Husk: A Maresman Tale (6 page)

He could just about see one of the men through the trees, down on his hands and knees, scrabbling about. When he stood, he was holding together a split package, trying to stop flakes of something dark from blowing away in the breeze. Another man snatched the package from him and placed it in the wagon. All the while, the hooded man shook his head and stabbed at his ledger with a stick of charcoal.

Jeb stood gingerly, took one testing step at a time. He put his hand to his mouth to suppress a cough, and instantly clutched at his screaming ribcage with the other.

Probing with his fingertips, he tried to locate the source of the pain, but it shifted whenever he thought he had it. He opened his shirt to reveal a canvas of bruises, but none so bad as to suggest a break. Had to be thankful for small mercies, he guessed, and then, amid a rising surge of panic, he unbuttoned his britches and examined his aching fruits. All there; still intact. Had to be thankful for big mercies, too.

After fixing his clothes, Jeb leaned into the shelter of a tree trunk to observe what was going on by the wagon. The men had finished loading and were gathered around the hooded figure with the ledger. The guards outside the house came to sloppy attention, and the front door opened. Jeb frowned as he recognized the tub of lard that stepped out, swaddled in a white fluffy robe and curl-toed slippers. Boss, puffing away at a weedstick, as if that’s the first thing he did on waking.

When he came up alongside the hooded man, he stood behind him, studiously avoiding looking at the loaders. He said something Jeb couldn’t hear, and the hooded man nodded and untied a pouch from his belt, which he handed to one of the loaders. With that, the men climbed on board the wagon and it rolled away—south, toward the distant smudge of Carus Woods. That’d take them toward the Origo River, and the crossing to New Jerusalem. Had to wonder what was in those packages, what kind of merchandise would have to be loaded at such an early hour, and with Boss in his robe and slippers. He hardly struck Jeb as the kind to be up with the dawn.

Boss and the hooded man watched the departing wagon for a while, then Boss ambled back to the house alone. His partner in crime waited till he was alone, cast a look around, and then lowered his hood. Jeb pressed himself up against the bark, and his breath caught in his throat. The man had skin as black as pitch, and elongated ears like a bat’s.

A stygian.

The thing with the ears told him it was a sorcerer, too. They did that from birth, stretching and shaping them with a combination of bindings and dark theurgy, apparently to give them the look of the Abyss. What in Gehenna was a stygian sorcerer doing with the nominal ruler of Portis?

Jeb chewed on his lip, allowed himself a grim smile. No wonder Boss had been so keen for him to leave. Like Jeb had known from the outset, the fat man had been hiding something, and now he knew what it was. Had to credit Tubal for taking that right turn from the bridge and bringing them to the edge of Boss’s land. No matter how bad the night had been, no matter the crushing power of his stinging shame, at least there was one good thing the new day had brought.

Jeb had found his husk.

Or, more accurately, Tubal had. Not that the colt was boastful; he still had his head down so he could rip at the grass. You’d think no one ever fed him.

Question was, why hadn’t Jeb sensed it? The blood trail had grown cold almost the instant he sighted Portis. The answer struck him at the same time the stygian pulled a medallion on a chain from beneath his robe. The sorcerer rubbed the metal thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger, curled ears twitching, hooked nose sniffing. It was a charm, a ward; that much was obvious. It’s what stygians did: they crafted crude items of magic, when they weren’t brewing potions and growing crops of the herb somnificus that could have a man contemplating his own fingernails for days on end. Had to wonder if that was what was in the packages. Shipment like that would fetch a mountain of gold in New Jerusalem and keep Boss in haddock pies for twenty years at least. Well, ten, maybe, given the size of his gut and the corresponding appetite.

Of a sudden, the stygian turned its head to glare straight at Jeb. Heart hammering, Jeb swung himself back behind the trunk, cursing himself for being so careless. Must’ve been the blows to his head making him dull-witted. Physically, he was a wreck. He’d stand no chance against the guards outside the ranch, and even less against a husk of this caliber. Last thing you wanted to do was alert a stygian sorcerer you were on to him. Creature like that had spells you wouldn’t—

Sparkles fizzed through the branches above Jeb’s head, igniting leaves and illuminating the copse in shimmering silver. Sulfur filled Jeb’s nostrils, and pressure built in his ears. A droning started up, increasing in volume, rising in pitch. The hairs on the back of his neck stood erect, and on instinct, he dived away from the tree. As he hit the ground, lightning struck the trunk and split it in two down the center. Between the smoking, charred halves of the tree, Jeb glimpsed the stygian striding toward him, hands aswirl with a purplish miasma. Behind the sorcerer, the house guards were rushing forward with spears leveled, and one of them tooted three notes on a horn.

Agony lanced into Jeb’s limbs, ripped through his chest. For a moment, he thought it was a renewed magical attack, and it was something of a relief to realize it was the after effects of Sweet’s pounding. He struggled to his knees and whistled for Tubal. The colt nickered and trotted to his side, nuzzling him to get up. Tubal knew there was danger, sure enough. Knew it was from a husk, too, most likely. Jeb clawed his way up a stirrup, grabbed a hold of the saddle horn, and half-rolled, half-climbed onto the horse. He could’ve sworn Tubal bent his knees to help him.

Shouts of “Oi!” and “Halt!” rang out, and veins of purple smoke quested through the copse.

As Jeb took a fistful of reins, one of the tendrils brushed his temple. Cold flooded his brain, and feelers of wrongness split off from the main thread. He felt them twining about his thoughts, probing, pestering, cajoling. He recognized the attack straight away. The sorcerer was attempting coercion, probably the most intricate sorcery yet to arise from the nightmare realm of Qlippoth. Problem was, Jeb’s mother had been born with such power, and a whole lot more. Way Mortis told it, she’d been able to not just control someone’s mind; she took over the whole being, body and soul, and when she’d finished, discarded it like an old coat. If Jeb had learned anything in his time as a Maresman, it was that he was his mother’s son through and through. Mind attack like the one the stygian was throwing at him was the equivalent of taking a potato peeler to a sword fight. If he hadn’t hurt all over, he would’ve laughed as the sorcerous strands recoiled and snapped straight back into the stygian’s startled mind.

Somewhere beneath his scalp, Jeb felt the sorcerer scream in shock and rage. Closest he could come to describing it would’ve been running head first into an invisible wall. No, he realized with sudden clarity: it was like firing a shoddy flintlock and having it blow up in your face.

He kicked his heels into Tubal’s flanks, and they were off through the trees without a single glance back.

10

T
UBAL CARRIED HIM
deep into the foothills of the Gramble Range, north of Portis. It was far enough from Boss’s ranch for the guards not to pursue him on foot, and easily far enough for Jeb’s bruises to be hidden from Maisie. It also reduced the risk of running into Sweet before he was fully recovered. Next time they met, it was gonna be on Jeb’s terms, without the element of surprise. The only danger that left, besides rattlers and wolves, was if Boss decided to send trackers on horseback, or if the stygian, knowing a Maresman was on to him, stopped hiding and went on the offensive. Not too much Jeb could do about either possibility, given his physical condition. Times like this, you just had to be realistic. If there was a god, like the Wayists in New Jerusalem had been proclaiming since the demise of the Technocrat, now was when you’d trust yourself to his mercy. Course, god like that, with all those honorific titles, all that supposed goodness, weren’t likely to shed much mercy Jeb’s way, what with him being half a husk and all. That left chance, the way he saw it, the kind of thing that won you a game of seven-card, or kept you free of the pox when most everyone you knew was itching and scratching from it.

He stayed in the wilds three full days and nights, sheltering from the twin suns beneath a low overhang, and emerging in the evenings to stare up at Aethir’s moons. The howls of wolves kept him alert throughout the dark hours, but they were never more than watching eyes reflecting the yellow light of his fire. Rattlers, though, they were another thing. Once you knew how to root them out from abandoned burrows and clusters of rock, they made pretty good eating, save for the tip of the tail and the head.

Jeb had gleaned enough about medicine from the shabby healers in Malfen to gather wild herbs and flowers for a poultice to ease his bruising. What he didn’t need for that, he brewed up into a tisane using the tin cup from his saddlebags. If nothing else, it eased his thirst a darn sight more than the muddy water of the streams he found, but if he was pressed, he’d have to say it helped with the pain some, and sure thawed the tension from his limbs.

On the fourth day, he saddled up Tubal and took a long slow ride back to Boss’s ranch, this time stopping at the top of a low rise and surveying the land from a distance. He watched the better part of the afternoon and evening, but of the stygian there was no sign, and the blood trail remained as dead as Jeb’s run of luck.

Boss arrived by trap as the suns set, and occasionally Jeb could see his bloated silhouette pass across the lamplit windows of the ranch.

The guards were changed at regular intervals, and he judged there to be at least eight of them on patrol at any one time. Course, that didn’t account for who else might be in the house, and how many other guards occupied the outbuildings dotted about the property.

That night, Jeb pulled back farther into the woods and didn’t risk a fire. The massive disk of Raphoe provided enough silvery light to see by the early part of the night, so he took the opportunity to check and clean Brau’s flintlock. About halfway through oiling the frizzen, the sound of cracking twigs made him stiffen and stop. At the edge of the tree line, a pair of yellow eyes peered at him from the dark.

Licking his lips, Jeb pushed himself into a crouch and set about opening the powder flask and measuring a portion into the barrel. The bag of lead shot he kept in his coat pocket was still virtually full. He fished out a ball and shoved it home with the ramrod, all the while maintaining eye contact with the wolf. When he was good and ready, he cocked the pistol and took aim. Sensing something was amiss, the wolf whimpered and backed away. Jeb yelled after it, and it turned tail and scampered into the night.

He didn’t dare sleep after that, so instead, he spent the rest of the night preparing: rubbing at the wooden handle of the flintlock with the linseed he carried for the purpose; honing the edge of his saber with a whetstone, and pondering his next course of action.

Time the suns came up, Jeb was already halfway back to Portis. Sure, the bruises hadn’t fully faded, but his strength was coming back daily, and he was keen to enlist the help of the sheriff to bring in the husk. Well, bring in wasn’t the whole truth of it; he aimed to kill it.

Only problem was, something had started to niggle away at the back of his mind, like a maggot boring into an apple. Something about stygians. They weren’t exactly known for their lustfulness. Rumor had it they didn’t even mate to reproduce; they relied on some sort of dark magic. If that was true, and Jeb had no reason to believe it wasn’t, how could he explain the way the Outlanders had been taken, or the three Maresman who’d clearly been in the throes of passion when they’d been sent back to the mud?

11

T
HIS TIME WHEN
Jeb crossed the bridge, there was no sheriff waiting for him. The high street was already bustling with fisherfolk on their way to work, and a number of the shops he’d passed when he first arrived were open early, some selling bait and tackle, others taking in nets to repair or offering deals on new oilskins that no one seemed to want or need. Either they’d better create a need soon, or they’d go out of business. Mind you, from the looks of the storefronts, worn by the salt spray carried off the sea, they’d been there a while, so Jeb guessed they knew what they were doing.

The bitter smell of coffee was thick in the air, coming from a shop that displayed an array of pastries outside beneath an awning. Jeb dismounted, leaving Tubal tethered to a post, and bought himself a steaming fill of coffee for his tin mug, along with a sweet pastry and a meat pie for later.

“Haddock pie’s my specialty, stranger,” the crone running the place said. “Folk round here swear by it.” She spat something brown and sticky into a bucket through the gap in her teeth.

“So I’ve heard,” Jeb said. “Maybe next time.”

Truth be told, the thought of eating fish in a place that stank of nothing else made him think he’d be wearing it on the front of his shirt. Still, never hurt to be neighborly when dealing with the locals.

“Tizzy Graybank, I presume?”

She was rake thin, which struck Jeb as somewhat incongruous, and her fingernails were stained the same brown as the muck she’d spat in the bucket. She had a face like a weathered saddle, and her mussed-up white hair failed to hide the flakes that coated her brow like fish scales. It was the kind of appearance to make a hungry man suddenly full.

“That’s me. How’d you know?”

Jeb pointed to the sign bearing her name at the back of the counter. “That, and the sheriff put in a word for you.”

“Did he now? Mighty nice of him. So, tell me, son, where you from?”

“Malfen,” Jeb said, knowing the reaction that would get.

“Oh,” she said, and spat again, a great bubbly wad of phlegm that clung to the side of the bucket and trickled its way to the floor.