Aramaya - Jane Routley The Dion Chronicles

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gateway. To bring a demon though I suppose and use it as a bound servant. Though these three people, and the girl, would not have been much of a sacrifice for such a big spell."

      "Perhaps they were used to simply put the gateway rune in place," said the Prince.

      "Possibly. If that's so, it seems we have come just in time. Though this is not like other gateways I have seen - the runes are in the wrong order and I don't think they are all there. And what were they going to use for fodder when they opened the gate?"

      "Perhaps the people from your ship," he said. "Though I agree it doesn't seem enough."

      I understood his doubt. The last demon I knew who had come through a gateway into our world had required to be fed the life force of 450 people.

      "Strange wounds this girl," said Count Alexi. "Surely blowing the poor creature open like this would have been too quick for a sacrifice."

      I looked more carefully at the runes. I had learned a great deal about them after I had married Shad. His people, the Klementari, used runes much more than normal mages.

      "Look at this one," I said. "That's the rune for enclosure. Surely that is not usual in a gateway spell."

      "So that's what that is. I've never seen anything like it before. This can only be some kind of new experiment, but unfortunately with the fellows upstairs dead, I'm not sure we'll ever know what they were up to."

      He turned and looked at the woman on the table. From here we could only see her face, blank with death.

      "Poor woman," he said echoing my thoughts.

      He sent Sergi back upstairs for pen and paper so that we could copy out the runes. While he was gone we examined the rest of the cellar.

      Another wooden table in a corner showed signs of recent use. Prince Nikoli noted, with a certain satisfaction, that it had the youth runes carved in it.

      "This is the table he would have been using to prolong his life," he said.

      A large empty cage stood in a nearby corner. The sight of this chilled me. This horrible fate might have awaited Kitten and I. Locked down here in the darkness watching your fellows killed one by one. All Kitten's charm and all my skill at magic, all the things which made us special and our lives unique, made irrelevant by the fact that these monsters needed our life force to power their spells.

      Though we spent the rest of the morning searching and scanning the manor and its grounds, it was clear that nothing else was alive there. At this point a party of Peninsula witchfinders would have declared themselves finished. They would probably have burned the house to the ground and left. The Aramayans had no intentions of leaving so precipitately.

      First the Prince set Alexi to taking extensive notes on all aspects of the secret cellar while he examined the dead woman's body in gruesome detail. Interestingly enough there were a series of enclosure runes scratched into her back. I wrote them down and named them for him. Then I helped him wrap the body in a linen cloth and remove it for burial. Magic can be very welcome at such moments.

      After the autopsy, Prince Nikoli took me and several of the older boys along the rutted cart track to the nearby peasant village. Our arrival at the settlement took on some of the qualities of a raid. The young men rounded up everyone they could find and herded them into the muddy clearing around the village well. The Prince addressed the serfs in the same strange dialect of Aramayan he had used with the shepherd. I was astonished by this language. Like all educated Peninsula folk I had learned Aramayan as a child and I could speak it easily with Prince Nikoli, but I could barely understand a word of this peasant dialect.

      I was so fascinated at my first glimpses of Aramayan life that my attention quickly wandered from the Prince's incomprehensible words. Fascinated but repelled. What a mouldy and sagging little village it was. How poor the people looked, all thin and dressed in dirty rags. Some of them were covered in sores and several of the half-naked children had the bloated bellies of those who did not get enough of the right food.

      When the Prince had finished speaking, a wizened old headman led us up to a great barn. At this time of the year after the harvest, the bins were full of grain, apples and vegetables and the loft was stuffed with hay. There was room for a table and chairs to be set up in the middle of the floor however. One of the young men now sat at the table and took notes while the prince proceeded to question everybody in the village. Unable to understand the questions, I read the student's notes over his shoulder. As I had suspected the Prince was questioning the people in great detail on the activities at the manor house. Even though he mindsearched several of them, he seemed to be learning very little that was really useful. They were able to identify the twisted signet ring the Prince had taken from the body as that of their lord, Igor Shugorsky, but they had no knowledge of the wreckers.

      Rumors of Lord Shugorsky's dark activities at the manor house had abounded in the village for some time. The two strangers had arrived only the week ago and since then nobody had seen the manor servants. A couple of days before seven girls had been taken from the village to the manor. It was the first time in several years anyone had been taken from the village.

      It sounded as if the resident necromancer had invited or been coerced into inviting two other necromancers to his house, but why was not clear.

      Had any villages on the peninsula known so much about necromantic activities at their lord's house without informing their local mage, they would have been severely punished.

      "Why did they not send for someone if they suspected all this," I asked one of the boys. All he said in answer was,

      "They are serfs, my lady."

      This explained nothing to me, but he gave me such a pitying look for having asked such an obvious question that I did not press him further. Nobody is as good as a youngster at making you feel pitifully foolish.

      The Prince took the peasants' testimonies without a word of reproof and afterwards he gave each person a sack of grain and a bag of vegetables and apples.

      "The Prince is a soft hearted fellow," said one of the boys nearby in a low voice. "These people are like the useless sweepings of a stable. They would probably be much better for a taste of the whip."

      "Yes it is odd," said Sergi. "It's his one vice this foolish softness. He's notorious for it. Still he is very successful at finding out information. It’s not impossible there is some connection."

      'And they had seemed such a nice young men too,' I thought, a bit chilled by the whispered exchange. Later I was to realize that he was just repeating the commonplace thoughts of most Aramayan nobles.

      I helped the Prince by relieving the pain of the mindsearch victims, but I was very glad when Kitten arrived with the servants. I wanted to do something about all the sick people in this village. They seemed to so fearful I did not like to leap on them and just heal them without having someone to translate for me.

      "How can this lord have done nothing for them?" I said to Kitten later as we went from house to house, examining the villagers and using healing magic where it was applicable. "They do not even have a village healer. They could not have been very productive workers. It's like the worst excesses of the Revolution of Souls!"

      "He would hardly have wanted an educated and independent person in the place," said Kitten.

      I picked up a little toddler holding a doll plaited out of straw. The child clung to me in a way which made my heart ache. Alinya would have been this child's age now had she lived. The thought upset me. I had avoided small children for the last two and a half years for just this reason.

      "Oh look at this child. Its bones are not growing right," I exclaimed. "Tell this woman that her children must have more milk."

      "Dion, don't you think these people would give their children milk if they could?"

      I dropped my eyes in shame. I had been insensitive. They were obviously too poor to afford milk. I put the child down and tried to forget how empty my arms felt.

      "They are serfs," continued Kitten. "They must look to their lord for their well-being."

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