by Kate Novak
“Have some apple sauce!” she yelled, loosing the fruit down on the crowd of zombies. “Go on, get out of here.”
The ripe apple caught an undead square in the forehead, and it toppled backward. By the time it hit the ground, two more apples were zinging with halfling accuracy through the ranks of the undead. Those monsters that came close enough to climb the coach were met by Giogi’s merciless foil.
The nobleman parried their clawlike hands and stabbed at them fiercely. Their lack of self-preservation appalled him. At the same time, he worried about his own preservation. Just how long will this magic potion last? he wondered as sweat began breaking out on his forehead. Will I be able to tell right away?
Giogi glanced toward the temple, but Mother Lleddew had abandoned her defense of the stairs. She was heading toward the carriage, wading through the crowd of zombies, jostling them as she went. The creatures paid no more attention to her than they did to each other.
“Giogi! Look out!” Olive cried, snapping an apple at a ghoul that had managed to climb up to the driver’s seat. The red missile splattered in the middle of the undead’s shredded face, but the ghoul kept coming. A hissing snarl escaped its torn lips and the ghoul leaped on Giogi.
In a moment, the creature had Giogi bent backward, its claws securely fastened on the noble’s shoulders. A paralyzing coldness crept from the ghoul’s fingers, and Giogi felt himself go numb. His foil fell from his unfeeling fingers and clattered to the driver’s seat. The ghoul’s ruined mouth smiled and opened, displaying a row of fanglike teeth.
Olive ran across the carriage roof and kicked the monster in the head before it managed to sink its teeth into Giogi’s throat. The ghoul loosed its grip, but Giogi was unable to move to balance himself, and he toppled from the driver’s seat into the zombie horde below.
A collective “Ah!” of undead delight issued from the mouths of nearby zombies. They fell on top of the man and began pummeling him with their corpse-white hands.
Olive screamed and began pelting the zombies below with apples thrown by hand. A few fell back, but more took their place. The halfling was just wondering if it would be worth risking her life to jump down on top of the fray when something grabbed her ankle.
Olive twisted around. The ghoul who had paralyzed Giogioni had not fallen over with the nobleman. Now the monster was dragging Olive toward the edge of the carriage roof.
“Let me go, you ghoul!” Olive shouted, reaching frantically for the dagger she kept up her sleeve. The ghoul laughed until Olive slashed off its hand at the wrist. She jerked her leg back and gave the undead another kick—sending it into the hordes below. She poked with her dagger at the fingers of the dismembered hand until it fell away from her ankle.
On the ground below, Giogi was wondering if the potion had already worn off. The fists of the zombies rained down on him in a torrent. He could never recall hurting so badly in his life, and the paralyzation was like a nightmare. The worst part, though, was his inability to breathe.
One of the zombies had enough sense left in its undead brain to throttle him. It knelt beside him and gripped his neck in the bony vise of its fingers. The other zombies pulled back and watched their compatriot choke the noble. Dark spots danced in front of Giogi’s eyes. Somewhere in the distance, Olive shouted.
Something warm touched Giogi on the face. The warmth spread downward to his torso and then to his arms and legs. In a moment, he felt his muscles relax, and in another, he could move again. He brought a fist up sharply in the face of the zombie who was choking him. The creature fell backward from the sudden assault. The noble kicked and pounded and stabbed at the zombies who tried to close on top him. Strong hands, warm and living, latched about his arm and helped him to his feet.
Mother Lleddew stood beside him. “Get back up on the carriage and take the reins,” she ordered, “I’ll clear a path for you to turn around.”
Looking up, Giogi saw Olive squaring off with a noseless zombie on the drivers seat. Giogi plucked his foil up from the seat. Leaping up the carriage step, he thrust his weapon into the zombie’s back. The creature crumpled. Giogi withdrew the foil and pushed the zombie from the carriage. The noble took his place on the driver’s seat.
“Better hold on, Mistress Ruskettle,” he warned Olive. “We’ll be moving soon.”
Mother Lleddew moved forward toward the horses, whispering and patting them comfortingly. The ghouls drew back from her. The zombies remained all around both her and the horses, though they did not attack. Slowly the woman spoke into the lead mare’s ear, and the horse rose from its knees, pulling its companion to its feet as well.
The priestess placed herself in front of the lead right horse and began muttering loudly. The zombies suddenly noticed her presence and began crushing in on her, trying to drive her under the mass of bodies. Mother Lleddew held up a platinum engraving of Selune’s sign and cried out, “Return thou to dust!”
The engraving glowed, and the zombies in the carriage’s path ignited with a mystic blue fire. In another moment, they’d crumbled to gray ash.
Mother Lleddew stepped aside and smacked the lead horse’s rump. It charged forward. More zombies rushed to fill the gap left by those the priestess had disintegrated, but the horses trampled over them. The priestess grabbed hold of the carriage door as it shot past. The carriage shifted precariously from her weight until she managed to scramble up to the roof.
For a bulky old priestess, she’s pretty spry, Olive thought, clutching the back of the driver’s seat.
The carriage shot across the meadow toward the temple, the horses trampling undead and the carriage wheels crushing them. Giogi yelled and steered the horses so the carriage made a wide turn back in the direction of the road.
Overhead, the great carrion birds wheeled beneath the shadowy, solitary cloud. “You, halfling,” Lleddew called, pulling from her shift pocket a fragile glass vial of clear liquid and tossing it to Olive, “try this.”
“Holy water?” Olive guessed.
“Yes. Don’t bother with anything on the ground. Get one of the vultures in the air.”
“The vultures?”
“Yes. They’re undead as well.”
A vulture swooped overhead with a ghoul in its claws. Olive shot at it as it banked toward them. The vial of water smashed into the vulture’s wing. The bird dropped its cargo as its wing burst into smoke. It crashed to the ground, smashing several zombies beneath it.
“Nice! Got any more?” Olive asked with delight.
Mother Lleddew handed her another vial and Olive loaded it into her sling. The carriage pulled out of the hilltop clearing and into the light cover of the trees.
Olive hit a second undead vulture with a holy water missile. The bony creature broke up in the air and crashed into the temple pillars. It lay still, but in the temple behind it something else moved.
Olive’s mouth fell open as she caught sight of what caused the movement. “There’s a girl back there!” she gasped.
“Where?” Giogi cried, pulling back on the horse’s reins.
“Don’t stop!” Mother Lleddew ordered, her wrinkled face tight with panic.
Giogi stood in his seat and looked at the temple. It was the girl he’d spoken with the night before. “We can’t leave her!” he objected.
“You must,” the priestess insisted. “She’s a Shard. It’s her duty to protect the temple. Mine is to protect you. Now go!”
Giogi stared at the girl, shimmering still like a moonbeam in the shadow. “But she’s just a girl,” he said, unable to bring himself to abandon so helpless a creature.
“She just looks like a girl,” Lleddew argued, moving forward to take the reins from Giogi. A pair of ghouls dropped onto the carriage roof from an overhead branch. One slammed into Mother Lleddew and succeeded at knocking her to the ground. The other lunged at Olive. Giogi stopped the carriage immediately.
These ghouls stank with an overwhelming odor of rotting meat. The halfling doubled over with nausea, bu
t managed to sidestep the undead attack anyway. Brandishing her dagger, she whirled about to keep the creature in sight. “You really need a bath, pal,” she gasped. “Why don’t you go jump in the lake?”
To Olive’s astonishment, the creature immediately turned from her, hopped off the carriage roof, and headed down the hill.
Realization and recognition flamed in the halfling’s mind. “It just obeyed me. A ghast! That was a ghast! I just commanded a ghast!” she cried excitedly. “The potion only works on ghasts!”
Suddenly remembering Mother Lleddew, Olive looked down at the ground. The other ghast had the priestess pinned to the ground with its inhuman strength. Olive scrambled down from the carriage roof and gave the creature a kick, trying not to inhale its odor.
“Get off her, you stupid undead,” Olive ordered the ghast.
The ghast stood up and blinked its bloodshot eyes in confusion.
“Go away!” Olive shouted.
The ghast stumbled off into the woods.
“Ugh!” Olive grunted. She bent over the priestess. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Mother Lleddew groaned. Her shift had been slashed in a dozen places, and she was bleeding profusely. Her breath was husky and labored, and the whites of her eyes had gone strangely dark. Olive couldn’t tell if these were symptoms of an injury or an effect of the ghast’s touch. She tried to pull the large woman to her feet, but Lleddew slumped against the halfling, driving Olive to her knees.
“Damn! Giogi, give me a hand here!” Olive cried.
Oblivious to the undead closing in on the carriage, Giogi stood on the driver’s seat, watching with horror the undead surrounding the dark-skinned, silver-haired girl. The girl shone now more like a powerful magic light, and the undead nearest her covered their eyes with their hands.
Olive looked up at the nobleman and noticed with panic the ghouls coming down upon them. “Giogi!” she shrieked.
Huge arms lifted Olive from behind and tossed her onto the top of the coach. Olive looked down to see Mother Lleddew, once again on her feet, facing the pack of ghouls with her arms outstretched. Her whiteless eyes held a manic gleam. The priestess roared a guttural, incoherent cry of rage. Then the ghouls were upon her, toppling her and burying her with their bodies.
Olive shouted Giogi’s name again.
The roar, and Olive’s shouts, finally attracted the noble’s attention from the girl at the temple. He looked down to where Olive pointed frantically just in time to see Lleddew disappear under a torrent of undead.
Like a man awakening from a dream, Giogi whispered, “No, no,” and then shook himself to action, screaming, “No!” He leaped down and began stabbing like a madman at the pile of ghouls.
Olive wondered if, by now, it wasn’t too late for the priestess when the pile of undead began to shift and grow, like a swelling seed. A huge paw broke through one side of the pile, flinging a pair of ghouls off. Then a second paw shot out, spearing a ghoul clean through the chest with its claws.
A huge black bear waded out of the pile of ghouls, shaking their broken bodies off it like they were hunting dogs. The bear’s forehead and chest were marked with silver-haired crescents, and Olive saw Mother Lleddew’s manic gleam in the beast’s eyes.
The great bear roared, a roar more powerful than the one Lleddew had made a moment before. The remaining ghouls broke away from the pile and fled from the bear.
An eerie keening rose from atop the hill. Giogi looked back at the temple. He could no longer make out the girl who Mother Lleddew had called a Shard. There was nothing but a white fire burning at the heart of the temple. The undead on the hilltop were fleeing into the woods.
The bear fell to all fours and wobbled unsteadily. Its front paws looked as if they’d been caught in a trap, and its massive shoulders slumped. Olive scrambled down from the coach once more and checked the bear’s wounds. They were many and deep.
“Get the carriage door,” Olive ordered Giogi.
The nobleman obeyed automatically; his attention was fixed on the hilltop. The bright white flames seemed to be dying down, and the noble caught sight again of the Shard, but she seemed to fade with the fire. A thick, glittering fog rolled around her, and she seemed to grow as one with the mist, which drifted out the open sides of the House of the Lady.
Olive looked at the mysterious, growing fog with anxiety. “Hop in, Mother Lleddew,” the halfling said. She gave Giogi a sharp nudge. “Get up there and drive,” she ordered.
The bear scrabbled into the carriage and collapsed onto the boxes of food. Olive slammed the door and climbed up beside Giogi.
The nobleman turned about and looked over the roof of the carriage. The Shard had vanished. The cloud roiled and bubbled as it descended the hill, and the undead fled before it. Those who were caught in its coils screamed and then collapsed beneath it and were silent.
Suddenly a single lance of white light shot up from the center of the temple, pierced through the roof, and struck the lone dark cloud overhead. As if it were a wounded beast, the cloud shot away from the light striking it. Afternoon sunlight returned to the hill immediately. The fog became milky white and began dissipating in the warm spring sunshine.
“She’s gone,” Giogi whispered.
With a sigh, Olive took up the reins and slapped the horses into motion. The unevaporated edges of the fog slid beneath the carriage and through the horse’s feet. The mist hid the road from their sight, but caused them no harm. Of the undead that had haunted the woods beside the road there was no sign.
From inside the carriage, the bear echoed the Shard’s keening with a plaintive wail of its own.
The Spur
Cat leaned over Drone’s journal with her elbows holding the binding open and her head propped up in her hands. Despite the shattered window and broken door, the tower room was a comfortable temperature, as long as she kept her fur-lined cape draped around her shoulders. Isolated from the rest of the family’s living quarters, the room was also marvelously quiet, but the mage could not concentrate. The old wizard’s crabbed handwriting blurred before her eyes, and her gaze wandered about the room, unable to focus on anything.
Idly she pulled out the amulet of protection from her skirt pocket. She could feel five lumps of varying sizes and shapes wrapped in the silk. Her curiosity prodded at her to peek at just one of the lumps, but with a sudden burst of will, she shoved the amulet back in her pocket. Ignoring Mistress Ruskettle’s advice would be like asking Tymora to send me more bad luck, and I’ve had more than my share of that, Cat thought.
She stared into space and let her mind wander from the duty at hand to the events of the past year. Nothing had gone right for her since the previous summer. She’d awakened on Midsummer Day in a Zhentil Keep alley with no memory of how she’d gotten there, or indeed any memory at all beyond her name and place of birth. The rest of her history had vanished, leaving an irritating void in her head and an uneasy feeling in her heart.
With nowhere to go, she wandered the streets after dark and ran afoul of one of the Keeper press gangs. After the briefest of struggles, she became their prisoner. She foolishly bragged of her magical power, hoping to coerce or frighten the recruiting thugs into letting her go. Instead she’d found herself drafted into an army unit headed for Yulash.
An ugly little spider of a Zhentarim wizard tested her powers. He gave her a slender book, containing only such spells as slave mages could be trusted with. From the tiny size of the book, and the bloodstains on its cover, it was obvious that her masters did not expect her to survive, much less excel at combat.
After five days of forced marching, her unit engaged in its first battle, against a unit of Hillsfar’s Red Plumes. The battle was a mutual slaughter—only officers on the sidelines survived. Cat’s magic power was quickly spent as the enemy overran her position. Powerless and exhausted, she lay down in hopes of passing for one of the dead and escaping after dark. That was when Flattery had rescued her.
Maybe rescued w
asn’t the right word, Cat thought. Collected would be more accurate, she decided.
As soon as the army officers had quit for the evening, retiring to their tents and dinners, Flattery’s zombies stumbled onto the battlefield and began collecting bodies for Flattery’s experiments—and as food for some of his more disgusting undead minions. A particularly mindless zombie, unable to distinguish between the dead and the unconscious—for Cat had fallen asleep—collected her and brought her to its master in his fortress.
Cat remembered how impressed she’d been at her first sight of Flattery as he stood on a parapet overlooking the rolling fields far below. She thought his hawklike features and wolfish smile quite handsome. His capability and power were equally alluring.
But Flattery guarded his power and secrets jealously. He had no apprentices, no familiars, no companions, but surrounded himself with undead servants. He isolated himself from the outside world and everyday life, using his minions to gather everything he needed to work and live. The wizard had erratic fits of temper, which might explain why he chose to work with blindly obedient slaves. On the other hand, working with such slaves might have contributed to his quirkiness.
The wizard could have made Cat a zombie, or fed her to the ghouls, or resold her to the Zhentarim. But he didn’t. Instead he took her under his wing—kept her in pleasant surroundings, taught her some new magic, and worked on a spell to help her regain her memory. Cat was not averse to being sheltered and trained, but most especially she wanted her memory back.
A gnawing desire to fill the void in her head grew in her daily. Regaining her forgotten history was worth everything to her—enduring Flattery’s mad temper, living among the undead servants, reconciling herself to the confinement of Flattery’s fortress. After all, she told herself, slavery to the Zhentarim could be much worse.
Finally, one evening many months later, Flattery finished the spell creating the dark jewel that held her missing past. He presented it to Cat with a proposal of marriage. Cat had looked at the gem, yearning to hold it. Afraid of Flattery’s reaction should she refuse him, she agreed. She’d flattered herself into believing he’d come to prefer her company to the undead, that he found her beautiful, that he wanted to take care of her. After all, she told herself, he was handsome and clever and very powerful—she could do worse.
