chapter TWENTY
THE SAME BLOOD
More nothing. Nerron threw another hand on to the pile of bones they’d already sifted through. Lelou had all but disappeared behind the pile. Eaumbre had smashed up one of the pews and stuck its wood into all the chandeliers, burning as torches, but the night smothered what little light they gave, and thousands of bones were still hidden in the dark, even from Goyl eyes.
What if the hand wasn’t in the damned church? What if it was still somewhere out there in the damp earth? They couldn’t possibly have dug up all the bones!
Nerron had run out of curses. He’d wished himself in a hundred different places, and he must have asked himself more than a thousand times whether Reckless had found the head yet. Still, all he could do was sift through another pale pile of human remains and hope for a miracle.
Lelou and the Waterman were helping him with moderate enthusiasm, but at least there were four extra hands to sort the legs, skulls, and ribs from the bony fingers. The good ones to your pot, the bad ones to your crop – he felt like Cinderella. Wrong thought, Nerron. That only reminded him that Reckless had found the glass slipper before him.
The Waterman lifted his head and reached for his pistol.
Someone was coming through the church door.
Louis stumbled over the first skull in his path. He reached for a hold on the nearest pillar. ‘The wine around here is even more sour than my mother’s lemonade,’ he babbled. ‘And the girls are even uglier than you, Eaumbre.’
And of course he had to throw up over the bones they hadn’t searched yet.
‘How much longer are you going to be doing this?’ He wiped his tailored sleeve over his mouth and tottered towards Nerron. ‘And anyway . . . all that treasure hunting . . . the magical crossbow . . . My father should be looking for engineers that are as good as Albion’s instead.’
He stopped abruptly and stared at a pile of skulls to his left. Something was moving beneath them. Eaumbre drew his sabre, but Louis waved him away impatiently.
‘I’ll break his neck myself,’ he shouted drunkenly. ‘Can’t be that hard. Nasty little . . .’
Lelou shot Nerron an alarmed look. A yellow follet’s bite was nearly as dangerous as that of a viper. But what came crawling out from between the bones had neither a yellow skin nor legs or arms.
‘Don’t!’ Nerron yelled as the Waterman lifted his sabre.
Three fingers, pale as wax.
They moved as fast as locust legs. Nerron tried to grab them – and immediately let go with a curse. His arm was numb all the way up to the shoulder. The hand of a Warlock – what were you thinking, Nerron?
The fingers scurried towards Louis. He stumbled back, but something was crawling down the pillar behind him. Thumb and forefinger. The second piece. Eaumbre hacked at them with his sabre, but the fingers skilfully dodged the blade. Louis tugged at his dagger, but he was too drunk to get it out of the scabbard.
‘Damn it!’ he screeched. ‘Do something!’
A piece of the hand was crawling up his boot.
‘Grab it!’ Nerron barked at him. ‘Do it now!’
There wasn’t much of Guismond’s blood flowing through Louis’s veins. Still, maybe it would give him enough protection. If not . . . but Louis was already leaning down. The fingers kept twitching like the legs of an unappetisingly large beetle, but they didn’t give Louis a jolt. So the princeling was useful after all! Things were now crawling from all directions towards him. The two halves of the wrist slithered like turtles across the flagstones.
Louis put the pieces together like a child playing with a grisly model kit. The dead flesh stuck together like warm wax. There was still gold on the stump and the fingernails. Nerron smiled. Yes, this was the right hand.
The swindlesack he pulled from his jacket was from the mountains of Anatolia, a place from which one didn’t easily return alive. Still, every treasure hunter had to own at least one of these sacks. Whatever was put inside disappeared and would re-emerge only when one reached for it deep within the sack.
Nerron held out the sack to Louis.
The prince flinched away from him, and he hid the hand behind his back like a spoilt child.
‘No,’ he said, yanking the swindlesack from Nerron’s fingers. ‘Why should you have it? The hand came to me!’
Lelou couldn’t hide his gleeful grin. The Waterman, however, exchanged a look with Nerron, and floating in that look like pebbles in a pond was the memory of every one of Louis’s insults.
Good.
One day that might save him the trouble of having to snap the princeling’s neck himself.