by S A Maus
They began walking again, side by side. The wind had picked up and was a whistle in their ears. Omer thought it sounded sad.
“Would you change it, if you could?” Omer asked.
“What? Becoming En’shen?” Tahr said with a raised brow.
“Yes. To go back and live like… like all the rest,” Omer waved towards the surrounding farmland. “To be normal. Find a girl somewhere in the world and settle down to a family of your own.”
They walked in silence for some time after that. Omer began to think Tahr was simply not going to answer him, but as they rounded a long curve of the road and were greeted to the sight of distant stone buildings atop the Hill that was Timmelan, Tahr finally took a deep breath and shook his head.
“I would not change,” Tahr said. “A Tahr who is not En’shen is not truly Tahr. I knew the cost when I took up this path and I have not wavered. Besides, what better life than to keep safe the young of countless cities, children who will never fear Ghoul or Squalip and never know the cry of Banshee or Sau? My heart will never quite fill the same as a father returning home from the field, but I take comfort all the same. But what of you? This is a strange question to ask on a Hunt. Regretting your Trials?” Tahr asked.
“No,” Omer answered. “Not yet, at least. Only wondering. We Hunters tend to live in isolation, or else waste away on thankless journeys into far places. Few even have graves to be remembered. I wonder how many have been tempted by simpler things, a family in a quiet house somewhere far from the cares of the world.”
Tahr stopped. He raised a brow. “Are you wondering for yourself, or for another?”
Omer frowned and kicked at some loose stones on the road. In his mind’s eye he could see Benahia, wrapped in a Hunter’s cloak that had once belonged to his friend. “Gaul truly loved that woman,” he said. “I may not have seen it in his eyes, but I certainly saw it in hers. I can only wonder if he was led away by the promise of an easier life. Perhaps it clouded his judgment, slowed his hand.”
“That is a thought,” Tahr said. “I did not know Gaul as well as you, so I will not speak to it. Maybe he lost himself in love, or maybe he spent too much time patronizing Tihm’s pies. That is not for me to crunch on. Too philosophical. Does love slow a hand in war? Maybe it speeds it.” Tahr shrugged his shoulders. “I think I would be fine, but I have not been tested. Do you think Gaul was caught up in the heart?”
“I don’t know,” Omer answered. “My head remembers every warning against such things that the Masters spoke to us, and remembers also Gaul there beside me, but I cannot help but wonder. There are stronger forces in the world than potions and oaths.”
“Ah, that I can wrap my head around,” Tahr said. “We are just Men, in the end.”
Chapter VII
A Strange Visit
They walked for a few hours until the sun was far over the western fields. Farms and small forests came and went. The hill of Timmelan now dominated the northern way and behind it the distant forms of mountains rose in a line. They were close enough now to make out individual stone houses and the winding roads that ran back and forth across the hill. Citizens of the Hill were roaming here and there, busy on whatever task a far-flung town had need of that day. Likely some of those Timmelans had already spied them in the valley and warned their fellows of the coming Walkers. Doubtless, they were working on some hearty slights to send their way the second they stepped onto the Hill, but the Hunters would not be entering Timmelan proper. Gaul’s family lived south of the Hill in the Stownfields.
The two Hunters stepped off the main road and onto a thin dirt path, passing below a hedge that rose up over their heads in a thick bramble. On the other side, the path opened up into a meadow full of high grass and red, prickly flowers, with bees flying about as if they owned the land. Somewhere in the distant shrubs the sound of braying animals could be heard. The scent of a well-tended garden came pleasantly out from the south.
“This is their property,” Omer said.
“They will not be pleased to see us, I think,” Tahr said.
“No, they will not. The last time I was here… I was bringing them an empty scabbard and an apology,” Omer said. “Aileen shouted me out of the house. Mothers should not outlive their sons.”
“No, they should not,” Tahr said grimly.
The dirt road looped around the eastern side of the field, soon being met on the western side by a low wooden fence that was more for decoration than any serious impediment. They followed the fence for a few dozen yards before the road bent west and toward the center of the meadow. A moment later they were standing at the edge of a short stone path that cut through a gap in the fence, and at its end the house of the Falln family. The house itself was simple and unadorned, being made of wood and earth, with the lawn rolling right up over its top on the east and north to form a hill-born roof, out of which stuck a single silent chimney.
Omer stepped to the plain wooden door and rapped twice. “I am not looking forward to this,” he said.
“Ai, no jests for me here,” Tahr said. “Some things are not for mockery.”
Minutes passed. The sun continued to slide westward, now casting long shadows onto the flowerbed that sat beneath the eastern window. Roses and peonies in a neat array, red and blue and pink, but beneath them a thin bed of weeds was beginning to show. Omer found that odd. Aileen had always been keen to her garden.
Realizing that they had been waiting for an oddly long time, Omer knocked once more. Minutes passed, but again there was no answer.
“Perhaps they are away?” Tahr wondered.
Omer huffed and walked around the side of the house. A stable was set off the western side in a flattened area of dirt and wooden fencing. He went to the window and looked inside. In the gloom, he could see two horses sleeping quietly in their pens.
“Their horses are still here,” he called back to Tahr. Then he turned and walked back to the front door. Tahr was kneeling down looking at something in the dirt. “What are you doing?” Omer asked.
Tahr held up his hand. A fine silver powder coated his fingers.
“Is that Silt?” Omer asked. A knot wrapped his stomach up in an instant.
“It looks like it,” Tahr said.
Omer did not hesitate. He kicked open the front door. The afternoon sun was hidden away, for the house had no western windows, but Omer’s new eyes adjusted quickly. The Falln home was pristine, untouched. A thin dust lay over the tables and counters. If Omer had not known better he would have assumed the family was merely gone for the day, but the overwhelming smell that suddenly assaulted him spoke otherwise.
He heard Tahr sigh behind him. “Oh no,” Tahr said.
Omer hurried into the dark. The front door opened into a double-length room that was both a kitchen and a common. Three doors waited on the eastern side while on the west a line of cabinets and full shelves sat flush with the wall. In his worry, Omer lost his memory of the house and began to check each room in a panic. He went to the first door and threw it open. It was a closet with linen neatly stacked against the back wall and various tools hung aside the door.
He ran to the second door. It was an empty guest room, though it had belonged to Gaul in his youngest years. The bed was bare and the nightstand was the same, the Falln had not entertained company for a long while.
With only the third door left to open, Omer hesitated. Death was nothing strange to a Hunter, even a novice, but the death of a friend was rare, and a loved one even rarer. The Falln had been a second family to Omer, always welcoming him into their home, whether Gaul was with him or not. Aileen had even taken to calling him son; Morel had put Omer’s name into the will, though he knew Hunters took no inheritance. Despite his training, he was unsure if he was prepared to open the last door.
Finally, with a deep inhale edged by a foul sour stench, Omer reached out. He was surprised, however, when Tahr’s giant hand passed his own and touched the door, blocking his way.
“I will go f
irst, if you wish,” Tahr said quietly.
“It is my contract,” Omer said.
“It is,” Tahr nodded. “But your contract is to know if Gaul is returned. Subjecting yourself to this is beyond the task.”
Omer stared at the door for a moment, then shook his head. “A Hunter must know death.”
“Yes, but he should never seek it,” Tahr said. Then he bowed his head and pulled his hand back. Omer opened the door.
The room within was pristine, without even a tussled sheet or thrown pillow, the only mar a candle which had burned down to its base and spilled over onto a small nightstand beside the double-wide bed. Atop the bed, lined harshly by the bright light of evening and still resting quietly under their blankets, lie two silent forms. Were it not for the overwhelming stench of death, Omer might have thought them sleeping; but the pallid skin and the slight tang of metal in the air told him it was not so. Death had visited the Falln home.
“What leaves Silt? Windin?” Omer asked aloud. He already knew the answer but the talk helped him focus.
“You ever heard of a fear spirit in the middle of the country?” Tahr asked.
“No,” Omer said. “Not enough minds. Little else leaves Silt, though.”
“True. The signs agree. A Banshee could do it, but I’ve never seen a bloodless Banshee attack,” Tahr said.
Omer grunted. He stepped to the bed and looked about carefully. Windin were dangerous spirits that used terror to paralyze prey before stealing the spirit for their own consumption. That terror could linger for weeks after an attack, even causing panic in animals and children that stumbled upon the scene. There was little danger to a Hunter, even were a Windin to appear at that moment, but Omer hesitated all the same. He reached out with his mind into the surrounding air, searching for the lingering echo of horror that often accompanied such creatures, something he had always associated with an acrid scent, a scent that was oddly absent amidst the stench of death.
“Windin are drawn to the fearful and despairing,” Omer said. He stepped to the foot of the bed. He could see their faces now, the faces of friends he had known for years, a man and woman he had considered his own family, long ago, before the grave beneath the mountain, before Testing. “I feel no fear about us, only despair… that is harder to see. I brought enough with me the last time I was here.”
“You did not cause this,” Tahr said quickly. “You brought the news of Gaul’s death over a year ago. This attack is days old at most. Something fresh spooked them. Windin need fresh emotion.”
“I know,” Omer said, “but knowing does not stop the guilt. I-,” Omer stopped. He frowned and turned his head to the side. “They are both looking in the same direction,” he said. “They saw their death.”
Tahr came around the bed and knelt down before the face of Morel Falln. He was a balding man of some seventy years with a thin face and frowning eyes which were wide open, almost too wide, as if they had been forced as far as they could go. Behind Morel, his wife looked much the same. Her head was turned towards the far window, eyes wide, mouth slightly ajar as if she had been trying to speak when she perished.
“Windin do not often reveal themselves,” Tahr said. “They prefer sleeping victims.”
“Nightmares,” Omer said. “They cause nightmares and feed on them until the spirit is weak.”
“Yet, both of them are looking in the same spot,” Tahr said. “It would be strange for one of them to be awake, though not unheard of, but both?” He raised a brow and looked at Omer. “This is odd.”
Omer turned around and faced the far wall, the place Gaul’s parents would have been staring when their end came. There was a window on the left hand looking out into the meadow, but on the right hand the wall fled out into a nook and a closet beyond that.
Omer checked the window first. There was nothing immediately strange to his trained eye, though he would need to check the outside to be sure. The dust on the sill was the only stranger in the otherwise homely scene.
He went to the closet next and looked inside. Within were various long pieces of clothing on hangars and a few pairs of shoes, as well as what looked to be a shovel for winter with a wide base. It was as average a closet as Omer could imagine, mirrored in a hundred and thousand other homes across the land.
“I don’t see anything odd,” Omer said. “I don’t see… anything.”
“We should, if it is a Windin,” Tahr said. He was kneeling at the bedside running his fingers along the wood grain floor. “There is no Silt inside the house that I can see. No frost burn on the victims. Nothing in the room appears to have been moved and there are no tracks. Windin are not overly violent, but neither are they known for escaping clean. These deaths look almost natural.”
Omer stepped back to the bed and leaned over, swallowing back the catch in his throat as the faces of his friend’s parents looked back at him. He reached out and gently touched Morel’s ears, pulling them away lightly to see behind. “No piercings,” he noted. “Might have latched beneath the neck, but that is rare. I am inclined to think it is not a Windin.”
“And yet, besides the calm, this might as well be an example from old Crimmlin’s textbook. It looks like a Windin attack,” Tahr said. He stood up and ran his hand across his chin. A frown crept over his lips. He stared hard at the bed. “Do they appear odd to you?” he asked.
“Odd how?” Omer asked.
“They look… stiff,” Tahr said. “Not the sort that comes naturally after death. They look shocked, paralyzed.”
Tahr reached out then and grabbed hold of the blanket by its base. He tugged once, not hard enough to lift the blanket away from the couple but enough to ruffle it out of its long slumber. A layer of dust rose up into the air and with it another, darker substance that sunk faster than the grime.
Omer immediately threw up a hand to cover his mouth. Tahr hissed. “Sulcher,” he said through pressed lips.
“How?” Omer wondered, stepping back from the slowly settling cloud. “That’s an alchemist’s poison. A common thief would not have it. The only Men using it outside of laboratories are-.”
“Hunters,” Tahr finished his thought with a snarl. “That wasn’t Silt outside. It was dried Soulsilver. The kind that falls out of our cloaks if we do not reapply the oils every few months. A Hunter was here, or one who once was.”
Omer lowered his hand. The black cloud had settled once more, its paralyzing touch returned to the fabric. He looked at Tahr with a name on his lips, but one he was not quite ready to speak aloud. “Hunters do not have a monopoly on Sulcher. It could be anyone else,” he said. “The laboratories of Nun are just as stocked and more likely to lose track than Shalim.”
“Sulcher alone, maybe, but Soulsilver is not found in the hand of a thief,” Tahr said softly.
“It could be old,” Omer declared, though he did not believe it himself.
Tahr shook his head. “That pile was untouched and almost directly in front of the doorway. Even a single rainstorm would wash it away. It cannot be more than a week old. It is fresh. It is…,” he trailed off as his eyes fall back on the unmoving corpses that lie beneath the blankets.
“Not Gaul,” Omer said, more to himself than Tahr. “He’s dead, Tahr. He was not here. He could not be here.”
“Omer,” Tahr said calmly in a voice too soft for his huge frame, “you know this is not chance.”
“I did not say it was chance,” Omer said through gritted teeth. “We are amidst a mystery. I just cannot quite put it all together.”
“Well, you have the mind for it. Lead it out and I will follow,” Tahr said.
Omer began to pace about the room, his eyes trained on the bed at its center. “They have been dead… what, two days? Three?”
“Three, but that is a guess,” Tahr said.
“Not more than a week, certainly,” Omer said. “Which means someone arrived only shortly before us.”
Tahr rocked back on his heels and folded his arms. “You think someone is play
ing about our path?”
“Perhaps,” Omer said. “Gerry said there was rumor of strange bandits about, which is odd enough, but I thought he described them awfully close to the bandits at Appledor. If they are one and the same….”
“Are they, though? We have not seen them, either here or back in Appledor,” Tahr said.
“I know, but it is too close for coincidence,” Omer said.
“Hmm, but why here?” Tahr wondered. “Accosting Hunters I can understand. Stupid Men abound. But why seek out the Falln? They were leagues away and without connection to Shalim.”
“No connection but Gaul,” Omer answered. “Perhaps they sought him, or some rumor of him? It would explain their being in Appledor, and perhaps a reason for them to rush here before us.”
“Sounds a bit coincidental to me,” Tahr said.
Omer tapped his forehead and scowled. “I know. The most fated chance could not time us up so neatly with a band of ruffians looking for a dead Hunter. We are missing something. Who knew we were coming? Azod would not even speak with Zekhain about the contract, and surely he was not telling novices about the fortress.”
“Our lips were not iron in Appledor,” Tahr said. “We told everyone that asked we were going to Timmelan. The right ear would know where our path led.”
“An ear that knew of Gaul’s strange case?” Omer said.
“It sounds absurd, I know, but I cannot think of another,” Tahr shrugged.
Omer pursed his lips and stopped his walking. “I am at a loss,” he said. “We are missing a piece to the fence that will connect it all. Come, let’s look about the grounds. We were not expecting murder as we walked up, perhaps we were not as vigilant as we should have been.”