David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Cashel wasn’t one to waste time arguing when a job had to be done.

“Chalcus is coming!” Merota said, hopping up from where she sat opposite Ilna on the horseshoe bench under a grape arbor. She started to run toward the conference room but caught herself before her legs moved. “Ilna, can I…?”

Ilna felt a thrill of anticipation. It didn’t reach her face, of course, and her fingers continued the knotwork she was using to busy them.

“Yes, of course,” she said. The words weren’t fully out of her mouth before Merota was racing across the lawn toward Chalcus. He’d just passed through the cordon of guards with a joke and laughter.

Ilna’s almost-smile—about as close as she ever came to a smile, she supposed—hardened before it reached her lips. Though Chalcus moved with his usual lithe grace, Ilna recognized the tension beneath the grin he flashed her.

Tenoctris waited just outside the cordon of Blood Eagles, resting some of her weight on Liane’s arm. Garric spoke from the doorway; the two women joined him and Sharina in the conference room. Just before closing the door, he gave Ilna a look she couldn’t read.

She continued to knot wool into fabric on her lap. Ilna didn’t carry a loom with her, but she always had skeins of yarn. Work didn’t occupy her mind, but the rote exercise provided a foundation of support that settled her when otherwise she would…

Would be unsettled, leave it at that. Not even Ilna os-Kenset could in perfect calm view the gray web-draped Hell Tenoctris had drawn from Echeus’ mind.

Ilna thought of the spiders whose unwinking multiple eyes stared as if they saw her through the curtain of wizardry. Well, let them stare; she had her work.

The fabric lengthened. Ilna didn’t have to look at it to know that anyone who did would feel the touch of sunlight on the ancient stonework of the mill in Barca’s Hamlet. There was hard work and hard living in the borough, as there was everywhere in this world for a poor orphan. But the sun endured, and the mill endured, and Ilna had endured also.

It wasn’t the most cheerful gift to offer those viewing the fabric, but Ilna didn’t believe there was a better one. Especially for a viewer whom spiders might be watching.

Ilna didn’t need to be in the conference room; Tenoctris alone could tell Garric what they’d seen in the dead man’s eyes. Perhaps the old wizard could even explain it, though she’d seemed as much at a loss as Ilna was.

Ilna’s fingers continued to knot the yarn, turning the vision of Hell into a pattern of repose and gentle pleasure. She was making the world a better place by that much; a trivial thing in the long run, but—Ilna grinned coldly—in the long run they’d all be dead.

Merota flung herself toward the sailor; he scooped her up in his arms. Ilna had expected that, but she was surprised when—instead of striding directly over to the bench where Ilna waited—Chalcus set the girl on the platform of a sundial several paces away. He stood before Merota, holding her hands and talking earnestly.

Ilna deliberately turned her head and studied the grape leaves behind her. Small ants tended herds of aphids along the curling shoots.

Ilna felt a surge of bitter desperation: she had as much kinship with those insects as she did with the human beings around her. Garric had turned her away, and now Chalcus chatted with the child instead of—

“Mistress Ilna…?” he said, unexpectedly close.

Ilna spun around, flustered despite herself. She’d grown accustomed to Chalcus announcing himself with a whistled tune; and of course his soft-soled boots made no sound on the turf….

Merota remained standing beside the sundial, wide-eyed and nervously stiff as she watched them. “She won’t wander,” Chalcus said, half-turning his head to indicate the girl. “I told her you and I must talk without her, mistress”—he smiled, though not as broadly as at most times—“and she agreed, though without pleasure. So that now I can speak with you about matters that give me no pleasure either.”

Ilna folded the knotwork ribbon and put it in her sleeve. She took out a few lengths of twine to occupy her fingers in its place.

“Speak, then,” she said. Her own smile was as cold as the winter sky.

“Your friend Garric’s mind was raped away by the wizard you saw killed,” the sailor said baldly. He squatted so that she needn’t look up to meet his eyes. “The fellow who looks through his eyes now says he’s a friend to the Isles and to Garric…which I believe. But he’s a very hard man, that one, my dear. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do if he thought the choice were failure.”

“A change indeed from Garric,” said Ilna calmly. She took Chalcus’ words as fact, the way she’d have expected hers to be accepted in a similar case. “Not so very different from present company though, perhaps.”

“Aye,” said Chalcus with a flash of the old humor. “Not different at all. But when he asks you and me to go to Tisamur with young Lady Merota to conceal our purpose, then you must know that it isn’t Garric who weighed the risks to the child before he spoke.”

“I see,” said Ilna. With a flash of relief she understood why Chalcus had paused to chat with Merota before he came to where she sat. “The girl has agreed, of course?”

“The girl thinks she’d be safe in the heart of the Underworld with you and me to guard her, dear one,” the sailor said softly. “She would not, and I’ve told her she would not; but she won’t believe me.”

“What does the one who isn’t Garric expect us to do on Tisamur?” Ilna said, filing the response to consider later if at all. She suspected that Merota understood more than Chalcus thought she did, but she didn’t suppose that mattered.

“There’s wizardry besides rebellion there, he thinks,” Chalcus said. “That one—”

He’d never given a name to the one in Garric’s body.

“—doesn’t need help with rebels and sword strokes, but wizards are another matter. A matter for you, he thinks.”

“And you think, Master Chalcus?” Ilna said with a faint smile.

“I’ve seen that one use his sword, dear one,” he said. The term didn’t grate on her ears as it sometimes had. “I trust his skill as I would trust my own. And I’ve seen you work as well. None will stand against you, of that I’m as sure as I’m sure—”

Chalcus laughed; fully alive, fully himself again. “As sure as I am that I’ll stand by you,” he concluded.

Ilna sniffed. “Yes,” she said, “ that at least I’m sure of.”

Tisamur was only a name to her. She’d woven for buyers trafficking to the powerful islands of the north: Sandrakkan, Blaise, and even as far as Ornifal. All of them based their fashions on the mode in Valles.

Ilna’s lips twisted in a grim smile. The nobles of other islands might not recognize Prince Garric as their overlord, but Garric’s court formed their taste in dress.

She looked at Chalcus, watching his face settle into a neutral expression as he waited for her to speak. Merota remained the set distance away, shifting from foot to foot because she was too young to have learned how to hide her nervousness. The child was afraid that Ilna would refuse to let her voyage to Tisamur because of the danger.

“Yes, all right,” Ilna said, pleased by the flicker of surprise in Chalcus’ eyes. She’d thought of questioning him about Tisamur first, letting him wait and worry about her response the way he and Garric and all of them had forced her to wait.

That would have been petty. Ilna wasn’t petty—when she caught herself and mastered her nature, at least. Mastering her nature allowed her to avoid being so many other things, worse things. On a good day.