Wrath Of The Medusa (Book 2) (45 page)

“We should reach the Derrach crossing by noon tomorrow, Lady Niarmit.” Fenwell had the faintest hint of a smile as he walked down the slope into the hollow where they had made camp for the night.

Niarmit nodded, “Thank you Master
Fenwell. We’ve made good time.  You must know these paths well.”

The manservant gave a slight shrug.  “I have travelled a lot, Lady Niarmit, I know many paths.”

“Aye,” Kaylan looked up from the small fire he had kindled. Just large enough for warmth, but not so great that any glow from it should be seen beyond the encircling ridge around their camp.  “You’re not a native of Nordsalve, by your accent.  Where do you hail from, Master Fenwell?”

The manservant shuffled uncomfortably at the question and looked to Niarmit for guidance.  “Kaylan’s history is a strange one filled with far too many misdeeds, Master
Fenwell,” she told him.  “My own too is not all it might appear.  I doubt your story could be more unusual or less virtuous than ours, but there is no need to share what you do not want to tell.”

Kaylan scowled, doubtless disappointed that Niarmit would let the man say nothing, but
Fenwell chose to unload some of his past at least.  “I was born in the Eastern lands beyond Salicia, Lady Niarmit.”

There was a cluck of triumph from Kaylan which the thief tried to cover with a cough. At the end of the spluttering that followed, he said with streaming eyes, “they do things different in the Eastern lands, I hear.”

“And where I came from the word is they do things differently in the Kingdom of the Salved,” Fenwell responded.

“So how did you come to be in Lady Isobel’s retinue?”  Niarmit asked.

“A long and slightly chequered story, Lady Niarmit.  Her father had much business in the Eastern Lands and had need of certain services that I was able to provide.”

“What services?”

“Discrete services, Master Kaylan, the kind one does not talk about, but which might afford one man an advantage in business over another.”

“Spying?”

Fenwell shook his head, “I would not call it that, Master Kaylan.  But one time in an affair that did not concern the lady’s father, there was a misunderstanding, a rather serious misunderstanding, and a number of people acquired a keen and unhealthy interest in my whereabouts.”

“So Lady Isobel’s father saved you from a set of vigilantes?” Kaylan offered.

Fenwell frowned.  “He offered me an opportunity,” the manservant admitted.  “A new life in the Petred Isle where my talents could be put to good use.”

“And what are those talents?”  Kaylan demanded.

Fenwell shifted uneasily.  “Talents whose usefulness is diminished the more who know of them,” he mumbled equivocally.

Kaylan snorted in disgust. “That makes you a thief or an assassin,” he declared.

Fenwell blenched white at the accusation.  “Neither, master Kaylan, I assure you.”  He turned his head as he spoke to direct the last entreaty at Niarmit.

The Queen gave an airy wave of h
er hand.  “Kaylan teases, Master Fenwell, that is all.  Come we should get some sleep and make an early start in the morning.”

“I’ll take first watch,” Kaylan declared.
 

“I wish I could remember more.”

“Hush child, you will make yourself ill.” Despite
Elise’s reassurances, the young Princess was growing increasingly agitated as she paced back and forth in front of the fire thumping her own recalcitrant head with the heel of her hand.  The sorceress fumbled in her pouch for a few grains of myrroot, thinking to cast a spell of mild sedation.  Not to make the girl sleep, just enough to stop her from concussing herself.  “Kimbolt will be back soon with the Lady Regent.  Don’t try to force your memory, it will come back in its own good time.”

Hepdida stopped suddenly and sank to her knees on the hearth of the fire.  Elise kicked the poker to one side to save the oblivious girl from sitting on it.  “What is it, Hepdida? Is there something else?”

The girl’s face was creased in a deep frown, staring at the floor but seeing something else.

“Do
you remember who it was? Who came to you in the forest?”

Hepdida shook her head slowly.  “No,” she said in some surprise.  “It’s not that.  I’m remembering when I first met you.”

“You were distraught then, upset. It was all understandable.”  Elise thought back to the thin ill girl, arms bent to thrust a knife into her own ribcage.  “You were sick. You were worried for Niarmit. Things can seem desperate.”

A quicker shake in eager rebuttal.  “No, Elise, it’s not that.  But before you came I had been dreaming I think, but it wasn’t a dream. Someone was there, talking to me, telling me what I must do, and I was agreeing.  They said when
I awoke there would be a knife, said I must use it, said I owed it to Niarmit, that I had to.”

“Someone told you to kill yourself? Who?”

“I don’t know,” Hepdida wailed in misery.

“That makes no sense.”  Elise tried to fit this piece into the jagged conspiracy that Kimbolt had described.  “Why spend all that effort to keep you sick and tie Niarmit to your bedside and then have you end it.”

“But that was it, that voice, I can’t place it, but soft reasonable.  I was holding Niarmit here.” Hepdida sounded out the brutally rational argument for a young girl’s suicide.  “I was dying anyway.  I was stopping her from helping her people.  I had to let her go, I had to kill myself.  It said I would know what to do when I awoke.  That I would find what I needed.”

“Why? W
hy?”  Elise railed at the nonsense of it. “Unless Maelgrum wanted Niarmit to go, unless something had changed and he wanted her in Nordsalve.” It was the sorceress’s turn to scratch her head in search of answers.  “If her leaving is what Maelgrum wanted, then… then this could all be a trap for the Queen!”

“Tell someone!” Hepdida shrieked.  “There must be a way to warn them. Tell Rugan.”

Elise turned towards the door.  She had taken two steps before there was a yelp of alarm behind her. She tried to turn back, but she couldn’t, not back, not forwards, no muscle answered to her command.  Panic seized her, a visceral childhood fear. 
Malchus had been the only one that had ever used a spell of holding on her and those memories were dire enough. 

Unseen behind her Hepdida yelped again.  “You,” she cried.  “It was you..” The words were cut short by the sound of a sharp slap, and the thump of a body falling to the floor.

Elise strained every sinew, fought against the enchantment with long practise of the futile struggle.  She was older now, she was stronger now.  She would break free. Her eyelid trembled in half a blink.  Movement yes, but not force enough to stop whatever assassin lurked behind her. 

But no blow came, no sound, no stirring all was silence.

Hepdida are you all right?
Her mind thought the words but her mouth would not say them.  There was a scuffling sound, the girl lived.  “Heh-eeda,” a slurred call slipped past Elise’s treacherous lips. “Heh-eeda, oo’ aw ‘ight?”

The answer was an unintelligible howl, a growl of malice and hatred.  There was a clin
k of metal against stone floor. The poker. Oh shit!

“He
h-eeda, ‘s no’ ‘oo,” Elise squeezed her own plea out but the only answer was a closer animal grunt.  She could feel hot breath on her neck.  She wept inside for the warnings she could not give and the people she could not save, not least of them herself.

Niarmit always knew when she was dreaming.   Her dreams often featured her father Matteus, the man who had raised her, the man who had conjured her away from his side at the calamity of Bledrag field. Asleep she saw him again, sometimes close, sometimes far, always smiling but turning away and vanishing as she ran towards him.  More recently she dreamt of Gregor, King Gregor the adulterer who against all her hopes was the one who indubitably had sired her.  He too was always running away, but not from her, from something else and it was fear she saw in his eyes as she hovered like a wraith at the shoulder of his fleeing form. No matter how hard she shouted he never seemed to hear, still less to give the answers that she begged for.

All her dreams were the same, populated by the people who had been taken from her and, wilfully or
not, left her alone to search for solutions to problems she had not courted.

So this must be a dream too,
her father’s voice singing strong.  His hands beneath her armpits lifting her high onto the back of his horse as he had when she was a tiny child.  She had always loved to sit infront of him on the saddle of his great destrier.  But this dream horse was constantly growing, or maybe she had shrunk, for he was lifting her still and the horse’s saddle never came level.  It wasn’t so much a horse as an equine cliff that she was soaring up past and her father had become a veritable giant, his rich melodious voice filling the night as his face disappeared from view into the clouds.  Strangely though his hands were still small enough to lift her beneath the arms, sharp fingers bruising her skin through the soft leather she had gone to sleep in.

There was a sudden scream that split the dream as the wind rushed past Niarmit’s face and her father’s voice stopped singing and Niarmit awoke and before she could help herself she had screamed too.  A long cry of vertiginous alarm as she looked beneath her dangling feet to the carpet of snow far far below.  She was flying without wings, and it was not a dream but a horrible waking nightmare.

There were wings nearby, great shadows of feathers beating rhythmic downdrafts of air around her.  But there were hands also, bony fingers gripping beneath bicep and around wrist on each side as she was carried aloft.  She twisted her head round looking up past the dirty skinny arms to bare chested but not quite human torsos.  They were female, that much was plain, though gravity did little to flatter their scrawny figures.   The huge beating wings sprouted from their shoulders, the faces were turned away looking along the line of flight. All Niarmit could see from this angle was a sharp chin, smeared with dark stains that might have been blood, and tangled tresses of hair hanging so heavily that the wind could barely lift them.

“My Lady!”

It was a faint cry from behind her.  Niarmit twisted her head to look over her shoulder, past feathered legs and taloned feet to where a blacker patch of darkness hinted at another pair of foul creatures bearing an unwilling burden.  “Kaylan?” she called.

“What is this nightmare?”

There was another scream close by and spinning the other way Niarmit saw the third victim of the aerial kidnappers.  Twisting and screaming in a struggle that could only loosen the creatures’ grip, to his own terminal disadvantage.

“
Fenwell!” She mustered her best parade ground voice to break through the wall of wind and panic that enveloped the Nordsalven manservant. “Be still! Stop wriggling. You will make them drop you.”

It was the last admonition that brought the man’s whimpering compliance.  “What is this, Lady?” he shouted a snot specked snivel across the distance between them.

“These are Harpies,” Niarmit shouted back.  As her eyes grew accustomed to the shadowy blackness she could just descry another half dozen creatures flying escort to the six who bore the three companions.  “Quintala told me about them. They serve Maelgrum and they carry men aloft.”  She left out the part about dropping those same men to certain death on the rocks below, the fate that had overwhelmed her half-brother Eadran and so made her Gregor’s heir.

Below her feet the ground was still pristine winter white with a fresh snowfall.  There was no way of knowing how deep it was, but she guessed that the harpies were looking for a more certain killing gro
und than the potential cushion of a blanket of snow. 

She shrugged her shoulders, felt the weight of her sword in the scabbard across her back.  The bird women had snatched them as they slept
, doubtless having lulled the guard, Kaylan it would have been, with the beauty of their singing.  Niarmit was grateful that long habit of a life in the wild had left her sleeping fully armed.  She flexed her biceps, trying to raise a hand to the hilt of her weapon, but the harpies pulled apart, stretching her arms out and giving them more room to beat their mighty wings.  Niarmit arched her back, bringing her booted foot towards her right hand.  It was a difficult manoeuvre buffeted by the wind and tugged by her captors and twice she failed, but at last she could touch the top of her boot with her fingertips.  It was there, the thin blade of last resort, and in a second she had plucked it from its hiding place.  

She drew her arms inwards with all her strength, dragging the harpies together and then as they tried to pull apart she shot out with the blade, stabbing at one in its dirty pale belly.  There was a earpiercing shriek, the blade came away red, and suddenly her right arm was free as the wounded harpy shot away.  Before its companion could react
Niarmit swung herself under its belly, entwining their legs together, wrapping one arm around its waist and pressing the tip of her knife between its sagging breasts.

The creature’s wings were beating in wild panic. Alone it could not bear their combined weight and they were tumbling earthwards in little more than a controlled fall.  The birdwoman looked down at the ferocious limpet clamped to its chest.  “Fool!” It cawed in thickly accented common tongue.  “You will destroy us both.”

“You’re the one with the wings,” Niarmit barked.  “You work it out.”

There was a flurry of other wings around them, wiry hands grasped Niarmit’s ankles and prized them free of their leader’s body.  Niarmit tried to kick the newcomers off, but their grip was strong and they kept her flailing feet at arms’ length as, borne now by three of the vile birdwomen, the little formation slowly began to regain height.

“You’re not going to drop me,” Niarmit shouted a command at the lead harpy’s chin.

“No, we not drop you,
” the harpy gave a flat assurance as though the thought had never even been entertained.

“You’re going to put me down, slow and safe.”

“No, we not put you down.”  The same untroubled disinterest in Niarmit’s demands.

“Me and my companions.
”

“No, not you, not your companions.”

“Do it or I will cut you. I will slice open your belly and use your guts as a climbing rope.”

The harpy shook with some strange sensation, it might have been laughter.

“You not make threats, not while we hold your companions.”

The harpy looked to left and right and Niarmit followed suit.  Kaylan and
Fenwell were now more tightly confined with a fluttering harpy on the end of each outstretched limb.  Carried by a quartet of flying stretcher bearers the thief and the manservant were quite helpless in their captor’s grip.

“We drop one of them now!” The harpy said.  “We drop the other one the next time you scratch me.”

“No!”

The harpy made some throaty squawk and there was a long scream from Niarmit’s right.  She glanced that way to see unburdened harpies drifting upwards as the beat of their wings adjusted to the lightened load.  She twisted her head round to see the dark speck of a man, twisting and turning, limbs flailing for purchase on the insubstantial air as he plummeted towards the ground pursued by the thin wail of his fear. Niarmit turned left and there was Kaylan, pale but still securely held by his bird-women bearers.

“You killed
Fenwell!” Niarmit told the harpy.

“We kill many. W
hiny man not first not last.  We not kill you, Master not want you dead, but we kill him.” The creature jerked its head towards Kaylan.  “Drop your knife, little girl, or other man falls.”

“If you drop him, then I will kill you,” Niarmit said, pressing the blade against the creature’s filthy flesh by way of emphasis.  “I will kill all of you.”

“Brave words from wingless girl a thousand feet above the ground.”

“
I don’t need wings, I’ve got a knife, a knife and you on the end of it.”

There was an exchange of cawing squawks between the agitated harpies as the leader steadily beat her wings carrying them ever further across the white cloaked reaches of Morsalve.  “Simple,” her harpy announced.  “If you kill me, we drop him.  If we drop him, you kill me.  We not drop, you not kill.”

“Stalemate, then?”

“But we still fly.” The harpy gave an extra powerful flex of her wings by way of emphasis.  “Master wants you, little girl. Master wants you very bad.”