The Barbed Coil

by J. V. Jones

  With dusk approaching and only one remaining sheep unaccounted for, any other farmer would have counted himself lucky, said a prayer to Martyr Assitus, the fabled shepherd who had died defending his flock, and headed home. Long Angrim refused to return until he had found his last sheep.

  Eventually, as the sun set over the limestone cliffs, the search party came to the valley. As they waded through snow three paces deep, Long Angrim heard the sound of a sheep bleating. His flock were like children to him, and to hear one crying out was more than he could bear. Shouting, “Papa will be with you soon,” he ran ahead toward the rocks.

  Afterward people said it was the snow that killed him. Blown into shoulder-deep drifts against the rocks, the snow covered all the sharp edges of stone with a smooth blanket of white. Long Angrim, the sound of his lost sheep ringing in his ears, stepped onto one of the drifts, expecting the snow to be packed solid. It wasn’t. The snow had formed into a loose, grainy layer. And the instant Long Angrim’s weight fell upon it the drift collapsed, sending Long Angrim’s body crashing to the spears of rock below. His skull was smashed and his spine was broken, and by the time the search party reached him, he was already dead. The lost sheep stood over the body, nuzzling gently at Long Angrim’s hair.

  Camron’s father hadn’t let his son see the body, but Camron remembered getting close enough to hear the sound of Long Angrim’s blood, dripping drop by drop onto the chunk of limestone below his neck.

  Even back then Camron had known that the villagers weren’t telling the truth about the real cause of Long Angrim’s death. It wasn’t the snow that killed him. It was the rocks.

  Shivering, Camron clambered over stone slickened by the retreating mist. “Rhif!” he called to the missing knight. “Rhif!”

  This time when there was no reply, Camron wasn’t surprised.

  With a dozen men right behind him, Camron made his way through the rocks. As he stepped onto a knuckle of limestone, the faint smell of charred wood met his nostrils. Looking ahead, he spied smoke escaping from a nest of tall, lichen-covered stones. There was no sign of Rhif. Running his sword hand through his hair, Camron took a deep breath. Almost against his will he found himself looking over his shoulder, checking for Ravis of Burano. No matter how much he disliked the man, he valued his opinions. And right about now, faced with a situation that looked benign enough on the surface but his every instinct told him was dangerous, he could do with the Drokho mercenary’s advice.

  Ravis was nowhere to be seen. Although he didn’t much feel like it, Camron shrugged, jumped down from the rock, and made his way forward.

  Entering the nest of broken stones was like entering a tomb. The temperature dropped along with the light level. The ground underfoot was no longer soil; it was solid stone. A small burned-out campfire formed the center of the ring. A few lingering breaths of smoke escaped from its loosely built timbers. Cutting toward it, Camron was aware of his men, steps behind.

  As he drew close, he spied a vaguely familiar shape set amid the blackened timbers of the fire. Seeing it, a warning pulsed high in Camron’s temples; and even as he took the last few steps toward it, he knew he wouldn’t like what he found.

  It was a human forearm, burned black near the elbow where it had been thrust into the fire. Camron would not have been able to recognize it for what it was, had it not been for the fact that the hand had barely been touched by the flames. It protruded from the charred, smoking firewood like a salute from the underworld. All the fingernails had been removed, and the index finger had been crooked into a slyly beckoning curve.

  Swallowing hard, Camron tried to look away. Something caught his eyes, though, some tiny little detail on the hand. A gold ring resting at the base of the fourth finger; an amethyst stone sparkling in its center like a lizard’s eye. Camron recognized the ring immediately. The man who wore it had been the first to show him how to handle and care for his sword. His father’s second at Mount Creed. Mollas the Bald.

  Camron’s stomach turned. He bit down on his lip, right down until his teeth pressed against bone and his mouth filled up with blood. What had the harras done to him? Why had they left part of him here to burn? Camron fell onto his hands and knees and pulled the arm from the fire. He couldn’t bear to see it there amid the burned timber and ash.

  That was when he smelled it. The foul animal stench from the night his father died. The stench of blood and sweat and urine decomposing within warm fur.

  Smelling it, Camron felt himself falling into a deep black pit where the sides were formed from a coven of shadows and the bottom was amethyst wax. He was in his father’s study again. Men who weren’t men at all glided around the room like witches. And no matter how hard he tried, how fast he ran, and how loud he shouted, the dagger still slid into his father’s chest.

  “May God help us all,” came a cry to Camron’s left.

  Camron blinked back to the present. His breath was coming in short, quick bursts. His hands were shaking, and something deep within his chest ached like an old wound. He felt lost.

  “We’ve found Rhif,” came a second cry.

  Camron struggled back to the present.

  From the tone of the second man’s voice, he guessed that what the men had found wasn’t Rhif at all. It was his body. Adjusting his grip on his sword, Camron pulled himself upright. The animal stench had gone. All he could smell now was charred timbers and burned flesh. His mind must be playing tricks on him.

  Walking over in the direction the shouts had come from, Camron tried hard to control the beating of his heart. He had to appear calm and in control before his men.

  He found the men just outside the nest of stone, gathered around Rhif’s body. Their faces were grim. Hands were bunched into knots. Lips moved, in prayer or warding, Camron didn’t know. Seeing their leader approach, they parted, allowing Camron a clear view of Rhif of Hanister’s body.

  He thought he was prepared to see the worst. He thought after what he had seen in his father’s study and what he had found on the fire, nothing would shock or surprise him.

  He was wrong.

  Rhif wasn’t dead. Not quite, not yet. The skin on his chest had been torn off, and the chest cavity had been ripped open. The rib cage had been pried apart, and flesh and muscle had been scraped away to allow a clear view of the heart. It was still pumping. Rhif’s eyes were open, and his breath came in powerless gasps. The muscles in his right hand contracted involuntarily, and a small wound in his leg dripped blood onto the ground. The fabric of his britches was soaked in urine.

  Camron closed his eyes. His throat felt raw. The air in his lungs felt as heavy as water. Taking a quick breath, he fought back the memory of racing down the stairs in Castle Bess and finding Hurin’s nephew laid out on the bottom step.

  This wasn’t about him now. It was about this young man who had wanted to fight so much, he’d ridden ahead of the troop.

  Camron knelt beside him. Dimly he was aware of someone saying the Lord’s True Prayer. Rhif’s eyes were dark with pain. He was trying hard not to look frightened. Camron took hold of his right hand, gripping hard to still the spasms. There were many things he could say to him just then—questions about what happened, where his attackers had come from, how many there were, what weapons they had. Yet he chose to ask nothing. Instead he moved his whole body close to Rhif’s, hugging the young man to his chest, and murmured, “May the Lord take and cherish you. May you find your way home. May your deeds be neither forgotten nor in vain, and may you rest in eternity knowing your loved ones could not have loved you more.”

  With that Camron took his knife from his sheath and slit the arteries leading to Rhif’s heart. Laying down beside him, he held him tight until the last breath left his lips.

  The men above were silent, swords pointing toward the earth, eyes closed.

  When the contractions stopped, Camron let go of the young man’s hand. Leaning over, he laid a single kiss on his cheek. Strangely, he felt calm. The words he had spoken had be
en wrapped around his heart since the night his father died. Now, finally, they had been said. Not for his father—they had always been too late for his father—but somehow that didn’t matter anymore. The words had been said and a brave young man had heard them, and that was, surprisingly, enough.

  Camron stood.

  A sharp breeze cut from the east.

  The stench of animal excretia caught in Camron’s nostrils. Thinking his senses were failing him, he glanced at the nearest man.

  “Something reeks around here,” the knight said.

  Even as the words left his mouth, the nature of the dawn changed.

  The air was filled with harsh, animal braying. Hundreds of torches blistered to life, creating a ring of fire around the valley and the stones. Swords rang. Horses squealed. Hooves drummed over rock.

  The shadows of the stones seemed to come to life, and dark forms slid from even darker recesses, knives catching, then reflecting, the sun’s first rays. They came from everywhere—from beneath rocks the troops had scrambled over, behind bushes they had walked past, and from the trees they had leaned against to catch their breath or lace their boots.

  More and more poured from the rocks, the valley’s slopes, the periphery of the broken stones. Within seconds they were everywhere, like a spill of black oil. Cloaked and dressed in darkest gray, they seemed to crawl from the very earth itself. Swords held high at their shoulders, they stalked rather than moved. Their shoulder movements were strangely fluid, and their heads remained level as they drew close. Cloaks whipped from side to side, eyes darted, mouths were open, revealing notched pink gums, white in places where the bone and roots pressed against the surface. Saliva, thick as mucus, flashed between crowded teeth.

  The foul animal stench of meat left rotting in a lair was overpowering. It caught in Camron’s throat, making his gorge rise.

  The harras brought a hail of light and shade. Their torches robbed the dawn of its glory, creating a fistful of shadows for each man and standing stone.

  The smell. The shadows. The light. Thin blades, bared teeth, gums like animal vertebrae in their mouths. Camron swallowed bile. He gripped the hilt of his sword so hard, veins broke in the meat of his hand.

  It was the night his father had died all over again.

  That terrible, damning night.

  Camron looked at his men and saw they were ready. He looked at the body of Rhif of Hanister and saw a man at peace. The carnage of his flesh was nothing compared to the expression on his face. It was faith Camron saw nestling there between Rhif’s eyelids and his mouth.

  Pure, unquestioning faith.

  Camron felt a weight so heavy on his heart, he was sure it would break. Every man here was his father, son, and brother. And if he couldn’t save them, he would go down with them, and a terrible wrong created the night his father died would finally be redressed.

  He should have died saving him.

  With the harras calling to each other in their howling half-animal voices, and the stench of animal waste and naphtha-soaked torches heavy in the air, Camron called out the order to take up positions.

  The enemy was a dark fluid line spilling closer as, without a word being passed between them, a dozen men formed a circle around the body of Rhif of Hanister.

  The ruling and leadpointing was done now. A gray-washed leaf of vellum, stiff from being dried on the hearth, lay waiting beneath Tessa’s hand. As she looked at it, she was aware of her stomach muscles contracting in a long-drawn-out wave. She felt sick with anticipation.

  “Here’s the first one, miss,” Emith said, handing her a bone-and-sable brush. “I’ll oil a finer one next, just in case.”

  Tessa nodded. She couldn’t speak. Already, in the seconds between finishing the ruling and Emith handing her the brush, the world had started falling away. Behind her back and to her sides, she felt shadows railing her in. As she dipped the brush into the gleaming, viscous blackness of pitch and lampblack pigment, she felt the room around her contract to a single square of light. The vellum, her hands, the pigment, and the brush were all that mattered now. Even the air felt heavy on her fingers, as if that had contracted, too.

  Emith was speaking, perhaps giving last minute advice or first-time encouragement, but Tessa could no longer understand what he said. His words were so much dust in the ink.

  The knuckles in Tessa’s right hand cracked as she drew the paintbrush down toward the page. The loaded tip trailed a line of purest, deepest black onto the vellum. Tessa imagined she heard the pigment hiss as it settled against the chalk.

  With a practiced flick of her wrist, she sent the line curving upward toward a guide mark on the top left-hand corner of the page. The movement was swift, and Tessa could feel the brush gathering speed, see the pigment racing behind. Halting the trajectory of the brush, she used the built-up momentum to send a wide band of ink flaring on the page. Brush freshly dipped, she then sent a curve spiraling downward to the baseline ruled in lead.

  As the brush moved in her grip in a series of slow, repetitive loops, and the pigment slid from the tip in a succession of ever-thickening lines, Tessa felt her head begin to spin. Her stomach contracted sharply. The skin on her scalp bristled, as if a thousand tiny insects were crawling through her hair. The brush slid in her hand, sweat oiling the grip.

  She caught a whiff of woodsmoke and something else. Before she could identify it, it was gone.

  The black curves drew her in like a beckoning hand. Thick, shiny, and guarded, they promised secrets if she would follow their path. Tessa’s eyes and hand moved as one. She felt her physical self dimming to a silhouette of lines. A flutter of panic rose in her chest, but the urge to keep painting was too strong and she half swallowed, half willed it away. The brush turned, pigment flowed, spirals uncoiled like silk from a reel. Leadpoint lines and pinpricks glowed against the gray: no longer simply guidelines, they were a roadmap to another world.

  A soft noise hummed in her head, but she ignored it. It was a ghost attack of tinnitus, that was all. Deveric, his fine-haired brush, and his even finer ink were no longer here anymore. They couldn’t do anything to stop her. Not this time. Not here and now. Not ever, ever, again.

  From now on she could do what she wanted.

  Feeling a mad rush of adrenaline, Tessa pushed the brush across the page. A skitter of sound grazed her eardrums: harsh metal clanging muffled by stone. She tried to focus her mind upon it, but the noise trailed away like smoke.

  Down she went, down deep into the vellum with the lampblack and the pitch; down to where the pigment seared the hide, and the bristles touched flesh, and the page gave birth to the design. Tessa’s head spiraled with the brush. Her thoughts soared with the ink. Catching a glimpse of the landscape that lay beyond, through, and behind the design, she began mirroring the pattern on the right-hand side of the page. This time there was no going back.

  As her brush turned curve after curve, the shadowy territory beyond the design grew clearer. A pool glinted darkly in the center. Almost unaware of what she was doing, Tessa took a second brush from Emith’s outstretched hand, dipped its tip into niello ink, and began painting knots. A string of XXXs wove their way off the brush as Tessa moved closer to the pool. The landscape was a construction of shadows and shadings. Not really a landscape at all anymore, rather a series of lifting veils. Black, gauzy, and infinitely thin, they rose from the illumination like fumes from the paint.

  Suddenly uneasy, Tessa bit on her lip. Just like Ravis, she thought.

  She tasted blood in her mouth. Or was it the ink? Both tasted of copper and salt.

  The line between what she was, and what she was painting, began to fade away. A shiver passed down her spine. A cool breeze brushed against the left side of her face. The smell came again. And this time Tessa recognized it at once: the stench from the night on the bridge.

  The rangy, spoiled-meat odor of the harras.

  Blood, ink, whatever it was, turned to powder in Tessa’s mouth. Something soft and mallea
ble pulled at her stomach, causing a sickening hollow to form beneath her lungs. The dark, shifting forms of the harras—knives held at shoulder height, knuckled gums wet and dripping—fixed themselves in Tessa’s mind. Their images passed along her body to her fingers, where they became slants in the brushstrokes. Shadows in the ink.

  A spine of knots spilled from the brush, propelling Tessa further, deeper, into the world on the other side. Tinnitus rang its ghost chimes in her head, as the harras’ cloaks formed a whipping, undulating pathway to the pool. Panic began to beat in Tessa’s temples, and this time she couldn’t will it away. Her scalp felt as tight as a bowstring. She didn’t want to go, didn’t want to see, but the patterns kept spinning from her fingertips, illuminating the way.

  Remember Deveric, she told herself. Remember what he did.

  Grinding her teeth, Tessa forced an image of the damning gray spirals to come before her eyes. Lines as fine and abundant as facial hair that had held her back most of her life. Twenty-one years she had been misused and manipulated, and now she had a chance to find out why.

  She could and would take that one last step.

  “Be careful, miss. Please don’t go too far.” Emith’s voice was a vague undertone. By the time he’d finished speaking, Tessa had forgotten what he said.

  Through the pigment, vellum, and chalk she moved, down to somewhere deeper, darker, and immeasurably distant, far on the other side.

  While her mouth counted knots and her eye controlled the brush, Tessa McCamfrey entered the design. A shearing sensation passed along her body, and the tissue lining her nose and throat became sharply and suddenly dry. Taking a running man’s breath, she forced her way through to the pool that lay at the heart. Human cries and animal cries and sounds of fighting followed her. The smell of the harras no longer tantalized, it overwhelmed.