“What is this?” Pilgrim asked, blinking in surprise as Maisha raised her head. Her features had undergone an abrupt transformation. The almost sculptural handsomeness was now a cadaverous mask of such deep-set illness he found himself resisting the urge to step back.
She’s dying, the voice observed with its ever-keen eye for sickness. Tumours are eating her lungs. She’ll be lucky to last a month. At least now you know what she intends to pray for.
“We need to stop for a time,” Kusiph said.
“We can’t,” Priest insisted, casting wary eyes at the encroaching mist. “And all this noise will draw them to us.”
“It’ll take just a moment,” Kusiph replied. He opened his wife’s bulging pack and rummaged inside, emerging with a small green bottle. Removing the stopper, he held it to Maisha’s lips.
“We…need to…preserve it…” she gasped, shaking her head before another bout of coughing wracked her.
“Please, beloved,” Kusiph whispered, putting one arm around her shoulders as he pressed the bottle to her lips once more. This time she drank, her body convulsing as she swallowed, letting out a loud pain-filled moan.
The sound of disturbed water snapped Pilgrim’s eyes to the left. It was just a faint splash, but it was the first he had heard since starting along the ruined road. The stretch of marsh visible through the mist remained as placid as ever, but the warning thrum from the sword told him they were being observed.
“We can’t delay,” he said, turning back to find Maisha climbing to her feet. As she straightened her hair parted and he saw that the cadaverous mask had disappeared, her features returned to well-crafted beauty, although he fancied there was more redness to her eyes now and the hollows of her cheeks more pronounced. Whatever concoction resided in the green bottle it evidently held remarkable restorative powers, albeit temporary.
Pilgrim began to tell Priest to point the way onwards, but then the sword let out a sharp trill of warning and his hand flashed to its handle. A loud splash sounded as he whirled, the sword guiding his arm and slicing with its preternatural swiftness, cleaving into the neck of the beast surging from the water. The blade cut through hard muscle and bone to sever the narrow-snouted, gape-jawed head from its shoulders. The huge scaled body it had been attached to writhed and twisted, long tail thrashing and four limbs twitching as black, foul-smelling blood jetted from the neck stump.
Disgusting, the voice complained, Pilgrim seeing how the dark viscous liquid slid off the blade’s surface, rejected by the being within. Animus ichor, it added by way of explanation. A potion from the depths of the Infernus. Evidently, the Mad God’s pets died long ago, but this stuff animates their bodies and stokes the memory of hunger in what remains of their brains.