A Bright and Terrible Sword Page 10

  It was the dogs. Always, from Shadow on, I had known that there was something strange and terrible about the grey dogs …

  Macon and Dick gave a great cry and collapsed to the ground. At the same moment, the two dogs threw back their heads and howled in pain. Kelif dropped to his knees, dragging me with him, and bent over the men. Macon’s eyes rolled back in his head. Dick gasped as if he would never catch his breath. It took several moments for them to stop convulsing, and then both moaned.

  Leo stood above us, his voice filled with satisfaction. ‘A good inhabiting.’

  Kelif looked at him, and for once there was a complex expression on that sleepy broad face: concern for his brother hisafs mingled with contempt for Leo’s lack of it. Leo did not notice. He had raised his gaze to the dogs, led a little way off by the other men, who now slipped the leashes from their great heads.

  The dogs looked no different. One sniffed at a hisaf’s boots; the other scratched its flank. Were Macon and Dick really ‘inhabiting’ – that was the word Leo had used – these animals?

  Yes.

  Such a dog had killed Straik. Such a dog had attacked Tarek, the savage chieftain. Such dogs had saved my life. They were dogs, but they were somehow directed – or partially directed – by the hisafs, who were simultaneously in their depleted bodies and in the animals. Just as I had been able to be, until recently, both in my tranced body in the land of the living and simultaneously walking in the Country of the Dead. Just as the men and women of Hygryll had been both in the round stone hut and also present as watchers in the grey vortex on the other side.

  And my father had created this living weapon, which had now spread to the Brotherhood. Just as the savages’ guns had spread to The Queendom and the Unclaimed Lands. Was it always thus, so that the world would always grow more dangerous with each new discovery?

  Leo pulled me to my feet, which led Kelif to rise, too. His eyes burned, just as when I had met him, with some hatred or fervour I did not understand. He put his face very close to mine and said softly, ‘I wanted you to see what awaits you.’

  I managed to say, ‘I cannot become a dog. I will not.’

  Leo gave a great shout of laughter, perhaps the most cruelty I have ever heard in a single sound. ‘You don’t understand yet, do you, Roger? But you will. Kelif, bring him back.’

  Leo vanished without another look at his barely conscious men. It was Kelif who said sadly to the strangers, ‘Ye maun guard them well. Please.’

  ‘Aye,’ one said, while the men lay weak on the ground and the dogs sat on their haunches, regarding us with their green eyes under the bleak and unchanging sky.

  ‘How does it work?’ I said softly to Charlotte. Rawnie lay asleep beside her, Kelif beside me. Sometime during the night the wind had risen, clouds had raced in, and drizzle had begun to fall. The four of us had been moved to sleep underneath the wagon, close to the fire, which had since sputtered and gone out. Rain pattered softly on the wagon bed above us, which smelled of wet wood. The ground felt hard beneath my back. Charlotte could not sleep, no more than I. ‘The dogs – how does it work?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘How much of a dog’s brain becomes hisaf’s? How much is still dog?’ Clearly the men could exert some control, including attacking at will.

  She whispered, ‘I only know what Rawley told me.’

  ‘Tell me.’ One of the two dogs padded into view, patrolling the camp. The Brotherhood would not be taken by surprise again, as they had with Straik’s death. Charlotte waited until the animal had passed, a grey shape in the grey drizzle.

  She said, ‘The dog is still a dog. The man’s soul rides quiescent most of the time, as if dreaming. Rawley says it’s not exactly boring, it’s more like dozing. But when the soul becomes alert, it can direct the dog’s actions, although the exertion is exhausting.’

  Mother Chilton admonishing me: ‘Everything has a cost, Roger Kilbourne – when will you learn that?’

  I said, ‘And afterwards? The dogs are from the Country of the Dead, they cannot stay here past a fortnight. They … disintegrate and melt away.’ Like Cecilia.

  ‘The full life force returns to the hisaf, and that is the most dangerous time. It’s like an attack on the body. Sometimes the hisaf does not survive the end of the inhabiting.’

  ‘And my father has done this? More than once?’

  ‘Yes. Rawley is very strong. It takes not just a strong body, you know, but also a strong will.’ Her soft voice held pride.

  ‘But how … what does he do to …’

  ‘He tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t understand. Maybe you will. He said that when he crossed over, instead of falling down a well, he made his mind climb up, out of the well. Does that make sense?’

  ‘No.’ Crossing over had never felt to me like falling down a well, but rather travelling through a grave. Was it different, then, for every hisaf? I didn’t know; I had never met another hisaf until this past year. I said, ‘How many hisafs are there? On either side of this war?’

  ‘I don’t know. Rawley never told me.’

  My mind raced. Ten men left here now, although I didn’t know if all of them were hisafs. But a pack of the grey dogs had rescued me once, on Soulvine Moor. A small pack but each animal carried the soul of a hisaf who was risking his life for me. Had my father commanded that? Why did the hisafs consider me worth so much trouble?

  I could not ask Charlotte that. But the question suggested another idea to me.

  ‘Charlotte – I don’t think Leo is going to turn us over to the men of Soulvine Moor to use in their … their ceremony.’ I could not bear to name it, nor to think of it.

  She stirred slightly. ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No. We’re certainly heading towards Soulvine, but I think we’re going beyond some border village. I think they’re taking us to Galtryf.’

  ‘To Rawley?’ she breathed. And then, ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Leo’s words howled in my brain: ‘I wanted you to see what awaits you’. But I didn’t know what he meant. If I was to be torn apart by a dog, as Straik had been, the Brotherhood could have done that already. If I was to ‘inhabit’ a dog, I did not see how I could be forced to do so, or why the hisafs would want me to. So why did they want me – and Charlotte and Rawnie – at Galtryf?

  Charlotte laid a grateful hand on my arm. I felt her relief; I had given her hope that she and her daughter would not die in the monstrous ‘ceremony’ practised by Soulvine Moor. Even without knowing what awaited us at Galtryf, my speculation felt like a reprieve to her. She would not have to watch Rawnie stretched out on a flat rock, stabbed through the heart, and then her young flesh …

  As always, my mind rebelled from the image. It was too close to what I had nearly endured, to what had been done to Cecilia. Instead, I dwelt on my own relief. If we were going to Galtryf, the Brotherhood was not using me to reach Maggie. They did not know about Maggie. She and my son were safe.

  And so, in pathetic gratitude for the lesser horror rather than the greater, Charlotte and I were both finally able to sleep.

  10

  The next day we crossed the border onto Soulvine Moor. The change was apparent immediately. Woods and wild, ravine-cracked mountains gave way to a vast, high, treeless plain. The undulating ground was covered with peat or coarse grasses between clumps of low purple flowers. Occasionally huge outcroppings of rock thrust up from the springy peat. These granite outcroppings somehow looked older than any stone in The Queendom. The occasional curlew wheeled overhead, crying shrilly.

  The wagons made slow progress over the uneven ground. Rawnie hung over the side, watching the monotonous landscape when she could not watch Leo. She missed nothing. ‘Mama, did you see that?’

  ‘No. What was it?’

  ‘A nest of birds – under those purple bushes. Oh look – a rabbit! Why are their ears so long?’

  I rose to my knees to peer over the side of the wagon, straining the chain
between Kelif and me. He grunted in mild protest but did not pull me back down. ‘Those rabbits are a different breed from the ones in The Queendom. Cousins.’ Jee had told me so.

  ‘Nobody asked you, Roger,’ Rawnie snapped. ‘Oh, there’s a—What are those?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlotte said wearily.

  In the far distance, barely visible, moved a herd of wild ponies. Rawnie’s eyesight must be almost as good as mine. I said, ‘Those are ponies. They breed wild on the moor.’

  ‘Ponies!’ Rawnie breathed. ‘I wish I could catch one!’ Her voice turned wistful. ‘I have a horse of my own, at home. Papa taught me to ride. He said I have a very good seat.’

  Immediately she regretted the confidence. A kick was aimed my way, but her chain would not stretch that far. She settled for making a dreadful face and turned her attention back to the moor. Her hand tightened on the little pack with her pet mouse.

  All at once I understood her dislike of me. Rawnie was jealous. Spoiled, petted, indulged, she had been her adored father’s only child until she learned about me, in the same moment she and her mother were ripped from their cottage, her horse, her life. In her child’s mind, I stood for loss and fear. It softened me towards her.

  Or perhaps I simply felt guilt for bringing yet another child into danger. Jee, Stephanie, Rawnie. And of course Katharine, whom I could barely stand to think about.

  I said, ‘Look over there, Rawnie – another rabbit!’

  ‘Eat dung, Roger.’

  I gave it up. Anyway, I wanted to think in peace. Climbing up a well instead of falling down into it … Had Charlotte remembered my father’s words correctly? If so, what did they mean?

  Throughout the day the wagons rumbled along, staying as much as possible on higher ground. Once a wheel sagged into a particularly spongy patch of peat and we were all ordered out while Straik’s men, cursing, lifted the wheel. Later one of the dogs startled a nest of grouse and they rose nearly straight up into the air, scolding and flapping. Rawnie turned to me almost defiantly.

  ‘What are those birds?’

  ‘Grouse.’

  ‘Do you know much about the moor?’

  Too much. ‘I know some.’

  ‘How?’ she demanded.

  ‘Friends taught me.’ Jee. Fia. Tom Jenkins, the best tracker in three lands. Pain smote me. I would never see Tom again.

  ‘Why do you look like that? Are your friends dead?’

  She missed nothing. I said, ‘Some of them are.’

  ‘Oh.’ Then, a moment later, ‘What are those flowers called?’

  The rest of the afternoon she asked me questions. When I didn’t know the answers, I made them up. During a brief respite, while Rawnie dozed with her head on her mother’s lap, I studied the dogs. They looked like Shadow, like Shep, like Hunter, like every other of their kind that I had seen. Were they really carrying the life force – the souls – of Macon and Dick, as quiescent in them as were the Dead on the other side? And like the Dead when I roused them – the ones I could rouse anyway, which were mostly old women – Macon and Dick could be roused to direct the dogs to attack, to kill.

  Climbing up a well instead of falling down into it …

  I picked one of the dogs, concentrated on it, and then changed my mind. No. Too dangerous. If I succeeded—but, no, I would not succeed, Charlotte said my father had needed much practice to cross over into the mind of a dog. That was a web woman’s art, not a hisaf’s. But if I should succeed, then Macon or Dick would be there already, and then what?

  No.

  Rawnie was back, standing beside me in the swaying wagon. Either her resentment of me had lessened or she was hiding it for reasons of her own. I was beginning to think her fully as good an actor as Leo.

  ‘Roger, there’s a light!’

  Dusk had fallen. At the bottom of a long sloping hill an eerie light shifted over the ground, pale and flickering and somehow cold. The country folk thought it was the souls of the dead who could not cross over. I knew better. All Dead crossed over.

  ‘It’s marsh gas. There’s a bog in that low-lying place. Bogs are very dangerous. One can swallow a grown man.’

  ‘It can!’ She was thrilled. ‘And what’s that?’

  I didn’t see anything.

  ‘There, Roger! Are you blind? It’s moving slow and careful …’

  With difficulty I made out the skulking animal, all but hidden by bushes and dusk. Although I had never seen one before, Jee had told me about them. ‘It’s a moor cur.’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘No. A beast somewhere between a jackal and a wolf.’

  Rawnie strained to see. ‘Is it dangerous?’

  ‘They can hunt. But they prefer to eat dead things. Carrion.’

  She turned her head to look at me, her thin face alight. ‘How dead?’

  I shrugged. ‘Dead is dead, Rawnie.’ Although not if Soulvine Moor succeeded in their quest.

  Rawnie snorted. ‘Don’t be so stupid, Roger! I mean, how many days does something have to be dead before it’s too rotten for moor curs to eat?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She rolled her eyes and went back to peering at the moor cur. ‘It’s coming closer. Do you think it’s hungry?’

  The beast had crept towards us. Larger than I had thought, it had silver-black fur and big, pointed ears. Its hindquarters were so large and powerful that it looked misshapen. The wind shifted and I caught its scent, pungent and raw.

  ‘Probably it’s hungry, yes.’

  ‘There are two! See that other one way back there – I’ll wager that’s his wife. Do you think they would eat me if I was dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What if I were still alive?’

  ‘Yes, if it cornered you and it was hungry enough. They have powerful jaws.’

  ‘Can it run faster than me?’

  ‘Much faster.’

  ‘I would fight it,’ Rawnie said seriously. ‘I would outwit it.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I would. I would kill it dead, dead, dead and then I would skin it and make myself a cloak of its fur. But before that I would bash in its head and gouge out its eyes and—’

  ‘Rawnie,’ Charlotte said, without hope.

  ‘—and cut out its heart and … oh! We’re stopping. That’s good, I’m hungry.’

  The wagons halted for the night. The moor curs disappeared. Leo shouted directions at his men, who were already doing what was necessary. We had stopped at the base of a great hill topped by a tor, a rounded outcropping of bedrock. Coarse grasses blanketed the area, dotted with patches of low green moss and waist-high clumps of heather. A golden plover, startled by our arrival, took wing from a stand of grass and one of the dogs streaked after it, barking furiously. From the side of the hill a spring burbled, forming a small pool before the water was sopped up by the damp peat. We made camp far enough from the spring to avoid the worst of the dampness, and men filled our waterbags.

  It is wearying to ride all day in a jolting wagon, chained to a taciturn giant and a chattering child. As soon as we had eaten, I wanted to return alone to the wagon, or under it, or perhaps just lie on the open ground and sleep. But Kelif sat by the fire, and so I did, too, staring blearily into the night. Stars blazed overhead.

  Rawnie, also tired, said little. She didn’t even try to convince Leo of her adoration, or ask him for another display of acting. She sat with her head bent over the pack on her lap, one hand thrust inside it. For just a moment I glimpsed her mouse, its pink nose and quivering whiskers, before she pushed it back inside, glancing fearfully to see who had noticed. In that moment she seemed less an obnoxious and conniving nuisance and more a pathetic child.

  She caught me looking at her and stuck out her tongue.

  I gazed into the night. The larger moor cur had crept towards the pool under the spring. So far the dogs, both asleep by the fire, had not scented it. I could barely make out its silver fur as it moved, and then drank.


  Climbing up a well instead of falling down into it …

  Staring at the moor cur, I concentrated my will, just as I did when crossing over. Charlotte had not said that pain was necessary for this, but in case it was, I bit down on my tongue. A well, a well … I pictured myself wedged inside a stone well such as Maggie and I had had at Applebridge, about a metre from the top, my back braced against the curved side of the well and my good hand extended to hold myself in place. I could almost feel the stone at my spine, smell the water below, see the gleam of sky above me. Climb, climb by inching my body upward—

  Nothing happened. I did not cross over to the Country of the Dead, and I did not inhabit the moor cur. I stayed beside the fire, and nothing had changed. I was still headed to Galtryf and whatever terrible fate Leo had planned for me there.

  Several nights later, lying under the wagon on that barren and wild moor, I dreamed for the first time of my son.

  But it was Princess Stephanie that I actually saw. The little princess, who would be seven years old in a few weeks, appeared in a wavering landscape I could not identify. It might have been a garden, or a wood, or even a courtyard. Although the surroundings flickered and flowed, Stephanie seemed almost shockingly solid, as if I could reach out and touch her. The lessons she was receiving from Mother Chilton must be refining her talent. Her forehead crinkled.

  ‘Roger, your baby got born.’ More creasing of the forehead. ‘And another, too. I don’t understand … oh, be careful, that one is such a bad thing!’

  ‘Your Grace,’ I tried to say, and the effort woke me. I lay under the wagon. Rain pattered lightly on the wood above. One of the dogs passed by on silent patrol. Kelif and Rawnie both snored. And the sweat of pure panic soaked my already chilled clothes.