Tonight, however, was different. Despite the complete lack of emotions or divine contact in what was supposed to be the most holy of places to expect it, he felt two things: first a dread, a palpable conjuration of fear that froze the very blood in his veins. Something wasn’t right. And then came the divine, an inspiration that held the fear at bay. Good rose to meet evil, but the outcome was in doubt. That did not matter to Markus, however, as the mere fact that evil was met with goodness comforted him, but he could not shake off the fear. It infected him to his core. He did not understand why this was happening to him or what he should do with it.
Then it all vanished, and he heard a loud scream.
Julian paced back and forth on his veranda. He seldom spent time indoors during the summer and especially during high summer. It was so pleasant outside, and he loved watching the twin sisters rise each night. Oftentimes he partook of some bread and tea after dinner and a hard day’s work, but today he wasn’t interested. His thoughts were on his children, Osric far to the north and his daughter, who had been gone only two days, yet he missed her immensely.
Osric was born to lead. He had always proven himself worthy and more than capable not only on the battlefield but also in the inner chambers of political intrigue. He would make a fine prefect one day, and Julian felt pride when he thought of his son.
His daughter, however, he felt more love for now, though his pride for her had grown considerably this past year. She was actually more intelligent than her brother, Osric, having spent years visiting the local library and taking specially tutored classes with the best teachers whom gold could afford. Her learning progressed immensely once she started her studies in the Temple of Astor as an acolyte.
She had a better understanding of human nature as well and seemed to understand human motivation better than most. With Osric everything was black and white, but Olivia understood the shades of grey that constituted mankind. Not everyone was entirely good or evil. For this reason he had wanted her to enter politics with her brother and assist in the governing of the Pentost region, but Olivia found the entire idea repulsing to her sensibilities. She seemed destined for something else, though Julian did not know what that would be.
He wondered if his late wife would have approved of the way he had raised them the last decade. He missed her too, and decided on the morrow he would pay her a visit at the family crypt just outside of town. He would pay his respects and seek forgiveness. Forgiveness for something he should never have done.
Olivia saw the first undead skeleton as it lumbered into the light of the central fire. It was a walking, moving skeleton, somehow animated to attack. It had no expression on its skull face, and there were almost no clothes on the creature, though it held a rusted sword in one hand and the handle of a long decomposed wooden shield in the other.
Olivia wondered if the creature knew it had no shield, when several more screams came from the east. One of Commander Fulbert’s sergeants stepped forward and smote the creature with a sword, hacking downward, severing its shield arm, and knocking several of its ribs to the ground. The creature made no sound or noise and swung its own rusted blade at the sergeant’s head, forcing the man to duck and parry the next blow.
Finally another soldier hacked at it again and clove the skull and sternum in two.
“To me! Form a circle, backs to the fire!” Commander Fulbert yelled, commanding his men to form a defensive perimeter.
It was so black, and the twin moons had yet to rise, so it was difficult to see into the inky darkness that enveloped them.
Three soldiers appeared. Two of them were carrying an injured comrade, and several more soldiers became visible in the darkness as they fought, backing themselves towards the light of the fire. The clash of steel on steel rang throughout the area as men yelled, screamed, and died. Their tormentors continued to attack in an unnatural silence.
“Over here! Quickly!” Olivia yelled, motioning for the men to bring their comrade and lay him next to the fire. He had a serious laceration across his torso where a blade had hacked him. Olivia noted with disgust that the wound was infected with small bits of marsh weeds. She reached into her pouch, attached at her waist, and pulled out some bandaging that she had prepared days earlier. She set some of it in the wound to stop the bleeding and pulled the sides of the wound together, applying pressure.
“Hold here!” she commanded the nearest soldier, motioning to the wound.
Olivia fumbled in her pouch for her medical kit so she could sew the wound shut. She had done some training in the temple in various first aid techniques, but had never had to actually use them on anything worse than a sprain or a mild burn.
Soon several more men fell near her, and their shouts of pain and death filled the air. Olivia felt overwhelmed as she tried to work on the first soldier who had now lost consciousness. She felt fear not only of the creatures that were attacking them in silence, but also at the chance that she would fail these men on her first quest as a Hand of Astor.
Just when she thought she couldn’t handle any more of the screaming and yelling, she felt a warm surge come from her bosom. It was the necklace that the matriarch had given to her the day of her supposed initiation into the order. It was warm to the touch, and instantly it calmed her. She heard a voice inside her head say, Fear not.
Calm came over her, and, though she had no training in divine magic, she knew instinctively what to do. She grabbed the necklace from under her tunic and held it in her left hand, while she placed her right hand on the first man’s wound as his companion pulled his own blood-soaked hand off.
Olivia recited the prayer of healing, which before was nothing more than a mantra that she had chanted countless times, but this time the result was different. The man’s wound stopped bleeding, and the skin closed on its own, leaving a nasty red mark along the man’s upper torso. The man next to her gasped and looked at her with amazement.
Quickly she went from soldier to soldier and repeated the healing prayer and process. Several of them were already dead, and she could only look upon them sadly, closing one man’s eyelids before moving onto the next. Before she could finish, she heard more shouts from the rear.
“We are cut off!” one soldier cried.
“Run! There are too many!” another yelled.
“Hold your ground, men!” the commander yelled, using a large tree branch to smash the skull of another approaching creature while keeping a tight grip on his sword in his other hand.
Olivia noticed that Nerus, the commander’s aide-de-camp, had backed himself all the way to the fire, and was standing behind not only the soldiers but also several servants. The servants had armed themselves with various branches from trees or porting sticks that they had used to carry supplies.
“I said, hold your ground!” the commander shouted, pausing between each word to gasp and wield his wooden weapon, smashing yet another skull from an undead creature. He turned to look back after crushing yet a third skeleton into pieces and met Olivia’s gaze. “Pull your weapon, Hand! Get into the fight!”
Olivia drew her sword, stepping past Nerus, when to her right three creatures broke through the outer ring, shambling forward quickly into the mass of wounded soldiers and servants milling around the fire. Several servants shrieked in fear and raised their makeshift weapons. Olivia jumped over two wounded men and engaged the first undead skeleton.
Its swing would have severed her head from her body, but the creature seemed slower than what she was accustomed to when she had practiced with her trainer, Meiler. She easily ducked under the swing and brought her own sword across in a backhanded move from right to left, severing the creature in half at the spinal cord. It fell on the ground, bony legs kicking and arms flailing.
Olivia had no time to finish it as the other two engaged, and she parried both their blows until she could cleave one’s skull in two after performing her figure eight swing. But the blade didn’t pull free immediately. She tried to move out of the way of the
rusted blade of the third skeleton, when it hit her square in the side, knocking the wind out of her and wrenching her blade free from the other skull.
She nearly lost her footing, and luckily balanced herself on the moist ground, bringing her blade up to parry another swing by the third, before, in a fit of intense anger and rage, she swung her blade overhead, coming in diagonally on the creature’s right collarbone and completely shattering its torso, which exploded in all directions as her attack finished.
She felt pain where the creature’s sword had hit her in the abdomen, but her armor had deflected the blade easily. Another painful blow to her shin made her look down, and she saw a small amount of blood coming from above her shin guard, where the first creature had managed to hit her with its own moss-covered blade while it lay on the ground. Olivia took one step and brought her heavy boot down on its skull, hearing, as well as feeling, the comforting sound of bone cracking beneath her booted heel.
The sounds of death continued, and Olivia was reaching out a hand to help a soldier up who had lost his footing when the creatures broke through the north part of the ring. She stepped back as he resumed his position and looked around. There were bones, old weapons, and even shields, pieces of armor, leather, and human blood scattered throughout the main camp.
Commander Fulbert was holding his ground at the very east end of the camp, having rallied his troops, and that was where the strongest attack had come from. She could see, however, that, despite his immense size and strength, he was panting and breathing heavily. She saw several cuts and lacerations on him, and his plate armor was battered and sliced completely open in several places. She was amazed he was still alive despite the beating he had taken.
“We are surrounded!” Nerus yelled, pointing behind him to the west. Indeed, several skeletal creatures had shambled around the perimeter and took up a line two deep along the drier path that they had used to arrive at their camp. Only three soldiers stood there, holding them at bay, and they faced at least a score of the enemy.
Suddenly, as if on cue, the enemy attacked in force. Yells and screams permeated the area, and several soldiers started to yell at the eastern end.
“The commander has fallen!” one man yelled.
“There are too many!” another shouted.
Somewhere a servant shrieked.
Olivia did not hesitate. She ran the twenty yards from her position just north of the main fire pit to the skirmish line on the east end, where the creatures were strongest and bunched up almost shoulder to shoulder.
The commander had indeed fallen on his back. Blood poured from a serious cut on the side of his head as his plate armored helmet had been cleaved in two. How his head remained whole Olivia could only guess. Fulbert had lost his tree branch and now wielded only his blade, swinging it at the creatures as they rushed him. He managed to cut the legs off of two creatures before he had to parry three blows in a row.
Two soldiers next to him fell as they were killed under the assault. A dozen more soldiers were losing ground quickly when Olivia arrived and decapitated two skeletons closest to the commander.
“There are too many!” Commander Fulbert yelled over the clashing of steel on steel. “Get my men out of here, Olivia! Do it now!”
Olivia was about to respond, ignoring the familiar use of her name from the otherwise normally proper commander, when things seemed to slow down as if time had changed and decided to pass much slower. She looked around and saw the fight continuing to rage about her. In the glowing light of the main campfire, she could see illuminated scores more of the undead creatures just beyond them—a hundred of them at least just at her end of the camp.
She looked back and was surprised to find that the light seemed to be changing ever so slightly. It wasn’t really the light changing, she thought to herself, but instead the darkness was lifting and, though the night remained black as ink, she could now see more clearly past the illuminating glow of the fire. The undead creatures started to glow, not a bright glow, but there was a foul, dark ultraviolet light that beamed from them, their bones and their weapons. She wasn’t sure what she was seeing, but they were no longer invisible in the dark and they no longer were silent to her ears.
“Kill them.” She heard a voice like a whisper come from behind. “Death to the living!” said another sinister voice. Olivia felt a chill run along her spine as she realized these voices did not belong to her companions. Just when she was sure that fear would return to her, the entire scene vanished and she saw only pure white light all around her.
“Olivia, do you fear, child?” said a disembodied voice.
“Who is this?” Olivia asked, looking around but seeing nothing except pure white light. She couldn’t hear anything else either. The dark voices as well as the shouts of the soldiers and the screams of the servants were gone. No longer could she hear the clash of steel.
“This is the Mother, child. Do not fear, Daughter of Light, for your path lies upon the foundation of virtue. Go! And do your duty. Protect the innocent, defend the helpless, heal the sick and wounded.”
Slowly the voice faded, the light diminished, and she was back in Kero Swamp, standing over Commander Fulbert. All around her the fight had stopped as if frozen in time, but now it began to move. Time flowed, and the creatures and soldiers around her moved again, faster and faster, until they were moving in real time. Sound returned slowly until the familiar screams and clashing of steel resumed.
There was no hesitation any more. Olivia held her sword over her head pointed at the creatures to the east, and, using her left hand, she held her diamond pendant tightly. “Foul creatures of the Abyss, return to your master!”
There was a white light that shone brightly from her sword, and her left hand glowed bright red as it was illuminated from within her palm by the diamond. The effect was immediate. The closest dozen creatures raised their bony hands and arms to deflect the light and simply fell apart where they stood. The other creatures scrambled backwards, retreating from the light.
Olivia could hear the malicious voices cursing her. “Damn the she-witch!” one said.
“Burn in your own light, demon-woman!” cried another disembodied voice.
Commander Fulbert was not one to miss an opportunity. “Rally to me!” he cried as he stood up with an intense effort and stumbled back to the fire in the middle of camp. “Leave everything—take only your weapons!” he yelled, as he started to move to the west along the narrow trail, followed by all the surviving soldiers and servants who could move. Those who could not stand or move were carried or helped by the uninjured.
Olivia dared not move for fear of breaking whatever spell she had unleashed. She wasn’t completely sure of what had transpired, but the results were more than favorable, and she watched contently as the expedition attempted its escape. But the west trail was blocked as the creatures there were too far away for Olivia’s light to repulse them.
“Ready to charge!” Commander Fulbert yelled, using his sword as a crutch to reach the far west side. Nerus managed to find enough courage to at least assist his commander in walking, and the well-trained men of the commander’s company fanned out along the side of the trail, striking out at any creature that drew too close to the group.
Just when Fulbert seemed ready to command the charge, the creatures seemed to be thrown into chaos as a noise erupted from behind them. Suddenly several of the enemy were hacked from behind and fell to the ground, no longer animated.
“Felix!” Olivia found herself yelling as she saw the tall, lean ranger hack down the last of the evil creatures from behind. Suddenly she found her strength fading quickly, and her light started to dim.
Run, child! She heard a voice in her head, commanding her to flee.
Olivia did as she was commanded, and lowered her sword, running back towards the fire, jumping over several bodies of her slain comrades.
The loss of light was noticed by the group, and several of the servants moaned in fear again. “Run!�
� Felix urged the group, and he stood with the scout Pascal on either side of the trail as the survivors of the expedition fled past. Commander Fulbert stopped with his aide and looked back at Olivia as she caught up to them.
“I have no idea what, or how, you did that, Lady Olivia, but that was no less than spectacular!” Commander Fulbert said weakly.
“She is a Hand of Astor now,” Nerus corrected his leader.
“Now is not the time for formalities!” Olivia said, panting and gasping for air, bending over somewhat at the waist to assist with her labored breathing. Somehow the act of turning the undead drained her of strength, and she felt fatigued and even winded as if she had run a long distance.
Felix offered his hand to Olivia to allow her to rest on his arm. “Will you be alright?” he asked, concern in his voice.
Olivia paused long enough to take a couple of deep breaths and look behind her at what was once a bustling, organized camp. Then she stood completely upright and motioned after the others. “I have lost a lot of my strength. There are several score more of them beyond our vision.” She paused as if listening, and then looked back yet one more time. “They are coming again, more tentative, but they are moving again—time to go!”
No one bothered to ask how she knew, as it was dark except for the area around the now dying fire, and only a couple of creatures could be seen walking into the light of the camp. But the urgency of her words spurred them on.
Soon they caught up to the main group, which was being led by one of the scouts who had stayed behind and had not accompanied Felix. Olivia didn’t know the man’s name, but he seemed to be doing a pretty fair job of keeping everyone on the correct path. Several people cursed as they stepped into a deep bog, getting wet up to their waists, but no one really complained, not after what they just escaped.
The Black Dragon: A Claire-Agon Dragon Book (Dragon Series 1) Page 8
