“A fortnight, no more,” Aeden said.
A bitter gust fell off the misted spires of the Gyntors, pushing before it the cloying reek of corruption. Raising his face into the wind, Rathe spied a ragged tent hunkered a little deeper into the forest. He looked a question at Aeden, and the man’s jaw tightened in answer.
The closer they came to the tent, the stronger the stench of rot grew. Skin prickling with unease, Rathe halted several paces away, tried to get an image of what had happened. Animals had scattered stores of dried goods around the tent, and its sides had been shredded to flapping tatters. By the pile of wood shavings and kindling next to the blackened fire ring, it looked as if the huntsman had been about to start a cookfire. On a nearby stone, flint and rusted steel waited for hands that would never pick them up. From a picket line, four ropes fell to a cluster of carcasses-oxen, by their size.
“Is this all?” Rathe asked.
Aeden pointed to a place of dense undergrowth, the murk made deeper, more substantial, by the coming dusk. Fresh footprints in the slushy skim of snow showed where Aeden and Eled had already walked.
Wanting to get back to the company before full dark fell, Rathe moved to the spot, searching, and halted mid-step. The legs of a pair of corpses clad in woolen trousers poked from under the brush, as if they had died trying to find cover. As scavengers had been at the camp’s stores, so too had they been at the dead, savaging rotten meat and strewing entrails. Beetles and grave worms, sluggish with cold, churned through the soupy corruption.
“Fever must have taken them,” Loro said.
“No fever did this,” Rathe said, nodding toward two rounded lumps covered in strands of dark hair. Heads. While a wolf or bear might have torn the skulls from the dead men, neither animal would have placed them upright and side-by-side, as if to grant the gaping eye sockets leave to watch the slow decay of their bodies. Such as that took the calculating mind of a higher order of creature.
“Something watches,” Loro warned, looking back the way they had come. The trio moved together, brandishing swords. The forest gazed back with bland menace. Shadows lay thicker than before.
“By all the gods,” Aeden whimpered, the wavering tip of his sword pointing at a group of pale shapes flitting between tree trunks. A moment later, the creatures vanished into forest.
The three men stood mute, still as iced statues.
“What-”
“We must get back to camp,” Aeden said. “Come!”
Chapter 18
They ran to their horses, all looking in different directions for another glimpse of the elusive creatures. The forest revealed nothing. Eled sat his mount where they had left him.
“Did you see?” Aeden asked.
Eled, who had regained some of his color, paled again. “See what?”
Aeden swallowed. “The Shadenmok and her demon hounds!”
Eled let out an agonized moan and sawed the reins, dragging his horse around. Without a word, he kicked the mount into a hard gallop.
Rathe leaped into the saddle, waited just long enough for Loro and Aeden to do the same, then went after Eled. Rathe fought against whipping branches and his horse’s plunging stride until breeching the forest’s grasp. Having caught up with Eled, the foursome raced back along the road to the first glade.
Captain Treon and the rest of the soldiers looked around at the thunder of hooves. Before Treon uttered a word, Eled began screeching, “Strike camp! We must flee. Now!”
“What’s the meaning of this?” Treon demanded.
“Shadenmok!” Aeden cried, provoking a few startled outbursts.
Treon glanced at Rathe, for once his gray gaze showing something different than anger or hate. Fear leaped within them. “What did you see?”
Rathe shrugged. “I know not what I saw,” he admitted, then described the creatures as best he could. “Perhaps it was mist, or a dark fancy conjured after seeing the dead huntsmen.” He did not quite believe that, but then, he did not want to believe the alternative. He had been frightened as a child by tales of fell creatures lurking within the black forests of the Gyntors, things that stole flesh and mortal souls with equal abandon. He did not wish for those stories to become reality.
“Are you sure you did not see bandits?” Treon asked, voice trembling.
Loro shook his head at the same time Aeden blurted, “It could not have been.”
Eled shivered. “I saw nothing.”
Treon regained some of his composure. “Probably a pack of wolves-”
An agonized shriek rose from the south, stilling the captain’s words. Another cry followed, and abruptly cut off. The soldiers scanned the woods, goggling eyes twitching back and forth.
“That was Alfan,” someone muttered. “He went out to hunt.”
“Fool’s been drinking again,” Treon said unconvincingly, “and is toying with us.”
“Or the Shadenmok hunts him,” Aeden blurted.
“We must organize a search,” Rathe said.
“No,” Treon countered. “I will not risk good men for a single, buggering fool with no more sense than a stone.”
“Then I will find him on my own,” Rathe said. He was not keen on locating the man who might have ravished his backside over a barrel, had he misstepped the day he arrived at Hilan, but Alfan was a soldier under his command, and a brother-in-arms until he proved differently. Moreover, now was an opportunity he had waited for in which to begin implementing his plan against Treon. All the better that the cause was just.
Treon sneered. “The Shadenmok is a race of she-devils that fill their wombs with the seed of dead men, then give birth to Hilyoth, their hunting hounds. You would challenge such a creature alone … in the coming dark?”
Behind that derisive expression, Rathe saw the face of pure cowardice. “If I must,” he said, praying to Ahnok that no such hellish creature actually existed … or if it did, he prayed for his god to lend him the strength to defeat it.
“I will join you,” Loro said. “There are torches in the wagons.”
For a moment, no one moved. Then, hesitantly, a handful of the Hilan men stepped forward, then more. None looked to Treon for permission or guidance. Instead, all eyes fell on Rathe. I am the whipped dog no more.
Not waiting for Treon to argue, Rathe squatted, drew his dagger, and stabbed the tip into the churned snow and mud at his feet. “We are here. Alfan is in this area. And here,” he said, scratching a deep groove, “is the road where we will form up, with no more than ten paces between each man. At my word, the line will beat the forest until we find Alfan … or whatever hunts him.”
He looked up, marking each face. “If we do not find him before our torches fail, the forest may become his tomb.”
Treon scanned the soldiers around him, and Rathe could see his mind trying to work out a response. If Treon refused to allow the search, he would lose more respect than he already had. Moreover, he had to know Rathe would go, whether granted leave to do so or not, and that act of defiance would further bolster his standing.
“Take half the men, lieutenant,” Treon snapped, his face reddening. “The others and myself will remain here-to guard camp, and build fires to ensure you find your way back.”
“I would expect nothing more from you,” Rathe drawled.
Before Treon could register the insult, Rathe called for every man to take up a torch. After the torches were lit, the soldiers hurried down the road. Rathe came last, and Breyon halted him with a touch.