The Margarets (35 page)

Ferni rose early and quietly from the warm bed where I lay, still half asleep. He left the door ajar, and I heard him speaking to B’Oag in the oasthall below.

“You’re putting a fine polish on that copper,” he said.

“Been rumblin’ at me,” B’Oag complained. “In the night. D’ja hear it?”

“Once or twice,” Ferni said. “It didn’t sound like an imminent eruption.”

“Yah, well, last time it went, it didn’ give any warning atall. Never hurts to check, see all the seams’re tight.”

“You have a relief valve, don’t you?”

“Be a fool not to, wun I?”

“Any chance of getting some breakfast? Do you have a henhouse here?”

“Oh, sure. Sev’ral nice little vents comin’ off this spring, ’ere. Got one of ’em cased up through the henhouse ’fore it warms the barn. Keep a lantern out there, so eggs we got. Hens won’t lay ’thout light, ’thout heat. I got jibber sausage, too, smoke or plain. The bread’ll be baked another little while. Y’wanna take it up?”

“Good idea. The longer she rests, the quicker her job will be.”

There was silence for a few moments before B’Oag remarked, all too casually, “I heard somethin’ a few days back. Mebbe somebody’s got one a those, like she has.”

Ferni said, “I’m sorry to hear that. People who happen on those things usually don’t live long after.”

“Thing is, this person has a fambly person sick, like to die. This person knows the…the thing takes souls to Joy.”

Ferni made a sound of rude derision. “Oh, again I’m sorry to hear that. That story is put about by the things themselves, so people will let them in, let them near. I’ve met with teachers, wisemen. The creatures don’t take the soul to Joy. They just eat it until nothing’s left. Envoys like her upstairs are sent to stop the soul-eating, to trap the evil thing and see it’s put where it can do no harm.”

“Y’mean there’s no Joy? No bein’ took up?”

“Who would say the good are not taken to Joy? They may well be, but not by these things. The person who found this one was worried because his dear one is near to dying?”

“She,” B’Oag corrected. “Where’s these things come from, then, these evils? Did a man make them?”

Ferni said, “They’re parasites, Oastkeeper. Like a louse or a flea, only more deadly. We don’t know who makes them, but we will find out!”

“You’re one a them, then. Them silence people.”

No sound. Ferni didn’t agree or disagree. Perhaps he only waited, his nose full of the same wonderful smell that had opened my eyes wide. Someone had opened the oven door and filled the oasthouse with the aroma of new-baked bread.

“I’ll see to breakfast,” said B’Oag. “Ya’ll wait?”

“I’ll wait,” Ferni said. “No need for you to make the trip upstairs.”

I dozed, only a moment until I heard the thud of Ferni’s step on the stair, and I grinned when he came in, unable to help it.

I sat upright, pulling the blanket around my shoulders. “By the Ghost of Joziré, that smells edible.”

He set it on the foot of the bed, turning a troubled face toward me. “By the Ghost of Joziré? Why’s he a ghost? I thought…I thought he was just hiding out somewhere.”

I examined his face. “It bothers you to think he might be dead? Did you know him?”

“Of him, yes. A good man, so I’ve been told.”

“It’s just something people say, Ferni. What did you bring for breakfast?”

“Eggs,” he said. “Sausage and fresh bread and tea and what looks like”—he uncapped the small stoneware jar to see what it held—“honey.”

I made a lap and beckoned for the tray.

“I have news,” he said.

“The oastkeeper decided to speak of it, eh? I thought he knew where it was.”

“Well, he hasn’t told me where, yet, but he’s told me why. Somebody’s on death watch.”

“Then we’ll hope we’re not too late.”

“After breakfast,” he agreed. “And, by the by, what’s this oath on King Joziré’s ghost?”

Spooning honey onto fresh bread, I said, “I’ve seen it, the ghost.”

His mouth fell open, and it took a moment for him to latch it up again. “Come now.”

“You’re the one sent me to that shaman, Ferni. What’d you think she’d teach me? How to make tea?”

Now it was his turn to think. “Quite frankly, I didn’t think about it at all. At the time, I was just told to do it, send you, I mean, and I thought you’d be safe there.”

“Safe I was for a time. Then safe I wasn’t, but I was less fearful than previously. You say you’ve heard a threat. Well, I’ve seen one. Someone does want me dead.”

“What did the shaman teach you?”

“She taught me ways to fly, to escape, to die, if necessary. To see spirits and converse with ghosts. To speak at a distance to someone receptive. Though she seemed to think I knew most of it already. It was in my bones, she said, else all her teaching would have done naught.”

Ferni asked, “So what did the shade of King Joziré have to say for himself?”

Around a mouthful of egg, I said, “When I saw him on the night road, he said he was wandering, seeking Wilvia and his children…”

“His children?” Ferni gaped at me, forehead furrowed.

“Twins. A boy, a girl.”

“What makes you think Wilvia and the children died?”

“I didn’t say they did!” I snorted. “I didn’t say he did.”

He muttered, “Well then, what you saw wasn’t a ghost. What you saw was a night wanderer, a spirit: alive, asleep, dreaming.”

This was perfectly possible. “He seemed so familiar to me that I didn’t even wonder. I didn’t think of him being a spirit wanderer, though I do that myself.”

After we had eaten and put on multiple layers of additional clothing, I put the chitterlain in a cage Ferni had borrowed from the oastmaster, set it in a warm place with food and water inside, and went to retrieve the basket from the lockroom. Then we heard B’Oag’s reluctantly given directions, which concluded with: “She’s only a lass, Envoy. Go easy with her.”

“Easy as I can,” I replied. “If it’s not too late to go any way at all.”

The ice storm had given way to frigid calm. The road was only a shadow-edged depression that curved around the snowy hillocks before us. Ice lay beneath the thin layer of new snow, too slippery to traverse until we strapped thorn-feet over our boots. The world was painted in shades of metallic gray, silver where weak light struck it, pewter where shadows fell, iron beneath the cover of ice-laden trees. When we had gone far enough to be out of sight of the oasthouse, I gave Ferni my tool kit to carry before opening the coin-sized window in the basket. It had to be held well away from me as the questing tentacle emerged hesitantly into the cold. It squirmed, then slowly flailed the air, up, down, right, left, suddenly becoming rigid as it pointed in the direction we were traveling.

We held our breaths as much as possible, for when the ghyrm were not well fed, they stank, sending out their smell to others of their kind, calling a gather of the hungry. Alone, ghyrm were weak, easily crushed, burned, poisoned if one had the right tools, and thus unlikely to survive long treks in dangerous country. A gather of them, on the other hand, stank with a feculent rot that made creatures emerge gasping from burrows or plunge unconscious from the skies. Both of us had seen records of tribal settlements ravaged by ghyrm in which nothing was left alive beneath, upon, or above the soil.

The tentacle began to swerve slightly to the right of our line of
travel. Shortly, we came to the narrower lane that went in that direction, a barely shadowed trail around the breast of the hill. The tendril quivered.

“When will you basket it?” asked Ferni, observing the questing tentacle with disgust.

“As soon as I’m sure we have the right place,” I replied.

The house lay just behind the hill, dug in for more than half its height, small, shuttered windows high upon its walls beneath the deep eaves of the high-pitched roof. The door was set at the inner end of a roofed tunnel that led through the hill to the house wall. The tentacle quivered its eagerness. Before we entered the tunnel, I took my tool kit from Ferni, opened it, and fastened it around my waist, where I could reach it easily. I slipped the killing knife from its sheath and put it near the tentacle, which shrieked as it lashed back into the basket. I shut the opening and set the basket on the snow.

“What makes them yell like that?” asked Ferni.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” I retorted. “The Siblinghood doesn’t tell us. I’ve always supposed the blades are poisoned because they make ulcers on our skins if we touch them.”

The latchstring was out. Ferni released the inside latch, letting us into a long, ice-cold room, ashes on the hearth, an inside door standing ajar. We peered through the crack: a bed, a body lying on it, another beside it, no movement in either. I stepped back.

“It’s loose in that room,” I said. “Probably on the girl.”

We pushed the door open and went to the side of the young woman lying beside the bed, pale as the snow. The woman on the bed was long dead. Ghyrm-kill were often virtually mummified, making it impossible to learn when they had died. We did not see the thing itself.

The girl’s chest moved in a shallow breath. I said, “She’s still alive, so it’s on her somewhere, under her clothes. They can sometimes move quickly. There are too many hiding places in here, including us. Take the girl’s feet, I’ll take the hands. We want her outside on a nice, empty, hard-packed snowbank.”

We carried her out through the doors and the tunnel to lay her on the snow some distance from the house. I returned to the basket and opened the porthole once more, carrying the basket near to the girl, watching the tentacle as it quivered, quivered, stretched itself to the
maximum length near the girl’s breast. I set the basket a safe distance aside, took my killing knife in one hand and a cutting tool in the other, starting at the girl’s throat and slitting her clothing as far as her waist.

“There,” whispered Ferni, pointing with the tip of his knife at a pulsing red mole on the girl’s breast, a mole with legs that trembled as it sucked her life into itself.

“How long does one of them take to kill a person?” he asked.

“If there’s only one small one, half a day or more. Lend me your knife.”

He held out the sheath, and I drew forth a twin to my own, a broad, curved blade with a slightly hooked end. With a knife in each hand, I bent forward, catching the thing between them like grist between grindstones, mashing and twisting the flat sides of the blades to pulverize what lay between.

A scream came from between the blades, impossibly shrill, barely within the limit of hearing, and was echoed by a howl of fury from the basket as the tentacle turned toward the house, quivering, quivering.

“More of them in there?” asked Ferni.

“If the tentacle stays rigid, yes,” I said, scrubbing the blades in the snow to clean them. “When they kill someone, they sometimes split into buds. The buds don’t always grow, but sometimes they do.”

“The Order wants us to capture them…” he said doubtfully.

“I know,” I said, returning his knife carefully. “Several times I’ve tried, but it’s impossible to capture the tiny ones. There’s no way to hold them securely outside a laboratory. We have to put everything that may be contaminated in that building, then we have to burn it.”

“What about her?”

“We strip her bare, shave her head and body hair into her clothes, throw them into the house along with that spot on the snow, which could conceivably have buds in it, search her body, wrap her in one of our coats, and take her back to the oasthouse.”

“She’ll freeze!”

“It’s partly the cold that’s kept her alive so far. The things aren’t as active in the cold. She won’t freeze in the time it will take us to get her back. I’ve done this before, during even colder times. I’m quick at it.”

Under the clippers from my tool kit, the girl’s clothes and hair fell away like wool from a shorn sheep. I scanned every intimate part of her, an inspection that Ferni regarded with discomfiture.

“I violate her no more than needed,” I explained. “I look only in the creases. The creatures do not enter the body orifices. They have gills, and they need air. Here, wrap her in my coat, I have four or five layers on besides it. They’ll keep me warm enough until we get back.”

“How do we fire the house?” he asked.

“An incendiary in the pocket of the coat. Pull the lever and toss it inside.”

I checked to see that the tentacle still pointed rigidly at the house, forced the tentacle into the basket, and closed it, then put the bundled girl over my shoulder and started back the way we had come, leaving the basket for Ferni. From behind me came a sudden whoosh, then the crackle of flames and the sound of curses. He caught up to me where the lane joined the road.

“Let me take her.”

“When we get halfway, you can have her.”

We went on trudging toward the steam plume above the oasthouse, sun breaking through the clouds above us in momentary encouragement. At the halfway mark, we traded burdens, arriving finally at the oasthouse under B’Oag’s accusatory frown.

“We committed no violence on her,” I snapped from behind my colleague. “The thing was killing her. It already took the woman. Was that her mother?”

He looked down guiltily. “Her ma, yes.”

“Well, she didn’t get to Joy, Oastkeeper. She’s simply gone, erased from existence. That’s what the creatures do. You should talk to your neighbors and let them know the facts.”

“What about her?” he grumped, pointing at the girl.

“I’m taking her to your baths, where I’ll search her skin, to be sure there are no more.” I would do it, though I was positive there were no more. My “finder” should have reached for her if there had been. However, I remembered too well finding a bead of a thing on my clothing one time when I undressed for bed, and I’d been positive that time, too.

“What about her ma’s body?” B’Oag asked Ferni.

“We left it in the house, and we had to burn the house behind us, for there were more of the creatures inside.”

The oastkeeper grumped, “Thought what you were for was to catch ’em, take ’em away. That all was a good house.”

“You can’t catch the tiny ones,” Ferni told him sternly. “Some are too small to see. And, since you knew about all this, now we’ll need to know who may have brought it here and who else knew about it besides you.”