Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,9
happened to the other horse,” she muttered.
Flickering lights, glimpsed through the foliage, guided her closer. Widdershins ducked beneath a pair of crossed branches, dropped even lower so her crouch was more of a duck-waddle, and peered around a pudgy thumb of a stump.
A large campfire crackled angrily away, feeding on moist, snapping tinder that belched thick plumes of smoke in its death throes. Over the fire hung a primitive spit, little more than a branch on two rough Xs of wood. Shins couldn't clearly see the hunk of horse flesh dripping grease to sizzle in the flame, as it was already heavily blackened and veiled in smoke.
From across the encampment, a frightened whinny drew her gaze. The missing horse—a speckled roan, bits of its torn harness still wrapped around its chest—tugged frantically at the rope that bound it to a neighboring tree.
But if the horse was over there, then what…?
Widdershins's gaze flickered back to the roasting meat, and she felt her stomach turn inside out.
“Olgun…” Barely a croak.
She felt the god's power tingling in her gut, settling it enough that the nausea wasn't overwhelming so that she could bite it back and not give away her presence with a loud retching. Even so, it was a near thing.
Then the thing whose camp this was tromped into view on the far side, actually shaking the nearby branches with each step, and Shins forgot about everything else.
It was no demon she'd heard described in sermons; no fae she'd run across in any fairy tale. More or less humanoid in silhouette it might have been—if overly, even obscenely, muscled—but it was anything but human. A single eye peered from furrowed brow; above, a lone horn curved upward, tearing leaves and twigs from the branches. Although difficult to tell in the firelight, it seemed the thing's skin was a deep russet; on a person, it would have suggested an exceedingly painful but slowly fading sunburn.
It smelled, even from this distance, of soured sweat and rotten breath. It wore only leather breeches, carried a primitive but brutal-looking spear, and none of these were the detail that first stole a reluctant gasp from her throat or set her gut to quivering all over again.
“Gods! The frog-hopping thing's got to be twice my height!” And that wasn't even counting the creature's horn. “What in the name of Khuriel's codpiece is it?!”
It was, in some ways, a useless question. Communicating through sensation and imagery as he did, Olgun couldn't really offer her an actual word for what they were seeing even if he knew it.
What he could convey was a sense of time. Of age.
Great time and age.
Before Galice and Rannanti and the other modern nations, a lengthy age of barbarism had engulfed the continent, perhaps the world. For centuries, violent tribes warred for territory, for supremacy of culture. It had been from these tribes that the 147 gods, those who would eventually make up the Hallowed Pact and bring about the rebirth of civilization, had come.
And earlier even than that, a millennium and more before Shins's own time, an age of myth. Legend spoke of great empires and warring kingdoms, magics far more potent and more common than today, and monsters the likes of which had never since been seen.
Shins didn't believe much of it. Nobody really did. But one tiny bit was true, apparently, since Olgun seemed pretty emphatic that this sort of creature was indeed that ancient.
“You don't believe this one's actually lived that long, though?!” she demanded.
No. No, he most assuredly did not.
“Then where the happy hens did it come from?” And then, “How do you even shrug without shoulders?”
To which, of course, Olgun only offered a second shrug.
“Whatever, then.” She watched as the creature squatted beside the fire, winced as it poked at the cooking flesh, perhaps to see if it was done. Even crouched, it was markedly taller than she.
“I really don't want to fight that,” she confessed. “So let's make this count, yes?”
The tingle in the air flared up as Shins raised the flintlock. Carefully sighting along the barrel, between grasping branches and the shadows cast by the dancing fire, she took a single, deep breath….
Allowed Olgun's influence to tweak her aim, shifting the weapon a hair this way, then that….
Thunder cracked; fire spat; smoke plumed. Through the dark and the sudden haze, Shins saw the creature's head rocked back by the impact. It screamed, hands flying upward to clutch at its temple.
And then, roaring like a tornado made of lions—and,