by James Lowder
“Shall I build a pyre?” Piotr asked, “or should we have the monsters do it?”
“Neither,” Alexi said. “We break camp now. There is no time to build a fire hot enough to burn the bodies.”
Piotr shook his head emphatically. “I will not leave my Greta to the crows,” he said. “This is not our way.”
Alexi clapped a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Much we have done today is not our way, Brother.” He stared sadly at Katan’s corpse, at Nikolas, who lingered over the friend he had murdered.
“What good are all these sacrifices if we lose ourselves?” Piotr asked. “What are we fighting so hard to save?” He walked to the corpse of his beautiful Greta. With a short sword he found on the ground, he began to scrape the beginnings of a grave.
Alexi sighed raggedly. “Dig a grave,” he told the zombies. “Make it deep enough and wide enough to hold all the Vistani you killed.” He called to Piotr. “Let them do it. Come help me sift through the splinters of the raunie’s vardo. We need to find her strongbox.”
By the time the zombies finished with their work and the corpses had been laid to rest, the sky had clouded over. A light rain fell upon the three men as they looked upon the shallow grave. Alexi said a few brief words in Patterna, commending the fallen Vistani to their ancestors and wishing them fair travels beyond the Mists.
“Now you are no longer bound to any lands. Now you are free,” he finished quietly. The silence that followed was marred only by the hollow spatter of rain on the zombies’ armor.
Only a short while after the Vistani left the clearing, bound for Nedragaard Keep with their shuffling guardians, a figure separated from the trees. His colorless clothes seemed to match the bleak, rain-sodden day, yet his spirits were bright as he approached the grave.
“A thousand pardons for the indignity I am about to inflict upon you,” the Bloody Cobbler said in all sincerity to the figures piled beneath the mounded earth. “It would have been much simpler for everyone had they left you where you fell. Still, this is all in a good cause.”
He raised his arms in much the same fashion as Lord Soth had earlier. “Up and out of there,” the Cobbler ordered. “I summon you up, and you must obey.”
Whistling an ancient traveling song once popular among the Knights of Solamnia, he turned his back on the shuddering, churning grave mound and walked to a fallen log. There he rested a book-like leather case the same pale color as his clothes.
The Cobbler glanced back once, just in time to see the first fingers claw at the dismal daylight. He smiled and let the case fall open. Carefully, he began to unpack the tools of his trade.
Thirteen
Ganelon looked down at the severed ear in his hand. Slowly, he brought the piece of rotting flesh to his lips and whispered into it. The effect was instantaneous. Bratu and the other lunatics, even his beloved Helain, hurried from where they had strayed across the hillside. They huddled together at his feet and looked up at him expectantly.
Beyond the cowering madmen, at the foot of the hill, lay their destination. The Invidians who lived in this part of the Border’s Edge Mountains referred to the huge field as Malocchio’s Dream Garden. How appropriate, mused Ganelon, that it should be so dismal and twisted.
A low wall of rough-hewn stone surrounded a riot of misshapen greenery. Emerald tendrils, almost like veins, crept from the garden through gaps in the wall. They did not seem intent on escaping the place, but shoring up the stones to keep trespassers out. From the looks of things, the garden had few enough of those.
The greenery was horribly overgrown, the paths choked with weeds. There seemed to be no clear pattern to the beds. They ranged in size from smaller than a child to larger than one of the massive carts used to haul salt at the mine. Some were bunched together, others isolated. The only thing they had in common was the sort of plant crouched upon each: a large, thorn-snarled rose bush with flowers the crimson of freshly spilled blood. Together the blooms formed a blanket of red that resembled a gaping wound slashed into the Invidian countryside.
The semblance was chillingly appropriate. The garden was located upon the site of a massacre, the spot where Malocchio Aderre himself had slaughtered an entire caravan of Vistani. As it was Malocchio’s ambition that all Vistani be similarly butchered, so the field had been tagged his “Dream Garden.” It was no less a monument to madness than the Whispering Beast’s hedge maze. Ganelon hoped that the congruence would work in his favor as he readied his ragged band of lunatics to begin their perilous work within.
“Go to the garden wall and wait,” Ganelon said to the two dozen or so soldiers in his mad army.
A few evinced some small comprehension. Most just stared at him blankly. He sighed and repeated the order into the ear the Beast had given him. They immediately turned to the task.
Ganelon wondered what they heard when he spoke to them, if the voice was his own or if the Beast’s gruesome present gave it a sinister sound. From what the Beast had said about Helain, she couldn’t hear the commands at all. She only aped the others, her guilty conscience goading her to take on their punishments and fears as her own.
It pained Ganelon to see his beloved so distanced from the person he knew her to be. Still, hints of her former self shone through now and then. When the lunatics were at their most manic, she would go suddenly calm. They whirled and capered about; she remained still. The breeze of their passing would stir her red locks and billow her torn, soiled nightdress. Through it all she stood unmoving, letting them swirl harmlessly around her like wasps swarming a gravestone.
He watched her now as she walked atop the low stone wall. She turned, as if she could feel his longing eyes upon her. No spark of recognition lit her face as she returned his gaze. Ganelon finally looked away. She was lost to him.
With a heavy heart, the young man focused again on the task at hand and took a quick accounting of his wards. Most had reached the wall. Once there, they took up their usual crazed behavior.
One woman, whose name Ganelon had forgotten, walked with direction and determination for short spans, only to stop suddenly. All sign of intelligence fled her thin face until, just as suddenly, she would pluck at her hair until she came away with precisely eight long strands. Tossing them over her shoulder, she would turn sharply and repeat the routine. A few more repetitions, and she ended up close to where she’d started.
Some lunatics wept openly, others sat on the ground and rocked back and forth. Only Bratu ventured into the garden. He wandered aimlessly among the maze of plants, slapping at his ruined ears and pointing at the beds. It was a gesture many of the others, still perched atop the low wall, soon copied. They were obviously frightened by something in the garden, something hidden from Ganelon’s view by the weeds and the wall.
Ganelon hobbled down to the garden. As he wrestled his braced leg over the wall, he noticed that the roses’ fragrance was twined with some other, more ominous odor. It was pungent and earthy, the smell of old rot. At first he suspected the black blight spider-webbed across many of the plants. A closer inspection of the nearest rose bush revealed the actual source of the smell.
The bases of the rose bushes were thick and woody, completely denuded of leaves. They resembled nothing so much as human bones, a trait that allowed them to blend seamlessly with the old skeletons from which they grew.
That was the thing that had so alarmed Bratu and the others. Each of the rose bushes was rooted in a corpse. Malocchio had left the butchered Vistani where they fell, then planted his victory garden amongst the dead. Some of the bodies were partially buried. Some lay atop the dark loam. The branches so resembled bleached bones that the remains were invisible from a distance.
As he walked the weed-choked paths Ganelon realized that some of the corpses were newer than others. They still retained some scraps of desiccated flesh or some tatter of clothing. Around a few of the beds lay coins and small trinkets, even a rusting knife or two. The remains of failed thieves, no doubt, he guessed.
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The thought made Ganelon stop dead in his tracks. He peered more closely at one of the bushes. Through the mold-flecked leaves, he could make out wicked greenish-yellow thorns running along the stems and branches. Ribbons of mummified flesh dangled from some of the spikes. Others were dark with old blood.
An insight blazed across his mind: Those aren’t thorns. They’re teeth. These are corpse roses.
The intuition’s clarity stunned Ganelon. He wondered briefly at its origin, but left that problem for another time. The information it had imparted was indisputable. They were all in terrible danger.
“Don’t touch the roses,” he said into the severed ear. “Stay on that side of the wall!” He directed Bratu to join the others. The Vistana was reluctant to leave the garden, as if he could sense that these poor souls were his people. Eventually, Ganelon took him by the hand and forced him over the wall.
His charges out of harm’s way for the moment, Ganelon returned to his examination of the corpse roses. There was no way around it; without the roses, the Beast would not cure Helain. Cautiously he plucked one of the flowers. The stem shuddered and oozed blood as red as the bloom but did not lash out at him. So long as Bratu and the others could harvest the roses carefully, they’d be all right.
He walked back to the wall, giving the bushes as wide a berth as possible. Through the Beast’s charm, he gathered the madmen who had strayed from the wall. That none of them had ventured into the garden, as he had ordered earlier, gave Ganelon some small hope as he outlined his orders to them. If he was precise enough in his instructions, they might survive this ordeal.
“All right,” he said, “remember why we’re here. We are collecting roses for the Beast.” At the mention of their tormentor’s name, the madmen whimpered piteously. “He does not want leaves or stems or thorns-especially thorns. Whatever you do, do not touch any part of the rose bushes except the flowers.”
Ganelon slung the small pack he had been carrying from his shoulder. “The sack tied to your waist is for holding the flowers.” He dropped the bloom in his hand into his pack. “Like this. Just the flower, nothing else.”
One of the older men, scarcely any hair left on his head, grabbed the canvas sack from his neighbor. He hugged it to his chest as if it were a long-lost friend. Ganelon returned it to its owner quickly, before a brawl broke out; then he led the old man into the garden.
“See, Grandfather,” he said kindly, “we want all the pretty flowers, but only the flowers.” Ganelon beheaded a few blossoms to demonstrate. With palsied hands, the old man slowly pulled the roses free. Ganelon bit his lip as he watched the man’s shaking fingers pluck at the blooms, but the man seemed to catch on quickly. With a quick word of praise, Ganelon was off to get the others started.
At first he kept a careful eye on the demented souls as they went about their task. As the afternoon wore on, though, Ganelon found himself less and less attentive. It was tedious watching them work, or attempt to work. And after three days with the madmen, leading them from the Beast’s lair to this field just across the Invidian border, he had little stomach left for the manifestations of their sad, awful, infuriating sickness.
Thoughts of Helain were quick to provide distraction. The fragrance of the roses reminded him of the plans they’d made for the wedding, how they would transform Ambrose’s store into a blossom-filled chapel. He was caught up in imagining what that happy event might have been like when a soft voice startled him from his reverie.
“They smell like churches should smell,” Helain said quietly. In her hand she cupped a single red rose. “Though they’re the wrong color. White roses are my favorite.”
Ganelon’s heart sang. Even when she turned away in mid-sentence, making it clear that she wasn’t speaking to him so much as to herself, the happiness lingered. The old Helain had surfaced for just an instant, long enough for him to realize she still existed. It was enough.
Helain knelt to collect the blossoms from a particularly thorny bush, and Ganelon moved to her side. Even if she weren’t aware of his presence, he might bask in hers and hope for another glimpse of her old self.
She hummed a work song from the mine as she plucked the flowers. It had been one of Ambrose’s favorites. The stout old fellow sang it endlessly around the shop. Helain went through three verses as she stripped the bush, pausing only when she dropped a large blossom. It fell onto the skeleton beneath the bush, into its open rib cage, where it sat like a suddenly resurrected heart.
Ganelon warily reached into the bones and retrieved the rose. He marveled at the bloom’s color, a crimson so deep it was nearly black. He held it out to Helain. She looked first at the blossom, then up into Ganelon’s face. Without a word, she slowly shook her head from side to side.
Before Ganelon could ask her why, a shriek of fear rent the garden’s calm.
Bratu stood before a particularly large bed, face contorted with terror. One of the partially buried skeletons was moving. The bare bones trembled, seeming to push up out of the ground. Ganelon was at his side in an instant. He immediately spotted the rat, disturbed by the Vistana’s proximity, as it burrowed deeper into its home within the bones. Bratu, however, was too blind with fear to recognize his terror’s mundane cause.
Mouthing silent prayers to his ancestors, Bratu backed away from the rose bushes. He could not hear Ganelon’s murmured words of reassurance or the frightened squeals of the other madmen. He shoved Ganelon’s hands away when the young man tried to grab hold of him. An instant later, the Vistana toppled backward onto a plucked rose bush.
The struggle was brief, too brief for Ganelon to react in time to aid the Vistana. The thorns bit into Bratu’s back. He howled in agony and tried to stand, but the branches entangled his legs. He reached down, frantic to pull himself free. The limbs of the bush bent to meet his fingers, and the thorns buried themselves in his hand. As they drank in the Vistana’s blood, they pulsed and swelled in the wounds until they were all but impossible to shake loose.
More branches wrapped themselves around him, eager for his blood. Finally, the brawny Vistana got his feet beneath him. Using all his considerable strength, he pushed himself up. Some of the branches tore loose. Their thorns etched gory streaks in his flesh as they fell away. Most of the bush kept its awful grip upon him, so that when he stood, the skeleton from which the corpse rose had sprouted jerked to its feet, too. The skeleton appeared to wrap its arms around Bratu, though it wasn’t clear if it was acting on its own or merely animated by the vines and branches of the corpse rose.
The sight of the skeletal remains clinging to Bratu shocked Ganelon into action. He reached for the Vistana’s hand, but the corpse encircled Bratu’s arms and pinned them to his sides. A steady, wet slurping sound came from the thorns as they drank in the man’s blood. Even as Ganelon watched, new roses budded upon the stems and blossomed. Their petals were dewed with Bratu’s blood.
The feeding frenzy of one plant sent the rest into motion. Branches lashed out, snaring arms or legs or faces with their inch-long thorns. Panic swept through the garden. Most of Ganelon’s mad army not entangled by the bushes fled. Because the sacks had been tied to their belts, they carried the precious blooms with them as they scurried over the wall. A few froze, paralyzed by fear, Helain among them.
Ganelon tore one of the madmen free of a bush; the thorns claimed ribbons of flesh from the unfortunate’s face as he came away. Shoving him toward safety, the young man stormed through the garden. Bones and branches crunched beneath the heavy tread of his braced leg. He found Helain huddled at the garden’s center. Corpse roses snaked all around her, but luck or some unseen hand kept them from her fair flesh.
“I’ve spilled my flowers,” she said, gesturing to the red roses scattered across the path. “There can be no wedding now.”
Ganelon tried to pull her up from the ground, but she resisted. A branch snagged his leg. He wrenched himself free, heedless of the deep cuts the thorns left in his calf. However, the blood spilled f
rom those wounds drew the unwelcome attention of another rose bush, and it lurched forward hungrily. The corpse at its base stirred, too. Like a half-dozen others around the garden, the ravenous plant uprooted itself. Supported by its skeletal host, the corpse rose shuffled forward in search of blood.
Ganelon stuffed his own small, rose-filled pack into Helain’s hands. “The Beast wants these. Hurry.”
He protected her flight from the garden as best he could. The mobile corpses moved slowly enough for Ganelon and Helain to evade them. The lunatics already immobilized by the stationary plants were not as lucky. Crazed with hunger, the ambulatory roses descended upon the doomed men and women. The sounds of their feasting followed Ganelon up the hill, away from Malocchio’s Dream Garden. The young man knew that the moist tearing and the agonized screams would forever echo in his nightmares.
When he was far enough from the garden to slow his pace, Ganelon removed the Beast’s token from his pocket. “Back to him,” he whispered into the ear. “Take the roses back to the Beast.”
Ganelon hoped the madmen heard him. He had little chance of catching them now.
As he topped the hill, though, Ganelon was stunned to find the survivors of his mad army kneeling on the ground, groveling before a youth clad entirely in black. The sinister figure paced back and forth through the whimpering crowd, hands clasped behind his back. The steady clank of Ganelon’s leg brace drew his attention away from the madmen, and he waited patiently for the newcomer to approach.
“Do you know the penalty for disturbing my garden?” Malocchio Aderre asked impatiently. “I’m going to kill you whether you do or not, of course. I’m just curious as to whether you are ignorant or foolhardy.”
The tone was playful, but Ganelon recognized an undercurrent of deadly earnest there as well. He would have to deal with this carefully. Still, he felt an odd sense of comfort in the Invidian lord’s presence. He’d spoken with this man before, many times. He just couldn’t remember when.