Free The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) by Richard Monaco Page B

outlined (as the stars faded above the old hills) grayish in a shapeless sack dress. Pleeka was behind her. He turned back to the strange, jerky-stepping man who reeled to a halt just ahead. Broaditch saw the dead-white flesh streaked with dark, eyes that seemed to palely drain the light into themselves; overlarge, pale hands on broomstick wrists, gesturing before him, and then the voice, hoarse but tremendous, ringing, the force of it overwhelming its own raw, painful rasp, saying, singsong:
    “Devils fall back from thy master!”
    Torky, startled, went back a few steps behind his father’s solid, shielding shape.
    “What?” Broaditch wanted to know.
    Alienor was watching. She’d heard the voice, muffled, flattened by dull earth and musty air and it had startled her: familiar … something from the deep, disturbing past … She moved a little closer, Tikla swaying reluctantly against her, rocking her head back and forth over her mother’s hip. Pleeka paced and muttered inaudibly behind her, lost in his reveries.
    “Ideals,” he whispered. “Ideals …”
    “Devils be bound to my will alone,” the bizarre stranger insisted.
    “What a greeting,” Broaditch allowed. Watched the ragged man totter, still twitching his outsized hands and long, thick fingers at them in what he finally realized must be magical passes. “Fellow, you seem to have but few steps left in you. You’d do well to husband your strength for walking along.”
    The wide, empty, bright eyes glared as the body (as if to confirm Broaditch’s prophecy) suddenly sagged and was gone, leaving the big man surprised there’d been no rattle and clatter when all those bones hit the ground.
    Broaditch bent over him. Torky watched. Alienor sat her daughter on a stone and came over.
    “What new trouble have we now?” she wondered. “I’ve grown tired of my easy life.”
    “A very thin man,” her husband said. Stooped and lifted one of the arms and let it limply flop back. Wrinkled his nose. “From the smell he’s been dead a week and moving on from spite only.”
    “What said he?”
    “Nothing with sense in it, woman.” Broaditch straightened up. “We’ll attempt food and drink on him.”
    “What little we have, you mean. The water jug’s low and where’s the next well, I wonder? All the streams been dry so far.”
    “Well, since four days’ hike anyway.” Wiped his hands together. “It’s always the poor has got to make loans.”
    She didn’t react. Glanced back over her shoulder.
    “How far do we follow the crusader ?” she asked.
    Broaditch shrugged, rummaging in the foodsack as the sweet, dampish air filled imperceptibly with light and the trees and huts and the hills shaped themselves from the draining night.
    “It doesn’t matter yet,” he answered, bent over the sprawl of bones in question.
    “Give him not enough to kill him or it’s a double waste.” She sniffed and looked around again at the emerging village. “He had a loon’s voice.”
    Broaditch held the waterskin to the raw slash of blackened mouth. Heard the breath catching and wheezing. The dribble of water sparkled and vanished into the shadowy gaping that chewed the air now and sputtered slightly.
    “Well,” Broaditch murmured, “here’s a face that shows some wear.”
    “We have to decide,” Alienor was saying, watching Pleeka pace. Tikla had slumped on the grass with her back on the rock. Torky remained standing close to his father, watching, intent, absorbed, as if about to utter some grave profundity. She asked herself why they had to remember. If there were just some potion that would blot away all ill and leave only the sweet. She smiled.
    There would be , in that case , she thought, more hollow in life than hill …
    “Who is he, papa?” Torky wanted to know.
    “He neglected to say.”
    “A hermit?” the boy drew back a little again. “He stinks bad.”
    “That may well be holiness, son,” Broaditch said as the man’s eyes popped open