Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  Blood spattered the hard-packed dirt floor under that eerie roof of braided obsidian. Congealed and caked in layers, it was nearly an inch thick in places. Some was old, some was new, and much was mixed with dried strings of ichor that Isiem couldn't identify. The vomit smell came from that rippled crust of gore, although mercifully the hut's gap-riddled sides allowed the wind to dilute the odor.

  Up close, the walls of this hut did not seem to have been built by human hands, but rather somehow grown as an organic whole. The obsidian logs that composed it had been bent and woven around one another like strands in a wicker basket, but they had no apparent ends. Each flowed seamlessly into the next, again and again, in a fashion that unpleasantly recalled the dizzying shifts in the engraved silver of Sukorya's jewel case.

  Above the bloody floor, between those eye-wrenching walls, the ceiling curved to a gently pointed apex. There, suspended seven or eight feet from the ground, a bizarre and bulbous cauldron hung.

  It was Nidalese work. Isiem recognized that immediately. A wide web of spiky black iron and obsidian served as the cauldron's framework, supporting an inner lining of milky, blue-tinged white membrane. The inner lining sagged through the iron, bulging out from the metal's grasp.

  Tubes of similar membrane, these slightly thicker and more opaque, connected to the cauldron's base and looped up to gaps near the shack's ceiling. It was these that Isiem had glimpsed from the outside. He had thought they were ropes, then, but now he could see that they were rinsed, bleached coils of preserved intestine. Each of the tubes ended in a smooth, podlike obsidian bulb with a conical tip.

  "What is it?" Kyril whispered tensely.

  Isiem started. He had forgotten she was there. "I don't know," he admitted, taking a step closer. There were footprints pressed into the softer parts of the bloody muck inside the hut and around its entrance. These, too, looked human, and it appeared that whoever had made those tracks had been dragging some bulky burden along with them.

  "The Splinter Men," Ascaros said. "This is where they feed, and are born." He had approached from the opposite side of the clearing. The shadowcaller's face looked like a waxen mask, and from that Isiem knew he was deeply troubled by what he'd seen among the buildings. If Ascaros was too disturbed to maintain the illusion of normalcy, they were in grave danger indeed.

  "I don't know what the Splinter Men are," Kyril said.

  "You would have heard rumors, surely, among the other guards in the caravan," the shadowcaller said. "Bands of marauders in the Umbral Basin who wear rags over their soot-smudged skin. They murder men with black knives as their victims sleep. It's said that their mouths are stitched shut, and that they never utter a word."

  "I heard stories like that, yes," the paladin said doubtfully. She lifted her sword toward the obsidian structures, and its holy flame flared bright. Isiem imagined that the coiled intestines twitched away from the light of that divine fire ...but that was only his imagination. Surely it was. "I heard a lot of other stories as well. Do you mean to say this one was true, and that such creatures live here?"

  "They don't live anywhere," Ascaros said. "The Splinter Men are dead things walking. This is where they feed. The splinters driven into their mouths prevent them from consuming anything that their master does not give them. That cauldron dissolves their victims into the only sustenance they can take. Its feeder tubes force apart the splinters and spew the contents into their throats, like a mother bird regurgitating worms for her young.

  "Sometimes, when their numbers are too few, they capture living people and force the tubes into their mouths, and thus create new Splinter Men from their victims." He gestured to the cauldron and its connected intestines with a hand that blurred in the air. A suggestion of gray bone was evident in that blur, like the outline of a fish glimpsed through rippling water. Isiem darted a sidelong glance at Kyril, wondering if the paladin had noticed the shadowcaller's illusion beginning to come apart, but her demeanor revealed nothing.

  "Who's their master?" she asked. "And where are these Splinter Men now?"

  "Their master is long dead. He was another of my revered ancestors. And yes, like the others, he was seeking immortality when he created these monsters. Their method of feeding was meant to transfer the victim's soul and consciousness into the bodies of those who consumed him. I don't think it worked quite as intended, but since my ancestor was one of the first to be destroyed and digested, we can't effectively ask him." Ascaros's smile was a tight white line. He was regaining control of his illusory mask, though; his black curls had regained greater definition and his face appeared fully human again. "As for where the Splinter Men are, I have no idea. Out hunting, I would presume. They'll return when they have another victim."

  "Will that victim be alive?" Kyril asked.

  "I don't know," Ascaros replied, "and it hardly matters. We don't have time to be distracted with such things."

  "Saving the life of an innocent is not a distraction," the paladin said stiffly.

  "No, but this discussion might be," Ena called from where the others were still grouped with the horses. "You'd better get back over here. Something's coming through the mist."

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Splinter Men

  The Splinter Men came through the mist like black-clad wraiths, silent even down to the soundless slap of their feet.

  They looked alive, almost. Their pale skin and expressionless faces were little different from those of living Nidalese, and if there was a whiff of old blood and chill earth to them, it was no worse than might cling to any gravedigger. But the burning hunger in their dead black eyes betrayed them, and the splinters driven like wooden stitches through their lips told their name.

  Isiem had hoped there might only be four Splinter Men, corresponding to the four empty shacks ringing the central hut, but the gods did not choose to smile on him there. At least a dozen of the maimed murderers streamed toward them, dragging two other bloodied, apparently insensible people. Through the dense fog, Isiem couldn't see if their victims were alive or dead, but in either case the two of them hardly looked able to stand up on their own, let alone offer any resistance. They'd be of no use in a fight.

  The Splinter Men seemed to think the same, if they thought anything. Twenty yards away, they let their victims fall to the ground. Focus returned to their hollow eyes, and they raised their heads like blind men hearing music. An awful yearning contorted their dead faces as they turned in wordless unison toward Ascaros.

  They said nothing. No threats, no demands. Abandoning their victims, the Splinter Men simply rushed toward the shadowcaller with their long knives drawn. The blades were sickle-shaped shards of obsidian, eight to ten inches long, and did not seem to have any handles. The Splinter Men gripped their knives by the bases, slicing open their hands so that cold black blood darkened their palms and ran down their wrists.

  Although the Splinter Men seemed singularly fixed on Ascaros, the others stepped into their path. Pulcher, Copple, and Kyril formed a rough line to meet them, while Teglias tried to wrestle his balky horse around to face the oncoming mob. Ena raised her crossbow, sighted down the oaken shaft, and fired at the Splinter Man in the lead. The bolt caught him in the chest with a meaty thud. The dead man staggered, rocked by the impact, but steadied himself and kept coming. The dwarf nudged her pony backward, slotting another quarrel into her crossbow.

  Fire rushed out to greet the Splinter Men. Ascaros hurled a ball of shadowy flame at the stitch-lipped undead, bowling them over in a burst of blinding light and heat. Before they could recover, Isiem hit them with a second fireball from another angle. The Splinter Men ignited swiftly, their arms and legs draped in flickering scarves of flame and their faces melting like tallow masks. Silently they burned and fell back into the mist, never issuing so much as a moan.

  More climbed over their thrashing bodies, stamping out the flames with their bare cold feet and leaving their companions inert in their wake. Ganoven, his jaw knotted tight in concentration,
raised his hands toward the oncoming undead. A bolt of virulent yellow-green acid flew from his fingers, reflecting brightly against the obsidian blades of the Splinter Men before slamming into the lead one's head. The sizzle of bubbling flesh sounded strangely loud in the fog; a moment later, the stomach-turning smell hit.

  Stumbling and sightless, the Splinter Man kept coming, even as the left half of his face sagged and dripped down his chest in gooey rivulets. Chunks of bone sloughed off his skull as the acid consumed it, and through the widening socket of his dissolved left eye, Isiem could see that the interior of the dead man's skull was completely empty.

  He couldn't see it for long. Pulcher's hammer came swooping down to crush in the Splinter Man's hollow skull. The dead man crumpled, slumping to the ground, but then the rest of them were on the front line, their black knives raised high. One grabbed at Copple, dragging the shrieking man sideways in his saddle and slashing a red gash across his thigh. Another hacked wildly at Kyril, but the paladin's horse danced nimbly to the right and the half-elf drove her boot into the Splinter Man's face, snapping his head back.

  Others closed in, but by then Teglias had gotten his snorting, kicking steed back under control. Gripping the reins tightly in one hand, the cleric lifted the other to the sky. Wan gray sunlight coalesced around his upthrust hand and intensified, gathering strength until it seemed that the full fury of the sun had been summoned through the Umbral Basin's fog.

  It erupted from the cleric's hand in a nova of white-gold radiance, searing away the mist instantaneously and incinerating the Splinter Men where they stood. Isiem felt the sunlight as a flash of warmth across his skin, just hot enough to verge on unpleasantness, but to the undead it was devastating. Not one of them was left standing when the brightness cleared enough for the wizard to see again.

  "That was easy," Ena said, surprised. "We're not even scratched. Other than Copple, who doesn't count." She removed the bolt from her crossbow and slung the weapon back on its saddle loop, then nudged her pony over to take a look at their fallen foes.

  "I fear it might not be so easy as that," Ascaros said. He had gotten ahead of her, and was peering down at the nearest of the Splinter Men.

  It was the one melted by Ganoven's spell. While Copple winced his way through wrapping a crude bandage around his thigh, Isiem joined the others studying the dead creature. His face was a mangled ruin, scorched by Teglias's divine fire and bubbled by Ganoven's acid bolt. Cratered splash marks dotted the grayish skin of the Splinter Man's neck and continued down to his chest.

  He was dead, completely dead, and parts of him looked like they'd been dead a very long time. Under the thicket of splinters that riddled his lips, the flesh was parched and dry. His fingernails were cracked, missing in places, and mazed with a dark web of dirt. The eye that hadn't been melted by acid was a flabby, desiccated orb, wrinkled and mushy as an apple left in the cellar too long.

  Whatever the man's name had once been, whichever nation he'd hailed from and whoever he'd once known or loved, he was nothing but a corpse now. Isiem had already turned, ready to walk away, when he heard Ascaros suck a hissing breath through his teeth.

  The Splinter Man was moving. His fingers were twitching. His lips trembled behind their hundred cruel piercings. The shrunken eyeball vibrated in its socket, and above it the dead white threads of his eyelashes shook as though he were trying to blink his vision clear. He moved to sit up.

  Swearing, Pulcher smashed his hammer into the Splinter Man's head, knocking the thing back down like a rag doll. Acid-softened flesh splashed into the air, and the Splinter Man stopped moving. But all around them, unseen in the mist, Isiem could hear the others beginning to stir.

  "Immortality," Ascaros whispered. The shadowcaller sounded on the verge of hysteria. He took a step back from the corpse, beckoning for his shadowsteed to come near. "They wanted immortality, and this is what they made. Monsters who cannot be killed."

  "What do you mean, can't be killed?" Pulcher hefted his hammer, tossing it six inches in the air and letting the haft slap back into his palm. He pointed the weapon's bloodied head at the crushed Splinter Man. "I killed it. It's dead."

  "Afraid not," Ena said, tapping her pony's flanks to urge the animal alongside Ascaros. The dwarf's eyes were wide, and she snapped her head up in alarm at the increased commotion of the Splinter Men getting to their feet around them. "It's not dead. None of them are. Kyril, get back here. There's no time to see to the fallen."

  The paladin had already started into the mist, trying to find the Splinter Men's discarded victims, but she stopped upon hearing her name. "What do you suggest?" Kyril asked sharply, turning as the dwarf addressed her.

  "For us to not get lost in the mist, first off," Ena said. "Beyond that, I'm open to ideas."

  Kyril's sword was blazing once again, and she seemed to regard that as conclusive proof that their enemies were not defeated. Her scowl was ferocious. "We've struck them with fire, acid, and Sarenrae's holy light, and they're not stopping."

  "We run." Ascaros climbed into his saddle, not waiting to see if the others did the same. He tapped his heels to the shadowsteed's sides, turning eastward—at least Isiem thought it was eastward; he couldn't be certain through the valley's haze—toward something only he could sense. The silver links of Sukorya's chain gleamed between his clenched fingers. "To Fiendslair. If the wards around the place don't keep out the Splinter Men, the gate itself surely shall. These creatures might not have existed when Eledwyn built her stronghold, but she would have warded herself against all Mesandroth's underlings. And these are, in some way, his. They were drawn to the magic of her diamond." He grinned. "Or his blood."

  "Let's go." Kyril wheeled her dapple mare around. Her horse rushed to follow the shadowcaller, forgetting its earlier unease around the spell-spun mount. "And pray you can find it before the Splinter Men run down our horses."

  The next hours passed in a blur. The mist closed in around them, wet and cold and blindingly thick, as though guided by some hostile mind that did not intend to let them escape. It was impossible to see their surroundings, their direction, anything. Even the shapes of their companions, not twenty feet away, were dim blurs in the fog. Isiem couldn't tell which one was Ascaros, or whether the shadowcaller knew where they were going. All he could do was lower his head against his gelding's neck, trust he was following the right blur, and pray that they reached Fiendslair before his spell gave out.

  The drumming of their horses' hooves was impossibly loud, a desperate driving percussion to nowhere. It wasn't the only sound, though. The slap and crash of the Splinter Men's pursuit surrounded them, echoing eerily from all sides.

  Grunts and growls and bestial panting breaths floated through the haze, and even though the dead men had never uttered a sound when Isiem could see them, he was entirely convinced that the cries of the chase were theirs. It was impossible to say how close they were: it might have been ten feet or a thousand.

  Pulcher's horse was the first to go lame. It twisted an ankle on something unseen and went down hard, throwing the big man into the fog. He came up cursing, clutching his shoulder, and searching fruitlessly for his bow and helm. Even if they'd had time to mount a real search, though—and they didn't, not with the Splinter Men hounding their heels—it would have been hopeless. There was no finding anything in the mist, and the sun was going down.

  "Get on, you idiot." Copple turned his horse back to his stranded friend. His face was deathly pale, and sweat beaded on his brow. The wound in his leg seemed to be causing his significant pain. But he clenched his jaw and stayed behind, waiting.

  Swearing incessantly, Pulcher clambered up behind the tattooed man, grabbing him around his ample waist. Under other circumstances, the sight of the mismatched Aspis thugs clinging to the overburdened horse might have been funny; as it was, Isiem just hoped they didn't lose the second beast too quickly. It was struggling under Pulcher's weight, and he doubted it would stay up for long.

  Not a minute
after they'd left the lamed horse behind, its screams pierced the mist, along with the wet noise of knives sinking into living flesh.

  "It might buy us time," Kyril murmured grimly, but from her tone it was clear she didn't believe it would be much.

  "How are they that close on foot?" Ena gasped. "We've been riding for hours!"

  No one had an answer, or the breath to give it. Darkness was coming down on them fast, and the ghostly lights they'd conjured were little help. The mist caught their illumination and turned it from diamond to pearl: bright, and beautiful, but utterly opaque. Soon they rode in a bubble of blind, reflected whiteness, while the misty night stretched out infinitely around them.

  Then Teglias's horse went down. Kyril circled back to collect the cleric, but there was no saving his gelding. Moments later, Ena's stout shaggy pony began to falter.

  "We've got to stand and fight," the dwarf growled, dismounting from her pony. She refused to leave the animal, though, looping a rope through its bridle and coaxing it to follow them after she doubled up on Isiem's conjured steed. Relieved of its burden, the shaggy little pony gamely fought to keep up. Its ears flattened at the shrieks of Teglias's horse in the distance. "Outrunning them isn't working."

  "No," Ascaros snapped. The shadowcaller was far forward of them all. Isiem could see nothing of him, not even the suggestion of a silhouette reflected in the fog. "We're nearly there."

  "How much farther?" Ena demanded. Her pony was weakening, and it seemed to make the dwarf angrier. She gripped the rope with both hands, staring across the stained hemp as if she could renew the animal's failing strength by sheer force of will.

  "Soon," Ascaros insisted. "Soon."

  It was hard to imagine, harder to believe. Isiem couldn't see anything through the cloud of diffused light around their group. If salvation lay ahead, it was well hidden.

  But then he became aware of a new sound: a shrilling, jarring, jagged vibration, like a steel file scraping against the long bones of his body or a slow shot of lightning through his veins. It was less noise than sensation; Isiem didn't hear it so much as he felt it, and what he felt wracked him worse than pain.