The angry set didn’t leave Baldassare’s jaw, but actual thought seemed to be going on behind his eyes.
“You’re a proud man, true and plain,” Tobias said calmly, “but if you’re the sort of man who puts his pride ahead of his family, then I’m Miraculata Winnifred.”
Baldassare let out a breath and nodded, sizing up Ulric. “Your word as a gentleman that we’ll have your aid finding my sister?”
“I’m not—” Ulric began.
“Yes,” Minda cut him off quickly. “Yes, you are.” When he started to protest further, she grabbed him and pulled him aside. “It’ll be hard enough having noblemen thinking they’re taking orders from a common knight,” she hissed. “You are not going to make this worse by telling them you’re not even that. I’m knighting you here and now. If we survive to tell the tale, you’ll have earned it. You can do the whole kneeling and sword thing with Daddy later, but now you’re going to turn around and reassure our guest with your word as a gentleman. Got it?”
“Ah, yes, Lady Minda,” Ulric said, turning back and clearing his throat with a cough. “Of course you’re right.
“By my word as a gentleman, and by the hospitality of my Lord Haywood, I’ll do whatever good conscience allows to help you find your sister.”
Baldassare nodded his acceptance, mollified.
“So, first things first,” Ulric said. “We need to relocate immediately while we’ve got a heavy rain to cover our trail, and not just mud to mark it for anyone who might come looking. The ruins of Caer Cacamwri should make our best base of operations in the forest. It’s far enough in that the Inquisition should be hard-pressed to find it, but not so far—”
“The one-eyed wolf!” Elissa blurted abruptly. Everyone looked to her questioningly.
“It’s the one-eyed wolf we need to make for!” she went on, turning to Minda. “That thing you said the Inquisition was trying to find! Look at this!” She fumbled to produce the damp page of bilge glyphs from the folds in her robes. “Right…” she traced a searching finger over the page. “Right…oh, damn. Before it got smudged, there was a glyph I was puzzling out—a wolf’s head with one eye a circle and one eye an ‘x’. I thought they were talking about a wolf hiding in the woods or something, but I just realized, it all makes sense if the wolf is the hiding place. We have to beat the Inquisition to the one-eyed wolf!”
“You’re sure?” Ulric asked.
“Of course not!” Elissa answered. “I’m trying to sort this out with one part guesswork, two parts hope, and three parts wild and unfounded supposition. But the Inquisition was sure enough about it that they were ready to maim anyone they could reach in order to get there in a hurry. Can we not race them to it?”
“You heard our scholar, folks,” Ulric said. “We’re moving out now—two teams. Nolan, take our new friends, Doryne, and the prisoner to Caer Cacamwri to set up camp. Everyone else with me.”
Tobias cleared his throat. “With all respect due your current role, I have to protest one thing.”
“We don’t have time for…” Ulric began crossly.
“I chased this young woman all the way from Serylia,” Tobias said. “We’ve settled our differences. We haven’t finished our business, and she has a habit of simply vanishing every time I turn my back. I’ll follow your lead for everything else, but where she goes, my squire and I go.”
“Fine,” Ulric snapped. “Let’s move.”
Heading straight out into the storm might have been necessary, but that didn’t make it safe, and it certainly didn’t make it pleasant. The clouds blotted out the sun, the treetops blotted out the clouds, and the rain obscured everything. Their little company might nearly as well have been traveling by night—and without Minda’s confident guidance, they would have been lost within minutes of leaving the lake shore.
The thought of feline eyesight tempted Keely to change back into a cat, as did the thought of riding on someone’s shoulder—drained as she still felt from her earlier exertions—but she feared that to do so would be rubbing her past deceptions in Tobias’ face, and spending the day in sodden fur held even less appeal than spending the day in sodden clothes.
Even filtered through the forest canopy, the cold rain poured down steadily on their heads and pooled around their feet in muddy rivulets or standing puddles. The foliage did manage to break the velocity of the rain’s fall and to provide them with a wind break, but it couldn’t hold back the sheer quantity of the torrent spilling from the sky.
“Someone up there’s sure upset!” Keely observed, shielding rain from her eyes as best she could as she stared upward. “Do miraculatas ever do storms?” she asked.
“There’s precedent,” Elissa said. “But this doesn’t feel particularly holy—just wet and cold. Maybe angry.”
“They say demons up in the hills send storms like this,” Minda said between cracks of thunder as she ducked under a low-hanging, wind-blown branch. She cradled her carefully wrapped rifle to her body as protectively as she could, clearly uneasy about having to trust the oilskin to keep her prized weapon safe from the elements.
“It’s just the sky gnomes,” Conrad said.
“Sky gnomes?” Elissa asked dubiously. “Gnomes are earth elementals.”
“Oh, sure,” Conrad agreed. “Just not the sky ones.”
“His grandmother considers herself something of an expert on the alchemical sciences,” Tobias murmured in Elissa’s ear. “She’s deucedly good at making things explode, just not generally when she means to. In any event, the boy worships her. I’d just let it go.”
“Next person to float a theory for who’s making it rain,” Ulric said evenly, “had better be ready with a theory for how to make them do it somewhere not on top of us.”
“This is my chastised face,” Minda said, glancing back at him angelically. “You know, the one that exudes contrition together with…” Her sentence ended in a short, sharp shriek, that in turn ended with a very substantial splash. In the blink of an eye, she’d vanished into the puddle they’d been forging through, leaving behind only ripples.
“Minda!” Ulric charged forward, stopping just short of where they young woman had vanished, and raising an arm to hold back the others crowding up behind him.
Before anyone could commit to doing anything more, her head broke the surface, gasping and spluttering, followed by her hands clawing for anything to latch onto. What they found was Ulric, who heaved her up out of the water, ignoring the small, desperate scratches he received for it.
“Artema!” Minda wailed. “She’s in there!”
“What? Who?” Tobias demanded.
“Her blasted gun,” Ulric explained even as he shed his pack, then plunged feet-first into the muddy waters.
Keely peered after him, seeing nothing, trying not to be concerned. While there was no telling how deep the waters might be, at least they were still, and Ulric—unlike Minda—had gone in fully prepared. Tobias shouldered his way forward to stand beside her, tensed to do something, but clearly uncertain as to what he could do.
After many long seconds, Ulric surfaced, hefting his burden into the shallow water at Minda’s feet. To Minda’s credit, she only backpedaled a couple of steps and said quietly, “That’s not Artema.”
Ulric wiped the water out of his eyes and stared at the long, solid bone that might easily have been a human femur. “I’m…in a bone pit, aren’t I?” he asked Minda flatly.
“Pretty sure, yeah,” Minda said.
He swam a stroke over along the edge of the submerged pit and looked up for a moment at Minda’s empty arms, clutching at her shoulders as she shivered. Then he looked on up into her eyes. Then he muttered a curse and ducked back under the water.
“A bone pit?” Keely asked from behind her best poker face as the seconds ticked by.
“Tuatha burial bogs,” Minda said.
“Imperial,” Elissa said, then repeated when all eyes turned questioningly to where she was prodding at the water with a stout stick,
exploring the edge of the pit. “Maybe Tuatha threw the bones in, but that pit started out as an imperial-dug cellar.”
“Really?” Minda asked archly. “What architectural detail of mud gave it away?”
“Well, there’s the nice, straight stonework lines along the edge,” Elissa said without looking up from her prodding. “Then there’s that.” She pointed over their shoulders to the right, toward the towering statue that stood upon a rocky promontory not thirty yards away.
Though it stood half-obscured by rain and foliage, and though its features had been eroded by the passage of centuries, there could be no mistaking the iconic image of the emperor Marcus Lupus astride his rearing horse, sword held low in his right hand, falcon alighting on his raised left hand, and a lioness stalking along the ground at his right.
“Okay,” Minda admitted. “I’ll give you that one.”
“Whatever building rated that statue had to be big and important,” Elissa said, finally tossing aside her stick and standing back from the edge of the pit, visibly relaxing as she put some distance between herself and it. “Odds are it came with big and important cellars, and with a whole compound of lesser buildings that may have had cellars of their own. There’ll be no trusting standing water around here. We’d best head for higher ground.”
Ulric’s head broke the surface of the water again, thoroughly muddied and gasping for breath. This time when he tossed Minda’s hunting rifle at her feet, it was really Minda’s hunting rifle—still wrapped in its oil cloth, for all the good that did it now—but he was grimacing as he crawled up out of the pit, favoring his left arm. “That new title comes with a nice estate, right?” he asked Minda. “A really, really nice estate?”
“Only if my father has any sense of justice,” Minda said, hugging the rifle fiercely before leaning it against a tree so she could get down and have a look at Ulric’s arm. “You’re bleeding.”
“Probably stabbed it on someone’s rib,” he muttered. “It’s nothing.”
“Yeah, right,” she said as she watched the blood dripping from his torn sleeve to dilute into the muddy water. “We’ve at least got to bind it. Get that shirt off.”
Especially after those steamy, stolen moments with Tobias, a proper lady would have studiously avoided watching Ulric stripping out of his soaked shirt—but there was nothing proper about any of the claims Keely had ever made to ladyship, so she found herself repaying his earlier appreciation of her legs by taking a moment to look over his well-muscled torso, thoroughly storied with scars. It was, she concluded, a very good torso. It suited him.
Studying the bleeding arm she left to Minda, who—with the help of supplies from Conrad’s un-muddied pack—cleaned and bound the wound with business-like detachment.
None of it distracted her for long from thoughts of the bone pit and what it had to say about the pool at the heart of the Wolf’s Tooth. Was this pit really only filled with clean old bones, or was Ulric just trying to keep from freaking the rest of them out? In that mud, whatever he’d discovered, he’d discovered by groping around blind. Bad enough searching a pile of bones that way, but her head filled with nightmares of what that would have been like had the pit harbored recent corpses.
And was this really just the odd ritual of a barbarian culture as Minda thought? She couldn’t imagine those folk they’d met at the water’s edge slipping out unnoticed, across pasture and orchard, to conduct routine burials in that distant cave. But if they didn’t do that, had they done this? And if not them, and if there were similar pits scattered around the forest, then who? How? Why?
None of the plausible answers she could come up with were answers she liked, and even the most plausible of those answers seemed improbable. The one thing she felt certain about was that she’d stumbled into something she wanted to stumble out of at first opportunity.
Keely was still staring out across the standing water, in morbid contemplation of the pit beneath, when she saw a faint, flickering swirl of red brighten up the murk from below. She froze in horrified fascination, as in an instant her doubts that the two dreadful pools were connected dissolved, along with her doubts that she’d really seen something stir in the depths beneath the Wolf’s Tooth.
When the surface of the water began to bubble, to where there could be no mistake that it was still just roiling from the impact of the rain, Keely finally found her voice, small and faltering though it was. “Run,” she said, though so quietly that no one paid it any mind, if they even heard it at all.
Whatever lay beneath still moved in an unsteady meander, but it seemed to be meandering in their direction—particularly toward Elissa, who still stood disturbingly close to the edge of the pit, her back turned to it as she exchanged words with Minda that might as well have been random babbling for all the impression they made on Keely’s brain. At last she broke the paralysis and barged forward, grabbing Elissa by the wrist.
“Jenny, run!” she screamed, dragging Elissa nearly off her feet in the haste to pull her away from the pit.
When her outburst was met with more startled queries than action, she grabbed Tobias next and shoved him after Elissa. “Move it, hero! Go! Go! Everyone out of here now!” That got them started. “Away from here,” she snapped to Minda, pointing her to take the lead—and now that Keely had broken the emotional inertia, her will brooked no argument. “And straight for high, dry ground!”
A couple of chaotic minutes later, Keel finally allowed the group to stop on a ridge of rock, and she held up a hand for silence as she peered back into the gloom behind them, straining to hear anything above the sound of the rain through the trees.
“There was something there,” she said quietly once she felt certain that, if they were being followed, at least they weren’t being followed quickly. “Something stalking us under the water.”
“Are you sure?” Ulric asked her. The subtext of the question implied she could have gotten spooked and imagined it, but at least it didn’t go so far as to sound dismissive.
“I’m sure,” she said, folding her arms across herself as she shivered. “Please tell me we’re getting close to this wolf-rock thing. The rain is actually getting colder.”
“No promises,” Minda said. “I never saw that statue before, which means we aren’t exactly where I thought we were. It might be another fifteen minutes, or we might be totally lost.”
“Right,” Ulric said. “We should be well away from the Inquisition by now, and they’ll be blundering around without a guide. We’ll press on, but if we come across any sort of shelter from the rain, we stop to dry off and warm up while we wait for the rain to clear. This is no place to risk getting farther off the track than we absolutely have to.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Once Upon a Time
“There’s not going to be a less bad time,” Keely said. She pulled the blanket tight around her otherwise-bare skin while rain continued to rattle the leaves outside their shelter. She, Elissa, and Ulric had each brought packs they’d filled in preparation for an extended round of hide-and-seek with the Inquisition, and had managed to keep most of their contents miraculously dry.
Keely had insisted Minda take the simple, sensible outfit she’d packed for herself, on the grounds that she’d been given it by Minda’s family anyway, and that between the two of them, she was the one with no qualms to speak of about lounging around in nothing but a blanket in mixed company. With only three sets of dry clothes available between them, Tobias and Conrad had joined her in blankets of their own.
They’d holed up in what could either be called a shallow cave or a generous overhang of rock, but for the moment what they called it was “mostly dry and out of the wind”. Everyone had wanted a fire to gather around, but no one had wanted it enough to overlook what a beacon that would make for all the people they were trying to avoid just now, so they’d contented themselves with the simple pleasure of not being soaked to the skin, and their various shiverings had begun to subside.
“Lady Minda,
” Keely asked, “what do you know about these ‘bone pits’?”
“Less than I thought, apparently.” Minda shrugged. “Unmarked mires and pools scattered around the forest, filled with ancient bones. I’ve seen a few. They’re plenty creepy, but I don’t know they’re more dangerous than any other deep pool or mire in the forest. They make great fodder for ghost stories, and they’re supposed to be Tuatha graveyards, like I said. Can’t imagine who else could be responsible.”
“Even the one in the Wolf’s Tooth?”
“Wait…what?” Minda asked with a double-take that Keely found very reassuring. Given that she could count on fully four of the six people present to have her back if the scion of Haywood turned out to be some sort of mad cultist, and that Ulric could at least be counted on to be conflicted if it came to that, now was the time for confrontation. If there were answers to be had, she needed them.
“I’ve been all over that rock,” Minda said. “There’s no bone…” she trailed off, frowning.
Ulric gave Keely a sideways stare. “Are you saying you’ve taken your own dive into a pool of bones?”
“That big, central shaft?” Keely said. “Yeah. That pool at the bottom is full of them…and worse.”
“Worse?” Ulric arched an eyebrow, turning his gaze on her fully.
She told them what she’d seen, including the thing glimpsed moving in the water. She’d omitted that from her previous telling to Elissa, as she’d still been trying to tell herself she’d imagined that part. “And three of us have been down there with these things now—four, if you count the crazy guy with the shovel—and climbed back out untouched. But back there, it suddenly dawned on me what roused these things.”
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 33
