by David Drake
The creature reached for my head. I ducked sideways and slashed backhanded for its wrist. The hand flew away and thumped to the leaf litter. The creature took another step toward me; the hand, now a shapeless lump, crawled along the ground after it. Another hand was forming again at the end of the wrist. I backed away.
Baga was jumping about behind the creature, waving Osbourn’s weapon. He couldn’t even switch it on. “Baga, get out of here!” I shouted. “Go back to Histance!”
Sam was staying close and barking, but he wouldn’t close with the creature. Though he snapped and snarled, he couldn’t bring himself to take a mouthful of that crawling flesh. I didn’t blame him, and it wouldn’t have done any good: the severed hand had reached the nearer foot and merged again with the remainder of the creature.
I brought out my shield, wondering if it would block the grasping hands. The creature clawed through the shimmer just as an ordinary human could have—only a human would have collapsed after I thrust past the edge of the shield and ripped up from his belly. I smelled something burning, though it didn’t remind me of flesh; more like wet rags.
I backed again and shut off the shield; it was just a distraction. My shoulders slammed into the fallen tree trunk that I’d just walked around.
I lunged desperately at the creature, carving at the lump on top which I took for its head; I don’t know that it really was. The creature knocked me down. Before I could get up, it pinned my torso with its foot and leaned over me. Its eyes were widespread and mindless. The lower portion of the face opened into a broad jaw with teeth like the scutes on an alligator’s back.
I saw movement behind the creature and again screamed, “Baga, run!”
As the mouth lowered onto my face, a weapon snarled. The creature lurched upward like a hooked fish. Then it slumped into a reeking pile of garbage like dredgings from a harbor basin.
I tried to slide backward and hit my head on the tree. Using my arms to push myself up, I managed to get to my feet and scuttle sideways around what had been the monster.
“Lord Pal?” Osbourn said. “Are you all right, sir?”
I stared at him. He was holding his weapon; he’d just switched it off. Baga hung in the background, and Sam came around them to my right side to paw fiercely at me.
“Where did you come from, Osbourn?” I said. Then, “God be praised that you did!”
“Well, I heard you calling and I knew you’d come for me,” he said. “Sir, I always knew that you would. I saw you fighting the monster, so I took the weapon from Baga and tried to help.”
“Boss, I couldn’t use it,” Baga said. He sounded close to tears. “I told you that.”
“Nobody’s blaming you, Baga,” I said. “I can’t guide the boat like you do, either.”
I reached down to knead the skin of Sam’s head and neck. “Osbourn,” I said. “How did you manage to kill it? I’d cut it apart and it just came back at me.”
“That’s what happened to me too, sir,” Osbourn said. “There was another guy here—Count Thomas’s son, I thought, but we didn’t have time to talk because the monster attacked. He told me to run but I tried to fight it. It kept growing back together, so I did run.”
I went over to the creature’s body—the garbage pile, it looked and smelled. I remembered what I’d thought was a spear sticking out of the thing’s back; I prodded into the pile with my boot toe and touched something hard. I teased it out.
“Sir, what’s that?” Osbourn said. “There was a thing on the monster’s back. I hadn’t seen it when I was fighting the monster, but from behind I did.”
I squatted to look more closely at the object without picking it up. It was half a silvery spindle; an Ancient artifact of some sort. The end had been cut with a weapon; the edges had melted slightly in the direction the stroke had moved. I finally did touch it and used it to root around more in the body till I found the other half.
“I thought it was maybe a weapon, so I stabbed at it,” Osbourn said. “The monster hadn’t used a weapon on me, just tried to grab me like it did you.”
I dropped both pieces into my right tunic pocket. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to put my weapon away until we were back in Lord Thomas’s castle. I said, “Fidele’s notes said that the Queen’s son had been healed by a device, but that the healing hadn’t worked the right way. They finally had to imprison him. Maybe that spindle was the device.”
“That thing wasn’t anybody’s son!” Baga said. “That wasn’t ever human!”
“I’m not sure the Queen was human either,” I said, looking at him. “Fidele was very cagey about a lot of what he said.”
“It’s a shame Fidele isn’t here to ask,” Osbourn said as he returned his weapon to its holster. His shield was still balancing the other side of his rig.
“I’m not sure I agree,” I said. “I think King Fidele had friends of a sort of that I don’t like. I’m not sure he and I would’ve gotten on.”
“Do we go back now, sir?” Baga said.
He clearly wasn’t interested in what had happened generations ago. I decided that I didn’t have to be either, not just now.
“Yeah,” I said. “And we’ll hope we run into Lord Herbert on the way.”
CHAPTER 23
Taking Stock
We walked back through the forest. Baga was whistling, and Sam frequently circled around to have his scalp rubbed.
I was seeing my surroundings for the first time. Until now I’d been too keyed up to really take in anything that didn’t seem about to attack me. The tree trunks ranged from gray/reddish for the ones that looked a bit like pines and green/brown for the ones with diamond bark.
I suddenly laughed. I guess that was my way of reacting to the lack of tension. The others looked at me. I shrugged and said, “Osbourn? What are you thinking about?”
“Getting a meal in Histance,” he said with a wry smile. “You fellows didn’t happen to bring some food along, did you?”
“There’s the spout in the building,” I said, pointing to the structure as we approached it. “I can’t say much for the flavor, but I took a taste when we were coming past and it hasn’t poisoned me. And Herbert’s been eating it for as long as he’s been here.”
We went into the crystal building. There’d be people who’d be more interested in it as a huge diamond than I was to see a large Ancient artifact, but I hoped that only a Maker would identify it as diamond. Certainly I wasn’t going to tell anybody but Guntram and maybe Louis about what I’d found.
I demonstrated the converter to Osbourn—“It’s just like the ones in the boat”—and washed my fingers off in the water jet while Osbourn experimented.
Baga was playing with a piece of what I thought was wood. I looked more closely and said, “Baga? What’s that you’ve got there?”
He held it out to me. Close-up I recognized the teeth of the creature I’d been fighting. I’d last seen them about to close on my face.
“I didn’t figure it’d hurt to take this,” Baga said, holding it out to me. “I thought I could carve it into something for Maggie. It looks like tortoise-shell, don’t it?”
If he can touch it, so can I, I thought. Stiff-faced, I took the—upper jaw, I supposed?—between my left thumb and index finger. It was light and flexed slightly. When I held it against the brightest portion of the sky, a little light came through. The material was formed in vertical layers and the edge seemed almost vanishingly sharp.
I handed the jaw back; it wasn’t something I’d want to give to May, but with a nice bit of carving it might be just the ticket for Maggie. “I hope she’ll like it,” I said.
We started off through the building’s other opening. “That thing wasn’t ever human, was it?” Lord Osbourn said.
“I doubt it,” I said. “But the artifact that repaired its body—we don’t know how much it changed whatever the body was to begin with. A lot, certainly.”
As we neared the hole I’d made to the Road, I shouted, “Lord Herbert
!” a couple times. Osbourn and Baga joined me—with no response.
When we passed through the curtain and onto the Road, Herbert was waiting for us, looking anguished. “You got away from the monster, then?” he said when he saw me.
“We killed the creature,” I said. “Lord Osbourn did, that is.”
Sam started straight off for the entrance to Histance. Through his eyes I saw an undifferentiated border of gray-green willows on both margins of the Road.
“I didn’t know which way to go,” Herbert said. “I’d been drinking with Arcone, and then when I woke up in the morning I was in that place.” He gestured over his shoulder. “Where was it, anyway?”
“I suspect it was originally part of the same node as Histance,” I said. “Somebody, a Maker of some sort, cut it off from the Road but he made a tunnel between the two parts. I don’t have any idea how he did those things, but I was able to open the old connection to the Road. I’d like a real expert to look at it. I’d like to bring Master Guntram here.”
Nothing I’d done since I learned Guntram had vanished seemed to have brought me any closer to finding him. I had a better notion of the sort of place he must be in, though. The knowledge weighed on me like a basket of sand.
“The bones that held the monster together,” Baga said unexpectedly. “They were like strips of this, only thinner and clear. They don’t look like bones, but I saw them on Magdalene when they were catching squid to put in the mounds where they planted seeds. They call ’em pens.”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like it was ever human,” I said, but we still didn’t know any more than we had at the start when the creature attacked us. What I really wondered was whether I’d just met the last surviving member of the Ancients. There wasn’t any way to answer that either.
Sam led us straight to the blur that was the entrance to Histance. We walked through the mist and into a real crowd at landingplace. Quite a lot of the people were civilians from the town, though there were plenty wearing red sleeves. There was a squad in white sleeves also, but Lord Alfred himself wasn’t present and I didn’t feel the hostility there’d been when my boat arrived.
The spectators started chattering loudly—none of them saying anything that mattered, at least that I heard. They weren’t pushing close, maybe because Lord Osbourn and I both had our weapons in our hands.
Count Thomas was dozing on a couch under a canvas fly. He lurched up when the noise woke him and pushed through the crowd instead of using his voice and rank to clear the way.
“Lord Pal!” he shouted. “Did you find any sign of Herbert?”
“Dad!” Herbert shouted and rushed to him. I don’t think anybody had recognized Lord Herbert until them. He was filthy and dressed like a swineherd, and I guess he’d lost a lot of weight besides.
I went into the boat to place the pieces of the artifact in a cabinet so that I could drop my weapon in its usual pocket again. Baga came in with me. He stayed when I went back out to address the crowd from the top step of the hatchway.
I raised my hands. It took a moment, but things quieted down without my having to switch on my weapon to get attention. Count Thomas came closer, pulling his son along by the arm. This time spectators got out of his way without having to be pushed.
“People of Histance!” I shouted. “Lord Herbert is back safe from where the Count’s own employee tried to hide him! There’s no reason to fight now, none!”
There was a general hiss and rustle from the crowd. Count Thomas was trying to say something to me but I ignored him.
I gestured to the squad of Lord Alfred’s men. “One of you lot go tell Lord Alfred that it’s all over now. Tell him to be here at my boat in three hours. I’m going explain to him and Count Thomas both about the Leader’s decision on the place Histance will have in the Commonwealth!”
Two white-sleeved retainers started off up the path to the right. Before they’d gotten out of sight, all their companions were running after them. There was a lot of excitement. Even though there wasn’t any reason for hostility, it’s never fun to watch your friends moving away when everybody around is keyed up.
I stepped down and faced the Count for the first time. “Your lordship?” I said. “I think your son is in the mood for a real meal. And by heaven, so am I!”
The meal was a stew of a sort that was common in the better sorts of households on Beune. Every time there was a bit of extra from a meal, it was added to a stock that had been simmering for months or even years on the back of a stove. The housewife—the cook, here in the castle—added liquid when it got low, and the family members had bowls when there was nothing special planned for the meal. If the stew was spiced well—and this was—the result was tasty and filling—exactly what I wanted after a day in which I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.
Lord Herbert tucked in with similar enthusiasm. He topped it off with two bottles of wine and was opening a third when I rose and said, “Count Thomas, thank you very much. I’m going to the boat now and expect you to join me—”
I paused to calculate how long it had been since sundown.
“—and Lord Alfred in half an hour or so.”
The Count swallowed and bowed his head in agreement.
I asked a servant to fetch Baga from the kitchen or wherever he’d gotten off to. Sam was waiting at the door and walked me and Osbourn down the track to the boat.
Osbourn leaned close and murmured, “I didn’t realize that the Leader had given you instructions about the settlement on Histance.”
I smiled at his delicacy. Lord Osbourn really was a clever fellow. From his upbringing, he probably understood politics at governmental level better than I did.
Aloud I said, “Jon knew only the high spots of what was going on here. He didn’t know anything at all about the people involved. He told me to solve the problem, and he trusted that I’d solve it in a fashion he approved of.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m going to hope that he was right,” I said.
There were still forty or fifty spectators at landingplace, though there wasn’t much to see except to watch the grass growing. Folks perked up when Osbourn, Baga, and I arrived, but I wasn’t going to do anything more exciting than the grass was. I hoped not, anyway.
Lord Alfred came just after us. With Alfred were a dozen men of his bodyguard, but he left them at the head of the path from his domain and walked on alone to where I sat on the boat’s top step rubbing the loose skin of Sam’s head.
This was my first chance to look closely at the miner. His beard was short and had less gray in it than the close-cropped hair of his head did.
He smiled wryly and me and said, “Am I here to negotiate? Or just to listen?”
“Just to listen, I’m afraid,” I said. “If you two had been able to negotiate, I wouldn’t be here at all.”
Alfred shrugged, still wearing a sort of a smile. He said, “I wish I could argue with that.”
The Count and his son arrived with a dozen retainers, but not all of them were members of his bodyguard. When he saw me with Alfred at the hatch, he spoke to the entourage. They stayed behind while he and Lord Herbert joined us. Herbert had bathed and was in fresh clothes—which hung loosely on him—but his eyes were haunted and his complexion wasn’t good.
“Let’s all go inside,” I said, rising to my feet. “The furnishings aren’t much, but nobody’ll interrupt us.”
Sam went to the compartment he shared with me, and Baga went outside to stretch out a folding chair on the opposite—shaded—side of the boat. I closed the hatch and rotated the boatman’s seat around to face the others. I took the seat partly to avoid an argument as to who got it, and partly because the cockpit area was crowded with five people in it.
“The Leader will be sending out a colony shortly,” I said. “I don’t know how big initially but it’ll grow. And it’ll support a garrison to keep the peace on Histance. That’ll be thirty sold
iers or so, maybe fifty—somebody else’ll decide that, and it may change. Until the colony is capable of supporting the garrison on its own, you two—”
I nodded toward the landowners, one and then the other, “—will be assessed for its maintenance. That’s in addition to your current tribute to the Commonwealth.”
“Bloody hell!” the Count said. “On what grounds?”
Because I say so, flashed through my mind, but I said, “There were at least fifty armed men here at landingplace when we arrived, and I’m sure an audit will find more than a hundred between you. You can pay off your private armies now and still save money after you’ve covered the upkeep of the Leader’s garrison.”
Thomas glared at me but didn’t respond. Lord Alfred said, “Where will you be placing this colony? Sorry—” ironically “—where will the Leader be placing this colony?”
I grinned at him. Lord Alfred didn’t look like a scholar, but he was a very clever man who cut to the core of a question even before I’d raised it.
“The colony and garrison will be in the node which Lord Osbourn and I just opened and made habitable,” I said. “Cleared of its monster, that is. It doesn’t have a name at present, but the Leader will give it one. And he’ll send some people out to decide what sort of business the colonists ought to focus on, because I’m hanged if I know.”
“That’s part of my territory!” Count Thomas said. “It’s not fair that you take all the land you need from me.”
Osbourn laughed and tapped Lord Herbert. “Say, Herbert? You want to explain to your father how you were making out on what he says is his land? Before we arrived, that is.”
“Dad, drop it,” Herbert said, his eyes on the floor. “Just drop it, all right? You’re being dumb.”
I didn’t have anything to add to that, so I nodded and said, “You can all go back to your holdings, now.”
I opened the hatch. As the landowners moved toward it. Thomas and Alfred eyed one another, apparently to avoid colliding in the hatchway.
“One moment, gentlemen,” Lord Osbourn said, surprising me even more than it did our three visitors. When everybody was looking at him, Osbourn said, “Lord Pal is a smart man, very bloody smart. He hasn’t made a dumb mistake in all the time I’ve known him.”