Mistress of the Catacombs

To Randy Long, who's not only been a friend for many years but who also acted as my son's coach during his bodybuilding competitions—a task for which I would've been hopelessly inadequate.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For many years now Dan Breen has been reading the rough drafts of my prose and making it better. Mistress of the Catacombs is the latest beneficiary of his attention.

I didn't, for a wonder, blow up another computer while writing this novel. Nevertheless my wife Jo found me a backup and my son Jonathan set it up for me. (Mark Van Name and Allyn Vogel, whom I believe have been cited for computer help in every book of mine for the past decade, will doubtless be back in the next one.)

Many friends provided this or that bit of information which will show up in the text of Mistress. Thanks very much to everyone who helped. Two whose contribution was even more considerable are Karen Zimmerman, my webmaster, and Sandra Miesel.

Stephanie Lane, my liaison with the machinery of Tor, is a continuing delight to work with. Contact with Stephanie is clear and pleasant, and she invariably follows up her end of whatever business.

And finally, I owe many debts to historians and to other fiction writers. Readers who are familiar with the work of Clark Ashton Smith will realize that I owe him in particular. Readers who aren't familiar with Smith should correct that gap in their education at their earliest convenience.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The common religion of the Isles is based on Sumerian cult and ritual. That is, the Lady equates with Inanna; her consort the Shepherd equates with Dumuzi; and the Sister fills the place of Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.

Religion in the Isles (and generally, except perhaps in fantasy fiction) is separate from magic. The magic in Mistress of the Catacombs is based on the practice of the Mediterranean Basin in Classical times. The wellspring was mostly Egyptian, but there were admixtures from many other cultures (particularly the Jewish). What I've referred to as "words of power" are formally
voces mysticae
, words in the language of the demiurges who act as intercessors between humanity and the Gods.

I don't myself believe in magic, Classical or otherwise, but I know that reality doesn't always conform to my opinion of what it should be. Just to be on the safe side, I prefer not to pronounce the
voces mysticae
aloud.

As in the past, I've used Classical authors as part of the cultural underpinning of the Isles. Pendill is Ovid, who's given me much pleasure over the years and has also educated me as a writer; Tincer is Tacitus, about whom I would say the same; and I was thinking of Gildas by the reference to Ascoin. I suppose a writer can learn from everything he reads, but I do hope that less of Gildas stuck than others.

David Drake
david-drake.com

CHAPTER ONE

The spy, a stocky shipping agent named Hordred, looked at Garric and Liane with haunted eyes as he whispered what he knew of the planned secession of several western isles. His restless gaze flicked about the room with the randomness of a squirrel surprised on the ground.

"There's priests in it too," Hordred said. "They call themselves Moon Wisdom and have ceremonies in the temple of Our Lady of the Moon in Donelle. It's not just prayers and temple tithes, though. This is...."

He swallowed. Liane had found Hordred through associates of her late father, a far-travelled merchant before his wizardry first ruined, then killed him. In the normal course of things the agent must have been a man well able to take care of himself. A falling block might as easily have been the cause of his broken nose as a rival's cudgel, but the scar on his right forearm had to have been left by a knife. Mere physical threats wouldn't have frightened Hordred into his present state.

"I think there's something real," he said. He stared at his own hard-clasped hands on the patterned wood before him. "Something that comes in... dreams."

They sat at a round cedarwood table in a small conference room, part of Prince Garric's private section of the palace compound. A row of louvers just below the tile roof let in air and muted light, but no one could see those inside. Members of the royal bodyguard regiment, the Blood Eagles, stood unobtrusively in the surrounding gardens. Garric had told the guard commander not to let anyone pass while he and Liane interviewed their visitor; therefore no one would pass, not even Valence III, though he was in name still the King of the Isles.

"In your dreams, Master Hordred?" Liane said to jolt the spy out of his grim silence. "What is it that you see?"

Hordred looked up in bleak desperation. "I don't know, mistress!" he said. "There's not really anything, it's all gray. I'm dreaming, but it's just gray; only I know there's things there reaching for me and I'll never see them because they're gray like everything else. And then I wake up."

"You're safe now, Master Hordred," Garric said, hoping to sound reassuring. He reached out, touching the spy's hand with the tips of his strong, tanned fingers. "You can stay here in the palace if you like, or you can go to any of the royal estates on Ornifal if you think you'd be less conspicuous out of the capital. The conspirators won't bother you here."

In Garric's mind, the spirit of his ancestor King Carus scowled like a cliff confronting the tide. "And if I could put my sword through a few necks," the king's ghost said, "the Confederacy of the West wouldn't bother anyone. Except maybe dogs fighting over the carrion."

Carus grinned, reverting to the cheerful expression he most often wore. "But I know, lad, cutting throats isn't your way; and maybe if my sword hadn't made so many martyrs, things would've turned out better in my own day."

Carus had been the greatest as well as the last ruler of the Old Kingdom. When he and the royal fleet sank in a wizard's cataclysm, the Isles had shattered into chaos and despair. A thousand years hadn't been enough to return the kingdom to the peace and stability it had known in the age before the Collapse, and forces gathering now threatened to crush what remained into dust and blood.

Not if I can help it! thought Garric.

"Not if we can help it!" echoed the ghost.

"I'm not afraid of their bravos!" Hordred snapped. In the angry response, Garric caught a glimpse of the man he must usually have been: tough and self-reliant, able to handle himself in a fight and well aware of the fact.

Relaxing with a conscious effort, Hordred continued, "I wrote down the strength of the forces gathering on Tisamur and the names of as many leaders as I could find. That's in the books I gave you."

He cocked an eyebrow at Liane; she nodded back. Hordred continued, "There's contingents from Haft and Cordin, but the real danger's in the mercenaries the leaders've been hiring from all over the Isles."

Garric's face went hard. His formal title now was Prince Garric of Haft, Adopted Son and Heir Presumptive to Valence III, King of the Isles. What he really was... one of the things he really was... was Garric, the nineteen-year-old son of Reise the innkeeper in Barca's Hamlet on the east coast of Haft. The only contact Barca's Hamlet and the borough around it had with the outside world was the Sheep Fair every Fall and in Summer the Tithe Procession, when priests from Carcosa on the west coast rolled images of the Lady and the Shepherd through the countryside and collected what was due the temple.

Garric was a peasant from Haft—and he was also the real King of the Isles, though the authority of the central government didn't really stretch far from the capital here in Valles on Ornifal. If he didn't put down this Confederacy of the West promptly, he wouldn't rule his birthplace even in name.

"The notes are in Serian shipping code," Hordred added. "Can you read that?"

"Yes, of course," Liane said, touching the travelling desk in which she'd placed Hordred's notebooks. They looked like ordinary accounts, thin sheets of birchwood bound in fours with hinges of coarse twine. The inner faces were covered in a crabbed script written in oak gall ink.

"I should've stopped there," the spy muttered, sounding both angry and frightened. He clasped his hands again unconsciously. "I thought, 'Let's see what the cult's part in it is. Let's learn about Moon Wisdom.'"

He swallowed. "I got into one of the ceremonies," he went on, his voice dropping back to a whisper. "There were over a hundred people in the temple, some of them from as far away as Ornifal. They each had a symbol stamped on their forehead in cinnabar, a spider. I made a stamp for myself and nobody noticed anything wrong. But...."

Hordred fell silent again. Garric moistened his lips with his tongue and prompted, "What went on at the ceremony, Master Hordred?"

The spy shook his head, trying to make sense of his memories. "We chanted a prayer to the Mistress of the Moon," he said. "I didn't know the words, but I could follow well enough."

"Chanted Words of Power?" Liane asked, her face and voice sharper than they had been a moment before. She understood that wizardry was neither good nor bad in itself; like a sword, the power depended on the purpose—and the skill—of the wizard using it. But Liane would never forget the night that her wizard father had prepared to sacrifice her for purposes he had thought good.

"No, no," said Hordred to his writhing hands. "Just ordinary speech, a hymn like you might hear at any Tennight ceremony if you're the sort who wastes his time in temples. Only something happened, I don't know what. I could feel something. And I thought I saw something in the air in the middle of the room but there wasn't anything there except gray. Nothing!"

He clenched his right fist as though to bang the table, but his arm trembled and he lowered his hand instead. "There wasn't anything there, but it's been with me ever since. Whenever I go to sleep."

Garric stood. The discussion made him uncomfortable. He was as religious as any other youth in Barca's Hamlet. He dedicated a crumb and a sip of beer to the Lady and her consort at most meals, and once a year he'd offered a flat cheese of ewe's milk to Duzi, the roughly carved stone on the hill overlooking the meadows south of the hamlet. Duzi watched over sheep and the poor men who watched them; and if he did not, if Duzi was only the scars of time on rock, well... a cheese wasn't much to spend on a hope of help in trouble.

But this business of temples and the powers called down by them—this was wizardry or worse, and no place for ordinary mortals. Becoming king hadn't made Garric any less mortal, but he knew that this was a matter for kings regardless.

He grinned. There was a time that Garric or-Reise had imagined that nothing could be more unpleasant and frustrating than herding sheep caught in a sudden thunderstorm. Prince Garric knew his slightly-younger self had been wrong.

"Master Hordred," he said, "I've called a meeting of my council to discuss the conspiracy. You needn't be present—"

Not every member of the council loved Garric, but each councillor knew his own survival and the best chance for the Isles to survive depended on Garric's success. Even so, Liane had insisted that as few people as possible know the face of this spy or the other agents she had hired.

Garric accepted her judgment, as he did on most matters where Liane felt strongly and he did not. A boy from Barca's Hamlet didn't have the special skills needed to gather intelligence from across the kingdom's scattered islands.

"—but I'd like you to remain here for the time being in case we have further questions for you afterward. There are cushions if you want to sleep—"

He nodded to the built-in benches. The walls were wainscotted to the height of a seated man's shoulders and frescoed above with scenes from pine forests like those of northern Ornifal.

"—and I can have food and drink brought in if you choose. You'll be well guarded, of course."

"Sleep!" Hordred said. "I could sleep on broken lava, I'm so tired. If I dared!"

"You're in Valles now," Garric said. "You're as safe as I am myself. Or Lady Liane."

Hordred looked up at him, then toward Liane as she rose also. "Am I?" the spy said. He laughed bitterly. "I suppose I am at that. Well, it doesn't matter, I've got to sleep."

Liane had been taking notes of Hordred's information with a small brush in a vellum chapbook. Even though she was merely going with Garric to a larger bungalow ten paces distant, she placed her notes in the uppermost tray of the desk and locked it with a four-ward key.

"Yes, well...," Garric said. "We'll see you soon, Master Hordred. On my honor, the kingdom won't forget the risk you ran for its safety."

As Garric opened the door for Liane who carried the desk, he heard Hordred mutter, "I should've known better than to go into the temple. I thought it was just priests with a new trick to put money in their purses, but it's wizards' work or worse!"

"There's no safety for anyone in the kingdom," said the wizard-slain king in Garric's mind, "while there's wizards above the ground!"

Carus was wrong in his blanket condemnation: without the aid of the wizard Tenoctris, Garric and the Isles would have been doomed long since. But Garric remembered the desperation in Hordred's eyes, and he knew that there was more than just prejudice to support King Carus' opinion.