Ilse Witch - Terry Brooks [43]
Time slipped away. Slowly, he began to find fragments of what he was looking for, the leavings and discards of a powerful magic employed not long ago. They came to him in different ways, some as small sounds, some as flickers of movement that reached him even behind his closed eyelids, and some as scents of the magic’s wielder. There was not enough to form an entire image, but enough to determine small truths that could allow him to make educated guesses.
He opened his eyes finally, satisfied. Magic’s use could never be disguised entirely from those who knew how to look for it. A residue always remained to testify.
He went back out into the main room, where Hunter Predd and Dome were visiting. Both looked up quickly at his appearance. “Can you take me to the cold house?” he asked the Healer. “I need to see the castaway’s body.”
The Healer said he could, although he informed the Druid that the cold house was some distance away from the healing center. “It’s not much of a night to be out in the weather,” he said.
“I’ll go alone,” Walker advised. “Just show me the way.”
The Druid wrapped himself in his damp cloak and went out the front door. Following the Healer’s instructions, he worked his way around the house, first along the porch and under the veranda, then under the eaves along one side, and slipped through the shadows in the rain. The forest began twenty yards from the back of the center, and the cold house was a hundred more beyond. Cowled head dipped against the rainfall and low-hanging branches, Walker made his way down a footpath widened from usage by the Healer and his attendants. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and whistling fiercely, a wind off the ocean blew steadily through the sodden limbs.
At the end of the footpath, the cold-house door opened into an embankment buttressed by huge boulders and covered thickly with sod and plants. Runoff cascaded down a sluice to one side and disappeared into a stream. The handle on the door was slippery and cold beneath the Druid’s fingers, and it took him a moment to release the catch.
Inside, the sounds of the storm faded into silence. There were torches set in brackets on the wall, and tinder with which to light them. Walker lit one in its bracket, then lit a second to carry. He looked around. The room was large and square and laid floor to ceiling with slabs of rock. Niches in the wall contained wooden sleds for the bodies, and runnels chiseled in the stone floor carried away excess moisture and body fluids. A metal-sheathed wood table sat in the center of the room, empty now, but used by the Healer for his examination of the dead. In the deep shadows, glinting like predators’ eyes, sharp instruments hung from pegs on the wall.
The room smelled of blood and death, and the Druid moved quickly to do what was needed and get out of there. The castaway was in the lower niche to the far left of the entry, and Walker slid the body free of its casing and turned down the covering sheet. The man’s face was bloodless and white in the torchlight, his body rigid and his skin waxy. Walker looked upon him without recognition. If he had been Kael Elessedil, he no longer looked so.
“Who were you?” Walker whispered to the dead man.
He jammed the torch he was carrying into the nearest wall bracket. Carefully, he placed his fingertips on the man’s chest, moving them slowly down his torso and then up again to his shoulders. He felt along the man’s throat and skull, probing gently, carefully. All around the man’s face he worked his fingers, searching.
“Tell me something,” he whispered.
Outside, a burst of thunder shook the earth, but the Druid did not look up from his work. He placed his fingers against the dead man’s ruined eyes, the unsupported lids giving beneath his touch, then probed slowly down to his nose and cheeks.
When he reached the man’s bloodless lips, he jerked away as if stung. Here, he mused silently, this was where the man’s life had been taken from him! The magic lingered