Swordheart

by T. Kingfisher

  “Are we going to be tripping over all the local swineherds?” asked Sarkis.

  “I doubt it.” Halla shook her head. “It’s too late in the season. Everybody slaughtered their hogs already. Any left out now are starting to lose fat.” She frowned. “I won’t swear there’s not a sounder of feral hogs in the woods, of course…”

  “There are,” said Zale. “We get reports in Archenhold. Somebody tried to bring an action against a pig farmer saying his boar went feral and mauled their son, but without tracking down the boar to check the brand, they couldn’t prove whose boar it was. And the army says it’s not their job to kill livestock and the paladins won’t do it unless the boar’s possessed and the Squire here doesn’t hunt, so…” They shrugged. “The case was dropped.”

  “Pond,” said Brindle, nodding ahead of them.

  “You smelled this from the road?” said Sarkis, impressed. The pond was little more than hollow filled with leaves and slush. Tracks in the frozen mud showed that the pigs had been using it to drink.

  “Surprised you didn’t, sword-man.”

  “Well,” said Sarkis, looking at the pond, “I suppose it’ll work. If the pigs dig them up, they’ll vanish just as effectively into a hog as a pond.” Zale made a small noise of dismay.

  Sarkis had to use the camp shovel to make a hole in the slush. It was normally for digging small, impromptu latrines and occasionally for covering over campfires, but it did well enough. Brindle got out the hatchet and set to work beside him. Between the two of them, they slowly chopped out a corpse-sized hole in the ice, while Halla collected pine boughs to cover over the bodies.

  Zale looked slightly green, but unlocked the wagon and pulled the door open. “I am starting to feel like a murderer,” they said.

  “This wasn’t murder,” said Sarkis. “It was killing. And they started it.” He grabbed one of the sheet-wrapped bodies by the head. Brindle grabbed the feet.

  “Hold on,” said Halla, as they were carrying it toward the ice. She pulled out a knife and slice off a bit of the sheet’s hem.

  “Eh?”

  “There’s a dancing rat embroidered in the corner. Bit of a giveaway if anyone finds the bodies.”

  “Must your Temple put rats on everything?” grumbled Sarkis, dropping the body into the trench in the ice.

  “Our god is a rat! It’s what we do!”

  The second body followed the first into the ice, sans decorative rat.

  “Right.” Sarkis dusted off his hands while Halla dragged pine branches over the bodies. “There’s that sorted.”

  “It doesn’t look very well disguised,” said Zale dubiously. “It looks like somebody chopped up the ice and then put branches over it to hide something.”

  “Yes, well. Doesn’t your practical rat-god teach you how to hide bodies?”

  Zale sighed heavily. “No,” they admitted. “Although I am starting to believe that was a severe oversight. I shall bring it up with the bishop.”

  “You do that.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be better after it snows a bit,” said Halla.

  They climbed back on the wagon. Brindle clucked to the ox and it began moving, following the track deeper into the woods.

  “Don’t we want to go back?”

  “Can’t turn a wagon here, sword-man. Got to find a wide spot.”

  Halla frowned. “There must be one nearby. You don’t make a wagon road without having at least a place to pass. Otherwise if you meet someone coming, one of you has to back up for a long way.”

  Sarkis grunted. He had never given it a great deal of thought. The supply wagon for his band, once they were big enough to have one, had been handled by the quartermaster. Beyond determining if a road was wide enough for a wagon, Sarkis had little to do with it. He’d always praised the woman as a miracle worker, he just hadn’t realized what sort of miracles she’d been pulling off.

  “We could cut down some of these trees,” he said. “Make a space to turn around.”

  Halla and Zale both looked at him as if he had casually suggested burning the forest down.

  “…what?”

  “To cut another property owner’s trees without permission is worse than poaching,” said Zale. “Men have been hanged for it.”

  “If they try to hang me, they’ll get a surprise,” said Sarkis.

  “Yes, but…” Zale looked at Halla helplessly. “Without explaining three hundred years of forestry laws, I’m not sure how to express this.”

  “You’re allowed to collect fallen deadwood,” said Halla. “That’s everybody’s right. But cutting a living tree is like killing a shepherd’s sheep. They belong to somebody.”

  “We’ve already murdered a couple of people. I don’t think cutting trees is going to be that big a sin.”

  “No, but…” Halla waved her hands. “Whoever owns these trees didn’t do anything to us! And if it’s a tenant, they have to inform the landowner if they’re clearing and if the landowner finds the trees cut, they’ll think they’re stealing and they might turn out the tenant! People have lost their homes for less!”

  “Takes a long time to cut a tree with a hatchet anyway,” said Brindle. “Lot of chopping. Lot of noise. Lot of noise next to dead humans.”

  “Fine, fine.” Sarkis held up his palms in surrender. “We don’t cut down the trees.”

  “There’s got to be a turnaround up here somewhere,” said Halla.

  The sides of the road began to rise. Brindle shook his head, but kept the ox plodding forward.

  “There’s got to be…” Halla started again, and then trailed off. Her lips were pressed together, the thin upper lip jammed into the full lower one. Sarkis realized, with surprise, that she was angry.

  “Of course I’m angry!” she said when he asked. “Someone didn’t do their job! You build a road, you have to put a spot to turn around. It’s just…it’s what you do. There’s got to be a spot.”

  There wasn’t. The embankment on either side grew steeper and steeper, until it was nearly shoulder-high on Sarkis, even sitting on the wagon. Trees leaned over the road, their bare branches laced tightly across the sky.

  “It’s a hollow way,” said Zale. “One of the old, old roads. People passed here so often that they wore a groove in the earth.”

  “It looks like a tunnel,” said Sarkis, loosening his sword. “And it feels like a trap.”

  “It’s just the acorn wood,” said Halla, but she didn’t sound as sure as she had a few minutes ago.

  “Better hope an ox doesn’t meet a hog on the road,” said Brindle. “An ox might get…upset.”

  Sarkis pictured the ox panicking. It took some mental effort. But assuming the ox was like a horse, and tried to get out of the way of a threat, or tried to run…He pictured the high-wheeled wagon tipping over and being dragged sideways through the hollow way by the panicking animal, or getting hung up in the shafts and breaking legs…no, that was not a good thing. And if the ox decided to attack instead of run, the situation wasn’t going to be much better. Sarkis didn’t want to think about an ox trying to gore a boar that was trying to gore an ox, all while dragging the wagon yoke behind it.

  “I see light,” said Halla, pointing. “It opens up there.”

  Brindle urged the ox to greater speed, which was largely an exercise in futility.

  They reached the end of the hollow way and emerged, blinking, into the sunlight.

  They were no longer in the acorn wood. They were halfway up a hillside, near a drop-off. Hills stretched out around them, blazing orange with fall color, set against a steel-blue sky.

  Zale and Halla went very still. Brindle halted the ox.

  “We’re out, right?” said Sarkis. “We can turn around?”

  “Out of a hollow, sword-man,” said the gnole. “But into something worse.”

  Chapter 33

  “It’s the Vagrant Hills,” said Zale. “It’s got to be.”

  “But they’re south,” said Halla. “Much farther south! Days
of travel, at least, and there are hills and…” She knew that her voice had a hysterical edge to it, but she couldn’t quite seem to control it.

  “Not if they don’t want to be,” said Zale.

  Sarkis looked from one to the other. “The what?”

  “The Vagrant Hills,” said Halla. “They…well, they sort of move around a bit. Sometimes they grab people. But we should have been much too far north for that!”

  “Perhaps they made a special effort,” said Zale, glancing at Sarkis. “To get a closer look at something that interested them.”

  “A gnole is not getting paid enough for this…” muttered Brindle.

  Halla put her hands over her eyes. Of course the haunted Vagrant Hills had grabbed them. Why wouldn’t they? Her life had been wildly out of control ever since Silas died. A cranky, if attractive, warrior in a magic sword, random people attacking her…what was one more patch of enchanted geography, more or less?

  Quit dithering. Roll up your sleeves and get to work.

  “How are we going to get out?” she asked. “Does anyone have any ideas?”

  “All my knowledge of magic is abstract,” admitted Zale. “I do not even know if the Hills count as magic, in the sense that we understand it, or if they are something else we have no word for.”

  “A gnole’s job is to drive the wagon. You want magic, you find a different gnole.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything much about magic,” said Halla. “My family hasn’t even thrown a minor wonderworker in generations.”

  “On your mother’s side,” said Sarkis.

  “…true.”

  “Of us all, the only one with significant firsthand knowledge is Sarkis,” said Zale. “So if anyone is qualified—”

  “What?” Sarkis laughed, mostly in disbelief. “My firsthand knowledge is all from the wrong direction. One might as well say that getting trampled by a horse would make you an excellent rider.” He waved his hand toward the landscape before them. “And even if it did, this is wildly different than anything I’ve ever seen. The Weeping Lands doesn’t do this.”

  “What, bits of your countryside don’t get up and move around to suit themselves?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “It’s these decadent southern landscapes, I expect,” said Halla. She sighed and slid down off the wagon.

  “Where are you going?” asked Sarkis.

  “To check the edge,” she said over her shoulder. The hillside road was wider than the hollow way, but not by much. “If we can turn around, maybe we can still get out of here.”

  Her heart sank as she neared the drop-off. It wasn’t a sheer cliff, but it was at a nasty angle, and if a wheel went over, they weren’t getting it back up in a hurry. Most of the hill was a growth of pokeweed and blackberry bramble, full of fluttering as birds popped up from the tangle and then flew back down again.

  She leaned forward, frowning. How the devil had the road been cut into the hill at this angle, anyway? You’d need a great many men with shovels…well, it could be done, of course, but who would come out to the Vagrant Hills to do such a thing? Even if you assume the hollow way was linked up by magic…hmmm. No, the hollow way looked exactly like the rest of the hillside, just with the embankments higher than the roadway, with trees growing on top.

  Arms went around her waist, and Sarkis lifted her back from the edge of the cliff.

  “Please don’t stand so close to the drop. I may be immortal but I would rather not die of heart failure just yet,” he said.

  “I wasn’t that close to the edge…” grumbled Halla. She was having a hard time concentrating on being indignant, however, since his arms were still around her waist. His chest pressed against her back, very solid and very warm.

  Was he holding her longer than necessary? It certainly seemed like it. What if she turned around right now and put her arms around his neck? Would he drop her, startled? Would he kiss her again? Would—

  Zale cleared their throat loudly.

  Sarkis dropped his arms.

  “I don’t think we can turn around,” said Halla, feeling a flush rising up her face. “Not without risking a wheel going over the edge.”

  Brindle nodded to her. “Think the same, fish-lady. An ox is strong, could pull the wagon back, but if an ox goes over…” He spread his hands.

  “I suppose we just follow the road, then,” said Halla. “Since our other choice is to abandon the wagon. Which at this point will probably just leave us in the Vagrant Hills with no wagon.”

  “I can’t believe the Vagrant Hills reached out that far,” said Zale. “The road was put there mostly because it was too far north for the Hills to bother with.”

  “I cannot believe that your people have rogue mountain ranges roaming about and have not dealt with it!”

  Zale gave him a wry look. “How do you propose we ‘deal’ with it? Various churches tried to burn out bits of the Hills ages ago. It didn’t go well. There are songs about it.”

  “They aren’t happy songs,” added Halla.

  Sarkis grunted. After a minute he muttered, “You should have used more fire, then.”

  “I’ll take your suggestions to the bishop if we ever get out of here. Now where do we go?”

  “What are our options?” said Sarkis.

  “Go forward, sword-man.”

  “Or abandon the wagon, turn the ox, and go back the way we came,” said Zale.

  “It’s got to be one of those two,” said Halla. “Since we can’t fly.”

  They looked at the track in front of them. They looked at the track behind them. They looked at the Hills around them.

  “I suspect that the Hills are going to let us go, or not, as they choose,” said Zale, dark eyes somber. “I doubt the direction matters a great deal. We cannot be anywhere near where we are, ergo it likely does not matter which way we go.”

  There was a pause while everyone attempted to parse this.

  “What does your god tell you?” asked Sarkis.

  Zale blinked at him. “Uh…I’m a lawyer. I serve the Rat, and yes, I’m ordained, but I’m not…ah…god-touched. You want justiciars for that sort of thing. That’s…um…our equivalent of paladins. I’m merely support staff.”

  “There’s nothing merely about it,” said Halla, with some asperity. “A paladin wouldn’t do me any good getting my inheritance back.”

  “I suppose they could chop your relatives into tiny bits, but there would be repercussions. Anyway, justiciars don’t chop people up, except metaphorically and in court.”

  Sarkis stared at them. “You…literally…have god-touched lawyers in your order?”

  “Not many. We used to have more, but they’re really more of a frontier justice sort of thing. Once you have a legal system in place, you mostly need good clerks and people to make sure that the powerful don’t walk all over everyone.”

  Brindle took matters into his own hands and tapped the goad across the ox’s back, clucking his tongue. The ox began to amble forward.

  “I guess we’re going ahead,” said Halla.

  “Better than talking, fish-lady.”

  The path wound on around the hill, flanked by trees. They looked like oaks and maple, familiar enough to Halla, but these were only barely beginning to turn color. A few leaves spangled the hillside, but not many. It might be late autumn in the outer world, but in the Vagrant Hills, it was still the tail end of summer.

  “What lives in these cursed Hills?” asked Sarkis. “Do you know?”

  “Well, there are plenty of reports,” said Zale. “But you have to filter those reports based on the fact that people lie and exaggerate and scare themselves silly. I don’t think there’s dragons living in here, for example, or giants herding trees like sheep, or kraken.”

  “Kraken in the woods?”

  “You see why we considered that report unreliable.”

  Sarkis ground his teeth in frustration. It occurred to Halla that he probably didn’t have to worry about damaging his teeth,
since he’d get a new set whenever he came out of the sword. She had not previously envied Sarkis’s imprisonment, but having had teeth drawn before…yes, all right, she could see the advantages.

  Brindle sighed. “A gnole knows a few,” he admitted. “A gnole’s cousin went into Hills during a war.” He held up his left hand and counted them off on blunt claws. One claw. “Mandrake root. Little, throw rocks.” Second claw. “Big stone fish. Doesn’t do anything.” Third claw. “Rabbit. Talks.” Fourth claw. “Rune.”

  “Brindle’s cousin may be more reliable than many of our sources,” said Zale. “The Many-Armed God’s dedicates report that there are, indeed, rune in the hills.”

  “What’s a rune?” said Sarkis.

  “Stag-men,” said Zale. “And women, presumably. An intelligent people, though there is no written form of their language, so we do not know much about them. Not necessarily hostile, though they seem to primarily wish to be left alone.”

  “Do they wear green body paint and carry spears?” asked Sarkis.

  Zale was intelligent enough to know what that meant. “Where do you see them?”

  “There’s one up ahead, in the shadow of that split tree,” said Sarkis, jerking his chin forward.

  “If you see one, there’s probably at least a dozen,” said Zale. “Make no sudden movements. Do not draw your weapons unless they attack.”

  Sarkis, nerves already taut, did not like how this was going at all. He had only spotted the rune in front of him because the creature had flicked his ear. He looked like a deer-headed man, more or less, but with fine green hair feathering his lower legs, and hooved feet. His spear was taller than he was and had the look of a stabbing weapon rather than a throwing weapon.

  A spear like that, in the proper hands, could be far more lethal than a sword, as Sarkis happened to know. One of the lower scars in the mass scribbled on his chest had been from the point of a spear like that. The wielder had used it like a staff, blocking Sarkis’s sword, and then jammed it directly up under his sternum so that Sarkis’s last moments had been spent being lifted several inches in the air, looking down the length of the shaft and feeling the sickening drag of metal through him.