Mistress of the Catacombs

5

Fingers closed on the pattern Ilna was knotting. She jerked back, confused by the contact and not really aware of her immediate surroundings.

The fingers were stronger than her own. They snatched the cords from her, crumpling the half-done curse…for curse it was, certain condemnation to the bleakest levels of Hell for the victim and for Ilna herself.

Her mind opened onto present existence. Chalcus faced her, holding her eyes as his fingers picked apart her knots with a seaman’s skill.

“Don’t do this thing, dear one,” Chalcus said calmly.

With the fury of a hornet, Ilna shouted, “Do you wish to spend forever with crows pecking your liver, little man! Do you doubt I can do that?”

“I well know what you’re capable of doing; to me or to any man, dear heart,” Chalcus said. He reduced the pattern to individual cords and stroked them alongside one another on his callused palm. “In good time you’ll be able to do whatever you choose; but not just now. And not, I hope, in this way.”

He tilted his hand and dropped the hank of cords back into hers.

Merota had joined them, still wearing the single thin tunic in which she took her lessons. Ilna frowned. The girl knew better than to come out in public in such a scandalous state of undress!

Ilna breathed deeply. Her legs were trembling; for a moment she wasn’t sure the big muscles of her thighs would continue to hold her. Chalcus held out his left forearm for her to grab the way she would have gripped a railing. She took it and felt her body return to normal.

“You saw what he did to me,” Ilna said, her eyes on the ground. Seeing that Merota had grounded her again in a world where duty constrained Ilna os-Kenset more straitly than ever chains did a prisoner. It was a safe world, a world she knew well enough to feel comfortable in. There was nothing Ilna feared more than herself and the things she might do if unconfined.

And there was nothing she regretted more than the things she had done when she put her skills at evil’s service and was governed only by anger and her own cold logic.

“I heard him,” said Chalcus. “I’ve left men lying in their guts for less, dear one. But not you, not that way.”

“I’m sorry,” Ilna whispered. “I was so angry that I wasn’t…”

She laughed, surprising herself but not—from his expression—Chalcus. “I was so angry that I was myself,” she corrected herself. “And that’s a thing I try not to be very often.”

Ilna reached toward the silent Merota and, holding the girl, hugged Chalcus as well. There was as little give to his flesh as there was to a brick wall. Merota squeezed back fiercely.

They stepped apart. Chalcus eyed the small building now ringed by Blood Eagles, the conference room into which Garric had disappeared with the three women. The other women.

“Dearest…?” he said in a bantering tone. At any other time Ilna would have snapped at him for the word, but not now. “Don’t ever use your art to kill someone you care for. Use that little knife you carry, if you must. Or better—”

He grinned at her. There was no expression at all in his gray eyes.

“—use me. It’s a thing I’ve a talent for.”

The crowd of civilians across the watercourse was beginning to break up into lesser groupings. Each pair or handful chattered among itself as people went off to tell others about the wonders they’d witnessed—and likely, from Ilna’s experience of human beings, telling about many things they hadn’t witnessed.

Ilna brushed the thought aside, angry at herself for what she’d tried to do. “No,” she said. “I’m not so great a fool as that; at least when my friends see to it that I’ve time to think. Garric’s a clever man and a wise one. He’ll have had a good reason for whatever he chose to do.”

“Ilna?” Merota said, perfectly the lady now despite her garb and hair tousled from running. “You saw Garric being threatened, and now he’s acting funny. Couldn’t that be because of the danger you saw?”

Ilna looked at the girl coolly. “You were listening to me and Chalcus when you should have been about your lessons,” she said. She paused, then continued, “And a good thing, too, since you’ve obviously got better sense than I do.”

Her eyes met those of Chalcus again. “You both do,” she said.

“Do you care to wait here, Mistress Ilna,” Chalcus said. “Or shall we—”

The door of the conference room opened. Tenoctris shuffled out, looked across the narrow stream, and said, “Ilna? Would you help me with a task, please? It may help us find your brother.”

“Of course,” said Ilna, hiking up her tunic skirts and jumping the channel. Spectators still in the neighborhood watched with renewed interest.

Garric came out of the building with Liane on his arm. Liane stepped away, glancing toward Ilna. Ilna froze where she’d landed.

Garric acknowledged Ilna with a nod, then put his fists on his hips and stood arms akimbo.

“Master Chalcus?” he called. “Will you talk with me now? Liane can take care of Lady Merota, for neither our business nor that of Tenoctris and Mistress Ilna is anything they should trouble themselves with.”

Chalcus looked at Merota. “Go on, Chalcus!” the girl said. “Liane and I will sit in the bower there”—she nodded to the ivy-covered frame of withies near the terrace of fountains—“and discuss Celondre’s poetry.”

She giggled, suddenly a child again. “Or something.”

Ilna gave the sailor a brief lift of her chin in assent. She didn’t know what was going on, but that wasn’t a new experience for her.

“I’ll be right glad to join you, prince,” said Chalcus, hopping the stream without seeming to prepare for the leap. “Indeed, I think we’ve matters to discuss.”

He sauntered toward Garric, grinning broadly when he saw the Blood Eagles tense at his approach. The officer in command leaned toward Garric, who waved him away with a curt syllable. Garric held the conference room door for Chalcus, then entered behind him and closed it.

Ilna sighed. Part of her wanted to squat here on the turf and see what her patterns told her, but no doubt she’d learn in good time. For now she’d help Tenoctris.

She smiled coldly. It was her duty, after all.

Tint crept up to the fallen structure, pausing midway to turn and stroke Garric nervously. He grimaced but didn’t let reflex jerk him back in disgust. The beastgirl had been frightened even before the snake; she was proceeding now only because Garric demanded that she do so. It wasn’t much to ask that Garric let her take a little reassurance in his presence.

The palms and jagged-leafed philodendrons which shaded the boggy clearing were so motionless in the still air that Garric had the feeling he’d stepped through the frame of a painting rather than being part of a real setting. There was a chittering and sudden swift motion behind him; his heart leaped. A flock of bright yellow finches burst through the foliage and wheeled away again as suddenly.

“Stone and ring here, Gar,” Tint said, pointing to a corner of the ruin. “Under wall. You dig from side, not touch mushrooms.”

She hadn’t started at all when the birds fluttered past. They were harmless, after all….

Garric smiled faintly and patted Tint’s shoulder; she licked his hand. That was disconcerting, but it no longer irritated him.

He looked at the fallen wall. The orange puffballs grew only on the stones, bright blotches that punctuated the mosses and the original gray surface. If the builders had buried a statue as part of a foundation course to keep the new structure from sinking into the bog, Garric ought to be able to reach it by tunneling into the soft soil.

If it was there. And if it had the ring.

“Tint,” Garric said, “how do you know the statue you smell is the one that has the ring?”

The beastgirl shrugged. “Men find stone feet,” she said, gesturing back the way she’d brought Garric. “Writing on stone. Vascay say, ‘Find rest of statue.’ Stone under there smell same as stone feet.”

She scratched the middle of her back absently, a multijointed motion that startled Garric almost as much as the finches had. “Gold with stone,” Tint added. “Maybe ring, maybe not ring.”

Garric probed the ground with his finger. Water gleamed in low spots in the soil, drowning even the moss. He didn’t see how Tint could actually smell objects through that, let alone discriminate between particular veins of marble and types of metal.

But it was easier to believe that than to imagine the beastgirl either wanting to lie to him or having enough intelligence to carry it off. “Then I’ll dig,” Garric said.

It struck him suddenly that he had no tools or clothing whatever. Granted the ground was soft…

Garric looked around, chose a palm sapling whose trunk was only two fingers broad, and pulled it upward. It came easily, but the mat of surface roots at the end would make a better broom than a digging implement. Maybe he could chop or crush the staff into some sort of point?

“Tint,” he said, “do you see a rock with a sharp edge? I want to cut the roots off this tree.”

Instead of answering, Tint took the sapling and put the end in her mouth; her lips curled back. The beastgirl’s eyeteeth would have shamed any dog Garric had seen, but now he realized that her long jaw held the molars of a horse besides.

She crunched down hard, twisted the stem with her hands, and spat out a wad of fibers. “Tint fix,” she said proudly as she handed back the staff.

“Thank you, Tint,” Garric said. He bent to his task, thrusting his pole into the soil at a flat angle and scooping it aside. His new body—Gar’s body—was stronger than Garric’s own had been when he was in top shape at the end of harvest and threshing.

But he wasn’t stronger than Tint, for all that the beastgirl weighed barely half what he did. Gar’s memories were too chaotic to tell Garric how he and Tint had met. It seemed that the bandit gang had gathered them up separately, but Garric wasn’t sure the brain-damaged youth could have survived without Tint’s sharper senses and clear, if limited, intellect.

The palm trunk was too flexible to be a perfect dibble, but the ground was so soft that Garric made good headway nonetheless. The end of the pole almost immediately rapped stone beneath the lowest visible layer. He kept prodding inward and thrusting the spoil sideways. Tint, though she wouldn’t help dig, scooped the muck out of his way with her long hands.

This piece of the foundation was a statue’s torso, all right. The raised right arm was now broken off. The left rested on the figure’s waist. When Garric saw the hand, he set the pole aside and rubbed the marble clear with a philodendron leaf.

The fourth finger had been carved in the round; it was broken at the first joint. On the stub, under a layer of mud and corroded stone, was a gold ring set with a small sapphire. Garric twisted it free without difficulty.

He sloshed off the dirt in a puddle, then rubbed off the rest of the lime crust with his thumb before holding the ring up to a shaft of light. Tint leaned against him, trembling and making little clicking noises with her teeth. She didn’t seem to be frightened, just excited.

Garric tried the simple band on his little finger; it would have been loose, but not very loose. The jewel, though small, had been faceted with great skill.

“I wonder who the fellow was,” he said. The statue’s face was too worn to have features; without the carven sword belt, Garric wouldn’t even have been sure the subject was male.

“Thalemos,” said Tint unexpectedly.

Garric looked at her in surprise. She edged sideways, afraid he was going to hit her. “Gar?” she said nervously.

“I’m just curious how you know who he was,” Garric said. The name wasn’t one he remembered hearing before. “I’m not angry, Tint.”

He hoped the sudden hardness of his lips didn’t frighten the beastgirl further. Her reaction reminded him of the life she’d lived with the bandit gang…and brought back some of Gar’s memories as well.

Tint crouched close again, rubbing Garric with her hands and neck. “Vascay see stone feet by house,” she explained. “Rub stone with finger, then shout, ‘Thalemos! Find rest of statue!’ Men dig around house, but no smell stone. Tint smell stone!”

Sure, the bandits had found the base of the statue carved with the name of the subject portrayed. They’d have looked nearby and even dug in the ground, but even if they’d guessed that later comers had carried the torso off they couldn’t possibly have found it here under a later ruin.

She looked up at Garric. “Gar like Tint?” she said.

“I like you very much, Tint,” Garric said. “Without you, we wouldn’t ever have found the ring.”

He patted her shoulder while he thought. “I guess,” he said, “we need to find Master Vascay. To meet Master Vascay, though he may not think so at first.”

Garric considered carrying the ring on his finger, but he decided not to. It wasn’t so much that the ring gave him a bad feeling, but there was something odd about it. Garric didn’t understand a lot of what had been happening; he didn’t care to increase his contact with strangeness.

Besides, he’d never worn jewelry, either as peasant or as prince. Holding the ring between his left thumb and forefinger, Garric said, “You’ll have to lead me, Tint. I don’t know the way.”

The beastgirl twisted her head up and back to look at Garric in concern. “It’s all right,” he said reassuringly. “I’m fine, Tint. I just don’t know some of the things I used to know before I fell in the water.”

Tint dropped onto all fours, her normal travelling position. As she did so, a tall man with his beard bound into three tails stepped through the palm thicket. He wore a leathern jackshirt studded with rivets for additional protection; from his bandolier hung three daggers and a long, curved sword.

Tint hunched and bared her teeth. Gar’s memory gave the man a name: Ceto. He was a swaggerer who thought himself a handsome fellow despite a scarred cheek and the two toes missing from the left foot visible through his hobnailed sandals.

Ceto was the sort of man you sometimes met among the bodyguards whom merchants brought to Barca’s Hamlet for the Sheep Fair. Garric smiled with one side of his mouth. He’d met the type, and he’d occasionally had to throw one out of the inn. He could do something similar with Ceto if he had to.

“What are you monkeys doing here?” Ceto demanded. He sounded angry, but angry the way you’d be to find a dog sniffing the stewpot. “You’re supposed to be foraging! Heigh yourselves up those nut trees by the camp!”

“We’re headed back to the camp, Ceto,” Garric said, speaking with the insouciant precision of an educated man dealing with an inferior. “We have something to show Vascay.”

Light winked from the sapphire. Ceto, striding toward Garric and Tint, noticed the ring and stared. He hadn’t listened to Garric, let alone noticed a change from Gar’s demeanor.

“What do you have there?” he demanded. “By the Sister! Let me have that!”

“I think it’ll be safe with—” Garric said. Ceto hit him in the pit of the stomach.

Garric doubled up, his lungs paralyzed and his brain screaming for air. All he could hear was Tint’s terrified chirps and the white roar of pain.

Ceto kicked him in the head with a hobnailed foot. White drained to blackness, taking Garric’s mind with it.

Cashel pushed through a lobelia thicket, thrusting his staff into the clay of slope behind him for a brace; Tilphosa clung to his sash as she’d done as they came through the surf. The spring and the twisted framework were as they’d left them an hour earlier.

“We’re there,” Cashel said, stepping aside so that Metra and Captain Mounix could make their way to the top, panting. Cashel might have offered them the alternative of the gentler slope where the lava nodules complicated the footing, but he’d decided that he didn’t care about their opinion. It was enough that he’d agreed to guide them back here.

Tilphosa had come along without comment. She’d taken off her red-leather slippers; that was another reason Cashel had chosen the less stony route.

“May the Lady bless my eyes!” Mounix cried. “That’s gold, or I’m a virgin!”

He started forward. Metra cried, “Wait! Let me examine it before you tear it apart.”

Mounix ignored her. Cashel caught the neck of the captain’s tunic and pulled him back with a startled grunt. Costas, laboring along well to the rear, cried, “What is it? Where’s the gold?”

“Let the wizard work her spell,” Cashel said quietly to the captain’s furious scowl. “Then you can do what you please, so far as I’m concerned.”

Tilphosa lifted her chin in agreement. “I don’t want anything from this island,” she said. “It’s a place of ill omen.”

“You don’t have to tell me about ill omen,” Mounix growled. He relaxed; Cashel let go of his tunic. “I saw what happened to your maid, didn’t I?”

He’d sheathed his curved sword because he needed both hands for the climb; he drew it again now. Cashel had met swordsmen. Mounix wasn’t one.

Costas joined them, saying nothing. He nocked one of his three arrows in the waxed string of his bow.

Metra sat on the nose of the outcrop where only lichen grew. The crumpled golden framework lay before and beside her. Instead of scraping figures onto the rock, she took out a square of white silk embroidered with symbols in red. She began to murmur an incantation, her ruddy copper athame dipping and rising above each syllable in turn.

Mounix grimaced and turned his back. “Sister take all this!” he muttered. “But if she can send whatever it was that ate the girl back to the Underworld, she can talk to a thousand demons for all I care.”

“When we get off this island,” Cashel said, “it won’t matter what it is that lives here. The boat looked like it came through the storm pretty well. Can’t we leave in it?”

“The dinghy, you mean?” Mounix said with a sneer of disgust. “Not like it is now, not if we want to get everybody aboard and take food and water for them. I guess that doesn’t matter to you, since you’re not with us, right?”

“We’re all strangers here,” said Cashel. “I figured we’d stick together for the time being.”

“Master Cashel will accompany me, captain,” Tilphosa said coldly. “Will you be building another ship, then?”

Light—red wizardlight—shimmered in the thicket where the framework lay. Metra raised her voice enough that the others could hear, “…iorbeth neuthi…”

When Mounix heard the words of power, he snarled, “Sister take her!” under his breath. He was one of the people who lost all their courage in the face of wizardry; though it didn’t seem to Cashel that the captain was particularly brave on a good day.

Costas didn’t seem to be bothered. “It’s easier than that,” he said. “We’ll just build up the gunnels of the dinghy so that we can load her deeper. We’ve got enough timbers salvaged from the wreck we can do that easy. Right, captain?”

“Yeah, we can do that,” Mounix said. “I’ve got the crew working on it now. That’s why I left Hook behind, to get going on the job. He’s the ship’s carpenter.”

The air in front of Metra squealed; the sound didn’t come from the wizard’s throat. Red light coalesced into something almost solid, the way butter forms in a churn.

Metra lowered the athame and slumped backward. She’d have fallen if Cashel hadn’t reached out to support her; he carried the wizard back a double pace.

She’d managed to hold on to her athame, but Cashel bent to pick up the embroidered silk with two fingers of the hand holding his staff. He didn’t much like Metra, but he’d so often helped Tenoctris that caring for a wizard exhausted from working her art had become second nature to him.

The rosy light expanded. Cashel couldn’t judge its size; without any seeming change, what had been a globe became instead a hole into another place. A spindle-shaped object of ivory and mother-of-pearl floated on its side over a forest of giant horsetails and trees with limbs like green whips.

“Is that a ship?” Costas said, squinting at the vision. “What kind of a ship is that? It’s flying!”

Captain Mounix glanced over his shoulder, then turned his head again with a look of thunderous misery. He sliced at a shrub with his sword. His blade cut into the wood, then sprang back.

“The Third Race was able to fly, according to Asterican scriptures,” Tilphosa said quietly. She was composed: frightened but facing her fear.

Cashel didn’t know who the Astericans were, let alone the Third Race. “Did they live around here?” he asked. Though he didn’t really know where “here” was.

Metra had regained enough control of her limbs to stand without Cashel’s help. She slid the athame under her sash. Cashel offered the silken document. She took it from him without thanks and folded the square into a tight bundle before replacing it in her sleeve.

Tilphosa looked at Cashel. “The world was very different then,” she said. “According to scripture. The Isles didn’t exist.”

Cashel frowned, trying to imagine how the Isles could not exist. It was like hearing that there was no sky.

“The Third Race weren’t men,” Tilphosa added. “According to scripture.”

The vessel’s hull began to glow with soft pastels that weren’t just the sheen of the mother-of-pearl. The ship rose straight up, then sailed toward the horizon at gathering speed. Though the evening air was warm, Cashel felt a chill along his spine.

The vision ended—or the window closed?—soundlessly. In its place was the brushwood thicket where incorruptible metal sparkled.

“How old is the boat you just showed us, Mistress Metra?” Cashel asked. He squatted down for a closer look at part of the framework sticking clear of the undergrowth. He didn’t touch it.

“You couldn’t understand,” Metra said with a shrug. Turning to Mounix, she said, “Captain, you can do what you please now. I have no further use for this trash.”

Tilphosa gave the priestess an appraising look; while not actively hostile, there was no affection in it either. To Cashel she said, “It would be very old, Cashel. If it was from the Third Race, it was older than we have words to describe. A year wasn’t the same thing when the Third Race lived.”

Mounix and his henchman were listening to the girl also. The captain spat, then said, “Let’s get back to the shore. It’s getting late, and I don’t want to be caught around this thing in the dark.”

“But how about the gold, captain?” Costas demanded. He rotated his arrow and held it against the bowstaff instead of ready for use. “Aren’t we going to take it with us? Some, I mean.”

Mounix started down the slope. “You do what you please, Costas,” he said. “I don’t want any part of that thing.”

“I’ll go in front of you like before,” Cashel told the girl. Metra started to speak, then decided not to. Cashel guessed the wizard was going to ask him to help her as well, but she figured he’d give her a short answer because of the way she’d been acting toward him.

Cashel smiled faintly. Sure, he’d help Metra the same as he’d help most anybody. He couldn’t change how other people were, but he didn’t let them change how he behaved either.

Mounix was moving faster than Cashel cared to do on this slope. There was some reason—it would be dark soon; dawn and nightfall were more sudden in this place than Cashel was used to. Cashel guessed the captain was afraid of more than darkness, though.

On the outcrop, metal chimed as Costas tried to break off pieces of the gold. He’d have his work cut out for him: the tubes were hard enough that iron didn’t scratch them and so tough that mostly they’d bent instead of breaking when the boat smashed into the rocks.

“Metra?” Tilphosa said. She spoke without turning her head but in a clear tone so that the woman following could hear. “What did your dreams tell you? Does the wreckage up there have anything to do with why we wrecked on this island?”

Cashel caught several geranium stems in his left hand. “Watch this,” he warned those behind him. “The clay’s slick here.”

The soil anchored roots solidly, though. Even Cashel’s weight with Tilphosa’s added hadn’t threatened to pull out any of the bushes he’d used for support on the way up.

“Captain?” Costas called from some distance above them. “I’m coming, captain. Which way are you?”

Mounix didn’t answer; he might not even have heard. “We’ve gone this way, Costas!” Cashel shouted. He knew what it was like to be alone in a strange place…and this island was stranger than most.

“Metra?” Tilphosa repeated more sharply.

Metra spoke in a tired murmur. Tilphosa said, “I can’t hear you. Please speak up.”

It struck Cashel that the girl was—or anyway felt she was—of a higher station than the wizard. Cashel had spent most of his life as a poor orphan, so for the most part he’d been on the wrong side of that division.

It was kind of interesting to see how it worked from the top, so to speak. He hadn’t told a stranger that he was Tilphosa’s guardian; and maybe by now Metra was wishing she hadn’t done that either.

“This island, this place,” Metra said, “has always been a focus for Chaos. When the powers that work the cosmos rise, as they’re rising now, the tendency toward…bad luck, call it, grows stronger. We were caught by that, and so was the vessel that crashed on the peak. But at an earlier time.”

A lot earlier. Sharina would understand it better, though Cashel didn’t guess it made much real difference. He wished Sharina was here, though.

He could hear men’s voices ahead of them, and the slope was leveling out. “We’re getting close,” he said. He turned his head, and repeated loudly, “We’ve reached the shore, Costas!”

Tilphosa let go of Cashel’s belt; they walked together through the palms fringing the sand. Captain Mounix stood with half a dozen of his crew, talking in angry frustration. Cashel heard him say, “By the Lady, Hook! If you don’t have the dinghy ready to take us all away before tomorrow midday, I’ll take her with enough men to work her and leave you here!”

Sunset lighted the beach, but the inland jungle was jet-black save for orange and pink tinges to the topmost foliage.

“Costas!” Cashel called. “This way!”

A terrible scream split the night—and stopped. Mounix fumbled as he tried to draw his sword. Several of the sailors ran toward the dinghy, then paused uncertainly.

Cashel stepped toward the forest. “No, Cashel!” Tilphosa said.

He halted. She was right. In the darkness he couldn’t have found where the scream came from.

And from the way it had broken off, there wasn’t a thing anybody could do for Costas now anyway.

Sharina watched past Carus’ right shoulder as Ilna’s close-coupled friend swaggered toward the conference room with a grin for the Blood Eagles. She murmured, “Will you be wearing your sword when you interview him, Carus?”

The king—and Sharina didn’t know how anyone could mistake the face for her brother’s, for all that the physical features were the same—glanced at her and smiled minutely. “I’d insult him if I took it off, girl,” he said. “That one isn’t afraid of my sword—or my temper, either one. Though I think he respects them both.”

He faced Chalcus again. Out of the corner of his mouth, he added, “But I’ll keep my temper on a checkrein; and you’ll be here to tell me if I’m out of line, will you not?”

“Yes,” said Sharina. She grinned. “Of course.”

The guard officer snapped a command; two of his men stepped shoulder to shoulder across Chalcus’ path.

“Your dagger, please, sir!” said the officer loudly, his back stiff, and turned to Carus. He pointed to the weapon in Chalcus’ sash.

Carus frowned. “Captain Deghan—” he began.

“Your majesty, on my oath I won’t let him by while he carries that blade!” the guard officer said.

Chalcus looked past the two Blood Eagles. He cocked an eyebrow at Carus, then handed his sheathed dagger to the officer without deigning to look at him.

“Shall I give him my belt as well, my brave lad?” he asked Carus. “Many a man’s been throttled with a leather strap, you know.”

“I’ll take the knife, Captain Deghan,” Carus said. He held out his left hand, palm upward.

Deghan—young for a captain in the Blood Eagles, in his early twenties—turned, trying to control the emotions skating across his face. “Yes, your majesty,” he said; all he could say, on his oath.

He placed the curved weapon in Carus’ hand. The sheath and hilt were both tin, decorated in black niello with symbols that looked like writing—though not in a script that Sharina recognized.

“Sorry for the rigmarole, Master Chalcus,” Carus said, gesturing the sailor into the conference room. Sharina stepped back to let the men enter. “There’s wine on the sideboard, and I suppose we can find food if you need it.”

He drew the hilt and sheath a finger’s breadth apart to look at the steel, then clicked the blade home. He said, “A nice piece, though I don’t fancy curved blades myself,” and gave the weapon back to Chalcus. Nodding to Captain Deghan, Carus closed himself in with Sharina and the sailor.

“You’ve a good pack of hounds there,” Chalcus said, tossing his head slightly to indicate the black-armored guards on the other side of the door. He slid the sheath into the folds of his sash and walked to the sideboard.

“Aye,” said Carus, walking to the other side of the table. “But sometimes I wonder which of us serves the other.”

Chalcus laughed, an infectious sound that made Sharina realize how little laughter there was in the palace. Little of it in the presence of great ladies like the Princess Sharina, at any rate.

“Oh, I don’t think there’s really much doubt, is there?” Chalcus said. “When it matters to you.”

Two carafes of etched glass stood on the sideboard, one full of deep red wine and the other with a lemon-colored fluid. A mixing bowl, drinking cups, and a larger vat of water with a ladle—all of the same pattern as the carafes—were ranged tastefully behind them.

Chalcus raised the red wine and said, watching Carus, “And this is such a vintage as the poets sing of, is it not? Sunlight pressed from grapes, a nectar fit for the Lady to offer the Shepherd in their bower?”

Carus shrugged. “I suppose,” he said. “You’d have to ask somebody who cared.”

“And if I cared, I would,” Chalcus said agreeably. He swigged from the mouth of the carafe to make his point, then set it down on the sideboard again. “So if we’re not to talk of wine, what is it that you brought me here to discuss, then?”

Carus put his palms on the table and leaned his weight onto them. “Would you care to go to Tisamur, Master Chalcus?” he asked; his tone challenging, though playful rather than hostile. “Lady Merota has wide holdings there, granted her by the crown to replace the wealth she lost when her parents were murdered.”

Chalcus raised an eyebrow.

Carus grinned. “No, she doesn’t know it yet,” he said. “But it’s true regardless…will be true as soon as I’ve talked to Royhas, anyway. You and Mistress Ilna would pass unnoticed travelling as the child’s servants, of course.”

“Would we indeed?” Chalcus murmured. His left hand reached for the wine again, then withdrew; his eyes never left Carus’ face. “But you haven’t discussed this with Mistress Ilna. Why is that?”

Carus straightened, lacing his fingers together before him. He was watchful; not tense, exactly, but as controlled as an archer throwing his weight onto his left arm to bend a bow. Across the room, Chalcus’ posture was identical.

Sharina remained motionless. She understood now why Carus wanted her here. Though neither Chalcus nor Carus acknowledged Sharina even by a glance, her presence was a reminder of civilized behavior to men who were only by courtesy civilized.

“Master Chalcus…” Carus said.

“‘Chalcus’ will do,” he interrupted. “Or ‘sailor’…or such name as you choose, soldier, for I’ve had my share and more of different ones.”

“Chalcus, then,” Carus said with a smile rather than a scowl at the baiting. “I know you wouldn’t—and couldn’t—force Ilna to your will; but I’m sure as well that she won’t go to Tisamur if you refuse. I want you both on Tisamur; and I want her especially, because there’s wizardry in that place and worse from the reports I’ve gotten.”

Chalcus laughed. “You know a thing I don’t, then,” he said. Sharina thought she heard bitterness underlying the banter, but it was hard to be sure.

Chalcus took the carafe again, but this time filled a goblet—straight, no water to mix it—and drank it down. He wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand and looked appraisingly at Carus.

“Well?” said the king. He was smiling; with humor, but a sort of humor Sharina found more disturbing than most men’s rage. “Will you go to Tisamur, sailor?”

“You don’t think duty would carry Ilna to Tisamur, whatever I said or said against, soldier?” Chalcus snapped.

Carus walked to the other end of the sideboard and splashed some of the white wine into a goblet. He dipped a double measure of water into the wine, then smiled over at Chalcus.

“If I had the power to convince Ilna that it was her duty to carry a child into such danger,” Carus said with an edgy lilt not so very different from the sailor’s tone, “then I’d be the greatest of wizards, would I not? What I do believe is that if I tell her that Merota is willing to go for duty’s sake, and you—”

“For duty?” Chalcus said, his voice louder than before. “Will you say that, soldier?”

“And you for the sake of adventure,” said Carus, calm and more nearly relaxed than ever since the moment he called Chalcus to him. “And for duty as well, I think, though I won’t push the point with a red-handed pirate…if I can say those two things, then perhaps Ilna will go despite her concern for the child, eh?”

Chalcus fluttered a smile, the normal humor of his expression alternating with something as bleak as the gray steel of his dagger blade. “Aye, she might,” he said. “I don’t doubt you read her as well as I can, friend soldier.”

He stared for a moment at Carus, then said, “If it’s a wizard you need on Tisamur, you could send Lady Tenoctris. Not so?”

“Tsk!” Carus said between his teeth. “Sharina has a knife as long as my forearm, does she not?”

For a moment the present world became a flat, colorless backdrop to Sharina’s vision of Nonnus the Hermit: her protector, her friend; and at the end, her savior at the cost of his own life. Sharina had his memory—and she had the long, heavy knife that had served Nonnus and other hunters from Pewle Island for tool and weapon as needed.

Sharina had used the knife also; for both purposes.

“Nonnus,” she prayed in an unformed whisper, “may the Lady shelter you with Her mercy. And may She shelter me as well.”

“Aye,” said Chalcus with an appraising glance at her. “She has a Pewle knife, that’s so.”

“Which she would use again at need,” said Carus. “Shall I send her out on purpose to give hard strokes, then, sailor? I have Attaper and his hounds for that, do I not? And perhaps I have you.”

He smiled; Chalcus smiled back. Neither man spoke for a moment.

“There’s hard wizard strokes to be given on Tisamur, sailor,” Carus said softly, almost whispering. “Who better should I send? Who better is there?”

Chalcus laughed cheerfully. He poured himself more wine; this time he chose to cut it. As he lifted the ladle a second time from the water vat he said banteringly, “Prince Garric is a bold young man and a clever one besides….”

He straightened, holding the goblet in his left hand. Instead of drinking, he fixed his eyes on Carus. His lips smiled, but his eyes did not.

“Prince Garric is all those things,” Chalcus continued, “but he’d not be making a plan so heedless of the lives of a young child and a childhood friend. Who made this plan…soldier?”

Carus crossed his arms before him. “I’m not heedless, sailor…” he said. The emotion wasn’t on the surface of his words, but Sharina heard it bubbling beneath them. “But a general who won’t risk his troops when needful will lose them all when there was no need. And as for who made the plan—I did. My name’s Carus. I’m not here by my own will; but seeing that I am here, I won’t sit on my hands and let the kingdom go smash for want of a ruler.”

“Are you indeed?” said Chalcus, and he sipped his wine. “Are you indeed.”

He set down the goblet. “May I tell her?” he said, nodding toward the door.

“Yes,” said Carus. “Or I will, if you prefer.”

Chalcus shrugged. “I’ll take care of it,” he said with a wry smile.

The smile broadened into a bark of laughter. “Well, soldier,” Chalcus continued, “I’m not one to sit on my hands either. If Mistress Ilna chooses to go to Tisamur, why, I wouldn’t mind going back. I was only a lad the last time I was there.”

“And you think the survivors have forgotten by now?” Carus said, strait-faced.

“Who says there were survivors, soldier boy?” Chalcus replied.

Sharina watched as the men clasped arms, laughing like demons. They understood one another, those two.

And might the Lady protect her—Sharina understood them also.