Samakarantha breathed in deeply. He tasted the air. He closed his eyes and dwelled on the fragrances he detected. He listened intently for echoes of echoes of songs and voices in the darkness too. Just faintly he could smell blood and burnt clay, wet ochre, gritty river sand, rank peat fires and brackish smoke. Beyond the smells wandered a few last remnants of noise. Voices raised in chorus. Chants in dead tongues. Promises given up to the dark.
He opened his eyes.
Magic had been done here. Long-ago magic, full of ritual and the turning of seasons, and heavy with the weight of years. There was a wellspring of power in this place… and yet… and somehow… this was not the end of last house’s secrets. Something had passed through here, just recently. Something cold and alone and sad. This other sadness: this was the presence he had been sensing and tracking, he thought. This was what he needed to follow further.
Carefully, he explored the space and found another doorway, tucked away behind a standing stone on the far side of the room. This led into a cramped stone passage. He entered the darkness and found himself standing in a tunnel that ate directly and deeply into the world’s rocky heart. And there–in the darkness ahead–he saw a face. She turned to him, eyes wide and wetly glistening. It was a young woman, her hair and skin red in the bloody light of his uncertain torch. But she did not seem to see him. Rather, her eyes looked right through him. She looked startled, as if suddenly afraid. A moment later, she turned abruptly and hurried deeper into darkness. A suggestion of a cloak followed her as she left, but there was no sense that she was fully physical. What was she then? Memory. Apparition. Ghost. Illusion. He was not sure where she fell in the varied taxonomies of the unreal, but she was certainly made of chillness and sorrow.
He firmed his thoughts and set his will. The coldness was pressing against him now, making him shiver. The prickling cold needled itself into his temples, a distracting pain. His ears buzzed a little, as if swarms of invisible gnats were all about his head.
He had to bring every last scrap of his will to bear in order to move a step forward, and another, another. There was a presence here that did not want him here. Waves of misery and pain came at him, washing over and around him, and swelling up the walls. And there was something else too–a sort of vile, pent up rage, frustration and resentment. A desire to inflict harm. There were echoes of sobbing and screaming and mean, nasty laughter too.
At the end of the narrow corridor stood a blind chamber. Roughly hewn from the rock and stained with impressions of rusted rings and hooks, and a few red-grime lines of old corroded chains. The inaudible noises of rage and pain were now painfully sharp in Samakarantha’s mind, and so overwhelming as to make it difficult to think. He was about to retreat to gather his thoughts when a face came wildly, furiously at him out of the dark: bearded and scraggly, big round eyes and thick-lipped. Samakarantha reeled back, startled, looking at the thing, up and down. But as suddenly as it had appeared, it halted its flailing attack. It looked as if it were caught between desperately wanting to throttle Samakarantha and finding itself unwilling or unable to do so for some inscrutable reason. He considered it. The creature stank, but not of human odour, rather it smelled of bogs and thick mossy mud. The rest of its body was just as wild as the face, leathery of skin, matted and tangled of hair. And it did not appear to be properly dressed, but wore a sort of kilt made of reeds and thrown-away rags. Its body was small and shrivelled, with long sinewy arms and legs, but also grotesquely pot-bellied. The hands especially looked powerful. Samakarantha recomposed himself. He regarded those hands dispassionately as they reached for his throat. He studied the calluses and the fingers that wrestled with the air just inches from his windpipe. He examined the fingers, just slightly too long and sharp-nailed to be human. Not quite fingernails. Not quite claws. Something in-between.
The creature kept reaching for the magician’s neck, but never closed its grip: it was frozen, trembling, unable to touch him.
“I’m gunna strangle ye scrawny neck.”
“No, you will not.”
“Arg,” it screamed. “Who are ye to bring yer nasty foreign spreets into my homestead? Who are ye to change the very bones of the house of my ancient dwelling? Ye feculent toad-charmer. Ye ugsome charm-spinner”
“I am he that is called Samakarantha, born of the Golden Dales, magician and wanderer.”
“I’ll magician you, ye piece of rank fly-blown offal.”
“Again, no, you will not.” He regarded the creature. It was a strange thing, human-ish in appearance, but it did not have the look and countenance of the folk who called Brae home. Everything about it was tan or dun coloured: as if it had been buried in a peat bog and left to soak for a thousand years. Even the whites of its eyes were more of an off-white. It’s teeth, when it snarled, were brown, as if stained by drinking endless cups of tannic bog-water. “You are one of the Faer Folk, I think, but, you are not free to roam, are you? No,” he mused, considered the magic that seethed before him. “You are bound. Is that why you cannot hurt me, though clearly you would dearly love to do so. You are chained to this house?” He considered the shape and sounds of the magic. “And you did not make yourself Faer either. It was not a choice. Someone else changed your soul into flesh?” More abruptly, he asked, “Where are your bones?”
“There’s nothing fair about me, ye gangrel wussit. Ye hapenny nag-bitten ill-begotten hog-filth. I’m a broonie, and the broonie of this abode. This house is meself, and I am the house. Me ribs are the rafters. Me skull is the attic. How dare ye change my own body without me own leave?”
“No. You had other bones once. Maybe you have forgotten, but I do not think so. Tell me, where are your dead bones? Where are your once-living bones? Where did they bury you?”
The creature paused a long time then, before sniffing and saying, more quietly and with much more misery, “Oh, so that’s how it is, is it? What will ye do, curse me if I don’t tell ye?”
“Where are your bones?” asked Samakarantha again, and this time he let power seep into his voice. The question did not permit silence in reply.
“So ye put the mockings and the geas upon me, do ye? Have it your way. I am buried under the threshold stone, if ye must know. But it won’t do ye any good. The stone is rune-cut and spell-hewn, and no power alive today can lift it. Me skull and me raw-bones will rot there with the worms til the day the sun turns to ash and boils the seas.”
“I see.” Samakarantha looked into the darkness. “And why are you lurking about here, in this gloom and misery? Did you kill her?”