Malice of Crows

by Lila Bowen

  Rhett followed her as she walked purposefully toward the mission. “Yeah, well, she’s out cold right now. But I tied her up first.”

  Cora huffed. “Well, that should certainly make her willing to talk.”

  “She attacked us!”

  “I begin to see why.”

  She stomped past Winifred and into the mission, and Rhett muttered under his breath, “I will never in my life for a single moment understand how the female mind works.”

  Cora didn’t even stop to inspect Winifred. She marched up to the brightest spot in the mission, dropped the books, and began flipping through them. When Rhett didn’t follow fast enough, she pierced him with a look and pointed to the stack of books with a claw. A small curl of white smoke hissed from her nose. He hurried to deposit his books and get the hell away before she became more dragonish.

  Back outside, the night air was one hell of a relief. Dan still stood by his sister, one hand on her shoulder like he was offering her support.

  “Does Cora have the right book? Can we fix her?” he asked.

  Rhett shrugged. “Damned if I know. Considering there’s statues all over the mission. I reckon that if the nun could do anything about it, there wouldn’t be so many.” Another thought struck him. “Unless she likes it that way. Maybe she ain’t a friendly kind of nun.”

  “Are you sure she’s a nun?”

  “Hellfire, Dan. She’s wearing a nun’s black duds and a veil, so I don’t know what else she’d be. A waiter in a tuxedo? But I reckon now she’s a nun with a broken nose. Serves her right if it heals cattywampus.” Ever since Rhett’s nose had healed crooked after tasting Jiddy’s silver knuckledusters, he’d pretty much begrudged everybody whose nose was straight and slender still. “In any case, seems like you’d do more good reading than you would standing here, being tetchy.”

  Dan released Winifred’s stone shoulder. She rocked a little, and he winced. “Perhaps, for once, you’re right.”

  Cora was still reading and had already discarded a couple of books, which were tossed away, their spines cracked open like they’d dared to insult her. Dan sat down beside her and took a book into his lap. His finger ran down page after page, and every so often, he’d glance up at the statue of his sister, his brow furrowed and his eyes gone soft and sorrowful.

  Across the room, the nun was sitting up, conscious now and writhing against her bonds. Her shoulders rubbed at the cloth over her eyes, the snakes straining to bite the air before her face.

  “Listen, nun. We got to talk,” Rhett said as he walked up.

  The nun gritted her teeth, hissed, and let out a stream of sounds that made no sense to Rhett but seemed to promise death and dismemberment.

  “She only speaks Aztecan,” Dan said, all surly. “And she said you will be punished for your sins.”

  Sadness gripped Rhett’s heart, thinking about Earl’s last confession. “I reckon I don’t believe in sin, and she’s not much in the position to punish just now, anyway. Ask her how to make Winifred a person again.”

  Dan stumbled over his words a bit, but whatever he said made the nun laugh, and a dark and evil sound it was, especially coming out of someone who looked so saintly on the outside. When she spoke again, Dan said, “She says nothing can make my sister a person again, that she will join the sinners who watch the door. Such is her curse: to punish and to keep the books.”

  “Wait. Keep the books? So this is the place the Captain told us about?”

  Dan translated, and the woman’s voice when she next spoke was less evil and more curious. Rhett caught the words el Capitán, which sounded pretty familiar.

  “She wants to know which Captain told you? And who you are.”

  Rhett dug in his pouch and pulled out the Captain’s badge. Careful to hold back the sharp pin, he ran the woman’s fingers over the metal. “Las Moras. And I’m the Captain now,” he said gently. “He even gave me his name. I’m Rhett Walker, and this is my posse.”

  Even with her hands bound, the woman went still as she touched the metal, her fingertips light over the carved letters. She spoke, and Dan spoke back, although he had to stop and think a bit.

  “I don’t know the word for sand wyrms,” he explained. “But she seems familiar with them from my descriptions.”

  Dan and the woman conferred, and soon he stood with a tired sigh. “She liked our Captain. Won’t deal with Haskell, since he called her some unkind names.”

  “Goddamn Haskell. I should’ve killed him myself,” Rhett fumed.

  “She says they had a signal so the Captain could approach without losing any men. She’s willing to help us because we didn’t kill her, but you should know… she would rather be dead.”

  “So why don’t she kill herself?” Rhett asked, but his voice broke on the last word.

  “Suicide is a sin,” the woman said, her English perfectly understandable. “This is my punishment and my task: to stay here and cause suffering and in turn, to suffer.”

  “Well, why the hell didn’t you just start talking right off?” Rhett hollered, exasperated.

  The nun gave a small, sad chuckle. “You learn more about a man when he thinks you can’t understand him.”

  “Goddamn, lady. If you’d just dealt straight with us from the beginning, we’d all be in a hell of a better mood. Now can you help Winifred or not?”

  The woman’s head turned toward the door, where the night wind whistled in past Winifred cast perfectly in stone, gray and mottled and hard, hands outstretched.

  “I cannot.”

  Dan growled and swore.

  “Can anybody?” Rhett asked, feeling like he was asking a bunch of stupid questions but that somebody by God had to.

  The nun shook her head, and as the cloth fell away from her eyes, Rhett lunged for Dan and tackled him to the ground while shouting, “Close your eyes, Cora!”

  They landed hard, and Dan grunted but didn’t complain, and Rhett climbed up so that he was blocking Dan’s face completely from anything the nun might do. But she didn’t move, and nothing happened.

  “My eyes are closed,” she said softly. “And if I could use my hands, I would put my veil down. You will be safe.”

  All of a sudden, Rhett realized he was plastered all over Dan, and it was damned awkward. He clambered off carefully, whispering, “I want to trust her, but I don’t yet. Keep your eyes closed, you hear?”

  Dan nodded, and Rhett braced his hands on the dirt floor and stood, circling around to walk toward the nun from behind.

  “This your veil, falling down your back?” he asked.

  “Sí.”

  “Reckon that means yes. I’m gonna try to flip it over the snakes now.”

  The nun chuckled. “Perhaps they will allow it.”

  Holding his breath and ready to whip his hands back, Rhett gingerly plucked the white fabric from the nun’s back and tried to sweep it over the nest of snakes that writhed and hissed where her hair should’ve been. It took several tries, but he finally succeeded. It was a rumpled job, but when he checked from the side, the nun’s face was completely covered. She lifted her tied hands and arranged it as well as she could until she looked like nothing more than a simple nun.

  “The serpents have no venom, you know,” she said.

  “I’ll keep my distance, just the same.”

  “You said you came here as a Captain, for information?”

  Rhett knew that tone. It was the sort of tone a person used when they wanted something and knew they had something valuable to trade in return.

  “I did. And let me guess. You’ll help with that information if I untie you.”

  Her laugh was a lively thing, for a snake-haired nun. “Exactly so.”

  “But nothing anyone can do will fix our friend?”

  At that, her head hung low. “I am sorry, but no. It is permanent. Ask me anything else I can grant you or tell you, and it is yours.”

  “Once you’re untied.”

  “Once I’m untied.”

&
nbsp; “And you’re not lying about our friend?”

  “Look around you. These statues are my constant companions. If I could save anyone, it would lighten the load my soul bears. This is not a destiny I wished.”

  Rhett looked to Dan, who walked to the mission wall and punched the stone with his fist, hard enough to draw blood. He stalked back to Winifred.

  “My sister will not sit here, in a church, watching sins punished for eternity. She hated the church. I forced her to go there once, to seek solace and contemplation and safety within a cloister’s walls, and she rebelled. I will not force her again.” With both hands, he shoved the statue, hard, in the chest. The statue rocked backward, wobbled for a long second, and fell back, smashing against the floor.

  “No!” Rhett yelled, running toward the toppling statue.

  He was too late, of course, and he skidded to a halt as the statue crashed against the dirt. The gray rock exploded and skittered across the floor. Rhett was completely flummoxed to see Winifred’s skin revealed underneath it, as if the stone had been merely a crust. She landed on her back, eyes wide open, totally still. And then she drew a deep, sucking breath and pushed it back out.

  Dan was across the room in a heartbeat, whooping fiercely in joy and kneeling by his sister’s side.

  “How can this be?” Cora muttered, her face bathed in wonder as she came to kneel at Winifred’s other side.

  “I keep forgetting she’s cursed,” Rhett muttered back.

  Dan put an arm around his sister’s shoulders and took her hand, helping her to stand. Her face showed complete shock, her hand going immediately to her belly.

  “Gorgon,” she whispered.

  “We know,” Dan said, grinning.

  “What happened?” the nun called. “You broke the statue, and… she’s alive? She was within?”

  “Exactly so,” Rhett said, giddy with joy and mimicking her earlier clever tone.

  “It can’t be.” The nun struggled, trying to stand on her tied feet. “It can’t be so easy.”

  “You never tried to break one before?” Rhett asked.

  “Of course not! I can’t help turning them to stone, but smashing them would be cruel, blasphemous.”

  “Except she’s alive,” Cora said wonderingly.

  “Please. Help me stand. I have to try. I have to see.”

  Rhett looked at Dan. “Your call.”

  Behind Dan’s joy was his usual canny wisdom. “Free her feet and retie her hands behind her. And then we’ll see.”

  The task that had seemed impossible while the nun was unconscious was far easier with her eager help. As soon as her feet were free and her hands were behind her back, she ran to the statue Rhett had inspected, the one with arms upraised and brandishing a cross. The nun threw her body at the statue, again and again, trying to make it topple over. Finally, Rhett took pity on her, walked over, and pulled it down with one hand. It smashed against the floor, and everyone stopped, waiting for the same magic that had revealed Winifred’s copper skin under the hard stone coating.

  All they saw was smashed gray stone.

  “No!” the nun cried. “No! Not Eduardo. My love. Gone now. Truly gone. Why did I believe you? Why was I so foolish to hope?” She fell to her knees and dragged her veiled face through the rubble.

  “Hey, now,” Rhett called. “Keep that veil on.”

  “Or what? What could you possibly do to punish me more than this life?”

  Winifred broke away from Dan and went to the nun, careful to keep her face turned away to avoid any accidental eye contact. Kneeling, she caught the nun by the shoulders and helped her to sit up, smoothing down her veil and patting her like a baby.

  “It’s never foolish to hope,” Winifred said. “It’s what keeps us going.”

  “But you’re alive, and he isn’t,” the nun wailed.

  “I’m under a curse. I die nine times, and the ninth time, I stay dead.”

  The nun swallowed hard and hung her head. “Ah, so you tangled with a cat shaman.”

  They shared a small chuckle, and Rhett looked at Dan and shrugged.

  “Come. Stand up. We have to move forward. It doesn’t do to sit in the dust of the departed, my mother used to tell me,” Winifred said, sounding kinder than she’d ever been to Rhett.

  “My hope is dead,” the nun said. She took a deep breath and sighed. “But we are not. Close and bar the doors, and I will show you what I know.”

  An hour later, they sat in a warm kitchen around a long table on benches much like the ones in the Ranger cabin, roughly handmade but long worn by years of buttocks. In blessed peace, they ate chicken soup and beans as Winifred and Inés, for that was the nun’s name, discussed stew recipes. The room was homey, lit by candles and with a cleanly swept flagstone floor. Rhett would’ve been angry and bored if the food wasn’t so good and if the womenfolk hadn’t all been too pleasant to harp on him for his bad manners. As it was, he at least had a full belly and didn’t have to bother with building up a fire. He’d checked on Sam before coming inside, but nothing had changed. Nothing had changed in days. Sam wasn’t getting any better, but at least he wasn’t getting any worse.

  “How did you come to be here?” Winifred asked. Rhett was surprised to find that the girl who’d been turned to stone had a softness for the woman who’d nearly killed her.

  Inés sat down with her own soup bowl, carefully spooning the rich broth under her veil with a delicacy that suggested long practice. “Your Captain found me when I was in a dark place, soon after I took over this abandoned mission. I arrived with only my husband, Eduardo – but he was stone, by then. I dragged him behind the wagon because I could not lift him. He was always bigger than me. He was the first statue, and it was your Captain who helped move him to where he stood, until this day.”

  She dropped her soup spoon and went to a cabinet, returning with an old, sack-wrapped bottle and a wax-dappled candle cup. After pouring a sloppy shot, she held the cup under her veil and drank it in one gulp.

  Seeing Rhett’s confused stare, she murmured, “Tequila can be curative.”

  “A drunk nun. Who’d have thought?”

  “Sometimes a dash of strength is needed before telling one’s sad story, boy. Now listen. I was left at the doorstep of a mission in Santa Lucia when I was just a little girl. I don’t remember my parents, but I do remember that I was always kept blindfolded. A mortal sensitivity to sun, they said. The sisters were pure of heart and couldn’t see the evil I hid under my habit.” Rhett raised an eyebrow, and she could apparently see well enough through the veil to laugh at him. “The snakes are biddable when I will them so. I knew well enough that if the nuns were displeased, I’d be alone in the world, so I was a good little girl. I grew up almost like an ordinary novice, but before I took my orders, I wanted to experience the world. It’s not uncommon, and I soon fell in love with a boy named Eduardo in the nearby town. We married, and had a daughter, and she was born like me. My sweet Maria. Eduardo could not see what she was, couldn’t see the tiny snakes. I kept her eyes covered, like mine, telling him she had the same light sensitivity, and he was understanding. Oh, Eduardo.”

  Winifred put a hand on Inés’s back as the woman’s head fell. “But one day, she was angry, as babies can be, and her snakes attacked him while he took her for a walk outside. He couldn’t see what was happening, and before I could stop him, he flung her away. It was such bad luck, so impossible. She landed on an old branch, and something pierced her heart. So tiny, so fragile she was. She turned to sand, and when I cried out, Eduardo looked to me and saw what I am. We fought, and he ripped the blindfold from my eyes, and then… he was stone.”

  “Looked like he was holding a knife to kill you at the time,” Rhett observed.

  “He was. What would a normal man do, finding a monster in the body of his wife? How could he understand what he was seeing for the first time? I do not blame him. For her, or for this. Losing them both, I knew I had to withdraw from life. To live alone, and to find
some kind of work that would make up for my sins. This mission had a fine library, and your Captain brought me many books over the years. It would appear that the monks knew of monsters, and the way I found their bones suggests they were killed by the creatures they studied. Ripped apart violently. Partially eaten.” Her veil tilted as she looked around the room, filled with sturdy but simple furniture and hanging herbs. “Oh, yes. This place is very haunted. It is what I deserve.”

  The hairs on the back of Rhett’s neck went up, and he, too, looked around. He could see, now that he was looking hard, the dark splashes on the limed white walls where rusty red couldn’t quite be scrubbed away. He imagined what it might have looked like, this table full of quiet men in brown robes eating their supper, and then the door flew open to reveal… hell, anything. Sand wyrms, Lobos, chupas, some critter no one had lived to tell about yet.

  “Why didn’t the Captain mention you earlier?” Dan asked, ever the logical one.

  Inés shrugged. “Because we agreed it was best kept a secret. People who come here don’t leave. This is not a boardinghouse or a saloon. I protect information that would change the very fabric of the world. Such things must be kept secret at all costs.”

  Rhett finished his soup and stood. “So where’s this library? Because we got a lich to kill and a sick friend who needs medicine for what the lich’s poison has done to him.”

  Even through the fabric, he could feel the nun’s glare. “Where are your manners?”

  “I like her,” murmured Dan.

  Rhett sat back down as everyone else finished their soup. Not like he could do much with a library on his own, anyway. Despite Sam’s repeated attempts at teaching, he could barely understand the letters that made up his own name, much less parse out an entire book about killing alchemists. Ever since Winifred had turned back to flesh and blood, he’d felt the Shadow’s tug renew, pulling him east toward San Anton proper. It made him feel restless, almost itchy, as if sitting anywhere but in a saddle on a moving horse was a godforsaken waste of his time. He glanced at Cora, who sat back with her arms crossed and her mouth pursed. He reckoned she felt about the same way as him: ready to go kill a lich.