Briga said, 'The Choosers of the Slain.' He could not get over that 'The Choosers of the Slain. They came. Here.'
Trygg nodded. Harl and Kel did the same.
Briga completed the thought. 'There wasn't a battle. He was murdered.'
'Frieslanders,' Pulla said. Everyone knew there would have been a war with Friesland if Erief had had another summer to finish uniting all of Andoray. The Kings of Friesland claimed Andoray too, despite Neche's Reach.
The old men stared at Pulla. The old women, Borbjorg and Vidgis, too. None agreed with the godspeaker.
Pulla shook his head. 'Maybe I'm wrong. But that's what I think.'
Trygg observed, 'Erief was a great one.' Speaking no ill of the dead. 'Maybe so great the Walker himself wanted him. Who else would send the Choosers? Did anybody see His ravens? No?'
Pulla said, 'I'll throw the bones and consult the runes. There may be something the Night wants us to know. But first, we have to decide what to do with the outlanders.'
The law had been observed. But tempers were no cooler than when the murder had been discovered.
Pulla sensed a wrongness before the torchlight revealed the prison pit. He barked, 'Stop! Something huldrin has been here.' Huldrin literally meant 'hidden.' In this instance huldrin meant a creature of Faerie, spawn of me Instrumentalities of the Night and the Hidden Realms. Huldre people, the Hidden Folk, while seldom seen, were part of everyday life. You disdained the Hidden Folk only at great peril.
The priest stopped. He shook his bag of bones overhead. Their clatter would intimidate the things of the night.
Still rattling the bones, Pulla moved forward. He stumbled after a dozen steps. He asked Briga to lower his torch.
He had slipped on a stick as thick as his wrist. Had he fallen forward he would have plunged into the empty prison pit.
'They're gone.' Briga was a master at stating the obvious.
The outlanders had come to Snaefells and Skogafjordur three weeks earlier, peddling some absurd religion from the far south, where the sun burned so hot it addled men's brains. They seemed harmless enough at first. Their stories were so ridiculous they were entertaining. No grown man with the smarts to scratch his own lice would buy that nonsense. Physically, they were bad jokes. A half-grown girl could thrash them. Except that they refused to get that close to anyone female.
But sometime during the night last night somebody drove a dagger into Erief's heart while he slept. The dagger got stuck between the hero's ribs. The assassin abandoned it.
That blade was foreign, like none known in the north. Not even Trygg had seen its like. And Trygg had visited many far lands in his youth.
The foreigners went into the pit, protesting their innocence, minutes after the crime was discovered.
Trygg thought them innocent. His view, however, constituted a minority. The missionaries were awfully convenient.
Pulla gathered the old folks close. 'These foreigners must be powerful sorcerers. They scattered the stick hut over the pit, then flew away.'
Trygg snorted derisively. 'Someone helped them climb out The someone who really murdered Erief. Someone huldrin.'
That started a ferocious argument over whether the foreigners had been beaten badly enough before being dumped into the pit. They should not have been able to climb, even with help.
Herva, a crone so ancient she made Trygg seem young, snapped, 'You waste your breath. None of that matters. They have escaped. They must be brought back. There must be a trial. Find Shagot the Bastard and his brother.'
The people of Snaefells heard her. They approved. Shagot and his brother had been Erief's lieutenants. They were hardened, cruel men who made their own people nervous. Especially now that there was no Erief to rein them in. So why not get them out of the village and exploit their experience at the same time?
Something screamed on the mountainside. Nearer, something laughed in the dark.
The hidden folk were never far away.
2. Esther's Wood, in the Holy Lands
Else wakened instantly. Someone was approaching his tent stealthily. He grasped the hilt of a dagger. A silhouette formed at the tent's entrance, limned by the campfires beyond.
'Else! Captain! We need you.' A hand parted the flaps beyond Else's toes. The firelight leapt inside.
'Bone?”
'Aye. We have a situation shaping up, sir.'
The blazing campfires had told him that. 'What kind of trouble?' It was nighttime. The fires were up. That was all the answer he needed, really.
'Supernatural.'
Of course. Here in the wilds of the Holy Lands, amongst the Wells of Irhian, the most supernaturally infested corner of the earth, human danger seldom prowled the Realm of Night.
Else dressed quickly, slid out of his tent like a big cat, six feet tall, lithe and hard, with striking blond hair and blue eyes, at his physical prime.
'Where?' A glance at the horses told him they were not yet troubled.
'There.'
Else jogged. Bone could not keep up. Bone was too old to be in the field. He should have stayed home to teach the youngsters coming up. But Bone knew the Holy Lands better than any other Sha-lug. He had fought the Rh?n here for two decades, long ago.
Else joined al-Azer er-Selim, the band's Master of Ghosts. Az stared fixedly into the darkness.
'What have we got? I don't see anything.'
'Right there. The darkness that hides the trees behind it.'
He saw it now. 'What is it?' He saw more as his eyes adapted. Vague black wolf shapes prowled beyond the fringes of the light
'It's a bogon. The master spirit of the countryside. In a more settled land it would be a local deity, probably confined inside an idol in a town temple. To limit the amount of evil it could do. Out here, where no one lives, it would remain diffused. Normally.'
'Normally.' The darkness now had a vaguely manlike shape, but doublewide and fourteen feet tall. 'It's manifesting? Why?'
'Somebody compelled it. Somebody — or something — conjured it, commanded it, and here it is. Once it manifests completely, it'll attack us. And slaughter us. Our charms can't repel that much brute power.'
The wolf shapes were there in anticipation of the collapse of the mystic barriers protecting the camp.
'I thought things were going way too smooth. What do we do?'
'Right now we can only get ready to do whatever we'll try to do. We can't hurt it while it's still pulling itself together. Once it manifests, though, we'll have a few seconds before its intellect catches up with its body. That's when you'll have to act. So you'll have to be ready.'
'I will, eh?'
'You're the captain.'
'How much time do I have?'
'About five minutes.'
Else turned. The men were all awake, now. Some seemed frightened, some resigned. In this foreign land, the Realm of War, their confidence in their own god was less than complete.
Other gods stalked this land. This was the land where gods were born. And devils, as well.
