by RW Krpoun
“No,” Hunter shook his head. “If anyone could do that, my head would have burst like a dropped melon ten miles ago.” He continued to turn as he walked, peering into the mist, which cut vision to about a hundred feet.
“So…,” Hatcher prompted him.
“So nothing. The mist is a reaction to power being drawn, but where is it going?”
“What did you expect to find?” Hatcher fingered a throwing axe uneasily.
“A manifestation,” Provine Sael pointed her staff, and Pieter guided the mule in that direction. “Usually some pointless activity left over from an artifacts’ days of use, or something like that. I expected an unattended artifact that was simply mindlessly drawing and expending power, somewhat like an unattended wagon rolling downhill.”
“It smells like the power is being used,” Hunter muttered distractedly. “But I don’t see anything.”
“Could it be underground?” Pieter asked.
“Not and produce this mist,” Provine Sael abruptly released her horn and smoothed her hair. “This way.”
“There are things pacing us,” Torl observed after we had been walking a few minutes. “Both sides.”
“Any idea what?” Provine Sael did not sound surprised.
“Man-sized and erect, no count on numbers.”
The Dellian sighed. “I’m very sorry to have gotten you all into this. This is far worse than I had expected.”
“Well, we’re here now,” Hunter observed. “And there should be gold stashed in some of these barrows.”
Provine Sael nodded. “There usually is.”
“So why aren’t they attacking us?” Hatcher asked a couple minutes later. “Waiting for help?”
“They’re most likely necromantic creations,” Provine Sael pointed with her staff, and Pieter guided the mule in that direction; the mule didn’t seem unduly concerned about the situation.
“So very basic orders, right?”
“Yes…,” Provine Sael caught Hatcher’s point. “You’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “Random patrols, guard the source, fight if attacked…everyone stop.” She looked around. “Let us see how they react to this.”
I considered getting more javelins out the cart, but decided against it; cold steel was my strong suit. I kept my eyes moving, and wished I had had a better breakfast.
“Here they come,” Torl said without any special emphasis. “Burk, Grog, move up to cover the mule, Hatcher, get on the cart and protect Rose.”
“Blast.” Provine Sael stamped her foot.
“What?” Hunter asked.
“We brought a true innocent into this. That could explain their behavior.”
“Care to explain? I’m not well-versed in the sentient sacrifice aspects of the Arts,” Hunter noted.
“The artifact that is causing all this is work of the Elder Ones, and they sacrificed their own infants.”
“Ah.”
“Care to explain a bit more?” Hatcher asked from the cart.
“The things approaching have…I don’t know how to explain it in lay terms, so let us say ‘memories’ from the activating artifact. A group carrying an infant might be regarded as,” she waved a hand, searching for a word. “Caretakers, worshipers, something along those lines.”
“Visitors who are not mhm unwelcome?” Pieter suggested.
“Yes.”
“So…they might let us pass?” Hatcher asked.
“I don’t know, but no one attack until I give the word.”
Figures approached out of the mist, at first just shadows to either flank, the shadows consolidating into forms whose details slowly swam into focus with each step.
“Ukar,” Hatcher breathed.
The figures were indeed Ukar, but long-dead members of that tribe, just skeletons encased in flaps of leathery skin and armor gone green, and crumbling at the edges. Darkness swirled in their eye sockets, a darkness that made me think of balls of concentrated mist, and their tusked jaws were grimly shut.
“Old-school necromancy,” Hunter noted. “Actual animation of the dead with dark spirits, instead of fusing bones and malign humors into beasts.”
“They are not weak,” Provine Sael warned. “The newer sort of necromancy is more efficient but less powerful; no one living can match the Elder Ones. Pieter, take the mule and flee at the first sign of violence; stay within sight, and return when the fight is over.”
“The rest fall in on the cart when Pieter goes,” Torl didn’t sound concerned in the slightest.
“What are they waiting for?” Hatcher asked as Pieter swiftly unharnessed the mule.
“They are uncertain in purpose because no living mind summoned them, just a reflex action from an object,” Provine Sael’s voice was tight. “They are investigating, and until some event or development trips the command to fight, that is all they will do.”
“So if we don’t attack them, they’ll let us pass?” Hatcher didn’t sound hopeful.
“Wait until they get close enough to smell a Provine,” Hunter drawled, fingering the pouches on his harness. “The presence of a necromancer-killer ought to do the trick.”
“All right, then.”
A half dozen steps further the Ukar all stopped at once; for a heartbeat they stood motionless, and then one raised its green-coated battle axe and the lines moved again, only quicker and with deadly purpose.
“That’s torn it; Pieter, go,” Provine Sael’s voice cracked on his name.
I stepped into a throw that slammed the steel head of my javelin through the decaying breastplate of an Ukar and the thing collapsed in a shower of bones and corroded bronze. Stepping backwards towards the cart, I drew another javelin from my baldric.
Hunter fell back to my side of the cart, gesturing as he went, and two undead exploded into fragments. “Damn, I didn’t intend that,” he grinned wolfishly. “Apparently there’s power here for anyone who wants it.”
I cast, but the javelin glanced off the curved side of a breastplate and whispered off into the grass. Drawing my last javelin, I threw again, my cast drifting high to strike an Ukar square in the forehead, rendering it inert.
“Nice cast,” Hunter gestured and two more undead shattered.
“I’m getting the hang of it.” I drew my sword.
“Good for you. Now, it’s going to look like I’m hiding a safe distance behind you, but that’s because I really am.”
I took two steps forward and came in low with my full weight behind the swing, shearing through three legs belonging to two different Undead, and chipping the fourth limb. Catching a powerful but graceless stroke with a horizonal parry, I stepped back and drove the point of my sword through the back orb in an eye socket, feeling an uncomfortable prickle along my arms and spine as the creature collapsed into its component bits.
The Undead were stiff in their movements and inclined to only the most basic swings, but those same swings were made with terrible ferocity, and the green verdigris that coated the old bronze blades was an effective poison, should they break skin.
A sword blade shattered against the side of my breastplate, my ribs flexing painfully below the impact, as I severed an undead’s spinal column at the neck, and my return swing chopped off an arm and stove in the thing’s chest, sending shards of decaying bronze in all directions.
As they pressed in around me I should have died in short order, but they exhibited no teamwork whatsoever; in fact, more than once one skeleton’s recovery inadvertently parried another’s attack. Meanwhile I kept moving, sticking with the point, parrying the best enemy strokes and dropping an undead Ukar with nearly every thrust.
I wasn’t fighting alone: Hunter kept shattering Undead, and Hatcher sent a throwing axe into my part of the fight at regular intervals; I expect she was alternating between groups. It was a good fight: hard, fast, and on clear ground that let me use my footwork and the length of my blade to best advantage. The uncertainties of freedom and an ever-more-complex world left my body with the sweat and blood
as my focus narrowed into the single flowing action Master Horne had hammered through my thick skull. I may be stupid, but in the pit I am as good as any and far better than most. Behind a sword I am whole, proud, and strong.
Provine Sael might think that these undead were strong, but to me they were predictable and their bones parted under my sword’s edge with ease. They did not go willingly back to their dark slumbers, but their efforts were not up to facing a High Rate of the Ebon Blades.
Smashing in a skull with the pommel of my sword, I decapitated another undead with a roundhouse swing, my lungs heaving and burning, hot blood running inside my left bracer to pool above the buckles at the wrist. Blade-locking a war axe that was crusty with corrosion, I shoulder-slammed its wielder to the ground and ducked a powerful but graceless swing from another foe, punching my point through old bronze and bone to sever the spine.
Recovering, I stomped the skull of a crawling skeleton into shards, and pivoted, looking for a foe, but there were only a couple crawlers left on my side. I stomped their skulls apart and headed for the other side of the cart, encountering Burk coming to my side with the same intention of continuing the fight.
“All done on my side,” he panted, sweat streaming down his face; he had blood leaking between damaged scales on his lower left side.
“Mine, too.”
“That wasn’t very tough,” Hatcher stated from where she sat on top of the cart, rocking Rose’s cradle with one hand.
“You might consider what I am doing,” Provine Sael noted drily as she worked on the gash in my upper left arm. Burk sat on a stool nearby, armor off, holding a bandage to his side.
“What I mean is that there’s so much power floating around here that Hunter could tap into it, and yet all we got hit by is a rather small number of Ukar chieftains who were buried here before the Dusmen took over.”
“Buried at the edge of the Place of Mounds,” Provine Sael corrected her, and took another tool from the chamois roll that Pieter was holding. “Using weapons whose corrosion is giving me difficulties.”
“This old-school necromancy has to work with what reasonably intact skeletons they have available,” Hunter noted from where he was leaning against the cart. “Instead of building creatures from bones. And these were merely puppets of a disturbed artifact.”
“If the artifact that made the Undead in the Emperor’s tomb was from the Elder Ones, why did it make new-style minions?” Hatcher asked.
“It had been used by a Human, who imposed new rules upon it,” Provine Sael used a slender tool to pick something out of my wound. “The newer ways of necromancy are more efficient, if less powerful.”
“Do we press on?” Torl asked from where he was repairing arrows.
“Yes,” Provine selected another tool. “Those should be all the guardians currently active, according to my examination. I expect that there are not many skeletons nearby, and time will have ruined some.”
“Can the artifact defend itself with other methods?”
“Not in and of itself. It is restricted to rote actions, and only its most common.”
“What if Stavodrag the Binder gets ahold of it?” Hatcher asked.
“Finding it is one thing, controlling it is another,” Hunter answered as Provine Sael was whispering over my wound. “If he was powerful enough to control a runaway First Folk artifact, he wouldn’t have tried to scare us off.”
“What about you? Could you control it?”
“Me?” Hunter chuckled. “I value my soul too highly, tarnished though it is.”
Before we started moving again Torl slipped off into the mist to conduct a scout of the area. Provine Sael wasn’t happy about him doing that, but she deferred to him as was her custom. She wandered amongst the remains of the undead, pausing to study one set of bones or another, while Pieter issued out salt beef, slices of dried apples, and yesterday’s flatbread. Hatcher fed Rose some of the white mush that Provine Sael had made, but the baby was fretful.
“She wants to be held,” Hatcher advised.
“She stays in the cradle until we are clear of the mist.” The Dellian did not look up from her study of a sundered bronze breastplate.
“We’ll have to change her soon, or she’ll cry like the blazes and break my tender heart.”
“She will sleep for the next three or four hours, by which time we should be in a position to send her out of the mist, under escort.”
“She’ll get a rash!”
“I can cure rashes. If there are no more Undead I’ll continue on with Hunter, and the rest of you can withdraw with Torl.”
“Speak of the devil,” Hunter observed as the scout came out of the mist along our back trail. “What news?”
“We are very nearly on top of your goal,” Torl advised Provine Sael. “But there’s something you need to see, first.” He indicated the direction, and Pieter got the mule into motion.
“Torl, I respect your judgement, but how can you be sure you’ve found my goal?” Provine Sael asked.
“It’s a fairly fresh hole that is over a hundred yards across with something glowing in the center.”
“That’s probably it,” Hunter conceded. “Sometimes the arcane is not subtle.”
What Torl wanted Provine Sael to see was a battleground, and a fairly fresh one. A high-wheeled ox cart stood in the mist, its team of two huge oxen slaughtered in their traces. Bone debris was scattered for fifty paces out from the cart, and lay in heaps around the cart itself.
Torl led Provine Sael and Hunter around the scene of the engagement while the rest of us stayed with our cart.
“Sleeping like an angel, poor little dear,” Hatcher sighed, leaning in to kiss Rose. “This is no way to treat a child.”
“Better than her fate would be had her people mhm not found us,” Pieter observed.
“True.”
“Who fought here?” Burk frowned at the ox-cart. “I can’t make out bodies.”
“Perhaps Stavodrag the Binder? He likely had Undead guards mhm, which would account for a shortage of corpses,” Pieter suggested.
“That makes sense,” Burk nodded.
“Explains why we didn’t meet that many,” I agreed. “The necromancer cleared our path.”
“In a hurry to get to whatever is here before Provine Sael could.” Hatcher noted
“If he was in a hurry, why bother with that construct he sent us?” I asked.
“Because he was hoping to scare Provine Sael off,” Hatcher stroked Rose’s cheek. “Provines are deadly foes of necromancers. If nothing else he got a measure of her determination.”
“Still seems like he should have just concentrated on moving faster. Provine Sael wouldn’t have known he was around if he had kept to himself,” I pointed out.
“I’ll share everything I know about the inner workings of the arcane: leave the thinking to others,” Hatcher grinned. “There’s more complexities than you can imagine. Plus casters always seem to go to great lengths to avoid actually using their arts on another caster. I’ve seen exactly one arcane confrontation in my life.”
“Yinran was trying to avoid an actual fight,” Burk said thoughtfully.
“My point exactly.”
I leaned against the cart and thought about magical mist, and the helplessness of babies, and about Undead fighting Undead. The world was full of strange things, and I seemed to encounter them all. Life was so much simpler when all I had to think about was escorts and death matches. I had heard people refer to the past as ‘it was a simpler time’, and now I understood what they meant.
Simpler times are good times, although having these people around me was good, too. I hoped that we could be friends someday, but just working together as a group was good, too, especially since Provine Sael and Hunter talked more now than they had in the early days.
Provine Sael and Hunter were returning.
“Was it Stavodrag the Binder?” Hatcher asked as they drew close.
“It was,” the Dellian nodded
. “Being a necromancer conferred no benefit, although the tally of guardians he and his guards exacted certainly served us well. Hatcher, see to the valuables, and burn all the written works.”
“All right. What’s that you found?”
“This?” Provine Sael glanced at a leather folio she was carrying. “His notes and personal journal. I am interested in what he thought he would find here.”
Hatcher dropped onto my shoulders without warning, although she didn’t weigh enough to be anything more than a surprise. “Whooo! Almost had a relationship with a javelin!” She tugged and pulled at my baldric.
“Stop that,” I said as I headed towards the ox cart. “I keep my sword positioned just so.”
“I damn near had it just so.” But at least she quit messing with it. “Your neck has gotten thicker since we started.”
“It’s from wearing armor all day every day,” I kept my eyes moving. “It’s built me up a little more.” Carrying her more miles than I could count hadn’t hurt, either.
“Like you needed it.”
“You could ride Burk, his neck is smaller than mine.”
“Nah, I’m just getting you trained; no point in starting all over. What kind of wood is this in your hilt?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think it’s ironwood.” She was messing with the baldric again.
“Leave it alone, a back-scabbard has to be at just the right angle.”
She slapped the top of my head. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Horses buck, you know.”
“Not the good ones.” She drummed on my head. “You should name your sword.”
“Why?”
“Because a sword with an ironwood hilt ought to have a name.” She was messing with it again. “These aren’t plates, it is a single piece of ironwood drilled out to fit the tang like a glove. That’s tough to do with ordinary wood, much less wood that is really hard and worth its weight in silver. This is a really nice weapon; someone put out serious coin for it. Did you realize the pommel is folded steel?”
“Yes.” I had spent my entire life learning about weapons, after all, but I didn’t point that out. For that matter, she had been sitting in front of it for weeks, and only now noticed, but I kept that to myself, too.
