The Banshee's Walk (12 page)

Still, we managed to all take hold of the rope and pull, which brought the limp Miss Eaves finally up to and then through the open roof access panel.

The rope was looped under her arms. We scratched her up a bit dragging her back inside, and she lost a lock of golden hair in the corner of the opening, but she was breathing. I let Gertriss and Lady Werewilk adjust her flimsy nightgown while Marlo and I averted our eyes and collapsed against the wall.

“And that there is what we call a banshee,” were the first words I was able to hear, spoken by Marlo.

If Lady Werewilk heard she pretended not to.

Serris began to stir.

“She all right?” I shouted.

Gertriss nodded, spoke words I still couldn’t quite hear.

I shouted. “That was damned brave of you.”

“Grave for who?”

“Never mind,” I yelled. I rose, forgot to duck, banged my head on the low ceiling.

“I’m going outside,” I said.

“You’re a damn fool,” opined Marlo, who then surprised me. “I’ll go too.”

Serris came to her senses and erupted into shrieks and cries. I still wasn’t catching every word, but I gathered she’d seen something out there, and I had a good idea what it was.

Gertriss held Serris close and began to rock her. Before I’d managed to turn away she went quiet.

“Don’t waste your time, Mr. Markhat,” said Gertriss. “It’s gone.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” She murmured something to Serris. “We both saw it leave.”

The girl started shaking again.

“We can talk downstairs,” I said. “Lady Werewilk? Can you arrange for someone to stay with Serris tonight?”

“She won’t be left alone, I assure you,” said Lady Werewilk. She moved to stand by Serris and Gertriss, leaned down, and laid a hand awkwardly on Serris’ shoulder.

“There, there,” she said. I gathered Lady Werewilk’s stock of comforting truisms designed for hysterical teenage mothers-to-be was nearly as limited as my own. “Everything will be all right. There’s no reason you can’t be an artist and a mother.”

Which nearly resulted in a fresh round of renewed bawling, an event avoided only by fervent whispering from Gertriss and her insistence that we leave the attic at once.

The banshee’s howl had scattered the artists and staff. They were beginning to creep back up the stairs, though. Most were brandishing walking sticks or chunks of firewood, so I called out before we descended lest some nervous pre-War abstract impressionist decide to wax heroic.

Serris and Gertriss were quickly mobbed by artists, who cooed and wooed at the same time and generally embarrassed the poor girl to death.

“All right,” I shouted over the din. “The young lady is fine. The sound you heard came from outside. No, I don’t know what made it. No, we didn’t see anything. You, you, and you—” I pointed at random, picking out the three largest male painters who weren’t wobbling. “—get downstairs. See that the doors are locked. All the doors. Right now, son.”

I said the last in an Army bark perfected during my eight years in the War. Earnest young men darted for the stairs.

Gertriss chuckled despite herself.

“You’d make a fine pig-herder,” she said.

“Great. Let’s get out of here and buy a herd of swine.”

“Be a might safer.” Gertriss let Serris go into the hands of a trio of female artists, who covered Serris in a blanket and made what I assumed were the appropriate noises of commiseration and encouragement.

Marlo appeared at my side. His face was grim. “Need to get a few things. Meet you at the front door.”

And he lumbered away, bowling over artists as he went.

Lady Werewilk and Gertriss raised eyebrows. I suppose Lady Werewilk hadn’t heard Marlo and I plan our expedition.

Both began to question the wisdom of proceeding outdoors. I raised my own eyebrow at Lady Werewilk, who had not very long ago cast scorn on the very idea that banshees walked her woods.

“You’ve got the whole estate cooped up in here. Unless you want start assigning them bedrooms, we’ve got to make sure it’s safe for them to go home,” I said, resorting to practicality. “Marlo and I are going door-to-door before anyone leaves. Lock your doors behind us. We’ll need torches.”

Inspiration struck.

“I’ll be right back. Have the torches ready.”

I hit the stairs, huffing and puffing. Gertriss caught up to me easily, her face set in the same expression of unshakable pig-headedness Mama wore when she got her dander up.

“Don’t even bother, Mr. Markhat,” she said. “I promised Mama I’d keep an eye on you.”

“I promised Mama the same thing.” I couldn’t get all the words out in one breath. “Last thing I need out there is another body to watch.”

“And what you need most is somebody who can use Sight to see in the dark.”

“We’ll have torches.”

We finally reached the landing. I hustled into my room, Gertriss still on my heels, and yanked Toadsticker from his wrapping of old shirts.

“Torches won’t show what you need to be a seein’.”

“You slip back into country talk when you’re agitated, Miss.”

“And you change the subject when you know you’re wrong, mister.”

I shrugged. Gertriss went still, and I swear the room got cold.

She closed her eyes.

The hairs on the back of my neck tried to fall in formation and march.

“What are you doing?”

“Having a look,” she said, slurring her words.

She tensed.

“It’s back. Not close, but thinking about it.”

“Which direction?”

Gertriss lifted her right arm, pointed, then turned. I figured she was facing the barn we’d set as out last-resort meeting place.

“Has it seen you?”

“Not yet.” She opened her eyes, blinked, shivered.

And grinned.

“We’d better hurry. You can’t tie me up and leave me. You haven’t got time.”

I sighed, cussed.

“Stay behind me. Don’t use your Sight outside without warning me. Your word now, or I send you back to Mama, no second chances.”

She nodded. We made for the ground floor. I drew a frown from Gertriss by darting momentarily back into the kitchen. And then we trooped for the big red doors and the dark beyond them.

Marlo was there, an axe in his hand. The blade gleamed, and though it had never chopped anything but firewood that blade wasn’t anything I’d want swung at me.

A crowd had gathered. Those who could clustered at the three-bolt windows and peeped out, oohing and ahing at the dark like they could see anything at all.

No one stood anywhere near the doors though.

“I reckon you know your own business,” said Marlo, after a glance at Gertriss.

“And I reckon you should mind your own,” said Gertriss.

Marlo puffed up and went red, but before he could sputter out a response Lady Werewilk appeared.

She was dragging an umbrella stand that she’d stuffed with swords. “I thought you might need to be armed,” she began, trailing off when she saw Toadsticker and Marlo’s well-honed axe.

But Gertriss grinned like she’d just knocked over a bowl full of earrings.

“Oooh, I’ll take this one, if I may,” she said, yanking a short straight blade out of the jumble.

Lady Werewilk nodded, bemused.

“I believe it was actually used in the War.” She eyed the blades critically, selected one very similar, and damned if she didn’t spin it around in her left hand with as much skill as my old army sword master.

“I’ll be by the door with this, Mr. Markhat.”

I saluted her with Toadsticker, and she returned it—perfectly.

“I’m full of surprises.”

She threw back the bolts, and pulled the door open.

Marlo grunted, laid the axe on his shoulder and marched outside. I followed, Gertriss on my heels, and the three of us went half a dozen paces and stopped.

Gertriss laid her unlit torch onto the one burning by the door. It flared to life, trailing the stench of pitch. I grinned as Gertriss tried to figure out which hand to use for the torch and which to hold the sword.

“Torch in your right,” I offered. “Sword in your left, and then stick it point first in the dirt. You’re better off in a pinch with the torch anyway, unless you’re trained with a blade. Are you trained with a blade, Miss?”

The look she gave me would doubtlessly have sent an entire herd of pigs running for the stable or wherever it is that pigs are domiciled in quaint, scenic Pot Lockney.

Marlo helped by guffawing. Before Gertriss could turn on him, I motioned toward the barns.

“The woman with the big lungs is that way,” I said.

Marlo nodded. “So that’s where we head?”

“Nope. We go door to door like we don’t know where she is. That’ll take us that way anyway, but it won’t be quick. Gertriss, you keep an eye—a regular eye—out for women in the trees. Marlo, you watch the ground. If anybody’s been out here planting stakes while everyone was eating I want to know it.”

Marlo frowned. “We got banshees in the pines, and you’re worried about some damned surveyor’s sticks?”

“That’s what I was hired to worry about. And for all we know the banshee is the one leaving the stakes.”

“Banshees don’t give a damn ’bout land deals.”

“I’ll ask her when I meet her,” I said. My eyes were adjusted to the dark, helped by Gertriss’ flickering torch.

“Let’s get started.”

Gertriss managed to shove her shortsword through her sash. I put her at the back of the line so the light from the torch wouldn’t blind Marlo and I.

Eight outbuildings. It took us maybe twenty minutes to make a show of checking the windows and doors to see if they were all locked or shuttered—they were—and to light the door torches that flanked every opening. By the time we were nearing the barns, there was just enough stray torchlight flickering about to turn the Werewilk estate into something out of a nightmare.

Shadows danced. Huge old blood-oaks towered above us, spreading their boughs wide and blotting out the sky. The dancing red torchlight illuminated tossing leaves far above, giving the impression of furtive movement to join the dry, wooden whispers of the night.

Gertriss whispered occasional updates. She seemed sure the banshee was staying put, well out of the farthest reach of the torchlight.

I kept my eyes out for surveyor’s stakes and hoped she was right.

Marlo kept a white-knuckled grip on his ax and nearly let fly with it when a rooster flew down on his head from an outhouse roof to our right. Truth is, I nearly did the same with Toadsticker while Gertriss shamed us both by shooing the dim-witted bird away with her torch.

Finally, the last dwelling checked and found secure, we halted, gathered in the flickering half-circle of light cast by the door torches.

The barns loomed up a short distance away, more shadow than shape. A wind walked through the corn, and the ways the stalks bent and rasped made the hairs on my neck crawl the same way they had done on a regular basis during the War.

Gertriss caught my eye, glanced at the furthest barn, nodded slightly, just once.

“You two start bringing people out.” I spoke during a lull of wind so my voice would carry. “I’ll stay here, keep an eye out.”

Gertriss started to argue. I gave her a hard look. Marlo turned his back and started walking.

Gertriss handed me her torch.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

And then she was off, rushing to catch up with Marlo.

I figured I had maybe a quarter of an hour. It would take that long for the gaggle of staff to find their way home. So I stuck Gertriss’s torch in the ground, and then I walked to the edge of the light and I put my back to the barns.

Toadsticker’s hilt was warm and reassuring in my hand. Which made sticking it through my belt a difficult action to take.

The corn rustled. Leaves and limbs made dry furtive noises overhead. I imagined all manner of creeping horrors, slinking up behind me.

I’d had my back to the barns for maybe three long minutes—just enough time for Marlo and Gertriss to reach the House—when I heard a twig snap behind me.

I judged the distance to be maybe twenty feet.

And that, I decided, was plenty close enough.

My hand was already in my pocket. I moved it slowly.

I turned around. Slowly. Calmly. In my outstretched right hand was a slice of warm corn bread with a chunk of butter still melting in the middle.

And there she was.

Just standing there.

A banshee.

Every hair on every spot of my body stood on end.

She appeared to be a tiny woman, naked save for a liberal coating of dirt and spider-webs. I don’t mean a woman of small stature—I mean a human woman who had grown to full size and then been somehow shrunk down to a stature befitting a child. I’ve seen trick mirrors at Yule houses that can either shrink or enlarge reflections. The banshee might have stepped out of the former.

Except for perhaps her ears. In the dim light, and under all that matted hair, I couldn’t be sure, but it looked as though her ears might be pointed, as those of the Elves were said to have been.

Her hair was the color of dusty hay. It was wild and matted, encrusted with spider webs and leaves and twigs. Her eyes, though, were big and bright and blue.

I looked into them. The ghost of the huldra let out a scream that nearly brought my hands to my ears. But it made me look away, and that spared me the experience that had nearly overwhelmed Gertriss.

I fixed my gaze on the tiny woman’s filthy chin. Her face was a mask of indifference.

No fear, no anger, no emotion whatsoever. She just stood there, halted in mid-step, watching me with those wide blue eyes.

“I’ve never met a person of your lineage before,” I said. “What do I call you?”

She tilted her head and eyed me quizzically, but neither spoke nor howled.

“My name is Markhat. Do you have a name?”

Again, a blank stare. A vagrant breeze arose, and carried a whiff of her scent to me. I had to fight not to gag. I’d have to tell Mama banshees weren’t strong proponents of bathing.

My banshee kept staring. But she still wasn’t running.

I laid the corn bread and the napkin down on the ground and took three long steps back away from it. The corn bread was mashed a bit, but the butter had melted into it and the smell was heavenly. “Well, I’ll call you Buttercup for now. Is that all right with you? May I call you Buttercup?”