Abomination (34 page)

One final touch. Wulfric slipped a padlock between two links to fasten the chain around him, then turned the key to secure it. He set the key down on the ground nearby, but after regarding it for a moment, picked it up again and tossed it away, out of his reach. Indra realized that he intended never to need it again.

The time after that passed strangely. Dusk turned to night, and the darkness seemed to amplify the silence between her and Wulfric as the two of them sat, some distance apart, her watching him closely and him gazing off into the forest. There was a serenity about him she had not seen until now, his mind already in some faraway other place, a place he hoped his soul would soon follow. She asked him if he wanted to talk; just to break the silence, she said. In truth, she wondered if he might have any final words, anything he wished to unburden himself of before he died—before she ended his life. But she could not bring herself to say it that way.

Wulfric seemed to discern her meaning anyway, but said no, all he wanted to do now was sleep. To really, at last, sleep, the way he remembered from long ago, and to never wake. And he thanked her, which took her by surprise.

“For what?” she asked.

“For freeing me,” he said. “I had given up hope long ago, but when I first saw you, something within me told me that you offered it. I cannot explain it. I knew, somehow, that you were a merciful soul, that you would do me a great kindness. Know that I am grateful for it.”

Indra looked away, suddenly feeling ashamed, unworthy. “What mercy or kindness there is in ending a man’s life, I fail to see,” she said.

“If you had lived mine,” he said, in a voice so weary that it had become little more than a whisper, “you would know.”

For a while Indra kept her eyes off him, watching instead the subtle movements of leaves in the wind, listening to the gentle
sounds they made as the night air wafted between them. Anything to avoid looking at the man she had pledged to kill.
Not a man
, she reminded herself.
An abomination, just not in the form you expected. But like any other, one that has killed countless innocents, and will kill many more if you do not see this through
.

Finally, she looked back at the tree where Wulfric sat. As the last of the day’s light had faded, he had been partially hidden by the broad shadow cast by the tree’s boughs, but now the darkness of night had moved in and consumed the rest of him. Now he was just a black shape set against what little pale moonlight penetrated the canopy of leaves above him. Unmoving.

“Wulfric?”

He did not answer. Indra slid her back up along the smooth stone she rested against until she had risen to her feet. Warily, she peered into the darkness beneath the tree. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the night, she was able to see that Wulfric had slumped forward against the chain. His head hung low against his chest, a mop of tangled hair obscuring his face. So still he barely seemed to breathe.

“Wulfric?”

Still nothing. She took a step closer. Venator, from his perch on the rock behind her, squawked and flapped his wings, a warning. Indra silenced him with a wave of her hand and took another step, close enough now that the beast might be able to reach her, but Wulfric was not yet a beast, still just a man. She found herself wondering how quickly the transformation occurred. Could the monster burst out from within suddenly, without warning, and catch her by surprise? She doubted it, while admitting that the things she had seen since first meeting this man gave her little cause to doubt that anything was possible.

She was aware that her curiosity might be endangering her and kept a close eye on the distance that separated her from him—from it. Satisfied that it was still sufficient for her to react speedily should the need arise, she took one more step closer. It was then, as
her foot touched down gently on the soft earth, that Wulfric’s head suddenly snapped back, fully upright against the trunk of the tree, his eyes wide open.

Indra sprang backward. Her face flushed red as a hot jolt shot through her, radiating outward into every muscle and sinew—her body arming her to either fight or flee. But she did neither, rooted to the spot and fixated on the man bound to the tree before her.

Moments ago, she could not bring herself to look at him. Now she could not look away. The position of the moon had changed; now its light shafted through the gaps in the canopy of leaves and fell directly upon Wulfric. In that pale swath of light, Indra saw that though his eyes were open, it was no longer him. The warmth, the spark, the life she had come to recognize in those eyes, was gone. These—and she had seen enough to know—were the eyes of a dead man. And yet still he moved, a puppet now controlled by some wild and inhuman force within him.

His body began to shudder and twitch, not greatly at first, but soon he was writhing and thrashing uncontrollably, only the chain around him holding him in place. Indra had once seen a man in the throes of a convulsive fit, his entire body racked by spasms so violent it took three others to hold him down while his back contorted to the point of almost breaking. This was worse.

The thing that had been Wulfric opened wide his mouth and let out a tortured howl that shook the birds from the trees above, scattering them into the night, and made Indra shudder with a sudden chill. It was Wulfric’s voice, but it was also something else: a base, guttural sound that did not belong to this world—the sound of whatever now possessed him. Indra reached over her back for a sword, her heart jumping when her hand groped for it but found nothing there. Suddenly she remembered that she had unsheathed her swords and propped them against the rock so that she could rest her back against it.
Stupid!
She darted back to the stone, grabbed both swords, and gripped them tight, the feeling of the hilts’ leather bindings in her hands instantly reassuring.

Venator was dancing atop the stone as if it were a hot stove, flapping his ruffled feathers and screeching like Indra had never heard. She looked back to the tree and saw the worst thing she had ever seen in her young life.

Wulfric’s body had begun to split open like an overripe fruit as something inside him pushed violently outward, fighting to escape. The tearing began at the center of his chest, where the beetle-shaped scar was burned into his flesh, and proceeded downward to his navel. Wulfric’s eyes rolled over white and his head sagged to his chest as the two sides of his body were pulled apart from within. What issued forth was not blood but slimy, glistening black viscera that bubbled and oozed as it spewed from the widening gash. Indra stepped back, aghast, as a grasping claw, dripping with the oily black muck, appeared from within Wulfric’s open chest and felt around blindly before finding the forest floor. Then another clawed, elongated leg followed. By now, there was almost nothing human left of Wulfric, or at least nothing visible; what flesh of his still remained was covered with the seeping black slime, and it was impossible to tell where he ended and the beast began.

Its two front legs found their footing, allowing more of it to clamber out from within. As the beast’s head emerged, Indra recognized the hideous cluster of bulbous eyes, the awful chittering mandibles, those great needle-toothed jaws. It reared its head upward, its mouth yawning wide and drooling thick saliva as it breathed in the night air. As the rest of its body emerged, the elongated legs unfurling at their joints, the plates of its armored carapace spreading outward, Indra marveled in horror at the black magick that allowed this monstrosity to somehow be birthed from a vessel so much smaller. For that was what she had witnessed, she realized. An infernal, violent birth, a parasite born in darkness, killing its host so that it might live.

When the beast had fully emerged and nothing of Wulfric remained, it tried to move forward—and found that it could not. The chains that had hung slack around Wulfric’s chest were now
stretched taut around the increased girth of the beast. It looked down in confusion, its gnarled limbs clawing at the chain with growing frustration, but to no avail. Now its entire body flailed against its confinement, the chain twisting and pulling against the trunk of the tree so violently that it gouged deep into the bark. Leaves fell to the ground like rain as the boughs above shook.

Indra stood in a defensive posture, both swords at the ready in case the beast should break free, but both the chain and the tree held fast. She watched it for a while longer, waiting for the beast to tire or quit and realize the futility of its struggle, but it never did. If anything, it seemed to grow wilder and more violent the more it tried—and failed—to get free, its frustration ever building, its rage without end.

Now is your chance
, said the voice within her.
Do it!

The way the beast’s back was lashed against the tree left its soft, pulsing underbelly exposed, like a tortoise turned on its shell. While a blow anywhere else might glance uselessly off its stone-thick armored plating, underneath, it could bleed. She had done it once already; now it would be easier. Though its clawed legs struck at the air and it continued to struggle against its bonds, it remained a static target. She could dart and dodge before it, striking at will, bleeding it one thrust of her sword at a time until it was dead.

And yet something stayed her. She moved only a few steps toward the beast before finding herself rooted to the spot again, her swords at her sides.

The sound of her approach alerted the beast to her presence, and the sight of her enraged it further. It howled and hissed as it strained against the chain, desperate to be free, to kill. It lashed out at her with outstretched claws, but she was still yards out of range. It spat its acidic venom at her, but Indra had learned to recognize the chewing motion that preceded the spitting and dodged easily, the gobs of sputum burning into the bark of the trees behind her.

She knew that killing it would not be difficult. She knew that she would be doing the world a service by sending it back to the
infernal pit from which it had been so wrongly summoned. She knew that her father, on seeing what she had done, would be forced to admit that he was wrong. And she knew that she would at last find retribution. But it was no longer so simple a matter as slaying a monster, as she had always imagined. For she could not escape the knowledge that the hateful, murderous thing that thrashed and howled before her was not only a monster but also a human soul. Somewhere within that black, soulless shell there was still an innocent man, a good man. A man as much the victim of an abomination as any who had been killed by one. Perhaps more.

As the beast continued to screech and writhe and claw at the air, straining with all its rage to reach her, Indra returned her swords to their scabbards, then turned away and walked back to the rock, where she sat. From her tunic she retrieved a small piece of parchment and a piece of sharpened reed, which she used to scratch out a short note. It was something she had hoped never to do, but this situation was far beyond anything for which she had prepared herself, and she needed the counsel of those with expertise greater than her own.

When the note was done, she rolled it up as small as she could make it and attached it to Venator’s leg. “Home,” she said, then watched as he took flight, disappearing into the night sky.

She sat back down and began to rummage through the small pack on her belt for the needle and spool of strong thread that she kept for repairs to her leather armor. She would have need of them come the morning.

As the early-morning clouds parted, dappled sunlight broke through the treetops and fell upon Wulfric’s face, sparking him awake. He sat up with a groan. Some days, the lingering after-effects of his transformation were worse than others. Today, the hangover, as he sometimes thought of it, was a bad one. His head pounded, the bright light from above only making it worse. His stomach ached with a hunger as if he had not eaten in days, though he knew that he had, just last night. More than anything, he was disoriented, his vision blurred, and the world around him seemed to rock back and forth like a boat on an uneven sea. It would be some time, he knew, before he would recover fully.

Even so, his faculties were present enough to know that something was wrong. From the moment of his waking he had sensed a strangeness. As he slowly grew more aware, he realized that it was an absence that puzzled him. Several absences.

First, there was no chain around him; he had woken not shackled upright to a tree, as was normal, but free and on the ground. What else? He had long grown accustomed to waking to the stench of sulfur, but this morning he could barely smell it at all. It was only as he sat up, his vision slowly focusing and adapting to the light, that he saw why. He had not woken covered in and surrounded by a thick layer of ashes, as he had every day for years. The gray patina of grime that usually coated every inch of him
had been largely washed away, and his skin was bright pink and clean—which seemed to Wulfric unnatural, so long had it been since he last saw himself so. And he was not naked, but dressed in his tattered hooded cloak.

None of this was normal. None of it was right.

Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet, letting out a pained groan as at least one familiar thing made itself known: every muscle and joint in his body ached when called upon to do anything. Still dizzy, he stumbled and almost fell, steadying himself against a nearby tree. He noticed the splintered grooves gouged into its bark, looked down, and saw the iron chain sitting loosely around its base, unlocked. Then, at last, he realized the thing that from the first had seemed to him strangest of all, the thing he had least expected upon waking. It was the fact that he had woken at all, that he was still alive.

“Good morning,” came a voice from behind him. He spun around, more quickly than was wise given his poor state of balance, and staggered awkwardly before regaining his footing. Then he saw Indra, sitting not far away, casually skinning a small animal. She smiled at him, which he returned with a look of bewilderment.