“It’s the Devil’s gold, Father. It would require a proper ritual cleansing before a man claiming to be holy could touch it.”
Father Scheitzen stiffened. Nitz violently beat back the smirk forming on his lips.
“And an explanation for the lack of your companion and weapon?”
“The world is a dangerous place for women, Father, even Scarred Sisters. As for Wolfreiz …” He shrugged. “I thought it best to leave the heathen weapon where it lay, embedded in the beast’s skull.”
Father Scheitzen nodded. Nitz felt almost free to loose a sigh of relief.
“And the smell?”
“Smoke, Father. The beast spews hell.”
“Indeed, it does.”
For the first time since he had met the priest, Nitz saw a smile, unpleasant and grim, form upon Father Scheitzen’s face
“Truth be told, I hadn’t expected you to come back, young Nitz.” He turned and strode behind the altar with its grisly trophy. “I was therefore loath to remove this from its sacred resting place, where it was to remain until the last heathen was cleansed upon the earth.” He reached down, wrapped hands about something heavy. “But what good is a killer that does not kill?”
Nitz could hardly breathe when Fraumvilt was brought to the light of the church. Just as the dragon’s tailbone shed light across the vast and gloomy halls, so too did the mace’s metal, so gray as to be black, drink it up.
From its leather-bound handle, up its long, thick shaft, it consumed the light, consumed the brightness, until, like an actor resentful of sharing the stage, only Fraumvilt existed, its spiked, ever-bloodied head smiling with a wickedness far more gruesome than Father Scheitzen could ever hope to conjure up.
“And you, Nitz, are a killer,” he said, approaching the young man. “A Killer Divine, as your father was.”
He smiled, undoubtedly with the intent of appearing compassionate, which made him seem all the more unnerving. He took the weapon in both hands and extended it to Nitz.
“And he would be proud.”
“So you say, Father,” Nitz nodded shakily, extending his own hands to take the weapon.
“So say we all,” the priest finished.
THE coins echoed across the evening sky as they were thoughtfully counted out into the wooden chest. Nitz observed them with special consideration, noting each and every fleck of gold that glistened in the dying light, paying careful attention to the droning of the arms dealer as he dealt every coin out from pudgy hands with an eagerness not befitting his profession.
“One hundred and ninety-eight,” he counted off, “one hundred and ninety-nine … two hundred.” The last coin he let drop into the chest with a frown on his face, as though he had just bid farewell to a loved one. “Two hundred golden brides of God.”
“God needs not gold,” Nitz replied as he eased the chest shut.
“Nor does he apparently need weapons, anymore.” The arms dealer looked to his cart, where his unwashed assistants carefully wrapped and stowed the ever-bloodied mace in leather and then in an extravagant-looking chest. “Though I must inquire, what does God tend to do without the famed Fraumvilt?”
“More good than you intend to do with it, I would hope.”
“I intend to deliver it to the Holy Land, where the priests will undoubtedly pay twice as much to see it put to battle again.”
Nitz nodded and picked up the chest with a grunt.
“Say you found it on a corpse. It would do no one any good to hear by what means you truly came upon it.”
The merchant nodded.
“So say we all.”
“Yeah.”
The journey up the hill, with the rattling wheels of the dealer’s wagon behind him, was not quite as hard as he expected it to be. The chest, heavy as it was, was not beyond his means to carry over the ridge and down to the valley.
Still, when he set it down before a giant, red foot, he did so with a great sigh of relief.
“There we are”—he dusted himself off—“two hundred pieces of gold, as promised.” He looked up into a pair of golden eyes. “Now, as you promised, spit her out.”
Zeigfreid regarded him carefully, with more than a little callousness suggesting he was hard-pressed to find a reason to comply. Still, with a roll of his great, scaly shoulders, he opened his mouth and made a gagging sound.
Nitz held his breath as something sticky and green rolled out onto the earth and lay still. He finally released it when the object moved, one eye, bewildered and astonished, peering out from beneath the viscous layer of saliva covering it.
“Good lord,” came a shrill voice. “What did you do to her?”
Armecia came rushing forward, blanket in hand, Leonard close behind her, and moved to wrap the muscular woman in it. Zeigfreid, in response, shrugged again.
“I ate her,” he replied in a thunderous voice. “I would think that would be obvious from the fact that I also regurgitated her.”
“I never knew dragons could do that,” Sir Leonard mused from behind the cigarillo in his mouth. “Then again, I do get a mite hungry after I partake of the glorious herb.”
“You’ll learn all sorts of things about dragons, if you pay attention,” Zeigfreid replied with a morbid grin. “Such as the fact that four puny weaklings are hard-pressed to kill one.”
“And the fact that they can remove their tails,” Nitz muttered, grimacing at the nub behind the beast’s wings. “Did … did that hurt?”
“It’ll grow back,” the dragon replied. “All things do.”
“For dragons?”
“And people,” the creature replied, “as well as what they destroy in the process of their short and stupid lives.”
Scooping the chest up in one hand, he turned with massive splendor and began to hobble down the dirt road, toward the distant hills and distant sunset. The earth no longer shook with each step, no birds flew away at his step, nor did vermin flee at his passing.
And, in a few breaths, Zeigfreid was a mass of crimson, indistinguishable from the dying sun.
Nitz found himself vaguely jealous.
“I suppose that’s that, then.” He sighed. He glanced over his shoulder to spy Maddy, now clean and wholly irate, snatching Vulf back from Leonard’s grasp. “This is where we part ways, then.”
“After slaying a dragon together?” Armecia asked, raising a brow. “That seems to go against tradition.”
“After I bribed a dragon, yes.” He put a finger to his chest in emphasis. “I. Me. Nitz. I sold a holy weapon to pay off a dragon I was supposed to kill. I took the punishment for this particular endeavor, so please don’t begrudge me when I choose to walk away from you all.”
“For what reason, though?” Sir Leonard asked, puffing out a cloud. “I thought we got along quite nicely.” He glanced toward Maddy. “You know … aside from all this attempted murder business.”
“Because, in less than a day from now,” Nitz replied, “Father Scheitzen will go to Zeigfreid’s lair and find no gold and no carcass. The day after that, Fraumvilt will appear in the hands of someone, and he’ll be able to figure it out.”
“But you told the arms dealer—”
“I also told him that priests would be grateful to have it back in their hands. I neglected to mention that they’d offer grateful prayers after they crushed his head in for stealing it.”
“But he didn’t steal it—”
“Lenny, for God’s sake.” Armecia silenced him with an elbow to the side before looking toward Nitz. “So where will you go?”
“The Holy Land, I suppose.” The young man shrugged. “Where all the other heretics and heathens seem to putter about.”
“It’s a good place to lose your life,” Maddy pointed out.
“We’ve all got to go sometime.”
“Without Fraumvilt?”
“I just—”
“You said it would take a day or two,” the woman replied, smiling unpleasantly. “That’s plenty of time to run down the arms
dealer and smash his genitals before we steal the stupid thing back.”
“Do we have to smash his genitals?” Sir Leonard winced.
“What do you care?” Armecia asked. “You can’t even feel yours.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t be sympathetic.”
“No one is smashing anything,” Nitz barked. “I’m going to the Holy Land. You can all go to hell.”
He had barely taken two steps before he felt a broad hand seize him by the neck of his shirt and pull him back against a large, muscular body flanked by two smaller ones.
“Sort of the same thing, aren’t they?” Armecia asked. “I’ve got business in the Holy Land, too, which, by proxy, means that Lenny does, too.”
“Yeah,” the knight muttered, “sure, why the hell not.”
“You still owe me,” Maddy said, giving him a rough shove forward.
“And me,” Armecia pointed out.
“Owe you?” Nitz turned on her, incredulous. “For what? I said I took the punishment for this.”
“So you can take another one and help me get my journal back,” she replied. “It’s not like you’re particularly bad at this whole doing well by God thing.”
“But I’m a heretic!”
“Lots of good men have been heretics,” Sir Leonard replied. “I mean, none come to mind, and I’m sure they all had their genitals torn off and fed to them …” He clapped the young man on the back with a smile. “And that could be you!”
“Lucky me,” Nitz muttered.
“Point being,” Maddy said, “that there are at least three people who would rather you not die until you help them.”
“My father wouldn’t like it,” Nitz said with a sigh.
“Yeah,” Armecia said, “mine, either. But, I figure, if you’re going to blaspheme dead ancestors, you might as well not do something so halfhearted as selling their favorite bashing stick.” She winked. “After you dig up his corpse and sell that, then you can consider yourself finished.”
Heralded by morbid laughter, a jagged yellow grin, a dejected sigh, and the stench of the Devil’s herb, they stalked down the road, dirty, ragged, and covered in various fluids.
In a few breaths, they were but a blob of shadows, indistinguishable from the night.
Stop!
GARTH NIX
Here’s a creepy and suspenseful story that shows us that even the most ancient of creatures can sometimes learn new tricks …
New York Times bestselling Australian writer Garth Nix worked as a book publicist, editor, marketing consultant, public relations man, and literary agent while writing the bestselling Old Kingdom series, which consists of Sabriel, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr, Abhorsen, and The Creature in the Case. His other books include the Seventh Tower series, consisting of The Fall, Castle, Aenir, Above the Veil, Into Battle, and The Violet Keystone; the Keys to the Kingdom series, consisting of Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, Sir Thursday, and Lady Friday; as well as stand-alone novels such as The Ragwitch and Shade’s Children. His short fiction has been collected in Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories. His most recent book is a new novel in the Keys to the Kingdom sequence, Superior Saturday. Born in Melbourne, he now lives in Sydney, Australia.
THEY spotted him an hour after dawn, as the two jeeps drove along the ridge road. It was Anderson in the lead jeep who saw him, which was kind of ironic, since he was the only one who wore glasses, sand-blasted GI-issue things with black frames a finger thick. He called out to stop, and Cullen stomped the brake so hard that the jeep fishtailed off into the loose gravel and almost went over, and Breckenridge, driving the jeep behind, almost ran into them because he did the same thing.
When they finally stopped, with the dust blowing back over the top of the vehicles, they debused as per the SOP and shook out into something approaching a line along the road, with Sergeant Karadjian shouting at them not to f—ing do anything unless he told them to, most particularly not to let their stupid fat f—ing fingers go anywhere near any f—ing triggers unless he f—ing well ordered them to shoot.
When the dust cleared, the guy that Anderson had seen was still walking towards them. Just walking through the desert like it was some kind of park, or maybe a neighbourhood he was visiting, since he was done up in one of those brown robes, the ones with the hood like the old Mexican monks who ran the orphan school over near the border wore; but that was eighty miles away, so if it was one of those monks, he’d walked a hell of a long way.
“OK, priest or whatever you are, stop right there!” called out Karadjian. “Can’t you read?”
He meant the signs that peppered the Proving Ground, the ones that said that the Army would shoot you if you came in. The man had to have seen the signs, not to mention climbed over at least three fences, the last one still just in sight, a steel blur shimmering in the heat haze, looking like a mirage, only it was real, and twelve feet high, with concertina wire hung all along the top, so who knew how the guy had got over it, or under it, which was more likely the way the ground was a bit unsteady due to previous tests.
“I said stop!” shouted Karadjian again, and he racked the slide on his .45 and raised the pistol, aiming over the guy’s head. But either the guy couldn’t hear or he was nuts from the heat, because he kept on coming, and he still kept on coming even after Karadjian fired one, then two shots over his head.
Karadjian swore and quickly looked at the men, then back at the approaching cretin, and wished that he’d never signed back on again after Korea, but then, you could never expect what was going to happen in the f—ing Army from one day to the next and before you knew it, you had to shoot a damned priest or a monk or whatever and he’d been brought up Orthodox and his mother would never forgive him—
“Stop or I will shoot to kill!” he shouted. The idiot was only twenty feet away now, just walking with his head down, Karadjian couldn’t even see his face, though maybe that was better, and then he was taking aim and tap-tap, two rounds straight into the chest, and the guy didn’t fall down!
“Crap! Anderson! Four rounds rapid!” barked Karadjian as he fired another two shots, this time at the man’s head. Anderson fired too, his M1 a higher, sharper report, bang-bang-bang-bang. The fourth round was tracer, and they all saw it go straight through the guy, chest high, no doubt about it.
Panic rose in Karadjian. He was back at Koto-ri, with the Chinese pouring over the forward positions, a tide of men in the moonlight that the machine guns hadn’t stopped and the artillery hadn’t stopped, and he knew that his rifle and bayonet wasn’t going to make no difference, but the training took over and he mechanically loaded and fired and then when the platoon sergeant pulled them back by squads, he did as he was ordered and somehow they survived …
Training took over again.
Treat the f—ing bullet-proof walker as a tank, he thought, and get out of its way.
He pointed urgently at the jeeps.
“Patrol! Fall back on the front jeep! Steady!”
When he was satisfied that they were moving right, keeping the line, and weren’t going to stumble together, he shouted again.
“Opportunity fire! Nice and slow, take your shots, watch your flanks!”
The walker kept going as they shot at him, five M1s and a .45 shooting as steady and true as any sergeant could wish, and they kept shooting till he got too close to the rear jeep and Karadjian shouted to cease fire.
In the immediate quiet, they heard another noise, one that had been drowned by the gunfire. A noise they didn’t want to hear, shrieking out of the rear jeep, the high squeal of a recently issued, almost brand-new Detectron Geiger Counter, even more terrible to hear because it’d been turned right down, the background squeaking a pain to listen to on the long patrols.
“Stay back,” croaked Karadjian. “Don’t nobody move.”
The guy didn’t stop. He just went on walking, straight towards the inner cordon, and the next fence, two miles to the east. The bullets had sh
redded his robe or habit or whatever it was, and it looked like he was naked underneath, only he was caked in dust or mud or something. Karadjian holstered his pistol, fumbled for his binoculars, and got them up and twiddled the focusing knob, his hands shaking so much he couldn’t get a good look till he clamped his elbows in; then he saw the flash of a thin, scrawny leg slide out of the shredded robe. It was red, all right, but it didn’t look to him like it was from mud or dust.
Karadjian lowered his binoculars. The men were looking at him, the Detectron was easing off its scream but was still loud, too loud to be anything but bad news.
“Back up twenty yards that way,” ordered Karadjian. He pointed along the road. Away from the jeeps. Away from the path of whatever was inside that robe. “Keep a look-out, see if there’s any more of those guys.”
“More?” muttered someone. Probably Breckenridge.
“Shut up and move!”
Karadjian lit a cigarette and coughed. His throat was dry. It was always dry in the desert, but it was even drier now.
“What we going to do, Sarge?”
“Pass the shitty buck,” said Karadjian. He threw the cigarette down and ran to the lead jeep. The Geiger counter in the back seat of that was screaming too, only not as loud as the one in the other jeep. The sergeant snagged out the field radio and ran back, and thinking about it, moved everyone back another hundred yards, so the shriek of the radiation detectors wasn’t scaring him so much he felt like taking a dump right there in front of everyone and had to suck air and try to think of other stuff to stop himself.
Karadjian had been on the Proving Ground security force for three years. He talked to the scientists, particularly the troubled ones, who roamed around at night and wanted to talk, and wanted to hear him tell them about Korea, and how they needed the Bomb and more and bigger and better Bombs, because when it came down to it, there were billions of Chinks and Russkies out there and there wasn’t anything else that was going to stop them. But the scientists talked about other stuff too, and so did the guards, and all of them had seen what it meant to die of radiation poisoning, and anyone who’d been slack early on was dead now, or wished they were.
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