The Plagueline

Anthony Brink sat on the porch of his cabin, listening to the soft sounds of his music box as his gaze wandered over the ruined city of Strateny just a few miles away. Fifteen years, and still no one had so much as come back to bury the bodies.

He sighed, turning toward the mountains resting under the setting sun. The Knuckles of the World, his father had called them. He didn’t know their actual name - though he was sure he’d heard it in passing - but, as with most things his father said, the imagery was better than reality ever could be. The man had been quite the storyteller. The memory of his tales had filled many a lonely night for Brink in his cabin.

The lullaby spilling out from the music box stopped, its winding finished, but Brink barely noticed the difference in the silence of the plains around him, the wind rustling through the grass just as musical to his ears as the song that came when he turned that little brass key. Still, it was chilly for an early summer evening, and so he gathered his things and headed inside. He had already put Hartlocke up in the pin he’d built the mule around back with enough hay to last him til morning, and an early night after a long day’s scavenging sounded pretty good.

It had been a pretty good haul this time around. There were more valuables left behind in Strateny than he could likely collect in a lifetime, and no one else would dare risk venturing beyond the Plagueline to give him any competition. He had a good system for it, though - a heavy jacket, hood, gloves, boots, and mask with glass lenses to limit his exposure to the plagued air, and spend no more than four or five hours at a time past the Plagueline. It had worked for him these past couple of years, and he intended to keep doing it.

He had barely latched the door shut when he noticed a cloud of dust on the horizon. It was small, not enough to be a storm, and he squinted to try to make out what it was. Figures moved within, running with enough speed to kick up the dust around them. Figures coming from Strateny. Brink cursed, scrambling back from the window.

Nothing good came from Strateny - at least, nothing that moved on its own.

He grabbed his crossbow from its mounting on the wall and loaded a pair of bolts within, cranking the twin bows back to their ready position, then edged back up to the window. Any hopes he may have had of the figures passing him by vanished as the cloud grew larger, closer. Whatever they were, they were heading right for his cabin.

Scrambling, Brink ran back out to the porch and set the crossbow down by the railings, then bolted back inside to pull the iron lockbox he kept for emergencies out from under the bed. He fumbled the key twice before he got it open. Within was some gear he had scavenged, looted, or built himself for whenever something nasty came too close to his cabin. He grabbed a bandolier loaded with a half-dozen glass vials filled with blue liquid and strapped it across his chest; he belted on a pair of small bucklers, their iron faces curved slightly into quarter domes around his forearms; he even pulled out his small belt-quiver of extra crossbow bolts, though he doubted he would have time to reload the thing in a pinch.

Finally, Brink grabbed from off its place on the shelf his pick-hammer, the whole tool a single piece of forged iron with comfortable leather wrapped around the base to make a handle. It was a versatile thing, especially to a scavenger; if the rubble in a ruin shifted and caved him in, he could use its pick end to help tunnel his way back out.

And, if something decided it wanted him for breakfast, he could use the hammer end to convince it otherwise.

Arming himself this way was a practiced motion that took him only a few minutes, but by the time he got back outside, the figured were close enough to make out. Likho, a whole coven of five. The bird-like creatures were just over half his size and looked like old crones when hidden under the rags they liked to wear, but they were nasty enough to live beyond the Plagueline, a feat generally reserved for things starring in stories to scare children.

A dull chill of fear spidered its way through him. He had prepared the tools he needed to defend himself, but he was still no warrior. The bottles he used for target practice didn’t move or dodge or leap about, and they certainly didn’t have long, taloned claws. He had seen likho before as he was scavenging in Strateny, but Anthony Brink could hide with the best of them, and that was the tactic he generally employed against the crone-beasts.

Now, in the open plains that surrounded his house along the border of the Plagueline, hiding wasn’t an option. He could try to run, perhaps, but the avian creatures were deceptively fast, and if he was exhausted from running when they caught him, he would stand no chance at all. All he could do was pace back and forth and sweat. He checked his crossbow for the third time and looked up again to find the likho now only a hundred yards away. They had covered the distance from the blurred horizon to the foreground of Brink’s view in less than ten minutes, and the dust was billowing behind them as they ran furiously on. If running was once an option, it wasn’t anymore.

Brink tried to steady his breathing. His hands were shaking now as the blunt realization that he could die in the next couple minutes seeped into him. He shook his head; he couldn’t banish his fear entirely, but he could push it away, hide it in a dark corner and pretend it wasn’t there. He knelt on the side of his porch, bracing the crossbow on its banister. He could see them clearly, now, make out their ravenous forms. There were five of them, and they weren’t trying to masquerade as human – their heads were unhooded and they were clothed only in tattered rags that draped off their angular forms like the wings of angels long since fallen.

Now at fifty yards, the crone-beasts were in range of Brink’s crossbow. He inhaled, lined up his sights on the lead likho, and exhaled as he fired. It was a difficult shot, but Brink had always been good at hitting moving targets – there was something about their pace, their stride; there was always a rhythm to it, and once he caught on, it was a simple matter of firing at their next beat. The heavy, bone-tipped bolt slammed into the creature’s chest, and its forward momentum sent it into a violent tumble that ended only when it crashed into a jutting rock. It twitched once, twice, and then lay still. But if the death of one of their companions discouraged the remaining four crone-beasts, they didn’t show it.

Quickly, Brink took aim again and fired the second bolt. He rushed the action, and the bolt merely grazed the next likho across the side of its chest. The creature’s body jerked in response, but Brink’s second shot had done little more than slow the likho by a few steps. He cursed and dropped the weapon, drawing his pick-hammer in his right hand and the uppermost glass vial from his bandolier in his left.

“Damn it!” he cried at them, taking a quick step back from his banister, “What do you want from me?”

Their answer came in the form of a wild howl, a horrifying mix of an old woman’s raspy cackle and the clarion call of some beady-eyed bird of prey. The first likho to reach Brink’s porch barely slowed its murderous pace before leaping onto the banister, clinging to it like some twisted parrot swinging on its cage’s perch. Instinctively Brink ducked low, beginning the movement even before the crone-beast swung its three-taloned claw high at his face. He felt the rush of air as the claw barely missed its mark and responded with a wide-arced swing of his pick-hammer. The likho jumped a few inches off the wooden railing, just enough for the hammer to pass harmlessly beneath it, and landed lithely back onto the banister. It brought its claw down on Brink as it did, this time slashing across his right shoulder. He growled at the pain, but the cold spider of fear began to creep back out of the dark, hidden corner of his mind. Likho are a lot faster than he had realized. He might be able to fight off one or two, but four?

An idea appeared in his mind, a bright lance of light that sent the fear scurrying back to its hiding hole. He slashed his hammer again, this time not at the beast but at its perch, smashing the banister’s supports away. The likho rocked back but kept its balance, lunging once more at Brink with its claws. But the scavenger dropped to the ground, kicking out with both feet as he landed. They connected solidly with the railing, and with a sharp crack the wood splintered and fell to the hard dirt below. The crone-beast let loose a quick shriek as it hit the ground, the wind knocked out of it. Brink scrambled to the edge of the porch and tossed the glass vial hard onto the prone likho. It shattered, spilling out an oily blue-green concoction that spread rapidly over the helpless creature, igniting into an eerie blue flame as it made contact with the air. The crone-beast gasped, trying to catch its breath to shriek in pain but could not. It rolled on the ground to extinguish the biting blue flames and found them too persistent, too wild and powerful, to be defeated by such a tactic. Brink didn’t have time to watch to be sure, but he was confident that one was out of the fight.

In those seconds he had been fighting with the first likho, the next two had made their way to the back of his porch and were moving in to flank him. He got to his feet just as they set upon him, clawing this way and that, their impossibly quick talons slashing viciously at his legs and chest. Thankfully, without the added height of the banister, the shorter creatures weren’t able to easily reach Brink’s head and neck, and the scavenger’s heavy coat took the brunt of the assault. Still, he needed a plan, one that hopefully wouldn’t burn down his house in its implementation. He held his arms up, the bucklers on his forearms facing out to guard against the crone-beasts’ attacks, scrambling for some way to go on the offensive. He let one of the claws slip by his shields and it slashed painfully across his chest, his coat doing little to soften the blow. With a cry he lunged forward, the likho’s overextended claw unable to stop him, and slammed his pick-hammer down in a vertical chop onto the creature’s angular head, putting all his weight and strength and anger behind the blow. The crone-beast’s skull caved in beneath his rage and it crumpled unceremoniously to the ground.

Brink yelled as fierce a battle cry as he could muster as he turned to face the remaining likho. But he was reminded suddenly of the fifth creature, the one that had fallen behind when his crossbow bolt grazed it on its approach, when an sudden weight bore down on his shoulders and a stabbing pain raked his back, nearly toppling him to the ground. The crone-beast had leapt onto his back and was clawing at him furiously. The creature couldn’t get much force behind the attacks and hold its grip at the same time, but Brink could still feel the warm blood beginning to seep out of a dozen claw marks. He knew that if the creature on his back brought him to the ground, the one in front of him would simply tear out his throat as he lay there. He turned and rammed his back into the wall of his house, trying to dislodge the grasping likho.

Or rather, he thought he was ramming his back into the wall; in the confusion of the melee he’d lost track of where he was standing, and instead of a solid wooden wall he’d slammed into a window, the force of the impact shattering its glass and sending the two combatants tumbling inside.

Hitting the ground hurt, even more so because Brink wasn’t expecting it. His feet had snagged in the window on his way down and his fall was an awkward, contorting thing. But he also knew that if the fall had hurt him, it certainly hurt the likho he had fallen on even more. He felt the creature’s grip loosen on him and he tore himself away. His pick-hammer wasn’t in sight and he cursed as he realized it had probably fallen from his grasp outside on the porch. Improvising, Brink scrambled over to the nearest wall and, with a heave, shoved his shelf down onto the still-prone likho. It and all the trinkets and books it had on it landed with a crash that shook the house, and Brink was quick to finish the stunned crone-beast with a stomp from his boot.

As he struggled to regain his balance, Brink saw the last remaining likho enter his house. But instead of rushing the tired and wounded scavenger, the monster ran for the corner of the room. There it began to tear through the boxes and bags where Brink had stored his loot from Strateny, haphazardly tossing back discarded goblets and jewelry onto the floor behind it. At last the creature paused, its body going rigid, and then reverently held up a decorative egg, roughly the same size as a chicken’s, made of bronze and studded with modest gems. Its eye widened and it made a soft humming sound as it slowly, meticulously turned the egg over again and again in its talons. It didn’t even notice Brink edging up behind it, pick-hammer raised, until the spike of the pick had been driven through the top of its skull. It hung there, a macabre marionette, until the scavenger shoved the lifeless beast off with his boot.

With the five likho dead and the immediate threat to his life ended, all of the adrenaline and fear that had bottled up within him escaped in a single rush. He collapsed to the ground where he stood, panting, shaking, suddenly wanting nothing more than to be very far away from the blood-soaked pick-hammer that lay on the floor beside him.

After a moment, he looked over to the bronze egg the likho had picked out of his loot, which had rolled just a few feet from where the creature had fallen. He picked it up and turned it over a few times in his hands. It was cold to the touch and heavier than it looked.

He had never seen likhos hunt for treasure that didn’t include meat before, and if there was anything special about this egg, it wasn’t about to let on about it.

Brink sat there on the ground for a long while before picking himself up. He set the egg gently into one of the lockboxes he used for valuable or breakable goods and locked it, then stripped his coat off, wincing, and moved over to his wash bin. His body felt like it was on fire, covered as it was in scrapes and bruises. He would have to clean his wounds, and dress them. He knew he was going to feel all those injuries keenly on the two-day trip to Cesta, but being behind walls far from the Plagueline would make it all worth it.