Roger Taylor - Farnor

Kicking some charred debris to one side, he went into the remains of the house. Gryss followed him, picking his way carefully. Inside he looked round at the smoke-stained walls of the familiar rooms. Equally familiar furniture lay crushed and broken under the blackened remains of the collapsed roof and floors. Gryss grimaced. It was the very familiarity that height-ened his appalling sense of desolation. He wanted to say something, but no great words of solace came to him.

‘The walls are sound,’ he said weakly after a while. ‘It can be rebuilt, Farnor.’

‘The cows will need milking,’ Farnor said absently.

‘We’ll get someone along to round up the stock and tend it,’ Gryss said, suddenly glad to be practical. ‘There’ll be no shortage of willing hands, you know that.’

And no shortage of wild speculation and rage and anger, came the thought at the same time. He dismissed it. That would break about his head all too soon. His immediate task was to take care of Farnor. The rest of the village could remain safe and secure in its ignorance for a little while yet.

Farnor put the knife into his belt, then bent down and picked up something. It was a small model cart, neatly carved, and still intact. ‘My father made this for me when I was a child,’ he said. ‘A solstice gift. I played with it for hours on end.’ He looked around as if momentarily lost. ‘It ended up as an ornament on that shelf there.’

He pointed to a clean line on the wall running be-tween two split and charred brackets.

Gryss watched him carefully.

‘How did my father die?’ he asked, in the same ab-sent tone.

Once again Gryss considered an easy lie, but again such of the truth as he could divine came out almost unbidden.

‘A great blow, Farnor,’ he said. ‘As far as I can tell. Probably several. The only time I’ve seen anything like it was years ago when someone fell off the crags up east.’

For an instant he had the impression that he was at the centre of a powerful force as he seemed to feel Farnor’s scattered attention suddenly draw together into a single hard-knotted whole.

‘I don’t understand,’ Farnor said. ‘Do you mean he was beaten, like Jeorg?’

‘No,’ Gryss replied. ‘I’m certain he wasn’t beaten like that. The external damage would have been worse and the internal damage less.’ He gave a helpless shrug. ‘The only way I can describe it is as I have done. He seemed to have been killed by a massive impact, as if he’d fallen from a great height.’

Farnor’s brow knitted as he struggled with Gryss’s explanation. An image came into his mind from his early childhood. An image of Rannick teasing a cat with increasing roughness until finally it lashed out and scratched him. Rannick had sworn, then with one sweeping action he had snatched up the cat and hurled it into a nearby wall, killing it instantly.

The sound of the impact lingered in Farnor’s mind yet, though he had not thought about the incident in many years.

‘Or as though he’d been thrown against a wall?’ he said, partly to himself.

Gryss stuttered, caught unawares by the attention given to his answer. ‘I… I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Yes. But I can’t think of how a thing like that could’ve been done.’

Farnor looked at him coldly. ‘Well, he couldn’t have fallen off a cliff around here, could he?’ he said.

Before Gryss could answer, Farnor had turned around and walked out of the house. Gryss hurried after him, thoughts of Farnor’s parting words at the cottage rising to the surface.

But Farnor was standing just outside the door, gaz-ing round the yard. Harlen and Yakob were backing a horse awkwardly between the shafts of a high-sided cart. They stopped when they saw Farnor emerge from the house, but Gryss motioned them to continue.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked Farnor.

‘Hurled against a wall,’ Farnor said quietly, as if turning the words over for inspection. Then he pointed and said, ‘There’s been a great wind here. Look at the damage to those roofs over there. Lines of slates torn off.’ He swung his arm round to encompass the yard. ‘And look at the mess. Walls damaged, everything scattered everywhere.’ He turned to Gryss, his eyes unnaturally bright. ‘That wind at the castle snatched you off your feet and pinned you to the gate like a dried leaf, didn’t it?’ he said. His hand went to his injured arm. ‘Whoever set that… trap… for us there killed my father.’ He shivered. ‘And that creature had something to do with it as well. I felt it, out there in the woods. I thought it was on top of me, it felt so close. But it was after something else, and it was in full cry.’ He bent towards Gryss, confidentially. ‘Wherever it is, it draws a power from somewhere else. I could feel that too,’ he said. ‘Some place that’s both here and beyond here. There was a great flood of energy pouring through. Like something alive.’ He paused. ‘And the creature is a channel for it.’

Gryss gazed at him wildly, understanding nothing, but caught up by the force in his words.

‘Now what I have to do is find out who it is who uses this power and controls this creature,’ Farnor went on.

Gryss pulled himself together. ‘And?’ he said.

‘And kill him,’ Farnor answered, without hesitation. When Farnor had made this threat at his cottage, Gryss had taken it for no more than an angry, frightened outburst. But here there was such resolve in it that he went cold with fear. He wished he could have laughed and cried out, ‘You couldn’t hurt anyone, Farnor, it’s not in your nature.’ But the words would not come, because they were only half true. True in that Farnor would not willingly hurt anything, but not true that he would not kill. He had slaughtered animals in the past as a matter of routine. Slaughtered them quickly and efficiently under the tutelage of his father. The skills were in his hands. All that was needed to bring them to bear on people was the will.

‘Is it Nilsson, do you think?’

The question burst in upon Gryss, catching him completely unawares in the middle of his dark reverie. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s Rannick.’

Even as he spoke the words, his mind sped after them as though it could seize them before they reached their destination.

Farnor spun round and his gaze fixed Gryss just as surely as would one of his long-bladed knives. ‘Ran-nick?’ he said, his voice filled with changing shades and nuances: disbelief, doubt, realization.

Every encounter that he had ever had with Rannick seemed to pass through Farnor’s mind, culminating in that irritated flick of the hand and the angry buzzing of a cloud of flies restrained by some power beyond their knowing. And with those memories came memories too of subtle familiarities in the contacts he had had with the creature. Familiarities that now fell into place around the name of Rannick, as crystals would form about a single seeding grain. It was sufficient. He needed no further interrogation of his informant to confirm this knowledge.

And, as if Farnor’s sudden realization were conta-gious, Gryss found himself back in that dim castle room with Nilsson telling him about the intention to turn the castle into a permanent garrison. The vaguely familiar figure silhouetted against the window… it had been Rannick! Of course. How could he have failed to recognize him at the time? Too tired? Too shocked by Nilsson’s news?

But it didn’t matter now. It was as if a cold wind had blasted away a cloying mist that had been clinging about his thoughts.

Then welling up into this new-found clarity came a terrible, murderous urge.

Though with that same clarity he knew that they were not his thoughts. They were Farnor’s. Gryss could feel the young man’s swirling, complex pain and anger. Somehow, through his torment, Farnor’s strange gift had reached out to him. He felt no wonder at this revelation, however, only fearful concern for the terrible, purposeful intensity of Farnor’s emotions.