Mistress of the Catacombs Read online

  “What?” said Tenoctris. It'd taken her mind a moment to come up from the depths of whatever mental sea it swam in. “Oh, dear, I don't think so, Cashel. But I'm not really sure. I did a guidance spell because there's something nagging at me, and it directed me here. I think.”

  She gave him an apologetic grin. “I'm not a very powerful wizard, you know,” she said. “Even in times like these, when there's so much power everywhere.”

  Tenoctris had explained that every thousand years there was more of the sort of power that wizards used. In those times wizards could do far more than in the past, and generally far more than they'd intended. It was a peak like that which ended the Old Kingdom; and the forces were rising again.

  Cashel and the wizard reached a building site from which the remains of the former brick-and-wattle structure had mostly been cleared. Though heavy construction wagons weren't allowed in Valles during daylight hours, the stacks of freshly cut stone for the new foundation blocked part of the street.

  Cashel paused, letting a group of housewives pass from the other direction with baskets full of greens bought in the produce market a little nearer the river. He could've pushed through the congestion easily enough, but he and Tenoctris weren't in any kind of hurry.

  On the building site, men were already at work on the kiln which would provide lime for the cement; it was better to burn it there than to transport so dangerous a load through the city, with the chance of losing it to a sudden rainstorm besides. Piled as high as the quarried blocks was a load of broken limestone and marble to feed the kiln. Some of the bigger pieces had been ships' ballast at one time; those were dark and still slimy from bilgewater.

  The housewives passed; Tenoctris started forward, then stopped when she realized that Cashel was staring at the rubble. She said, “Cashel?”

  Cashel's skin prickled, the same sort of feeling as when he got too much sun when plowing in early spring. There was something about the stones... . Holding his staff out for balance in his left hand, he clambered onto the pile.

  Several of the workmen glanced toward Cashel, but nobody shouted at him. He wasn't doing any harm by climbing around on a pile of rock, so only the urge of people to boss other people would've led them to speak. Cashel was too big for that to seem a good idea, even to a half dozen burly workmen.

  Tenoctris watched intently, but she didn't say anything that might have distracted Cashel from whatever he was doing. Cashel grinned. He didn't know what he was doing either, just that there was something about these chunks of stone that made his senses prick up. It was the way you could feel there was something wrong with your sheep, even before ewes ran out of the woods blatting because one of their sisters had managed to catch her neck in the fork of a sapling.

  “Here!” Cashel said in triumph. He used his free hand and his staff's iron-shod tip to pry a piece of marble out of a litter of limestone gravel.

  “Hey! What's that you're doing up there?” called the foreman of the building crew, a squat man of thirty with a bushy moustache and biceps that would've looked well on a man of twice the size. The other workmen watched in interest, glad for an excuse to stop work and hopeful that there'd be more entertainment to come.

  “I'm looking at your rock,” Cashel said. The crew wouldn't own the building materials, but he guessed they'd still be willing to sell a chunk for the price of a round of ale. “This piece here.”

  He hefted it, noticing the foreman's eyes narrow. It was the torso of a statue, meant originally for a woman, Cashel guessed, though he couldn't swear to much in the shape the piece was now. The marble had weathered and worse, been buried in a forest where rotting leaves had blackened it and eaten at the surface during every rainstorm. In some places white foam had boiled from cancerous pits in the stone. A soaking in a ship's bilge had added final indignities.

  Though the block was of no obvious interest—even to Cashel, except for the tingling it raised in him—it was still stone and weighed as much as a man of ordinary size. The foreman knew that and understood what it meant that Cashel held it easily in one hand.

  “I want to buy it from you,” Cashel said. “I'll pay you a, a...”

  He didn't know what name a silver coin had. In Barca's Hamlet there was mostly bronze and little enough of that, except during the Sheep Fair, when merchants and drovers came down the road from Carcosa. Ornifal used different coins; and though Cashel now carried a purseful of them on a cord around his neck, they weren't something he paid a lot of attention to.

  “A silver piece!” he said, getting the idea out well enough. That'd buy a jar of wine that the whole crew could share at any of the open-fronted cookshops in this quarter of the city.

  “For what?” cried a workman in amazement.

  “Let's see his money,” said another, slipping his masonry chisel into a pocket in his leather apron.

  “What is it you want it for?” the foreman asked, scowling like thunder. He was confused and because of that a little angry. He walked forward.

  Instead of answering—because he didn't have an answer, just a feeling—Cashel said, “Tenoctris, will you pay the man for me? I, ah...”

  To pull out his purse and open it, Cashel would have to use both hands. He didn't want to let go of either his staff or the piece of statue until he'd gotten to a place where he had more friends than he did here.

  “Yes, of course,” Tenoctris said. She carried a small purse in the sleeve of her silk brocade robe. She squeezed a coin through the loosened ties, then held it up so that sunlight winked on the silver in the sight of all the workmen; then she gave it to the foreman.

  “Deal?” said Cashel from his perch above the others.

  “Deal, by the Lady!” said one of the workmen. “For that you can carry off the whole pile and we'll tell the boss the rats ate it.”

  The foreman rang the coin against the head of the hammer in his belt. It sang with the bright note of silver rather than something duller and leaden.

  “Deal,” he said, still a little doubtful. He spat in his palm and held it out to Tenoctris. She stared at the man blankly.

  Cashel stepped down from the mound of rubble with the care required by bad footing and the weight he carried. “Shake his hand on the deal, Tenoctris,” he said. “Ah, if you wouldn't mind?”

  “Of course,” said the old woman, nodding to Cashel in gratitude for having explained how you sealed a bargain. Nobles probably did it different. Tenoctris was of a noble house; though from what she'd said, in her lifetime they hadn't had money even by the standards of Barca's Hamlet. Still, she took the foreman's hand gracefully like an adult humoring a child and let him shake hers up and down.

  Cashel cleared his throat. “Ah, Tenoctris?” he said. “I'd like to be getting back to the—”

  Cashel's tongue stuck. He'd dressed this morning as he would have back in the borough, in woolen overtunic and undertunic. The garments were peasant's wear, though smartly cut and of the best quality—as they were bound to be, since his sister Ilna had woven and sewn the cloth. Nobody in the Isles, maybe nobody in all time, could do more with fabrics than Ilna could.

  Tenoctris was in silk, but her robe was neither new nor stylish. The two of them would pass for a noblewoman fallen on hard times and the sort of rustic servant such a lady could afford. That was fine, but Cashel didn't want to use the word "palace" here and cause all sorts of fuss and excitement.

  “To go home, I mean,” he said instead.

  “Yes, of course,” Tenoctris repeated. She turned, getting her bearings with a skill that a countryman like Cashel couldn't match in this warren of streets. “I think if we go...”

  A few of the passersby had stopped to see what was going on. Cashel and Tenoctris weren't doing anything more exciting than hens did in a farmyard, but it was a little different from the usual. There were people in Valles—and everywhere Cashel had been in his life—who'd rather watch others work than do something themselves.

  Through them came a clean-shaven heavys
et man, not a youth but still younger than his baldness made him appear. He wore a tunic of tightly woven wool, black with a stripe of bleached white slashing diagonally across the front. His face was set. He wasn't exactly angry, but he looked ready to snap into anger if something balked him.

  “You there!” he said to the foreman. “Are you in charge? I want to buy this pile of stone. I'll pay—

  The workmen's eyes shifted from the newcomer to Cashel and Tenoctris. Cashel made a wry face, but he'd learned young that some days bad luck was the only kind of luck you were going to have.

  Cashel squatted and set the block of stone between his feet rather than drop it on the cobblestones. Then he rose again, holding his staff with both hands and waiting for whatever might come next.

  The newcomer's glance followed the workmen's; he looked at the piece of statue, then raised his eyes to Cashel's. “I believe you have some property of mine, my man,” he said. His tone held a thin skin of politeness over fury. “I'll take it now, if you please.”

  “It's not yours,” Cashel said. Tenoctris had stepped behind him, but he didn't know just where. He hoped she'd be clear if things started to happen, as they might. “I bought it, fair and more than fair.”

  “Yes, well,” said the stranger, looking over Cashel appraisingly. He reached into the folds of his twisted silk sash. “I'll buy it from you, then.”

  “No,” said Cashel, his voice husky. His hands were going to start trembling soon if he didn't do something, either spin the quarterstaff into the stranger's face or pick up the statue and run.

  The stranger's hand came out of the sash with three broad, thin pieces of gold. He fanned them into the light between his thumb and two well-manicured fingers. “Look at this, my man,” he said. “Yours for a bit of old stone.”

  “No,” Cashel said. There was going to be trouble if Cashel didn't move away, but he couldn't leave the stone, and he didn't want to be holding it if the stranger came at him with a knife.

  Instead of attacking, the stranger swept the spread of coins under the foreman's nose. “Bring me the piece of marble,” he said, pitching his voice so that all the workmen could hear, “and these are yours. Twice this, a gold piece for each man!”

  The foreman scowled his forehead into even deeper ridges than before. The gangling, scar-faced workman beside him snatched a pole from the bundles of scaffolding and stepped forward. “Ansie, Blemm...” he called in a matter-of-fact voice. “All you guys. That's enough money to set us up for life.”

  “Right!” said the foreman, reaching for his hammer.

  Cashel stepped forward, driving the tip of his quarter-staff into the foreman's gut. The fellow saw it coming and tried to jump back. He wasn't fast enough, but the move may have saved his life. The iron-shod hickory flung him into the kiln, spewing his breakfast of bread sopped in wine lees, but it didn't punch through the muscle walls as it could've done if Cashel was really trying.

  The stranger had ducked behind the stack of quarry-stone. Cashel ignored him and the shouting spectators both. It might be that a section of the City Watch would arrive, but Cashel doubted that. He sure wasn't trusting his safety and Tenoctris to that hope.

  The workman with the pole swung at Cashel. The bamboo would've made a decent weapon if the fellow'd known what he was doing, but he didn't. Cashel blocked the stroke with the ferrule nearer his body, then spun the other end into the workman's side. He heard ribs crack.

  Two of the men who'd been hesitating when things started to happen now backpedaled. Another had pulled out his chisel to use as a sword; he flung it as a dart instead. The heavy bronze tool caught Cashel on the right shoulder, a solid blow but not a dangerous one because the edge was sharpened to split rock rather than to shave wood.

  Cashel grunted with anger and stepped forward, recovering the staff so that both his hands gripped the wood at the balance. The workman squealed and dodged behind the partner who held a heavy maul up in the air like a torch.

  The fellow with the maul couldn't have been more open to a stroke from the quarterstaff if he'd turned his back and begged to be hit. Didn't anybody in Valles know how to fight? Cashel rapped him where he gripped the helve, breaking fingers on both hands and flinging the maul into a cart hard enough to tip it over.

  Cashel kicked the screaming man he'd just crippled out of the way and went after the fellow who'd thrown the chisel at him. That one was scrambling off by now. Most times Cashel would've left him be; but his shoulder throbbed, and he knew that except for the bulges of muscle there he'd have had a broken collarbone.

  The workman tripped on his leather apron and skidded into the stack of scaffolding. Cashel raised his staff for a straight-arm thrust that would've been fatal—then grimaced and instead gripped the apron's neck loop with his right hand to jerk the fellow upright.

  “You like to throw things, do you?” Cashel bellowed. The workman's eyes were screwed shut: he couldn't change whatever was coming, but he didn't have to watch it.

  Cashel straightened his arm and put his shoulders in it too, hurling the fellow over the basement excavation to slide through debris at the back of the lot. The man's arms and legs were moving before his body came to a halt. He hopped over a mound of dirt saved for backfill and continued running.

  There was a blue flash from the other side of the pile of quarrystone. The stranger who'd started the trouble sprang into view with a shriek. His robe was on fire. Instead of the grudging, halfhearted flames Cashel expected from wool, these were vivid and tinged with the same blue as the flash: wizardlight.

  The stranger bolted down the street, tugging his garments off as he ran. Spectators lurched out of his way, pushing a path violently through their fellows the way they'd have done to escape a runaway horse—

  Or maybe more violently yet. Wizardry scared lots of people worse than death did.

  Tenoctris stood alone at the edge of the street, swaying and so weak she was about to fall over. Cashel, gasping with his own efforts, stumbled to his older friend and put his arm around her. His shoulder hurt as badly as it had the day Scolla's ill-tempered lead ox had flung its head around while Cashel was trying to yoke it.

  “Are you all right, Tenoctris?” Cashel asked, speaking the words between one deep breath and the next. “You did a spell to send the fellow off, is that it?”

  He'd split the back of his undertunic when his shoulders bunched; it looked like he'd broken his sash too. Well, it hadn't been a proper bout where he'd have had time to get ready.

  “I interfered with his own spell,” Tenoctris said, panting like a snared rabbit. Cashel had seen before now the wonders that wizards could do; but it took real effort to guide their powers, as sure as it did to use a quarterstaff the way Cashel used one.

  Still clinging to Cashel's arm, Tenoctris hobbled around the stack of squared blocks. Spectators kneeling in the dirt there scattered like startled quail, looking over their shoulders at the old woman. Cashel guessed that the stranger had dropped the gold he'd offered. People in this district weren't going to let a gold coin go to waste, no matter how much wizards frightened them.

  Tenoctris pointed to symbols drawn on the ground where the stranger had been hiding. “He was going to send dust into your eyes, Cashel,” she said. “I just opened his circle of protection before he'd directed the stroke.”

  Cashel felt a surge of warmth for the old wizard. Tenoctris was quick to say that she had very little power; but she knew things, knew what she was doing, and generally knew what other wizards were doing better than they did. Cashel trusted Tenoctris the way he trusted his own ability to put an axe into a tree trunk where he meant it to go.

  Strength was fine, but control was a better thing if you had to have only one.

  “What's this made of, do you suppose?” Tenoctris said in surprise. She bent closer to the greenish-yellow rod lying beside the symbol the stranger had drawn with it. It was his athame, abandoned like the coins when he fled—and to a wizard, far more valuable than that gold.
“It looks like the shell of an insect. A very large insect.”

  Cashel reached toward it with a bare toe. He could see the blurred texture of the soil through the athame, as though it was a sheet of mica.

  “No, I don't think we'd better touch it,” Tenoctris said, moving her slippered foot to block Cashel's. She scuffed the athame sideways, onto the cobblestones. “The wagons tonight will grind it to powder; I suspect that's the best choice. And I'll burn this slipper when we've gotten home.”

  “Let's be doing that now,” Cashel said, looking behind him for the chunk of statue he'd forgotten during the fight. Quite a fool he'd feel if somebody'd made off with it... but they hadn't, nobody would. It was an ugly, awkward piece of stone whose only use was for burning into the living white fire of quicklime; but it was Cashel's piece now for sure.

  “Will you be able to carry it yourself?” Tenoctris asked. “I mean, you must be tired from... ?”

  Cashel grinned. “Guess I'll manage,” he said as he lifted the block, using his knees instead of his back for leverage. “The harder thing's going to be figuring out what to do with it now that I've got it, but maybe Sharina will have an idea.”

  And because he was thinking of Sharina, he grinned even broader.

  Ilna os-Kenset's fingers wove with a speed and skill that any woman on the island of Ornifal would have envied, but her mind wasn't on her work. In this fine weather she'd set her loom in the bungalow's courtyard, walled off from the rest of the palace. Bees buzzed about the flowers; birds chirped and pecked and fluttered for food among the plantings. Ilna didn't pay them much attention either, except to note that they were just as quarrelsome and snappish as they'd been back in Barca's Hamlet.

  Not long ago Ilna had been the orphan girl who supported herself and her brother Cashel by skill and by working so hard even by the standards of a rural village that everyone marveled at her. She was a woman that everybody respected and nobody liked; nobody, or very few.