Elemental

by Steven Savile

  She walked slowly across the field. It had snowed last night, and the rough bottoms of the graves were coated with a virgin layer. The soil piled around them still broke surface, as though warm enough to melt any snow that settled there. The Mourner knelt, scooped up a mixed handful of snow and soil and let it fall between her fingers. Cold. She closed her eyes and delved inward, but it was cold in there as well.

  The only footprints were her own.

  She stood and hugged her cloak around her. A cool breeze blew in from the north, agitating the forest that bounded the northern edge of the field and shaking snow from the leafless limbs. It fell in dusty sprays, creating false movement in the shadows. The Mourner sighed and tried to look deeper.

  She had walked two hundred miles from Long Marrakash, stopping only to eat and once to sleep, and all the way she had been dwelling on the period of Mourning to come. In the Temple of Lament she had been touched by the sense of death from this place; a virulent disease had wiped out most of the small village of Kinead, and she had collected her meager belongings and gone to serve as its Mourner. She and others like her drifted to and fro across the north of Noreela, out to sites of great loss and back again, like tides of blood in a great living thing; the Temple of Lament its heart, the places of death its fading extremities. It was ironic that as the land slowed down, so its blood flowed faster.

  The walk had been long, the going harsh, and those hours and days of introspection had served to sharpen her mind.

  Now she was cold and tired, and her mental preparation had formed a weight inside, a pressure craving release. She had been expecting several days of mourning, yet she had found only empty holes in the ground. The bodies had gone elsewhere, and she could sense no wraiths to chant down.

  She walked back and forth across the field, looking down into each rough hole but finding only more snow. She was well versed in death and she could see that these graves, though opened up and spread across the ground, were still relatively new. Whatever had once occupied them had been buried weeks, perhaps even days before. There were no loose bones here, no scraps of rotten clothing, no mad wraiths skimming beneath the surface of the world as they tried to come to terms with living no more. And with every breath she took, the Mourner sensed the scent of fresh death on the air.

  She scanned the foliage bounding the graveyard, the shadows beneath the trees, searching for observers or signs of the absent dead. There were none. She was alone with these waiting holes.

  “Death can go nowhere on its own,” she whispered, and a breeze snatched her words away like rare birds. She heard their echo, though there was nothing to echo from.

  She left the empty graveyard and headed through the trees for Kinead.

  Perhaps before the Cataclysmic War two centuries before Kinead might have been a happy, healthy village. But like many places across Noreela since that terrible War ended, this village was falling into ruin. Stone buildings were patched and repaired with timber, and timber dwellings were rotting into the ground. The frozen stream was black as night, the two tracks passing through the village were filled with potholes, and a large machine stood motionless at the crossroads, its hollowed stone and metal carcass exposed to the elements. A skull raven sat atop the dead machine, watching the Mourner as she walked slowly into the silence.

  There were no signs of life. Snow blanketed the village, its surface pristine and untouched by anything other than a few lonely, hungry birds. The door to the tavern was wedged open by a chair lying on its back. The Mourner passed by, glancing inside but unable to make out any detail. It was dark in there. She could smell spilled ale and rotten food. She closed her eyes; still no wraiths.

  “Where are you?” she said. The village did not answer.

  She moved to one of the stone dwellings, mounted its terrace, and stood before the door. There was a red smudge on the dark timber, as if something bloody had been thrown against it. She looked around her feet but the terrace was empty. A small nudge from her boot opened the door with a creak of frozen hinges. She held her breath, probing inside for the owner’s wraith but finding nothing. She could smell only must and age, not the stench of rot. No bodies here.

  The people of Kinead were dead, their diseased passing rapid and painful enough to have been felt at the Temple of Lament. Every death was different, and the Mourner could recall the sense of Kinead’s doom settling across her mind like a slayer spider’s corrosive web. Something unnatural, she had thought, but that idea was not new. Much that happened in Noreela these days was strange.

  During her journey from Long Marrakash, the bodies of Kinead’s dead had been exhumed and taken away. With them, still attached by the shock of death and their fear of the endless Black that awaited them, their wraiths.

  Taken where? the Mourner thought. And why?

  “You’re here!” The voice held both wonder and dread. “I knew you would rise from the hollow field, I knew you’d come, I could smell you down there, hear you, taste you!”

  The Mourner turned around and saw the naked man. He was standing shivering beside the dead machine, his skin gray in some places, red and purple in others where the cold had killed his flesh. He had a long beard clotted with blood, and in one feeble hand he carried a rusty sword. His fingers seemed to merge with the handle as though he could never let go.

  “Who are you?” the Mourner asked. “Where are the dead? I’m here from Lament to mourn and chant them down.”

  “Lament?” the man said. He frowned, took a couple of faltering steps, and went to his knees. He held the sword up before him. “You’re not the Violet Dog?”

  Violet Dog! The words surprised the Mourner; so filled with dread yet uttered infrequently, and heard even less.

  “No,” the Mourner said, remembering long lonely periods spent reading in her room at Lament. “There are no Violet Dogs. They’re a story from before history.”

  The man looked at her, his eyes surprisingly bright in a face so wan. He seemed to be searching for something. She lowered her cloak’s hood and let him see her face, and his eyes went wide. “Are you a Mourner?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Then what of the Violet Dog?” The man looked around as if expecting someone or something else to join in the conversation.

  The Mourner did not reply. Instead she pulled one hand from the wide sleeve of her cloak and delved inside for her knife. She plucked it from the strap around her waist and held it at the ready. The man was weak, almost dead, and he seemed to pose no real threat. But the air was filled with violence. She looked left and right around the village, and for the first time she saw and recognized the red splashes on many of the doors. Hand prints, in paint or blood. Perhaps they were signs of those households having fallen victim to the disease, or …

  The Violet Dogs enjoy the taste of pain. They savor the tang of fear in the flesh, and they may mark their victims days or weeks before taking them. Words the Mourner had read long ago in forgotten books, yet now they came to her unannounced.

  “Death-whore!” The man came at her. He was surprisingly fast, jumping to his feet and covering the distance between them before the Mourner could lift her knife. He struck her across the forehead with the sword’s hilt and fell on her as she stumbled back, pushing her down into the snow. It soaked quickly through her cloak, making her as cold as the dead. The man grinned down.

  “Leave those wraiths where they flail and suffer,” he said. Spittle dribbled from his mouth and landed on her face. It was warm. She saw fever in his eyes, and she wondered how long he had left.

  “I came here to—”

  “You’re not needed,” the man said. “It needs them, the Violet Dog, and it will be here to claim their rotting corpses soon.”

  “There are no—”

  “Violet Dogs?”

  The Mourner tried to shift but the man held her down. Thin though he was, naked and half-dead from cold and disease, still he found strength in his madness. Perhaps he’ll kill me, the Mourner th
ought. She glanced at his hands, looking at his nails to see whether they held grave dirt beneath them. But his nails were all torn off. And the sword raised in his right hand was not darkened by rust after all.

  “Maybe,” he said. He drew close, the stubbled black flesh of his chin scraping the Mourner’s cool lips. “Maybe not for a while. But the land is changing. And I know at least one of the secrets it’s thrown up.” He stood, turned, and ran.

  By the time the Mourner lifted herself from the ground, the man had vanished. He knew Kinead, she did not, and there was no chance of finding him.

  So where are the dead? she thought. She closed her eyes and calmed herself by listening for newly dead wraiths, but she heard only the background mumble that was evident almost anywhere in the land. Whispers from before history began, louder mutters from those dead these past few years, these were wraiths either at peace or with voices grown distant over time. Where are you? she thought. She expected and received no reply.

  She considered going back to the field of open graves. Perhaps there she would find clues to the dead villagers’ location: drag marks in the ground, a splayed corpse pointing the way. But she was tired, hungry, and thirsty, and it had started snowing again.

  And there was something else. Though the rest of the village remained completely silent—the movement of the air itself dampened by the snow—she felt observed. The unsettling sensation had been growing since discovering the empty graves, and it had reached a new intensity the moment the naked madman left her lying on the ground. She scanned the village; windows, doorways, shadows beside leaning buildings and beneath leafless trees, rooftops and the spaces beneath stilted homes. She could see no one else. Even the skull raven had gone from atop the dead machine, though she had not heard it fly away. The living had gone from this place, yet the mystery remained: the dead had vanished too.

  The Mourner closed her eyes but sensed only time paying her attention, stretching out behind much farther than it ever could before. History was so rich and full, and the future held no certainties. The Cataclysmic War had seen to that.

  The snow thickened, the first brief flurries replaced quickly with fat, wet flakes. The sky promised much more to come. The Mourner looked at the red hand prints on the doors of Kinead’s buildings, certain that the madman had put them there yet still disturbed by their presence. Virtually every door she saw had a print, and one that did not—across from the frozen stream, a run-down dwelling that seemed to have a tree growing from its roof had suffered a recent fire. Its timber walls had fallen in, and the tree growing through its remains was charred black.

  I wonder if the Violet Dog has come back to claim its victims, she thought, then shook her head and sighed. There were no Violet Dogs. Even if they had ever existed, it had been so long ago that there was only doubt and myth about their existence now, not fact. She had read books, yes, and heard occasional rumors of them when she came out into the world to mourn, and once she had met a woman in Pavisse who claimed to know where one was buried. But the woman had died soon after from Plague, and the Mourner had left Pavisse several days later exhausted from mourning so many thousands of dead.

  She had forgotten the woman’s mention of the Violet Dogs, until now.

  The Mourner turned and looked at the tavern. It was the only building with an open door. She would not feel right forcing her way into any of the homes, dead though their owners were. As she approached the tavern entrance, she avoided looking at the front of the door. Inside there would be food and drink and somewhere to rest, and she did not need foolish superstition to trouble her while she decided what to do next.

  The villagers were dead, and to chant down their troubled wraiths, first she had to find them.

  As she tried to pull the jammed door closed behind her, the Mourner heard the man shouting from elsewhere in the village: “It will make you one of them as well, Mourner!”

  The stench of rotwine permeated the tavern. Beneath that lay the memory of a million conversations, all of Noreela’s history—true and not so true—discussed here over food and drink, while all the time the land wore down, dragging its people with it.

  The Mourner leaned against the bar, exhausted. A clay mug toppled to the floor and shattered. She held her breath and listened for a reaction. None came, not even the sound of a startled rat scurrying for cover.

  “The graveyard is empty,” the Mourner said. Living in such solitude at the Temple of Lament meant that she was used to her own company, and talking to herself made her feel less alone. It could also give life to places never meant to fall silent. “Something dug up the recently dead and took them away. The naked madman … though he looks almost dead himself. Frostbite. Disease. And where or what is the hollow field?” She leaned over the bar and found an unopened bottle of rotwine. She hated the vile drink, but right now she needed something to wet her dry insides. She was unused to fear, and the attack had shaken her more than she cared to admit.

  She popped the cork and drank, wincing at the taste but welcoming the warmth that spread quickly through her body. Even the sound of her swallowing seemed loud.

  “And the Violet Dogs,” she said. But she spoke no more, because their name seemed to hang in the atmosphere of this place, giving a ghost to the myth.

  The Mourner busied herself finding food. There was a stew in a huge pan in the tavern’s kitchens, but it had developed a surface mold that puffed a haze of spores as she leaned in to sniff. She found a few sour apples, however, and a loaf of bread that was just edible after she had removed its hardened crusts. She sat at a table in the corner of the tavern, ate and drank, and before long her vision started fluttering between the tavern, and somewhere else.

  The tavern: wood oiled black by spilled ale, bar polished smooth by decades of patrons, the air heavy and still and possessed of a ghostly shine from snow reflecting through the two small windows.

  Somewhere else: a large open plain leading down to the sea, a collection of timber dwellings huddled in a small valley, and in the distant port a forest of tall masts sailing in.

  Here, and there. Present, and past. The Mourner’s head nodded forward, and though she fought against it she could not prevent sleep from taking her away.

  There is panic in the village. A rider had come from the port, spreading news of invaders from the sea, though he quickly rode on before anyone could glean more sense from him. So the villagers stand at the western approach and stare down at the port, where flames sprout in several places and smoke rises into the still autumn air, and the shapes rushing outward are too fast to be the town’s fleeing inhabitants.

  In the port, a hundred strange ships bob at anchor.

  We should leave, someone says.

  We can’t leave, this is our home and we should fight, comes the reply.

  I’m scared, a child says, and the adults realize too late where their duties lie.

  The red tide swarms up the shallow hillsides from the port, screeching and yelling, wailing and crying out words that no one here understands. Their legs are long and muscled, arms thin and spindly, bare torsos red with tattoos or spilled blood, and their heads are doglike with teeth as long as a man’s finger. They stand twice the height of any villager. They are incredibly fast. And their intent is obvious.

  The first Violet Dog reaches the village and buries an ax in a woman’s face. The other villagers are fleeing now, some of them taking up puny weapons against the attackers, and even as the last of them is killed, so the woman with the axed head rises from the ground and sets off with a shambling gait toward the east. She is dead, but somehow she finds the breath to scream.

  The Mourner sprang awake. A scream had stirred her, and she wondered whether it was her own.

  She rubbed at her temples to try and work the dregs of the nightmare from her mind. She had many dreams and almost always recalled them, but as she came around this one scattered away, and she was happy to let it go.

  Violet Dogs, she thought. I read about them once, th
at’s why the dream was so vivid. She frowned, feeling the dream dissipate into a background sense of death gone wrong. And the madman thought I was one.

  The bottle of rotwine lay spilled on the table, contents still glugging from the broken neck. The remains of her second apple had turned brown. The light from outside had faded, but she could tell by its stillness that it was still snowing heavily. She stood and went to the door, ready to open it and see whether anything had changed.

  They’ll be there, she thought, the dead, standing in the street and staring at me, and before them will be the sick naked man, dead now but still much, much better.

  “Out of my damn head!” the Mourner said. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, holding her hands by her sides and bowing her head. The dream had faded, but its impression remained.

  She opened the door. Snow fell thick, already obscuring her footprints to and fro across the track. She wondered what other strange trails were also hidden beneath earlier falls. There was no sign of the man, and no dead villagers stood rooted in the deepening snow. Wherever they were, their wraiths still needed chanting down.

  The Mourner left the tavern and pulled the door closed behind her. It was colder than it had been, the snow deeper, and the only sound was the crunching of snow underfoot.

  She started searching before even realizing the choice she had made. She could have easily returned to the Temple of Lament in Long Marrakash, but in doing so she would be abandoning the lost dead of Kinead. Few people were ever ready to die.

  The Mourner guessed that they must be somewhere in the fields beyond the village. There were not many buildings large enough to hide them all together, and if she closed her eyes and tried to hear their wraiths, there was only the usual background mutter. Nothing new. Fresh wraiths remained very close to their former flesh, and she would have to find one to help the other. So she headed south, planning on circling the village. She kept a wary eye open for the madman.