12

Tenoctris drank greedily from the pitcher, giving no sign that the brackish taste of Erdin's water bothered her. She had a bruise on her right temple. By daylight in six hours, it would look terrible.

"Oh!" she said, setting the container down and taking a breath. Garric had brought her out to the pavement in front of the tomb when he went for the water.

Mosquitoes whined and settled in the darkness; occasionally Garric brushed a hand along his bare arms or over his forehead, but for the most part he ignored the bites. Insects were well down his present list of concerns.

Tenoctris looked at him. She smiled, an expression as dim as the moonlight illuminating her face. "Benlo came back for his daughter," she said. "He was in another body, but his aura is unmistakable."

Her smile grew lopsided. She added, "I thought I'd lost you too, Garric."

"I got lost," he said. "It wasn't your fault. Cashel brought me back."

Tenoctris nodded as though there was nothing surprising in what Garric had said. "Cashel is a fine young man," she said. "His instincts are so good that his lack of—"

She made a moue with her lips to devalue the word she was about to use.

"—education isn't the danger it would be in another wizard of his power. He has quite remarkably good instincts."

"Cashel's a wizard?" Garric said. "Cashel's a wizard?"

"Yes," Tenoctris said. She raised the pitcher and took a series of small swallows. When she lowered the pitcher she went on, "Indeed he's a wizard, though I suppose he'd be as surprised to hear it as you are."

She shook her head and added, "I'm less puzzled by the things people don't see than I am about the things they do see, must see, but ignore. Where did you get the water?"

Garric's mind was still struggling with the ludicrous vision of his friend chanting in a dead language as he gestured over a pattern of mystic symbols. It took a moment before he realized that Tenoctris had asked him a question which was grounded in the world he understood.

"Oh!" he said. "Well, I went to the back entrance of the house and tried to buy water at the kitchen. They gave me the pitcher and some bread too, but they wouldn't take my money. I guess I looked..."

He laughed, thinking about his mother's reaction if a man with a long sword, wild eyes, and dusty cobwebs in his hair had appeared at her kitchen door.

"Well, I was pretty upset."

If Liane was gone, so was her sash filled with gold coins. Garric still had the silver from his pay, more money than he'd ever seen in one place before he set out from Barca's Hamlet. Money wouldn't be a problem in the near future.

"How do we get Liane back?" he said bluntly.

Tenoctris nodded. "First we have to locate her," she said. "We can't be certain that she's still on this plane, though I think that's the greater likelihood."

She looked at Garric and added, "Benlo took his wife's mummy as well as Liane. This is...a matter that gives me concern for Liane. Benlo ceased to be her father at his death. The soul that remains is a very powerful entity, but it isn't fully human."

Garric got to his feet, working out the stiffness and the bruises he'd gotten during his return from—wherever he'd gone. He retightened the belt when he stood. The sword's weight was better distributed when the belt was firm.

"Should we get started now, then?" he said. "I mean, the longer we wait the more likely..."

He wasn't sure that was true. He didn't know what Tenoctris was afraid would happen to Liane, and he didn't think he wanted to learn.

"Yes, we should do it now," the old woman said, rising with Garric's help and support from the fence beside her. "The situs, here, the tomb, is already prepared."

She went into the darkness; the candle had burned out long before. Old smoke and the stench of corruption mingled in an odor that turned Garric's stomach.

Tenoctris found the satchel containing additional tapers. Garric brought out his flint and iron striker. The wood of one of the coffins had crumbled to punk which would make good tinder.

"Don't bother," Tenoctris said. She murmured something under her breath. A blue spark jumped between her cupped hands, igniting the taper's wick.

Tenoctris set the light on the ledge where Mazzona's coffin had lain, then grinned. "This tomb would make anyone a wizard, Garric," she said. "There's more power focused here than it took to sink Yole into the sea. It's all in balance, fortunately."

She moved to the side of the previous circle and began sketching her symbols on a bare piece of floor. There was very little room. "Garric," she added without looking up from her task. "Please remove Benlo's corpse from the burial jar and stretch it out on the slab. I'm afraid it's necessary."

"Yes, all right," Garric said. He drew his knife and began working its straight iron blade into the pitch the funerary workers in Carcosa had used to seal it. He hated the thought of what he was doing, just as he'd hated crawling among the huge spiders in the passage back to the waking world; but he hadn't been raised to back out of a job because it was unpleasant.

"Tenoctris?" he said as he worked. "Is this dangerous, what we're about to do? I'm not worried for myself..."

Tenoctris chuckled. She continued to write for a moment, using the clear wax of an unburned candle for a crayon, but she began laughing so hard that she had to pause. She looked up at Garric.

"My dear friend," she said. "My dear young friend. Have you ever started running down a hill so steep that you couldn't stop? And you had to run faster and faster or you'd fall?"

Garric nodded.

"That's what the three of us have been doing from the very beginning," Tenoctris explained. "But no, I don't foresee any exceptional risk in the next step."

Garric laughed also. It felt good; he'd been tense for too long, tense and lost and alone.

"I guess that was a pretty silly question," he admitted. Being with a friend was the same as being home; and soon they'd have Liane back with them as well—or die trying.

He laid the corpse full length on the stone bench, ignoring the stickiness of his palms. Farm labor meant you found yourself up to your knees in most kinds of nastiness at one time or another. Garric hadn't moved a half-preserved human body before, but he'd dealt with worse things.

Tenoctris finished drawing her symbols and leaned back with a sigh. The wax characters were only a texture on the stone floor, a rippling reflection. Garric guessed that the words had to be written but that they didn't need to be visible to human eyes.

"Normally this would be a very long incantation," she said, as much to herself as to Garric. "With the forces that are gathered here tonight, I doubt I'll need to repeat the spell more than once; probably not even that."

She looked at Garric. "This is necromancy," she said as if daring him to react in horror. "I'm calling the corpse to life so that it can answer questions."

Garric nodded to show that he didn't object. Disturbing a dead man's rest was a small price to pay for saving a girl's life. But—

"If Benlo's in another body," he said aloud, "then how will you..." He turned up his palms in question.

"I'm summoning the spirit of the man whose body Benlo occupies," Tenoctris said. "He'll still have a link with his former flesh, and I hope that will help us."

She shook her head in wonder. "I find it hard to believe that I'm doing these things," she said. "For me to control so much power."

She smiled. "The important thing is 'control,' of course. Not 'power.' "

Her focus sharpened back to Garric and the job at hand. "I'll call on you to continue the incantation if it requires more repetitions than my throat can stand," she said. "But I'd be very surprised if that were the case."

Garric nodded. "I've been surprised often enough recently," he said. "I'll do my best if you need me."

He couldn't read the wax-written words. That shouldn't matter, because he'd be able to memorize the sounds if Tenoctris repeated them so often that she had to take a break.

Tenoctris bobbed the ivy sprig twice in her hand as though to loosen it, then said, "Catama zauaththeie cerpho..." 

Garric laid a finger on his sword's iron pommel and felt Carus rise within him like a man stretching himself out of sleep. The sword, for all its weight and awkward length, felt right on his hip.

"Ialada kale cbesi..." 

The hair on Garric's arms and the back of his neck prickled as though lightning were about to strike. He turned his head to look at the corpse. A blue nimbus surrounded it, slightly veiling features which decay had already begun to soften.

"Iaththa maradtha achilothethee chooo!" Tenoctris concluded.

The corpse sat up slowly. Its arms remained folded over its breast. The white burial tunic was stained with fluids leaking through the terrible wound to the chest and abdomen.

"By the power of Phaboeai, tell me your name!" Tenoctris ordered in a steely voice.

"I am Arame bor-Rusaman," Benlo's corpse said. Its voice had the timbre of wood blocks being rubbed together, a dry whisper. "I am dead."

"Arame, are you aware of your own body?" Tenoctris said. Garric's hand was tightly gripping the sword hilt. He forced himself to release the weapon.

"Yes," the corpse said. Its chest moved the way a bellows does, emptying and filling in long strokes that had nothing to do with the rhythms of human breath. "I am aware of my body. It is not moving."

"Arame," Tenoctris said, "why is your body not moving?"

"My body waits for the full moon," the corpse said. Its lips moved with the slow deliberation of a snake swallowing an egg. "My body waits for tomorrow night."

Garric expected Tenoctris to ask what the body—Benlo—would do at the full moon. Instead she said, "Arame, describe what your body sees."

"My body sees a door," the corpse said. A swatch of scalp slumped from the left side of the skull, baring the bone beneath. Movement was making the revivified body fall apart more quickly than decay alone would have caused. "The door is iron. The door is cold iron."

The corpse's chest pumped up and down more quickly now, but air whistled from the chest cavity and the voice was weaker. The stitches were pulling out of the wound the embalmers in Carcosa had sewed up.

"There is a coat of arms on the door," the corpse continued, wheezing like a runner on the verge of collapse. "A bunch of grapes over a skull. Over a skull. Over a—"

The whisper faded into a dry cackling: laughter, Garric would have said if it had been from a healthy man; a death rattle in a sick one. The corpse's lower jaw disarticulated from the socket. It continued to wobble for a moment until the tendons gave way completely and it dropped into the creature's lap.

The corpse sank like a sand figure dissolving in a wave. The finger bones appeared as the flesh liquefied around them. The stench was overpowering.

"Benlo's in the mansion," Garric said, trying to keep his stomach from throwing up the bread he'd eaten while Tenoctris was unconscious. "He had a secret room that the new owners don't know about."

"We can leave," Tenoctris said. She struggled to her feet, breathing hard. "Poor Arame can't tell us any more. And I think I can learn the rest from that hint."

They stumbled into the clean night air.

"Hold it right there!" a voice shouted. A lantern threw their shadows unexpectedly onto the stone front of the tomb.