Between Worlds: the Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (23 page)

Ilias sat down on the midden, wanting to collapse as
well.

* * *

They burned the dead guls, and Giliead dug the wizard’s
head out of the midden and wrapped it in a shawl scavenged from one of the
houses. They would take it back to the traders for proof, then to the nearest
god’s habitation for burial.

“I thought all the bodies would come back,” Ilias
said. “The townspeople. Once the wizard was dead.”

Giliead shook his head wearily. “I think they’re stuck
in that other place, with the guls. And even if the bodies did come back, I don’t
think it would matter. From what we saw, the guls must not really eat flesh; it
just looks that way because they don’t leave any remains in this world. They
actually eat...everything. The soul, the shade, the body.”

Giliead was saying that there wouldn’t be any trapped
shades to release, even if they had the bodies to do the rites on. Ilias was
too tired and sore to be horrified at the moment, but he was sure that would
come later. “We know there’s one shade trapped here.” He squinted against the
noon sun, looking around the midden. “But where is she? You think she’s
actually hidden under one of these piles, or was she just drawn here, to his
body?” Ilias wasn’t looking forward to searching the midden and the town again,
and there was always the chance her body had ended up in the river and been
carried away, or left in the open and so torn apart by scavengers that there
was too little left to be found. But they had to find her. Ilias was determined
to save something in this cursed town, even if it was just a forsaken shade.

Giliead’s face was lost in thought. “I have an idea.”

* * *

They found her outside the city wall, near the pit
with the execution stake, curled up under a tree. A wool wrap had been thrown
over her, the colors hidden by windblown dirt and detritus. Giliead found a
mild curse on the body to keep away scavengers. It didn’t prevent them from
doing the rites.

“If she was out here, and wasn’t taken by a gul,”
Ilias said, shouldering their waterskin and his pack as they walked toward the
road. “He killed her.”

Giliead let his breath out, glancing back toward the
town. “She must have come out here to try to release him, but she was too late.
His body was dead and his soul had taken over the guls. He was one of them now,
and he killed her. But maybe he thought he could make her into what he was, if
he kept her shade here long enough. He would have her with him, then.” He
looked down at Ilias, his mouth twisting in irony. “Maybe he loved her.”

Ilias made a rude noise. “She showed us where his body
was.”

Giliead smiled ruefully. “Maybe she loved him.”

Crouching on the rocky flat above the streambed, Ilias
studied the sandy gravel below for tracks. “I wish this idiot would just give
up so we could kill him and go home,” he said in irritation.

“He’s not that smart,” Giliead replied, sounding
weary. He stood above Ilias on an outcrop, surveying the narrow valley where it
wound down the mountain pass. The late afternoon light was failing rapidly, as
somewhere past the gray clouds the sun sank and the heavy shadows grew under
the pine forest covering the slopes. This stretch of the pass was godless and
they had seen no trace of anyone alive for days, except the frantic stumbling
tracks left by Pheneras.

Ilias pushed to his feet, absently brushing his hands
off on his pants. “Can you catch his scent?” He shook the hair out of his eyes;
his queue needed to be rebraided and his skin itched from long days of travel. He
was wearing a sheepskin jerkin over his shirt, but the dampness in the air made
the cold seep into his bones. Giliead didn’t look much better off: his chestnut
braids had mostly unraveled and his shirt was still stained with blood from the
curse Pheneras had thrown at him before the wizard had fled. They both wore
swords strapped across their backs but carried horn bows, as the preferable way
to kill a wizard was from as great a distance as possible.

Giliead frowned, still looking down to where the
stream vanished into the darkening forest. “No. There’s something, but it’s not
Pheneras. I’d know his scent anywhere. This is faint, barely there, and... It
comes and goes.” He shook his head, shrugging it off. “Maybe it’s my
imagination.”

“I don’t like it when you imagine things,” Ilias
grumbled, shouldering his pack and following him down into the streambed. Especially
not out here, when the nearest god was in Theselae, several days walk down the
mountain. Giliead had caught hints of old curses, most rendered harmless by
age, all the way up the trail. In civilized country the gods kept curselings
and wizards at bay to a certain extent; out here people had nothing to rely on
but themselves. And they had been heading inland long enough that Ilias missed
the sound of the sea; the lonely wind through the tall pines and the rush of
rocky streams were a poor substitute.

He and Giliead were brothers though Ilias was only a
ward of the family, and they didn’t look like blood relations. They were both
Syprians but Ilias’ ancestors had come from inland, where people were smaller
with lighter hair and skin. Giliead, from the bigger, darker strain born on the
coast, was more heavily built and nearly a head taller. The biggest difference
between them was that Giliead had been gifted at birth by the god that watched
over Cineth, the city near his family’s farm; the gift made him into a Chosen
Vessel with the ability to smell curses and see the traces they left in air,
earth and water. Sometimes Ilias thought the gift was a curse in itself; some
people feared Chosen Vessels almost as much as they did the wizards Giliead
hunted and killed.

“Camp here?” Giliead asked. He looked annoyed and
disgusted with their progress. Or their lack of progress. In going on seven
years of killing wizards, they had never had one run this far or this long. “There’s
no point in going further tonight.”

Ilias considered it, pausing to look around again. Large
flat rocks and gravel were strewn down to the sandy flat that led to the banks
of the stream. Down toward the woods, the shadows grew under the trees and
ground mist crept up through the grass. It was a lonely view, and a cold one,
but nothing made his hackles rise. “All right. If we can’t catch Pheneras
tonight, at least we can catch dinner.”

Ilias meant to help, but Giliead had caught three
drowsing fish in the shallows of the stream by the time Ilias had found a
branch to make a good spear. But then Ilias, wandering the edge of the twilight
woods, idly kicking the occasional pine cone or sitting on his heels to poke
curiously into a hollow under an old beech, wasn’t actually looking that hard. Wet
to the knees from wading into the deeper center of the stream, Giliead had the
discourtesy to point this out, which led to splashing. Giliead, completely
drenched but at least temporarily distracted from his preoccupation with
killing Pheneras, came out of the water to tackle Ilias and wrestle him into
laughing surrender on the prickly carpet of dead leaves and dirt beneath the
pines.

Under the darkening gray sky the lively noise echoed
off the cold hollows, and if anything listened, it remained silent.

* * *

Sitting in front of the fire waiting for the fish to
cook, his damp clothes drying, Ilias was still finding pine needles in
inconvenient places. Wriggling, he dug one out from down the back of his shirt,
aiming a mock glare at Giliead. The glare failed to land as Giliead was staring
abstractly into the dark outside their shelter, the firelight glinting off the
copper of his earrings.

They had found a cleft in the rock above the stream
with room to spread their blankets and protected enough that they could build a
small fire without worry that Pheneras would see it. Though the wizard was such
a poor woodsman and so afraid of Giliead, Ilias wasn’t much worried about that.
“Do you smell redberry?” Giliead asked suddenly.

Ilias snorted, more interested in poking at their
dinner where it was baking on the flat rocks next to the fire. All he could
smell was woodsmoke and damp earth and about to be overcooked fish. “It’s too
early for redberry. And I think we’re too high up.”

Giliead stared out at the dark a moment more, then
dismissed it, shaking his head. “Must be something else.”

“Then why did you ask me?” Ilias speared a fish with
his knife, pulling it away from the fire. He eyed Giliead, noticing his
distracted expression. “You feel all right?”

“I’m fine.” Giliead gave him an odd look, as if Ilias
was the one asking the odd question about the local flora. Shrugging it off, he
poked experimentally at his own fish. “I was sure we would have found him by
now,” he added with a grimace.

“He’ll never make the Barrens,” Ilias said around a
mouthful of fish, shaking his burned fingers. There were no gods in the desert
lands on the far side of these mountains, and the empty territory was rotten
with curselings and worse. Wizards lived as they liked there, keeping people
like cattle; they also guarded their territory jealously and killed their own
kind as often as they killed everyone else, but Pheneras had nowhere else to
run at this point. Ilias eyed Giliead sharply. “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”
He had said it at the time, but he knew it bore repeating.

There was nothing mock about the glare Giliead fixed
on him. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

Ilias lifted a brow. It wasn’t an image he was having
any luck getting out of his head and he hadn’t seen it at close range; he knew
it would be that much worse for Giliead. But he said, “I didn’t say you were.”  

Pheneras had been a traveling merchant, using subtle
curse-traps and poisons to rid himself of competition and make people pay
extravagant prices for his wares. It was the killing of another merchant in
Cineth that had drawn Giliead’s attention and put him on Pheneras’ trail.

After a few days of searching, Giliead had caught him
in the fountain square of a small town. It was a warm dusty day, near the noon
hour when the men were coming to fill the water jugs and the women to meet and
talk. Pheneras, emboldened by his success and unaware there was a Chosen Vessel
nearby, had been trying to curse the well. Giliead had sensed it though he
couldn’t tell what the curse was meant to do; it could have compelled the
townsfolk to buy Pheneras’ trinkets or made them all fall in lust with him and
line up to share his bed or it could have killed anyone who touched the well
water. Giliead had drawn his bow, taking aim at the wizard across the square. But
he had had to wait for a clear shot, and in those moments Pheneras had seen him
and cast a curse.

The god’s protection rested on Giliead and most curses
didn’t work on him, but this curse had been one that, thwarted of its target,
had turned on the nearest victim. It could have been Ilias, but he had been
angling through the crowd, trying to block Pheneras’ escape. The nearest had
been a young girl, barely into her full growth, who had died in Giliead’s arms
with her guts turned inside out.

She had been the only daughter of aged parents too,
and in the city-states of the Syrnai only women could inherit land and
property. When her mother died her younger brothers would lose ownership of
their farm and might end up going begging, if the parents couldn’t buy good
marriages for them before then. It couldn’t have been worse if Pheneras had
picked her deliberately.

Giliead said, coldly, “If she’d lived she would have
ended up with a curse mark and been shunned by the people who are mourning her
now.” He looked away, out at the lonely night again. “It’s just part of what
happens. It’s not me that gets hurt, it’s always someone else. You should know
that better than anyone.”

Ilias rolled his eyes. “Right, you never get hurt.” Giliead
had been dealing with it, or not dealing with it, by pretending he didn’t care when
the reality was that it wore at him like an open wound. What Giliead needed was
to go home, to be with his mother and his sister, the others who accepted him
whether they understood him or not. Ilias just wanted to get this over with. When
Giliead could bring Pheneras’ head to the girl’s mother and bury it at the
nearest god’s cave, then he might have some peace.

* * *

Ilias remembered later that he had meant to take the
first watch, but he didn’t remember waking Giliead for his turn, or lying down
to sleep at all. He did remember that he had slept too deeply, curled on his
side in the warm nest of blankets, and grumbled without really waking when
Giliead shifted around, letting in cold air and laying a hand on his side. Ilias
growled a sleepy protest, rolling over on his stomach and burying his head in
his arms. A knee brushed his hip as Giliead climbed over him, then he was
asleep again.

* * *

Ilias woke to birdsong. He rolled onto his back in the
tumbled blankets, scratching idly. The light outside was gray with early dawn. He
yawned, ready to go back to sleep before Giliead appeared to drag him out of
the warmth.                                        

Then he noticed that the fire had gone out, leaving
just a heap of cold ashes.

Huh
. Ilias
sat up, listening, but couldn’t hear anything except the chuckle of the stream.
Throwing the blanket back, he got to his feet, ducking out of the cleft.

He had expected to see Giliead in the stream again,
catching breakfast. But he wasn’t there. Ilias squinted up at the sky,
realizing the gray overcast had fooled him. It was well after dawn. Starting to
worry in earnest, he scanned the area again, but nothing human moved.

He got up last night,
Ilias remembered suddenly.
That was hours ago.
“He didn’t come back,” he said aloud, in startled realization. Swearing, he
ducked back into the cleft. Giliead’s sword was still there, leaning against
the rock in its scabbard, next to their bows and quivers and packs. Grabbing
his own weapon, Ilias ducked out again. It had to be a curse.
So, think. Why
did it take him and not me? What did we do differently?
There was nothing
that he could think of.

This was why Ilias had decided long ago to accompany
Giliead when he went searching for wizards; a strong subtle curse could still
snare a Chosen Vessel, though it was rare. He had heard enough stories of past
Vessels to know that the ones who had companions on their travels lived longer
than the ones who went alone.

Ilias cast about for tracks in the mud between the
rocks and found a clear heel print from a very familiar boot. Heading hurriedly
downstream, he found another print leading into the forest.

About twenty paces under the trees, still following
the stream, Ilias could tell he was on the right track. It didn’t take a Chosen
Vessel to smell curses in these woods. Though it was broad daylight now the
shadow under the heavy green canopy seemed just as dense as it had at twilight.
He could tell there was something odd about it and it was almost inconceivable
that Giliead hadn’t seen it last night. Curses that hid themselves from
ordinary people were common enough, but those that could hide from Chosen
Vessels were thankfully rare.
Pheneras didn’t do this,
he thought,
ducking under low branches,
that slimy little motherless bastard doesn’t
have this in him
. He picked up Giliead’s tracks readily and followed them
deeper into the dank growth.

He caught sight of a shape out of the corner of his
eye and jerked his sword up into a guard position, heart pounding. After a
moment he realized the apparition wasn’t going to attack.

Ilias stepped cautiously closer. A stunted twisted
tree perched on the bank of the stream grew around a man, or what was left of a
man. The corpse was shrunken and mummified, like a body that had come out of a
bog or been left in desert sand. The wood had grown through the skeleton,
twining in the ribs. It didn’t look like a good way to die.
What did
Pheneras lead us to?
He cautiously stepped close to the curving branches,
careful not to touch them. They were wreathed with a vine that looked a little
like redberry, though it was unpleasantly fat and succulent, as if the plant
had fed off the dead man’s flesh. Ilias stepped back, feeling his stomach
trying to turn.
It might disappoint the cousins, but we’re definitely
finding something else to wind around the door next Harvest Eve
. At least
he knew for certain now that this wasn’t Pheneras’ work. It had been here a
long time.