David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

He could hear her chanting, but he couldn’t tell what the words were. She wasn’t using her athame, but on every third step she tossed a pinch of glittering dust toward the words in the sand.

“I wonder if I’ll feel that way about Thalemos,” Tilphosa said, her face turned out to sea. She was looking at the moon or the path it drew on the water. “I’ve never even seen a picture of him. He’s supposed to be exactly my age, but…”

She shrugged. “Laut isn’t like what I was told,” she said, “so I don’t know if Thalemos or anything else is.”

“Tilphosa?” said Cashel. He pointed with his staff. “Do you know what Metra’s doing there?”

The girl leaned forward, then shifted the way she was sitting so that she could see around the pillar. She said nothing for a moment, then turned to Cashel with worried eyes.

“Cashel?” she said. “When Metra was in the woods this morning, before we boarded the boat—could she have gone back to the top of the hill where you killed the thing?”

Cashel stroked his staff as he considered. “I guess she could’ve,” he said. “There was time enough, and she knew the way. I wasn’t paying any attention to her.”

“Because I wonder…” Tilphosa said. “If she went back for the amulet the thing was wearing.”

“There’s no amulet, Tilphosa,” Cashel said. He spoke calmly, just as if he didn’t know the girl had watched him grind it to dust. Maybe she’d gotten too much sun on the pinnace? “I smashed it, remember?”

“Yes, I know you smashed it,” Tilphosa said with a little of the sharpness that Cashel had carefully kept out of his voice. “But that didn’t make it vanish—or its power either, I’m afraid. What do you suppose Metra is dusting onto her words of power?”

She grimaced. “Oh, I’m sorry, Cashel!” she blurted before he could speak. “I’m just mad at myself for not thinking of that before it was too late. It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t know that it’s too late, either,” Cashel said, rising to his feet like an ox. He shrugged his whole body, loosening the muscles for what he might have to do after he went down and rubbed Metra’s symbols out of existence.

“Cashel,” Tilphosa said, not loudly but with a hint of urgency. She was looking inland around the north corner of the temple.

Cashel, his staff held close along his side, stepped past to look for himself. Sailors were coming through the woods toward the temple in groups of three or four men, each with a lighted pine knot for a torch.

“Mounix!” Cashel said. “I don’t need your company tonight. We’ll talk in the morning, if you think you need to.”

“Stand aside, farmer!” Hook called. “You don’t need to get hurt, but it won’t bother us if you do.”

He carried a sapling with a chisel lashed to the end to make it a spear. Other sailors had spears tipped with the belt knives that had been their only weapons when they landed, or sections of branch shaped into cudgels. Mounix had his sword out, but he let his carpenter do the talking.

“I’m not standing aside,” Cashel said. “And you’re not getting past me either, Hook.”

He knew there were sailors to the south side of the building where he couldn’t see them; there was no chance of getting to the shore the way he and Tilphosa had come up. As for trying to climb straight down at night from where he and Tilphosa stood at the highest part of the cliff, he’d likely break his neck even without sailors dropping rocks on his head.

There wouldn’t be much gain to being down on the sand. And besides, he didn’t feel like running.

“We’re not going to hurt the girl!” a sailor said. “We just want her with us while we go back to Tisamur where we belong. The wizard stays here, and the girl comes with us so we’re sure she doesn’t send anything after us!”

Tilphosa had stepped sideways into the nave, where the sailors couldn’t see her until they came around the front. She fingered her crystal pendant and watched Cashel with wide-open eyes.

“I told you no!” said Cashel. Tilphosa gasped at the volume of his growling bellow. “If I need to crack heads, I’ll do that. It won’t be the first time!”

The dozen men Cashel could see from where he stood had reached the back of the temple. He risked a glance to the side; torchlight flickered around the southern edge of the masonry, showing that the rest of the crew were close to being able to rush him from behind.

“Get inside,” he snarled to Tilphosa. There’d been a door through the back wall to the storage room, but half the roof had collapsed across it. Beams and broken tiles blocked the opening. Given time, the sailors could clear a passage, but Cashel didn’t guess they’d try that for a while.

“We’re coming for you, farmer!” Hook shouted.

The girl had obediently moved to the center of the nave. She nodded when Cashel’s eyes glanced across her. She’d picked up a jagged piece of the screening wall, small enough to throw but big enough to hurt if it hit somebody.

Cashel placed himself in the middle of the opening, just back of the porch. It was some three times as wide as he was tall, about the right width to give him free play with the quarterstaff but not let the sailors get around him to the sides. The raised steps gave him an advantage too.

Sailors edged into sight on both sides, staying close to the cliff edge until they were sure where Cashel stood. One of them waggled his torch between two pillars, then jumped back. A fool’s trick, a nervous fool’s trick.

Cashel started to spin his quarterstaff slowly before him, waiting for the moment one of the gang milling in front of the temple would get up the courage to rush him. He was a lot better at this kind of fight than any of the sailors dreamed of being, but there was a right herd of them.

“We’re coming!” Hook repeated, holding his spear by the butt instead of the balance to make it reach longer.

“Then come!” growled Cashel.

A heavyset sailor with a club bounded up the temple steps. Cashel’s staff struck—half spin, half thrust—and broke the man’s knee as the rest of them came on.

Red wizardlight mushroomed from the beach below. It wrapped the ruins of the temple, and the stones began to change.

“No like water, Gar,” Tint whimpered. “Gar, take Tint to land? Tint smell land close.”

“We’ll be ashore soon, Tint,” Garric said, seated in the fishing boat’s stern with the beastgirl hunched against his legs like a hound frightened by thunder. “We’re just looking for the place to land.”

“Shut that monkey up,” snarled an oarsman, “or by the Lady she goes over the side!”

The vessel the Brethren had stolen for the voyage was undecked but broad and beamy. There was a mast step amidships, but Vascay had decided they’d row instead. “You can see a sail for a long ways,” he’d explained when Garric raised an eyebrow on first seeing the boat.

“Gently…” Garric said. It took him a moment to dredge the man’s name from Gar’s damaged memory. “Alcomm. We’ll all be happier when we get to shore.”

The sun had set an hour before. The air was cooler, but rowing an uncertain course in the darkness was more uncomfortable than the glare of sunlight reflected from the calm sea. Except for Hakken, a fisherman before his wife had gone off with one of the Intercessor’s officers, the bandits were landsmen.

A few households in Barca’s Hamlet supported themselves by fishing. Garric had pulled an oar on occasion himself, though never one as long as the sweeps of this Laut craft which the men sculled standing.

“Aimal,” called Vascay to the lookout, standing with a foot braced on the stempost and a comrade holding his belt for safety. “Can you see anything?”