“Maybe a fawn? ” said Finch, then snickered at her peeved expression.
Dag stood abruptly in his stirrups, staring hard. “That’s not a goat. It’s a mule.”
“Can’t be,” scoffed Finch. “That’d make those bird wings ten, twelve feet across.”
“Those aren’t birds. Sumac? Lend me your eyes. And your groundsense.”
Sumac kneed her horse forward, peering along with Dag. Her breath hissed in. “What the… Dag, what are those ugly things? ”
“Mud… men? ” His voice sounded remarkably unsure. “Mudbat… things. No feathers. Joints are wrong for birds. Bat wings.”
“Malices can make bat-men? ” said Finch blankly. “Why didn’t you say? ”
“I’ve never seen the like,” said Dag. “Wolf-men and dire wolves, yes. So why not bats? ”
Fawn could think of a dozen good reasons why not bats, right up there with why not alligators? No, ick, eew!
“Absent gods, they’re huge,” said Arkady, who’d ridden up to look.
His voice held a very un-Arkady-like quaver.
At the mule carcass, one shape was driven back by its feasting friends. It spread long, leathery wings, and vented a sharp snarl like a mill saw jamming.
“More leftovers? ” said Fawn. “Like the ones you said got away over the river? ” She hoped fervently that these were leftovers. Because the alternative…
What in the wide green world would a malice have to run from?
Nothing.
Except-a worse malice.
“Are those hands at the tops of those wing joints?” said Sumac.
“With… claws? ”
“Blight,” said Dag. “Fawn, Finch, ride back and stop the wagons. Sumac, round up the patrollers. I’m going for a closer look.”
“Not alone, you’re not!” said Sumac sharply. “Arkady, you alert the patrollers.”
Arkady gulped, nodded, and wheeled his horse. Reluctantly, Fawn followed, turning awkwardly in her saddle to watch over her shoulder.
As Dag and Sumac cantered up to the carcass, the bat-creatures scattered from it, making more jamming-saw noises. They were awkward, crawling on the ground with their wings trailing like half-folded tent awnings. Two clawed their way up nearby trees. Others made for a pile of rocks, scuttling up one after, or over, another to gain height. Another turned and screamed, rearing up and flapping its wide leathery wings like a crowing rooster; both Dag’s and Sumac’s horses spooked, pivoting and trying to bolt. Dag couldn’t force Copperhead close enough to slash with his knife, but did persuade his mount to spin and lash out with both hind legs. The shod hooves connected; Fawn could hear the bone-crack.
The bat-creature screamed again and flapped over the ground trailing its broken wing. Copperhead bounced wildly.
The bat-creatures who’d made it to the rock pile took off one after the other in great noisy wing flaps, barely clearing the ground before they started their climb into the air. They could fly, oh no! Roughly batshaped, with flat, oddly rectangular bodies like a flying squirrel’s, heads large, with backswept, pointed ears. Fawn couldn’t see the shapes of their mouths from here. Worse, they could fly well. Gaining height, the nightmare trio sped off over the woods.
Sumac gestured, mouth moving; Dag nodded. Both came galloping back to the wagons.
“Get everybody turned around!” Dag gasped.
“Not again!” wailed Grouse.
Fawn hesitated. “Dag-it’s open country for miles behind us. If those things can drop down out of the air on us”-and it sure looked like they could-“wouldn’t we be better off amongst the trees, where they’d tangle their wings? ”
He stared at her openmouthed, eyes dilated. “Ah,” he wheezed.
“Point.”
“At least,” called Sumac, whose horrified horse still fought her, “close up under the trees till we can scout and take stock. Knives are going to be no good on those things. We want spears and bows.”
“Axes, too,” suggested Fawn. The ones with the good long hafts.
Everyone who was mounted rode up and clustered around to listen;
Sage left their team’s reins to Calla and came running up to hear as well. Shrewdly, he bore his long-handled sledgehammer, though his hands shook as he clutched it.
The wagons lurched forward once more. Fawn stuck close to Calla’s.
All the patrollers except Rase, and half the farmer boys, rode forward to make another attempt at slaying the mud-bats. They closed rapidly on the fallen one; when they parted, the shape lay still, like a collapsed tent. The remaining two seemed to have snared themselves in their tree branches. A rider might reach one with a spear, but the horses wouldn’t go near; Whit had already dismounted. Fawn could hear the ratcheting of his crossbow, and see him exchanging gestures with Sumac about the angle of his shot.
So Fawn had a clear view when a black cloud of about fifty of the batthings burst over the eastern ridge and stooped upon them.
She’d never been much for shrieking, or making squeaky girly noises, but she screamed in earnest now. Magpie reacted to the vast flapping wings much like the other mounts, plunging under Fawn and almost unseating her, carrying her away from the wagons in an all-out attempt to bolt. If only the mare had run toward the trees, Fawn would have let her carry on. Fawn sawed the reins, trying to get Magpie’s head turned around in the hopes that her body would follow.
Water streamed from Fawn’s eyes and whipped away in the wind as she bounced in her saddle. She gasped in terror of falling hard and maybe losing the baby, till she realized that at this speed she was more like to break her neck; the thought was oddly liberating. She gripped with her legs, felt herself slipping with every hard stride, then abandoned her reins to grab her pommel.
Every animal in the party was bolting or trying to. The Basswood’s wagon was slowed because the two leader mules were tangled in their traces, and Sage and Calla’s wagon was jammed behind it. Grouse had evidently fallen off, but he leaped after his rig jabbing upwards at mudbats with his spear. Vio was braced on the box with one hand around the roof hoop and the other swinging an iron skillet. The wagon was covered with swarming bat-creatures, much as they’d mobbed the dead mule.
They used their wing hands to hold on, mostly, but tore strips out of the canvas roof with their clawed feet, reaching down as if feeling around inside. Vio banged her skillet down on the clutching claws like a hammer, which made them jerk back, and whanged other mud-bats in the face or body as she could reach. She drove off some, but more came.
Vio’s screams shattered when a bat-creature beat its wings and began to rise, clutching her toddler in its two feet. Owlet’s mouth went square with terror and pain as he was lifted into the air, his shirttail flapping wildly around his churning knees. From the corner of Fawn’s eye she saw a patroller boy, she wasn’t sure which one, unseated and pulled struggling from his horse. Three mighty wing beats, and he fought free, only to fall with a cry cut off too sharp and a sickening bone-crack noise. Arm, leg, neck? Yanked around by Magpie, Fawn couldn’t see where he fell.
A stench and a hot wind buffeted Fawn in the back, and suddenly a clawed foot anchored itself in her shoulder. Her cry of pain came out a stretched wail, “Go away! Go away! Go away!” as she beat at the creature with her hands, only to have it grab her around her other arm and flap its vast wings again and again. Its claws were like iron, its thin muscles like cable. Without the grip on her pommel, she began to rise from her saddle, and frantically wrapped one foot into a stirrup strap. Galloping Magpie jerked them along as if the mud-bat was a kite and Fawn the kite string. If the creature let go and she fell she could be dragged by her ankle, but if she let go she could be carried off like Owlet…
Copperhead, half bolting, half bucking, appeared in the right of Fawn’s vision. Dag was somehow still aboard, gasping for air, gold eyes demented. There was no sign of his steel knife, but he swiped frantically with his hook and connected at least once, tearing a strip from a leathery wing beating against his face. The mud-bat yelped and drew its foot claws from Fawn’s right shoulder, which welled with blood.