I nodded. “The ‘Old Man’ is one of the demons mentioned in the Codex. One of the ‘Creatures of the Dark’ that were sealed by the victors inside the ‘stones that lay among the mountains’ at the end of the last ‘Great War’. It’s why Destry sensed that this particular spirit had visited your palace many times before. Over the eons, the account of that war was lost. That spirit could do no more than watch as King Julian raised your palace, as each of your forebears ruled and died in turn. And since no human knew the spirit’s true identity, it became a folk legend.”
“A being that knew things no material creature could,” Fitzwilliam added, catching on. “I recall stories from my childhood. This ‘Old Man’ was someone who provided useful – and somewhat malicious advice.”
“I learned from Destry that ethereals can, with practice, manipulate small objects.” I looked upslope, where the dark woods stretched up the slope into the fog. “A weapon as light as a blowgun dart made of pine needles would be ideal. But a fragile weapon would need a potent poison to be effective. As it happens, up here in the mountains, it could access a pretty good supply of it.”
Fitzwilliam raised an eyebrow. “Gold from my mines?”
“Not the gold. The solvent used to extract it.” I rubbed my forehead absently as I went on, dredging up old memories from chemistry class. “There’s not much gold in each ton of ore. In order to pull the metal from the rock, small-scale miners use mercury. Or cyanide salts. Tipping a dart with concentrated fluid from, say, the mine’s tailing ponds would give you a weapon that could kill almost instantly.”
“That does add up, Lady Chrissie. But I still need ask: why kill one of my Captains? Why kill the Fayleene Protector? What could a rock-demon desire so strongly that it would be driven to the act of murder?”
Before I could answer, my mount suddenly shied away from something just ahead of it. I cried out in surprise, fighting the reins and probably doing just as much to discomfort the horse. Galen exhaled deeply and rubbed his eyes as he shook off his light trance. He quickly stepped to the charger’s side, laid a hand on its mane, and spoke a quartet of magical words, calming it.
But the other horses in the column began to act similarly. Several knights had to fight to calm their mounts, and a couple swore under their breaths. A stiff breeze howled through the trees on either side of the stream. Destry appeared from his place at the head of the column, his eyes wide and nostrils flared.
Rocky’s grandfatherly voice emerged from the swirls of wind. Only this time, the warmth of his ethereal speech was long gone. In its place lay a harsh, brittle undertone. One that made me think of the angry hum of bees when someone had poked their hive with a stick.
“What would drive a being like me to kill a human and a Fayleene?” Rocky asked, in a sing-song manner. “Could it be that three thousand years of imprisonment inside a stone cell has driven me insane?”
“Dayna!” Destry’s voice sounded in my head. “This spirit moves fast, faster than I!”
King Fitzwilliam’s sword rang as he drew it from the sheath. His men followed suit.
“Where is he, then?” Fitzwilliam demanded. That startled me; Destry had evidently broadcast his speech to everyone in the party, and not just me. “Speak now, pooka!”
Destry’s voice was full of alarm “I’m not sure…it feels like he is…all around us!”
And with that, the Old Man of the Mountain let out a phantom cackle that danced in the air around us, setting my nerves jangling like I’d stuck a finger in an electric socket.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The demon’s ghostly cackle set my teeth on edge worse than steel-tipped fingernails on a blackboard. King Fitzwilliam frowned, and a couple of his knights gritted their teeth as they squinted around, looking for an excuse to hit something with their swords.
To my surprise, it was the wizard who first found something intelligent to say.
“Perhaps you are insane,” Galen remarked coolly. “Yet I doubt that is the case. Your acts were quite full of conscious meaning, as well as the times you chose not to act. I for one shall not forget that you purposely fogged Dayna’s mind and sent her away instead of outright murdering her. You have a larger plan in mind. One that I look forward to finding out from you one way or another.”
A ragged breath raked the air in the sudden silence.
Damn, I realized, Galen actually surprised Rocky.
“You are not as smart as you think, centaur. Come ahead if you want to find your answers.”
And with a soundless ripple in the air, the presence withdrew.
“He is gone,” Destry called, from his position at the head of the column.
The column’s leaders looked around, unsure. Fitzwilliam’s voice boomed out orders into the stillness.
“Your king did not call a halt! Back in formation!” A quick round of ‘yes, Sire’ from all around, and the fording of the streams got underway. Fitzwilliam hung back for a moment and spoke under his breath to me and Galen. “This voice on the wind is doubtless a harbinger of ill things, am I correct?”
“I’m afraid so, your Majesty,” I answered. “Rocky wants us going up there. Where his power is strongest. I’m worried about traps.”
“I must agree.” Fitzwilliam waited until we’d finished the crossing and then ordered his knights to don their helmets. The king followed suit; he removed his crown and handed it to a squire for safekeeping. He then pulled his hood of chain mail up into place and topped it with a gold-tinted helmet. “What do you think? Do we stand a chance against this demon’s arms?”
I considered. Fitzwilliam and his knights weren’t wearing the hinged great helms that one saw in the museum displays about jousting. Instead, these looked more like the kind the Roman legionaries wore – an open-faced helmet with wide cheek and nose guards. The rest of the Andeluvian kit was equally questionable. Chain mail, padded underneath with cloth or leather.
“It’s better than nothing, Sire,” I hedged. “But hardly dart-proof. Perhaps if you were to retire, to re-equip–”
He shook his head. “Nay, Lady Chrissie. If we do not press our foe, it gives him more time to plot, to counter our plans. He can move and strike us at will in my palace; I cannot do the same to him. We press on.”
That was the end of that argument. We continued upslope as the forest shifted from birch and elm to pines and the road turned into a series of muddy switchbacks. Another hour of climbing took us up to a jagged outcropping at the edge of one switchback’s hairpin turn.
“This is as far as we came, before,” I said. “From here to the summit, the way is only wide enough to go single file, at least on horseback. Then at the top, it’s a wide, boulder-strewn summit. This ‘Rocky’, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountains’, is a vine-draped granite boulder the size of an automobile.”
One of the knights at my left turned to face me. At a glance, I recognized Commander Yervan. He’d swapped out his gold-trimmed plate armor for the lighter chain mail, as the rest of the party had done. His brow furrowed under the ridge of his helmet.
“Pardon, Lady Chrissie. The size of a what?”
I reddened. It was easy to forget that no one had visited my world save for my closest friends.
“The size of a large wagon,” I amended quickly. “Unfortunately, I doubt that this type of creature will fall to the blow of a sword.”
“That is troublesome. But when we learned about the dragon attacking the Fayleene, we came armed for most any trouble.” Yervan issued a set of terse orders. The knights dismounted and stowed away their swords and pulled out either battle axes or blunt-tipped war hammers from their kit. “These should serve to shatter stone well enough. Failing that, we have a sapper’s charge with us as well.”
“Very good,” Fitzwilliam said approvingly, as both he and I dismounted as well. “We’ll see what stuff this demon is made of when it’s shattered into a million pieces.”
Destry phased into existence at my side, watchful but quiet as each knig
ht strapped a small triangular shield onto one arm and began heading up the slope. Galen stood on my other side, while the king bade me to fall in behind him. It was quiet now as we ascended the slope, save for the heavy breathing of the men, the clink and creak of armor, and the occasional clop of Galen’s hoof on some half-buried rock along the path. Fog blew in from above, shrouding everything in gray. I could barely make out the head of the column, and I was all too aware that evening was only a few hours away.
The men at the front of the column crested the rise ahead. I heard a disturbed murmuring from the knights at the vanguard. Frowning, King Fitzwilliam picked up his pace. I followed as well, almost at a run. The fog had parted for a moment, and the view at the top through the haze had taken on the reddish glow of the late afternoon.
I felt my heart sink.
The entire summit had been covered with near-identical, vine-covered boulders.
A collective creak as the knights turned to look at me.
“Can you tell which is our quarry?” Fitzwilliam asked.
I shook my head.
“Right.” He raised his voice again. “Spread out, all of you! Our foe shall not lie passive; he shall take an action that will give himself away.”
With a jingle of mail, the knights began to move into position. Fitzwilliam waited, hefting his axe in one hand as if daring something to jump out for him to chop.
“Illusion spell,” murmured Galen. “It has to be.”
I heard a cackle then. A tinny, not-quite-human laughter. The sound was distant at first, floating along the breeze. Then it got louder, echoing off the stones around us. The fog grew denser, darker.
Rocky’s voice erupted out of the laughter, the voice of an old man whose sanity had been eroded away by centuries of solitude and confinement.
“Oh, Dayna,” it said mournfully, “Why couldn’t you have just followed my orders and killed Lady Behnaz? Everything would have been so much easier! The Fayleene would have been destroyed and Sirrahon would be running rampant! And as a bonus, the humans would have been at each other’s throats over Behnaz’s death!”
I didn’t have a target, but I drew my gun anyway. Three, maybe four shots left. They weren’t much good against an ethereal, but I’d spend the shots wisely. I fought to keep my voice in check as I shouted back into the wind.
“Sorry I couldn’t do your dirty work, Rocky!”
“But it was so little to ask! I mean, I already worked so hard to pave the way for you.”
“How?”
“By a few well-placed murders, of course! I even bent the will of one of the best and brightest Fayleene, just to turn him against his own people!”
King Fitzwilliam stepped up, his face creased with anger under his helmet.
“By all that is sacred, monster, why attack us?” he demanded. “The Fayleene, the humans, we have done nothing to you, and yet you attack and slay our people with impunity! What do you want, foul being, in that dark heart of yours?”
The voice took on a gloating tone. “What I want is quite simple. I want my people to rule this world as they once did, with my kind and my allies grinding our enemies into the dirt! Open your eyes, human knave. You are witnessing the re-birth of powers that have laid dormant and buried for eons. Sirrahon has woken. I set him upon the Fayleene like a hungry wolf among the sheep. I even killed the older, experienced Protector and then set two of his princelings at each other’s throats!”
“By promising one the secret of driving off Sirrahon,” I breathed. “All the while making sure that the other – Liam – got no help at all.”
“And you did that by murdering one of my captains,” Fitzwilliam finished. “Then blood lies between us, demon. Blood which must be repaid. You shall answer for the deaths of the Fayleene Protector and the commander of my kingdom’s Air Cavalry, and your admitted attempts to throw my kingdom into war and desolation!”
An evil chuckle. “Your ‘Lady Chrissie’ likely told you how hard it is for we ethereals to manipulate material objects. But we can. It took years, you know. Years to craft my darts. Years to gather up the poison. Years to learn how to coalesce my spirit into shape and attack…to kill…to rend…to tear you to bits!”
Rocky’s dust-demon form swirled into existence above us. A shout from the knights as they spotted the apparition. Followed by a deadly string of thwips as a volley of darts rained down as if fired from a Gatling gun.
Curses and oaths as knights hurried to raise their shields or step behind cover. Galen shouted a harsh magic word, swatting a dart from the air before him. Fitzwilliam brought up his arm, shielding both me and himself from the darts that pinged off of his shield. But a pair of screams told me that some of Rocky’s missiles had found their mark.
The barrage didn’t let up, either. Galen danced back and forth on his hooves, trying to summon his power, but he had to focus on swatting darts from the air around him. Three knights tried to charge forward, until a hail of darts forced them to a halt. Two made it to cover, while the last one caught a razor-sharp needle in the face. The man let out a full-throated scream as he collapsed, twitched violently for a moment, and then lay still.
I swung out from behind Fitzwilliam’s shield and brought my gun to bear. I squeezed off a pair of shots. The bullets passed harmlessly through Rocky’s dusty midsection, but it must have disturbed his ability to hold the form. The dust demon vanished in a puff of air.
“Keep moving forward!” Fitzwilliam bellowed. “Those damned darts can’t penetrate your armor, your shield! Use them!” The king lowered his voice as he added, “Stay close to me, Lady Chrissie. It seems that I can shield you long enough for you to at least disrupt the creature.”
We pressed on another ten, twelve steps. Past one of the bodies of the first knights that had fallen. One of Rocky’s missiles lay buried in the man’s throat. His eyes bulged from a red, swollen face. I swallowed hard and looked away.
The minutes ticked on by, feeling like hours. Each rock that we came to had been draped in vines, shaped by magic or illusion to look just like Rocky himself. Finally, the tension became too much for one of the youngest of the knights. He raised his iron maul as he stood and cried, “Show yourself, monster!”
A bolt of lightning slashed down through the fog. The bolt struck his upraised weapon with the sizzling sound of bacon dropped on a hot griddle. The man jerked inside his armor and fell forward with a clank. Greasy smoke oozed out from below his helmet.
A collective waver ran through the remaining knights. Naked fear showed on their faces for a moment before they clamped down on their emotions. Still, it rocked me to see it.
The shout came from the left. “There he is!”
The swirling demon form materialized overhead again. Galen hurled a bolt of energy, dispelling it, but not until it spat out a trio of shots. And another of Fitzwilliam’s knights lay dying on the ground, a dart lodged deep in his eyeball.
“That was fast work, wizard,” Fitzwilliam said quietly.
“Not fast enough, alas,” came the reply.
“Galen,” I said, “We need to find Rocky before he whittles this column of knights down to nothing! Can you dispel his illusions?”
“I’ve been trying.” The centaur’s voice boomed as he added, “A fháil ar shiúl ó anseo!”
A flash of blue light lit up the fog for a split second. But nothing else changed.
The pooka materialized by my side as he spoke. “Perhaps he has proofed his enchantement so that it may not be dispelled.”
A nod from Galen. “I believe that is the case. I should be able to cast a spell on this being to put him in stasis, if I can locate him. But he’s certainly had time to prepare for anything expected.”
That got me thinking. Rocky may have prepared for the expected…but by definition, he couldn’t do the same for the things he couldn’t expect at all.
What did we have to throw at him that fit the bill?
I thought back to our investigation. When Galen had come up
with his brilliant idea: If we do indeed have a non-corporeal being to deal with, it would be to our advantage if we also had one on our side.
An ethereal wouldn’t expect us to use another ethereal against it.
I remembered something that had struck me as a little odd. From the conversation that I’d had with Destry just before my probation hearing.
I had asked, “Can you change someone’s mind? Influence them to do something?”
His answer: “Ah, the pooka do not have that power.”
And then my mind made a final click as I realized what Destry was hiding. What all of the pooka had been hiding, behind their scary exterior and their dream-magic.
Destry hadn’t lied. Not exactly. The pooka didn’t have the power to change someone’s mind. But he sure as hell did. It was exactly what he had done to Bob McClatchy and, to a lesser extent, to my friend Shelly Richardson.
“Destry!” I hissed urgently, as Rocky’s incessant laughter echoed in the stone around us, “It’s up to you. You’re going to have to take Rocky out for us. Get him to expose himself. At least until Galen can get that stasis spell on him.”
A shake of the head, and a snort. “I’m not sure what you mean, chére. I cannot ‘take him out’, as you put it, for I am only a pooka.”
“No, you’re not!” I snapped, and Destry actually danced a step back. In the distance, a cry from a knight and the sound of darts pinging off of armor. I ignored it as best I could. “Destry, you’re more than a typical pooka! You know this, but you’ve been denying it to yourself!”
King Fitzwilliam frowned and threw a quick glance at me over his raised shield. “Lady Chrissie, is this really the time to be giving your friend a therapy session?”
“I’m afraid it is, Sire.” I turned back to Destry. “You have the ability to tap into someone’s memories, their emotions, and bend them to your will!”
The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2) Page 22