David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

He shrugged.

Instead of finishing that thought, Carus looked at a corner of the room, and said in a quiet, rigidly controlled voice, “I knew I was dreaming, Sharina, but I wasn’t able to wake up. Until you pulled me up out of the dream. And even then I wasn’t sure I was going to reach the surface until I was there.”

“The room felt… I guess cold when I came in,” Sharina said. The temperature was normal now, and the frieze had returned to being flat and inoffensive. The young mother was fluffing the covers around her baby, not smothering it with a pillow as a trick of the light had made it seem a moment before….

The anteroom where Sharina’d slept was meant for a servant. Normally Liane would have been there while Sharina had her own separate bungalow, but for the time being the two of them had exchanged accommodation.

The change was at Carus’ suggestion, but Liane had leaped at it with an audible gasp of relief.

There was a bustle in the corridor. “Go on through, Lady Tenoctris,” the officer called in a loud voice. “We’ll close the door behind you.”

Carus stepped into the anteroom with his hands outstretched to greet the wizard and support her if she needed it. Sharina grinned at the care the soldiers took to communicate their intentions without giving offense. She sobered when she thought of the danger-filled void that those men—she didn’t know a single one by name—faced. The soldiers didn’t know whether indigestion or a monster from the deepest pit of Hell had caused the man they guarded to cry out.

Neither did Sharina, of course, but she and her friends at least had the chance to learn. The soldiers would remain in ignorance, most likely forever—but possibly until only an instant before some hellspawn struck them down.

Tenoctris, looking as sprightly as a sparrow, came in. She didn’t need the support of Carus’ arm, though he carried her satchel of paraphernalia. Behind them the outer door closed with heavy finality; the guards were putting a material barrier between themselves and the wizardry they expected—feared—would take place within.

“You said you had a nightmare,” Tenoctris said, surveying the room with quick jerks of her head instead of a sweeping glance. “What exactly did you see?”

She sat on the floor abruptly; Sharina caught and helped her the last of the way as the older woman paused in mid-motion. Carus passed the satchel to Sharina, who placed it before Tenoctris.

“I didn’t really see anything,” Carus said. He had control of himself again; he spoke reflectively, casting his mind back to retrieve the details of the experience. “I felt as if I was deep underwater. Something held me, pulled me down, but I couldn’t touch it when I tried to.”

He cleared his throat. “I was drowning,” he said. To Sharina’s amazement, there was real humor in the king’s smile. “Drowning again, I mean. Only this time I don’t think I’d have seen daylight again. Not even in a thousand years, through another man’s eyes.”

The floor was a woodland mosaic. In the slight present illumination the trees and creatures were shadows on shadow, with the only real contrast the splotches of white plaster: temporary patches filling places where the tesserae had fallen out.

Tenoctris took a writing brush and a pot of cinnabar from her satchel, then outlined a simple triangle over a stag with unlikely antlers. “Could you see anything?” she asked as she began writing words of power in the Old Script along the sides of the figure. “Or was it just blackness?”

“I couldn’t see anything,” said Carus. He scowled reflexively at what the wizard was doing, then caught Sharina’s glance and smiled in wry self-deprecation. “But it wasn’t black, it was gray.”

Tenoctris tapped the three sides of her figure with her bamboo sliver, then began to intone the words under her breath. Air within the triangle blurred the way it might over a field on a summer day.

“Gray like what Hordred saw,” Sharina said. “Didn’t see.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about while I was down there,” Carus agreed. “Wherever ‘there’ was. And after watching what happened to him, I can’t doubt that something really was after Hordred in that grayness.”

Tenoctris flung her wand aside and sagged. Sharina caught her before her head hit the floor.

“Wait,” Tenoctris said. She straightened, then deliberately smudged the symbols with the sleeve of her robe. Red pigment smeared into the fine silk brocade.

Sharina winced, wondering what Ilna would say if she’d seen that. Perhaps nothing: Ilna was ruthlessly pragmatic herself, and Tenoctris would have a good reason for whatever she did.

“I didn’t want to leave that where someone might accidentally pronounce it,” the wizard said, now allowing the younger woman to help her up. “It was a simple location spell, but it started to go deeper than I thought was safe.”

“Deeper?” said Carus.

“Spells have a weight of their own,” Tenoctris said, settling herself onto an ivory chair. Its legs crossed in an X before curving upward to form the arms. All the surfaces had been chased with a pattern of vines and snakes. “I thought it would point me to a place in the present, Laut, perhaps, or Tisamur. Instead it began racing toward an end so distant that I was afraid it might carry me with it.”

She quirked a smile, but the slight trembling of her hands was not merely from physical reaction. Carus squatted beside her, cocking his sword with one hand so that the scabbard’s chape didn’t rap on the floor. His other hand closed gently over those of Tenoctris.

“Carry you far in time?” Sharina asked. She thought of the cataclysm that had flung the old wizard a thousand years to this age.

“Carry me to the Underworld,” Tenoctris said. For a moment she didn’t move or even blink. “Carry me to Hell, Sharina.”

Carus rose, patting the old woman’s shoulder. “We can’t have that,” he said, his tone quietly cheerful. “If I need to sleep only in daylight, well—”

“Hordred was asleep in daylight,” Sharina said sharply. “The last time.”

“Then—” said Carus, louder yet and grasping his sword hilt.

“There’s another way,” said Tenoctris. The others looked at her.

“Go on,” said Carus, opening his right hand. Sharina felt a surge of relief; she hadn’t seen any good result coming from the desperation she knew the ancient king felt even more strongly than she did.

“If Ilna is amenable,” Tenoctris said, “I can put her in a trance and send her soul to follow the visitation back to its source. I don’t think it would even be difficult for her. Though of course there’s some danger.”

Sharina shrugged. “Ilna would do anything to help,” she said. “Any of us will.”

“Send me,” said Carus. His smile had a tinge of ruthlessness—if the expression wasn’t simple cruelty instead. “This is my fight, after all.”

“It’s all our fight!” Tenoctris said with unusual force. “It’s the fight of everyone alive and everyone who hopes to be born.”

Her expression softened. “Of course you’d all go,” she added, “but you’d never find the way. It’s not what you would do but what you can. Ilna can follow the pattern to its source, I’m sure.”

“And I’m sure,” said King Carus, “that I’ll know what to do when somebody shows me where to strike.”

He laughed in fierce anticipation, his right hand on his sword. The candleflame guttered at the violence of his joy.

The guards accompanying Sharina and Ilna couldn’t help marching in step. The clash of their boots on the flagstone walkway leading to Garric’s apartments sounded like construction work on a large scale. It was a harsh sound, and maybe for that reason Sharina felt nervous.