A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [9]
“I wager you’d like to feel solid again, nice and solid and warm. Come over to the fire, lad.”
As the presence drifted into the warm light Nevyn could feel its panic reaching out like tendrils to clutch at him. Slowly he rose to his knees and tossed the half-rotten hay onto the hottest part of the fire. For a moment it merely stank; then gray smoke began to billow and swirl. As if it were a nail rushing to a lodestone the presence threw itself into the fire. Since it “lived” as a pattern of etheric force, the matrix immediately sucked the smoke up and arranged the fine particles of ash to conform to that pattern. Hovering above the fire appeared the shape of a youngish man, naked but of course perfectly whole, since his killers’ knives could do no harm to his etheric body. Nevyn tossed in another handful of thatch to keep the smoke coming, then sat back on his heels.
“You can’t stay here. You have to travel forward, lad, and go on to a new life. There’s no coming back to this one.”
The smoke-shape shook its head in a furious no, then threw itself out of the fire, leaving the smoke swirling and spreading, but ordinary smoke. Yet enough of the particles clung to the matrix to make the haunt clearly visible as it drifted across the room and began scrabbling again at a loose board between floor and wall. Nevyn could see, too, that it was making the snuffling noise inadvertently, rustling and lifting dead leaves and other such trash as it passed by.
“What’s under there? Let me help. You don’t have the hands to dig anymore.”
The presence drifted to one side and gave no sign of interfering as Nevyn came over and knelt down. When he drew his table dagger and began to pry up the board, the haunt knelt, too, as if to watch. Although that particular board was somewhat newer than those around it, still the rotted wood broke away from its nails and came up in shreds and splinters. Underneath, in a shallow hole in the ground, was an oblong box, about two feet long but only some ten inches wide.
“Your treasure?”
Although it was faint now, a bare wisp of smoke in the firelight, the thing shook its head no and lifted both hands—imploring him, Nevyn thought, to forgive it or do something or perhaps both. When he reached in and lifted the box, some weight inside lurched and slid with a waft of unpleasant smell from the crack around the lid. Since he considered himself hardened to all forms of death, Nevyn threw open the lid and nearly gagged—not from the smell, this time, but from the sight. Crammed inside lay the corpse of an infant boy, preserved with some mixture of spices and liquids. Only a few days old when it died, it had been mutilated in the exact same way as the corpse nailed to the palisade.
Since the box brought a lot of dust up with it, the haunt kneeling nearby looked briefly solid, or at least its face and hands were visible as it tossed its head back and threw up its arms in a silent keen;
“Your child?”
It shook its head no, then slumped, doubling over to lay its head on the ground in front of him like a criminal begging a great lord for mercy.
“You helped kill it? Or—I see—your friends were going to kill it. You protested, and they made you share its Wyrd.”
The dust scattered to the floor. The haunt was gone.
For some minutes Nevyn merely stared at the pitiful corpse in its tiny coffin. Although he’d never had the misfortune to see such mutilations before, he’d heard something about their significance—some half-forgotten lore that nagged at the edges of his memory and insisted that he examine the corpse more carefully. Finally he summoned up all his will and took the box over to the fire where there was light to work in, but he got bits of rag from his saddlebags to wrap his hands before he reached in and took the mutilated pieces of the tiny mummy out. Underneath he found a thin lead plate, about two inches by four, much like the curse-talismans that ignorant peasants still bury in hopes