A Time of Dread (Of Blood and Bone #1) - John Gwynne Page 0,135

but there was more to it, not sweet-scented like a horse, something acrid in it.

A meat-eater.

Voices. He followed the sound, found himself in an alley between two long buildings, what looked like sleeping barracks, and beyond them a larger building, longer and wider, timber-walled with a grass-sod roof. Lights flickering in shuttered windows, the murmur of voices. One man’s rising in laughter.

He moved close to a shuttered window and carefully peered in.

A long table, a score of shaven-haired men around it, a wooden board, one man standing, grinning as he tossed the bones onto the board, watching them roll.

Playing knuckle-bone.

The man barked a laugh, punching the air, turning so that Drem could see his face.

It was Wispy Beard.

Conflicting emotions at seeing him, anger and fear mixed as he remembered the noose around his neck, being hoisted into the air. Wispy laughing.

Drem scanned the others, recognized some, though he didn’t see Burg there, the leader with the scar on his face. In the gloom someone else sat, the firelight and darkness making him look too big, longer and wider than a man, legs outstretched as he leaned back in his chair, arms folded, seemingly asleep.

The animal-roar again, a sad thing, closer, louder, vibrating through the snow-slush and into the soles of Drem’s boots. Most in the room ignored it, the big man’s legs twitching, but nobody moved to tend whatever it was that made such a sound. The stench of excrement was stronger, too, insinuating itself into the back of Drem’s throat.

He moved on, a lifetime of trapping having taught him silence and patience. He knew instinctively when to wait, when to move, and how to tread as silent as a fox. But there was no light-footed trick in the world that could avoid footprints in snow. He tried to follow well-used tracks, his footprints mixing with a stream of others.

A stable block stood before him, a torch burning outside it, fixed atop a post. Drem froze in the shadow of a building and stared. In time a head loomed over the stable-door, but it was no horse. A bear, dark-furred, huge, its eyes baleful. It opened its jaws and let out a sound closer to groan than growl.

Is that the bear that killed my da?

Drem’s fist tightened on his spear, the urge to run over and plunge it into the creature’s chest sweeping him.

Wait. The hunter is patient.

In answer to its mournful groaning another sound echoed around the encampment, a chorus of howls and whines.

‘Shut your row,’ a voice called out. Drem’s head snapped around to a dark hollow, dense and thick behind the bear pen. He crept along the building’s wall to get a better view and saw an open space, a long table set within it, legs of timber thick as trunks. Shapes were scattered upon the table, unclear in the darkness.

Strange, a table out in the open.

Behind it was a huge boulder, rising like a cliff face. As Drem moved to get a clearer view, the stench grew worse, fetid and cloying.

A man stood in the boulder’s shadow, wrapped in furs and cloak, a spear in his hand that he rattled against the rock, clanging on iron, and Drem saw darker shapes in the boulder, iron bars slatted across them.

Cells, dug into the rock face, iron-barred gates.

‘Shut your row,’ the guard shouted again as strange howls and whines echoed out from many cells, haunting, chilling Drem’s blood.

As Drem watched, the man walked a dozen paces, turned to face the wall, his back to Drem, and urinated up the rock face. Drem hurried across the open space, long legs speeding him, the man hearing him at the last moment, turning, urine steaming in the icy cold, but not quick enough to avoid Drem’s spear-butt in the head. He dropped with a grunt, cloak hood falling away. Another shaven-haired man.

Drem hit him again, just to be sure.

A sound in the cell closest to him and he approached it, saw only darkness inside, a form moving, deep at the back. A warning growl.

Drem bumped into the table, turned and looked at it.

Tools were scattered across its surface, saws and knives, a butcher’s cleaver chopped into the wood. Thick iron rings were set deep into the timber, chains hanging from them. Then Drem realized what the lumps he’d seen spread upon the table were.

Body parts.

Some animal, some human. Arms, legs, torsos. A wolven head, a furry shoulder and leg, its paw as big as a plate. A bat like the one