*
Kenna staggered and sat down heavily on the sand, swaying and feeling for the ground as though drunk. Blood was pouring from her nose and down her mouth and chin.
‘What’s . . .’ Andres Vierny leaped up, but all of a sudden seized his head in both hands, opened his mouth and uttered a croak. He stared at Stigward with eyes wide open, but blood was already dripping from the pirate’s nose and ears and his eyes had clouded over. Andres dropped to his knees, looking at Neratin Ceka, who was standing to one side and watching impassively.
‘Nera . . . tin . . . Help . . .’
Ceka didn’t move. He was looking at the girl. She turned her eyes on him and he tottered.
‘It’s not necessary,’ he quickly forestalled. ‘I’m on your side. I want to help you. Here, I’ll cut through your bonds . . . Take the knife, cut through the collar yourself. I’ll fetch the horses.’
‘Ceka . . .’ Andres Vierny stammered out, choking. ‘You trai—’
The girl struck him with a gaze and he fell onto Stigward, who was lying motionless and curled up in a foetal position. Kenna still couldn’t stand up. Sticky drops of blood dripped onto her chest and stomach.
‘Alarm!’ yelled Chloe Stitz, suddenly appearing from behind the cottages and dropping a mutton rib. ‘Alaaaaarm! Silifant! Skellen! The girl’s getting away!’
Ciri was already mounted. She was holding a sword.
‘Yaaaaaa, Kelpie!’
‘Alaaaaaaarm!’
Kenna was clawing the sand. She couldn’t get up. Her legs were totally unresponsive, as though made of wood. A psionic, she thought. I’ve encountered a super-psionic. The girl is about ten times stronger than me . . . I’m lucky she didn’t kill me . . . How come I’m still conscious?
A group was now running from the cottages, led by Ola Harsheim, Bert Brigden and Til Echrade, and the guards from the gate – Dacre Silifant and Boreas Mun – hurried into the courtyard. Ciri wheeled her horse around, yelled and galloped towards the river. But armed men were already running from there.
Skellen and Bonhart dashed out of the hall. Bonhart holding his sword. Neratin Ceka yelled, rode his horse at them and knocked them both down. Then he hurled himself, straight from the saddle, at Bonhart and pinned him to the ground. Rience dashed out onto the threshold and looked on, dumbfounded.
‘Seize her!’ Skellen roared, springing up from the ground. ‘Seize her or kill her!’
‘Alive!’ Rience howled. ‘Aliiiive!’
Kenna saw Ciri driven away from the riverside palisade, rein her mare around and speed towards the gate. She saw Kabernik Turent leap forward and try to drag her from the saddle, saw a sword flash and a crimson outpouring gush from Turent’s neck. Dede Vargas and Fripp the younger also saw it. They decided not to bar the girl’s way, but bolted between the shacks.
Bonhart jumped to his feet, pushed Neratin Ceka away with a blow of his sword pommel and smote him terribly, diagonally across his breast, and then raced after Ciri. Neratin, slit open and spurting blood, managed to catch him by the legs, and only released him when he was skewered to the sand with the point of a sword. But those few seconds of delay were sufficient. The girl spurred her mare, fleeing from Silifant and Mun. Skellen came up stealthily and wolf-like from the left, and swung an arm. Kenna saw something sparkle in flight, saw the girl writhe and sway in the saddle and a fountain of blood erupt from her face. She leaned back so far that for a moment she was lying on the mare’s croup. She didn’t fall but straightened up and remained in the saddle, then pressed herself to the horse’s neck. The black mare jostled the armed men and raced straight for the gate. Behind her ran Mun, Silifant and Chloe Stitz with a crossbow.
‘She won’t jump it! She’s ours!’ Mun yelled triumphantly. ‘No horse can clear seven feet!’
‘Don’t shoot, Chloe!’
Chloe Stitz didn’t hear in the general uproar. She stopped. Put the crossbow to her cheek. It was widely known that Chloe never missed.
‘She’s dead meat!’ she cried. ‘Dead meat!’
Kenna saw a man whose name she didn’t know run forward, raise a crossbow and shoot Chloe point-blank in the back. The bolt passed right through her in an explosion of blood. Chloe dropped without a sound.
The mare reached the gate and drew back its head a little. And jumped. It soared and quite simply scaled the gate, gracefully gathered up its fore hooves and streamed over it like a black silk ribbon. Its curled hind hooves didn’t even brush the upper bar.
‘Ye Gods!’ screamed Dacre Silifant. ‘Ye Gods, what a horse! Worth its weight in gold!’
‘The mare goes to whoever catches her!’ Skellen screamed. ‘To horse! Mount up and after her!’
The search party galloped through the finally open gate, kicking up dust. Bonhart and Boreas Mun galloped ahead of everyone.
Kenna stood up with effort. And immediately staggered and sat down heavily on the sand. Her legs were tingling painfully.
Kabernik Turent wasn’t moving, but lay in a red puddle with arms and feet splayed apart. Andres Vierny tried hard to lift the still-unconscious Stigward.
Chloe Stitz, huddled up on the sand, seemed as tiny as a child.
Ola Harsheim and Bert Brigden dragged the short man, the one who’d killed Chloe, before Skellen. Tawny Owl was panting and trembling with fury. From the bandolier slung across his chest he took out another orion, the same kind of steel star he had wounded the girl’s face with a moment earlier.
‘May you rot in hell, Skellen,’ said the short man. Kenna recalled his name. Mekesser. Jediah Mekesser. A Gemmerian. She had first met him in Rocayne.
Tawny Owl stooped and swung his arm vigorously. The six-toothed star whined in the air and plunged deeply into Mekesser’s face, between his eye and nose. He didn’t even cry out when hit, but simply began shaking violently and spasmodically in Harsheim and Brigden’s grip. He shook for a long time and bared his teeth so ghoulishly that everybody turned their heads away. Everybody except Tawny Owl.
‘Pull my orion from him, Ola,’ said Stefan Skellen, when at last the corpse was hanging inertly in the two men’s arms. ‘And bury that scum in the muck, with that other scum, the hermaphrodite. Not a trace shall remain of those two execrable traitors.’
The wind suddenly howled and clouds massed. It suddenly became dark.
*
The guards on the citadel walls shouted. The Scarra sisters were snoring a duet. Kohut pissed noisily into the empty bucket. Kenna pulled the blanket up under her chin. She was thinking back.
They didn’t catch the girl. She vanished. Simply vanished. Boreas Mun – unprecedentedly – lost the black mare’s trail after about three miles. Suddenly, without warning, it became dark, the wind flattening trees almost to the ground. The rain lashed down, nay, even thunder rumbled and lightning flashed.
Bonhart didn’t give up. They returned to Unicorn. They all yelled at one another, interrupting and shouting each other down: Bonhart, Tawny Owl, Rience and the fourth, mysterious, inhuman, croaking voice. Then they ordered the entire hanza to mount up, unlike those – like me – who were unable to ride. They banded together peasants with torches and drove them into the forests. They returned just before dawn.
With nothing. If you didn’t count the horror in their eyes.
The tales, Kenna recalled, only began a few days later. In the beginning everyone was too afraid of Tawny Owl and Bonhart. They were so furious it was better to get out of their way. Even Bert Brigden, an officer, was hit across the head with the handle of a knout for some imprudent word.
But later people talked about what had happened during the chase. About the tiny straw unicorn from the little chapel that suddenly grew to the size of a dragon and scared the horses so much the riders fell from them, only miraculously avoiding breaking their necks. About the cavalcade of fiery-eyed apparitions galloping across the sky on skeleton horses led by a terrible skeleton king ordering his phantom servants to wipe out the black mare’s hoof prints with their ragg
ed cloaks. About the macabre choir of goatsucker nightjars, calling: “Liiiquorrrr of blood, liiiquorrrr of blood!” About the horrific wailing of the ghastly beann’shie, the harbinger of death . . .
The wind, rain, clouds, bushes and fantastically-shaped trees, and fear, which turns everything into nightmares, commented Boreas Mun, who had been there, after all. That’s the whole explanation. But the nightjars? The nightjars were screaming, as nightjars always do, he added.
And the trail, the hoof prints, which suddenly vanish, as though the horse had flown up into the heavens?
The face of Boreas Mun, a tracker able to track down a fish in water, stiffened at the question. The wind, he answered, the wind covered the tracks with sand and foliage. There’s no other explanation.
Some people even believed, Kenna recalled. Some people even believed that they were all natural or predictable phenomena. And even laughed at them.
But they stopped laughing. After Dun Dare. No one laughed after Dun Dare.
*
He stepped back involuntarily and sucked in air on seeing her.
She had mixed goose lard with soot from the chimney and with the greasepaint thus created had blackened her eye sockets and eyelids, extending them with long lines to her ears and temples.
She looked like a demon.
‘From the fourth tussock up to the high forest, keeping to the very edge,’ he repeated the directions. ‘Then along the river until you get to three dead trees, and then due west through a hornbeam woodland. When you see the pines, ride along the edge and count the tracks. Turn into the ninth and don’t turn off after that. Then it’ll be the Dun Dare settlement, there’s a hamlet on the north side. A few cottages. And beyond them, at the crossroads, a tavern.’
‘I remember. I’ll make it, don’t worry.’
‘Be most vigilant at the bends in the river. Beware of places where the reeds thin out. And places covered in knotgrass. And should darkness overtake you before the pine forest, stop and wait until morning. Under no circumstances ride across the bogs at night. It’s almost a new moon now, and the clouds—’
‘I know.’
‘As far as the Lake Land goes . . . Head north, across the hills. Avoid main roads, the main roads are heaving with soldiers. When you get to a river, a large river, which is called the Sylte, you’re over halfway.’
‘I know. I have the map you drew.’
‘Oh, yes. Indeed.’
Ciri checked her harness and saddlebags yet again. Mechanically. Not knowing what to say. Putting off what had to be said.
‘It was agreeable to have you to stay,’ he forestalled her. ‘Truly. Farewell, O witcher girl.’
‘Farewell, O hermit. Thank you for everything.’
She was already in the saddle, already prepared to click her tongue at Kelpie, when he came over and took her arm.
‘Ciri. Stay. See out the winter . . .’
‘I’ll reach the lake before the frosts. But later, if it’s as you said, nothing will matter any longer. I’ll teleport back to Thanedd. To the school in Aretuza. To Madam Rita . . . Vysogota . . . Like it used to be . . .’
‘The Tower of the Swallow is a legend. Remember, it’s just a legend.’
‘I’m just a legend,’ she said bitterly. ‘Have been since my birth. Zireael, the Swallow, the Unexpected Child. The Chosen One. The Child of Destiny. The Child of the Elder Blood. I’m going, Vysogota. Farewell.’
‘Farewell, Ciri.’
*
The tavern by the crossroads past the hamlet was empty. Cyprian Fripp the younger and his three companions had forbidden the local people from entering and drove away travellers. They, however, spent their time eating and drinking, never leaving the smoky, gloomy tavern, which smelled as a tavern usually does in winter when the doors and windows are kept shut – of sweat, cats, mice, footwraps, pinewood, farts, fat, burnt food and wet, steaming clothing.
‘Sod this rotten place,’ centurion Yuz Jannowitz, a Gemmerian, said for probably the hundredth time, gesturing towards the serving wenches to bring him vodka. ‘Damn that Tawny Owl. Ordering us to hunker down in this mangy hole! I’d sooner be riding through forests with the patrols!’
‘Then you must be stupid,’ replied Dede Vargas. ‘It’s bloody freezing outside! I’d druther be here in the warm. With the maid close at hand!’
He slapped the wench hard on the bottom. She squealed, not very convincingly and with evident apathy. She was slow-witted, to tell the truth. Working in a tavern had only taught her that when they slap or pinch you, you should squeal.
Cyprian Fripp and his company had already begun to take advantage of the two serving wenches the day after arriving. The innkeeper was afraid to complain and the wenches too dim-witted to think about protesting . . . Life had taught them that if a wench protested she got hit. It was more judicious, usually, to wait till they get bored.
‘That there Falka,’ Rispat La Pointe, bored, took up another stock topic of their bored evening conversations, ‘croaked somewhere in the forests, I tell you. I saw Skellen slice her face open with the orion and the blood shooting out in a fountain! She can’t have come through that, I tell you!’
‘Tawny Owl missed her,’ Yuz Jannowitz stated. ‘He barely scratched her with the orion. Granted he carved her face up good and proper, saw it for myself. But did it stop the wench jumping the gate? Did she fall from her horse? Not a chance! And we measured the gate afterwards: seven foot effing two. And? She jumped it! And then what! You couldn’t have stuck a knife blade between the saddle and her little arse.’
‘Blood was pouring from her,’ protested Rispat La Pointe. ‘She rode away, I’m telling you, rode off and then fell and croaked in a hollow somewhere. Wolves and birds ate the carcass, martens finished it off, and ants. That’s the end, deireadh. So we’re sitting here in vain, drinking our money away. Our money, it is, for I don’t seem to see any pay!’
‘It can’t be that no traces or signs of a corpse are left,’ said Dede Vargas with conviction. ‘Something’s always left: the skull, pelvis or one of the bigger bones. Rience, that sorcerer, will eventually find Falka’s remains. Then the matter will be over.’
‘And perhaps then they’ll drive us so hard we’ll recall with delight this idleness and this lousy pigsty.’ Cyprian Fripp the younger threw a bored glance at the tavern’s walls, on which he already knew every nail and every damp patch. ‘And that poxy booze. And those two, what smell of onions, and when you rut them they lie like calves, staring at the ceiling and picking their teeth.’
‘Everything’s better than this tedium,’ Yuz Jannowitz stated. ‘I feel like howling! Let’s fucking do something! Anything! Shall we torch the village or what?’
The door creaked. The sound was so unexpected that all four of them leaped up from their seats.
‘Scram!’ Dede Vargas roared. ‘Get out, old man! Beggar! Filthy bastard! Get back outside!’
‘Leave him.’ Fripp, bored, waved an arm. ‘See, he’s lugging some pipes. He’s just a beggar, probably an old soldier who earns a crust by playing and singing in taverns. It’s cold and rainy outside. Let him stay . . .’
‘Just well away from us.’ Yuz Jannowitz showed the beggar where to sit. ‘Or we’ll be crawling with lice. I can see from here what specimens are crawling over him. You’d think they were tortoises, not lice.’
‘Give him some victuals, landlord!’ Fripp the younger beckoned imperiously, ‘And us some hooch!’
The beggar took off his bulky fur hat and solemnly gave off a stench that filled the room.
‘Thanks be to you, m’lord,’ he said. ‘For today is Samhain’s Eve, a holy day. It doesn’t befit to drive anyone away on a holy day, to be soaked and frozen in the rain. It befits to regale a body on a holy day . . .’
‘In truth!’ Rispat La Pointe slapped himself in the forehead. ‘Today is Samhain’s Eve! The end of October!’
‘A night of witchcraft.’ The beggar slurped the watery broth he was brought. ‘A night
of ghosts and horrors!’
‘Oho!’ said Yuz Jannowitz. ‘The old gimmer, heed you, is about to divert us with beggarly tales!’
‘Let him divert us,’ Dede Vargas yawned. ‘Anything’s better than this boredom!’
‘Samhain,’ repeated Cyprian Fripp the younger. ‘It’s already five weeks since Unicorn. And two weeks that we’ve been here. Two whole weeks! Samhain, ha!’
‘A night of portents.’ The beggar licked the spoon, fished something out of the bowl with a finger and ate it. ‘A night of dread and witchcraft!’
‘What did I say?’ Yuz Jannowitz grinned. ‘We’ll have a beggar’s tale!’
The beggar sat up straight, scratched himself and hiccoughed.
‘Samhain Eve,’ he began with emphasis, ‘the last night before the November new moon, is the last night of the old year to the elves and when the new day dawns it’ll be their New Year. Thus there is among the elves a custom that on the night of Samhain every fire in the homestead and yard should be lit with a single pitch taper, and the rest of the taper stowed well away until May, when Beltane is kindled with the same flame. Then, they say, there will be prosperity. Not only elves do thus; some of our folk do likewise. To protect themselves from evil spirits . . .’
‘Ghosts!’ Yuz snorted. ‘Just listen to the old fart!’
‘It’s Samhain night!’ the beggar said in an excited voice. ‘On this night spirits walk the earth! The spirits of the dead knock on the windows. “Let us in,” they moan, “let us in”. Then they should be given honey and groats, all sprinkled with vodka . . .’
‘I’d sooner sprinkle my own throat with vodka,’ Rispat La Pointe chortled. ‘And your ghosts, old man, can kiss me right here.’
‘Oh, m’lord, don’t make fun of ghosts, they’re liable to hear, and they’re vengeful! Today it’s Samhain Eve, a night of dread and witchcraft! Prick up your eyes, do you hear something rustling and tapping all about? It’s the dead coming from the beyond, they want to steal into homesteads, to warm themselves by the fire and eat their fill. There, over the bare stubble fields and leafless forests rages a gale and a frost, the poor ghosts are chilled, so they head towards homesteads where there’s fire and warmth. Then one mustn’t forget to put out food for them in a bowl on the step, or on the threshing floor, for if the phantoms find nothing there, they go into cottages themselves after midnight, to search for—’
The Saga of the Witcher Page 147
