Byzantium, Book 1: Dead Men's Road

by I.A. Watson

  “Blessed be,” he told the light. “Children, stay close to this saucer. It’ll protect you.”

  “You’d better really know your stuff, Albion,” Mirabelle told the priest. “Why did they throw you out of the White Isle anyway?”

  “It was a mutual decision,” the Wanderer insisted. “Sigroth, bring your axe here a moment.”

  The big Viking hefted his blade over. “What is it?”

  A third flask contained a greasy brown sludge. Kirkgrim painted a sigil on the side of Sigroth’s weapon, a vertical line with two notches out from the right side two-thirds of the way up it. “This is the symbol Luis, meaning rowan. Rowan’s a sovereign tree against evil and magic. This should give your axe a little extra kick.”

  “So I can give them beasties a little extra kick?”

  “When they come. Bide your time. Fitz, can I decorate your pig?”

  The scout shrugged. “Ask him.”

  “Fred, can I please adorn you with the holy ogham runes for Ibhar, the yew tree, sovereign over graveyards, and Straif, blackthorn, protector against enchantments and fear? I promise it’ll help.”

  Mirabelle turned from Kirkgrim’s hog painting and set her grimoire down on a shelf. She unlocked its metal clasp and lifted the cover, then turned the yellow diagram filled pages until she found what she was looking for. Some notes were her own. Others were gifts from her mentor, and Merill de Famagusta was considerably more versed in certain lore than her young student.

  The dead wolves stalked nearer, growing more confident as the evening shadows lengthened. A low ground mist began to seep around the empty graves.

  “Nion, the ash, the tree that connects heaven, Earth, and hell,” Kirkgrim told Fitz as he painted the tracker’s arrowheads. “Try putting one of these shafts through a revenant’s eye. Just stay clear of the splatter zone.”

  “Thanks,” the caravan scout replied dryly. “What’s the paint you’re using?”

  “This? It’s my enemies’ blood.” Kirkgrim grinned ferally. “You should see what I can do with an enemy’s skull.”

  Mirabelle was reminded that the enthusiastic, affable Wanderer had originated from that strange and terrible White Isle whence mystics and clergy across the known world traveled to learn forgotten secrets. What lay beneath that charming casual veneer?

  “They’re getting closer,” Ulas reported. “They’re glowing.”

  “That’d be them burning through the sanctuary protections,” Kirkgrim judged. “Expect other company soon.”

  Mirabelle forced herself to ignore the high strangeness around her. She plunged her mind into the abstruse arcane calculations of her tome, drawing mental lines to channel arcane forces at need, almost completing spells that would hang ready for her to trigger them. She tried to recall all Lady Merill’s instructions. This was very different from the controlled tests at the Invisible College, but the principles were exactly the same.

  Except she’d be torn apart by dead men if she failed.

  Kirkgrim finished his arrow painting and licked his fingers clean. “Now to have a word with the local deity,” he announced to his companions.

  “You think their god can save us?” Fitz asked.

  “Didn’t do a bang-up job in the village,” Sigroth pointed out.

  “No, I think he’s just about exhausted,” Kirkgrim admitted. “I just don’t want to offend him when I steal his bowls.” He bowed briefly to the uprooted oak then scooped the votive offerings away from the altar and piled them in a heap beside the children. “Right, youngsters. Did you ever go with your families to tend your ancestors in the boneyard? Yes? Can you remember their names? Or some of them? Yes, Grandpa and Grandma, I know, but what did other people call them?”

  “Something’s moving out there,” Fitz reported. “Other than the flaming huge undead wolf pack, I mean.”

  Sigroth peered into the gathering gloom. “I can’t see what it is.”

  “Let’s get some light on it,” the scout suggested. He lit an arrow from Kirkgrim’s holy lamp and shot it out into the night. It embedded in the chest of one of the walking dead.

  Mirabelle suppressed a shudder of dismay. “They’re here. The shamblers who destroyed the village.”

  “It’s called Deara, this place,” Kirkgrim reported from his huddle with the children.

  The revenant with the burning arrow in her chest continued shambling forward for nine paces more, then suddenly flared like a giant candle. She continued walking as she burned away.

  “That’s why I can’t just burn them with a great ball of fire,” Mirabelle noted. “Last thing we need are blazing walking dead attacking us.” She considered carefully. “It would have to be a really hot fireball.” She made a note for later.

  “Its impossible to see how many there are in the dark,” Fitz warned. “A lot.”

  “One, two three, many,” added up Sigroth happily.

  “That’s Egard the bootmaker!” Ulas gasped, recognizing one of the shamblers.

  “That’s Daddy!” Aggie called out. “Daddy! Daddy!” Lessi caught hold of the child to stop her running out.

  “So they killed the villagers then added them to their number!” Mirabelle recognized, sick to the stomach. “Serious necromancy indeed.”

  The dead reached the perimeter of the temple’s sacred ground, lining the edge. Then, as one, they stepped forward, over the boundary. A few faltered and fell. The rest ignored the breached sanctuary and shuffled for the chapel door.

  “Now?” Fitz checked with Kirkgrim.

  “No. They’ve still got to deal with the wine. I need time. I’m negotiating.”

  “With clay bowls?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “We can block the door,” Sigroth told the children. “Me, the pig, and the lanky scout. We’ll just kill everything that comes.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Fitz lied.

  The dead reached the damp semicircle where Kirkgrim had spilled sacred liquor. They halted again, waiting.

  Now they were close enough for those trapped in the temple to see them. Some were mere cadavers, near skeletons that shambled blindly. Others looked almost human save for their corpse skin and lolling heads and the terrible wounds that had killed them. A few carried weapons. Most reached out with bone tipped fleshless fingers.

  “Any chance you could undo the magic that made them walk, Lady Mirabelle?” Fitz checked.

  The mage shook her head. “It took serious, specialist magic to do this to them. Something very dark and unpleasant.” She bit her lip. Somewhere there was a Necromancer who could do this, who was looking for her.

  The first of the wolves came suddenly over the wine line, growling its unearthly challenge, leaping straight at Sigroth’s head.

  Fred the truffle pig slammed into it, intercepting, bearing the huge beast to the ground, matching it bulk for bulk. Sharp porcine teeth tore into rotting meat. Sharp canine claws scratched over the hog’s leather barding. The two rolled over and over, biting and goring.

  A second wolf leaped in. Sigroth caught it on his axe, splitting it from muzzle to neck. The weight of its charge knocked the Viking over, but it was truly dead when he heaved its carcass off him. “Hey, Kirkgrim, it works if you chop to the neck downwards as well!” he called out to the priest.

  The third wolf followed hard after the second, still motivated by some lupine instinct for pack-mob tactics on downed prey. Fitz loosed his first arrow into its eye. The undead exploded into rotting offal, plastering Sigroth and the scout.

  That distracted Fitz long enough for the final beast to target him. He turned too late as a frothing maw lunged at his neck. Mirabelle cried out the last syllables of her incantation, one hand on her grimoire, the other extended to hold wild lightning. Fizzing streamers of power leaped from her outstretched fingers, tangled the undead wolf, and seared it to black char.

  Fred completed his gory tooth work and trotted back to the doorway dripping wolf blood from his tusks.

  �
�We did it!” Sigroth called, just as the horde of dead villagers attacked over the sundered protective line.

  The children screamed.

  Sigroth screamed too, some Viking battle oath that warned Hel and Valhalla to expect incoming. His axe blazed a wild circle at neck height. Fitz stood a pace back, letting Fred hold the undead at bay while he loosed shaft after shaft at the approaching army. Mirabelle flipped the page of her grimoire and began again, loosing another spell of destruction to sear the front rank of the approaching dead.

  It wasn’t enough. Ten dead went down, then twenty. There were many more.

  “Vile spawn of evil, begone!” Kirkgrim shouted, suddenly back from whatever he’d been doing with his borrowed pottery. He brandished his acorn talisman and spoke with such authority that the dead backed away from the doorway.

  “Why didn’t you do that before?” panted Sigroth.

  Kirkgrim didn’t answer. His lips were drawn back over his teeth and sweat beaded his forehead. Each step he took toward the doorway drove the dead men back a pace, but clearly at a cost to the struggling priest.

  Then the revenants parted to make way for their leader.

  “What is that?” Fitz asked, trying to keep his voice calm and failing.

  A man sized tatter of black robes ghosted toward the temple in despite of Kirkgrim’s acorn. It pulled darkness with it, mantled in evil.

  “Necro-thingie?” Sigroth checked with Mirabelle.

  “Necromancer’s major creation,” the mage assessed. “Very major creation. The lieutenant that Kirkgrim suspected was out there controlling this horde, I presume.”

  You presume correctly, Mirabelle Mirabilis de Castile, Silver Adept Initiate of the Venetian Chapter. The voice was in their heads, cold, spidery, intrusive. The creature had no lungs to give it breath. It had only intelligence and hate.

  “It’s talking to us,” Fitz complained. He tried to stop his hands trembling so he could hold his bow straight.

  “It’s talking in my brain. How can it do that?” Sigroth demanded.

  Mirabelle faced the creature. “What are you?”

  A king under the soil. A lord of charnel glory. The triumph of death over fragile life. Your doom.

  “What do you want?”

  Your treasure. Your children. Your life. Your soul. Your eternal agony.

  “None of those things are available to you. Be on your way.”

  “Also, bugger off,” Sigroth contributed. His breath steamed. The temple had become very cold.

  “You killed all these people just to get at Lady Mirabelle’s box?” Fitz objected. “Why? What’s in there that could possibly justify this kind of horror?”

  I exist to find it. My master demands it. The world shall tremble for it. You shall be damned through it.

  Kirkgrim chuckled. “Well, my first major undead – at least he’s world-class ominous.” He lowered his acorn talisman and retrieved his staff.

  “Your first!” Mirabelle was not comforted.

  “Got to be a first time, beautiful,” the Wanderer told the mage-girl with a lewd wink. To the undead he said, “Just to clarify the plot, you were raised by your Necromancer master to shepherd these revenants around and build up the horde? You needed enough monsters to overcome the caravan so you could get Mirabelle’s goodies? And there’s a one eyed competitor out there trying to beat you to it?”

  I do not answer to you, Alainn-Annasach Cuideigin, Angharad’s son, bastard of Lugh, who stole words from the gods and broke truce with giants.

  “Well technically you just did answer me. It wasn’t a lot of use, but it was an answer. So you can see into our minds – the top bits anyway. What am I thinking about now?”

  Mirabelle moved over to the priest. “Kirkgrim, is this the time to be clever?”

  “Look around you, darling. We’re surrounded by undead hordes led by this wight-lord. This is exactly the time to be clever.”

  You have pilfered the offerings of the broken god who failed his people in Deara. You have sought the names of those who once rested in the soil here. It does not matter.

  Kirkgrim’s bantering tone peeled away as he accused the wight, betraying raw anger beneath. “Of course it matters. Those pots were made by the people here. Their fingers touched them. They made them carefully, for their temple, because it mattered to them. They cared. They put a little bit of themselves into them. And the names of the dead matter. Not to you, who just wants a mindless army, but to the families who buried loved ones here, who had to suffer the horror of being slaughtered by the animated flesh of their lost, missed kinsfolk. It mattered to them. It mattered to their ancestors!”

  It amused me. Your death will amuse me too. Perhaps I shall leave you till last. Perhaps I shall keep your consciousness in your flesh as I command your corpse to devour the mage.

  “It didn’t amuse the ancestors here whose bodies you plundered to murder their descendants,” Kirkgrim snarled. “It didn’t please them when you bound the slaughtered villagers’ souls into their corpses so they’d have to endure what their revenant shells did next. In fact it’s made them really, really pissed!”

  The wight plunged deeper into the priest’s mind. It didn’t like what it found there.

  “Names, things they made, people they cared about,” the Wanderer listed. “All they needed was a route back, dark spirit. And making a bridge between out there and down here is a priest’s basic job description. It’s day one stuff.” He touched the pile of pottery and traced a rune. “Like this.”

  The wight lunged forward, across the threshold, searing through Sigroth to drop the big Viking shuddering to the ground, hurling Fred aside at the inner wall, swatting Fitz down in a shivering heap. It came straight for Kirkgrim.

  Mirabelle completed an Incantation of Occlusion, twisting local space and time around the undead lord. The energy cost drove her to her knees. The calculations gave her a blinding headache. She struggled not to pass out. The wight struggled to break loose from her unexpected intervention.

  Kirkgrim opened the heaven-gates. “Anyone who wants to help the children of Deara, come through now!”

  Lessi, huddling younger children to her behind the Wanderer, looked up in surprised wonder. “Grandfa?”

  Mirabelle couldn’t see it. Her head was aching from her spent magics. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to perceive it anyhow; this was personal between the living and the dead of a ravaged mountain village, where the daily life of centuries had been abruptly sundered by foul necromancy.

  Yet from somewhere came a wind that tore at the wight like claws, dragging it down and shredding it. The undead horde outside began to shudder worse than Sigroth and Fitz, clawing at themselves as if trying to tear away some troubling vestige of their former lives.

  “You took their bodies, wraith,” Kirkgrim told the black spirit. “You left their souls for me. And they… don’t… like… you!”

  The struggling black deathlord tried to rise. Sigroth planted his rune etched axe through its hooded head. “Base o th’ neck, right?” the Viking gasped, scarcely able to stand.

  The wight rose again, but it was already in tatters. The spirits of Deara fell upon it and tore it apart.

  Lessi felt an invisible kiss on her forehead, and knew that she was loved.

  The walking dead dropped to the ground. Some decomposed where they lay.

  Fitz finished retching and stood up. Fred nuzzled him. “What just happened?” the scout demanded. “Do I even want to know?”

  Kirkgrim beamed. “I can’t believe that worked!” he admitted.

  Mirabelle turned on him. “You didn’t think that would work?” she asked menacingly.

  “Fifty fifty. Maybe twenty five seventy five. Who knew I was as good as I think I am?”

  Sigroth poked a corpse with his axe. “These are dead dead,” he concluded.

  “Yes,” Lessi assured him. “Granfa saved them.”

  ***

  Morning was gray and wet, but Fitz led the
column of children out at first light to catch up with the caravan before it had traveled too far. “They’ll probably think we all died,” the scout imagined. “Padavas will be glad to see I’m still available. Not so glad to have seventeen orphans to feed.”

  “He’ll feed ‘em,” Sigroth promised fervently.

  Kirkgrim stretched and yawned. “A new day, a new set of problems,” he noted happily. “Not least of which are tracking down the Necromancer who created Happy from last night, and finding his monocular rival, and the bandit raiders, and of course discovering why everyone wants to grab Lady Mirabelle’s treasure box when any sensible fellow should be grabbing Lady Mirabelle.”

  The mage gave the Wanderer a cold stare. He winked back at her. She snorted. It was a start.

  “It’s still a long way to Byzantium,” Fitz warned. “I don’t think we’re out of trouble yet.”

  “Good,” opined Sigroth Sigrothson with some satisfaction.

  “I knew this would be an interesting journey,” approved Kirkgrim Carrionwake.

  “But first the discussion with Padavas,” sighed Mirabelle.

  “That’s right. Come on, children,” the Wanderer called. He drew a flute out from his sleeve, piped up a merry marching tune, and led them back the way the explorers had come.

  CONTINUED in BYZANTIUM: STONE AND FIRE

  The Alternative Historian’s Notebook

  Astute readers may have noticed that our story features references to places and events from actual history mixed with some that are unique to the world and timeline that Kirkgrim, Mirabelle, Sigroth, Fitz and the company inhabit. For those who are interested in divergence points and their effects, here is a brief explanation.

  Our story’s timeline assumes one significant difference: Christianity never happened. Either Christ never came, or else Christian worship never became prevalent. The Romans continued to pay increasingly sceptical tribute to their traditional gods, with occasional forays into Mithraism, Eastern mystery cults, and various other experimental faiths. Constantine the Great never converted to Christianity and never proclaimed it the Roman Empire’s official religion. Many historical changes derive from the consequences of his choice.

  Without Christianity popularizing monotheism, our story further allows that no other “faith of the book” such as Mohammedism, grew to prominence, and that Judaism has also passed from the world. Kirkgrim may follow the Tuatha de Danaan and Sigroth might acknowledge Valhalla and Hel. High officials with ceremonial duties such as imperial courier Rhodin make formal sacrifices to Apollo or the Divine Julius. Humble farmers such as Hodis and isolated peasants in villages like Deara may offer prayers and sacrifices to local gods of sky and field. What, if anything, hears or answers is a matter of individual faith.