The Warded Man (Demon Cycle, #1)(128)

He rationed his dwindling supply of food carefully. The edge of the desert, and the nearest hope of more, was at least five days from Anoch Sun on foot, perhaps three if he traveled at night as well as day. That didn’t give him much time, and there was a lot to do.

For the next week, Arlen explored the catacombs, carefully copying new wards wherever he found them. He found more of the stone coffins, but none contained weapons like the first one he’d found. Still, there was an abundance of wards etched upon the coffins and pillars, and more were painted into stories upon the walls. Arlen could not read the pictograms, but he understood much from the body language and expressions on the sequential images. The works were so intricate that he could make out some of the wards on the weapons the warriors carried.

There were new breeds of corelings in the pictures, as well. A series of images showed men killed by demons that looked human, save for their teeth and claws. One central image showed a thin coreling with spindly limbs and a scrawny chest, its head enormous for its body, standing before a host of demons. The coreling faced off against a robed man who stood before a like number of human warriors. The faces of the two were contorted as if in a contest of wills, but they stood well apart. A halo of light surrounded them, as their respective armies looked on.

Perhaps most striking about the image, the man held no weapon. The light emanating from him seemed to be from a ward painted—tattooed?—upon his forehead. Arlen looked to the next image, and saw the demon and its host flee as the humans raised their spears in triumph.

Arlen copied the ward from the man’s forehead carefully into his notebook.

Days passed, and food dwindled. If he stayed in Anoch Sun any longer, he would starve before he found more. He decided to leave at first light for Fort Rizon. Once he reached the city, he could secure a bank note against his accounts to cover a horse and supplies to return.

But it galled him to leave having barely scratched the surface of Anoch Sun. Many tunnels had collapsed, requiring time to dig through, and there were many more buildings that might have entrances to underground chambers. The ruins held the key to destroying demonkind, and this was the second time his stomach had forced him to abandon them.

The corelings rose while he was lost in thought. They came in numbers to Anoch Sun, despite the lack of prey. Perhaps they thought the buildings might one day attract more men, or perhaps they took pleasure in dominating a place that had once stood in defiance of their kind.

Arlen rose and walked to the edge of his wards, watching the corelings dance in the moonlight. His stomach rumbled, and he wondered, not for the first time, at the nature of demons. They were magical creatures, immortal and inhuman. They destroyed, but they did not create. Even their corpses burned away instead of rotting to feed the soil. But he had seen them feed, seen them shit and piss. Was their nature entirely outside the natural order?

A sand demon hissed at him. “What are you?” Arlen asked, but the creature only swiped at the wards, growling in frustration and stalking away when they flared.

Arlen watched it go, his thoughts dark. “To the Core with it,” he muttered, leaping out from the protection of his wards. The coreling turned just in time to take a blow from Arlen’s warded knuckles. His punches struck the unsuspecting creature like thunderbolts. Before it knew what had hit it, the demon was dead.

Other corelings approached at the sound, but they moved warily, and Arlen was able to dart back to the building and cover his wards long enough to drag his victim through.

“Let’s see if you can’t give something back, after all,” Arlen told the dead creature. Using cutting wards painted onto a sharp piece of obsidian, he opened up the sand demon, surprised to find that beneath the hard armor its flesh was as vulnerable as his. The muscle and sinew was tough, but not so much more than that of any beast.

The stench of the creature was terrible. The black ichor that served as its blood stank so badly that Arlen’s eyes teared and he gagged. Holding his breath, he cut meat from the creature, and shook it vigorously to remove the excess fluid before setting it over his small fire. The ichor smoked and eventually burned away, the smell of the cooking flesh becoming tolerable.

When it was cooked through, Arlen held up the dark, foul meat, and the years melted away, casting him back to Tibbet’s Brook, and the words of Coline Trigg. He had caught a fish that day, but its scales were brown and sickly, and the Herb Gatherer had made him throw it back. “Never eat something that looks sick,” Coline had said. “What you put in your mouth becomes a part of you.”

Will this become a part of me, too? he wondered. He looked at the meat, mustered his nerve, and put it in his mouth.





SECTION IV



CUTTER’S

HOLLOW



331–332 AR





CHAPTER 25

A NEW VENUE

331 AR





THE RAIN INCREASED to a steady pour, and Rojer picked up his pace, cursing his luck. He had been planning to leave Shepherd’s Dale for some time, but hadn’t expected it to be under such hurried and unpleasant circumstances.

He supposed he couldn’t blame the shepherd. True, the man spent more time tending to his flock than his wife, and it was she who made the advance, but coming home early to beat the rain and finding a boy in bed with your wife didn’t tend to put men in a reasoning mood.