Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 110
110
To his right, the pass yawned wide like the mouth of a terrible beast, still hungry even after all the lives that had been lost inside its maw.
The tracks were all but gone, buried beneath a fresh layer of snow, but the drops of blood were still there, shining brightly in the stuttering torchlight of the Foxes at his back. Their number had grown beyond fifty as they moved through the camp, and all of them were armed with bows, crossbows, knives, hatchets, and even leftover building tools such as hammers and spades.
It was a mob, plain and simple, but it wasn't the same as the mob that had come to invade their homes and spill their blood. The reason they picked up arms was not to go out and slaughter a monster. It was to prevent the monster from taking any more lives. That was the important thing.
It's not the same. It's different.
Ander swept his own torch over the frozen ground, shining a golden circle of light across a starburst of blood. He got down on one knee, scooped up a handful of crimson snow, and raised it to his nose. The smell was...
"What's wrong?" Nilia asked, crouching down next to him.
"It's definitely Banno, but not the way I remember him. Smell for yourself." He held out the clump of snow, but Nilia pulled back after only a single whiff, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
"It smells of rot."
"I've smelled this before in Mother's doctor tent. It -" Thinking of Shekka sent a needle of pain through his heart. For a moment he had forgotten that she was no longer with them. It just sort of... snuck up on him, the image of her smiling, dying face as she dragged the scissors through her throat.
My boys... I love you...
He gave his head a brief shake and pushed those feelings deep, deep down. He knew they wouldn't stay there for very long, but right now he had to concentrate. Lives were at stake. "It's the smell of a wound that's been left to fester for too long."
Sorrin's bulky shape emerged from the crowd. The torch in his hand cast half his face in flickering shadows. "Good. I hope he rots from the inside out. I hope maggots are boring tunnels through his flesh as we speak. I hope it hurts. By the Cora I hope it hurts. It'll make our job a lot easier, too."
"You'd think so, but..." Another image flashed into Ander's mind. It was Banno, dragging himself through the mud and the dirt, pulling himself along with his claws, smiling a maniacal smile, his eyes wide and staring, completely oblivious to the biter digging into his ankle. "He's not a normal Wolf. I don't think he feels any pain at all. Or if he does, he doesn't feel it the same way we do."
"That doesn't matter. If we cut off his head, he'll die just like any other Wolf, whether he can feel it or not."
Ander nodded, but he didn't like the look in Sorrin's eye. It was too much like the thousands of eyes that had stared back at him from the bottom of the pass, crushing and trampling all over each other in their crazed bloodlust, their savage desire to grab their prey and tear it apart completely overwhelming all notions of sanity.
One of the other torches, this one much closer to the ground, broke off from the group. It was Jonah's father, Jon, looking both angry and more frightened than he's ever been. "You three find anything?"
Ander wiped his hand on his knee and stood up, steeling himself for what would surely be the beginning of the end.
After tonight, the only family he'd have left would be Hezzi.
If he makes it through the night.
He will. I know he will.
You're not just going to kill your brother, Ander. You're also going to kill his.What do you think he'll make of that? Losing both a mother and a brother in a single night, after he begged you to spare them?
I have to. There is no other choice.
Not so different, after -
"Ander?" The torch in Nilia's hand reflected off her emerald eyes in bands of gold, illuminating the concern on her face in stark contrast to everything else happening on this cold, hard night. She had changed so much since coming here. They all had.
"I'm fine," he answered, not quite meeting her eyes. If she was so easy to read in this unforgiving light, he didn't want her to see whatever his own eye might betray. He turned to face the crowd instead -
The hunting party.
- at least a hundred eyes staring back, waiting for his command.
"He went south," Ander said. "Let's go."
He set off without taking his eye off the ground, following the random splatters of blood as they wound their way through the trees. For a moment there was silence, and then a hundred feet began their march. The shadows of dozens of Foxes stretched out alongside his own, flitting between evergreen branches and sliding over rocky outcroppings in the snow, reaching out to their final confrontation, their battle with the beast.
But the deeper they went, the darker it became, until it was the shadows that seemed to banish the light instead of the other way around. It was a world of shadows. Shadows passed by on his left and right, carrying torches that spluttered and flickered as flakes of snow fell past them, torches that threw even more shadows across the ground and between the trees, trees that leaked inky black shadows that slowly spun around and around as the light floated by, occasionally illuminating a frightened face, terrified eyes peering into the darkness, and shaking hands clutching at bows and hatchets that looked more like toys than weapons.
Ander focussed on the task at hand, keeping his eye on the trail. The drops of blood were getting harder to follow. They weren't wet or hot anymore, so fresh layers of snow kept covering them up, making them smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter. In some places the trail petered away to nothing, and he'd stop dead in his tracks, carefully reading the terrain until he spotted a drop of blood frozen against a rock, or a bright red streak across a gnarled web of roots, illuminated by bands of torchlight shining through the gaps in the trees, and then the hunt would continue.
A weak, fearful part of Ander's soul wished the trail would disappear completely, but he supressed it, pushing it deep down to join with the thoughts of his mother and all the other atrocities of this night. He knew he would have to shine a light on that dark spot at the bottom of his soul before long, just as the torches were shining on these diseased splatters of blood in the snow. It would hurt. It would hurt a lot. But he had good friends and family to help him through it. And most important of all, he had Kiana, the one who had had the strength to blow on that horn when his own strength faltered, the only one who knew exactly what it felt like to be responsible for the deaths of so many.
They would help each other.
He just had to get through this night, and that meant putting an end to the darkest soul of them all.
"He went through here," Ander whispered, gesturing towards the trees up ahead. "Be careful."
Sorrin huffed, but Nilia only frowned and looked at the trail of blood droplets as they zigzagged from tree to tree.
"I don't like this," she said, shaking her head. "Banno has the advantage in close quarters. If he's smart he'll try to set up an ambush. Surely he must know we're coming after him?"
Ander didn't like it, either. Standing inside the circles of light thrown by dozens of stuttering torches, the forest was a maze of twisting shadows. They slithered across the trees, transforming rough bark into sneering faces with bleeding eyes, and black branches into reaching arms tipped with razor sharp claws.
Banno could be hiding inside any of those shadows, just waiting for them to come closer...
Ander took a deep breath, intending to calm the frantic beating of his heart, but instead of the fresh, albeit icy air of the mountains, his lungs were suddenly filled with the thick, cloying stench of blood and decay, so strong it felt like he had just walked headlong into a wall. That stink was all around them, strong enough to persist despite the chilling winds and falling snow. It entered his nose and flowed down the back of his throat, coating his mouth and tongue. He could taste it.
Ander motioned for everyone to stop and he squinted into the dark, past the pulsating circles of light and the diverging shadows they birthed. There, right at the very edge, where his torch barely reached, was a single pinprick of reflected light, a reddish half-sheen staring back at him like a single, bloodshot eye.
It was him. It was -
Ander closed his eyes and gave his head a brief shake. When he opened them again, he saw it for what it really was. In a way, they really had stumbled across Banno. Just not in his entirety.
"Gods up in heaven..." Michael whispered, yanking the collar of his coat up over his nose.
Ander approached it slowly, revealing more and more of this ugly sight with every step, peeling away the shadows until it stood before them, completely naked and exposed.
There were two bloody handprints smeared across the trunk of a frostbitten tree, almost fresh. The blood had seeped into the bark and crawled down the cracks in jagged, saw-toothed lines, but that was far from the worst. Below those handprints, down where the trunk began to split into a system of roots, the ground was absolutely splattered with blood. It had melted a great stinking pool into the snow that was only now beginning to fill back up again, creating a nauseating red slush.
Sorrin stepped out of the darkness like a wraith, giving Ander a jolt he really did not need right now. In the dark, he looked way too much like Banno. "What happened here?" he asked, shining his torch down on all the blood.
Ander put out his hand, almost (but not quite) touching the crimson handprints. They were only slightly bigger than his own.
"He fell," Ander said, hardly aware that he had spoken out loud. He traced the motion of those hands as they smeared themselves across the bark, north to south, arcing down.
He could see it as if it were still happening. Banno, limping through the woods, walking through the snow, at the absolute limit of his endurance without even realising it, skirting the edge of death without believing such a thing was even possible. He stumbled, lost his balance and tried to grab hold of this tree, but he was too weak. He fell, leaving these bloody handprints behind.
Ander crouched by the pool of blood, not liking the way it reflected his face. It was like a whole different world in there, where everything was dark and backwards, at least until the snow could cover it up again.
He saw Banno lying here, half-conscious, caught in the throes of a wild delirium, pawing at the snow in an attempt to get back up, leaving claw marks like gashes in the ground. And then...
"This wasn't just a minor fall," Ander whispered, taking in every detail. "There's too much blood for that. He must have rested here for a few minutes, or blacked out entirely. It's also possible an old wound opened up when he hit the ground. Either way, he had great difficulty getting back to his feet."
"If we're lucky, it was all of those," Sorrin said. "I don't care how he dies, just as long as it's slow and painful."
Once again, Ander was deeply disturbed by Sorrin's words, but he held his tongue. As a future father himself, he thought he could understand Sorrin's feelings at least a little. If anything were to happen to Kiana or the baby - the 'little passenger' as she sometimes called them - he didn't know how he would react. It was such a dark thought he didn't even want to consider it.
"This is a good sign, though," Nilia said. "This could mean he's more injured than we thought."
Ander stood up and shone his torch close to the ground, sweeping it back and forth. There was a trail of blood droplets branching off from the bigger pool, still continuing south, but grouped much closer together than before.
Ander saw him clearly in his mind's eye, clutching at his wounds and limping through the snow, blood steadily leaking from between his fingers.
"He went this way," Ander said and gestured to the trail of blood leading deeper into the shadows.
Sorrin nodded. "Then let us find the baby-killer and put an end to this."
Ander started down the black, winding path dotted with his brother's blood, but couldn't keep from looking back over his shoulder one last time, at the frostbitten tree with the bloody handprints smeared across the bark in two crimson arcs, alternately bathed in shifting torchlight and sweeping shadow.
"I'm coming, Banno," Ander whispered to himself, not realizing that there were tears freezing solid against his cheeks. "I'm sorry..."
I'm coming to kill you.
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