“What?” whispered Fetch.
“There were no guards down below, which seemed a little odd. But there’s no one up here either. No watchers on the walls. No one.”
“Tssssck. Maybe they’re all out?” answered Fetch, not sounding entirely convinced.
“You’re sure they were camped here?”
“There were armed men here last night,” hissed Fetch. “Tsch. Tss. I saw them. And three at least, walking the battlements. Two men on the door.”
“Odd,” repeated Caewen. She tested the weight of her sword, moving it back and forth, then made a way to the door, looked within and wrinkled up her nose. “Smells like someone’s been butchering meat in here. Phew. But not preserving it.” She stepped into the keep interior. “I suppose we must see what there is to see.”
The bulk of the space was open to the air and rain, roofless and full of grassy weeds. Burnt patches and black logs indicated two cookfires. Scattered bags, pots and some weaponry lying against a wall suggested someone was living here, but had perhaps left in a hurry? There was a heap of horse manure in one corner. So Rawn was finding some way to move his horse in and out of the ruin.
As Caewen moved through the weedy courtyard she noticed that someone had set one of the fallen building stones so that it was upright. They had–of course–draped a stinking, bloody deer skin over it, and even drawn something that looked like a face onto the stone under a hairline of blood. The face was presumably drawn in blood too. It was brown, dried out and faded.
“Odd.”
“Tssch. You keep saying that. What are you seeing?”
She’d momentarily forgotten that Fetch was strapped inside his bag. She described the scene to him.
“Tssch,” he said. “Yes. Odd.”
There was a tower standing in one corner of the yard. It was in better repair, with a door–standing open–and some stone stairs visible from where Caewen stood. The tower was a squat, wide construction–not a spindly thin turret or watchtower–and it might easily have housed one or two large rooms. It seemed the most obvious place to search next, so Caewen went that way, stepping lightly into the shadowy stairwell, ascending. “You could probably come out now, if you like. We’re in shadow.”
“No thank you. Tssck. I’ll just stay hidden here, if you don’t mind.”
Caewen’s footsteps resounded against the stone. The smell was worse on the coiled stairs, and before long she needed to cover her mouth with a sleeve.
When she pushed through a curtain of sacking at the top of the stairs she found what was causing the stench. About half a dozen men were lying dead in an otherwise bare room. Furniture, some richly carved and old, some rustic–all presumably stolen–was pushed up in a random heap against one wall. The bodies had all had their throats cut and they were arranged to make a pattern of jagged lines and loops. Although the sight of the dead men was sickening enough, the pattern their bodies made struck such a jarring thorn of dizziness and repulsion into Caewen’s mind that she physically recoiled. Just to look at it without wincing was difficult. It seemed almost as if the dead limbs shifted slightly each time she looked across them, as if there was still a weird life in them, though their sightless eyes were obviously as dead as anyone had ever been.
All of the men still wore their robber’s garb, some in armour, some in rough linens or patched old woollen wear. She recognised one bloated face from the attackers by the road. These were the brigands, but where was Lord Rawn? Was he among them? She mentally noted their features, hair colour and faces as much as was possible–she could describe them later in the hope that one of them might match Rawn. Though–she noted–none of them looked like a young nobleman. They were all too rough, scarred and battered by hard lives.
She looked about. A rickety ladder went up through a hole in the ceiling. It looked like the level above was open to the air. Caewen put away her sword and climbed the ladder far enough to check that the floor above was empty. It was. The breath of fresher air was a relief at least.
She returned to the scene of blood and ruined flesh, looking over it with a cold ill-at-ease feeling.
“A bleak sort of ritual,” she said. “Blood-magic of the worst sort. Did Rawn do this? There’s no sign of his horse or armour. And what is the spell’s purpose do you think? Can you read the weaves of the magic, my little Fetch?”
“Yes. That I can answer,” said the shadow-thing. “I can feel the magic through the satchel. I don’t need to look at it, nor taste it. Tssch. It’s a summoning magic. A strong one too. Before you ask, no, I don’t know what was summoned–but there are many names drifting silently here. Old, weird names. Unpronounceable by the lips of men and women. Or so I’d have thought. It would tear up a tongue to say some of those names.”
“So… was it a single thing with many names, or many different things?”
He paused. “Many, I think. Each of them minor on their own. It is a beast-bidding… I think… Tssch. Tss. Tsch. The magic is strange, distant and strange-woven. I can only guess. I’m sorry. I can’t say more.”
She walked around the room, being careful to avoid stepping in men’s innards or fly-blown splashes of gore.
The windows were flung wide-open, and yet, and but, there were no carrion birds here. Not even outside nosing around. The stink was so strong every crow and raven for a hundred miles ought to be here. As she tread her way, a step at a time, something small and bright did catch her eye. A silver coin was sitting on one of the stone windowsills. Several more glistening silvery motes were visible on the ground below. This seemed another puzzle. Had someone thrown silver coins out of the window? Why? Then it came to her: very likely a puckle-dragon had been in here. Hadn’t Seath said something about them stealing shiny objects? Presumably, it’d found some treasure and stolen it, but dropped some on the way out? It might have carried off other things too. More clues to the strange mystery. And then she remembered the nest right outside the keep. So… if she were right about a visitor thief…
Before leaving, Caewen poured some lamp oil on the bodies and set them alight with a small spark of fire-magic. She couldn’t be sure this would properly cleanse the room but she had to do something. If nothing else, the uncanny sense that the men were somehow still a little bit alive had to be put to rest in her mind. If she didn’t burn them to ashes, she would be dreaming about them tonight, and that she did not want to do.
As she plodded downstairs, the air already began to fill with smoke. Her eyes stung.
“Why kill your own men?” she pondered out loud. Partly, she was thinking, partly throwing thoughts at Fetch. “So Rawn rebels for no clear reason. He is defeated and goes off into the hills with some robbers. He decorates old stones with skins. Commits a blood sacrifice. I would write this all off as the actions of a madman–but there was real magic in that ritual. Dead magic. Old magic. Evil magic. The dead were laid out very specifically. Very portentously. There is a brooding depth hiding here, and if our runaway knight is at the heart of it, I fear.
She was continuing these lines of thought when she emerged into the weedy court once more. She looked around. “The dragonets were singing before. They’ve stopped. Everything is silent.”
She took a step, but no sooner had she put a foot onto the stone than a stirring in the grasses caught her eye. She stopped but it was too late.
Even as she drew her sword, a mass of twisting, sinuous shapes came out of cracks and crevices, over the walls, out from behind tufts of grass, out from under tumbled stones. A hundred or more snakes came hissing and slithering out of every hiding place. And all of them swarmed towards her.
Caewen slashed at the nearest one, beheading it, and retreated back a step. More snakes were appearing on every side. They were coming down the stairs behind her now too… out of the burning room above. How could they be coming down from the burning room above? She cut and slashed, and did her best to get up on a sheer-sided block of stone. As she reached back to bring down the tip of her sword on one bright silver and green serpent, Caewen felt pain in her sword wrist. It was hot and cold all at once, and it seared through her skin and flesh.
A snake had lunged out of a crevice in the wall behind her and had sunk its teeth into her wrist. She shook it free and it hit the stone. In a flash it was gone in the twist of scales and muscular coils.
“Caewen! Caewen!” hissed Fetch, fear in his voice. “Not again! Don’t fall down in the sun. Shadows! Tssch. Tss. Fall into shadow!”
She dropped her sword. The clattering noise rang like an angry bell. It was difficult to close her fingers. A terrible pain crept up her arm, towards her elbow. Stumbling down from the rock she found that the snakes had all lost interest. They cleared away from her weaving footsteps, just hissing at each other in a confused mass. Whatever will had mastered them was broken. All that was wanted was a bite, and she was bitten.
Mind stuffed full of pain, skin crawling with waves of cold and heat, she made her way into the outer entranceway and collapsed onto the stone steps there, deep in a cold shadow, pinched between two bright thumbs of sunlight. She could feel Fetch crawling out of his satchel, quickly moved over her and sniffing at the wound.
“Venom and sorcery. Sorcery and venom. Don’t die, Caewen. Tssch. Tsss. Tsssh. You will not die. You will not die.” His voice fell to an inaudible mutter of words in a language Caewen did not know. The roll of whisperous syllables was the only thing her mind had a grip on before she slipped into a state of awful dreams and nightmares. “I will not let you die. You can’t leave me alone here. Tsssch.”