Chapter 482: Unnamed
There were perhaps twenty of them visible from this angle, and the count grew as he moved and the angle changed. Abomination corpses, drained and desiccated, their hides sunken over their frames like old leather over collapsed frames. Each one had been opened — not torn, not savaged, but opened with precision, the ribcages pried back in matching patterns, the internal cavities swept clean of anything that had been inside them. It was systematic in a way that exceeded the behavior of any Abomination he knew of, and it had clearly not been recent; the corpses had been here long enough to have dried to the texture of old wood, their colors leached to uniform grey-brown.
"Church’s work?" Jacob asked, looking at Arthur.
"No," Arthur said, and there was something careful in the word, something that was not quite reluctance but was adjacent to it.
"You sound certain."
"I am." Arthur studied the far wall a moment longer, then turned his gaze to the trees at the far edge of the riverbed, where runic markings had been carved into the bark of three separate trees at uniform height — each one catching the pale filtered light with the faint luminescence of residual Ein Sof, still active despite however long they had been sitting there. They were not any runic family Nero recognized, and the arrangement between them did not follow the symmetrical patterns of standard inscription work. They made something that was closer to a sentence than a formula, oriented inward toward the riverbed rather than outward toward the forest. "This is older than the Church’s project. And more purposeful."
Jacob said nothing to that. The silence among the three of them had a different quality from the easy quiet of moving through familiar territory, and Sergeant Aldric, stationed a short distance up the bank, had gone very still in a way that was nothing like his usual watchful distance.
Whatever had made those markings was not here now. Nero held that knowledge carefully, because the other half of it — that whatever had made them was simply not here *now* — was not particularly comforting.
They moved on before anyone suggested that lingering was a good idea.
The ground rose again on the far side of the channel, and the forest closed back overhead, and another ten minutes passed without incident before the Maw Tyrant appeared.