David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“Ma’am?” said the leader of the guards. “Is she—”

“She’s all right,” Ilna said.

“I’m all right,” Tenoctris echoed weakly, “I’m just tired.”

The Blood Eagles shifted their stance, uncertain whether they ought to be helping the women or simply preventing the approach of intruders. There was no one within fifty paces of the grotto except for the larger detachment of guards around the conference room where Garric and Chalcus spoke.

Ilna felt the older woman gather her strength, then straighten her legs. When Ilna was sure, she let go except to keep one arm crooked where Tenoctris could hold on to it.

“Tenoctris, did you see it?” Ilna whispered. “That place ?”

Garric… Ilna remembered she’d felt murderous passion when Garric turned his back on her less than an hour before. She was purged of that now. Nothing humans did was worth anger, not when one had seen Hell wrapped in webs of finest silk.

“Yes, I saw it,” Tenoctris said. “I don’t know what it means, but now that I have a starting place I think I can learn.”

“That was what Echeus was trying to bring about?” Ilna said. She’d meant to whisper, but for once control failed her. She let her loathing loose in her rising tone. “ That was why he attacked Garric?”

Tenoctris took a deep breath. Now at last she appeared to have recovered from the ordeal of her art—and perhaps from the shock of what her art had shown her.

She stepped back and managed a wan smile for Ilna. “No,” she said. “Echeus wasn’t trying to create that…world, that path for the future to follow.”

Tenoctris drew in another breath; her smile failed her.

“What we saw was a vision of what Echeus feared most,” the old wizard explained. “Echeus attacked Garric to prevent that future from occurring.”

Cashel sat with his back to a coral head thrusting up from the beach. He made no more sound or movement than the rock behind him, but he was fully alert.

The sailors’ several driftwood campfires had burned down to coals. Occasionally a salt crystal spluttered into transparent pastel flame, but for the most part the fireglow sank slowly toward the darkness of the surrounding night.

Cashel waited the way he’d watched over flocks when he knew danger threatened. Captain Mounix had set guards, but Cashel didn’t believe anybody had relieved the first watch. The shipwreck had disturbed the crew’s structure, and the terrible slayings had put paid to what discipline remained.

There would be no more slayings. Cashel smiled. Not unless the killer got through him first, anyway.

The surf rumbled on the reef, drowning with its low note the many lesser night sounds. When Cashel took his place the tide had been going out; now it was returning. Occasionally waves splashed against the base of the coral head. Most of the survivors were sprawled on the sand up at the tide line. Cashel had chosen this location because he wanted to cover as much of the encampment as possible, though in darkness he couldn’t see his companions.

Just inland of Cashel’s position, Lady Tilphosa slept under a sailcloth shelter for privacy. Metra lay nearby but outside the shelter. Cashel hadn’t asked them to stay close, though he would’ve done so if Tilphosa hadn’t volunteered that she wanted to sleep nearby for protection.

Another wave hit the coral, spraying high enough that drops spattered Cashel. Arms of water reached around from both sides, hissing and foaming; one wet Cashel’s tunic before sinking into the sand.

It’d be dawn soon. He’d move when the sky brightened, maybe even get some sleep of his own. Until then, well, he’d been wet before.

Cashel felt a presence in the night; he tensed.

It wasn’t anything he could’ve described to another person, unless they were folks who’d felt this sort of thing themselves. Something was threatening his flock….

There was movement though not a shape against the palmettos and screw pines. It was at the head of the trail Cashel had broken, going uphill to the spring. That was what he’d expected, though he hadn’t been conscious of his belief until the event confirmed it.

He rose in one silent, fluid motion. Cashel was deliberate in all things, but no one who’d seen him act during a crisis thought he was clumsy. He started toward the shadow. It was now drifting in the direction of a campfire which had settled to a shimmer of heat.

Cashel moved in a near shuffle, his feet lifting barely above the surface of the sand. He angled his approach to put himself between the intruder and the gap in the vegetation from which it had come.

It was very near to dawn, though the constellations were distorted enough that Cashel couldn’t say if the sky would begin to lighten in one handful of minutes or two handsful. Certainly no more than two.

One of the sailors lay a little farther from the dead fire than his companions did. The intruder sprang the remaining distance to him while Cashel was just beyond his staff’s reach.

“Hi!” Cashel shouted, and jumped himself, whirling the quarterstaff in a full-armed slash.

Quick as Cashel was, the intruder proved quicker. It had snatched its chosen victim from the sand in the eyeblink before Cashel moved. Now it hurled the sailor away and ducked beneath the whistling blow.

The sailor was screaming. His companions sat up, shouting in fear; men at the other fires cried out also. Cashel skidded on the sand, recovering his staff with both hands at the balance to defend himself from the intruder’s counter-stroke.

Instead the shadow—it was still no more than a shadow, though Cashel was nearly on top of it—bounded for the jungle in a graceless, low-slung motion. It covered ground like a scorpion jumping. Cashel couldn’t cut it off before it vanished into the vegetation.

That was all right. Cashel knew where it was going, or anyway thought he did.

A bow twanged from the direction of the southernmost campfire. Cashel didn’t hear the whistle of an arrow, so maybe the archer wasn’t aiming toward him after all.

Cashel plunged into the forest, slanting his staff before him to extend the line of his right forearm. His left hand was free to clutch or fend away.

“Cashel, wait!” Tilphosa called. “Wait for daylight!”

Cashel kept going. When he’d come this way during daylight he’d blundered into trees while watching his footing and had slipped if he kept his eyes on the trees. Now he moved through the darkness as easily as a puff of smoke. He had a countryman’s feel for a path once trodden, but more than that was working tonight: he was on the trail of the creature which as long as it lived would threaten those under Cashel’s protection.

Surefooted Cashel might be, but he crashed through the undergrowth like a bull in a thicket. He couldn’t hear the thing he was chasing, and there was at least a chance that it’d pick its spot and turn on him.

He wasn’t worried. He wanted to get his hands on the thing—the sooner, the better. He couldn’t in his heart believe that it was a real danger to a man who was alert and unafraid.

The sky grew paler through the broadly splayed leaves of the begonias. It was still some minutes short of sunrise, but false dawn brightened the heavens if not the ground beneath. Cashel no longer needed to climb on instinct: gnarled trunks stood out from one another and from the background. He was close to the outcrop where the airship lay wrecked. He paused to decide how he’d negotiate the last dozen paces of steep hillside.

As he stood silent, he heard movement down the slope behind him. Was there a pack of them, surrounding him before they struck?

Farther back still he heard Metra call, “Lady Tilphosa! Stop!”