The Dreaming Hunt (60 page)

“That direction Tarryn
really
wishes us to go.”

Reluctantly, everyone in the party was forced to admit that Sha'Li was correct.

“Perhaps she attempts to throw us off their trail because she fears for our safety if we take on Kerryl,” Will suggested.

Rosana frowned. He had a point.

They paused in indecision for a minute more, and finally Eben said reluctantly, “We should trust Tarryn and Kendrick. If they wanted us to go that way, it was for some important reason.”

Rynn added, “We can always come back to this spot and pick up their physical trail. Now that we're in these wetlands with a lizardman tracker, I'm confident we can track them without Tarryn's trail sign.”

Sha'Li smiled a little at that. “Decided are we, then?”

Everyone murmured an affirmative, and they headed off to the left.

Before long, Sha'Li announced from the front of the party. “Two men we track. Narrow of foot, small in stature.”

“The twins with the long noses the innkeeper in Shepard's Rest spoke of,” Will declared.

Everyone relaxed a little. Two men would not pose much of a threat to their party, now that they were all fully restored to health and armed to the teeth.

A bleary sunset tinged a rapidly forming and putrid-smelling fog orange. Not long thereafter, Rynn made a sound of surprise in front of her. Rosana peered around his broad shoulders and spied the silhouettes of man-made structures in front of them. It looked like a homestead of some kind, a long, low cottage, a pair of barns, and several outbuildings. What manner of people chose to live in a place like this swamp? Apprehension skittered across her skin.

“Smoke I smell,” Sha'Li announced low.

Rosana looked more closely and spied thin spirals rising from a half dozen sources ahead of them. Something was wrong. The narrow, raised path led to a rough-shored island of sorts, a low rise that sloped shallowly to the water on all sides.

Something long and flat slithered off the bank into the water with a tiny splash. They all froze, staring. Something else flashed, a white underjaw the size of her torso. Another jaw flashed in response as two enormous creatures bickered momentarily.

“Alligators,” Sha'Li breathed.

A
lot
of alligators. Side by side, crowding the banks until there was hardly any space between them. Rosana had never seen one before, and now she was looking at a massive collection of the reptilian monsters. The shore was not rough in terrain at all. She was merely looking at the ridged and scaled backs of dozens of green-gray alligators. They moved restlessly, a seething mass of sinew and hide, as if agitated.

All at once, half a dozen of the creatures scuttled into the water, gave a single swish of their mighty tails, and disappeared from sight. Several more alligators crawled ashore to fill the gap. Oh, gads. How many more of the reptiles were lurking in that black water, just out of sight? Her skin crawled to think of it.

Sha'Li led them closer to the farm, and Rosana began to make out details. A huge alligator skull was mounted over the doorway of the house. A strand of individual claws was draped over the window beside the door, which hung askew, one hinge torn off.

The smoke came from the roof itself.

Sha'Li's claws were fully extended, Eben's sword came out of its sheath, and Will's staff came up in front of him. Rynn was walking more silently than usual, one foot placed carefully in front of the other on high alert. Even Raina's hands glowed as she dropped in close behind the fighters to heal them as need be.

Rosana called her own magic, summoning curse energies from her gypsy blood and rehearsing incants in her head as they moved forward cautiously toward the silent steading. The place looked lived in with benches, buckets, tools, stacks of firewood, and other plentiful signs of habitation about. But the farm itself was completely still with not a single creature moving except those agitated alligators down by the shore.

As they approached the buildings in the rapidly failing light, Rosana gasped. The home and barns were nothing more than blackened hulls, still smoking and even burning sluggishly in places. What had happened here? As they neared the cottage, a new smell intruded upon the sharp tang of smoke. She knew that stench. It was blood.

Everyone tensed. Eben and Sha'Li went left with Raina at their backs, and Will and Rynn moved right with Rosana on their heels. They approached the house from each side, peering through the ruined walls at utter chaos. What hadn't been charred and burned to ash was tossed around and broken as if this had been the scene of some horrific fight.

Rynn entered through a gaping hole in the far wall and picked his way through the ruins, lifting a plank here and there to peer underneath. The space was not large, and in a minute or two, he shook his head in the negative. Sha'Li and Eben backed away from the collapsed wall across the cottage and moved toward one of the barns. As soon as Rynn had rejoined them, Rosana and Will did the same, heading for what looked like a smokehouse.

Built of sturdy wood, this structure had survived the fire, albeit more blackened than it should be. Eben waved at them and indicated that the second house was empty, as well. All of them headed for the big barn.

In the deathly silence, Rosana heard Raina gasp. The White Heart healer dashed forward and knelt beside something on the ground that looked like a pile of rags.

They converged on the spot, and it turned out to be a woman of middling years. Dead. Very dead. Rosana watched the faint glow of a life spell fade off the body's waxen, pale skin. It was nice of Raina to try to renew the woman, but Rosana estimated that she'd been dead several hours or more.

They moved into the smaller of the two barns. The damage and chaos here matched that in the house. The place was wrecked. A goat pen beside the barn was bloody but empty, and the inside of the barn was liberally sprayed with blood. There'd been a whale of a fight in here. Somebody had bled a lot. But the barn yielded no more bodies.

They moved to the second, larger barn, and even Sha'Li groaned at the sight that greeted them as they rounded the doorframe. This must have been where the last stand had happened. Four humans lay dead in the middle of the space, two men, two women, all young, and one a boy barely sprouting his first mustache. They were hacked to bits.

While Raina checked the bodies for any indication that they might not be past the reach of a life spell, Rosana cast her awareness wide around her for any spirits that might be lurking nearby in search of a source of resurrection.

So far away from civilization, there would be no Heartstone Glow to draw spirits to it. However, a healer like she, who knew how to perform resurrections, could project a dim Glow of her own, which would attract any nearby spirits. They could linger near their bodies for up to several days before finally dissipating completely, unable to resurrect. The Heart tried desperately to spread enough healers out across the land so all people had access to resurrection. Only in the most remote corners of Urth—like this place—was access to resurrection a problem. No spirits came to her light, however.

They moved deeper into the barn, and Rynn made a makeshift torch of a length of wood and a rag he found on the barn floor. He held it out to Rosana, and she sent a spark of magic into it, lighting the greasy rag. It cast a heathen, guttering light on the scene of the massacre.

Without warning, Rynn fell to his knees, groaning. Rosana rushed over to him in concern, and as she drew near, she saw beyond him to the source of his agony.

“Ahh, no!” she cried. “Not the children!”

Five of them were huddled in the corner behind a big stack of hay, dead in one another's arms. Their little bodies had been brutally hacked apart, which was a cold mercy. These children had not suffered long. But their mouths still screamed in silent terror.

It looked as if something heavy had fallen beside them, knocking down part of the haystack, and then had been dragged away. A trail of bloody hay led all the way to what had once been a rear exit from the barn.

Sha'Li knelt beside the trail of hay and squinted down at it. But after a moment, the lizardman girl dashed angrily at her eyes before trying again. Was she
crying
? It was hard for Rosana to tell through her own tears.

“Stay back, Raina,” Rynn said sharply. “There is nothing you can do for them.” It was kind of him to try to spare her. But he did not know the Heart very well if he thought she and Raina would shy away from suffering. It was what the Heart did best. They bore the burdens and shared the pains of commoners' lives within the Kothite Empire. They stood beside simple people like this family had been, tried to alleviate as much misery as they could, and hoped to resurrect the rest.

But the Heart had failed these five children. They would be lost somewhere between this life and the Void, too young to pass through the spirit realm and find their way back.

Raina fell to her knees by the nearest child, a towheaded boy of perhaps six summers. “If these were my children, I would want someone to wash them and brush their hair, to lay them out tenderly and find a favorite toy to bury them with.” Her voice broke on a sob.

They all helped with the heartbreaking task. The children ranged in age from perhaps four to ten summers. The adults had fought fiercely to defend them but in the end had failed. And they all had paid the ultimate price.

As they neared the end of their grisly task, Rynn said low and furious to Sha'Li, “Have a look around. Find out what or who did this.”

“Those are edged cuts,” Will declared confidently, looking down at the remains of one of the women. “Not a well-made steel blade, but something sharp.”

Will, Rynn, and Eben busied themselves digging graves, and Sha'Li studied tracks, while she and Raina went in search of some small token to bury with each child. The pickings were slim and ended up being scraps of cloth from the mother's apron that had somehow escaped the fire. But it was better than nothing. They pressed a square of the fabric into each small fist and folded the cold little fingers around it.

They laid the entire family in a single grave, together in death as they had been in life. Rynn said something compassionate and moving over the bodies, but Rosana was too torn up to listen to much of it. Then Eben and Will set about the task of covering the bodies. They buried them deep at Sha'Li's instruction. Apparently, alligators were carrion eaters. Sha'Li told them grimly that only the fires had likely stopped the alligators from coming ashore and erasing all evidence of the attack before the six of them had arrived.

They were all exhausted and soot covered by the time they finished their sad task. Will built a fire in the open space between the buildings, and they sat on logs Eben and Rynn had rolled over beside the blaze. Rosana was glad for the big fire tonight. It held the dark at bay—and hopefully the alligators that were now roaring and rumbling ominously all around them.

Sha'Li joined them in a little while. Rosana did not know until that moment just how angry a scale-skinned humanoid could look. But Sha'Li looked ready to kill.

“What did you find?” Rynn asked in soothing tones.

“Goblin tracks and man-sized rodent tracks. A dozen. Maybe a few more. Unlike changeling tracks are these. On some of the tracks alligators lay, so a better look at the tracks I cannot get. Predators of alligators my kind be, but move away from the shore they will not, even for me. Extremely strange the creatures act. Refusing to leave the island they are.”

“Do they guard clutches of eggs, perhaps?” Rynn asked.

“Wrong season,” Sha'Li replied. “More there is. Two sets of narrow human tracks I saw, as well. With the goblin-rat beings they left this place, dragging a third person.”

“You have a live trail for them?” Rynn asked sharply.

Will and Eben snatched up their weapons in unison. “What are we waiting for?” Will demanded. “I'm in the mood to kill a whole crowd of rats, and a few humans to boot.”

Raina stared down at the fire miserably, and Rosana sympathized. This was one of those times when being White Heart tested the resolve of the strongest soul. Even after massacring children, Raina was still bound to defend the lives of the evil beings who'd done it.

Rosana said to her wryly, “Maybe you just don't have to defend their lives very hard this time.”

Raina looked up and smiled briefly, but the expression did not reach her eyes.

“Sit down,” Rynn commanded Will and Eben quietly. But there was steel in his voice. “We've had a long, upsetting day, and no one got any rest last night. We are emotional and would not focus in battle as we should. As angry as we all are at them, the murderers of this family will still be out there tomorrow. But tonight, let us look to our own spirits that are in need of solace.”

Thankfully, Will and Eben subsided. Rosana shared their need for vengeance. It sang in her veins and burned in her heart. But she also agreed with Rynn. On the morrow would be soon enough to go forth and seek blood revenge for those innocent babes.

They each made peace with what they'd seen in their own way. Rynn moved off by himself to go through those martial dances of his and meditate. Eben and Raina went to sleep early after agreeing to take the middle watch, and Sha'Li slipped away into the darkness again. Whether she merely slid into the water to sleep for the night or performed some private Tribe of the Moon ritual, Rosana did not know and did not ask.

As for her, she stayed close to the fire, keeping it well fed and blazing up high into the night sky as the cold and damp closed in around them. Will sat silent beside her for the most part, clasping her hand sometimes loosely and sometimes squeezing it painfully tight. The fog cleared off somewhat, and she was able to look up at the stars and wonder what lay beyond them.

It was a long night, but Rosana eventually slept, and heavily. Some of the preserved food stores in the homes had not been destroyed, and they picked through the pantries to find dried meat, fruit, and nuts to break their fast. They met back at the fire and huddled around it eating; no one seeming inclined to move on with their trek yet.