Mortal Rites

by Melissa McShane

  She stopped. Turning her head, she pushed her hair out of her face and regarded them with a dead, white-eyed stare. Her eyes were, as Perrin had said, filmed over, but Sienne had no doubt the undead saw them. The creature tilted her head like an inquisitive bird. Her mouth worked as if she were chewing something hard and resinous. Then she turned and resumed her slow, halting walk. In less than a minute, she was out of sight.

  Sienne let out a deep breath and heard the others do the same. “Your guess was right,” she said.

  “I have never been so grateful for that,” Perrin said. “I hope she did not communicate our presence to her master.”

  “She probably couldn’t,” Sienne said. “Necromancers have to have a special connection to their creations to see or hear what they do, and it gets harder the more creatures they, well, connect to. With dozens or even hundreds of undead, the odds are in our favor that he didn’t try.”

  “And undead lack minds with which a priest might forge a mental link, not to mention our Master Murtaviti is no priest,” Perrin said. “We might actually succeed at this.” He blinked. The purple light was dimmer than it had been.

  “We should move quickly, regardless,” Alaric said. “How much longer will that blessing last?”

  “I have no idea,” Perrin said, “and I confess I do not know how long it has lasted until now. But the figures are dimming, so I imagine it will not be much longer before it fades entirely.”

  They walked more quickly, Perrin giving directions in a clear, curt voice that suggested he felt the urgency more than any of them. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, and just as Perrin said, “I can see no more,” Dianthe said, “We’re almost out of the village.”

  They paused in the shelter of one of the log houses, larger than the rest, to regroup. “Another hundred paces, and we’re in the fields,” Dianthe said, “and we haven’t seen anything of Master Murtaviti.”

  “The last thing I saw before the blessing faded was a large contingent of undead massing about a hundred yards away,” Perrin said, “which would put them beyond the village, in the fields.”

  “That will give us no cover,” Kalanath said. “We will certainly be seen.”

  “It doesn’t look like the undead care anything about us,” Alaric said.

  “I mean that if Master Murtaviti is there, he will see us,” Kalanath pointed out. “And we do not know what he will do.”

  “If we can get close enough, it won’t matter,” Alaric said. “Are we ready to go on?”

  The others nodded. Sienne gripped her spellbook more tightly and prayed the undead wouldn’t suddenly change their minds about attacking.

  She was in the front again, with Alaric directly behind her. Compressed lips and a tightly clenched jaw were the only signs he gave that he was unhappy about it. Her heart beat rapidly enough it was uncomfortable, her palms were once again sweaty, and the strong odor of rot reached her nose, making her feel ill. All this for one man, she thought.

  They passed beyond the last of the houses and into the fields. When the settlement had thrived, there would have been a cleared area between the houses and the beginnings of the plowed and planted fields. Twenty years later, weeds and tall grasses grew right up to the houses, pale yellow from where the sun had already begun to burn them. There was no sign that any of the land had ever been cultivated. The late afternoon sun slanted across the fields, deepening their color. It also fell on dozens of bodies, moving through the fields like harvesters. But these creatures carried no sickles or scythes, and they walked random paths that rarely intersected. They simply avoided one another, stepping out of each other’s way long before collision was possible. The drunken dance sent a shiver down Sienne’s spine. It just wasn’t natural.

  “Keep walking,” Alaric said, nudging her. Sienne hadn’t realized she’d stopped. She jolted into motion again, her first few steps as halting as the undead’s. Dianthe, on her right, barely disturbed the long grasses as she went. Behind her, she heard the rustle of the men’s passage, and the faint creak of Alaric’s boots that he hadn’t had mended before they left. At least it wasn’t likely to draw more attention to them than anything else.

  She sucked in a breath as they neared the first undead, a man dressed in rough workman’s attire who showed no sign of how he’d died. Dianthe stopped to wait for him to pass. He, like the other one, turned his head to look at them, but made no other movement. After he continued on his inexplicable path, Dianthe nodded at Sienne to continue, and Sienne exhaled slowly and blinked until the spots in front of her eyes vanished.

  They had more encounters the further they went, and Sienne could see Perrin was right: they were converging on a spot where more and more undead had gathered. From somewhere up ahead came a low humming sound, or, more accurately, the sound of someone singing O in a very low voice, without stopping for breath. It was unnerving. It made the increasing numbers of undead, who were now headed the same direction they were instead of parallel to it, seem like people gathering around a busker on a street corner.

  “We’re going to have to push through,” Dianthe said, coming to a halt. “I really don’t want to touch them.”

  “They cannot hurt you,” Perrin said, “or, rather, have not been ordered to do so.”

  “Yes, but they’re disgusting. Some of them leak. And they smell terrible.”

  “I think we shouldn’t risk the possibility that Murtaviti gave them the command that they could defend themselves if aggressed on,” Alaric said, “especially since, for all we know, touching them could count as aggression. It’s time for a protective shield.”

  “Contact with the shield might arouse their anger, too,” Perrin said, but he removed a red-smudged paper from the riffle and gestured to them to gather around him. He recited his invocation, and a pearly-gray hemisphere sprung into being around them, large enough to allow them to move freely within it. “So long as they do not attack it, it will last for several minutes.”

  “Let’s move more quickly. We have to assume Murtaviti saw that, so there’s no more need for stealth,” Alaric said.

  They strode forward, keeping in formation around Perrin, on whom the shield was centered. Sienne cringed as they made straight for a couple of undead who showed no sign of awareness of them. Each held a squared-off stone about head size in both hands, their arms fully extended as if the weight was almost too much for them. If contact with the shield would send them into a frenzy, the friends would soon find out.

  Two more steps, and the front edge of the shield pressed up against the creatures. They stumbled, caught their balance, and looked back. Perrin kept walking, so Sienne did too. The shield pushed the undead harder, and they dropped their stones. One turned and pressed its hands against the shield, compressing it slightly. The other let the shield push it out of the way to the left, like one soap bubble sliding off another. Sienne watched the first warily, waiting for it to snarl and turn its hands with, she now saw, sharply pointed nails on the shield, tearing strips from it until it popped.

  But it merely stepped away, pressing one palm to trail across it as if caressing it. “That’s disturbing,” Alaric said. “They’re indifferent to us, even though we’ll have to destroy them if we can.”

  “The undead no longer have human concerns,” Perrin said. “They do not remember their former lives except as vague shadows—or, in the case of revenants, as white-hot rage against their murderers.”

  Sienne kept herself from cringing a second time as the shield bumped up against another creature. There were many of them now, almost a crowd, none of them interested in the humans in their midst. Many of them carried stones, some of which were crusted with dark loam. The droning sound had grown in volume, and multiple voices joined in the sound. The shield bubble shoved undead inexorably aside like a plow pushing up earth. “Why do you know so much about the undead?” she asked. “I know about necromancy because it was required in my studies, but they never taught us about the creatures it creates. I think they we
re afraid it would encourage us.”

  “My mentor, the man who converted me and taught me the priesthood of Averran, was in his youth a spirit hunter,” Perrin said. “One who dedicates himself to destroying the undead and laying phantasms to rest. He liked to talk about those days, which is unusual, in my experience. I have met other spirit hunters and they were, with that one exception, all morose and reluctant to share stories. But Evander, my mentor, believed his work was a divine blessing upon those poor souls tortured by necromancers. He was a remarkably cheery fellow—but that is a story for another time.”

  “The crowd is getting thick,” Dianthe said. The shield was now pushing aside four and five undead at a time. “We’re almost—”

  With those words, the shield displaced another few undead, and they were suddenly in a cleared area, empty of all but a handful of creatures. Those undead carried stones and walked slowly, single file, toward a pile of stones about waist-high. As each reached the pile, it set its stone atop the others and let its hands fall, then turned away and walked back into the crowd. They didn’t seem interested in building a stable structure; the pile of stones was roughly conical, and as one undead laid its stone atop the cone, it rocked and then slid down to lie at its base.

  Standing next to the cone, observing its building, was a man whose short dark hair receded abruptly from his brow. His dark eyes were fixed on the cone as if measuring its height against some unknown standard. He wore dark clothes too warm for the weather and a lined cloak that was too heavy for the light breeze to move. He glanced up at their arrival, then returned to watching the pile of stones. It was so clearly a dismissal Sienne almost turned to leave. She caught herself before it was embarrassing and looked up at Alaric.

  “Pauro Murtaviti?” Alaric said in a firm, carrying voice.

  “I am he,” the man said, not looking up.

  “Your wife hired us to find you,” Alaric said. “She’s very concerned.”

  “I sent word that I would be delayed,” Murtaviti said.

  “She never got the message.”

  “That’s unfortunate. But this shouldn’t take much longer.” Murtaviti gestured the next undead to stop and measured the top of the cone with the flat of his palm, swinging it over to compare its height to his. Based on this crude measurement, the cone came to just above his belly button. His lips moved as if he were counting.

  “You need to stop what you’re doing,” Alaric said. “And release these undead.”

  Murtaviti motioned to the undead to continue and finally looked up. His eyes were large and dark brown and completely devoid of emotion. “Do I? Why is that?”

  “Practicing necromancy is illegal. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.”

  “And you’re here to bring me in. You’re rather informally dressed for guards.”

  “We’re not guards. We’re not interested in prosecuting your crimes. If you release these souls, we won’t say anything about it to the law.”

  Dianthe made a small, somewhat pained sound. Alaric ignored her.

  “How generous of you,” Murtaviti said. “But I think not. I’ve worked for too many years to bring this plan to fruition. I’m not going to give up now.”

  “Alaric,” Kalanath said, a warning note in his voice. Sienne swiveled to look at him and saw, beyond the shield, the hordes of undead pressing toward them. Where they had previously been indifferent to the shield’s presence, they now seemed very intent on it, slowly but inexorably reaching for it with their clawed hands. The ones in front pressed up against the shield, tearing at it, and were in turn climbed on and over by more undead, until the entire back half of the shield was dark with bodies.

  Alaric gave the situation a single look, then turned his attention back to Murtaviti. “That’s a delaying tactic,” he said. “All we have to do is kill you and your control over them is lost.”

  “Turning them into an army of masterless ghouls,” Murtaviti said. “By all means, kill me.” His mouth quirked up on one side as if he’d made a joke.

  Alaric’s lips thinned. “Take him,” he said, drew his sword, and slashed at the protective shield. Dianthe hurried to join him. Sienne paced near Perrin, her spellbook open to force now. If they could knock him unconscious…

  More undead circled the shield, putting themselves between it and their master. Alaric swore and slashed harder. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he began.

  “I feel absurdly as if I should apologize for the increasing potency of my blessings,” Perrin said with a weak laugh.

  The shield parted down one side where Alaric and Dianthe had slashed it. Dianthe slipped through, followed by Alaric, and came up against a wall of undead standing protectively around Murtaviti. Alaric swore again and began laying about with his sword. “Sienne!” he shouted.

  Sienne emerged from the dome just as it popped and vanished entirely. Thumps indicated undead falling from where they’d been perched atop the shield, but she didn’t have time to worry about that. She could barely see Murtaviti past his undead slaves.

  She moved to the right, hoping to skirt them, and they followed, slowly and implacably drawing nearer. Except for the droning sound that now came from every direction at once, they were eerily silent, their white eyes unblinking, their arms outstretched and reaching for her. She bit back a scream and flipped the pages to burn, casting about for the best target. She needed to cut through the line of undead, but there were so many of them. Cursing herself for not having learned scorch, she read off burn and struck one of the undead with the blue fire. It kept coming for her, ignoring how the fire spread across its torso to its head.

  Sienne backed up and cast burn again, and again, before concluding that setting the undead on fire only made them harder for the fighters to hit. She backed up again and screamed as someone grabbed her. “It is me,” Kalanath said. “There are more of them coming this way.”

  She turned in his arms to see the approaching horde stumbling in their direction. “Can they see?” she shouted.

  “I cannot tell,” Kalanath said. “It seemed they saw us before. Why?”

  It was worth a shot. “Let’s see,” she said, and flipped back a few pages to read out the summoning fog. The sharp-edged syllables cut her tongue, and she tasted blood, but thick mist rose up from the ground between them and the undead, completely obscuring them.

  “We should move,” Kalanath said, drawing her along with him. They ran to where Alaric and Dianthe fought madly, both with sword and with boot. Kalanath took up a position on Alaric’s left, his staff flicking faster than Sienne could follow. The fire of burn was finally having some effect, and the first undead Sienne had cast it on sagged to its knees and then fell face-first to the ground. Sienne cast burn again, but the spell was just too slow. She needed another solution.

  Pearly light flashed, and Perrin stood beside her, his left arm bearing a divine shield. “This is not working,” he said as the first undead reached them and began clawing gray shreds off the shield. “We must reach Master Murtaviti or we will be overwhelmed.”

  Sienne watched the undead, five or six of them, scrabble at the shield. Beyond them was the clear space she wanted, but every one of them blocked her line of sight. “I have an idea,” she said. “Keep the shield going.”

  She flipped directly to jaunt, near the back of her book, and began reading the summoning. It tore at the insides of her cheeks, filling her mouth with blood she swallowed. Transit spells were so long, it felt as if she’d already been reading the spell for an hour, though her memory of the spell’s beginning had long since faded. As she read, she kept that sight of the clear space in a corner of her mind, encompassing it, picturing herself standing there. Tension built up in the muscles of her arms and back, like lifting a heavy weight high above her head and holding it there indefinitely.

  She reached the end of the spell and spat out blood with the final syllables. With one last mental push, she saw herself in the empty spot—

  —and she was ther
e, not ten feet from Murtaviti. He was soundlessly counting again as he poured a dark liquid from a waterskin into a goblet that looked as if it were made of sooty glass. It was such a strange thing for him to do as battle raged only feet from him that Sienne just stared at him instead of hitting him with force.

  Murtaviti flung the empty waterskin away. “Two hundred seventeen undead exactly,” he said, gesturing toward the pyramid of stones. He raised the goblet to his lips. Sienne broke free of her reverie and started reading off force.

  Before she could finish the spell, Murtaviti lowered the goblet and wiped his lips, which were stained a dark purple by whatever was in the glass. “Farewell, wizard,” he said, dropping the goblet. Then he convulsed, doubling up over himself and dropping to his knees.

  Sienne made a movement toward him, then hesitated. Touching him might be a bad idea, even if he was in pain.

  She glanced back toward her friends, hoping for some inspiration. Her jaw dropped. All the undead, including the ones she’d set on fire, slowly sagged toward the ground, folding up on themselves like puppets with their strings cut. Her fog had dissipated slightly and was spreading—no, it was darker, whatever it was, and certainly not her spell. The dark mist arose from the undead bodies, flowing from their mouths and noses, and crept along the ground in tendrils like fast-growing black ivy. It piled up against her legs, then flowed around them, making for Murtaviti’s shuddering body, racked with seizures. Murtaviti’s mouth and eyes were open, and the mist flowed into them, making it look like it was choking him.

  Sienne took a few steps back and bumped into Alaric. “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I don’t know. He drank something, and then he fell down and went into seizures.” Sienne prodded his leg with her toe. Murtaviti didn’t respond.

  Perrin picked up the goblet and sniffed it. “I do not recognize the concoction, but it smells strongly of black currants.”