The Dark God: Servant Part 4

He turned to his oldest son. "You're going to have to take my place," he said.

"Why should you go?" asked his wife. "n.o.body else will be there. n.o.body would dare." She sat at the table braiding the youngest boy's hair for bed.

"They will," he said. "They're counting on me. But I'll be back soon enough. And I think I know a way to take this whole b.l.o.o.d.y mess off of your mind. We'll go fis.h.i.+ng tomorrow."

She looked at him in disbelief. "Fis.h.i.+ng?"

He leaned in close then whispered in her ear so the children couldn't hear. "Happy plans will put the children at ease."

She looked down and said nothing.

Barg kissed her gently on the cheek. Then he considered his girl and two boys. The firelight sparkled in their dark eyes. To think they had played with that woman's hatchlings.

"I'll be back soon enough," he a.s.sured them. "We're taking quarter watches is all." Then he belted on his sword and picked up his spear. Foss, their hunting dog, rose to go with him, and Barg opened the door.

The smoke in the room curled out into the night. Barg pointed at the children. "You do your ch.o.r.es and get to bed and when you wake up in the morning, we'll be off."

"To the river or the beach?" asked his oldest.

They loved the beach. It would be a long day, but it would give them something to think about.

"The beach," he said. "We'll roast crabs."

Then he shut the door behind him. He took a long drink of water from the bucket at the well then set off down the path that led to the Smith's ruin, Foss padding along at his side.

Smoke from the fires still hung heavily in the air. At the other end of the village, the last remains of Sparrow's house smoldered. The fires had burned low, but they still cast enough light to silhouette the barn and outbuildings of the house next to Barg's.

Barg glanced back at his house a few times as he walked. The shutters were latched and snug. His wife had barred the door. They would be fine.

As Barg got closer to the site, he looked about for the others. There were supposed to be ten men on each watch. Perhaps they were all bunched up behind the barn. But when he rounded the corner of the barn, he found his wife had been right: n.o.body was there.

A few small fires still licked the last remains of Sparrow's house and smithy. Barg skirted around the wide area of ash and burning coals, for the whole mess still produced a blistering heat. A small flame rose at the edge of a blackened log close to him only to disappear moments later. He paused. All was silent except for the crackling and popping of the fire. He looked at the surrounding houses of the village.

Cowards.

He'd roust them out of bed, every one.

Then something moved in the shadows at the edge of where the house had stood. Barg peered into the swallowing darkness. A tall man moved aside a charcoal log, kicking up sparks. It looked like the miller. He reached into the hot coals and pulled something out.

"Ha," Barg called to him. "It's good to see there's more than one stout heart among us."

Foss stopped and began to growl.

Then the man straightened up and turned, and Barg got a look at him in the firelight.

That was not the miller. He was taller than anyone Barg had ever seen, but his arms and legs weren't proportioned like a man's; they were thicker than they should be. And his face-it was all wrong. He had a mouth that was dark, ragged, and huge. A mouth that seemed to crack his head in two.

That was no man.

A tuft of hair on the creature's arm caught fire. The flamed brightly then receded into red and yellow sparks that fell to the ground. And Barg realized it wasn't hair. It was gra.s.s. Patches all along its arm had burned, some of them still full of dull red sparks. A clump of smoldering gra.s.s fell from the creature's arm to the ground.

Barg saw what the creature held. It was Sparrow's scorched leg, reduced almost completely to bone.

The creature flung Sparrow's leg aside and began to walk toward Barg. The ashes and coals of the smithy stood between them, but the creature did not walk around them. It walked straight into the blistering coals, over a tangle of charcoal logs, and through one of the remaining fires. The long ragged gra.s.s about its legs began to burn and smoke, but the creature did not waver or cry out.

G.o.ds, Barg thought. Keep your calm. Keep your calm.

The thing's mouth gaped like a cavern. Its eyes. Lords, where were its eyes? And then he saw them-two pits all askew.

Filthy rot. Filthy, twisted rot! Regret himself had sent this thing.

Barg brought his spear up, took two steps, and, with all his might, yelled and hurled the weapon.

The creature did not flinch or step aside, and the spear buried itself in the creature's chest.

"To arms!" Barg shouted and unsheathed his sword. "We're attacked! To arms! To arms!"

There would be others here shortly. And together they would dispatch this monster. All Barg had to do was keep his courage. Keep it like he'd done this morning and not run away.

The creature strode on as if nothing had happened. It plucked the spear out of its chest, like a man plucking straw from his tunic, and flung it into the ashes.

Foss surged forward to the edge of the coals, but Barg took a step backward. He glanced at the homes; n.o.body had emerged. It was just him and his sword.

The creature strode forward.

G.o.ds, but it was huge. Barg took another step back, and then he turned and fled.

Foss stayed back. He snarled, barked, then let out a huge yelp. A moment later Barg heard the dog running. Barg glanced back. Foss was stretched out, galloping for his life. Behind him, the creature loped after them both, a thin line of fire burning up one of its sides.

Foss pa.s.sed Barg and ran towards the house. Barg turned and realized he was running the wrong way: he was running away from the other houses and help. But to go back to the houses meant he would have to run back toward the beast.

Then the door to his house opened. The firelight shone into the night, silhouetting his wife standing in the doorway.

"No," he yelled. "Go back!" But he knew it was too late. The creature surely would have seen her, which meant that now, even if Barg were to change his direction, the monster might not follow him.

"Get the children!" he yelled as he ran into the yard.

"Barg?" his wife said in alarm. Then her face twisted in horror and she backed into the house.

The creature chuffed behind him.

Barg spun around, holding his sword at the ready.

The thing stood not ten paces away. The fire had risen and burned its shoulder and head.

Courage, Barg told himself. All he needed was a bit of courage.

There was movement in the village. Men began to shout, but they ran the wrong way. They ran to the smith's.

"To me!" he cried. "To me!"

The creature opened its mouth wide and drew in a hoa.r.s.e breath. It turned its head toward the door of the house.

Barg thought of his daughter, his son, his excellent wife just behind the door. "No, you won't," said Barg. "You filthy abomination, you'll feel my steel first!" Then he let out a yell, and, for the second time today, charged, his blade held high.

The creature turned back to face him.

Barg brought his blade down in a cut that would have cleaved a man from collar bone to belly.

But the creature simply grabbed the blade in midswing, reached out with its free, rough hand, and took Barg by the face.

Barg struggled in its stony grasp. And then he was slipping, twisting, falling into another place entirely.

Miles away, Sugar crouched in the moon shadows at the edge of the forest and looked across a river at the farmstead of Hogan the Koramite. The man she knew as Horse.

"Is the water deep?" whispered Legs.

"I don't know," said Sugar.

"Do you think he will help?"

"This is where Mother sent us," said Sugar. But in her heart she knew the chances of him helping them were slim. If Horse harbored them, he put his whole family at risk. But if he delivered them to the hunt, he, even as a Koramite, would earn a fortune.

"I think I'm wicked," said Legs.

"You're not wicked," said Sugar.

"I should have listened to the wisterwife."

"What are you talking about?"

"Sometimes, when I held the charm, she would call to me like I was lost."

Sugar looked at her brother. She'd never heard of such a thing. "She called to you?"

"In my mind. I could see her. She was beautiful. And sometimes I could see something else with her. Something made of earth, dark and wild and . . ."

Sugar waited while Legs found the words.

"Something in her voice," he said, "it was horrible and wonderful. Every time I heard her, fear stabbed me because I didn't want someone to think I was like old Chance. I didn't want to be mad and taken to the altars for hearing voices in my head. And so I never answered. She said that the fullness of time had come. She promised to make me whole. Promised all sorts of things. Lunatic promises. But I was too scared. I think she wanted to help."

She thought of Mother and her horrible speed, her terrible secrets. All this time they'd thought the wisterwife charm was a blessing, a gift. It was an annual ritual for most people to fas.h.i.+on a Creator's wreath and hang it above their door to draw the blessings of the wisterwives. The wreaths were fas.h.i.+oned with rock and leaf, feathers and bones. Many set out a gift of food or cast it upon the waters. But Regret had his servants as well. So who knew what this charm really was? That charm could be anything. "You think it was real?"

"I don't know what to think." His voice caught. Sugar couldn't see his tears in the darkness, but he held his head the way he always did when he was in pain.

Sugar wanted to cry with him, wanted to feel overwhelming grief. But she was empty, as desolate as rock. And that pained her as much as anything else. What kind of daughter was it that had no tears for the butchering of her parents?

And what kind of daughter was it that ran? She'd had her knife the whole time. Furthermore, she'd been trained how to use it.

"Da always said you were an uncanny judge of character," said Sugar. "If your heart tells you to be afraid, then let's trust it. Da would have."

Legs leaned into her, and she took him into an embrace, putting his face in her neck and stroking his hair.

Things to act and things to be acted upon. She had a knife. Lords, she'd had at least six, for there were a number in the kitchen. She could have done something. She could have sent Legs to the pheasant house, gone around back herself and surprised that line of bowmen. She could have distracted a whole group of men. She might have tipped the battle.

Why? Why had she run!

And if she hadn't run, if, beyond hope, she'd tipped the battle, what then? She'd seen Mother. Seen her horrible power.

Legs gently pulled away. "Will we talk to Horse?"

They had no tools to survive in the wild. Besides, an army of hunters would be combing the outer woods, expecting them to run there. If Horse helped them, and that was a desperate if, then maybe they might be able to survive until all but the most patient hunters gave up dreams of a bounty and went back to their normal labors. If she and Legs survived that long, that's when they would escape.

"I don't know," said Sugar. "Let's just take this one step at a time. Right now we need to find where they ford this river."

5.

Thieves TALEN, SON OF HORSE, sat at the wooden table in nothing but his underwear because he had no pants. Somehow, during the middle of the night, they had walked off the peg where he'd hung them. And he'd searched high and low. The last of their cheese was missing as well.

The cheese he could explain: if you were hungry and a thief, then a cheese would be a handy meal to take. But it was not the regular poverty-stricken thief who roamed miles off of the main roads, risked entering a house, and pa.s.sed up many other fine and more expensive goods to steal a pair of boy's dirty trousers hanging on a peg in the loft.

No, there wasn't a thief in the world who would do that. But there was an older brother and a sister who would.

Talen had two pair of pants to his name. And he wasn't about to ruin his good pair by working in them. He needed his work pants. And to get those, he needed leverage. The good news was that he knew exactly which items would provide that leverage.

It only took a few moments to find and hide them. Then he went back to the house, cut three slices of dark bread, and put them on a plate in the middle of the table next to the salted lard.

River, his sister, came in first from outside carrying a ma.s.sive armload of rose stems cl.u.s.tered with fat rosehips. Talen sighed. She had fifteen bushels of the stuff in the back already. Were they going to make rosehip syrup for the whole district? And he knew he'd be the one that would have to cut each and every hip and remove the seeds so her syrup didn't end up tasting like chalk. It was a th.o.r.n.y business, even if he did wear gloves.

River walked to the back room to deposit her load and returned. Blood spattered her ap.r.o.n. A thick spray ran from her cheek to throat.

"What happened to you?"

"Black Jun," she said. "The cow that was bred by that rogue bull, her water broke last night, but the calf was too big." She shook her head. "Jun's brother-in-law from Bain cut into her this morning and made a mess of it."

"Did she die?" asked Talen.

"Not yet," said River, "but such a wound, even with old Nan's poultice, would take a Divine's hand to keep it from corruption." River had been apprenticed to Nan who had midwifed as many cattle as she had humans. That's where River saw how to take a calf that was too big by cutting in from the side. That's where she'd learned about the virtues of everything from pennyroyal to seeding by moonlight. She could have learned far more, but old Nan went out late in a rainstorm one night and tumbled down a steep slope to her death. Even so, if River said the wound was bad, it was bad.