David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“Tint,” he said, “do you see a rock with a sharp edge? I want to cut the roots off this tree.”

Instead of answering, Tint took the sapling and put the end in her mouth; her lips curled back. The beastgirl’s eyeteeth would have shamed any dog Garric had seen, but now he realized that her long jaw held the molars of a horse besides.

She crunched down hard, twisted the stem with her hands, and spat out a wad of fibers. “Tint fix,” she said proudly as she handed back the staff.

“Thank you, Tint,” Garric said. He bent to his task, thrusting his pole into the soil at a flat angle and scooping it aside. His new body—Gar’s body—was stronger than Garric’s own had been when he was in top shape at the end of harvest and threshing.

But he wasn’t stronger than Tint, for all that the beastgirl weighed barely half what he did. Gar’s memories were too chaotic to tell Garric how he and Tint had met. It seemed that the bandit gang had gathered them up separately, but Garric wasn’t sure the brain-damaged youth could have survived without Tint’s sharper senses and clear, if limited, intellect.

The palm trunk was too flexible to be a perfect dibble, but the ground was so soft that Garric made good headway nonetheless. The end of the pole almost immediately rapped stone beneath the lowest visible layer. He kept prodding inward and thrusting the spoil sideways. Tint, though she wouldn’t help dig, scooped the muck out of his way with her long hands.

This piece of the foundation was a statue’s torso, all right. The raised right arm was now broken off. The left rested on the figure’s waist. When Garric saw the hand, he set the pole aside and rubbed the marble clear with a philodendron leaf.

The fourth finger had been carved in the round; it was broken at the first joint. On the stub, under a layer of mud and corroded stone, was a gold ring set with a small sapphire. Garric twisted it free without difficulty.

He sloshed off the dirt in a puddle, then rubbed off the rest of the lime crust with his thumb before holding the ring up to a shaft of light. Tint leaned against him, trembling and making little clicking noises with her teeth. She didn’t seem to be frightened, just excited.

Garric tried the simple band on his little finger; it would have been loose, but not very loose. The jewel, though small, had been faceted with great skill.

“I wonder who the fellow was,” he said. The statue’s face was too worn to have features; without the carven sword belt, Garric wouldn’t even have been sure the subject was male.

“Thalemos,” said Tint unexpectedly.

Garric looked at her in surprise. She edged sideways, afraid he was going to hit her. “Gar?” she said nervously.

“I’m just curious how you know who he was,” Garric said. The name wasn’t one he remembered hearing before. “I’m not angry, Tint.”

He hoped the sudden hardness of his lips didn’t frighten the beastgirl further. Her reaction reminded him of the life she’d lived with the bandit gang…and brought back some of Gar’s memories as well.

Tint crouched close again, rubbing Garric with her hands and neck. “Vascay see stone feet by house,” she explained. “Rub stone with finger, then shout, ‘Thalemos! Find rest of statue!’ Men dig around house, but no smell stone. Tint smell stone!”

Sure, the bandits had found the base of the statue carved with the name of the subject portrayed. They’d have looked nearby and even dug in the ground, but even if they’d guessed that later comers had carried the torso off they couldn’t possibly have found it here under a later ruin.

She looked up at Garric. “Gar like Tint?” she said.

“I like you very much, Tint,” Garric said. “Without you, we wouldn’t ever have found the ring.”

He patted her shoulder while he thought. “I guess,” he said, “we need to find Master Vascay. To meet Master Vascay, though he may not think so at first.”

Garric considered carrying the ring on his finger, but he decided not to. It wasn’t so much that the ring gave him a bad feeling, but there was something odd about it. Garric didn’t understand a lot of what had been happening; he didn’t care to increase his contact with strangeness.

Besides, he’d never worn jewelry, either as peasant or as prince. Holding the ring between his left thumb and forefinger, Garric said, “You’ll have to lead me, Tint. I don’t know the way.”

The beastgirl twisted her head up and back to look at Garric in concern. “It’s all right,” he said reassuringly. “I’m fine, Tint. I just don’t know some of the things I used to know before I fell in the water.”

Tint dropped onto all fours, her normal travelling position. As she did so, a tall man with his beard bound into three tails stepped through the palm thicket. He wore a leathern jackshirt studded with rivets for additional protection; from his bandolier hung three daggers and a long, curved sword.

Tint hunched and bared her teeth. Gar’s memory gave the man a name: Ceto. He was a swaggerer who thought himself a handsome fellow despite a scarred cheek and the two toes missing from the left foot visible through his hobnailed sandals.

Ceto was the sort of man you sometimes met among the bodyguards whom merchants brought to Barca’s Hamlet for the Sheep Fair. Garric smiled with one side of his mouth. He’d met the type, and he’d occasionally had to throw one out of the inn. He could do something similar with Ceto if he had to.

“What are you monkeys doing here?” Ceto demanded. He sounded angry, but angry the way you’d be to find a dog sniffing the stewpot. “You’re supposed to be foraging! Heigh yourselves up those nut trees by the camp!”

“We’re headed back to the camp, Ceto,” Garric said, speaking with the insouciant precision of an educated man dealing with an inferior. “We have something to show Vascay.”

Light winked from the sapphire. Ceto, striding toward Garric and Tint, noticed the ring and stared. He hadn’t listened to Garric, let alone noticed a change from Gar’s demeanor.

“What do you have there?” he demanded. “By the Sister! Let me have that!”

“I think it’ll be safe with—” Garric said. Ceto hit him in the pit of the stomach.

Garric doubled up, his lungs paralyzed and his brain screaming for air. All he could hear was Tint’s terrified chirps and the white roar of pain.

Ceto kicked him in the head with a hobnailed foot. White drained to blackness, taking Garric’s mind with it.

Cashel pushed through a lobelia thicket, thrusting his staff into the clay of slope behind him for a brace; Tilphosa clung to his sash as she’d done as they came through the surf. The spring and the twisted framework were as they’d left them an hour earlier.

“We’re there,” Cashel said, stepping aside so that Metra and Captain Mounix could make their way to the top, panting. Cashel might have offered them the alternative of the gentler slope where the lava nodules complicated the footing, but he’d decided that he didn’t care about their opinion. It was enough that he’d agreed to guide them back here.

Tilphosa had come along without comment. She’d taken off her red-leather slippers; that was another reason Cashel had chosen the less stony route.

“May the Lady bless my eyes!” Mounix cried. “That’s gold, or I’m a virgin!”

He started forward. Metra cried, “Wait! Let me examine it before you tear it apart.”

Mounix ignored her. Cashel caught the neck of the captain’s tunic and pulled him back with a startled grunt. Costas, laboring along well to the rear, cried, “What is it? Where’s the gold?”

“Let the wizard work her spell,” Cashel said quietly to the captain’s furious scowl. “Then you can do what you please, so far as I’m concerned.”