by Rex Jameson
None of this added up.
“Did you see anything else?” Godfrey asked.
Jeremy shook his head free of a trance. “Perketh was burning. I think he was running toward it. You could always count on Jeremy to run toward danger. Always thinking of others. Always doing the right thing, no matter what the cost. He was a hero. He died a hero, killing dozens of bandits of the Red Army. He’ll be remembered. I guarantee it. I’ll commission statues… stories… songs… I’ll—”
Godfrey choked on his tears and mucus, leaning heavily against the table and interrupting Jeremy’s promises. He wailed at the absurdity of this ending for his marvelous son. He caressed his son’s golden locks and brushed them with his fingers until he retreated to a corner of the dark room and cried as the memories of his boy flooded over him.
He looked up at the ceiling and thought of the tournaments Freddie had won. Of Freddie’s beaming face on one of Godfrey’s favorite horses, a lance held at the ready. Of Jeremy standing next to Frederick after their graduation from the war academy. Of the look he imagined on his wife Martha’s face if she had lived to see any of hundreds of small or large accomplishments of their amazing son. Of the many accomplishments Freddie would never live to see.
“God damn it,” Godfrey said, his face wet. “God damn it all…”
13
The Dark Knight of the Wood
Ashton walked alongside the reanimated men and women of Perketh as they shuffled along the devastation left behind the Red Army. Miles of murders weighed down on him. Every new visited home was a fresh horror. Every new living room a bloody mess waiting for resurrection.
He paused on the road to Mallory Keep where a trail of blood led to a nearby house. He knew the family of seven whom had lived here. The man was a carpenter and he supported his wife and mother-in-law with their four children—three girls and a boy. It was the type of place that did not belong to a town or village. If someone asked where you lived, you simply said you lived between Perketh and Dona.
From the nearby woods, a horse whinnied. Ashton turned to find a man in dark black armor and a gold star cresting a horizon painted on his chest. His helmet was ornate with gold swirls and trim around the visor. On his back was a gold-and-steel war hammer. In his hand, a long, gray spear, likely used for jousting and charging.
“Where were you when they died?” Ashton yelled.
The knight surveyed the host around Ashton. He paced his horse along the side of the forest.
“Where were you?” the knight asked in response.
Ashton grumbled. He looked at the house where he knew more victims waited for him.
“Are you the necromancer?” the man hailed in a powerful, booming voice.
“Are you a Mallory man?”
The knight shook his head. “I belong to no man. I am pledged to… something else… to a greater power…”
“So you are with the King, then?” Ashton called.
The knight again shook his head.
“Are you here to kill the necromancer?” Ashton asked. “Is that why this greater power sent you?”
“I’m here to keep the peace.”
“The peace?!” Ashton yelled. He pointed to the blood trail that led to the home of the carpenter. He pointed to the host of hundreds of dead innocents who walked along the path to Mallory Keep. “Does this look like peace to you?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the knight said sincerely, “but they’re not my charges.”
“Do you not live here?” Ashton asked. “Are these not your people? What kind of lord are you?”
“I am no lord,” the knight said, “and I live nowhere and everywhere. I’m not the type of man that the king rewards with lands. Those days have long passed.”
Ashton mumbled to Clayton who eyed the well-armed traveler warily. “Curse a man who speaks in riddles. We don’t have time for this.”
Ashton walked toward the house, following the trail of sticky blood that dripped slowly down the wooden stairs and pooled in the grass and mud. The carpenter Jerry, who Ashton had made a hammerhead for at Master Nathan’s forge, lay face-first in the dirt, his cream-colored shirt stained with red. His wife Mary lay in a heap only ten feet away on the deck. She had been cut deeply across her throat. Ashton climbed the stairs, dreading the sight of the children. The girls had been violated and stacked on the kitchen table. Their small son Jeffrey still held a small knife where he sat in the kitchen. His eyes had been gouged out and a hilt protruded from his chest.
Ashton stumbled out of the house and slipped down the stairs. His stomach churned and he tasted bile. His hands fumbled along the carefully-crafted railing along the porch, the craftsmanship of a master carpenter, until he found a patch of grass that had not been touched by blood. He vomited there for a full minute. His head swooned from the heat and the nausea. Twice he thought he was done throwing up, but his stomach found something else to bring up.
He steadied himself against the railing.
“What kind of necromancer are you?” the knight called from the wood. “Squeamish at the first signs of death, when the smells are at their sweetest and the bodies have not yet bloated? What happens when you must walk beside a corpse who has been decaying for months?”
Ashton snarled. “This is not the path I chose!” he yelled back at the man in the dark armor with the gold star. “I am not here for the dead! I am here for the living!”
He trudged through the blood to look at Mary and Jerry. Again, he felt a strong presence here—like the family were still present, watching him. But Mary’s eyes were glossy and a gray film was over them.
Clayton put his hand on Ashton’s shoulder, comforting him. Ashton put his hand on his friend’s.
“If the knights of this land will not protect the people,” Ashton said, “then we will…”
“I’m no knight,” the man said from the edge of the forest.
“Then what do you do in all that armor?”
“I fight for the people too,” the man said. “In my own way, against an enemy that only someone such as I am equipped to deal with.”
“The people are attacked by bandits,” Ashton said, “but you wait for another enemy to appear?”
“I don’t deserve your spite,” the man said, pointing at the hundreds of maimed undead shuffling between them along the road. “I do have pity. I do see them suffer.”
“The suffering of these people is over,” Ashton said. “Save your pity for the living.”
The man lowered his head and backed into the darkness of the woods.
“Remember the Rule of Three,” the man in the black armor said, “and I will bother you no more…”
“The Rule of Three?” Ashton asked under his breath.
He turned back to the door. In his mind, he could almost see Jerry sitting on the porch with Mary, watching him. The ghosts of their daughters and son smiled and waved from the doorway. Somewhere in the backyard, Mary’s mother wandered amongst the garden, probably judging Jerry for not fighting the bandits off.
Ashton closed his eyes.
“If you want vengeance,” he said, “if you don’t want your final act on this world to be the way you’ve died here, then I beg you to come back. Join me and your neighbors. Help us fight the Red Army. Stand with us before Lord Mallory. Make him answer for his neglect—for letting these men prey on us all like wolves…”
Mary was the first to stir. She stumbled down the stairs from the deck on her hands and feet. Ashton tried not to let on how creeped out he was by her strange movements. He smiled as welcoming as he could as she bowed briefly to him before pulling herself to her feet with the aid of the deck’s railing. Ashton pointed toward the line of marchers, and she fell in behind a man with a mangled arm.
Jerry woke next. He walked up the stairs and leaned heavily against the door frame. He barked an order into the house, and Ashton heard the sound of soft bodies sloshing against the floor. Without seeing them, Ashton knew the children had woken.
<
br /> Ashton turned toward the procession and fell in step with his people. He looked to the woods, but the man in the dark armor was gone.
Ashton pulled his brown hood and cloak down until it almost touched his nose. He brooded about the lake of blood in the house he just left. He thought about Riley’s charred body in the Perketh Square. He closed his eyes as he imagined the dark carriage racing away from Clayton’s body, along this same road to Mallory Keep.
As he marched, his dark thoughts ebbed. There was a strange calming effect about being in the mob. There was a sense of dread purpose here and of strength in numbers. He found himself swaying in the same manner as the undead, following the cadence of their lock step march. He felt their swelling anger, and he joined them in that too.
He looked at the shopkeepers and housewives. The masters and apprentices. The mothers and daughters. The fathers and sons. Ashton swore that their losses would not be in vain. It may cost him his life, but the Red Army would pay for their sins upon his people.
14
The Dead Souvenir
The Archer, de facto leader of the Red Army now that Jeremy Vossen had abandoned them, walked into a house on the outskirts of Dona, a town roughly seven miles north of Mallory Keep. The house was one of dozens he had entered that day, looking for loot. He cared not for the women, not like many of his men. He’d pay for a well-kept whore when he needed that relief.
His men had already visited this house. A woman lay dead in the kitchen, her blood draining through the loose gray boards to the cold, hard-packed ground below. The house had been mostly picked clean of whatever few trinkets and metal that had remained in this hovel of a home.
He came to the house for something else.
“He’s out back,” a grisly man named Murphy with a red sash and blood-stained brown tunic said.
The Archer grunted. He exited through a creaky door that was only attached at the bottom hinge and strode confidently down the stairs. A thigh-high gray wood fence with many loose boards surrounded the small yard. A simple clothes-line spanned the middle of the muddy field, blocking his view of most of a shed at the back of the property. A few blood curdling screams could be heard nearby where his men slaughtered another family. Closer still, the sound of thrusting from his men taking liberties. His eyes weren’t on the rickety projects around him but the trail of blood from the steps to the shed.
“He turned tail,” the grisly lieutenant behind him said. “Soon as we came through the door. Didn’t have a lick o’ fight in him.”
“Sounds about right,” Archer said.
“Frank caught him in the back,” the man said. “He dragged himself yonder there. I knew you wanted to see him. That’s why I sent Frank to find you.”
Archer nodded as he pushed through the creamy sheet with the blood stain from where a hand had pushed it aside. His dark brown boots sloshed in the crimson mud along the stained ground.
“Where were you going, Karl?”
He pushed the door to the shed inward. Karl coughed, favoring his stomach as he lay on his side looking at Archer. A loose board had been disturbed near Karl’s head, exposing a hole in the floorboards.
“How you doing, Stan?” Karl asked, feigning pleasant conversation.
“Is that where you hid it?” Stanley the Archer asked. “Has it been here all this time?”
Karl coughed on his blood. “Go to hell!”
Archer laughed. “If only you’d have had that much fight in you at the dig… Did you run away like this when Sam needed you at Xhonia?
“Demons,” Karl said. “Demons… killed your brother. Black… Came out of the hole. Hot breath. Claws… Fangs…”
“So, it’s not your fault?” Archer asked mockingly. “You did everything you could.”
“They were… eating us…”
“How did my brother die?”
“Not well… Not well at all…”
A tear welled in Archer’s eye. He had raised Sam in the wilderness. The boy had only been sixteen. He had never been in love. He had never been out of the south. The kid never had a chance to really live.
“And you just took the loot and ran?” Archer asked.
“We broke something,” Karl said before a fit of coughing. “What we took… You saw the ice recede before you left. Deep blue water, frozen there in the old city. Receded somewhere… into the darkness. After the ice left, the demons came. I took the device. It’s here… Someone’s going to need it. Someone who can fight.”
Karl patted the loose board.
“I kept running south,” Karl said, “returned home, but I was a shit father and a worse husband. I couldn’t stop thinking… about them… I felt like the demons might come out of the ground, looking for it. So, I left them there to live a better life without me.”
“Perketh is burned to the ground,” Archer said. “Everyone you might have known there is dead.”
“Margaret?”
“She’s been gone for years.”
“What about my son?”
“If he was in Perketh, he’s joined her in the underworld.”
Karl leaned back against the rickety wall.
“Don’t give me no act!” the Archer said. “If you cared so much for either of them, you wouldn’t have left. I mean, what brought you here? Fear? Is that what drove you to shack up with this woman? In this hovel?”
“She expected less of me,” Karl said, “and this place was farther from Xhonia.”
“You were on watch that night,” Archer said. “I know because I set up the schedule. I had to report back to our sponsors. I trusted you to keep him alive.”
“I couldn’t,” Karl said before spitting up blood. “They were demons, Stanley. They ripped him apart. It was over in seconds.”
“I’m going to kill you now,” the Archer said.
“Good,” Karl said, steadying himself against the wall. “I’m ready.”
Stanley held the sheath on his belt, feeling somewhat hollow that this man he had hated for five years would die so easily. Nothing would bring Sam back, but no punishment at all would be even more unforgivable.
He drove the knife into Karl’s chest and held it there while he stared into Karl’s eyes.
“I’m taking you with me to Mallory Keep,” Stanley said as Karl struggled to breathe. “I’ve got a cart out front, waiting for you. Every morning, when I wake up, until your bones turn to dust, I’m going to drive my knife into you once more. You say what happened to Sam was over in seconds? What I have planned for you will take weeks. Maybe months. I’m going to look into your decaying, putrid eyes, and I’m going to remember this moment. And I hope you remember this day and every morning after this while you’re burning in the afterlife, you son of a bitch!”
Karl choked on a laugh. He mouthed some choice words that he couldn’t give voice to. He patted the loose floorboard once more, and then the light left his eyes. He coughed and laughed no more.
Stanley wiped the knife on Karl’s clothes and re-sheathed it. He walked out of the shed and into the light, feeling somewhat lighter. He sent a silent prayer into the sky for Sam.
“Murphy!” he called.
The lieutenant casually walked onto the porch. He put his fingers through his belt loops and raised his eyebrows, waiting for a command.
“Bring the cart around,” Stanley said. “I have some garbage that needs picked up.”
Murphy nodded and retreated into the house.
Stanley returned to the shed, removed the floorboard and found a medium-sized burlap sack lightly covered in dirt. He untied the simple knot and removed the silver device, which was about the size of a child’s torso. Ancient scripts were embedded into its exterior, but these were hard to read, even if he’d known how. Time and the elements had not been kind to it outside of its frozen prison in Xhonia. He remembered digging it out with picks and chisels. It had shown like a beacon through the ice and dirt.
They said it might be 500 years old.
The donkey-pulle
d cart creaked along the side of the house. The bandit driver rode through the clothesline, driving the clean laundry into the dirt, mud and blood.
“Load him in,” Stanley commanded.
“Why save this one?” the driver asked.
“I needed a souvenir.”
15
The King Responds
King Aethis Eldenwald sat on an unusually uncomfortable pillow. The halls echoed more than normal, and he was annoyed by every little thing in the throne room. He noticed the remnants of mold in the binding of the stones in the walls. The mannerisms, eccentricities and tics of the nobles below him irritated him. The ambassador in gold from Scythica appeared to smirk at him from the foreign visitors section of the room. He wondered if these armies in his southern territories might be retribution for the murder of their monarch. Perhaps the Visanth Empire had fomented a rebellion within his own houses in retribution.
The torches flickered and flittered as a breeze rolled in from a nearby balcony. The thought of the dead city of Ul Tyrion reminded him that this infighting was not to be taken lightly. Any internal matter could open oneself up to external enemies, just as the dark elves were rumored to have been betrayed. Any weakness in a nation’s armor emboldened its enemies and allowed the shadows to creep in and assail it.
Aethis leaned forward on his throne as his spymaster Theodore Crowe ascended the marble steps. Mr. Crowe had just arrived back in the capital from his investigations into the necromancer in the south. He had not yet cleaned up. Aethis had ordered the guards bring him up to the throne room immediately. Mr. Crowe was dressed in a simple brown tunic and cloak and an unshaven face. He did not stop at an acceptable distance, as other guests might. He proceeded all the way up the stairs to the chair itself, bending down to the King’s ear so that not even his wife Shea could hear him.
