Mistress of the Catacombs

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 islands. 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 visit∨ therefore, no onewouldpass, not even Valence III, though he was in name still the King of the Isles. "Inyourdreams, 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'tknow, 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 Cams 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 helpDrake, David is the author of 'Mistress of the Catacombs' with ISBN 9780812575408 and ISBN 0812575407.