Deverry #06 - The Westlands 02 - A Time of Omens

by Katharine Kerr

  “What’s all this, my liege?”

  “We found somewhat, Nevyn, the silver daggers and me, I mean. After you saw us leave, we went down the east-running road. It was about three miles from here that we found them.”

  “Found who?”

  “The corpses. They’d all been slain by the sword. There were three dead horses but only two men in the road, but we found the third man out in a field, like he’d tried to run away before they killed him.”

  With a grunt of near-physical pain, Nevyn leaned back against the cold stone wall.

  “How long ago were they killed?”

  “Oh, a ghastly long time.” Maryn looked half-sick at the memory. “Maddyn says it was probably a couple of months. They froze first, he said, and then thawed probably just last week. The ravens have been working on them. It was truly grim. And all their gear was pulled apart and strewn around, like someone had been searching through it.”

  “Oh, no doubt they were. Could you tell anything about these poor wretches?”

  “They were Cerrmor men. Here.” Maryn reached into his shin and pulled out a much-tarnished message tube. “This was empty when we found it, but look at the device. I rubbed part of it clean on the ride home.”

  Nevyn turned the tube and found the polished strip, graved with three tiny ships.

  “You could still see the paint on one shield, too,” Maryn went on. “It was the ship blazon. I wish we had the messages that were in that tube.”

  “So do I, Your Highness, but I think me I know what they said. We’d best go down and collect the entire troop. No doubt we’re months too late, but I won’t rest easy until we have a look round for the murderers.”

  As they hurried back to the broch, it occurred to Nevyn that he no longer had to worry about communicating with his allies by dweomer. It was obvious that their enemies already knew everything they needed to know.

  Even though Maddyn considered hunting the murderers a waste of time, and he knew that every other man in the troop was dreading camping out in the chilly damp, no one so much as suggested arguing with Nevyn’s scheme. If anyone had, Maddyn himself would have been the one to do it, because he was a bard of sorts, with a bard’s freedom to speak on any matter at all, as well as being second in command of this troop of mercenaries newly become the prince’s guard. The true commander, Caradoc, was too afraid of Nevyn to say one wrong word to the old man, while Maddyn was, in some ways, the only real friend Nevyn had. Carrying what provisions the dun could spare them at the end of winter’s lean times, the silver daggers, with the prince and old Nevyn riding at the head of the line, clattered out the gates just at noon. With them was a wagon and a couple of servants with shovels to give the bodies a decent burial.

  “At least the blasted clouds have all blown away,” Caradoc said with a sigh. “I had a chance for a word with the king’s chief huntsman, by the by. He says that there’s an old hunting lodge about ten, twelve miles to the northeast, right on the river. If we can find it, it might still have a roof of sorts.”

  “If we’re riding that way to begin with.”

  They found the murdered men and their horses where they’d left them, and it ached Maddyn’s heart to think how close they’d been to safety when their Wyrd fell upon them. While the servants looked for a place where the thawing ground was good and soft, Nevyn coursed back and forth like a hunting dog and examined everything—the dead men, the horses, the soggy ground around them.

  “You and the men certainly trampled all over everything, Maddo,” he grumbled.

  “Well, we looked for footprints and tracks and suchlike. If they’d left a trail we would have found it, but you’ve got to remember that the ground was frozen hard when this happened.”

  “True enough. Where’s the third lad, the one who almost got away?”

  Maddyn took him across the field to the sprawled and puffing corpse. In the warming day the smell was loathsome enough to make the bard keep his distance, but Nevyn knelt right down next to the thing and began to examine the ground as carefully as if he were looking for a precious jewel. Finally he stood up and walked away with one last disgusted shake of his head.

  “Find anything?”

  “Naught. I’m not even sure what I was hoping to get, to tell you the truth. It just seems that . . . ” Nevyn let his words trail away and stood there slack-mouthed for a moment. “I want to wash my hands off, and I see a stream over there.”

  Maddyn went with him while he knelt down and, swearing at the coldness of the water, scrubbed his hands in the rivulet. All at once the old man went tense, his eyes unfocused, his mouth slack again, his head tilted a little as if he listened to a distant voice. Only then did Maddyn notice that the streamlet brimmed with glassy-blue undines, rising up in crests and wavelets. In their midst, and yet somehow beyond them, like a man coming through a doorway from some other place, was a presence. Maddyn could barely see it, a vast silvery shimmer that seemed to partake of both water and air like some preternatural fog, forming itself into a shape that might not even have existed beyond his desire to see it as a shape. Then it was gone, and Maddyn shuddered once with a toss of his head.

  “Geese walking on your grave?” Nevyn said mildly.

  When Maddyn looked around he saw Owaen and the prince walking over to them and well within earshot.

  “Must be, truly. Here, Owaen, did you and the lads find anything new?”

  “Doubt me if there’s aught to find. Young Branoic did come up with this, though. Insisted it might be important, but he couldn’t say why.” Owaen looked positively sour as he handed Nevyn a thin sliver of bone, about six inches long, barely a half inch wide, but pointed on both ends. “Sometimes I think that lad is daft, I truly do.”

  “Not at all.” Nevyn was turning the sliver round and round in his thin, gnarled fingers. “It’s human bone, to begin with. And look how someone’s worked it—smoothed it, shaped it, and then polished it.”

  “What?” Owaen’s sourness deepened to disgust. “What is it, some kind of knife handle?”

  “It’s not, but a stylus to rule lines on parchment.”

  “A stylus?” Maddyn broke in. “Who would make a thing like that out of human bone?”

  “Who indeed, Maddo lad? That’s the answer I’d very much like to have: who indeed?”

  In his role as a learned man Nevyn recited a few suitable lines of Dawntime poetry over the corpses; then the silver daggers mounted up and left the servants to get on with the burying. When they rode out they headed for the river. Maddyn spurred his horse up next to the old man’s and mentioned the decrepit hunting lodge.

  “It’ll be better shelter than none, truly,” Nevyn said.

  “You don’t suppose our enemies camped there, do you?”

  “They might have once, but they’re long gone by now.” He gave Maddyn a wink. “I have some rather reliable information to that effect. Tell the men we won’t be out hunting wild geese long, Maddo. I just want one last look around, that’s all.”

  Only then was Maddyn sure that he had indeed seen some exalted personage in the stream.

  Just at sunset they reached the lodge, a wooden roundhouse, its thatch half-gone, standing along with a stables behind a palisade that was missing as many logs as a peasant his teeth. As soon as they rode within five hundred yards of the place the horses turned nervous, tossing their heads and blowing, dancing a little in the muddy road. Maddyn had the feeling that they would have bolted if they hadn’t been tired from their long day’s ride.

  “Oho!” Nevyn said. “My liege, you wait here with Caradoc and most of the men. Maddyn, you, Owaen, and Branoic come with me.”

  “You’d better take more men than that, Councillor,” Maryn said.

  “I won’t need a small army, my liege. Most like there’s naught left here but bad memories, anyway.”

  “But the horses—”

  “See things men don’t see, but men know things that horses don’t k
now. And with that riddle, you’ll have to rest content.”

  Nevyn was right enough, in the event, although the ‘bad memory’ turned out to be bad indeed. The men dismounted and walked the last of the way to the lodge, and as soon as they stepped through the gap they saw and smelled what had been spooking the animals. Nailed to the inside of the palisade, like a shrike nailed to a farmer’s barn, was the corpse of a man, half-eaten by ravens and well ripened by the spring weather. Yet the worst thing wasn’t the stench. The corpse was hung upside down and mutilated—the head cut off and nailed between its legs with what seemed to be—from the fragment left—its private parts stuffed into its mouth. Branoic stared for a long moment, then turned and ran to the shelter of the palisade to vomit, heavily and noisily.

  “Uh gods!” Owaen whispered. “What?!”

  For all his aplomb earlier, Nevyn looked half sick now, his face dead white and looking with all its wrinkles more like old parchment than ever. He ran his tongue over dry lips and spoke at last.

  “A would-be deserter, most like, or a traitor of some sort. They left him that way so he’d roam as a haunt forever. All right, lads, get back to the troop. I think they’ll all agree that we don’t truly want to camp here tonight, shelter or not.”

  “I should think not, by the asses of the gods!” Owaen turned to Maddyn. “I know the horses are tired, but we’d best put a couple of miles between ourselves and this place if there’s a haunt about.”

  “You’re going to, certainly,” Nevyn broke in. “I’m going to stay here.”

  “Not alone you aren’t,” Maddyn snapped.

  “I don’t need guards with swords, lad. I’m not in danger. If I can’t handle one haunt, what kind of sorcerer am I?”

  “What about this poor bastard?” Owaen jerked his thumb at the corpse. “We should give him some kind of burial.”

  “Oh, I’ll tend to that, too.” Nevyn started walking for the gate. “I’ll just get my horse, and then you all go on your way. Come fetch me first thing in the morning.”

  Somewhat later, when they were all making camp—in a meadow about a mile and a half downriver—it occurred to Maddyn that Nevyn seemed to know an awful lot about these mysterious people who had left that ugly bit of sacrilege on the palisade. Although he was normally a curious man, he decided that he could live without asking him to explain.

  With the last of the sunset, Nevyn brought his horse inside the tumble-down lodge, tied him on a loose rope to the wall and tended him, then dumped his bedroll and saddlebags near the hearth, where there lay a sizable if dusty pile of firewood already cut, left by the hirelings of the dark dweomermaster behind this plot—or so he assumed anyway. As assumptions went, it was a solid one. After he confirmed that the chimney was clear by sticking his head up it for a look, he piled up some logs and lit them with a wave of his hand. Once the fire had blazed up enough to illumine the room, he searched it thoroughly, even poking at the rotting walls with the point of his table dagger. His patience paid off when under a pile of leaves that had drifted in through a window he found a pewter disk about the size of a thumbnail, of the kind sewn onto saddlebags and other horse gear as decorations. Stamped into it was the head of a boar.

  “I wonder,” he said aloud. “The Boar clan’s territory lies a long way from here, but still, if they thought the journey worth it for some purpose . . . are they in league with the dark dweomer then?”

  The idea made him shudder. He slipped the disk into his brigga pocket, then paced back and forth before the fire as he considered what he was going to do about the possible haunt. First, of course, he had to discover if indeed that poor soul whose body rotted outside was still hanging about the site of his death. He laid more wood on the fire, poked it around with a green stick until it burned nice and evenly, then gathered up a mucky little pile of the damp and mildewed thatch that had slid from the roof over the years. If he needed it, the stuff would produce dense smoke. Then he sat down in front of the hearth, let himself relax, and waited.

  It was close to an hour later when he felt the presence. At first it seemed only that a cold draught had wafted in from the door behind him, but he saw the salamanders in the fire turn their heads and look up in the direction of something. The room turned thick with silence. Still he said nothing, nor did he move, not even when the hair on the back of his neck prickled at the etheric force oozing from the haunt. There was a sound, too, a wet snuffling as if a hound were searching for a scent all over the floor, and every now and then, a scrabbling, as if some animal scratched at the floor with its nails. As the air around him grew colder, he concentrated on keeping his breathing slow and steady and his mind at peace. With a burst of sparks the salamanders disappeared. The thing was standing right behind him.

  “Have you left somewhat here that won’t let you rest, lad?”

  He could feel puzzlement; then it drifted away, snuffling and scrabbling round the joining of floor and wall.

  “Somewhat’s buried, is it?”

  The coldness approached him, hesitated, hovering some five feet off to his left. He could feel its desperate panic as clearly as he could feel the cold Casually, slowly, Nevyn reached out and picked up a handful of the grubby thatch.

  “I wager you’d like to feel solid again, nice and solid and warm. Come over to the fire, lad.”

  As the presence drifted into the warm light Nevyn could feel its panic reaching out like tendrils to clutch at him. Slowly he rose to his knees and tossed the half-rotten hay onto the hottest part of the fire. For a moment it merely stank; then gray smoke began to billow and swirl. As if it were a nail rushing to a lodestone the presence threw itself into the fire. Since it “lived” as a pattern of etheric force, the matrix immediately sucked the smoke up and arranged the fine particles of ash to conform to that pattern. Hovering above the fire appeared the shape of a youngish man, naked but of course perfectly whole, since his killers’ knives could do no harm to his etheric body. Nevyn tossed in another handful of thatch to keep the smoke coming, then sat back on his heels.

  “You can’t stay here. You have to travel forward, lad, and go on to a new life. There’s no coming back to this one.”

  The smoke-shape shook its head in a furious no, then threw itself out of the fire, leaving the smoke swirling and spreading, but ordinary smoke. Yet enough of the panicles clung to the matrix to make the haunt clearly visible as it drifted across the room and began scrabbling again at a loose board between floor and wall. Nevyn could see, too, that it was making the snuffling noise inadvertently, rustling and lifting dead leaves and other such trash as it passed by.

  “What’s under there? Let me help. You don’t have the hands to dig anymore.”

  The presence drifted to one side and gave no sign of interfering as Nevyn came over and knelt down. When he drew his table dagger and began to pry up the board, the haunt knelt, too, as if to watch. Although that particular board was somewhat newer than those around it, still the rotted wood broke away from its nails and came up in shreds and splinters. Underneath, in a shallow hole in the ground, was an oblong box, about two feet long but only some ten inches wide.

  “Your treasure?”

  Although it was faint now, a bare wisp of smoke in the firelight, the thing shook its head no and lifted both hands—imploring him, Nevyn thought, to forgive it or do something or perhaps both. When he reached in and lifted the box, some weight inside lurched and slid with a waft of unpleasant smell from the crack around the lid. Since he considered himself hardened to all forms of death, Nevyn threw open the lid and nearly gagged—not from the smell, this time, but from the sight. Crammed inside lay the corpse of an infant boy, preserved with some mixture of spices and liquids. Only a few days old when it died, it had been mutilated in the exact same way as the corpse nailed to the palisade.

  Since the box brought a lot of dust up with it, the haunt kneeling nearby looked briefly solid, or at least its face and hands were visible as it tossed its head back
and threw up its arms in a silent keen.

  “Your child?”

  It shook its head no, then slumped, doubling over to lay its head on the ground in front of him like a criminal begging a great lord for mercy.

  “You helped kill it? Or—I see—your friends were going to kill it. You protested, and they made you share its Wyrd.”

  The dust scattered to the floor. The haunt was gone.

  For some minutes Nevyn merely stared at the pitiful corpse in its tiny coffin. Although he’d never had the misfortune to see such mutilations before, he’d heard something about their significance—some half-forgotten lore that nagged at the edges of his memory and insisted that he examine the corpse more carefully. Finally he summoned up ail his will and took the box over to the fire where there was light to work in, but he got bits of rag from his saddlebags to wrap his hands before he reached in and took the mutilated pieces of the tiny mummy out. Underneath he found a thin lead plate, about two inches by four, much like the curse-talismans that ignorant peasants still bury in hopes of doing an enemy harm. Graved on it were words in the ancient tongue of the Dawntime, known only to scholars and priests—and some words that not even Nevyn could translate.

  “As this so that. Maryn king Maryn king Maryn. Death never dying. Aranrhodda ricca ricca ricca Bubo lubo.”

  His face and hands seemed to turn to ice, cold and numb and stiff. He looked up to find the room filled with Wildfolk, staring at him solemnly, some wide-eyed, some sucking an anxious finger, some gape-mouthed with terror.

  “Evil men did this, didn’t they?”

  They nodded a yes. In the fire a towering golden flame leapt up, then died down to a vaguely human face burning within the blaze.

  “Help me,” Nevyn said to the Lord of Fire. “I want to get that corpse outside in here, and then burn it and this pitiful thing both. Then both souls can go to their rest.”

  Sparks showered in agreement.