Fearless (Mirrorworld 2)

‘The Fairy is claiming her name back.’ He could barely speak. He could still feel the scream in his throat.

Pull yourself together, Jacob. Oh, his damned pride. He held out his hand, even though it was trembling. ‘Give me the shard.’ Fox dropped it into her pocket and pulled his sleeve over his bare arm.

‘No,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think you have enough strength to take it off me.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE HAND IN THE SOUTH

The Waterman turned out to tax Nerron’s nerves the least. Eaumbre – when his name crossed his scaly lips, you felt as though you had the mud of his pond in your ears. Even Louis was bearable, though he was constantly asking about their next meal or riding after every peasant girl. But Lelou! The Bug was talking all the time, at least whenever he wasn’t scribbling in his notebook. Every castle above the winter-bare vineyards, every collapsed church, every town name on a weathered signpost – each triggered a flood of commentary. Names, dates, royal gossip. His chatter was like the hum of a bumblebee in Nerron’s ear.

‘Lelou!’ he interrupted at some point as the Bug was explaining why the village they were riding through was certainly not the birthplace of Puss in Boots. ‘See this?’

Arsene Lelou fell silent as he cast a confused look at the three objects Nerron had poured into his hand from a leather pouch. It took him a few moments to realise what they were.

‘You’re seeing right!’ Nerron said. ‘A finger, an eye, a tongue. They all annoyed me. What do you think I’ll cut out of you?’

Silence. Delicious silence.

Nerron had picked up the Three Souvenirs, as he lovingly called them, in one of the onyx’s torture chambers. The objects never failed to work. Maintaining a bad reputation was hard work, especially if, like Nerron, you didn’t actually find pleasure in cutting off fingers or scooping out eyes.

Lelou’s silence held until they saw the walls of the abbey of Fontevaud appear ahead of them. One glance at the rotten wooden gate and they knew that the abbey was deserted. The cloisters were overgrown with nettles, and the sparse cells housed no more than mice. The only cemetery they could find consisted of merely eight crosses with the names and dates of deceased monks. None of the graves were older than Sixty years, but yet, if the Bug was right, the hand would have been buried here more than three hundred years ago.

Nerron felt the urge to cut Lelou into thin, moonstone-pale slices. The Bug saw it in his eyes and quickly hid behind Eaumbre. Lelou had not forgotten the Three Souvenirs.

‘The farmer,’ he stammered, pointing a trembling finger at an old man who was digging up potatoes from a fallow field behind the abbey. ‘Maybe he knows something.’

The old man dropped his meagre harvest as soon as he saw Nerron coming towards him. He stared as though the Devil himself had emerged from the damp earth. Goyl were still a rare sight in Lotharaine. Kami’en would change that soon enough.

‘Is there another graveyard?’ Nerron barked at the old man.

The farmer crossed himself and spat in front of Nerron’s feet. Touching. People believed that kept demons at bay. But it didn’t help against Goyl. Nerron was just about to grab the old man by his scrawny neck to shake some sense into him, when he dropped to his knees.

Louis was coming towards them, with Lelou and the Waterman in tow.

The princely garments had grown a little scruffy, but they still looked a thousand times better than anything the old man had ever worn. He probably had no idea that he was looking at the crown prince of Lotharaine – the old peasant didn’t look like he read a newspaper – but the vassals always knew what masters look like, and that it was better to do as they told.

‘Ask him about the cemetery!’ Nerron whispered to Louis.

All he got was an irritated look in return – sons of Kings were not used to receiving orders. But Lelou came to his aid.

‘The Goyl is right, my prince!’ he warbled into Louis’s perfumed ear. ‘He’s sure to answer you.’

Louis cast a disgusted look at the peasant’s filthy clothes. ‘Is there another cemetery?’ he asked in a jaded voice.

The old man ducked his head between his lank shoulders. His bony finger pointed at the pine trees beyond the fields. ‘They built a church from them.’

‘From what?’ Nerron asked.

The man still held his head bowed. ‘The whole ground was full of them!’ he mumbled. He quickly dropped a couple of potatoes into his baggy pockets. ‘What else could they have done with them?’

He took them to the church, which, at first sight, looked no different from the other churches of the region. The same grey stone, a stout tower with a low roof, a few weathered battlements. But the peasant made a quick getaway as soon as Nerron pushed the brittle door open.

Even the crest that was set into the wall behind the altar was made of human remains. The pillars were encrusted with skulls, and the fenced-off alcoves were piled to the ceiling with bones. There were hands as well, of course. They served as candleholders or were splayed across the walls as ornaments. Frustrated, Nerron kicked in one of the skulls. How, by his mother’s green skin, was he supposed to find the right hand here? He was going to be stuck neck-deep in brittle bones while Reckless easily picked up the head and the heart.

‘What are we looking for again?’ Louis poked his fingers into a skull’s eye socket.

‘Your ancestor’s crossbow.’ The empty church made the Waterman’s damp whisper sound even more ominous.