Between Two Fires (9781101611616) by Christopher Buehlman Read Free Book Online

and bury the dead, and with those who gathered at the alehouse, including the militia. When the churchyard was full, families dumped the bodies in the river and the eels fed on them.
    Then something else moved in that also liked to eat what the eels grew fat on. Fishermen who speared or cast nets for trout, eels, and pike began to disappear, even when they went in groups of two or three.
    Nobody knew what was happening until a young boy sprinted back to town and said that his father and uncle had been eaten by a “great black fish or snake” with a “flat mouth” that hid in the murky shallows. It had lashed at them with the end of its tail and pulled the men in, then tore them with spines, and then its great, froggy mouth had opened and clamped down on their heads, swallowing each of them whole in several fast gulps. The boy had stood transfixed until he saw that it was slithering up the bank toward him, and then he had run screaming for the road. The monster would have caught him, but hispanicked flight had startled his uncle’s mule, still tied to its cart, causing it to buck and catch the thing’s attention. It wanted the mule more than the boy, so it coiled all around the poor animal and bit its head off, dragging the body, cart and all, back down the bank and into the river.
    “How long was it, boy?” the priest had said.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Think. You saw it take the mule. So of course it was longer than a mule. As long as three mules perhaps?”
    The boy shook his head.
    “How many, then?”
    The boy held up eight fingers, then corrected it to nine.
    Several of the men in town who were still healthy and still brave enough to leave their houses met up at the alehouse and drank until they had the stomach to go down to the river and look for it. They took their axes and wooden flails, their clubs and scythes, and they swore to Saints Martin and Michael and Denis to cleave the thing in two or die in the attempt. The priest, who drank with them, witnessed these oaths, and agreed to come with them, and to hold over the men his processional crosier with its agonized Christ. All their boozy courage left them when they went to the banks and saw the wreckage of the cart, and the piles of shit the thing had left on the bank, all full of boots and bones and broken tools, and even the shredded cuirass of a man-at-arms. Even with the bridge down, it seemed, some were trying to cross the river. But they were not making it to the far shore.
    “This is beyond our power, brethren,” said the priest. “God forgives us the oaths we make in ignorance. Let us return to town before we make the thing stronger on our fat and our blood.”
    None of them protested.
    “What about the seigneur?” asked Thomas, leaning toward the priest over his modest table. “If he’s well enough to issue orders aboutletting in strangers, he should have enough spunk to buckle on his armor and put a sword in that thing.”
    The priest smiled his distinctive, sad smile, making the well-used lines around his eyes deepen. He was probably a year or two older than Thomas, but drink and soft living made him look closer to fifty than forty; faded speckles of wine on the chest of his alb, only muted by his attempts to clean them, testified to the death of the town laundress. Despite his woolly eyebrows and masculine chin, there was something womanish, almost wifely, about the cleric’s aspect.
    “Our lord is what you might call…”
    “A frightened cunt?”
    “If no more generous term occurred to you. He has shut himself and his retinue in the tower. His herald comes down on Fridays and reads his proclamations, which are ignored. He never gets off his horse. A man confessed to me that he intends to throw a slop pot at the herald the next time he comes, and asked me to pardon him in advance. I told him that gesture would put him one slop pot closer to Heaven. Better the herald should get a faceful of shit tomorrow than an axe handle across the