Pathfinder Tales: The Crusader Road

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Creelisk bowed his head as a momentary fatigue shook him. He'd used the ring's magic before to animate the dead, in order to familiarize himself with its workings, but those times he'd been closer to the body, often able to touch it. When he'd worked at a distance, it had seldom been more than the depth of a grave, and many of those had been shallow.

  But this, this is different.

  The Silverlakers had made a good decision in choosing to sink the ogrekin's body in the lake. Were other ogres to find it, at some point or other it would occur to them that the people in Silverlake had killed their compatriot. While most ogres wouldn't waste sentiment on another of their kind, a community of ogrekillers was a threat to everyone. It could not be allowed to stand.

  Hiding the body deep in the lake would keep it away from ogres, but the Silverlakers didn't understand that their watery grave didn't mean the ogrekin would be hidden forever. The lock of hair, because it had come from the corpse, had a connection to the corpse. And the lake's water, which touched the ogrekin, likewise had a connection to it. To accomplish his goal, Creelisk merely had to use those connections to link the corpse with his magic.

  His fingers tingled up to the knuckles, and he smiled. He'd not expected the link to be that strong, at so far a distance, but the corpse would be fairly fresh. The depths would retard putrefaction, so save for bits gnawed off by fish or cut off as mementos by Silverlakers, the ogrekin should be in fairly good shape.

  He pulled his hand from the water. The ruby glowed lightly, and Creelisk hid it once again within his glove.

  He withdrew from the lake's edge and concealed himself in a tree's moonshadow. He should be coming right... about... now...

  Something bobbed to the surface thirty feet from shore. It came in, water draining from a head and broad shoulders. The left hand had two fingers remaining, the right three.

  Water sheeted off as the creature limped from the lake. It dragged its right foot, but that didn't concern Creelisk. He didn't need speed or agility from the undead ogrekin. He just needed it following his command. It would deliver a message, and that would be enough.

  He remained in shadow. "I who raised you now command you. You are to go to Mosswater. Consume what you must only when you must, to sustain yourself. Once in Mosswater you will conceal yourself until I give you further commands."

  The ogrekin did not turn to look at him, nor did it acknowledge him in any way. The end of the fishing spear remained stuck in the one eye. It limped on, shifting its course slightly south, then again west, heading on a fairly straight course for the Mosswater ruins.

  Creelisk smiled and rubbed his left hand over the ring. He'd set things into motion. Barring unforeseen interference, nothing could stop his plan from working. He looked up at the stars twinkling in the cold sky. "If you could see me, Father, I think you'd be amazed at how well I learned the lesson you worked so hard to teach."

  paizo.com #3236236, Corry Douglas , Aug 10, 2014

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  Chapter Twenty

  The Perils of Curiosity

  Something about the goblin and what it had done with the bones kept at Jerrad like an itch on his back that he couldn't ever scratch. The magic had felt so wrong and so evil that he wanted nothing to do with it. At the same time, its being that evil meant that to ignore it would be an irresponsible act which could jeopardize Silverlake.

  Armed with two sticks, he ventured back to the hollow where he and Nelsa had seen the goblin. He used every ounce of woodcraft that Nelsa, Kiiryth, and his desire to avoid the fey had taught him. Out of respect for his skill, or simply because they didn't notice his silent passage, squirrels ignored him. He didn't see or hear any fey—especially sprites.

  The absence of goblins also gave him heart.

  He hadn't told Nelsa what he was going to do, even though he'd made up his mind to do it the last time they'd explored the wood together. He wasn't afraid she'd talk him out of going, or point out that what he was doing was decidedly foolish and certainly dangerous. He wasn't even afraid that she'd have followed him. He knew she'd have led the way, even though she thought the expedition was foolish and dangerous.

  He keenly felt the lack of her company as he slipped from shadow to shadow. Nelsa wasn't easy to peg. Smart and adventurous, she tended to think about things almost as much as he did. It wasn't that she couldn't be emotional—though nowhere near as much as his sister—but she let her mind take a run at things before she defaulted to her heart. She was more like his mother in that way, though her laconic sense of humor wasn't anything like his mother's.

  My mother's sense of humor has been missing since the attack. It had died about the time she killed the ogrekin. The advent of Baron Creelisk and the need to prepare for winter hadn't given it any chance to come back. He missed hearing his mother laugh.

  I miss my mother.

  A little indignation shook him. He was thirteen years old. Almost halfway to fourteen. He wasn't a mouse. He'd killed goblins. He could work magic. He didn't need his mother.

  Still, he missed her. While anger had prompted her to monitor his training; the result had been that they spent two hours together every day. She'd taken delight in his successes and consoled him over his defeats. She'd offered advice and chastened him when he got arrogant or lazy.

  Jerrad understood that she had to be mother to him and to the whole of Silverlake. He didn't really want to be sharing her with everyone else, but they needed her as much as he did—or more. Whereas he was nearing manhood, Silverlake was still in its infancy and wasn't anywhere near weaned.

  It was with that in mind that he'd decided on his mission. He needed to show his mother that he could help with Silverlake, and that he wanted the settlement to succeed as much as she did. He also needed to make sure she knew it wasn't because he planned to return to Ustalav when the twenty years was over. He'd decided Silverlake was going to be his home—he wasn't in exile, he was right where he was meant to be.

  Part of that decision came from the heart. He really liked Echo Wood. As much as he enjoyed traveling over the Vishov holdings, they lacked something. Ustalav was a nation that had long ago been tamed. The only vitality came in political intrigues. There was nothing wrong with his old home, but it lacked the wonder of Echo Wood. In Ustalav he was a Vishov. Here, he could be anything.

  Practically speaking, however, he didn't expect there would be anything to go back to. Serrana and Ranall seemed quite cozy with each other. It wasn't going to surprise him if before winter, or in the spring, or at the height of next summer, Ranall asked for his sister's hand in marriage. They'd return to Ustalav, probably live on the Vishov estate, then take over the combined family estates once Baron Creelisk died.

  That he'd be shouldered out of his birthright didn't bother him at all. He and his sister might fight, but they shared the same blood. Just as his mother had been supportive of her brother through to the bitter end, so he'd support Serrana and she'd support him. If he'd ever doubted that she would, he only had to think back to her beating goblins to death to save him.

  Jerrad reached the hollow and crawled up the hillside. He listened, but heard nothing. Peeking over the berm, he saw nothing. He pulled himself up in a crouch behind a fern and studied the situation a bit longer. He couldn't see a single thing out of place.

  He moved into the hollow slowly, stopping every step or two. Both Kiiryth and Nelsa had taught him that most creatures saw movement more easily than they saw stationary items. When he paused, he studied the area, moving his eyes only. Everything remained clear, so he completed his descent.

  He crossed to where the goblin had flicked the bones off the mat. A few leaves had blown over the area. He dropped to knee and brushed some aside. He had to look closely, but he managed to spot bits of white bone against the darker leaves and loam.

  His eyes sharpened. He reached toward one of the mouse skulls, but froze before he touched it. He opened his palm, recalling that the
goblin had reacted to the bones as if they were embers. He felt no heat, so he touched the skull with his finger.

  Nothing.

  Tentatively he picked it up between thumb and forefinger. He was ready to drop it in an instant, but he caught no hint of warmth. The bone felt cool and damp, even a bit greasy. He put it in a pouch on his belt, then added a couple more long bones.

  He retreated from the hollow and made his way north. He didn't follow either his entry path or the one he and Nelsa had used to leave the hollow previously. He picked out as difficult a path as he could, choosing a route that should be harder for short-legged goblins. He even found a stream, went south against the current, then west and around north again to throw off pursuit.

  Confident he'd not been followed, he crouched in the wind-scoured bowl at the base of an enormous, old pine. He pulled the skull out of the pouch, laid it on the ground, and covered it with both his hands. Then he closed his eyes and blended the colors, invoking the spell that let him sense magic.

  He caught the magic from the skull. It felt faint, like the last wisp of fog burning off the lake in the morning. He almost couldn't feel it, so he concentrated. More of its nature came to him, as if the skull was a bell still vibrating after long ago having been struck.

  Wait.

  He turned away from the skull, but the sense remained. No matter which way he turned, it permeated the air.

  It's not the skull. It's the land, the wood itself. Jerrad frowned. The spell wasn't working on the skull, but it appeared as if the wood knew what he sought and was giving it to him. But why?

  Then an even greater vibration pounded into him, not from the skull but from the north and west. It hammered through his chest like a thunderclap. He shied from it and tumbled back, bowled over as if in a goblin stampede. Something tightened around his chest. He couldn't breathe. It's like I'm under the pile of goblins again.

  After a moment, the pressure eased. Jerrad slowly rolled to his knees and shrank down to make himself as small as possible. He waited and listened. Nothing came to him save for the normal sounds of the forest. Even though something had shaken him, he couldn't remember having heard anything. He just knew it felt wrong—just as the ritual magic had felt wrong—but scaled up to be a mountain instead of an anthill.

  He quickly tucked the skull away. Remaining low, scuttling forward on all fours, he moved in the direction from which he'd felt the vibration come. He became hyper-vigilant, taking nearly an hour to cross what couldn't have been more than a hundred yards. His travel brought him to the edge of a steeply walled ravine.

  At first he couldn't be certain what he was seeing, but he resisted the urge to venture down to get a closer look. The ravine didn't have much of anything in the way of old-growth trees. Bushes and saplings grew there. Many of the smaller trees appeared to have been shoved aside. The bushes had been uprooted in some cases and trampled underfoot in the rest. It looked as if something enormous had stalked through the ravine, leaving a trail there the way Jerrad would in meadow grasses.

  He paralleled the trail for a bit, then started down a game path. He kept low and quiet, taking forever to descend. Sweat rolled down his cheeks. He didn't swat at a mosquito intent on landing on his temple. He held his breath as he waited in a cloud of gnats. His lungs burned by the time his quarry's trail cut across the game path.

  He might only have been in Echo Wood for less than a season, but he'd learned enough tracking to have his guts get squishy. A big left footprint, as long as his arm, had sunk a handspan deep in the moist ground. It looked terribly familiar. He'd seen that sort of track before, in Silverlake, after the attack.

  An ogre?

  That realization paled compared to the second one. The right foot hadn't left a print. It had just gouged a wide track through the leaves—a track as long and as wide as a shallow grave. The creature was dragging its right foot. Where the left foot planted, the drag marks stopped for a bit as it heaved that leg forward.

  It can't be the ogrekin. It's dead. His mouth went sour. But dead doesn't mean gone, does it?

  Jerrad glanced at the sky, shading his eyes with a hand, then looked at shadows. He couldn't be certain, but he was pretty sure the trail started in the direction of the lake, and appeared to be headed west toward the Murdoon compound. Unbidden came to mind the broken corpses the Silverlakers had dug out of the longhouse ruins. All too easily Jerrad was able to put Nelsa's face on one of the corpses.

  He couldn't let that happen. The very idea of Nelsa lying dead took his breath away again and made him feel queasy. She couldn't die. She had too much life in her—but he would have said that of any of those who had died at Silverlake, too.

  He had only one course of action. He steeled himself and followed the track. He couldn't tell exactly how old it was. Leaves on broken branches had begun to wither. Animal tracks overlaid some of the footprints. The weather for the past several days had been cool and sunny, but in the ravine's shadowed depths, the sun hadn't been able to dry out and crumble the tracks' edges. Jerrad was willing to bet the tracks were at least a day old, but not more than a week.

  Reanimating a corpse... He shivered. I don't even know spells that kill. How powerful does a necromancer need to be to do something like that? His stomach twisted in on itself. Dealing with the ogrekin had been bad enough, but a necromancer who could raise it was worse. Though he had no practical knowledge of necromancy, countless fairy tales had made clear the evils of that dark art, and the twisted nature of the magic made it easy to classify as such.

  Jerrad considered trying his spell again, but held off. He recalled his mentor's caution about magic always being detectable. As long as he had the tracks to follow, he didn't need magic. He did, however, slip the two sticks from the quiver he wore across his back and made ready to fight if he had to.

  The trail remained painfully easy to follow. The ogre made no attempt to conceal his passage. Where the ravine split, with one branch heading more south, it went in that direction. This made Jerrad feel better, since that meant the ogre wasn't headed directly for Nelsa's home. Still, its path would cut across the road up from Thornkeep, and a right-handed turn would aim it at the Murdoons again.

  He tracked the monster to the road, which was nearly a mile since he'd found the trail. The ogrekin didn't appear to hesitate or hurry in crossing the road. Jerrad located the crushed blossom of a night-blooming flower in a track, suggesting the thing traveled at night. No wonder no one has seen it. Then again, even though Jerrad was crossing in mid-afternoon, he couldn't see any traffic north or south.

  He followed for another half-mile, to the place where the ogre turned west and dragged itself up a hill. Unless it was going to curl up and around to the north, its path wouldn't take it anywhere near Nelsa. In fact, the ogre's trail hadn't deviated much off a southwesterly course for as long as he'd followed it, leading Jerrad to guess it was bound for Mosswater.

  He cautiously concluded the necromancer had to be an ogre calling the dead ogrekin home. While he didn't have anything to compare the magic's sense to, the sheer strength seemed monstrous enough to pin on ogres.

  That meant Silverlake's effort to hide the fact that they'd killed the ogre had gone for naught. He really needed to get back to Silverlake and let everyone know about the danger.

  But what if it's a false alarm? He looked up the hill. It could easily be that the magic ran out, and the ogre's body lay sprawled on the other side of the hill. The goblin's magic had certainly run its course—why wouldn't the same be true of the ogre magic? If I go back, sound the alarm, and it turns out to be nothing...

  He shook his head. It would take too long to track this thing back to Mosswater, but at least he could see its path from the top of the hill. That would be good.

  He scrambled up in the monster's wake. The way the ogrekin's left foot had dug deep holes in the hillside helped him immeasurably. He moved from one to the next, pausing to rest and listen. He watched the sky for carrion birds, but saw none. When h
e felt it was safe to move on, he worked his way further toward the crest.

  He reached it and smiled. In the distance lay a town he took to be Mosswater. From afar he had trouble seeing much more than a tower here and there, but they clearly stood out. He eyeballed the distance as roughly a dozen miles as the crow flies.

  And longer as the ogrekin tumbles.

  The ogrekin had come up and over, then really gone over. A couple of deep holes marked the first few steps it had taken, but after that flatted bushes and snapped trees marked its passage. Clearly it had stumbled and rolled. If Jerrad wasn't mistaken, the gray, flappy thing impaled on the sharp end of a sapling was a strip of the monster's hide. As the ogrekin had made its uncontrolled descent, sharp branches and rough stones had flayed it.

  If I bring a scrap back...

  Jerrad started down cautiously, but sand and gravel shifted. A stone turned beneath his sole, and Jerrad lost his footing. He somersaulted, then bounced into the air and landed hard. His sticks went flying. He clawed at the ground as he slid, but that just slewed him around. Stars exploded before his eyes as his head bashed something, then his ears popped and he rolled again.

  He slid to a stop at the base of the hill, and instantly knew something was wrong. Blood leaked from a cut on the back of his head. He felt dizzy, but that cleared easily enough. The main problem was that he lay on a bed of dry leaves when those stuck to his forehead and cheeks were still wet. Nine feet further on, past scraggly thorn bushes, a wrought iron fence separated him from a dusty cobblestone street.