‘Lelou!’ he interrupted at some point as the Bug was explaining why the village they were riding through was certainly not the birthplace of Puss in Boots. ‘See this?’
Arsene Lelou fell silent as he cast a confused look at the three objects Nerron had poured into his hand from a leather pouch. It took him a few moments to realise what they were.
‘You’re seeing right!’ Nerron said. ‘A finger, an eye, a tongue. They all annoyed me. What do you think I’ll cut out of you?’
Silence. Delicious silence.
Nerron had picked up the Three Souvenirs, as he lovingly called them, in one of the onyx’s torture chambers. The objects never failed to work. Maintaining a bad reputation was hard work, especially if, like Nerron, you didn’t actually find pleasure in cutting off fingers or scooping out eyes.
Lelou’s silence held until they saw the walls of the abbey of Fontevaud appear ahead of them. One glance at the rotten wooden gate and they knew that the abbey was deserted. The cloisters were overgrown with nettles, and the sparse cells housed no more than mice. The only cemetery they could find consisted of merely eight crosses with the names and dates of deceased monks. None of the graves were older than Sixty years, but yet, if the Bug was right, the hand would have been buried here more than three hundred years ago.
Nerron felt the urge to cut Lelou into thin, moonstone-pale slices. The Bug saw it in his eyes and quickly hid behind Eaumbre. Lelou had not forgotten the Three Souvenirs.
‘The farmer,’ he stammered, pointing a trembling finger at an old man who was digging up potatoes from a fallow field behind the abbey. ‘Maybe he knows something.’
The old man dropped his meagre harvest as soon as he saw Nerron coming towards him. He stared as though the Devil himself had emerged from the damp earth. Goyl were still a rare sight in Lotharaine. Kami’en would change that soon enough.
‘Is there another graveyard?’ Nerron barked at the old man.
The farmer crossed himself and spat in front of Nerron’s feet. Touching. People believed that kept demons at bay. But it didn’t help against Goyl. Nerron was just about to grab the old man by his scrawny neck to shake some sense into him, when he dropped to his knees.
Louis was coming towards them, with Lelou and the Waterman in tow.
The princely garments had grown a little scruffy, but they still looked a thousand times better than anything the old man had ever worn. He probably had no idea that he was looking at the crown prince of Lotharaine – the old peasant didn’t look like he read a newspaper – but the vassals always knew what masters look like, and that it was better to do as they told.
‘Ask him about the cemetery!’ Nerron whispered to Louis.
All he got was an irritated look in return – sons of Kings were not used to receiving orders. But Lelou came to his aid.
‘The Goyl is right, my prince!’ he warbled into Louis’s perfumed ear. ‘He’s sure to answer you.’
Louis cast a disgusted look at the peasant’s filthy clothes. ‘Is there another cemetery?’ he asked in a jaded voice.
The old man ducked his head between his lank shoulders. His bony finger pointed at the pine trees beyond the fields. ‘They built a church from them.’
‘From what?’ Nerron asked.
The man still held his head bowed. ‘The whole ground was full of them!’ he mumbled. He quickly dropped a couple of potatoes into his baggy pockets. ‘What else could they have done with them?’
He took them to the church, which, at first sight, looked no different from the other churches of the region. The same grey stone, a stout tower with a low roof, a few weathered battlements. But the peasant made a quick getaway as soon as Nerron pushed the brittle door open.
Even the crest that was set into the wall behind the altar was made of human remains. The pillars were encrusted with skulls, and the fenced-off alcoves were piled to the ceiling with bones. There were hands as well, of course. They served as candleholders or were splayed across the walls as ornaments. Frustrated, Nerron kicked in one of the skulls. How, by his mother’s green skin, was he supposed to find the right hand here? He was going to be stuck neck-deep in brittle bones while Reckless easily picked up the head and the heart.
‘What are we looking for again?’ Louis poked his fingers into a skull’s eye socket.
‘Your ancestor’s crossbow.’ The empty church made the Waterman’s damp whisper sound even more ominous.
‘A crossbow?’ Louis’s mouth tightened into a contemptuous smile. ‘What’s my father hoping for – that the Goyl will laugh themselves to death when they attack?’
‘This is a very unusual crossbow, my prince . . .’ Lelou began. ‘And it’s a little more complicated, if I understand the Goyl right.’ He pursed his mouth like a toad about to spit venom. ‘First, we have to find a hand, and then –’
‘You can explain that later,’ Nerron interrupted gruffly. He went to one of the alcoves and stared through the metal trellis at the piled-up bones. ‘If Lelou is right, then the hand was quartered. Also, it probably isn’t decomposed, and it has golden fingernails.’
All Warlocks gilded their nails to hide the fact that the Witches’ blood made them rot.
‘Yuck!’ Louis muttered, fiddling with his diamond buttons. He still wasn’t missing a single one. You couldn’t even rely on the Thumblings any more. Pretend he’s not here, Nerron. Neither he, nor the Waterman, nor the prattling Bug.
He pried open the gate with his sabre and immediately stood up to his knees in bones. Great. A forearm splintered under his boots. Goyl bones turned to stone after death, just like their flesh. Much more appetising than human putrefaction.
‘This is ridiculous. I’m going to a tavern.’ The boredom on Louis’s face had given way to anger. He had a hot temper, when he didn’t numb it with elven dust or wine.
A hand-sized gnome crawled out from one of the skulls on the pillar next to the prince. Eaumbre grabbed it before it could bite Louis. ‘A yellow follet!’ Lelou quickly pulled his charge away. ‘Easily confused with house follets, but . . .’ One glance from Nerron ended the lecture.
Crack.
The Waterman hung the follet’s corpse from the cobwebs, which were catching flies and dust between the pillars. ‘If you break the neck of one, it’ll be a warning to the others,’ he whispered.
Lelou threw up on the bones, but Louis stared in fascination at the small corpse. Nerron thought he could make out a trace of cruelty in the pudgy face. Not an entirely unsuitable character trait for a future King.
‘Right, then. Enjoy the search.’ Louis threw a skull at Lelou’s chest and laughed as the Bug stumbled back. ‘You’re staying as well!’ he ordered the Waterman. ‘I don’t need a guard dog to get myself drunk. And your ugly mug scares away the girls.’
He turned around, but Eaumbre stepped into his path.
‘I’m under orders from your father,’ he whispered.
‘But he’s not here!’ Louis hissed at him. ‘So just haul your fishy body out of my way, or I shall telegraph him that I caught you dragging a screaming peasant girl into the village pond.’ He flicked back his curly hair and gave the Waterman a princely smile. ‘We can all have our fun.’ Then he marched regally through the church door and slammed it behind him so hard that the brittle wood shed a few more splinters.