The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  Molly began a low chant in Irish, and her eyes opened, and Nemain began a counterchant, in some way that Hob could not quite grasp interleaving with Molly’s voice, and this went on for what seemed a long time, and then ceased abruptly. Molly stooped and picked up a small skein of pure white lamb’s-wool thread and a small flat gray stone with a raven’s image scored in its surface. She tied the thread about the stone and carefully placed the stone beside the basin, and paying out more thread around the perimeter, reached across the water to hand the skein to Nemain, who paid it out around the other side of the basin and gave it back to Molly. The older woman bent down and fastened the rest of the thread to the stone.

  Now the basin was encircled with an unbroken boundary of white lamb’s wool. Hob, to whom Molly’s rituals and practices were mysterious, and uncomfortably reminiscent of old Father Athelstan’s warnings against impious practices, tended to avoid thinking as much as possible of this aspect of his adopted family. But suddenly he saw this thin thread, this fragile boundary, as protection against what might be seen in the dark ironbound water: white lamb’s wool, a protection with the strength of innocence. Though he knew this was no Christian ritual, he knew Molly was good to her depths, and the lamb’s wool made him think of Christ, whom the old priest called the Lamb of God, and he crossed himself, and felt inexplicably reassured.

  Yet Molly and Nemain were obviously tense. They resumed a chant, and in the intervals drank from a cup of uisce beatha that they passed between them, and then they poured some from the little cask directly into the basin, and then they each bled a small amount into the water, and then there was a pause. Molly looked into Nemain’s eyes; some understanding, some agreement that all was ready passed between them. Molly bent swiftly, picked up the little ivory box and slid the cover partway off, and turned it upside down over the basin.

  Sir Tarquin’s silver button tumbled with a glint of reflected moonlight into the dark bloodstained water. There was the faintest of hissing sounds, as of iron being quenched at a smithy some way in the distance, and a little swirl of vapor blew this way and that on the water’s surface; a vein of milky whiteness mottled the darkness in the iron basin, as though the moon were dissolving in the vessel’s depths. Gray mist or smoke began to rise from the water’s surface, but remained within the basin, so that the water was covered with what looked for all the world like a miniature fogbank, on a miniature lake.

  Hob stared in fascination. Was there movement at the center? The mist began to revolve, the gray mass moving in a circle, but so gradually that Hob was not sure at first that it was moving at all. Striations appeared in the fabric of the vapor, and soon the swirling cloud circled the basin more and more quickly. An aperture opened in the dead center of the bowl, widened, and widened further. Eventually there was a ring of fog running round and round the inner rim of the basin. It thinned; it thinned; it vanished. The surface of the water was now opaque, black as a bat wing, and then a glow in the depths appeared, wavering as torchlight wavers.

  Hob bit at his lip in order not to cry out. “Death, and worse,” Molly had said, but his astonishment had nearly betrayed him. He looked at the image of a torch, centered in the water, and then it was as though he were moving away from it. The torch became smaller, and he saw it was in a bracket on a stone wall, and that in a dim-lit room. Back and back he seemed to move, till he could see more of the room: walls of dressed stone, one wall deep in shadow.

  Along that wall was a bench, and on the bench sat six knights. Some had been with Sir Tarquin when he visited Castle Chantemerle; others Hob had not seen before, but in some ways they were all alike as brothers. They sat motionless, their faces composed to the point of blankness, their hands on their knees, and they stared before them. As they sat, just apparent in the deep shadow that lay over them, Hob could see a faint blue sheen to their eyeballs, and—somehow even more unpleasant—to their fingernails.

  Along the base of the stone wall, where it met the stone floor, eight or nine rats sat on a long low white pillow, unnaturally still, back on their haunches with front feet placed together, like dogs awaiting a command, and all facing outward. Hob thought there was a sense of awareness in the narrow faces, more intelligence than the animals’ ordinary cunning; in any case their behavior was as odd in its quiet attentiveness as was the knights’ somnolent passivity. He strained to see. Their eyes, so small, were harder to perceive, yet seemed to have something of the eerie blue luster of the knights’ eyes.

  A rat at one end shifted position a little. Past its hindquarters two fingertips came into view, and Hob squinted at the pillow on which the row of vermin perched. It was a woman’s arm, from fingers to elbow, and ended in a bloody stump. Hob felt burning liquid rise in his throat, and he checked it with a furious effort of will, desperate not to cough or retch. “Death, and worse,” Molly had said, and now he began to feel, however indistinctly, the weight of those words.

  Molly, Nemain, Jack made no sound, and Hob could not tear his gaze from the water-mirror to see, but he felt their fixed attention on the scene before them, which now showed him a clearer view. Now he saw that the walls were dripping with moisture, and he saw that there was a heavy oaken door set in the wall to his left, and he saw a stone in the floor to his right that had a great iron ring set in it, and finally he saw that the knights were not alone in the room.

  Somewhat to the left of Hob’s view, a broad shoulder became visible, and the room moved farther from Hob, or he from it, and he was looking at the back of a knight clad in a ring-mail hauberk, and he knew even from this angle that it was Sir Tarquin.

  A screech of unoiled hinges, and the door in the left-hand wall opened, and two more of the eldritch knights came in, holding by the arms between them, his legs all but useless with terror, a man about forty, by his dress a peasant. His shirt was torn open at the back, his hair was in wild disarray, his eyes showed white all around the irises, and where he was not held in the knights’ iron grip, he trembled as with fever from the severity of his fear. Yet he did not seem to have been harmed.

  When he caught sight of Sir Tarquin, he said only “ahhh,” in a whispery moan; “ahhh,” as though he would have screamed it had he been able to draw breath into his lungs. The knights released him and he fell to hands and knees, his gaze fixed on Sir Tarquin’s face, which was turned away from Hob, and he began to crawl, a movement of blind hopeless instinct, for he was in a cell, and there was nowhere to go. The two knights blocked the door, the row of knights sat against the far wall, and against what must be the near wall sat Sir Tarquin.

  And so the peasant crawled ahead, toward the ring in the floor, toward the wall away from the only door, a distance of perhaps twenty feet, for the room was much longer than it was wide, and all at once Sir Tarquin stood up and turned to the right, to follow the wretch’s progress, and Hob could at last see his face.

  Despite everything, Hob almost cried aloud. Sir Tarquin’s strong pale face was a mask of malignant hunger. Hob had seen a hawk standing with taloned foot on a mouse and tearing it with its hook-knife bill, and it was a model of sweetness beside this face, this expression, that might have been the portrait of Satan in a rage.

  Sir Tarquin’s lips pulled back in a rictus, and Hob rather expected to see fangs, but it was the knight’s incisors that seemed overlarge, not huge, but crossing that border into the eerie that caused the hair on the lad’s neck to prickle. He covered his mouth with his hand; he could hardly bear to look at the Sieur de Duncarlin, but he could never have looked away, either.

  The peasant had almost reached the far wall when Sir Tarquin took a step toward him, and another step, and then sprang, a tigerish leaping dive that Hob would not have believed a man could make, covering the distance in one bound and landing atop his victim’s back.

  The peasant shrieked once with surprise and terror. Sir Tarquin gripped him by the shoulders; Hob could not see clearly, with the speed at which events were unfolding, but it seemed to him that the knight’s finge
rs ended in nails that seemed longer, that seemed more pointed, than a true man’s should be, and where he gripped the unfortunate’s flesh, little wells of blood sprang up around Sir Tarquin’s fingers, and ten blots of red stained the fabric of the peasant’s shirt.

  And now the lord of Duncarlin bent his sleek dark head, and sank those ghastly front teeth into the peasant’s spine, between two knobs of his backbone, and there was a flash of blue light and a muffled bang, and both knight and peasant became immobile, and flickers of blue played about the knight’s mouth, and after a long moment the peasant’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he settled to the floor, his death rattle wheezing from his compressing lungs.

  Sir Tarquin rode him down, and stayed motionless for another long moment, resting on the corpse. Then, with a fluid powerful grace he sprang to his feet, looked about the room, and stretched his arms toward the ceiling, a long luxurious stretch of satisfaction. The knights looked on in stolid fashion, unperturbed, uninterested almost, their faraway expressions hardly registering the murder of the peasant.

  Hob looked at the victim, and his blood seemed to freeze. The peasant was shriveling before his eyes: slowly, slowly, his skin was wrinkling; his eyes began to sink back into his skull; a brownish undertone to his flesh was setting in. Sir Tarquin motioned to the silent row of men along the wall. Three knights came forward, seized the ring set in the stone, and heaved. The paving stone, some four feet by three, swiveled on an unseen pivot and stood upright. Hob could hear what sounded like the faint swash of seawater echoing up through the opening thus revealed. With no ceremony the knights seized two arms and a leg, and dropped the body through the trap. A moment later there came a splash, and two of the knights pushed at the stone. It leaned, tilted past the point of no return, and crashed back into place.

  Sir Tarquin, his step that of a vigorous young man setting out for an evening of courting, started toward the door. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks; he stood as though listening; and slowly he turned his head and looked straight up through the surface of the water, right into Hob’s eyes.

  Hob managed not to cry out, though he took a silent step backward. He could not believe he was unseen: Sir Tarquin appeared to be looking right at him, and the malevolence of his gaze felt to the lad as though it drew the strength from his bones, the heat from his blood.

  Molly’s hand flicked over the basin, and a fine gray-gold powder flew out and settled on the surface of the water, and Sir Tarquin’s image, the stone-walled room, the knights, vanished instantly, and there was just a basin of bloodstained water with a scum of what appeared to be dust or pollen or both on the water’s surface.

  Molly and Nemain stepped back a pace each, then Molly sat down on the earth, right where she was. Nemain came around the basin and scooped up the cup and the little cask, handed Molly the cup, and stood and poured it full of the uisce beatha. Molly drank off half of the fiery stuff without stopping, and handed the cup to Nemain, who took a sip, then another. She sat down next to Molly and began sipping steadily from the cup, coughing a little.

  Hob looked at the iron basin, an inert and harmless thing, and the arrangements around it; then he bent and looked more closely. The white lamb’s-wool thread was now of two colors: the original white, and an inner border that had been charred black and brown. Molly’s voice came from behind him:

  “Aye,” she said, “that’s where he tried to see through, to see who spied upon him, or even—he being so strong, so very strong—even to come through and to come at us, and it’s we who were fortunate that this little thread held fast, and we safe outside its circle.”

  Hob turned and regarded her. She was as one who has run a long race, breathing heavily; Nemain was not much better, although so much younger.

  Molly sighed. Exhaustion hung on her; her handsome face was slack with fatigue and the uisce beatha was now taking hold a bit. “He is a magus of the first rank; I have never felt such a will thrust against mine, and myself and Nemain pushing with all our might to hold him in, and the little lamb’s-wool thread our bulwark against this horrid buidseach, this . . .” She put her palms to her eyes. “It’s a great weariness there is to me. Nemain, child, what is buidseach in English?”

  “A wizard, seanmháthair.”

  “So it is, so it is—this horrid wizard, then, and he nearly breaking through to us, and we not ready for him. He will be hard to kill.”

  “Can you kill him, then, Mistress?” asked Hob.

  “Anyone can be killed, lad, unless—” Molly scowled; her eyes narrowed; then she shook her head. “It’s something that’s whispering to me, far back in my thoughts, and ’twas at the castle, something about this drochdhuine, and I marking it at the time, but what . . .” She passed a hand down her face. “Nay, I am destroyed with weariness. Jack, mo chroí, settle the campfire; Nemain, Hob, to bed—this night is done.”

  CHAPTER 19

  MOLLY AND NEMAIN SLEPT through much of the next day. Jack and Hob went with hooks and lines along the stream, Sweetlove nearly treading on Jack’s heels, down to pools where trout hunted the caddis flies. There they caught three fish for breakfast. Jack was expert at whirling the hooks, weighted with little stones, with feathers for bait, about his head and casting them so they lingered for a moment just above the water’s surface, the fish erupting from below to seize the hook.

  After a while Hob just lay back on the stream bank, propped himself up, and watched Jack hurling his weighted hooks into the river. Sweetlove sat by Hob and did not let Jack out of her sight, but she would take little excursions up and down the riverbank, never out of view. By Hob’s elbow were burrow entrances: the holts of otters, asleep during the day; Sweetlove went to investigate them, walking on Hob’s legs in the process. She thrust a muzzle into the opening and snuffled deeply. Soon she wearied of this and came back, placed an extremely cold and wet nose against Hob’s eyelid by way of greeting, and lay down beside him, contemplating Jack and his fishing out in midstream. Hob himself was weary from the night before; soon he sank back and turned his face up to the sun.

  After some time spent in drowsy sunlight, the chill water chuckling and running between green banks, Jack shook Hob, who had begun to drift to sleep, and patted Sweetlove, who was snoring in a reedy tenor. Jack and Hob returned to the campsite, cleaned the fish, and had them ready for whenever the women arose.

  At last Molly and Nemain joined them, and Jack cooked the fish on spits. The company prepared to eat, sitting here and there on cloths spread on the grass. All at once Hob arose, lifted the cloth he had sat on, and scuffed at the grass with the toe of his shoe. There was a dead field mouse there, partially decomposed. Hob kicked it away, followed it along, and kicked it twice more, till it was far enough that the odor would not spoil their breakfast.

  He came back and sat down again. “It’s as bad here as at the castle,” he said, laughing. “There was a dead mouse or rat or something among the rushes there, though I could not find it. It was the night we played for Sir Tarquin, when they rose to leave, and that pup went at him. I think that the dog was pulling to get away from the leash, and its paws were digging up the rushes the while, and disturbing what lay beneath. It was strong for a moment, and then . . .”

  “I’m noticing it that night as well,” said Nemain idly. She was shaving slices from a hunk of hard cheese and placing them on rounds of bread. “It—seanmháthair?”

  Molly had risen abruptly, and taken several strides this way, and then back; turned, and walked away, and then back, as though too agitated to sit still.

  “ ’Tis worse, and yet worse,” she said. She sat down heavily. “Let us eat, and drink, and then it’s a council we must have, to speak of what we know, and of what we must do.”

  They breakfasted on trout and bread and cheese, washed down with clear brookwater. After they had finished, Molly filled their mugs half-full of uisce beatha, diluting Hob’s and Nemain’s with water. Then she called a council of war to order.

  “It’s not a thi
ng I’m to be telling those knights, not even Sir Balthasar, and nor am I speaking of it outside this family, and nor must you,” she began. “Nemain’s already knowing this: In my dreams, at whiles, a raven is coming to me, and sitting on a stump or, it may be, at my bedhead, and it speaking.”

  She paused and took a sip of the strong drink. “This raven, there is Irish at it.”

  Seeing a look of utter bewilderment on Hob’s face, she paused and, realizing her error, translated the sentence again, for often she thought in Irish at moments of stress, and then translated it to English speech, sometimes too literally. Now she corrected herself. “The raven is knowing Irish; any road, it’s seeming like Irish that it’s speaking to me, and it’s telling me . . . things. I believe it to be Herself, the Great Queen, the Mórrígan.”

  Hob stopped himself from making the sign of the cross, feeling obscurely that it would be insulting to Molly, although also feeling that it might be advisable.

  “I’m just thinking on my dream of last night—’twas Hob brought it to mind, and he in my dream as well. There was a live rat, and it was very old, and its mate was a dead rat, and it lying at Hob’s feet, and he pointing to it. Then there was only the one rat, the dead rat, and Hob still pointing to it, and the raven, wasn’t it saying that I must use my two spears of the moon to trap this rat, and to destroy it.”

  “But—” Hob stopped, unwilling to interrupt.

  Molly was subdued, and did not seem upset with Hob. “But what, lad?”

  “But the rat was already dead,” Hob said.

  “ ’Twas. And this morning, I waking up and thinking on this dream, I’m not understanding it, and let it be, that I might be pondering it later, and Hob’s now showing me . . .

  “The raven’s after telling me it’s a geis upon me—an obligation from Herself, do you see?—that I trap this rat, and it dead all the while. I’m to be holding it immobile from midnight to dawn, and then destroying it utterly. And it’s only now I understand what the rat is.”