Certainty by Unknown
Author:Unknown
Language: por
Format: epub
Published: 2012-10-06T18:49:29+00:00
Chapter Four: The Stone
âJelani, Adrun, with me,â I said. âThe rest of you, keep going.â Whatever the scout had found had terrified the man, and I didnât want his panic spreading to the others.
âFound tracks,â the scout said when we were out of the othersâ earshot. âFollowed them.â He thrust a hand forward, jerkily, as if to hurl the memory away.
I was about to ask how he had spotted tracks on the tundra when I saw them myself: a line of booted prints sunk deep into the ground, as though it were summerâs soggy marshland instead of the rock-hard terrain of late fall. The earth was slimy and discolored in those prints; the very dirt and ice seemed to have rotted at the touch of whoever had passed there.
âSeen that kind of thing around the Worldwound,â the scout said. âNever on this side.â
The bootprints tattooed a dark line back to the wardstone. Nearer us, they went over a low, rocky rise and into a shallow cleft. I followed, uneasy. Adrun and Jelani were watchful at my sides; the scout lagged fearful behind.
In the cleft we found the man who had made those prints. Heâd died badly. Deep gouges tore through the back of his sheepskin coat. Green-black rivulets leaked from the wounds; the stench of sickness pervaded the area despite the wind and chill. I could see brown bone under the flapping tatters of the manâs coat; the skin and muscle was rotted away entirely.
Heâd survived his poisoned wounds long enough to get this far, though, and I didnât think theyâd killed him. Blisters covered his mouth in a frozen pink froth. His throat had collapsed, eaten away from the inside; its long red track vanished into his sternum. The soft part of his jaw was gone, too, and a shaggy beard of red ice spilled across his chest.
An empty waterskin lay near his hand. It bore the same mark as the ones weâd received in Kenabres.
âHoly water,â Jelani said, reaching the same realization that I had. âHe was already deadâor rather, undead. He killed himself by drinking holy water.â
âMaybe he thought it could flush out the poison from whatever got him in the back,â Adrun said. âMaybe it would have, if the poison hadnât spread.â
I left them to their speculations and rummaged through the dead manâs kit. He didnât have much. A few blankets, some lamp oil, a good sheepskin hat. Most of it was standard-issue, like ours. Heâd been a soldier, or stolen from oneâand, like many crusaders, he had a sizable collection of warding amulets. I picked them up as an afterthought. They didnât take much space, and he might have a sweetheart or an orphan back in Kenabres whoâd want them.
We returned to the company in silence. The others watched us apprehensively, aware that something had gone wrong without knowing what. A gloomy mood fell over the camp, and it deepened when the other scout failed to come back. No one mentioned it, but I knew no one expected to see him again.
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