Petrified, L could not stop Kat or do anything for me, and with a face draining of color, eyes bloodshot, and bulging, crushing windpipe blocking air, I reached for the dagger by my waist; I was left absolutely no choice!
"Do not touch that blade!" Kat said, watching my hand squirm toward the hilt. "I am giving you an order, Fox. What should you do?"
My fingertips grazed the dagger. I could remain conscious just long enough to pull it and kill Kat.
"What should you do?" he asked again, breath hot against my cheek.
Darkness descending, I raised a conceding hand and Kat released me. I dropped like a bag of shit whilst he glowered at Madam L's critical expression near the door.
"Take this." he said, throwing a long length of rope at me. "Keep it over your shoulder. Do not lose it."
"Where," I spluttered, recovering, "did you get it?"
"On your feet!" he demanded. "We leave through the south side. Keep low, move fast. Do not stop!"
Before I could breathe, Kat raced out of the shack and into the fog.
***
We joined the samurai in the nippy night, our breath clear in the cold. Slouching at one hovel, it was not the women, bogs, or Grutas we were avoiding, but Scarfell. Kat would never admit it, but he feared wizards. They commanded a power that made his with the blade redundant.
Low and fast like Kat expected, sparse candlelight glossed like fireflies from various locations, and I heard the rumor-mongering conversation of women near them. The daunting mountain loomed ahead with its precipitous edges glittering silver and rising like a mystical finger to the sky.
"There!" said Kat, pointing to a vague spot ahead. "Come!"
Fixing the rope over my shoulder, I turned to inform Madam L, but the girl was nowhere to be seen.
"Kat! She's gone! We have to go back!"
"Move!" he cried, snatching the scruff of my shirt and dragging me ragged.
I carried on, struggling with the rope, and constantly looking back with the hope of seeing L bringing up the rear.
Progressing past the remaining hovels, we reached an area of flattened grass and continued south toward a tall barn remote from the village. Presumably storing supplies, hay or cattle, it was a practically straightforward construction seen on any farm. Kat pressed his back to its main wall and I wedged in, stiff from the cold beside him.
"Where is she?" I wheezed. "Christ, she was right there! You see her?"
Calmly, Kat watched the oppressed village in the gloomy gas and gave no comment regarding the girl's fate. Suddenly, a rustling coming from inside the barn disturbed us.
"Could be L?" I whispered in Kat's ear, the sound like scuffing feet on floorboards.
SCUFF — SCUFF
"Could be the wizard," he replied.
“My call!” I said, and without pause, I hurried to open those large doors. “Madam…” I covered my mouth to hold a scream. It was not the smell of feces that disgusted me, but the wooden pen encasing the barn. Inside, under the warmth of a lantern were over thirty pig-like creatures — bogs. Some of these oily infants slept, some clashed heads with others, while the rest dug their snouts into stacks of yellow hay. Kat failed to conceal his own repulsion when he joined me at the doors.
"An army," he said, palming his stubble.
A trough lined one side of the pen, filled with a blend of bones, hair, and rotting pieces. "They have to be destroyed," I said, emotionless. "All of these things. They can't live, Kat, and we can't leave till it's done."
Kat took hold of my elbow. "You want to protect the women? Destroy these creatures, and the wizard will show them no mercy."
I remembered the lashes on L's back, and the price she was going to pay, but Kat was wrong.
"He needs the women," I said. "They're his bog makers, after all. No, Scarfell will come for us, Kat, and if we can make it to this King Bludgeon, maybe he'll give us an idea how to kill him, and how to set this village free."
Eager to leave, Kat moved outside the barn and demanded that I follow. I thought seriously about running then, to follow him and be done with it, but after one more look over these gooey abominations, I could not tear myself away.
Snatching the hanging lantern from the barn wall, and swallowing all that was left of hesitation, I flung the lighter into the pen of half-breeds, and shielded my face from an explosion of glass and flames over belly and backs.
"No!" shrieked Madam B, appearing breathless at the barn doors, and she quickly was joined by her alphabet of women stock, each with unborn swine growing in their stomachs and rippling torches in their hands.
Kat returned to me inside the barn, his sword protecting us from the grieving mob as the flames set high hay stacks alight behind us.
"Get away!" moaned Madam B, at the top of her voice. "Get away from our children! Away!"
Penned monstrosities wailed their alien sounds. It seemed their slippery skins were extremely flammable, and it did not take long for the blaze to spread. One set fire to another, then another; it was a procession of moving lights around the pen, sun yellows and whites, with that intolerable screeching underneath.
Black smoke began to build in this confined space, and the stench of cooking flesh became sickeningly apparent.
"How could you?" exclaimed one hysterical woman on her knees. "Not our children! Someone get water! Help!"
I was stunned. "How can you love these creatures?" I hollered, watching at least ten running in search of water buckets. "These fucking things? Are you crazy?"
Still, they ran to save their offspring, as if their lives depended on it.
"This ends tonight!" I bawled, over cackling firewood. "You hear me?"
"The wizard can't be stopped!" squealed Madam B, overseeing the dousing of flames. "We have watched Grutas feed our husbands and friends to bogs! To our own children! Stronger women than us have been ripped apart for disobe-"
A distant cry interrupted her. Looking at something beyond Kat’s and my sight, something outside the barn, a goggle-eyed Madam B staggered and dropped her torch to the hay.
"What is it?" I asked, fires blazing. "What?!"
Presently, I heard the thudding of approaching steps, and watched frantic women flee in tears as the giant Grutas came to block the barn doorway, holding the tangled hair and decapitated head of Madam L in his hand. A constipated look sat on her pretty face, the blood dripping like clotted cream from her serrated neck.
"No…" I mumbled.
Behind us, the fire caught something it liked to erupt in a ball of frazzling heat and falling cinders everywhere. Grutas flung L's head far into the pen of roasting children, and then stamped his authority with a prolonged roar.
"You dirty pig!" I roared back. "Dirty fucking pig!"
With no way out of the barn but through Grutas, I felt Kat's sudden squeeze on my wrist. "Do not move." he said, as composed as any man ever has been.
Placing me in his protective shadow, Kat squared off with the beast, which showed us the clump of hair and blood glued to his hand. Grutas then made a fist, and Madam L's blood seeped from the gaps of his fingers like soapy lava from a sponge.
"Kill him." I said. "Kill that son of a bitch!"
Kat flicked the katana tip to the straw at his feet, the heat causing the sweat to bubble from his arm and grease down the blade. "I will not fall…" he told the giant.
Grutas smiled, showing all of his stained teeth and murky tonsils. However, with the smoke thickening and the air cooking our lungs, there was no time for posing. Kat charged full-bloodedly at the monster, only to be caught by a wrenching kick to his guts, sucking all of the oxygen from Kat's body and hurtling him backward through the barn enclosure. Splinters burst every which way as Kat touched down at the hellish end of the barn; meanwhile, I dived to avoid a falling stack of burning hay.