by Kyra Halland
Coltor dropped the wallet into Lainie’s duster pocket. “Consider it payment for saving my fifteen hundred head of cattle on the drive this year.”
As Lainie looked from Silas to Coltor and back again, Silas took the wallet out of her pocket and handed it to Coltor. “For room and board and the doctor’s fees.”
Coltor laughed. “You’re a stubborn son of a bitch.”
Silas grinned back at him. A year ago, he never would have guessed that the rancher would turn out to be a good friend, even if he still didn’t quite completely trust Coltor or feel comfortable with owing him so much. “No, I just know better than to let myself be indebted to a wily bastard like you.” His grin faded as his thoughts returned to the grave reasons why they were finally leaving Coltor’s house. “And we owe you too much already. What I want instead is to know I can count on your help against the Hidden Council.”
“Like I said, I’ll do what I have to do to defend my family, my property, and my town.” Coltor sighed and shook his head. “In a strange way, I hope you’re right and this is the doing of those folks that took over the Hidden Council. I’d hate for the Compact to be broken after all these years. If it is these renegades, we can get their noses out of our business and send them away, and go back to how things have always been. If the Compact is broken, that could well be harder to fix.”
“I hope so too,” Silas said, though he doubted that dealing with the Hidden Council would be any easier than re-establishing peace with the A’ayimat. “Either way, though, I think we’re in for some trouble ahead.”
“I reckon you’re right about that,” Coltor answered.
With Coltor following them, Silas and Lainie headed out to the stables, carrying their heavy-laden knapsacks and saddlebags. “We’ll send word,” Silas said as he strapped his bags onto Abenar.
“I’ll be waiting,” Coltor replied. “The gods go with you.”
“Thanks,” Silas said. “I think we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
* * *
THORNWOOD WAS A good five or six days’ ride south-southeast from Bentwood Gulch. As he and Lainie traveled, Silas practiced drawing on his power through the “stitches” of earth-power Lainie had used to fasten it in place inside him. At first he could only call up a little power at a time and the process required a great deal of concentration. Each time he tried he pushed himself a little harder; he was going to have to get a hell of a lot better at this if he was going to be of any use in a fight.
When they stopped to rest and again at night, he also practiced drawing Wildings earth-power from the ground. Unlike trying to use his own power, this was much easier than he had thought it would be. The Wildings power inside him seemed to reach out on its own to connect with the power flowing just beneath the ground. As he practiced pulling the earth-power into himself, he found that the strands of amber magic within him became stronger, making it easier for him to draw on his own power through them.
But actually working magic was still difficult. The combination of Wildings magic and his own power differed in strength, consistency, speed, and natural inclinations from what he was used to. He imagined it was like a man who had lost a leg learning to walk on a wooden leg – if the wooden leg was faster and more flexible than his own leg and had a will of its own.
Lainie watched anxiously as he struggled to shape and control simple spells, but he never let her see his frustration with his efforts, which were as clumsy and feeble as a child whose power was just beginning to manifest itself. She had done her best; he couldn’t fault her efforts to do something that should have been impossible. Anyhow, it did a man good sometimes to take on a new challenge and learn new things. And this was much better than that terrible, helpless, lost feeling of not being able to use magic at all.
Sooner or later, he vowed, he would be better than new, just as Lainie had promised, and Elspetya Lorentius would rue the day she had meddled with him and his magic.
* * *
THORNWOOD CAME INTO view on the sixth day. In the weak, cloud-filtered daylight, it appeared as a dark smudge against the rocky, snow-dusted Thorntree Hills just to the east. The light wind carried a faint smell of burning with a foul undertone of charred meat and death.
At the north end of the town’s only street, Silas and Lainie stopped and stared at the burned ruins, frosted with snow that failed to hide the violence and thoroughness of the destruction. The street was lined with the snow-dusted, blackened skeletons of wood buildings and with charred, twisted lumps – bodies, Silas realized. The smell of burning wood and flesh lingered thick in the air. Mala and Abenar whickered and pranced nervously at the smell of death and fire, and even Silas’s blunted mage senses could feel the remnants of the magic that the A’ayimat had used, along with swords and spears and fire, in the attack. Something else teased at the edge of his senses, as well; shades of terror and grief borne by unquiet spirits, distraught and confused by the awful fate that had suddenly come upon them.
“Oh, gods,” Lainie whispered in a choked voice. She had gone deathly pale and was pressing a shaking hand to her mouth. If even Silas’s dulled mages senses could feel the echoes of the horror that had happened here, hers must have been overwhelmed.
“You better wait a ways back, darlin’,” he said. “I’ll do what needs to be done for them.” No one had come to bury the dead and say the rites and prayers that would send their souls to the Afterworld. Little wonder their restless, unhappy spirits still lingered here, in the place where they had died. Silas was no priest, but licensed mage hunters were required to know the proper rites and rituals for the dead, death being an unavoidable part of the job.
“No, I should help you,” Lainie said, though she kept her eyes averted from the scene.
“You can take care of the horses and keep watch while I’m busy.”
With that excuse to save face, Lainie nodded. Silas dismounted and took his knapsack and saddlebags from Abenar. Leading the big gray, Lainie rode back the way they had come.
Silas dug in his saddlebags for his folding shovel. With limited use of his power, he had to tug a good bit to get the shovel out from the magical expanded space where he kept it. Then he walked to the middle of the street and started digging.
It took him a good couple of hours to dig a shallow grave big enough to hold the number of bodies he guessed would need burying. From time to time, he had to stop to rest and catch his breath; he still wasn’t back to full strength. The ground was partly frozen, and he practiced using magic to break up the dirt with bursts of power. Drawing on power, his own and the earth-magic, greatly increased his mage senses, and the sorrow and fear and rage of the murdered spirits tore at his thoughts and wrenched his heart. He did his best to harden himself to the emotions and focus on the task that would give the spirits of the dead the rest they yearned for.
When the grave was ready, he took a worn-out blanket and his old duster, which he had kept just in case, from his knapsack. As he recited the prayers to the Gatherer and the Sunderer to guide the spirits of the murdered dead to the Afterworld and more prayers to the Avenger for justice, he carried the bodies to the grave, one or two at a time, wrapped in the blanket and coat so he wouldn’t have to touch them directly, and laid them with all possible dignity and respect in the earth.
Most of the bodies were too burned to have decayed or been bothered by scavengers; the ones that weren’t badly burned had been somewhat preserved by the cold weather, but animals had been at a few of them. Over and over, Silas had to swallow back bile at the sight of women, children, a cowhand he recognized from the drive… Body after body, hacked, mutilated, burned.
At first, he found comfort – though poor comfort it was – in the fact that, judging by the injuries he could see, most of the victims must have died before they were burned. But then he came to one burned-out building where a couple dozen or more charred bodies, mostly women and children going by the size of them, were crowded inside, some of them up against the door, o
thers at the windows. As though they had been locked into the building to burn. He finally couldn’t hold back his gorge any more, and he dropped to his knees and vomited up what felt like every meal he’d ever eaten.
At length, the sickness ran its course, though he still shook from outrage and horror. Weakened but determined to do right by those who had been so cruelly murdered, he forced himself to his feet and got on with his work. When he had gathered all the bodies he could find, he returned to the mass grave and covered it with dirt. Then he collected some large stones and laid them in a circle atop the grave, marking it with the eternal, cyclical path through the heavens and hells of the Afterworld, as he recited the prayers for the murdered dead on more time.
His duty to the dead fulfilled, Silas went to the town pump and did his best to rinse the stink of old char and burnt flesh out of the blanket and coat so he could use them again if he needed to. He also scrubbed his hands, face, and hair in the cold water, trying to banish the odor of burning and death from his nostrils. But no matter how much he washed, he thought, he would remember that smell to the end of his days.
Chapter 12
SILAS WALKED BACK out beyond the edge of the town to where Lainie was waiting with Mala and Abenar. The horses were grazing on some dead grass sticking up through the thin layer of snow as the gloomy sky darkened to what would be a moonless night, Darknight. The dark of the moon was not a night for lingering in a place of death. Silas shivered, and not just from the cold.
“You done?” Lainie asked, her face still wan. “See anything?”
“Nothing but death,” he answered. “You okay?”
“I threw up. Don’t know if it’s because of the baby or that.” She tilted her head towards the ruined town.
“You been having the morning sickness?”
“Been fighting it off the last few days. But,” she looked at the ground as though embarrassed, “I just couldn’t hold it back no more.”
“It’s okay, darlin’. I lost my stomach, too.” He didn’t mind admitting his weakness, but he had no intention of telling her exactly what had brought him to it.
Her eyes strayed back to the town. “I don’t want to sleep this close to… that. Not with all those ghosts around and tonight being Darknight.”
“Me either.” He had said the rites, but on Darknight, the one night of the month with no moon and given to no god, when the gods hid their faces from the earth, it was harder for spirits to find their way to the Afterworld.
They mounted up and rode another league or so away from the town, far enough away that the smells and restless spirits were much less noticeable. There was no sign of livestock on the range out here; neither had there been any in town, unusual for a ranching town. Had the animals wandered off or been taken by the A’ayimat? Or had Hidden Council people come and rounded up the valuable stock? Or maybe the cattle let out to range in the area knew better than to come near this haunted place.
Silas pitched the tent. Using dead branches from a small copse of scrub oak, he dredged up a spark of power and lit a campfire. It might attract attention, but the midwinter Darknight was no time to be outside without a fire. He spread out his wet coat and blanket, that he had washed at the pump in town, by the fire, and practiced using a drying spell to extract most of the water. It was clumsy and difficult, like trying to saddle a horse with just one hand and that hand missing most of its fingers. If he had so much trouble with such a simple task, what was he going to do if it came to a full-fledged battle against Elspetya Lorentius and her gang?
He and Lainie ate and then sat together at the fire for a while, deliberately speaking only of ordinary, comforting things – the horses, Mrs. Murrison’s cooking, how much money they still had. Lainie’s face was haggard with exhaustion, and before long her eyes started drifting shut. Though Silas had little desire to face the night watch alone, he kissed her hand and said, “You get some sleep. I’ll sit watch.”
She returned the kiss on his own hand. “Get me up later. Don’t stay awake all night. You need your sleep too.”
“I’ll do that.” He would let her get plenty of sleep before then, though; she was sleeping for two, now. He could make do with only a couple of hours. He kissed her mouth, a lingering kiss as he both sought and offered comfort, then she crawled into the tent.
Silas settled himself for the watch. He left his mage senses – what there was of them – partly exposed to detect any hint of trouble, and cleared his mind, letting his thoughts flow freely around each other. The anguish of the dead still teased at the edge of his senses, and he sent up another prayer to the Gatherer and the Sunderer to help them find their way on this moonless, gods-forsaken night.
Unrestrained by conscious direction, his thoughts wove in and out of what he knew about the attack on Thornwood. Despite Coltor’s reservations, Silas believed the surviving children’s claim that no one in town had done anything to break the Compact. Thornwood was a small town; in towns like that, everyone knew everyone else’s business. It was doubtful that someone could commit a serious violation of the Compact without anyone else knowing about it. Also, children the age of the ones who had escaped were much better at picking up on things unspoken than most adults gave them credit for.
And the savagery of the massacre didn’t fit with what he knew of the A’ayimat. Though fierce warriors, and fiercely protective of their privacy, they possessed an equally fierce sense of honor. They would not commit the first offense; neither could he believe they would carry out such violence upon children unless they believed it was justified.
As well, the kind of trespass that the A’ayimat might consider answerable by a massacre like the one here was completely inconsistent with what Silas knew of the people of Thornwood. They would have regarded such a serious offense as a grave sin before the gods.
Who, then, had committed the inciting offense? It had to have been the Hidden Council. From what Lainie had told him, they were ruthless and bold enough to try something like this, and had a powerful motive, to take control of the Wildings and, eventually, maybe even Granadaia. But what in the gods’ names had they done to provoke the A’ayimat to such violence? And would they do it again?
A scuffling in the dirt some distance behind Silas caught his attention. Instantly, he was on his feet, his revolver in hand. Guns wouldn’t do any good against restless, vengeful spirits, but they were still useful against bandits, renegade mages, and angry blueskins. “Who’s there?” he called out.
“Don’t shoot!” a boy’s voice replied, breaking with fear. A tall, skinny figure emerged from the darkness, hands raised over his head. “I’m unarmed, please don’t shoot!”
Silas lowered the gun but didn’t holster it. “Come closer.”
The young fellow stepped into the faint circle of firelight. He was closer to boy than man, maybe fourteen or fifteen and tall for his age, ragged and filthy and thin, his eyes shadowed with long-standing fear.
Silas returned his revolver to its holster. “You from Thornwood?”
The boy nodded.
“You escape from the massacre?”
“Yes, sir. My Pa got killed in the first fighting. I should have helped my Ma and my little sister, but I couldn’t get to them –” he pushed his fists against his eyes “ – an’ I was scared –” He buried his face in his arms as sobbing overtook him.
Silas gave him a few moments to settle himself, then said, “Here, sit down and have something to eat.”
The boy wiped his eyes and hunkered down close to the fire while Silas took some hard sausage and flatbread from their provisions and handed them to him. He wolfed the food down like he’d hardly eaten since the massacre.
“What have you been living on?” Silas asked.
“Not much,” the boy said around a mouthful of food. “Whatever I could scrounge.”
Lainie stuck her head out of the tent, then quietly slipped outside and sat at the fire with them. Silas didn’t tell her to go back to bed; she would need to hear wh
atever the boy could tell them about the attack. And the presence of a woman might help reassure the boy that he was safe.
When the boy finished eating, Silas handed him a water flask. “What’s your name, son?”
The boy gulped water like he hadn’t had a drop in days. “Ned, sir.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ned,” Silas said, “though I’m sorry about the circumstances. I’m Silas Vendine. That’s my wife, Lainie.”
The boy’s eyes widened. “You’re the ones that saved the herd from the wizardly storm! My Pa –” His voice broke again. “My Pa told us all about it. He was on the drive too. Said you’re wizards, but you’re good folks in spite of it.”
“What do you think about wizards?”
“Well, the priest said wizards was made by the gods, just like everyone else, and just like anyone else, they can choose to do good or bad. Most of ’em choose bad, but they don’t have to, he said. An’ my Pa always said, don’t judge people by what you hear, judge by what you know yourself about them. I never knew any wizards before; I’ve mostly only heard bad things of ’em. But I know you folks did a good thing for us.”
“The priest was right.” Silas hoped what he was about to say wouldn’t make Ned change his mind, but he needed the kid to talk man-to-man with him, in full honesty. “There’s good wizards and bad, and we choose which of those we’ll be, just like anyone else. Now, Mrs. Vendine and I have crossed paths lately with a gang of bad wizards – the same ones that tried to take over the herd. We think it was them behind what happened here, and we’re going to hunt them down and stop them. I know it’s a hard thing I’m asking of you, but can you tell me exactly what happened that day?”
Ned chewed his lip, looking unhappy, but he nodded. As Silas listened with slowly-growing fury, the boy told how, on a calm morning with a little light snow, he had been doing chores in his family’s stable out behind their house in town when an unearthly shriek sounded from the hills. A hundred or more blueskin warriors, men and women, came charging down into the town, attacking with swords, spears, arrows, and blasts of magic, killing everyone they could reach. The men in town, including Ned’s Pa, had fought back, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and outfought.