LYN HAD GOT HERSELF out of sight of the others before losing her breakfast. One more reason to envy the sorcerer his ability to set aside his emotions until some more convenient time. She had heard the tales, but tales are exaggerated in the telling, everyone knew. Except this was worse than anyone had said, as though the demon had spent the intervening time devising new amusements for itself.
It was not the plight of the vermids themselves that had overthrown her stomach, but the thought that, somewhere in the forest, there might be a similar spire twenty feet tall and built of writhing human beings, fused together in the same abominable way.
Esha woke her halfway through that night, a hand to her shoulder and an urgent murmur in her ear. She clutched for her sword, envisaging . . . Except the horrors she could imagine surely paled compared to what was actually out there. But there was something out there, Esh’ said. Something large, but being quiet. Not a comforting combination.
They woke the others, even Nyrgoth Elder. Weapons to hand they stalked through the midnight woods, jumping at every cracked twig, backing into one another, their hoarse and frightened breath jagged in one another’s ears. Lyn saw the thing move ahead, a great angular mound of a creature squatting over the rotted bole of a fallen tree. For a long time it was no more than a shadow, shifting position occasionally on its many legs. Then . . .
“It’s the wizard’s monster,” Esha said. Her eyes were better in the dark. Allwer, of course, was leery enough about a wizard, let alone any attendant familiar, and had to have the story recounted to him. The thing that had devoured Lyn’s sword back near the Elder’s tower.
Nyrgoth just stared at them blankly. “Where is the demon?” he asked, obviously expecting a continuation of their hunt. Because, apparently, he’d known the monster was here all along, as they stealthily crept up on it. He just hadn’t thought to mention it.
“It won’t harm us,” he told them, still not really understanding. “It hears my voice. I am most of what it can hear in the world, and so it follows me. But it will not break my forbiddances. Soon, most likely, some part of it will fail and we will leave it behind.”
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.