Rich Larson - [BCS289 S01] - The Star Plague (html) Read online

  Bragi is so intent on his prey that he doesn’t see the huddled shape on the stone until it’s under his feet. Hands shoot up and pull him down. He yelps a surprised curse. The croucher scrabbles at him, reaching for his neck. He slams its head against the floor and wrestles free. It’s the drunk and funny priest, the one he stabbed, but now there’s a fresh chest wound that must be the beast’s handiwork.

  “I forgot about you,” Bragi admits, and yanks up the croucher’s robe to slice through the backs of its haunches. He leaves it wriggling on the stone.

  The beast is gone. Bragi eyes the walls for its outline, remembering its camouflaged skin. His own skin prickles. He listens for movement but only hears the croucher shifting. He wipes his blade on the back of its robe before he continues on.

  Silver smears lead him to the dormitory, the room where the priests sleep together but each on their own pallet. He’s glanced inside before during his night wanderings.

  A faint blue glow is coming through the open doorway. Bragi flexes his hand, adjusts his grip on his sword. He peers inside. The beast’s light is bobbing in the dark like a lure, suspended over one of the straw pallets. He can almost make out its hunched shadow in the corner.

  “I’m not a fucking fish,” he whispers, and slips inside.

  Bragi knows that predators are most dangerous when wounded and cornered, so he approaches the wiggling light slowly. The edge of his blade glints pale blue as he readies to strike. Then the light whips over his head, impossibly fast, tracing a glowing line through the gloom. He throws his head back to follow it, and as the beast drops down from over the doorway he realizes that he is a fucking fish.

  The impact slams the wind out of his lungs and sends his sword flying off into the dark. He hears it clang against the stone but has no chance of scrambling after it; the beast has him pinned, talons puncturing his clothes and skin, and its remaining knife-limb is falling at his face. He jerks his head to the side and feels the blade shear off a tuft of his beard, the lobe of his ear. He tastes his own hot blood on his lips.

  He jacks back onto his shoulder blades, kicking high. One of his feet finds the wound he opened with his sword; he digs his heel in. The beast shudders. Its fleshy beak opens for a moment, giving him a glimpse of its sewing-needle teeth. He twists his foot into the cut and the beast’s talons pull back. He hauls upright, searching for his blade, for anything that might be a weapon.

  The knife-limb slashes sideways. Bragi spins; the beast’s weight carries it past and for an instant he sees its turned back. The head of his axe is still lodged there, splinters of the haft sticking out like wooden feathers. He lunges low how he would in a wrestling match, taking the beast’s bony legs out from under it. They crash together to the floor and Bragi scrabbles for the axe head.

  A sliver of wood slides under his thumbnail like a hot needle. He ignores it, wrapping his hand around the iron and wrenching it free. The beast’s knife-limb twists to jab at him. He blocks it with the axe head but loses hold of his foe. It tosses him to the floor again. As it dives onto him he comes up to meet it, swinging the axe head at its beak. Silver splatters his face and he hears a crunch as its delicate teeth are shattered.

  “Bent and blistered beast,” Bragi pants. “I’ll tear out your teeth, mash in your maw. I’ll break your black blades.” He seizes the thrashing whip on its head. “And I’ll lop off your fucking lure.”

  He slices it at the base and it flies across the room, blue light spinning wildly. The beast swings its knife-limb again and this time Bragi can’t move quickly enough; it opens a gash down his hip. Blood spurts across his stomach. He falters but manages to catch the next blow with the hook of his axe head, and when the beast’s maw flicks open he screams and drives his his axe hand inside to the elbow.

  The needles shred his forearm. He jerks the axe head upward, through the roof of its gaping mouth. Something yields. Splits. A shudder goes through its entire body. He keeps screaming even after the beast collapses, even after he drags his bloody hand free. He watches it twitch and go still.

  “You fucking thing,” he gasps. “You fucking thing.”

  He slumps onto one of the straw pallets, trying to calm his hammering heart. He pushes his uninjured palm against his hip. Blood is still welling out, but it’s a trickle, not the torrent he feared. He cuts a strip of wool from the blanket and binds his shredded hand, then cuts a longer strip to wrap all the way around his hipbones. He’s trying to knot it when he hears a familiar voice from the hall.

  “Bragi?” Symond sounds unsure whether to shout or whisper. “Bragi? Bragi?”

  “Symond,” Bragi says. “Symond, Symond.”

  The young priest appears in the doorway. His wide eyes roam over the beast’s corpse. His arms are empty. “The goat’s with Father Wilthrop,” he mumbles. “Safe. All the crouchers, they’ve stopped moving.” He stares at the beast again. “You killed it.”

  “I killed it.” Bragi stands up. “Help me drag it. I want to show everyone.”

  Symond reaches with a tentative hand. He pokes the beast’s foot once, twice. Then he looks up, and Bragi sees his crooked-toothed smile slowly returning.

  They haul the beast’s body out into the yard, where the priests are embracing each other, some of them weeping with grief, others weeping from relief, some of them singing to their dead god. One is on his hands and knees, vomiting. Siv skips up onto the man’s bent back, as if it’s a boulder on a hill, then springs nimbly back down again.

  Bragi looks around for the crouchers. He sees one pulling its way through the dirt, belly-down like a serpent. It’s heading for the pen, where all the slaughtered animals are piled. His gaze goes to the sticky mass of dead flesh and he realizes it’s not just animals anymore. The crouchers who could still walk have thrown themselves onto the mound. The ones who crawl have crawled to its base and gone still there. It’s as if they’ve built their own funeral pyre.

  He drops the beast’s leg and Symond drops the other. Splayed out on the ground, skeletal limbs stretched outward, it’s a huge and hideous thing, and Bragi wonders how he killed it. Its skin stays dark against the pale dirt. The surviving priests crowd around to look at it.

  “I did it with my teeth,” Bragi says. “It tasted like eel.”

  Siv comes ambling over to nip his lacerated fingers; he yanks them away with a hiss but manages to rub the goat’s head with his good hand before she darts off again. She’s sniffing at the mound of the dead. He remembers that the nanny goat is in it.

  “Bragi. Father Wilthrop wants to thank you.”

  Bragi turns. The old man is holding onto Symond’s shoulder for support, and to have an interpreter. He mumbles Anglish into Symond’s ear. The young priest nods.

  “He says it was a mistake to drive you out of the monastery,” Symond relays. “And he says that the Northmen’s loss is Anglishmen’s gain. You are welcome in our land. You are a heathen, but you are welcome here.” He hesitates, then speaks for himself. “I think you are unable to return to your land. Is that what it is to be útlagi? You were driven out?”

  Bragi is tired of carrying the judgement like a stone in his belly, so he nods. “It was by my own doing. A drunken man tried to console me during Freya’s festival. He said to me that plagues are the gods’ way of weeding out the weak.” Siv has wandered back to him; he kneels to scratch her chin. “And so in the night I weeded him with his own dagger. His back was turned. He had no weapon. He was the jarl’s half-brother. But even if he wasn’t, I am a murderer and I deserve my exile.”

  Symond is silent for a moment. “I think there is purpose for you yet,” he says. “Even if it’s not in your land or among your people. You’re alive. And we’re alive because of you.”

  “That at least is true.” Bragi gives Siv a long look, then sticks her up on his shoulder. “Open the gate for me. I want to go to the ash tree and make a blood sacrifice.”

  Symond’s eyes bulge.

  “Not Siv,” Bragi says sharply. “I’m ble
eding enough for Odin on my own.”

  Symond nods. “Alright. But I won’t tell this to Father Wilthrop. What should I tell him?”

  Bragi shrugs. “Tell him I want to be alone for a while and look at the sea.” He casts a glance at the mound of crouchers and dead sheep and goats. “And tell him to burn the bodies.”

  Symond mutters to the old man, then shouts to his fellow priests. Two of them hurry to the gate to lift the heavy iron bar.

  As Bragi steps forward with the baby goat on his shoulder, he notices something strange. The rust smell is getting stronger, and he feels a humming again in the base of his skull. When he gets to the gate he spots tendrils of dark red dust creeping underneath the crack. His neck prickles cold.

  The two priests shove the gate open, smiling at him, saying something in Anglish.

  Bragi is rooted to the spot by what he sees.

  It’s the size of the whale carcass he found once in the fjord, enormous and bloated, a slithering mass of tongues and spines. His eyes can barely make sense of its shape. The hide is wet and grease-yellow. Red dust leaks from puckered orifices all across its body. Only its mouth is familiar, a gaping hole with rows on rows of needle-thin teeth.

  The creature makes him think of the kraken of sailor’s tales, but he knows it wasn’t dredged from the bottom of the dark sea. It came up from the pit.

  “Bragi! Behind you!”

  Bragi whirls and sees the beast clawing its way towards him, uncannily quick, not a corpse after all. He dives to the side, but he is not its goal.

  He watches as the beast crawls into the mass of undulating flesh, how Litton crawled in the night, and somehow attaches itself. Its dark skin slowly fades to grease-yellow. Its limbs fold away.

  Iċ eom se bonda. The beast was only the husband, preparing food and den, and now the wife has joined it.

  One priest has the presence of mind to try shutting the gate, but the monster forces its way through, its bloated body contorting. It looms over Bragi. He steps backward, tucking Siv under his arm.

  “Should we make the svinfylking, Bragi?” Symond calls hoarsely. “Or are we doomed men?”

  Bragi doesn’t know the answer, but he knows he doesn’t want to die easily. “Your god has more sights to show you, Symond,” he says. “Get everyone behind me.”

  He draws his bitter-biting blade. The monster surges forward, and Bragi’s eyes are strong enough to count every tooth in its maw.

  © Copyright 2019 Rich Larson