by T. O. Munro
Haselrig’s head twitched in the slightest shake towards the half-elf. “A moment more, Quintala.”
The necromancer’s expression was fierce with concentration and the zombie shuffled round, clumsily offering the sword to the puzzled orc. The creature looked to Haselrig for guidance and, at a nod, reached out his hand for the weapon.
There was a flash and a bang and the orc was flung halfway across the room by an arcing electric shock which left the zombie quite untouched.
No less stunned for having witnessed the event, rather than experienced it, Quintala stood open mouthed. At the wizard’s direction the zombie replaced the weapon on the table and then heaved the senseless orc over its shoulder to bear him from the room. The orc was groaning a little as consciousness returned until an awkward stagger and sway from his undead bearer swung the invalid’s head crashing against the stone wall by the steps. Concussed once more, the orc made no further murmur as the three assistants in Haselrig’s experiment took their silent leave.
Quintala watched them go, mind racing as she tried to decipher what the ex-antiquary had shown her. The first question leapt from her lips as soon as the door had closed. “These are the swords still, not some cunning facsimile imbued with some echo of the bloodline magic?”
Haselrig nodded. “They are indeed, the swords they always were. I have checked and the orc’s unfortunate experience proves it. They are as protected as they ever were by the Vanquisher’s bloodline charm.”
“But not against the zombie?”
Haselrig shook his head. “No, indeed not. That was a puzzle it took me some days to unpick.”
“Days?” Quintala seized the man’s shoulder. “How long have you known this, Haselrig? How long have you kept this from me?”
Haselrig shuffled off the half-elf’s hand. “Recent experience has taught me caution, Quintala. A need to be absolutely certain of my facts before I share them. I would not want to be the cause of any more disappointments for you or the master.”
“And what certainty have you discovered in those days of study?”
“The bloodline magic is a powerful tool, but it responds to living things. In living hands of Eadran’s line the swords are formidable weapons, in living things of any other provenance his magic fires a defence of great force. The dweomer must be linked to some sense of their life force, their souls.”
“And zombies?”
“They have no life force. The bloodline magic is blind to them, and they to it. The swords will not harm them, but they cannot wield them – or at least they cannot harness the power Eadran imbued in the blades. They are simply lumps of steel, well-crafted and sharp, but for a zombie hands and teeth are more certain weapons than a sword.”
Quintala found she was pacing the room her brain reeling with explosions of insight. “How did we not know this, a thousand years and this was not known?”
Haselrig shrugged. “Necromancy is the master’s talent, his and his disciples. The bloodline artefacts were crafted after he was imprisoned. For a thousand years there have been no zombies, no soulless undead. Those blades have cut their way through steel and leather and the living flesh and bone beneath it for a millennium, yet never have they been raised against the undead.”
“You think they might not harm a zombie.”
“The sharpness of the weapon’s edge comes from the heritage of he or she who wields it. In the queen’s hands I fancy these blades would dismember a zombie as readily as they would an orc. But an orc could not steal the blades away from their owner, whereas a zombie could.”
“And if the bitch queen had balls she’d be the king,” Quintala spat back as her amazement at the discovery faded into disappointment at its irrelevance. “We have no need of zombies to steal away what we already possess.”
“You are missing the point, Quintala,” Haselrig said gently.
“Am I?” she cried railing at his impertinence. Then a moment later a softer, self-directed “am I?” And then at last she answered herself, even as she reached inside her jerkin for the black medallion on its lanyard. “I am!”
***
“Governor, Governor Odestus,” Vesten hammered on the door to the workshop with increasing desperation.
At last the door swung open and Odestus blinked owlishly at his worry thinned secretary. “What is it Vesten?”
“Lady Quintala commands your presence.”
“She is always commanding my presence.”
“And begging your pardon, Governor, but she is often disappointed with how quickly you respond.”
“That is between her and me, Vesten. It is no concern of yours.”
Vesten bobbed unhappily. “I would concur whole heartedly, Governor, save only that she has said she will cut off one of my fingers for each minute that you are late.”
“Ah!”
“So if we could please hurry.”
The secretary’s entreaty worked where Quintala’s inherent authority had not. The little wizard hurried after the secretary letting the door slip to behind him.
In their haste neither noticed the dark shape detaching from the shadows. A small robed figure with a collar of preposterous height which embraced his head from neck to crown and from ear to ear.
***
Galen slipped quickly across the passage way and thrust the long thin toe of his silk shoe into the crack of the almost closed door. He held his breath as the door slowed and stopped. A sliver of torch light showed where it had stalled still ajar. Letting out a slow exhale, the necromancer slipped inside his former master’s workshop and pressed the door closed behind him. It was a moment to savour, a chance seized and now to be fully exploited. He gazed around the chamber, its crowded workbench and overflowing bookshelves. A chest here, a pot there and to one side a cloak flung over some stand.
Nothing was locked away, nothing hidden from view. The foolish wizard had trusted to his magical lock on the door to prevent any unwanted visitors. It was a powerful, albeit one-directional enchantment, but the stronger the spell the more foolish the faith that it would never be circumvented. And, like all spells, it relied ultimately on the fallible human mind, dependent on Odestus to ensure the door was properly closed in order for the magic to function.
Galen suppressed a giggle and lifted the lid of the nearest box. An ugly lizard glared back at him. Galen let the lid fall. All those chameleons, what was it the little wizard had in mind for them? A pot held a foul smelling glowing orange liquid. Galen resisted the urge to taste it. He had a dozen different poisons brewing in his own workspace; he did not doubt that Odestus’s laboratory would have as many perils for the unwary.
He pulled the cloak from its stand, thinking to rifle it for hidden pockets, but stopped, all thought of thievery banished by the sight the garment had concealed. An oval window hung in the space before him. Despite the subterranean nature of the chamber, the opening showed a narrow corridor in red veined rock clearly lit by some yellow light of day. Galen gasped. He had heard of gates, of portals between the planes. He knew that Maelgrum had an uncanny mastery of these openings but he had never suspected Odestus had any talent in that field.
He pressed his fingers against the surface, feeling it yield to the pressure like a soap bubble. The sight resolved so many mysteries. The little wizard’s extended disappearances and sudden returns. He gave a squeak, covering his mouth with a hand to stop the noise escaping. That awful day when Odestus had humiliated him outside the castellan’s chamber, when the snot rag secretary had insisted that the wizard wasn’t even there. The streak of shit had not been lying, Odestus had not been in the room, he had been on the other side of a gate such as this.
But what had he been doing there? And why was he so desperate to conceal his sojourns into another plane. Galen gulped and pushed both hands against the portal. There was only one way to find out. The necromancer picked up the cloak and stepped carefully back towards the portal. His backside was through the gate while his hands were still in the little wiza
rd’s workroom hooking the cloak over the edge of the planar gate. All appeared as it had been when Galen first stepped into the room, save for the bulge of the necromancer’s body beneath the cloak. Then the cloak went flat again, hanging straight to the floor as Galen passed through the portal into the world beyond.
***
It was always peaceful in the graveyard. The sloping ground, rising slightly towards the wall of the volcanic cavern. It looked out over the lake and afforded the honoured dead the best view in the heart of the mountain. Persapha arranged the confusion of moss and lichen to best effect and set them by the stone marker. It was not a karib custom, but Odestus had always paused to set something at Lyndat’s grave. Persapha took comfort in mimicking the human ritual and solace in the opportunity it gave for her to be apart from her adopted people.
Odestus was right, they would never turn her out. But she knew that her presence troubled them and that thought troubled her. The itching in her restless scalp also troubled her as did the way that, even with the mask, it had grown uncomfortable to look at her own reflection in the still waters of the lake. The sparkle of her eyes through the gauze had grown brighter, brighter still when she was anxious, in a way that sent shivers down her own spine.
But most of all, what troubled her was the temper that lurked within her. The dark urges, the sudden desire to turn a momentary irritation into a surge of violence against the good natured karib. She ran whenever she felt the passion seize her, running far from anywhere that a stray lizard’s tongue might taste her fury and recoil in horror. She could sense it within her, a heady, intoxicating aroma, sweet and spicey. It had its own allure, calling her to savour it, and she fled from its addiction and worried for the day when she would have to flee far further.
She patted distractedly at the hood of her cloak. If she had to flee, if she had to run, where could she go? The cavern was her home. She had never spent a night beyond its protection. Even the daytime excursions had been brief, little more than tours of the volcano’s environs with Vlyndor pointing out just some of the signs of the dangers that lurked beneath the sand and rock. The karib took even greater care with them than with those airborne perils whose shrieks and shadows practically trumpeted their arrival.
She shivered, a clammy sweat upon her skin, and wished she had told Odestus more of the fear that consumed her. But then the little wizard had his own worries and it did not take a karib tongue to tell how great they were.
She patted the moss into a shape and pattern that would have pleased Lyndat, the purples, lilacs and greens blending and swirling in blooms of colour. A rock skittered and she looked up and then stood, backing away.
He was a man, like Odestus, but unlike him too. This man’s robes were bright and garish, the colour of blood. They were cut to show his bare chest an expanse as hirsute as his scalp was bald. A voluminous pair of trousers garbed his legs while long curled shoes hinted at toes quite unlike the delicate pink stubs at the end of Persapha’s feet.
He was looking at her quizzically, head tilted as though he could not quite believe what he was seeing. Her hood shifted, her scalp seething with her alarm. He was studying her cheek intently. “Dema?” he said at last.
Her eyebrows shot up beneath her mask. “Are you Bob?” she asked wondering, if that were the case, where Odestus might be.
“No,” he shook his head. “Are you Dema?”
“She was my mother,” Persapha admitted.
The man’s face split in a broad smile, his lips parting to show teeth of perfect length and whiteness. He seemed ready to laugh, his expression one of deep pleasure, a man filled with a joy all the greater for having been entirely unexpected. Persapha flicked her tongue out, straining to taste his intentions. The joy was honest, the pleasure sincere, but it was tainted with the flavour of malice, a bitter taste far uglier than any she had felt in fourteen years of living with the karib. She spat instinctively on the ground, trying to rid her mouth of the ghastly aroma.
The newcomer’s face darkened at her reaction. “Odestus has not been teaching you good manners has he girl, still I am sure my master will put that right.”
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“He is not a friend, Persapha. He is not a good karib.”
Vlyndor and two other Karib came slowly out of the mushroom field, tongues flicking to taste the situation.
The man laughed. “More of you reptiles! Where did Odestus find you and what use can you possibly serve? The little wizard has a fondness for little lizards it seems.”
“Odestus is our friend, he is welcome here. You are not.”
The man scowled. “Did you find him then, your foolish sentry? You should really have stationed a better guard, one who would not let a new arrival come within a knife’s reach of him.”
“He was a good karib,” Vlyndor went on. “He would have showed you courtesy and hospitality.”
Persapha frowned trying to unpick what Vlyndor was saying. The two karib behind him spread out to either side forming a loose net around the cackling man in his red cloak. “What has he done, Vlyndor?” she demanded, swallowing away a sickly sweet taste of spice in her mouth. The karib made no answer, keeping his gaze steady on the newcomer. She spun round at the stranger, “What have you done?”
“You are not welcome,” Vlyndor repeated. “You may go, we will do you no harm, but you cannot stay, not here.”
The stranger laughed a loud unpleasant laugh, the bitter taste of his malice had karib and girl alike gagging. He spread his arms wide. “You think to command me, to command Galen, Galen the necromancer, when he is standing in a graveyard!”
His fingers were flexing in a delicate dance even as his mouth roared with unkind laughter and, beneath their feet, the ground was shaking and the mounds of earth above the karib graves began to shift.
***
“What are they, your Majesty?” There was a rare doubt in the habitual certainty of Torsden’s voice, a disbelief in the evidence of his own eyes.
The difference in height between the Northern Lord and the queen was amplified by the necessary difference in the stature of their mounts and Niarmit found herself talking to Torsden’s waist. “They are the unrested dead, Lord Torsden. Bodies animated by the will of necromancers and driven by the most base and primal urges that remain in their rotting heads.”
The horses stamped their unease as the queen and her column of cavalry looked down from the low rise into the shallow valley to the north. There were about five hundred of the foul undead shambling their way eastwards. A crescent of wolf riding orcs and robed and mounted humans were spread out behind them like dogs behind a flock of sheep.
The big man crescented himself. “I would not have believed it possible.”
Niarmit scowled. “In the crevice of choice that the Goddess gives us, it is possible for men to follow all manner of ill paths and foul deeds, none more so than Maelgrum.”
“What purpose can these creatures serve?”
Niarmit waved eastwards to where a collection of houses nestled at the valley’s head. “He means to subdue with terror, to unleash the clawing crawling undead on the village of Grogham. Now that the freezing paralysis of winter is past, he intends to convince the people that they are not safe from his reach, even when they lie under our protection.”
Torsden grinned. “Indeed, your Majesty. We will be the people’s shield.” He hefted an axe so huge it could have felled a sequoia at one stroke. “Undead or not, I fancy those creatures work a lot less well when they are in pieces.”
Niarmit smiled at the Northern Lord’s cheerful espousal of extreme violence as the solution to most problems. On this occasion he was probably right. As Torsden waved the rest of the horsemen into position in a line along the rise, she pulled the Helm from her saddle bag and placed it on her head.
Again there was that discombulation of the superimposed scenes within and beyond the Domain of the Helm. Thren the Seventh had told her that Chirard had worn the Helm for
every second of his reign, not taking it off until the moment at which he was slain. Niarmit could barely imagine what they would have felt like. The duality of existence, standing astride two places, was a nausea inducing experience. It must have hastened the loss of those final fragile shreds of the Kinslayer’s sanity.
She kept her eyes focussed on the flattened valley before her, letting her ears alone capture the excited interest of her ancestors within the Helm’s protection. There had been a trickle of further monarchs to join those guarding the palace at the Helm’s centre against Chirard’s return. However, the voice she waited for most, that of the King Gregor who had loved her mother, remained unheard.
It was faithful Thren’s eastern twang that asked the first questions, to which she thought the answers.
“Where is this Niarmit?”
A place west of Colnham. There were signal fires warning of an enemy moving eastwards so Lord Torsden and I have ridden to investigate.
“How many have you?”
Two hundred and fifty.
“They have more.”
She knew he was looking through her eyes, seated in the stone thrones.
“What are those things? Ill-disciplined soldiers, unmannered even for a militia.” Another voice, Bulveld the Third, struggling to comprehend the shuffling zombies. The shepherds had at last perceived the threat from the south. The zombie horde was swinging sluggishly round from its target village, turning to face the line of Nordsalve cavalry that Torsden had arraigned in perfect formation atop the shallow crest of the hill.
They are zombies, your Majesty. The dead kept from rest by an enchantment of Maelgrum’s, a particular skill of his which he has shared most generously with his underlings.
“Zombies!” A squeak of alarm. It was the rotund Gregor the Third who, having suffered most in life and death at the Kinslayer’s hands, never strayed far from the collective protection of his fellow monarchs.
“Santos, summon the others,” Thren calm and assured in command. “We may not be able to kill them, but fire, ice and sword will destroy them.”