Demonspawn
Demonspawn. Somebody a long way back had a turn of black humour naming this one, or else they named it in a hurry after a very bad night, and either way the name has outlasted whoever coined it. I want to deal with the disappointment early, because it always comes: it is not a demon. It is a cow. A big, black-and-rust, cloven-footed, slow-blinking beast that grazes, chews, and stands about doing beef-cattle things for most of its considerable life, and if you met one at murklight in a fold with its head down in a trough you would think it deserved a name like Bramble or Clover rather than something out of scripture. I have eaten it. I have not stopped eating it since I started writing this entry, though I will admit the second helping goes down slower than it used to. None of that changes the name, and none of it should, because the name was never given for what the animal looks like. It was given for what the animal produces in the people standing near it without lifting a hoof, and on that measure demonspawn earns every syllable it was handed. Ask any farmhand on the Loxley side which put the worse fear in them, an honest fight or a demonspawn stood dead still in a gateway at murkneet with the wind coming off it, and they will not need thinking time before they answer.
What a demonspawn does with its day is walk the same short circuit it walked yesterday, and the day before that, and however many days back the fold's memory runs, which on some farms is longer than anyone currently working them. Out to the top pasture at murkrise, graze until the light goes flat, back down to the byre by murkfall, in the same order, along the same worn strip of ground, every day of a working life that can run past twenty years for a bull kept back off the slaughter list. Where a wooltard cuts a trod with a whole hillside's worth of moving bodies, a demonspawn wears its own narrower and far deeper track, because one demonspawn weighs what a dozen wooltards weigh put together, and a working droveway on this side of The Dark Peak might carry six or eight head rather than six hundred. Fewer animals, heavier feet, the same result: a groove in the land you could turn an ankle in, walled on both sides in most of the folds around Loxley and Bradfield because nobody trusted a demonspawn not to wander off the line, and somebody had to make the wall the only option left to it. Here is where the wooltard and the demonspawn part company completely. Corner a wooltard and it panics, the way anything with no plan of its own panics. Corner a demonspawn and it does nothing at all, because from where it is standing there was never a problem to solve. It was always going this way. You are the one who is in the way, and it has not once occurred to the animal that this might be a fact worth adjusting course over. Stand in a droveway gate at the wrong hour and a demonspawn will keep coming at the exact speed it kept for the last mile, entirely unbothered by whether you move, because moving was always your problem to have thought of first.
None of that is where the actual danger sits, and I want to be honest about the order things happen in, because newcomers get frightened by the wrong half of a demonspawn encounter more often than not. The smell arrives before the animal does, most of the time, and it is not a farmyard smell. It is sulphur and old meat, a stench of decay with no business coming off a living animal and coming off this one anyway, carried on whatever wind is going and strong enough that I have watched grown men turn back off a public footpath rather than find out what was making it. Then, if you wait, the sound: a low, tidal sort of call, nothing like the honest bellow you would get off an off-world bull, closer to something dragged up out of a drain, and it does not need to be close to reach you. Put those two together in the dark and you have your fright before you have laid eyes on a single hoof, which is exactly the arrangement canon insists on, and exactly the arrangement farmers around here rely on to keep ramblers off their land after murkfall without paying for a fence. A demonspawn stood quiet in a gateway, unseen, reeking, calling once into the murk, will do more to a grown adult's nerve than most things in this book that actually carry teeth. Where it stops being nerves and starts being a corpse is a narrower window than people like to think, and I have had this argument in the Sportsman more than once with people who wanted a simpler answer than the one on offer. A demonspawn is not dangerous at murklight. I have walked past working bulls at midday with nothing worse than a long stare for my trouble. What I will not do, and what nobody sensible on the Loxley or Bradfield side does either, is stand between a demonspawn and its byre in the hour either side of murkfall, because that is the hour the herding happens: the gates go narrow, the light goes, and whatever wariness got bred out of these animals for the rest of the day comes straight back the moment they are pressed into a gap at dusk with murkneet coming on behind them. I have watched an entire fold turn on a stockman who had walked the same gate a thousand times before, on an evening no different from the one before it, for no reason he could name afterwards beyond the hour on his watch. It passes again by full murkneet, oddly, once the herd is shut in and settled. It is the shutting-in itself that is dangerous, not the dark that follows it.
Two-toed, the same cloven print as a wooltard's foot and nothing like the single hoof of an onetoe, which tells you plainly enough that demonspawn and wooltard come off the same clovenfoot stock, however differently that stock ended up split between them. Both are clovenfeet, both trace back through however many careful generations of crossing the nascenti and the xin put into this stock between them, and I have covered the detail of that arrangement properly elsewhere, so I will only repeat the one fact that matters here: the wooltard got its size and its calmer temper from a cross with an old bull bloodline, wild stock never fully brought inside a fence, the kind that still throws up an animal too big for any byre once every so often and too badly tempered to sell. Demonspawn is not the cross. Demonspawn is closer to the source, bred down from that same bull line directly for meat rather than borrowed from it for wool money, and that is worth sitting with, because it means every farmed demonspawn stood placid in a Bradfield fold is a good deal fewer careful generations away from an animal that never agreed to any of this than the wooltard grazing the next field over. There are two populations worth keeping separate in your head. The farmed demonspawn, folded, fed, and slaughtered on schedule the same as an onetoe or a barker earns its keep the ordinary side of the boundary, is the one most people will ever meet, and it behaves the way I have just described: placid outside its hour, unbothered by people, dangerous only when pressed. The other population lives in the Wisewood proper and answers to no fence at all. Nobody farms them. Nobody has cornered one for long enough to say with any confidence how big they get, though the tracks left in soft ground under the tree line suggest an answer nobody farming cattle wants to hear, and it is that population, not the corvids, that I would put money on when ramblers ask what exactly is making the noise nobody can place along the Wisewood boundary after murkneet. Whether the Wisewood population and the farmed population still count as the same animal, or whether several centuries either side of a fence line have quietly turned them into two different animals still wearing one name, is a question I have put to people better qualified than me and had handed straight back unanswered. Somewhere out past the last working wall, on ground the Wisewood population treats as its own, there is supposed to stand the oldbrownhorn, old enough that nobody farming today has laid eyes on it and lived to describe more of it than the horns. I have not seen it myself. I have met three people who swear their grandfather did, and no two of the three accounts agreed on anything except how big it was. Whatever it actually is, it is not folded, tagged, or sold, and every placid, slow-eyed demonspawn chewing scran in a Loxley fold is descended from something built along its lines.
Field note: if you must cross a working fold, do it at murklight and still give the gates a wide berth. If you are caught out at murkfall with a demonspawn between you and its byre, do not wait to see whether it moves first. Go round, however long the long way is. The smell will tell you when you are close before your eyes do, and in every account I have gathered, it has never once been wrong. - P.R.
| Type | Warden |
| HP | 3 |
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