The Skeleth

Chapter 19

The thrice-opened eye went blind with the heart's blindness. The thrice-beloved king cast his love upon the pyre with his honor and his truth. In his anger, in his fear, in betrayal of his kin, King Childeric called upon the Skeleth, They Who Crawl Below, they who shape as one with men, but are not men. In his lust for lordship without limit, Childeric asked for that which could be halted not by sword, nor by axe, nor by spear. He had asked for that which could kill without end and, screaming to the last, he received his gift.

Edmund balanced a pebble on the rat-eared corner of the page to weigh it down. He drew up his cloak against the wind that blew in sudden gusts across the village green of Moorvale. It was a warm wind for autumn, southerly and kind, but even so its pulsing breath did not please him in the least, or anyone out on the green behind him, from the sudden shouts of disappointment it evoked:

"Oh, a pox on it! Did you see that? That was a bull's-eye, dead to the middle, and then that accursed breeze—"

"You always blame the breeze, Nicky Bird. You're not fooling anyone."

Edmund followed the scrawling text onto the facing page: The land where the Skeleth walk is now waste. It is ruin, given up to death, a land under the sway of That Which Waits Within the Mountain. We have tasted the bitter fruits of King Childeric's greed. Upon the banks of the river we have made our redoubt, and there we fight an enemy that knows neither mercy nor fear.

The hairs on Edmund's arms went up and stayed raised. He looked behind him, up and west to Wishing Hill, then over through the square, past the mill to the turn of the broad river Tamber. The statue of the old stone knight that stood in the center of the square faced eastward, toward the bridge over the river and the empty moors beyond. No one in the village knew who the knight was or what he had done to deserve a statue in his honor. His head and right arm had broken off long ago, so that no one even knew if he was meant to be raising a hand in welcome or shaking a sword in defiance.

Edmund raised the pebble and turned the page—parchment flaked in his hand, and a whiff of wind nearly sheared the page clean off. They are seen and yet unseen, they are form without substance, they are man and monster both. They serve only their master, only That Which Waits Within the Mountain—

"It's your turn."

Edmund startled. A thin, curved shadow hung suspended over the pages of the book—a horn-handled bow of springy yew. Geoffrey held it out, the quiver of arrows in his other hand.

"Come on, Edmund!" Martin Upfield called from the other side of the walnut tree Edmund had been using to block the wind. Martin stood with a crowd of peasant folk at one end of the common green, a place used for grazing livestock most days, but on that morning the sheep and cattle had been moved across the road and replaced with a line of ragged old archery butts. Almost every man Edmund knew stood in clumps at the near end of the green, and a goodly handful of women, besides. Even as he looked across, Missa Dyer loosed and struck firm into her target, bringing a cheer from her brother Jordan and half the Twintree clan.

"I've been looking for you all morning." Geoffrey dropped the quiver in his lap. "The practice is half over already."

Edmund grabbed the feathered flights of the arrows before they could spill forth from the quiver. "I don't want to take a turn."

"You've got to shoot, Edmund." Geoffrey held forth the bow. "You're over thirteen; it's the law. Every able-bodied man in the village is here, and there's a clerk walking about with the tax rolls making sure we all showed up."

"I'm busy!" Edmund struck the open page before him. "Do you think that figuring this stuff out is easy? I'm trying to find a way to defend us from the Skeleth!"

Geoffrey shook his head. "I don't see those Skeleth things anywhere. Why are you so sure they're coming back, anyway? Just because that wizard girl told you?"

Edmund closed the Paelandabok and slid it into the sack at his feet. "What do you think we were doing in that tomb?"

"Stomping around like fools and nearly getting ourselves killed, so that you could pull up some dusty old spell, and—let me guess—you showed it to the wizard girl, didn't you?" Geoffrey shot Edmund a sour smirk on their way over to the targets. "You think you know everything, but you're really stupid, sometimes."