Abomination (20 page)

She had not been happy growing up, though she had been raised in a household surrounded by most everything a child could hope for, in a kingdom ravaged by poverty and privation. But she had from the beginning felt that something important was missing from her life. She was daughter to a wealthy lord, a widower who had raised her on his own—though mostly that meant delegating her daily care to nannies and other household servants. He rarely had time for her himself, even when he was home, which was less often than not. Mostly he was away, hunting or attending to important business of the Order.

Still, she knew that her father’s presence was not the thing that was missing, the source of the emptiness that gnawed at her. Perhaps
missing
was not the right word. For as nebulous as the feeling was, Indra knew that it was something not absent, just somehow . . . misplaced. It was maddening, an itch she could never scratch, even though it bothered her constantly.

And then there was the other thing. The thing that had brought her here, had compelled her to walk away from a life of privilege and wealth in favor of the rigors of the Trial. Her father had always told her to put it behind her, to forget, but she could not. She knew she would never know peace until she had done the thing she had set out to do. Yet to the last, her father had tried to deter her, using every argument he could call to mind.
It’s too dangerous. You’re still just a child. Even if you somehow succeed, revenge will not bring you peace
. Indra often wondered if he would have counseled a son as he had her. She suspected not, and so she had set out, resolved to show him that vengeance was as much the province of women as of men. Perhaps more.

She cursed under her breath. It was an old mistake, dwelling on these things too long, and now her appetite was not what it was. She ate a little more of the salmon, for strength, then cut an
extra piece and tossed it to Venator. She could finish the rest for breakfast tomorrow. Lying on her back, she gazed up at the infinite blanket of night above, looking to the sky to quiet her mind and usher her into sleep.

Suddenly she sat bolt upright. The sound that came echoing across the hills and valleys was beyond definition, a hideous, piercing shriek that rolled Indra’s stomach and turned the skin on her arms and neck to gooseflesh. It was fleeting, the echo fast dissipating, gone as swiftly as it had come, leaving the night silent and still once more. And yet it left nothing unchanged. The air seemed colder in its wake, the sky darker and more menacing.

Indra had known trepidation and anxiety and unease, but she had never known fear, the true fear that coiled around your entire body like an ice-cold rope and left you paralyzed, unable to move though every fiber within you told you to flee. Now she wanted nothing more than to leap to her feet and run, though she knew there was nowhere—out here in the open—to run to. But she did not move. She stayed, rooted where she sat, listening, unable to do anything but. She turned her head, trying to place where the sound had come from. Near or far? Here or there? It had seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. All she could be sure of was the terrible
wrongness
of it, a sound that belonged not in this world but in the conjurings of a nightmare.

No, no man could have made that sound, nor any beast of this earth. That sound was monstrous, as was the creature it had come from. An abomination, she was sure of it, though she had never seen nor heard one in the flesh before. Her father had sheltered her from that, had made sure that she was kept safe and far away when he and his men brought one back with them to study. He had intended to protect her from such horrors, things no innocent young girl should ever see, but had only made her more curious, more determined. She wanted to see one up close, to know how it looked and smelled and moved. More than anything, she wanted
to watch one die, hear the sound it made when she drove a sword through its beating black heart and killed it.

And yet as that ungodly screech echoed through her mind, she found herself momentarily unsure of her wish to be that close. That deep, primal part of her mind whose sole function was to protect her from danger urgently wanted her away, far away from here. Then the cold rope around her slackened a little; she found that she could move and she rose to her feet, surveying her surroundings, though it was impossible to see anything in the blackness of the night. The urge to flee was almost overwhelming, a frightened companion tugging on her arm and whispering,
Let’s just go
. Still, she resisted. She had not come this far only to cower and turn tail at the last. This was what she wanted, had wanted for as long as she could remember. To find such a beast as this, one of the last few that remained. An endangered species, soon to be all the more so because of her.
It is you who are the hunter, and it the prey
, she reminded herself.
It should be running from you
.

Venator flew to her side and alighted on her shoulder, as ever her protector. She stroked his feathers, which were ruffled; he was as unsettled by the sound as she. “It’s all right,” she said, in a vain effort to comfort them both. Then she sat back down, trying to relax, though her mind raced now more than ever. Yes, she was closer than she had ever been, and tomorrow would bring her closer still. Perhaps tomorrow, or the next day, would bring her face-to-face with this beast. Close enough to kill it, and watch it die.

She let Venator off her shoulder, and he resumed his watch over her as she lay back and closed her eyes. She feared that she would find little sleep tonight. Her chest was pounding. From excitement or from fear, she did not know.

Stupid. Stupid!

Wulfric berated himself under his breath as he knelt by the river- bank, trying to wash away the ash. He knew he could not remove it all, nor usually would he try, but today he wanted as much of the beast’s residue off him as was possible. Naked and shivering in the bitter cold, he plunged his hands into the flowing river, scrubbing at his arms and splashing the frigid water onto his face.
This is all your fault
, he told himself as the ash that stained his skin joined with the river and was carried away by the current.
You could have prevented this
.

Wulfric had long suspected it, but there was no longer any doubt: the beast was growing stronger. It had been for years, night after night, with each new incarnation, until finally, three nights ago, the chain had broken. Lashed as always against a sturdy tree, the beast had strained against its bonds until the iron, stretched beyond its tolerance, snapped. And the monster escaped, with Wulfric trapped within it, paralyzed in a waking nightmare, able only to watch in helpless dismay as the creature wandered the countryside looking for something to slaughter.

He had been lucky that first night; the surrounding woodland was empty, and though the beast wandered ravenously for miles, it had found nothing to feast upon. Wulfric woke a little after dawn on his bed of ashes and dust, cursing his luck but thankful at least
that the night had passed without incident. He spent most of that day trying to find his way back to the tree so he could retrieve his chain and cloak—a difficult task since, as was often the case, he had only a vague, hazy recollection of the path the beast had taken in the dark. Long ago, in the nights before Wulfric had hit upon the idea of the chain, the beast had sometimes traveled farther than seemed possible with its lumbering gait, and the night the chain broke had been the same. By the time Wulfric found the tree with the broken chain around it, the sun was close to setting, and he thought himself lucky to have found it at all.

As his accursed fortune would have it, the link that had snapped was close to the center: where once he had one good chain, he now had two, each half the length and neither long enough to be of any use. He would need to find a smith to fix them together again, but the closest town was more than a day’s walk. It would mean venturing perilously close to a populous area and spending the night there with no ability to safely bind himself. The beast, he knew from hard experience, would massacre every living soul within such a town if it should chance upon it in the night. Safer, he reckoned, to venture a little farther in another direction, toward a smaller, more sparsely populated village perhaps three days away. And so he gathered up the broken chain and started walking. The first night had passed without bloodshed somehow, and he hoped, if he was careful, he could survive a few more without doing harm.

He was wrong. The second night, though Wulfric had chosen the most remote, secluded spot he could find, the beast came upon a family of deer in a woodland clearing and tore them limb from limb, babes and all. The beast then moved on until it found a field of penned-in sheep. It clambered over the fence and descended upon the defenseless flock, hacking through them in a frenzy, chasing down the ones who tried to flee as they scrabbled desperately at the walls of their pen, until the last of them was silenced.

The next day, the day before this one, Wulfric happened upon a pit along his road through the forest. It was more than ten feet
deep—a mass grave, he suspected, that for whatever reason had been dug but never filled. Hoping that while he could climb out of it, the beast would not be able, he lowered himself down at sunset. But the creature would not be confined. For a few minutes only it clawed angrily at the earthen walls of the pit before finding purchase and scrambling up and out. It bolted from the wood and into the open countryside, where before long it found a farmer’s field where dozens of cows were sleeping—and worse, the farmer himself, keeping watch over his herd.

The farmer saw the vile black shape emerging from the darkness and into the pale moonlight that fell upon his field. He stood and watched, wide-eyed with horror and disbelief, as it lumbered toward his cattle; then he heard it shriek and the sound jolted him into action. He turned and ran.

And that was his undoing. The beast, focused on the herd, had not noticed the farmer until his sudden movement alerted it. Though the cattle were by far the easier and the fatter prey, the beast somehow instinctively knew what would be the greater evil. It stalked the man across the open field in the dead of night, watching him stumble and fall and get up again and keep running. It could have run the man down far more speedily, but instead toyed with him, allowing him to run and run until he was exhausted and his legs could carry him no farther. When he finally collapsed and rolled onto his back, gazing in terror at the beast as it closed the final yards between them, all Wulfric could do was look, through monstrous eyes, into the face of a man who knew he was about to die. As a soldier, Wulfric had seen many men face death. Not like this. This was a look of terror so raw, so pure, that death came almost as a relief. It was the kind of fear that could emerge only in the face of something as grotesque, as utterly
wrong
, as the thing that now possessed Wulfric. It surely would have been enough to inspire madness had death not immediately followed.

The beast stood over the fallen man and stabbed him in the belly with a long thorn-like claw, slowly, driving it deeper until
it ran all the way through him. It watched for a moment as the man screamed and writhed in helpless agony, grasping at the barb that skewered him to the ground. Then it grabbed the farmer by one arm and one leg and simply pulled him apart, splitting him open at the center like an overripe fruit. That outpouring of blood, the blood of an innocent man that would forever be another stain on his conscience, was the last thing Wulfric remembered before waking the next morning. All because he was foolish enough to believe that he could have kept the unbound beast from killing for even a few short nights.
Stupid. Stupid!

There was one small mercy. The beast had not traveled so far that night and even after backtracking to recover the chain and cloak, Wulfric was at last within daylight’s walk of the small village he sought. If he made haste, he could be there by noon—time enough, he hoped, for the local blacksmith to repair and strengthen his broken chain so that he might secure himself before nightfall. Else he would have no option but to retreat back into the wilderness, as far as possible before sundown, and pray.

Indra arrived in the village a short while after noon. It had been some time since she had last passed through any kind of town, and she was grateful both for the touch of civilization after so many days of solitude and for the chance, perhaps, to gain some useful information.

It was not much of a place, a minor, nameless settlement that had sprung up at the crossing of two dirt roads in the hope of attracting passing travelers. Though it was still drizzling, the rain had relented enough for the local farmers and traders to have set out their stalls. There was one selling chickens and other meats, another with fruits and vegetables, and on the other side of the road, a blacksmith and a skinner.

Though it was the height of the day, none appeared to be doing much business. Perhaps because people did not yet trust this break in the weather or, as likely, due to the rampant poverty that still blighted much of the kingdom. There was a sign of that before her very eyes. A filthy beggar in a tattered cloak, his hands and face streaked black with grime, quarreling with the blacksmith over a matter of some pennies. Clearly the most pitiable fellow, yet the smith appeared to have no sympathy for him, and though Indra found so uncharitable an attitude contemptible, she knew it was not uncommon. In times as hard as these, few felt compelled to share the little they had.

She would have helped the poor man herself but for the fact that she had nothing of her own to give. Instead, she convinced herself that it was none of her concern. What interested her was the tavern on the other side of the crossroads. It was the kind of place locals came to trade gossip, and she needed to know if there was any truth to the stories she had heard.

The ramshackle structure of stone and thatch was too small to warrant a colorful name. Others she had passed in her travels had names like the Dancing Ogre, the Nag’s Head, the Slaughtered Dane. This one was as anonymous as the hamlet it served. As she approached, Indra pondered what name might best suit it. The Pile of Bricks, perhaps.