“Perverts?” Matt frowned, ready to do battle for a misunderstood and oppressed minority. “What kind?”
“The kind that get their thrills from killing the innocent,” Sergeant Brock said grimly. “They dressed up in robes and ivy crowns to do it, and set her out as a naked sacrifice to some pagan god under the full moon as an excuse, but they were going to kill her, right enough. Four of them were holding her down, one to each limb, and a fifth, their priest or whatever, was lifting his blade to do her, when we came upon the scene and routed them.”
Matt struck the “oppressed minority” off his list. Even freedom of religion had its limits, and two of them were human life and pain. “That sickle’s kind of odd as a sacrificial knife. The blade’s too narrow for a murder weapon.” But he thought it would make just the right kind of wound in a straw doll—right to match the cut in Prince Gaheris’ back.
“That sickle is not what the priest wielded—he lifted high a knife with a stone blade. We found it afterward.” Sergeant Brock sat down and began to sharpen his short sword. “You must do this every day, if you have no squire to do it for you— catch each speck of rust before it can grow.”
“Yes, I know,” Matt said. “Gives me something to do while I’m on watch. You take care of your weapon…”
“And your weapon will take care of you. Yes.” But Sergeant Brock stopped stroking the blade with the stone, frowning off into the distance. “I suppose it would have been a different matter if the woman had been one of them, and going to the slaughter of her own will…”
“Not really,” Matt said. “Hardly different at all. But she wasn’t?”
“No; that’s why the reeve called us in—because she’d disappeared, and his men alone couldn’t find her, and there are some nasty bogs on the King’s Own Lands.” Brock started whetting again. “But we knew they’d kidnapped her, for we’d heard about other cases like this, and chased down three of them already, so we knew what we’d find before we went looking.”
“Four cases?” Matt stared.
Sergeant Brock nodded. “They’ve sprung up all around the land this last year. Claim to be the Old Religion, and their-leaders Druids who’ve kept the old knowledge passed down from father to son, but the bishop set his monks to looking in old books, and they found a dozen ways these kidnappers differ from the Druids of old. No, I think they’re just a very nasty bunch who like to dress up in outlandish robes so they can forget who they really are and have some excuse for their twisted pleasures.”
Matt shuddered. “Nice country we’re going into.”
“It is that.” Sergeant Brock stopped whetting and lifted his head to look Matt straight in the eye. “It’s a beautiful land of rolling downs and vasty old woods, of azure lakes and stonewalled fields, and the people are the salt of the earth, steady, hardworking, and always ready to help a stranger. Don’t judge us by these bands of cultsmen, Lord Wizard. They’re a sprinkling only, and the most of us are good folk indeed.”
He might have said more, but the moonlight suddenly dimmed, and Sergeant Brock looked up in alarm. Sir Orizhan shouted an oath, then froze, staring up at the huge dark mass outside the doorway, sword in hand.
“The stray cow was near,” the huge voice rumbled out of the darkness. “You owe the farmer who dwells in the cottage with two tall pines beside it, Matthew.”
“I’ll pay it.” Matt grinned. “I’ve claimed first watch, Stegoman.”
“Wherefore?” the dragon asked. “I have no lids to my eyes; even in sleep, I shall see what occurs.”
“Dragons don’t really sleep,” Matt explained to his companions. “They just sort of slow down their systems and go into a trance.”
“How reassuring,” Sir Orizhan said in a hollow tone, and the two men slowly went back to what they were doing. Matt went to get out his own whetstone, feeling much safer knowing that Stegoman would be watching when he went to sleep. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the two men, really—it was just that he couldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t proved his loyalty by saving his life a few times, the way the dragon had.
Both knight and sergeant rolled out their pallets and lay down to sleep. Matt rolled his out on the other side of the firepit, but sat up on his blanket, on watch. He let his mind wander, sorting through the various possibilities of who gained by Gaheris’ death, and wondering where the Man Who Went Out the Window fit in. It all came down to him, of course. For a moment he had the crazy irrational notion that if the man hadn’t gone out the window, none of this would have happened.
Then that thought vanished from his mind, because he saw the eyes watching him from the shadows.
They were perfectly nice eyes, seemed almost like those of a deer, large and brown, but what were they doing there? Sir Orizhan lay parallel to the hearth, Sergeant Brock lay at right angles with Mart’s pallet opposite him, but the corners of the room lay in shadow, deepest opposite the fire and farmer away from it, on the wall with the doorway. Matt was close to the hearth, and the eyes were watching him from the corner farthest away, where the darkness was most complete.
No, not perfectly nice after all, Matt decided—there was definitely a malicious cast to those eyes, or at least a mischievous one, and they didn’t blink, they just stared, wide-open and calculating, staring right at him!
Matt didn’t use his captured magic wand very often, so he never carried it, but he had found that any long, straight object would do reasonably well for focusing and directing a magic spell, so he rested his hand on the hilt of his dagger and waited, watching. After all, the eyes might be those of a sheep who had wandered in out of the cold while he wasn’t looking. Not likely, he had to admit, but he hoped the only problem here was his own lack of vigilance.
Then the eyes turned away with studied nonchalance and moved toward the fire. They brought the whole creature along with the grace and silence of a prowling cat, and Matt stopped breathing for a moment.
It was humanoid, he could say that at least, though its legs were shorter than a man’s and bowed; Matt couldn’t see what shape they were, because the creature wore a ragged pair of trousers that came down to mid-calf—trousers, in a land where peasants wore leggins! Its arms were longer than a man’s, almost to the proportion of a gorilla’s—and it was just as hairy as a gorilla. But it walked with the upright posture of a human being, and its face was almost completely human. The ears were larger, and the head was very round, almost a perfect globe, covered with hair except for the face—but it grinned with a very human delight in its own mischief as it settled down near the fire, holding its hands out to the flames.
Matt was appalled, more than he would have been if it were so severely deformed as to be an outright monster. He could have accepted a different species more easily than a creature that was as much animal as human.
The creature sat on its heels, its legs folding like jack-knives, and rubbed its hands in the warmth of the fire, but its eyes stayed on Matt, and its grin widened.
Matt stared back, feeling the atmosphere grow tense and more tense, waiting, waiting. He was bound and determined that he wouldn’t speak first, or take any hostile action—but a defense spell ran through his head again and again, ready to be shouted at the slightest false move on the creature’s part.
Apparently the creature realized his resolve, because it finally said, “Ye might as well speak up, man. I know you’re watching.”
Matt only nodded.
“Fear not for them.” The creature dismissed Sir Orizhan and Sergeant Brock with a glance. “They’ll not wake till dawn. I’ve seen to that.”