SongWeaver

by Derek Moreland

  Ven's smile was a touch savage. “All good predators hunt at night,” he said. Even when we don't want too.

  “And your plan is to wait here until they do?”

  “More or less,” Ven said. “Though in my profession we call it 'positioning.'”

  “And why is that?”

  Ven grinned. “Probably so we don't sound like a bunch of lazy bastards on the job, at a guess.” Veritea returned the look with her familiar cryptic show of amusement.

  X'on clomped down the ladder from the loft, dusted his hands. “You're all set, Ven. Is there anything else we can do for you?”

  “I'm afraid not,” Ven said. He put out a hand for X'on. “This is something I'm better suited to do solo. Take care of them if I'm wrong?”

  X'on clasped his hand over Ven's own, dwarfing it. “Of course. But I will see you again.”

  “I hope so.” Ven's expression of bravery was weak, but determined.

  “You're sure you have all you need? Enough provisions?” Veritea asked.

  “I'll be fine. Even if I run out of the food you prepared, there's plenty of rocks on the ground. I can forage.”

  She nodded, then turned and headed back out in the direction of her vehicle. X'on gave him a final pat on the shoulder and followed.

  Ven watched them go until the moonlight was no longer enough to keep track of them. Then he bounded up the rails to await his quarry.

  *

  After giving the field a quick visual inspection using the bio-noculars--his beloved ocular enhancement goggles hadn't made it across the pond, of course--Ven turned to inspect the articles X'on had acquired during the day. The bad news was that almost all of it was a meager, bizarre substitute for the dwarven tech he preferred. The good news was that it had been free; when the Humans had found out that Ven the Gargoyle needed the stuff for his quest against the monstrous Wendigo, they had volunteered it with good cheer. Ven ran a talon over the hilt of the sword, still strapped to his hip. He'd been willing to sell it; he really had. But damn, if it didn't feel good hanging by his side.

  Enough idle reflection; it was time to work. With quick, practiced movements, he set up the tent that would provide him shelter--and more importantly, cover--during the day; he cleaned and checked the long-range weapon, with its telescopic sight and trigger mechanism that was clearly built for fingers, not talons, but he could make it work; he checked the special device he'd had X'on inquire about for him; hell, there was no way of knowing if this one would work until he tried it, but he examined it anyway. Afterwards he scouted out the area by the window that gave him the best view of the pasture while obscuring him from unwanted attention below. Then he took up the bio-noculars, shifted in his newly hemmed tunic that itched to no end, and began to wait.

  Luck failed him that night. The creature, whatever it was--whatever they were--didn't show. Half an hour before dawn, Ven crept from his position, ate a small, cold meal, and curled up in the tent under the rough blanket Fleisze had wrapped him in back when his sorry carcass had first been drug ashore.

  Tomorrow, he thought. This ends tomorrow.

  He was not wrong.

  *

  Ven was up and moving at the crack of dusk. He bolted down another cold breakfast, gave his equipment a fresh once-over, recovered his position from the previous night, and watched.

  It took most of the night, but his patience was rewarded. The moon hung high in the west, moving with an inexorable gait towards the skyline, when a small creature crawled over the fence and into the pasture from the north, out of the treeline of the nearby forest. Ven peered at it through the scope. It was bipedal, with strange, cloven hooves and elongated shins that gave the illusion of knees that bent backwards. Its short forearms ended in clawed digits, with three fingers and an opposable thumb, from what he could tell. It had leathery wings on its back, but like Ven's, they were stunted, and probably unsuited to flying. It had a forked tail that whipped around, which seemed to provide balance. Its head looked something like a goat's, but the horns were off, corkscrewing away behind its ears. The whole of it was covered in dark, mottled brown fur. And Ven could smell it from here.

  Its scent was a uniform red. This was a beast that lived in blood. What the devil are you supposed to be?

  As Ven watched, it crept around the pasture, sizing up the cows as they slept. After it rejected a couple for reasons Ven couldn't begin to fathom--and took a long, sucking bite from the second one, presumably to fuel up--it settled on a particularly hefty bovine, peeled back its lips to bare a nasty set of fangs, and threw itself at the cow's shoulder. It hung there, leech-like, for nearly a minute. Then it dropped, hefted the entire creature across the girth of its shoulders and began walking with incredulous speed back to the woods from whence it came.

  “Goatshit,” Ven muttered. He'd had the business end of his new weapon trained on the beast's head since it had entered the field. But he pulled it back and flew down the stairs, careful to stay downwind, determined to track the creature back to its lair. Something that size could feed on a carcass that big for weeks, easy. No, this thing has a pack. Putting this one down wouldn't solve anyone's problem, and would likely just exacerbate them. He was going to have to follow this one, and root out the entire infestation.

  It took Ven almost an hour of careful pursuit before the creature finally made its way home. Not that the beast was trying to shake a tail or anything; it never doubled back or took a direction other than a straightforward path. But Ven had no idea what the creature was capable of hearing, or smelling, or sensing, so he held back as far as he dared, taking painstaking care not to rustle a bush, or snap a branch. He'd even left his new toy, that beautiful tube of iron and explosives, behind in the loft. He'd deliberated on it for most of a second before throwing it aside, but he figured if he could smell the oily black spice of its grease, it stood to reason that this little monster could as well. Not for the first time he missed his automatic crossbow, lost somewhere in the manifold rooms of his late elvish torturer's estate--its precision calibration and taut silvered drawstring had never failed him. Even the replacement the dwarves had crafted as part of his armor hadn't been as accurate. Without really thinking about it he gripped the hilt of his dwarven sword, its reassuring weight a comfort to his hand. Then he realized the brute had stopped; it had dropped the meat it was carrying and was using its strength to shift aside a boulder that rested against a stone outcropping in the clearing ahead of them. A crisp wind blew by; Ven shuddered and shifted with it, trying to follow it so as not to carry his scent along its edge.

  It took only a moment, once the slab had been moved, for the rest of the pack to show themselves--six, then ten, then an even dozen, the littlest of them flapping their wings, hovering off the ground and buzzing the heads of the larger, elder creatures that lurched with uncanny momentum around the fresh kill.

  Argh. If he'd brought the shooting weapon, he could have started picking the little bastards off right here, without even engaging in hand-to-hand. Then again, he was pretty sure the weapon had a limited supply of ammo, and these beasts moved so fast that they probably would have been on him before he'd had a chance to change tactics. Nope, the sword was still his best bet. Wish I had a knife for my off hand, though. Feels like I'm about to be swarmed.

  For the second time in two nights, he wasn't wrong.

  *

  The one he'd followed was grunting and barking at the others when Ven stepped out from his hiding place, pointed his sword, and said, “I know you can't understand me, but this has to end. You've taken something that you have no right to. And I will stop you.”

  The first one pointed back with a curved nail and hissed. The others looked up, and bared their needled teeth at him. Then, with a piercing scream, the whole of the pack charged.

  Ven lashed out, swinging in a low arc, trying to catch the first wave as it advanced almost too fast for him to see. His blade bit into the belly of a large, heavyset one; it screeched, a sound that curdled
Ven's blood, and slumped down, pulling Ven's sword with it. It took him a moment to dislodge it, during which the small ones, what Ven believed to be the children, swooped around him, biting at his face and neck, nipping at his hands as he tried to swat them away. Distracted, he didn't notice the pair that banked around behind him until they had fangs deep into his tail, another got in under a swinging blow to sink its incisors deep into his thigh, near his crotch. He screamed at the one, and ripped it bodily from his leg, hurling it away and into the stone slab that had covered their den. He barely heard the crack of something necessary breaking on impact with the stone; his ears were filled with the flapping of leathery wings and the pulsing rush of his own blood.

  He snapped his tail next, hard; it loosed the two that had attached themselves there, but they were unfazed, and dove back into the fray. He shook his sword arm, suddenly painful and heavy with the weight of three devils, hanging parasitical from him. He resorted to punching at their heads with his free hand until they let go, at which point he realized his free hand wasn't free at all, that two of the flying ones had attached themselves to that arm around the bicep. That was a bad sign; if he was starting to get bit and not feeling it, it meant the beasts' saliva had some kind of paralytic in it. With an effort, he brought his sword around and decapitated the two feasting on his arm. He shook the heads free as he brought the sword around in a high crescent; by sheer luck, it took out another of the flying beasts. He cracked his tail again, confident that another one or two had clamped themselves on it; sure enough, three more rolled off, then pulled themselves up, stalking around him.

  Five down; seven to go. He was wounded, bleeding, losing feeling in his extremities and getting light-headed; they were regrouping before him, snarling and spitting amongst themselves, planning their next attack. The were faster than him, they knew the territory, and they most importantly they outnumbered him by a staggering amount. He'd run in half-cocked--again--and he was paying for it. Again. He was going to lose.

  Which, for the most part, meant that everything was going according to plan.

  *

  The night he'd handed his list to X'on, he'd made sure to highlight a couple of things of special interest. He was almost positive they were dealing with a group of scavengers, not just a singular entity; it would make sense, then, to have a weapon that could kill multiple opponents at the same time, instead of one by one. So in addition to the tent and rations, the bio-noculars and the gun, Ven had asked for a specific arrangement of flammable and explosive chemicals, as well as some kind of flame-retardant clothing. His hope had been to firebomb the nest while the majority of the beasts had been inside. Now though....

  He pulled the object--a small ovular tube of metal and thin glass--from the oilskin bag he had wrapped it in, both for safe keeping and to hide its scent. He watched the devils before him eye it, wrinkling their noses and growling, but not running. They had no idea what it was; even less what it could do.

  But they were spread too far apart; there was only one way for this to work the way Ven wanted it to. He hoped like hell the specially treated clothes he'd had the Humans stitch together were up to the challenge.

  “I'd say something clever, but you bastards can't understand me anyway,” he thundered, then smashed the vial to his chest.

  Flame rushed over him, splashing and spilling along the tunic to his arms, his thighs, his talons, his sword; he screamed with the agony of it, then lunged forward, into the pack of abruptly confused devils. Their confusion turned to anger, then torment, then panic in short order as Ven's flaming form became too hot to handle. Ven, still screaming, culled through the remaining monsters, using fire and sword to put them down as swiftly as he could swing. One or two tried to flee to the safety of the cave, but even their vaunted speed was no match for a gargoyle literally burning with the desire for their death.

  In a few seconds, it was over. Ven didn't even bother to pull the blade from the corpse of his final enemy. Instead, he yanked off his tunic and leggings, then rolled back and forth on the ground to smother the flames that still clung to him.

  When he was sure he was no longer alight, he sat on his knees and took stock of his situation.

  Setting the flame-retardant garb on fire meant that he was currently in trunks. Which was uncomfortable, yes, but better than being dead. The garments had done their job, for the most part, as well; other than the spot on his chest where he's actually smashed the vial, his torso was barely singed. His arms and forelegs were already blistering a little, though, and his hands were a mess--he hadn't thought to grab gloves. The majority of it would heal overday, of course, so while it was inconvenient, it was not the end of the world. But he wouldn't be making it back to the loft tonight, that was for sure. And every inhalation brought with it the angry red scent of blood. Guess I'm holing up in yet another cave for the day.

  Just as that thought passed through, a small stone wall fell from the sky and impacted right between his shoulder blades, knocking him a few meters forward and driving all the air from his lungs. He gasped, choked, desperately tried to get a breath in; he was spinning around, looking, searching to see what hit him, That hit harder than a troll, harder than an ogre… I can’t take another punch like that....

  … and there, towering above him, every step a leisure, every breath a bellows, was the thing that Veritea had worked so hard to describe to him. Its fur was a brilliant white caked with red so dull it was turning brown; its teeth and claws like daggers, like spears. And its eyes....

  It had no irises. The whole of its eyes were shiny, liquid red.

  It spoke, rough and guttural, and though Ven didn't know the language, he'd heard the words from Veritea's mouth enough to know exactly what it was saying.

  “Wen. Di. Go.”

  Chapter 34

  Ven scrambled, trying to find purchase against the ground around the cave. The grass was slick with early morning dew--another bad sign, we are closing in on sunup, and there's nothing saying he doesn't smash me the moment I shift--and glanced around for his sword. Like an idiot, he'd left it in the devil that was now much closer to his newest opponent than it was to him.

  “Wen. Di. Go,” the behemoth moaned again, and this time, it almost seemed there was a plaintive cry, a sadness beneath the declaration. But it continued towards him, its arms raised, ready to tear him apart when it reached him.

  So why was it taking so long?

  Because it has too, Ven realized with a flash.

  Slow as he was, even with the devil venom and the burns and the bleeding wounds, he was still a touch faster than this monster. He charged low, on unsteady legs, and ducked under the horror's crushing swing to pull his sword from the devil he'd slain last. Sliding, he struck out at the Wendigo's calcaneal tendon.

  For half a second, it looked like the blade would have no effect, that the Wendigo's flesh had shifted around it somehow. Then the weapon found purchase, and bit deep. The tendon snapped and rolled up into a tangled bunch behind the creature's knee. Its roar reverberated off the surrounding trees, nearly deafening Ven. Then it surprised him with a rapid, swinging punch to the chest that threw him clear of the beast and separated two ribs in the process. Ven landed in a snarl with the body of one of the devils he'd killed, its mouth agape in what appeared to be a grotesque smirk. Well, why not? He's getting to watch me get killed back.

  “Wen! Di! Go!”it bawled, and the words were soaked in hurt. Now dragging its injured leg, it started towards him again; but again, its pace was slow, torturous. Even with the sword impaled in one appendage, it could have moved faster than that. It had every advantage, and it clearly meant to kill him. So why was it taking so long?

  In his old life, before Ven had seen so much of the world, he would have thought the Wendigo was just savoring the kill. Now, though, he wondered. Maybe… it doesn't want to?

  Maybe the curse, or whatever the Humans want to call it, drives it to?

  Ven took a short, sharp, breath; anything more was t
oo great a strain on his injured ribs. It didn't matter, did it? The beast was trying to put him down, and he had almost no time left to do the same to it.

  With agonizing slowness, he extricated himself from the devil's remains, trying not to think about the fact that he could barely feel his arms, his hands. Then he realized: he could barely feel his arms, his hands, his legs; any of it. He looked down at the grinning devil, and smiled a bit himself. Then he cracked the corpse's jaw open and started worrying at its teeth.

  “Wen. Di. Go!” the monster wailed, and the noise made Ven want to vomit. It was close, he was cutting it close....

  With a slick crunch, he managed to pull the two longest teeth from the devil's skull.

  He turned and ducked again as the Wendigo slashed out. If he'd taken a second longer, his head would have been torn from his shoulders. It was a thought he tried to push out of his mind as he dove between the Wendigo's legs and plunged the first tooth deep into the open laceration. The effect was almost instantaneous. With the devil venom so deeply injected into the naked wound, the Wendigo lost its footing and fell. As the beast collapsed, Ven managed to pull his sword free as well.

  “Wen… di… gooooooooo,” it wept, and the tears that ran from its eyes were blood. It shifted position and took a half-hearted swing at Ven, who dodged it without effort, took the other tooth and stabbed it into the Wendigo's deltoid. He jumped back, danced around just outside the monster's reach. Then he fell to the ground, because he lost what little feeling he had left in his own legs.

  He pointed the sword at the Wendigo's heaving throat. “'Hide so tough their greatest weapons can't pierce it,' huh? But this weapon isn't Human forged. It's a Dwarven blade, and a legacy one at that. I can take your head off, right now. I should,” he continued, almost to himself. “Before the sun comes up and takes the decision away from me.”

  Why is there even a decision? A voice that sounded almost familiar, yet strange and cavernous and alien, boiled within him. Sudden, dark pain pulsed from the base of his skull across his senses. Kill it, kill it now! Kill him for attacking you, for hurting you! Kill it for your duty, for your honor! Kill it because the sight of it offends you!