Page 29 of Into the West

They weren’t illusions. The creature’s undamaged skin was murky-dark, with hundreds of convincing eyes glowing in it. They suddenly made themselves seem like hundreds—which would cause complete panic in their prey, and to anyone who could sling a spell, it undoubtedly had to be an illusion, right? It was a trick. To make someone . . . think it was an illusion . . . be impressed by themselves . . . get cocky for figuring it out . . . and waste a spell. Which I did. I fell for it. And now they’re breaking off, just . . . retreating.

The beasts—the ones that still could—fled into stands of trees as far from the village as they could find. The ones that couldn’t run met their ends from axes and scythes, arrows, crossbow bolts, and one Spitter in the hands of Beltran, when he was charged at. Unexpectedly, Beltran dropped his Spitter as soon as he’d fired it, covering his hand up and screaming amidst a sudden cloud of frost. He shook the damaged hand and Kordas could see it seemed intact, though frosted over. Spitters shouldn’t do that. Permanent enchantments in the metal safely hold the cold inside. Without that magic, as often as not they’d explode and take a hand with them. With a second thought, Kordas realized that the weapon had fired before Beltran even had a finger on its trigger. It was going to go off anyway. Beltran happened to be aiming when it did.

It wasn’t long until everyone entered the dazed “What just happened?” phase of combat. Monster bodies twitched, dogs barked, people yelled for their children. A quarter of the combatants were at the stage of after-action shock in which staring was the maximum they could offer anyone. Another quarter rotated among each other, repeatedly asking if everyone was okay. Kordas couldn’t blame them. Nobody could have been ready for that.

Kordas dismounted and extinguished the flame curtain with a gesture, and the poor blacksmith sat down heavily right where he was. His gore-pasted hands were shaking. Kordas went to him, leading Arial, who was getting over her own experience. Kordas was still filled with the lightning of his first actual battle, and felt as if, if he could win against that, he could conquer anything. Right up until that end. If the reinforcements hadn’t run to the rescue, those creatures could have strung defenders out and picked them all off over the course of hours. I am never going to tell anyone how close that was. Everyone but me saw a successful fire attack come out of me, and I won’t bring up the details.

But his brain was back in control now, and not his training and instincts. His instincts wanted him to pursue those things; his mind warned him that was a bad idea. Still, this was a win, and while there were injuries, there had been no deaths he knew of yet, and a win felt—

Euphoric. He hadn’t felt a crippling moment of doubt or fear once he’d spotted those beasts, and now that they were dead or fled, the feeling coursing through his veins right now was as heady as distilled spirits.

The blacksmith looked up at the Baron with tears in his eyes. He was obviously no stranger to fighting, and even more obviously, this village was his life. He’d have died today if that was what it took to make his people safe. “Y’s good a fighter as diplomat. Y’came. I’se desp’rate, an’ ye came t’help. Arter how we met ye—ye helped us anyroad.”

Calm down. Think. Choose your words carefully. Kordas went to one knee, and offered his kerchief to the blacksmith to clear up the—substances—caked on his hands from the battle. The big man accepted gratefully, and offered the disgusting remains of the cloth back to Kordas. He declined. “You didn’t treat us any differently than we might have treated you, if our positions had been reversed,” he said, hanging his crossbow back on his belt. “What in the names of all the gods are those things?”

He looked down at one with a bashed-in spine—the “eyes” on its skin had faded away, and its death twitches fired off broken patterns of lights on its skin. A dozen or more dots of light came up through the intact skin and clustered as bright strobes. Do they do that to attract attention when they fall, to draw off attackers from the others? Are they sneaky even when they’re dead? His mind was still processing what all had even happened, and he did take notice of something. He knew what coursing-hounds should look like, lean, but with good muscles. He could see every bone on this thing’s body; the strange, hairless, smoky-gray hide was stretched as tight as a drumhead over its bones.

“And why are they starving?” he added, wondering out loud.

The blacksmith got to his feet. “Dunno what they’s called elsewhere,” he said, slowly gaining back his composure. “We calls ’em hell-dogs. They got poison fangs. They stay ’way. Ne’er see’m like this.”

“Was anyone bitten?” he called over his shoulder, but no one answered, so he took that as a negative.

“Dunno why they’s starving,” the blacksmith continued. “There be plenty game hereabouts—”

But Kordas was now going from body to body, and he noticed that there were differences in each of them. All of the beasts looked to be starving, but some had twisted limbs, some had swellings of the hips or shoulders, and some had bloated bellies, incongruous on those bony frames. “They’ve either got some sort of disease,” he said aloud, “or they’re far, far too inbred. Maybe both; maybe they are so inbred that they’ve all got the same crippling diseases.” He looked back at the blacksmith. “I don’t think more than four or five escaped. They were all wounded, and I don’t think they are going to last the next moon, much less last the winter.”

“From yer mouth to the ears of the gods,” the blacksmith said fervently. “They ain’t never come into the village; we only ever had run-ins with them out huntin’. An’ then it was on’y two or three. That whole pack come down on us like a thunderstorm.” The blacksmith picked at his ear with a twig, freeing up some wet who-knew-what from the side of his head. “They fought wit’all they had. S’like if they didn’t, they coulda dun nothin’ more. An’ us, best day, we couldn’t’a done what ye did. How’ll we ever thenk ye?”

“If someone comes through here after we take down that door in the air, pretend we were never here,” Kordas told him promptly. “I don’t think anyone will, but if they do—”

“What? Travelers?” the blacksmith said, his face a study in abject stupidity. “Nah, we ain’t seen nonelike, the bank allus looks like thet. The wild pigs tear it up somethin’ cruel, this side of the river.”

Kordas clapped him on the back, and went to check on his guards.

Despite the shudders and nightmare-inducing sights, they were utterly unscathed, and though they lamented the loss of the arrows and crossbow bolts, no one wanted to touch the carcasses to dig what was left of the heads out. The villagers were emerging from their cottages and the blacksmith directed them to haul the bodies into a single pile—and Kordas noticed that none of them touched the bodies directly. They used shovels, or strips of rag tied around the feet. The men building the pile of bodies used pitchforks to manipulate them.

When they were piled up, the blacksmith returned to Kordas, hands clasped on the shaft of his hammer. “I don’t s’pose ye’d bring down the magic fire agin to set them things t’ash?”

Kordas chuckled shakily. “As long as I’m not likely to need it because another pack of those things is on the way—”

“Nay, no, don’t think so,” the blacksmith replied, but looked warily over his shoulder as he said so. “They went after th’ beasts ye traded, an’ hit’em an’like, but didn’t kill’em. S’like takin’ th’milk, y’ken? Like they meant t’come back, but, when battle started, ’twas for their lives then, an’ they was gonna fight ye.”

“They could have all escaped unharmed if they’d run, but they attacked us. So what was so special about those trade animals?” Kordas murmured. He thought on it. They were all fine beasts, they’d made the journey without harm so far, and they’d stuck with their barges until they’d been traded. Ordinary. Ordinary for where he was from, maybe, but ordinary for here? To be honest, probably, since the species of animals were close enough to the natives’ that they should have interbred just fine. There was some part of this that would have made sense to them, that he was missing. Something wasn’t wrong. He scratched at his left ear. No, something was unclear. The things were uncanny, but apparently acting in their “normal.” Kordas squinted and scanned around the aftermath with his mage-sight. He made himself receptive to minor, background magic within a quarter mile, from the villagers gathering up livestock that had bolted, to all the soldiers and guard here, and the residual magic from his spellcasting, which wasn’t there.

Wait, what?

The area was “clean.” More accurately, it was scrubbed wherever the creatures had moved. Not even the tiniest pockets where magic was usually held in seedpods, or bees, bugs, or birds flying through the village held magic right now. He gave an “I’m thinking” gesture to Beltran, who carried over his Spitter wrapped in a kerchief, while he paced and pieced it out.

Unnatural creatures attack new livestock but don’t kill, they all look starved and miserable, and now there’s no leftover magic, because . . . because they took it with them. The traded animals would have had the remains of the tethering spell on them. That’s what was new about them. Kordas took three steps and pulled the Spitter from Beltran’s hand. Its magic, too, was gone. All but a trace in the metal. Its enchantment remains, it’s simply—unpowered. The structure of its enchantment was there, but the energy was only now beginning to recover. He told Beltran, “Sink it in the river when we return. You shouldn’t trust a Spitter once they’ve endured cold-firing. They look fine to us, but they crack up inside and can burst right apart.” Beltran frowned without any pretense; he was not happy about losing his weapon. At least it wasn’t one of the pair he had stolen from the Emperor. “We’ll issue you another one,” Kordas murmured as he looked away.

The things knew I was a spellcaster, yet they went after the troops. It was obvious to anyone that I was in charge, so it made sense for them to go after me as their biggest threat, but they didn’t. They went after those protecting me, leaving me free for more spellcasting. Kordas did not care at all for where this was going. Because? Because they needed the magic. The mortally wounded one tried to reach me. It could have fled or hidden—but I must have smelled of magic to it. Magic it needed . . .

The one that was struck by Beltran’s shot was only a horselength away, and the Spitter was closest to it at that moment. So the things had to be close by to take magical energy in.

Kordas looked Beltran in the eyes and said, “Those things . . . by their emaciated look, even though food was around aplenty, they needed magic to—eat anything. To digest. Food all around them, but—I think this was something to do with their diseases and stunted shapes. Their bodies didn’t work right. This was all they could do, Beltran. It was their last chance to live.”

Beltran asked, “Then how many more are around us? Around the expedition?”