Lady Of The Helm (Book 1)

by T. O. Munro

  The sorcerer’s cheerful interest in Thomelator had faded quickly when the younger man had revealed his chosen sphere of magic craft. “Illusion!” Rondol had stormed. “Orc’s blood, why make an illusion of fire when you can make a real fire. Fucking useless waste of thaumatic energy!”

  “The Master wants us to use all the exiles,” an outlander had reminded the volatile sorcerer.

  “Well let Marwella and the necromancers have him. I am sure he has enough wits to drive her witless creations around or if he doesn’t they’ll eat him soon enough. Either way, it’ll keep him out of the path of the real wizards.”

  So it had begun, the apprenticeship to the foul mannered, and foul smelling Marwella. Three years of learning how to herd the mindless animated corpses and yet always being the most junior of the wizened hag’s assistants. Try as he might, and to be honest he had not tried that hard, Thomelator had never learned the skill of animating corpses to create these awful revenants. So he was only ever a shepherd boy to the herd of zombies.

  Thus a direct causal chain could be assembled linking that distant ill fated trip to the blasted florist and Thomelator’s current solitary stumble across the burned stubble of a wheat field by the banks of the Nevers River.

  The morning head count had shown two of the zombies had somehow broken free of their pen and wandered off in the night. Who else would Marwella send to retrieve them, but Thomelator the kicking boy. “They probably smelled fresh flesh somewhere out there, always hungry those ones. If you want to draw ‘em back faster you could always cut yourself, let ‘em smell your blood. You can bring them under your will before they attack you. Probably.” Her cackling laugh had quickly been echoed by the other necromancers as Thomelator set off on his thankless task.

  It was not a hard trail to follow. One of the creatures had a broken foot and its dragging twisted limb scored a shallow furrow across the soil, there had even been a grey toe or two dropping free along the way to reassure the unhappy illusionist that he was on the right path. The other was lighter on its feet but prone to falling over leaving periodic imprints on the ground.

  It was nearly noon and Thomelator was confident he was gaining on the missing re-animations. As he walked he rehearsed the foul words of the spell of command. He also tried flexing the mental muscles that he would need to exert some influence on the vestigial consciousness that drove these corpses. The process gave him a sick headache but he had no choice. Nausea was preferable to becoming a target himself for their never ending hunger.

  As he crested a low rise Thomelator caught sight of them at last, the two walking corpses stumbling towards the river. “Blasted florist,” the illusionist muttered. “Where are they going?” The field ran almost to the Nervers’ edge but there was a sharp drop before the river hiding the bank from view. The two slightly built grey monsters would either stumble into the water or fall on stony ground. Neither eventuality would destroy them but a few more broken limbs would reduce their effectiveness while the strong river current would carry them swiftly down stream, two different kinds of failure to fuel Marwella’s contempt for him.

  “Hey,” he called trying to draw their attention, but they staggered on oblivious. “Hey, stop!” he shouted hopelessly, before gathering up his robes and breaking into an ungainly run.

  He was a hundred yards short of them when the two fugitive zombies toppled awkwardly out of sight. Huffing and puffing, he picked up the pace in his haste to see what had befallen Marwella’s escaped pets. He was quite out of breath when he reached the edge of the bank and what he saw there took what little wind he had left.

  The bank dropped about eight feet vertically to a short sandy beach which was quite invisible until one got this close, literally on top of it. There was an elegant silver boat hauled up half out of the water. A half dozen well armed and armoured figures stood by the boat looking up at him, fine featured and dark skinned Thomelator did not need to see their cuspate ears to know he was in the company of elves. The two escapees that had been his quarry were in an untidy pile at the foot of the sheer drop. They were still animate, but cowed and submissive, for standing infront of them was a robed priestess with flame red hair. The woman held before her a crescent symbol of the Goddess and was murmuring some invocation which had quelled and stilled the ravenous rotting monsters. Hiding behind the priestess was a dark haired girl, staring wide eyed at the grey tangle of dead limbs.

  All this Thomelator absorbed in an eyeblink and a further split second of thought made him turn to run. But it was too late. “Adhuc hospes,” a powerful elven voice commanded and inevitably Thomelator obeyed, frozen rigid to the spot despite the quivering fear that pervaded his being.

  ***

  Kimbolt’s chest heaved as he drew desparate breaths into lungs that burned. It felt like surfacing after an unendurable period underwater but yet there was no water, just the stone floor beneath his feet and the arms into which he collapsed.

  “There, there,” a male voice was reassuring him. “You’ve been ill. You’d fainted.”

  He’d fainted? Kimbolt leaned heavily on the stranger, his limbs answered weakly to his bidding as though weighed down with lead. If he’d fainted why was he coming round standing up? Coherent thought however was difficult and a wave of nausea overcame him as he struggled to make any connections in his brain. “Water,” he rasped, for his mouth and throat were as dry as dust.

  “Certainly,” he was assured as the other man clumsily manouevred his charge back and down on to the bed. “Water, in here, now!”

  There was a swish of silk as they were joined by a third person. Kimbolt struggled to focus his vision on either of his carers, but a cup of water was pressed to his lips and he drank greedily from it. “More,” he croaked as soon as the vessel was drained and it was quickly replenished.

  “Do you know where you are?” a woman’s voice demanded, familiar and yet he could not place a face or name to it.

  He shook his head. “No, where am I?”

  “Do you know who you are, soldier?” The male voice came from a podgy round face that hovered infront of his slowly clearing vision.

  With a rising sense of panic Kimbolt found he could not answer the question. He tried to rise from the bed, as though physical activity might kick start his sluggish senses.

  “You need rest, soldier.” The man pushed him back gently onto the bed with one hand, the fingers of his other twitching. “Requiescet facilis.”

  Kimbolt slipped into near slumber only dimly aware of the continuing conversation between the man and the woman. “Has he forgotten everything?” she was demanding.

  “I think most of it will come back to him in time,” he assured her. “But I don’t know for sure. I have never brought one back after so long in an altered state.”

  “Does he know what has happened to him?”

  “Let us say he has been ill, close to death.”

  “Well that is true enough and he has you to be grateful to for his deliverance.”

  “Indeed, my dear, indeed.” There was a moment’s silence as the pair of them surveyed the dormant invalid. “Now have I at last earned the usual welcome of some refreshment for a weary traveller. I have these past five years discovered a liking for crème du liebay. Do you think you might have some?”

  The woman’s laugh echoed in Kimbolt’s dream. A laugh he had heard before though often with a harder edge. “What a vile concoction you have chosen Odestus. The former castellan here did have a cask of the green muck somewhere. I am sure it is still there; even the orcs have standards and would rather drink lamp oil than that thickened pig’s piss.”

  ***

  Thomelator could not wait for the enchantment to wear off. They had brought his paralysed form down to the beach and bound him tightly. The zombies too had been restrained with ropes, though their hungry hostility had been cowed by the presence of the priestess. She was now in urgent conference with the elf mage and it was their discussion which made Thomelator desparate to sp
eak.

  “It is best you take the girl away,” the elf was saying. “She shouldn’t see this.”

  “What are you going to do to him, Tordil?”

  “I’ve seen his kind before. Look at him. He has been driving those poor dead wretches, denying them rest, tying some tattered shreds of their souls to this world. ‘tis not right and getting the truth out of him will be some recompense for their suffering.”

  “How long do you need?”

  “A couple of hours and I will have everything he knows of any worth. There won’t be much left of the rogue by then.”

  “Yes Tordil, but the last one you interrogated. That got really messy.”

  “Fear not my lady. I allowed my heart to o’er rule my head. Thinking on what this foul scum did it can make it hard to hold back I can’t say I regret it though. That outlander simply got what he deserved, just as this one will. As soon as the holding spell releases him we’ll begin. Ah ha, it’s softening now. See how he’s blinking.”

  The elf had taken a step towards the unhappy illusionist, under the priestess’s watchful eye, when Thomelator at last found his voice. The words came tumbling out in a single breath. “My name’s Thomelator, I’m an illusionist, I was exiled three years ago. I work for Marwella and the necromancers but I’m not really one of them. I’m no good at it. I was sent out to retrieve these two. We need them for the work that the Master has us doing in Morwencairn. He’s carving into the mountain and the undead are used for labour to clear the rubble. That’s why I have to get them back. I won’t tell anyone about you. I don’t want to go back anyway.”

  His gushing confession had non-plussed even the sombre faced elf who paused in his stride to exchange a glance with the priestess. She met his gaze with a half-smile and then turned quickly away, her shoulders shaking a little as the elf homed in.

  “My, but you’re a cheerful little songbird,” Tordil mused as he crouched before the trembling illusionist. “Not forgetting of course that you’re also an undead torturing exiled traitor.”

  “I’m not,” Thomelator gasped. “I’m not one of them, by the Goddess.”

  “Three years in their company you say, and you reckon there’s still some core of decency in you. Do you take me for some fool. You’re one of Maelgrum’s scum through and through. If there’d ever been any doubts about you they’d have thrown you into a worg pit.”

  “I’m an illusionist,” Thomelator bridled with a spark of professional pride. “I dissemble, I obfusticate, I confuse and deceive and I’m a very bad necromancer that much is true. That’s all they ever thought I was. The lowest of the low.”

  Tordil weighed the words carefully before straightening up. “May hap you’re right, but the lowest of the low won’t have much worth telling.” He gestured to one of his kin. “Open the scoundrel’s throat. It’s a kindness.”

  “Nooo!” screeched Thomelator as the other elf advanced sword drawn. “Let me help you. I want to help you. I can help you.”

  “How?” The priestess interjected, waving the would-be executioner back. “How can you help us?”

  “That depends,” the miserable illusionist replied damply. “What is it you’re trying to do?”

  “See,” Tordil gave a furious cry, his lips split in a fearsome scowl though the corners of his eyes were crinkled with amusement. “See how he tries to interrogate us.”

  “Enough, Captain Tordil,” the priestess commanded. “I have an idea and this snivelling wretch may yet give us the information we need to make it work. So Mr Illusionist, I have some more questions for you. Answer them true and if luck attends me, you may yet live to see another sunrise. Lie and you will die.”

  Thomelator nodded quickly, gulping down breaths of relief. “Please, lady, call me Thom. Everyone does, or did back in Oostport.”

  The priestess nodded slowly. “Very well, Thom. Now tell me, when did Morwencairn fall?”

  ***

  “Orc’s blood, Odestus, how can you drink that stuff.”

  The little wizard gave a little pout. “Allow me my indulgences Dema, as I allow you yours.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bedchamber where Kimbolt slumbered easily. “We have both earned some little comfort for what we have endured these long years.”

  “We would have survived any how, you know.” Dema returned to a theme they had often explored in private moments. “We would have survived without him.”

  “Without Maelgrum?”

  “We had lasted three years before he came to us. Survived and grown stronger.”

  Odestus nodded. “Aye, we survived, we might even have survived this long. But we would never have returned, not without the Master.”

  Dema was lost in thought for a moment. “Do you ever think of death Odestus, of a world without you in it?”

  The little wizard gave his companion a sharp look. “Death will come to us all. Our existence is perhaps more perilous than we ever imagined it could be. Between the Master’s wrath and our enemy’s assassins, each day is an adventure to be survived. But I try not to think of death. The contemplation can be paralysing.”

  Dema nodded quickly in vigorous agreement. “But suppose our deaths are all appointed. Suppose you knew when yours was due. Would you try to avoid it, to face it or to fight it?”

  Odestus eyed the Medusa over the rim of his glass, braving the chilling stare of her gauze clad eyes in a bid to fathom her mood. “The past can’t be changed,” he observed. “But the future is not written. For myself, I would prefer death to take me in my sleep at the age of a hundred and quite a lot and beyond that I prefer not to dwell on the matter. But you my dear have always been a fighter, not just a fighter but a winner. In a fight between you and death, it’s not the man with the scythe that I’d be betting on.”

  She laughed at that with the honest amusement which had always charmed him, from that first shadowy meeting in a dark alleyway twenty one years earlier, and he smiled to see her happy. “Well dear Odestus when, no if, that day comes, I’ll do my best to keep your money safe.”

  ***

  “You found them then,” Cholus greeted the returning wanderers. “Took you long enough.”

  The wispy bearded form of Thomelator the dogsbody stared back at him with unaccustomed defiance. Even the two zombies he had been shepherding through the ruined city gateway seemed to sense the tension for they faltered in their stumbling.

  “Don’t you be staring me out you corpse loving apology for a necromancer,” Cholus unleashed a quick jet of invective to assert the natural order of things. The audience of orcs and outlanders that formed the picket at the city limit grunted their approval, their interest roused at the prospect of an entertaining confrontation. “If you want to play with the big boys then I can set your pets ablaze so’s you’ve nothing but ash to show Marwella for your morning’s efforts. She might then decide you’d serve her better as a zombie than as a witless excuse for a wizard.”

  For a brief second Thomelator held his tormentor’s gaze, and Cholus thought he might have to make good his threat. There was a whisper from an outlander to his left. The placing of a bet. Cholus gave a flex of his forearm to loosen his sleeves and flexed his fingers in thaumatic menace.

  The taller of the zombies gave a hiss, an unusual vocalisation from the mindless ones, which gave them all a start and seemed to break the mood. Thomelator’s head dropped in defeat and, with eyes fixed on the ground, he turned back to the road into the city.

  “That’s right,” Cholus taunted, ramming home his advantage. “You stumble up the road to mama Marwella. There’s plenty of rock clearing for you to do. Help the Master back to his old halls and caverns. That’s all you and your pets are good for, labouring. You’re not real wizards any of you.”

  The sorcerer enjoyed the satisfaction of Thomelator’s silent submission, no word of riposte, not even a raising of the eyes in his abuser’s direction, as the reedy necromancer and his two charges stumbled into the city. “That’s right, you stick close to
your dead kin,” Cholus called, for Thomelator was barely a couple of paces behind the staggering zombies. “Maybe your hold will weaken enough and they’ll tear your throat out for you, maybe they think you’re already dead. To be sure you’d hardly be less use if you were.”

  He shouted a few more insults until the little trio had turned the corner, so he did not see the moment when the taller zombie fell back a step and hoarsely whispered, “Captain, forget your elvish pride and act like the feeble simpleton whose appearance you wear, or this plan will come to nothing”

  “My Lady,” the one in the shape of Thomelator acknowledged.

  “Hush,” the smaller zombie mumbled through fixed lips. “and keep moving.”

  Another necromancer was coming down the street driving a dozen undead each burdened by a basket of rubble. The task did little to feed the creatures’ incessant hunger and their shepherd needed all his efforts to hold them in his will. As the newcomers passed the three spies, a couple of the genuine zombies hesitated in their shuffling gait, sniffing the air at the scarce disguised smell of fresh meat. “Get those two moving, you halfwit,” the necromancer called. “The slaves are nearly through to the old chambers and the Master is growing impatient.”

  Obediently the three spies staggered up the main street, meeting an ever increasing flow of traffic as they neared the town square. Like the rest of Morwencairn, the town square was on a noticeable incline with the Western side somewhat higher than the Eastern side. The centrepiece of the open plaza had been the great statue of Thren the fifth atop his column of triumph, with the crowned leaders of the Eastern lands bowing down in submission to him at the pillar’s foot. The entire edifice had gone, reduced to rubble on one side of the open space. In its place was a yawning maw, twenty foot in diameter, in the centre of the square. Steady streams of zombies were entering the steeply sloped tunnel beyond, while others of their kind were leaving bearing with them the detritus of excavation. Dust covered men and women huddled in the open, coughing and spluttering as far as exhaustion would let them, while orcs and outlanders stood an unnecessary guard duty.