by William King
The Cursed Lands really did seem haunted. It was easy to imagine ghostly sentinels watching them from the stumps of those destroyed watchtowers. Kormak had passed through many places blighted by the Shadow but rarely so vast or so tainted. The power of the Defiler must have been great indeed for his curse to have been so strong. He said as much aloud.
“It need not be so,” said Aisha. “There are some places where the Shadow is stronger anyway, where old curdled magic lies heavy.”
She sounded as distantly thoughtful as he had, and seemed just as surprised to have spoken. All of them were looking at her now. “Generations of necromancers dwelled in this place. For centuries they worked their evil wills. They made sacrifices. They worked the darkest of magics. That will leave its taint. Some ancients claimed that such magic draws the Shadow to it, others that it is merely a filthy residue left by the spells themselves.”
“These are not good things to know,” Brandon said. He eyed her suspiciously. “Where did you learn them?”
“I am a scholar of sorts, Sir Brandon. I have picked up many odd bits of lore in my time.”
“You think the fact that the necromancers worked their magic here led to the Shadow tainting their land.”
She shrugged. “It may be that the Shadow already was in this place, that it made necromancy easy and twisted the minds of the Kharonians. Once they started working the spells all of that was reinforced. It has happened in other places at other times. People forget.”
Kormak’s eyes narrowed. This was the sort of thing his Order had taught him during his noviciate. He could remember the dry voice of old Frater Orice reciting the tale of the fall of the Kingdoms of the Sunrise from the Deed of Saint Marcus.
“Does it really matter how the land became tainted?” Lucas asked. “The problem is that it is and we are here and we need to pass through it.”
Shae whimpered uneasily, paused to sniff the air, and then hurried into Aisha’s shadow. She glanced around with nervous eyes. Kormak wondered what she could see. Witches could often perceive what ordinary mortals did not.
He suspected he had some idea. The whole land seemed to watch them resentfully, like a vast monstrous thing waiting to spring on them when their guard was down. He had rarely been in a land that felt so inimical to the living, as if the Curse of the Defiler was a vast sentient thing that animated all around them with its fathomless malice.
Sometimes Kormak thought he caught hints of movement. He was not sure what they were and that disturbed him. Sometimes it seemed to him that the shadows were in the wrong place, that clouds of mist billowed in slightly the wrong direction for the prevailing wind.
“I don’t like this at all,” said Lucas. “There’s something out there, watching us, and it’s hungry.”
So he felt it as well. Kormak studied the sky. It was overcast, the light of the sun was wan, but still too strong for Old Ones to be abroad. Few creatures of Shadow would walk in its light unless they had a mortal host to protect them from its beams. As far as he could tell they would still be safe until nightfall.
It did not mean that they were unobserved though. Some of the Old Ones could perceive mortals in their dreams, as if their consciousnesses had become unshackled from their bodies. Many of the undead could sense the presence of the living as they walked across the land in which they were buried. In daylight, they were, perhaps, safe from assault but they were not hidden.
Some of the most powerful of the inhumans could work magic even in the sun’s light, reaching out from their sunken lairs to affect the weather or the minds of mortal men, causing them to walk astray, into traps and mazes of spells. He thought of how the wight had trapped those children back in Brandon’s village. He thought of little Olaf and suppressed his feelings of guilt. No, it was well not to assume that they were safe simply because the Holy Sun was in the sky.
“Why did the Solarians come here anyway,” grumbled Brandon. “They had already seized the nice, warm southlands when they came over the Ocean. What was up here they could possibly want?”
“Mines full of silver and tin and copper,” Lucas said.
“A land full of sorcerous enemies,” said Kormak.
“I think Lucas was right,” Aisha said. “Something is definitely out there, watching us.”
“You can sense it?” Kormak asked.
She nodded. “Shae can too.”
“He does not look too happy.”
“He is not easily upset but he does not like this place.”
“Then we should pay attention to him,” said Kormak. He eyed the witch as suspiciously as she looked at him. There were too many secrets in the air. He needed to find out what she knew and soon.
“What in the name of the Holy Sun?” said Brandon. Kormak looked around. Mist had gathered about them, keeping its distance like an army awaiting the order to charge, wraith-like shapes moving within it.
“Stay close,” said Aisha.
The watery sunlight got weaker and the clouds of mist on the hills became denser. They seemed to move like living things.
“There’s nothing natural about that fog,” said Lucas.
“I know,” said Brandon. “It’s almost as if it’s stalking us.” There was an edge of fear to his voice. “I don’t mind telling you it’s getting on my nerves. If there’s something a sword can cut I will fight it but how do you fight mist?”
“It has not attacked us,” said Kormak, wanting to put an end to this chatter before it went any further. “So you don’t need to.”
“It has not attacked us… yet,” said Brandon. As if in response to the conversation the mist had come closer, tendrils reaching out like tentacles, one of them crossed the road ahead, partially blocking it.
Shae's ears pricked up. They all stopped and listened. After a minute, Kormak heard it too. It was a small, clicking noise, like hundreds of tiny needles being run across the teeth of an ivory comb.
“What is that?” Brandon asked. He was looking directly at Kormak.
“I don’t know,” said the Guardian. He got down from the saddle and put his hand on the hilt of his blade. He peered into the gloom. Small patches of shadow seemed to moving in the mist at ground level. They reminded him of small, scuttling animals, but they moved backwards and forwards with a crazed purpose and intensity. He moved forward and they and the mist retreated in front of him. A similar soft, sinister noise could be heard from further up the slope. It seemed that whatever the things were, more of them were coming. They were gathering in a fashion that Kormak did not like.
He glanced over at Aisha. She shook her head. The horses were becoming very skittish. They liked what was happening no more than Shae did. Tendrils of mist were lapping all around them now, cutting off everything from sight. Kormak moved back towards the group, not wanting to get separated from them, in case of attack.
“Any idea what it is?” he asked Aisha.
“Shae thinks it’s something dead.” It was a sign of how worried the others were that they seemed to pay no attention to the fact she was telling them what the wolf thought. They had other, even more sinister types of sorcery on their mind.
“Something?”
“Lots of somethings, coming closer.”
Clouds of greenishly glowing fireflies shimmered in the mist. As Kormak studied the phosphorescent lights moving around them, he noticed they appeared to be twinned, moving in pairs. It took another heartbeat for the realisation to sink in.
“Eyes,” he said. As if giving voice to the thing made it so, it immediately became evident that he was right. Behind the glowing eyes, small forms became obvious, scurrying through the gloom. The clicking sound grew more intense. Shae moved closer to Aisha then suddenly something emerged from the mist and nipped at his legs.
It was a rat, or rather the mummified corpse of a rat. Moments later another and then another emerged. Some of them were little more than walking skeletons, others still had parchment flesh clinging to them. They crunched under the hooves of the h
orses, splintered when Shae bit them but that did not stop them coming.
The horses neighed in terror as a gigantic tide of undead vermin seethed out of the gloom and flowed over them, biting, scratching, sawing at flesh with the sharp edges of bone and vertebrae.
Kormak pulled his sword from the scabbard and lashed out around him. His blade reduced the tiny things to heaps of blackened bone but there were thousands of them, and they fought and moved as if guided by a single mind, scampering up cloaks, clambering all over the living. One of them was in Aisha’s hair, its long tail scratching at her cheek as it curved around it.
His sword flickered out, caught the mummified rat on its tip and flicked it away to the ground. Bones crunched under horses hooves. They whinnied and screamed as the unnatural horde swept around them. There were just too many of them to fight. Smashing one or two or even five or ten would not stop them. Their individual bites and scratches seemed negligible but it was only a matter of time before eyes were lost or a panicked horse threw its rider. And who knew what diseases or poisons or wicked magic the bites of such things might contain? He vaulted back up into the saddle.
“Ride!” he shouted, “Get out of the mist!”
In response to his command, the others rode, fleeing along the path as fast as their mounts would carry them. Kormak held back. The pack seemed to be avoiding him, perhaps because of fear of his blade or because of the Elder Signs he wore. The vermin swarmed off in pursuit of the other riders but had difficulty keeping up and returned to surround him.
Thousands of tiny green glowing eyes looked at him. He was pierced by a sense of their malevolence and of a strange intelligence contemplating him. Thousands of tiny jaws opened as if trying to speak and failing.
The vermin swarmed towards him. He spurred his horse into their midst, slashing with his blade, burning scores of them, even as more tried to clamber over him. Instinctively he flailed his arm, casting off a larger than usual mummified rat that was moving up his arm.
A moment later he emerged into wan sunlight on the cold hillside and saw the others looking at him. An evil smelling smoke rose from the corpses of the vermin that still clung to him and they fell to the ground all animation lost. The light died in their eyes.
“What was that?” Brandon asked him as he rode up.
“I don’t know but we need to get as far away from it as possible while the sun is above the horizon.”
The others needed no further encouragement. They rode as if demons were at their heels. The path carried them deeper and deeper into the Cursed Lands.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY RODE ON through the gathering gloom, glancing over their shoulders at the moving mists, passing tumbled down buildings which still bore the signs of war even after all these centuries. The stonework showed cracks from intense heat, their roofs were open to the sky. A conquering army had passed this way.
The symbols of Kharon were inscribed on the walls of some of the buildings, having survived obvious attempts to deface them. There were more skeletal faces, leering and inhuman, set upon what looked like lunar disks. There were things that looked like the skulls of beings other than human, faces obviously distorted, possessed of fangs.
Kormak did not think that this was because the artists lacked the skill to depict human skulls either. It was clear that they were getting closer to the heart of the ancient kingdom with every step. At least there was no more mist close to them, although pockets of the stuff boiled near the road.
On a hilltop ahead of them was a tall tower, partially tumbled. From its peak glowed a soft light. Kormak pointed and said, “We will camp there for the night.”
“As you say, Guardian,” said Lucas. Aisha nodded, clearly understanding what it was. Shae's ears perked up and his tail wagged for the first time since they had entered the Cursed Lands.
“What is it?” asked Brandon.
“It is a First Empire Watchtower, and it looks like the wardstone still functions. If nothing else, we will have a safe campsite for the night.”
It was easy to tell that the tower had been built by a different people than those who had raised the burned-out villages they had passed. Even though it was made from local stone, the lines were cleaner and less crude. There was an arch over the doorway on which an Elder Sign had been carved along with the winged sun emblem of the Solari, a symbol still echoed through all the Temples of the Holy Sun to this day.
Kormak felt his heart lift when he passed through the entrance. This felt like sacred ground, of the sort that could be found in the Chapter Houses of his Order and the sanctuaries of the great temples and cathedrals.
He entered a bare low-ceilinged room. A flight of ancient steps rose up out of it onto another floor. Someone had left rune signs inscribed with a stone on the floor. Kormak inspected them.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Watcher sign,” said Lucas. “I’ve seen them before. They leave messages for each other this way in places they consider safe or are likely to pass.”
“This does not look too recent,” Kormak said.
Lucas shrugged. “At least we know one of them passed this way, that they come to the Cursed Lands.”
Kormak looked at Aisha. She was looking at the signs closely. “It is a variant of Hardic rune-script,” she said. “That was a language old even when the Solar Empire was at its height.”
“What does it say?”
“Shadows lengthen,” she said. “Keep watch.”
“Is that all?”
“It might be a code phrase. It has a ritual sound to it, a reminder of duty. It might mean all is well.” She spoke slowly, considering her words. Kormak felt as if she could say more if she wanted to, which she clearly did not.
“Or it could be a warning,” said Brandon.
Kormak headed upstairs. There were three stories, all empty and then he reached the roof. On it was a large crystal, the size of a helmet, inscribed with an Elder Sign, glowing very softly. He reached out to touch it and felt very faintly the tingle of magic within it.
“A Solari Watchstone,” he said. He knew this sort of thing. It was a ward against the Shadow and against Old Ones. Evil magic would not work within the radius of its glow. Its light would cause an Old One pain at the least, dissolution at the worst, although he doubted this one was strong enough now. “An Eye of the Sun.”
“It is very old,” Aisha said from behind him. “And almost has ceased to function. If you look closely you can see dark veins within it, where the Shadow on this land has seeped in.”
“We should still be safe here,” he said. She nodded.
“It is lovely in its way,” she reached out and touched it very deliberately. He realised she was doing it to show him that she could. Her hand would have burned if she was touched by Shadow.
“There are protections that allow even a shadowchild to handle such things,” Kormak said. Her smile was a little sad.
“I know,” she said. “There are no perfect defences against the Evil That Waits.”
“Against anything,” he said. They stared at each other in silence, neither wanting to be the first to speak.
She looked out into the gathering twilight. Pockets of mist had started to form in hollows near them, but from this height they still had a clear view over leagues of terrain.
“The Legionaries of the Sun once stood here,” she said softly. “When they came to fight the evil of Kharon. They built this tower as part of a chain of fortifications to shield their advance. They were always methodical when they did such things. It was their way.”
“They probably sheltered here when the Defiler’s Curse fell on the land and they were fleeing southward,” said Kormak. “Its magic might have shielded them against even that.”
“It did,” said Aisha. “I have read the account of the retreat written by General Leonidas.”
“When did you do that?”
“When I was an apprentice,” she said.
“An apprentice what?
”
“You would say witch.”
“You would say something different?”
“It does not matter,” she said. “In this matter we are on the same side.”
“I would like to believe that,” said Kormak.
“But you don’t.”
“Let us just say I am not convinced.”
“Your way of life has left you very suspicious.”
“But alive,” he said.
She smiled. “It has that to recommend it, I suppose.”
“I wanted to thank you for looking at my wound last night. It seems to be healing cleanly,” Kormak said.
“I think you heal better than most men anyway.”
“I am blessed by the Sun,” said Kormak.
He meant it to sound ironic but she looked at him warily and said, “I suspect you are. You would not have lived so long otherwise. You heal fast and I would bet that most diseases do not touch you, and those that do leave you quickly.”
Kormak looked away. He did not want to discuss the secrets of his Order with her.
Aisha smiled. “My ears were burning earlier today. Were you talking about me to your friend?”
Kormak looked at the wolf and wondered how much she had in common with it. Had she heard everything they had said. “Sir Brandon is curious about you.”
“And you are not?”
“I already know you have bonded with the wolf or the spirit that inhabits it.” She tilted her head to one side and smiled slightly. The gesture reminded him of the wolf.
“I can see I have few secrets from you.”
“You don’t deny any of this then?”
“Why should I? You have clearly made up your mind and any denial would be useless.”
“And you follow the Old Faith, don’t you? You worship the Moon.”
“At least you are polite. Most Sun worshippers call us moondogs.”
“I have been in places where the term was justified.”
“No doubt. And I have been in places where the Lords of the Sun burn the followers of the Old Faith.”