Minor Mage

by T. Kingfisher

  The whole damn forest is after you by the sound of it, came the acid reply.

  He didn’t have the breath to laugh, but he was amused anyway. Crashing noises came from the undergrowth, followed by a long string of inhuman syllables. The forest wasn’t making it easy for the ghuls.

  Oliver ran. Every step in the dark risked a broken leg or a broken neck, which was still probably preferable to what would happen if the ghuls caught him.

  You’re almost at the hand-off, the armadillo told him.

  I AM? ALREADY? It hadn’t felt like it. He felt as if he still had a lot of running left in him.

  Save it, said the armadillo. You’ll need it later.

  Oliver nodded, forgetting his familiar couldn’t see him, and dove under a set of bushes.

  His heart was hammering in his ears and his lungs wanted to gasp for air, but he didn’t dare. He forced himself to breathe shallowly, mouth open, even though he felt half-strangled.

  The crashing sounds of the ghuls slowed as they approached.

  “Where?” said one, in a thin waspish voice. “Where, where?”

  “Shut up!” hissed the other one. “Listen!”

  Oliver’s nerves screamed. He heard twigs snapping. It seemed like they had to be mere inches away.

  Then leaves rattled and he heard a thud, as if someone went floundering through the trees off to his left. The ghuls both inhaled sharply. “There!” one said, triumphant, and they charged in the direction of the sound.

  THEY’RE HEADING YOUR WAY.

  They damn well better. I had to break a perfectly good rotten log for that, and I didn’t even get to eat one grub.

  Oliver crawled out from under the bush and began to slink in the direction of Stern’s campsite. The crashing noises were so loud that he was surprised Stern couldn’t hear it.

  He’d gotten perhaps a quarter of the way to the campsite when the armadillo spoke into his mind again. Better get them off me. They’ve figured out I’m not a human and they’re starting to hunt lower down.

  Oliver picked up a stick and swung it hard against a tree trunk two or three times, then broke into a run.

  That did it, said the armadillo. Heading your way now.

  The ghuls hadn’t exactly sounded happy before, but now they sounded downright angry. “Someone is playing gamesss,” hissed one of them. “Someone thinks they’re clever.”

  “Clever meat is sweeter,” said the other one.

  Oliver did not feel particularly clever. He kept his head down, trying to duck under as many branches as possible. He’d never much liked being short, but when your pursuers were six feet tall, it was a definite advantage.

  He needed any advantage he could get. He was tiring more quickly now. A stitch was starting up in his side, jabbing him in the ribs with every breath.

  GETTING TIRED, he admitted.

  You’re nearly there, said the armadillo. Or I’m nearly there, as the case may be.

  A ghul squawked in alarm, far too close behind him. “That was my face!” it snarled.

  “Should have ducked!”

  Oliver took advantage of their squabbling to dive into a tangle of logs. A moment later, the armadillo began to crash loudly through the woods and the ghuls were off once more.

  It was a simple plan, ultimately. They lured the ghuls in a long zig-zag between them, and eventually onto Mayor Stern. For a minute, hidden in the logs, Oliver started to hope that it might work.

  Then everything went bad.

  They’ve split up, the armadillo thought. I only hear one. Watch yourself.

  Oliver cursed silently. He couldn’t remain still, though. He climbed to his feet and hurried toward the campsite, bent practically double, trying to keep his breathing quiet. The skin on the back of his neck crawled, expecting ghul claws to close over it at any moment.

  He was almost to the last point where they were supposed to trade off when the armadillo thought, Ah, hell.

  It was quiet, resigned, and it chilled Oliver to the bone. WHAT? WHAT?

  One got ahead of me. They’ve got me trapped.

  TRAPPED?

  Won’t be long now, I’m afraid.

  ARMADILLO?

  EGLAMARCK?

  Nothing.

  Oliver threw caution, plans, and everything else to the winds and charged toward the armadillo.

  “Hold on!” he yelled, and realized he was yelling out loud as well as mentally, which probably wasn’t helpful. He didn’t even have a weapon against the ghuls, not so much as a pointy stick, but they had his familiar and that was the only thing that mattered.

  Don’t be a fool—the armadillo tried to say, and then Oliver burst between the trees and crashed headlong into a ghul.

  The ghul fell down. Oliver almost fell over the top of it. In the gray light of pre-dawn, he could make out the second ghul blinking at him. It was holding something to its mouth, something the size and shape of a mostly rolled-up armadillo.

  The ghul’s mouth was open and it was biting his familiar.

  All thoughts of magic went out of his mind. Oliver screamed in rage and punched the ghul in the stomach.

  Surprise was definitely the only thing that saved him. The ghul let out a grunt and the armadillo, already hunched up in as tight a ball as he could manage, suddenly kicked free, dropping to the ground.

  “You!” said the ghul. “You and your nasty scaled rat!”

  Run, you idiot! yelled the armadillo. Run! Behind you!

  Oliver bolted sideways. The second ghul’s arms closed over empty air and it tripped over the armadillo and went down again. Oliver scrambled over a tree trunk and pelted through the woods, praying they followed him and didn’t stop to grab the armadillo again.

  Don’t worry about me! Run!

  He’d lost his sense of direction. Which way was the campsite? He should see the fire by now, but maybe it was getting too light, maybe the fire wouldn’t stand out any longer, what if he was running in the wrong direction—

  Red flared in the corner of his vision and swept behind a tree. Oliver changed direction and ran toward it, nearly sobbing with relief. His ghostly benefactor was back.

  He burst out of the trees into Mayor Stern’s campsite barely a step ahead of the ghuls. A dozen startled faces turned toward him.

  “Ghuls!” bellowed Oliver.

  “Wha—?” said someone and then the ghuls came out of the woods behind him.

  Oliver had been a little afraid that the ghuls might talk to Stern. They were clearly capable of lying, and if they’d been very clever, they might have tried to claim that Oliver was a thief (or worse, their runaway son) and so retreat without bloodshed.

  He needn’t have worried. The ghuls saw a dozen humans—a dozen sources of meat—and reacted like feral dogs in a henhouse.

  They went berserk.

  Stern’s men had been in the process of breaking the camp. One man was still holding a set of blankets in his arms when the first ghul leaped on him, biting at his face and grabbing at the back of his head with red-knuckled fingers. He went down. The ghul tore at his flesh, hissing in pleasure.

  “What is going on here?!” roared Stern.

  Oliver didn’t wait to see what the second ghul had done. By the sound of the screams, it wasn’t pretty. Trebastion knelt near the fire, hands tied behind him, face a mask of dried blood, and Oliver dashed toward him.

  Stern swung around. “Get away from him!” he said—to Oliver, not the ghul. Oliver tied his shoelaces together with as much venom as he could muster.

  Stern made two steps, hopped on one foot, and fell down with a roar of fury. One of the ghuls spotted him and leapt off the man it had been attacking, eyes shining with delight.

  “Meat!” it sang. “Meat, lovely meat!”

  One of Stern’s men grabbed the mayor’s elbow and hauled him to his feet. The ghul swayed back and forth in front of them, like a snake deciding whether to strike.

  Oliver got an arm under Trebastion’s shoulders and tried to pull him
upright. “Come on!” he whispered. “Come on, you’ve got to move…”

  “What the hell are those things?” whispered Trebastion. He sounded much more coherent than Oliver would have expected, given the abuse he’d been taking.

  “Ghuls. Come on, come on, they’re bad…”

  “I got that!” Trebastion regained his footing, staggered, but managed to catch himself against Oliver. Oliver tried to steer the groggy minstrel toward the trees. The skin between his shoulder blades crawled. He was expecting a ghul or Stern to grab him at any moment. He looked over his shoulder, just in time to see the ghul stop its sway and lunge for Stern.

  The mayor grabbed the man who had helped him to his feet and flung him into the ghul’s embrace. The ghul rocked sideways, giggled, and wrapped its arms around the man. Despite all the yelling, Oliver heard, with horrible clarity, the sound of the ghul’s teeth in the man’s throat, a crisp wet crunch like a man biting into an apple.

  It was all so sudden and shocking that Oliver could barely comprehend it. Surely, he couldn’t have just seen the mayor throw one of his own men at the monsters to save his own skin. Surely…

  The others saw it too.

  A strange, low noise rose from a half-dozen throats. Oliver had never heard it before, but he recognized it instantly. It was one of the calls of the mob. It was a sound of horror and betrayal. It was the sound of men realizing they had been misled.

  It frightened Oliver almost as much as the ghuls. A crowd making that sound would tear you apart just as easily as a ghul would, even if they didn’t eat you afterward.

  Oh god what have I done oh god I brought the ghuls on them they’re dying some of them are dead I didn’t mean for this I knew it would happen, but I didn’t know what it would be like…

  He knew that he should just run. He knew that the longer the men and ghuls fought, the better off he’d be. But he couldn’t leave it. “Fire!” he shouted. “They’re afraid of fire!”

  For a moment it seemed like no one heard him. Then one of the men reached down and grabbed a log that was still smoldering in the fire and swung it at the nearest ghul. It leapt away, squalling and swearing, and the man pressed his advantage, driving it back from the flame.

  It’s not enough, but it’s all I can do. “Come on,” Oliver said to Trebastion, his voice cracking as if the words were a sob. “Come on, we have to get out of here…”

  Stern took a halting step toward him. “Don’t you dare run!” he snarled. “Get away from that boy!” Oliver didn’t know if the man was talking to him or to Trebastion. It probably didn’t matter either way.

  Stern took another shuffling step. His bootlaces were a mass of knots and he could only move a few inches at a time.

  Trebastion was moving like he was dead drunk. Oliver walked backwards behind him and Stern was much too close and Oliver thought, this is the stupidest race I have ever run, and over Stern’s shoulder, one of the other men stabbed the ghul between the ribs with a knife.

  Oliver wanted to cheer. The ghul howled, dropping his victim, and turned, but another man was there with a burning stick to drive it back.

  Stern didn’t even look around. He kept shuffling after Oliver and Trebastion, a creature from a nightmare, slow and relentless.

  The armadillo hit him in the back of the knees, and he went down with a scream.

  They were almost at the treeline. Trebastion nearly fell again but caught himself on a tree trunk. The armadillo scooted past them and Oliver could not resist one last look over his shoulder.

  One of the ghuls was down. The second one was surrounded by a trio of men bearing torches. But two men were also standing over Stern, and their faces were cold and expressionless. Oliver’s nerves screamed that the mayor could still turn it all around, still talk his way out of it, he only had to say the right thing.

  “Get that fool minstrel!” he snarled, pushing himself to his feet. “Go after him, you idiots! He’s getting away!”

  That was not the right thing.

  Oliver stepped back into the trees and left Mayor Stern and the ghuls to their fate.

  10

  It took longer than anyone would like to get Trebastion’s ropes off. Oliver’s knife was long gone to the bandits and the armadillo really didn’t have the teeth for it. “I don’t even have enamel,” he said irritably. “You’re better off gnawing it yourself.” But eventually they found a sharp rock and Trebastion managed to wiggle them off, even though his hands were scraped and raw by the end.

  There was no sign of Stern or any of the men. Oliver suspected that they had their own problems to deal with now, but he was still glad that Trebastion had managed to get a fair distance, even with his hands tied, before they had to stop. It was full daylight now, and that made moving easier, but it also meant that they could be spotted at a much greater range.

  “How are you still walking?” asked Oliver, as Trebastion finally got his hands in front of him. “I thought you were dying!”

  Trebastion rolled his eyes. “If somebody’s beating you, you go limp and pretend to be much worse off than you are,” he said. “Otherwise they keep beating on you. I’ve felt a lot better, but I wasn’t going to give Stern an excuse to keep going.”

  Oliver nodded, tossing the sharp rock down, and turned.

  And stopped.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Trebastion behind him. “I never want to see this forest again.”

  “I don’t think we can,” said Oliver. “Not just yet.”

  “What?”

  Oliver pointed.

  There were only a few threads hanging on the branch, but they were brilliant, ripe-tomato red. Trebastion’s eyes nearly crossed as he focused on them. “Huh…?”

  “I think it’s the farmer’s wife,” said Oliver. “From your song.” He looked past the threads and for an instant, thought he saw a flicker of red in the trees. “She helped us before. I couldn’t have rescued you without her.”

  “But that was just a song!” Trebastion insisted.

  “You told me that old timers said it had really happened.”

  “Yeah, but they say that about everything! They say that about the song with the mad bull and the maiden, and everybody’s grandfather supposedly knew somebody in the next town over from the miller with the bloody millstone!”

  Oliver shrugged. “Come on,” he said, heading in the direction of the flash of red. “I think she wants something.”

  “But what do ghosts want?”

  “Don’t look at me,” said the armadillo, trotting after Oliver. “I can’t see red anyway.”

  Trebastion gripped his head in both hands, muttering to himself, and then followed after the armadillo and the very minor mage.

  The ghost of the farmer’s wife—Oliver wished the song had included her name, since it didn’t seem fair to keep thinking of her in terms of the person who had indirectly murdered her—led them northwest, into a part of the forest they hadn’t seen before. The trees here were very tall, a vaulted cathedral of green. Ferns had nestled into cracks in the bark and hung down in long chains.

  Every few hundred yards, there was another red thread caught on a twig or draped over a fern.

  “Where is she taking us?” whispered Trebastion.

  “I don’t know,” Oliver whispered back. It did not seem right to speak loudly, as if they were in a church or attending a funeral. “Can you see her? Not just the threads?”

  “I see… something.” He rubbed his eyes. “Not directly, but I keep getting little flashes.”

  Oliver nodded. He deliberately hadn’t looked behind him to see if the threads were vanishing as they passed. He didn’t know whether it would be better or worse if they were.

  “If it wasn’t for the threads, I’d think my eyes were just tired,” admitted Trebastion.

  “You’re not,” said the armadillo. “There’s something there.”

  “Can you see her?”

  The armadillo gave him a wry look. “I can barely
see you. No, I smell something. There’s an aftertaste to the air here. Could be a ghost. Could be Harkhound itself. This forest is more than just the trees.”

  “Heads up,” said Oliver, stopping in his tracks. “I think we’re getting there. Wherever there is.” He nodded to a gap in the trees. “She’s standing still.”

  Trebastion blinked repeatedly, moving his head back and forth rather like the armadillo hunting a slug. “Where… ah, yeah, there.”

  They waited silently. Oliver slowly turned his head, trying to bring the bit of red into better focus.

  She was not young. That surprised him. He had been picturing a young woman for some reason, probably because of the romance of the ballad. Instead she was his mother’s age, her hair streaked with gray. She stood in the gap between two large trees, smoothing her apron down with her hands.

  I’ve faced ghuls and bandits and Mayor Stern, Oliver told himself. A ghost is nothing. A well-intentioned ghost, no less.

  He took a step forward. The ghost did not fade as he approached. She kept her hands in her apron, eyes downcast.

  “Hello,” said Oliver finally.

  The ghost glanced up, then back down.

  “You’ve… um… been very helpful. I’m very grateful.”

  Another glance up and down.

  “I’m grateful too,” said Trebastion. “I hear you saved my bacon, ma’am.” He bowed to the ghost very deeply, his arms out to one side in a minstrel’s flourish.

  A fleeting smile crossed the ghost’s face. A ghost of a smile, thought Oliver, and then was immediately grateful that the armadillo hadn’t heard that thought, because he’d probably get nipped in the shins.

  The four of them stood there—mage, minstrel, armadillo and ghost—for a moment that stretched on and on. Oliver wondered what he was supposed to do next, if anything.

  The ghost seemed to come to some decision at last, because she stepped aside and stretched a hand out to point through the gap.

  “All right,” said Oliver. He took a deep breath and stepped forward.

  Go on. It’s okay to turn your back on her. She’s a ghost, she can just pop up behind you any time she wants. His skin prickled anyway, but he kept his eyes firmly forward.