Micah spun on one heel, falling to a crouch. He slid quietly up to a nearby window. “Greeching bad luck,” he whispered. “You can sense this Kreg fellow, yes?” Shaia nodded slowly as the color left her face. She lifted herself from the floor, climbing from her seat to her feet. “Then he must not be with that Alkern Tasher,” Micah told them miserably, “because he is sitting on a horse out in the street.”
“But Kreg…”
“Knows you can sense him, I’d bet,” Kelc growled. “Imbeciles. We never even considered that they might understand us. Skeesh!” he hissed. “It’s their greeching jobs and we thought we could just ride away.” Kelc slowly crawled across the floor to Micah, to the window so he could look out into the street. He needed to see for himself what the sinking pit in his soul already seemed to know.
Tasher sat atop his horse, his eyes raking the town, darting from place to place. Not far behind him, Hull Jista crossed the street, kicking his way through the door of a small shop, his sword in hand.
“That’s them, yes?” Micah’s voice seemed almost a thought, so quietly did he whisper.
“Yes,” Kelc said, his answer causing a disquieting whine to come from Shaia. “That’s them.”
“They’re going through every house. Every building.” Kelc stated the words for his own ears, but loud enough for both Micah and Shaia. “There’s the other one back there,” he said, nodding as if that would help the others see Dell Pyter a few hundred paces behind Tasher, his posture slack as he leaned against a hitching post in front of a small building, one hand idly smoothing the coat of a brown horse. “Pyter. The one that tested you, Shy.”
“Kelc,” she agonized, “what can we do? They ran us down.” She pulled in a steadying breath. “They’re not afraid. He,” she hissed, waving at Micah, “said that they just waded through men wielding spirit as if they were addled.” Her lips fell into a deep frown and her shoulders sagged. “What can we do?”
Kelc glanced back out at Tasher, the man’s eyes leaping from place to place, Jista emerging from the doorway he’d forced. “I’m not sure.”
“Attack them now!” Micah offered. “You blew up a building. Blow one up that sits right near them.” His energy built as he spoke. “It’s one thing for them to have defenses against spirit magic, but that doesn’t mean that an explosion caused by the dead won’t kill them, does it?”
“He’s right,” Shaia added. “Maybe they can stop you from- I don’t know- lifting them from the ground or something, but if you cause a wall to fall on them…” Her eyes implored the theory to be correct. She clasped her hands. “Then it is just flesh and armor.”
“Yes,” Micah punctuated her statement, his reflective eyes showing dangerously as he considered the deaths of these men.
“What if…” Kelc felt as if he was being assailed by them. “Stop for a greeching moment. What if the way that they come at us, the way that they just charge right in is designed to cause Practitioners to try and retaliate with their power? What if they can feel or sense it and that is the only way they can find us? What keeps us from just hiding here in town? They can’t search every broom closet. Hells,” he hissed, “we could move around as they search.”
“They feel those of us with…”
“Is that why one of them is kicking down doors and looking through homes a room at a time?” Kelc snapped, keeping his voice low. “Let’s keep our heads about us. If we act like imbeciles then we will be caught.” Were it not for the circumstances, Kelc may have laughed at his lack of words, at the only words he could think to say. “Stand capable,” he said.
The words quieted Shaia, forcing her chin up. She nodded after a moment of reflection. “You’re right,” she whispered. “I will follow whatever plan, Kelc. I know that if you have to, you will try whatever force is needed.”
Micah looked to the young woman as if she’d succumbed to insanity. His mouth opened as if he might disagree before he sealed his lips and nodded once, emphatically.
“Try that one!” The voice carried to them from Tasher. “See there! That building didn’t burn down. Either some fool took it down with a stove or a furnace exploding out, or the dark arts were at work here.”
Micah leapt from his place near the front window, crossing the room in only a few steps, his eyes now looking out a smaller back window. “That fellow just looked right at us,” he gusted.
Kelc slid down, allowing himself a brief final look out into the street where Tasher started forward atop his stallion, headed into the center of town. Jista, crossing the street just behind him, headed straight for Kelc, to the weaver’s shop. Pyter strolled up the middle of the street well behind both of them, a crossbow now in his hands, a bolt knocked and ready.
“They’re coming,” he mouthed to his sister.
“We can get out this window,” Micah said hurriedly. “Just break it out of the jamb and…”
“They’d be on us like hounds if we shatter that glass,” Kelc said, interrupting him. “Everyone under the piles of material. If he seems to detect us, I’ll blow the wall up behind him. Get under heavy materials.” Shy and Micah looked at him as if he’d gone daft.
“Kelc, you’ve not worked enough to control such…”
“Now!”
He turned to his sister after cutting her off, careful to avoid the window, and began tossing unraveled bolts of material over her as she lay down on the ground. “You too,” he said to an obviously doubtful Micah. “Down.” The thin man dropped to the floor in a corner, making it easy for Kelc to hurl material on him, including a couple of still-folded bolts. Kelc then burrowed under an unkempt pile himself until his back pressed against a wall.
His breath felt heavy and close beneath the materials draped over him, causing him to force deep pulls of musty air. He felt instantly sweaty and full of panic.
His thoughts began to range out, searching for spirits, finding one nearby in this cursed town, but before he so much as greeted the soul of the woman he felt, he stopped. “Calm,” he told himself. “Calm.”
To Kelc, it felt as if he hid under the suffocating cloth for several glasses before the deputy arrived. Every breath struggled into and out of his lungs. But that stopped. Kelc dared not draw breath after the first heavy footfall of Hull Jista.
His iron shod boots sounded out on the wooden floor as if he intentionally stomped, each foot causing the boards to tremble beneath his weight, every vibration giving a sense of how near the giant deputy truly stood.
First his steps pounded out, crossing the front room, where he seemed to be away from Kelc. He stopped there for a short time before he resumed. The boards beneath Kelc’s body almost came to life as Jista stepped into the material storage, each piece of wood complaining beneath the girth of the man.
Kelc could hear Jista’s breathing, his muttering, as he surveyed the room. “Some mess,” he grumbled. “No damned stove did this. Greeching vampire either.” His feet seemed to adjust on the floor, shuffling just a bit. “Get all of us the fever in this greeching place.”
The deputy stepped even closer to Kelc, the boards beneath him telling him that Jista stood directly on them as they literally shifted a bit beneath his boot soles. “Silk,” he mumbled. “Guess they could take it into Skurgaard.” Kelc felt the slight movement of the materials over him as the deputy plucked the smooth cloth up. It felt as if the man stood just there for too long, causing worry to surge in Kelc. The silk landed back on him, nearly forcing the hidden man’s heart to stop. “Huh,” Jista said. “Warden’ll be interested to hear that,” he said aloud, “once he pins this vampire to the wall down south.” Jista offered a cynical snort before his heavy steps again crossed the weaver’s floor. “Pyter!” he yelled, causing all three hidden figures to jump. “There’s a tunnel bored right out from under this tavern here. That ought to give you something to chase.”
“Before that, you both need to come to the town’s square!” Tasher’s voice cut through the air like a blade. “None of these folk ev
er made it into the ground.”
“Greeching bad luck! Not for that we’d have none,” Jista announced as he walked from the weaver’s shop, allowing the floor to finally rest. “Whistle up our mounts, Dell. I’ll not walk amongst those killed by Red Fever. Bad enough we have to net ‘em and pile ‘em up to burn them. Take glasses if there’s as many as I expect.”
Kelc shoved the material off of his head and cool air washed over him as a high-pitched whistle sounded outside. He gulped it, struggling to remain silent as he did.
He glanced at Shaia but she remained cloaked. He looked to Micah and from beneath his pile of cloth, Kelc could see an opening the man had created right along the floor to breathe and hear. Deep within it, staring right at Kelc, his eyes burned yellow.
Kelc sat still as a stone, still able to hear Jista just outside of the weaver’s shop, his heavy boots crunching dirt and gravel as he shifted from foot to foot. After a short wait, the sound of horses clopping up the dirt street became louder, stopping just before the deputy. Leather creaked as he climbed into the saddle and he and Pyter rode away.
Micah emerged from his hiding place only a moment after everything fell silent. He frowned as he stood up out of the pile of material, straightening his clothes.
Kelc mopped sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve as he struggled out of his hiding place, scooting over to where Shaia still lay.
“Shy,” he whispered. “It’s okay. You can come out.” He arrived at the heap under which his sister hid and began pulling the cloth off of her.
She lay frozen on the floor, one of her hands still covering her nose and mouth. Her eyes flicked over to Kelc, both shot wide with fear, her brown irises looking small in her looming orbs.
Kelc could see her trembling. “It’s okay,” he offered. “He left and now we will as well. Come on.” He offered her his hands and she just looked at him. “We need to go, Shy.”
As if the words did not reach her at first but were now sinking in, she began to melt, her hand edging away from her mouth, seeking the warmth of his skin.
Kelc slowly extracted her from the blankets of woven cloth and pulled her upright, her clothes sticking to her sweaty skin. “Okay. We need to get out of here.” He turned to the third of their party. “Micah, can you look outside and make sure that they’ve gone?”
The slender fellow only nodded as he made his way across the wooden floor, peeking around the door jamb into the main room, one of its walls missing after Kelc’s show of power. Quiet as a shadow, he slipped through the open doorway into the front room, out of Kelc’s sight.
“He was so close,” Shaia whimpered, a single tear crawling down her cheek. “I almost couldn’t breathe for fear.”
“Me too,” Kelc admitted. “I nearly grabbed for spirits though I had no idea what I wanted to do with them. But now we need to get moving. Jista expects they’ll need several glasses to deal with the bodies in the square. And there were a lot of them there.”
Shaia nodded weakly as she turned from him. She looked almost drunk as she stumbled toward the doorway, her steps graceless, her posture defeated. She stopped and spoke without looking back at her brother.
“Is Kreg really trying to kill us?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t think so,” Kelc said. Shy’s head turned ever so slightly, her interest pricked. “Jista said something about a vampire, which is a dead of some sort. I think that is what they are after.” Kelc shrugged. “Not us.”
“Then where is he? I can feel him north and east.” She sucked in a breath, calming down after hearing Kelc’s explanation. “Why did he stop and let these three come ahead?”
“I don’t know, Shy.” Kelc eased up behind his sister and wrapped his arms around her. “I wish I knew. All of this feels too bizarre to be true and yet it is. We’re running from the deputies…from Kreg.” His sister nodded. “We need out of Symea.”
“Skurgaard?”
“I guess so. It’s so hard to tell what we should do. And without horses…” Kelc let the rest of his breath between his lips noisily. “I just don’t know.”
“They’re in the square,” Micah said, his voice guarded not at all. Kelc and Shy jumped at the sound, stepping apart, hands rising defensively. “Dealing with all the dead.”
“You’ve been there and back already?” Shaia asked. “That’s not…”
“I’m very fast,” Micah said, his eyes narrowing. “It’s part of how I am.”
“I see.” Shaia turned her attention to her brother. “Then we should go. What do you suggest?”
“Straight east, exactly where they came from,” Micah suggested. “The last direction they are likely to go.”
“Kreg is still east,” Shaia inserted. “North and east, but east. We cannot ride…walk straight into his line of sight.”
“This is little better than grassland,” Kelc said. “We’ve seen fewer than a dozen trees on this whole trip. It will matter little what direction we travel if anyone is out there looking for us. Especially Kreg.” He drew his black steel skiver and pressed the flat of the blade into his palm. “North, I think.”
“We just came from there.” Shaia glared at her brother, anger pushing her fear away. “That gains us nothing except a little time.” She pulled a deep breath, folding her arms under her breasts. “I hate the idea of heading back to where we came from.” Kelc just stared into her brown eyes, agreeing with her sentiment but not wanting an emotional response to dictate their actions. Micah hovered in the doorway but did nothing to interrupt them. “North,” she finally said. “Damn it all. North.” Kelc nodded before raising his eyes to Micah.
“Let’s get going. You’re obviously our best scout. Go on ahead and we’ll weave our way through after you.” Kelc closed his eyes for a moment. “How can you let us know which way to go?”
“Easy,” Shaia announced, stepping across the room to her hiding place. She dug into the cloth and came away with a small wooden bin loaded with brass buttons. “Any time he comes to a spot with more than one way to go, he drops a button or two to show where he went. If we pick them up, no one will be the wiser.”
“Fine,” Micah said, unimpressed. He stepped up to Shaia and scooped a handful of buttons from the box. He carefully poured them into one of his jacket pockets. “I’ll drop the buttons near to corners where I turned so you’ll know what direction I went. If there’s more than two paths, look for another button a few steps further to tell you where I went.” He shrugged after thinking for a moment. He then grabbed a second handful, adding it the store of buttons he already had. “I guess I’m off then.” With that, he spun on his heel and walked back to the doorway, sliding up to it with nearly the same caution he had before, looking through it only after he stopped to listen for a few moments. Once satisfied, he slipped through it to find a path out of Wemmerton.
A haze of brown smoke sifted slowly through the streets of Wemmerton, weaving through the small town carrying the incinerated flesh of its former inhabitants. It rose and fell on the patient winter breeze that seemed to carefully guide it from the center of town.
A heavier, darker smoke rose up over the dark tarred rooftops and solid wooden buildings that lined the streets, riding the heated air rising off of the burning pile of bodies that the deputies created.
Kelc unconsciously glanced back in the direction of the center square, the simple motion allowing the collar of his shirt to fall from his face where he’d positioned it to protect him from the putrid smoke all around him.
“Kelc,” Shaia said quietly, pointing to the ground where two brass buttons lay. He nodded as he bent down to pick them up, holding his shirt over his face as he did. He noticed another a step or two around the corner and plucked it up as well, heading in the direction it suggested along a narrow street.
He looked ahead, searching for Micah but the man knew how to keep from sight. Since slipping out of the Weaver’s shop neither he nor Shaia had seen or heard anything of him. Shy knew where he was, ge
nerally, as she had attached several strands of spirit to him. But that did little to ease Kelc’s growing anxiety about him.
Micah seemed genuine enough in what he said and did, admitting that his desire to continue on with Kelc and Shaia was linked directly to his perceived chances at survival. But his nature? That is what Kelc worried over. What exactly was Micah? His eyes acted like those of a dog or a wolf, and though the man acquiesced to every plan Kelc suggested, and seemed to fear Kelc’s ability with spirit energy, Kelc knew the man had a temper. After eighteen years with his father, he could spot the sort of anger that Micah sought to hide.
“Eighteen years,” he muttered, drawing Shaia’s attention. “Eighteen,” he said again. His sister raised her eyebrows, unsure of either what Kelc said or what he meant by it. “Shaia, midwinter has passed.” He leaned into his sister to speak. “I’m Eighteen.”
“You are,” she said, a little too loudly before instinctively raising her free hand to cover her already covered mouth. “You turned eighteen only days ago, and I forgot. I’m so sorry,” she said, crowding her brows together emphatically. “I’ll make it up to you when we’re out of this place. We’ll do something special.” She glanced at the ground, something catching her attention. “Button,” she said.
Kelc looked down to find three buttons lined up, pointing across the narrow street into an even narrower alleyway that wound between squat houses. He bent his knees, lowering himself to them. As he picked them up, he thought he saw something moving out of the corner of his eye.
He turned to it, but found only a tattered curtain flapping outside of window, the broken shutter long ago unable to contain it. “White,” he whispered to himself, certain that something dark had been there. He sat on his haunches, staring at the curtain, waiting to see whatever had first drawn his attention.
Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One Page 27
