At the gate, one of the men there handed Gerin a blazing torch. "Against the ghosts, lord prince," he bawled. Gerin was grateful for his quick thinking, but felt overburdened as he pounded toward Besant Big-Belly's village.
Even with the torch, the night spirits assailed him as soon as he got outside the keep. Dark of night was their time, their element; they sent a chilling blast of hate and resentment down on a mortal who presumed to enter it without better apotropaic than fire alone.
He set his teeth and ran on. Beside him, Van muttered oaths, or perhaps prayers, in a language he did not recognize. When those had no effect, the outlander shouted, "Be still, you cursed soulsuckers!" If any living man could awe the ghosts, Van would have been the one to do it. But no living man could.
Fortunately, Besant's village lay only a couple of furlongs from Fox Keep. Before the spirits could find all the chinks in the armor of Gerin's soul and slip cold mental fingers in to drive him mad, he was among the wattle-and-daub huts of the serfs. They'd given the ghosts the usual gift of sunset blood, and so were not haunted through the night. But things fiercer than phantoms assailed them now.
A man lay sprawled in the street. His blood darkened the dirt on which he'd fallen. His linen tunic was rucked up; monsters had been feeding on his legs and hindquarters before the warriors came to drive them off.
Gerin threw down his bow. In the dim light, shooting was useless. Math's crescent almost brushed the horizon, and even pale Nothos' fatter crescent, higher in the western sky, made distances seem to shift and waver, as if in a dream. His sword snaked free. This would have to be close-quarters work.
Screams from inside a hut with its door flung open told of a monster inside. Peering over the edge of his shield, Gerin ran in. The darkness was all but absolute, but his ears told him of the struggle there. Roaring, the monster turned from the serf it had been attacking to meet him.
He thrust at it with his sword. He couldn't have done more than pink it, for its cries redoubled. Crash! Something wet splashed in the Fox's face. The monster was staggering, though—the serf, with great presence of mind, had hit it over the head with a water jar. The Fox stepped close, stabbed again and again and again. The monster stumbled, recovered, fell.
"Dyaus bless you, lord prince," the serf and his wife cried in the same breath.
"And you, for the help you gave," he answered as he turned and rushed back out into the street. No time now for polite conversation.
Fighting the monsters was not like fighting human foes. That had both advantages and disadvantages. As Gerin had noted before, the creatures fought as individuals, not as part of a larger group. In the confused brawling in the darkness, though, his own men were hardly more organized. And the creatures neither cared anything for loot nor felt any shame at running away if they found themselves in danger they could escape by no other means. Full of notions about glory and honor and courage, Trokmoi would have held their ground and let themselves be killed where they stood.
Gerin caught the reek from a monster's body—a thicker, meatier smell than came from a man, no matter how long unwashed—and threw up his shield before the creature, just another shadow in the night, closed with him. He almost dropped the shield in surprise when a sword slammed against it.
The monster gave him the first unmistakable words he'd heard from one of their throats: "Die, man!" They were in the Trokmê tongue, and snarled rather than spoken, but he had no trouble understanding them.
"Die yourself," he answered in the same language. The monster had no shield, no armor, and no skill at swordplay to speak of. But it was very quick and very strong. When it beat aside his thrust, the blow almost knocked the sword from his hand.
He wondered if it could see better in the night than he could. After it and its ancestors had spent so many generations in a troglodytic life, that seemed likely. And, though it was very awkward with its sword, something let it thwart his strokes again and again.
"Here, Captain, I'm coming!" Van shouted. His heavy footfalls got closer fast.
The monster, though, did not wait to be attacked by two at once. It turned and scampered away toward the woods, faster than an armored man could hope to follow. The fighting died away not long after that, with the rest of the creatures either down or fled. Some of Gerin's troopers had been clawed or bitten, but none of them was badly hurt.
Besant Big-Belly sought out the Fox. The serfs in his village hadn't been so lucky. As lamentations and moans of pain rose into the night, the headman said, "We've three dead, lord prince, and several more, men and women both, who won't be able to work for some while. Dyaus and the other gods only know how we're to bring in enough crops to meet your dues come fall." He wrung his hands in anxiety.
It was, Gerin thought with a flash of contempt, utterly characteristic of him to worry about the dues first and people only afterwards. "Don't worry about it," he said, "If I see the people here are making an honest effort, I won't hold them to blame for falling a bit short of what they might have done otherwise."
"You're kind, lord prince," Besant cried, seizing Gerin's hand and pressing it to his lips. The Fox snatched it back. He suspected the headman would use his generosity as an excuse to try to slack off before the harvest or cheat him afterwards, but he figured he had a decent chance of getting the better of Besant at that game.
"Lord prince?" A hesitant touch on his arm: it was the serf in whose house he'd fought. "I want to thank you, lord prince. Weren't for you, reckon that hideous thing would've et Arabel or me or maybe the both of us."
"Pruanz is right," the woman beside the peasant said. "Thank you."
"Can't have my villagers eaten," Gerin said gravely. "They never work as well afterwards."
Rihwin would have smiled at the joke, or at least recognized that it was one. It flew past Pruanz and Arabel, a clean miss. "Words, they're cheap," Pruanz said. "Want to give you something better, show we really mean what we say."
"Pruanz is right," Arabel said. "You come back with me to the house, I'll make you feel as good as I know how." Even in darkness, he saw her twitch her hips at him.
"Lord prince, she's lively," Pruanz said. "You'll like what she does."
Gerin looked from one of them to the other. They meant it. He sighed. He'd taken his pleasure with peasant women a good many times, but he didn't feel like it now, not with Selatre waiting for him back at the keep. As gently as he could, he said, "I don't want to take your wife from you, Pruanz. I was just doing as a liege lord should, and I have a lady of my own."
Pruanz didn't answer, but Arabel did, indignantly: "Well! I like that! What does she have that I don't?" She rubbed herself against the Fox. By the feel of her, she did indeed possess all female prerequisites.
He was embarrassed enough to wish he'd left her and her husband in the hut to be devoured. He managed to free his arm from Arabel and said to Pruanz, "The best way for the two of you to show you're glad you're alive is to bed each other."
Arabel let out a loud, scornful sniff. "Well! Maybe I should leave you to your fancy lady, lord prince, though I don't suppose she gets much use out of you, neither."
"Arabel!" Pruanz hissed. "That's no way to talk to him what saved us."
"And who saved him, smashing a jug over that horrible thing's head?" she retorted. "I expect that means you saved me, too." She all but dragged her husband back toward their hut. Gerin suspected his suggestion was about to be fulfilled, even if he'd given it to the wrong one of the pair.
He gathered up his troopers. They didn't have torches for the walk back to Fox Keep, but the ghosts were fairly quiet. Why not? he thought as he neared the drawbridge—the night spirits were no doubt battening on the new gift of blood they'd just received from the dead peasants and monsters.