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 damnedplanthad 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 grotesquelynot thereas 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?”
