Blade and Bone

by Jon Sprunk

  Niko glanced around the next corner and signaled back. The Blades set out, moving deeper into the town.

  Like most Akeshian cities, Omikur clustered around a central hub of civic buildings. This was also where the upper castes lived, close to the seat of power. As such, Three Moons expected to encounter resistance sooner or later. The silence gathered around them like a stifling blanket as they moved from street to street. His nerves vibrated like a stretched cord every time a stone or piece of debris clattered underfoot, and one thought echoed in his head. This is a trap. This is a trap. This is a—

  Niko stopped at the crossing and held up a closed fist. The mercs pressed against the buildings on either side of the street, weapons ready. Three Moons strained his senses, but everything was quiet. The spirits were silent, too. That made him even more nervous.

  Standing next to the captain, he whispered, “Looks like no one’s home.”

  Instead of commenting, Captain Paranas eased his way forward to join the scouts. Three Moons stuck with him. Thirty paces ahead, the street ended in a broad chasm cutting through the town. Shards of broken tiles crunched underfoot as the Blades approached, stopping at the edge of the impediment. The trench was at least fifteen feet across at its narrowest point and extended through the buildings on either side of the street. Strata of mud pavement and earth descended far down into the crevice before it was lost in darkness. A sickening odor rose from the trench, making his stomach curdle. Something lurked in those depths. He could feel it. Something that did not belong to the natural world.

  Three Moons muttered, “Coming here was a mistake. We should leave.”

  Captain Paranas was studying their surroundings. “Not until we do what we came for.”

  All was quiet, but an atmosphere of malice radiated from the empty windows and stained walls around them. Even from the flat, gray sky above. Three Moons didn’t know how he’d missed it before. “You don’t understand. I don’t think there’s anyone left alive here.”

  Captain Paranas grunted. “What? In the entire town? That’s ridiculous. You’re supposed to be our ace in the hole. So try to shine some positive light on the situation, eh?”

  “Sorry, Cap. But there’s some bad mojo here.”

  “Get hold of yourself, Moons. Where’s Niko? Niko!”

  Three Moons winced as the captain’s words echoed down the street. Maybe he was overreacting.

  Niko appeared beside them. Dust caked his face. “Here, Captain. I think I found a route around the divide.”

  “Good. Your people take point. Everyone else, form up on their asses.”

  The mercs said nothing as they filed past. Three Moons took his customary spot in the center of the formation, heading north along the edge of the trench and into a dark alley. Three Moons squinted at the thin slice of sky overhead. The sunlight was fading fast, and he didn’t want to be inside these walls when night fell. Then he heard a sound, like a stone dropping on hard pavement and skittering away. He spun around, one hand dropping to the fetish bag tied to his belt. There was nothing behind them but buildings and broken street.

  “What?” Pie-Eye asked, looking back too.

  Three Moons shook his head. “Nothing. Just hearing things.”

  They had hardly gone another dozen yards before Three Moons stopped again. This time he was positive he had heard something. A different noise this time, almost like dry leather being dragged over stone. “What was that?”

  Captain Paranas whistled, and the entire band came to a halt. Three Moons strained to listen. There it was again. Coming from one of the nearby buildings, though he couldn’t say which one for sure.

  The captain pointed at the nearest doors on either side of the alley. The Blades formed up without a word. While Niko and Jauna watched from the ends of the street, the rest of the band assaulted the entrances. Three Moons held back a moment as they rushed inside. Fear emanated from the doorways, so thick he could taste it. Still, he followed his brothers into the left-hand entry.

  They charged into a long washroom dominated by two large copper tubs. Smashed potsherds were scattered about. Dharpa and Finum stood in the doorway at the far end. Three Moons and the captain joined them at the threshold of a larger room that occupied most of the building’s lower level. It looked to be some sort of woodworking factory, with long tables cluttered with metal tools and raw timber. Two closed doors faced them from the opposite wall. Just as they started to enter, a crash sounded from back in the alley.

  Captain Paranas ordered them to stay put as he ran back outside. Three Moons hesitated. There was something wrong in this building that tickled his otherworldly senses. But he followed the captain out anyway.

  Outside, the alley was empty except for the scouts. Niko gave him a hard look, as if asking what was going on. Three Moons held up his hands in ignorance as he entered the door on the other side, into a dyer’s shop. Wooden tubs and drying racks lined the walls. Ino’s squad stood in the middle of the room, all of them staring at the deep shadows shrouding the far end of the chamber. Low sounds issued from the gloom, and it took Three Moons a moment to realize they were the sounds of a fight.

  “What are you standing around for?” he shouted as he pushed past them.

  As his eyes adjusted, Three Moons saw Harunda and the captain grappling with someone. It wasn’t until he moved closer that he noticed it was a civilian. Short and thin and mostly bald with stringy gray hair hanging down to his collar. He had gaunt features as if he hadn’t eaten in days, and his hands were black with filth. Harunda was holding the man around the waist while Captain Paranas slammed him repeatedly in the face with the pommel of his sword. Three Moons was about to demand they stop their attack on an unarmed civilian when the stench hit him. A sickening odor like maggot-filled meat that had been left out in the sun for days clogged his throat. He gagged and coughed at the same time.

  The civilian grabbed Harunda by the arm and tried to bite him. Captain Paranas gave up trying to subdue the man and stabbed him through the stomach instead. The blood froze in Three Moons’s veins as the civilian ignored the blade piercing his guts. The man’s gaping jaws reached toward Harunda’s exposed forearm. His teeth were stained brown, his tongue bright red. His eyes were black and empty.

  Struggling against his revulsion, Three Moons wracked his brain for things to use against the possessed. Silver and fire topped the list. As he reached into his bag to find some silver coins, he heard a meaty thud. Captain Paranas had brought down his sword with both hands. The blade plunged into the side of the civilian’s skull. The bone crumbled inward through the ruined flesh. Thick, black blood oozed from the wound, spilling a dark river down the civilian’s shoulder. Finally, he fell to the floor.

  Harunda slumped against the edge of a dyeing tub, with a hand pressed against his neck. “Fuck, Captain! What kind of shit show have we stumbled into here? That guy . . .”

  “What happened?” Three Moons asked.

  “He came out of nowhere,” Pie-Eye answered. “He didn’t say nothing. Just charged us with his bare hands. Before I knew it, he was all over me, scratching and biting.”

  Harunda pulled away his hand to reveal gouge marks on his neck, trickling blood.

  “Get that cleaned out,” Captain Paranas ordered. “Everyone, back outside.”

  The sound of creaking wood made Three Moons look over as three people—a man, a woman, and a teenaged boy with a disheveled ponytail—staggered out of a hallway at the back of the room. Their black eyes stared out from the gloom.

  Captain Paranas backed away with his sword held before him. “Everyone, out! Now!”

  “Captain!” a brother yelled from outside.

  Spitting curses, Three Moons shoved Harunda out the door and into the alley ahead of him. They waited until the captain and the rest of their brothers were out, and then slammed the door shut behind them.

  Dharpa and Finum were in the alley. Three Moons didn’t have to ask why as they held their shoulders to the door across th
e way. Heavy blows pounded from the other side.

  “We were attacked by crazy women!” Finum said.

  “A whole mess of them,” Dharpa added. “They came out of nowhere and swarmed us. We barely got out.”

  Three Moons looked down the alley in both directions. Citizens attacking armed soldiers? What was going on? Had everyone in this town gone insane? It was more than that. He couldn’t get those black eyes out of his mind. He whispered to the spirits, but there was still no answer.

  Captain Paranas spared no time. “You did the right thing. Secure those doors. Niko! Find us a way—”

  A loud thud echoed from the door behind him as one of the wooden panels snapped outward. A grubby arm reached through the gap. While Dharpa and Finum leaned on the door, Ino chopped at the thrashing arm with his falchion. It took three cuts before the arm came off. Only a few spurts of black blood spilled from the severed stump, but a repulsive stench billowed forth. Choking against the foul odor, Three Moons turned away.

  “We need to get out of here, Cap,” he said. “Now.”

  “I’m starting to see it that way, too. We’ll regroup outside town and rethink this whole situation. Niko?”

  Dharpa and Finum wedged the factory doorway shut with loose pieces of wood. Ino and Mesane did the same for the door to the dyer’s shop. The pounding continued from inside, but it looked as if the doors would hold for a while. Three Moons glanced at all the windows facing the alley and wondered how many more crazy people were hiding inside.

  Niko jogged down the alley. “We can get back, but I suggest we hurry. There’s movement all around us. I don’t think we want to stick around to find out if they’re friendly.”

  Captain Paranas nodded. “Lead the way. The rest of you, fall in and stay tight.”

  Niko started back toward the trench at a quick hustle. The Blades moved with purpose, crossbows out. Three Moons stayed by the captain. He was relieved their commander had seen the wisdom of a tactical retreat, but what they had witnessed disturbed him. What could have changed these people? A plague? Some infection that decimated the town and left only these horrific wretches? No, he sensed it was worse than that. The dearth of spirits nagged at him. I fucking hate running. Let me die standing still. Preferably in the shade with a cool drink in my hand.

  The scouts abruptly changed direction, turning down a side alley between a pair of houses. After a few zigzags, they came to a broad street. The backs of tall buildings faced them on either side. Three Moons recognized them as temples by their stylized construction. Some were merely shrines with a stone pagoda and a couple of statues, but others were as big as palaces, decked out with gilt and glitter.

  The mercenaries hurried down the street. Three Moons heard sounds in the distance but couldn’t pinpoint them. The echoes were all wrong. A groan sounded behind him. He glanced back, but nothing was there.

  A shout made him spin back around. For a second it looked as if a mound of garbage was attacking Finum. Then he saw the long, spindly arms reaching from the refuse, its fingers crooked into gnarled claws. It was a woman with dirt-streaked hair and the broken shaft of an arrow protruding from her rib cage just below the right breast. Her mouth hung open as she lurched forward.

  The Blades reacted like an angry beast, surrounding the woman and pinning her to the street. By the time Three Moons arrived, she had been hacked apart, both arms and one leg separated from her trunk, with dozens of punctures all across her body, but still she kept moving until Ino planted a dagger in her forehead. Then her black eyes rolled back in her head and she spat out a mouthful of dark bile.

  “Holy shit!” Dharpa shouted. “What’s wrong with these people?”

  “They’re fucking insane!” Harunda shook the gore from his sword. It oozed like black tar.

  Three Moons knelt beside the body. It was still now, with no sign of the terrible power it had possessed only moments ago. Black spittle dripped from the mouth. The teeth were sharp, like a dog’s, but she had definitely been human, once.

  “Wights,” he whispered.

  “What did you say?” Captain Paranas asked.

  Three Moons cleared his throat. “Some call them ghuls. My grandfather called them wights. The dead possessed by evil spirits and brought back to an unholy semblance of life.”

  “Damn me! Who would do such a thing?”

  Three Moons shrugged. “People willing to mess with the darkest arts without caring what it does to their souls.”

  “So how do we fight them?”

  “It’s not easy. Burning them’s best, or so I’ve heard. Never seen one before today.”

  Captain Paranas shook his head. “Fuck it. We’re getting out of here. Niko, find us an exit! Cut down anything that gets in our way!”

  Three Moons looked around for a clear avenue of escape, but there was none to be had. Yet, the Bronze Blades were all business. This was what they knew, what they were trained to do. They were killers. Lovable and crazy, perhaps, but killers at heart. As long as they held to that, they had a chance.

  “Captain!”

  Three Moons followed Captain Paranas to join the scouts at the end of the block, and felt his heart drop into his stomach. A pack of twenty or so people, or what had once been people—shopkeeps, washerwomen, slaves, soldiers, scribes—were coming toward them from the east in a wild, seething mob. Their gait was more like a shambling gallop than a true sprint, as if they had lost all sense of humanity and returned to their animalistic roots.

  There were alleys to the north and south, but they were narrow and dark. Anything could be hiding in those shadows.

  Paranas pointed to the approaching mob. “Ino! Form up your squad in front. Everyone else, stack behind them. One volley with crossbows, and then we charge.”

  Niko frowned. “Cap—”

  “Your scouts have rearguard, Sergeant,” Paranas snapped back at him.

  As the Blades readied their weapons, Three Moons watched the advancing pack of locals. He reached into his fetish bag and sorted through his paraphernalia. “Captain, I’m not sure what use I’ll be. The spirits aren’t talking to me here.”

  “Do what you can, Moons. We either push through or we die here.”

  “I picked a shitty time to stop drinking,” Three Moons muttered.

  Strings twanged as crossbow quarrels were launched into the mob, and then Ino’s squad led the advance. They met the enemy between the high walls of two abutting temples. Three Moons wished they had heavy infantry up front clad in mail and tall shields. As it was, the fighting was bloody and vicious. The wights fought like beasts, clawing and biting. Even when stabbed through the vitals, they kept coming. And their eyes . . .

  Three Moons couldn’t help himself from staring into those hungry, black orbs. They promised an unholy appetite that even death could not satiate. Teba and Finum went down under the first wave of clawing, gouging assailants. The captain tried to rally the company, but the best they could do was form a tight cluster in the midst of the insanity.

  A door in one of the temple walls banged open, and three ragged wights shambled out. Akeshian lancers, judging by their conical helms and tattered uniforms. The flesh of their faces was wasted away. They had lost their weapons, but that didn’t make them any less intimidating as they leapt into the fray.

  Captain Paranas met them with a broad swing of his sword that cut into the neck of one wight, tore clean through, and smashed into the cheek of the creature beside it. Dark blood and broken teeth exploded across the clay pavement.

  Three Moons picked up a broken brick from the ground. Without the spirits’ help, he didn’t have many tricks in his bag, and there wasn’t much time to consider alternatives. So, fighting his distaste for this kind of magic, he gathered a portion of his own life force and infused it into the brick. Cold pain cut through him as the stone shot from his hand, as if it had been launched by a trebuchet, and nearly took off the head of an incoming wight. The creature dropped to the ground, and Three Moons almost collapsed, t
oo, as a wave of vertigo crashed down on him.

  Captain Paranas thrust his sword through the temple of the undead lancer he had almost decapitated, and the blade stuck for a moment. Before he could pull it free, the last wight was on him. Just like the woman in the garbage, the creature was immensely strong. It tore open the captain’s studded jacket with its bare hands. Paranas tried to retreat, dragging his trapped weapon, but the wight had latched onto him and held on fast. Three Moons came around behind the creature and stabbed the point of his knife up through its jaw, pinning tongue to palate. Black drool ran down from the wound, but the wight continued clawing at the captain.

  Doors banged open down the street, and more undead appeared from nearby alleyways and temple yards, perhaps drawn by the fracas. Hunched figures loomed on the rooftops above. Undead. Scores of them.

  Pain exploded in Three Moons’s right shoulder as the wight with the pierced palate twisted his arm halfway out of joint. He kicked at its knee, but he might as well have been kicking a tree stump for all the good it did. The undead soldier kept wrenching on his arm as if it meant to tear it off. As Three Moons struggled to free himself, a steel point exploded from the wight’s left eye socket. The thing thrashed for a moment, and then collapsed to the ground. Three Moons staggered back as his arm was released. Niko knelt behind the dead wight, yanking his dagger free.

  “Try not to die, old man,” Niko said with a wink. Then he dashed off to rejoin the melee.

  The rest of the scouts were firing at the undead approaching from the west. Shots to the head dropped them in their tracks, but all other wounds were ignored.

  Three Moons knelt down to retrieve his knife, holding his injured arm close to his body. His right shoulder burned with pain, reminding him for the thousandth time that he was a fool to still be caught up in these types of adventures. I should be sitting in a comfortable inn with my feet up and a jug of whiskey at my elbow.