Dark Path: Book Three of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  The Badgers sat in silence, contemplating this information. None of it was completely new; they had touched upon it in various briefings over the weeks in the wastes, but the proximity of Tiria gave it much greater import.

  “One more point,” Bridget’s tone was hesitant. “In the liche’s inner sanctum the effects of the decades of necromancy will be the strongest, and the fabric of our world will be weakened to the greatest degree. The line between death and life will be thin here, very thin. Do not be surprised if you see and hear things there that would seem to be impossible.”

  “Such as?” Henri’s voice was as flat and hard as an axe blade.

  “It is possible to encounter, well, the dead,” Bridget’s shrug was visible even in the darkness.

  “I thought that was what we were talking about all this time?” Maxmillian said.

  “Not Undead, but the dead, in non-corporeal form.”

  “Ghosts,” Henri explained.

  “Yes, well, those to whom you have particularly strong or recent ties, whether good or bad,” Bridget admitted.

  “You never mentioned this before,” Maxmillian was startled; it was the first time he had heard real anger in Elonia’s voice. “This was something you could have shared earlier, such as before this mission started. Did it ever occur to you that some of us have dead in our pasts that we might not want to meet again? People we went to some lengths to kill just so we wouldn’t have to meet them again?”

  “Non-corporeal form is the key,” Bridget said miserably. “They can’t touch you or affect you in any way; in most cases, unless the ties are especially strong, they won’t even be able to communicate with you. Certainly only you would be able to see them, not anyone they aren’t connected to.”

  “If I had wanted to hear from them again I wouldn’t have killed them in the first place,” Elonia said peevishly. “Bad enough we have to take on a liche in its den without an audience of bad memories. What’s the point of killing someone if they can heckle you from the safety of the other side?” Maxmillian patted her shoulder and the mixed-blood Seeress subsided, muttering.

  Surprised and badly shaken at the normally impassive woman’s outburst, Bridget ended the briefing and advised her comrades to get some rest.

  The final run to Tiria began at midnight, as the tired Badgers mounted their weary horses and picked their way across the moonlit countryside. They alternated between riding for one hour and walking for two, both to rest their worn mounts and because in the poor light there wasn’t much difference in speed. They managed to cover twelve miles before dawn, making camp in a grove of cembra pines a short distance from a crumbling highway.

  “We’ll follow that tonight,” Bridget whispered to Henri, indicating the road. The wizard had drawn first guard, and the two were choosing a sentry post. “It must lead to Tiria.” Henri grunted, uninterested; the lean Arturian’s features were drawn and marked by fatigue. “Hang in there, Henri; a good day’s sleep and you’ll be a new wizard.”

  Making her way to her own bedroll, Bridget wrestled with the question of whether to spend a day resting after they had hidden their horses in the outskirts of the ruins. On the one hand, all four were worn from thirty days of travel in the Wastes, but on the other was the fact that they would only have four day’s rations when they concealed their mounts. It had been only two days since their last full rest day; the advocate doubted that one day of rest would restore much of her group’s strength. No, better to press ahead as soon as they reached the city, too many plans were ruined by hesitation at a crucial moment. More than ever the weight of command bore down upon her like a pack filled with wet sand; not only the lives of her friends were at stake, but the future of the Company to which she had devoted nine years of her life.

  She shook her head; how Durek bore up under this pressure year after year was beyond her.

  The road, although in very poor condition, did allow the raid group to move faster; by midnight they a stony ridge and saw the smudgy black mass of Tiria stretching away below them and smelled the sharp tang of the sea on the breeze.

  They made a temporary camp in an old quarry that had a stream-fed pond in its center which allowed them the luxury of a bath and the opportunity for washing their clothes. After five hour’s rest, the group climbed the ridge on foot to survey the city in daylight.

  Tiria lay before them in all its long-faded glory: the city had once held perhaps seventy thousand citizens within its walls, and half again as many outside in village-clusters a short distance from the walls. The Sur River did not actually bisect the city as they had imagined; rather, a largish village protected by a fortified citadel had been built up on the north side of the bank, and was connected to the main portion of the city by four bridges.

  There was very little left of the city now, however: of the north bank community only the eroded roads and the citadel’s tumbled piles of cut stone remained; the bridges were three rows of crumbling piers, and one much-patched span whose gaps were bridged with logs and ancient timbers salvaged from the ruins. The village-clusters were likewise tangles of brush and meadow bisected by overgrown roads and dotted with the mossy stumps of fireplaces and sagging fragments of building walls.

  The city’s moat had long since turned to marsh and silted up, undercutting and collapsing long stretches of the wall; indeed, the wall now consisted of a long lumpy earthen rampart with patches of unstable wall jutting out here and there, and the occasional leaning tower or moldering gatehouse. Inside the defenses the grid of paved streets could still be seen, although grass and saplings exploited and enlarged every crack and pothole. Fewer than one in twenty roofs still stood, although it appeared that many of the building walls were still upright. Fire had leveled large patches here and there, and storms boiling off Darktower Bay had devastated much of the waterfront. Silent and empty, the sea of ruins before them was both poignant and threatening, an eerie place that seemed all too much like a graveyard.

  The four studied Tiria, or as much as they could see from the ridge, for several minutes before Bridget finally spoke. “The quarry should do as well as anywhere as a place to leave our horses. There’s plenty of water, and greenery for a couple days; we can chop more forage over there and just drop it over the rim in case we’re gone longer than that. Any objections? Good. Now, it shouldn’t take more than an hour or so to get them settled in, then we’ll rest for another hour, which’ll put it around noon. We’ll jump off then, start circling around to the north. I believe the key is that bridge: obviously the liche’s followers are maintaining it, so that seems the best place to begin tracking down the White Necromancer’s hold.”

  “When will you don the Torc?” Maxmillian asked, hurling a pebble at Henri.

  “That’s the crucial question. I’ve based my planning on the fact that necromantic magic, however enhanced by the aura of a liche’s lair, is weak in long or even medium range detection abilities. Until we are near the walls of the city we should be outside the White Necromancer’s ability to detect us, so I believe we’ll wait until we are close to the walls, which means tomorrow morning. The Dayar have no difficulty in seeing in darkness, so there is no point in trying to enter at night. We’ll get in position today, and enter tomorrow.”

  “It might not be able to detect us, but I can feel the aura,” Henri observed, snapping a limber twig back at the scholar. “Any closer and my spellcasting’ll begin to be blocked.”

  “We won’t get much closer than we are now until we begin the actual entry tomorrow morning;” Bridget assured him. “I’ll don the Torc first thing in the morning. Anyone have anything else?”

  “Do you want Elonia and me to bring our crossbows or leave them behind?” Maxmillian asked. “It won’t be much use against Undead except at very close quarters, but they’re our only long range weapons.”

  The Serjeant gave that some thought. “Leave them. We’ll be carrying three days rations and full water bags as it is. I would like to take one pack horse with us, but i
t’s too much of a risk. Let’s get to work, sooner begun, sooner finished.”

  The four Badgers spent the rest of the day cautiously working their way north to the banks of the Sur, sacrificing speed for stealth, using every bit of cover they could find and doing their best to hide their tracks as they went. Like shadows they slipped across the land, crossing the rolling meadows that had once been tilled fields, darting across the overgrown ruts of long-unused roads, and climbing warily over tumbled piles of stone that had once been farmers’ houses.

  Their fireless night camp was deep in the heart of a copse of horse chestnut saplings that grew so thickly together that from two feet above the ground and higher there was an impenetrable mass of branches; below the two foot mark, however, there were no obstructions: the Badgers simply crawled into the center of the copse and made beds of dry leaves, secure from even the most diligent patrols. It was, as Henri remarked, as if they were camping in a beetle’s cathedral.

  Dawn’s first grayness hadn’t penetrated their copse when Bridget crawled from Badger to Badger, awakening the raid group. The four mercenaries crawled out of their hiding place and set about their morning ablutions as best they could in the cool predawn air. The proximity of the river allowed the raiders to wash up without regard to water use which helped raise their spirits. Henri used the enchanted goblet to heat water for tea and soup while Bridget drew the Torc from its travel case and studied the artifact in the weak morning light.

  The Torc was a simple thing in appearance, eight thick strands of gold wound together to form a braided near-circle, the ends capped with hexagon-cut rubies, the stones the size of a robin’s egg and afire from within with eldritch light. The rubies were deeply etched with focal runes, while the inside of the Torc was smoothed both for the wearer’s comfort and to accommodate line after line of tiny script explaining the device’s powers and capabilities. She had read them a hundred times before, but Bridget forced herself to read each word as if she had never seen them before; this was no time for carelessness.

  Finally, she uttered the proper incantation, the one she had practiced every day for the last six months, and twisted the Torc slightly, spreading the device’s narrow opening. Slipping the ruby-capped ends across her earlobes, she settled the circlet of gold around her neck, feeling the Torc twist back to its original form without any help from her hands. The metal was exactly the temperature of her skin, and the circlet fit her perfectly, snug but not chafing. Starting at her fingertips and toes, a warm tingling not unlike that of a blood-rush into a sleeping limb filled her, rushing inward and upward until it danced in the tips of her ears, filling her with a warm throb of confidence and strength. Around her she saw her comrades perking up as the aura of the Torc reached them.

  Taking a deep breath of air that seemed richer than wine, the Serjeant grinned at her little command. “Harness up: it’s time to go. Elonia, take a reading and we’ll be on our way.”

  After months of planning, and thirty day’s hard travel across the Wastes, what they had been dreading and worrying over for so long was now to begin, and each of the four found the actual undertaking of the mission to be easier than the waiting.

  In a compact formation that kept all four within the Torc’s aura the raiders moved towards Tiria, using all the care and skill they possessed. Every mile or so they stopped so Elonia could ply her trade, seeking to locate any dangers nearby, and to get a general feel for the place. Despite the aura of the Torc, the Seeress reported that she was unable to pinpoint the location of the liche or even its general area, although she did identify the locations of two guard posts on the sod-covered ruins of the wall. Henri and Bridget conferred and decided that the White Necromancer had undoubtedly used additional spells to further cloak its compound, which was an annoyance but hardly a decisive setback.

  Beginning an hour into their journey Elonia began reporting a growing sense of some group of great potent or potential danger drawing close from the north. At first it was interpreted as a roving patrol on a wide sweep outside the city, although the Seeress said that the impressions were very unusual. The impressions grew stronger as the morning went on, until it was clear that it was no patrol belonging to the White Necromancer, but rather a group from outside heading into Tiria on some errand all their own. Bridget decided that they would watch the group enter: no doubt the liche’s followers would conduct the visitors to either the compound itself for negotiations, or to guest quarters to await the White Necromancer’s summons. In either case the visitors would lead them to their destination.

  The trip into the city was an eerie one: with Elonia’s Sight, they moved with a knowledge of guard posts and roving patrols, and within the aura of the Torc, which each could feel as a faint tingling, they feared no magical sensing, so that in theory they might have walked about as if on holiday. But years of experience and training are not put aside lightly, and the grim possibility of some new twist or cunning plan by their ageless foe was foremost in their minds; accordingly the four Badgers stalked forward using all their stealthy skills, weapons ready.

  They crept along a rutted track whose flanking trees had pressed so close as to make the unused lane a long, narrow green tunnel. It led them through one of the encircling villages, now a cluster of rubble-piles slowly growing a layer of sod, the few standing walls devoid of roofs, window sills, and doorframes. Orc and Goblin graffiti was carved into many of the walls, the defacement often so old that it was nearly invisible. In the village square an old but fairly well maintained garnul marked some triumph or another and added to the already strong feeling that the four were somewhere they were not meant to be.

  The expanse of land between the village and the city walls had originally been kept clear to offer fields of fire for the city’s garrison, devoted to market grounds and pastures for grazing. Now it was simply a wide expanse of meadows dotted with copses of horse chestnuts and the occasional stand of blue spruce. The raiders saw little hint of Human occupation other than an occasional stretch of a crumbling rock wall that once marked a pasture or garden plot, and strips of paved roads whose surfaces were crumbling under the onslaught of tree roots.

  The city moat was now marked by a thick belt of cane grass whose golden tuft-heads reached twenty feet in the clear summer sun. The stalks were as thick around as crossbow shafts and disinclined to break or bow unless handled too roughly, a fact the Badgers carefully exploited, pacing through the golden ranks in a line abreast, squeezing and weaving between the stalks in an effort not to damage any and thus leave clear evidence of their passing. Underfoot the moat, which once must have been twenty feet or more deep, was now just a shallow trough in the ground barely a foot deep, still muddy as if clinging to an ancient memory of its intended purpose.

  On the other side of the moat the wall began, a long, low mound of collapsed blocks of stone and rotting timbers covered with a few inches of grassy sod, the latter an accumulation of centuries. Here and there blocks of stone protruded from the ground like a beggar’s elbows through his torn sleeves, both defiant and pathetic. More ominous, however, were the blocks of cut stone set out on top of the mound at regular intervals, each bearing a carefully inscribed skeletal right hand on its outward-facing side, the symbol of the White Necromancer, and clear warning that the liche regarded this place as its own. The Badgers waited in the edge of the moat grass while Elonia used her Sight and the rest watched for signs of guards or patrols. Finally, they slipped over the mound, careful of loose rocks and of leaving visible damage that would mark their passage. Fortunately, over the years the wall had collapsed and settled evenly, making crossing it a simple enough process; with fast-beating hearts, the raiders entered Tiria.

  “That would be them,” Elonia breathed, studying the approaching figures with interest. She and her comrades were two hundred yards from the city end of the one usable bridge, waiting patiently for the arrival of the outsiders who, hopefully, would lead them to the necromancer’s lair. They had chosen for their vantage
point the hollow shell of what had once been a two-story building, perhaps an inn or rooming house, which had been gutted by a fire generations ago. In the decades since a sturdy oak had sprouted in the front room of the roofless structure, growing until its top stood a good ten feet above the ragged tops of the building’s walls. The raiders had chosen this spot because by climbing the tree they could watch the bridge while being concealed by both the remains of the building and the branches of the tree.

  Crossing the ghostly streets of the dead city had been worse than approaching it, as on the outside the legacy of Human occupation was a gently fading memory, a distant echo of the city’s greatness. Inside the ruined walls, however, the bare bones of the glory that was once Tiria were plain to see and grated harshly upon the spirit. Time and Nature had worn down Man’s work, but the sheer volume of stone could not be overcome even in the span of centuries. Although every garden and park in the city had spilled beyond its borders, the relentless questing energy of root and creeper exploiting every crack and crevice to hurry the ruin of the city, and wind-borne dirt and seeds had created pockets of greenery here and there, the basic outline of the city still remained clear, viable, and depressing.

  The raiders had done their best to ignore the grim atmosphere of the place, and even Maxmillian, whose historian soul drove him to sketch Orc markers and totems in an effort to decipher their boasts, scanned his surroundings with an eye for defense, choosing not to dwell overlong on any particular detail of the ruins around them.

  Around noon they observed a series of green and red-lensed lantern signals from a roughly maintained tower on the far side of the river; blue and yellow signals were sent nearly two hours later, followed by a mixture of green, orange, and untinted lights still later. Not long after the last set of signals a single hooded figure mounted on a sturdy mule passed by, coming from the center of the city and heading towards the battered bridge. Now, as the afternoon shadows were slanting towards evening, the mule-mounted figure could be observed leading a group off the bridge and down a crumbling boulevard.