Page 23 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

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(THE BELL TOWER)

I shiver, the warmth of the forest dissipating to a pale, warning chill.

I want to turn back, to return to our happy walk, but there’s no way around this village.

It cuts through the valley. Circumventing it would take us off course—again.

I can’t afford that. I take a deep breath and make a silent promise to Ceridwen that if I see anything horrible in this town I’ll hit her for it.

I enter the waist-high wheat without waiting for Neirin.

Seconds later, there’s a crunch as he follows.

The wheat parts like butter around us as we advance.

The town draws closer, but the golden hour remains silent.

No one chatters; no boots head home. There’s only the creak of a shop sign, and a windowpane—unlatched, slamming against the wall. Two eerie, competing pulses.

I pause, but Neirin continues, undisturbed.

“Wait,” I call.

The wind picks up and the wheat ahead bows, revealing the rows closest to town. They’re black and rotted to the core, with flies forming a cloud around their heads.

Neirin gives a small, shaky laugh. “No point in hesitating now, is there?”

We weave through the dead wheat, flies buzzing at our ears. Neirin winces and covers his nose, but I shake my head.

“It doesn’t smell,” I say. “Isn’t that strange?”

He shoots me a confused glance. “It reeks of burning, Habren.”

I breathe deep, but all I smell is crisp air. The rot, whatever it is, is scentless to my human nose.

Carts lie abandoned in the road. Nothing moves inside the houses.

A door stands ajar beside us, and we peer into an empty kitchen. Neirin steps forward first, pushing the door open. Nothing shifts. No one emerges to admonish him. When he steps inside, it’s the first time I’ve seen his footing uncertain.

“Come look,” he says.

I follow, hand on my sword-hilt. The kitchen is not so different from my own. The table is set for dinner and bears a jug of decaying flowers. The bottom of the tablecloth looks like it’s been dipped in black powder.

There’s more powder on the floor. I toe it carefully and it too has no smell.

Neirin traces a hard black seam protruding from the back wall. I reach for it and touch the cool, dry surface. Stone, seeping through the cracks.

No, not stone. Coal.

“Strange place to have—What!” Neirin leaps away from the table, back toward the door. A small arm disappears beneath the tablecloth.

“Something grabbed my leg,” he says.

I kneel and draw my sword, using it to lift the tablecloth slowly like it’s a theater curtain.

I reveal a pair of dirty feet, then spindly legs covered with tattered, blackened trousers.

Coal-dyed arms follow, clinging to scuffed knees, until a child is there, center stage, head buried beneath masses of filthy hair.

I open my mouth to speak, but then she lifts her head. Her eyes are covered over completely with coal, a stone blindfold drawn across her face.

She lurches forward.

I run for the door, and we dash back into the street. The girl follows. We bolt to the right, turning into the town square, and immediately find a tableau.

Thirty fairies fill the space, surrounding a well that bleeds coal through its stones. Coal encases their bodies, limbs and faces covered in growths.

Simultaneously, their heads snap toward us, and as one, they open their black mouths impossibly wide. Neirin seizes my wrist and drags me away.

We run through street and alley, but every step finds another dead end, another patch of coal bubbling out of the ground and seeking the sun. The fairies move like puppets on strings. I look around wildly, desperately, and somehow I still miss the one that seizes my arm and yanks me away.

She takes me to the ground, her talons slicing through my coat and shirt into my stomach. She lets out a rattle from deep in her chest. Her mouth gapes like a cave, and my free arm drives the point of my sword through it.

Her eyes go wide. Tar leaks through her teeth.

I heave her off and scramble up, a boot on her chest as I yank the blade out with a vile squelch.

“Habren!” Neirin bellows.

He’s at the bell tower.

If I was fast when running from John Branshaw, I’m a bullet with thirty undead fairies at my heel. They lurch and stagger, burdened by their sickness and rot. I clear the door to the bell tower and Neirin slams it shut.

He starts for the stairs and shouts back, “I’ll need your sword!”

I nod and give chase. The mob bangs at the door.

“That won’t hold,” I tell him.

“I’m counting on it!”

The stairs wind up and up, and I’m sweating and chafing with effort as I burst into the belfry behind Neirin, only to almost collide with the giant, shining bronze bell.

We edge around the trapdoor we entered through, looking down at the approaching undead fairies.

They scramble over each other, crusted limbs groaning, coal growths scraping viciously against stone.

They move like a many-armed insect, a hive devouring itself.

“When I tell you…” Neirin says, “cut the rope.”

The bell is too big to fit through the trapdoor, so I don’t understand what he intends to do.

The slash on my stomach strains, and I groan as I hold my sword at the ready. Neirin raises a hand.

“Hold,” he says.

My chest heaves.

“Hold.”

My arms ache above me; the wound tears deeper.

“Hold!”

Their gargling, choking screams are just below us.

“Now!”

My sword slices through the rope. The bell hovers in the air.

An ungodly guttural moan fills the tower, and the bell begins to warp. It folds in on itself, the bronze creaking and shrieking loud enough that a twitch seizes my body, and I cover my ears.

With a twist of Neirin’s hand, the bell melts.

Bronze leaks from its moorings and crashes through the trapdoor like rotten fruit dropping from a tree. The metal follows the path of Neirin’s hand, lapping and racing down the stairs, encasing the creatures chasing us, devouring all in its path.

Neirin’s face contorts. He doubles over, covering his mouth and nose with his hand, gagging. I can still smell nothing, but I swear I can hear the metal as it hardens—a strange hissing and cracking noise—and skin sizzling beneath.

“It’s rancid,” Neirin chokes out.

In that moment, I’m rather glad I’m not one of the teg. He looks like he could be sick.

The fairies are trapped in still-hardening bronze, locked eternally in poses of sheer terror on the steps. Running, falling; shielding others, shielding themselves. Dead fairies clawing their way up a bell tower, frozen in time.

At last, Neirin rights himself, shaking his head like it will banish whatever it is he can smell.

He lays a hand on my back. “Come on.”

But I’m rigid, doubled over on my fresh wound. My palms are locked over my ears. He removes them gently, leaving them limp at my sides.

“That was clever of me” is all he says as he returns to the trapdoor and makes his descent into the bronze-covered mass.

All I can think of is Ceridwen and Gran, and how I nearly died and failed them both. I stumble after Neirin, almost oblivious to the strange new statues surrounding us. Neirin cocks his head to the side as he stares at one who died pressing himself against the wall.

He raises a curious fist and knocks on its bronze head. It rings hollow. The fairy inside is already gone.

Gone where, I don’t know.

The wound in my stomach feels like it’s gaping open and my innards could just fall out.

My legs turn to jelly and I grip the first thing I can to keep me upright, which happens to be the outstretched arm of a bronzed fairy.

I recoil, hissing in surprise, and I drag myself to the final steps before searing pain courses through me like fire.

White spots speckle my vision, and before I know what’s happening I’m sitting on the stairs, doubled over and gasping.

“Habren?” Neirin kneels before me.

He tries to remove my arm from where it’s pressed against the wound, and I cry out. The whites of his eyes are wide as he stares down at my blood-soaked shirt.

“One got me,” I grit out. “Holding my arm up… made it worse.”

Neirin’s lips part. “Tell me what to do.”

I blink but his face blurs before me.

“I don’t know what to do, Habren.” Unfamiliar panic leaks into his words.

Neirin’s hand shoots past my own, pressing down on the deep cut as if he can command the bleeding to stop.

I hiss and squirm back. “Doctor.”

His eyes rake over my face, but no grand idea ignites behind them. Neirin’s free hand goes to the back of my head, twining through the strands of my hair. I have the silliest idea for a moment that he’s going to kiss me, until the world falls away from my shoulders like an old cloak.