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Ashe struggled to form the words. “My wife?” he whispered. “My child?”

The Bolg woman let her breath out slowly, then spoke three words in the common tongue of the continent.

“I am sorry,” she said.

34

The Krevensfield Plain, Roland

The days of endless snow passed, one into another.

Faron’s mind, absent of other things to comprehend, honed a harder focus. He had lost all memory save one, had turned away from acclimating to his new body, his new reality, to keep his attention set on but one goal. Mile by mile, he followed winter’s path through unbroken farmland, sighting along the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare, the frozen road that bisected the continent. There was very little traffic on that thoroughfare; Thaw had come, and the people of the towns, villages, and cities of Roland were busy making repairs, stocking up peat, wood, and dung for fuel, and settling in, awaiting winter’s return. With the lore of the earth strong within him, Faron had learned to blend into the landscape, so whether it was because of that new ability, or the lack of anyone to see him, he passed unnoticed.

He was following a sound now, a distant call in a vibration he had known all his life, the ancient, primordial song of the scales he had lost. If it had been possible for him to forget the tune, he would have been reminded by the humming of the ones within his possession, their power reverberating through his stone body.

Ofttimes the noise of day served to mute the call, and when it did Faron became angry beyond all measure. The cry of a winter bird, of geese flying overhead in formation, caused him to stop in his snowy tracks, looking up to the firmament of the sky above, muttering silent curses in a long-dead language deep within his brain. He craved the silence of the world, for in that silence, he could hear the call clearly. Once he got a fix on it, he followed it ceaselessly.

Until at last one night he found what he was looking for.

He had come to the top of a rise above a small, low-lying valley, one of the undulating hills of the Orlandan Plateau, on the wide Krevensfield Plain, and there it was below him.

The full moon was shining, bright as day. Its light glazed the snowy fields, making them gleam silvery blue. Even in the dark, the moonlight was so intense that it was easy to see the brightly colored wagons, the crimson and purple flags dressing the carts that by day were pulled by horses. Those beasts were quartered together now, blanketed for the night; they alone noticed the chain in the earth, and nickered in a growing panic.

Within the Monstrosity’s camp torches and barrel fires burned, sending sparks skyward to dance with the blazing moonlight.

Around those barrel fires some of the men who served as guards and laborers sat, drinking foul ale and telling fouler jokes. The hunchback ticket taker had imbibed more than he could handle, and was now being used as a human ball in a grotesque game of Tossabout, to which he seemed to proffer no objection and was, in fact, cackling aloud. The laughter echoed off the empty world of hummocks and rises around them, fading off into the night.

Masking the call of the scales.

Malik held his battered mug to his lips, blowing the dirty foam off, the ale spattering into his beard as he laughed. He had pulled his legs against his chest in the attempt to warm them when out of the corner of his eye he spied movement.

He looked again, peering out into the darkness, but whatever had been moving was gone. Nothing more ’an a snow devil, he decided, taking another draught. Wind’ll be a bitch tonight.

The wagon closest to their barrel fire reared up off the ground, then was slammed down on it again, shattering into pieces.

For a split second, no sound was heard on the wide expanse of the great plain except for the splintering of the wood. Then the screaming began.

The freaks that had survived the initial impact inside the wagon started to scream; their harsh, alien voices rose in a discordant wail that sliced through the winter wind and the crackle of the fire, blending with the frightened whinnying of the horses. Malik and the others around the barrel fire fell back, covering their faces, then scrambled to their feet in shock. The keeper’s mouth flapped, forming two words.

“What the—”

The next nearest wagon suddenly skidded sideways toward them, as if it were being swung from behind. It smashed into the wreckage of the first, doubling the screams and filling the night air with the sounds of gruesome snapping and grinding.

Then it was hoisted up into the darkness, and tossed in much the same manner as they had been tossing the hunchback the moment before, right into their midst.

Through the sheer luck of reflex and favorable positioning Malik dropped on the snow and rolled to his left, bruising himself from face to knee but spared from being crushed, as three of the other men he had been drinking with the moment before were.

As the cacophony swelled around him, and the blood pounded crazily in his ears, Malik’s mind tried to determine what was happening, why a pleasant night’s drinking in the cold had suddenly become a nightmare. All he could imagine was they had been caught in the middle of a terrible winter storm that had whipped up from nowhere, catching the wagons and sending them flying.

He struggled to regain his feet and his gorge, which had risen into his throat and was choking him; just as he did, Malik thought he saw a shadow pass between the destruction and a third wagon, from which freaks and others that traveled with the Monstrosity were streaming, gibbering in confusion and fear. In the tattered light of the remnants of the barrel fire that had been in their midst and now was scattered over the snow the shadow appeared to be human, but elongated into gianthood by the undulating flames.

The roof of the next wagon splintered into pieces as the chorus of confusion grew into screams of terror.

This time Malik looked up over the top of the broken wagon in time to see the silhouette of two enormous arms and upper body slamming down with fury again. The shadow seized the wagon, shaking it violently, causing whatever other creatures had still been inside, crowding their ways to the exit, to be thrown clear onto the snowy ground, where they huddled, their eyes fixed above them, as it brought the wagon down directly on top of them with a resounding slam.

In the fading light of the barrel fire Malik thought he could make out the entire silhouette now. For a brief moment he had believed that one of the freaks was rampaging; such things had happened before, and a number of their exhibits were very strong. But as the titanic shadow lurched away in the snow toward the Ringmaster’s wagon, he could see that whatever was assaulting the monstrosity was no freak, nor was it any man he had ever seen.

And it was making its way to the Ringmaster’s abode.

“Fire at it!” he shouted hoarsely to the men who had been on duty while he and the others were drinking with the hunchback. Those men were leveling their crossbows, shaking; they were in better sight of what they were facing, and whatever it was must have been far worse than Malik could imagine by the sight of their faces, frozen in a rictus of fear. His shout seemed to waken them; in unison they fired, one of the bolts going wide, but the other three finding their marks on a target that was hard to miss, even when moving.

The bolts glanced off or shattered, as if they had been fired into a stone wall.

“Again!” Malik screamed, but two of the crossbowmen had already dropped their weapons and run while the third stood motionless; only one of the guards had the presence of mind to fire again, which he did even as the moving earth in man’s form brought its arms down in a single clenched fist onto the guard who had frozen.

Amid the spattering of blood and crunching bone that followed, a tiny metallic clink could be heard.