The Phoenix Unchained (33 page)

A Town Filled with Shadows

T 
HEY’D ONLY BEEN inside the inn for a few minutes, but by the time they came out into the street again, it was already enough darker that Tiercel’s MageLight crown was bright enough to cast shadows. Both of the horses raised their heads and looked at it inquiringly. Thunder paid no attention.

“Everybody just vanished,” Tiercel said. He sounded as if he were saying it to see if he liked the sound of the words any better aloud. From his expression, he didn’t.

“In the middle of eating their stew and pulling a pint of cider,” Harrier agreed.

“We should check the other buildings,” Tiercel said next.

“For
what
?” Harrier demanded in exasperation. “To see if—”

“I saw something,” Simera said abruptly.

Both of the boys turned to look at her.

“I don’t know,” she said, having no trouble at all interpreting their looks. She pointed up the street. “Maybe an animal.”

“We should look,” Harrier said reluctantly. “But let’s take the horses with us.”

Tiercel had just settled into Cloud’s saddle, and Harrier had one foot in his own mount’s stirrup, when Simera let out a sharp yelp of surprise. There was a creature in the middle of the street where none had been before. It was about the size of a two-year-old child, but it was obviously not human, or a member of any race that Harrier recognized. It was completely naked and its body was as featureless as a child’s doll. Its purple-grey skin was slick and hairless—reminding Harrier of a frog—and it looked a little more like an ape than it looked like anything else. Its head was round and nearly featureless; it had a lipless mouth so wide it seemed to be smiling; no nose that he could see; and large round silver eyes that it kept squinting and blinking, as if even the dusk was too bright for it. Harrier swung up into his saddle, trying to do it silently.

As he did, two more of the things appeared. They didn’t come from behind the buildings, or up the street. They came up out of the street itself, sliding through the hard-packed surface as if the street were water.

“Get rid of that light,” Harrier said quietly.

Tiercel gestured, and the globe of MageLight went to hover over the roof of the inn. The creatures turned their heads to watch it move. Their mouths hung open, and now Harrier could see that their mouths were filled with long, needle-sharp fangs.

Simera was stringing her bow. She knew even better than Harrier did that no creature had teeth like that if it weren’t a predator. From the expression on her face, the creatures were as strange to her as they were to Harrier, but she recognized them as dangerous none the less.

And the fact that they appeared in a town where all the inhabitants
had vanished was too gruesome a coincidence to
be
a coincidence.

“Let’s go,” Simera said. “Slowly. Maybe they won’t follow.”

They moved their horses down the center of the Main Street at a slow walk.

Harrier looked back.

There were five of the creatures now.

FOR a few moments Harrier dared to hope that they’d actually be able to just walk away. Simera had told them both various stories of her encounters with wild animals, everything from unexpected meetings with bears—the small black kind—to facing down lynxes and rutting bucks and even angry foxes. Sometimes you could avoid a disastrous—or violent—encounter simply by walking slowly away, as they were doing now. Both Harrier and Simera were watching over their shoulders. Tiercel was leading Thunder, and looking in the direction of the road. They would have to follow the road now; it was getting much too dark to strike off over the Plains.

The pony was restless, shaking his head and pulling at the lead rope, obviously unhappy to be where he was. They made it as far as the end of the street, and the road was in sight, when suddenly the creatures began moving down the street after them, swinging themselves slowly along on their elongated forearms. They weren’t simply going to let them leave.

Simera stopped, turned, and shot.

Her arrow flew true, straight into the eye-socket of the lead creature. It fell back among its fellows with a shriek of pain, and in an instant the other four fell on it like a pack of starving dogs, devouring its body before it had stopped twitching—possibly even before it died.

That was the final straw for the horses. Whether it was the smell of blood, or the sounds, or some combination of both, they laid their ears flat back and bolted.

Thunder’s lead-rope was jerked from Tiercel’s hand immediately when Cloud stretched his neck out and began to run. The pony had been built for endurance, not for speed, and Thunder was left behind as soon as Cloud jumped the ditch at the edge of the main road and began running through the long yellow grass of the Plains.

Tiercel flailed as he tried to get both hands on the reins without either dropping his wand or simply falling from the saddle. He tried to remember everything Halyon had told him back in Sentarshadeen about what to do if Cloud ever ran away with him, but he couldn’t think of any of it. He finally got both hands on the reins and was pulling back as hard as he could, but it was useless. All he could do was try to stay in the saddle as Cloud galloped, in a line as straight as the flight of an arrow, away from the town of Windy Meadows. He didn’t even know where Harrier or Simera were.

Behind him, he suddenly heard an unearthly shrieking.

“TIERCEL!” Harrier shouted.

“The road!” Simera shouted back.

Harrier had been slightly more fortunate than Tiercel had. When Lightning gathered himself to bolt, Harrier had given the reins a savage jerk and kept the gelding from getting the bit between his teeth. He couldn’t stop his mount from running—and considering what was after them, he didn’t want to try—but he could control the direction the two of them went.

He couldn’t see Tiercel anywhere.

He and Simera galloped up the road. Thunder followed them, running free, but the pony was dropping farther behind with every passing moment.

And the
things
were following.

He hoped they could outrun them.

Then Harrier heard a scream behind him, and realized he was alone on the road. He sawed frantically at the reins, forcing Lightning around in a tight circle. The gelding danced and bucked, but at the end of a long day’s travel even so short a run had tired him, and Harrier was able to force him back the way they’d come.

The scream he’d heard was Thunder.

The pony lay in the middle of the road in a spreading pool of blood. The creatures—more than five, now, many more—swarmed over his corpse, devouring every scrap of flesh and bone. Simera stood in the road a few yards distant, loosing arrows into the seething swarm of creatures, but it was almost fully dark now, and often her arrows didn’t find their mark. The creatures seemed willing to turn on dead and wounded alike, however, devouring them just as they had the one Simera had killed in the town. But no matter how many of their own kind they devoured, their appetite seemed endless.

“Go!” Simera shouted when she saw Harrier. Her voice was ragged as she gasped for air after her long run, and her flanks were foamy with sweat. “Find Tiercel!”

“Come on!” he said urgently. “Why did you stop?”

Despite the animal’s exhaustion, it was taking everything he had to hold Lightning in place. The poor beast was tossing its head and stepping backward and sideways, desperate to be away from this place.

“I can’t outrun them,” she said, never stopping her careful mechanical aiming and loosing into the feeding mass of creatures. Despite the additional fodder she was providing them, they would have finished consuming the pony’s carcass in only a few minutes more. “Maybe you can.”

“No.”

He slipped from Lightning’s back quickly, before the gelding
could shy again and trip him. The moment it realized it was free, the horse turned and galloped away.

Harrier drew his sword.

“Damn you, stupid city boy,” Simera panted.

“Yeah,” Harrier said. “There’s a lantern in my pack.”

Harrier found the lantern and lit it, setting it behind them on the side of the trail.

The creatures were starting to advance again. Less than half a dozen remained, but from all that Harrier had seen, half a dozen would be more than enough to kill the two of them. He clutched the sword tightly and tried to imagine what he was doing here. He would have been afraid, except for the fact that this all seemed completely unreal.

Then Simera was loosing more arrows again, and for a moment he thought—with a pang of relief so sharp it almost made him dizzy—that everything was going to be fine, and they were going to get out of this okay, because the creatures kept stopping to eat their dead, and that made them easy targets. She’d kill the rest of them, and the two of them would go find Lightning. They’d
escape
. . . .

Then Simera threw down her bow with a sob and Harrier knew she was out of arrows. She drew her knife. Four left.

There weren’t even bones where Thunder’s body had been, just a few chewed pieces of the packs’ contents and the saddle.

“Get away from them!” he heard Tiercel shout.

But they couldn’t. The creatures sprang forward, moving fast now, and one of them jumped at him and Harrier hit it, the sword twisting in his hands, and there was a sudden sharp terrible smell in the air as the creature came apart with the force of the blow—not blood, but it still made him want to gag—and Simera screamed, because one of them had jumped at her; she’d turned and kicked it but it was holding on, fangs buried deep in her rump.

There was a rush of heat and light.

Screaming.

Harrier pulled the knife Roneida had given him. He rushed toward Simera and stabbed at the one that was biting her, pulling it free and throwing its body down into the road. It wasn’t quite dead, but it was dying.

Simera staggered away, and that one burst into flames, too.

Tiercel leaned over the side of his horse and threw up.

Harrier dropped his sword in the road and ran over to Cloud. He grabbed the horse’s reins; the animal was foam-flecked and exhausted; obviously too exhausted to stir a step, but Harrier still didn’t want the horse bolting again.

“Simera!” he called over his shoulder. “Are you all—”

“No,” Tiercel said, his tone one of quiet protest.

Harrier looked back over his shoulder. Simera was down on her knees. Harrier dropped the reins and ran back to her.

She’d rolled to her side. Her long legs were twitching, as if she were running, and her flank was dark with blood from the gaping bite-wound.

“Simera?”

He knelt on the road beside her and attempted to drag her torso into his lap. Her skin was ice cold. The fires from the creatures Tiercel had set alight had gone out, leaving small stinking splotches on the road, and the only light came from the one lantern they’d lit earlier.

“Poison,” she whispered, gasping for air. “If you—Don’t let them
bite
you.”

Tiercel skidded to his knees in front of her, a small bottle in his hands. “Simera? I have the brandy. Drink it.”

He tried to pour it into her mouth, but she couldn’t swallow. She choked and coughed, and then she gasped for air.

And then she died.

“Why didn’t you get here sooner?” Harrier said, getting to his feet.

Tiercel stared up at him, his face blank with shock and the growing horrified realization that Simera was dead.

“I got here as soon as I could,” he said after a long silence. “I couldn’t find you. Then I saw the lantern. And heard . . . the sounds.”

He pushed himself slowly to his feet and walked back to Cloud, his back to Harrier.