The village head of Clearwater gathered his people in the square after the cart was gone.
The women were still scrubbing the gateway with buckets.
The men had gone up the road with a lantern to look at the hole in the hill.
“We’re alive,” he said.
“That’s what matters tonight.”
“Shuan isn’t,” someone said.
“Shuan was the only one of us with a spear.” The head had been turning it over for an hour, and in the telling it came out clear and cold.
“Did you see?
He didn’t touch the gate, and he didn’t touch the wall.
He went for the one armed man first, before any of us could shout.
Then he stood over him so we’d all have to look.”
“He was weeping,” said the baker, uncertainly.
“He was dancing,” said the tanner’s wife, who had been at the back.
“Waving the pieces about.”
Nobody argued with her.
The men came back down the road white-faced.
They said the pit on the hill was five feet across and deep as a grave, and that it hadn’t been there at noon.
The head nodded slowly.
It was a message, then, left where they’d see it every time they looked up the hill.
He sent his nephew south on the last horse the demon hadn’t wanted.
To the crossroads post, and then the sect lantern at the ford.
The crossroads post-keeper was locking his shutters when a boy from Clearwater half-fell off a horse at his door.
It was a little before midnight.
The boy told him a demon had come.
“Tall,” the boy said, shaking.
“Taller than a man.
Ten feet, maybe.
He came down the road faster than a horse and there was blood to his shoulders.
And he said, he said if we didn’t give him everything, he’d kill us.
All fifty of us.”
By the time the keeper had poured him a cup and sent him on toward the ford, the carters sleeping in the yard were awake and listening.
What they heard was that a ten-foot demon had killed fifty men at Clearwater.
The carter who reached the ford first, an hour before dawn, had been going over it all the way.
He’d heard it from three men by then, each of them surer than the last.
“Twenty feet if he’s an inch,” he told the ferryman.
“Killed a hundred men at Clearwater.
Just looked at them, and they burst.
Then he danced in it. This story is hosted at g.com.
Left a pit in the hill you could lose a house in.” He drank.
“They say he can’t be cut.”
The ferryman told the woman who kept the ford-house fire.
She told the grain-factor from the south bank.
By the time the gray light came up the river, the demon was thirty feet tall and had killed a thousand men.
And it had a name.
The watch-disciple at the ford post was barely nineteen, and had been sent there as a punishment he still thought was unfair.
He came out yawning to trim the post’s great paper lantern for the day and found half the ford waiting for him in the cold.
“Disciple.” The grain-factor pushed to the front, and the others let him.
“There’s a demon in the north.
Thirty feet tall.
Killed a thousand at Clearwater and danced on the bodies.
The whole river’s talking about it.”
The boy from Clearwater was there too, gray with exhaustion, still holding the reins of his horse.
He opened his mouth to say that wasn’t quite what he’d said, looked at all the faces, and closed it again.
“Does it have a name,” the watch-disciple asked, “this demon?”
“The Demon of Clearwater,” said the grain-factor, and everybody nodded, as though they’d always known.
The watch-disciple looked at them, and then back at the post-house, where a light was already burning in the guest room.
Somebody from the Peak had arrived in the night, and he hadn’t dared ask who.
He went to knock.