Chapter 83: No Body, No Evidence
"Fuck," Darion muttered.
He stood with his hands on his hips and looked at the scene: the wolf sitting with the head at its feet, the headless body on the ground, and the dead hunting animal still attached to the man’s left hand where the fingers had locked around it in the last reflexive grip before everything stopped.
The blood was spreading slowly into the soft earth of the treeline floor.
The wolf looked up at him.
He looked back at it.
It had saved his life. That was the plain fact of the situation, and he acknowledged it. The spear had been thrown properly, with real force, from fifteen feet. It would have surely gone through him.
The wolf had taken it instead, the spear still lodged in its flank, and had resolved the secondary problem before it became one.
He kind of owed that animal more than he could quantify.
But the man on the ground was a problem that the wolf’s intervention had created while solving another one.
He thought through it quickly.
Inside the barracks, men were going to start dying from the venom. That was the designed outcome: the invisible illness, no external cause and no evidence of intrusion.
The deaths would be processed as the same unexplained sickness that had taken men weeks ago. Healers called, they’ll give no answers and then the men would be buried. A pattern without a visible author.
This man was different.
This man was headless!
When the barracks realized one of their number was missing, which might take time, given that the other men would be occupied with their own deteriorating condition and the confusion that came with men dying around you without explanation, they would search.
And when they found him, what they found would not look like illness. A headless body in the treeline outside the barracks, with evidence of a large animal’s work, was not a natural death.
It was a killing. Someone had been out here. Something had happened that Valdenmoor’s command structure would have to respond to.
Which meant night watches. Patrols through the treeline. Men in the bushes watching for intruders.
His tree, the specific, perfectly positioned tree with the sightline over the barracks entrance, would become a compromised position the moment Aldric’s officers decided the treeline needed watching.
Fifteen nights of this operation. He had completed one. He could not lose the position on night one.
He suddenly came up with a solution.
What of no body, no evidence of what had happened here, a missing knight who went night hunting and didn’t come back...
In the context of the barracks simultaneously losing men to mysterious illness, it was also not the most pressing thing to investigate.
Knights who knew about the hunting habit might have already been bitten. The ones who hadn’t might be too busy with the more immediate crisis to pursue one missing man’s unexplained absence through the treeline in the dark.
"Problem solved," he said.
He bent down and picked up the head. It was heavier than expected. He picked up the dead animal too, still warm from the hunt.
"Carry the body," he told the wolf.
The wolf took the body up.
Darion walked to the horse with the head and the hunting animal under his arm, mounted up, situated what he was carrying across the front of the saddle, and turned the horse onto the road.
The wolf followed with the body.
They moved at speed. Darion kept his eyes on the road and his attention on the sound of the treeline to either side, this stretch of road between Valdenmoor’s territory and the open borderlands was exactly the kind of place that things moved through at night that you didn’t want to meet unprepared.
The wolf’s presence helped. Most things that lived in these woods had enough instinct to register what the wolf was and recalibrate their interest accordingly.
Most things...
He had been riding for maybe twenty minutes when shapes appeared at the treeline edge ahead on his right. Low and moving, five of them, spreading in the way of animals that had learned that spreading before a target registered them improved outcomes.
They were Wild wolves. Lean and hungry in the way that most wolves in these borderlands were lean and hungry, ribs showing through the coat. They had the desperation of predators in territory that had been stripped of easy prey.
His undead wolf made a sound beside him, a low, chest-level warning, and stepped toward them.
"Stop," Darion said.
The wolf stopped.
The five wild wolves circled at a distance, watching. They had noticed the undead wolf as wrong and very different from them even though it was also a wild wolf. The smell of it, the half-flesh appearance, the green eye.
Darion dismounted.
He looked at the five wolves. Then at his animal inventory, it was full, all ten slots occupied.
He could make these five his undead, but only by sacrificing something already in inventory, and the bats were not something he was willing to lose with fifteen nights of work ahead of him. The wolf was not something he was willing to lose under any circumstances too.
The idea of new undead wild wolves was definitely tempting but he couldn’t take the undead animals already in his inventory away.
He had something the wolves wanted...
He lifted the headless body from the wolf’s grip and carried it a few feet forward, then set it on the ground. He put the dead hunting animal beside it. Then he stepped back.
The five wild wolves looked at the body. Then at him. Then at each other, actually exchanged glances, which he found briefly remarkable, the body of communication between animals that had been hunting together long enough to read each other’s intentions without sound.
A man had just walked up to them and put food on the ground voluntarily. That did not match any prior experience they had of men.
If anything, they had expected him to attack, not give meat.