The alderwoman’s name was Edith, and she paid them with reluctance. It wasn’t communicated in so many words, though. It was written in her actions, in the way she entered the inn before the sun had fully risen, trying to get the business done before anyone else was stirring, before the innkeeper even took up his post and saw her lingering in the main hall. She didn’t want it witnessed that she’d brought in an enquirer. She didn’t want it known, but after losing three villagers to ‘strange circumstances,’ she’d taken matters into her own hands. There was meant to be a council meeting about those sorts of decisions, she told Eida, her voice low, but she knew by the time the last man came up dead that they had to move quickly.

Eida admired her, even if she could tell she was eager to have both she and Tadrin gone. She was polite throughout the transaction, but their last words to one another showed her feelings well enough.

“You’ll be leaving, then?” A searching look from those rheumy, half-blind eyes.

“Yes. We have business elsewhere.”

“Good. Mother keep you on your travels.”

The words came out in a rush and she scuttled out the door without waiting for a reply. Eida didn’t let it get to her. Compared to other encounters she’d had, Edith’s farewell may as well have been a smile and a hug. She decided to make an effort to actually remember her name.

Tadrin was quiet as they took to the road. He kept that silence until the sun was well up in the sky, brooding. Some part of Eida enjoyed it, enjoyed the solace of it. Blightwatch itself was not a terrain most would call beautiful: the road they traveled from the town began with cobbles, but the further they went, they became more and more cracked and in need of repair. Two miles out, and they’d disappeared entirely, bleeding into nothing but earth packed down by the passage of other travelers. The landscape stretching out around them showed hills rolling with browning, sagging grass, patches of tenacious green only just starting to show with spring. Further, deep into the horizon in every direction, it bled into mountains. Cruel looking mountains, their peaks capped with sharp edges coated in snow. There was a stark beauty to it, she supposed, but those mountains often made it feel as though the county was bearing down on her, fencing her in. Even if they were miles and miles away, mere smudges in the distance, she could feel their presence.

“How’s the leg?” Tadrin asked abruptly. She glanced over at him, but he was still facing forward, upright in the saddle. His face was inscrutable.

“Perfectly fine. It was only a bit of glass. Not serious.”

“Empty vial?”

“Thankfully.”

“Mm.” He flexed his fingers over his reins, letting go for a moment to stretch before grabbing hold again. “Lucky.”

There was more silence after that, and she was content with it. He was rattled. He hid it well, but Eida could see it as clearly as a rain cloud. It wouldn’t be fair to accuse him of sulking. She knew it was more than that. It went unspoken between them, but they’d become something of a family. A strange, disjointed one, to be certain, but she knew he wanted to look out for her. Sometimes he’d tease her, ask her when she was going to settle down and have children. Find a nice man. He’d taken to calling her ‘old maid’ the day she turned twenty-seven. ‘Who’s going to look after you when I’m gone, eh?’ She’d given him a wry look. ‘Me,’ she’d answered. He laughed at that, but she could read the worry in his eyes.

She often wondered if he ever had a family. She wondered if he ever had a daughter. She also never had the courage to ask.

It was true, though, that she could look after herself. Perhaps not as an enquirer, or at least not one who dealt with the creatures that came from the blight, but Tadrin well knew there were many professions the title could bleed into. She had at least basic skills with healing, and could create mixtures for it, too. They weren’t that potent, but there were many villages like Coniston, and even passing knowledge would be a great boon. There were more things too, of course: investigative work, like the enquirer who’d given up the trade in order to solve common murder. A lot of her profession involved understanding how someone had died, gritty and grim as it often was. Perception like that had a broad reach.

But she understood what Tadrin meant. Why he worried. He was beyond his sixtieth year, and even if he never complained, she knew his sword was feeling heavier of late. She suspected that he wanted to die fighting, die with it in his hand. She kept an eye on him just in case, made sure he wasn’t slowing down. She intended to keep him around for some time, set him up with a nice cottage somewhere, with lots of pointless hobbies to partake of and copious amounts of alcohol.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

He’d pretend to hate it, but deep down he’d be grateful.

They didn’t see anyone else during the first two days of the journey. They didn’t talk much, but it was companionable, and after the shifting stares and upturned noses of the villagers in Coniston, Eida enjoyed keeping to herself. She opened a new journal, scrawling notes on the Rakisha, marking down where they’d found it and what the mutations entailed. She cursed herself that she hadn’t opened it up, taken a closer look to see if anything but the teeth were changed, but she’d been too rattled at the time to think of it. That, and she had no doubt the stench of that beast, sliced open, would have been enough to make her retch.

On the third day, the road ahead finally spat out something that wasn’t endless dirt and spots of green-brown grass. Soldiers marched towards them. Sordheim soldiers, bearing the livery of a golden lion standing on hind legs, lashing out at some unseen enemy. Count Nickolai Sordheim’s men, the current liege and lord of Blightwatch. Eida knew little about the Count, but she kept her distance from his men anyway: she’d found that being armed to the teeth and full of self-importance tended to be a dangerous mixture. Both she and Tadrin moved to the other side of the road as they passed by. Five men were at the front of a large wagon, all astride horses. There were six more, three to either side, marching single file with pikes in hand.

She couldn’t see what was in the wagon until they were passing directly by one another. A waxy tarp of old cloth, rough burlap tossed over a stack of something amorphous. Something…

Bodies. Around fifteen of them. Feet were sticking out of the cloth at the end of the wagon, and their skin was blackened and twisted strangely. Not burning. Something else. She could detect no hint of smoke, and the distortion seemed to originate beneath the flesh, not from anything that’d charred the surface.

One of the soldiers caught her glance and barked out: “Eyes forward. Show some respect.”

“Is there trouble ahead?” Tadrin asked, his low voice close behind Eida. “We’re moving up the road to Blackstone.”

“No. The way is clear.”

The other soldiers didn’t spare them so much as a glance, and there was no slowing in their marching forward. Soon enough, they were little more than a clattering of metal and pounding boots behind them, and the squeak of one of the wagon’s wheels, strangely eerie in the quiet of open ground.

When they were well away and the path was clear again, Tadrin asked: “Any idea what killed them?”

Eida chewed on the inside of her cheek, racking her mind for an answer, but she shook her head. “No,” she replied. “But it was nothing good.”

“Nothing good?” He looked over at her, briefly. “Death is rarely good, Eida.”

“Nothing natural killed them.”

“More beasts, then?”

She rolled her shoulders back, drawing in a breath. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Tadrin. We’ll see when we get to the university. Maybe we’ll be able to learn about what’s happening there.”

He nodded. They kept moving, and when night came, they decided to forgo setting up camp and pushed onwards into morning.

~~

The gate was open before the men reached it. Up on the ramparts, sentries spotted them winding down the open road. They knew what the wagon meant. They knew what the sackcloth meant, white and laid on top of the dead like a flag of surrender.

No word had been sent ahead. No word needed to be, anymore. This was the seventh patrol that’d been ordered out to scan the border. The seventh patrol meant to report on the perimeter between Blightwatch and the largest pocket of blight, that span of twisted, corrupted land that was enough to fill most hearts with nothing but terror.

But the Count’s men were loyal. They knew the meaning behind the name of their beloved county. They had a long, valiant history of keeping watch over those atrocities, of making sure the number of abominations that got through were few and far between.

Yet they weren’t few. Their numbers grew by the day, and those front lines were failing. Courage alone wasn’t enough to stand against it. It was a bitter truth to face.

Bitter, because all those songs and stories told by the fireside had implied otherwise.

The wagon ground to a halt. They stood before the crumbling enormity of Schloss Sordheim, its Western wing abandoned long ago to cave in on itself. The Captain stepped forward, pondering, for a moment, how well the castle suited Blightwatch. How well it reflected the way it was crumbling.

Turning to one of the men lingering before the massive, iron wrought doors, he said:

“Inform the Count we’ve returned. I have my report ready for him.”

The man, a new recruit who hadn’t had the excitement whittled out of him yet, darted up the stairs. The doors opened, and the half-light of the great hall swallowed him up immediately.

The Captain turned back towards the wagon. Ten haggard faces stared back at him, ten sets of tired, hollowed eyes.

“Dig a pit for the dead,” he instructed. “And burn them.”

High overhead, a vulture circled lazily on frigid wind currents, its cry echoing like a death knell over the courtyard below.