The others in the party cautiously circled the edge of the village, sorting through scattered discarded objects. Since they had seen similar sites of disaster before, their horror had diminished somewhat. But they still had no answers, nor had they found any of the escaping villagers whom they could interrogate.
Thinking of this, Meriwether stepped closer to Sacagawea. “People who ran with very few of their possessions should not be difficult to find. Did they just disappear into the mountains?”
She bent to touch the ash on the ground. “They will have horses, so they can travel fast and far from our route. I hope they are safe.”
Clark called the people to order so they could move on, knowing from past experience they would find nothing in the burned village. They had to get back to the river and their boats, so they could press on. As the men prepared to leave, Charbonneau sauntered out of the fringes of the forest. The strange man still had spoken no words.
Meriwether blinked as he caught sight of Sacagawea’s husband. For just an instant as the man emerged from the trees, he thought he had seen a giant creature beside him, a dark and furry beast like a huge bear. But then the shape melted into the forest shadows, and Charbonneau kept walking, unaffected.
Meriwether narrowed his eyes, but he could prove nothing. Still, he would keep a close watch on the stranger who had claimed Sacagawea as his wife.
*
“Up, up! Fire!” The screams woke Meriwether, and he lunged out of their buffalo-hide tent. Clark scrambled out beside him, rubbing his eyes in the same confused way.
In the camp around them, people ran in a panic, while others just stood and pointed. Meriwether turned to look up at the nearby ridge, and he saw…Fire.
At first he thought a tall tree had caught fire, but then he realized the blaze had a human shape, with a pair of arms and legs. It spread out its limbs, also giving the impression of branches.
And it moved closer, shambling along and trailing bright fire, feathered by intense flames. It picked up speed, loping toward them.
“Faster!” a man cried as he sped past Meriwether. “We can save the tent, and the camp!” He realized he was the last in a bucket brigade line the men had formed. The fiery being still crashed toward them, too far away, but they could throw the water on the hides of the tent, on their own shelters. They drenched their own possessions, and when the flaming being lurched into the perimeter of the camp, Meriwether flung the bucket’s contents directly at it.
The water struck the bottom of the creature’s legs, sizzled loudly, and sent up a gushing cloud of steam. For a moment, with the fires briefly doused, he saw a tangled mess of human bones before the intense flames came roaring back, like an incandescent skin. The creature roared closer, throwing off heat as if from an open oven.
Meriwether vividly remembered the moment at Tavern Rock when he’d stuck his knife blade into the bluff face, and the pure forged metal, a talisman of civilization, had broken the spell, driven off the attacking crows. As the flaming creature crashed closer, igniting trees and underbrush, Meriwether thought of the dozens of incinerated villages, knew they had no chance.
He had nothing to lose, no matter what his rational mind told him.
He pulled his long knife out of the sheath on his hip. Without pausing to think, he took hold of the hilt, snapped back his hand, and hurled it. Exactly as he had skewered scampering squirrels in the Virginia woods, he flung the blade.
His knife flew true, streaking directly into the fiery being’s heart…if such a creature had a heart. He was sure the blade would melt, drip into molten metal to puddle on the ground.
But instead the blazing man shimmered, flickered…then exploded into sparks and whistling flames that spun into the darkness. Burning pieces of trees and human bodies spewed out of its form, as if it had been assembled from the pieces of a thousand funeral pyres. Bones and branches flew in every direction.
On the other side of the camp, Toussaint Charbonneau let out an inhuman scream.
Scattered fires caught in various parts of the camp, and the bucket brigade scrambled around, throwing river water on any small blaze.
Meriwether stared, his eyes dazzled from the brilliant eruption and the sudden darkness as the flame creature was extinguished.
In the aftermath the camp seemed very quiet and very dark. The men were stomping out the last few scattered blazes. He heard someone retching, sick with terror.
“Captain,” York said, close by. The big former slave stepped up to him, and his expression looked sick. “Captain Lewis, there are people in there, people twisted in this stuff of roots and branches that made up its body. All broken and burned, but countless pieces, little bodies. Children…”
“I see,” Meriwether said in a hoarse voice, but he didn’t see. He seemed to be walking in a nightmare. How many more attacks would they suffer before they reached the west coast? Every new landscape they traversed seemed to spawn some new magical horror, like this fiery beast composed of burning trees and bodies. What if they couldn’t go on this way?
The sound of loud retching continued, and he saw Toussaint Charbonneau on his knees, with Sacagawea kneeling next to him. She seemed to be whispering something. Now he recalled hearing Charbonneau’s scream the instant his knife pierced the shambling creature of fire and horror. Was there some connection?
Shaken men and women went around the camp, putting out the last of the fires and also collecting the shattered and extinguished pieces of the fiery thing, the remnants of the human bodies that comprised its supernatural form. Clark was shouting for the men to get their shovels, to dig a grave where they could deposit the remnants of the humans trapped inside the demon’s form. What kind of evil force would kill children and twist them among pieces of trees, then set the whole on fire to create a living golem of destruction?
Even back east, many people considered magic and wizardry to be unnatural, threatening. Despite his fame and his numerous good deeds, Benjamin Franklin was considered a sorcerer and possibly dangerous. Some had even called for him to be burned for witchcraft, as the Bible proscribed. Meriwether had not given it a second thought, for he had revered the great wizard. He remembered how eager he had been just to catch a glimpse of the man in the St. Louis town square. And Franklin’s powers were certainly remarkable.
But now Meriwether saw a much darker side of magic, the sort of thing the preachers called black witchcraft, dangerous magic that robbed creatures of their souls. They had seen other instances during their long expedition, but this creature of fire and death that had visited them tonight—no doubt the same being that had torched dozens of native villages—was the epitome of the twisted, evil magic.
In the back of his mind, he felt a stirring, a sinister laughter, and he knew it was the dark dragon, angry, longing for vengeance. He drew in a breath, hard, then held it, used it to control himself, including that spirit part of him that he refused to admit.
Stumbling away in the darkness while the frightened people busied themselves at the camp, he circled around to the main tent where he and Clark slept. Fortunately, because the bucket brigade had doused the buffalo hides, the tent had snuffed out the scattered embers that pelted it when the fiery creature exploded. A pile of debris, smoking remnants from the creature, lay scattered to one side of the tent poles. Even in the dim light, he could see that a grinning, soot-smeared human skull surmounted the pile. The smell of charred remains reminded him both of a fireplace and a charnel house.
“Sir,” a soot-smeared Richard Windsor said, hurrying forward to extend Meriwether’s knife. “We found it in the main pile of debris.”
He accepted the knife, looked at the blackened blade, the cracked hilt. A strange discoloration made the tip shine violet under the scant light of the moon.