by Dave Duncan
“They’ve painted a pentagram on the door,” de Grasse said.
“I can deal with that. Let’s go!”
chapter 19
i made another vain effort to convince Lovise that she ought to go home then, because she naturally wanted to be in at the kill, when Corneille and Quentin were arrested. Again I pointed out that her father would be worried about her and might need help with his patients.
She set her jaw stubbornly. “I am not your wife yet, Sage Durwin of Helmdon, so I do not have to take your orders.”
“If I promise never to give you another order as long as we both shall live, will you accede to my wishes and go home now?”
The men-at-arms were waiting by then, clutching chains and shackles and the other things I had ordered. They were amused that this wizard lad might be able to work miracle cures and storm warded sanctums, but he had no more skill at dealing with a stubborn woman than regular god-fearing mortals like them. I found their grins and chuckles intensely annoying, and I could see that Lovise did, too, but she was not going to give up.
“No,” she said, “because my wedding vows will override your promise, so let’s get started or there won’t be any wedding vows. Not that I’ve agreed to them anyway.”
“She doesn’t sound too enchanted to me, lads,” remarked one of the men-at-arms, and I had to surrender.
“Proceed, then, Master-at-arms,” I said, and went with de Grasse as he set off through the maze of buildings. “I wish I knew where those two devil worshipers have gone,” I added.
“I checked with the gate watch, Sage, and they haven’t been seen leaving. Can they turn into birds? Or make themselves invisible?”
“No. They can do some nasty things, but not those. And the healers in the town are in league with them, all except Healer Larson. All together, I mean all five of them together, could raise the Devil, but just two are not so dangerous.”
I thought I knew everything back then, and I was grossly underestimating the likes of Corneille Boterel.
We came to a door marked with a pentacle, recently painted from the look of it. Everyone else then stood back and waited to see how the constable’s new magician would deal with this.
I tested it as Eadig had, and decided like him that it was fairly harmless. I was much more worried that Corneille and Quentin might be waiting inside with spanned crossbows aimed at whoever entered, but I murmured the Lord’s Prayer and lifted the latch. The door opened, and nothing more happened.
I led the way inside. As Eadig had described that room, it had an inner door by the entrance and an open hatch at the far end; it was furnished with a table and some stools. Someone had been writing at the table, leaving his quill standing in the inkwell. There was a foul stench in the air that I could not identify.
I said, “Leave someone on watch up here, if you please, Captain. Men, do not touch that inner door. It isn’t marked, but it is warded, and will damage you. A lantern?”
A man handed me a lantern and produced a tinderbox. I took my second opportunity to impress my audience by lighting the candle with the Repeat spell I had ready. Confident that I now had them all sufficiently convinced of my supernatural credentials, I went over to the trapdoor. The cellar below was dark, but was obviously the source of the smell. Wishing I had enough hands to hold my cane, the ladder, the lantern, and my nose simultaneously, I scrambled down.
The stench was reminiscent of many things—rot, feces, gangrene—and the only good thing about it was that it was too strong to be coming from corpses less than one day dead. There were no bodies, dead or alive, only bars, chains, and so on, as Eadig had described—and of course the ominous pentacle on the floor. But no Neil, no Piers, and no Francois. Had they been magically convinced that there was no treachery brewing in Lincoln, and sent off back to report as much to the king? That seemed too good to be true.
De Grasse had followed me down. He said, “What in hell makes this stink, Your Wisdom? Boiled dog shit?”
“I think it may be the smell of Hell itself, Captain. I fear some horrible evil has been done here. Send a man to the paddock, will you? Ask if Sir Neil d’Airelle’s horses that arrived yesterday are still there. And let’s you and me get out of here before I lose yesterday’s dinner.”
Upstairs I found Lovise studying the warded door, while the rest of the men-at-arms studied her. She grimaced. “This is more intense than anything I’ve ever met, Sage.”
I joined her and recoiled when I tested the door. “Or I! Captain, it will take us some time to open this one. Would you please leave a couple of men on guard outside here and get everyone else available onto the hunt for Quentin and Corneille?” I also explained that it would be quite safe to knock on the door if they wanted me. Then I closed it behind them.
Lovise, seated at the table, was studying what had been written on the small piece of parchment that had been lying there beside the inkwell and pen.
“I can’t read this,” she complained. “What language is it? Greek?”
I took it and held it to the fading light from the window. “Not Greek. Nor Hebrew. I’d recognize the letters if it were either, although I couldn’t read the words. It’s in no alphabet I know.” I tossed it back down on the table. “Let’s get the warding curse off that door, shall we?”
Her smile could have melted iron. “Go ahead. I shall be interested to watch. Very instructive, I expect.”
“The only antiphon we have with us needs two voices.”
“But you wanted to send me home. You said you didn’t need me any more here.”
I was quite sure I hadn’t said that, not exactly. She was playing, of course, and I would happily have spent hours with her in such meaningless chatter, remembering later not a word that was said, only her smile, her lips, her eyes.
Unfortunately our discussion was interrupted by a knock on the door. Captain de Grasse had returned to report that Sir Neil and Squire Piers had collected their horses at dawn and left the castle. They had ridden two and led the other two. I thanked him, but the news was bitter. My own Bon Appétit had gone, but that was the least of my worries, for we were playing for much higher stakes than one palfrey. Neil and Piers were still alive, which was a relief, I thought I knew what had happened to the man who had ridden her yesterday—I assumed that Eadig was probably close to Nottingham by now, astride Ruffian— but what had happened to Man-at-arms Francois? I wondered if they might be inside the other, warded room.
Lovise saw much of that in my face when I closed the door. “They’re still alive, though—Neil and Piers?”
“After a fashion, maybe. I cannot believe Neil would have left here voluntarily. I was thinking that Corneille and the coven were planning to work their evil tonight, but they must have done it last night, after Eadig left. He was asleep on the woodpile, poor kid, and didn’t see or hear the sorcerers returning around midnight. The d’Airelles have a whole day’s start on us.”
“But what are these traitors planning? Is Neil heading home to tell the king that there isn’t anything wrong, here in Lincoln? Could they make him do that?”
“Of course they could,” I said. “You’ve seen fairground swindlers working deceptions like that—convincing customers that their magic pickled snake eggs will make boys grow muscles or bring girls the men of their dreams. On that scale it’s just slick patter, a cheap swindle, but I’m sure Corneille’s black arts could convince Sir Neil that he was the Queen of Sheba. That’s not the point!
“Think of how it started. The letter to the king was a forgery. Elvire told us that there were no mysterious visitors, and old Sir Courtney conveniently died before he could be questioned. You don’t commit forgery and murder just so you can later send the king a message saying that there was no truth in your previous letter. The letter was carefully designed so that King Henry would take it seriously but not too seriously. He didn’t send the justiciar north with an army, he sent one of his familiares.”
In fact he had sent two, and neither
of us had shone so far. “I still don’t follow,” Lovise said.
“When Neil arrives at the king’s camp to report on his mission, he’ll be granted a private audience, and he probably won’t have to surrender his sword first, because he’s a familiaris. Even if he does, he’ll still have a knife on his belt. He may even be able to take his brother, Squire Piers, in with him, and he too may be armed.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no!”
“Oh yes! And we don’t know where he’s gone: back to Nottingham or straight to Dover? We don’t know where the king is. Neil does, and he certainly carries a royal warrant giving him royal authority, which I don’t.”
It was too late in the day to set out in pursuit, so our next step must be to catch and de-claw Corneille and his gang. Tomorrow we should have to begin the chase.
I found our spell-removing text in my pack, and this time Lovise made no objection to helping. We chanted at the warded door, and we both felt only a faint acceptance.
“Our villainous friends take no chances,” I said. I tested the door again, and it was still warded. As we had for Constable Richard, we tried the chant again. This time it seemed to have more effect, and at a third attempt we cleared the final spell and it was safe to enter the inner sanctum. Triple-warded! The conspirators took no chances.
We had no idea, of course, that Eadig had been in there less than an hour before us. We saw what he had: a bed, a desk, shelves of medicines, chairs, and some chests, at least one of which should hold the Satanists’ grimoires.
I closed the door, wishing it had a bolt on that side. “Let’s see what’s lurking in those boxes.”
“First let’s light some candles and close the shutters,” Lovise suggested, ever practical, so we began by doing that.
All four chests were warded, so we had work ahead of us. The first three chests contained nothing of interest to us, except a battered old grimoire. A quick glance inside showed that it contained healing spells. It might have belonged to the evicted and murdered healer, Bjarni, but he would have taken his books with him, so more likely it was Quentin’s, for he would need such recipes to act out his role as in-house healer.
“We’ll have to go through this,” I said, “in case some of these spells are not what they seem to be. But let’s hope fourth time lucky.”
The fourth chest was even more heavily warded than the door, and put us to a lot of trouble before we could lift the lid and peer inside. The first thing we saw was a fleece, or rather several fleeces sewn together to make a bedcover for winter nights. It was bulky and heavy, and the sort of thing that would be dumped tight at the bottom of a storage chest so it need not be lifted out until the cold weather came. I wasn’t going to be distracted by that fancy, though, so I hauled it out and found myself looking at boards, the bottom of the chest.
Disappointed, I stepped back and studied the matter. Why ward a bedspread? Was this just a distraction? The sight lines looked wrong . . . the bottom of the chest must be very thick . . . I reached in, hunting for concealed hinges or a catch to unlock a false bottom, and instead my fingers went right through the boards as if they weren’t there at all. They weren’t. I touched something that felt like a book, and lifted it out. It was exactly what I had hoped to find: another grimoire. Its covers were made of stout black oak, its clasps of solid brass, and it had a pentagram stamped on it in gold, with the number IV in the center.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Lovise said quietly. “If you’ll swear me a solemn oath that all your children will be as clever as you are, then I probably will have to marry you.”
“With you as their mother, they’ll be three times as smart.”
“Flattery is not what I asked for.”
“I’ll promise anything under the sun if it will make you marry me.”
“That statement does not inspire confidence in your veracity.”
“Stubborn wench! Then take this and I’ll see what else I can find that may move you.” I reached back through the box’s illusory floor, and ultimately brought out four more grimoires. At the cost of dirtying my fingers, I felt around every inch of that chest and could find nothing more.
But what I had found was more than enough to confirm all our fears. The books were identical, each much smaller than Harald Larson’s huge volume, smaller even than most in the Helmdon library, but beautifully crafted with pages of fine lambskin enclosed between oak covers held by shiny brass clasps. They were numbered from I to V. The text was a single incantation for five voices, in old Church Latin. Although it was written in an ancient minuscule hand, this was so finely done that it was not difficult to read. However, with five voices— Primus, Secundus, and so on—the logic was devilishly hard to follow.
We opened Book IV on the desk and began to study it—in silence, because I was afraid to speak a word of this foulness aloud and would not let Lovise do so. The text was the heart and core of Corneille’s evil. It could only be the black magic that had been invoked the previous night over the wretched prisoners then chained in the cellar. By the second page I felt physically ill: demons, devils, and human sacrifice! Whatever had we done to bring such iniquity into our land?
The text referred to “servants”, “offerings”, and “recruits”. It was obvious that the “servants” were the five Satanists chanting the incantation. The “offerings” were the victims they were now tendering, body and soul, as a price for the “service” they requested, meaning enslavement of the “recruits” to serve Satan in future in whatever acts the prime servant directed.
“Why are so many of the words underlined?” Lovise asked.
“Because . . . um . . . er . . . because,” I said triumphantly, “the only words underlined are ‘offerings’ and ‘recruits’. The ‘servants’ must always number five, but the ‘offerings’ and ‘recruits’ may be one person or more, so the forms of the words will change, singular or plural.”
“That must make it the very devil to chant.”
“Too true, but we are dealing with experts here, love.”
So now we could guess that Francois had been offered up as the price for the two d’Airelles’ enslavement. Had Eadig been discovered, he would have been dragged bodily to Hell also. I flipped to the final page and confirmed my conclusions: Neil and Piers would be turned into puppets, unable to resist any commands that the principal enchanter gave them.
I slammed the grimoire shut. “That’s enough!”
“Too much!” Lovise agreed.
“Let’s take these over to the kitchens and burn them,” I suggested. “Then no matter what happens, this monstrous evil will not contaminate the world again. Not hereabouts, anyway.”
Lovise took two of them, I tucked the other three under my arm and led the way to the door.
As I said, even then I was greatly underestimating the evildoers. Constable Lord Richard had been enchanted several times over, as had the door and the chest, so I should have been more cautious. I was in such a hurry that I barely heard the sudden thunder of the warning drum. Never before had I heard of a door being warded on both sides, but that one was. The moment I touched the latch, the curse hurled me backwards. I landed flat on my back in a heap of grimoires, totally unconscious.
Lovise was left by herself, with no way of removing the curse from me or the door. She was effectively locked in, and all the windows were barred.
chapter 20
“r etournez!”
Eadig was frozen, aching all over, and really, really, really in need of a pee. It was dark. He was lying on straw, but not much straw, on cobblestones stinking of horse dung. Huh? Then he remembered coming to the stable to get Ruffian . . . Corneille . . . Oh, shit!
“Get up!” The voice was familiar.
He struggled to obey. It wasn’t easy. His feet began screaming pins-and-needles at him.
“Need to pee!”
“Do it, then, but if you aim it at me I’ll have Odell smash all your teeth out.”
The horses wouldn’t
like it. Human pee didn’t smell right to them, but Eadig was past worrying. What time was it, anyway? Oo, that felt good . . .
The moment he pulled his britches back up, the voice told him to put his hands behind his back. It was Corneille’s voice, but that wasn’t surprising. The bastard roped his wrists tight enough to hurt. Then a rag was forced between his teeth and tied even tighter.
The enchanter said, “Bring him, Odell. If he causes any trouble, hit him.”
A hand the size of a saddle wrapped itself around Eadig’s neck and moved him. Causing trouble just wasn’t on the agenda. Staggering along on pins-and-needles feet was. Out of the stable, into the night . . . It was even darker out there, but the man in front, who must be Satanist Corneille, was setting a fierce pace, and the giant behind was keeping up, so Eadig had to. The hand around his neck was holding him up more often than it was pushing him forward. Could both men see in the dark? All Eadig could see was stars above the buildings. The Dipper the right way up meant it must be near midnight, and a pentacle at midnight meant black magic, and so whatever had happened to Sir Neil and Squire Piers was about to happen to Eadig son of Edwin.
Eadig the late son of Edwin.
They arrived at the sanctum. Two men-at-arms were standing outside, keeping guard over the door, but they were chatting and did not react at all to the new arrivals. Eadig was not taken close enough to them to lash out with a kick, and when he tried to make noises through his gag, Odell squeezed the pressure points under his ears hard enough to make him squeal like a tortured rabbit. The guards did not seem to hear anything. Eadig could—the Tambour drum was going crazy inside his head: da-DUM . . . da-DUM . . . da-DUM . . .
Either the door had been left ajar or its warding had been removed, because Corneille just pushed it open, without pausing to speak a password, and went in. Odell the giant pushed Eadig inside after him. Even the candles in the guard room were bright when your eyes had been working in darkness. The door to the inner sanctum was open, with more light coming from there. Quentin and another men were at the guard room table, chattering away in French . . . Quentin’s snaky eyes gleamed when he saw the prisoner arriving . . . a pile of books on the table, probably grimoires . . . the outer door thumped shut.
