51

It could smell them. At last!

So sure it had been that it would catch up with the girl, the one who smelt of brightness that made it want to scream with hunger and lust and dark glee, and now it had paid off.

There was the old one with it, and it sniffed at her, contempt filling its mind. That one was nothing, an old carcass, barely any flesh on its bones, its mind a round marble of loss and grief and puny faith. But it had led the Chemei to the girl, and that was enough to make it grateful enough to eat it anyway. It would be a tough old bird to chew on, but there would still be that fierce spurt of panic at the first bite, and then the begging – how it loved the begging and the screaming and the squirming, how sweet all that made even the most gristly of meals.

And when it had taken the old one and squeezed all life from its leather sack of skin, when it had tossed the bones aside white against the red-stained soil, then it would have the prize at last. The one it had tracked all the way here, into a part of the forest through which it had not ventured for so long, not since the trees had banished it to one small corner from which they were not strong enough to roust it completely.

It had defied them, and laughing, considered why it had not done so earlier. These trees were a joke! They were asleep on their roots, their dreams so deep and broad and long that they could not even see what was in front of them anymore.

Knowing this, once it had dispatched these two lovely little meals, the Chemei decided it would not return to its territory back by the river and the stone house and the trees that shook and trembled in death throes whenever it touched them. No, now that it knew that time had passed and not been kind to the trees, it would not go back there. It would venture everywhere. It would go looking for food.

Food that smelled like these ones here.

Relishing the ripple of wooden-hard muscles under its skin, it reached out and grasped a thick branch, pulling lips back from teeth sharpened on bone, and grinning as it tore the limb from trunk, listening to the shocked yelp from the sleeping tree, and set about building one of its knotted webs.

It had no use for the souls it ripped from the flesh it devoured, but that did not mean the souls could be allowed to roam free, leave the forest. No, the Chemei was a killer that liked its trophies. And so it built the webs, and it trapped the souls in them, kept them there until they withered and faded and eventually winked out of existence completely. It did not take long for the souls of birds and lizards and fish to do that, the scaled ones especially. Birds took a little longer, their spirits thrashed in the webs for days, weeks – and owl or hawk could spend months trapped, fighting, refusing to give up. The Chemei loved to watch. Once, a long, long time ago, it caught an eagle impudent enough in its strength and size to blunder upon the Chemei’s territory. The eagle’s spirit had struggled against the web for many turns of the seasons, and the Chemei had waited eagerly for another to come long to join the fun, but there had never been another, and sometimes it thought that maybe it had been lucky enough to eat the very last one.

All this thought of souls and eating made its stomach growl. Working faster, it tore more branches from the foolish, unsuspecting trees, and knotted them together, planning its forthcoming meal, and how afterwards, maybe without even waiting to digest its food, it would move on.

The time had come to walk once again not between trees, but men.