Vorse watched him for a while without expression. At one point he crossed the ground in three steps, adjusted Josh's grip by twelve degrees, stepped back, and said nothing. Josh tried the grip. Lost slightly more slowly.

  In the evening, sitting outside his tent with his arms aching in places he hadn't known had muscles, Josh thought: I have two days before the Baron sends me into that village. He thought: I need to learn everything I can. He thought: I need to pay attention to things I have been running past.

  He went to sleep.

  He slept badly, and the deer skull was there, in the way of dreams — not a dream exactly but a texture behind his closed eyes, patient and enormous, waiting for him to wander close enough again.

  — ? —

  The march to the village took the better part of a morning.

  The squad of thirty moved in a column that contracted and expanded depending on the path — wider on the open ground, narrower where the forest pressed in on both sides, the men falling quiet when the trees got close enough that sound began doing strange things, echoing where it shouldn't, going dead where it shouldn't. Nobody acknowledged this. Nobody had to.

  Josh marched near the rear and watched.

  He watched the other two scouts. The woman's name was Sera — he'd caught it in passing the previous night, quick and low, someone calling her across the firelight. She was lean and light-footed and kept her eyes moving in a way that suggested she'd done this before. She moved with the specific quality of a person who had learned to assume threats and survived long enough for that to feel like instinct. She was not afraid. She was readied, which was different.

  The man was large — genuinely large, not armour-large — with a scar that ran from his left cheekbone to the corner of his jaw in a line too clean to be accidental. He'd said nothing to Josh or Sera since the march began. He walked with his chin up and his hands loose at his sides, scanning the tree line with a professional patience that put Josh in mind of a dog that has been trained so thoroughly it has forgotten it was ever not trained.

  Josh thought: these two have done terrible things to be here. He thought: I need them to survive the next two hours. He thought: that's a problem to solve in the next loop, when I know more. For now, watch.

  Ahead, the forest broke open, and the village appeared.

  — ? —

  He had been bracing himself without knowing it.

  Not for violence — he'd somehow expected violence, some version of obvious wrongness he could identify and name and back away from. What he hadn't expected was the quiet.

  The village was the kind of quiet that is not merely the absence of sound but the removal of it. The distinction mattered, though he couldn't have explained why — it was less like silence and more like the aftermath of a sound too large to leave room for anything else. The kind of quiet that presses. That has weight.

  He stepped through the gate and the noise of the squad behind him fell away as if he'd pushed through a curtain, and he stood in the main lane of the village and looked.

  Wooden houses. Maybe forty of them, in two uneven rows along a lane that ran from the gate to a central square. Doors closed. Windows shuttered. A cart in the lane with one wheel sunk into a rut, tipped at a slight angle, the load it had been carrying — firewood, scattered — still on the ground around it where it had fallen. A cookpot hung on a hook above an outdoor fire that had been dead long enough for the ash to have gone to dust. A dog's water bowl, bone dry.

  Everything stopped. That was the phrase that came to him, and it was right: everything stopped, simultaneously, mid-action, as if the village had been playing out its ordinary life and someone had reached in and pressed a button.

  The squad captain's voice behind him, low: "Scouts forward. Standard sweep. Report back in twenty minutes."

  Sera moved west without a word. The large man moved east. Josh stood in the lane for a moment longer, looking at the stopped village, and then moved toward the square.

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  — ? —

  The first house he entered belonged to a blacksmith.

  He knew because the tools were still on their hooks — tongs, hammers, chisels arranged by size with the particular precision of a man who'd spent his life knowing exactly where each thing was in the dark. The forge was cold. Not banked-cold, the warmth that remains in stone for hours after the fire goes — cold-cold, the cold of something that had not been lit in days. The charcoal in the pit had not been disturbed. Whatever had happened here had not left the blacksmith time to bank his fire for the night.

  Josh stood in the doorway and looked at the tools on their hooks and felt, for the first time, the specific weight of human absence. Not a place no one had been. A place where someone had been, steadily and daily, for years — and then wasn't.

  He moved.

  The next house: a weaver. Loom still threaded, the shuttle resting in the warp like a hand laid down mid-gesture. The house after: a family home, four sleeping mats rolled out in the single room, a half-eaten meal on the table with flies on it — flies, which meant days, not hours. Children's wooden toys in the corner. A small boot under one of the mats, just the one.

  He put it down and moved.

  The square. A well at the center, a low wall around it, a wooden bucket still on the rope. Stone paving, uneven, worn smooth by years of feet. And on the ground around the well — bones. Not scattered, not violent, not the bones of slaughter but the bones of animals: small ones, birds and rodents, deliberately placed. A ring of them around the well's base, radiating outward in a pattern he recognised with the back of his mind before the front caught up.

  The same pattern as the altar in the forest.

  Different scale. Same intention.

  He took a step back.

  — ? —

  He had been cataloguing — clocks on the walls of every house he'd passed, he noticed them now, and every single one had stopped at the same hour, the same minute. He was certain of it without having checked every one, the way you're certain of a pattern after enough repetitions. The bone ring around the well. The clocks. The shuttle in the loom. The half-eaten meal.

  Something had happened here at a specific moment and it had happened to everyone at once.

  He was thinking about what that meant — running the logic forward, the skull in the forest and the altar and whatever the Cult of the Wild actually was and what kind of thing could stop forty people in their exact tracks — when he heard Sera scream.

  It came from the west side of the village, behind the houses that backed against the forest's edge, and it was not a long scream. That was the thing. Not the sustained scream of fear but the short sharp scream of someone who had seen something and had time to register it and not enough time for anything after.

  One second. Maybe less.

  Then silence.

  Then, from somewhere close — somewhere very close — footsteps.

  — ? —

  He told himself later that he had been ready. He had not been ready.

  No amount of death, he would learn, made the first sight of the thing easier. The mind had limits. There were things it would accept and things it would simply refuse, and it refused this — bounced off it, skidded, tried to reassemble it into something with a logic to it and kept failing.

  It came around the corner of the westernmost house in something that was not quite a walk and not quite a crawl — an articulation of limbs that had no analogue, more than four points of contact with the ground, the arrangement shifting as it moved. It was man-shaped in the way a shadow of a man is man-shaped, which is to say the outline was roughly right and everything inside the outline was wrong.

  The skin was the grey-white of things that grow underground. Wet. Moving, slightly, in patterns that might have been muscle beneath it.

  The heads were the thing. There were three of them. One where a head should be, two more erupting from the mass of the shoulders and upper back — not tumorous, not accidental, fully formed, eyes open, mouths slightly open, all of them oriented independently, casting slightly different directions the way the eyes of a panicked horse cast. One of them was looking at Josh.

  The limbs — he tried to count. Stopped.

  On its back, between the secondary heads, a mark had been cut into the skin and something had been pressed into the cut so that it healed around it. A shape. Geometric, angular, dense with a meaning he could feel rather than read — the same quality as the skull's antlers, the same wrongness that the eye refused. It pulsed, faintly, with the rhythm of something living.

  Josh's hands tightened on the crude dagger they'd given him.

  He thought: this is what killed the scouts before me. He thought: this is what I have to solve. He thought: not today.

  He ran.

  — ? —

  The thing was faster than it looked.

  He understood this in the first three seconds, when the sound of it behind him — not footsteps, something wetter, something with more contact points — closed the distance he'd opened with his initial sprint. He cut left, between two houses, out onto the main lane, and the thing came around the corner of the building he'd cut past with a speed that was wrong for its size, wrong for its articulation, wrong in the specific way that nightmare things are wrong, which is that they do not obey the physics that everything else does.