CricketAndKestrel/Chapt08
Part 7 | Story Info Page | WBM Home Page | Part 9
As Shoat looked down at the baby's face, the purity draining into pain, her mind locked in the familiar falling once again.
She remembered when she herself had been pure. A feeling rushed to her: a group of her friends sitting in a circle playing a game and filled with only pure joy. She didn't see their faces -- she never did -- but the bliss of innocence was clear.
The bliss shattered in an instant, the single image becoming a clamoring of emotion. Each of the feelings was familiar, drawing from a part of herself, and yet as the tempest raged the feelings more and more resembled the intensity of dreams, the deep terrors that used to wake her at night and run her screaming to her parents' bed.
Slowly the storm resolved, coming to a single whispered point, a single emotion filled with all the power of rage and all the composure of hatred. The child in front of her was a beautiful example of a living thing as well as a treasure of mortal endeavor. So many hopes were bound up in this thing before her.
Shoat let her emotion guide her hands and her essence. The lesson of loss was the most divine gift anyone could give. If Shoat could teach this lesson while furthering the goals of herself, and of her mother, so much the better.
Somewhere Shoat heard a child's voice screaming.
Chapter 7: Inheritance
Kestrel threw back Sky's front door to find her eating calmly her breakfast. Cricket's mother stood at the stove, frying hotcakes in what smelled like the grease of the bacon she had stacked neatly next to her.
Cricket's mother spoke without turning around, "Hello young man, there's still more than enough if you'd like and I was about to put on a pot of coffee."
Kestrel stood for a moment, completely dumbstruck, before gesturing away the coffee kindly, "No, thank you. I've actually come with rather pressing business for Sky."
Cricket's mother tsked before Sky could respond. "You'll find, when you no longer have the opportunity to enjoy it, that there are few things more pressing than a nice hot breakfast. But suit yourself. There's extra here if you change your mind."
Kestrel thanked the old ghost and proceeded to go about explaining the circumstances of the morning, with particular detail given to Shoat's strange behavior. "Before I left, I thought I heard Shoat say something -- a bad dream about the newborn."
Sky tried to blink the sleep out of her eyes, "So you think that, whatever's going on in the house, it's after children?"
"Well, I think it's after youth, yes, but not just children; whatever it was turned freshly cut flowers to dust overnight. Tell me, were you involed with the birth of Tamsin Eventide?"
"Not really. Two years ago I didn't have the skills of midwifery I do now. Cricket asked me if I could help, but I'd recently had a very bad blow to my professional pride, so I declined. Why do you ask?"
"I wanted to know more about Tamsin's birth. Even though their nursemaid carried little Tamsin to term, Dust Moth treats the child as her own. I believe that Dust Moth's own blod runs through the veins of the little child and, if that's true, powerful sorceries must have been involved. A deal might have been made with one of the local fertility gods and, if that's true, such a god may still wish payment for his services rendered. You must at least know of the local gods in your line of work. I thought that you could help he to find and talk to whichever one is responsible."
Sky shook her head, "Most of the local gods tend to look towards the other end of life. The few local gods of fertility tend to be generous sorts, owing to the fact that few around here think about new life when death surrounds them. They would never do that sort of thing to people who tried so hard to bring a new life into this world. Besides which, why would such a go choose now, when you and Cricket have suddently shown up. No, I think that its far more likely that whatever the force is, you and Cricket brought it with you."
Kestrel looked agitated, "What do you mean, why would a fertility god be following Cricket and I?"
"Another thing you learn as a midwife in Sijan is that birth and death are very close together." Sky shot Cricket's mother a glance, "We should talk about this somewhere else."
Cricket's mother spoke from the kitchen, "Don't stop talking on my account, dear. I know more about my daughter's welfare than you think."
Catching the surpised look on Sky's face, Kestrel realized that he was completely lost. Time being of the essence, he decided to cut to the point, "Just what is it here that I'm not getting?"
Cricket's mother brought two hot mugs of coffee with her, setting one down in front of Sky and one in front of Kestrel. "No arguments young man, just drink it. You'll have plenty of time; this might take a while."
"You can tell me on the way. Both of you can come with me, we need to get to the Eventides." Kestrel grabbed the coffee, "But I will take this and thank you for it. If, of course, Sky doesn't mind me taking one of her cups."
Sagacious Breath of the Heavens stooped low over the scroll-covered desk, inspecting every strange rune and symbol for clues. He had already been over the rest of Liuwen's apartment, had seen the stains of the sheet and the strands of long hair that still clung tothe pillow, and seemed to undulate softly even in the stale air of this squalid apartment.
Kamaria was proving to be more like her mother with each new thing Breath learned about her. Whoever this Liuwen Mortwright was, he had run afoul of Kamaria's inherited feminine wiles. The state of the bed and a sniff of the empty bottle by the nightstand were enough to tell him that. The real question was what he had given Kamaria in return, and Breath had an inkling something in these papers would tell him.
Most of these papers described ghost wards and spirit traps of the simplest variety and yet the describing hand was artful enough that Breath suspected it could do much better than this. He'd seen this sort of hack time and time again, doing just enough work to keep himself in business.
Wait a minute, there was something.
Breath had just been putting another half-finished sigil, this one found on the wall in the bathroom (this Mortwright had an astoundingly Laisse Faire attitute towards organization) face down in a pile of papers already gone through when he caught the light coming through it. What had looked like a mess of meaningless squiggles to make a simple warding pentagram look a little more expensive took on a whole new light when viewed through the paper, as they were now, reversed. This was a Rime ward.
Rime on the Barque of Heavens had been of the old school of necromancy, one of the necromancers who had pioneered the art long before the Deathlords and the Abyssal exalts had taken up the practice. While he had done a great many things to make his name famous, the thing he was still most known for was the Rime ward: a completely unbreakable armor against the spirits of the underworld.
The ward functioned by riding the favor of one of the great celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, or one of the five maidens. By describing a place where astrological fortune would naturally favor one of these bodies in arcs and symbols around a central pentacle, the bearer could tie herself so into the workings of the world that those inhabitants of the places below could not affect her. Unfortunately, the astrological description had to be precise enough so that it could protect the bearer only in one place a few acres wide and, even then, could only protect for the space of a few hours.
Looking at the ward now for what it was, Breath could see that it had been designed to be used some time last night. A little more work would yield up a place.
He smiled as he came a little closer to tracking down what exactly it was that Kamaria was up to.
Cricket was starting to panic.
Kestrel had been gone for over an hour now. To look at her Shoat hadn't gotten any better at all. To make matters worse, whatever it was in the house had struck again: now little Tamsin was sitting in the same strange catatonia that had struck Shoat, crying out every few minutes and then lapsing back into complete staring silence.
Cricket shared a worried look with Lily. The two had been debating for the last twenty minutes about whether they should wake the Eventides. The usually slept for another few hours and to wake them up and worry them when there was nothing yet to be done wouldn't help at all.
"Tell me again what happened just before Tamsin started to act strangly?"
Lily sighed and looked down at the little child in her arms, who had just finished another bout of screaming. "Shoat came in, said she wanted to hold Tamsin because she'd just had a dream about something bad happening to her. She took up little Tamsin in her arms and, just then, a breeze came in through the window that wilted all the flowers in the room. When I looked again, both children had gone completely blank and silent."
"And Shoat didn't say anything else about the dream."
"No, nothing. I let her hold the child, the wind blew back the curtains, and the room went dead silent."
Cricket couldn't take it anymore. She put all of her terror into a loud scream.
Lily gasped, "Hush!"
Cricket was usually composed, but the events of the morning had awakened a certain petulance in her, "It's not as if I'll wake the children, and the Eventides are in the other wing of the house. No sound I make will carry there."
"That's not what I mean. I think I just heard something."
Cricket listened for a moment but didn't hear anything, and told Lily so.
"What did you hear?"
"It sounded like the front door. That man must be back with help."
The two women waited for a few minutes. When Cricket heard feet on the stairs she was relieved at first but when she noticed that it was only one pair of footsteps, and when the footsteps went down instead of up towards them, both women lost what composure they had managed to retain.
Cricket stood up, "Is anyone supposed to be moving around the house at this hour?"
"No, not in through the front door. Everyone else is asleep or in the other wing."
"I'm sure it's nothing, Lily, but I'm going to go down and look. I can't stand sitting here waiting anyway. You stay here with the children. I'll be back in a few minutes to tell you it was nothing."
Kestrel walked through the early morning streets of Sijan trailing holding a mug of coffee, trying to take in what Cricket's mother was telling him. On his other side walked Sky, still dumbfounded for reasons Kestrel couldn't quite fathom.
"I was sick for so long before I died. It was hard on Little Cricket. That's when she really learned how to take over the business. I suppose she was lucky to have the time to learn from me, however feeble I was, but she had to take care of the shop and me at the same time, a greater burden than I would wish on anyone.
"Towards the end I lapsed into a sleeping sickness. My body was alive, Kestrel, but I was dead. My spirit was already free of my my sickness but still she tended my body, and when the young rich man started coming around the shop she was careful never to let him into the living quarters. But I still saw everything.
"I saw him woo her with the same tricks a thousand men tried to play on her before, the same tricks she had seen through and I had helped her to navigate around, but I couldn't help her now. I was still a young ghost, and barely aware of myself anymore. Half the time I felt only what she felt and the only part of me that kept away was trapped, powerless to help my daughter.
"As soon as she told him she was with child they both knew she couldn't keep it. He was of a different class, and already promised to someone else anyway. You were a good friend, Sky, to keep everything so quiet. I don't fault you for what happened, nor do I fault Cricket. Mostly I blame myself. I should have been able to keep her safe from him.
"But another thing death teaches you is not to dwell on regrets. Cricket hasn't been ready to tell me about it, and I havn't been ready to tell her that I know. This is the way of mothers and daughters, even ones that both still live. But a mother always knows, Kestrel.
"Sky, if something is after my daughter because of what happened I want to help you in any way I can. I'm not so useless as I look."
Cricket stayed close to the wall as he edged down the stairway, keeping her eyes trained for whatever might have made the sounds. She had a thousand images racing through her mind of what might be stirring in the basement, but none of those thoughts prepared her for the well dressed man in the middle of life she caught running his fingers over the cobblestones of the walls and floors.
"What in the name of the five winds are you doing here?"
The figure stood and smiled gently at her and in that smile she was certain there could be no harm. "Careful not to speak those names lightly," the dapper gentleman said, "only last week the west wind herself bent my ear for nearly an hour about how there wasn't enough to do this season."
Cricket stood gaping for a moment before the figure continued, "How rude of me! Allow me to introduce myself to you, miss Cricket. My name is Sagacious Breath of the Heavens. I am a good friend of Kestrel's, and I've come to take you both out of harm's way."
Part 7 | Story Info Page | WBM Home Page | Part 9
