An unbidden flutter stirred her belly.‘I’d appreciate that,’ she said.
‘Given you’re willing to keep paying,’ he went on.‘Naturally.’
Fola glared at him.He smiled back.An invitation to banter that could easily be read as flirting.If only he hadn’t raised the issue of payment.
‘I came here because a haunting spread over an entire kingdom was already unusual in scope,’ she said, shutting him down.‘It may be over, yes.If it is, that says something truly awful about good King Elbrech.If it isn’t, it means this situation is as interesting, and as dangerous, as I had hoped.Simplest case, the kingdom is besieged by a necromancer.’
That sobered Colm for the rest of the day.They spent the night in Forgard, another bustling harbour.While Ispont’s docks had been home to bright yachts and merchant carracks, Forgard’s were full of heavy, high-decked ships armed with rows of cannon.They flew broad banners bearing the crowned bear on a red field she had seen elsewhere in the kingdom, but also an orange ship on a blue field, plus a third device unique to each vessel, followed by an assortment of stripes and chevrons.Colm called them ‘battle flags’, and though he did not know the precise iconography of the kingdom, he explained that the designs marked each vessel’s position within the naval hierarchy and the rank of its commanding officer.
Though Colm’s enthusiasm charmed her, Fola found the whole display unsettling.Weapons were off-putting enough, but she had yet to observe any show of organised military might that did not fill her with dread.Worst of all had been in Ulun, but any formation of armed men or machinery seemed little different, to her, from those undead legions and bone-crafted engines of war.
That evening yielded no new rumours, nor any answers about the king’s death.Fola spent the deep hours of the night at her window, her thaumaturgist’s loupe pressed to her eye, scanning for even the glimmer of a ghost wandering the streets or a wraith wafting over the sea.She glimpsed only the odd shimmer of some long-buried First Folk magic, and the ribbons of power that traced the lines of their roads.
They turned north at Forgard.They spent one more night before reaching the city of Parwys, this time in the sleepy town of Halway, situated with the sea to its west and otherwise surrounded by fertile farmland.There, while early autumn rain drummed on the roof of the inn, Fola found the first clue that truly intrigued her.
‘No, y’see, the king weren’t the first to die.’
Fola leaned across the table, despite the sour tang of the old woman’s breath.‘To the wraiths, you mean?’
Her name was Puli.She had six stick-thin arms, six eyes like chips of grey flint, and skin the greenish-brown of mossy bark.One of the stranger morphologies Fola had seen in this part of the world, but not the strangest.It would be interesting to examine the woman through her thaumaturgist’s loupe, to see whether she had inherited her shape from natural evolution or magical ancestry, as Colm did.More useful to keep her talking.People tended to shut up once you started treating them like research subjects.Fola had plied her with two mugs of bitter beer and a game of dice.Puli took a long swig, patted at her leathery lips with a stained cloth plucked from a pocket of her apron, and nodded at the dice in Fola’s hand.
‘You plannin’ to throw?’
Fola tossed the dice, paying them hardly any attention, though all six of Puli’s beady eyes traced their falling.
‘Aha!’Puli shouted, pumping one fist in the air while the other five danced about the tabletop, plucking coins and stowing them in various pockets about her person.
‘Who else died?’Fola pressed.It was one thing for a teamster to see a wraith and believe it meant him harm…entirely another to learn that the haunting had, indeed, claimed multiple victims.Confirmation that the object of its wrath extended far beyond King Elbrech.
Puli waved her mug at one of the servers for a refill.‘Not many folk around here travel like I do.Fewer ever talk to the noblefolk.Even fewer ever enter their houses, y’understand?Not many folk around as specially skilled as Puli.’She waggled the fingers of three hands.‘They’ve got clockworks what need winding and mending, and stranger devices, too, and I’ve a knack for it.This is no rumour, you understand.Have it from the count’s steward’s own mouth, I have it.’
‘Impressive,’ Fola said, growing impatient.‘Havewhat?’
‘Ifan, Count of Glascoed.’
‘He was killed by the wraiths?’
‘No!’Puli sputtered laughter, spraying Fola with a few gobbets of sour spit.‘I have itfrom his steward.The count’s father.He’s the one who died.Old Harlow of Glascoed.Three years back.An illness, they said at the time, but I suspected.It was within a year since the first wraiths were spotted on the Windmarsh.I know ’cause I was nervous to travel, but already had the contract with old Harlow.A clock, y’see.Or… Well, more than a clock—muchmore—but that will do for an explanation.A right beauty of a timepiece, dating back to the First Folk.All glass and crystal.Didn’t need winding, in truth, but he had me out to inspect it once a year to be sure it kept its time true, as his father did before him.’
Fola drummed her fingers on the table while a server refilled Puli’s mug.‘And when you arrived, Harlow was dead, and his steward told you the wraiths killed him?’
‘Oh aye, Harlow was dead.’Puli took a long swallow and leaned across the table, scattering the dice.‘And the son in a right fit.Wearing the family sword at all hours, steel with a raw iron core, swingin’ it at every howl of wind or branch scrapin’ the window shutters.The steward of the place told me the young count had dreamed a terror on the night the illness took his father.A dream of ghosts and clawing hands around old Harlow’s throat.Convinced, he was, the illness had been a curse of the undead.’
‘And you agree?’Fola said.‘Why?The young count might have simply been addled by grief and fear.’
Puli took another drink, then set her mug down and held it with all six of her little three-fingered hands and sighed.‘Y’must remember, lass, fear had the kingdom in its grip, then.The haunting wasnew.In the years since it’s become like a long dry summer, or a mild plague, or the winter wind off the Rime Sea.A trouble and a hardship, aye, but one we’re used to.But then we were all in a panic.As I said, I nearly skipped my journey to Glascoed, which woulda cost me the count’s custom, I’m sure, and possibly that of the other noble houses I service.That’s how ripe it was, then.Fear fit to bursting.I’d seen a healthy share of it.Felt a healthy share of it.What young Ifan showed… That was different.’
She nodded solemnly, six eyes staring into the black depths of her beer.‘That wasn’t just fear, lass.That was certainty.Not a mouse aware of the cat, hiding, but backed into a corner.Shiverin’ while the cat’s teeth gleam and claws reach.’
* * *
A pleasant petrichor and a cool autumnal breeze off the sea accompanied their departure the following morning.A morning Colm spent failing to comprehend the implications of old Puli’s account.
‘I’ll make it simple for you,’ Fola said, exasperation leaking into her voice.‘A haunting has atarget.A specific goal in mind.Vengeance is far and away the most common, though some ghosts seek to make amends for a wrong they committed in life, or to reunite one last time with a lost loved one.In any case, it is the specificity and simplicity of the goal that is important.Everyone who dies leaves unfinished business—goals unmet, relationships frayed and not fully healed.Yet only a tiny fraction of the dead linger as ghosts or wraiths.
‘It is a type of magic.A spell cast, often accidentally.And the more complex an act of magic is, the more difficult it is, the more it costs, the more skill is required, and the more mental focus.Thus, only the dead whose minds are so consumed by their unmet need as to command all of their focus at the moment of death, and whose needs are simple enough to be contained in that singular moment of focus, manifest that need in undeath.This is why, say, a vengeful wraith that results from a murder plot does not seek out and avenge itself upon every member of the plot, unless it is an unusually potent ghost.Instead, it seeks vengeance on whoever the victim held most responsible in the moment of death.Now do you understand?’
Colm frowned down at her.‘No.’
