Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [46]
There had been silence for some time after the sound of the sword being drawn, but now he could hear retching noises. Then a woman’s voice, tense and low. “Something’s coming, Urus. Hurry! Get up!”
Just a few paces ahead, the corridor gave access to a large chamber. Arvin saw a man, down on his hands and knees, vomiting. A woman was bent over him, tugging on the back of his shirt with one hand. Both wore high boots slicked with sewage to the knee. Judging by the crossbow that lay on the ground next to the man’s knee, they were the ones who had shot the sailor.
He hadn’t been their only victim.
A bull’s-eye lantern lay on the ground beside the kneeling man, its light painting a bright circle on a cultist in faded gray robes who was slumped in a heap against one wall, his chest bloody. Judging by the slit in his robe, he’d been killed by a sword slash. A large basket lay on the floor beside the cultist. Freshly butchered chunks of meat had spilled out of it. One of them was recognizable as a human foot.
The man on his hands and knees was middle-aged and broad shouldered with dark, curly hair and a full beard. The woman was younger-in her early twenties-and slender, with a narrow face framed with waist-length hair that hung straight as a plumb line. She wore a man’s trousers tucked into her boots and held a bloody sword. She tugged frantically on the man’s shirt with her other hand, trying to drag him back to the corridor in which Arvin had halted, but without success. Her eyes were locked on the chamber’s only other entrance: an archway that led into a darkened corridor tall enough for a human to walk upright. From it came a slurping sound, as if something large and wet were being dragged across the floor.
Arvin peered through the archway. His darkvision revealed what looked like a grayish mound, moving slowly toward the chamber. It hunched and sagged as it moved, sections of it bulging out like bubbles trying to burst through thick oil then sinking flat in a fold of flesh as the rest of the mass surged over them. As the thing drew closer to the lantern light, colors were revealed. Gray resolved into greenish yellow, the color of diseased flesh. Red pustules dotted the body of the thing, as did molelike tufts sprouting wiry black hair. The creature had no eyes, no mouth. Here and there, a bone jabbed momentarily out of the flesh like a thrusting sword, causing a dribble of pus-tinged blood, then was drawn back into the mass with a wet sucking sound as the mound surged forward.
“Torm shield us,” the woman croaked as the thing bulged out of the archway. “What is that?”
The man glanced up as the fleshy mound squeezed its bulk through the archway and tumbled into the room with a sound like a bag of wet entrails hitting the floor. The mound hesitated, pulsing first in the direction of the two living humans, then toward the cultist’s corpse. The kneeling man tried to climb to his feet but was only able to rise partway before clutching at his stomach and doubling over again. His back heaved as he gave in to nausea, retching over and over again. One hand gestured weakly, urging the woman to leave him.
The young woman, gagging in the overpowering stench that filled the chamber, at last let go of his shirt. But instead of turning and running, as Arvin expected, she stepped between her companion and the mound, readying her sword.
“You fool,” Arvin whispered to himself. “Get out of there!” He’d already started backing down the corridor through which he’d crawled, though he could not tear his eyes away from the horrific creature that was only a pace or two away from the woman. The stench of the thing was terrific; Arvin’s eyes watered as he fought to keep himself from vomiting. Control, he told himself fiercely. You can control-
No he couldn’t. His stomach was twisted by a wave of nausea that felt like a dagger stabbing