David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

As Cashel himself was, but strength came flooding back now that he was on his feet again. His whole body had locked into a series of mortise-and-tenon joints in order to support the block of stone. Now he was himself again, Cashel or-Kenset, moving with the graceful deliberation of thick cream flowing.

The stone had dented the pod over a surface the size of a wash basket, but the split in the center was no longer than Cashel’s hand and too narrow to reach through. The impact had sprung the hidden catch that locked the pod into a featureless whole, however: the top stood away from the bottom half over most of the oval seam.

Cashel shifted his grip on the quarterstaff, poising it so that he could punch a ferrule forward like a spear. He stretched out his right foot, then lifted the lid with a quick jerk of his toes.

In shadow, the figure lying within could have passed for a man: the jaws were a little longer, the brow flat; the eyes set too far to the side and bulging more than a human’s would. The creature’s skin had a faint green cast and a pebbled surface with fine scales on the backs of the hands.

Faint though the morning light was, when the lid opened the creature gave a squeal of agony and covered its face with its four-fingered hands. It stank: the blood and bits of human tissue that smeared its head and clawed hands were rotting. A pendant hanging from a neck chain was the creature’s only clothing or adornment.

Cashel stabbed his staff down, crushing the creature’s hands and skull together. The ferrule rang with a muffled note on the bottom of the pod. The creature’s back arched; it writhed, flinging its legs out of the capsule where it had laired.

Gasping more with revulsion than effort, Cashel stepped back. Tilphosa touched his arm, letting him know where she was. She peered past him to the interior of the pod.

“Duzi, stand at my side,” Cashel whispered. A palm tree growing down the hill leaned over him. He ripped a frond from it and scrubbed furiously, cleaning blood and brains from his quarterstaff. “Duzi, help the one who guards your flock.”

Metra edged past. Tilphosa caught her arm. “Let her go,” Cashel muttered. “I’m done with that now.”

The almost-human body still twitched. It was smaller than it’d seemed in the darkness, the size of a girl in her early teens. The teeth were no more impressive than a man’s, and the claws on the fingers were more like a dog’s than the big cat Cashel had imagined from the corpses. Savagery and bestial strength, not weapons, had torn the victims apart.

That wouldn’t happen again. Cashel didn’t know what the creature was or why it killed the way it did—but he’d stopped it.

Metra bent over the corpse and lifted the pendant. Cashel had thought it was metal. Raised so that light fell on it, he realized it was transparent and shimmered like the fire opals which nobles from Shengy wore when they visited Garric’s court.

“The Talisman of See-Char!” the wizard cried. “It wasn’t a myth after all! Relonia really did see it in her questing dreams!”

“What is it, Metra?” Tilphosa said. Her voice was calm but a little louder than it need have been to be heard. She’d stuck the chisel under her sash, but as she spoke her fingers stroked the use-polished pommel.

Metra pulled the chain over the creature’s shattered head. It didn’t seem to bother her to touch the congealing ruin. She held the pendant out at arm’s length and turned it to view from every angle.

“It’s what kept him alive,” she said. “He must have been a great wizard. Perhaps he was fleeing the cataclysm that wiped out the remainder of the Third Race when his vessel crashed here. The amulet is a thing of wonderful power.”

“Did all of them kill this way?” Cashel asked. “All the Third Race, I mean.”

As he spoke, the flesh blackened and sloughed from the corpse. The shinbones separated, pulled from the thighs by their own weight; they fell to the leaf mold around the pod. The bones themselves crumbled first to dust, then less than dust. A faint black slime remained to color the golden cavity.

“What?” said Metra with the angry irritation of someone interrupted by what they think is a stupid question. “No, of course not, they were more advanced than we are in many respects. The amulet could keep him alive, but it wouldn’t dull his hunger. Over the years, the centuries…”

She smiled at Cashel, looking down on his peasant simplicity from the height of her sophisticated wisdom. “Well, after all,” she said, “there wouldn’t have been anything for him to eat except other castaways, would there?”

“Ah,” said Cashel.

“Metra, put that amulet back in the coffin and leave it,” Tilphosa said with a grimace of disgust. “I don’t think it’s a good thing to have, however valuable it may be.”

“Don’t act like a child!” snapped the wizard. “With the Talisman of See-Char we’ll be able to—”

Cashel reached out and closed his fist over the dangling amulet. It felt greasy, as though the stone was a heavy liquid.

“Tilphosa’s right,” he said. “We’re not going to have this around.”

“Who are you to tell me what to do, you barbarian?” the wizard shouted. She held on to the chain. Cashel lifted his arm until Metra dangled by her hand.

“Metra!” Tilphosa said. “Let go at once!”

The chain didn’t break, but Metra whimpered and let go when the thin metal had lacerated her palm beyond bearing. She tried to grab it again, but Cashel body-checked her with a thrust of his hip.

“I’m the man who killed the thing wearing it,” he said in a low growl.

He dropped the amulet onto bare stone. Tilphosa caught the wizard as she crawled toward it. Cashel brought the butt of his staff down in a short, sharp blow, the same way he’d smashed the creature’s skull. The amulet exploded into powder.

“Now,” Cashel said, “let’s get back to the others.”

Gar’s senses were even sharper than the ones Garric was used to. He smelled the campfire fifty double paces before he reached their encampment, and he smelled the scattered garbage and human excrement almost as quickly.

Garric wrinkled his nose in disgust, less from the stench itself than what it said about the gang he was joining. The tanyard in Barca’s Hamlet, where Halmat and later his son cured hides with dung, was downwind from the rest of the community. Vascay’s band didn’t bother with such niceties.

Garric stepped into the natural clearing where the band camped. Tarpaulins were strung for shelter from the frequent rains. Smoke from the cookfire clumped in the humid air. A pudgy fellow stirred the stewpot hanging from a rod placed between wooden forks.

Ceto stood in a midst of half a dozen men. One of them held a horn that had probably once belonged to a noble’s coachman: the etchings on the curved brass tube were filled with silver and gold. He raised it and blew a long, deep note calling in other members of the band.

A pair of giant fig trees had shaded out all lesser growth save for ferns and seedlings with trunks only the diameter of a finger. The bandits had chopped away some of the palely hopeful saplings and were using others as drying racks for soaked clothes and bedding.

“Gar?” chirped Tint, still in the clump of elephant ears growing at the edge of the clearing. “Gar not be hurt? Gar?”

Nobody noticed Garric until he whipped a canvas ground sheet off the bush it was draped on and wrapped it around his waist. Tunics hung not far away, but Garric needed to cover himself more than he cared about the style of his garment. He knew that being naked would put him at a greater disadvantage than being unarmed did.

“Hey, monkey boy!” called the cook, sweating profusely despite being stripped to a breechclout. “Get some more wood, and make it dry this time! That punk you came back with last time isn’t worth the trouble to toss it on the fire!”