XXIV. Yvag Reversals
As Thomas and the Waits marched out from the shadows in back of the ground-level cells, three guards came to attention. To the left stood a trestle table not unlike the one in the Chandler’s Lane gaol, surrounded by five stools. Parchments lay upon it, warrants by the look of them.
Thomas scrutinized the guards, listening for their unspoken chatter. None that he could detect.
Elias noted, “There were two more here when we arrived.”
“Aye, they just up and run out afore yas come down,” explained one of the remaining trio. “Where be the sheriff?”
“Lost his humors,” said Thomas, to which Benedict added, “’Twas terrible to behold.” The guards traded a worried look.
Elias told the guards, “You’ve a comrade making his way to the oubliettes with the one who slew your sheriff. You might want to assist him. We can, ah, look after ourselves.”
The three men sprang into action, running for the steps in the rear.
Behind the table, a row of pegs had been hammered into the sandstone wall. On one hung a fat leather purse. “Hey, that be mine from the contest wi’ Benedict here,” John said, and pushed the table aside to grab the purse. Beside it hung the sheriff’s distinctive red-and-green chapeau à bec. “An’ that’s a lovely cap, don’t ya think?” Smiling delightedly, he grabbed the hat and jammed it on his head, which was too large for it, but he didn’t seem to mind.
Scathelock remarked, “I think you’ll be very easy to find with that on. You should definitely wear it.” They all chuckled, even John.
Thomas was looking at the table—specifically at the open warrants lying upon it. They included one for Little John passing as Reynold Greenleaf, another for Benedict “of the Waits,” and a third one for Robert “Robyn” Hodde or Hoode or Robbehood. Taking no chances, it seemed. The sheriff had been in the process of filling these out when Elias and the others arrived.
Thomas rolled the warrants up and dropped them in his mason’s bag.
Isabella frowned at him. “Now I see the outlaw in you, I think.”
“Lady Isabella, later I’ll make you a present of these and you can arrest and hang me, if that’s what you choose. But I’m tired of playing by the rules of the Yvag. It’s time they have to play by ours.”
“You must tell me what they are, our rules.”
“I surely will, once I find out.”
To his surprise and perhaps her own, she laughed, then looked him over as if studying a new form of life. For a second he worried that he had somehow glamoured himself in front of her. Uncomfortable under her intense scrutiny, he caught up with Elias. “How are we going to explain all this to Orrels?” he asked. He pushed aside the iron door.
Elias replied, “I will convince him. I won’t be going with you to the King’s Houses. As the leader of the Waits, it’s my bound duty to remain, and there are too many of us have not witnessed these creatures and so must be persuaded. It will be up to each man to decide if he remains and guards the town from these demons or goes off to safety. Geoffrey and Benedict, and Osbert, when he returns, can decide for themselves. But we are charged with protecting the town, and some of us must remain, ever-vigilant. Who can we trust but those we know?”
Thomas refrained from pointing out that “those we know” would be the first ones imitated by the Yvags.
Osbert was annoyed. First off, they hadn’t gone ten feet before Ernald insisted they swap weapons, leaving Osbert with the long-handled, unwieldy poleaxe.
Second, the steps up were uneven, some narrower than others and worn. Worse, they curved to the left or right such that Ernald’s torchlight came and went; in some places, masked by the young guard’s body, it failed to highlight the turn altogether, forcing Osbert to call out for them to slow up and wait for him. Who would have thought the steps could go on so long? It began to feel like the demonic Kunastur was playing with them, casting a spell to make them climb the same steps over and over. Of course it was just that nervous Ernald was in a hurry to drop the Yvag in a hole. Osbert could appreciate that, but for him this was a trudge on tired knees. He should have let Geoffrey go in his stead. Besides, he wanted to hear what Scathelock’s plan was.
Then came a fluttering sound in the darkness behind and below him. The first time, he whipped about and cut a gouge in the wall to his left, the poleaxe being almost the full width of the stairwell.
He squinted into the darkness below. Nothing appeared. Osbert supposed there were bats or birds in the stairwells, nesting pigeons at the very least. He turned back. Ernald’s torch had gotten ever farther away. He groaned and hurried to catch up.
The glow of the torch revealed the tunnel where they’d gone to his right. Huffing, Osbert pushed himself up the last few steps to it.
There were two grates in the tunnel floor and both lay open. The second one had a rope dangling into it, but Ernald stood peering into the nearest one. He turned at Osbert’s arrival. “He jumped!” he exclaimed.
Osbert hurried over to look in, too. Something lay in the bottom of the oubliette. Since both guard and prisoner wore the same surcoat, it took him a few moments to identify the features of Ernald down in the straw, his head twisted at a terrible angle. “Headfirst, can you imagine?”
Osbert turned back. “Ernald” grinned at him, and a dark green, batwinged monstrosity came flying straight at him, screeching, with teeth like needles. Warin had been attacked by such a thing. Osbert swatted a hand to ward it off, didn’t even realize he’d stepped back until he was slipping, falling straight into the hole. The poleaxe caught across the opening for a moment, but snapped in half from his weight.
He fell into darkness, desperate to brace for the impact but not sure when the floor would arrive. His left leg took the brunt, jamming up through his knee, which shattered. He landed on his hip so painfully he thought certain it was broken, too. Pain radiated up the leg and into him like a stream of fire.
The axehead missed him but stabbed into Ernald’s body next to him. The shaft clattered across the stone floor.
Osbert stared up, in such agony that his consciousness seemed to disconnect from his body. Above, the glamoured Yvag stood on the now-closed grate and peered into the second hole. There had been a prisoner there—if Osbert recalled correctly, it was someone Passelewe had arrested for being a pickpurse. The open grate suggested that the man had escaped, though where in these tunnels could he hide? Osbert wished he was up there, hunting for the thief right now.
His head throbbed with a terrible pressure, with whispers of some sort of incomprehensible conversation, as if the oubliette was haunted by the ghosts of all those who had died there. He supposed he was about to join them. His lower body felt terribly cold. . . .
Kunastur, still glamoured as Ernald, patted his shoulder and the little winged hob dropped from the ceiling to land there. “Tell Zhanedd their plans,” it said. “Big reward for Fleega, yes?”
“Very big reward,” Kunastur promised, sheathing the arming sword taken from the real Ernald. The boy had been so skittish and nervous on the way up that he noticed nothing as the Yvag distorted his perceptions, finally telling him to jump into the hole. “And for me, as well, I imagine. Not from Zhanedd, though. We are going to find the dights, Fleega. With no assistance, no interference from Zhanedd or any of the Queen’s handpicked knights. An even bigger reward when we triumph.”
Kunastur turned and started up the stairs. “The other knights do not know what we do, in part thanks to you—that they’re fighting a human that can change its shape as I do. We will show them all up by killing it.”
By the time the Yvag was halfway up the steps, it had glamoured itself as Passelewe. That was who various soldiers in and around the Norman keep beheld selecting a horse and riding off past the town and to the north. The sheriff said not a word to anyone, but Passelewe was often brusque. The only odd thing, in fact, was the queer bird or bat that rode like a pet on his shoulder until he was mounted and then flapped along beside him.