"I know," he smiled wide enough his cheeks would burst, "just like home."
"You come from the rotting carcass of a whale?" Isa pressed, fighting off her own unhappy memories of a sea and a trip away from an uneventful life.
Kynton bowed, "My lady, isn't that a bit too formal for us? Our parents haven't even been introduced."
The witch scowled and lowered her stick, as if it were any danger outside of some slight swelling along his abdomen. But Aldrin snagged an opportunity he rarely took to pile onto Isa, "Her mother is a big scary witch. I doubt any would want to meet her."
It wasn't his best, but it did have the intended effect of digging under Isa's scales. Her pale eyes turned on him and a finger badly in need of a manicure waved under his nose, "Do not speak of things you do not understand, boy."
"Why not? How else will one learn?" Aldrin asked back with such sincerity Isa was dumbstruck. She snapped her head from the priest, to the servant, and back at the prince before gathering up her skirt's edge and climbing up the hill obscuring the horizon, muttering curses under her breath.
Kynton slugged Aldrin in the back, causing some minor spine damage on his own, "That was bloody beautiful my boy! But next time, try'n bring up her weight. That always pisses girls off."
The priest's blessing made Aldrin feel dirtier than he already did. He hung his head and looked sheepishly over at Ciara, who, in a strange fit of womanly camaraderie, followed after Isa. The witch was struggling with the hill; her smaller stride unable to find purchase in the slippery ground but the walking staff provided remarkable assistance. For once, Ciara wished she had one.
Isa's plump posterior rose in front of her as the witch claimed the hill as her own before disappearing over the side. Ciara dropped to her hands to help steady herself against the ice, clinging to clumps of snow she was suddenly in no mood to toss at anyone. Her eyes were still on the ground as she rose to the top to join Isa.
"That was a right pain in the ass. Scepticar should install stairs in some of these hills," Ciara muttered to herself. As she brushed the mud off her hands and looked up, her voice fell silent.
Like burst cherries upon the snow, tossed and broken where they fell, clumps of bodies dotted the horizon below them. The blood, aged to the color of wine, ate away at most of the snow before freezing itself and turning a sickening purple. Swords and other broken weapons were all that marked the incredibly shallow graves of the forgotten and fallen warriors. The only movements were the black birds, dancing about the corpses, hunting for their own loot from the decomposing treasure chests.
Aldrin, broken free from the man's club, joined the women staring in shock at the battlefield. "Oh gods, what happened here?"
"Your war," Isa said simply, "Part of it, at least."
The prince shook his head, as if that could erase the memory of the crow dislodging an axe buried deep inside some poor nameless man's brain to peck at the gray matter below. "No. How? The Empire's...somewhere else," he tried to argue, finding it difficult to piece together his thoughts on cartography as the sea air carried the sadly familiar scent of decay and death.
"Look around you, boy," Isa scolded, "Your war has begun, whether you admit it to yourself or not."
"You do not know it is the Empire, it could be a local skirmish," Ciara argued, knowing all too well how often those would break out if someone let their prized hounds crap all over someone else's hunting grounds.
Taban coughed politely. The assassin was dangerously light on his feet and knew when to make a more pronounced entrance. "Their corpses will offer identification."
Rather than waiting for the boy prince to object he walked down the hill solemnly, slotting his bow back across his shoulders after drawing it at the child's outburst. Ciara looked over at Aldrin who was still dumbstruck at the seemingly limitless bodies stretched across the frozen land. His frozen land.
"Who died?" Kynton asked, slapping Aldrin on the shoulder, before looking out towards the seascape, "Oh, everyone."
The witch didn't even bother zapping the inelegant priest and, taking her skirt into her hand, followed behind the assassin with Ciara trailing both. A dark hand, uncovered despite the snow in deference for the dirty job, slid aside a fallen arm revealing a chest of armor that had been a washtub in another life. A crudely painted bird graced the front, its tongue lashing out to the side. Ignoring the anatomical confusion of a bird with a tongue, Taban flipped over the man piled on top of him, this one in armor he purchased off one of those wandering peddlers who are in no way yanking it off the dead, repainting it, and selling for a serious markup *wink wink*. The painted eagle was replaced by a bat? Bear? Cougar with a head cold? It was difficult to tell, but its tongue also leaned to the right.
"Local heraldry," Taban muttered to himself. The city-states were rife with it, each father scrounging enough land to declare himself noble and then throwing a few crude drawings onto a dinner plate and calling it a coat of arms. It was truly an army of one.
The witch walked past the assassin, striding deeper into the field of battle. Ciara paused for a moment and quickly closed the eyes of the men who served under the banner of the eagle and the bat bear. Taban turned to her and started to smile, but she already chased after Isa, not wanting to get into an argument. There should have been smoke and fire, and cries in the distance as priests like Kynton raced from one dying man crying about the woman he'd left back home to another. The only response to the crush of boot into snow was a 'caw caw' from the crows and the hanging whispers of throats sliced before their time.
Ciara shivered and slowed, gazing back at the priest and Aldrin in a heated conversation, which Kynton was having all by himself. The prince seemed to be in shock, unable to move past the first set of bodies. His eyes were focused only on that soldier slumped back, his intestines gutted out and drying in the winter sun. If it weren't for all of his insides on the outside he looked as if he were sleeping with his head tossed back carefree, and the aging of stress drained from a face as youthful as Aldrin's.
"Peasant," Isa called crisply.
Ciara glared at the witch who was bending over a soldier crushed beneath retreating boots, her walking stick poking the corpse she dare not touch. "I have a name."
"Yes, yes," the witch waved her hand, not bothering to look up, "bring your named self over here and look."
Shaking her head, almost grateful for the indifference to rile up her frozen blood, Ciara joined Isa just as the witch finally flipped the dead body over. The face was bruised and bloodied to such a pulp it could barely be considered human. But that wasn't what the witch was pointing to.
"Look familiar?" she asked, butting the armor with the end of her stick.
A whole plague of frogs caught in Ciara's throat as she gazed at an all too familiar interlocking symbol across an obsidian chest. It was one she'd ran face first into all those months ago. The mark of the Empire.
"This is no common battalion of the Empire," Isa continued as if she were giving a lecture, "that is the Emperor's elite." The witch's eyes gazed about the battlefield, noting the small mounds of black under numerous piles of metal and leather. "I'd guess less than a few hundred died for your Ostero thousand."
"How do you know so much about the Empire?" Ciara asked as if she weren't standing in the middle of a field full of their dead, "Where are you actually from?"
Isa sighed and raised her hands to the sky as if that would offer some succor from the fools, but all she got back was a slosh from the great noodle bowl in the sky. Turning to the peasant she said, "Witches travel. I happen to have traveled more than most. And along the way we listen. No, I am no more Avari than you, or our assassin, or the drippy thing you have your eye on."
"Kynton's all yours," Ciara snapped back before a blush gave away any lie.
Isa shivered at that, "I am from a place far away."
The peasant snorted at that, "Far far away," she waved her hands around for dramatic affect, "second star to the right and straight
on to nowhere land?"
"That is a terrible set of directions without a starting point," Isa clipped, unused to the reference. "Fine, I am from a village."
"A magical village where people talk to crocodiles and feed pirates to mermaids?" Ciara cut in, getting a bit punch drunk in the above ground cemetery.
"No," Isa's eyes were crackling a dangerous blue, "a typical village where most of the inhabitants spend their living and dying days in a patty field. It was superstitious, though nowhere near as bad as this dreadful land."
Isa shook her head, not enjoying the trip down memory lane. "Do you know what it is like to be the unhammered nail in a wall? The pebble in the shoe? A person marked as different from birth." Ciara folded her arms and glared at the witch. Isa acquiesced to the dark flesh, "Right. My birth was marked, thanks to this shock of white hair. A sign of magic."
"Did the villagers try to destroy you? So you had to flee with your mother?"
"No, of course not. It was a gift from the gods. A sign that their village was favored. Truth be told, I was overtly coddled as a child, fattened on sweetmeats and protein as many came to me for help with their problems. It was a heavy burden for a three year old that just figured out what the privy was for.
"My mother, Seda, was not my actual mother, but a witch traveling through the foreign lands offering up her own services. She discovered me, wasting away in a backwater and recruited me."
"How old were you?"
Isa caught the trap in her concern and said, "Old enough to understand, young enough to agree anyway."
Ciara folded her lips and looked away, not enjoying this bonding moment anymore than the witch was. As far as she was concerned witches were torn from the thigh of the god of cats, and she liked to keep it that way.
"The point being, I am not from Avari. You need not fear me turning your precious prince in for coin."
"Into a frog is a different matter entirely," Taban said walking towards the girls so wrapped up in their conversation they forgot there were other living souls there.
Isa pouted but didn't make a move. She'd watched the assassin move, like liquid metal he could blanket the field of play before you even took your turn. The man frightened her, not that she'd ever admit it. Luckily, he had some disquieting affection for the peasant. Keep near her and she should be safe.
"Empire, as I suspected," Taban said glancing down at the black armor. "Familiar ones too." He looked over at Ciara, "We left many in our wake, Nightingale."
This threw Isa, "Wait, you've seen these men, this squadron before?"
Ciara nodded, not wanting to break eye contact with the assassin who'd killed so many of them.
"And lived to tell of it?" She'd faced down her own run-ins with the religiously crazed emperor's arm and barely escaped with her buns intact. And that was with her mother.
"It was dark, perhaps they failed to see us," Taban smiled at the witch like a hungry panther stretching its reach to prove it didn't need to prove anything.
The witch's hair rose in response, the white tufts climbing skyward in anger as the familiar blue mist danced about her pupils. Taban, momentarily thrown, stepped back, earning a scowl of joy from Isa. But he wasn't moving away from the witch, his eyes were trained upon the dead soldier laying behind her.
His bow was fitted with an arrow and in his hands before the witch could turn. "Do not point your weapons at me!" Isa growled at the assassin, trying to turn the quiver in her voice to steel.
But Taban ignored her, his arrow aimed for different prey. She glared over the corpse, laying there as it had been for the past day or two. It was hard to judge decomposition in the frozen wasteland. Then, no, it must have been a trick of the eyes. This land had some dreadful weed that pulled at her vision and caused her nose to leak.
Ciara squeaked, and pointed in horror to their left. As Isa turned, the severed knee of a man twitched, as if it kicked in response to the body that was yards away.
"Shit!" Taban cursed as the broken knight of the empire sat up, its bloated face so broken the eyes were invisible. The head began to turn. He unleashed his arrow, which stuck right into the scabbed eye socket but didn't slow down the turn of the unblinker's head. It bobbled and weaved, dropping down as the neck muscles gave out, snagging the feather of the arrow on a rivet in the chest plate.
Still the head twisted as if it couldn't make sense of the snare, fighting against it like a wild animal. Taban grabbed Ciara's arm and pulled her back to him, uncertain what to do. The leg, forgotten as the empire soldier tried to get his own underneath him to rise, thudded into the witch.
Isa's scream shattered the eardrums of the few dead soldiers who'd managed to retain them. "By all the..." Taban muttered, trying to shield his own tortured hearing. The girl had a set of pipes that would disillusion most eunuchs. He whacked her lightly in the back with the end of his bow trying to get her attention.
The scream died to a gurgle as Ciara picked up the still hopping leg by the foot and, putting all her revulsion into muscle, wound up and threw the fetid thing like a discus. "What in the hell is going on?" she begged the gods, while wiping the gore onto her dress.
"I need to leave," Isa was dead calm.
"What was your first clue?" Taban asked, drawing out his blade and wishing he had that old firebomb his recruiter was always going on about.
The witch's head turned to the assassin and he gasped himself, trying to lean away from the blue mist that encircled her entire face, "No, I must leave. Now!"
A dead hand latched onto her ankle, the broken necked son of the empire would have turned to look up at her if it could. Before she could draw breath for another scream, Taban sliced off the hand at the wrist, the arm falling to a thud in the snow, a small dribble of blood answered back as if whatever foul magic drove the corpse was also warming its veins.
Isa kicked wildly, sending the hand flying in the direction of a pair running towards them as if their asses were on fire.
"Go, flee, the unblinkers they're..." Aldrin shouted to the gathered group.
"Back," Taban said flatly, as he grabbed the dead man's sword and drove it into the chest of the soldier, pinning it to the ground. "We noticed." In reaction to their vanguard's snare, piles of snow erupted as soldiers sat upright, most with entire quiverfulls of arrows still sticking from their chests.
"Gods!" Kynton mumbled, crossing his chest with his arms as if that protected him from the evil.
Taban, his own sword pulled free, dashed about the encircled group, watching in a compartmentalized terror as dead men rose to their feet. Dead men who were still armed and armored. "Run. Run!"
Ciara grabbed Isa's sleeve and yanked her off her feet, jumpstarting the witch. Kynton was already beating feet except it was towards the shoreline, deeper into the battlefield of the dead. That damnable priest, Taban cursed but nodded after him and Ciara followed with the witch. It was better they stick together and who knew how far they had to go until the dead wouldn't follow. Aldrin unsheathed his own rusty sword, ready to face down his own people but Taban booted him, "Swords are no use here."
Aldrin pointed to the still twitching soldier pinned under his own.
"Swords are some use here," he admitted, "but not against two armies." Taban sheathed his own and looked down at the princeling, "Come boy, we'll live for now and fight later."
Together the two of them chased after the girls. Ciara jumped over the rising legs of one man while Isa ducked under the swinging dead arms of another. The witch was almost her own torch in the dark as the magic built up around her, coating her entire body in that blue glow. Kynton, sprinting for his life, failed to notice the pike swinging from the amputated arms of the infantry line. It was about to stick right into his priestly gut had Ciara not stomped down hard on the hand, cracking the bones so it slipped from the fingers and clattered to the ground in front of the priest. He glanced back to the girl who'd saved his life and shrugged before trying to break out ahead again, as if that would somehow s
ave him.
Behind, Aldrin and Taban were trying to fend off dead blows; the assassin appeared a psychic thanks to the still frozen limbs of the unblinkers. He could yank the prince out of the way before a heaved sword or dropped arrow could find purchase. But his luck couldn't hold out. The further they ran the more rising soldiers they found. He wasn't certain what they'd do if one finally got to its unsteady legs.
Glancing out over the horizon he spotted the only possible refuge in the sea of bloody foaming snow, "Can the dead climb trees?" he shouted to the world.
Ciara looked back momentarily, missing a shield that banged into the side of her. She started to crumble but Isa held her upright, blasting a charge into the shield that rocked the body until it lay motionless. "Only one way to find out," Ciara shouted, trying to not let the blow break her concentration. Throwing a clod of snow at Kynton's head, she motioned towards the tree and made for it.
The rare bit of landscape in the dead fields, it was an ancient elm with branches as thick as some battering rams. Kynton skidded to a halt, his 6-foot frame jumping to try to reach the lowest branch. Even as his fingers missed by inches, he still kept at it, with the feverish hope that he'd suddenly sprout wings.
"This is never going to bloody work," Ciara muttered, her eyes turning back to the unblinkers slowly crawling forward, aware that in the distance a few taller shadows moved. Some were upright.
"It will if we work together," Taban said like one of those depressing inspirational scrolls her mother used to hang above the servants' door.
The assassin stalked forward and, grabbing the jumping priest around the middle, lifted him like a dancer during a very dramatic scene that was probably supposed to represent man's triumph over animal or a baked good. It was enough of a boost for Kynton's fingers to find purchase around the branch. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to give some extra muscle to the priest's slacking biceps. He dangled from the tree like a rag doll.
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