The Crooked Key, Chapter 2: Foxes and Dogs
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 2: Foxes and Dogs
The banisher spent twenty minutes trying to find Lord Gloce. Finally, the blacksmith was able to give Eilo directions: the old man had retrieved a horse from a neighbor and was racing away from the river, toward the swamp west of town, followed by seven dogs with red-streaked tails. Eilo hurried to catch up before Lord Gloce drowned in the swamp, which is the sort of thing that got banishers in trouble. He was able to find Gloce because the dogs kept baying. He joined up with the eager old man, then waited for his companion to realize the folly of bringing a mount.
“That animal will die if it goes any farther,” he said. “You should not have come, Lord Gloce.”
“These are my lands, boy,” the gentleman said.
“But do you know these lands?” the banisher asked. He drew his glaive and pointed out toward the bog, with its dead trees and its icy mists. Even beneath a clear afternoon sky, it looked utterly accursed and desolate, a trackless mire that could swallow armies.
Lord Gloce fell silent.
“Wait here,” Eilo said. “If I’m not back by tomorrow morning, there are instructions in my saddlebags about whom to contact regarding my death.”
The banisher smeared himself with an unguent that would keep insects away, then headed into the bog. He traveled glaive-first, feeling his way over the cold mud, glad that he wore good boots purchased after the knight-who-was-a-sword job. To his annoyance, one of the dogs followed him: a swift, lean bitch with black fur and a red tail and ears. She moved like a fox, low and skulking, though she was bigger than any of the hounds Eilo had seen previously. The banisher couldn’t get her to go away. With a cynicism borne of long experience, Eilo decided that if things went badly, he could urge the dog to attack, sacrificing her and buying himself time to escape.
A man could have disappeared into this muck ten minutes ago and Eilo would have no way of finding him; a hexguard dead four years might be impossible to find. And that assumed he was fully dead. But the undead left signs of their passage, especially around water and wood. The banisher was serious when he spoke to Lord Gloce about the power of rivers, which were both barriers and portals. They had a strange power that even the dullest peasant recognized with the old adage that spirits feared running water.
As he picked his way through the mire, the banisher remembered his mentor’s words: “There are walls and roads we cannot see, that we cannot use. To the spirits of the world and the spirits made by our ancestors, a warding sign is as hard as a stone wall; a beckoning hex as swift as a ship with the wind at your back.” To mortals, this bog was nigh-impassable, but banishers learned to recognize the signs of spirit-passage, the subtle alterations of tree and grass that signaled a place so wild that spirits could move easily, even as they would turn back from a warding sign painted on a door. The signs here were strong: this bog had a deep, natural wildness to it, one shaped over the centuries by the spirits who lived here. Many spirits were clever, and they shaped their environment as cleverly as mortals did—only, to their own ends. This felt like a worked environment, a place somehow more savage and untamed than a natural swamp. Life swarmed and churned beneath Eilo’s feet. Whenever he stopped, roots seemed to reach for him.
Eilo glanced back at the hound, but she showed no signs of alarm. Strange.
The banisher let his intuition guide him to the wildest places, as a city-dweller might ignore his sense of caution and head as deep as possible into the slums to seek out vice and crime. For this place felt unclean and wicked: spirits, like mortals, had every right to work their environment, banishers believed. But this place was like land never allowed to lay fallow—overworked, feverish, ready to collapse.
He saw his first witch-sign hanging from a tree after less than a half-hour of slow travel. The bundle of sticks turned slowly from a length of braided rope. More followed, all hung from bent and gnarled little trees. A few minutes later, he saw his first hanged animal: a vole, so tiny he almost missed it. Then a cat, probably taken from the village. Three foxes, rotten and sinewy, their fur matted, their guts teeming with worms that sometimes fell down into the still black water.
“It’s definitely not a boat,” the banisher told the dog.
The animal growled. The banisher hefted his glaive and peered into a tangle of reeds just past a dead tree. Some of the reeds looked woven together, as if to form a huge nest.
The banisher inched past the dead tree and pushed the reeds apart. There lay the swollen form of a man, black with rot and hard as old wood. The form was swollen up, as if gas had built up in a corpse and then turned solid. Eilo could only see its legs and torso.
“Everything is changing,” the corpse said, its voice a deep bass rumble that made the cold black water ripple.“It’s starting here. What a curse, to bear witness to the changing of things.”
“Dripper,” the banisher said. Drippers were drowning victims consumed not by need or unfinished business, like other undead, but by habit. They returned to their families, tried to live normal lives despite their swollen bulk. They slowly lost who they were and forgot what they were doing. Hard to destroy, as their skin was tough as old wood and they resisted that old standby of the banisher’s art (lighting it on fire), but they were slow and usually stupid. Eilo studied the corpse for signs of a hexguard’s armor or accoutrements, but saw none. Maybe this was another man, not the hexguard at all?
The thing in the reeds drew in a breath with a horrible creaking and groaning, then laughed. The air seemed to grow colder, and the banisher felt a sharp stabbing terror that set his teeth chattering. But Eilo had felt enough real fear in his life to recognize the artificial dread kindled by witchcraft. He had ways to counter those tricks, and he forced himself to stay calm.
“Why have you been visiting people at night?” Eilo asked. “You’re frightening them.”
“Because I belong there,” the deep voice said. “I live among them, and have for a long time.”
So definitely not the hexguard, who had only been passing through the Bantish towns. Which meant everyone he had spoken to had concealed a death from him. Why?
“Give me your name,” the banisher said, because that sometimes worked. “I will make sure you aren’t hurt.” Meaning: if you give me your name, I can banish you from civilization, and then you will be able to rot out here in peace, rather than me needing to destroy you before your decaying brain makes you hurt someone.
“Death is horrible,” the corpse said. “I did not think a creature like me would experience this. It is like I am before a narrow stream at night and the moon is full, and I know I can leap the stream but when I step, my foot sinks into the mud and slips, and the moon sees me and is disgusted with me, and when I am up in the air all crooked it catches me and holds me and I writhe there above the little stream, twisting and kicking as a man drowning in deep water, forever in pain and aware that it is my fault and my shame for slipping when I first set out, and that is what death is like.”
The dead thing wanted to say more, but it ran out of breath. The banisher shifted his grip on his glaive, turning it from a tool into a weapon.
“What are you?” he asked.
The answer came in the form of cruel, high laughter behind him. He turned, slipping a little in the muck, and saw that the dog was laughing at him.
“What is it you said?” the dog said. “Ah, yes: ‘Everyone wants to be told that they’re hunted by werewolves.’”
The dog sat up on its hind legs and its throat rippled and started to bleed as if pierced by an invisible spear. Then the flesh parted and a gore-streaked face pushed its way out, followed a moment later by long black hair and silver earrings.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on here, Medru?” Eilo said.
“You almost figured it out, banisher,” the dog-thing said from both its mouths. “When you noticed that the manor-lord’s dogs had a streak of fox-spirit in them. That was a long, long time ago, but sometimes the blood breeds strong and true. And when it finally happened twice in one generation—dogs don’t live that long, you see, unless they learn a trick—we thought we had a chance to restore ourselves, to claim this place again. This place we deserve to rule.”
Behind him, the corpse sat up. Eilo got his back against the dead tree so he could watch both of them at once. The corpse had a man’s body but a head that was halfway between a dog’s and a fox’s. The combination was viscerally unsettling, and now the banisher knew the source of the unnatural dread that threatened to overwhelm him.
“I lied about being afraid,” Medru said. “There is something in the mixing of dog and fox, of an animal bred to be humanity’s slaves and an animal more savage and untamed than the wolf or the owl, that fills humans with dread. I no longer fear. I rage. I rage at what they did to my beloved.”
The corpse stood up and towered over Eilo. Blue witch-fire, almost invisible in the bright afternoon sunlight, burned like a crown around its head and crawled slowly up from its swollen feet to its fanged mouth.
So, not a dripper, not exactly, but still dead and decaying like one. These were two descendants of a fox spirit that had bred with the local hunting hounds. Some essence of that spirit lived on in the blood of those dogs down the generations, waiting to be recombined and reborn, and to reclaim the swamp, which the spirit considered its own.
“But a hexguard came to town and killed him,” the banisher said, pointing with his glaive to the swollen corpse.
“Before he could father a child upon me,” Medru said. “Before we could reclaim this land from the usurpers in their tower of green stone. Our line is dead. We are finished.”
“That’s not true,” Eilo said, recalculating his entire plan of action. “He’s dead, that’s true, but the blood of the fox spirit is still strong in Lord Gloce’s hounds. Another can arise—for you, or another pair, in the future. The spirit can be restored. But who are these ‘usurpers’?”
Medru hesitated; she had been getting ready to attack, but now she looked confused.
“I’m not a slayer,” the banisher said, lowering his glaive a little. “Not a hexguard. I protect people. I don’t get involved in politics, mortal or spirit, but that also means I don’t have any interest in interfering with a power struggle here in a land that humans can never claim. I won’t stop you from restoring the fox spirit, but if this ‘usurper’ is a threat, I need to know.”
The banisher did not say that he would help—power struggles among the various spirit courts were less his business than power struggles among the Emmer Dukes—but if this ‘usurper’ also threatened the local people, perhaps they could work together. He left the option open for her, and he could see her thinking about it.
But then the corpse-thing roared and stumbled forward.
“He is deceiving you, my love!” it cried.
The corpse swept its huge fist at the banisher’s head; he ducked just in time and the fist tore a branch from the dead tree behind him.
“He wants to destroy us!” it roared. It tried to aim another punch at the banisher, but its thick foot got tangled in the reeds and it stumbled.
“Medru, you still have a chance, but this creature is dead and dying,” Eilo said, talking fast as he kept the glaive between himself and the walking corpse. “Give me his name and I can send him away. Then we can—”
“He’s trying to kill me!” the corpse roared, ripping free of the reeds and running directly at Eilo. The banisher dodged behind the tree and the corpse hit it at a run, smashing it. Eilo barely dodged the trunk as it fell, and the falling branches knocked his tricorn hat from his head and scratched his cheek.
Medru howled, and the woman’s face disappeared into her furry throat as she stood on two legs. She leaped for the banisher. Eilo ducked and slammed his glaive’s hammer-spike into the canine’s torso. It didn’t do anything except knock her to the ground, as plain steel can’t do much against a spirit: it was a warning, and Medru knew it. She crouched on all fours, watching Eilo with her black eyes.
The corpse raised both its huge fists, but the banisher was ready. His mentor had always thought Eilo’s glaive too complicated by half, especially in the sorts of messy fights that banishers found themselves in, but Eilo had one talent rare even among banishers: he remained analytical and precise in his thoughts and actions, even when terrified out of his wits. He turned a knob on his glaive and extended it to twice the height of a man. Using its momentum, he lunged before the corpse could bring its huge fists down. The glaive’s spike did not pierce the oak-hard flesh, but the corpse, already off-balance, stumbled backwards and then landed with a terrific crash in the reeds.
“Enough,” the banisher said, touching a hidden trigger on his glaive. Medru, who had been creeping toward him again, backed away, and when the corpse-giant looked up, he howled in fear, eyes burning with witch-fire.
Worked metal, wood, and stone is ineffectual against spirits, who are by nature unimpressed with mortal artifice. It does not affect them, any more than banishing-signs affect mortals. It takes living things to hurt a living spirit or an undead one. Every peasant knows to drive a wooden stake through the heart of a walking corpse, or to hang certain flowers to reveal a mimian or frighten one of Hausen’s brides. Once, the moon was alive and so silver inherited that spiritual property, but after the moon died, spirits no longer feared silver. The hexguards favor swords and spears carved of ivory or antlers, specially treated so they were almost still alive. Certain unaffiliated hunters just use crude clubs, as no one likes being beaten to death. But the last banishers had their own method.
Capillaries of fine steel spread a colorless liquid over the surface of the glaive. A mixture of tree sap, spring water, the dissolved ash of trees burned beneath the full moon (which still retained a fraction of the power it had in life), and the wielder’s own blood, banisher’s wine was deadly against creatures of the spirit worlds.
“Get back, Medru,” Eilo said.
The hound slinked away. Still, she would not give him the corpse’s name, so when the bloated thing with its fox-wolf head stood up again, the banisher could do only one thing. He studied the soft ground, making sure his boots would not slip in the muck.
The corpse brought its fist down again; the banisher jumped onto the trunk of a dead tree and brought the glaive down with both hands onto the dead thing’s wrist. The blade parted the hard flesh as easily as a knife cutting into a fish, cracked radia and ulna, and left the arm hanging from a strip of jerky-like flesh. The corpse howled like a wolf and shrieked like a fox, lunging with its other swollen hand to grab Eilo. But the banisher jumped off the broken trunk, turned the knob on his glaive that collapsed it to half its previous length, and got inside the corpse’s reach. He drove the glaive’s spear-point up into the dead thing’s still heart, shoving forward until his gloved hands hit the swollen black stomach.
The corpse toppled backward. Even as it fell, it disintegrated into true death, so that the banisher’s glaive parted the flesh and the blade emerged from the giant corpse’s shoulder.
Eilo heard the dog leap. He pivoted and swept the glaive through the air. Medru screamed and landed in two glistening piles. The upper half writhed and squirmed, dog-mouth opening and closing mindlessly. From the mouth crawled Medru in human form, naked and filth-smeared, cut in half at the navel. Screaming, she dragged herself away from Eilo, toward the water. She got into the cold water and died there, floating face-down, her black hair fanned out and her silver jewelry glinting in the sunlight.
The bottom half of the wolf kicked and rolled for a few more minutes, dislodging the woman-half within it, until it finally stopped.
“Shit,” the banisher said. He should have turned his blade. He could have spared her.
Eilo retrieved his tricorn hat, then used a pocket mirror to check himself for injuries. There was nothing except a scratch on his cheek caused by the falling tree. It stung because of the insect repellant he had applied, but that unguent would also keep the scratching from growing infected. His breath steamed in the cold air. He forced himself to breathe normally, knowing that if he kept gasping, a great lassitude would overcome him, as it sometimes did after a serious fight. He didn’t need that in the middle of a bog, especially as he had brought no food with him.
They had fought on a kind of island next to the tall reeds, out of which the tree grew, and for a moment Eilo feared that he would not be able to find his way back out. But then he saw some of his own tracks. He took another moment to investigate the little island, which the corpse-giant’s rampage had left trampled and muddy. A heap of rocks was visible on the far side of the tall reeds, which the corpse had flattened. He tried to get a better look because they seemed oddly regular.
No, not just some rocks: some kind of structure. The banisher remembered Medru’s words about the “usurper.” Could this be it?
Eilo checked the sky. The days were getting longer, the sun had not yet started to set, and the clouds still weren’t threatening rain. He had time. Restoring his glaive to its traveling configuration, the banisher prodded his way around the edge of the reeds until he stood on a mossy hill in full view of the stone structure.
He did not recognize the architectural style, perhaps because it was not finished. The lopsided building consisted of two-ton stone blocks and slightly smaller cylinders that looked like they should serve as columns. But everything was out of joint, as if the builder had botched some elementary math in the planning phase and refused to make any corrections as the structure moved further and further out of joint. It was a confused jumble, but Eilo could almost see how it should fit together. Push the entablature over to the left, and that would turn those cylinders into three proper columns. Twist the northwest corner around and the building’s foundation would be a proper trapezoid. But everything had gone wrong right at the beginning, and now there was no fixing it.
Eilo explored the entryway below the entablature and found it blocked off by broken stones after a few steps. He climbed the heap to the south, which should have been a wall, and found a way in. He had no lantern, but sunlight illuminated the slimy gray stones, so he dropped down the crooked steps, making sure that he could climb back up again without difficulty. He looked for carvings or writings that might give a clue as to this place’s age or purpose or what had gone wrong, but the walls were smooth and unfinished. Vines crawled down them, some with fat yellow flowers, and toads squatted in puddles. The air stank of rot, but not unpleasantly.
A hole in the ceiling illuminated a chamber ahead. Promising himself that he would explore that room and no farther, the banisher turned the corner and found himself in a crooked oval chamber with part of its roof missing. The chamber contained a suit of armor, as fine as any he had ever seen, and chased with intricate abstract designs. The armor looked like bronze and shone like gold in the sunlight. Mud stained the sabatons and the greaves. Three blue feathers rose from the ornate, completely sealed helm, fluttering slightly in the cold breeze.
Sensitive to the supernatural and familiar with all manner of walking armor, ghost armor, and armor infected by evil dreams that killed its owners, the banisher approached cautiously. It did not move. Could he cart it away? It might be valuable. Eilo thought of Fylent Maer, who handled his legal affairs in Baristoc. A member of Clan Nysse like Eilo, he loved novelties like this. And he loved mysteries. Eilo could not place the design of this armor, and he knew a great deal about the world’s militaries.
“I really thought there’d be something I’d recognize in here!” the armor said.
Eilo fell back on his ass into tepid water, his glaive clattering to the ground.
“But there’s not a single shape or mark, and everything is out of joint.” The armor—the woman, from the voice—turned to face him, revealing a blank silver mask. “Hello! My name is Skaithness, and I’m here to destroy the world.”
*