Silvernose turned away from the raucous music and catcalls across the tavern, to focus his attention again on Beata and Zdenka nearby. He asked them to explain more about what had driven Sister Ludmilla from her hermitage.
“I couldn’t get a grasp on it from Mother Vlasta’s description,” said Zdenka. “It started when Sister Ludmilla was praying at night in her hut. Distant howling, inhuman shrieking, coming closer. A wave of insects, squirrels, stoats, and mice bursting in through every crack under the door, through cracks in the floorboards, fleeing something outside. Then an almost-palpable wall of dense stench- an overpoweringly intense rotting musk- struck her. She grabbed a brand from her fireplace, ran outside past dozens of pairs of red eyes. She kept running until she reached Skalica, where she hitched a ride with a merchant caravan to Vodnikov.”
“Sounds horrific! Devils?” Beata hazarded.
“Es sind Werwölfe!” guessed Silvernose, drawing on the Schwabisch legends he had grown up on.
“A whole pack of them!”
“Or ghosts of angry pagan Hill Country ancestors,” Zdenka wondered. “Furious that Ludmilla’s hermitage stands atop some long-gone sacred grove, or pagan cemetery. The Old Gods of the Hill Country, like those of Krajansko, and all of their monstrous attendants, could be fierce.”
Wild shrieks burst from a gaggle of stable girls across the pub. They had won Honza’s hair.
“You’d think working in a stable, they’d have enough of horse-manes already!” hooted the innkeeper above the applause and cheers.
The inelegantly-shorn young musician now danced a percussive, boot-stomping, thigh-slapping, highkicking, aggressive verbuňk for the giggling stable-hands.
+++
Thank you for reading.
There are seven other chunks of this story so far; in case you haven't read them, you might wish to begin at Part I.
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