The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [57]
“Well, use your senses,” Winna said. “Where did it go?”
It was Ehawk who answered, solemnly pointing up.
“Good lad,” Aspar said. He motioned to where Ehawk had indicated. “The bark is scraped there, see? It’s traveling in the trees.”
Stephen paled and stared up at the distant canopy. “That’s almost as bad as being able to turn into moss,” he said. “How will we ever see it?”
“Is that a riddle?” Aspar asked. “With our eyes.”
“But how to track it?”
“Yah, that’s a problem. But it seems to be going along the forest edge where the briars are, which is where we’re going, as well. The praifec didn’t send us out here to hunt utins. I reckon we’ll keep on with what we were hired for, and if we run across it again, all well and good.”
“That’s not at all well and good by my sight,” Stephen said, “but I take your point.”
They traveled in silence for a time. Aspar kept his eyes searching the treetops, and his back itched constantly. The smell of autumn leaves was almost overpowering. Long experience had taught him that the smell was a sign that murder was coming. The Sefry woman who had raised him had told him the strange sense came from Grim, the Raver, for Aspar had been born at a place of sacrifice to Grim. Aspar didn’t necessarily believe that, nor did he care—he cared only that it was usually true.
Except in autumn, when the smell was already there . . .
But once again, his nose was right. Approaching a clearing, the scent intensified.
“I smell blood,” Stephen said. “And something very foul.”
“Do you hear anything with those saint-blessed ears of yours?”
“I’m not sure. Breathing, maybe, but I can’t tell where.”
They advanced a little farther, until they saw the crumbled, torn body in the clearing.
“Saints!” Winna gasped.
“Saints bless,” Stephen said. “The poor lad.”
Blood soaked the leaves and ground, but the face was clean, easily recognizable as Algaf, the boy from the homestead.
“I guess he didn’t listen to his mother.” Aspar sighed.
Stephen started forward, but Aspar stopped him with an outstretched arm.
“No. Don’t you see? The boy is bait. It wants us to walk in there.”
“He’s still alive,” Stephen said. “That’s him I hear breathing.”
“Asp—,” Winna began, but he hushed her. He walked his gaze through the treetops, but there was nothing but bare branches and a sigh of wind.
He sighed. “Watch the trees,” he said. “I’ll get him.”
“No,” Stephen said. “I will. I can’t use a bow the way you can. If it’s really hiding in the trees, you’ve got the best chance of stopping it.”
Aspar considered that, then nodded. “Go, then. But be ready.”
As Stephen advanced cautiously into the field, Aspar nocked an arrow to his bow and waited.
A flight of sparrows whirred through the trees. Then the forest was eerily silent.
Stephen reached the boy and knelt by him. “It’s bad,” he called to them. “He’s still bleeding. If we bandage him now, we might have a chance.”
“I don’t see anything,” Ehawk said.
“I know,” Aspar said. “I don’t like it.”
“Maybe you were wrong,” Winna suggested. “We don’t know that an utin—or whatever it is—is smart enough to set a trap.”
“The greffyn had men and Sefry traveling with it,” Aspar reminded her. He remembered the footprints. “This thing might, too. It doesn’t have to be smart enough itself.”
“Yah.”
He was missing something—he knew it. It had to have come into the clearing on foot. He had found only the one set of tracks in. He’d assumed it had left on the other side, then taken to the trees.
“Utins could shrink to the size of a gnat or turn into moss,” Winna had said.
“Stephen, come here, now,” Aspar shouted.
“But I—” His eyes widened, and his head nearly spun from his shoulders; then he lurched to his feet.
He hadn’t gone a yard when the ground seemed to explode, and in a cloud of rising leaves, something much larger than a man leapt toward Stephen.
CHAPTER THREE
MERY
LEOFF’S FINGERS DANCED ACROSS the red-and-black keys of the hammarharp, but his mind drifted into daymarys of corpses with eyes of ash and a town gone forever still beneath the wings of night. Darkness