He awoke with a shiver—no, it was a distant snarl, not too distant.
He looked to the Feather in the Morning Sky above, as Reverent Arbor had called it at such times. The moon was barely a vision of an arrow fletch in the deep blue before dawn, as Trek wondered, with eyes cast skyward toward the Nightlands, how Cull had fared.
Well, and badly, I think.
You hated me, I know, hate me still down below.
Yes, I earned your hate learning Mud words, creeping where you crushed, slinking where you smashed. But we have made a story of this, you and I.
Trek, shivering, naked save for his grease paint, sitting bare-assed on the flat unnatural hilltop at the center of the Mud Combs where the Cumber River meets the Mud River, could not even see a hand or a foot from among the ruin of the enemy.
How, Cull, I ached—unlike you—to see Broodhome again, to stand before Reverent Arbor beneath the Oak Unbent. But I was not honest enough to admit it—Muddy ways rub in, they do.
The heap of shivered glass, shards of ancient rustless steel, and the blocks so old they had crumbled to dust, spread out and over the enemy, buried as they were by the toppling of the three-oak tall building that Reverent Arbor had pointed out to him in his youth, as a deadfall awaiting dead men, lacking only the wolfish mind to let it loose.
How I would like to see your clear eyes again, Reverent Arbor, to speak of ancient, unhallowed things beneath the holly wreathe at your door.
The Mud archers, the entire witless band with their Mudder scouts, blind, deaf and dumb without their hounds, had been easily enough detoured off the trail of Est, Fend and their reverent burden. Too easily, it had come to pass. Though he left a plain enough trace—not too clearly marked to cast suspicion of ambush or trap—the fools had lost his trace. Such a thing was unfathomable to a Nord—and had therefore killed him.
Even you could have traced me, Cull, singing your damned songs.
Trek had to return, to get in sight of the pursuers, to pluck their sensibilities. What Nord would have thought that a better archer, with a surer lead, than Trek, Long Looser of the Nords, would have feathered him at such a range? Not having slain a single one of the pursuers with his mighty bow, his only weapon other than his knife and dagger, Trek was feathered with an arm-long shaft just before his namesake hour.
Well, Cull, Defiler of Dens, I made a true enough bait then.
As his skin had grown evermore pale with the passing of night, and the muffled cries of the fools that had followed him past the leaning tower of old finally subsided from deep within their rubble tomb, he had much trouble staying awake, and few worries. His lung seared him with every breath, as the arrow had transfixed him from back through breast, just under the right shoulder blade. Among men of a tribe who yet lived he might be saved, as Reverent Chandler had. But alone, alone like the wolf without a pack, he died, dripped his life into the soul-eating earth and waited.
You have finally given up.
The mongrel pack of bastard wild dogs, thirteen in number, had sniffed the rubble mound all through the night, trying to dig out the ones that moaned beneath it. One had managed to tear loose a foot from a screaming thing entombed in the ancient ruin.
The snarl sounded closer now, answered by twelve others.
Raspy tongues licked cracked snouts.
Moistened snouts sniffed the blood-scented air.
Deep rumbles were heard within gaunt bodies.
Famished growls emerged from hairy throats.
The moon looked like a feather in the sky.
His body ached as he rose up, drawing his knife with his left, the dagger useless in his dead right hand, his single lung and little remaining blood barely enough to keep his feet, from spinning into Hel.
They came as one musky, slathering, roiling thing, a great hairy-backed beast, unstoppable in the half light, not even slowing when one of its mouths died choking on a great knife, a knife that was once feared up and down the Mud River, from delta to dunes, from the jagged Sarks to Cumberland.
Eat cousins, eat.
