The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  Suddenly Hob remembered the button, flashing silver as it fell to the rush-strewn floor. Folk were dispersing; Sir Odinell was telling off two servants to help Mistress Eloise with the dog, now scrambling to his feet, a bit dazed, but with wagging tail. Hob turned about. He had been sitting . . . there. And when Sir Tarquin was leaving, he struck against the bench over there. . . . Hob quietly walked over, held to the bench-back with one hand, and moved the rushes aside with his foot.

  There was nothing to be seen but the wide bare planks of the hall floor. Discreetly he began a search, probing with the toe of his shoe, moving small patches of rush stalks and the dried wildflowers sprent in with them. Hob saw tansy, lavender, lady-of-the-meadow, and what might be cowslips—all these were to control vermin and to impart a pleasant scent. He uncovered a bone from a chicken or other bird, some cat droppings—the floor had not been swept and fresh rushes laid in a fortnight or more. Hob considered, with perhaps some partisan feeling, how much more efficiently Sir Jehan’s hall was maintained.

  He looked about; no one was paying attention. He began to widen his search, a hand’s-breadth to this side, a hand’s-breadth to that, and yet there was noth— There! Brightness was just perceptible beneath some of the long tubular stems of the rushes. He crouched swiftly, and, still crouching, retrieved the button, brushed it off, and dropped it into his pouch. He put a hand to the bench-back, about to stand up, and froze.

  The table’s far side was almost against the wall and, hunkered down as he was, he could see beneath the table and the benches on that side to the wall beyond. He was looking at a large rat. Rats were not uncommon in castles—the cats and terriers allowed to roam the keep held them at bay and kept them from becoming a nuisance, but they would get in occasionally. What was unusual about this rat was its size, and its imperturbability. It regarded Hob with a steady, unfriendly gaze, and by some trick of the shadow beneath the table, its eyeballs seemed to have a bluish luster. A cat was nearby, but it was flat to the floor, its ears back.

  After a long moment when Hob and the odd creature stared at each other, the rat calmly turned, walked a short distance, hugging the wall, and paused. It looked at Hob one more time, as if memorizing his features, and then squeezed into a small opening at the base of the wall. The cat’s ears came up; it backed away a few steps, and then turned and ran. Hob stood up, wondering at the uncanny encounter, and the unpleasant impression it had left on him.

  CHAPTER 15

  LATER THAT EVENING, IN THE solar Sir Odinell had assigned to Molly’s party, Hob seized the first opportunity to speak with her privately, and to give her the button.

  “Mistress,” said Hob, “that knight—Sir Tarquin—he dropped this, and I thought . . .”

  Molly’s eyes lit up, and she reached for the silver disk. Hob dropped it into her palm.

  “Sah!” Molly cried, a meaningless exclamation of shock, and dropped the button as though it were white-hot. She drew a little ivory box from her pouch. Hob could just see that the box’s surface was carved with a decorative knotwork pattern. Molly slid the cover off partway with her thumb, then bent down and gingerly retrieved the button; quickly she dropped it into the box.

  “It’s a grand evil he has to him,” she said. “I’m just after feeling it in that button, that was on his person, and it stinging me like a wasp, the wide deep evil of it.”

  Hob looked at the box in wonder. “I felt nothing, Mistress.”

  She patted his shoulder. “A blind man is spared horrific sights, a deaf man hideous noises. It’s a man of your hands that you are, and not a man of the Art. You to learn your weapons, and Nemain to protect you from all else, those things that come from the shadows; you’ll raise up a clan of little ones, great as the Uí Néill, and they safe between the two of you.”

  Hob felt himself, all unwillingly, beginning to blush.

  He said, partly to change the subject, “I saw Lady Rohese looking at us, Mistress. It was not a pleasant look, and I saw Sir Tarquin looking at you, and it was worse.”

  “It’s an ill look to her, and no mistake,” said Molly. “As for himself, he is evil to his bones, and they are partners in evil. But this,” she said, hefting the box, “it’s a weapon against him, and you’ve done well this night.”

  She said this with such heartfelt sentiment that Hob looked down in embarrassment. For a moment he was looking at the rushes, and this brought back the memory of his search for the button, and this led to—

  “Mistress,” he said. “I saw something else: when I stooped to take the button, I saw a rat beneath the table.”

  “A castle like this—” began Molly.

  “I beg your pardon, Mistress,” said Hob, “it was not that it was a rat, but a strange rat, very large, that looked at me with a . . . look.”

  “Looked at you with a look . . . ?”

  Hob grimaced in frustration. “It looked at me as, as though it were a person, as if it could see me, if you understand. As if it understood matters, and, and—the cat was afraid of it, and it had blue eyes. Not blue eyes, Mistress, such as your own, but a bit of a blue shine to them. I can’t say it properly. But the cat was afraid of it, and it did not act as such vermin act, and it—it was strange.”

  But Molly was paying attention to him now, and her face grew more and more grave, and finally she sighed.

  “ ’Tis clear enough you are, lad; I’m thinking that I know what you’ve seen, and ’tis some sort of familiar, and who would it belong to if not that evil gesadóir, that enchanter. ’Tis some kind of watcher he’s left here; it may have come in with his party, and ’tis our tongues we’ll need to watch. This matter we’re about, ’tis more fey and more dangerous the more we see of it.”

  She put the box carefully into her pouch; she put her arm around his shoulder. “On the day after the morrow we’re away, and ’tis easier we’ll breathe outside these walls, and they haunted by who knows what creatures.”

  IN THE MORNING Molly and her troupe met with Sir Odinell.

  “Take care in what you say,” said Molly, “for this do-dhuine and his wife may have left spies behind.”

  “Spies? But where would spies hide?” asked Sir Odinell, confident in his defenses, his well-trained knights and guards.

  Molly told him about the rat; with some difficulty he accepted it, although with some bemusement.

  “Speak out of doors, or on the battlements—where it is open, and speech difficult to overhear. We’ll be going through your castle, and mayhap we can find some of these vermin, and remove them, for they’re a great danger to you. Even if we miss some, I will rid you of Sir Tarquin, and then this creature will have no power, but for now, guard every word.”

  She thought a moment. “Give us your best ratter for today, and we’ll be using it to flush out our rat spies before we leave.”

  “A ratter,” said Sir Odinell, in the distracted voice of one in a small boat on a downrushing stream, seeing the rocks slip swiftly past, and uncertain what might lie around the next bend. He raised his voice. “Jacques!”

  The door opened and a man-at-arms appeared. “My lord?”

  “Send for the groom Herluin and have him bring us a good ratter. Quickly, now!”

  “My lord.” Jacques bowed himself out, and they heard him clattering on the stair.

  CHAPTER 16

  A SHORT WHILE LATER, THERE was a knock on the door of the solar.

  “Enter,” said Sir Odinell.

  The groom Herluin entered, a small fell-terrier bitch under one arm. She was about fifteen pounds, stiff-haired, otter-faced. Her bottom left fang had grown askew, coming up outside her upper lip, which gave her a wild-boar expression of ferocity, somewhat at odds with her diminutive size.

  He touched his forehead to the Sieur de Chantemerle. “My lord.”

  “This is our best ratter?” asked Sir Odinell.

  “But yes, my lord. Sweetlove lives to find and kill rats. She’s a mort of trouble, but well worth it. Is it that you wish us to hunt t
hese rooms?”

  Sir Odinell looked a question at Molly.

  “We will take her with us, and scour the castle from the deep cellars to the parapets,” said Molly.

  At this the groom looked unhappy, and shuffled his feet.

  “What is troubling you, man?” said Sir Odinell.

  “If it please you, my lord, our Sweetlove can be a bit . . . difficult. She’s small, but sometimes I believe her to be part wolf. Even Luc and I—and we her keepers since she was born—have been bitten. We named her before she was a day on live, and did not know how she would grow. Were she not such a nonpareil at ratting, Luc says, he would have had her drowned long since.”

  “Let her down, lad,” said Molly pleasantly to Herluin, who was thirty if he was a day.

  Herluin looked at Sir Odinell, who nodded.

  Herluin did not shrug, but his shoulders twitched, and he bent and let the little dog slip from his opened hands, somehow managing thereby to convey a Pilate-like handwashing.

  In the moment it took her to fall the few inches from his grasp to the rush-strewn floor, Sweetlove twisted in midair with a yelp and snapped at Herluin’s hands.

  The groom snatched his hands high, muttering a barely audible “Fuck!” under his breath, slowly straightening.

  “Sit down,” said Molly quietly, looking the dog in the face. After a moment’s hesitation, the terrier folded her hind legs and sat down, stiffly. She looked up at Molly expectantly, but after a moment, became restless, and began to look past Molly. She squirmed, and whined a bit.

  “What ails her, man?” demanded the Sieur de Chantemerle of his groom.

  Herluin shrugged. “Nay, my lord, I know not. She is an odd one, and has always been headstrong; sometimes defiant.”

  Molly put her hand down toward the dog, palm up. Sweetlove came to her feet and approached in a crouch, tail wagging, ears down. She gave Molly’s hand a lick, then darted around Molly and leaped into Jack’s lap, where she settled with a sigh.

  “Christ sitting above us,” muttered Herluin.

  Jack placed a large hand on Sweetlove’s back, almost covering the little dog. She wriggled with pleasure, then stretched out along his thigh like a marten along a tree limb, and sighed ostentatiously.

  “Sure, and it’s a new friend you’ve found,” said Molly, grinning. “If Master Herluin will be our guide, we’ll start low and work up through Chantemerle.”

  “As you will,” said Sir Odinell. “Herluin . . .”

  “My lord,” said the groom, and held the door for Molly and the others. Jack scooped the terrier up with one hand, and the company made for the turret stairs.

  They descended first to the deep cellars, below the blind first floor. Entrance to the keep was at second-storey level, and below that was a windowless first floor, a storehouse. Below that were cellar rooms where were kept the rolls, the rolled-up parchments that recorded the legal records of the castle, the tax records of its tenants, and other documents of importance. Other rooms held items not needed every day: spare lumber, iron ingots for the forge, and so forth.

  Molly and her troupe, Jack with the dog under one arm, followed Herluin and the page Guiscard down a steep crude wooden stair. Herluin held a cudgel, Guiscard a torch. The page had been supplied with keys to various doors normally kept locked, and now they proceeded along dank stone walls to a stout oaken door. The passage ran away into shadow before them. Guiscard bent to the lock, handing the torch to Herluin, who angled it to illumine the work. After two false starts, Guiscard found the correct key; the lock clanked open; the door opened with a groan.

  They stepped into a wide shallow room lined with cases and cases filled with pigeonholes; from almost all protruded rolls of parchment. A table with an inkpot and a sheaf of quills stood along one wall. Guiscard retrieved his torch, and went about the walls lighting oil lamps, and soon the room was much brighter, although darkness lingered in the corners.

  Jack put Sweetlove down—she did not snap at him as she had at Herluin—and the little dog immediately made a circuit of the room, nose to the ground. She stopped now and then, looking at what to Hob appeared to be blank wall, her ears erect and one forepaw lifted, listening, listening.

  Suddenly she darted at the wall, scrabbling at it with her forepaws, the claws scraping against the stonework. There was a scuttling behind the nearest manuscript case and Sweetlove immediately abandoned the wall and galloped down the front of the case, skidding into a turn, darting into the space between this case and the next, all the way back to the base of the wall. There was a small shriek, and she backed out with a rat in her jaws, shaking it furiously. A moment later the rat was dead, its spine snapped, and she dropped it at Jack’s feet and looked up, wagging.

  Herluin shook out a coarse-woven sack, and clucked his tongue at the little dog. “Bring it here, Sweetlove,” he said. The terrier looked at him a moment as though trying to recall him, her tail drooping, then looked back to Jack; she began to wag again. Jack held out his hand for the sack, and the groom deposited it in his grasp. Jack bent, seized the rat’s tail, and dropped it into the bag.

  Sweetlove turned at once and paced around the room, nose to ground, stopping to listen. Snuffling at crevices and gaps in the cases, and in one instance peering into one of the lower pigeonholes, she started two more rats; one she ran down, seizing it by the neck, shaking it till it went limp. The other ran by Herluin, who swung his cudgel once, and then again, clubbing it to death.

  Sweetlove trotted around the room a few times, then sat down in the middle and looked at Jack expectantly. “There’s no more in this room,” said Herluin. “That’s her signal that she’s done here.”

  Out into the passageway again, Guiscard locking up behind them, and into a storeroom of some sort. Here were sawn planks, sacks of lime, a pyramid of stacked iron bars for the castle smithy, and piles of stones for ammunition—small ones for throwing, large ones for the catapults. All these irregular stores afforded many bolt-holes and secluded spaces for a mother rat’s nest.

  Jack set Sweetlove down in the middle of the room. The terrier’s ears went up at once, and she dashed into a murky corner. A squeak, and she backed out with another corpse; Herluin darted forward and struck into the shadows with his cudgel, producing another victim. This went on until Jack had another eight or nine dead in his sack.

  Sweetlove worked her way between two stacks of planks. A moment later she backed out rapidly. She was snarling, but her ears were down and her tail partly tucked; her head was lowered and her back hunched. From the narrow alley between the two stacks of wood, two rats, very large, prowled forth slowly, with an unratlike air of physical menace, pacing like hunting wolves.

  “Mistress!” cried Hob. “Their eyes! It’s what I saw!”

  And indeed their eyes, dark as any ordinary rat’s, would, as they turned their heads this way and that as though questing, catch the light and show a bluish sheen, almost a glow. Sweetlove retreated as they advanced, matching step for step. Suddenly she whirled and ran behind Jack’s legs, whence she peered out at the sinister rodents.

  “Now she’s turned white-liver!” said Herluin, exasperated. He paced toward the rats, cudgel held high.

  The rats, so far from fleeing, separated and circled his legs. One sprang at his right calf, drawing blood from the muscle, and the other curled around his left foot and bit neatly through the tendon that ran up from his heel. Herluin bellowed with pain; his left foot was no longer willing to support him, and he went down like a sapling gnawed through by beavers, and crashed to the stone floor. The rats ran up his chest toward his throat. A moment later two silvery wheels spun through the air: Molly and Nemain had each thrown a dagger, and each found its mark. The rats were knocked off Herluin, dead or dying, impaled. A moment later they were still, and the women retrieved their daggers and wiped them clean.

  Molly knelt by Herluin, who was groaning in agony, and tore a strip from her hem to bind his ankle. She took the torch from Guiscard and sent him
for men to carry Herluin to safety.

  Then she put a hand to each of the dead rats. She looked up at Nemain. “There’s still a wee tingle of that gesadóir’s spell to them. There is to them the same . . . flavor . . . of evil as there is in that button Hob’s after finding. Feel.”

  Nemain put her hand to a rat’s side, and her face took on the blind look of someone listening intently. After a moment she nodded. “I have it,” she said.

  Four sturdy men-at-arms clattered down the wooden stairs; a moment later they entered the storeroom. Herluin was gathered up, groaning softly, and borne up the stairs again.

  The troupe followed Herluin and his bearers up the second flight to the great hall, and thence to a niche in the wall where a cot awaited. Curtains were drawn across the opening, and Molly sent Nemain for herbs and powders and linen bandages from the wagons. Soon Herluin was treated and bandaged, and given a half cup of one of Molly’s sleep-inducing and pain-quelling potions.

  Molly was rinsing her hands in a bowl held by the page Guiscard when Sir Odinell came in. After a brief inspection of Herluin, the Sieur de Chantemerle drew Molly outside for a report.

  “ ’Tis worse each time I peer at it,” said Molly. “I’ll be needing some archers from you, and we’ll have to be scouring the castle and that swiftly, swiftly, for these watchers that Sir Tarquin has set on you will be reporting to him what you know of them, and so will he be forewarned.”

  Sir Odinell stood a moment, his mouth tight with disappointment; then he turned and began bawling orders. In short order a squad of six archers had appeared, leather handguards in place and quivers slung to their backs, carrying their unstrung lug bows. Their leader was a fellow named Godfrey, a lean gray-eyed man with lank blond hair.

  Down the steep wooden stairway—almost a broad-tread ladder—they trooped again, Guiscard with the torch, Jack with the terrier under his left arm and poor Herluin’s cudgel in his brawny right hand. They swept through the rolls room again, just in case one of the rat spies had returned there, then on to the storeroom where the battle had taken place.