Abomination (29 page)

The beast halted and turned back around. Indra noticed that it did so slowly and not with ease, its legs moving awkwardly beneath it to rotate its body in place so that it faced her once more. There was an advantage: the beast was fast and powerful at full charge, and it could scuttle sideways easily enough, but it could
not quickly turn itself around. It was something she could use. If she could get behind it . . .

The beast came at her again, but seemed to have learned a lesson and did not commit to another thunderous charge. Instead, it got within striking distance and lashed out at her with a claw. Indra deflected it with her sword and skipped to the side, trying now to circle the thing at close range.

As she’d hoped, the beast could not turn swiftly enough to keep facing her, and Indra was gifted a free window of attack. She drew back her sword and brought it down with all her might; the impact drew sparks, but the blade bounced harmlessly off the beast’s carapace without leaving so much as a scratch. She might as well have tried to cut into a boulder.

As the jarring force of the impact reverberated along her arm, the beast continued to turn toward her, and though it was not well enough aligned for a frontal attack, it lashed outward with a mandible and struck her, backhanded, at her right shoulder. Indra cried out and dropped the sword she had been holding in her right hand. No time to retrieve it; she was forced to back away as the beast faced her again, and pressed its attack. Its tongue shot out and coiled itself around her left wrist. Indra tried to wrest free, but the thing was too strong, yanking her arm ahead of her as it began to reel her in.

Indra passed her sword from her ensnared hand to her free one, but when she tried to raise it to cut herself free, she was greeted with a sharp bolt of excruciating pain up her right arm. Something in her shoulder had been badly hurt by that backhanded blow; her arm would not move without causing agony. But as the beast pulled her closer to its gaping mouth, she knew she had no choice. Wailing from the white-hot flare of pain, she brought the sword down, with as much force as she could. It was not enough to sever the tongue, but it made a deep cut that spat black blood and caused the beast to let out a wounded screech and release her.

As Indra retreated, she heard something that sounded like bacon frying in a pan. She looked down to see that the beast’s saliva was burning its way through her leather gauntlet. Her right arm was useless, so she tore open the gauntlet’s binding with her teeth and shook it off. It fell to the ground, sizzling, as the acid ate clean through it. The beast was still shrieking and stamping its feet in a rage, its lacerated tongue retracted into its mouth. Indra clutched her hand to her shoulder and winced from the pain she felt there. She was quite sure that it was dislocated, the arm now useless. So they were both injured now. The difference was that she was growing tired and less able to fight, while the minor wound the beast had sustained seemed to have served only to enrage it further.

She would not run; she would never run. Nor could she continue to fight like this much longer. She had already lost one sword arm, and the beast was too resilient, too powerful. Her only chance now was to gamble all on a last-ditch attack, to force this thing onto the unfamiliar ground of defending itself and hopefully land a mortal blow—or die in the attempt. She was not a fool; in all her years of dreaming and training and preparing for this moment, she had always known that her own death was the more likely outcome. Whenever that unwelcome inner voice arose to taunt her with the thought of it, she would become crippled by suffocating panic. But now that she faced the reality, she did so unafraid. If she were to die, it would be fighting to the last, in the service of the quest to which she had devoted her life. Even as she died, the monster would see not fear but defiance in her eyes. She would know, and it would know, that she was not a victim.

She charged, her body sidelong so as to keep her injured shoulder to the rear, with her good sword arm aloft and shouting a war cry so fearsome that even the beast seemed taken aback by it. It froze briefly as she stormed toward it, then opened its mouth wide, let loose its own roar, and charged to meet her.

As the two converged at the center of the clearing, Indra dropped to the ground and slid beneath the beast and raised up her sword, the blade scraping along its underside as it thundered over her. She heard it cry out, then she scrambled back to her feet after it passed and watched as it tried to turn itself back about. It was limping now, lopsided, and she could see black blood trickling from beneath it into the patchy grass. She looked at her sword and saw its blade dripping with the stuff. As she’d hoped, she had pierced something in the beast’s soft, unarmored belly. Now it was truly hurt—not nearly enough to kill it, but enough to hobble it, to bring it real pain, to diminish its ability to fight. Now, perhaps—

Its tongue lashed out at her again. Indra, taken by surprise that the beast could counter so quickly after such a grievous wound, could only dodge, throwing herself sideways to the ground and crushing her injured shoulder against it. She wailed and promptly rolled onto her back to relieve the pain.

The beast staggered slowly toward her, trailing blood behind it.

Though she was reeling, her vision obscured by a haze of bright, shimmering points of light that flared with every fresh stab of pain from her shoulder, she looked across the ground to her other sword, lying where she had dropped it. Somehow she had still held on to the one. If she had both again . . .

She reached out; the hilt was less than a foot from her fingertips. She clawed at the ground and dragged herself closer, but as she came within reach, closed her hand around it, she felt a blow to her stomach like a kick from a horse. The world spiraled around her and she gasped for breath as she tried to sit up. She tried to orient herself but could see only the scattered stars above. Then even they disappeared as the great black mass of the beast appeared and stood over her.

A clawed limb pressed down on her wrist and squeezed until she was forced to open her hand and release the one sword she still held. Now she was unarmed and helpless, pinned beneath the
monster as it settled into position over her to ensure she had no chance of escape.

She groped for her other sword with her injured arm, but it was hopeless, and to be sure, the monster flung it across the clearing with a swipe of its leg. Then it leaned in close, close enough for Indra to feel its hot breath on her face.

So this was how she died.

The certainty of it came almost as a relief; she realized now that the fear of death lay only in the anticipation of when and how it might come. Once it was settled, inevitable, all that remained was to accept it and die well. And so she let herself go, slackened her body, refused to give the beast the satisfaction of a struggle or the slightest hint of desperation or fear.

It leaned in closer still, mere inches from her now. She looked up into its hideous cluster of wet, bulbous eyes and saw herself reflected a dozen times in them. It was oddly beautiful, she thought, to see herself that way, each of her reflections a different size, each one a perfectly convex distortion, like an array of spherical black mirrors. More than anything, she was satisfied to see in herself no trace of fear. The certainty of her death had brought upon her a warm, comforting sense of tranquility. The very concept of fear now seemed to her like a foreign thing, absurd even. Though her life did not flash before her as she’d heard others speak of, she found herself thinking back to all the times she had allowed fear or trepidation to slow or thwart her ambitions or had seen it happen to others.
What a terrible waste it is to be afraid
, she thought.

The beast pressed down harder on her arm with its claw—Indra could not help but gasp from the pain—and opened its mouth wide with a breathless hiss, exposing rows of needle-teeth, saliva running down them in long beaded threads. Indra closed her eyes, bracing herself for the end . . . and then the beast’s mouth closed again.

Indra opened her eyes to see its vile face still encompassing her vision, still so close that she could feel the thick, coarse hairs
that protruded from it brushing against her skin. Its mandibles twitched and it made a sound like a truffling pig as it sniffed at her, then drew back its head and shook it as though disoriented, confused. It snapped at the air with tooth and claw, its head now gyrating wildly, beset by some maddening sensation beyond Indra’s own perception. And then it reared up with a tortured roar, removing the claw that had pinned her to the ground, and setting her free as it withdrew, yowling in distress and gnashing its teeth.

Indra found strength in her legs and scrambled backward across the ground, planting her good hand and pulling herself unsteadily to her feet, all the while watching the beast. It stamped its feet and lashed out blindly, fighting some unseen enemy through a haze of bewilderment and undirected rage. And then, with a final bellowing howl so filled with torment that for a brief moment Indra actually pitied it, the beast turned and took flight, still limping and bleeding as it crashed headlong into the forest. Indra stood and watched the trees shake and branches snap as the beast once more became a shadow in the darkness, the sound of its retreat growing fainter and fainter until finally it was gone.

Indra stood there for a moment at the center of the clearing, the perfect stillness of the forest returning to settle in around her. All that remained was the sound of her labored breathing as her chest heaved inward and out. And just as quickly as the outer calm returned, the inner one that had allowed Indra to face her own death free from fear drained away, replaced by an overwhelming sense of panic that sank deep into every pore. Without thought or reason she turned and fled, as fast as her bruised and aching body could manage. She bounded into the dense forest of trees without breaking stride, branches whipping at her and scratching at her face but slowing her not at all as her heart pounded deafeningly in her chest and she ran and ran and ran.

Wulfric woke as he did every morning, naked and half-buried in a heap of smoldering black ash that reeked of sulfur. He sat up with a groan, every muscle in his body aching, every bone ringing out like a struck tuning fork. It was just past dawn, the forest still shrouded in early-morning mist, sunlight shafting through the trees in a dull gray haze.

It was bitterly cold, but at least it was dry. Wulfric raked his fingers through his hair to shake loose the ash, then, bracing himself for the pain, rose to his feet and brushed as much as he could from his body, flakes of ash falling like fluttering snow to be carried away by the wind.

He looked around, trying to gain his bearings. He needed to find his way back to the clearing and recover his chain. He hoped he would find his cloak there, too; roaming the countryside naked in this cold weather neither appealed nor suited his intention to draw minimal attention to himself. But the chain was important most of all. The beast had been allowed too many nights of freedom—though last night could not be helped—and he would not allow it another.

His stomach gurgled and growled. He was hungry. Just another small but punishing detail of Aethelred’s hateful curse: even when the beast fed, as it had last night, Wulfric always awoke feeling
starved. But there would be time enough to forage for food once he was clothed and able to shackle himself once more.

He touched his hand to his stomach in a vain attempt to quiet it and noticed that the skin was rough and sore to the touch. He looked down and saw a long, jagged scar that ran from just above his genitals to his sternum. Evidence of an apparently deep and grievous wound, it looked relatively fresh but already well on its way to healing. Wulfric could not understand it. He did not recall sustaining any such wound, and even if he had, his body was remade whole each morning after the beast was gone.

Could his memory be failing him? Certainly his recollection of the waking nightmare he shared with the beast was muddled and hazy, more so than usual. He remembered, clearly enough, killing the two men, or at least watching helplessly as the beast within which his consciousness was imprisoned killed them. That distinction mattered little to him; he held himself responsible for each and every death all the same. He did not remember what became of the third man, but he remembered the girl striding toward the beast, as no one had ever done, standing before it defiantly and clashing her swords together. Goading it to fight her.

He found himself questioning whether that had really happened or if it was some lie of his hazy, half-remembered dream-state. All he knew for sure was that everything after was a blur, a flurry of disjointed images and confusing sensations. He touched his belly again, recalling a sharp pain there, though from what he could not remember. He remembered feeling the searing fury and bloodlust of the beast’s consciousness, as he always did, and summoning all his will in a desperate attempt to suppress it, even though he had proven time after time that all his efforts to stay the beast were useless.

But somewhere amidst that nightmarish cacophony, there had been . . . something. Some emotion that seemed to him now more vague and dream-like than all that surrounded it, so distant he could not place it. Yet in the moment, he had felt it more keenly
than all else, and for the briefest instant it had armored him, made him immune to the beast’s vile hatred and rage.

It was a strangely familiar sensation, and he struggled now to remember why that was so. It was—

He shook the thought away; it was confusing him, and besides, it mattered not. What mattered was that the girl was most certainly dead. None had come into such close contact with the beast and lived; the only variable was the manner in which they died. Sometimes it was mercifully quick; other times the beast was spiteful and would watch its victims suffer. Wulfric hoped that in the girl’s case it had been the former. Though foolhardy and far too sure of herself in a world as dangerous as this, she was noble and good-hearted, and he had liked her. He despised himself anew for failing to find the strength to save her. Just one more soul for him to carry the rest of his days, a greater burden than the chain would ever be.