The Corpse Thieves

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Fine, I’ll do it,’ said Tasha at length. ‘Play nice, Radinka.’

  Radinka did not enjoy the idea any more than Tasha, but she could not deny the merit of his suggestion. Konrad waited impatiently while the two of them managed the business with only a little distaste and not too much horror. Tasha concluded the process with an unpleasant groan of discomfort, and he was appalled to notice an odd change in her eyes: a dizzy duality, from which he quickly averted his gaze.

  ‘Nan?’ he said, and looked to his friend.

  ‘I must await my people here. They will not know where to go.’

  ‘We cannot wait.’

  ‘I will be a few minutes behind you.’

  With this, Konrad was obliged to be content — until the timely return of Weveroth, who came racing back into the tea house and hurled himself at Nanda. Nan soon had him installed as her emissary, bearing another note. Konrad instructed Eetapi to remain, too, against Diana’s arrival.

  Then away the party went, traversing the snow-laden streets of Ekamet with as much haste as the conditions would permit.

  Favin and Lazan had established themselves not far from the site of Faina and Pavel’s attack. Eetapi’s instructions guided them past that very spot, though all traces of the violence had long since been buried under a fresh layer of snow. Konrad expected to find a hut, or some kind of building, but the brothers had merely corralled their captives right out in the open. Each one was lashed to a bone-white, snow-covered tree, blue with cold, some of them unconscious.

  Konrad did not immediately approach, but paused a little distance away, out of sight. It was Ootapi who brought him his information, together with a mental picture of the little camp.

  The seven living had already been whittled down to six, one turned lamaeni by Favin’s and Lazan’s ally.

  ‘I know him,’ Kovalev said with a growl, upon receiving Konrad’s description of the newcomer. ‘I will deal with him.’ An axe appeared in his hands, a wicked, deadly weapon whose outlines flickered and wavered for a short time before it solidified — by appearance, at least, well able to inflict appalling damage.

  Konrad weighed his options, deeply uneasy. He was no inconsiderable power himself, and he was aided by Nanda, Ootapi and three other lamaeni (and Radinka and Pavel, however reduced they were). But Favin and Lazan had already prevailed over the latter two, and Tasha and Faina were both hampered by their passengers.

  Could they wait, until Diana and others arrived? It was risky. One of the captured living had already been turned, and was in imminent danger of further violence. The remaining six could not hope to survive long.

  ‘We must move,’ Konrad decided. ‘Kovalev, please dispatch their associate. Ootapi, bind Favin as you did before, give Nanda a chance to deal with him. Tasha, Faina, we need to dispose of Lazan. Pavel, use me to attack — dislodge him if you can. Release me as soon as that’s done, reclaim your body. I’ll take care of Lazan after that. All clear?’

  Nobody liked the plan, and Konrad could not blame them, for it was a shambles. But it was the best he could come up with, and doing nothing while the three lamaeni tore through their captives would be indefensible.

  Nanda cast him a sideways look, and he waited, expecting a sarcastic comment if not an outright objection.

  Instead she said: ‘Thank you for not trying to coddle me.’

  That required a little thought to interpret. She was right: it had cost him something to direct her Favin’s way, and he had to stifle the part of himself that wanted to keep her as far from the mess as possible so she couldn’t get hurt. But he knew better than to underestimate her, and he badly needed her help.

  He also knew she would happily kick him somewhere painful if he tried to shield her. Deservedly.

  But did she really mean what she had said? Was some part of her dismayed that he hadn’t shown concern for her welfare? Was she being sarcastic?

  No time to think about it now. He merely gave her a nod, which she answered with a roll of her eyes.

  They approached the camp — in time to watch as one of the living, a burly man with a black beard, attacked one of the others. The former was possessed, Konrad judged, and the latter probably the newly-turned lamaeni. This confused spirit was easily dislodged, and devoured on the spot by Favin-as-Radinka. The process was conducted with a chilling efficiency, though it had one advantage: so absorbed was the group of Favin and Lazan and their unnamed associate that they did not immediately observe the assault upon their camp.

  Kovalev went straight for the third lamaeni, a thin, brown-haired man of indeterminate age. He was brutal. He’d made for himself a second axe, and he wielded both with ruthless savagery. Surprise served him well. His target was intent upon another captive, presumably preparing for the process of turning the next; Kovalev felled him with one staggering blow and hacked off his head with the next.

  Ootapi bound Favin, before he had any chance to react to the invasion. Favin-as-Radinka was only temporarily paralysed by surprise; he fought, and Konrad knew that Ootapi could not hold him alone for long. But Nanda was there, shimmering with that odd light she had once or twice displayed before: a mantle of The Shandrigal’s power, wielded with cool expertise. Konrad did not much fancy Favin’s chances.

  Konrad made for the figure of Pavel, within which Lazan resided. Tasha and Faina flanked him.

  ‘What is this?’ Lazan snarled with fury, his teeth bared —

  — and then he was down, Pavel’s body laid out in the snow with a series of shallow knife-wounds criss-crossing his flesh. Pavel had not been gentle. The body was inert, dead, which meant that Lazan was dislodged…

  Konrad sought for the spirit he knew would be nearby, hoping that Pavel would soon regain possession of his stolen body. He couldn’t worry about that now. Where was Lazan?

  He held great power, as the Malykant; some portion of his Master’s, lent to him for the performance of his duties. Usually he kept these hidden, cloaked himself from the notice of others beneath a semblance of normality. Only in times of great need did he permit that cloak to fall away, to reveal his true nature to the world. He did so now, gathering everything that he had for the fight. He felt stronger at once, his soul blazing with The Malykt’s cold, bone-chilling will.

  His heightened senses alerted him: a freezing, malevolent presence nearby, lunging for him, intent upon his destruction.

  Excellent.

  Konrad pounced. It was not a physical attack; more of a mental one. He extended his borrowed Will like a net, gathered up the enraged spirit of Lazan, and mentally swallowed him whole.

  The pain began.

  If the presence of Tasha in his mind had been hard to bear, this was intolerable. Lazan was like a bundle of fireworks, tearing his mind apart, burning away his resistance and shredding his sanity. The man fought to subdue Konrad’s will with the strength of desperation; even with The Malykt’s power supplementing his own, Konrad was hard pressed to retain control of his wits. His awareness of the world beyond his own mind faded; there was nothing but Lazan and the paralysing pain.

  Distantly, Konrad thought he heard himself screaming.

  Irinanda Falenia was, ordinarily, a tolerant woman and composed, not given to outbursts of high emotion of any kind. But she had spent days tending to Arina, who would probably never recover from the appalling use that had been made of her, even if she had not actually taken any lives. The knowledge that such violence had been committed by her hand; the memory of the bloodied snow and her bloodied clothes, those inert bodies felled by the grave wounds she had inflicted; the realisation that it was possible for her wits to be mastered by so malevolent a soul, and that she was powerless to resist; all these things took a grave toll upon her. Nanda saw that her life, her spirit, had been crushed by all of these things, and grieved. Anger had been ignited in her heart, and she had been nursing a growing desire to hurt something.

  The sight, then, of this sorry, snowy clearing and its complement of terrified captives burned
through her restraint in an instant. All tolerance and forgiveness melted away, and Nanda let her fury blaze forth as she made for Favin. She’d wanted Lazan, really; wanted to wreak her revenge directly upon the one who had broken Arina, and who had probably masterminded this horrible sequence of events. But she did not doubt Konrad’s ability to manage him suitably, and meanwhile… Favin would do.

  Nanda opened herself to The Shandrigal, letting her mistress’s power fill her to her core. It blossomed and swelled within her, fuelled by her own rage until she felt she might burst with the pressure of it. She knew she was glowing as she advanced upon Favin, Ootapi at her shoulder.

  She smiled upon him. It was not a pleasant smile.

  ‘Favin,’ she greeted him. ‘I am somewhat displeased with you.’

  He was not given time to respond. Ootapi struck, winding itself around Favin’s spirit in a paralysing grip. Radinka’s stolen body stiffened and froze — for an instant. But Favin gathered himself and fought; Ootapi hissed and shrieked with effort and pain; and Nanda had no time to think.

  Ideally, Favin ought to be expelled from Radinka’s body and captured. His judge ought to be The Shandrigal, or perhaps The Malykt, for he and his brother had transgressed mightily against Them both. But Nanda had never been faced with such a problem before; there was no clear way to proceed, no precedent for how to prevail.

  So she acted on instinct. She reached for Radinka’s face and gripped it in her shimmering hands, staring into the eyes that burned with a fury almost equalling her own. Then, brutally, she took all of The Shandrigal’s power that ran in her own veins and forced it upon Favin. It penetrated his skin, pore by pore, and flashed through him with the speed and ferocity of a house fire.

  With an agonised shriek — a sound Nanda would cherish until the end of her days — the wayward spirit of Favin died. In fact, he melted, all the thoughts and energies and memories and cruelties that made up the core of his soul dissolving under her burning touch.

  Nanda held on, until every last flicker of Favin had vanished and she knew she beheld naught but an emptied shell. When at last she removed her hands, the body of Radinka crumpled into the snow and lay there, seared and broken.

  Ootapi? Nanda enquired, suddenly frightened that she might have burned him away, too.

  But the serpent shivered to life in her awareness, cringing and shrieking, shocked and damaged but essentially whole.

  You did well, she praised him.

  The serpent shivered on, seemingly unable to muster a response.

  Sorry, she added, regretful.

  She took a breath or two to steady herself, for she, too, was shocked and shaking in the aftermath of such an effort. Then she turned, seeking Konrad.

  He was locked in a similar struggle with Lazan-as-Pavel as she had just won against Favin, but she immediately received the impression that he was flagging. Perhaps Lazan really was that much stronger than his brother. Perhaps Konrad lacked the burning fury that had driven her; he was not given to rage the way she sometimes was, and he had not spent days nursing poor Arina. Perhaps it was merely that The Malykt’s power was less serviceable in this endeavour than The Shandrigal’s; the lamaeni were undead, and that arguably placed them outside His influence.

  Whatever the reason, Konrad was losing. She could see it in the uncontrollable way his body shook, sweat pouring off him despite the freezing, falling snow that turned his black coat white.

  Fear blossomed in her heart. She ran for him, hampered by her skirts and her weariness and the thick snow under her feet, too slow.

  She reached him just as his eyes rolled back and he sagged, defeated. He turned his head to regard her, and nothing of his eyes showed but the whites.

  Nanda had no warning. Konrad was Konrad no longer and he lunged for her, teeth bared. No attempt to capture or distract or disable her, this: he sought to kill. A pair of ethereal knives flashed into being in his curled fists, solidifying before her horrified eyes.

  She dodged. Too slow: a knife grazed her arm, slashing through her clothes and leaving a burning, stinging wound carved into her shrinking skin.

  Nanda cursed, knowing herself outmatched. She was no killer; no duty of hers carried her into harm’s way, ordinarily, and she was not equipped. She carried no weapons, reliant upon The Shandrigal’s might to defend herself at need. But this was beyond her experience, and the fact that Lazan attacked her with her dearest Konrad’s hands badly unnerved her. She dodged another slash of those terrible knives, and another, gaining new cuts each time: another down her arm, a second across her back.

  Panic shot through her. She fumbled for the power she had wielded so easily only moments before, but fear undid her — fear, or weariness, for she had badly spent herself in her battle against Favin.

  She was going to die.

  Then she was no longer alone. A chill, alien, dead presence slithered into her mind and bound up her will, holding her terrified mind in a ruthless grip. She flailed and struggled and screamed but to no avail: she was caught tight and held fast, and the end could only be seconds away.

  She was slow to realise that the ghostly spirit with whom she was suddenly sharing quarters was no enemy.

  Ootapi held her in his snakey grip, binding her up as he had bound Favin. Not just Ootapi, either: Eetapi was there beside her brother, both snakes shrieking with a splintering anger which threatened to crack her bones. They had served Konrad eight years already, and perhaps another Malykant before that. They knew what to do.

  Under their direction, Nanda’s body dodged and whirled far more effectively than before. More than that: she ceased to withdraw and went on the offensive, advancing upon Lazan-as-Konrad with the terrible, cold might of The Malykt’s own servants strengthening her limbs. Her panic faded; she remembered herself, remembered her own strength, forgot to be deterred by the sight of Konrad’s contorted face. Ootapi and Eetapi loosened their grip, and Nanda’s own power revived. Her spilled blood turned black and her skin began to glow.

  Konrad took a step back.

  Then another woman materialised behind him, a woman with a mane of curly dark hair blowing wildly in the wind. Diana Valentina.

  She was not happy.

  ‘That’s quite enough,’ she snapped. To Nanda’s horror, a glimmer of metal flashed in the wan light and Konrad screamed. Diana had buried a knife in his back, slammed the blade hilt-deep with chilling precision and a shocking ruthlessness.

  Konrad dropped face-first into the snow. Blood poured from the wound in his back, turning the snow red around him. He would bleed out; he must do, for his lifeblood flowed out of him with every beat of his heart and there was so much of it.

  Diana let go of the blade as Konrad dropped and stood watching, her face utterly cold.

  It was no ordinary knife. The blade glittered with a weird light that was somehow half shadow, a glittering black fire that quickly spread to engulf Konrad’s whole body. It blazed and burned and Nanda had to look away.

  When the fire faded, Konrad had not been consumed, as Nanda had briefly feared. But he had not been mended, either. He lay there bleeding, far too still.

  Nanda dropped to her knees beside him, heedless of the wet, cold snow that instantly soaked her clothes. When she touched Konrad, she found his body almost as cold as the air around him.

  ‘You’ve killed him,’ she gasped, and stared at Diana with something close to hatred.

  ‘I had to,’ replied the leader of The Malykt’s Order. She looked dispassionately down at Konrad, unmoved, then bent to remove the knife. More blood gushed from the wound, but the knife was somehow pristine. ‘A lamaeni gone mad is a threat that cannot be lightly dealt with, and for such a being to take control of the Malykant…’

  She did not finish the sentence, but she did not have to. Nanda understood. Such a combination of powers posed so severe a threat that the utmost force was justified in its removal. Konrad was…

  … something else. Not undead, though Nanda knew that he worried it
was so. He was not lamaeni. But Myrrolena had been right to say that he was not alive either, not in the way that Nanda was, as he had once been. He had died in the course of his duties and been revived by his Master’s will, but not quite everything had been restored to life. That was beyond the power even of The Malykt.

  What that meant as far as Lazan was concerned was… difficult to say. Would Lazan have relinquished Konrad’s body, once he had gained control of it? Would he have found it as habitable as the undead body of a fellow lamaeni, or as repellent as the corpse of a living man?

  The former was not impossible, and such a scenario must be avoided at all costs.

  But that did not lessen the tragedy of it. Nanda stared at the limp form of Konrad Savast, her dearest friend, so shocked and numb she could barely think. At last she lifted his head, very gently, and placed it into her lap, stroked his half-frozen hair. ‘He will be revived, of course,’ she said to Diana, hoping that her confident statement would receive an immediate confirmation.

  But Diana said nothing. She met Nanda’s gaze, her face expressionless.

  Nanda’s heart quailed.

  The Shandrigal’s Order arrived, or two of them. Too late to be of any use, too late to prevent Konrad’s paying so high a price. Nanda ignored them, did not even look their way. She stayed with Konrad, waiting for his Master to arrive and make everything right again.

  But minutes ticked past and The Malykt did not appear.

  ‘Where is He?’ Nanda said at last, looking to Diana.

  Diana Valentina minutely shook her head. ‘He does not always answer.’

  Nanda bristled. ‘He must! His servant lies dead!’

  ‘There is always another Malykant.’

  The coldness, the brutality of the statement shocked Nanda to speechlessness. She could only stare at Diana, aghast.

  Diana’s face softened, a fraction. ‘Do not mistake me. I respect Konrad, and to an extent I am fond of him. We all are. But it does not pay to grow too attached to the Malykant. A ten-year tenure in that role is considered lengthy indeed, for they rarely last anywhere near so long.’