Jimmy the Hand (33 page)

Bernarr leaned
over the drawing, studying its particulars. ‘But how can you be
sure you’ll have enough pressure?’

‘That’s
what these cylinders are,’ Lyman said, indicating them on the
drawing. ‘They’re twenty-pound weights and, of course,
the knives will be extremely sharp. So?’ He looked at his
patron. ‘What do you think?’

‘Fascinating,’
Bernarr murmured. Then he shook his head. ‘But I cannot like
it. Bad enough to take them one by one, but this many at once will
draw attention.’ He thought for a moment, then shook his head
again. ‘No. I don’t see how we can do it.’

The wizard drew
back, affronted. ‘Well, of course, the ideal solution would be
to use a child born at the exact instant that your lady was
endangered. That would have been your son.’ He looked at the
Baron with a stiff-lipped frown. ‘But, unfortunately you
impulsively made that impossible. Didn’t you?’

Bernarr glared
at him. ‘Well you might have said something at the time,’
he pointed out.

Lyman sniffed.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t trust me
then and might not have listened. And you were understandably
distraught; another man might have succumbed to a paternal impulse
and kept the child while letting his beloved go, but you saw the boy
as the cause of her death—’ a black look from Bernarr
caused him to amend his statement, ‘—her unfortunate
condition, and had him disposed of.’

Something
flickered across the Baron’s face and not for the first time
Lyman wondered if there was more involved in that choice than he
understood, even after all these years. He said, ‘Still, a
terrible waste.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Hmm. Do you
know where they buried him? Perhaps I can do something with the
bones.’

Bernarr thought
about that. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘I
wasn’t interested at the time. And you’ve never mentioned
it before.’ He frowned. ‘I will ask the midwife. She
still lives in a nearby village. She will know what was done with the
creature.’

‘Excellent,
my lord,’ Lyman said, smiling. ‘And do keep the plan and
think about my other suggestion. I fear that without your son it may
be the only way to bring your lady back.’

Baroness Elaine
woke with the feeling that someone had been calling her name. But now
there was no sound and the call, if there had been one, was not
repeated. Her thoughts were slow: even the breaths that she took
seemed unnaturally spaced and Elaine wondered if she were dreaming.

She felt weak:
that was the first physical sensation she was aware of, then the
pain. It tore into her like a furious cat, digging into her vitals
with sharp claws and teeth that ripped and chewed. Elaine wanted to
writhe, wanted to scream in agony, but she couldn’t. She
couldn’t even open her eyes, or so much as twitch. Trapped in
the darkness behind her eyes, she screamed in her mind, begging for
something to ease the pain, for someone to come and help.

This wasn’t
like the terrible birth-pangs, which came in waves of agony cresting
higher and higher; they were over. Elaine was sure of that: she had
heard the crying of her child.
I saw his face,
she thought.
The memory brought comfort, or at least took her mind from the pain.
But not for long—the pain wouldn’t be denied and she
wanted to weep, but she couldn’t.

She could feel
her life flowing away slowly but irresistibly. It terrified her. She
struggled to hold on: she wanted to live! She wanted to see her son
grow to manhood. She wanted Zakry!

Elaine imagined
him holding her hand and telling her to be strong. His touch seemed
so real that in spite of everything she was briefly happy. Then the
pain bit deeper and in her mind she screamed, and screamed, and
screamed. Soon she was begging for death.

But death never
came. After a while Elaine lapsed into darkness until at last both
she and the pain were gone.

The magician
looked up.

‘It’s
not a complicated spell,’ Lyman Malachy said, when the
preparations were complete. ‘But it’s tricky. The degrees
of similarity must be delicately balanced.’

He looked aside
at his . . . employer? Host? Friend? Benefactor? Someone who’d
given him shelter for seventeen years, and let him carry on
researches which would be . . . frowned upon . . . in most places, at
least. No, he amended, it would get him hanged or burned alive in
most places.

They were alone
together in the room, with only the candle’s flame for company;
certainly, the remaining castle staff were used to that. They were
probably the best-paid domestics outside the great cities and the
households of the greatest lords; and they weren’t much as far
as quality went. But, like the household guards, they were paid as
much to ignore what they heard and saw as they were to render
service.

The magician’s
mouth quirked slightly as he drew his robe more tightly about him—the
spring rains were heavy tonight, a thrush-thrush-thrush sound on the
shutters and the streaked diamond-pane glass of the windows; he would
have liked a cheery fire himself, but Bernarr cared nothing for the
damp chill of this stone pile.

Gold can do
many things,
he thought. Even overcome superstitious fear among
servants and soldiers. But it cannot make a fortress a comfortable
place to live.

Bernarr waved a
hand that trembled ever so slightly. ‘Yes, yes. The brat must
bear a similarity to both me and my lady Elaine, and your spell will
find it,’ he said. ‘Damn the midwife! I gave orders that
the brat be disposed of!’

Lyman nodded
downward at the three shallow gold disks with their thin crystal
covers, each about the size of the circle made by a man’s thumb
and forefinger. Silver and turquoise, platinum and jet made complex
inlays on the inner surface of the gold. Above that was a thin film
of water, and on that floated a needle. Each of the three needles was
wound about with a hair—for the needle of the central disk two
hairs were twined around it, crossing each other; the crystal covers
kept the whole undisturbed.

‘However,
it maybe fortunate that she disobeyed,’ Lyman said. ‘A
pity that we could not get more details from her, but this will do as
well—better, for the knowledge it brings will not be seventeen
years stale.’

Lyman rose and
shook back his sleeves. His eyes closed, his lips moved, and his
hands traced intricate, precise patterns over the central casing.

While the man
Bernarr still thought of as a ‘scholar’, rather than
‘wizard’, conjured, he remembered the first night they
had met.

It had been the
night of the big storm, hills and walls of purple-black cloud piled
along the western horizon, flickering with lightning but touched gold
by the sun as it set behind them. The surge came before the storm,
mountain-high waves that sent fishermen dragging their craft higher
and lashing them to trees and boulders, and to praying as the thrust
of air came shrieking about their thatch. When the rain followed it
came nearly level, blown before the powerful winds. The onslaught
accompanied his beloved going into labour with the little monster
they were now trying to find. His joy at the impending birth of a son
caused him to be generous in offering hospitality to the stranger, an
odd-looking man with protruding brown eyes and a large nose, made to
seem enormous by a very weak chin. He appeared a few years older than
Bernarr, in his middle to late thirties, but Bernarr was uncertain
about his true age, for he appeared much the same as he had when he
had first arrived some seventeen years before.

Lyman had
introduced himself as a friend of Bernarr’s father, a
correspondent who had never met the old Baron in person, but who had
been consulted by Bernarr’s father occasionally on matters of
scholarship. Most specifically, the purchasing of old tomes and
manuscripts. He had come to enquire as to Bernarr’s intent with
the library, not knowing if the son shared the father’s
enthusiasm for scholarship and wishing to purchase several works
should the son not wish to continue caring for the collection. He had
been pleased to discover that Bernarr shared his love for learning.

And then had
come the news that the Baroness was having trouble with her delivery,
Bernarr remembered.

His memory
brought Bernarr’s remembered pain. He leaned back, swearing.
Then he saw the two hairs twined about the central needle were
writhing, like snakes—snakes which disliked each other’s
company. They wriggled away from the floating needle, pressed to
opposite sides of the casing, and then went limp again.

That’s
about the most emphatic case of non-similarity I’ve ever seen,
the magician thought, his face impassive.
If there’s one
thing certain, this pair did not make a child together.

‘What does
this mean, Lyman?’ Bernarr snapped. His eyes glinted with
suspicion: when it came to matters concerning his wife, the Baron of
Land’s End was rather less than sane.

As
I of all
men know,
Lyman thought. Aloud he continued: ‘Ah . . . my
lord Baron . . . could it possibly be that you have another child?
One fathered before you met the lady Elaine?’

That stopped
Bernarr’s anger; instead he shifted a little in his chair, and
reached for his mug of hot, spiced wine. ‘Well,’ he said,
his eyes shifting. ‘I was a man grown before I wed . . . thirty
summers . . . a wench now and then . . . and of course, for all I
know—’

‘Of
course, my lord, of course; we’re men of the world, you and I,’
Lyman soothed. ‘But it would make the twined hairs incompatible
with the nature of the spell, you see. That is why I begged another
of your lady’s hairs. The spell will not be quite so sharp, nor
function over quite so great a distance, but it should still
function.’

He stood, moving
his hands over the left-hand casing.
And I’m not going to
use the one with only your hair, my lord Baron, because I suspect it
would be quite useless for our purposes.

Bram halted as
he came to the crest of the hills and looked down on Land’s
End. The city was familiar enough: he’d made several visits. He
tried to see it as Lorrie would.

The first
thing she’ll need is money,
he thought.

He grinned,
despite his anxiety, and the ache in his legs. He hadn’t wasted
any time on the journey, and he was more than ready for sleep, not to
mention ale and food. She wouldn’t get far on the few coppers
he’d hidden under the mattress of his bed. While Bram’s
life savings, he had a short life so far, and by city standards it
wasn’t much. He suppressed an idle thought: he’d had
daydreams about her lying in his bed, right enough, but not in quite
that fashion.

He shifted the
bow, quiver and rucksack into a slightly less uncomfortable position
and strode through the usual throngs to be found on a road so close
to the city gate. If he remembered rightly, there were a couple of
horse dealers not too far outside the north gate.

‘Help you,
lad?’ the horse-trader said, looking up.

He was standing
with a cob’s forefoot brought up between his legs, examining
the hoof. The sturdy little horse shifted a little when it thought he
was distracted, and began to turn its head—probably thinking of
taking a nip at the man’s rump. The trader elbowed the flank
beside him, and Bram reached out with the stave of his yew bow,
rapping it slightly on the nose.

It gave a huge
sigh and subsided, and the trader let the hoof down with a dull
clomp. ‘Thrush,’ he said over his shoulder to the cob’s
owner. ‘You should know better than thinking a dip in tar will
hide an unsound hoof from me, Ullet Omson. I’ll not have him,
not even if you treat the thrush and bring him back; not at any
price. He’s vicious.’ The disappointed seller led his
animal off and the man turned to Bram. ‘And how can I help
you?’

‘I’m
looking for a girl,’ Bram said, and then blushed under his
ruddy tan as the horse-dealer roared with laughter, looking him up
and down.

‘Well, I’d
say you won’t have much trouble, even if your purse is flat,’
the man wheezed after a minute, ‘for you’re a
fair-looking lad. But that’s not my stock-in-trade. Fillies and
mares, but only the hoofed sort. M’name’s Kerson, by the
way.’

Bram gave his
own and shook his hand, and to no surprise found it as strong as his
own, or a little more.

‘She’ll
have sold a gelding,’ he said. ‘Not more than three days
since. A farm horse, saddle-broke but more used for plough work, and
well past mark of mouth.’

He went on to
describe Horace, whose markings he knew like his own: the two
families had swapped working stock back and forth all his life.

‘Wait a
minute!’ the trader said. ‘Why, yes, I bought the
beast—but from a young lad, not a girl. Could he have stolen
it?’ He frowned.

Well, of
course she’s passing for a boy, idiot!
he thought.
She
can’t be going about countryside and town in your old breeches
as a girl in boy’s clothing, now can she?
‘No, I know
that lad,’ Bram said.

The trader
shrugged. ‘He seemed a nice enough young sprig; pretty as a
girl, though, and a few years younger than yourself. Friend of his
came out to enquire about the horse just today.’

Friend?
Bram thought, cursing himself.

‘Overheard
the lad who bought the horse talking to a gent who purchased another.
Seems the boy is foster-brother to Yardley Heywood’s
granddaughter and they’re staying with her aunt. Anyway, the
two of them rode out together about midday, heading north. The lad
mentioned that his friend had sold the animal to me . . .’ The
trader received a puzzled look from Bram but continued, ‘He
said the girl who owned the beast originally was also staying with
the Heywood girl.’ Fixing Bram with a narrow gaze, he asked,
‘Are you sure that horse wasn’t stolen?’