David Drake: Mistress of the Catacombs

Carus was wrong in his blanket condemnation: without the aid of the wizard Tenoctris, Garric and the Isles would have been doomed long since. But Garric remembered the desperation in Hordred’s eyes, and he knew that there was more than just prejudice to support King Carus’ opinion.

Cashel or-Kenset walked down the crowded street beside Tenoctris, protecting the birdlike little woman without really thinking about it. Tenoctris didn’t seem frail any more than a wren does to somebody like Cashel, who’d often watched those sprightly, tuneful little creatures. But she was old, seventy years or so; and small; and a woman.

Cashel himself was none of those things. People who watched where they were going didn’t barge into him. In a busy city like Valles, there were always those who didn’t watch. They bounced back from Cashel’s shoulder or the arm holding his quarterstaff, placed for the moment in front of the old wizard.

“Huh!” said Tenoctris, stopping before the open front of a shop selling used metalwork. Nearest the street were bronze bedsteads with verdigrised statues farther inside. Cashel knew that people paid good money for art, but time had eaten these figures to greenish lumps, with here a torso, there something recognizable as a horse’s head. Smaller—and therefore more easily stolen—items were racked against the back wall.

Tenoctris pointed to an octagonal pewter bowl, racked on its side so that passersby could see the niello symbols on the interior. She said, “Look at that, Cashel. I wonder how it got here?”

Cashel couldn’t read or write beyond picking his own name out with care, but he recognized the flowing black marks as letters in the Old Script. Scholars, Garric and his sister Sharina included because their father Reise had taught them, could read the Old Script, but the only people who wrote that way now were wizards when they drew words of power for their incantations.

Cashel gripped his staff a little tighter. Wizards were just people. Tenoctris was a wizard, and she was a lot like the grandmother who’d raised him and Ilna when their father brought them home with no word—ever—of who their mother might be.

But there were wizards who thought their power let them push other people around. Cashel had met that sort too; and they’d all been wrong when they’d thought they could push Cashel or anybody Cashel happened to have put himself in front of at the time.

The shopkeeper noticed Tenoctris’ interest and got up from his stool. He was a balding man with a wispy goatee who reminded Cashel far more of a weasel than anybody so fat should’ve done.

“You have excellent taste, madam,” the fellow said. He lifted the bowl from its place and brought it toward them through the maze of corroded metal. “This is a genuine Old Kingdom antique, the prized possession of a noble family here in Valles. Only their present distressed circumstances persuaded them to part with it.”

“It’s a great deal older than that,” Tenoctris said sharply. “This came from the grave of a priest of the Mistress, either on Tisamur or just possibly on Laut. There would have been a lid as well.”

“I’m sure I can find madam a craftsman who can make any sort of lid madam wishes,” the proprietor said, still smiling. “The workmanship is quite exquisite, is it not? And such a remarkable state of preservation.”

Cashel blinked. The fellow was responding to what Tenoctris said, but he wasn’t listening to her.

Tenoctris backed and raised her hand as the proprietor offered her the bowl. “No, I don’t want to touch it!” she said. “You wouldn’t either, if you had good sense. It held the priest’s brain. The sort of thoughts that a priest of the Mistress might have aren’t for sane humans—or humans at all, I’d say. Melt it down! Can’t you feel the power in it?”

Cashel couldn’t see swirls of power the way Tenoctris said she did, tangles that clung to objects the way foam boils below the rocks in a fast-flowing stream, but he knew when they were there. Things used by wizards in their art held some of their power ever after; prayer permeated the stones of a temple; and scenes of blood and death held stains much deeper than those of the fluids that leaked from corpses.

The pewter bowl created a sort of pressure like that of air gone still before a storm. It didn’t frighten Cashel any more than a storm would, but it was something to be wary of. Unconsciously, he shifted his grip on the hickory quarterstaff that he’d shaped with his own hands as a boy and had carried ever since.

The shopkeeper blinked and looked at the bowl in his hands. Cashel wondered if the fellow really saw the object. More likely it gleamed in his mind like a stack of silver pieces or even gold Sheaf-and-Scepters.

“Well, then,” the man said in the same oily voice as before. “Perhaps madam would care to see some candlesticks from the palace of King Carus himself, preserved in the collection of a noble family linked by blood to the ancient royal house?”

“Come, Cashel,” Tenoctris said, turning abruptly and continuing down the street with quick, short steps.

After a moment, she sighed and slowed to a pace more proper for an old woman and a youth accustomed to walking with sheep. She said, “In my own day I didn’t get out into the world enough to realize how ignorant most people were, but I’m sure it was no better then.”

Tenoctris had washed up on the shore of Barca’s Hamlet one morning, thrown there by a storm not of wind but of wizardry. She said she’d been wrenched from the age a thousand years before, when King Carus ruled and the Isles were unified for the last time in their history.

“Well, people can’t know about everything,” Cashel said, calm as he usually was. “I don’t know about much of anything at all, Tenoctris. Except sheep.”

He grinned. He’d have given his quarterstaff a spin for the pleasure of it, except that the street was far too crowded. Seven feet of hickory take up a lot of room, especially when the hands of a youth as strong as Cashel were whirling them.

They passed a shop which sold new and used bedding: coarse wool covers to be stuffed with straw for folk with just enough money to sleep on a mattress rather than the rush floor; close-woven linen that their betters would fill with feathers; and blankets, coverlets, and bed-curtains to suit any taste or purse. Tenoctris didn’t give the wares even a glance.

“Was the bowl what you were looking for?” Cashel asked. He was glad to escort Tenoctris through the city—though he didn’t mind the palace, there wasn’t anything for him to do there—but he was sure that the old wizard had more in mind than a change of scene for herself.

Tenoctris hadn’t explained, probably because it hadn’t crossed her mind to. Cashel was used to doing things simply because somebody asked him, but this seemed a good time to say something. He guessed he was about as curious as the next fellow, but he’d learned that a lot of times it was better to just keep his eyes open than to ask and be lied to—or be given a flip answer, the sort of joke people tossed at the dumb orphan kid.

Cashel’s fingers tightened very slightly again. They hadn’t laughed at him much since he got his growth, though.

“What?” said Tenoctris. It’d taken her mind a moment to come up from the depths of whatever mental sea it swam in. “Oh, dear, I don’t think so, Cashel. But I’m not really sure. I did a guidance spell because there’s something nagging at me, and it directed me here. I think.”

She gave him an apologetic grin. “I’m not a very powerful wizard, you know,” she said. “Even in times like these, when there’s so much power everywhere.”

Tenoctris had explained that every thousand years there was more of the sort of power that wizards used. In those times wizards could do far more than in the past, and generally far more than they’d intended. It was a peak like that which ended the Old Kingdom; and the forces were rising again.