Briardark, page 12
Such a creature haunting Felstein was a horror for which she’d be responsible. It was her hand that had killed Alastair, as surely as if she’d stuck a knife into him. She remembered something from one of Pater Kosminski’s sermons, that spirits, particularly those fated to become nighthaunts, experienced revelations about their deaths and learned things unknown to them in life. Alastair, she was sure, would know he’d been murdered by magic and that she was responsible. She could imagine his wrath when he rose from his grave as one of the undead. He’d be like the ferryman, lashing out at whoever he could find.
Dread roared through Cicely’s heart. She sat down and took up the tapestry. Her eyes fixed on Alastair’s image. Why had she ever done it? What madness had provoked her so?
Not madness, she corrected herself. Survival. To live, Cicely needed the needle’s magic. There was nothing more to it.
Agitated by what she’d heard, already weakened by Alastair’s dissipating energy, an inexorable weariness fell upon Cicely. Slumber took her while she sat in her chair, the tapestry thrown across her legs like a blanket.
The sleep that crept upon Cicely was anything but restful. Foul dreams beset her. Dreams of death. Useless, senseless deaths. She saw Marden, his body ripped by the wolf’s fangs. In his hands he gripped the half-finished carving. At first it was a mammoth, then it transformed into a wolf. Her brother stared at her with dead eyes, and she heard him speak. ‘My life is yours,’ the nightmare said.
Then she was looking upon the streets of Felstein. She saw Alastair’s grave, the largest and most magnificent in the cemetery. The heavy marble slab slid away, and from the casket below, a dark shadow billowed upward, a shrouded form draped in chains. Anguished laughter cackled from the apparition as it sped into the town. The chainghast drifted through barred doors, seeking… ever seeking. At last, it descended upon her house, seeping through the wall itself. She could hear its vengeful groan as it hurtled towards her mother and wrapped its spectral fetters around Emelda’s throat. Cicely flung herself at the spectre, but her fists passed uselessly through the phantom. All the while her ears were filled with her mother’s croaking burble as she fought for breath, her face turning purple…
‘Mother!’ Cicely cried out as she snapped free of her nightmare. Her dazed eyes swept about the confines of her room, half expecting to see the chainghast crouching in one of the corners. Only a dream, or was it something more? A premonition? A warning of what would come to pass?
‘No! I can stop it!’ Cicely vowed. Her fingers closed about the needle. She shifted the tapestry around so that she’d have an open spot to work with. If Thayer was the one who insisted his son’s death was an accident, then he was the menace that had to be eliminated. Without Thayer to influence them, the town would take a prudent approach. They’d cremate Alastair and cast the ashes into the river. There’d be nothing buried in the graveyard to manifest itself as a malignant. There’d be nothing for Felstein to fear then.
Cicely felt regret at the necessity of doing that to Alastair. Treating his body in such a fashion would condemn his spirit to wander the lowest and most ill-favoured of the underworlds, but it was the only way to ensure he wouldn’t come back. She could sympathise with Thayer not wanting to condemn his son to such a fate. She was proud that Samuel had expressed an equal determination in regard to Marden.
Pangs of empathy wouldn’t stop her, however. Both to replenish her own vitality and to protect Felstein from Alastair’s spirit, she had to act. She set needle to thread and began to work. It wasn’t as easy for her to picture Thayer in her mind. She wasn’t as familiar with him as she had been with his son or Barnabus or Saint. More, there kept flashing through her brain that grotesque scene of the chainghast strangling her mother. It was a supreme effort to keep her focus. So intense did her concentration become that it seemed that her hands flew about the tapestry with a life entirely of their own.
At times a flicker of doubt nagged Cicely while she worked. She knew it was death that she was invoking. As certain and unalterable as the trickling gravesands at the edge of Shyish. She thought instead not of Thayer as a person but of all the malicious things he’d done. The hurt and pain he’d caused so many people, not just her cousins and her father. And always there was that terrifying image of her strangled mother to spur her onwards. It was in her power to keep that from happening.
The needle dove in and out of the cloth, tireless as a Kharadron machine. Cicely shifted the tapestry around as she worked, but such was the swirl of fears and fancies that sought to disrupt her concentration that she didn’t truly observe what she was doing until it was done.
‘Sigmar!’ Cicely gasped when the needle fell still and her hands drew back from the tapestry. All the images that had tormented her as she worked faded from her mind. Nothing could be more nightmarish than what she now gazed upon. While she’d held the needle, her perceptions had been befogged by the daze of her affliction. Now there was no such veil between herself and what she’d created. She lurched to one side and vomited her dinner onto the floor.
She took up the tapestry, desperately trying to deny the evidence of her eyes. It was a trick, another of the hideous deceits brought on by her affliction. Cicely stepped to the window, letting the moonlight shine down on the cloth. She moaned as the light displayed the image of a red-haired woman instead of a bald, paunchy man. A woman with deep eyes and sharp features. Features Cicely knew as well as she knew her own.
She wiped the spew from her lips with her sleeve and looked again at the image. Without being aware of what her hands were doing, Cicely hadn’t added Thayer into the tapestry. Instead, she’d completed her mother’s picture. There was a heavy coil around Emelda’s throat and the face was almost black. Cicely thought to the nightmare scene that had played out in her imagination. It was that scene that had been communicated into her fingers, that horrible moment she’d depicted with needle and thread.
‘Please, no,’ Cicely begged. She didn’t care about her father’s warnings now. She’d grovel before Nagash and plead that what she feared wouldn’t happen. She sprang across the room and grabbed her mirror. Horror stared back at her – a face that was flush with health and rich in colour. A visage ripe with stolen vitality.
Feeling sick to the core of her being, Cicely took the tapestry and threw it under her bed. Then she turned and opened her door. The house was quiet, wrapped in the perfect silence that occurs just before dawn. The darkness wasn’t quite complete when she started into the hall. She could see a flicker of light coming from the front room. A frightful compulsion took hold of her. Cicely was horrified to go further, but it was impossible to stay where she was. She had to confirm her mounting fear. To see for herself the evil she’d caused.
There was a rushlight clamped into a little tin holder standing on the table, but its glow wasn’t what cast the flickering red hue about the room. That came from the hearth, where a bed of embers smouldered. Cicely stepped around the table and saw her worst fears realised. She tried to scream, but all that left her throat was a terrified gasp.
An iron stand leaned over the hearth. It had double hooks from which a big pot normally hung. One of the chains had snapped, and the pot sagged from the remaining links. The broken length was caught tightly around Emelda’s neck. Cicely tried to reconstruct the weird scene. Her mother would have stirred the embers to start a fire before swinging the pot out over it. For whatever reason, she’d knelt down towards the fire again after moving the pot. One of the chains had snapped and in a freakish manner had coiled around her neck.
Cicely wept as she imagined the scene. One of her mother’s hands was pulling at the chain while the other lay stretched on the floor, coated in soot. The floor showed black marks where she’d struggled to keep herself propped up. In the end, however, she’d slipped and fallen face-first into the embers. Cicely wondered how long her mother had struggled, the chain making it impossible for her to cry for help that was only a room away.
Agonised sobs quivered through Cicely as she thought of her mother’s terrible death. A death she’d caused. Guilt managed what horror could not, and Cicely’s ragged cry echoed through the house.
The sounds of Cicely’s anguish roused the rest of the household. Anya, carrying her baby, got as far as the edge of the hallway. One glance at the figure lying sprawled by the hearth was enough to make her turn back. Firmly, she kept Amelia from seeing the body.
Samuel barely acknowledged Cicely as he dashed to the hearth. He dragged Emelda out of the fire, snapping the other chain and pulling the pot along with the body. He flipped her onto her back and frantically unwound the chain from her neck. He froze when he had it free and just stared down at his wife. A pained howl swelled up from him.
Cicely dared to look past her father at the body he crouched over. By some malicious caprice, Emelda’s face was still recognisable, though it had been charred by the heat of the embers. In the flickering glow, it had a purplish cast to it. Exactly like her picture on the tapestry.
Horror compounded upon horror. Cicely felt her knees turn to jelly. The darkness that escorted her mind into oblivion was far more comforting than the accusations of her consciousness. For a moment she struggled against it, then she collapsed to the floor.
CHAPTER TEN
Carrion crows squawked from their perches on the gravestones while vultures soared through the fog overhead. A chill wind slithered across Felstein’s cemetery, bearing with it Briardark’s musky odour. On a rare, clear day, when the mists were low and the sun was high, the dark forest could be seen from the edge of the graveyard, ominous and brooding, as redolent of death as any tomb.
For the third time in as many weeks, Samuel found himself standing in Felstein’s graveyard listening to Pater Kosminski recite the rites of the dead. First Marden, then little Barnabus, and now his beloved Emelda. As he watched the deacons lower the casket into the plot beside his son’s grave, it was all he could do to keep from shouting over the funerary ritual and cursing every god he could name. Respect for his wife was the only restraint that held him back. Before the first shovel of earth was cast into the grave, he reached up to his neck and pulled at the skull-faced talisman of Nagash that he wore. The cord that held it snapped as he exerted his strength. He didn’t even look at the talisman he’d worn since he was a child, just tossed it down into the grave.
Samuel was through with gods. What use was it to honour and worship them when they simply sat back and allowed such misery? From baleful Nagash to righteous Sigmar, he was done appealing to gods who didn’t listen.
Cicely stood nearby, her eyes red from weeping. She looked so frail and vulnerable, pale and drawn as though her sorrow were eating her from the inside out. Samuel thought she looked even worse than when Marden had died. He knew that guilt had compounded her grief then and that his blaming of her had made it even worse. He worried now that in some way she was blaming herself for Emelda’s death as well. By Nagash, it would have been better if anyone else had found her mother, Samuel told himself. He could just imagine the guilt she was feeling, that if she’d only been there sooner then her mother would be alive. He started to reach towards her, to offer some kind of comfort. For a moment his hand hovered near Cicely’s shoulder, then he drew it back before she was even aware of the overture.
First Marden, now Emelda.
The beasthunter didn’t know what he could say that wouldn’t make things worse. Maybe the words would come later. Samuel prayed he would find them while they could still do some good. He turned his head and looked across the other mourners.
Anya and her children were beside Cicely. They, too, were visiting the graveyard with heinous regularity. Samuel saw them casting lingering looks across the cemetery to where Barnabus was buried.
Other relatives were gathered around as well. Cousins more distant than Rukh and Anya, an elderly uncle from Emelda’s side of the family, a wandering nephew named Thorley who just happened to be in Felstein. In all, Samuel counted just over thirty mourners between relations and friends. It brought a smile to him to consider how Emelda would’ve reacted. She was so humble that it would have shocked her to know so many people had come to bid her farewell.
A commotion at the graveyard gates interrupted Pater Kosminski’s prayers. Samuel followed the priest’s gaze and was surprised to see a large group of people marching towards them. Briefly, he wondered if they, too, had come for the funeral. Then he noticed the pitchforks and spears many of them carried. These weren’t mourners. This was a mob.
Pater Kosminski closed the Nagashian Verses, his hand tightening about the prayer book as though it were the grip of a sword. He stormed around the open grave and confronted the mob. ‘What’s the meaning of this outrage!’ he demanded. ‘You intrude upon a sacred ceremony. Begone before you provoke the wrath of Nagash!’
The mob faltered for only a moment. There was a stirring within their ranks, and Samuel was stunned when Thayer forced his way to the fore. The townmaster was cold with wrath of his own. His eyes were like chips of ice when he met the priest’s glower. ‘We’ve come for Anya Helmgaart. Turn her over to us and we’ll be on our way.’
Pater Kosminski shook his head. ‘This ground is sacred to Nagash–’ he began. Thayer raised his voice and shouted down the priest.
‘That wasn’t a request, it was an order,’ Thayer snarled. He pointed a shaking finger at Anya, who cowered beside Cicely, hugging her children to her. ‘By the gods, we can profane this ground no worse than she already has!’
Samuel never knew who shouted the word, but he heard it rise up distinctly from the midst of the mob. A word that, under the circumstances, was the most awful sound imaginable, a thing that seemed to slither into the ear on legs of terror.
‘Witch!’
Pater Kosminski took a step back. The priest’s indignation faltered as doubt crept into his eyes. His posture lost the defiant confidence of a moment before and his arms dropped down to his sides. Thayer was quick to leap upon the priest’s vulnerability.
‘Aye! Witch!’ he yelled, sweeping his gaze from Kosminski to the shocked mourners. People began withdrawing from Anya’s vicinity. Samuel didn’t know what scared them more, the possibility that his cousin was a witch or the threat of becoming another target for the mob. He stepped forwards, taking up the position Kosminski had abandoned and standing in Thayer’s path.
‘That’s absurd,’ Samuel growled at the townmaster. ‘She’s no more a witch than you are.’
Strangely, instead of shouting down the hunter, Thayer spoke with sympathy. ‘You don’t know what she’s done, do you?’ A few in the mob would have pressed ahead, but Thayer waved them back. ‘We’ve had our differences, Samuel, but whatever antagonism we feel towards one another, this is bigger than that.’ He gestured at Anya. ‘She’s hurt us both. She took my son from me. She took your wife from you.’
The claim left Samuel speechless. Only dimly did he hear Anya’s cry of protest. His mind was reeling with the horror of what Thayer was saying. He felt numb all over, shocked to his very core.
‘It’s true,’ Thayer said, seizing upon Samuel’s silence the same way he had Kosminski’s. ‘After I lost Alastair, I went to Mama Ouspenskaya. She put me into contact with Alastair’s spirit.’ His voice cracked with the weight of emotion that surged up from inside him. ‘Alastair told me he’d been killed. Murdered by fell magics!’
Samuel stirred from his shock when he heard Cicely gasp in alarm. His daughter’s fright rallied him back to his senses. His gaze hardened when he looked at Thayer, recalling the townmaster’s dubious methods. ‘So that’s it, isn’t it? You’re so desperate to have Alastair buried that you’ve concocted this story to silence anyone who thinks he killed himself.’ He thrust each word at Thayer as though it were a knife. Of all the despicable things he could envision, this was probably the lowest. ‘You’ll accuse an innocent woman, a mother, of witchcraft just to ease your own grief.’
‘That’s not true,’ Thayer countered, still choked with emotion. ‘During the séance I heard Alastair’s voice speaking through Mama Ouspenskaya. He spoke as though from a great distance and with difficulty. But I heard him. He told me he was killed by magic.’
‘Herr Greimhalt’s right,’ piped up Gunther, the sour-faced glassblower who had his workshop near the town square. ‘I was there. I heard Alastair’s spirit say these things.’
‘I’m not surprised to hear you echoing the townmaster, Gunther,’ Samuel snapped. ‘You were never slow to make yourself useful to Thayer.’
‘She is a witch, Samuel.’ The beasthunter was surprised when Roderick stepped forwards to support Thayer’s accusation. ‘With my own eyes I’ve seen her speaking with a raven in her yard. She would talk and it would respond.’
‘Is that your proof?’ Samuel growled at Roderick. ‘Who in a moment of fancy doesn’t speak to their animals? I used to speak to my gryph-hound. Does that make me a witch too?’
‘The bird had an ill-favoured look about it,’ Roderick retorted. ‘Surely a messenger from the Ruinous Powers.’
‘It had been mauled by some predator and only had one leg,’ Anya tried to explain. ‘I felt sorry for it and would give it bread crusts–’
‘Shut up, witch!’ someone from the crowd shouted. Anya trembled at the angry murmur that rippled through the mob. She drew her children closer to her, as though to remind the people of their presence and evoke mercy.
