The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (26 page)

“Fifteen,” Caris said at last. “It's the first thing you do in training, you know. The man's tied up. They don't start you on criminals free to fight back until your second or third year of training. But, they say, a weapon must know the taste of blood from the first.”

“Oh,” Joanna whispered soundlessly.

She thought it was all Caris would say. It was no wonder, she thought wretchedly, that her own inarticulate scruples sounded ridiculous to that beautiful young man. But when Caris spoke again, she realized the long delay had been because the sasennan was inept with words; not wanting to hurt her, he had paused long to choose what he would say with care.

“But I had never killed a man before in a true fight-a fight for my life, one that was not in training. We're trained to be ready for it, but . . . it really seldom happens.” There was another long silence. Then he said, “Do you know what the Witchfinders would have done-to me and to Antryg, and probably to you as our accomplice?”

Joanna shook her head.

Caris told her, in a wealth of clinical detail that made her almost physically sick.

“A weapon that thinks is a flawed weapon, Joanna,” he said softly. “You had to do what you did. You didn't take two lives, you saved two, probably three-probably a lot more. I have to get Antryg alive to the Regent, not as his accomplice in some plot the Witchfinders are accusing us of, but free and on my own terms, as proof of the truth. Sometimes you can't think too much. Only do what you need to do.”

And in those words Joanna took a certain amount of comfort, at least for as long as she remained awake.

The lowing of a cow woke Caris, to the clinging, tepid HEAT of morning. Last night's storm had cooled the air enough to permit sleep after the killing exhaustion of the last twenty-four hours; but with the new sun, the rain was evaporating in clammy dampness which made his rough peasant clothes and coarse stockings stick to his body like an evil fairy's garment of itches.

He lay in the hay for a few moments, looking at his two companions in flight.

He had never expected the girl Joanna to be still with them after four days. What he had seen of her world and what she had told him and Antryg during the first day's walk to Kymil had made him doubt her abilities to keep up with them. Caris had been raised in the Way of the Sasenna, and, from what he had seen and heard, hers was a world in which machines, like the cars and computers of which she had spoken, had taken over both the work that strengthened the body and the entertainment that sharpened the wits. She was shy and, he suspected, more used to speaking to these computers than to people; but it had surprised him that she bad not panicked yesterday. If asked beforehand, he would have laid money against her having the nerve to pull the trigger.

And, he reflected ruefully, lost it.

Curled up on the hay, she looked thin and even smaller than usual. They had gotten rid of her bloodstained peasant clothing, and she looked like a little boy in her scruffy blue jeans and creased and filthy tank-top, with hay caught in her feathery blond curls. Her arms and shoulders were brown and sunburned, covered with scratches and insect bites. For all her small size, weariness had printed lines on her face that even sleep couldn't erase, and she looked older than her age, which she had said was twenty-six, and very alone.

A little ways from her, Antryg lay with his head on his rolled-up coat. His cracked spectacles rested in the hay nearby and the strings of cheap glass beads around his throat caught slivers of hurtfully bright gold sunlight that streamed through the cracks in the barn walls. Under the unruly tousle of his hay-flecked hair, the bruises on his face already looked less swollen than they had. They were turning black; Caris had spent the last five years of his life training to be sasennan and had an intimate acquaintance with bruises; he knew they must hurt like the devil. He'd taken a swordcut on the cheek in his first year of training and he remembered that the pain had dogged even his sleep.

And well served, too
, he thought bitterly. He sat up and shook as much hay as he could out of his smock. Like the pain of a burn, his anger returned to fuel his strength. For what he has done to
my
grandfather for what that disappearance did to
all the mages . . .

Outside, the cow lowed again. Raised to the rhythms of farm and village life, Caris recognized the pain in the sound. The beast was stray, he thought, and needed to be milked. The gray deadness that had gripped the countryside yesterday morning had left its effects; not a cowman between here and Parchasten had remembered to close his gates. All afternoon and evening, they had been seeing strayed beasts in the half-cut hay meadows and standing corn. Now that he thought about it, Caris looked around the barn. The storm, he thought, would have ruined the best part of the haying. It was late enough in the summer that this barn should have been full-stocked. He frowned to himself at the recollection of something the Bishop of Kymil had said regarding farms let fall to rot.

But a cow in milk is a cow in milk, and the bread that he and Antryg had variously pocketed during the last, distant supper at the roadhouse had long since been eaten. Casting a glance behind him at the sleepers, Caris slipped his scabbarded sword into his sash, ready to draw and fight, and moved cautiously to the door.

His first glance around, as he opened it a crack, showed him that the woods onto which the barn faced were deserted. His trained mind toyed with the idea of a trap, with the cow as bait, then dismissed it. Anyone who knew they were there could simply have come in and overpowered them, exhausted as they were, or simply burned the barn over their heads.

It was only at his second glance that he truly saw the cow.

She was standing a few yards from the rickety doors of the barn, and Caris did not even need his farm background to know there was something terribly wrong with her. She stood broadside to him, weaving on her feet; her white and cream hide was sunk over her broad pelvis and barrel ribs as if with long sickness, but the green stains of grass smudged her legs. She had been out to pasture. Caris pushed the door gently open and walked toward her. There was no sign of ambush or threat from the woods, but the sixth sense of a sasennan screamed at him of danger . . . .

Then she turned her head and forequarters toward him. Caris felt the vomit rise to burn his throat and the sudden chill of sweat stick his coarse clothing to his back.

There was an abomination fastened leechlike to the cow.

It was unlike the one he had seen in the marsh, but he knew it for nothing that existed in this world. It dangled, swollen, from the beast's shoulder like a monstrous tick, mottled green-black and purple and longer than a man's forearm. By the swelling under the hide where it was attached, Caris knew there was at least four inches of head buried under the skin.

The cow lowed again and stared at him with sunken and pain-glazed eyes. Caris gritted his teeth-sick as the thought made him, he knew he could never leave an animal to suffer in that fashion.

He looked quickly about. It was broad daylight now-early, by the elongated indigo shadows. The patrols would be checking every building they found. In a little pile of rubbish by the door, he found some old tools, including a couple of broken scythe handles and half-rotted leather straps. With one of the straps, he tied a bunch of hay onto the end of a handle; with the flint and steel no sasennan is ever without, he lighted this makeshift torch and advanced, rather queasily, upon the cow and its horrible parasite. The poor beast flinched a little from the pale brightness of the fire, but was too exhausted to flee. Caris gingerly gripped her horn and brought the burning end of the torch to the parasite's slimy back.

Like a tick, it twitched revoltingly; then it backed slowly out of the wound and dropped to the ground with a horrible squishing sound.

Clotted with blood and flesh, its head was almost indistinguishable equipped, Caris thought, with at least three mouths, mandibled like an ant's, but infinitely more hideous. For an instant, the mouths worked with an unspeakable chewing motion. Then the head swung around, and Caris leaped back as the thing writhed like a snake on the trampled grass and launched itself, with incredible speed for something so puffed, at Caris' groin.

As with the thing in the marsh, Caris' body thought for him. He struck at the thing with all the force of his arm, using the side of the torch like a bat. The mandibled mouth clamped around the wood; the tiny, lobster like claws grappled, and the thing lunged up the handle toward his chest. Horror-sickened, Caris flung the torch from him and ran; he heard the thing's body thump soddenly against the door as he slammed it shut.

“Antryg!” Renegade, devious, and student of Suraklin he might be, but he had spoken of the abominations as if he knew them. At least he would know what to do.

The wizard sat up, blinking, already fumbling his spectacles onto his lacerated face. He took one look at Caris and asked, “Where?” without bothering to ask what. Like a gawky heron, he unfolded to his feet and strode past Caris to the door to peer through the cracks. After a long pause, he held up a cautionary hand and pushed open the door slightly. Through it, Caris could see the cow lying on her chest, too exhausted to flee or even to stand. The parasite had returned to her, now hanging from her throat. Flies were already swarming over the first gaping wound its exit had left.

Caris was aware that he was shaking.

Antryg's voice was deep and oddly comforting in the hot, umber gloom of the barn. “There's nothing we can do for her now, except put her out of her pain, and I'm not sure it would be safe to get close enough to do that silently.”

Quietly, Joanna joined them at the door. She made a small noise of utter revulsion in her throat at the sight of the parasite, but nothing more. “It's an abomination,” Antryg murmured to her, “a thing that has come through a weakening in the Void when a gateway was opened. Or, more likely, it was a parasite on something that came through.”

She took another cautious look, around him at the cow. “The original host could have died almost immediately,” she said thoughtfully. “Who knows-maybe its parasites started off small and something in this universe made them grow.”

The remark baffled Caris, but Antryg nodded as if he understood. There was a fleeting appearance of kinship between them, with their blue jeans and white shirts, their tangled, curly hair, and their sunburned faces. After a moment, the wizard walked back into the darkness of the barn, his white shirt a blur in the gloom. Caris saw what had not been apparent last night; the building had two doors, one facing toward the woods, through which they had come the previous night, and the other facing out into a lowland hay meadow. Green sweetness and a sharp square of primrose light breathed into the dim barn in a rush as Antryg pushed open one leaf of the vast portal. The meadow had only been partly cut; cows stood in the long, lush grass that ran down to a stream deep in cresses and ferns. When the wind shifted, Caris could hear another cow groan in feeble agony.

Antryg murmured, “As I thought.”

Past the stream, the dark tangle of a quickset hedge marked the road; Caris shivered. He had not thought it so close, and wondered how obvious the barn was from it. Quietly he joined the wizard by the door. “We haven't time for this,” he said softly. “We have to leave this place.”

“Don't be silly.” Antryg drew him back into the protective shade of the barn. He pushed his specs a little further up the bridge of his long nose with one bony forefinger, wincing where the metal of the earpiece touched the bruised mess of his temple. “We have to know at least a little of how to deal with the things. Look at how those cows are moving. They're all infected. It's more than likely the things are in the woods as well.” He walked back to the piled hay where he had slept, unrolled his coat, and put it on, the worn velvet rumpled and covered with shreds of hay.

Joanna had remained by the door to the meadow. She was looking out with what might have been nauseated fascination or what might have been simple watchfulness, for it was only by close scrutiny that someone might be seen on the road on the other side of the hedgerow. Caris followed Antryg back toward the door to the woods, but caught him by the sleeve when he made to go through it. For once, he did not fear the wizard making a break for it. Indeed, he suspected that, unless Antryg was playing a very deep game, Antryg would not try to escape until they reached Angelshand itself. But the thought of stepping outside, where the dying cow and her hideous vampire still lay joined in the brightness of the morning sunlight, made his nape crawl.

Gently, Antryg shook loose the grip. He slipped through the open door, stepped quickly to where the torch lay guttered out in the dust, retrieved it, and returned. Neither cow nor parasite moved. His hair shadowing his eyes in the early light, Antryg undid the strap, shoved a little more hay under it, and cinched it tight again. He looked up at Caris. “Either come with me or lend me your sword.”

The descent into the hay meadow was closer to the hell of the Church's Sole God than anything Caris had yet experienced in his life. He had been trained in the Way of the Sasenna, taught to face and fight and kill any man or woman living. But in the last weeks, he had faced, not man or woman, but things he had never prepared for: the mewing abomination in the marsh; the hideous, icy fall through the blowing darkness that lies between universes; and the ghastly uncertainties of trying to operate by the Way of the Sasenna without a master to command him. To fight even a monster was one thing; to walk through a plague of lethal and filthy parasites was something for which neither he nor his masters had ever thought to prepare him.

The meadow was full of the abominations.

What little wind there was set from the woods; it was only when he and Antryg were in the long grasses of the meadow itself that the smell of blood came to Caris' nostrils. With it came a foul, half-familiar pungency he did not know, but which nauseated him. There were half a dozen cows in the meadow, drawn there to drink at the spring. Every one bore at least one parasite; some poor beasts had two or three, hanging like swollen, slimily gleaming bolsters from their sides or throats or lying draped over them, if they lay in the grass. The parasites themselves were anywhere above a foot in length; one, twitching over the heaving side of a yearling calf, was nearly four feet long.