—FROMA DEFINITIVE STUDY OF THE BLESSED: MAGES AND MAGECRAFT OF THE MEREISH ISLES,TRANSLATED FROM THE MEREISH BY SAMUEL I.ROSSER
THIRTY-SIX
The Implings
SAMUEL
Mist prickled across my skin as Grant and I crested the low mountains beyond the fort and, hopping a wall, picked our way down to the sea.We moved casually, speaking here and there and generally maintaining the appearance of friends escaping the city on a warm spring evening.
The fog, however, undercut our façade.It shielded anything not within half a dozen paces, encapsulating us in our own, small world of last season’s crushed grass and melting snow—the latter adding its own gentle mist to the greater miasma.
The hulking rise of the fort briefly came and went.Shaggy cattle watched us pass with squinty, furtive eyes, and once I swore I heard a child laugh.
Then the ground gave way in a crumble of sodden, half-thawed earth.I flung out an arm to stop Grant, who made a startled sound and slipped on muddy snow.His legs struck mine, and the two of us hit the ground in a graceless tumble.
I froze, fully expecting us to slide off the mountain in a deluge of earth and rock and clots of grass.But the ground was solid other than a gentle rustle of falling dirt.
“Damn.”Grimacing, I smeared mud from my cheek and started to rise, staring over the cliff we had nearly wandered off.
“Wait!”Grant grabbed my arm, his eyes round as coins.We heldour breaths, not daring even to breathe until the silence, the press of mist, began to ring in my ears.
A sound came from the fog.A thud.A brush.The shifting of feet.
I slipped a hand slowly inside my mud-smeared coat.Grant did the same, crouched low and ready to spring.
The fog swirled, and a great, hulking mass appeared.My mind transformed it into a hundred, twisted shapes—Otherborn beasts come to tear us limb from limb.I would have to remove my coin to fight them, then Hae would come, and all would be lost.
The mist abated, and a shaggy, long-horned cow considered us sedately.
I rasped out a breath, half laughing, half winded.“Saint.”
“It may be premature to give thanks,” Grant muttered, pushing himself upright.At his feet, his ghisting had manifested in its mangy-dog form, glowing a faint, dark indigo.
I followed the creature’s gaze back to the cow.There, perched atop the cow’s enormous, broad head, was an impling.The unholy mingling of an infant and a starved dog, it rode upon the beast’s neck and held its horns, all the while watching us over its mount’s windblown fur.It was naked, bones sticking out against pale, nearly necrotic flesh and contrasted by chubby, round belly and cheeks.
Had I been in the Other, or even attuned to it, the impling would have shone orange.But here, wholly in the human world, its glow was barely discernable.The last burn of a setting sun.
“Sam,” Grant said, very low.“Now might be a good time to risk taking off that talisman.”
“Hae will find us,” I reminded him, equally low.My voice did not quaver, but my guts were watery.Could I take command of the impling without my contact to the Other?Or would my status as a Sooth be wholly irrelevant as it sliced our throats to ribbons and pried our eyes from our skulls?
Back atop the cow, the impling began to crawl forward, kneeling on the creature’s head, its vaguely humanoid skull cocked to one side.The cow itself did not move, unperturbed.
“Either he finds us alive today or a cowherd finds our bodies tomorrow,” Grant gritted out.
The impling leapt into the grass and began to crawl towards us.Grant pulled a knife.I reached for my sleeve, and the cow lowed in sudden distress.
Movement revealed a new source of subtle orange advancing from the left, more from the right.A dozen implings, crawling towards us like hungry, four-limbed spiders.
Grant’s ghisting began to flit in front of us, a decidedly un-canine pattern to his steps.One of the implings shied away from him, but the others came on, crowding us back to the edge of the cliff.
I tore the handkerchief from my forearm, shoved it and the coin into my pocket, and dropped into the Other.I reeled at the suddenness of the shift, but my instincts were already in action, gathering my power and infusing it into my voice.
“Stop.”
The implings, blazing orange reflections here in their natural home, paused.One was so close to Grant it might have reached out to claw his ankle with its long, thin claws.
“Back up.”
