David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“I’ll take the wine,” Vascay said. He drank, deeply this time, and rested the bottle on his thigh. His lips smiled very tightly as he looked Garric up and down.

“Prince Garric of Haft,” Vascay said musingly. “The last ruler of the New Kingdom. He died in battle on Tisamur, fighting the Count of Blaise. After his death and the destruction of both great armies, the Archai swept over the Isles. Only Laut was preserved, by the power of the Intercessor.”

He drank again. Handing the bottle back to Garric, he added with a wry grin, “That’s the way we tell the story on Laut, at any rate.”

Garric shrugged. “I don’t know how I came here,” he said. “I only know that I am Garric, though the body I’m in is Gar’s.”

He drank. Wine was an imported luxury on Haft. Reise kept bottles on hand for visitors during the Sheep Fair, but his family and the other residents of Barca’s Hamlet drank the bitter beer he brewed with locally grown germander.

This bottle had a wreath impressed into the clay before firing, showing that the vintner was proud enough of his product to make it identifiable. It was all a matter of what you were used to, though; to Garric the drink had a nasty aftertaste.

He wasn’t sure he was going to like being a member of a bandit gang a thousand years after his own time; but, like the wine, it was what he had at the moment.

Instead of responding immediately, Vascay pursed his lips and eyed the fabric of leaves overhanging the stream while he thought. After a moment he grinned again at Garric, and said, “The question now is what to do with you, eh?”

“That isn’t how I’d phrase the question,” Garric said, “but I’ll let it stand for now. Tell me how you worked the ball. Poisoning Ceto and not me, I mean.”

Vascay laughed. “You don’t believe I cared for a saintly hermit, my friend?” he said. “Indeed, I did just that.”

His face changed minusculely; Vascay’s lips still smiled, but he was no longer the jolly plump man. “That had nothing to do with Ceto, of course,” he said. “It wasn’t poison, just a wash of alum. Some beads have the alum on the outside, some under a thin layer of hard biscuit.”

Garric considered what he’d just been told. “You didn’t know that Ceto was lying,” he said. “You didn’t care whether he was lying or not.”

Vascay chuckled. “Well, friend,” he said, “let’s just say that I’ve had my eye on Ceto for some time. He was getting a little too big to wear the cap I’d given him, so when you came along, well…”

He turned his hands palms up in a gesture that only context made clear.

The buttress roots of the giant tree behind Vascay were wrinkled like a rooster’s wattles, brown and gray and gray-brown. One of the folds formed a cup large enough to hold a firkin of beer. Garric suddenly realized that the pair of specks glittering on the rim weren’t black-capped mushrooms but rather the eyes of another snake coiled in the hollow. There were a lot of snakes in this place.

“How did you know I’d be able to handle Ceto?” Garric said quietly. He already knew the answer; he was asking to hear the way Vascay responded.

“I didn’t, to be honest,” said Vascay—honestly, which was what Garric needed to know. “But I’d seen you face Ceto, and I’d seen the way you moved. I’d have bet on you, friend…and if I’d lost my money, well, you wouldn’t have been much good for the job, would you?”

“Go on,” said Garric. Snakes weren’t the only thing cold-blooded in this place, but Garric had learned how cold a prince had to be many times. He could imagine that was true as well for a bandit chief.

“If you’re a prince from another time,” Vascay said, crooking his finger for the wine again, “and even if you’re not—”

He smiled, but only partly in humor. The words were an open warning that Vascay was willing to accept Garric’s story, but that belief was a different thing from acceptance.

“—you may not understand our situation on Laut.”

“This is Laut?” Garric interjected. Neither he nor Carus in his own time had visited Laut. Liane would know more about the island, but—Garric felt his gut tighten—she wasn’t here.

“This is Serpent’s Isle, just off the south coast of Laut,” Vascay said. “A place no one ever goes by choice, eh? Unless they’ve a very good reason.”

He tapped his wooden leg again. “My reason, our reason,” he went on, “is that Lord Thalemos has hired us to find a ring of power on Serpent’s Isle. Thalemos has a wizard advisor who tells him that the ring will bring down Echeon the Tyrant and reopen Laut to the world beyond.”

Vascay closed his left hand into a fist. When he reopened it, the sapphire ring winked on his little finger.

“That ring?” Garric said. “The one I found.”

“So I hope and believe, my friend,” the chieftain agreed.

Vascay closed and reopened his hand; the ring vanished again. “I keep in practice,” he said softly. “You can never tell when you’ll need the skill. Today, for example.”

He met Garric’s eyes squarely. “There’s a lot I can do through sleight of hand,” he said, “and a few things I can do with my knives as well; but Ceto would’ve become a real problem for me if you hadn’t”—Vascay’s hand duplicated the questing circle that Garric’s had made a moment before—“appeared when you did.”

He held out the wine. When Garric’s hand touched his on the bottle, Vascay added, “I need someone like you as my deputy, Garric. The man I can trust to do what I’d do every time…only maybe better, some of the time, because he’s got the stronger arm.”

Garric drank, paused, and drank more. The wine’s astringency was what his mouth needed, and the aftertaste didn’t seem so unpleasant now.

“You think I’d make a good bandit, Master Vascay?” he asked. “Perhaps so, but I don’t have a taste for the work. We’ll part after we return to the mainland.”

Garric leaned forward very slightly. “Unless you have different ideas on the matter,” he said. He wondered whether he’d have been quite so ready to carry out the threat implicit in his words if his red-handed ancestor Carus hadn’t shared his mind for these past months.

Vascay burst into full-throated laughter. “Unless I choose to threaten the fellow I just watched use a rusty spit to put down the best swordsman among the Brethren, you mean?” he said. “No, no, I won’t do that, friend Garric.”

He gestured for the wine, but instead of drinking immediately he gave Garric a hard smile over the bottle. “And you’re right, we’re bandits,” he said. “But we wouldn’t have been, most of us, if honest men could live on Laut under the Intercessor. I wouldn’t have been.”

Vascay drank. His hands trembled slightly, and his smile when he lowered the bottle was sour with the thoughts behind it.

“We’re not saints, Garric,” he said. “We’ll rob anybody with money—but that’s pretty generally the Intercessor’s agents and his friends. We’re here now on Serpent’s Isle”—he too leaned forward, his face as hard as Garric’s had been shortly before—“which has the name of being cursed, and where Kelbat or-Haysa died of snakebite before we’d been ashore an hour. Not for the money Metron is offering but because of what he plans to do. Thalemos’ ancestors were Earls of Laut before the wizard Echeus set himself up as Intercessor before the end of the New Kingdom. The present Intercessor, Echeon, has ruled alone for the past hundred years; the greatest wizard and the worst tyrant of the line. But Metron says he can put Thalemos on the throne in Echeon’s place with the help of this—”