by David Benem
“Lad?” whispered Brugan. “You’re certain of this?”
He sucked in a shuddering breath. His heart thundered. The Necrists’ presence seemed a distinctly physical thing, like the chill of a fever that left one shivering and slicked with sweat. As much as he wanted to avoid it he knew it folly to shun his Coda, one of the most powerful weapons against the enemy. His fingers found the box’s seam and drew it open, touching the cool metal of the object inside. He clutched it, feeling the sketched iron to be a strange and nearly forgotten comfort.
Perhaps I have no choice.
He held still, one hand about his Coda and the other gripping his sword. He readied himself. The shadows ahead were heavy and something even darker seemed to dim those thin margins where light still dared to wander. The cold wrapped about him like a noose.
Lannick drew the blade, the sword scraping against the scabbard’s iron lip with a jarring squeal. He stood upon the tower’s first stair, watching.
He turned his gaze about but there was nothing but blackness. He knew they were here, though. He could feel them. The Necrists know men by the scent of their flesh and the shadows they cast, his fellow Variden had warned.
“Lannick…” The whispered word came from what seemed nowhere.
He froze, fearful.
“They call to you?” came Brugan’s voice just behind him.
“Lannick, my love…”
Lannick snatched his Coda from his purse. He used his sword hand to ease open the iron then worked clumsily, holding both sword and Coda in one hand and making ready to snap the Coda upon his wrist. No half-measures, he thought.
A piercing scream shattered the darkness, an awful, ear-searing sound that shook Lannick to his core.
“Dead gods!” Brugan shouted, then lurched into Lannick’s side.
The blow caused Lannick’s hands to fumble. His Coda fell and tumbled across the floor with a terrible clanging. He dropped to a knee, hands sweeping over the stone in search of the instrument. Brugan and the others stumbled about, kicking Lannick as they did. “Move back!” Lannick spat.
Another scream tore from the tower’s reaches. Boots shuffled back toward the door.
“What is that?” said Arleigh Lay, voice tinged with a rare hint of fear.
A mad chitter fell from the stairwell, an insect-like ticking.
“Move back!” Lannick shouted. “Out of the tower!”
The men did as ordered, drawing back with fear written on their faces. The light drew away with them and Lannick was left on his knees in an utter darkness. He shifted hurriedly, pressing his hands this way and that. The sound grew louder and he heard with it the intonations of sorcery. Spiteful, broken-sounding words that seemed to summon a greater chill to the air. The weight of the darkness crushed him.
Sweat beaded upon his brow in spite of the cold. He eyes darted about. Where is my Coda?
“Lannick…”
The word was intoned with sick familiarity, a perverse affection. Lannick’s guts twisted. He lunged about, fingers splayed wide and seeking the cool iron of his Coda. He glanced toward the door and saw Brugan and the men outside, just yards away though it might as well have been as many leagues. Their burning torches seemed distant as starlight.
“Old hells!” he hissed, finding nothing upon the tower floor. “Where is it?”
“You seek this?” said a slithering voice from the stairwell. “Your trinket?”
Lannick wheeled about, forcing down the sudden rise of bile in his throat. He arose, brandishing his blade against the darkness and retreating toward the door. “Brugan!” he roared. “Torches and oil!”
“General Fane promised you to us,” the Necrist said, its voice a serpent’s hiss. “You were promised as his part of a special bargain, Variden. Now we have come to collect the general’s debt.”
Lannick tugged his cloak—the green cloak of the Variden—tightly about his shoulders, remembering it offered some protections against the night. His head spun as he tried to recall old wards and invocations, but in this moment he could remember nothing. Those old prayers seemed buried too deeply beneath the fog of forgetfulness. He needed his Coda.
“Brugan!” he shouted and spun toward the doorway. He could see Brugan and the others standing just where they’d been, ten yards distant and staring dumbly about. It seemed they’d heard nothing of his commands.
“Brugan!” he shouted again, though the big man’s lumpy face shifted not at all. “Now!”
Thick fingers of shadow stretched across the faint light of the doorway and began knitting together.
“Your family loved you,” the Necrist said. “Memories linger in the flesh, and those of your family have become known to us. Death is not the end. Come…”
“No!” he screamed. He cleaved the shadow with his sword. The darkness retreated for an instant then reformed.
A hand caressed his neck. A cold, clammy hand. “Lannick, my love…”
No, he thought. Not again!
“Brugan!” he cried. He thrust his hand outward, through the icy shadows obscuring the doorway. “Brugan!”
He jabbed his sword behind him but caught nothing. The hand had left his neck and he felt cold tendrils wrapping about him, about his legs and waist and forearm. He hacked his sword about, feeling resistance as the blade dug against the darkness. The shadows were thick, almost tar-like in consistency. His sword stuck and seemed in danger of being sucked away as he thrust.
He tore through to the outside and shouted again. “Brugan! Torches!”
The tentacles yanked him back into darkness, turning him about to face the Necrist. The shadowy things lifted him from his feet and drew him toward a pale circle now just visible along the stairwell. Not a circle, but a face. A pallid countenance set eerily aglow by no visible light. A chalk-colored face divided into neat quarters by a crisscross of thick stitches stretching from chin to crown and ear to ear. It wasn’t a face Lannick knew, though that made it no less grotesque. Black eyes glimmered in deep sockets.
“Lannick,” the Necrist said, its black tongue rolling indulgently in its mouth.
“No!” he screamed, jerking about. His sword arm was pressed against his side though he managed to work it upward, slicing through the darkness as he did.
“Captain?” he heard from somewhere.
Brugan?
“Lannick,” the Necrist whispered, its voice carrying some awful parody of comfort. “Be still… Be quiet… We have you now. Come learn all that the dead take with them. Embrace the gentle dark beyond this world. Embrace it, and yield to us your secrets.”
He shivered and shook, struggling against the sorcerous bonds. His sword cut through the shadow though there remained many more restraining him. He felt their grip slacken but soon they held him fast again. He looked to the stairwell and saw two more pale, stitched faces descending toward him.
“Lannick,” they said in unison.
“No!” came Brugan’s bellow from behind him. “Back to the old hells with you!”
Fire came from everywhere. Men shouted curses and threw torches that smashed against the stairs, sending showers of sparks and flames into the dark. A ceramic jug banged into Lannick’s shoulder then tumbled over it, shattering against the stairwell before him and spreading a mess of oil. A vase followed it. Flames erupted and engulfed the Necrists. A clanking sound came from the stairwell.
My Coda!
The shadowy tendrils vanished and Lannick dropped to the stone floor. The Necrist that had held him convulsed about, smacking pasty hands upon its black garments and the flames that covered them. The fire swept up the stairs and consumed the other two creatures.
Lannick searched about in the fire’s orange blaze and found the dull metal of his Coda. “Illienne the Light Eternal!” he roared, rising. He snapped the instrument upon his wrist. “Banish this darkness!”
Green fire dripped down the length of his blade. An assault of images flooded his head though he silenced them with old training and
hard resolve. “Cut them down! Now, while the flames still burn!”
He charged toward the closest Necrist with sword held high and Brugan and others followed him. A cascade of steel rained upon the Necrist as it twitched on the stone. At last, with a horrid shriek, it fell still.
Lannick leapt over the corpse to the next creature, the vile thing flailing just two stairs ahead. Its patchwork face twisted in agony as bright fire surrounded its still-standing form. Lannick reared to strike but just then a dagger struck the creature square between its black eyes, sinking halfway into its skull. Its arms fell slack against its sides, the crackling flames upon it rising anew. It snarled with yellow teeth and ugly gums, as if making ready to speak. Then a fist rushed over Lannick’s shoulder, cracking into the butt of the dagger’s hilt. The Necrist’s eyes rolled and it collapsed in a lifeless heap.
“Fucking devils!” Arleigh cursed from beside him, shaking his hand. “I didn’t dare believe you!”
Lannick turned to see the third Necrist bolting up the stairs, the smoldering tatters of its robes just visible in the firelight. “Hurry!” he called, leaping up the stairwell. “They are weak in the light but fearsome in the dark! We must kill it while we still have fire!”
He bounded up the stairs. Shadows cloaked the tower’s interior, though the remaining torches of the men who followed him seemed able to penetrate the gloom at last. What was more, these shadows somehow seemed more natural than those at the structure’s base.
Lannick at last came to another doorway, this one thrown open to the night. Beyond it stretched the rampart, a walkway only a few feet wide and lined with waist-high walls capped by merlons. The rampart ran perhaps eighty feet to another tower, and about halfway down its length slumped two corpses in a bloody tangle.
The Necrist was nowhere to be seen.
“Where?” huffed Brugan from the stairwell behind him, hefting his sledge with obvious discomfort. “Where’d that thing go?”
Lannick looked about and caressed the cool iron of his Coda. “Stay here, Brugan,” he said, worrying over his friend’s injuries. “You and a few of the oath-bound.”
“Captain,” Brugan grumbled. “I’ll not shy away from a fight.”
“Of course not,” Lannick said softly. “It’s just that you’re the one man I can trust to keep a watch on this stairwell. We’re not sure if the one we’re chasing is the last of them.”
“Very well,” Brugan said. He shifted his eyes about and gingerly rested his hammer upon his shoulder. “I’ll have your back, Lannick.”
“Just as you always have,” Lannick said with a quick grin, “and I’ll never forget it.” He slipped out onto the rampart.
Though the heavier darkness seemed to have diminished and the moon now lit the keep, a chill lingered upon the air.
It’s here, somewhere, Lannick thought.
“Lannick, I’m with you,” whispered an unwelcome voice within his head. “I can help.”
Lannick whipped his head about, then realized the voice’s source.
My Coda.
Alisa.
For an instant his mind was drawn to her and he could see through her eyes. A vast, barren landscape of dust and scrub beneath a starry sky. A campfire burned near, about which huddled a frail-looking man in heavy robes and a rough, dirt-crusted woman.
“We toil each of us in secret,” came Alisa’s voice, “but we are never alone.”
Lannick shook his head and pulled his thoughts to a tight focus. To the present, and to the night about him. He sucked in the cool air and took an uneasy step along the walkway, his sword raised. He heard the boots of others scrape upon the stone behind.
Several torches still burned. Between their light and that of the moon, Lannick could discern the pitiful dead. Two armed, armored men whose scabbards still held their blades but whose bodies no longer held their flesh. Their hands were all bone and sinew, their faces sickening masks of red tendons and bulging, sightless eyeballs.
Lannick bent low, pressing a hand upon one of the blood-soaked oath-bound. Cold, he thought, withdrawing his hand.
Cold as newly fallen snow.
“Dead gods!” Arleigh spat. “What could do this?”
Lannick rose, shifting his jaw and studying the night. “I’ve told you.”
A hideous shriek pierced the air. Lannick spun back to see the Necrist leap from the shingled roof of the tower they’d exited, its black robes reduced to rags and blown open to reveal a gangly, pallid body crossed with the same stitches as those knitted across its head. “Variden!” it screeched.
Counting his companions and the oath-bound there stood at least a dozen men upon the rampart between Lannick and the Necrist. The soldiers braced themselves as the creature rushed toward them. Two threw torches but the fires sailed well wide. Another did the same and the Necrist ducked nimbly beneath it. The thing wailed a sickly wail as it ran, its whole form shifting and shaking from some vile sorcery.
In the moonlight Lannick could see the Necrist gathering shadows to its hands, tugging black curtains from cracks in the stones and dark corners where walls met the walkway.
Lannick gripped his Coda and willed his head to some semblance of calm. In a moment his mind swirled with those old words, those old spells. Those divine enchantments that’d not filled his thoughts in a decade.
“Lannick!” Arleigh barked, looking back to him with wide, terrified eyes. “We’re out of torches!”
Lannick struggled with the torrent of power filling his head and the mad scene before him. “W-weapons,” he stammered.
The Necrist charged the closest of the oath-bound. Thick tangles of shadow whipped from its hands like striking serpents. The soldier fell to the walkway, writhing on the stone with a sad gurgle. The shadowy tendrils curled back to the Necrist then bolted forward to strike another.
“Weapons!” Lannick screamed, his head finding some sense of order.
The oath-bound brandished their blades and jostled for position. The walkway, though, left room for only two men to stand abreast so they could not assail the Necrist with numbers.
His head spun and panic seized him. They’ll be ripped apart like this…
“Attack!” Brugan bellowed from the tower’s doorframe. The big man twisted his sledge about with a flinch and lumbered forth, charging the Necrist from behind with two of Vandyl’s oath-bound in tow. “To the old hells!”
Lannick bared his teeth and his green-hued blade. He focused on his Coda’s power and clambered to the wall’s crest. He tilted precariously on that edge, fearing the fall to the keep’s courtyard some twenty feet below.
But the power filled him, whispering through his head and coursing through his limbs. His feet found a firm balance. He turned and he ran, leaping across the merlons toward the Necrist.
He closed the distance. The Necrist had cloaked itself behind an amorphous mass of shadow, its features invisible. Lannick leapt, hurling himself toward the thing and cleaving away at the swirling tendrils that bit his skin like ice. He cleaved with great swings of his blade and the shadows retreated, freeing the trembling oath-bound soldier they’d seized. The man collapsed, dead, upon the rampart. But the mass of shadows remained, the Necrist indiscernible within.
“Lannick!” cried Brugan from somewhere on the other side of the dark.
Lannick hacked again with his blade but could see nothing. He pulled himself atop the wall again and jumped ahead. He spotted his friend flailing weakly with his hammer. Sweat shone on his lumpy face and a serpentine shadow wound about his midsection. The oath-bound accompanying the big barkeep thrust their blades blindly.
“Brugan!” Lannick screamed. He darted past the black mass then dropped near his friend. He swung his sword at the thick braid of shadow wrapped about the big man then cleaved his glowing blade into the gathered dark. Ancient words of divine spellcraft resounded in his head. His mouth moved with their utterance.
The shadows diminished. There stood the Necrist, its maw of yellow teeth
chattering and spitting out incantations of necromancy. Its nearly naked frame of sickly skin shook with impossible speed. Its arms became a blur. It dodged swinging blades from the oath-bound behind it and managed to lunge toward Lannick an instant later. Long-nailed and pale fingers shot toward Lannick’s throat. He spun sideways but the dagger-like nails found the back of his neck, rending flesh. Pain seared him and he staggered back.
“I have your back, Captain!” Brugan groaned, lurching past Lannick. He hoisted his heavy sledge with a pained look then brought it down toward the Necrist.
“Brugan!” Lannick yelled. “No!”
The Necrist was swift and Brugan too slow. The creature shivered and shook away from the labored blow and the drone of vile necromancy filled the air. Shadows simmered and swelled in its hands then sprang to loop about the old barkeep.
“No!” Lannick roared, rushing forward. He reared his blade and prepared a killing blow, divine and powerful words upon his tongue.
The Necrist looked to him. Its body shook and flailed and tentacles of shadow whipped about it, but look to him it did. It giggled. “Dada,” it cooed, its black tongue lolling about its mouth and its voice sounding very much like that of Lannick’s eldest child.
My son. My dead son.
Lannick stopped, slack-jawed. His sword-arm lowered. He hesitated.
Brugan screamed.
Lannick looked to his friend to see a long finger of shadow pressed into his mouth. The big barkeep stiffened and his eyes rolled back in his head and his hammer fell to the stones with a great clang. The tendril withdrew, pulling with it what appeared to be a large chunk of Brugan’s brain.
Brugan stood twitching for a moment before slumping against the low wall and then toppling over it.
“Dada,” the Necrist said again, its lips curled in a wicked smile.
Anguish seized Lannick and he howled. He heaved his weapon in a wide and desperate arc, green fire trailing the blade. The sword found the Necrist’s arm and cut it in two. The creature screeched and the shadows about it vanished. It chattered and gnashed its teeth and clawed at Lannick with its remaining arm.
