"Help . . ." A garbled sound. "Help."
"Stay where you are," Gavril said.
"Help--"
"Stop moving. We will come to you."
The grass went still. Gavril waved for Moria to circle around while he approached straight on. He kept his gaze fixed on the spot where they'd last seen the grass move while Moria scanned the plain. Both drew steadily nearer until they could see it was Toman. Leader of the bandits.
Gavril took one look at him and said, "Moria! Back! He's--"
"No, he's not possessed," she said. "This is not the same."
Toman was indeed misshapen. Not twisted and wizened but inflated, his skin stretching like an overfilled waterskin. His clothing had split at the seams, flesh bulging through the gaps, some of it ripped and oozing. His face was nearly as unrecognizable as the wagon driver's had been, his eyes and mouth almost lost in bloated flesh.
Gavril stared in horror as Toman's distended arms reached toward Gavril's boots, his fingers digging into the ground as he pulled himself forward. Toman lifted his head, wobbling on his neck, as if he could no longer support it.
"Help me," he said.
Gavril started to look over at Moria, then stopped and squared his shoulders, as if deciding not to seek her opinion in this, not to ask for her complicity. He lifted his sword.
"Keeper?" he said. "Turn away." Then, "Please."
She did. She heard the sound of steel cutting flesh and bone and then a distant growl, and she spun to see Gavril with both hands gripping his bloodied blade, Toman's head at his feet, severed from his body. Gavril breathed hard, his eyes shut. And behind him--
"Gavril!"
A growling figure flew over the ridge. A shadow stalker. She launched her daggers, one after the other, and both hit their target and stopped the stalker just as it came within arm's length of Gavril.
Gavril's sword was already in flight. It hit the thing at the waist and cleaved clean through it. Both halves of the shadow stalker fell. Then the upper half began to twitch, and the thing launched itself at Gavril as Moria caught the back of his tunic and yanked him away.
The shadow stalker's torso continued toward them, dragging itself on twisted arms as it gnashed its teeth.
"Begone!" Moria said, focusing her energy on the creature. "In the name of the goddess and the ancestors, begone."
It continued coming as they backe
d away and as Moria commanded the spirit to leave, which only seemed to antagonize it. Finally, it dug its clawed hands into the earth and hurled itself again at them, and she shouted, "Begone!" and the thing dropped to the ground as a cloud of fog swirled up from it. Moria pulled Gavril to her, but the cloud made no move to come for him as it whirled up in the air and disappeared into the night.
"Anger," Gavril said. "That's what it needs. Anger and force."
She looked at him, not comprehending, but he was gazing out over the plain, surveying it for more trouble.
"Your banishing power," he said when he caught her look. "You need to infuse it with anger and force. Command them to leave with full authority and confidence. Clearly you have no shortage of either. Simply channel that better when you are banishing."
This was, she could point out, not the time for a post-battle analysis, and in the past she'd have bristled at it. But she knew by now there was no insult intended. He was unnerved, and this was how he calmed himself.
"And I must learn not to be so disturbed by . . ." He glanced down at Toman's decapitated corpse. "By what I must do."
"It was the most merciful way."
"Hmm."
He started to return his sword to its scabbard, his gaze still distant.
"Clean your blade, Kitsune," she said.
"Hmm?"