Flesh-&-Bone(28)

These were fighters, Lilah decided. She appraised their weapons and saw every kind of knife, hatchet, cleaver, ax, and sword—but not one firearm.

As more people came out of the woods, the others greeted them with joyful smiles, handshakes, and hugs.

Lilah moved away from the rocks and silently threaded her way through a stand of leafy shrubs so she could reach a high stone ledge that rose above and behind the group of people. She moved like a ghost, and no one saw or heard her. She flattened out and went utterly still with a clear view of the gathering through a tiny break in the overhanging foliage.

Two of the gathered people produced glass bottles filled with a viscous red liquid. They uncorked the bottles and moved through the crowd, dribbling the fluid onto the ends of the red ribbons. The breeze carried the foul smell of it to Lilah, and she wrinkled her nose. It was not the same as cadaverine but definitely something similar, and it probably served the same purpose.

The crowd suddenly stiffened and turned as two additional figures stepped out into the sunlight at the edge of the stream. A woman, with a brute of a man walking a pace behind her. The gathered mass of fighters bowed with great reverence to her.

Lilah heard many of them speak a name as they bowed. “Mother Rose.”

The woman—this “Mother Rose”—was the most beautiful person she had ever seen, like one of the goddesses from the books of ancient myths that Lilah had read. She was tall, with haughty features and eyes that seemed to radiate their own dark light. Unlike the others, she had all her hair, and it fell in gleaming black curls around her face and shoulders. This woman’s personal power was such that all the others, even the men who towered above her, seemed to shrink in her presence.

Behind Mother Rose was a man Lilah knew had to be a bodyguard. He was enormous, a giant who could not have been an inch less than seven feet tall. He had skin the color of mahogany and a shrewd, intelligent face on which was no single trace of compassion or humanity. It was a killer’s face, and Lilah knew what killers looked like. The giant stood apart, just inside the darkness of the forest. He leaned on the haft of a long-handled sledgehammer. There were knives sheathed at both hips, and around his neck he wore a necklace of withered human hands. Lilah counted nineteen of them. Somehow she did not think that these hands had been cut from the wrists of zoms.

“Blessings to you all, my reapers,” Mother Rose said in a soft southern drawl. “May you always walk the shortest path to the darkness.”

“Praise be to the darkness,” they responded.

Reapers, mused Lilah. Her hands tightened on the shaft of her spear.

One of the men Lilah had seen on the bikes, the one with the two-handed sword, knelt and kissed one of the streamers that was tied to Mother Rose’s ankle. It did not seem to matter to him that this streamer had trailed in the dirt and mud.

“What have you found, Brother Simon?” asked Mother Rose.

“The gray wanderers you flushed toward the clearing are still there,” said the man. “Jack and I—”

“Brother Jack,” corrected Mother Rose.

Brother Simon nodded, took a breath, and continued. “Brother Jack and I put the call out all along the western slope. There are at least three or four hundred grays heading downland now, which means that those trails will be totally blocked. Sister Abigail has her reapers on the north flank, and Brother Gomez is in a nice blind down at the southern end. If any of Carter’s people slip the grays, they’ll have to take one of those two routes, and they’ll walk right into our people.”

Mother Rose nodded.

“I think Carter and his people are still heading southwest,” continued Brother Simon.

“Good,” said Mother Rose, nodding her approval. “That means the heretics will walk right into Saint John.”

At the mention of that name, Lilah saw many of the people stiffen, their smiles becoming tighter, forced.

“It would be better for Carter if he let us catch them,” said one of the reapers, a woman with red poppies tattooed on her face. “They’d at least have a chance to join us instead of immediately going into the darkness.”

Many of the others nodded. Mother Rose’s smile was less forced and entirely unpleasant. Lilah did not like that smile. Not one little bit. It was the way she imagined a shark might smile.

Mother Rose said, “Saint John is the favored son of the Lord Thanatos.”

“Praise be to the darkness,” replied the gathered reapers immediately upon hearing the name.