Stealing Midnight. Tracy MacNishЧитать онлайн книгу.
Well then, we’ll be busy, won’t we, girl? Good, good,” Rhys said, and he rubbed his hands together against the cold. “Wake Drystan. I’ll get into my work clothes and meet you down there.”
Olwyn didn’t demur, even though her heart fell into the pit of her guts. She did as she was told, fetching Drystan by pounding on his door. As he was usually drunk on the nights he didn’t work, it took some doing to rouse him. When he answered, the stink of unwashed skin, greasy bed linens, and sulfurous belches hung in the air around him. At her word, he grunted, scratching at his crotch as he headed down the long corridor. As part of his duties, he would pull the bodies inside, strip them of their burlap sacks, and lay them out.
After he’d gone, Olwyn moved like a wraith through the ancient keep. The stone walls held the chill and dampness, her footsteps a hollow echo reaching into the dark corners untouched by tallow lanterns.
Reaching a small, curving staircase so narrow it only allowed for one person’s passage, Olwyn ascended to the tiny landing that led to her chambers. She withdrew her key from a cord around her neck, and unlocked and opened the door.
A grouping of three small rooms warmed by a central fireplace comprised Olwyn’s sanctuary. There were only three windows, tall, thin, and arched, their stained glass as ancient as memory. Those she left uncovered, leaving the red-gold light to spill in from dawn to dusk.
The room smelled of strong incense: amber and Tamil mint, sage and sandalwood, cardamom and ginger. She burned a tiny bit nightly, her one indulgence, necessary to chase away the nightmares. The scented smoke clung to the drapes and rugs, her hair and her clothes.
Olwyn closed and locked the door behind her, a matter of constant practice since Drystan began watching her with increased interest.
Alone in her chambers, she breathed a sigh of resignation. The task before her loomed with gristly promise. But someday, she promised herself, she would escape. She needed to believe that, or else succumb to insanity.
Over her door, the brass bell jangled. The bell had a long, thin cord that ran down to the lower levels, so that she was able to be summoned. The few servants they’d had before had long ago been dismissed, so it was Olwyn who was called to duty.
With a fleeting, impotent glare at the hated bell, Olwyn quickly dressed. For the task ahead she wore a simple, muslin sheath that was easily laundered, and topped it with two thick, woolen robes that had been washed so often they were soft and fringed with threads. To keep her hair from her eyes, she braided it into a thick twist that hung heavily down her back. She left on her knit stockings and pulled on thick boots made of lamb’s wool that laced to her knees. The dungeon floor held a chill that would quickly leech the warmth of the living.
Those who believed hell to be hot had never stepped into her father’s frigid nightmare.
Olwyn grabbed her throwing dagger and slid it into her belt, took her pistol, checked its priming, and tucked it in her waistband at the small of her back.
The bell rang again, this time five rapid tolls that smacked of irritation and manic obsession. And Olwyn had nothing further to delay her. The time to return to hell had come again.
“You take too long, girl,” Rhys muttered as Olwyn entered. He never looked up from the naked corpse in front of him, but waved his hand at the other. “Get started on that one. This one needs to be opened immediately. He’s only got another day or two left in him.”
Drystan had dragged the bodies down to what had once been a dungeon, located in the oldest part of the keep. It was now Rhys’s workroom, for the permeating coldness helped to keep the corpses fresher.
It still bore the feel and look of its original purpose, however. The stone walls and floor were dark with the perpetual seeping wetness of the underground. Torches and lanterns hung from iron spikes, their smoke a thick wreath against the ceiling, the smell of which did not disguise the stench of rancid blood and rotting flesh.
Iron bars separated a few tiny cells which were now filled with crude shelves that housed her father’s collection of organs and brains preserved in brine, the abnormal ones beside the normal, each showing various stages of depredation.
And high above them, an old iron cage was suspended from the ceiling. It had been used in years past for madmen, when the former lord of the land saw fit to restrain them.
It had also been used for Olwyn, one dark night when her escape had been thwarted. After the dogs had attacked her on the property border, her father had dragged her back and put her in the cage. A lesson, he’d said, for a girl who’d dare to abandon the last member of her family.
She tried to avoid looking at it. It held memories of the worst night of her life, wounded, afraid, and alone in the dark dungeon, with the rats.
Scuttling rodents kept to the shadows, fat, bold, and rapacious from feasting on the scattered bits of flesh that regularly fell to the floor.
Olwyn’s hand rode lightly on the hilt of her dagger. She could shoot a rat in the head at fifty paces, could hit it with her dagger at half that. The rats seemed to know it, too, skittering to the corners when she entered.
Lord, but she hated them. They plagued her nightmares, their long, naked tails dragging behind their slick, dark bodies as they wallowed in the chest cavities of the corpses.
She peered into the shadows where they waited. She could see their eyes glittering in the torchlight. A shiver took her and she stamped on the floor as she walked, hoping to frighten them further away. The effort remained futile, though. The rats were as brash as they were ugly.
Olwyn moved to the stone slab that held the other corpse, just as her father instructed. Tuning out the meaty sounds of Rhys’s work, she got to her own.
The body was male, aged between twenty-five to thirty years of age. He was well formed and well fed, healthily muscled, and looked as though he had been in vigorous, perfect health at the time of his demise. Her eyes swept over his naked body, taking in his details. A scar on his arm, a birthmark on his thigh, a thick thatch of dark bronze hair surrounding his long, flaccid penis.
If she ever found a man who did not fear her a witch or sorceress, at least she could go to his bed not fearing his nakedness. Rhys did not cover the sexual organs of the dead to preserve Olwyn’s innocence. His determination to figure out why the human body aged, succumbed to illness, and ultimately died consumed him. Everything else that concerned the living had become an extraneous detail to which he gave no notice.
The sound of grinding bones beneath a saw mingled with the grunts of her father’s labor.
Olwyn inwardly cringed and kept her eyes on the body before her. He had not been dead long, she thought. He’d not yet flattened on the bottom, and he had no signs of stiffness.
Sadness touched her heart, as it often did when the specimen had been cut down in their prime. Did a young widow weep for him at night, her bed empty and cold without him? Was his father holding his mother in comfort, even as he shed tears for his son? Did a small child sleep, dreaming of a father he would spend a lifetime trying to remember?
Olwyn’s gaze slid up and down the naked man’s body. Even in death he was handsome, with dark gold hair gleaming in a thick halo around a visage that when alive, must have been quite a sight to behold. He wore joy on his face, in smile brackets around his lips, and in thin lines stretching from the corners of his closed eyes.
And taking up her papers and charcoal, she was full of regret that she could not sketch him as such, a virile, vibrant man full of life and laughter.
Instead, she drew his body as it was, long and lean, a study in symmetry and masculine beauty. She worked fast, and as she did, she tuned out the noise behind her and focused on the man whose life had been cut so short.
Olwyn drew his hands, his sinewy arms, the bulge of muscle and elegant shape of his shoulders. She tried to capture his face, so still and beautiful in death, and a lump thickened her throat once again. Did he have sisters who mourned him? Brothers who longed for just one more day?