“All four limbs. Both eyes. Shame about your nose. But you should see the state of some of the others.”
I was fingering a rather ghastly triangular hole in the middle of my face when the room shook once again, in the way a human would say “Ahem.” With a noise like the enthusiastic mating of giant stone golems, the far wall buckled inwards and part of the floor gave way. The skeleton, still trying to stand up, fell from sight with a terrified “khakk,” followed by the remains of my coffin and presumably my nose.
“We’d best get out of here,” said my new friend. I nodded, took a step, and fell flat on my face. It would have probably been quite traumatic for a person with a nose, but fortunately I was ahead of the game there.
“Sorry,” he said, helping me up again. “You’re a bit wobbly. Expecting to wake up fresh and ready to go after being dead for a while would be a bit optimistic.”
“Well, yes. Expecting to wake up at all would have been a bit optimistic.”
“Hey, don’t take it out on me. I’m trying to help.”
Specifically, he was trying to help me run away from whatever was causing all the rumbling, and from the increasingly collapsing floor. Old and long-unused signals from my brain were having trouble making the long climb down my spinal column to my limbs. I stumbled through the underground chambers on my colleague’s shoulder, sensation returning to my feet and joints by tiny increments. The thought was sinking in with greater and greater certainty and considerably greater discomfort: I was dead. I was alive and dead at the same time. I was un-dead. My current biological status was aggravatingly inconsistent.
I had seen zombies before. There had been a necromancer’s tower in the village near my family farm and you’d sometimes see an undead slave lurching through the marketplace. On shopping days me and a few other kids used to flick bits of bread at them so that hungry seagulls would chase them around. And then later, at college, Mr. Everwind was in the habit of raising undead teaching assistants, and a popular hazing ritual was to steal the Undead Command Stone from the staff room and use it to make them pole dance on the school flagpole. I remembered how amusing it had been at the time to watch them move around as if their joints were held together with elastic bands. Now I just wanted to know how they had made it look so easy.
Getting to grips with myself would have to wait, because now the floor was rumbling continuously. We staggered through another archway moments before it cracked and into a wide nexus of passageways at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs. Moonlight shone invitingly down towards us, but in our current state, the steps might as well have been the north face of Mount Murdercruel. Several of my fellow undeads were milling around waiting for someone to take charge.
“Found another one,” said my helper, jiggling me.
“Ohh,” said a balding woman with no arms. “Look at this fancy dan with his four functioning limbs.”
“And his skin hardly flaking off,” said a man with no face on his skull.
“Aaa ih ee oo uh aaa,” said someone else with no lower jaw.
“I bet he could still maintain an erection,” grumbled a decrepit old corpse who probably had issues.
“Uh uh aaaa!”
Between us there were about six complete bodies, spread out over around ten individuals. There was more exposed bone and sinew on view than in a dumpster behind an abattoir, and everyone was wearing expensive funeral attire that had become faded and torn by the passage of time. The whole effect was rather like
the aftermath of an explosion at a high-class dinner party.
For the first time I took a moment to examine myself properly. I was wearing what had probably once been a basic mage’s robe, creamy brown linen stitched into a pattern that the nearest convenient tailor to the funeral home had probably thought was mystic and artsy. Time, however, had not been kind to it. Both elbows were worn right through. Threads all over the garment had come unstitched, and now dangled shamefacedly from all over my body. The tailoring had been utterly spoiled by whatever thoughtless person had cut a huge slit in the back, from neck to arse.
A particularly loud clash of falling ceiling echoed through the subterranean halls, and the floor was starting to shake again. I and the assembled undead collectively realized that we were still far from safety. A section of nearby wall slid into the abyss that was all that remained of my tomb, and a huge cloud of dust billowed out.
Now half-blind and fighting off a powerful desire to lie down and go back to sleep I tottered over to the stairs, fell forward and began wildly flinging my elbows and knees upwards in an impromptu attempt at climbing.
“Look, he can even climb stairs!” said the man with no face, struggling to follow.
“God, life’s wasted on the young, isn’t it?!” said the woman with no arms.
The fellow with no lower jaw was probably planning to add something, but then the ground cracked open beneath his feet and he was swallowed by the earth with a tongue-flapping wail of fright.
It’s amazing how imminent peril can aid recovery from rigor mortis. I was making decent speed, and was already halfway to fresh air. At this rate I’d be perfectly fine as long as I was never called upon to do anything complicated, like shake someone’s hand or sit in a chair. The rumbling was turning into a roar, the stairs were starting to shift beneath my hands and feet, and small bits of rock were raining down upon us constantly. A much larger bit of rock decided to join in the fun and thundered down the steps, but it flew over me and collided wetly with someone I hadn’t had time to care about.
Being the most functional horrors present, I and the chap who’d found me were the first to reach the top. My arms and legs continued spinning through thin air for a few moments before I collapsed onto dead grass. A handful of the others were able to escape before the crypt entrance uttered a final impatient cough and caved in.
“Wait a second, I know this place,” said the man with no face, who had been the third to emerge. “This is the graveyard near Whitbury Farmstead. In Goodsoil County.”
I knew of Goodsoil County, but I had never been there in life, because of the rumors that circulated about the native farmers and what they got up to with domestic animals and unsuspecting travelers. It had not, as far as I could remember, been fingered as a dark and sinister place that oozed an atmosphere of tangible evil from every square foot of ground, but that was the sort of thing that could easily be overlooked if you were concentrating on keeping your private places away from backward rural folk.
The crypt had been the centerpiece of a vast graveyard that rolled away in all directions, a stark navy of gray stone slabs sailing upon an ocean of dead grass. It was hilly country, surrounded by a black pine forest from which emanated the growl of predators and the abruptly cut off squeals of their prey.
Once again, the ground began rumbling underneath me. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Was a single moment to myself too much to ask? I jumped back just as the dying grass split asunder and a zombie hand burst forth, flesh hanging from it like puff pastry from an aging apple turnover. It clawed the air for a moment, and an involuntary yelp of terror escaped from my lips. After that, though, it seemed to be having trouble, so my new colleagues and I helped pull it out, closely followed by the owner.
“Thanks,” he said, re-attaching his arm. “Why am I alive?”
The same question was occurring to the graveyard’s entire population, who were popping up like extremely fast-growing, foul-smelling daisies. That was what had caused the cave-ins, I realized: the graves were so packed together that the simultaneous stirring of their residents had caused massive trauma to the local geology. Of course, the huge green crystals probably weren’t helping, either.
They were sitting on makeshift towers made from metal girders, thin and flimsy-looking but tall enough to loom over the treetops, and which were erected at regular intervals around the graveyard’s perimeter. Mounted on the top of each tower was an irregular lump of green crystal—probably magical stone, judging by
the way it glowed and the arcs of chartreuse lightning crackling around. As we watched, some unspoken signal caused the crystals to become connected for a brief second by a huge circle of green magical energy, which detached and drifted off into the sky like a smoke ring.
“This is necromantic magic,” I thought aloud.
“Well, DUH,” said someone.
“I mean, it has to be, but I’ve never seen anything like it. I didn’t think it was done with crystals. I thought it was all blood sacrifice and that kind of thing.”
I tapped my chin thoughtfully, felt exposed bone in my fingertips, and resumed taking stock of my current condition. My hands were skin and bone—in some places, just bone—and my flesh was discolored to a sickly grayish-green. None of my fingernails were less than an inch long. My toenails were poking out the front of my flimsy cloth boots. Miserably I unbuttoned the front of the robe and ran a clawed hand across my chest and belly. A deep scar ran diagonally across my torso, held together with rusty metal staples. At least my nerves had warmed up to the point that now I merely felt as if all four of my limbs had fallen asleep at the same time.
“Do you want to . . . take a look around?” asked the zombie who’d found me. Now that the earthquake had stopped, everyone in the graveyard was milling around uncertainly.
“No,” I said, folding my arms with a series of unpleasant cracking noises. “I’m not moving until someone or something comes along and explains what the hell’s going on. And only if it’s a good explanation with lots of apologies.”
Suddenly there was a thunderclap of magical energies colliding and a vertical sheet of flame burst forth along the ground several feet away, walling off access. More firewalls started igniting, forming a zigzag that seemed to be bearing down on us.
That’ll have to do, I thought. Somehow I’d leapt to my feet, and I found myself forced to run again. More flaming barriers were bursting up all over the cemetery, and the undead masses were soon high-speed shuffling away from them and towards the graveyard entrance, where a crowd was frantically shoving against a pair of massive iron gates. A few attempted to scatter in different directions and were turned away by pointed bursts of flame. The word “shepherding” came to mind.
“What’s going on?!” I said, repeating myself somewhat.
“It is a sign for the righteous,” said someone next to me, who was gazing at a point above and to the left of him. “We have been resurrected for the Day of Judgment.”
Too late I noticed his suspiciously cassock-like robe and collar. Mages, even student ones, don’t get along with priests. Priests are all about using magic to heal wounds, and mages are all about using magic to create the wounds in the first place. Still, religion was probably the best place to start looking for an explanation, since there was a definite apocalyptic taste to current events. “Day of Judgment?”
He looked down at me in that way priests do, with what remained of his lips smashed tightly together and his eyes staring like I’d just widdled on his daughter. “The LORD has returned the righteous to life in time for the Rapture.”
I looked around for my cryptmates, but they had been absorbed by the crowd, and once they reach a certain stage of decomposition, all corpses start to look alike. “Er,” I said, glancing toward the spooky and unhelpful forest. “Does Almighty God say anything about the itinerary for Judgment Day? I mean, are we supposed to meet him somewhere?”
Almost all the resurrected were now gathered around the entrance gates. A couple of forward-thinking undead were rattling the padlock with numb fingers, but they jumped back in terror when a colossal explosion rang out. As one, the crystals
disintegrated, filling the air with tiny shards of twinkling green glass. A fork of lightning split the night sky, a boom like the crashing of worlds. The wind picked up, fluttering our rotting rags insanely about our bodies. Something was obviously trying to get our attention.
“This is it,” said the priest. “I am returning to my father!” He kicked me in the leg. “Stand not so close to me, demon, and stain not my soul!”
“Ow.”
A laugh screamed out over the graveyard, a hearty and insane laugh, about as far removed from polite after dinner laughter as you can get. This was the kind of insane laughter even the truly insane have to practice for years to get right.
There, standing on top of the gate with legs wide, one fist pointed skyways and one clinging to a nearby pillar for stability, was a cackling silhouette. A bolt of lightning set alight a circle of fuel, obviously prepared beforehand, and a fire quickly rose around his perch.
“Rise, my hordes of darkness!” he shrieked, then he did that laugh thing again. With the firelight, I could now make out his features. He was very tall and very thin, with the body and skin tone of one who has placed far too many pieces of his soul in far too many evil magic artifacts. He had tried to disguise his skinny build with a thickly padded black cloak and a pair of spiked shoulder pads the size of watermelons. Framing his sunken face was an ornate obsidian helmet carved somewhat predictably into the shape of an angry fanged skull. In addition to all that, he was addressing a bunch of dead guys, so he might as well have been wearing a sash with “NECROMANCER” writ big.
“Rise!” he repeated, throwing up his hands. “Rise, and join the ranks of my unholy horde!”
He seemed to notice for the first time that we weren’t exactly rushing to his side, but were mainly watching him as a zoo patron would watch a crazy monkey, curious but ready to move at the first sign of poo-flinging. There was a minute of awkward silence before someone near the back with their head held under their arm said, “Who’s this twat?”
“Are you God?” asked someone else.
The necromancer clearly wasn’t prepared for either of those questions, but to his credit he recovered quickly. “Perhaps I am!” he said, flashing a winning smile. “Your ruler, certainly! And soon the ruler of the world!” He stretched out the word “world” until a roll of thunder served up the exclamation mark. “March, my undead minions! We ride to my fortress of darkness!”
Glances were exchanged between the undead minions in question, most of them directed towards the agnostic speaker of the previous question, who was apparently being groomed as company spokesman. He was a turquoise fellow with missing ears and piles of gravedirt on his shoulders. “Do we have to?”
This time, the necromancer’s improvisational skills abandoned him. His arms dropped to his sides, and when he replied, the booming insane qualities were missing from his voice. “Well . . . yes, I mean . . . you’re my undead minions. I raised you from the grave. You have to do everything I say.” Doubt was clearly nagging at him. He extended his hands again, holding his gnarled ebony staff horizontally. “I command thee to march!”
“Your commands are the futile bleating of the damned, bedfellow of the Serpent,” growled the priest.
“March!” A spark of panic materialized in the necromancer’s eyes as if it had finally dawned on him that he had just placed himself right in the middle of a cranky, unstoppable army of unwilling zombies and identified himself as the source of their misfortune. “March! Walk . . . jump up and down . . .
do a little dance . . . er . . . ” The staff wobbled nervously in his grip. “You’ve got free will, haven’t you.”
“Sort of,” said the spokesman.
“They’ve got free will!” called the necromancer, to a trio of men in full suits of spikey black armor who had been tending to a quartet of horses some distance away. “How the hell have they got free will?!”
“I dunno what to tell yer, Lord Dreadgrave,” said one of the soldiers, his voice echoing nicely in his senselessly huge helmet. “It’s your ritual.”
Dreadgrave smacked himself in the face with a full open palm. “It’s my ritual. It’s meh reh teh meh. It’s meh meh meh meh. I came in here for a horde. What the hell am I supposed to do with a bunch of smelly . . . independents?”
“Why don’t you just ask us to join your horde?” s
aid the haughty lady with no arms. “Like polite, decent people do.”
“Would you really? If I asked? Gartharas, would you put this fire out, please, I think it’s coming straight for my shoes—”
“Maybe,” said our spokesman, as the armored men began stamping on the dwindling ring of flame. “I mean, we’ve never really been in any undead hordes before, so we might be interested in the opportunity to try new things.”
“And it’s not like we’ve got much else to do with our time now that we’re piles of rotting meat and bones that no-one besides the utterly depraved would ever want to sleep with,” said the decrepit old corpse (whom I still felt had issues).
Dreadgrave tapped his staff against his palm pensively. “Do you want to join my horde?”
The undead closest to the spokesman, and the ones who had appointed themselves senior members of the undead community, went into a huddled conference. For a few minutes, all eyes were on a muttering scrumdown of assorted abominations. Someone put forward a motion, someone else seconded it, and the meeting was adjourned. “What does it pay?” asked the spokesman, after a cough.
“Pay?” said Dreadgrave distastefully. “Why should it pay anything?”
A collective moan descended on the crowd, and some of them started drifting away, losing interest in the whole stupid affair.
“But . . . wait, wait, wait, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,” said the necromancer, flapping his arms to avoid losing his audience. “What I meant was . . . why do you want to get paid? What could you possibly want the money for?” No-arms opened her mouth to reply, but no answer was forthcoming. Dreadgrave continued. “You don’t need food. You don’t need water. You don’t need to sleep, so you don’t need shelter, so you don’t need rent money. You can’t get tired so you don’t need to pay for carriages and things. What else is there?”
“Prostitutes?” tried Gartharas, leaning amicably on a tombstone.
“Well, like he said, they’d need to be blind or open-minded to a completely shameful degree. I just don’t think any of you could have any possible need for a regular wage.”
Mogworld Page 2
