The Stone of Farewell (64 page)

“Where ... are ... my friends?” Simon croaked.

“Hush, silly. Go out to the yard.”

He stumbled helplessly through the darkened room, barking his shins on hidden obstacles, lurching like a clumsily manipulated puppet.

“Here,” Skodi said. The abbey's front door swung open on grating hinges, filling the room with baleful reddish light. She stood in the doorway, pale hair fluttering in the swirling wind. “Come, now, Simon. What a night this is! A
wild
night.”

The bonfire in the dooryard blazed even higher than it had when the travelers arrived, a beacon of flame that reached the height of the sloping roof and threw the abbey's cracked walls into red relief. Skodi's children, the young and old alike, were feeding all manner of strange objects into the fire: broken chairs and other bits of ruined furniture, and deadwood from the surrounding forest that burned with a ceaseless hiss of steam. In fact, the bonfire's eager wardens seemed to be throwing everything they could find into the blaze, without regard for suitability—rocks and animal bones, cracked pottery, and shards of colored glass from the abbey's decaying windows. As the flames roared and leaped in the surging wind, the children's eyes caught the light, glowing like the yellow orbs of foxes.

Simon tottered out onto the snowy courtyard with Skodi following close behind. A keening howl lanced through the night, a wretched, lonely sound. Slow as a sunning tortoise, Simon swiveled his head toward the green-eyed shape crouched atop the hill that overlooked the clearing. Simon felt an instant of hope as it lifted its muzzle and moaned again.

“Qantaqa!” he cried; the name fell strangely from his stiff jaws and slack lips. The wolf came no closer than the hill-crest. She howled once more, a cry of fear and frustration as clear as if it had been spoken with a human tongue.

“Nasty animal,” Skodi said with distaste. “Child-eater. Moon-shouter. It won't come near Skodi's house. It won't break my charm.” She stared hard at the green eyes and Qantaqa's baying became a whimper of pain. A moment later the wolf turned and vanished from the rise. Simon cursed inwardly and struggled again to break free, but he was still as helpless as a kitten dangled by the scruff. Only his head seemed his own, and every movement was painfully difficult. He turned slowly, looking for Binabik and Sludig, then stopped, eyes widening.

Two crumpled shapes, one small, one large, lay on the frosty ground against the abbey's rotted plaster front. Simon's tears froze into stinging ice on his cheek as something tugged his head back around and drew him another unwilling step toward the fire.

“Wait,” Skodi said. Her voluminous white nightdress flapped in the wind. Her feet were bare. “I do not want you too close. You might be burned and that would spoil you. Stand there.” She pointed a plump arm at a spot a couple of paces away. As if he were an extension of her hand, Simon found himself trudging unsteadily across the thawing mud to the spot she had indicated.

“Vren!” Skodi cried. She seemed gripped by maniacal good cheer. “Where is that rope? Where are you?”

The dark-haired boy appeared in the abbey's front doorway. “Here, Skodi.”

“Tie his pretty wrists.”

Vren shot forward, skittering over the icy ground. He grasped Simon's limp hands and pulled them behind his back, then deftly bound him with a length of rope.

“Why are you doing this, Vren?” Simon gasped. “We were kind to you.”

The Hyrka boy ignored him, pulling the knots tight. When he had finished, he put his small hands on Simon's hips and pushed him toward where Binabik and Sludig lay huddled.

Like Simon, both had their hands trussed behind their backs. Binabik's eyes rolled to meet Simon's, the whites gleaming in the fire-shadowed yard. Sludig was breathing but insensible, a strand of spittle frozen on his blond beard.

“Simon-friend,” the troll rasped, each word a labor. The little man drew breath as if to say more, but instead fell back into silence.

Across the yard, Skodi had bent to draw a circle in the melting snow, trickling a handful of reddish powder from her fist. When that was finished, she began to scrape runes into the muddy ground, her tongue clenched between her teeth like a studious child. Vren stood a short distance away, swiveling his head from Skodi to Simon and back again, face empty of all emotion but a sort of animal watchfulness.

Finished stoking the fire, the children were huddled near the wall of the abbey. One of the youngest girls sat on the ground in her thin shift, sobbing quietly; an older boy patted her head in a perfunctory way that seemed meant to comfort her. They all watched Skodi's movements with fascinated attention. The wind had blown the fire into a rippling pillar, which painted their sober little faces with vermillion light.

“Now, where is Honsa?” Skodi called, clutching her nightdress closer to her body as she straightened up. “Honsa!?”

“I'll get her, Skodi,” Vren said. He slipped into the shadows at the corner of the abbey, vanishing from sight, then reappeared a few moments later with a black-haired Hyrka girl a year or two older than himself. A heavy basket swung between them, bumping and jostling across the uneven ground until they set it down by Skodi's swollen feet and scampered back to the crowd of watching children. Once there, Vren squatted in front of the little group and pulled a knife from his belt, then began to nervously shred the end of his remaining hank of rope. Simon could feel the boy's tension from across the yard. He wondered dully what the cause might be.

Skodi reached into the basket and lifted out a skull whose mandible clung by only a few knots of dried flesh, so that the eyeless face seemed to gape in surprise. The bulging basket, Simon now saw, was full of skulls. He suddenly felt sure he knew what had happened to the parents of all these children. His numbed body shivered reflexively, but he perceived the movement only dimly, as though it happened to someone else who was some distance away. Nearby, dark-eyed Vren picked at the end of rope with his gleaming blade, his features set in a brooding scowl. Simon remembered with a sinking heart how Skodi had said that beside his other chores, Vren butchered and cooked for her.

Skodi held the skull before her, her oddly pretty face utterly absorbed—a scholar studying a table of high mathematical formulae. She swayed from side to side like a boat in high wind, nightdress flapping, and began to sing in her high-pitched, childish voice.

Skodi piped,

Skodi's song went on and on, circling downward like a black whirlpool in a weed-strewn and unfrequented pond. Simon felt himself sinking with it, tugged by its insistent rhythms until the flames and the naked stars and the gleaming eyes of children blurred together into streaks of light, and his heart spiraled down into darkness. His mind could feel no connection with his shackled body, or with the actions of those around him. A bleak hiss of idiot noise filled his thoughts. Bleak shapes moved across the snowy courtyard, unimportant as ants.

Now one of the shapes took the round, pale object in its hand and tossed it into the fire, throwing a fistful of powder in after it. A plume of scarlet smoke belched forth, trailing off into the sky and obscuring Simon's view. When it cleared, the fire was burning as brightly as before, but a heavier darkness seemed to have settled over the courtyard. The red light that splashed the buildings had become subdued, old as sunset on a dying world. The wind had failed, but a deeper cold crept through the abbey's grounds. Though his body was no longer fully his own, still Simon could feel the intense chill crawling right into his bones.

“Come to me, Lady Silver Mask!” the largest of the figures cried. “Speak with me, Lord Red Eyes! I want to trade with you! I have a pretty thing you will like!”

The wind had not returned, but the bonfire began to waver from side to side, bulging and shuddering like some great animal struggling inside a sack. The cold intensified. The stars dimmed. A shadowy mouth and two empty black eye-smudges formed in the flames.

“I have a present for you!” the large one shouted gleefully. Simon, drifting, remembered that her name was Skodi. Several of the children were crying, voices muffled despite the curious stillness.

The face in the fire contorted. A low, grumbling roar spilled from the yawning black mouth, slow and deep as the creaking of a mountain's roots. If words were part of that drone, they were indistinguishable. A moment later, the features began to shimmer and fade.

“Stay!” Skodi cried. “Why do you go away?” She looked around wildly, flapping her large arms; her exhilarated expression was gone. “The sword!” she shrieked at the covey of children. “Stop crying, you stupid oxes! Where is the sword? Vren!”

“Inside, Skodi,” the little boy said. He was holding one of the smaller children on his lap. Despite the curious sense of dislocation—or perhaps because of it—Simon could not help noticing that Vren's arms were bare and thin beneath his ragged coat.

“Then get it, you fool!” she cried, hopping up and down in a leviathan jig of rage. The face in the flames was now barely distinguishable. “Get it!”

Vren stood up quickly, letting the child in his lap slide to the ground, where it joined its wails to the general cacophony. Vren sped into the house and Skodi turned to the billowing flames once more. “Come back, come back,” she coaxed the diminishing face, “I have a present for my Lord and Lady.”

Skodi's grip on him seemed to diminish somewhat. Simon felt himself slipping back into his body once more—a curious feeling, like donning a cloak of softly tickling feathers.

Vren appeared in the doorway, pale face solemn. “Too heavy,” he called. “Honsa, Endë, you others, come here! Come and help!” Several of the children came creeping across the snow toward the abbey at his call, looking over their shoulders at the groaning bonfire and their gesticulating caretaker. They followed Vren into the shadowed interior like a string of nervous goslings.

Skodi turned again, her round cheeks flushed, her rosy lips trembling. “Vren! Bring me the sword, you lazy thing! Hurry!”

He stuck his head out of the doorway. “Heavy, Skodi, it's heavy like a stone!”

Skodi abruptly turned her mad eyes on Simon. “It's
your
sword, isn't it?” The face had vanished from the flames, but the stars, pale as balls of ice, still barely smoldered in the night sky; the bonfire still rippled and danced, untouched by any wind. “You know how to move it, don't you?” Her gaze was almost intolerable.

Simon said nothing, fighting inwardly with all his might to prevent himself from babbling like a drunkard, from spilling to those compelling eyes every thought he'd ever had.

“I must give it to them,” she hissed. “They are searching for it, I know! My dreams told me that they are. The Lord and Lady will make me ... a power.” She began to laugh, a girlish trill that frightened him as much as anything that had happened since the sun had set. “Oh, pretty Simon,” she giggled, “what a wild night! Go and bring me your black sword.” She turned and shouted at the empty doorway. “Vren! Come untie his hands!”

Vren popped out into the open, glaring furiously. “No!” he screamed. “He's bad! He'll get away!
He'll hurt you!”

Skodi's face froze into an unpleasant mask. “Do what I say, Vren. Untie him.”

The boy loped forward, stiff with rage, tears standing in his eyes. He roughly pulled Simon's hands out behind and thrust the knife blade between the cords. Vren's breath came in constricted gasps as he sawed the ropes away; when Simon's hands fell free, the Hyrka boy turned and sped back to the abbey.

Simon stood, rubbing his wrists slowly, and thought about simply running away. Skodi had turned her back on him and was crooning imploringly to the bonfire. He looked out of the corner of his eye to Binabik and Sludig. The Rimmersman still lay without movement, but the troll was struggling against his bonds.

“Take ... take the sword and run, friend Simon!” Binabik whispered. “We will be escaping ... somehow ...”

Skodi's voice cut through the darkness. “The sword!” Simon felt himself turning helplessly from his friend, compelled beyond any possibility of resistance. He marched toward the abbey as though prodded by an invisible hand.