Chapter 14: The Night Spawn

They had come off the ship loud, the way a pack of wolves comes at a wounded thing that has stopped being able to run.

There were nineteen of them.

The stink of them reached him long before any sound did, rolling up the shore in the night air, a thick wall of a smell, old sweat and old drink and rot and woodsmoke and the deep ground-in filth of men who had been weeks at sea and washed in none of it. It turned his stomach from a hundred paces off.

He had smelled bad men before. This was something else. A stench like a thing already half-dead and still walking.

They spilled down onto the flat moonlit rock and made it theirs at once and they stretched and they spat. Some waded a few steps into the surf to relieve themselves into it, fouling the water and laughing about it.

They sat on the rocks dragging whetstones down their blades, in no hurry at all, the long thin scrape of it carrying across the water.

Animals wearing the flesh of men. Tainting his sanctuary, his home. Dragging their filth up onto it as though it were nothing, as though it were theirs to dirty and spoil.

And they talked.

"...told him, di'n't I," one of them was saying, loud and slurring, to the laughter of the rest, "told him, if he's gonna weep that hard over a, over a burned roof, he should've stopped under it." He hawked and spat. "Did him the kindness. In the end."

"Generous of you."

"M'a generous man."

Another stood swaying, fists on his hips, head tipped back at the ruins climbing the dark hill above, the broken towers black against the stars. "Would you," he started, and belched, and went again. "Would you look at that. An island. Out here. Not a mark on a single chart in the whole'a the world, an' we sail right up onto it." He laughed, a wet greedy sound. "There's stone up there older'n the gods, lads. Come back with ten ships an' we don't carry the half of it. Drink ourselves blind in a hall with our own names cut over the door."

"The gods love a bold man," someone agreed.

"The gods," said the first one, "love me especial."

They had grounded on the worst stretch of shore for sneaking. Flat open rock, bare to the bright moonlight with not so much as a scrap of cover between the waterline and the cliffs.

There would be no slipping down among them.

They would see him coming from the moment he left the rocks and there was no other way around it. So he would let them watch. Because there was a particular terror in a thing that does not trouble itself to hide.

Hiccup Haddock had met cruel men all his life, on Berk and off it. But this was long past it. This was rot that walked, and laughed, and made plans, and the longer he listened the hotter his ire burned, and the hotter it burned the more it wanted them, and the more it wanted them the more reasons it found to burn, around and around, until there was very little left holding him back at all.

He wanted them to feel the terror. Every last inch of it.

He did not hide. He gladly refused the kind dark all around him that would have otherwise swallowed him whole and stepped down into the open expanse.

It was one of the loud ones who saw him first.

"...an' first thing I do when we make port," he was boasting, "is find that one-eyed bastard that shorted us last winter, an' I take the other..."

His voice trailed off. He had gone still, squinting up the slope, at a place where the moonlight seemed to bend around a single standing shape. Pale. Wrapped in dark, a long dark cloak, the cloth of it stirring though there was no wind worth the name.

And the eyes. The eyes were wrong. Green, and lit from somewhere behind like a predator's at the rim of a fire, and fixed on them with a flat and total blaze that had nothing of mercy in it, and nothing, quite, of a man.

Then the shape started to walk.

Then to jog.

Then it was running, and then it was running faster than anything with two legs had any right to, the dark cloak snapping out behind it like a torn sail, eating the open ground between them in the time it took a man to draw one startled breath.

And then it was among them.

The first man never finished turning. It came through him without slowing, one pale open hand swept across his throat, and his head was simply gone, struck clean off, and before the body had even begun to fall it had caught the corpse by the shoulder and flung it into the knot of men quick enough to be reaching for their swords. They went down under their own dead friend, and the thing was already past them.

What came after did not have a shape a man could follow.

They would begin to step back and lift their blades, and their blades would already be gone, spinning off into the dark, and then the arm that had held it, and then the man, and the abomination was three bodies on and counting before the first of them had finished dropping.

It was no wild dragon. The horns, the slits, the pale skin that was not a man's. A demon. For most of them it was the last thing they ever understood, that they had sailed across half the world to die on the claws of a demon.

Its face was a furnace, blazing and scorching with fury, the eyes burning bright green. But the body under that face moved cold, and exact, and unhurried, as though the thing's heart and the thing's hands belonged to two different creatures that had agreed, only for tonight, to share the work.

They were not soft men, they would not die easily.

There were too many of them for that and they were strong, a lifetime of raiding had taught them to fight as one ugly animal that missed no opening and spared no chances. So they closed on it from the flanks. And they worked in pairs. And their blows landed, more than once, blades biting into pale flesh and coming away red, and a ragged cheer went up the first time one of them drew its blood.

It only made the thing worse. Every cut it took fed the fire instead of bleeding it out, the rage in its face banking hotter, the green of its eyes flaring brighter with each new wound, even as the cold hands went on paying the pain back tenfold, until they were not fighting a thing who could bleed but a furnace that had learned their faces.

Some of them gave up and ran. Then the blood-slick sword of a fallen friend would come wheeling out of the dark behind them, thrown flat and hard, and cleave through a running back and nail the corpse to the rock. It happened fast. Far too fast. They barely understood that they were dying before the shingle was awash with it, blood and worse than blood, men they had laughed with steaming in pieces across the rocks, and only a handful of them left on their feet.

They begged.

They went down on their knees in the gore of their friends, in the reek of their own opened bellies, and they begged it. They called on every god whose name they could still drag up. They offered it the ship, the ruins, the cargo, everything they had stolen across a lifetime of stealing and everything they had never had, their voices climbing into a raw animal register with nothing left in them of the men who had laughed on the beach a minute before.

He also kneeled.

He did the moment he looked up and found he was the only one still standing. He had been brave, near the start, for a moment.

Now he stood in the wreck of his crew with his hands held out in front of him and could not make his legs lift him, and he watched the thing he had taken for a man come toward him through the steam, with no more hurry than a fisherman walking out to his nets.

And its face, when it loomed over him, was not cruel. It was only empty, and certain, and tired.

He opened his mouth to say something.

“Abomin-!!”

He never felt his own head leave his shoulders, and he died without ever understanding when, or how.

Then it was quiet.

And the thing standing alone in the middle of the red rock, the devil, the demon, the monster, the spawn of night, the abomination, all the names they had thrown at him across the few short minutes they had lasted, was the thing that used to be Hiccup Haddock. He stood there in the steam and the stink and breathed in, slow, for what felt like the first time in a very long while.

He had known they were there.

He had known it the whole time, since he released his senses upon the island. He had only needed the breath, and the quiet, before he made himself turn around and look.

So he turned.

They had been brought out of the ship.

Near a hundred of them. Hauled up onto the shore for air, or water, or to be counted, or for some small mercy or smaller cruelty that no longer mattered, and left chained the whole length of the waterline while their owners went up the shore to die. Thin past thin, grey-skinned, wrists raw under the iron, and every one of them staring at him with the same expression.

He could not hide.

That was the first thought, absurd and complete. The moon was high and merciless and the slavers' torches still burned along the shingle, and there was nowhere on that bare open rock to put himself.

So he stood in the full of the light, bathed to the elbows in the blood of things he had not let himself count as people, his hands still wet with it and dripping.

His own wounds had begun to wake now, a dozen of them burning all at once down his arms and his ribs, and beneath them the old break in his side grinding worse than any of them, and he had to set his teeth against the urge to let out a scream.

The moonlight showed everything. The horns. The slit eyes. The pale wrong skin. All of it, laid plain, with no kind of dark left to soften any of it.

He had thought the begging of the men would be the worst thing he heard that night. He had been wrong. The worst thing was the silence of the chained, and the look on their faces while they kept it.

He knew that look. He had spent the better part of a year learning to read it on every deck he boarded and in every town he had ever made himself reluctantly walk into. The look people gave a thing that should not be. Not an enemy, not even a monster, those at least had a place in the order of the world. It was the look you gave a transgression. A wrongness wearing the shape of a man and walking, when it had no right to walk. An abomination out of the oldest and worst of the stories, come up the shore with its captors' blood on its hands.

Even them. Even people in chains, who knew better than anyone alive what it was to be looked at as less than human, even they looked at it and saw something below even that.

And that, somehow, was what sealed it. Something in Hiccup that had been holding on let go.

The light went out of his eyes. He let it go. It was easier that way, with the glint gone out of them, not to think, and he did not want to think anymore.

He did not want to stand in front of strangers one more time and wait for them to decide what he was. He was so tired of the deciding.

Of uselessly trying to stop the inevitable. So he would put a stop to it the only way he knew how.

He would simply kill them too.