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.
That high penetrating call seemed to change everything.
At its signal, twenty or thirty men charged through the village on horseback.
They knew what they were doing: they didn’t risk any of their mounts in an attempt to trample the ghouls. Instead, they carried lights of every description – torches, lanterns, blazing fagots, even oil lamps. Shining like a host of glory, the riders swept into Naybel at dusk.
Obliquely, Terisa noticed that one of them was the Fayle himself. She recognized him by his age, his leanness, his long, heavy jaw.
She didn’t have the strength to wonder what he was doing here. She was too busy watching.
The light seemed to hurt the ghouls worse than death did: it paralyzed them. They lost their grins, their hunger, the power of movement. And when they couldn’t move, they couldn’t feed on each other; they couldn’t multiply.
Clearly, the Fayle’s men knew this would happen. At once, they took advantage of it.
In grim concentration, as if they had never been able to reconcile themselves to killing creatures that looked like children, they began hacking the ghouls apart and setting the pieces to the torch.
They used cast-iron tongs and shovels to pile the dismembered corpses together so that the flames fed on each other. Before long, the bonfire beside the meeting hall of Naybel grew so large that its flames seemed to reach the darkening heavens. After the last of the sun went down, there was no other light in the village except fire.
Hot fire and acrid smoke slowly took the cold, rotting odor out of the air. A gust of wind carried smoke into Terisa’s eyes; tears ran down her cheeks as if she were weeping. But she was able to breathe again, able to get air all the way down into the bottom of her lungs, able to move her shoulder. So that was why, she thought deliberately, distracting herself from the slaughter she had just witnessed so it wouldn’t overwhelm her, that was why the bodies in those burned huts in Aperyte hadn’t been consumed, when every other form of flesh in the village was gone. Once the acid had set fire to the wood, the flames had cast enough light to keep the ghouls away.