The Dead Seekers

by Barb Hendee

  Guardsman Lavich had died the morning after his attack. His body was skeletal.

  Though Stàsiuo could barely bring himself to speak with Tris, they had managed to work together to a point. At Tris’s suggestion, the captain changed the guard rotation. Any man who had ever by action or intentional inaction refused to assist one of the escaping refugees was pulled off night duty. These men were all packed into a single barracks room as soon as the sun set and remained until dawn broke. They even used chamber pots to relieve themselves, as they were not allowed to leave the bunk room.

  Tris slept in there with them.

  This was the only way he could think to protect them.

  Mari slept on the bunk just above. He didn’t like the idea of her staying in here with a pack of men, but it was better than the alternative. He could not leave her alone and unprotected in their room all night.

  None of the men involved liked the arrangement. The bunk room was overcrowded, and it stank by morning. None of them wanted to be sleeping in the same room with the Dead’s Man. These same men who had raised their ale mugs to him now blamed him for Lavich’s death, almost as if he had brought the quartet of ghosts down upon them.

  But neither did they protest his presence or his plan. In three nights, there had not been a single attack or a single death.

  For Tris, this arrangement was torture, and spending every darkened hour in a room filled with people was beginning to take its toll. He was not sleeping, and in the wee hours, he’d begun counting the moments until dawn.

  This morning was no different, but today, at least he could feel a glimmer of hope. If the rider Stàsiuo had sent was as fast as his reputation, he could have made the run to Strîbrov in a day and a half. For an aging man, Heil was skilled on a horse, and he could make it back in almost equal time.

  Barring anything unforeseen, he would arrive before darkness fell again.

  To Tris’s relief, dawn broke with a hint of light coming through the window.

  Above, he heard Mari stirring and knew she was awake as well, but she did not speak to him yet.

  Rising, he sat up in his bunk and saw movement across from him. Guardsman Kreenan sat up as well. On the first night, Tris had been surprised to see him among the men chosen for this curfew. Kreenan had not struck him as the type of man who would side with the colonel in regard to the refugees.

  Kreenan’s eyes were bleak. Perhaps he had not slept either.

  “What is your duty assignment today?” Tris asked quietly.

  “I’m on the front gate.”

  The thought of the front gate brought Tris another hint of hope. “Keep your eyes out for a man with longish silver hair and a silver ring in his ear. His name is Heilman Tavakovich.”

  Kreenan nodded but did not appear to be truly listening.

  A part of Tris wanted to offer a word of reassurance, but he didn’t know how. His own task took up all his efforts. He needed to make sure there were no more killings before help arrived.

  Then he would make sure those four spirits died forever.

  —

  Heil approached Soladran’s front gate in the midafternoon. He stopped urging his horse, and the beast slowed in exhaustion. It was the third horse he’d worn out in a night and more than half a day.

  Tris hadn’t ever sent for him while on the hunt, not even once.

  Ahead, guards framing the great stone gate didn’t stop or question anyone. All wore the same white tabards and padded armor as the messenger who’d come to Strîbrov, but these also wore fur-trimmed helmets. There was something odd about the way they eyed all comers and goers, but more so the road and land all around, as if they were watching for something.

  Soladran was a vast, walled city, home to thousands, and he’d visited it only a few times in his life. Whatever was happening here, he didn’t like not knowing.

  He had a few choice words for Tris about that short, cryptic note.

  Reaching the arch, he dismounted, approached a guardsman to ask the quickest way to the northern barracks.

  “Sir?” someone called.

  Heil frowned to see another guardsman hurrying toward him. It was a young man with a brown ponytail hanging over his left shoulder from out of his helmet.

  “Are you Master Tavakovich?” the guard asked. There were dark circles under his eyes.

  Heil was exhausted and impatient. “Who’s asking and why?”

  The guard appeared to take that as a yes and exhaled in relief. He called over one shoulder. “Jacques! Take my place.” Then he turned back to Heil. “Sir, I’ll bring you to the barracks. The Dead’s . . . Baronet Vishal is waiting for you. Please come with me.”

  Heil grumbled under his breath; Tris hated that title, but it obviously had its uses.

  “All right, lead on.”

  —

  Mari stood outside the common room on the frozen ground, leaning back against the worn doorframe and watching Tris pace before the barracks. At every turn back the other way, he peered toward the courtyard’s entrance. The last three days had been tough on him, but they had also been hard on her.

  They were stuck, unable to do anything, until Tris’s “landlord” arrived. Or that was all that he’d told her. She was curious. Learning whoever this Heil Tavakovich was, and whatever he could do to help, might also offer Mari another way to track the truth about the Dead’s Man.

  Tris never talked much about anyone in his life except Heil. Apparently, this person had concocted the powder Tris had stuck in her mouth back in Jesenik.

  But Tris had barely spoken at all these past three days. He hardly ate and spent the long nights in that bunk room, which meant she had to as well. She hadn’t slept much in keeping an eye on him; she did sleep sometimes, but she wasn’t sure he ever did.

  Why did she worry about that?

  The bunk room was the last place she’d wanted to be, after what she’d seen upon following a scream in that first night. The guards in there had drawn swords, swinging uselessly at white wisps flying at anything that moved.

  All those ghosts looked half-starved and tattered, like the one he had dispatched earlier that first night. The cries in that near-dark room drove Mari back to where she started—frozen in fear, a little girl hiding in the Wicker Woods as she watched her family die.

  And there was nothing she could do about it—not like him.

  Everything he could do told her that he was the Dead’s Man, the one she’d been hunting. But everything else about him . . .

  She couldn’t stop thinking about that night in the field, across the stream from the northern gate. He’d just sat there, alone in the dark, with a small knife in his hand.

  Why’d he gone out there like that? If not to raise another host of spirits, then for what?

  And now he just kept pacing.

  “Stop, please,” she whispered without thinking, like a child who’d suffered too long.

  Tris stopped pacing and looked at her.

  “What?” he said, just barely loud enough to hear. “What did you say?”

  The air was cold and growing colder as the afternoon waned.

  Mari couldn’t stop anger from rising. “Will you stop this? Pacing out here won’t bring him any faster. Get in by the fire, before you freeze us both!”

  He didn’t answer, frowned at her, and started pacing again.

  She should have just gone in herself and left him to freeze, but she didn’t. She couldn’t let him out of her sight.

  Tris stopped again.

  “Finally,” she sighed.

  Straightening, he stood there and looked out into the city.

  “What now?” she asked.

  A door behind her opened.

  When she turned, Stàsiuo stepped out—again—as he’d done throughout the day, more times than she’d counted, to ask her if Tris’s
“associate” had arrived yet. The last time, she’d simply jutted her chin toward Tris going back and forth in the courtyard.

  Stàsiuo didn’t ask anything this time when he spotted Tris hesitantly walking through the courtyard toward the city.

  Mari stepped out halfway behind Tris. She easily recognized one of the two men coming toward them: Guardsman Kreenan. The other man led a sweating, almost staggering horse. She remembered him from the night she’d first reached Strîbrov.

  He was maybe around fifty years, with long silver hair that framed his eyes of the same color above a stubbled long jaw and chin. Now and then, a thick silver ring in his left earlobe showed when his hair swung out of the way. He was dressed in canvas pants, a dark leather jerkin, and a cloak with the hood thrown back. The closer he came, the more speed he picked up as he walked straight to Tris.

  Tris quick-stepped out of the gate to meet the older man.

  “Heil,” he breathed. “Finally.”

  Mari was taken aback by the relief in Tris’s voice.

  “Well, you look awful,” Heil quipped back. “What have you been doing to yourself this time?”

  The two men didn’t shake hands, but the obvious connection between them left Mari feeling uncomfortable. For some reason, standing there beside the captain, she felt like an outsider watching Tris and Heil.

  Kreenan approached the captain, looking hesitantly hopeful. Like everyone here lately, he stank of fear to Mari. Stàsiuo dismissed Kreenan and walked out toward Tris and the newcomer. Mari caught up.

  As they approached, Heil looked their way.

  He studied the captain first, briefly, before his gaze fixed on Mari. Her own steps faltered once when he frowned at her and she heard a sharp exhalation through his nose. His expression was intense, almost as if he recognized her.

  Other than the night she’d seen him open the shop’s door at the pounding of a peasant boy, she’d never met him.

  “Captain Stàsiuo,” Tris said, “this is Master Heilman Tavakovich. Perhaps we should retire to privacy before speaking further.”

  Mari glanced up and found Stàsiuo studying Heil.

  “The common room is too busy now,” Stàsiuo answered. “Follow me to my office. We can talk there.”

  It seemed Tris wasn’t going to introduce Mari. She didn’t do so for herself, especially not for the way Heil kept looking at her, narrow-eyed and almost suspicious—of what? She found herself liking him even less. He stepped up to walk with the captain as she followed beside Tris.

  “Captain,” Heil said, “perhaps you should excuse your girl.”

  “My girl?” Stàsiuo slowed in his steps. “She came with the baronet, as his translator.”

  Heil stopped completely, turned to fix on Mari, and snorted. “His translator?”

  Mari flushed hot at that, clenching her jaws.

  Heil’s sharp eyes shifted away from her. “Tris?”

  Tris shook his head. “Not here; in private.”

  Heil’s frown turned to a scowl, and he assessed Mari again. Then he turned onward with the captain, and Mari followed, still watching his exposed back.

  Maybe this older man wasn’t a soft way to learn more about Tris.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Not long after, Tris stood in the captain’s small, sparse office, too relieved by Heil’s arrival to be embarrassed. All that bothered him now was that the elder alchemist seemed irritated—possibly concerned—by Mari’s presence. In turn, she watched him with puzzling intensity. What was her sudden interest in him?

  When Heil asked about her again in a hushed voice, Tris only whispered, “Not now.”

  That did not please Heil, and Tris had no intention of explaining later. What could he possibly explain?

  Stàsiuo closed the office door, and Mari shifted uncomfortably in the tight space. She continued watching Heil.

  Tris did not care for the close quarters either, but important issues needed to be addressed if anyone in the barracks was to survive another attack. And he had not forgotten that black hand coming at his throat several nights before.

  Thankfully, as all four people in this room could speak Old Stravinan, this spared Tris another of Heil’s dry comments over his “inadequacies.”

  “So, what are we dealing with?” Heil asked as the captain settled behind his small desk.

  Tris began recounting deaths and causes, starting with what had been learned of events before arriving at the barracks. With several interruptions by the captain, he explained Mari and Bródy’s first sighting, the conflict at the stream, the initial trap, the vanquishing, and Bródy’s death. He ended with the final attack by the four spirits in the bunk room.

  He did not mention his own flight from the city and the night he spent across the stream, alone in the field.

  Stàsiuo braced both elbows on the desktop. “What’s next?”

  Tris hesitated, as he had been thinking this same question.

  “Four ghosts, all at once?” Heil whispered, stalling Tris again. “Makes me wonder about a vengeance in common.”

  Heil would know there was more that Tris had not mentioned. He also knew that the next scheduled appearance of Tris’s other half was not far off.

  “Have you ever dealt with so many at the same time?” the captain asked.

  Yes, such as on the night Tris had first met Heil, but this was different.

  Had Black Tris found a way to gather and command spirits from beyond the living world?

  “It can be done,” Heil answered the captain.

  “Did you bring the disk and the conch?” Tris asked without thinking—and regretted this.

  This slip earned him an angry glance. Heil disliked such mentions in front of outsiders about his pursuits in alchemy or artificing.

  “Of course,” Heil growled at him.

  Captain Stàsiuo’s focus shifted between them. “What disk? What conch?”

  At this, Tris balked, wondering how much to say, but to make proper arrangements, they would need the captain, and therefore, he would need to understand the details of any plan.

  “This disk can ward off a spirit,” Tris answered. “Sometimes disperse it temporarily. If we are dealing with four that might appear together, I can banish only one at a time.”

  At this, Tris stopped and waited. Heil’s jaw muscles clenched.

  “Where is it?” the captain asked.

  With no choice, Heil knelt to dig in his pack. He withdrew the flat disk resembling a plate with strange, engraved markings lining its outer edge. This diverted both Mari and the captain. Heil still hesitated in placing the disk on the forward edge of the captain’s desk.

  “And the conch,” Tris said. “They will see it soon enough anyway.”

  Glowering, Heil reached back into the pack and withdrew an object wrapped in cloth. This device was harder to explain. Heil unwrapped it carefully, exposing the brown and white striped shell.

  It was an experiment gone wrong.

  Before meeting Tris, Heil had created objects to drive off spirits, though he could not truly banish them, as Tris did. Desperation and obsession seeded the idea of a way to trap the essence of a ghost within a natural substance, thereby to use its properties against others of its kind. And an object that could transmit energies trapped within it might be a more active repellent against other spirits.

  Spirits did not normally group together.

  Heil chose the conch of a sea snail as the vessel. It was now etched with tiny symbols and coated in a concoction that kept the material’s original glossy sheen. The spiral cone’s tip had been ground off, allowing one to blow into it like a horn.

  Then it had to be tested.

  Hearing of parents plagued by their daughter’s dead spirit, Heil traveled to their village. The girl had been a singer in life, performing for nearby nobles and gentry t
o earn a living with her voice. But when ample coin began to come her way, the parents limited her, also requiring charitable performances for the sick and the poor.

  After one such event, she caught a fever and died within days.

  A spiteful spirit rose the following night, seeking vengeance upon the parents.

  When Heil faced her in the family’s home, he had brought both disk and conch. He did not tell the parents all that he intended. Using the disk, he taunted the daughter’s spirit by dashing about, flashing the disk before her and not allowing her to leave. He had been younger and faster then, and whipped up her anger. In her fury, she rushed him.

  He dropped the disk and held out the conch.

  She passed through the shell and his right arm, shrieking as he cried out in pain, and then she vanished.

  If not for his mineral and herb concoctions—alchemical and otherwise—Heil would have died. It had still been a long recovery, though he thought it worthwhile. Part of the girl’s spirit was forever trapped within the conch.

  Only later, when he tried to use it, did he realize it did not work as planned. Upon attempting to repel another spirit, he’d blown long and hard into the shell, and a lovely sound came out, like a note of music hanging in the air. But as opposed to repelling the spirit, the sound had the opposite reaction and worked as a lure, calling the ghost directly to Heil.

  He’d escaped only by dropping the shell and grabbing his disk.

  After that, the conch had little use to Heil until he met Tris, and the two of them had used it a few times. The results could be unpredictable, though. Sometimes the shell worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Once, it had called more than one spirit, and the result caught Tris off guard.

  Tris normally preferred his own methods for setting traps. He preferred depending on his own abilities as opposed to Heil’s devices.

  Now, however, he needed to use everything at his disposal.

  “What does it do?” Stàsiuo asked.

  “By blowing into it,” Tris answered simply, “Heil can call spirits. They are lured by the sound.”

  He decided this was enough of an explanation. It was time to make a plan.