The crowd roared. The shadows separated into people. Somewhere, the girl was shouting. Ren could barely hear her. She could not see her in the crowd. Blood and tangled hair fell into her eyes.
First came the fangs. Then came the fur.
Then came the fury.
9
THEIR HORSES’ HOOFBEATS WERE MUFFLED by ivy, by dead leaves, by a decade-old carpet of scum on the cobblestones. The forest loomed at the far end of the road, swallowing the farthermost houses. The shadows of trees sprouted straight through their roofs, black branches choking their chimneys. If Lukasz had been a more imaginative man, he would have said that the forest was strangling what remained. But he wasn’t imaginative. He was a pragmatist right down to the broken bone.
He kept a hand on his rifle. It wasn’t as if he’d be using the sword again.
“You know,” said Koszmar. He had a very deep voice, with a wild kind of edge under it. “They killed the strzygi. And the strzygi killed them.”
It took Lukasz a moment to realize he meant the bodies in the graveyard.
“Was that poetry?” he asked dryly.
“Lukasz,” murmured Koszmar. “If the strzygi and those poor souls killed each other . . . who buried them?”
Lukasz didn’t answer, but a shiver scuttled over his shoulders.
The sooner he found Franciszek, the better. Hopefully he was still somewhere in the forest, because Lukasz had no interest in revisiting the Mountains. Then he and Franciszek could get the hell out of here and return to Miasto. Franciszek would finally get what he wanted: he could quit hunting dragons, especially now that Lukasz was probably off the job permanently. Besides, they had enough dragon gold in the vaults of the Royal Welona Bank to live in luxury for the rest of their lives.
Koszmar drew up his horse. Near the end of the row, light flickered behind the shutters of one of the houses.
“There—”
Lukasz spurred Król on, urging the horse up the steps to the front door. The wood creaked alarmingly under Król’s heavy hooves, but Lukasz ignored it. He unslung the rifle from his shoulder and pounded the door.
“RYBAK!”
At the shouting, a nocnica scuttled through the branches overhead, pincers clicking. Lukasz was about to raise his rifle when a white eagle swooped down from the darkness and snatched it off its branch.
“Eugh,” said Koszmar.
“RYBAK!” repeated Lukasz. “It’s Lukasz Smoków, and you’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do!”
No response. It didn’t seem possible. Six years, and he was still alive . . . and he’d lied.
Lukasz slid from Król’s back and hammered on the door until it danced on its rusty hinges.
“OPEN THE DAMN DOOR, RYBAK.”
Behind him, Koszmar dismounted. With two fingers and an expression of exquisite disgust he looped his horse’s reins around a slimy horse rail. He cast a doubtful look to the eagle overhead, crunching loudly in the eaves.
Lukasz hammered the door again. That lying, cheating—
“RYBAK, OPEN THE DOOR.”
No one stirred inside. Lukasz took a step back and stared up at the second floor. The whole house had a precarious lean to it. He cupped his hands around his mouth.
“RYBAK! OPEN UP, YOU FILTHY, STRZYGOŃ-KISSING, BANNIK-B—”
“Steady on,” interrupted Koszmar languidly. “I wouldn’t be rude, if I were you—”
The door swung open.
“STRZYGOŃ-KISSING?” boomed a voice from inside.
A figure appeared in the doorway, the top of his head lost in the shadows of the room beyond. All the color drained from Koszmar’s face, but Lukasz was too angry to be scared.
“Well, it’s about goddamn time,” he growled.
“You are very lucky,” said Jakub Rybak. One eye glittered in the dimness. His voice was different from how Lukasz remembered it; it was softer. A bit lisping. “If you had broken my door, young Smoków, I would have removed your teeth one by one.”
Like the rest of the house, the door was falling to pieces.
“Yeah, right.” Lukasz rapped the door, and the top hinge clattered to the floor. “I could huff and puff and blow this shack down.”
Every word cracked like a gunshot. Rybak didn’t respond. Then he moved out of the black interior and into the damp moonlight. Lukasz retreated a few steps, right into Koszmar.
He wasn’t sure Koszmar would have been his first choice, but at least he had someone to back him up. Besides, the noble was a major. Surely that counted for something?
“What do you want, Lukasz Smoków?” asked Rybak.
It took Lukasz a moment to find the words.
Jakub Rybak’s beard had grown down to his chest, where it tangled with his long, matted hair. What remained of his face was oddly distorted, with the last shreds of an eyelid fluttering over an empty left socket. His mouth didn’t close properly over his teeth. Five gaping scars ran from his left temple to his right jaw.
It was as if an animal had spread out its claws and dealt him a single, raking blow.
“Finished?”
Only then did Lukasz realize he was staring.
Rybak turned and disappeared back into the house. Lukasz glanced back toward Koszmar. He wasn’t sure why he did it—maybe because he was so used to seeing Franciszek? Maybe the sight of Rybak’s face—the reminder of Henryk, of the basilisk—maybe for a moment, he’d forgotten. Maybe he’d forgotten his brothers couldn’t possibly be standing with him.
Maybe he’d forgotten they were dead.
“Go ahead,” said Koszmar. “I’ll be right behind you.”
When Lukasz didn’t move, Koszmar twitched open his coat to reveal two expensive revolvers holstered at either side.
“Have a little faith, Lieutenant.”
Lukasz unslung the rifle from his shoulder and followed Rybak inside.
Despite the rain and the mist, the interior was dry as bones. The floor buckled and crackled under his feet. It was baking hot, warmed by a fire roaring in the hearth. Beside the fire, oblivious to the heat, the white eagle was now settled on her perch. The air tasted rough. And when Lukasz steadied himself on an overhead beam, he was taken aback by how crisp it felt.
And the parchment.
There was parchment everywhere. Parchment piled on the three-legged table, spread across the windowsills, sitting in stacks in a washbasin caked in brown dust. Covered in spidery ink, sheets of it hung on rows of clotheslines strung across the kitchen. Lukasz was already too tall for the house; he had stoop to almost half his height because of the pages, illuminated and semitranslucent in the firelight.
Quite unnecessarily, in Lukasz’s opinion, Jakub Rybak stoked the hearth until the fire roared. He was barefoot, in nothing but trousers, and judging by the smell, he had not washed since Lukasz had last seen him six years ago.
“Welcome,” said Rybak, without turning around.
Lukasz did not feel especially welcome.
He glanced sideways at Koszmar, whose hand was on his hip, resting very close to the gun.
“It’s, um . . .” Lukasz searched for the right word. The house smelled overwhelmingly of soot and sweat. “It’s, um, very . . .”
“Flammable,” provided Koszmar.
The loose pages were densely packed with text, all in the same cramped writing. Poorly drawn pictures. Clumsy-looking maps. Should have asked Jarek, Lukasz thought. Then: Did Jarek come here?
A worse thought:
Did Franciszek come here?
Lukasz looked at Rybak sharply and realized that the single eye was fixed on his burned hand. For a moment, he wondered if there was something there. A bond that went beyond blood and betrayal. After all, ugliness was a lonely state.
Then Rybak asked, “Finally learned to read, have you?”
No. No bond.
“You can’t read?” Koszmar looked up from fiddling through some pages on the mantelpiece.
Lukasz ignored him. He told himself that he couldn’t
care less what Koszmar thought. He’d slain dragons at fourteen years old, for God’s sake. Who gave a damn if he couldn’t read?
“How did you know that?” he asked as levelly as he could. “How did you know I can’t read?”
Rybak tugged a shirt and a coat off a chair. The coat was long and had once been ivory, with black embroidery. Lukasz recognized it.
“Your brother told me,” said Rybak.
Koszmar had gone very still and was watching them both intently.
“When was Franciszek here?” Lukasz asked at last.
“Six weeks ago,” said Jakub.
Lukasz sank down at the table.
Franciszek had probably sat at this very table mere weeks before. Lukasz ran a hand over his face. Franciszek’s spectacles would have been sparkling on the end of his nose and his hair would have been neatly pulled back, and he’d have shared a drink with this one-eyed monstrosity and calmly planned his road through the forest.
Lukasz rested his forehead in one hand and asked, “What did he say?”
“He asked for his notebook back,” said Rybak. “It had a map to the Mountains.”
Of course, Lukasz realized. Franciszek had been taking notes for as long as he’d been able to write. The bank vault in Miasto was filled with every volume he’d ever filled, going back ten years. Well, every volume except for one.
The one they’d given to Jakub Rybak.
“Notebook?” asked Koszmar, firelight flickering off his uniform as he shifted closer. “What notebook?”
Lukasz lifted his head, using his ruined hand to rub his chin.
“It was the first one Franciszek kept,” said Lukasz, without taking his eyes off Rybak. He didn’t mention Franciszek’s most recent notebook, tucked in his coat pocket. “It had a map of the forest in it. The route we took when we came down from the Mountains in the first place, seventeen years ago.”
Rybak watched his burned hand, enraptured. He said, in his soft, lisping voice:
“Your brother was well prepared.”
“Of course he was.” Lukasz laughed, rubbing his eyes. “He’s always prepared.”
To a fault, he added silently.
He could feel Rybak watching him. Over the crackling fire, the teakettle began to whistle.
“For what it’s worth,” said Rybak, getting up from the table, “I think that wherever he is, your brother is still alive.”
Lukasz watched Rybak pour two dirty cups of tea, and waited for his throat to loosen. If Franciszek had been here, it could only mean that he was at this very moment making his way to the Mountains. And if Franciszek was going back to the Mountains, then Lukasz would follow him.
Behind him, Koszmar peeled himself off the mantelpiece long enough to take a cup of tea. He returned to his perch by the fire, where he idly examined his tea before asking, “Did you make copies of the maps?”
Rybak returned to the table and eased himself into one of the chairs.
“Even if I had, they’d be useless,” he said. “The forest is changing too quickly. It is being devoured by evil. The Golden Dragon is burning it down, and from the embers of its fires, new monsters rise. Nawia, nocnica . . . all the unimaginable evils in the world. Every day, new pits open. New things crawl out. The forest itself is growing, swallowing up this village.”
Perhaps flirting with destruction, Koszmar shoved aside a few stacks of parchment and lit his pipe. With an elbow on the mantelpiece, he said, “Even if you don’t have the map, you could be our guide. You could get us to the Moving Mountains.”
Lukasz shot him a questioning glance. Rybak snorted, seeming just as baffled.
“Why would you think that?”
Koszmar’s fingers played with the pages on the mantel. There was an exaggerated slowness in how he moved. A lazy kind of elegance that completely escaped Lukasz.
“Only one of us is illiterate, Rybak. You’ve been writing about this forest. Specifically”—Koszmar put his pipe in his teeth and rifled through a sheaf of papers—“about the monsters. I’m impressed by your level of detail. Eyewitness, I should think.”
Lukasz swallowed and rapped his knuckles on the table. When he had time, he promised himself, he’d learn to read.
“That is a manuscript,” Rybak replied in a stiff voice. “It is an observational field report on the development of monstrosity in this kingdom. It is not a how-to manual for idiots looking to get drowned by rusalki or—or eaten by strzygi or—”
Koszmar interrupted.
“Or attacked by lynxes?”
Lukasz’s heart skipped a beat.
“What?” he asked hoarsely. “What are you talking about?”
He wasn’t sure if he had imagined the hands on his cheeks, the wet strands of hair that had flickered across his face. Those green eyes, changing, slipping away, turning to slit pupils and perfect rounds—
“There’s a monster in the woods,” said Koszmar, striding forward to drop the sheaf of papers in front of Rybak. “Vila, demon, who the hell knows what she is. She preys on humans. Well. One human, especially.”
Despite the disfigurement, Rybak had an expressive face. And now he was glaring at Koszmar with a look of pure murder.
“She’s not a demon,” he said at last. “At least, not in the traditional sense. In my opinion.”
Koszmar smirked.
“Your opinion?”
Lukasz was reeling. She’d pulled him out of the water. Thrown him down on the bank. Dragged him up the grass. She’d come so close—
“What . . .” He hesitated, not quite able to gather his thoughts. “What—what is she?”
“I suspect she was human once,” said Rybak. He sat back from the table, hands folded in his lap. “Or, at least, as human as the rest of us. Perhaps something got ahold of her, made her as she is. The strzygi, for example, multiply not by procreation, but by consumption. In the act of devouring a susceptible human, the strzygoń creates its progeny. Perhaps that is how this creature came into being.”
Her eyes, above that water. That dark hair, wrapped slick and shiny around her throat. She had been so overwhelmingly human. But then again . . .
“I do not know whether she is better or worse than other monsters,” continued Rybak thoughtfully. “But I do think she is more powerful. The forest seems to listen to her. She is, to my knowledge, part human and part lynx. The animals adore her. She has the allegiance of wolves. To them, she is almost . . .” He searched for the right word. Cast his eyes to the ceiling, and after a moment, seemed to pluck the term from the rafters. “She is almost . . . a queen.”
“And you know this how?” Lukasz asked, dreading the answer.
Rybak smiled. His mouth didn’t move fully on one side, and it looked more like a grimace.
“I met her.”
Sympathy flared dully in Lukasz.
Lukasz looked up at Rybak’s notes. His last contribution to this doomed kingdom. Volumes of evil, of destruction, all cataloged here in a house just waiting to burn to the ground. Gargulec. That was what Koszmar had called him. It had been so conversational. A single person’s suffering, summed up in one light-hearted, cruel comparison.
“If she gets in our way,” said Koszmar, “we’ll kill the evil witch. No problem.”
But those hands. Those eyes.
“I do not know,” replied Rybak. “I do not know if creatures of her ilk deal in good or evil. I think they deal in survival.”
Those teeth.
Lukasz would have replied, but at that moment, a scream split the silence.
Koszmar jumped and knocked a basket of crumpled papers directly into the fire. The blaze surged, casting the whole room in dancing gold and red.
All three rushed to the window, upsetting the eagle. She gave a piercing whistle and shot into the air. Shouting and clattering sounded outside. Beyond the window, yellow light spilled down the cobbles. While Koszmar frantically cleared a tiny space in the dirty glass, the eagle shrieked to high heaven.
“Ducha!�
�� called Rybak. The eagle flew to his arm, where she perched, eyes rolling. Jakub stroked her head.
Outside, the shouting got louder. Lukasz put his cap back on, readjusted it on his head.
“What the devil is going on out there?” he demanded.
“Speak of the devil, indeed,” murmured Koszmar. He stood a bit out of the direct line of the window, one hand resting lightly on the windowsill. “Or she-devil, shall we say? She’s here.”
Rybak leaned forward, peering through the dirty glass. Then, after a moment—a moment in which the scars on his face grew stark in the dry, red-tinted heat of the house—he whispered, “God help them. They’ve cornered her.”
Henryk
SIX YEARS EARLIER
“THEY FOUND THE BODY HERE.”
Henryk knelt and touched the cellar floor.
The restaurant owner had tried to cover the stains with sawdust, but Lukasz’s lantern illuminated a scrap of bloody silk, caught on a nail driven into the wall. It fluttered gently as Henryk got back to his feet.
“She put up a fight,” said Lukasz.
“Most people do,” replied Henryk, taking the lantern and shining it around the cavernous cellar. “Everything wants to live, Lukasz.”
Lining the walls were barrels the size of carriages, dozens of which were splintered to smithereens. Bits of twisted steel loop curled toward the dim ceiling, wrenched free by superhuman claws. Wine dripped steadily in the darkness.
The two brothers continued their search in silence. The nine of them had split up, each taking a different restaurant in the city. Rats scuttled in the corners of this one’s cellar, and behind one of the smashed barrels, a toothy creature spat saliva that sizzled straight through the glass on Lukasz’s lantern. This dragon—whatever it was—had been keeping to the cellars. They had only been in Szarawoda for a few days, and it had already killed two more people.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and both Henryk and Lukasz drew their swords.
“It’s just me,” said Franciszek, putting up his hands. His face hardened when he saw Lukasz. “Henryk, what is he doing here?”
“He’s the best,” said Henryk simply.
“He’s too young!”
Don't Call the Wolf Page 8
