Tales from the Half-Continent by D.M. Cornish

Author:D.M. Cornish [Cornish, D.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760271138
Publisher: Scholastic Australia
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Even as Wells watched, the mighty famuli devoured the last horse, stripping the poor nag’s armoured shabraques with its curling boneless arms like a child peeling an orange, its gory perpendicular mouth quivering and yawning perversely as it ate. Swallowing a last mouthful, barrel trunk bloating with this equine feast, the Shilemoth turned and cast about as if looking. Though it possessed no eyes, it seemed to fix its dire attention upon the tiny fleeing figures of the carriage’s previous occupants scrabbling up the farther slope and away from Case Nigrise. With a peculiarly sibilant and triumphant hoot from that perverse mouth, the beast pivoted awkwardly and strode on tripod limbs to catch them, its long supple arms writhing with the jaunting rhythm of its walk as they reached for new prey. Now the Shilemoth spoke again, howling in some coarse blubbering language words of death and bitter, dire inevitability.

A bleak and hopeless terror took grip of Wells’ soul.

Door stumbled and slipped upon the slick of pine needles underfoot, sending his chief tumbling as he sought to catch his fall.

Clutched now in Cilestine’s arms, Viola screamed.

Catching himself on a sapling stump, Wells froze despite himself and watched in uncanny dread as this incomprehensible horror of the deeps strode towards them. Some small, removed part of him wondered matter-of-factly if this was finally to be his end, and all the struggle with his back and hips and too-short legs finally done.

There was a flash and a sharp crack. One of Sprawle’s grenadoes detonated with a flat thump on the Shilemoth’s flank, engulfing the creature in a rapidly expanding fizz deep and roiling red.

The dark enchantment broke.

Wells scrabbled to stand. Helping Door to do the same, the sleuth made his own way up the cleft in the hill now, pulling himself along by his arms and forcing his ungainly shanks to move at pace with great agonising gyrations of hip.

With a great whooping, fictlers appeared on the road below, several dozen of them and more still sprinting in their long red robes, gleefully intent on catching the escaping party now that they were beset and the upstart invading foreigners’ transport was a ruin.

At the top of the cleft the rescuers found the end of a long ridge that ran off into further gloom. Achieving the higher ground, Cilestine put Viola into Door’s care and without a parting word or a second look, veered away into the trees and back down towards the fictlers, to take the fight to their pursuers and purchase her fellows some distance.

Its aberrant mouth wide with hooting rage, the Shilemoth swatted at the foul crimson air as Sprawle threw yet another grenado. The famuli gave a dismissive hiss and came on, crashing through limb and trunk as if they were mere twigs in its increasingly maddened career.

From the left – beyond even the chasing fictlers – blared a sudden and shocking roar somehow more terrestrially familiar.

“What new horror has come to defeat us?” Sprawle cried angrily, pivoting, a third caste already in hand to hurl at this new threat.

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