A Whisper of Death

by Paul Barrett

  Erick’s forces had destroyed many of the enemy. Their dismantled corpses littered the ground, but nearly the same number of Erick’s lie motionless, and he could ill afford the losses.

  The battle raged on three sides. Erick backed up, ready to tell the others to break and run through their remaining avenue of retreat. When Gabrielle screamed, Erick found another force advancing toward them, closing the gap and surrounding the party.

  Erick had never--even at the death of his parents--known such utter despair. They would all soon fall under the weight of the Inconnu’s assault. Death did not bother him as much as the knowledge that he had failed. The other Necromancers would have to do their best without him. He had made it to the base of Twr Krinnik only to be denied by treachery conceived from his compassion. Perhaps he deserved it, but the others didn’t.

  He wrapped his hands around the talisman on his neck, closed his eyes, and offered a prayer to the Eight Good Gods. “I am your servant, as I have always been. If death must come, let it come quickly for all of us, and let us not return as servants to Eligos.” Warmth radiated from the medallion, and a tingle flashed through Erick’s body.

  A strangled cry of pain cut the air nearby, a sound of agony and frustration.

  Erick opened his eyes. To his astonishment, the attacking gateloah slowed, the fury of their assault lessening. Erick’s forces continued to cut them down.

  The death hounds launched themselves at the nearest creature, ally or foe, and the ghouls left off their attacks and began feasting on nearby bodies, paying no attention as Erick’s creatures walked up and wrenched their heads off.

  On the gallows, Marcus stood on one side and Andras on the other. The assassin reached for his back, out of which protruded two knives. Blood ran from the wounds, and Andras’s legs collapsed from under him. As he landed on the wooden planks, he glared at Marcus with fearsome hatred. “You haven’t won,” he gurgled.

  His face a grim, emotionless mask, Marcus pulled a third dagger. The emerald on the handle flashed with green fire as Marcus rammed the silvered blade into the man’s chest and drove it up to the hilt. “Yes, we have.” He spat in Andras’ face.

  Blood bubbled from the assassin’s mouth as he let loose a gurgling laugh. He pointed a finger at Marcus. “You are marked.”

  A sizzling beam of chilling black shadow flew from Andras’ finger and struck Marcus in the forehead. Screaming, Marcus reached for his head and stumbled backward. He tumbled off the edge of the gallows and slammed into the ground ten feet below.

  The scream snapped Corby from his daze. “Marcus,” he shouted as he and Gabrielle ran toward the prone thief.

  On the scaffold, Andras let out a last wheezing gasp and died. Erick watched as a shadow, blacker than night and shot through with scintillating points of red light, left the assassin’s body and flew away. Corby stumbled, his face blanching as the nauseating chill of the creature’s passage swept by.

  You have not won, a voice whispered to Erick as the ebon void fled into the night. I am more powerful than death, and you will bemoan the day you defied me.

  Elissia! Erick ran to the stricken girl and dropped to his knees in front of her supine form. The cut on her leg was so tiny, but the skin around it had turned dark green and puffy. She had been so brave protecting him, and it had earned her this.

  Tears welled in his eyes. He put his arms around her and lifted her head to his chest, rocking her gently. Eligos’ words were right; they hadn’t won at all.

  A hitch of breath, so soft he wondered if he imagined it, renewed his hope. He put his ear against her mouth. The faint tickle of her breath played over his ear, a slap at death’s face.

  “She’s still alive,” he told Corby and Gabrielle, who had helped the stunned Marcus into a sitting position. “We have to go to the mountain.”

  “What?” Marcus said, rubbing at a dark scar on his forehead.

  “The mountain,” Erick said, knowing beyond doubt that they needed to go there to save her. Elonsha still crackled about it, visible only to him. The energy of death, but Erick knew, without knowing how, that it would bring Elissia back. “We have to go into the mountain.”

  “If we move her, she may die,” Gabrielle said.

  “If we don’t, she will die. The mountain can save her.”

  “I’ll help you,” Marcus said, his gait unsteady as he stood and walked to Erick.

  “I should apply a tourniquet to slow the poison,” Gabrielle said. Erick pulled off his shirt, exposing his chain coat, and handed it to her. Grabbing the knife from Elissia’s belt, Gabrielle quickly cut a long strip from the garment.

  “Do you know where to go?” Marcus asked as he dropped beside his sister, Corby standing behind him.

  “We’ll find a way,” Erick assured him. A circle with three dots over it in a curve had been seared into the flesh of Marcus’s forehead, the skin red and angry. Erick shivered. The Inconnu had branded the young thief with a morazol, a death mark.

  Gabrielle wrapped the bandage around Elissia’s leg, just above the wound. She pulled the cloth tight, and Erick winced as pale green ooze splashed from the cut. The healer sliced into the puffy skin around the wound and squeezed, forcing more of the sickly liquid onto the dirt.

  Turning away, Erick concentrated and sent his thought out to his gateloah, calling them back from their hunting. Of those he initially summoned, less than a tenth returned to his call. Only fourteen vohquana to protect them, but it would be enough. With the driving force behind the attacking creatures gone, they wandered aimlessly.

  “Ready,” Gabrielle said, tying a knot in the strip of cloth.

  Erick took Elissia’s arms, and Marcus grabbed her legs. They lifted her and moved toward the mountain

  Corby led the way and Blink flew ahead to warn of trouble. They moved quickly through the rest of the town, avoiding the worst fires and the largest gatherings of undead. The battle for Prospector’s Camp was all but over, the citizens either dead or escaped, the few wooden buildings left to the conflagration that ravaged them. Once or twice a cry for help shrilled from an upper window, but Erick ignored it. He took pity on them before, but his mood changed with Elissia’s fall. The town had wanted him dead, and he happily returned the favor.

  Within ten minutes the mountain loomed above them, the road turning into a path that wound up the side into an opening thirty feet above.

  At Erick’s nod, Corby continued, and the rest followed. Erick’s arms ached, and his legs burned, but he didn’t care. He would carry Elissia up the side of the mountain if he had to. The determined set to Marcus’s back told Erick her brother had the same determination.

  They reached the entrance. A door of dark wood, seven feet high and five wide, barred their way. Corby turned to Erick.

  Erick studied the door. Set in the center, burned into the wood, was the pattern of Denech: eight interlocking circles pierced by an arrow. “Take my necklace and hold it to the door.”

  The scholar slipped the amulet off Erick’s neck and pressed the symbol against the wood, aligning it to match the seared pattern.

  The talisman flared, flickered for a brief span, and then pulsed with a dim glow. The door swung open, and Erick’s mind cleared. It revealed the path they needed to take as plainly as if he navigated his manor. “Put the amulet back on my neck and follow me.”

  They went into the mountain, though the mineshafts and further, deep into long-abandoned caves. An hour passed and still they moved, deeper and deeper until they trod in caverns unseen by humans for over a millennium. Erick’s arms and legs went beyond pain into numbness, but still they continued. Although Gabrielle and Corby occasionally stumbled in the darkness, Erick, Blink, and Marcus never faltered.

  Time soon lost meaning, and Corby and Gabrielle began to flag, fatigue overtaking them. Neither complained, and instead renewed their efforts, driven by Erick’s determination and their desire to save Elissia.

  At last, when it seemed to Erick they had traveled through t
he mountain and would soon come out the other side, they entered a large cavern, the biggest they had seen so far. As soon as Erick crossed the threshold, the amulet flared again, and the cavern sparked to life, the glow starting low and growing until every wall in the hollow became suffused with rich amber light.

  Much like the mountain that held it, the cavern was huge, five hundred feet across and equally as high. As illumination filled the room, they saw ten figures standing in the center, looking toward them.

  “Welcome, Erick Necromancer,” they said; the voices echoed through the cave until ten became a hundred.

  “Who are you?” Erick asked, his voice reverberating across the chamber.

  “We are your past,” they answered. “Come closer and bring your companions with you.”

  They marched across the floor. Six men and four women stood before them. Different ages and races, they each appeared solid, but an ethereal white glow surrounded them. As he neared, the power emanating from them flushed through him, Elonsha strangely untainted by the evil of Eligos.

  “Evil surrounds us and permeates the mountain,” one of the women told him. “It is only in this holy chamber, where Eligos was banished, that his diablerie holds no sway.”

  The cavern struck Erick with awe. The final struggle with the Master of Shadows took place here. A millennium ago, these walls echoed with the sounds of battle as the ten fought the three, the fury of their conflict reducing the summit of the world to a fraction of its glory. Erick could almost envision it. He turned back at the people before him. “You are the Ten.”

  “We are.”

  The ten original Necromancers! The immensity of it all overwhelmed Erick. He swayed on his feet as fatigue and shock took hold.

  “You may put your mate down,” a man told him. “She is safe here.”

  They carefully lowered Elissia to the ground, and Erick shook his arms, wincing at the dull throb that reverberated through his leaden limbs. “Which of you is my grandfather or mother?”

  A man walked over and stopped in front of him. He stood two inches taller than Erick, about forty years of age, with periwinkle eyes and tightly curled brown hair. Erick looked at his past, but also stared into a mirror twenty-five years in the future. “Grandfather?”

  “Yes, with a substantial number of greats- in front.”

  “Elissia is dying. Can you heal her?”

  The man looked at Elissia’s body. “Heal her? No. We were Necromancers. Healing is not our calling. But the corruption in her body is of Eligos. This we can remove, and she will recover, but the poison will still be within, dormant until some unknown agent brings it to life. This we cannot remove.”

  “But if you remove the corruption, she will live?”

  “Yes, but for how long we cannot say. And the poison may do terrible things to her. Perhaps she would be better as she is until you can find a cure.”

  It tore Erick’s heart to see Elissia’s pale face and still body, as if death had already taken her. It wouldn’t stand. “Please bring her back.”

  “Move away.”

  Erick stepped back, and the Necromancers surrounded Elissia. They held their hands over her and chanted in the dread language of Lonsh, but their words spoke not of rescinding death, but of restoring life. They used words unknown to Erick and beseeched the Gods to bring their power to bear on destroying the corruption within Elissia. The words of Eligos, infused with the holy energy of the Covenant, turned against his foulness.

  A blinding white light suddenly arced from the ceiling and slammed into Elissia. Her body convulsed as the light speared her, but Erick no fear followed it, only a sense of cleansing. His aches and worries dissolved away in that pure luminance and he emerged almost newborn.

  The light faded and Elissia’s eyes fluttered open. “Well, this is different,” she said. “I’m usually the one looking down on you.”

  Erick choked back a sob as he dropped to his knees beside Elissia. His relief at her recovery was so intense as to be painful.

  Marcus ran to her. “You’re okay, sis. I thought we had lost you.”

  Erick looked at his ancestor. “Thank you.”

  The older man bowed his head. “We have done what we could. Had she died, she would have returned as a servant to Eligos. That will not happen now, but until the poison is purged from her system, she is still in mortal danger.”

  “What will trigger the poison?” Erick asked.

  “Such answers are beyond our ken. You must ask your healer.”

  Erick turned to Gabrielle. The plain girl shrugged. “Without knowing what species of poison it is, I can’t tell.”

  “How can you tell what the poison is?”

  “If we had the knife that cut her, I could find out.”

  “You mean this knife,” Corby said, holding the black dagger gingerly by the hilt. “I grabbed it so I could study it if we survived.”

  “Oh, you beautiful person.” Marcus leapt up and gave Corby a fierce hug. Corby returned the embrace with one arm, holding the knife as far away as possible.

  “That is all well,” one of the female Necromancers, a stern-faced woman with piercing eyes even in ghost form, said. “But there are more important matters to discuss. Eligos has already grown in power, and it is only because he underestimated the resolve of your companions that you are still alive. You have done well and destroyed his talba. This has set him back and given you valuable time, but he will soon have another vessel for his spirit and will not be so overconfident the next time. There are things you must know to stop him.”

  “Should we not wait for the others?” Erick asked.

  At the mention of the others, the Ten lowered their heads and the room suddenly dimmed.

  “What’s wrong?” Erick asked, although the words spoken by Andras suddenly became clear. I am filled with the Elonsha of your brethren.

  His ancestor looked at him sadly. “That is why Eligos has become so strong. There are no others. Three are dead, and two have betrayed the Covenant and turned to serve Eligos. You are the only Necromancer left, Erick Darvaul.”

  END OF BOOK ONE

  Acknowledgments

  Like the Academy Awards speeches, I'll try to keep it brief. Thanks to the Brinkers Writers Group, who helped me shape this story. Thanks to my cats, who kept me company and "helped" with the writing. And especially thanks to Tony, who has been there through it all and cheered me the whole way.

  About the Author

  Paul Barrett has lived a varied life full of excitement and adventure. Not really, but it sounds good as an opening line.

  Paul’s multiple careers have included: rock and roll roadie, children’s theater stage manager, television camera operator, mortgage banker, and support specialist for Microsoft Excel.

  This eclectic mix allowed him to go into his true love: motion picture production. He has produced two motion pictures and two documentaries: His film Night Feeders released on DVD in 2007, and Cold Storage was released by Lionsgate in May 2010.

  Amidst all this, Paul has worked on his writing, starting with his first short story, about Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, at age 8. Paul has written and produced numerous commercial and industrial video scripts in his tenure with his former creative agency, Indievision.

  Paul lives in North Carolina with three cats and his film director/graphic designer husband.

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  Copyright © 2019 by Paul Barrett

  Cover by Robyne Pomroy

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