It did not take long to retrieve the others. There were already four warriors at the gate—the counselors having become concerned by their prince’s vanishing inside—and Ashyn, who’d been threatening to go in herself.
On Tyrus’s instructions, the warriors were to search the homes for survivors. The counselors, along with the scholars, were to follow, taking notes to convey to the emperor—the number of dead, the manner of death, anything they could glean from the bodies. Simeon did not make it past the first house, where he vomited so quickly that no one noticed someone had left a similar mess before him. Katsumoto and the counselors did not take to the task any more easily, requiring frequent breaks for air. Even the warriors often found excuses to step outside.
Ashyn wanted to aid the scholars and counselors. Moria forbade it. Ashyn was not trained in such reporting, so there was no need to add to her nightmares. Finally, Ashyn relented and took Simeon to find the town hall, where they could retrieve records. Moria and Tyrus joined the search for survivors.
There were almost a hundred houses in the town. The task was as long as it was unpleasant. With each home, they would open every door and check every room. There were no cellars in Fairview, with the volcanic rock of the Wastes not far below the soil. That made the task swifter. It also, however, had robbed the townspeople of the best place to hide and survive. When the shadow stalkers had struck Edgewood, that’s where Moria, Ashyn, and Ronan had been—underground, in the cells.
People here had fled to the community hall. The main doors were open. Inside, bodies carpeted the floor. Two lay at the foot of a closed interior door smeared with blood. The hands of the corpses were battered and swollen, as if these two had—like the woman in the first house—survived the first wave and died of their injuries, pounding on that door to be let inside.
“It’s the storeroom,” Moria said. “When they brought us here to speak to Barthol, I saw inside. It was communal food storage, for charity and festivals and such.”
“That is where the townspeople went,” Tyrus said. “Where they could barricade themselves in and survive.”
Moria looked down at the two bodies by the foot of the door. Townspeople had fled into that room and dared not open it even for their neighbors.
Tyrus banged on the wooden door and announced himself. Sounds came from within, but no one answered. After being in there a fortnight, any survivors would be much weakened. Tyrus tried again, and Moria did the same, telling them who she was, that she’d been here with her sister, that they’d come back to rescue them.
“We’ll need an axe,” Tyrus said, stepping over the strewn bodies.
Moria pushed on the door. It moved a crack before banging shut again.
“Something’s against it,” she said. “But it’s not properly barricaded. Help me push.”
He did. Daigo came closer, but only to supervise. As soon as they got the door open a couple of handspans, he leaped through.
“Daigo!” Moria cried. “Don’t—”
A hiss. A scrabbling. A shriek. Moria shoved the door wide and burst through, ready to calm the frightened—
The smell. By the ancestors, the smell. It sent her back out that door, propelling Tyrus with her. She pulled her tunic up over her nose. He did the same as he heaved breaths through his mouth to calm his stomach. Inside, Daigo hissed and spit. Enraged shrieks answered, so shrill that Moria’s first thought was Children! It’s the children! Then she caught the smell again and thought, No, please don’t let it be the children.
Stepping back through the door, Moria saw what Daigo was chasing. Rats. That’s what had been making the squeals and the skittering. The only people in there . . . Moria saw what had been stopping the door. Bodies.
When the killing had started, townspeople had fled in here. And then they had died, not because they’d run out of food or drink, but because there were men with them, and the shadow stalkers had sought out and possessed them. Then those who’d barricaded themselves inside had found they were trapped here.
Moria thought of those dead outside the door. Had they known what was happening within? Had they heard the screams and been trying to help? She squeezed her eyes shut and wished she’d not been blessed with such a vivid imagination.
After she surveyed the carnage, she turned to Tyrus. “There are no children. It is like Edgewood. No one under twelve summers remains.” Which was not entirely true. They’d seen babes in arms, as in Edgewood, but she’d not think of that.
“They’ve taken the children again,” Tyrus said. “As hostages.”
That, then, was all she could take from this. A spot of hope. The children lived.
“We should go,” Tyrus said. “The others can make the accounting here. It does not help to linger.”
She was about to call Daigo when he let out a snarl, and she spun to see him facing off with . . .
It was a rat. Yet it was not.
In the Forest of the Dead, they’d seen a twisted creature with quills. Gavril had said it must have adapted to the conditions of the forest. She looked at this rat, up against the wall, and she knew he’d lied. Whatever magics Alvar Kitsune had been working in that forest, preparing to raise the shadow stalkers, they had warped that beast.
This rat was nearly twice as big as the corpses of the others, swollen and bloated, with huge patches of angry pink skin showing through its coarse fur, as if it’d been stretched almost to the bursting point. Its eyes were lost in the lumpy, bloated mass that had become its head. Only the tips of its ears and nose protruded. And teeth. The swelling seemed to have pulled its lips back, its pin-sharp teeth exposed all the way around. A creature in transition, bloating and swelling as it metamorphosed into something else.
“It’s sick or poisoned,” Tyrus said. “Daigo! Away!” He turned to Moria. “Call him off.”
Sick or poisoned. Yes, perhaps that was it. Her imagination was getting the best of her.
She did not command Daigo to leave his prey, though. It would be an insult to call him off. She threw her dagger instead. It caught the rat-thing in the side and there was a grotesquely wet popping noise as the beast shrieked its last.
“Or you could just kill it yourself,” Tyrus said.
“That is the advantage to thrown daggers,” she said. “No need to get close enough to be attacked.”
“Just wash the blade well. Please.”
Daigo was looking around, as if for more enemies to fight. Tyrus bent and pulled out Moria’s dagger. When he did, it seemed half the rat’s insides bubbled out of the hole, like an overstuffed sausage roll.
“Well, that’s disgusting,” said a voice behind them.
Moria turned to see Ronan. He stood in the doorway, and his gaze was no longer on the rat-thing, but sweeping the room, and as it did, any glimmer of humor fell from his face.
“It’s all disgusting,” Moria said. “Unspeakably disgusting.”
Ronan nodded soberly. Moria reached for her dagger, but Tyrus was cleaning it and ignored her.
“You think that beast was infected?” Ronan asked Tyrus as he scrubbed the dagger with a cloth and wine from an open skin.
“Either that or it ate far too much.”
Ronan exchanged a look with Moria. He was thinking what she had been, and while she wanted to see that as proof that her imagination wasn’t taking liberties with her common sense, she knew that, like her, he was probably overly quick to blame sorcery. They’d seen too much of it, in too short a time.
“We should take the corpse,” she said. “For study. Ronan can do that.”
“No, Ronan cannot,” Ronan said. “Because he isn’t under your command, my lady. That thing will not walk away. Leave it for the warriors to collect. I have found something more interesting. A survivor.”
Tyrus and Moria hurried through Fairview, with only Daigo accompanying them. Ronan had given them directions and then slipped off.
He’d said he’d spotted a woman darting across a road, while Ashyn was still in the town hall. Had Ronan been keeping an eye on her? Moria hoped he wasn’t playing with her sister’s heart, as he determined his own feelings. She’d let it happen once with no repercussions. It would not happen again.
When they neared the house the woman had entered, Moria noted movement beyond a half-closed shutter. Across the road, a pair of guards searched. They all made enough noise that any able-bodied survivors should be dashing from their homes.
“But how would they know we’re rescuers?” Tyrus said. “She may have heard me identify myself. She may have seen me and recognized my armbands. Yet even if she knows who I am . . . ?” He shrugged. “Would you come out so quickly?”
After being beset by bandits and shadow stalkers, one might not trust the emperor himself if he appeared and offered sanctuary. And given what Moria had seen, if someone had been trapped in this town for almost a fortnight, it was entirely possible she was not in her proper mind.
“In here,” she said, motioning to a house across the road.
From inside, they watched the house where the woman hid. Finally, the front door opened. A woman peeked out. She was younger than Moria expected, no older than Tyrus. She looked one direction and then the other, and, once convinced the way was clear, the young woman darted out and slipped into another house farther down.
“Avoiding the search,” Tyrus said. “She does not want to be found.”
“Well, she will be,” Ronan said, appearing as if he’d come in through a window. “Do we have a plan?”