Steven Erikson - Forge of Darkness

‘Then she will not wander lost.’

‘No,’ Faror replied.

‘And so,’ Spinnock added, amused once more, ‘this night shall see no revelations. By the fire’s light no answers will be found.’

‘It seems you understood Gallan well enough, Spinnock Durav.’

‘I grow older with every moment.’

She sighed. ‘As do we all.’

Captain Finarra Stone reined in, her eyes fixed upon the carcass thrown up on to the ragged shoreline of the sea. The bitter air had sweetened with the heavy stench of rotting meat. She had spent years patrolling Glimmer Fate, and the Outer Reach that was the verge of the Vitr Sea. Never before had a creature washed ashore, living or dead.

She had ridden far from her companions and it would be dark well before she managed to return to them. This time, however, she regretted her solitude.

The beast was enormous, yet so much of it had been devoured by the acidic Vitr that it was difficult to determine what manner of creature it might be. Here and there, along the back of the massive torso, ragged sheaths of scaled hide remained, bleached of all colour. Lower down, closer to the ground, the thick slabs of muscled flesh gave way to a curved fence-line of red-stained ribs. The pale sack encased by these ribs had ruptured, spilling rotting organs on to the ground, close to where the Vitr slowly lifted and fell on the quartzite sand.

The nearest hind limb, bent like that of a cat, reached up to a jutting hip bone, level with Finarra’s eyes as she sat astride her horse. There were remnants of a thick, tapering tail. The forelimbs seemed to be reaching for the shore, the hand of one stretched out with thick claws buried deep in the sands, as if the beast had been trying to climb free of the Vitr, but this seemed impossible.

Its head and neck were missing, and the stump between the shoulders looked chewed, torn by fangs.

She could not tell if the creature belonged to land or sea, and as far as she knew the mythical dragons were winged, and there was no evidence of wings behind the humped shoulders. Was this some earthbound kin to the legendary Eleint? She had no way of knowing, and among all the Tiste, only a few had ever claimed to have seen a dragon. Until this moment, Finarra had half believed those tales to be exaggerations — no beast in all the world could be as large as they had made them out to be.

Her horse shifting nervously beneath her, Finarra studied the stump of the neck, trying to imagine the weight of the head that those huge muscles had held aloft. She could see a large blood vessel, possibly the carotid, the severed end forming a mouth big enough to swallow a grown man’s fist.

Some vagary of air current carried the heavy stench towards them and her horse backed a step, hoofs thudding the sand.

At the sound, the stump lifted.

The breath froze in her lungs. She stared, motionless, as the nearest hand dug deeper into the glittering sands. The hind limbs bunched, pushed. The torso rose and then lurched further up the beach, thumping back down heavily enough to make the shoreline shiver. The reverberation awakened in Finarra a sudden sense of danger. She backed her horse away, watching that ghastly torn stump wavering about, blindly groping. The second arm twisted round, coming up beside its companion, to sink talons long as hunting knives into the sand.

‘You are dead,’ she told it. ‘Your head has been torn away. The Vitr dissolves your flesh. It is time to end your struggles.’

A moment of stillness, as if somehow the beast heard and understood her words, and then the creature heaved forward, straight for her, crossing the distance between them impossibly fast, one hand scything through the air.

Her horse reared, screamed. The bludgeoning, raking hand caught its forelimbs, shattering the wooden leaves of armour, twisting the animal round in the air. Finarra felt herself pitched downward to her left, felt the immense weight of her horse suddenly above her. Disbelieving, overwhelmed by the impossibility of her death, she sensed one booted foot slipping free of the stirrup — but it would not be enough; already they were falling together.

The second hand came from the other side. She caught a flash of talons scything close, filling her vision, and then there was an impact and the horse’s scream cut off abruptly, and Finarra was spinning through the air.

She landed hard on her left shoulder, facing back the way she had come, and saw the carcass of her horse, its head and most of its neck torn away. The beast had lunged again, savaging the horse with its hands. Bones splintered to drumming concussions, blood pouring out on to the sand.

Then the demon fell still once more.

Pain was filling Finarra’s shoulder. A bone had broken and fire was lancing down her arm, numbing the hand. She fought to control her breathing, lest the creature hear her — she did not believe it was dead, and indeed wondered if death was even possible for a beast such as this one. Sorcery held its life-force, she suspected, an elemental defiance against all reason, and if the Vitr had worked its absolute dissolution, devouring even its bones, something shapeless yet white-hot would now reside on this shore, washed up from the depths, as virulent as ever.

Teeth clenched against the waves of pain, Finarra began pushing herself away, heels digging into the sand. She froze when she saw the beast flinch, the severed neck trembling. Then a shudder took the entire body, violent enough to tear flesh, and the demon seemed to sag, sinking down until a swath of hide on its flank facing her began to show bulges, and then split, the broken ends of ribs pushing through.

She waited a dozen heartbeats, and then resumed her slow, tortured retreat up the slope of sand. At one point her boot dislodged a fist-sized rock that broke under her heel, but the crunching snap elicited no response from the beast. Emboldened, she drew her legs under her and regained her feet, her left arm hanging useless and swollen at her side. Turning, she mapped out her avenue of retreat between boulders, and then cautiously set out.

Reaching the high ground she turned about and looked down on the now distant creature. She’d lost her saddle and all the gear bound to it. She could make out her lance, a weapon she’d possessed since her Day of Blood, half its length pinned under the carcass of her horse. And her mount had been a loyal companion. Sighing, she faced east and set out.

As the day’s light faded, Finarra was faced with a decision: she had been walking along the boulder-strewn ridgeline above the beach, but her pace was slow, made more difficult by her useless arm. If she set off down to the beach… she had to admit to herself a new fear of that shoreline. There was no telling if the beast that had dragged itself ashore marked a solitary intrusion. There could well be others, and what she might in the gloom imagine to be a boulder could prove to be another such creature, that had crawled up higher on the strand. Her other choice was to cut inland, on to the flatter verge of Glimmer Fate, where the grasses had died, leaving nothing but gravel and dusty earth. The risk in that, with night fast approaching, would come from the high grasses — the naked wolves were not averse to pursuing prey into the lifeless area.

Still, she could pick up her pace on the level ground, and so reach her companions that much sooner. Finarra drew out the long-bladed sword that had once belonged to her father, Hust Henarald. It was a silent weapon, predating the Awakening, water-etched and a known breaker. Serpentine patterns flowed up the length of the blade, coiling at the hilt. Off to her left the Vitr Sea was an ethereal glow and she could see its play on the polished iron of the sword.

Finarra swung inland, threading past the rotted boulders until she reached the verge of the plain. She eyed the wall of black grasses off to her right. There were darker gaps in it, marking some of the hidden paths forged by the beasts dwelling in Glimmer Fate. Many were small, used by deer-like animals the Wardens saw but rarely, and even then as little more than a flash of scaled hide, a blur of a serrated back and a high, slithering tail. Other gaps could easily accommodate a horse, and these belonged to the tusked heghest, a kind of reptilian boar, massive and ill-tempered; but the passage of these beasts through the high grasses eschewed stealth and she would hear any approach from some distance. Nor could a heghest outrun a mounted Warden: the animals were quick to tire, or perhaps lose interest. Their only enemy was the wolves, evinced by the occasional carcass found on the plain, in trampled clearings drenched in blood and torn pieces of hide.