The sundered seal

Chapter Three: The First Abomination at the Border

They reached the northern wall in less than four minutes, and in that time Dorran did not speak a single word.

He flew low and fast over the rooftops, cloak whipping behind him, with Lyra at his right shoulder and Kaelen a little to the left. The streets below had begun to fill with startled townsfolk spilling from their houses in nightclothes, children clutched against their mothers' shoulders, old men peering up at the three flying figures with the stunned faces of those who suspect they already know the answer to a question they dare not ask. Dorran paid them no attention. His eyes were fixed on the line of torches burning along the wall, and on the shape that had begun to move beyond them.

The wall of Dawnhollow was not a great fortress. It was a timber palisade, twice the height of a tall man, built generations ago against wolves and bandits and the occasional hungry bear. A walkway ran along the inner face of it, where the watchmen stood in pairs, and on the night of the Lantern Walk there had been twenty of them posted along the northern stretch.

Now there were seventeen.

"Where are the others?" Dorran demanded, landing hard on the walkway beside the captain of the watch, a lean, grizzled woman named Brenna Voss.

"Gone, my lord." Her voice was steady, but her knuckles were white around the haft of her spear. "Fenn and Aldis went down to investigate the noise. Marek followed them. I told them to wait. I told them." She swallowed. "We have not heard from them since."

Dorran looked out over the wall.

The land north of Dawnhollow was open pasture, rolling away in gentle swells towards the distant hills. In daylight it was a green and peaceful sight. By torchlight it was a grey sea of shadows, and in the middle of those shadows, perhaps two hundred paces from the wall, something was kneeling.

It was a man-shaped thing. Kaelen saw that first, and the knowledge turned something cold in his stomach. It was shaped like a man, but it was wrong in every particular. The limbs were too long, bent at angles that no joint should allow. The skin hung from it in loose grey folds, mottled with black veins that seemed to pulse faintly in the firelight. Its head was lowered, almost reverently, over something on the ground, and the sound that reached the wall was a wet, ripping, grateful sound that Kaelen would hear in his dreams for years afterwards.

"Gods," whispered one of the younger watchmen. "Gods above, it is eating him."

"Hold your tongue," said Brenna Voss sharply, but there was no strength in it.

The thing lifted its head.

Its face had once been a face. That was the horror of it. There were still two eyes, though they had turned a clouded, sickly yellow, and a nose, and a mouth that had been stretched far beyond its proper width and lined with teeth that were too many and too crooked. Black fluid ran from the corners of its jaw. It stared at the wall, at the torches and the tiny figures standing behind them, and then it rose slowly to its full height, which was easily nine feet, and opened its mouth.

The scream that came out of it was the sound that had begun the night.

Several watchmen dropped their spears and clapped their hands over their ears. Lyra staggered, her wind faltering, and had to grip the palisade to keep from falling. Even Dorran flinched. Only Kaelen stood motionless, staring across the field, and a strange and terrible thought was forming at the edge of his mind.

"Father," he said slowly. "Look at what it is wearing."

Dorran looked. The creature's body was draped in what remained of a rough woollen coat, stained and torn but unmistakable in cut. Strapped to its back, half buried in the grey flesh as though the body had swollen around it, was a shepherd's crook.

"It is the shepherd," said Kaelen. "The one who came down from the mountains. The one with the dreams."

Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to.

The thing began to run.

It did not run as a man runs, or even as an animal does. It ran like something that had forgotten the purpose of running and remembered only the hunger, in great, lurching, uneven bounds that tore up the earth beneath its feet. It covered the two hundred paces in the space of a dozen heartbeats.

"Archers!" Brenna Voss roared. "Loose!"

A volley of arrows hissed down from the wall. Most of them missed. Three struck true, thudding into the creature's chest and shoulder, and it did not so much as slow. It reached the foot of the palisade and flung itself upward, long fingers clawing at the timber, and the entire wall shuddered under its weight.

"Lyra," said Dorran quietly.

"I have it."

She stepped to the edge of the walkway, raised both hands, and drew in a breath. The air around her bent. Torchlight flickered and streamed sideways. Then she brought her arms down in a single clean sweep, and a blade of compressed wind, invisible and singing, struck the creature across the chest.

It was a blow that could have cut a tree in half. It opened the thing from collarbone to hip, and black blood sprayed against the timber, and the abomination reeled backward with a gurgling shriek.

And then, impossibly, it kept coming.

The wound was already closing. Kaelen could see it, the torn flesh knitting itself together in ragged, unnatural strands, the black veins writhing beneath the surface like worms. The creature caught the lip of the palisade with one enormous hand and began to haul itself over.

Dorran moved. He did not shout or raise his voice. He simply stepped forward, drew the heavy sword at his belt, and brought it down in a clean, brutal arc through the creature's outstretched wrist. The hand fell away. The thing howled. Dorran struck again, and again, driving it back from the wall, and Kaelen realised with a distant kind of awe that he had never truly seen his father fight before. The gentle, patient leader of Dawnhollow had vanished. In his place was a man who had been trained since boyhood to kill, and who remembered every lesson.

But the creature was strong, and it was relentless, and it did not feel pain. When Dorran's blade bit deep into its shoulder, it simply lunged through the wound and seized him by the arm.

"Father!" Lyra cried.

Kaelen did not think. He simply acted, as he would remember doing a hundred times in the years to come. He threw himself forward, off the walkway, over the edge of the palisade and down into the dark, and as he fell he raised both his hands and let the light come.

It poured out of him like water from a broken dam, golden and warm and blinding. It washed over the creature and over his father and over the whole stretch of wall in a single breathless instant, and for a heartbeat the world seemed to hold still.

The abomination froze.

Its yellow eyes widened. Its grip on Dorran's arm slackened. The black veins in its face flickered, dimmed, and, for the briefest sliver of a second, receded. Kaelen saw it with perfect clarity. Beneath the grey and the ruin and the rot, there was a face. A weathered, bewildered, human face, with kind eyes and a deep furrow between the brows. A man who had spent his life minding goats on a cold hillside, and who was looking at Kaelen now with an expression of utter and desperate confusion.

"Please," said a voice that was not quite a voice. It was a whisper, a breath, a memory of speech. "Please. I do not know what is happening to me."

Then the light faltered, and Kaelen's strength went out of him all at once, and the black veins surged back across the thing's face like a tide returning. The eyes clouded over. The mouth tore wide.

Dorran, freed by the shock of the moment, drove his sword through the creature's throat and then, with a grunt of effort, through its skull.

The shepherd's body collapsed against the base of the wall. It twitched twice. Then it lay still.

Silence followed, long and heavy and broken only by the crackling of the torches.

Kaelen was on his knees in the grass. His hands were shaking. His head was spinning, and a strange numbness had settled into his arms, as though he had been holding up a great weight for far too long. Above him, Lyra dropped lightly to the ground and caught him by the shoulders.

"Kaelen. Kaelen, look at me. Are you hurt?"

"No," he managed. "No, I am only tired."

"What did you do?" she whispered. "The light. It was different. It was brighter than I have ever seen it."

"I do not know." He stared at the body at the foot of the wall. "Lyra, he spoke. Did you hear him? He spoke to me."

"It was a monster, Kaelen."

"It was a man." His voice cracked. "It was a man, and he was afraid, and I could not help him."

Dorran came slowly down from the walkway. He was bleeding from a deep gash in his forearm, and his face was grey with exhaustion, but he walked to his son and knelt beside him and placed a heavy hand on the back of his neck.

"You saved my life," he said quietly. "Do not forget that, whatever else you remember about tonight."

"Father, the wound," said Lyra. "Let me see it."

She took his arm gently and turned it to the torchlight, and then she went very still.

Around the edges of the gash, where the creature's nails had torn the skin, a thin dark line was spreading outwards. It was fine as a thread and black as ink, and it moved, slowly, along the veins of her father's wrist.

Dorran looked at it for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was calm in the way that very frightened men are calm.

"Kaelen," he said. "I think I will need your light again."

On the horizon, beyond the northern hills, a second scream rose into the night. Then a third. Then a dozen, overlapping, rising and falling like the baying of some vast and terrible pack.

The mist was moving. And something was moving inside it.