Session 28: Knock, Knock. Chew’s There?

Lightning filled the cloud, and for an instant Elora could see the bones of her own wings.

The white went through her as pain, and her wingbeats stuttered. There was no shape to strike, no face behind the voice she had heard, only vapour, the bitter sting of charged air, and the crack of the bolt going on downward without her. Below, somewhere, was the little dome where her friends were sleeping. She fell out of the cloud and flew for it.

The hut had held. Its curve stood whole beneath her, and inside it the others were stirring, hands going to weapons, faces turning up toward the sound. Elora dropped through into shelter with the shock still jittering along her bones.

Outside, the cloud came down. It settled over the dome the way a hand settles over a cup, taking the road first and then the trees, until the last thin sliver of night went grey. There was nothing beyond the wall by which to judge whether the cloud was a few feet thick or had swallowed the world.

Then the hut came apart.

For a heartbeat she could not make sense of it. The spell had stopped the lightning. Now its edge simply unravelled, like a seam pulled from the wrong end, and cold night air touched her face.

“Good luck with my friends.”

It sounded like Strahd. The cloud thinned and blew apart before she could find anything inside it, and the trees came back as ragged black cut-outs. The road ran away eastward, back the way they had come. Out of the woods on either side, the howling began.

Thorn drew his sword and stepped out with a springing, deliberate confidence that might have been a fighting stance or simply a very heroic strut. Elora, still aching from the bolt, found herself absurdly grateful for it. If he could look that pleased with his own footwork before anything had happened, the night had not entirely won.

The first werewolf came out of the eastern trees, a second on the far side of the road, then more: long limbs, lifted muzzles, hands that ended in hooks. Seven of them gathered for the rush.

“They might only want a hug,” Thorn said. “It must get lonely in the forest.”

They came at a run. Elora had just time to register how fast before the nearest was almost on Maledurk. The brass dragonborn met it with claws of his own, his hands changing as he struck, the rage finding its old shape in him. Three quick blows opened the creature up. It staggered and kept its feet while the others came on behind it.

Elora reached for fire and the fire answered at once, hugely: flame tore across the road in a broken, roaring line and caught the pack mid-stride. Fur went up. Shadows leapt against the trunks. For a moment every claw and bared tooth stood out in dreadful clarity, and then the fire folded over them.

It caught the trees too. She saw that almost at once, a branch flaring over the road, light climbing through needles and dead twigs. Something would have to be done about that. Werewolves first.

Thorn’s lightning took three of them. The bolt split and leapt, stitching one smoking body to the next in a crooked, brilliant chain, and Elora flinched at the crack despite herself. The creatures dropped where it found them, their charge ending in a sprawl of limbs on the road. Four were still moving.

Ireena kept behind the line as the survivors closed. Maledurk drew back a fist and punched the wounded werewolf in front of him with splendid directness. It fell over. There was something deeply reassuring about that, too.

Then the rest were too close, and Elora’s choices narrowed. She could feel the hollow places where her greater spells had been; the night’s rest had barely begun before the cloud arrived, and nothing she had spent had come back. More fire would stop them, but Maledurk was in among them, and she was not far off herself. A wall of flame here would give everyone a hot foot at the very least.

She looked up instead. A second cloud gathered above the road, hers this time, its darkness carrying a purpose she could feel in her teeth. She fixed on the two werewolves nearest her and called the lightning down. It struck between them hard enough to jar through the ground. Both recoiled. The reek of scorched fur thickened, and Elora held the storm ready overhead.

Thorn was quicker. His second chain swept through all three survivors, and they went down among the bodies of the others. The howling nearest the camp stopped. For a moment there was only the crackle of the forest.

Elora looked up. “Oh.”

Fire was walking from branch to branch. What had seemed a small problem with seven werewolves charging now occupied a great deal more of her attention. Sparks drifted over the road, bright against the dark, and a tongue of flame wrapped the trunk of a tree.

“Water,” she said. “I can do water.”

“Yes,” Thorn said promptly.

She called a wall of it up through the burning growth. Water slammed against bark and branch; steam rolled into the night. The crackle became a hiss, then a wet, sulky sputter. She drove the water wherever the fire was until the last eager flame went out, and the trees stood blackened and dripping. A little of the forest was singed, but it would go no farther.

Elora let her hands fall. There was no sign of the cloud that had found them. Ordinary smoke rose from the wet branches, and she watched it more closely than it deserved. Seven werewolves lay on the road and no one had been dragged into the trees. But the place where the hut had stood was bare, their interrupted camp open to the night on every side.

“I think we should keep going,” she said.

Thorn looked at the empty air where his spell had been. The lightning had not broken it; he was certain of that much. He had watched the shelter take the strike, and the unmaking had come after, separate and deliberate. Magic strong enough to unravel the hut existed, and he suspected that was what had happened to it inside the cloud. A stronger roof would be no help against someone who could remove it.

“It is still midnight, isn’t it?” Maledurk asked. “Pitch black out there?”

“Past midnight.”

“Doesn’t the boogeyman come out at midnight?”

Elora glanced toward the dead werewolves. “Yes.”

“We should be careful, then.”

Thorn wiped his blade and sheathed it. Past the scorched trees, the road toward Vallaki looked no more inviting than the road behind them. They were close now, a few hours’ walking at most. Close enough to tempt a man into foolishness, perhaps. Also close enough that sitting in the same spot seemed a rather elaborate way of asking for another visit.

“We can put the hut up again,” he said. “But we know it can be dispelled.”

“It came apart,” Elora said, with the understandable indignation of someone who had been inside it at the time.

“It is a spell. I can cast it again.” He considered the black line of the woods. “It should at least keep the mosquitoes off.”

That bought the smallest easing in the silence. He laid out what he could. Breaking a shelter like that took considerable power. Whoever had done it might not be able to do it again at once. Might was the troublesome word. They did not know how much magic Strahd commanded, whether he had been the cloud or merely driven it, or how far this land bent in his favour. Barovia had already given Thorn ample reason to distrust comfortable assumptions. And if that voice had truly been Strahd’s, then Strahd knew exactly where they were.

“We could stand guard and wait for light,” Thorn said. “Or take our chances on the road. Elora and I can see well enough to lead.” It was a practical advantage, if a modest one beside everything they could not see coming.

Elora was ready to go. Thorn found he was too. “Maledurk?”

The dragonborn regarded the darkness with apparent interest. “What the hey. Haven’t seen the boogeyman in a long time. Could be exciting.”

“Then let’s go.”

They gathered their things and left the camp to the dead. Thorn felt the shortage of sleep behind his eyes and in his shoulders, a dull weight under the sharper fatigue of casting. Thirteen winks, perhaps, out of the customary forty. It would have to do.

The moon was up, though Barovia seemed determined to make as little use of it as possible. Its light lay thin on the road. Under the trees the dark massed in broad, solid blocks, and the gaps between trunks looked deeper than gaps had any right to be. They walked with their attention split between the way ahead and the woods to either side. A branch shifted at the edge of Thorn’s sight. He turned, found a branch, and faced forward again.

Far behind, a howl rose and faded. Another answered from somewhere deep in the forest. Neither was close, but he listened until their own footsteps were the loudest thing again.

For the better part of an hour, nothing happened. Walking slowly worked the tightness of the fight out of him. Maledurk kept pace, Ireena kept with them, and each bend brought Vallaki a little nearer.

Then they came round a corner and found two wagons across the road.

Thorn stopped. They stood perhaps a hundred yards on, set across the way so that no traveller could mistake them for anything but a barrier. Big, enclosed wagons, the kind that carried people. Nobody stood beside them, and there were no horses. After an hour of watching, their very stillness felt pointed.

“Have they seen us?” Maledurk asked.

“I don’t see anyone to do the seeing.” An unsatisfactory answer, but the only one on offer.

Thorn studied the ground around the wagons. There was room to leave the road, though the woods had their own opinions on that. Nothing moved between the trunks. That had been true of the werewolves, too, right up until it wasn’t.

“Take cover,” he said. “I’ll go and look.”

The others stepped off into the trees. Thorn spoke the spell and watched his hands go. Invisibility brought its usual odd liberty. He could walk straight at the thing without offering a target, though his boots still met the road and his breath still smoked in the cold. He went carefully.

From a distance the wagons had put him in mind of the Vistani camp. Closer, the resemblance thinned. Their bodies were wrong. Where a wagon ought to be squared off, these tapered, broad in one place and narrowing in another. Coffins, he thought. Very large coffins on wheels.

Poles jutted where horses should have been hitched, but there was no harness: no loose straps, no dangling rigging, nothing meant to meet a living animal. Someone might have stripped it all. Someone might have pushed the things here by hand. He circled the first, keeping his distance.

No one crouched behind them with crossbows levelled at the road. On the back of the wagon was a door with a handle, and Thorn gave it his full attention. The handle was real enough. The door, he slowly decided, was not. Its outline seemed drawn onto the surface; he could find no honest seam, no gap that would let it swing. It was a picture of a door where a door ought to be. He straightened very slowly.

A thing shaped almost like a wagon, with poles and no harness, and a door that would never open. He did not need its name to dislike it.

He slipped between the roadside trees and the barrier and went on past. The road beyond was empty. Forty or fifty yards on, a bend took the wagons out of sight. He watched the forest, listened, and found nothing waiting there either. They could go around with a little flight, a little invisibility, some careful ferrying of companions from one side to the other. He entertained the picture of Maledurk dangling by the tail beneath a flying rescuer and decided the dragonborn would enjoy it a good deal more than the rescuer would.

There was no reason to kick this particular hornets’ nest. If the great wheeled coffins opened under the moon and let out vampires, he would prefer to hear about it from a distance. On his way back he passed the second wagon and saw its false door matched the first.

Something drew a breath.

Thorn stopped moving. The sound had come from the wagon, a quiet intake of air near enough to tighten the skin between his shoulders. He was still invisible, and whatever had breathed gave no sign of having noticed him. After a moment he walked on.

Maledurk listened to the report from somewhere in front of him. Thorn’s absence was taking a surprisingly active part in the conversation.

“Two enormous caskets,” said the air. “No horses. No real doors. Nothing behind them that I could see. And something breathing.”

Maledurk looked down the road. Explained like that, the wagons did seem less friendly.

“I think we should call out,” Elora said. “See whether anyone answers.”

Thorn’s account had included a plan involving flying around the wagons and possibly carrying Maledurk by the tail. Maledurk had been looking forward to that. Still, having a look was a perfectly respectable plan too. “We could go and knock,” he said.

An invisible hand encouraged him forward. “Good idea,” Thorn said. “Go and knock.”

“All right.”

“I’ll stay invisible a little longer, if you don’t mind.”

Maledurk did not mind. Everyone had a preferred way of approaching a problem. Thorn liked to be hard to see. Maledurk liked to be where the problem was.

Elora stopped him before he set off and laid a spell on him to see better in the dark. Road and trees sharpened into a world of clean edges. He blinked, appreciating the improvement.

“Got your best smile on?” Thorn asked.

Maledurk showed his teeth. It was an expansive smile, generous in the quantity of tooth on offer. He considered it welcoming. Anyone opening a door to it would certainly know he had made an effort. “I’ll tap nicely,” he said. “Ask if anyone’s home.”

“And if they don’t answer?”

“I’ll rip the top off.”

With the plan settled, he went down the road. The wagons grew as he came. He could make out the odd shape Thorn had described, the narrowing ends, the poles reaching for horses that weren’t there. The nearer one had a surface that looked like wood. There was the handle, and the pretend door around it.

He was still choosing where to knock when the wagon lurched at him, and the other came with it. Their shapes split open into mouths and clawed feet, and suddenly the road held a great deal more teeth than Maledurk had brought to it. Before he could knock, the nearer mouth closed on him from shoulder to knee.

Pain clamped around him. His feet scraped the road, and he found that while he could move his arms, he could not pull himself free. Up close, the thing’s resemblance to a wagon was a lot less interesting than its evident intention to eat him.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s biting me.”

The observation did not improve matters, but it made them clear. He braced against the mouth and hunted for an angle. A creature this big ought to offer plenty of targets, and he still had his tail. Perhaps he could bring it up and over.

Elora was running toward him. He could hear the urgency in her voice, though he could spare little attention for the words. Behind her Thorn stayed unseen. Maledurk hoped he was doing something clever. He himself had reached the stage where the plan was mostly to hit whatever was nearest until it regretted its choices.

Then Elora’s magic took him, and the mouth around his body seemed to shrink. For one marvellous moment Maledurk thought the wagon was being made smaller. Then the road dropped away, his shoulders rose, and the treetops slid down past his eyes. His body lengthened and swelled with a tremendous new strength. His jaws pushed forward. His arms became suddenly, almost insultingly short. His tail, however, was magnificent.

He looked down. The wagon was still biting him, but it was now chewing on his ankle. A deep sound rolled around his enormous chest. He had seen these creatures in Chult, had felt the ground shake under them, the terrible authority of a tyrannosaurus walking through its own country. Knowing it from the inside was better.

Maledurk Rex, he thought, with immediate satisfaction.

The wagon worried at his leg. What was this? A gnat? He lowered his head and bit it back. His jaws closed on the thing that had caught him; there was resistance, and then a wonderfully substantial crunch. In the same motion he swung his tail into the other wagon and struck it hard enough to feel the blow travel the whole length of his new body.

Neither stopped moving. Sturdy little baby carriages, he would give them that.

A fireball bloomed in front of him and for an instant the road vanished behind rolling flame. Heat washed past his face, but Thorn had placed it with care; the blast took the wagons and spared him. Their hides blackened. Pieces began to drop away. Then they bit him again.

One mouth closed hard, and then the other. He felt both. Being enormous had not made him immune to teeth. It had, however, changed his opinion of how much those teeth were entitled to worry him. He shifted his weight and prepared to bite harder.

Ireena came round the bend and stopped dead at the sight of two wagon monsters and the towering dinosaur between them. “I think I’ll be behind this tree for a while,” she said.

Maledurk could see the wisdom in that. There were going to be pieces.

Elora held the spell steady as Maledurk gathered himself to strike again. She had hoped the change might force the creature to let go. It had not, but he looked a great deal happier with a wagon-sized monster gnawing his ankle than he had with one trying to swallow him.

The sight of that tremendous head brought Chult back so sharply that for a moment the cold Barovian road seemed an improbable place to be standing. She knew the animal she had called into being: the jaw, the thick counterweight of the tail, the strength moving under the hide. That familiarity had guided her choice.

Both enemies were scorched and broken now, and still moving. Elora could not even say how much of them was wood. What had looked like boards and fittings a minute ago now included tongues and teeth, and their bodies flexed in ways no honest wagon should. She had spent long enough searching for a spell that would solve everything from a distance. A bear would do.

She ran forward and let the change take her. Her hands hit the earth as paws; fur closed over her skin. The world dropped lower and filled with smells: char, damp soil, the hot animal presence of Maledurk above her, and something unpleasantly alive beneath the wagons’ disguise. She was not big enough to loom over them as he did, but she was big enough to tear at whatever he left.

Maledurk bent and caught one of the monsters in his mouth again. This time he lifted it. Its feet left the ground and it writhed between his jaws while chunks rained onto the road beneath. Elora heard the grinding pressure of the bite and the clatter of falling fragments. The thing remained horribly lively.

His tail came round into the second wagon. The crack of it carried down the road, and more pieces flew. Elora planted her paws and waited for her opening as the battered creature reeled, then gathered itself to attack again. Above her, the one in Maledurk’s mouth was still struggling.

Thorn, visible once more, raised a hand. A pale ray lanced through the dark and struck the captive monster. Frost raced across it, whitening the broken edges, stiffening the parts that had been squirming. Maledurk’s jaws closed once more, and the frozen thing shattered.

Pieces spilled from his mouth in a tumbling fall of icy wreckage. Elora ducked as fragments struck the ground beside her. One wagon was thoroughly gone. The other bit the tyrannosaurus again.

It really did not know when to stop.

She lunged. Her forepaws came down on the battered body, claws finding purchase where Maledurk’s tail had already smashed it open. The thing shifted under her weight. She tore at it, felt something give, and drove her teeth into the gap. After one last convulsion, nothing under her moved.

She kept her weight on it a breath longer, listening through the blood in her ears. There was no answering scrape from the wreckage, no hidden legs gathering for another rush. She stepped back and surveyed a road strewn with broken boards, teeth, and tongues.

It was a disagreeable assortment. She had seen a great many strange things in her life, but she did not care for the way a tongue could lie among splinters and make both seem worse.

Above her, Maledurk was still a tyrannosaurus. The bites had not been enough to knock him back into his own shape. The great head hung over the wreckage, his tail stretching down the road behind him. Elora remained a bear at his feet. Thorn stood a little way off, and Ireena watched from behind her tree.

Beyond the shattered barrier, the road to Vallaki lay open. Elora lifted her muzzle toward Maledurk. From here she could see mostly his underside, a great deal of leg, and the imposing curve of his jaw. He was going to be difficult to overlook.

They had set out hoping to reach the town before sunrise. Now, in what was left of the dark, a bear and a dinosaur stood among the ruins of two wagons, their companions nearby and the last stretch of road still ahead.