There was a quality to the air that Barlow couldn't quite explain. It came to him by all senses at once. His nose told him of rot, sickly sweet, with an undercurrent that was far more unpleasant - he thought it might be carrion, or vomit. His mouth tasted of metal, as if his nose had taken a blow in a fistfight and he was swallowing his own blood. His skin rippled, and his vision grew dark - somehow the torch he held was not giving off near as much light as it ought to.
Only his ears seemed to be working properly. He heard every sniffle, every creak of leather and clink of chain-mail, every spark thrown by the torches. And, faintly to the south, what might have been an errant gust of wind... or a moan coming from a wounded man.
Barlow quickened his pace, a deep and heavy dread settling into his gut.
* * *
There was a figure on the forest path.
Barlow was so taken by shock that he stopped short. Trahern skidded to a halt next to him, and behind him Farley nearly ran into his back.
The air had grown so dark, and the torches so dim, that Barlow could hardly see. The figure was seated, or perhaps crouched on the forest floor. For a moment it did not move. Then, it shifted slightly, and a faint moan escaped it.
Barlow's heart soared: he recognized his brother's voice even in a wordless moan. It was Yared. Wounded, but alive.
"Brother!" he shouted, stepping forward. His heart raced in mingled joy and worry. Half of the battle had been won, but now they would be faced with the task of stopping Yared's wounds and getting him back to the hidden keep alive. Barlow was worried what he might see when the light from his torch fell upon his brother.
He drew closer. Yared hadn't moved at Barlow's shout, but now, with agonizing slowness, he stuck an arm out as if to prop himself upright. Barlow's joy began to falter. Yared was moving as slowly as a man in the final stages of the plague. Could it be that something out here had poisoned him near the point of death?
The arm came out. Barlow saw how thin and wizened it had become. What in God's name had happened to Yared in the two days he had been alone?
The arm came out, bending backwards. The figure shifted. Barlow realized what he was seeing just as Trahern scrambled backwards and Dolly beside him screamed, "That's not a man! Gods up high, that's not a man!"
The outstretched arm was two feet long at the elbow. When it unfolded, it revealed a forearm long again as the shoulder. Naked and dry, thin as bone and a dusty blue, it ended in a slender hand with two fingers and two thumbs.
The arm came out, and its palm pressed against the hard ground in a silent thud. The figure began to push itself upright. As it rose, it unfolded. Barlow watched it grow to five, then seven, then ten feet in height. It looked sick and emaciated, but moved with an eerie grace. It began to turn. Barlow found that he could not move, or even turn his eyes away.
The fiend took the rough shape of a man, but pulled tall and thin - skinnier about the waist than Barlow, but more than half again as tall. It was naked and hairless. Far too little skin was stretched over a deformed skeleton, with a thin waist, a huge ribcage, and the long, four-fingered arms.
It had a head, but no face. Its eyes were nothing but empty sockets, sunken holes leading to the back of the skull.
A horrific, carrion smell reached Barlow's nostrils. Dolly vomited, the stew he had eaten earlier boiling from his mouth and slapping against the forest floor. Faintly, Barlow could hear the cursing and shouting of his compatriots, and the thrumming of footsteps as a few men in the back of their squadron turned tail and ran. He heard Trahern's panicked orders, telling the men to form up and draw steel. But he couldn't move, nor could he act. All in his world had disappeared, but for himself, the fiend, and the bundle that the fiend held in its arms.
The arm that the fiend had used to prop itself upright was hanging by its side. The other was crooked in front of its chest, as if to cradle a baby. Only the figure nestled against its body was no baby, but a full-grown man.
Another moan, rattling and faint, escaped from Yared's mouth. It was hanging limply open, and his eyes were wide and vacant. He was breathing, and every so often an arm or a leg would twitch. But he was dead, dead, dead.
His chest looked as though it had exploded outwards; broken ribs stood sentinel around the lip of a bloody cavity below the heart. A single strand of intestine ran over the lip of the wound and fluttered in the open air.
A thin, fleshy nozzle protruded from the fiend's face, where a mouth might have gone on a saner creature. It wriggled downwards until it was lost in the bloody hole that it had carved into Yared's body. It might have been Barlow's mind, but he thought he heard a faint sucking noise coming from inside his brother.
Barlow felt as though he was falling into a deep hole. The world was black, and his vision grew dark. The vacant eyes of the creature in front of him seemed to grow larger and larger until all else was blotted out. It looked at him, holding its body in perfect stillness; he looked at it, trembling, faint, his cheeks cold and his mind hot.
This can't be real, he said to himself, over and over again. This isn't happening. It's not real.
Slowly, the figure slackened its arm. The tube it had buried in Yared's chest came loose with a wet sucking sound. Yared fell to the ground, striking the forest floor with a dull thud.
That didn't happen, Barlow's mind told him. You didn't see it.
The creature, with the inescapable slowness of the plague itself, took a step forward. Its foot came down on Yared's collapsed stomach. There was a dry crack of bone as his spine snapped and his body caved in.
No, thought Barlow.
The fiend took another step forward. Its head swayed gently in the cool breeze, and its sightless eyes were fixed on Barlow. The nozzle attached to its face was threshing about like an animal caught in the throes of death.
Another step, and the fiend was close enough for Barlow to see every wrinkle on the creature's skin, every rib protruding from its collapsed chest. There was something, or a multitude of somethings, writhing under the skin behind the ribs.
Still Barlow could not move.
A long, slender hand reached out, fingers spread. Barlow felt them brush against his clothes. Then they began to tighten, and his arms were pinned to his sides, and the breath was pushed from his lungs. Heart failing, stars bursting in front of his eyes, he fell into darkness.
YOU ARE READING
Black Wind
FantasyThe world is suffocated by a mysterious plague. Foul creatures known as fiends patrol the wilderness. The great empire that once crowned the earth lies in ruin. In the small town of Tranton, three outcasts set out on a quest to preserve one last gli...
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