by Kaleb Schad
As he drew his sword, slow, silent, a whisper, he couldn’t keep from smiling. His old familiar blade in his hand. The hsing-li in him and around him. This was something he’d done. Could do. For the first time in three years, since walking out of Anathest, Anaz felt driven by a purpose rooted in who he was.
He leapt from the ridge.
34
Daveon bent over with his hands on his knees, strands of his retching kiting off of his lips. He smeared his arm across his mouth and picked up his sword and straightened. He looked behind the house.
The boy’s skull still flared in his mind’s eye. His lips had remained. They’d looked like Elnis’s, small and almost feminine in their childish fullness.
Syla and Red walked around the side of the house and he went to them. They were still tethered together. Syla was snorting and looking towards the barn. It was burning, looked to have been burning for an hour or more already. Daveon could feel the heat from here.
Then he realized Syla wasn’t looking at the barn at all. She was looking at his horses! Behind the barn, just barely in the light cast from the flames, he could see his two stallions in the turnout pasture. He’d recognize those bastards’ shapes anywhere. They’d herded together in the far corner, pressing up against the wooden fence, as far from the burning barn as they could get. He started humming with tension. Airim bless it, those were his horses! He was certain. He had no idea why they’d be in the same pasture—those two stallions weren’t in the habit of sharing anything, mares or otherwise—or why they hadn’t been killed like the cattle, but he didn’t care. All he wanted was to round them up and get as far away from here as he could.
There was only one thing nagging at him. The hole in the room. He couldn’t leave without checking. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he abandoned someone to face these creatures.
He left Syla and Red and went around the back of the house. The tip of the sword twitched and he fought to keep from dropping it again in his sweating palm.
It was a small hole, but somebody could have squeezed through it. He saw claw marks next to it, but Daveon couldn’t tell if it was animal, human or…worse.
He looked all around him. Nothing moved.
He turned to go back to his horses and stopped. He looked at the tipped wagon. It was on its side, the frame for a carriage had splintered and dug into the ground, setting the wagon almost as a lean-to. One wheel pointed towards the heavens, the wagon’s traces jutting straight outward. There were shovels and rakes and hoes and long wooden handles stacked next to the opening. Stacked. Not tossed. Not thrown from the wagon when it flipped over.
Daveon wiped his palms on his pants again and crept toward the wagon. Like a cat touching a waterfall, he reached the blade forward and tapped a rake’s handle. Nothing. He stepped closer. He tapped again, this time on the wagon itself. Nothing. He crouched and looked into the black.
Two yellow eyes caught the flames and blinked at him.
Daveon screamed and fell backward, dropping his sword, kicking wildly, his hands clawing at the dirt and grass and his heels slipping in the mud. He stopped two or three yards from the wagon.
A girl’s head shot out of the shadows. A girl! She was eight or nine, small, with gold blond hair, though it was streaked with mud and strands of straw.
He jumped to his feet and caught her as she got her shoulders out from under the cart. She screamed. Daveon wrapped a hand over her mouth and shushed her.
“Stop!” he hissed. “Shhh.”
Something clicked, a rattling sound of sharp, pointed ticks. It came from the barn. Daveon held his hand over the girl’s mouth. A hunched creature walked out of it, black against the flames. It stood on two legs, but was curled forward with a massive arch to its spine so that its front hands dragged along the ground. A long tail wagged lazily like a snake. Odd shapes of hair and bone silhouetted against the flames. A Fletcher.
At some point, Daveon would have thought the body stops feeling fear, that there was a bottom to this well of terror, but it seemed his was bottomless. He couldn’t say how long he knelt there, one hand on the girl’s mouth, the other half out-stretched for his sword, stuck between decision and despair or how long he would have stayed that way had the girl not moved. She wriggled from him and slid back under the wagon.
Good idea.
Daveon snagged his sword and somehow squeezed through the tool handles and into a space much too small for him. Once under the wagon, he again grabbed the girl and pulled her to him, one hand on her mouth, the other holding her shivering form to his.
The Fletcher looked from the horses to the wagon.
Please go. Please go. Please go.
It stalked towards them.
“I’m probably the nicest guy in all of Fisher Pass, maybe all of Blackhand’s Barony,” Malic said. He swiped the back of his deformed hand over his scalp.
Keep him talking.
“You’re a real knight,” Alysha said.
“Oh don’t give me that. You’ve met Sir Nattic.” Extra emphasis on the “sir.” “A knight’s oath is as solid as an ox’s fart. I’m talking about real niceness. Helping people.”
Alysha smiled and tried to pass him, a wooden mug in her hand, but Malic put an arm out to lean against the wall, blocking her path.
“You know how many people in this village would have starved were it not for me? How many kids I feed?”
“It’s true,” Alysha said. She gave him her warmest smile, an oily feeling in her stomach. “There are people that owe you.”
“Take your kids for example.”
Ice in Alysha’s veins.
“That oldest, what’s his name? Nikolai? He probably had a supper tonight. Maybe it wasn’t a lot, but it was something. He sat there and he chewed it and he swallowed it and the entire time he was probably thinking this is of my father and my mother. They have provided this.”
He stepped closer and Alysha had to step back to keep him from touching her.
“He probably thought,” Malic said, “‘My father is a hero, off helping people and still we have food to eat.’”
Malic stepped forward again. Alysha stepped back. She set the mug on the bar.
“What was his supper tonight?” Malic asked. “What did I provide your child tonight?”
“Barley mutton,” Alysha said. She slid against the bar. There would be a knife at the end of it, on the shelf underneath. She’d been sharpening knives again that night, had left it there. She dragged her fingers along the shelf as she backed away.
“Mutton,” Malic scoffed and shook his head. “All that money I gave you and your child eats mutton.”
“You gave us money, aye.” She wished she didn’t sound so afraid, but she might as well wish a star to fall from the sky and strike down Malic where he stood. “And we’re thankful.”
“Are you, though? That Daveon. He comes in here and he works my Stop and all he does is tell story after story about his glory days in the army and his father’s glory days and, oh we can’t forget, his glorious brother Rayen’s glory days. Not once does he say thank you to me in front of the others. Carrying on like he’s too good to be here, like it were some kind of dishonor. A mighty Therentell forced to work for a living.”
She was running out of room to back up. Where was the Airim-blessed knife?
“And then you. You come in here when you’re fuck-up husband runs off on a fool’s errand and you don’t give me the light of day.”
“I do,” she said.
“You don’t look at me. You don’t—”
“I do.” Was it begging? She was scared she was going to start crying. Where was the Airim-blessed knife?
“—touch me. You cringe when I’m even near you.” He was near now. He was near.
“And yet, I’m the one feeding your children.”
“It’s a kindness,” Alysha whispered.
“Gods you’re beautiful.”
There was nowhere for her to go now. Her back was again
st the bar and the wall and her heart was against her chest and her throat.
Malic reached his twisted knob of a hand up to Alysha’s face and slid it down her cheek.
“How a creature as graceful as you stays with a man like him. I would have you, you know? Say the word and we would be wed.”
Alysha couldn’t believe this was happening. What had she done? What had they ever done to deserve this?
“Malic,” she said. She realized it was the first time she had said his name. It was a mistake. He liked it. She could tell he liked the sound of his name on her lips. “I’m married.”
Malic grinned. “That might be the easiest problem in the world to fix. May already be fixed for all we know. And, let’s be honest, it’s not so much of a problem in the first place.”
His eyes slowly, so slowly, slithered from her face, down her neck to the her chest. He licked his lips and reached out with his left hand and pressed it against her breast.
Alysha sobbed. It came out of her and she closed her eyes and turned her head away from him.
“Shhhh,” Malic whispered. “There are so many ways a person can offer their thanks.”
He stepped closer.
There! Her right hand found the knife, the blade and she twisted it around and snatched at the hilt.
Malic pressed his crotch into Alysha’s hip and she could feel his erection, thick and squishy against her.
“Do you feel that?” he whispered, his mouth inches from her ear.
She opened her eyes and looked at him and she knew he could see something had shifted and then he felt why. The blade pushed into his groin, the tip digging through the fabric and pricking his skin.
“Do you feel that?” Alysha whispered.
35
Isabell is alive!
She turned her head, watched him leap from the edge.
Anaz dropped straight into the middle of the monstrosities. He reached out with the hsing-li and asked the earth to rise up and meet him, then swallow his force as if he were a boulder thrown into a lake. The ground buckled and exploded out in a circular wave, earth and stone and trees and roots tossed mercilessly. The creatures flew through the air, tumbling head over feet, bellowing demonic shrieks.
Anaz caught Isabell in a cocoon within the hsing-li, towing her to him. She lay wrapped like a mummy, her eyes wide and clinging to Anaz. He slashed at her, his blade perfectly distanced, slicing through the calcified cage. And that was all the time he had to help her.
“Mmmmm,” Isabell hummed behind the webbing.
Anaz tore into the creatures. His blade screamed, sharp whistling sounds as it sliced air and Wretched alike.
He couldn’t sense the creatures in the hsing-li. It chewed the bottom out of his excitement, this fear of these unholy things. It was as if they didn’t exist inside the hsing-li. Black voids where they should have been. Not even the un-creation of a sandfury had felt like this.
Four of the Fletchers surrounded him. Anaz’s blade made a medley of sounds as it smashed itself against a mixture of metal and bone and flesh. The creatures cried a constant rattle of screams and ticks.
Anaz buckled forward. It felt as if a hand had wrapped itself around his soul, sucking every last drop of his strength. The Wallwraith. It extended an arm toward him, bone fingers wrapped with gauze. Loose muscle dangled off the skeleton arm and the blue glow from under its cloak flared bright, cycling and pulsing.
Anaz coughed. He couldn’t breathe.
Magic. Necrotic magic. He hadn’t been ready for that. And now you’re going to die, you foolish idiot.
A Fletcher bit into his right shoulder. He tried to scream, but was too weak even for that.
Another one raked a hand across his back. Four long gashes opened down his spine.
Inside, the hsing-li guttered to a futile glow, then snuffed out.
And then Isabell charged the Wallwraith. He’d never seen the angels of Al-Hakar, but he thought this was what they looked like. She brought her sword down on the Wraith’s arm, separating it in a smooth slice. The hand crumpled in on itself, turning to dust before hitting the ground. The Wallwraith threw back its head and howled.
Anaz gasped. Each breath felt as if he were sucking life itself back into him. He regained the hsing-li.
“Thank you,” he said.
“We even?” she said.
Another Fletcher sprinted at him, its jaws wide enough to swallow all of Anaz’s head. He lifted his sword and drove it through the creature’s mouth so hard that the cross guard and hilt exploded out the back of its skull. Black gore coated his arm. He used the speared creature’s body as a shield and swung it to intercept another leaping Fletcher’s bite.
“Getting there,” he called.
Behind him he could hear Isabell battling the Wallwraith. The thing spoke with a voice that held thousands of other voices within it. It was no language Anaz could understand, but he didn’t need to. The creature’s fury was clear.
A hot thrashing exploded in the meat of his right leg. Only by the grace of the hsing-li was he able to stay standing. A Fletcher buried its claws to their second knuckle in his thigh. Anaz slashed down, separating the hand from the creature’s arm, then separated its head from its shoulders on the back swing.
Anaz’s body began to yield. So much pain. He hadn’t forgotten that this sort of thing hurt, but he had forgotten how badly.
Isabell screamed. Two dozen, black spiders materialized out of nowhere and savaged her. The Wallwraith held its left arm out toward Isabell. The one she’d cut off began to regrow, snaking tendrils of pink muscle twisting like wet snakes over themselves, forming something akin to an arm, firming.
Anaz leaped for the Wallwraith and buried his sword through the creature’s side. He aimed for where he suspected the glow was coming from. The creature wailed. All those voices. A chorus of agony. And then it dropped to the ground as nothing more than a pile of cloth and brittle bones.
Isabell collapsed under the spiders, her sword tumbling from her grip.
He gasped and strained to breathe, a tingling exhaustion in his lungs and arms.
How did you get so bad at this? So much for being the Hero of the PIt.
Three remaining Fletchers circled Anaz.
Daveon faced the creature coming towards him, tufts of animal fur, some grey, some black, some blond, standing at bizarre angles, separated by areas of hard carapace and slime. This one had no eyes, no nostrils, only a hard crusted shell where its face should be and dozens of slivered teeth. A leather cord stitched up the side of its shell. It opened its maw and sucked at the air, a thick, pink wormy tongue coiling in and out.
It looked like the one at Lindisfarne, the one at the top of the stairs, that had killed those girls’ father. The one Daveon had killed. Barely. There would be no second performance like that. He knew this. Somehow, despite the haze of fear, he thought it ironic that the second time ever facing one of these creatures, he was again protecting someone else’s child. He wanted to give a bitter laugh.
The creature looked at Syla and Red and the horses jumped and snorted and tried to run, but the lead rope snapped taut between them. They stood solid, confused.
The Fletcher turned toward the wagon.
The girl’s shivers went from a tremor to a near uncontrollable thrashing.
“Shhh,” Daveon whispered, his lips touching her ear. He tried to squeeze the shaking out of her. Or had he sucked them into himself? He wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold the sword. What was the point? He couldn’t fight this thing. Look at it. Created by a god outside of even Airim’s reach. Spawned to gather souls to its master’s table. Reasonably, he knew they could be killed. After all, hadn’t he already done it once? Hadn’t his own brothers killed dozens between them? But reason wasn’t even in the same nation as Daveon right now. And admit it, Daveon wasn’t them. He’d thought he was, but he wasn’t. This wasn’t where he belonged. This wasn’t where he wanted to die.
The creature was on them. It
leaned forward and watery mucus dripped from its dome-shaped face.
Daveon held his breath.
With a howl, the creature thrashed one taloned hand into the pile of tools, splintering several and sending the rest flying like dried leaves.
The girl screamed.
36
Anaz opened a pit under the Fletcher to his right. The ground, rock solid a moment ago, turned liquid and the creature sank to its waist, a gurgled shout of surprise.
The movement sent the other two flying towards him. He charged forward and met the front one halfway, his sword smashing into a steel rod buried in the creature’s forearm, sliding off meaninglessly. The other raised its claws towards Anaz’s face, but, just as he spun to meet them with his blade, the creature dropped to all fours and crashed into his legs.
His legs flipped over his head and he landed on his face and chest. His breath gone in a whoosh. Panic. Choking gasps.
The creature in the pit pulled himself out of the mud and loped at Anaz on all fours, his tongue flapping around the side of his dog-like snout. Something buried into Anaz’s left shoulder. A barbed tail. Anaz slashed at it, cutting the blade tip free from the creature.
He rolled on his side as the first Fletcher lunged for his throat, its mouth snarling wide and hungry. Anaz formed an earthen catapult out of hsing-li and thrust himself to his feet. He reshaped the catapult into a solid lance of rock and speared it into the creature that had lunged for him. It caught the fiend under the chin, digging into its throat, out the back. The creature hung suspended like a lean-to.
Hotness, then numb. The creatures were secreting some sort of poison. Anaz knew he didn’t have much time. His legs became as of another creature entirely, alien and jelly. Poison. Anaz could feel it inside of himself, the hsing-li crying out against the invasion.