by Jo Spurrier
Minerva just scoffed. ‘I don’t need nothin’ I can’t get for myself. Although . . . Bodies, you say?’ She glanced my way, and chuckled. ‘I don’t think your lass likes the sound of that.’
She read me like a book. I didn’t like it at all. ‘You can’t!’ I hissed.
‘Shut up, Dee,’ Aleida said. Then, to Minerva, ‘She hasn’t seen much of the world yet.’
‘Who? Swineherds, woodcutters?’
‘More bandits,’ Aleida said. ‘Taking out the old troupe left a bit of a void behind. Others have come in to fill it. I could give you five, easily. Real hard-bitten types, look like they’ve been in the game for a while. Even got Armund’s mark carved into them. They’d give you a lot to work with.’
Minerva rubbed her chin. ‘Hmm. I suppose . . . no. No, too much work to prepare them for the ritual. I’m close now. I can finish this with what I have. I want to tie it up and get out of this wretched place.’
Aleida shrugged. ‘Oh, well,’ she said.
‘At least you can tell the lass you tried.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Aleida said. ‘Yeah, I’m sure that’ll go down splendidly.’ With a shrug she took one last swig and passed the bottle back to Minerva. ‘One for the road. Thanks for the drink.’
‘Welcome. Now get the hells out of my den, missy. Take my advice, and get yourself and your lass well away from here, you don’t want to be around when I finish this up.’
‘Sure.’ She turned for the wall, the same way we’d come in, and waved at me to come with her.
‘And if you do get it into your pretty little head to come back and meddle,’ Minerva called after us. ‘Just you remember that I’ve tested your strength now. You might have killed Gyssha, but she took a chunk out of you on her way down. Don’t think I don’t know it.’
‘Come on, Minerva,’ Aleida called over her shoulder. ‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you that wounded tigers are the most dangerous?’
Minerva just laughed. ‘And tell that young lass that if she’s vowed and determined not to leave her father, she’s quite welcome to come and join him.’
I clenched and unclenched my fists as we walked back through the dark tunnels. ‘How could you say that?’ I demanded.
‘Say what, exactly?’ she said, distractedly.
‘You know what I mean,’ I said. ‘Would you really have handed over those bandits when you know she’s just going to kill them?’
‘Of course. If she’d just taken the damn deal it’d be so much easier.’
‘But you might as well kill them yourself!’
‘Look, do you want to help Kara or not? And don’t give me some blather about them still being people, or a life is a life. Those marked men are murderers, I’d put any money on it — and that’s not the worst of it, I’d say. Damn it, I really thought she’d take them.’
‘Why, because she’s as heartless as you are?’
She ignored the dig completely. ‘She’s got a thing about bandits, old Minerva. You heard her say she’s been on her own since she was just a little girl? From what I heard, her family was attacked on the road and she was the only survivor. Ran off into the woods to hide from them, and eventually fell in with a pack of wolves. Lived wild with them for years and years before old Mother Wormwood took her in and taught her witchcraft. Got to give her some credit, taking thieves and murderers for the work rather than innocent travellers; Gyssha never would have bothered with that distinction. But that’s beside the point. Dee, it’s just plain idiocy to say all lives are equal.’
‘Is it? Is it really?’
‘Of course it is. Look, if your house was on fire and you had the choice of saving your idiot stepfather or your little sister Maisie, who would you save?’
I clenched my teeth. ‘Lem’s a grown man. He could save himself.’
‘Not if I’ve chained him to the godsdamned floor, and trust me, I just might. Is that what you’re upset about? Not the other thing?’
I didn’t need to ask what other thing she meant. ‘Well, it wasn’t a lie, was it? The ring didn’t buzz. And these last few days have made it pretty clear I’m all but useless as an apprentice.’
‘Oh, it buzzes for you? That’s interesting, for me it turned hot. Dee, ragging on your apprentice is traditional. Apprentices are always lazy, stupid and ungrateful. Mistresses are cruel, demanding and expect miracles on a daily basis. Besides, nothing good comes of bragging about an apprentice. They’ll either want to put you to the test or poach you away, and you, my sweet, are not ready for either of those. But forget the hypotheticals, we’ve got real problems to think about.’
I scowled at her back. ‘Do we? I thought we were just going to load up and roll on out of here.’
For a moment she said nothing. She kept walking, head bowed. ‘I’m wondering if we should. I really am. We could even take Kara with us. I could tamper with her mind a bit, give her a memory of nursing her father through a sudden illness, laying him to rest and all that. It wouldn’t be perfect; deep down she’d know it was false, and she’d probably dream about searching for him for the rest of her life, but it’d do the job.’
I stopped, folding my arms across my chest.
She turned back to me. ‘Dee . . .’
‘It’s wrong and you know it,’ I said. ‘Just because you chose to walk away from your family, doesn’t mean you can make the same choice for her.’
That earned me a flat, unfriendly look. ‘Even if it means a little less suffering in the world?’ She shook her head. ‘But that’s just an aside. No, I’m talking about that ritual she’s working up. Lord and Lady, it doesn’t make sense. Gyssha and Mae, of all people? What on earth were they playing at? The idea of those two working together . . . Gods.’ She shivered.
‘Who is she?’ I said. ‘Someone like Gyssha, I take it.’
Lips pressed together, she shook her head. ‘No. Not really. Look, you know what Gyssha did, tearing down kingdoms, destroying cities, starting wars. Mae’s not into that at all. She . . . Honestly, I don’t really know what she does. She just . . . appears sometimes. Mae o’ the Mists, they call her. This fog springs up out of nowhere, so thick you can’t see your hand in front of your face. There’s a deathly silence . . . and then it’s gone, and everything’s . . . different. Or nothing is. It’s kind of hard to explain.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t sound . . . bad, exactly.’
‘She isn’t . . . exactly, not like Gyssha was. I mean, Gyssha hated her, but she hated everyone. That time they fought, it happened just because Gyssha caught wind of her and wanted to see what she could do. I tried to stay the hell out of it — Mae could have killed me then if she wanted to. I was six years under the wand, then, and no slouch, but that’s nothing to her. I only caught the briefest glimpse of her and she clearly decided I wasn’t worth bothering with.’ She paused, biting on her lower lip. ‘I think Mae is into some weird stuff — walking between the realms, into the void, that kind of thing. Gods only know. You spend enough time out there, it changes you. Whatever it is she’s been doing, I doubt she’s truly human anymore.’
‘But if you knew why she was involved, maybe you could figure out what the ritual is about?’ I asked. Despite everything she was telling me, I felt no closer to understanding just what was going on.
‘Oh, gods, no,’ she said, and started walking again. ‘No, I figured that out ages ago. Well, you told me, really, with the nether beasts, but looking at the sigils in the basement there just confirmed it. That’s why I’m trying to decide if we should stay and try to stop the ritual, or pull up sticks and get the hell away from here. She’s summoning a hell-beast.’
CHAPTER 9
Back at the wagon, Aleida heaved herself up the steps and leant her staff in the corner. ‘Coffee?’ she said.
With a sigh I took out the mortar and pestle. ‘Yes, miss. Um, Aleida?’
‘Mm?’ She rummaged through one of the cubbyholes beside the bed to pull out her runestones, and sat at the tiny table to shake
them out of the bag.
‘When you say hell-beast,’ I said. ‘Do you mean one of those things that came through the rift, back when the warlock died?’
‘No, no,’ Aleida said. ‘Those were just critters. Nether beasties.’
‘No, they weren’t!’ I said. ‘One of those things was big enough to carry off a horse!’
‘Dee,’ she said. ‘No. Look, the nether realms are in tiers, right? Like layers on a cake. That rift back at the cottage opened without any guidance or ritual to drive it, so it opened into the nearest of them. That’s what you saw. And from the sounds of it, it’s where that beastie you saw yesterday came from. But if you do the groundwork and really put your back into it, you can go deeper; and with months to set this up I’ll bet Minerva’s gone a long way down. How much do you know about demons, kid?’
‘About as much as I’d like to,’ I said. ‘Which is not much at all.’
She gave a huff of amusement. ‘Demons come from the deepest of the nether realms. They’re a different order of being than the critters you’ve seen. They don’t have bodies, exactly. Or maybe it would be better to say that the bodies they have can’t survive here. If you want to bring one through, you have to give it a body.’
‘Like the tree back home?’ I broke in.
‘That’s one way of doing it, if you want to keep it bound to one place and harvest bits off it when you need them. But Minerva’s giving it a body built from the strongest and fiercest beasts she can find.’
‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘Oh, you know, a bit of wanton chaos and destruction. And by a bit, I mean a lot. Really, quite a lot. This thing could raze a city inside of a few days. Kill every living thing that doesn’t manage to flee. Shed poison into the air and the water, reduce forests and fields to ash and sludge. But whatever they meant to do with it, Gyssha was part of it, and she’s gone now. I’m not sure what’s worse — someone with a hell-beast and a plan to use it, or a hell-beast turned loose on the world with no plan and no one to control it.’
The coffee made, I poured her a cup and set it by her elbow. She barely acknowledged it as she laid out her rune-cloth and gathered the stones into the palm of her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Well, I mean, I know what. Why are you doing that?’
For once, she didn’t roll her eyes over asking a foolish question. ‘Trying to get a read on what might happen. Minerva’s probably doing the exact same thing right now.’ She rattled the stones and scattered them over the linen kerchief. ‘There’s got to be some way to head this off.’
We both bent over to peer at them, but before I could make head or tail of it Aleida gathered the stones up to cast them again.
I pulled back to watch. As far as I knew, you weren’t supposed to do that. The first reading was the true one, you can’t just go casting the stones again and again to get the result you want. But I rather doubted that’s what Aleida was doing. She was focused intently on her task, lips shaping words I couldn’t hear.
That was how it always seemed to go, though. Ever since I’d become her apprentice, it seemed that the set of rules I learned one week was thrown out the next and replaced with something more confusing, less specific and with more uncertainty.
In the end, she pushed the stones away and leaned back with lips pursed. I gestured to the stones, offering to pack them away, and she nodded.
‘What do they say?’
She didn’t reply right away. Instead, she twisted around on the bench to look out the window behind her. Maggie had returned while we were calling on Minerva, and was patiently cropping the dry grass nearby.
‘I might be able to stop it,’ Aleida said. ‘Might. The summoning, I mean. I could kill Minerva . . . but I don’t really want to. Aside from the fact that it wouldn’t exactly be easy, she’s not truly at fault here. She’s not a witch of the dark path like Gyssha was, she’s been forced into this.’
‘How would we stop it?’ I said. ‘If she’s been working on it for months, there’ll be an awful lot of power bound up in it.’
‘Mm. You’re right, it’s well advanced, it has a lot of . . . call it momentum, all stored up. Like a boulder poised at the top of a hill.’
I nodded, though I had only a loose idea of what the word meant. Sometimes I really hated Ma for not letting me go to school like my brothers and sisters. ‘So what does that mean?’
‘It means all that energy has to go somewhere . . .’ She broke off with a shake of her head. ‘It’s not going to be easy. It might be more than I can manage with this curse hanging over my head. Releasing that power safely is a big problem, and rather out of my area of expertise. It’s not something Gyssha ever cared about, so my training is more of the “let the chips fall as they may” school.’ She looked out the window again. ‘Mind you, we’re more or less in the middle of nowhere. If we were going to just let ’er rip, there’s worse places for it.’
‘“Let ’er rip”? What would that look like, exactly?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, gods know. That’s the fun part. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s no point worrying about what to do with all that energy when we still haven’t figured out how to stop the blasted boulder from rolling. And even if we do thwart her, with that curse Gyssha and Mae put on Minerva she’s still bound to do their bidding.’
‘So, start all over again somewhere else?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What if . . . what if we let the ritual complete, and then try to . . . I don’t know, shove the hell-beast back again?’
She gave me a wide-eyed look, and shuddered. ‘Oh gods, no. That’s not a good idea.’
‘I thought those were your specialty?’ I quipped. ‘All right, it was just a thought.’
We fell silent for a moment as she looked out the window, drumming her fingertips on the tabletop. ‘We should probably just get out of here.’
‘Well, if you don’t care about the folk who live here —’
She gave me a sharp look. ‘I never said that. I said the bandits aren’t my problem, and they’re not, Belmont and his ilk are more than capable of dealing with them. But Minerva and her hell-beast make for a whole different kettle of fish, and the truth of the matter is that there’s no one else in this corner of the world who’s remotely equipped to face it.’
‘The nuns at the Haven?’ I suggested.
‘Pfft, no. They’ve got all the offensive capabilities of a litter of baby rabbits; they couldn’t even keep Holt and his merry band of idiots out.’ She propped her head on her hand as she spoke, looking weary. I’d had my doubts about facing Minerva, and though she’d proved up to that task, this would be something far bigger.
She caught sight of my face, then, and grimaced. ‘What is it, Dee? Spit it.’
‘You tried to undo the spell Minerva cast on Toro,’ I said. ‘And it laid you out good and proper. Maybe you’re right, maybe we should just leave.’
‘Really? I thought you were all about doing the right thing, whatever the cost.’
‘Within reason,’ I said. ‘Jumping in front of a tumbling boulder is a fool’s errand, by any measure.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be calling on my own well of power,’ Aleida said. ‘I’d have to go and raise some. But I haven’t done much of that since I landed this curse. Just the once, really.’
I was about to ask when, but then I remembered — sunrise, the morning we’d set out to face the ghost of Gyssha Blackbone. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right. Is there anyone who could help?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t really have those kinds of friends. Or any friends, except you.’
‘What about Attwater?’
‘Attwater?’ Her eyebrows climbed to her hairline. ‘He’d laugh himself silly and then find a handy mountain to hide behind. He can handle the smaller critters, but not something like this. I’d never ask it of him. Now, if we had a paladin, that might be a different matter, but there hasn’t been one of those in over a century.’
She fell silent for a moment, except for the drumming of her nails. ‘So we should probably get going, right?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Probably.’
‘I mean, it’s the only sensible option. That, or go and kill Minerva before she pulls it off.’
Killing Minerva might be logical, but I didn’t like it one bit. Even though she had killed those men and kept Kara’s father chained up like a beast. Like Aleida said, it was their choice to attack her. I shook my head. ‘No. Like you said, it’s not her fault. And I really don’t want to see anyone dead.’
She glanced across at me, her eyes full of sadness. ‘Sweet child,’ she said. ‘What on earth are you doing with me, then?’
‘I was brought here, remember?’ I said. ‘To plague, pester and generally harass you, it seems. Maybe I’m supposed to lead you away from Gyssha’s dark path, or something.’
‘Well, you’re about as far away from what Gyssha was as it’s possible to be without being such a paragon of the noble virtues that I want to strangle you. So you’ve got that going for you, kid. I just hope it doesn’t get you killed. But in any case, Gyssha’s behind this, in some way, and as her heir and slayer it’s my right to screw with her plans and schemes to my heart’s content. And believe me, upsetting an apple cart of this scale would make my heart very content.’
I had to smile at that, but only briefly. ‘We’re not leaving, are we?’
‘Oh, gods. How on earth am I going to stop this, Dee?’
‘There has to be something we can do. There must be . . .’
I fell silent, then. Outside the window, Maggie had stopped her grazing and lifted her head, ears pricked towards the road. But that wasn’t all. I heard something. Shouting voices, and the ring of steel.
Aleida lifted her head.
‘Did you hear that?’ I said.
We set out swiftly on two pairs of wings, flying straight towards the road. We’d chosen Aleida’s favourite beasts for borrowing, a pair of black crows.
The first clue to what was going on was the plume of smoke rising up from the narrowest part of the track, where it wound between pale, blocky boulders. The same place where the bandits had launched their ill-considered attack on us. Had that only been a few hours ago? I remembered, then, what I’d overheard when I’d flown this way before — a caravan, rich but lightly guarded, expected on this road today.
