“I don’t know of any being in my world either—” Yilvina’s voice broke. “I don’t know what it was. I really don’t.”
Tears stood in the priest’s eyes. When he had found Halgard in the wet grass, he only recognized her by the brooch on her shawl.
By all the gods, what had they done to deserve such a judgment? In moments like these, he found himself doubting Luth’s wisdom. Hadn’t the girl been punished enough? She’d lost her father. She was blind. And now this. Her face was as withered as an old woman’s. Dark age spots marred her cheeks and forehead, and her hair had turned snowy white. Gundar lowered the curtain in front of the bed. The girl was sleeping soundly, and he was glad he did not have to look her in the face anymore. No child should look like that, he thought, filled with anger. Who could do something like that to a little girl?
Halgard did not yet know what had happened to her. She had been too tired. She had, however, been surprised at how hoarse her voice sounded, as if it wasn’t hers at all. Gundar swallowed hard when he thought of the lies he had whispered into Halgard’s ears. He had not found the courage to tell her the truth, nor did she know that her mother was dead.
The Luth priest went to the table that stood close to the fire pit and slumped onto a stool beside it. Asla set a bowl of steaming fish broth in front of him, but he pushed it away. He could not eat now.
If only he had held his tongue the day before! Then the girl would not have had her youth stolen from her, and Alfeid, her mother, would still live.
“It must have been a ghost,” said Yilvina. “There were no tracks. None on the muddy path and none in the grass. It kills without spilling blood.”
Gundar looked at the grain of the wooden tabletop. Yes, that had occurred to him, too. But where would a ghost come from? He had even taken three books from his library in his search for counsel but had found nothing that could explain the incidents in the village. Only in the Book of Omens had he found a few lines about ghosts. Apparently, they appeared when someone died before they had been able to bring some important matter to a close while they lived. Usually, it came down to revenge or love.
Sometimes, a ghost was sent back by the gods to haunt the living, but there had been no crime that the gods would have to punish. If a sin against the gods had been committed that deserved a punishment like this, then he as the priest would have known about it. It could not have remained hidden from him!
No one in the village had died in the late summer, so there was no one who could have become a ghost. Yet ever since this creature had begun spreading its wickedness, death had been a constant guest in Firnstayn.
So we must have angered the gods, Gundar thought. But how? Because they had opened the gateway to the elven world? It was clear that their problems had begun only after Alfadas and his army had departed. Was that a coincidence? Had something perhaps come back through the gateway?
“Are there ghosts in Albenmark?” Gundar asked.
“No,” Yilvina replied firmly. She had returned to her place on the stool beside the unconscious queen. She had been standing guard in that same place for weeks, like a never-tiring watchdog, ready to give her life for Emerelle. In a house occupied by no more than a mother with two children and a seriously injured man who would probably never leave his bed again, her behavior seemed to the priest to be grossly exaggerated.
“The Alben, our distant ancestors, drove out all the beings of the darkness,” Yilvina said. “The Devanthar and the Yingiz are either dead or banished forever into the darkness between the worlds.”
Asla had joined Gundar at the table. She was tearing a fresh linen cloth into strips.
“What are those? Demons? I’m just a fisherman’s daughter,” Asla said with slight irritation. “You have to explain names like those for me.”
“Of course. My apologies.” Yilvina stood up, went to the fire pit, and poked at the embers with a stick.
For a moment, it seemed to Gundar that the elf did not want to say any more. When she did speak, however, she did so tentatively, her words faltering. She seemed to be weighing each word with care. Was she afraid she might bring the old terrors back to life by speaking about them?
“The Devanthar hated all forms of order. Whenever something was completed, they had to destroy it to make room for something new. For them, order meant everything coming to a standstill. I can explain it no better than that, for the Alben destroyed the Devanthar a very long time ago.
“It was the Alben who created all the worlds and races that we know today. To protect their creation, they had to destroy the Devanthar. The war between them was so catastrophic that one of the worlds actually broke apart. For many of the Alben, the horrors of the war wounded their souls deeply, and they began to abandon Albenmark forever or withdraw to a life of solitude. They sought out places like Albentop, where they meditated for centuries in isolation.
“With the Yingiz, things took a different course. The Yingiz were beings of pure malice, able to take pleasure only in the suffering of others. They were banished to the darkness between the worlds.”
“That’s it!” Gundar cried. The enemy finally had a name. “One of those creatures of the dark must have come through the gateway to our world.”
“Out of the question.” Yilvina broke the stick in two and tossed the pieces into the fire. “The Alben surrounded the gateways and the paths through the void with powerful protective spells. No Yingiz has ever returned. Nobody even remembers anymore what they look like. It has to be something else that has laid siege to the village. Are there no ghosts here in the Other World?”
Gundar nodded uncertainly. “There are, though I have never seen one.”
“We can safely say that nothing of flesh and blood attacked Halgard. I would have found tracks. It must have been a ghost,” the elf woman insisted. “Believe me. I’m an experienced huntress.”
Ole rolled and groaned in his bed. There it was again . . . that smell, the odor of an open grave. Gundar took a twig of pine and tossed it onto the fire. The dry needles crackled and flared. Pleasantly scented white smoke spread.
It was pointless to talk to elves. She would never accept that the killer might have something to do with her or the queen.
Asla stood and looked across at Gundar, a silent plea for help in her eyes. She gathered the strips of linen and went to Ole’s bed.
The priest picked up the earthenware bottle on the table and filled his cup. He drank the apple liquor in one draft. It burned his throat, and tears sprang to his eyes. Then he went over to Asla. When she pulled aside the blanket covering the sleeping niche and bed, he felt nauseous. The sharp odor of decay rose to meet him.
Ole’s eyes were wide open, but he saw neither Asla nor the priest. His eyeballs were rolled up so that only the whites were visible. Cold sweat prickled his forehead.
Asla dabbed her uncle’s ravaged face with a cloth. Ole did not blink once. Then she threw back the blanket. The bandages covering the stumps of his legs were soaked with a brown secretion. Asla took a knife and began to cut through the linen strips. With the tips of her fingers, she picked away what she could, trying to touch her uncle as little as possible.
“Blue sparks . . . ,” Ole murmured, and began to giggle.
“Easy, Uncle. Easy.” Asla stroked his forehead.
“The godswhip . . .” The dog breeder let out a deep sigh. “Gods . . .”
Asla looked at Gundar. “Now.”
The priest leaned forward and pressed Ole onto the bed with both hands. At the same time, Asla jerked the bandages off. The fabric stuck to the open wounds. Ole screamed like an animal and tried to rear up. Dark pus dripped from the putrid flesh.
Gundar could only breathe shallowly through his mouth. The stink robbed him of breath. He had to look away and had trouble keeping his nausea in check.
Asla worked quickly, washing the wounds with spirits. Her uncle lay very still now. He had fallen unconscious. Like thin branches, two bones protruded from the ragged flesh o
f his thighs. The skin there was unnaturally white, and the blood vessels stood out as inflamed red lines tracing upward to his loins.
Asla wrapped fresh linen around the stumps. Dark fluid soaked through the cloth.
The priest looked at Asla’s face. He concentrated on the fine lines around her eyes. She was still beautiful. Her golden hair hung in a heavy braid over her shoulder. Gundar understood well that Kalf could not simply forget her.
Asla changed the dressings on the stumps of Ole’s wrists as well. Her uncle still lay unconscious. What had he meant when he spoke of a “godswhip”?
Gundar kept his eyes fixed on Asla’s face. Tiny droplets of sweat formed on her forehead and dampened her eyebrows. Finally, she finished her work. She wiped one hand nervously across her brow. Then she bundled the soiled bandages together and threw them into the fire and laid a few more pine twigs over the top.
Gundar stood and poured himself another cup of liquor. His tongue felt like it was covered with fur. He had an unpleasant taste in his mouth, as if he had been drinking brackish water.
“Give me some of that, too?” Asla asked.
She was standing bent over a bucket, scrubbing herself with a brush. When she sat at the table, her hands glowed red.
“Didn’t Kalf bring one of Ole’s whips with him?”
“Two,” said Asla flatly. “They lay where he found my uncle.”
“Can I see them?”
“They’re just dog whips. Horrible things with spikes in them. You know what they’re like.”
“Please.”
“I’m tired.” She pointed to an iron-banded chest. “They’re over there. What do you want with them?”
Instead of answering, the priest crossed to the chest. Yilvina watched him with curiosity. The two whips lay on top of a patched blue child’s dress. With care, the priest let one of the long leather bands glide through his fingers. Just recently, he saw, new pieces of iron had been woven into the whip with pale leather strands. Gundar inspected the metal spikes, one after the other. The pieces of iron that had been in the whip originally were covered only with a fine layer of surface rust. If he rubbed them, the metal gleamed silvery again immediately. But the newly added iron pieces looked very different. The rust had eaten into them deeply.
Gundar looked closely at the tip of a knife bound into the whip—on its cutting edge, the metal had peeled away in layers. Now, it looked as if it was stepped, as if the knife had once been put together from many thin layers of iron. The priest found rings of chain mail, nails, a piece from a horse harness. On all of them, the surface was eaten away and rough. Wind and weather had gnawed at those pieces of iron for a long time. He recalled a brief conversation he’d had not long before with Ole. The dog breeder had told him that he’d been on a pilgrimage and that now, with Luth’s help, he was going to teach his dogs the meaning of obedience. Gundar had not taken him seriously at the time.
The priest straightened up quickly and pushed the whip into his belt.
“Well?” said Asla.
“He sinned against the gods! Yilvina was right. The beast is not from Albenmark or the void. I should have known. The corpses themselves scream out who sent this punishment. They scream it!”
PURSUED
Gundar had left the fjord behind him long ago. He was making his way up the mountain, following the same path that Mandred and his elven friends had taken when they had gone after the manboar. The old priest hoped that he would not have to go as far as the Luth’s cave. Ole was a lazy bastard—he certainly would not have climbed all the way to the pass to commit his sin!
Gundar stopped abruptly and looked around. He sensed that he was being followed; he narrowed his eyes and peered into the driving snow. “There’s nothing out there,” he said aloud to himself. It felt good, hearing his own voice in the silence of the mountains. “There’s no danger. I’m a man of religion.” He spoke the last words somewhat louder. Not to impress anyone who might be following him, but just to hear his own voice. He was not a man for the wilderness. He felt most at home with a watertight roof close by and the prospect of at least two warm meals a day.
Kalf had offered to go with him, but Gundar wanted to be alone. He had to come to terms with himself. How could it have taken so long for him to recognize such a clear, unambiguous sign? All the victims but Ole had aged with unnatural speed. Alfeid, the washerwoman . . . she had been a young woman, yet when they had found her, her body had been as emaciated as a crone’s who had far outlived her due. And Halgard . . . Gundar did not like to think of the young girl. It was no mercy that she still lived, a child in an old woman’s body. How could Luth be so cruel? The weaver of fate had sent a ghostly executioner that had coiled the threads of destiny of its victims and wiped out their lives in an instant. Those deaths were meant as a sign!
Gundar began to move faster. He should have realized sooner what was going on, but the events of recent weeks had blinded him. Too much had happened. The elven queen seeking refuge; Horsa, the king of the Fjordlands, visiting the village not once but twice; the departure through the elven gate; the army.
Ole, fool that he was, had stolen from the ironbeards and had called down Luth’s wrath on the village by doing so. Gundar thought of his own departure from the village. He had made the villagers swear not to leave their houses and had scrawled protective symbols with chalk and soot on their doorsteps. Luth could not punish them all just because one had strayed!
Puffing and panting, he continued up the path, the snow crunching softly underfoot. It was a pleasant, calming sound. Water seeped through the seams of his boots. He should have oiled them better, he knew: his feet were already soaked. Not much farther and he would reach Wehrberghof. He could spend the night there, but he would have to take better care of his boots the next day.
Gundar stopped again. Were those steps he heard behind him? The snow was falling more heavily now. He saw nothing but swirling white.
The storm was bringing the day to an early end. Gundar cursed. If he lost the trail or missed the farm, then he would be in serious trouble. His feet would freeze inside his wet boots. He should have accepted Kalf’s offer.
Again, he looked back. Was that an outline there in the whiteness? No. He went on, accelerating his steps. But someone was staring at him! He could feel it clearly! He passed one hand carefully over the leather pouch hanging at his belt. “I’m returning what is yours, Luth,” he whispered. “Please be patient for another day. Everyone in the village has given something of iron to sacrifice to you. Forgive them! They cannot be held to account for Ole’s deeds.”
Halgard entered Gundar’s thoughts again. The memory made him angry. How could Luth have done that? What did the blind girl have to do with Ole? Gundar had been his god’s loyal servant for almost forty years, but the previous night, for the first time, he had begun to doubt. A god that would send an avenger to ravage his village so indiscriminately . . . that was not the Luth of whose wisdom he had spent all these decades preaching. There was no visible pattern in the horrors that had befallen them, none that the priest could see, at least. They were simply cruel.
Steps! Gundar had heard them very clearly this time. But what did he expect? He cursed Luth, if only in his mind, though he knew an unspoken curse would not go unobserved by the weaver of fate. The priest turned around.
“Send him, then, your assassin!” he shouted into the wind-whipped snow. He planted his hands on his hips. “Come on! Put an end to it! I’ll stand here and wait.”
What was he doing? Had he lost his mind? “Let me return the stolen iron,” he said in a placating voice. “Then take me as a sacrifice if you want. I’m as much to blame as Ole. Spare my village.”
A horse whinnied close by. Wehrberghof. Was he already so close? Gundar moved on. Was it a sign from Luth? Did the god want to show him the way to the farm? Gundar bore left and paced on with more confidence.
After a short distance, the outline of a hill appeared through the snow. Gundar was all to
o aware that he would have walked past the hill entirely if had not heard the whinnying and changed course. The Wehrberg, on which Thorfinn’s farm lay, was surrounded by three rings of half-collapsed earthen walls. There had probably been a settlement there a long time ago, but now only the large farm, Wehrberghof, huddled in the lee just below the crown of the hill.
Gundar followed the old path that led between the earthen walls. He smelled smoke. The thought of a fire and a bowl of warm porridge made the priest’s heart beat faster.
In the swirling snow, the longhouse’s gable looked raven-black. It was finished with two carved dragon’s heads, their jaws opened wide. The back of the house had been dug partly into the hillside. The stable and the house proper were united under a single long roof with a thin wooden wall separating them. The thick earthen walls and the warmth that radiated from the fire pit to the stable kept the animals safe from even the hardest frost.
Gundar knocked at the heavy wooden door. Nothing stirred. The wind had freshened again. The priest pushed the door open. Strange, he thought, that it had not been barred for the night. He stepped into the tiny entryway. A heavy woolen curtain separated it from the rest of the house. An oil lamp burned on a stool.
“Thorfinn? Audhild?” He could not remember the names of their three children. The family did not come to the village often enough for that. Gundar was sure, though, that he’d recall the names as soon as he saw the youngsters again.
No answer. Maybe they were in the stable and hadn’t heard him. He closed the door and used the scraper leaning on the stool to scratch the crusted snow from his boots. Then, humming softly to himself, he knocked the snow from his clothes.
Finally, he pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the parlor. It was pleasantly warm, and fresh rushes had been strewn on the floor. A fire glowed in a fire pit with a stone surround in the center of the parlor. Over it hung a heavy copper kettle from an iron hook. Whatever was in the pot smelled burned. He heard a soft blubbering noise and saw five wooden bowls on the table. A clay cup lay on its side at on one end of the table, and a pool of wine shimmered like blood on the wood. There was no one in sight.
Elven Queen Page 8
