Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy's Wild (8 page)

Kaige heard this and his eyes bulged. He stopped and stared, horrified. “Scrolls? Like paper magic?”

“Yes,” Jasper replied. He didn’t look as if he appreciated the implications in Kaige’s tone.

“You mean you can’t heal for real? Like a real wizard?”

Indignation pushed Jasper’s eyebrows upward, and he clearly restrained his initial response. Instead, he said, “Since you are a simpleton, I will explain it to you—not that I expect you’ll understand, but I will try. I am an enchanter. That is my only school of the eight, so, doing the math for you, yes, that makes me a One. Enchanters make scrolls, and we read scrolls. And what happens when we read them is
magic
—magic just like all other magic that’s ever been cast by any human in history. My gift, the enchanter’s gift, is the gift of sigils and signs. It is the gift of permanence.” He straightened to his full height upon finishing, the hauteur in his bearing suggesting that he expected Kaige to appreciate the information he’d just been given and maybe even offer an apology. He did not.

“Yeah, but if we get harpy spat, you can’t just lay on hands like a real healer. We’ll all die.”

Jasper rolled his eyes, rolling his head along with them. He looked back to Kaige. “I will ‘lay on’ parchment, and it’s all the same.”

“But you just said you don’t got the scrolls.”

“That is true. But my point is that a healer who doesn’t know the correct spell can’t help you any more than I can without the right scroll. So you see, your objection is groundless.”

“What about, say, spider bites or copperheads? Or a bad fall? Or a patch of death weed? What about dragon’s fire, or even if someone just gets a hole poked in them with a sword?”

“That’s enough,” Ilbei said. “It’s gonna be me what puts a hole in ya with my pickaxe if’n ya don’t quit with all that. All of ya. Now Kaige, if’n you’re gonna spell me fer clearin the road, then take yer damned sword back and get to it.” He nodded toward the shortsword he’d borrowed from the big man to cut their path, droplets of water shaking loose and falling from his beard as he did. “Go on now. We need to get to that camp, gather what word we can, and get back by nightfall. So move it.”

Kaige looked warily from Ilbei to the skies, then to Jasper, then back to the skies. Ilbei took a step toward him, menacing him with the promise of violence far more immediate than anything an imaginary harpy could contrive. Kaige saw it and stepped away, taking up his sword and setting himself to work, hacking here and there at the crooked, red-barked limbs of the manzanita brambles that reached across the trail to block their way. Such was his worry over the possibility of harpy diseases that he made quick work of it, hacking through thick limbs as easily as cheese. In little more than an hour, they’d made it to Camp Chaparral.

Chapter 7

C
amp Chaparral, like Cedar Wood, surprised Ilbei by its small size. Neither camp could have supported the needs of more than fifty or so miners and their families—those that might be inclined to drag a family so far away from the rest of humanity anyway. The camp consisted of five wooden buildings. Two were barely more than shanties, but three of them were built well enough to have the look of civility. One sent up a plume of smoke from a mud-brick chimney despite the scorching heat of the day, suggesting the preparation of a hot meal underway. Harpy Creek ran at a pretty good clip forty or so paces beyond the buildings, and the sight of the water and the promise of food set the soldiers’ spirits on high as they gazed out over the last hundred spans of brush that separated them from the tiny little town. That is, until they heard the wail.

The sound rose from the buildings below, at first barely on the edge of hearing but rising, sharp and high, slicing through the promise of the tranquil scene below them. It stopped abruptly, and once more the day’s mounting heat was the only thing in the air.

“What was that?” Jasper asked, eyes darting between the camp and his brawny sergeant. He shifted closer to Ilbei.

Meggins glanced sideways at the nervous mage and stifled a grin. “A banshee, most likely,” he said. “That nymph didn’t get us, but there’s an angry curse upon these hills, a female spirit gone bitter with all them miners abusing the ground all these years. And she can see a man coming long before he sees her. Likely smelled
you
when you poured that honey into the water, trying to trick her, and sent the banshee to finish us off.” He winked at Kaige while Jasper looked frantically to Ilbei.

“Oh dear,” said Jasper. “Do you really think so?”

“No doubt—” Meggins began, but Ilbei silenced him with a hiss.

They waited, looking down into the clearing where the camp was, watching and expecting another wail. A few chickens ran out from the unseen side of one of the smaller buildings, clucking and fluttering in fright. Jasper tensed, prepared to run, and Ilbei, without looking at the mage, reached out and clamped a manacle’s grip around his arm, holding him in place.

An old woman came out after the chickens, cloaked in rags of graying homespun, her long hair as filthy and ragged as her raiment. She stooped and ran with her arms outstretched, her hands like claws as she shambled after the chickens ineffectually. One of the chickens got close enough that she dove for it. She missed, and the chicken skittered away, once again clucking its indignity.

Again came the wail. The woman, upon sliding to a dusty stop in the wake of the renegade chicken, got to her knees and, seated upon her heels, let forth another of the piercing cries. She sounded it with every ounce of her breath, her head cocked back, her mouth wide, howling with the full-bodied passion of a wolf.

“A banshee!” Jasper cried. “It’s true!” He turned and bolted back the way they had come, but he only got as far as the length of Ilbei’s arm, at which point he was jerked to a halt like a dog hitting the end of the rope that tethers it to a tree.

Meggins had all he could do to keep from laughing aloud and giving their position away, although for once Kaige wasn’t sharing in Meggins’ levity. Meggins’ ruse had been too well crafted for one wink to dissipate. The big man, like Jasper, looked nervously to Ilbei for a cue.

Ilbei remained vigilant, looking down the hill into the clearing. The woman stopped her wail and once again chased after the chickens. She dove headlong after another, and, after failing to grab it, once more loosed a long, agonized wail.

A second woman appeared after a third episode of chicken chasing. This one was much younger than the first, and she walked rather than ran despite the ruckus that had summoned her. She came out of the building from which the smoke rose and went to the bedraggled woman, helping her up gently. The younger led the elder into one of the small buildings, all the while patting her gently on the back of the hand and speaking to her in a voice too low to be heard from where Ilbei and his men were concealed.

When the two women were out of sight, Ilbei nodded and straightened himself. “Weren’t no banshee, that. Come on, then. Let’s get down there and see what we can learn. Jasper, you stay with me. Meggins, you and Kaige wait outside while we go in.”

“Right, Sergeant,” Meggins said.

A few moments later, Ilbei and Jasper entered the largest building, where the smoking chimney was. They let themselves inside on account of there being a “welcome” sign on the door.

Inside were several tables, no better made than those at Cedar Wood but twice their number all around, and there was a big mud-brick fireplace on one wall. A fire burned inside it, above which hung a large black stew pot, filling the air with promising smells of meat. Near the far wall, a long, narrow plank lay across a row of fat pine stumps cut flat on each end and long enough to prop the plank up to serve as a bar. A door stood open behind it, allowing Ilbei to look into a room beyond: shelves on all four walls, amply supplied, and a door leading into another room. Nobody was about.

“Halloo,” Ilbei called anyway, “anyone here?”

Nobody answered, so Ilbei went to the fireplace and checked the pot, in which various roots and hunks of dark and light meats simmered in savory brown gravy.

“Halloo,” Ilbei called again, this time loud enough so that the woman across the way could hear him easily.

Again no answer came, so Ilbei motioned with his head for Jasper to come along. They exited the building and went to the one across the way, to the shanty into which the young woman had gone with the not-quite banshee.

A flimsy door fit into the frame with large gaps above and below. Ilbei peeked through a gap at the left side. “’Scuse me, mistress, but is everythin as it should be? Might we lend a hand?”

“It’s as good as it’s likely to be,” replied a strained female voice. “And yes, come in and help me, please.”

Ilbei entered, Jasper still at his heels, and the two of them beheld the speaker seated upon the chicken chaser’s chest, the young woman’s knees pinning the older woman down on a bed of rags upon the floor. The squirming hag upon whom she sat—and ‘hag’ was a fair description, for she was filthy and wild to look upon—rolled her head from side to side, her eyes closed and her mouth clamped tight as a priestess of Mercy’s knees. Her stiff-lipped security served in the cause of avoiding whatever the younger woman was trying to dose her with, a clear liquid that sloshed about in a bulbous ladle made from a dried gourd.

“Can you hold her head for me?” the gourd-wielding woman asked. She rose and fell with the bucking of her patient, who thrashed upon the heap of rags. “I swear, the crazier she gets, the stronger she gets right along.”

Ilbei guessed by the ease with which the younger woman rode the spasms that this wasn’t the first time at this for either of them. “What’s wrong with her?” Ilbei asked as he moved toward the pair.

“She’s got the craze,” the woman replied. “Please, hold her before I waste the medicine.”

Ilbei cleared the remaining distance between them and knelt on the floor, taking the twisting woman’s head in his strong hands and holding her still, as gentle as he might a babe but firm as a vice.

“Can you get her arm too?”

Ilbei looked to Jasper and directed him to the patient’s arm with his gaze. “Grab her,” he said.

Jasper looked as if he’d rather eat bees, and he actually stepped away, backing into the wall behind him and then sidling along it until he was nearly hidden in the dark shadows at the corner of the small room. He might have stayed there too, had he not moved into a tangle of spiderwebs that set him to spasms not unlike those of the woman writhing on the mound of rags. He spat and swatted desperately, wiping at his face and mouth.

“Worthless wizard!” Ilbei spat. “Get over here and hold this woman’s arm. She needs yer help, ya craven fool.”

Jasper, slapping at his face, neck and hair, protested frantically. “But she’s got ‘the craze’! And I’ve got spiders all over me!”

“Jasper, if I have to get up, I swear to sweet Mercy herself I will break every bone in yer body and pour ya into a chamber pot. Now get over here. Now!” He spoke this last so loudly it shook dust from the thatch above and startled the young wizard into motion. He came shrugging and tiptoeing hesitantly across the room, his fear of Ilbei only slightly greater than his fear of spiders and whatever it was wracking the poor woman lying there. He paused when he got close enough to see the spittle running down the side of the patient’s face, and once more Ilbei snapped at him.

“Tidalwrath’s teeth, son, ya got one more second, and then I
am
gonna hurt ya.” He meant it.

Jasper heard the danger in Ilbei’s voice. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly up and down his pale, skinny neck as he crept the rest of the distance across the room. Staying as far back as he could possibly arrange, he stooped down and, with two fingers, took the supine and twisting woman’s arm by the wrist. He held onto it with his thumb and forefinger, the barest pinch, as if her arm were the stem of a fragile—and poisoned—wine glass, even his pinky upthrust as if manners held some present supremacy.

Stricken by the wizard’s abject delicacy, Ilbei roared at him. “Jasper! By the gods, take hold!” Ilbei’s hand darted out like a snake strike and snatched hold of Jasper’s wrist, the force of his grip cosmically opposite Jasper’s in both will and strength. With a yank, he jerked Jasper to his knees and dragged him up against the makeshift bed. “Use two hands like ya mean it, and if she gets loose of ya, I’ll snap that pinky finger off and eat it right before yer eyes.”

That was enough convincing for Jasper, and at last he set himself to holding the woman down in earnest, freeing the other woman to pry the patient’s mouth open and pour some of the concoction in. The younger woman had to hold the elder’s nose pinched tight, and she forced her gnashing mouth shut, pressing the palm of her hand upon the patient’s chin. She held on, riding the waves of fury until finally the dose was delivered and everyone could relax. Well, all but the woman with the craze, of course. She lay there, still thrashing for a time, well after everyone had released her and stepped away. She tossed and spasmed, scattering what little comfort the bedraggled bed could offer her and swearing foul enough to raise even the veteran Ilbei’s worldly eyebrows.

“Thank you,” said the young woman, who was still holding the gourd. She held it up and said, “There’s not much of this left. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep her going now.”