Barbara Hambly - Dragonsbane

Someone in the corridor held a lamp high. Its light showed small, stooped forms crowding in the broad hall beyond. Old and young, men and women, there must have been forty of them, with white, sloped, warty faces and round, fishlike eyes. The first through the doorway were the old man and the old woman, the Meewinks whom John had nearly shot that afternoon.

The old man held a rope; the woman, a cleaver.

The house of the Meewinks stood where the land lay low, on a knoll above a foul soup of mud and water from whose surface rotting trees projected like half-decayed corpses. Squat-built, it was larger than it looked—stone walls behind it showed one wing half-buried underground. In spite of the cold, the air around the place was fetid with the smell of putrefying fish, and Jenny closed her teeth hard against a queasiness that washed over her at the sight of the place. Since first she had known what they were, she had hated the Meewinks.

John slid from his dapple war horse Osprey’s back and looped his rein and Battlehammer’s over the limb of a sapling. His face, in the rainy darkness, was taut with a mingling of hatred and disgust. Twice households of Meewinks had tried to establish themselves near Alyn Hold; both times, as soon as he had learned of them, he had raised what militia he could and burned them out. A few had been killed each time, but he had lacked the men to pursue them through the wild lands and eradicate them completely. Jenny knew he still had nightmares about what he had found in their cellars.

He whispered, “Listen,” and Jenny nodded. From the house she could detect a faint clamor of voices, muffled, as if half-below the ground, thin and yammering like the barking of beasts. Jenny slid her halberd from the holster on Moon Horse’s saddle and breathed to all three mounts for stillness and silence. She sketched over them the spells of ward, so that the casual eye would pass them by, or think they were something other than horses—a hazel thicket, or the oddly shaped shadow of a tree. It was these same spells upon the camp, she knew, that had prevented Gareth from finding his way back to it, once what must have been the Whisperer had led him away.

John tucked his spectacles into an inner pocket. “Right,” he murmured. “You get Gar—I’ll cover you both.”

Jenny nodded, feeling cold inside, as she did when she emptied her mind to do some great magic beyond her power, and steeled herself for what she knew was coming. As they crossed the filthy yard and the strange, muffled outcry in the house grew stronger, John kissed her and, turning, smashed his booted foot into the small house’s door.

They broke through the door like raiders robbing Hell. A hot, damp fetor smote Jenny in the face as she barged through on John’s heels, the putrid stink of the filth the Meewinks lived in and of the decaying fish they ate—above it all was the sharp, copper-bright stench of new-shed blood. The noise was a pandemonium of yammering screams; after the darkness outside, even the smoky glow of the fire in the unnaturally huge hearth seemed blinding. Bodies seethed in a heaving mob around the small door at the opposite side of the room; now and then sharp flashes of light glinted from the knives clutched in moist little hands.

Gareth was backed to the doorpost in the midst of the mob. He had evidently fought his way that far but knew if he descended into the more open space of the big room he would be surrounded. His left arm was wrapped, shieldlike, in a muffling tangle of stained and filthy bedding; in his right hand was his belt, the buckle-end of which he was using to slash at the faces of the Meewinks all around him. His own face was streaming with blood from knife-cuts and bites—mixed with sweat, it ran down and encrimsoned his shirt as if his throat had been cut. His naked gray eyes were wide with a look of sickened, nightmare horror.

The Meewinks around him were gibbering like the souls of the damned. There must have been fifty of them, all armed with their little knives of steel, or of sharpened shell. As John and Jenny broke in, Jenny saw one of them crawl in close to Gareth and slash at the back of his knee. His thighs were already gashed with a dozen such attempts, his boots sticky with runnels of blood; he kicked his attacker in the face, rolling her down a step or two into the mass of her fellows. It was the old woman he had kept John from shooting.

Without a word, John plunged down into the heaving, stinking mob. Jenny sprang after him, guarding his back; blood splattered her from the first swing of his sword, and around them the noise rose like the redoubling of a storm at sea. The Meewinks were a small folk, though some of the men were as tall as she; it made her cringe inside to cut at the slack white faces of people no bigger than children and to slam the weighted butt of the halberd into those pouchy little stomachs and watch them fall, gasping, vomiting, and choking. But there were so many of them. She had kilted her faded plaid skirts up to her knees to fight and she felt hands snatch and drag at them, as one man caught up a cleaver from among the butcher’s things lying on the room’s big table, trying to cripple her. Her blade caught him high on the cheekbone and opened his face down to the opposite corner of his jaw. His scream ripped the cut wider. The stench of blood was everywhere.

It seemed to take only seconds to cross the room. Jenny yelled, “Gareth!” but he swung at her with the belt—she was short enough to be a Meewink, and he had lost his spectacles. She flung up the halberd; the belt wrapped itself around the shaft, and she wrenched it from his hands. “It’s Jenny!” she shouted, as John’s sword strokes came down, defending them both as it splattered them with flying droplets of gore. She grabbed the boy’s bony wrist, jerking him down the steps into the room. “Now, run!”

“But we can’t …” he began, looking back at John, and she shoved him violently in the direction of the door. After what appeared to be a momentary struggle with a desire not to seem a coward by abandoning his rescuers, Gareth ran. They passed the table and he caught up a meat hook in passing, swinging at the pallid, puffy faces all around them and at the little hands with their jabbing knives. Three Meewinks were guarding the door, but fell back screaming before the greater length of Jenny’s weapon. Behind her, she could hear the squeaky cacophony around John rising to a crescendo; she knew he was outnumbered, and her instincts to rush back to fight at his side dragged at her like wet rope. It was all she could do to force herself to hurl open the door and drag Gareth at a run across the clearing outside.

Gareth balked, panicky. “Where are the horses? How are we …?”

For all her small size, she was strong; her shove nearly toppled him. “Don’t ask questions!” Already small, slumped forms were running about the darkness of the woods ahead. The ooze underfoot soaked through her boots as she hauled Gareth toward where she, at least, could see the three horses, and she heard Gareth gulp when they got close enough for the spells to lose their effectiveness.

While the boy scrambled up to Battlehammer’s back, Jenny flung herself onto Moon Horse, caught Osprey’s lead-rein, and spurred back toward the house in a porridgey spatter of mud. Pitching her voice to cut through the screaming clamor within, she called out, “JOHN!” A moment later a confused tangle of figures erupted through the low doorway, like a pack of dogs trying to bring down a bear. The white glare of the witchlight showed Aversin’s sword bloody to the pommel, his face streaked and running with his own blood and that of his attackers, his breath pouring like a ribbon of steam from his mouth. Meewinks clung to his arms and his belt, hacking and chewing at the leather of his boots.