Part XII - Terror of the Trdlo - Empty, Disturbed, Dead

In the blink of an eye, the evidence they had seen assembled itself in their minds.  Many people of various ages, traveling in a hurry, some bleeding from wounds to their feet or other body parts.  Zdenka turned to look at Ludmilla, Beata, then Silvernose.  These bleeding people had fled from the direction they were heading toward.

The hills undulating on either side of the road turned rockier.  

“Hill Country, hmm…  This is more like Foothill Country, or Mountain Country,” observed Zdenka, mostly to herself, with the reins in hand.  Ever since they had stopped to look at the prints and tracks, Beata had been scanning the road ahead especially carefully, finger on the trigger of her repeating crossbow.

Sister Ludmilla poked her head from the roofed back of the wagon to smile a broad, missing-toothed smile and interject: “You Krajans, you don’t know real mountains!  Here in the Hill Country, what you’d call mountains, we call hills, and climb up and down ‘em and back every day.”

“And what of us Schwabs?” asked Beata, grinning despite keeping her eyes darting watchfully ahead and to the sides of the road.  The Schwab Empire was vast enough to contain multitudes, and stretch from river valleys to plains to forests to snow-capped mountains.  The tallest mountains and their valleys in the south of the Empire were home to the Mountain Schwabs, with their peculiar lilting dialect and piquant cheeses. “Are we also ignorant of true mountains?”

Beata, eyes on the road, creased her smile a little more.  She felt comfortable doing a little verbal sparring with Ludmilla, whose playful hyperbole she felt she could now differentiate from a tirade in earnest.

“Well, you see-” Ludmilla was winding up.  “Anybody with the tiniest droplet of sense knows…”

The horses crested a hilltop and pulled toward a tableland of grass and trees.  Under a tall, rocky cliff, a village stood on either side of the road they traveled.  An eerie silence pervaded the scene.  Not a soul was abroad.  There were no chickens, horses, sheep, or goats to be seen either.  The doors to every building were closed and locked, and many of the windows were shuttered, too.

 

“This is Skalica,” said Ludmilla, serious again.  “Something is very wrong.”

Zdenka drove through the village at a cautious pace, eyes alert to any potential ambush.  Beata handed one of her custom-built repeating crossbows to Silvernose.  Beata kept her eyes sharp and her finger on the trigger of her other crossbow.  Ludmilla peered cautiously over the side of the wagon.

“Everybody locked up and moved out.  And quick,” observed Ludmilla. 

A strange musky odor hung in the air, mixing with the acrid scent of days-old blood.  The dirt of the street and gardens looked violently disturbed.  There were mounded lines going everywhere, as if crazed moles had been tunneling.  There were footprints, hoofprints, bloodstains, trails of dried blood soaked into the dust.  Splinters of wood lay in front of the bottom corners of doors, where any small openings looked forcibly enlarged by claws or fangs of something unbelievably ferocious. 

Beata saw them first.  Ribcages, feathers, fur, piles of still-fresh meat lying on the ground.  Silvernose saw larger mounds of flesh which looked like dead horses fallen on their sides and gnawed by predators. 

From Ivan Horvat on Pixabay.com

Ludmilla breathed a prayer of thanks that she had not seen any human corpses in the village.  These were people she had seen and sometimes bought supplies from, even if she might not come into town for months.  They were Hill Country people like her, people who spoke the Hill Country dialect with the same accent she did.  They had helped build her hermitage.

“I pray the people all left, and nobody ended up like these poor animals,” she whispered, suddenly hoarse.

There was a signboard hanging over the entrance to a wooden building with field-stone foundations.  

The signboard read “The Trdlo” in Hill Country lettering and bore a stylized painted cartoon of a cute, furry, hedgehog-like animal above it.  Zdenka read the name aloud as she drove the wagon past the building.

“I thought that meant ‘a fool’ or a ‘wooden stake’, not a hedgehog,” Beata said quietly.

“A trdlo can be a clumsy fool,” said Sister Ludmilla. “Or a stake, but it can also mean a Hill Country spitcake made from rolled dough wrapped around a stick and fire-grilled. Along with the usual pub foods and beer, they cooked and sold trdla in this place, which was Skalica’s only public house.

“It can also mean a little animal that is a sort of mascot for the Hill Country.  It’s just an old legend - It doesn’t really exist.” 

One of the two doors of the building was hanging ajar. 

Silvernose and Ludmilla craned their necks to look inside the building as the wagon rolled by. 

“Claw-marks or gnawing around the edges of the door,” said Silvernose.

“There’s a bashed-open barrel on the floor stones, bits of food strewn around like animals had been at it,” said Ludmilla.  The musk smell coming from within was especially strong.

“This fits my thesis, unfortunately, that you and your neighbors may have been raided by a pack of Werwölfe,” the rotund swordsman said soberly.

“We call them vlkolak here,” added the Hill Country hermitess.  “It’s a horrific possibility, but you might be right!”

Sister Ludmilla addressed everyone: “I’m loath to lead you to your dooms… and myself, too!  What do you say to a quick look-about at my hermitage before the sun goes down – and then we ride fast to a safe, stone-walled town like Horalka?  You can drop me off, and then go back to Krajansko and St. Vlasta’s.  At my hermitage, I’ll just pick up my icons and the most important supplies, and then we can be on our way.  We can reach the safety of Horalka before nightfall, before the full moon rises.”

All agreed this was a reasonable plan.  Zdenka slapped the reins and steered off the road to a fainter, lightly-rutted forest path, following Ludmilla’s directions.

+++

The story so far...
The Terror of the Trdlo, Serialized:

Part I - The Adventure Begins (But Not Really the Terror, Yet)
Part II - Zdenka vs. The Green-Eyed Monster (Jealousy - That Is)
Part III - Nun: The Wiser
Part IV - The Hermitess
Part V - Silvernose Arrives Minus His Weird Girlfriend
Part VI - She's Gone Feral
Part VII - A Little Traveling Music
Part VIII - Horror at the Hermitage
Part IX - The Rutting Moon
Part X - Herbal Interlude
Part XI - "It's Blood"