Crypt of the Violator

by K. J. Coble

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “—wine’s running low—”

  “Are you trying to make this worse?”

  “—we’ll be dead on our feet if the Xyxians try to make a play at us now.”

  “Almost hope that they do,” Strayden replied, lowering his voice. “Lot of ways a battle could fix things up.”

  Durrak didn’t immediately respond. Stepping up close, alongside Strayden, he whispered, “What are you playing at?”

  “You heard Harald,” Strayden replied, beginning to shiver, “and you saw the dead man.”

  Durrak gnawed his lip and shot a look over his shoulder. “Aye. So did the others and it’s been a devil of a thing keeping their chatter down. But what’s this scheming you’re at?”

  “There’s no way this mess fixes itself, I don’t care what kind of witchery the lady Lyssa has concocted. Someone’s got to find out. And then...” He shrugged.

  “Yeah?”

  “Then we’re screwed,” Strayden hissed savagely. “I’m not waiting around for that judgement. So maybe when battle’s joined again—and I can feel another one brewing soon, as sure as Gruzh is a whoremonger—a lot of things can happen. Maybe people slip away in the confusion.”

  Durrak froze in place, so abruptly the lads behind him bumbled into his back. Clank of gear and curses rippled back along the column. Durrak swore at the Vothan pressing him from behind and scrambled to catch back up to Strayden. “You cannot mean that!” he whispered furiously at Strayden’s ear. “Run from a fight? Gruzh would curse our souls to the Corpse Cave!”

  “I’m not saying run,” Strayden snapped back. “I’m saying the afterwards of a fight is a mess, yeah?”

  Durrak eyed him suspiciously. “Aye.”

  “So maybe that’s a good time that a few of us aren’t there when the rolls are called.”

  Durrak didn’t say anything for a long, long time. “Not cowards,” he murmured, “just deserters.”

  “I figure Gruzh will understand the distinction.”

  The other man shook his head. “They’ll never stop hunting us.”

  “They can’t even keep track of dead princes in the middle of their camp,” Strayden replied. “Look, you snagged goodies from that” he shuddered at spidery memories “place. We’ll pool the wealth. It’ll be more than enough. We’ll make for the coast, charter a ship, and find a new berth. Somewhere. Anywhere.”

  “What about Hilde?”

  Strayden winced and shrugged. “She’s still sitting pretty from the goods we brought back a year ago.” He shrugged again rather than acknowledge the hurt. “I’ll send word or something.”

  “What about the lads?” Durrak asked. “What about the Fifth? The Guard?”

  “The Vothan Guard was here before you or I; it’ll be around long after we’re bones.”

  “You’re serious about this?”

  Strayden didn’t answer right away. Desperate thoughts had whirled through his mind since their return from the ruins. Desperation had become terror when he saw Xass Kham’s corpse riding at the head of his men. Nothing about any of this felt right. And there was no way any of it ended well for those involved.

  But the Guard was home. More than anything else in his life, it had given Strayden place and purpose. Even speaking the words of his frantic scheme felt like a crime. Sure, it wasn’t strictly oath-breaking—plenty of Guardsmen came and went—but there’d never be a way he could come back, having deserted. He’d have to find a new way.

  He’d never again be the Captain of the Fifth; he’d just be Strayden of Starad.

  “You ever hear of the Red Gloves of Scintallos?” he asked Durrak.

  The Nuburran frowned. “Some kind of treasure?”

  “Some kind of punishment.” Strayden held up a hand. “The priests cut you at the wrists, real precise-like and all the way around. And then they peel the skin off your hands, slowly.” He wiggled his fingers. “The Red Gloves, you see.”

  Durrak scowled. “You’re saying we can expect something like that.”

  “Something worse,” Strayden growled. “These Scintallans enjoy torture almost as much as they enjoy gossip.”

  “I get the point.” The Nubburan shuddered. “All right...we live through this next fight that’s coming, and then we go. Yeah?”

  “That’s the idea.” He wiped sweat stinging from his eyes. “Find the others who were involved with the delve into that pit. I’m sure none will refuse to join.”

  “All right.” Durrak sounded like he was still trying to convince himself. He spat into the dust to his left. “Wish we’d never gotten mixed up with that Xyxian snake.”

  “You and me both.”

  THE SUN SLID DOWN TOWARDS the west, afternoon aging towards evening. The shadows of the dunes ahead lengthened, deepened, gave them an illusion of height they didn’t actually possess. Urius, riding leisurely at the head of his subject contingents, with the Barons lingering just behind, looked up to see a clump of riders atop one of the heights. The plug-like build of one of them made it Veridas. The frantic motions amongst them made their conversation an argument.

  He half-turned in the saddle to catch Artem Ech’s beady-eyed gaze. “I’ll be along,” he told the noble. “Stay with the rest.” He didn’t wait for a response, spurred his horse off from the march column and galloping up the dune.

  Veridas, his helmet off and red face agleam with perspiration, saw him coming and mumbled something under his breath. The others went quiet and looked toward Urius as he topped the rise. Finery made two of the riders noblemen of Verdias’ contingent. Leathers streaked with dried sweat salt, a shouldered long bow, and a look of disrepute gave the third away as one of the Ossonian horse archers.

  “Some sign?” Urius asked.

  “No sign,” Veridas growled back. He nodded at the Ossonian. “He says the constant shift of the sands and the winds have swallowed the trail.”

  More likely, he and his hill-born kin have no idea what they’re looking for. Urius brought his destrier to a halt atop the dune and looked out across another featureless expanse. Except it wasn’t featureless, not really. Whorls played across the desert, the sands ever-shifting. And as the sun dipped, its glare silhouetted tufts across the horizon—closer, even—of dust devils, whipping themselves constantly into miniature storms. Be hard to distinguish them from the dust kicked up by an army.

  “Did they find any sources of potable water?”

  Veridas pointed towards a slightly higher dune, to the northwest. “Local guides and maps were correct about that. There are springs there.”

  Urius turned in the saddle to regard the column of the army, winding below him as it reached the line of dunes and meandering north, as though the sandy ridge was some barrier it could not surmount. “Not the worst progress. And the Oasis of Shamir is how far?”

  Veridas wiped his sweaty face again. “At least another day. They were smart, the Xyxian devils. Fall back to regroup and let the damned heat defeat us.”

  Urius looked out into the wastes again. Movement caught his eyes and he stiffened. But it was just a small pack of riders, some of the Ossonians trotting out of the dust haze in the distance. Scanning the horizon showed him a few more small parties, combing the horizon. “Call your scouts back in,” he said. “It’s getting late. Pull them in and establish close outposts.”

  Veridas’ lips pinched with irritation and Urius thought he might snap back at the presumption of him giving the orders. But he’d likely been readying to give the same, himself, and nodded to the Ossonian. The greasy hillman wheeled about and rode off. A moment later, blatting notes blown through elk horns echoed into the desert.

  “My cousin won’t like it,” Urius said, “but we’re not going to get farther today.” He scowled at the disorder of the army column. “We don’t want to still be pulling this lot back together after dark. The dogs could still be out there.”

  Veridas waved and his nobles drew back while he nudged his mount closer to Urius�
�. “They found nothing of the pezeneks,” he said quietly. “What’s more, not all of their own parties have been seen since noon.”

  Urius looked at him sharply. “How? You can see for miles!”

  “There are endless rises and falls, a maze of dips you can’t see.” Verdias fidgeted. He’d been in the saddle a long time, but it was more than that. “And everything looks the same.”

  Urius swore and shook his head. “We have the local guides, do we not?”

  “We do,” the other Duke replied, “but they’ve become almost useless, spooked by something. We’ve had a few slip away, not come back.” He gestured towards the column. “Maybe you ought to take it up with our ‘ally’, the lousy quality of his men.”

  Fresh sweat cooled Urius’ flesh under his armor, padding, and tunic, glued the latter to his skin. Turning his head, he saw the Xyxian contingent coming up behind his own troops. Xass Kham rode at their fore, obvious by his shimmering retinue, but more so by the way he rode out ahead of it and obviously alone.

  “Call in your men,” Urius said, didn’t care if Veridas took it as an order and an affront; something about all of this was wrong. “And I’ll take your suggestion, see if I can shake something meaningful out of our Xyxian colleagues.”

  “Perhaps you should do more than shake,” Veridas growled after him as he spurred his horse downhill to meet the Xyxians.

  Kham’s coterie slowed at Urius’ approach and a low babble began amongst them. But the Prince, himself, continued on until the Duke was practically on top of him. Urius had to pull alongside and practically in contact before Kham even looked at him. And when he did, it was like staring into a doll’s featureless eyes.

  “My Prince,” Urius said with false cheer, “we’ve had little time. Might we speak?”

  Kham nodded once, stiffly, as though forced by unseen hands.

  Urius kept a smile plastered to his face, but his words rasped with long-suppressed anger. “What the hells are you playing at?” he whispered. “No word. No warning. What happened in Zadam? Did you succeed?”

  Kham nodded again, wordlessly. His complexion had gone ashy, waxy. There was nothing in those eyes, still.

  “You did?” Urius almost squeaked. “Then she is free? All the gods damn you, man, you must tell me!”

  A horn blatted in the near distance. Just one of the Ossonians. Another answered it, and another, their discordant chorus snorting up and down the gulley behind the dunes, echoing out across the skies. And new notes were clashing with them.

  Urius stiffened in the saddle. Around him and Kham, the marching column began to slow and stumble, riven with murmurs. The Ossonian horns weren’t being answered, he realized with a jolt; they were being challenged.

  An icy blade slid into the Duke’s gut.

  The Xyxians...they’re here!

  “THERE,” ASYRA SAID, and pointed.

  Clover slid in close to her, knelt. They’d left their already-weary ponies in a dip behind them and crawled up a low dune to crouch and watch. The other spy nodded. “I see it. You’re right. It’s not another one of the Ossonian rubes.”

  They’re ridden steadily due west all day, at first following the mounted archers, then increasingly drifting southwest as the hill riders became obviously clumsy and uncertain in their sweeps. By their sheer numbers, the Ossonians could screen an approach from their direction. But Asyra had felt an itchiness about the Scintallan flank. And a dark flutter of movement had caught her eye.

  “Not a man or a horse,” Clover said after staring a long time.

  “Crows,” Asyra said, watching the blue-black shimmer of their movement. She glanced to the sky, saw a few more, but nothing like the clouds still picking at the dead of the battlefield below Zadam. “What do you think they’re worrying at?”

  Clover uncorked her waterskin, lifted it, and took a quick sip before shrugging. “It’s not far. Let’s find out.”

  The pair mounted up again and spurred the nimble ponies up and over the dune, back down into the next gulley. Those had been a nightmare, labyrinthine and ever-shifting. She began to understand how an army could get lost in their endlessness. Landmarks lasted only as long as the elements left them be. The only constant was the scouring sun.

  The grisly landmark she’d note from a distance crowned the next rise. As Asyra and Clover drew near, the crows scattered with caws of protest, some lingering until the pair was nearly on top of them, cries rising to shrieks of fury. As black wings carried the last of the vermin away and their voices faded, Asyra could faintly make out horns.

  “You hear that?” Clover asked, dismounting.

  “Just the army,” Asyra replied, doing likewise. She glanced to the north, where dust clouds smudged the sky over the Scintallans as they floundered. “They’re probably getting ready to make camp.”

  “Do you think they even got ten miles?” Clover asked with disdain. “What a mess. Hard to believe they’ve conquered half the world.” She stiffened and halted before the object of the crows’ attention. “Speaking of messes...”

  A skull adorned with only tufts of greasy black hair and dried shreds of meat protruded from the sand. A puff of breeze stirred dust off a tangle of torn white kaftan and straps around it, these holding together the tags of bones and viscera that still accompanied the skull. Empty eye sockets regarded the pair of spies sightlessly. A splintered curve of a wastelander’s short bow confirmed some of the body’s identity.

  “One of the pezeneks,” Clover said in a hushed tone.

  “Mm-hmm.” Asyra drew her short sword and knelt, used the point to prod the remains, what lay beneath them. She wrinkled her nose. “He was half-buried before they” she nodded skyward at the crows “could get at all of him.” She scanned the horizon, watched the lazy prowl of the dust devils that seemed to play endlessly in the distance. They’d increased in number as the day wore on, despite the absence of any real breeze.

  A din of caws and clacking beaks burst from below the dune, the next gulley down. A scattering of dark shapes dove in, stirred denizens already there into a furious flutter. And again, a distant flurry of horns played counterpoint to their cacophony.

  Asyra ignored it, stood with a chill beginning to circulate in her blood. Careful steps carried her to the edge of the dune to look down into the gulley. Crows clustered here and there. Eddies of sand swirled about them. Something flashed in the dust, a point of steel. A crow beat its wings to fend off competitors and resumed picking at something.

  She took another step and started sliding down the backside of the dune. Only contact with something firm and unyielding slowed her descent. A look around showed her bits of gear poking out from under the sand, dented helmets, broken-off arrows, and the crows—pulling more up to the surface. Her skin began to crawl as what one drew forth became apparent as a gloved hand. The crawling worsened as she looked down at what had stopped her slide.

  Her boot rested on the side of a face, blackened by the elements, frozen in a voiceless scream that left sand running out of its gaping mouth and empty eyes.

  “Shit,” Clover whispered. “I think we found out where the scouting parties went.”

  Asyra yanked her foot back, fell onto the dune, and flailed for a moment to get clear. Panting, swallowing once, twice before she could trust her voice, she said, “There are dozens down here. Maybe more. Looks like they got corralled into an ambush. And then the dust buried them.” She recalled the sandstorm and weird mists of the fight days ago and wondered if perhaps something else had contributed to their burial.

  “You hear that?” Clover asked from above.

  “What?”

  Asyra scrambled back to the top of the dune. By the time she’d reached it, the sounds of horns across the wastes were everywhere and her question was answered.

  “There!” Clover pointed to the north.

  At first, Asyra thought she was gesturing at one of the ever-present dust devils. But the whirling haze fell away suddenly from a distant ridgeline, dis
solved in yellowy brown tendrils from which appeared a mass of mounted men. As the two spies watched, this phenomenon repeated; twirling sands that’d seemed like natural occurrences suddenly dissipating to reveal hundreds of men emerging from the desert.

  The dust devils had disguised their approach. And Asyra had no doubt about their true source now, as Xyxian riders materialized all along the horizon to the north and west, followed by ranks of men on foot, scrambling to form battlelines, all while the horns blatted and warbled.

  “Look!” Clover pivoted in the saddle and pointed west of them.

  One of the writhing min-storms unraveled a mile or less from them to unleash a spray of riders in the fluttering white of Xyxian horse archers. Behind them, coming at a slower, more careful trot, followed men with the glitter of armor and heavier horses. One of the latter paused to raise a horn and add its song to the others’. It sounded as though they were all around.

  They were.

  Looking south, Asyra saw the waste alive with small parties beetled up out of the endless twists of ravines and gullies between dunes. Alone, each would be a menace. But even now they were flowing together, coming together into a flood that was already cutting across to the south, to the east. In the distance, the heights and crags of Zadam seemed to stare out upon the drama, mockingly, knowingly.

  “Scintallos and the Saints,” Clover swore. “They’re moving to cut across the army’s line of retreat! We have to warn them!”

  “They know,” Asyra said, sweeping herself back up into the saddle and taking the pony’s reins. A glance showed her the Xyxian outriders spreading out and spurring their mounts into a full gallop. They’d spotted them and she could see the flash of teeth as the waste dogs sighted an easy kill—or worse, that they realized they’d happened upon two women.

  “We need to get out of here!” She sawed her mount’s reins about savagely. “Now! Back to the army!” She spurred the pony into motion. “Quick!”

  LYSSA WAS MILES AWAY.

  She was right there.

  Her only sense of things was what echoed through the dead man’s dumb flesh. It was like being imprisoned in clay. Her mind screamed at the captivity. Her soul writhed at the touch of decay. And she could see, hear, feel only what Xass Kham’s body sensed.