There! Was that the flicker of the black cloud, vanishing behind the crest of the next hill? He hurried ahead and saw that the bosom of the hill hid a hollow, as if some giant had scooped an enormous handful of the sandy earth out of its side, leaving a gentle depression large enough to hold a manor and its grounds. The Boy could hear the consistent hum, louder and louder as he approached the lip of the hollow.
If they had settled to rest, or to spend the night, in some foliage in the hollow, he had a chance. He probed his pocket, feeling the rough surface of the box inside. If he could find the queen in the center of the swarm, and if he could manipulate her into the box without hurting her, and without the defensive worker bees turning hostile … He muttered a quick prayer and pulled out the box. He reached the edge of the hollow, looked down, and gasped.
His first impression was that some elemental horror, a story told to frighten children around the fire in the dead of winter, had risen from the ruins of a cursed habitation. A primal bolt of fear, ice-cold, shot through his bowels. A tall humanoid stood just below him, featureless save for a vague indentation where its eyes should have been. Although the figure was still as stone, its black and tawny flesh was moving, like a goat’s carcass alive with maggots, and he felt a prickle over his own skin in response.
It stood as a supplicant, facing the setting sun with arms upraised as if in appeal. The lumps at the ends of the outstretched limbs looked like hands from which the fingers had corroded and fallen away. As he watched, a golden brown mass of the thing’s skin fell to the ground in a clump and fell apart. It disintegrated into many small bodies, some crawling over the grass that grew between the squared-off stones and some flying back to rejoin the hideously quivering mockery.
Then he heard the hum and drew in a great gulp of the warm, summer air. It was only the bees lighting on a statue. The scattered stones were the ruins of a temple where once a deity had stood, depicted in stone, arms spread to receive its worshipers. Or perhaps a great house stood here, with the image of an ancestor preserved in granite, now covered with the questing swarm.
Feeling foolish, he scrambled over the lip of the hollow and picked his way over the tumbled stones that had once made a wall. The bees’ buzzing grew louder, and he gently waved aside a few that flew around his face. He knew he was safe. It was rare for a swarm to sting an intruder, so long as one moved slowly and unthreateningly. It wasn’t until they’d found a home to defend that they’d be dangerous. In front of the bee-encrusted statue he paused, smelling the honey-scented tang of the insect mass, searching the quivering, moving surface for the long-bodied queen. The statue was a head taller than he. The Boy looked up into where its featureless face should have been.
There was a quiver as two handfuls of bees fell away. From the blunt-featured face, two eyes blinked open and looked at the horizon. They blinked again and looked down at the Boy. Round eyes with golden yellow irises and a black, black center looked down at him, reflecting two tiny images of the reddened sun. No other part of the statue moved.
The Boy opened his mouth to scream, but only a harsh whistling sound came out. He felt as if a blow of Skreetchu’s baton had struck his ribs, knocking away his air. He wanted to scramble away, but he felt as if his limbs had frozen in place.
The Boy had nightmares like this-nightmares of goblins and worse chasing him, close enough so he could see their leering faces and yellowed teeth, and him unable to move, or moving unnaturally slowly, knowing in a few seconds he’d be seized and devoured. Drenched in sweat, he’d wake, sitting bolt upright on the thin pallet he was allotted in the stables.
But this was no dream, and he wouldn’t wake. A bee-covered arm reached up before he could move, and a strong hand grasped him about the throat. He grabbed at the arm, feeling a few bees crushed beneath his fingers and the dull shock as his hand was stung. This time he managed to scream, a shrilling cry that rang in his ears. He tried to yell again, but no sound came.
As if reacting to his scream, the bees sprang away from the figure, swirling up and away like a thick mist. The Boy’s neck was still clasped in a firm grip as the statue’s head turned to watch the bees as they spread out so one could see them as individuals instead of a solid mass. They merged into a solid black column, then dissipated again, vanishing over the edge of the hollow.
I’ll never catch the queen now, thought the Boy, despite his terror. The figure turned back to look at him, and the Boy would have screamed again had the pressure on his throat not increased, choking off his cry. He felt a warm trickle against the inside of his leg as he lost control of his bladder.
Yellow eyes in a fierce face stared into his own. The figure’s head was furred, with deep black stripes across the burned orange and stark white of its cheek, chin, and muzzle. Stiff, wirelike whiskers jutted beneath the flattened, flaring nose of a predator, and the feline-split upper lip quivered in a snarl, exposing thick ivory fangs. Tufts of tawny fur framed its ears, the backs of which had jagged black stripes while the inside of each was snow-white. The ears swiveled slightly to catch every sound: the distant buzzing of the bees, the occasional chatter of a bird, his own subvocal whimpering.
It was a tiger’s head, square on a thick neck and muscular body that was a man’s, save that it, too, was covered in short tawny, black-striped fur. The tiger-man pulled the Boy up by the neck until his toes barely touched the ground. The creature growled in his face. The Boy’s breath was cut off, and black dots danced before his eyes. He could feel the tips of sharp claws biting into his skin.
He thought he’d been afraid of Skreetchu, with his species’s cruelty and his baton always at the ready for an errant slave. But he’d willingly go to the kenku now and confess to losing the swarm and to a passel of other sins if only he could get free of this monstrous creature.
Just as the pressure on his neck grew intolerable, the tiger-headed creature snarled and tossed him aside. The Boy fell heavily against an inscribed slab of rock that tilted, broken, half-buried in sand. He struggled to regain his breath and wrapped his arms around his battered ribs, knowing that if the creature decided to kill him there was no defense.
He squinted up at the creature, which stood rooted in place, ignoring the Boy. The tiger-headed thing was staring at its own hands, turning them back and forth. They were strange hands, unnatural-somewhere between a human hand and a paw, elongated with claw-tipped fingers mobile enough to hold small objects, but powerful enough to wrap around the hilt of a weapon. The hand-paw was covered with fur, striped tawny and black on the back and white on the palm. As the creature turned its hand over, however, it became apparent that something was wrong: the palm faced back, and the large, clawed thumb was reversed. It was as if some clever trickster had severed the tiger-man’s hands, flipped them over, and skillfully stitched nerve, bone, sinew, and skin back into place, backward.
The Boy closed his eyes, and a small groan escaped him. He’d lived too near the Beastlands for far too long not to know what stood there; a rakshasa-a demon with the body of a humanoid and the head of a jungle cat, and most telling, those awful backward paws.
Lusk looked at his hands in baffled rage and horror.
He looked at the small human who had witnessed his rebirth, whom he had seized upon in his anger and tossed aside. A boy, he saw, grown too tall for his shabby clothing and a face too thin for his eyes. He was thirteen, perhaps; no older than sixteen, surely. The child struggled to his feet, breathing unsteadily and cradling his side as if it pained him.