by K. J. Coble
“Th-the corpses-things...?”
Groon gripped the front of his cuirass—like the accoutrements many of the Blood-drinkers now wore, taken from butchered troops animated once again. The chieftain gave his lieutenant a hard shake. “Yes, the things. We follow.”
“Won’t be popular,” Vraka replied.
Groon pulled the taller hobgoblin down close to his face. “Since when do I care what’s popular?” He released Vraka when he grunted obediently. “We will follow until we reach the Legion’s old camp. The Dark Lady says we will find our targets there.”
“What targets?”
Akrak was aquiver beside them, seemed almost to prance as he mangled his face with his wild pawings. Blood and saliva mixed. Blood-drinkers nearby saw his euphoria and milled in unease. The shaman was known by all to be mad; but this was a new level of it. “The voices promised...raise the dead...She is the Unstoppable...the voices promised—”
Groon struck the shaman with a backhand to the jaw so hard he wasn’t certain Akrak’s jaw hadn’t broken. A tendril of phlegm glinted momentarily in campfire light, speckled onlooking Blood-drinkers. “Shut that raving mouth or I’ll put a tulwar down it!”
Akrak shook himself and spat blood and teeth, looked back up at Groon with a red, broken smile and maniac eyes. He giggled. “She is the Unstoppable...”
Groon tensed for another punch, but paused, rethought it as he noticed the others watching the spectable, noted Vraka’s shivering unease. Relaxing slowly, he said, “Yes, She is. And she has instructions for us, if you can shut up long enough to listen.”
Akrak spat again. It wasn’t clear if that was defiance.
“The Dark Lady warned of a wizard,” Groon said and pointed at the shaman. “He’ll be your problem. We’ll follow those things up the road, but when we get near the old camps, we split. I want a screen of skirmishers left to block the way south, just in case.” He waited for a nod from Vraka. “And the rest swing out to the right of the...the dead things, and come around, blocking from the north.”
“Nothing’s getting through that,” Vraka rumbled, nodding after the dead Legion.
Groon rapped the bigger hobgoblin across the back of his head. “I said a wizard, didn’t I? Wizards are always tricky. And there’s another we have to watch out for.”
Rubbing his scalp, Vraka glowered at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Groon grinned crookedly. “The Lady says we might run across a half-elf maiden.”
Vraka and Akrak exchanged a look of digust and turned it on Groon.
“And She wants us to take her alive.”
“Another elf?” Vraka groaned while Akrak giggled incoherently.
“Yeah. I gather she’s some sort of gift for her plaything.”
“We already got one elf. And one is one too many.”
“Agreed.” The chieftain of the Blood-drinkers gripped both his subordinates by their shoulders, pulled them close so he could keep his voice down. “So, here’s what we’re going to do. Lot of things can happen in a fight. There’re always mistakes.”
Vraka, picking up already on his meaning, grinned. “Deadly mistakes.”
“That’s right.” He looked back and forth between the shaman and the lieutenant. “With magic and arrows flying, no telling who goes down.”
THE RIVER WAS THE BEST way, Illah decided. The highway would be watched and the woods thronged with goblinoids and whatever other foulness now allied with them. She found a tree trunk caught on the banks and shuffled into the chill of the Aleil, pushing it before her as the current began to tug about her thighs. She paused to look over her shoulder at Jayce, barely visible in the gloom.
“I will be with you,” he said softly. “The jewel is the bond.”
Illah fingered the ruby broach clasped securely at her sword belt; the same one Danelle had used weeks before to summon the pair of them back from peril at Graystone Glade. The stone prickled under her hand, alive with Jayce’s sorcery.
“Through that,” Jayce continued, “you will have some of my power, as well. Mortal eyes will not see you.”
What of eyes not of this world? She kept the thought buried, nodded instead and held out a hand. Jayce waded into the river up to his shins and took it. His smile was obvious against the dark of his skin.
“You never told me how old you were,” Illah said with playfulness she hoped hid her fear. “You promised me.”
Jayce shrugged. “It matters little, I guess. I am seventy-five.”
Illah’s eyebrows arched. He didn’t appear a day past thirty, though his years put him older than Illah by a decade.
“I told you,” Jayce said. “Wizardry has its side-benefits.”
Illah released his hand. “Still, a youth by elfin standards.”
“Make sure you come back, Ilanahl Aloicil.” Jayce’s voice went stony though his smile did not slip.
“I will.”
She turned and pushed off, drawing a leg over the driftwood and leaning over it as the current took her. A glance over her shoulder showed Jayce still waiting by the bank, no longer smiling. She turned away, savagely thrusting a surge of feelings into a place far to the back of her mind, focusing on the task at hand.
The Aleil moved swiftly, pushed her along with little effort beyond an occasional paddle to keep her course. She lingered near the banks, but not too near; already the gloom to the south glimmered with hints of campfires. Voices drifted out over the water, harsh, guttural barks, brutish goblinoid humor. She picked out movement ahead, heard splashes and curses. Grinding her teeth against the cold, she rolled over onto the log’s far side, put its bulk between her and eyes prying from the shore. Hunched shapes clustered about a shallow inlet, a trio of goblins arguing as they filled water skins. Then she was past and quiet encompassed her once more.
Mist accumulated across the Aleil’s surface, chill and deafening. The campfires continued to glitter by as she drifted on, but sound hushed, save occasional yelps of half-awake fear. The temperature fell, a shroud of chill her senses screamed to her was unnatural, something not of her world. Dread like she’d not known since seeing betrayal on Lonadiel’s face crept into her chest. The air stiffened about her, held, it seemed, in a taught grip of her own terror. She was sweating suddenly, even in the murky cold of the river. A force of will, alone, kept the strange, primal terror from boiling up out of her throat.
Illah gripped Jayce’s stone. Are you there?
I am. And Jayce was, within the stone but more, clinging to the log with her, somehow, watching over her shoulder. It brought some comfort.
Something comes out of the night.
We knew it would.
This is more, she thought. It moves past me. It may be moving north. Be careful.
You, too.
The mists thinned as a sliver of moon shined forth from a part in the clouds. Illah hunched lower into the water, despite Jayce’s promises that she wouldn’t be seen. The chill passed and a sullen breeze tickled her neck but did not carry away the dread. Shadows clung to the bank, draped stubbornly against the moonlight. The clouds billowed shut over the sky, snuffed out its sliver rays, and the darkness slid forth from its solace amongst the trees, purled across the water to swirl about her. The feel of otherworldliness vanished, replaced by something hot, hungry and hateful, a sultry atmosphere speaking not only of the unnatural, but of defiance of nature.
Evil.
Headache blossomed in Illah’s skull, an instinctive revulsion to something not seen but felt as fundamentally as standing too close to a fire. Certainty clamped over pain and anxiety. She gripped Jayce’s broach until its edges bit. I am near. When nothing answered her thoughts, she tensed. Jayce?
I am with you. Jayce’s presence felt strained, the prickle of his magic in the ruby sputtering. It becomes harder...it hurts, Illah. Perhaps you should come back?
Illah drew in a steeling breath and kicked under the surface, guided the log towards the shore. No, I cannot. I must know.
; Maybe we know too much already.
Illah’s feet touched the murk of the river bottom and she edged into a narrow inlet carved by runoff. I must know. She rose from behind the driftwood. Campfires shimmered through the trees above. Ghost-like, Illah drifted up from the river, passing from shadow to shadow, tree to tree. Quick glimpses showed her goblins clustered about their guttering flames, faces tight and eyeing the dark about them while they exchanged whispers that spoke of some unknown horror.
The woods along the river opened ahead and Illah paused, wincing as the slaughter yard stink of a battlefield wafted into her face. She edged forward to the tree-line and knelt, eyeing the wide, open bowl before her. Wreckage littered the ground, sad shapes of discarded packs, still-smoldering provision carts and shattered spear shafts driven into the earth. Another speckle of moonlight through malevolent cloud cover revealed torn earth and pools of fetid water rimmed with clotting, brown-black. Goblin corpses sprawled in windrows, some piled near half-finished burial trenches.
But no Legion bodies.
Illah’s gaze rose to the rim of the bowl, to the point where the jewel-string of campfires converged at a massive pavilion of stretched hide, lit from within by a crimson glow. Her heartbeat slowed, as if a hand had reached into her chest and begun to squeeze the organ. The pavilion was the key. Whatever luxuriated within that red-limned gleam was the heart, pumping out evil to the horde sprawled about it.
With only the faintest hiss of metal, Illah drew her saber from its sheath.
Thunderclaps tore to the north. Her drawn breath of shock was hidden in the jabbering birthed among the goblinoid camps. Cyan flashes briefly under-lit the northern gloom, were followed in moments by another crackle of otherworldly storm.
Illah’s hand flew to the broach. The ruby was cold against her grasp. She released it after a long, hoping moment. Jayce?
Nothing.
She was alone.
JAYCE SAT CROSS-LEGGED between a pair of gnarled oaks that had grown together, their mass shielding him from the drizzle and hiding him in their shadow. His jaw clenched till the muscles ached as he fought through a haze of fatigue and fear to recompose his trance, find the spark of Illah in the tossing sea of the cosmos.
The horses, tethered down by the river where they could water and graze on undergrowth, whinnied and stamped the muck, a low groan of rising panic issuing from their throats.
The cosmos churned behind Jayce’s clamped eyes. Swells rose, tossing his mind backwards into troughs where successive waves crashed down upon him, battering his will, drowning him in power that shined tarry black in the nether-light of the energetic Beyond. Frustrated and weary, he had to let the trance go, relaxing his muscles and opening his eyes with the explosive inhalation of a shipwrecked man surfacing.
Something was not right.
The drizzle had let up and the woods hung damp and sullen about him, branches sagging under the weight of rainfall, drooping like the arms of defeated soldiers. Mist frothed from the ground, thick and undisturbed by any breeze. He glanced down to the banks and saw the horses, their ears flattened, their breath hanging about them in puffs of vapor. One nudged the other and received a snap of teeth in response. Both neighed with the anger that comes only in deepest alarm and began tearing at their restraints.
Jayce ground his teeth at the racket, leapt to his feet with the need to quiet them before their position was revealed. But something held him in place, a frigid hand of dread on the back of his neck. He turned slowly, eyeing the darkness. There. He heard it again; feet shuffling in the woods.
Something moves north, Illah had warned.
Jayce whispered words of command, felt a surge of power that would normally bring him the confidence of his craft. But here, trying to mask himself in magical invisibility, his talents seemed meager tricks performed before a dubious master.
Deadfall splintered under an unskilled boot. The trees rasped with the sound of approaching forms, oblivious to stealth, shuffling about, stumbling and staggering through the tangle. Jayce’s nostrils flared at the sickly-sweet tang of rot. Something tickled across his skin, whined in his ear. Flies, drawn by the growing reek. The horses screamed and slammed against each other.
Jayce no longer thought their racket mattered.
A figure crashed through the undergrowth to his left and went down on one knee. Jayce backed behind a tree, watching the newcomer through dripping leaves. Hands scrambled in the muck, found purchase and pushed the figure to its feet.
Do not see me, Jayce thought, drawing the shroud of energies taught about him. But the figure turned towards him, as if hearing his plea and Jayce knew with nauseated horror that his efforts were in vain.
A corpse stared at him. Its mouth came open without sound, a torrent of flies pouring forth. One eye was gone, a hollow socket trailing chord-like tatters. But the other, a featureless black of dilated pupil, saw. Arms came up, the fingers hooking into claws, and the abomination shambled towards him.
Jayce backpedaled. A curtain of branches parted to his right and a second horror emerged, a hacked, one-armed hideousness that brushed his sleeve with its good hand before Jayce flinched away, retreating further towards the river bank. All around him, the woods whispered with the approach of the dead, the air steaming with their decay, their choking stench. The horses shrieked. Their hooves hammered the ground, the air and finally putrescent flesh as the walking corpses reached them. Jayce winced, put his hands to his ears and throbbing temples as wet sounds of teeth ripping flesh stood out between animal screams.
A semicircle of nightmares closing around him, Jayce knew the time for subtlety had long passed. Letting the obviously ineffective veil of invisibility drop, he focused his energy on a word of command and extended his arms. The dead came on, seeking to join him in their loveless embrace.
Lightning crashed from Jayce’s fingertips.
Bodies burst like ripe fruit at its cyan touch. Pulped meat and shattered appendages spun through the air. A corridor opened before him, Jayce sprinted into the opening, deathless fingers snagging at his clothes. He leapt a downed tree and clambered through undergrowth up a shallow incline.
The skin of his back prickled with the awareness that the dead were right on his heels. He spun with a fresh spell readied and fanned his right hand before his pursuers. Jets of fire spat from his palm, miniature meteorites that lanced through unholy flesh and bone. Globes of flame expanded, washed across the tide of undead, enveloping them. But on they came, undaunted by an inferno they could no longer feel.
Jayce ran again, knowing he had to get out in the open where he could better see and face this horror. Trees thinned ahead and he tore through a last snag to reach the Imperial Highway. He slowed, turning on his heel to back away from the tree-line. The rain returned, soaking through his tunic, weighing down on his heaving body. The forest shook and rustled. The dead began to emerge, smoldering tags of meat falling away from ravaged faces to reveal toothy grins.
Shouts echoed. Jayce glanced southward, momentarily hopeful for more Legion survivors. But packs of scuttling figures in outlandish, mismatching armor brandished tulwars and let loose with howls of glee. Hobgoblins scrambled up the highway towards him, others coming down from the hills to the east. These groups recoiled as the undead came into sight, but kept coming, skirting the edge of their shambling mass. The air hissed and arrows speckled the ground near Jayce’s feet.
Danelle was right: it was a trap.
For the first time in since he’d fled Zerrax, Jayce knew hopelessness. Flight on foot northward along the highway meant certain doom. He glanced at the approaching dead, knew what welcome he could expect there. But the river was the only way. He turned and began to run, angling northwesterly along a path that would take him back into the woods along the Aleil and eventually to its banks again. Between hoarse, tearing breaths he whispered another spell and his fists took on a fiery glow. Gauging that he had enough clearance, he lurched from the road and dove into the trees.
The living dead were waiting.
One gripped his right arm while a second burst from the left, mouth open and mud-clotted teeth clamping for his windpipe. Jayce put his blazing left hand to the thing’s face and damp, rotten flesh steamed away, the bone beneath melting before the sorcery, the skull sagging in upon itself as the corpse fell away. Jayce spun in the grip of the second, aware of others closing in, and slugged the beast in the chest. The torso came apart at the impact, splitting diagonally from shoulder to hip and sloughing to the ground in quivering piles.
Jayce shouldered on, dodging outreached hands and snagging branches. Something tugged at his boot and he gave a kick to loosen the grasp of the still-clinging arm and torso of the dead man he’d smashed. An arrow thocked into a tree trunk near his head as he weaved down to the river.
The hobgoblins, forgetting fear of the undead in their bloodlust, were peppering the woods with short bow arrows. Projectiles pattered in the Aleil just below. Jayce lengthened his strides, felt muscles and joints howl in pain as he pushed them past their endurance. He tripped, went down hard and skinning the pants from his knees.
The stumble saved his life. A scream of fire flared through a part in the trees, leapt into the air, and screamed through the space he’d occupied moments before. Even dazzled by its brilliance, Jayce could see an open-mouthed skull at the heart of the flame. Its howl vanished in a roar as the skull-fireball struck at tree down by the river and shattered, blasting itseld and the trunk into a hip-hihg spray of fiery splinters.
The magic had been crude and brutish, like a sledgehammer in comparison to the chisel of his work. But its wielder was winding up another blast. The smoke and air thrummed with it. Jayce couldn’t let another come seeking him.
Raising his still-glowing palms and altering his words of evocation, Jayce brought his hands slapping together. Between them, sparks seethed and chords of power wound instantly together. He waited, as goblinoid howsl builts around him, and goblinoid arrows sliced the dark around him, and the undead pawed through the trees for him. Judging the instant right, he ripped his hands apart, flung his arms wide. The motion birth a scythe of crimson light that lashed out, slicing through trees, brush, and anything else in its path. Wherever it touched, explosions crashed and things died.