The Nethergrim (13 page)

“Maybe when you rest, you’ll remember,” said Tom.

Edmund put his head to the table. Sleep rose in silver waves, tipped with the poisoned spikes of his dreams.

• • •

He woke. Scattered bowls and mugs ranged along the tabletop before him. The side of his face felt damp.

A braid of honey hair swung down across his view. “What book?”

Edmund sat up. He rubbed at his eyes. “Did I say something?”

“You said a few things.” Missa Dyer sat across from Luilda Twintree, a half-finished game of hopsnakes between them. “You were sleeping—you just mumbled something about a book.”

“Ah. Oh.” Edmund pushed his bangs from his forehead. The fire burned low. His neighbors surrounded him on the benches, chairs and floor—some sleeping, others hunched in silent worry. Katherine lay curled by the fire, draped in her cloak. From the look on her face she was having a nightmare.

“Sorry. Must have been a dream.” He ran a hand along his cheek. The wetness was spilled ale. He glanced down at the game. “You’ve already lost, you know.”

Luilda sighed. “I know.” She moved a snake. “Just trying to pass the time.”

“We brought some food around.” Missa moved a hound in to block. “We didn’t want to wake you.”

“Thanks. Not hungry.” Edmund tried to stand, and found that most of his strength had returned. “Just want to go—check on the horses. In the stable. Be right back.”

He slipped out through the back of the tavern. Torches flickered down by the mill—men’s voices melded into the murmur of the river. He crept past the inn’s store of empty kegs, through Knocky’s garden and in between the Coopers’ and the Millers’. He poked his head around the corner. The old statue of the knight stood alone in the square, lit along one side by the watchlight on the steps of the hall.

He took his chance and rushed into the open, then west down the road. The fields of Moorvale stretched off into the darkness low and earthy black, striped with the chaff of the harvest. He drew level with the old ruined keep, its snaggled outline reaching dark against the stars.

“Keep up back there!” John Marshal’s voice carried far across the silence. Edmund spied a clump of torches approaching from the west. He leapt the fence and hurried north into the pasture. The patrol passed by on the road, their tread slapping echoes off the side of Wishing Hill.

The book lay where he had dropped it, though by luck it had fallen closed in the leaves beside the log. He picked it up, then felt in the undergrowth and found his leather bag. He opened the drawstring and slid the book inside, then retraced his steps to the road. Excuses for what he was doing out alone came to him as he ran, but he found no need for them. The patrol he had seen had passed on up toward Dorham, while another moved off onto the moors across the river, their position clear from the barking of their dogs.

Edmund stole back across the square and around the back of the inn. He slipped inside and ducked through the doorway of the best private room, the only one with a hearth of its own. He drew out the book and set it on the table, then lit the lantern hanging by the door and moved it close. The light fell crossways over the rounded, sweeping script on the open pages before him, kindling burnished glints on the leafwork around the elaborate capital letters. He turned through page after page until he found what he was looking for.

“It’s the Nethergrim. He’s come back.”

Chapter
13

I
n here.” Tom pushed back the door to the inn’s best room, letting in the sound of someone murmuring a lullaby from the hallway beyond. “He said it was important.”

Katherine followed him in. She wore a blanket around her shoulders and her hair in a messy braid. “Edmund, I told you—you’ll go stone blind doing that.”

“I didn’t want to wait for morning.” Edmund held up his quill to the feeble light of the lantern. He trimmed the tip sharp with his knife.

Katherine bent to stoke the fire. “Tom says you found something.”

“Many things.” Edmund dipped the quill into the inkhorn. He blotted at the upper corner of the only scrap of parchment he still owned, and made a note:
Seven children on the star. Blocky Hand and Curled Hand agree. Seven inside eight, repeated twice.
He scattered a trace of dust across the words to dry the ink.

Tom hovered over the table. “Is that a man on that wheel?”

“You’re in my light.” Edmund flipped the page.

“Sorry.” Tom moved. “Is this about what happened tonight?”

“Sit down and I’ll tell you.” Edmund stretched back his neck with a grimace.

Katherine took the chair across from him. Tom pulled up a log from the stack of firewood. From outside the shuttered window came the scuffle and tramp of a patrol going by on the road.

“All is well,” spoke a voice, though not so loud as to wake any who had found sleep that night. “Midnight—or thereabouts—and all is well.”

Edmund flicked backward through the parchment pages of the book, turning past a succession of diagrams and passages of writing in all manner of hands and hues. Some of them ran left to right, but others up and down, and still others twisted back and forth across the parchment like oxen plowing a field. “I’ll start here.”

Firm black lettering ran in two columns down the pages under his hands. He traced his finger along the close lines of text and read aloud:

“‘Also numbered amongst the servants of the Nethergrim are the bolgugs, who are said to be the hounds in his hunt for the flesh of the young. They are the height and figure of a man, but of a dark blue hue, like unto the skin of a blueberry. They walk bowed and bent, but are yet hale and quick, and fear no hurt. Their heads are round and their eyes bright yellow.’”

Katherine raised a hand to the bruise on her jaw.

“‘Hunger rules the bolgug—it has no thought save for the ceaseless gnawing in its belly, wherein lies a’”—Edmund skipped over a hole in the text, a place where the parchment had rotted and crumbled through. “‘A’—let’s see—‘a bolgug can gorge itself forever and forever and yet feel that it starves unto death. A pack of bolgugs, on their own, will ravage the land without pause, feasting on the flesh of man and beast until they are destroyed. Only in the presence of a mastering will can they do anything but rend and devour.’”

Katherine pondered awhile. “The bolgugs we saw on the hill could easily have eaten the children, but they didn’t. Instead they bound them up and took them away—and we still don’t know why there was a fire up there.”

“What about the other thing we saw—the thing made of thorns.” Tom leaned from his makeshift seat to stare down at the script. “Does your book say anything about that?”

Edmund turned the page. There was a drawing of the creature they had seen atop the hill, rendered in meticulous detail, its tendrils twined around the gilded first letter. “‘As the quiggan serves the Nethergrim in fouled water, and the stonewight in his mountainous lair, so the thornbeast does his will in vale and forest—thorn-handed, black of eye.’”

Katherine exchanged a horrified glance with Tom. The lantern between them guttered and failed.

“But this can’t be.” Katherine reached out to trim the wick. “The Nethergrim is dead. He died on Tristan’s sword.”

Edmund fiddled with his quill, fearing to say what he must. “That’s what we’ve always been told.”

Katherine’s features dropped into a frown. The flame awoke, fizzing and smoking until it found the oil.

“Sixty men went up the mountain, but only three came down again.” Edmund plunged on before he lost his nerve. “Vithric died before we were born, and Tristan’s not been back to Elverain in years. Your father is the only person who could have told people what really happened, but so far as I know, he never has. After they returned, there were no more attacks, so everyone just took it for granted that Tristan killed the Nethergrim, that the bad old days were gone for good, but—how can we be sure?”

Katherine crossed her arms. “What are you trying to say? What are you saying about my papa?”

Edmund stared down at the book, unable to meet Katherine’s gaze. “I’m only asking—are there things he’s told you that he hasn’t told anyone else?”

Katherine turned away. She drew a breath, and let it out. “Sometimes, in the evenings, after we’ve eaten, Papa will sit by the fire with a cup of wine. I mend his clothes and watch his face as he goes up that mountain, up to the Nethergrim again and again. He’s never told me what happened there—and I don’t think it’s something I would want to hear.”

Tom let his chin rest on his fists. He flicked a look at each of his friends. “Maybe Tristan did stick a sword in the Nethergrim. Maybe it wasn’t enough.”

“We don’t even know what sort of creature it was.” Edmund felt through the bits of twine he used for bookmarks. “Not even wizards can agree on it—some seem to think he’s just a very large and nasty bolgug, while others say he’s an urgebeast, which is a ‘fiend made flesh by evil thoughts.’ This one here, some southerner, he argues that the Nethergrim must be a thornbeast, for all tales of his deeds arise from villages in the eaves of the great woods of the north. He adds to this the account of Eudo the Bald, wherein—well, he just goes on for a while about all the creatures in his service and the ways they can rip people to bits. And then, back here, I found this.”

He ran his finger to the top, following a script inked thick in red: “‘There in the Girth, at the marriage of the rivers, the men who served the Nethergrim did make their hallowed havens, their grand, forbidden halls in the shadow of the mountain. From that fastness they reigned in fearful might, and bid all men bow and give offerings. In those days the bolgugs were said to roam the streets by night, choosing victims to sate their master’s hunger.’”

Tom swallowed. Katherine shivered, and drew up the blanket around her shoulders.

“If I’ve read this right, there was once a race of men in the north who came under the sway of the Nethergrim.” Edmund tapped the feather of his quill on the page. “These men had lords that ruled over them—they had a name that I think would come out in our speech as ‘Goodly Folk’ or ‘The Fitting,’ ‘the Suitable Men’ or maybe even ‘Gatherers.’ So far as I can tell, these Gatherers served the Nethergrim of their own free will, and built a kingdom with its help.”

“What kingdom?” said Tom. “Our kingdom?”

“No, another kingdom, long before.” Edmund felt a twinge of pride at the looks of stunned awe on the faces of his friends. “Haven’t you ever wondered who built all the old things you see around you—the village hall, maybe, or the old keep on Wishing Hill, or the bridge? No one knows how to make a bridge like that anymore. Haven’t you wondered why the West Road is so straight and wide when it just goes through a few villages and then off into the wilderness? The world wasn’t always the way it is now.”

He drew a slip of vellum from the book. “There’s a note stuck in between these pages, here. It’s a list. Mithlin, 515. Longsettle, 498. Rushmeet, 476. Byhill and a scribble, then Quail, 447 to 455. Dorseford, 428, Chessmill, 409, then Longsettle again, 384 to 390.”

Tom scratched his temple. “What are those numbers?”

“They’re dates,” said Edmund. “The numbering of years.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” said Katherine. “What year is it now, then?”

Edmund shrugged.

“Places and dates.” Katherine stroked her chin, then winced when she touched the bruise. “Every twenty years or so, and villages all through the north.”

“It sounds like the wizard who wrote all this was trying to trace the Nethergrim’s steps,” said Tom.

“He wasn’t a wizard when he wrote it.” Edmund shuffled the book in front of his friends. “Look very closely at the inks.”

Katherine moved the lantern near the page. “The writing along the sides is a deeper black.”

“It’s much newer,” said Edmund. “The main text is long-winded and comes at things from a number of different points of view, but the notes are all just corrections and additions added many years later. This isn’t a wizard’s book, you see—it’s an apprentice’s book.”

“A child wrote all this?”

“Well, no one wrote the whole thing. This book is very old—at least two dozen people have written in it, three of them in languages for which I don’t even know the letters. Each apprentice studies what’s there, then binds in some more pages to copy down what his master teaches him. In some places you can even see where a master corrects a student—this last one’s master had the long, scribbly writing you can see a few pages back here. And as you go farther back—see? That scribbly writing becomes the main text, and is corrected by this strange blocky hand. Master to student, one after the next, for centuries.”

“I guess that would make the last one your master, in a way,” said Tom.

A shudder seized at Edmund. His gut clenched in—a memory wisped from his grasp, leaving him with nothing but the sense of being watched by a pair of hard, cruel eyes.

“I’ve been wondering about that,” said Katherine. “You said your father burned all your books, so how did you get this one?”

A guilty start nearly made Edmund drop his quill—then he wondered where the feeling came from. “I can’t remember. I really can’t. Father must have missed it, I think.”

“I doubt he could miss this one.” Katherine raised one side of the book to look at the cover. “You could buy a horse with this thing—a good horse. How many hiding places do you have, anyway?”

“Only the two.” Edmund stared at the wall. “You’re right, this does not make sense. My father did find all my books, burned every single one, I’m sure of it. I can feel it, there’s something wrong with my memory.”

“Maybe it’s because you hit your head,” said Tom.

Edmund shut his eyes and strained, and for a moment—no. Nothing.

Katherine turned a page. “Ugh!” She let it drop open. “What is that?”

There between them lay the drawing of seven children arrayed upon the star. Symbols turned and twisted all about the design, seeming to coil in around the little bodies.

“That is what the Nethergrim does to children.” Edmund smoothed the page flat. “It’s a spell.”

“But I thought it just ate them,” said Katherine. “That’s what all the legends say.”

“When legends get old, they twist in the telling,” said Edmund. “This is what really happens. I’ll try to read a bit: ‘Bring a blade for He-That-Speaks-From-The-Mountain in the—the large exalted hollow household,’ I think that says. ‘Bring then seven children from the villages of the wheat slaves and clean them,’ or maybe ‘purify them in the marriage of the rivers, and’—I just can’t get this next part, something about a pact, a sealing of words.”

“I don’t see how you can read that at all.” Katherine squinted down at the page. “Those aren’t even letters!”

“They are—they’re just not the letters of our language.” Edmund stared hard at an elaborate symbol, flipping its meaning over and back. “There is a bargain struck, a spell cast by a man but grounded in the power of the Nethergrim. Each of them takes something from the children, something different.”

Tom looked at Edmund. “What happens to the children?”

“They die.” Edmund traced the diagram. “One by one, they die, and as they do—” He scanned along through the text, trying to draw sense from a thicket of curled and interlocking glyphs. Was the join mark supposed to descend like that, or had the scribe made a mistake? It could as well mean “Youth in a Thousand Seasons under the Seventh Path through Death” as it could mean “Seven Youths Turn Death into a Thousand Seasons.”

“A bargain.” Katherine knit her brows. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know yet, but the wizard who drew this made some notes on the next page.” Edmund pointed. “See there, at the bottom? ‘Seven children on the star.’ And down there—‘Seven inside eight’—when he gets excited, he tends to use too much ink. In two different places he writes that there must be seven, and that if there’s not enough—let’s see—‘the circle will break, and the Form will not form.’ It sounds as though if there aren’t seven children, the whole thing’s ruined.”

“But there were only five children up on the hill,” said Tom.

“And three down in Roughy.”

“But we rescued Miles and Emma—and Peter’s dead.” Katherine’s dark eyes lit. “The Nethergrim needs seven, and he doesn’t have it!”

“My brother is alive, and he’ll stay alive until the Nethergrim collects seven children.” Edmund stabbed a finger at the parchment. “Geoffrey is alive, and if we can find where those bolgugs took him in time, we can save him. Here, there’s one more entry.”

He flipped back to the middle of the book and placed his finger amongst close lines of ink faded green with the years. The words seemed to crawl under the wavering light of the lantern as he read along: