Empire Of The Undead

by Ahimsa Kerp

  “How did you devise it?” Rufus asked.

  “I have spent long years studying the process. It’s a delicate one, and a false step can result in a quick death. I have been intrigued since I encountered a reference in Thucydides. The Athenians used something like this during the Siege of Delium. Of course, they had an elaborate mechanism to dispense their solution. I have only these.” He gestured to the cart beside him.

  “The amphorae?” Felix asked.

  “They are not Roman. Call them tzykalia, or kytrai if you must. But never amphorae.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Little, perhaps,” Hyacinthus said, “but it behooves us to call things by their real names.”

  “And it can obliterate life to nothing, in seconds?” Felix asked, pointing the billowing smoke and roaring fire. “That damage was from one of them? How many do you have?”

  “Ninety-seven, now,” Hyacinthus said. “We left with ninety-eight, of course. I wanted to make a hundred, but I ran out of naphtha at the end.”

  “Nearly a hundred!” Felix said. “I thought you were taking too much care of this wagon. You are taking too little!”

  “I know,” Rufus said grimly. “I had not thought to see the creatures this close to the city. We were fortunate there were not more of them, and that Hyacinthus acted as quickly as he did.”

  "I'll have more guards ride with you," the Senator said. "The future of the Empire outweighs all of our lives." With that, he rode away, back up the road to the assembled guards.

  The sound of fire crackling and popping filled Felix's ears. The worry in his big friend's eyes was visible, and Felix gave him a reassuring smile.

  “So, what do you call it?” Felix asked.

  “I was thinking of calling it,” Hyacinthus said, “War fire.”

  PART III: WOE TO THE CONQUERED

  CHAPTER XXV

  Dacia: 89 CE, Spring

  He wasn’t ever hungry anymore. His shrunken stomach had given up that fight, but it was glad of the pine needles, grubs, and coarse meal he occasionally ground. Only in his dreams did he remember the food he had loved so much.

  Everything he ate was cold. The alchemist could probably have started a fire if he’d desired, but he did not want to alert others to his presence. As winter gave way to spring, each day without signs of the lifeless was putting off the inevitable. He had sharpened seven long spears and had them next to him at all times. His basic rope at the floor of the cave was now four feet high. It still wouldn’t stop the lifeless, but if they came while he slept, the delay could save his life.

  Spring came to the mountains late, but now even here there were blossoms and wildflowers above the tree line. In late afternoon, the streams were swollen with melting snow. It was then that he decided to go fishing. In his dreams, he had seen the fish frying on a fire that warmed his hands and feet. He woke and could not take his mind from the mountain trout.

  He traveled far from his cave that afternoon, farther than he yet had during the long, cold months of winter. It was nice to feel free, to feel safe. He had not seen—living or not—wolves again. The sunlight made him feel a new man, and he danced a little as he walked through the green grass.

  There was a clear stream that until recently had been frozen over. Now it was rushing, filled with snow melt, and it took some time to find a calm area. He lay on his stomach, head peeking into the stream. Chuckling with pleasure, he at last used the net that had taken so many hours of winter to create. It was hard, and he felt like an ass at a lyre, but he caught on and had three fish in the first hour. They flopped their life away on the bank next to him. His stomach rumbled and the idea of making a fire was ever more enticing.

  He was happier than he’d been for months. “I’m going to eat you little fishes,” he sang to them. “I’m going to put you in my stomach and you’re going to taste so good.” He grabbed one of the fish and held it before him. He realized he had chewed his fingernails to nubs.

  “Please eat me,” he said, in a high, fishy voice. “We will be so tasty.”

  “Yes, little fishy, I think I’ll do just that.”

  The only warning he had was a low moan behind him, a sound from his nightmares. He sat there for precious moments, mind not comprehending.

  Then he rolled away, onto his back, and leapt up. There was a lifeless before him, only meters away. It had once been a woman, but she had been dead for months now. Her jawbone was gone and much of her skin was blackened by frostbite.

  She moaned hunger at him again. He surprised himself by not being scared. One lifeless was not a threat, and this creature was slower and more shambling than most.

  He only needed a weapon of some sort and the thing could be destroyed. He looked past her, into the forest for a large branch or walking stick.

  “Oh bad,” he said. “Oh bad bad bad bad bad bad bad.” His voice was hoarse with disuse. There were four more lifeless that he could see. All had the pale, ice-burnt look of the first. He whirled around. There were more on the other side of the river.

  Zuste wondered if they’d been frozen in the snow and released by the spring thaw, but he didn’t have much time for idle thought. There were more monsters than he could count, now, creeping through the forest. They advanced toward him with the ponderous inevitability of time. There was nowhere to go. He took a regretful look at his fish, lying there uneaten on the shore, and then he moved.

  Zuste leapt into the icy stream. He was not a strong swimmer, but he could stay afloat indefinitely. But that was in summer, in a lake. The chill of the water assaulted him, blasted him, turned him upside down, and shook him with its frigid intensity. The force of the current carried him away quickly, but he was rapidly growing numb.

  The cold presented as great a threat as the lifeless, if he stayed in it for too long. Turning his head back, he saw the silhouette of several creatures at the river shore. They were stooped over something. He realized in horror that they were eating his fish! For a brief, irrational moment, he hated the lifeless for that more than anything else.

  The strong current fought him, and it took no little while to climb out of the water. By the time he did, he was shivering uncontrollably. It was growing dark and he could not make it back to his cave tonight. Not with the lifeless out there, ready to seize him in the dark. He thought of Rowanna and knew what he must do, though his buttocks clenched at the thought of it.

  First, he stripped off his frozen, sodden clothing, and hung it on a tree to dry. It was strange to be standing naked, shivering, and alone in the forest. He felt so exposed without the cave walls around him. There was no question now that a fire was a bad idea. Instead, he gathered leaves, moss, and grass into a large ball, all the while keeping a careful eye out for any moving creatures. He didn’t think they had followed him, but the forest could be crawling with the ravenous monsters. Still carefully watching, he rubbed himself vigorously with the assembled foliage. He didn’t feel entirely warm, but he stopped shivering.

  His gaze fell upon his own naked body. No man would call him thin, but he was not the corpulent man he’d been. He wondered if the changes in his body could come close to the changes he’d gone through mentally, and started laughing at the absurdity of such questions. He stopped immediately. Ovid had advised laughter to the wise, but silence was needed now. He forced himself to focus. He needed shelter.

  There were no apple trees this time, so he climbed a white birch tree that was the tallest around. Three branches forked together at the bottom, making it easy to ascend. From there, he very carefully slid up the tree, his soft naked skin scraping against the tree bark. He was almost ten meters up when his hand brushed something hard, something dark.

  Zuste hissed in excitement. It seemed too good to be true. Chaga. It looked like ashes that had coalesced into a hard disc. It was a parasitic fungus that grew on some mountain trees. It was among the rarest of alchemical ingredients and it was the most important item he needed to re-create his elixir vitae.
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  He climbed up further and saw that the tree was covered with chaga. It meant the tree was doomed, of course, but he could not stop laughing. He didn’t care if it doomed him. There was enough chaga here to allow for a hundred elixirs, a thousand. At last, he had a weapon with which to fight the horde.

  ****

  He somehow slept through the night, his body wedged between two branches. Most of his weight rested on his posterior, which was scraped and sore. He woke up in the pre-dawn light, shivering in the eerie cold. He still had mud on his body from the river. His hand flicked it off his leg. It didn’t move. He realized with heart-seizing panic what that meant.

  Leeches.

  With ill-thought panic, he reached down to rip it off. As he did, he realized there were more. On his arms, chest, and legs, and on something worse.

  “Zalmoxis, no,” he whispered, seeing the leech clinging to his cock. He didn’t know what happened next, but as he pulled and tugged at the swollen thing, rising to give himself better leverage, he slipped from the tree.

  He hit the ground with a solid thud. His nose hit hard and he could taste blood. All the air was driven from his body with a painful whoomph, and he gasped for breath.

  Scrambling up, the alchemist ripped the bloody leech from his member and flung it as far as he could. Blood leaked from his smashed nose into his mouth as he tore away another dozen of the fat clinging things. With a grunt of triumph, he flung the last one away as far as he could.

  His body was a seething mass of bloody sores. Though none of the wounds hurt, they gushed with a surprising amount of blood. He moved gingerly, still feeling sore from the fall, and collected his clothing, checking it carefully for any of the bloodsuckers.

  Only once his clothing was on, did he start shaking. Blood loss combined with delayed energies rushing through his body was almost overwhelming, and he sat shaking on the river bank, hands clasped around his knees, for a long time.

  It was only later, after the morning mists had burnt away from the mountain tops that he thought the leeches might have been something else, something worse. Could the leeches have killed him, caused him to become lifeless? But he had not changed yet. He wondered about that.

  Would he know if he had changed? He knew of several mushrooms that, when ingested, gave visions seen only by those who had partaken in them. Was that what being a lifeless creature was? Or did they operate on an animal level, as removed from thought as from poetry or sculpture?

  It was interesting. Iullianus, that great oaf, had not even seemed to notice changing. Some of us have farther to fall, he thought glibly. He wondered if the Roman and Rowanna had made it to Rome. If they had even tried.

  He realized he was smiling. I need to find them. I need to bring them the cure. He did not know how to get to Rome. There had been a map once, a rough thing sketched by a Gaul, but he could not remember much of it now. The roads would take him there, after all, all roads led to the Rome.

  Zuste sighed. The Romans were such a young Empire. They caused untold destruction out of ignorance. Greece, Egypt, and Carthage, all had been upstarts. It took an ancient culture like the Celts, like the Dacians, to realize the futility of world conquest. He sighed again, feeling far too old for his years. Even without the lifeless, it seemed there was little hope for the world.

  It was, however, far too nice a spring morning for brooding. The sun was bright now, and he felt recovered enough to stand. His nose had stopped bleeding and although sorely bruised, he was not otherwise injured from his fall. It took a few hours to scale the trees and collect all the chaga that he could. In the end, he had a pile that was far too big for him to carry. He would need to grind it to a fine powder anyway, but without any of his tools, this presented a challenge. When he had made the initial elixirs, he’d been able to use rotted chaga, which was the most effective. For this, however, he would need concentrated wine and water. It would take time, and he could not do it all in the cave. Every man, he realized, reached a time when he had to leave his cave and emerge into the greater world, and his time had come.

  ****

  It was many days or weeks later when he emerged from Sarmizegetusa. He’d climbed down from the mountains, finding that spring had bloomed in the valley. The flowers buzzed with insect life and the verdant shoots that clad the forest were fragrantly vibrant.

  There were almost no lifeless. Even the city of Sarmizegetusa itself was mostly free of them, though it was full of bloated, dead, rotting corpses. The stench was nigh unbearable, but the alchemist had been able to cleanse his shop with a powerful fragrant elixir. He had washed the blood from the floor, threw out the two corpses, and then boarded the door and windows. His place had been rummaged—his gold was gone. However, there was good luck, for his alchemical instruments were mostly still there. The water was still flowing and he didn’t require much food. A small amount of foraging every few days provided him with enough sustenance.

  He had felt safe, and had known how dangerous that was. He had seen a few lifeless from afar, and he occasionally heard them at night, but it seemed that without prey to feed on, the creatures dispersed. Though, there seemed to be more in the city than when he’d arrived. Perhaps they were able to track humans, as the frozen creatures had found in the mountains. It had become clear that it was time for him to go. He had worked with little sleep for ten days until he felt ready, however belatedly, for the apocalypse that he had created.

  In his pack was enough dried food to last him a few weeks, if he was careful. Within the bags, padded with black wool, were seven loculi, leather satchels he had found on dead centurions. Each loculus had ten vials of elixir vitae. The bag itself was stuffed with more wool. He could drop the entire bag three meters onto hard rocks, and the vials would not break. He had an additional two vials in the pockets of his trousers.

  His hands clasped a tall pilum, the Roman spear. Different from Rowanna's, it consisted of an iron shank ending in a pyramidal head, which was attached to a long wooden shaft. Zuste kept the spear point sticking up and used it as a walking stick. In addition, he strapped a short sword to each side of his waist. He had a smaller knife strapped to his ankle, and several more in his pack. Also in his pack were enough dried powders, herbs, and ingredients to make that many more, though he could not find room for his equipment. He supposed he ought to feel ridiculous, but instead, he felt like an avatar of Mars himself. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Rowanna's face when he found them. He did ever doubt that he would find them, however improbable reunion seemed.

  ****

  It took him long days of walking before he encountered any real danger. The broad cobblestone road was ringed by fragrant pines, and it had been easy to find a tree to sleep in during the night. To his great pleasure, he had thus far avoided both leeches and falling from the tree, as well. But he grew less cautious and by the third afternoon, he had let his guard down. Rounding a broad bend in the road, he nearly stumbled across three lifeless ripping apart a corpse.

  With blood-smeared faces and hands, they rose slowly. Former centurions, they were big men with armor and helmets. Their eyes gleamed with pale light. They reeked of carnage, of danger. Two of them lurched around him while the third came straight for him. The alchemist tried to suppress his panic as he realized what was happening. They were flanking him!

  Zuste did not much feel like Mars anymore. He took several steps back, breathing deeply, and switched the pilum in his hand so that the sharp end faced his foes. It was meant to be thrown, but he liked the length of it. He wouldn’t have to get too close.

  He was aware of the two stumbling through the edge of pine forest, trying to get around to him, but the threat directly before him was more immediate.

  The alchemist screamed and ran at the thing, holding the pilum with both hands as he charged. He aimed the spear at the bloody-handed monster’s neck, just above the cuirass.

  He didn’t miss by much, but he struck it in the armor. The impact knocked the lifeless back a few st
eps, but it bent the soft iron tip as well. His weapon was useless.

  The two lifeless from his side were coming at him now, slowly shambling at him from his left and his right. Zuste screamed at them wordlessly. His left hand dropped into his trouser pockets and his right hand whipped out the gladius from his side.

  Spinning, not sure where to attack first, he withdrew the vial and held the blade before him.

  Inspiration struck, but it was too late. The creatures reached him, bloody hands extended. Zuste whipped his blade across, slicing at their hands. The blade struck bone and stopped. The hilt was pulled from his hand as the monster wrenched away. The first of the lifeless reached him as well, mouth open and hands grasping with hunger. Zuste was surrounded, and he could feel them tearing at his head, at his shoulders, at his waist. One still had his sword lodged in its arm, but that didn’t seem to bother it.

  Zuste punched one in the nose with all the force he could muster. It didn’t notice—merely opened its mouth with a hungry moan. There was too much weight pulling at him, and he found himself on the ground. On his side, awkwardly, as he had twisted to avoid landing fully on his pack. His left hand still clenched the vial, but curing one of these monsters would not save him from the other two.

  There was a mouth in his face. It was coated in congealing blood and the teeth were dotted with rotting chunks of flesh. Even through his panic and fear, Zuste’s eyes watered from the stench.

  One of the things bit into his arm, and the pain of the dull teeth was immensely unbearable. He screamed and could feel another grasping his skull. He realized that he might be making the last decision of his life.

  The lifeless on his shoulder bit again, hot blood spurting across its face. With his rapidly numbing hand, Zuste uncorked his elixir vitae and swallowed it. If this works, I’m the greatest genius of my time, he thought wryly. He felt an energy flow through him and a font of health seemed to fill him.