Seven
The second letter
Croaker:
Bomanz peered through his transit, sighting on the prow of the Great Barrow. He stepped back, noted the angle, opened one of his crude field maps. This was where he had unearthed the TelleKurre axe. “Wish Occules’ descriptions weren’t so vague. This must have been the flank of their formation. The axis of their line should have paralleled the others, so. Shifter and the knights would have bunched up over there. I’ll be damned.”
The ground there humped slightly. Good. Less ground water to damage buried artifacts. But the overgrowth was dense. Scrub oak. Wild roses. Poison ivy. Especially poison ivy. Bomanz hated that pestilential weed. He started scratching just thinking about it.
“Bomanz.”
“What?” He whirled, raising his rake.
“Whoa! Take it easy, Bo.”
“What’s the matter with you? Sneaking up like that. Ain’t funny, Besand. Want me to rake that idiot grin off your face?”
“Ooh! Nasty today, aren’t we?” Besand was a lean old man approximately Bomanz’s age. His shoulders slumped, following his head, which thrust forward as though he was sniffing a trail. Great blue veins humped the backs of his hands. Liver spots dotted his skin.
“What the hell do you expect? Come jumping out of the bushes at a man.”
“Bushes? What bushes? Your conscience bothering you, Bo?”
“Besand, you’ve been trying to trap me since the moon was green. Why don’t you give up? First Jasmine gives me a hard way to go, then Tokar buys me out so I have to go digging fresh stock, and now I have to dance with you? Go away. I’m not in the mood.”
Besand grinned a big, lopsided grin, revealing pickets of rotten teeth. “I haven’t caught you, Bo, but that don’t mean you’re innocent. It just means I never caught you.”
“If I’m not innocent, you must be damned stupid not to catch me in forty years. Damn, man, why the hell can’t you make life easy for both of us?”
Besand laughed. “Real soon now I’ll be out of your hair for good. They’re putting me out to pasture.”
Bomanz leaned on his rake, considered the Guardsman. Besand exuded a sour odor of pain. “Really? I’m sorry.”
“Bet you are. My replacement might be smart enough to catch you.”
“Give it a rest. You want to know what I’m doing? Figuring where the TelleKurre knights went down. Tokar wants spectacular stuff. That’s the best I can do. Short of going over there and giving you an excuse to hang me. Hand me that dowser.”
Besand passed the divining rod. “Mound robbing, eh? Tokar suggest that?”
Icy needles burrowed into Bomanz’s spine. This was more than a casual question. “We have to do this constantly? Haven’t we known each other long enough to do without the cat-and-mouse?”
“I enjoy it, Bo.” Besand trailed him to the overgrown hummock. “Going to have to clear this out. Just can’t keep up anymore. No; enough men, not enough money.”
“Could you get it right away? That’s where I want to dig, I think. Poison ivy.”
“Oh, ’ware poison ivy, Bo.” Besand snickered. Each summer Bomanz cursed his way through numerous botanical afflictions. “About Tokar...”
“I don’t deal with people who want to break the law. That’s been my rule forever. Nobody bothers me anymore.”
“Oblique but acceptable.”
Bomanz’s wand twitched. “I’ll be dipped in sheep shit. Right in the middle.”
“Sure?”
“Look at it jump. Must’ve buried them in one big hole.”
“About Tokar...”
“What about him, dammit? You want to hang him, go ahead. Just give me time to hook up with somebody else who can handle my business as good.”
“I don’t want to hang anybody, Bo. I just want to warn you. There’s a rumor out of Oar that says he’s a Resurrectionist.”
Bomanz dropped his rod. He gobbled air. “Really? A Resurrectionist?”
The Monitor scrutinized him intently. “Just a rumor. I hear all kinds. Thought you might want to know. We’re as close as two men get around here.”
Bomanz accepted the olive branch. “Yeah. Honestly, he’s never dropped a hint. Whew! That’s a load to drop on a man.” A load which deserved some heavy thinking. “Don’t tell anybody what I found. That thief Men fu...”
Besand laughed yet again. His mirth had a sephulchral quality.
“You enjoy your work, don’t you? I mean, harassing people who don’t dare fight back.”
“Careful, Bo. I could drag you in for questioning.” Besand spun, stalked away.
Bomanz sneered at his back. Of course Besand enjoyed his job. It let him play dictator. He could do anything to anyone without having to answer for it.
Once the Dominator and his minions fell and were buried in their mounds behind barriers wrought of the finest magicks of their day, the White Rose decreed that an eternal guard be posted. A guard beholden to none, charged with preventing the resurrection of the undead evil beneath the mounds. The White Rose understood human nature. Always there would be those who would see profit in using or following the Dominator. Always there would be worshippers of evil who wished their champion freed.
The Resurrectionists appeared almost before the grass sprouted on the barrows.
Tokar a Resurrectionist? Bomanz thought. Don’t I have enough trouble? Besand will pitch his tent in my pocket now.
Bomanz had no interest in reviving the old evils. He merely wanted to make contact with one of them so as to illuminate several ancient mysteries.
Besand was out of sight. He should stomp all the way back to his quarters. There would be time for a few forbidden observations. Bomanz realigned his transit.
The Barrowland did not have the look of great evil, only of neglect. Four hundred years of vegetation and weather had restructured that once marvelous work. The barrows and mystical landscaping were all but lost amidst the brush covering them. The Eternal Guard no longer had the wherewithal to perform adequate upkeep. Monitor Besand was fighting a desperate rearguard action against time itself.
Nothing grew well on the Barrowland. The vegetation was twisted and stunted. Still, the shapes of the mounds, and the menhirs and fetishes which bound the Taken, were often concealed.
Bomanz had spent a lifetime sorting out which mound was which, who lay where, and where each menhir and fetish stood. His master chart, his silken treasure, was nearly complete. He could, almost, thread the maze. He was so close he was tempted to try before he was truly ready. But he was no fool. He meant to try nursing sweet milk from the blackest of cows. He dared make no mistake. He had Besand on the one hand, the poisonous old wickedness on the other. But if he succeeded... Ah, if he succeeded. If he made contact and nursed away the secrets... Man’s knowledge would be extended dramatically. He would become the mightiest of living mages. His fame would course with the wind. Jasmine would have everything she quarreled about sacrificing. If he made contact.
He would, by damn! Neither fear nor the infirmity of age would stay him now. A few months and he would have the last key.
Bomanz had lived his lies so long he often lied to himself. Even in his honest moments he never confessed his most powerful motive, his intellectual affair with the Lady. It was she who had intrigued him from the beginning, she whom he was trying to contact, she who made the literature endlessly fascinating. Of all the lords of the Domination she was the most shadowed, the most surrounded by myth, the least encumbered by historical fact. Some scholars called her the greatest beauty ever to have lived, claiming that simply to have seen her was to have fallen into her thrall. Some called her the true motive force of the Domination. A few admitted that their
