“Drop the knife,” Dirk said, turning to face Marren. He flicked his eyes to Anbrough. “Drop the iron.”
“Why should we?” Marren asked, spitting blood-flecked phlegm onto the floor.
“Do it, and live,” Dirk said. “Do it not, and you can rot beside your father. I care not.”
Anbrough's eyes flicked from Dirk, to Marren, and back again. He flung the poker down, holding up his empty hands. Marren rounded on him, surging to his feet.
“Cur!” he bellowed, drawing his arm back for a vicious slash.
The blow never landed. Dirk fell on Marren's back, yanking the man's chin up. Dirk's knife flashed, and Marren's throat yawned wide, cut to the bone. He fell on the hearthstones, still trying to curse his brother as he died. Anbrough stood still as stone while red rivulets ran down his face.
“Sit yourself,” Dirk said. When Anbrough didn't move, Dirk repeated himself. It wasn't until Dirk shoved a chair toward him that Anbrough looked up. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Anbrough collapsed into the chair. Dirk pulled a kerchief from his pocket, and wiped down his blade. Blood slid from it like oil, dripping from the tip and pattering onto the floor. When it was clean enough, Dirk slid the steel back into its sheathe. He tossed the bloody cloth to Anbrough.
“Clean yourself, if you have a mind,” he said.
Anbrough folded the kerchief carefully, scrubbing his hands, then his face. Tears welled in his eyes, though Dirk doubted he felt them. “You... you killed them.”
“I did,” Dirk agreed, taking down a cup from a shelf above the bar. He blew the dust off of it.
“With an iron knife,” Anbrough said. He didn't appear to realize he was speaking. “Why did you not use your dagger?”
“That blade is not meant for the likes of them. An honest knife did the deed well enough.” Dirk picked up a pitcher from the bar, and glanced into it. He frowned, swirling the water. “Is this safe to drink?”
“Why would it not be?” Anbrough asked.
“There was enough Crone Tongue in that stew to choke a horse,” Dirk said. “My tongue is half asleep just from the taste I took, and that is after chasing it with a salt cleanse. There could be just as much, if not more, in here and I would never be the wiser.”
Anbrough met Dirk's eyes. His head sank, and his shoulders slumped. “Father put the herb in the bowl with a chip on the rim. He told us that bowl was the one for guests, and if we ate from it then it would be on our own heads.”
Dirk nodded. He poured from the pitcher, and held the cup out to Anbrough. Anbrough hesitated, then took the cup, and drank it dry. He handed the empty cup back, and Dirk refilled it for himself. He picked up a chair, and placed it facing Anbrough. Dirk sat, putting the cup on a side table.
“How many?” he asked. “How long?”
Anbrough shook his head. “I know not. Father brought us here ten years ago. We were meant to sleep the night and move on, but in the morning he told us we were staying. No one owned the rock pile, and it was as good a place as any to stay in. After a few weeks fixing holes and wiping stains, it did well enough.”
Anbrough folded his hands in his lap. They were nervous, though, and he fiddled with his fingers as he stared off to one side. He licked his lips, and swallowed hard.
“We saw no one for months,” he said. “No one wanted to linger near that thing in the woods, so we were left alone. Until a man came. He was a northerner, but a snow storm had pushed him off his path. He was afoot, and he was heading to some place we had never heard of. He bargained for food and a room, and when I woke he was gone. When I saw Carrig wearing the man's square-toed boots, I knew what had happened.”
Anbrough coughed, hacking into his closed fist. He spat. Dirk walked to his bag, took out a small flask, and handed it to him. Anbrough took a drink without asking what was in it, and gagged slightly. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, and held the flask out. Dirk took it back, and set it next to the water cup.
“I said nothing, but when I went to gather wood I found a trail leading past the demon pond. I turned away from it, but I knew what I would find if I followed.” Anbrough wiped his face again, stroking the bloody kerchief across his forehead, and patting the back of his neck. “When the snow was mostly gone, another stranger came to our door. A woods girl who thought the road past our door would hasten her journey. I told da she had nothing we needed. There was no reason to hurt her. He agreed with me, but that night I woke to screams. Marren was having his way with her, and when he finished he cut her throat. He said we would kill her anyway, and he wanted to plow her field while she had life in her.”
Anbrough rubbed his eyes. They were watering, and his nose was starting to run. He snuffled, and spat again. Dirk offered his flask again, and this Anbrough took a deeper drink. There wasn't much in the flask to begin with, and it was nearly gone after a swallow or two.
“It blurs after that,” Anbrough said. “There were more than ten, I know that. Some seasons, though, we would go months without seeing anyone. I tried to warn one old man, but Carrig beat me bloody when he caught me, then killed him anyway. After that, I kept my mouth shut.”
“What about this pearl Marren spoke of?” Dirk asked. “Did you truly have such?”
Anbrough nodded. His pupils were several sizes too big, and he was having trouble keeping the thread of his thoughts the longer he spoke. “Was a year and some odd back. A man came from the north. A dark man, young, dressed in ragged sheepskins. They were white under all the dirt. I could barely understand his words. He had a footsore limp, and dark circles under his eyes. Was skinny, too, and when da gave him a bowl, he ate it so fast he was scraping the bottom before the sweet leaf caught up to him. We found the pearl in his bag, and da put it up on the mantle. Was the size of a babe's fist, and it shone bright. Probably worth this whole place, and the forest a'sides.”
“A lot of agony, over such a small thing,” Dirk said.
“I think it was more than just a stone,” Anbrough said. He blinked several times, and wiped at his right eye. “The first night he had it, I found da miles down the road. He was walking in his night shirt, his feet bloody from the trail. He was confused after I woke him, and rare left his bed the next two days. He babbled about a dream, and a doorway. He forbade the rest of us from sleeping in the common room thereafter. He misered over the thing, and some morns I would wake to find him clutching the pearl in his fist hard enough to turn his knuckles white.”
Anbrough fell silent. He swayed in his seat, listing first to the left, then to the right. He kept jerking himself straight, as if he'd been about to fall asleep. The fire crackled. The scent of blood, sharp in the initial moments after the fight, wafted through the place. Anbrough turned, and glanced at the mantle as if there was still something there to see. He licked his lips. Dirk waited. Finally, Anbrough looked up. His face was pale, and sweat beaded in the hollows of his temples. He coughed, and Dirk nodded.
“It was a clever lie you told about your da mixing the herb in the bowl,” Dirk said, glancing toward the water pitcher with the dregs of Crone Tongue sitting in the bottom. “And bold to drink when you knew it was poison, hoping I would do the same. The road to hell is a long one. Do you have any burdens you want to leave here before you start walking?”
“I was glad to see them die,” Anbrough said. His voice was a harsh rasp, and when he coughed this time blood spattered his lips. Not much… not yet. That came later, after the paralysis had fully settled in. “I could have been free, if you would have turned me loose. But they were my kin. I had to try.”
Dirk nodded. Anbrough tried to lift his hand to wipe his mouth, but it flopped in his lap like a dying fish on a river bank. He managed to raise his head. Tears ran freely down his cheeks, and blood was welling in his right eye.
“Would... would you make it quick?” Anbrough asked. “A mercy? I know what happens after. Spare me that?”
“Did you trail Teller?” he asked.
“Yes,” Anbrough said. “But not for days. The wine made us sick, and by the time we could walk without shitting ourselves, a storm had come through. He could have gone anywhere. Da gave up after a month. He talked about taking up the chase again when he got lost in a bottle, but talk was all he did.”
Dirk nodded. He put a hand on Anbrough's head, and tilted it back. The boy tried to say something, but before the breath could pass his lips, Dirk slipped his knife between his ribs. Anbrough gasped. The fire flickered in the hearth, and whatever had looked out of the boy's eyes was gone. Dirk took a waterskin from his pack, and rinsed the bad taste out of his mouth. He reversed his grip on his knife, and eased open the door to the rear room.
The bedroom was much like the main room of the dug out. Sleeping mats were rolled out in three of the four corners, each near a jumble of belongings that marked out territory. A man lay in the dirt, one arm twisted up behind his back. Dirk crouched, and tilted the man's head. His face was young, but his hair was beginning to recede, and his beard only grew in patches. He bore no wounds, but his lips were nearly black with blood. He was still warm to the touch. Dirk thumbed back the dead man’s eyes, and found crimson cataracts beneath the lenses. The crone's kiss, his grandmother had called it when she'd given her grandchildren their lessons. Dirk let go of the man's lids, and returned to the main room. He plucked a small vial of oil from his pack, and sat down across from what was left of Anbrough.
Dirk laid his knife across his thigh, and carefully dripped oil onto the blade. He stroked the bloody cloth over it, pulling the red remnants of the four dead men from his steel. Once the knife gleamed, Dirk turned the blade on its side, and looked down its edge. He took a small whetstone from its pocket on his sheathe, and smoothed the nicks left by bone and gristle. When he was satisfied, Dirk put the knife away, and thumbed the leather loop over the pommel to keep it in place. He stood, and patted Anbrough on the shoulder. The body slumped, and sighed.
Dirk wasted no words on the dead. He gathered his pack, and took down his cloak. Then, taking only what he'd brought with him, he opened the cloudy bottles and poured the rest of the spirits over the tables, tack, clothes, and the former masters of the hovel. Once the stink of the brew overtook the smell of death, he pulled down one of the lit lanterns and smashed it on the ground. The burning oil spattered in all directions, hungrily devouring anything it fell on. As the blaze crackled to life, Dirk stepped back into the night. As he walked back toward where he'd left Sunset, he tried to shake the feeling that the poisoned man in the rear room had been a sign of things to come; dead no more than a few hours before vengeance had walked through the door. Dirk remembered what his grandmother had told him to do, if he was too late to fetch Teller back home.
“What will be, will be,” Dirk said to no one. He rested his hand on his knife, and walked a little faster.
Chapter Six
Dirk rode north from the hole-in-the-hill. At first he kept his eyes open for Teller's blazes, but once he'd covered a week's worth of ground without seeing them, he stopped looking. He was careful to stop once or twice a day to leave his own mark, though. As he and Sunset traveled, the last wisps of summer bled from the days, and chill nights became standard fare rather than the exception. Even the small collections of clan fams and farm communes he was used to stumbling across in wild country grew fewer and further between. When the people in them began meeting him with hard looks, and with steel close to hand, he chose to avoid them entirely.
Fortunately for Dirk, Teller's blazes weren't the only sign of his trail. His cousin could walk for days without missing a breath, and keep talking the whole while, but for all his time in the wild Teller was never truly comfortable in it. Nor was he skilled at going unnoticed. So even when there was no one to note his passing but the trees and stones, there were still signs he'd been there. Dirk found secluded caves and dug-outs where the wind and rain weren't welcome, and in them were fire pits whose ashes still reflected Teller's peculiar, cross-hatched method of fire building. He found old scars in trees where Teller had hung his hammock, and even a few scraps of horsehair shank rope he had knotted too tight for him to untie the next day. Dirk even found one or two crumpled sheets of parchment bearing his cousin's distinctive scrawl. The pages were covered in gibberish phrases and empty nonsense, but it was all written in Teller's minute script. The pages made Dirk's hands feel dirty when he touched them, but he tucked them away in an empty sack in the bottom of his saddlebags just in case they might be useful later.
There were times when the trail vanished entirely. When that happened, Dirk had to follow Teller with his mind instead of his eyes. Looking at his back trail, Dirk saw that every detour Teller had taken eventually turned back to the northwest. So Dirk followed the paths most likely to lead him in his cousin's footsteps. Sometimes he traveled for a day without any fresh sign, sometimes for two, but he usually came across some remnant that confirmed he'd gone the right way. Part of it was that Dirk knew Teller's mind, and how his cousin picked his way through a wild. Another part, a part Dirk didn't like to think about, was that not long into his northern trek Teller had thrown his former caution completely to the winds. There was no circling around, no backtracking, and no attempts to confuse followers. There was also no attempt to turn his steps back toward home. So Dirk followed, worrying at his thoughts like a hound with a bone.
He was deep in true woods, where the hand of man was so lightly felt that it may as well have never touched the wilderness at all, when Dirk smelled smelled smoke. Dirk drew rein, and sat his saddle for a long moment. He tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. It was wood smoke, and it had the dry, incense smell of kindling, rather than the hot char of green wood that had met fire by accident. Spruce, with a hint of old pine running through it. Mixed into the aroma was the scent of cooking meat, and spices; all tell-tale signs of a home fire. Dirk opened his eyes, and scanned the trees. Through a gap in the branches, he saw a lazy curl of smoke slipping into the sky. He drew his wood-handled knife, and cut a sharp, diagonal line into a trunk to mark where he'd turned from the path. Sheathing the blade, he turned Sunset's head west, and they walked toward the sinking sun.
What he found was a small clearing, with a cabin butted up against the treeline. The low building sat next to a clear-running creek, whose bed was made of bright, white stones. The shutters were open to the evening breeze, and chickens clucked from the cleared patch of ground around their coop. A bloodstained stump stood in the side yard, with a hatchet buried in the wood. A fire burned nearby, and an old man stood to the side of it, slowly turning a spit. Sitting next to the old man was a stout ash bow, and a quiver full of white-fletched arrows. He glanced over when Dirk rode from under the branches. The old man stepped away from the fire, resting one hand on the bow as he raised the other to shade his eyes. Dirk drew rein at the edge of the clearing, and kept his hands in sight, giving the codger time to glance him over. The trees to either side of the path bore strips of white paint, as well as the scars of old shafts. Somewhere in the forest, a rook coughed its flat, toneless cry.
“Good morrow,” Dirk called after a moment, raising his empty right hand a little higher in greeting.
The old man glanced at the sky, and turned back to Dirk. Despite the thin, gray hair and his age-spotted scalp, the man's eyes were sharp. So was the smile he gave, revealing crooked, snaggled teeth the color of old beech wood.
“Too late by half for a morrow, youngling,” he called back. “Get thee down off yonder beast, and pray, say what you would have of me.”
Dirk slid down from Sunset, who shied slightly. He caught hold of the saddle horn, and stroked a hand through her mane. She quieted, and looked around the clearing with her ears pricked up.
“I would share your fire, and your meal if there is spare,” Dirk said.
“My well is flooded,” the old man said, making a sweeping gesture with one hand while the other turned the bird. “I shan't thirst if you drink.”
“My thanks,”
Dirk said.
“I have no use for your wind,” the man said, leaning close enough to singe his chin whiskers. “Rope that mare, then come help me lift Drucilla off her pyre.”
Dirk did as the old man asked, hitching Sunset to one of the cabin's porch railings. The chicken was brown and dripping, with fat oozing from the crispy skin. Dirk grabbed one end of the pole that had been stuck through the bird, and the old man grabbed the other. They lifted the chicken out of the fire, and settled the bird on a nearby stump. The old man pushed a sharp stick into the breast to anchor the bird, and Dirk slid the spit out.
“Just toss it in the grass,” the old man said, seating himself in a cane chair and carving off a piece of the bird with a pitted, bog iron blade. He put the steaming meat into his mouth, and talked around it as he chewed. “Rain will wash it clean. Sit yourself, and rest. You look like a hundred miles of bad walking.”
Dirk didn't wait for the invitation to be made twice. He crouched, cut away one of the bird's wings, and ate while he sat on the soft ground. Neither of them spoke for a time. They cut slices of meat from the cooling bird, chewing and swallowing in a companionable silence. When there was little more than bones, gristle, and a pool of melted fat, the old man belched, and leaned back in his chair. He watched Dirk for a moment, wiping grease from his knife with the pad of his thumb before sucking the digit clean.
“Do you hunt the one who came before?” the old man asked.
“I may,” Dirk said.
The old man grinned again, showing his mouthful of crooked teeth. “In all the days of this season, I have but two visitors. One came early, walking on ragged steps, seeking succor and rest on his journey. Now, with the end of summer and true birth of fall, another comes upon his very tracks. What am I to make of this?”
Crier's Knife Page 7