Cobweb Empire (30 page)

“Put it down, André, right there—now, serve
His Lordship.”

“Yes, Ma.” Even his voice seemed at first
glance that of a normal healthy seven-year-old. It was only the
slight delay before inhaling, and then the overly even speech, that
hinted at something not exactly normal. . . .

Percy looked at him, stunned. And the boy
and his little shadow, also seemed to sense her. As all the dead
did in her presence, he eventually turned to her, and looked up in
her eyes with his earnest green-blue ones.

“Say hello, André!” said his proud mother,
wiping her round pudgy hands against the front of her apron.
“There, speak to His Lordship first.”

“Hello, Your Lordship,” the boy said,
looking away from Percy momentarily, and again bowing before
Beltain.

“How old are you, André?” Beltain asked
kindly.

“Will be seven in three weeks, Lordship.”
And the boy, having unburdened himself from all the plates, now dug
his hand into his breeches pocket and took hold of something.

“What’s that you have there in your hands,
little man?” While taking a deep draught of his beer, Beltain had
noticed his movements.

“My horse and cavalry man.” And the boy
turned out his pocket and pulled out a small, carved wooden
figurine of a horse and rider, with the rider holding a tiny little
shield and pike.

“I see. That’s a very handsome soldier. Well
armed too.”

“Yes, Lordship.”

“Oh, now, don’t bother His Lordship at his
meal, André,” his mother spoke hurriedly, suddenly looking in the
direction of the outside door and unshuttered front windows showing
the street. “You run along now! Go in the back and wait for
me!”

“Yes, Ma.” And the boy ran slowly, holding
the wooden toy soldier in his hand.

The next moment, the outside door opened,
and two very large men came in, moving stiffly with the telltale
awkwardness of the dead. They had grim cynical faces, the look of
mercenaries, and a shabby quality to their clothes. Percy noticed a
few belted weapons on at least one of them. Their death shadows
moved alongside, large and menacing, she saw.

Beltain sat with his side partly turned from
the entrance, but there was not a moment of doubt he saw
everything, including the new arrivals, with his sharp peripheral
vision. He was dipping bread in the barley soup and bringing the
ladle up to his mouth, but for some reason she noticed a subtle
quality of relaxation in his muscles, like a coil loosening, ready
to spring.

She redoubled her efforts to slurp her own
soup and stuff her cheeks with the bread, keeping her head down
over her bowl, even though now the flavor was gone, and her pulse
was in her throat.

The proprietress of the tavern however, did
not waste any time. The woman took a few steps, putting her hands
on hips, and said loudly to the dead man who entered first. “What
do you want, Jared? What now?”

“And a good day to you, Mistress Saronne,”
spoke the dead man, dark haired and bearded, with heavy overhanging
brows and a deeply rutted pale face. The act of ballooning his
lungs caused a crackle of breaking ice on the inside of his chest
cavity, which indicated that he’d been out in the cold without
speaking for some time. “Need a man have a reason to come inside a
public establishment?”

Percy heard that crackle, and continued
staring into her bowl. Everyone else in the room heard it too, as a
few of the townsmen paused eating and glanced warily at the
newcomers.

“You’re no longer welcome here,” Mistress
Saronne replied in a firm voice. “I’ve asked you before not to come
in any longer, and now I ask you kindly to leave, both of you.”

The two dead men slowly looked at each
other, and their fixed eyes did not change but the mouths shaped
themselves into grotesque versions of smiles.

“Why so uncharitable to an honest dead man?”
said the second man, leaner and also dark, with a long gash scar
running up his neck and jaw, its wound edges frosted over and
crystallized with pallor.

“Because, Hendrick, you are
dead
, and
a rude villain to boot. You were a right horror when you were
alive, and I can just about tolerate that kind of thing if you’re
living flesh and blood and can pay me with coins for your supper.
But no longer! You don’t belong here, where honest folk are trying
to have a meal. You are scaring the customers!”

“Come now, why so mean, Mistress Saronne? No
one here is scared.” The first man slowly walked into the room,
stiff-limbed yet managing to saunter insolently. He walked up to
the table edge and stopped next to a man having a bowl of soup.
“Well, am I a bother to you, good fellow?” he asked.

The man shook his head silently, but his
eyes were troubled, and he’d stopped eating and put down his
ladle.

“Jared Gaisse, begone!” Mistress Saronne
exclaimed, in a rising voice.

“See, there, he ain’t bothered.” And the
dead man called Jared moved away from the eating customer and
sauntered over along the table, moving deeper into the room.

Meanwhile, the other dead man also began
edging into the room from the other side of the long table. Slowly
they were moving nearer to Percy and Beltain who were close to the
middle of the long table, across from each other.

The black knight calmly chewed bread and
sausage, picking up the next slice with the end of his knife, then
taking a long pull of the beer. He did not even look up or
around.

Percy gave him a series of hard looks,
widening her eyes, then raising her one brow meaningfully, and then
the other. He did not seem to notice her antics at all, and was
completely engrossed with his meal.

The dead man called Hendrick stopped on the
side near Percy and leaned to stare at a small balding townsman who
was timidly eating right next to her. “What’s that you have there,
my friend?” he drawled, ice crackling in lungs. “Any good, this
swill? Wish I could taste some, but I don’t remember how that works
any more. How does eating and drinking, and pissing work?”

Percy glared at Beltain . . .
who pointedly ignored her. And when she finally caught his eye, she
could have sworn there was a bare shadow of a smile around his eyes
and near his lips—that is, if they would only stop moving long
enough between chews and swallows.

“Ah! And, look here, we’ve got us a comely
little thing, with a fat little arse! Stuffing those fat round
cheeks, are yah?” Hendrick had stopped behind Percy. Had he been
alive he would have been breathing down her neck. Instead, there
was only crackle in the inside of him and creaks of settling
limbs.

“You ought to leave now,” said the black
knight softly. He wiped his mouth and jaw with its newly sprouted
growth of beard with the back of his hand and put down his tankard
of beer.

“What’s this?” Hendrick looked past Percy’s
back and at her dining companion. “Is this a mighty knight I see?
Your Lordship, what, with your fancy mail and a sword belted on,
are yah?”

“You are a dead idiot,” said Beltain,
looking up at Hendrick with his very clear slate-blue eyes. “I will
overlook your insolence, your crude words to the girl, even your
lack of courtesy to the good woman whose establishment this is.
Simply turn around and go.”

“Or you’ll do what, Lordship?”

“
He
is not going to do anything,”
Percy said suddenly. And without getting up, she turned around and
took the dead man’s ice-cold hand.

It was as if out of nowhere a windstorm
moved inside her, entering with a hard snap, filling her, swelling,
rising, rising. . . .

And suddenly the entire tavern
rang
.

Percy felt it with her mind, the homogeneous
blanketing pressure of raw power, resonating among the rafters of
the high wooden ceiling, and echoing to the beaten rush-swept floor
and the winter-hardened earth below. And it made her cold and hard
and full of knife-edge clarity. She held the animated corpse by the
hand and saw his death-shadow, long and billowing like a torn sail,
come to attention before her as she took it by its gossamer
filaments into a chokehold.

The dead man called Hendrick went perfectly
still before her, immobilized by her touch.

“
This
,” Percy said. “This is what
I
am going to do.”

Everyone in the tavern was also taken by a
stillness—by something they had no words for, even though they
could not feel the electric coursing of power all along the
room.

“And you—” Percy said to the other dead man
across the room, reaching out through empty mind-space and taking
his death shadow’s thread of energy into a similar hold. He froze
also, completely immobile, watching her with suddenly obedient
fixed eyes. “—You can feel it also. I hold you both now.”

“What . . . are you?”
Hendrick’s voice creaked.

“I am your
end
,” she replied. “Would
you like to know it now? Or would you like to stay in this world a
while longer?”

“Please . . .” the dead man
called Jared croaked, “I want to stay . . .
here . . . in this world.”

“Then get the hell out of this tavern, and
let us eat in peace!” Percy said, releasing the two death-shadows
with a hard snap of her mind, so that they flickered like blown
candle flames before resuming their pitiful vigilance next to the
dead men’s bodies. She then turned her back to Hendrick and picked
up a large chunk of bread, dipped it in the barley and stuffed it
in her mouth.

In the sudden perfect silence of the tavern,
the two dead men turned around, and walked out of the tavern,
moving as fast as their frozen log-limbs would allow.

“Fat arse, indeed. . . .”
Percy mumbled incomprehensibly with her mouth full. The ringing
power was gone and she was suddenly ravenously hungry, even more so
than she had been before she started eating.

The tavern came back to life. Customers took
in big breaths, resumed their meals and conversation, and cast a
few curious glances her way. But none of them of course had any
idea what had just passed on the level of the mind, the kind of
exchange of power that took place before their noses. All they saw
was that a young peasant girl had just told off a pair of big dead
ruffians and somehow sent them running.

The knight regarded her with a half-amazed,
half-amused gaze. He parted his lips to speak.

But the proprietress, Mistress Saronne, came
rushing up to Percy, and waved her hands about in joyful
gesticulation. “Oh, my dearie! Oh, bless you, sweet girl! Whatever
you’ve done or told them, oh, thank you! You have no notion how
rough it’s been, with ’em coming by every day it seems, harassing
the good folk here! I fear they even robbed some folk just outside
the door! Now why would a dead man need to be robbin’ anyone, I
don’t know! That Jared Gaisse was no good, even back when he was
living, and when he got in a fight a few days ago, and got himself
cut up for dead, what with the death stopping and all, now he’s
been a rotten nuisance around town! And that Hendrick too!
Cutpurses, both—”

Percy watched the woman speak, passionately
waving her hands around. “I don’t think they’ll be back to bother
you any more, Ma’am,” she said.

“Oh, bless you! I have no notion of what you
said to frighten them off, and I don’t want to know, but it was
sweet magic! Now, what else can I get you, dearie? Something sweet
indeed! How about some tea and tarts? Would you like that? And it’s
on the house, I’ll have you know!”

“Oh . . .” Percy said, with a
smile. “Yes, please!” And then she snuck a glance at Beltain who
was struggling to hold back his lips from sliding into a grin, and
instead busied himself again with chewing.

Mistress Saronne hurried away to deliver
Percy’s tarts, and was back soon, with little André trailing her,
carrying a round-bellied pot of tea and cups on a tray. With an
almost apologetic curtsy to the knight, she served the girl first,
and Percy found a large fragrant apple and pear tart swimming in
honey syrup, on a saucer before her.

While André stood by dutifully, holding the
tray, his mother poured two steaming cups of the amber liquid and
set them down before Percy and then Beltain.

“No tart for you, little man?” the black
knight said, turning to the boy once again. The child stood looking
very intently, his pale blue eyes never blinking, so it was easy to
mistake his manner for interest in the sweet course.

“No, Sir.”

“Want a bite of mine?”

“No, thank you, Sir.”

Mistress Saronne seemed to become flustered.
“Oh, no, Lordship, don’t you be worried about my André, he has
plenty to eat whenever he likes!”

“I’m not hungry,” the boy said simply.

Percy bit her lip.

“Go on, child, take the tray back now,” his
mother said, starting to pile the empty dishes on the main tray in
her hands, after putting just a few lighter ones on the boy’s.

When André moved away, Percy said very
softly to his mother. “Begging pardon, Ma’am, but your little
boy—he is—well, you do know what he is?”

The woman’s smile was instantly gone, and an
expression of anxiety came to her rounded features, and the loaded
dish tray in her hands clattered precariously. “Oh!” she said.
“Goodness! Why, what is he? What do you mean, dear?”

In that moment Beltain looked up at them
both sharply, ignoring his platter. By the serious gravity in his
expression, Percy knew that at last he understood.

“Let me help you with the tray, Ma’am,”
Percy said, rising from her seat. She then took the tray from the
startled Mistress Saronne and went with her to the back of the
tavern, walking past the table and benches.

When they came to the back room and kitchen
door, there was little André, just standing there at attention, his
back straight, and arms at his sides. The firelight from the large
oven illuminated his porcelain delicate beauty of suspended
childhood.