“Okay, what the hell was that?” Hunter asked as the adrenaline high slowly faded.
Fawkes was down on one knee examining the remains of the mule.
“Low-dwellers. They’re horrid, are they not?”
“Not them! You! Did you just use me as monster bait?”
“No,” said the woman without taking her eyes from the carcass, “though I’ll keep that idea in mind in case we come across another pack. I had to see whether you are who you say you are.”
“By feeding me to the corpse-eaters?”
Fawkes wiped her blade clean on one of the mule’s haunches that was somehow not covered in blood and stood up.
“Low-dwellers are not natural creatures. They are not born and bred–they are created with vile sorcery. They make good fodder, but they are feral and unstable. That’s why the Skaarn–the fleshwarper, the sorcerer that creates them–places a seal on their primitive minds; no matter what, they cannot turn on their creator.”
It was a test, then. It made sense, but that didn’t help Hunter feel any better about it.
“Lady,” he said, trying to stay calm, “do I look like the kind of person who can create roided-out flesh-eating monster-monkeys? I can barely find my butt with both hands in this damn forest.”
“I know,” she said with the tiniest of smirks. “I just had to be sure. Who knows what tricks you transients have up your sleeve?”
“That thing could have eaten my face off.”
“Never mind that. Look at the carcass. What do you see?”
Hunter took a hesitant peek at the carnage. He was too busy trying not to see anything. The smell was enough to make him gag without any visual aids.
“Uh…”
“Look at the ribs here, at these bitemarks.”
“Looks like they belong to low-dwellers,” said Hunter, glancing at the open maw of one of the dead necrophages that lay nearby.
“Right so. Still, these aren’t the wounds that killed the animal. It was already long dead when the necrophages did their biting and chewing. At least half a day, I’d say. What was the killing blow?”
“Seeing how its head is over there by that bush… I’d say, decapitation?”
Fawkes walked over to the bloody head and poked it with the end of her saber.
“It was torn clean off,” she said. “No low-dweller has that kind of strength.”
“May I ask a silly question?” said Hunter. “What was a mule doing in the middle of the Weald, saddle and all?”
“It’s not a silly question,” Fawkes nodded, “though it does have an obvious answer. The Brennai use mules as pack animals. It probably belonged to the missing woodsmen.”
“If the mule’s here, where are the woodsmen?”
“Where indeed…?”
Hunter thought he could have Biggs and Wedge scout around a bit. Where had they flown off to? He hadn’t seen them since their heroic maneuver during the fight with the low-dwellers. Hunter tried to feel their presence in his head.
“Uh, guys? Are you there?” he projected.
They were, although they were uncharacteristically quiet.
“You okay?”
They sent Hunter the telepathic equivalent of a shrug. Tired. Why?
“That dive bomb you pulled was quite a move. Thanks.”
Happy bird noises filled his head. You’re welcome!
Despite all their fluttering and chattering, the feathery windbags weren’t actual flesh-and-blood birds. They were aether spirits from who-knows-where, with whatever implications that carried. He’d have to keep reminding himself that.
“Take a look at this,” Fawkes said and squatted near the path they’d been following. “Tracks, many. The woodsmen came this way.”
“Should we follow them?”
Fawkes kept studying the tracks, her brow furrowed.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Fawkes?”
“It’s strange.”
“What is?”
“They were walking. Dragging their feet, almost.”
“Maybe they were tired?”
“Tired or not, lad,” she said, looking up, “if I’d seen whatever took down that mule, you can bet your best hat I’d be running as fast as I could.”
***
They didn’t have to follow the tracks too far before they found the woodsmen, though Hunter immediately wished they hadn’t.
“What in God’s name…?”
“Lad,” said Fawkes, grimmer than usual, “no decent god had anything to do with this.”
They were in a clearing. There was blood everywhere, of course; its metallic smell permeated the forest air. Then there were body parts. Arms, legs, feet, hands, heads–human heads, still wearing expressions of terror and shock. Some were on the ground, half-chewed. Some were poking out of the weeds and the undergrowth. Some were impaled on tree branches. And some, Hunter realized with an ever-increasing sense of dread, were actually arranged in a neat, logical, almost ritualistic pattern. It was like someone had taken the time to leave a message, writing in blood and dead heads and arms and legs instead of ink and letters.
“Did the low-dwellers do this?” he muttered, more to himself than Fawkes.
“No," Fawkes shook her head. “The smell of blood is what drew them in the area, whipped them up into a frenzy. But this… someone else did this. Something else.”
Hunter’s mind refused to take in what he was seeing. It was like the world’s most horrid jigsaw. All he could see was the pieces, tossed around all over. As for the whole image… hell, he couldn’t even begin to guess how many people the dismembered body parts had belonged to.
Careful not to disturb any of the remains, Fawkes started examining the scene of the carnage up close, looking for who knows what.
“Don’t move,” she ordered. “And don’t touch anything.”
That wouldn’t be a problem. He was barely managing not to gag on the air that he breathed as it was–he was certainly not going to touch anything he didn’t absolutely have to.
“Take a look at this,” Fawkes said and squatted at the edge of the clearing. “The tracks end here. These people straight up walked into the clearing. They came here of their own volition. Nobody panicked. Nobody ran. They simply stood over there and waited for their turn.”
“What do you mean, waited for their turn?”
Fawkes stood up and gave a grim look at the trees around them.
“Do you know what a shrike is, lad? It’s a kind of bird. The butcherbird, some call it. It’s known for its habit to impale its prey on sharp thorns, so it can tear it apart into smaller bites more easily. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
Hunter didn’t–and then he suddenly did. The trees around them were littered with body parts. Torsos hung from branches. Limbs hung from thin strips of flesh and sinew. Intestines were stretched over the crowns of the trees like gossamer. The smell of blood wafted from everywhere, overpowering.
“Someone–something–grabbed these people one by one and strung them up on those branches like sweetmeats on a Yule tree,” Fawkes went on. “And the rest simply stood there and watched.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Hunter mumbled, still taken aback.
“It gets worse. Try to imagine what kind of strength it would take to pick a man or a woman off the ground and pin them on a tree branch until it runs them through. Then there’s the question of how all these people were dismembered.”
Fawkes picked up a mutilated arm and waved it at a horrified Hunter.
“See, there’s no signs of cutting or sawing. These people were literally pulled apart limb from limb by means of brute strength.”
“Like the mule’s head.”
“Right.”
“Something that strong would have to be really, really big, right?”
“Right.”
“And something that big would have left back tracks, footprints, something. Right?”
Hunter started looking around for tracks, broken twigs, trampled underbrush–anything to take his mind off the brutality above. A minute passed, then another. Then, finally, he spotted it.
There it was, still clearly visible among the carnage and the dead; a somewhat humanoid-looking print, large as a goddamn flipper. Once Hunter knew what to look for, he saw more, too. They were everywhere on the ground around the clearing. Judging from how they were spread, Hunter guessed they belonged to a large bipedal humanoid creature–a guess that must have been right, because it triggered a notification.
“So it’s big, impossibly strong, stands on two legs, and it murders people,” said Hunter. “What else?”
Fawkes looked at the torn arms and legs around her, and her mouth became a thin line of worry.
“It’s smart, too,” she said. “Intelligent. These are no random killings. See how meticulously the limbs of the murdered were placed on the ground?”
“What kind of beast kills that way?”
“Beast?” Fawkes said. “Only man is capable of such cruelty, lad. Man, or worse.”
“Is that why you mentioned I might be a werebeast earlier?”
“Yes," she grunted. “Though I think you’re more or less acquitted of suspicion now.”
Hunter was about to offer a half-hearted ‘I told you so’ when an idea crossed his mind.
“Give me a moment,” he said. “I think I might be able to learn more.”
He summoned his essence once again, savoring the cold sensation that ran from the base of his spine all the way up to the center of his brain. Then he braced himself for the burning, briny shock that inevitably followed, spat a couple swear words for good measure, and cast Mystic’s Eye.
Hunter took a few breaths to steady himself and shake off the terrible feeling of saltwater and rust eating at the back of his nose and eyes, then read the tracks’ description out loud. The woman stared at him, and her frown deepened into a scowl.
“That thing you did just know… was it a spell? Some kind of transient’s divination?”
He shrugged, she scoffed.
“You’re a crafty one, I’ll give you that," she said. “Full of surprises. At any rate, you are correct. I don’t know of any beast or monster around these parts that fits the tracks and marks the killer left behind. And I noticed something else, too; there are no prints leading in or out of the clearing. It’s as if the creature came out of thin air, did its killing, and then vanished again.”
“Maybe it climbed the trees," Hunter offered. “Or maybe it flew.”
“Maybe,” Fawkes said, ruminating. “Unlikely, but maybe.”
“So, what now?” asked Hunter, mainly to fill the silence that was beginning to last a bit too long. “Are we going to bury them, say a few words or…?”
“I’m not a soothsayer, lad” she drawled. “Nor am I an undertaker. Let the Brennai sort this out and take care of their dead themselves. We’ve done our part here. Let us be on our way. The day’s a-wasting.”