Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 05 by Oz Into the Wild # Christopher Golden

Author:Oz Into the Wild # Christopher Golden [Golden, Oz Into the Wild # Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-06-30T13:41:43+00:00

Chapter Nine

Twenty-six Nights Until the Full Moon

The nomads had brought guns.

Kangri stood at the eastern edge of his village with both hands gripping the carbine rifle that was slung across his shoulders. It was gas-operated and held ten rounds. The nomads had said these rifles were used by militia in China, but Kangri had never seen a weapon like this before. Rifles, certainly. They used them to hunt antelope and deer for food, or bear and leopards if such beasts threatened the village or livestock.

This carbine, though, this was a powerful weapon.

Yet even with the guns the nomads had brought, Kangri did not feel safe. The carbine held ten rounds; there was no way to know how many monsters served the demon of the eastern mountain, or how many rounds would be required to kill even one of them.

It was cold enough that he wore his thick wool hat pulled down over his ears, and yet Kangri’s hands were sweating, making his grip on the rifle slick. The night was clear, the moon still fat as it dwindled above them. Wooden posts had been planted all around the village, and torches burned in them all night long, replenished constantly by those whose turn it was to act as sentries. When the nomads had brought the corpse of the horrid creature into the village, the people had all thought it was over. Messengers were sent to ask the monks to come down from the monastery and bless their dwellings again, to place wards all over Lingka.

But the messengers never returned, and the monks never came. It was assumed that those sent to solicit their aid had never reached the monastery, and it was considered unwise to send anyone else out of the village.

Several nights later, the bloodshed began again. Late at night, women and children, even grown men, plucked from their beds. No blood, no screams, just gone, as though ghosts had come and stolen them away. Seven villagers missing in three days. Two men had been chosen to go to the monastery and beg the monks to intervene, but they had never returned.

Now each evening the darkness stole upon them like an accomplice to the evil things that lurked in the night. The torches had been put up, and the entire village took turns at sentry duty. But even those who were not on duty did not sleep well, if at all. In the mornings the people of Lingka were sluggish, their work suffered. They were sullen and bitter and jumped at every sound. But Kangri thought that perhaps it would get better now. Since they had posted sentries and lit torches there had been no sign of the creatures, nothing moving in the shadows of the night, and no one else had been harmed. But each time Kangri stood sentry, he felt a kind of terror he had never imagined before. His impending wedding was forgotten. Work on the nearly completed home he was building for his bride-to-be had been put aside.

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