and there was an unseasonal early chill sloping down the spine of the country from the Majak uplands. The peaks of the mountains that the town nestled under were already capped with snow, and it was reckoned that Gallows Gap would be impassable before Padrow’s Eve. People were talking again about an Aldrain winter. There had been stories circulating for weeks now, of high-pasture livestock taken by wolves and other, less natural predators, of chilling encounters and sightings in the mountain passes. Not all of them could be put down to fanciful talk. This, Ringil suspected, was going to be the source of the problem. Bashka the Schoolmaster’s cottage was at the end of one of the town’s cross streets and backed onto the local graveyard. As by far the most educated man in the tiny township of Gallows Water—its resident hero excluded—Bashka had been handed the role of temple officiator by default, and the house went with the priest’s robes. And in bad weather, graveyards were a fine source of meat for scavengers.
You will be a great hero, a Yhelteth fortune-teller had once read in Ringil’s spittle. You will carry many battles and best many foes.
Nothing about being a municipal exterminator in a border-town settlement not much bigger than one of Trelayne’s estuary slums.
There were torches fixed in brackets along the main streets and river frontage of Gallows Water but the rest of the town must make do with bandlight, of which there wasn’t much on a night this clouded. True to Ringil’s expectations, the crowd thinned out as soon as he stepped onto an unlit thoroughfare. When it became apparent where he was headed specifically, his escort dropped by more than half. He reached the corner of Bashka’s street still trailing a loose group of about six or eight, but by the time he drew level with the schoolmaster’s cottage—the door still gaping open, the way its owner had left it when he fled in his nightshirt—he was alone. He cocked his head back to where the rubberneckers hovered at the far end of the street. A wry grin twitched his lips.
“Stand well back now,” he called.
From among the graves, something uttered a low droning cry. Ringil’s skin goosefleshed with the sound of it. He unshipped the Ravensfriend from his shoulder and, holding it warily before him, stepped around the corner of the little house.
The rows of graves marched up the hill where the town petered out against outcroppings of mountain granite. Most of the markers were simple slabs hewn from the self-same stone as the mountain, reflecting the locals’ phlegmatic attitude to the business of dying. But here and there could be seen the more ornately carved structure of a Yhelteth tomb, or one of the cairns the northerners buried their dead under, hung with shamanistic iron talismans and daubed in the colors of the deceased’s clan ancestry. As a rule, Ringil tried not to come out here too often; he remembered too many of the names on the stones, could put faces to too many of the foreign-sounding dead. It was a mixed bag that had died under his command at Gallows Gap that sweltering summer afternoon nine years ago, and few of the outlanders had family with the money to bring their sons home for burial. The cemeteries up and down this stretch of the mountains were littered with their lonely testimony.
Ringil advanced into the graveyard, one bent-kneed step at a time. Clouds broke apart overhead, and the Kiriath blade glinted in the sudden smear of bandlight. The cry was not repeated, but now he could make out smaller, more furtive sounds. The sounds, he reckoned unenthusiastically, of someone digging.
You will be a great hero.
Yeah, right.
He found Bashka’s mother, as it seemed, grubbing around in the dirt at the base of a recent headstone.
Her burial shroud was torn and soiled, revealing rotted flesh that he could smell from a dozen paces upwind even in the cold. Her deathgrown nails made an unpleasant raking sound as they struggled with the casket she had partially unearthed.
Ringil grimaced.
In life, this woman had never liked him. As temple officiator and priest, her son was supposed to despise Ringil for a worthless degenerate and a corruptor of youth. Instead, as a schoolmaster and man of some education himself, Bashka turned out to be far too enlightened for his own good. His easygoing attitude to Ringil and the late-night philosophical debates they occasionally got into at the tavern earned him vitriolic