Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
A gust of wind blows against the house, whistling through the seams, and making the shutters vibrate against their—
One of them rips open, and light pours in.
The massive blood splatter is to the left of the doorway, under the window.
Most of it’s on the floor, but there’s a splash up the wall that speckles the glass panes … as if someone with many injuries was thrown there on a surge of great violence. Most of the stain is brown, indicating that a number of days have passed since the incident, but what marks the window remains a brilliant, bracing red.
Fates, that was a tremendous amount of blood. And with a feeling of piercing dread, I pivot around—
My hand rises to my mouth and locks on. There’s another stain over by the hearth, big as a puddle in a lane after it’s rained for nearly a week.
Right where I’ve been sitting all night long.
With a feeling of foreboding, I walk over to the stairs to the second floor. I fear what I’ll see up there, yet I can’t stop my feet as they mount the creaking, soot-dusted steps. Rounding the rough-hewn bannister, I look across an open, raftered space that’s streaming with sunshine. Another set of shutters has blown open … so the rust-stained quilts on the tiny bed and even smaller crib are cruelly visible.
The parents were killed downstairs. The children up here.
Did they hear their mother and father fighting off the intruders? The breaking of furniture and the scattering of things down below?
Squeezing my eyes shut, I moan in the back of my throat, and my descent back down the stairs is a trip and fall that nearly lands me on my head. With a shuddering shamble, I bolt out the door—
The ruination from the fire overwhelms me.
In the shadows of the night, when I was worried about being ambushed, it was bad enough. But now the devastation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and all I can do is imagine the heat and the flames, the people and animals panicked and fleeing and burning alive …
Except that’s not the way it happened, was it.
And when I put it all together, I’m even more horrified.
Across the narrow lane, a beam of sunlight at a low angle rounds the corner of another house that’s managed to survive … and the brown marking on the stucco beside the door is highlighted as if something unseen is demanding I pay attention to the symbol.
The sloppy swirl was made in a counterclockwise direction, given where the brush ran out of blood. The drips that flow down from the design suggest it was done in a hurry, and I know, even before I pivot around, that the same marking is going to be beside the door I’ve just come out of.
It is.
As I turn to the lane we rode in on, and look at all the burned-out shells, I don’t need to inspect any of the other surviving structures to know that they’ve been marked with the symbol as well. It’s an S and a P, intertwined.
Salvation and Protection.
I’ve only ever heard about the dark-magic warning before. Supposedly, it’s made with the blood of a goat or other cloven-hooved animal that’s slaughtered in a prescribed way. What it means is that someone came through here, killed the farmers and their families, along with all the livestock, and then marked the little community as contaminated with evil.
And everything was burned to the ground because when they stacked the bodies and doused them with the same oil used in the lamps in Mr. Lewis’s pub … the fire was so hot, so intense, so big, that it spread throughout the buildings.
The goal was to incinerate the people’s remains, not the houses.
“Merc…?” As I call out, it feels as though I am forever saying his name in that pleading tone of voice. “Where are you?”
I have to find him. I cannot be alone in all of this revelation, though surely he knows what’s transpired here, too.
Assuming he hasn’t left me.
As I set to walking, ash squeaks under the soles of my slipper shoes, and the smell of faded smoke and dead bodies becomes all that I know, the noxious combination staining the insides of my nose and dripping down the back of my throat. Falling into a run in spite of how stiff I am, I try to outpace the stench.
And then I don’t think any more about it … or anything else.
I pass by the final two houses and a long view to northwest unfurls before me. But instead of the fenced-in grazing pasture and then the outer rolling farm fields, it is the lone figure standing in the midst of the grass that draws all my attention.
Merc has his back to me. His black hair is waving in the wind that blows into him, and he’s bathed in the golden light of the dawning sun, the broadsword in his hand glinting silver. Beside him, our horse is cropping great yanks of green blades, tethered by a lead line looped around his chestnut neck.