Zeeahd held up his own right hand, the stump of his thumb a mirror of Sayeed’s, although marred with scales and a malformed joint.
“And we owe that to Abelar Corrinthal. Look for no more meaning than that. Men do awful things to other men. That’s the world.”
“That’s the world,” Sayeed echoed.
“We’ll be free of all this soon,” Zeeahd said. “The Lord of the Eighth promised. We need only find him the son.”
The son. They’d been seeking their prey for decades, scouring Faerun. By now, the son of Erevis Cale would be an old man. Or dead.
“You think this Oracle will tell us how to find him?” Sayeed asked.
“We’ll make him tell us,” Zeeahd said. “And if the son is already dead of age, we’ll find out where his corpse is and give that to Meph-to the Lord of Cania. And he will free us. Come on. We must find a village.”
Zeeahd picked up his pace, his gait lumbering, awkward, bestial. Sayeed fell in after him.
Over the next several hours the rain picked up until it fell in brown, stinking sheets. The whipgrass under their feet squirmed at the foul water’s touch.
“Do you require shelter?” Sayeed asked Zeeahd. “Sleep?”
“No,” his brother said, in a voice deeper than usual. The hood of Zeeahd’s cloak hid his face. “You know what I require, and I require it soon.”
They hustled through the rain, the wet ground sucking at their boots, the anticipatory cries of the hungry cats driving Sayeed to distraction. His brother wheezed, coughed frequently, and spat a black globule every few steps-to the delight of the cats, who feasted on it.
After a time, moans began to slip through Zeeahd’s lips and his form roiled under the robes. Sayeed could not help but stare. He’d never seen his brother so bad.
“Stop looking at me!” Zeeahd said to Sayeed, half turning his cowled head, his speech slurred and wet from malformed lips.
Sayeed licked his lips and looked away, queasy. The plains looked the same in all directions. The road they traveled appeared to lead nowhere. He feared that they would not be able to stop whatever was soon to happen to his brother.
A small, secret part of him wished that whatever was to happen would happen. His brother disgusted him. Their lives disgusted him. He tried to exorcise the traitorous thoughts with a half-hearted offer of aid.
“How can I help, Zeeahd?”
Zeeahd whirled on him. “You can find me a vessel! Or become one yourself!”
Sayeed’s eyes narrowed. His hand went to the hilt of his blade. As one, the cats turned to face him, all eyes and teeth and claws. He tightened his grip on the hilt, prepared to draw.
But a sound carried out of the rain, the distant scream of a woman from somewhere ahead. The cats arched their backs, cocked their heads.
“You heard it?” Zeeahd asked, still eyeing Sayeed out of the depths of his cowl. “It’s not a phantasm of my mind?”
“I heard it,” Sayeed said slowly, and relaxed his grip on his blade. More screams carried through the rain, terrified wails, dogs barking feverishly. “Someone requires aid.”
“Come on,” Zeeahd said, turning and staggering over the wet earth toward the screams. Despair raised his voice. “Hurry. I can’t continue like this.”
They ran over the slick earth, Sayeed leading, the cats trailing. Twice Zeeahd slipped and fell. Twice Sayeed turned back, lifted his brother to his feet, and felt the flesh and bone of his brother’s body swell and roil under his touch, as if something were nested in his flesh, squirming underneath it in an attempt to burst forth. Bile touched the back of his throat and shock pulled a question from him before he could block it with his teeth.
“What in the Hells is in you, Zeeahd?”
Zeeahd kept his cowled head turned away from his brother. His voice was guttural. “I told you before! I don’t know. He put something in me. To make sure I did his work. It’ll. . change me.” He shoved Sayeed ahead. “Please, hurry.”
Closer now, Sayeed distinguished the screams of several women and men, the frantic barking and growls of not one but two dogs. He topped a rise and crouched low amid a stand of broadleaf trees. Zeeahd crawled into position beside him, wheezing and moaning. The cats formed up around them, silent and staring.
Below them, the ribbon of the packed-earth wagon road stretched east to west. Two wagons lay overturned on it. A flotsam of household goods lay scattered in the grass: rain-sodden blankets, a small table, broken stoneware. Two bodies lay among the debris, both torn open at the abdomen, the ropes of their entrails smeared on the grass, glistening in the rain. A third corpse lay a few paces from the first two, arms and legs at grotesque angles, the skin drawn tightly against the bones, mummified, as if sucked dry.
A misshapen bipedal creature twice as tall as a man stood in the road. It appeared almost skeletal, but sickly black flesh and chunks of muscle wrapped the bones here and there. Overlong arms ended in finger-length black talons, and large, pointed ears walled a hairless, misshapen head. Green light burned in the depths of its sunken eye sockets. The fanged mouth was opened wide and a pink tongue as thick as Sayeed’s wrist and as long as his forearm dangled grotesquely from the opening. Currents of dark energy swirled around it, gathered on its claws.
It shrieked in hunger and hate, a high-pitched, ear-splitting sound that would have stood Sayeed’s hair on end a hundred years earlier.
Zeeahd coughed, spat a globule of dark phlegm. The cats pounced and consumed the black mass in a moment. “It’s a devourer. An undead that draws power from the Shadowfell.”
Two men-simple villagers, to judge from the homespun they wore and the wooden axes they wielded as weapons-circled the devourer at a distance of two paces, the weapons trembling in their grasps. A mastiff, barking frenetically, harried the devourer opposite the two men.
A boy’s body lay on the ground near the devourer’s feet, his head nearly ripped from his neck. A girl lay not far from the boy, her dress torn and covered in mud, face down, unmoving. The bodies of three other children lay around the road, their clothes and bodies torn, pieces of them scattered about like the wagon’s debris.
Two women hovered on the outskirts of the combat, shouting, cursing, crying, hurling rocks and stones and whatever they could find at the devourer, all to no effect. A second mastiff stood near the women, barking and growling.
“Run!” the tall, bearded man shouted to the women. “Run!”
“I won’t leave you,” the thick-set woman answered, crying. “Leave us be, creature!”
The bearded man lunged forward, axe held high. Before he could bring his weapon to bear, dark energy flared around the devourer, a cloud of darkness veined with green streaks that knocked the man from his feet. The second man, much younger, perhaps the first man’s son, shouted in anger, bounded forward, and sank his axe into the devourer’s leg. The weapon barely bit and the devourer showed no sign of pain. The creature lashed out with its overlong arm and claw and caught the young man across the face. The impact spun the youth completely around. Blood sprayed and he fell to the mud without a sound.
As he fell, the younger of the two women screamed in despair, her hands clasped before her as if in prayer. The dogs’ barking grew manic. The heavier woman tried to pull the younger girl away, but she seemed frozen to the spot.
The devourer lumbered forward, grasped the older, bearded man and lifted him triumphantly into the air. The man’s arms were pinned against his body, his axe hanging futilely from his fist.
“Run!” the man screamed at the women, his face twisted with pain and fear. “Please run!”
The devourer pulled the man close and ran its tongue over his face, leaving a road of blood and blisters and a ruined eye in its wake. The man wailed, legs kicking against the devourer’s chest, all to no effect. The devourer opened its fanged mouth as if in glee, tongue dangling. The dark energy that animated the creature spun and whirled in a black cloud around the man and the undead.