A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [7]
“Geese walking on your grave?” Nevyn said mildly.
When Maddyn looked around he saw Owaen and the prince walking over to them and well within earshot.
“Must be, truly. Here, Owaen, did you and the lads find anything new?”
“Doubt me if there’s aught to find. Young Branoic did come up with this, though. Insisted it might be important, but he couldn’t say why.” Owaen looked positively sour as he handed Nevyn a thin sliver of bone, about six inches long, barely a half inch wide, but pointed on both ends. “Sometimes I think that lad is daft, I truly do.”
“Not at all.” Nevyn was turning the sliver round and round in his thin, gnarled fingers. “It’s human bone, to begin with. And look how someone’s worked it—smoothed it, shaped it, and then polished it.”
“What?” Owaen’s sourness deepened to disgust. “What is it, some kind of knife handle?”
“It’s not, but a stylus to rule lines on parchment.”
“A stylus?” Maddyn broke in. “Who would make a thing like that out of human bone?”
“Who indeed, Maddo lad? That’s the answer I’d very much like to have: who indeed?”
In his role as a learned man Nevyn recited a few suitable lines of Dawntime poetry over the corpses; then the silver daggers mounted up and left the servants to get on with the burying. When they rode out they headed for the river. Maddyn spurred his horse up next to the old man’s and mentioned the decrepit hunting lodge.
“It’ll be better shelter than none, truly,” Nevyn said.
“You don’t suppose our enemies camped there, do you?”
“They might have once, but they’re long gone by now.” He gave Maddyn a wink. “I have some rather reliable information to that effect. Tell the men we won’t be out hunting wild geese long, Maddo. I just want one last look around, that’s all.”
Only then was Maddyn sure that he had indeed seen some exalted personage in the stream.
Just at sunset they reached the lodge, a wooden roundhouse, its thatch half-gone, standing along with a stables behind a palisade that was missing as many logs as a peasant his teeth. As soon as they rode within five hundred yards of the place the horses turned nervous, tossing their heads and blowing, dancing a little in the muddy road. Maddyn had the feeling that they would have bolted if they hadn’t been tired from their long day’s ride.
“Oho!” Nevyn said. “My liege, you wait here with Cara-doc and most of the men. Maddyn, you, Owaen, and Branoic come with me.”
“You’d better take more men than that, Councillor,” Maryn said.
“I won’t need a small army, my liege. Most like there’s naught left here but bad memories, anyway.”
“But the horses—”
“See things men don’t see, but men know things that horses don’t know. And with that riddle, you’ll have to rest content.”
Nevyn was right enough, in the event, although the ‘bad memory’ turned out to be bad indeed. The men dismounted and walked the last of the way to the lodge, and as soon as they stepped through the gap they saw and smelled what had been spooking the animals. Nailed to the inside of the palisade, like a shrike nailed to a farmer’s barn, was the corpse of a man, half-eaten by ravens and well ripened by the spring weather. Yet the worst thing wasn’t the stench. The corpse was hung upside down and mutilated—the head cut off and nailed between its legs with what seemed to be—from the fragment left—its private parts stuffed into its mouth. Branoic stared for a long moment, then turned and ran to the shelter of the palisade to vomit, heavily and noisily.
“Uh gods!” Owaen whispered. “What?!”
For all his aplomb earlier, Nevyn looked half sick now, his face dead white and looking with all its wrinkles more like old parchment than ever. He ran his tongue over dry lips and spoke at last.
“A would-be deserter, most like, or a traitor of some sort. They left him that way so he’d roam as a haunt forever. All