by D. P. Prior
“Zombies, I’d say. Jankson Brau said he’d seen them out past the village, but this is a first for—What are you doing? Did I tell you to move? Now look what you’ve done. They’re turning round.”
“Weren’t my fault,” Nils said. “You’re the one with the big mouth.”
Ilesa looked like she was gonna say something, but then went stiff as a corpse and went back to pretending she was one.
Thankfully they were real slow, shambling mounds of rotting flesh. Trouble was, there were a lot of them. A heck of a lot, and they had Nils surrounded. His guts were roiling and his bladder was fit to burst. When the zombies started moaning and reaching their arms out like a blind geezer trying to find a doorknob, Nils reckoned he’d made a mistake crossing the Farfalls. Not that he’d had much of a choice. Shogging dwarf had seen to that.
“Get back down,” Ilesa hissed. “Shit’s the best chance you’ve got. Doubt they’ll see you in the muck, and they sure won’t smell you.”
“Where the Abyss are Nameless and Silas?” Nils whined, like he used to back home when he thought something weren’t fair. “How long’s it take to have a riddle, for shog’s sake?”
“Shut… up.”
“Shut up yourself, you… Oh, crap!”
Nils threw himself facedown in the shite, cursing himself for a stupid numbskull. Shogging zombies had near enough crept up on him, and all because he and the bitch couldn’t stop arguing.
Women! his dad would have said. All the world’s problems in a nutshell. If it hadn’t been for Ilesa, they wouldn’t have come waltzing into the village in the first place. Her and Silas, in any case. Maybe if the wizard weren’t so precious about pissing in the bush, they’d have left this dump well alone. Shog, Qlippoth was meant to be stuffed full of nightmares. Didn’t take a genius to figure out that towns and the like were no-go areas. If you asked him—
A foot squelched down in the muck beside his head. Nils didn’t want to look, but his eyes had a life of their own. Whole leg was rot all the way to the knee, which was about as far as he could see from his belly. Weeping ulcers and peeling black skin. Thing was so full of pus it looked ready to burst, like overripe fruit.
The other foot came down, narrowly missing his ear. Something splashed the back of his neck, and he choked back puke. His heart bounced around in his ribcage so hard he thought it might shoot out of his back. All he could do was lie still and hope it hadn’t noticed him, hope it moved on.
One flayed leg lifted, and a chunk of putrid flesh flopped off into the shite right by Nils’s mouth, so close he could almost taste it. The zombie stepped over him and lurched away, and Nils took the opportunity to roll to his side and look for Ilesa.
“Bollocks,” he whispered under his breath, fighting back tears of panic. She was lost amid a sea of lumbering dead flesh. Her disguise was so good, he couldn’t pick her out from the dozens of walking corpses shambling about the smallholding.
“Ilesa,” he said as loud as he dared. “Where are you?”
A chorus of moaning went up from the zombies, and scores of milky eyes turned on him.
“Ilesa!” he called, his voice quavering like it did whenever he got caught with his hand in the cash drawer and Dad took his belt off—not because he didn’t approve of the stealing, course, but because Nils had got himself caught.
“Quiet!” Ilesa whispered back. Only, it was a bit loud to be a useful whisper. Loud enough to draw some attention away from Nils.
A cluster of zombies turned on one of their own, filthy fingers grasping, pawing, thumping.
“Aargh,” the zombie in the middle cried. “My shogging tooth!” It spat blood, and the air shimmered around it, dead flesh becoming firm and olive-hued. Dank hair grew into satin locks, and tattered rags turned to a leather laced-up corset and britches.
Ilesa’s thumb and forefinger fumbled about in her mouth and came away with a pink-stained tooth. “That’s just great,” she said. “Shogging great.”
She’d only half drawn her sword when the zombies surged over her, and she went down screaming.
Nils just reacted on instinct, and legged it the other way. But he ran straight into cold, stinking flesh.
Icy hands wrapped around his throat, lifting him into the air. He wriggled and squirmed, coughed and spluttered, but no matter how hard he fought, he was helpless in the zombie’s grasp. A cold tongue ran up the side of his face, then he caught a whiff of rancid breath as teeth latched onto his earlobe. His struggles got weaker and weaker, and his vision blurred until it seemed he entered a dark tunnel that started to close in on him.
Don’t let them kill me, his oxygen-starved mind threw up. Mom!
Where the shog were Nameless and Silas?
Air whistled past his face, and there was a sound like the pulping of a melon.
NAMELESS
“Come on, come on,” Nameless muttered through clenched teeth as he shuffled about nervously on the porch of the ramshackle cottage.
He didn’t like the feel of this village one little bit. Ilesa had some ken of it from Jankson Brau, the wizard who’d tried to have Nameless and Nils killed on their way to Malfen. She said the dwarves would have passed this way, unless they wanted to chance the moors to the east, where Brau had lost a dozen men to the quagmires, or found a way to cross the Upper Sour Marsh to the west. Apart from that, she’d said, Qlippoth was unmappable, shifting like the sand on a churning seabed.
“One foot over the shogging border, and he needs to relieve himself,” Nameless grumbled under his breath.
Couldn’t deny the fact he needed to pay a visit himself, though. Accursed place gave his guts a life of their own, but there was no way he was about to drop his britches and squat. The unruly grass around the shack was undulating under the weight of a thousand insects, each the size of a small bird. They had carapaces like plate armor and pincers that looked like they could snip through bone, or worse.
Silas had refused to go on the trail, as they’d been among a scattering of dwellings overflowing from Malfen like crap from a cesspit. “Someone might see,” he’d complained.
Nils and Ilesa had wandered off to a smallholding Brau’s people used to do business with, hoping to find something to eat.
Why anyone would want to live this side of Malfen was beyond Nameless. He turned his nose up at the dilapidated buildings dotting the plain, then shook his head and glared at the door of the cottage.
The place was more lichen than wood. Its broken timbers were coated in green and yellow fluff that gave off a stench like rotting vegetables. Unless that was Silas’s business he could smell. Its two narrow windows were boarded up, and there was a rusty metal pipe jutting from the roof that presumably served as a chimney. The roof itself was mainly exposed rafters, the few remaining tiles hanging like scabs. The garden was all brown leaves and briars with sickle-shaped thorns.
Nameless shivered and jumped on the spot. “Come on Silas.”
This was getting ridiculous. How long did it take, for shog’s sake? He’d kill the shogging shogger if he was in there taking tea with the woman who’d answered the door. Sweet old lady, Nameless thought. All hunched over in her shawl. What she was doing out here in Qlippoth, he’d love to know. What she was doing living in such a rundown, moss-covered, scorpion-infested hovel was a mystery, too. If he’d been asked to imagine who might have lived in such a hole, he’d have had to say a…
“Witch!” he exclaimed.
He bounded up the three steps to the porch in one leap and crashed straight through the door.
It was dark and dusty in the entrance hall. Thick cobwebs draped down like curtains, and the corridor straight ahead was choked with them, so much so that it was obvious no one had been down there for years. The stairs were another matter. They were relatively clear, although a dark and viscous fluid had splashed onto them. Nameless sniffed as he started to go up. There was a sickly, coppery smell coming from the spillage.
He’d barely made the landing, when a shadow d
etached itself from the wall and leapt at him. There was a flurry of fangs and claws, a hissing snarl, and the fetid smell of decaying flesh. Then there was the crunch of axe cleaving bone, and the shadow-being grunted and dropped to the floor. As Nameless wrenched the axe blade clear, the creature started to shimmer and change, until the old lady lay on the floor with her head split in two.
Nameless exhaled sharply, hefted his axe, and ambled through the open door to what was presumably the hag’s bedchamber.
There, manacled to an iron bedstead atop a mattress black with mildew, was Silas. He was stripped naked and shivering. His clothes were strewn over the floor. The black leather grimoire lay open atop his bag.
“Thank shog,” Silas said, rattling his chains. “Another minute and she’d…and she’d…”
“You hurt?” Nameless asked. “There was blood on the stairs.”
Silas shook his head. “Some other poor bastard, I expect. Shog me, Nameless, she was going to…”
Nameless held up a rigid finger like a chastising father.
“First day across the border. First step, practically, and you have to stop to shag a wrinkly.”
Silas shook his head frantically and struggled against his bonds. “No, it’s not what it seems. She was a witch. A real life witch, I tell you. Surprised me with her magic and landed me here.”
Nameless wasn’t listening. He stooped to look at Silas’s book.
“Ah, yes,” Silas said. “She was after the grimoire, you can be sure of that. The minute she opened my bag, she was flicking through it.” He licked his lips. “You can’t read Ancient Urddynoorian, can you?”
“A little,” Nameless said, shutting the book so he could see the cover. It was virtually the same as Old Dwarvish. The embossed letters danced before his eyes, and he could no longer focus on them without feeling nauseous. He retched and straightened up, glowering at Silas.
The mage looked away nonchalantly.
“Hmm,” Nameless growled, and turned toward the doorway.
“Wait,” Silas said. “You’re not going to leave me?”
Nameless was sorely tempted. “I’ll be back,” he said above the rattling of the wizard’s manacles. “But first I need to pay a visit to the good woman’s latrine. I may be a while. All that time being tube fed, my guts don’t know whether they’re coming or going, now I’m back on solids.”
ILESA
Didn’t matter how much Jankson Brau was paying her, it wasn’t enough.
Ilesa ducked beneath a blue-tinged fist and skewered another zombie with her dagger. Its guts sloshed out, and she whipped her blade back just in time to avoid being tainted with putrescence. Chill fingers groped at her back, but she reversed her sword and stabbed something pulpy.
Nils’s prone body started to stir, probably due to the slush that was pouring on it from eviscerated zombies.
Ilesa could have run, she knew it. Could have weaved through their shambling ranks, maybe used another disguise to keep them off her scent, but she’d not been able to leave the boy. She’d thrown her knife on reflex, felling the cadaver that was about to rip his ear off with its teeth, then darted in to retrieve it before she even realized what she was doing.
Protecting his stupid arse, is what. Because he reminded her, she guessed, ducking beneath a clubbing arm, thrusting with the sword and slicing with the dagger. Reminded her of her brother, Davy, back before that stinking piece of shit who was supposed to be their father—
A clubbing fist slammed her sideways, straight into the arms of a huge living carcass. Ice coursed through her ribs as the air was squeezed from her lungs. Rank breath threatened to choke her, and she screamed as a mold-encrusted tongue tasted the skin of her neck. She stamped down on the corpse’s foot and shoved at the same time. The ankle snapped clean off, and the zombie toppled, only it didn’t release its hold on her. She landed on top of it, shattering its ribcage. Cold pus and gore soaked her bodice. She rolled free, stabbing her dagger through its eye socket and into the brain, then came up into a fighting crouch.
She was completely surrounded. Couldn’t even see the farm buildings now, there were so many moaning, shuffling corpses pressing in upon her.
Nils crawled over to her, but one of the zombies grabbed him by the leg of his britches. He thrashed about like a fish on the hook, wriggled around, trying to free his sword from its scabbard. If she hadn’t been so close to death, Ilesa would have laughed. He looked like a little boy desperate to get his cock out before he pissed his pants. Maybe he already had; it was difficult to tell, what with the sludge from the pig sty caking him head to toe.
She lunged in and severed the zombie’s hand.
Nils scrabbled back on his arse.
“Thanks,” he said, finding his feet and drawing his sword.
“Welcome. You any good with that thing?”
Nils took a double-handed grip, and Ilesa suppressed a sigh. “I can handle myself,” he said, puffing out his chest.
“Sure you can.” Ilesa glanced at his groin. “But can you fight?”
She already knew the answer, and he just reinforced the fact with a wild swing that nearly took his own toes off. She tugged him out of the way of a slavering maw and stuck her sword down the zombie’s throat.
That’s it, she thought as the throng pressed in tight around them. That’s shogging it!
She shut her eyes and imagined being one of them again, imagined her flesh hanging from the bone, her organs turning to slush. She was almost there, almost there. Shog that little runt, Nils. He was nothing like Davy. Nothing. At least when that sick bastard had come for him, Davy had put up a half decent—
The zombies in front surged forward, but there was nowhere to back away. Hands as strong as vices gripped her from behind, and a drooling face pressed up so close she gagged. She couldn’t see Nils any longer, but she could hear him screaming.
Shog Brau and his plans. Shog his money.
“Shoggers!” she roared.
She cracked her head against a zombie’s nose. Half its face came off, but the teeth were still there, gnashing at her.
“Shoggers!” she screamed again as the horde swamped her and her knees buckled under the weight.
SILAS
“Walk away, Silas,” he told himself as Ilesa and Nils disappeared beneath a sea of rotting limbs. “No sense in us all getting killed.”
And besides, he was bone weary. It had taken every last drop of sorcerous juice from his perpetually leaking well to free himself from the manacles, and all because the dwarf was taking an eternity doing his business.
He cast a look over his shoulder, but Nameless was still nowhere to be seen.
The grimoire slipped from his bag and thudded as it hit the ground, open and demanding to be read.
What the Abyss? How the shog did…? Silas flicked his gaze between the book and the zombies ripping his companions apart.
Wind turned the pages, but it seemed to Silas it was the book doing it, goading him into reading.
And he was sorely tempted, though he’d have been happier doing so a thousand miles from this place. He looked back at the zombies and then returned his gaze to the pages of the grimoire. He stooped to pick it up, and an idea struck him.
“You clod, Silas.” He mentally slapped himself.
First, Nameless had reminded him he had the power to free himself with magic, and now the book—an inanimate object—was prompting him to use arcane power to save his companions. He knew he lacked the skill to do so by himself, but Otto Blightey’s ancient tome held out a promise to him, though he couldn’t tell how. All he had to do was focus on the page. All he had to—
“Make way!” Nameless roared, sending Silas into a spin as he thundered past, stumpy legs pumping, chainmail clanking, axe held high above his bald head. “Come here, you shoggers! You’re dead, you hear me! All shogging dead!”
Nothing like stating the obvious, Silas thought, closing the book so he could put it back in his bag.
Only,
the book wouldn’t close. The spine had stiffened, and the pages refused to be turned.
It actually hurt his neck to look away from the grimoire to see what was happening.
Nameless tore straight into the zombies, axe rising and falling with elemental savagery. Blood flew up in great showers, limbs were lopped off, bones crushed, and then the dwarf disappeared in among the dead.
“Nothing I can do,” Silas said, once more trying to close the book.
He strained with the effort, but the spine resisted him. The letters on the page flashed red, and an angry whisper hissed between his ears like a whiplash.
He blinked, and then squinted down at a jumbled confusion of Ancient Urddynoorian script. There were sigils in the margins, each of which was swirling, drawing him in. He tried to pull back, but couldn’t break the rapture. His lips started moving in time with the shifting letters on the page. Still reading, still incanting, he turned to face the fray, even as molten lava pooled at the base of his spine and rushed in a great torrent toward his head.
NAMELESS
“This ol’ dwarf, he killed one,” Nameless sang as he lopped off a head amid a spray of reeking pus. “He shoved his axe right up your—”
The shambling corpses let out a communal hiss and started to turn away from Nils and Ilesa. The axe crunched through a skull, splitting it clean in two. A swipe to the left, a hack to the right, and he was in the midst of the horde, bobbing and weaving, barging and kicking. He thought he could make out Nils’s jerkin, caught a glimpse of Ilesa sprawled on the ground, a bunch of zombies crouching over her.
“With a quick hack, bloody splat, make a shogger groan.” He barreled into them, bowling them out of the way.
Nils came to his knees, clutching his throat and hawking up phlegm. Blood streamed from one ear. Ilesa scrabbled about for her sword and dagger, bleeding from half a dozen cuts. Nameless stepped over her to hammer his axe into the face of a groping zombie.