Hag in the Water, page 5
The water trickled down over the edge into the pool, and was gone.
*
“Poor child.” Taseldwyn turned over in her stubby hands the brown, brittle volume that Jenny had found, hidden in the chamber of the two younger daughters. With it had been the little mammet of hair and bones that Jenny had flung into the pool, the mammet that Anathagantes had made to conclude the summoning and release the wight. “Poor Anathagantes.”
“Did you guess?” asked John. Zarbochedronn and Periozames, whose skills lay in healing, had restored strength and feeling to his leg, though in truth the numb coldness had been gone even when Jenny had scrambled down the wet rocks to him beside the pool. Taseldwyn, who had struggled to a kind of clouded consciousness under Jenny’s spells – almost in the hour that John had realized that the thing he’d seen in the garden had been the Hag-Wight and not Nezbardina the Beautiful – had waked fully, clear-headed, at the same moment that the wight had returned to the pool. Thus she had been alert when, a few moments later, Jenny had tried to speak to her through her scrying-stone. She it was, who had sent Brabishanjo and his guards to the place, to bring John back to the Second Deep.
After a long moment the old gnome-witch nodded. “Anathagantes had not been with me but two months,” she said, “when her father wed the Beautiful Nezbardina. He had doted upon his daughters. They had been the whole of his world in his grief, as they had been the whole of their mother’s. Such was her anger and her chagrin – for she and her sisters had done everything in their power to prevent the match, as they had argued him out of marrying the Widow Vashwedtha two years before – that for weeks she could not clear her mind to meditate. Every spell she attempted went awry. But she worked like a very demon to focus her mind and her powers, and the trouble seemed to pass. Anger is a perilous thing – heat in the soul is a perilous thing – when one weaves power from the earth and deep water, and the strength of one’s own heart.
“Aye.” She sighed. “Aye, when Anathagantes was killed, ‘twas clear to me that some powerful spell she was weaving had gone amiss. Then when the foreman and workers in the North Mine were killed, upon the same night as the Widow Vashwedtha… Then I sought this book, the Dark Annals of Yl.”
Her stubby fingers stroked the crumbling black leather of its cover.
“An’ there is wasn’t?” John raised his brows, but Miss Mab only shook her head in sadness.
“As thou sayst, There it wasn’t. But I well remembered from it the tale of the Hag-Wight, who had been formed from the bones and hair of a child whose step-mother had treated her with such cruelty – while the father, and the child’s brother, were on a journey to the north – that the child had died. The step-mother threw the child’s body into a well, deep in the North Mine, and on returning, the brother hired a mage to summon a wight, for the father believed his new wife’s tale, that his daughter had died of sickness, and would do nothing. ‘Twas writ in the ancient tongue of House Tcharprexis, but the first wife of Krastochilliam was of that House. Anathagantes knew enough of the old writing, that ‘twas the first of the spell-hands that she studied.”
“Twilkin’ lucky for me—” Through the neck of his shirt John touched the bandages that bound his chest and back, “—Jen happened to turn up the very day I figured out that what I’d seen was the wight, an’ where it had come out from.”
“Lucky nothing.” Jenny shifted in the great carved chair beside the gnome-witch’s bed, and put her arm around John’s waist, where he sat on the chair’s arm beside her. “Don’t you think I scry for sight of you in my crystal, many times each day? I saw you riding to the Deep amid a great company of armed gnomes, with the King at their head, and guessed there had to be trouble of some sort brewing. I started back then.”
John bent down a little (at the cost of a dart of pain in his bandaged back) and kissed the black heavy midnight of his wife’s hair. “I been twilkin’ lucky for years.” He looked back at Miss Mab.
“Then the thing kept comin’ back here—?”
“‘Twas confused,” said the gnome-witch. “The spell was not properly done – not properly concluded. I think ‘twould have killed Krastochilliam himself, for his eldest daughter’s hatred was ‘gainst him as much as her beautiful step-mother.”
John remembered, when they had carried him back to the house of Krastochilliam, that the Lady Nezbardina had kept her head and hadn’t fussed or gone into hysterics when Jenny had told the Steward that it had been his daughter who had summoned the wight – unlike her two surviving step-daughters, who had wailed their confessions in oceans of terrified tears. Sellymanjes and Zurkymella had unhesitatingly poured all blame for the murders upon Anathagantes, which did not adequately explain why they’d hidden the Dark Annals of Yl in their own chamber, after their sister’s death.
“Many wights,” Miss Mab went on, “–and the Hag-Wight of the Water was one such – do not realize their task is done until their summoner releases them. Anathagantes at least knew this, and prepared the mammet which Lady Jenny found with the book and the salt and the vessel of blood, and the other things my poor Anath used to call this thing.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I loved her,” she said. “They call us – the Wise Ones – uncanny, and cold, when we put aside the concerns of family and friends, to follow the hard road of power. ‘Tis a grief to do so, and still greater grief, if we do not.”
*
The following day – before they left the Deep, to return to Bel and thence to take the road again for the Winterlands – John went with Jenny down the windings of the North Mine to the lightless blow-hole where the Hag-Wight’s pool lay. They took the longer route through the active sections of the mine, for the ventilation tunnel through which the wight had climbed to Krastochilliam’s stone garden had been blocked up, and at dinner the previous night Krastochilliam had said that the whole ancient quarter of the Mines would be walled off.
This was one of the few things that he did say. The bluff, sturdy gnome looked shaken and haggard, for he had said good-by to his daughters that day, before sending them off to dwell with their kindred in the Deep of Wyldoom, hundreds of miles away in the Gray Mountains. Nezbardina, glorious in the silk-dagged gaudiness which to the gnomes was good taste, had proved a skilled and charming hostess, and John had noticed that under its incrustation of jeweled rings and cloisonné nail-guards, her left hand was bandaged.
“Nezbardina was kind enough,” said Jenny, “to let me draw blood from her hand to soak the mammet which I cast into the pool. To tell the poor Hag-Wight she had completed her task.”
“Poor Hag-Wight nuthin’,” grumbled John. “I for one don’t have many tears to shed over her.”
Now, picking their way cautiously down the slippery hairpin turns of the path by the glimmer of witchlight, Jenny said, “Wights take shape when a part of a ghost – a part of a soul – is given material being again to accomplish some task. One doesn’t exactly give them instructions. Rather, the summoner weaves a dream for them – for what is left of their minds. They think they’re accomplishing, what is closest to their hearts – usually hatred and revenge. Only when they think it’s done can they rest.”
They reached the tiny space where Anathagantes had scribbled her circles of protection, when first she’d gone down to summon the Hag from the water; scribbled them with a rage in her heart which had transmitted itself to the thing that had slept there, all those centuries in the darkness.
“It is all they can feel,” Jenny went on quietly, standing with her arms folded under her heavy cloak, almost as tiny as the gnomes themselves, her black heavy hair like a second cloak around her shoulders and her blue eyes somber in the witchlight. “As a person obsessed by drink or self-righteousness cannot feel beyond the dark circle of thought that sees only one question, and one answer. They cannot be reasoned with, cannot be spoken to, save in the ritual of the summoning spell. Nothing else remains of their thought. What they are aware of, we do not know.”
John was silent, looking down into the blackness of that stagnant pool in the heart of the earth. Cold seemed to rise up off the water, to breathe on his face the wet, sour smell of depths that had been stirred by no life since the mountains had been born. Fishless, bug-less, sunless. Yet the black water was clear, and the white glow of Jenny’s witch-light penetrated it for a distance. Far down, he thought he could make out something floating, suspended at the edge of sight. Drifting in a cloud of electrum hair, and the gray rags of a gown.
The thought that she might in some fashion be conscious – of something, of anything – was more horrible than he could imagine.
“There’s no way we can free her?” His voice echoed queerly in the toothed ceiling, the frozen spines of the floor.
“None that anyone knows of.”
On the floor around his boots John saw his own blood, dried now among the scrawled sigils of summoning. A tale writ in a tongue unknown.
“So she’ll just go on lyin’ there,” he said softly. “Dreamin’ of whatever it was her step-mum did to her. Dreamin’ maybe, on top of that, of all the spite an’ poison Anathagantes wove into the spells that called her up. Never rottin’, never dyin’…”
“Or it may be that she sleeps,” said Jenny. “Until such time as someone calls her forth again.”
After a long time they turned, and climbed silently back towards the light.
*See – Dragonsbane
**See – Knight of the Demon Queen
About the Author
Since her first published fantasy in 1982 – The Time of the Dark – Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.
For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series – short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way – with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna – in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.
She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.
Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.
Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.
Barbara Hambly, Hag in the Water
