by David Keck
“Here,” said Berchard, louder. He fumbled a moment and found the bailiff’s wrist. “We’re with you now, eh? Take heart. I’ve tickled more than a few surly devils with this old broadsword of mine. An heirloom blade, it is. And we’ve toyed with a few of these fellows in Fellwood, between us.”
Durand nodded along, but was more concerned with the new movement he saw in the sunken roadway. Like a swarm of silverfish, the impish things had suddenly slipped away, losing themselves among the bushes and banks. The bigger brutes remained.
“Aed,” said Durand, “get a couple of your people behind us. Anything that tries to go around should have a fight.” Whispers were passed through the crouched clot of villagers. “Those boys of yours look handy.” There was a scuttling shuffle as men changed places. Durand must have taken his eyes from the maragrim in that moment, for the bigger maragrim had vanished from the road when he turned back.
He had lost them.
Out in the village, laughter echoed like a dog’s barking. Durand could see nothing, but he listened with the rest as screams rang, frantic. They heard a cackle and shriek of hens. A few more of the stunted maragrim swept past the alleyway, not ten paces away. Durand wore no armor, but he had hauled the shield from his packs and now the leather straps creaked in his fist.
Then there was the huge startled bellowing of an ox. He heard the shipboard creak and groan of ropes hauling hard, and remembered seeing beasts hanged in another village that day. Beasts howled out all around Benewith—shrieks of weird horror.
“They are taking their time,” said Berchard. “Working their way around the village, plucking the low fruit. I’ve had heard that it’s fear they hunger for, terror. They are mad by now. All of them. Dead so long.”
And, suddenly, the maragrim were there.
Something flashed in the mouth of the alley, broad and dark as a barn door. Durand swung, lashing down with the urchin head of the flail. Then Berchard got a blow in, his antique broadsword flashing up like a blade of fire.
The creature staggered back, and in a flash of the Farrow Moon, Durand saw an outsized human form split three ways—three faces, three shoulders, three huge ropey arms. Eyes bulging in distorted terror along with its gaping, howling mouth. Every one of the three faces was straining as if to pull away from the others. Berchard’s blow had half severed one forearm.
Now, Aed bulled forward. He had a broad woodcutter’s axe, and he leapt into the three-armed brute, heaving mighty blows as it gibbered and howled back at him. Durand darted out, protecting the bailiff’s flank, joining the man with wild looping swings from his flail that cracked bone and knocked long teeth from several mouths until, finally, a second blow from Berchard’s old sword fell on the thing’s knee, and the brute dropped onto the tangle of its half-severed thigh. It did not take long for the village axemen to leave the thing a twitching heap of butcher’s meat.
They stopped, out of breath, stupid with victory and spattered with blood.
Durand managed a look at Aed, about to say something: a word of praise. But, in an instant, the stocky villager was snatched away as a pale enormity from the gloom snaked a long hand around the man’s wrist.
Astonished, Durand tried to catch a hand, but the man was gone. And, suddenly, Durand realized just how many other things were out there in the dark.
With his eyes open, he saw huge shapes swing and lurch, rolling like bears, shrieking.
“Back, back!” Durand cried. “It is too late! Back to the thorns. We will do no good surrounded.” And the panting villagers stuttered back.
Berchard got hold of Durand’s elbow, groping till he found his hand. “Durand, what are you doing with that damned flail? You won’t put these brutes to sleep with a tap on the head. Have you still got that sword? Ouen’s sword?” Durand had almost forgot Ouen’s sword. It had been a gift from Coensar. The outsized weapon was more full of memory than the flail could ever be. “I don’t know what demons are worrying you, but it is time for a very large blade, I think.”
Durand ground his teeth. The maragrim had the bailiff now. “No one steps beyond the thorns. Keep your wits about you. More could have gone that way.”
Durand heard something howl behind them; one of the fiends must have met Aed’s boys at the back of the party. In the same moment, the enormous mass of a giant dropped into the alley mouth. Big as two bulls and pale as a gob of suet, the thing bent, groping forward, its stolid face as closed and blind as a fist. One hand dragged a club of enormous thorns. It heaved close, then stopped, lifting the huge block of its face as a thousand slits over its moist skin burst. Pustular eyes erupted in every crease and wrinkle, each one rolling with its own mad terror.
Durand forced himself at the creature. He hauled Ouen’s huge sword into the air, chopping and stabbing, digging more than fighting, with fists on hilt and blade. But the brute shoved forward. A mass of writhing eyes blinked against Durand’s jaw as the thing drove Durand stumbling backward into the screaming children. The giant’s face dragged in the thorns overhead, slashed and pierced and bleeding, while its manifold eyes blinked in shimmering waves; the club snagged in the high branches. Half in revolt, Durand thrust his sword out—a foot of steel vanishing into the ogre’s breast. A waste, it should have been, stabbing where no heart beat. But the ogre caught at Durand’s blade with both hands, every eye popping wide.
Something spread from the point of Durand’s blade, wet and black but running like flame over dry leaves. The thing was coming apart. Stones, beetles, wet glop, roots like hair. In a few moments, the slab-like head had pitched into the reeking collapse, and the rest was a writhing mess: running vermin, rotten matter, flying things, bits of stone. And a sharp reek.
Durand’s sword had skewered a bit of bone—a fragment of jaw and two yellow teeth stitched all around with hooked script. He had seen such a thing years ago, in Acconel, when poor Ouen had been sent by the Rooks. When he killed the sending. A sorcerer could bind a man’s soul to a bit of the dead man’s body.
But Durand had only a moment to notice it, for over the corpse of the giant leapt a cowled snipe, and a man of barbed iron cages. Shrieks came from the rear, and the dwarfish maragrim rattled in the branches overhead. There was no time to draw breath. The maragrim had them from every side.
Then Durand saw the horses. “The horses must go!” he roared. “Stand clear!” With luck, they would bowl a way through the closing ranks of the maragrim. Some of the women had hold of bridles and reins, but now they let go. Durand rushed among the horses, roaring as wildly as the maragrim while Ailric and the villagers slapped the animals’ flanks. The beasts surged toward the mouth of the tunnel and the wild shapes there, but one solid shoulder knocked Durand against the hedge. And, when he stumbled, he struck a hollow place—a spot where the branches were few—and saw a chance of escape. The maragrim would set upon on the horses, expecting the villagers to follow in their wake, but they would not follow. “Follow me!” Raising his shield, Durand rammed through the branches.
At first, he struck the face of a whitewashed wall, but he could not stop, so he threw his elbow against the willow lath and plastered clay to land in a bondman’s longhouse between the man’s startled oxen.
Before Durand found his feet, Ailric was already handing child after child through into the dark house. Durand thought of cellars and lofts—places where a child might be hidden—but he had no time to search. The trick had gained them only heartbeats. Already, he heard fiends on the thatch. And then, the maragrim appeared at the breach.
Durand fought in the gap, striking limbs and beaks and eerie human faces. Berchard and Ailric swung too. Abruptly, a hand shot through and one of the oxen was snatched through the breach, the wall and bones breaking.
In the next instant, an incomprehensible thing had seized two of the corner posts that held the roof. Limbs of all kinds. Faceless or many-faced. The longhouse shook like a wicker cage. The villagers had to get out. To Durand, the tower was the only option. At least there, t
hey could have stone at their backs. “Get the children through! Rally at the tower!” Durand said. He leapt at the thing, striking relentlessly at insect limbs and fish’s flesh even as it tried to pry open his lips, to catch his throat, to haul him in, to drink the life and fear from him.
The light shifted.
Heremund had found the hearthstone, and the skald was flinging coals into the thatch as the monstrous maragrim struggled through the house. Maybe the place would burn.
Durand ran.
The survivors poured through the bondman’s yard, dodging sheds and troughs and sties and stumbling out a gate where the crooked tower seemed a hundred leagues away. But they ran, tangled with their pursuers. Behind them, the longhouse bucked like a flaming bed on a man’s back. The thing within bellowed in agony.
Durand slapped down dwarfish obscenities to buy the villagers time for their desperate retreat while the ragged pack of stumbling men and half-carried children sprinted for the tower. Ailric and Heremund dragged Berchard. And, finally, they piled up against the pillar-narrow tower’s base, trapped and scrambling to make their final stand as the maragrim bounded straight into their ragged line.
Durand yanked the huge sword around in fatal loops, splitting a bearded head on spider’s limbs and hacking to the wishbone in a rotten man. But, before he could wrench his blade from the rotting shape, an enormous figure in a priest’s cassock caught his shoulder with dead fingers.
Above the collar, the priest’s head was utterly lost in the maw of a living woodlouse that swung over the huge man’s back like a bulging grain-sack. All the louse’s limbs and mouthparts worked in running blood. Stronger than carthorses, the thing heaved Durand from the ground, belly to belly, crowding him close to the hideous face.
The woodlouse swung like a pendulous hood and there wasn’t room for an entire human head in the thing. Blood and bile was in Durand’s eyes.
Berchard struck, but the thing might well have been made of brass. Durand’s heels were kicking three feet from the ground.
He could not work his blade around. He could not free his arms. There, in the open, the thing would go through him and all the rest. He could not stop it.
It was at his face, pawing with its gray limbs, mouthparts jabbing like writhing fingers …
And then it exploded, and Durand hit the ground in a spray of chitin and bile.
Choking and fighting for air, he still twisted to see what could have struck the maragrim. At the top of the tower, he saw a face vanish from the window.
This was very nearly the end of the maragrim at Benewith. The survivors slew a moth-thing with a maiden’s face and another two of the smallest fiends. And then they were alone, swaying with exhaustion and terror under the tower. Children sniffled. Durand looked over the pale gaggle of survivors. The bailiff was gone, along with one of his sons and, perhaps, three of the other men. All the rest had survived.
“It nearly killed me,” said Durand. “I could do nothing.”
“Did you see?” said Berchard. “The woman in the tower? The stone? Didn’t miss you by a handspan.” Berchard pointed at a substantial block of masonry that had appeared in the midst of the gore at the bottom of the tower. This, then, had exploded the maragrim.
The nearest of the villagers were making the Eye of Heaven, and a few glanced at the top of the tower. And, indeed, something moved, though it was not at the top of the tower. Something slithered along the masonry. At first Durand could not understand what he saw, but, after a moment, he knew. It was rope—rope of a gray and patchwork sort, but rope. Inch by inch, it descended from the window until the tail of the thing brushed the ground.
Durand looked to Aed’s son, but the startled blank of the man’s expression told him that this had never happened before—not in their memory at least. The villagers departed, bent and furtive, unwilling to look up. Most touched Durand’s arm. Some gave his hand a squeeze. Finally, Aed’s son gave Durand a nod and backed away with the rest.
Durand and his companions were alone in the firelight.
The rope hung in the midst of the silent company like a question. Finally, a face appeared high overhead. A pale, perfect oval, shining like the full moon.
Berchard shifted his weight, foot to foot. “Do you notice that the base of this tower is littered with dollies? Cloth mostly. Rag. Twists of willow. There are hundreds, I think.”
They stood upon a low mound. Here and there, it was sod. Always it had a forest-floor give. Things cracked.
“Some of the things are in wedding garlands,” said Heremund. “And are those wounds on some? Signs of sickness?” Heremund bent. “Here. This is the skull of a lamb.” He looked to Durand. “They have been leaving their bits and pieces here for many lives of men.”
Still, the rope dangled.
Ailric met Durand’s glance, but gave no counsel.
“She dropped the stone,” offered Berchard.
And Durand nodded. “I will climb.”
“Be careful,” said Heremund.
“How can a man be careful in these times?”
Durand climbed, feet against the tower and its mortarless patchwork stones. Hand over hand, he pulled, with his forearms searing and his boots sliding in the ivy. It was not curiosity that compelled him. He felt that the rope and the Lady were a doom of sorts, and the Book of Moons counseled that a man must face his doom. When such a door opens, a man must step through or dread the day he stands before the Bright Gates of Heaven.
High overhead, he was unsurprised to see two black birds teetering in a lopsided gyre above the uncanny tower.
“Where is he going, our hero? Our precious spider so far from the ground? Does he know?”
“We know little enough.”
“The Atthias are so full of oddities. Every hill is a barrow mound of knocking kings and silver coffins. Does it not seem so?”
“What has come to this place on the straight road from Pennons Gate? What relic survives here that these villagers make their humble offerings and leave their little prayers? Their menfolk will all have tried the climb.”
“Oh, of course.”
“What youth could resist it? A question standing in their midst and the answer awaiting the first one to climb. Curiosity has long been the downfall of humankind.”
“And of ourselves, brother.”
“Indeed.”
“But still, they know nothing.”
“No one has made the climb.”
“Or none have survived to tell of what they’ve seen, brother.”
Before long, the suffocating effort of the climb squeezed all thought from his skull—even the rattling whispers of the Rooks. His back and shoulders burned. Twenty fathoms below him, the village might have been a scattering of drab toys, but Durand saw nothing to do but press on. He squinted at the dark socket of the window above as his soles slithered over the masonry, and a chaos of birds flew out of that dark stone mouth.
Finally, Durand levered his elbows onto the narrow broken sill of that high window to blink into a tiny room little larger than a sentry box. A pale light glowed in the room, as though moonlight penetrated the chamber through a flaw in the roof.
There sat a woman, young and slender.
She worked at an embroidered hanging on a tall stretcher. Her cheek was pressed against the broad drum skin of fabric like a maid listening at a door. Her dark and gleaming eyes were elsewhere—far away indeed.
Then the eyes twitched and he was caught.
“You are not he,” she said.
And, after an instant of stillness, the girl was at his side. He had not yet got his legs over the windowsill.
“No,” she said. “But I thought … There is something.”
Her lips swept very near his jaw and a cool scent stirred in Durand’s nostrils: green leaves and dark earth, rain and rotting things.
“Fellwood,” she said.
“I—”
“But you have been in the glade. I waited so long.”
The l
ady slipped back from Durand’s cheek. And the wholesome living glow of her dimmed like a passing shadow, giving Durand a glimpse of the same woman drawn in shades of ice: clear over black depths, the scratches of frost over blue darkness.
“Hells,” said Durand. He had climbed twenty-five fathoms. I have ghosts enough of my own, he thought, but held his tongue.
She wafted back to her embroidery and now Durand saw the scene depicted there: two princes, two warriors of the Atthias with antique arms, on each brow a diadem. The taller prince bore the eagle of the royal heir, a blond warrior in gold and russet. The other bore the Windhover blazon of a younger prince, and was picked out in the blues and grays of the thrush’s egg and the heron’s wing.
This dead woman pressed her high cheek to the golden prince—the prince who must be Calamund, lost to Einred, lost to Godelind to whom he gave the twining serpent ring. The ring upon which Durand had taken his oath.
“I have lost my ring,” she said.
Durand remembered the pouch at his belt.
The woman was at Durand’s cheek once more. She was a thing of faint bones, a pale tracery of ice, delicate as the bones of a pike. And frost grew upon the walls of her bower, bristling like needles while she spoke, confidingly, in Durand’s ear. “I left it, you know.” Her voice was the same, though now its childlike softness was conjured from the air and the Otherworld. “He came from the forest, south, where I knew he must come, stumbling toward my reaching arms. I thought he was my Calamund, my love, my life. And I could not help but follow. Follow him north, back into Errest the Old. Back even to Eldinor. So wounded, so lost was he. But he knew me not. He could not see or understand, and he was much changed.”
Her voice tore at him, and Durand shuddered.
“It was long before I understood that he was not my love returned to me, but another. Another who knew me of old. Near to me, but not my love. But I am waiting. For perhaps he will follow, over the mountains and down as I came. The king, he gave me this place, and bid me rest and say no more. So I wait in my tower, the tower I built, stone by stone. And at my needlework, I press my ear so that he will not pass without me.”