“Gives me the right chills it does,” murmured Seldom, his long body drawn up like a dead spider. “Ain’t the restin’ place of decent folk.”
Early grunted. It was nearly the only thing Early ever did. And when he’d done it, he turned his fat thumb like frame on a few jerky movements and lumbered around the cart. He hauled out Bannock’s body like a sack of potatoes and dragged it to a bald patch just off the cart track.
Witchknoll had no proper grave markers; they weren’t permitted for those who died wretched or with sin. Instead, bald, finger-shaped holes told the men where to dig or not dig. And for the truly wicked dead, each shaft filled with field stones told them to keep away.
Early hauled out dirt until he was winded.
Seldom scooped out a few shovelfuls of parched soil and threw down his spade. “In then. Drag him on.”
Early grunted. “Twelve foot’s the law.”
“I bloody well won’t!”
“Abbot’s orders.”
Seldom crept close to his brother on gouty legs, fondling his greasy whorl of gray hair. “Well now, look about ye.” He raised a hand to the darkening sky. “It’s late now, quite late. And we’ve not brought a lamp. Got no things to ward off spirits and devils what come out to dance in the moonlight.” Seldom rubbed a calloused palm up his brother’s ham of an arm, solicitous. “We can’t be expected to put our own clean souls in peril now. Surely the abbot don’t want that.” He shook his head. “Surely no.”
“No, no,” chanted Early, gaining steam.
Seeing his success, Seldom twirled his fingers. “So, what’s say we do a little hole now. Four feet or five, yeah? Then we go off home to our drink and our fire and first thing on the morrow we lope right up here and finish the work. Eh? Ehh?” He elbowed his brother.
Early grunted.
“On then!”
Early rolled the body in and scooped the dirt, and together they filled the last foot with stones.
Seldom leaned on his spade, admiring their shallow trench. “A man can have pride in a hard day’s labor such as this. A little celebratory imbibe is in order, eh?”
Early climbed onto the buckboard, took the reins and grunted.
An owl called out across the darkened hills, crushing Seldom into an accordion of superstition once more.
“Quick with them lashes now,” he hissed to his brother, tossing his spade into the cart. “The Devil’s waitin’ to collect the soul what’s due him, and it’ll not be mine!”
“Owl,” mumbled Early, snapping the horses into a slow lumber.
Seldom gave Early’s ear a quick twist. “Don’t contradict! And work them tethers or these nags will be our death.” He shivered.
Early urged their horses on faster. Seldom was unquestionably wiser and worldlier, but Early couldn’t see or hear a single thing they should run from.
“An evil eye is on us, I tell you.” Seldom burrowed into the horse blanket and peered into deep shadows beyond barren autumn branches.
Early grumbled, but the sound had a contrary note, and Seldom snapped his brother’s ear again.
“Sing?” offered Early, pawing at his swollen earlobe. Music put Seldom in a better mood when no drink was at hand. It would pass the time at least.
“Ah, why not? Keep the spirits away.” They each hummed a note, for harmony. It didn’t help.
“Well I was slick and I was quick, and up the stairs I sped,
And much to my surprise I found the chandler's wife in bed!
And with her was another man of most gigantic size, and they were having a,” Seldom and Early rapped on the buckboard, “Knock, knock, knock! Right afore my eyes…”
Their singing faded into the trees of the lower slope.
From a copse atop Witchknoll, eyes followed the brothers’ departure and waited for silence.
-Three-
Agetha tottered from her copse when the wagon’s last bump and creak had faded. She’d smelled Inquisition on the air for days now, and it’d kept her from her garden. The witch could wait no longer; some plots within the graveyard were ripe and in need of picking. She rolled up aged and tattered cheesecloth sleeves and set about her gruesome harvest, muttering her own little tune along the knoll as she poked the mounds with her long wand.
Lopsom dopsom five in a pot
A frog and an eye and
A’look what I got
A rag and a bone and a hank a’hair
And the prince is a’kissin
A corpse made fair
Lopsom dopsom stone ‘im with a rock
No wits in a man wot thinks with his –
Agetha stopped her singing and shuffling between the graves and rubbed slender fingers like kindling.
Her eyes saw in the dark better than any creature’s, and what she saw... “What’s this, what’s this?” She hobbled close.
A grave of the Old Rite. “I’ve not seen one of these in nigh a hundred years,” she trembled out on a whisper. “Something good beneath this mess. Something good indeed, to be buried in the old way…”
Agetha hurled the stones mounded up by Seldom and Early, pegging a crow, destroying most of the canes on a tenacious wild rose, and creating a small avalanche down the slope.
She’d clawed two handfuls when the dirt sunk, shifted, and sprayed an earthen geyser.
Agetha screamed.
Bannock screamed.
And he wasn’t ashamed of it. The witch was hideous, and thoroughly witch-like, the last thing he needed just now.
Agetha hunched beyond her usual stoop and shielded her face with both arms. “You ain’t dead!”
“Neither are you!” Bannock felt his concern was greater, because she looked and smelled just the opposite.
Or maybe that was him. He wrinkled his nose and pulled a particularly tenacious bit of rotten onion from his hair.
Agetha clutched a noose of leather thongs at her neck and shook her wad of talismans at Bannock. “What be ye? Speak it!”
Bannock brushed the damp soil from his brown cassock. “A Bloodsworn.”
Agetha’s arms fell to her sides and her shrieking laughter rose above the clearing like birds. “A monk? A monk what’s a Bloodsworn? Blow me right over with that nonsense!”
Bannock peered down at the witch across the vast distance in their heights. “I’m not a monk. And I don’t have time to spin you a yarn, old woman.” He had a lot of ground to cover, and thanks to those two idiots with the hay cart and his purse, no gold left at all.
“That so?” Agetha picked thoughtfully at a chin wart. “Maybe you already spun your yarn. Tellin’ me that Bloodsworn tale so I’ll let you be. Tsk tsk.”
Bannock yanked up the wide sleeve of his robe to reveal all he could. A spread-winged raven on the muscle of his right chest stayed hidden, but red teardrops that covered his bicep, elbow, forearm...those were perfectly visible.
Agetha gasped and raked a sharp nail over three black rings nested on Bannock’s wrist, ripples in a pond just beyond reach of his blood-drop trail. “An honest-to-Job Bloodsworn.” She sniffed long through the gnarled beak of her nose and smiled. “What’s that on the air? Compulsion incense and holy water. Well, my days! You’re not a Bloodsworn, yer a miracle worker. First being in a hundred years got the Church and the Inquisition united. Never seen such a mythical creature in all my time.”
So, the Church was after him, too. Someone in Varnay must have sent word about the abbey’s poor choice of tutor. “Now you’ve seen, and I have to go.” Midday tomorrow might as well be minutes, with Inquisition hounds and hot air breathing bishops on his heels.
“Not without some…” Agetha sized him up with a milky eye, “Compensation? Bit a’ somethin’ to fill my mouth. Keep me forgetful… and quiet. Help me –”
“Compensation for what?”
“Why, pryin’ you from the grave.”
“Until I showed my mark, you were measuring me for the pot!”
“Irrelative. You’d still be pawing that mound lik
e a stray cur if not for me. I gived you a head start on those scarlet hats!” Her eyes narrowed.
Bannock wanted to point out she was burning any head start with her blathering. But he didn’t need a witch on his bad side. “Three days. Keep this to yourself for three days and I’ll be back with ten crowns.”
“Ten!” She guffawed. “Well, ten gold bits! Lordship and a Bloodsworn, ain’t he?”
“Ten. You have my word.” Agetha did not have his word, but Bannock felt this was a minor detail, all things considered. Hardly worth mentioning. He gave his word the way most men gave syphilis and pregnancy; freely, and without bothering to stick around for the consequences.
“I don’t need your word. I seen how close your Burdens come to that oath-mark on your wrist. How many Silver Hand deaths can you afford?” She was disconcertingly canny for a common swamp witch. His oath was nearly used up, his arm marked by far more blood drops than he’d ever intended. Wasn’t that always the way, when bargaining with gods?
“Are you willing to cross Räsvelg? He has no love for or need of witches.” That’d fix her.
“Oh,” she chortled but it held a bitter note. “He needs me a good dollop just now. Besides,” her eyes glittered at Bannock in the early nighttime, “you’re here now. Giant, corpse-swallowing bird? He’s clear at the end of the world!”
“Raven,” said Bannock. It sounded silly and emasculating to have made a bargain with a giant bird.
“Field crow,” spat Agetha with a degree of blasphemy not even Bannock could stomach.
“Three days, ten crowns. Please.” He’d promise anything to be on his way – but the less promised, the better.
“Well…” she grumbled, gnawing a shriveled lower lip. “Always did have a weakness for the handsome ones. Damned fool I am.” Agetha stuck out her hand. “Shake on it and we’ll have a bargain.”
Bannock took her parchment fingers. Agetha grabbed his wrist and he winced at the cold burn of imbued silver. “What the hell…!”
She offered a gap-toothed grin. “Case you lose your way back. Or grow forgetful.”
A binding? Not in all the hells was he letting her bind him. “No bargain. Tell the Inquisition! I don’t care.”
“Ah ah! You shook on it.”
“I’m unshaking.” Bannock tried to grip the shackle. It burned through his flesh like frost and lightning, leaving a sad trail of smoke wisping from his hand.
“Behave yerself,” Agetha wagged a finger. “It can do a might more harm.”
“Just tell me what you want. You live in a copse atop a knoll at the edge of a festering swamp, so I have the sense gold isn’t of much interest.”
“Ohh!” Agetha puffed out her sagging chest. “Not so dull as I thought. You may do after all.” Her face hardened. “I want ingredients.”
“Flower picking? Dagda help me.”
“Magic ingredients, you dolt!” Agetha slugged him in the gut with sharp knuckles. Bold move for a woman the size of his thigh.
“Where, what, how. No more nattering.”
“Madainn,” she spat.
“No, and also not a chance in hell. I’m not trifling with goblins, and I’m already going the opposite way.”
The shackle lanced a bolt into his arm. Agetha cackled. “Not no more!”
From here Bannock experienced several minutes of frustration-fueled madness. He banged the shackle with a stone. He tried stepping on it. He hooked it over the nub of a tree trunk and tried to rip his arm off.
When he fell to the dry grass, panting, Agetha shuffled over and stood above him, fists on her withered hips. “Madainn.”
“Fine.”
“There’s a reasonable lad. Now, those tight-fisted, scheming goblin whoremongers have three stones and a soul box. Bring ‘em here and I’ll think our bargain settled.”
“Three…! A box?!” Where the hell would he find a magic box? Bannock peeled himself off the ground. “This is complete shite. Rock gathering for a hag. No gold, and a hundred miles from where I need to be.”
“Mortals and your gold!” Agetha stomped at his toes. “Fortune’s given you the wink this time. So happens some of Madainn don’t like being hungry, half-clothed, and empty pocket while them green meanies live high on the hog. Get your gold from the town then, and get me my stones!” She scooped a handful of grave dirt, threw it in Bannock’s eyes and spat a word he didn’t understand before shuffling back toward her copse.
“And I smell outriders, lad,” Agetha called over her shoulder. “Best get to running.”
A baying hound split the darkness, its cry echoing from the foothills beyond Varnay.
Bannock briefly toyed with following Agetha and choking the life out of her, damn the consequences. Purpose outweighed vengeance when the second hound bellowed, and Bannock fled down Witchknoll and into the swamp.
-Four-
Bannock picked along the spines of spongy ground between black pools, finding his way by the green glow of will-o-the-wisps dancing on the water’s surface and lighting skeletal trees with their fairy light.
Bone chimes rattled in the boughs, placed by mortals to ward off the nymphs, but they were unnecessary just now. The wisps hadn’t taken notice of Bannock, or chose to ignore him, obscured by or intimidating them with his Bloodsworn aura.
He crouched just once, at the rattle of pikes and armor. A cluster of wisps shot high like stars, descended on the man, or men, and danced their prey out into the swamp. A few screams, a gurgle, and silence in the night. Whoever had followed Bannock in was not so lucky as he.
Hopefully it had been a pair of Inquisition outriders. “Good fucking riddance,” he whispered, slipping back onto the path.
Bannock followed the brightest star, the only one visible through bog haze, until the swamp raised into a carpet of peat grasped in the fingers of ancient, gnarled tree roots.
He’d barely set foot on the forest’s edge when a voice boomed out, “Hold, or I’ll skewer your guts!”
Skewer your guts? Bannock rolled his eyes.
“You must pay a toll to I, Flavigrad the Merciless!”
“Sure.” Bannock shrugged. “You can have my entire purse.”
“Place it in the hollow stump!”
“Mm. I’d feel better if you just came and took it. What if it fell too deep inside the stump? What if I miss and it slips into the swamp? A squirrel could drag it off. I’d just feel better if you collected in-hand.”
“The stump!”
“As you wish.” Bannock stepped up onto the stump, thrust a hand into the boughs and dragged the voice into a corporeal form that thudded against damp earth.
“Dagda’s balls! How’d you do that?” God-like command became the unoiled squeak of puberty.
“I’m Bloodsworn, boy, not some mortal dolt on a night road. I can see you on a moonless night. Now run on to your ma before I teach you the folly of your sport.”
The boy got to his feet, shaking out long limbs and smoothing a shock of brown hair. He rattled like a trunk full of tin cups, draped in knives, a rapier, and several pieces of armor strapped in the wrong places.
“I’ve got no ma. No da. Just me, and the only road north this side of the Berrigand pass.” He shook his satchel at Bannock, musical with the clink of silver and gold.
Bannock salivated at the sound. One solid kick and he could take it.
“And you can shove the folly of my sport right up your –”
Bannock snatched the sack, holding it too high for the boy to reach. He leapt like a small dog, rattling and clanging under the weight of his junk.
“I’m Bloodsworn. You’re not. We could go on like this all night, or you can shove off and let me have the coin.”
“Wait, wait!” The boy folded to his knees, panting. “You’ve got no weapon. And there are worse things ahead than me, even for a... Bloodsworn, or whatever you are. Give me back my take and I’ll lead you to my hoard. I’ve got honest to goodness weaponry there.”
Bannock hefted the satchel
onto his shoulder. “Sounds like a trap. That where your ringleader hides out?”
“It’s not! I swear.” The boy raised pleading hands. “I’ve been saving for a year now, for the squire tourney. Weapon, armor, and coin. I’m nearly sixteen; the autumn tourney is my last chance.”
Bannock ground his back teeth. First the witch, now the boy. Dagmara was doing everything in her power to make sure Bannock failed his blood oath.
“What’s your name? Or should I call you Flavigrad the Merciless?” asked Bannock.
“Witt.”
“Well, Witt, lead the way. I’ll hold the bag for safekeeping, and if you cross me, I’ll wring your neck with the strap. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Witt led Bannock off the path, impressively deft over roots and slopes in the dark. When they reached a wide-fanned oak at the center of a clearing, Witt circled the trunk, crouched, and disappeared.
“I knew it.” Bannock sighed. “Should have trusted my gut.” At least he had the money. Then the cold realization that he didn’t actually know there was money in the bag set in. It could be stones and chain scraps.
He pulled at the leather thong.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Witt’s vice came from somewhere near Bannock’s feet.
“What are you doing?”
“Get in here, before someone sees you.”
“In where! And who would see me?”
An arm stuck out from behind the trunk, waving. Beneath a flat stone set between the oak’s wide roots was a tunnel. When Bannock crouched, he could just make out a light inside.
Seeing the opening was one thing. Getting in…
After wriggling, grunting, and nearly suffocating in the bunched burlap of his cassock, Bannock landed in a cave.
The chamber was better than some inns he’d stayed at. Witt had a slat bed, a small larder hung with dried fowl and chipped crockery. A narrow, quick-flowing stream ran from a spring on one wall out through some rocks at the far side. A small fire danced in a brick fire box. Bannock pointed to it. “Where does the smoke go.”
Beguiler Page 2
