Elemental

by Steven Savile

  Her first circle of the village revealed no hints of where the dead had been taken. The snow had lessened slightly, and though that meant she could see further in the fading light, the fresh fall still made the going difficult. Her feet were cold, and she stopped every few hundred steps to sit and rub some warmth back into her toes. No fresh footprints crossed her path.

  She moved out a few hundred paces and started a second circle, and she was a quarter-way around when she entered a small copse of trees. She slowed, then stopped, because something was wrong.

  The Mourner closed her eyes and listened for wraiths. Nothing. Her own labored breaths sounded unreasonably loud, and trying to slow her breathing made it louder. She looked behind her. Nobody followed. Yet she was being observed. It was the same sensation she’d had when the naked man fled, an idea that she was the center of something’s attention, the focus of all its thought.

  “Being foolish now,” she said. She walked on. “Just that poor dying man, spouting his madness while the disease eats him from the inside out. That’s all. There’s nothing else out here.” She continued, muttering words of comfort and considering how she could barricade the tavern door that evening.

  And then the Mourner found the hollow field. She emerged from a copse of trees, pushing her way through a dense wall of undergrowth that had taken on the weight of snow and ice, and the land vanished before her. She stepped back into the embrace of vegetation, suddenly grateful for its spiky touch through her heavy robe. Though bare of leaves it was alive. Before here, in the hollow in the ground, nothing lived.

  It was larger than a single field, perhaps two thousand steps across, and surrounded by trees and bushes heavy with snow. Its sides sloped down toward its center, maybe three hundred paces lower than where she now stood. They were formed of smooth, bare rock. Nothing grew down there, and when the snow landed it instantly melted away, forming small streams that trickled down toward the black throat at the hollow’s base. A cave? A hole? The Mourner did not know, and she felt no inclination to find out. The village dead needed her. And there was the fear. Because the madman had mentioned this hollow field in the same breath as a Violet Dog, and the Mourner could still remember that woman in Pavisse raging that she knew where one of those mythical creatures was buried.

  She turned her back on that place and started pushing back through the trees, her sense of direction subsumed by the simple need to be going away from the hollow field. A while later, still surrounded by trees, she heard the first sounds of the dead in her mind.

  The Mourner came to a stop with the sweat of fear trickling down her sides.

  The wraiths of the dead were crying. They were very quiet, but knowing they were there seemed to make them easier to hear. She closed her eyes and welcomed them in, showing them that she had a song to chant them down. Even then they barely calmed. They raged and whirled in her mind. There were many of them, and they were mad and frightened. Usually the dead feared nothing.

  The Mourner started forward, pushing through the trees that grew close together, stepping high to avoid her clothing becoming entangled in the spiky shrubs around their trunks.

  Violet Dogs, she thought, those creatures still on her mind. They’re a myth. Living-dead invaders from somewhere out of the land. There are stories, but no proof. Rough dreams for adults mourning the world gone bad. Nightmares for children, threatened with the Violet Dogs to make them behave. She moved toward the moaning dead, wondering what she would find.

  When she parted the final overhanging branches she saw the field, its strange crop, and the naked man dragging himself from one planted corpse to another.

  “There’s no such thing as a Violet Dog,” the Mourner said.

  The man seemed to be ignoring her. He was tending his grotesque crop, still naked and crawling from one dead villager to the next. His skin was purple with the rot of disease. The sword had vanished.

  There were over a hundred corpses planted across the field. They were fixed to heavy sticks thrust down into the ground, tied by their burial clothes or wrapped around with rope. Most heads bowed down, though a couple had tilted back to stare at the sky with hollowed eye-sockets. Some of the bodies—those that looked as though they had never been buried—bore terrible wounds to their faces and necks.

  The Mourner’s head was filled with the awful muttering and moaning of their wraiths, though the field itself was silent but for the constant crawl of the madman.

  The field was all but bare of snow. The muck was churned up, and puddles of brown water filled dips in the frozen ground. He must have dragged the bodies here one by one, digging them out of their fresh graves and hauling them through the village and the small forest to this dreadful place. Though subsequent snowfalls had covered the drag trails through Kinead, here the snow did not have a chance, because the man never stopped moving. He reached the planted feet of one corpse, ran his rough hands up the dead woman’s legs, shook to make sure she was secure, and then moved on to the next.

  The Mourner closed her eyes and listened to the wraiths. Still attached, still waiting to be chanted down to peace, they were being tormented by this man’s unnatural intent.

  “You’re doing this for nothing,” she said. “There’s no Violet Dog to accept your offering. The hollow field was made by a swallow hole. I’ve heard of them. They’re appearing across Noreela now that magic has gone and the land is winding down.” She waited for the man to react, but he kept on crawling. The field was painfully silent. “Do you hear me?”

  The Mourner stepped forward, emerging from the trees and becoming the second living thing in the field. The man stopped and stared at her, pulling back leathery lips to reveal his few remaining teeth. His left arm seemed to give out and he fell into the mud. He lowered his head and rested it on the ground, hissing, writhing, making strange patterns in the wet earth.

  The Mourner closed her eyes, and the man’s wraith was already screaming.

  “You’re dying,” she said.

  “I don’t care. The Violet Dog will be here soon, and it will wake the dead. My mother, my father, my brothers, and my wife. It will wake them!” He started sobbing into the wet soil.

  “And you?” the Mourner asked. “When you die, do you want to be woken?”

  The man looked up, raised himself on outstretched arms. “Of course,” he said.

  The Mourner shook her head. “The disease has made you mad. The disease, and that thing in the field you can’t explain, it’s driven you to distraction and—”

  “It spoke to me,” the man said. His voice was growing weaker. “It told me what to do. I sat in the hollow field for a whole day when the last of my family and friends died. I sat next to the hole, and I was being watched, and it gave me hope.”

  “Where’s the hope in being living-dead?” the Mourner said. “That’s what they did, you know, or so it’s said. They took life and then remade their victims in their own image. Dead, but walking. There’s no hope in that.”

  “You have no idea. You never lost anything like I have!”

  “I never had anything like you. No family, no lover. I’ve always been a Mourner.” I’ve always been alone, she thought. But that was more than she ever wanted to say. She closed her eyes and sighed, blocking out the wraiths. She would get to them soon.

  “Don’t you feel it?” he asked. “You do. You know it’s there. And it’ll have your soul too.”

  She turned away from the dying man and walked through the field of corpses. She started at the farthest corner where an old man was tied to a dead tree. Signs of the disease that had killed him were evident, and she quickly found his wraith. Her chant was low and fast, and the wraith calmed and went down into the earth, below this plane and into the next. The corpse looked the same, but the noise in the Mourner’s mind was slightly lessened.

  She went from body to body, chanting their wraiths down and setting them at peace. She always kept one eye on the man writhing in the mud. He tried to pull himself after her, and
occasionally he shouted. But his words were making less sense than ever, his language distorted into a dialect she did not know, and eventually he lay still.

  It took her until the sun was dipping to the west to reach the final wraith. It was still raging, and she recognized the man’s madness in its violent twisting. All the other wraiths had wanted to be given peace, but this one still awaited the touch of the Violet Dog. However he had come to know about those monsters, he had been so obsessed that his wraith still craved resurrection in rotting flesh.

  The Mourner began her chant, low and fast, and she knew that it would take until morning.

  After she chanted the dead madman’s wraith down, she had another nightmare:

  The Violet Dogs are attacking a town on the Cantrass Plains. They swarm in from the west, slaughtering horses and sheebok to begin with, then setting into the town’s defenders. The people raise a valiant defense, but it is over in a matter of hours. The Violet Dogs wait in the defeated town for a while, eating those dead people too mutilated to rise again, resting, turning their faces to the sun as if challenging its brightness. Many of the dead have already risen and started their shambolic march to the east. They are the Violet Dogs’ advance army, sent on to bear the brunt of any more sustained defenses that other towns may offer. But the outcome, inevitably, will be the same.

  The town in ruins, the Violet Dogs streak out across the landscape, like a flow of blood heading east. None of them remain behind. They come, they destroy and kill, and then they move on. Their victims rise again. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to their assault, other than to spread the contagion with which they are afflicted.

  The Mourner woke up wondering whether the Violet Dogs had ever been truly alive.

  She knew that she should bury the dead, but at the same time the thought came, Why bother? They were at peace, and moving them from an upright stick to a hole in the ground would do nothing to benefit them. Her job was done. She could leave the corpses to carrion.

  And yet the Mourner was not yet ready to head back to Long Marrakash. Something drew her east, not west. Something she had to see, to know, and hopefully to understand. So she went that way, pushing through the trees and undergrowth until she stood on the edge of the hollow field once again, and she tried to imagine just what had driven Kinead’s single survivor mad. She had heard of swallow holes in the land, pits that sucked in their surroundings, but she had never seen one until now, and she never truly believed. It’s the land wearing down, another Mourner had once told her. It’s Noreela eating itself as it dies.

  She started walking down the gentle rocky slope toward the base of the hollow. The snow had started again, and now it was settling on the stone, damping the sound of her footsteps. It felt as though she was walking into air that grew thicker with each step, the coldness offering a resistance she had never felt before. Fear, she supposed, could do that even to a Mourner.

  Something cried out above her, and when she looked up she saw a flock of skull ravens flying west to east. They came in over the fields and then swerved, passing around the great bowl in the land instead of straight across it.

  She was perhaps halfway to the base of the hollow now, and with every step something inside was urging her to turn and flee. Fear built up, but she could deal with that. A lifetime filled with death had given her a particular insight into that emotion. The thing telling her to turn around was something deeper, darker, less well known. Something more basic.

  A hundred steps from the hole at the center of the hollow, the Mourner stopped and fell to her knees. She smelled age and rot and something worse than death. She cried out and tried to back away, but her legs seemed fixed to the ground by the cold, held there as if the cold itself were an attractive force. She waved her arms and leaned to the left, the right. Still she did not move. She could only go forward. Her knees scraped across the sharp rock, staining the snow red. She struggled to her feet again and walked the final few steps, and even there, leaning over the edge and looking down, breathing in the stink of ages as though the land itself were rotting, still she could not see.

  As the Mourner fled Kinead, the hollow in the ground and the field of corpses, something intruded into her mind and gave her images of cold and darkness that she could never understand. She did not even take time to collect food and clothing from the village. The snow had increased and she walked into a blizzard, yet the pull of the Temple of Lament was already strong. There lay safety and peace, and a loneliness she knew of old.

  “No such things as Violet Dogs,” the Mourner said, and the sound of her voice gave comfort. Deadened though it was by the heavy snow, tinged with the fear that she could not shake off, still she started talking, repeating that phrase for as long as it sounded true.

  In a very short time she could talk no more.

  Butterflies Like Jewels

  BY ERIC NYLUND

  Eric Nylund has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in chemical physics. He has published five novels: virtual reality thrillers A Signal Shattered and Signal to Noise; contemporary fantasy novels Pawn’s Dream and Dry Water (nominated for the 1997 World Fantasy Award); and the science fantasy novel A Game of Universe. He has also written books for the Halo game universe, including Halo: The Fall of Reach and Halo: First Strike.

  Eric Nylund lives near Seattle with his wife, author Syne Mitchell.

  Man will analyze, calculate with microscopic precision,

  and narrow his perception until one day he will be able

  to measure everything in his ever-shrinking universe …

  and be able to imagine exactly nothing.

  —last telegram from Sir Eustace Carter Van Diem

  (of the famed Lost Nile Expedition) to the

  Royal Geographic Society, 16 March 1841.

  Dr. Robert Lang wished he could take the old man anywhere else; the mountains, a beach, he’d even have settled for a night at a bowling alley.

  The room had a single bed, a rack of electric bio-monitors, a dust-covered television suspended in the corner, and nothing else to get in the way of the attending staff. It felt like a prison cell—not a private room in the most prestigious elder-care facility in the country.

  The man in bed was emaciated, his skin taut and his eyes recessed in their sockets. The last thing Dr. Lang wanted to do was bother him with questions, but he had no choice.

  He pulled a chair next to the bed and sat.

  “Mr. Van Diem? Sir?”

  The old man’s eyes fluttered open and focused on the young doctor sitting by his side. His thin lips quavered into a smile. “None of my nurses wear such sad expressions. I appreciate the sentimentality, Dr. Lang.”

  He reached out and touched Lang’s hand. And as if he had felt something unexpected, he suddenly looked at the doctor’s hands. “Are you an artist?”

  Fifteen years ago, Lang had painted. But he quit art when he’d fallen in love with his one required science class: biology. Before he could blink, he found himself a premed major, up to his eyeballs in student loans, and at Oceanview as a resident. He knew helping people was his life’s work … but sometimes he missed being able to make his imaginings real and create whole worlds on canvass.

  “Yes, a long time ago.”

  Van Diem nodded and withdrew his hand.

  “Are you well enough to talk, sir?”

  “Ah.” Van Diem struggled to shift his frail frame higher upon his pillow. “You wish to discuss Dr. Ambrose.”

  “You were the last to see him.” Dr. Lang resisted the impulse to add the word alive to the end of this statement.

  It had been six days since Ambrose went missing in the middle of his rounds. His Mercedes remained in the parking garage, his coffee half-drunk on his desk; they even found his notes in this room, halted mid-sentence.

  “Do you remember anything?” Lang asked, leaning closer. “Something perhaps you forgot to tell the police?”

  “Are you my doctor, now?” Van Diem’s hazel
eyes lit like tiny candles, and he sat straighter. “Anything we discuss is covered by doctor-patient confidentiality?”

  Lang wasn’t sure what he meant. He glanced at Van Diem’s chart. There was no mention of senility, Alzheimer’s, or other dementia in the hundred-four-year-old man.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Unless, Lang failed to state, a life was at stake. And one was: Lang’s.

  The police had him marked as their prime suspect in Dr. Ambrose’s disappearance. His arguments with Ambrose were well known to the staff. There had been a scuffle last month over a nurse. Everyone hated Ambrose. He was indifferent to his patients’ suffering, molested the nurses, and enjoyed playing God. Lang, however, had been the only one on the staff who had communicated his feelings with his fists.

  His animosity for the man must have been obvious to the detectives when they had interviewed him.

  Van Diem cleared his throat, startling Dr. Lang from his wandering thoughts.

  “You were somewhere else, young man?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  The old man stared into Lang’s eyes, unblinking.

  Van Diem was another mystery. According to his records he came to Oceanview Convalescent Home thirty years ago. In his commitment statement, he said he needed peace and quiet before he continued his journey. He had no previous medical records. No social security number. His bills were paid from a Cayman Islands account.

  Dr. Lang took a pen from his coat and flipped open his notepad. “Ambrose saw you on his rounds, and then? Did he leave? Was there anyone with him?”

  “Yes. He came. He left. Alone. Not.” Van Diem’s voice was a rustle of dry leaves. He inhaled. “I smell tobacco and vanilla bean.” His gaze drifted to Lang’s lab coat pocket. “You have a pipe?”

  Lang wondered how Van Diem could smell such a thing, but nonetheless fished Dr. Ambrose’s pipe from his pocket. It was a meerschaum. The white stone was carved into an elephant’s head, trunk flowing into the stem, and large ears folded against the body of the bowl. Lang could make out tiny wrinkles in the animal’s skin so lifelike that he half expected its soulful eyes to blink.