When Demons Walk (12 page)

Turning back to the hard wooden table where the Reeve was still lying, she saw that he had turned his face into his arms. Careful not to touch him, she inspected his back carefully for damage. “Why did you let him do this?”

Kerim started to shrug then grunted. “It can't do any harm, and it makes Mother happy.”

Sham muttered something suitable about the stupidity of males, Cybellian males in particular, under her breath. Beneath the beautiful brown skin, his muscles, heavy from years of battle, were twitching and knotted. Dark mottled bruises told her that Tirra's healer had used the small wooden clubs that were set carefully on a nearby table, but there were no blisters from the iron rod that was being heated over a large candle.

Taking one of the set of clubs in her hands, she traced the misfortune rune she'd used to avenge Maur. She wished she were powerful enough to add an extra year to her curse, and had to argue with herself before she added the mark
that limited the amount of damage that the spell could cause.

“What are you doing?” asked the Reeve, his voice only slightly hoarser than normal.

Shamera looked up to see that he had turned his head to watch her. She also noticed he was being very careful not to move anything else. She was tempted to alter the limits of the spell again.

“It's just a little spell,” she said in her best mistress style. “About that hat—”

He smiled, tiredly, but it was a smile. “About that spell.”

“I thought that you had your doubts about magic.”

“I do, but I have made it a policy never to dismiss any possibility completely—one of the reasons you are here now. About that spell,” he repeated firmly, his smile becoming a little less strained.

“Just something to occupy that little worm . . .” Sham paused as an intriguing possibility occurred to her. “I wonder if the Shark knows about him. I'll have to ask.”

Kerim started to laugh, and then stopped abruptly and gritted his teeth.

Dickon entered the room quietly. Judging by the air of satisfaction that he wore as well as a slight redness on the knuckles of his right hand, Shamera assumed that he'd gotten a little of his own version of vengeance.

He cleared his throat quietly so that Kerim would know that he was there before he said, “The healer has chosen to wait in the kitchens until we retrieve his items. If you wish to rest a while on the table before we try to move you, Lord, the man didn't seem to be in a great hurry.”

“No,” Kerim said, levering himself up with his hands until he was sitting.

Dickon brought a light robe. It wasn't warm enough to wear outside, but in a room with a fire burning merrily and tapestries to keep out the draft, it was more than adequate. The Reeve's face appeared more grey than brown against the dark blue satin of his robe and the lines around his mouth were more pronounced than usual.

Shamera worked hard at being solitary; she'd learned at an early age that people died, and if you let yourself care for them it only hurt worse. She'd become adept at hiding herself behind the roles that she played, whether she was mistress or streetwise thief. There were only two people Sham considered friends, and one of them had been killed by a demon. In less than a week, the Reeve of Southwood had joined that select group, and Sham was very much afraid he had become something more.

“If everything's taken care of here, I think that I'll run around and do a little snooping while people are still gossiping at court,” she said, suddenly anxious to leave the room.

The Reeve settled into his chair and nodded, as if conversation were beyond him. Sham worked the lever that opened the “secret” panel and stepped through. She started to close the aperture behind her when she noticed Dickon packing the healer's belongings.

“Dickon,” she said. “Be careful how long you hold those wooden clubs—and make doubly sure that the healer gets them back.”

Dickon eyed the clubs, flexing his right hand slightly, as if he were envisioning returning the clubs in a less than gentle fashion. “You may be certain I will.”

 

T
HOUGH THE PASSAGE
was kept dimly lit by candles during the day, most of them had burned out. Sham called a magelight to follow her as she was highly unlikely to meet anyone here. The steady blue-white light glistened cheerfully off the polished floor as she walked. There was a brief passage that ran back along the Reeve's room and ended in a stone wall. She didn't bother to travel that way but took a step to where the main passage branched to the right. Straight ahead was a narrow tunnel that ran the length of her rooms; she decided to go there first.

Since the only people living in this area were she, Dickon, and the Reeve, she'd only been this way once, though she'd learned the passages elsewhere in the Castle thoroughly.

Next to the hinged panel that opened into her bedroom was a set of brackets that held a board against the wall. In all the passages Sham had found such brackets marking spy holes into most of the rooms of the Castle. The boards were originally placed in front of the hole so light from the tunnel wouldn't alert the person being spied upon. As the passageways were no longer secret, most of the peep holes in personal rooms had been permanently sealed.

Experimentally, Sham shifted the board, and it slid easily into her hand. Frowning, because she should have thought of it before, she set the wood back into the brackets and used a fastening rune to hold the board against the hole. If she stayed longer than a few weeks she would have to remember to renew the spell. Satisfied, she returned to the wider passage and continued her explorations.

The spy hole opening into the room next to the Reeve's chambers revealed a meeting room of some sort when Sham sent her magelight through the opening to illuminate it. There were a number of uncomfortable-looking chairs surrounding a large, dark oak table. A space was left empty, the more visible for the uniformity of the spacing between the other chairs—a space just wide enough for the wheeled chair that the Reeve used. Finding nothing of interest, Sham turned away and crossed the passage to look into the room next to hers.

White sheets covered the furniture in the room, protecting the valuable embroidery on the chairs from the dust that accumulated with disuse no matter how good the housekeeping was. She could tell from the shapes of the shrouds that the muslin-covered furniture was arranged in fashion similar to the last room she'd seen.

Her nose wrinkled as a whiff of air came through the little hole and she frowned at the stench.

“By the tides . . .” she swore softly, forcing herself to take a deep breath near the spy hole.

The Castle had been occupied for a long time, and all the rooms had their own smell. The Reeve's room had the musty-salt smell of leather, horses, and metal; her room
smelled faintly of roses and smoke—this room smelled like a charnel house.

Increasing the power of the magelight, she sent it up near the chandelier so she could get a better look. There was a large table surrounded by fifteen high-backed chairs, all draped in white fabric. With better lighting, Sham could tell that the chair just opposite the oaken door had been pulled out of place. The dust covers made it difficult to tell, but it looked as if the chair faced the door rather than the table.

From the position of the spy hole, she couldn't see anything else. She walked to the passage door. The levers worked smoothly and the panel slipped back onto a track and slid easily out of the way, just as the door to the Reeve's room did. The full effect of the stench hit her when she opened the door, and she had to swallow hard before she entered.

She increased the intensity of her light again, as much for reassurance as for the increased visibility. The oddness in the placement of the chair seemed suggestive, and she remembered that the demon's pattern should have led it to kill again several days ago—though no body had been found.

She took a step into the room and noticed for the first time that the polished granite floor near the oaken door was stained with dried blood. Breathing shallowly, Sham rounded the chair until she stood in front of it. From there she could see more blood stains on the floor, washing up in splatters against other furnishings and disappearing under the chair's covering. Between the door and the chair was a larger stain where there had been so much blood that it had formed a puddle. The rank smell of the rotting blood made her cough.

Oddly enough, the sheet covering the chair was virginally white, as if it had been kept clean purposefully. A shroud, she thought, not to hide the body it clearly outlined, but to frighten the poor maid who found it the next time the room was cleaned.

She forced herself to step forward onto the dark-stained
floor near the chair. Not wanting to disturb the body any more than she could help, she was careful as she tugged the sheet off and tossed it on top of the table.

Sham had lived in Purgatory for a long time. The sight of a body, no matter how gruesome, did not bother her . . . much. It didn't require an intimate examination of the dead man before she deduced that whatever had killed her old master had also killed this man. Thin cuts covered his skin, just as they had Maur's.

His head had fallen forward, obscuring his features. The chances were slim that she would know who this man was; from the condition of the body, he had been killed near the time when she had moved into the Castle, but she had to look. Rather than moving the body, Sham crouched low so that she could look up into his face.

When she saw the bruised and battered death-greyed features, she swallowed hard against the terror that chilled her blood. This man had been dead at least three days, perhaps longer. Dead, Lord Ven wasn't nearly as handsome as he had been when she last spoke with him—less than an hour ago.

 

T
HE
R
EEVE SAT
in his chair in front of the fire where she had left him; Dickon was nowhere to be seen. At Sham's abrupt entrance he looked up. He appeared so tired and worn that she wondered if she shouldn't find Talbot instead.

“What's wrong?” he said, turning his chair slightly and pushing it closer to her.

She bit her lip. “I found a body in the room next to mine.”

The tiredness disappeared from his face to be replaced with animation, and Sham realized that it was depression as much as fatigue and pain that was bothering him. She wasn't sure that the discovery of his half-brother's body was going to help his melancholy much. Without a word he passed her on the way to the opening that led to the passageway.

“Kerim?” Her voice cracked with strain.

He stopped and looked at her inquiringly. Shamera bowed her head a brief moment before meeting his eyes. “It's Lord Ven.”

She caught a flash of something in his eyes, before his expression flattened unreadably into that of a battle-hardened warrior. He nodded and continued through the passage door. Sham took a lighted candle from a nearby table, since she'd doused the magelight before entering Kerim's chambers, and followed the Reeve.

She'd left the door to the room ajar and the stench had traveled into the passage. She brought the scented candle closer to her nose; it didn't help. Kerim's chair didn't fit easily through the narrow doorway; the hubs left deep mars in the wood as he forced it through. He stopped just inside the opening.

“Hold your candle higher,” he said, the tone of his voice making it a request rather than an order.

Sham raised her hand and let the flickering light illuminate the room. She noticed the eerie shadows that jumped as the flame moved on the wick and was exceedingly grateful that she hadn't found the body by candlelight. Kerim looked over the scene carefully before he moved forward, stopping again to look at the places where Sham's feet had cracked the dried blood.

“Me,” she replied in answer to his unvoiced question. “There was no sign that anyone had been here before I came in.”

He nodded and circled the chair with its macabre occupant. She watched his face and knew that he noticed the pattern of the blood on the floor—the pool had been evenly distributed. Lord Ven had been killed standing and brought to the chair after he was dead, as evidenced by the trail of blood his heels had made. It was the large pool of blood that the Reeve would find most troubling. There was no disturbed area where a killer would have stood, absorbing blood that would otherwise have fallen on the floor, no bloody footprints where the killer had run away.

Sham pulled the white cloth off the table and held it so
Kerim could see its pristine condition. “This was covering him when I came in.”

Kerim frowned and touched the cloth without taking it, rubbing it lightly between his fingers. He looked again at the stains on the floor and frowned.

“Someone went to a lot of work to make this murder look odd,” he commented; Shamera didn't reply.

Finally he pushed himself over the stained floor and touched his half-brother's face, tipping it up. Shamera's candle revealed the high-carved cheekbones and the wide, straight nose that both men shared before he gently let the head fall back down.

Silently, Kerim wiped his hands on his thighs, not to clean them but as an outlet for his excess energy. Without looking at her, he spoke. “My brother has been dead for three or possibly four days. This room is cool, so it is hard to be certain.”

“Yes,” agreed Sham without inflection.

“I talked with him this morning.”

“He spoke to me an hour ago,” she replied evenly. “He said that he had something to tell me in private, but Dickon came to fetch me before I went with him.”

“The demon.” Kerim stared at the body without seeing it. There was belief in his tone.

“I think so,” she agreed.

“I thought that it could only take the form that was given to it by its summoner.” His voice was neutral once more: she couldn't tell what he was thinking.