The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [174]
“I’ll be talking with every guard who went over to the armory. I told Gart to make sure they assembled at first light.”
“The armory? Gart told me they did find the lad in the stone ruins.”
“Was it now? Well, that’s another matter I’d best get clear.”
At the guardhouse by the gates, Gart and the other men who’d been on duty were waiting. When Verrarc opened the door, they stopped whatever they were doing and rose to greet him.
“Sit down, sit down all of you,” Verrarc said. “I’ll not be troubling you long.”
The others sat. Gart brought a stool over, which Verrarc placed at the head of the table. The guards watched him with eyes so weary he could assume they’d not slept all night.
“Very well,” Verrarc said. “Here be the tale as I heard it. There be a need on you all to tell me if I’ve heard wrong.”
They nodded, glancing back and forth among themselves.
“Early in the evening watch,” Verrarc went on, “Demet and Gart did stand upon the catwalks near the South Gate. They saw a strange silver light upon Citadel’s peak, near the armory. Demet rowed across alone and did go up the hill to see what it might be.”
The men nodded. Verrarc turned to Gart.
“You did say that Demet were a long time about it. And then his wife did come with his supper?”
“She did, Councilman,” Gart said. “And sore upset she was, too, when she did hear where her Demet had gone. So I did take one of the lads and went over to look for him.”
“But what made you decide to go look?”
“His poor woman, that’s what. Everyone knows there’s a touch of the witch about Niffa. She did fall into a faint, like, and then she began talking in this strange voice, babbling of Demet lying in the stone ruins. It were like she was up on the walls and looking down, telling me what did lie below where I could not see.”
Verrarc wondered if his blood were freezing in his veins, he felt so cold and sick.
“And what else did she tell you, Sergeant?”
“Naught. Just somewhat about the silver light and Demet lying so still on the ground.”
“She saw no one there, lurking in the shadows or suchlike?”
“Naught that she told me about.”
“Ah. Very well.” Verrarc felt his blood begin to thaw. “Well, poor Niffa’s off with Demet’s family, attending to his last journey. I’ll not be bothering the lass today.”
As the ancient custom demanded, Demet’s family took his body out to the forest to give it back to the gods who had let him wear it a little while. Niffa and Emla washed his body and laid it on a litter, then covered him with a blanket. The menfolk carried the litter out and laid it in the sledge, drawn by two heavy horses and driven by Werda, who was dressed in white fur robes, covered from head to toe in the spirit-color. As Demet’s widow, Niffa wrapped herself in a white cloak and walked behind the sledge when they set out. Behind her in a ragged procession came his family and hers.
In the high snow the journey was a hard morning’s trudge through a world turned to glittering rime by a cold sun. Even though she kept to the ruts that the sledge made, Niffa was sweating in the heavy cloak. She welcomed the discomfort and the effort; it blocked everything out of her mind but putting one foot after the other. Ahead of them down the river valley the pine forest loomed closer and darker with each mile, as if they approached the fortress of Lord Death himself. At the forest edge Werda clucked the horses to a halt. Emla and Niffa took the long knives she gave them and cut pine boughs to cover the body. The blanket they left in the sledge. Demet would return naked to the forest.
His brothers came forward. When they lifted the bier from the sledge, his father began to weep, the long sobs of a man unused to tears.
“Why did they not take me?” Cronin said. “Ai! How I wish I’d gone instead of him.”
Emla caught his arm. She still looked dazed, like a woman awakening from a hard fall.
“Don’t go questioning the gods,” Werda said, “nor be tempting them. Let us go among the holy trees.”
Lael and Kiel took the lead to beat a path through the snow, but the drifts lay so high among the bluish shadows