Abomination (28 page)

Fish Knife stepped forward, still keeping some distance from the trees. “We see you out there,” he called out. “There’s five of us, and we’re all armed. You see the dead men out there? Those are the last that tried us. Turn around and go.”

For a moment, their answer was silence. And then there came a great rumble from the darkness, and a deep, guttural growl that echoed through the forest, powerful enough that the three men felt the vibrations in the earth beneath their feet. The trees shook, the tops swaying in the night air, and a flurry of leaves fell to the ground.

“All right,” said Fish Knife as he backed up a step. “What the hell is that?”

Across the clearing, at the tree where she was bound, Indra tried not to react, lest she draw attention to herself. Keeping her head hung low, she glanced up and through the strands of matted hair hanging over her face saw the attention of her three captors fixed firmly on the trees, away from her. Perhaps now was her chance. The knot she had been picking at had begun to loosen—not yet nearly enough, but with the three of them distracted she could allow herself to struggle more openly against her bonds.

She was motivated now as much by what might be lurking in the woods as by her desire to free herself from these men. Whatever it was that had so unsettled them had the same effect on her. She knew how to travel a forest safely, how to identify everything that lived there by sight, sound, and smell. Whatever was out there in the darkness was not any of those things—which left only one dreaded possibility. That she could spend her entire life dreaming of this moment, training to finally face an abomination, only for it to arrive with her bound and helpless . . .

No, she would not allow it. She wrestled with all her might against the rope that tied her; her captors were too petrified to notice or perhaps even to care. Then, as she twisted her wrist, the rope slackened a little more, and then one hand was free. From there, the rest was easy.

“A bear?” Pick wondered.

“No bears in these parts,” said Fish Knife, although he had briefly considered the same. What else could be that large? He
nudged Broken Nose with his elbow, never taking his eyes from the trees where the thing was moving. “Go and have a look.”

Broken Nose shook his head emphatically.

“I think we should just go,” said Pick. “I mean, right now, we should go.”

“And come away from this with nothing? I don’t think so.”

“We can come back for the chain tomorrow.”

“I’m not leaving it here for someone else to find!”

“Even if someone did, we still have the—” For the first time he looked away from the trees, only to see that the girl was gone, the rope that had bound her left in a loose spool around the base of the tree.

“Fuck.”

Another deep, ominous growl brought them all back to attention.

“We’ll all go,” said Fish Knife, girding himself. Reluctantly, the two others nodded agreement. Pick and Fish Knife each had one of the girl’s swords, Broken Nose his gnarled club. Together, they approached the edge of the clearing, the sounds of the beast beyond, grunting and rooting around in the darkness, growing louder as they drew closer. They were close enough now that they could not only hear the thing but smell it, too. It brought them all to a stop, just a few feet from the trees, as the rank odor overpowered them. Pick raised a sleeve over his nose and mouth; Broken Nose retched with the stench in his throat.

“What in God’s name is that stink?” Pick said, his voice muffled through his sleeve.

“Sulfur,” said Fish Knife, who in his youth had apprenticed for an alchemist before his life took him down a less noble path. “Brimstone.”

Broken Nose squinted and leaned in closer. “I think—” he said, and then something dark and wet shot out from the forest and coiled around his waist and yanked him into the darkness, limbs flailing.

Fish Knife and Pick sprang backward. Broken Nose’s shrieks rose in pitch, turning from those of terror to those of agony, and were joined by the wet, sickening sounds of rending flesh and splintering bone and the ravenous, unnatural snarling of the thing that had him.

The screaming stopped.

After a moment of unnerving quiet, two torn and bloody hunks of meat were flung from the darkness, landing on the ground before Fish Knife and Pick—the two halves of what remained of Broken Nose, one leg and both arms gone at the knee and elbows, blood and bowels oozing into the dirt.

The trees shook. And now the beast came forth, out of the dark, into the clearing and the pale light of the moon. It shook its head and made a gruff, guttural snort, its hot breath fogging in the cool night air.

Fish Knife and Pick stood before it, wide-eyed, mouths agape in silent, paralytic terror. It was at least three times their size and resembled nothing so much as a giant, grotesquely malformed beetle. It moved with a lumbering scuttle on three sets of barbed and bone-like legs, its body encased in an armored carapace that looked like a gigantic, oil-black walnut shell. It peered down at the two men with a cluster of a dozen globular, irregularly sized eyes, which glimmered in the moonlight. Beneath those eyes, a pair of jagged, claw-like mandibles scissored back and forth, slick with saliva and blood.

For a moment the beast stood there, regarding the two men frozen in fear before it. And then it opened its jaw wide, revealing a black chasm lined with densely packed rows of long needle-like teeth, and let out a long breathless hiss, a sound so hideous that Pick instinctively turned and fled. Running faster than he ever had, he covered perhaps ten feet of ground before the monster’s long glistening tongue lashed out and ensnared his leg like a toad catching an insect. Pick fell to the ground, dropped his sword, and screamed and clawed at the earth with his one good arm as the
tongue retracted, dragging him toward the beast’s maw. As he was brought yammering before the creature, it lowered its head and took him between its mandibles, then tossed him into the air and caught him between its jaws.

Fish Knife saw his chance, with the creature distracted as it fed, and ran for his life. He made it across the clearing in galloping strides, glancing behind him as he approached the trees to see, to his relief, that the creature was not following. Then he was brought suddenly to a hard stop, something cold against his chest, and found himself face-to-face with the girl, emerging from the shadows.

He looked down and saw the hilt of the sword Pick had taken from her square against his chest, surrounded by a blossoming saturation of blood on his shirt. He could not see the blade, as it had run clean through him—or, rather, he had run clean through it. The girl had simply stepped out from hiding as he ran full pelt, his eyes behind him, and offered the blade to meet him. His own forward motion had done the work of a thrust.

Indra watched the man closely as the realization of his imminent death set in. She did not enjoy the suffering of others, but she allowed herself the satisfaction of this one moment—if not for her, then for the innocent man they had murdered only for trying to protect her. Then, as Fish Knife’s eyes rolled back and the life left him, she drew back the sword and let him collapse to a heap on the ground. She bent down to pry her other sword from his lifeless grip and, reunited now with both of them, marched forward to face the monster.

Indra had not considered running away, as the two cowards had tried to, though she had had far better opportunity. Free from her bindings, she had watched from the seclusion of the trees on the far side of the clearing as the creature killed one man then emerged from the forest to kill another.

The sheer size and monstrosity of the thing gave Indra pause; even after all her studies of the Bestiary and all the tales she had heard, nothing could have prepared her for the ice-cold horror of seeing an abomination in the flesh. But she had not dedicated her life to this task only to run away at the last. All she needed were her swords, and now she had them both. She strode across the clearing, past the sputtering campfire, as the great black beast with its slavering tongue devoured what was left of Pick. It did not notice her until she drew closer, shoulders back, a sword held firmly at each side, marching right toward it with steely determination.

She stopped a handful of paces in front of the monster, her hands closing around the grips of her twin swords so tightly that her knuckles began to whiten. If the beast was three times the size of the men it had killed, it was at least four times hers, and the way it moved suggested that it weighed even more. She was dwarfed before it, and the shadow it cast against the moonlight swallowed her entirely.

For a brief moment, the absurdity of it all came crashing down upon her—she was a tiny girl before this behemoth, a thing shaped and brought into the world for the sole purpose of killing—and she felt herself tremble before reminding herself that it was she who held the advantage. The beast was mindless, no more than a dumb animal, while she was trained to be a finely honed weapon. She, too, had a singular purpose. And she, too, had been shaped to kill. She looked up at the beast, glaring into its cluster of black, soulless eyes with fierce resolve.

“Come on,” she growled.

The abomination cocked its head at her, as though confused. It had likely never encountered a human whose reaction had been anything other than to flee in terror. It made a strange chittering sound, its mandibles scissoring open and closed as it regarded her.

Indra was fast growing frustrated. In her daydreams of how her confrontation with an abomination would one day play out, she had imagined every possible scenario, and none of them had ever gone like this.

“Come
on
!” she barked, her tone unmistakably a challenge, and to make sure of it she clashed the blades of her swords together hard enough that it drew a spark. Something seemed to work, for the beast suddenly reared up, its thorn-tipped front legs thrashing wildly, and let loose a shrill, piercing screech. Instinctively, Indra backed away as the monster towered over her and the full size of it became terrifyingly apparent.

The thing attacked. Its insect tongue shot out at her, making a grab for her arm, but Indra rolled away to one side and was up again, eyes locked on her enemy. It lunged, with an outstretched front leg, razored claw scything through the air—a swipe that would surely have taken Indra’s head clean from her shoulders had she not ducked so swiftly and batted it away with the flat of her sword.

The beast hesitated, grunted, seemingly surprised that the girl could move so quickly. Indra saw it in its unblinking eyes and was
emboldened.
Yes, that’s right. I’m not just another of your helpless victims. This one is going to fight back. This time, you’re the prey
.

The creature scuttled sideward, circling Indra, still apparently sizing up this strangely adept and unafraid opponent. She matched it step for step; the two circled each other now, a dance. Indra used every moment to observe the beast intently, watching the way it moved, how it shifted its weight, where it was fast and where it was slow. Her eyes darted over its anatomy, looking for any soft and fleshy spot where a sword might find its way in. Where was the heart on a thing like this? Was its brain even in its head? Sometimes it wasn’t. One thing Indra had learned from countless hours studying the Bestiary was that no two abominations were ever exactly the same anatomically. There were commonalities among those of similar type, but the one before her now was of no type that she had ever seen. How could she—

It charged, thundering at her like a giant bull. And now it was Indra’s turn to learn how deceptively fast the thing could be as it sprang from a standing start. Indra flung herself to one side to get clear of its path, but not fast enough; the beast’s armored shell sideswiped her as it passed. The force of the impact lifted her off the ground and tossed her several feet through the air before she landed in a tangle of limbs in the dirt. She had lost hold of one of her swords as she fell, but recovered it even as she hauled herself up, staggering for a moment as she regained her footing. Though she had escaped a trampling that would surely have killed her, even the glancing blow from the monster had hit her with the force of a runaway wagon. Her side ached, and she touched her hand to her rib cage, wondering if something might have broken.