“Cat, you’ve gotta come here.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Say, uh, are there lots of horses or cows or, I don’t know, other animals here in the Lonely Lands? Herds, I mean.”
Catali cupped her hands in the creek water and splashed her face. “No.”
“Thought you said that footprint I saw was probably an animal?”
She flicked her fingers dry. “An animal, as in a single one. There are no herding animals here.”
“Well,” Nape said in the voice of someone who just sighed and washed a hand down his face, “then I’d say we’re nippin’ at the heels of, uh, an army.”
Catali patted her wet face with the hem of her shirt. She put her hands on her knees and stared in the direction of Nape’s voice. I’m going to regret this. “What are you talking about?” Nape didn’t answer. “If I come over there and waste my time, I’m ruining your mind, Nape. Do you understand me?”
He still didn’t answer. Her annoyance shifted to concern. She shoved her bags safely away from the creek and unsheathed her skinning knife. With careful, quiet steps, she sidestepped fresh leaves and the wiry grass that had blown into this little forest abode. If something was out there—and if it had gotten Nape—she needed to catch it by surprise.
Nearing the end of the tree line, she peered through a couple branches. There, kneeling in a lemony-copper field of wiry grass, was Nape, unharmed.
Relieved, Catali sheathed the knife, then stormed out of the thicket. “Did your tongue fall out of y…our…mouth….”
“See?” Nape said, looking back.
She saw, all right. She saw flattened grass, miles of it, stretching in each direction. It looked like brush after a family of deer had lain in it all night.
Nape opened his arms, gesturing in his find. “See? What else could cause this other than a herd?”
Catali was on her knees now. She brushed a hand over the grass, as if it would suddenly speak to her and tell her who—or what—had trespassed over it.
“Or an army,” Nape continued. “If it ain’t a herd, it’s got to be an army. And if it ain’t—”
“Stop talking,” Catali said. She glanced up. “I need a moment, okay?”
Nape nodded.
She parted the fibrous grass, revealing soil beneath. A faint outline was imprinted in the dirt. A foot, Catali thought. Numerous feet—heels, sole, toes and all.
A chill seized her, shivered right across her shoulders. The problem wasn’t the existence of the footprints, but rather the shape. The heel was fat and bulging in the rear but thinned severely at the sole, which couldn’t have been more than an inch across. It looked grotesquely misshapen. A hoof, if she had to give it a name, but a very perverted hoof.
“What’s wrong?” Nape asked.
Catali covered the soil and stood. “Hmm,” she said, finger drumming her chin, “I was just thinking, we’re not far from Fennis Valley. We should see the Bluffs soon. There are plenty of cattle there; maybe a pack roamed through here.”
“Er. Look how far back it goes, though. It curves here, then… well, I can’t see how far it goes. Why would they go so far into the Lonely Lands? Ain’t nothing to eat here.”
Catali shrugged. “Maybe they eat this grass.”
“See, I don’t think that’d sit real well with their innards.”
“I don’t know of anything else that could cause this. Come on, we’re wasting time.”
Doubt wrinkled across Nape’s forehead. She held his eyes for a moment, then retreated into the thicket to grab her bags.
She’d marked Nape as a simpleton turned even simpler by his fiendish need for spice. But apparently he could still sniff out an unconvincing lie. He wouldn’t press for an answer, though. She knew him well enough to be certain of that. He was passive. Skittish when confronted.
“Cat,” Nape said, swatting away gnats from his face, “let me tell you a bit about me. I’m an observant guy. Now, see here, I know you saw something under that grass. And it’s the same damned thing I saw.”
Catali gave a silent sigh. Had she always been this bad at reading people, or was this a recent development? She strapped on her bags and faced Nape. “And?”
“And?” he said, incredulous. “That’s what you have to say? There’s something—lots of somethings out there—that made them… them… what kind of footprints are they, Cat? As sure as Aleer ain’t sittin’ in pond water sucking on his thumb, those ain’t normal tracks.”
Catali wrapped her thumbs around the straps of her bags. She bobbed back and forth for a few moments, then said with sincerity in her voice, “I don’t know, Nape. I honestly don’t know. But I told you in the Free City that I don’t need you. What I mean,” she said, reconsidering her word choice so she didn’t sound so hurtful, “is that you don’t have to tag along. If you don’t want to be here anymore, leave. You won’t hurt my feelings.”
Nape plucked a scab from his face. Blood trickled onto his lip. “Now, I don’t mean no offense by this, but it doesn’t seem like a whole lot could hurt your feelings. You’re, uh, y’know.” He twiddled his thumbs. “Stone.”
“Stone?”
“Yeah, stone. I don’t know if you have feelings is what I’m trying to say.”
Catali winced. “Ouch.”
“Oh. So you do have feelings. Well, I do too, and you’ve been damned heartless and uncaring, see. Now, I know I ain’t much of a person to you. Not much of a person to anyone, not even to myself, but dammit, I am a person. And I’ve got a little—not a lot, mind you—of self-respect and pride left. You’re going to start treating me right, do you hear? Or I will walk.
“Only reason I ain’t done so yet is simple. You need me.”
That delusional comment turned Catali’s head one way, as if seesawing the statement from the left side of her mind to the right would help her form a response. It did not.
“That last bit,” said Nape flatly, “was a jest. But the rest of it wasn’t.”
Catali might have smiled at that had her world not turned so suddenly dark and absolutely grim. She wasn’t sure if what saw was real, and if it was, where it had come from. Diametrically opposing thoughts cluttered her mind: Run. Stay. Fight. Flee. Scream. Don’t say a word.
A thing staggered toward Nape, a crooked frame of bone and gnarled spine. Its flesh was the color of garnet. Its arms swung like snapped limbs of a tree hanging on by tendons of bark; they drooped downward, fingers—no, talons—almost scraping the ground.
Also, its eyes had been gouged out.
Nape heard its laggard, uneven footsteps. The whites of his eyes seemed brighter, more expansive, dilated with fear.
Catali tilted her head leftward, and again. Nape mimicked her, and she nodded. With his hands clenched into fists, he sidestepped in that direction, then paused.
The fiend continued on its course, never adjusting for the slight movement of its would-be victim.
Again Catali tilted her head, and again Nape sidestepped. This continued until he was out of the fiend’s path, and only then did he chance a look behind him. What he saw brought his shivering hands up to his mouth. Probably he wanted to run. Probably he wished he had a handful of spice. He couldn’t muster the courage to do the former, and he had none of the latter.
With a silence belonging to only assassins and the darkness, Catali withdrew her skinning knife. She aimed the pointy end at the fiend and walked toward it, careful to avoid foliage, twigs, anything that might have cracked or snapped.
Nape watched idly, hands still in fists at his heart. He glanced at Catali, then the fiend. Back to Catali, to the—now they were one. Close enough that with one lunge and a firm hand, Catali could spill blood.
As Catali pulled her arm back, readying a devastating blow, the fiend stopped. It sniffed the air with narrow nostrils and a long, daggerlike nose. Its thin, triangular head swiveled in Nape’s direction, and the creature adjusted course.
Nape looked to Catali with pleading eyes. He ha
d no weapon. He wasn’t trained in hand-to-hand combat. He’d go down without a fight, crying and wailing as talons and teeth rived flesh from bone.
Catali tightened the grip on her knife. The frayed leather wrappings on the handle chewed into her palm. Her temples throbbed, and her chest felt like it was trapped in a vise. She’d count to three, she decided, and then strike.
One, and the creature tasted the air. It grinned.
Two, and the thing lowered its head. It looked like it was preparing a charge.
Three, and Catali lunged.
Aimed at the creature’s chest, presumably where its heart lay beating, the tip of her knife stabbed through the air, closing in on its target.
But it never reached its destination. The fiend wheeled around with unexplainable and unnatural speed, swiping its long, unwieldy arm into Catali’s jaw. The blow jarred loose her knife and sent her reeling back with a sharp wail, clutching at her face.
She stumbled, shook her head and gathered her bearings. She stole a quick look at the ground, searching for her knife but unable to find its dull silver sheen.
The fiend staggered forward with uneven, awkward steps. It hissed and sniffed and licked the air. Catali stumbled backward, thinking, hoping, praying—all the things you do when life seems to be rapidly approaching the end.
She hunted for a way into the thing’s mind, hopeful to manipulate its murderous thoughts. But the pathways and entrances were foreign to her; it was like trying to access the thoughts of a dragon.
She kept backing away, sticks crunching under her feet. The fiend stood in place, opened its mouth and bellowed forth a series of deep, phlegmy sounds. Perhaps it was babble as babies are wont to do, or more likely the noises were words of a foreign tongue.
He probably said I’m going to rip your face off your head, Catali thought.
A pillar of sunlight punched through the huge, twisted branches of the thicket, placing itself before Catali. She blinked and the patch of golden light was blotted out by the racing fiend.
It moved at an unthinkable speed, like a spider leaping out of its burrow and snatching up its prey. A blur. That’s what this monster, creature, beast—whatever misbegotten spawn of nature it could be called—had become.
Catali reflexively threw her arms up, shielding her face. To her surprise, she felt not claws or talons. She didn’t feel the wetness of drool and the bite of sharp teeth crushing the bones of her arm. Instead, she heard a distinct crack.
Cautiously peering out between her arms, she saw the fiend lying before her feet, writhing. Nape loomed over it, a thick branch in his hands.
She lowered her arms and traded glances between the fiend and Nape. “Well, look at you. From spice aficionado to noble hero.”
Nape raised the branch above his head and came down on the creature’s skull once more. This time, it stopped writhing. “I don’t know about a hero. But I guess I’m not a coward, am I? That’s a surprise to me. Now, what in the great bowels of hells is this thing?” He prodded its ribs.
Catali jabbed the toe of her boot into the fiend’s shallow cheek. It didn’t move, so she crouched and inspected it closer. “Take a guess.”
“Huh?”
“Take a guess. That’s what I’m going to do, because I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Nape dropped the branch. He knelt beside Catali. “What’s your guess?”
“An injection gone wrong. Worse than the poor saps whose flesh sloughed off. Help me flip it over.” She and Nape turned the fiend on its back. “It’s still breathing,” she said, pointing to its rising and falling chest.
“That ain’t no injection,” Nape said. “I mean, it could be. But what’re the chances an injection makes you a whole different species? Boiling your flesh off… I can get behind that. Make sense, somehow. But this? It’s like it came from another world.”
Catali ran her fingers over the fiend’s body. “Skin is moist and spongy.” She picked its arm up and it moved like a door missing two of its hinges. “Arm feels barely connected to the shoulder.”
“Whole body’s thin as a twig too,” Nape observed. “And look at those cheeks. Looks like they’re caving in. Where you goin’?”
Catali jumped up and walked past the fiend, hunched over. She returned with her knife. “Let’s see if it bleeds red.”
“Wait,” Nape said, putting his hand on hers. “We could capture it, y’know? Uh, research it, yeah?”
She looked at him in the same way you might look at that one special friend who tends to let his thoughts tumble out unfiltered. “I don’t wish to die today. So, no.”
Nape shrugged. “Fair enough. Let me scoot out of the way here. Don’t want blood spraying into my face. Could burn like acid for all I know.”
Catali gave him that look again. When he positioned himself behind her, as if she’d be his shield from acid-squirting blood, she ran her knife across the fiend’s throat. Flaps of flesh folded back as the blade edge made a neat laceration from left to right.
“Well, what do you know,” Catali said as blood poured out. “It’s red.”
Nape peered out over her shoulder. “Huh. Say, you don’t think those tracks and all that flattened grass… you don’t think there’s more of these—” His mouth twisted as he attempted to find the proper word to describe the grotesque thing he was looking at.
“Fiend,” Catali said, helping him. “Or thing. Or beast. Call it whatever you will.” She took in her surroundings. A cool wind chased away the warmth in the air; it felt like rain. She stared at the fiend, blood still gushing from its eviscerated throat. She committed its rangy anatomy and malformed carcass to memory. “We need to move on.”
“Cat,” Nape said, still on his knees as she stood. “Answer the question.”
“What do you think?” she said flippantly, picking up her bags of supplies and injections. She marched toward the edge of the thicket, not bothering to wait for Nape.
“I don’t know what to think!” he shouted after her. Then, in a mutter, “I know what to hope for, though.” He looked at the fiend and shuddered. “It damn sure ain’t more of these monsters.”
THE ARCHING BLUFFS arrived not with the subtleness of a mountain range slowly coming into focus over the horizon, but with the immediacy and unexpectedness of a sucker punch. Catali and Nape passed through a snowy curtain of thick nighttime fog and there the Bluffs jumped out at them, a dominating presence in the moonlit sky that seemed to loom over the world itself.
The Arching Bluffs stretched for two hundred miles to the west and two hundred miles to the east, each side rising in an arc to form one half of an arch. The point in which they nearly met and plunged downward forged a narrow pass known as Fennis Valley.
“Hotly contested, that valley,” said Nape. “Way back when, I mean, before the Conclave and King Fahlmar seized half of everything on Baelous.”
Catali showed little interested in Nape’s history lesson, mostly because she knew plenty of Fennis Valley’s past. When her aunt had allowed her to leave the larder she’d spent most of her days and nights in, she would sneak off to Curator Gough’s house, and the old man would give her piles and piles of books to read.
They were thick tomes, dusty and ancient. Most of them concerned past events, including Baelous’s civil war, in which the East and North were pitted against the South and West. Fennis Valley served as the sole gateway into the West and East.
The mountain pass, no wider than ten feet in some areas, saw its red clay walls painted with blood from thousands of men, until the war ended rather limply a decade later, when a plague ravaged cities all over, dropping armies faster than twenty trebuchets could drop a wall. Depending on who you asked, the East and North won the war. Talk to those who lived in the West and South and they’d tell you a different story.
“That’s strange,” Catali said. “The city’s dark.”
At the mouth of the valley, where the pass was at its widest, lay the city of Lorris. It’d been known by two
dozen other names throughout its existence, but Lorris had been the most recent.
“Sky’s dark,” Nape said. “Makes sense, if you ask me.”
“Torches,” she said flatly. “They exist, you know? And most cities I’ve been to have at least a walking path lit. I don’t see even a fluttering flame down there.”
Nape massaged his mouth. “Hmm. Could be that the bugger back there—what was his name?”
“The fiend?”
“No, no. That chum whose mind you raped.”
Catali glowered. “I don’t rape minds.”
“Sure, all right. Whatever it is you do to them, then. Anyways, could be that he lied to you. Mislead you. Misdirection, I bet.”
“Possibly,” she said, although she thought it was unlikely at best. What reason would the man have to lie? People don’t always need a reason to deceive, but most don’t do so simply for giggles.
Nape put his hands on his hips. “Hmm. Y’know, it does look kind of, uh… dead, don’t it?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of abandoned.”
He shrugged. “Sure, that too.”
Catali hugged herself for warmth. The night brought with it an unseasonable chill, although thankfully the rain that had seemed inevitable days ago had still not come. Being cold is miserable enough without also being wet.
“We’ll make camp on that hill,” she said, pointing to a nearby hump of earth. “In the morning, we investigate the city. It’s too dangerous in these conditions.”
Atop the grassy knoll, Catali shouldered off her bags and let out a sigh of relief. Her back ached and legs burned. She was no stranger to long treks, but she preferred making them without carrying a bagful of deceptively heavy injections along with food and drink. Most of the time she foraged as she went, but traipsing through a desert in hopes you come across an oasis or bushels of berries is a fantastic way of ensuring both your torture and subsequent death.
Nape gathered twigs, bark shavings, and leaves from under nearby trees, placing them in a pile. Catali got the fire going with a few strikes of her knife against a chunk of flint.
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 13
