Faithful Servants (2 page)

“Right.”

Connell shrugged, helpless. “He was my master. If he wanted to study necromancy, that was his prerogative. An eidolon doesn’t question.”

Salim nodded, but trained ears had caught the verb tense. “Was?”

All at once, the eidolon’s composure broke, and the face he turned to Salim was a caricature of anguish.

“He sent me away,” Connell whispered. His tone made it sound like a death sentence. “In all my life, I had never been more than a mile from his side. But he had changed so much. He had never been over fond of travel, but now he never left the manor. He quit eating hardly at all, and would go for days without sleep. He ignored the clean clothes I left out for him. He tore down the shrine to the magic god Nethys, and built a new one to Urgathoa, the Pallid Princess. The old one was wood and paper, beautifully made. This one was made of parts from his—experiments.”

Salim had seen plenty of such shrines, and could well imagine the decomposing limbs and reanimating scramblings it entailed. The Pallid Princess was a sick bitch, and made Salim’s own goddess look downright warm in comparison. Where Pharasma was, for all her faults, at least even-handed and devoted to perpetuating natural cycles, Urgathoa was devoted to undeath and gluttony, her necromancers filling the world with perverse beings that refused to die. Needless to say, the two ladies didn’t get along.

“You said he sent you away.”

Connell wrapped thin arms around himself. “It was that stupid crown—I know it was. After a while, he didn’t even take it off to sleep, and didn’t notice when the wounds from the thorns got infected. I tried to take it off him once—just for a minute, to clean them out!—and he threw me halfway across the room. And that was when he said he didn’t need me anymore.” Another slow tear. “That—that he had plenty of new servants. Better ones. And then he cast a spell, and I was somewhere else.”

The eidolon went silent, and Salim gave him his space, recognizing in the set of his shoulders how hard this must be for him. After a moment, Connell continued.

“He’d sent me back to the Maelstrom, the chaos plane he’d drawn me from. Except it didn’t feel like home anymore. I was awkward, and lonely, and everything I met was either terrified of me or trying to eat me. But worse—I could still feel him. My master. The thread was faint—so faint—but I could still feel him.” The eidolon pointed to the rune on his forehead. “I’m still my master’s creature.”

“That’s when I realized how much danger he was in. He had his undead things, but they were still weak, and sooner or later someone was going to get fed up with the grave robbing and try to do something about it. And I wouldn’t be there to protect him.”

Salim was starting to get tired of the eidolon’s puppylike devotion. He attempted to hurry the story along. “And so?”

“So I went to see Pharasma.”

Salim stopped walking so abruptly that Connell almost tripped and fell over onto a flower whose blossoms were shaped like tethered hummingbirds, petal-wings buzzing frantically to pull them away from the clumsy eidolon.

“You went to the Boneyard?” Perhaps Salim had underestimated the creature. Though the goddess of death wasn’t the sort to slay anyone out of hand—quite the opposite, in fact—there were plenty of other beings around the Gray Lady’s realm who were less discriminating, and the journey there was hardly easy.

“It took a while,” the eidolon agreed, “but I got there eventually. Some nice crow-vulture-things in masks led me in and showed me to one of her servants, a black-winged angel called Ceyanan. I think you know him?”

“You could say that,” Salim said wryly. In the same sense that you know your master, he thought, just without the hopeless love. But he didn’t bother confusing the eidolon with his own problems.

“He was very nice,” Connell said. “I simply explained the situation as best I could, and he agreed that it would be in Pharasma’s interest to help me.” Here the eidolon grinned, and despite the amulet’s illusion, Salim could easily imagine the serpentine smile beneath it. “See, it’s not just the necromancy—I know the goddess hates undead, but that problem will take care of itself when someone eventually comes along and kills him. The real issue is the crown. It’s what’s changed him and made him do all these evil things—I’m positive. And if it’s the crown, that means it’s not his fault. And if it’s not his fault”—here the eidolon raised a triumphant finger—”then it shouldn’t affect the final judgment of his soul. It’s a tricky situation. If my master dies while the crown’s magic is making him do bad things, does that count against him? Does his soul go to Urgathoa, or to Nethys? At the very least, it seems like a long and complicated judgment is in order.”

Now Salim understood. “And Ceyanan sent you to me.”

Connell nodded enthusiastically. “He agreed that such a judgment would be needlessly complicated and take up the goddess’s valuable time, and that the best thing to do was remove the cursed crown and let my master’s soul cleanse itself. Then he gave me your description, and the name of a bar, and transported me to Axis.”

“Of course he did.” Salim had to admit, the eidolon’s logic was sound. And it would be just like Ceyanan to send Salim on a job that was, in essence, missionary work. Soul saving. That would tickle the angel’s sense of irony.

“So will you do it?” the eidolon asked eagerly. “Will you help me help my master?”

As if he had a choice. “Ustalav, you said?”

“Aton’s Field, a village near Kavapesta.”

Salim reached into his robes and produced an amulet of his own. The size of his thumb, the stone was a perfect, lightless black, save for an iridescent spiral that seemed to shimmer and move of its own accord. Cupping the stone in one hand, he offered the other to Connell. “Let’s go, then.”

The eidolon took it.

The world twisted.

There was the usual moment of darkness and cold, the terrible feeling of being drawn through space like a fish on a line, and then the light was back and the amulet deposited them safely.

Right in the middle of an angry mob.

Salim looked quickly to Connell, but the eidolon was already holding his own pendant. Before Salim could say anything, the eidolon’s disguise as an axiomite melted into something less suspicious. The pointed ears were still there, but shorter. Gone was the inhumanly perfect skin, replaced by a moonscape of old pockmarks. The cowl of the robe he wore—now old and tattered, stained as much by the road as any dye—came up to cover the glowing forehead rune.

It was a good job. The peasant closest to the new arrivals blinked, peered at the two of them as if he trying to remember something, then visibly gave up and returned his attention to the shouting man at the front.

They were in the central green of a modest town, a ring of shops and public houses encircling a muddy patch of grass long since chewed into submission by the hooves and jaws of livestock. Beyond, Salim recognized the dark and craggy peaks of the Hungry Mountains rising ominously on all sides. Even now, at midday, the fog that shrouded their dark forests was thick, and moved in strange ways just beyond the valley’s last farmsteads.

The mob was barely worthy of the name—perhaps forty men and women in varying states of disrepair—yet Salim had seen such groups before. The deciding factor for mobs wasn’t in their muscles, or their makeshift weapons, but in their eyes. These folk were afraid. And where there was enough fear, something could break, and turn even the most timid housewife into a killer.

The man trying to catalyze that change stood at the focal point of the loose semicircle, perched precariously on an overturned wheelbarrow. He was middle-aged and almost completely bald, with only a few wisps of white hair scrambling to cling to and cover his shining pate. From beneath voluminous black robes similar to Salim’s own poked stick-thin arms, gesticulating wildly. At his throat hung a large silver spiral on a chain—the holy symbol of Pharasma.

“Too long have we suffered the monster to remain in our midst!” the priest cried. “Far too long! You, Silva,” he pointed at one of the women near the front, “was not your husband’s grave torn up, just weeks after his passing? And you, Tam”—this time a fat man in a flour-stained apron—”your uncle’s grave as well. No wolf digs so deep, or so thoroughly.”

He returned to addressing the whole crowd.

“Suffering is our lot! Yet that doesn’t mean the Goddess desires us to lie down and let monsters roam the night, taking our loved ones. As your priest, I should be leading you—yet I am old, and my hands shake with the palsy.” He raised the offending appendages high. “Thus I must pass the burden to my son, Sir Percinov. It is he who will lead you to glory.”

The crowd shifted slightly, and Salim glimpsed the figure that stood at the old priest’s knee. The plates of its armor were all in black and silver, the chest embossed with Pharasma’s spiral, and a businesslike bucket of a helm obscured the face. At the figure’s waist rested a long sword in a matching scabbard. All in all, a suitably imposing sight. Yet something about the way the warrior stood gave Salim pause.

“When?” a voice from the crowd cried.

“At dawn,” the priest said. “Mirosoy and his creatures are things of darkness. We will bring them the cleansing light.”

“That’s my master,” Connell hissed, and Salim tapped his arm to quiet him.

The crowd shouted its ragged approval, and then the church bells began chiming. In twos and threes, the people shuffled off to be about their errands, or perhaps just to rest up before the lynching.

The priest had stepped down from his wheelbarrow and was talking with the knight. Salim approached.

“Excuse me, Father. May I have a word?”

The priest turned. Above his beak of a nose, hard little rat eyes crawled up and down Salim’s length, taking in the black robes and sun-darkened skin, the short beard and strangely melted-looking sword hilt. His eyes lit upon the amulet, which Salim had left hanging prominently against his chest, and the hard mouth softened almost imperceptibly.

“A fellow clergyman?”

“Something like that.” Salim drew the spiral of Pharasma in the air between them.

“Yet not from around here.” Salim’s southern skin, so much darker than the sickly pale Ustalavs, kept the words from being a question.

“No,” Salim agreed. “My companion and I have traveled far to offer our assistance. It seems others in the church have learned of your situation.”

“Hum,” the priest said, a sound that wasn’t altogether pleased. “Very well, then. My name is Father Adibold, and this is Sir Percinov. My rectory is just over here—please, allow me to welcome you properly.” Without bothering to wait for a reply, the man turned and began stalking toward a little house attached to the church, the armored warrior just behind him. Salim and Connell followed.

“A child in armor is still a child.”

The house might better have been called a cell. Though the walls were still painted white, they’d clearly been neglected for some time. The outlines of less-faded regions suggested that, at one point, there had been more furniture in here—a bureau, a couch—yet now the room contained only a stove, a cupboard, the roughest of wooden tables, and two chairs. Salim accepted the priest’s invitation and sat in the nearer chair, then immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d interrogated men in more comfortable chairs than this.

Father Adibold took the opposite chair. Connell remained standing next to the door, while the armored figure took up a respectful position behind the priest’s left shoulder. For the first time, the metal mountain spoke.

“Da, may I—?”

“Yes, fine!” The priest waved a hand. With an audible sigh of relief, the warrior removed his gauntlets, then reached up and pulled off his helmet.

It was a boy, brown-haired and skinny. His bobbing larynx didn’t even come close to touching the steel gorget meant to protect his throat. Salim bet that if he struck the breastplate, the teenager would rattle around inside the armor like the clapper in a bell.

The old man spoke first. “You’re not a priest,” he said bluntly. “The sword tells me that much. So what are you?”

“A hunter,” Salim said. “A problem-solver for the church, specializing in the sort of thing you now face. Or have I heard wrong? It’s undead creations that your people fear, is it not?”

The priest grunted. “Indeed.” Reluctantly, he got to his feet and went to the cupboard. He returned with two cups of water and a cob of bread, which he set between them. “Please,” he said, gesturing. “Eat.”

Salim tore off a chunk of bread and bit into it. It was hard, and old, but blessedly weevil-free.

“I’d apologize for not offering better fare,” the old man continued, not sounding the least bit apologetic, “but we of the Kavapestan branch don’t believe in southern niceties.”

Aha. Suddenly both the ostentatiously poor hospitality and the deliberately uncomfortable furniture made more sense. Salim’s eyes twitched toward the man’s sleeves, which had fallen back when he proffered the food. The priest caught the look and deliberately pulled the cloth back down, but not before Salim caught the telltale lines of dozens of thin white scars on his forearms.

“So you follow the Penitence, then.”

The old priest thrust his jaw out pugnaciously. “The Lady of Graves judges us not only on what we do, but what we endure. Those who suffer in this life are rewarded in the next. We Ustalavs have known this for generations.”

“Very admirable,” Salim said.

The priest searched for any sign that he was being mocked, and upon finding none, slowly nodded. “Yes, well. It’s rare to find a southerner who understands the value of forsaking worldly pleasures.”

“Believe me,” Salim said, “I’ve forsaken plenty. But I didn’t come here to discuss theology. Tell me of Mirosoy.”

“Bah!” the priest said, and spat on his own floor. “A magician and minor noble who lives in a manse at the far end of the valley. He’s been there for years.”

“It’s disgusting,” the armored boy put in helpfully. “Using magic to avoid honest sweat and labor.”

“Shut up, Percy,” the priest said, yet he nodded at the sentiment. “It’s true, we have no love of wizards and witches here. Yet it’s still not a crime, and his business helps keep the village alive through hard times. Of late, however, the lord has turned to darker arts. Graves have been disturbed, even within the grounds of the church.”