Philip Athans - Lies of Light

6 Hammer, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

BERRYWILDE

Phyrea watched it eating, and it was the most horrifying thing she’d ever seen.

After only the first few bites the mystery of what had been killing the workers at her father’s vineyard had been explained. They’d blamed one animal after another; hunted for wolves, then bears, then giant boars. The remains had always been found in the morning-bones with a few strips of bloody flesh or tendon hanging from them like threads off the edge of an old blanket. They never found the skulls.

At first, Phyrea didn’t pay any attention. She didn’t even know anything was wrong at the camp until a tenday and a half and six murders had passed. It had been more than three months since she’d left Berrywilde for Innarlith, and she wasn’t happy about having to go back.

The ghosts had come with her, but at least in the city she didn’t feel so alone with them, so much like them.

But when her father told her about the murders, complained that the workers were beginning to desert the site and the winery construction was woefully behind schedule, something nudged at her. She wanted to call it guilt, but wasn’t sure what the feeling was. It wasn’t as though she had killed and eaten those men herself. She’d been miles away when it happened, but the voices that spoke to her when no one was there seemed to relish the news of the murders. They took some kind of spiteful glee in the fact that something was eating those innocent men. It was the feeling that they knew something she didn’t that brought her back to the country estate. Her own instincts, and her sense of smell, brought her to the ghast.

It didn’t see her, hear her, or smell her. At least it hadn’t yet. Phyrea wanted to look away from it, but couldn’t. In the dim starlight it was difficult at first to tell that it wasn’t human-or at least was no longer human. She had heard of things like it before-ghouls-undead creatures that feasted on the flesh of humans, but what was killing the workers was something similar, but stronger, more dangerous.

Phyrea sighed.

The ghast took another bite, a huge mouthful of bloody skin from the dead man’s thigh. It came away with a tearing sound, duller than fabric. Thick blood pattered on the wet grass. The thing’s jagged fangs ripped the skin and meat into strips that it gulped down with undisguised relish. Its burning red eyes rolled back slightly in its misshapen skull, and its shoulders twitched. The ghast’s purple flesh was the color of a bruise, but a single bruise that covered its entire bony, naked form. Even from a distance Phyrea could smell rotting flesh, decaying meat, blood both old and new … the odor of a crypt.

You made that , a voice-one she had come to associate with the old woman who’d lost the skin from the side of her face in what must have been a terrible fire-echoed in Phyrea’s mind.

Pretty, pretty thing , a little girl’s voice added.

Phyrea tried to answer with a feeling of impatience. She tried to tell them to be quiet without words, and for the moment at least it seemed to have worked.

They were well outside the perimeter torches of the work camp-far enough that no one could hear the ghast feed. The workers who remained, and the guards her father had hired to protect them, slept as soundly as they could knowing that the murders were still going on. Phyrea couldn’t see in the dark any better than any other human girl her age, but the starlight would just have to be enough.

You don’t want to see it any better anyway , a man’s voice told her.

She smiled, nodded, and took a step closer to the still-feeding ghast. It didn’t hear her first step, and went on chewing with the same calm abandon. She had the gentle winter breeze in her face, so had reason to hope that the undead cannibal couldn’t smell her either.

As she moved closer still, one silent footstep at a time, she wrapped the fingers of her right hand around the pommel of her sword. The grip tingled at her touch, almost as though the beautiful blade were trying to communicate with her. She’d been getting that feeling more and more from the sword she’d found in the hidden tomb beneath her family’s country manor. Like before, she ignored it. The weapon felt good when she used it, so she let it nettle her when she wasn’t.

Though the blade didn’t make the faintest whisper of a sound when it left the scabbard, the ghast looked up when she drew it. Perhaps the finely crafted, wave-shaped blade had caught a bit of the starlight. Maybe the creature finally smelled her despite the cool breeze. It could have heard the toe of her boot sink into the rain-soaked, muddy grass.

It can taste you already , the burned old crone told her. It remembers you .

Remembers me? she thought, and was answered with the feeling of morbid amusement.

The ghast growled and lunged at her. She stepped back, skipping on the tips of her toes, and brought her sword up in front of her. She stopped, and froze for half a heartbeat, for two reasons. First, she was hit by the stench like she’d fallen from a tree onto her head. And second, she recognized the thing.

Closer, a break in the gathering clouds letting through just enough starlight to reveal it’s violet-hued features, she could see its face. Skin stretched taut over its skull, it appeared to be a man who hadn’t eaten in weeks. Stretched back over teeth that would have been even more horrifying to the man it had once been, its cracked lips drew back into something that might have been a smile.

“You,” the ghast said, its voice a desiccated mockery of its living counterpart. “I know you.”

“Yes,” Phyrea replied. “Yes.”

“It’s you,” the thing hissed.

Phyrea tried to speak again but gagged instead. The smell of the thing was thick in the air. She could taste it as much as smell it. The damp night around her had a greasy quality to it. Bile rose in her throat, and she found herself fighting just to breathe. Her lungs at once lusted for air and rejected the putrescence, and they had no choice but to inhale.

“Why?” the ghast asked, and Phyrea thought it was going to cry.

She shook her head and coughed. The ghast took that as an opportunity to lunge at her, its yellowed talons out in front of it to rake her flesh from her bones. Its fang-lined mouth opened wide. If she could have breathed, she would have screamed, but instead she acted.

Was it her arm that reacted or the sword itself? She didn’t know, but in the moment, she didn’t care. All she knew was that the blade took one of the ghast’s hands off at the wrist before the claws could touch her.

The undead thing scrambled back, screeching so loudly that Phyrea’s eyes closed against the sound. The cry was one part pain, one part anger, and it was the second part that snapped Phyrea’s eyes open as fast as they’d shut. It was going to come at her again.

The sword once again moved her arm, pulling at her. She stabbed at the ghast, letting the enchanted blade do the work for her. The wavy steel sank deep into the thing’s chest, releasing black blood that fell in clumps to the ground. The smell made her stomach twist and her eyes water. She was too close to the thing and tried to back away, tried to pull the sword out of it, but the blade only went deeper.

“What now?” the ghast rattled, it’s voice like the last gasp of a drowning man.

A chorus of voices, none of them her own, echoed in Phyrea’s head: Obliteration .

“Obliteration,” she whispered to the man she’d killed three months before.

“No,” the ghast whimpered.