The priest’s blessing on the food was decidedly anticlimactic.
SHAM WAITED UNTILmost of the room had turned their attention from the Reeve to their plates before saying softly, “Fykall did a good job of calming the waves.”
Kerim growled, but when he spoke it was equally soft. “I have worked to pull away from Altis’s priests since I became Reeve; some of the people have embraced Him, but none of the Southwood nobles. If they think I’ve become a puppet of the priests, they’ll run back to their estates and stay there until they rot. In one speech, Fykall ruined a decade’s work. I’ll be lucky if a third of the Southwood nobles I’ve managed to coax into Court are here tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” replied Sham, remembering Lord Halvok’s pleasure at discovering that the Reeve’s mistress was a Southwood native. “I suspect the need to believe you can help them will outweigh their distrust. You bring them hope: it will take more than a single speech to destroy it.”
He didn’t look reassured.
“In any case—” she said, taking a bite of fish, “—that boat has left the docks, and the tides will see its journey’s end.”
AT DUSK, LORDVen’s body was lifted to the pyre and his soul given to Altis in an elaborate ceremony presided over by the High Priest. Kerim touched a torch to the base of the pyre, stepping back as the oil-soaked wood began eagerly to burn.
Long before the flames died down, most of the court retired, to leave only Lord Ven’s family to mourn him. Lady Sky would have been there, but she had taken the news of her betrothed’s death badly. The castle healer had confined her to bed for fear that she would lose her child. Sham waited until everyone else was gone before leaving the Reeve and his mother staring silently at the orange flames.
EARLY THE NEXTmorning, Sham opened her trunk and took out her dagger. It was a moment’s work to pull the itching stitches out of her wounds and toss the pieces of thread into the fire.
She put her second-best working clothes on again. The baggy breeches and the black cotton shirt, patched roughly on the left sleeve where she had once caught her arm on a wooden casement, would serve her better than any of her dresses and she wouldn’t have to keep the illusion over the cut on her arm.
She caught up a candle and lit it with a breath of magic before pulling the tapestry aside and peering into Kerim’s room. With no reason to maintain the fire or to light candles and the sun on the wrong side of the sky to light Kerim’s windows, the room was hidden in shadows. Sham’s instincts told her there was no one in the room.
With a gesture, Sham lit every candle in the chamber as well as the wood laid in the fireplace. Setting her candlestick on a convenient table, she contemplated the wardrobe. It seemed a fit place to start looking for more of the demon’s runes.
WHENDICKON ANDthe Reeve entered the room some time later, the fire was roaring merrily as it consumed the majority of the Reeve’s clothing, and Sham was tugging one of the large woven rugs across the floor with the obvious intention of sending it to join the clothing.
Dickon cleared his throat and spoke quickly, “Sir, that is a three-hundred-year-old rug, a bridal gift from the King of Reth to his sister on her wedding to the King of Southwood.”
Sham straightened and gave both men an annoyed look as she wiped the sweat off the back of her neck. “It also contains one of the demon’s runes—I don’t have the strength to remove them all. If the Reeve would like to stay in that chair for the rest of his shortened lifespan, I’ll be glad to leave it here.”
“Sir,” Dickon’s voice was almost a moan. “. . .demon runes . . . that rug is irreplaceable. There are ways of making one man look like another. To destroy such a rug on mere superstition . . .”
“We could put the rug in a store room somewhere, if you like,” offered Sham. “If we get rid of the demon there’s no need to destroy it and until then it will do no harm in storage.”
“But that has to go in the fire.” She nodded at a large, ornate bench sitting against one wall. “There’s more than one rune on it, and two of them I haven’t seen before.” They looked to her like the strange bits and pieces that had been on the binding rune she’d taken off Kerim. “—I’m not certain how to deal with it—it won’t fit in the hearth. You must be very important to this demon, Kerim. It has expended a tremendous amount of energy to ensure that you were vulnerable to it. I’ve found its runes on your shoes, your clothes, your armor—”
“What!” exclaimed Kerim, noticing the heavy war hauberk crumpled into a pile on the floor for the first time. It had taken a master armorer nearly a year to complete the shirt and ten years of battle to make it fit like a second skin.
Sham shook her head, “The metal is fine, it was on the leather padding. For some reason, none of the marks are on metal—maybe the nature of the demon’s magic.”
Dickon shook his head and muttered softly.
“Over a lifetime of dealing with difficult women, I have learned it is often better to give into their demands immediately,” said Kerim approaching the bench Sham had condemned. “See if you can find my axe somewhere in this mess, Dickon, and I’ll follow my orders and reduce this defenseless work of art to kindling. Then track down a couple of strong men to cart the more valuable pieces to the nearest storeroom.”
Once Sham knew what she was looking for, she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen the magic that touched almost everything in the chamber. The fire roared higher and higher and the room began to look as if a mischievous giant had decided to toss furniture around.
At some point in time, Talbot entered the room to join the effort, and his help was invaluable as they moved several especially heavy items. Shamera suspected that the wardrobe in particular hadn’t been moved in several hundred years: judging by the effort required to shift the thing it wouldn’t be moved again for another hundred.
Once he’d resigned himself to the destruction, Kerim seemed surprisingly lighthearted. It struck Shamera he’d lost the air of quiet acceptance that had formerly characterized him. Not even the death of his half-brother tempered the energy with which he attacked the room.
He chopped not only the bench, but a room divider of six panels into pieces small enough to fit in the fire—as the divider bore one of the strange runes as well. He insisted on helping when Shamera directed the complete disassembly of the large state bed, the last place left untouched in the room. It was there she found the second of the demon’s focus runes.
The hall door opened quietly.
Sham, whose black trousers and shirt were the same grey as the dust that had been stirred up by the tumult, crouched where the center of the bed had been, muttering hoarsely in a long-dead language. Kerim watched her intently, immobilized because the various pieces of the bed were scattered helter-skelter around his chair. Talbot leaned with half-assumed weariness against one of the imposing bedposts that leaned in its turn against the wall. Dickon had left to see what could be done to replace the furnishings and rugs Sham relegated to storage. It wasn’t until the intruder spoke that anyone looked toward the door.
“It seems meet that, after ruining your brother’s funeral with political theatrics, you would spend the next day rearranging your room,” Lady Tirra’s tones could have frozen molten rock.
Although Sham registered the sound of Lady Tirra’s voice, she didn’t pause in her chanting. The mark she’d found on the floor under Kerim’s bed was older than the rest, and the demon had spent time since reinforcing the spell. As the option of burning the stone floor seemed as doubtful as removing it to storage, Sham had to unwork the spell. This was the third time she’d tried and it finally looked as if she might succeed—if she could concentrate on her work.
Tracing the rune backwards (or so she hoped, since like several others the demon used, this rune was somewhat different from the one she knew) and calling upon parts of several spells, Sham felt the rune fade, but not completely. As long as a portion remained, it could be reinvoked. She tried again, va
rying the pattern of the spells and feeling them begin to unravel the rune at last.
When she finally looked up from her task, the first thing she noticed was Talbot attempting to be invisible. For a man without the ability to call upon magic, he was doing a fair job at it.
“. . . could expect little more than that from you.”
“Mother, I am sorry that Lady Sky lost her child, but I don’t know how my actions could have altered that one way or the other.” Kerim faced his mother across the pile of boards and leather straps that had been his bed, his voice dangerously soft.
Lady Tirra ignored the warning tone and continued to attack him, “You could have broken the news more gently to her—a note delivered in the middle of the night is hardly considerate. If you had even arranged a proper laying out . . . instead you had him burned with less dignity accorded the son of a gutter-thug.”
“I did as I thought best at the time. Since I am not responsible for Ven’s murder—whatever you may feel to the contrary—I was unable to choose a more convenient moment to announce his death. As for laying him out for public mourning: his body was not fit for viewing, certainly not by a lady in the advanced stages of pregnancy. I suppose I might have allowed my brother’s body to rot for a month or so to give Lady Sky time to have her child safely.” Kerim said the last sentence with bitter sarcasm reflecting, thought Sham, a fair portion of the hurt he was feeling.
“You have always resented him, haven’t you?” said Lady Tirra in the tone of soft discovery. “Why would you give him honor in death when you granted him none in life? We came here five years ago in the hope that you would find Ven an estate worthy of the Reeve’s brother, but instead you kept him here at your beck and call. You wouldn’t even make him heir to your office. Then, just when he might have come into wealth by marriage to Lady Sky, he is killed. I find it interesting that the other nobles killed by this . . . unknown killer opposed your policies.”
Kerim had regained control of his temper, and there was only sadness in his voice when he replied. “Lady, almostall the Eastern noblemen oppose most of my policies regarding the Southwood Lords. It would be difficult to find one who didn’t.”
“With the wealth of Lady Sky’s dowry, Ven would have been a problem for you,” commented Lady Tirra icily.
Sham looked at the bitter woman and saw, unexpectedly, the same strength in Lady Tirra that characterized her son. It might have been the resemblance that made Sham stop her; it might have been the white-knuckled grip Kerim’s hands had on the arms of his chair.
“Lady Tirra.” Sham watched as the other woman hesitated, as if she wanted to ignore her son’s mistress.
Stiffly, Tirra turned to her. “I see you have continued in your attempt to win attention by the strangeness of your attire.”
Sham looked at the black shirt and pants, grey with dust and smiled, but when she spoke, it was not a reply to the lady’s challenge. “Kerim has reasons for his actions, Lady Tirra. He has chosen to keep them from the rest of the Court, but I think you have the right to know the whole,”or , Sham thought,as much of the whole as I choose to reveal .
Without giving Kerim the opportunity to stop her, she continued. “As you said, there have been a number of murders of which your son was but the most recent victim. My lord has been utilizing some of my—” she cleared her throat gently, “—unusual talents, to trap the killer. In the last several days, we have become convinced that the killer was not what he appeared. The discovery of Lord Ven’s body last night merely confirmed those suspicions.”
Sham carefully met Lady Tirra’s eyes. For some inexplicable reason, people always thought that meant you were being honest with them. “Lady, Lord Ven was not killed last night; he has been dead for several days.”
The Lady stiffened and her eyes flashed and when she spoke her voice shook with a repressed emotion Shamera couldn’t put a name to. “You are mistaken. I talked to my son yesterday.”
“As did we all, Lady,” agreed Shamera, not ungently. “But all of us in this room saw Lord Ven’s body when it was found last night. He had been dead for several days.”
The Lady’s hands clenched, but her face remained cold. “Master Talbot, saw you this as well?”
Talbot bowed. “Yes, Lady. It is as Lady Shamera has spoken. I am passably familiar with death.”
“How do you purport to explain this?” Lady Tirra asked, finally addressing her son. The flare of anger had dissolved, leaving only a very tired woman who was no longer young.
He rubbed his hands on the smooth-sanded armrests of his chair and said bluntly, “Demons.”
His mother stared silently at him.
“Lady Tirra,” said Sham, “I assure you that there are such; ask any Southwoodsman of your acquaintance—perhaps the magician who keeps shop on the Street of Bakers and supplies your maid with the cream she rubs into your hair. Demons live among people and prey upon them. We have reason to believe that this one is living among the courtiers, looking as human as you or I. It has killed more people than just your son, but we are hopeful that Lord Ven’s death may lead us to it.”
Lady Tirra whitened a touch further. “Just what are your special talents that Lord Kerim would call upon you for aid?”
“Magic,” said Sham softly, and, with a gesture, snuffed all the candles and the fire in the fireplace, bringing shadows to the room, now lit only by skylights.
She waited a long breath then raised her hand and pulled a ball of magelight out of the shadows. Small at first, she manipulated the ball of light until pale illumination seeped from an oval source as tall as she was and twice as wide.
From the items Sham had found littering Kerim’s mother’s private rooms when she’d searched them several days previously, Lady Tirra was fascinated by the possibilities of magic. If Sham was convincing enough, Lady Tirra would leave here with the belief that Ven had been killed by a demon and Kerim was doing his best to find it. For Kerim’s sake it was important that Lady Tirra didn’t think he had killed his brother.
“I have heard that there is no magic in the East,” she said softly, “but here there is magic aplenty, and other things beyond the common ken. Selkies dance in waves of the sea, howlaas wail in the northern winds, Uriah skulk in the Great Swamp and here, in this Castle a demon walks the night.” As she spoke, she caused the surface of her magelight to flatten and shimmer with illusions to illustrate her words.
Sham had never actually seen any of the creatures that she spoke of, except possibly the selkie, but she’d heard stories since she was a child. From these childish images she drew lifelike pictures that filled the illusionetic mirror. The demon was particularly impressive. Sham let its image hang in the air for a moment, allowing the full impact of silver-edged claws and six eerie yellow eyes before calling the illusion back into the simple magelight as big around as a man’s fist.
She waved, and the candles relit themselves. The fireplace was harder, as some of the fodder still contained remnants of magic and didn’t want to burn, but it caught finally and sputtered to life. Sham dismissed the magelight.
Kerim’s mother swayed and would have fallen, but for Talbot’s quick support. Kerim tried to push his chair over the mound of disassembled bed that trapped him, but one wheel caught in a hole and the chair tipped precariously.
“Talbot’s got her, plague it. If you don’t stop it, you and the chair are going to be on top of me,” grunted Sham as she grabbed at the corner of his chair and braced herself against it until it stabilized.
“She’s fine, Lord,” said Talbot promptly, as he carried his burden to the couch and arranged her comfortably. “She’s a delicate Lady, unlike some here. The sight of that demon was enough to cause a grown man to faint, much less a gentlewoman.”
Reassured, Kerim helped Sham back his chair into the cleared space.
“I’m sorry,” apologized Sham. “I guess I got carried away with the demon.”
“You were able to remove the rune beneath the bed?” asked
Kerim, bending to heave one of the dark boards aside to clear a path through to the couch where his mother rested, deliberately refraining from commenting on her decision to tell Lady Tirra about the demon.
Sham nodded and took one end of a heavy bedpost and rolled it aside. “That should be the last of them. I’m afraid that it has left you rather short of clothing . . .”
The Reeve grunted as he managed to collapse the rest of the boards into a relatively flat pile that he muscled the chair over. Sham winced at the scratches the sharp edges of the narrow metal wheels left in the finely polished wood.
Talbot stepped away from the couch as Kerim rolled near his mother and hovered over her, holding her hand. In a voice designed to carry no further than Sham’s ears, Talbot commented, “Considering the poison she’s always spewing at him, he’s very concerned with her well-being.”
Sham glanced at the Kerim near the prone figure of Lady Tirra. “She’s all the family he has,” she said finally and turned to begin the task of rebuilding the bed.
Without a word Talbot helped her to lift the heavy baseboard and shift it into position. The bed was an old one, slotted and carved so it was held together like one of the intricately carved puzzles that were sold in the fairs. Sweating and straining, the sailor and Sham managed to slide the first of the four, heavy bedposts into position. Long before they were half-finished rebuilding the bed, Lady Tirra opened her eyes and struggled to sit up, pushing Kerim’s restraining hands away impatiently.
“You believe that demons killed my son?” Lady Tirra’s gaze was focused on the ground so that she might have been addressing anyone.
It was Kerim who chose to answer. “Yes, Mother. Furthermore, I believe that it is still here, waiting to kill someone else. I don’t know what it looks like, or how to destroy it—but it must be done before it kills again.”
Lady Tirra raised her dry eyes to meet Sham’s. “Why did you tell me this? I assume Kerim would have kept it to himself.”