Woad

I have encountered many things in Hellsborough that I cannot fully account for. The woad I can account for precisely. They came at the milting settlements in black gruizers barely big enough for three people, sweeping down from the Ripperthroat range in the past-highmurk hours, firing fungets before anyone on the ground had time to understand what was happening. The flesh hangs off their faces like candle wax left in the Fecunder — dripping — which is why the milting call them flesh'eads. I mistook it for burns at first. It is not burns. It is simply what their faces do. Where one had stood long enough, the flagstones beneath showed a faint dark stain, as though the rock itself was beginning to take the same disease.

Below the waist the woad are something other than human. What passes for legs is a dense mass of tentacles that propel them across deck and courtyard at twice the speed of most creatures in The Dark Peak. They are tall — six foot or more — and they fight with solid blades that cut through a milting soldier's whipo'wil like a shiv through soft butter. Van Hallam, who is not easily impressed by combat, described their feighting skills as second to nowt. He said it with some emotion, a century later.

The woad take prisoners. They do not take them for ransom. No milting stolen away by a raiding party has ever returned to describe what awaits. The craft land, the pirates sweep through the temple gardens, and they depart with young captives bound to the deck rails. The milting do not dare destroy the gruizers when they have the chance — they tried once. For a whole murkmoon thereafter, a thousand great black battleships circled the Ripperthroat Mountains and poured bombs down until there was no-one left standing. The milting live only by the sufferance of the woad.

They call themselves the First Born of The Dark Peak — the oldest race, tracing their lineage to the fungai that colonised the world before anything else made a start. In their cosmology every nascenti, milting, clown and xin is a descended thing, lesser, created partly from them. A woad Psalliota — their word for prince — told Van that the milting were just the result of eons of evolution from the flitters and the First Born themselves. They interbreed with boggarts, smeln, and netherlanders from the Sunderlands, and with other creatures far more heinous. They are, as Van put it, children of the murk — all a bit different; the spawn of chaos.

Field note: if a woad raiding party sets down near you, do not touch the craft. Do not approach them. Do not attempt to damage a gruizer. Leave immediately, in the direction they did not come from. The milting learned this lesson once. They have not forgotten it.

Free eBooks

COMING SOON

COMING SOON

NEW