Mistress of the Catacombs Page 12

  Cashel plunged into the forest, slanting his staff before him to extend the line of his right forearm. His left hand was free to clutch or fend away.

  “Cashel, wait!” Tilphosa called. “Wait for daylight!”

  Cashel kept going. When he'd come this way during daylight he'd blundered into trees while watching his footing and had slipped if he kept his eyes on the trees. Now he moved through the darkness as easily as a puff of smoke. He had a countryman's feel for a path once trodden, but more than that was working tonight: he was on the trail of the creature which as long as it lived would threaten those under Cashel's protection.

  Surefooted Cashel might be, but he crashed through the undergrowth like a bull in a thicket. He couldn't hear the thing he was chasing, and there was at least a chance that it'd pick its spot and turn on him.

  He wasn't worried. He wanted to get his hands on the thing—the sooner, the better. He couldn't in his heart believe that it was a real danger to a man who was alert and unafraid.

  The sky grew paler through the broadly splayed leaves of the begonias. It was still some minutes short of sunrise, but false dawn brightened the heavens if not the ground beneath. Cashel no longer needed to climb on instinct: gnarled trunks stood out from one another and from the background. He was close to the outcrop where the airship lay wrecked. He paused to decide how he'd negotiate the last dozen paces of steep hillside.

  As he stood silent, he heard movement down the slope behind him. Was there a pack of them, surrounding him before they struck?

  Farther back still he heard Metra call, “Lady Tilphosa! Stop!”

  Cashel smiled. Tilphosa'd said she'd stay close to him for protection tonight. He hadn't expected her to follow him up here, but maybe she wasn't showing such bad judgment.

  The chime of gold on gold rang softly through the night. Cashel sighed in relieved anticipation. He'd been afraid that his quarry would keep running instead of going to ground. A shepherd learns to get along in the woods, but he doesn't become a tracker.

  He started climbing to the crag and spring, slipping a little on the slick, steep clay. Funny. It'd been easier to lope through the night than it was to make this last short way under a pink-gray sky. The immediacy was past, though the job that remained might be hard enough.

  “Cashel?” Tilphosa called from not far below him. “I'm coming up! It's me, Tilphosa.”

  She was smart enough to know how Cashel might react to being startled just now. Tilphosa was smart enough, period.

  After his breathing slowed, Cashel could hear water dripping down into the basin of the spring. Dawn had awakened creatures to squawk and warble, unseen because of distance and the foliage.

  The airboat's skeleton lay as Cashel had left it. So far as he could see, Costas hadn't been able to mark the flint-hard gold. The sailor's body lay at the edge of the spring, his chest ripped open and emptied. Costas' eyes stared at the dawn.

  “I'm coming, Cashel,” Tilphosa said, blurting the words out between gasps. “It's me behind you.”

  The girl clambered onto the ridge as she spoke. Cashel turned slightly so that he could see her without losing sight of the wreck.

  Thorns or a sharp branch had torn Tilphosa's tunic. A line of dried blood crossed her right cheek to the lobe of her ear. She didn't have Cashel's instinct for the darkness, but she'd come anyway.

  In her right hand Tilphosa clutched a chisel she must have taken from Hook's tool chest. The shaft was hardwood, but the fluted blade was steel and sharp enough to shave with.

  “You took a chance,” Cashel said, but his tone was approving. “I guess there isn't anywhere a lot safer around here, though.”

  “Yes, well, I wasn't going to stay down there without you," Tilphosa said. Her quick breaths whistled, but she made a point of not opening her mouth to pant like a dog. “Did it get away?”

  “I don't think so,” Cashel said. He looked around him carefully to be sure that nothing, no thing, waited in ambush. Then he pushed into the lobelias with his staff slanted forward, this time in both hands.

  “Cashel?” said the girl. She'd stayed far enough back to be clear if he and the quarterstaff had to spin suddenly. “Do you know what it is? Is it a man?”

  “We'll know in a little bit,” Cashel said, his voice a growl as he concentrated on what was in front of him.

  Three larger swellings grew from the tubing like seed-pods hanging on a trumpet vine. One was near the bow. The impact had crushed it open. Roots twisted about it, and a line of ants crawled in and out of its protection.

  Cashel moved on, each time testing the ground with his toes before putting his foot down. At any moment his legs might need to anchor a smashing blow of his quarter-staff... .

  He heard rustling and the crackle of a branch behind him. “Lady Tilphosa!” Metra wheezed. “Where are you, lady?”

  “Keep her out of the way!” Cashel said. He trusted Tilphosa's judgment, but he didn't trust anything at all about her attendant wizard.

  The two women talked in quick, irritated voices, but Cashel needn't worry about that now. He'd reached the second pod, this one about the size of a goatskin water bag. It dangled in the air, half-wrapped in the skein of tubes that supported it. The pod's weight had pulled the hard gold into a cat's cradle, folding and flattening the tubes without breaking them.

  The third pod was egg-shaped and larger than a man. Loam, the detritus of centuries of leaves and fallen branches, mounded around it. The softly gleaming upper surfaces reflected growing daylight; the smooth metal was not only untarnished but clear of the litter which covered the surrounding soil.

  Cashel eyed the pod, watchful for any change in it. After a time—he couldn't have said how long, a length of time he found appropriate—he rapped the cold metal with the outstretched tip of his quarterstaff. It rang hollowly at the touch of the ferrule, a sweetly musical sound. It was the same note that Cashel had heard as he chased his quarry in this direction.

  Cashel eyed his surroundings, sure now of what he needed but not quite certain he was going to find it here. Tilphosa waited, still-faced and obviously nervous, just back of the crumpled framework. She raised her eyebrows in question when Cashel glanced at her, but she didn't speak. Maybe she was afraid of breaking his concentration.

  Metra sat behind Tilphosa, her athame bobbing like a chicken gobbling corn. She'd spread another silk square, this one black with symbols—different symbols from those of the other day, Cashel supposed—in red. Clever of the wizard to change colors so that she wouldn't grab the wrong pattern in haste.

  Cashel saw what he needed, a torso-sized chunk of limestone separated from the rest of the outcrop. Moss outlined the fracture, probably the result of the airboat's crash.

  Could the creature hear him? Could it understand speech even if it did hear?

  “It's all right,” he said to Tilphosa. He smiled. “Just keep that chisel ready. I'm going to have to put my staff down for a bit.”

  She probably thought he was being reassuring. He truly was glad she was here with a weapon.

  Cashel backed, then sidled, carefully, to the block. After watching the pod intently for some moments more—just in case it decided to open—he leaned his quarterstaff into the angle where two gold tubes joined seamlessly.

  He squatted, gripping opposite sides of the block and shifting it slightly to make sure it would give. It did. Because the soil was so thin over the outcrop he didn't have to worry about trees. He didn't want to trip and lose his balance when he was carrying a stone as heavy as a young bull.

  Cashel breathed deeply—once, twice, and again. “Now!” he shouted—to the stone, to himself, it didn't matter—and jerked the block free. As it crunched away from the outcrop, Cashel straightened his knees. Stiff-legged, his hands adjusting the block minutely to balance it as he moved, he walked toward the pod.

  The blood roared in his ears. He couldn't hear outside sounds, not even the thump of his heels on the ground step after step, but he felt the words
of Metra's incantation. Her art was affecting the cosmos through which Cashel moved... .

  He couldn't look down: his spine was perfectly vertical to accept the weight it now bore. The pod was a golden shimmer through the red haze throbbing with his pulse.

  “Now!” Cashel repeated. He swung his missile down, tilting his whole body when the stone's path had slanted clear of him.

  Cashel fell forward, following the missile. The block hit corner foremost in the center of the smooth curve. Metal bonged, splitting before the massive stone rolled off to the left and wobbled crazily several paces downhill before a stand of lobelias halted it.

  Cashel struggled to his feet. Tilphosa grabbed his arm to lift. She was more trouble than help, but he didn't have enough breath to send her away. Anyhow, he appreciated the thought.

  Metra pushed through the brush, looking as wobbly as Cashel felt. She tried to slide her athame back under her sash, but the effort of her art had robbed her of the necessary coordination. Her eyes were fixed on the ruptured pod.

  “Get her back" Cashel whispered hoarsely. Tilphosa handed him his quarterstaff—that was a help—and caught Metra around the shoulders. She held the wizard easily; and would, Cashel was pretty sure, even if the other woman weren't already exhausted.

  As Cashel himself was, but strength came flooding back now that he was on his feet again. His whole body had locked into a series of mortise-and-tenon joints in order to support the block of stone. Now he was himself again, Cashel or-Kenset, moving with the graceful deliberation of thick cream flowing.

  The stone had dented the pod over a surface the size of a wash basket, but the split in the center was no longer than Cashel's hand and too narrow to reach through. The impact had sprung the hidden catch that locked the pod into a featureless whole, however: the top stood away from the bottom half over most of the oval seam.

  Cashel shifted his grip on the quarterstaff, poising it so that he could punch a ferrule forward like a spear. He stretched out his right foot, then lifted the lid with a quick jerk of his toes.

  In shadow, the figure lying within could have passed for a man: the jaws were a little longer, the brow flat; the eyes set too far to the side and bulging more than a human's would. The creature's skin had a faint green cast and a pebbled surface with fine scales on the backs of the hands.

  Faint though the morning light was, when the lid opened the creature gave a squeal of agony and covered its face with its four-fingered hands. It stank: the blood and bits of human tissue that smeared its head and clawed hands were rotting. A pendant hanging from a neck chain was the creature's only clothing or adornment.

  Cashel stabbed his staff down, crushing the creature's hands and skull together. The ferrule rang with a muffled note on the bottom of the pod. The creature's back arched; it writhed, flinging its legs out of the capsule where it had laired.

  Gasping more with revulsion than effort, Cashel stepped back. Tilphosa touched his arm, letting him know where she was. She peered past him to the interior of the pod.

  “Duzi, stand at my side,” Cashel whispered. A palm tree growing down the hill leaned over him. He ripped a frond from it and scrubbed furiously, cleaning blood and brains from his quarterstaff. “Duzi, help the one who guards your flock.”

  Metra edged past. Tilphosa caught her arm. “Let her go,” Cashel muttered. “I'm done with that now.”

  The almost-human body still twitched. It was smaller than it'd seemed in the darkness, the size of a girl in her early teens. The teeth were no more impressive than a man's, and the claws on the fingers were more like a dog's than the big cat Cashel had imagined from the corpses.

  Savagery and bestial strength, not weapons, had torn the victims apart.

  That wouldn't happen again. Cashel didn't know what the creature was or why it killed the way it did—but he'd stopped it.

  Metra bent over the corpse and lifted the pendant. Cashel had thought it was metal. Raised so that light fell on it, he realized it was transparent and shimmered like the fire opals which nobles from Shengy wore when they visited Garric's court.

  “The Talisman of See-Char!” the wizard cried. “It wasn't a myth after all! Relonia really did see it in her questing dreams!”

  “What is it, Metra?” Tilphosa said. Her voice was calm but a little louder than it need have been to be heard. She'd stuck the chisel under her sash, but as she spoke her fingers stroked the use-polished pommel.

  Metra pulled the chain over the creature's shattered head. It didn't seem to bother her to touch the congealing ruin. She held the pendant out at arm's length and turned it to view from every angle.

  “It's what kept him alive,” she said. “He must have been a great wizard. Perhaps he was fleeing the cataclysm that wiped out the remainder of the Third Race when his vessel crashed here. The amulet is a thing of wonderful power.”

  “Did all of them kill this way?” Cashel asked. “All the Third Race, I mean.”

  As he spoke, the flesh blackened and sloughed from the corpse. The shinbones separated, pulled from the thighs by their own weight; they fell to the leaf mold around the pod. The bones themselves crumbled first to dust, then less than dust. A faint black slime remained to color the golden cavity.

  “What?” said Metra with the angry irritation of someone interrupted by what they think is a stupid question. “No, of course not, they were more advanced than we are in many respects. The amulet could keep him alive, but it wouldn't dull his hunger. Over the years, the centuries...”

  She smiled at Cashel, looking down on his peasant simplicity from the height of her sophisticated wisdom. “Well, after all,” she said, "there wouldn't have been anything for him to eat except other castaways, would there?”

  “Ah,” said Cashel.

  “Metra, put that amulet back in the coffin and leave it," Tilphosa said with a grimace of disgust. “I don't think it's a good thing to have, however valuable it may be.”

  “Don't act like a child!” snapped the wizard. “With the Talisman of See-Char we'll be able to—”

  Cashel reached out and closed his fist over the dangling amulet. It felt greasy, as though the stone was a heavy liquid.

  “Tilphosa's right,” he said. “We're not going to have this around.”

  “Who are you to tell me what to do, you barbarian?” the wizard shouted. She held on to the chain. Cashel lifted his arm until Metra dangled by her hand.

  “Metra!” Tilphosa said. “Let go at once!”

  The chain didn't break, but Metra whimpered and let go when the thin metal had lacerated her palm beyond bearing. She tried to grab it again, but Cashel body-checked her with a thrust of his hip.

  “I'm the man who killed the thing wearing it,” he said in a low growl.

  He dropped the amulet onto bare stone. Tilphosa caught the wizard as she crawled toward it. Cashel brought the butt of his staff down in a short, sharp blow, the same way he'd smashed the creature's skull. The amulet exploded into powder.

  “Now,” Cashel said, “let's get back to the others.”

  * * *

  Gar's senses were even sharper than the ones Garric was used to. He smelled the campfire fifty double paces before he reached their encampment, and he smelled the scattered garbage and human excrement almost as quickly.

  Garric wrinkled his nose in disgust, less from the stench itself than what it said about the gang he was joining. The tanyard in Barca's Hamlet, where Halmat and later his son cured hides with dung, was downwind from the rest of the community. Vascay's band didn't bother with such niceties.

  Garric stepped into the natural clearing where the band camped. Tarpaulins were strung for shelter from the frequent rains. Smoke from the cookfire clumped in the humid air. A pudgy fellow stirred the stewpot hanging from a rod placed between wooden forks.

  Ceto stood in a midst of half a dozen men. One of them held a horn that had probably once belonged to a noble's coachman: the etchings on the curved brass tube were filled with silver and gold. He rai
sed it and blew a long, deep note calling in other members of the band.

  A pair of giant fig trees had shaded out all lesser growth save for ferns and seedlings with trunks only the diameter of a finger. The bandits had chopped away some of the palely hopeful saplings and were using others as drying racks for soaked clothes and bedding.

  “Gar?” chirped Tint, still in the clump of elephant ears growing at the edge of the clearing. “Gar not be hurt? Gar?”

  Nobody noticed Garric until he whipped a canvas ground sheet off the bush it was draped on and wrapped it around his waist. Tunics hung not far away, but Garric needed to cover himself more than he cared about the style of his garment He knew that being naked would put him at a greater disadvantage than being unarmed did.

  “Hey, monkey boy!” called the cook, sweating profusely despite being stripped to a breechclout. “Get some more wood, and make it dry this time! That punk you came back with last time isn't worth the trouble to toss it on the fire!”

  Ceto didn't look around, but the peg-legged older fellow he was showing the sapphire ring to did. He carried too much of his weight around his waistline, but he still had the shoulders of a powerful man. The two knives thrust under his orange-silk sash had simple, serviceable blades ... but they'd been forged from steel, not iron, and their bone scales were yellowed by frequent use.

  Garric would have recognized the leader, Vascay, even without Gar's memory. The other men were mostly bigger, younger, and more heavily armed, but this fellow was in charge.

  Garric noticed the glance; he nodded in response. Vascay made no overt reaction, not even a raised eyebrow, but his face tightened minusculely above his grizzled, short-cropped beard.

  The brain-damaged Gar wouldn't have met another man's eyes. Garric shrugged mentally. Well, the whole band would learn shortly that things had changed.

  “You've got my ring there, Ceto,” Garric said in a clear voice. “I'll take it back now, if you please.”

  Ceto turned in amazement which changed swiftly to anger. He folded his right hand over the ring, protecting it at the cost of preventing him from drawing his sword. He reached for a dagger in his bandolier. Garric's left hand caught the bandit's wrist.