Roundworm Woods
The Walk of the Graves? Why do you ask for another story from those grisly years? No happy endings lurk there. Still, none know the history better than I, Greymalkin the Scribe. I saw it all.
This day I speak of…
I had just joined the company. I had marched many days from the sea, to meet them at their camp in the vast Whiteeye Waste. The Waste - land of the black soil, of hissing fog, of the steel that never sleeps. The company had a deserter, who they named The Gurn. This Gurn had abandoned his walk, and fled into a nearby wood. I was to find him.
But, a Road Walker never walks alone. The company commander assigned me a partner, Cemetery Stones. Ah, Stones. Never did I meet a man more suited to our grim undertaking. Violent, but happy in his violence; he used to sing as we walked.
So it was that in my first days of The Walk of the Graves I set out beside one monster. A reaver and a rover. Never could I have anticipated the others I would soon know.
Greymalkin flinched, eyes skittering over the cloudshadowed hills to either side of the road. “Did you catch that?” he said. “That sound? I have no- no experience, in this atmosphere. I rely on your judgement, my comrade. Are there Blights at hand?”
Stones chuckled, then said, “Put on your gear if you’re scared.” His full black eyes glittered like obsidian.
Greymalkin brushed at his collar. ” I’ve read the accounts of the first Walk. Blights are a different kind of pest entirely.”
Stones leaned against a ruined wall of cobbled stone at the side of the dusted road. “So melodramatic. Fear not. It’s probably rats. I happen to be in a mood for some cooked rat.”
Greymalkin stared at the dark hills with the practiced squint of a scholar. “I’ll leave such dining to you.”
Stones laughed. “Trust me. By dusk, we’ll have every Blight within twenty miles scuttling back to the stinking womb.”
Stones resumed a jovial march along the road, his steps kicking up plumes of The Whiteeye Waste’s pervasive black dust. Atop his head a furred cap bobbed in the red light of midday, protecting an otherwise hairless scalp. His cheeks were perfectly clean-shaven, though above his lips there stretched a tenacious shadow of stubble that no shave seemed able to eradicate, no matter the closeness. Stones had a robust, healthy complexion, thickly muscled and full-of face, though his skin was dead-man pale.
Beside Stones, Greymalkin seemed faint by contrast, almost as if he might disappear. He stood half-a-head taller, but five times as lank, with a posture that seemed always leaning forward or to one side.
Together the two moved along the dusty Road of Graves, their steps stirring the ashen dirt into a thin boot cover. Dead, zigzag trees, and the pointed stumps of trees, decorated the rough hillside country. The wind in that country carried a faintly caustic smell, which the nose seemed to become accustomed to. There were no bird calls in The Waste. The only sound was the moan of the wind.
“Relax,” said Stones, noticing his companion’s lingering look on the hills. “Men suffer no mutation from a Blighted rat’s chewage.”
“The Blight infects all beasts,” said Greymalkin.
“Yep,” Stones agreed. “Polluted blood’ll Blight the life and breath right out of any living thing. But their regular fluids — their bite spit, their spoor — won’t condemn a man.” Stones barked a laugh. “If it did, men wouldn’t have many summers left as a species.”
“It seems that was omitted from the annals.”
“A sharp rat bite will turn a dog or a cat though,” Stones went on. “And pigs.”
“Stones-” Greymalkin began, then stopped. “Or would you prefer if I address you by your-”
“Cemetery Stones is my walking name,” interrupted the heavier man.
“Stones, what else have you and your fellow — my fellow — Road Walkers witnessed in this Waste? Besides The Blights? If I am to be keeper to your company’s record, I would like to begin with a current accounting.” To accentuate his point the towering scholar stopped, and reached the long distance down to the leather sack at his hip, as if to draw forth writing implements.
Stones interrupted once more, this time forcibly, with a shove against the scholar’s spine that sent him stumbling back into motion along the thin ribbon of the road.
“Don’t gibber over the rotten things in the periphery,” said Stones. He pulled out a long, ugly knife from somewhere under the leather folds of his coat. The sharp edge caught the murky daylight as he pointed it ahead of them along the road. “Today’s a traitor-gutting day, not a day for killing disgusting yippers. Blighted or otherwise.”
“Alright.”
“Now, do you see yonder fork in the path?” Greymalkin nodded somberly. “In two distinct directions does it go. East is Stonehills. A tombland for dead slaves. Our quarry The Gurn — scatterbrained though he always was — would have been outright brainless altogether to hide in a place like that. No, he’ll have taken the west way. That road wends between the wooden skeletons and blackened stumps of Roundworm. The trees made a thick forest there, once. To Roundworm, then.”
The shadows had not twisted far about the upright stumps of Roundworm when Stones and Greymalkin — stepping through the burned, dead wood — came upon a shrine. It was a wide, large, flat disc of metal, probably iron, embedded in the earth. The scored and dusted surface of the shrine did not quite reflect the red and grey clouds that floated silently overhead, though the metal seemed to take some of their hue. The air was cold and heavy. The shrine lay between two low-grassed knolls at the side of the road. The black tree stumps roiling up on the hills all around it seemed possessed of a particularly malformed character, even for a forest as rotten as Roundworm. Thousands of small holes riddled the black wood, like a kind of sick cheese. Any trees which still supported their creaking, barren upper limbs sported long curtains of old man’s beard, and shelf mushrooms gathered small pools of water at the base of every trunk.
Stones stepped carefully onto the metal disk. He bent low, searching for signs of human passage.
Greymalkin climbed a little up the side of one hill. He un-leaned, craning his neck, scanning the road and woods. Further down the road he spotted the opaque, silvery surface of a river. A lump lay on the bank beside the too-still water.
“What is this shrine?” Stones asked abruptly. He stepped to the side of the huge disk.
Greymalkin walked down from his position on the hill. “A star shrine, surely,” he said. He bent and brushed some of the road dust from the surface of the metal, revealing a series of angular runes below. “This is Oulsraak script. The Shrine… is to Old Man Spider. That is the constellation — they, the stars — that watches for balance in life.”
Stones stepped back a pace from the disk. “Maybe there’s un-dead steel sleeping under it.”
“No. It’s just a shrine. ‘Watch us, spider father’,” Greymalkin intoned, tracing a finger along the angular letters. “‘Thanks we render for the flies; thanks for the spiders; thanks for the web’.”
“Flies, huh?” Stones smirked. “About as useful of a blessing as fingernail splinters.” Despite his practicality, Stones did not step again upon the disc.
Greymalkin then pointed out the river, and together the pair stepped down the road to where it ran beside the water. The odd shape Greymalkin had seen turned out to be a fishing boat, pulled up far on the bank and overturned. Green moss grew over its curving boards.
Stones went to inspect the watercraft; first with a kick and then, when this elicited no sharp scurry from beneath, by quickly grabbing the gunnels and flipping it over. Greymalkin meanwhile walked to the edge of the water. He stared down at the perfectly-flat, silver, opaque surface. He examined his reflection. He thought his cheeks looked a little hollower than usual, and he smoothed down a wild hair at the corner of his pencil-thin mustache. His eyes seemed to pull in the shadows of the waste. The forest behind him rustled with wind, adding to his sense of wasting emptiness; the cold air touched his skin, leaving a chill.
Stones looked up from the boat. “There’s a village not far,” he said. “Wild slaves. The Gurn might have looked for shelter with them.”
Greymalkin, distracted by the water, nodded absently. “Why is this river so still?” he asked.
Stones grabbed the lip of the boat and pulled it toward the bank. “We’ll travel by water. This raft looks floatworthy. Come. Help me drag it.”
Greymalkin grabbed the other side. Together the two hauled the heavy, old fishing boat to the edge of the placid water. Stones lifted his pack over his shoulder. He set it softly in the floor of the craft with a clang of metal and glass.
They pushed off and climbed in. Greymalkin missed the first step; his boots splashed as he hopped awkwardly, finally pulling himself over the gunnel. The boat rocked, then settled. Stones pulled a small oar from a leather loop beside the bow seat. He handed it to Greymalkin and ordered him to paddle. Greymalkin did so.
Each swipe of the oar made a soft splash as Greymalkin plied the water in long, slow strokes. The gaunt man had something of water-bug’s aspect, with his long and thin arms made longer by the wooden oar. Stones meanwhile stretched his thick legs out before him. He took a pinch of smokethistle from the bag at his feet, along with a pipe and firesteel. He smoked. He watched the scholar. For a time they travelled thus.
“On this river,” said Stones, “we avoid the dangers of Roundworm, and may watch both banks.”
Greymalkin cast a doubtful look at the blackened trees, and paddled without reply.
What?” asked Stones.
Greymalkin shrugged, pulling the paddle from the water and dipping it on the other side. “I feel - or rather, I have the same sensation as when I am - exposed to the elements.”
“Is it The Gurn you’re sweating over? One of us will have to stick him.” Stones winked, and pulled his crude knife from his belt, and gave it an appreciative scan. “Of course, we know between ourselves which of us will have to handle any bloodwork.”
The banks of the river rose higher — the river drew narrower — and soon the pair were floating through a gorge. The boards of the boat had shrunken and wasted with time; Stones now had to take small copper cupfuls of water leaking in through the hull and toss them against the corn-yellow moss growing up the gorge walls. Still they floated on, every so often passing under the drafty shade of a Roundworm tree leaning out above.
When the first rat struck the water, it’s splash coincided so closely with the dip of Greymalkin’s paddle that, initially, the pair were not certain of the sound’s source. Both glanced up. Greymalkin held his paddle still at the side of the boat. Stones held his hands in his lap.
The succeeding splashes, heralding a sudden downpour from the ledges, could not be similarly mistaken. The gorge came alive with falling rats. Dozens of squealing, chittering, bloated, black rats. They leapt from on high, each one striking the water like a dropped stone. One fell near enough to the craft that the side of Greymalkin’s face was wetted by the splash.
Greymalkin yelped. In his surprise he dropped the paddle into the water. Stones shouted for him to grab it, but their boat had already floated out of reach. The scholar wasn’t listening anyway. He fastened the buckles which he’d loosened on his leather coat, and rifled through his pack in search of gloves and his wool mask. The bloated rats were swimming towards their boat now, half-a-hundred fat black shapes, with more than a hundred gleaming eyes.
Stones calmed himself quickly. With no undue haste he reached into his bag of Road Walkers’ equipment and pulled out a pair of thick leather mittens. Another rat leapt at that moment. It landed inside the boat with a wet thud, leaving a spatter of ichor where it struck. The Blighted rodent rose on two hind legs. It swayed on the floor of the boat between the pair, seeming stunned. Greymalkin shied back, kicking. Stone rose, keeping himself in a low crouch so as not to upset the boat. He snatched the rat. In the same quick motion he hurled it to splatter against the yellow-mossed stone of the gorge. This time when it fell it struck the water, and this time remained perfectly still.
Some of the other rats had made the edge of the boat by then. They began crawling up the sides. Greymalkin swatted at one, an unsteady swipe that left the boat rocking. Stones went about the job of removing the vermin more deliberately. He picked them up one-at-a-time as they made the gunnel of the fishing boat. He hurled them, one-at-a-time. Most died after a throw. The ones that did not swam back, only to be thrown again.
Of the fifty or so Blighted rats that had leapt into the water and swum to the boat, one lived through two throws. It died on the third.
Stones looked over the river’s surface for a minute, watching the water return to stillness, searching for movement. Seeing none he nodded once, thumped his chest, and belched.
Greymalkin had realized as the attack went on that the rats represented no real threat. He now sat more calmly at the stern. The rats — the ones that had climbed the craft — had not been able to chew through his leather coat or boots or gloves. Still, the scholar kept his leathers on and his cloth mask up.
“Hideous,” Greymalkin remarked.
“Day in the life,” Stones replied with good humor. He tore off his gloves and dunked his hands in the water.
“You may speak with a voice of levity. I for one cannot believe that any man, deep in his spirit, truly callouses himself to such repulsive gore as this.” Greymalkin looked about them, watching the little lumps of black rat floating on the mirror-surface, around each one a nebula of pink and yellow Blighted bile.
A single “Hah!” was the only response to come from Stones’ mouth. He pushed their boat back to where Greymalkin had dropped the paddle, though Stones took care not to place his hands near any of the rats or their spreading blood.
Not so long after, the gorge pressed close again on both sides. The slate-colored sun — though they could not see it past the clouds — moved beyond the midday hour.
Ahead in the water, they spotted the splintered skeleton of a wooden bridge. Jagged timber poles stuck up from the silver water, like the ribs of some prehistoric monster trapped in tar. “This collapsed long ago,” Greymalkin reasoned.
“See there, on the left?” said Stones, pointing. “There’s space for the boat between that set of poles.”
Greymalkin pushed them softly toward the gap. When they reached it, Stones set his palms against the poles to guide them through.
Somehow, as he looked up and saw the crumbling edge of the bridge remains on the gorge face, dangling over the gap, the old wooden boards creaking in the higher wind above, Greymalkin had a premonition of what was to happen. It flashed before his mind in a finger’s snap. Somehow, he could neither speak nor move to check the disaster.
One of the heavy timbers mortared to the stone abutment above came loose at the exact moment their boat came floating through the supports. The wind had finally freed it, after however-many dozens or hundreds of seasons, in that particular flash of time. The beam must have weighed half a ton. It fell. It rebounded once off the cliff edge with a sharp crack that scattered rock. Stones looked up just as the beam came down. It struck the frail, crumbling gunnels of the fishing boat in a perpendicular line right between the two. It severed the craft.
The two halves of the boat blew apart. The ends tilted up as the middle plunged into the silver water. Stones and Greymalkin dropped together in the wake of the explosion of splinters and silver. Greymalkin had followed the descent of the beam with his eyes, and he had a last glance of his pale, heavy companion. Then he himself sank like a stone into the opaque blackness.
The scholar swallowed two lungfuls of water in his moment of shock. Greymalkin couldn’t swim. Adrenal panic erased in an instant any rational thought. Greymalkin flailed desperately. In his flailing he lost his sense of direction. Left and right reversed. He spun upside down. He swallowed another throat’s-worth of frigid water. Tears of pain mingled unnoticed with the river. His lungs burned. He screamed, thrashed, felt that he was drowning.
Greymalkin felt the bones in his wrist compress under a grasp of steel. A second later the cold blast of The Waste’s Winter air smashed against his sopping face and chest. He sucked in air, then coughed, then sucked again — all through his soaked cloth mask. He pulled the mask down with the hand that was not locked in Stones’ clutch, and vomited up the silver water he had inhaled.
“To the bank,” Stones yelled in Greymalkin’s ear. The latter blinked away silver water. Then, half-dragged, he followed Stones to the thin strip of sand at the base of the cliff.
They crawled like the slimy first ancestors of reptiles onto the black sand beside the river. It was early winter in The Whiteeye Waste, and each felt the cold bite through their soaked clothes, rubbing like a thousand razors at the skin beneath. Having emerged fully from the river, Stones sat up on his knees, tilted his head back, and breathed deeply through his nose. He rubbed a hand over the goosepimples on his scalp; he’d lost his hat in the plunge.
Greymalkin and Stones pushed forward along the narrow strip of sand under the cliff, each step accompanied by the wet squelch of their feet in their boots. Greymalkin lifted his eyes to a sky the color of a tombstone. Between the sky, and the black digits of Roundworm’s trees reaching over the cliff face, and the cold that was now sinking through muscles and into bones, he had the momentary sense of being like a coffin-corpse, still breathing.
When their boat had sunk, Stones had kept enough presence of mind to grab their bag of Road Walkers’ equipment. Greymalkin hoped that their burnbottles hadn’t shattered. Of still greater concern to him were his journals. His bag had been looped about his shoulder, and he had it with him now. He feared water damage to the paper and ink. He would have checked, but removing his already-numb fingers from the scant protection of his wet gloves and thick coat flaps — exposing them to the air — seemed not to be worth the disappointment he expected to find.
“Cursed river,” Stones grumbled. He rubbed the top of his head furiously. “If I had to choose, I guess freezing’s better than other dyings.”
Greymalkin said, “Good fellow Stones, we need fire.”
“Uh huh.”
“Your bag.” Greymalkin stopped. Stones turned to look at him. “If the burnbottles were not damaged in the fall-”
Stones shook his head. “Bottles are fine. But we might need them. It’ll take timber to fill us with any kind of heat anyway,” he reasoned. “Come. Let’s find a way back to the woods.”
“Alright,” said Greymalkin. He fell into step behind Stones.
Though the stars were yet blind to The Whiteeye Waste at that hour and that pitch of cloudiness, still some fortune-bearing spirit must have blessed the footsteps of the two Walkers. Not far down the bank from where they had crawled ashore, they spotted a narrow defile in the cliff. Packed gravel and soil unfurled up a steep slope. Steep, but not of an angle unwalkable.
They climbed. Stones led, pressing each foot into the soil for secure footing. The cliffs were perhaps twenty yards high — they soon neared the top. Greymalkin hesitated as they crested the rise, his hearing tensed. He heard only the wind, and the worsening shudder of his body inspired in the scholar a level of disregard for any dangers of Roundworm. He followed quickly after Stones.
Above the two the sky lowered darker; about them the woods gathered. The riddled trunks seemed to gape at them with a thousand drooling mouths. The trees gave no protection from the wind.
They moved steadily deeper into Roundworm, their lids peeled for hollow or sunken shelter from the wind. Stones picked up branches and twigs as they walked. He forced Greymalkin to carry the bundle. “We’ll have f-fuel r-ready,” Stones said through a chatter. “Just have to f-f-find a site.”
Only a moment later they stumbled upon a long crag in the middle of the woods, the stone and soil roiling up to one side. Here the wind was lessened. Greymalkin readily dumped the bundle of sticks he carried with a wooden clatter, at a spot Stones indicated, the opening of a cleft in the cliff.
Hardly had Greymalkin spilled his burden at the front of the cleft, and hardly had Stones knelt and started arranging the smaller kindling into a pile, when mass squealing erupted from the hundred-thousand holemouths in the nearest trunks. Stones and Greymalkin whirled to face the woods.
The rats came forth as rivulets from the holes in the trees. Chittering, bloated, Blighted — they massed and scuttled toward the pair. Greymalkin shrieked. The lead rat leapt at him, but its feeble limbs could not support the desire of its teeth. It’s fat body fell short. The lank scholar gave the animal a good kick, and the rat went soaring back to the brush. But a thousand more vermin skittered in behind. Greymalkin stumbled backward.
Then something small flashed past the scholar’s shoulder. There was a crack of glass, then an immense, wavering, yellow brightness swelled up.
Stones had thrown a burnbottle.
The chemical substance erupted. A dozen rats had been in the immediate radius of the flame — their own shrieks went hissing out in a crackle of shriveled hair, baked skin, and smoke like a fire in wet grass.
The swarm paused. The fire lit the shadowing night, reflecting in the eyes of Greymalkin and Stones as they stared at the rats. It reflected in the rats’ eyes too, and thousands of beetle-small, twinkling, hungry stars stared back as the two Road Walkers retreated into their cleft.
The pause stretched. The stink of burned rat drifted over Stones’ and Greymalkin’s faces.
Greymalkin heard a movement at his side. He turned to see Stones glancing at the cliff behind them. “Look,” Said Stones. His eyes were wide and white as he pointed higher up the cliff.
Greymalkin turned reluctantly from the rats.
Only a few arms above them on the steep ledge, they saw a blacker crease in the rock. A cave.
“They will scrabble after us,” Greymalkin argued. He had turned back to the swarm. He saw some of the rats moving again.
“Could be a crevice through the rock,” Stones argued.
“Or it could be a dead- and black-end for us.”
One of the rats scuttled suddenly towards Stones, but he stumped it with an accurate boot. “It’s up or through,” said Stones. “And I only brought two bottles.”
“You said their bite does not- Throw it!” Greymalkin cried suddenly, seeing the front line of the rats closing in toward him. “Stones, throw the bottle! I would rather face the Blighted under the daylight, faint though it may-”
The words dwindled off Greymalkin’s tongue when he glanced behind at Stones. The large and pale man had already taken to the face of the cliff. Stones pulled himself swiftly up, the broken rock providing ample handholds and stepping space. He looked like a leatherclad ghost, especially pale from the cold, and with his sack of tools clattering against his hip.
Greymalkin hesitated only as long as it took to feel the first rat scurry over his boot. Then he kicked, and sprang up the cliff after Stones.
The huge flame of the burnbottle had burned low now. The cleft wall was shaded in darkness. But there was enough light for the pair to climb by, and the blast of heat had gifted a momentary warmth to both sets of hands. Hand-over-hand they climbed. Behind, the squeals and the rustling resumed. The rats scurried in. Some leapt at the back of Greymalkin’s legs. He nearly overbalanced when one sank its teeth into the leather leg of his pants. He called out, “Stones!” but the latter had already climbed several arms above him — had reached the lip of the cave. Stones would save himself before he so much as blinked at another in peril, Greymalkin knew.
The scholar shook his leg; the rat dislodged. He climbed on.
The rats climbed after. By kicking and by scrambling, however, Greymalkin soon reached the lip of the crack in the rock. Stones reached with a wet-gloved hand and yanked the scholar up.
The two tumbled over each other into the cave. They fell to their arms and knees — the cold stone made more painful by the numbness in their hands and feet — onto a surprisingly flat floor. Stones rose immediately. He whirled on the door, ready for the rats.
At that moment they heard a pealing note. From Roundworm, there came a squeal — like the sound of raging swine, mixed with a huge tree limb ripping from the trunk. Stones tensed. Greymalkin pushed up to his knees and stared back at the mouth.
But neither beast, nor even the rats, appeared at the opening. And in the wake of the cry, and in the setting of the cloudcovered sun, the gloomy dusk beyond their cave was bleached of hue and sound.
A shiver coursed so sharply through Greymalkin’s thin frame that it knocked him to his knees. “F-f-fire,” he gasped, remembering his chill with the heat of exertion lost. In the dark, their breath misted. Greymalkin’s clothes felt like a suit of ice covering his skin — and indeed, as he stood shakily, he heard the soft crackle of frost breaking from his leather coat. His chattering teeth echoed in the cavern.
Stones rubbed his shoulders and shivered. “Need something to burn,” he said weakly. “Give us your books.”
“They’re soaked,” Greymalkin reminded him.
“Search the f-f-floor.”
The two groped blindly and nearly without feeling. The cavern seemed enormous for the small crack that had led into it. A long time passed before Stones’ hands touched a wall. When they did, he said, “Feels carved.”
“I’ve f-found something here as w-w-well,” said Greymalkin. Then, with a note of excitement, “Stones, it’s boards. Sweet Persistent Necromancy! Stones, there’s firewood here, and — such a smell! — there’s oil too.”
Stones tripped over something long and round and clanging. He ignored the thing and scrabbled over to the wood Greymalkin had found. By now they could hardly feel their hands — each breath came as a shuddering gasp — but they discovered the contours of some small shed in the midst of the cave. A pile of sweet flammable wood lay next to the shed. Of more significance was the barrel just inside. As Stones pressed his nose below its open top, he breathed deeply of a thick oil musk.
Together in the dark the two managed to tumble the top pieces from the stacked wood into a smaller pile, and to use their hands to splash palmfuls of oil onto it. “Hurry with the striker, Stones,” Greymalkin pressed. He sank down beside the pile in the darkness, huddling close as if it were already lighted.
When Stones tried to clutch and strike his firesteel, however, his fingers could not feel the implement in his pocket. Quelling panic with a barbarous wrath that came easily to him, Stones tore the frozen leather gloves from his hands with two savage yanks of teeth.
“I have n-n-never b-been so ab-b-bominably c-c-cold,” Greymalkin chattered.
With his degloved hands Stones found the firesteel in his pocket. He pulled the two pieces out by their connecting leather thong. He got his fingers wrapped around the two metal pieces, but fine motor control proved beyond him. He struck his hands savagely, but succeeded only in bashing the unfeeling appendages together. He produced no spark. Stones brought his hands to his face and breathed on them, trying to breath long, finding some deeper air in his lungs that was still warm.
Greymalkin sat up and watched the silhouette of Stones blow upon its shadow-hands. The silhouette stopped. Greymalkin saw the glinting whites of Stones’ eyes looking at him. Then he heard Stones give an order, faintly, as if through a heavy velvet curtain: “Help.”
It did not occur to Greymalkin to question the order. He shuffled on his knees closer and, together with the huge man, blew upon Stones fingers.
After what seemed like the whole season of winter, Stones sensed a faint tingle of feeling in his digits. He blew once more. Then he raised his arms and snapped his hands together again, striking Greymalkin’s cheek. The latter recoiled, falling beside the cold wood pile. Stones struck again, and this time a blast of sparks shot from his hands. He had the briefest glimpse of the pile. The sparks died without igniting the oil though. Stones cursed, and leaned in. He struck again. And again. The pain in his fingers was fading again now.
Beside the wood, in his frozen clothes, Greymalkin’s breathing slowed. His eyes sank.
Stones struck again.
A fresh wave of cinders rained from his frozen hands-
-and a huge golden crown gleamed deeply in the dark.
Long moments passed before either Greymalkin or Stones felt warmth’s first inkling creep into their bodies. The fire burned hot and bright, and the two forms dwelt for a time as frost-crusted statues; wet, amorphous shadows with ghastly faces; with glossy eyes capturing the flame; only the gasps of white breath steaming from their lips to suggest life lingered in either body.
After night had firmly set beyond the cave, however, and with the fire still burning steadily on their pile of wood, the two once more began to feel. Stones blinked, and blinked some more — not both eyes together, but each eye individually, so that it appeared on the shuttering of the first eye as if he were winking, and only resolved into a blink because the second eye invariably followed on the heels of the first in closing and reopening - and he rolled both eyes slowly up and around and down, as if he were trying to dislodge an icy eyeball filament. He rubbed his shoulders. Greymalkin lay on his side at first, shuddering. Gradually he too sat up. When, ‘Who am I?’ no longer posed quite so challenging a question to each — their sense of identity returning with their sense of body — they took a measure of their surroundings.
In the firelight they beheld a Cavern Enormous — a cathedral of natural stone, or so it seemed in contrast to the narrow entry and the smallness of their flame. Here and there the natural stone had been clearly worked, for nature did not make walls or floors so smooth, nor steps so angled. In the center of this cave, right next to their little fire, an old shed of cracked boards and a broken tile roof tilted up from the floor. The deteriorating wooden walls enclosed a primitive firepit, ringed in large stones charred black by countless old fires. A strong smell of oil suffused not just the shed (beside which was the barrel Stones had used to prime their small fire) but the entire cavern. Oil massed in several open puddles on the broken tile floor. (Each tile, moreover, sported a hundred different black runes, of the same angular Oulsraak script that the pair had seen at the shrine earlier in the day — though these were charcoal marks, not oil). There were three large copper pipes running along one wall of the cavern. Oil had dribbled and stained the stone at each seam of the pipes. Another yet-larger pipe jutted at a thirty degree angle from the middle of the floor tiles. It was wide enough that a man might crawl comfortably inside it, if he so chose, and the tip ended in a jagged, broken rim, enhancing its mannish traversability.
Other pieces of tarnished copper and iron — wide wall plates, curved bands, rusted springs and gears — lay strewn about the space, forming the bones for piles of dead leaves and animal filth. A bright crimson moss grew over some of this; combined with the waking warmth shed by the fire, it leant a soft, almost comfortable atmosphere. The air felt heavy.
Greymalkin curled his long body closer around the fire, letting its heat warm and dry his leather. Stones removed his clothes. He stripped down to his loincloth, and laid his outer garments flat on the tiles around them. He set another two logs on the fire, then seated himself comfortably across from Greymalkin, his softly-muscled and pale body shining, his fingers flexing and unflexing in alternating slowness.
After sitting thus for some time, Stones broke the silence. “You’re a real genteel, my lank comrade.”
Greymalkin’s grey eyebrows drew in. “Is there exception to be- No, a better way: do you fault a man acting in a polite manner? Not to suggest that your own… boorishness is something to which you may be held accountable; but do you, Cemetery Stones, take it on yourself to arbitrate in manner matters?”
“Not the least lice’s bit.”
“That’s quite…” Greymalkin stopped midsentence and stared without blinking, as he took a long, draw-out moment to select the proper word from his vocabular ballast; until at last he concluded with the perfectly-suited: “magnanimous.”
“I’d venture this though,” Stones leapt in, before the last syllable of ‘magnanimous’ had ceased to echo in the cave. To supplement the echoes, Stones picked up a few broken pieces of tile from the floor. He proceeded to hurl these at the opening of the huge angled pipe jutting from the floor, punctuating each of his succeeding sentences with a reverberating gong of tile-inside-pipe:
“I would say that gentility’s one thing when all about you is gentle right back.” — gong — “A garnish.” — gong — “The beer to wash the meat.” — gong — “I would say, however and also, that it’s another thing altogether in The Waste.” — gong — “When mutant whiskers are tickling your calves.” — gong — “When you don’t know if you should shut your eyes in camp — not for some exceptional worry of wild peril — but on account of you can’t stop thinking about that shiny cutter in the fingers of your fellow Road Walker, and how he wasn’t too gentile himself at your last chat.” Stones threw three successive pieces of tile, as if to catch up for the longer string of thought. “In the waste, I’d say gentility’s a real…” Stones paused again, arm cocked for a throw, his face screwed up in a facsimile of Greymalkin’s own. Stones tossed his last tile and terminated with: “drag.”
“Ah,” Greymalkin replied with his politest, least-numb finger upraised in emphasis, “but ponder this-”
Whatever Greymalkin intended Stones to ponder was never aired. Before the scholar could launch into it, Stones reached across the flame in one swift motion and dealt a heavy punch. The fist struck solidly on Greymalkin’s temple. It laid him flat on the tiles. He yelped like a dog, scrabbling back.
Stones had risen, but showed no interest in further violence. Not at that present moment. He only grinned down, and said, “Best to hold your tongue when I’ve decided to have the last word,” then walked over to stare out the cave’s thin mouth.
Stones still wore only his tawny loinpants, but the cave had warmed tremendously. The cold night air on Stones’ chest now presented a pleasantly chill contrast to the heat against his buttocks. He stared at the starless blackness of Roundworm.
Greymalkin crawled nearer to the fire. When his heart had calmed he took his leather coat off and set it beside the fire much like Stones had. He kept his underclothes on. He took his bag, undid the copper buckle on its front, and began setting his journals out beside his coat. Examining one, he found that the writing had not blurred to unreadability during their river plunge. The pages would dry. He pulled a long scroll from the bottom of the bag, untied the ribbon of blue satin keeping it furled, and unfurled it over the tiles.
The map, once crisp of paper and line, had fared worse. The lines of mountains and woods blurred together in an unreadable smear of ink. The words on the parchment — Carranza’s Well, The Mountains Dead and Crooked, even the huge letters of The Whiteeye Waste — had faded as ink mingled with water and paper. Greymalkin squinted over the place where he knew the black smudges of letters said ‘Roundworm Woods’. He traced his finger above the smudge of the woods, but could discern no particular coalescence of the smudge that might have marked their sheltering cave.
“Feet, anchor.” Greymalkin spoke the words of a prayer without feeling. “Wind, speak. Road, carry. Sky, watch.”
From the woods beyond the cave they heard a lone owl’s hoo. In that place and time, though natural enough for a forest, the sound carried an eerie note of singsong.
“Not every animal’s afflicted in this Blighted waste,” said Stones. He sighed and returned to the fire. “We’ve still got the birds.”
Stones began to move about the room. Every so often he would stop, stoop down, and inspect a palm-sized piece of tile — like an artisan inspecting his tools, weighing them, checking their surface. He had gathered perhaps half a dozen when Greymalkin asked, “What are you planning to do with those?”
“Birdsey back at camp likes throwing rocks at birds,” Stones replied.
“And you are gathering missiles as a present?” The scholar raised his eyebrows pointedly as if in accentuation of the question.
“He’s never stoned an owl. Imagine the green blush on his cheeks if I come back with one.”
“Ah.” Greymalkin gave a single concluding nod of his head. Then he pulled his pipe out from his pack, and rummaged for his pouch of smokethistle.
Stones spun back to the fire so quickly that Greymalkin — fast wisening to the man’s unpredictable moods — ducked and covered his head. He expected the sharp crack of a hurled missile.
Stones said, “Bring me my waterskin.”
Greymalkin slowly lowered his arms. He stared at Stones. The latter stood only a few strides from the fire himself. He remained standing, with a look of no great patience on his dark and hairless face.
“Ah,” Greymalkin said again. “Alright.”
Greymalkin picked up the waterskin where it lay beside Stones coat. He shifted as if to rise, but Stones called out, “Don’t walk. Crawl.”
“Crawl? Stones. Cemetery Stones. Why?”
“Crawl.” Greymalkin heard the tone in Stones’ voice. He crawled, holding the waterskin out.
“Now turn around,” Stones continued. “But remain in your position. Good. Now, disrobe.”
“I certainly shan’t!” Greymalkin moved again as if to rise and face Stones once more.
Before he could he felt Stones’ hot palm against the back of his neck. “I said disrobe.” Stones breathed in the scholar’s ear.
Shivering now, though not from any cold, Greymalkin moved his hands to his belt buckle. His fingers fumbled with the clasp.
“Hah!” Stones barked a sudden laugh and threw Greymalkin away with a shove of his hand. Greymalkin rolled onto his back and regarded the man, thinking Stones had gone mad. The impression was strengthened by Stones’ ensuing laughter. “Hahahahah! Oh my poor laughing eyes. Oh my poor scholar. You’re not long for this career — which I’m sad to say, for you’re entertaining to scare. Stop shaking now, genteel man. I won’t touch your scarless bottom. That’s not my vice. A word of warning though: you will most certainly discover men in our company of esteemed Road Walkers, who would delight in your soft flesh.”
His look turned sharply serious, and he continued: “You’ll brawl. Or you’ll surrender. But when the grey sun rises over The Road of Graves after the night of your disgrace, you’ll stand next to your abuser when the animal killing starts. You will.”
And Greymalkin believed that Stones was telling the truth.
Without the cave, night rolled ponderously. Sleep would not come to Greymalkin or Stones.
Greymalkin turned on his side. He watched the firelight reflect off the black oil stains on the walls. “Stones?” he asked quietly.
“Hm?” the large man replied from the fire’s other side.
“From what you have seen — witnessed — in your days as a Walker, can you speak of the Staalsatr? These pipes must connect somehow to that river. Is it a pumping station? How and why should the Staalsatr build such things? Why would they choose to dwell near so inhospitable a woodland? In so ruined a cave?”
“Some learned man once said that the Staalsatr and their Waste were different before The Road died.”
“It is hard to credit that a dead road could sport so septic a wound.”
“You’re the scholar; you tell me.”
Greymalkin rubbed his chin, then expanded his arms in emphasis of the telling. “So it is written in The Song of Grot, penned by Mooyg the Grot. According to the text, on the very day that the god-necromancers raised their bodies from their coffins, the sky ran red with a wound, the machines and the factories of the Staalsatr erupted with wild, uncontrolled activity. ‘Metal with an animal’s thoughts’ so say the text.”
“You think it’s a shame,” Stones said more than he asked.
“Imagine what these pipes — this copper — once did. But more than shame, I find it unbelievable.”
Stones got up (he had re-clothed himself by now) and went to the fallen-in shed. He lifted one of the rotten wooden boards that lay beside the structure. After pushing his fingers through the dead leaves, he drew his hand back with a small beetle in his clutch. This, he ate. The flavor was earthy, but not bad. He threw the board across the room and rooted through some of the other debris, occasionally plucking and eating the bugs he found.
After a moment in this search, Stones whistled. Greymalkin had turned away and tried to block out the crunching; now he rolled to look at his companion. Stones held a weapon in his hand. It was an old, rusted, long-handled cleaver. The leather around the arm-length handle hung loose and fraying, and rust scarred the half-arm, blunted blade. Still, damaged as it was, Greymalkin recognized the cleaver as a valuable weapon.
“What happy fortune,” said Stones, holding the cleaver up to the light. Greymalkin jerked in surprise a second later as Stones slammed the cleaver-blade flat side down against the broken tiles. The blade rang — some of the rust flaked off as powder. Stones slammed it again.
“Are you trying to destroy the implement?” Greymalkin asked.
“Our dear departed Gurn had a cleaver just like this,” Stones explained. He smacked the weapon again with a sharp ringing sound; Greymalkin saw it bend. “Only, The Gurn’s blade was fragmented. We break this, and we’ve got our proof to bring back to the captain. For the body, well, The Blight got to him.”
“Stones, you gave me the impression,” said Greymalkin, slowly moving as he spoke, as if the words were stuck in place, and he had to pull his mouth away from them to give them release, “that you enjoyed the violence involved in a hunt.”
“I like a hunt. But I’m not going for days in search of a deserter. Not in this cold.”
“Is not the long pursuit a part of the thrill?”
“Only for worthy prey. The Gurn’s just ordinary human meat.”
“I see.”
“Surely a paper-turner like you would prefer a swift return to camp?”
Greymalkin let the idea stew for a moment. “It may be that your — our — captain only wanted that I should develop some practice in navigating-”
“Right,” Stones interrupted. “Experience is the best teacher here.”
Both men were awake now — they had been awake since yesterday’s dawn, with only a diminutive interruption of sleep. They sat across the fire from each other, sucking in its warmth, staring at its flame with eyes double-blooded by smoke and lethargy.
“How’d you get assigned to the crusade?” Stones asked.
Greymalkin glanced at Stones, then back to the fire. He rubbed his chin. “That is not a worthy story,” he said at last.
“Keep your mind closed then,” said Stones. “I myself was made for this. Killing animals I mean. And other plagued creatures. That’s my first memory; surviving plague. Some fishermen out of Far Man’s Chrypt found me aboard a ship, not forty crests from the coast. Plague ship. All dead but me, just a waifish sea-lad, pale then and pale still. I’d beaten plague and disease as a boy; as a man, it’s only another spoonful.”
The fire dwindled. Its flames turned to embers, blurring the distinction between shadows and the dark. Beyond the cave, dawn’s crimson tinted the edges of Roundworm’s dead trees. Greymalkin, spotting the glow, furled his map. Stones rose and stretched.
From the slanted pipe rising through the floor, they heard an echo.
The crooked opening of the pipe held a perfect pool of gaping blackness, from which wafted the circling smells of oil and damp earth. From that darkness, through the smell, Stones and Greymalkin heard again a single sharp retort. Something hard smacked against the metal, reverberating up the shaft. Another bang. Another. Something moved along the angled pipe, something large, coming closer.
Stones and Greymalkin stood side by side, the embers between them, unmoving. The pair were spellbound; their eyes fixed on the opening. Something in the rhythm of the echoes — louder and louder they rang — reverberated within the two brains, silencing other impulse.
Like a snake wriggling slowly from its tunnel, the thing of glistening fur and distorted flesh slipped gradually up through the opening. A hideous head — hideous enough to defy immediate comprehension that it was a head, in the scholar at least — came first. It was roughly in the shape of a boar’s head. The body followed, and at its sight Greymalkin could not stifle a groan. The huge piggish frame was covered in mottled slick bristles and, still more hideously, holes. Hundreds of holes, big holes, riddled the monster; like a porous cheese. The skin around each was purplish and bare, with a clammy sheen. Scuttling and squeaking, inside and around and across these hundred cavities, they beheld once more a host of rats.
Within the riddled behemoth the rats made a nauseating, lurid, shifting mosaic. Like maggots falling from a raised lode of rotten meat, they tumbled and scattered around the stomping hooves that emerged from the broken pipe; cliffs of flesh spewing cataracts of vermin. The reek of The Blight rolled like sea foam. The shriek of rats shuddered along the cavern walls.
With their minds gradually brought into the reality of this monster by its stench and its skin and its chittering swarms of rats, their eyes at last refocused on the head of this Blighted creature, with fresh comprehension. They stared into its mouth as the jaw cracked open. The mouth was not a mouth of lips or teeth or tongue — not one set. In place of the boar’s maw, the heads of two dozen rats squealed and chittered. Their eyes gleamed in place where the white of tusks should have shown. These tinier mouths opened when the greater mouth opened — two-dozen pinkly-cushioned holes with square teeth around a plush cavern. From this masticatory vortex, breath issued in syncopation.
Thus accoutered did the Blighted boar-thing step fully into the cave. It’s hoof drummed on the stone. Like a signal the drum struck Stones. “Grab the burnbottle,” he said sharply to Greymalkin. The latter did not move. He stared, horrorstruck. Stones cursed. He waved his bent cleaver in the air. “Crawl off, Squealer.”
The beast tamped the earth twice with a forefoot. Its rat-mouth squealed in chorus. Stones tensed.
Then the monster burst at them. A loping and uneven gait nevertheless brought it flying at speed towards Stones. Rats poured off and pooled with each step. They kept stride with the monster as it lunged toward Stones. Stones crouched and stepped swiftly sideways as the many-mouthed maw snapped across the location he had been; not one snap, but the bite of the dozen smaller rat mouths, and the soft smack of the greater. Greymalkin meanwhile stomped a pair of Blighted rats that had charged in his direction.
The boar wheeled its great head to follow Stones; the latter was faster. Stones came back in with a downward chop of the rusted cleaver. The boar let out another choral squealing sound — with one deeper, bassier voice — as the blade carved down the side of one of its eyes.
Stones swung again, a vicious chop. Rage contorted his face. The blade cut the beast’s hide again, but the monster came on. Stones backpedaled toward the hut, kicking firepit embers at the rats scurrying around his feet. Greymalkin stomped another rat to a too-pink bloodstain on the dark floor. The mass seemed to be focused on Stones. Greymalkin nearly threw his body at Stones’ equipment pack where it lay on the floor. He struggled with the clasp, his fingers shaking, his eyes refusing to leave the lurching horror in the dark cave.
Rats continued to slough off the Blighted boar. They leapt and scurried around Stones’ legs, nipping at his ankles. Fortunate was he that their bite couldn’t carry the Blight into his body, but their blood was still toxic. Stones was gasping now. He flailed with his rusted weapon to keep the boar at bay. He’d struck the creature half a dozen times. Still it came on, unfazed, squealing.
Greymalkin dropped the bag and screamed as a rat bit into the palm of his hand. He flung his hand out; the creature held on stubbornly, its teeth pulling a trickle of crimson from his skin. Greymalkin yelled in mixed pain and terror, whipping his arm, dancing around the rats jumping at his feet. His breath came in panicked wheezes. His eyes rolled like a cow before the butcher’s gates. All reason fled the scholar’s mind — he was more animal than man in that moment, reacting with pure Flight.
The scream of Greymalkin, the squealing of the distorted boar and its tumorous rats, Stones’ roars as he chopped like a woodsman with his broken cleaver; from beyond the mouth of the cave, it seemed as if some macabre, otherworldly ritual must have begun. Some gate to an outer, alien dimension seemed to have opened in the ember-lit darkness of that hollow crack in the cliff. Greymalkin’s frenzied, flailing, traipsing movements seemed a mockery of terpsichorean art. Stones’ blows became a leathery, meat-smacking rhythm. The slickness of blood reflected the scant light in the chamber, so that the broken floor tiles showed as a ballroom in a slaughterhouse.
Flash went the rusted cleaver’s reflection across the tiled mirror of blood. Flash, its physical counterpart. The coarse weapon’s ragged tip sheared through three rat-headed teeth on the front-lower jaw of the rat-carrying boar.
The monster produced a wail of an eardrum-shattering pitch. Greymalkin, despite his panic, stumbled back and stared in stunned fear. Stones capitalized and swiped again. His cleaver gored a cleft through one of the boar’s body-tunnels.
The boar shrieked again, then spun. It shot toward the pipe. Stones roared and ran in pursuit, his face a mask of red blood and blushing fury. But the boar, lopsided though its gait was, moved more swiftly than the pale man. With a leap it cleared the ragged edge of the tunnel, and disappeared into the black opening. Greymalkin and Stones heard the thunder of its body striking the copper piping, fading away as it slid down the long dark egress. And the verminous flood followed after it.
“By the black lung,” Greymalkin swore. He kicked a half-broken, still-squirming Blighted rat.
Stones shook wrath from his head. “Did you catch any blood?”
“It bit me!” Greymalkin’s voice bordered on hysteria. He held his shaking palm against the lighted backdrop of the cave mouth. Stones was beside the scholar in two steps. He grabbed Greymalkin by the wrist and dragged him down, toward the embers of the fire. Greymalkin thought at first that the huge man meant to cauterize the wound in the hot coals; he squirmed, uselessly in the iron grip. Stones however only held the palm over the glow. He gazed at the wound for a moment.
“The blood looks red enough,” he grunted at last.
“But it’s an open wound.” Greymalkin rubbed his wrist as Stones released it. “What if a fleck struck my palm in the fighting?”
“We’ll know in a few days. Me, I’d cover such a dainty cut.”
Greymalkin caught the roll of woundwool that Stones retrieved from their equipment bag and tossed his way. He wrapped his palm, all the while scanning his ankles and the rest of his body. The slate-colored sun had dawned in full; its rays fell slantingly through the cave opening, and offered light to see by.
Dead rats and Blighted blood painted the cave in pulpy hues. A few twitched in their streaks and stains of blood, but most were smashed dead or had fled. Both men’s clothes were spackled in the blood of the rats or the boar — they themselves, aside from Greymalkin’s cut, were unhurt.
“We’ll have to burn these,” said Stones, taking off his clothes. “It’ll be leathers only on the trip back. Wipe your arms and face with your waterskin.”
As they wiped themselves down, and burned their Blight-soiled clothes in the pit of embers which Stones had stoked back to a flame, Greymalkin felt the fear within him cooling. He looked across the scene with a less-partial eye. He committed it to memory, as well as he was able, for the record he would make. His eyes eventually settled on Stones. Stones was wiping Blighted blood off the rusted cleaver with a rotten cloth.
“You still need to break the blade,” said Greymalkin.
“Come round to my thoughts, have you?”
“It seems unrealistic — to my mind — that a man alone would survive long in The Waste. Surely your Gurn is dead, and we may return.”
“You’ve had your fill of The Waste for one day, haven’t you scribbler?” Stones laughed. Then he put the cloth away, only to take out a whetstone, and begin sharpening the weapon.
“So, won’t you shatter the weapon?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you- do you mean to pursue the Gurn?”
“Don’t soil yourself. I’ve no more mind to go on a month-long trek than when we set out. Especially not without my wooly undergarments. The Gurn’s most happily dead. But I’ll not fracture this weapon yet. Not until I’m done with it.”
“The weapon seems quite done already,” said Greymalkin. He eyed the bent and rusted metal, and the fraying leather wrap of the long hilt.
“It’s got a squealer to kill.”
Greymalkin paled. “It fled. You drove off that horrible creature. We are fortunate to have come away — hopefully come away — with no more than my scratch and our lost clothing. You don’t mean to hunt the beast?”
Stones looked steadily at Greymalkin. “You’re a Road Walker now, not a scribbler. It’s time you stopped acting like an ignorant boy-child. You’re a killer. You’ve got your prey’s blood on your heels. Your job is killing. So’s mine. We’ll kill it. Then, we’ll return to the captain, and tell her we killed a man instead. That’s the job.”
Not a squeal or a scurry, or the rustle of wind, or the crackle of flame, broke the ensuing silence. All was still, but for the sliding of a whetstone against steel.
Along the sawtoothed stone of the cliffs abutting the southern side of the motionless silver river, Stones and Greymalkin shuffled. The water below reflected once more a sky of grey clouds. Stones picked a route along the ledge to skirt any loose soil, or any pile of deadwood that might sound sharply in the still air. Greymalkin followed in Stones’ steps. While they moved so as to produce no sound, and Stones kept glancing down at the river, both he and Greymalkin kept their ears angled in the direction of Roundworm.
Stones saw their destination just ahead. He stopped. With a wave at Greymalkin, he carefully brought his pack down over his shoulder. From it he drew two torches that they had put together from the boards of the cave-shack and their bloody clothes. He stuck both upright in the soft soil. Greymalkin watched the woods.
They had whetted the clothes in oil before departing. Now stones took his firesteel and struck light and heat into the oil-soaked rags. The twin flames shone on the silver water far below. Stones pulled the upright torches out and handed one to Greymalkin. Then he started once more along the ledge, though with less attention paid to silent stepping. Both men now watched the woods intently for signs of movement.
Their torches soon drew the attention the pair had anticipated. A few scuttles sounded from the nearest trunks. Stones ignored these, but kept his gaze mostly fixed on the shadows. He glanced every so often down at the river, however, and stopped as they reached a desired position on the ledge. He looked below.
The broken spines of the bridge glared back at the pale crusader. On the sandy bank below, Stones could still see the trails he and Greymalkin had left when they crawled ashore. No movement of the water had smoothed the disturbed sand.
Stones turned to Greymalkin. “Never caught a squealer like this before,” he said.
“Perhaps it would be better to use our remaining bottle,” Greymalkin suggested. “Or to return to camp and see if our commanding officer has a suggested strategy for encounters with ‘squealers’.” Greymalkin made air quotes with the fingers of one hand as he spoke the last word.
“Wave your torch,” Stones ordered. He began to do just that himself. Together they wove their flaming brands in slow arcs over their heads. With his free hand, Stones cupped his mouth and shouted, “Here pig!”
The Waste’s black dust swirled through the skeleton-monuments of Roundworm. Within the dust, Stones and Greymalkin could hear the scurrying. From their position on the cliff — a precipice where had once stood the abutment of the bridge — the two stared hard through the murk. Stones’ eyes were the color of focused steel; Greymalkin’s, dark and uncertain as the promise of rain.
From the woods, they heard a deeper huff.
The hairs on their arms and their necks stood stiff as they watched, lumbering into view, the mutant, Blighted, riddled figure of the Squealer. Stones knelt, stuck his torch in the soil, and drew his cleaver. He swung it, loosening his arm. The creature walked with its ungainly stride out from a copse of the twisted trees. Under the grey daylight, its gleaming, grotesque, putrefied skin was shown to have already begun to scab over. The monster looked somehow larger, immortal. It pawed the ground with a rootlike and twisted hoof. It opened its maw, and the two-dozen rat heads (less the three which Stones had severed) hissed. Other rats poured from its body tunnels.
Greymalkin called out, “Come here, you swine.” He tried to wave his torch in a way that looked threatening, but his heart was in neither call nor action.
“Here pig!” Stones shouted again from his cupped mouth. “Heeeeerrreeee pig!”
The boar lowered its head, pawing and tearing the soft soil again. Muscles — distorted muscles — rippled under its porous skin.
Then the monster lunged. It’s huge bulk barreled towards the pair. Rats flew from the body with every thunderous gallop, dancing and scuttling in the monster’s dusty wake. The squeal of a thing beyond the age of men seemed to rattle among the barren branches as it cleared the tree line.
Stones crouched almost imperceptibly, raising, and angling his bald head toward the charge as if to meet the beast that was twice his weight.
Greymalkin darted his eyes sidelong. The cliff seemed suddenly too narrow, no path of escape available, except for the broken wooden poles far below them. The scholar felt fear burn in his throat.
Thirty yards. Twenty. Ten.
With another shriek to awaken the fear of man or any other animal, the squealer lowered its head. It had no tusks to gore with. But it had mass. With a bend of hoof it angled sharply, veering at Greymalkin. The scholar faltered. He stared, stricken, as Blight thundered down on him.
Stones threw a sideways shove that caught Greymalkin in the shoulder. Greymalkin flew right under the strong arm of his companion. Stones used the momentum to dive aside himself. They both felt the wind of the boar’s passage brush against them.
The beast shot between. It flew out. Its legs pushed earth to slow its charge. Pushed too late. With a roar — from the boar and all its offspring — the animal hurtled over the cliff.
A second of gasping silence was all that passed for the two on the ground. The boar plunged unseen.
The sharp and wet crack of a heavy meat-thing striking and breaking wood echoed through the river gorge. No squeal rose in its wake. Only a weaker cry of agony.
Then, a moment later, there was a sound like tearing textile. The pair heard a communal shriek. Wet thudding like a rockfall into a river sounded from below.
Stones and Greymalkin rose, and walked to the edge. They looked down, ignoring the scuttling of Blighted rats behind them.
The monster had impaled itself perfectly on the upright spine of a bridge support. Its body continued to thrash against the wicked and thick barb, but the strength was gone from its mutant muscles, and its squealing sounded pithless. Its stomach and haunches, moreover, seemed to have erupted. Whatever rat-producing glands the horror possessed had exploded. Its flesh lay racked and torn in those places; its rats had tumbled into the mirrorwater.
Without a word, Stones reached over to where his equipment bag lay on the ground. He withdrew and lit the rag of the burnbottle. His eyes narrowed as he raised the bottle over his head, took a bead, and threw. The bottle tumbled end over end through the open space.
It struck home on the protruding support where the squealer was impaled. Glass exploded, then a lurid yellow inferno erupted in the space. The beast thrashed once more with a renewed vigor, but only for a moment. Then its thrashing became twitching. Its twitching eventually stilled to fiery expiration. Then, its last squeals fading, the two heard only the crackle of burning Blighted skin.
Greymalkin shook his head. He could find no word to fill the sudden calm. Something brushed against his foot — a rat. He kicked it aside almost without thinking.
Stones looked blinklessly down upon the burning squealer. Two twins of the flame below danced in his fullblack eyes. At last he seemed to wake; taking a long, deep breath with his mouth; drawing in air tainted with the smell of burning protein. He turned to Greymalkin, smiled, and said, “Think we’ll make it back for breakfast? I’m in the mood for a bacon rasher.”