Feast of Souls (14 page)

“There is no guarantee she is in his kingdom at all. You know that.”

“He would have done it anyway.” Andovan sighed heavily. “I’ll be surprised if by dawn he does not find someone to blame for something enough to have his head.”

“And thus the great respect that neighboring mon-archs have for him.”

Andovan’s expression darkened. “Take care with your words, Magister. He is still my father.”

“Of course. Forgive me.”

“He believed the ruse completely?”

“Why should he not? The peasant who took your place looked just like you, thanks to my art. He went to his death willingly, thanks to your bribery. The suicide note was genuine, written by your own hand, expressing your own true thoughts. What flaw was there for even a Magister to find?”

“Yes.” He muttered, “Truly, I would rather die by my own hand than waste away a cripple in some royal bed.”

“You have chosen a dangerous course, you know that. The sickness will progress. Its worst episodes will come without warning. Toward the end there will be no clays of strength left to sustain you.”

He said between gritted teeth, “
I will not die in bed
.” I lien, with a heavy sigh, he asked, “How long do I have?”

The Magister hesitated. “There is no way to know that. I’m sorry. But once the symptoms become this marked… not generally long.”

“A few years.”

Colivar’s eyes glittered, black onyx in the moonlight. “At most.”

“Very well.” Standing up, Andovan hoisted the pack onto his shoulder. He wore simple clothing, not the silken raiments of a prince but the layered, earth-toned wools of a commoner. Dressed thus he appeared to be but a simple traveler, not a prince of the blood who was raised to wealth and privilege.

He just might pull it off
, the Magister thought. He had done all he could to support the young man’s quest, weaving spells that would draw him toward the one who had claimed him as consort. At least that was the theory behind it. In truth such a thing had never been tried before, and he could not test its efficacy nor strengthen its power without risking that the magical link which bound the two would claim him as well. And of course he could not explain to the young man who he sought, or what she had done; the prince was a homing pigeon, nothing more. A compass point to serve Colivar in his own quest for information.

A woman of power
, the Magister mused.
That is worth the experiment, is it not? Worth even a bit of risk to have that answer
.

“Be out of the kingdom by dawn,” the prince warned him. “Don’t test my father in this, Colivar; he’s killed those with the power before.”

“I am aware of that, your… Andovan.” He bowed respectfully. “But I thank you for the warning.”

“Not Andovan. Not any longer. I shall have to come up with something else, yes?” The prince paused. “How odd it is, that we let go of our accustomed lives with little more than a night’s planning, but abandoning a name, that simple set of sounds, takes longer.”

“To change a name is to change a life,” Colivar said quietly.

“Yes,” the prince whispered. “Just so.”

He did not speak again, but set his foot upon the packed earth and began to move westward, his movement silent: a hunter’s step.

But you are not the hunter in this quest
, Colivar thought.
Merely… bait
.

He waited until the dim glow of the prince’s lantern could no longer be seen, then drew the power of borrowed soulfire about himself and took on wings. Long wings, black wings, that beat at the forest shadows for strength, to bear him in a direction that was not home. Not yet.

Westward.

Somewhere in the world, unnamed, unseen, his own consort weakened.

The two moons set soon after.

“Mother?” The young boy blinked as he regarded the empty street. It was still filled with all the normal smells of life—greasy smoke seeping out of kitchen windows, the reek of emptied chamberpots outside residences, spilled beer and vomit soaking the mud outside the tavern’s side door—but other than that the place was empty. Eerie in that emptiness. The young boy stumbled a few steps forward, the word trembling on his lips. “Are you here?” he whispered. A lock of blond hair, crudely trimmed, fell over his left eye; he pushed it back with a grimy hand. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

He had fled the place earlier in the day, with his father’s rage bellowing behind him. He’d spent the afternoon playing on the moors, making mud-fortresses with tiny grass soldiers to fight vegetable wars at his bidding. The last one had been to rescue a comely maiden from the grasp of an ogre. The ogre had beaten the woman, not once but often, until her younger brother had run off and raised an army to avenge her. They had defeated the ogre and dragged him off to be stamped to death by all the soldiers. By the time the sun had begun to set a circle of earth had been beaten down flat by their campaign, the grass ogre had been torn to pieces, and the boy felt marginally better.

Only marginally.

By now his father would have left the house or passed out, and his mother would be dressing bruises for all the family. It was safe enough now to risk a return, at least long enough to get some food. There wasn’t much in the house—a few scraps of old bread, a few cubes of old cheese—but he was hungry enough now that he’d eat anything. His mother would scold him for running away that morning, but not severely. She understood. She’d run away too, if she could.

“Hello?”

The stillness in the street was eerie. It was more than a question of everyone being indoors, though that was certainly strange enough. Or that they were all so quiet he couldn’t hear a single voice through the thin walls and tiny windows. But there was something more to the scene that bothered the boy, on a level he could not have given words to. It was the way that animals are sometimes bothered by unnatural things, that makes them want to tuck their tail between their legs and run. He felt like that.

As he walked down the street, calling out names in a trembling voice, he could feel the hair on the back of his neck rising. He fought to be brave. He had already run away once that day, and now that he was coming home he was ashamed of his former cowardice. Surely mere silence, no matter how mysterious, could not make him run away again.

But someone should have been in the street. Surely!

Skittish as a wild rabbit, the boy made his way slowly down the silent street. Nothing was moving. By now he would have expected a dog to come around sniffing after him, or, or… something.

Nothing.

He passed a lump of horse excrement on the street. It wasn’t all that old, and had a host of flies gathered around it like greedy peasants at a feast. The sight of it struck such sudden fear in his heart that the young boy almost turned and ran without even knowing why. But he forced himself to stand his ground, telling himself that mere flies and feces could not harm him, and trying to put a name to the fear that was slowly becoming a cold fist around his heart.

“Hello…?”

He passed by the town’s small tavern. It wasn’t much of one, really, but it served well enough to sell cheap ale to the men who called this place home, and such tidbits of food as the dusty coinage of weathered peasants might buy. In deference to their business the owner dumped his waste in a narrow alley between houses rather than out in the street like most others. The boy caught sight of the refuse pile as he passed by… and then stopped, and came closer, and stared at it. Again he was filled with a sense of wrongness so instinctive, so utterly animal in its tenor, that he nearly turned and ran. Again he forced himself to stand his ground and tried to figure out what it could be about a mound of rotting garbage that would make him so afraid.

And then he realized what it was.

There were no rats.

He looked back at the street behind him. None were there either, though the small gray creatures should be slipping out of their hiding places this time of the day, daring a moment or two in the sunset’s growing shadows to grab a bit of refuse before all their brothers came out to fight for their share of human filth. Their presence in the town was a normal backdrop to human activity, something that women cursed vehemently but no one had any hope of stopping.

There were no rats now.

Not in the street, not in the shadows, not nosing through the fresh garbage… none at all.

He took a few steps back, and inadvertently stepped in a mound of horse droppings. The flies rolled off its surface like tiny black marbles. Dead. They were all dead.

“Mother?”

Panic gripped his small heart. He began to run. Not away from the town, as all his better instincts were screaming for him to do, but down the street, past the main section of the town, to where small houses were scattered along the dirt road, each with its own mound of rat-free, insect-free garbage.

“Mother!”

The birds weren’t singing either, he noticed breathlessly as he pulled up before his house. Nor were the insects buzzing. Wrong, wrong, it was all wrong!

He pounded on the front door until it gave way before him. No voice answered his cries. He upset a stool as he staggered inside, tears of fear running hot down his cheeks. No one noticed the stool careen across the floor, or lifted a leg to get out of its way, or cursed at him for knocking it over.

Next to the coarsely hewn table in the middle of the small common room sat his mother. She was slumped on the bench with her head resting on the table’s surface beside a dried-up piece of bread. Her expression was almost peaceful, if you could overlook the morning’s bruises; had the boy not just made enough noise upon entering to wake the dead, he might have thought her merely sleeping. His little sister, however, had slid off the bench beside her and was huddled on the floor like a broken doll. A small piece of bread had rolled out of her hand, and come to a stop by the hearth. There were a few small black bits nearby that might once have been insects. They weren’t moving now.

The air in the small room was stifling. For a moment the boy’s chest tightened up and it was hard to breathe, as if the very stillness of the place had a mind of its own and was sucking the life out of him. By sheer force of will he forced himself to move, to look in all the tiny corners of the house where small, frightened children might hide. There he found another body, that of his youngest brother, barely an infant. The body looked peaceful for once, not screaming its hunger and frustration out to all within hearing as it had done most of the time when it was alive. Whatever had taken the people in this house, it had done so with such stealth that no one saw Death coming.

Was that what had happened in the rest of the small town? Was every house like this one, peopled with corpses?

He felt bile rise up in his throat and knew that he was about to vomit, not from sickness but from fear. Out of habit he turned to the door and started toward it, fearing the beating his father would give him if he soiled something in the house. But then he saw a shadow of movement outside, and in his sudden stunned wonderment he forgot about vomiting altogether. Even the sourness in his stomach receded, and the worst of the fear with it.

Motion. There was motion! That meant that something out there was alive, right?

He stumbled to the door, afraid that whatever it was would be gone by the time he got there. But no, it was out there in the street, a flying thing about the size of a bird, and as he came to the door it approached him and hovered right in front of his face, its bright wings beating quick patterns in the dying sunlight.

If he had seen it from a distance he might have called it a dragonfly, for it had the long slender body of one, and its translucent wings fanned out in the same graceful pattern. But it was far too large to be a dragonfly, or any kind of insect, and its head was more like that of a lizard than an insect. Or maybe a snake. The body was supple, a deep blue-black that reflected the sunset in glints of purple, and its flesh seemed to quiver as the matching pairs of slender, gossamer wings beat the air, holding it in position right before his face. What beautiful wings they were! All blues and purples, translucent as stained glass, flashing iridescent in the sunlight. Their motion was rhythmic, hypnotic, and despite his fear the boy felt himself drawn into them, unable to look away. From somewhere in the distance he was aware of two black eyes gazing at him, and perhaps if he had looked directly into those eyes he might have felt a new terror take hold, sensing the nascent intelligence in their depths. But he didn’t. His eyes were fixed wholly on the jeweled wings and the play of the dying light upon their moist and glittering membranes.