The Nethergrim (14 page)

“‘And there, in those chambers, did I see with mine own eyes his works in all their dread and decaying splendor, for rotting there in that cold sanctuary lay the hoarded wealth of centuries, taken by force and fear and left to ruin in a lightless grotto. Upon the star lay seven children. The people wept for fury and for shame as the light of their torches did fall upon the crypt where stood the little graves set row upon row upon row.’”

The fire crackled alone for a while.

Katherine shook herself. “But it can’t be the Nethergrim. Tristan killed him—he’s dead. My father was there.”

Edmund looked up at her across the parchment expanse of the book.

She sighed. “I’ll talk to him.”

Chapter
14

D
ew lay on the grass and mist rolled above it as Katherine walked home in the gray-black quiet of the hour before dawn. She crept across the yard just as the first traces of coming light touched the distant edges of the moors. She stopped to listen at the door of her house—no sound from within, no smoke from the chimney, but the window had been left unshuttered. She leaned in and pressed the door open with the greatest care, only to find her father seated in shadow at the table, still in his cloak and riding boots.

“Katherine,” he said. “You should have waited for the sun.”

“Tom came with me on the road.” Katherine stepped in and shut the door. Chill had taken hold of the house after a day and a night without fire. She reached for the flint and tinder by the hearth.

“I spoke to Edmund last night.” She sparked the lantern to life and set it on the table between them. “He thinks the Nethergrim has returned.”

Her father looked away, out through the open window. The light found him old, drew in the lines around his eyes, found the gray in his hair and hid the brown.

“He has a book, Papa. I don’t know where he got it. He found some things in this book, about the bolgugs, and the other thing we saw—the thornbeast. They’re the Nethergrim’s servants, the ones who help him take children away. Edmund read about all the horrible things that he’s done, and—Papa, what happened on that mountain?”

Her father put his head in his hands.

“Papa?” She reached out for him. “Papa, please . . . what’s wrong?”

Dawn broke across the stubble on his jaw. “Have I ever told you how I first met Tristan?”

“No, Papa.”

He turned to her. “My daughter. I owe you as much truth as I can bear to give. When I am finished, I will tell you what you must do, and you will obey me. Do you understand me, Katherine?”

A void opened in the pit of Katherine’s stomach. She sat down. Her father breathed in, then out.

“I come from the Burrs, a long line of hills through the downlands on the southern border of the kingdom. My father—your grandfather—was a stable groom, a man who had spent his whole life caring for horses. That is the trade my brother William and I spurned for the adventure of war. We hired on as men-at-arms in the garrison of our lord, and it was there that I met Tristan for the first time. You might not believe that your papa was ever young, but I was—very young, not much older than you are now.”

He looked down at his scarred and calloused hands, and clenched them in. “I was there the night our lord tried to storm the home castle of the Duke of Westry. I was one of the men who scaled the gatehouse and let down the bridge for Tristan and the other knights. Your uncle William died there, on the ladder next to mine. I wish he could have seen you.”

Katherine recoiled. It felt for one disorienting moment as though she was seeing her dear old papa for the very first time. She saw through what he had worked to become, to what he had been before—a lonely, frightened man who had lost too much, too young.

“After the war,” he said, “I was very much adrift. My brother was dead, as was my liege lord. Tristan, my captain and my hero, had fled the battlefield. I was not yet twenty, yet I felt I had made such disastrous errors that my life now stretched before me without joy or purpose. I had followed a greedy fool, and in my desire for glory made myself imagine we had a cause beyond his greed. Now we that remained of his army splintered and made for home, and tried to forget all that we had seen and done.

“William was the younger brother, the apple of our mother’s eye. I had promised to look after him. They never forgave me when I came home to tell them he was dead. They did not curse me, but they would not stop grieving, and after a while I could no longer stand the sting of it. I left them to be alone with my thoughts, promising I would return one day to set everything right. I never did.

“I won’t say much of the time that followed. I don’t care to remember it. I made my living as a groom, wandering farther and farther north, sleeping in grange and byre and keeping myself to myself. There were places I could have stopped, folk I would have liked well enough to make my friends, but I would not, and as I lay awake in yet another haystack, I would wonder why I could not stop roving, until I realized one night that I was searching for Tristan.

“I did not at first know why I was looking for him. I thought I hated him. If you ever go to my homeland, you will find many folk there have a very different opinion of Tristan than they do here. He was a deserter, a false hero, never mind the fact that the battle was already lost when he left it. If he was such a hero, they said, why did he abandon us at our greatest need? I thought for a while that I wanted to kill him, or at least drag a confession from him, an apology, an explanation for all that had happened. I dreamed of finding him one day and hurling my grief at him, shouting, ‘Why did you not stay? I believed in you. I thought we could not be doing so wrongly if you were there to lead us. It had to mean something if you were there, but then you ran, and I was left alone with my doubt.’

“As the miles and faces slid past me, though, I came to know that I wished to find him for a different reason. I wanted only to know if he felt as sorry as I did for what we had done, and whether he knew if there was a way to make the nightmares stop.

“Quite by chance, I came into the north not long after Tristan, though I did not know it at the time. I found work as a groom and stablehand in the town of Bale, where your friend Edmund was born, just down in Quentara over the hills. I remember the winter morning when a fellow groom rushed into the stables where I was mucking out the stalls and gave me the news that was racing through the town. A hamlet newly founded on the old West Road into the Girth had been sacked by fiendish creatures and its people driven out. The Nethergrim was rising, and that was news enough, for Quentara’s north and west borders are hard against the mountains, and they had as much to fear from the Nethergrim as anyone. But what made me drop my shovel was not the fear of bolgugs. The groom told me of the desperate defense of the village hall, and the three-day flight to Elverain afterward. This tale had a hero, a knight from the south who had rallied the people, fighting trog and mound-boggan single-handed, driving back their host again and again as he led the villagers to safety. Without this man, it was said, not a soul would have reached Northend alive. They even had a name for him.

“I had found Tristan at last. I left Bale that same day, and walked through the new year’s snow to Rushmeet and then north, and so crossed the borders of Elverain for the first time in my life.

“It was the simplest thing, when I arrived. I was expecting to have to look for him, to wheedle an audience somehow, but when I walked across the drawbridge of the castle, there he was in the ward, standing upon a cart and exhorting the folk of the castle to rally with him, asking for men to follow him against the Nethergrim. He knew me when he saw me, though we had spoken only once or twice before. I must have seemed like a ghost from his past, but his eyes lit up in welcome as I approached. I knew then that I did not need to ask him anything. I pledged to follow Tristan, then and there, and though there was death and darkness and fear in our future, it was the saving of me.

“Soon enough, as you know, we had gotten quite a band together—the Ten Men of Elverain, as they called us. Tristan and Vithric, of course, and Sir Unwin, who was there when I arrived. He was the eldest; he must have been forty-five or so. A local man from Roughy, but a veteran of the wars from away south. Lord Aelfric is a friend to the Duke of Westry, and so had sent a small force under Unwin to fight against our old lord in the wars. Tristan and I could easily have met Unwin in battle a few years before we came north, and let me tell you, I’m glad we didn’t. Then of course the Twins, Owain and Bram, the finest archers I have ever known. Bram was the better shot, by the way, just to settle that argument—but only by a little. Owain did not really mind, since he was a better shot than everyone else, and quicker with a sword. A better singer, too, and fancied himself the more handsome of the pair, hard as it was to tell them apart.

“Then there was Bill Piper, the spearmaster, Thoderic, sword-and-hatchet man, and Quicksilver Jack from Tumble Bridge—what a terror he was! You couldn’t ask for a quicker hand when he was sober, but the trouble always lay in keeping him sober. And then of course your uncle Hubert Upfield. A great ox of a man—your cousin Martin is his very image, head to toe. Once we taught Hubert how to fight with that mattock, he was like a walking siege tower.

“Good men, all.” He said it near to a sigh. “Good friends. How I miss them sometimes.”

He shook himself. “Well—we had come together at the right moment, that was certain. Even as Tristan and Vithric assembled our band, foul creatures of all sorts started to harass the edges of Elverain and Quentara as they had not done in many years. We rode all about the borders, hunting and being hunted, sometimes with levies of local men but as often as not alone. During those early months we stayed near settled lands and played our part in the events of the day.”

“The Siege of Mithlin Mill,” said Katherine. “The Battle of the Potter’s Field.”

“Yes, that sort of thing—and all the while Vithric was watching, recording, thinking. I had few thoughts beyond the next campaign, the next urgent message from harried peasants, but Vithric was in the opening moves of a great game against the Nethergrim. I cannot possibly rate his intellect too highly. Our enemies were monstrous things, striking out of cover, out of shadow and mist without warning. We should have been ten steps behind them always, but Vithric found patterns, traces of the mind of our enemy in every maneuver. There seemed no depth he could not sound. He and Tristan would confer together at our lodgings long into the night, and the rest of us began to find ourselves in the right place when trouble struck more often than not. The attacks diminished. The people were glad, and so were we, but Vithric told us that our enemy was not in retreat. The Nethergrim’s forces had been pulled back in preparation for a more determined strike, one that Vithric said might overrun all of the north. We thus resolved to take the fight into the mountains as soon as we could.

“The following spring, when the passes were clear, we made our first sorties into the Girth. It is a vast and lovely place, though teeming with danger. I would like to have seen it in more peaceful times. I won’t say too much of it, only that we found bolgugs there, and boggans, quiggans and things for which I had no names. We found ruins there as well, which was a surprise to everyone save for Vithric. They were quite a sight, even in their decay. There were great blockish manses and squat towers crumbled almost to the foundations, with narrow cellar stairs that led down to places I’d rather not describe. We found and searched as many of them as we could, routing the awful things that had taken up residence there.

“As the months went by, we came to understand that we were involved in a game of cat and mouse. We would probe the defenses, searching the ruins we found for some clue that would lead us to the lair of the Nethergrim, and all the while its creatures would be on the hunt for us. We had to choose our battles very carefully, and still our explorations were not without loss. Thoderic was slain in battle on one of those journeys, and none of us escaped without wounds, but we gave our enemies enough to worry about that the attacks back in settled country slowed to a trickle. We found great stone tablets carved with very strange writing, and after a while Vithric seemed to learn how to read them. By autumn he must have learned enough, for he and Tristan assembled us in secret council at the castle.

“We met in Lord Aelfric’s chambers late one autumn evening. I remember it was windy that night—the shutters moaned and rattled, but it was far too cold outside to open them. The Twins, being youngest, had to stand since there were not enough chairs. Vithric lit a single candle, and we all leaned forward to listen to him. I can still see those faces, just as they were. ‘The Nethergrim is asleep’ was the first thing he told us.”

“Asleep?” said Katherine.

Her father chuckled. “Not quite what we had expected to hear, either. Vithric told us that the Nethergrim had arisen before, in long-ago days out of all record save for the tablets we had found. It had been placed into a deathless slumber by a mighty spell—we had the great misfortune of living in a time when that spell was about to end. Our only chance was to find the Nethergrim before it awoke. Aelfric considered awhile—I could see he wasn’t quite convinced—but at last he said he would send a levy of fifty men to serve under Tristan.

“Three days later the levy assembled in the castle yard and Tristan rose to address them in the presence of Lord Aelfric and all the court. He told us that this journey would be so perilous that he would think no less of any man who chose not to go. I remember the look on Aelfric’s face when he said that; he wasn’t used to the idea of volunteers. It did not matter, though—by then we all would have followed Tristan off a cliff. The men gave a great shout and we marched from the castle and then down through Northend—Bill Piper on one side of me with his great boar spear on his shoulder, your uncle Hubert on the other, hefting that tree-trunk mattock like it was kindling and singing in rounds with the Twins in that great boom of a voice. It was a fine day for a parade, and all the folk of the town turned out to see us off. There is nothing like a cheering crowd to speed you on your way, but soon enough we had gone beyond hearing, and the silence was all the worse for it. We marched into the mountains by nightfall, each man sunk deep in his thoughts of what was to come.”