Gruesome shook his head, looking agitated. "Wrong! Wrong!" He pointed out toward the darkness in several different directions. I frowned. "What's the problem, then?"
"Dunno." The troll twitched, raising his head to look out into the night. "Feel wrong, wrong!"
"Just a hunch?"
Gruesome nodded and held up his huge mitts. I backed off in alarm, but he only wiggled his inside talons.
"Feel pinches! Trouble, trouble! "
" 'By the pricking of my thumbs,' " I quoted, but remembered, in the nick of time, not to finish the verse: "something wicked this way comes." I rolled up to my feet. "I'm never one to scoff at intuition - at least, not in this world. Want to wake up the broke off, staring.
With my usual paranoia, I had decided to set up a barrier against supernatural attackers-there had been too many things that had gone bump last night, though that could have just been Frisson dreaming in verse. We hadn't gone very fast today, out of deference to his weakened condition, and we were still in pretty open country, though there were a lot of scrub trees about.
So I had conjured up some talcum powder, sprinkled it around our campsite in a circle, and chanted the tail end of Shakespeare's dirge from Cymbeline, with a few adjustments:
I'd figured if anything spooky had tried to get too close, that verse ought to keep it outside our perimeter-and it seemed I'd been right.
Just outside the circle of white powder, a blob of formless mist was rising from the ground, thickening and coalescing into a human form - but a mangled human form. Its face was bruised and swollen, one eye socket empty, thumbs dangling, one foot twisted almost backward, and its tunic ripped open to show dark smudges against its chest and abdomen.
"It is a ghost," Gilbert murmured from his place by the fire. Apparently, Gruesome and I hadn't been as quiet as we'd thought. The squire sounded excited, fascinated. "It is the shade of one who died by torture. " I was glad he could take such a detached interest in it. For myself, I felt rather queasy and thoroughly sickened in my heart. The specter flitted from point to point about the circle, moaning. Chains, attached to the fetters on its wrists, clanked and rattled.
"Bewa-a-a-re!" it cried. "Oh, foolish mortals, bewa-a-a-re! Flee! Hide yourselves away!"
I summoned my courage and called out, "Having you hang around just outside the perimeter doesn't exactly imbue me with a great desire to go exploring!"
"Heart of stone, who would mock a soul in torment!" the ghost cried. "O kindred of my fate, arise! Up, all ye who died by torture! Spirits bound to this world in unquiet slavery to a sorcerer's will, come now to school this foolish mortal!"
I had to turn to follow its progress, and I muttered out of the corner of my mouth, "Keep an eye on the place it came from, Gruesome." The troll moaned in answer-but I figured he'd fight all the harder if he were scared. Either that, or run.
I wished I could.
Moans began to fill the night in horrendous discord, faint, but growing louder; and dim forms, drifting here and there, swam out of the darkness.
"Abandon your ill-advised escape!" the ghost cried. "Return whence you came! For know that, if you do persist in opposing Queen Suettay, you shall become as I - a shadow of a soul who died in agony unspeakable!"
I felt the blood draining from my face. I remembered Gilbert's commander warning me about the evil sorceress-queen of this country. How the Hell had I attracted her attention?
How the Hell?
No. Couldn't be. Just a figure of speech.
But I spoke up bravely. Unfortunately, it sounded more like a croak. "So I'm to be deterred by the thought of a horrible death, a punishment for even thinking about leaving Allustria, or raising my hand against the queen?" Not that I had ...
"Even that!" the spirit cried over the chorus of moans and wails behind it. "I gave the queen my fullest measure of obedience - yet she had me rent apart, while still alive, for her mere pleasure! Chortled with delight at all my screams! And as I died, despairing, she seized my soul, to chain it in eternal slavery to her will!" Now I began to tremble inside. I scolded myself harshly, if silently, and reminded myself this was all impossible.
"It is true." Gilbert came to his feet. "Suettay tortures folk for mere amusement, daily."
A sadist. I was being pitted against a sadist of the worst kind - and for what?
To get home. Preferably, alive.
I steeled myself to the piteous cries around me and called out, "Go! The afterworld is huge - you don't have to stay around here! The queen loses power over you when you die!"
"Foolish mortal, how little you know!" Another specter swam up beside the first, a ghost like an illustration from an anatomy text, muscles and ligaments naked to the night. "She whose power comes from Satan can petition her master for dominion over others who have turned their hearts toward the Evil One!"
"But you only fall into the Devil's power through your own fault!"
"And so we did," the phantom sneered. "I myself sought power, always power. While yet a boy, I swore to do whatever deed the Devil wished, if he would give me power-and I gained dominion over peasant folk, then over soldiers. Yet Suettay plucked me out for her fell mirth, and I died in agony, crying to my master Satan for power against this corrupted sorceress-and as I cried out to evil, Suettay wove her spell about me to capture my soul! At the last instant, I cried out in despairing repentance, but it was too late. Suettay had claimed me, and I am bound to her!"
I suppressed nausea. I mean, I really felt sorry for them, even if they had been total vipers when they'd been alive. If ever I'd heard a sound reason for being good, this was it. Unfortunately, I was aware of my own enormous failings and knew I wasn't in the world's greatest shape for combatting evil.
"Be of good heart, Wizard Saul," Gilbert counseled. "They cannot touch you here, within your enchanted circle."
I turned, welcoming the change of topic with zeal. "You're right. So why did Suettay sic them on us? Just to make sure we don't sleep and are so weak tomorrow that we'll fall into her hands? I can't really believe that! "
"I doubt it, also," Gilbert answered. "It may be that they seek to frighten you into joining their foul cause."
"That's crazy." I turned back to the spooks, debating within myself. I could only wonder how Suettay had come to know I was here. Crystal balls? Ink pools?
It didn't matter. "Go tell your mistress that it will take worse than you to scare me!"
The ghosts' moans turned into roars, and they came swooping against the invisible barrier like moths to the chimney of a hurricane lamp, anger and outrage in their faces.
I turned back to the squire. "Has to be more than just a try at scaring me."
"It must," Gilbert agreed. "Otherwise, when they saw you were not daunted, they would have fled."
"Yeah." I gestured to the barrier of specters. "You'd swear they were trying to attack us, but it's obvious they can't get in."
"Obvious indeed," the squire said, turning toward the perimeter, but not looking all that sure, himself. "Yet there's this, too--if they cannot come in, it is equally true that we cannot go out." I could feel my eyes widen. "But that means somebody's trying to keep us here, to make sure we haven't gone anywhere until ..." A gout of greenish flame ripped the night, lighting all the hillside with an eerie light. The ghosts moaned in terror as the light dwindled. The residual chartreuse glow flickered on a dozen hooded forms, and lighted from below the face of the huge, grossly fat woman who stood before them, swathed in brocaded robes, rings glittering on her fingers, an elaborate crown on her head.