The Witch Doctor

Chapter Eight

Guardsmen were shoving me roughly, trying to push me into a cell, and one of them was saying something about things being wrong. I turned to him with sullen resentment, and was surprised to see that he had a troll's head.

I stared at the troll, then looked quickly about me and saw the campfire with Gilbert lying on his side asleep, soles of his feet toward the coals, Frisson across from him, curled around the warmth. I realized I'd been dreaming. I looked up and, sure enough, the troll's head was still there - but now I recognized it. "Time for my watch again?"

Gruesome shook his head, looking agitated. "Wrong! Wrong!" He pointed out toward the darkness in several different directions. I frowned. "What's the problem, then?"

"Dunno." The troll twitched, raising his head to look out into the night. "Feel wrong, wrong!"

"Just a hunch?"

Gruesome nodded and held up his huge mitts. I backed off in alarm, but he only wiggled his inside talons.

"Feel pinches! Trouble, trouble! "

" 'By the pricking of my thumbs,' " I quoted, but remembered, in the nick of time, not to finish the verse: "something wicked this way comes." I rolled up to my feet. "I'm never one to scoff at intuition - at least, not in this world. Want to wake up the broke off, staring.

With my usual paranoia, I had decided to set up a barrier against supernatural attackers-there had been too many things that had gone bump last night, though that could have just been Frisson dreaming in verse. We hadn't gone very fast today, out of deference to his weakened condition, and we were still in pretty open country, though there were a lot of scrub trees about.

So I had conjured up some talcum powder, sprinkled it around our campsite in a circle, and chanted the tail end of Shakespeare's dirge from Cymbeline, with a few adjustments:

I'd figured if anything spooky had tried to get too close, that verse ought to keep it outside our perimeter-and it seemed I'd been right.

Just outside the circle of white powder, a blob of formless mist was rising from the ground, thickening and coalescing into a human form - but a mangled human form. Its face was bruised and swollen, one eye socket empty, thumbs dangling, one foot twisted almost backward, and its tunic ripped open to show dark smudges against its chest and abdomen.

"It is a ghost," Gilbert murmured from his place by the fire. Apparently, Gruesome and I hadn't been as quiet as we'd thought. The squire sounded excited, fascinated. "It is the shade of one who died by torture. " I was glad he could take such a detached interest in it. For myself, I felt rather queasy and thoroughly sickened in my heart. The specter flitted from point to point about the circle, moaning. Chains, attached to the fetters on its wrists, clanked and rattled.

"Bewa-a-a-re!" it cried. "Oh, foolish mortals, bewa-a-a-re! Flee! Hide yourselves away!"

I summoned my courage and called out, "Having you hang around just outside the perimeter doesn't exactly imbue me with a great desire to go exploring!"

"Heart of stone, who would mock a soul in torment!" the ghost cried. "O kindred of my fate, arise! Up, all ye who died by torture! Spirits bound to this world in unquiet slavery to a sorcerer's will, come now to school this foolish mortal!"

I had to turn to follow its progress, and I muttered out of the corner of my mouth, "Keep an eye on the place it came from, Gruesome." The troll moaned in answer-but I figured he'd fight all the harder if he were scared. Either that, or run.

I wished I could.

Moans began to fill the night in horrendous discord, faint, but growing louder; and dim forms, drifting here and there, swam out of the darkness.

"Abandon your ill-advised escape!" the ghost cried. "Return whence you came! For know that, if you do persist in opposing Queen Suettay, you shall become as I - a shadow of a soul who died in agony unspeakable!"

I felt the blood draining from my face. I remembered Gilbert's commander warning me about the evil sorceress-queen of this country. How the Hell had I attracted her attention?

How the Hell?

No. Couldn't be. Just a figure of speech.

But I spoke up bravely. Unfortunately, it sounded more like a croak. "So I'm to be deterred by the thought of a horrible death, a punishment for even thinking about leaving Allustria, or raising my hand against the queen?" Not that I had ...

"Even that!" the spirit cried over the chorus of moans and wails behind it. "I gave the queen my fullest measure of obedience - yet she had me rent apart, while still alive, for her mere pleasure! Chortled with delight at all my screams! And as I died, despairing, she seized my soul, to chain it in eternal slavery to her will!" Now I began to tremble inside. I scolded myself harshly, if silently, and reminded myself this was all impossible.

"It is true." Gilbert came to his feet. "Suettay tortures folk for mere amusement, daily."

A sadist. I was being pitted against a sadist of the worst kind - and for what?

To get home. Preferably, alive.

I steeled myself to the piteous cries around me and called out, "Go! The afterworld is huge - you don't have to stay around here! The queen loses power over you when you die!"

"Foolish mortal, how little you know!" Another specter swam up beside the first, a ghost like an illustration from an anatomy text, muscles and ligaments naked to the night. "She whose power comes from Satan can petition her master for dominion over others who have turned their hearts toward the Evil One!"

"But you only fall into the Devil's power through your own fault!"

"And so we did," the phantom sneered. "I myself sought power, always power. While yet a boy, I swore to do whatever deed the Devil wished, if he would give me power-and I gained dominion over peasant folk, then over soldiers. Yet Suettay plucked me out for her fell mirth, and I died in agony, crying to my master Satan for power against this corrupted sorceress-and as I cried out to evil, Suettay wove her spell about me to capture my soul! At the last instant, I cried out in despairing repentance, but it was too late. Suettay had claimed me, and I am bound to her!"

I suppressed nausea. I mean, I really felt sorry for them, even if they had been total vipers when they'd been alive. If ever I'd heard a sound reason for being good, this was it. Unfortunately, I was aware of my own enormous failings and knew I wasn't in the world's greatest shape for combatting evil.

"Be of good heart, Wizard Saul," Gilbert counseled. "They cannot touch you here, within your enchanted circle."

I turned, welcoming the change of topic with zeal. "You're right. So why did Suettay sic them on us? Just to make sure we don't sleep and are so weak tomorrow that we'll fall into her hands? I can't really believe that! "

"I doubt it, also," Gilbert answered. "It may be that they seek to frighten you into joining their foul cause."

"That's crazy." I turned back to the spooks, debating within myself. I could only wonder how Suettay had come to know I was here. Crystal balls? Ink pools?

It didn't matter. "Go tell your mistress that it will take worse than you to scare me!"

The ghosts' moans turned into roars, and they came swooping against the invisible barrier like moths to the chimney of a hurricane lamp, anger and outrage in their faces.

I turned back to the squire. "Has to be more than just a try at scaring me."

"It must," Gilbert agreed. "Otherwise, when they saw you were not daunted, they would have fled."

"Yeah." I gestured to the barrier of specters. "You'd swear they were trying to attack us, but it's obvious they can't get in."

"Obvious indeed," the squire said, turning toward the perimeter, but not looking all that sure, himself. "Yet there's this, too--if they cannot come in, it is equally true that we cannot go out." I could feel my eyes widen. "But that means somebody's trying to keep us here, to make sure we haven't gone anywhere until ..." A gout of greenish flame ripped the night, lighting all the hillside with an eerie light. The ghosts moaned in terror as the light dwindled. The residual chartreuse glow flickered on a dozen hooded forms, and lighted from below the face of the huge, grossly fat woman who stood before them, swathed in brocaded robes, rings glittering on her fingers, an elaborate crown on her head.

"So, then." She smiled, and her eyes almost disappeared in folds of fat. "You have the audacity to trespass in my Allustria."

"It is not yours, gross mockery of a woman," Gilbert cried, and I had to stifle an impulse to shush him. "The land belongs unto the people! "

"Then it cannot, of a certainty, belong to you, who come from Merovence." Suettay laughed, a sound like frying bacon. "You are not yet a man - only a beardless youth."

Gilbert flushed; blond beards don't show much.

The queen turned to the row of men behind her. "Counselors, behold a marvel! A boy that speaks like a man! Yet an he were, he would feel desire!"

The hooded forms dutifully laughed, but there was little humor in the sound.

Suettay turned back to me. "The more fool you, to be so cozened into taking a mere boy for to ward you!"

"Oh, he's man enough," I assured her. Bitches always make me mad, and she wasn't the first one I'd run into who'd thought she was a queen. Gilbert looked up at me with surprised gratitude, but it was as much for myself I'd said it as for him - I felt anger growing, just enough to begin countering the fear.

"You twisted the facts," I told Suettay. "But then, you twist everything that's true within your domain, don't you? Or try to leach the life from it, if it won't twist!"

"Indeed, as my dunce of a country sorcerer will yet bleed your troll." Suettay's lip curled.

"What a vile thing is he, that's neither gnome nor rock! What a catastrophe of nature, nay, a perversion of life! Yet you should thank me, corrupted monster, for you owe your life to me."

"Wozzat?" Gruesome's grunt had a dangerous edge.

"Your father was a gnome who strayed out of his hole!" the queen chortled. "I saw, and cast a glamour over a boulder, to make it seem a woman of his own kind, wondrously beautiful in his eyes! For my own amusement, I inflamed him with lust for it! Then, in my crystal, I watched what did ensue, and oh! what delightful-" Gruesome's roar drowned out the rest of her words, as he lunged.

"No, Gruesome!" I cried in panic. "If she can get you mad enough to break the circle-"

The monster stopped with a jolt, his head poking out above the white line. I wondered what could have stopped him, then saw Gilbert down below, ramrod straight, shoulder against Gruesome's chest, straining against Gruesome's bulk - but his feet were plowing up the ground as Gruesome pushed steadily toward the witch, and Gruesome's top had made a hole in my defense screen.

The troll roared, almost managing to make words-but anything he was saying was drowned in a mass shriek, as all the ghosts dove at the hole he'd made in the magical wall.

I leapt up to shout at the monster. "It couldn't be true, Gruesome! Rocks can't have children! Only a mommy troll and a daddy troll can make little trolls!"

The troll's eyes suddenly lost focus, and his brow creased with effort as he tried to figure out the facts of life. He wasn't long on brain power-but the distraction was enough for the squire.

"Back, brave being!" Gilbert shoved harder, and the troll rocked back just enough for its head to clear the white line.

The ghosts' noise rose to a howl as they all tried to jam into the hole, but I shouted out,

The ghosts groaned in disappointment, then roared in rage and began to dash themselves against the invisible circle again. I called out to Gruesome,

He looked up, blinking his huge, glowing, saucer eyes, totally dumfounded, then turned slowly and came hulking back to the campfire. Gilbert breathed a long and shaky sigh of relief.

But Suettay and her boys were laughing themselves silly. "Oh, skillfully done! Skillfully done!" the queen wheezed, between giggles.

"Why not march upon my kingdom, mortal! Do! For you should be mired in your own muddle ere the day is out!"

"Oh, yeah, sure!" I strode up to the circle, anger getting the better of common sense. "We're such total klutzes that you bring yourself and your top twelve henchmen out to try to scare us? Meanwhile, of course, you can't even breach this simple little guarding circle I've set up!"

The queen's laughter chopped off on the instant, and her eyes narrowed to slits with glowing coals behind them. "Enough! Show this foolish impostor what awaits him!"

A scream rent the air-but one that was very much alive, not like the ghosts' mourning wails. This one was filled with terror and was definitely feminine.

The hooded ones threw her sprawling onto the grass between Suettay and the guarding circle. She was young, with long blonde hair and an enchanting figure; I could see it through the rips in her tunic. She scrabbled in the dirt, turning toward Gilbert and Frisson and Gruesome and me, her face filled with horror - a face bruised and battered, with a swollen nose, marks of burns on her breasts and belly, blood still dripping from triple gouges in her skin. "Help me! Please, I beg of you, before I-" Then she broke off into a scream as four hooded forms surrounded her, two of them falling on their hands and knees side by side, the other two catching her thrashing limbs to lift her and swing her up onto the backs of the first two. I almost went right through the guarding circle. All that restrained me was Gilbert's arm - but it had about as much give as granite.

"You cannot help her now, Wizard Saul - you can but break your warding circle!"

"Besides, 'tis like enough that she did put herself into Suettay's power, in hope of preferment," Frisson quavered, staring at the scene in loathing. "The most you can give her now is a quick death and the queen will do that herself."

The woman cried, "I did not-" but her sentence ended in a one of the hooded forms twisted something.

scream, as My mind raced as I stared. The poor victim had been trying to say she hadn't done anything wrong. How could I save her?

Without breaking the guarding circle, of course - that was what Suettay wanted. She was lumbering forward, hitching at her robes and pulling out a long, twisted knife. She held it up in both hands, gloating gaze fixed on the woman's body as she droned out a long chant, overriding the screams.

"It is an invocation," Gilbert told me, "an invocation in the Old Tongue! " It must have been very old indeed - it didn't sound a bit like Latin, or even Greek. I felt a chill prickling outward from my spine - how could I fight spells in a language I couldn't understand?

"She calls on the Devil." Apparently, Gilbert didn't labor under that handicap. "If the woman, in her terror, despairs of salvation and is damned, the queen dedicates the woman's soul to Satan, but asks that her ghost be the queen's slave as long as Suettay endures." I felt my scalp prickle; the woman's screams filled my ears, maddening me. I fought to control myself, to keep from charging out to try to save her, knowing that I couldn't win, that Suettay had chosen the time and the conditions. The knife soared high in Suettay's fists, beginning to glow with the chant as the hooded acolytes joined in. I fought back with the only thing I could think of - a chant of my own. I sang it, of course - that's how I'd learned it.

The girl stared up at me, and Suettay flushed with anger and jerked a nod at one of her acolytes. He reached down and twisted, and the girl screamed.

I fought down the urge to leap out of the circle and start kicking.

I couldn't win alone.

Alone?

"All right, angel!" I yelled. "Now's your chance! You want to make me believe? Then give me a hand - or an idea! Nothing physical, mind you, just inspire me! Fill my mind with a way to rescue this poor victim!"

And, confound me, it was there - the knowledge that the woman didn't deserve this fate and, moreover, was human and worth any help that I could give, and my mouth was moving, a voice booming out of it that didn't seem to have anything to do with my thoughts, but had a very familiar ring.

But the knife was slashing down, and the woman was screaming. Screaming, "My God, forgive me my sins and save-" Then there was only a gurgle, for her throat had been cut, and the knife slashed downward through her heart. Her whole body convulsed once and was still.

"Rise and obey!" Suettay thundered.

She didn't.

Well, she rose, all right - at least a shred of her, a wraith. It was her ghost, and it floated over toward the white chalk line of my guarding circle as if a breeze were blowing it.

Suettay screamed like a spoiled brat seeing a box of candy being snatched away. "Vile interloper! Ball of slime, thatch of dung! She should have despaired in that last instant and been bound for Hell, whereupon my master would have given her soul into my power! But you have interfered, curse you, and her soul is lost to me! She was innocent of all but the smallest sins, and her spirit will flee to Heaven! " Then, suddenly, she fell silent, eyes bulging, a depraved grin spreading over her face. "Not yet! Not if I act quickly!" She whirled to the corpse, hands spread wide and going through gestures whose meanings I shuddered to consider while she chanted some racheting verse in a language I didn't understand. A glow sprang up around the body, like the phosphoresence around decaying vegetable matter in a swamp, then died away, and Suettay spun about to me with a crow of triumph. "I have bound her to Earth! As long as her body lives, her soul is bound here, for I have cast a spell that has preserved her mortal coil."

"Why, you filthy bitch!" I swore.

"How dare you!" she shrieked, and her hands clutched something unseen and threw it at me while she snapped out a quick, incomprehensible rhyme. Energy lanced from her fingertips in purple streamers-and dashed itself to sparks on my shield.

This time, though, the queen didn't scream. She only glared at me, her eyes gleaming malevolently in the midst of her slab of pitted face.

"See to the purifying of your own soul, Wizard, for if you do not, you shall fall into my power - and you shall meet the same fate as the girl. Maiden, come!" she snapped at the wavering spirit. But the girl's ghost had drifted across the line into my circle, and now she cowered away from the wicked queen, eyes wide and frightened, shaking her head.

"You have stolen her!" Suettay screamed. "You have taken from me my rightful-" But her voice was drowned out by a long, shuddering moan that filled the air, rebounding from ghost to ghost, the specters' eyes widening and filling with hope.

"I did repent!" one cried.

"I, too, with my last breath!" another answered.

"God forgive my sins!" a third cried.

One by one, they remembered their final moment of repentance, wailed their appeals for salvation - and, one by one, they winked out, like candles snuffed.

I stared. "You mean all that was holding them here was their own belief in the queen's magic?"

"It would seem so," Frisson said, huge-eyed. "They lost faith - but you have restored it."

That hadn't exactly been one of my prime goals in life. On the other hand, it hadn't exactly been me speaking, either. But a new moan filled the air, a moan of dread, as the hooded acolytes shrank back from the bleeding corpse, huddling together, terror-filled faces turned up to watch the ghosts depart. And Suettay was turning to me with a gaze filled with more malice and hatred than I had ever seen before, a glare of berserk fury. She strode forward, arms uplifted, striding straight at my guarding circle, intoning a chant in the Old Tongue.

"She summons a devil!" Gilbert cried.

"Angel!" I yelped. "She's breaking the rules! You can protect us!" Blue sparks leapt at the queen's fingers with crackles like gunshots. She shrank back with one of the foulest curses I had ever heard, then turned to me and my companions, eyes just slits in fat, hands weaving a symbol I didn't know, bellowing,

Her hands snapped out, all fingers pointing at us. A coruscation of sparks filled the air over the white line. A wave of nausea swept me, and my knees gave way, but Gilbert held me up, and my legs strengthened again as my stomach settled.

"Cowards!" Suettay screamed. "Pusillanimous pests! Come out to battle!

"We ... we battled," I managed.

"You shall, you must, soon or late! Then shall I be revenged upon you! Then shall I see your flesh fry from your bones, your eyes drop from their sockets!"

I was feeling a little bolder and said the only counterspell I could think of.

With a shriek of frustration, Suettay disappeared. Green fire thundered inward on itself, seeming to consume the huddled, hooded forms. It died away, and the night was quiet and dark again. And clean. Even the corpse was gone.

For some reason, that bothered me.

But I didn't have long to think about it - my head suddenly swam, and my knees gave way again.

"Now, now, buck up! You did marvelously!" Frisson assured me.

"Heroes are made of sterner stuff, Wizard Saul!" Gilbert chided.

"You must not collapse as soon as the battle's over!"

"It's better than ... melting while ... it's still going on," I gasped.

"That is true, and there is no shame in it, so long as he does wait until the battle's over," Frisson allowed. He propped me up against Gruesome's side and began chafing my hands. "Really, you were masterful - you came only moments from death, and a horrible one at that."

"Huh?" I blinked, the thrill of dread pulling my mind back into focus. "You mean I almost blew it when I started to charge out?"

"You did indeed. That whole affair with the poor peasant lass served one purpose, and one only - to induce you to leave your magic circle in an attempt to save her."

"Yeah." I swallowed thickly. "Yeah, I knew that's what I was doing as soon as I heard her scream. I knew it, but it almost worked on me anyway-and on Gruesome. Thanks, Gilbert. You saved his life - and all of us."

"Surely, Wizard Saul," the squire said, blushing with pleasure at the compliment. "It was little enough I could do."

"It was enough all right. Thanks again, Gilbert."

"My pleasure," he said, then frowned. "Yet there's another you should thank, whose aid was greater than mine."

I frowned ' looking around me. "Who ... ? Oh. Yeah." I remembered my guardian angel. "Well, I'll give him my warmest, next time he shows up."

The night was awfully quiet.

Then Frisson cleared his throat, and Gilbert looked away, abashed. I looked around, frowning. "What's the matter?" Neither of them answered.

Then Gruesome growled, and my hair rose. "All right, all right! Frisson, what did he mean?"

"I do not speak the troll's language," the poet said with hesitation.

"Still, if I did, I would guess he had said ... that your behavior was rather . . ." He trailed off, looking away.

"Cheap," Gruesome rumbled.

Frisson looked up, startled. "I did not know he knew the word!" I frowned. "What do you mean? Angels don't want bribes."

"Of course not," Gilbert said slowly, "but it might be polite to at least indicate a willingness to return the favor." I frowned at him while his meaning percolated in. Then I went hard inside. "Now listen, and understand this well! I am not committing myself to either side, or any side! Anybody who does me a favor, I'll do a favor for him, if I can - but aside from that, I'm not promising anything!" But it seemed to me that the stars winked, and the sounds of the night began again as the land came to life around me.