The Broken Man

by Hawkings Austin

  He examined her front; her belly wasn’t extended. Most natural ingested poisons cause bloating, discoloration around the mouth, and…

  He thought that he remembered three symptoms to ingested poisons. He looked into her mouth, but her tongue wasn’t swollen and there was no evidence of vomit in the mouth.

  Still, the darkened eyes are a weird symptom, Piju thought. Dialation of the pupils could be a poison symptom. The southern Bolg had a drug which caused the eyes to darken like this, but the effects weren’t this extreme. Some of the spirit talkers that Waylaid and Piju talked to had used it. Piju had seen it used in the Midsummer ceremony, two years ago. The drug didn’t kill, but left the user in a trance.

  Still, the fear on little Ella’s face reminded him of a story. He hadn’t seen it, but he had been warned that some users of the trance potion would run screaming into the night. The Spirit Talker had told him that Master Waylaid was a brave man. The Talker had said that seeing spirits was more frightening than Piju could imagine. Piju hadn’t bothered to argue, but he knew just how frightening spirits could be. The Bolg called it “soul juice” and did not talk about how it was made. There was no real reason the child would have been exposed to it here.

  He looked at her bare feet; they were marked with a dozen cuts, scrapes, and a bad puncture near the ankle. He looked at that for a long while. He pushed it and squeezed it to see if there was an injected poison. There were no strange fluids, and no old clotting, but it didn’t look infected. It was fresh; it had bled while she died. Her face also had a fresh scratch that could be serious on her right cheek.

  He touched her shoulder and her hip and carefully turned her over, expecting the worst, and was completely disappointed. There was no evidence of any damage on her back. He had expected a savage bite, or at least a snake bite, a bee sting, the mark of some poison insect, or at least Bolg arrow tipped in soul juice, but her dress was unmarked and closer to clean than its front. He checked her head, her back, bottom, and legs; nothing.

  “I expected the beast or poison to have punctured, abraded, or cut a way in,” he said.

  “What did you say, Piju?” asked Brea.

  “Nothing. I was just trying to remember what can cause this. The effect on her eyes is odd. I think I remember Waylaid talking about soul takers.” Piju shook his head, the memory was fleeting. “It was a spirit thing, not one of my skills.” Spirit creatures could kill by many means, but this didn’t appear to be a killing of any sort. There was no unusual bruising about the throat, no blood in the lungs, no obvious self-destruction on the child’s part, nothing that pointed to an evil spirit.

  “I don’t know what caused this, but I know what didn’t cause it.” Piju hoped that sounded more learned than it felt. His only clues were negative clues. It clearly wasn’t an animal attack. It wasn’t clearly any attack at all.

  Piju back-trailed the girl, moving back along the path she had taken. He eased through the brush, a thorn bush, and into the children’s clearing. He sat on his heels, staring at the clearing. There were too many tracks to make sense of any set, but he stared at them and let images of children running back and forth fill his mind.

  He walked carefully over to the tall stump in the middle of the clearing, trying not to leave a track himself. There was a good bit of stone in the ground, and he could move without tracking in the mud. The top of the stump was littered with things which didn’t belong there. He picked up each item and turned them in his hands, trying to grasp their purpose.

  Piju smiled slowly, recognizing toys more from where they sat than what they were made of. There were a handful of rocks, including two fist-sized chunks of marble that could have come from the ancient Fomor fortress that had stood on top of that hill before Ard was built. There was a weathered half-brick that certainly came from the new construction.

  “The works of both the modern man and the ancient one are toys in the hands of a child.” Piju laughed to himself, quietly. Somehow his association with Waylaid had given him an odd sense of humor.

  He looked at the base of the stump, at the small and well-clawed burrow. He knelt beside it, his hand snaked in and back out, holding the most affronted frog. He looked at the frog.The frog looked at him, and it sprang away. Piju didn’t go after it. Two hops later it hit the bushes by the pond.

  “Good enough,” he said. “She wasn’t killed by a frog.”

  Piju walked around the pond, his bare feet sinking into the thick mud. He squatted, looking out over the pond and clearing from a child’s point of view. It was beautiful and green, a farmyard dream of the deeper forest.

  Here was her playground. What did she see?

  It hung on the lower branches of a small oak tree. Only waist high for him, it was a tall reach for the young girl. He freed it gently, a straw doll. There was a circlet around its head, a tiny crown of red cuaichin flowers.

  “Good evening, Princess.” He admired the handiwork for a moment, then tucked the doll into his pouch; the rough yellow hair had reminded him of little Ella.

  Piju crossed the stream, taking careful steps on an old log, and headed up the slope on the far side. Overall, it was still a beautiful day. If he were hunting, say an elk, a deer or a wood cock, now would be the perfect time. There was about half an afternoon left of strong daylight and perhaps as much or more of near-night. The moon was in a good position to keep at least the first half of the night well lit, and the temperature was perfect. Well, perfect for a Bolg who was only wearing a kilt and a sheepskin vest.

  He passed a fort made of fallen branches, roped together with woven grass ropes. Clearly a child’s effort, but it looked like a nice job of it. Perhaps it would be good for a night fort, if you were spending the night in the forest. There weren’t any wolves this close to Ard, so it should be safe enough.

  Piju saw the rabbit snare before he touched it. The linen twine to make it was well wound, better than most children’s efforts. The catch-brace was a little high, more likely to catch a deer than a rabbit… and the deer would just snap the thread. It is for the hunter to know his prey. He left the snare to catch its rabbit or fail.

  And what is my prey?

  There was a second fort near the top of the hill, but the bindings had broken and spilled the branches across the forest floor. From the top of the hill the fort had a commanding view in all directions; it was a beautiful spot to have a camp. From here you could imagine yourself the King of Ard, gazing upon your fields far below. The trees were thin here, the rocky ground didn’t give a lot of dirt for trees or feet, and you could see for as far as your eyes would let you. The light green of the fields, the dark green of the forests, the black green of the yew, and the moss green of the tree trunks.

  He imagined this fort at sunset with the fading sun at his back, the cool breeze from the forest, the sky slowly turning red, and Ard shining a brilliant white as the last full rays of the sun struck it. He wanted to take Roe here; to show her what was beautiful in the world outside of Ard. He doubted she had ever seen past the southern gate.

  The smell of burned pine needles stopped him. The hair on the back of his neck raised, and he slid behind a tree. Someone is out there. Are they watching me? He looked across the hill but didn’t see any signs. He moved into the broken fort for cover, sniffing strongly for the scent of burned pine needles, brought to him by a vagrant breeze.

  In the center of the fort had been a small fire. There was a slice from a devil deer’s tail and some pine needles; it had been a spirit fire. He rocked back on his heels, stunned.

  A Bolg had taken a devil deer within ten paces of here. There was no sign of the kill, but the unburned pine needles were fresh, within a couple days at most. The hunter had been a village Bolg. A man raised up in the ways of the hunt, setting the spirit to rest, and walking while leaving little trace.

  There was no Bolg village anywhere near Ard. Those had been removed during the wars between the Daen and the Bolg near a hundred years ago, making a place for their Ruad
allies. There probably hadn’t been a Bolg hunter in the north half of Pywer, besides himself, for decades.

  Suddenly, the spirit talker’s stories came flooding back. He hadn’t had time to learn all the details, so he had never re-told it, but he had heard part of a story in the South. Now the details he didn’t have didn’t seem as important as the parts he did have. Could there be a spirit taker in the forests?

  Piju looked through the walls of the fort, checking in each direction in the setting sun. He hadn’t expected Bolg near Ard. He hadn’t truly expected a killing dart in Ella’s back, but knowing there was a southern Bolg here made it much more important.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

  The basic outline of the story was this. First, there had been a Bolg who would have made himself king. He was a powerful man, supposedly as strong as a Fomor and he had conquered all the tribes of the Bolg.

  So, a Bolg as strong as a Fomor isn’t a very likely story, but this is the story they gave me.

  He moved slowly from the fort to his own back trail. Had the hunter beaten him there? He shifted his path, heading for the stream bed a bit further north. No arrows flew, no darts sought his back. He moved down the slope a slow foothold at a time, easing through the growing darkness one quiet step at a time.

  For some reason, the warrior named Morn had turned against the prophecy of the next king of the Bolg, the Serpent Rider. Piju didn’t know what the serpent rider was, or what a serpent could be, but a prophecy was an important thing, you didn’t just throw it away for no reason. Again, the story didn’t make a lot of sense, possibly because Piju didn’t have all of the details.

  There was a noise upslope, someone moving toward the fort. Piju moved as only a hunter can, finding handholds and foot placements that moved him silently across the rocky face of the hill. He flipped the hood of the cloak to cover his hair, the stripes of green blending with the moss of the tree trunks and the grass upon the hill.

  Was the intruder a man or a large rabbit?

  A single look might answer that question, but it also might end up with one of them dead. A Bolg hunter hadn’t killed the girl, so whatever Piju saw wouldn’t matter. A man who takes the time to lay the spirit of a deer to rest doesn’t steal the soul of a child.

  The warlord of the story hadn’t bothered Leest because it wasn’t important. It was too far north. Piju’s town was on the northern edge of the Bolg territories, though he had never known it till he traveled with Waylaid. In the story, nothing could stop the warlord from conquering all of the Bolg territory and declaring himself ‘King of the Bolg,’ but he had suddenly died.

  Piju had no interest in dying by any technique; an arrow or spear is just as fatal as sorcery. Perhaps Waylaid would say that a man was, “more dead or less dead,” depending on his ghost, but in his opinion, Piju’s ghost wanted to stay in his body. Piju lowered himself into the streambed and walked quietly along the edge of its shore, ducking under the log bridge. He came in sight of the clearing again and had to stop himself from running to safety. No one had followed him, and perhaps whoever it was didn’t even know he had been there.

  The warlord who had wanted to be king had died with his eyes black—the same as the child. A single symptom wasn’t proof, but the presence of Bolg in the North was a second piece of this puzzle. Waylaid had called the warlord’s death a “spirit taking.” Waylaid had said it was a most hideous crime, for the victim and the killer. Waylaid believed that some Fomor had stolen the soul of the Bolg. The Bolg didn’t perform sorcery; most Bolg thought that they weren’t capable of it. Piju reminded himself that at least one Bolg had fed his blood to a spirit.

  He remembered Waylaid’s teaching, sitting with him beside the Bolg fortress on the southern shore. The winter felt so much colder when fed with the stories of a cloak of shadows, soul stealing, and spirit taking.

  “The killer takes the spirit into his own body and must live with the victim’s voice in his mind forever after,” Waylaid had said, shaking his head sadly. “We teach the Fomor sorcerers to take a small tax from a soul, not enough to bond their spirit with yours. The Bolg teach you to lay the soul to rest or to bind it into an object. No one would teach someone to do a spirit taking; it is insane and foolish.”

  “Is there no way to protect yourself?” Piju had asked.

  “Yes,” Waylaid had replied. “I know of a way, but the cost for that is greater still. It is called the Cloak of Shadows, but it is not a secret given to anyone. Only the high priests of Fomor know of that ritual.”

  “Do you know the ritual?” he had asked.

  Waylaid had only looked at him and would not answer.

  Piju was clearly over his head. He walked quietly back to the body. Looking down at Ella and her mother, grieving over the child, he was still confused as to what could have happened. He handed the doll to Ella’s mother.

  “Ella left this behind, maybe it still holds a piece of her shattered soul—may it find rest. I’ll find who was responsible for this.”

  “My husband says that there is a Fomor sorcerer to blame. He says that he lives in Ard,” she said.

  “A Fomor may be to blame, Goodwife,” he said nodding, “but not the Fomor of Ard. That man is my master, and if anyone can stop an evil sorcerer, it is that man.” It may also be a Bolg, he thought, but he didn’t feel like sharing that information.

  She didn’t look convinced, not immediately. She stared down at the doll.

  “Who could kill a child?” she asked. She still couldn’t call him by a name, but at least did him the courtesy of not calling him, “slave boy.”

  “Mistress Goodwife, I assure you I don’t know. But remember, it isn’t just one child, terrible as that is; it is a now over a dozen.”

  “A terrible, evil man, a sorcerer,” she said.

  “I suspect that you are right, that it is sorcery,” Piju replied, “but there is no mark of sacrifice, so her soul was not given to one of those hateful Fomor gods.”

  “Is there anything more you can tell us, Piju?” Brea put her hand on Piju’s shoulder.

  Piju just gave his half-shrug.

  “There is no mark on Ella. I found no trace of poison on any skin or wound or her mouth. No beast bit her and no weapon struck her. She was not Daen or Bolg or Fomor, so she had no defense against a ghost or sorcery. I cannot tell you more, but perhaps my master can.” He would not tell the woman that her child’s soul was taken. He had little kindness for the Ruad, but in her pain, she didn’t seem that different from any other woman.

  The Ruad woman looked at him, seeing little more than a young man with strange tattoos upon his skin. His face was like her husband’s, much like any of her kin. He was a man who spoke clearly, who lived outside, and who worked each day for a living. This Bolg was not weak and stupid like the slaves in Ard, or a vicious monster from a children’s story.

  She still couldn’t address him directly, though; it was wrong. She spoke across his shoulder to Mistress Brea.

  “I’ll speak with him, if the Mistress Brea will back my claims. I want to know if he is the sorcerer who killed my baby.”

  “Goodwife Ruad, I expect you will learn a great deal before the morning. I hope it is learning you can live with.” Piju covered his face with his hands and bowed to her with great solemnity and then turned and walked away.

  Brea stopped him.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m going for a walk,” he said simply.

  “Are you done?” She waved at the woods, the body of the girl, the mother.

  “The rest is for Waylaid to do, Mistress Brea. I have to find the killer.”

  “Who is the killer?” she asked.

  Piju gave his half-shrug. “I don’t know who or what it is. I know what it could be. I know what it couldn’t be. Now, I just have to know what is in those woods.” He pointed his nose at the forest beyond the hill before them.

  Mistress Brea frowned at him then looked pointedly
at Keynan’s dogs.

  “What are you looking for? Do you want help?”

  “No, I just need to go for a walk. I’ll be back by…” Piju frowned at the lowering sun. “Before the moon sets, or before the sun rises, not sure. It could take a while.”

  “We’ll be waiting for your report.”

  Piju walked past Keynan.

  “Master Keynan, good hunting,” he said.

  “Thanks, Piju. Be careful.” Keynan knew in his mind that there was nothing dangerous to Piju in these woods. They had been hunted out for a hundred years. There was not enough game to support a wolf, much less a pack of wolves. But still, he thought, there is something out there, this time, and it hunts the Ruad.

  “Be careful, my friend,” he spoke to Piju’s back. “Don’t get between that killer and his prey. That is why we are here, eh?”

  Piju shouted back, starting to jog away.

  “I’ll be fine, tell Waylaid I’ll find his killer for him.”

  Keynan started to watch him head out, but his attention was caught by Blue’s growl. She hadn’t backtracked a dozen paces but had stopped at some yew bushes. Blue growled and shook herself, but wouldn’t approach the bushes. She had backtracked the girl there as fast as Keynan could walk it. But she wouldn’t take a step farther after she found the bushes; she just stared at the bushes and whined. She was his best tracker, but she was really still a puppy, and puppies could be complicated.

  Keynan grabbed her by the collar, dragged her out of the clearing, and led her up to Ella’s mother’s house. The house was only a hundred paces away, across the leading edge of their field. He had left Ugly and Grins tied up at the edge of the woods. If he did have a boar to turn or a man to catch, those two would do it. They were old dogs and simple to work. Blue was the tracker though, so he started her on this end of the track. She ran from the house, down the path between the fields, between two trees, and dove right into the clearing.