Between Two Fires (9781101611616) by Christopher Buehlman Page A

head, presumably to protect fine clothes they couldn’t see from their angle.
    “If you’re not here to buy grain, then go your ways,” he said.
    “Good herald,” the priest said, “please let us speak to Guillaume.”
    “Guillaume has fallen. I am seneschal now. You may speak to me.”
    “Then I will say a Mass for Guillaume, and rejoice in your good fortune. We have not come here to buy grain, which you know we cannot afford, or to rent your mill, for we have nothing to grind, or your oven, for we have nothing to bake. Rather, we offer your master the chance to win God’s love in battle.”
    “Go away,” he said simply, and disappeared.
    Thomas felt his anger rise.
    “Herald!” he shouted, making the skinny man flinch.
    No answer came from above.
    “Whoreson ass-sniffing herald!”
    The herald reappeared.
    “Who has the insolence to speak that way to me? When you speak to me, you speak directly to my lord!”
    “Then tell your lord to get his little prick out of his wife and help us kill the thing in the river.”
    “You common bastard!” the herald yelled. “I’ll have you know we still have men-at-arms in here.”
    “Then tell them to stop husbanding their hands and come down to the river. Something is killing your people.”
    “It’s called the plague, you idiot,” the herald said, more quietly, and disappeared again. Thomas’s worst insults didn’t bring him back this time. So he grabbed the cord and yanked with all his might, grinning at the sound of the bell coming loose and clanging down stone steps somewhere above them.
    The five of them gasped at what they saw. Tracks in the muddy bank, like a snake would make, but much larger, had beaten under all the grass close to the river, and crisscrossed and looped between here and the town. It was visiting the town now. The piles of foul shit the priest had described were still there, full of bones and clothes. A woman’s severed leg lay white but mud-spattered just by the bank. This was nothing less than a visitation from Hell. The priest, quite pale now, began to pray psalms in Latin, and he urged the girl to swing the censer, which she did. The man with the big beard started shaking. Thomas said, quietly, “Priest. If it goes badly for us, run like a young man, and take the girl. She’ll try to stay, but don’t let her.” The priest never stopped praying, but nodded, which Thomas didn’t see because he kept his eyes fixed on the milky gray waters of the river.
    He went forward at a crouch, with his sword at the ready. The stout, drunk one with the billhook came next, and the beardy one barely walked forward at all, staying close to the priest and the girl. Thomas was as taut as wire.
    Step.
    Step.
    Step.
    He froze when something moved in the water near the pilings of the collapsed bridge, something like an oily black arm, but the width of a draft horse’s chest. He wasn’t entirely sure he had seen it.
    Then all of them said some variant of “My God” when its head broke the water’s surface.
    White-eyed and flat-headed, like some giant cross between eel, newt, and frog, it laid its head on the bank and felt the ground with long whiskers around its mouth and eyes until it found the woman’s leg. Its tongue darted out and latched onto the leg with a thatch of evil little hooks at its tip, pulling it under the water with it, bending a growth of sweetflag rushes. They sprang back up. The water foamed and then flowed gently again, as if none of it had happened.
    Those white eyes, a grandfather’s blind eyes.
    The small, beardy man dropped his boar spear and ran so fast his hat blew off him.
    The stout one stood openmouthed, then vomited. But he didn’t run. Rather, he followed Thomas right up to the edge of the water, which flowed gently now and showed no sign of the thing.
    “Please, sir knight. Please protect me in this fray.”
    “Wipe your chin,” Thomas said.
    Now what?
    He was so heavily armored he dared not go far into the