Something in his tone made Damien look up sharply at him. “You’ve seen this kind of thing before?”
The Hunter nodded. “Several times. Ulandra comes to mind, right after the tsunami broke through her sea wall and drowned the entire city. And the fields of Yor, when Hasting’s fortress fell at last and the invading army slaughtered everyone within. And I seem to recall a particularly nasty horde being created when the Neoduke of Moray snapped under siege and slaughtered his entire court for the cookpot.” He smiled darkly. “Unfortunately, his Grace had no idea that the constructs birthed by his victims’ dying screams devoured every soldier outside his gates, and he killed himself in the morning. Which rather negated the point of the whole exercise.”
For a moment Damien just stared at him. He struggled to find his voice. “Mass murder?”
“That, or some natural disaster. Just as the terminal terror of one man can give birth to a demonling, so can the anguish of a thousand souls give birth to . . . what you saw. And you were very fortunate,” he added. “They weren’t yet crazed with hunger, as they will be in a few nights. Nor have they developed real intelligence yet, as the faeborn are wont to do.”
“They came from that direction.” Hesseth pointed. “Does that mean-?”
The Hunter nodded. “The source will be there. Less than a night’s journey from us, if I read things correctly.” He looked at Damien and said dryly, “I suppose you’ll want to go to it?”
He hesitated. “It’s along our route,” he said at last. “If there’s some danger there—”
“As there certainly will be.”
“Then we need to find out what it is. Right?” When the Hunter didn’t answer, he pressed, “Don’t you agree?”
The Hunter smiled faintly. It was a tense expression, but not without humor.
“If I didn’t,” he asked dryly, “would it make a bit of difference?”
The village was deserted-
Or so it seemed.
They entered the main gate silently, leading their horses behind them. There were no faeborn predators fluttering about the gate-wards, as there would have been outside any city. It was wrong, terribly wrong. As he passed the warded lintels he noticed that the very air seemed leached of sound, eerily silent. No insects chirruped in the underbrush, nor was there the rustling of any tiny herbivore. In the still night air he could hear himself breathing, and the sound seemed unnaturally loud.
“Can you smell it?” Hesseth whispered. The place demanded whispering.
He lifted his nose to the air and tested the breeze for content. At first he smelled nothing worse than a vague miasma, the kind of damp unwholesomeness common in swamps and mires. Then the wind shifted slightly, and he caught a whiff of something else. Decaying meat. Drying blood. Death.
They moved into the village warily, senses alert for any sign of movement. There was none. The breeze blew a few loose leaves across the street, then stilled. Nothing else.
“Tarrant?” he whispered.
The Hunter looked about, his pale eyes narrowed in concentration. “No life,” he said at last. “No life at all. Nor unlife,” he added quickly. An acknowledgment that his own unique state reminded them of questions they might otherwise not think to ask.
Damien looked at the buildings which flanked the narrow street. Simple wood and brick construction, painted long ago in colors that were neither too bright nor too dull; it was hard to tell anything about the people here just from their facades. “We should look inside.”
Hesseth hissed a soft agreement.
“If you want,” the Hunter said softly, “I’ll stay with the horses.”
Damien looked up sharply at him, wondering if there was something here he didn’t want to see. But no, his eyes were fixed on the earth-fae before him, and the silver intensity that glittered in their depths told the priest that he had every intention of finding out what had happened.
Taking two of the small lanterns with them, Damien and Hesseth entered the nearest house.
The door was unlocked, and swung open at their touch. Two feet back it jammed against something, and Damien had to press his weight against it in order to force it open.
A chest. Someone had pushed a heavy chest up against the door, hoping to keep it shut.
Which meant someone was probably still inside.
His first instinct was to call out some reassurance, in case someone was still alive. But while the Hunter might be wrong in other things, Damien trusted his judgment utterly in matters of death. And so he picked his way carefully through the house’s sitting room, over bits of furniture and decor that seemed to have been scattered by some violent movement. The smell grew thicker as he moved toward the back of the house. At the far end of the room was a heavy wooden door, slightly ajar. He walked warily up to it and peeked inside.
No life, the Hunter had told them.
There were five bodies in the bedroom, strewn about like damaged and discarded toys. One lay on its back across a window seat, and Damien could just make out the look of tortured horror on the young man’s face. That, and the reek of urine and fecal matter which filled the small room, told Damien that death had been neither slow nor secretive in this place.
He looked at them a moment longer, but couldn’t determine the cause of death. Let Tarrant discover that with his Knowing. He backed out of the small room and shut the door gently, feeling his gut unknot just a little as the powerful stench was closed away. Flies buzzed past his face as he forced himself to breathe deeply. Once. Twice. Again.
He looked about for Hesseth. He didn’t see her in the sitting room, but there was another door open at its far end. As he made his way toward it he heard her hiss softly; the sound was more anguished than hostile.
He found her in a back room, kneeling in a narrow doorway. Looking beyond her Damien saw the fixtures of a primitive bathroom, the walls and floor awash with blood.
“What happened?” he whispered.
She pointed to where a pile of bodies lay in the far corner, huddled together like a pile of broken dolls. Four children, all pale and lifeless. By their feet lay another body, that of an older woman.
He squeezed his way into the small room, casting his lantern light on the bodies. There was a dark gash visible on the neck of one of the children, and he pushed the small head gently to one side in order to get a better look. The cut was deep and long and there was no question about its being the cause of death. Another child was positioned so that its neck was also visible; he studied that also, nodding to himself as the grisly pattern made itself clear. Then he stopped by the woman’s body long enough to see the two deep cuts that grooved her wrists, the blood-covered knife in her hand. And he ushered Hesseth out.
“She killed them,” he said quietly. “Most likely they were her own children, and she killed them to save them from . . . that.” He nodded back toward the room he had inspected, not willing to put the horror into words. Not just yet. “A cut to the carotid artery is a quick and almost painless death. She knew what she was doing.”
“What happened here?” the rakh-woman whispered.
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Hesseth. But it didn’t happen quickly, that’s for sure.”
The relatively clean air of the streets was a welcome relief after the poisoned closeness of the house’s interior; he breathed deeply when they exited, trying to clear his lungs.
Then he looked up at Tarrant, a question in his eyes. The Neocount said nothing, but nodded toward a building across the street from them. Meeting Hall, the sign over the door said. “In there,” he directed them. His tone communicated nothing.
Filled with more than a little misgiving, Damien and Hesseth moved toward the building. The smell was stronger there, sick and forbidding. His stomach was tight with dread as he turned the worn brass handle and pushed it open, as he stepped forward to look inside-