by Ari Marmell
“Olgun? What the hopping horses is going on?”
There really shouldn't have been an emotional equivalent to Olgun chewing the inside of his cheek in nervous confusion. Nevertheless, that was precisely the impression Widdershins received.
“Fat lot of good you are, then. So are these guys magic?”
Faint and confused, but the answer was a definite yes.
“And are they what you sensed before?”
No puzzlement at all, this time. Absolutely not.
“Then what-?”
“Oh, my, oh, my! Blood and pain and beautiful songs! They've gone and started the celebration without us, and we shall be greatly put out if there's no more cake to be had!”
The worst wasn't the hideous two-toned voice, that of a grown man and a child speaking in unison, though that alone was enough to make every hair on her arms and neck stand firmly at attention. Nor was it even the figure itself, which scuttled headfirst down a nearby wall using only its impossibly long fingertips, the rest of its body held straight as a board, its coat and hat refusing to fall despite gravity's insistent tug.
No, what caused the blood to drain from Widdershins's face as though it, too, were trying to escape, and made the rapier twitch and vibrate in her trembling fist, was Olgun's silent shriek of absolute terror. She'd sensed the like from him only twice before: once when he'd almost been slain by the wholesale slaughter of his cult, of which Widdershins herself was the only survivor; and once, a few years later and mingled with near-helpless frustration, when he'd done his best to help her face down the demon responsible for that slaughter.
This creature she faced now-for, no matter his mostly human shape, human he clearly was not-was no demon, or at least not the same sort of demon she'd faced before. But whatever he was, he was enough to scare a god.
A tiny, weak god with only a single worshipper, yes, but a god for all that.
Widdershins sucked in her breath to speak, and was overwhelmed by the scent of peppermint. Somewhere, as though hidden behind the buildings that surrounded them, a chorus of children giggled in the dark.
“Run,” she ordered. The two pedestrians, though scarcely able to stand on shaking knees, didn't need to be told twice. The broad-brimmed hat of the creature clinging to the wall shifted as though he watched them go, perhaps deciding whether or not to give chase.
“Don't even think it, Bug Man,” Widdershins told him with-she hoped-more bravado than she felt.
“Don't need to.” The hat tilted again; this time, the face beneath seemed to be examining Widdershins herself, as well as the men who'd fallen-one directly, one less so-to her unexpected attack. “Girls and boys!” The figure began to chant. “Girls and boys, girls and boys, some for eating, some for toys!”
Widdershins felt the rapier slip slightly in her hand, clenched her fingers in a futile attempt to wipe the sweat off on the hilt. “I, uh…I don't think I plan to be either, thanks.” And, much more softly, “Olgun, what is that?!”
But, other than the sensation that it was very, very old, she got nothing but bafflement and fear from her unseen ally.
“Oh, you're so welcome!” The creature dropped from the wall, flipping as it fell to land feetfirst on the grass beside the street. “She thinks she has a plan. That's so cute!”
The chorus of children cooed, as though having discovered a little, lost puppy.
“Where is that coming from?!” Widdershins herself wasn't certain whether the question was addressed to Olgun, the gaunt figure, or the world in general, but it was the creature who answered. And for the first time, he sounded honestly puzzled.
“You can't see them?” he asked.
It was, given the current state of Widdershins's nerves, absolutely the worst answer he could have given. She shuddered and found herself desperately glancing around, despite her best intentions, searching for an army of slack-faced, staring children creeping up behind her in the dark. There were none, of course, but in that moment of distraction, the creature lunged.
Not at her, no. Fast as he moved-and he was unbelievably fast-he might not have crossed the distance between them before she could once again bring up her guard. But Widdershins wasn't his target. Bending neatly sideways, he reached out with those impossibly long, flexible fingers, and snatched up the dark-clad figure who had fallen, a few minutes before, from the neighboring building.
With a single arm, he hefted the screaming man toward his face. Widdershins fell back with a whimper at the rough tearing sounds that followed, and felt the bile rising and stinging in the back of her throat as the body shriveled and dried, in a matter of instants, into a desiccated, leathery slab. (She didn't even notice the cries of agony emerging from the second man, whom she'd earlier stabbed.)
“Ooh, yummy, yum, yum! He tastes a bit of magic, doesn't he? Extra spice is extra nice!” The creature advanced as he “ate,” and when he allowed the body to fall, he was finally near enough for the ambient moonlight and the nearby flickering lanterns to illumine the face and figure beneath the flopping brim. “Will you also taste of magic, little girl? Or was this one a special appetizer?”
His features were, other than being grotesquely emaciated, human enough at first glance. The skin was pale; the icy green eyes and ivory teeth gleamed even in the night, as though reflecting a light whose source she could not see. Hair of a filthy, stringy black hung limply from within the hat, the brim of which was stained with a glistening grease.
Her second glance-the one in which she noted the figure's cheeks and jaw rippling, as though something moved just beneath the flesh, attempting to distend his mouth in ways it was never meant to flex-was quite sufficient to put the lie to any sense of humanity.
His hands were even worse. His thumbs were relatively normal, perhaps slightly longer than they should have been, but every other finger was hideous. The shortest was a foot long, and all of them were narrow, pointed, twitching, bending in ways and in places they should never have bent. Widdershins couldn't help but think of them less as fingers than as the legs of some monstrous spider.
And that, in turn, stirred up memories in the farthest reaches of Widdershins's mind, the faintest recollections of childhood. But whatever those memories were, they refused to surface on their own, and she wasn't about to take the time and effort to dredge them up now.
“Gonna need everything you can give me, Olgun,” Widdershins whispered.
His response was a ferocious urge to run.
“Oh, no.” Much as a very large part of her agreed, Widdershins stood her ground. “I don't want that thing at my back! Besides, you're the one who pushed me into this in the first place, remember?”
Olgun might have responded to that, had their inhuman enemy not beaten him to it. “And who do you talk to, in the silence, in the dark, hmm? You cannot see my friends, so you invent one of your own? How very silly of you.”
Widdershins didn't even bother asking how he'd heard the words that she'd barely even formed on her tongue, let alone spoken aloud. “Why don't you step closer, and I'll introduce you?”
The creature's shoulders hunched, his head lowered, his impossible fingers twitched. “I think…I would like that.”
The unseen children cackled, and the two opponents-one blessed by a god, one utterly ungodly-hurled themselves together in the center of the roadway.
Any observer (and there may or may not have been one; Widdershins had no idea if the man she'd stabbed remained conscious or not) would have seen little more than a blur of movement. The creature advanced in a series of dancing steps and graceful twists, almost pirouettes. Each step should have taken him in a different direction from every other, yet somehow he glided toward Widdershins in a perfectly straight line.
For her own part, Widdershins simply charged, propelled by Olgun's energies beneath her pounding feet, carrying her far more swiftly than her steps alone.
Even as they converged, those impossibly long fingers swept through the air, clutching at the young thief's
body, but she wasn't there to be hit. An arm's length from her foe, Widdershins dropped to her knees, allowing her momentum to carry her onward. It should have been an impossible slide, across the rough and muddy cobblestones of the street, but she felt the hum of Olgun's power in the air-a power that allowed her to “coincidentally” hit the slickest, smoothest stretch of stone, that smoothed over the worst of the bumps and crevices. Her knees were scraped raw, portions of her hose shredded, but it was enough to carry her beneath her enemy's attack and past him, thrusting her rapier into his thigh as she went.
Or rather, she tried to thrust her rapier into his thigh. Despite the swiftness and unexpected angle of her attack, the creature jumped back a fraction of a second before the blade struck home. His leap carried him clear to the nearest wall from which he now hung-again, by his fingertips only, which were stretched out behind him. Despite the sudden acrobatics, his coat and hat remained as immobile as ever. His eyes first went wider than any Widdershins had ever seen, then narrowed into glinting green slivers.
“Godly!” It somehow emerged as a high-pitched growl, improbable as the concept might seem. His chorus of children began to wail as though someone had just stepped on their favorite toys.
Widdershins flexed her legs and sprang to her feet, ignoring the pain in her knees. “Noticed that, did you?” Not much use in trying to deny it at this point…“How'd you enjoy that, you creepy critter?”
“I don't think you're fun anymore.”
A flex of the fingers sent him hurtling once more across the roadway to land before Widdershins. For several long moments, the air was filled only with the swooshing sounds of blade and digits. No matter how swiftly she attacked, no matter at what peculiar angles she held her rapier, Widdershins couldn't strike fast enough to land a blow. Each and every time, the creature danced nimbly aside or, on occasion, parried with a single finger against the flat of her blade.
For his part, he hadn't laid a finger on Widdershins, not due to her speed-even with Olgun's aid, the inhuman thing was far faster than she-but because the god kept interfering in other ways. A tingle in the air, and her opponent, despite his unnatural grace, skidded briefly in a thin layer of wet mud. A hum that only Widdershins could hear, and her rapier just happened to be in precisely the right spot to block an attack that she never would have seen coming. It was very much an evenly matched contest.
For about half a minute, give or take. At which point it abruptly became clear that Widdershins and Olgun were reaching the limits of their combined endurance, and their opponent was very much not.
Widdershins slowed, just a heartbeat; her luck faded, just by a hair. And that was enough.
Four of those fingers dragged across her, starting at her left shoulder and running across her collarbone to the neck. She heard a terrible scream, and failed to recognize the voice as her own; heard a ragged tearing, and was scarcely coherent enough to recognize the sound as coming from her clothes and her flesh both. The fingers didn't cut, didn't shred, not exactly. No, they simply fastened to her skin through the fabric, much as they must have fastened to the walls the creature climbed. And when they pulled away, they peeled away narrow strips of flesh with them. Blood coursed down Widdershins's chest, and what tiny portion of her mind remained capable of thought grew nauseated at the sight of tiny banners-made up of twisted strips of skin, strings of muscle, and cloth-that wiggled cheerfully from her attacker's fingers.
She felt the rough cobbles beneath her palms, pressing into her knees, and only then realized that she'd fallen. The film of mud across those stones was mixing slowly with the blood that leaked from her frayed wounds, as well as a small puddle of vomit that she must have coughed up as she stumbled.
“But our little girl cries!” She heard the foul voice, sensed the presence looming over her, and could barely crane her neck enough to look up. The creature was slowly running the stolen strips of flesh-her flesh-across its tongue, leaving nothing but dry, wrinkled sticks of leather that it casually tossed to the earth. “Where is her god, to wipe away her tears? Shall I kiss them better, little priestess? I have such comforting kisses. I swear to you that, should you but allow me, you'll never cry again. Never, ever, ever, ever…” The figure began to bend, wriggling fingers reaching, reaching…
“Olgun…”
The tiny god's power surged, flowing through her chest, her shoulder, tingling in the wounds like cold water. It barely helped; far less than it should have, for Olgun had, in the past, relieved the hurt of worse wounds than these. Indeed, the pain surged anew each time it faded, a stubborn, unnatural tide that refused to bend to Olgun's will.
But it helped enough, just enough, that Widdershins could still move-and move far faster than her assailant could possibly have anticipated.
With a hoarse cry she struck, wincing at the sound of steel on stone, and then she rolled upright and ran, staggering and stumbling over her own feet. Laughing maniacally in its dual voices, and joined by the ubiquitous chorus of giggles, the creature began to pursue-only to be yanked abruptly to a halt.
Widdershins hadn't missed, no. She couldn't possibly have slain the creature even if she'd hit it, not with a single weakened stroke. Instead, she had plunged her rapier through the hem of her attacker's coat and wedged it between the cobblestones. That weapon-one she'd carried for years, the one that had brought her into the life of Alexandre Delacroix, thus shaping who she was today-had saved her for the final time.
Abandoning the blade, sobbing as much over its loss as for the agony that racked her, Widdershins dashed around every corner she could, keeping to the darkest reaches, using every trace of Olgun's power not to lessen her own pain, but to hide her trail from one whose senses were far more than human. She was blind to the city around her, deaf to its sounds; only the next step, the next stumble, the next pool of shadow mattered. Her trick would buy her only a handful of seconds, before the creature wrenched the sword free or ripped his coat from the blade. She had to be out of sight by then.
It had to be enough.
She needed help; needed a place to collapse, to figure out what to do next. And since she wasn't about to risk leading that thing to her friends at the Flippant Witch-nor did she think it probable that the Finders would appreciate her dragging a second monster into their midst-that left her only one option. If she lived long enough to get there…
“…the patrols along the southwest edges of the district.” The suggestion was coming from one Major Archibeque, a grizzled veteran with leather-brown skin, iron-gray beard, and a perpetual squint. Technically, he held no greater rank than any of the other majors present at the meeting. Unofficially, as everyone expected him to be promoted to commandant of the Guard when their current leader retired, his words carried a lot more weight than his rank suggested. At the moment, he was leaning over a scarred oaken table, gesturing at it as though it held a map of the city. (It didn't-the maps weren't currently handy, as this had been a last-minute, haphazard meeting-but every man and woman present knew Davillon's layout well enough to get the point he was trying to make.) “It'll mean drawing some manpower away from other quarters, but since most late-night travel comes from the direction of the markets, it seems to me that…”
He trailed off with a faint growl at the sound of a fist pounding on the door to the mess-hall-turned-conference-room. “Enter!” Every head in the chamber glanced toward the young constable who appeared in the doorway.
“Apologies for disturbing you all, sirs, but there's a visitor here for Major Bouniard.”
Julien rose from his own seat, cast an apologetic glance at Major Archibeque, then returned his attention to the messenger. “A visitor? At this hour?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And can't this wait, Constable? I'm rather-”
“She's insisting that it's an emergency, Sir. And she's injured.”
Julien's fists clenched. Injured? She? Assuming it wasn't a fellow member of the Guard-and the constable would surely have said so, were tha
t the case-he knew pretty damn well who it had to be.
“Major?” he asked.
Archibeque nodded brusquely. “Go on, then. We'll fill you in on what we decide.”
Bouniard held himself to a moderate (if stiff-legged) pace as he departed the room and followed the constable, even as every muscle twitched, demanding he break into a sprint. After what felt to be about three or four years of passing along the drab, flattened carpets, and the pockets of greasy smoke belched forth by the cheap oil lamps that were the hallways' main sources of illumination, he finally reached the door to his own office.
“Didn't know where else to put her, sir,” the constable said in response to the unasked question. “I didn't think we ought to have a young woman bleeding in the foyer, right?”
“You did call for a chirurgeon, I assume?” Bouniard demanded.
“Of course, sir. Not sure why he hasn't arrived, but-”
“Then go see what's taking him!”
The constable recoiled from the abrupt shout, then offered an abortive salute and sprinted away. Bouniard grunted and threw open the door.
Yep, that's who he'd thought it would be.
“Hey, Major,” she said weakly.
“Widdershins, I…Gods!” It was only as she turned away from his desk, on which she'd been leaning (and probably looking for confidential papers, no doubt) that he saw the sheer quantity of blood plastering her tunic to her skin.
“We've got to stop meeting here,” she said with a pale, shaky smile. “I keep mixing with questionable elements like the Guard, my reputation's going to-to…”
Julien caught her before she hit the floor, but it was a very, very near thing.
From yet another rooftop-one several dozen yards from the action, but near enough to make out the gist of what was going on-three fleshy masks of terror had observed the bloody confrontation. They'd marveled at Widdershins's dramatic entrance, widened at the appearance of her opponent, cringed at the horrid death he'd delivered to the first of the black-garbed pair, and struggled to keep up with the inhumanly swift duel that followed. Some long minutes before, the inhuman creature had freed himself from Widdershins's rapier, yanking it free of the stones between which it was wedged and leaving a ragged tear in his coat. Head tilted and muttering to himself, he'd wandered off-perhaps in pursuit of the fleeing thief, perhaps merely on his way to whatever endeavor might appear next on his itinerary.