Free The Golden Queen by David Farland

afoot, he’d better be warned.” She glanced up the road again. There was a tightness in her stomach, a certain knowledge that Gallen had already found trouble. He would never willingly keep a client waiting, and Maggie suspected that his body lay somewhere on the road to An Cochan. If she was lucky, he might still be alive.
    “You’re as likely to meet one of those monsters on the road as he is,” Orick said. “And he’s better prepared to defend himself. Just sit tight.”
    Orick paced in a circle, rose up on his hind legs and tasted the air again.
    Cries of dismay rose from the south end of town. Crowds of people began shouting. Maggie and Orick rushed to the crossroads, looked down the lane: between the shading pine trees, up the cobbled streets lined with picket fences, an ungodly array of giants marched three abreast. Some of them, green-skinned ogres, looked like huge men, eight feet tall. At their head was one of the monsters Orick had slain last night, its too-human head down low, sniffing the ground, blinking at the townspeople with orange eyes.
    There were thirty or more of the monsters, and in their center, well protected, walked a creature straight from the bowels of hell. It stood seven feet tall and had a chitinous black carapace. It walked on four extraordinarily long legs, and it held two huge arms before it. One club like arm seemed to end only in a vicious claw, while the other revealed a small, spidery hand that held a black rod.
    The beast’s head was enormous, with three clusters of multifaceted eyes in various sizes—two sets of eyes in front, one in back. A long, whip-like whisker was attached to each side of its lower jaw, beneath teeth that looked like something that might have belonged to a skinned horse. Its main body was only about a foot wide across the front, but its ribs would have measured three feet in height. From its shoulders sprouted two enormous pairs of translucent wings, the color of urine. Its bloated abdomen, which was carried between its front and back pair of legs, nearly dragged the ground.
    People shouted and ran for their houses, dogs barked and leapt about insanely. Some women and an old man fainted outright, falling to the ground.
    Father Heany in his vestments rushed to the street and confronted the black beast. He swung a crucifix overhead and shouted, “Beelzebub, I command you in the name of all that is holy to turn back! Turn back now, or suffer the wrath of God!”
    Beneath the black devil’s mouth, dozens of tiny fingers drummed over a patch of tight skin.
    The ogre guardians stepped aside, and for one moment the devil faced Father Heany. It pointed the short black staff at the priest. Flames brighter than lightning fanned out, catching Father Heany in the chest. For a moment, Father Heany stood, blazing like a torch, and then the flesh dropped from his bones and his skeleton fell in the middle of the road, amidst a puddle of burning skin. Maggie felt as if her blood froze in her veins.
    The ogres trampled Father Heany’s body and just kept advancing toward the inn.
    Maggie backed away, retreating between two house-trees toward the edge of town, and Orick padded quietly beside her.
    When the menagerie of creatures reached Mahoney’s Inn they stopped, and the doglike leader crouched to sniff the bloody ground.
    He turned to Beelzebub and cried, “Master, a vanquisher died here!”
    The giants stopped. Beelzebub strode forward and let the whip-like tendrils at his mouth feel the ground, twisting from side to side.
    Orick circled behind a tree to hide. Maggie had seen enough. Her heart was pounding, and she struggled to breathe. Every instinct told her to run.
    “Let’s get out of here!” she said.
    “Wait,” Orick whispered. “Let’s see what they want.”
    One ogre kicked down the door to Mahoney’s Inn and rushed inside. A moment later, it dragged out John Mahoney. The innkeeper screamed, gibbering for mercy.
    Beelzebub made clicking noises, and one