“Master, I—”
“Hold your tongue,” Verek snarled. His voice dropped to a menacing whisper. “Years ago, when the pain of losing all I loved was a pike through my heart, I bade you put these out of my sight, for I could not bear to look at them.” He reached into his coat, pulled out the kerchiefs, and laid them on the table. Lightly he rested his fingertips on them. “You know the bitter memories these stirred in me, and how they preyed on my mind. I gave these mute reminders into your care, trusting you to keep them safe.
“Treacherous, cold-hearted woman!” Verek’s voice rose to a shout. “You took from me these precious things—which I hold dear and yet cannot bear to gaze upon—and you gave them like rags to a worthless vagabond who sees in them no value save for wiping filthy hands and binding festered wounds!”
Myra buried her face in her apron and wept—great, racking sobs that shook her body.
Carin stood by the woman’s side and glared at the warlock. How could he be so cruel? His anger at herself, she understood. But to blame a faithful servant for crimes committed by another was a great injustice, and a poor way to repay the housekeeper’s devotion.
Seething with indignation, she couldn’t hold her tongue. “Stop this!” Carin hissed at him. “I took the kerchiefs without asking, like I took the knife and the horse. Myra didn’t know what I was doing. You leave her alone. If you want to punish somebody, then punish me.”
Verek bent stiffly from his waist and grasped the edge of the table with both white-knuckled hands, as if he was preparing to overturn it and send the supper dishes crashing to the floor. Carin reached to grab the still-sobbing Myra and pull the woman clear. But Verek released the table without venting his anger on it. He straightened, and turned to his captive.
“In the course of this dismal day,” he said, his voice brittle, “I made you two promises, you little fool. Do you remember them? I vowed to house you as you deserve. And I swore that I would exact a price from you for your offenses—a high price for your mockery of my grief. I will now keep those promises. Come with me.”
Carin winced as Verek seized her left arm in exactly the spot he’d earlier bruised. He hustled her down the passageway to the foyer. Past the foot of the stairway he turned abruptly, jerking her around.
The sudden turn brought them hard against the wall under the stairs. Verek lifted a latch and flung open a door-sized panel that was angled along its upper edge to follow the rise of the stairs. The panel, grating on hinges squally from disuse, opened to an unlit void. He thrust Carin into the blackness, then released her arm and snapped his fingers. A torch flared in an iron holder.
The firelight revealed steps of stone dropping into nothingness. Verek lifted down the torch, put a firm hand to her back, and ordered her to descend.
“I don’t—”
Carin broke off when the hand at her back gave her a shove that nearly tumbled her down the steps. “Oh sweet Drisha!” she cried, twisting, catching her balance by a fingernail. “All right! I’ll go.” With the warlock close behind her, Carin worked her way down, planting her feet with care to avoid slipping on the smooth, seamless stonework.
At the bottom, a cavernous dungeon stretched away beyond the reach of the torchlight. Iron bars rose on either side, parceling the vault into row upon row of windowless cells. Rust caked the bars. The rock underfoot, unlike the chiseled blocks of the steps, was cracked and pitted. Water trickled darkly down the cavern’s walls, flowed in thin threads across the floor, and disappeared like spilled blood into a labyrinth of cracks. The moisture-laden air was icy cold and reeked of decay. A crypt lined with moldering human bones could not have been more ghastly than this sorcerer’s dungeon.
A crypt? Her crypt? Her final resting place? Carin shuddered. The evil-smelling pit made her breath come short and the hairs lift on her neck and arms.
“In here,” Verek ordered. He shoved her into the first cell. Her prison’s width was an arm-span; its length, a foot or two greater than her own height. It was, therefore, just large enough to lie down in, but the cell offered no cot or bench, only the cold, wet floor.
Waves of dread broke over Carin. She grabbed the bars and stood trembling.
“Good night,” Verek said, his voice sardonic, as he fastened the cell door. “I trust you’ll sleep well. You will sleep long, for the night is uncommonly long in this place. Indeed, sunrise is as absent here as in the grave. And if day does not come, what is there to awaken to? Only an endless night that is close kin to death itself.”
Clinging to the bars, Carin watched the warlock mount the steps, the torch in his hand. The circle illuminated by the flickering light shrank until darkness reclaimed every part of the dungeon except for a bright dot at the summit of the steps. Her gaze fixed on that remnant of light as a starving beggar’s would on a crust of bread. Then Verek extinguished the torch and shut the door behind him.
Intense blackness flooded in: heavy, a crushing weight, thick and clammy as mud. The blind nothingness pressed on every side, such a dense, cold, black pall of nothing that it suffocated her.
Easy! she ordered herself. No one ever died of darkness. Settle down.
Squeezing her eyes tight shut, Carin put her hand over her mouth with her fingers spread so they wouldn’t stop her breath, but on her skin she could feel the warm puffs, and in every quick, frightened gasp she could feel the vital force that was her—Carin. She might have been buried alive, but she was still that: alive.
With one shoulder pressed to the bars to keep her bearings in the blackness, she slid down to crouch on the floor. She ran her hand over the pitted stone, hunting blindly for a dry spot to sit on. Finding none, she sat on her heels with her back jammed against the bars, needing to feel the ironwork’s solid presence in what was otherwise a formless abyss.
Only a corpse should rest easily in a sealed tomb. It was a measure of Carin’s exhaustion that she dozed almost at once … huddled, head drooping, unmoving except for her shivering …
Shivering that grew more pronounced, convulsing her with spasms violent enough to jerk her head up, though her eyes remained closed. In this drifting state, for a moment neither awake nor asleep, Carin felt the presence of death—cold as the stone beneath her and dark as the grave.
No! screamed a voice inside her skull. I’m not dead!
But awareness came too late to anchor her. Springing up, Carin lurched on numbed legs into concentrated nothingness. Screams of terror—she only vaguely recognized them as hers—reverberated through the crypt like a chorus of night-fiends.
Their echoes ringing in her ears, the floor slipping out from under her … she was falling. Her head struck stone, and a bright flash penetrated the darkness behind her eyes.
With the fading of the flash, she sank away into silence and stillness, and down into a blackness that swallowed all existence.
Chapter 8
Two Horrors
Carin lay at the bottom of an ocean, achingly cold. She was drowning. Feebly she moved her arms through a frigid slush and tried to swim to the surface. But the mire pulled her back. It clung like mud.
It was mud. She was suffocating in a pool of black ooze. Try as she might to reach the surface, she couldn’t free herself. There was no escaping: the mire held her fast. One more breath and the ooze would fill her lungs, and she’d die in the depths …
“Now then, dearie, ’tis time you were awake,” said a voice from beyond. “The master says ’twould be better for your poor bruised head if you’d wake up. Can you open your lovely green eyes, for Myra? ’Twould do this old woman’s heart good to have you stirring this morning.”
Carin moved a hand. It touched smooth linen and soft wool. Her shallow breaths drew in only air. There was no suffocating ooze, nothing dragging her under.
“Wha-a-a—” she croaked, struggling to understand.
“Oh, my!” The excited voice sounded in her ear. “At last! Let’s lift your poor bruised noggin just a bit now, and you drink down as much of th
is potion as you’re able.”
A warm, pudgy hand slid under Carin’s neck and gently lifted her head. With difficulty, she forced her eyes open. Two Myras beamed down. She blinked, and the two became one.
“Here … take this, child, and ere the week’s out you’ll be right as rain.”
A cup pressed against Carin’s lips. Aware suddenly of how desperately thirsty she was, she accepted the drink. It tasted of herbs, and of something unidentifiable. Though its flavor was less pleasant than its aroma, she tried to drain the cup but could swallow only the liquid, not the bitter mash coating the bottom.
“That’s right, dearie.” Myra eased Carin’s head back to the pillows. “A good long draught like that will put the color in your cheeks. The master will be pleased. Last evening when he came home, and early this morning before he left on his rounds, he looked in on you. ‘Myra,’ he said, ‘you’re to give the girl this elixir the minute she’s awake. Do not delay a moment!’ And I nodded and told him—for the twelfth time as surely as the first—that I’d do it. Now I must find the master and tell him the news: our foolish young runaway has rallied.”
“No.” Carin croaked a protest, but the housekeeper was already out the door and gone.
Whatever else the draught might do for her, it seemed already to be clearing the cobwebs. Her mind focused on one pressing urgency: she wanted Myra’s master—that warlock Verek—coming nowhere near her. Would Myra bring him?
Tensing for the effort, Carin made to throw back the bedclothes and rise. It was useless. Her attempt accomplished nothing, except to trigger a merciless pounding in her skull. She barely had strength enough to lift her hands to her face.
Sweet mercy, she swore in silence. What … ? Exploring cautiously, her fingers found that her head had been bandaged. Strips of linen bound a sticky pad of cotton wool to the side of her skull.
And then she remembered: her tomb. The sensation of being stone-cold dead in her grave. Screams echoing through the darkness. And then a brilliant flash.
Carefully she worked a finger under the padding. She touched a swelling on the side of her head and flinched from the sudden, shooting pain.
Carin lay quietly, making no further effort to rise, and the pounding in her skull lessened. From far off she caught a snatch of voices, unintelligible. She kept her face turned away from the window. The brightness of day, barely veiled by the lace curtains, hurt her eyes. Those curtains said she was back in her bedchamber. The vivid light suggested morning.
Scurrying footsteps sounded on the landing beyond the bedroom door. Myra entered, carrying a tray.
“Now then, dearie. The master’s potion went down handily, so let’s see if a drop of broth won’t follow just as quick.” The housekeeper set the tray on the dressing table. “The master’s medicines work their good with speed to make a body dizzy. ’Twouldn’t surprise me to find you strong enough already to sit up and take a little broth. I’ll help you. Gently! Gently. Mustn’t move too fast.”
With Myra’s help, Carin raised to a half-sitting position, propped on fat pillows. The effort so tired her that she had no strength to hold the oak-burl soup bowl; she let Myra spoon-feed her. Nothing in recent memory had tasted as good as the warm broth of chicken and herbs.
Between swallows, she tried to question the housekeeper. It was all Carin could do to whisper a few words, but Myra needed little prodding. The woman was adept at one-sided conversations.
“Is Verek … ?” Carin murmured.
“No, my good master is not in the house. But as soon as he returns, I’ll tell him of your recovery. He’ll be pleased.”
“No!”
“Aye, indeed he will. My master has been anxious about you. When he found you lying senseless in that awful cellar, he carried you up and helped me put you to bed. He fixed a poultice to take down the lump on your head. ’Twas big as a goose egg! The knot pains you yet, I shouldn’t doubt, but not half so much as ’twould without the master’s medicines. He fixed the potion you drank when first you roused; ’twill ease the ache in your brain and build your strength.
“’Twas a hard blow you took,” Myra added. “There’s some as don’t wake up from such a blow to the head as that. Or if they do wake, they sweat and vomit and go white as a sheet, and can’t remember their own names. But you’ll be troubled by none of that. You’ll be right as rain. The master’s medicines will have you out of bed in no time.”
“The dungeon … ”
“’Tisn’t a dungeon now, only a cellar. Years ago, when there were scores of mouths to feed in this household, the housekeepers who had the post before me filled that great empty cave with crates of roots and kegs of beer, vats of wine and long links of sausages, and all manner of food and drink. Things keep fresh for months in that dreadful cold. But I’ve no need of such a cellar. I’ve only to feed the master and Lanse—and Jerold, too, if the old goat would let me—and now you, dearie. I never go down there. ’Tis too dark, and too cold for these old bones.”
“Why … ?” Carin whispered, and Myra understood. She shook her head and sighed.
“I didn’t wish the master to lock you in that awful place. ‘She’s hardly more than a child,’ I said to him. ‘She’ll be frightened out of her wits. It’s pitchy black in there, and cold and damp as a dead fish.’
“‘Send her to bed without supper,’ I said to him. ‘Make her stay in her room for a month. Lock her in the library—or out of it, for that might be a heavier burden to one who takes such pleasure in the books. Punish her, my lord,’ I said. ‘Do punish her, for Drisha knows she’s a thief and a scamp and as stubborn as a jennet. But don’t put her in that awful cellar. She’ll catch cold. And if she slips on that wet floor and cracks open her skull, you’ll not forgive yourself, master.’ Those were my very words, and didn’t it happen just as I had feared?”
The hand that held the soup spoon hung suspended, midway to Carin’s mouth, as Myra relived her argument with Lord Verek. It wasn’t every day, Carin guessed, that the housekeeper dared to challenge her master. Then Myra’s eyes refocused on her patient, and the spoon completed its journey.
“My lord knew I spoke truth,” the housekeeper went on as Carin swallowed the broth. “But, oh my! Dearie, he was so terribly angry with you. ‘Silence, woman!’ he bade me. ‘Take care I don’t lock you in that black hole with her.’ Then he sent me to my room.
“I tried to sleep, but I was too anxious for you, poor lamb. I made up my mind to take a lamp and a blanket and a loaf and some cheese, and go down in that cellar and feed you your supper. I resolved to do it and suffer the consequences. ‘If my master wishes to punish me,’ I said, ‘so be it. I can’t leave that child to pass the night, cold and hungry, in that black pit.’
“But what did I find as I reached the door under the stairs? I spied my master climbing up with you in his arms. ‘She fell and hit her head,’ he said to me. ‘We must poultice the knot.’ The rest I’ve told you, of how my master fixed your medicines and looked in on you as you slept. He’ll be glad to see you awake and mending.”
“No.”
Again Myra grasped what Carin packed into the one word.
“Now, dearie, don’t judge him too harshly. My master has always had a temper, since he was a boy. And you do provoke him—you know you do. He was wrong to lock you in that dreadful place. It was badly done, and he is sorry for it. When I asked him how it was that he found you lying senseless, he said he was coming to let you out. He said two hours in such a place were enough to teach anyone a lesson. He was just reaching out his hand to open the door ’neath the stairs when he heard you screaming. ‘It sounded like the gates of farsinchia were breached and all lost souls were wailing in the cellar,’ he told me. My master ran to you, but he wasn’t in time to catch you.”
Carin swallowed the last of the broth. Her head sank back on her pillows. She tried to fight off sleep long enough to beg Myra to keep the warlock away from her. But her lips and tongue refused to form the words. She was descen
ding through darkness, still hearing Myra—
“You’ll be stronger … We’ll get some solid food down you … a bit of veal with ginger … ”
—And then the darkness had her. Deep within it, in a cold horror of a nightmare, Carin fled a mounted swordsman. He pursued her through a forest of silence where gaping pits waited to swallow her. No matter how fast she ran or how well she hid, there was no escaping him, no way to get free. Carin wanted to scream and could not.
But just as it seemed the swordsman must chase her and oblivion snatch at her through all of eternity, a veil lifted to reveal a table, festively dressed. The table groaned under the weight of all manner of meats and vegetables, artfully prepared as if for a Mydrismas feast.
Gradually, Carin’s dreams faded, to be replaced by hunger pains so sharp that they woke her. To judge by the softening of sunlight outside the window, she had slept for several hours.
She pushed back the bedcovers and lowered one leg over the side. The move was a modest success. Her head ached dully but she was spared the vicious pounding that her earlier exertions had spawned. She levered herself fully upright. A moment of dizziness threatened to undo her then, but it passed as she braced against the dressing table.
Carin hardly recognized the face that looked out at her from the mirror. Below the linen that wrapped her head, the whole side of her face was an orangey yellow.
She slowly unwound the bandages. The pad of cotton wool was gummy with poultice and peeled off painfully, to reveal a black and purple bruise. In its center was a lump big enough to make her skull look lopsided. Verek’s orangey poultice had been slathered on liberally, leaving her hair a sticky mess and staining her skin.
Carin fumbled with the table’s drawers and found the length of twine she used as a hair ribbon. She’d been wearing it in the dungeon. The housekeeper must have undone it after the warlock bore Carin upstairs.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 10