The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (27 page)

In his rough smock and coarse canvas breeches, Caris had never felt so unprotected in his life. Horror and revulsion made him queasy, but he heard Antryg, peering through the quizzing glass at that sunken body with its hideous burden, murmur, “Fascinating.”

Around the stream, the long, rank grasses thrashed with their squirmings. Antryg raised his head, curious. “There seem to be a lot of them down there.”

A sharp rustle in the meadow to their left made Caris swing around, his sword in his hand; his mouth felt dry with fear. “Let's go back . . . .”

Antryg, torch in hand, advanced, wading through the deep ferns toward the stream.

Caris had only an instant's glimpse of the abomination in the ferns before it struck. It was three feet long and launched itself at Antryg like a striking cobra; Caris' sword was whining through the fetid air while his mind was still identifying what it was that he struck. His blade caught the thing in the middle of its swollen body, checking the strike as it fell in two pieces; Antryg stepped lightly back as the head and struck at him again, bouncing short, like a hellish ball, its spined mouth snapping. Grayish slime from the split abdomen stank as it pooled in the grass; Caris whirled in horror as the whole meadow around them erupted suddenly into a sea of frantic thrashings.

It seemed as if every filthy creature in that abominable meadow was galvanized into abrupt and greedy life. From every point of the compass, there were wallowing and lunging toward the two humans. From the hay barn at the top of the meadow, Caris heard Joanna's entirely unnecessary warning scream.

The abomination feeding on the calf pulled its filthy, puerperal head from the wound and struck at Caris in a streaming splatter of blood and fluid from a distance of only feet. Caris moved his sword to strike but the thing caught the blade itself, wrapping tiny, hideous claws around it, dragging it down with its huge weight. Reflex made Caris drop the blade and spring back, remembering how its fellow had lunged up along the torch; an instant later he cursed himself for dropping the weapon. Antryg's powerful hand closed around his arm and the two of them fled through the long grass of the meadow, both knowing it was only a question of instants before that wallowing circle of creatures closed around them . . . .

But they did not. They fell to feeding, instead, on the split carcass of the dead parasite. Halfway back to the barn, Antryg and Caris stopped, panting, to look back and saw nothing of the dead abomination and the stinking pool of slime around it but a writhing, struggling mass of slimy purple backs.

Something brushed Caris' ankle, and he sprang aside with a shuddering gasp. It was a foot-long abomination, plowing through the grass like a determined maggot toward the others. Caris' whole body was shaking with something more terrible than cold, but Antryg stood, his head a little on one side, watching.

“Caris, I think we've been snubbed,” he remarked. Swinging the burnt out torch, he walked back up towards the barn.

It was only when they were very near it that Caris realized that Joanna was not alone.

There was a wagon and team tied up at one side of the barn. A man in the green livery of a coachman was on the box; a footman, carrying a long, old-fashioned pike, stood beside it, nervously watching the meadow. Caris stopped in his tracks, feeling for his missing sword and cursing himself again for dropping it. But in any case, fighting would be hopeless. From the shadows of the barn, he saw Joanna wave, beckoning. In the gloom behind her, steel flashed.

Antryg laughed suddenly, and said, “Well done!” He strode forward, leaving Caris either to abandon his captive or follow. He had to run to catch up.

The man standing beside Joanna in the dense shade of the barn was wearing armor of the sort not seen in centuries-a suit of plate that covered the wearer from head to foot. The steel was ornamented with scallop and mille fleur, bright with gilding, and every inch overwritten with spells and proofs against the workings of the rival champion's wizard. It was, in fact, the product of the last days before the battle of the Field of Stellith-massive, proof against both crossbow and heat-spell, and weighing well over a hundred pounds.

Only the helm of this archaic marvel was missing. From the enormous shoulders, with their cresting and giltwork, rose a head of startling modernity. The young man's round cheeks and a slight double-chin gave an indication of what sort of form lay beneath all that ensorcelled steel. His hazel eyes were bright with interest and meticulously painted; the soft, dark-brown curls clustering around his face showed an expert's assiduous hand in their arrangement.

The emblem on the massive breastplate was that of the royal house of the Emperors of Ferryth.

It was not the Way of the Sasenna to acknowledge lordship, other than of one's own master, not even the highest, but Caris bent his head respectfully and said, “Lord Cerdic.”

The young man waved away the gesture of respect with one massively mailed hand. “That was brave-incredibly brave.” He looked from the desperately thrashing meadow to Caris and then to Antryg. “Do I guess correctly that you are the mage my cousin's men have been combing the countryside for?”

Caris frowned disapprovingly, but Antryg nodded. “At your humble service,” he said, with a glint in his gray eyes. “If it please your Grace, I shall keep my name to myself.”

“Of course,” Prince Cerdic said hastily. “Of course. I would never dream of asking such a thing of the mageborn.” His painted hazel eyes returned to the field again, and concern creased his open brow. “What have you decided about them, my lord? My peasants came to me begging my help. I put this thing on-it's been standing in a corner of Devilsgate Hall for centuries-and came down to have a look at them, though deuce knows what I'd have done if I'd fallen over out there in it.”

“When were they first seen?” Antryg asked.

Cerdic shook his head. “Three, four days ago one of my cowmen reported finding one-a little one, no bigger than a sausage-on a heifer up in the high pastures near the Devil's Road. He got it to back out with a torch, then it struck at him, and he ran away; fire didn't seem to bother it. When they started showing up on the herds, we tried poison, and that doesn't slow them down, either. Perhaps, if your lordship used magic . . .”

Caris glanced sidelong at his so-called prisoner, with spiteful satisfaction. Antryg pushed up his spectacles, like a man who is stalling for time to explain why he has appeared at an evening function in a morning coat.

“Well, there is a reason I can't use magic,” he said apologetically. “And in any case, it would take-”

Still leaning against the jamb of the barn door, Joanna turned her head from the thrashing grasses of the meadow to ask, “What kind of fire did you use?”

Cerdic raised his plucked brows. “What other kinds of fire are there, my dear? Fire is fire.”

“If fire was fire,” Joanna pointed out, a little diffidently, “you'd be able to temper sword steel in the kitchen stove. Have you tried destroying them with condensed fire, as in a kiln? The hottest kind of kiln you have . . .”

“That would be a limekiln,” provided Antryg thoughtfully. “They have steel hearths hotter in Parchasten, where they can get the coke . . . .”

“But we do have a limekiln,” Cerdic said eagerly. Then his face fell. “But as for getting them in it-we could only bait one or two at a time, and then they mightn't respond, if the bait was inside the kiln.” He glanced hopefully at Antryg. “Unless there were some kind of a summoning spell?”

Antryg sighed. “I'm afraid the abominations wouldn't be the only things such a spell would summon.”

“And we wouldn't have time,” Joanna put in and nodded toward the horrible movement in the meadow outside. “The things seem to be multiplying pretty fast.”

“We may have less time than we think.” Antryg shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and cocked his head to one side. “It all depends on whether they're ticks or maggots, you see.”

The remark made no sense to Caris, but Joanna went white with horror. Feeling a little as he did when talking to his grandfather, Caris demanded, “What difference does it make?”

The wizard shrugged. “The most attractive thing that can be said for a tick,” he responded, “is that it isn't going to turn into anything else that might have wings.”

Caris stared at him in shock; the idea that the abominations might metamorphose had never occurred to him. Cerdic whispered numbly, “Mother of God . . .” He swallowed hard. “But if you will not use magic-if poison won't work-”

Caris' eyes went to the wizard's face, reading the struggle obvious there as he tried to figure some way of using his powers without summoning down the Council or the Church dogs, as well. Cerdic was watching him intently, and Caris wondered if he could use this unwillingness to turn the Prince from Antryg's ally to his own.

Then Joanna asked, “What would you need for a spell?”

Antryg shook his head. “Something to draw them. They came like ants after sugar to the body of the dead one. I'd probably send out some kind of an illusion of its smell to draw them to the limekiln. Once they were inside it could be fired.”

“We've tried using blood,” Cerdic added, clanking forward and awkwardly folding his arms. “Two or three came to it, but the poison didn't stop them. We used plagueroot-the most virulent poison there isquarts of it. The smell alone should have killed them.”

“Try mercury or arsenic,” Joanna said. “They're metals. No matter what kind of organisms the things are, a heavy metal should at least slow them down. Whatever they smelled in the dead abomination must be a concentrate of something from the cow's blood, to bring them so fast that they ignored everything else.”

Caris shook his head. “One of them attacked me within feet of the carcass.”

“Did it?” Antryg inquired suddenly. “As I remember, it attacked your sword. Which, of course, was smeared with fluid from the thing's body. It didn't leap after you, once it had the sword. And I'll tell you something else. Whatever they look for in blood, I think they also look for it in earth. At least the stream bank was all chewed with the things tunnelings.”

“A trace mineral?” Joanna suggested thoughtfully. She scratched at a fragment of hay in her hair-very different, suddenly, Caris thought, from the painfully shy girl who had accompanied them up from Kymil. She was not, after all, merely a talker to machines, and he wondered suddenly if it was this quality, this knowledge, for which Antryg had kidnapped her. “Blood is mostly water, salt, proteins, and some trace minerals and it carries oxygen. Obviously it isn't water they want or they'd have been in the stream itself. It might be nitrogen . . . .”

“Cerdic.” Antryg turned to the Prince, who had stood throughout this with a look of mystification on his round, perspiring face. “Did there used to be a salt lick down by the stream?”

The young man looked blank. “Dashed if I know. Does it matter?”

“A salt lick?” Joanna asked, puzzled.

“Yes-a natural outcropping of salt in the ground. There's a trampled patch on the bank that looks as if it's where the cattle regularly came down . . . .”

At the Prince's signal, the coachman jumped down from the wagon and approached, casting a wary look at Antryg and a disapproving one at Joanna's jeans-clad legs. “Oh, aye,” he said, when asked. “That's what the cows were doing in the meadow in the first place, after that good-for-nothing Joe left the field gates open day before yesterday. The cowman drives 'em down there regular, and a job he has keeping 'em out of the hay.”

“Well,” said Antryg simply, “the lick's gone, now. The whole bank's tunneled in.”

“That's probably when they started feeding on the cows,” Joanna said. She turned back to the baffled-looking Cerdic. “I think that's your answer,” she said, and abruptly, as if she heard and feared the quiet authority in her own voice, her old shyness returned. Diffident but resolute, she continued, “Heavily concentrated salt-as much of it as you can get with enough water to make it liquid and as much mercury and arsenic as you have. If it doesn't kill them, it should slow them down enough to be shoveled into the limekiln.”

Cerdic caught her hand between his two massively mailed ones and said what no knight in gilded armor ever said to any lady of any legend. “My dear girl, you're a genius!”

Joanna blushed furiously and shook her head. “It just took breaking it down into subroutines,” she explained self-deprecatingly. “I meanthat's how all programmers think.”

The Prince frowned. “Programmer-is that a sort of wizard?”

Antryg, seeing Joanna's confusion overcoming her, put a comforting arm around her shoulders and said, “Yes. And now,” he added gravely, “I hope you mean to arrest us, because that would mean we could stop running and have some breakfast.”

With equally sober mien, the Prince began to bow, and Caris, the coachman, and Antryg all barely caught him in time, before he overbalanced in the weight of the armor. He substituted a graceful gesture of his arm. “My lord wizard,” he said, “please consider yourself under arrest.”

“So what happens now?”

Antryg turned from the long rectangle of the window's shadowy luminescence. Far off, a line of smoke marked the first of the limekilns firing up.

“It seems to have worked,” he said and smiled a welcome as Joanna gathered up the handfuls of green sprig-muslin skirts and petticoats and rustled her way across the parquet of the drawing room floor. The rooms the Prince had given them at Devilsgate Manor looked east over a short stretch of informal garden to the woods; at this hour, though the greenery outside was still spangled with the last brightness of the evening sun, the rooms themselves were growing dim. “And he was quite right, my dear. It was a stroke of genius, subroutines or no subroutines.”

Joanna shook her head again, as self-conscious over the praise as she was over the ribbon-edged flounces and low-cut neckline of her gown. She still wondered who the Prince was in the habit of keeping spare gowns around for. “It comes from breaking everything down for programming,” she said. “Talking to a machine, you have to think like one -choose one alternative or the other, decide A on what grounds, decide B on what grounds, if not B, what's C . . . everything in a million little increments.” She made a move to sit on the edge of a nearby chair back and gave it up as the unwary move earned her a poke under the ribcage from the boning in the gown's bodice. “It may be slower than talking to a person; but if you do everything right, you always know where you are.”