Unclean: The Haunted Lands

by Richard Lee Byers

  The intruders turned again to avoid a trio of spires that, groaning and shedding scraps of masonry, sometimes flexed like the fingers of a palsied hand. The facades of crumbling houses seemed to watch them go by, the black empty windows following like eyes. For a moment, a sort of faint clamor like the final fading echo of a hundred screams sounded somewhere to the north.

  The noise made Bareris shiver, but he told himself it had nothing to do with him or his comrades. Delhumide was replete with perils and eerie phenomena; they’d known that coming in. It wasn’t a problem if you could keep away from them, and so far their reconnaissance had enabled them to do so.

  That luck held for another twenty heartbeats. Then one of the gnolls deviated from their course by just a long, loping stride or two, just far enough to stick his head into a courtyard with a rusty wrought-iron gate hanging askew and a cracked, dry fountain in the center. Something had evidently snagged the warrior’s attention, some hint of danger, perhaps, that demanded closer scrutiny.

  The gnoll suddenly snarled and staggered, tearing at himself with his thick canine nails. At first Bareris couldn’t make out what was wrong, but when he saw the swelling black dots scurrying through the creature’s spotted fur, he understood.

  The gnolls had fleas, a fact he’d discovered when he started scratching as well, and the parasites on the outlaw in the courtyard were growing to prodigious size. Big as mice, they swarmed over him, burying their proboscises and heads in his flesh to drain his blood. Bulges shifted under the gnoll’s brigandine as insects crawled and feasted there as well.

  A second gnoll rushed to help his fellow, but as soon as he entered the courtyard, he suffered the same affliction. The two hyenafolk flailed and rolled and shrieked together. Their fellows hovered outside the gate, too frightened or canny to risk the same consequence.

  Bareris sang. Magic warmed the air, and he felt a sort of tickling as his own assortment of normal-sized fleas jumped off him. He then charged into the courtyard, and the enchantment radiating outward from his skin drove the giant parasites off the bodies of their hosts just as easily. With a rustling, seething sound, they scuttled and bounded into the shadows at the rear of the space.

  He still had no desire to linger inside the crooked gate. For all he knew, the influence haunting the courtyard had other tricks to play. Fast as he could, he dragged the dazed, bloody gnolls back out onto the street, where the spirit, or whatever it was, couldn’t hurt them any further. At least he hoped it couldn’t, because they needed a healer’s attention immediately if they were to escape infirmity or worse, and in the absence of a priest, he’d have to do.

  He chanted charms of mending and vitality. The other gnolls looked on curiously until Wesk started grabbing them and wrenching them around. “Keep watch!” the chieftain snarled. “Something else could have heard the ruckus or hear the singer singing.”

  Gradually, one gnoll’s wounds stopped bleeding and scabbed over, a partial healing that was as much as Bareris could manage for the time being. The other, however, appeared beyond help. He shuddered, a rattle issued from his throat, then he slumped motionless. Meanwhile, the survivor sat up and, hand trembling, groped for the leather water bottle strapped to his belt.

  “How are you?” Bareris asked him.

  The gnoll snorted as if the question were an insult.

  “Then when you’re ready, we’ll press on.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Bareris turned and saw that the speaker was Thovarr Keentooth, the long-eared gnoll he’d punched during their first palaver.

  “You said you knew how to get us in and out without the spooks bothering us,” the creature snarled, spit flying from his jaws. He apparently meant to continue in the same vein for a while, but Wesk interrupted by backhanding him across the muzzle and tumbling him to the ground.

  “We said,” the chieftain growled, “we’d do our best to avoid the threats we knew about, but there might be some we hadn’t spotted. This was one such, and you can’t blame the human or anyone else for missing it, seeing as how it was invisible till someone stepped in the snare.”

  “I’m not talking about ‘blame,’” Thovarr replied, picking himself up. “I’m talking about what’s sensible and what isn’t. There’s a reason no one comes here, and—”

  “Blood orcs do,” Bareris said. “Are they braver than you?”

  Thovarr bared his fangs like an angry hound. “The pig-faces have Red Wizards to guide them. We only have you, and you talk big but don’t keep us out of trouble.”

  “Enough!” snapped Wesk. “We’re soldiers again, and soldiers expect to risk their lives earning their pay. If you don’t have the belly for it, turn back now, but know it means the rest of us cast you out for a coward.”

  That left Thovarr with three options: obey, leave his little pack forever, or fight Wesk then and there for his chieftaincy. Apparently the first choice was the most palatable, the perils of Delhumide notwithstanding, because the long-eared gnoll bent his head in submission. “I’ll stick,” he growled.

  They dragged the dead warrior’s corpse into a shadowy recessed doorway, where, they hoped, it was less likely anyone or anything would notice it. There they abandoned it without ceremony. Bareris had dealt just as callously with the mortal remains of other fallen comrades when a battle, pursuit, or flight required immediate action, and he had no idea whether gnolls even practiced any sort of funerary observances. It wouldn’t have astonished him to learn that they ate their dead as readily as they devoured any other sort of meat or carrion that came their way. Still, he found it gave him a pang of remorse to leave the creature unburied and unburned, without even a hymn or prayer to speed its soul on its way.

  Maybe it bothered him because Thovarr was essentially correct. If Bareris hadn’t used magic to undermine the gnolls’ better judgment, they would never have ventured into Delhumide. His friends from more squeamish—or as they might have put it, more ethical—lands might well have deemed it an abuse of his gifts.

  But his present comrades were hyenafolk, who boasted themselves that their kind lived only for war and slaughter, and Bareris was paying them a duke’s ransom to put themselves in harm’s way. If he’d sinned, then the Lord of Song could take him to task for it when his spirit knelt before the deity’s silver throne. For now, he’d sacrifice the gnolls and a thousand more like them to rescue Tammith.

  Wesk lifted a hand to halt the procession. On the other side of an arched gateway rose a cylindrical tower. Constructed of dark stone, vague in the darkness, it reminded Bareris of some titan’s drum.

  He peeked around the edge of the gate and squinted at the flat roof, but he couldn’t spot anything on top of it. He’d considered singing a charm to sharpen his eyes before entering the city but had opted not to. He could only cast so many spells before exhausting his powers. Better, then, to trust the night vision of his companions and conserve his magic for other purposes.

  “Is it up there?” he whispered, referring to the blood-orc sentry that usually kept watch on the roof.

  Wesk bobbed his head up above the low wall ringing the tower to check. “Yes.”

  “Can you really hit it from down here?” Bareris asked.

  He knew Wesk was a skillful archer, maybe even as adept as he claimed. He’d watched the gnoll shoot game on the trek to Delhumide, and only once had the creature missed. Still, Bareris was enough of a bowman in his own right to know just how difficult a shot it was. The orc was four stories up and partly shielded by a ring of merlons.

  Wesk grinned. “I can hit it. I’m not some feeble runt of a human.”

  He caressed the curves of his yew bow and growled a spell of his own, evidently some charm known to master archers and hunters. The longbow glinted as though catching Selûne’s light in a way it hadn’t before, despite the fact that nothing had changed in the sky. Wesk nocked an arrow, stepped into the center of the gate, drew the fletchings to his ear, and let the missile fly.

  To Bareris’s e
yes, the shaft simply vanished into the dark, but from Wesk’s grunt of satisfaction, and the fact that he didn’t bother reaching for a second arrow, it was evident the first one had found its mark. Bareris imagined the orc collapsing, killed before it even had an inkling it was in peril.

  He and the gnolls skulked across the open ground between the wall and the tower. They had no reason to think anyone else was looking—it seemed likely the rest of the folk inside were happy to shut themselves away from the terrors infesting the night—but they couldn’t be sure.

  Stone steps rose to a four-paneled door. As Bareris climbed toward it, he hoped to find only a handful of warriors waiting on the other side. Whoever was garrisoning this particular outpost, though, he and the hyenafolk had no choice but to deal with them.

  That was because one could only see so far into a ruined city while scouting it from the outside, and thus the intruders had little idea what lay beyond this point. If they were to avoid lurking demons and locate Tammith, someone would have to enlighten them.

  Bareris tried the door and found that, as expected, it was locked or barred. He motioned for the gnolls to stay behind him then bellowed.

  The magic infusing his voice cracked the door and jolted it on its hinges but failed to break it open. He threw himself against it and bounced back with a bruised shoulder, but then Wesk and Thovarr charged past him and hit the barrier together. They smashed it out of its frame to slam down on the floor of the hall beyond. Orcs, three kneeling in a circle around their dice and piles of coppers, and two more wrapped in their blankets, goggled at them in amazement.

  As it turned out, there were no mages on hand, and with the orcs caught unprepared, the fight that followed was less a battle than a massacre. In fact, that was the problem. Caught up in the frenzy of the moment, the gnolls appeared to have forgotten that the point of their incursion was to take at least one of the enemy alive.

  Bareris cast about. For a moment, he could see only gory, motionless, gray-skinned bodies and the hyenafolk still hacking at them. Then he spotted an orc that was down on its back but still moving, albeit in a dazed manner, groping for the dirk in its boot. Thovarr swung his axe over his head to finish the creature off.

  “No!” Bareris shouted. He lunged and shoved Thovarr away from the orc, swiped the latter’s hand with the flat of his sword to stop its reaching for the knife, and aimed his point at its throat. “We have to talk to one of them, and this appears to be the only one left.”

  He proceeded with the interrogation as soon as the gnolls verified that the rest of the tower was empty. “You can answer my questions and live,” he told the orc in its own language, “or I can give you to my friends to kill in whatever fashion amuses them. It’s up to you.”

  “I can’t tell you anything!” the orc pleaded. “I’ll die!”

  “Nonsense. Perhaps your masters will punish you for talking if they get their hands on you, but you can run away.”

  “That’s not it,” said the orc. “The Red Wizards put a spell on me, on all of us. If we talk about their business, we die.”

  From the manner in which he attended to the conversation, it was apparent Wesk understood the orcish tongue, and now he and Bareris exchanged puzzled glances. The bard wondered again what endeavor merited such extraordinary attempts at secrecy.

  “Listen to me,” Bareris said, infusing his voice with the magic of persuasion, “you don’t know that your masters truly laid a spell on you. It would have been a lot less work simply to lie and claim they did. Even if the enchantment is real, you can’t be sure it took you in its grip. It’s the nature of such charms that they can always fail to affect a particular target. On the other hand, you know my sword is real. You see it with your own eyes, and you can be absolutely certain of dying if I cut your throat with it. Bearing all that in mind, whom do you choose to obey, the wizards or me?”

  The orc took a deep breath. “I’ll answer.”

  “Good. Where in the city do the slaves end up?”

  The prisoner sucked in another breath. Bareris realized the orc was panting with fear. “They—”

  A single word was all it took. The orc’s back arched, and surprised, Bareris failed to yank his sword back in time to avoid piercing the orc’s neck. But the point didn’t go in deep, and he doubted the orc even noticed the wound. The orc was suffering far more grievous hurts.

  The orc’s back continued to bend like a bow, and his extremities flailed up and down, pounding the floor. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and bloody froth foamed from his mouth. Hoping the creature might survive if he could only keep him from swallowing his tongue, Bareris cast about for an implement he could wedge in his mouth, but before he could find one, the orc thrashed a final time and lay still. A foul smell suffused the air. The warrior had soiled himself in his death throes.

  “Well,” said Wesk, “it wasn’t lying about the geas.”

  “No,” Bareris answered.

  He felt a twinge of shame for compelling the orc to such a death, and scowling, he tried to quash the feeling. He’d had no choice but to force the creature to speak.

  “So what do all of us ‘soldiers’ do now?” Thovarr asked. “Just wander around and look for the slave? Delhumide’s big, and it’s got a spook hiding in every shadow.”

  Bareris prayed it hadn’t come to that. “We search this place,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find something useful.”

  They began by searching the orcs’ bodies then moved on to ransacking their possessions. Wesk dumped out the contents of a haversack, picked up a parchment, unfolded it, and then brought it to Bareris.

  “Is this anything?” asked the gnoll.

  Bareris studied the scrawled diagram. It didn’t have any words written on it, just lines, circles, rectangles, and dots, and for a moment, he couldn’t decipher it. Then he noticed certain correspondences, or at least he hoped he did. He rotated the paper a quarter turn, and the proper orientation made the similitude unmistakable.

  “It’s a map of this part of the city.”

  Wesk eyed it dubiously. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It’s difficult to tell because it’s crudely drawn and the orc left so much off, but this is the breach in the wall we came through, here are the laughing shadows, and here the towers that squirm of their own accord. The mapmaker used the black dots to indicate areas best avoided. This is the building we’re in now, and this box near the top must be the place where the Red Wizards themselves have taken up residence. Why else would anyone take the trouble to indicate the best path from here to there?”

  The gnoll chieftain leered like a wolf spying a lost lamb. “Nice of the pig-faces to go to so much trouble just to help us out.”

  With the map to guide them, they skulked nearly to the center of Delhumide without running afoul of any more malevolent spirits or mortal foes, but as Bareris peered expectantly, waiting for the structure indicated on the sketch to come into view, he felt a sudden difference and froze. The gnolls sensed something as well, and growling, they peered around.

  It took Bareris a breath or two to puzzle out precisely what they’d all registered. Probably because it was the last thing he would have expected. “It’s … more pleasant here. The feeling of evil has lifted.”

  “Why?” asked Wesk.

  Bareris shook his head. “I don’t know. Just enjoy the relief while you can. I doubt it will last.”

  It did, though, and when they finally beheld their goal, he knew why. It was a square-built, flat-roofed hall notable for high columns covered in carvings and towering statues of a manlike figure with the crowned head of a hawk. Thayans no longer worshiped Horus-Re, but bards picked up a miscellany of lore in the course of acquiring new songs and stories, and Bareris had no difficulty identifying the Mulhorandi god. The structure was a temple, built on hallowed ground and still exerting a benign influence on the immediate area centuries after.

  Bareris shook his head. “I don’t understand. I’m sure it’s the right place, but w
hy would the Red Wizards set up shop in a shrine like that?”

  “The god’s power keeps the bogeys away,” suggested Wesk. “The bogeys the warlocks didn’t whistle up themselves, I mean.”

  “Maybe, but wouldn’t the influence also make it more difficult to practice necromancy? It’s inherently—“

  “What’s the difference?” Thovarr snapped.

  Bareris blinked, then smiled. “Good point. We don’t care what they’re doing, how, or why. We just want to rescue Tammith and disappear into the night. We’ll keep our minds on that.”

  Employing buildings, shadows, and piles of rubble for cover, they crept partway around the temple to look for sentries. It didn’t take Wesk long to spot a pair of gaunt figures with gleaming yellow eyes crouched atop the roof.

  “Undead,” he said. “I can hit them, but zombies and the like are hard to kill. I don’t know if I can put them down before they sound the alarm.”

  “Give me one of the arrows you mean to shoot,” Bareris said.

  The gnoll handed it over, and Bareris crooned to it, the charm a steady diminuendo from the first note to the last. At its end, the whisper of the wind, the skritch-skritch-skritch of one of the gnolls scratching his mane, and indeed, the entire world fell silent.

  Bareris handed the arrow back and waved his arm, signaling for Wesk to shoot when he was ready. The gnoll chieftain laid it on the string, jumped up from behind the remains of a broken wall, and sent it streaking upward. Sound popped back into the world as soon as the shaft carried its invisible bubble of quietude away.

  Wesk’s followers shot their own arrows, and at least half found their mark, but as the gnoll had warned, the undead proved difficult to slay. Shafts jutting from their bodies like porcupine quills, they picked up bells from the rooftop and flailed them up and down. Fortunately, though, the sphere of silence now enshrouded them. The bells refused to clang, and after another moment, the amber-eyed creatures collapsed, first one and then the other.