Dalibor inhaled the cool night air and relished the scent of more burning wood than ever. Bright orange flames illuminated the interior of the village they’d come to overtake. Ockham’s Fringe had finally caught fire. “At dawn we assault the walls. Prepare your necromancers to fill their trenches with your dead bodies. We will smash down their peasant fortifications as we stand on the backs of our legion of undead. It is as it should be, as our Queen would have it.”
Yefim rubbed his hands together. “Happily, my lord. We shall act for Queen and country at your signal.”
Miles away, and miles above, Bridgette Marie and her crew and passengers fought against the winds in a race against the Empire.
—Chapter Nineteen—
THE HUNT
Yefim Gneery had masses of undead shuffling, agitated by the commotion of war on all sides when the spirit bearing Peiron Fitch’s newest sending caressed his cold, dead ear. The dead may have been ignorant of the spirit of the little boy dancing about in their midst, but somehow their lifeless eyes and ears could sense the excitement of the coming assault. They gnashed their teeth and clenched their fists; ready for a war their feeble minds couldn’t know was coming. But somehow, they did.
The spirit of the dead boy whispered to Yefim. My lord, their noose tightens around me. They are aware of my work and have started to hunt me. I shall hide in the basement of a tanner with the hides. I await your coming.
Yefim gritted his own teeth and fought against sending an angry message to a scared Peiron. Scolding would achieve nothing. He composed his thoughts, and with a whisper to no one in the middle of the crowd of the serving undead, he sent a reply back.
You would be better suited saving your energies for your defense if they find you. Lay low and avoid confrontation. Your skills are best suited for subterfuge, not combat. Before noon, we shall meet. Be wise, and have faith in the will of the Queen.
Gneery waved his hand as if he was brushing away a pestering insect, and the spell was gone, soaring invisibly above the heads of five thousand undead. He returned to his pets, and the weaving of spells around them to make them into the undead shock troopers he needed them to be at dawn.
As Marcus and his two soldiers left Howard’s tavern in search of Peiron, they rounded up an Apostle that looked no older than the first falling leaf they’d seen on the march up. He had wide but brave eyes below unkempt straw colored hair. He had no scars save for the emotional ones they couldn’t see.
“What is your name?” Marcus had asked the boy as they passed him tending to a fireman with an arrow through the meat of his bicep.
The young Apostle broke the arrow in half and pulled the pieces out of the wound with an experience that drained Marcus of joy. For such a young man to have such talent for the arts required by war was a bad thing, he thought. “Priest Richard, my Lord.”
“Didn’t you bless the body of Willem in the tower the other night?” Private Stone asked the young priest.
The apostle closed his eyes as he rested both palms of his hand on the entrance and exit wounds on the soldier’s arm. He said a prayer too quiet for them to hear, and when he took his soft hands away from the damaged limb, the previously ragged circular wound had disappeared. A puffy scar remained behind. He stood, and wiped the grateful soldier’s blood off on a rag he had tucked into his leather belt. “I did. He deserved peace, and I am not afraid of heights.”
Stone’s face became serene, and his eyes welled with the slight presence of restrained tears. “I thank you, Richard. Willem was a friend.”
Priest Richard’s face softened, leaving the darkness of tending the wounded behind, if only for a minute. “From what I knew of him he served admirably. As does the female archer he was teamed with.”
Stone brightened. “Aubrey Leaf. She’s the best of the best. Shoot a cherry off your nose at a hundred paces and steal your heart after to rub it in. I’d like to hear how many purple robed bastards have met their end with one of her arrows through them.” A flaming arrow fell into the street with a clack ten feet away. The men stood safe below one of the wooden roofs Marcus had built, and in the moment they’d forgotten a siege surrounded them.
“Speaking of purple robed bastards,” Marcus interrupted, “we need to find Peiron Fitch fast.”
Richard looked perplexed. “Do we need to make a sending? I could try, though I’ve never done one successfully.”
Marcus swung his sword in a gleaming circle out of frustration and hefted the weight of his big crimson shield. “It may yet come to that, Priest, but no, we need to find Peiron because we believe he is a traitor.”
An unseen scar formed behind Richard’s eyes. The wound of betrayal. “Not good. Not good at all. You think he serves the Queen, or has he gone mad from the fighting?”
Marcus gritted his teeth and shook his head. “I suspect he serves the Purple Throne. But we will find him, and we will ferret out what the truth is.”
“How do you plan to locate him?” Richard asked.
“We’ve a trail of blood where we believe he killed Corporal Beckett. We will track him from there,” Marcus said as he motioned for the men to move. The soldiers moved immediately, Richard delayed, thinking on the task at hand.
“The firefighter?” Richard asked, his displeasure with the situation growing as each moment passed. Another arrow thunked into a wooden post that held the roof aloft, and the flames started to dance a wicked pirouette around the pine beam. A soldier nearby ran over to the arrow and yanked it free, stopping a fire from taking root.
“Yes, and as a result his team has been disorganized, and in his area of the village, fires have started that are now nearly out of control.”
Richard steeled himself and picked up the pace until he strode beside the Knight Major. “Get me to the area where the blood is, and I’ll ask the spirits if they saw anything.”
“You can do that?” Hester asked the Priest.
“There is a spell. I’m good at casting it. The spirits are fond of me, I think they’ll answer.”
“Then let’s move. Pray as we go, apostle. Every moment wasted might be another dead Varrlander,” Marcus said, and the men took off running.
In a basement below a building on the edge of the village against the new wooden wall that surrounded all of Ockham, not far from where he surprised Corporal Beckett with The Way, and closer still to where he stabbed Sergeant Dunwood with a poisoned dagger, Peiron Fitch hid under a waist-deep pile of rough leather. The crushing, alkaline smell of the tanning vats invaded his nose and scraped at his nostrils and throat, threatening to trigger dry heaves and coughs until the heaves weren’t dry anymore. He cursed at his choice of hiding place, but maintained that the basement had been a good idea. No one lived at the leather worker’s shop, and with its hammered tin roof the tannery seemed unlikely to catch fire from falling arrows.
The hair on the back of his neck suddenly tickled and stood on edge like the quills of a porcupine. Peiron knew instantly The Way moved about, somewhere close, and somehow, it involved him. Sweat formed and ran into the cracks and crevices of his body, spurred on by what the feeling meant.
An apostle had joined the hunt for him. The spirits of Ockham’s Fringe had been roused against him. He buried himself a few inches deeper under the rancid smelling rawhide and prayed that his rescue would come before his pursuers did.
Richard kneeled in the alley where Beckett’s head smashed against the stone foundation and cracked open earlier in the night. The young man held a hand out, hovering it an inch away from the ground where the body had fallen into the damp dirt. His eyes were closed, and his spell just cast into the air like an invisible net, fishing for equally invisible answers.
“Did you learn anything?” Private Hester asked as he watched the apostle with angry, impatient eyes.
“Leave him be,” Marcus said softly as he kept vigil, watching where the alley met the street. It felt dangerous in the darkness to him, and for more than one good reason. “Too little time
has passed for an answer to have come. Watch the end of the alley.” Hester turned, and did as he was told.
Richard suddenly inhaled deep through his nose, taking in all the scents of the scene of the crime. Eyes still closed, he licked his lips and inhaled again, tasting the air. He stood abruptly, robes straightening, his face soured. “The Way was used here. A sleep spell, I think. I’m not sure precisely what spell, but magic has happened in this place.”
Marcus turned, the confirmation of the spell having been cast making him a bit angrier. “How powerful a spell is that?”
Richard looked unhappy about the question. “It’s Neomancy. A common spell shared by any form of spellcaster, though it is a powerful spell. Beyond my ability by a fair amount.”
Marcus pressed the apostle for more, “Do you know if Peiron knew that spell?”
“I do not. I can say that he was certainly powerful enough in The Way to have cast it, though. Few of the apostles that made the journey here other than him would have been able to cast it. Most or all of them died in that attack that he survived,” Richard said.
“Strange coincidence, that,” Marcus said. “Can the spirits help us find him? I’d like to put that question to him directly.”
Richard perked up. “They have been known to answer a question or two now and then when asked politely. Forgive me a minute to summon a spell and we’ll test the waters.”
Marcus, Hester and Stone all turned back to watch their environment as Richard closed his eyes and meditated, summoning The Way. Stone kept his bow readied with an arrow on the string, and his eyes on the upper elevations surrounding them. He didn’t want a hidden archer or miscreant with something as simple as a dropped rock from a rooftop to threaten them. Though you’d have to be mad to think going on a roof on a night like this was a good idea.
The priest extended his senses and allowed the ebb and flow of the unseen world to mingle with his mind. His blackened vision inside his eyelids opened and formed an image of the alley, complete with ghostly forms, obviously human but shapeless and sexless moving about. They seemed to shuffle their mist-made feet with tension and uncertainty. Something had upset them, and Richard could sense it. With his mind, he reached out.
Elders, a man murdered another here. Where has he gone?
One of the spirits heard Richard’s voice and slid across the ground to him without touching it. The ghost’s hands moved about, gesturing in frustration. Richard couldn’t decipher if the spirit had been born a man or a woman. The apostle. A turncoat. He has gone to hide where the fire he has brought down cannot touch him.
To the water?
No. Under the ground. Where the stench is.
You bless us with your knowledge. I thank you.
Richard opened his eyes, leaving the spirits in the halfway world, and looked at Marcus with his real, living eyes. “He has gone underground somehow. Not far I don’t think. The spirits here saw him run somewhere the fires couldn’t get to him. Perhaps a stone building with a basement or root cellar? Maybe with dead bodies. Someplace that smells.”
“There aren’t many in Ockham, and only one that I can think of near here. We follow the blood, and see what we see,” Marcus said. He led the way, and the four men followed.
Sergeant Dunwood’s corpse lay in the street on its back, motionless. Devoid of life and activity. Inside, a storm raged.
Absent life, the soul of the soldier writhed in agony, unable to transcend the body and move along to the afterlife without the gentle words and prayers of an apostle. His consciousness departed his eternal energy, leaving only a mindless power behind to shake and fester. That pain and suffering transformed what was left of the good man into an angry dead one. The rotting soul grew more powerful with each passing moment, leeching back into the flesh it was trapped in, subverting the peaceful body into a chassis, a vehicle, a tool. A weapon to strike back at the living with.
Dunwood’s body sat up, and looked around for something to kill.
Killing made the pain fairer to suffer, after all, and he had so much pain to share.
Marcus led. The only way he knew how to go into danger required him to be at the front, sword in hand, shield held at the ready. This village is impossibly large. I walked these paths and streets ten times over and I swear to the dead that this place has gotten bigger inside the walls we built around it.
The packed dirt paths that the locals called streets had originally been laid out in a series of squares on the plains, easy to navigate so long as you kept to them. However when a visitor strayed from the main thoroughfares and entered the alleys, yards and gardens of the homes and businesses, the sense of the place disappeared. Walls, hedges, rock outcroppings, stables and fences had grown during the town’s slow expansion over the years in a very organic way. As Marcus and his three men navigated these labyrinthine back ways they often had to double back, move diagonally, jump over stone walls, crawl under wooden fences and reassess their direction.
All without the comforting presence of the protective wooden roofs Marcus had built where foot traffic would be heaviest during the siege.
Hester had a small buckler strapped to his left arm and of course Marcus had his much larger steel shield, but Private Stone and their Apostle Richard had no protection from the sea of flaming Empire projectiles swimming in the sky above. They ran from stable to alcove, wagon to wall, eyes fixed on the orange darts screaming by above.
“Here,” the bow carrying Stone said as he ripped a wooden lid off of a water barrel. He handed it to the apostle, and the boyish man took it gratefully. He moved it in his hands, trying to find an easy way to carry it, and settled on holding it over his head like a giant dinner plate.
“Thank you,” Richard said from his crouch under the roof of an animal pen. A goat bleated from the shadows nearby as an arrow thunked into its home. Richard and Stone laughed, and the soldier stood up and yanked the arrow out. He put the wooden missile with its flaming tip on his own bow string and fired it right back into the sky, over the wooden stockade wall and hopefully into the face of an Empire archer, or a zombie. He nodded happily after.
“Richard,” Marcus asked from his own crouch against a half burnt home just a few paces away in the dark. Have you any sense if we’re close? There are several homes here with cellars and basements.”
Richard finished watching the arrow fly away and looked back to the leader of the Ghostmakers. “I sense nothing. I can reach out again to the spirits. Perhaps there is one nearby that saw something.”
“We have good cover at the moment. Reach out with The Way and—“ Marcus stopped speaking when he heard a man’s scream on the opposite side of the single story home he had his back against. “With me,” he said as he got to his feet and exited the cramped space between the two homes. Stone and Hester acted without hesitation, moving in the wake of their Knight Major as he left to confront whatever it was that caused the screams. Richard heard a gurgling choke as he, too, followed the soldiers. Someone’s life had someone’s fingers wrapped tight around it.
The four ran, and in just a few steps, saw despair in human form.
Their friend and comrade Sergeant Oberyn Dunwood had died, and failed to shuffle to the other side of the afterlife, and his body had returned as a wrath filled undead. Always a big and powerful man, he stood over a dominated younger man with his gauntleted hands wrapped around the throat of his victim. His armor had been pierced twice by arrows that were alit with flame, one in the center of his back, the other directly into his breastplate where his heart lay. The tongues of flame licked up, illuminating his twisted, snarling, color-drained visage into a nightmare that curdled the men’s stomachs like old milk.
“Dunwood! Cease!” Marcus yelled, his voice strong but trembling with the first tremors of grief.
The scream caused the zombie-sergeant to stop growling at the dying boy in his hands. His face snapped up with a jerk, and his yellow-red eyes focused on the man who had been his friend in life, just an hour befor
e. With a roar he tossed the boy aside into the side of a small business, his head bouncing off the wooden siding with a thunk. As the boy slipped to the earth, Dunwood lowered his head and charged his Knight Major.
To his credit, Private Stone already had an arrow on his bow’s string, and he drew and sent the feathered shaft straight across the street and into the torso of the sergeant without hesitation, or regret. The arrow’s slender bodkin tip punctured the thick steel encasing the dead warrior’s torso and plunged into the soft flesh within, but with no need for his stomach or intestines, the wound failed to slow the charge.
Marcus had his shield at the ready and his sword drawn. He planted his sword foot back and raised his crimson aegis, putting his entire torso behind its protection. As Dunwood’s wild advance smashed into the shield, the Knight simultaneously lowered his entire body into a crouch and allowed Dunwood’s momentum to carry him atop the shield.
Marcus Gray twisted his shoulder and stood up powerfully, launching the zombie into the air over his body, head over heels. When Dunwood landed on the ground head first, breaking the arrow lodged in his back, Marcus had already spun his footing, and had his blade poised to strike. The landing on the ground put Dunwood’s feet directly into contact with Hester’s, and the far younger warrior acted immediately, following the training he’d received. He hacked downward with his own blade at the lightly armored boot of his former leader and severed the left foot. He backed away as Dunwood’s somewhat stunned body tried to lash out at him, hissing. Foamy white saliva hit the swordsman’s legs and he backed away, afraid of the undead foe he’d just struck.
“My apologies friend,” Marcus said to the dead man’s rear, and he swung his long sword in a wide, whipping arc at his hip, and severed his friend’s head from his shoulders. As the head rolled away into the shadows, the rest of his body fell back to the dirt. No blood ran from his wounds as more fiery arrows fell into the dirt nearby.
The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3) Page 23
