Cobweb Empire Read online

“What are you talking about, Jen?” said Patty. “What is?”

  “The pig!”

  “Holy Lord!” Belle exclaimed, and started to cross herself.

  Percy frowned, growing very cold on the inside. A wave of memory came to her, that terrible evening when the Doneil livestock butchering turned into a nightmare, and the animal would not die. . . .

  And Jenna resumed pulling her arm, and crying, “Please, Percy, you have to come and help it! I know you can! What you did yesterday, my parents say it’s some kind of dark unholy magic, probably, but I know they’re wrong! Everyone’s talking, but I know you helped your Gran, and you can help the poor pig! I beg you, please come!”

  “Oh Lord, no!” Belle whispered. “No, Percy, oh no, you shouldn’t go—”

  Jenna wailed, so that heads turned in their direction. “But she’s gotta!”

  “Stop it, Jen!” It was young Patty who spoke up angrily, then shoved the barely younger girl lightly with one arm. “Percy has better things to do, and you are just a stupid dunce-head—”

  Jenna’s thin little earnest face started to contort and then she was sobbing, loudly and thickly, snot gathering at her nose with each juddering gasp.

  “That’s enough now, all right, I’ll come.” Percy looked up, meaningfully nodding to her own sisters to move away. She then took the weeping girl by the shoulders, holding her then giving her a solid but gentle shake.

  “It’s all right, Jen. Here, wipe your nose, now. I’m coming with you.”

  Chapter 2

  It took them five minutes to walk down the street to the Doneil house. Belle and Patty stayed behind, following their sister only with frightened looks that seemed to have become a permanent fixture with them.

  Jenna hurried, moving almost at a run, ahead of Percy, and pulling her by the arm.

  But at the door to their house, on their porch, she stopped.

  “It’s in there, in the back . . .” she said, shivering, clutching at her dress with her fingers. “But you have to be really quiet, please. . . . Pa and Ma are still asleep upstairs, and they don’t know I went to get you.”

  She then opened the door slowly, and it was all dark inside. No hearth light, no tallow candle, nothing.

  Percy felt a sickly pang of nausea in her gut, felt her insides twisting. But she took the first step forward and then the next, finding herself in the large barn-like area that the Doneils used on the first floor for their livestock. The family raised everything from goats, geese, and chickens, to cows. And they engaged in everything from selling eggs and milk to butchering.

  Percy’s footfalls made a slight crunch against the brittle hay and rushes strewn on the floor, and she inhaled a metallic unpleasant scent.

  There was—she could hear now—a constant shuffling noise in the back near the wall, and Percy was suddenly infinitely grateful there was no light.

  She soon realized she did not need it.

  She could see through the dark.

  The small, squat, quadruped death shadow of the young pig stood cowering pitifully in the corner. While next to it, in the darkness, something lurched against the wall and bumped softly, quietly, to no end. . . . It was what was left of the animal’s damaged body. . . .

  Percy felt a terror, the scraping finger-claws of winter slash across her own innards, petrifying her into a moment of impossible ice and immobility. Vertigo came, and she felt a pull at the top of her forehead on both temples, a sudden prickling that raised every hair on her body. . . it was as though her conscious self was detached and floating high overhead near the wooden beams, just to get away, screaming to be far, far away from this, all of this—

  She took in a sharp cutting breath, and then advanced forward, despite herself.

  The world narrowed to a focus.

  Percy Ayren reached the corner of the back wall, and leaned forward, while a now-familiar ringing gathered all about her, the darkness congealed, and the grand tolling of bells echoed in her mind, as the power rose inside her, like well water surging. With one hand she reached for the small shadow, feeling its tangible thickness and layers, and ran her fingers gently against an ethereal hide, calming it, loving it, stroking it. . . .

  With the other hand, Percy reached for something that was better left undescribed, feeling clammy cold, a slippery horror of broken flesh and bone and slick bristling hide.

  Metallic smell was everywhere, rising.

  And then she pulled the shadow and guided it into the remains of the animal—feeling the two connect, touch, blend, for one brief instant only, as a circuit of energy was completed, and she was its third point, a conduit.

  The pig shuddered, in infinite relief, and then its poor body expired, falling to the floor in a lump of permanent silence.

  Percy stood over it, breathing fast as though she had just run some distance. And then she turned around, and went outside, into the growing daylight.

  They returned to the Ayren house, with Jenna dancing every step and exclaiming in crazed joy, “Oh, it’s free! Oh, thanks be to Dear God in Heaven! Oh, Percy, you did it, I knew you would, I just knew it!”

  Percy walked in silence, looking straight ahead, her expression grave. As they passed neighbor houses, she noted with her peripheral vision how people stared at her, oh, how they stared! From her to the happy and hollering girl they looked. And in moments, many approached to ask Jenna what had happened.

  “The pig is dead! It’s finally dead! Oh, it’s at peace at last! Percy helped the pig pass on! She did it! Just like she helped her Gran, she helped—”

  “Hush! That’s enough, quiet already!” Percy hissed, seeing how Jenna was telling the whole neighborhood things that could be taken all kinds of bad ways, dangerous ways.

  “What has Percy Ayren done?” asked old Martha Poiron, in a quavering but very loud voice, standing at her door in her usual dark brown dress and grease-splattered apron, as they passed the Poiron house. “What have you done, Percy? What in Lord’s name is going on? Will someone tell me what is going on?”

  Percy reluctantly came to a stop. She could not just walk by old kind Martha without a response, without at least meeting her rheumy old eyes. She stood, gathering herself for speech, while her temples still carried an echo of grand bells.

  But Jenna took Percy’s hand and replied first, smiling with pride. “Percy has helped the pig die! The one that couldn’t die! It’s at peace now!”

  “What? You mean that sorry thing that Nick Doneil had trouble with and beat to a pulp?” The speaker was Jack Rosten, a large muscular man with a scraggly wheat-colored beard, on his way to the workshop.

  Jenna turned to see him there, and immediately her smile fled and she herself shrank away. Jack Rosten and her Pa had a horrid deal between them that Rosten’s second son Jules was going to marry her in exchange for some livestock, as soon as spring came. Jack Rosten was hard and mean, and his sons were even worse.

  “Let’s go, Jenna,” said Percy in reply. She then grabbed Jenna’s arm and pulled her after her, saying, “Morning, Mistress Martha, it’s nothing, really. . . .”

  “Hold it, girl!” Jack Rosten called behind her. “That’s not nothing! Hold up, I say! Did I hear that right, you did something to make the pig die?”

  “Forget the pig! Didn’t you hear? Last night, she killed her own grandmother!” This time the speaker was Rosaide Vellerin, another neighbor, and the biggest gossip in Oarclaven.

  Just their rotten luck, thought Percy. Rosaide, standing with her arms folded in satisfaction, in her own front yard next to Martha’s small place, also happened to have a longtime feud with Percy’s mother. And she really took pleasure in putting down the Ayrens whenever possible—which was, to be honest, not that common, since the impoverished family had a reputation for decency.

  Percy walked rapidly, dragging Jenna behind her, hearing Rosaide yell in her wake. “Have you no shame, Persephone Ayren?”

  When they made it to the Ayren house, there was Alann Ayren, together with Fa
ther Dibue and Niobea, talking quietly on the porch, and the soldiers moving around in the backyard among the smell of wood smoke and roasting sausage.

  “There she is!” said Niobea. Her face was hard and pale in the light of morning, and she looked exhausted and sleepless.

  “Where have you been, Persephone, child?” Alann said, far more gently.

  Father Dibue, the village priest, was a large, ruddy-faced man with straw-colored hair, a jutting chin and coarse features. The hood of his coat was as usual worn over many layers of closely wrapped grey shawls against the cold, on top of the woolen habit, since he was always on the go, and spent so much time outside, walking from house to house all day long.

  “Good morning, my child,” said the priest, looking at Percy, and his expression was wary but his eyes not unkind.

  “Good morning, Father,” said Percy, stopping before them, since she had been addressed. “And, Pa . . . and Ma.”

  “Your Grandmother has indeed passed on. May the Lord have Mercy on her soul, and may she rest in His Bosom and in all Heaven’s Light,” said Father Dibue with a tired sigh, deciding not to beat around the bush. “And I am told that somehow you had something to do with it.”

  “Yes,” Percy said simply.

  The neighbors were watching them. And the soldiers in the yard had come around to stare, some still holding chunks of bread and sausage and mugs of tea.

  “Would you kindly explain to me what exactly you did, Persephone?” Father Dibue continued. “I realize you’ve been to Death’s Keep, and something happened there. What does it mean exactly, now, that you’re Death’s Champion? Don’t be afraid to speak the truth, girl.”

  “I am not entirely sure, Father, but it means, I think, I can help the dead pass on.”

  “But how? I do want to understand you better, you can imagine how unusual, how unnatural this whole thing is—I of course must make certain it is God’s Hand at work here, and not the other—”

  Percy felt her head filling with remote cold, and a wave of now familiar darkness. And then, just as quickly it receded, and she blinked.

  “Well, speak up, daughter!” Niobea said loudly. “The Holy Father asked you a question, and you must answer him now!”

  “I am sorry, but I don’t know how to answer. I don’t know what it is,” Percy said softly. “I only know that it feels like the right thing to do. I see death’s shadows near the dead. I bring the two together, that is all. If that is indeed God’s Will—that the dying be granted peace in one way or another, even if Death Himself has stopped and cannot do his work here on earth, and if I have been given this ability, then—then I do not see how it could be wrong.”

  “Now, you do realize how presumptuous that sounds, child?” said Father Dibue, after a long pause. “It is presumptuous indeed for a mere child of your age to presume to know what is God’s Will at any given moment. While I do understand our present difficulty—that the world is placed in very strange circumstances right now—but given such a thing, it is especially important that we carefully examine this from the proper angle of faith and righteousness—”

  “There is nothing more to examine, Holy Father,” came a powerful baritone from the back. It was the black knight, standing fully dressed except for his heaviest armor plate, holding a steaming mug in one hand. His head was bare and the top of his wavy brown hair shone in a soft nimbus, full of golden highlights in the morning sun. The overnight rest had done him some good, for, except for a new shadow of stubble, his face was smooth and composed, without the strain of weariness of the previous day.

  “The girl tells us she has been given this ability to ease the dead,” Lord Beltain went on, “and I see nothing wrong with it, considering what else is going on in the world around us.”

  Father Dibue bowed his head respectfully. “True enough, it is not as if the girl is going around randomly murdering anyone.” And then he glanced momentarily with new alarm at Percy. “You cannot do that, can you, my child? That is, you cannot simply kill a healthy person from a distance?”

  Percy frowned. She was at a complete loss as to how to respond.

  “I would think,” the black knight again spoke in her stead, “that being Death’s Champion is an honorable circumstance, and murder is not a part of her gift.”

  “Percy is a good child,” said her father suddenly. “She means no harm to anyone, I can promise you.” And speaking thus, Alann worriedly looked back and forth from the priest to his wife to the knight. So far, the discussion had not taken a dangerous turn, but he had a bad feeling about it, considering that a minor crowd was once more beginning to gather around them, as more and more neighbors and other villagers congregated on the street. Various murmurs were heard, and Rosaide Vellerin and her big mouth were recognizable more than once above the voices of others, together with the utterances such as “shameless hussy” and “witch” and “unholy doings.”

  Father Dibue decided to make a quick conciliatory decision on the matter, since, to be honest, he was generally overwhelmed by the events of the past week. The priest was infinitely weary, even more generally confused, secretly frightened, and had no desire to incite a mob. All things considered, what Persephone Ayren had done was no more terrible and no more unnatural than what was the present alternative for the suffering dead.

  “And so I see,” said the good Father wisely. “Furthermore, I have examined the late Bethesia Ayren’s mortal remains, especially her countenance, and she appears to be as godly and peaceful as possible under the circumstances. This tells me that her soul is with the Lord, and since I myself had administered the Last Rites earlier, all is as it should be. It is therefore safe to rule out any influence of witchcraft, or any other unholy means in this case—”

  “But what about the pig?” Someone on the street yelled out.

  “What—What’s this?” the priest asked.

  “She made the Doneil pig pass on, just now!”

  Father Doneil’s brows rose, and he looked back at Percy with newly rising concern. “Is this true?”

  “Percy only helped the pig!” exclaimed Jenna Doneil, at Percy’s side, meanwhile clutching at the front of her own coat and dress, as was her fretful habit. “And she didn’t just do it on her own, I asked her to do it, Father!”

  Percy nodded silently.

  The priest exhaled in some relief, recalling the horror of that incident. “Then, it is all the same,” he said. “If I remember right, that was a terrible thing that had happened. So, it is indeed God’s Will that the creature is now at rest. And now, enough, I declare, I am quite satisfied that all is well here.” He nervously handled the rosary in his fingers, and pulled out his mittens from a voluminous pocket. “Master Ayren, Mistress Niobea, have you all the burial arrangements in hand? Yes? Good. Let me know when you expect the funeral, and I will perform the mass. . . . Now I think we have all seen enough here, and I will be on my way—”

  “Thank you, Father,” said Alann Ayren, handing the priest his payment in a small pouch.

  The priest took it matter-of-factly then picked up his large bag from the porch. “Wonderful! And so, I wish you all a good and blessed day, Master, Mistress, and you, of course, My Lord—”

  As he came down the porch, nodding to everyone, and then walked past Percy, Father Dibue briefly placed his large meaty hand on her forehead, and gave her a loud blessing. “Fare thee well, my child, Persephone Ayren, never falter from the path of righteousness, and always do the Lord’s bidding, now!”

  Percy gratefully looked up in his faded watery eyes, and saw a benevolent expression there. At the same time, since the priest continued onward and down the street, the neighbors started to disperse, seeing that nothing more was going to come about.

  “I think it is time we were on our way,” said the black knight to Percy, without looking at her parents.

  “Yes,” she said. “But first, I need a bite to eat. . . .”

  “You may come inside, daughter,” said Niobea from the porch. />
  Percy looked up, meeting her mother’s eyes, and saw a reluctant acceptance there. The priest had examined things, and made his decision, and apparently it was no more than Niobea could do.

  “Thank you, Ma. But it’s all right, I will eat in the yard.”

  “You—” Niobea paused, gathering herself, it seemed. “You do not have to go.”

  Percy stood facing her mother. “Actually, I do . . .” she replied softly. And then Percy turned away, and followed the knight into their backyard.

  Niobea could only watch in silence.

  They were back on the road within the hour. Percy was done eating in a hurry, stuffing her face with chunks of bread and cheese and tea, while the soldiers were packing up and readying the horses. After another tearful farewell from Jenna Doneil, hanging onto Percy’s neck, and tight hugs from her sisters, Percy had Betsy once again hitched to the cart, and all the girls back in their seats, next to the Infanta and the marquis.

  Betsy and the cart pulled out slowly from the Ayren yard, wheels and hooves crunching on the fresh overnight dusting of snow, flanked by Chidair soldiers, and the tall imposing knight, fully armored, and seated on his great warhorse. They turned onto the street, heading south, with Alann and Niobea and Belle and Patty watching from the porch with grave faces, and the rest of the neighbors not trying particularly hard not to stare.

  They look, and yet they do not even know what it is they see, thought Percy, glancing sometimes behind her, and seeing the Infanta huddled in her poor cloak.

  The familiar parts of Oarclaven were soon behind them, as the rutted road wound outside the village, and was soon framed by hedgerows on both sides, and beyond, snow-covered fields. A dark speck of a bird or two circled the sky.

  Overhead, the winter morning sun shone brightly for once, and there was as yet no overcast.

  The knight did not approach the cart, nor did he look back at any of them for more than a brief glance, but rode up ahead with Riquar and a few others. In general, there was silence among the men-at-arms.