is it?” Mounix called. “Sister take you if you’re just shouting to exercise your lungs!”

He carried a short, curve-bladed sword unsheathed. Costas accompanied him with a bow, while Hook had a cudgel made from a length of spar.

“Well, look for yourself then!” snarled the sailor.

A quick glance showed Cashel all he needed to see of the torn corpse. It’d been a girl Tilphosa’s age or thereabouts before something clawed her chest open and devoured her heart and lungs.

Tilphosa gasped but didn’t scream. She had a right to scream. “That’s my maid Matone!” she said. “I thought she’d drowned.”

“No,” said Cashel. The girl had been alive when she was ripped open; otherwise, there wouldn’t have been so much blood. It must have happened during the night, though: the carrion was already starting to smell.

“What did this?” Mounix bellowed. “What hellspawn lives on this accursed island?”

Cashel turned to face the wall of vegetation. Unless they were luckier than he expected, they were going to learn the answer to the captain’s question the hard way.

Fingers closed on the pattern Ilna was knotting. She jerked back, confused by the contact and not really aware of her immediate surroundings.

The fingers were stronger than her own. They snatched the cords from her, crumpling the half-done curse…for curse it was, certain condemnation to the bleakest levels of Hell for the victim and for Ilna herself.

Her mind opened onto present existence. Chalcus faced her, holding her eyes as his fingers picked apart her knots with a seaman’s skill.

“Don’t do this thing, dear one,” Chalcus said calmly.

With the fury of a hornet, Ilna shouted, “Do you wish to spend forever with crows pecking your liver, little man! Do you doubt I can do that? ”

“I well know what you’re capable of doing; to me or to any man, dear heart,” Chalcus said. He reduced the pattern to individual cords and stroked them alongside one another on his callused palm. “In good time you’ll be able to do whatever you choose; but not just now. And not, I hope, in this way.”

He tilted his hand and dropped the hank of cords back into hers.

Merota had joined them, still wearing the single thin tunic in which she took her lessons. Ilna frowned. The girl knew better than to come out in public in such a scandalous state of undress!