by Mark Johnson
“They’re scaling the walls, Sergeant!” Zale called.
Thick cables of Tower-controlled vibrations stretched from the Barracks’ gem enclosure, over his head and down the Wall’s shaft. The tendrils twisted around, securing themselves to the climbing cadvers.
Those vibration flows would steadily drain the cadvers’ chaos energy, weakening them and scaring them away before they came much further.
He magnified his vision, a tide of dread surging in his gut.
“Tokkus!” Sarra yelled, halfway into the doorway. “The gems aren’t working on the cadvers! The weaves aren’t touching them!”
The sergeant pulled back from the side. “Fall back, we will not hold the turret,” he boomed. “Everyone down! Secure the trapdoor!”
“What happened?” Paan asked Zale.
They followed the retreating novices, jumping through the trap into the corridor beneath, ignoring the ladder. Above them Tokkus bolted the door with a thick metal slab, pulling the ladder down after him.
“The cadvers slipped through the weaves,” Zale said. “The Tower weavers did everything right. We’ve got some sort of super-cadvers set against us.”
“How could —”
A thunder beneath their feet forced everyone to the ground. Cadver screams erupted from the lower level. Zale righted a crying, pigtailed novice by the back of her shirt.
“Guards! Defend the internal staircase and the turret door,” Tokkus called.
“Cadvers climbing with explosives?” shouted Paan, rushing to the staircase. “Blowing their way in from outside? What’s wrong with this Polis?”
He’d never heard of cadvers with explosives: nothing remotely like that. Gods, the four of them were disaster magnets. What had they done to deserve this?
“Paan.” Zale seized his friend’s shoulder and spoke low into his ear. “I know what we said about secrets, but if we hold back against the cadvers once they break in here, people die.”
“Then we don’t hold back, Zale.” Paan grimaced.
Tokkus passed out weapons from the storage room. Zale tested his spear’s weight and balance as the novices and initiates huddled against the corridor’s wall, protected by the men. The dim, white glowbulb flickered. He watched Nocev pull Henk from his father, thrusting him into the middle of the novices.
Cadver screams penetrated the trapdoor and rickety window shutters, raising the hairs on the back of Zale’s neck and forearms. No creature of the Gods’ creation should have been able to make such an unholy racket.
Tokkus stood at the front, closest to the door. “Aim for the knees!” he called.
Novices whimpering. Heavy breathing, spears creaking. Through the walls, humanoid outlines delineated by chaos energy crawled up the walls on all fours. Closer, never slowing, until they reached the trapdoor above.
“Ready flare flows!” came Sarra’s voice. “Distribute on my mark!”
The trapdoor trembled under rapid blows. The girls screamed. Zale gritted his teeth. Chaos outlines looped circles around the trapdoor. Seeking a way in. Beneath his feet, chaos outlines bounded about the lower level, leading towards the turret.
The trapdoor shattered.
All the corridor’s glowbulbs burst into sparks at once, leaving only moonlight.
“That’s impossible. They run on electricity!” Paan shouted over the novices’ screams.
A massive cadver fell from the roof, landing on two feet with a triumphal, ear-shattering shriek. The sound waves dizzied Zale as they bounced around the room.
It had been at least fifty years since the creature’s infection, judging by its two-metre height and hard, reflective skin. Its once-human skull had black eyes and a jutting, toothless jaw. It grinned when it saw them, yellow gastric juices dripping from the corner of its mouth.
Zale and Paan linked without hesitation, their bodies becoming as one, four hands operating with a single mind and advancing to meet the crouching creature.
They closed the distance as more cadvers followed the first. Time slowed as they swung their staves, slowing the cadvers’ scrabbling and lunges, elongating their screams.
Pale claws came near to raking Zale’s face. Parrying blows, Zale and Paan struck back and forth with one another’s rhythms. Never seeing one another, only feeling and knowing where one ducked and the other was vulnerable. Their bond made them a four-armed mechanism, their spinning spears tripping legs and demolishing noseless faces.
Flashes of vibration struck from the novice circle, stunning the cadvers off balance. Such strong vibrations should have been an agony, like nails hammered into flesh, but the monsters seemed oblivious.
Someone choking. Zale turned. Jespow, his neck in the one-handed grip of that first cadver, half his throat in its other hand, dripping blood and chunks of flesh.
Jespow still lived, clutching at his throat. Eyes wide, mouth open in a rictus of pain or horror. His eyes darted from the leering monster holding him by the neck, to Henk, sprawled on the ground. Jespow’s arms flailed slower, and slower, and stopped. Hanging at his sides.
When the cadver noticed Zale, it let Jespow fall.
It crouched to leap at him, then stopped, motionless. All the cadvers stopped: every cadver in the corridor. Something passed over the face of Jespow’s killer, its wide jaw dropping open and its neck craned back.
Was that… ecstasy?
Roaring flooded the world, the air searing with sound.
A flash ripped away Zale’s sight. The floor juddered and shook with another explosion. His knees buckled. Too much energy and movement for his acute sight to handle. That second explosion had been greater than the one that had opened WestBarracksWall’s lower levels to invading cadvers.
Then Paan was in his head, telling him to get up. Something insubstantial fell on his face. Dust? No, the smell of plaster. The mortar around him groaned, and something further away collapsed loudly.
Waves of roiling chaos distorted the world, like watching through a window pane of running water. Paan was swinging his stave at something. On the ground, Henk nudged his father’s body. He looked up above Zale, mewling. To where the monster loomed, grinning. It bent and wrapped its fingers around Zale’s throat.
The edges of his vision blurred, narrowing slowly toward the center as his energy, all his will to live, was sucked away. The cadver’s leer was all he saw. The cadvers screamed in one voice — a backdrop of sound punctuated by human shouts and wails, serenading his plunge into darkness. Stale body odor overwhelmed him as the cadver pushed at his windpipe with both hands. Sour breath poured from a toothless gray mouth. Zale’s lungs seized and choked with the little air he had left.
His name came to his ears faintly between sobs. Zale, Zale, Zale! The boy — what was his name? — needed him. Dimly, he saw bloody hands, his own, clawing, pawing at the cadver’s throat, trying to get a hold on its slippery, hard skin.
The monster pinned his arms, emaciated legs jamming him to the floor. It grinned in demented glee. Its gums were no longer red, turning gray like the rest of the world. Zale drifted. There was no more sound, nor sight, nor touch.
Zale.
He hadn’t always been called that. At home, he’d been called Zalaran by family and friends, by the servants. The first person to call him Zale had been Ina.
On that old smoky ruin of crumbling bricks and rotting wooden frames in The Bird district, they’d sat on the highest crumbling stone cornice, watching the world from a height neither had shared with anyone. That day, Ina had beaten him up there, jumping more precisely and faster with those impossible reflexes of hers, clinging to the slightest outcrops. She was strong, even in her fingers. He always saw the places that were harder and safer, or those with mortar he could push his fingers into.
She asked him to point out his home. The Dancing Bridge district was hidden by hills and buildings, but she knew
the direction. Strangely, there was no judging him for being wealthy. That had been what made her magic, teased from a fairytale. Using his unusual sight against the night, he’d watched the wind slowly tease her blonde hair out of her long ponytail. She’d kissed him, not the other way around as other boys had said it should be. His first kiss.
And entwined in one another’s arms, watching the district’s flickering glowbulbs, she told him that Zalaran would never do: that he was Zale.
Zale.
He drifted at the side, watching the cadver strangle him. Time moved slowly in colors, as hard white fingers pushed out veins on his purple neck. Henk lay beside them, a wordless howl escaping his mouth. It had been a short life, but at least he’d tried. Henk howled again. The cadver would go for him next. Close by, Paan strained against two cadvers.
Zale.
He wasn’t surprised to see Ina. It was right that she’d be at his end, as he’d been at hers. She smiled, her face young and beautiful. The dead man on the ground was older, scarred. Burned out.
He pointed at Henk.
There. Can we do something for the boy?
The cadver shook Zale’s white head by the neck. No resistance.
Ina looked at him with a sad smile, like she expected him to say something else.
I can’t help him.
She nodded agreement, encouraging him with a hopeful smile.
Ina, will you help him?
She shook her head slowly, wistfully, sadly. The cadver looked at Henk and grinned wider.
Look, if you won’t do anything, then help me do something!
Ina laughed in delight. The world brightened, bursting into color and life. People flashed into existence, materializing from nowhere. Their ageless features looked familiar, though he couldn’t place them. They smiled and took him by the shoulders, the arms. Others knelt by his lifeless body, surrounding him and the cadver.
“There, Zale, what took you so long?” Ina laughed as she reached out to his face.
And there was light.
He pushed, and weight dropped from his arms. He pulled hands from his neck, color and sound streaming into his head as he took his first breath. His fingers ached, his neck stiff and swollen. He stood on the cadver’s chest, holding its wrists in one hand each. It hissed its surprise.
The creature’s eyes widened, confused at his resurrection. Zale flexed, then strained, the cadver’s muscles whining and bones popping. Its arms broke out of their sockets. The thing hissed and gaped. Zale stepped off its chest and dropped its arms. Even at this, it didn’t seem in pain, simply convulsing and spitting in fury. Henk stared.
Zale dropped the arms, still flailing.
“Finish it,” he said. The thing flopped uselessly, like a beached fish on bloody ground.
Knowledge and memory bloomed together. The memory of the staves lining the walls of his old home, their weight in his hands and their smooth, shining surfaces. The knowledge of how to make that stave by pulling on Cess’s ability.
As he rushed three cadvers, his family heirloom snapped into being. A perfect replica of the Morgenheth bo, as heavy now as it had been then, but it swung like a feather at the first cadver to notice him. Zale made contact.
“A new record, gentlemen,” said Cess, not turning from the window of the room they’d slept in for only one night before the attack had occurred. “It took less than one week living in a new place to break it. Either that, or we have had exceptionally bad luck to stumble on HopeWall cluster the day it’s attacked for the first time in hundreds of years.”
“This wasn’t our fault, Cess. Not this time,” said Paan. “The TowerMiss said this was coming.”
Cess didn’t look away from the window. “Would the cadvers have come so soon if we hadn’t warned the BarracksSir and weavers? They changed their search patterns because of us, and the cadvers attacked soon as they realized.”
“We don’t know that,” said Nic. “And rushing them into an attack may have been better than letting the Enemy have all the time It wanted.”
A woman’s plaintive wail sounded below. Zale didn’t want to look out the window, for he knew what he’d see. Almost two hundred corpses, all male, covered in blankets. Most with women, children, or other men, kneeling by their sides. Some still held the deceased guards, smeared with their own blood and viscera.
Paan winced at the woman’s wordless howl. “We’re alive,” he said. “So are a lot of people. That’s all that matters.”
There was a creak of mortar. Something heavy fell and broke nearby. A spray of plaster dusted their feet.
“A few other things also matter,” Cess said. “Our new home? Dead and gone.”
Nic leaned forward. “Zale, what did you see? How could one explosive weave destabilize an entire structure?”
Zale rubbed the scarf hiding the large purple bruise encircling his neck. The problem when they took injuries was not in hiding the fact they’d been injured, but in how fast they recovered. Within days the bruise would be gone, to be replaced by questions, should anyone notice.
He winced, thinking back. “When the gem blew, I couldn’t handle it, couldn’t think straight. So much energy was swimming around up there I couldn’t deal with it. Chaos and vibrations reacted against each other, and I shut down. I can’t tell you what happened. I didn’t even know the gem had exploded until after the cadvers ran off.”
Nic shrugged, leaving an echo of angry frustration in Zale’s mind.
“That reminds me,” Zale said. “Did anyone see what happened to Henk? Is he all right?”
“Tokkus helped him carry his father’s body to his mother and sisters,” Cess said. “His mother wasn’t in a good way.”
There was a long silence.
“Zale saw Ina again,” Paan said quietly.
Cess and Nic went very still.
Why did they have such trouble believing him? Immersion Chambers, yes. Unheard-of powers, sure. Exploding cadvers, why not? A ghost? Utterly impossible.
“You all felt me leave the bond,” Zale said instead, pulling off the scarf and pointing to his neck. “I was dead. Would you like to argue, Cess?”
Cess raised his hands in surrender. “There’s no denying that, Zale. I wasn’t going to.”
“I saw her, and she helped me come back. Paan, could I have made the stave, the Morgenheth bo — my family sigil weapon — any other way?”
The bond between them dampened and their eyes screamed at one another. Paan licked his lips, looking down at a pile of plaster-dust on the floor.
“There was no way for Zale to survive,” he said reluctantly.
“Cess, I know you felt me pull on your ability. I made a stave out of nothing but energy, the way you can. And Paan saw me. Does anyone think I could have made something that big or detailed without help? Even you can’t do that Cess!”
Cess dropped his shoulders and looked Zale in the eye. “Fine, Zale. Fine.”
“You lot can’t pretend I’m crazy anymore,” Zale said, folding his arms.
“So, what did she tell you?” said Nic.
“She… she didn’t, really. I only asked her for help.”
“And you upending that cadver and manifesting your family weapon was that help?”
Zale nodded. There was little left to say.
“One more question,” said Cess eventually. “Kemmer’s first act after sunrise was to condemn WestBarracksWall. So. Where do we sleep tonight?”
Zale looked back over his shoulder, through the walls and into the Tower. “It looks like the Elders and Councilors are meeting. Maybe they’ll have an idea?”
10
Twenty-eight hours. Twenty-eight hours without sleep, and Sarra could barely keep her eyes open. Her loose, tangled hair itched the back of her neck, and she found herself swaying from exhaustion. She almost reached a hand over to N
ocev to steady herself.
Was she dizzy from exhaustion, or the memories of what she’d survived? People had died around her last night, but it didn’t seem real; it couldn’t be real. She was standing before the Elders and Councilors; the highest-ranked weavers and laywomen. But she could hear the terror of the novices’ screams and smell the broken bodies. Even with the glowbulbs blown and unable to see properly, she still couldn’t forget.
The boy who’d lost his father had said those two men from Armer had kept the cadvers back all by themselves. That would have been a sight to see, had she not been focused on the vibration defenses.
“We saw nothing substantial,” Sarra said to the gathering. “It was more like… residue of chaos weaves, but no actual weaving itself.” She blinked hard, hoping her eyes might moisten a little. “I’m sorry I didn’t have the presence of mind to look closer, but we were trying to weave enough to distract the cadvers so the guards could get in some good blows. But… we couldn’t help all the guards. There wasn’t enough light to show us the top level, because the glowbulbs all broke before the gem was destroyed. Our weaves had very little effect, and credit for our survival should go to Sergeant Tokkus and his guards, Miss.”
Miss Emment, the DefenseMiss, thumped the conference table. “An explosion that large, all the glowbulbs extinguished, and you two saw nothing? It’s not possible, Initiate.”
“I’m truly sorry, Miss Emment,” said Nocev. “Neither of us saw any chaos weaves. And barely any chaos residue.”
Miss Emment sat down and put her head in her hands.Sarra wanted to join her. HopeWall was supposed to be the safest place in the Territories. The shining beacon and hope of all Cenephan refugees. And nigh-invulnerable cadvers had torn the four BarracksWalls apart within ten minutes. Almost as soon as each Wall had been destabilized and its gem mechanisms destroyed, the cadvers had turned and jumped from the tops and run back out, screaming into the night. For all she knew, they might have kept on rampaging right into HopeWall itself. Right into the Tower.