[Heroes 05] - The Red Duke

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  The necromancer chuckled to himself and raised his eyes to the tower itself. Safety? Perhaps it was wrong to use that word. Indeed, if the knights knew what he had unleashed inside the tower, they might prefer to stay outside and be mauled by Renar’s zombies!

  CHAPTER XIV

  “Your grace.”

  The voice trembled with sorrow, the words choked and strained. Somehow they fought their way through the crimson oblivion that had seized the duke’s mind. He struggled up from the bloody dreams, grasping desperately at every word.

  “I do not know if you hear me,” the voice was saying. “I do not know if you can hear me. But I must tell you, your grace. I must tell you.”

  The voice was that of Earl Durand du Maisne. The vassal who had disobeyed his orders to leave him behind in the Araby an desert. The duke felt a flush of admiration for Earl Durand, the man whose loyalty had made him stand fast beside his stricken lord. He could not remember now why he had wished to die. Dimly he remembered a dark figure leaning over him, doing something to him as he lay helpless upon the sand.

  The duke brushed aside the errant thought, concentrating as Durand’s pained voice spoke again.

  “We are back, your grace. Back in Castle Aquin. We have returned.”

  Emotion flared through the duke’s heart. Castle Aquin! Aquitaine! He had despaired of ever seeing his home again. Furiously he struggled to open his eyes, but they felt as though iron weights had been chained to each lid. Then he suddenly remembered the emotion in Earl Durand’s voice. He sounded anything but jubilant. His was hardly the voice of a soldier returned in triumph from a long crusade. The duke wondered what horror he would see if he did manage to open his eyes.

  “Your grace,” Durand said, choking back a sob. The duke felt a tremor of fear course through him, trying to imagine what kind of tragedy could so unman a brave knight of Bretonnia.

  “Your grace, the Duchess Martinga is dead!

  The words pierced the duke’s mind like a red-hot knife. There was more; Durand was talking about how news had reached Aquitaine that the duke had died in battle. He spoke of how Martinga had at first disbelieved such tales, but how, in the end, as all the other crusading lords returned, she had at last accepted the truth of her husband’s death. Refusing to live without him, she had climbed to the highest tower in the castle and thrown herself over the parapet.

  Agony, pain like nothing he’d felt even with the Arabyan poison burning in his veins, flared through the duke’s body. He would have screamed, thrashed his limbs against the torment, but his sickened muscles refused to obey him. Instead, he cast his mind afield, trying to retreat into memory from the horror assailing his senses.

  In his mind, the duke raced through the dreary halls of his castle, passing by rooms rendered cheerless and forlorn without Martinga’s presence. He saw her sitting room, that happy chamber high above the outer wall. Was it from here she had watched for his return? And was it from here that despair had at last claimed her?

  The duke imagined he could see two men standing in the abandoned chamber. He recognized them, saw the faces of Baron de Gavaudan and Marquis Galafre d’Elbiq. He could hear them talking, discussing the invalid corpse Marquis Galafre had brought back from Araby. Their talk turned to accusations of sabotage and treachery. Marquis Galafre blamed the baron for sinking the ship bearing them back to Bretonnia. The baron, in turn blamed Marquis Galafre for not completing their compact.

  The duke’s mind retreated from the treacherous words, recoiling back into his paralysed body.

  Earl Durand was still speaking to him, telling him of his wife’s suicide. But El Syf knew better now. His wife’s despair had been born from a lie. A lie fathered by Baron de Gavaudan and the one man who would profit from the Duke of Aquitaine’s death.

  The man all of Bretonnia knew as King Louis the Righteous.

  Sir Leuthere and Count Ergon raced to the massive steel door that offered the only entrance to the Tower of Wizardry. Behind them, they could hear the horde of zombies awkwardly climb the rocky mound upon which the tower had been reared. Though some of them had fallen in their pursuit of the two knights, hundreds remained. The unexpected and unnatural speed the creatures had displayed seemed to have abated, reducing their pursuit of the men to a steady, relentless shamble.

  There was some hope, if the knights could gain entry to the tower in time. But as the two men drew closer, they saw that such would be easier said than done. Vigor was engaged in a vigorous argument with the warder on the other side of the steel door. The wart-nosed man peered out from a small window in the centre of the portal, studying Vigor intently.

  “How do I know you’re not some creature of the vampire’s?” the warder demanded to know. “A spy trying to slither his way into the tower so he can kill milady?”

  Vigor slammed his hand against the unyielding door. “We’ve been over that!” he cursed. “You’ve had a good look at my neck. Does it look like the vampire bit me?”

  The warder shook his head. “Maybe the vampire didn’t need to bite you. Maybe you’re working for him to earn some silver. There’s lots of wretches would do worse for less.”

  “I’ll do worse to you!” Vigor snarled, bashing his hand against the door again. He turned a hopeful look towards Leuthere and Count Ergon as the two men came running towards the door. “If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe my noble lords,” the peasant announced. He gestured Leuthere towards the door. “Tell this idiot why we’re here.”

  “We need to get inside to see the prophetess,” Leuthere said, gasping for breath. “Open this door and conduct us to your mistress.”

  The warder sneered back at him. “How do I know you’re a real knight?” he demanded. “Seems awful strange all those fiends would just let you march right in here.” His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “How do I know you’re not vampires yourselves?” He drew back from the window. “Show me your neck,” he ordered in a frightened voice.

  Count Ergon watched as the first of the zombies reached the top of the mound. Their brief respite was almost over. “Look, we’re friends,” he growled at the warder. “But in a minute, we’ll just be a pile of butchered meat if you don’t open that door!” The count shook his head in frustration. “Ask your archers if we’re part of the Red Duke’s army!” he exclaimed. “If we were, don’t you think they would have shot us down before we could reach this door?”

  Leuthere turned from the door, looking back at the zombies climbing the foundations of the tower. “That’s right,” he told Count Ergon. “But why aren’t they loosing arrows into that mob?”

  An uneasy feeling gripped the three men who had risked their lives to cross the battlefield. Count Ergon pressed his face against the little window in the door.

  “Something’s wrong,” he told the warder. “Something’s wrong inside the tower!” As he spoke, a piercing shriek echoed through the guardroom, a deafening wail that set the very flesh crawling. The warder cast terrified eyes to the ceiling, wondering what was going on in the halls above.

  The colour drained from Count Ergon’s face. His body trembled. “I know that sound,” he muttered, oblivious to who heard him. It was the shriek that had presaged the Red Duke’s attack on the Chateau du Maisne. The wail of the banshee.

  “What is it?” Leuthere asked, noting the nobleman’s fright.

  Count Ergon ignored him, facing the warder instead. “Let me in, man! I tell you I know what has been set loose in the tower!”

  The warder stared back at Count Ergon, paralysed with fear. On the small rise around the base of the tower, a full score of zombies had finished their climb and were shuffling slowly towards the gateway and the three men trapped on the wrong side of the door. The knights could hear the creak of dry bones grinding against one another, the rattle of loose armour against decaying flesh, the drip of unclean juices from burst organs. As the zombies advanced, they clumsily hefted the crude spears and rusty glaives they bore, presenting the trapped men with a fence
of splintered wood and sharp iron.

  Leuthere and Vigor turned away from the door, both men brandishing their own weapons, prepared to meet the lumbering horde. Count Ergon continued to pound on the door, trying to spur the terrified warder into action.

  It was nothing Count Ergon did that finally had the man scrambling forwards to unbar the gate. It was the keening wail of the banshee echoing once more down from the tower that broke through to the frightened man. Fairly leaping for the door, the warder threw back the heavy bolts and pulled down the heavy beam.

  Count Ergon scrambled through the door as soon as it started to open. Vigor hurried after him, Leuthere following last of all. The three men threw their weight against the door once they were inside the guard room, slamming it in the very faces of the oncoming zombies. The rotten hand of one of the creatures was caught in the slamming portal, decayed fingers spilling to the floor as the edge of the closing door sliced them off.

  The door closed with a metallic boom. The knights continued to press their armoured weight against it while Vigor and the warder hefted the heavy beam back into place and drove home the half-dozen bolts that secured the door into the stone wall.

  “I’m… I’m sorry, my lords…” the warder apologized. Vigor spoke for all of them when he planted his fist in the man’s stomach.

  “We’re in, what do we do now?” Vigor asked as he turned away from the retching warder.

  The ghastly shriek of the banshee sounded once more, piercing each of the men to the very core of his being. Like a thousand nightmares, the eerie sound set their bones shivering.

  “We go up there and find what’s making that noise,” Count Ergon declared, the intense look in his eyes telling his companions he would brook no argument.

  Leuthere nodded in agreement. “What do we do when we find it?”

  Count Ergon rolled his left hand, letting the light play across the sharp edge of his sword.

  “We make it stop,” he said.

  Climbing the central stair that wound upwards through the tower, it was not long before the three men found the first of the bowmen. Dressed in the grubby raiment of a peasant, the archer was slumped against the inward column to which the narrow steps had been set. Blood stained his ears, trails of gore running from eyes and nose. As Vigor pressed a hand to the bowman to check him for any sign of life, the body shifted, crashing to the stairs and slowly sliding down the steps. A grotesque thumping noise echoed through the stairway as the corpse gradually rolled down the steps.

  The bowman had been one of many to flee to the tower for protection against the Red Duke’s attack. He had trusted the thick stone walls and the magic of the prophetess to protect him. Instead, he had found a strange and horrible death.

  “Be vigilant,” Count Ergon warned. “The banshee does not need to see you to kill you. Her wail is enough.” The nobleman removed a silk ribbon from the sleeve of his gauntlet, then took the steel helm from off his head. Pulling back the mail coif and padded quilting which he wore under the helmet, he began to wind the ribbon around his head, binding his ears. Sir Leuthere noted the faint scent of perfume on the ribbon and the heraldry of the du Maisnes embroidered upon it.

  “Cover your ears,” the count advised the other men. “It may help against the banshee’s scream.”

  The count drew ahead of his companions, carefully mounting the winding stairs. The atmosphere about the stairwell was icy and lifeless, the knight’s breath turning to frost before his face. A splash of blood upon the centre wall had crystallized, shimmering weirdly in the flickering torchlight.

  Count Ergon’s thoughts turned back to the horror that had descended upon his own castle, his men-at-arms and knights slaughtered by a nightmarish apparition that could kill merely with the sound of her hideous voice. Against such a spectral fiend, he did not know if courage and steel were enough to cause harm. All that he did know was that an effort had to be made to stop the ghastly ghost before she could accomplish whatever malignant purpose the Red Duke expected of her.

  The body of another bowman lay crumpled across the steps, his face frozen in an expression of agony and terror. Count Ergon hesitated, staring down at the dead man, picturing how he had died. He imagined the same fate lurking in wait for him just beyond the next turn. In his mind he could see his own face, dead and terrified, blood seeping from his lifeless eyes.

  The knight summoned his faltering courage, whispering a quiet prayer for the Lady to preserve his valour in this, his moment of need. Carefully, Count Ergon stepped over the dead archer. He gazed anxiously at the winding climb ahead of him. The silk favour bestowed upon him by his wife had bound his ears in such a way that he was almost deaf. A good defence against the banshee’s wail, but now the count found himself wishing he could hear just a little more, detect some sound that would betray the presence of the malignant spirit.

  Firming his resolve, Count Ergon continued up the stairs. Another dead bowman was slumped across the steps, this one with his hands still locked about the shaft of an arrow. The peasant had sought to escape the torment of the banshee’s scream by driving the head of the arrow through his ear. The knight hoped the dead man had achieved some small measure of peace through his desperate act.

  As Count Ergon raised his eyes from the dead bowman, a gasp of horror exploded from his lungs. He staggered back, almost tripping over the legs of the corpse at his feet.

  Only a few feet from him, unearthly in her terrible beauty, was the pale figure of a woman, her voluptuous body clad only in the billowy rags of a burial shroud. The lissom ghost drifted rapidly towards the knight. As she closed upon him, her gorgeous face withered, collapsing into a leering skull. The banshee’s jaws opened in a hateful shriek.

  Count Ergon staggered, feeling the power of the banshee’s wail tearing at his body, clawing at his soul. Even with his ears deafened to sound, the pitch of the spectral scream was penetrating into his brain. Pain shot through his entire being, pain like a thousand tiny fires burning beneath his flesh. Still, the knight counted his blessings. Without the precaution of binding his ears, he knew the banshee’s wail would have killed him outright.

  Jacquetta’s fury swelled, intensified by the knight’s refusal to die. She swung the short sword clutched in one of her slender hands, chopping down at the staggered nobleman, intending to separate his head from his shoulders.

  If Count Ergon had been uninjured, the banshee’s sword would have finished him then and there. Pressed close to the supporting column, there was little room for a man climbing the steps to wield a blade in his right hand, certainly not enough for the knight to intercept the descending blow of Jacquetta’s sword.

  But Count Ergon had been injured. Clenched in his left hand, his sword had room enough to strike out, slashing across the banshee’s blade. The short sword was torn from Jacquetta’s spectral clutch by the nobleman’s desperate parry, the blade clattering off down the stairway.

  Hateful fires blazed in the sockets of Jacquetta’s skull. The shrieking banshee swept down upon Count Ergon, clawing at him with ghostly fingers. The nobleman could feel her hands like icy knives digging at him, shivering through flesh and armour. He lashed out furiously with his sword, the steel passing harmlessly through the wispy essence of the spirit. Overcome by pain, he fell to his knees, swatting at Jacquetta as the banshee began to pull the helm from his head. The ghost had guessed how he had survived her killing shriek and was now intent upon removing his defence.

  Leuthere and Vigor came running up the stairs, alerted to Count Ergon’s peril by the sword he’d knocked from the banshee’s hand. The younger knight paused awkwardly as he struggled to work his way around Count Ergon so that he could strike at Jacquetta. The banshee turned her head, shrieking at the knight, her fury swelling as she saw that he, too, was defended against her killing wail.

  While the banshee faced Leuthere, Vigor dove in to attack her from behind. Squirming around Count Ergon, the crook-backed peasant stabbed the point of his sword through the ph
antom. Jacquetta spun about, howling malignantly at the man. Set upon from all sides now, the banshee’s face filled out, her beautiful features growing outwards to replace the decayed skull. She smiled coyly at the men, then in a flicker she was away, sinking into the very wall of the tower.

  Leuthere lunged at the fading banshee, his sword drawing sparks from the wall as it scraped against the cold stone. Count Ergon gripped his arm and shook his head. It was impossible to hurt the ghost that way. He pointed up towards the higher levels of the tower. His meaning was clear. If they couldn’t hurt the banshee, then at least they could find Iselda and get the prophetess to safety.

  Hurriedly, the knights raced up the stairs. They watched the corridors that branched off from the stairway, expecting at any instant to run into the ethereal killer again. The men kept away from the walls as much as possible, fearful that the banshee would reach out from the very stones to claw at them with her ghostly fingers.

  Everywhere they found evidence of death and destruction. The bodies of peasant bowmen and servants in the livery of the tower were everywhere, sprawled in attitudes of abject horror or curled into little balls of pain. The chill of black magic and the supernatural was all around them, sucking the warmth from their bodies, draining the very vitality from their bones.

  It was near the top of the tower that Leuthere noted a change. One of the corridors branching off from the winding stairway felt different: cold, but without the debilitating taint that had assaulted them throughout their climb. He held his arm out, blocking the progress of his comrades. Firmly, he gestured towards the hallway. Count Ergon nodded in understanding, stepping aside so the younger knight could lead the way.

  The cold hallway was positively inviting after the supernatural chill they had experienced. The corridor was appointed in lavish style, with marble columns and gilded sculptures of the grail affixed to each of the white oak doors set into the walls. Here there were no signs of violence, no splashes of spilled blood and pain-wracked corpses. A sense of peace and security suffused the three men as they traversed the hall, drawn to the oaken double doors at the end of the corridor.