A Time of Omens. Katharine Kerr

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СКАЧАТЬ with me.’

      ‘You’d better take more men than that, Councillor,’ Maryn said.

      ‘I won’t need a small army, my liege. Most like there’s naught left here but bad memories, anyway.’

      ‘But the horses –’

      ‘See things men don’t see, but men know things that horses don’t know. And with that riddle, you’ll have to rest content.’

      Nevyn was right enough, in the event, although the ‘bad memory’ turned out to be bad indeed. The men dismounted and walked the last of the way to the lodge, and as soon as they stepped through the gap they saw and smelled what had been spooking the animals. Nailed to the inside of the palisade, like a shrike nailed to a farmer’s barn, was the corpse of a man, half-eaten by ravens and well ripened by the spring weather. Yet the worst thing wasn’t the stench. The corpse was hung upside down and mutilated – the head cut off and nailed between its legs with what seemed to be – from the fragment left – its private parts stuffed into its mouth. Branoic stared for a long moment, then turned and ran to the shelter of the palisade to vomit heavily and noisily.

      ‘Uh gods!’ Owaen whispered. ‘What?!’

      For all his aplomb earlier, Nevyn looked half-sick now, his face dead-white and looking with all its wrinkles more like old parchment than ever. He ran his tongue over dry lips and spoke at last.

      ‘A would-be deserter, most like, or a traitor of some sort. They left him that way so he’d roam as a haunt forever. All right, lads, get back to the troop. I think they’ll all agree that we don’t truly want to camp here tonight, shelter or not.’

      ‘I should think not, by the asses of the gods!’ Owaen turned to Maddyn. ‘I know the horses are tired, but we’d best put a couple of miles between ourselves and this place if there’s a haunt about.’

      ‘You’re going to, certainly,’ Nevyn broke in. ‘I’m going to stay here.’

      ‘Not alone you aren’t,’ Maddyn snapped.

      ‘I don’t need guards with swords, lad. I’m not in danger. If I can’t handle one haunt, what kind of sorcerer am I?’

      ‘What about this poor bastard?’ Owaen jerked his thumb at the corpse. ‘We should give him some kind of burial.’

      ‘Oh, I’ll tend to that, too.’ Nevyn started walking for the gate. ‘I’ll just get my horse, and then you all go on your way. Come fetch me first thing in the morning.’

      Somewhat later, when they were all making camp – in a meadow about a mile and a half downriver – it occurred to Maddyn that Nevyn seemed to know an awful lot about these mysterious people who had left that ugly bit of sacrilege on the palisade. Although he was normally a curious man, he decided that he could live without asking him to explain.

      With the last of the sunset, Nevyn brought his horse inside the tumbledown lodge, tied him on a loose rope to the wall and tended him, then dumped his bedroll and saddle-bags near the hearth, where there lay a sizable if dusty pile of firewood already cut, left by the hirelings of the dark dweomer-master behind this plot – or so he assumed, anyway. As assumptions went, it was a solid one. After he confirmed that the chimney was clear by sticking his head up it for a look, he piled up some logs and lit them with a wave of his hand. Once the fire had blazed up enough to illumine the room, he searched it thoroughly, even poking at the rotting walls with the point of his table-dagger. His patience paid off when under a pile of leaves that had drifted in through a window he found a pewter disc about the size of a thumbnail, of the kind sewn on saddle-bags and other horse gear as decorations. Stamped into it was the head of a boar.

      ‘I wonder,’ he said aloud. ‘The Boar clan’s territory lies a long way from here but still, if they thought the journey worth it for some purpose … are they in league with the dark dweomer then?’

      The idea made him shudder. He slipped the disc into his brigga pocket, then paced back and forth before the fire as he considered what he was going to do about the possible haunt. First, of course, he had to discover if indeed that poor soul whose body rotted outside was still hanging about the site of his death. He laid more wood on the fire, poked it around with a green stick until it burned nice and evenly, then gathered up a mucky little pile of the damp and mildewed thatch that had slid from the roof over the years. If he needed it, the stuff would produce dense smoke. Then he sat down in front of the hearth, let himself relax, and waited.

      It was close to an hour later when he felt the presence. At first it seemed only that a cold draught had wafted in from the door behind him, but he saw the salamanders in the fire turn their heads and look up in the direction of some thing. The room turned thick with silence. Still he said nothing, nor did he move, not even when the hair on the back of his neck prickled at the etheric force oozing from the haunt. There was a sound, too, a wet snuffling as if a hound were searching for a scent all over the floor, and every now and then a scrabbling, as if some animal scratched at the floor with its nails. As the air around him grew colder he concentrated on keeping his breathing slow and steady and his mind at peace. With a burst of sparks the salamanders disappeared. The thing was standing right behind him.

      ‘Have you left somewhat here that won’t let you rest, lad?’

      He could feel puzzlement; then it drifted away, snuffling and scrabbling round the joining of floor and wall.

      ‘Somewhat’s buried, is it?’

      The coldness approached him, hesitated, hovering some five feet off to his left. He could feel its desperate panic as clearly as he could feel the cold. Casually, slowly, Nevyn reached out and picked up a handful of the grubby thatch.

      ‘I wager you’d like to feel solid again, nice and solid and warm. Come over to the fire, lad.’

      As the presence drifted into the warm light Nevyn could feel its panic reaching out like tendrils to clutch at him. Slowly he rose to his knees and tossed the half-rotten hay onto the hottest part of the fire. For a moment it merely stank; then grey smoke began to billow and swirl. As if it were a nail rushing to a lodestone the presence threw itself into the fire. Since it ‘lived’ as a pattern of etheric force, the matrix immediately sucked the smoke up and arranged the fine particles of ash to conform to that pattern. Hovering above the fire appeared the shape of a youngish man, naked but of course perfectly whole, since his killers’ knives could do no harm to his etheric body. Nevyn tossed in another handful of thatch to keep the smoke coming, then sat back on his heels.

      ‘You can’t stay here. You have to travel forward, lad, and go on to a new life. There’s no coming back to this one.’

      The smoke-shape shook its head in a furious no, then threw itself out of the fire, leaving the smoke swirling and spreading, but ordinary smoke. Yet enough of the particles clung to the matrix to make the haunt clearly visible as it drifted across the room and began scrabbling again at a loose board between floor and wall. Nevyn could see, too, that it was making the snuffling noise inadvertently, rustling and lifting dead leaves and other such trash as it passed by.

      ‘What’s under there? Let me help. You don’t have the hands to dig any more.’

      The presence drifted to one side and gave no sign of interfering as Nevyn came over and knelt down. When he drew his table-dagger and began to pry up the board, the haunt knelt too, as if to watch. Although that particular board was somewhat newer than those around it, still the rotted wood broke away from its nails and came up in shreds and splinters. Underneath, in a shallow СКАЧАТЬ