Hallowed Ground (34 page)

"It sounds as though things are going well," he told her.
 
"Perhaps one might venture so far as to say very well.
 
With a little luck, and I am always lucky, my dear, our work may prove a little easier than I originally expected."

He slapped the reins to the horses' backs, and the wagon lurched forward again.
 
Mariah stared at the light intently as it grew brighter and more intense.
 
She didn't say a word.
 
It wasn't that she was listening to Balthazar, or even the curious ululating tones that weren't quite voices, she was simply lost to the light.
 
Every now and then she thought she saw something more defined, a shadowed shape whirling within that luminous ray.
 
And occasionally, as those shadows writhed and twisted, they looked almost human.
 

She couldn't tell if they were trying to get out, or if they were scrabbling desperately to find their way in.

Creed crouched in the small clearing, keeping himself just out of sight of the Deacon's camp.
 
Tension had his skin crawling.
 
He cracked his fingers.
 
He chewed at his lip.
 
It wasn't just that something was wrong – everything was wrong.
 
He felt it like a frisson in the air itself.
 
He hid there for as long as he could bear, then pushed to his feet and started to prowl, circling like a wildcat.
 
He was almost sure there wouldn't be a weakness in the barrier, but he'd been wrong before.
 
Supposing there was a flaw; he wouldn't find it by sitting back on his haunches and waiting.
 
He reached out occasionally, to test its resistance.
 
As the darkness deepened he thought he saw an actual wall shimmer between his fingertips and the tents.
 
Again and again he tested it, causing the charge to flicker in and out of focus beneath his touch.
 
If he strayed too near, the locket grew icy, freezing into his chest, and the pain drove him back.

He moved slowly and carefully around the perimeter of the camp, always looking and listening.
 
He didn't know who or what else he might be out there, but one thing struck him as pretty much sure, no barrier – whatever it might be – had ever been erected just to keep the likes of Provender Creed out of a camp.
 
So, thinking through it, Creed was fairly damned certain something else was out there in the darkness with him.

He paced the perimeter.

A little more than a quarter of the way around the circuit, he saw something.
 
A flickering light.
 
It was a fire, and not a small campfire.
 
This one was big enough to be a pyre.
 
It had been lit back a ways from the weird icy wall, in among the scrub of trees.
 
The blaze sent shadows dancing over the skeletal limbs, in turn sending more shadows dancing across the dirt.
 
Creed crouched and slipped closer, moving as quietly as possible.

The fire was blazing hot.
 
Whoever had set it wasn't too concerned with it being seen, that was certain.
 
The flames crackled.
 
The sound masked Creed's approach.
 
He felt like his heart would drive itself out of his chest if it got beating any faster.

"Damn," he whispered.
 
"Just what in the
hell
have I gotten myself into?"

Three tall shadows surrounded the fire.
 
Two had their backs to him, and the third stood directly across the fire.
 
They each had long poles in their hands.
 
It seemed as though they were intent on stirring the coals and keeping the fire burning hotter, but as Creed eased back a low hanging branch to get a better look, it was all he could do to bite back a scream.

The fire pit was maybe three feet across.
 
It was deep, and even from where he stood, twenty or thirty feet back, the heat was stifling.
 
It was like a bowl carved into the earth, filled with glowing coals.
 
To one side they'd stacked a pile of dead branches to feed in when the heat died down, but it didn't look like that was going to happen anytime soon.

None of that mattered.
 
What mattered was the man – thing? – trying to claw its way free of the inferno.
 
Creed recognized the three immediately.
 
They were the strangers who'd invaded his room.
 
He reached instinctively for the reassuring handle of his six-shooter but stopped no more than an inch from the grip when he realized how useless the weapon was.
 
At least one of them ought to have been dead; he'd been pumped full of enough lead put down a horse.

Long arms covered in blackened, searing flesh groped for the sides of the pit.
 
There was a mewling, mindless sound that might have been a voice, once, but whenever it rose, one of the three slammed the end of their pole into the side of the thing's head, or its shoulder, pressing it back and silencing it with the force and shock of each new blow.

Something beyond the obvious was wrong.
 
It took Creed a moment to sort it, and then he frowned.
 
Fire.
 
Meat.
 
Wood.
 
Charcoal.
 
But there was no smell.
 
Any one of those things ought to have been giving off some sort of smell.
 
The meat, a sickly sweet stench – he'd burned bodies before – during a bout of plague further west – but all he smelled here was the maddening, cloying sweetness of the fog of incense.

The man-thing lunged to one side.
 
It rose half out of the pit, and Creed reeled back, biting his lip hard to prevent any sound from escaping.
 
Where the man's torso should have met hips and leg, nothing but charred trailing guts and blood dangled.
 
One of the crow men lashed out with his stick, and the thing tumbled back, an almost surprised grimace of pain crossing its ruined features.

Creed didn't know what to do.
 
He knew he was no match for the three.
 
Together with Brady he'd barely managed to chase them off.
 
They were like a pack of crows – chase them out of your field all you wanted, they'd just circle and come back.
 
He didn't know what that thing in the pit was either, though he suspected that – at least at some point in its existence –it had more in common with him than the others.
 
There was nothing he could do to help, but he couldn't just stand there and watch it being tortured and burned.

He reeled away from the translucent barrier as a heart-chilling cry broke like shattering ice over the clearing.
 
In the silence between heartbeats a huge shadow enveloped everything, snuffing the light from the fire and plunging the world into utter, impenetrable darkness.

Creed staggered back and hit the wall.
 
He winced as the cold, icy pain tore through his body.
 
He opened his eyes again.
 
The darkness was gone, only the pain remained. No, he realized, a tall willowish woman stood beside the fire-pit.
 
She glared down into it contemptuously.
 
Creed's hand slid instinctively toward the six-shooters on his hip.
 
He tried to slow his suddenly
rapsing
breath.
 
His hand shook.
 
He gritted his teeth and pulled the gun.
 
The woman turned her head slightly and looked right at him.
 
She shook her head, just once, very slightly.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," a voice said inside his head.
 
The crow men fell away before her in a flutter of dark clothing and shuffling feet.
 
If she frightened them, Creed wanted no part of her.
 
So far, she hadn't told them he was nearby, and he thought – for some odd reason – that this was reassuring.
 
He holstered the gun.

She turned toward the camp and strode up to the shimmering barrier.
 
It brought her closer to Creed.
 
He backed away step after stumbling step as she neared.
 
She didn't acknowledge his presence at all.
 
When she reached the wall of light she placed her hand flat against it and scowled.
 
Luminous rings rippled out from her fingertips along that transparent surface.
 
For a dozen feet either side of her the barrier was suddenly lit by a bluish glow.
 
Stepping closer, she placed her other hand beside the first.
 
And pushed.
 

A jag of blue light arced down from somewhere far above and sheered through the barrier between her outstretched hands.
 
Creed watched, fascinated.
 
The fault in the otherwise perfect surface pulsed angrily.
 
The crow men let their poles dangle, taking only random pokes at the wretch struggling weakly in the fire pit.
 
They focused all of their attention on the woman.
 
Miniscule fissures rippled out from the fault, breaking the barrier open inch by inch.
 
The whole thing reminded Creed of ice on a river – though it had been years since he'd seen water freeze.

The three crow men turned to the fire and jabbed violently with their poles.
 
It was, Creed thought, as though a single thought controlled them.
 
They speared the wretch in the blaze from three sides, the red hot iron tips driving deep though his charred living corpse, and lifted him above the fire.
 
They held his writhing body easily.
 

Creed was torn.
 
Did he watch the crow men or the woman?
 
He thought about Brady, and Silas.
 
He thought about the woman whose locket he wore.

The crack widened.
 
The barrier screamed like a living thing.
 
The sound was worse than any death rattle he had heard.

Creed saw things – faces, hands, oddly elongated bodies that glowed and writhed, trying to make their way to the widening rift.
 
Something held them back.
 
It was as if the woman had opened a hole and rolled the edges back, forming a wall.
 
The fissure was narrow at first, but widened slowly.
 

When Creed looked back toward the fire the crow men turned toward him.
 
For a heart-stopping moment he thought they had seen him, but they weren't looking at him, they were staring at the woman's back.
 
Whatever was going on in that camp, he wasn't going to be able to do anything if he was stuck on the wrong side of the barrier.
 
That said, he couldn't believe the woman, or the crow men, breaking their way through was a good thing, either.
 
All he could do was watch as she tore the fault wider.
 
When it was wide enough for a man to slip through, he made his move.

Keeping low to the ground, he ran, hard, fast, parallel to the fire.
 
He had his gun in his hand before he took the first step.
 
It was habit.
 
Even though he knew on a gut level it was useless, it felt good to hold it.
 
The first of the crow men started to turn as he drew level with the fire.
 
Creed spun and fired from the hip.

Three shots.

Each bullet caught a crow man full in the face, splitting bone and feather as they went in deep.
 
That single second of gunplay was without doubt some of the best shooting he'd ever managed, but he didn't have time to savor it.
 
They staggered, and the poles they were using to brace the wretched thing between them shivered.
 
One of the iron tips tore free, unbalancing all three crow men.
 
As one, they loosed a horrifying screech – it was halfway between the cry of an eagle and the laughing bray of a hyena.

The woman, as though startled, turned a fraction casting a backward glance over her shoulder.
 
Creed didn't hesitate.
 
He charged at her.
 
At the last possible moment, as she raised her hands to protect herself, he threw himself to the side, scrabbled in the dust and, even as she twisted, hurled himself headlong into the gaping fault she'd opened in the barrier.
 
With a scream of rage she clawed at him, but that broke her contact with the shimmering wall and the fault sealed itself in an explosion of light and sound.

On the other side Creed scrambled to his feet and turned back, guns raised.
 
He saw the woman staring at him in fury, and then her expression changed.
 
Of all things, she smiled.
 
Then, with no warning, she threw back her head and laughed.
 
The sound was distorted by the barrier.
 
For a moment it sounded eerily like a parliament of owls screeching.