A Time of Omens. Katharine Kerr
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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 shapes 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 at 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. Since, 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 stable behind a palisade that was missing as many logs as a peasant has 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 know. 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 tumbledown lodge, tied him on a loose rope to the wall and tended him, then dumped his bedroll and saddle-bags near the hearth, where there lay a sizable if dusty pile of firewood already cut, left by the hirelings of the dark dweomer-master 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