Chapter 9 – Dangerous Creatures
The devils had come to Nandre first.
For generations, the tiny mountain village had scraped a meager living from the hillsides of the Berlawe Mountains, sowing the few crops that would consent to grow in the stony soil.
Poverty made an unlikely shield, but an effective one; whenever Valleth came, the villagers had only to retreat to the nearby mines until they went away. Nothing in Nandre was worth a siege.
We are made of sterner stuff than stone, they said to each other, a mantra that held true from one generation to the next.
Over a century of occupation, as so many other villages and towns were sacrificed to the Lord of Tales, many converted to his worship, hoping to be spared.
But Nandre never lost their faith in the stars.
Valleth must have suffered many defeats, for him to have come so far.
It would be some time before anyone connected those defeats with the arrival of the goat-stealers.
That was one of the problems, in the beginning.
Everyone had a different name for the things that had appeared in the night, and often it seemed they were not even describing the same thing.
In Meinhem, the great wolves came first, the swiftest of the devils, howling outside their stout log houses, smashing against the walls as if they were mad with foaming sickness.
On the high, precarious cliffs of Raida, they called them the slinkers and thought they were some new Vallethi scout, killing the night watchmen in advance of a raid.
And in Nandre, where the mountain scrub would not support any animal larger than goats, it was the disappearance of the livestock that first indicated something was out there, in the dark.
Was it dogs stealing them? Wolves? They began to hear the noises of both in the night, snarling, rasping growls, and distant howls that froze the blood.
“I’ll see to the beasties myself,” said Fridolin Creit, who had been one of the richest men in the village until four of his goats went missing.
And that was how he became the first human casualty of the devils.
For at sunrise, the pen with the goat he had staked out as bait was empty, and so was his perch in a nearby tree.
The people of Nandre began to catch glimpses of…
something, at dawn and twilight. Furtive shapes in the trees, scrabbling away from the sunlight.
Nandre was high enough in the mountains that the trees were fairly sparse, especially near the village itself, where the land had long been denuded to feed the hearth fires.
It likely saved some of the village children.
In Raida, Selgin, and three times in the old forest of Meinhem, it was children that went missing, rather than livestock.
The first clear sighting of a devil was on August 12, 822, when a sleepy Nelle Vittelich went out early to milk the goats.
Only a few months earlier, Nelle had given birth to one of those ice-blond babies, and that was why she rose early, to spare her husband the chores.
Donatin swore he didn’t blame her for what had happened by the stream, but Nelle felt herself shamed and disgraced forever.
It was her fault she had gone alone, her fault she had not heard the Vallethi warband coming, and her fault that she had not been quick enough to escape.
That was why she was star-cursed with a bastard babe, a child she could barely stand to look at.
When she arrived at the stable, there was more misfortune waiting. The door was already ajar, and one of the new baby goats was lying dead just inside.
Nelle clicked her tongue. This would upset her daughter Amalie, who had been hand-raising the kids after an unusual triple birth. It was rare for all three to survive in such case, but it had looked as if the runt might just pull through. Now all of them were dead, lying sightless in the straw.
At the back of the stable, there was a noise. An uncanny chuckling, rasping and breathy, and Nelle’s head lifted. For the first time, she found herself looking into the huge, lambent eyes of the creature everyone would soon call strangler.
“Monster,” she breathed, taking a wobbling step backward.
It was skinny, bony, bald, but close enough to human that she hesitated, wondering whether it might not be some feral, motherless thing.
But then its lipless mouth peeled back from rotten teeth and she stumbled toward the door, tripping over the dead goats. “Monster! Monster!”
It was so fast, she only had time for one good scream before it was on her, its breath rasping in her ear.
They rolled together into the shadowy yard and those long limbs wound around her, legs clamping tight, bony hands seeking her throat.
Its hands were almost like a human’s, but long and thin, with an extra joint on each finger.
Unable to break free, Nelle threw herself sideways, rolling over, fighting for every inch toward the house.
The fight saved her life. The first rays of sunlight struck the mountain peaks and tipped over them, and the thing gave a grating scream.
“Nelle? Nelle!” Donatin burst from the house, cursing and grabbing for a spade. His arms swung up and slammed the hard edge against the devil’s head until it let go, and Nelle scrambled free, coughing and gagging.
The thing burst into flames.
It was impossible to say whether the spade killed it, but the sickly green devil’s fire certainly finished it off.
All over the valley, others were having similar encounters.
On the Talfel Plateau, Sir Huber Adaman lost five horses to a pack of ghouls one night, when they got into the corral and tore the horses’ legs off, then couldn’t escape the slippery abattoir by sunrise.
In Selgin, a blacksmith named Herdegen had a nasty shock one morning when he encountered a wolf demon out by the woodpile, only to be saved by the sunlight as he was fighting it off with a hammer.
It was this common trait that named all of them devils, in the end. Crooked, wicked creatures, unquestionably evil, who could not bear the touch of the sun.
But as disturbing as the devils were, the Andelin had been under Vallethi occupation for a hundred years.
The horrors of the Lord of Tales were supplemented by the more prosaic dangers of the Andelin wildlife.
There were bears. Timber wolves, shaggy and cunning, which made off with sheep and occasionally small children.
Foxes. Maned bobcats with tufted ears. On the plateau, there were the coursing cats, leggy felines with pale gold stripes, fast enough to run down a horse at full gallop.
Fortunately, they weren’t big enough to attempt anything larger than a Talfel antelope.
Thus, after the initial shock of the devils, they became just another hazard, in time.
To be sure, it was strange and frightening; it would give anyone a start to suddenly see the huge eyes of a strangler in the dark, and the deafening howl of a wolf demon caused more than a few sleepless nights.
But until the spring of 826, everyone just took care to be indoors by nightfall, and barred their doors with iron.
“It’s not going to hold.”
“It will hold.”
In one of Meinhem’s sturdy timber cottages, a woodsman named Girnot Briouse moved between his wife and the door with a hatchet in his hand, the largest weapon available. The peasants of the Andelin Valley could rarely spare the iron for something so impractical as a sword.
“Get the children up into the rafters,” he said, on sudden inspiration, and boosted up his son himself, the eight-year old boy weeping as he clutched at the rough timbers, only nine feet overhead.
His wife Liberie was too big to fit between the close rafters, and their three year-old was too young to hold on.
She huddled into her mother, hiccoughing with terror.
Another slam into the door, wood shredding as things gnawed and clawed at it.
“Stars, stars, guard us,” said Girnot. The hand gripping his axe was shaking. “Stars, witness your children and have mercy, stars, stars…”
The door exploded open.
This was happening in Raida. It was happening in Selgin. It was happening at every fort on the Vallethi border.
That same night, it was happening in the small fishing village of Isigne.
The devils had come in howling, rushing down the Medlenne River like the spring floods.
They were not like wolves, which would hunt and eat and then be satisfied.
The same wolf demon that would burst through one door would slay and slay and then go straight onto the next, shouldering its way through the tide of slavering, gabbling ghouls.
They went for the doors and windows, biting and tearing at them, maddening each other with their blood lust.
“We’ll go for the boat,” breathed a young man named Siyoun Arpelle, five years a husband and barely that many a man. “The river should be deep enough, if we coast out for a bit. I’ll drop anchor in the middle, and we’ll be safe until morning. But we’ll have to run. Can you?”
“Yes,” whispered Oranie Arpelle, binding their fourteen month-old son more tightly to her body in a sling. It was understood that Siyoun would have to carry their daughter.
The fishermen of Isigne lived in rows of cottages fronting the docks of the Medlenne, a tributary of the mighty Brede.
Those docks were high and narrow, raised to withstand the spring floods, and it was the thought of those narrow walkways that gave him hope.
Narrow and treacherous, yes, but in such a place the devils could not come all at once, and a man might hope to fend them off long enough to make it to the boats.
There was no chance that their door would hold, if this many devils chose to test it.
A few houses down, another door gave way, and at the outburst of screaming, Siyoun shoved outside with an oar in one hand and his daughter in the other, pushing his wife onto the docks.