Lurking Dangers

A beast is an animal, and the word is meant to be plain. The Bear of the fell woods, the Dire Wolf that leads the ordinary packs onto prey they would not take alone, the Swamp Lion at the reed edge and the Marsh Crocodile lying along a cut like a log are all beasts, however large or however bold, and the country takes some comfort in saying so. Under the same badge stand the animals grown wrong: the wolf and the bear the dales call turned, the Mutated Serpent of the carrs, and stock that has gone over, which is the upland’s own phrase and which the upland does not explain.

The fells ask three questions of anything that troubles a flock, and a stranger should learn them before he learns anything else. Does it breed true? Does it keep to its ground? Can it be turned from the lambing? Three yeses, and it is a beast in the shepherd’s sense as well as in its shape, met with dogs, a lit fold and a bounty of two shillings a head; the art is to make one’s own pasture the least rewarding place in the dale, not to win. One no, and the shepherd ceases to treat it as a beast, whatever it looks like. He moves the flock, and waits in seasons rather than weeks.

A monstrosity has a body, and that is the first thing to be said of it, because it is what divides it from the horrors. It is big, or wrongly made, or both, and it breeds after its kind: the Bell Worm that comes through a coal face with its mouth open, the Hydra of the Oxford marsh, which the causey households tell as though it were last year’s, the Red Drake that comes up out of the wet ground for horses and goes back into it, and the Sea Leviathan that rises beside a ship on the long routes, higher than the mast. Its witnesses differ over what frightened them. In the main they agree on what they saw.

Because it has a body, it can be brought in. A bounty man may carry a head to the bailiff, and the clause at the foot of the Crown’s schedule, such other noxious beasts as the bailiff shall judge, might have been written for it. That is the comfort. The difficulty is that a monstrosity fails the shepherd’s three questions, so that the turning which serves against a wolf serves poorly against it. The country’s answer is ground given and ground kept: the fen keeps its reed cut, no pit opens into ground that is on no plan without an officer present, and the drove goes round. A company is hired where that answer has stopped being enough.

A plant is a growing thing that does more than grow. Trees walk; the Hangman’s Willow lifts what passes under it, a boar, a calf or a dog, and holds it clear of the flood until it stops moving; the Red Briar closes over an empty cottage and whatever comes to its door; Grasping Vines drag what they hold down into the earth. Most of them pass for ordinary growth until they move. The country’s first warning is seldom the plant itself. It is the wrong thing lying at the foot of a tree: bones, a dead deer, salvage that nobody has taken.

They keep to their ground. A plant does not follow a company down the road, and nearly every account of one ends with somebody who went round. Some are counted among a spirit’s servants and belong to the power of the place, as the charcoal burners hold of the Walking Tree in the no-cut belts of Wychwood; others answer to nothing anybody knows of, and are merely hungry. Fire, distance and daylight are the usual answers. A forester’s eye for a wood grown too quiet, or for deer that stand round a clearing in daylight and do not graze, is worth more than any blade.

A construct is a thing that was made and then set moving. The country knows the Iron Golem best, a giant of riveted plate with a furnace glow at its seams, standing guard in the square of a ruined town; but the word covers anything built rather than born that walks, guards or strikes: figures no taller than a dog, figures of a man’s size, and things as large as a gatehouse, like the Stone Golem that holds the gate of a ruin the nearest village goes round. What they share is that somebody put work into them, and that the work goes on after the maker has stopped.

How they are made is a matter for the learned, and the learned disagree. Most hold that arcane power is the heart of it, and that artifice, spirit-working, alchemy or the rites of a religious house are joined to it in different measures by different makers. A company wants plainer points. A construct does not tire, does not bargain and cannot be frightened, and it keeps to what it was set to do long after the reason for it has gone. Find what it was set to guard, or to do, and you will usually have found the way past it; the line at which it stops is the edge of its charge.

Humanoid is the word for anything shaped like a person that nobody would take for one: upright, two-legged, with arms and hands, and wrong in every other particular. The Skinless walking the Bone Marshes at sunset with the light showing through it, the Werewolf in a moonlit ruin, the Nosferatu on a manor wall, the corpse eaters at the churchyard edge and the dead who walk all answer to it; and so do the giants of bark and moss in the carrs, which carry their branches as a man carries his arms.

The word says what a thing looks like, and nothing more. It does not say that the thing was ever a person, or is kin to one, and careful people do not use it so; where such questions are argued, the Church, the Collegium and the bounty men argue them, each for reasons of its own. What the shape tells a company is practical. A thing with hands can open a door, climb a wall and carry something away. A thing that stands like a man can be taken for one at a distance and in poor light, and more than one traveller has gone to help a figure in a lane and learned his mistake too near.

Humanlike is for what can look exactly like a person: near enough to sit at a table, stand behind a counter or be spoken to in the street without anybody looking twice. The Vampire is the chief example, a living person under a curse who does not age and must feed, and who in good light is simply a neighbour, an apothecary’s assistant or a guest at a recital. The possessed belong here too, since what is wrong with them does not show in the face; and so do certain presences seen as a living woman, as the Lady of the Pool among the lilies, or the Fen Bride among the stones of a drowned churchyard.

The difficulty with all of them is the same: the eye is no help. The country falls back on habit instead, on who is never seen at noon, who has no history in the parish, who came up from the pit changed; and those habits accuse a great many more of the innocent than of the guilty. A company that meets something humanlike should expect to be unsure, and should be slow to act on suspicion alone. In these stories the commonest harm is a wrong accusation, and when it is looked into it is usually found to be about property: a will, a lease, a house that has stood too long in one name.

A horror is what the country meets and cannot draw. It is seen in fog, under ground, over still water and at the edge of the lamps, and no two who have seen it agree upon its shape. The Mist Horror is made of the fog it walks in and is gone when the fog goes; the Star Below is a light where no lamp stands, over black water in the deepest workings; the Many-eyed Orb rises out of the mist over a mere, and nobody who tells it says the eyes were looking at them, only that they were looking. Accounts of a beast agree on what it looked like and differ on what frightened the teller. Accounts of a horror are the other way about.

Nobody is paid to kill one, since nobody has found where one begins and ends. The surest evidence is what a district does: a hole walled up within the week at the village’s own cost, a lamp kept burning on the wall from October to March, eleven parishes performing the same four acts within the same hour and never saying why. The rule for anybody caught out in one is short. Stop, sit and wait for full daylight, holding the rope or the next man’s belt. Do not walk, call or ring. Follow nothing: not a light, not a voice, not even a voice you know. A district that has built a wall has already reckoned what leaving the thing alone is worth.

The restless dead are the dead who do not settle, and the realm has built bell, ledger, watch and office about keeping them in the ground. Most of the time it answers. Four in five of the graves a priest is called to are quiet graves made badly, and an evening and a bell settle them for the price of a candle. The few that walk are another matter. What gets up after a bad thaw is slow, does not speak, and goes where it went in life: the Zombie on the road home at sunset with a wooden cross still at his neck, the Forgotten Knight on an old road towards a place nobody now remembers, the Skeleton Hounds running through ruins with no sound of feet.

The Church’s doctrine holds that the dead require consecrated ground, the rite said and burial within a stated interval, and that the failure of any one of the three is what produces the trouble. The northern march, which fails all three oftener than anywhere, gives its reasons as distance, season, water and money, and no fifth. Its counsel to a company is the same from the prior to the bounty men. Bury your own dead properly and at once, whatever it costs the commission. Take a turn at the churchyard wall when a watch is set, six nights, two at a time, with a lamp and a bell. And before a suppression is paid for, ask whether the bell was tried, and whether anybody knows a name.

A haunt is a presence of a place, and the realm does not believe the two can be parted: the stair, the meadow or the drowned churchyard and the thing in it are one matter. It is not a demon, which belongs nowhere, nor a spirit, which answers. A haunt repeats. It does its one act, in its one place, at its one season, whatever the parish does. The Pale Woman of the Stream drifts downstream at dusk and is never seen twice in the same reach; the Hollow Choir sings without words over an old field in fog; the Fen Bride stands among the stones of a drowned churchyard, and every water that has one tells a different wedding.

The marches put the test in four words, a haunt repeats, a power answers, and any parish can run it for nothing: change something small and lawful, light the lamp an hour later, and see whether the ground takes notice. A haunt will not. Nothing can be agreed with it. The question that matters is whether it travels. What has ever been seen off its own ground is for the suppressing orders; what never has goes to the Wardens of the Quiet Ground, who walk it and watch it rather than cure it. To name a haunt is to admit it publicly, and a named one comes with a candle, a rule and a yearly vote in a minute book.

A spirit is a power of place: of a ford, a grove, a spring, a ridge, one reach of a river, the weather over one field. It holds ground, not a body, and beyond its bound it does nothing whatever. It is not one of the dead and never was, nor a demon, since it belongs where it is. The country gives such powers titles of place, which mislead strangers and never the people who live there. The Lady of the Pool is the power of a woodland pool, seen waist-deep among the lilies; the Candlehart, a black stag with a flame on every tine, is a power of the wood; the Spirit Wolf on the rock above the pack is the upland’s Old Watch of a ridge.

What a spirit wants is continuation: what it has always had, at the season and in the manner it always had it. A bucket returned to the spring, one hedge cut from east to west, a bend where no child whistles after dusk. A richer offering is no kindness, for it is not what was agreed. Friendly is not tame; a river may keep one ford safe and drown a man fifty yards below it, where nothing was ever promised. Terms are made through the Concord of Saint Winnow or a pact-family, and a company should promise nothing at a boundary stone on its own authority. Destroying a spirit is very often the worst answer, and the district will say so.

A demon is an intruder: a will from outside the world’s rightful order, which belongs nowhere in creation and holds standing nowhere, so that no lawful bargain can ever be struck with one. It is not a ghost, nor a spirit of place gone bad, nor a beast, whatever shape it shows. The country pictures the Horned Guest, red as a forge and taller than a door, and doctrine says a demon is not a matter of horns. More often one is known by what it does. Possession is a thing done to a person rather than a creature; the imps are smaller troubles, the Fat Imp in the drains and the Coal Imp undoing at night what the fitters did up by day.

Its signature is breach. A troubled parish does not report horns; it reports that what was shut is open: a sealed door, a ward, a kept agreement, a settled marriage, a burial ground’s wall, each undone with nobody to name, and always in the direction of undoing. To call a thing a demon is a legal finding of the Church, and the chapter makes it slowly; findings number a handful in a decade, accusations hundreds, and no court will rule that a person is possessed. A company that cries demon at every wrongness will be wrong forty-nine times in fifty. The fiftieth goes to a Black Lantern house, for the Concord may not treat with it.

Blighted is the badge for what the dales call turned: a creature gone sore-hided and swollen, past fear, running down what a sound beast of its kind would leave alone. The Blighted Wolf is heavier than a sound wolf and hunts alone by day as readily as in a pack by night, and an ordinary wolf that meets one in a stream gives it the water and goes round; a shepherd who sees that has seen all he needs to. The Blighted Bear bears it, and the Tanglehorn that runs the deer off the hill under black antlers, and so do most of the feral kinds. The country’s word serves the country, and it asks no further.

Every body that writes such things down has its own word for them. The bounty men ask whether a beast is a stray, a breeder or a run, and the answer is the size of the commission. The clergy write vitiate stock, or the marred. The Collegium writes of a strain and ties it to a place, so that a man may read of the Gant strain in a survey and know the belt of ground his grandfather kept his sheep off. Only the bailiff at Mereton writes down what was actually brought in. The shepherds accept the learned words without much interest, since none of them alters what a shepherd does: move the flock, light the fold, and wait.

A spirit’s servant is a creature that keeps the ground of a power of place and answers to it. It is not the power itself, and the country is careful to say so. The charcoal burners of Wychwood hold that the Walking Tree belongs to its no-cut belt as a dog belongs to the fold: it is not the thing the belt is kept for, but the thing that keeps the belt. They say the same of the Tanglehorn, which runs the deer along a belt’s boundary stones and never past them. The wolves that run with the Spirit Stug are told as its own, and keep to the old wall line of its ruin more exactly than any wolves the shepherds know.

The sign of one is commanded country, ground where something is in charge: a thing that comes along one line, and lesser creatures that go quiet before it. A hunter who has watched a wood empty ahead of something is seldom in doubt of what he saw, and often in doubt whether to report it, since such a report doubles the cost of the commission. A creature that keeps the edge of somebody’s ground is a frontier, not a nuisance, and a company hired to clear a frontier should ask whose it is, and who has the standing to offer the power anything. Fell the belt, the burners say, and whatever is in it will come out.

An avatar is a shape a spirit takes and walks in: the black stag at dusk, the woman among the lilies, the pale wolf on the rock. The shape is not the spirit, which belongs to its node and cannot be killed. It is what the spirit hunters hunt, because a shape can be broken.

Breaking one is hard and seldom ends anything. The spirit is quiet for a season, sometimes for years, and then the shape walks again, or another one does. The hunters say the first question at any sighting is not how to bring it down but whether there is any need to; most avatars are seen on their own ground, doing nothing to anybody.

A working is a spirit acting directly through the things and forces of its own place, with no shape to be seen: a bell that rings in no wind, frost that falls on one field, a gate that will not stay shut, a boat turned in the current. Most of what a district reports of its spirit is this.

There is nothing in a working to fight. The question a company asks of one is the question the parish asks: what day is it by the old reckoning, and what has not been done?

The Marked are people bound to a place so deeply that its spirit moves through them: a ferryman sworn to his water, a widow who will not leave her holding, a family three centuries on one piece of ground. They are not possessed, and the hedge-readers are firm on it.

They are often the best interpreters a company could find of what the ground wants. But their moods, their dreams and at last their choices may not be wholly their own, and the danger in a tale of the Marked is seldom the marked person, and usually what is done to them.

Undead is the badge for the dead that walk: a body that has not stayed where it was put. The Zombie in his grave clothes on the road home, the Skeleton on the steps of a roofless chapel with a sword still in its hand, the Forgotten Knight in rusted mail and a ragged red surcoat, the Undead Bear rotted to the skull and still coming on. The realm’s own accounts hold that walking is a condition of a body and not a kind of creature, which is why a bear may bear the badge as well as a man, and why the priest, whose office and bell are for the baptised, has nothing to offer the bear.

It is a loose word, and those who use it most carefully use it least. Common speech calls the vampire undead as well, and the hunters who have had to do with one say plainly that it is nothing of the kind: it is a living person under a curse, who does not age and must feed, and it is not dead at all. The badge is not set on it. What walks is met in season, after the thaw. The parish answers it at night and without a priest, with iron, a fire and a second burial at a place it chooses; where the ground is the Church’s, a Black Lantern house is sent for, at eight to fifteen pounds once the bounds and the keep are added.

Spawn is the harder religious houses’ word for the small demonic things the country calls imps. The country’s own word comes from chapel plays and cheap printed books, not from any office, and the country uses it freely: of the Needle Imp in the rafters of a disused church, which comes down the wall head first; of the Fat Imp in the drains, told oftener than any other because more men work in drains than in church roofs; of the Whisper Imp upstairs in an empty inn, calling down in a voice it has copied. By spawn the houses mean lesser things that serve a greater intruder; the word speaks of service, not of breeding. The scholars answer that it assumes what it ought to prove.

The Church is slower than the houses to call anything a demon. In law a demon is a finding of the chapter, not a kind of creature, and the chapter dislikes making one, most of all on consecrated ground; so a priory records a disturbance and sends a priest to say the office. The works are slower still. Insurance policies exclude losses from demon panic by name, and a director who writes coal imp in his book has told his underwriter that he cannot claim, so the book says bad fitting. A company should look up from a church doorway in daylight and count what is on the beams, and should keep the word demon out of any report it means to be paid for.

Imbued is set on a creature that carries in it a power beyond its nature, as the country sees it: a beast, a growth or a thing of the deep water that does what nothing of its kind has any business doing. It knows what it ought not to know, or comes on through what should stop it. The badge is a countryman’s sorting and not a learned one. It says what witnesses report and nothing of whence the power came, and it does not pretend to. The drovers’ grave mare, said to know which drove will leave somebody behind, is the kind of telling it is made for; the priory’s answer, that droves always do, is the kind of answer it must survive.

Because it rests on the country’s sight, the badge invites argument, and a company will hear it argued. A priest will ask whether the thing is a power of place, and so not a creature at all; the Collegium will want a trace and a certificate; the bounty men will want to know only whether it bleeds. All three are worth hearing, and none of them settles anything. What the badge tells a company is practical. The ordinary measures that serve against a thing of that kind, the lamp, the dog, the lit fold, may not serve against this one, and a party that plans as though they will has planned for a different creature.

Arcanum is the badge for what was worked or set going by arcane art: power put into matter by method, sometimes with artifice, spirit-working, alchemy or a religious rite joined to it. The Iron Golem in the square of a ruined town bears it, and the Stone Golem in the gate of a fallen keep; the learned bodies set it besides on certain imps, where they have judged the art to be at work. It is the one badge the realm gives with something like confidence, for the realm knows what a golem is, which is more than it can say of most things in ruins. What it does not know is who made them, when, or what they were told to keep.

Arcane work is the concern of the learned bodies, and ordinary people approach it as they would a difficult tool: admirable when it holds, dangerous when it fails. Anything brought out of old ground has no title that a court will recognise. At Dover the customs house detains it and sends to Cambridge for a certificate of what it is, which takes four to eleven weeks and which only the examiners there can give. A licensed artificer will tell a company plainly that he cannot stop an iron golem and cannot say what it guards. He will add the first rule with any made thing: learn what it was made to do before standing in its way.

Feral is a matter of conduct, not of kind: a violence past reckoning and very nearly past control. A feral creature is past fear and past hunger, and it kills what it cannot eat. The woodwards of Wychwood know the Feral Wolf by the stag left whole across a ride, and by the dogs it goes for before anything else; the Feral Ram comes through a fold gate, timber and all, at the flock and then at the shepherd. The badge is not kept for beasts. The Red Briar is a growing thing and bears it, and so does the Feral Vampire, a living person under a curse who has gone past all control and kills far beyond hunger.

The word is the drovers’, who use it first of ground a district has given up as no longer worth the lives it costs; the hunters borrowed it for a creature gone past all control. Most that bear the badge bear the blighted one as well, though not all, and the two are not the same. For a company it means that the country’s whole art fails. The march meets a dangerous beast by making its own ground unrewarding, and that answer assumes the beast wants something; a feral thing wants nothing it can be turned from. So the dale goes to it, by daylight, several together, the dogs held back. Agree a day with somebody at the last hearth, and let whoever waits not come in.

Cursed is the badge for a creature under a curse, in the sense the realm gives the word. A curse is an undertaking, like a pact, but made against a person instead of with the power of a place, and it takes hold only with four things: a set form of words, a place to lay it, someone with the standing to lay it, and something given up in exchange. Many curses are nothing more than anger. A few take hold. The vampires bear the badge, the Vampire at the recital and behind the shop counter, the Nosferatu in the drains, the Feral Vampire in the abbey shell: living people under a curse, as the hunters who have met them hold.

The standing to curse comes, in the realm’s understanding, from having been wronged with no other means of putting it right, and curses are laid mostly by the dispossessed, the dying and the refused. That is the trap in any commission to lift one: the party paying to have it lifted is very often the party who did the wronging. A company should ask who was wronged, and how, before it asks anything else, and should expect not to be thanked for the question. The badge itself says only that a curse is on the thing. It does not say who laid it, or what was given up, and it does not pretend to know.

Vampiric is set on whatever feeds on blood, be it beast, growth or cursed person. The Blood Leech, as long as a man’s arm, crosses the flooded roads in summer with smaller ones behind it; the Night Drinker glides down from a barn roof onto the cattle; the Crimson Tick waits in the crack of a ruin, the size of a fist when it is hungry and of a barrel when it has fed; the Vampire Oak stands alone in its clearing with dead deer among its roots, their skin whole and their bodies light. The badge says how a thing feeds and nothing else. It makes no kinship between the leech and the woman at the recital.

Of the vampire proper the hunters are clear, and the ballads are wrong. It is a living person under a curse, not dead, whatever the word undead says; it does not age, and it must feed. Daylight does not burn it. It tires it and sharpens its hunger, so that one which has been out in the sun is weaker and more dangerous at once. The country’s sign for the lesser feeders is a beast found at morning beside something swollen dark red. Its sign for the greater is never a scene but a rate: a ward losing women faster than its neighbours, and bodies drained of more blood than the wound explains.

Charge eater is the badge for a living thing that feeds on worked power: the light of a sealed lamp, the current in a relay, the cut marks of a ward, the treated metal of a reliquary. The Lamp-Leech on the stair lamp bears it, and the Choir Moth in the vaults, the Wire Wisp in the signal cabinet, the Chalk Eater grinding at a ward. They are not made things and they are not powers of place. They breed, they can be starved and they can be killed, and the Collegium keeps them in its schedules as pests of the trade, much as a granary keeps rats in its accounts.

What they cost is seldom a life and often a great deal of money, and sometimes more than money. A lamp that has been fed on burns lower and then not at all; a relay that harbours a wisp sends its messages wrong; a ward that a chalk eater has ground away keeps nothing out, and what it was set against comes in. The sign of them is always the same: worked things failing slowly, in one place, with nobody to blame. A company paid to find the cause of such a failure is very often being paid to find one of these.

Corpse eaters are living things that feed on the dead. They are not the dead themselves, and the country is firm on the point: they breathe, they bleed, they can be starved and they can be killed, and so they are hunted as any dangerous living thing is hunted, never suppressed. Most are gaunt and long in the arm and stand upright, and are met at the edge of a churchyard, in the lower rooms of a ruin, or caught half out of a grave, like the Lean Grey Ghoul in a back lane where a man expects to see a beggar. A few have no such shape at all: the worm-headed kind of the flooded ruins, the Grave Eel, the Corpse Crab of the Kentish foreshore.

The sign of them is new disturbance in old ground: graves opened from below, bones moved and gnawed, a sexton’s tools gone missing. Since 4278 country priests have been taught to ask what is new in the ground rather than what is new in the wood. Corpse eaters gather where burial has already failed, where a parish has emptied or a flood has opened its yard, and they leave when the ground is put right; nor will they stay in a lit place. That is the work for a company, and the clearance fee is the lesser half of it: find the failed ground, keep the living out of it after dark, and see it set right.