Enzo stabbed the meaty sausage with his fork, all the good oils and fat oozing out onto the wooden bowl.
"It's good you know, their new sausage. I think they put a little less meat than before, but it's still good."
Huncho raised his chin which was inundated with grease. He ate voraciously like a pig, but didn't mind anything about it. He cared about the food, not the decorum that acted as the premise to a fine dining. Plus, he didn't have the money to walk into an expensive restaurant, wipe a frivolous handkerchief on his mouth to blanch it, then eat small portions, all cut up and served with utensils, and primly place chopsticks betwixt forefinger and smaller digits.
Unlike some people trammelled by convention but with pious vanity the suiting of assimilation, Huncho didn't spend a dime on what other people thought of him.
Here, he ate with his hands and the sausages tasted good. That's all that mattered.
Enzo licked each one of his fingers. "How was work today?" He asked in his brute voice.
Huncho took a second to take in all the buzz and everything. A few lanterns lit the restaurant. A brasserie it was, with waitresses hulling mugs of beer that frothed to the brim, a brindy texture. Men sat coated next to chairs that floated to their neck, the back like wide strings of a zither, and creaked and groaned as men slid out of their seats to pay or talk to another, immerse and embroil in the hurlyburly of a crapulous bar. Prattle, repartee, taut lines of sound that flew out the windows that siphoned in a fresh wind.
"You know," Enzo said, licking at his fingers again. "One time I lost some people too, a lot of them actually."
Huncho almost didn't hear his sound as the sea of voices drowned him out almost.
"You weren't in the war though. You said you weren't a soldier. I don't know why you couldn't be, you exceed all the body types of specs."
Enzo shook his head. He looked beyond Huncho, thoughts at wharf, and rudimentary word not carried out of lorry by his mouth.
"Huncho, what do you want to do with your life?"
Huncho looked up. He hadn't thought about that.
"Huncho," Enzo continued. "Do you want to apprentice to a master, go to one of the universities, do menial tasks and live a care-free life, get conscripted off to war, be a merchant sailor, visit all the great cities of Rorania, see the high-rising needles. Or do you want to stay here?"
It was such an influx of information that Huncho stopped eating his sausage. Enzo must have had a reason for asking all of this. He really did care about Huncho's future.
A sharp creak sounded behind him, someone got off his seat, and stumbled, intoxicated, outside.
Huncho shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe -"
The brouhaha amplified.
Huncho turned his head. "Maybe I -"
"Gentlemen, listen up! I only need two tenths of your drunk minds and a likewise minute to talk about something!"
The throng of men sitting down, most buff, cumbersome, girth wider than their pants, florid faces, some with prognathous jaws and long lanky necks, others with square faces and bushy beards, but they all did not like the man up front, a stout man in a velvet robe, a quizzical expression borne on his countenance, and flourishing an ebonwood cane, and so the crowd made sure to express vitriol.
"Hey, we're eating!"
Like pigs, true pigs, Huncho thought.
Fists hammered to tables. Mugs raised up in exuberance and protest.
"There is a Diskrali here in the village. Here in Stennus. There are Diskrali! There are Diskrali! Demons that roam in the dark." He said it so fast, but so silencing that it seemed like the stout man was a tax collector of throats, because the crowd hushed at the word of Diskrali. And so did Huncho; his spirits emptied faster than the mugs of beer here.
"Is it true?" Huncho whispered to Enzo.
Enzo pursed his lips. " I don't think so, the Diskrali are way off where Arbitrators are fighting them."
The velvet man tapped his cane thrice on the floorboard. "Folks of all girths, please allow me a worth of your time. I speak no hearsay here."
The crowd did lean in more with their chins than ears.
"The young lads of the sixth ring of snake catchers that went out that day, out over the wall into the unknown, did not come back, as you've all heard or saw with pried eyes and loped ears. The one that did, by his patrynomic name Secor of the Dandes, arrived in a cart, hands splayed out of the wooden trolley like a mannequin's wooden limb, and his face, oh I saw it, it was mangled and distressed. He saw the most horrid thing for his eyes were wide with fear, apalled by six nightmares of resinuous acumen. And mine own too! I could not bade farewell to night, and doss in sleep, but instead drown myself in fear from that boy's ripped face and torn body, eviscerated like the fat that oozes out of your own sausages!"
The man paused for effect, then continued ranting.
"And now in the past two weeks, two men have died at night. And a herd of cows has been slaughtered. That's more proof!"
Huncho shivered. The words twanged in his ears and beat his heart like a rabbit caught in a snare. He was facing cold lines that crawled up the side of his shoulders like slimy pauldrons, and insinuated between his ragged leather and the erect hair that stood at parade rest; the story was too gruesome, and was told by others and told by himself and told by Enzo and everytime he heard what had happened to his friends, his brothers, he could not help but curl and cringe for that even if Dilango's restaurant always filled his stomach, these days his stomach was but a molten crucible, that pried and tined at his insides, that something would hatch from his ribs and leap out like a subducted volcano.
"You alright, you want to head out?" Enzo's voice was not sweet holistically but like the aftertaste of bitter tea, it turned out sweet.
He smudged the sweat (and grime) of Huncho like a Credic's Swang (the smudge of ash that they put on a priest in Sammels) with his large thumb. His thumb was blacker than the Swang itself.
"But hark listen! There are demons lurking among us. Beware, spread the news! There is something darker lurking in the darkness at night. Guard your children by the mother's ween this week."
Fiery voices erupted. "But there are Arbitrators, they'll fight 'em off!"
Some were still in disbelief or disagreement. "It can't be! It was the Sammels before, it has to the Sammels! The recent ones were flukes!"
"Ya, let's head out," Huncho motioned for the door. Enzo dropped a few coins on the table that was lit up by an oil lamp.
They quickly snuck out as the people pushed inwards towards the man to ask him questions, to raise arguments and capitulate to drunkenness.
Huncho breathed a fresh air as he zipped through the only door to the restaurant and speed walked out as all the noises behind him started drowning.
"What killed them Enzo, what killed them, you were there that day weren't you? I've never asked you because I didn't want to know, but now I do. What killed them?" Huncho begged the man, as he hung his hands by his waist in shock.
"I don't know, I don't know," Enzo mouthed.
"Do you know what Dawyn said to me?" Huncho trembled. "Do you know what he said?"
Enzo shook his head.
"That he could catch lies better than snakes. You're not telling me something, Enzo, to protect me. You're trying to protect me from something, right? What are you hiding, I'm not scared. Nightmares won't scare me, if it's gory. Did you see anything that day when you were out with the others that day? Tell me what you know. You know something!"
Enzo sighed. "I'm not hiding anything. I'm just as scared as you. That day," he pressed a thumb to his forehead. "I did not go with the sixth ring fully."
Huncho felt shocked to hear this. He wanted to castigate his friend, his family member, but Enzo soon cut him off.
"That's why they're not questioning me as a witness. Because I wasn't there when it happened. I wasn't that far into the forest. It pains me that the moment I was gone, my whole ring was gone then after. It pains me that while I was discussing business with another ring master, my own ring was discussing business with the wreath of death."
Huncho, mouth agape, stared Enzo straight in the eye. "I thought you were there, you weren't. Sorry, I'm so sorry," Huncho recanted. "I'm sorry. So nobody saw what happened. Nobody knows."
Enzo nodded. "Insofar I thought that it was all a dream. How come for like twenty minutes I wasn't with the crew, they all disappeared. When we went to find Secor, Dawyn, Lior, Michael, Cassio, and all the rest, me and a few others only found Secor. We searched a bit more but nothing was found. We even tracked the trails of blood that were left in the grass." Enzo stuttered the next words as he tried to gesticulate what had happened. "Then I-I, I saw a trail of blood, a streak of red - " (Huncho gulped) "-and it wasn't on the grass. The blood marks slithered up a tree. The blood was dashed on the wooden bark, and it dripped down from the leaves like a beehive of crimson. And there, hanging on one of the thick branches, I saw the wan face of Secor. I never felt so helpless. We tried to wake him up, tried to urge him to come back to us, but he wouldn't. He just, he just, stood there pale and looking at something beyond us, through us."
Huncho shivered. He was scared but he was inclined to listen more.
"We tried searching for others but most of us knew that this was a really large threat, whoever, whatever the attacker was, we needed to get out of there. We hauled Secor on the snake trolley and I think you know the rest."
"We would have gone to find the rest, but that's when some soldiers came, and the next day, arbitrators."
Huncho imagined Secor's bloody face. The wooden trolley was a folded rectangle of plywood. The man splayed in it had no right eye. That no right eye was looking back at him. It had veins of blood that winded about it. There used to be an eye in Secor's right socket. Huncho's heart ached like a vein being cut in half, Enzo's most likely ditto.
"I don't think it was Diskrali. But I'm not sure what the heck happened. Secor, I felt so sunken when I - I saw him like that."
Huncho gulped the saliva that magnetised in his now conspicuous adam's apple. "Wow." He was left with no words to say. Huncho felt so bad that he accused Enzo of not telling him the full story. He thought that Enzo probably saw some bloody faces, more viscera, limbs torn off, and would not describe those events to him since that would make him depressed or scared. Maybe it would deliver Huncho a gehenna of pain. Maybe if Enzo had told him that his mates all died in horrible, inexplicable ways, it would be as if a nail kept poking and fretting that little concave area in the middle of a person's chest, until it reached the heart, and did not stop.
"Let's go back home." Enzo mouthed. He looked back and it seemed that a hoard of people may have been coming out of the restaurant.
Would it still be home if most of the residents were dead and their beds empty?