Slowly, Zahaak returned to the box of bone, removing a copper athame. The wight looked down at the crying pink thing, at the flutter of its racing heart.
The stretched claw of the statue reached out from the shadows, demanding payment for its power.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The skeleton upon the throne grew dark, as though some great shadow had fallen upon it. By degrees, the blackness began to disperse, not by any influence of the light, but in some nebulous, unwholesome manner. To Kessler, it looked as though the darkness had seeped into the old bones of Gordreg Throatripper, absorbed into the skeleton like water soaking into a sponge.
The bony hand was the first thing to move, shifting from the skeleton’s empty lap to slap listlessly against its armoured thigh. The second hand fell, brushing against the makeshift throne. The petty hates of men were forgotten as all within the tomb continued to back away. Mercenary, bandit or dwarf, none could deny the cold terror that crawled through their bodies.
With a slow, creaking motion, the fanged skull of the orc turned, staring at the men with its empty face. Talons closed about the grip of axe and club, legs fused to the throne by centuries of decay pulled free, armoured boots scraping against the bone-littered floor. The wight stood for a moment, tottering on its withered feet. It soon recalled its balance. Another turn of its fleshless face, and the orc warlord took a menacing step away from the throne. What colour remained in Rambrecht’s face drained from it as the Averlander realised that the creature was moving towards him.
The stroke of the axe was slow, Rambrecht easily blocking it with the runefang. The sword briefly blazed with light, but whatever power it held failed to topple the wight. After centuries with the sword across its lap, perhaps Gordreg’s old bones had become attuned to the runefang’s power. Perhaps something still more powerful was working against it. Whatever the cause, the wight seemed to be emboldened by Rambrecht’s attack. When it struck at him with its club, the blow was faster and less awkward than before. Again, the Averlander blocked the attack, the runefang exploding with magical energy as it connected with the pitted orcish iron.
Shouting a war cry, Kessler lunged at the reanimate. Watching the wight recover from the second attack, he could almost feel the thing’s power swell. His greatsword crashed against the armoured side of the hulking skeleton, making it stagger.
“Stay away from it!” Kessler snarled at Rambrecht. The Averlander backed away, content to allow his enemies to fight among themselves. Already the wight was coming again, swinging the axe with a speed that at least resembled that of a living arm. Kessler felt his arms ring with the force of the stroke as he caught it upon his sword. He risked one look at Rambrecht to assure himself that the Averlander had obeyed his warning, and then the orc was upon him once again, bringing the club about in a murderous arc. Kessler dodged the effort, spinning his body around so that his zweihander smashed against the wight’s ribs. Rusted links of armour splintered beneath the contact, ribs shattering under the force of the sword. Gordreg’s bones didn’t seem to mind, its arm already rising to hack at Kessler with its axe.
Rambrecht gave no further attention to the uneven contest between mortal strength and deathless horror. If the fool wanted to play hero, Rambrecht was content to allow that. While the wight was finishing Kessler, he’d be getting clear of the tomb. Such were his thoughts, until he remembered the grim-faced men who had so soundly rejected his service. Valdner and his comrades were still there, including the dwarf Skanir with his formidable hammer. Of Rambrecht’s rogues, those not lying upon the floor dead had fled back through the crypt.
Valdner glared at the Averlander, looking at the runefang, and then into the aristocrat’s anxious face. “Anselm, Skanir,” he called. “Help Kessler. Raban, watch the door. If this scum gets past me, you get to kill him.”
The bitter hatred in the mercenary’s voice chilled Rambrecht’s blood nearly as much as the presence of the wight. The aristocrat stepped back, trying to move around the advancing Valdner while at the same time keeping his distance from the wight.
“Whatever that fool Ottmar promised you,” Rambrecht hissed as he retreated, “I’ll double it! I’ll give you a captaincy in the Averheim Guard!” He had seen the blurring speed and terrible skill of this man. He was too accomplished a swordsman to think he had any edge over a seasoned soldier like Valdner. Against Kessler, Rambrecht had trusted the speed of the lighter runefang against the weight of the cumbersome zweihander. Here, he knew, the greater skill of the mercenary would be the deciding factor, magic sword or no.
“You are gracious, milord,” Valdner sneered, spitting at Rambrecht’s retreating boots as he spoke. “Tell me, does your offer also bring back all the men killed by your hired scum?” To punctuate his words, Valdner stabbed at Rambrecht with the point of his blade. The aristocrat retreated before the feint.
“I’ll give you a real command!” Rambrecht swore. “Real soldiers, not sell-sword vermin! The finest fighting men in Averland!” He danced away from another jab of Valdner’s sword, nearly falling across one of the broken dwarf caskets. Valdner was on him in an instant, slashing at the aristocrat. Rambrecht only narrowly avoided disaster, rolling away from the edge as it licked across his body. Blood wept from the jagged slash across his chest.
Gore bubbled between the fingers that Rambrecht clutched to his chest. The aristocrat stared in horror at the determined, fanatical expression on his enemy’s face. “Black Gods damn you! What is your price? What do you want?”
Valdner’s lip curled into a snarl. He paused, hateful eyes boring into those of the Averlander. “I want my brother back, you bastard!”
As Valdner spoke, he thrust at the cowering aristocrat. Rambrecht started to retreat from the attack, but reversed the motion in a quick lunge when he saw Valdner crumple. The mercenary’s foot had twisted beneath him, his boot slipping on the uncertain floor of splintered bones. Rambrecht drove down on him, intending to spit the avenger before he could recover.
The mercenary’s sword crunched through Rambrecht’s chest, burrowing through flesh and bone. A look of shock was the last expression to flow across the aristocrat’s face, disbelief that the mercenary had recovered so quickly. He would hardly have credited that the fall had been deliberate, bait to lure him into recklessness.
Valdner rose, letting Rambrecht’s weight pull the sword from his grasp. The Averlander flopped down into the carpet of bone, his body twitching as life fled from it. The mercenary reached down, ripping the runefang free from nerveless fingers.
“That’s for Ernst,” Valdner snarled.
The wight’s axe slashed down once more, coming so close that Kessler saw some of the tassels from his sword severed by the sweep of the blade. He braced himself for the brutal crash of the club. The wight was tireless and unstoppable, but also mindless, slave to its own routine. First would come the axe, and then the club, a pattern the horror was unable to break. It made it easy for Kessler to anticipate his enemy, to react to its attacks even before it made them. He knew, however, that anticipating the thing was not enough to bring it down. Unlike the wight, he was tiring, his muscles feeling like strips of raw fire burning beneath his skin. Every block, every strike was slower and weaker than the one before.
Relief came in the forms of Skanir and Anselm. They came at the wight from opposite sides, slashing at it with hammer and sword. The wight’s leg buckled beneath the crack of Skanir’s hammer, nearly pitching it to the floor. Anselm’s sword scraped against the arm holding the axe, all but severing the limb from its lurching body. The wight fought back, bringing its axe around in a clumsy swipe at Anselm. It turned to face Skanir, some fragment of the ancient hate between orc and dwarf causing its fanged jaw to drop open in a silent roar. Skanir met the wight’s hate, cracking its skull with his hammer as it loomed over him, all but ripping the jaw from its socket. The huge club came smashing down, narrowly missing the dwarf as he dove aside.
Before Kessler could warn him, Anselm wa
s attacking again. Expecting the wight to maintain its attention on the dwarf, to continue trying to smash him with its club, the Reiklander rounded on the creature, delivering an almost blinding array of cuts to its body. Any one of the blows should have crippled a living thing. Against the wight, all they did was to shred its already rotting armour and chip away at its already fleshless bones. The axe came swinging around, catching Anselm before he could leap away. The man had no time to scream. Before he could understand what had happened, the Reiklander’s head was torn from his shoulders, bouncing across the floor in a gruesome display.
Skanir rushed at the wight, expecting it to gloat after dealing death. A living orc might have, but Gordreg was far removed from the living. It lifted its club once more, repulsing the dwarf with a bone-jarring sweep of the weapon. There was blood in Skanir’s beard as he picked himself up from the floor, more gushing from the gash in his forehead. The dwarf shook his head, bracing himself as the wight lumbered towards him, its axe at the ready once more.
Ignoring his protesting muscles, Kessler intercepted the orc skeleton, slashing at it with his zweihander, finishing the job that Anselm had started. The hand clutching the huge axe and most of the attached forearm crashed to the floor. The wight turned away from Skanir, and back towards Kessler. Without even looking at the arm lying beneath its lumbering feet, the bones of Gordreg stalked after Kessler.
Down came the club, crashing to powder fragments of bone. Kessler tried to strike the wight, but the effort was beyond his protesting muscles. Instead, he backed away, bracing himself for the sweep of the axe.
Then he remembered that the axe was lying on the floor. In its place came the club once more. Kessler’s sword was torn from him as the murderous bludgeon caught him in the side. He slammed into the floor, his body lighting up with flickers of pain. The sensation urged him on, his fingers questing for the weapon that had been torn from his hands. Above him, the wight continued its deadly march.
Suddenly, a man was standing between him and the wight. Kessler shouted at the man to back away, but the warning came too late. Instincts honed on a hundred battlefields, reflexes fired in a dozen wars, it was almost without conscious thought that Valdner brought the runefang smashing into Gordreg’s skull. Coming at the wight from its unprotected side, the mercenary found an almost contemptuous ease in planting the enchanted steel in the brutish head. Bone shattered beneath the blade, accompanied by an ear-shattering boom.
Even with its skull shattered, the wight of Gordreg Throatripper did not fall. Instead a black fog billowed around it, swirling and flickering with obscene energies. Valdner backed away from the fell power that exuded from the headless thing, almost letting the runefang slip from his stunned grip. Kessler scrambled for his sword, staring in mute horror as the bones of the orc warlord began to crumble. It was not the dissolution of the orc that struck him with horror, but the unleashing of that which had employed it as a vessel. Within the swirling black cloud, that darkness that was deeper than the natural gloom of the crypt, Kessler could see a shape, a shape that had haunted his dreams. It was the black outline of a hooded skull, the same hideous sending that had destroyed Carlinda.
The two men staggered back from the sending, their breath an icy mist that froze in their lungs. They could see tendrils of darkness, like a legion of shadowy worms, dripping from the thing. In the blink of an eye, an entire carpet of spectral maggots was writhing on the floor. The men watched in awed silence as the maggots began to spread, sinking into the numberless fragments of bone littering the floor.
As the bones absorbed the shadow-worms, they began to jump and shudder. Some began to lift into the air, forming into little whirlwinds of shattered bone. Faster and faster the whirlwinds grew, larger and larger as more of the litter was infected by the sending. Even the fragments beneath their feet began to move. Valdner gripped Kessler’s shoulder.
“We need to get out of here,” the mercenary swore. The whirlwinds were joining into a cyclone, the shards of bone spinning ever faster in a tempest of darkness. Some fragments would rip free, streaking across the tomb at incredible velocity, gouging into the walls of the crypt. Valdner did not want to consider their terrible power against mortal flesh.
The men turned and ran. Skanir had already withdrawn to the doorway, his face a crimson mask from the cut in his forehead. Raban and Skanir shouted desperately to their friends, encouraging them to hurry. Neither man looked back to see the source of their fear, it was enough to see it in their faces. Once, Valdner staggered as a shard of bone punched through him, slicing through his armour as easily as a knife through cheese. Kessler caught him before he could fall, pulling the man along as the tomb behind them became a raging maelstrom.
It seemed they would never reach the beckoning figures at the doorway. More shards of bone struck them as they ran, opening Kessler’s cheek and stabbing through the meat of his arm. Valdner’s screams told how much greater was the toll on the mercenary. There was no chance to consider his suffering. It was all Kessler could do to keep moving. A flash of pain swept up his leg as a piece of bone punched through his thigh, another as his shoulder was shredded. Another man would have yielded to the pain, but Kessler charged on. As his master had told him so many times, he thrived on pain, and had never allowed it to overcome him.
Finally, hands were reaching out to Kessler, pulling Valdner from his shoulder and pushing both men through the door. Skanir and Raban hurriedly dragged the heavy metal doors closed. Shards of bone could be heard pattering against it, like rain against a windowpane.
The immediate danger over, Kessler sank to his knees, trying to rest his abused body. He began tearing strips from his shirt to bind his wounds, and then stopped as he saw Valdner lying against the wall. The mercenary was in poor shape, his body coated in blood. Kessler winced as he saw the enormity of his wounds, trying to determine where he could even start tending the man.
Valdner’s eyes blinked open and he smiled at Kessler, trying to force a laugh from his tortured frame.
“Next time you go on a treasure hunt,” Valdner wheezed, “don’t invite me.” The mercenary brought his arm around. Despite the punishment he had endured, his hand still clutched the jewelled hilt of the runefang. “This one was more than enough trouble.”
“So that’s it,” someone said, with a sharp whistle. Kessler spun around, seeing the other occupants of the antechamber for the first time. Theodo came creeping forward, his steps awkward and pained, one hand still clutched to his side. Whatever weakness there was in his body, none of it showed in the halfling’s eyes. Kessler could imagine him already trying to calculate the value of the relic. It was just as well the halfling hadn’t been around to hear Rambrecht’s offer.
“Grudge Settler,” Kessler agreed, “the salvation of the realm: Zonbinzahn.”
Theodo nodded his head appreciatively, acknowledging the blade’s value beyond monetary wealth. Behind him, crouched in a heap against the wall, Ghrum managed an impressed grunt.
“It’s the runefang,” Skanir interrupted. He’d tied a bandage around his head, the blood-soaked cloth looking incongruous with his wild mane of beard. “I’m not so certain it is Zonbinzahn, ‘Sun-Tooth’.” The dwarf nodded grimly at the looks of horror his remark evoked. He stabbed a thumb at the doors behind him, at the image of King Fallowbeard. “Remember, that’s an axe he’s holding. Now if I recall, some of the old runes—”
“Excuse me,” Theodo piped in. “I do hope the lecture can wait. While Ghrum and I were catching our breath out here, some scruffy looking fellows ran past us.” He jabbed a thumb at the tunnel. “Not too long after that, we heard them doing a fair bit of screaming.”
“The Averlander’s scum,” Raban snorted. “They must have run into some of the old traps.”
“Ever hear of a trap laughing at you while you died?” Theodo protested.
Valdner managed to rise from the ground, staring at the black mouth of the passage. “That answers the question of who won the f
ight, the orcs or the hydra.”
“Maybe they’re in as bad shape as we are,” Kessler said. The suggestion didn’t seem to encourage anyone. Slowly, painfully, he picked up his sword from the floor, sending fresh flashes of protest from his muscles. “I didn’t think so either.”
They formed a ragged battleline at the mouth of the tunnel. Too injured to fight, Valdner was propped against the far wall, Theodo trying his best to stitch the worst of the man’s wounds. Unable even to stand in the antechamber, Ghrum likewise crouched against one wall, a look of terrible frustration on the ogre’s heavy features. To be left out of a good fight was about the worst thing that could happen to an ogre, beside the dreaded curse of “half rations”. With few illusions as to their chances, Kessler, Raban and Skanir waited for the orcs.
A sharp bang punctuated by snorts of gruff laughter told them when the orcs had reached the goblin pressure traps. The tension in the antechamber grew as sharp as a knife, sweat dripping from the faces of the waiting men. A few moments later, the first of the orcs rounded the corner of the corridor. A huge bull with curling tusks and a breastplate of bronze, the brute came hurtling down the corridor. Raban met the monster’s charge, chopping at it with his axe. The blade crunched into the orc’s shoulder, the strength behind the blow forcing the monster to its knees. Skanir brought his hammer cracking around, smashing into the side of the brute’s skull. Kessler slashed his greatsword into its arm, for good measure, nearly ripping it from the orc’s shoulder. The mangled orc slumped to the ground, shuddering as its tiny brain came around to the reality that it was dead.
Snarls and bellows echoed from the tunnel, a series of savage grunts that were almost precise enough to be called speech. Skanir motioned for them to back away from the entrance to the passage. Clearly the first orc had been used by its fellows to clear any traps ahead. Finding enemies, the brute had been overcome by its natural viciousness and had attacked without waiting for the rest. Even so, its death had warned the others.
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