The Pillars Of The World

power we grant we can also strip away. So shall it be.”
    With effort, he climbed to his feet and slowly returned to his horse. Opening a saddlebag, he pulled out a flask of brandy and drank deeply. He followed that with hunks of bread and cheese. His strength returned, slowly—far more slowly than it once did. But he was older now, and it took more out of him to strip power from the land.
    Finishing the bread and cheese, he drank his fill from the water canteen, then poured water into his cupped hand for the horse.
    “That’s enough,” Adolfo said, shaking the last drops of water from his hand and tying the canteen to the saddle.
    He walked the horse out of the woods.
    His nephew’s ghost now stood halfway between its grave and the border of the Old Place.
    Adolfo suppressed a shudder, viciously controlling himself so that nothing would show on his face.
    A twist of released magic must have struck the ghost, turning it into a nightmarish image, all the more dreadful because it could still be recognized as the young man it had been. In time, the villagers might have become used to a handsome ghost prowling the meadow. No one would be able to look on this without fear.
    “They will pay for your death,” Adolfo told the ghost. “That I promise you.”
    He turned away, aware that Konrad trailed after him. He didn’t breathe easily until he was well beyond the meadow and Konrad could no longer follow him. Mounting, he settled the horse into an easy trot. He
    ’d ridden hard to reach this place at the right time. Now he would stop at the first available inn to give the horse and himself a well-earned rest.
    He couldn’t control what the twisted ropes of magic would do. He’d never been able to control it to that extent. He simply released it and let each rope find its mark. Over the next few days, the villagers would suffer unexplainable troubles. Wells would collapse, cows would suddenly go dry, chickens would cease to lay, a dog would turn vicious and savage a child, a healthy woman would be taken to childbed before her time and die in agony birthing a corpse.
    And those ropes of magic caused transformations, taking something from the natural world and twisting it into something else. The nighthunters were formed that way. A few were always created when he or one of his Inquisitors, drained an Old Place of its magic. That didn’t trouble him since they mostly preyed on the Small Folk—or people who were foolish enough to walk through deep woods at night.
    The villagers would still be reeling from Harro’s grisly death so soon after Konrad’s, and all the other troubles that would suddenly plague them would shatter any doubts they may have had about the existence of the Evil One and leave them at the mercy of what he had to teach them.
    And he would teach them. In a few days, the other Inquisitors he had summoned would arrive at this village, as well as a couple of minstrels who found their purses well filled now that they played to his tune.
    He would return here as the Master Inquisitor, the Witch’s Hammer, and by the time he was done purging these people of all the Evil One’s servants, those who survived would spread a story that would leave no doubt about how thoroughly the Evil One could devour people wherever an Inquisitor died.
     

 

     
     

Chapter Fifteen

 

     
     

     
    The road through the Veil shone in the deepening twilight.
    Morag hesitated. It looked safe; it felt strong. It was the first shining road she’d found in the handful of days since she’d killed the young man in the black coat and taken the witch up the road that led to the Shadowed Veil. And yet . . .
    The dark horse stamped one foot, mouthed the bit impatiently.
    “There’s a storm coming,” Morag said quietly. “The sky is clear and there’s no wind, but this place feels hushed, the way a place does when everything has sought shelter to hide from whatever is going to happen.”
    She stretched her senses and the magic that was her gift. Death didn’t whisper to her, didn’t stir. Almost as if Death also waited.
    Morag looked around, still uneasy.
    The road through the Veil beckoned.
    “Let’s go to the Fair Land,” she said.
    The dark horse needed no urging.
    They cantered along that shining road walled by mist.
    Little tendrils of mist drifted across the road.
    She’d never seen that before.
    Was it taking longer than usual to reach the Veil that separated the human world from Tir Alainn?
    Shouldn’t