by T. O. Munro
***
“There’s another one, father Paleron,” the boy cried. “Over here.”
“Wait, don’t go near it,” Paleron called after the eager boy. “It’s not safe.”
“It’s just like the others, father,” the boy called back. “It’s quite safe.”
Paleron cursed his fondness for game, of the edible variety, which had stretched his girth to such uncomfortable proportions. Within the confines of the church, or on the seat of his carriage, it was not such a problem. Out here in a freezing winter’s day, following after the pack of eager urchins, his slow movement was a significant irritation. At least however, it was not dangerous.
“What are you doing, boy?” he called seeing the lad moving and then jumping up and down above the line of the frozen heather.
“Just trying something father,” the boy shouted back cheerfully.
“Don’t, anything could happen!” Paleron quickened his pace from slow to slightly less slow.
There was a dull crack of something breaking and the boy disappeared. “By the Goddess!” Paleron was huffing and puffing his heart thumping with the unaccustomed exertion as his fat body generated heat it was too well insulated to lose.
He was within a few yards of the spot when the boy popped up again, waving a hand at him. It wasn’t the boy’s hand.
“What’s that?” Paleron demanded.
“It broke off when I jumped on it,” the boy explained. It was a blackened rotten hand, covered in a fine dusting of frost. The boy tapped himself on the head for show and recoiled at the bruising icey hardness of it.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Paleron said.
The boy stepped to one side. “Here father, just like the others.”
Apart from the missing hand, this one was just like the others. A rotten corpse that had walked to this place until the creeping cold had frozen it solid and it had fallen in the gorse. Even as the ice had filled its veins and flesh, its hand must have stretched out groping towards the distant village. Now, though, after the boy’s efforts, it was just the frozen stump of a wrist that pointed the way. The boy tapped his trophy hand against the corpse’s back with a dull solid thump.
“It must be dead, mustn’t it father. It’s not moving at all, see.”
Paleron shook his head, setting his jowls a wobbling. “Father Horace thought that. He, took one of them to his church to thaw it out and give it a proper service. The creature started moving, just the fingers at first. By the time the housekeeper had got Horace back to the chapel the thing was sitting up. Lucky he always carried his crescent symbol, managed to destroy it before it got its legs moving.” He shuddered at the image.
The boy just nodded sadly, leaving Paleron to ponder whether the child would not really like to see one of these unrested abominations staggering about in its rotten flesh. The priest pulled his own crescent symbol from about his fleshy neck. “No boy, we deal with these poor soulless ones as we were told.”
It was a moment’s work to cast the benediction. Paleron stared into the creature’s frozen eyes as he invoked the grace of the goddess. He owed them that much, or at least he owed that much to the man who had once inhabited this body, Goddess knew what force had driven it after death. The power flowed through him and the creature disintegrated into icy dust.
“That’s the fifth one today, father,” the boy announced. “How many more do you think we’ll find?”
“Plenty enough, boy.” Paleron got heavily to his feet. “But we have time. These abominations aren’t going anywhere at the moment. We just need to find them before the snow buries them or the spring thaws them.”
“Father, I think my brother’s found another one,” the boy pointed east where his equally scrawny sibling was waving both arms in the excitement of discovery.
***
Thom picked his way carefully through the boulders. Ambrose and his soldiers were still dragging in the orcish bodies. The fierce frost had spared them all the stench of decay and given them time to clear the killing ground where so many of the enemy had fallen. They were building another funeral pyre, a pyramid of frozen corpses with a timber fuse and core. Once the fire caught it would be like the others, thick black smoke and a foul sickly sweet smell on the air. There were already four circles of ash and bone from the previous days’ efforts. Looking at the emptying battleground, Thom reckoned another day of cremations should finish the task. He hurried onwards circling up and west through the heights along the side of the pass. The wind was blowing from the west and he did not want to get caught again downwind of the smell of burning orc.
He followed the narrow twisting ledge with its precipitous drop to one side. It was here that that Thom had endured a grandstand view of the battle but he did not stop to admire the spectacle. The stony pass had lost its charm once he had watched it seething with a mass of bodies pressed upon each other too close to wield sword or axe against the stabbing spears. Those in the centre waiting only for their comrades at the edge to fall and then their turn for death would come. It had been a victory, but it had not been pretty.
The ledge turned left to become a pathway along a crevice in the cliff. Then it climbed right and opened out into a broad platform of rock from which one could see clear across the plain to the towers of Listcairn.
“I thought I’d find you here, your Majesty,” Thom said.
Niarmit was sitting cross-legged on the stone gazing out at Morsalve. She looked back over her shoulder at his greeting, but did not rise. He took a seat next to her. She didn’t seem to mind. “You have no fondness for the smell of burning orc either, your Majesty?”
She shrugged. “I like to watch the enemy, to see what they are doing next.”
“I doubt they’ll do much at all. You gave them such a bloody nose we’ll not see them this side of spring.”
“You played your part Thom, those few well placed but entirely illusory pits and stakes helped us corral them where we wanted.” She sighed. “But we are not safe yet.”
Thom looked up at the cloudless sky. The first few flakes of snow had been as deceitful as his battlefield illusions. The winter blizzard which would seal the pass was stubbornly late.
“They will not come again. They are too badly hurt.” He said emphatically, in the hope that conviction of tone alone might make reality of his words.
“Then what is that?” she said, pointing along the Eastway.
He followed her line of sight to where two huge and leafless trees seemed to be crawling along the road, attended by a crowd of ant like creatures, whether orcs or humans could not be discerned at this distance.
“I don’t know,” he confessed.
They watched a while as the lumbering apparitions drew closer and resolved themselves into two huge siege engines, drawn along the cobbled road by teams of straining oxen. The machine’s escorts were a disparate group. To one side outlander soldiers and a handful of nomad cavalry, to the other a net of orcs drove forward a host of slow moving townspeople. The orcs were followed by two carts heavily laden with some burden.
“Thom,” Niarmit asked. “How far can you see?”
“You want to know what passes down there, your Majesty?” When she nodded, he smiled. “I have a new spell to show you. I think it will suit your purpose well.”
“Cast it.”
Thom shut his eyes and shaped his hands to the casting, a mime somewhere between throwing a bowl upon the potter’s wheel and winding a ball of thread, and then he could see though his eyes were still closed and at his side Niarmit gasped, “what’s that?”
In his mind he turned and saw the Queen’s face her mouth twisted somewhere between shock and disgust. He made another mental turn and saw himself sitting cross legged with his eyes closed. There was something oddly unfamiliar about his face, which he could not place at first. Then he realised the small mole upon his cheek was on the other side to what he had been used to seeing when glimpsing his reflection in mirrored glass or still water. He observed
his own lips open as he answered the Queen’s question. “This, your Majesty, is an eye of the mage.”
“It looks like an eyeball that someone has plucked from your head, Thom.”
“It is pure conjuration, ma’am. My eyes, my other eyes, are safe within my skull.” He turned the ocular apparition towards the advancing machines of war. “However, this magic eye is a lot better at climbing down cliffs than I am.” With the gentle pressure of thought he moved the floating eyeball forwards and over the edge of the cliff. As he looked down he was still seized by vertigo at the sheer drop, even though he knew his body was safely seated well back from the ledge. “It is a little disconcerting to find what you are seeing is so far displaced from what you are feeling and hearing,” he admitted as the eye floated feather light down the cliff face.
Niarmit’s voice just by his ear, yet already a hundred yards from his sight, asked, “What other uses have you put this spell to, Thom?”
He gulped, “none that would embarrass your Majesty in the telling. Now let me direct our spying.”
“Tell me what your eye spies, Thom.”
He was silent for a moment, driving the eye across the frozen earth, occasionally lifting it a few feet up to readjust his bearings, then driving it in a long ground hugging manoeuvre to float round and approach the column from the rear. His own eyes watered as the westerly wind whipped across the ground that his visual avatar was following. It was a strain. He’d never sent one so far before and he could sense the sinews of control and the substance of the eye both threatening to evaporate at the limit of his range. But then at last he turned the thing and brought it back behind the swaying timber and stomping orcs.
It was the carts he came to first, soaring up and over their jolted shifting load. He groaned at the sight.
“What do you see, Thom?” Niarmit demanded at his body’s side.
“Dead, your Majesty, dead. The carts are full of bodies, plain simple people, not soldiers. All piled high.”
“Who killed them? What killed them?”
Thom quailed, sandwiched between the awful vision in the cart and the edge of menace in Niarmit’s voice, even though the two were almost a mile apart.
“There are no wounds, sores on their bodies yes, but no blow cut these people down.”
“A sickness then?”
“It must be rank, the orc drivers have their cloaks about their faces to mask the smell.”
“Rank indeed, if an orcish nose cannot stomach it. What of the siege engines?”
Thom kept his floating eye amidst the bodies on the cart, grateful the spell brought sight not smell to his mind, and peeped it through the bars of the cart. “Very tall ma’am, with a great wooden box in the middle of them and a sling dangling from the tapered end of that long arm.”
“A trebuchet,” she said. His puzzlement must have shown on his face for she added, “it’s like a sort of catapult, Thom. The thing can throw great rocks hundreds of yards.”
“They’ve not brought any rocks with them, not that I can see.”
“What are the people doing? Look at them, the ones the orcs are driving.”
Thom frowned with concentration. He slowly moved his bobbing eye down the side of the cart and then scooted it along the ground, between the feet of the orcish escort and into the midst of the crowd of prisoners. Resting it on the earth he could look up as they walked past his spying eye. While on the cart he had been grateful to have no sense of smell, here on the ground he was glad he could not hear.
“What are they doing, Thom?”
“They are sick and crying, ma’am. Women holding children tight, men barely able to lift their feet. These cannot be slaves to work, they are barely fit to walk.”
And then the last of them was past and the line of orcish guards approached, spears at the ready to poke any stragglers into motion. One looked at him, looked Thom in the eye, the orc towering over him like a giant.
“I think I’m seen.”
“Careful, Thom.”
“No, he’s looked away, it’s all right.” The orc walked on by and Thom held the eye still, trying to be the odd shaped pebble or the remnant of a battlefield victim that the orc had mistaken him for. But the cart was approaching, its broad wheel making tracks for his eye’s resting place and he must move it soon or risk destruction.
“Hey,” he exclaimed. “It’s gone black, I can’t see.”
“That’s because your eyes are shut.”
“Not these eyes, Ma’am. The other one, I can’t see through it. Oh now I can.”
He could see, but he could not move the thing. In fact it seemed to be moving itself.
“What can you see?”
The view through the eye was changing with dizzying speed, a whipping scan across a line of orcs, one or two of whom glanced his way, but most trudging on. A lot of sky, cold blue with high scudding clouds. Then it shifted and he was looking at a wrist, an arm, down an arm towards a face. It was a face surrounded by hissing swaying snakes. A masked woman with a ragged scar beneath the mask’s edge.
“What can you see, Thom?”
The masked woman was shaking his eye and he could feel it, he could feel it! No that was Niarmit shaking his body even as the snake lady on the plain rattled his eye. Her lips were moving, silent words he wished he could understand.
“Open your eyes, Thom. These eyes here,” Niarmit was saying.
Thom was struck by the scintillating blue that filtered through the lady’s gauze mask. Shards of light that chilled the blood. As he watched, her other hand, the one that wasn’t holding him, whipped off the mask and unleashed the full force of her glittering gaze upon his spying eye.
It all went black.
Sound and vision returned with equal lack of clarity. A bubble of noise in his ears to match the patchy white across his eyes. But then he gradually found some focus to his blurred senses and it was the cloudless sky and Niarmit’s voice and he was lying on the hard surface of their rocky ledge.
“What happened? Thom, what did you see? You just fell over all cold and still.”
Thom swallowed some eager breaths, his lungs heaving. “How long?”
“A minute, no more than that, but you were so still.”
He sat up and pulled his cloak tight around him. “She has a cold stare, that snake lady.”
“The Medusa? You saw the Medusa?”
He nodded. “You do not want to see her eyes, Majesty. They will suck out your soul and bury it in ice.” He shivered.
“By the Goddess she could do that through your conjured eye?”
He sniffed. “I knew sight could travel through the mage’s eye, I did not think a Medusa’s gaze would make the same journey.” He shook his head. “The eye must have been destroyed first, before her whole power could be brought to bear on me through it, I did not enjoy the little taste that she did send.”
Niarmit seized the illusionist’s hands and rubbed painful warmth into them as she asked. “What do you think the snake lady intends with those weapons? Why has she brought the dead and the sick to attend her?”
Thom shrugged, too chilled by the experience for clear thought. “It will be nothing good for them, your Majesty, or for us. Where is that blessed snow?”
***
Hepdida made another lunge and Kaylan only just evaded it. “Close enough, my Princess,” he said. “Let’s take a break.”
The thief sunk down on the bench. Hepdida sat opposite on the rocky edging to the raised flowerbed. He was breathing more heavily than usual, an untidy stubble across his cheeks and his eyes rimmed with the red of an unrested night. While pleased to have come closer to besting him, Hepdida could tell the thief was not at his sharpest. “Your knife play lacks its usual edge, Kaylan,” she said. “How goes it with Sorenson’s servant, Fenwell?”
“The man can drink,” Kaylan admitted, belching fumes of stale beer and then begging a mortified pardon of his Princess.
“I thought you could manage affairs so he dru
nk more than you?”
Kaylan nodded glumly. “I thought so too, either he is more skilled in that art than I, or he is a phenomenally talented drinker.”
“And did you find anything out?”
Kaylan frowned and then winced at the pain the gesture brought to his aching head. “Not much. I hope I gave away less than I discovered.”
“You can’t remember!”
“It was a long night my Princess, but certainly the man, Fenwell is more than the sum of his parts.”
“How so?”
Kaylan rolled up his sleeve to the shoulder and gestured to his own bicep. “He has a mark here, a tattoo that has been removed, but still it shows when he exerts himself.” Hepdida’s quizzical look drew out the explanation. “We arm wrestled.”
“Who won?”
“That’s not important, my Princess. I was not there to win an arm wrestling contest.”
“Or to get drunk,” she pointed out reasonably. “What of this mark though?”
“It was hard to see what the exact design had been, but in the Eastern lands such patterns are used to show membership of the different guilds.”
“So Fenwell is an Easterner from across the sea.”
“He was once, yes.”
“And what guild did he belong too?”
Kaylan shook his head and swayed a little in regret at the gesture. “I don’t know, Princess. There are many guilds in the Eastern lands, some high, some low, some light some dark. Whichever it was, it is an association he no longer wishes to be known about.”
“What else did you find out?”
Kaylan sighed and ran his hand across his stubbled jaw. “That was all, my Princess.”
She laughed at the absurdity of it and when he shot an angry glance at her she chided, “well you have to admit it is funny, Kaylan. You spend the best part of a week trying to track the man down and in the end you lose to him at both a drinking contest and at arm-wrestling and find out no more than half a fact about the man.”
“That in itself should keep our suspicions high. The man who hides secrets must have secrets worth hiding.” He groaned at a returning memory. “I only hope I held my secrets as well as he.”