Before he knew how Abe was at her side. The pain was excruciating, but he didn’t notice it… not yet. He felt a momentary twinge at what he was doing as he pulled Merry’s dress up past her knee, wrestling with the fabric, soaked in blood and starting to freeze… it was, he belatedly agreed, a magnificent dress – barely looked different now than it had when he first saw her again at the party, but underneath...
“Femoral,” said Abe, his memory supplying the name of the artery that her shattered bone had opened. He felt the cold more deeply than before as he looked at the weak throb of new blood dribbling down her bluing skin into the snow. “She’s dying.”
Tym forced himself to sit up. “They said that they weren’t going to kill any of us.”
Abe blinked hard as he looked up to Merry’s face. Her lips were still red from her makeup, but he knew they were blue underneath. The cold and the blood loss would collude to kill her in minutes. At least she wasn’t awake for what must be a tremendous amount of pain. He had felt the same way in Underton when the Woodsman had left him beaten and useless with her death on his hands, but that time it had been an act. An act that Tym and The Lady had been a part of.
“They did,” he said weakly, then looked at Tym. Big fat Tym with his broken nose and his hopeful look. “But it looks like they lied. Imagine that, Tym, a lie from the gods-forsaken monsters who betrayed you and your whole damned school and cut your teachers head off!” He was shouting in the end, and finally he spat out, “can’t trust anybody these days.” It didn’t make him feel any better to see Tym hang his head, reproached.
“Didn’t say they wouldn’t kill us.” Tym and Abe both looked together to Winchell, who was still breathing shallow and fast, but he spoke with deadly calm. “They just didn’t want to.” The little boy leaned his head up to see the others. There was a stump where the monsters had taken one hand, but he held Abe’s revolver in the other, just as steady as can be. “Remember why we’re here?”
Abe had no damn idea, and was about to say so when Tym said, “the fountain?”
Winchell put the gun to his own temple. “The magic,” he said.
“There isn’t any,” said Tym.
“There will be,” Winchell said. He slowed his breathing and sighed and smiled. “Use it.” He locked eyes with Tym and he pulled the trigger.
3.
The steam from Winchell’s last breath mixed with the smoke from the gun as he fell back into the snow. Abe jumped to his feet and got a step toward the boy before he doubled over from the pain and fell. It was too late, anyway. He crawled the rest of the way and confirmed that the boy was gone, then took the gun from his hand and tried not to look. He checked the chamber and then turned toward Tym. “Two,” he said grimly.
Tym had his hand on Merry’s ankle, his eyes closed. There was something faintly bluish about him, but not the frigid blue of blood loss or of cold… this was a bright warm blue like sunlight through clear water. It was magic. Color flooded Merry and there was an unpleasant popping sound as her bones shifted into their proper place and knit.
She sat up with a surprised gasp, eyes flying open as her face flushed with blood that her body, an instant earlier, did not have to spare. “Lady,” she said and then looked around her with frantic eyes as memories she’d rather not have had rushed back.
Tym shook his head.
“What happened to Winchell? And the Woodsman and Be… the other?”
Abe nodded toward the footprints in the snow, a more or less human set alongside collection of prints that resembled shoes in some places and paws in others and the tracks of a sled in still other places. He gestured weakly with the revolver toward Winchell’s corpse in answer to that question.
“Oh gods,” she said.
“Did it to save you,” said Tym. “Gave me magic.”
“Oh,” she said again, more solemnly. “Oh.”
After a moment, Tym spoke again. “Can you move all right?” Merry nodded, standing up a little stiffly to prove it. “Good… get him a bit closer.”
Merry walked over to Abe and leaned down to grab him by the ankle. “I’m sorry if this hurts,” she said.
“What are you doing?” Abe asked. Merry didn’t answer. She dragged him a few feet through the snow, digging her pointy-toed shoes into the ground. Finally, she dropped his leg beside Tym, who reached out and touched the bare patch of leg between sock and his pushed-up pants.
The pain in his arm and his stomach faded with a spreading warmth, like the first sip of strong whiskey. He reached down to feel his stomach with tentative awe, finding the hole where the bullet tore through his shirt and underneath, dried blood and tender knitted flesh. “Oh, that’s nice,” Abe said as a massive inappropriate smile (given the circumstances) spread across his face and he laid back in the snow.
“Get up,” said Merry, nudging him with her shoe. “We’re not done.” Abe stopped smiling and climbed to his feet. “And you,” she said to Tym. “Heal yourself and let’s go.”
Tym rolled over onto his back and tried to shrug and failed. He also tried to smile but the effect was somewhat diminished by the blood caked around his face from his broken nose. “Can’t,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry Tym. Is there anything I can do before we go?”
“But you just did,” said Abe. Then he turned to Merry. “He just did it.”
“I’m fine, Merry,” Tym said.
“He’s used all there is on us,” Merry said to Abe slowly. “He can’t heal himself.”
“Well why in the hell did he…” Abe turned to Tym. “Why did you heal me instead of yourself, you idiot?”
“Never been in a fight,” Tym said.
“Oh, come off it. You laid me out. And Roods… you’ve been fighting all day, man!”
Tym smiled knowingly. “No magic,” he said.
And of course it was true that Abe was no master of combat, but he was at least used to operating without the aid of magic. He had fired a gun and taken a blow, which, unfortunately, made him their most experienced fighter by a large stretch. “It’s very honorable of you, Wharmley.”
“Go on,” Tym said. “I’m countin’ on you to bring her back safe.”
Abe didn’t have it in his heart to rejoin. He nodded resolutely and checked his pockets for fresh ammunition.
Chapter Thirty-One: A romantic walk among the dead
1.
Before they set off, Abe and Merry helped Tym to the shelter of a tree, where at least he wouldn’t be surrounded by corpses and, if the snow began again, he wouldn’t be in danger of being buried. Abe was going to make a comment to that effect when he was struck by the macabre implication of the badly wounded Tym getting buried. Instead, he simply reassured Tym that they would be back for him and set off with Merry along the path of destruction left in the wake of Mud and the Woodsman.
The path was distressing, but it was easy enough to follow. The snow was falling slowly enough that Abe and Merry had no fear of the footprints (and whatever one would call the prints left by Mud, the half-foot, half-tentacle tracks) being lost. Even if this were a blizzard, however, Abe had no doubt that they could find their way. The bodies were a dead giveaway.
“Oh, ha ha,” said Merry.
Abe looked down, ashamed. “I didn’t mean… it’s just a turn of phrase. Sorry.”
They had been following the path left for them slowly – in part because they were both still in a great deal of pain (Tym had lacked the energy to heal them completely, and they were both more than a little sore, which beat being deceased), but at least a little because they were in no rush to catch up. Abe had given Merry his coat, so at least they were both uncomfortably chilly, but even with their desire to keep warm encouraging speed, it had still taken them longer than it should’ve to crest the next hill.
It was, in their defense, the tallest hill in the area, and it was from the top that Abe had made his distasteful comment. As far as they could see, the path was clear, both from
the prints in the snow and the lumps that lay alongside them. They could see no details of most of them beyond vague outlines, but the nearest one was only a few dozen feet down the hill. More than close enough to identify it as a corpse.
When they got near enough to see the details, Merry averted her eyes. The slaughter that had been Mud and the Woodsman’s preferred method of dispatch was nothing she ever cared to see again. Abe saw no obvious wounds or, as he had come to expect from the Woodsman, giant pools of blood, so he rushed over and knelt down beside the body to confirm that it was dead.
Abe turned the body over and held a hand in front of the woman’s mouth. He held his breath and looked her over, waiting for some time before saying, “dead.” He stood up. “I don’t know that she was killed, though.”
“What does that mean?” Merry said. She turned around and saw.
The woman was old.
Exceptionally, amazingly old. It would be foolish to guess at the life span of the people here, but Merry had once met her great great grandmother, who was one hundred and one years old at the time, and this woman made Grandma Whiddershins look positively spry. She was wrinkled and spotted and shriveled, her hands were gnarled bent and what hair remained on her head was patchy and coarse and white as snow. There was a cane laying beside her hand and a basket in the snow on her other side. She had apparently been gathering kindling for a fire when she died.
“There’s not a wound,” Abe said. “I wonder if she died of shock.”
“Could have done,” said Merry. “Poor old thing’s heart might’ve given out.”
“At the sight of that Mud creature my heart nearly gives out,” said Abe. He knelt and closed the old woman’s eyes and then started along the path again. “Least she didn’t suffer.”
2.
“I think I understand what’s going on,” said Merry.
“Good,” Abe closed the old man’s eyes and rose to standing once more. This was the fourth incredibly old corpse they had encountered along the way. “Because I have no idea.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Hemina or the fountain before, have you?”
“Now would be a bad time to try and impress you by pretending to know a lot of things I don’t, right?”
“Right.” Merry started walking again, slowly along the path. The snow was starting to mix with cold rain now, and the footing was gradually getting more treacherous as the wet snow started to give way to ice and slush. She pulled Abe’s jacket tighter around her shoulders and turned up the collar. She drew a deep breath and said, “gods, where to begin…?”
“How about at the start,” said Abe as he fell into step beside her. His shirt was soaked through by now and he moved his revolver from the leather holster to his pocket, unsure if the rain could damage it. He was rather distressingly aware that the gun might be all they had if they ever caught up.
“It’s a long story,” Merry said.
They crested the next hill and could see miles of path before them, littered with bodies. “It’s a long walk.”
“A lot of this is myth or half-truth or possibly outright lies,” said Merry. “But as near as I can understand it, a long time ago the gods created Hemina as their home and became people. Or some of them did… or they created people, but anyway, the people of Hemina weren’t happy. They had hunger and want and aging and pain and suffering. It was an awful place.”
“Sounds like Highmark,” Abe said.
“Exactly!” Merry smiled at him like he was a good student. “It was like anywhere else, except there was magic, as well. And someone figured out a way, a sort of bargain, to change all that. They would trap all the magic, remove it from the world, and in exchange the people would be immortal and beautiful and happy forever.”
Abe cast a sidelong glance at the corpse they were approaching. Like the rest it was impossibly old. “Seems to have worked out for them.”
“Well, it did,” Merry said, “except that there was a catch. It wasn’t enough for them to give up magic, they had to make a sacrifice. So every few years, somewhere in the world below them, in Darbyshire or Highmark or Underton, there was a child born with the gift of magic. And every few years someone from Hemina would go and find the child and bring it to the fountain where they locked away their magic, and they would drown it.”
“That’s monstrous!”
“The gods demand sacrifice, Abe. It’s part of the deal.”
“But they killed children!?”
“Any child born with the gift.”
Abe stopped walking. He looked at Merry and then back behind them as if he could see all the way back to Tym and to Winchell’s freezing body. “Until…”
That didactic smile reappeared on Merry’s pretty face. “Until about twenty years ago, when the person who was supposed to find the children stopped.”
“The Lady.” Not a question, Abe said it with certainty.
“Walk and talk, Abe, its damned freezing.” Merry took Abe’s hand. It was a close contest to see which of them had the colder hand. “The Lady saw life in the other parts of the world, and she didn’t think it was that bad. People got older and people got sick and people went hungry, but by and large it wasn’t dreadful. It certainly wasn’t worth killing children to avoid.”
“Especially not if there was magic to ease the pain,” Abe said.
Merry squeezed his hand. “So The Lady quit, bringing the children up here and started to protect them from Hemina. She found the two monsters who would do anything to spite the gods and enlisted their help. Together she and the Woodsman protected us from afar until she started to bring us together in the school.”
“So far, I understand… but why bring you all here? Isn’t this the last place you should be?”
“The fountain is here. Without any sacrifices for all these years, the people of Hemina have weakened…”
“So that’s why they’re so old and feeble,” said Abe.
“And why there’s no magic here. The fountain is sort of the channel for it all, and as long as the fountain flows the magic will go where it always has, into the Spirit and into the next child. Something happens during the sacrifice that converts it into… whatever it is that keeps the people here young and healthy.”
“I’m still not clear on the reason The Lady brought you all here.”
“We’re here to destroy it,” said Merry. “And she brought you here as well, Abe. You’re here for the fountain as well.”
“What are they here for?” Abe pointed at the path before them, the footprints of the two creatures they were following.
“For the fountain, as well, I imagine.”
“Well then why don’t we leave it to them?”
“Abe, they’re not here to destroy the fountain, they’re here to use it.”
“Use it for what?”
“You know the story, what do you think?”
“Well,” said Abe, “if the story I heard is accurate then they’ll want to use it to prove that the gods made a mistake. I don’t see how that would work, though.”
“They drink from the fountain and take in all that latent energy, and then how do you think they prove the gods wrong?”
Abe inclined his head as he considered, speaking slowly. “The story I heard was about them being dismissed in favor of man, and if that were the case,” he turned to Merry. “Are they jealous?”
Merry nodded. “You’ve been a part of Highmark society long enough to know how jealousy tends to work out.”
“They’re going to steal our husbands? Teach our children to think poorly of us?”
She pulled her hand out of Abe’s. “I think it’s more serious than that.”
3.
The snow changed over completely to rain and as it did the air and the methods of death Abe and Merry found got more heated. The bodies were uniformly old, but the level of violence was increasing with each new corpse. First there were the people who appeared to have been simply scared to death, and then there began
to be broken necks. Stab wounds next, and then one scene that appeared to have been an actual fight.
There were maybe twenty victims so far, and as the violence stepped up, the age of the victims seemed to go down. Not that Abe would have guessed any of these people were younger than eighty, but the further they went along the path the younger they got. And when they stopped seeing bodies all together, Abe surmised that the people along the path were able to react quickly enough to not be on the path once they learned about the violent visitors to Hemina traveling along it.
And it was a path, in fact. After the rain and the warmth colluded to melt away the snow, they saw that they were on a broad dirt road. There was a line of grey granite bricks down the middle of the path, end to end, running perfectly straight along the hills and off into the distance. In the middle of the bricks there was carved a very narrow channel, one evidently worn into the hard rock by a pencil-thin stream of water. The channel was only wet from rain now. “This is part of the fountain,” said Merry. She squatted down and touched the brick and then raised her finger to her lips.
Abe though he saw a tiny flicker of light on her finger.
“We need to hurry,” she said, and she took his hand again and started to run. At the feel of her hand on his Abe felt the pain in his stomach lessen an iota. Or maybe he imagined it. Or maybe it had more to do with the pretty girl grabbing his hand than any sort of residual magic in a dirty channel in a brick stream.
Chapter Thirty-Two: The summer fountain
1.
Within five minutes of starting to run Merry grabbed the lapels of Abe’s too-big jacket that she was wearing and pulled it off over her head. She handed it to Abe and jogged on, her bare feet in the mud and her elegant dress ruined. It was getting downright hot and had stopped raining by then, so Abe carried the jacket bundled in his arms for about ten seconds before he let it drop to the ground. “We’ll be coming back this way,” he said breathlessly. “Get it then.”
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