Mistress of the Catacombs Page 3

  Sharina had liked her, even then; and she thought Garric liked her as well.

  Ilna's fingers moved: opening the shed, feeding through the shuttle, and closing the shed again with the certainty of water pouring through the spillway of the ancient tide mill that had been her grandfather's. The pattern of the cloth she wove suggested a woodland at sunset, all buffs and browns and blacks shading into one another.

  Today Ilna worked in naturally colored wools, her usual choice. She could have used silk, coarse hemp, or hard-drawn copper wire, and had the same effect on those who viewed the fabric. She'd always been a skilled weaver; since she returned from Hell, her skill had become inhuman.

  Her fingers wove. She'd paid with her soul for the power to rule others in the way that evil would have her rule them. She'd been freed from the evil that came from outside her, but Ilna knew her heart well enough to be sure that the home-grown variety was sufficient to ruin more lives than even a city the size of Valles held.

  If she let it, which she would not.

  The garden was peaceful but not silent. At the quarter hour, criers called the time across the palace compound from the water clock near the center. Occasionally servants laughed and chattered as they passed along the path on the other side of the back wall, and in the bungalow's atrium a music mistress was giving Lady Merota bos-Roriman her voice lesson.

  The child—Merota was nine—had a clear voice and an instinct for craftsmanship. Ilna found her lessons as pleasant as a wren's warble, even when they involved nothing but repetitions of the scales.

  Ilna was weaving a thin baize, almost a gauze. Even in its partial state it gave anyone who viewed it a sense of peace and tranquility. If Ilna wished—and once she had wished, had done—the same threads could have roused those who saw them to lust or fear or fury. The patterns of the cloth, the patterns of a man's life—the pattern of the cosmos itself—all were connected.

  Anything Ilna wanted was hers for the taking. Anything at all; and she smiled with wry self-disgust because she didn't know what she wanted.

  Once not so very long ago she'd wanted to be the wife of Garric, the innkeeper's son. He was Prince Garric now, but so great was Ilna's power that she could have him nonetheless.

  The shuttle clattered across the loom; Ilna's smile grew harder still. She'd done things in the past that she'd be paying for throughout the future, no matter how long she lived; but she hadn't done that thing, and today she wasn't even sure she still wanted to.

  Ilna os-Kenset, the orphan who couldn't read or write, didn't belong on a throne beside the King of the Isles; nor did Garric belong in a little place like Barca's Hamlet, for all that he'd been raised there with no reason to expect he'd ever travel farther than Carcosa on the other side of Haft. Garric was fit to be king, and a noblewoman like Liane bos-Benliman was a fit companion for him. As for Ilna—

  Merota began “Once There Was a Servant Girl”—a song Ilna had heard before, but not from the child, and certainly not at the request of Lady Stolla, the music mistress. Ilna smiled, this time with a gentler sort of humor.

  “Early one evening a sailor came to me,” Merota sang, “and that was the start of all my misery.”

  Chalcus had a tenor voice every bit as fine as Merota's high soprano. He was a sailor when Ilna and the child met him, as skilled at that trade as any soul else on the ship—though Chalcus would've been the first to say it was no honor to be first among that crew of thumb-fingered nobodies.

  “At sea without a woman for forty months or more...” Merota sang.

  “Lady Merota!” cried Lady Stolla, a decayed gentlewoman, as prim as she was proper, and clearly horrified to realize the thrust of the child's performance.

  “There wasn't any need to ask...” Merota continued. Her birth was better than Stolla's as those who cared about such things judged it, and she wasn't about to let the older woman decide for her what a lady might choose to sing.

  “... what he was looking for!”

  Ilna sniffed. She was Merota's legal guardian now—one orphan caring for another. Despite that, Stolla persisted in treating Ilna as a jumped-up governess or perhaps a maid; and if the music mistress chose to be embarrassed, well, Ilna wouldn't pretend to be sorry about that.

  Her face grew harder. Ilna wouldn't pretend to anything.

  Instead of going on with the next verse, Merota squealed cheerfully, and cried, “Chalcus!”

  “And how's one of the two most lovely ladies in all Valles?” replied the cheerful, lilting voice of the man who must just have arrived at the bungalow.

  Ilna rose from her loom and went to greet her visitor: a man of middle height with a broad chest and muscles that appeared flat until effort made them bunch. There was generally a smile on Chalcus' lips, the curve of it echoing that of the inward-sharpened sword thrust through his sash.

  Ilna herself smiled less often than Chalcus did, at least as an expression of good humor; but she was smiling now.

  Princess Sharina of Haft spent most of her public life wearing the formal garb of an Ornifal aristocrat while receiving deputations from the provinces in place of her brother Garric. Thanks be to the Lady, there was no need of such rigid, stifling state at this meeting of the royal council—the real, working government of the kingdom. Having said that, the dozen or so heads of the civil and military departments were all aristocrats. In Barca's Hamlet, casual dress meant an undertunic alone—worn without a sash on a summer day like this. Here the civilian councillors wore court robes of silk brocade with a sash, while their military colleagues replaced the sash with a sword belt bearing an empty scabbard. The Blood Eagles didn't allow anyone but themselves to enter Garric's presence armed, and the chief of the Blood Eagles—Attaper bor-Atilan—accepted the limitation himself to avoid friction with Lord Waldron, the equally highborn head of the army.

  Sharina stifled a wan smile. To avoid worse friction, rather; Waldron, thirty years Attaper's senior, believed in his heart that he himself should be king. He was at best on stiff terms with Attaper, who didn't bother to put a diplomatic gloss on his disagreement with that opinion.

  “There's more to this 'Confederacy of the West' than hick rulers on Haft, Cordin, and Tisamur deciding they want to secede from the kingdom,” said Chancellor Royhas, seated at Garric's right hand.

  “Begging your pardon sir and lady”—Royhas nodded to Garric and Sharina, a cursory apology for the implied slur against the island of their birth—“but all the force of those islands isn't enough to delay the royal army any longer than it takes to sail there.”

  “They've got more force,” said Attaper forcefully. “They're hiring mercenaries. We knew that even before this latest spy came back with the numbers.”

  “They still couldn't stand against us,” Waldron snapped, though it didn't seem to Sharina that Attaper had suggested otherwise.

  “And that's why I say there's more to it than just these three islands!” Royhas said. “Why, they scarcely know they're part of the kingdom as it is. When's the last time enough taxes came out of Carcosa to pay the salary of an underclerk here in Valles?”

  “They may be concerned about the future,” said Lord Tadai. “We—by which I mean Prince Garric—have given Ornifal a real government for the first time in generations. They may realize that in time, we—”

  The plump, wealthy nobleman had been royal treasurer until his rivalry with Royhas meant one or the other had to go for the sake of the kingdom. He'd accepted his removal with the good grace of a patriot and a man of great intelligence, but no one would deny him a seat on the council so long as he remained in Valles.

  He nodded to Garric in smiling—but real—homage.

  “—will unify the whole kingdom again, and they'll no longer be able to apply their own notions of justice and tax policy.”

  “Count Lascarg never thought beyond trying to keep Carcosa quiet and spending the revenues of the estates that he took over when the previous rulers of Haft died,” Garric said with harsh assurance. �
�Died in riots it was his duty to put down as commander of the Household Troops. His foresight isn't behind this secession.”

  Sharina nodded, in agreement and in understanding for her brother's bitterness. The parents who raised them, Reise and Lora, had served the former Count and Countess of Haft until the night of the fatal riots; that much she and Garric had known since childhood. Only during the disruptions of the past months had they learned the other half of the story: that Count Niard was Sharina's father, and that Garric was the child born to Countess Tera, who traced her ancestry back to King Carus and the royal line of the Old Kingdom.

  Niard had been an Ornifal noble, which explained for the first time Sharina's blond hair and slender height. She'd always felt something of an outsider among the darker, stockier folk of Barca's Hamlet, but she'd still been shocked to learn the truth.

  “They're getting money from outside,” said Attaper, leaning forward with his hands clasped before him on the burl walnut tabletop. “The wages of the mercenaries gathering on Tisamur run to more than the revenues of all three rulers combined. And the troops are being paid—they're not staying on in hope of future loot.”

  “The Earl of Sandrakkan's behind it!” said Lord Waldron. “That's the only place the money could come from. Earl Wildulf doesn't dare face us directly, so he's setting up this confederacy as a stalking horse to see what we'll do!”

  Waldron was an active, passionate man who was rarely comfortable sitting down. Now he rose so abruptly that his chair clattered over behind him. Normally a servant waited behind a seated noble, but Garric—though in truth Liane, Sharina suspected—had instituted a policy of greater privacy during discussions of such moment.

  The noise startled everybody, even Waldron, who grimaced and tried to pick the chair up. He got the legs tangled in the robe of Lady Vartola, Priestess of the Temple of the Lady of Succor, and today representing religious interests before the council.

  Sharina sprang to her feet and stepped around Vartola. Waldron was about to fling the chair into the paneled wall in fury. She took it from him. With the skill of one who'd been serving in an inn before she could read, Sharina set the chair upright again and gestured Waldron into it. The old warrior obeyed, his hard face maroon with embarrassment.

  Sharina sat down also. She kept from smiling, but only with difficulty.

  “I believe Lord Waldron has the right idea,” said Pterlion bor-Palial, the new treasurer, “but he's wrong about the source. The money's coming from Blaise, not Sandrakkan.”

  He stopped, waiting with a smug smile to be asked why he was sure. The treasurer was a clever man, but rather too fond of showing how clever he was instead of just getting on with the job.

  “Explain,” said Garric, his sharpness wiping the satisfaction from Pterlion's face. “And in the future, Lord Pterlion, please recall that there are no fools at these council meetings—and no time for foolishness either.”

  “That would be a good idea,” said Lord Waldron, glowering as though he'd prefer to rip the treasurer's throat out with his teeth instead of using a sword on the fellow. “A very good idea.”

  Pterlion grinned in embarrassment. “Yes, ah, Prince Garric,” he said. “Ah. There are two items of evidence. Merchants coming from Cordin and particularly Tisamur are paying their port duties in Blaise coinage, much of it fresh-minted—and, I might add, with more lead than silver in the bullion. Whereas reports from Blaise itself indicate that trade is suffering because of a lack of currency on the island. Lerdoc, Count of Blaise, is behind this secession.”

  “I never thought Wildulf had the sophistication to mount a plan like this,” Tadai agreed, tenting his fingers before him. “Successfully, at any rate.”

  “They haven't succeeded,” said Garric. “They won't succeed. And thank you, Lord Pterlion. Knowing where the trouble started will make it easier to end it.”

  “I want to know about this Moon Wisdom you mentioned,” Lady Vartola said in a rasping wheeze. She was the color of old bone and so thin that Sharina wondered if she had a wasting disease. There was nothing wrong with Vartola's mind, however, save that she focused it wholly on the betterment of her temple rather than the common good of the kingdom. “Are they usurping ownership of temple property?”

  Garric glanced over his shoulder. Liane's formal position was amanuensis to Prince Garric, so she wasn't qualified to sit at the council table proper. Instead she waited at Garric's right elbow, her lap desk open and her fingers ready to withdraw whichever scroll or codex might be required.

  “We don't have direct information on that as yet,” Liane said without bothering to consult the records this time. “The evidence suggests that may be the case.”

  Sharina's mind ticked back over a file of appointments already in her schedule for the next two weeks. For the most part they involved providing a high-ranking ear to which aggrieved citizens could complain: salt merchants protesting the new tariff on their product, the clothmakers' guild demanding higher tariffs on silk from Seres, and a thousand variations on the theme of what the government was doing wrong.

  Occasionally there was an exception. For example—

  “An assistant inspector of temple lands has returned recently from Tisamur,” Sharina said, loudly enough to cut through Admiral Zettin's question about the confederacy's naval forces. When everyone was looking at her she continued, “He's been demanding an audience with Prince Garric—”

  Royhas snorted angrily at such presumption in a junior member of a department tangentially under his direction.

  “—and gathered enough support from his superiors to be shunted to me, whenever I manage to get around to him,” she continued. “I'll see him this afternoon.”

  A thought struck her. She added, “Unless you would like to see him yourself, Garric?”

  He looked at Liane, who gave a tiny shake of her head. “No," Garric said. “But I will want to know what you learn, Sharina. This Moon Wisdom may be more than—”

  He glanced at the priestess. “Than a scheme by opportunists to defraud the temple of its proper revenues,” he concluded. Only the slightest hesitation suggested that he'd intended to say something a little different from the words that actually came out.

  Garric stood, ending the meeting. “Lords Waldron, Attaper, and Zettin,” he said, “I'll need a report on the current readiness of the forces you command. By the end of the day, if you please.”

  He turned his eyes to the Chancellor. In the same tone of command, so different from anything Sharina had heard from her brother's lips during the years they grew up together on Haft, he continued, “Lord Royhas, I want all the information we have on the property and perquisites of the individual rulers of this confederacy. I realize that—”

  Someone nearby shrieked like a hog nose-clamped for slaughter.

  “What's that?” bellowed someone else, a guard because during the meeting nobody else was permitted near this building and the smaller one adjacent, where her brother had interviewed a spy. “What's the matter in there!”

  Garric was the first to the door and out it, drawing the sword that he alone wore in the council. Attaper and Waldron had the same instinct to run toward trouble, but Garric was younger and already standing.

  Another scream... Sharina followed Attaper, leaping over the chair Garric had flung aside as he moved. Waldron was at the other end of the room, fighting his way through civilians who'd risen also but weren't as quick to learn for themselves what was causing such terror.

  The pair of Blood Eagles posted at the door of the smaller conference room were banging their fists on it, apparently trying to get the attention of the man inside. He had other things on his mind, to the degree that fear let him think at all.

  “Break it down!” Garric shouted. Before the guards could act, he slammed his own right bootheel into the latchplate. Sharina knew her brother wasn't Cashel for strength, but nobody who'd seen Garric lift free a bogged ewe would doubt he was a powerful man by most standards.

 
The bronze catch inside flew out of its staples. Garric rebounded from the impact, so the guards burst into the room ahead of him.

  The spy, his face contorted, was wrestling with nothing at all. And yet there must be something, because both the man's feet were off the floor... .

  A Blood Eagle thrust his spear past the spy's ear; the steel point met only air. His partner dropped his weapon and tried to grapple with the screaming man.

  The spy vanished with a sort of twisting motion, like the last of the foam being slung from the rim of a washbasin. There was an odd odor; it reminded Sharina of the way a stone might smell in the dead of winter.

  For a moment she thought she could still hear the screams; then they too vanished.

  Chapter Two

  “Swing me on your arm again, Chalcus!” Merota demanded. “I want to go all the way over this time!” Ilna didn't let her face react. In the sailor's presence the girl was sometimes either younger than her nine years or very much more mature.

  “And so we shall,” said Chalcus, glancing up at the square funnel that slanted rainwater from the roof into the pool here in the center of the entrance hall. “In the garden, though, for you're growing to such a fine woman that I fear your heels would smudge the ceiling.”

  He gestured the women ahead of him and out the south doorway, adding a little bow to Ilna. “And then,” he continued in the same cheerful lilt, “you'll go back to your room and the lessons I've no doubt your tutors have set you. Mistress Ilna and I will speak alone after that.”

  They stepped past the loom, covered for the moment. In Chalcus' company, Ilna took in the colors and sounds of the brick-walled court, the richness that she generally ignored because it had nothing to do with her work.

  Five generations in the past, Duke Valgard of Ornifal ruled the neighboring islands outright and claimed with as much justice as any other could to be King of the Isles. Valles was the kingdom's greatest metropolis then, while the palace compound housed thousands and was a city in its own right.