The Croning (2 page)

The Spy nodded politely, believing none of it. Nonetheless, he did due diligence and investigated the merchant in question—a burgher formerly of Constantinople named Theopolis who specialized in antiquities and dwelt in a posh manor on the upwind side of the city. Quiet inquiries revealed Theopolis to be no more devious or unscrupulous than any other of a hundred merchants; no more or less perverted or corrupt, no more or less exotic in his leisure proclivities.

Desperate for any lead whatsoever, the Spy broke into the house while its master and most of the servants were on the town drinking and whoring. Nothing seemed untoward. The house was sumptuously appointed in a variety of styles as befitting a man of Theopolis’s means; a few tasteful volumes of erotic lore, a handful of risqué statuary, a titillating nude portrait of some long-dead diva. Perhaps several of the pieces of armor in the hall or a baggie or two of the spices in the bedside drawer might be of questionable legality, but certainly nothing sinister or helpful in tracking down the damnable Dwarf.

On his way out the window, he hesitated, then doubled back to check the bookcase in the master study, and Lo! did find a cunningly concealed lever. The cramped brick chamber hidden behind the case was fitted with shackles and chains and arcane torture devices. An onyx floor plate gleamed by the light of his candle. A skeletal serpent bent into a C configuration was deeply etched into the plate.
Serpent
wasn’t accurate; perhaps a worm. Whichever, it was altogether unwholesome. In a bamboo hamper, its lid also engraved with the occult symbol, were the bones of children. The Spy counted enough discrete segments to constitute nine or ten infants and toddlers.

It appeared he had a lucky winner.

Later that night he abducted the drunken merchant from his bed and interrogated him in the wine cellar. All Theopolis would admit to was that the Dwarf belonged to a powerful family who dwelt somewhere in the Western Mountains. The man also predicted the Spy was going to wind up suffering a fate worse than death. The Spy thanked beaten and bloodied Theopolis for his information and dumped him in a burlap bag full of stones off the Swangate Bridge. While the bubbles were still popping in the water he set forth on the Western Road.

This was the end of the first month.

3.

He and the dog traveled on highways, then roads, then trails, and finally tracks that vanished for leagues at a stretch. The cities shrank to towns, villages, hamlets and thorps, each farther and farther apart, then there was only the occasional woodcutter’s hut in the depths of the wilderness. Fellow pilgrims were seldom seen. It was a lonely journey.

After much hardship he came to a remote valley populated by dour, sunburned folk who tended sheep and goats and raised beets and radishes in the turf. A province of peat-cutters and burners of cow chips. The kind of place overlooked at court and likely awarded to some down at the heels shirttail noble as a booby prize.

The countryside was largely untamed beyond primitive farm plots and unfenced grazing lands. Copses of pine were broken by stony pastures and hillocks. A river thundered down from a glacier caked in black dust. The far end of the valley rose into a high, desolate moor stalked by wolves and dotted with the ruins of ancient fortresses and the weathered cairns of defeated barbarian tribes. A rugged and gloomy scene that disturbed the Spy’s anxieties while also exciting him with its potential as the spawning ground of the miscreant he hunted.

The Spy struck gold right away.

A graybeard farmer had occasionally seen the Dwarf in the nearby village. Name? Who could say? Folks called him the Dwarf. He lived in a cave and came down to the lowlands for supplies once or twice a year during the festivals where he’d get drunk and dance with the pretty maids who weren’t nimble enough to escape his lecherous advances, and horrify the children (mostly he’d horrify the mothers) with gruesome tales of sexually deviant fairies and monsters. Made his way in the world as a crafter of jewelry and a wolf trapper. Privately, the farmer suspected the Dwarf was a professional tomb robber who filched most of his trinkets from the ruins on the moor.

In any event, a right homely bugger, that little man, and long-lived.

“Long-lived?” the Spy said.

“Aye. First I clapped eyes on ’im, I was a sprat. Saw ’im again, caperin’ along the Moor Road, just last spring. ’e ’ad a sack slung o’er ’is hump. Must’ve ’ad a goat in there…That bag was jumpin’ somethin’ fierce.”

The farmer offered his barn as refuge since the village was full of wicked folk and no place for any God-fearing Christian. When pressed for examples of this wickedness he simply spat and made the sign against the evil eye and grumbled into his beard. On parting, he warned the Spy to beware the Dwarf. “Ye wanna steer clear o’ ’im and ’is little friends. Ye shall come to a nasty end nosin’ ’bout that gent.”

The Spy knew the refrain. He wondered aloud as to the nature of these
little friends.

“Ain’t ever seen ’em, just ’eard of ’em. Cripples and deformed ones. Some ain’t got no arms or legs is what I ’ear. They crawl along behind ’im, see? Wrigglin’ in the dirt all ruddy worm-like.”

“He’s got an entourage of folk without arms,” the Spy said, raising his brows toward the brim of his cocked hat. “Or legs. Following him wherever he goes.”

“Some got arms, some don’t. Some got legs, some don’t. Some got neither. That’s what I ’ear.” The farmer shrugged, made the sign of warding again, and would say no more on the matter.

The Spy slogged his way to the village and took a room at the dingy inn. His disguise was that of an ex-soldier trekking across the kingdom to his homestead near the borderlands. He claimed to be a prospector and that he might linger a week or two surveying the hills for likely sources of gold or silver. None of the sheepherders or goatswains who staggered in for a pint of grog after a day in the heather seemed to give a damn.

He bedded a couple of the serving wenches who were pleased with his appearance and moreso by the fact he at least didn’t smell of cowshit and actually had two silvers to rub together. Both had seen the Dwarf as recently as the previous month. Both were frightened and repulsed by the creature’s demeanor, though he’d not done much to offend either of them directly. Yes, they’d heard of his deformed kin who were said to remain hidden in a mountain cave except rare occasions when they accompanied him on excursions into the moor. The rumors the wenches shared were not enlightening. Except for one—according to certain old goodwives, the Dwarf and his kin made mincemeat of babies and their cave was carpeted with the bones of several generations of wee victims. There’d be a proper torch and pitchfork army marching on those cannibals one fine day, avowed the wenches.

The Spy did not learn the name of the village. The buildings were from olden times, fashioned of mud and brick and thatch with small doors and smaller windows sealed with sheepskin. Doors got barred shortly after sunset. Pagan tokens hung above entry mantles and the bones of animals were common decorations in yards. Conversations dried up when he entered a room or passed by on the street and the people smiled at him and looked at their feet or the sky.

The local denizens were a queer lot—the folk dressed archaically and spoke with an accent troublesome to his ear, such that he missed every third word when they conversed slowly in normal tones, and lost the gist entirely when they muttered amongst themselves, which was often. On the whole, the population was homogenous as a pod of toads. Not counting the wanton barmaids, who’d been born outside the valley in a more populous area, the women wouldn’t speak to him. The women weren’t shy by any means; they smiled and winked and brushed him in passing, but simply wouldn’t exchange words. Many of them were pregnant, but the Spy was surprised to see no other children in evidence. The youngest person he noticed was old enough to shave.

A half mile north of town lay a bluff upon which loomed a temple built in ancient times. On the Spy’s first evening ensconced at the inn, he witnessed a commotion in the taproom. Proprietor, staff, and guests set aside mugs of ale and haunches of roasted goat and gravitated outdoors into the square. A procession of villagers marched from the square and up the lane to the temple, lighting the path with torches and lanterns. They marched in absolute silence, led by a trio of figures garbed in rust-colored cassocks and frightful pagan masks that resembled no beast of fact or legend familiar to the Spy.

Once the stream of petitioners had disappeared into the distant edifice, its exterior remained cold and dark for the better part of two hours, whereupon the procession returned to the village square and dispersed. The innkeeper was one of the bizarrely robed leaders of the ceremony. He removed his unpleasant mask that appeared to be a waxen hybrid of an eel and a predatory insect, and stamped about the taproom, stoking the hearth and clearing flatware as if nothing unusual had transpired. Later, the serving wenches kept their eyes downcast and deflected the Spy’s queries regarding the incident with inelegant, but exuberant ministrations of love.

The next morning, he ate a hearty breakfast and decided to visit the site. The dog followed him with a decided lack of enthusiasm. The dog had communicated through growls and groans and baleful glares at every villager who passed that he didn’t like this place one bit. The mountain air agreed with his canine sensibilities not in the slightest.

The temple on the hill was by far the grandest monument the Spy had seen since departing the capital; extravagant beyond the wildest imaginings for such a remote province of the kingdom while also existing in a fabulously decrepit state; certainly a relic from an ancient era. A forbidding structure of granite blocks and carven pillars, the whole shot through with cracks from age and earthquake (a massive shaker had hit the region about ten years ago, according to the innkeeper—
The Worm turned
, he quipped with a sour grin) and covered in unwholesome northern black mold and thorny vines.

Instead of the traditional crucifix, a massive ring of hammered brass hung above double doors the likes of which belonged to a fortress. The ring was broken in the upper corner, much as the monstrous symbol he’d encountered in the burgher’s cell, and it canted at an extreme forward angle, presumably as a result of the earthquake. The effect was that of a giant torque poised to descend, literal hammer of the gods style, on petitioners shuffling through the gates.

The interior was dim and cavernous, reminiscent of Roman and Greek temples of the Hellenic; naves and altars to a dozen gods were arrayed in alcoves. The Spy recognized Jupiter and Saturn, Diana and Hecate, and busts of the Norse pantheon, in particular a feral depiction of Loki undergoing torture for his crimes against Baldur, and another of Odin weeping gore from his plucked eye socket. The Spy’s father was a learned man despite toiling as a simple miller, and his sister a supremely ambitious woman, and between the pair it was books and lessons in classical history throughout the long, bleak winters.

There were other gods represented that he did not recognize, however. Situated deeper inside the temple hall these statues were much older and the writing upon their placards was foreign to him. Upon reflection, he concluded this place had been constructed or renovated piecemeal over the centuries, with the modern additions, gods and architecture alike, tacked on near the entrance. Thus, proceeding into the torchlit gloom was to travel backward into antiquity.

His hunter’s senses were sharp and he knew a hostile gaze had fallen upon him. On several occasions he caught movement in the corner of his eye; small shadows moving inside the larger ones of the pillars and arches. Low and thin and fast; at first he thought it must be children, whatever the pagan equivalent of altar boys were. He soon decided this was incorrect, although he couldn’t quite name how or why. He recalled what the farmer said of the alleged “limbless kin” of the Dwarf, and shuddered.

At the opposite end from the main doors were two huge pillars of basalt and a thick curtain of crimson. On the other side was a nave, larger than its neighbors, and a crude altar of primordial black stone, hewn from the spine of the Earth herself, and roughly fashioned into a pyramidal shape, flattened at the apex in the manner of certain jungle civilizations. The ziggurat was nine feet tall, and approximately twelve feet broad on a side. A shallow depression was carved in each face at eye level.

Above the altar and inset at the heart of a soot-streaked tile mosaic was another broken ring symbol the diameter of several men standing on one another’s shoulders; this version was constructed of countless pieces of interlocking bone aged to a decayed black. Dragon’s-blood incense wafted from wrought-iron braziers and mingled with the torch smoke in a haze that caused the ziggurat and the effigy to distort and bend like reflections in stained metal.

The Spy took a torch from a sconce and raised it high to better examine the broken ring and the mosaic of murky imagery that enmeshed it—a hunt or revel in a forest; maidens with babes in arms fled dark figures whose eyes blazed red and who grasped with elongated arms and spindly, clawed hands. He saw, as his light glanced from surface to surface, that the bones of the broken ring symbol were real human skeletons of all sizes, mortared and fused to create a piece of unholy art.

Upon determining the sheer numbers of corpses involved, and inevitably recalling the burgher’s collection of children’s bones and the tavern wenches’ pillow talk of a cave carpeted with baby bones, his knees shook and he nearly lost his resolve. The Spy was by no means a pious man, nor afflicted by undue superstition. Even so, this sight quickened in his breast a chill dread and reminded him that he was a man without friends, far from home.

“Welcome to the House of Old Leech,” a woman said. She stood in an alcove, watching him. Clad in a diaphanous gown, a crimson diadem at her throat, she was dark of hair and eye and lushly proportioned. Older than the Spy by a rather wide margin, her flesh was taut and she radiated carnality as voracious as fire.