Page 139 of Stardust Child

His mouth twisted with impotent fury.

“They started doing that when they couldn’t strangle us,” he said tightly. “Dragging people over the barricades and letting them drop.”

Ophele’s quill scratched busily, noting these details. It was more evidence of the cruel cunning of stranglers.

“The last people in Meinhem were living in the granary when we got there. It looked like some of them tried to build another stone structure, but either something broke into it or it got them before they could finish it. There were more dead in shallow caves up and down the riverbank; the devils dug them out. Wolf demons, from the claw marks.”

Later, Remin would have to send someone to interview the survivors of Meinhem. He needed to know what they had tried, what had worked, and what had failed. He could imagine how it had been all too well: desperate days spent frantically trying to build something that would survive the night, food supplies dwindling, until the survivors were too starved to defend themselves. Starvation was a terrible way to die. He listened as Ortaire described what they had found, and it was both a comfort and punishment to know that all of the two hundred and twenty-six dead had been found and burned, to send them to the stars.

No one could have known how much worse this year would be. The valley had been coping with the devils for four years, and the folk of Meinhem had managed as well as anyone else, until now. There had been no sign to warn them that the devils would be coming like a storm. Remin couldn’t have known. There was nothing he could have done to save them.

But he hadbeento Meinhem. He had gone to them and accepted their oaths of loyalty and swore his own oath to protect them. He hadgiven them his word.His people had suffered and starved, they had died in pain and terror, and nothing would ever make that right.

“…a dozen or so on the way back,” Ortaire was saying. “It was much quieter, but slow, since most of them were on foot. All of Meinhem’s beasts were devoured. It helped, having Bram meet us with the wagons.”

“You did well,” said Remin, giving himself a shake and meeting Ortaire’s eyes. “No one could expect more. Sometimes there is no good place to camp.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Ortaire said quietly, and took his seat.

“There was not that much trouble with devils for us, on the way to the Spur.” Remin launched into his own tale. The success of the tree camps, the dozen or so stranglers that came over the barricades at night, and the crowd of devils on the ground underneath: all alarming, but nothing at all compared to the swarms of midsummer. “We were near the crossroads to Nandre when we heard a strange sound among the devils. A growl, but longer and deeper than any other devil noise I’ve heard before. A sort of…purring,” he said, picking the word carefully. “We never saw it, but it came back three or four nights in a row before it started trying to shake us down. Whatever it was, it was big.”

That was a night he had recalled in his dreams more than once already. A chill went through him as Remin told the tale, forcing himself to recall every crucial detail. The glow of the sleeping platforms all around him, like lamps strung on tree branches for a capital evening soiree. The way the torches had blazed, their lights streaking as the platforms swung wildly. The screams. The man who had fallen.

“The devil left not long after,” he finished. “But the next morning, we found something strange.”

Auber brought out the leather pouch and shook the oily-looking black quills onto the table.

“Those were embedded in a tree about four feet off the ground,” Remin said, eying them with distrust. “We had to pull them out with tongs.”

“Spines?” Juste said, leaning over to examine them. He did not touch them.

“They look like porcupine quills to me,” said Auber, poking them apart. “One of the men touched them. He got a rash on his hand for a few days, but it went away. They might not be anything at all. I’ve heard of spiders that cause rashes, if you handle them. These could be from some animal we haven’t discovered yet.”

“They didn’t burn?” Ophele flushed as every head in the room swiveled toward her. She looked at Remin. “I—I mean, if it was a devil, they would burn. The quills. In sunlight, I mean. Did you keep them in the pouch, all this time?”

“Auber,” Remin said, after a moment. It had not occurred to them to make this trial.

Auber needed no explanation. Picking up one of the quills with the tongs, he went to one of the windows and pushed it open, admitting a shaft of sunlight. It only took a minute before the quill began to smoke, and maybe three minutes total before it began to burn, an evil blue-orange flame that every man in the room recognized. Beside him, Ophele drew a short, surprised breath.

“It appears we have a new devil,” said Juste.

“The devil of Nandre,” Auber agreed.

* * *

It was some time before the hubbub died down, and Remin let them have it. It was a shattering revelation by itself, and fit unpleasantly well with the other pieces of evidence that remained to be presented.

“We’ll tell you the rest in the order we learned it ourselves,” he said, calling them back to order. “We saw no further strange signs on the way to the Spur. There were many more devils in the mountains, and Tounot has the numbers for the first four days of our journey. There were not too many to count,” he added a little acerbically. “But the fifth day there was heavy snow, and the devils came upon us in the dark. I saw at least six wolf demons myself. We estimate three dozen stranglers killed, and about the same number of ghouls.”

He would have preferred not to linger over the details of the battle with Ophele listening; for a while, her busy quill stopped altogether, and she listened as round-eyed as if he were telling tales by the fire. But there was much to be learned from the tactics they had improvised, particularly the use of the terrain. Tounot added his own remarks there. It had been his task to find a path through the dark and snow and devils, and it was he that secured their refuge for the night, forming up the vanguard with shields to push a frothing pack of ghouls and stranglers off the side of the mountain.

“We lost eight men that night.” Remin resumed the narrative. “But it was strange that so many devils appeared there. There were other places lower on the mountain where they might have attacked more easily. The next morning, we went on, and came at last to a cave near the top of the mountain.”

Auber was already distributing the sketches they had made, and setting out the map marking its location.

“It was about a half mile above us. There was no reaching it,” Remin added, his mouth tightening. He was still bitter about that. “I would guess the opening was about twelve feet high, and about ten feet wide. And it might be like every other cave in the Berlawes, but I have never seen so many devils so late in the year anywhere else.”

“It is circumstantial,” Edemir agreed, examining one of the sketches. “But powerfully so. This is a rockslide beneath it? It looks as if something burst out of the mountain.”

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