Mistress of the Catacombs Read online

  Mistress of the Catacombs

  Lord of the Isles

  Book IV

  David Drake

  CONTENT

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter One

  The spy, a stocky shipping agent named Hordred, looked at Garric and Liane with haunted eyes as he whispered what he knew of the planned secession of several western islands. His restless gaze flicked about the room with the randomness of a squirrel surprised on the ground.

  “There's priests in it too,” Hordred said. “They call themselves Moon Wisdom and have ceremonies in the Temple of Our Lady of the Moon in Donelle. It's not just prayers and temple tithes, though. This is...”

  He swallowed. Liane had found Hordred through associates of her late father, a far-travelled merchant before his wizardry first ruined, then killed him. In the normal course of things the agent must have been a man well able to take care of himself. A falling block might as easily have been the cause of his broken nose as a rival's cudgel, but the scar on his right forearm had to have been left by a knife. Mere physical threats wouldn't have frightened Hordred into his present state.

  “I think there's something real,” he said. He stared at his own hard-clasped hands on the patterned wood before him. “Something that comes in ... dreams.”

  They sat at a round cedarwood table in a small conference room, part of Prince Garric's private section of the palace compound. A row of louvers just below the tile roof let in air and muted light, but no one could see those inside. Members of the royal bodyguard regiment, the Blood Eagles, stood unobtrusively in the surrounding gardens. Garric had told the guard commander not to let anyone pass while he and Liane interviewed their visitor; therefore, no one would pass, not even Valence III, though he was in name still the King of the Isles.

  “In your dreams, Master Hordred?” Liane said to jolt the spy out of his grim silence. “What is it that you see?”

  Hordred looked up in bleak desperation. “I don't know, mistress!” he said. “There's not really anything, it's all gray. I'm dreaming, but it's just gray; only I know there's things there reaching for me and I'll never see them because they're gray like everything else. And then I wake up.”

  “You're safe now, Master Hordred,” Garric said, hoping to sound reassuring. He reached out, touching the spy's hand with the tips of his strong, tanned fingers. “You can stay here in the palace if you like, or you can go to any of the royal estates on Ornifal if you think you'd be less conspicuous out of the capital. The conspirators won't bother you here.”

  In Garric's mind, the spirit of his ancestor King Carus scowled like a cliff confronting the tide. “And if I could put my sword through a few necks,” the king's ghost said, “the Confederacy of the West wouldn't bother anyone. Except maybe dogs fighting over the carrion.”

  Carus grinned, reverting to the cheerful expression he most often wore. “But I know, lad, cutting throats isn't your way; and maybe if my sword hadn't made so many martyrs, things would've turned out better in my own day.”

  Carus had been the greatest as well as the last ruler of the Old Kingdom. When he and the royal fleet sank in a wizard's cataclysm, the Isles had shattered into chaos and despair. A thousand years hadn't been enough to return the kingdom to the peace and stability it had known in the age before the Collapse, and forces gathering now threatened to crush what remained into dust and blood.

  Not if I can help it! thought Garric.

  “Not if we can help it!” echoed the ghost.

  “I'm not afraid of their bravos!” Hordred snapped. In the angry response, Garric caught a glimpse of the man he must usually have been: tough and self-reliant, able to handle himself in a fight and well aware of the fact.

  Relaxing with a conscious effort, Hordred continued, “I wrote down the strength of the forces gathering on Tisamur and the names of as many leaders as I could find. That's in the books I gave you.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at Liane; she nodded back. Hordred continued, “There's contingents from Haft and Cordin, but the real danger's in the mercenaries the leaders've been hiring from all over the Isles.”

  Garric's face went hard. His formal title now was Prince Garric of Haft, Adopted Son and Heir Presumptive to Valence III, King of the Isles. What he really was ... one of the things he really was ... was Garric, the nineteen-year-old son of Reise the innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet on the east coast of Haft. The only contact Barca's Hamlet and the borough around it had with the outside world was the Sheep Fair every fall and in summer the Tithe Procession, when priests from Carcosa on the west coast rolled images of the Lady and the Shepherd through the countryside and collected what was due the temple.

  Garric was a peasant from Haft—and he was also the real ruler of the Isles, though the authority of the central government didn't really stretch far from the capital here in Valles on Ornifal. If he didn't put down this Confederacy of the West promptly, he wouldn't rule his birthplace even in name.

  “The notes are in Serian shipping code,” Hordred added. ”Can you read that?”

  “Yes, of course,” Liane said, touching the travelling desk in which she'd placed Hordred's notebooks. They looked like ordinary accounts, thin sheets of birchwood bound in fours with hinges of coarse twine. The inner faces were covered in a crabbed script written in oak-gall ink.

  “I should've stopped there,” the spy muttered, sounding both angry and frightened. He clasped his hands again unconsciously. “I thought, 'Let's see what the cult's part in it is. Let's learn about Moon Wisdom.'”

  He swallowed. “I got into one of the ceremonies,” he went on, his voice dropping back to a whisper. “There were over a hundred people in the temple, some of them from as far away as Ornifal. They each had a symbol stamped on their forehead in cinnabar, a spider. I made a stamp for myself and nobody noticed anything wrong. But...”

  Hordred fell silent again. Garric moistened his lips with his tongue, and prompted, “What went on at the ceremony, Master Hordred?”

  The spy shook his head, trying to make sense of his memories. “We chanted a prayer to the Mistress of the Moon,” he said. “I didn't know the words, but I could follow well enough.”

  “Chanted words of power?” Liane asked, her face and voice sharper than they had been a moment before. She understood that wizardry was neither good nor bad in itself; like a sword, the power depended on the purpose—and the skill—of the wizard using it. But Liane would never forget the night that her wizard father had prepared to sacrifice her for purposes he had thought good.

  “No, no,” said Hordred to his writhing hands. “Just ordinary speech, a hymn like you might hear at any Tennight ceremony if you're the sort who wastes his time in temples. Only something happened, I don't know what. I could feel something. And I thought I saw something in the air in the middle of the room, but there wasn't anything there except gray. Nothing!”

  He clenched his right fist as though to bang the table, but his arm trembled and he lowered his hand instead.

  “There wasn
't anything there, but it's been with me ever since. Whenever I go to sleep.”

  Garric stood. The discussion made him uncomfortable. He was as religious as any other youth in Barca's Hamlet. He dedicated a crumb and a sip of beer to the Lady and her consort at most meals, and once a year he'd offered a flat cheese of ewe's milk to Duzi, the roughly carved stone on the hill overlooking the meadows south of the hamlet. Duzi watched over sheep and the poor men who watched them; and if he did not, if Duzi was only the scars of time on rock, well... a cheese wasn't much to spend on a hope of help in trouble.

  But this business of temples and the powers called down by them—this was wizardry or worse, and no place for ordinary mortals. Becoming king hadn't made Garric any less mortal, but he knew that this was a matter for kings regardless.

  He grinned. There was a time that Garric or-Reise had imagined that nothing could be more unpleasant and frustrating than herding sheep caught in a sudden thunderstorm. Prince Garric knew his slightly younger self had been wrong.

  “Master Hordred,” he said, “I've called a meeting of my council to discuss the conspiracy. You needn't be present—”

  Not every member of the council loved Garric, but each councillor knew his own survival and the best chance for the Isles to survive depended on Garric's success. Even so, Liane had insisted that as few people as possible know the face of this spy or the other agents she had hired.

  Garric accepted her judgment, as he did on most matters where Liane felt strongly and he did not. A boy from Barca's Hamlet didn't have the special skills needed to gather intelligence from across the kingdom's scattered islands.

  “—but I'd like you to remain here for the time being in case we have further questions for you afterward. There are cushions if you want to sleep—”

  He nodded to the built-in benches. The walls were wainscoted to the height of a seated man's shoulders and frescoed above with scenes from pine forests like those of Northern Ornifal.

  “—and I can have food and drink brought in if you choose. You'll be well guarded, of course.”

  “Sleep!” Hordred said. “I could sleep on broken lava, I'm so tired. If I dared!”

  “You're in Valles now,” Garric said. “You're as safe as I am myself. Or Lady Liane.”

  Hordred looked up at him, then toward Liane as she rose also. “Am I?” the spy said. He laughed bitterly. “I suppose I am at that. Well, it doesn't matter, I've got to sleep.”

  Liane had been taking notes of Hordred's information with a small brush in a vellum chapbook. Even though she was merely going with Garric to a larger bungalow ten paces distant, she placed her notes in the uppermost tray of the desk and locked it with a four-ward key.

  “Yes, well...” Garric said. “We'll see you soon, Master Hordred. On my honor, the kingdom won't forget the risk you ran for its safety.”

  As Garric opened the door for Liane, who carried the desk, he heard Hordred mutter, “I should've known better than to go into the temple. I thought it was just priests with a new trick to put money in their purses, but it's wizards' work or worse!”

  “There's no safety for anyone in the kingdom,” said the wizard-slain king in Garric's mind, “while there's wizards above the ground!”

  Carus was wrong in his blanket condemnation: without the aid of the wizard Tenoctris, Garric and the Isles would have been doomed long since. But Garric remembered the desperation in Hordred's eyes, and he knew that there was more than just prejudice to support King Carus' opinion.

  Cashel or-Kenset walked down the crowded street beside Tenoctris, protecting the birdlike little woman without really thinking about it. Tenoctris didn't seem frail any more than a wren does to somebody like Cashel, who'd often watched those sprightly, tuneful little creatures. But she was old, seventy years or so; and small; and a woman.

  Cashel himself was none of those things. People who watched where they were going didn't barge into him. In a busy city like Valles, there were always those who didn't watch. They bounced back from Cashel's shoulder or the arm holding his quarterstaff, placed for the moment in front of the old wizard.

  “Huh!” said Tenoctris, stopping before the open front of a shop selling used metalwork. Nearest the street were bronze bedsteads with verdigrised statues farther inside. Cashel knew that people paid good money for art, but time had eaten these figures to greenish lumps, with here a torso, there something recognizable as a horse's head. Smaller—and therefore more easily stolen—items were racked against the back wall.

  Tenoctris pointed to an octagonal pewter bowl, racked on its side so that passersby could see the niello symbols on the interior. She said, “Look at that, Cashel. I wonder how it got here?”

  Cashel couldn't read or write beyond picking his own name out with care, but he recognized the flowing black marks as letters in the Old Script. Scholars, Garric and his sister Sharina included because their father Reise had taught them, could read the Old Script, but the only people who wrote that way now were wizards when they drew words of power for their incantations.

  Cashel gripped his staff a little tighter. Wizards were just people. Tenoctris was a wizard, and she was a lot like the grandmother who'd raised him and Ilna when their father brought them home with no word—ever—of who their mother might be.

  But there were wizards who thought their power let them push other people around. Cashel had met that sort too; and they'd all been wrong when they'd thought they could push Cashel or anybody Cashel happened to have put himself in front of at the time.

  The shopkeeper noticed Tenoctris' interest and got up from his stool. He was a balding man with a wispy goatee who reminded Cashel far more of a weasel than anybody so fat should've done.

  “You have excellent taste, madam,” the fellow said. He lifted the bowl from its place and brought it toward them through the maze of corroded metal. “This is a genuine Old Kingdom antique, the prized possession of a noble family here in Valles. Only their present distressed circumstances persuaded them to part with it.”

  “It's a great deal older than that,” Tenoctris said sharply. “This came from the grave of a priest of the Mistress, either on Tisamur or just possibly on Laut. There would have been a lid as well.”

  “I'm sure I can find madam a craftsman who can make any sort of lid madam wishes,” the proprietor said, still smiling. “The workmanship is quite exquisite, is it not? And such a remarkable state of preservation.”

  Cashel blinked. The fellow was responding to what Tenoctris said, but he wasn't listening to her.

  Tenoctris backed and raised her hand as the proprietor offered her the bowl. “No, I don't want to touch it!” she said. “You wouldn't either, if you had good sense. It held the priest's brain. The sort of thoughts that a priest of the Mistress might have aren't for sane humans—or humans at all, I'd say. Melt it down! Can't you feel the power in it?”

  Cashel couldn't see swirls of power the way Tenoctris said she did, tangles that clung to objects the way foam boils below the rocks in a fast-flowing stream, but he knew when they were there. Things used by wizards in their art held some of their power ever after; prayer permeated the stones of a temple; and scenes of blood and death held stains much deeper than those of the fluids that leaked from corpses.

  The pewter bowl created a sort of pressure like that of air gone still before a storm. It didn't frighten Cashel any more than a storm would, but it was something to be wary of. Unconsciously, he shifted his grip on the hickory quarterstaff that he'd shaped with his own hands as a boy and had carried ever since.

  The shopkeeper blinked and looked at the bowl in his hands. Cashel wondered if the fellow really saw the object. More likely it gleamed in his mind like a stack of silver pieces or even gold Sheaf-and-Scepters.

  “Well, then,” the man said in the same oily voice as before. “Perhaps madam would care to see some candlesticks from the palace of King Carus himself, preserved in the collection of a noble family linked by blood to the ancient royal house?”

/>   “Come, Cashel,” Tenoctris said, turning abruptly and continuing down the street with quick, short steps.

  After a moment, she sighed and slowed to a pace more proper for an old woman and a youth accustomed to walking with sheep. She said, “In my own day I didn't get out into the world enough to realize how ignorant most people were, but I'm sure it was no better then.”

  Tenoctris had washed up on the shore of Barca's Hamlet one morning, thrown there by a storm not of wind but of wizardry. She said she'd been wrenched from the age a thousand years before, when King Carus ruled and the Isles were unified for the last time in their history.

  “Well, people can't know about everything,” Cashel said, calm as he usually was. “I don't know about much of anything at all, Tenoctris. Except sheep.”

  He grinned. He'd have given his quarterstaff a spin for the pleasure of it, except that the street was far too crowded. Seven feet of hickory take up a lot of room, especially when the hands of a youth as strong as Cashel were whirling them.

  They passed a shop which sold new and used bedding: coarse wool covers to be stuffed with straw for folk with just enough money to sleep on a mattress rather than the rush floor; close-woven linen that their betters would fill with feathers; and blankets, coverlets, and bed-curtains to suit any taste or purse. Tenoctris didn't give the wares even a glance.

  “Was the bowl what you were looking for?” Cashel asked. He was glad to escort Tenoctris through the city—though he didn't mind the palace, there wasn't anything for him to do there—but he was sure that the old wizard had more in mind than a change of scene for herself.

  Tenoctris hadn't explained, probably because it hadn't crossed her mind to. Cashel was used to doing things simply because somebody asked him, but this seemed a good time to say something. He guessed he was about as curious as the next fellow, but he'd learned that a lot of times it was better to just keep his eyes open than to ask and be lied to—or be given a flip answer, the sort of joke people tossed at the dumb orphan kid.

  Cashel's fingers tightened very slightly again. They hadn't laughed at him much since he got his growth, though.