The Bone Queen (11 page)

Even as she realized this, the air seemed to thicken, as if the darkness solidified into something malign that sought to invade her mouth and nose and ears, seeking a way inside her. All around was an awful pressure, a heaviness that pushed her down to her knees, down further, until her mouth was pressed against the earth. Her pulse pounded in her ears, as if she were drowning. Selmana twisted in panic, crying out the word for Bardic fire:
Noroch!
The white flame sprang out of her, a fierce blaze that flared vividly against the night, so she was blinded. For a few dreadful moments, she could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. She only knew that the dreadful pressure had lifted.

She lay on the grass, gulping in air, conscious only of relief that she could breathe again. Then fear caught her up and she scrambled to her feet, grabbing the knife that she had dropped. She looked around, sobbing. Above her the branches of the apple trees still smouldered from the white fire, throwing a flickering light. The night was clean again. The orchard was just an orchard. Whatever it was had gone.

The boar was dead, stilled in the midst of its writhing so it seemed distorted and monstrous. The wildfire had burned it, and the sharp reek of singed hair mixed with the stench of its panic. She checked her shield again, and made a magelight so she could see the carcass. The sight made her gag. She had once seen a horse with colic, that had foamed at the mouth and twisted in anguish like this boar, and that had been horrible; but this was much worse. She turned away and walked about the orchard, circling every tree, looking for any clue to what had happened. Still nothing. She searched mechanically and thoroughly, not asking herself why she was doing this, even though her body was still racked by the tremors of aftershock.

Then she walked back to the house. She barred the door behind her and lit a lamp and stoked up the embers of the fire. She poured herself a cup of the strong blackberry liquor her mother made and crouched by the hearth, warming her freezing feet. It was still the small hours of the night, but she knew she had no chance of going back to sleep. She didn’t veil her listening: her ears were open, aware of every sound for half a mile about the house. For the first time she wondered why, despite her terror, she had gone out into the night: was it some kind of madness? She had been like some stupid insect blundering towards a flame. And she had only just escaped. She shuddered, drawing her cloak around her. Escaped what? She thought of the boar. The animal’s torment was branded on her mind: no creature should ever suffer so. Poor innocent beast, she thought. And then:
It could have been me
.

When Berdh, Selmana’s mother, rose before dawn to do her morning tasks, she was dismayed to find Selmana crouched by the fire. Her daughter was pale and haggard, with deep circles under her eyes, and she seemed to be talking wild nonsense. She told Berdh that she had to go back to the School straight away, and that there was a dead wild boar in the orchard that needed dealing with.

“But why now?” said Berdh, bewildered. “Your uncle is coming over from Derim, especially to see you. He’ll be very disappointed.”

“I know,” said Selmana. Huys was her favourite uncle, a village smith like her father had been, and she had been looking forward to seeing him. “But it’s important, Mama.”

“And what’s this about a boar?”

“In the orchard,” said Selmana. “It’s dead. But don’t eat it, it’s been sick. No, on second thoughts, leave it there, don’t touch it. Don’t go near it, it might be… Not until I come back… And, Mama, can Huys stay with you? I think you shouldn’t be alone in the house…”

“My dear, you know very well I can look after myself. The Light knows, I have all these years,” she said. “And Huys has his own duties to attend to.”

Selmana stared at her mother. “There’s something … bad happening. I don’t know what, but it’s bad. Mama, you mustn’t be alone.”

Berdh studied her daughter, catching her urgency. Even though she had the Gift, Selmana had always been the most practical of her children: she wasn’t given to nerves or flights of fancy. She patted Selmana’s shoulder. “Huys will be here later this morning,” she said. “Maybe he’ll stay the night, if I ask him. Now, don’t you worry about me. I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I never do with Bard business. If you have to go, so be it.”

Selmana took Berdh’s hand and held it to her cheek. She wanted to curl up in her mother’s arms and cry, as she did when she was a little girl. She set her jaw: now was not the time. She dressed and washed her face and saddled her horse, and made it to the School of Lirigon in less than an hour.

She found Nelac in his rooms, eating breakfast. He raised his eyebrows at her breathless entrance, and asked if she had eaten.

“No,” said Selmana. “But…”

“Sit down,” he said. “I can see you are big with news, and it’s better heard on a full stomach. Besides, these delicious meat pastries deserve proper attention.”

Despite her anxiety, Selmana couldn’t help smiling. She realized she was ravenous, and devoured three of the pastries. They were, as Nelac had said, delicious.

“Now,” said Nelac. “Tell me why you’ve burst in here, looking as if you’ve ridden in on a whirlwind.”

Selmana blushed, and wiped her hair out of her eyes. “I couldn’t think what else to do,” she said. “Last night…”

She looked doubtfully at Nelac, fearing that he would dismiss what she said as wild fancy. Nelac simply waited for her to begin. Haltingly, searching for the right words, she told him about waking so suddenly, how she had crept out of the house and found the tormented boar. To her own ears, the suffocating terror that had possessed her sounded stupid: in the sober light of day, it could only be the fears of a silly girl frightened by noises in the night. Nelac listened without interrupting, frowning.

“I’m glad you came to me,” he said, when she had finished. “You were quite right.”

Selmana felt almost giddy with relief. “I thought you might not believe me,” she said.

“Why would I think you were making things up, child?” Nelac smiled at her. “After these months of teaching you, I know that’s the last thing you’d do.”

“You mean that I have absolutely no imagination,” said Selmana.

“Say rather that you are not given to fancy, like so many of my students,” he said.

“What was it, Nelac? Do you know what it was?”

“Not for sure. What I do know is that you were very lucky. If you had not shielded yourself, if you had not had the white fire, I hate to think what might have happened.”

Selmana shuddered, thinking of the thing that had tried to invade her. Even the memory made her feel sick in the pit of her stomach. “It’s some kind of … haunt, maybe?” She thought of the stories she had heard as a child, of spirits who refused death and sought to return to the World by possessing the bodies of the living. Until today, she had never really believed them.

“Yes, something like that. Fortunately for you, it was not strong. If it is a mere haunt, then it is easily dealt with…”

“You think it might be something else?”

“I worry that it might be something worse. But let’s not be driven by fear, hmmm?” He stood up, brushing his clothes. “I simply can’t eat these pastries with dignity. Crumbs every-where…”

Selmana giggled, looking down at the crumbs on her own lap. “I’m messier than you,” she said. “But they were very nice. I feel a lot better now.”

“Good. Are you ready to ride again? I think we should visit your village.”

Nelac and Selmana arrived in Kien just before noon, throwing Berdh into a fluster. “You should have warned me!” she hissed at Selmana, as they prepared a herb tea in the kitchen. “I’ve only that mess of stew I made for Huys! Thank the Light I baked some loaves and that apple pie. What will he think of me?”

“Oh, Mama, Nelac won’t mind,” said Selmana. “Anyway, he didn’t come here to eat.”

They paused only briefly, to rest and to drink a tea, before they walked to the orchard to inspect the dead boar. Berdh, and Huys, who had arrived shortly after Selmana and Nelac, came with them, full of curiosity. The boar looked much smaller in the light of day, but the evidence of its suffering seemed more stark. For a few moments they all stared at its grotesquely distorted form in silence.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Huys. “Looks like the poor beast had a colic. But – look at that eye…”

Berdh made a noise in her throat and stepped back hastily. One of the boar’s eyeballs had popped out of the socket and flopped down its cheek.

Nelac squatted down and inspected the animal closely, screwing up his face against its smell. “One of its hams is dislocated,” he said. “I think it might have done that itself, in its agony.” He laid his hand on its hide, and his form glowed briefly; then he shuddered and stood up, looking at Selmana.

“There’s no sign of disease, although its innards are ruptured,” he said. “Perhaps it was a colic, although I’ve never seen a beast this bad.”

“What else could it have been?” said Selmana.

“I’m not sure,” said Nelac. He looked at Huys. “I have seen something like this before. Not in an animal, though. It was in a man.”

“In a man?” said Berdh, drawing in a sharp breath. “What happened to him?”

“He was … very unfortunate. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He looked at Berdh. “I think you’ll not want to eat this beast,” he said. “The body would be best buried. You can take no harm from it: whatever possessed it has gone now.”

There was a short silence. “Are you talking about a haunt?” said Berdh, her voice wavering. “I thought they were just – stories…”

“Yes, something like that,” said Nelac grimly. “You might as well go back to the house with Huys. I’ll just look around here, and I’ll join you when I’ve finished.” Selmana turned to leave with her mother. “Selmana, can you stay?”

Selmana watched Berdh and Huys walk back to the house. “Are they in danger?” she asked, in a small voice.

“I don’t think so,” said Nelac. “No more than any of us, at least.” He looked at the boar again, his face troubled. “I wish I could be sure of that, but I am as certain as I can be. Now, Selmana, if you don’t mind waiting, I am going to enter the Shadowplains. I’ll be absent for a little while, though it’s always hard to tell how time passes there. If I am longer than, say, an hour, I want you to ride back to the School and bring Bashar here. Do you understand?”

Shadowplains? Selmana swallowed and nodded, although she didn’t know what Nelac meant. He smiled reassuringly.

“I’m sure it will only be brief,” he said. “I ask in case of mischance.”

This made Selmana feel no better, but she tried to hide her dismay. As she watched, Nelac’s eyes went blank, as if he were blind, and just as suddenly his skin seemed to lose its blood: he looked as if he were made of marble. With a clutch of vertigo, she understood, with her deeper senses, what Nelac had meant when he said he would be absent. She didn’t dare to touch him, but she knew that if she did, he wouldn’t respond. His body was there, but he was not.

A few minutes passed with agonizing slowness, and nothing happened. Selmana realized that tension was singing through her whole body. She sat down cross-legged on the grass and looked around at the apple trees. Bees were buzzing in the grass amid the sunshine, and she could hear cows lowing in the distance. Somewhere a dog barked. Everything looked and felt absolutely ordinary, aside from the Bard standing in front of her, motionless as stone, and the twisted corpse of the pig.

At last Nelac stirred. He stumbled forward, as if he had fallen in through a door that had suddenly given way, and Selmana jumped up and took his arm so that he wouldn’t fall. He steadied himself, and slowly sat on the ground, shivering and rubbing his arms. “It’s cold,” he said. “The frost is all over me.”

Selmana bit her lip, but said nothing. The afternoon sun was almost uncomfortably warm, but where she had touched his hand his skin was as chill as a corpse. What disconcerted her more was that Nelac seemed lost; he looked around like a man who didn’t recognize his surroundings. It reminded her painfully of her grandmother, when she had lost her wits before she died.

“Are you – all right?” she asked hesitantly. “Can I do something to help?”

Nelac stared at her blankly, and then it seemed as if his eyes filled up with himself. “Selmana,” he said, and briefly gripped her hand so hard she gasped. “How long was I gone?” he asked.

“Not very long,” said Selmana. “A few minutes, maybe.”

“It’s very far away,” he said. “A long way there and a long way back…”

“Did you find what – what you were looking for?”

“No,” said Nelac. “I found nothing at all. There should be some kind of spoor, a trace, but there was nothing…”

“Spoor?” said Selmana. Again she was confused: Nelac spoke to her as if she knew what he meant, but this was magery she didn’t understand at all. Nelac now seemed to be deep in thought, and she didn’t like to interrupt him. She watched the colour slowly returning to his face.

“My child,” he said at last, breaking the silence. “Can you tell me again what happened here?”

Selmana repeated her story, but this time Nelac questioned her closely, forcing her to recall the details: the exact textures of her loathing, the weight of the terrible pressure that had pushed her down to the ground. “And then – nothing?” he said, when she had finished.

“It disappeared,” said Selmana. “It was there, and then – it just wasn’t.”

“If it was a haunt, you would feel its presence,” said Nelac. “You would see where it had been, as a hound perceives a scent. Even if it was—” He paused and stared into space, abstracted.

“Even if it was what?”

Nelac shook himself, and turned to face her. “The first time I saw something like this, it was the Bone Queen. She took the body of a shepherd named Miln, near Lir Lake, and left him broken and twisted, even as this beast. It was not the last time I saw it… Haunts do not do this: they are parasites, sucking on the life of those they inhabit, but they destroy minds, not bodies. Kansabur is … more violent.”

“Kansabur? But didn’t you – the Bards destroyed her, didn’t they?”