Stars and Graves

by Roberto Calas

  Lokk Lurius nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Grae nodded his thanks.

  Meedryk gasped.

  †††

  Skeletons.

  The magician had withered away the top layer of mushrooms exposing the partially dissolved remains of men, women and children. All of them jumbled together in the pit. They lay in a crash of bone, piled high upon one another, a towering stack of unimaginable depth. Hundreds lay in that pit. And they seemed too fresh to be ancient remains. But something was wrong with the skeletons. The bones drooped, like melted wax. Eye sockets had sagged into squints. Fingers had fused together. Long bones had bent and curled into impossible shapes. Ribs had dripped inward like stalactites.

  “Was that you?” Grae asked. “Did you do that to the bones?”

  “Not me, brig, sir,” Meedryk replied, a hand over his mouth. “You... you can’t wither bones.”

  They called Lord Aeren out of the half-dug escape pit. He stepped forward, his legs and hand covered in damp soil, and studied the skeletons. “Yes. This confirms my suspicions” He pointed to the pit. “This is what becomes of the maurg when they grow old. When their bodies weaken and break down to the point of uselessness, they come here to die.”

  “You mean, they throw themselves in the pit?” asked Grae.

  Aeren shook his head. “No.” His eyes were unfocused, as if he were working something out. “They are spat into it. I believe the Beast uses the maurg as its hunters. Some of its victims, the ones it stings, become hosts that search the forest for food. Any food—animals, humans, thrulls. Whatever they can find, I imagine. The maurg drink the blood and any other fluids. I assume the fluids are converted into something that can nourish the Beast.”

  Sage raised a hand to stop him. “You are saying that these creatures eat, then convert that food into something the Beast can eat?”

  Lord Aeren nodded.

  “They are the mortar,” Meedryk said quietly.

  “They are the pestle,” Sage added.

  Grae thought about poor Daft Dathnien and his lunatic philosophies, waved for Lord Aeren to continue.

  “This is why we hear stories of the dead walking in Maurai. They aren’t walking. They are hunting. They store the blood within themselves, like walking wineskins. After a time, the maurg bodies begin to break down. I have noticed that there are fast maurg, and there are not as fast maurg. Strong ones, and not as strong. They seem to age, but not in the same way they did before the transformation. I believe the longer they go after being stung, the slower and less powerful they become. Or maybe they just fill up with too much blood. I’m not sure. Either way, when they are no longer capable of hunting efficiently, the Beast sucks the nourishment from their bodies.”

  “It eats them?” asked Meedryk.

  “In a sense,” Aeren replied. “The Beast doesn’t have proper chewing teeth, but it has powerful jaws and that green fluid perhaps acts as some sort of acid. I think the Beast crushes and melts the maurg to a pulp, then sucks them down. Everything that is not soft gets spit out. Owls eat in a similar fashion.” He looked toward the pile of armor, weapons and tools that had been discarded at the edge of the village. “That explains the metal objects in the hall. That explains the mangled bones in the pit. The force of the jaws and the acid in the creature’s mouth likely warp the bones into those shapes.” Lord Aeren nearly smiled. “It’s an amazing way to survive, really. The Beast can have hundreds of creatures roaming the forest, searching for food. Once it has enough hosts, it doesn’t have to hunt for long periods of time if it doesn’t want to.”

  “But it does anyway,” said Grae. He gestured to Meedryk and waved at the pit.

  “Get rid of them,” he said. He felt as if something was being seared into him. Something irreversible. It wasn’t just the ghastly bones. It was Maug Maurai and the senseless deaths, the Chamberlain and Beldrun Shanks, dead children, Cydoen and all the other villages. Everything hurt. “Get rid of them,” he repeated. “All of them.”

  In the distance, they heard the Beast’s first howl of the night. A long, baleful cry that threatened terrible things to come.

  Chapter 46

  They stab a burning hot poker through your hand if you steal integrants. And they put the poker up your arse if the integrants are third circle or higher.

  —Rudris Howett, mantic in the Laraytian Standards

  Drissdie sat with his back against a giant blue fueryk and watched as darkness seized the forest. Torches lit the gates to CWNCR. Meedryk had planted them there with Lokk Lurius. The two of them had placed pairs of torches at intervals along each of the four roads and at each of the four gates. Drissdie imagined that they were magical torches, because the flames had lasted an hour already with no sign of guttering out. Magical or not, the torchlight did little to push back the darkness. Except at the village center, where twenty torches had been planted. A camp fire burned there, too. Drissdie put his hands up as if he could warm them on the flames from two hundred yards away.

  He reminded himself that everyone in the village would die soon. He, too, had entered CWNCR, but they had forced him. Surely the curse understood that. He had fled the village as soon as he could. Mundaaith couldn’t fault Meedryk for something that he hadn’t wanted to do.

  Mum, don’t let me be punished. I left quick. Please don’t make me cursed. Mother of light, protect our children.

  He rummaged through his pack until he found a small linen pouch. He untied it and took out the coin he had found on the Maurian Road all those days ago. His good luck charm. He needed all the luck he could find. He flaked the dried mud off its surface. It had studs on the edges. And a metal loop had been fused to the top edge. It didn’t seem like a coin anymore. Drissdie thought that maybe it was a pendant, fallen off a necklace.

  The Beast howled and Drissdie let out a whimper. Snaps and crunches sounded from the forest. Footsteps. He lit his lantern but its pathetic glow only made him more fearful. Made him realize again how vast the forest truly was. His breath came in quick, quivering bursts. He put out the belt lantern and climbed the ancient fueryk. It was difficult with his mail on, but fear lent him strength. A fork of two branches, ten feet above the ground, provided a perch. He gripped his coin in one hand and pulled his leather hat low over his eyes with the other.

  So it was that he never saw the shapes that stepped out from the forest and approached the village gate.

  †††

  Grae stepped into their fortified hall and picked up the woolen sack just inside the entryway. He reached in and drew out the culmination of the squad’s work. The project that would bring glory or death to everyone in the squad.

  A pair of fake, gauntleted arms.

  He placed the arms on the ground and stared. The bones of the arms were made from oak shafts. Jurren meat formed the muscle. Black chain mail sleeves were fitted over the assortment and gauntlets were attached with layer upon layer of fletcher’s silk. Long leather straps, taken from breastplates, had been sewn into the chainmail. Grae himself had sewn the straps. He had placed eighty looped stitches on each strap, then had clamped individual chain links through the leather. He borrowed rivets from Hammer’s quarter-kit and drove the mail into the wooden bones. Hammer had held the straps while Grae pulled with all of his weight to make sure they wouldn’t come loose and they hadn’t budge.

  “The arms will be rigged to a spear, so when I put them on, it will look like I am standing ready to thrust,” he had told the squad. “We’ll secure the harness under my arms and around my chest. My real arms will be tucked inside my hauberk.”

  Grae’s hauberk and leather tabard had been split down the middle and tied together loosely, in three places, with silk thread. With luck, the Beast would think the mock arms real. With more luck, it would grab Grae as it had Jjarnee and Rundle—one taloned hand grasping the arms, another holding his legs. Grae could then reach out with his real arm, holding Jjarnee’s tiny hand crossbow. If all went well, the tip of the quarre
l would sit less than a foot from the Beast’s eyes—not even Lord Aeren could miss from that range. If Grae’s shot was true, the bolt would pierce the Beast’s eye and, with Lojen’s help, carry the fatal enchantment to the brain.

  Just like that.

  It had seemed feasible when he conceived the plan. But something about the night now, about the darkness, made him see the idea as infantile. Did I honestly think this would work? He looked at the shambles of his squad, most digging in the hall. Did they?

  Lokk made his way over. His face held no expression, but Grae had learned to read danger in the man’s posture. “There’s someone at the western gate.”

  “Drissdie? Has the darkness scared him into the village?”

  “It ain’t Drissdie.”

  They walked behind the fortified hall and looked out toward the western gate. A hulking shape stood silhouetted in the torchlight, just beyond the entryway.

  “Shanks,” said Grae.

  “I don’t think so,” Sage replied. He had been digging outside of the hall, at the back, trying to join his tunnel with the one on the inside. “Shanks is leaner and a bit taller.”

  The three of them studied the figure. It made no effort to enter the walls of the village. It stood just beyond the gap in the stones. As they watched, another figure, slighter of build, joined the first and both of them stood staring silently.

  “Grae!” Aramaesia called from the other side of the hall. They sprinted to her. She and Ulrean stared toward the northern gate, the one the squad had entered through. “There’s someone there.”

  Another of the figures stood at this entry. Standing motionless, staring into the village. Two more figures stepped from the darkness and joined the first.

  “This makes no sense,” said Grae.

  “Perhaps they are maurg,” Aramaesia offered. But the figures stood so still.

  “Someone get Lord Aeren,” said Grae quietly. “And Meedryk.”

  The two came out of the hall with Hammer, all of them covered in mud. Meedryk had been helping with the digging, softening the stones in the earth, turning them into a mineral ooze so they could be dug out easily.

  “Could those be maurg?” asked Grae.

  Lord Aeren studied the figures, wiped at his forehead leaving a mud stain. “I suppose,” he replied. “But we’ve never seen them standing quietly. They have always just attacked.” He took a few steps toward the gate, squinting. “I don’t know. Perhaps they are something else.”

  “I’ve seen ‘em stand like that,” Lokk said.

  “You have?” Aeren asked.

  Lokk nodded. “But they made noise. These aren’t saying anything.”

  No one wanted to ponder the possibilities. Thoughts of curses and skeletons and Mundaaith and The Dark Place swirled in their minds. Even Grae found himself recalling tales told in the dark summer nights of his childhood.

  “Meedryk,” said Grae. “Can you set up some palisade chants on the paths?”

  “I’m low on integrants,” he replied. “The chemics that… that help with the magic. I don’t think I can do very large areas.”

  “Then set a few halfway between them and us. Lokk, escort him. And if they enter the village, run back here. Understood?”

  “Aye, brig, sir.”

  Grae turned to Aramaesia. “Can you reach them from here?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I can hit them.”

  “How many arrows do you have?”

  “Twenty two.”

  “Let’s wait and see if they enter.” said Grae. “We should conserve. And the rest of you...” He trailed off as he looked around.

  “You mean me?” asked Sage with quiet humor.

  “You and Lord Aeren get back to digging. How close are we?”

  “We’ve made shafts on the outside and the inside. It is difficult. There’s about five feet of stone slab buried underground. But you can stand in the shafts now. Just have to connect them. We’re close.”

  “We had better be,” said Grae.

  “Brig, sir,” said Sage. “We… found something while we were digging. Old metal rings. Rusted away nearly to flakes.”

  “So?” said Grae.

  Sage looked at each of the four halls, then back at Grae. “Those scyllhing things that Meedryk talked about. The things the Margils had. How many did Meedryk say there were?”

  Grae looked at the other three halls. At the stone slabs sealing them off. He looked at the toppled slab in front of the hall they had fortified. “Great Mother of Light,” he whispered.

  “It’s just a thought,” said Sage.

  “It’s a seamarken nightmare. Don’t think about it.” He shook his head and pointed to the back of the fortified hall. “You two try to finish the tunnel. Don’t open it too wide. Make it a little difficult to get in and out. If there’s to be a siege, I don’t want that to be a weak spot.” He scanned the outskirts of the village beyond the wall. “I wish I knew what Drissdie was doing.”

  “Bleeding,” said Sage. The others looked at him. He cleared his throat. “Possibly.”

  †††

  Drissdie sat in the branches of the fueryk, quiet as a caterpillar. That’s what his mum used to say when she tucked him in at night.

  Be quiet as a caterpillar, little one.

  The footsteps became impossible to ignore so he peered from under his hat. And he instantly wished he hadn’t.

  Three figures stood before the gate, staring into the village. The torchlight silhouetted them and sapped their details. But the flames glistened from helmets and mail. The one in the middle looked like an ogre. Large and powerful and ominous.

  Mundaaith’s demons, here for the squad.

  Drissdie shook his head slowly. He had warned them. For the first time in his life, he had chosen correctly.

  I didn’t go in on purpose. Mundaaith can’t take me. I can’t be blamed.

  He stroked the good luck pendant. Another figure emerged from the trees and joined the first three. And then another. And another. Before long there were eleven figures standing before the gate, many of them armored.

  And then a strange thing happened. The Beast cried out again, much closer this time, a long, hateful shriek. And as it howled, so did the figures. Each of them threw their heads back and screamed, their bodies jerking, their limbs twitching convulsively. Their cries began at precisely the same instant as the Beast’s, and ended at the same moment. It was as if the monster’s cry emanated from a dozen throats at once.

  †††

  Meedryk enlisted Aramaesia to help him set the palisade chant. He had read extensively on the methodology of the wards, but had never actually made any. Intricate patterns were required and careful craftsmanship. He’d come to trust Aramaesia’s eyes and hands. But with Aramaesia came Ulrean and with Ulrean came questions.

  “How do you set palisades?” The boy peered over Meedryk’s shoulder, at the pouch in the mage’s hand.

  Meedryk scratched the back of his neck. “Uh,” he looked down at his feet. They were on the northern path, a hundred yards from the fortified hall. Lokk Lurius stood a few feet away, watching the creatures at the gate.

  The premise for palisade wards was simple: Lay down an abeyant, the chemics that held power within themselves, and a fomentriatic, the integrants that created a reaction when combined with abeyants. For palisades, both chemics had to be in powder form. The mage setting the palisade had to pour the two chemics in heavily interlaced patterns, making sure the two powders never touched.

  He looked over his shoulder at Ulrean and cradled the pouch with his body. “I call on the power of the universe to create a phlogistic disturbance when anyone passes through my spell.”

  Meedryk poured the emerald powder into a wooden bowl then handed the bowl to Aramaesia.

  “What’s the powder for?” asked Ulrean.

  Meedryk held up the pouch and lied. “The powders constrain the magic into the patterns that I set. Otherwise the power would leak out and no one would be safe.
”

  The powders are the magic, thought Meedryk. Just a charlatan’s tricks.

  But Meedryk had been thinking quite a bit about the day he had electrocuted Beldrun Shanks. He had had never let go of the second integrant. The spell should not have discharged. Not even if a few grains of the secondary chemic had spilled from his hand and found their way into the abeyant cloud. A few grains would not have been enough to create such a reaction. He remembered the pulsing in his head just before the lightning crackled. Pulsing, like a million heartbeats. The calm that had swept through him. The buzzing in his limbs.

  “How do the powders constrain the magic?” asked Ulrean.

  Meedryk blinked his thoughts away. “It’s complicated.”

  The fomentriatic powder for this palisade had to be mixed with an adhesant that would make it stick to feet. Intruders would step on the sticky fomentriatic then carry it, on the next step, into the abeyant. When the two integrants touched, a reaction would occur. The reactions were typically explosive, or flaming, or electrical in nature. Meedryk was using fulminating ceration as the abeyant. A chemic that created powerful, flaming explosions when it came into contact with the right fomentriatic.

  Ulrean twisted his face. “I’m clever. Tell me how a powder laid on the ground constrains magic. Why can’t the magic simply rise over it?”

  “I need to concentrate!” Meedryk ground his teeth and put a fist in front of his lips. He composed himself and forced a smile. “Sorry.” He unclipped another pouch from the inside of his meridian cloak. “The powders attract the magic. Like when someone blows a smoke ring, then sucks it back in? I blow the ring. The powders suck it back.” Ulrean was about to speak again, so Meedryk drew out a tin vial and held it up. “You see this? This turns good mages into great ones.”

  Ulrean studied the vial. “Are you holding it for you master?”

  “No! This is mine. This is what will destroy the beast. It’s an accelerant called agglumerant oil. It makes magic much more powerful and dangerous. Few mages dare to use it.”