David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“Sister drag you all down,” Ceto muttered. He snatched the bead from Garric, hesitated a moment, and popped it into his mouth.

“ I found the ring myself and—” he said. His face went white, then flushed red. He spat the bead onto the ground, then gagged up a mouthful of phlegm and saliva.

“You tried to poison me, Vascay!” Ceto shouted. He whipped out his curved sword in a slashing arc. “I’ll send your soul to Hell!”

The other members of the band backed away. Ceto was a powerful man, and the long sword was a particularly dangerous weapon in the hands of somebody too angry to worry about self-preservation.

Instead of drawing his knives, Vascay hopped sideways to put the cookfire between him and Ceto. He nodded to Garric with a sardonic grin. “Brother Gar,” he said, “your opponent doesn’t accept the verdict of the Ball of Truth. What do you say?”

Ceto whirled toward Garric, raising his sword. Garric gripped the near end of the rod supporting the soup and jerked it toward him. The pot tipped into the fire, hissing and fuming. Garric backed a step, judging his new weapon’s weight and balance as Ceto came on.

The rod was iron, five feet long and thumb-thick beneath the scale and rust. By reflex Garric slid his left hand toward the center the way he would’ve gripped a quarterstaff.

A quarterstaff hadn’t been holding a stewpot over a fire for the past several hours. There was a sizzle and a greasy feeling in Garric’s fingertips. Grateful for Gar’s calluses, he jerked his hand back to the end where the iron was cool enough to be safe.

Ceto slashed down at Garric. Garric raised the rod crosswise, blocking the stroke in a shower of sparks. The blade bit deep enough not to skid, but it’d take a stronger man than Ceto to hack through so thick a rod with a sword.

Garric heaved the rod up, lifting Ceto’s sword arm with it. While Ceto was extended, Garric kicked him in the gut, near the spot where his punch had landed. Ceto woofed and doubled up, drawing both arms close to his sides.

Garric stepped back, judged his distance, and brought the rod around in a whistling sideways stroke. Ceto tried to raise his sword. The rod flung it away and thumped into the bandit’s skull.

Ceto sprawled onto his left side, bleeding brightly from the pressure cut in his scalp. The sword spun end over end—Ademos jumped out of the way with a squeal—and stuck in the ground. It sang angrily until it had damped itself to silence.

Garric stabbed his rod into the dirt at his feet and rested some of his weight on it. He sucked in great gasping breaths, wavering slightly because his blood still raced with readiness to fight or flee.

To fight: Garric or-Reise wasn’t running anywhere.

Smiling faintly, Vascay walked around the spluttering fire and pulled Ceto’s sword from the ground. He held it up at a slant, peering along the edge. Garric could see from where he stood that there was a dent where his rod parried the blade, but the edge hadn’t broken away. The smith had started with good steel, then cooled it slowly to a working temper instead of the brittle hardness suitable only for razors and fools.

Vascay swept his glance around the circle of his fellows, turning his body slightly so that he eyed each man squarely. Ademos and a few others looked away, but nobody spoke.

“Ceto didn’t accept the verdict of the Ball of Truth,” Vascay said; not shouting, but an open challenge to anyone who might disagree. He stared at Ademos, whose head was turned sideways as though he were fascinated by the bromeliads growing from the trunks of the great figs. “Does anybody want to take up where he left off?”

Garric had his breath back and his pulse under control. He straightened and lifted the rod again. The iron had cooled enough he could hold it by the balance now.

Tint came out of the ferns and crept to his side. She was whimpering. Garric reached down and rubbed her scalp, but he didn’t take his eyes off the gang’s leader.

“That’s what I’d hoped,” Vascay said with a broader smile. He walked to Garric and rotated the sword in his hand, offering him the hilt.

“Here you go, Brother Gar,” he said. “Finish the oath-breaker and take the scabbard as well.”

Garric took the sword. He’d never handled a curved blade before, so he was glad to find that this one, at least, balanced perfectly in his hand.

“He can live,” Garric said. Ceto was unconscious and breathing in a ragged snore. “I won’t kill a man in cold blood.”

“Well, that does credit to your upbringing, brother,” Vascay said. He bent and undid the two-tongued buckle of Ceto’s heavy belt, then jerked it clear and tossed it to Garric. “You and I will take a skin of wine to a quiet place and discuss matters now, shall we?”

“Yes, all right,” said Garric. Other members of the band nodded or murmured approval under their breath, even Ademos.

“Fine,” said Vascay. He bent again and cut Ceto’s throat from ear to ear. Blood like that of a slaughtered hog spewed out. There was no bowl of meal here to soak it up for black pudding….

“My upbringing, on the other hand…” Vascay said. He let out a full-throated laugh.

Vascay settled on a boulder whose angles had been smoothed by the freshets that swept the channel during every heavy rain; he gestured Garric to a similar slab which sloped to face his own. The stream was now only a milky gurgle at their feet. Fern fronds and the hard green foliage of large-leaf philodendrons spread overhead.

Garric eased himself onto the rock. It felt clammy through his tunic, but everything in the forest was.

The seat Vascay had chosen for himself was less comfortable than Garric’s broader slab, but it was also a hand’s breadth higher. Garric grinned knowingly—upward—at the chieftain.

Vascay laughed and sucked wine from the stoneware bottle—a sip only, just enough to show it was safe. He offered the bottle to Garric. “Now, my friend,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me who you really are?”

Garric’s mouth had tasted foul ever since the fight with Ceto. He took a swig of wine, sloshed it over his cheeks and tongue, and spat it out. Then he bent and dipped a palmful of water from the stream. It had a milky tinge, but it tasted clean and cold.

He met Vascay’s waiting eyes. “Ceto kicked me in the head,” he said. “I regained my memory.”

“I see the bruise,” Vascay said pleasantly. “But Gar didn’t start remembering a poet dead for two thousand years. I was a schoolteacher before this”—he tapped his wooden leg—“and the rest of my problems with the Intercessor’s tax men, and I could only spout half a dozen tags from Celondre. I say again, who are you?”

Two thousand years! Celondre had been one of the greatest poets of the Old Kingdom—but that was only a thousand years before Garric’s day. Echeus had sent Garric’s mind not only to a strange place but to a distant time.

“I’m Prince Garric of Haft,” Garric said deliberately, watching for any change in Vascay’s expression. “If the ‘Intercessor’ you’re talking about is Echeus of Laut, then we share an enemy. I think he’s the one who…”

Garric flicked his free hand in a circle, searching for the right word. He couldn’t find it.

“Who sent me here,” he said, close enough for Vascay to understand as much as Garric himself did.

The camp was within easy bowshot if the jungle hadn’t intervened, but the rest of the band could have been on the moon for all the sign there was from where Garric sat. Every few steps in this green maze put you in a separate world.

Tint hunched on the bank nearby, shivering but otherwise motionless. She stared fixedly at a liana which trailed crookedly across the stream. Garric followed the line of her eyes in puzzlement till he realized that the liana was unusually thick for part of its length. A python mottled brown on green lay on the vine; perhaps sleeping, perhaps waiting for prey to pass beneath it.