Mark Newton - The Broken Isles

Suddenly she disappeared from sight. Shit! He ran along the street down the entrances of every alley to see if he could spot her, but he found little but rotting food waste, cats, or old men urinating up against the wall. He continued for several minutes and, as time passed, his search seemed increasingly futile. Eventually, assuming he had lost her, he decided to head back the way he had come to the Citadel.

But then there , in one side street behind a destroyed theatre, where the old buildings of the Ancient Quarter met the debris of war, he spotted her hunched over in a corner. She was doing something, but in this light he couldn’t quite see what. He walked to the end of the street and cautiously poked his head around the corner from a slightly different angle.

She had something in her mouth, and he thought for a moment that she might have been eating litter, but it was something far worse.

Randur was agog.

You are shitting me. .

Rika was eating through an arm — one that was still connected to a corpse. She nibbled into it like a fevered fox. It seemed for a moment as if the ambient sounds of the city had fallen away entirely, and Randur could hear the sounds of delight and little groans of pleasure that Rika was emitting as she dined upon the dead flesh.

And the victim was indeed dead — he had been a young male with blond hair, still in his teens by the look of it. The dead boy’s head tilted backwards and both his mouth and eyes were open in an expression of sheer horror. His throat had been cut cleanly, marked by a line of blood, and a gore-covered blade lay beside his body on the ground. The sleeve of his coat had been ripped or sliced open to expose his arm, and a cap had fallen to one side.

Randur was vaguely aware that it might be a good idea to tell someone about this, and soon, but he couldn’t help but stare at the gruesome display. He waited to watch enough of what was going on to be utterly sure, to be confident that he was indeed watching the former head of the Jamur Empire chewing on human flesh.

Once the initial shock had worn off, Randur became entranced by her actions and tried to work out what she might be actually thinking. She was no longer normal — they all knew this — but how could a girl of religious purity transform in such a way?

Rika continued for several minutes, hunched as she devoured the flesh. She had begun with the arm, then moved on to one of the boy’s legs, which, Randur supposed, were logical, fleshy places if this was a wolf attacking, so was she genuinely hungry? He made the connection with her lack of appetite at dinner, though that was a bit vague.

She froze. She looked up.

Randur’s heart seemed to stop, and he tried to turn back before she could see his face, then sprinted along the street, jumped up on a crate, grabbed a piece of guttering and slithered into a concealed position on a flat rooftop.

His heart was racing and he was out of breath. But at least Rika had not seen him. Well, hopefully she had not seen him — he couldn’t be entirely sure.

Randur lay there for some time, for ten or twenty minutes, maybe even longer, every now and then peering over the side to see if she was still there.

Satisfied that he was safe, he slid back along the roof tiles and flipped himself down over the edge. He made his way back to the scene of the crime, curious. When he looked around the corner, Rika was no longer there. Randur approached the body and pushed it over with his boot: the neck wound was clear to see, as was the absence of flesh in certain areas. She had eaten her way through half an arm and just a little thigh.

This would need reporting.

He walked back to the main thoroughfare and eventually attracted the attention of a Dragoon out on city patrol. After a hurried explanation, he guided the slender, young soldier back towards the body, which was still there.

‘You sure you didn’t do this yourself, eh? Guilty conscience n’all that?’ the soldier replied.

Randur explained who he was, the companion of Eir, and where he had come from. ‘So I have better things to be doing with my time than chopping up strangers in dark alleys.’

‘Right you are, sir, I’ll get the lads to bring a stretcher and we’ll record this. You sure you didn’t see who did this?’

‘No,’ he lied. Randur waited for the logical question of Then how did you come to find the body? But it seemed this soldier was not the brightest of sorts.

‘OK,’ the soldier said, shaking his head. ‘You would’ve thought after all the fighting people would’ve seen enough killing, wouldn’t you?’

Randur walked hastily back towards the Citadel, constantly checking over his shoulder. The night was deepening, and he had been out for well over a couple of hours. He realized Eir would probably be worried and, no doubt, would berate him for not letting her know where he was going.

As he reached the streets within a few hundred yards of the approach to the Citadel, he could see there was something of a lively atmosphere growing. People were here in their hundreds, milling about the streets expectantly — and there were quite a few military types too. The noise grew. It seemed peculiar since a little while ago there was nobody about. Randur pushed his way forward, glancing to and fro to locate gaps in the crowd.

He turned to a middle-aged couple. ‘What’s going on here? Why’s everyone out and about?’

‘The Night Guard is back,’ the man replied. ‘There is news of their arrival tonight. They say they saved the lives of many thousands of people on Jokull.’

Randur thanked the couple and continued on to the Citadel.

The crowds were at their most dense immediately outside the front ramp, so he pushed his way around the side to one of the other entrances. He made his way inside, nodded to those guards he knew on the door, and quickly tried to process what he would do.

I’ll tell Eir — I’ll have to , he thought. It won’t be easy but there’s no other choice .

Up the stairs and along the corridors, he continually brushed past administrative staff busying themselves for the arrival of the Night Guard. Eir would, perhaps, be readying herself also. Breathlessly, and sweating from the adrenalin buzz, he went along the higher levels towards her quarters. The guards let him through swiftly, and he knocked on her door before entering.

Rika.

There she was, sitting opposite Eir at the table; Eir, now dressed in an ornate blue dress with heavy woollen shawl, stood up to greet him.

‘Randur, where have you been?’ she asked. ‘Have you not heard that the Night Guard are approaching the city? They were victorious! Brynd did it.’

‘Yeah, I heard talk of it and came back.’ Randur couldn’t take his eyes off Rika. He just kept staring at her, trying to gauge whether or not she knew he had been following her, and that he was aware of her vile secret. ‘I, uh, I needed some air. I’m sorry. I should have told you.’

‘It’s nothing to apologize about — I simply wondered. Are you feeling OK? You look a bit distressed.’

‘Nah, I’m fine,’ he replied. ‘So, was Rika out as well?’

‘Yes,’ Eir replied, ‘both of you it seems have become creatures of the night.’

Creatures of the night. . That sounds about right. Monstrous witch.

‘What did you get up to, Lady Rika?’ Randur asked as innocently as he could manage. He sauntered around to her side of the table, trying to get a closer look at her face, to see if there were any signs of her nocturnal habits.

‘I had a minor discussion with local business representatives. They were not trivial matters.’

‘Is that so.’ Randur eyed her a little longer, but there was nothing in her expression to suggest her terrible secret. For a brief moment, he began to doubt that he had seen her out at all, and that it had been his imagination playing tricks on him.