The Viletails fed on what was left of Kervyn.
Their long jaws tore through the flesh and the muscle with a relish that had no cruelty in it and no mercy in it, only hunger, and the blood coated their snouts and dripped from the needle teeth, and the wet sound of the chewing carried under the Bleed Bark canopy and joined the far-off cries of things deeper in the Heart.
Five minutes since the body had gone down in front of them, and everything below the chest was nearly gone. The belly had been opened first and emptied, the organs taken before anything else, and then the thick muscle of the thighs and the back. Splinters of rib stood up out of the ruin. Pieces of bone lay scattered across the floor. The blood-smell had thickened over the clearing until even from cover, dozens of paces off, Kei could taste the metal of it on his tongue.
