The ghoul smelled nothing. He grunted, and continued on through the brush.
Erin closed his eyes, fighting his urge to vomit, then slowly crawled away through the woods.
Distantly, he heard another giggle, and this time it was accompanied by a guttural voice: “Eat well. Long time till fresh meat again.”
“Not so sure.” Another tittering giggle. And those words were followed by hearty, giddy laughter. “They stupid stupid. Fight fight.”
Erin crawled back on his knees and elbows, careful not to make a sound. He was one with the brush, one with the clouds above him, barely making furrows in the ground beneath him.
People that ate people. Not even the Horseclans had been accused of such things. Murder, yes. But cannibalism was something so . . . wrong that it was difficult for him to even hold the thought in his mind.
When he was so far away that he could no longer see their campfire or hear the guttural barks of their laughter, he oriented himself by the mountains and began to crawl more rapidly.
What kind of people would these be? Men who hunted men . . . how dangerous would they be? They would not trade with other men, so their skills in many ways would not be high. Their toolmaking would be unrefined. But be that as it may, there was no way to overestimate the danger of his position.
If he was very, very careful—
Pain. Sudden, bright agony flared in his leg, and he had to stop, sobbing for breath. He checked the belts around his knee, found that one of them had slipped. The leg was numb, and sore.
Erin had a brief urge to stop, to wait for the pain to diminish. He was only human. He couldn’t keep going . . .
He exhaled harshly. He was Erin the Warrior! The Slayer! He had a purpose, a reason to keep moving, and he would.
Although he crawled in the mud, his pride sustained him. He was a warrior of the greatest warrior people in the world. And he would survive.
As Tal and Steel Tooth had taught him, he tunneled his mind, focusing on the sounds of the songs that would be sung, the images of the dancing, the taste of the food, almost managing to mask the terrible whimpering sound which had begun in the back of his throat.
Erin forced a grim smile. He gripped his spear and crawled on, unmindful of the branches slapping against his face.
Erin, the survivor! The one who had outwitted the monsters, his thousand acts of battlefield valor already famous. Erin! Who would lead the Crow against a savage new enemy, new flesh to hone their lances against before renewing their feud with the Horseclans.
He stopped, curling himself against a tree as the ground shook with hoofbeats. Along a rocky path through the marshes there came a devil horse. A stallion as black and as terrible as an eclipse of the sun. Its hooves struck sparks as it galloped, and when it stopped, not ten yards from where Erin lay hidden, it pawed the ground into furrows, snorting like a wild animal.
The rider was gigantic, twice Erin’s size. His arms and shoulders were animal knots of muscle. He was larger than Hezros, or even Steel Tooth. The ghoul carried an axe with a huge doubie-bladed head, darkly crusted with blood.
The moon was behind Erin’s tree, and he rested in deep shadow. The cannibal could not see him.
The man’s eyes were like open sores. His skin was very pale. His teeth were sharp, filed for eating raw meat. His eyes were large, and the whites too overpowering. The man searched through the underbrush, searching for something. What did those terrible, dead eyes search for?
With a thrill of nausea, Erin realized that he knew exactly what they were looking for.
They knew that somebody had survived. They’d found tracks. He crawled even farther back into the shadows, but as he watched that horse, tossing and pawing the ground, an idea began to blossom.
Silently, Erin felt around in the shadow until he found a chunk of rock as big as his fist, and then a second one that was even larger. He hefted the first carefully, took aim, and threw.
The horse reared violently as the rock hit it squarely between the eyes. As it shied, the man turned cat-quick, cursing gutturally. Erin hefted the second rock, the biggest and heaviest that he could throw accurately, and hurled it. The man groaned and sagged to his knees as it hit him in the back of the head.
Even hurt as he was, on his knees, he managed to turn, fought to bring the axe to guard. Erin steeled himself, shut the pain in his leg away, and leaped from the shadows. He barely managed to suck his gut in, to evade that first clumsy swing. His leg was aflame—he had no strength for a long fight, especially a long fight against a man as huge as this.
He had to hope that the man’s head was as clouded as it seemed. Erin faked to the left, and the man tried to pivot on his knees to follow the feint. There was a moment of uncertainty, and Erin twisted to the right, gambled everything and drove the spear in. The momentum of the axe was too much for the man to redirect, and he didn’t make it. The blade clanged against the spear, cleaving the haft as the head struck home. The man knelt there, staring unbelievingly at Erin, blood gushing blackly into the moonlight, and fell over onto his face.
Erin tumbled to the ground. His leg! The pain had doubled. He had torn something, or allowed splintered bone to tear through his flesh.
He forced himself to his knees and wrenched his broken spear out of the man’s throat. He grabbed the horse’s reins before the animal could get away from him. Every breath more labored than the last, he sucked wind and climbed onto the saddle, digging his heels into its great flanks.
It sprinted forward as if released from a sling, plunging wildly through the brush. At his strongest he would have struggled to control such a beast. Now it was more than he could do just to hang on. His eyesight blurred in the darkness. Erin didn’t see the branch that smashed his face, didn’t even know that he had been hit until his back struck the ground. He lay there, the world spinning around and around.
Distantly, he heard voices. He had to keep moving. He forced himself to his knees, groping out in the darkness. Where was his spear? Desperately he flailed, until the nearness of the voices wrenched a sob of despair from his lips. He staggered to his feet, hobbling in the direction of the river.
He barely saw the figure flickering to the left. He threw himself to the ground, and a war axe buried itself in the tree trunk behind him. A great hairy figure launched after it, striking Erin before he could get his knife from his belt. They rolled over and over and around in the dirt, gasping and sweating. The man’s breath smelled like rotted human flesh.
Erin sank his fingers into the cannibal’s throat, felt the great corded muscles there in the same moment that the man’s hands found his own.
The man’s throat was thicker than his own, his hands stronger. Erin felt the awful pressure as the fingers dug into his neck, crushed his throat closed.
Air! There was no air! His vision blackened, splashes of red and silver flashing in the darkness. Desperately, he rammed his head forward, smashing it into the face of the man above him. There was a strangled snarl of surprise and pain, and the tension on Erin’s throat eased.
He changed his grip so that his thumbs clawed at his attacker’s eyes. He squeezed with everything that he had left. There was a long moment of resistance, and then his thumbs plunged into warmth and wetness.
The beast-man atop him gave an awful, animal scream, his hands clapping to ruined eyes. He flung himself back, rolling on the ground making great whooping sounds.