CHAPTER 14: A Man’s Enemies

A man’s enemies are
the men of his own house.
Micah 7:6

Naich scratched a few more notes on the lined parchment before him, then set the pen back into the ink jar and gazed at the stanza, his chin on his fist. As he read the page from top to bottom, notes played in his mind, jarring to a sudden halt as he reached the end.

It was no use. He couldn’t finish. He needed fresh air, the scents and sounds of the wilderness. For a moment he considered throwing the sheet away. Then he laid the music aside on the writing desk. Perhaps the rest would come later.

“Does the muse grow weary of your company, Gestern?”

Grey eyes lifted to meet black.

She smiled.

“Perhaps I can take her place.”

Black hair cascaded over her shoulders, shadows and night, over a dress of ancient, pagan design. She had pale skin and raven’s eyes, and dark minions that shifted and snarled around her ancient skirt.

Naich shook his head.

“Father hunts tonight, and he has left us behind.” She smiled, as sweet as death. “Our job is to prepare the field of battle.”

He remained impassive, longfingered hands resting on the arms of his chair. She laughed, softly.

“I liked you better when you answered back,” she said, standing in a swirl of shadows, wolves pressing close to her legs and whining for her attention. “I liked you better when you howled and pleaded.” Still he didn’t reply, as quiet as one of Danti’s sculptures, although his eyes followed her.

“Play for us, then, if you will not kill for us.” The darkhaired creature pointed imperiously toward the silverbanded flute upon the desk. Naich lowered his graying head in assent and stood, picking up the instrument, and followed her.

“You captured his spirit well.”

Danti felt his heart skip a beat. With an effort, he took control of himself and turned.

Alrune sat in the chair by his worktable, his dark eyes gleaming under a stray curl of black hair that fell over his forehead. Danti hadn’t heard him enter the studio.

“Thank you.” He turned back to his sculpture, seeing it as a whole for the first time since he’d started working that evening. For a moment his breath caught in his throat, and he wondered how he’d managed to get so far in such little time. He felt like a man driven, and as he gazed at his work, he realized that the sculpture had come to offer a refuge for him from the cares of the keep. It was no wonder, he thought ironically, that he’d come so close to completion in such a short time.

There was a lot to take refuge from.

The Erl King could be easily discerned now. He had the same brooding eyes and dangerous face Danti had seen in his dreams, his head arrogantly tilted to meet the viewer’s gaze. He was wrapped in a long fur-lined hunter’s cloak, taken from Danti’s memories of old Bavarian woodcuts and tapestries, and from vague images remembered from his dreams. The cloak swept around him in long ripples and folds, hiding all but the toe of a boot, one gloved hand.

“That’s not necessarily a good thing.” The scholar smiled as Danti turned. “He rides the hunt tonight.”

“I thought I heard a horn earlier,” Danti muttered. He set the chisel and mallet down on the table, flexing his hands. “Is everyone safe?”

“Young Sebastiano and the Donna Caterina have left to bring back Father Völker,” Alrune informed him, smiling maliciously as Danti’s eyes widened. “They go entrusting their lives to Araciel.”

“What?” Danti slammed his hand on the table, leaning forward and glaring at the dwarf. “And nobody told me?”

“And what would you have said?” Alrune chuckled. “Words were spoken to stop her, but the Donna Caterina has risen to her upbringing.”

“Dammit, you sound like you approve!” Danti pulled off his working apron and ran his hands through marbledusted hair. “How long ago did they leave?”

“About an hour.” Alrune’s eyes danced. “You’ll never catch up to them in the storm.”

Danti gave him a long, hard look.

“Who else knew about this?”

“Why, only our sculptor had cause to be on his own tonight. Albrecht seemed a bit alarmed, but I think Naich looks forward to seeing what will happen.” Alrune smiled. “Our composer hides secrets behind the walls of his voicelessness. And he doesn’t hesitate to send others out into danger.”

“Neither do you, from the sound of it,” Danti growled. “You realize you may have just sent the lord’s daughter and my apprentice to their deaths?”

“Oh, but what about Araciel?” Alrune asked, voice solicitous. “You yourself have argued that he’s trustworthy.”

“And I still think he is,” Danti replied, meeting Alrune’s eyes. The dwarf’s mocking smile never wavered, and Danti felt a small twinge of apprehension. Could he, after all, been mistaken about the devil?

He swore and turned, staring blindly at the sculpture. It was too late to follow them, Alrune had told the truth. If they’d been gone an hour, their tracks would be long since covered over by the wind, and they’d never hear him shouting over the storm. All he could do now was wait, and hope, and try to ignore the seeds of doubt Alrune had sown.

“So, the Erl King is out after them.”

“It seems.” Alrune slid to his feet, the carving knife in his belt glinting in the lamplight. “Beware nobody comes after you.”

Danti shook his head as the dwarf walked to the wide studio window and began unfastening it.

“Well, Hunter,” he muttered softly to the blind, proud sculpture. “You’ve kept me distracted long enough.” He coughed. His mouth tasted like stone dust. “Time for me to figure out exactly what’s going on around here.”

“Good fortune,” Alrune said, opening the shutters and gazing out into the snow-swept night.

Danti shivered as cold air swept through the room, picked up one of the lamps, and left.

As he stepped into the hall, the flame in his lamp flickering, he heard Naich playing — a nocturnal lament that fit his mood perfectly.

Pondering Alrune’s words, he decided to seek out the musician. It was true, he thought, as he picked his way through the dark halls. Naich often seemed privy to some private knowledge that kept him calm in the worst disasters. He remembered Naich’s quiet acceptance of the news of Alfons’ death, his strange lack of alarm when Dietrich was poisoned. Of all of them, the alchemists’ son and daughter, the repentant devil, the riddling scholar, the hiding sculptor and the gloomy cook, Naich was perhaps the most mysterious, his past hidden behind walls of silence. Danti remembered the day that he’d invited Naich to the keep to model for a sculpture — the Orpheus, which he’d eventually sold to a family in Firenze. When the lord and lady had invited the flautist to stay, he hadn’t seemed surprised by the request. He’d simply moved his few possessions into one of the many spare rooms and become a fixture.

Danti reached the west wing, where Johannes and Elisabeth had decided to build a ballroom that had never been used, and opened the door below the musician’s gallery. Naich often played here, where the dust gathered and the windows were always shuttered.

The door opened into a nightmare.

Naich stood in the center of the room, playing, while wolves wound around him, strange figures in clothes three generations past the current fashion, figures whose throats had been torn out and whose eyes were amber and soulless.

For a moment Danti froze. The macabre scene looked like something out of the old medieval paintings of Judgment Day — woodcuts of souls condemned to Hell. The dead come to life.

Then his eyes fixed on Naich, who turned to look at him over the silverbanded instrument. Somehow, it didn’t surprise him that the mute composer stood calmly in the face of madness.

“Naich!” He lifted his lamp higher, as if its meager flame could ward off the apparitions that filled the musty room. They stopped to look at him, wolves and strangers alike, and Danti blanched.

Wings fluttered, and something black flew through the ballroom toward him. Before he could step back, wings brushed the ground and became the nightblack skirts of a beautiful, smokeeyed woman.

“The sculptor,” she said in a German so accented he could hardly understand it. She smiled at his startled look and reached out, touching his cheek. Danti jerked his head away and took a step backward.

“You’re a ghost,” he blurted, fighting off the fear that stirred inside him. “You can’t hurt me.”

“Not a ghost,” she said, still speaking in that guttural tongue, dark eyes fixed on his face. “Perhaps wælcyrge, or alaisiagis, if you must.”

He shook his head. The names meant nothing to him, but the fact that she conversed with him like a human alleviated his fear, settling it back behind a slowly growing sense of outrage.

“I don’t care what you call yourself — you’re not human and you’re not welcome in this keep.” He felt his temper rising and put a mental chokehold on it. This was no brawl in one of the campi of Venezia, no barfight in Padova. This was something outside his experience, and he couldn’t let old habits get him into trouble now.

“No?” she seemed amused. “But the keep is our home.” Another whisper of black feathers from the shadows, and a raven settled on her shoulder, watching him. Danti shivered. The eyes of carrion-bird and woman looked identical. “Ask your friend, if you must.”

Naich let the flute drop from his lips, the lament ending in midnote. Shadows seemed to reach out and draw the wolves and the walking dead away, hiding them in darkness, until only the composer, the sculptor and the spirit stood in the pooled lamplight.

“Naich?” Danti stared at the composer, challenging him to affirm the woman’s words. Had Naich summoned her here? He stared at the slim, somberly clad man, whose grey eyes were deep with unspoken sadness as he returned Danti’s gaze.

Naich slowly inclined his head.

The strange woman smiled.

“We have right of birth, sculptor; we were here before these stones were walls. And we have right of invitation, too, for we were given leave to enter when blood washed these floors.”

Danti flinched as crimson spilled over the parquet, then sharply shook his head. An illusion; the color was nothing but the light of the lamp flames.

“You’re talking about the old Gestern murders.”

“I am.”

“Well, you can consider that invitation rescinded! The new owners of the keep don’t want anything to do with you or the Erl King,” he growled. He took an unthinking step forward. “What do I have to do to drive you off, ghost? Get a cross? Holy water? What?” He clenched a fist. “I’ll find it.”

“You’re brave, sculptor,” she said softly, as he glared into her face. Her cold hand touched his shoulder, and Danti felt the anger drain from him, to be replaced by sudden fear. The raven on her shoulder spread its wings as she leaned toward him. “We are bravery’s reward. I am agony and my sister is death. We walked with mankind long before your pathetic visionary was pinned to his wooden frame.”

The lamp fell from Danti’s fingers as he struggled to shake off the mind-numbing chill that fettered him. He heard it shatter against the floor as if from far away. He felt ensnared by her eyes.

Suddenly, something flashed between them. The woman stopped.

Naich stood close, his silver-banded flute held like a shield across Danti’s chest.

The raven on the woman’s shoulder took flight, vanishing into the darkness in the back of the ballroom. Danti shuddered, stepping backward out of the doorway and into the hall. Naich had just saved his life, he was sure of it, even though the ghostwoman held no weapon in her hand with which to kill him.

“He would have been more merciful to have let me take you,” she said, looking at him. Before Danti could think of an answer she turned and walked into the shadowed depths of the ballroom. As she passed, the lamps went out, one by one.

And then they stood in utter darkness.

“Naich?” he croaked, reaching out. His fingertips touched the wall, grounding him in reality. Steps approached, and he felt someone take his arm, guiding him.

They turned right, entering a room. The hand left his arm, and he reached out, his hands finding a table. His workroom. Winter winds still rustled his sketches and notes.

Naich lit a lamp.

“That woman,” Danti began, staring at the composer’s silhouette. “Who was she? A ghost?”

Naich turned and gestured toward the dimly lit statue. The storm wind from the open window gusted through his hair.

Danti nodded, scrutinizing what he could see of Naich’s face. The composer may have saved him, but Danti would never forget how he had stood and played for the wolves and the dead, like some demon piper from Hell. He had served her, had possibly even controlled her, in the end. What was he?

“Naich, what’s going on? Does she work for the Erl King? What is she to you?”

Naich looked around, his hands rising as if to still him. Guessing what the composer was looking for for, Danti pointed to a cabinet against the wall. Naich opened it and pulled out pen, paper and ink.

After a moment’s writing he handed the sheet to Danti, brushing past him as he left the room.

The Erlkönig is served by the choosers of the slain. I have already been chosen.

“Naich!” Danti lunged around, reaching for the composer. But the silent man had already vanished in the darkness of the hall, as if he were a spirit, himself.

I have already been chosen. Danti shuddered, and stared into the shadows. What did that mean? Was Naich a spirit, too?

“I see you found him,” Alrune said. Danti blinked, looking up. The motleyclad scholar sat in the window seat, apparently unaffected by the snow and wind that blew through the open window.

He hadn’t even noticed him there.

“Yeah. Dancing with the dead. Or playing for them, anyway.” He walked over and handed Alrune the note. “What do you make of this?”

The scholar read it, his dark eyes intent. For the first time since Alrune had arrived, Danti saw the man not as an annoyance, but as a potential ally.

“It seems our composer is playing a very dangerous game,” he replied, and in his voice Danti heard the same strange note of approval he’d heard when the scholar described Donna Caterina’s foolhardy bravery.

“This means he’s allied with the Erl King, doesn’t it?” Danti asked, pulling over a stool and sitting across from the window. Alrune chuckled, dark eyes twinkling.

“So it seems, but seeming isn’t everything.” Alrune turned and leaned out the window, wind sweeping his hair back. “Have you been hearing horns?”

“Alrune! What are we going to do about this? We can’t just let him go free to betray us!”

The scholar glanced over his left shoulder, and for a moment in the eerie light it seemed to Danti that even Alrune was a spirit, some Kobold of Gestern Mountain himself. An ancient creature worthy of being captured in stone.

He shook his head sharply. This was no time to lose control of his imagination.

“Perhaps it is a matter best left to Donna Caterina’s decision,” the scholar suggested, voice almost too soft under the storm wind to be heard. “Is she not the chatelaine of this house?”

Danti scowled. If Naich were a threat to them, it was Danti’s concern, because he was the one who’d invited Naich to the keep in the first place.

What use did the Erl King have for a mute musician?

He shivered, and looked up.

“Do you really need that window open?” he asked irritably. Alrune turned back, looking outside once more.

“‘He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.’”

“So use someone else’s window to do your observing,” Danti grumbled, standing to leave. It was getting cold enough for him to see his own breath. “You’re not a farmer, anyway.”

“On the contrary,” Alrune said, his mocking smile reappearing. “I’ve planted many seeds during my stay here.”

Danti stopped and turned, scrutinizing the dwarf through narrowed eyes. But Alrune had turned away and seemed intent on the swirling patterns of snow.

Indeed, he thought, lips tightening as he turned again and left. And not a few of those seeds of mistrust were beginning to sprout in Danti’s breast.

Indeed.

A lone flute played, somewhere in the darkened halls.