by Jim Galford
Leaning against the door, Estin listened for a time, while keeping his eyes on the street. Both were still and quiet. Only the occasional creak of wood and the cries of the birds far above broke the silence.
Taking another sniff of the air, he began to pick up on a lingering scent of raw meat left in the sun too long. This was not uncommon, especially for this tavern, but it seemed to hang everywhere in the air. Without thinking about it, he looked up again, watching the large flocks of crows. There were a lot more of them than he remembered having seeing before that day. Cities always drew carrion birds, but these flocks were enormous.
Estin eased the tavern door open, even as he pulled his hood farther forward to do what he could to conceal his face. His kind were allowed in this particular tavern, but anyone new to the place was often assaulted by the regulars and he had no desire to provoke a conflict any sooner than necessary. As the door swung outwards, he had to let his eyes adjust to the dark inside. Not a single candle or torch was lit and that same raw meat smell drifted out of the tavern more strongly.
He stepped in cautiously, his bare feet coming down immediately on bits of broken glass and pottery, which he ignored even as they bit into the pads of his feet.
The whole tavern had been sacked by the look of things. Many of the old mugs and pottery plates now lay strewn about, as though nearly every patron had tossed their meals onto the floor. Rotten food lay in the space between tables and several large mugs still sat on the bar, partially drained.
Estin took each step with increasing care as the hair across his neck and arms began to stand on end. The place reeked of decay, but he could not be sure if it was just all from the old food. He approached the first table closest to the door with trepidation, eyeing the plates of food on it with suspicion.
Though the chairs at this table were overturned, there were two plates of potatoes and steamed vegetables—at least he believed that’s what they were after this much decay, though the winter weather had preserved them somewhat—still sitting on it, with one mug that contained a small amount of liquid. On the floor alongside the table, he saw the remains of a second mug.
On a whim, Estin bent over the plates of food and took a long deep breath. He was sure of what the food had been now, but there was something more. Maybe a spice he did not recognize. He racked his mind for the particular aroma, but could not place it.
He began creeping through the tavern again, this time moving towards the bar. Leaning over it, he checked on the bartender’s side for any further clues as to what had happened.
Estin froze as he saw shoes and followed them up to a man’s body, hidden behind the bar. The man looked as though he had fallen down and just lay there, close enough to the inside of the bar that he could not be seen from the main room.
Cursing his curiosity, he climbed over the bar and dropped alongside the barkeep. It took no healer’s skill to see that the man was quite dead, his skin ashen and face bloated. Estin guessed that the man had likely been dead three or four days.
As he had been taught, Estin lay a hand on the body and let his mind drift free, searching for the man’s spirit. The room remained as empty as it had when he entered, letting him know that the spirit had moved on. This man was well beyond any healer’s power.
Estin tossed back his hood and the bearskin, freeing him for swift movement. He doubted stealth was really needed at this point.
He hurried outside, searching the streets for any sign of any living being, but aside from the crows there was no one. Not a footprint, not a recent track from wagons or carts, not even the smell of a single person wandering by in the last day.
In a blind panic, Estin ran from home to home, kicking in the door of each and searching for humans. Every place he went, he found disheveled rooms that appeared as if the owners had fallen down or knocked something over, then vanished.
At the fifth home, he finally stopped, panting, at yet another overturned table. He dropped to all fours and began sniffing at some rotting food, trying to identify what they had been eating. It had been bread and some vegetables, but again there was that other scent.
He scrambled all over the room, searching for the source of the smell. As he was about to give up, he spotted a large clay pot of water under a counter.
Yanking the pot out into the open, he whipped the cover off of it and put his nose close to the water’s surface. There he found the smell at last, a deep earthy scent that made his skin itch. Unable to identify it, he stuck his finger-claw into the pot, then touched the tiny amount of water to his tongue.
Bitterness in the water was his only hint of what was in there, just before his muscles shook and his stomach clenched. Estin struggled against the effect, forcing his body to accept it and deal with it. This was something his parents had always told him was part of what made his people special and different from the humans, but he had rarely had cause to poison himself. Today, that resistance saved him as his muscles eased and his stomach relaxed, the toxin passing as his body fought it off.
“They poisoned everyone?” he said aloud, surprised at the audacity of the killer. “Why would someone even want to?”
Estin went back to the street, finding Finth walking up the middle of the road, his face pale.
“They’re all dead,” Finth told Estin, glaze-eyed. “Every single one.”
Estin opened his mouth to say something, but his sharp hearing picked up the sound of footfalls approaching. He snapped his fingers in front of Finth’s eyes, then motioned to the tavern.
Together, they ran inside, but kept the door ajar so that he could watch the street.
It took several minutes, but finally a group appeared in view.
Numbering almost fifty, the group was entirely made up of undead. Shambling zombies groaned and eyed the buildings, while smooth-moving skeletons marched behind silently. The entire morbid group took a long time to pass, seemingly checking for any survivors…or more corpses.
“Never again!” whispered Finth hoarsely. “I’m staying out in the friggin’ woods til the day I die! Who turns their citizens into undead?!”
“We need to know if this is just happening in the slums,” Estin told him, checking the road again. He could see no more of the abominations in either direction. “One group of them is bad enough, but there are a lot of people in this town…or were. If the Turessians turned them all, we may have a problem.”
Finth paled further.
“Twenty-thousand,” Finth said softly. “That was the number I always heard. Another ten-thousand in the farms across the region.”
Estin thought about the idea of twenty-thousand undead like he had fought marching on the camp and felt briefly sick. Thoughts of the massive army to the far southeast only furthered his dread, wondering how many of them once lived in Altis.
“We will head for the west gate, then. It’s near enough to the slums that we can still move freely, but should be close enough to the arts district to give us a feel for how the rest of the town is doing.”
Finth nodded, adding, “We can go through the central market on the way. I promised Ulra I’d try to free some fur-suckers. Promise is a promise.”
They waited a little longer, then Estin led the mad dash from the tavern, using his sense of smell and keen hearing to watch for further patrols. They ran through the empty streets towards the middle of town, finding no sign of life the whole way.
As they entered the market, Estin began to smell still more death. He looked in all directions, until at last he noticed the tall wooden structure in the center of the market. It was new and still smelled faintly of fresh-cut wood.
The new gallows had four “guests.” Hanging by their necks, two orcs, the duke, and a woman Estin guessed to be the duke’s wife all swung in the breeze. They were kept swaying by their struggles to free themselves, their tied limbs twitching and tugging at their bonds.
“Should we free them?” asked Finth.
Estin watched the duke as the man’s body sp
un about, finally getting a good look at the man’s face. He was grey and bloated, his broken face snarling as he fought to be free.
“They’re already dead. Keep going.”
Estin moved on, trying to ignore the guttural noises from the gallows above them. Having avoided this part of town for most of his life, it took him a little bit to find the slave pens, but when he did, he wished he had just left the town.
Long cages were inset into the ground, with narrow staircases that led down to them for adding or removing the slaves. With the slavemasters all gone or dead, the slaves still remained in their cages. Wildlings, fae-kin, and even a few halflings lay in the long pens by the dozens, their emaciated bodies lying still and cold.
“They look as though they were left out through the recent storms,” he noted, kneeling beside the lip of the drop-off into the cages. He shifted his mind into the spirit-realm, searching for spirits seeking a healer, but the pens were just as dead in the spirit world as in his own. “These ones never got poisoned. They starved and froze.”
Even Finth, for all his stalwart belligerence, looked about ready to cry as he looked from one nearly-skeletal body to the next. Some of the bodies were not even recognizable by race.
“This city needs to burn, Estin.”
“It’s too big for us to deal with. We need to go.”
A shrill hiss from the west made Estin look up. There, a robed humanoid figure stood with about twenty shambling zombies right behind it. The Turessian raised a long spear, then pointed at Estin and Finth, setting the undead into lumbering motion.
“Can you do anything about them, Estin?”
He shook his head vigorously, taking to his feet in a hurry.
“Run.”
Finth did not argue, taking off at a pace that Estin struggled to match. They did not bother with any semblance of stealth anymore, making for the east gate as fast as they could manage.
As they approached, Estin remembered the groups of undead that they had seen at the various entrances as they had neared the city originally. He checked behind them, finding the group of zombies moving along fairly swiftly, trying to catch up with them.
“This is going to be rough,” he warned Finth, as the gate came into sight.
The east gate—the city’s largest—was nearly packed with skeletal or mostly skeletal guards, all facing out towards the foothills and plains beyond. Not one looked back towards the inside of the city.
“Follow me!”
Estin rushed the group, shoulder-checking the first zombie as he cleared the gate proper. He turned sharply, hugging the wall as he leapt at the next corpse that started to turn his way, crashing into it with both feet and tipping it over. He recovered from the landing and hopped over its clawing grasp, punching the next zombie to knock it off-balance as he moved past it.
Only a handful of the creatures remained between them and freedom, but Estin could feel the oppressive weight of the monsters closing on them, forcing them nearly flat against the wall to avoid their grabbing hands.
Estin acted as quickly as he could, summoning the only offensive spell Asrahn had taught him thus far. He made the motions, whispered the secret words, then stomped his foot and threw his arms up towards the sky, feeling magic rush through him with the now-familiar whispers of spirits in his head. A rush of power flared outwards, driving back all of the undead at least ten feet.
“Go!”
Finth raced past him, heading for the trees.
Once his companion passed him, Estin dropped the magic, feeling his heart flutter as the power faded and the undead began rushing forward again. He turned from them, running for all he was worth to catch Finth.
They ran together for a long time, stumbling over rocks and zigzagging through trees as they headed in a randomly-chosen direction. Even the cold winter air was ignored as they sweated from the exertion of running.
When at last they collapsed, they had neither seen nor heard the undead for a very long time. They lay there until the rush began to wear off and the damp cold began to finally make its way through their clothes. Estin found himself shaking from the chill, even when he tried to ignore its effect on him.
Estin rolled onto his feet, even though his body begged to stay on the ground.
“Lihuan will want to know,” Finth said, still staring up at the sky.
Estin nodded, then squinted at the faint stars in the sky.
“What day is it?”
“How would I…maybe mid-month. Why?”
Searching the sky, Estin finally found the faint outline of the moon. It was nearly full.
“I’m supposed to patrol the western range tomorrow night. If we head back now, I can just head that way and get to work hours early. I can talk to Asrahn when I get back.”
“It’s Lihuan that needs to know…besides, I’m on the patrol list, too. I don’t remember you having a patrol for another week. There isn’t even anything out in the bloody west range.”
Estin shook his head.
“I don’t answer to Lihuan anymore, if I can help it. It’s Asrahn’s assignment. Part of the training, I think. I wouldn’t question her…would you?”
Finth looked quite skeptical, but said nothing.
They made the trek back slowly, their feet aching the whole way after having gone both directions in one day. There was not a single bit of conversation on the return, with both watching the woods for signs of the undead horde, but finding none.
As they reached the outer edges of the camp’s patrol range, Estin came to a stop.
“This is where I go elsewhere.”
Finth turned around and eyed him oddly.
“When will you be back? Gotta tell Lihuan something, or he’ll be expecting you to shamble into camp with the rest of the rot-faces.”
“I should be back in a day, maybe a day and a half.”
“Travel safe then, monkey.”
“Always.”
Estin turned from the dwarf and began a western path until he knew he was out of sight, then made for the southwest, moving through the woods by memory. The route was certainly not one that Asrahn had told him to take and likely would have forbidden. Even so, he knew that Finth would not question Asrahn about it. Any time questions had come up about the details of his training, the elder had yelled at the asker, shooing them away. That had worked to his advantage when he had wanted to disobey orders.
Guided by instinct and occasionally his nose, Estin moved through the woods like a shadow, avoiding several potential ambushes and at least one pit-trap that he knew about. The route seemed to become more lethal each time he traveled it, but that was not going to change his decision. He had a feeling that those he was avoiding knew he had come through this way, thus the newer traps.
At last, he reached the sheer face of a cliff and went up it, keeping his body flat against the rock. This was not nearly as easy as climbing trees or the badly-fit stones of the Altis walls, but it was not terribly hard, either. The cliff was uneven, giving him many places to grab if he was careful. He just had to be cautious to stay quiet and watch for anyone moving at the bottom of the cliff who might see him.
Once Estin had reached about fifty feet off the ground, he moved sideways until he came to a thin pathway where the rocks had shifted, leaving a narrow ledge. This took him about another mile southwest, until he found his usual hiding place and settled in.
Below him, Insrin’s village lay in full display, all their attempts to hide the place unable to conceal it from above. From here, he had watched them many times.
The guards for the village were diligent, that Estin had to give them. When Feanne had first left, he had come day after day, trying to find a way to sneak in and had always wound up running away. Once his ribs and leg had healed fully, he had climbed the cliff and found this location, from which he could watch the whole town, learning more about them. It was in doing so, he had learned the schedule he now followed.
Twice every month, Insrin would go out with hi
s hunters for a night or two. The times were practically set in stone, letting Estin plan around them by simply watching the moon. By his estimate, tonight would be one of those nights, with Insrin returning late the following day or early the morning after.
He lay in waiting, concealed by the shade of the mountain face, as well as the fact that the village guards would never look up. After this many visits, Estin felt confident that he could probably throw rocks down on the village without fear.
The sun slowly disappearing behind him, Estin waited patiently, until at last he saw Insrin emerge from his mud hut, right at the bottom of the cliff. The pack-leader stopped at the doorway until Feanne joined him, the two embracing and speaking briefly.
Estin had seen this exact exchange over and over and after months it finally no longer hurt him. At first, he had seen the callousness in Feanne’s demeanor, the complete indifference for her mate’s departure. Slowly, she had warmed to her mate and they appeared fairly happy now. That had been hard at first for Estin, but he dearly wanted her safe and to have a good life, so this was at least a small comfort.
What had been hard for him to cope with had been her pregnancy. He had first been able to spot the change in her about a little more than a month after she left Lihuan’s camp and he had felt sick for the whole remaining duration of the pregnancy—about three months of the four the fox-breeds took to have their young. Despite this, he kept coming back as often as he could sneak away, trying to watch her and wishing he could protect her from closer than the cliffs. He had wanted to wish her well during the pregnancy, but had no way to deliver that message.
Still, Insrin appeared to be doing well at caring for her, often escorting her himself when he did not have his personal guard and a female or two watching her. Someone had always been tending to her. She was being well cared for, Estin had to accept, but still wanted to help her, or at least be there for her.
Two months ago, just before the storms had kept him away, Insrin’s hunting trip had been canceled. Estin had sat on the cliff throughout the night, hearing Feanne give birth to the other male’s children and then wept for days, unable to even face Asrahn. He had stayed in his tent and spoken to no one for almost a full week. It was that night that had finally broken him.
