A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [8]
“I should think not, by the asses of the gods!” Owaen turned to Maddyn. “I know the horses are tired, but we’d best put a couple of miles between ourselves and this place if there’s a haunt about.”
“You’re going to, certainly,” Nevyn broke in. “I’m going to stay here.”
“Not alone you aren’t,” Maddyn snapped.
“I don’t need guards with swords, lad. I’m not in danger. If I can’t handle one haunt, what kind of sorcerer am I?”
“What about this poor bastard?” Owaen jerked his thumb at the corpse. “We should give him some kind of burial.”
“Oh, I’ll tend to that, too.” Nevyn started walking for the gate. “I’ll just get my horse, and then you all go on your way. Come fetch me first thing in the morning.”
Somewhat later, when they were all making camp—in a meadow about a mile and a half downriver—it occurred to Maddyn that Nevyn seemed to know an awful lot about these mysterious people who had left that ugly bit of sacrilege on the palisade. Although he was normally a curious man, he decided that he could live without asking him to explain.
With the last of the sunset, Nevyn brought his horse inside the tumble-down lodge, tied him on a loose rope to the wall and tended him, then dumped his bedroll and saddlebags near the hearth, where there lay a sizable if dusty pile of firewood already cut, left by the hirelings of the dark dweomermaster behind this plot—or so he assumed anyway. As assumptions went, it was a solid one. After he confirmed that the chimney was clear by sticking his head up it for a look, he piled up some logs and lit them with a wave of his hand. Once the fire had blazed up enough to illumine the room, he searched it thoroughly, even poking at the rotting walls with the point of his table dagger. His patience paid off when under a pile of leaves that had drifted in through a window he found a pewter disk about the size of a thumbnail, of the kind sewn onto saddlebags and other horse gear as decorations. Stamped into it was the head of a boar.
“I wonder,” he said aloud. “The Boar clan’s territory lies a long way from here, but still, if they thought the journey worth it for some purpose… are they in league with the dark dweomer then?”
The idea made him shudder. He slipped the disk into his brigga pocket, then paced back and forth before the fire as he considered what he was going to do about the possible haunt. First, of course, he had to discover if indeed that poor soul whose body rotted outside was still hanging about the site of his death. He laid more wood on the fire, poked it around with a green stick until it burned nice and evenly, then gathered up a mucky little pile of the damp and mildewed thatch that had slid from the roof over the years. If he needed it, the stuff would produce dense smoke. Then he sat down in front of the hearth, let himself relax, and waited.
It was close to an hour later when he felt the presence. At first it seemed only that a cold draught had wafted in from the door behind him, but he saw the salamanders in the fire turn their heads and look up in the direction of something. The room turned thick with silence. Still he said nothing, nor did he move, not even when the hair on the back of his neck prickled at the etheric force oozing from the haunt. There was a sound, too, a wet snuffling as if a hound were searching for a scent all over the floor, and every now and then, a scrabbling, as if some animal scratched at the floor with its nails. As the air around him grew colder, he concentrated on keeping his breathing slow and steady and his mind at peace. With a burst of sparks the salamanders disappeared. The thing was standing right behind him.
“Have you left somewhat here that won’t let you rest, lad?”
He could feel puzzlement; then it drifted away, snuffling and scrabbling round the joining of floor and wall.
“Somewhat’s buried, is it?”
The coldness approached him, hesitated, hovering some five feet off to his left. He could feel its desperate