Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [10]
Councilor Ghuda was violently febrile.
Standing outside a bistro with a rumbling stomach and a small pie raised in one hand, Randur watched the unsteady figure shamble toward him. People scrambled in fear, men holding their women protectively, as glossy beetles began to pullulate around the victim’s gaping wound.
Randur stepped aside into an alley by a gallery, too stunned now to take a first bite of the pie. A small child screamed and turned to run, while the dying man—eyes wide and aghast, and coughing blood—stumbled on into the same small passageway. He stared straight at Randur, hunching to his knees just paces away from him. He continued to howl as the insects ripped at his flesh, tossing it into the air in a fine pink mist. He fell forward, and was silent.
Within moments, a banshee appeared into the passageway, as if she had been following the incident all this time. Cocooned in a shawl, her face was gaunt and striking against the untidy strands of jet-black hair. With a distant look in her eyes, she sucked in a deep breath, then began her keen, her mouth opening impossibly wide.
The sated blood beetles having scurried out of the passageway, a gathering crowd soon cast a shadow over the body. Randur having lost his appetite, handed the pie to an urchin in filthy rags.
“Welcome to Villjamur,” Randur muttered.
CHAPTER 2
IT WAS THE EXPLOSION THAT WOKE HIM, A BASS SHUDDER THAT SEEMED TO shift the ground beneath him. Commander Brynd Lathraea opened his eyes, panting in the cold air, and looked up to realize that he was lying on the floor of a betula forest with dead twigs stabbing into his back. By his fingertips were wet knuckles of roots. He used them to help pull himself up, but his grip failed. He fell back, nauseous.
He tried to make sense of things.
Through the gaps in the trees, he watched a corkscrewing cloud of smoke, as branches swayed in the chilling wind. His ears were ringing. Strands of white hair blew across his face.
How had he got here?
The deck of a ship.
Then a blast.
He pushed himself upright, realizing how much his entire body hurt.
Next to him lay the remains of a wooden door, which he recognized as a hatch on his longship. His saber and short-axe were nowhere to be seen. Had his knife remained in his boot? Yes—good.
Through his daze, thoughts gradually returned.
As a commander of the Night Guard he had sailed to the shore recently, following the Emperor’s useless orders. He had set out from Villiren, that sprawling mess of a trade city, their mission ensuring that Villjamur had a good supply of firegrain before the icy weather became too severe. He considered it a pointless task.
At the next attempt he managed to stand. Brynd then stumbled through the aphotic fagus forest, peering between its mottled bark for any sign of movement. His eyes caught subtleties, as he gripped branches, slipped on moss-laden rocks. At some distance on, he passed the disaggregated body of one of his Night Guard—and could tell it was Voren by the elaborate bow cast to one side. Doglike black gheels lingered around the corpse, their triple tongues and double sets of eyes shifting in rhythmic twitches around the open wounds, in a ritual as old as the land itself. Bones crunched.
Shapes shifted in the far umbrage either side and he questioned their meaning.
He recognized the boundaries of the Kull fjord, hills towering on either side of it, then fading into the distance. This was Dalúk Point, a natural port, but one rarely heard of outside military circles. Its rocky shores led down several feet to where