Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles (26 page)

No one doubted it was the work of the urisk. Perplexed, Asrathiel picked
at random through the untidy stack. “Lo! Candles are here, yet not the candleholders,” she said wonderingly. “Certain garments, but not others. Behold, the wight has tossed out some of our possessions while leaving the rest undisturbed. Pots and pans, buckets and barrels, dishes and plates in the kitchen have been left untouched, but drinking vessels, wineskins and foodstuffs from the larder have been dumped without ceremony. Tables and chairs—a few have been hauled forth, most left in place. And it would have been easy for the mischief-maker to tear down the draperies, yet he has not done so. There is neither rhyme nor reason to his antics.”

Her aunt Albiona was in no mind to inquire as to the rationale behind the incident. “The horsehair couch all covered with
soap
—how such a heavy piece of furniture was carried out here is anyone’s guess!” she fumed. “And Dristan’s boots filled with last night’s gravy . . .”

This escapade of the urisk’s was the final affront, the last of a series of annoyances that took those responsible for the household to the limits of their patience. The day was spent removing objects from the tangled heap, cleansing them of lamp oil, foodstuffs, spilled glue and other contaminants, and replacing them in their customary locations. That evening Albiona laid out several spare sets of children’s clothing in the hope that the urisk would disappear with them and never return. As an added precaution against trouble, Avalloc bade the servants keep watch throughout the house all night.

“This is really all your fault, Asrathiel,” Albiona cried for the umpteenth time. She was flushed with anger. “The least you could do is show more remorse.”

Incensed by the injustice of this remark—and feeling some guilt which she tried to quash—Asrathiel felt obliged to defend herself. “It is
not
my fault! I did
not deliberately
invite the urisk across our threshold. He twisted my words!”

“Your mistake was far too grave,” responded her aunt, shaking her finger at the damsel. “Such an invitation cannot be retracted unless the creature agrees to it. The thing will plague this house forever! You must have a confrontation with it!”

“I shall do what I can, but I tell you, he is such a perverse and wanton thing I daresay he will not appear tonight,” Asrathiel warned the family. “Or if he does, it will be to me alone. That has ever been his way.” She could see how her actions, while innocent, had hurt her family and she felt a great sadness.

“We can only wait and see,” her grandfather said with his usual serenity.

When the dark hours came stealing over the Mountain Ring, nocturnal creatures of many species commenced their habitual activities under wood and water, upon hill and stone. On Rowan Green the windows of the House of Maelstronnar glowed softly with the dim radiance of part-shielded dark-lanterns and solitary candles. Asrathiel did not sleep. She stayed for a while in the library, but inasmuch as no goat-legged visitors appeared, she transferred her vigil to the courtyard, and thence to the scullery. Just before midnight, she wandered outdoors again, drifting to the garden bed that ran along the house’s exterior wall. In this very plot grew the roots of the briar roses that climbed to the cupola, where her mother lay in a trance.

At midnight it appeared; the urisk.

The air was quite still—only a light breeze played amongst the briar stems, flicking at the leaves and flowers. The rose-petals gleamed argentine in the starlight.

“So, you have escaped the walls,” remarked the wight, with no preamble, as if nothing untoward had happened and he had not discommoded the en-tire household.

“The walls contain my home, and you have caused mischief therein!” Asrathiel said indignantly.

“Why not? It is a loathsome place.”

“What?” The damsel could not be sure she had heard aright.

“Utterly nauseating. The kitchen and the library in particular.”

Boiling anger arose in Asrathiel. “I will not ask you to explain to me why you insult my home. I no longer wish to have parlance with you,” she said between gritted teeth. “Except to make one final request. Send the brownie back; we’d rather have it than you. It helps, while you only hinder.”

The wight scowled. “If you do not like my methods I shall take my leave.”

“That is the best news I have heard in ages!” flared the damsel. “Begone, then! Begone and never return here! You cause only discord.”

Next moment, Asrathiel threw up her arm and ducked, screwing shut her eyes. The urisk had tossed a handful of leaves into her face. When she looked again, he had, naturally, vanished. “And tell the brownie to come back!” the damsel shouted into the night.

No reply came from the darkness, but then, she had expected none. The argentine rose-petals shivered as a breeze shirred through.

In the morning, the brownie was found whimpering, curled up in an empty barrel in the cellar. When freed, it declared that it had been told to stay in the House of Maelstronnar and perform its duties as before.

But of the troublesome urisk there was no further evidence. Clearly, it had departed for good.

Asrathiel surprised herself by feeling disappointed at the lack of the wight.

Notwithstanding, there were myriad events to fill up Asrathiel’s days and push thoughts of the departed visitor from her mind. It was the middle of the month of Jule, and the hour of her birthday celebrations was approaching apace. Furthermore, tidings had recently come to High Darioneth out of Orielthir in Slievmordhu, where several enthusiastic prentices and journey-men had been fossicking for hidden wonders amongst the decaying remnants of the Dome of Strang. Three of them, armed against highwaymen, had ridden back to the Mountain Ring, bearing with them a small but well-wrapped bundle.

“Lady Asrathiel, I come to you at Lord Dristan’s behest,” said the senior journeyman. “It seems that your ruins have yielded a prize after all!” Handing her the package he explained. “Lord Dristan was weatherworking in Orielthir, accompanied by his children. After the task was finished he landed his sky-balloon at the Dome site, and let the children wander at will. While exploring, your young cousin Corisande spied something lying on the ground, amongst the rubble, half covered by broken pieces of mortar. It looked like an item of no value—a thing so blackened with grime and encrusted with growths that it barely resembled its original form. Yet the bri is strong in Lord Dristan’s daughter, and she recognised it as a thing of gramarye. She picked it up and took it to show her father, and when ‘twas cleaned we perceived ‘twas a comb of outlandish workmanship, fashioned in dark silver. Lo!”

He ceased speaking, for Asrathiel had opened the parcel. The article lay gleaming on the creamy linen wrappings.

Tall it was, with long, slender daggerlike tines, nineteen in number. The design—filigreed, engraved, knurled and embossed—was incredibly intricate and opulent. A narrow frieze depicting ugly, glaring creatures squatting in a row topped the tines. These grotesqueries bore on their shoulders a slim band of patterned silver, and out of this band sprouted an asymmetrical woodland scene of trees with intertwining leaves and boughs, in exquisite detail, about half the height of the prongs. It might have been beautiful, were it not insidiously disturbing.

“This is a potent thing,” said Asrathiel, turning the comb over in her hands. It was not hollow but solid, and as intriguingly wrought on one side
as the other. The somber metal prickled her fingers where they touched it.

“Aye,” said the senior journeyman, “but we have no idea what powers it might possess.”

“I, for one, am not about to secure my hair with such a comb,” said Asrathiel. “It looks like something that might send down its metal roots to infiltrate one’s brain and suck out one’s wits. On the matter of what it is capable of, I shall consult the Storm Lord.”

Avalloc, however, could not explain the comb’s arcane purpose, and neither could Lidoine Galenrithar, the carlin of High Darioneth, or any of the Councilors of Ellenhall.

“There is only one man I know who might be able to crack the riddle of this thing,” said Avalloc, “and that is my old friend Almus Agnellus.”

“Fortunately he will be amongst us any day now,” said Asrathiel, “for he is one guest expected to arrive early.”

The wandering scholar-philosopher appeared at the Seat of the Weather-masters several days before the party was to begin. At sixty-nine years of age, Agnellus was still a sprightly man. Although totally devoid of hair on his head, of recent times he made up for the lack by sporting copious quantities on his chin. His beard reached to his waist. Clad in simple, rustic garb of brown homespun he arrived on the back of a mule, accompanied by two loyal aides; a scribe and an apprentice scribe. Like his disgraced mentor, the missing ex-druid secundus Adiuvo Clementer, Agnellus had once been a member of the druidic brotherhood but, disillusioned, had resigned in order to pursue his interests independently. Few people who had known him during his tenure at the Sanctorum would have recognized him now in his disguise. As an added precaution, he went by the vague pseudonym “Declan of the Wildwoods.”

The history of both men was well known in the House of Maelstronnar. By Ninember of the year 3471, Clementer had become so zealous about his new philosophical insights that he took the daring step of publicly rejecting his faith in the actuality of the Four Fates. Jeopardizing his personal safety, he openly disseminated his opinions. This behavior by anyone, let alone an ex-druid, was intolerable to the Sanctorum. The Druid Imperius took immediate reprisals, sending a band of ruffians in the night, to apprehend Clementer as he lay sleeping. They captured him, confiscated his possessions, and hauled him away.

Naturally the Sanctorum denied all knowledge of the abduction.

Nobody could find out for certain what had happened to Clementer. His
assistant Agnellus, who had escaped the same fate only by chance—he had been lodging elsewhere that night—sought information in vain. It was later rumored that the venerable gentleman had been thrown into a dungeon, there to languish for the remainder of his life, or that his throat had been cut.

Outraged and terrified, Agnellus fled into hiding at a remote hermitage in dangerous territory near the borders of the Wight Hills. The brutality and unfair circumstances of his mentor’s downfall fixed his purpose; partly in retaliation against those wrongs, and partly because he believed in Clementer’s cause, he determined to actively promote the ideas of the vanished scholar. These days, he and his own squire passed their days immersed in study in the seclusion of his secret abode, or traveling the Four Kingdoms discreetly promulgating Clementer’s insights, gathering lore, and sometimes inveigling consultations with eldritch wights of the seelie kind. Always they journeyed in disguise, to avoid being recognized and betrayed to the Sanctorum; the punishment for defection was life-imprisonment or death.

“What prompted Clementer to forswear the Fates?” Asrathiel had once asked her grandfather as they engaged in one of their discussions in the library. “When he left the Sanctorum and first took to his wandering life he still believed in them, did he not?”

“He did. It happened this way: After he parted from the druids he spent much time pondering the nature of morality. At first he postulated that, in essence, ‘good is the sustenance of life, while evil is its destruction.’ Later he felt obliged to admit that for living creatures in general, both sustenance and destruction are essential. Death nourishes Life.”

Asrathiel nodded, not without a twinge of unease that she herself was exempt from this natural law. “Go on,” she said.

“Clementer began to travel further abroad,” said the Storm Lord, “learning as much as possible about living organisms. He began to perceive the greatest Good as being the safekeeping of Life itself, rather than the preservation of individual living creatures. After investigating Extinction, he concluded that
that
must be the greatest evil.”

“His further research,” Avalloc continued, “led him to augur that millions of years in the future, the world would slow in its orbit and fall into the sun. Then he suffered much, picturing all life on Tir having been snuffed out by the raging inferno.” Both Avalloc and his granddaughter grew pensive. “He arrived,” the Storm Lord said eventually, “at the belief that it would not matter so much if the human race became extinct after all, as long as some form of life remained in the world.”

“That would certainly be an unpopular tenet amongst most people!” Asrathiel commented with a wry smile. “Clementer seems destined to choose friendless doctrines. Where did his cogitations take him from there?”

“Do not be misled into thinking he was comforted by his conclusions! The world and all life seemed doomed. Convinced of the inevitability of apocalypse and the annihilation of our species, he toppled to the nadir of despondency. For many months he remained at a point of despair. He retired to a simple cottage near Tealgchearta, abandoning his scholarly investigations and spending most of his days in bed. Ultimately our good friend Agnellus persuaded him to climb from his pit of languor, and in a final desperate search for hope, Clementer began again to sally forth, time after time, employing every means possible to gather more information from eldritch wights. He questioned them closely, knowing that their answers were all true—or at least, the truth as the wights believed it.”

Asrathiel pictured the two weather-beaten sages in their travel-stained robes, trudging through the night along some woodland track; perhaps entering a moonlit glade wherein a haunted pool glimmered, and seating themselves at the brink; perhaps setting out some gifts of food or silver trinkets, and waiting patiently in the hope of glimpsing and hailing some eldritch personification—a trow, maybe, or a spriggan, or one of the elusive woodland guardians. The scholars were venturesome gentlemen, and over a long period their enterprise had been rewarded.

“They told Clementer,” said Avalloc, “of life existing in secret places; the deepest and the highest, the hottest, and the ends of the world where ice never melts. My learned friend began to understand how tenacious life is; how it can and will survive in almost any environment, no matter how extreme. It needs only one element—water.”