“She wasn’t dragged, Lance,” I said quietly. “She was carried.”
“Impossible. You saw the wound. No man did that.”
“I agree. But no animal walks on hind legs and carries a twelve-stone body in his arms either.”
“Few men could do so,” he pointed out.
“True. Come, let’s see where they found her.”
* * *
The spot was barely thirty steps from the gate. The snow still held the shape of the woman’s body. It appeared she’d been summarily dropped and then abandoned. Unfortunately, any tracks that might have been useful within the area had been trampled over when the villagers first found her. Still, I walked a wide circle looking for something to help resolve the scene.
I stopped when I reached a particularly deep set of prints. They were driven into the permafrost, nearly deeper even than Harsigny’s armored horse, and at an angle that pointed toward the wall. It was, I reflected, the same angle one might see if one stood atop the wall and fired an arrow directly into the ground.
It was quite obviously impossible, but it looked as if someone had leapt from the wall.
Harsigny rode up to me. “I’m of a mind to declare this the act of a wild animal,” he said. “We could arrange a hunting party, catch a wolf or two and be done with it.”
“Aye,” I agreed. “That would settle things down. Until it kills again.”
He looked at me appraisingly with his one good eye. “Yes, that would complicate matters. What are you thinking?”
“I am thinking that in order to determine what really happened to our leather smith’s wife, we need to ask the person who witnessed it.”
“You think there was a witness?”
“The body was left here, no? It wasn’t eaten, or buried, or burned, or taken to the woods. It was just dropped. Whoever killed her and moved her to here was interrupted.”
“We must find this person!”
I nodded. “Let me conduct my own inquiry. Quietly, when not followed by half the village. It would be for the best.”
* * *
Lord Harsigny was preeminently a man of his age. He did not deal well with deception, intrigue, or skullduggery in general. Any such deceit was, above all, a sin, and it was the duty of nobility to set an example for the peasantry by not engaging in it. (His church, meanwhile, had built a hierarchical structure that—at that time—depended a great deal on deception, intrigue and skullduggery, but I was never one to identify hypocrisy when doing so might get me killed.) Thus, I knew he would want nothing to do with my “investigation,” which required that I go about the town disguised.
I had two reasons for this. One, it’s hard to get anything done properly with a small crowd following you around, as always seemed to happen when I, or anyone else who resided in the castle, ventured out. Two, no crowd would fully appreciate the manner of person I expected to find.
Not to say that I was putting on a putty nose or any such thing, but I did trade in my furs for less expensive clothes: old boots, a grimy pair of pants, a torn shirt, and a hooded cloak on loan from a stable hand. Fully attired, and with the cloak secured, I looked more or less like everyone else in the town.
I waited until late in the day before leaving the castle proper and slipping out through the stables. Not surprisingly, there were few people about. The idea that there was a wolf out there that dared venture past the gates and was strong enough to drag an adult woman from the well had more or less guaranteed I’d be walking the alleys alone. Also, it was terribly cold, much colder than in the morning, although my lack of proper clothing may have contributed to that particular opinion. I had to keep the hood closed up tight to protect my face from frostbite, and since the cloak stank of turnips, this was not entirely pleasant.
I reached the wall near sunset. My area of concern was on the town side of the wall. The snow there was almost perfectly virginal, which helped a great deal.
At just about the same point on the wall where the heavy impression outside the gates had been made, I found a matching set. These were not nearly as deep and the angle was fairly straight but the evidence was clear, provided one’s world view allowed for such a thing. Somebody had stood in that spot and jumped to the top of the wall.
I knew of a few beings that could have made that jump—and the complementary one on the other side—and most of them preferred to come out only at night.
Working from the embedded prints, I was able to locate the trail that led up to them. They were made by someone who was running. Someone with small feet. Small, unshod feet.
I followed the path backward. It snaked through the untrammeled part of town behind the huts and beyond the main thoroughfares, making it easier to locate, but a frustratingly drawn-out process nonetheless. And with the sun failing and snow on the horizon, I was worried I’d soon lose the trail.
Abruptly, it came to a stop. I’d walked more than halfway back to the castle—albeit a roundabout way—and found the tracks ended at a heavy imprint similar to the one outside the wall. She—or he, although I was convinced I was dealing with a she just based on foot size—had jumped to that point from somewhere.
The best guess was a small enclosed barn thirty paces away. It was a bit taller than most of the buildings around it, so it probably had a loft of some sort, and possibly even a trap that led from the loft to the roof. Theoretically, my prey could have simply used the barn rooftop as a launching point after jumping from another rooftop, but these were not the finest of structures. Traveling roof-to-roof would more often result in one crashing through thatch and into someone’s living room. (Okay, they were one-room hovels, but you get my point.)
I walked around the barn once and found no footprints leading to or away from it outside of my own, so it hadn’t been in use since at least the last snowfall about a week ago. Horses need to be tended to daily, thus, no horses. Then whose barn was it, and what did they use it for?
I creaked open the door, and with a whiff of the inside air, I had my question answered. It was a tannery. Albert’s tannery, presumably, as he was the only tanner in town. I slipped in and shut the door behind me.
It was perfectly dark inside. And I’d stupidly neglected to bring a lantern with me.
Nobody born in or around the twentieth century can fully appreciate how absolutely paralyzing nighttime was before the invention of the light switch. If we wanted to see after sunset we risked death by fire or asphyxiation. If we didn’t want to see, we risked banging our shins on something made of stone or getting eaten, neither of which was good. Hence, we mainly just got a lot of sleep. I was somewhat worried about the getting eaten problem, especially if I was right about what was sharing the barn with me.
I slipped a tinderbox from my pocket and felt around for a lantern. Luckily—perhaps in anticipation of the light switch—Albert had one hanging by the door.
I put down the lantern and kneeled beside it, trying to spark a flame.
“What are you doing?” whispered someone from above. “Are you mad? Can’t you smell what’s in here?”
I stood up unsteadily, for fear that I was about to get pounced upon. “I know it smells awful…”
“And it can burn.”
The voice was coming from the loft. It was a woman’s voice, soft and melodic with the accent of a peasant, which certainly fit the surroundings.
“Then why is the lantern here?” A fair question, I thought.
“Albert and Louisa are not stumbling fools. They light it outside in the moonlight and then close it before entering.”
“And you?”
“I do not need it. I can see fine.”
“I imagine you can.”