Mistress of the Catacombs by Drake David Page A

Smoke rose from the enclosure again, this time a soft magenta. "Right, the ground rises enough to be worth following. We can always find our way back by striking for the shore."
    He started into the tree ferns—a mistake. It was easy to push through the shoulder-high fronds, but they hid from sight the frequent head-sized chunks of lava littering the ground. The second time Cashel tripped, he shifted their route into the mixture of gnarled shrubs. There were woody-stemmed varieties of geraniums, violets, and even buttercups.
    Cashel had taken to wearing sturdy sandals to walk the stone pavements of Valles. They came in handy here; the soil, though obviously rich, was thickly sown with sharp-edged pebbles from the same volcanic rock that the sea had ground to sand to form the beach.
    "Who's this Echea you're worried about?" Cashel asked. He was curious; and besides, it was better for the girl to talk than brood. Because he was using his staff to hold vegetation aside, Tilphosa could follow closely without being slapped by stems that he'd released.
    "A great wizard," Tilphosa said. "An enemy of the Mistress. She cut a jewel—or two jewels, rather, into patterns which combined will bring back the Mistress."
    Cashel slipped through a gap between the stems of a tree begonia. Another man, certainly another man Cashel's size, would have needed an axe to hack through the tangles. Cashel got along well with wood. He'd always been able to judge the grain of the branch under his shaping knife or where he should cut to drop a tree in a particular line. The same talent helped him here.
    In his mind he moved around the girl's words the way he'd handle chunks of fieldstone for a wall. Not every piece would fit in every place, but generally if you shifted slabs this way and that you'd come up with something that looked as tight as mason's work.
    A lot of times Cashel could also puzzle through a statement that didn't make sense when he first heard it. This wasn't one of those times.
    He said, "If Echea was against your Mistress—"
    When he first met her, Cashel had thought Tilphosa meant 'the Mistress' the way Sharina would say 'the Lady': the Queen of Heaven whose mate was the Shepherd. He wasn't sure of that any more.
    "—then why did she make jewels that will, ah, help her?"
    He could hear water, but in forest like this you couldn't get any direction from sound. The trunks twisted the gurgling around till it could've come from anywhere. Still, if he hadn't heard it before and he did now, then they were likely getting closer.
    "The pattern only exists once in all eternity," Tilphosa explained. "By forming it and then hiding the pieces, Echea keeps the Mistress from returning."
    Climbing through this undergrowth was hard work for her, even with Cashel choosing the path and holding aside the big stems. After each few words, Tilphosa whooshed out a breath and drew in a fresh one before continuing.
    "But when Thalemos and I marry, our rings will hold the two jewels. The Mistress will reenter the world!"
    "Ah," said Cashel. He didn't believe that or disbelieve it. The Great Gods didn't have much to do with the world Cashel lived in. "I guess you've got books that tell you this?"
    They'd reached a beech tree whose base was farther across than Cashel's own height. The trunk had split a generation ago; half had fallen, but the remainder was sprouting new growth.
    Wings the length of a child's arm clattered as creatures roosting in the upper branches launched themselves into the sky. The girl cried out, but the fliers were going the other way. They weren't birds, and peering through the small leaves, Cashel wasn't sure they were bats either.
    "Let's hold here for a bit," Cashel said, not that he was winded. Tilphosa hadn't complained, but he saw now that the soles of her high-laced shoes were thin suede. They were meant for carpeting, not this pebble-strewn soil.
    She nodded gratefully, sinking onto the fallen half of the trunk to take the weight