by Edwin McRae
Mark pondered his options. He could perhaps imbue his sword with Arcane Edge, charge the shagging scouts, and take them both out before they managed to disentangle. Then again, the ground was pretty rough around here. If he tripped and went down, their ambush was blown. He winced and tore his eyes away from the scouts. He really wished he hadn’t thought ‘blown’ just then.
His eyes settled on Dayna’s bow, laying beside her. Knowing she’d never agree to it if he asked, he touched his fingertips to the bowstring and muttered the appropriate arcanities. The tightly woven flax was immediately bathed in a soft, flickering hue, and began to emit the faintest of hums, like a wasp caught in a jar.
“What did you just do to my bow?!” Dayna hissed.
Mark gestured for her to calm down. “Arcane Edge. I’m hoping the bonus will transfer to your arrow before you fire it.”
“What if that shit transfers to my hand instead?”
Mark hadn’t thought of that, but figured it best to pretend he had. “Trust me. It won’t.”
Dayna’s narrowed eyes burned into him for a long moment, then without another word, she scooped up her bow and nocked an arrow. To Mark’s relief, the flickering hue swept over the feathers and along the shaft, reaching and enveloping the head in less than a second. Dayna raised her eyebrows as if to say “well, how about that”, drew back the string, and sent the glowing arrow streaking towards the scouts.
Vari let out a yelp of sympathy as the missile plunged into the side of the female scout’s chest, just below her armpit, piercing armor like it was the softest of skin. She shuddered and died in her lover’s arms, yet he had no time to react, no time to mourn his loss. Dayna’s second glowing arrow impaled him between the shoulder blades and tore through his heart. The two reivers slid down the tree trunk and onto the ground, locked together by their intimacy, even in death.
Your party has slain two Level 1 Reiver Scouts.
Your XP reward per party member = 6 XP
Mark shot Dayna an “I told you so” smirk.
Dayna shrugged. “How long will it last?”
“Five minutes.”
“That’s a bit shit, isn’t it?” She turned her back on him and set off back towards the horses.
That girl, thought Mark, has issues.
6
The next pair of scouts were less intimate with each other than the first pair. They’d placed themselves conveniently far apart. Convenient for them, Vari deduced, as it meant the scouts could cover a wider field of surveillance. This sensible tactic would’ve foiled Mark and Dayna’s plans had the scouts not been looking outward, alert to external threats, rather than inward to the thick stretch of forest between them and the wagon train.
The first scout fell quietly enough. Dayna’s arrow punched through the nape of her neck and severed her vocal cords. Yet Vari couldn’t help but cringe in sympathy at what the second scout was forced to suffer. Dayna’s arrow pierced the back of his leather armor but failed to hit anything vital. Thankfully, shock and overwhelming agony were on their side. The scout took a few stunned moments to realize what had happened, just enough time for Mark to charge forth, sword drawn, and behead him before his warning scream doomed them all.
Your party has slain two Level 1 Reiver Scouts.
Your XP reward per party member = 6 XP
The heat of rivalry was palpable between Mark and Dayna, so Vari wasn’t at all surprised when he made his comment about Dayna’s shooting of the second scout.
“Dayna, why is it, when you’re shooting at me, you can make it count, but when someone’s capable of summoning almost a dozen soldiers on our heads, you give him every opportunity to scream his bloody lungs out?”
Vari thought it a little unfair, considering how accurate Dayna’s archery had been up until this point, but figured that stress and anxiety were driving Mark’s need to vent. Neither was Vari surprised when Dayna promptly nocked another arrow and leveled it at Mark.
“Perhaps you’d be good enough to help me refocus, Mark?” Dayna’s tone was flat and cold, and Vari wasn’t at all confident that she was bluffing, so she offered the first thing that sprang to mind as a distraction.
“I can make these dead reivers fight for us.”
That got their attention. In fact, Vari couldn’t help but blush under the fierce light of their intense gazes.
“What?” It actually sounded more like a choked gasp from Dayna than an actual word, but it sounded close enough to ‘what’ for Vari.
She pointed off to where the female scout was lying spread-eagled in the undergrowth.
“Apart from the hole in her neck, that one’s pretty much intact. She’ll be easy. No need to spend extra essence on her.” She gestured at the headless scout. “This one will take a little boost, but he’s still salvageable.” Two essence points should counter the extra life force lost from the decapitation. Life force was something like water leaking from a bladder. The more holes there were, the harder it was to fill, and the less time it would remain so. But even a bladder riddled with holes had its uses. You could water a garden with it.
Mark’s smooth face crinkled with wry amusement and something else. That lustre in his eyes. Was that…excitement?
“Are we talking about zombies?”
Vari shook her head. “I’ve never heard that word before.”
“You know, the walking dead.”
He did a strange stiff-legged dance with his arms stretched out before him, wrists loose, allowing his hands to dangle and flop. And he made the oddest, drawn out groaning noise that almost sounded like the word ‘brains’.
“Well, yes, they’ll still be dead, and they’ll walk, but since rigor mortis won’t set in for an hour or two, they’ll move much as they did before, thanks to muscle memory.”
While Dayna simply glared at the two of them in disbelief, Mark actually looked a little disappointed.
“So they won’t hunger for brains and assorted internal organs?”
Vari tried her best not to smile. “I suppose, if the person had been a cannibal beforehand, they might experience some pre-conditioned urges. But it certainly wouldn’t affect how the corpse handled. And its digestive system would be completely torpid, so it wouldn’t feel anything close to hunger.”
“How the corpse handles, I see now.” Mark nodded sagely.
Dayna pointed a trembling finger at Vari. “See what? That she’s stark, raving mad?”
“No, Dayna,” he admonished, taking the tone of a parent trying to be patient with an extremely frustrating child. “Being a figurist, Vari must be able to harness the residual life force of the recently departed and use it to not only animate their remains but also control them like…I was going to say a ‘remote-controlled robot’, but you’d probably have no idea what that is.”
“I don’t either.” Vari grinned at Mark, delighted at how quickly he’d grasped the concept. “But everything else you just said is bang on.”
“Thanks,” responded a chuffed Mark. “Mind if I watch you work?”
“Not at all.”
Dayna promptly turned her back on them and strode off, headed for the horses. “While you two sickos are defiling the dead,” she called over her shoulder, “I’ll be leading the horses to safe spot up ahead. Then I’m going to do deal with the final scout.”
“We’ll meet you at the trail with our reinforcements,” Mark called after her.
Without looking back, Dayna raised her right hand, curled her forefinger under her thumb, and presented him with the remaining three.
“She wants us to meet her in three minutes?” wondered Vari.
Mark shook his head. “No, it’s Garlander sign language.”
“Meaning?”
“Something to do with farmers and goat-breeding. The details are best left to the imagination.”
“Oh.”
When they reached her, Dayna had already dragged the final scout’s body into the undergrowth.
Your party has slain one Level 1
Reiver Scout.
Your XP reward per party member = 3 XP
Dayna looked up at Vari and Mark as they approached, then looked away in abject disgust as Vari’s puppets emerged from the gathering mist behind them.
“What are you planning to do with those things, reiver?” She directed the question at the ground, the dirt, which Dayna seemed to consider a fair equivalent to Vari in that moment.
Vari felt the emptiness in her chest grow a little larger, the ache in her solar plexus become a little stronger. She folded her arms, doing her best to ignore it, and fixed Dayna with a steady, hostile glare. Dayna lifted her gaze from the ground and returned a bit of ocular hostility of her own. But Vari wasn’t about to be beaten, not this time. She’d been judged and used since the day she was born. She was going to become a Garlander now, one way or another, and she wasn’t about to start her new life by bowing to a bully like Dayna.
Still, she was grateful to Mark when he jumped in to deflate the tension before it popped of its own violent accord. Standing her ground against Dayna was one thing. Pulling an arrow out of her chest, that was something entirely different.
“We’re still outnumbered, almost four to one, and a straight-out ambush is only going to give us a small advantage. We might kill two or three before they can organize a defense, but after that, I don’t fancy our chances against eight heavily-armed and armored reivers in military formation.”
Vari nodded her agreement. “These two corpses,” she began as she pointed at the freshly killed scout lying amongst the ferns, “and that one, are going to attack and keep most of the soldiers busy while we kill the officer and free the captives.”
“Surely a few of those villagers can fight,” added Mark. “And I have another trick I want to try, one that should get me nice and close to the officer.”
Dayna switched her baleful glare to Mark. “More black magic?”
“Magic’s a bit of a grey area at the best of times, Dayna, and if it frees the villagers…”
Dayna put her hands on her hips, looked from one companion to the other and finally let out a defeated sigh. “Fine, do what you want. If you need me, I’ll be shooting reivers from the trees.”
Mark couldn’t resist. “How very honorable of you.”
“Fuck off, Mark.”
Dayna yanked two of her arrows out of the scout’s corpse, flicked the blood off them, and slid the arrows into her quiver as she headed for the trees.
“That went as well as expected,” Mark whispered to Vari.
“I’m finding it very hard to like her,” Vari whispered back. “I hope all Garlanders aren’t like that.
“They’re not,” Mark offered with a shrug. “At least not in my past experience, but things have changed a bit since I was last here.”
She shot him a speculative look. “Yes, we must talk about that soon, about where you’ve come from.”
“A long story for a more peaceful day.”
Vari nodded her acceptance and focused on raising the third and final corpse.
Your ‘Puppeteer’ spell has increased to Tier 2.
Your Meat Puppets will remain animate for an additional ten minutes each. Corpses in poor condition will require one less extra essence point to raise.
At that she smiled and gratefully patted the shoulder of her latest puppet.
Mark raised an eyebrow. “New favorite minion?”
“He is now. Just helped me level up my Puppeteer spell.”
“Nice.”
“Thank you. And you said you had a spell you wanted to try out?”
“Yup. Watch this.”
He stepped out into the middle of the trail, placing himself within a patch of mist. Vari could still see him well enough, although his features and the lines of his body were noticeably less distinct.
“Um, Mark. If you stand there, the reivers are going to see you as soon as they top that rise.” She pointed to where the muddy road dropped behind the crest of the hill upon which they stood.
“Not if I do this.”
To Vari’s astonished eyes, Mark’s body dissolved away to nothing, and the mist grew noticeably thicker where he’d been standing but a moment before.
“Mark?”
She’d never heard of this kind of magic before, let alone witnessed it. But Vari was left with no time for wonder as the creak and rumble of a wagon reached her ears. She took up the psychic strings of her meat puppets, and ordered them to crouch down in the roadside ferns while she beat a hasty retreat into the trees. As long as she could see the puppets, she could control them.
Mark, she supposed, would materialize when the time was right. At least, she hoped he would. Experience had taught her that first castings seldom went to plan. And as it turned out, first attempts at newly hatched plans seldom did either.
Vari unleashed her puppets just as the wagon’s team of oxen breached what she’d come to think of as ‘Mark’s fog’. Their blood-drenched visages had the desired effect, producing shrieks of terror from the captives, and startling the reiver soldiers so that one dropped his mace and another’s breeches grew suddenly and suspiciously damp. Yet the reiver officer, a slender, black-clad man sitting next to the wagon’s driver, proved to be decidedly less impressionable than the rest. He neither cried out nor hesitated. Instead, he took up the kite shield mounted beside him, a sensible action that saved his life. The arrow that was meant to strike him in the face, bounced harmlessly off the burnished steel. He then barked three crisp orders in a steady and commanding voice.
“Vanguard, destroy the puppets. Flankers, reinforce the vanguard and then find the puppeteer. Rearguard, bring me three prisoners.”
Vari tried to put up a good fight with her minions but soon realized her crucial mistake. Meat puppets were just that, corpses dangling from the strings of her mind. And her mind had never been taught to wield a shortsword or hatchet, never learned the footwork of melee, never had to hold itself still and cool in the heat of battle. Perhaps with one puppet she might’ve feigned a semblance of martial prowess through pure imagination. But with three, the sweat that drenched her, the blinding headache that followed, only sought to make her easy prey for the soldiers when they returned their comrades to the dirt and then came looking for her. Yes, Dayna’s arrows winged a couple before they reached her, but it wasn’t enough to change Vari’s fate.
As the survivors took hold of her arms, the steel of their gauntlets digging painfully into her flesh, she watched through bloodshot eyes as, under order from the captain, three more soldiers slit the throats of three captives, a wounded young man and an elderly couple. The expendables ones, she recognized bitterly. The ones they might lose anyway through infection or overwork. And then they went back for three more. Two young girls and a large, bearded farmer. Valuable slaves, yet Vari knew the captain had already weighed their cost against the risk that his bluff would be called.
“To the archer in the trees,” he called out. “Present yourself within a count of ten or you shall have another trio of deaths on your already bloodied conscience.”
He said all of this from behind the comfort of his kite shield, seemingly oblivious to the coalescing form above him, a figure of mist crouched upon the skyward bars of the wagon. Vari stared at the captain as the soldiers brought her forward, determined not to give Mark away. He returned her gaze, and there was no arrogance in his thin face, no smugness in his triumph. His black eyes regarded her with nothing but calculation. And as Mark returned to the world of the flesh, his sword raised above the captain’s head, the officer calmly drew a dagger from his belt, pivoted with practised grace, and backhanded his blade into Mark’s exposed armpit.
“Mark!” His name was more croak than scream in her shocked throat. Yet still he heard her, his blue eyes meeting hers even as the life fled from them.
The captain jerked his dagger free and Mark toppled like a stringless puppet to the ground. The officer then gestured for Vari to be placed alongside the three hostages. She wondere
d for the barest moment whether Dayna would happily let her die, until the cursing ranger emerged from the woods, her two white-knuckled hands clasped about the bow that she held raised above her head.
She and Dayna were loaded into the cart with the others while a pair of soldiers stripped Mark of his sword, chainmail and helmet. As the wagon pulled away, Vari watched Mark’s body through the bars, his face splattered with mud, his blank eyes staring at the sky, until they rounded a bend and he slipped from view.
7
Mark regained consciousness, scrambled to his knees, and prodded at his armpit with his fingertips. The jabbing pain was still there, a haunting echo in his mind, a memory of steel piercing his lung, causing every breath to become an act of agony. And then the feeling of his heart being skewered, that was something that he wished very much to forget. Not to mention the all-consuming numbness that followed. A black, ineluctable descent into a gaping, hungry nothing.
He took in his surroundings, the forest, the night-clad vegetation, the pentagram at his feet that he could barely make out in the wan moonlight. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then slumped back down onto the ground.
Time had passed and he had no idea where it had gone. That gap between life and death, that emptiness that he couldn't explain. Was that the point at which the game decided whether he would return to this world or that other world he was reluctant to call ‘home’? And what if, through some failure of the system or his own misconduct, that empty darkness decided to claim him as he passed through? The prospect brought burning tears to Mark's eyes, and a cold, clammy sweat to his skin.
He took another deep breath, let it out even more slowly this time, appreciating the wondrous expansion of his lungs and the gentle aching as he pushed the last of the air from his body. It was good to be alive. Beyond that, Mark didn't really want to think about it. And right now, he had more pressing issues.