The Baron groaned, and again clutched at his sheets. But now dream and memory were blurred, as were waking and sleeping. He drifted from knowing what night it was, lying in his bed, to thinking he was a younger man, facing terrible choices.
He stood looking in horror at his wife’s pale form, life draining from her as blood pooled in the bed, the midwife clutching the crying baby.
A voice at his elbow. ‘I can help.’
Without looking he knew it was Lyman. ‘What can you do?’
‘Cover the lady, and leave the room,’ commanded the visitor and it was done.
Then he was outside the room, the midwife already gone with the child to give it up to the wolves. But . . .
Bernarr’s eyes fluttered, and he realized it was night and he was alone, and the baby was now a youth, chained away in a secret room. He groaned and rolled over, clutching the pillow as he shut his eyes.
Lyman said, ‘An hour is but an instant, and a day but seconds within that room. She will abide while we seek a way to keep her from Death’s Hall.’
Healers came, chirurgeons and a priest of Dala, and another from a sect down in the desert of Great Kesh, but none could revive the lady of the house when Lyman lowered the time spell. Each time he failed, he vowed to redouble his efforts to find a way. And each time Bernarr accepted his vow, he felt more darkness seize his mind and heart.
Soon, Lyman had become a permanent member of the house, given his own rooms and places for his servants. Books were purchased and scrolls and tomes sent by collectors across the breadth of civilization. No matter what the price, Bernarr paid, but no solution was found.
Then the books of dark magic appeared, and blood was needed. First animal, but then . . .
Bernarr sat up, a scream torn from his chest, a man tormented beyond endurance. He forced his eyes open, willed himself awake and pushed himself to the glassed doors leading to his balcony. Throwing aside the sash, he opened the doors and stepped out into the cold night darkness. Only two more nights. He took a deep, cold breath of air. Then he whispered, ‘In two nights, it will be over.’
EIGHTEEN - Magic
The storm raged.
‘Meg!’ a voice bawled outside the cottage.
Thunder rumbled outside, and flashes of lightning filtered through the boards of the shutters. Rain hissed down on the thatch, but it was tight and showed no leaks as yet.
Jimmy looked up from putting a final edge on his dagger; Jarvis was already throwing his cloak around his shoulders.
‘Meg!’ the voice shouted again, and this time it cracked in an adolescent squeak.
Jarvis opened the door; a boy blundered in. Jimmy put his age at about two years older than himself, with a revolting crop of pimples that he’d been spared himself so far, praise be to Banath, God of Thieves. The lad was dripping from the steady rain outside, and panting as if he’d run several miles—which the rich spatter of mud that coated him to waist-height also bore out.
‘Come in, boy,’ the cottager growled; Meg brought a cup of something hot and herbal from the small pot she kept on the side of the hearth.
‘Why, Davy, what are you doing out on a night like this?’
The boy paused at the sight of the two strangers; Jimmy gave him a smile and snicked the dagger home in its sheath at his belt; the firelight caught the fretwork on the guard of his rapier.
‘Travellers,’ the cottager said. ‘Now, Davy-boy, why’d you come calling for Meg? Someone ill, or come to their time?’
Aside to Jarvis and the young thief: ‘This un’s Davy, son to Tael at the Holly Bush. Not the first time Meg’s been called out on a filthy night.’
‘Two of the Baron’s armsmen,’ Davy said, sipping at the herbal drink and calming. ‘Beaten! Naked and beaten in the stable.’
‘Serves them right,’ his host growled. ‘Let ‘em fester, I say.’
‘Your mother could handle bruises, or setting a bone broken in a brawl,’ Meg said. As she spoke she went to the bed and hauled out another box, this one of boards covered in rawhide. ‘What else is wrong with them?’
Davy looked at the men, shuffled from one foot to the other, and then blurted, ‘They walked out of the door and claimed that a . . . a whore lured them to the stables, and her pimp beat them!’
The cottager scowled more deeply. ‘A likely story. There aren’t no loose women at the Holly Bush.’
‘That’s what they say,’ Davy claimed. His pimply face looked more hideous as he blushed. ‘And . . . well, their clothes and weapons and all were gone, and they had their hair and beards cut off, and they were all rolled and slobbered with dung, and . . . and—’
‘Out with it, boy!’
‘And someone shoved a pinecone up their arses! Both of them!’