Master of the Cauldron (46 page)

He slid open a black velvet curtain. Attaper reached past left-handed and tore the hanging off its rod, then flung it to the side. There was a second curtain just inside the first. Estin wasn't able to tear it free, but again Attaper did.

The windows of Dipsas' room were shuttered. The only light was from a lamp of scented oil. Rugs piled in the center of the room must serve as a bed. The only other furnishing was a tall cabinet standing in a corner.

“The entrance is through that!” Estin said, pointing. Garric jerked it open. The cabinet had hidden brick steps leading downward.

“Wait!” said Liane, who'd pulled a pair of rushlights from her case. She held one in the lamp till the waxed pith ignited into pale yellow flame. She stepped to Garric's side and smiled, saying, “Now we can go.”

They started down the stairs. Garric was a step ahead with his sword forward, but Liane stayed close to give him the benefit of her fluttering light. Estin, from immediately behind, said, “We go right in the passage at the bottom.”

“Your highness—” said Attaper.

“I've been here before,” Garric said. “Just not by the short route. I belong in front.”

“With all respect, you do
not
belong in front,” Attaper said in a tired voice. “But I won't knock you over the head and drag you out of here, so I've got to live with your bad decision. Your highness.”

“He's right.”
Carus chuckled.
“But so are you, lad. These aren't times for a king who thinks about ways he could hang back. If there ever was that kind of time.”

They reached the passage, an interior hallway that survived from the building that'd been there a thousand years before. There were niches for decorative objects, but all had been removed except an alabaster urn that lay broken on the floor. There must have been people in every age prowling these tunnels, for loot or simply curiosity.

“Dipsas might've been told about the chamber below,” Garric murmured. “Instead of searching it out herself.”

“I wonder if we can block this up?” Liane said. Then, regretfully, she added, “I don't suppose so. There's just too much of it.”

“Left at the end,” Estin said. “And watch it, it's steep.”

At the bottom of a natural cleft, Liane lighted her second rushlight some moments before the first crumbled to orange embers. They went on, more quickly now because Garric recognized the route. In the darkness to the left was the way he and Liane had taken from their bedroom the previous night.

“I hear something,” Attaper said quietly. “Voices, or…”

“Yes,” said Garric. “I hear it too.”

He couldn't make out the words, but there were two voices. One was
the deep rumble that he'd heard when they entered the caverns before, the sound that hadn't come from anybody present in the vault. The other was high-pitched and scarcely human. It shrieked words in counterpoint to the thunder of the deep voice.

“By the Lady!” said a soldier farther back in the column. “By the
Lady
!”

Occasionally Balila's pet screamed. The bird didn't like this business any better than Garric did….

Violet light quivered through the vault's egg-shaped opening. Garric had seen hints of it before, but he'd told himself that it'd been his eyes tricking him in the near darkness.

He glanced over his shoulder. “Master Estin,” he said, “you can go back now if you like. I'll see to it that you're compensated for the dangers to which we've subjected you.”

“I'll see it through,” the spy said. He didn't have a weapon. “I'll make sure you get back so you can take care of that compensation.”

Garric shrugged. He crouched at the opening and looked through. Attaper moved Liane back with his arm and knelt beside Garric. He swore softly.

A lamp burned from a niche in the sidewall, but a violet shimmer filled the air itself. It trembled as the bass voice thundered words of power.

The great bird paced back and forth at the rear of the chamber, opening and closing its hooked beak. The horny edges clopped together, but the bird had ceased to scream. Its eyes flashed with rage.

Balila and Dipsas stood on opposite sides of a circle chalked on the vault's basalt floor. In the center, hanging by his blond hair from a tripod made of wooden poles, was Balila's cherub. He still wore his gilt wings. When the bass voice ceased its thunder, the boy's lips began to shriek a response in a high treble. As he spoke, his dangling body rotated slowly.

“They're demons,” Liane whispered. “They're not human to do that to a child!”

“We'll end it now,” Garric said, forcing the words out past the thick anger in his throat. He stepped through the opening, his sword before him. Dipsas had information that would be of value to the kingdom, but in his heart Garric knew that nothing the wizard could say would please him as much as the knowledge he'd rid the world of her.

The boy continued to swing and chant, but both women turned to
face Garric. The air was alive with swirling phantoms, coalescing in the edges of his vision but never directly where he looked.

“That's enough!” Garric said, raising his sword.

Dipsas pointed her athame at his chest, and shouted, “
Temenos!
”

Garric tried to take one further step to bring the wizard's throat within reach of his steel. He couldn't move. The word bound him in violet light.

“Sanbetha rayabuoa!”
the bass voice and the cherub chorused together. Dipsas broke into cackling triumph.

The vault's basalt floor cracked across the middle. The halves tilted upward, knocking over the tripod and making the women stumble backward. Things as pale as the mushrooms growing on corpses began to crawl up through the cracks.

The wizard's laughter changed to a scream as one of the things grabbed her ankle.

Garric was deaf and frozen in a world of purple light. He couldn't swing his sword or blink, and his heart had stopped beating. He was fully aware of what was happening in the vault. Not happy about it, but aware.

The creatures crawling through the crack in the rock looked as though a child had tried to mold men out of clay. They were hideous, maggot-pale travesties. As many had three limbs or six as had four. Some were headless, their eyes and mouth gaping from their chests; one hopped on a single leg and held an edged stone paddle in its single hand. Yet clearly, and most horrible of all, they'd been meant to be human.

The countess backed toward the opposite wall of the vault, wearing a stupefied expression. Even though Balila wasn't a wizard herself, she'd been enough involved in the spell that it'd numbed her to events in the waking world. She seemed only partially aware of her surroundings.

A troupe of not-men rose from the crack the way spring sap bubbles from a cut in a maple tree's bark. They shambled toward Balila. Their weapons were mostly of stone or bronze, but one carried what looked like the tusk of a monster in each of its four hands.

Garric thought of the passage Liane had showed him just that morning: a thousand years ago the wizard Dromillac had trapped invaders under Erdin. Like the People who attacked Valles, the race that the chronicler called pirates hadn't been quite human.

After a thousand years in darkness, their descendents were very much less human than the originals had been.

The thing that gripped Dipsas' ankle had one arm and no neck. Instead of legs it crawled on a nest of squirming tentacles. It grinned at the wizard, ignoring her wild struggles. She was probably part of the reason the monsters had broken free of the Underworld, but she obviously hadn't known everything that her incantations were doing.

Because Garric couldn't hear, he could only guess that when Dipsas pointed her athame at the creature holding her she was screaming a spell. If so, it failed on the not-man.

A creature with the head and torso of a handsome man minced toward Dipsas on the legs of a deformed goat. It held a copper trident with a short staff.

Six not-men advanced on the countess. Her bird opened its great beak; its tongue trilled a cry that Garric couldn't hear. It raised its crest, flapped its stubby wings, and lashed out with its right foot.

The bird's three claws were blunt, meant for running instead of gripping prey the way a hawk does, but its leg was immensely strong. The blow disemboweled a not-man and flung its two-headed corpse across the chamber.

The remaining five creatures converged, swinging their weapons. The bird grabbed a not-man in its hooked beak and shook violently, tearing an arm off before dropping the body and seizing another.

A blow from the bird's wings had batted a not-man to the floor, but it gripped the bird's legs with bonelessly flexible arms. The bird stamped twice, ripping the creature open with its dewclaws, but other not-men struck from left and right with stone clubs. The bird's skull was large to give the beak muscles leverage, but the bones were still bird bones, lighter than a mammal's of similar size. The clubs smashed it like an egg.

The bird leaped into the air, bouncing off the high stone ceiling. It
fell on its back, flailing its four limbs, but somehow got its legs under it again and ran across the chamber. The bird's wild career knocked down several not-men before it slammed into the wall not far from Garric. Its wings and legs gave one more spastic twitch; then the corpse fell, limp and bloodless.

Garric didn't know whether the spell that paralyzed him had also affected his companions. His body blocked the opening to the vault. Attaper hadn't or couldn't move him out of the way—otherwise, he would've.

Three not-men advanced toward Garric, but for the moment no more rose up through the crack. The right half of the vault's floor lurched, then dropped out of sight, carrying with it the cherub shrieking on his frame of poles. A horde of white monsters, no longer constrained by the narrow passage, filled the darkness beneath. They began climbing.

The pair of not-men who'd killed the bird now closed on the countess herself. Her eyes were unfocused, but her lips moved in prayer.

Both not-men struck Balila in the face. She fell forward, leaving a smear of blood on the rock behind her. A greater pool flooded out to soak her bloody hair.

Dipsas used her athame to stab the creature holding her. Its broad mouth continued to giggle. The goat-legged not-man jabbed its trident into the wizard's throat and twisted. She thrashed in a gout of blood, then went limp. Her corpse continued to dangle from the trident's barbed points.

Garric could move again.

He stepped into the trio of not-men, finishing the stroke he'd started a lifetime ago by beheading the creature on his right. The blade carried on to bury itself in the lower spine of the not-man in the center. The creatures' bodies were as solid as those of humans. Garric had struck with the rage that'd bubbled while he was helpless.

He stepped back and to his right, pulling hard to drag his steel from the not-man's bone. Attaper lunged past, thrusting through the mouth of the third creature before its copper mace hit Garric. The weapon flew from its fingers and rang musically from the wall.

“Back to the surface!” Garric said. “We can't hold them long, there's too many tunnels. Back to the surface, and we'll bring the army over from Volita!”

Two Blood Eagles shoved through the opening. One had a javelin, and both had shields.

“Retreat!” Garric said. He backed out of the vault as the next wave of white not-men met the soldiers. Several monsters went down in the first flurry, but a stone club dented one man's helmet. “Back to the surface!”

Garric wasn't worried about staying there to prove his courage. Somebody had to take command against the danger, and he was the only one who really understood what was happening.

The remainder of the vault's floor fell inward, exposing a pit that seethed with monsters the way maggots squirm in rotting liver. They climbed upward, holding weapons in their hands; those that had hands.

In the midst of them, sitting on a litter made of human bones, was a gray, wizened figure. Though it was nude, Garric couldn't guess at its sex. It was chanting words of power and beating time with a tourmaline athame: the wizard who'd led the invasion a thousand years before had been trapped in the earth with his creations. He was returning with their descendents.

“To the surface!” Garric bellowed. Liane's hand was on his shoulder, tugging him back. “To the surface fast!”

Or may the Lady save us, for we'll never be able to save ourselves in this warren of darkness.

 

Davus reached down with his right hand. Ilna took it and let him swing her onto the cliff's edge. He was, as she'd expected, extremely strong.

“Bring me the jewel!” Arrea cried. “The jewel is mine as the whole world will be mine!”

“Master Chalcus,” Davus said, “she's returned safely. You can turn now while I watch our front—”

Chalcus turned and caught Ilna in his arms. His face was set in lines as hard as a sea-washed crag.

“—if you choose,” Davus concluded, laughing.

“I never doubted you'd succeed,” Chalcus said. His hands were locked on her waist. He wasn't squeezing her, but Ilna doubted she could've pried his fingers apart if she'd tried. “Never in my life did I doubt that, dear one. But I'm glad you're back.”

“Yes,” said Ilna. “So am I.”

Though when I looked over my shoulder at the bird,
she added silently, I
certainly doubted.

Perhaps thinking the same thing, Chalcus leaned over the edge of the cliff. Ilna looked down also, aware of the sailor's grip. She was less likely to fall than if she'd been tied to a tree with an anchor cable.

The great bird floated upside down in the sea; its belly was a sulfurous yellow. Fish were nosing into the corpse. Some of them had worked through the feathers, because blood was beginning to cloud the pastel sea.

“The jewel!” Arrea shrieked. “The jewel!”

Chalcus turned with a fey smile. Davus had looped the sash back about his waist. The men's eyes met as Ilna glanced between them.

“That was a fine shot you made this day,” Chalcus said. “And never a better time to have made it, I think. Call on me if you've a wish, and you'll have it if it's in my power to grant.”

“And a considerable power that is,” said Davus with a nod. “But first things first, and your Lady Merota is first. Mistress, if you'll give me the jewel?”

Ilna lifted the gleaming stone from her tunic. It was bubble-light in her hands, but when Davus took it from her she felt a great weight pass from her soul.

“The jewel!” Arrea said. Her eyes glinted brighter than sunlight filtered into the shadowed alcove could account. She began to chant under her breath, mouthing a spell.

Davus walked toward the half-blocked entrance, holding the jewel out in his left hand. “The jewel in exchange for our passage, Arrea,” he said in a hard, distant voice. “That is the bargain I offer you. Come out and take the jewel.”

“Give me the jewel now!” Arrea said. “I'll blast the flesh from your bones, I'll fill your marrow with liquid fire!”

“You may do all those things,” said Davus, halting a double pace from the low wall and the woman behind it. Ilna and Chalcus were to his right and left.

The sailor's hands were open, emphasizing that he wasn't holding his weapons; Ilna's fingers knotted cords within her cupped palms. Davus knew what he was doing, so he was in charge, but they'd act if the situation started to spin out of control. If it wasn't already out of control…

“You may do all those things,” Davus repeated, “but you must come out from your cave and give us passage. Do you think to command me while I hold
this,
Arrea?”

He tossed the shimmering jewel in the air and caught it one-handed. He was grinning.

Arrea said nothing, but her whole form quivered. Ilna waited, her face perfectly blank. She had no idea of what was about to happen, but something—

Davus tossed the jewel up again. Arrea crashed through the masonry wall, scattering the blocks. Her human head and torso were joined to the body of a serpent so large that it filled the tunnel beyond.

No wonder Davus said that beheading Arrea wouldn't gain them a way into the Citadel. That mass of flesh rotting would be as complete a barrier as the rock itself.

“Come out, Arrea, come out,” Davus said cheerfully, tossing the jewel and catching it. “When you've opened us the passage, I'll give you the price you claim. As I swore.”

As Davus spoke he stepped back and toward Ilna. She scrambled away, hoping she wouldn't manage to stumble over the cliff while her attention was on the monster.

“What is that thing, Master Davus?” said Chalcus. “What in the name of all Gods is she?”

More loops of Arrea's massive body curled out of the cave. Her scales broke sunlight into a rainbow haze; each was as broad as a spread hand.

“Arrea was a snake, no more than the scaly friend who keeps your hut free of rats,” said Davus, continuing to sidle to his left as he tossed and caught the jewel. “But she found her place here beneath the Citadel and held it against her fellows, soaking in the power that trickled down through the passage. And in time she was not a snake but an echidna, a snake that hates humans because she wishes she were human. Yet she will give us passage.”

The creature was following him. Ilna remembered winding a wire worm out of a sore, taking it up slowly on a straw until she'd removed the worm's full length and could swab the festering wound with spirits.

“Give me…” Arrea said, her voice an inhuman buzz like someone trying to form words with a bone rattle. Her tail squirmed clear of the tunnel mouth. She was as long as a trireme, but even so, the serpent body seemed heavy. The ground shuddered as her weight slid over it. “…the jewel.”

Davus had brought them circling around to the entrance. The echidna's body lay in a great loop along the cliff edge, virtually penning Ilna and her companions against the face of the Citadel.

“You've kept your bargain,” Davus said approvingly. “And I will keep mine.”

He tossed the jewel to Arrea. She caught it with hands that seemed absurdly tiny now that the full body was visible.

Davus gestured toward the tunnel mouth. “The two of you can start up, now,” he said. “I'll stay here—”

“I've given you passage,” Arrea cried. She set the jewel on her human-looking head; it clung there, much as it had to the larva that Ilna took it from. “I gave you passage, and now I'll kill you!”

Chalcus started forward, light trembling on his sword blade. Davus touched his arm and Ilna's both, saying, “No. Wait.”

“Aleo,”
Arrea chanted.
“Sambethor basultha….”

She pointed her right hand toward the humans.

“Erchonsi!”
she shouted, and began to laugh.

The jewel flashed brighter than the sun. It shivered and shrank without losing brilliance. Arrea's triumphant laughter turned to a high-pitched scream.

“In truth, it's an object of great power, just as Arrea thought,” Davus said. He sounded calm, but Ilna could feel his fingertips trembling on her forearm. “But it's an egg, not dead crystal. The king wears such a jewel that's been properly prepared; it gives him power like no other in this land. But using the egg for wizardry without preparing it first—”

The jewel had shrunk to a wire-fine glitter extending from Arrea's forehead. It vanished down the hole it'd bored into the echidna's skull.

“—causes it to hatch.”

The serpent body gave a convulsive twitch. A loop rolled over the edge of the cliff, its weight pulling more loops after it. The whole echidna slid over with a rolling crackle and a cloud of broken rock.