by Ember Lane
Melody smiled. “Why don’t you do just that.”
Merl thought furiously, but too furiously. He’d had enough of that type of thought to last a lifetime, and his bonce was tired. He decided that it didn’t matter. That it wasn’t important. So what if him and his dad had slept for an age. So bloody what! It changed nothing. It was just like getting up late when you didn’t mean too. He would have some broth and cuddle up next to Gloomy. That’s what he would do.
“But,” Frank said, immediately dashing the hopes Billy had fired in Merl’s heart. “But who are you?”
“I am Melody. I am keeper of the Hall of Rally. I used to serve Percivale, one of the lords.”
“Why do you exist?” Frank pressed.
Melody cocked her head as if the question was unexpected. “A great blast of magic ended Percivale. It rent his castle asunder, folding it into the rock and decimating all. Somehow, this little pocket survived. I survived. That is why they hid Merl here. You don’t destroy what has already been eradicated. This was the safest place for him. That was why the Dark One could never find him. That was why he endured. There, you have it, that is the extent of the knowledge I gleaned. That is all the help I can give you. My energy is gone. My magic is undone.”
Melody began to shimmer. She reached out to Merl. Her eyes pleaded with him, but Merl couldn’t quite fathom the emotion in them. It appeared to be a mix of urgency and sorrow. It was like she’d been stolen before she could finish her task.
It was failure.
Her body faded. It became transparent and danced like gyrating beams, violet, green, and yellow. Merl felt an infusion of energy in his own self. It was like he was sucking up the tendrils of Melody’s being. He felt both horrified and elated as he consumed her remaining essence. Merl grew stronger. His muscles became fuller and more taught. Merl scrambled back against the grotto’s wall as disgust topped his joy. He wanted to heave. He wanted to vomit her essence up. But then he realized what she had done.
Merl blinked, and a guardian appeared in front of him.
21
“Melody has gifted you the Power of Nascent. Nascent is the third ward of Arthur14579. The gifting gives to the giver, but it only gifts what’s given, not what needs to be learned.” Merl kicked at the dusty road. “There, and that’s the last time I’m going t’repeat it.”
The small party was walking along a trail that headed, for the most part, in the right direction. The one issue they had, apart from what was in Merl’s bonce, was what direction was actually right and what wasn’t. After a long and fruitless argument, which no one won, they decided to head for Vorast, the city where Rourke lived. Melody had given them no path forward. She’d given them nothing apart from more questions, and once she’d gone the Hall of Rally had become an empty place, and the grotto had withered and faded.
“Let me get this straight,” Desmelda said. “You just wish the constructs to be, and they’re there, and then you wish them away, and they’re gone?”
“Somethin’ the like. Still can’t make new ‘uns. I also got me a weird few things in my eyehole that I don’t know what’s what with.” Merl trudged on.
“Ain’t an eyehole,” Billy butted in. “Ain’t an eyehole at all. It’s an earhole.”
“But it ain’t in me ear, is it, Billy Muckspreader?” Merl snapped.
Merl was still a little unhappy. He hated being the center of attention. Since Melody had thrust him right to the forefront of this damnable prophecy that no one had ever heard before, Frank and Desmelda had been right on his tail. He’d just about had enough.
“Then it’s just yer eye. Eyeball at best. Explain it t’me, Merl, then I’ll explain it to the ‘telligent ones in long words they can understand.” Billy jumped into step by Merl, though Merl elbowed him away a bit.
“What long words d’you know?” Merl asked, looking at Billy from the corner of his eye.
“Fermentation,” Billy replied proudly.
“What’s it mean?”
“It’s when you take one thing, add something, and a whole different thing comes out.”
Merl pursed his lips. “Bit like eating, then.”
“Much the same.”
Merl decided it was worth a go. If nothing else, it might shut them all up. “When you pricked me with your crappy elfen sword an’ I nearly died, I saw somethin’ almost the same as what’s in me bonce now. It were empty blocks that filled with red the better I felt.”
Billy held his hand up. “Hold on, now, let me put it into words they can understand.”
“Billy,” Frank said, a big grin on his face. “We can understand Merl. It’s us he sometimes can’t understand.”
Merl sighed. “Well, if you can understand me, why do you keep askin’ me t’repeat the same thing over and over?”
“Because we’re trying to understand it,” Frank told Merl, and in doing so, completely confused him.
Billy held up his hand to silence everyone. “He’s got a barn in his bonce,” Billy announced. “He ferments the constructs an’ it uses all ‘is hay. He un-ferments them, an’ all the hay goes back in his barn. That’s why he can only make…”
“Fifty,” Desmelda said. “He can make fifty constructs, and then he can unmake them, and the all go back to where they came from.”
“Fifty,” Billy agreed.
Frank stopped walking. “So, exactly like my hut. I make it and unmake it.”
“P’raps,” Merl said. He didn’t have a clue about Frank’s hut, but decided that by agreeing, they all might shut up. He needed a diversion. He needed something to happen. But they were in the middle of nowhere, following a narrow trail with sides overflowing with vegetation. There was about as much chance of something happening as of Merl suddenly understanding everything.
Then he saw someone coming toward them along the trail. It was a man. At least it looked like a man. There was something familiar about the man, about the way he walked. Yet that was impossible, because they miles away from anything Merl found familiar. The man was lumbering.
There was only one thing Merl knew that lumbered. “It’s here,” he said softly, knowing the sickness had come to Alaria.
“Is that a filthy zombay?” Billy asked, and Merl swore Billy had a glint in his eye.
He found a smile had hatched on his own lips. “Cleaver, Frank,” he demanded, holding his hand out.
Frank handed Merl his cleaver and Billy his crappy elfen sword. Merl and Billy stepped forward like two brave knights ready to do battle with a powerful foe.
“This is more like it,” said Billy.
“Much better,” Merl added, and he swung his cleaver at the dirty, zombay, and he chopped its filthy head off with a gush of blood and ichor.
Billy stabbed its rotting chest, ripping his elfen sword up and opening the zombay’s guts to the land, letting its fetid entrails spill onto the muddy way.
“Well that feels mighty better,” Billy purred. “Much better than talkin’ yerself ‘round in circles. Here comes another.”
An elderly woman lurched up the road. She was dragging one of her feet behind the other. Her head lolled to one side, and her mouth hung open. A great gaping tear in her cheek dripped black blood. She had a basket of potatoes cradled on one arm.
“She looks mighty sweet,” Merl said. “Type o’ grandma I’da given anythin’ fer.”
“Why don’t you conjure some constructs?” Desmelda shouted from behind.
“Why don’t you conjure some constructs,” Billy mimicked. “Why?” he shouted back. “Coz they zombays, witchey, an’ we’re zombay killers, like!”
“Zombay killers!” Merl shouted.
“An’ we don’ need no old lord, no magic, an’ no fancy castles t’stick it to zombays.” Billy screamed a battle cry and pelted towards the old woman, swinging his stupid elfen sword high and lopping her sweet old-lady noggin off in one fell swoop. He skidded to a halt, rounding on her falling body. Billy glanced one way and then the other, and then looked a
t Merl.
“Oh bugger!” he screamed—right as a dozen more zombays all burst from the overflowing undergrowth.
Merl scrambled forward, his battle cry flying from his throat. Gloomy Joe bounded alongside him. Quaiyl forged in front. The construct leapt at the zombays, knocking them away from Billy. Gloomy Joe ripped a zombay’s throat clean away. Merl swung his cleaver and severed a reaching arm, before bringing his weapon about to rend a swollen belly open. He kicked the fetid zombay away, reveling in the filth of its spilling guts. That created just enough space to separate the head—its black-veined, jaundiced head—from its falling body. Merl screamed with joy as blood gushed up in a gruesome fountain.
Quaiyl ripped a dirty zombay in two, throwing it back into the roadside bushes. Billy was neck-deep in the dirty bastards. His smile was as wide as his ears. The elfen sword flashed, its blade drenched in dark blood. Merl slashed at a lurching man who had maggots oozing from one eye. He hesitated, disgusted by the filthy beast and dropping maggots. Suddenly, Gloomy Joe crashed into it, flattening the bastard and ripped its face off.
Merl’s swerved his swing away from Gloomy, cutting a slab of rotten flesh off another undead abomination. It sagged forward, its maw opening, ready to chomp on Merl’s shoulder. Merl dropped down, letting the zombay fold over him, and then he sprang straight back up, launching it into the air and following up with a spine-slashing slice. The zombay’s back collapsed like it had Gloomy Joe’s hinge in it, and Billy swept his blade up and cut the gruesome-looking beast in two. Quaiyl twisted the last until it looked like it had been platted. Its innards exploded out from its top and bottom as Quaiyl wrung its guts dry.
“Hell yeah!” Billy cried, covered from head to toe in zombay entrails. “Now that’s better.”
“Better?” Frank asked, stepping carefully through the guts and limbs.
“Frank,” Billy said. “Zombays are an enemy I can see an’ feel. They is honest, not like that damnable Dark One—not like that bastard.”
“Yeah, right,” Merl agreed, wiping the ichor from his lips. “Bastards we can beat.”
Desmelda cleared her throat. “I hate to break this to you all, but we’re right in the middle of Alaria, and if I’m guessin’ right, it looks like the zombay plague has now ravaged this land as well. Day before yesterday, nothing, yet today it’s all the way up here in the mountains. Do you have any idea what that means?”
They all fell silent. Merl couldn’t think of anything other than the obvious—they’d have to fight their way through—but he didn’t think that was the answer Desmelda was after. Fortunately, Billy nailed it.
“Monster wagon,” Billy said. “We’re gonna need us a great-big monster wagon.” Billy stomped off down the trail as if there might be one around its corner.
“What were there, a dozen of those things?” Frank asked.
“’Bout that,” Merl said.
“Then there’s a hamlet ‘round here somewhere,” Frank concluded.
Merl was just about to marvel at the Wizard of Quintz’s powers of deduction when Billy shouted: “There’s a hamlet just down there!”
“Then there might be an inn,” Desmelda gasped, and picked her way through the zombay guts and limbs.
Merl thought it highly unlikely that there would be a hamlet, let alone an inn. The place was more remote than even Morgan Mount. Colossal mountains towered up on either side of them. There was no sign of farms, no sign of fields, nor logging or anything, just a press of ferns and brambles, of magnificent trees and bursts of thick-bladed grass. He didn’t think a man could get through the thick undergrowth, let alone find a place to hide in it and jump out on passersby.
Jump out on passersby?
That was wrong. That wasn’t how it happened. Zombays didn’t plan attacks. Zombays just lurched around hunting the living. “Err, Frank?”
“Yes, Merl.”
“You saw the zombays lure Billy on, didn’t you? You saw how they put one in the middle of the trail, wait ‘till he attacked, and then they all jumped him/”
“Yes, Merl. Yes, Merl I did. Eh wait? Hang on. They can’t…”
“They was usin’ their foul noggins, Frank.” A bad feeling hit Merl in the gut. “Billy! Billy!” He tore forward, streaking around the curve in the road, then skidded to a halt and took in the scene in the blink of an eye. The hamlet squatted either side of a narrow river. A half-dozen small, thatched cottages sat close with eight or nine on the other bank. Billy stood on a quaint wooden bridge, which was just wide enough to take a cart. He was leaning on a post and chewing a grass stalk.
“Come on down, Merl,” Billy called.
“It’s a trap, Billy. A filthy, zombay trap!”
Frank darted forward and equipped Scaramanza as he flew into the hamlet. Desmelda surged on too. Her fingers were primed and ready to spew her magics.
“Just a deserted old hamlet,” Billy crowed, right as the first foul hand slapped onto the bridge, and the first rotting head burst out of the river.
Once one had broken cover, ten—then twenty—instantly appeared. They lurched out from between the cottages. They clawed their way out of the water. They erupted from the vegetation. Soldiers, peasants, hunters, all zombayfied, all growling, enraged, and clearly sensing fresh, living meat. Billy screamed his lungs empty as he was instantly surrounded on all sides.
Merl burst forward. “Protect Billy, Quaiyl!”
The construct sped past Merl, little more than a plume of rising dust and kicked up mud. He sped into the ranks of slobbering zombays, plowing through them with a rising wake of torn zombay limbs. Quaiyl lifted a still-screaming Billy free, tossing him high. Billy arced through the air. He crashed onto the nearest cottage, plunging through its thatched roof and vanishing.
The zombays all turned on Quaiyl, but the construct merely carved another path through the creatures and soon stood back by Merl’s side.
“Well,” said Desmelda, “if we’re going to spend the night here, I’d suggest we remove those filthy buggers and throw them in the river.”
“Don’t have to ask me twice,” Frank shouted as he powered toward them.
Gloomy Joe growled, and Billy emerged from the hut with a pitchfork in his hand.
“Lost that daft elfen blade at last, but look at my fine pitchfork!” Billy stomped toward the filthy zombays.
Merl grinned. It was good to have the zombays back. They were a problem he could actually understand.
He ran after Frank, just as crimson magic flashed over them. Thorns rose up from the mud, grabbing at the zombay’s legs, tripping them, and holding them fast. Billy forked his first bastard clean in the guts. He lifted it high into the air, tossing it backwards. Gloomy Joe pounced. He ripped the zombay’s throat clean out, spitting its fetid flesh out in a plume of crimson and gob. Then, Frank sprung into action. One leap, two, and then three saw him right in the middle of the bridge. He held the zombays at bay like the hero he was. His swordwork was ruthless. It was a dance, a deadly dance. Scaramanza sliced through flesh and bone like a scythe cuts hay. He killed, he kicked, and he stamped, and the dead zombays fell from the bridge and floated away.
Merl crashed into their fetid ranks, swiping his cleaver down and growling like some feral beast. He wanted to kill them all. He wanted to kill every one of them and begrudged Billy his tally. He despised Frank his greed. Merl knew he could have called his construct army. They could have finished the battle in seconds, but he wanted to bathe in the enemy’s blood. He wanted to feel their guts splash against his skin.
Merl slashed and sliced until he couldn’t breathe. He decapitated and severed, chopped until all their rotten flesh was heaped before him in steaming mounds. Merl knelt among the dead, the truly dead, and he reveled in his simple victory. Frank strode over, offering Merl his hand and pulling him up.
“Feel better, Merl?” Frank asked.
“A little, Frank. Just a little. Is that what killin’ does? Does it get rid of your anger?”
“Yes,
Merl, but we should talk about that. You don’t want to go getting lost.”
“Does killin’ get you lost, then?” Merl asked.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Frank said. The shadow that was never far away from him seemed like it wanted to return and engulf Merl’s hero, but Frank pushed it away with a shake of his head and a gasp. “Now, call your constructs and get this place cleaned up. We might as well use them for something.”
“My constructs are fighters, Frank. They won’t know how t’do honest toil. Let’s try something different.”
Merl withdrew from the steaming gore and he bid Frank follow him. “Conjure me one of them crates—one with the brown blocks in it—and I’ll try and create us a few constructs to clear this mess up.”
“You reckon you could do it?” Frank asked. He looked up at Quaiyl as the construct resumed its guard of Merl.
“Reckon I could give it a try. If it works it works, if it don’t it don’t,” Merl told him, and so Frank retrieved a crate from his ring, he reached in, and brought out a brown brick.
He tossed it to Merl. “Do you even know where to start?”
Merl held the brick. He spun it around and inspected it. It looked nothing more than compressed mud, dried and flakey. Merl sniffed it. It smelled of earth, but not soil, of the actual earth as if all its components had all been compressed into the single brick. “It stinks of waterfalls and fields, of rainbows and caves.”
Merl then tried to imagine a construct rising from the brick. A brown construct, featureless, like Stobart’s farming constructs. He pulled the color from the brick, teasing it out like a droplet of brown rain, but it snapped back. Merl remembered back to when Stobart had created the crimson construct. He hadn’t even been looking at the green brick. He’d just imagined it, and the construct had appeared. Merl fixed his gaze on a rock a few feet away from him. He tried to concentrate, but that was something he just wasn’t any good at.