Sleepless Knight 2

Ghita pressed herself tight to the tiles of the roof, imagining herself a drop of water after rainfall, clinging to her place until taken back by the sun. She watched the man-shapes rove through the gray, the yellow flames they carried making them appear like drips of yellow bile. Fallen into the watery morass of the mist and spreading until they dissipated. What she saw of their light was motion and what moved was animalistic. Werewolf? No… there was nothing lupine in how the man-shapes moved… nothing of any animal she knew, but nothing of man either. But there was something of the fur and the four legs in how they rooted around, sniffing at the ground, scratching where their noses led them.

Ghita felt a chill grip her heart. The dead man was silent. He didn’t know what these were either—the dead had much wisdom. The things of which they did not know were outside nature: worldly things too sickened to be recognized by human eyes. The twisted ones worried her and that which had done the twisting made her afraid.

Her fear would have to wait. A ghastly curiosity took her. She watched the creatures not knowing what they were, but hoping to discern at least what they were doing. At the marketplace, they plunged bodily into baskets of apples, bins of oats. Feasting as even dogs would not. A water trough drew special attention. They dug their heads into the water in their thirst, some extinguishing their torches as they wrestled with each other for access. In a weird way, that relieved Ghita. There was life to these creatures, warped as it was. They craved food, water, the other accoutrements of breath. Twisted they might be, but they had not totally lost the shape they had been born with.

Then, hunger sated and thirst blunted, they went to the windows.

Ghita lifted her head away from the roof to follow them as they scattered. They went to houses, cottages—she heard bare feet slapping upon the pavement below her, frenzied breath clogging windowglass with fog. They had come to the tavern.

Then the doors. Disappearing into the homes that caught their fancy. Ghita looked down from the rooftop to see three at the tavern’s double doors, but only a glimpse of lank hair and bare skin before they were within the building. There was a crude familiarity to how they worked the door open, learned but uncanny. It reminded her of a dancing bear she had seen once. These beasts were not attuned to man as dogs, as horses, even as sheep. They had learned human ways as the conquered would learn their oppressor’s tongue.

Fear brought the dead man out of his stupor. He whispered calming words that found no purchase in Ghita’s racing heart. Her worry was of one alive; his calm was that of a corpse.

What came of one grave-touched when she entered the world of the dead fully? How much of her doings would be forgiven… how many sins punished? In the afterplace where all life echoed, would her fate be so different from the hated dead man? So hungry for life he’d even taste hers?

Again Ghita pressed herself flat to the roof, but this time she heard her ear to the tile and let her hearing descend down through the attic and second story to the monsters now inside the building. She heard chairs hurled around, tables overturned. Breathing that made her think of a corpse allowed to take as many breaths as it wished before the empty void of death. How sweet would even the breeze that stirred the house-dust be if compared to lifeless nothing?

Sounds too: this was the music of those inundated with silence and now given license to cry out. Inhuman voices in human mouths.

Confusion tried her patience. What were these that straddled the line between beast and men? What business did that have in the presence of life and humanity? The answer intimidated her, but lack of knowledge was intolerable.

She slid back inside the attic. Down to the second floor. Her sheathed sword clutched in the crock of her elbow and ready to be drawn, she bellied along the floor to the bannisters overlooking the ground floor. Whatever they were, they made no attempt at stealth and all that she heard of them was below. Ghita put her head between two bannisters and looked down.

They were men. Naked but for scraps of clothing that decayed right on their soiled bodies. Their faces distorted with bestial expressions, their salivating jaws spitting noises with no semblance of language. But Ghita could see no wings, no claws, no sign that the blood of some foul lineage had entered their heritage. They were human, but not even raving madmen had she seen act so removed from all humanity. It was as though this was a race of man raised without knowledge of any civilized refinements; with ire for any of the trappings of civilization. They ran about, hurdling their bodies into walls, throwing themselves upon the floor as eagerly as a drunkard would imbibe. Wracking chairs and tables with clumsy thrusts of their hands merely to elicit a hyena cackle from how that furniture flew about and was damaged. If a toddler were suddenly given a man’s strength, it might delight in destruction so. If a dog had hands, it might attack its surroundings thus instead of gnawing with its teeth.

Then they found the barmaid.

Their high-pitched yowls flew through the air. More obscene laughs, if those chattering coughs could be said to be laughter. The ripping of clothes. Flesh against flesh, brought together in the crudest way.

Ghita had seen rapine before. It was monstrous, but monstrous because it was evil sheathed in humanity. It went with guilt, shame, worry over getting caught.

This was something else. Raw physical need, sated with all the efficiency of a drowning man gasping in air. There didn’t even seem any pleasure to it. Only a venting, a voiding, a need to live through the hot little spasm completion would bring and be rid of the rank leavings. It was a mercy the woman slept through it. And a horror that she wasn’t even allowed the dignity of resisting.

Ghita unveiled her iron. She moved down the steps, avoiding their sagging middles for fear of a creak. That was the only credence she would give to the dead man’s caution. The wildmen didn’t keep watch. Their only interest was the act itself or the agonizing wait for it. They tore at their own hair, their flesh, whooping and hooting…

Ghita drew close. She could see the dirt that laid on their bodies as thick as their rags, the weeping sores, the scabbing welts. Bodies that were alive through no care or effort, only continuing accident. Lives like a plague upon the land.

She brought her sword back over her shoulder in a double-handed grip. Wrists locked. Elbows angled. Old training pounded in her temples like hot blood. The dead man was telling her what came next, but this guidance she’d long since committed to memory. The way to swing a sword so that it did not merely cut, but burnt through anything it touched.

One last moment for hesitance, to back down. For her heart to seize or her lungs to shut out air. But there was nothing to stop her. Only doubt, and now that it’d had its moment, she’d give it nothing more. Ghita swung.

The air parted before it, the neck only a little more reluctantly. The dead man said now but Ghita was already putting her muscle in, hitting the spine so that it split in two like a twig and let the blade scythe out onto the other side of the wildman’s shoulders. His head came away like a cork popping from a bottle and in the upward rain of blood, Ghita saw a face.

It was as if the blood were pouring into a glass in the shape of a face, then draining out through a crack in that glass. The image disappeared between one gout of blood and the next. But Ghita felt it sting her eye. It was bearded, male, humanoid, but in no other respect was it a man. It was too primitive, too unformed… a carving of a man by an inept sculptor, his amateurish efforts only able to fashion a semblance of someone who could speak, eat, sing, love. This was a creature only capable of the grossest, the most crude of actions. The thick planes of its face were not meant for any emotional expression… the deeply recessed eyes were absent of any light… the thick brow and bristling eyebrows were as immobile as bone. It was the face of an ape without hair or a statue weathered down until only the barest hint of craftsmanship was still evident… and somehow Ghita knew that it was why the headless body still stood, broken-nailed fingers questing out, seeking her at the direction of that spectral visage!