Free Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy's Wild by John Daulton Page A

where the smoking chimney was. They let themselves inside on account of there being a “welcome” sign on the door.
    Inside were several tables, no better made than those at Cedar Wood but twice their number all around, and there was a big mud-brick fireplace on one wall. A fire burned inside it, above which hung a large black stew pot, filling the air with promising smells of meat. Near the far wall, a long, narrow plank lay across a row of fat pine stumps cut flat on each end and long enough to prop the plank up to serve as a bar. A door stood open behind it, allowing Ilbei to look into a room beyond: shelves on all four walls, amply supplied, and a door leading into another room. Nobody was about.
    “Halloo,” Ilbei called anyway, “anyone here?”
    Nobody answered, so Ilbei went to the fireplace and checked the pot, in which various roots and hunks of dark and light meats simmered in savory brown gravy.
    “Halloo,” Ilbei called again, this time loud enough so that the woman across the way could hear him easily.
    Again no answer came, so Ilbei motioned with his head for Jasper to come along. They exited the building and went to the one across the way, to the shanty into which the young woman had gone with the not-quite banshee.
    A flimsy door fit into the frame with large gaps above and below. Ilbei peeked through a gap at the left side. “’Scuse me, mistress, but is everythin as it should be? Might we lend a hand?”
    “It’s as good as it’s likely to be,” replied a strained female voice. “And yes, come in and help me, please.”
    Ilbei entered, Jasper still at his heels, and the two of them beheld the speaker seated upon the chicken chaser’s chest, the young woman’s knees pinning the older woman down on a bed of rags upon the floor. The squirming hag upon whom she sat—and ‘hag’ was a fair description, for she was filthy and wild to look upon—rolled her head from side to side, her eyes closed and her mouth clamped tight as a priestess of Mercy’s knees. Her stiff-lipped security served in the cause of avoiding whatever the younger woman was trying to dose her with, a clear liquid that sloshed about in a bulbous ladle made from a dried gourd.
    “Can you hold her head for me?” the gourd-wielding woman asked. She rose and fell with the bucking of her patient, who thrashed upon the heap of rags. “I swear, the crazier she gets, the stronger she gets right along.”
    Ilbei guessed by the ease with which the younger woman rode the spasms that this wasn’t the first time at this for either of them. “What’s wrong with her?” Ilbei asked as he moved toward the pair.
    “She’s got the craze,” the woman replied. “Please, hold her before I waste the medicine.”
    Ilbei cleared the remaining distance between them and knelt on the floor, taking the twisting woman’s head in his strong hands and holding her still, as gentle as he might a babe but firm as a vice.
    “Can you get her arm too?”
    Ilbei looked to Jasper and directed him to the patient’s arm with his gaze. “Grab her,” he said.
    Jasper looked as if he’d rather eat bees, and he actually stepped away, backing into the wall behind him and then sidling along it until he was nearly hidden in the dark shadows at the corner of the small room. He might have stayed there too, had he not moved into a tangle of spiderwebs that set him to spasms not unlike those of the woman writhing on the mound of rags. He spat and swatted desperately, wiping at his face and mouth.
    “Worthless wizard!” Ilbei spat. “Get over here and hold this woman’s arm. She needs yer help, ya craven fool.”
    Jasper, slapping at his face, neck and hair, protested frantically. “But she’s got ‘the craze’! And I’ve got spiders all over me!”
    “Jasper, if I have to get up, I swear to sweet Mercy herself I will break every bone in yer body and pour ya into a chamber pot. Now get over here. Now!” He spoke this last so loudly it shook dust from