Sister of the Dead

by Barb Hendee

  It was constructed of oak held together with steel straps and bound to the wagon bed with chains instead of rope. As two guardsmen unhooked the chains, a deep muffled voice howled out from within the container: "Shairsnisag mi, na mi taitagag craiui ag shiui ag cher!"

  The words Welstiel heard sounded Elvish but were more guttural, and he could make no sense of them. A thunderous boom issued from the crate's walls, and it slammed sideways into one guard. The impact crushed the man's legs against the wagon's side with an audible crack of bone. His companion leaped out the other side and scrambled clear. The guard screamed and toppled over to dangle against the rear wheel with his legs pinned against the vehicle's sidewall.

  Master Ubad glided toward the wagon. His dark robe showed no sway from footsteps.

  "Fools!" he hissed, ignoring the trapped man's squeals of pain. "The contents are worth more than all your lives. Take care—and have all five crates brought to the lower chambers. "

  Ubad's face was covered by an aged leather mask with no eye slits. Only his withered mouth and chin were visible. When he moved, strange markings shimmered briefly across his char-colored robe in the torchlight.

  Welstiel heard less articulate growls coming from the crate, as the men returned to pulling it free from the wagon. All were careful not to pass too near Master Ubad, who watched them closely. The maimed guard was quickly dragged from sight.

  Welstiel and his father dismounted, and Lord Massing lifted Magelia to the ground and grasped her wrist to drag her inside. Her black hair hung in waves to the middle of her slender back, and her blue dress made her skin appear ivory. She struggled and tried to jerk away, but her captor kept walking, unhindered by her efforts.

  Master Ubad's bony hand motioned Welstiel to follow, as he moved smoothly toward the keep's main doors. Welstiel abhorred being so close to the creature, but he had little choice and followed.

  "I can walk on my own!" Magelia shouted. "Leave me be. "

  Some part of Welstiel was capable of pity, but this woman was just a peasant. He found these unfolding events more and more distasteful. They entered the main hall, furnished only by an aged table, a few chairs, and dusty rushes covering the floor. Welstiel shivered in the cold. He was always cold in this foreign land and rarely removed his cloak even when indoors.

  His father suffered no such discomfort, not since Wel-stiel's youth and the first appearance of Ubad in their lives. Lord Massing released the woman and removed his own cloak with one hand, tossing it onto the table.

  Magelia backed into the nearest wall, and Ubad's head turned as if he could see her clearly through the leather covering his eyes.

  "Do not allow your guard to drop, Bryen, " he said. "She must not escape. "

  It grated on Welstiel that this creature spoke to his father in such a manner. Welstiel called him "Father, " of course, but all others conducted themselves with suitable decorum, even Prince Rodek of the Antes. At the counsel gatherings of the house's nobles, his father was announced as "Lord Bryen Massing. "

  Ubad did not show his father the proper respect.

  Withered, faceless, conjurer of spirits of the dead—such rare specialization earning the title of necromancer—Ubad's forecasting ability was questionable at best. He amounted to little more than a servant in Welstiel's eyes and yet addressed Welstiel's father in a familiar way.

  Lord Massing raised a hand to his temple. His left eyelid twitched as he whispered inaudibly to himself.

  Welstiel no longer asked what troubled him. His father's unnerving habit of speaking to himself was becoming common. Ubad did not hesitate, sliding closer.

  "Your son can lock up the woman until all is arranged. You should rest... slumber... and commune. "

  Bryen Massing stared blankly into Ubad's mask, then nodded.

  "Yes, see to matters here, " he said, and turned toward the stairs curving up the inner wall, his vacant gaze passing briefly over Welstiel. "Lock her in the cellar and assist Master Ubad as needed. "

  Lord Massing walked heavily up the stone steps, leaving Welstiel to handle Magelia. He did not want to touch her for any reason, even on the orders of his father. This arranged joining was not of his making or desire. He pointed toward the stairs leading down the opposite way to the lower chambers.

  "Go, " he said.

  Beneath the fright in Magelia's dark eyes was anger, and she was watchful, studying everything around her. Welstiel noted for the first time that her face was attractive, with a long straight nose and delicate jaw framed by her mass of black hair. Her wrists and fingers were slender to the point of fragility. He pitied her as he might pity a sack of kittens just before they were thrown into a river.

  With a tilt of his head, he motioned again to the stairs and took a step toward her. She slid away from him along the wall and proceeded on her own. As they reached the stairs, a crate was pulled in through the keep's doors, and Welstiel glanced back.

  It was not the one that had crushed the man-at-arms. Built like a cage of wooden struts, thick canvas panels were stretched inside its bars to hide or protect what it held.

  As Welstiel descended behind Magelia, he heard the thrash of beating wings against the canvas.

  ILate the same night, Welstiel descended into the cellar passage. He passed the doors of the six small rooms, the first of which held Magelia locked within. He did not stop, but walked on to the end and the seventh room. Inside, he found a flurry of activity. Five crates had been unloaded. Several conscripted villagers and a few men-at-arms were settling the crates in place and removing their tarps.

  First the steel-bound oak box containing the muffled rage of its occupant, and then the framed canvas with its soft sounds of fluttering misery within. The third was cedar, and silent inside, while the fourth was a framework of oak surrounding an urn large enough for a man to crawl inside. The latter's weight was three or four times that of the others and, when moved, it sloshed liquid inside. Even when the box sat undisturbed, Welstiel occasionally heard liquid lap against the leather-sealed opening at its top.

  The fifth container was by far the most unsettling and intriguing.

  It measured less than half a man's height in all dimensions and was made of bound steel plates that were discolored and blackened. Steam rose with a sizzling crackle from the damp floor when it was set down, and erratic scraping came from within the metal walls. The frantic noise grew until a screech from the steel made everyone in the room flinch. Every nerve in Welstiel quivered at the sound. Then the crate sat silent.

  A villager was freeing a chain used to drag it along and brushed a hand against the discolored metal. The sizzle of his flesh filled the room and he cried out and pulled back, putting his hand to his mouth. He crumpled to the floor, whimpering, until a man-at-arms kicked him into motion again.

  Welstiel left the seventh room. He stopped outside Magelia's locked door for a moment, and then walked back up the curving stairs.

  ISeveral nights passed. Welstiel had come down for supper in the main hall when a roaring and clanging resounded from the cellar below. He hurried down the stairs, taking them two at time. Ubad's screeching voice echoed in his ears before he reached the landing chamber. "Alive, you fools. He must remain alive!"

  Welstiel ran to the passage's end. The door to the seventh room was ajar. As he grabbed its edge to swing it open, he looked through the crack. A body leaned in the near left corner.

  Fingers crooked in anguish, the elf's hands rested limp upon his chest. His head tilted back into the corner, and his eyes gawked unblinking at the ceiling, wide balls of white with amber centers. The hanging gap of his mouth was mimicked by a slash across his throat so deep that it had split through to his windpipe. Little blood seeped from the wound, and the corpse was too pale for one of the forest people.

  Welstiel's view was suddenly blocked as a man-at-arms crashed into the chamber's front wall. He pushed the door wide.

  Near the center of the room, Ubad stood behind a large brass vat with his bony hands
clenched.

  "Get up!" he shouted. "Break his legs, if you must. "

  The guard clawed up the wall to his feet, and he rushed across the room with an iron bar in his hand.

  Among the shattered remains of the oak crate stood a man, or so it appeared, struggling with Lord Massing.

  Bryen's opponent was thick and gnarled, his muscular limbs sprouting from a torso almost twice the width of a human's but only two-thirds as tall. His bushy brows and beard were coarse like chestnut horsehair around bulky rough features that made it hard to see his eyes. Iron shackles encompassed his wide wrists and ankles, but their connecting chains had been snapped and dangled loose.

  The guard stepped in, swinging the iron bar low into the prisoner's leg.

  The squat man's bare foot did not even move. The thudding impact had no more effect than striking a column of stone. He slapped the guard aside with little effort. The guard's body smashed headfirst into the back wall, and he fell to the floor, his neck broken. The iron bar rolled away.

  The prisoner roared out through yellowed teeth. "Mi ko' eag a' grunn ta gowl shiun ambi' shiu fuiliag mi!"

  Everything happened in a few blinks of the eye, but Welstiel felt locked in an eternity.

  Bryen punched the gnarled man's face, and Welstiel expected the prisoner to crumple. The man barely flinched and drove his larger fist into Bryen's sternum. Bryen buckled, and the prisoner crouched low and heaved him up into the air. Welstiel lunged forward to snatch up the iron bar, but he could not close the distance in time.

  The prisoner slammed his father down, and Welstiel felt the impact through the floor stones. He hesitated in fear, as he had little skill at arms. His chosen method of conjury was artificing, the making of objects and tools, and not spellcraft. Even so, what could he possibly conjure or summon of the elements to aid his father now?

  The air in the room began to swirl. It kicked up dust from the floor that made Welstiel blink as he looked for the source of the sudden wind in this underground chamber.

  Ubad, in his whipping charcoal robe, hovered above the floor.

  Wisplike eddies appeared in the swirling air around him, each twisting and curling, until translucent faces appeared at the head of each wisp. Their sorrowed features blurred in the air. Spirits of the dead gathered about the withered necromancer and, one by one, they broke away and dived at Bryen's opponent.

  The first spirit struck through the prisoner. He shuddered but kept pounding down upon Bryen with huge fists. Another wisp pierced the wide man's flesh, and another, until he finally screamed in pain.

  "Assist me—now!" Ubad shouted. 'Take his breath!"

  Welstiel blinked once before understanding. Such a simple thing, he should have thought of this himself, but spell-work was not his strength in conjury. He held out his cupped hands, palms facing each other, then lifted them until they framed his sight of the prisoner. Forming the lines, shapes, and symbols in his mind to overlay what his eyes saw, he began to chant.

  The air between his palms pushed outward, but he held it in place like a small entity trapped within a conjuring circle. He loathed following Ubad's commands but was determined to save his father.

  Another spirit struck the wide man. He opened his mouth to yell, but no sound issued, and he buckled, grasping his throat.

  Welstiel's head ached with concentration as he summoned the air from out of the prisoner's lungs. Free of the wide man's assault, Welstiel's father struck upward into his opponent's bearded jaw as two more spirits pierced the man's body.

  The prisoner's eyes rolled as he gasped for air, and he toppled over. Bryen was up and on him in an instant, pinning his thick arms back with the dangling chains.

  "Leave him alive, " Ubad commanded.

  Welstiel ceased chanting. His father pinned the captive's stomach against the brass vat and forced the man to lean forward over it. Before Welstiel understood what was happening, Ubad slashed open the prisoner's throat with a curved dagger.

  The hulking man bucked at the blade's passing and thrashed wildly. Bryen put his full weight on top of his captive. It did not take long for the prisoner to go limp as his blood drained into the vessel. Bryen stood up, releasing the body to flop heavily upon the floor.

  Welstiel saw the prisoner's eyes, smaller and darker than the elf's, staring blindly up at the ceiling. His mouth was clenched shut in a permanent grimace, and the thick beard was matted to his chest with his own blood.

  "Well done, my son, " Bryen said. "One dwarf is far more trouble man we expected. "

  Awareness filled Welstiel like a winter chill spreading from Bryen's approving gaze. His father lived an unnatural existence, but this spilling of blood without thought shocked Welstiel. The thing that stood before him, offering dispassionate praise, was far less his sire than he had ever before realized.

  "We must not delay, " Ubad said urgently. "Now that it's begun, preparation must be finished immediately. "

  Bryen cast the necromancer an annoyed glance but nodded agreement. Without another word to Welstiel, he stepped to the wood-framed crate with its canvas walls. Drawing his own dagger, he slashed open one side. The canvas separated and fell away.

  Welstiel saw the prisoner within.

  Bound with leather straps instead of shackles, she was delicate. Even curled in fright at the container's rear, he could tell she would barely reach his sternum when standing.

  Her face and build were as lithe and slender as the last prisoner's had been hulking and wide. She would have been slight even standing next to the dead elf. Her two eyes, staring out in wide terror, had no irises. They were fully black like a sparrow's, and the dark rings around mem showed she had not slept in days. From narrow feet to her head of feathery hair, her pale flesh appeared downy, though there were places where it had molted or been rubbed to bare cream skin.

  And bound down to her naked torso were wings of mottled grays and whites sprouting from her back. Her attempts to free them were likely what Welstiel had heard when he had first seen this container.

  Bryen grabbed her bound wrists, dragging her out and holding her up to dangle from his grip as he walked toward the vat.

  "You should retire, " Ubad said to Welstiel. "There's still much to do here, and you've exceeded your stamina. "

  Welstiel got to his feet. He was about to approach his father, but Ubad slid into his way as the necromancer followed Bryen across the room. Welstiel suddenly felt isolated and alone.

  He turned to leave. Behind him, the sound of a frantic scream was cut short. He thought of Magelia, locked in her cell, forced to listen, and he turned his eyes away as he passed her door.

  Once in his own room, Welstiel locked the door and sat at a small desk lit by the three dancing flickers in his orb. There he remained for the rest of a sleepless night with his eyes closed, flinching at the sounds of two more screams that echoed up from the seventh room beneath the keep.

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  C adell and Jan brought additional candle lanterns, and the room was illuminated around Magiere in yellow light. The stench was still so thick that she could taste it. Before her was a small heap of remains amid an old wood frame with decayed shreds of cloth still bound to it.

  At first, she thought it was two bodies, for there were too many bones for a single being. Yet there was only one skull, human shaped, but too small and narrow, with oversize eye sockets like those of the elf. There was only one set of hands and feet, with toe bones that were too long. Its limbs had been bound with leather straps now crusted hard with age, as well as another hanging loose around the frail rib cage.

  In the filth surrounding it were the remains of rotted feathers.

  "Wings?" Wynn whispered as she drew closer, holding up a crystal. "It had wings... like a bird. Perhaps female—if its make is similar to other races. "

  Magiere's gaze traced the tangled bones until the illusion of two bodies was dispelled by the memory of once seeing a dead hawk in the woods. A few feathers lying be
fore her still held their mottled gray and white color.

  "What is it?" Jan asked, though he kept his distance a few steps away, near the large vat they'd discovered.

  Wynn shook her head and looked up, but not at the zupan's son. Magiere saw fear in the sage's unblinking eyes. For an instant, all Wynn's horror turned upon her, and Magiere backed away.

  "There's another over here by this iron box, " Leesil called from the right side of the room. "But it's... something else. I'm not sure what. "

  The words barely entered Magiere's thoughts. What did the remains of this sealed chamber reveal concerning the death of her mother? Had something been done here to Magelia in order to bring her unnatural daughter into this world?

  Magiere saw her whole life infested with the dead and undead. Even her birth was somehow forecast with these bones, yet she couldn't fathom what they told her of the past. She sensed—somehow knew—that the contents of this room were connected to her.

  There were only more questions, and no answers.

  Beside the crusted vat lay the second body they'd found. Wynn had partly cleared the hardened leather clothes from it, telling them it was—had been—a dwarf. The sage knew of these people from a seatt—dwarvish for a city stronghold or fortified haven—across the bay from the capital of her homeland, Malourne. That capital, Calm Seatt, had been named out of respect for the dwarven people who'd helped to build its first keep.

  Neither Magiere nor Leesil had ever met one of his kind. Wide framed and wide jawed, with a skull as large as a soldier's helmet, his thigh bones were as thick as her whole wrist. Slightly yellowed with age, the bones had speckled shadows in them like a hint of granite.

  "If any of this bears upon the past you're looking for, "

  Cadell said, "I don't care to know any more of it. We've enough troubles of our own. "

  "More than you thought, " Magiere replied bitterly, but she didn't explain.

  Whatever happened here had been done in haste and then sealed up. Few but Leesil could have uncovered its existence. But if she had come looking, who else might do so, as well, once word traveled of what had been found here?