Dark Magic (60 page)

Chapter Thirteen

The Cemetery

Trev didn’t tell his mother about the tall Dead man named Morcant he’d found in the bushes the night before. When Trev had left the scene, Roland the watchman had been grunting, trying to drag Morcant onto a cart he’d brought up the High Street. The watchman had been muttering and cursing about how big Morcant was and saying that kids these days had no respect for the Dead. Trev felt this was unfair, because he was a kid and he had a very strong respect for the Dead. In fact, he feared them intensely.

Being Puck’s son, however, Trev did not let his fears get in the way of his curiosity. If there was a curse suffered by all who had elf-blood in their veins, it was their tendency to get into trouble. When the following afternoon began to fade outside, Trev professed a desire to be off on his own to play on the commons with the other children. Mari frowned, but could find no fault in her boy’s natural desires. She let him go with a litany of admonishments and watched out the window of the Spotted Hog as he lightly trotted up the High Street.

Trev felt her gaze on his back. He didn’t turn off the High Street until he was up the hill a ways toward Drake Manor and out of her sight. He continued up the cobbled lane until he reached the side path that led up another hill. A sign there said
Cemetery Hill
. Trev wasn’t much of a reader yet, but his mother had taught him the basics even before he’d gone to his first day of school. He read the sign slowly, and realized what it meant. He knew they kept the Dead people up there, up this road on the bald side of the wooded hill.

Walking up the hill into the quiet green gloom under the trees, Trev felt a shiver. The woods were quiet after the bustling streets of Riverton. He felt somehow that things were not right here. The birds did not sing, the insects did not buzz. It was as if the land knew something was amiss and held its breath, waiting.

When he reached the top of the hill, he found a cart there. He recognized it immediately as the same one that the watchman Roland had been struggling to load with Morcant’s body the night before. An old man walked around the cart and busied himself with a chisel and a rounded headstone. He was carving something into it.

“What are you doing?” asked Trev after watching the man work for a time.

The man startled and dropped his chisel. With a curse he turned around, eyes bulging. “Who are you then, child?” he demanded.

“I’m Trev.”

The man shook his head and blew out his cheeks. He laughed and picked up his chisel. “You gave me a start, you did. I didn’t hear you coming. I must be going deaf.”

“May I ask your name, sir?”

The man turned him a fresh frown. “I’m Daz, boy. The man who’s cursed to run this place until I drop. You’re too young to be up here on Cemetery Hill. This isn’t a place for play, you know.”

Trev stepped closer as the man turned back to his work upon the headstone. He tried to puzzle out the name the man was carving. “Does that say Morcant?” he asked.

Daz turned back to him, very slowly. He stared at him with intense eyes that were as blue as clear water. “What do you know about a man named Morcant?”

“Roland found him, sir,” Trev said. “Last night. He fell in the brush after putting out a lamp along the High Street.”

Daz suddenly turned angry. His lips curled from his teeth and he snarled at Trev. “That’s enough!” he shouted. He raised his chisel and took a step toward Trev, as if he’d like to cut him with it. “You’ve had your fun, and I’ll thank you to be gone from here now. No more talk of the Dead from you, no more pranks and lies!”

“I don’t understand,” said Trev, backing away. “I’m not lying. Ask Roland, he’ll tell you.”

Daz huffed and pointed with his chisel toward the headstone he was carving. “What name do you think I’m carving here, illiterate urchin! That says ‘Roland Drake’, and a good man he was! Better than Morcant, who died years back and lies under a slab within the Drake crypts even now.”

Open-mouthed, Trev backed away from the old man and his flashing chisel. He ran outside the shack and past the cart in the lane. He paused there, and soon heard Daz go back to his work.
Tink-tink-tink
went the chisel. Trev stood near the cart, and noticed the boots that stuck out from the back of it. He walked around to the rear, where he could see a still form lying in the cart. A coarse gray blanket covered the corpse. Trev nosed forward and took a peek beneath the blanket.

A fat watchman lay there, still and dead as a fallen leaf in autumn. Trev ran then, and kept running downhill. He ran away from the trees into an open area. He found himself, panting and standing in bright sunshine in the middle of the graveyard. Dozens of stones marked the resting spots of the Dead all around him. His eyes rolled this way and that, frightened. Last night, he’d seen the watchman struggling to put Morcant’s body on the cart, but now
Roland
was on the cart instead. Where had Morcant gone?

His eyes prowled the landscape, but everything was peaceful. He saw only round headstones with their carved names and the waving green grasses that surrounded each of them. Something larger caught his eye, however. It was a structure of carved stone blocks. It stood out among the small headstones as different from the rest. There was a hill behind the structure, and a gate in the front of it. The gate looked like a mouth to Trev, a mouth that led into the black depths of the rounded hill.

Trev eyed it for a time, but nothing came out or moved. He reasoned that this must be the crypt Daz had mentioned. Where else in this place might a person lie dead upon a slab? There was nothing else in sight that might fit the description.

Trev wanted to leave then. He wanted to go back to his mother and spend the evening staring out the window of the Spotted Hog. He’d eat dinner with mother, spending the coin father had left them. They had dined well these last few days on sausage, butter and thick slices of brown bread. Usually, back home they ate stew made from scraps of meat and vegetables from the garden. Trev told himself to go home to Riverton, eat two sausages and hear good-natured complaints from his mother suggesting he was either growing or working to become as fat as a hog.

But he couldn’t leave. It simply wasn’t in his nature to do so. He was drawn to the crypt entrance, as a moth was drawn to a flame at night. As all elves were drawn to the mysterious and the unanswered.

The crypt smelled of moldering earth and dust. He found the barred door hung open, unlocked. He pressed it aside, hearing the hinges groan and squeak in protest. A dozen steps led down to an underworld. He’d never been in such a place, and he ran his fingers over the bricks and the cold, moss-covered mortar between them.

Down he went, into the earth. Most human boys would have quailed at the entrance. The bravest of them would have required a cadre of onlookers, egging them forward. But Trev was not a normal boy. Half of him was Fae, and fear was different for one of his kind.

Beneath the earth he found rows of dead people. The walls were gray stone and the floor was marble. Most of the wrapped corpses were on shelves in the walls or drawers one could pull out from the walls. There were angled stairways downward to deeper places. Trev dug out a candle stump from his pocket and lit it with a match as he headed down a stairway. On the second level he found the floor was gray stone as well as the walls—the marble had vanished. He could see by the flickering flame there were less well-kept graves lower still. Upon the last level, where the floor was bare earth, he found the dead laying inside sarcophagi. He walked among them, trying to read each nameplate. He was not sure how to spell Morcant, but he knew it had to start with an ‘M’.

In time, he found it at the foot of an open sarcophagus. He recognized the corpse inside as the same one that had stood on the Riverton High Street the night before and doused a lamp. It was the same one he had seen Roland struggling with, trying to heave it up upon the cart.

Trev walked closer to the head of the dead-thing, but did not touch it. There was no sign of movement, no sign of danger, but still he felt fear to be close to the corpse. He examined the large boots next. There was fresh dirt there, upon the soles. He nodded to himself. Further evidence the dead-thing had walked. He had not imagined it all.

He turned to go, and found to his surprise he was not alone. Another stood at the exit, motionless upon the last stair. It was a figure wearing a cowl and ragged robe. A silver rod was gripped by a web-work of bones that served it as a hand.

“And they call
me
a ghost!” laughed the lich. “I am not the one doing the haunting this day, it is you who haunts me. The irony is not lost on my ancient mind, child. Do not think that I’m in my dotage, despite my great age.”

“I don’t sir,” said Trev seriously, although he didn’t know what
dotage
meant.

“What are you doing here? How came you to seek this spot?”

“I’ve seen Morcant walk the streets at night. I came to find out how the Dead came to Riverton.”

“How indeed?” said the lich. He shuffled forward toward Morcant’s body. He waved his rod over the creature, and the light of Trev’s tiny candle wavered in his hand. It was as if the Jewel in the rod released darkness as it moved. It was the opposite of a lamp.

The body on the slab twitched. One knee bent and then relaxed, slumping down.

“You see? I have awakened this thing that serves me. You say you saw it wandering about? I’m intrigued. That sort of initiative is rare among the Dead. I’ll have to consider giving Morcant a command of his own.”

“A command?”

“The rank of shepherd, perhaps,” said the lich, as if it spoke to itself.

Trev wanted to run. He wanted to race out of the crypt and down the hill, but he also wanted to know more of this enemy that befouled his world. Only he could learn its purpose and what threat it posed safely. There was also his curiosity. Knowing he was immune to the monster, he wanted to follow it, to learn from it and most of all—to harass it. His human half felt the strong desire to run screaming, but his elvish half wanted to delight in plaguing this dead-thing that was infinitely more powerful than he. It was a grand joke, an opportunity not to be squandered.

“What is that thing in your staff? Is it the Black Jewel?”

“What do you know about the Jewels of Power?”

“My mother has taught me all she knows of them. She’s held the Red in her hands.”

“Has she now?” said the lich. “Humph. The Red. Powerful, yes, but not as great as the Primal Three.”

“What are the Primal Three?” asked Trev.

The lich stared at him for a moment. “You are beginning to annoy me, child. I’m sorry I ever bargained with you.”

“Well,” said Trev, “if you don’t recall the details, I understand. My grandmother Bowen is very old like you, and sometimes she doesn’t know what day it is.”

“What?” cried the lich. “There it is again! Another insult from you, stripling. Another suggestion I don’t know what it is I’m about.”

“I meant no such—” Trev began, but the lich cut him off.

“I’ll tell you about the Jewels, child. The Dead are not all scatter-brained you know. We’ve been here longer than any of the rest, and I know more than all the rest of you blood-sacks combined!”

“Tell me then,” Trev said.

The lich sighed. “Very well. The Primal Three are the most powerful of the Nine Jewels. They are the White—also known as the Sunstone, the Black—which you see before you now, and the Quicksilver.”

As he spoke, the corpse upon the slab twitched again. Its arms writhed and the fists balled up. Trev took a step back from it, but still listened to the lich’s words.

“The next three are sometimes called the Core Jewels, they are the Red, the Blue and the Amber. The lowest tier is comprised of mongrels. The Green, the Orange and the Lavender.”

“I see,” Trev said. “If you hold the Black, you have the most powerful of the Jewels I know of. Where are the Sunstone and the Quicksilver, and what do they do?”

“Ha!” shouted the lich. “You think if I knew I would be standing here, talking to the likes of you? I would be seeking them my every moment. But anyway, you’ve interrupted me again…where was I?”

“You were telling me of the Primal Jewels,” Trev said.

Morcant had lain still for the last minute, but now he moved with unexpected purpose. He did more than twitch this time, he sat up and opened his dried eyes. The eyes rolled in their sockets and the neck creaked as it turned. Trev stepped back further, just out of the monster’s reach.

“Yes, of course,” said King Arawn. “The Quicksilver is interesting, some say it is the most powerful of Jewels, but I myself account it as inexplicably weak. It has the power to resist all other magicks, to reflect them back upon the wielder, or at least to turn them away.”

“Like a knight’s armor?”

“I suppose. Something like that. The Sunstone is supposed to be the only pure chunk left of the original. The core of it all. Some say it has the power of all the rest combined, but with lesser intensity than the pure colors.”

Trev thought about it. He liked the sound of the Quicksilver. In a way, it would be like the situation he experienced right now. He was immune to the Dead King, and so he could stand here talking to him, standing in a spot safely where perhaps no other mortal could. The Jewel could make one invisible, in a way. Untouchable. Trev smiled.