Not giving you the satisfaction. I said. “I ride a motorcycle, and I’ve ridden it in rain and snow when I’ve had to. Four points of contact with the ground? A steel cage all around me? Air bags? Hardly safe, but I’m used to worse.”
I felt the engine ease up as he took his foot off the accelerator.
He’d wanted to make me uneasy. He might as well have admitted as such aloud.
“He was bad enough before,” Fell said. “Since you came here, he’s worse.”
“Conquest? Yeah.”
“He’s not built to stop when he’s on a course like this. To steer clear of something like this.”
“Kind of a bad choice for a Lord,” I said.
“A long story.”
“It doesn’t fix anything, you know, if I die,” I said. “There are more following me. I’ve taken a small measure to ensure they won’t fall into the same traps, but that’s hardly a guarantee, and I can think of one or two of them who are liable to make some godawful mistakes along the way, even with my warnings. The sort of mistake that concerns people like you, perhaps.”
“My family has long dealt with major threats. We serve in a role similar to witch hunters, evading attention, disarming and misdirecting the greatest Others. If my family hadn’t lost to Conquest and been subsumed, then I might be hunting down the remaining members of your family right now.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “That’s kind of shitty.”
“Do you not see the kind of damage a mere mote causes? An imp? What happens when something greater follows? Do you think you’re going to come out of your dealings with the abstract devil in one piece?”
“Given that I didn’t come out of the thing with the imp in one piece, no,” I said. “I admit, I’m a little spooked about what I’m in for. Feeling woefully underequipped.”
“You should be.”
“You know, my little sister’s two?”
“Oh?”
“She’s one of the followers. Does that mean you’d kill her?” I asked.
“Personally? No. Easier to interrupt her before she sets foot on the path. Kill her parents, burn any resources your family holds, manipulate her destiny. If that failed, then I’d wait until she came of a certain age, six at a minimum, where she’s self-aware, or twelve, when she’s about to be indoctrinated, I would likely kill her then.”
“Oh?” I mused. I considered. “Pretty shitty, still, but that’s… fairer than many alternatives.”
“Oh? Have I met your standards, diabolist?”
Fell slowed. He turned down a side road. There were only trees on either side of us now.
A woman stood in the middle of the road. She turned to face us.
I caught a glimpse of the damage that had been done to her. One shoulder and most of her chest torn away. The meat around the wound glistened with blood.
Fell drove right through her, and she dissipated.
I craned my head around to see her reforming behind us. Walking awkwardly in our direction, before disappearing into the drift of snow.
“Ghost?” I asked.
“Close enough. Term, I think, is a spectre. Damage or disrupt a ghost like that, you break its pattern. It spirals out, unbalanced, unable to maintain continuity, and tends to drag a few people with it before it’s spent. Normally only seen around an area with another presence at work, or if it’s tightly bound to something and you destroy the focus.”
“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t read anything like that in the book about binding ghosts.”
“Too volatile to bind,” Fell said. “Just like you don’t handle old explosives.”
I nodded.
We passed a stretch of dead trees. Skeletal, pale.
I saw a group of tall men and women standing in the midst of the trees. Half again as tall as normal people, naked, their skin mottled, they were almost camouflaged. They simply stood there, arms at their sides.
Each one had been wounded the same way. Their heads had been bitten off, leaving only the neck and a lopsided lower jaw with teeth pointed skyward, tongue lolling. One of the men had a very small erection.
“What were those?” I asked.
Fell shrugged.
We passed another cluster of ghosts. All standing stock still. All maimed.
As we passed, a few of them took tentative steps or crawled in our direction. They gave up after we were gone. Responding more to our presence than anything. Like they were magnetic, but it wasn’t magnetism that had pulled them to us.
“Why so many ghosts?”
“I suppose his victims can’t go on while a piece of them rests in his stomach,” Fell said. “He’s been around a few centuries, moved over this way when people began to settle the new world. The spectres follow after him when he moves on.”
We passed a burning tree, half the branches torn away. It only dawned on me a moment after we’d passed that it was another Other.
A bloodstained patch of snow.
A tree with gore strewn around the branches like streamers, an animal that had no right to be alive at the heart of it. Another Other.
I drew out the objects I’d been given, for finding the hyena and the abstract devil.
“He’s more to the right,” I said.
“I know,” Fell said. “I’m not taking you to him. I’m moving around the perimeter. You wanted a view of the area. An idea of what to expect? This is it.”
“The Others are maddened by pain, insensate, out of place and out of sync,” I said.
“Yes.”
“How do I even protect myself against them?”
“Not my concern. As I said-”
“You’re happy enough if I die.”
“It means Conquest isn’t able to use you. At least not to the same extent. With the hold on your companion, he’ll likely have possession of your ghost, but the impact isn’t as strong.”
“Huh,” I said.
My eyes passed over a rock with snow layered on top of it.
In the same instant I saw a flash of blood and realized it wasn’t a rock, but something big, we’d passed it.
What in the fuck was that?
More ghosts. A smattering of children, all wounded.
Centuries.
Maybe one to three people a year?
“Would the ghosts collect nearer to roads? They’re bound within a certain proximity of him,” I said, “But…”
“Most would be on roads when they were killed. They would gravitate towards the road in death. Familiar ground,” Fell said.
“Then what’s deeper in the woods?”
“Things that don’t linger near roads,” Fell said. He made it sound so obvious.
“Alright,” I said. “I think I’ve got the gist of it.”
Fell turned, letting the car spin out, then turned the wheel into the spin. It fishtailed more, then settled on its new course, going in the opposite direction.
Okay, it wasn’t a bike, but that was a touch nerve wracking.
“That was more reckless than ‘free’, I think,” I said, as diplomatically as I could.
“You don’t want to stop moving in a place like this,” Fell said. “Too many things in too much pain, no longer aware of the rules and treaties. They invite disaster, breaking oaths in blind attempts to distract themselves from their agony, and the malign spirits cluster around them as a consequence. Everything spirals down to ruin, here.”
“And nobody’s stopped it?”