Read Online Mistress of the Catacombs by Drake David - Free Book Online

spluttered. The ornate building had ten feet of frontage on the water and was about that height despite the ruined condition of the cornice where he'd been standing, but it was only five or six feet wide. It was an altar or perhaps a monument, where statues had once sheltered beneath porches at either end. Thick vegetation hid any structures that might have been placed nearby.
    A root was twisted over the bank. Tint caught it with her free hand and brought a gnarled, hairy leg up so that a prehensile foot could double her grip.
    Garric put his legs down, expecting to touch bottom. Instead he stubbed his toe on the channel's masonry wall. He'd have gone under again had not the beastgirl raised him up like a sack of grain and deposited him on the bank.
    She sprang up beside him and squatted on all fours. Her legs bent more naturally into that posture than they did when she stood upright.
    "Tint save," she announced proudly. "Gar safe."
    "Thank you, Tint," Garric said. The image of jaws closing on his head was still the most vivid of the new memories, though unfamiliar human figures also shuffled hazily through his mind. Most often the figures were shouting at him, striking at him, or kicking him the way some men would kick a dog.
    Garric's belly muscles tensed over a cold lump. He wouldn't kick a dog; and nobody would kick him, unless they were trying to learn whether Garric could break their leg with his bare hands. Garric figured he probably could, if he were angry enough.
    But the jaws....
    Seawolves, giant marine lizards whose legs were little more than flippers to steer the beasts through the water, sometimes came ashore near Barca's Hamlet to prey on the flocks. Garric had killed seawolves, and once a seawolf had seized his leg and very nearly killed him.
    He touched his calf. His body would bear the scars of those long fangs for the rest of its life, but this body did not. The muscles were rock hard, if anything stronger than Garric's own, but he no longer wore the form to which he had been born.
    "Gar?" said the beastgirl nervously, sensing Garric's feeling of trapped horror.
    "It's all right, Tint," he said, hoping he sounded reassuring. He stood up. There was nothing wrong with this body; it just wasn't his own.
    There was nothing wrong with this body, but the mind that had used to wear it—
    Garric raised his index fingers to his temples, probing gently. He found what he expected: a line of indentations on either side where the jaws of a huge seawolf had closed, driving its fangs deep into the bone. Into the bone, and into the brain beneath.
    It was a wonder that Gar's body had survived a mauling like that. His mind had not survived.
    "Gar, what wrong?" Tint said, standing also. Fully erect, she only came to the middle of Garric's chest. She began grooming him with her fingers. His scalp was as shaggy as a ram's fleece in winter, and now he had an unkempt beard as well.
    "Nothing's wrong, Tint," Garric said, staring in bleak despair at the jungle of palmetto and larger trees choking the landscape around him. He saw squared stones under the network of surface roots supporting a large magnolia; as he'd guessed, there were extensive ruins in the vicinity.
    "Nothing's wrong that you can help with," he added.
    And very possibly no one could help. No one in whatever world this was.
    * * *
    As he sat above the tide line, Cashel ran a swatch of raw wool slowly over his quarterstaff. In part he was polishing the hickory, but mostly he used the familiar task to settle his mind. He carried the pad of wool under his belt. It'd sloshed through the breakers with him, but the fibers' coat of lanolin kept them free from salt water.
    The girl was coming around. Cashel had wrung out his sodden outer tunic and rolled it into a pillow for her. The beach here was mostly sandy, but there were rocks in it.
    "Mistress...," the girl murmured. Her left hand closed on the amulet hanging from her neck by a silver chain.
    The storm had broken