“Actually, I do, but death needn’t be the end of an entity’s existence. Lucky for me! Otherwise I wouldn’t have fared very well after my mother’s cuckold husband tore me from the womb.”
“I … I won’t be one of those.” She gestured to indicate the zombies. “I’ll make your servants tear me to pieces first.”
Xingax chuckled. “Do you imagine I’d have no use for the fragments? If so, you’re mistaken, but please, calm yourself. I don’t intend to turn you into a zombie. You have a much more interesting opportunity in store.
“You’ve seen enough,” continued the fetus-thing, “to discern what this place is: an undead manufactory. Given sufficient resources, we’d create only powerful, sentient specimens, since those are the most useful for our purposes. Alas, the reality is that it takes considerably more magic to evoke a ghost or something similar than it does to make a mindless automaton like my giant or my helpers’ helpers.
“So we function as we best we can, given our limitations. Many of the slaves who come here end up as zombies or at best ghouls. Others go to feed newly created undead in need of such sustenance, and afterward we animate their skeletons. Only a relative few have the chance to attain a more advanced state of being.”
Tammith shook her head. “I can tell you think that’s a boon. Why would you offer it to me when I’ve raised my hand to your servants more than once?”
“For that very reason. You have a boldness we can put to good use. Assuming the transformation takes. That’s the other thing I should explain. I recreate types of undead that became extinct long ago and breed others altogether new. It’s a part of my mandate, and more than that, my passion. My art. The closest I’ll ever come to fatherhood. The problem is that we have to refine the magic by trial and error, and well, obviously, it isn’t right until it’s right.”
She imagined what might befall a captive when the magic was still wrong. She pictured herself shrieking in endless anguish, her body mangled like an apprentice potter’s first botched attempt at shaping a vessel on the wheel. Hard on that image came the realization that she’d been a fool to cringe from the prospect of becoming a zombie. It was the best fate that could befall her. Her body would remain a thrall but her soul would fly free to await Bareris in the afterlife.
She lunged at the nearer of the Red Wizards. He had a dagger with a curved blade sheathed on his belt. She’d snatch it, slash the artery in the side of her neck, and all fear and misery would spurt away with her blood.
The necromancer had obviously been waiting for her to attempt some sort of violence. He barked a word she didn’t understand, swept his left hand through a mystic figure, and black motes swirled around it to form a spiral.
The flecks of darkness didn’t hurt her, but they fascinated her. She had no choice but to pause and stare at them, even though a part of her, now disconnected from her will, screamed that she mustn’t.
The wizard stepped back and the zombies shambled forward, closing in on her. Their clammy hands grabbed her and held tight. The spiral faded, allowing her to struggle, but writhe as she might, she couldn’t break free, and when she stamped on her captors’ feet, snapped her head backward to bash a zombie’s jaw, and even sank her teeth into spongy, putrid flesh, it didn’t matter. Since the creatures didn’t feel pain, the punishment couldn’t make them fumble their grips.
“I rather expected that,” said Xingax, “but it’s still a shame. You were doing so well.”
“Shall I subdue her?” asked the mage with the dagger.
“I suppose it would be best,” Xingax replied.
The Red Wizard extracted a pewter vial from a hidden pocket in his robe, and holding it at arm’s length, he uncorked it. He then moved to stick it under Tammith’s nose. She strained to twist her face away, but with the zombies immobilizing her, it was futile.
The fumes had a nasty metallic tang she tasted as well as smelled. Her limbs went slack, and wouldn’t so much as twitch no matter how she struggled. She might as well have been asleep.
“Put her in the pentacle,” Xingax said.
The zombies laid her on her back, spread her arms wide, and crossed her legs at the ankle. Then, for a considerable time, the Red Wizards chanted rhymes in an unknown tongue while brandishing smoking censers; slender, gleaming swords; and a black chalice carved from a single piece of jet.
At first it was sinister but ultimately incomprehensible. Eventually, however, the necromancer with the dagger—she had the impression he was the senior of the pair—crouched down beside her and dipped his forefinger in the black cup. It came out red. He rubbed her lips with it, then her gums, then worked it past her teeth to dab at her tongue. She tasted the salty, coppery tang of blood.
After that, she could somehow perceive the power gathering in the air and conceived the crazy, terrifying notion that the chanted incantations were a thing unto themselves, a living malignancy that was simply employing the mages to further the purposes implicit in the tercets and quatrains. She still couldn’t comprehend them, but she felt the meaning was on the very brink of revealing itself to her and that when it did, she wouldn’t be able to bear it.
A mass of shadow seethed into existence above her, thickening until she could barely see the ceiling or Xingax peering avidly down at her through a pair of lenses positioned one before the other. The clot of darkness took on a suggestion of texture, of bulges, hollows, and edges, as if it had become a solid object. Then it shattered.
Into an explosion of enormous bats. The rustling of their countless wings echoing from the stone walls, they flew in all directions. Xingax cried out in excitement. The Red Wizards, for all that they’d conjured the flock and were presumably in control of it, retreated to stand with their backs against a wall.
A bat lit on a zombie’s shoulder and plunged its fangs into its throat. The animated corpse showed no reaction to the bite, but despite its passivity, the bat fluttered its wings and took flight again only a heartbeat later.
Three bats settled on a second zombie, bit it, and abandoned it immediately thereafter. Because they crave the blood of a living person, Tammith thought, her heart hammering. Because they want me.
She made a supreme effort to roll over onto her belly. If she could only move a little, she could crawl away from the middle of the floor, then … why, then nothing, she supposed. The part of her that was still rational realized it wasn’t likely to matter, but she needed to try. It was better than simply accepting her fate, no matter how inescapable it was.
Her limbs trembled. The effect of the vapor was wearing off. She felt a thrill of excitement, of lunatic hope, and then the first bat found her. Cold as the zombies’ fingers, its claws dug into her chest for purchase as its fangs sought her throat.
As it sucked the wounds it had inflicted, the rest of the flock descended on her, covering her like a shifting, frigid blanket, the bats that couldn’t reach her shoving at the ones who had like piglets jostling for their mother’s teats. Scores of icy needles pierced her flesh.
Had she ever imagined such a fate, she might have assumed that so much cold would numb her. Somehow, it didn’t. The assault was agony.
The bats tore at her lips, nose, cheeks, and forehead. Not my eyes, she silently begged, not my eyes, but they ripped those too, and then she finally passed out.
Tammith woke to pain, weakness, searing thirst, and utter darkness. At first she couldn’t remember what had happened to her, but then the memory leaped at her like a cat pouncing on a mouse.
When it did, she decided Xingax couldn’t possibly have intended to create the crippled, sightless creature she’d become. The experiment had failed as he’d warned it might.
“So kill me!” she croaked. “I’m no use to you!”
No one answered. She wondered if she actually was alone or if Xingax and the Red Wizards were still present, silently studying her, preparing to put her out of her misery, or—gods forbid!—readying a new torment.
Suddenly she was frantic to kno
w, which made her blindness intolerable. She felt a flowing, a budding, in the raw orbits of her skull, and then smears of light and shadow wavered into existence before her. Over the course of several moments, the world sharpened into focus. She realized she’d healed her ruined eyes, or if the bats had destroyed them entirely, grown new ones.
It suggested that Xingax’s experiment hadn’t been a complete failure after all, but she appeared to be alone nonetheless. Her captors had deposited her in a different chamber, a bare little room with a matchboarded door. Up near the ceiling, someone had cut a hole, probably connecting to the ubiquitous system of catwalks, but if the aborted monstrosity was up there peeping at her, she couldn’t see it.
Which, she recalled, didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t. He’d concealed himself easily enough when taking stock of the new supply of slaves. She wheezed his name but received no reply.
She supposed that if she did constitute some sort of glorious success, and he wasn’t here to witness it, the joke was on him. But in fact, she doubted it. The Red Wizards had managed to stuff a little magic into her, enough to preserve her existence and restore her vision, but accomplishing the latter had left her even weaker and more parched than before. She stared at the myriad puncture wounds on her hands and forearms, willing them to close, and nothing happened.
At that point, misery overwhelmed her. She curled up into a ball and wept, though her new eyes seemed incapable of shedding actual tears, until a key grated in the lock of the door. It creaked open, and an orc shoved Yuldra through and slammed it after her. The lock clacked once again.
Tammith extended a trembling hand. She knew the other captive couldn’t do anything substantive to ease her distress, but Yuldra could at least talk to her, clasp her fingers, or cradle her, perhaps. Any crumb of comfort, of simple human contact with someone who wasn’t a pitiless torturer, would be better than nothing.
Yuldra flinched from the sight of her ravaged body, let out a sob of her own, wheeled, and scrambled into a corner. There she crouched down and held her face averted, attempting to shut out the world as she had before.
“How many times did I take care of you?” Tammith cried. “And now you turn your back on me?”
Nor was Yuldra the only person who’d so betrayed her. She’d spent her life looking after other people. Her father the drunkard and gambler. Her brother the imbecile. And what had anyone ever done for her in return? Even Bareris, who claimed to love her with all his heart, had abandoned her to chase his dreams of gold and excitement in foreign lands.
She realized she was on her feet. She was still thirsty, it was a fire burning in her throat, but she’d shaken off weakness for the moment, anyway. Anger lent her strength.
“Look at me,” she snapped.
Her voice was sharp as the crack of a whip, and like a whip, it tangled something inside of Yuldra and tugged at her. The slave started to turn around but then shook off the coercion.
“Fine,” Tammith said, stalking forward, “we’ll do it the hard way.”
She didn’t know precisely what it was. Everything was happening too quickly, with impulse and fury sweeping her along, but when her upper canines stung and lengthened into fangs, their points pressing into her lower lip, she understood.
The realization brought a horror that somewhat dampened her rage if not her thirst. I can’t do this, she thought. I can’t be this. Yuldra is my friend.
She stood and fought against her need. It seemed to her that she was winning. Then her body burst apart into a cloud of bats much like the conjured entities that had attacked her, and that made the world a different place. The sense of sight she’d so missed became secondary to her ability to hear and comprehend the import of her own echoing cries, but the fragmentation of her consciousness was an even more fundamental change. She retained her ultimate sense of self and managed her dozens of bodies as easily as she had one, yet something was lost in the diffusion: conscience, perhaps, or the capacities for empathy and self-denial. She was purely a predator now, and her bats hurtled at Yuldra like a flight of arrows.
Rather to Tammith’s surprise, given Yuldra’s usual habit of cringing helplessness, the other slave fought back. She flailed at the bats, sought to grab them, and when successful, squeezed them hard enough to crush an ordinary animal, wrung them like washcloths, or pounded them against the wall. The punishment stung, but only for an instant, and without doing any real harm.
Meanwhile, Tammith clung to the other thrall and jabbed her various sets of fangs into her veins and arteries. When the hot blood gushed into her mouths, she felt a pleasure intense as the fulfillment of passion, and as it assuaged her thirst, the relief was a keener ecstasy still.
Before long, Yuldra weakened and then stopped struggling altogether. Once Tammith drank the last of her, the bats took flight. They swirled around one another, dissolved, and instantly reformed into a single body, now cleansed of all the wounds that had disfigured it before.
That didn’t make the remorse that came with the restoration of her original form any easier to bear. The guilt fell on her like a hammer stroke, and she felt a howl of anguish welling up inside.
“Excellent,” Xingax said.
She looked up. The fetus-thing had been watching through the hole high in the wall, just as she’d suspected, and had now dissolved the charm that had hidden him from view.
“I believe that with practice,” he continued, “you’ll find you can remain divided for extended periods of time. I’m confident you’ll discover other uncommon abilities as well, talents that set you above the common sort of vampire.”
“Why didn’t you answer me when I called to you before? Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I wanted to see how far instinct would carry you. It’s quite a promising sign that you managed to manifest a number of your abilities and take down your first prey without any mentoring at all.”
“I’m going to kill you,” she told him, and with the resolve came the abrupt instinctive realization that she didn’t even need to shapeshift to do it. His elevated position afforded no protection. She dashed to the wall and scrambled upward like a fly. It was as easy as negotiating a horizontal surface.
Partway up, dizziness and nausea assailed her. Her feet and hands lost their ability to adhere to the wall, and she plunged back to the floor. She landed awkwardly, with a jolt that might well have broken the old Tammith’s bones, though the new version wasn’t even stunned.
As the sick feeling began to pass, Xingax said, “You didn’t really think we’d give you so much power without insuring that you’d use it as we intend, did you? I’m afraid, my daughter, that you’re still a thrall, or at best, a vassal. If it’s any comfort to you, so am I, and so are the Red Wizards you’ve encountered here, but so long as we behave ourselves, our service is congenial, and we can hope for splendid rewards in the decades to come.”
chapter eight
30 Mirtul, the Year of Risen Elfkin
Delhumide gleamed like a broken skeleton in the moonlight. The siege engines and battle sorceries of the ancient rebels had shattered battlements and toppled towers, and time had chipped and scraped at all that had survived the initial onslaught. Yet the Mulhorandi had built their provincial capital to last, and much remained essentially intact. Bareris found it easy to imagine the proud, teeming city of yore, which only served to make the present desolation all the more forbidding.
He wondered if it was simply his imagination, or if he truly could sense a miasma of sickness and menace infusing the place. Either way, the gnolls plainly felt something too. They growled and muttered. One clasped a copper medallion stamped with the image of an axe and prayed for the favor of his god.
Having cajoled them this far, Bareris didn’t want to give them a final chance to lose their nerve. As before, enchantment lent him the ability to speak to them in their own snarling, yipping language, and he used it to say, “Let’s move.” He skulked forward, and they followed.
He prayed they we
ren’t already too late, that something horrible hadn’t already befallen Tammith. It was maddening to reflect on just how much time had passed since he’d watched the Red Wizards and their cohorts march her away. It had taken him and the hyenafolk a while to reach Delhumide. Then, for all that the gnolls had scouted the general area before, Wesk Backbreaker insisted on observing the perimeter of the city before venturing inside. He maintained it would increase their chances of success, and much as Bareris chafed at the delay, he had to admit the gnoll chieftain was probably right.
As they’d gleaned all they could, so too had they begun to plan. After some deliberation, they decided to sneak into Delhumide by night. True, it was when the demons and such came out, but even if the horrors were in fact charged with guarding the borders of the ruined city, it didn’t appear they did as diligent a job as the warriors keeping watch by day. Bareris hoped he and the gnolls had a reasonable chance of slipping past them unmolested, especially considering that though creatures like devils and the hyenafolk themselves could see in the dark, they couldn’t see as far as a man could by daylight.
He and his companions picked their way through the collapsed and decaying houses outside the city wall then over the field of rubble that was all that remained of the barrier at that point. The bard wondered what particular mode of attack had shattered it. The chunks of granite had a blackened, pitted look, but that was as much as he could tell.
The gnolls slinking silently as mist for all their size, the intruders reached the end of the litter of smashed stones fairly quickly. Now they’d truly entered Delhumide, venturing deeper than any of their scouts had dared to go before. A cool breeze moaned down the empty street, and one of the hyenafolk jumped as if a ghost had ruffled his fur and crooned in its ear.
Wesk waved, signaling for everyone to follow him to the left. Their observations had revealed that shadowy figures flitted through the streets on the right in the dark. Occasionally, one of the things shrieked out peals of laughter that inspired a sudden self-loathing and the urge to self-mutilate in all who heard it. Bareris had no idea what the entities were, but he was certain they’d do well to avoid them.
Unclean: The Haunted Lands Page 16
