For his part, Sayeed could not rid himself of the foul taste of the devourer’s flesh, the memory of the girl’s screams of terror, his brother’s wet grunts as he expelled the evil in him.
“Her name was Lahni,” he said to himself, not understanding why he felt the need to say her name aloud.
“What’d you say?” his brother asked, looking back, his voice high-pitched, irritating.
“Nothing,” Sayeed said, knowing Zeeahd would not understand. “Protesting the rain.”
The cats eyed him suspiciously, their fang-filled mouths more devilish than feline.
Zeeahd held his hands out, palms up to the sky. “I like the rain. Renews the spirit.”
Sayeed said nothing. He feared he had no spirit to renew. He feared the Spellplague had stripped him of his soul and left a moral vacancy filled now by only his brother’s ambition and his own resignation. He lived, but he did not live. And so it would go, forever. He swallowed down the despair evoked by the thought.
Zeeahd stopped. “I smell wood smoke.”
The excitement in his voice made Sayeed nauseous.
Sayeed smelled it, too, the faint hint of a chimney’s exhalation. Breakfast fires, maybe. Once, the aroma would have made his stomach growl with hunger. Now, he barely tasted the food that passed his lips. To the extent his senses let him perceive anything with acuity, it was invariably something foul. Like devourer flesh.
“Come, come!” Zeeahd said, and picked up his pace. “A village is near.” He chuckled. “Perhaps Lahni’s village.”
Hearing his brother speak the girl’s name sharpened Sayeed’s irritation. He stared at his brother’s cloaked form, Zeeahd’s soul as distorted as his flesh, and wondered how it was possible to love and hate the same person so much. He flashed on an image of his sword driven through his brother’s back, the blade exploding out of Zeeahd’s chest in a spray of blood or whatever foul ichor now flowed in his brother’s veins.
“Come on!” his brother called.
Sayeed came back to himself to find three of the cats sitting on their haunches before him, slit eyes staring at him knowingly. They lifted paws to fanged mouths and licked at the mud on their pads. Their eyes never left Sayeed’s face.
“Out of my way,” he said, but they did not move and he walked around rather than through them.
The smell of breakfast fires grew stronger with each step they took. And by the time they reached the village, the rain had sputtered to a stop. A dozen or more ancient elms sprouted from the plains, noble looking trees with vast canopies lost to the shadowed air, giants compared to the meager broadleafs that predominated elsewhere on the plains. They must have been saplings when the Spellplague struck.
Within the circle of the elms was a large pond and the village whose breakfast fires they’d smelled. A few dozen single-story wooden homes huddled around a common pasturage. Bark shingles covered the roofs. Smoke rose from several chimneys. Post fences made from stripped broadleaf limbs delineated small fields and gardens. A few rickety wagons sat here and there, small chicken coops, livestock pens. The village was so small Sayeed could have run from one end of it to the other in less than a fifty count.
The overgrown cart path they walked carried them between two of the elms, which formed a kind of natural gate. Sayeed heard voices coming from the village center, the chatter of earnest conversation punctuated with laughter and the occasional jovial shout.
“A collection of hovels,” Zeeahd said, eyeing the village contemptuously. His good mood was already fading. Probably his hunger was already returning. “It smells of peasants and shit.”
A herd dog stood in the open door of a rain-sodden woodshed, eyeing them, its hackles raised. Zeeahd’s cats stared back at it as they walked past and the dog tucked tail and retreated into the shed.
No one seemed to be around. As Sayeed was about to announce their arrival, as was the custom, a boy of maybe ten winters with a too-large cloak thrown over his homespun hurried around the corner of one of the fences ahead. Head down, he clicked at a thin sheep that trailed him. When he caught sight of Sayeed and Zeeahd he froze, ten steps away but a world distant. The sheep, its head down against the rain, walked into him and bleated.
“Ho there, boy,” Sayeed said, raising a hand in greeting.
The boy’s sleepy eyes went wide. Sayeed and Zeeahd must have looked to him like ghosts stepping from the shadows.
Sayeed tried to look harmless, despite his armor, sword, and wild hair and beard. “There’s no need to be afra-”
The boy turned and ran off toward the center of the village, slipping in the mud as he went. “Mother! Mother!”
The sheep trotted after him, oblivious.
“Fly back to the nest, little bird,” Zeeahd said softly, and Sayeed knew his tone promised blood. “Predators are afoot.”
They followed the boy’s shouts toward the center of the village. The few local dogs and cats they saw slinked away as Sayeed, Zeeahd, and their cats drew near. Scrawny livestock lowed or bleated in their pens as they passed.
Ahead, they saw the village center. A raised, planked deck and a bell on a tall post had been built under the canopy of a large elm. It looked like the entire village had gathered there. Women, children, and men sat on stump stools or stood about, their eyes on the deck, where stood a large, fat man with a thick moustache, holding forth about something. A rickety peddler’s cart stood to one side, still yoked to a large, graying mule. Some of the villagers were examining the cart’s wares, smiling.
The boy Sayeed had frightened stood at the edge of the gathered villagers, a woman kneeling before him, probably his mother. The boy pointed back at Sayeed and Zeeahd while his sheep nibbled the grass.
“See! I told you more travelers had come! See!”
Dozens of eyes fixed on Sayeed and Zeeahd, questions written in their expressions. Eyes widened at the brothers’ blades, their unkempt appearance.
The brothers walked toward the gathered villagers. The crowd formed up to await them, shifting on their feet, children hiding behind parents.
The peddler standing on the deck bowed and doffed his cap. “Minser the Seller at your service, goodsirs. This gem of a village is called Fairelm. And if I may be so bold as to speak for these good people, we bid you welcome.”
The villagers did not echo the welcome.
Sayeed did not bow in return. His gaze swept the villagers, looking for anyone who might have been other than they appeared. He saw no one of note.
“My name is Sayeed,” he said. “This is my brother, Zeeahd.”
Their foreign sounding names caused a murmur of discontent to move through the crowd.
“Well met,” Minser said. He waited a moment for a return greeting that didn’t come, and the brothers’ silence seemed to take him aback. He looked around at the villagers, perhaps hoping one of them would speak, but none did. He cleared his throat.
“Oh, yes, well. What has you two walking Sembia’s plains under this bleak sky? There are dangers on the plains, although you look like a man familiar with a sword.”
“We are merely travelers,” Zeeahd said.
“We’re just passing through,” Sayeed added. “It is custom, is it not, to offer shelter and a meal to travelers?”
No one offered either. Eyes found the ground. The silence thickened. Finally the boy they’d frightened piped up.
“Those are strange looking cats.”
Nervous laughter greeted the boy’s words.
“Strange looking men,” said a man’s voice in the back.
Zeeahd stiffened at that, craned his neck. “Who said that?”
Sayeed took his brother by the arm, but Zeeahd shook it off.
No one responded to the question.
“Who spoke so?” Zeeahd said. “It seems the custom in this stinking mass of hovels is to speak rudely to strangers.”