Elder Race(24)
Perhaps it was the monster’s reappearance and ready dismissal that left them unprepared for what they found next.
Allwer had led them to the walls of Birchari, a town only nominally within Watacha’s curtilage, practically self-governing save when the tax caravan came. There would be no levies anymore. Half the place was a fire-scar that must have been fed with oil and the aromatic sap that the Ord fiefdoms exported, that smelled so good and burned so fiercely. The scent was heavy across the air, and probably it masked less wholesome odours. The fire had scorched across the buildings, the wooden wall and a swath of the forest itself before dying out. There were plenty of charred bodies, men and beasts both.
“No demon work this?” Esha asked hollowly.
“I’d say not,” was Allwer’s sober reply. “But they set the fires because of it.”
Having seen what the demon could do, Lyn reckoned burning was the more merciful fate.
“How did it get past the walls?” she pressed.
“It was already within the walls, within the people,” Allwer said.
“Do we go in?” Esha was obviously not keen.
“I will need to study its sign further,” Nyrgoth Elder said, and Lyn wanted to go, too.
“We are going on to Farbourand, or as close as we can, to the house of the demon that Allwer saw. Do you think anything we see in Birchari’s ruins will be worse than that? Let us see what can be seen. Let us grow strong from viewing its crimes, and teach ourselves vengeance.”
“Fine words,” Esha said tiredly, because she had heard that epic poem, too, and had little time for it. Lyn was primarily trying to kindle courage within herself, though. The rest could take or leave the heroic sagas, but the tales had been her inspiration when she was a child and they had carried her to the Tower of the Elders. She could only hope they’d take her farther still.
She drew her sword and Esha followed suit, cupping a sling in her off-hand, lead bullet palmed and ready. Allwer had a stout cudgel, and likely his exile had taught him how to use it.
They padded cautiously in through the great blackened gap in the walls the fire had made, seeing the logs splintered outwards where barrels of sap had exploded in the heat. The intact buildings beyond bore mottled patches of scaly rot, many of them trailing long whiskers that twitched and swayed where there was no wind, winking with black beads that Lyn could only think of as eyes. Which means the demon sees us.
Nyrgoth Elder was stepping towards the closest standing wall, already with some of his little metal tools in hand, just as he had carved off and sealed away a piece of the vermid spire. Lyn kept close behind him, holding her sword high so the demon could see just how much she wasn’t scared of it.
Something moved between the buildings and she let out a startled hiss and stepped back, freezing the rest in their tracks.
“I saw someone,” she swore.
“Someone, or a dead-thing?” Esha demanded, a single suffix turning the word from meaning a living beast to something sick, dead or rotten; unclean.
“It walked like a person,” Lyn hazarded, and then further explanation was unnecessary, for it—they—came limping out.
She counted three of them. Only one had been human. Of the others, one was a cerkitt, a long-bodied, short-limbed beast the Bircharii had kept for hunting. It still had its collar, although the flesh of its neck was puffed out in bulbous blisters so that the strap was almost lost within. One side of its body had moulted its feathery pelt, revealing a hide erupting with sores and more of those hard black eyes. The second non-human figure was made of sarkers, a pest from here all the way to Lannesite. Lyn knew the hand-sized six-legged creatures because there was a bounty on them each Storm-season’s End and people queued up at her mother’s palace to claim the reward, sticks over their shoulders from which the little bodies swung. At first she thought she was seeing a malformed sarker the size of a man, lurching along on oddly joined legs, but then she realised she was seeing a sarker made of sarkers, a hundred of the beasts just mashed together into the right general shape, lumpen body, twisted limbs, but all of it made from still-living animals whose free limbs and mouth parts writhed in constant agony.
Between these two prodigies was something that had been a man, once. He stood on two legs, profoundly lopsided. He still wore a forester’s hard-wearing clothes, though the seams had ripped down one side to the waist where his back and shoulder had bloated out with hard plates and jags, between which protruded long frilled filaments. On his other shoulder was an extra arm and part of a head, as though someone had been huddling close to him and then most of her had been taken away, leaving only those parts. The single remaining eye was closed, and Lyn was thankful. His own head, canted at an odd angle, was three-quarters obscured by a thick growth of the demon-mark, including both eye sockets. Five gleaming discs winked at them from within the shaggy mass.
“Ancestors preserve us,” Esha said frankly. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No,” Lyn said, because if they left now, they’d never stop running until they got to Lannesite, and then where would she be? And where would Watacha be? And how long before the demon spread its corruption across the Barrenpike and into her homeland?
And Nyrgoth said, “There is a voice.”
There was no voice anyone else could hear, and the three monstrosities were still lurching forwards, impeded by their own mutations. Nyrgoth did seem to be concentrating, though. He had a hand up and cast it about, as though it was some new form of ear he could use to track down what he heard.