Mortal Rites

by Melissa McShane

  The dark blue flames flowed over its head and down its neck to its back. The stink, now charred as well as rotten, was overpowering, and Sienne gagged and vomited uncontrollably. Shaking, she recovered herself to find the creature was still up and mobile, though not stable. It staggered in a tight circle, its hands outstretched as if it were blind. Dianthe retrieved her sword, and she and Kalanath and Alaric stood in a circle around it, poised to attack.

  “I do not know what more to do,” Kalanath said. His cheek was bleeding from four parallel scratches, one of which touched the corner of his eye. “It cannot be killed.”

  “It’s slowing down. We’re doing something,” Alaric said.

  The ghoul dropped to its knees and clutched its head again. It said something unintelligible and howled again. “Stand back,” Alaric said, and raised his greatsword high. The thing lifted its head and seemed to look at him. Alaric swung and took its head off. The head, still burning, bounced away into the fields. “Burn it again, Sienne,” Alaric said.

  Swallowing the last taste of bitter bile, Sienne read off burn once more, this time striking the ghoul’s battered body in the stomach. Even without its head, the thing flailed about, looking for a victim. It burned darkly for more than a minute before it collapsed and lay writhing on the ground. After another few minutes, the flames died, and the ghoul gave one last convulsive shudder and was still.

  Sienne slid off Spark and had to clutch the saddle to keep from falling over. Her legs trembled from having gripped the horse so hard, her hands shook from the excitement and terror of combat, and her stomach wanted to turn itself inside out again. Perrin came to stand beside her, holding the ghoul’s head, now a misshapen, stinking lump of flesh. She shrieked and stumbled away. “What are you doing? Don’t touch it!”

  “It was human, once, and no less deserving of respect than any victim of evil,” Perrin said. He walked forward and laid the head next to the collapsed body. “And it was most certainly a victim. It must have been murdered, and horribly so.”

  Sienne sidled around the corpse to stand next to Alaric, feeling obscurely that his presence would be a shield against her returning nausea. “Maybe so, but it’s disgusting. And it stinks.”

  Alaric put an arm around her and hugged her close. “A ghoul on the highway means nothing good. We should reach the outpost as quickly as possible and make sure everyone there is all right. Then return to deal with the ghoul’s corpse.”

  “This was no ghoul,” Perrin said.

  “It’s a masterless undead, Perrin. You said that was what a ghoul was,” Dianthe said.

  Perrin shook his head. “Indeed, but ghouls are incapable of speech, whereas this creature uttered more than one word, albeit not very clear ones. I believe this is not a ghoul, but a revenant, and that strikes terror into my heart.”

  “Then what is a revenant?” Kalanath asked, touching the scratches on his face gingerly.

  Perrin noticed the gesture and his lips thinned. “We should care for your injury first, my friend.”

  “It is just scratches.”

  “Yes, but the undead can contaminate the living, causing fevers or even diseases. Ghouls in particular carry marrowblight, which can be fatal if infected wounds are left untreated. I cannot imagine what sicknesses might have been transmitted by that revenant.” Perrin removed a blessing from his riffle of papers and pressed it to Kalanath’s cheek, muttering an invocation. The paper went up in a bright green flame, but Kalanath didn’t flinch, merely closed his eyes and sighed as green light filled the scratches and then vanished, leaving smooth, dark skin.

  “He wouldn’t turn into an undead, would he?” Sienne asked. “Or is that a story, too?”

  “Only a dead creature can be raised to unlife,” Perrin said, tucking the riffle of papers away. “And that can only happen intentionally. It is not possible for someone killed, for example, by marrowblight to spontaneously arise from the grave. In fact, revenants are the only creatures who return from death without the intervention of a necromancer.”

  “Mount up. Let’s talk on the way. I’m concerned about the outpost,” Alaric said.

  But no talking occurred, thanks to the rapid pace Alaric set. In just a few minutes, they rounded a curve in the road and saw the outpost, a large log building with a wooden shingled roof and a brick chimney from which issued pale smoke. Bodies lay in the road and on the wide porch circling two sides of the outpost. Alaric cursed and urged Paladin on faster. Sienne followed him, fear knotting her abused stomach further.

  8

  Alaric came to a stop beside the first body, which lay crumpled beside the well-worn path leading from the highway to the outpost’s front door. He dismounted and crouched beside the victim, rolling her onto her back. Sienne came to join him. The woman was clearly dead, her throat torn out and her neck and chest bloody. Alaric took her wrist. “Still warm,” he said. “This happened recently. It makes sense, given where we encountered the thing. Maybe there’s still hope.”

  “This man is also dead,” Perrin said, bending over another body some few yards up the road from where they stood.

  “He’s alive!” Dianthe cried out. She was crouched beside another man, who judging by the smears of blood had dragged himself from where he was attacked to the outpost’s door. “He’s fading fast, though.”

  Perrin ran up the path to the door and dropped to his knees beside the victim. “One moment,” he said, removing a blessing and pressing it to the man’s abdomen, which was slick with blood and showed signs of intestines bulging out. Sienne covered her mouth in horror. It seemed impossible that the revenant had caused so much damage with just its hands.

  Bright green light flared, blinding Sienne briefly. She blinked away tears and focused on the injured man. The green light filled each of the deep wounds, overflowing them like water pouring from an overfull pitcher. As it faded, the wounds sealed over, and Sienne could see unmarked skin beneath the rents in the man’s shirt. His breathing, which had been almost imperceptible, became the deep breathing of sleep. Perrin sat back and wiped his forehead, leaving a smear of blood. “That was the most complex healing I have ever taken part in,” he said, breathing heavily.

  Dianthe knelt on the man’s other side and shifted him into a more comfortable position, though it was unlikely he noticed in his unconscious state. “We should get him inside,” she said.

  Alaric came forward and picked the man up easily. “Someone get the door.”

  Kalanath put his hand to the latch and rattled it. “It is locked.”

  “That’s impossible. Outposts are never closed,” Dianthe said. She knocked hard on the door.

  Kalanath tried the latch again. “It feels like something is blocking it.” He put his shoulder to it and shoved. The door moved half an inch before stopping.

  Dianthe pounded on the door. “Hey! We’ve got a wounded man out here! Open up!”

  Shuffling, and the sound of something heavy sliding across a wooden floor, came from inside the outpost. Then someone said, “Prove you’re not undead!” The voice was high and querulous, and it annoyed Sienne instantly.

  “Undead don’t speak,” Alaric said. “Now let us in before we break the door down.”

  There was silence. Then the querulous voice said, “Is it gone?”

  “We have killed it,” Kalanath said. “It is gone.”

  More shuffling. The door swung open. Several people crowded around it. “Thank Kitane,” an elderly man said. He looked at the unconscious man in Alaric’s arms and his eyes widened. “Don’t you dare bring that into this house! He’ll turn undead and kill us all!”

  “That is impossible, I assure you,” Perrin said, stepping past Alaric and taking the elderly man by the arm to steer him away. “He has been healed of his injuries and needs a place to rest. You do provide such lodgings, do you not? Or am I wrong, and you turn away those who do not fit your idea of a worthy guest?”

  “Of course not!” The elderly man craned his head to look over his
shoulder at Alaric. “Take him to the men’s dormitory. There’s only a few occupied beds today. Pick whichever you like.”

  “Our thanks,” Alaric said.

  The outpost door opened on the large room filled with tables where visitors ate and conversed, and a hall extended in both directions from it. Alaric took the left-hand hall without needing to be told where to go; all outposts were built along the same lines. Perrin followed Alaric. The other three hesitated just inside the doorway. Sienne didn’t think they were needed to put the revenant’s victim to bed, but sitting and asking for food seemed callous.

  The crowd surrounding the door all spoke at once, their words tangled together into unintelligibility. “Stop, stop!” Dianthe exclaimed. “What happened here?”

  “Didn’t you see the thing on the road?” The old man was shaking hard enough that Kalanath had to close the door for him. “It tore through those three like they were nothing. We had to lock the doors for our own safety, don’t you see?”

  “How did they get trapped outside?” Dianthe asked.

  This prompted silence in a way her demand had not. Suddenly no one wanted to meet their eyes. “Orlan went toward it when it came near, thinking he could help,” a woman said. “It tore him apart in seconds. The rest of us ran, except for those other two. They tried to fight it.”

  “We tried to make them come inside, but they were sure they could kill it,” a man said. He had black hair that stood up on his head like a brush and a bony face. “It wasn’t our fault.”

  “Of course not,” Dianthe said. “It took four of us to destroy it.”

  A few mutters went up. Sienne caught the looks they were giving each other and concluded they were thinking about how a little cooperation might have saved at least two of those victims. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “But maybe some of you could bury the dead?”

  The muttering grew louder. A couple of men and one woman left the outpost and shut the door behind them. Others stepped aside to allow Perrin and Alaric back through the crowd. “Someone should retrieve the revenant’s body and bury it as well,” Perrin said.

  “Revenant?” the old man said. “I thought it was a ghoul.”

  “How were you able to kill it?” the first woman said. “It shrugged off every attack those others threw at it.”

  “Teamwork,” Alaric said shortly. “We’d rather not discuss it, if you don’t mind.” He pushed through the crowd and made straight for a corner table. The others followed him, with Sienne coming last. She didn’t like the way the crowd looked at them, as if they’d done something impossible. It wasn’t impossible, just difficult. But having seen the bodies of the revenant’s victims, she couldn’t help wondering if they were right to be awed.

  She sat next to Alaric, who unstrapped his sword and propped it against the table. “So what’s different about a revenant that worries you?” he asked Perrin.

  “When someone is murdered horribly, on rare occasions his spirit is not content with God’s justice in the afterlife. Someone who feels he has been wronged beyond God’s capacity to punish can under extraordinary circumstances re-inhabit his body and pursue his murderer. That is a revenant.”

  “But…isn’t God’s justice perfect?” Dianthe said.

  Perrin shrugged. “It only matters that the spirit believes he has not received justice. Such spirits are so driven by anger they are rarely rational.”

  “That’s so sad,” Sienne said. “If it hadn’t killed those people, I’d feel sorry for it.”

  “We have released the spirit to its eternal rest, and destroyed its body past its ability to return to it.” Perrin pushed his long hair back from his face and let out a deep breath. “I find it disturbing, though, that we are pursuing a necromancer and have happened upon a revenant.”

  “The two don’t have to be related,” Alaric said. “The necromancer doesn’t have to be the murderer the revenant was pursuing.”

  “But if Master Murtaviti is a practicing necromancer, which I find increasingly probable, he will almost certainly have taken lives in the pursuit of his avocation,” Perrin said. “He is the only murderer we are certain has passed near this vicinity in the last week.”

  Alaric opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, his brow furrowing in thought. Dianthe said, “We can’t be sure Master Murtaviti is anything more than a scholar with an unpleasant field of study.”

  “But we can be sure Mistress Murtaviti lied to us about how seriously her husband took his hobby,” Sienne said. “And he was in communication with two necromancers who were practicing necromancers. Doesn’t that make it more likely that he was, too?”

  “What’s certain is Pauro Murtaviti’s disappearance just got a whole lot more sinister,” Alaric said. “If he is a true necromancer, then it’s possible his raising the dead has gotten out of control, and he could be in danger. That’s assuming he is out of control, because it’s also possible he’s doing something evil intentionally. Something that might prompt a vengeful spirit to return from its eternal rest to seek him out.”

  “This is all a lot of supposition, though,” Dianthe said. “We need more facts.”

  “If we seek Master Murtaviti in the forest, as the map says, we will do better to know if we seek an innocent or a villain,” Kalanath said.

  “I don’t see how we can figure that out, though,” Sienne said.

  “I do,” said Perrin. “And I am extremely reluctant to do so.”

  “Why is that?” Alaric’s eyes were narrowed.

  “Because speaking with the dead is frowned upon by all six avatars, when it is not done within a court of justice,” Perrin said. “And although I am prepared to set aside such matters as legality to pursue such necromancy, I believe Averran would not be happy with me were I to petition him to do so.”

  “You want to perform a necromantic ritual?” Sienne said, lowering her voice. She was conscious that the crowd of people, lacking a better form of entertainment, had dispersed to tables around the room, and that at least some of them were sitting nearby, trying to eavesdrop. “Perrin, we can’t do that!”

  “We can. It is simply distasteful,” Perrin said. “Master Samretto was correct in characterizing his wife’s summoning of spirits as harmless, in the sense that no living humans were hurt or killed in so doing.”

  “I know. I’ve studied necromantic theory. But still…what would be the point?”

  “If we could speak with the revenant’s spirit, we could learn who his murderer was.”

  “That might not help. Suppose it wasn’t Master Murtaviti?” Alaric said.

  “Then we would be no worse off than we are now. But if it was, we would gain a tremendous advantage.”

  “This is all premature, given that we don’t know any necromantic rituals and aren’t in a position to learn them,” Dianthe said.

  Sienne cleared her throat. “Actually, I do.”

  They all stared at her. “Speaking with the dead was one of the rituals they used as an example at school,” she said, feeling a little defensive. “It’s really simple, which is why I remembered it. I’m sure they didn’t intend us to use it, but the line between theory and practice is really fine, for necromancy.”

  “All right,” Dianthe said, “so we can do it. I still don’t think it’s a good idea. What if it angers Averran, and he withdraws his blessings from us? Or what if we lose control of the ritual, and the spirit gets free and turns into a phantasm? There are far too many things that could go wrong, and the potential benefit doesn’t outweigh that.”

  “I don’t know,” Alaric said. “I admit knowing whether Murtaviti did or didn’t murder that revenant would affect how we pursue him. My instincts are telling me he’s our man, but I’d like the confirmation before we go plunging blind into the forest after him.”

  “What is the ritual?” Kalanath asked. “You say it does not kill, but what does it do?”

  “We need a piece of the body,” Sienne said, “and a few drops of the summoner’
s blood mixed with red wine. Then there’s a ritual chant. Like I said, simple.”

  Dianthe shuddered. “I can’t believe we’re considering this. Perrin, don’t you have a problem with it?”

  “In the abstract, yes. But I happen to agree with Alaric that learning the identity of the revenant’s murderer will aid us in our search. I also believe that so long as I do not use divine power to raise the dead, Averran will not be offended if I do so through necromantic ritual. The search for wisdom is very important to him, and I believe this qualifies.”

  “So…are we going to do this?” Sienne asked. The idea made her nervous and excited all at once.

  Alaric nodded. “I think we are.”

  The moon rose, full and bright, over the forest, painting the trees silver and sending pale shadows shivering across the highway to compete with the bolder ones cast by the setting sun. Sienne settled her pack more securely across her shoulders and heard it slosh. The old man, who’d turned out to be the outpost keeper, had wanted to give her a bottle of their finest vintage, probably out of some misplaced sense of guilt. It wasn’t that fine a vintage, but Sienne had still argued him down to the cheapest red and insisted on paying for it. She felt letting him give it to her somehow made him complicit in the ritual they intended to perform, and that felt unfair, making him a part of it against his knowledge.

  Ahead of her, Alaric and Dianthe entered the woods, pushing aside low-hanging branches and kicking old, fallen pinecones out of the way. This was a forest no one had ever taken lumber from, and it showed in how close-growing the trees were, their branches intertwined like lovers and bent into strange angles. Alaric was hunched over, and there were pine needles in his fair hair. The branches had tugged at Dianthe’s darker blonde hair too, disordering it from its neat braid. Sienne ducked and smoothed her own hair automatically. It was probably futile, but she had to try.

  Within only a few steps, the forest swallowed her up as thoroughly as a monster with a gaping maw might. The heavy growth meant very little light penetrated, neither the last rays of the setting sun nor the silver glow of the full moon. Sienne took a few more steps, ensuring she was completely shielded from view of the road, and made a dozen magic lights. It was no doubt more than they needed, but she was on edge with anticipation and the darkness felt claustrophobic, more like a tomb than a forest.