by Kaleb Schad
She didn’t blame them. For the entire ride into Fisher Pass, she hadn’t been able to tear her eyes from the wall. It stood taller than four Sunflower Stops stacked on top of each other and seemed to be in a constant state of avalanche, a wave that never stopped cresting. Inside the mass were all the dead things of generations of war. Animals, humans, elves, dwarves, every species of life in Humay and from who knows where before it, in the Wilds. They said the necrotic magic of the Wretched kept the bones from crumbling. Much of the meat and clothing and armor had been eaten away or scuffed off so that what came at them was white and bright in the lightning. A beacon of dread.
She understood now. She understood why there was a national holiday in Rayen’s honor. To ride into that thing, to see it and see those mites tossing the bones and to listen to the sound, greater than a thousand thunderclaps and constant and merciless and to choose to ride into that, it was something a nation should never forget.
“The kitchen,” Malic yelled. “Only one way in.”
Two Fingers didn’t answer, his eyes, too, locked on the wall.
One of the towers in the keep was on fire, giant tongues of flame licking at the shingles. Fires raged all across Fisher Pass. The bake house at the far end of town was a cube engulfed within an inferno. Someone ambled into the street, almost casually, out for an evening walk, aflame.
“Mercy,” Alysha whispered. She twisted the ropes around her wrists, drawing them tight, then began rubbing them back and forth across the firm edge of the saddle. It was a small hope.
Malic’s horse reared its head and tried looking behind it. Alysha turned. Four dog creatures, not Fletchers like what Daveon had brought home, but something else, smaller, raced out from between Henley’s butcher shop and the cobbler’s shop on the far side and began pacing their horses.
“Malic,” Alysha yelled. Too late.
The fastest of the dogs came up along one of the horse’s rear legs and, as if falling into the horse, clamped an iron jaw into the meat of its flank. The horse screamed, an ugly shrill sound that cut Alysha’s heart. It tried to keep running, but there was no use. A second of the dogs took the other leg out from the horse.
Almost in slow motion, she felt the back of the horse sway, droop.
Malic swore.
Then they were on the ground and rolling and there was mud in Alysha’s face and she felt the rope around her throat constrict like a viper. Malic smashed into her, then bounced off and skidded another ten yards.
The horse tried to get back up, pawing its front hooves into the road, humping its head into the air over and over. Its teeth where white in the night. Every time it thrashed, the rope jerked tighter into her throat.
Pressure built behind her eyes, in her ears. She burrowed her nails into her neck, desperate to get a finger under the rope.
A ringing sound rose and drowned out all other sound. She mouthed Malic’s name. Tasted blood.
The dog creatures were on the horse now, opening chasms in its flesh that gave forth great washes of blood. They began dragging the beast backward, dragging Alysha with it.
Malic ran forward and slashed the rope with his shortsword and Alysha was freed from the saddle, but the rope still strangled her. The rain had made it impossible to loosen. Blackness pressed in around her eyes.
Two Fingers leapt off of his horse and dropped amid the dogs. His greatsword arced in hateful, hurried swings.
She tried to reach behind her, but her tied hands kept her from reaching the knot. Everything was so thick. Slow. Her fingers were dulled lumps of mud.
Malic slapped her hands away. He said something, but it was as if hearing through water. He cut again, this time at the back of Alysha’s neck. She wondered if he would kill her. It wasn’t a terrible thought. She thought it might be okay.
The rope came free. Alysha gulped air.
As the blood dropped out from her head, she could hear again. She wished she couldn’t. Everywhere people screamed. Horrible, agonizing wails. A house crumbled as it burned. The bone wall gave brittle clacking and crashing sounds as its white wall came ever closer to Fisher Pass, growing taller, erasing the mountains from the horizon.
A woman—was that Patina Nilimon?—pushed her son out of their house. The boy fell down the front steps and crawled into the street. Patina turned and tried to slam the door shut, but she was too slow and a Wallwraith casually, easily, pushed the door open and stepped out. Victor Nilimon limped out behind it. He swung an axe at the monster, but it raised its hand without even turning and let a white-blue cloud of energy free. It swirled around Victor and when it cleared, he was emaciated, his skin black and sucked in around his bones. He crumpled to the ground.
“Patina!” Alysha screamed. “Here!” She waved her bound hands in the air, but the woman didn’t hear her, see her.
Patina pushed her son. Alysha heard her scream, “Run!” over and over. The ground opened under Patina and she sank into the road up to her knees. The Wallwraith stopped next to her and, without hurry or consideration, with no more care than brushing hair from one’s eyes, it sent a second cloud out to catch the boy as he ran. He stopped running. Fell. Would never run again.
“Up,” Malic screamed. He put a hand under Alysha’s arm and yanked her to her feet. He clasped her wrist and started hobbling towards the Stop.
Alysha looked over her shoulder at the half-orc. Two Fingers moved with a grace she hadn’t seen in even the finest of dancers during Market Days. There was something unnerving and beautiful in the way he killed. An artist, the sword his instrument.
She was going to die here. Her children were almost certainly already dead. Daveon was likely dead. There was only one thing she must do before they got her. The time was nigh.
Yes, she was going to die here, but not before Malic did.
He shoved Alysha through the Sunflower Stop’s front gate and into the courtyard.
68
They call them veterans, the men who had waged war and survived, who had watched their friends die and killed other men. Veterans. It meant “here goes one who knows how to kill and who knows how to grieve. One who knows the weight of life.”
The way Isabell moved, not letting the Fletcher find its footing in the window, not waiting for some internal debate on tactics or how to fight it, but drawing on everything she saw and learned at the wall, they would call her a veteran of killing Wretched.
She reached the Fletcher as it tried to withdraw its last foot from the window and she swung hard. It raised an arm to block the edge, but at the last second she flipped the blade in her hand, letting the flat of it slap against the monster’s arm, then used the skidding motion to ride up and over the forearm, passing it and slicing into the top of its cranium.
It stood looking at her for a moment, its mouth opening slowly, rows of teeth, jagged and moving, and it gave a weird cracking sound that Isabell thought might be a word. A language you’d have to yield your soul to understand.
It slid to the floor and lay still.
Everywhere, up and down the stairwell, came the clatter of steel and stone and bone, nightmarish snarling sounds, men screaming commands, trying to rally, trying to find a courage that could stand against creatures such as these.
Isabell gave a small gasp of relief when she saw Lelana. Her sister. Not in blood, but in love. In more love than any other woman or man had shown her since her mother had died.
She was backing out of her room, swinging something.
“Lela!” Isabell shouted.
The woman didn’t turn her head. Isabell saw she wielded a torch like a sword, swinging it at something. Blood spattered off of a bite on her hand when she swung the torch.
Isabell leaped the last four steps and landed hard, her bare feet thwapping on the stone.
“Back,” she ordered.
Another Fletcher, this one with a hard carapace face, like the back of a beetle, seamed in the middle and then forking over a mouth. Hand prints pressed against the inside of the she
ll where the face should have been, as if someone inside struggled to be released. Everything wet and dripping.
Isabell tasted bile.
She snatched the torch from Lelana then swung it in a wide circle at the creature’s face. She looped all the way around so that her sword came at the monster on the back swing. It ducked the slash and whipped a spiked tail at her. She threw herself against the door and the Fletcher’s tail speared into the wood, just slicing Isabell’s cheek. She felt the breeze from the attack a moment later. Vibrations hummed through the wooden door.
“Isa!” Lelana screamed. She had found a second torch and leaped at the creature.
Isabell brought her sword up and bisected the tail. The creature screeched like a cat caught in a fireplace, webbed mucus wapping up Isabell’s neck and face. It backed into Lelana’s room, giving a deep lowing sound, panning its head left and right looking for an opening.
The two women advanced side by side, the torches to the outside, raised and threatening, the sword centered on the creature. It moaned and lunged and snapped, then backed away, unable to find a way at them. When its severed tail touched the wall, the window behind it open and looking out on the blistering lightning, Isabell could see it knew it was out of options.
“Ready when you are,” Isabell said.
The Fletcher screeched again and leaped sideways to the wall. Isabell wasn’t ready for it. She’d thought it would come straight at her. Instead, the creature landed on the side wall, then, within a heartbeat, speared out towards her. She clubbed the monster with the torch, a constellation of sparks clouding out into the room. It wasn’t enough. The Fletcher’s mouth reached Isabell’s shoulder, fangs longer than a man’s thumb burying themselves.
Isabell screamed. Fire raged inside her shoulder.
Before the Fletcher could release the bite, however, Isabell drove her sword through its chest, the carapace back shattering into tiny bits of bone. She slammed it backwards, to the wall, through the window, then shoved. It came away from her, sliding off her sword like a lump of meat from a skewer and tumbled into nothingness.
Lelana leaned out next to Isabell, watching it bounce off the walls and tumble end over end away into the night. It hit the rap near the river and even from here they could hear the muffled crunch as it splattered against the stones.
They leaned there breathing for a long time.
“Airim save us,” Lelana whispered.
Isabell looked up and saw what Lelana was seeing. There, at the edge of Fisher Pass, rolled forward the wall. It was almost as white as snow, glowing in the darkness. Even here they could hear the ceramic rattle of bones clacking over each other. Fires blazed all across the village, more houses burning than not. Humanoid figures sprinted every which way, some mounted, most not, being chased by four-legged monstrosities.
“They’ll never stop,” Lelana said. “Our souls are forfeit.”
“I’m getting Sunell,” Isabell said. “And Anaz.”
Lelana looked at her. “They’re alive?”
Isabell didn’t answer. She wouldn’t lie, but she couldn’t admit that they likely weren’t. If Nattic hadn’t already killed them, the Wretched almost certainly would have by now.
“I’m coming with,” Lelana said. She grabbed a deerskin cape and hood she used for traveling and threw it over her evening dress.
“No,” Isabell said. “It’s too dangerous. I can’t—”
“My lady,” Lelana said and she took Isabell’s hand with the sword, wrapping her fingers around the grip. Her stag tattoo was on top. “Family doesn’t leave family. Not at a time like this.”
Isabell smiled and nodded.
“Let me go first,” Lelana said. They sprinted down the stairs, Lelana with a long dagger she’d hidden in a chest, Isabell with her sword and the torch.
They were no more than ten steps down when they heard screaming and the clang of weapons coming up the stairs. Isabell recognized her father’s voice.
The baron took the stairs two at a time, and saw Lelana and Isabell. His left arm was covered from shoulder to fingers in blood, a leaking gash sliced just under his neck and down his chest. He carried his sword, Seven Claws, named for its vicious crossguard with seven razor spikes rising along it.
“Back,” he screamed when he saw his daughter, raining blood at her with his dripping hand.
Behind him came his personal guard, Sirs Misten and Calinat and more than a dozen other knights.
And behind them came the Wretched.
Ten, eleven, twelve, more than Isabell could count. They came up the stairs, up the walls, up the ceiling, a night curtain drawing across the world known, forever cutting Isabell from what lay beyond. They crawled over each other like black maggots, reeking a terrible laughing sound.
Lelana tried to stop, to turn, but she lost her footing and dropped to a knee, just in front of the baron.
“Back,” he screamed again.
He grabbed Lelana by the hair.
“Father,” Isabell screamed and sprinted forward.
Too slow. She was too slow.
The baron flung Lelana behind him, clearing her from the steps, so he could pass. She fell forward, put her hands out to catch herself, dropped her dagger, but he’d thrown her too far, his panic giving him a strength far beyond his aged form. Lelana plummeted and rolled sideways and Isabell watched as her handmaiden somersaulted down the steps, wailing her terror, and crashed into the back of Sir Misten. The knight bowed backward before losing his balance and collapsing into Lelana. The two of them combined, a human snowball tumbling into hell.
“Lelana!”
The baron put his arm out just as Isabell ran past. He wrapped it around her head, pulled her into him.
“With me,” he said.
“Lela!” Isabell bit her father’s arm. She brought her sword up to cut at it, but there was no space to maneuver in the stairwell. Sir Calinat saw what she was doing and grabbed her wrist.
Lelana and Misten disappeared into the pack of Wretched. The ones on the ceiling and walls dropped into the melee as the knight tried to stand. Isabell caught a glimpse of Lelana, her deerskin cape coming to pieces, deer hair floating like snow. The knight couldn’t stand. One of them, Lelana or Misten, maybe both, gave up a giant gout of blood, a spray sudden and full, raining over the Fletchers.
Lelana’s screams. A sound Isabell had never heard before. Would never not hear again.
Isabell could only scream as her father and Calinat carried her up the stairs, pushed by a dozen of her father’s soldiers.
“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t, Anaz.” Sunell’s dread played through her voice and her hand quivered inside his.
They stood in the inner bailey, looking up at the baron’s tower. Like leeches clinging to a ship’s hull, the outside was covered in black, skittering shapes, their movements frantic and alien. On the ground lay desiccated bodies, dried sacks once mortal, now devoid of soul and quick. Several Wallwraiths hunted the square, loosing necrotic energy from their hands, calmly harvesting anything that walked or moved. As soldiers or household staff were hit, their skin blackened, then sucked in on itself, like a wineskin sucked dry.
Anaz pushed Sunell back into the stairwell they’d come up. Even that small gesture rent agony through his mutilated hand. They’d found their clothes and dressed and he’d taken Nattic’s sword, but even so, he felt vulnerable. So many of them. He couldn’t feel the Wretched through the hsing-li, but could feel them snipping souls out of existence, tiny tears in the fabric.
He said, “It’s okay.”
He knelt and pulled Sunell into a hug, then pointed at the breezeway between the chapel and the great hall. “You can go. They’re not over there. Get out and run. Run.”
She shook her head while he spoke, her grip climbing his hand and arm, terrified he might slip away from her.
He coughed, smothering his mouth, trying desperately to stifle the noise, but couldn’t stop for a long time. When it finally passed, he said, �
�Sunell, I have to go in there.” He gestured to the baron’s tower.
“You don’t.”
“I have to.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“Sunell.”
“What if she’s dead? Look at them. What if she’s already dead?”
“What if she isn’t, Sunell?”
Lightning flashed and painted them in white and black and it lit their terror in stark relief.
“Now’s your chance,” Sunell whispered. “You can leave now. Nobody will know. Nobody will blame you.”
Anaz smiled gently and shook his head.
“What I would be leaving, it would cost me more than my life is worth. I’ve only now rediscovered it. You helped me, but your work is done now, child. You can run. Go.”
Somewhere, she seemed to find iron inside of herself, wrapped it around her heart. She closed her eyes and nodded.
“You’re right,” she said. “What if she isn’t?”
69
Alysha struggled as Malic retied her to one of the trestle table’s feet, spitting at him, her legs windmilling, hopeful, yet hopeless. The man, for as wiry as he was and the club hand, had unexpected strength and finesse. He moved like an ex-soldier.
She stared at Elliot’s waxen face on the other side of the room, his legs still dangling from the table.
Malic ran back out to the courtyard.
She listened to the rain on the roof, smelled the smoke as the rain dripped through the louvre and sizzled on the still burning hearth’s fire.
As her breathing slowed and the thudding in her chest eased, she felt a smoothing out within her, like a lake settling after a wind. She would meet Airim soon. Tonight. Her children were likely already there, waiting for her. Maybe Daveon too. The struggle, the tears, the dying horses and dying family and dying neighbors, tonight it would all be swept away, carried off by her lord god and made meaningless. She found herself smiling. Almost eager.
