by Lynn Abbey
“So, what did you do to this ‘dragon-flourisher,’ eh?” G’han said then.
“I wanted to kill him, or at least pummel him a bit—gathered Griff and the rest of the gang I hung out with back then, but Griff talked us all out of it. Word has it he’s a lackey for some zombie magician living outside of town, and Griff figured messing with him would get us skinned alive—”
G’han sat back, a smile playing faintly on his lips.
Taran recognized that look, and shook his head emphatically. “No. G’han, you can’t just show up, kill a handful of ghouls, and expect a grateful mob to hand you a sack of coin! Appearances are deceiving, and even a mage’s kindness can be a curse …”
“You’ve said so before, friend Taran,” his companion murmured reassuringly, though whether he had given up that line of thought or merely filed it away until later Taran had no clue. “But why you should have such sentiments remains unclear, when I can see that it is not magecraft itself that bothers you.”
My father died because he was a mage … thought Taran, though to be sure, a great many other people had died during the Dyareelan interregnum as well. He sighed.
“Let’s just say that Sanctuary is haunted by magic … .”
Sula rinsed a porridge bowl and set it into the dish drainer to dry. She would never have expected to miss the mountain of dishes that were the usual sequel to breakfast at the inn, but it was scarcely worthwhile to heat water to wash only three bowls. There should have been two more, but by the time her brother and that strange friend of his had rolled in, dawn was breaking. Already wakened by her nightmares, she had heard them come in, and hoped that the stranger was drunk enough to sleep through any daytime disturbances.
She could hardly believe Taran was really home. She realized now that she had given up on ever seeing him again. Her grandfather had disappeared into that vast world beyond Sanctuary’s walls-he’d promised to be back in a year, but they had never heard from him again. Why should Taran fare any better? But now that he was here, his presence filled a hole in her heart she had not allowed herself to admit was there.
Stifling a yawn, she picked up the bowl and began to scrub. The backlogs of blackened pots were more than sufficient to use up the dishwater … . It wasn’t fair that Taran should be sleeping in while she had to slave out here.
“We’ll just take advantage of all this spare time to catch up on a few tasks we never could get to when the house was so full,” her mother had said. “Remember, ‘every misfortune hides an opportunity if you look it in the eye!’” And the inevitable proverb as well, Sula thought in exasperation.
There were a lot of jobs on her mother’s list, and a good number of them had been put off “Until your brother gets home.” Sula’s frown turned to a slow smile. Taran couldn’t stay in bed forever, and when he did get up, Latilla would be waiting for him … .
The temperature of the dishwater shifted suddenly to blood-warm and she jerked her hands from the basin with a cry, staring at the red liquid that filled it now.
It’s just blood, she told herself. I’ve seen it before. But the last time the dishwater had turned to gore had been three days ago, and she had hoped that whatever was haunting the inn would find some other manifestation to trouble them.
Taran woke from a dream in which his mother had set him to repaint the Phoenix Inn with a bucket of blood, and he lay for a moment, wondering why he had come home. Even his bed felt strange, smaller than he remembered and sagging in places that no longer fitted him. But the sunlight was flooding in through the window at an angle that told him the hour was well past noon.
The pounding in his temples was familiar, too, but that, he had expected. His mother made a tea that might fix the hangover, if he could persuade her to make it for him. She hadn’t seemed very pleased when he and G’han had left without even waiting for dinner the night before.
He headed down the hall, encountering G‘han, whose clothes, as usual, seemed to have been newly refurbished by some invisible minion. He grunted, half-listening as G’han continued some story about the best way to dispose of rainbow snakes, when both the tale and Taran’s attempt to make sense of it were interrupted by a scream from outside.
Taran peered through the window that lit the stair, and saw his uncle Alfi on the ground, his nose a bloody mess, while beyond him a fat, unshaven man was yelling at Latilla.
Taran flew down the stairs and out the door. Months of driving mules across the miles between here and Ranke and learning to hold his own among the caravan guards had given him muscles and a knowledge of how to use them. The world kaleidoscoped into a narrow tunnel at whose end two figures were struggling.
Latilla saw him first, her eyes widening. Her assailant, seeing her sudden distraction, turned, his jaw positioned at an angle that lined up perfectly with Taran’s incoming fist. An audible crack, and the man fell, his filthy hand loosing its prey.
Words buzzed around him, but the incessant pounding in his ears overwhelmed them. Instinct impelled his foot into the man’s rib cage as he fell.
Crunch! stated Taran’s fists as the man made the mistake of getting up again.
“Taran!” came a distant cry.
Taran staggered as his tunnel vision cleared. A very familiar face was looking up at him, murmuring comfort, and then his mother’s arms enfolded him in a fierce and protective hug. Beyond her he glimpsed his sister, her eyes shining with a fierce approval he did not remember ever seeing there before.
The stranger’s face was now redecorated in crimson, his torn shirt spattered with the remains of the lunch he was retching up into the road. G‘han helped him up, speaking quietly. The fellow cast a quick look at Taran, his face growing pale, though whether from fear or blood loss Taran couldn’t say. The man took a step, discovered he’d developed a painful hunch, and settled for a comical shuffle down the street. Taran’s instinctive surge after him was checked by G’han.
His mother grasped his face firmly between her two hands, forcing him to look into her eyes.
“Taran! Taran! It’s all right, we’re all right! You’re home!”
He coughed as a shift in the wind brought him the uric reek of the fuller’s bleaching vat. Interested neighbors averted their eyes from his bloodshot stare.
“Breathe, boy—did they turn you into a berserker out there?!” That sounded like his mother, all right.
“Sula, help your uncle up and put him to bed,” said Latilla. “Then come back to the dining room. We have some talking to do.”
Taran let her take him by the arm and lead him back inside. The house smelled of baked bread, and those funny herbs she liked to tuck into stew—the familiar smells of home. Why, he wondered, did his skin crawl?
They had not stayed long enough for him to notice anything when they first arrived, and he had been too drunk to feel anything when they came home from the Vulgar Unicorn. But the energy of the fight had dissolved whatever insulation his hangover might have supplied. There was definitely something wrong at the Phoenix Inn.
As Latilla finished her (rather expurgated) account of who Rol was and what he had been after, Sula poured tea into mugs and handed them to the two men, eyeing her brother uncertainly. Taran had been getting into fights since they could walk, but she’d never seen him fight like that!
“But I don’t understand—” he said when his mother was done. “If you didn’t have money, how did you buy that thing?” He pointed toward the carved cabinet that stood in the corner. Latilla had placed it where the afternoon light would caress each swirling curve of the carving, and strike gold sparks from the brass studs. After a moment G’han got up to inspect it more closely.
“It’s beautiful,” Taran said then, “but why—”
“It is strange,” said G’han. “I have seen work like this before, but where … ?” He shook his head. “Where did this come from?”
“Last Sperraz the fisherfolk found a strange ship washed up out on the reefs” said Sula. G’han turned to look a
t her and she flushed beneath his intent stare. It wasn’t a leer; she felt as if he was trying to look into her spirit, not through her clothes.
Her mother had seen the look, too, and was surveying G’han with a frown. Sula took a breath and plunged on.
“It wasn’t Beysib or Rankan or anything anyone had ever seen. It looked old, but the stuff in the holds was fine. There were all kinds of rumors about it, but no one really knows. Anyway, it’s gone now. By the time last month’s storm washed the wreck away, the treasure-hunters had picked it pretty clean. The cabinet came from the ship. It was empty too, when Mother fell in love with it—” She smiled.
Latilla grimaced. “I bought it from Rol. It just goes to show, ‘Even good food is spoiled if a rat drags it in!’”
“True,” replied G’han, “but even the fruit of a healthy tree can hide a worm—”
Sula met Taran’s exasperated gaze and both sighed. Their mother’s proverbs were bad enough—but if she and their guest were going to compete with them, maybe both Sula and Taran should run away from home.
“All right—” Taran attempted to get the conversation back on course as G‘han took his seat again. “Why couldn’t you pay the man back? Even when times were at their worst we’ve always had someone staying here. Why are G’han and I the only ones sleeping on the second floor?”
“Ah …” Latilla sat back with a sigh. “Well, the fact is, we do have a visitor—”
“We have a ghost, who drives our paying guests away!” Sula interrupted her. She glared at her brother. “Did you have bad dreams last night, or were you too anesthetized to remember?” She stepped, sensing the change in his awareness, but before he could speak, his friend sat up with the smile of one who has discovered a silver soldat glinting in a muckpile.
“Ah! So that is it! I felt energies, whispers, in my chamber, and I did wonder if that was normal, after what you have told me of this town.”
“No. Even for Sanctuary, this kind of haunting is strange,” Latilla said tiredly. “In the old days I would have gone to a wizard for help, or to the Mage Guild, but the Irrune have forbidden all such things now.”
“Not all!” grinned G’han. “Now I know why the divine forces direct me here. I am Master of the Fourteen Spirits, a destroyer of demons, a hunter of ghouls. Whatever the nature of the being who haunts you, I will undertake to banish it in gratitude for your hospitality!”
Sula suppressed a snort as Latilla raised one eyebrow. “If you do banish it, I will certainly be grateful,” she said tartly. “If not, I hope you have money. Even after the rough welcome my son gave him, or maybe because of it, Rol isn’t going to take no for an answer for very long … .”
“Not to fear,” G’han said grandly. “You show me where the spirit resides and I will show you what I do!”
“Well, that’s just the problem,” observed Sula. “We’ve had cold spots in the hall and blood in the dishpan. Levitating tables in the guest rooms and leering pictures in the hall. Wherever it came from, it’s all over the house now.”
“In the day or the night is it most active?”
The man appeared to be impervious to her irony, and Sula began to hope that perhaps he did know what he was doing after all.
“The manifestations can occur at any time,” said Latilla.
“But every night they visit me in my dreams …” added Sula.
“So then, I lie in wait for it, like a hunter at a water hole,” said G’han.
“Not alone—” put in Taran, eyeing Sula with a worried look that made her want to cry. With relief, she thought. She and her mother had been facing this without help for too long. “I’ll watch with you.”
At half-past the midnight hour the whispering began.
Struggling in the throes of dream, Taran dimly recalled something about battling alongside an assortment of heroes and gods, up north near the wintry passes where the Nisibisi witches rained down horrendous spells that turned men’s bones to jelly. The fact that the entire war was taking place in both the kitchen and main hall of the Phoenix was immaterial, as was the struggle up the stairs, littered with dead. The Nisibisi held the top, and if Taran was ever to get the tools to fix the sign out front, he would have to lead the charge.
But now … . Now the dream had become more … real. A stranger stood next to him, wearing clothes and a hat of most peculiar design. It turned, displaying a smiling mask, its laughter deep and frightening as the groaning of timber.
Somewhere upstairs his sister Sula screamed.
Taran started awake, and was up and into the hall before he realized he was not in his bedroom. He all but tripped over G’han, as the smaller man, who had been sitting by the fire, leaped up from the hearth, sword still sheathed but ready to hand. In moments they had cleared the stairs and were spilling out onto the upper landing.
A face poked out of the wall, a pale mask twisted in amused contempt. A low growl came from the walls about them, and his grandfather’s old paintings shook as a tremor rolled through the inn.
“Sula! Mother!” Taran shouted from the top of the stairwell, bracing himself between wall and banister. “Where are you?”
G’han slipped past him, drawing his well-oiled sword in one fluid motion and discarding the scabbard. He brushed the two middle fingers of his left hand across the flat of the short blade and sank into that peculiar fighting stance Taran had seen him use once before, hunting ghouls in the small town of Khava. Whispering a short prayer in a singsong alien tongue, the small man burst into action.
With a short leap he was across the hall, fingers sliding from hilt to tip of his blade. As he landed in front of the phantom face, his fingers skipped from the top of the sword, acquiring a sickly green luminosity quite unlike that of the sputtering lantern hooked above them as he touched the apparition’s brow.
“Haj-nak! Iilaa Iilaa!” he shouted. “Naming the Fifth Spirit I ban you now from wood and stone! Cower not in shadows but fight me openly, maleficent shade!”
Taran watched in horror as the wall around the face swelled and splintered, fragments spraying through the air. The apparition dislimned like a fog, filling the hall. Taran could barely see G’han dancing and weaving about. A barely discernible shadow moved with him, bending in inhuman ways.
“Taran!” he heard his mother shout.
“Stay where you are!” he cried, keeping his back to the wall. “G’han’s putting steel to your ghost now! We’ll be safe soon!”
“You fool!” Latilla shouted back, nearer now in the mist. “Tell your sword-crazy foreign friend to stop hacking up the place! I can’t find Sula with him swinging that glorified knife of his around!”
G’han’s dry laughter stopped their bickering cold. “No need! I am much sorry to say Mistress Sula has found me.”
As the mist faded Taran glimpsed him dancing backward, sword held tightly behind him with his right hand while he blocked his opponent’s reckless swings with his left. After another shocked moment, he realized that the attacker was his sister. But it didn’t move like Sula, and on the face beneath her madly fluttering golden hair was the same distorted smile he had seen on the mask.
G’han’s foot slid on a smashed board and only a quick twist saved him from her flashing fists. A titter of laughter accompanied each blow.
“Sheep-shite!” Taran threw himself across the span between them in a full-bore tackle. “Leave her alone!” he screamed as he caught his twin in his arms and the two slammed into the wall, and he did not know if he meant the warning for G’han or the thing that had possessed her. A portrait of an old man in purple robes holding a large, weird-looking crab fell to the floor.
Before Sula could break free Taran straddled her, pinning both arms to the floor. “Mother, get rope! I don’t know how long I can hold on.’
They had wrestled like puppies when they were children, but he had never, even when he was running with Griff’s gang, tried to master anything that fought with the contorting, fluid energy he gripped now. And
throughout the struggle she kept screaming. Taran could only be grateful he couldn’t understand the words. From the tone, it had to be something obscene. G’han stared down at her with widening eyes.
“What’s she saying?” muttered Latilla as the girl began to convulse.
“Not sure—never heard it spoken,” whispered G’han. “But I’ve seen such words in old scrolls. They come from Yenized, lady. It was an ancient empire with great magic far away.”
Taran rolled away, panting, as Latilla finished the binding and forced a piece of leather between Sula’s teeth to keep her from biting her tongue. Then she sat back on her heels and glared at G’han, who had picked up his sword and was sliding it into its sheath once more.
“Then we have a clue where the demon came from, and we know where it is now,” she said tartly. “How do you plan to get it out of my child?”
Taran’s heart sank as he realized that for the first time since he had known G’han, the little man was at a loss.
“Those of my Order are ghost-killers—” he said unhappily, setting his hand on the hilt of his sword. “The only way I know is to strike evil spirits with my blessed blade.”
“Not while it’s in my daughter, you don’t!” Latilla glared at him.
“Taran … what’s happening?”
Taran sat up, eyes widening as he realized those words had not been spoken aloud. They were in Sula’s voice, though. He looked at their prisoner and flinched from the fury in its glare. “Sula? Where are you?”
“I think I’m seeing through your eyes … . Ugh—does my body really look like that?”
Taran blinked. “Not when you’re in it. But it’s your body! Can’t you just shove the ghost aside?”
“There’s some kind of wall around it. Don’t let them kill me, Taran!”
“Taran!” His mother’s voice broke in. “Who are you talking to? Has that thing got you as well?”