He paused beside Winter, stick outstretched, and wrinkled his nose. Alex, up ahead, half turned.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can smell something,” Abraham said. “Something dead.”
After a moment, Winter could, too, the sick-?sweet stench of rotting meat infiltrating the cleaner smell of decaying leaves.
“Another deer?” she said. They’d passed several corpses, all in an advanced state of decomposition, not even torn much by scavengers.
“Probably,” Abraham said. He sniffed again. “I think it’s up ahead.”
“I see it,” Alex said. “It’s not a deer.”
*
Either Abraham’s sense of smell wasn’t as good as Winter’s, or—?more likely—?his time working with the sick had bred a certain tolerance. Either way, he was the only one who could approach the body. Alex and Winter stood together, upwind and a little way off, and watched.
Winter had had—?unfortunately—?quite a bit of experience with fresh corpses, but this one represented new territory for her. The body sat at the foot of a tree as though it had simply taken a rest one day and never gotten back up. The skin was sloughing off, and the flesh beneath was black with rot, to the point where Winter couldn’t tell where the remnants of the clothes ended and the body began. Bits of pale bone peeked through around the face, and the eyes were gone, leaving only empty holes.
“Still some scavengers around,” Abraham said, kneeling in front of the vile thing. “Probably crows. It’d take more than a freeze or two to get rid of them.”
“Why are you messing with that thing?” Alex said. “Please don’t tell me you think we ought to bury it.”
“I’d like to, but the ground’s too rocky,” Abraham said. “No doubt the forest will take care of it soon enough. But I’d like to see if I can figure out who this was.”
“Why?” Alex said, then saw that Abraham had picked up a smaller stick to poke the body. “Oh, saints and martyrs.” She turned away, making a retching sound.
“Because if there’s one person out in the middle of nowhere, there might be more,” Winter said.
“Exactly.” Abraham bent a bit closer. “This was a woman. Middle-?aged. Wearing some kind of robe, nothing fancy. Probably Murnskai, by the hair.” He straightened up, tossed the stick aside, and shrugged. “Any idea why she’d be out in the woods?”
“Refugee from the war?” Winter said.
“We’re pretty far north,” Abraham said. “And you’d think a refugee would run to a town, especially if she was alone.”
“Maybe she was with a larger group, and she died on the way,” Alex said, still not looking around.
“And they just left her like this?” Abraham shrugged. “It’s possible, I suppose.”
“Maybe bandits cut her throat and left her as a warning,” Alex said. “Can we please move on?”
There weren’t any bandits in these woods, Winter reflected. Bandits needed prey, and here there was no one, just endless miles of forests and hills. She’d always known Murnsk was a vast country, but she hadn’t appreciated how much of it was no-man’s-land, undisturbed except for the occasional trapper. She’d read that in the north, the Murnskai territory didn’t end at a border so much as peter out amid the tundra, where the nomadic tribes acknowledged no king or emperor.
The smell of the corpse faded after a few minutes’ walk. It was Alex who spotted the next one, propped against a tree like the first. This one seemed like it had been outside longer, and there wasn’t much left but bones and scraps of dark fabric. They gave it a wide berth by common agreement, and kept moving.
The third corpse was a bloated thing that looked like it had been drowned, lying among a pile of broken wood where a flood had washed it. Winter and the others looked down on it from the hillside above.
“This is getting weird,” Alex said.
“One body might be coincidence,” Abraham agreed, “but this many means there was a group of people here.”
“If it was a big group, we ought to have seen tracks. Campsites, maybe,” Winter said.
“I think this one is a soldier,” Alex said. “Look at his collar.”
Winter was unwilling to get closer, but even from this distance she could see that the jacket the body wore had a military look. “I think you’re right.”
“The last one looked more like a peasant,” Abraham said.
“Weird,” Alex repeated.
After that they found bodies at least once every few hours. Some of them had been dead for a long time, leaving little clue as to their identities, while others seemed more recent, still clothed and waxy-?skinned. They seemed to come from every walk of life—young men and old women, peasant girls and Murnskai soldiers, servants in drab linen and even a white-?robed Sworn Priest. Except for the ones that had been obviously moved by animals or floods, every body looked at rest, as though they’d all taken a seat and waited there to die.
“Sacrifices, maybe,” Alex said. “The Trans-?Batariai do human sacrifice.”
“None of them seem to be wounded,” Abraham said. “Poisoned, maybe?”
“There’s another.” Winter pointed. A man in a long gray coat sat slumped against a leafless trunk, head lolling. “It looks pretty intact. Abraham, do you think you could figure out how he died?”
Alex made a face, but Abraham nodded. “If something’s killing people out here, I think we ought to know what it is.”
They trudged through the muck of dead leaves to the body. It had been an older man, with a huge, wild white beard and a fur cap. A hunter, Winter guessed, by his clothing. There was no blood on him, and his posture gave no indication that he’d been in pain. He must have died relatively recently, since there was still a hint of color in his flesh.
Abraham poked the corpse with his stick, and it wobbled. He grunted. “Still fresh.”
Winter knelt next to it. The eyes were open, staring off to the east. Have they all been looking east? She felt like every body they’d found had been facing them, more or less. Something about the rising sun—
The dead face twitched, eyes blinking once. Winter startled, falling backward. She scrambled on her backside away from the thing, her mind filling with visions of a temple under the Khandarai sands. Corpses rising, their eyes filled with green light, smoke leaking from their mouths...
These eyes weren’t green. They were red, glowing from within. The man’s head wobbled, struggling to face Winter. His lips moved, flesh splitting as they formed silent words.
Winter, the nearly dead man mouthed, and the eyes glowed brighter. Found. You.
Then the lights faded.
“Winter!” Abraham had rushed to her side, stick raised, looking at the corpse. “What happened?”
“Not dead,” Winter said, breathing fast. The sight of those crimson eyes had sent her back to that horrible night in Elysium. “Not...”
“Looks dead now,” Alex said, darkness shrouding her hands as she approached. “Want me to spear him to make sure?”
“He was one of them,” Winter said. “A red-?eye. The Beast.”
“Oh.” Abraham’s voice was very quiet.