The Banshee's Walk (19 page)

And as I flew, the lightning fell. It came crackling and flashing, blinding bright. Long burning white arms of it reached down from the sky and plucked the sorcerers from their mounts and took them up and up and up, robes and staves and screams and all.

And then it was over.

The weeds broke out into a dozen small fires. The five black mares scattered, hooves thundering, bridles dragging. A hot wind thick with smoke began to blow.

I tore myself loose from the rosebush. Toadsticker lay at my feet, the blade smoking, the hilt so hot I couldn’t hold it.

I left it there, dodged fires, found Buttercup’s blanket, heaped amid the weeds.

I spoke the name I’d given her, but she didn’t stir. I lifted the blanket.

She was gone.

But from the trees, I hear a cry. Not a scream or a howl, just a wordless proclamation that let me know where to look.

Motion, a flash of dirty white arms, and she was there.

I balled up the blanket and threw it to her. She caught it in the air, and made that diving half step, and she was gone.

The lawn was a few good puffs of wind from being engulfed in hungry flames. I yelled for Gertriss, yelled for help.

I didn’t think we’d need to worry about mere archers when the skies themselves were out plucking sorcerers from their mounts.

Chapter Thirteen

It took the entire household to keep the neglected Werewilk lawn from turning into the flash point of a house-gobbling forest fire.

Everywhere, yelling, cursing people beat at flames with blankets or hauled buckets of water from the three wells or stomped out embers with their feet.

Gertriss had gone to help with the bucket brigade. She’d seen the five wand-wavers taken up into the sky. She claimed the sorcerer-snatching lightning had leapt from Toadsticker’s modest blade. Until I sent her off to haul buckets, she’d eyed me warily, as if she expected me to sprout horns or start tossing around random bolts of lightning at any moment.

The fires were small, but numerous. Years of neglect had made the lawn a tinderbox. Stamp out one tiny inferno, and two more sprang to life in revenge. Within moments, the entire House, with the exception of Singh and Milton, was outside, battling flames in the night.

I was side-by-side with Marlo before I even realized it.

We were both throwing wet blankets over the same patch of burning chokeweed. His face was covered in soot and streaked with sweat and grim beneath it all.

“You’re back,” I stated, when we’d beaten the flames down. I lacked the breath for any more elaborate greeting.

He nodded and tottered. I realized he was on the brink of collapsing from exhaustion.

“Burris?”

“Dead. Didn’t make it five miles. Woods are full of ’em.” He spat. “Saw the lightning, smelled the smoke. What’s happening, Finder?”

“They were out hunting Butter—the banshee. Almost got her and me too. Lightning struck them down first.”

Marlo spat again and muttered an unkind word.

“Lightning. Just happened. To strike.” I think he would have hit me, had he retained the strength.

“I’m telling you what I saw. I can’t explain it either.”

People were shouting all around us. Some for water, some for shovels or blankets, some for help. But Lady Werewilk’s cry of Marlo’s name sounded above them, and erased any fears that Marlo would be lacking a place to sleep once the fires were out.

Lady Werewilk and Gertriss came charging up. Both looked rather singed and sooty. Marlo turned to face them.

“I can’t even go to town without the place catching fire,” he observed.

Lady Werewilk coughed, slapped him and immediately caught him up in a brief fierce hug.

“He needs to get indoors,” I said. I surveyed the lawn. I saw smoke rising here and there, but no flames. “Same goes for everybody else. This is about to turn ugly, Lady. They’ve killed Burris, and I just watched five of them die. Time to get everyone inside and lock the doors.”

“Is that true, Marlo? Burris is dead?”

He nodded, and would have fallen had not all three of us taken hold of him.

My hand, where it gripped him, came away wet. A glance confirmed that it was blood.

“Everyone!” Lady Werewilk had a good voice. People all around turned. “Stop. Go to your homes. Bring whatever food you can carry. Lock your doors behind you, and come to the main house. I want everyone, and I mean everyone, inside, right now. Go!”

People went. Gertriss and I carried Marlo, who remained on his feet but could do little more than shuffle. Singh and Milton met us at the door. Milton stared and drooled. Singh handed me a bowl of clean water and a towel.

“For his wounds,” he explained, before returning to tend the empty-eyed Milton.

I maneuvered Marlo to the couch, sat him down, fumbled with his shirt.

“How many?” I asked.

“Lost count. Lot more’n fifty. They were waiting. Burris got a bolt in his chest before we knew they were there.” Marlo winced as Gertriss loosed the last button and lifted his shirt away from the wound.

It wasn’t fatal. He’d been slashed, long and shallow, right above his left kidney. A doctor would probably have stitched him up. Lacking a doctor, we’d be forced to clean the wound and bind it and hope he didn’t tear it open every time he moved.

“How long ago?”

“Not sure. Seems like hours and hours. I turned Hilly loose, started running. They didn’t even try to be quiet. Didn’t care who saw ’em, who heard ’em. All over the damned woods. Like ants. That hurts.”

“It wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d be still,” said Gertriss. She mopped away dried blood, and while a few beads of new blood weeped from the wound, she managed not to tear it open and cause a fresh round of heavy bleeding.

“It was dark by the time I got back here. I was hiding close to the road. Trying to see if they’d hit the House yet. I heard that banshee howl. Then I heard thunder.” He bit back a yelp of pain. “Ain’t no storms out tonight, Finder. I could see stars when the trees got thin. Where you reckon that lightnin’ came from?”

Gertriss raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you ought to be asking Miss Banshee instead of Mr. Markhat,” she said. “Seems to me she’d be the one to know about magical storms and what-not.”

I pondered that. I honestly hadn’t thought about it. I knew neither myself nor Toadsticker normally commanded the ability to call down fire from the heavens, but what did I know about banshees?

My last sight of Buttercup had been of her hiding beneath a blanket, like a child.

No, I decided, whoever or whatever had struck down the sorcerers outside hadn’t been Buttercup.

Which could mean only one thing. There was another sorcerer in the mix. Someone who didn’t want to see Buttercup captured or killed. I’d gotten lucky, I surmised. Had I run into the black-clad sorcerers alone, I doubted they’d have been consumed by any well-timed lightning.

People began tramping in, coughing and swearing. They bore bags of apples and the like, or bundles of clothes, or both. Marlo tried to start barking out orders, but fell into a fit of coughing.

Gertriss pushed him onto his side. Singh had produced a roll of clean white cloth and a bottle of something dark that stank of sulfur.

Gertriss sniffed at it, wrinkled her nose and poured it liberally over Marlo’s wounded side. Marlo gritted his teeth and bit back a scream.

Lady Werewilk came charging up.

“He’ll live,” I said, before she could ask. “Long wound, but shallow. Didn’t hit the kidney or anything else he can’t live without.”

Marlo issued a choked yet very colorful assessment of my medical skills. Gertriss blanched, but continued to bandage him.

“Everyone is inside,” said Lady Werewilk. She wore a sword. Her black hair was singed, and both her arms sported numerous small burns. Her face was as dirty as everyone else’s.

“We need to talk, Lady. Privately.”

“We do indeed, Mr. Markhat. As soon as everyone is settled.”

I nodded. “Which should be soon. Our friends outside may be mad enough to take a whack at us. And if they are, it’ll be tonight.”

“Even after what happened to their wand-wavers?”

“You saw too?”

“I did.” She looked down at Toadsticker. “It appears to be perfectly ordinary.”

“It’s got a charm against the halfdead, Lady. Nothing else.”

“If you insist, Mr. Markhat. Though I imagine the five sorcerers you just slew would claim other wise.”

I bit back a denial. I hadn’t slain anyone. Magic swords, at least ones that spat lightning, were the stuff of hoary old legends and nothing more. Even during the darkest days of the War, no one tried to charm swords with anything but simple hexes—sorcery is just too damned unpredictable, just as likely to spew fire down your trouser-leg as it is in the face of the enemy.

But from the looks I was drawing, I could tell my reasoned arguments would fall not on deaf ears but downright hostile ones.

I groaned.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” I announced, loud enough for all to hear. “I don’t have some legendary mass-murdering sword. I can’t go skipping out into the woods and come back with a bag of severed heads. If we have to fight, and I hope we don’t, you’d better all fight hard, because if you’re waiting for me to start some epic supernatural smiting you’ll be waiting a long long time. Got it?”

People scurried away. Gertriss bit her lip and shook her head but kept busy tying Marlo’s bandage around his hairy belly.

“Gertriss, find me when you’re done with him. And you, keep your ass on this couch. We don’t have enough hands to fight off bandits and stop you from bleeding all over the Lady’s good couches.”

Marlo glared, but nodded.

“Lady Werewilk. Let’s go.”

I rose and went stamping off toward the kitchen. Lady Werewilk followed.

“All these old places have secret escape tunnels,” I said, when we were out of earshot of Marlo and Gertriss. “Please tell me yours is no exception.”

She hesitated, and for the first time since we’d met I caught her shaping a lie.

“There’s no time, Lady Werewilk. We may have to use it ten breaths from now. Spill it.”

She paused at the kitchen door.

“I’ll need time first,” she said.

“Time to bolt the door on your secret room, Lady? The room where you keep your black cloak and your magical implements? That room?”

She glared. “Lower your voice.”

“So I was right. You’re my secret sorcerer. You’re one who called down the lightning.”

She shook her head. “All right. Yes. Like my mother and her mother before her, I have some training in the arcane. It’s a House tradition, one that has defended not only Werewilk but Rannit, down through the years. But I tell you this plain, Mr. Markhat. I lack the talent to do to those men what was done to them. I did send a working outside, one that I hoped would help you escape. But the lightning was none of my doing. It came from your sword.”

“Like Hell it did.” I put my hand on the door and pushed. “So show me the trap-door or the secret staircase or whatever it is. It’s in here, isn’t it?”

She followed me inside. “Yes. There are two entrances to the old tunnels. One is beneath the stove. There is a much larger one hidden in the back of a closet in the laundry room.”

“The tunnels. Where do they go?”

“One ends in the middle of the cornfield. The other extends much farther, to a point deep in the forest. Unfortunately, that tunnel has suffered a series of collapses, and the last fifty feet can only be crawled through, single file.”

I grunted, eyeing the stove. The builders had been clever. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary at all.

“Marlo knows about them? Anyone else?”

She shook her head. “Marlo knows. No one else knows. Except Singh, of course.”

Of course. Singh, who knew all and said very little.

I did some math in my head. Thirty artists, twenty odd staff – it would take a couple of minutes to evacuate everyone to the tunnels, even using both entrances.

A couple of minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, unless you’ve got a mob breaking down the doors at your back.

“We’ll need to split everyone up into two groups. One group is yours and the other belongs to Gertriss. If you yell for a retreat, your group goes down below with you from here. Same for Gertriss. You’ll need to show her the closet entrance, tell your people who to follow.”

“And which group will you follow, Mr. Markhat?”

“I’m my own group, Lady.” I gave the stove a pat and headed out of the kitchen. “Don’t worry about me.”

If she replied, I didn’t hear it. I was far too busy worrying about me.

She didn’t seem to be lying when she denied casting any deadly lightning charms. Of course, with sorcerers, even amateur ones, you could never tell. But she certainly had nothing to gain by denying her actions, if indeed they’d been hers.

Too, reaching down from the sky and catching up five adult humans and snatching them into the heavens was way beyond the ability of all but the most accomplished sorcerers. I hadn’t seen a stunt like that since the War.

I pushed that thought aside. If creatures on a level with Hisvin and the other sorcerous War heroes that haunted the High House were mixed up in this, the likelihood that any of us mortals would survive was dropping by the minute.

Toadsticker was still warm where it touched my hip and leg. I put conjecture concerning the Corpsemaster aside and grasped at straws instead. Had Evis snuck a major spell into the sword, somehow? I doubted it. A minor charm against the undead wouldn’t raise any hackles anywhere, unless you count any undead I happened to impale. But putting military-grade spellwork into a civilian trinket would be a risk even Avalante seemed unlikely to take. Especially just to protect a small-time finder with offices on Cambrit Street.

And if I put Lady Werewilk out of the running too, things were bleak for finders and clients alike.

I frowned and stomped. Chasing down errant husbands or wandering wives was beginning to look better with each passing moment.

Gertriss came running up, her eyes flashing. “All right, no more stalling. Tell me how you did that, out there.”

“Later, oh junior member of the firm,” I said. Lady Werewilk was coming up fast behind us. “Right now we have to get this lot ready for a siege. Lady Werewilk is going to show you something, and tell you part of our plan. Go with her. And listen.”