Thirty-Two

Of course there were dreams, and of course the dreams were far worse than they had been. Even in the midst of the nightmare, Toinette wasn’t surprised.

The dead wrapped their cold arms around her. They clawed at her flesh, and the wounds opened onto black nothing. Pustules swelled on her body and burst. She saw bone beneath. It shifted in the same liquidly wrong way that the elk creatures’ bodies had, lengthened into spurs and claws, then dissolved again, and the dead slurred in her ears all the time.

Stinking flesh.

Damned.

This is all.

A dead man’s mouth yawned impossibly wide, as the specter’s the day before had done. Inside was darkness that pulled at her.

“Piss off,” she said and struck out at it with one hand, forming claws almost as an afterthought. The skull broke under her blow and fell into the hole, which eagerly consumed its own matter. Toinette pulled herself back, shook free of the dead, and woke to more darkness.

“Well,” she told Erik, listening with gratitude to the beat of his heart beneath her ear, “I’m awake.”

They ate quickly and got moving. It was just as cold in the morning, if morning it was, as it had been, and the forest looked no different, though the green light had stopped flashing. Walking was warmer. Besides, the faster they went, the quicker they could do what they needed and be gone, or die and be done.

Before she’d been walking long, Toinette was sure either would be better than lingering.

Onward, in silence, they passed through the stream and into a trackless forest, keeping the temple ahead of them as a goal. For one stretch, the undergrowth would be clear, and they’d make their way around snarls of wood with comparative ease. Then the plants would close in again, and it would be work for swords: brutal, clumsy slashing that left Toinette coated with clammy sweat.

The sap hardly smelled at all, but she heard faint screams as she hacked at the plants. Occasionally, and worse, she heard laughter.

“We could change,” said Erik after the first such encounter, “and burn them.”

Toinette shook her head. “I’d as soon not breathe the smoke.”

Erik grimaced and made no argument. Changing wouldn’t have let them fly either. The branches above them spiked and twined in a painful mating, almost obscuring the sky. Any attempt to fly out would have brought only mangled wings—and one of Erik’s hadn’t fully healed yet.

So they went on as humans, tired and cold, walking on ground that at times seemed to fade beneath Toinette’s boots. When it was there, it felt fragile: an eggshell over a monstrously vacant yolk. If she’d thought it would help, she would have screamed. She might have regardless, except she wasn’t sure she would be able to stop.

When they came to another free patch, she put a hand on Erik’s arm instead.

He paused, turning his head. “All well?”

“So to speak,” she said. “Just wanted to make certain I wasn’t imagining you.”

It sounded ridiculous, but he nodded in recognition. His face was very white: darkness or strain, Toinette wondered, and did hers look the same? Likely. One of the deformed squirrels stared at them from an overhead branch, then chittered in a singsong rhythm, turned a hairless and raw-looking tail, and was gone.

“If I wasn’t real, my feet wouldn’t hurt.” Erik tried to joke, but neither of them felt like laughing.

Silently, he turned and they began to walk again.

The brush closed in before them, and this time it included the blood-drinking vines. With forewarning, they weren’t the menace they’d been before, but they whipped toward Erik and Toinette with a speed as much annoying as disconcerting. No damned plant had a right to be that fast. Toinette took to cursing them under her breath, the words falling into a rhythm with her sword.

So occupied, neither of them saw the man step out of the forest.

* * *

It was a breaking stick beneath the newcomer’s feet that brought him to Erik’s attention; else he might have thought the man another phantom.

The figure he turned to face, as the last of the vines fell beneath his blade, was short and starvation-thin, dressed in the remains of a leather tunic and breeches. His hair was long and white, his eyes large and dark, and what skin remained to him was ruddy bronze, wrinkled from weather. That was what Erik could have said about the human part of him.

All else was a sight to inspire profound horror—and deep pity.

The man was changed as badly as the elk had been. His right leg moved with an unnatural fluidity when he walked, and when the ripped leather parted, Erik glimpsed black void beneath it. Spots of blackness dotted his hands and his face, like plague pustules, but these had no tinge of purple, nor any sense of swollen flesh. It was more as though the man’s skin had opened, and nothing was within.

In one hand he held a stone knife, but he made no move to use it, nor, at first, to approach. He stared at Erik and Toinette and spoke words in a tongue Erik had never heard before. The tone was universal: desperate, broken hope.

“Sirrah,” Toinette began, frowning. “I—”

She stopped as the man took another few steps toward them. The knife dangled from his hand. Erik saw blood on it, but it was gray-red and too viscous. The man spoke another few words, then hesitated; his eyes turned briefly white, but he snarled, what was left of his lips flexing around patches of missing flesh, and shook his head.

The man looked at their swords, took one step forward, then dropped the knife with no reluctance. On that strange earth he knelt, the mismatched meat and shadow of his body moving in a way that hurt the eyes to see, said another word, and bent his head.

“It’s all right,” said Erik, though he wasn’t sure it was. “We mean you no harm. You may rise.”

The man stayed where he was and shook his head. He gestured to Erik’s sword, disintegrating hand shaking, and then drew that hand across the length of his neck.

“Ah,” said Erik, realizing. He would have felt embarrassed for taking so long to work it out, save that he was feeling too many other emotions, none of them remotely comfortable.

Toinette was at his side then, her free hand on his shoulder but her own sword drawn. “I’ll do it if you can’t,” she said, “but we must be quick.”

Erik knew she didn’t speak out of concern for their journey, and he knew his heart was hers at that moment, if it hadn’t been long before. “No,” he said and stepped forward.

He’d long been a soldier, almost never an executioner, but the stroke was a simple one and the flesh horribly yielding. The body crumpled and the head fell; there was, despite a moment of fear on Erik’s part, no attempt to reattach. Blood didn’t spurt, but flowed sluggishly in a gray-red stream. When he cautiously turned over the head, the eyes were blank, with the look he’d seen on a thousand dead men.

“Dominus vobiscum,” he said and sighed, cleaning his sword well. “But I don’t think we should stop to bury him. I’d consider it no grace to be laid to rest in these woods myself.”

“Not much rest either, likely.”

Erik remembered his dreams and crossed himself. “No.”

Nonetheless, they laid the man out with his arms folded across his chest, closed his eyes, and placed his head between his feet. The gesture was important, as grotesquely not there as his skin felt and as sickeningly as his limbs bent. Both Erik and Toinette rubbed their hands against their clothing as they started walking again, hoping to clean off any corruption that lingered.

“I’m glad we didn’t bring any of the men,” Toinette said.

Erik nodded. “I wonder,” he said quietly, “where he came from. He was no Templar. Another shipwreck?”

“Likely. Though from no place I’ve been, nor met men from—not from the way he spoke. The world is wide.” She pressed her lips together. “Or he might have been here long enough to forget all language but his own. Madmen do that at times, I hear, and there’s no telling how long he’s been on the island.”

“Nor how long he was changed,” Erik said, though he wished that the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

The man had kept enough of his mind to ask for death, and not to attack them. Had his eyes stayed white, Erik suspected, matters would have been different. How many years had he spent fighting off bloodlust? How many feeling the corruption take hold of him, looking at flesh that warped into nothing?

Toinette hacked at a vine, of the immobile sort, and added almost conversationally, “Christian, whoever he was, and more devout than me. I’d have killed myself were I him. Either God would understand, or hell could be no worse.”

“I’m not sure he could,” Erik said, remembering how the elk had kept coming while stuck full of arrows, and how its not-flesh had mended almost as soon as it was cut. A severing blow, with his whole strength behind it, had been the exception—or had the stranger used the very last of his will to keep away the unnatural healing? Erik thought of the stone knife and the dried blood upon it, the same color as the blood that had come from the man’s neck. “I think he tried.”

Their footsteps were loud against the trail, punctuated by the swish of blades and the snap of plants. “Poor devil,” said Toinette shortly but with great feeling.

“No,” said Erik. “Poor—but not yet a devil. He saw to that.”

He blessed the unknown man for it, but wanted to curse him too, for the thoughts now running the course of his mind. They’d delivered the stranger as much as he had done himself. That was well enough, and Erik didn’t want credit—but the forest, where they could remain themselves with little effort, was only the start of their troubles.

If the same fate overtook them, was there any salvation, even of the most fatal sort, on the island?

He doubted it.