Mistress of the Catacombs by Drake David Page B

off her feet. The spongy, mushroom-covered wood couldn't do much to harm tunics that had come through a shipwreck.
    "The Mistress sends dreams to her worshippers," Tilphosa said when she'd gotten her breath. "The priests see them most clearly, of course, but we all can feel her will. I know the truth of what I've said, because I've felt it myself."
    "Ah," Cashel said, nodding. He didn't have anything to say about that. He'd learned young that you'd do better to argue with a sheep than with somebody who knows the Truth.
    Another stand of ferns nearly concealed a limestone outcrop. He'd thought shadows thrown by the fronds caused the faint shimmer on the stone. Now, maybe because he was sitting still and looking in any direction except Tilphosa's face, Cashel saw the water he'd been looking for was seeping between rock layers.
    "We've found—" he said, rising from the log.
    "Cashel, what's that?" the girl asked sharply. Then she said, "That's gold!"
    She pointed to a bed of plants with sword-shaped leaves and feathery crimson flowers. Twisted among their thin stems was a tracery of metal—gold, just as Tilphosa had said.
    The water could wait. Cashel checked his quarterstaff with his right, then his left hand, reflexively making sure that the shaft hadn't gotten splinters or sticky patches while helping him through the foliage. He moved forward, holding the staff slantwise before him.
    "Are these pipes?" Tilphosa said. "No, they can't be—it's just a framework, isn't it?"
    "I don't know what it is," Cashel said. "What it was."
    The forest's trunks and branches wove through a fabric of tubes ranging from thumb-sized to as thin as Sharina's blonde hairs. Cashel pushed into the vegetation with careful deliberation, measuring the length of the thing: a handful of double paces, four times as long as Cashel was tall. The tubes connected several pods of the same shining metal. The largest of them was the size of a small canoe, smooth-skinned and featureless.
    The thing had hit the ground crushingly hard. The impact wrapped the nearer end around the outcrop, even gouging the rock in a few places. The top and back had flexed forward on their own inertia, warping the structure out of its original spindle shape.
    Cashel looked up. It'd fallen here; fallen from where, he couldn't guess. Waves could pick a boat up and fling it inland. Or again....
    Whatever the cause, it had happened a very long time ago.
    "I guess it could be a frame," Cashel said aloud. "Gold lasts when other things rot away or rust."
    Tilphosa had followed Cashel along the crumpled tracery. With a careful lack of emotion she said, "Then it would be quite old."
    With the end of his staff, Cashel tapped a tube broken at the impact. His ferrule woke a musical chime from the gold. "See the root?" he said.
    "Oh," said the girl. "Of course."
    Another fallen beech, larger even than the half-ruined one, had sent surface roots over the tube. In human terms the lifespan of a tree like that would be measured by generations.
    Cashel looked again at the tube and frowned. His iron butt cap hadn't scratched the metal. As soft as gold was....
    He knelt and drew his knife from its wooden sheath. It had been made with ram's horn scales and a straight, single-edged blade by Akhita the Smith, travelling through the borough on his circuit; Barca's Hamlet was too small to support a resident blacksmith.
    Akhita had forged the blade from the same iron he used to shoe horses, but he'd hardened it with a fast quench. It wasn't fancy, but it did well for digging a stone from an ox's hoof, slicing bread at dinner, and all the scores of other tasks a peasant needed a knife for.
    The edge should have notched gold. It didn't; not this gold.
    "Let's get back to the others," Cashel said, straightening. He put his knife away so he had both hands for his quarterstaff. He didn't think of a knife as a weapon; not that he needed a weapon here, not for any reasons he could point to. "We'll tell them about