Nights of Villjamur

by Mark Charan Newton

  The chief of defence was solemn as he clasped the parapet. 'I . . . I really don't know.'

  Urtica placed an arm around him. 'I wouldn't like to say what might happen otherwise. I mean, there are some prominent pro-military Council members with significant investments in armoury and ores - and in times of war their incomes and influence are known to rise hugely. Should they be denied this opportunity - and your name will be thrown about the Atrium - well, I have heard tell of punishment beatings for this sort of thing in the past. Such stories . . .' He shook his head and sighed for effect.

  A moment later, as if ordered, a banshee began keening in the distance, somewhere possibly Caveside. As time passed, Fentuk was visibly shaken by this potential premonition. 'How much money are we talking about exactly?' he muttered eventually.

  Urtica smiled. 'That's the spirit, Fentuk. You won't regret this. You should maybe join me for drinks sometime, socially.'

  *

  Brynd had ordered his men to set up camp for the night on the edge of a copse of trees seven hours' ride further on from the hamlet of Goule, and just past the Bria Haugr, a conical hill that was reputed to be an ancient Azimuth burial mound. The surrounding fagus would provide them with some concealment.

  They were now halfway to the military port of Gish. Brynd didn't want to travel via E'toawor, a significant port town and favoured entry point to Jokull. He couldn't afford to go further north either, to the towns of Vilhokteu and, on the estuary of the River Hok, Vilhokr. He certainly did not need the eyes of common tradesmen, dockers, and farm labourers to be the first of her subjects to set eyes upon the new Empress.

  As the sun set Brynd and Sen sparred with sabres a little to fend off the boredom. But as the sky became a bold shade of purple, it was clear that Sen was getting the better of him. The others, including the garuda, sat around the fire, backs against the wheels of the carriage, watching.

  'He'll have you, Brynd,' Apium said. 'I can see your defences falling apart. Sen doesn't even need a sword.'

  Brynd ignored the taunts.

  'Go on, lad,' Apium continued. 'Aim low. Go for his cock - he's not got any use for it these days.'

  Finally they sheathed their sabres and Brynd turned to the others. 'Time for a close-range scout. Sen'll stay here with the wing commander. The rest of you want to take a look around with me?'

  Everyone groaned but they stood up.

  Apium brushed himself down. 'Which way we heading, commander?'

  'I think we'll follow a circle going east, nothing too far out, just a few hundred paces. I need to make sure there'll be no surprises tonight.' Brynd wasn't sure exactly how wary to be. This was Jokull, after all, and there hadn't been any serious fighting on the island for years - before Daluk Point. Before that incident, the idea of any threat on the home island was something not even considered.

  The others followed him in a huddled group, taking a three-hundred-pace radius around their camp. The terrain was largely flat, and away from the forest, an open view for leagues. Underfoot was a mossy grass that concealed rocks and dips. Apium managed to fall over just twice.

  The sky blackened further. The glow of the campfire stood out as an intense beacon, revealing the silhouette of the carriage. Somewhere in the distance a wolf howled. Only one of the moons was showing - the larger one, Bohr - but it was now cresting the horizon just before leaving the landscape in utter darkness.

  After a while, Brynd heard something strange in the distance. He had spent enough time in the wild to know that it was nothing natural.

  He regarded the carriage.

  Apium asked, 'What's up?'

  Brynd gestured for him to be silent whilst he scanned the scene with the enhanced vision which the Night Guard benefited from, but it wasn't enough for a clear identification.

  Shadows moved across the landscape.

  Nelum and Lupus moved alongside, staring back to the campfire. Lupus said, 'I see something.'

  'Strap your weapons and armour tight,' Brynd said. 'Let's get back quietly.'

  The four soldiers jogged in stealth across the tundra, back to the carriage. Brynd began to slow, waved for the others to follow suit, then signalled for them to unsheathe their weapons. Lupus swiftly nocked an arrow, Apium and Nelum drew short axes, Brynd pulled out his sabre. As they approached the campfire they spread out.

  Sen and the garuda were nowhere to be seen, the only noise coming from the crackle of the fire.

  And something was wrong, an uncertainty hovering in the air, and once again the environment became to Brynd a matter of statistics, of distances, chances, arrows spent. He turned back to study the copse of trees. He concentrated, heightening his level of perception.

  To the other side of the carriage: a strange lump on the ground. It was difficult to make out in the darkness despite his superior vision.

  He went over and knelt down next to it.

  Lurched back in disgust.

  It was Sen's head, severed cleanly, blood draining away from it in a small trickle between Brynd's boots.

  Brynd hailed the others in an urgent whisper, and they ran to his side. The sense of shock amongst them was palpable.

  Brynd looked up. 'Stay calm. Stick together.' He analysed the scene as if the trees would produce instant answers. What the fuck is happening on this island of ours?

  He noticed the trail of blood leading under the cover of the fagus trees. The rest of Sen's body must be there somewhere. The treetops fizzed under the night sky.

  'Wait, commander,' Apium whispered. 'I don't think we should follow. Whatever did this to Sen is obviously skilled at picking people off quietly. Best we don't separate for the moment.'

  'You might be right there, captain,' Brynd murmured, though uncertainly.

  'What, we're just going to let Sen's death go without investigation?' Lupus said indignantly.

  Brynd gestured for him to lower his voice. 'One of the most promising young soldiers in the Empire is dead. One of our garudas has gone missing. So you think we should pursue this right now, at night, in the dark in the woods? There're just four of us now. Already two down.' Maybe I should've brought more men along, but no one but me could've known we were taking this route.

  'So we simply wait here,' Lupus protested, 'and get picked off one by one?'

  A rustling from the trees.

  Everyone looked towards the copse.

  Three figures lurched forwards and Lupus brought an arrow to anchor point, aimed it.

  'Not till I say.' Brynd held up a hand, but was reaching for his axe with the other.

  The dark figures started running towards them.

  Brynd signalled. Lupus released an arrow.

  It whipped through the air, struck one of the intruders powerfully in the face. By then he was nocking another arrow, and soon another figure was falling to the ground. The final one stepped forward with sword raised.

  Brynd hurled his axe though the intervening space.

  It cleaved the attacker's face and he too slumped to the ground.

  Then suddenly the unlikely happened: all three fallen bodies began struggling to push themselves upright, trying to pull out the arrows, with jerky, improbable movements.

  Lupus fired repeatedly, pinning the bodies to the ground, twitching. And again they tried to stand with a jagged motion.

  'Aim for their legs,' Brynd yelled, running to reach under the carriage for a crossbow. Then, returning to Lupus's side again, he began shooting at the heads and torsos.

  They fired until finally the bodies lay still.

  'Cover!' Brynd swept in towards the dead, seized one of the corpses back into the light of the campfire. Soon the others had done the same with the rest.

  Brynd began tearing open the ragged clothing on each of the corpses. 'By Bohr, these men we've killed were already dead.'

  'Are you sure?' Nelum questioned, and was rewarded with a glare of annoyance from his commander. Yes, I'm sure. These things are fucking dead, many times over.

 
'Look at this one. His skin is ice-cold - blue, even in this light. He isn't even bleeding, just the remains of some black gunk. He's been dead for several days at least.'

  The soldiers remained silent.

  'Draugr,' Nelum said eventually.

  'Y'what?' Apium demanded.

  'Draugr. Undead. A purportedly mythical creature. Well, that's what it looks like anyway. Give it a while longer and I suspect they'll be back to life, in some sort of manner. So we might want to make sure they're finished off properly, commander.'

  Even as soon as he spoke, one of the bodies began twitching, the fingers moving gently and impossibly. With a sigh, Brynd stepped quickly to the carriage and pulled out one of the larger axes. Over the next few moments he hacked away at the reviving corpses with relentless brutality, grunting as he hauled the metal blade down on them again and again, releasing his frustration in the process, and Apium soon joined in the frenzy with another axe till the camp was carpeted with bone and smashed heads. They then gathered the individual fragments together away from camp, and Brynd fervently hoped there was no way that they could resurrect themselves from that destruction.

  'Now,' Brynd demanded, with disgust on realizing he was covered in small chunks of flesh, 'could you tell me about these draugr, lieutenant. Please.'

  Nelum had this scholarly way about him when he was explaining, always had done for the years Brynd had known him, and the act in itself was a comfort now, the return to business-as-usual. He began casually, pacing around in slow strides. 'A few volumes of collected folklore report sightings of undead, mainly on islands like Maour and Varltung. Ascribed to distant mythology, mainly. So you certainly wouldn't expect to encounter them in this day and age, or for many centuries past. From the accounts I've read in bestiaries of the Archipelago, they're last reported about as far back as the Mathema civilization. That means myths of sixty thousand years.'

  'Yes, but what exactly are they?' Brynd interrupted impatiently.

  'Exactly what I said: the undead. Corpses that in some way become animated again. Normally, their bodies have to be disposed of in certain ways, so I'm guessing and hoping your little dissection would have covered the requirements rather effectively.'

  'So what are they doing here on Jokull?' Apium broke in. 'How did they ever get on the Empire's home island? With something as sinister as that coming ashore, you'd think some of the coastal guards would have noticed, eh.'

  'Your guess is as good as mine, captain,' Nelum admitted. 'I wouldn't say that they'd feel constrained by water, though. Perhaps they didn't arrive, and were here to begin with.'

  'It can only be cultist work,' Brynd said firmly. 'You remember that figure we saw at Daluk, captain?'

  'Bohr's balls,' Apium gasped.

  'Eloquently put, captain,' Nelum said. 'But I don't see how - and I don't see why.'

  'How? They've found some relic that'll do the job. But why? I can't answer that.' Apium sighed. 'Well, so much for a quiet night.'

  Nelum frowned. 'I can't understand what they're doing out here, and why they're attacking us. It's as if they attacked on some primitive instinct.'

  'They're even frightening off gheels,' Brynd observed. 'And that's saying something. All this blood and not one gheel in sight.'

  'Commander,' Lupus hissed.

  Brynd stepped alongside him, peering out into the darkness. 'What is it, Lupus?'

  'Over there, about fifty paces. Looks like Wing Commander Vish.' The private was pointing to the north, beyond the fringe of the copse, at a silhouette with wings protruding over its back.

  'Keep me covered, private,' Brynd whispered, then stepped forward to meet the garuda. As Vish came closer, Brynd could see that he was dragging his left leg along with both hands. One of his wings hung out raggedly to the side.

  Flesh had been removed in chunks from his torso as if devoured, and his feathers were slick and heavy with blood. Brynd kept the sabre in his hand as he supported the garuda along until they were back in the glow of the campfire. There, they eased him to the ground and wrapped him in strips of cloth torn from a cloak to serve as bandages. Finally, Brynd used some of his medical powders to knock the garuda unconscious so he wouldn't feel so much pain, and Nelum helped him stitch the wounds together.

  I should've been more prepared. What the hell is happening here?

  *

  The wing commander bled to death during the night, his story untold.

  Brynd took solace in the fact that he passed away without pain. No one else had slept at all through the night, and they burned his body the instant the sun rose. As they rode off across the sparsely forested sections of tundra they looked back to see a thin stream of smoke carrying the garuda's soul away. The cold air was sharp against the dried sweat on Brynd's brow. It was, at least, enough to remind him that he himself was still alive.

  NINE

  Investigator Jeryd stepped into his chambers, bleary-eyed. The sun had been up for a short while, not that you could see it yet. His head was mostly clear - an impressive feat considering the amount of whisky he'd imbibed. He never let it get too far and always knew when to stop. He'd seen too much of what happened to the lives of alcoholics to prevent the same from happening to him. No, if you drank all the time, that meant you wanted to use it to control your life, as if that was the only solution, and Jeryd was not looking for control, merely one night of escape. Two hundred years of it had taught him that you could never control the world around you.

  He slumped into his fine wooden chair with a grunt, and for a brief moment contemplated giving up his career. How had things come to this? His tail felt stiff, his body ached. As he rested his head in his hands he was staring directly at an envelope on his desk until it came into focus.

  Marysa's handwriting.

  Fumbling with eagerness, he tore open the letter.

  He read it anxiously.

  She wanted to meet him for dinner at the end of the week at one of their favourite bistros.

  He tossed the letter on the desk, reclined back in his chair. So she wanted to meet him? That was a start. The Bistro Juula was where he had first taken her for dinner immediately after they had been married in a Jorsalir church. A dimly lit place, with wooden floors, patient staff, and crammed with large potted ferns that gave each table a degree of privacy.

  He heard the bell tower strike thirteen: midday already, and he was meant to be meeting Tryst to look more closely at the body of Councillor Ghuda.

  *

  Jeryd swore at the horse that splashed an icy puddle onto his breeches. Tryst, a good armspan away, stared at Jeryd in faint amusement as the offending carriage proceeded into the distance.

  The iren across the road was packed. Cold in the shade of a nest of architectural monstrosities, dozens of stalls lined the cobbled streets edging this trading centre of the city, not far from the Council Atrium. The investigator's hands were clasped behind his back as he glanced casually at the arrays of food imported in from the surrounding agricultural communities where cultists had been treating crops to help yields survive the bad weather.

  Noticing a display of several pots, vases, ornaments, he made a mental note to investigate some of the antique shops further away in the city's expensive iren district during his lunch hour. Maybe he could find an interesting object for Marysa, something to impress her when they met for dinner. Moving on, he guided Tryst up a spiral passageway leading to the next level of the city.

  Along some of these higher roads they encountered some huge flies that must have just swarmed in, their wings a handspan wide. They were feeding near the stables of the chancellor's horses. They made a rather pleasant drone, and in a mildly disgusted way, he admired them. Usually they were harmless enough, occurring in twos or threes, the pterodettes keeping their numbers in check. It was not known if these giant insects had some collective consciousness, but he remembered investigating an odd incident last year, where a two-bit stage cultist used some of these creatures in his routine, to aid with his levi
tation. One night the insects picked him up, led him to a window, then promptly dropped him to his death. No one in the audience seemed to care that much at the time.

  The investigator and his assistant reached a low wooden door set in an unimpressive stretch of limestone. Whereas much of the upper city was decorated and ornamental, this thoroughfare was plain to the point of functional. A remnant from earlier days, perhaps, in a city that had changed its perspectives innumerable times.

  Jeryd knocked, turned to Tryst and explained, 'This should bring some leads, I hope.'

  Tryst was silent.

  'It was the Big Date last night, wasn't it?' Jeryd leaned against the wall, folded his arms.

  'Yes, it was nice,' Tryst murmured. 'But we didn't kiss at the end.'

  'Bloody hell, it doesn't always have to end with a kiss. You should be happy it didn't end with a slap.' He banged on the door again.

  This time it opened, and a man with a haggard face beckoned the two of them inside, his white gown stained an alarming red down the front. 'I'm sorry to have kept you gentlemen waiting, but I was in the middle of cleaning a corpse. My name's Doctor Tarr, and I'm pleased to meet you.' He offered a wrinkled hand.

  Jeryd eyed it uncertainly, and introduced himself and Tryst. So this was Tarr, then, a man who dealt daily with the dead. Jeryd wondered if he would be as jolly or remote compared to the other doctors he had worked with in the past. They were certainly an odd bunch, these people who chose to spend their day away from the living.

  'It's interesting to finally meet you, after reading so many of your forensic reports these last couple of years,' Jeryd said. 'And interesting that we should meet over Councillor Ghuda, certainly my biggest case.'

  'Yes, yes, Delamonde Ghuda is a most interesting case.' Doctor Tarr gestured for them to follow him.

  There were no windows in the room they entered, which was lit poorly by lanterns. Due to a proliferation of dried flowers and herbs, the odour wasn't as bad as Jeryd thought it would be. There was faint melody coming from another room. 'You employ a musician here?' he asked in surprise.

  Doctor Tarr stopped. 'Why, yes, of course.' He glanced at the investigator with mild disbelief. 'The patients wouldn't like it if I dismissed our lute player.'