Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  They were also homebodies as he recalled, choosing to spend their days in their private realms, seldom leaving them. The fact that a fairy was here at all, that said something about the importance of the meeting.

  Master Silas meanwhile was looking somewhat nervous, chewing at his lip and constantly rubbing at his beard, as he concentrated on the speaker. That Marjan figured, could not be good. Master wizards had little to worry about, other people worried about them. But he wasn’t alone, the mood in the chamber was subdued and just a little tense, as he reminded himself, it had been too often of late. But then they had a right to be as he suddenly placed the gold armour of the speaker and was shocked.

  By the colour of his plate, there was only one order that wore gold armour, and from the emblem embossed into the breast plate the man was a paladin of the Order of Fire, a good order dedicated to championing the weak and bringing the fire of righteousness and truth to the world. He had no doubt that the paladins would be a powerful ally in the times ahead and that was a good thing, even if he often found paladins in general to be a rather preachy, holier than thou lot, as did many. But he had no idea how he could be in Evensong and that wasn’t so good. The Order of Fire was a religious order based in the Varden Regency, and the Varden Regency was where the enemy’s soldiers had at least seemed to be coming from.

  Looking more closely Marjan realised that the paladin and his companions in the Order had been in a fight somewhere. Maybe many fights. Though their armour shone as it was always supposed to, it had dents in it here and there, places where it had actually been torn and mended, and some of it was ill-fitting as though it wasn’t all from the same set. They had simply repaired and replaced what they could and polished it until it shone as it was meant to, before attending the council.

  It was their eyes that told the truth of the fight though. These were tired men, they had seen too much, done too much, and though they stood tall, there was no other way for a paladin to stand, they needed rest and more than just sleep. Underneath their thick beards, long hair and sun burnt faces, there were lines, deep lines and bags under the eyes that spoke of more than just exhaustion. He could sense grief and horror very clearly, but underneath it, fear, isolation and most dangerous of all for the most holy of knights, despair. Seeing them Marjan knew that these were men at the point of simply breaking down, pushed to their very limits by whatever had befallen them, and paladins had very high limits.

  It was about then that he suddenly began to listen closely to what the man in the gold armour was saying instead of staring around him at the other guests like a bemused child.

  “- shades caught our people by surprise, and many were lost in the first hours. Many more were lost later when they surrendered before overwhelming numbers, never knowing that the shades wanted more than their homes and lands, they wanted their flesh. They took them as they surrendered, the act of submission in itself enough to grant them access, and what now walks in their flesh we do not know.” Marjan shuddered at the thought, even though he’d sensed the same thing in those he’d fought. Whatever now walked in those bodies, it wasn’t something even remotely human.

  “From then until now it has been a never ending war, as we fought our way south through the regency to the port of San Bol, or in truth were driven there, and then commandeered all the ships we could find. Five hundred ships set sail as we held the town against the shades and our own fallen, and maybe fifteen thousand souls survived to find safety among the islands. Twenty thousand more marched with us, and they are now scattered among the southern lands. But more than a hundred thousand fell along the way.” That was not the sort of figure a man could simply say and not expect a reaction, and there was a sudden indrawing of breath from the entire chamber.

  “We could not hold them back, not forever, and every step we have marched these past ten months has been bathed in blood.” A hundred thousand dead? The land had to be awash with blood Marjan thought, and yet he wondered how many in Gunderland had also died. It was a small province but the city itself had been home to over thirty thousand, and besides Snowy Falls there were many other towns and villages with numbers in the thousands. He like everyone else had no idea how many of them had been killed, how many had fled, but they could well have lost more than fifty thousand if only half the people had escaped. Yet the other question that caught his attention quickly swept even that horror away from him.

  “Shades?” Despite him wondering about exactly the same word it wasn’t Marjan who asked, it was one of the druids, his thoughts no doubt wandering the same confused path. Shades, ghosts, wraiths, none of them should be wandering the land let alone in numbers, and even when they occasionally did, either summoned by someone or else unable to cross over naturally, they were mostly harmless, occasionally startling people or creating a sense of fear, but no more. He’d never heard of any of them being able to simply possess people. And yet when he thought back on the soldiers they’d seen and fought, there was something in those memories that agreed with the idea. Possessed by some form of living death, maybe by those of an underworld.

  “A name only to cover our lack of knowledge. We truly don’t know what they were, and no other word describes them at all. We could see them with our own eyes, just, but we also couldn’t. They were there, until you looked at them directly when they seemed to vanish, but if you weren’t looking you could see them, out of the corner of your eye.”

  “They weren’t human, or elf or dwarf, or any of the other races of man. They were the wrong shape, like animals, snakes or lizards maybe, with wings, and brightly coloured too, - when you could see them out of the edge of your vision. They moved like lizards too, always making that strange wriggle lizards make as they walk, even as they flew. And they’d hiss, a strange sound too high for our ears to really hear, but one that could set a man’s teeth on edge.”

  “When they took a body, be it a man’s or an animal’s, they transformed it, quickly at first, though no two seemed to become the same. Some grew claws and fangs, others fur and tusks, a few grew spines and some even learned to breath fire, but none of them, whether they had once been either human or animal, seemed to speak. They communicate with one another somehow, they organise and plan, they strike as a pack, but they don’t speak.”

  Ghost lizards? The thought made no sense to Marjan, in fact it seemed like a complete nonsense, but he believed the paladin completely. Even if he wasn’t sworn to the truth among many other things, the look of exhaustion and misery on his face said it all. This was a man who had seen too much, done too much, lost too much. He had nothing of deception left in him. He had little left of anything at all and his comrades in arms were no better.

  There was also something in the back of Marjan’s memories that recognised the description, though he couldn’t place it. Still it sent a chill down his spine, and as the paladin continued to speak he let that fear sink in, not because he liked it, but because he knew that sooner or later the memory would return to him, carried by that fear, and he suspected it was important.

  “Yet they cannot be undead.” Master Silas was only saying what everyone in the chamber knew to be true, wanting to hear the paladin confirm it.

  “The souls and shades of those departed are weak and for the most part without purpose. They do not act so much as simply be, and never have I heard of one able to do more than frighten or fill with sorrow.”

  “We do not know. Seers were called at the start and they could not tell us either. They are from a world beyond our own so we believe, a world beyond life, perhaps even a hell, and yet they have not died. There is no sense of undeath in them, but no true life either, just screaming madness. Madness so powerful it allows them to quickly overcome the minds and souls of their victims and possess their flesh.”

  Screaming madness. The words themselves were screaming at him in his thoughts, telling Marjan that he knew them, stirring up long forgotten memories. Someone had once told him the same thing, except that as he finally realised
they hadn’t, someone had written them down and he’d read them.

  It was then, as he finally recalled the writings that Marjan knew their enemy, and he was briefly enraptured by the thought, until he recalled the rest of what had been written and he finally remembered why he was afraid. Yet the fear was minor compared with the need he had to be certain of what he suddenly believed.

  Quietly, but still too quickly, especially when he’d only just arrived, and probably far too noisily he got to his feet and made his way to the aisle, where he bowed to the elders as was expected, and then started making his way out of the chamber. Most of them were too busy debating the finer points of death and undeath with their guest to notice him leave, and if they had, they would probably have thought him merely needing to go and attend to a chore of some sort.

  They would have thought very differently had they seen him when his feet started flying the instant he was out of their view, as he ran all the way back to his chambers faster than he’d surely ever run before.

  People all around did see him run, and a few even had to get out of his way as he sprinted up and down the various walkways like a madman, but none said anything, at least not that he heard, and neither did the other rangers when he finally made the Great Oak all but breathless, and then started taking the stairs three at a time. He wouldn’t have cared if they had. All that mattered as he finally crashed through the door to his room and then started pawing like a wild animal at the shelves, was the tome he finally found on them, a tome he suddenly clutched to his chest even as he collapsed back into the small reading chair at his desk, unbelievably relieved to have found it.

  It was only then that he finally started breathing again, gasping in truth, even as he laid the aged leather bound tome down very gently on his desk and started hurriedly flicking through the pages.

  He found the correct page almost by instinct, knowing the work so well, and then the illustration of what he feared was once more right in front of him. Immediately he set his eyes upon the image of the wyrmling, Marjan almost wanted to cry, because there in front of him lay they incredibly detailed, almost translucent picture of the mythical beast just as he’d recalled, exact in every detail to what the paladins had described, and he finally knew their enemy. He knew every word of the text about them as well, even if it had been many years since he had opened the tome, but then this particular nightmare wasn’t one easily forgotten.

  Void creatures, so the author had claimed, an ancient wizard by the name of Gallanar the Elusive, were proof that on the other side of the real world, lying somewhere between it and the summoned, was life. Strange, inimical, alien and deadly, but still life. It was this that Gallanar had sought out through his experiments, and it was this that he had found, and this that had all but destroyed him.

  In his writings he had spoken of the way these creatures had seemed to simply appear out of nothing in his lab, using his deliberately misaligned and open ended portal as a sort of stepping stone between their void world and his, and then started to take control of everyone and everything around him. It seemed that some were strong enough to take over the bodies of people, especially when they weren’t prepared for them, while others could only take over the flesh of animals, but all of them had had that ability to some extent and the desire. They also had madness within them, screaming insanity that shone through the eyes of that which they possessed, whether they were animal or human. Some had some intelligence, some seemingly none at all, but all held that madness almost to the core of their souls, if they had souls.

  The wyrmlings, he’d named them that because of the very same lizard like movement he’d seen in them as the paladins and then assumed that they were part of a greater wyrm or dragon species living in the void, had quickly escaped his laboratory of course. Gallanar had been unprepared for them and common defences like walls and most common wards were completely useless against them. And then they had found the nearest living creatures they could inhabit, in that case a heard of cattle which had immediately stampeded through the town in a bid for freedom.

  At first Gallanar hadn’t suspected the danger, no one had, so while the unsuspecting people were busy trying to round them up, he had been trying to shut down the portal. But then the wyrmlings had quickly started transforming the cattle to reflect their own warped nature.

  At first it had just been their behaviour which had changed as for perhaps the first time in history the cattle deliberately started attacking people, determined to rend and kill in a way no grazing beast ever had before, and many had fallen to them, unprepared for the violence of the beasts. Over the following hours the cattle had grown stronger and faster than before, much stronger and faster, and their teeth had become sharp and pointed, much like that of the were-beasts and dire creatures he had encountered, and then filled with screaming insanity, that phrase he had repeated over and over again, they had attacked like wolves, stampeding the crowds, trampling those too slow to get out of their way, even eating their flesh. It seemed that they had arrived in the world hungry.

  Four of Gallanar’s students had been killed immediately, and the entire village in which they lived, Tenfellows five hundred years before it had grown to become the large town it had been, had been decimated, as the demon cattle as they were later known, had slaughtered everyone and everything in sight, knocking over buildings, trampling and biting everyone they could find, and laying waste to the survivors.

  As Gallanar and his remaining students had fought them, using all their strength against the beasts which had soon grown resistant to even magic, ever more of the wyrmlings had made it through the portal which once it had been opened seemed not to want to close again, and started possessing other creatures and finally even some of the villagers themselves, turning them too into raging lunatics of magical destruction.

  The people they had possessed were the worst so his writings had later claimed, insane, evil, unnatural and lethal with every weapon, but most of all frenzied, and they had turned on friends and family without hesitation, cutting down anyone and everyone, even the babies as they slept.

  Gallanar had fought for a day and a night, finally closing the portal and destroying the enemy one by one. Though the cost of each victory was too high, it seemed that once they found and possessed a body they were bound to it and could then be killed in it, but of course too many of those bodies he had once known as friends and family, turning the battle into a nightmare. By the following morning the war had been won. But the cost had been horrendous.

  Maybe two thousand people were dead, the village was destroyed, what the demon cattle as they had been called hadn’t trampled they had set fire to with the flames that started pouring out of some of their noses around the middle of the night, while the people who had been possessed had found enough intelligence to inflict even more terrible losses. Gallanar had not been left unscathed either, his own tower was a pile of rubble as was his home, his kin and the last of his students were no longer among the living, their magic not enough to save them, while his town was destroyed.

  He like the rest had spent many long tendays afterwards simply dealing with the disaster, burying people he had known his whole life, and when even that became too big a task, cremating them in huge bonfires that could be seen for many leagues. When that was done, when what grieving that could be done was ended, and when as much of the healing that could be begun was started, he had left, heading first for the Guild to face judgement, and then for a small cottage leagues from anyone else where he could be alone with his guilt and shame. It had taken years to rebuild the town, and many more for the people to return, most had never learnt where the enemy had come from, and without that knowledge they could never be sure they wouldn’t return.

  According to everything that was known, Gallanar had never returned.

  The Wizards Guild, having heard his confession, and even not being totally sure of his accuracy in reporting the cause of the disaster, had expelled him. Whether they believed him or not
they couldn’t allow a wizard who had created such a disaster to remain a part of them, and so he too had become a maverick, and perhaps that was a part of what had drawn Marjan to his ancient tale and his writings, what had made him carry it with him across all those leagues when he had had to leave so many other tomes behind. He felt a sense of kinship with the ancient wizard who like him had made such a terrible mistake. He understood him in a way perhaps most others wouldn’t.

  Like him Gallanar had accepted their verdict, expected it, and according to some even demanded it, and he had never protested his punishment, he couldn’t. And then he had settled down in the shambles of his new cottage, much like his own ancient trappers hut Marjan often thought, somewhere in the midst of a forest, to start writing of his terrible misadventure, trying to warn others.