by Kevin Hearne
Ya-ping was visibly relieved to get on the trail. She set a rather quick pace, in fact, which had Buck complaining before long, as he had to break into a jog to keep up.
“Ye all have legs that are longer than ma whole body,” he pointed out. “I should have stolen a motor scooter for this.”
He was given a break after a kilometer or so when we discovered three more victims of the turtle dragon spider. A middle-aged married couple, judging by their matching wedding bands, lay sprawled on the path with their entrails yanked from their torsos; perhaps a hundred meters farther along was a younger man, dressed in the uniform of a park ranger. I mentally revised the number of mystery cars down to three, assuming that the ranger and the hikers accounted for two cars in the park.
Burying them, erasing evidence, and erecting small cairns to mark the spots for later took us past six, and the sun was flirting with the horizon. Ya-ping was mildly revolted by the proceedings but much more worried about her master and anxious to keep going.
[Any of these people might be missed,] I said, [but it depends if they told anyone where they were going. The park ranger will definitely be missed and looked for, because his colleagues would know he was out here and will miss him checking in either tonight or tomorrow morning.]
“I should have fetched the dead drop earlier. I should have called you earlier,” Ya-ping said, her bottom lip quivering. She’d just witnessed some horror-movie levels of gore, and that wasn’t common to the lived experience of people in Glen Waverley. She was looking over that Grand Canyon of if only that I’d been gazing into some minutes before and feeling the same doubts and guilt.
[Nonsense,] I told her. [You acted precisely as you should have. If you’d called too early and she proved to be fine, I imagine you would have been scolded for being alarmist.]
“But what if that thing—or some other things—tore her up and left her like these others? Or if she’s trapped and needs help?”
[We can only hope we reach her in time.]
Unfortunately, another five hundred meters brought us to another pair of deaths. That one creature had been stupendously destructive. And after burying them in their turn, we were past seven and the light was waning. In theory we could have kept going, with sigils for night vision, but it had been an extraordinarily long day for Buck and me, since we’d begun it around our bedtime in Scotland. We agreed that we’d need to camp for the night and trudged another couple of hundred meters, worried that we’d find more bodies, but we instead found a nice level stretch where we could pitch tents.
Ya-ping got out her mozzy gear, but Connor waved that off. “Don’t worry about that stuff. I’ve got you covered.”
“How so?”
“I’ve asked the elemental to keep insects and spiders away from us. Small perk of traveling with a Druid.”
“That trick only works on regular spiders, then? Not turtle dragon spiders?” she said.
Connor snorted. “No, they’re Fae. We’ll have to deal with them ourselves.”
“Can ye sense any of the normal spiders around here?” Buck asked.
“Sure, if I wanted to have the elemental find them for me.”
“Do ye know if any of them are as big as me?”
“Well, not quite. Huntsman spiders can get to be about half your size. Don’t worry, none will bother you.”
My hobgoblin looked up at me. “Ye’ve been telling tall tales, ol’ man, and now they’ve come up a bit short. But I’m relieved. Ye had me worried that Australia was gonnay kill me. All I have tae do now is worry about unnatural causes of death, and I can most likely push you in front of the jaws first.”
Connor had a bedroll but no tent, since he never worried about the elements or things nibbling on him in the night. He was able to finish his preparations quickly and build a small campfire for us as we got our tents set up. With the elemental’s help, he also managed to get some decent-sized boulders to scoot across the earth and arrange themselves in a circle, creating quite the comfortable campground for us.
We had nothing to cook, just prepacked meals that required no heat, so the campfire was for comfort, Connor said. Ya-ping didn’t appear very comforted by it, but she did appreciate Starbuck jumping into her lap for pets.
Connor idly petted Oberon, who was curled up at his feet, and said that our current travails brought to mind echoes of days long past.
[How long past, exactly?] I asked.
“Long enough that I wasn’t the Iron Druid yet. I was just a Druid who’d managed to live longer than he should have. It was two thousand years ago, or close enough to make no never mind.”
Oberon woofed softly and wagged his tail, and Connor grinned.
“Yes, Oberon, it’s story time.” He looked around at us. “That is, if you’re all in the mood for one.”
We all nodded at him and he smiled.
“So be it.”
I left Ireland and came to the European continent in the first century of the Common Era. I was on the run from a fraternity of Irish gods because I’d stolen an enchanted sword they wanted to keep in Ireland. Every day I remained alive was a victory—and that’s still true, honestly. But it was also true for everyone living at that time, because scraping out an existence was difficult. Gods, the air was so clean and easy to breathe back then. But everything else was hard. Life expectancy was low to begin with, due to malnutrition and disease, but a violent death could come at any time. Anyone could come through and put you to the sword or simply steal the food you were depending on to survive the winter. The Romans could come calling, and that was never good, because you’d always be poorer for the visit. You’d be robbed at minimum, even if they called it a tribute, but there was also a good chance you’d wind up being enslaved or killed. They called themselves civilized and everyone else barbarians. I wound up either avoiding them or fighting them until they fell, since vampires were the true power behind that empire. And if they didn’t get you—or any other band of bastards that thought might made right—you could step into the wrong bog or forest and disappear into the belly of some monster or else some god or demon. Lots of lives ended too soon that way. It was still largely a pagan time, and many gods remained active across the earth. The veil between the planes was thin and easily passed through by all manner of entities.
I lived for a time with a tribe called the Chauci, who were settled near the Elbe River in what is modern-day Hamburg, Germany. They were eventually assimilated into the Saxons, but at that time they were sea raiders along the coast and cattle farmers in the interior—farming and raiding were the two main paths to prosperity, each with its own set of risks. If you farmed, you had to worry about protecting your crop, because raiders would try to take it. If you raided, you had to worry about well-defended farms. My own father, in fact, lost his life trying to raid another village. It was the way of things. And pretty much everyone tried to avoid the forests where possible; people too often disappeared. There were wolves, witches, wizards, and all manner of dangers hiding in the trees. These were not things that I feared, but I pretended to so that no one would think that I was to be feared.
I was already a stranger and didn’t speak their language fluently and was barely tolerated. Only the facts that I could hunt well, shared my kills generously, and seemed to have a knack for taming horses allowed me a place among them. Even so, I farmed a plot far away from prying eyes, near a dark forest, where I could remain a harmless curiosity and hopefully avoid any village drama.
The village drama, alas, did not avoid me.
There was a single inn, and when I say inn I mean a slightly larger-than-normal lodge with a slightly larger-than-normal hearth and exactly one beer on tap. The menu was always stew and a hunk of bread, and while the quality and ingredients of the stew varied, the bread was always good. I ingratiated myself with the owner, Gebhart, by bringing him some herbs I’d grown to throw into h
is stews. He got such rave reviews for adding actual flavors to his cooking that he asked me for more, and gradually it spread throughout the village that I knew how to make one’s sad vegetables taste less miserable.
Gebhart was a stout man in his mid-thirties with a bushy black beard going prematurely grey—he’d already lived longer than his own father had and counted himself as having lived a full life. He had a younger wife, named Gerlind, tall and pale and widely considered to be the beauty of the region. She was the one who baked the excellent bread and also looked after their children while Gebhart looked after customers.
Several men of the village, unfortunately, looked after Gerlind whenever she passed by, their eyes lingering longer than they should, and I noted them. One in particular was Behrtoald, who made little effort to disguise his lust. He made lewd jokes and suggestions to Gerlind, and for some while she attempted to laugh these off. Then she stopped laughing and told him it wasn’t appropriate, and he laughed off her reaction. Eventually, however, he pushed it too far, and I was there to see it happen. I didn’t understand exactly what he said to her as she passed by his table, but she whirled on him and shouted immediately for Gebhart. She repeated what Behrtoald had said, pointed to everyone in the room as witnesses, and demanded that he be banned forevermore from setting foot in the inn. Gebhart, of course, issued the decree, and Behrtoald’s attempt to apologize was shouted down. He was escorted out rather forcefully by a trio of men, including Gebhart, and told never to return. And since Gebhart’s inn was the only gathering place for literal miles, he’d essentially been cut off from the town’s social life. I heard him cursing outside for a good while, but eventually he quieted and went home.
A few days later, Gebhart was at my home. He was taking a day off, as he occasionally did, to get out and enjoy some time for himself. He liked to hunt, and I’d told him there was good hunting in the woods behind my place, and he wanted to see my farm in any case. We had a nice visit in the morning, and then I sent him off with some suggestions while I worked in my fields.
About an hour later, a distant whinny caused me to turn my head from my fields to the sound, trying to spot the source, and I spied a cloaked figure on a horse entering the woods. I couldn’t tell who it was and didn’t recognize the horse either—it was only the rear view, after all. At first I didn’t think much of it, because hunting in the woods was pretty common, but solitary hunters were less so. It gnawed at me, though, because with two solitary hunters in a forest, accidents could happen. And then, remembering the events of a few days before, it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t a coincidence after all. I began to worry: What if that rider had been Behrtoald, and the prey he was hunting was Gebhart?
I needed to check. I could do so fairly quickly, but I was paranoid about being seen, so I opened the back door, ran into my house, and shape-shifted into a wolfhound. I shot out into the forest from there, hopefully unseen, and quickly picked up the scent of Gebhart, who had left from the same place. I followed his trail, which angled a bit to the west, snuffling and noticing how the forest was either unnaturally quiet or else pierced by the warning calls of birds and squirrels.
I found Gebhart’s body ten minutes later. He’d shot a stag and had just begun to dress his kill when someone shot him in the back. He was slumped over the stag, a small ragged hole between his shoulder blades that suggested an arrow, because the wound was too small for a spear and the edges too torn for a stabbing. I thought it rather brazen, because it was quite clearly murder and no accident, and no effort had been made to hide the body.
A chill shook me as I peered ahead into the future and saw a cold fact waiting for me; I was going to be blamed for this. The rumor would be that the strange foreigner who lived near these woods must have done it.
The murderer had to have left his own trail, however, and a little bit of casting about allowed me to pick it up. I’d come back for Gebhart’s body later—I didn’t want to lose my chance of finding the murderer.
It was only another ten minutes before the cloaked rider came into view. He was heading back toward the village and whistling tunelessly, if happily, and his bow and quiver were plainly visible. I cast camouflage on myself so I could draw alongside without being seen. The horse nickered nervously, picking up my scent, but the man astride the horse didn’t react.
He was grinning, supremely pleased with himself. It was Behrtoald, as I’d feared.
I couldn’t know exactly how he planned to make it work, but it was not difficult to assume that he would somehow lay Gebhart’s death at my feet and then make a play for Gerlind.
I wasn’t going to let him do either.
I reversed course and sped back to my farm. Once inside the house, I shifted to human and got dressed, strapping on my sword just in case. Then I got on my horse and used all the juice from the earth that I could to boost its speed, hoping to beat Behrtoald back to the inn.
Victory was mine by perhaps thirty seconds. I actually galloped past Behrtoald on the outskirts, and he belatedly realized who had passed him, where I was going, and what was at stake. But being first through the door made a whole lot of difference. My grasp of the language wasn’t great, but I did manage to shout, “Gebhart dead! Behrtoald kill! I see him!”
That last part was a lie—I hadn’t actually seen him kill Gebhart. But I’d seen him enter the forest after Gebhart and exit a while later with nothing to show for his journey but a smug smile. And I’d tracked him by scent, of course, from Gebhart’s corpse, but I could hardly tell them that.
Then Behrtoald crashed in, obviously ignoring the fact that he’d been banned. He pointed at me and said, “He killed Gebhart!”
At that point there was a lot of shouting and determination to get to the bottom of this. The relevant information to Gerlind, of course, was not so much who did it as the fact that it had been done: Her husband was dead. While the people shouted, she came to me, quietly, and asked what happened.
“Gebhart come to hunt by my house,” I said brokenly. “He go. Behrtoald go after him later. I worry and go too. Find Gebhart dead, shot in back.”
“He’s still there? In the forest?”
“Yes. I can show.”
So a large portion of the adults in the village were soon on the road toward the forest. Some of them had already made up their minds as to who had done it, and I was worried that it wouldn’t end well for me. I was still an outsider, and though Behrtoald was not well liked, he had a much better grasp of the language and was trusted more, simply because he was one of the tribe.
They tried to take my sword but curiously found that it was stuck firm in its scabbard and they couldn’t remove it. I had bound it magically to prevent its removal, so they settled for tying my hands at the wrists once I got on my horse. Behrtoald was tied up too, his weapons removed, and we formed a group of about twenty men and five women out to recover Gebhard and figure out what exactly had happened. Behrtoald had either thrown away the arrow he’d used, somewhere along the trail, or fastidiously cleaned it before replacing it; they could not find a “smoking arrow” solution to the mystery.
I was not actually afraid for my life. I could unbind the ropes around my wrists at any time. I could communicate to all the horses and ask them to throw off their riders, leaving me a clear path to escape. I could cast camouflage and simply disappear. But that would mean that I’d lose everything I’d worked on for months, and I’d have to start over somewhere else. It would be a lean winter for me. Plus, I really didn’t want Behrtoald to get away with it.
Neither did Gebhart, it turned out.
Once we entered the forest and the sunlight was obscured by the canopy of leaves, the temperature dropped significantly, which was expected, but it was by far more than ten degrees, which was very much unexpected. Our breath suddenly steamed out of our mouths, even though it was summer. We had entered an uncommonly frigid pocket of air, and I knew rig
ht away it wasn’t natural. The others suspected but had their suspicions confirmed moments later, when an unholy roar erupted ahead and the horses startled.
A man’s body—Gebhart’s, in fact—with a stag’s head charged at us. Some of the men who had their bows strung were able to get off a shot, and arrows thunked into the torso and remained there but caused no visible distress. The creature kept coming, snorting, grunting, and because of the way we’d been surrounded by the others, preventing our escape, Behrtoald and I were helpless to get out of its path.
It was what the Germans call a wiedergänger, a revenant, dead tissue animated by an angry spirit.
The vast majority of the time—more than 99 percent of it, I’d wager—spirits move on to wherever they’re supposed to go when they’re severed from their mortal coil. But sometimes, in traumatic circumstances, the spirits either can’t or simply won’t move on. And in those days, when people believed widely in ghosts and vengeful spirits, you tended to have a lot more of both, since people devoted so much of their belief to that reality. That collective belief made it real. So when Gebhart was ambushed and shot in the back, his spirit wanted nothing more than to meet his murderer face to, well…face, I guess.
The villagers who were crowded in front of us parted before the wiedergänger just in time to clear its path to us. We still could not move well to either side or backward, however. I very nearly took my chances by sliding off the saddle, but I realized that the stag’s eyes were focused solely on Behrtoald, so I stayed where I was.
Behrtoald began to scream as he realized the enormity of what was happening. It was a reckoning, and there was no escape. He may have cried for help or uttered a prayer to his gods, I’m not sure—it was unintelligible terror.
He tried to goad his horse into charging the wiedergänger and got dumped on the ground for his efforts.
“No!” he cried—that much I understood—and then Gebhart seized him and yanked him to his feet. He bellowed his fury at Behrtoald, the murderer quailed and struggled to break free of an implacable grip, and then the stag lowered its head and very purposely thrust one of its antlers through Behrtoald’s screaming gob and right up into his brain. We all heard the crunch and squish, the screaming ceased, and Behrtoald’s body twitched, dangling on the end of an antler. The wiedergänger roared once more, whipped its head down and to the left, effectively flinging Behrtoald’s corpse to the ground, and stood there staring at him with clenched fists. The stag’s head jerked up only when Gerlind said, “Gebhart?” in a quavering voice.