Dark Path: Book Three of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Maxmillian stroked his hammer head and kept his eyes moving and his back squarely against the wall, but so far nothing unusual was going on. Bridget was crouched near the doors, one hand holding her amulet, and the other gripping the buckle of her belt, brow furrowed in concentration. Henri was leaning against the doors, carefully tracing the designs. Elonia was eyeing a section of wall and batting at the air with a manople blade, limbering up; Kustar was crouched a short distance away, flexing her shoulders and studying the ceiling. Everything seemed normal for the last minutes before a battle, no one seemed troubled by ghosts from their pasts or anything beyond the usual fear of horrible deaths. As if that weren’t enough, after all.

  “Max-mil-li-ian,” the voice came from his right side (he had been looking to the left), sending icy arrows through his heart. Suddenly dying horribly stopped being much of a concern.

  His head turned as if it were mounted on swivels. “Hello, Maerta.” Of course it would be her; if anyone came back from the dead to nag a husband one last time, it would be his wife. In retrospect, he supposed he should be grateful it took her this long to accomplish it. When his head finally finished turning, there she was, as it were. Maerta von Sheer appeared as she had looked in her late twenties, wearing a worn but clean dress such as she wore when in the house, her dark hair bound up in a bright kerchief to keep it clean and out of the way. It was how she had been dressed on most days when he came home for lunch. Her fists were planted on her hips and he could see the ghostly hem of her dress dancing from a tapping toe. She was in full fighting form, was his Maerta, dead or not.

  The sight of her thus, as she had been for so many years drove a sudden ripping spike of pain through him, transfixing him like a frog on a fisherman’s hook. He squeezed his hammer hard, fighting both to get his breath back and to control the burning tears that filled his eyes.

  “Maxmillian von Sheer, just what do you think you are about? This is no place for a scholar to be.”

  “It’s good to see you again, Maerta.” By force of will he kept his voice steady. “Things have changed a bit for me, as you have noticed.”

  “I knew you would go to pieces should I die first, Maxmillian, but I never expected this. Drink too much, make a fool out of yourself with some snip of a girl, yes, but this mucking about covered with weapons, why, that’s just too much. It just isn’t done.”

  The Badger shrugged. “I didn’t plan it like this, it just happened. I had to get out of the city, a research trip was the best idea, I hired some mercenary guards, one thing led to another.” He grinned ruefully. “You were my sea-anchor, Maerta: I lost you, and this is the shore I washed up upon.”

  “Well, it seems to agree with you,” his late wife admitted grudgingly. “I haven't seen you so lean and, well, tough-looking since you were driving a wagon for your brother, back when you were a student.”

  “Yes, and you used to creep out of your father’s house when I came back after a haul,” Maxmillian grinned into the past. “I’ve never looked at a haystack without thinking of you.”

  “That is quite enough of that,” Maerta jerked her chin, but he could see a smile tugging at her eyes. “I was young and foolish, and you were no gentleman.”

  “I miss you, Maerta.” The words ripped out of him by themselves, tearing open the wound in his chest anew; he had to chew his lip to hold back a sob.

  “Of course you do, I’m dead. But I’m gone, Maxmillian, remember that. At least you haven't kept the mourning period to pathetic lengths.” The vaguely transparent figure of his late wife turned to study Elonia. “She’s pretty, your Threll-person, especially for her age.”

  “Her name is Elonia.” Maxmillian took several deep breaths to get a grip upon his emotions. “She reminds me of you, in a way.”

  “Bosh. At least she’s not milking you for your money.” Maerta fixed him with a steely gaze. “I suppose you know what you’re about, running around with a sword and helmet like a madman, although why I’ll never know. Still, you’ve stayed alive doing it, so you must be as competent at it as you were with everything else. You were a fine husband to me, Maxmillian, and a good man. Now say it.”

  The tears in his eyes blinded him, and his throat closed until he could hardly breathe. Clenching his teeth, he tried to force the words out like a Badger, like a warrior, like the first Maxmillian would, but his jaws locked tight.

  “Say it, Maxmillian. You must. So few get this chance.”

  The words burned like dry ice. “Goodbye, Maerta.”

  “Goodbye, husband. I always loved you, and love you still. ‘Ware the past, Maxmillian, it is a trap. Like the polished floor inside those doo...” Maerta did not vanish, or fade away, she snapped out like a burning blade of grass that was slapped by a giant hand.

  “Maerta?” Maxmillian whispered, misery tearing at his being. Slumping back, he rested his burning face against the cool stone of the wall and gasped for air. Nothing in his life had ever hurt so bad. Each breath was a struggle, each heartbeat an eternity, until a gentle hand on his arm made him jump.

  “Maxmillian? Are you all right?” There was genuine concern in Elonia’s eyes as she knelt by his side.

  At least his cheeks were dry. “I...saw my wife. Late wife.” He had to hold his breath for a moment to keep it all inside.

  “I saw someone, too, although hardly a loved one,” the Seeress grinned ruefully as she sat next to him. “Unsettling nonetheless.”

  “She approved of you,” Maxmillian tried for a light tone. “It was just, you know, I hadn’t, that is, she went suddenly on an ordinary day, no warning.”

  “So you were able to say goodbye.” Elonia took one of his hands in both of hers.

  Maxmillian nodded jerkily, unable to trust his voice.

  “That is always good, in the long run. I was lucky: I was able to say goodbye to my mother when her time came. It helped, over the years.”

  They sat in companionable silence for a while. Finally the scholar shook his head and frowned. “Your, well, visitor, how did they go away?”

  The Seeress shrugged. “Just gone, like it appeared, out of nowhere.”

  “Did they talk to you about the present?”

  “Yes, in a way. She came back to taunt me, unsettle me before the fight. Someone I had killed who held a grudge. It didn’t work, and she got huffy and left.”

  “Maerta, my wife, she was snuffed out like a candle in mid-sentence, it mid-word to be specific.”

  “That isn’t what I saw with mine,” the Seeress scowled. “We better ask Bridget.”

  “So she wrapped it up with a warning about the past,” Maxmillian concluded. “She disappeared like someone was clapping a hand over her mouth. Could the liche be behind all this?”

  The dark-haired advocate shook her head thoughtfully. “No. Not directly, that is. The liche created the aura that made this possible, but the visitation is a by-product, a side effect. No, what you saw was something else entirely, something very rare. Your wife must be, been, a remarkable woman of tremendous will.”

  “That she was,” Maxmillian agreed fervently.

  “There are rules about these things, even here where the lines between life and death grow weak. Much isn’t known, and I don’t know all of that which is known, but to put it simply, these shades we talk to are not allowed to affect the living directly. Oh, they can comfort or taunt, and talk about a shared past, but they can reveal nothing about what lies beyond life or anything not a part of what was shared in life. Maerta knew that, and tried to warn you anyway. She was, well, recalled when she broke the rules, but the weakness of the lines here made it possible to get something out, a few words.”

  “Did it hurt her?”

  “No, that we know. That is a bribe many necromancers use, this speaking with the dead. Many serve them to see a lost one again and again. It would be weeks before her shade could return, but otherwise, no harm done to her.”

  “She wouldn’t come back again even if she could,” Maxmillian obs
erved sadly. “The past is done, that’s what she said.”

  “And said ‘ware the polished floors inside,” Bridget muttered, thumbing through Kustar’s papers. “Yes, here, and here: visitors who described the Grand Chamber comment on the rich carpets which cover the stone floor. How nice.”

  Henri swore. “Simple, yet effective. Pave the room with marble or something similar, polish it to a fine gloss, wax it, then cover it with carpets when company arrives. Any assassin that makes it this far breaks his neck trying to walk.”

  “Or at least is prone and easy pickings for the Dayar,” Elonia nodded. “Well, it didn’t last this long without a few surprises up its sleeve.”

  “More to the point, what are we going to do about this?” Henri wondered. “If we had those cleats you strap to your boots for ice work, we would be just fine, but we don’t.”

  “We’ve Elonia’s plan to create a trench with the Orb; that is still a good idea,” Bridget was studying the map while she spoke. “The floor’s condition simply means that we have to adapt our thinking and adjust our plans. Thank the Eight your late wife was a forceful woman, Maxmillian. Otherwise we would have been joining her.”

  “I have spoken of her formidable will in my prayers many times,” the scholar muttered to himself. “Many, many times.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Finished, Elonia signaled the others and repacked her lock picks into their leather tool-roll. Sword ready, Bridget eased the door open and slipped inside, carefully followed by the others, the Seeress in the rear. The room they found themselves in was not small, perhaps fifty feet on a side, but it was jammed with row after row of what looked for all the world like wine racks, packed in close together with only the slenderest of aisles between them. There were no bottles in the lath and pole structures, however: each ten foot tall rack had nine horizontal shelves supporting rows of dusty cylinders resembling of loaves of bread wrapped in old parchment.

  “Levare,” Bridget tapped one of the cylinders. “A skin container containing bone fragments and ash from a sentient creature, sealed with blood and fat, the whole assembled in a series of special ceremonies. These are Dayar in an embryonic state, my friends: an Undead army all around us.”

  Maxmillian’s lips moved as he stabbed a finger around him. “Over nine thousand of them.”

  “And this just one room of several,” the advocate nodded grimly. “What you are looking at is the accumulation of centuries, a massive expenditure of magic and effort.”

  “Why not activate them?” Kustar asked, absently hefting a levare. “They don’t eat, and they gain in experience with time.”

  “Controlling them requires expenditures of magical energy; small amounts, but when you are talking the numbers we have here, well, it amounts to a huge amount. The liche would only call them forth if attacked or when the moment to march was upon it.”

  “What is it waiting for?” Maxmillian prodded one of the containers with the tip of his hammer. “An army of Dayar would require no supplies.”

  “The trap of necromancy: by the time the liche had assembled enough levare to build an army, its physical being has deteriorated to the point where campaigning is impractical, if not impossible.”

  “That’s why it has so much material on necromancy: to try and restore its being,” Kustar grinned. “These are held against that day.”

  “Yes on the first count, but these are also material for trade. I’ve read that a third of the Dayar created on this continent came from levare obtained from the White Necromancer. It trades them for material for its archives, keeping enough around to make it a very dangerous foe. Enough discussion: Henri, how are we going to move them?”

  The wizard looked up from his examination of a rack. “These’re held together with cord and dowel pins,” he rapped the structure before him. “We can take one apart and put together a crude stretcher that should serve our purpose.”

  “Good, you and I will do that. Maxmillian, stand guard; Elonia and Kustar, each of you take one end of the room and work towards the middle. Stab each levare through the seal, here, see? There’s no need to tear it open or spill it out, just cut completely through the seal and you’ve ruined the enchantment.” The priestess looked about the room. “We should have time to do quite a few before we leave, and a good day’s work that will be, whatever else we accomplish this day.”

  “Getting out alive will be a good day’s work today, no matter what else we accomplish,” Henri countered, dumping levare onto the floor preparatory to dismantling the rack. “In my opinion, anyway.”

  Despite Bridget’s hopes, only a small portion of the room’s store of levare had been ruined by the time they had cobbled together a crude stretcher and loaded it down with thirty of the unholy packages; admittedly, that ran into the hundreds of the devices, but it put only a small dent into the total. The advocate glumly surveyed the rest. “Never enough time,” she lamented. “But we can’t risk remaining here.”

  “It would take the full Company and a couple more Torcs to put this place to rights,” Henri comforted her. “We do what we can and hope for the best.”

  Kustar and Henri took up the stretcher while Bridget led. Moving without haste or delay, slipping silently through the deserted halls, the raiders returned to the west entrance to the Grand Chamber of the White Necromancer. Bridget and Henri carefully arranged the load of levare in front of the doors while the other stood guard. Finished, the Serjeant turned to the other raiders. “Five minutes and we go in. Ready yourselves.”

  Kneeling a little apart from the others, she focused her mind upon the Torc and the enchanted belt, bracelet, and amulet she wore.

  “Damn long odds on this one,” Roger Turin commented from where he sat on the piles of levare. “I’m glad I’m already dead.”

  “Sod off, Roger, I’m busy,” the Serjeant snarled.

  “Now is that any way to greet an old friend from beyond? Especially one whose leg you cut off?”

  “The term is amputate, and you should have lived.”

  “Ooh, put the blame on the patient, ‘I did a good job, you ungrateful bastard, it was your fault you died’. Who ended up with Moonblade, anyway?”

  “Rolf. Janna likes her bastard sword too much to give it up.”

  “I really didn’t cheat on the throw of the dice that determined who got the sword; tell her that, won’t you?”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “I wouldn’t have joked about it if I knew how long she would hold a grudge; cost me making Serjeant, that did. You’re pretty calm about this meet-the-dear-departed-business, aren't you? Maxmillian took seeing his wife again pretty hard. ‘Course, we weren’t ever that close.”

  “Not from a lack of you trying.”

  “Look, I was drunk that time; by the Eight, all I did was crawl into your bedroll. You act like I tried to rape you or something. You and Axel weren’t even an item then.”

  “How about all the times you spied on me when I was bathing in the field?”

  “Well, all right, I apologize. Just a weak man, what can I say? Nothing personal, you know, just a pretty girl. Hell, I spied on Janna a couple times.”

  “Didn’t like what you saw, or you just preferred me?”

  “Actually, she came to suspect, and confronted me about it; well, to be truthful, she knocked me on my rear. Didn’t seem worth it, after that.”

  “I should have done that.”

  “Look, I quit once I met Nuilia, and anyway, it was only a few times. I’m sorry about it, like I said.” The apparition stroked its ghostly beard thoughtfully. “Of course, all Janna did was wash, which...”

  “Shut up and go away, Roger,” Bridget interrupted him. “I accept your apology, now bugger off.”

  He winked. “Just like old times, eh? Good luck to you, Bridget, and farewell.”

  “Farewell, Roger. We miss your skill with a blade, and your courage.”

  Sighing, she returned to her preparations, blinking away a tear. Roger had ne
ver been what you could call a friend, but they had served together for over eight years, and it stung to see him again. He wouldn’t have liked it had she said so, however; theirs had been a relationship of rough words, at least from her.

  Ready at last, she called the others together and went over their simple plan one more time while Henri worked on the stack of levare. “This is going to be over fast,” she concluded. “Either Henri and I will deal with the liche, or it with us, all in the pace of a handful of seconds. All you have to do is hold the Dayar off us for that time. In all likelihood, the seven on the east side of the platform won’t have time to get into action before the magical battle is over. May the Eight go with us all, and watch over our souls.”

  “I would like them to keep a close eye on my mortal health as well,” Henri muttered to Kustar as he wiped off his boot knife and sheathed it. The Pargaie officer chuckled.

  Elonia and Kustar took up position at the doors, which opened outward, ready to throw them wide. Bridget, Maxmillian, and Henri stood ready to rush the chamber. The Serjeant took several deep breaths, clasped her amulet in both hands, her thumbs touching the rubies of the Torc; Henri dried his hands on his trouser legs and readied his spells; the scholar shrugged his shield into a better position and worked his hammer-arm.

  “The time has come,” Bridget announced in a low voice. “Open the doors. We attack.”

  Bracing themselves, Elonia and Kustar flung the doors wide, opening the way into the Grand Chamber. The room yawned before them, a hundred feet on a side and half as tall, the ribbed stone dome of the ceiling lost in shadows. The floor’s expanse, a gleaming sheet of green marble panels so heavily waxed and polished that the seams between the individual slabs were invisible, was unmarred by furniture or fitting, interrupted only at the three-tiered dais of ivory marble slabs against the north wall, the top of which was hidden by a five-leaf folding screen of polished mahogany and stretched spider’s silk bearing the White Necromancer’s skeletal hand in silver on inky black. The walls, which were ribbed like a skeleton with support buttresses, were panels of black granite, polished so that gold and silver flecks caught the light provided by six chandeliers, the latter consisting of circular silver frames hanging from the ceiling by gold chains, each precious circle supporting a score of glowing skulls. Of the liche there was no sign, but seven shadowy figures stood to either side of the platform, dwarfed to insignificance by the room.