Sword and Sorceress XXVII (6 page)

“Can you take ale?” she asked as he
lowered himself into the chair. An odd question for a dead man, perhaps, but
bread and salt seemed to have some appeal.

“Not really”—his voice was fuller, not
longer a whisper, but surprisingly light—”but a mug before me would bring back
pleasant memories.”

She hurried to the counter to draw a mug
and set it before him. Then, hesitantly, she took the seat opposite him. He
reached up a gloved hand to loosen the strap of his helmet, and she tensed. She
really didn’t want to face whatever skeleton animated the armor, but there
seemed no choice in the matter.

The helmet lifted, and she held her
breath, expecting the moldering worst. Then she exhaled in surprise. Several
surprises, actually. Not only was the face perfectly intact with piercing blue
eyes and aristocratic nose, but it was also the face of a woman.

“You are surprised, I see,” she said,
shaking a cascade of dark hair.

Jenna forced a thin smile. “I was
expecting more... decay. I am delighted to be wrong. This conversation just
became much easier.”

“You were not so wrong,” the revenant said
with a very human-looking shrug. “This afternoon you would have seen bare bones
and rusted metal, but the moonlight allows us the semblance of what we once
were. Your kind always seeks us by day, though, and so sees us at our worst.”

“My kind—you mean the living?”

Another shake of her head. “Witches,
sorcerers, and the like. Those who always think that the dead have power to
share if the right deal can be struck.”

“I’m not really a witch,” she said
quickly, “just a witchblood.” The reference to striking a deal raised old
warnings.
Trust not the dead
, the saying went,
for they will betray
every bargain
. And how many times had Gran said never to bargain with the
dead? Give them gifts, but never bargain. “I have no interest in striking a
deal,” she added, “or in power or in your gold.”

“So I sense,” the woman nodded. “That is
one reason I am here. I believe you can be trusted.”

Jenna blinked. What an odd thing to say,
considering it was the dead who couldn’t be trusted. “My reasons are exactly
what I stated earlier. I see the curse as the adversary here, not you. I hope
we can be allies.”

“Refreshing.” The warrior raised the mug
and seemed to take a sip, though she might have only been sniffing the ale.

“How is it you are a woman?” Jenna
blurted out, unable to keep the question inside any longer. “Warrioring is a
man’s profession.”

“In my day skill with a sword was
valued, whether wielded by man or woman. But your Church long ago stopped girls
learning the ways of war alongside boys. Pity that. A woman has a very limited
place in your world.”

The statement might have been an
invitation to argue, but Jenna didn’t rise to the bait. She actually agreed
with her guest, the more so since facing the world alone without Gran. “The
world turns,” she shrugged. “What about the curse? It is said to be the gold.”

“It
is
the gold,” the revenant
said, lowering the mug again. “But not the barrow gold of local legend. Gold
was stolen during the night watch from my lord’s strong room. He decreed that
none of the guards of my watch could rest until the lost gold returned. And so
we rise each night.”

“But why would your lord’s decree last
after death?”

“In my time, lords were also
wizard-lords, and such pronouncements carried arcane weight. It is good, I
think, they all killed each other off. Mine was a grim age where souls were
often placed in bondage.”

“Ah,” Jenna nodded. It explained why
there were so many of these haunted ruins. The Church exorcists would have
secure jobs for decades to come. “And the exact wording of the curse?” That was
important in these matters.

“Ye shall not rest by day or night ‘til
the gold returns—those were his exact words.”

Jenna nodded, playing with
interpretations of the wording a moment, then suddenly deflated. “But that was
hundreds of years ago,” she said slowly. “There is no chance of finding that
same gold after all this time.”

“But there is,” the warrior insisted
with a glint in her eye. “We can sense the gold that binds us. It went far to
the south, beyond our reach, to the city of your kings. The thief bought a
sainthood with it and they raised a cathedral to his name. There the gold
remains, at least most of it. I sense a tiny bit of it has returned.”

Jenna frowned. There was only one
cathedral in the King’s City. “St. Kyre’s gold? Are you saying St. Kyre was a
thief?”

“Kyre the Liar, I name him. He deceived
me greatly that night.”

A flawed saint—that would take some
rethinking. Wait—a bit of the gold had returned? “Would a golden ring blessed
by Kyre be part of this stolen gold?”

The revenant froze. “Ring?”

“Yes, the Lord Bishop of St. Kyre’s has
come north and intends to use his Ring of Office to find the rest of Kyre’s
gold.”

Jenna had heard of chilly silences, but
now sitting across from a dead woman, she felt the temperature physically plunge.
“I didn’t mean to offend, milady,” she said hastily.

“I am a warrior, not a lady. I am
Brechia. There you have my name.”

Jenna blinked, startled. Names could be
power, and it made no sense for this undead warrior to be suddenly so open. “Why—”

“To show that I trust you. You sense my
anger, but it is not aimed at you. I smell anew the gold-lust of long ago, and
methinks it doth royally stink. A flawed bishop of a flawed saint in the
village and a traitor of your own blood much closer.”

“My brother isn’t a...” But Jenna fell
silent as she thought about that. In a test of loyalty, would Herrin jump
toward her or toward the Church? She actually didn’t know. His heart was good,
but he could be dense.

“It will come to a head soon,” Brechia
continued. “Are you still committed to help us restless dead find rest?”

“I am—but St. Kyre’s gold is far away in
the cathedral and short of taking the bishop prisoner and holding him for a
golden ransom, I see no way of getting it. And I don’t mean that seriously,”
Jenna added quickly because that sounded a little too much like a plan. Dealing
with the dead, she couldn’t afford to misspeak anything.

“Here’s what we shall do,” Brechia said
in a low voice. “Send a message to this Lord Bishop that the barrow hoard has
been found. We are willing to exchange gold for gold.”

If the dead were offering a bargain, it
had to be a trap... but the bishop would have Herrin in tow on any excursion to
the barrow. “But you can’t—” Jenna began, then fell silent. She had to avoid
anything that sounded like the terms of a bargain. “I mean,” she corrected, “that
the bishop would never go the barrow himself. Perhaps a meeting here at the
inn.”

Brechia gave a quick nod. “Arrange it.”

#

Jenna brought tea and porridge up to
Herrin’s room when dawn had scarcely broken. “Wake up. We have to talk,” she
said, coming through the door.

Herrin raised his head blearily from the
pillow. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“No, it’s early in the morning—that’s
why I brought you a nice breakfast. And we really do have to talk. I know of a
way to lay the barrow dead to final rest.”

That brought him fully awake. He hopped
out of bed in his nightshirt and came to the table by the window where she had
laid out the porridge and rudleberries. “You found something of Gran’s?”

“Not directly, but...” Jenna gave a
sigh. “Gran knew how to talk to the barrow dead, so I—”

“You conversed with the damned!”

“Keep your voice down,” she snapped. “And
yes, I talked with one of the soldiers cursed to haunt the barrow. She told me
it’s all about stolen gold.” Deliberately she waited, knowing that should
trigger a reaction in a gold hunter, if that’s what her brother was.

“She?” Herrin sputtered. “A woman can’t
be a soldier. It’s all against the natural order and...”

Jenna let him ramble on, relieved that
he was reacting to gender and not gold. Finally she interrupted. “Apparently
the natural order was different in her day, but that’s not the point. If the
gold is returned, the barrow dead can rest in peace, so they are willing to
trade the barrow gold for the stolen gold that was taken south to the cathedral
and—”

Herrin gave a sudden start. “St. Kyre’s
golden altar service? The one that sits in the cathedral vault and is brought
out on High Days?”

Oh. “Then all you have to manage is”—she
spoke rapidly to get the worst of it all out at once—”bringing the altar
service from St. Kyre’s for the exchange. I’m sure some goldsmith can create an
equally wonderful altar service out of the new gold. You can even say that you
need the pieces for a Church-mandated exorcism—all of which is perfectly true. How
could the cathedral say no to that?”

“Probably with a sharp sword through my
heart,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Jenna, none of that is going to happen.
The Lord Bishop would never turn over St. Kyre’s altar service. He has his own
plan for obtaining the barrow gold anyway.”

“Which is?”

“No idea. But I know he’s interested in
negotiation. Where and when?”

“Tonight. Here,” Jenna said. The word “negotiation”
sent a chill up her spine. It was just bargaining under another name.”

“And even if I had St. Kyre’s gold at my
beck and call,” Herrin continued, “you realize, don’t you, that the damned can
only want a consecrated altar service for unholy reasons?”

“I doubt that,” she said, but was
thinking furiously. It
was
a little odd that the stolen gold just
happened to be a consecrated and very famous altar service. Was she just being
stupid? All she had was the word of an unquiet spirit... and she remembered
what Gran said about trusting dead men. Or women.

#

As the afternoon crowd thinned out with
the coming of evening, Jenna’s unease grew. Brechia had a plan, the bishop had
a plan, and the two were probably on a collision course. Her stomach knotted
just thinking about it as she hung out freshly laundered clothes in the garden
behind the inn. Then just before sunset, the Lord Bishop rolled into the
stableyard with his Knights of the Holy Retribution.

Jenna kept hanging and rehanging clothes
to keep from going back inside. Her instinct said to flee and leave the Church
and dead to each other. But Herrin was inside. She couldn’t just leave him.

Finally at dusk, she went inside,
leaving laundry and basket in the garden, feeling taut as a clothesline
herself. At the door of the inn, she noted a salt line across the threshold,
the type intended to keep dark things out. This negotiation looked well planned
on the bishop’s part. Jenna whispered a quick charm as she stepped over the
salt line to allow Brechia entrance.  That would at least even the odds. Inside,
Jenna studied the far corner where Herrin, looking edgy as a cat in a kennel,
sat with the bishop. Again the man made her cringe. He might look gray-haired
and dignified, but she sensed a cold darkness. As she served the meager evening
crowd, Jenna noticed more salt lines at the windows.

Three Retributive Knights circulated
around the perimeter of the room with swords drawn while the Knight-Commander
hovered near the bishop’s table. This was another man she didn’t much like,
Jenna realized after watching him a few minutes. Too much death on his hands...
and no regrets.

Suddenly the outer door opened. A Knight
stepped forward, then backed up as a verbal barrage hit him broadside. “Get out
of me way, you great-assed fool! Can’t you see I’ve got work to do and don’t
think I won’t take it out of your hide if you put me behind!”

A launder woman pushed her way between
the guards, using her basket of clothes to knock him out of her way. The scene
should have roused a laugh from the inn’s patrons—one of the Church’s finest
flummoxed by a poor launder woman, but no one was laughing, not with the Lord
Bishop watching.

Jenna allowed herself the briefest of
smiles, before returning to her serving. Then she stopped cold. The inn didn’t
employ a launder woman. Laundering was one of Jenna’s many duties. Turning
again, she noted the basket was filled with clothes from the clothesline in the
garden, and the shabby dress and apron the woman was wearing were Jenna’s own
spares. The face turned toward Jenna—dark hair, aristocratic nose. One of the
blue eyes winked. Brechia.

Herrin had made a point about not
trusting the damned; Brechia had been equally opinionated about a traitor of
Jenna’s own blood. And the Lord Bishop—he might be greedy, but there was
something else as well. Seeing them all in the same room like this made Jenna
realize the only person she could trust was herself. Sad to say, but true.

She watched Brechia circulate among the
room’s customers, flirting here, haranguing there, but definitely circling the
room with a purpose. Ah, breaking the salt lines, Jenna finally noticed. Did
that mean that other revenants—

“This way,” a rough voice muttered in
her ear. “His Magnificence wants a word with you.” The Knight-Commander had her
by the arm and was propelling her toward the corner table.