Her hand hovered over it and Kellni had almost decided on picking it up when something else caught her eye. There was a darker smudge on the tall grass just outside the gate, at the very extremity of the light thrown off by her meager lantern. Holding the knife out in front of her like a lance, Kellni half crouched, half walked toward the stain on the grass. She passed through the open gate. It felt very vulnerable, as if being inside the fence offered her some sort of protection from the outside world.
When she lifted her lantern over the stain on the grass, any lingering doubt she might have had about this being a lighthearted All Souls Eve prank vanished like morning fog at sunrise. It was blood and it was everywhere. A large splash of blood led off through the high grass as if painted by a man-sized brush. There was so much of it. It dripped off the individual blades of grass in silky ribbons.
Before Kellni could process the full horror of what she was seeing, there was a sound behind her. She whirled, both lantern and knife held at the ready. There was nothing there. Except there was. She could hear it. There were shuffling footsteps coming toward her through the grass.
Still, the lantern showed her nothing.
“Selma, RUN!” she yelled, as the thing behind her screamed.
It was a scream unlike anything she had ever heard. Whatever was behind her in the pumpkin patch wasn’t human. Its high-pitched cry sounded like a pig being slaughtered, mingled with the throaty call of some massive beast of war. The sound alone was enough to convince Kellni that she didn’t want to hear it, much less see it. She pelted back toward the gate as fast as her feet would carry her.
Selma had, for once in her young life, listened without question. The child was racing up the path toward the house, the back of her dress a pale smudge in the darkness. Kellni was thankful for that. At least she might be able to save her daughter, even if she couldn’t save herself.
Saving herself seemed to be growing less and less of a possibility. Kellni could feel the thing in pursuit of her. Its footfalls pounded the earth behind her, and she dared not look over her shoulder to see how close it was. She knew that it was gaining on her. She could feel the air it moved swirling around her like a sudden winter storm. It was cold. Cold enough that she was able to see her breath as she gasped for air.
The thing behind her screamed again. It was almost on top of her. Something slammed into Kellni’s shoulder, sending her tumbling head over heels. The lantern went one way, its glass globe shattering as it hit the ground. The knife went the other, leaving her defenseless.
“Run, Selma, RUN!” she managed to cry, before something cold and slimy wrapped around her ankles.
It flipped her over with ease. Somewhere off to her side, the lantern had caught fire to a stack of hay bales. Light blossomed in the night. Kellni would have been happier dying in the dark. As the flames licked higher around the stack of dried fodder, she got a good look at the thing that was dragging her into its salivating, bloodstained maw.
Eight feet tall, its body was a mass of black tentacles, wrapped around each other. The tentacles formed a trunk, on which the thing’s bulbous head perched. Kellni uttered a bark of hysterical laughter. It looked like a giant pumpkin, but pumpkins didn’t have mouths filled with jagged teeth as long as a man’s fingers. She was still laughing when its powerful limbs pulled her toward those teeth. The laughter stopped when its jaws clamped down on her, tearing through flesh and bone.
Nightwind plodded forward, his head down and his nose pointed toward the frost-gilded ground. It wasn’t the first time that Tiadaria had thought that her faithful companion might be more attuned to the vagaries of her mood than any other horse would have been. She leaned forward in the saddle and gave him an affectionate slap on the neck.
“We should be there within the hour,” Adamon said from atop his mount. The dappled gray pony that lumbered alongside Nightwind was as non-descript and boring as the man who sat astride it.
Tiadaria didn’t trust herself to reply. It seemed like every time she opened her mouth on the trip from Dragonfell to Havenhedge, she and Adamon had ended up in a heated argument about something. Their conflict covered a wide range of topics, from the construction of the new ether gate in Dragonfell to the estimated severity of the coming winter. It seemed like whatever she said, Adamon took delight from standing on the opposite side of the issue, just to vex her. If she had said the sky was blue, he would tell her that it was more of a sea foam green.
They crested a gentle ridge and there, below them, Havenhedge lay nestled in the foothills of the Dragonback Mountains. Tiadaria fought down the urge to point out that Adamon’s timing was off. There was no point in stooping to his level. The town seemed sleepy and still, not the kind of place to have sent an urgent dispatch to the capital begging for immediate military assistance. The runner had been in bad shape when she’d arrived. The young woman had come very near to running herself into an early grave, but the healers and clerics at the hospitals had patched her up with their considerable skill. She might not ever run again, but at least she’d come out of the ordeal with her life.
Something about the scene below didn’t seem right to her, but Tiadaria shrugged it off as an overactive imagination. It hadn’t been that long since the conflict with Nerillia and Tionne at Dragonfell. She was still a little jumpy. She noticed Adamon’s hand hovering over his belt and felt a little better. Few people knew about the rare and powerful weapon he kept in the holster on his hip.
Since the events in Dragonfell, Adamon had eschewed the traditional garb of the Quintessentialists. He no longer wore the long off-white robes of the Order of the Ivory Flame.
Instead, he opted for a black travel cloak, a simple tunic, breeches, and boots. Tiadaria wondered, but would never ask, how much his choice of weapon influenced the change in his appearance. The dwarven hand-cannon he carried would have been unwieldy in a robe. With that much loose cloth, there were too many spurs and ridges to get caught on. The simple leather holster under his cloak was far easier to handle in combat.
Tiadaria spurred Nightwind toward the town. The sooner they were there, the sooner they would know what was going on. Adamon’s mount had just fallen in step with hers when suddenly both of them reared back with a terrified whinny. Tiadaria grabbed for the saddle horn, only just avoiding being bucked off the plunging horse. Nightwind was normally a stolid beast, well used to the hazards of battle. It had to be something very out of the ordinary to spook him into such a reaction.
She managed to get her steed calmed and pointed in the right direction down the road. The horse took a few reluctant steps and then Tiadaria understood what had made the beasts panic so. It was as if they’d crossed an invisible line in the road. On one side was a sunny autumnal afternoon. On the other, the air was cold and pregnant with a strong sense of foreboding. Turning Nightwind to face back the way she’d come, she watched Adamon move toward the invisible division between Havenhedge and the rest of the Imperium.
As Adamon crossed the point, his features twisted into a grimace, which he then schooled into a scowl. He glanced at Tiadaria, then over his shoulder. He, too, turned his mount to look back the way they had come. There was a shimmer in the air over the road, like the waves of heat you could see over the Western Dessert during high summer. It certainly wasn’t obvious. If it wasn’t your intention to find something abnormal, odds are you’d never have seen it.
“Well then,” Adamon said in his slow drawl. “What do we have here?”
“Whatever it is, the horses hate it.” Tiadaria leaned forward, patting Nightwind in a way she hoped conveyed reassurance. The horse nickered and tossed his head. “I think they’re probably right about it.”
“Animals can be very attenuated to changes in the Quintessential Sphere. I suspect that whatever we find in Havenhedge will be related to this phenomenon. However, we won’t know what’s going on here until we discover what’s going on there.”
Adamon pointed to the town, which, on this side of the disturban
ce, had taken on a more sinister countenance. From above and farther away, it looked as if it might just be a lazy afternoon without many people in the fields on roads. From where they stood, the town looked abandoned. No one was in the fields, on the roads, or manning the guard post that stood just outside the outlying town buildings.
A cold knot tightened in the pit of her stomach. Her hands dropped to the hilts of her scimitars. She felt, and was reassured by, the familiar lance of pain that shot from her palms up into the center of her chest. That deep burning was reassuring. It reminded her of her connection to the Quintessential Sphere and that she wasn’t just another fighter stumbling into the unknown. She was the Swordmage and Captain of the Grand Army of the Imperium. There were very few threats she couldn’t face. Fewer still she couldn’t stare down with the assistance of a powerful mage by her side.
Adamon might have liked to challenge her at every turn, but when it came to combat, there were few people Tiadaria would want by her side more. Unlike Faxon’s boyish, almost reckless, combat style, Adamon was more restrained. He was concerned with outcomes, advantages, and tactics. It was a welcome counterbalance to what Tiadaria had to admit were her own impulsive, reactionary ways. No matter how much they annoyed each other, they worked well together in combat, and Tiadaria was thankful for that.
Slipping off Nightwind’s back, Tiadaria took him by the reigns and led him outside the disturbance. As soon as she had passed its perimeter, she felt much better. As if all the joy and happiness she was capable of came rushing back to her. The apprehension and sense of impending doom was gone, as if someone had blown out a candle. A short distance off the path, there was a languid stream amongst the tall grass. Tiadaria looped his reins over a knob in a small tree, assured that Nightwind would have plenty of grazing fodder and water should he need it, until she could return for him.
The Quintessentialist followed her lead, providing for his mount in a similar fashion. After the horses had been tended to, they slipped past the almost invisible barrier and back onto the path toward Havenhedge. Travel on foot was much slower than it had been on horseback. What would have taken them less than an hour mounted ended up taking them almost twice that on foot. They were encumbered also by the fact that whenever either of them heard a strange noise, they’d stop and investigate before moving on. The last thing they wanted was to be on the receiving end of an ambush.
It was fortunate, then, that most of the noises they stopped to look into were just field beasts set free of their tethers and roaming the countryside nearest to the town. Tiadaria and Adamon remarked on the oddity of the beasts being unattended, then continued their approach. The nearer they got to the town, the more disturbing things they began to see.
The last turn toward the town lead them through a notch dugout of a tall hill that towered over them on either side. It reminded Tiadaria far too much of the blind pass where she’d been ambushed with Wynn and Faxon. Faxon had almost died after ignoring her advice, and she almost wanted to tell Adamon to go back and find another way, but this wasn’t as long as the pass. They’d be through it soon enough to warrant the risk.
“Mother of Light,” Adamon swore as they moved out of the shadow of the hill and into the town proper.
Tiadaria respected no deity enough to call on them for aid, but she understood Adamon’s sudden exclamation. There were patches of congealed crimson on the grass and in the dust of the road. It was easy to see why the runner had almost killed herself in her urgency to reach Dragonfell. Whatever had happened here had been a massacre. There was so much blood.
“Not the Xarundi.” Tiadaria sounded much more certain than she felt. She’d only seen a few places where there was this much blood and, almost always, it was the handiwork of the massive wolf-like beasts who had once ruled most of Solendrea.
Adamon shook his head. He went to one knee, looking at the dust around one of the blackening pools of blood. He indicated the area with spread fingers.
“No claw marks, no paw pads. It wasn’t the Xarundi. Whatever it was, though, was big.
Look at this.”
The Grand Inquisitor turned on his knee, painting a line with his spread fingers from the blood into the tall grass at the verge of the path. Blood streaked the grass that had been beaten down by the assailant’s passage. The trail was at least as wide as a man was tall. Adamon was right. Big was an understatement.
“I almost wish it were the Xarundi,” Tiadaria said, a certain amount of wistfulness in her voice. Her lips twisted in a little half-smile when Adamon shot a startled glance in her direction.
“The demon you know…”
“Ah.” He nodded, and then glanced back toward the battered grass. “In this case, you might be right. We should see if there are survivors.”
“Survivors?” Tiadaria was aghast. “You don’t think that everyone is dead, do you?”
“Have you seen anyone? Heard anyone?”
“No, but—”
“We won’t know for certain until we know for certain.”
Tiadaria ground her teeth. Of all the odd habits and annoying turns of phrase that Adamon was prone to throwing at her, that one bothered her the most. If the inquisitor didn’t hear it with his own ears or see it with his own eyes, it wasn’t fact. It was a guess. No matter how many times Tiadaria had tried to argue that sometimes, guesses were right, her words had fallen on deaf ears.
“Very well,” she said, her voice tight and controlled. She pointed the tip of her scimitar to the left side the main street leading into the town. “I’ll take this side. You take the other. We’ll make certain.”
If Adamon heard the snide tone that twisted the last word she spoke to him, he didn’t give any indication of it. Instead, he slipped his weapon from its holster and stepped up onto the wide porch that surrounded the first building they encountered. The sound of his boots on the planks was louder than Tiadaria would have imagined. She watched him make his careful approach to the guardhouse door and then followed his lead.
The building on her side of the street seemed to be a general store. There were large windows that faced the main street, with different wares propped up on crates just inside the glass. That made it difficult to see very far into the building. She’d have to go in and do a more thorough inspection. Tiadaria hesitated for a moment, trying to decide if she should just kick the door in. If there were people inside, she was likely to scare them even more if she were to just barge in. She opted to go the civilized route. She knocked on the door, feeling both stupid and apprehensive.
Her knock was answered by silence. The handle was a crosspiece of wood attached to a rope that ran through a hole in the door. It would lift a bar on the other side when she pulled down on it. Unless it was locked. She almost wished it would be. If people were barricaded inside their homes or places of business, that was better than the alternative. Her thoughts turned, unbidden, back to the bloody trail through the tall grass.
Tiadaria grabbed the handle and pulled. There was a jerk as the bar came up on the other side of the door and it swung inward. The hinges creaked in protest and she jumped at the sound. Tiadaria didn’t dare take her eyes off the darkened portal leading into the store, and she hoped that Adamon hadn’t seen her fright.
“Great Gatzbin’s Gonads,” she swore, stepping into the store. The light was dim and smoky, the faint flickering of a lamp drawing the last drops of its oil into the wick. Even in that meager light, Tiadaria could see the chaos that surrounded her. Barrels and crates were toppled over, their contents strewn across the floor. Tools and simple weapons were pulled off their pegs on the walls, but left abandoned almost in place.
Whatever happened here had been quick and in a blind panic. It looked as if people grabbed whatever they could get their hands on and abandoned the rest. They didn’t even stop to turn down the lamps. If just one of those had broken free, it could mean the building burning to the ground. It was obvious that the building catching on fire wasn’t the primary concern.
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Stepping over the worst of the clutter on the floor, Tiadaria made a quick circuit of the building. She found a small office and storeroom in the back. Above, by means of a rickety staircase, she found two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. A family had lived here. A girl, a boy, and two adults, Tiadaria guessed. Whoever had lived here, they weren’t here anymore. The question remained, where were they? She stepped out onto the porch and looked across at the guardhouse. Adamon was standing on the porch, leaning up against one of the posts. Catching his eye, she spread her hands and shrugged. He nodded and motioned to the next building on his side of the street. She indicated that she understood and carried on to her next stop.
They went on that way until the sun slipped low on the western horizon. Tiadaria didn’t want to be alone in this town after the sun went down, and she was relieved when Adamon expressed the same feeling as they met up in the town square. The only sound was the trickle of a stone fountain in the center of the square.
“Well,” Adamon said, sinking to the rim of the fountain and rubbing the back of his neck, “if there are survivors, they’re hidden very well. I haven’t found anyone or any bodies.”
“Me either. Just a lot of buildings that look like everyone left in a hurry.” The Quintessentialist nodded.
“Maybe we got lucky. Maybe they all managed to get away.”
“I’m not sure that makes us lucky,” Tiadaria said with a snort. “We’re still here!”
“True enough.”
They lapsed into silence. Tiadaria standing and Adamon seated on the edge of the fountain. She closed her eyes, rubbing her palms against her thighs. They were sore from contact with the scimitars for so long. There was a noise and she stood still as a statue. There it was again. Her eyes snapped open and she looked at Adamon.
“Did you—”
“Hear that? Yes.”
His curt gesture plunged them back into silence. The gentle trickle of the fountain now seemed to be the deafening thunder of a waterfall. They walked away from it with slow, methodical steps. Tiadaria called on the power of the Quintessential Sphere to augment her hearing. With the aid of magic, the noise was clear as day. She glanced at Adamon and he jerked his head in the direction of the sound. He’d come to the same conclusion she had. Somewhere nearby, a child was crying.
Quintessential Tales: A Magic of Solendrea Anthology Page 11