here. He had learned of the secrets of bone and root from the Dossel's old witch-woman, and he had secretly killed her and taken the secrets she refused to give him. He had sought out other, deeper secrets from the unseen voices and dark shadows that haunted the remote mountain glens. He had seen the words of spells in the spiralling flight of birds and found magic in the shapes that clouds make. He was jealous of it all—the power, the hard knowledge, all of it: hard won, and hard paid for too.
The old dead mountain ash that he stood beside was dead because of his magic. The sorcery had done strange things to Mannagarm over the years, coursing through him. It had changed his blood, and turned his shadow poisonous to plants—not only had his shadow killed the old tree he liked to stand under, but even the grass and weeds were withered beside the paths he walked. There were other odd things about him too. His hair sometimes blew as if lifted by a faint breeze, even when the air was dead still. He left no footprints, even in thick wet mud or snow. Strange things.
But he'd met other sorcerers who had it worse. There was that one man—what was his name? Anyway, his footprints oozed with blood where he walked. And there was that woman who caused carved patterns to appear on any stone she touched. Alright, he supposed, but annoying if you'd rather not turn your whole house into a mess of spirals and grooves and twisted knots just by living in it.
That was back when Mannagarm had been a young man. Back when he journeyed all the way south to the hill where the Convoke of Magians met once every seven years—the Sorcery Tor—the one outside of Bernoth. He didn't remember what the hill was properly called. It had some long name or another. His memory was not what it had been. Besides which, it strained him, and pulled his thoughts to breaking point just keeping up all the defensive wards and spells. The villagers hated him. He knew they hated him, and he knew any one of them would slit his throat if they could. One day, one of them probably would get the better of him. But for now, he was well protected, even if it did tire him sorely. Under his cloak of feathers and the necklace of wood beads his chest was increasingly hollow, his skin liver-spotted and his ribs jutted and visible. His was a miserable sight. Had he been such a miserable sight all those years ago at the sorcerer's hill? He cast an eye over the mountains with their distant, soft-hued shades and the clouds chasing above them. Maybe, he admitted. He had been an awkward boy, hardly more than a few years past childhood.
He remembered the smirks and the poorly covered laughter, the stares, the whispers and the nods and quiet conversations that stopped as soon as he neared anyone.
A Convoke of Magians was not a place for one such as him. Hexmonger, they'd called him. Charmpeddlar. Rattlebagger. Hedge-wizard. How he'd hated that last one. Hedge-wizard, hedge-wizard: a hedge of anything was the sort of person so poor, so miserable, so without talent that they slept under hedges and not as guests in good houses or inns. He hated it, because it was true, and in his unworldliness and youth, it had never dawned on him that such a thing might be an insult. At the Convoke all those years ago he'd admitted to sleeping under hedges during his journey, before he knew it was a byword for scorn anyway.
"Well, we haven't had our revenge against that lot but we never went back did we?" He leaned against the tree, listening to the rise and fall of wind and the creak of its timbers.
As he stood in his own thoughts, two rooks circled above him, then descended and landed in the higher-up branches. One of them was fat and sleek looking. The other was thinner, a bit of off-black overall, and quite grey around its neck, as if old.
The rooks fell to talking, which is not unusual for rooks. They are gossipy birds. Because Mannagarm knew the language rooks use to chatter, he listened. After all, they might be dim-witted birds, but rooks do sometimes know a thing or two that's worthwhile to hear.
"Oohahh," said the first rook, Fat-sleek. "I've been up over 'em ranges but there's no good eating up that way now. Them Wisht-Folk are keeping themselves to themselves this last season. They ain't been hunting, nor leaving any offal in the woods."
"Course they keeping quiet," said the other rook, Grey-collar. "Them's got that thing, that... erm... thing... lurking about outside their house-walls, hasn't they?"
"What thing?"
"It's a dead sort of thing, but not dead. Living-dead. What do you call it? A goule? That thing? Didn't you hear about it?"
"No, I ain't heard nuthing about no goule-thing."
"Well," said Grey-collar, "I was talking to a fox, and foxes are liars but I reckon this one was mostly telling the truth."
"True, true," said Fat-sleek. "Foxes are liars. Can't trust a fox."
"Well," replied Grey-collar, perhaps a bit testily, "This fox told me that the goule came out of the north during the winter and it's been hunting the Wisht-Folk. Killing them, and slaughtering them and leaving their bodies all about the woods."
"Pity," said Fat-Sleek.
"What?"
"I mean, it's a pity he's leaving dead Wisht-Folk about. Any other creature, I'd eat a bit of eye or tongue—if it were a dead humanfolk for instance, I'd gobble up a bit of tongue in a snap—but not one of them Wisht-Folk. They's uncanny, and their flesh is uncanny. Don't know what might happen. Might turn you into a sparrow."
"Or a fox," said Grey-Collar, with a touch of conjecture.
"Or it could turn you into a rook, only it'd be a different rook to the rook you are, otherwise it wouldn't be much like an uncanny changing at all. I suppose."
"Aye... I suppose," said Grey-collar eyeing his companion. "Anyway, the Wisht-Folk are all holed up waiting for someone or something to save them. They don't have fighting heroes, or none who are sturdy enough to tooth-and-claw it up with a deadly unliving creature."
"So then what?"
"Suppose it'll kill them all," said Grey-collar. "One by one. Unless some hero comes by, but that's not likely is it? Long way up in the Twilight Lands, over the Snowy Mountains. Long way from anywhere."
"And why would a hero would want to help them anyway? Unfriendly lot."
"Well, I suppose the creature has some treasurish whatnot it's taken from them it's killed. Gold and silver."
"Well, I guess. Don't see the appeal, meself," said Fat-sleek.
"But some folks like it. Magpies for instance. They love a bit of shiny gold to put in their nest."
Fat-sleek looked at Grey-collar askance. "Magpies?" said Flat-sleek. "Mad, if you ask me."
"True. Though the Wisht-Folk have their uncanny arts too. And the goule-thing keeps that big roundish object, the one made from bone."
"Ooh. Ooh. I know this one. It's a hat. Humanfolk wear them too."
"No. It's more important than a hat. It's like a special hat. It has a name." Grey-collar thought. "Crown! Like the crown of a skull."
"So it has a fancy hat?"
"The special hat has magic in it, sparrow-brain," said Grey-collar. "Lots of power. I heard the Wisht-Folk saying so. Enough magic to make anyone a great and powerful magicking sort of person."
Fat-sleek thought about this a moment. "Magic! Bleh. Can't see the appeal, meself."
"Some folks like it," said Grey-collar. "Wolves for instance. They're always casting spells. It's all that howling they do, and all that pissing on trees. They urinate the parts of giant magic shapes in the landscape. They do magic through their piss."
"Wolves? Mad, if you ask me."
Mannagarm had heard enough. If the rooks could not see the appeal of gold and silver, he more or less agreed... but an object of power? That surely must be what this bone crown was. Some ancient artefact, handed down sorcerer to sorcerer, and now perhaps within his grasp? Age was telling on him, but there were stories of ancient magics so great they could slow ageing or reverse it. He never had got his revenge on those simpering, nasty, arrogant cretins at the wizard-moot.
And yet, as if by fate, now, he wondered if he might.
He could taste it.
He could see it dangling in front of him.
And with visions of a long and charmed
life filling up his mind, he turned his back on the rooks and walked up the hill, back to his house. He needed to think, ponder, plan.
If he had glanced over his shoulder, which he did not, Mannagarm would have seen both rooks silently watching him go. Almost as if they had been delivering a bit of theatre for an audience, and now that they were done they were watching the reaction.
Before he'd reached the door of his house both rooks took to the wing and flew north, on a more or less direct line for the nearest mountain pass.
-oOo-
As Mannagarm approached his house and out-buildings the ground became sere and grey. Not a green blade or leaf grew near his home. His shadow had fallen too often on that soil.
The path to the house was surrounded by jutting outcrops of rock and when the light was right, twisted faces and agonised half-glimpsed bodies were just visible in the stone. Mannagarm did not have the power to actually turn a person to stone—he was not even sure that such a power existed—but he did have the power to snare the souls of those he killed and entomb those spirits in the natural spurs of rock. Over time, wind and water eroded faces in the stones where the souls were trapped. It was an effect he had not anticipated when he worked his necromantic trickeries, but he was pleased with it. A good warning to keep away the more foolhardy villagers.
His door had other warnings and wardings woven into it too. Jangling copper and bronze chimes hung above the