The Robin and the Kestrel (16 page)

She kept the lantern over her head to keep her eyes from becoming dazzled by the light, and led the horses up the untidy, long-neglected track. It wasn't as overgrown as she would have expected, though; no bushes or trees, only weeds, and those looked sickly and were no taller than her calf, even after a summer's worth of growth. She knew what
that
meant; there was a road underneath this track, one of the Old Roads, the ones no one knew how to build anymore. If she got out a shovel and dug, she knew she would hit the hard surface of one of the roadways that dated back to the Cataclysm; it would be a lightless black substance, like stone but yielding, like tar but much harder. Nothing could grow through it; that was why there was nothing growing on this track but short weeds. The earth and loam that had covered this road couldn't be more than an inch or so thick; just enough for grass and weeds to take root in. There would be no cracks or imperfections in it, unless she came to a place where an earthquake had split it, or the edge of a Cataclysm-boundary, where it would be cut off as if by a giant knife.

The Old Roads usually connected two or more important places—or at least, places that
had
been important before the Cataclysm. There were often ruins along them. The Deliambrens always wanted to know about Old Roads, so the Gypsies kept track of the ones they ran across. Did Harperus know this one was here?

Probably not. Whatever this segment had connected before, it certainly connected nothing of any import now. Gradford was a very minor city-state despite its pretentions otherwise, and what was Westhaven? Nothing, full of nobodies. A dead-end, dying, and not even aware it was in its death-throes. Too stupid to know that its days were numbered.

The only thing that makes it important is that Rune came from there,
Gwyna thought cynically, thinking of the women in the marketplace and the three bullies they had left damaged. Of course, she had—she hoped—inflicted some emotional damage on the women who deserved it, with her descriptions of Rime's tame and prosperity.
I
hope that hen-faced bitch is so envious of Rune that she chokes on her dinner. I bet
she's
the one that set those bullies on us. I hope she nags her husband about silk gowns and carriages until he beats her senseless. I hope that fool I scared into incontinence
is
her husband, and I scared him into impotence as well!
She kept her feral snarl to herself.
Vindictive? Oh, a tad.

She knew better than to say any of this out loud. Jonny, bless his sweet little heart, was
not
vindictive. He believed that concentrating on revenge simply reduced you to the level of your persecutors. Gwyna believed in an old Gypsy proverb;
Get your revenge in early and often. You might not have another chance.

Maybe that was why the Ghost fascinated her so. Was he somehow working out some bizarre scheme for revenge? If so, on who, and why? Was he choosing to let
some
people by, people they never even heard of because they were unaware that they had been in any danger at all?

Or was he a strange revenant from the distant past, from the time when this Old Road had been in use? Could something have called him up out of that past to haunt this stretch of roadway? Could his reasons and motives, or need for revenge, be buried so far in the past they no longer had any relevance?

Or if this creature was strange enough, could they even understand his reasons, much less his motives?

An owl called up above her, and she sighed. No point in following that line of speculation. He had to be understandable; there was no point in this, otherwise.

Well, he's enough like us to enjoy our music.

The track grew steeper, and she felt the strain in her calf muscles. Too bad she couldn't ride, but if she let the horses try to pick their own way, they might get hurt. She glanced back at Jonny; he was watching all around them, nervously expecting the Ghost to pop up at any moment.

She didn't think that was likely; the Ghost and things like him often picked specific times to appear. Sunset, midnight, moonrise, or moonset seemed to be the most often chosen. Since people had been caught out on this track by the spirit after dark, not knowing that it was there, and since Rune had climbed Skull Hill without seeing the Ghost and had to actually wait for it to appear, Robin guessed that it probably appeared at midnight or moonrise. Tonight the two would be almost simultaneous; midnight and moonrise within moments of each other.

And they would be at the top long before either. There would be plenty of time to rest her aching legs and eat a little. Time enough to park the wagon and ready the instruments. Time to think about what they were going to play, what they were going to say. Everything needed to be perfect for this performance.

After all, it was going to be the performance of a lifetime . . . and it had better be the best performance of their lives. She had the feeling that the Ghost would not accept anything less.

"You might as well eat something," Robin observed, biting into her bread-and-cheese with appreciation. Mother Tolley did, indeed, make very good bread; firm and sweet, with a chewy crust.
About the only thing good in that whole town,
she decided.
Unless Annie Cook's skills match Rune's memory.
The tasty bread settled into her stomach comfortably, and she took another bite.

"C-c-can't," Jonny replied, nervously fingering the tuning-pegs on his harp as he watched the shadows for any sign of the Ghost. There was nothing, and had been nothing since they had parked the wagon here. And if Rune's story was accurate, there would be plenty of warning when the Ghost
did
arrive; it was not going to sneak up on them when they weren't looking.
Likes to make an impressive entrance. I wonder if it was an actor once?

They were at the very top of the hill, with the slash of the road going right across the clearing at the very peak. As overcast as it was, even with the lamp burning, you couldn't see a thing beyond the darker forms of trees and shrubbery against the slightly lighter sky. A cool breeze blew across the clearing, but it held no hint of moisture, and no otherworldly scent of brimstone or the fetor of the grave, either.

Robin shrugged as she caught Jonny's eye. "This would steady your stomach," she suggested. "It's going to be a long time until dawn. You're going to need a little sustenance before the night is over."

"I g-guess s-so," he said, after another long moment. But he groped after her hand, then seized the slice of bread-and-cheese she handed him without looking at it, and wolfed it down without tasting it, his eyes never leaving the clearing in front of their wagon.

With the help of the lantern, Gwyna thought she'd identified Rune's rock—that is, the one Rune had been sitting on when the Ghost appeared to her. They had parked the wagon with the tail of it facing that rock and the clearing in front of it. She figured it was the most likely place for the Ghost to manifest. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

Jonny was not taking the waiting well. He was as tight as a harp strung an octave too high, and if she hadn't
seen
him in crisis situations and
known
that he handled them well and settled once the crisis was upon them, she'd have been very worried about his steadiness.

Her stomach was fluttery—hence the bread-and-cheese—and her shoulders were tight. But her senses seemed a hundred times sharper than usual, and everything happened with preternatural slowness. She heard every cricket clearly and knew exactly where it was; she knew where the owls were hooting, and about how far away they were. She felt the breeze across her skin like a caress; she tasted the bitter tannin of dead leaves, the promise of frost in the air. All of it was very immediate, and very vivid.

She
wanted
this to happen; she had not felt so alive for weeks. That was what performance nerves did to her; she'd felt exactly like this when they'd gone in to confront Jonny's uncle, King Rolend. Afterwards, she might shake and berate herself for doing something so risky—but now, there was only the chill tingle of anticipation and—

And the moon was rising!

She caught the barest hint of it, a mere sliver of silver at the horizon, before it was covered by the clouds. But that was enough—and enough to tell her that the chill tingle she felt along her nerves was not anticipation. It was something else entirely.

Magic? The crickets!

The crickets stopped chirping abruptly, with no warning. They had not faded away; no, they had stopped entirely, leaving behind a hollow and empty silence that seemed louder than a shout. The breeze dropped into a dead calm.

Then, in the very next moment, a wind howled up out of nowhere, just as Rune had described, a wind carrying the chill of a midwinter ice-storm. It flattened their clothing to their bodies and if Robin had not taken the precaution of binding her hair up for travel, it would have blinded her with her own tresses. This was not a screaming wind—no, this wind
moaned
. It sounded alive, somehow, and in dire, deadly, despairing pain. A hopeless wind, a wind that was in torment and not permitted to die. A tortured wind, that carried the instruments of its own torture as lances of ice in its bowels.

It whirled around them for a moment, mocking their living warmth with deathly cold, as they huddled instinctively close together on the wagon-tail. There was more than physical
cold
in this wind; the hair on her arms rose as she realized that this wind also carried
power
. Not a power she recognized, but akin to it. The antithesis of healing-power . . . malignant, bitterly envious, and full of hate. The horses were utterly silent, and when she looked back at them, she saw them shaking, sides slick with the sweat of fear, and the whites of their eyes showing all around.

She didn't blame them.
Now
, now that it was far too late, she realized what an incredibly stupid thing she had done. Whatever had made her think she could bargain with this thing? This wasn't a spirit—it was a force that was a law unto itself. She shook with more than cold, she trembled with more than fear. She had walked wide-eyed into a trap. Her own confidence had betrayed her. Her guts clenched, and her throat was too tight to swallow; her mouth dry as dust and her heart pounding.

The wind spun out and away from them; in the blink of an eye it swirled out into the clearing, gathering up every dead leaf and bit of dust with it. In a moment it had formed into a column, a miniature tornado, swaying snakelike in the middle of the clearing.

There were eyes in that whirlwind; not visible eyes, but something in there watched her. She felt those eyes on her skin, felt them studying her and searching for weaknesses, hating her, hating jenny, hating even the inoffensive horses. Hating every living thing, because
they
were alive and it was not.

She couldn't take her eyes off the whirlwind, and Rune's description quite vanished from her mind. All she could think of were the words of the song:

. . . then comes a wind that chills my blood
And amkes the dead leaves whirl . . .

But the song had said nothing about how the leaves glowed with a light of their own. Nor about the closing in of malignant power as it surrounded her and increased until it choked her.

Each leaf glowed in a distinctive shade of greenish-white, the veins a brighter white against the shape of the leaf, somehow calling to mind things rotting, things unhealthy. The leaves pulled together within the center of the whirlwind, forming a solid, irregular shape in the middle of the whirling wind and dust, a shape that was thicker at the bottom than the top, with a suggestion of a cowl crowning it all.

The shape grew more distinct by the moment as the wind whipped faster and faster until the individual leaves vanished into a glowing blur. Then the odd shape at the top of the column
was
a cowl, and the entire form was that of a hooded and robed figure, somehow proportioned in such a way that there was never any doubt that this
thing
was not, and had never been, human.

Exactly as Rune had described.

. . . rising up in front of me, a thing like shrouded Death . . . .

Oh, it looked like Death in his shroud, all right—worse, it
felt
like Death. The wind died; it had, after all, done its work and was no longer needed. Robin had never felt so cold, or so frightened. Her heart seemed lodged somewhere in her throat, and her fingers were frozen to her instrument—

It's doing this, not you!
The thought came sluggishly, up through a thick syrup of fear.
This thing is making you afraid! Didn't you feet the power? Fight it! Fight it, or you won't be able to speak! And if you can't speak, you can't bargain, and you certainly can't sing!

With the thought came determination; with the determination and the sheer, stubborn will came the realization that the fear
was
coming from outside her! She clenched her jaw as momentary anger overcame the fear—

—and broke it!

It was gone, all in that instant, and once broken, the spell of fear did not return. She sat up straighter; she was free! Her stomach unknotted; her heart slowed. Her throat cleared, and she was able to breathe again.

The last of the leaves settled around the base of the robe. The figure within that robe was thin and dreadfully attenuated; if it had been human, it would have been nothing but bone, but bone that had been softened and stretched until the skeleton was half again the height of the average human male.
Elongated.
That was the description she was searching for. And yet, there was nothing fragile about this thing. The cowl turned towards them, slowly and deliberately, and there was a suggestion of glowing eyes within the dark shadows of the hood.

The voice, when the thing spoke, came as something of a surprise. Robin had expected a hollow, booming voice, like the tolling of a death-bell. Instead, an icy, spidery whisper floated out of the darkness around them, as if all the shadows were speaking, and not the creature before them.