The Master of Heathcrest Hall

by Galen Beckett

  “I’m sorry, Rafferdy, but I cannot—” Mr. Baydon’s voice halted as the words caught in his throat. “I will leave you with him,” he said when he regained the capacity for speech, then departed.

  As Rafferdy approached the bed, he understood Mr. Baydon’s reluctance to enter. All that was visible of Lord Baydon was his head, for the rest of him was covered in blankets. Though for the way the covers laid almost flat on the bed, it seemed there was hardly anything at all beneath them. That part of him which was exposed bore little resemblance to the Lord Baydon Rafferdy knew. The gray mustache was familiar, but the rest was all yellowed, shriveled flesh stretched over sharp bones.

  Rafferdy felt a pang in his chest, then forced himself to draw closer. Lord Baydon’s eyes were shut, but his faint, rattling breaths were audible.

  “It’s too much, sir,” Rafferdy said, his own voice becoming choked now. “They asked too much of you.”

  Except Earl Rylend and Lord Rafferdy hadn’t known what Lord Marsdel intended to ask of Lord Baydon—or so Rafferdy’s father had written in the letter that had been locked in the drawer with the onyx box. Lord Rafferdy had explained:

  Had we understood what Marsdel intended, Rylend and I would never have allowed it. He told us only that he had found an arcane artifact that could be used to remove some fraction of the curse of Am-Anaru from each of us. Yet ignorant of the truth as we were, Rylend and I were not without fault. So eager were we both to be rid of at least a portion of the dark spell which afflicted us that we readily agreed to this plan without pursuing further details.

  The three of us took turns, holding the box and opening the lid just as Marsdel instructed. Though I did so for but a few moments, at once I felt a great relief come over me, and I knew that some part of my life had been returned to me. But at what cost! It was only later I discovered that Marsdel had only revealed half of the box’s enchantment to us. The artifact could not contain the power of the curse permanently; in time it would escape. The only way to be sure the curse would not return to the three of us was to have another person open the box and take on the three portions of the curse within. I fear that, in Lord Baydon, Marsdel found all too cheerful and willing a subject for this unspeakable experiment.

  Rafferdy could imagine what Lord Marsdel had said when he approached Lord Baydon. No doubt he had said this act would make Lord Baydon a member of their little band, the Lords of Am-Anaru. And so Lord Baydon had readily opened the box, wanting to feel like an adventurer himself.

  “It is enough,” Rafferdy said, bending over the prone figure on the bed. “You have done more than your share. More than you ever should have.”

  He took the onyx box from his coat pocket. It was hard in his hand and strangely cold. He placed the box on the covers, just below Lord Baydon’s chin, and opened the lid. He spoke the runes of magick that were inscribed on the box’s side. Then he watched, both horrified and entranced, as several tendrils passed from Lord Baydon’s thin lips like an exhalation of black smoke and coiled into the box.

  IT HAD BEEN CLOSE to a month since that day, and during that time it seemed to Rafferdy he had spent more than half of his life in the saddle. With an exhalation of great discomfort, he dismounted the big gray gelding, stumbling a bit as his boots struck the ground.

  “I’ll take your horse, sir,” said a soldier in a brown coat.

  He was so young in appearance that he made Rafferdy, at twenty-seven, feel positively decrepit. But then, given all his present aches and pains, he was rather decrepit at the moment.

  “Thank you, Private,” Rafferdy said.

  He detached his small pack of things from behind the saddle, then watched as the young soldier led the gelding away. Small clouds of ash, the color of dried blood in the moonlight, were stirred up by its hooves. A chill went through Rafferdy. He wondered if that was how the Ashen had been named—if that was what Altania and all the world would be reduced to when the Grand Conjunction came and the door to Cerephus was broken open.

  A barren plain of ashes.

  He shivered again; the long umbral had grown cold, that was all. He went to the stone-walled farmhouse. The men had cleared out one end of the main room—the other being filled with debris fallen from the roof. They had lit a fire on the hearth and arranged a wooden bench near it. Rafferdy spread the blanket that served for his bed on the bench, then sat down. He might rather have lain down, but he could not rest yet, for Beckwith would be coming back to him soon with a report on the state of the encampment.

  Rafferdy let out a grim laugh at this thought. He had never in his life wanted any sort of power or responsibility. Indeed, he had fled from it at every turn. Now here he was—a military captain in command of forty other lives, able to order them to march no matter how hungry or exhausted they were, or to throw themselves into a battle no matter how overwhelming the odds. It was utterly absurd.

  Yet somehow, that was how things had transpired. After taking his leave of Lady Marsdel and Mr. and Mrs. Baydon—hardly an hour after his arrival at Farland Park—he had ridden west, giving Invarel a wide berth as he made for the front lines of the war.

  That had been a harrowing experience. He had ridden through a countryside plagued by Valhaine’s forces. More than once he had pulled hard on the reins, plunging his horse through the hedges narrowly in time to avoid being spotted by a patrol of blue-coated soldiers. At last he had come to the valley of the River Telfayn. It seemed far too bucolic a landscape for something so awful as war, but as he neared the region around Baringsbridge he saw evidence of recent fighting.

  He waited for night, then under cover of darkness made a mad gallop to the river. There was some skirmish going on to the north, for he could see the flashes and hear the rumbling of cannon fire. It was his hope that the attention of the royal army would be turned in that direction, and in general that was the case. All the same, the flanks of the army had not been forgotten entirely, and as Rafferdy was traversing a marshy field he saw lights bobbing toward him. They were lanterns, carried by an entire company of redcrests.

  There had been nowhere for Rafferdy to flee. Hastily, he had leaped down from his horse and fashioned a circle in the damp ground with his boot heel. He arranged some sticks into the shape of several runes, then hastily spoke words of magick, calling down a circle of darkness.

  All went pitch-black. The stars and moon were hidden from him. There had been no time to call a circle of silence as well, but the company of enemy soldiers made a great noise themselves as they marched by. Rafferdy could feel the ground tremble, and he had been in dread that they would march right into him and thus discover him.

  But they did not. At last the sound of marching feet receded into the distance. Rafferdy dispelled the circle, then mounted his gelding and rode hard for the river.

  He knew he had at last made it past the front lines when he encountered a band of grim-faced young men in brown coats. Hurriedly, he called out the words Garritt’s compatriots had taught him in a ragged voice. Had he been any slower about it, he would have had several rifle bullets in his chest before he finished. As it was, though the rifles were lowered, he was regarded with great suspicion, and was led none too gently to a tent to meet with the colonel in charge of the regiment.

  There Rafferdy was subjected to much scrutiny. But he repeated the words he had been given, and explained how he came by them, and before long the colonel was satisfied.

  “We cannot be too particular out here,” said the colonel, a country lord whose large white mustache was stained yellow from tobacco smoke. “We need every man we can get, and no matter what side you might have been on, I warrant if we put a gun in your hand, you’ll fire it at any fellow who bears down on you. For by God, you know he’d do the same.”

  After that, Rafferdy was given a rifle with a bayonet and a brown coat. He had a pistol he had brought himself from Asterlane. Rafferdy had not stated he was a lord, but that he was a man of education was apparent, and therefore it did not matter that he
lacked any sort of military experience, but was at once made a corporal with ten men to command.

  Not that this situation lasted for long. Two umbrals later, their position along the river was attacked in the middle of the night. Somehow the sentries had been slain without a sound being made, and a small band of the enemy had struck at the heart of the regiment’s encampment, making directly for the colonel’s tent.

  All was in a great confusion as the rebels tried to rise up from sleep and ready themselves to meet the sudden attack. There was a volley of rifle fire, and bright flashes of light sundered the darkness, forcing the rebels to hastily fall back. It seemed utterly insane for a small band to drive right into the center of a larger force: an act that would surely result in their death. Stranger yet, several men reported that the enemy had dogs with them, vicious animals that had torn out the throats of several rebels.

  Then, from his position behind a makeshift barricade near the colonel’s tent, Rafferdy had seen the enemy approaching. There were three men, and slinking alongside them was a pair of humped and spiked forms. Even before the House ring upon his right hand began to throw off blue sparks, Rafferdy had been certain those things were not dogs.

  What occurred then might have been a terrible massacre of the colonel and the men around him, which had surely been the enemy’s plan. The rebels opened fire upon the intruders. Bullets struck their blue coats and opened holes in their necks, but still the three men lurched forward. The shadows beside them coiled in upon themselves as if to spring.

  Then all at once a voice was shouting queer, harsh-sounding words.

  It was Rafferdy. Using his ring, he painted blazing runes upon the black canvas of the night air, summoning a barrier of protection. The shadowy forms leaped forward—then fell back, writhing and baring curved yellow teeth. There was a smell like burning bone. Had any of the men been looking for it, they would have detected a faint blue shimmer before them, like light reflected off a pane of glass.

  “Aim for their heads!” Rafferdy called out, hardly caring that the men around were not his to command. “Shoot only their heads! Fire!”

  A dozen rifles fired, then a dozen pistols followed. The skulls of the three enemy soldiers burst apart in a violent effusion. Thus decapitated, their bodies stumbled forward for a few more steps, then slumped to the ground.

  By then, Rafferdy was speaking more runes, redoubling the magickal barrier he had erected. More shots rang out; the men had reloaded their rifles. The shadows convulsed and snarled. Bullets could not kill them, but they did seem to inflict pain. Or perhaps it was the power of the eldritch magicks Rafferdy had summoned that burned them. Either way, with no one to direct them now that their masters were gone, the gol-yagru shrank back from the barrier, then turned and loped away, vanishing into the night.

  It was over. Rafferdy had slumped to the ground, trembling. Someone made a quick inventory of the men; other than the sentries, no soldiers had been lost.

  By the time dawn came, much to his bemusement, Rafferdy had been branded a hero. No one who had been there understood that he had done magick. Rather, the men spoke approvingly of how he had waved a torch to blind the intruders and ward off their dogs, then gave swift and level-headed commands in the chaos, ordering a volley of gunfire, and so surely prevented further casualties. The colonel called for him, and shook his hand, and promoted him to captain there and then.

  “It is only a field promotion,” the colonel said, “and will require the signature of a lieutenant general to become permanent. But that’s not likely to happen until this entire affair is over, so for now you may wear your stripes in confidence that they are yours for the duration.”

  For his part, Rafferdy had felt something less exuberant after the affair. Though they were merely bits of cloth, the stripes seemed to add a weight to his coat once they were sewn on. He had watched grimly as the bodies of four rebel soldiers, wrapped in linens rusty with blood, were lowered into the ground. After that, he had gone to the ditch into which the corpses of the three intruders had been heaved the night before.

  In the dark, someone had tossed a few shovelfuls of dirt over them. Rafferdy had knelt, and brushed aside some of the thin coating of soil. As he did, he felt a compulsion to retch. The three bodies were already in an advanced state of liquefaction. It was not due to decay, though, for inside their skins was no flesh to rot, nor bones to remain afterward. Instead, a grayish sort of gelatin oozed out of their wounds. A hand protruded from the shallow grave; beneath the crust of dirt, Rafferdy could just make out the sharp black lines drawn upon the palm.

  So that was why the three men, upon entering the rebel camp, had not feared for their lives. They had already been deprived of them.

  Since that night, Rafferdy had not encountered any more gray men or Ashen-slaves himself. Yet he had heard rumors and tales—things that struck most of the men as oddities, but which for him carried additional meaning. He met a man who described how his horse had been attacked by a wolf—even though wolves had not been seen outside of the remotest parts of Torland in more than a hundred years—and had managed to outride the beast. The man’s horse still bore the scabbed-over gashes on its side, and Rafferdy had counted them himself. There had been seven long, thin scores in the horse’s flank, all drawn in parallel, as if made by a single swipe of a paw. But what wolf had seven sharp claws?

  Later, he heard the men repeating the story of a young rebel who had vanished from his camp, then had returned two lumenals later. With a pistol, he had shot his closest companions in the chest, killing them all. He did this with no apparent feeling or remorse, his expression blank, before turning and walking away. Those who told the tale presumed war had driven the young soldier mad. But Rafferdy wondered if anyone had noticed the young man’s hand, and if it had been marked by a dark, angular symbol.

  Finally, there had been a tale recounted by a young man who joined them after traveling south from County Dorn. He had described encountering several haggard rebels who told how they had gotten lost in mountainous terrain after being separated from their company during a firefight. For days they had wandered, fearing that they would perish. Only then, in a remote valley, they had come upon a little village, and had entered it hoping to find food and shelter.

  What they found instead was a thing hardly to be comprehended. There was not a grown man or woman in the hamlet, only children. These were found not in the stone hovels, which had been crusted with ancient moss, but rather locked inside wicker pens.

  “It was like the children were lambs waiting to be slaughtered, or so the men told me,” the young soldier had said. “They set the children free, but the wee things seemed to have no capacity to speak, and they only wandered to and fro, aimless and silent, as if they knew not what to do with their freedom. A terrible fear came upon the men, and they left the valley. At last, after much travel, they reached a more populous village at the foot of the mountains. They told the people there of the hamlet, and said the children would need help. But the villagers only shook their heads, and said that while there had once been a hamlet in the valley the men described, no one had come from that place nor had ventured there since the Plague Years more than three hundred years ago. The mountains, they said, were empty of any people. But if that was so, then how did those children get there?”

  How indeed? And for what use?

  Now, in the half-ruined farmhouse, Rafferdy looked at the House Gauldren ring on his right hand. It glinted blue, but it was only the firelight reflecting off its facets. Yet would the gem have flickered with a sapphire light all its own if he had ridden alongside the man who believed he was fleeing a wolf, or if he had stood in the camp when the young soldier with dead eyes shot his comrades? What if Rafferdy somehow found that lost village in the remotest mountains of Northaltia? Would the gem have blazed to life as he wandered among the ancient, moss-crusted hovels?

  He could not know for certain. Yet from all these tales—and from the attack on the rebel encampment
that he had helped to thwart—he could draw only one conclusion. The influence of the Ashen was not limited to a handful of occult orders in Invarel, or hidden in a few desert caves in the Empire. Rather, the forces of magick were everywhere.

  Indeed, threads of the arcane were woven into the very fabric of the world. How many daemons locked in magickal prisons, or artifacts concealed in ancient tombs, had felt the growing influence of the red planet, and were now beginning to stir after millennia of slumber? Ever since the previous war—the very first war—they had been waiting for their time to come again.

  And it was nearly here.

  “Captain Rafferdy?”

  He looked up from his ring. The young rebel soldier who had taken his horse now stood in the door.

  “The cook is roasting some of the beef we found on a spit. And he’s made a pudding of old biscuits and the drippings. Would you like to take a plate in here, sir?”

  Rafferdy was sorely tempted to say yes. He was weary to the bone, and wanted nothing but to eat a little food and lie down. Then he regarded the young man’s dusty, anxious face, and he knew that, in the depths of the long night, the men could use a little reassurance.

  “I had better come out,” Rafferdy said, making his voice cheerful. “We haven’t seen beef in a quarter month, and I don’t want a brawl to break out if someone thinks all they got was the gristle. Rather, if I see a disagreement, I will call for a duel at twenty paces so matters can be settled in a civilized manner, with the meat going to the victor. Just give me a moment, and I’ll be there.”

  Now the young man was grinning. Rafferdy always thought his attempts at humor to be very poor, but the men seemed to enjoy them. “Yes, sir!” he said. “I’ll tell the men to clear a path of forty paces at once.”

  He saluted, then departed the farmhouse.

  Rafferdy found himself grinning as well. He had not believed her at the time, but as usual Lady Marsdel was exceedingly perceptive. Absurd as it seemed, given his history and habits, it turned out Rafferdy was genuinely good at being an officer. In some ways, he even found he enjoyed it. Not the countless miles spent in the saddle, of course, or the frigid sleeping conditions and miserable food. And not the long hours of boredom waiting for an engagement with the enemy to begin, or the swift minutes of blood, confusion, and fright when it finally did.