Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [141]
Dartun dumped his heavier furs back on the sled in case he had to move quickly, then resumed the investigation. Soon he thought he could hear something. “Stay together,” he urged to the others, and they huddled together like children, clutching various relics that could kill a man in an instant.
A muffled, animal whimper.
A sharp inhalation of breath originated from somewhere behind a nearby building.
Dartun strode across the slippery ground, reaching in his pocket for one of his relics, though he realized suddenly it wasn’t necessary.
What remained of a young girl lay naked on the ground, her entrails emerging from a horizontal slit in her stomach, while a famished dog was loitering nearby with blood on its maw. Dartun waved his arms to scare the creature off, till it finally trotted away through a gap between the shacks, stealing a cautious glance backward every few moments until it disappeared.
Dartun crouched next to the girl’s body; he saw several bones of her ribcage were exposed and the flesh of her scalp peeled back to reveal a tiny piece of her skull glimmering white. With gloved hands he prodded her arms in turn, and they flopped aside, half severed from her torso. Something had actually tried to remove her bones, but apparently had given up. There was no way of telling what had been used to slice her open.
Was it some creature’s claws that did this? But why was she left here and yet no others?
The whisper of feet approached through the snow behind, and then Verain was in tears, Todi and Tuung peering over her shoulder. “Is that …” she sobbed. “What …?”
“Stay back, Verain,” Dartun commanded. “All of you, go and keep watch.” He gestured them away.
He studied the body once again. Although he had often raised the dead, there was nothing Dartun could possibly do to help this girl. She had been torn apart too cruelly to restore to living form.
What would do such a thing, and why would they try to pull her bones out? Was it intended as some warning? No, they would’ve left her in a more prominent position. This one has been discarded, as if she was merely waste.
Although the issue intrigued him scientifically, he was emotionally disgusted by this discovery. If a new race had arrived on the islands of the Empire, what interest could they have in killing Tineag’l’s population in such a barbaric fashion? Although, from another perspective many of the tribes in these regions had thought the same about the Empire stealing their lands.
Dartun assembled the others to follow him on a thorough tour around the town’s haphazard streets hoping to make some sense of these disturbing scenes. They examined the smashed buildings, doors hanging off hinges, tools strewn outside doorways, fragments of splintered wood littering patches of red snow, broken swords lying abandoned in the alleys. This had clearly been a terrifying struggle.
As he studied the tracks in the snow, he began to build a picture of what must have happened. From the north, they’d come, these creatures, and had smashed their way along every house systematically, driving residents into the open where some were slaughtered. Bloodstains were not frequent enough for complete eradication on the spot, which meant the town’s population had been driven away, herded like animals. There were heavy tracks leading back to the north.
More corpses were discovered, people who had met death in their homes: two more young children, a baby with its head removed, five elderly men, six old women, their bodies dismembered at the backs of buildings. One old man’s body was lying