Paul Kemp - The Hammer and the Blade

"It was a hatch, whoreson, which you well know."

The guards returned with two small beer barrels, cracked them, and started to pour.

"But well enough," Nix said, his cup sloshing with beer. "I'll tell them about that hatch, and about how you nearly pissed yourself when…"

Hours later, their bellies full of beer, Egil and Nix sat around the glowing embers of the small fire. Nix's storytelling had put everyone at ease for a time, but the moment he stopped, the sense of foreboding crept back into camp and took a seat at the fire.

The guards without watch duty had either gone to their tents to sleep or snored on their bedrolls near the embers. Above them the wind howled, and Nix swore he heard voices in the gusts, a mad muttering that made his skin crawl.

"This is an unholy place," Egil said. The priest stared into the fire, dice in hand but idle.

"No argument from me. Shake those dice, will you?"

"Eh? Oh." Egil shook the dice, his habit when tense, but he kept at it only a short time. As he put them away, he said, "I've been thinking about what you said. The woman's voice you heard?"

"And?"

"We've both heard of Oremal and the mindmages, Nix."

"We're far from Oremal."

"Yes, but what's to say such magic is limited only to Oremal?"

"They're not even conscious."

"And yet they seem to be affecting you somehow. To what purpose we don't know, but it seems reasonable to assume a sinister intention."

Nix could only shrug. He could not disagree.

"We have to do something," Egil said.

"Like what?" Nix said. "Even if I could harm a woman — which I can't — the spellworm would prevent it. His sisters are the very point of Rakon's charge to us."

"Maybe we tell him what they're doing. Maybe he can stop it."

"I don't trust him any farther than I can spit," Nix said. "He'd turn it further to his advantage somehow."

Egil toed the embers with his boot. "So, what then?"

"We get the horn for Rakon or we slip the compulsion."

"I've had no luck on that last," Egil said. "I've just made myself sick."

"Likewise. But either way, we get clear of this and far from the Norristru family as soon as we can. Then maybe we try our luck out west, stay away from Dur Follin for a time."

Egil sighed and stood. "If that's what we must do, that's what we'll do. And now I've prayers to say and then sleep to find. I'll note only that if you start acting odd due to the sisters' witchery, I'll kill you quickly. Well enough?"

"Fak you," Nix said with a smile.

Egil chuckled. "In the morn, then."

"In the morn."

Nix sat before the fire, trying to solve the puzzle of his situation, and succeeding only in irritating himself over his inability to do so. At length the eunuch emerged from the carriage, bearing Rusilla as easily as Nix might have carried a child. Her face was turned toward Nix, the vacant eyes on him, her hair a red curtain falling from her head. Seeing her caused Nix's heart to thump. His eye itched, watered, and he wanted to scream at her to leave him alone.

The eunuch placed Rusilla in one of the tents, saw that she was blanketed, then did the same with Merelda. Once he had them ensconced, he tied their tent closed and took station just outside, arms crossed over his huge chest, eyes unblinking and staring at nothing.

Nix wanted very much to face Rusilla again, to look into her eyes, get to the bottom of her game, but the eunuch afforded him no opportunity. The man didn't move and showed no signs of fatigue. He might as well have been carved from stone. Once, Nix rose and made as though to walk in the general direction of the sisters' tent.

Instantly the eunuch had his knife in hand and his vacant gaze fixed directly on Nix. Nix diverted to the supply wagon and took another loaf of flatbread from the sack. He returned to the fire and stared at the flames, his left eye pained.

"Leave me be, woman," he said.

He listened to the wind and his eyelids soon grew heavy. He fell asleep to the crackle of wood and the pounding of his pulse in his skull.

Nix dreamed of an ancient, dilapidated mansion. He stood in a long hallway, where dim light flickered. Paint peeled from cracked plaster walls. The lines of the cracks, the whorls and spirals, called to mind the indecipherable script of a madman. Dread settled on him, a heavy, dire foreboding.

"Hello," he called, his voice small and high-pitched, girlish.

At his utterance the plaster and cracks in the wall wrinkled, shifted, finally coalesced into the outline of a pair of huge eyes. Paint and plaster chips rained to the floor as they opened, bloodshot and terrible. Pupils dilated as they fixed on him, their regard judgmental, terrifying.

He staggered back, reached for a weapon but had none. In fact, he realized to his shock that he was not in his own clothing. He wore a dress, a blue dress like Tesha's, but with a ragged, dirty hem and a torn bodice. For a reason he could not articulate, the attire made him feel vulnerable, and the vulnerability deepened the terror gnawing at his self-control.

He hurried down the hall and the eyes swiveled in their plaster orbits to watch him go. New pairs of eyes formed in the walls as he went, cracking open in the plaster and paint. They were the eyes of men, he knew, judging, planning, plotting. He could not escape them.

Thick wooden doors lined the hall between faded, moth-eaten tapestries. Sounds carried through the doors: a bestial, rhythmic grunting, the pained screams of women. He felt something sticky and warm under his slippers. He looked down and saw bright red blood seeping under the bottom of the doors, soaking the floor, drenching his feet in crimson.

The grunting behind the doors grew more urgent, the screams more pained. He put his hands to his ears, unable to bear more, but he could not escape the terrible sounds. He fled, speeding down the hallway, past an endless processional of doors behind which horrors and bloody violations occurred unchecked.

"Stop it!" he screamed, and banged a fist on one of the doors. "Stop!"

But it didn't stop. The grunts grew faster, harder, the entire floor shook. A woman screamed desperately. He reached for the handle on the door but there was no handle. He put his shoulder into it, once, twice, but it would not budge.

He whirled to glare accusingly back at the eyes in the wall — it was their fault, he somehow knew — but they were gone. Instead, the cracks in the plaster formed words, a sentence.

This already happened. It will happen again.

The grunts and screams stopped. He blinked, breathing hard.

Down the hall he heard wet respiration, deep and steady. He licked his lips and turned slowly on his heel to face the sound. The hallway ended at another door, larger than the others, and this one with a handle.

The door was breathing, stretching and expanding as it respired, a great wooden lung that exhaled the smell of sweat, sex, and terror. He stared at it a long while, stuck to the ground by his bloody slippers and his fright.

The handle on the door started to turn, a slow rotation that caused him nearly to faint.

Panicked, terrified of the hulking form he knew must lurk on the other side of the wooden slab, he ran down the hall and grabbed the handle with both hands, preventing it from turning. Small, fearful sounds escaped his lips as he tried to hold it still.

"Go away!" he shouted. "Leave me alone."

He heard cracking and feared the wood of the door giving way. A titter of laughter sounded in his ears, wispy and otherworldly.

He opened his eyes, his heart a hammer against the cage of his ribs.

The wood of the fire crackled, not the door of his dream. He'd fallen asleep around the fire. Two of the guards lay on the ground near the fire, too, wrapped in their bedrolls. One of the pack horses stirred, whinnied, the sound like laughter.