While everyone else remained too focused on dealing with the fire to even acknowledge the presence of an inquisitrix in their midst, Shoshona looked around for any sign of the story behind the fire. What she spotted was a man in the distance, standing on a rocky outcrop on the lower slopes of the Wolf’s Tooth, watching the proceedings. He wore red and black, and seemed to incline his head in acknowledgment of her gaze. From here, it was hard to make out any other details, but the man had to be Sir Riordan. Spurring her mount to skirt around the heat of the fire, she headed off toward him.
She rode through a quiet pasture, leaving the scene of destruction behind only to discover a whole new scene of destruction awaited her. An enormous bull lay dead in the middle of the field, it’s skull cloven in by one powerful blow, its blood still pouring out to pool on the ground. Shoshona paused only a moment to take in the scene before riding on.
At last she came to the point where her horse could go no further, so she dismounted and climbed the rock up to where Riordan stood waiting patiently. He’d managed to find his axe on the trip down the Wolf’s Tooth, and he cradled it now, the blade crimson and dripping with blood. Blood covered his face and clothes, as well, in great spatters all over. He’d made no attempt to clean any of it.
Wordlessly, Shoshona stepped up beside him and just stood for a minute, watching the cottage burn. “It happened again, didn’t it?” she asked at last.
Keely and Ulric had circled the pit a couple of times and passed a couple of side tunnels—one rough and natural, the other smoothly carved from the rock—when they heard a loud clang of metal on stone, reverberating up and down the shaft. They both jumped from the suddenness of it, then froze listening until the echoes had died away. A heartbeat passed in silence. Then five. Then…clang! C-clang! And silence fell once more, at least until they’d climbed halfway round again. Klump, klump, tlang! Klump, klump, tlank!
At last they spotted the source of the noise: a man in filthy workman’s clothes on the far side of the shaft, still some ways up, but descending noisily. After every couple steps with his heavy boots slapping against the stone, he’d swing the shovel in his hand carelessly around, striking the wall or the steps, and occasionally sending off sparks. His scraggly beard, unkempt hair, and erratic gate suggested, if not an intimate familiarity with alcohol, then at least a passing relationship with some state of mind other than “sound”.
While both Keely and Ulric remained frozen, lest a sudden movement attract the man’s attention before they’d decided what to make of him, they watched his unsteady progress around the arc of the pit until he’d gone almost out of sight again.
Then as one particularly vigorous swing of the shovel rebounded off the wall, the shovel slipped from his fingers and began to tumble away. He lunged after it, and Keely let out an involuntary gasp as the man stood tottering on the rail-less inner edge of the stair. He’d succeeded in grabbing the shovel, and for a very long second, he swung it around with the rest of his weight in the fight to control the direction of his imminent fall. At last he got it right and sat down hard on the stairs.
“Are you all right?!” Keely called up to the man, instantly earning herself a scowl from Ulric.
The man whipped his head around in surprise, bobbled the shovel again, and this time succeeded in overextending himself as he grabbed for it. Keely muttered a single expletive under her breath as the shovel clattered off the stone then went whirling away into free-fall, followed immediately by its owner. Both plummeted past, hit the pool with an awkward splash that violently disrupted the smooth, black waters, then disappeared beneath them. The shovel was gone in an instant, any buoyancy in the handle overcome by the weight of the blade. The man resurfaced after several seconds, just long enough for his flailing to make it clear he didn’t have a clue how to swim.
Keely made a move to start down the stairs, but she drew up short—coughing—as Ulric snagged the hood of her cloak and it caught around her throat. “I’ll go down,” he barked. “You’re going up.” She rounded on him viciously, with a slap that left his face stinging and blood trailing down his cheek from the instinct she hadn’t quite been able to overcome to claw at him. Then the cloak fluttered limply in his hand and she was a little white cat, launching herself off of the stairway and out into open air, falling, falling…
She closed her eyes, trying to trick herself into forgetting the onrushing experience of wet fur, and just went limp. The water still hit her like a brick, but she had done the mental arithmetic and chosen it as better than attempting a graceful high-dive as a woman, hoping she’d actually pull it off and not run straight into some barely concealed pile of rubble in the process.
Then the initial shock of hitting the water was over, and she was a woman again. With long strokes, she made for the surface, but found she’d gotten turned around. Irregular shapes loomed out of the dark water ahead of her until she realized abruptly that she was going down, not up.
At the same moment, she also realized what it was she was seeing, and in the shock of it nearly inhaled a lungful of water. She fought again for the surface, this time getting her bearings right, and broke into the air, gasping. Above her she could hear Ulric cursing her, and the sound of his bare feet slapping against stone as he hurried after her in the best semblance of a run one can manage while descending a stairway.
Orienting on the point where the staircase met the surface of the water, Keely made her best guess to where the man had gone down, and she stroked quickly over to it before steeling herself and diving once more beneath the surface. Her guess proved true, and there he was, still struggling ineffectually to reach for the surface.
He went wide-eyed when he saw her, and Keely saw in those eyes a reflection of how she must look to him: a naked woman, floating above him, surrounded by a halo of long, silver hair—back-lit and extending a hand downward to him as he hovered on the doorway of death. He was having a religious experience, and she couldn’t have been more grateful, because it stilled his thrashing. Not wasting a moment for his panic to reassert itself, she grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him toward the stairs for all she was worth.
Ulric was there to meet them as Keely pushed the man, coughing and gasping, up out of the water. Ulric had never let go of Keely’s ratty red cloak on the way down, and she grabbed it gratefully as he dropped it now to help pull the man up. She was out of the water and wrapped in it, trying to escape the chill of the water and the vision of what she’d seen in its depths, well before Ulric could get the man settled to rest on solid ground.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Living a Nightmare
Sabina pulled another dusty book off the nearest shelf and dropped it with a satisfying thud onto the table next to the growing pile. She opened it reverently, and carefully turned the brittle pages, to find more of the ancient, indecipherable text. Or, to put a finer point on it, the text was indecipherable to her, given her personal ignorance of the old imperial tongue, but this was the stuff: tome after tome that reeked of age and authority, each one a musty exemplar of what a fifteen-hundred-year-old holy text should be.
Behind Sabina, a light flared as her hostess lit a candle, then placed it on the table, and it was only then that Sabina realized how dark the cottage had become. Was night falling already?
“Where did you get these?” Sabina asked the woman excitedly. It was the first words either of them had spoken since Sabina had been invited in. Instantly entranced by the collection, Sabina had never even spared her hostess a second glance, and the woman had seemed in no hurry to break the spell.
“Oh, the usual places.” The woman answered in the hushed tones of a librarian—though there was no one else about for her voice to disturb—before gliding off again into the gloom. “Salvaged from the deepest pits of despair, wrestled from out of the darkest nightmares. That sort of thing.”
“That’s…usual, is it?” Sabina asked. Finally taking an active interest in her hostess, Sabina peered into the darkness, but cou
ld see no more of her now than a shadowy silhouette as she moved about, pulling a book off a shelf here, sliding one onto a shelf there.
“Where else?” The woman still whispered, though her voice carried like a bell in the cold silence of the library. “Seriena trains up women to read and to write so that when they die and she drags their souls screaming down into the pit, she can chain them up in dank little cells to make books for her for all eternity. When they’re not being poked with red hot needles, of course. That would make them jump, and smudge the words.”
“Oh,” Sabina said, not knowing what other answer she could give to that story.
“Books are evil, dear. Poison. They’re how Seriena spreads her hate and her venom to every corner of the land.”
“And yet you surround yourself with so many…” Sabina observed, trying against all her natural urges to not sound judgmental.
“Oh, these aren’t mine,” the woman whispered. “These are for you. That’s what you came looking for, isn’t it? Forbidden knowledge? Power at any cost?”
“Who are you?” Sabina asked, shivering suddenly. She found herself whispering in imitation of the woman.
“Oh, I know Seriena has this whole ‘sweetness and light’ thing going,” the woman continued. “But that’s just a mask for the rubes. Helloooo? Inquisition? You think she doesn’t condone their methods? She’s no better than the rest of us.”
“I think I’d better go,” Sabina whispered nervously. “My brother’s looking for me.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “Show yourself out. Sometimes the power’s not worth the price, is it?”
“Sometimes,” Sabina agreed, a note of uncertainty creeping into her note of uncertainty. But she stood up slowly and started edging toward the door. “You’re the witch, aren’t you?”
The woman laughed loudly, the suddenness of it startling in the quiet darkness. “I’ve been called a witch,” she murmured finally. “I’m not.”
“Then what are you?” Sabina asked earnestly.
“Famished,” the woman answered with a thoughtful nod. “And perhaps a bit melodramatic. It’s hard to be sure, though. Is this Tuesday?”
“I…no,” Sabina shook her head, now at least as perplexed as she was nervous.
“Pity.” The woman sighed wistfully. “I have a theory about days of the week, you know. Melodrama is so much easier to recognize on a Tuesday. But look, we’re not here to talk about me, are we? This is all about…you.” The woman finally stepped into the candlelight, and for a moment there was something unnervingly familiar about her manic grin. Then she leaned over and blew out the candle with one quick puff of breath and the room plunged into utter darkness.
Sabina screamed. She screamed until—stumbling backward in the darkness—she tripped over a chair and fell flat on her back, at which point she found there was no more air in her lungs to scream with. Then as she lay there gasping and helpless, a dazzling burst of light blinded her as thoroughly as had the darkness before. And then all was stillness and silence except for Sabina’s own gasping, and she lay there with her head swimming until she’d recovered enough first to breathe, and then to see. The first thing to come into focus was her hostess bending over her.
“Ah, you see?” the woman said enthusiastically. “Now that’s melodrama. You’re really quite good at it. Consider me impressed.” The burst of light seemed to have come when she’d pulled back a very heavy drapery from one of the cottage windows, and now she stood there illuminated by it, looking all sincere innocence. Then she gave an amused little smile, and Sabina remembered where she’d seen that smile before—or, rather, one very much like it.
It had resided on the face of the mysterious lady who’d crashed the party on that stormy night in Denecia, where this whole thing had started. And this, Sabina thought, must be what that lady had looked like fifteen or twenty years ago. That the two women were of a blood, Sabina had no doubt. Had the face not instantly convinced her, the mannerisms would have.
“Up you go,” the lovely redhead said, extending a hand and helping Sabina effortlessly to her feet. “So…melodrama? Check. Tuesday? We’ll reserve judgment on that one. Famished? Yes, but not a state we want to maintain. Apples are in season, if you like that sort of thing. Or I’ve got a basket of goodies around here somewhere…” She began rummaging around, shoving aside books and looking under tables.
“Did I say I was hungry?” Sabina asked.
“Aren’t you?”
“I…guess,” Sabina said, realizing suddenly that she was. How long had it been since she’d last eaten? How long had she been in the forest, for that matter? How long had she been in the cottage? “But it can wait. The books…”
“Oh, right…Books.” The woman bit her lip, eyes glazing for a moment in thought, as if it had entirely slipped her mind that not only were they surrounded by the things, but that she’d just delivered a diatribe against them. “It’s not here, you know.” Sabina started to ask her what wasn’t there, but the woman fixed her with a reproachful, don’t-be-silly gaze, and the words died unformed. “And none of these are going to help in finding it. To be brutally frank, they’re all rubbish—every single one.”
“Well, if you don’t want them…”
“I said,” the woman enunciated slowly and impatiently, “they’re all rubbish.” With that, she picked up the doused candle from the candle holder and jabbed it wick-first into the pages of the book Sabina had left open on the table. The dark red wax, still soft from the heat, squashed and splattered across the page, leaving it looking for all the world like the book was oozing blood for being stabbed with the candle.
Sabina let out a small, distressed yelp. “What are you doing?!”
The woman sighed as her only answer. Then in defiance of Sabina’s estimate of how long a doused candle could remain a fire hazard, the page erupted into flames. Sabina shrieked, thinking even as she did so that this was suddenly turning into a bad habit, but the woman dispassionately picked up the flaming book and tossed it into the nearby fireplace.
“That was worth…” Sabina could feel a tear rolling down her cheek as she watched the fire greedily consume the book. “…a lot,” she finished weakly.
“It really wasn’t,” the woman said, casually grabbing another grand-looking tome and tossing it into the fireplace with the first. “They’re not even as old as you’d think. Anyway, what’s wealth to you but a road to power? You didn’t buy that fancy dress you’re wearing because it’s comfortable,” she laughed. Indeed, Sabina did squirm uncomfortably, though it would not have been fair to blame it all on the dress. “You bought it to impress; to convince everyone you’re a noblewoman to be reckoned with and to help seduce foolish men into your thrall. Am I wrong?” The woman arched a questioning eyebrow, but Sabina just stared back at her uncertainly.
“Do you want power, little girl?” the woman asked. By all rights, the words should have come out sounding patronizing—or, at best, like a fresh round of marginally coherent babbling—but somehow they managed a sincere, motherly tone that wrapped itself like a warm cloak around Sabina’s shoulders and attempted to dry her tears. When Sabina looked into those ice-blue eyes now, they gazed back at her like a steady rock of sanity in a tumultuous sea, and they whispered of a wisdom that had no right to exist on such an unblemished, girlish face.
“I…yes,” Sabina answered.
“The church was foolish to turn you away.” The woman beckoned, and she opened her arms, truly embracing Sabina now and smoothing down her hair. “Such a strong and clever girl. No doubt Seriena would have turned you into a pontifine before she was through with you, but some jealous little tart of a priestess denied her the chance. Their loss.”
“How…how do you…?” Sabina’s voice cracked, denying her the chance to finish the question.
“I know all about you, dear. I’ve been watching you. Watching over you.”
“Like a…faerie go’ssmother?” Sabina asked.
“Sure, dea
r,” the woman answered with a glint of kindly laughter in her eyes. “Like a faerie go’ssmother. Now let it out. I’m here.”
No more tears came, despite the invitation, but Sabina did bury her face in the woman’s hair.
“So there you’ve been,” she went on, gently patting Sabina’s shoulder, “stuck playing politics in a man’s world, grabbing for whatever scraps of power you could find, knowing like a cursed prophet that the whole world is about to collapse into ruin, but that no one will listen to your warnings no matter how loud you scream.”
The detached, dispassionate corner of Sabina’s mind idly noted that perhaps this summary of her life was a bit on the melodramatic side. The exhausted, overwrought majority of Sabina’s mind responded by slapping the other bit in the face and telling the little weasel to shut up. That’s when the quiet tears started up again.
“Maybe if you’d become a power in the church, you could have restored some sanity, but that’s not going to happen now, is it? We’ve got to find you another way. We will find you another way. Just leave it to Scarlet.”
“What are you even doing here?” Ulric’s voice echoed down from above. He’d accepted at this point that they were past any pretense of stealth, and that anyone who might have come out from a side-tunnel to confront them would have done so by this point. So he’d put his boots back on, and agreed that it was better for Keely to follow at a discreet distance than to have the rescued workman wondering about either the silver-haired woman or the curious cat trotting along with them.
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 19
