A Man Rides Through (42 page)

"I certainly hope not." In a transparent effort to reassure her, Geraden grimaced lugubriously. Then he set himself to give her an answer.

"It's probably true that every world has predators. But even if a world didn't contain any violence at all, its creatures or powers might still be destructive if they were translated—if they were taken out of their natural place. There's nothing immoral about a pit of fire—as long as you leave it where it belongs. What's really destructive is the man who translates it somewhere else.

"Would you call a fox destructive? After all, it hunts chickens. And people need those chickens. Even so, there's nothing wrong with the fox.

"For all we know, the firecat that burned Houseldon might be the same thing as a fox in its own world. It might be anything. It might even be an administer of charity."

An administer of charity. Just for a moment, she took the idea seriously. Someone who ran a mission, for example. Then, however, she was struck by the thought of Reverend Thatcher going around setting towns on fire. On his own terms, that would please him. But
literally
setting towns on fire—

Involuntarily, she grinned. When Geraden rolled his eyes at her, she started laughing.

She felt like a fool—like she was losing her mind. But she went on laughing, and after a while she felt better.

Nevertheless she didn't sleep very well that night. She kept expecting the horses to snort and shy—kept expecting to smell something cold and slightly rotten in the dark. And for some reason Geraden spent most of the night snoring like a bandsaw. When she nudged him awake in the early gray of dawn, so that they could be on their way, she felt cold herself and vaguely stupid, as if the matter inside her skull had begun to turn rancid.

The day began well. The air was clear and crisp, and the horses moved easily along the increasingly traveled paths. And before noon

she and Geraden came upon a village that had nothing wrong with it.

Nothing, that is, except anxiety. When the people of the village heard what Terisa and Geraden had found in Aperyte, they muttered nervously and scanned the woods around their homes and began to talk about leaving.

"Ghouls," a woman pronounced, confirming Terisa's guess. "Don't know what else to call them. Never seen one—but the lord sent men to warn us. Attack at dusk or dawn. Little critters, almost like children. Green and smelly.

"Eat every kind of flesh. Don't even leave the grease and bones. That's what the lord's men said."

Geraden scowled as if he were in pain. "That's why the gate was closed," he muttered. "The horses never got out. They were eaten right there in the corral."

Terisa was thinking,
They're the ones who did.
They escaped into their huts and somehow sealed the doors. And then they were incinerated in their own homes.

Eremis.

She was beginning to understand why King Joyse had fought for twenty years to strip Alend and Cadwal of Imagers and create the Congery. He wanted to prevent creatures like ghouls from being translated into the world.

Through a haze of nausea and anger, she asked one of the villagers, "What're you going to do?"

"What the lord's men told us," came the reply. "If we heard any rumor of ghouls around here, saw any sign. Get to Romish as fast as we can."

"Good"
said Geraden fiercely.

He and Terisa rode on.

She still felt like the meat of her brain was going bad. Even though those villagers were safe, she couldn't rid herself of the impression that the day was getting worse. How many ghouls had Eremis already translated into the Care of Fayle? How much of the Fayle's strength had already been eaten away?

How could he help King Joyse and defend his own people at the same time?

She practiced saying
oh, shit
to herself until it began to feel more natural.

"Here's some more good news," Geraden remarked the next time he studied the map. "At the rate we're going, we're due to reach another village just about sunset. A place called Naybel."

Oh, shit.

Grimly, she made an effort to think. "Maybe we should stay away from it. Maybe those things are following us."

He glared at her. "You
do
have a morbid imagination." After a moment, he added, "If we're being followed, we've got to warn the village. We can't lead ghouls past Naybel and expect them to leave it alone."

The day was definitely going downhill.

The afternoon wore on, as miserable and prolonged as a toothache. Eventually, Terisa concluded that there were after all worse things than spending so much of the day on horseback. She couldn't get that
smell
out of her mind—

Without making an explicit decision to hurry, she and Geraden began to urge their horses faster. They wanted to reach Naybel before dusk.

Mishap continued to dog them. Because they were hurrying, they rode into the village precisely as the sun began to dip into the horizon. At a slower pace, they wouldn't have arrived until full dark.

The decision to ride straight into the village was also one which they hadn't made explicitly: they did it simply because the need to warn Naybel's people blanketed other considerations. As a result, they were already among the huts, on their way in toward the center of the village, when they realized that Naybel was as empty as Aperyte.

Geraden slowed the gray's canter. The beast's head went up and down like a hammer, fighting the reins. Terisa's gelding had its ears back. Where the sunlight came through the trees, the shadows of the huts were as sharp as blades.

"Geraden," she whispered, "we're too late. Let's get
out
of here."

Geraden hesitated, turned his head to fling a look around him— and lost control of his mount. The gray caught its bit between its teeth and bolted.

Terisa couldn't stop her roan from following.

Almost at once, she heard the squeal of a pig. Geraden nearly lost his seat as the gray wrenched itself aside to avoid collision with a fat porker. Immediately, his horse blundered into a squall of chickens. Terisa followed him through feathers and shadows.

Into the center of the village.

Like Aperyte, Naybel had an open-sided meeting hall among its houses.

In the hall stood a group of men—six or eight of them. They wore heavy boots and battle-leathers; they were armed with swords, pikes, longbows.

As soon as they saw Geraden and Terisa, they began to yell, waving their arms wildly.

"Fools!"

"Fornication!"

"Get away!"

"Stop!"

Several of them apparently wanted to chase the horses off. Fortunately, one man had a different idea. Or he realized that the gray was a runaway. With the practiced ease of someone who had worked with horses all his life, he jumped at the gray's head and caught the reins. The gray wheeled to a halt so hard that Geraden was nearly snapped out of the saddle.

More to avoid hitting the gray than because of anything Terisa did, the gelding also blundered to a stop.

"Fools!" a man shouted. "You're going to be killed!"

Terisa tried to hold herself still, but the whole village seemed to be spinning. A shadow as distinct as a cut lay across the roan's head. The men from the meeting hall shifted in and out of shadows; their weapons disappeared, caught the sun, disappeared again. Geraden had nearly run into a pig. And chickens. Naybel wasn't empty, not like Aperyte.

Then what—?

It was true: she could smell something cold, something that had begun to rot; something like the exhalation from a neglected tomb.

Out of a hut beyond the meeting hall came a little boy. She
thought
he was a little boy, oddly naked. A grin split his face, leaving a wide, empty place. He didn't leave the shadows; because of the dim illumination, a moment passed before she noticed that he had a chicken in his hands.

The chicken was melting. It slumped over his fingers like heated wax. But none of it dripped to the ground. Instead, as it oozed it was absorbed into his flesh.

Now she realized that his whole body was covered with slime. Maybe the shadows were playing tricks on her eyes. The boy looked
green
—

A hoarse cry broke from the men. Two of them already had their longbows up, arrows nocked. Bows like that could have flung their yards straight through the walls of one of these huts. The two arrows that hit the little boy spiked him to the dirt.

Terisa distinctly heard a popping noise, a sound of rupture; she heard a brief wail claw the air.

Instantly, three more green children appeared in the shadow beside the little boy. They grinned as they began to feed.

Somewhere out of sight, the pig squealed—a shriek of porcine agony. The gelding took this occasion to pitch Terisa off its back. With a whinny like a scream, it rushed out of the village.

Terisa landed heavily, knocking the air out of her chest. In the distance, Geraden yelled her name, but she couldn't react to it. The jolt of impact stunned her. A streak of sunlight fell over her face: she looked up and saw one of ghouls standing in shadow no more than four or five feet away. She could
smell
the child—

In fact, the odor wasn't particularly strong. It was insidious, however, and its subtlety seemed to make it more nauseating, more corrosive, than a stronger stench would have been. Smelling it, staring at the small girl who grinned at her as if she were an especially tasty snack, Terisa decided that the slime on the ghoul's skin was acid. It rendered flesh down to a tallow the creature could take in through its pores. And when someone tried to escape by barring the door of a hut, the acid probably set the wood on fire.

The ghoul was so hungry that she started out of the shadow into the light that covered Terisa's face.

Geraden leaped over her and swept the girl's head off with a long swing of his sword.

The popping noise, the sound of rupture; a high, thin cry.

Two, three, no, at least six more ghouls came at once to feed on their fallen sister.

Around the meeting hall, a weird battle raged. Superficially, it was an uneven struggle: the men slaughtered the ghouls with relative ease. Swords, pikes, arrows, even stones thrown hard—everything worked. Panting, raging, the men hacked down, sliced up, or spitted the ghouls as fast as possible. They were only children, as simple to kill as children.

But they were so many—

No, they weren't as many as all that. The truth was more complex. As soon as one of them got enough to eat, the creature split apart, became two. And whenever one of them died, the body provided enough food for three or four other ghouls to multiply.

And with every death wail, more creatures swarmed out of the shadows.

In addition, the weapons of the men didn't last long. Every arrow that struck home caught fire; every blade that cut came back pitted and weakened, streaked with ruin; every pike that pierced a ghoul lost its head.

Geraden tried to wrestle Terisa toward the meeting hall, into the relative center of the battle, where the men watched each other's backs. She thought she ought to help him, but she couldn't get her legs under her; the fall from her horse seemed to have broken the connection between what her brain suggested and what her muscles did. She wanted to say, Water. Try water. Maybe the acid could be washed away. Or diluted. Unfortunately, all that came between her lips was a hoarse gasp for air.

And the air was full of wails and death; the stench of rot; men cursing for their lives; sunset.

Then, so suddenly that the sound of it almost relaxed her chest enough to let her breathe, she heard a trumpet.