She regarded Brer Jowls with suspicion, but then let it go. She would ask Everett later and go from there.
That night she unwrapped one of the first documents she had taken from her grandfather’s valise. It had been bundled in linen, as if especially dressed to draw attention. She had set it aside until the right moment, which perhaps wasn’t now but now would have to do. She sat up in bed and opened it carefully, unfolding the stained coverlet to reveal pages ripped at the edges, as if torn in haste from an antique binder. They were the compliment to a dubious late-night strategy of white wine and lemon pie with whipped cream. Threading through passable cursive, she read:
His spoken name was Barren. Like others of his kind, he had secret names, seldom uttered words that evoked his origin among the ancient animals and their spirit hosts. He had come to this place fresh from hunting Woodsmen. They were an entertaining quarry. Their pride oft betrayed them. To one of his night-stalking skills, they were clumsy.
He knelt, head glistening with oil, eyes like black marbles. He bowed deeply before the Dark Lord. Estimable captains, Morath, Baldagis, Lacklin, were arrayed in similar poise beside him. Their tunics blended in seamless weave with the shadows.
Lacklin spoke first. “What errand, Master, would have you draw us to this hidden dell and save these slinking Woodsmen from our sport?”
“My loyal shadow-stealers. Your service is now of most timely need. I would have you deliver one in particular of your chosen prey. As Brothers in Darkness you have left the numbers of these far-seeking rangers, these meddlers, greatly dwindled. There is one, of descent most irksome, who craves power and pretends to a throne that has stood empty since the time of my … interruption. You know him well. He goes by the name of Quickstep, apt for one who flees at the very rumor of your approach.”
Morath responded. “He is elusive, and yet his trail tends now to one direction. He consorts these days with a lesser wizard and the two of them conspire to grow their heads to great size. So bloated is his with dreams, that now perchance he will slow his flight from me and let my snare of dark-within-dark take him. Do you wish him alive and able to grovel before you in confused and drooling pleading?”
“Bring him to me, and you shall each have the reward of watching my special treatment for this bothersome pretender.”
They bowed their heads in assent.
“All save you, Barren.” The hunter looked up in surprise.
“For you, a different quest. With aid of the token sealed in this small pouch, are you prepared to burrow deep, wiggle and squirm into the constraining rock and there transform yourself in appearance and time to emerge long hence as one with the tasteless mien of your quarry’s heirs?”
“I … am.”
Barren reached up and took the pouch from the Dark Lord’s spindly fingers.
“In your retreat from this world, my servant, you shall find in that pressing cleft a pool which you shall enter and from whence you shall emerge. There you shall retrieve a clutch of writings and rid them of a young woman that is their steward. She plucks and worries at them in search of some fantastic truth. A truth that is best left to those of a higher realm”.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“And, a further direction.”
“Yes again.”
“Others have been sent before you. Many of my emissaries now people that world. Some I have sent and brought back, including the bumbling Wraith, Pazal. They have all failed their quest. They perhaps have been stiff and ill-suited to their task. You, Barren, are the quick learner and the quiet hunter that blends with all. You shall not fail me, nor be turned by the petty distractions of that realm!”
“Neither minstrels nor sweet fare nor drink shall unsteady my hand from the pull of the bow nor my eye from the gaze that has ever been death to my quarry. This I swear!”
“Go then, and return to me with these scribbles entire and bloody showings in hand.”
An unease settled on Cadence as she read, the vague sense that this was not just a story book. Who was the “young woman” that was “steward” to “scribblings”? Ara? The words, cracked and distant, muttered through time and places long lost and pointed a finger right at her chest. If so, what “fantastic truth” did they hold? She turned to the remaining pages as her mental juju drums echoed, dim and far away. The first page had a short passage, almost like an entry in some ancient encyclopedia:
The one known as Barren was originally called Seax, which means “knife.” As we all know, only free men may possess knives. Thus should his later actions be judged.
He was eleven years old that spring. As soon as the muddy wagon roads became passable there came into his village a carnival, an itinerancy of rude apothecaries, alchemists, and jesters. In their train came a circus of caged beasts not of these parts. Great short-nosed bears, immense lime-green vipers with huge yellow eyes and hissing mouths that were obscenely white or light-robbing dark. Four legged serpents and talking birds from southerly climes. Monkeys that resembled little, angry caged men.
Within two days there dogged the carnival a parade of penitents, scabbed and feverish, moaning of some great god that had forsaken them. The villagers blockaded the roads with bonfires and barred all they could. But it was too late. The Great Itinerant, the Plague, had arrived.
The strange circus, rushing in fear ahead of the pestilence, swiftly moved on. With its passing it took the boy.
The next page, in a close-scrawled hand she hadn’t seen before, returned to the previous parley with the Dark Lord:
As always, Barren did the Dark Lord’s bidding without question. It was not that he lacked the will, but that he lacked the questions.
Once, early, he displayed temerity. Just a slippery step down the path toward questions. He had walked forth on a rocky promontory overlooking a vast and wooded wilderness. The morning, much like this one, all gray and clammy, a predawn full of imminence of change. There he felt through the very soles of his feet the intimate, slow mechanical grind of all being. Deaf to questions. Just the unanswering grind.
He took that for what it was, and he did not again think beyond what he understood. His was the pursuit and the kill. Since leaving his village as a strange and troubling child caught up in the throng of a minstrel troupe, hunting was his skill consummate, and so that he became.
He was naked save for a small leather pouch tied on a cord around his neck. Fog lay close about him; earth and moss clung to his skin from the narrow clefts in which he had spent a score of moonless nights. Foodless, drinking dew that beaded on the granite that rooted and contorted down and down to the center of everything. He lay bent and still until he was ready.
Before him beckoned a pool. From its depths he could smell his prey.
With sound less than a limb falling far away in the pre-dawn forest, he cut the water like an otter and disappeared from Middle-earth.
She reread parts of it, then put it away and fell asleep. The drums stopped.
Except that something made her get up to check on Jasper. In the blue light that flowed like glowing liquid wax through the front windows, she approached him. His back was to her and head was still cocked as if to hear her sneaking up on him. She reached out to touch his shoulder. His head turned mechanically to greet her, big evil- doll eyes and bigger teeth. His body pivoted and his clubby-fingered over-sized paws came up and closed around her neck. She tried to scream. The worn velour of his paws felt itchy and harsh as they shut off her air.
Chapter 5
OCTOBER 17
Cadence convulsed and gasped and woke up. The demonic Jasper Jowls receded into the gimlet pool of dreams. She got her breathing under control, exhausted from trying to outrun a freight train laden with nightmares.
