The ingredients and the kettles had taken their toll on her purse. She sat down at the kitchen table where she had cleared a little circle amid the refuse, freeing it from dust and webs. She spilled three gold gryphs and several silver beks from a clutch and let them roll around the tabletop. They were all she had, all that she could find in the bedroom before she left.
It made her laugh. A slightly crazy lost giggle that echoed off the decayed walls. She held her head in her hands and shivered. For a moment she thought about the High King’s featherbed.
The nights were cooling.
She stared at the coins—more than enough to pay the sexton off.
He was a huge creature that barely spoke Trade and gouged sentences out of Hinter like a three-year-old fumbling at clay. She had met him a week ago while gathering stones.
He did not know she was the High King’s witch.
Sena swept the coins back into the pouch and listened to the creatures twittering in the rubbish piles.
It must be nearly time, she thought. She checked her watch. She could hear bells ringing in the city, tolls like ghosts floating on the wind. Outside, the untrimmed bushes scrabbled at the windows, hungry for more sweets.
Sena stood up. Through one of the dirty windowpanes she had seen a lantern bobbing in the yard.
She wiped her hands on a damp rag and darted up a set of creaking stairs to one of the web-choked towers where she kept her things. With her pack over her shoulder, she ran back down to the foyer and outside where the smell of dying weeds met her.
The sexton was poking around at the edge of the estate. Sena sprinted toward him amidst the roar of leaves.
The sexton looked up.
“Moon’s greetin’,” he called. His voice seemed to come out of a cave. When Sena reached him, he offered her his huge gaunt hand, either to shake or to assist her in walking.
Sena dropped a silver coin in the cavernous palm and pretended to misunderstand the gesture.
“Do you think it will storm?” It was a moronic question she asked to fill up space.
He swung his head. “Mubee few drops.”
Everything about him was enormous. Even his nose. Blade-like, hooked and thin. Long unkempt hair hung to his shoulders in straight uneven lengths almost too heavy for the wind. Instead of eyes, his face held tiny sunken points of obscurity.
Like a scarecrow, he towered over her, emanating an unsettling darkness from his pores.
“I been here once before,” he said. “Boneyard’s uver ther, ain’t it?” He pointed with his spade, shouting hard above the wind.
Another sudden gust ravished the trees and a storm of plundered leaves flapped crazily into his lantern light.
Sena nodded. She led the way, picking a route through the old forest.
As they went, voices floated up from the crofts below. Faraway shouts about closing barn doors and getting livestock inside. Disembodied and broken up over the distance, they sounded like the shades of men and women mumbling near fields they once farmed.
When Sena came to the place marked with white stones the sexton stopped and lifted the spade off his shoulders. He swung it down into both hands.
“Wait,” said Sena.
A huge leathery leaf slapped her in the face. She batted it away. “I need the doors opened.” She pointed up the hill.
The sexton scowled but shrugged. He plodded off through the burial grounds. Sena followed.
Strandy saplings had conquered most of the cemetery. The mausoleum doors glared from a disturbingly dark recess in the hillside where crisp beveled letters had been chiseled into an arch.
Oblivious to omens, the sexton put the haft of his spade through the chains that ran between the handles and cranked down. Though the spade gave a pained crack, the well-corroded links burst apart, falling with a dull clatter to the slab.
The slab was covered with leaves and maple seeds. The sexton sorted out the chains and tossed them heavily to one side like a man who had just killed a snake.
Hunched over, Sena thought the sexton might pass as the creature the farmers were talking about.
“Hab to dig curful now,” the sexton muttered to himself, “spade’s craked.” His lantern beamed fitfully. It cast a yellow circle across the slab and up the stone doors, making him look monstrous as he examined the damaged tool. He pulled one of the doors open but didn’t bother looking inside.
“Want a tikyular one?” He picked up his lantern and walked back out among the graves.
“Any one will do.” She thought her voice sounded idiotically chipper. “Make it a man. Try one that’s not so old.”
When she heard the chink of the spade biting into ground she walked up to the mausoleum. Fallen crab apples on the hillside permeated the air with cider. Sena poked her head inside.
The fusty silent darkness seemed palpably chancy. She crouched in the doorway to light her candle lantern. Even the flame was frightened. It fluttered down as though trying to hide in the tallow.
Once she got it going and slammed the glass, Sena saw that the vault had been constructed in crisp simplicity. An empty stone shelf for lights and flowers rested on claw-like corbels. She raised her candle box. Some roots had forced their way through the tiles overhead. They looked like pale wooden worms.
Not too windy, relatively tidy, the vault would do just fine.
She began to unpack her things, setting them out in a neat circle. An earthen bowl, a wooden pestle, several small bags of herbs, a stoppered silver vial, a skin of water, a box of charcoal, several black tapers, a pouch of powdered chalk, a bit of coiled string and the C
srym T
.
For a while she waited, straining to hear the shovel. The wind was too strong and the mausoleum door groaned, threatening to close.
An irrational fear, that the sexton might lock her in, made Sena rise. She left her things on the floor and went back outside.
The sexton’s light already rested below ground. Its glow bled over the edge of a hole, illuminating pebbly sprays of flung dirt. As Sena approached, she saw him plunge the spade and violently hammer it down with the heel of his boot.
He was a Naneman and she could hear him humming and singing quietly in an old dialect of Hinter that she could not understand, a sort of chant that accompanied the rhythm of his spade.
When he noticed her, he stopped.
“There soon.” His breathing came hard. “They been pushed up. Mubee frost or shifts in the grund. Ain’t deep no more.”
Sena could see where he had brutally hacked through roots, his long stringy arms swinging heedless of anything below. He had removed his wool shirt and his sharp shoulder blades looked dangerously close to cutting their way out every time he threw the spade. His strength and energy were horrific.
She moved away, listening to the endless cascade of leaves. She had mixed Caliph’s blood with fermented creepberry juice to sweeten it and prevent it from thickening.
She leaned back against an ugly statue of a serpent and rested her hips on its brow.
At last she heard the dull thud she had been waiting for.
“Just tha hed, right?” the sexton shouted.
He had dug a hole roughly four feet square near the top of the grave, leaving the lower half of the coffin locked in the clay. The last few shovelfuls had been particularly difficult as the cracked spade finally broke.
The sexton had been forced to his knees to finish the excavation.
“Just break it open,” she called.
He hauled himself out and picked up the other tool he had brought, a hooked metal bar too short to have been useful in leveraging the mausoleum chains. Returning to the hole, he set about the boards, prying them away from the face. They broke with soft mealy noises, exposing a grisly form to his lamplight.
“That all?” he asked. His tiny black eyes looked around as if making certain there were no more holes to dig.