With a gesture, Sham lit every candle in the chamber as well as the wood laid in the fireplace. Setting her candlestick on a convenient table, she contemplated the wardrobe. It seemed a fit place to start looking for more of the demon’s runes.
When Dickon and the Reeve entered the room some time later, the fire was roaring merrily as it consumed the majority of the Reeve’s clothing, and Sham was tugging one of the large woven rugs across the floor with the obvious intention of sending it to join the clothing.
Dickon cleared his throat and spoke quickly, “Sir, that is a three-hundred-year-old rug, a bridal gift from the King of Reth to his sister on her wedding to the King of Southwood.”
Sham, straightened and gave both men an annoyed look as she wiped the sweat off the back of her neck. “It also contains one of the demon’s runes. I don’t have the strength to remove them all. If the Reeve would like to stay in that chair for the rest of his shortened lifespan, I’ll be glad to leave it here.”
“Sir,” Dickon’s voice was almost a moan. “... demon runes ... that rug is irreplaceable. There are ways of making one man look like another. To destroy such a rug on mere superstition ...”
“We could put the rug in a store room somewhere, if you like,” offered Sham. “If we get rid of the demon there’s no need to destroy it, and until then it will do no harm in storage.”
“But that has to go in the fire.” She nodded at a large, ornate bench sitting against one wall. “There’s more than one rune on it, and two of them I haven’t seen before.” They looked to her like the strange bits and pieces that had been on the binding rune she’d taken off Kerim. “—I’m not certain how to deal with it—it won’t fit in the hearth. You must be very important to this demon, Kerim. It has expended a tremendous amount of energy to ensure that you were vulnerable to it. I’ve found its runes on your shoes, your clothes, your armor—”
“What!” exclaimed Kerim, noticing the heavy war hauberk crumpled into a pile on the floor for the first time. It had taken a master armorer nearly a year to complete the shirt and ten years of battle to make it fit like a second skin.
Sham shook her head, “The metal is fine, it was on the leather padding. For some reason, none of the marks are on metal—maybe the nature of the demon’s magic.”
Dickon shook his head and muttered softly.
“Over a lifetime of dealing with difficult women, I have learned it is often better to give into their demands immediately,” said Kerim, approaching the bench Sham had condemned. “See if you can find my axe somewhere in this mess, Dickon, and I’ll follow my orders and reduce this defenseless work of art to kindling. Then track down a couple of strong men to cart the more valuable pieces to the nearest storeroom.”
Once Sham knew what she was looking for, she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen the magic that touched almost everything in the chamber. The fire roared higher and higher and the room began to look as if a mischievous giant had decided to toss furniture around.
At some point in time, Talbot entered the room to join the effort, and his help was invaluable as they moved several especially heavy items. Shamera suspected that the wardrobe in particular hadn’t been moved in several hundred years: judging by the effort required to shift the thing it wouldn’t be moved again for another hundred.
Once he’d resigned himself to the destruction, Kerim seemed surprisingly lighthearted. It struck Shamera he’d lost the air of quiet acceptance that had formerly characterized him. Not even the death of his half-brother tempered the energy with which he attacked the room.
He chopped not only the bench, but a room divider of six panels into pieces small enough to fit in the fire, as the divider bore one of the strange runes as well. He insisted on helping when Shamera directed the complete disassembly of the large state bed, the last place left untouched in the room. It was there she found the second of the demon’s focus runes.
The hall door opened quietly.
Sham, whose black trousers and shirt were the same grey as the dust that had been stirred up by the tumult, crouched where the center of the bed had been, muttering hoarsely in a long-dead language. Kerim watched her intently, immobilized because the various pieces of the bed were scattered helter-skelter around his chair. Talbot leaned with half-assumed weariness against one of the imposing bedposts that leaned in its turn against the wall. Dickon had left to see what could be done to replace the furnishings and rugs Sham relegated to storage. It wasn’t until the intruder spoke that anyone looked toward the door.
“It seems meet that, after ruining your brother’s funeral with political theatrics, you would spend the next day rearranging your room,” Lady Tirra’s tones could have frozen molten rock.
Although Sham registered the sound of Lady Tirra’s voice, she didn’t pause in her chanting. The mark she’d found on the floor under Kerim’s bed was older than the rest, and the demon had spent time since reinforcing the spell. As the option of burning the stone floor seemed as doubtful as removing it to storage. Sham had to unwork the spell. This was the third time she’d tried and it finally looked as if she might succeed—if she could concentrate on her work.
Tracing the rune backwards (or so she hoped, since like several others the demon used, this rune was somewhat different from the one she knew) and calling upon parts of several spells, Sham felt the rune fade, but not completely. As long as a portion remained, it could be reinvoked. She tried again, varying the pattern of the spells and feeling them begin to unravel the rune at last.
When she finally looked up from her task, the first thing she noticed was Talbot attempting to be invisible. For a man without the ability to call upon magic, he was doing a fair job at it.
“... could expect little more than that from you.”
“Mother, I am sorry that Lady Sky lost her child, but I don’t know how my actions could have altered that one way or the other.” Kerim faced his mother across the pile of boards and leather straps that had been his bed, his voice dangerously soft.
Lady Tirra ignored the warning tone and continued to attack him. “You could have broken the news more gently to her—a note delivered in the middle of the night is hardly considerate. If you had even arranged a proper laying out ... instead you had him burned with less dignity accorded the son of a gutter-thug.”
“I did as I thought best at the time. Since I am not responsible for Ven’s murder—whatever you may feel to the contrary—I was unable to choose a more convenient moment to announce his death. As for laying him out for public mourning: his body was not fit for viewing, certainly not by a lady in the advanced stages of pregnancy. I suppose I might have allowed my brother’s body to rot for a month or so to give Lady Sky time to have her child safely.” Kerim said the last sentence with bitter sarcasm reflecting, thought Sham, a fair portion of the hurt he was feeling.
“You have always resented him, haven’t you?” said Lady Tirra in the tone of soft discovery. “Why would you give him honor in death when you granted him none in life? We came here five years ago in the hope that you would find Ven an estate worthy of the Reeve’s brother, but instead you kept him here at your beck and call. You wouldn’t even make him heir to your office. Then, just when he might have come into wealth by marriage to Lady Sky, he is killed. I find it interesting that the other nobles killed by this ... unknown killer opposed your policies.”
Kerim had regained control of his temper, and there was only sadness in his voice when he replied. “Lady, almost all the Eastern noblemen oppose most of my policies regarding the Southwood Lords. It would be difficult to find one who didn’t.”