The passage had been used for burials, but in a much more economical fashion than the vault. Instead of niches large enough for a sarcophagus, the deep slots cut in the soft rock here were barely big enough to hold the corpse itself in a winding sheet. The passage was so narrow that Vascay had to walk sideways. To fit bodies into these six-high banks, they must have been bent at the waist and fed through like hawsers being coiled in a ship’s hold.
“It’s a good place to defend,” Vascay observed.
“Echeon would dig down through the roof,” Metron called from the end of the line. His voice echoed among graves which the ages had emptied. “He’ll know where we are. We must go farther.”
Garric continued forward, his sword in his right hand and the torch before him in his left. The passage sloped steeply downward. There were no frescoes in this portion of the catacombs, but prayers and eight-pointed stars scratched in the rock showed that the poor were as pious as their betters.
Even in death they were segregated, though. It was the way of the world, he supposed.
Garric stepped into another large chamber, this one circular and domed instead of being roofed with a barrel vault. From the end of the passage, a flight of seven steps led down to a tessellated pavement. Engaged columns carved from the living rock ornamented the walls; medallions were painted in the spaces between them. An arched doorway led off from the other side.
Garric paused only a moment at the head of the stairs before stepping down to the sunken pavement. The scuff of his bare feet was syncopated by the thump/tap of Vascay’s boot and peg behind him. Lord Thalemos followed a moment later.
“Yes, that’s right!” Metron said. “Thalemos, stand in the center. Move yourself, boy! How long do you think we have?”
Garric turned to eye his companions for the first time since entering the passage of the dead. The wizard had shown a febrile liveliness since his incantations on the cliff’s edge. Now he put a hand forward as if to hasten Thalemos with a push.
Garric thought of Ademos, gurgling his life out on the cliff’s edge so that more monsters could rise from the sea. “No!” he said. “Don’t touch him!”
He raised his sword and strode back toward the steps. “No! by the Shepherd,” Garric said. “Thalemos, come here. Wizard, leave us. If you come near this boy again, I’ll kill you!”
“We’ll go out the other way,” Vascay said, stumping past Garric and Thalemos. He held the javelin poised to throw in his right hand.
Metron drew the bloody athame from his sash but remained where he was, midway down the stone stairs. Garric watched him for a moment, then turned to follow Vascay.
“Master Gar?” Thalemos said. “I can take the light to free your hands. Ah, if you’d like?”
“Right,” said Garric, grateful but a little irritated not to have thought of that himself without the youth suggesting it. He turned, and as he did so the pattern on the floor caught his eye. He paused, lifting the torch to illuminate the whole area.
From the top of the steps Garric had thought the flooring of stone chips was laid in the matrix randomly. From his present angle these few feet lower, he saw that the polished gray tesserae formed a subtle pattern of radial lines with circular lines crossing them. Spaced at intervals—
“The floor’s a spiderweb,” Garric said. “There’s words in the Old Script around the center. The whole room’s been prepared for a wizard’s spell.”
“Then let’s get out, shall we?” Vascay said, his voice loud with tension. His words echoed sullenly from the dome.
Garric handed the torch to Thalemos. His movement shook a bead of sap from the burning wood onto his wrist; it stabbed like a stiletto, causing him almost to drop the torch instead of passing it.
Vascay looked over his shoulder. “Hey!” he shouted, cocking the javelin to throw. Garric turned to see what the threat was. “Sister take that wizard!”
“Aphre nemous nothii…” Metron chanted. Using the step for a dais, he gestured with the bloody athame. “Baphre neou nothii….”
Torchlight touched Thalemos’ ring, waking the sapphire into blue fire. The facets flung brilliant reflections around the walls and dome. Garric’s body turned to ice; he could neither move nor speak, though his senses seemed unnaturally acute, and his skin prickled.
“Lari…” called the wizard. “Kriphii kriphiae kriphis!”
The walls blurred into a smooth spinning expanse of blue. The floor was fading, becoming a tunnel that stretched toward infinite distance; overhead was the night sky of some other time. The three men stood like flies trapped on the web-marked stone. The wizard above them chanted triumphantly, “Phirke rali thonoumene!”
Garric felt the ground beneath his feet give way. In a rush of gravel and powdered rock, he tumbled into a vaster room a dozen feet below the first. He could move again, but he’d lost his sword and couldn’t breathe for the dust. He tugged the front of his tunic over his mouth and sucked air through the cloth.
Vascay had fallen at the same time Garric did. Lord Thalemos had been standing in the center of the upper chamber; he was still there, supported by a pillar rising from the floor of this lower one. The wizardlight was gone, so the only illumination was from the youth’s torch flaring through the dust clouds.
“She is come!” Metron shrieked ecstatically. “The Mistress is come into Her kingdom!”
Vascay stumbled over to Garric, breathing through his sleeve. The fall had broken his javelin, but he still held the half of the shaft with the point.
“I’ll lift you,” he said in a muffled voice. “We’ll heap stones up at the far end, and then I’ll lift you.”
Garric nodded, his lungs on fire. He couldn’t get enough air through his thick tunic. He had to restrain himself from gasping in an unfiltered breath that would suffocate him.
Vascay started toward the mass piled against the wall opposite where Metron stood. Garric followed, feeling the rock shift under his bare feet. No piece of the previous floor bigger than a walnut remained, so why did it mound so high there in front of them? The dust and gravel should have slipped—
The mass moved. It was alive, if barely.
“Vascay!” Garric shouted. He was too late. Four huge, hairy legs traced a pattern in the air. Garric had seen Ilna’s quickly knotted cords paralyze men bent on murder; now a similar power bound his body in bonds of fire.
“She is come!” Metron repeated.
The dust had settled. Thalemos was locked into a statue on his pedestal, gripped by the same compulsion as held Garric and Vascay. The torch in his hand lighted the scene below. The column under him shielded the wizard from the creature’s spell.
The legs shifted the rhythm of their movement slightly. Vascay dropped the javelin. His body stepped forward, controlled by a will not his own.
The thing was a spider, huge beyond nightmare. Millennia of imprisonment left it desiccated, but still it lived. For ages it had spoken in dreams; and when the protecting walls of rock and wizardry had ruptured, it moved.
The Mistress was calling the first of many meals to herself. When she had finished with the victims brought to her chamber here, she would return to the upper world and to lordship over all other life. She was not a god, for all that Metron and the others who lived her dreams thought otherwise, but her mastery over anyone who saw her conferred godlike power.
Vascay walked toward the waiting jaws like a man already dead. The eight eyes glittering in the torchlight watched him. If extended, the Mistress’s legs could have spanned Palace Square in Carcosa, where thousands had gathered to listen to the monarchs of the Old Kingdom. Now the limbs were crabbed close together, leaving only enough space for the victim they pulled toward them by their quivering power.
Vascay stepped between the legs. When he could no longer see the pattern they drew, he shouted and managed to half turn before the Mistress sank her fangs in his back. His body stiffened.