No one spoke. Everyone stared at Zeeahd, wide eyed.
“Then see.”
He threw off his cloak, untied his tunic, and tore it from his body, revealing his torso.
The villagers gasped, turned away. Children screamed, started to cry. Sayeed simply stared, dumbfounded. He’d not seen his brother’s exposed flesh in years.
Fissures and scars deformed skin that was the color of an old bruise. In places the flesh looked melted, like candle wax. Tumors bulged, the largest in the small of his back, and here and there were malformed lumps of vestigial tissue. A few red scales covered the flesh in places. His distended stomach looked like that of a starving man, like it would pop if it were pierced. Blue veins, visible through his skin, made a grotesque net on his flesh.
“You see now what your Dawnlord wrought? Do you?”
As they watched, his skin bubbled and rippled, as if something moved below the surface of his tissue. He laughed, the sound manic, filled with rage.
“That is what Abelar did to me!” Zeeahd was respiring heavily, the sound wet and bubbling. He whirled on Minser, who quailed before his wrath, and pointed a finger in his face. “You will take me to the abbey, peddler. And I will see the Oracle. And while I am there, I will also visit the sacred tomb of Abelar Corrinthal.”
Minser sputtered. “I. . I told you, I don’t know how to find it. And even if I did-”
Zeeahd stalked forward and slammed the medallion into the peddler’s brow, knocking the fat man to his knees and causing him to exclaim with pain.
“I think it’s in that head, Minser. And I’ll have it out one way or another.”
He cast the medallion at the feet of the bleeding peddler. Elle stepped forward and tried to help Minser to his feet, but the peddler seemed in no mood to stand. Instead, he sat there, stunned and bleeding.
“I’m all right, lady,” Minser muttered, but he was weeping. “I’m all right.”
Elle whirled on them, face red with anger, a vein bulging in her forehead. “Get out of here!” she shouted, and pointed at the road. “Get out of here now!”
Zeeahd ignored her as he gathered his tunic and cloak. The cats paced around him, meowing, licking their chops, eager, hungry. Sayeed could not deny that he felt some of the same hunger, looking on the faces of the stupid peasants and their foolish reverence for Abelar Corrinthal. He had not come into the village intending to kill, but the desire to do so rose in him now, ugly and bloody.
“The peddler comes with us,” Zeeahd said.
Sayeed stepped forward, pushed Elle away roughly, grabbed Minser by the arm, and jerked him to his feet.
“Leave him alone!” Elle said.
“It’s all right, lady,” Minser said, his speech slurred, daubing at his bleeding forehead. “I’ll be fine.”
The cats continued their insistent meowing. Zeeahd rubbed their heads.
“Hungry, are you?”
He looked up at the crowd, a sly smile on his face.
“Please,” Elle said. “Just go.”
“We are going,” Zeeahd said. “But first, something for those who revere Abelar Corrinthal.”
A nervous rustle from the crowd, one uncertain laugh, a cough. “Come out,” Zeeahd said to the cats. “Show them.”
The villagers watched in wide-eyed horror as the cats’ mouths opened so wide it looked as if their jaws were unhinged. Their faces seemed nothing but an open hole. Something wriggled within the cats’ bodies, under the skin, causing their forms to bulge grotesquely. Their eyes rolled back in their heads and their bodies convulsed.
A woman screamed. Another fainted. Everyone took a step back. Terror moved in a wave through the crowd.
“What’s wrong with them?” someone shouted.
“Gods!” said another.
Scaled hands reached out from within the cat’s throats, took hold of either side of the gaping mouth, and began to pull back. The cats’ skins stretched as blood-slicked diabolical forms wriggled out of the maws.
More screams, shouts of horror.
Diabolical forms wriggled forth in a slick, bloody mess of scales and horns and claws and teeth, the bodies much larger than the skin of the cats that contained them. They snarled as they emerged, drooling, shedding the feline skins like cloaks.
“The light preserve and keep us,” Minser whispered beside Sayeed.
Sayeed backhanded him in the face with a gauntleted fist. The peddler did not even groan, just fell to the ground unmoving.
As the devils stretched, panic seized the villagers. They gathered children, screaming, and fled. All except Elle. She stood her ground, her hand to her mouth, terror in her eyes.
The gore-slicked devils crouched on all fours, their sinewy muscles coated in a blanket of long spines. Their slit-eyed gazes darted about as they fixed on one and then another of the fleeing villagers. Long black tongues ran over mouths fanged like a shark’s. The one nearest Sayeed lifted its head to the sky and uttered an eager, clicking ululation.
“Feed,” Zeeahd said to them, and gestured at the fleeing villagers. “All but this woman and the peddler. They’re mine.”
The devils snarled and pelted after their prey like a pack of wolves, howling for blood and flesh, their clawed feet throwing up clods of sod with every stride. One of them thumped into Elle as it passed, nearly knocking her down.
“The woman, Sayeed,” Zeeahd ordered.
Two of the devils pounced on the villager who had fainted. They seized her by head and feet and tore her apart in a spray of gore.
Sayeed grabbed Elle by the wrist. She whirled, terror in her eyes, and kicked him hard in the groin.
“No! No! No!”
The blow might have doubled over another man, but Sayeed barely felt it. He pulled the woman close while she slapped and clawed at his face, her nails digging bloody furrows in his cheeks.
“Leave me. . alone!”
Sayeed grabbed her by the hair and thumped her in the temple with the pommel of his sword. She sagged to the ground, as limp as a grain sack.
He stood over her and watched Zeeahd’s creatures work.
The devils prowled heedlessly through the village, gleeful in the bloodletting. They overturned wagons, knocked down doors, shattered fences. From time to time they launched groups of spines from their backs, the missiles catching fire as they flew, thudding into flesh and wood and setting it all aflame. Screams sounded from all over the village, terrified shrieks from inside cottages and barns, wet ripping sounds from the street, gurgling groans of pain. The devils slaughtered everything within reach, not even sparing the livestock. Pigs squealed, impaled on devil’s claws. Dogs, cows, goats, and cats were chased down and torn to pieces. The devils careened wildly through the streets, soaked in blood, bits of flesh and fur hanging from their claws, arms or legs dangling in their fangs, an orgy of gore.
Zeeahd came to Sayeed’s side.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
When Sayeed said nothing, Zeeahd kneeled beside Minser and pulled him to a sitting position. Slaps to his face opened Minser’s eyes. Seeing the slaughter, the peddler clamped his eyes shut, shaking his head.
“No, no.”
Zeeahd slapped him, once, twice, a third time.
“Open your eyes, peddler! Open them or I will cut off your eyelids!”
Wincing, jaw clenched, his entire body trembling with the effort, Minster opened his eyes. He wept at the screaming, the blood.
“What have you done? What have you done? The light preserve us.”
Zeeahd grabbed him by the hair.
“That will be your fate and worse, if you don’t take us to the abbey. The light won’t preserve you. Nothing will.”