Oskalt (3)

A ghoul.

A monster that wears the shape of a rotted, festering human and craves the blood of the living.

They and I had a long and tiresome bad history. It began in a canyon I was passing through. In a stretch of it unusually dark and dry, Plibentorinus I, my horse, let out a forlorn cry. I built a campfire, and he lay himself down in contentment.

That was the losing move.

Drawn by the warmth and the light, they came gathering in from every side. Kill one and two came over the corpse; cut down two and ten came rushing in. It was as though a scene out of hell had been transplanted into the real world.

As the flesh was torn off him, the one thing Plibentorinus I, my horse, could do was scream, and the scream burst up out of the depths of his soul. I had a hard time of it myself against that overwhelming weight of numbers. To hundreds, to thousands of ghouls, a deathless man was nothing but ideal prey, the answer to a food shortage. In the end I killed them all and got out of the canyon, but for those few days I could not have told you where my own arms and legs were attached.

I came out of that experience knowing a few new facts.

Ghouls like dark, dry places.

Ghouls are drawn to light.

And if you have noticed these facts, it is already too late.

“Kalen.”
“Y-yes?”
“Get up on Pormel. Quickly.”
“What about the baggage we’ve unpacked?”

Pormel had sensed that something was out of the ordinary too, and its spines were bristling as high as they would go.

“If that blanket is worth more to you than your life, by all means gather it up.”

Kalen went white, took the hand I held out, and climbed up onto Pormel. Their cries had filled the whole forest before I noticed.

An unpleasant sound, like metal being scraped, coming out of torn vocal cords.

Pormel broke into a run. The campfire’s heat fled in an instant, and all that reached me was the chill settled over the forest and a few scant sounds.

The sound of dry earth underfoot, the sound of Kalen sucking in a hurried breath, and the cries that froze a man through.

No. That was not right.

There was one more.

— TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK!

The footfalls of a ghoul running alongside us at furious speed.

“Whoa—!”

Kalen had caught sight of it beyond the huge old trees, vanishing and reappearing, over and over, and his breath caught. The ghoul twisted its whole body grotesquely and yet ran like a man. The sight might have carried a faint-hearted man off on the spot, and fainting would have been the least of it.

— KHEEEEEK!

The thing cried out. There was a clear meaning in that cry. The shout of a primal instinct: to tear flesh, to drink blood.

Was that the signal? The more old trees we passed, the more shadows showed beyond them. We were running through the middle of a sea made of flesh and blood.

Once you are caught in their grip, deathless one or dragon’s descendant, none of it counts for anything.

An impartial malice.

Ghouls hate every living thing.

Their bursts of speed were something to marvel at. Before long some of them had drawn level with Pormel and came at us from the flank. I twisted at the waist and swung my sword with everything I had.

— SHUNK!

The ghoul, cut clean in half, sprayed murky blood and fell away. The sticky fluid soaked me from head to foot.

— SKRAAAAAAK!

Pormel roared long and chewed up whole the ones that came leaping in from the front. It could not bring itself to swallow, spat them out and drooled everywhere; they really did look about as unpalatable as anything could.

Several hours of cutting our way through waves of flesh, Pormel taking the front and I the two sides.

By the time the stink of rot no longer bothered me.

“Sir knight!”

Kalen’s shout snapped me back to myself. I had stopped thinking altogether and was cutting them down mechanically.

“The ones chasing us have thinned out.”

He was right: the ghouls that had been sprinting along beside us had grown sparse. And now that I looked, our surroundings had changed from a moment ago as well. What had changed was not the look of the dark forest but the smell. Until a moment ago it had reeked of rotting corpses; now it was nearer the smell of blood.

Is there some sort of territory here?

They caught the smell of blood, and promptly gave us up. Which meant that setting foot in this place cost them more than tearing us apart and eating us would gain.

Avoiding the smell of blood? Ghouls?

That made about as little sense as an animal avoiding raw meat, did it not?

There is definitely something here. But I do not know what.

Pormel. Put on speed.

In that case, we get out of here as fast as we can.

Fast enough that there is no need to find out what that something is.

— THOOM!

Pormel’s massive body struck the ground, and the sound rang through the forest. I could no longer hear the ghoul cries that had come intermittently until then.

Pormel let out a hot breath. It had already been moving quite fast, so however hard it pushed from there, this looked to be the limit.

“Sir knight, there are carcasses.”

Corpses sprawled here and there came and went in my field of view as we raced past. Every one of them was a ghoul’s.

“Not one animal among them.”

Only then did I catch what it was about the primeval forest that had felt so alien. There is not a single fallen fruit on the ground, so there are no small animals; there are no animal carcasses, so there is no nourishment for a tree to grow on. Which meant every old tree in this place was already dead.

Why had I not noticed sooner? A forest that ought to be damp at all times through transpiration was abnormally dry, and cool besides.

This forest is a dead forest. Moving or unmoving, it makes no difference; this is a cursed land where everything lost the vitality of life long ago.

“Sir knight, do ghouls ever bite into other ghouls?”
“Why do you ask?”
“If there’s no food chain, then how on earth did these corpses come about?”

Kalen had put his finger on a legitimate problem. Corpses mean there is something that made them corpses. What, though? In this land of death, with neither prey nor predator, what manner of thing had turned moving corpses into corpses that do not move?

The question was answered before long, because a ghoul savage enough to look as though it could tear Pormel apart bare-handed came rushing in with a hideous shriek. Pormel used an old tree ahead as a springboard, rebounding off it into a new direction, and the recoil snapped the trunk with a splintering crack.

“Wh-wh-wh-what is that thing?!”
“I don’t know either!”

Could that thing even be called a ghoul?

A rotted, festering giant, as tall as the old trees.

If an ordinary ghoul takes the shape of a human, that thing had the shape of a troll.

What is that? No. What is a ghoul?

We define a ghoul as ‘the carcass of a living creature raised again by some unfathomable power’. It is only that those carcasses are overwhelmingly human ones, so the human form became the byword for a ghoul. I had never once heard it said that a troll could become a ghoul. But was the opposite not just as true?

“This is no ordinary matter.”

There is nothing I can know right now. Only this much was certain: if I, who have lived several hundred years, am meeting something for the first time, then it is nothing ordinary.

“Kalen. How large is this primeval forest?”
“Well, you’d have to run a full day to get across it.”

Pormel’s stamina had to be taken into account, so outrunning the thing was not an option I could choose. And by the way it ran, it did not look likely to tire and fall behind.

I have to make a decision.

If it came to a fight, I might be fine, but there was no telling what would become of Kalen and Pormel.

“Kalen, do you see that big old tree over there?”
“Ah, yes. I see it.”
“I’m going to bring Pormel to a stop near it. The moment I do, run back the way we came. Don’t look behind you.”

Pormel’s true worth lay not in its hard scales nor in its powerful bite, but in the strength of its legs. However fast it is moving, it can stop and accelerate at will. I meant to use that to put Kalen as far from this place as I could.

The troll ghoul swept a hand at us as though swatting a fly, and Pormel twisted its body and got clear of it.

— SKRAAAAAK!

Pormel kicked hard off the ground. At the same moment the ghoul, too, gave a hideous shriek and threw itself forward.

Now.

Pormel drove all four feet into the ground. The earth heaved up high, and a hazy dust scattered. From top speed to a dead stop, it had slid a bare five meters.

The ghoul, by contrast, went hurtling on past and struck an old tree.

— KA-BLAAM!

The old tree could not take its weight and burst apart in a great clatter. Even then its speed had not fully bled off, and it flew on a good distance further.

Without taking my eyes off the collapsing old tree, I climbed down from Pormel’s back. Kalen was already running off behind us.

“Pormel.”

Its eyes flashed a red glow as it glared at the place the ghoul had vanished. Perhaps because the air was cool, its breath came out especially white.

“I’m counting on you.”

A hideous shriek that plucked at the soul reached me. Beyond the wreckage of the old tree, a blurred shape rose to its feet. It cut through the darkness and branded itself on my eye, like the grim reaper.

But.

To a deathless one, how trifling a thing is death? And so the thing’s grotesque scream could not touch my soul.

Pormel too let out a low, long cry, one that gave nothing away to the ghoul’s shriek ringing through the forest. That served as the starting gun, and it burst forward.

Legs that can stop in an instant.

Which is to say, legs that can accelerate in an instant. Pormel collided with the ghoul at a speed even I would have struggled to react to. The ghoul’s huge frame reeled. Pormel did not let the chance slip and bit deep into its waist. The thing flailed both arms to shake it loose, but Pormel had its teeth sunk in and clung on doggedly.

Watching it, I slid in between the braced Pormel and the thrashing ghoul. At the same time I drove my sword down into the heel of its right foot, and working the blade as though butchering meat, I took an enormous slab of flesh off whole.

Merely cutting flesh away is not enough to bring a thing like that to its knees.

…I hope the church’s gauntlets are of the top grade.

So I would smash the bone instead.

I turned the longsword upside down and took hold of the flat of the blade in both hands. Then, as though driving a hammer, I struck the thing’s bared bone with the crossguard. There was a sharp cracking sound, and a clear fissure opened in the bone.

I repeated it again and again. Blood seeped out of both my hands, but the crack in the bone widened by exactly that much. At last the right leg gave way, unable to bear its weight, and the ghoul screamed and began to topple backward.

“Pormel!”

Pormel, waiting on the word, snatched me up lightly in its jaws and got clear. Its mouth stank foully of corpses.

— THOOM!

The ghoul went down completely. An old tree caught up in its thrashing snapped under a blind swing of its fist.

It would not be getting up again in a hurry. Put like that, it sounds as though I had dealt some enormous mortal wound, but all I had done was disable one leg. The ghoul was still visiting an impartial, overwhelming violence on everything within reach of its two arms.

Alone, I’d have had a good deal of trouble with this.

Pormel, part of its scales torn away, pushed its head at me. I scratched it carefully, avoiding the wound.

— Krk.

“Pormel, let’s go.”

Pormel did not answer. It only blinked those big red eyes.