The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [110]
“Not that any’d give much credence to such testimony in these times, eh?” Agnes said to Quire. “Not talk of dead men rising, and spells dug up out of deserts.”
“No. There’ll be no trial, I think.”
He absently let the blanket fall back across the window.
“I have to go,” he muttered. “I have to find Dunbar. You’re sure you’re willing to watch over Durand?”
“Aye.” Agnes nodded. “They’ll not find him here, and it might be I can do something for his fever.”
“They will mean to kill you, assuredly,” Durand said in a matter-of-fact tone to Quire.
“They will try, I know. Perhaps I will kill them.”
The Frenchman grunted, and wiped a weary hand across his damp brow.
“You will not find it easy to kill what is in Blegg. Not easy at all. Still the heart, remove the binding spells from the skin of his hands. Destroy the body, utterly, to its last scrap. And even then…”
Durand shrugged, which made him cough and tremble once more. It took a moment or two for him to recover, before he could speak again.
“He is an old thing. Not like we poor mortals. It takes no more than a fever to put an end to us.” He smiled bitterly. “Should you see Mr. Blegg in your travels, perhaps you could enquire whether he has some little figure of me—made of clay or wood, most likely—about his person.
“He is a great one for making such things. Each of the dead we have raised had one of its own, as part of the binding of flesh and spirit. He hides them away somewhere up on that great hill of yours—Arthur’s Seat. It is a place of old power, evidently. One might be used just as well, I suspect, in the right hands, to separate flesh and spirit. It would need some part of me—hair, perhaps—but he might easily have obtained such a thing while I slept.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” Quire said.
“Thank you. He will not part with it, of course, but you could ask. This is not how I would choose to die. Ha. How many of us choose how we die, though?”
A flock of kites swept and swirled across the wind. Half a dozen of them, each tethered to the earth, to the hand of a child, by a long, taut string. Each straining against that tether, trying to tear itself free and escape into the sky’s embrace; go dancing off with the wind into the distance.
They floated close by Holyrood Palace, rising up from the fields just to the east of it. There was little by way of flat ground in the King’s Park, and what there was drew families. The parents brought their children, and the children brought paper kites, painted with faces and trailing sinuous tails of ribbon bows. The grass was grazed low by sheep and cattle, and for the younger children in particular it must have felt like a limitless, soft expanse, fit for running and falling and tumbling.
Quire knew, for his friend had told him often enough, that Wilson Dunbar’s was one of those families to be found here, on any Sunday suited to the flying of kites. He walked across the turf towards them with a feeling of sick dread in the pit of his stomach.
He could hear the kite strings thrumming in the wind, and the crack and snap of their long tails. If he had closed his eyes, it could have been the rigging on a fleet of little boats, stirring. The laughter of children fluttered around and through it, light and joyous. Dunbar should be here, a part of it. This, Quire thought miserably, was what he had taken the man away from.
Ellen Dunbar was standing with her back to him, watching her sons happily wrestle with the straining kites, dragging them across the breezes, shouting encouragement up to them. Quire did not know the boys well, for he had never intruded much upon the privacy of Dunbar’s familial life, but he knew how precious that life was. He envied it, though the envy had never troubled their friendship.
“Hello, Ellen,” he said as he drew near.
She half-turned to him, not wanting to lose sight of the boys. The wind that buoyed the kites above them lifted