David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Carus glanced back at Sharina. “Shall we—” he said.

“Shut the door please,” Sharina said. Her stomach was tight; mention of the Pewle knife and her memory of Nonnus made her able to ask a question when ingrained courtesy would have kept her silent. “For a moment.”

Carus turned, nodded to Deghan, and closed the door again. When he faced Sharina he was expressionless, watchful. “All right,” he said.

“Why won’t you see Ilna?” she said.

“I told—”

“I heard what you told Chalcus!” Sharina said. “I can see the logic; so could Garric, and I think he’d have done the same—for all a sailor’s doubts. People in Barca’s Hamlet have to make hard choices every fall if they expect to survive the Hungry Time the next spring. But you haven’t answered my question.”

Carus’ grin was brief and false. He walked to the sideboard and poured himself wine, using the carafe of red and the goblet closest to him—the one Chalcus had left behind. He didn’t mix water with the wine.

“When I was…” he said to the far wall. “In the flesh, say; alive, I don’t care what you call it.”

He set the goblet down untasted and met Sharina’s eyes. “When I was a man , Sharina, I knew a lot of women,” he said. “I liked them well enough, and some I liked a good deal. But there was one…”

Carus reached for the wine, then snatched his hand back and snarled, “Sister take it! And may the Sister take me if I’m so great a coward that I won’t talk about her!”

“Carus…?” Sharina said. She didn’t know what she wanted to say next, except that she wished she hadn’t spoken before. “I don’t need… You don’t have to tell me anything.”

The king’s passing reference to the knife had opened an old wound, but he’d had a reason. Sharina no longer believed she’d had a reason for her question, at least not one that was worth the pain it gave her companion.

“Don’t I, girl?” Carus said. He managed a gust of his usual laughter. “Perhaps not, but I’ll tell you anyway. There was a girl, a woman, named Brichese bos-Brediman; from Cordin, noble of course but from a family no wealthier than yours in Barca’s Hamlet despite the title.”

He shrugged. “I loved her,” he said. “And she died, because I didn’t save her…or couldn’t save her…. Or perhaps you could say because I didn’t choose to save her. And that was all a thousand years ago. She’d be dead now in any case and none of that would matter. Except—”

Carus grinned. “You know,” he said, “I sometimes think that the Lady…or Fate, if the philosophers are right when they say the Great Gods don’t exist…that whoever rules men has a sense of humor. Your friend Ilna is as close to being my Brichese as ever twins were born. In body, but in spirit as well.”

Sharina’s face went blank. “Ah,” she said. “I see now.”

“It was hard enough when I watched through your brother’s eyes and heard through his ears,” the king said. He sipped the wine, drinking without the desperation that had driven his urge a few moments before. “Now that I’m wearing this body instead of being a guest in it, I thought…”

He laughed and finished the wine. “I thought it’d be best for everybody,” he said, “if I put temptation out of the way.”

“Yes,” said Sharina. She breathed a sigh of relief. If Carus had been a different man, Ilna and the kingdom both would face a future that would be even more dangerous than what loomed today.

“Let’s go out to the others,” she said, crooking her arm to be taken by the man wearing her brother’s body. “I want to see what Tenoctris has learned about Garric.”

Fear twisted her gut. She immediately hid it beneath a smile.

“And Cashel,” Sharina added; and then lied. “Though I’m sure Cashel will never meet any danger that he can’t manage.”

Tenoctris had decided to use the marble bench on one side of the artificial grotto as a table. Ilna watched while the wizard adjusted the strips of parchment that she’d written on and placed around the edges of two smoldering braziers. Along the grotto’s back wall water trickled from lead pipes into a channel leading out into the garden, past the squad of Blood Eagles facing stolidly away from the wizard.

Beards of moss grew on the wall beneath the pipes. A similar dark smudge spread down the front of the bench. Echeus’ severed head sat upright between the braziers. Blood still leaked from its neck.

Tenoctris stepped back, breathing quickly. “There,” she said. “That should be all right. Now where did I put—”

“I have your wand,” Ilna said, holding out the split of bamboo the wizard had chosen for this incantation. “And your stool is set up right here.”

“Ah,” said Tenoctris. “Yes, of course.”

She sat carefully, gathering the hem of her robe so that it didn’t collapse the folding ivory stool Ilna had placed facing Echeus. She glanced up at Ilna. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m nervous because of what I’m about to do.”

Ilna shrugged. “But you’ll do it anyway,” she said. “That’s all that matters, not what it costs.”

She smiled wryly at the older woman. “That’s what I tell myself, anyway,” she added.

Tenoctris grinned. “Yes, of course,” she said. “And I’m sure you’re right.”

She faced forward, focusing on a point in eternity rather than on the head in front of her. Echeus had died with his eyes open and a look of surprise on his face. The eyes had glazed and the stiffness of death was sharpening the expression into a demonic grimace.

The parchment crinkled in the slow fire; by becoming black ash, the words of power executed themselves in coils of smoke. Tenoctris tapped the air silently for a moment, then said in rhythm with her wand, “ Oh maosaio naraeeaeaa…. ”

With every syllable Tenoctris spoke, the rising smoke quivered. Ilna saw hints of glowing color in the thin columns. There was a pattern to them, something her brain couldn’t grasp but her soul almost could.

“ Arubibao thumo imsiu… ” the wizard said. “ Oulatsila moula imsiu…. ”

Ilna, Tenoctris, and the severed head were alone in a grotto carved out of the cosmos, not just a man-made hill. The entrance and the guards outside had vanished. The only light was from glowing smoke that wove new patterns in the fabric of space and time.

“ Ae eiouo soumarta max akarba…. ” No longer words spoken by a human but rather the thunder of the cosmos.

Echeus’ eyes were expanding, or else Ilna was looking into another world which those eyes had seen. Gray, softly gleaming…utterly evil.

“Chraie zozan ekmet prhe satra!”

A world: a world draped in gray silk, webs swathing rocks and trees—and everywhere those who had woven the webs, watching through jewel-hard unwinking multiple eyes. A world of spiders the size of dogs, the size of sheep. Spiders waiting: expressionless, emotionless; as cold as the void between worlds.

Spiders who had woven patterns of inhuman perfection, and who were weaving one further pattern that Ilna could almost understand. Indeed, she could under—

The gray hellworld shrank into itself, vanishing like a snowflake caught in an open hand. Ilna staggered, but the instinct of duty caused her to grab Tenoctris and hold the old wizard firmly before she could slip off her stool. She seemed skeletally frail within her silken robe.

The grotto stank of charred flesh: parchment was no more than sheep gut, after all. The strips had burned to ash and Echeus’ head was only a body part, already flushing with the purple tinge of decay.

A haze of gray smoke filtered the sunlight entering through the entrance, but it still made a bright contrast to the place Ilna’s mind had just visited. She lifted Tenoctris as she’d carry an injured child and stepped outside.