20. RHYDIAN
20
RHYDIAN
W e passed through the forest unhindered for two hours, but the closer we got to the station the more I started to worry. What if it was someone else picking off the Hunters? It had been a year since we’d located the last Rabid in the Deadwood and given it mercy, perhaps we missed one?
Train stories claim before the rail became a prison, Mortusilva, The Deadwood was used as a hunting ground. Devolved Humans like myself who carried taints in their blood were decreed by Kensilla as The Quarry, a species who were to be culled. So whenever one of my kind crossed over Kensilla’s borders they were hunted down and slaughtered. Those who survived were said to have become wild and deranged, forced to survive in the forest with only their taint for survival. Someone rabid.
They had once roamed this forest in numbers too great to count. It had taken three generations to mercy their numbers. Perhaps someone, one of the Hunters had thought it would make the Hunt more exciting, more exhilarating and entertaining to set another Rabid loose in the forest where their ability to determine friend from foe was starved and tortured from them.
I widened my senses, but I never detected the erratic beat of a Rabid’s heart.
We had another thirty-minute walk uphill before we reached the station. We had just passed through the thickest part of the woods when I sensed the blood.
Instinctively, I increased the speed of my blood flow. Within moments my sight improved, adjusting to the dark. I knew this forest like the back of my hand, so traversing it at night had never been an issue, but fighting in the dark required my taint. My ears picked up nothing but the sound of insects.
“What do you smell?” I asked,
“Blood. Old. Several hours. You?”
“The same.” I couldn’t sense anyone either.
Rieka lowered the supply cache sack to the floor, the ground silent upon the motion and she began moving in the direction of the blood, drawn to it the same as me.
We walked twenty feet before we saw it. A dark pool glistened at the base of a tree, a bloody arrow, pulled from a wound, dispersed on the ground beside it. Rieka crouched down low, her nostrils flaring.
“Injured Fabricant,” she told me, then adding with a tone of certainty, “A Spindle.” Another thing to add to the list of things I didn’t know about this woman. She may be Stilled but her sense of smell was unnaturally precise for a Brute.
Rieka followed the trail and then stopped. “It’s fresh here.”
“No more than an hour,” according to my own senses.
“She’s hurt.”
The blood was spiked with adrenaline.
“She was running when she was struck. Come on. The trail goes this way.” Rieka indicated along the bottom of the rise.
“It could be a trap.”
“What if she’s one of yours?”
Rieka’s eyes narrowed as she watched me dip a finger into the blood pool and bring it to my lips.
A flash of a life swam behind my eyes. A mere few seconds passed, and I knew.
“It’s Peia. She’s one of Sal’s girls in MedCom.”
Rieka didn’t wait for another response. Feet light to the ground she proceeded along the rise following the trail. The blood got fresher the further from the hill we trekked.
“There she is!”
Rieka caught sight of the injured woman less than five feet away, clothes torn and bleeding from her abdomen. She was kneeling in the middle of a clearing.
Too late did I react.
The moment Rieka passed into the clearing I could no longer sense her. Peia had not existed to my senses and so when Rieka passed through the perimeter of the Void trap, nor did she.
I’d rushed to grab her hand before she crossed only to find myself lifted into the air, having sprung a trap. A net fit for a bear confined me. The braided rope workings had been entirely transmuted into Alchemist steel, unbreakable and invulnerable to human weapons. Like an animal in a snare, I hung ten feet above the forest floor and with no weapon in hand.
My shouts for Rieka to run were drowned out when a cry ripped through the air, tearing at my ears. The surety with which I knew one of my eardrums had perforated was the same with which I knew the Hunter was subjecting us to an Echo’s Cry. Powerful and incredibly painful.
Rieka and Peia both curled in on themselves, hands covering their ears when the Hunter emerged from behind the injured woman. He leaned down, gripped her by the hair pulling upward and slit her throat.
I could sense nothing of the freshly strewn blood when it seeped from the dying woman’s neck.
Resheathing his knife the Hunter approached Rieka, her body twisting low to the ground as she tried desperately to regain her footing. He was no less than five feet away when I saw his bare face. Cold hollow eyes. A predator. The man wore no mask. The mark of a hunter who feared nothing and one who never failed to kill his prey. I could see Rieka rise to stand, her body in a position nearly identical to one I’d just taught her, and she struck at him.
I watched the movement of his lips over the sound of the sonic cry. “Stop.”
Rieka did.
I shouted at her to run away but she did not move. Could she not hear me?
Again the Hunter spoke. “Stand up.” Rieka obeyed the order, sending a chill down my spine.
Other than my own, I knew of only one other taint that could compel a person against their will. The Hunter was using Charmer’s vapour to control her.
He was going to kill Rieka and there wasn’t a thing in this godsdamned world I could do to stop him.
“You really don’t want me as your prize,” were the words Rieka’s lips formed. A useless emotional appeal to one who saw our kind as animals.
“Oh, but I do.” He closed the distance between them, the seven collars on his arm glinting in the moonlight as he raised it to her face. Rieka flinched as he lifted a black-gloved hand to a white strand of hair that had fallen to her cheek, twirling it around a finger.
He moved closer, the angle obstructing my sight. I could only read two words on his lips. “...enjoy this.”
He inched ever so close towards her, so close that his face was in the crook of her neck. Was he smelling her?
I struggled in the net, shifting to find a hold, to stand, to do anything to get out. I had to get out of here or he was going to gut her open and watch her bleed out. Just like he had Peia.
The Hunter’s hand slipped down to her arm, then across to her hip where he grabbed it and spun her around, forcing Rieka to press her back up against him. Intimately.
A sinking feeling ebbed at my stomach and I glanced over at Peia’s body. Her clothes weren’t torn, they’d been ripped open.
I shook the net violently, screaming beneath the ear-splitting sound of the bottled Echo’s cry for him to release her. A useless plea, and an involuntary one.
I leaned forward trying to stretch around for the pin in my hair. I’d never tried my taint on Alchemist Steel before, but at this point, I was willing to try anything.
My eyes still locked on the inhuman creature with Rieka, with one hand wrapped around the base of her throat, the Hunter slid the other across her stomach to her coat buttons, where he unfastened one and then another until he could freely examine her chest.
As his hand moved up towards her breasts, a look fell upon her face. Rage. Pure unadulterated rage and I watched as Rieka’s lips mouthed a word I didn’t recognise.
In an instant, the Hunter was flung backward by some invisible force crashing into the forest floor. A feat impossible for any species except—
She can’t be!
The Hunter’s shock was short-lived, the moment he regained his footing, drawing his blade once again, Rieka had surprised him.
Claws emerging from long feminine fingers tore through the forearm of the Hunter and straight through his armour. A howl of pain ripped from the man. Fangs were drawn, eyes turned amber and the most unsettling howl I’d ever heard from an Apex erupted from Rieka’s lungs. The Hunter stumbled back in shock, but she gave him no time to refocus.
Rieka ran for the man, using a nearby tree for leverage. She sprung off the trunk and came down upon the much taller man, her claws racking across his bare face. As he collapsed, she jumped upon his chest, hands striking down haphazardly in a ravenous and bloody manner, pink misting the air.
The fatal blow was fast. Rieka grabbed his head and gripped the hair on his head, lifting it to bare his neck before she sunk her teeth in. A final ruby splatter filled the air as she released him.
The Hunter’s body fell hard to the ground, limp, the forest floor turning scarlet as blood pumped from the gaping wound where his windpipe had once been.
Rieka stood and simply stared at the dead man.
She didn’t move. She just stared at him as the blood crawled ever so close to her feet.
Rieka .
Silence.
Rieka!
Nothing.
“Wife!”
Her head snapped around. Eyes dark and rimmed with gold, those wells of pain found me, a snarl half-formed that vanished as fast as the rage had first emerged. The predator, a creature of fury, vanished. Rieka’s expression fell to one of startled surprise. Her gaze lowered to her surroundings, to the body at her feet, to the blood on her hands.
She crouched back down over the Hunter’s corpse, his face frozen in an expression of terror and began rifling through his armour. She found something and displaced it on the forest floor. Then she stood and in one swift move, drove her boot down hard onto the item.
The Echo’s cry died.
In utter silence, Rieka walked towards me, to the tree that held the knot to the net and released it. I fell to the ground fast, the pain of the hit bearable enough that I was able to roll into the fall to avoid getting the wind knocked out of me and came to a stop a few feet from the body.
She had utterly destroyed the man. He was unrecognisable, his face was shredded, his chest open to the air in a series of long gaping cross-hatched gashes that bared claw-carved bones to the world.
“We should go.” The words were all I could manage as my mind tried to piece together the riddle that was Rieka. I’d taken her for a Stilled Brute, cursed by the gods to be unable to use her taint, a punishment for her crime of killing a god. But that couldn’t account for the mind speak, the fact she had survived the Lobby, and now this.
Rieka is a T'eiryash ?
I knew they were real, how of all the species of Tainted, they were the ones who did not conform to our lore and how they still retained their connection to the gods who blessed them. I knew humans often maimed those they suspected of being able to speak Gods’ Tongue, and that more often than not, those allegations turned out to be false. I just never expected to meet one in the flesh.
Trying to absorb this new revelation, I gathered up the collars of the dead man and tucked them inside my jacket.
Turning back around to face her, I found Rieka still standing where I’d last seen her by the tree, only her gaze was fixated on the crimson state of her gloves.
“Rieka.”
She lifted her head slowly out of her stupor. “Coming,” she replied, her voice hollow.
When we got back to the supply cache at the bottom of the hill, I took out the water skin and proceeded to wash my hands with its contents. Then without a word, I handed it to her where she did the same, first to clean her hands, and then to wash off the blood that had rendered her face into a scarlet mask.