There is a lot more death in my second book, which has got the working title of Virus. The deaths are all due to war and murder. It's a much more cynical book than Brendan. It doesn't view violence as something that is glorious or attractive. I'm of Ferguson's point of view that it's to be avoided if at all possible. This next scene is the reason why. It isn't pretty, but I think that makes it more realistic. It comes purely from imagination, so it's probably wrong, but I hope it feels right.
There was a smell. Danny had smelt nothing so bad before in all his life, but somehow knew what it was. Something in the DNA told him. It was the smell of death. Over the hill were rotting corpses. Dead meat. He knew it.
Over the hill were rotting corpses. A level plain full of them. The Warg must have assembled in thousands and been moving together. Something had killed them. Killed them all. Full human, full wolf or some caught in mid-change. A species lay across the grass, black birds picking at them.
He looked at a corpse nearby. A raven, almost absently, pecking the face. He realized that one of the sounds he could hear, behind the cawing, behind the sound of the wind and the fluttering of wings, was the sound of eyeballs being plucked from sockets. The thought seemed to flutter inside his head, resisting the effort to chase it out. He didn't even want to think about that being a sound an ear could hear. He didn't want to know what that sound was. But he thought he would hear it in nightmares for the rest of his life. Chase the bird away? Pointless. There were thousands of them.
A cluster were packed around the open guts of a young female Warg. Blue-black feathers stained with a red itself curdling into black. Heads bobbing, pulling, mindlessly stabbing at each other in arguments over scraps in the midst of a myriad dead. Steam rose in the cool morning air from some bodies too fresh to be cold. The place stank already, but a day more and it would gag the breath from everything for miles.
Ahead of him a scene from a nightmare, behind the sound of someone vomiting their guts, Davy looked and searched in vain for words. He couldn't tell anyone what this was like. Nothing he could say would cover it. Within clear view was a Warg family. Half changed father, wolf changed mother and two cubs. The parents had obviously tried to shelter their offspring from whatever had killed them. Small holes were dug into the bodies. Guns? Had someone shot them? Offspring, what kind of a word is that? Something killed them and their kids. These aren't enemies any more. These are victims. This isn't war. This is murder. Behind him, someone was muttering. “Shit, shit, shit.” It didn't work for Davy. It wasn't enough. He couldn't even curse his feelings into sound. Nothing matched this.
Alice spoke. “What could kill all of them?
And they saw it. Across the plain. A figure on a horse picking its way through the piled dead. Even at a distance the flash of gold from the face told them of the mask it wore.
“Maldon.”
They should have disappeared, fled, done it by reflex and done it immediately. But reflex was dulled by shock. They stood and looked.
“How could he do all this by himself?”
At that moment, the figure on the horse turned its head and saw the group of young Mages. Simultaneously, every raven on the field stopped and turned its head in the same direction. A caw erupted from every throat on the plain and there came a clatter of wings.
Only one of the cohort made it from the field alive. Blind in one eye and bleeding from more jagged rips in her flesh than anyone could count, she limped into Ferguson’s camp and stammered out a tale that stunned.
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