Page 63 of The Malevolent Seven

‘Everythingabout this job stinks.’

‘And the brothers?’ I asked Vidra. ‘You only saw them the one time?’

‘Some of the younger folks sneak up the hill at night, looking to see what’s going on. They come back with stories of beasts on two legs, shadowy men in robes seen through the windows doing things to the spellers who entered the fortress. The kids say that sometimes, when the screams finally stop, they hear a buzzing in their heads, like when a mosquito gets lodged inside your ear.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s about all, though.’

There was something disturbing about the way she spoke, the lassitude in her expression when she described terrors that would have most people fleeing into the night, running as fast and as far as their legs would take them. Vidra, though– maybe all the people in this town, in fact– sounded inured to horror and sorrow.

‘Best you get on your way,’ she said to me. ‘He’ll be starting up again soon.’

‘Who?’

She pointed up at the baron’s corpse.

‘By all that’s holy,’ Galass cried, staring.

She was right to be shocked, for the scorched remains of the hapless baron’s skeleton were definitely twitching. It looked like the blood soot was coagulating around his bones, sticking to them like moss on a tree, then thickening into something like sinew and muscle. Soon enough, there was enough of him to start screaming again.

‘He’ll quiet down again once you’re gone,’ Vidra explained. ‘He only does this when there’s a speller nearby.’

‘Why do you stay here?’ I asked.

She scratched at her cheek, then stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked the powder from it. ‘We have thought about leaving,’ she said, not even appearing to notice what she’d just done. ‘When the baron took over the fortress a couple years back, he came down for a visit. He wasn’t like most of them– he knew a little of our language, enough to get me to agree to bring the whole town together. He said something real bad was coming to the Blastlands, that we should maybe all leave. Even offered us money to make the trip easier. Funny thing is, he didn’t seem surprised when we refused. Didn’t threaten us or kill anybody, just said he’d do his best to keep us out of the ugliness when it came.’

‘If this man offered you the means to leave, why did you stay?’ Aradeus asked.

Vidra knelt and scratched under her jaw, this time on purpose. She held it out for our inspection. ‘You see them red flecks?’

‘I’ve been calling it blood soot,’ I said.

The mayor smiled as if I’d said something amusing. ‘Fancy name. We just call it “the red”.’ She stuck out her tongue and licked it. ‘Foul stuff– gets in everything. The air. The soil. The food.’

Shame, looking now like one of the townsfolk, young but weathered to an early middle age, came over and scraped some of the flecks off Vidra’s hand. She put the stuff on her own tongue– then immediately spat it out.

‘Consecrated,’ she said.

‘“Consecrated”? You mean there’s ecclesiasm in it?’

Alice came over and knelt down to pick up a bit of the red soot between her claws. She too spat it out as soon as she tasted it. ‘The angelic is right.’

When Alice stood back up, she held out some of the clay soil in her hand. ‘In the Infernal demesne, ecclesiasm can be broken down into an even more fundamental element of creation– one that is present in all planes of reality. On its own, it’s unusable, but when mixed with the physical matter from our own plane, it promotes life like a kind of. . .’

‘Fertiliser?’ I asked.

‘If I understand the concept, something not dissimilar. It is what attunes crops to our natures, what makes them edible for us.’

‘And this?’ I asked, pointing to the handful of soil she held.

‘I could not eat food raised here.’

Alice turned to Shame, who shook her head. ‘Nor could an angelic. I am surprised the humans can tolerate it.’

Vidra gave that hoarse cough of hers again. ‘Tolerate it? No, we don’ttoleratethe crops that grow here. We can’t live without them. That’s why we can’t leave.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why would—?’

She cut me off. ‘Sometimes folks come through here on their way north to trade. They offer us food to show their goodwill. Stuff tastes fine– good, even. But it don’t. . . it’s like eating air.’ She patted her ribs through her dusty linen shirt. ‘Won’t stick to us, you follow? We can’t get anything from it.’

The baron’s screaming was rising in both volume and pitch.

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