by Barb Hendee
“What now?” she asked.
He frowned. “I scryed for Chap and Chane’s location. They have left the Lhoin’na lands, heading southward, toward the Slip-Tooth Pass. It will still take many days more before they reach the northside entrance to the tunnel running beneath the mountains into Bäalâle Seatt, but they are en route.”
Magiere stiffened. “What does that mean for us?”
He sighed as if the rest were unpleasant. “Within two days—and nights—we must turn west if we are to meet them within a day or two of their exiting the southern side of the Sky-Cutter Range. They will never find us out here on their own, and they have three more chests—orbs—with no beasts of burden they can bring through.”
Magiere had known this was coming but wasn’t ready. They’d learned next to nothing so far. The Enemy was rising, calling its own to the east, but all that was little more than what her gut had told her. She’d hoped to learn the Enemy’s actual hiding place before meeting up with Chap.
At times it felt like only Wynn was on her side. Brot’an didn’t count, since he’d always pushed for the best tactical choice—and he wanted to meet up with Chap and bring all five orbs together. Ghassan was worse, at times eager to push on and at other times not.
Magiere could feel Leesil watching her; he said nothing, and he didn’t have to.
“A night or two,” she said. “So we keep looking until . . .”
Even she heard the overoptimism in that, but Leesil merely nodded. As he and Ghassan gathered what was needed, Magiere stepped off to the edge of the camp. Wynn looked over, and Magiere had only to cock her head.
The small sage got up and came to join her. Magiere kept her voice low as she eyed Chuillyon, who made an obvious point of ignoring everyone.
“See if you can get anything more out of him,” Magiere whispered.
Wynn nodded. “Of course.”
With that, Magiere patted Wynn on the shoulder and headed out with Ghassan and Leesil following. She remembered exactly where to go and strode quickly across the packed sand into the foothills under the endless black sky of winking stars.
Tracking would’ve been easier in daylight, but none of them could last long walking under the fierce sun, especially Leesil. If she got close enough to her quarry, she wouldn’t need tracks to follow.
Before she realized, ahead stood the upslope they had climbed last night.
Magiere rounded it on the desert side instead, steeling herself for what she would find. Spotting the first body, she slowed, and Ghassan and Leesil caught up.
Blood had already dried upon flesh, into the sand and torn clothes, and on weapons still in limp hands or lying nearby. Belongings were scattered from ripped and torn tents. Even three camel carcasses were torn up and lay still in the dark. Gruesome, it was exactly what she’d expected, but the littlest corpses—the children—were the worst.
Nothing could prepare anyone for that.
Even a half dozen undead, if there had been that many, didn’t need to feed this much. And once sated, they’d slaughtered the rest for . . . who knew why. Maybe just the pleasure. It was as if they baited her, though they couldn’t have known she was near. It was like what she’d seen from Chane back in her homeland.
No, this was worse.
“Ghassan,” she said.
He stepped ahead and she followed. They stopped beside two half-dug graves with several bodies in pieces with arms and legs gnawed to the bone. She hadn’t seen any of that last night, but it told her something more.
These people had been attacked more than once, and on separate nights.
Magiere’s jaw locked at the sight of a man’s severed head with his face partially torn off. He had to have been digging one grave when he was attacked, but vampires didn’t kill like that.
It made no sense.
Leesil looked down beside her. “What in seven hells hap—”
“Back up, now!”
Magiere stiffened at Ghassan’s command, just before hunger and rage flooded through her. She pulled the falchion without even thinking, spun, looked in every direction, but saw nothing. Her jaws began aching under the change in her teeth.
All she managed to get out was, “What . . . here?”
“Move quickly!” Ghassan ordered.
Leesil now had both winged blades in hand. He turned all ways, looking about as he took one back step.
Magiere heard a faint shifting of sand and grit, but it didn’t come from his step. She heard it again, and then the choking stench of carrion welled up around her. It was too strong for even the carnage.
A fierce grip latched onto her left boot.
Sand gave way before she could jab her sword down, and a blast of grit and sand shot up, blinding her. Something grabbed her belt and then her sword hand’s wrist as it clawed up and pulled her down in the sand at the same time.
When her sight cleared, she looked down into a gray-white face with a mouth full of distended, yellow, almost needlelike teeth. The creature jerked her downward as the sand seemed to open under her feet. She screamed as jaws closed on her forearm above the falchion.
Magiere felt herself sinking fast. She released the falchion weighing down one arm and struck down into the gray face with her other fist. When its head whipped aside, she groped for the Chein’âs dagger sheathed beneath her hauberk at the small of her back.
When her hand closed on the hilt, she heard Leesil cry out.
• • •
At a hiss of sand, Leesil saw something launch out of the sinking ground beneath Magiere’s feet. He pushed off to charge for her, but the sand suddenly gave way beneath his own feet. He sank so fast that his legs became mired. Something sharp raked and stabbed into his left thigh, and he cried out.
He hacked down with his right blade . . . and it struck only sand.
A gray-white, bony face jutted out of the sand now past his knees.
Its mouth opened, exposing what looked like teeth but too jaggedly sharp. It eyes were like black pits that swallowed faint moonlight, and where there should have been a nose were collapsed nostrils.
A clawed hand released his thigh—where it had jabbed him—and hooked its fingers higher into the rings of his hauberk. It hissed once before he slammed his punching blade’s outer edge down into its face.
Leesil heard Magiere’s screech shift into a vicious, grating snarl. That was all that told him she still lived.
“Get free and run to me!” Ghassan shouted, now sounding farther off. “More may come!”
Leesil understood that, though he didn’t look for Ghassan. He didn’t have time.
With his blade pressed into the creature’s face, he writhed and wrenched one leg out of the sand. Once he’d kicked down into its face, he pushed to wrench his other calf free. In a roll, he slashed his other punching blade’s tip as that thing crawled out after him.
When he gained his feet to face it down, something latched onto his left ankle.
• • •
Khalidah watched from where he had scrambled to a slab of stone rising from the sand.
Magiere rolled, slashed at one burrowing attacker’s face with hardened nails, and then followed with the white metal dagger. Smoke rose amid crackling when the blade split gray flesh down a sunken cheek and into the hollow of a collarbone.
The creature’s screaming wail took another two blinks to come.
All that Khalidah saw then were two obscured figures flailing amid tossed sand and smoke. No, he saw one more thing, off to the left beyond Leesil.
Another spot in the sand began to sink rapidly.
A third one was rising.
“Leesil, run to me, now!” Khalidah shouted.
He had no intention of letting either Magiere or Leesil fall prey to these things. He still needed them to get to Beloved—especially if so many of its unde
ad were gathering to it.
At more screaming and screeching, Khalidah glanced toward where Magiere had been. Still, all he saw were two shadows flailing at each other.
• • •
Magiere slashed at her attacker again, barely able to see its shape in the dark through smoke and cast-up sand. Her hardened nails tore through something soft in its face—an eye socket perhaps. At its scream, hunger welled up and burned in her chest and then her throat and finally her mouth.
She brought the blade across, below her last strike.
The glow of the dagger’s hair-thin centerline disappeared for an instant as it cut into something solid. And that thing’s snarls and shrieks choked off instantly.
All of its flailing stopped. Its grips on her belt and hauberk faltered.
She struck down with her free hand where instinct told her to, and her palm slapped upon its scalp. Her fingers closed instantly on sand-clotted hairs, and she brought her blade back the other way well beneath her grip.
Just before the crackle and sizzle of flesh, she thought she heard scrambling upon the sand to her left. Then the head of her prey came loose in her grip.
• • •
Leesil kicked into the face of the creature scrambling toward him. Its head lashed back, and he rolled back into a crouch. And it still kept coming. He crossed both blades, dropped forward to one knee, and slashed outward high and low as it closed.
One blade’s edge sliced across its sunken belly. The other’s tip tore through one side of its neck. It lurched back.
When he expected a shriek or gasp, he heard nothing in the dark. He saw its shape crumple upon itself, and he quickly looked for Magiere.
“No, run!” Ghassan shouted again.
Leesil saw something else in the dark scramble across the sand to his right . . . straight toward where he’d last seen Magiere. From the corner of his eye, he saw his own opponent hunch . . . and spring.
• • •
Khalidah watched Leesil stall, and grew furious. And for what was now needed, he could not expend energies on widening his sight to see more clearly in the dark. Thankfully, Ghassan would not dare interfere for what had to be done now.
He dug into his robe, pulled out a sage’s crystal, and after swiping it once across his robe, he cast the crystal toward Leesil. Sudden light tumbling through the air distracted the wounded creature scrambling after the half-blood.
Leesil was startled by light and looked back.
In that off-balance instant, Khalidah focused with his will and used his thoughts to wrench the half-blood. Leesil arched backward, landing on his back, and Khalidah quickly wrenched him again. Leesil slid, flipped, and tumbled wide-eyed to the edge of the stone slab.
Khalidah snatched the collar of Leesil’s hauberk, and by both will and physical effort, pulled the half-blood onto the stone.
“Do you have a crystal?” Khalidah demanded.
Leesil barely gained his feet. “What . . . what did you—?”
“Answer me, now!”
Light beyond the slab vanished.
Khalidah’s head swiveled as he looked into the dark. His crystal was gone, and so was the creature that had come after Leesil. That was expected once that thing understood the light could not affect it.
There were still two more out there in the dark—at least two. When he glanced aside, Leesil at least had a crystal out, and Khalidah did not question where it had come from.
“Light it,” he commanded, “and toss it toward Magiere. We must get her here on the stone instead of the sand.”
That second crystal would not last as long on the sand as his before being pulled down as well. He heard the half-blood swipe the crystal on his thigh. Light brightened the darkness an instant before the crystal shot out through the air. It landed some thirty paces out, and he spotted a dark-clad figure picking itself up and clutching a dangling object in one hand.
It was Magiere, and the object in her free hand appeared to be a head.
That left only one of the creatures unaccounted for—unless there were more hiding underground.
“What are those things?” Leesil asked.
“Watch the sand around this stone,” Khalidah ordered, and then called to Magiere. “Run to us! Quickly!”
“Magiere, come on,” Leesil called to her. “Get over here.”
Finally she came, and Khalidah got a better look at what she still held. The remaining hair on the severed head meant it was a younger one, or rather that it had been infected and turned less than a handful of years ago.
Magiere’s eyes were still fully black, and between her parted lips showed teeth like those of a predator. For an instant, it brought back that terror-filled night of agony when she had torn apart his last host, a’Yamin. He could not help looking down at the white metal dagger in her other hand, and he remembered as well that burned blade cutting him apart.
How fitting it would be if he used that blade on her in the end.
“Back to back,” he ordered harshly, and looked away to where Leesil’s crystal had fallen. “Watch in all directions. They cannot come up through stone, so they will have to show themselves first.”
That the second crystal had not been pulled down caused both relief and frustration. Either the last one had fled—if there were only three—or it knew better than to betray its position, now that its prey was aware of it.
Khalidah would have preferred to take one whole. Perhaps in its hunger-maddened thoughts would have been some memory or notion of exactly where it was being summoned. Even so, by this point in their travels, he had his own notion.
“You know about these things?” Leesil whispered from behind on Khalidah’s left.
Khalidah hesitated. How much should he say, considering any answer would bring more questions?
“Yes, I have read of them.” He had done more than that. “Old folktales, still told among desert tribes about the eastern provinces before the empire, called them ‘ghul.’”
Khalidah heard a low grating hiss from Magiere who was behind on his right. She had not known of them. That was obvious. They had been used to clear outer sentries when forces first approached to siege the ancient Bäalâle Seatt. He had been the one to lead that siege.
“What are they?” Leesil asked.
“Undead, of course, by what they did here, likely coming in the following night after whatever attacked these nomads first.”
“Why didn’t they wait to get the bodies after burial?”
Khalidah scoffed. “Because they eat the living, not the dead. Once life leaves a victim’s flesh, there is no life left to feed them. But they are solitary. I have never read of more than one attacking at a time.”
The last part was true, though conjurers under his command had enslaved them in numbers before assaulting the seatt. But any one of his conjurers had been able to control only one ghul. There had been at least three here tonight, possibly working together.
“What about the victims?” Leesil pressed. “Will they . . . get up when the next night comes?”
Khalidah hesitated. Some tales were close to the truth that he knew. They claimed any victim who did not die was possessed by feral demonic spirits with no intellect. And slowly they changed as hunger drove them mad.
Again, close to the truth, but not quite.
“No,” he finally answered. “The process—from what I have read—is not the same as for . . . well, there is no word in my language to match your ‘vampire.’”
Khalidah said no more, though he listened now that Leesil was silent. Between Magiere’s labored breaths, he heard not a grain of sand shift. In a calm night without a breeze, that still did not mean the ghul had moved on. They could not travel at any worthwhile pace underground and never truly did so. To avoid them as with other undead meant waiting for daylight.
When he ha
d said as much and sat down to keep his vigil, Leesil sighed harshly in doing the same. This at least served an additional purpose now that it seemed no true path to Beloved would be found.
None was needed as Khalidah raised his eyes to the starlit, eastern horizon.
It had been a thousand years since he had last come this far, back when he still had his own flesh, but of late, landmarks had been coming back to him. In the dark, clear night to the east, something blotted out the lowest stars for as far south as he could see, just as the so-called Sky-Cutter Range did to the north beyond these foothills.
Another range of mountains marked the continent’s far edge, and where the two ranges met a line of peaks. The sight was familiar. Khalidah had wanted to be more certain, to see so himself before turning back for the other three orbs.
Now he was.
But there was a greater concern.
Neither a pack of vampires nor a trio of ghul would have been arranged by Sau’ilahk and Ubâd as bait. How many other of Beloved’s servants—undead or not—were headed east?
One dhampir and her followers might not be enough for what was waiting.
It was time to turn back and prepare.
• • •
The dreamer fell through darkness, and without impact suddenly stood upon a black desert under a bloodred sky. Dunes began to roll on all sides, quickly sharpened in clarity, and became immense coils covered in glinting black scales. Those coils turned and writhed on all sides.
“Where are you?” the dreamer called. “Show yourself!”
I have always been here . . . waiting.
The desert vanished.
The dreamer stood upon a chasm’s lip. Over the edge, the sides did not fall straight down. The chasm walls were twisted as if torn open ages ago by something immense ripping wide the bowels of the earth. Looking upward, the dreamer saw the same, as if the great gash rose into an immense peak above.
Across to the chasm’s other side was another wound in the mountain’s stone. It was too dark to know whether that was a mere pocket, a cavern, or just a fracture leading to either deeper beyond the stone wall. There was no bridge to that other side.