*
Niam looked around cautiously. There ought to be people everywhere around the camp, but only silence filled the tents and gnawed at his nerves. It was odd how a lack of something had its own kind of presence. With a glance back into the tent’s dim interior, he spared one more long moment for a look.
He walked slowly around the circle of tents where nothing else moved, trying to push away the dark thoughts in his mind. The only sound he heard was the low murmur of Davin and Maerillus talking quietly behind him. Suddenly, he stopped. Before him an object lay in the grass. It was small, only a bit larger than a jewelry box, and it was black—the kind of black that formed on the sick skin of rotting fruit.
A pressure began to build between Niam’s temples as he stood there staring, not knowing why he remained frozen. Slowly he forced his lips to open. Words stalled out before passing through his mouth. Niam wanted to tell Davin that he had found something he should look at. But the words got stuck. Something about that box was familiar in a darkly comforting way. He stood there, knowing that he needed to tell Davin what he had found. Somewhere between the command for his lips to move and the muscles that did the moving, he felt all snarled up.
Niam strained with all his might until slowly his mouth opened. “Think I’ve found something.” It came out as a croak. Part of him wondered if anyone heard him. For several moments more he stood there. A scintillating wave of color flickered across the box’s surface. Shapes of some sinister script appeared and then licked across the sides of the thing like wet eels in muddy water. At first the script reminded him of drawings he had seen of ancient runes in the ruined cities of Elb and Sorin on the continent. But then these flowed, as if they were alive and struggling to write themselves. The pressure in his head continued to build. He needed to get closer.
The object on the ground called to him. Involuntarily, Niam took a step toward the box. Once again a flicker of light and colors coruscated across the thing’s surface, like light bent by the scales of moth’s wings in sunlight. Shapes twisted, straining into dark and forbidden words. Dimly, a part of Niam screamed at his disobedient limbs to turn back.
Instead, he took another step toward it.
Niam strained. He fought. He took another step.
Then he looked down at the box. All he had to do was reach down and touch it. He could almost tell what the flowing runes said, if only they would stay still long enough for him to read them. But they writhed and wriggled . . . worms feasting inside a ripe corpse. For the life of him, he could not figure out why he wanted to touch it. His hand slowly moved out to grasp it. Maybe if he touched it, he could make the script stop long enough to read it. Maybe that’s what this was all about. Maybe it wanted to be read.
Niam grunted as a great force suddenly jerked his body back. For an instant he stared around, dazed. Something hard gripped his shoulder. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Davin’s steady voice held a note of concern in it.
Niam staggered and straightened up. Davin still had a firm hold on him. Niam batted him away and stumbled. His arms flailed about as he lost balance and fell several feet away. Quickly, he scrambled several more feet away from the thing. “Don’t get any closer!” he barked. His heart raced in his chest. The farther he got away from the box, the more the pressure that had built inside his skull eased. “There’s something very wrong with those things!” he stammered.
Davin and Maerillus gathered around him as he stood and composed himself. Both kept wary eyes on the box as he told them about what happened. When he was done, Davin led them farther away from the thing. Maerillus whistled. “I felt like something was wrong with them from the moment I saw the first one,” he said wonderingly. “But none of them affected me like that.”
“Me either,” Davin said.
“And you said you could read some kind of writing?” Maerillus asked. But there was a note in his voice Niam didn’t like.
“Don’t you say that!” Niam nearly shouted.
Maerillus looked taken aback.
“I’d bet that’s sorcery,” Niam growled. “And I never said I could actually read it. It was like it wanted to be read.” A lump of dread grew in his stomach at the thought of reading something like that. Everyone had heard stories of people touched by the Lord of the Grave. It was said they were chosen from birth by him, that they were born into his arts the way mothers swaddled their children in warm linens. They had been down this road of discussion already because of the ghost dog, and he wasn’t ready to revisit it. “I’m not a damned sorcerer!”
“Oh.” A look of dawning realization spread across Maerillus’s face. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
“Well, I just want to keep away from those things.”
Maerillus deliberately shot back, “I told all of you that they made me uneasy,” and Niam gave him a sour look.
Niam’s stomach clenched. “I feel like I could jump into a bathing tub right now with an entire cask of soap,” he spat. At that moment he felt soiled. Whatever it was that had reached out from the box and tried to lure him to it left a residue like a snail left a trail behind it on the early morning lawn.
“It didn’t affect either of us as strongly as it did you,” Davin said quietly, but there was an emphatic tone in his voice. “But we both get the point. These are bad things. Let’s look around some of the other tent rings, just to be sure. I don’t want anyone to drop out of sight.” Then he looked at Maerillus and caught Maerillus’s eyes with his own. “Even if that means you have to stay right by Niam. I don’t want you disappearing on us because of your gift. Not when these things can do what they did to Niam. Hopefully this is the worst we’ll find here.”
Niam saw through Davin’s words.
What Davin really meant was that he didn’t want Niam to be left alone with those boxes. Niam didn’t like feeling like he needed a babysitter and began to say something to that effect, but he had to admit that having Maerillus nearby did make him feel better. Especially when the alternative was being drawn toward another one of those things.
As they made their way through the circular encampments, Niam saw carts abandoned here and there, as if the inhabitants had spared no time to hitch them to their horses. In some tents, saddles still remained. The Vandin had been in such a hurry they hadn’t even bothered to do that much!
It didn’t take long for Davin to find something worse. “Hey guys!” He called out, alarmed.
Niam felt another lump of dread from in his gut as they sprinted over to Davin’s side. It didn’t take long to discover what had driven the Vandin fleeing in all directions. A large open space had been created in the middle of the encampment. Niam guessed this was where everyone gathered as a village. Davin was staring into the expanse of trampled grass with a mixture of fear and disgust. Misshapen lumps teeming with crows dotted the ground. The mass of birds quivered and shivered with a furtive and nauseating effect. In a way, it reminded him of the discordant movement of script across the black surface of the box that nearly drew him to touch it. Moments passed before it dawned on him what he was seeing.
“Great lord! Those are bodies, aren’t they?” Niam gasped.
“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.
They stared for several long moments, wondering what their next course of action had to be.
“We’ve got to see what killed the people under there, don’t we?” Niam moaned.
“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.
While he watched the seething surface of twitching feathers as the birds gorged themselves on carrion, Niam could only imagine what the bodies looked like. “And that means walking over there and scaring the crows off, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.
“Were going to ha
ve to smell them, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Davin said miserably.
“That’s not all you’re going to say, is it?”
Davin clapped him on the shoulder and motioned toward the bodies. “What are you waiting for, buddy?”
Niam grimaced. “Oooh no I’m bloody well not going over there and smelling that!”
“Somebody’s got to do it.”
“We’ll all do it, Maerillus said, and they moved forward toward the bodies. When the smell finally DID hit him, it hit with the force of a mallet. Niam almost turned back. One crow hopped off of the nearest body with a flap of mottled flesh dangling from its beak. It looked at Niam through a sullen and gimlet eye. How dare you interrupt my feast foolish boy?
Just knowing what the flesh hanging from its beak came from made Niam want to wretch.
“Get out of here!” Niam shouted with revulsion. The bird gave an indignant scream and lifted into the air. Niam began waving his arms. The others did too. An angry cloud of crows bellowed into the air like a grave robber lifting a pall from a corpse. Dozens came to ground yards away, where they formed a restive mob of starving ghouls that cawed angrily.
Now laid bare, the twisted shape of a man lay in an impossibly contorted posture. The work of the birds had not completely picked the copse clean. Charred tatters of clothing still clung to parts of the body, which had been stripped clean to the bone in places along the legs and arms. A skinless skull stared out at him through empty sockets. Bits of flesh still clung to it in places. The abdominal cavity lay open where something had crawled inside and begun eating.
Niam quickly turned away and became sick. Maerillus bent and vomited, too. With a snarl of disgust, Davin ran at two other corpses. His charge drove the stubborn birds away only briefly. They quickly returned as a raucous rabble of murderous mendicants that, in Niam’s mind, begged to continue their crime after the kill was done.
“It’s the same with these two,” Davin choked. Niam and Maerillus kept their distance. Several more corpses lay half-devoured in the central clearing. In places the earth had been scorched free of grass. Where the ground had been burned clean, they saw that in places the soil had been melted into dull, dirty runnels of glass. It looked to Niam as if a short rain of molten fire had fallen into the heart of the Vandin camp.
“This reminds me,” Maerillus began—
“—Of the burned animals I found out at the barrens,” Niam finished.
As they backed away from the grisly scene, Davin gnawed at his lip.
“I think I have an idea what may have happened here.”
Niam and Maerillus looked at him expectantly.
“Did you notice how trampled the grass is in the clearing looked?”
Both of them nodded. “Looked like there was a large gathering there,” Niam said.
“Exactly. I think whoever did this hit them when they were all together. I wouldn’t be surprised to find more bodies and more burned ground in some of the other tent rings. Looks to me like someone—”
“—Or something,” Niam corrected him.
“Or something,” Davin averred “Like someone or something wanted to run these people off,” he finished.
“Why,” Maerillus asked, perplexed. “There’s really nothing of value here.”
“Maybe we’ll find out in the big buildings back there past the camp,” Niam told them. “There are rooftops over there.”
When they left the camp behind to investigate, the rest of the circling crows descended to renew their meal in peace. Niam felt a pang of regret that they could not bury the bodies in a good and proper grave.
As he walked cautiously through the grass, Niam kept his senses open to the faintest sign of danger. When he reached the edge of one of the buildings, he saw that the structures resembled tall barns and storage buildings. Looking down as he stepped carefully through the thick grass, he let out an unexpected yelp.
“Gold!”
Necklaces, bracelets, and rings were strewn all across ground. Broken shards of pottery lay where several crates had been torn open. Maerillus bent down and rifled through several of the necklaces. “Brass. Copper. Bronze,” he said like a merchant counting off his wares for sale. “No gold, though there is plenty of silver.”
Davin took a small necklace and looked it over. “This looks a lot like the jewelry Dad buys Mom in Kalavere,” he said thoughtfully. Niam walked through some of the debris, and suddenly froze.
“Another box! I can see the bloody writing moving across the thing!” His chest grew tight, and his head grew heavy. “And I can feel it again.”
“Let’s get back!” Davin all but pulled him to what felt like a safer distance. “What are those things?” Niam growled in frustration.
From the side of the camp they hadn’t explored yet, another sort of answer made itself known—the sound of grunting laughter.
“Looks like we’re not alone,” Maerillus said.
Niam scowled, and a white-hot surge of hatred blossomed inside his chest. He recognized the sound of that laughter—had heard it in countless bad dreams. “Bode!” he snarled.
More laughter erupted from the camp, and the sound of things being broken carried all too clearly. Niam saw several horses tied up near Bode and his gang.
“Where did they come form?” Maerillus whispered.
“There’s a road behind this barn heading east,” Davin said. “I saw it as we walked up. It hugs the bottom of this rise where the ridge begins. If this place is what I think it actually is, then there will be another one on the opposite side of the camp. And good thing for it. They’d have come right up on us if they had taken the road that comes out on your property, Maerillus.”
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t a winter camp,” Davin said with certainty. “At least not like everyone believed. I’ve been thinking about it. There’s not enough grazing room for all the animals that the Vandin would need to bring with them if they come here to winter over.”
Maerillus slapped his knee. “You’re right. I should have seen it before anyone else.”
Niam looked at them both expectantly.
“It’s a trading camp. The wagons left behind, the jewelry . . . were all supposed to be for winter markets. They probably had only just started hauling their goods down here. All of those people were here to spread out into the larger cities and sale their crafts. I think each circle of tents represents different markets or artisans. The other road will go to Kalavere.”
“Oh,” was all Niam could say. His mind was focused on Bode’s group. That was when a troubling thought occurred to him. He closed his eyes, trying to push the thought back. Not for the first time, Niam wished he didn’t think so much. “We’ve got to go over there and stop them,” he said urgently.
“Why on earth do we have to do that?” Maerillus asked incredulously. “I think we’ve seen more than enough to get Lord Joachim to send his men up here and deal with this. We’ve done our part and the sooner we’re away from here, the better.”
“No,” Davin said emphatically. “He’s right. They’re up there with those boxes.”
Maerillus looked at him blankly for a moment.
“What happens if they get ahold of them?” Niam complained.
Davin closed his eyes and said, “That’s easy enough to answer. What always happens where Bode is concerned—nothing good.”