Page 99 of Stardust Child

“Guard,” Remin ordered, removing Lancer’s reins to set the horse loose, and went to help make camp.

They had practiced this over and over before they ever left Tresingale. One of the most valuable lessons learned from Huber and Ortaire’s journey to Ferrede and back was that camps might be made just as easily in the trees as on the ground, and were far safer there. It wouldn’t have mattered during the war—they could hardly lift a whole army into the canopy—but Remin was proud of how cleverly his blacksmiths and carpenters had addressed the problem, and how quick they had been to manufacture the solution.

“Could let someone else do the lifting once in a while,” grumbled Jinmin as Remin opened a box wagon and dragged out the first of the sleeping platforms, a sturdy pine rectangle big enough to sleep five men. A stout system of steel posts, rings, and hooks would suspend it safely from a thick length of rope, all of it reinforced with heavy leather and steel to make sure even stranglers’ strong fingers could not pry it apart.

“They would be slower. Get that side,” Remin grunted, turning and tipping the platform toward Jinmin. Auber’s trained climbers were already scaling the massive trees with huge coils of rope over their shoulders, walking out onto branches three times the width of a man and then sending the ropes down to haul up hooks and pulleys.

It was surprisingly quick work. Emptying one box wagon made room for the first horse to go inside it, blinkered and hooded to muffle the worst of the devil noises overnight. There were five platforms per box, fifteen platforms total, including the supplies that they dragged out of harm’s way every night, just to be safe. Even as Remin and Jinmin set each platform down, another team was ready to rig the defenses on it, sliding spike frames into place on all sides, then slotting torch brackets onto each corner. The ropes came down, heavy steel hooks gathered up the loops of the platform’s supporting ropes, and the first man hopped onto the platform, already loaded with the necessary supplies for the night.

“Ready?” Remin called, swiping the sweat from his brow.

“Yes, my lord!” called one of the climbers from above, and Remin and Jinmin looped their arms around the rope.

“Pull!”Remin ordered, and both of them hauled back, throwing their combined six hundred pounds into it. The platform shot upward, and behind them, two other men dragged the rope back around thetrunk of a tree, yanking in the slack. “And…pull!”

In jerking stretches, the first platform ascended into the branches, with the man aboard hacking them clear as he ascended. Far above, the climbers had another hook rope waiting to take the weight of the platform, wound around the massive branch and covered with a leather sleeve. Arms trembling with effort, Remin shook the falling bark and leaf litter out of his hair.

“Secure, my lord!” shouted another man, and he and Jinmin let go at once, flexing their aching hands.

The next platform. The next. The ring of wagons shrank as men and horses went up, and the camp at the base shifted along the forest floor as they worked. They could not put too much weight on any one branch or tree, and it was a race against the light as the gloom deepened, the sky darkening with clouds.

“Devils!”someone shouted at the same time Lancer gave a whinnying scream, and Remin almost dropped his platform as he whipped around to see the stallion’s black head plunging up and down amidst the squalling and gabbling of a pack of ghouls.

“Almost there, my lord,” said Jinmin beside him, loud and flat over the commotion, and Remin snarled and hauled with all his might, the men above shouting in surprise as the platform shot upward.

“Lower a little, my lord!” one of them called, and Remin only had to hold in place for an instant more before they hooked the lines into place, and he could bolt off to save his horse.

Though by the looks of it, it was the devils that needed rescuing.

“Stars and ancestors,” Tounot breathed as they took in the carnage. Lancer was just finishing off the last ghoul, tearing at its neck with his teeth in between stomps and kicks from his heavy hooves. Remin had never seen the spiked hoof-caps in action, but now he knew why Huber swore by them. Lancer wasn’t just bludgeoning the devils to death; he was tearing them to pieces with every kick and stomp.

“Lancer! To me!” Remin called, pushing his way through his watching soldiers, and Lancer gave a parting kick to a groaning devil and strutted over, spattered with blood to his withers.

“I’ll get him some grain,” said Auber in a profound silence.

There was no time to reward the stallion properly. If ghouls werealready coming out, the other devils would not be far behind. But Remin splashed some water over him to get the worst of the blood off and stroked his nose, suppressing a smile. Stars, Ophele was going to love this story.

If they lived to tell it. The devils were not happy to be deprived of their prey, and it seemed every night the chorus grew louder, howling and snarling and cackling together until Remin and his men had to stuff their ears with cotton wool to sleep. Even that was done in shifts, with two men awake and three men sleeping on each platform, replenishing torches and watching for stranglers.

Remin had burned through three torches of his own watch when Tounot waved him over, pointing downward.

“Listen,” he said, cocking his head toward the ground. They stood together behind one of the spike frames, far back enough that no strangler could suddenly appear and drag them over. “Hear that?”

It was hard to guess what sound he might mean in the howling, yowling cacophony, but Remin listened, moving a pace closer to the barriers. He couldn’t hear it at all until a break between howls, and it might have been lost among the ghoul noises if he hadn’t been paying attention, but it was a sound he had never heard before. A purring, growlinghnnnguh, hrrguh, hnnnguh,almost like the noise of the lion dogs he had once seen in the Imperial Menagerie. But there were no lion dogs in the Andelin.

“What under the stars is that?” he muttered, straining his ears to track it. The noise was moving back and forth beneath them, sometimes lost in the noises of other devils, and a sudden burst of howling that almost made his heart burst out his ears, he was listening so hard. He had been hearing the noises of devils for four years now, but never this sound. It was easy to imagine some great beast pacing restlessly beneath them in the dark, hungry and terrible.

“Never heard anythi—bugger, you bastard,” Tounot interrupted himself, and smashed a club down on top of a strangler that was trying to clamber over the spiked barricade beside him. The devil fell to the ground with a distant thump. “Think it’s a wolf?”

“I don’t think so…” Reaching for a spare torch, Remin kindled it with one of the lit ones. “Watch my back,” he said, leaning over the barrier. It was a dangerous maneuver; if a strangler were nearby, it might try to snatch him over the side. But he dropped the torch and watched it plummet into the darkness below, illuminating a seething mass of devils that would linger in his dreams for some time after. Grey-black skin. A roil of spiky, smoky fur. And then the light went out.

“See anything?” Tounot asked, and Remin shook his head, frowning. They did not have so many torches that he could repeat that experiment.

It gave him a headache, listening to them. Straining his ears until it might just as well have been his imagination that fueled that new sound, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. The sense of something large and dangerous prowling beneath them in the dark, with a purring growl that rumbled like thunder.

Chapter 10 – Hunters on the Trail

Predictably, the scholars of the Tower arrived at the worst possible time.

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