Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  Tobias coughed uncomfortably, then chewed his lip for a moment as he stared at the ground. It took only a few moments for him to decide which direction a horse had just gone galloping through, tearing up the soft earth as it went. “Best of luck, and I shall keep your misfortune in mind.”

  Baldassare, left somewhat at a loss by the comment about the hedgehog, watched silently as Tobias offered a respectful salute of departure, and took off with Conrad trailing behind. When they’d gone, Baldassare’s spirits began a relentless slide from the annoyance they’d been harboring for weeks, down into a bog of guilt, anxiety, and genuine concern. No matter what differences he had with his sister, she was his sister, and that meant enough that he’d come along on her fool’s errand just to see she didn’t get herself killed on the road.

  Now he might even have failed at that, a thought made all the worse by the knowledge that she’d been not so insane after all. And if she’d been right about the witch, had she been right about the book, too?

  “Lanzo,” Baldassare snapped, “return to the inn and ask where we can find a huntsman. Once you’ve found him, rouse Evadne out of her bath and bring them both back here as quickly as you can. Oh, and be sure that Evadne brings her claws. We may have want of them.”

  For the next several minutes, Baldassare paced and brooded, unaware that’s what he’d been doing until the sound of hoofbeats once again drew his attention. As before, the thunder built, only this time it built into a massive wave, until everyone backed nervously up against the hedges—and none too soon, as what must have been a score of riders in the black and red of the Inquisition came barreling past.

  Baldassare was fairly sure he recognized the inquisitrix and her horse who’d come through before, now leading the unnerving charge. In her wake rode a half dozen more priestesses, a few knights and their squires, and a smattering of other retainers whose roles he couldn’t be sure of.

  Lastly, just when he thought they’d all gone, came one grim little dwarf of a man astride a wild-maned white pony that cocked its head as it passed. Baldassare could have been wrong, but he imagined the fierce-looking little beast to be just listening for any whisper of laughter as an excuse to kick in someone’s head.

  Baldassare was watching the tail of the pony disappear around the curve of the road when he heard the sound of a throat being cleared and turned to find Tobias and Conrad sitting there on their horses.

  “I’m going to say that the Inquisition has this one well in hand,” Tobias said. “Let’s go find your sister.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Dead Pool

  “This is safer?” Keely asked dubiously, craning her neck to look up at the towering southern rock face of the Wolf’s Tooth. “And quicker? I mean, I can see how it would be quicker to get down, provided you weren’t concerned about getting back up again. Anywhere. Ever. But ‘up’ doesn’t seem to even be on the table as an option.”

  “Which is exactly why it’s safer,” Ulric assured her. “Hardly anyone knows it’s possible, and certainly not your friends in the Inquisition. At least not yet.”

  “So how are we supposed to get up?” Keely asked. She turned to follow him as he led on, ducking under a low-hanging limb of a particularly old and gnarled apple tree. This could have once been an orchard he was leading her through, but in the here and now it was just a wild and overgrown copse, sandwiched between the edge of a pasture and the cliffs. “I certainly hope you don’t expect me to turn into a raven and fly. I don’t do ravens.” What she did do, however—and with some satisfaction—was notice Ulric pretending not to notice when her makeshift dress fell away from her leg as she maneuvered through the foliage.

  “Skull Crevice,” Ulric said, then continued when Keely prompted him with a dubious look. “At least that’s what the young ladies call it.”

  “The young ladies?” Keely asked.

  “Earl Darby’s girls. I’ve spent more than a few hours watching over them while they explored this rock. I was tagging along with Minda when she discovered it.”

  “So is Skull Crevice where the farmers dump the leftovers when they take down their scarecrows?” Keely asked. “And are you having me on with that? I can’t imagine where they’d get that many skulls. Or, rather, I can imagine it, because I am. I just wish I wasn’t.”

  “Condemned criminals,” Ulric said. “The farmers say the nastier the criminal, the better the scarecrow. Most of the present lot came from an old peddler woman who travels the kingdom, collecting them from the headsmen. It’s illegal to trade in them without a license from the king, and I doubt there’s a black market for them. Hard to accept that Bloodthirsty Alfred’s head on a spike will protect your garden without also accepting that Grandma might come throttle you in the night if you accidentally buy her skull off of some grave robber who dug up your family plot.”

  “And what do you accept?” Keely chuckled.

  “I just try not to think about it.” Ulric shrugged. “I hear that Seriena frowns on killing people, and I’ve done that more than once. Only when I had to, of course, but still, nothing in the official rules about, ‘Don’t kill people except when it’s an important part of your job’, is there?”

  “Not that I’ve ever heard.” Keely shook her head.

  “So all in all, I try to pretend that the next world is a bit more…murky?…than we give it credit for. And in the meantime, I’ll let the farmers sort out the bit about the scarecrows.

  “Ah, here we go.” Ulric paused at a fissure in the rock no more than three feet across, and slipped inward between the massive walls of stone.

  “You know you’re not nearly in such an impossible spot as you think,” Keely said, pulling the cloak about her a little nervously as she stepped into the crevice. Although she’d never thought of herself as claustrophobic, something about staring up at the distant sliver of sky overhead left her feeling the weight of the rock closing in from either side.

  “Do tell,” Ulric prompted her as he carefully picked his way up a wall of debris where large slabs of rock had sheered away from the cliffs high above some decades or centuries back, and now choked the crevice to a height of fifteen or twenty feet. Behind him, Keely carefully studied the climb, then looked down and contemplated how she’d look from above as she climbed with no hands available to hold the tattered cloak closed.

  A few moments later, the balled-up cloak came sailing past Ulric to land at the top of the climb, and a little white cat came bounding lightly up after it. By the time Ulric reached the top, Keely had squirmed under the cloak, transformed back, and was pulling it about her shoulders with what little modesty the situation would allow—which, as coincidence would have it, was about all the modesty she had to scrounge up anyway.

  “Yes, you’re boxed in,” she continued as they squeezed one after the other through a narrow opening left by two particularly large slabs of rock, “but a box is only as strong as its lid. In this case, that’s our inquisitrix. The moment she loses interest in your insult, you’re back in the clear.”

  “What? No warrant for my arrest…?” Ulric asked.

  Keely waved the thought off. “You hurt her pride. It’s personal, and she means to deal with it personally, for the sheer pleasure of indulging her anger.”

  “You know her that well?”

  “Not really. Witches just know things.”

  Ulric fixed her with a skeptical stare before beginning the climb down the other side of the rubble.

  “It was all over her face,” Keely admitted with a smirk. “In her voice and her eyes and her bearing. That wasn’t some church bureaucrat who wants you to quake at the massed power of her flunkies. That was a woman who wants you to fear her—personally—and who loves getting her hands dirty. I’ve only laid eyes on her twice, already underestimated her once, and it very nearly cost me a dagger in the back. I promise, she’s not dreaming of having your head served up on a plate right now. She’s dreaming up the way she’ll catch you where that gun and the size you
have on her will both be worthless.”

  The cloak came floating down past Ulric, followed by the little white cat again, and he paused to watch with some interest as it wriggled under the cloak and arose as a woman.

  “But that’s all to your advantage,” Keely went on, “because people do stupid things while nursing their anger and defending their pride. And the moment she gets more worked up about something else than she is about you, all you’ll have to do is give her time and space to forget the insult. Provided you stay out of her line of sight, eventually she’ll leave town, and odds are you’ll never hear from her again.”

  “And what do you think she’s going to get so worked up over?” Ulric asked.

  “Me, probably,” Keely said.

  “Not an option,” Ulric said sternly. “You’re not getting anywhere near that woman again, and she’s not getting anywhere near you.”

  “Then I’ll just have to upset her from a distance, won’t I? Send her a stiff note, maybe. Or help someone else find the book she’s looking for.”

  “She’s looking for a book? Around here?” Ulric laughed incredulously.

  “I said she was dangerous. I never said she was sane.” Keely shrugged as they arrived at a point where the crevice began to climb sharply up and away, the rock underfoot carved into a twisting flight of stairs—ancient, weathered, and covered in moss, but still serviceable.

  “This used to be someone’s postern gate,” Ulric said, “but I think it was forgotten centuries ago.”

  The scuffing of Ulric’s boots echoed up and down the narrow stairwell as they climbed, now passing intricate scrollwork designs carved into the walls as high as twenty or thirty feet above their heads. Scattered at random amidst the abstract carvings, hundreds of realistic human skulls had been carved, jutting out where natural extrusions of rock must have existed for the sculptors to reshape. Their cold, empty stares fueled the unease Keely had already been feeling from the weight of the walls around her, and she shivered despite herself.

  “This place is almost as cheery as your scarecrows,” she said, failing to deliver the observation in the usual cavalier tone she reserved for such comments. A sense of wrongness had descended on her that couldn’t be explained away by a bit of morbid sculpture.

  “I think we can thank the Tuatha,” Ulric said.

  “The what?” Keely asked.

  “The barbarians Emperor Lupus died fighting. This would have been their land back then. They were…” Ulric stopped, staring down at the step in front of him. “Now that’s curious.”

  Keely followed his gaze to where a few shards of broken glass lay. “And potentially nasty,” she said, thankful that whatever else might go wrong with her wardrobe, she never had to deal with the mishaps of wandering barefoot.

  Ulric crouched down and carefully picked up one of the shards, turning it over in his fingers, and examining the step where it had lain. “Apparently this stair isn’t as forgotten as I’d thought.” He rubbed a finger across the ground, then held it up to study the glistening stain on the tip. “Lamp oil.”

  “The ‘young ladies’?” Keely ventured.

  “Possibly,” Ulric agreed. “I’m definitely going to have to ask, but it’s no less likely that it was our vandals. Even some chance it was the Inquisition after all. Whoever it was, we’re going to pretend they’re still up there, so stay behind me and keep your voice down.”

  Keely fought a brief skirmish with her natural state of contrariness before simply nodding her acquiescence. Her gift for reading people hardly limited itself to knowing when an inquisitrix wanted to chain someone to the wall and torment him with branding irons; and however calm and collected this man might seem, it was the calm of a soldier already committed to a suicide mission, determined to see it through to the end. If he needed to feel he was in charge at this moment, it was an illusion she owed to him.

  They’d climbed a hundred steps or so before the stairs ended at a stone arch, decorated with the same skulls and abstract designs as the walls. Above the arch, the crevice continued, but rising so steeply and narrowing so quickly that it might as well have ended to anyone but a seasoned rock climber.

  The arch, for its part, opened into a tunnel—not a particularly large one, but still broad enough that they could have comfortably walked side by side, and tall enough that no man would have fear of banging his head. Ulric stepped inside without hesitation, and Keely followed.

  They’d only gone a few paces in when Ulric stopped, listened to the fading echo of his footsteps, shook his head, and leaned against a stone skull to take off his boots. Even before he’d finished, Keely realized with gratified surprise that her eyes were already adjusting to the underground environment.

  Far from being a descent into a world the sun had forgot, this was just a hole bored straight through a wall of rock to come out the other side, perhaps a hundred yards away. There remained plenty of deep shadow toward the middle that could easily be hiding some dark pit or side tunnel, but Ulric showed no sign of concern—so if the shadows held any hazard at all, it was probably more broken glass. Ulric did take his time traversing the tunnel, clearly mindful himself of the potential dangers that unseen objects could offer bare feet, but they emerged from the far side without incident, and Keely craned her neck around to take in the sight.

  The place turned out to be a circular pit, open to the sky hundreds of feet above, and broad enough that while Keely could have hit the far wall by throwing a stone at it, she would have had to put some real effort into the throw. The mid-day sun was doing a fair job of shining down the shaft from above, but would probably have faltered long before reaching the bottom were it not for the numerous little cross-shafts bored in at an angle from the south—too small to climb through, but letting in light.

  All around the outside of the main shaft wound a spiral stairway, cut back into the rock as if by the threads of some monstrous screw. The pit extended down from here, as well as up, though how far down was impossible to guess because it seemed to have collected rain like a cistern. The black, mirror-smooth surface of the waters lay near enough below that Keely could have safely dived into them, but far enough below that she would have thought twice even if she’d known no surprises lurked beneath.

  “The barbarians did all this?” Keely asked quietly.

  “Probably,” Ulric whispered. “But let’s save the history chat, okay? We’ll be passing more than a few side-chambers on our way up. Any of them could look like a very nice hideout to the sort of people who’d tear down a cathedral.” They’d barely begun the long ascent when he held up a hand for Keely to stop, and he pointed out the muddy boot prints on the stairs—faint but unmistakable, even to an untrained eye. “Not the young ladies,” he assured her. “Big, rough boots. Someone’s been through in just the last few hours.”

  “Should we turn back?” Keely asked.

  “Depends. Fancy your chances out there with the Inquisition scouring the countryside for you?”

  Keely actually fancied her chances far better than his. A cat could disappear into the hedges and evade dozens of determined humans, but Ulric…No matter who they might meet in here, he’d be better off taking his chances with them than trying to avoid the woman leading that lot out there.

  And page twenty-five of the Rules—which not coincidentally happened to smell like a rather savory stew and feel like a bit of warm and well-used blanket—clearly stated, “Take care of the people who take care of you.” Whatever Ulric’s motives might be, he was making it his personal mission right now to keep her alive. That made it her responsibility to return the favor, and that made turning back completely out of the question.

  “Good point.” She smiled, shooing him ahead of her, and they continued cautiously on up the stairs.

  Smoke floated above the orchards in the shadow of the Wolf’s Tooth—not the fine sort of wisp that might rise from a chimney or a campfire, but the thick, roiling black cloud that only comes from a serious blaze. Sister Shosh
ona had smelled it before she spotted it, and now she contemplated the cloud as she sat astride her horse, waiting.

  A couple of the other black-robed priestesses waited with her in the shade of the trees, atop a small rise with a commanding view of the crossroads where the trail up the Tooth started. The rest of their company had dispersed in pairs, beating the metaphorical bush in the hopes of driving the witch back this way. If she was seeing this, then so were they—most of them, at least. So were many of the locals.

  Would they be drawn to it to investigate? Would the witch? Had the witch started it herself? And if she had, was it a ruse to distract them or to draw them out, or was it the incidental effect of some wicked magic?

  “I’m going to check it out,” Shoshona decided at last. “Don’t leave this spot except in direct pursuit of the witch.”

  She rode off quickly and alone, down the road that led most directly toward the billowing smoke. When that no longer seemed to be getting her closer, she found a gate in the hedges and cut through field and orchard. Along the way she passed more than a dozen panicked locals—men, women, and children all scrambling toward the blaze.

  The summer had been dry enough that despite the recent rain, even an intentional and supposedly controlled fire of that magnitude would be courting disaster. One wafting spark that landed in the wrong place could set fire to countless acres of crops before they could be harvested and devour orchards that had been decades in the growing.

  When she arrived at the blaze, she found it busily devouring a farm cottage. A mercifully barren plot of dusty earth surrounded the cottage, but the flames had still found enough traction among the sparse tufts of grass to spread to a nearby chicken coop. The few people already on the scene had clearly given up the cottage for lost, but they were running around trying to smother any flames that spread, and a line had formed passing water from the nearby well to the chicken coop. Shoshona doubted they’d be able to haul water fast enough to salvage the coop, but that would have to remain their own concern. Her concern lay with the witch.