“Hold where ye are!” the first sentry commanded. “Ye got two bows aiming at ye!”
Now they did recognize the approaching form—he was barely a dozen strides away—as a man, skinny and grizzled, with long hair and a huge beard. He had to have heard the command, they knew, but he kept on coming in that stiff-legged gait, his arms straight out before him.
And he was filthy! Covered in dirt, or peat, and smelling like a rotting and dirty carcass.
“Hold now! I’m warning ye!” the sentry commanded.
He kept on coming; and the sentry, a trained and seasoned soldier, followed his orders to the word and let fly his arrow. It hit the approaching man’s chest with a dull splat, and burrowed in deep, but the man kept coming, didn’t even flinch!
“I hit him! I hit him!” the confused sentry protested; and now his companion let fly, a shot that took the intruder in the side, just below the rib cage, a shot from a bow so strong of pull that the arrow disappeared completely into the body, its tip breaking through the other side.
The approaching man flinched, the sheer force of the blow knocking him a step sideways. But he kept on coming, coming, his arms outstretched, his expression blank.
“Awake! Awake!” the second sentry yelled, falling back through the wall of pines toward the camp. His companion, though, didn’t retreat, but drew out his heavy sword and leaped ahead.
The approaching intruder didn’t change his speed or his route, coming straight in; and the soldier exploded into motion, bringing his sword up and over, cleaving one of those reaching arms above the elbow, severing it easily.
A bit of blood rolled out, but more than that came a sickly greenish white pus.
The soldier knew then the horrible truth, understood the stench to be a mixture of peat and rot, the sickly smell of death, but tainted even more with earthen richness. He knew then that he was fighting not a man but a corpse! Gagging, horrified, he fell back; but the zombie caught his sword in its bare hand as he turned, in a grip tremendously strong.
He screamed out—somehow he found his voice enough to make noise—and tugged and tugged at the sword, then gave it up altogether and tried to scramble away. But as he turned, he saw them, dozens and dozens of walking dead, coming through the mist. Overwhelmed, he stumbled and went down.
He cried out again as the one-armed zombie fell over him, grabbing him by the elbow, crushing his joint in its iron grip. He shouted and flailed, beating the thing about the head and shoulders, to no avail.
But then his companion was beside him again, and with one mighty swing, he decapitated the zombie.
Still it held on stubbornly. The other soldier, seeing the monsters approaching from everywhere, it seemed, hacked wildly at that clasping hand, severing it, too. He pulled his friend to his feet and dragged him to the pines, but the man was still screaming, for that severed hand was still clutching him!
Duke Tetrafel rubbed his bleary eyes and peeked out from his bedroll. The sight of the encampment, of the panic, brought him wide awake, and he scrambled to his feet.
“Attack! Attack, my Duke!” one nearby soldier cried to him, running forward, bearing Tetrafel’s sword belt.
Tetrafel struggled to clasp it on, turning, trying to keep up with the dizzying scene.
“The dead, they are!” screamed a sentry crashing through the pine wall. “The dead’ve risen against us!”
“From the forest, from the forest!” another yelled. The pines all about the small clearing began to shake, and the monsters strode through, in that stiff-legged gait, their peat-covered arms out straight before them. From the back of the camp came a horrified cry that turned Duke Tetrafel about. A pair of sentries scrambled through the pine wall, but got yanked right back in, grabbed and tugged so hard that one of them left one of his shoes behind.
The screams that followed were, perhaps, the most awful sound Duke Tetrafel had ever heard.
“Form a defense!” the captain of Tetrafel’s contingent cried, and his men moved back near the fire, forming a ring about it, with the servants and their Duke behind them.
The zombie ring closed slowly, ominously.
“Go for their heads,” cried one of the sentries who had first encountered them.
But then, above the tumult, they heard a melodic song, a gentle, sweet harmony of beautiful, delicate voices, drifting on the evening breeze, singing in a language that they did not know, something preternatural, a sylvan song of an ancient forest. As if on cue, the zombies stopped and lowered their arms.
The wind blew a bit stronger, as if flowing with the song.
“What is it?” more than one man asked anxiously.
“Be still,” Duke Tetrafel told them all. “Allies, perhaps.”
Between the men and the zombies, the ground began to tremble and then to break apart, and then …
Flowers sprouted. Huge flowers, with great petals shining silver in the moonlight, the likes of which the men of Honce-the-Bear had never seen.
And the smell of them! Overwhelming, overpowering, burying even the stench of the zombies.
An inviting smell, Duke Tetrafel thought, compelling him to lie down and rest, to close his eyes and sleep. Yes, Tetrafel realized, he wanted nothing more at that moment than to sleep. He saw several of his companions go down beside him, nestling comfortably on the ground, and without even registering the movement, he found himself on his hands and knees, having trouble, so much trouble, even keeping his head up.
“Get up!” He heard the captain’s voice from far, far away. “All of ye! They’re coming on again! Oh, get up, ye fools!”
And then he heard the cries and the shouts, the swoosh of cutting blades, the hum of bowstrings.
And then he heard … nothing at all, just felt the warmth of a deep, deep sleep.
Duke Tetrafel woke up as if in a dark nightmare. The fog clung to the ground all about him—not a watery mist like the one from the falls, but an opaque, soupy blanket. He was sitting now, tightly bound with his hands behind him around a small stake. He was in a forest, still, but not the same one, as far as he could discern; for instead of the thick rows of pines, the trees about him now were mere skeletons, black and twisted and leafless.
Groans to either side of him made him glance about, to see many of his party, similarly seated and bound, in a neat line, which told him that these stakes had been purposely placed, that their captors, whoever they might be, were skilled at this.
“Where are the others?” he asked one soldier near him.
“They took them!” came the nervous, completely unsettled reply. Duke Tetrafel followed the sweating man’s gaze to a pair of smallish, very slender creatures walking toward them. Flanking the duo came several of the walking dead.
Trying hard to ignore their horrid escorts, Tetrafel studied the pair carefully, their creamy white skin and penetrating blue eyes that seemed to glow with an inner sparkle. They wore dark-colored robes, the cowls back, and at times seemed to simply disappear into the landscape, except for their exposed heads. Tetrafel tried to sort things out. These weren’t merely small humans, he knew, and that was confirmed as they neared and he noted their pointy ears and angular features.
“Touel’alfar?” he asked, for he had heard some tales of the elves, mostly children’s fireside stories.
The two robed figures froze at the word, glancing at each other with obvious rage.
“Doc’alfar!” one of them said sharply. He strode over and hit Duke Tetrafel with a backhanded slap across the face that nearly left the man unconscious. He could hardly believe that a creature so lithe and small had hit him so damned hard!
By the time Tetrafel had recovered his senses, the two robed Doc’alfar had selected their next victim, a woman seated several places to the Duke’s right. They motioned to her and turned away; and their unthinking, unquestioning servants moved to her, pulling her free of her bindings and hoisting her up. She cried pitifully, and her legs would not support her, but that hardly mattered to the zombie
s. They kept moving, holding her fast; and if she did not work her legs to keep up, they dragged her along.
“What are you doing with her?” Duke Tetrafel demanded, and when the two robed Doc’alfar didn’t even glance back, he turned to the soldier next to him. “What are they to do with her?”
“To the bog with her,” the man replied grimly. “Watch yer own fate, me Duke.”
Duke Tetrafel stared back into the fog, to the receding figures, seeming like ghosts now.
He saw the Doc’alfar pause and pour various liquids over the squirming woman, and then watched the zombies drag the woman to the side, and then up a small platform that he had not noticed before, for in the fog it had seemed like just another of the many twisted trees.
The zombies took her, screaming and sobbing, out to the end of the platform and held her there; and all of her wriggling and screaming and kicking did her no good at all.
The two Doc’alfar began chanting, one after another, their melodic voices filling the wind with sound, complementing each other perfectly. Gradually, their song blended together, until they were chanting in one voice. Others, unseen among the trees and in the fog, joined in, Tetrafel realized after a while; and the whole forest seemed to be singing.
What garish ritual is this? the Duke wondered. Was it religious?
And then, abruptly, all sound, even the woman’s sobs, stopped, as if compelled by one of the Doc’alfar, the lithe creature thrusting his arms up into the night air, his voluminous sleeves falling back to show his white, slender arms. All the world seemed to pause, as if the creature had stopped time itself.
And then the zombies pushed the woman forward, and she screamed as she fell, breaking the spell.
Tetrafel could barely make her out through the shifting fog, buried to her waist in the bog, scrambling and crying; her movements only made her sink down even farther.
“Oh, help me!” she cried, sinking slowly, slowly. “Help me. I don’t want to die! I don’t want to be one o’ them zombies!”
It went on and on, for several agonizing minutes, the woman unable to get out and being dragged down, slowly, slowly. The Doc’alfar began their song again, a prayer of sacrifice, apparently, drowning the woman’s shrill, horrified cries. Soon that song was the only noise carried on the wind.
When it was over, the Doc’alfar methodically headed back again, their zombies in tow, and despite the shouting protests, they selected another, a soldier this time; and all the man’s vicious fighting proved to be of no avail as the zombies dragged him away.
Duke Tetrafel could hardly breathe! What horror had he stumbled upon, out here beyond civilization? He knew then, as they all did, that the woman’s assessment of her fate was correct, that through some magical ceremony, he and all his party would be given to the bog, then returned to the Doc’alfar as unthinking, undead servants!
He thought of all his work, of all the glory, of his aspirations for immortality. Now he would find that immortality, but in no way he had ever wanted!
“They’ll go off for a bit after the second,” the soldier next to him whispered harshly. “Two at a time, they do, and then they’re away for a bit.”
Tetrafel instinctively struggled with his bindings. “Too tight,” he replied to the man, trying hard to keep his voice steady, to not cry out in fear.
“But I’ve got me post loose,” the man replied.
The chosen soldier went into the bog then. At first they heard nothing, the man apparently facing his death bravely, but then, as the thick, wet bog rose to his neck, he began to scream out in protest, and then to cry. And then … silence.
As the soldier beside the Duke had predicted, the Doc’alfar and their zombies disappeared soon after, melting into the fog.
The man gave a grunt and a great tug, and he fell over onto his side, his head right behind the seated Duke. Tetrafel strained his neck to glance back, wondering what good that movement might have done.
The soldier opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue—a tongue pierced by a stud set with a small gray stone.
“Magical,” the man explained, “a gift from a friend, put in to put a spark in the ladies, if ye get me meaning.”
“What are you babbling about?” Duke Tetrafel replied rather loudly, and he glanced back as if he expected a host of zombies to rise up and throttle him.
“Ye might feel a bit of a charge, a spark,” the soldier explained. Before the Duke could even ask what the soldier was talking about, he did indeed feel a sharp sting on his wrist. He didn’t protest, though, for he felt, too, that the rope holding him had loosened, the binding burned by the electric charge.
Tetrafel pulled his hands free and fell over the soldier, working furiously at the man’s bindings. Then he was free, too, and the Duke moved to the next in line, a servant woman, who was crying wildly. He had just finished with her bindings and moved to the woman beside her when he realized that the song had begun again, and he turned back to see ghostly forms appearing in the fog.
With a cry of terror, Duke Tetrafel abandoned the woman and ran off into the night.
He heard the screams of those still tied, or of those who had just begun to flee and were not quick enough, as they got hauled down and dragged back.
A part of Tetrafel demanded that he go back, that he die with these men and women who had served so well beside him for these three years. A noble part of him screamed at him to face his fate bravely.
But he pictured the zombies, the horrid peat-covered undead, and he ran on. He wanted to go back, but he could not. His legs kept moving. He fell hard and scraped his face, but he scrambled right back up and ran on, into the fog.
Others were running in the fog-enshrouded forest, he knew; and pursuit was all about—the heavy dragging steps of the zombies and, even more dangerous, the nimble Doc’alfar, some running in the boughs above.
Duke Tetrafel ran until his legs ached and his breath would not come, and then, driven by the sheerest horror, he ran on and on and on. For all of his life, he ran. For his eternal soul, he ran.
The sun rose before his eyes, and still he ran, and he thought for a moment that it had all been only a terrible dream.
But he knew better, knew the truth. And Duke Timian Tetrafel of the Wilderlands, a nobleman of the court of King Danube Brock Ursal, a man who had planned to engrave his name in the histories of his people and upon some of the greatest natural monuments in all the world, crumpled into the grass and wept.
Tetrafel met two other soldiers of his band that day, men as frightened as he. There was no talk of returning to try to save any of the others; there was little talk at all.
They just ran on and on, to the east, to lands where the dead did not rise out of peat bogs.
More than three weeks later, the three came back into the somewhat civilized lands of Wester-Honce, and a week after that, riding in the back of a farmer’s sleigh, Duke Tetrafel arrived home in Ursal. The very next day, Duke Kalas returned to the city, vowing never to go back to wretched Palmaris.
A week later, King Danube’s son was born to Constance Pemblebury.
Chapter 24
The Brothers Repentant
“YOU HATE EVERYTHING, AND EVERYONE,” SOVEREIGN SISTER TREISA INSISTED, coming forward and poking her accusing finger De’Unnero’s way. Outside the abbey, spring had passed its midpoint, and the number of pitiful, plague-ridden, desperate folk had swelled once more, adding to the sovereign sister’s foul mood. She was the one remaining sovereign sister at the abbey, and thus had become the spokeswoman for all fifteen of the sisters still alive at St. Gwendolyn.
The man, the self-appointed abbot of the devastated abbey, glanced around, his smile wry, reminding Treisa that she was not among friends here in his office. Several brothers of St. Gwendolyn, converts to De’Unnero’s definition of the Abellican faith, desperate men seeking answers, lined the room.
Treisa backed off a step and followed the abbot’s gaze about the room, staring incredulously at the faces of m
en she had once considered her brothers. What a different abbey she had found when she had hastily returned after hearing of the demise of her friend and mentor Abbess Delenia and several others! What a different place was St. Gwendolyn, with Marcalo De’Unnero as abbot! That had been De’Unnero’s first tactic, she understood, separating the remaining brothers from the remaining sisters of St. Gwendolyn. He had installed a patriarchal, male-dominated order here in the one abbey that had been established to see to the religious ambitions of those few women who managed to earn, through bribery of rich fathers or through sheer, undeniable goodness, a place in the Church.
“You claim that the followers of Avelyn brought the plague to us,” she said, quietly but not meekly.
“Plausible,” the abbot replied calmly.
“Unproven,” Sovereign Sister Treisa retorted.
“Plausible,” De’Unnero repeated. “And if we are to believe that the plague is a punishment from God, as we know it must be, then the proof lies before you.”
Treisa stared at him curiously, not catching the link.
“With the murder of Father Abbot Markwart, the Abellican Church has shifted its purpose and its direction,” De’Unnero explained; and it was clear to Treisa that he was preaching to his followers more than explaining to her. “Rumors from the College of Abbots hint that the process to canonize Avelyn Desbris will begin this very year. Canonization? The man murdered Master Siherton of St.-Mere-Abelle—I was there and remember well! The man stole a huge treasure of sacred gemstones and ran across the world as an impostor brother, ignoring law and commands to cease and return. Canonization? Saint Avelyn?”
“Is not the process one of investigation?” Treisa asked, but De’Unnero scoffed at her before she finished.
“It is political,” he argued, “a way to placate the masses who have become very afraid—a way to fabricate a hero, that those who seek personal gain might raise that hero’s name in their own honor.” He paused and eyed Treisa suspiciously. “Such was the canonization of St. Gwendolyn.”
DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) Page 39
