by Mike Ashley
“Well, I’m in for it now,” Frennet said, “but ye’ve a right to know, ma’am – sir – noble stranger. Folk who sleep here don’t come back no more human; did ye see those little children down yonder? They’re only halfway changed; the potions don’t work all that well on children. I saw you didn’t drink yer wine; so when they came to drive you out to the sty, you’d still be human and they’d kill you – or drive you out in the dark, where the Walker Behind can have ye.”
Shivering, Lythande recalled the entity that had destroyed her magical knife. That, then, had been the Walker Behind.
“What is this – this Walker Behind?” she asked.
“I dunno, ma’am. Only it follows, and draws folk into the other world; thass all I know. Ain’t nobody ever come back to tell what it is. Only I hears ’em scream when it starts followin’ them.”
Lythande stared about the small, mean chamber. Then she asked, “How did you know that I was a woman?”
“I dunno, ma’am. I always knows, that’s all. I always knows, no matter what. I won’t tell the missus; I promise.”
Lythande sighed. Perhaps the girl was somewhat psychic; she had accepted a long time ago that while her disguise was usually opaque to men, there would always be a few women who for one reason or another would see through it. Well, there was nothing to be done about it, unless she were willing to murder the girl, which she was not.
“See that you do not; my life depends on it,” she said. “But perhaps you need not give up your bed to me either; can you guide me unseen out of this place?”
“That I can, ma’am, but it’s a wretched night to be out, and the Walker Behind in the dark out there. I’d hate to hear you screamin’ when it comes to take you away.”
Lythande chuckled, but mirthlessly. “Perhaps instead you would hear it screaming when I came to take it,” she said. “I think that is what I encountered before I came here.”
“Yes’m. It drives folk in here because it wants ’em, and then it takes their souls. I mean, when they’s turned into pigs, I guess they don’t need their souls no more, see? And the Walker Behind takes them.”
“Well, it will not take me,” Lythande said briefly. “Nor you, if I can manage it. I encountered this thing before I came here; it took my knife, so I must somehow get another.”
“They’s plenty of knives in the kitchen, ma’am,” Frennet said. “I can take ye out through there.”
Together they stole down the stairs, Lythande moving like a ghost in that silence that had caused many people to swear that they had seen Lythande appear to disappear into thin air. In the parlor most of the guests had gone to rest, she heard a strange grunting sound. Upstairs there were curious grunting noises; on the morrow, Lythande supposed, they would be driven out to the sty, their souls left for the Walker Behind and their bodies to reappear as sausages or roast pork. In the kitchen, as they passed, Lythande saw the innkeeper – the hag. She was chopping herbs; the pungent scent made Lythande think of the pungent drink she had fortunately not tasted.
So why had this evil come to infest this country? Her extended magical senses could now hear the step in the dark, prowling outside: the Walker Behind. She could sense and feel its evil circling in the dark, awaiting its monstrous feast of souls. But how – and why? – had anything human, even that hag, come to join hands with such a ghastly thing of damnation?
There had been a saying in the Temple of the Star that there was no fathoming the depths either of Law or of Chaos. And surely the Walker Behind was a thing from the very depths of Chaos; and Lythande, as a Pilgrim adept, was solemnly sworn to uphold forever and defend Law against Chaos even at the Final Battle at the end of the world.
“There are some things,” she observed to the girl Frennet, “that I would prefer not to encounter until the Final Battle where Law will defeat Chaos at world’s end. And of those things the Walker Behind is first among them; but the ways of Chaos do not await my convenience; and if I encounter it now, at least I need not meet it at the end of the world.” She stepped quietly into the kitchen, and the hag jerked up her head.
“You? I thought you was sleeping by now, magician. I even sent you the girl—”
“Don’t blame the girl; she did as you bade her,” Lythande said. “I came hither to the Hag and Swine, though I knew it not, to rid the world of a pigsty of Chaos. Now you shall feed your own evil servant.”
She gestured, muttering the words of a spell; the hag flopped forward on all fours, grunting and snuffling. Outside in the dark, Lythande sensed the approach of the great evil Thing, and motioned to Frennet.
“Open the door, child.”
Frennet flung the door open; Lythande shoved the grunting thing outside over the threshold. There was a despairing scream – half animal but dreadfully half human – from somewhere; then only the body of a pig remained grunting in the foggy darkness of the innyard. From the shadowy Walker outside, there was a satisfied croon that made Lythande shudder. Well, so much for the Hag and Swine; she had deserved it.
“There’s nothing left of her, ma’am.”
“She deserves to be served up as sausages for breakfast, dressed with her own herbs,” Lythande remarked, looking at what was left, and Frennet shook her head.
“I’d have no stomach for her meself, ma’am.”
The jackdaw flapped out into the kitchen crying, “Clever girl! Clever girl! There’s a good girl!” and Lythande said, “I think if I had my way, I’d wring that bird’s neck. There’s still the Walker to deal with; she was surely not enough to satisfy the appetite of – that thing.”
“Maybe not, ma’am,” Frennet said, “but you could deal with her; can you deal with it? It’ll want your soul more than hers, mighty magician as you must be.”
Lythande felt serious qualms; the innkeeper-hag, after all, had been but a small evil. But in her day, Lythande had dealt with a few large evils, though seldom any as great and terrifying as the Walker. And this one had already taken her magical knife. Had the spells weakened it any?
A long row of knives was hanging on the wall; Frennet took down the longest and most formidable, proffering it to her, but Lythande shook her head, passing her hand carefully along the row of knives. Most knives were forged for material uses only, and she did not think any of them would be much use against this great magic out of Chaos.
The Blue Star between her brows tingled, and she stopped, trying to identify the source of the magical warning. Was it only that she could hear, out in the darkness of the innyard, the characteristic step of the Walker Behind?
Step-pause-step.
Step-pause-step.
No, the source was closer than that. It lay – moving her head cautiously, Lythande identified the source – the cutting board that lay on the table; the hag had been cutting her magical herbs, the ones to transform the unwary into swine. Slowly, Lythande took up the knife; a common kitchen one with a long, sharp blade. All along the blade was the greenish mark of the herb juices. From the pocket of her mage-robe, Lythande took the ruined handle – the elaborately carved hilt with magical runes – of her ruined knife, looked at it with a sigh – she had always been proud of the elegance of her magical equipment, and this was hearth-witch, or kitchen-magic at best – and flung it down with the kitchen remnants.
Frennet clutched at her. “Oh, don’t go out there, ma’am! It’s still out there a-waiting for you.”
And the jackdaw, fluttering near the hearth, shrieked, “Don’t go out there! Oh, don’t go out there!”
Gently, Lythande disengaged the girl’s arms. “You stay here,” she said. “You have no magical protection; and I can give you none.” She drew the mage-robe’s hood closely about her head, and stepped into the foggy innyard.
It was there; she could feel it waiting, circling, prowling, its hunger a vast evil maw to be filled. She knew it hungered for her, to take in her body, her soul, her magic. If she spoke, she might find herself in its power. The knife firmly gripped in her hand, she traced o
ut a pattern of circling steps, sunwise in spite of the darkness. If she could hold the Thing of darkness in combat till sunrise, the very light might destroy it; but it could not be much after midnight. She had no wish to hold this dreadful Thing at bay till sunrise, even if her powers should prove equal to it.
So it must be dispatched at once . . . and she hoped, since she had lost her own magical knife, with the knife she had taken from the monstrous Thing’s own accomplice. Alone in the fog, despite the bulky warmth of the mage-robe, Lythande felt her body dripping with ice – or was it only terror? Her knees wobbled, and the icy drips seemed to course down between her shoulders, which spasmed as if expecting a knife driven between them. Frennet, shivering in the light of the doorway, was watching her with a smile, as if she had not the slightest doubt.
Is this what men feel when their women are watching them? Certainly, if she should call the Thing to her and fail to destroy it, it would turn next on the girl, and for all she knew, on the jackdaw, too; and neither of them deserved death, far less soul-destruction. The girl was innocent, and the jackdaw only a dumb creature . . . well, a harmless creature; dumb it wasn’t; it was still crying out gibberish.
“Oh, my soul, it’s coming! It’s coming! Don’t go out there!”
It was coming; the Blue Star between her brow was pricking like live coals, the blue light burning through her brain from the inside out. Why, in the name of all the gods there ever were or weren’t, had she ever thought she wanted to be a magician? Well it was years too late to ask that. She clenched her hand on the rough wooden handle of the kitchen knife of the kitchen hag, and thrust up roughly into the greater darkness that was the Walker, looming over her and shadowing the whole of the innyard.
She was not sure whether the great scream that enveloped the world was her own scream of terror, or whether it came from the vast dark vortex that whirled around the Walker; she was enveloped in a monstrous whirlwind that swept her off her feet and into dark fog and dampness. She had time for a ghostly moment of dread – suppose the herbs on the blade should transform the Walker into a great Hog of Chaos? And how could she meet it if it did? But this was the blade of the Walker’s own accomplice in his own magic of Chaos; she thrust into the Thing’s heart and, buffeted and battered by the whirlwinds of Chaos, grimly hung on.
Then there was a sighing sound, and something unreeled and was gone. She was standing in the innyard, and Frennet’s arms were hugging hard.
The jackdaw shrieked, It’s gone! It’s gone! Oh, good girl, good girl!
It was gone. The innyard was empty of magic, only fog on the moldering stones. There was a shadow in the kitchen behind Frennet; Lythande went inside and saw, wrapped in his cloak and ready to depart, the pudgy face and form of Gimlet, the dog faker.
“I was looking for the innkeeper,” he said truculently. “This place is too noisy for me; too much going on in the halls; and there’s the girl. You,” he said crossly to Frennet. “Where’s your mistress? And I thought you were to join me.”
Frennet said sturdily, “I’m me own mistress now, sir. And I ain’t for sale, not any more. As for the mistress, I dunno where she is; you can go an’ ask for her at the gates of Heaven, an’ if you don’t find her there – well, you know where you can go.”
It took a minute for that to penetrate his dull understanding; but when it did, he advanced on her with a clenched fist.
“Then I been robbed of your price!”
Lythande reached into the pockets of the mage-robe. She handed him a coin.
“Here; you’ve made a profit on the deal, no doubt – as you always do. Frennet is coming with me.”
Gimlet stared and finally pocketed the coin, which – Lythande could tell from his astonished eyes – was the biggest he had ever seen.
“Well, good sir, if you say so. I got to be off about my dogs. I wonder if I could get some breakfast first.”
Lythande gestured to the joints of meat hanging along the wall of the kitchen. “There’s plenty of ham, at least.”
He looked up, gulped, and shuddered. “No, thanks.” He slouched out into the darkness, and Lythande gestured to the girl.
“Let’s be on our way.”
“Can I really come with you?”
“For a while, at least,” Lythande said. The girl deserved that. “Go quickly, and fetch anything you want to take.”
“Nothing from here,” she said. “But the other customers—”
“They’ll turn human again now that the hag’s dead, such of ’em as haven’t been served up for roast pork,” Lythande said. “Look there.” And indeed, the joints of ham hanging along the wall had taken on a horrible and familiar look, not porcine at all. “Let’s get out of here.”
They strode down the road toward the rising sun, side by side, the jackdaw fluttering after, crying out, “Good morning, ladies! Good morning ladies.”
“Before the sun rises,” Lythande said, “I shall wring that bird’s neck.”
“Oh, aye,” Frennet said. “Or dumb it wi’ your magic. May I ask why you travel in men’s clothes, Lady?”
Lythande smiled and shrugged.
“Wouldn’t you?”
THE LAST WITCH
James Bibby
James Bibby (b. 1953) is best known for his series of humorous fantasy novels featuring Ronan the Barbarian which began with, uhm, Ronan the Barbarian (1995). Bibby has been experimenting with other ideas recently of which this is his latest story. It has a neat sting in its tail.
PAUL INKMAN TOOK ANOTHER drag on his cigarette and then leant on the worn sandstone parapet of the old bridge and stared down at the smoothly-flowing river below. Outlined against the image of the bright blue sky, his reflection stared morosely back.
“What the hell are you doing here, you loser?” it seemed to be saying to him. “Upton-upon-Dee . . . a place with less going on than Bournemouth on a Monday night. What the hell has happened to your career?”
For most of his life, Paul had wanted to be a television war reporter. As a child, he couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than to be one of those super-cool, casually-dressed heroes speaking earnestly to camera from beside some dusty, foreign track whilst soldiers scurried purposefully about, tanks rumbled by and refugees shuffled dejectedly past. So when he had joined regional television at the age of twenty-two as a local reporter, it was to be just the first, purposeful step onto the career escalator that would sweep him up to the heights of national TV journalism. Cats stuck up trees and award-winning sausages were to be mere stepping-stones to fame, fortune and instant recognition wherever he went.
And so it was all the more galling to find that, six years later, the escalator had not budged one inch. Paul Inkman was still just a minor name on regional television, still covering the marathon-running octogenarians and the motor-biking vicars, still being sent to obscure little hamlets like Upton-upon-Dee to cover non-existent village poltergeists. For some reason, he had never stumbled across that big story, the one that would make the national news and give his career the boost it needed. And something told him he wasn’t going to find it today, either. Sighing, he flicked his cigarette away and watched as it spiralled down to land in the water and be swept to oblivion beneath the bridge.
“This is going to be a complete bust. I can feel it,” he said to Tony, his cameraman and sound operator.
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Tony. He was peering through the eyepiece of the steadicam, swinging it round and zooming in and out on whatever caught his fancy. “This place is dead picturesque. Good sound, too. Cows, birds, the river, the church bells . . .”
“But what use is that?” complained Paul. “We haven’t found a trace of a hint of a sniff of a story! I’ve interviewed eight people about this so-called poltergeist and they’ve all said exactly the same thing.” His voice took on a mock-rustic accent. “Oi’ve seen nothing myself, but there’s definitely summat odd going on.”
“Maybe you just need to dig around a bit.”
> “Maybe I just need a miracle. Ah, what the hell! I might as well go and dig around in the village store. I need some more ciggies, anyway. I’ll see you in the pub for lunch.”
The road over the bridge dipped down, running between picturesque grey stone cottages for a couple of hundred yards before meeting the main A441 at a crossroads in the centre of the village. It was quiet and deserted as Paul walked along, the peace being broken only by the occasional car passing through in the direction of Hereford, and Paul found himself wondering yet again what the hell people found so attractive about living in the countryside. It would have driven him mad inside a week.
He reached the crossroads and paused outside the village store. He could hear the increasing rumble of a diesel engine, and a faint tremor in the ground told him that some massive lorry was passing through the village. After a few seconds it appeared, swerving round the corner by the church and travelling too fast, roaring between the houses like some rogue, runaway monster in pursuit of its prey.
And then, before Paul had time to react, it happened. A cat tore across the road in front of the lorry with a small dog yapping excitedly in pursuit. The cat had timed its run well; it had reached the far pavement before the lorry drew level. But the dog was not so lucky. Realisation arrived a fraction of a second before nemesis and the dog jerked its head towards the massive juggernaut that was about to strike. And then the dog was flying through the air and the lorry was rushing past, the turbulence of its wake ruffling Paul’s hair, its horn bellowing a belated warning, roaring onwards down the road past The White Hart before vanishing round another corner.
Paul stared in disbelief as the roar of the lorry dwindled, unable to accept what he had just seen. For the dog hadn’t been smashed to a pulp by the juggernaut. It hadn’t even been touched. A fraction of a second before the lorry struck, the dog had been snatched up, yanked sideways through the air and deposited safely on the pavement as though by some giant, invisible hand.
It sat there for a few moments, visibly shaking, before turning and bolting back between the houses from where it had come. And then Paul realised that he wasn’t the only witness. Twenty yards further down the road was a small girl of nine or ten who was gazing at him with a horrified expression on her face. Briefly, Paul wondered whether it was her dog, but then realisation hit him and professionalism took over. He had just seen something completely inexplicable. He had a story, and now he had a witness.
