Summer was old and the hour late when Falk brought Lady Nimue of the Knights Le Fay at last to the closed gate of Sword Manse. Far west, past the house on its hill, the sun sank beneath the scarlet boughs of the Rotwald, and all the sky burned red like blood in its light. Against this, Sword Manse stood shadowed like a black scab, old and pained.
“Is this it, then?” asked the grey-coated unicorn mare, a front hoof pawing at the cobblestone path.
“It is,” answered the falcon-gryphon. Falk stepped forward with a flutter of his wings, dug out a heavy ring cluttered with keys, brow furrowed as he began to try them one at a time on the heavy iron gate blocking their way. Nimue noticed how his talons trembled, but made no mention of it as he spoke again. “My apologies for not having things more prepared for your arrival. We did not expect the Knights Le Fay to respond so swiftly to our call for help. In truth, there were some in the town who did not expect you would come at all.”
“There is no need for apologies,” said Nimue, keeping her words civil and her tone warm. “But why did your people doubt?”
“Oh, I reckon it’s not all too important. Only-ah!” The gryphon found the right key, pushed the gate open with a harsh screech of old metal which seemed to echo up and down the height of the hill, and stepped aside so the unicorn could enter first. “It is only, we are a small town, of no importance that we are aware of. We feared the attention of the Knights Le Fay was only for the great and powerful. Monarchs, the rich cities of Heraldale, knights and ladies. And we are also mostly a community of gryphons and minotaurs, and the Knights Le Fay . . .”
“Are primarily unicorns,” finished Nimue, nodding as her guide bore a blush. “I see. Well, the horrors against which I primarily battle may happen to the small and insignificant of the world just as often as to the important and powerful. You may never need fear that you are beneath my notice.”
“Yes, my lady.”
The way had been steep so far, the grasses wild and pocked with vivacious wildflowers and weeds, but beyond the gate and its accompanying stone fence the slope of the hill settled, the grasses brought down to barely taller than Nimue’s fetlocks, the flowers arranged into something which might have been approaching artful asymmetry. Four yards up the cobblestone path from the gate stood two broad-limbed apple trees, one two each side. Their unpicked riches littered the ground beneath the trees, filling the air with a sickly sweet stench of apples, fermentation, and rot.
Beyond all this, the house itself. Nimue had seen its like before, but never so far north. It was in the typical style of a minotaur mansion, outwardly a bleak grey stone, three stories tall, decorated tastefully with vines of sprightly ivy. Facing eastward, two tower attics rose on the north and south sides of the building in mimicry of minotaur horns. the windows of the lower floor looked out at the pair of newcomers from behind a veranda of dark grey wood, almost black. At center, a pair of heavy doors inlaid with finely-wrought iron and brass, the doors also made of the dark grey wood.
The veranda did not creak as Nimue stepped onto it, as she had half-expected. She hmmed and tapped a front hoof against the wood, trying not to frown. Her favorite part of visits such as this were the theatrics almost always involved. “What sort of wood is this, do you think? Oak? Cedar?”
“I wouldn’t know, my lady. Forgive me.” Falk passed Nimue, stopping at the front doors and beginning the long process of finding the right key again. “I was not involved in the construction. I was only hired on from the town by Lord Andrew—that is, the minotaur who built the mansion—to oversee care of the estate. I was the second person to hold this position.”
“The second?” A breeze blew from the east and Nimue perked her ears to the sound of rope creaking with a heavy load. She looked back the way they had come and stared for a long several seconds at the Wolf-Lord child hanging by the neck from one of the trees overlooking the path. The rope creaked as the corpse turned against the wind. “What happened to the first caretaker?”
“Nobody is certain. He was a sphinx, an old friend of Lord Andrew’s who came with him and his family from Wedjet. A few weeks after they had all moved in, a terrible screaming was heard from the sphinx’s quarters up in the north tower, but once the lord and his guards arrived, it is said they found nothing but an empty room. The sphinx has not been seen since. Ah! Here we go, my lady.”
The click of a key turning accompanied this proclamation, and then the wheeze of ill-tended hinges as the double-doors opened. Nimue watched the ghostly vision in the tree for a moment more before turning and following Falk into the mansion’s front hall, the gryphon already lighting gold-wrought lanterns along the walls to banish the encroaching dark of night. Here there were walls of amber wood, heavy tapestries of purple and silver, onyx stands covered in ruby and diamond trinkets, ivory bowls, and more to be expected of a rich minotaur lord wishing to show off his power and prestige. Though, the effect was well-dampened by the many weeks of dust and cobwebs which had been accumulating. And as Nimue looked closer it seemed something with sharp teeth had been having its way with the tapestries. And worst, the air was still and stale, and stank of many dead things in the walls.
The doors slammed shut behind them. Falk screamed and spun to face them, the hawk-gryphon’s eyes wide with naked fright. Though her own heart raced from the sudden shock, Nimue raised a front leg to rest a hoof against her companion’s side. “Calm, friend. It is only the doors. They will open again when we need them to.
“In the meantime,” she continued, turning to take in the front hall once more, “the hours are getting on and I suspect there is much to be done. This place is rather spacious. Is the whole home sized for the ease of unicorns and gryphons?”
Being so called upon, the falcon-gryphon managed to rouse himself enough from his fear to speak. “Um, much of it is, yes. All except the upper floor bedrooms and the lady of the house’s private garden in the rear. We might like to . . . conduct our business in the kitchens here on the ground floor, though. Lord Andrew employed a unicorn for his head chef.”
“Very well. Lead on.”
The kitchens were not far, out of the entrance hall and down a long central corridor, from which the many rooms of the rest of the house sprouted. Falk lit lanterns along the walls as they went, though sparsely, leaving the hall in a dim twilight mood. The kitchens were near the end of the hall, through a door to the left and past a short, almost squat dining room, done up in heavy greens and decorated with potted plants in the four corners, all now dusty and dying. The square table at room’s center was a deep black wood inlaid with green jade, its beauty lost beneath the lack of care in recent weeks.
“It is the Green Room,” said Falk upon catching Nimue’s curious glance. “Lord Andrew had diverse ideas in how he would entertain his select guests. Also scattered here on the ground floor are the Red Room, the Blue Room, and the Yellow Room. I, uh, reckon you can guess how they look.”
The kitchens were in as dreary a state as the rest of the house, as far as Nimue had seen. There was the dust and all-consuming stench of rot she had suffered through since the first, but there was more, an accompanying smell of fresh blood spilled. Nimue saw no fresh blood as Falk lit the room’s lanterns, but she saw old stains splattered across the walls and countertops, a reddish brown against the dingy white. A glance up found nearly a dozen knives embedded into the ceiling, some up to the grip, others almost dangling free.
Done with his task, Falk followed her gaze and flushed. “This was the site of one of the later hauntings, not long before Lord Andrew decided to . . . take his family elsewhere until things were resolved. One of the cooks lost an eye in the chaos.”
Nimue winced in sympathy as she set her bags from her back onto the floor. Healing magic was a powerful, wondrous talent, but it was limited by the knowledge of the healer, and the ocular organs were too strange, too complex, too unknown for any spell healer to ever dare.
“All the more reason to deal with this haunting swiftly and thoroughly. I’ve learned some on my way here, but I want you now to tell me everything you can, in as linear a manner as you can, to the very best of your ability. The history of the house, every haunting, and every response your Lord Andrew bothered with before sending word to the Knights Le Fay for help. My help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Falk. Wings fluttering, he moved to stand across a kitchen island from her, rearing back to rest his front half upon it. “Though, it all began so small at first, or at least it seemed so small, it’s hard to be certain of the very first haunting. The earliest instance I am aware of occurred before the house was even finished. This was early last winter. Construction was behind after an unexpected cavern was discovered beneath the hill—”
“A cavern?” asked Nimue. She had been using her magic to lift drawings of the house’s layout from her packs onto the kitchen island, but at this she paused and stared at her gryphon guide. “Only a cavern, and nothing more?”
“Y-yes. As you say, nothing more, though deep enough for the minotaur worker who fell into it to break her leg in two places. She said that as she was waiting for the gryphon workers to fashion a sled to lift her back to the surface, she saw eyes looking at her from the surrounding shadows. Yellow, glowing eyes.”
Nimue frowned and resumed her work. “How many eyes?”
“14. The worker was always clear on this, 14 eyes.”
“In pairs, or all scattered about?”
“That, I am unsure. Does it matter? Do you know what to make of this?”
Nimue conjured inkwell and quill with her horn, dipped the tip into the ink, and made a mark on the house’s central floor plan to signify the cavern she had heard tell of. “Every detail matters in a case like this, and I have ideas, but I need more. Continue with your recounting.”
“Er, yes, of course. Let me think. Well, construction continued and the house was finished with no further incidents of note, nothing more serious than the occasional missing tool or act of vandalism which could be attributed to local hooligans.
“But then, three nights after Lord Andrew moved in, something . . . strange, happened. Just after dinner, the smell of fresh blood flooded through the entire house. Every floor, every room, even the private garden and bathhouse and all along the path to the front gate, reeked of blood. A horrible, clinging, cloying stench—”
“I am familiar with it,” remarked Nimue. She made a note of the date and phenomenon. “We’re there any areas of the house or grounds that smelled worse than the rest? Anything this could be blamed on?”
“Well . . .” The falcon-gryphon’s eyes darted past Nimue, back the way they had come, and he swallowed. The pause ticked on for long seconds before he answered, voice sunken low. “It was overwhelming everywhere, but it did seem the worst on the ground floor, the center of the house.”
“Over where the worker fell into the cavern?”
“. . . yes. But continuing on, after an hour, the smell disappeared as suddenly as it had come, without a hint of it lingering beyond memory. It was judged to have been a prank by local unicorns with an impressive spell repertoire and set aside. Things lasted peacefully for a week, and then it began to escalate. The stench came back every day for an hour, as regular as clockwork. Marks began to appear across the floor and along the walls, deep grooves in the wood as if left by wicked talons or claws. One night, the lady of the house was awoken by the fleeting but terrible sensation of iron-cold hands gripping her throat, choking the breath from her. The previous caretaker of the estate disappeared, as I’ve mentioned already. And then there was . . . the tree incident.”
At once, Nimue’s mind went to the ghostly manifestation she had seen right before entering the house, the Woof-Lord child hanging by the neck. It sent a wave of pity and revulsion through her. “What happened?”
“It was the first time Lord Andrew considered fleeing this place,” said Falk in way of answer, a strange tone entering the gryphon’s voice. He looked away, to a window in the kitchen’s far wall looking out on an enclosed garden stuffed with moldering produce and shadows. “It very nearly drove me from my job here. It was a day I brought my niece up here from the village to be a playmate for the Lord Andrew’s two daughters. It was not the first time I had done so, and the girls were all fond of each other, and my brother and his wife thought it all a tremendous opportunity to build up relations for future employment. But that day their games took them out into the front of the yard, to the trees overlooking the pathway up. None of the children have been able to . . . fully tell us what happened that day, but I know at one point the Lord’s daughters asked my niece to fly up into one of the trees to retrieve some apples for them, and she did so, and then . . . then . . . there was a scream, we could all hear it even in the house, and . . .”
A deep, shuddering breath as the gryphon gathered himself. “I knew my niece’s screams, and I flew, arriving before anyone else to find the two girls all in a panic, clutching each other and staring up at the apple tree as if it might lean down and eat them. I won’t lie, they had scared me, and my niece’s screams and her disappearance had scared me worse, and I was . . . ungentle in my demands for answers about the whole things. Worse when Lord Andrew finally arrived. We might have come to blows, but the girls were panicking, and my niece’s screams started up again, and then she . . . she fell from the tree, an old rope wound tight around her neck, tight enough to choke her. And worse, she was bruised and bleeding all over, her feathers mangled and her talons and beak cracked. She looked as if many somethings had been . . . chewing on her, the way a wolf might worry at a bone. We all thought her dead at first.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nimue. She circled the kitchen island and rested a front hoof against the gryphon’s shoulder. Whatever her suspicions regarding the house and its haunting, she knew her guide’s pain. “If something like that had happened to one of my sons . . .”
“It was horrible,” said Falk. He busied himself, wiping at his eyes with his wingtips to rid himself of tears. “Horrible. But that wasn’t the worst of it. God above, I wish that had been the worst of it. Even as we all looked down at my brutalized niece, the screaming continued. It came still from the tree.”
Nimue’s heart fell. Before she could say a further word, before she could even think of what that further word could be, one of comfort or of questioning, the surrounding lanterns went dark with a rush of wind and a whisper, plunging the kitchen into near-total darkness but for the dim moonlight coming through the window. Falk, already high-strung, shrieked and tumbled away from Nimue’s hoof, the gryphon’s breathing harsh as he whipped his gaze about. “Oh God, it’s here now, it’s here! Lady Nimue-“
“Calm, friend,” said Nimue again, though the words did not come quite so easily as they had before, to her embarrassment. She called upon her magic and the room lit up with the purple light shining from her horn. She focused the spell into a small orb, brilliantly bright, floating it to hover along the ceiling at the center of the room. Once more, they could see.
“There,” said Nimue. “Crisis averted.”
Falk drew close again, though by the set of his wings twitching against his back he did not look much reassured. “This cannot go on! I’ll recount more if you demand it, but surely you’ve heard enough to draw some conclusions already! Please!”
“No. Not yet. I have a last question to ask.”
So speaking, Nimue turned away to regard the room again and lit her horn, channeled her magic again to feel at the ambient magic around them. It felt heavy and bruised, red and raw like a bad gash too insistently picked at. The magic of the area BLED with an agonized, seething rage which snarled and snapped at Nimue’s every probing. She reeled from the sensation, closing her eyes to better focus, to better push back as decades of training, study, and experience had taught her. The seething, corrupted presence surrounding them was terrible, but she had felt worse lingering on the battlefields of Heraldale, wandering curses of pain and rage left behind in moments of death. She had encountered acres of woodland where every step flooded the victim with memories of final moments before death. She had found caves where to take a single breath would freeze the heart with sheer terror. She had found living, walking death curses, spreading themselves through towns like a disease.
“All . . . that sets this apart . . . is location . . .”
Her front hooves bumped against something soft and yielding. Nimue opened her eyes and frowned. In her first, brief struggle against the presence inhabiting the house, she had somehow found her way from the kitchens to what she guessed to be the house’s main den. It was a fairly large room, almost square but for its flattened corners, against which stood wood side tables decorated with ornate vases of now-rotting plants. Three wood-backed couches dominated the room, one each to Nimue’s left and right and one right in front of her, between her and a cracked bay window looking out on the front of the house’s grounds. It was this she had bumped into. Overhead, a chandelier of gold and crystal swayed in with an unaccountable breeze, while all around the walls and paintings along the walls had been clawed asunder. The den felt, in essence, the summation for all the rest of the haunted property.
“Lady knight?” rose Falk’s voice tentatively behind her, near the doorway. “You . . . mentioned a last question?”
“Two questions now, in truth.” Nimue circled around the couch before her and went to stand before the cracked and dust-clouded window. Through it she could see the grounds of the house straight to the outer walls, and beyond the walls, a faint glimmer of the lights of the nearby town. She imagined the view to be more impressive from the second and third stories. “What brought Lord Andrew to your village, Falk?”
A lantern lit in the room behind Nimue. She could see the gryphon busying himself with it in the window’s dim reflection. “I couldn’t say, my lady. I was not in his employ when he first came, you’ll remember.”
“I assume there was some theorizing in town over it, though, and surely you have gotten an idea of things since.”
Falk’s reflection bowed his head to her. “Well . . . there is talk of wood harvesting along the southern borders of the Rotwald. And Lord Andrew, though you could never say so to his face, fancied himself a lord over the town when I came into his service.”
“And has he been a good, worthy lord?”
“He . . . has kept us employed, my lady.”
Nimue nodded. “I thought as much. Now I ask you this. What was here before Lord Andrew came?”
Falk’s reflection nearly dropped his lantern. He looked stricken with sudden fear unconnected to the house and its doings. “My lady?”
Nimue turned at last to face him rather than his reflection. “I am no fool, gryphon. Hauntings do not start from nothing, and if this was happening before the house was built, then the most likely possibility is that said construction disturbed something which was already here. I have a few ideas already, but it’s a waste of time to stand here trying to guess when you can just tell me. I doubt it was something as mundane as the town’s cemetery, your Lord Andrew improperly exhuming the bodies.”
“No, it was not that, not quite, not . . . the town’s cemetery,” said Falk after a long, miserable moment, seconds passing like days to the pair as the lantern light flickered and cast strange shadows upon the walls. Somewhere down the long, black passageway behind the gryphon, the wood floor creaked as something old and dry was dragged across it.
Creeaak. Thump.
“This wasn’t always a village of gryphons and minotaurs,” admitted Falk, seeming to pay the sounds no heed. “40 years ago, it was a Wolf-Lord village. Then there was the war and, well, there weren’t any more Wolf-Lords, were there? And this was a good place for fishing from the rivers to the east and south, and hunting in the Rotwald to the west. And villages ought to be lived in, I reckon. You can hardly say we or our parents did anything wrong, moving here.”
In the dark of the passage behind the gryphon, the wood creaked again, became a slow, regular sound. Something like paper rustled and the wind hissed down the corridor with the stench of the dead. Nimue stood silent, patient and listening.
Creeaak. Thump.
Creeaak-thump.
“We tried to warn Lord Andrew,” continued Falk, anger beginning to deep into his fear. “We did, we tried to tell him of the rumors haunting this land, of why he was desecrating. But he laughed, and paid handsomely any who might have raised a legal fuss, and after all, nothing had ever REALLY happened before all this—”
“Desecrating,” snarled Nimue. For once, she allowed a shadow of her own mounting anger to show through. “Haunting. You are a cowardly lot, I see, and yet not half as superstitious as you ought to be. That wasn’t any mere cavern the construction broke down into, was it? It was a barrow. A Wolf-Lord barrow.”
“Maybe,” said Falk, and then more hastily, “Yes. From before my time, and my father’s time. But it wasn’t us who broke into it, or sealed it back up, or built over it! And I sure as Sheol know my niece had nothing to do with any of it!”
“But you knew!” Nimue stomped a hoof and flared her magic for the briefest moment, marched forward a pace and then another, forcing the gryphon to back away. “You knew there were people buried here. You had a responsibility to the dead to stop this!”
“What does it matter, anyway?” whined Falk, backing away until his lashing lion tail dipped into the shadowed hallway behind him. “It shouldn’t matter, anyway! They were only Wolf-Lords!”
Thump thump thump-thump-thumpthumpthumpthump—
Even as the words still echoed from the doomed gryphon’s beak, the black shadows of the corridor behind him were shattered by the sudden blazing of many infernal yellow eyes. Upon him fell a swarm of snarling, biting wolf heads, little more than bone and fur as frothing fangs clamped down on Falk’s wings, his legs, his shoulders. Biting, gnawing, tearing, his blood spraying across the den as wildly as his screams, his screams squelched—though not, to Nimue’s horror, entirely silenced—by another wolf head biting into his throat.
Then the wolf heads were drawn back into the shadows, dragging Falk squirming and screaming with him, his blooding running into the desperate grooves left in the floor by his scrabbling talons.
A terrible CRUNCH rang from the shadows, silencing the screams in totality. Then there was nothing but the smell of blood and rot.
Nimue stared into the dark of the hallway for a long time, as the shadows danced to unheard melodies across the den’s walls and the trees beyond the bay window swayed beneath a howling wind. Beneath her hooves the floor trembled, and there came a feeling of a vast, cavernous cold somewhere close, beneath her and beneath the house, empty yet full to bursting, untouched yet disturbed, dead yet breathing the wet, frigid breath of the cave.
Nimue listened for a moment to dead words whispered only for her, then nodded and started for the door. She kicked the lantern off its couch as she went, ears perked to the sounds of shattering glass and sudden, hungering flames. She walked unmolested through the darkness of the house, finding her way back to the front door as easily as if she had always lived there. She left the porch and passed under the apple trees now empty of any hanging bodies. She did not look back until she had passed the main gate, and then only briefly. The fires had spread well, by then, the house seeming almost eager to be destroyed. Already it was too late to stop it, and by the time anyone from the village showed up to help, there would be nothing left but the stone outer walls and whatever stone ruins managed to withstand the burning. And Lord Andrew, if he had an ounce of sense, would find somewhere else to rebuild. But Lady Nimue, unicorn of the Knights Le Fay, put little hope in the sense of others.