Free Web NovelChapter 90: Shadow Cocoon
The Viletails fed on what was left of Kervyn.
Their long jaws tore through the flesh and the muscle with a relish that had no cruelty in it and no mercy in it, only hunger, and the blood coated their snouts and dripped from the needle teeth, and the wet sound of the chewing carried under the Bleed Bark canopy and joined the far-off cries of things deeper in the Heart.
Five minutes since the body had gone down in front of them, and everything below the chest was nearly gone. The belly had been opened first and emptied, the organs taken before anything else, and then the thick muscle of the thighs and the back. Splinters of rib stood up out of the ruin. Pieces of bone lay scattered across the floor. The blood-smell had thickened over the clearing until even from cover, dozens of paces off, Kei could taste the metal of it on his tongue.
The three of them held still in the bushes — Kei, Asp, the thing that wore Corvyn — and none of them spoke and none of them looked away from the feeding. A crimson phosphor fungus threw a faint red light across the roots of a Bleed Bark tree and lit the worst of it. Asp’s face had set hard a long time ago. Corvyn looked as if the sight unsettled him, and held his silence, and the unsettlement sat on his borrowed face the way an expression sits on a thing that has chosen it. Kei crouched low with his eyes on the pack and his thoughts somewhere past them. Out beyond the feeding, in her own patch of dark, Tula waited. She had put herself forward as the bait with a steadiness that did not match the plan’s madness, and she was not certain, even now, whether the thing she meant to do was brilliance or a way to die.
One of the Viletails lifted its head from the body.
Strings of flesh hung from its jaws and the blood ran off them to the floor. Its pale eyes drifted up the corpse to the part the pack had not reached — the face, still mostly whole, torn strips of it clinging to the skull, the neck and the collarbone intact. It left the main feast and began to crawl up the body toward the head.
Two shadow threads came out of the dark behind it.
The move was so quiet and so small that Kei nearly lost it. One moment the creature was alone. The next there were two threads of darkness around its throat, thin past seeing. The Viletail froze. Its jaws came open. Nothing came out of them.
The threads drew tight.
The muscle of the throat compressed inward under them. The creature tried to scream a warning to the pack and managed only a wet choke, and the panic broke across its face, and it clawed at its own neck and twisted against the things it could not see. The rest of the pack fed on. None of them turned.
The threads tightened further, and then they began to cut.
They slipped under the skin and into the muscle of the throat itself, and blood started from the corners of the creature’s eyes, and a moment later from its ears, and the Viletail convulsed while the threads carved deeper and deeper from the inside. Corvyn grimaced at it.
" Tula? " he whispered.
Kei nodded, once.
Asp let out a slow breath. " That’s kickass. "
Kei found that he agreed. There was something in House Nightloom’s way of it that put a cold finger on the back of the neck. Other shadow practitioners leaned on speed, on force, on a flood of darkness. Tula’s craft was none of that. No clash. No burst of violence. No attack the eye could find at all. Only the silent threads, and the silent suffering, and the silent dying.
The trapped creature’s panic crested. Its heavy tail lashed against the floor.
THUMP.
The sound went through the clearing, and every feeding head came up at once. In the same instant the trapped creature jerked backward, and the threads pulled taut, and cut.
Blood went up into the air.
The head came away clean and spun and struck the roots of a tree and lay still, and the body dropped where it stood. Silence took the clearing. For a few long seconds none of the others moved; their pale eyes only stared at the fallen thing. Then something came out of the bushes behind it.
A cocoon the size of a person burst from the undergrowth and landed heavy on the floor.
It was woven of countless layers of white shadow thread. No opening in it. No limb, no face. Its shape was the shape of a body wrapped for burial, and the threads of it shifted faintly under the red light of the fungi so that the whole thing seemed almost to breathe. Asp’s eyes went wide. Kei understood at once.
" Tula. "
She had wrapped the whole of herself inside a cocoon of her own shadow.
Kei drew the Twin Umbral Wings from his bead, the bat-wing blades coming out without a sound, catching the faint red light. He had no wish to step on Tula’s plan. But if the Viletails opened the cocoon and found her, he would already be moving.
The pack stared at the thing. Low growls came out of them. Their nostrils worked. Something alive was inside the woven shape — they could smell it — and yet the smell that reached them was a smell they could not place.
One of them came forward. It put its tail out and touched the cocoon, gently.
Nothing happened. The cocoon lay still. It touched again. Still nothing. The Viletail tilted its head.
Another came and circled it, sniffing without pause, its nostrils opening and closing as it hunted for an answer, and whatever it found in the scent only deepened the confusion.
For the better part of an hour the cocoon held the whole of their attention. The strange thing passed from one to the next, their curiosity never thinning. One dragged it across the clearing by the tail and another stole it back. At one point two of them grew so set on owning it that they forgot the rest and began circling each other, growling low. The cocoon took every test without the smallest reaction. It was kicked and scratched and bitten and rolled and lifted and dropped, and through all of it Tula did not move. Hidden in her layers of shadow thread, she held a stillness Kei found almost hard to look at.
The game wore out by degrees. The creatures moved with less heat than before. Their tails swung slower. Their attention drifted off the cocoon and came back and drifted again. One settled by a root and licked dried blood from its claws. Another lowered its head to the floor and lay down. The clearing went quiet once more, the blood-smell still hanging in it like a thing with weight.
Then one of them gave a sharp cry, and every head came up.
Kei caught the change in them at once. The curiosity was gone. Something had moved into its place.
Hunger.
They had spent a great deal feeding and playing and climbing and searching, and now the instinct in them had swung back to the oldest and simplest need, and their pale eyes went across the clearing looking for meat. For a few seconds none of them moved. They only sat, nostrils working. And then their eyes settled on the nearest meat there was.
The body of their own dead packmate.
Asp frowned. Corvyn looked at the body and back at the pack. Neither said anything.
The largest of them came to the corpse first. Its movements were careful, almost thoughtful. For a moment it lowered its head and smelled along the open stump of the neck where the head had been, the blood still seeping there, and it held still for a few seconds as though something in it weighed something. Asp’s face softened by a fraction.
Perhaps some thread of recognition held. Perhaps the things carried some rough sense of the pack after all.
The hope lasted less than three seconds.
The Viletail opened its jaws and tore a great piece of flesh from the shoulder, and the sound of the muscle parting went through the clearing, and the rest of them rushed in at once.
Whatever recognition there had been was gone under the hunger.
They came down on the body of their own with the same relish they had shown Saana and Kervyn. The flesh went fast under the snapping jaws. Long ropes of muscle were torn from the torso and swallowed whole. One drove its claws into the ribcage and hauled back until the ribs cracked apart. Another buried its snout in the opened chest and came up red. The body shifted and shifted again as different parts of it were torn away.
Kei watched in silence.
There was no hesitation in the creatures, and no recognition. The body of the thing that had hunted beside them had become, in the space of three seconds, only meat. The feast went on for the better part of a quarter of an hour, and by the end little of the corpse was whole. Then one of them came to the severed head.
It lowered its snout and looked at it a moment. The dead pale eyes looked back without anything in them. Then it took the head in its jaws.
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The skull folded at once. One eye burst under the pressure. Bone scattered. The creature shook its head and tore the rest apart, and the brain spilled across the floor, and another Viletail rushed in and took it. The face was gone in moments. A third swallowed part of the lower jaw. What was left of the skull was crushed again and again until it was no more than wet fragments in the dirt.
Asp grimaced.
" Remind me never to die around those things. "
Corvyn snorted, despite himself. Kei said nothing.
The pack fed until almost nothing was left, and then went over the scattered bone in case any marrow remained, and licked their claws clean, and cleaned their snouts against the bark. The clearing looked as though neither corpse had ever lain there. Only the stains stayed.
The Viletails gathered again around the cocoon. The heat of before was gone out of them. They seemed content now only to be near it. One laid its head against the woven surface. Another curled its tail around part of it. A third sat close and watched the forest.
An hour passed.
The shadows shifted slowly across the clearing. Strange sounds moved through the far canopy. More than once Asp thought the pack might finally rise and go, and each time they settled again. Kei held his patience. His eyes did not stray far from the cocoon.
Somewhere inside that mass of thread, Tula waited, and the thought of it was enough to make Kei shake his head. Most novices would have come apart inside of minutes. Tula had let herself be made a toy — kicked across a clearing, bitten, dragged, dropped, again and again — and had not once given herself away.
At last the largest Viletail rose.
The movement pulled the others’ attention to it. It looked off into the forest and gave a low run of clicking sounds, different from the cries and growls of before — these had purpose in them. The pack answered almost at once. They came up off the ground and went to the cocoon.
Kei narrowed his eyes. " They’re moving. "
Asp nodded. " Looks like it. "
Three of them set themselves around the cocoon and wrapped their tails about it, and slowly the woven shape lifted from the ground. The fourth hung back. Its attention had gone to what little remained of Kervyn — the upper part, the sliced face still held to the collarbone and a few fragments of neck. It went to the remains and smelled them and took them up in its jaws.
Kei understood. The pack was carrying food home. The cocoon. The fragment. Both would travel with them.
The three carrying the cocoon reached the nearest Hemoth Pine and set their claws to the bark, their tails keeping their grip on the prize, and began to climb. The fourth came after with Kervyn’s remains. In seconds they had gone up several dozen feet.
Branches swayed overhead. Leaves moved.
The Viletails went through the canopy with a speed that did not seem possible for their size, the long limbs and the heavy tails carrying them branch to branch, the cocoon swinging gently below them.
Kei rose from cover. Asp came up beside him.
" The nest. "
" Hopefully. "
Corvyn breathed out, slow.
High above, the Viletails carried their prizes deeper into the rainforest, their shapes harder and harder to hold among the crossing branches. Wait much longer and they would lose them.
Kei took one last look up into the canopy. Then he stepped out of the bushes.
" Let’s move. "
Asp followed at once. Corvyn muttered something low and unpleasant and came after.
The three of them slipped into the dark beneath the Bleed Bark, and above them four Viletails carried a cocoon with a Nightloom noblewoman in it toward whatever place they called home. None of the three knew what waited there. None of them knew how many more of the things lived past this small group. But all three knew the one thing that mattered.
The hunt had only begun.
