The Waters Rising (72 page)

“But at a terrible price for Wold,” he said.

“And Rancitor?” asked Xulai. “If he could use flesh from Mirami or Alicia, can’t he use Rancitor? Or Hulix?”

Precious Wind repeated monotonously, “There will be an end to it.”

O
ldwife Gancer met the wagon at the Woldsgard gate. Xulai leapt from the wagon to hug her, seeing over her shoulder that the courtyards and stables swarmed with livestock, with wagons, with farm families, all in from the farms and behind the walls for protection.

“Oh, child, you look . . . so grown up. I keep remembering my baby. You and little Bartelmy.” She broke into tears.

“Bartelmy?” asked Xulai. “Oldwife, what about . . .”

“That thing got him,” she said. “They found what was left of him. That thing killed him. And it got Black Mike.” Weeping, she led Xulai and Precious Wind into the castle.

Prince Orez came out to meet them, embracing Justinian as a long-separated brother. “I’m sure you know how things have gone,” he said, motioning to include them all. “We feared you might be attacked on the way. We’ve lost too many people. The thing takes someone every night. Here, there, no reason for it. Time enough to talk about that later. Come in, there’s food prepared. Our people will take care of the horses.”

“One of us has a wolf pack,” said Justinian.

“I know. We’ve received messages.”

“How?” asked Justinian. “No pigeon can cross the sea!”

Orez said, “Before Abasio left the abbey, he sent pigeons to Etershore and here to Woldsgard saying that Precious Wind had left a far-talking device here. She had brought it from Tingawa originally and had used it to keep in touch with Tingawa since Xulai was a child. The message told me where it was and how to use it to receive messages from Tingawa. I’ve been getting them every now and then, only a few words, but enough so I could be sure we had prepared for the wolves. There’s a little gate in the back that opens into an orchard. She can bring them in there. We’ve cleared out a storage building for their den. Whenever she’s ready, we have meat hanging for them.”

Abasio remembered the gate, the poppleberry orchard. He went to find Precious Wind, and once they had the wolves settled they joined the others in a dining hall near the kitchens.

Orez was saying to Justinian, “When you left, Justinian, we got here within the time you allowed for. We beat the troops from the abbey by several days. I was a bit confused when they showed up, until one of the commanders advised me his orders had come from the prior, not the abbot. The commander, a Colonel Sallis, was perfectly reasonable. I showed him the authorization; your people here verified it, and he realized his men weren’t needed here. I told him I’d send a pigeon to get him some new orders and I asked him to take his men back to Netherfields, where they’d have room to camp and probably find some supplies. They were, I’m thankful to say, out of the way and off the road before King Gahls’s men arrived.”

“Not so easy with them, I imagine,” snarled Justinian.

“Getting rid of the royal armor was a bit harder. I’d taken the precaution of closing the gates and having most of my men inside on the walls, with the horses well up in the hills, where they couldn’t be seen. I didn’t want them thinking Wold had been invaded but I did want them to know it was defended. Their troop commander was surprised to learn that Wold was not part of the king’s territory. He had evidently received orders through Mirami or that old adviser of hers. I told him the king’s stepson would no doubt be eager to see them in Kamfels, which was a good thing as we had no room or provisions for them here, even overnight. I’m told they camped hungry just beyond the Stoneway and took several days to get themselves over to Kamfels. The ferry couldn’t handle many of them, so most of them had to ride all the way east around Ragnibar Fjord, and the road’s only wide enough for two horses abreast.”

“Hulix?” asked Justinian. “What’s going on there?”

“Evidently he didn’t need them either. They soon went back to Ghastain, most of them by the long, slow northern route along the river that runs into the fjord and then up onto the highlands by the forest trails. A few of them stayed for a while, then came back this way later. The ones who passed by here told us Hulix was very ill. You know about the explosion south of us?”

“We were told,” said Justinian. “The Old Dark House was destroyed.”

“Shortly after that Hulix fell ill. Strangely enough, we heard the same thing happened to the king’s son, Crown Prince Rancitor. About that same time, too.”

Justinian looked at Precious Wind, who shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s possible the same machine that . . . maintained the . . . thing also maintained . . . but that would mean . . .”

“It would mean that the Old Dark Man was the father of Mirami’s children, or had a part in fathering or creating them,” said Xulai. “In both cases, Mirami needed a son: Hulix to inherit Kamfels, Rancitor to inherit Ghastain. Was something in the Old Dark House helping to keep them both . . . living?”

Precious Wind looked at the scarf she held in her hands, twisting it as she thought. It had become a habit recently, this wringing of the hands, or things in hands, though not yet her mind. Better her hands than her mind! “Most organisms are self-monitoring. If our bodies need something, some kind of feedback mechanism inside us tells us we are thirsty or hungry, or need to sleep, or it adjusts the flow of this hormone or that secretion. If we suppose the Old Dark Man’s creations were
not
self-monitoring, if their organs or components required adjusting from time to time, those adjustments might have been triggered remotely . . .”

“Remotely?” asked Justinian.

“Like the far-talker,” said Abasio. “It is triggered by a device that converts sound or writing into waves and sends those waves through the atmosphere to another device that converts the waves into instructions, or a voice, or whatever.”

Precious Wind nodded slowly. “A signal could have been sent directing some organism, or some tiny mechanism, to adjust whatever it was. If the adjustment didn’t happen, the organism might fail, eventually.”

Xulai’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “So Mirami’s brood were not human!”

“In talking about Mirami, we always thought in terms of human genetics,” Precious Wind confessed. “Even though we knew the Old Dark Man was not entirely flesh, I don’t think any of us thought Mirami could be partly . . . mechanical. That’s not the right word. Something more refined than mere mechanics, but still . . . not flesh.”

“If both Hulix and Rancitor die, it solves two minor problems,” said Abasio. “Lok-i-xan will be delighted.”

“Poor King Gahls,” Xulai murmured. “Not an heir to his name.”

“He’s still not too old to get one,” said Hallad, Prince Orez. “Now that no one is poisoning every attempt. He may not know just how far Mirami had gone. If Hulix dies, Kamfels can be garrisoned by my men. Perhaps, once everything . . . settles down, I’ll make a visit to the court. He might be grateful, even conciliatory.”

Justinian asked, “What about our defenses here? I left you little enough to work with, my friend. I’m afraid the years took their toll on Wold’s readiness and mine.”

“You are looking very fit and you have some good men,” the prince said. “Perhaps both you and they needed only to be reminded of that fact. We’ve brought your Men of the Mountain into Woldsgard and sent some of the old hands north to the pinnacle; we have scouts watching your borders. And I’m not leaving here, my men aren’t leaving here, until everything is settled for the foreseeable future. I understand that the future beyond that is to be strange and wonderful in ways we have never dreamed of, but we’ll have years to talk of that later . . .” He marked this in his memory, to remind Justinian of it in happier times. Or to forget it, if there were none. “As to our defenses here: we are no longer threatened by prior or queen. Only the creature threatens us and we assume it has no allies. It came here long enough to kill some of our people, but it will come alone if it comes at all. There have been no recent sightings close by.

“Lately, it stays mostly in that area where the Old Dark House was and up the eastern slope from there. We’ve taken the advice received from Tingawa. If it attacks, the archers will shoot only flame arrows. We are told that pistols will probably not hurt it, but fire may. We have catapults that can throw bigger lumps of fiery stuff that sticks to what it hits. We also received a visit from a Tingawan armorer who came here after he and his fellows had destroyed the Old Dark House. He gave us some small cannons and showed us how to use them to fire the same kind of stuff. We’ve always stayed away from guns, big ones at any rate. Using them brings us very close to the ban on machines. However, they are easier to aim than catapults and since he left the things with us and taught us how to use them, we’ll use them if we have to. I hope we won’t need them, for your plan is to meet it some distance away.”

“That is the plan, as I understand it,” said Justinian without expression.

“Not that we’ve been told much,” said Abasio.

“A secret is best kept between two people when one of them is dead,” said Hallad, staring at Precious Wind. “Such has always been my understanding.”

“And mine,” said Precious Wind.

Abasio felt something was very wrong with the plan. This monster was not supposed to be able to think about maintenance. And yet it could think about creating subordinate creatures that would receive signals from the maintainer? It could modify the device to do that?

It seemed unlikely. Except . . . those things were related to killing. And it could think about killing . . .

L
ater, in Xulai’s old room high in the castle gard, Oldwife grieved over Bartelmy and Black Mike while Xulai sat empty eyed beside her.

“He were just a lad,” Oldwife said for the tenth time. “Just a boy. A sweet boy. No harm in him. Went out to see his folks, got caught in the woods by that . . . that . . .”

“How do you know it was the . . . the creature, Oldwife?”

“What else kills and rips and tears flesh away and then just leaves a body? Bears don’t do that. The big mountain cats don’t do that,” she cried. “What else but that monster?” She sobbed. “Both on ’em, they wore those nice scarfs you made ’em. Both the boy and Mike. They was so proud of those!”

Xulai went to find Abasio. “Find Pecky Peavine and Willum and Clive Farrier. I knitted them each a scarf before I was taken from the abbey, remember. Bartelmy and Mike were wearing them when they were killed. They may have been smelled out, Abasio. Tell them to wear nothing they might have worn when they were with me, or Precious Wind, or Bear.”

Abasio collected Precious Wind and together they found the three living men. The scarves were burned and Xulai’s warning was passed on. Meantime Xulai lay curled on her bed, shivering uncontrollably. If it had smelled them out because their scarves had her scent upon them, how much easier to smell her out when she was bait in the trap.

T
hat night Precious Wind, Abasio, and Prince Orez met atop the tower. It had been tented over to protect them from rain, the side curtains open to the south and east. Below them, in a room beside the bird lofts, four Tingawan warriors pedaled slowly, evenly, to create power for the small device set on a sturdy table. They were there to discuss the plan.

“This is Alicia’s pattern,” said Precious Wind, holding up a little angular receptacle. “We made this in Tingawa from the hairs that Alicia left in the forest here at Woldsgard. I put the pattern in this slot and press this small lever that says ‘record’ on it.” She pressed the lever and stepped away. “If it can read it and record it—and it did read and record patterns successfully in Tingawa—the red light at the lower left will go on.”

The red light blinked on as she spoke.

“Now, the locator will make its own map outward from us, searching for the pattern of Alicia, which is in her blood, even old, dried blood. It reads the area around it and shows coastline as a dark line, river edges by a slightly narrower line. Water is blue. Land is gray. Elevations are shown as the old mapmakers showed them, very thin lines every ten feet, or twenty, or fifty, or one hundred. Here I have it set for fifty.”

An image appeared. Precious Wind pointed out the clustered lines east and west, where the mountains or cliffs rose steeply. Beyond the mountains, the blue of the sea, the dark line of the coast, the narrower lines of the river Wells leading to the blue of Lake Riversmeet.

“I’ll bring the edges in closer. We want to have the tower here at the top so the screen covers all the land between here and where the Old Dark House used to be. We want to keep the cliffs on the screen, as well.”

They stared. Abasio stirred, laying a fingertip on the screen. “There he is. See this little light. It moves.”

For a moment, they couldn’t see it, a tiny dot, barely visible, a green tint. It did not seem to be moving. “What scale of distance do we have here?” Abasio asked.

“Three to four days’ journey across. You have good perception, Abasio, sensory or otherwise. That odd-looking blotch is where the Old Dark Tower was, and he’s very near that. We rather hoped for that. What was sowed there by the blast will help kill him, though it doesn’t kill as quickly as we’d like. Once we’re sure we are seeing him, we can come in closer . . .”

“Do it now. A larger scale will help his movements show up better,” said Abasio.