Stone of Tears

Pasha stared at him. “Richard, if you are here when the sun goes down, you will die.”

“Then I would suggest you hurry.”

She turned, holding her arm out toward the city. “But… I must go all the way back. It took me hours to get here. It will take me hours to go back, and then I must find Sister Maren, and then convince her that you’re serious, and even if I could get her to agree to return with me, we must still get back here.”

“You should have ridden a horse.”

“But I ran here as soon as I realized where you were! I wasn’t thinking about a horse, or anything else! I knew there was trouble and just came after you!”

He gave her an even look. “Then you made a mistake, Pasha. You should have thought before you acted. Next time, maybe you will think first.”

Pasha put a hand to her chest as she gulped air. “Richard, there is hardly time…”

“Then you had better hurry, or your new charge will be sitting here, in Hagen Woods, when the sun goes down.”

Her eyes moistened with frustration and concern. “Richard, please, you don’t understand. This is no game. This place is dangerous.”

He turned a little and pointed with the sword. “Yes, I know.”

Pasha peered around him, to the shadows, and gasped. Hesitantly, she stepped to the thing by the trees. Richard didn’t follow. He knew what was there; two halves of a creature from a nightmare, its guts spilled across the ground.

Its sinuous head, like a man’s half melted into a snake, or lizard, was a picture of wickedness itself; covered in a glossy, tight, black skin, smooth down to the base of the thick neck where it began welting up into pliable scales. The lithe body was shaped much like a man’s. The whole of the creature seemed made for fluid speed, deadly quick grace.

It wore hides covered with short, black hair, and a full-length, black, hooded cape. What Richard had taken for claws were not claws, but three-bladed knives, one in each webbed hand, with crosswise handles held in the fist. Steel extensions went up each side of the wrist for support when a strike was made.

Pasha stood dumbstruck. Richard finally went to stand by her, looking down at the two halves of the thing. Whatever it was, it bled, the same as any other creature. And it smelled, like fish guts rotting in the hot sun.

Pasha stood trembling as she stared at the thing. “dear Creator,” she whispered. “It’s a mriswith.” She took a step back. “What happened to it?”

“What happened to it? I killed it, that’s what happened to it. What sort of thing is a mriswith?”

Her big brown eyes came to his. “What do you mean, you killed it? You can’t kill a mriswith. No one has ever killed a mriswith.”

Her face was a picture of consternation.

“Well, someone has killed one now.”

“You killed it at night, didn’t you.”

“Yes.” Richard frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Mriswith are rarely seen outside Hagen Woods, but there have been reports over the last few thousand years. Reports given by people who somehow managed to live long enough to tell what they saw. The mriswith always take on the color of what is around them. In one report, one rose up in the tidal flats, and was the color of mud. One time in the sand dunes, it was the color of the sand. One report noted that in the light of a golden sunset, the mriswith was golden. When they kill at night, they’re never seen, because they are black, like the night. We think they have the ability, maybe the magic, to assume the color of their surroundings. Since this one is black, I guessed that you killed it at night.”

Richard took her arm, gently pulling her away. She seemed transfixed by the creature. He could feel her trembling under his hand.

“Pasha, what are they?”

“Things that live in the Hagen Woods. I don’t know what they are. I’ve heard it said that in the war that separated the New World from the Old, the wizards created armies of the mriswith. Some people believe the mriswith are sent by the Nameless One.

“But the Hagen Woods are their home. And the home of other things. They are why no one lives out in the country on this side of the river. Sometimes, they come out of the woods, and hunt people. They never devour their kills, they seem simply to kill for the sake of killing. Mriswith disembowel their victims. Some live long enough to tell what got them; that is how we know as much as we know.”

“How long have the Hagen Woods, the creatures, been here?”

“As far as I know, at least as long as the Palace of the Prophets, nearly three thousand years.”

She took a fistful of his shirt. “In all that time, no one, not once, has ever killed a mriswith. Every victim said that they never saw it until after it slashed them open. Some of those victims have been Sisters, and wizards, and not even their Han warned them. They said they were blind to its coming, as if they were born without the gift. How is it you were able to kill a mriswith?”

Richard remembered seeing it coming in his mind. He took her hand from his shirt. “Maybe I was just lucky.