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dribbled slime-trail the thing had left, back towards the barn. "Does Prince Chare know about this?"
"Ari brought him into the infirmary this morning, while the guy you saw was still alive. Chare kept talking
about resistance fighters from the countryside and what horrible weapons they carried that could do that,
and how we'll all just have to be more careful."
"Weapons my ass. Yike!" she added, as Battlesow slipped the lantern-slide and raised the lantern to
throw yellow light into the root-cellar before them. "He can't be one of ours," she added, studying the
youthful, snub-nosed face what could be seen of it under the blood and the expensive if tattered
clothing.
Butcher shook her head. "Look at his hands. He was somebody's clerk, or a student. He isn't even
wearing a sword, look. Poor sap must have just been walking home." She looked around her at the
darkness. "What the hellisit, Hawk? Sun Wolfs been learning hoodoo for two years now, and that things
hoodoo if I ever saw it."
"I'm guessing it's a wight of some sort," said Starhawk. "According to the books the Chief picked up in
Vorsal they're usually hungry like that. When they meld into corpses they often have some kind of vague
memories or thoughts picked up from the brain of the corpse, but they're not bright enough to take
orders or anything. And if itisa wight, we'd better make ourselves scarce, because wights are "
Her hand flipped up for silence and in the same instant, it seemed, Butcher rapped shut the lantern-slide.
The three warriors pressed automatically back against the wall and slid along it, getting clear of the boy's
corpse, swords held low in the shadows beside them but ready again.
The stink of the wight was like drowning in rotting glue.
White movement where the starlight struck, in front of the ruined barn. A vast obscene wriggling under
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the filthy shroud. Bony hands groping over the ground.
Battlesow leaned to breathe in Starhawk's ear, starlight slipping over the shaved curve of her head, the
glister of the five-carat diamond in her earlobe. "What's it looking for?"
"Probably," breathed Starhawk back, "its teeth." She'd seen several go flying when Battlesow decked
the wight.
The bony fingers fumbled something up from the mud, traveled to the slobbery mouth. Then back to the
earth, picking at pebbles, old nails, miscellaneous animal-bones and snail-shells. Looking more closely,
Starhawk saw how the thing's head was wrapped in a sort of dirty turban, beneath which wisps of hair
hung down, faded in the blanched light like frost-painted grass. Butcher raised her sword a little she
could amputate a leg in fifteen seconds and Starhawk touched her hand, and shook her head.
"Cutting it to pieces won't help," she breathed. "It'll still come after us."
"If this situation gets any better I'll burst into song. Where's Sun Wolf when you need him?"
"Where's any man when you need him?" muttered Battlesow.
The wight froze.
Pox rot it, thought Starhawk,it heard us.
It was on its feet then and turning, not towards them but in the direction of the black crumbled debris of
what had been the main farm building, as two figures emerged from the darkness. One stepped forward,
lifting a halberd a woman, the Hawk identified it, by the movement more than by the dim glimpse of
trailing braids and the wight fell on the newcomer, knocking her down and aside with the force of its
rush. The second figure, also female though both were clad as men in breeches, tunics, and boots, sprang
to her companions defense, slashing with another halberd, a weapon whose length and leverage were
often chosen to compensate for a woman's lighter weight and shorter reach.
Drawn off its first victim, the wight whirled upon the second, and by that time Battlesow, Butcher, and
Star-hawk had reached the struggling group. Disregarding all Starhawk's warnings about dismemberment
Battlesow plowed in like a demented woodchopper on hashish, Daffodil rising and falling in time to
battle-cries like the shrill barking of a very small dog. Wriggling, serpent-sized maggots flew and
splacked on the damp earth; one brown-gummed bony hand whirled away and crawled spider-wise into
the ruins. Mewing and pawing, the wight backed off and fled; Starhawk and Butcher had to grab
Battlesow to keep her from following it into the darkness.
"Stinking thing." Battlesow spit after it. "That'll teach it."
"It won't," pointed out Starhawk. "They don't learn. They just come back. Indefinitely. Whatever you do
to them, they incorporate into themselves. Absorb it, and make it part of their attack."
"I was married to a man like that once," remarked Butcher.
They turned back. The tubulate, serpent-like growths had already crawled away from the ruined
dooryard. One of the two newcomer women gave over trying to help her friend to her feet and sprang up
herself, grabbing her halberd and bracing herself for another attack.
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"Relax," said Starhawk, crossing to them and stopping just out of halberd-range, not that she thought
either woman capable of doing much damage. She sheathed her sword and her dagger, and held up her
hands to show them empty. "That thing yours?"
The two women one standing, the other, whom the wight had first borne down, scrambling painfully to
her feet looked at one another, then at Starhawk and her friends. The older woman, scrawny as a
cut-rate chicken a poor housewife would have to boil for most of a day, said at length, "In a manner of
speaking. Are you all right, Elia?"
"More or less." Her friend brushed filth and soot from her sleeves, wiped the spattered slime of the
wight's mouth off her face, to reveal a plain, square-jawed, motherly countenance. She leaned her
halberd against the wall near her and held out her hand to Starhawk. "I am Elia, representative to the
town council of Horran from the Seven Streets district. This is Teryne."
"Starhawk of Wrynde. Butcher," she nodded back at the others who still watched, weapons ready, for
the return of the wight, "and Battlesow. Why 'in a manner of speaking'? Did you call it into being?"
Teryne spat, a crones eloquence. Elia said, "No. I was not informed of the town council meeting at
which the decision to to create such a thing was taken." She added drily, "From all I can learn, a
number of us weren't."
"I could have told them," Teryne said in her harsh, surprisingly deep voice. "I did tell them, Brannis
Cornmonger, and Mowyer Silks, and all their merchant friends. Told them old Aganna Givna was so
angry and spiteful in her old age that if they opened up her tomb and let the charnal-wight claim her body,
the way that book of theirs told them how, she'd turn on anyone she could get at, not just the troops of
the Prince."
"Book?" Like Sun Wolf, Starhawk was always on the lookout for the ancient lore of the craft, the only
remnant of teaching left. "They had a book of magic?"
The old woman gestured like one shooing flies. "Brannis Cornmonger, that's Mayor though now he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]