Watcher of the Dead (2 page)

Raina Blackhail was relieved to see the
last of them. As she stood on the paved court at the front of
Blackhail’s roundhouse and watched the team of horses pull the
wheelhouse south, she prayed they wouldn’t stop.

Go, she wished.

All the days of living with fear.

Go.

Sunlight flickered in and out of
existence as bands of clouds passed overhead. It was close to midday;
two hours later than planned. There’d been a problem with the
wheelhouse—one of the rear axles had required remounting—and
repair had caused delay. Raina had not known what to do with herself
during those hours. She could not sit and wait. Walk? Ride? How could
you go about your life when you feared being discovered for a
murderer? In the end she had worked, taking herself off to the cattle
shed to assist the spring calving. It was hard, bloody work and it
had helped. A distressed cow in labor required one’s full
attention. Two calves had been born, but only one had stood and
suckled. Raina and the head dairyman, Vern Satchell, had been been
lifting the second calf to encourage it to stand when the call had
come from court.

“All ready with the wheel house.â€

Marafice Eye

MARAFICE EYE SPOONED the jellied eel
into his mouth and swallowed. Twice. Sweet mother of all beasts, how
did these grangelords do it? Sitting around in their stiff silks and
itchy collars, sipping wine as tart as acid and chewing fish parts?
Any beggar in Hell’s Town could eat better than this: beer and
sausage, beer and pork pie—and they could slouch in loose
linens as they did it. Frowning in disgust, Marafice pushed away his
plate and leaned back in his chair.

The throne.

“Is my lordship displeased with
the food?â€

North of Bludd

“WE GO THE long way,â€

Wolf Dog

“NAN, YOU’VE DONE enough.
Leave him.â€

Captive

THE BUZZING GREW louder and more
complicated as individual threads dropped in and out of hearing. He
ignored it. The sound came from a place he didn’t want to be.
The place was trouble, and he didn’t want trouble. He wanted to
drift on the warm sea a while longer. Reason cast a dim light here,
memory an even dimmer one. Drifting was safe. Drifting was good.

Or so he’d thought. Things began
to gather on the horizon, in the shadows where salt water smoked into
gas. The things had necks humped with rotator muscle and the
fortified jaws of wolves. They waited for him to drift within
striking distance. He was whole and they wanted to tear him into
parts.

Watcher, they hissed. Over here. We’ll
show you how to use that sword.

The words were a puzzle, but not a
pressing one. Other things pressed harder. Drift and you were at the
mercy of currents and undercurrents, prevailing winds and tides. For
the longest time he had assumed he was drifting in circles. Harmless
and unharmed. He was aware of the tow now. It was dragging him toward
the hump-necked things, forcing him to make a choice. Do or be done
to. Take action or let action be taken to you.

Raif Sevrance opened his eyes. Looked.
Blinked. Failed to understand. Closed his eyes. It required an
exertion of will not to return to the warm sea. He concentrated on
receiving reports from his senses to hold himself alert.

The buzzing sound had the particular
resonance of mosquitoes in flight. Anyone who had camped in the
badlands in spring and summer knew the noise. Music of a thousand
bites, Da called it. “While you’re out hunting in the
Badlands, the Badlands is busy hunting you.â€

Stovehouse

“THE CHOICE IS yours. Stealth or
candor: take your pick.â€

Sinking into the Swamp

“YOU’LL EXPLODE IF you eat
one more of those.â€

The Treasure Hall

TAKE IT, RAINA. By rights this is yours
to do.

Raina Blackhail recalled Orwin Shank’s
words, spoken last night in the privacy of the chief’s chamber,
as she entered the Great Hearth. Noon was the best time to find
Blackhail’s principal chamber, domain of its sworn warriors,
empty. Hailsmen were out riding patrol, practicing on the weapons
court, and hunting in the Northern woods. Raina had hoped that its
great curved benches would be empty, thereby saving her the trouble
of making her business public.

She was out of luck. Gat Murdock and a
couple of old-timers were playing some dusty old game with pieces on
a board. A pair of sworn Scarpemen were building up the fire, and
Corbie Meese was oiling the chains on his war hammer. The old-timers,
who looked half bored to death to begin with, regarded Raina with
interest. Here was something to lively their game: the chief’s
wife, without cleaning crew or kitchen crew, entering the Great
Hearth with purpose. Women were not disallowed in the hearth, but
custom did not favor it. Raina girded herself, there was no other
word for it. She drew air into her chest, squared her shoulders and
sucked in her gut. Gods, this would be all over the clan by sundown.
What was Orwin thinking?

“Lady.â€

The Sull

WE ARE BLACKHAIL, the first amongst
clans. We do not cower and we do not hide and we will have our
revenge.

Raif’s lips moved in time with
the clan boast, but he could not tell if he spoke the words or
thought them. Differences like that were getting harder to separate.
Whole days had passed where he could not be certain if he was asleep
or awake.

He was pretty sure he was awake now.
Mosquitoes were feeding. A couple of hours of sunlight and they would
hatch from pools in the snow and rise in a cloud to torment him. He
made an easy target. A sitting duck. Throwing his weight forward,
Raif forced the cage into motion. The mosquitoes took flight and he
had a minute of peace as the insects scrambled to match trajectories
with the cage.

We do not cower, Raif thought with
satisfaction. Maybe he said it.

A hunger cramp sliced through his gut
and he pulled up his legs and chest to wait it out. His body hardly
seemed to belong to him anymore. He could not keep track of all its
weaknesses. His back and shoulders were a landscape of pressure sores
raised by the ridges of the cage. At night he used the waterskin as a
pillow for his head but there was nothing to cushion the rest of him.
He was beginning to understand it didn’t matter. The worst
sores, the ones that were leaking and beginning to ulcerate, were
tended.

And they took good care of his hands.

Raif shivered. He did not want to think
about his body in their possession. Taking a shot of water, he
focused his gaze on the rising mass of the Boreal Sway. The sun had
come and gone and snow clouds were closing in from the north. The
first stirrings of wind moved the forest canopy and Raif watched as
the wave it created rolled toward him. His sole unobstructed view was
to the north. This was it. Wake in the morning and wonder if he’d
been darted and drugged overnight, piss and shit through the cage,
drink, sleep.

Patrol.

He had a place to go to now. The line
between days was dissolving, and although he could look at the record
of his days spent in the cage—eleven horizontal scratches on
the northeast corner post—he could no longer recall when he’d
added to it. Time moved differently in the other place. Shifts in
light, wind and gradient were what mattered. Raif licked his lips and
scanned the forest. The light was changing now, decreasing. Hearts
were on the move, hunting, evading, feeding.

It was an easy thing to loose his
sights, to send his mind’s eye out of the cage and into another
living thing. A shock of heat, a switch in rhythm, a seasickness
moment where movement and mind did not match, and then he was inside,
in the heart. Elk. The index finger on his right hand twitched. The
reflex to release the bowstring was strong. Enter, mark the target,
loose the arrow: that was how he hunted. Yet there were no arrows
anymore, no heart-kills, just Watcher of the Dead and beating hearts.

The elk heart raced with fear. She was
young, a yearling separated from her dam and herd. She’d lost
their scent and was heading southeast through the forest. Blood was
rushing through her arteries at force. Raif felt her terrible
alertness. Any movement in the trees could be her death. Nothing
large enough to take her down was close, but she did not know it. She
saw shadows beneath the bloodwoods and smelled wolf scat. Raif stayed
with her as it grew colder and darker, living her fear and
exhaustion. As she moved further east his connection began to fade
and he strained to keep it intact. Slowly, she drifted from him and
he found himself back in the cage.

It was dark and the mosquitoes were
gone, killed by the cold. His body was shivering and his fingers were
numb. Tucking his hands under his arms, he shifted his position to
ease the pressure on his butt. The motion rocked the cage, driving it
against the canopy. Raif spotted pale fires to the east. He had to
search his mind for their meaning. Sull, the word came to him.

His knee-jerk reaction was to escape
and he refocused his attention on the forest, searching for something
to carry him away. Night brought out the predators. A gray owl was
circling above the ridge, silent as the dead. Raif touched it
briefly, felt the surprising heft and unfamiliar geography of its
heart. Again there was the reflex to release the string. He moved
away, descending beneath the canopy, questing for another heart.

Fox. A female in her prime with a
strong and steady heartbeat. She was still, listening intently. The
instant she located her prey the great veins descending from her
lungs to her heart expanded, fueling the muscles in her haunch.
Within a second she pounced. Saliva jetted into Raif’s mouth as
she muzzled through the snow to reach the stunned mouse. As her jaws
sprung to snap its neck, she heard something. Releasing the carcass,
she listened. Raif could not understand what she heard but he
understood her reaction. Abruptly she took off, abandoning her kill
and fleeing north.

Raif withdrew his sights and scanned
for the source of her fear.

The Sway at night was studded with
hearts: voles, skunk, mink, winged squirrels, deer, lynx, bears. Raif
saw them as small fires in the darkness. The fox had headed north so
he patrolled south.

Something large was on the move. Raif’s
fingers hooked the walls of the cage as he perceived the creature’s
heart. Muscular, cool and alien, it had a rhythm he did not
recognize. Pushing away his misgivings, he entered.

An inkling of awareness, like the
partial opening of an eye, acknowledged his presence. It knew he was
there. As quickly as Raif received the sensation it was gone, and he
was left with the strange tows and suctions of a reptilian heart.
Three chambers instead of four pumped blood around the body, and
there was a place where fresh blood and stale blood mixed, a delta of
dark currents that flowed both ways. The creature was moving at speed
across old, hackled ground-snow, sidewinding in perfect silence,
white upon the white.

Moon snake. Its name cast a spell,
conjuring dread in its purest form, smoking with old myths.
Generations of hunters had murmured its name around campfires. At
night—always at night—after long bloody days spent
butchering their kills, with the stench of organ meat weighing their
shirtsleeves and malt liquor concentrating in their veins, hunters
spoke in hushed voices about moon snakes. Someone in the party would
know someone who had lost a sheep, a calf, a mare. The stories, like
elk, migrated east. Raif had listened to Dagro Blackhail’s
account of the time his father, Burdo Blackhail, had parleyed with
the new-minted Dog Lord at Bludd. No Hail chief had ever set foot in
the Bluddhouse and Burdo had camped to the north with a company of
twelve men. Right from the start the horses were spooked and Burdo
ordered the corral to be raised to a height of eight feet. Afterward,
he realized it made no difference. The moon snake slid under the
barricade and tore off a stallion’s leg. Within seconds the
screams of the horses brought clansmen from their tents. When torches
were lit, a bloody trail leading east into the forest was clearly
visible. Burdo gave the order: Do not follow. As Dagro told the
story, it was the only time his father’s jaw failed him. It was
the marks the thing left behind, Dagro had whispered, like whip
cracks in the snow.

Back in the cage, Raif’s body
shivered. In the forest, at ground level, he cast off the memories
like snakeskin.

The night was a revelation, a wholly
new world of taste and heat. Animals were silver forms against the
black. The owl overhead, the fox, the dead but still warm mouse, the
elk: the moon snake saw them all, knew them all. Feared none. Licking
the taste of their exhaled breath from the air, she tracked and
calculated, applying the sure mathematics of death. Distance,
direction, size, state of health: they were her parameters. Her heart
beat smoothly as she muscled across the snow, choosing her prey.

In all the years he had entered hearts,
Raif had never experienced anything like it. Snagcats, bears, wolves:
predators, but they lived with fear. The moon snake was beyond
emotion. She tracked the possibilities, figured the odds. Killed.

Raif settled into her primitive heart
and moved with her as she tracked the elk yearling east. Later, he
would understand that his connection with the moon snake was stronger
than the ones he’d formed with other creatures. He traveled
farther with her, far beyond the point where he’d lost contact
in the past.