by Dylan Doose
* * *
Bloodstained letter found near the mostly consumed corpse of Lord Edgar Alabaster Pote in his estate.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
Trail of Dead Crumbs
The farmhouse was empty. Maybe.
“What if they’re hiding?” Aldous asked.
Theron just looked at him.
“What if we get bitten?” Aldous asked, his nerves firing as he stared at the blood-spattered sun sigil, the symbol of the Luminescent hanging above the family’s fireplace. Little protection he gave them—as little protection as he offered my family.
“By what?” Theron asked.
“By the Upir, or the ghouls,” said Ken.
“It will hurt,” said Chayse.
“Will we turn into them, is what I mean,” said Aldous.
“No. That is mostly a myth. The family turned to ghouls because the Upir sucked them all completely dry,” Theron said, and Aldous shuddered. “Not a drop left in them. They must have been sleeping when it came. After a day or two, sometimes three, the Upir’s emptied victims rise as ghouls, or minions to the Upir. Their bite can’t turn you into anything but their dinner, for ghouls feed only on human flesh.”
Theron walked from the small home out into the field. Aldous followed.
“What if we get bitten by the Upir?” he asked.
“I just explained that. Were you not listening?” Theron asked, and stopped by four freshly dug—then un-dug—graves in the ground.
“They just got up and left,” Aldous said with a shudder. Of course he had heard stories about Upirs and ghouls and Lycos, and harpies and so on, but even after he’d witnessed the Rata Plaga, he still held the hope that he would never need to see any of the others. That perhaps they didn’t truly exist.
“If Upirs drain humans to make ghouls, then what makes a human into an Obour then an Upir?” asked Ken, as he strode over to join them.
“Greater Upirs spill their blood into a fresh human corpse,” Theron began as he crouched over a grave and inspected the turned up earth. “Two days old at most.” He glanced up. “The blood regenerates the corpse and then it rises as an Obour, eventually becoming an Upir. They’re nasty things, Upirs. Greater Upirs even worse. They look like us, completely human, except, of course, when they unsheathe their fangs. Lesser Upirs, on the other hand, are skeletal, with white and purple flesh, and red in the eyes. He will be slow, the one we are hunting, engorged on blood from his recent feeding.” Theron paused. “Well, relatively slow, compared to if he were not engorged on blood. The ghoul tracks will lead us to him. After they rise, they go in search of their master.”
They followed the tracks for three hours as daylight died. On the near horizon was an abandoned windmill.
“No doubt with a deep, dark cellar full of damp and cobwebs, and for our sakes ghouls and an Upir,” Aldous said.
“No doubt,” Theron replied with a broad smile.
Aldous sighed.
The fading sun cast a red glow behind the windmill; the wood was rotten and the decay was visible from their hundred paces out. They crouched in the bushes, waiting.
“What are we waiting for?” asked Aldous.
“Do you want to go in there?” asked Theron. “We have no idea how many ghouls the Upir has already risen. If there is a good score of them, I’d rather have the scrap outside than in the tight confines of the windmill.”
“So we wait here until they come out for an evening stroll?” asked Ken.
“Who is the hunter here?” Theron snapped. “We wait until they get a smell of our flesh—the ghouls are fresh and they need to eat. They will be mad with hunger. They have found their master and now they are ready to feast.”
“What if they aren’t in there?” Aldous asked, hoping dearly that this was the case.
Theron did not need to answer, for just as Aldous asked the question, a thing in the figure of a man stepped out from the mill. It had a lit torch in its right hand and a small sickle in the other. Although it held the tools of a man, and was in his form, even at that distance Aldous could tell it was not a man, at least not the traditional sort. The skin was an unnatural gray, and it clung to the bones and muscle as if all water had been pulled from the body.
“Some say that the ghouls can still think,” Chayse said softly from behind Aldous. “That they can even reason. But their thoughts and their reasoning only drives them toward the will of their Upir and the consumption of living human flesh.” Aldous was not sure if she was trying to break his morale on purpose, but her words had such an effect.
“That must be his family,” said Ken, as four more of the gray, hollow-skinned forms came from the mill, pitchforks and cleavers in hand.
“And those must be their neighbors,” said Theron as a good deal more came filing out. They looked like a drunken mob ready to string up an oppressive landlord, but without the screaming and shouting, just hungry stares. “Take off their heads. When we’re done, we burn them all. Chayse, start us off.”
Chayse stood and stepped from the bushes. The entire group of ghouls whipped their faces toward her, scenting her flesh. She raised her bow and pulled an arrow from her quiver, notched it, aimed. Loosed. In a split moment perhaps halfway from Chayse to impact, Aldous thought he saw the arrow split in some sort of silver flash, then curve, and the next instant the head of the torch-bearing ghoul was clean off its shoulders.
“How the bloody hell?” asked Ken.
“Guillotine arrow,” said Chayse as she strung another. The ghouls were charging now, just over twenty of them; they were brittle but they were fast. Chayse let fly another, and a second head came off. “The long arrowhead splits at a certain speed, turns into more of a bladed cross,” she explained as she drove the spiked end of the bow into the ground and drew her short swords. “This time, Ken,” Chayse said, looking back, “if I say I have it under control, then I bloody well have it under control.”
Ken said nothing, just gave a nod, and although Aldous knew this was not the place or the time, he felt a pang of jealousy that Chayse and Ken had shared some prior moment that allowed there to be a this time.
“Focus on the task,” growled Theron as he drew his claymore and charged in, Ken right behind him, his axe and mace ready for work. The ghouls gave their hellish moans, and thrashed wildly with their villager tools tasked with harvesting flesh.
Short staff in hand, shield and short sword on his back, Aldous decided he would take up the rear.
Ken split an incoming pitchfork to splinters with his mace then split its wielder’s skull with his axe, right down to the chest. “Come on, then, wizard! Set something ablaze.”
Aldous raised his staff and tried to focus on one of the ghouls that was a safe distance from his three companions. He tried to picture the thing bursting into flames. It wasn’t working, and, as if the once-human thing could sense Aldous’ ill intent, it turned to him, kitchen knife raised, and came scrambling forward. It was a fright up close—not as bad as the rats, but a good fright nonetheless. The thing had been a woman no less than a week ago; now it was a corpse with an uncontrollable hunger, its eyes glazed over with an opaque mist in the pupils, and the whites were stained piss yellow.
It slashed. Aldous blocked with the staff and was shoved back, amazed by the force that the thing had just unleashed. Another fiendishly heavy strike sent Aldous toppling backward onto the ground.
Burn, you fucker, burn.
Aldous aimed the staff uselessly at the ghoul as it in turn raised its knife with both hands above its head, ready to plunge a killing blow. Before it got the chance, the edge of Theron’s claymore cleaved its forehead, showering Aldous with skull fragments and a mist of brain juice.
“If you can’t bloody well burn them, draw your sword and do what we spent months teaching you, boy,” Theron growled as he turned around to evade a cleaver, lop off an arm, and shatter the base of a skull with all his strength behind a pommel blow.
Aldous tossed down th
e staff and pulled the shield and sword from his back as he sprang to his feet and joined his comrades. Keep your shield up, block, bash, and cut, Aldous told himself as he advanced behind Theron. Two grabbed the hunter’s focus, but a third slipped by and came at Aldous.
It was a child, no doubt from a poor family on some farm that went hungry every winter, but the hunger he knew then was a romantic hope in comparison to the hunger the ghoul child knew now.
“It is a boy no longer, Aldous!” called Ken from twenty paces away, as if reading Aldous’ thoughts. Ken ducked and twirled below the wide strike of a burly ghoul’s smithy hammer. Ken kneecapped the ghoul with his mace, and it moaned and fell, not exempt from pain in its un-death.
Aldous looked back at his foe before Ken delivered the smiting blow upon his. The living-dead child brandished a hatchet in pale gray hands, veins black beneath the thin skin. It struck. Aldous blocked, willing his training to take hold, to guide his movement, but it was too hard to strike out against this child that was not a child. It struck again, and he bashed forward with his shield, but the thing had the same freakish strength as the last and was not leveled by the impact. Again it came for him. Aldous back-stepped then lunged forward and drove his short sword through the ghoul’s chest. It moaned, and a viscous, coagulated black muck oozed from between its teeth. It kept walking, sliding its small body down the blade, and began driving Aldous backward.
The boy had black hair, like Aldous himself. It slid along the sword right to the hilt, until its face came inches from his, and it snapped its teeth, trying to bite at his flesh. It raised its hatchet again, still impaled to the hilt of Aldous’ sword. He smashed the rim of his shield into the thing’s face, knocking it back, and then pulled his sword free. The blade cut through the abdomen as he did, and the ghoul stumbled back, its rotten entrails hanging out. It gave a moan and again came forth.
“It will not die, Theron! The fucking thing will not die,” Aldous screamed, his hands shaking violently as the gutted child advanced, still every bit as hungry as before.
“I told you, take off its head!” Theron called back, his words followed by the whistle of his mighty sword, the crunch of shattering skull, and the splatter of mulched brain.
Aldous gave a shout and charged, almost tripping and falling face first before the ghoul, for his legs wobbled madly with adrenaline. He managed to stay upright, and his training finally kicked in. With his first lash he took off both the ghoul’s upraised hatchet-wielding arms at the elbows. Aldous spun, and on the back slash he hacked his sword through the thing’s head just under the eyes—almost made it all the way through. Didn’t matter, though. It was enough. He slid the blade out, and the ghoul’s brains followed.
* * *
“Good lad! Now carry on,” said Kendrick as he caught a glimpse of Aldous getting his first kill out of the way. Pride touched him, for he and the others had taught the boy well.
The ghouls’ numbers were dwindling; more than half were ready for the torch. If they were human they would have run, they would have known fear, and perhaps these things did, but they knew hunger a great deal better. So the last of them came just like the first.
Ken hooked a ghoul over the shoulder with the beard of his axe and heaved it close; his mace met its face as he brought it in. He got a good bit of coagulating plasma on his leather for the effort, and another ghoul was ready to stoke the fire.
Ken saw a ghoul getting the drop on Aldous. He headed for it, but it was too close to the wizard, who was over top of a downed ghoul and shrieking as he stabbed like a wild thing into the creature’s face.
“Boy!” Ken yelled. Aldous turned, but he was not prepared.
A ghoul closed in on Ken from the right, another from the left. He needed his axe, but Aldous needed it more, so Ken threw it with the honed precession acquired from carrying out such a motion a thousand times. The axe struck Aldous’ threat right in crown of the skull. The thing twitched wildly on the ground; it was a threat no longer.
They came at Ken now from the right and the left. He caught the right ghoul’s dagger arm by the wrist, and parried the left attacker’s crude, rusted sword with a downward blow of his mace. It came off balance for a moment; Ken took the opportunity and bashed it in the head as he swung the other creature off its feet by the wrist. Before it could get to its feet, Chayse was stomping its brains into mush with her iron-heeled boot.
“That’s”—Theron plunged his sword through the eye of a legless ghoul crawling aimlessly through the grass—“all of them.”
“What about the Upir?” asked Ken.
“He’s still sleeping in the mill, no doubt. Perhaps the scent of his new family cooking will wake him,” said Chayse.
Theron gave her a disapproving glance.
“A bit grim, Chayse, a bit grim,” he said.
“We are monster hunters, brother,” she said, her voice strained as she dragged two headless ghouls to join three others, aiming to start the bonfire. “Grim is what we are,” she finished with a grin.
They dragged the bodies into a heap; Ken did so two at a time.
“You want to have another try with that staff, oh great Arch Mage Aldous Weaver?” Theron asked when the bodies were well stacked.
Aldous gave him a pitiful look.
“It shouldn’t be too hard to get them cooking. Their flesh is paper dry; it should catch flame with ease,” Ken said.
Aldous looked a bit sick. He still looked like a new recruit to Ken, and part of him wanted to leave the boy alone. He knew Theron felt the same. But the greater part of them needed Aldous to perform, they needed to push him, they needed him to cross the line. Because he was one of them. They could not leave him behind.
Ken was a killer. Theron and Chayse were killers. Aldous needed to prove he was the same.
“Do it, boy. Swallow the bitter taste and do it,” Ken said. “Set them ablaze.”
Aldous remained still. The adrenaline from the fight had passed through, and he was pale, staring at the pile of ghouls that mostly looked like humans, gray, mangled, headless humans.
“Norburg was worse, Aldous. You made it through that. Now make it through this so we can get back to Dentin and live through Norburg all over again,” said Ken.
“I can’t,” said Aldous. “Theron, use your oil flask and some tinder. I can’t do it.”
“Then why did I give you that staff?” said Theron as he stepped up to Aldous’ back and spoke down the boy’s neck. “So you would have a fancy walking stick? Light the corpses so we can drag out the Upir. So we can kill it and, like Ken said, get back to Dentin and kill some rats.”
Ken watched as the boy looked to Chayse, but she did not come to his aid. Not this time. She only crossed her arms and stared at the boy.
“Light it,” Theron said, shaking Aldous by the head. “Light it… Light it, light it.”
Aldous whirled round and yelled in Theron’s face.
“I can’t do it! I can’t do any of this. I’m not like you. I’m not like Ken.”
“What if you need to be?” said Ken, his voice cold. Aldous had to perform. Ken couldn’t show mercy to the boy now. If he did, it might mean the boy’s death later. Or his, or Theron’s, or Chayse’s. But it wasn’t just their lives at stake. It was the lives of all those who might fall prey to the monsters they failed to kill. No longer Kendrick the Cold. Kendrick the Altruistic. He almost snorted. “What if you need to be like Theron? What if you need to be like me?” Ken stepped forward now and closed in on Aldous, surrounding the boy. “Make the choice to be the man you need to be.”
“Leave him be,” Chayse said. “One of you just get on with it and light the bloody bodies, before they find their mushed-up heads and start walking again.”
“No,” said Theron, his voice as cold as Ken’s, “this is the way it must be. He must stomach this, for in the days to come things are going to get worse, and I want to know we can count on his talent.”
“I don’t have any talent! I don’t wan
t to light it, Theron. I don’t want to watch them burn.” Aldous’ voice was quivering now. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to fucking smell it. I don’t want to taste it in the air.”
“You’ve done it once and you’ve seen it twice. Third time is the charm. Light them up and it will be smooth sailing from here on out. These things are not even human,” said Ken.
“Fuck you!” said Aldous, and sniveled.
Ken laughed. Theron gave a chuckle too. This was the way of the pack: when it came to day-to-day life it was love and laughter, when it came to the killing, to surviving, it was savage and cruel, but it was done together.
A sky-splitting wail came from the mill. They all turned.
The Upir exploded from the rotted shingled roof and hit the ground below with the nimbleness of a predatory feline.
* * *
“Don’t watch, don’t watch, my son,” his father pleaded, tears running down his face, the torchbearer coming closer.
The boy turned his head away.
“Watch, you must watch. You must know what happens to heretics, to sorcerers,” said a cloaked priest as he turned the boy’s head to look forward once again.
“Bastard, you bastard,” the boy’s father wailed at the priest.
“This is the will of the Luminescent. This is the will of God.”
“Father!”
“Close your eyes.”
The torch ignited the stake. His father screamed, his flesh burned, and the smell crawled into the boy’s nose.
“Look. Look, as the heretic burns, or you shall suffer the same fate.”
The boy kept his eyes on his father as he burned—not because he feared the priest, but because he wanted to be sure he would remember this day for the rest of his life. He wanted to be sure he remembered the sight of the flames boiling the flesh from his father’s bones, the singular smell of charred human, and the taste of the soot that was his forsaken father, for one day he knew this memory would light the fire that would ignite the world.