Draeder edged his mount back. He straightened his robes and lifted his chin.
‘I do not need to answer to anyone,’ he said. ‘But if it will placate you, then I will indeed choose to tell you what I know that you do not.’
Felix nodded, though he could see that Erhard remained unconvinced. Draeder however, was a moment in answering, as though he actually had no explanation at the ready, despite his boasting. Finally, after a long and uncomfortable pause, he replied with a rambling narration.
‘We are in fact very close to our goal. Next we must seek out a single hill, one unlike any other across these barren fields, for it is crowned by a distinctive marker, an ancient gateway of three great standing stones. There will we find the passage into the Valley of Skethris. The map outlines the trail we have thus far followed, and I believe we will find the location soon. But we must be fully prepared when we arrive.’
‘Prepared for what?’ Felix asked.
‘The dolmen stones are watched over by an un-living guardian.’
‘A ghost?’ Felix asked.
‘More than that,’ Draeder replied. ‘But the texts do not make clear the nature of the sentinel. They say only that this guardian is bound to the portal itself, and that it never sleeps. He is forever on watch. By the time we see the hill-tower, that-which-dwells-within will already have seen us.’
‘Then how do we hope to pass through it?’ Erhard asked.
‘The secret to entering and safely crossing through such portals is a matter of magic, and thus it is my concern, you need not consider it except to know that if we are to succeed, I must be quite ready before we arrive.’
He held out the vellum, but only so that Felix could see it, pointing to a series of runes stencilled beside the representation of a dolmen. Felix studied it for a moment, puzzling at what he saw.
‘There appear to be two markers there, are there not?’ he asked, pointing at the dolmen and something beside it. ‘Which one is the right one?’ he asked.
Draeder sneered. He yanked the map away.
‘That is my concern. I was not asking for help,’ he said.
‘Why wait then?’ Erhard questioned. ‘If you know the path, and you have the rite at hand, then lead us there. What more must you prepare?’
Draeder scoffed at him, as though he were but an ignorant child.
‘Here indeed is written the oath that must be recited upon these hills, the incantation that can open the gateway. But it is more than a mere matter of recitation,’ he said. ‘The tower must only be approached by moonlight. To attempt to cross the path any other time would be disastrous. Even a perfectly done incantation would fail if not performed at the right time.’
Erhard groaned, and he bade his horse to edge backward. He fell in with Strang and Torsten, whose haggard eyes bespoke their shared frustration.
‘We’ve come this far,’ Felix said.
‘Listen to Felix, let me do what only I can do, and soon I will… we will have the Book of Ashur within our grasp,’ Draeder said, half by request but spoken more as a command.
Felix looked over to the men, and then back to Draeder. Erhard finally nodded, and the others agreed.
‘Do what you must,’ Felix said. ‘We will camp here while you prepare. Summon us when you’ve made ready and this journey can finally come to an end.’
Draeder nodded.
‘Indeed. Make your camp, and I will consult my volumes. Once I have the incantation prepared, we can proceed.’
As the men turned away, satisfied for the moment to merely circle their horses in preparation for setting up camp, Draeder put his hand on Felix’s shoulder. He drew the young man aside, sidling their horses close and lowering his voice so none of the others could hear.
‘Keep your eye on them, Felix,’ he warned. ‘They’re not like us. They’re not men of education. Only you and I can truly understand our purpose here. You and I, Felix. We must watch out for one another as this mission goes forward. I know I can count on you.’
Felix nodded, but as Draeder dismounted and collected his volumes, he cursed under his breath, realizing that the two men he most depended upon did not trust one another, and that both might soon ask him to turn upon the other.
Several hours passed in near silence. Draeder sat with his back turned, perched atop the barrow itself. He was frozen in a pose of perfect concentration, all sign of him lost beneath his huge shroud. The entire time, neither Felix nor Erhard detected so much as a hint of movement from the mage.
The men huddled together in a small circle at the base of the hill. Having no wood with which to build a fire, they wrapped themselves in their cloaks to guard against the damp cold that prevailed over the misty barrens. For a long while they clustered there, some trying to steal a few moments of sleep while the others patrolled the area, keeping a watchful eye for whatever might come out of the wastelands as the sun set upon the Barren Hills, lowering a veil of darkness over them once again.
They were not looking for a threat from within. But only moments after the fall of night, a terrible, blood-curdling scream alerted them to their error.
It came from behind them, from the barrow itself. The shrieking was vile, and it reverberated with many voices – high-pitched and deep-throated in unison. It roused them all at once, scrambling to their feet but covering their ears in some small effort to blunt the awful noise.
Yet that was hardly the worst of it. Still down on his knees and straining as the horrible wailing pounded in his head, Felix managed to look up. He saw a column of mist and shadow emerging from the heart of the barrow. At first merely a shapeless mass, the currents of darkness and fog began to coalesce, and as he watched, they took up a human-like form.
The figure assembled itself into a kind of translucent female form, but dreadful and horrific as an animated corpse. Her stare was ghastly, a face frozen in an anguished stare, with sunken cheeks and eyes that glowed pure white. Black currents of twisted, moving shadow crowned her with a mane of ghostly hair. The gown of mist that trailed behind her was a shredded mantle that rippled with every scream from her pale lips.
Her voice shrieked with abominable fragments of sound. As she moved toward them she raised her thin bone-like hands, pointing long white fingers at them as she wailed.
Felix leaped from the ground, slashing his long sword at the ghostly maiden. The blade passed through her with no effect. When he pulled back his sword the steel was cold, and covered in frost.
Erhard did the same, but again to no avail. The banshee ignored the attack altogether. Unperturbed by any strike or flail, she merely pointed her long, ethereal fingers. And she continued her screeching cry.
Draeder came running down the hill, drawn by the sight and the sound of the ghost maiden. As Felix moved for yet another attack, the wizard shouted at him to hold his position.
‘Our weapons have no effect!’ Felix shouted. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’
Draeder came to the base of the hill, falling in beside Felix and his men. He pointed his scythe at the banshee, but that too seemed to accomplish nothing.
For a long, terrible moment the translucent figure merely hovered over them, screaming.
Then, just as suddenly as she had appeared, the ghostly woman backed away. In the same fashion as she had come, the wraith drew herself off, floating backward toward the haunted barrow. The shadows of the hill seemed to reach out to reclaim her, as her spectral form began to fade, disappearing like little more than candle-smoke.
As she vanished, the last thing that remained of her was her skull-like face. It turned from a ferocious visage into a devious, evil smile before it too faded away.
‘We drove it off!’ Torsten said.
‘We did no such thing,’ Erhard replied. ‘That cursed spirit left of its own accord.’
‘Why?’ Felix asked. ‘But for a fright, it did us no
harm at all.’
‘It wasn’t trying to harm us,’ Draeder said. ‘It was issuing a warning.’
‘What was it warning us about?’ Felix asked.
‘Not us,’ the wizard replied, looking out toward the misty, dark horizon. ‘It was warning the guardian. Night has fallen, and now it knows that we’re coming.’
8.
Moonlight touched the Barren Hills with an eerie, ghostly glow. The pale shining of Mannslieb reflected off every surface, glinting from steep slopes and at odd, oblique angles. A haze of cold shimmers and ever-shifting shadows filled the air. Deep and sombre quiet reigned across the barrens by night, a stillness that sent a shiver through Felix. No howling or shrieking he’d heard in all his travels bothered him quite so much as the spooky, flawless still of that deathly silence.
They’d made haste after the banshee’s arrival, having no time to lose with their presence now known across the barrens. After a short while trekking through yet another stretch of badlands, a larger formation grew up out of the foggy distance. A single rocky hill rose high over the bleak sea of stone, its rise dominating the terrain for miles around. The path of a winding trail had been cut into its face, snaking up along the front slope. Upon its crest there stood a lonely, half-crumbled stone triptych. The ancient, free-standing granite blocks sparkled in the weird moonlight, like a beacon across the misty barrens.
Again, Draeder halted the party. He studied his map, compared it to what he saw and puzzled for a moment.
‘That is the hill,’ he said. ‘There we will find the entrance to the Valley of Skethris. We must be on guard now.’
As if in answer to his announcement, the ground rumbled underfoot. An eerie call sounded in the distance, a guttural roar that echoed through the cold mist.
‘There can be no doubt. It knows we’re here,’ the wizard said.
They rode ahead with swords drawn, Draeder still at the lead but now with Strang and Torsten never more than a pace behind him.
As they proceeded, the dead silence began to give way. At first the still was broken only in isolated bursts, a screech in the distance or a muffled howl somewhere in the shadows. But it soon became more, and Felix began to wish for the uncomfortable quiet he’d so dreaded only hours earlier.
When they reached the crest of the hill and dismounted, they found the great dolmen standing alone. It appeared to be large doorway of rock, leading down into the earth. Composed of three great standing stones, two were anchored into the ground while a thinner, flat capstone lay atop them, tilted at a slight angle.
‘I’ve never seen such a thing,’ Felix whispered.
‘The ancient tribes who once ruled these lands laid their kings and chieftains to rest beneath monuments such as this. They were believed to mark portals to the land of the dead,’ Draeder replied.
Although he realized he should have been inured to such a notion already, the suggestion sent a fright through Felix.
‘What must we do?’ Erhard asked.
‘Just as it was for the ancients, the dolmen is the entrance for us as well. Beneath that stone triptych is the portal into the necromancer’s realm,’ Draeder said.
‘We can just enter it?’ Felix asked.
Draeder shook his head.
‘I’m afraid it is not nearly that simple. I must perform the proper rite in order to open the way. And you must distract the guardian long enough for me to do so.’
Felix stammered, looking around across the barren, lonely hill.
‘But I see no guardian,’ he said.
Draeder stepped back, leaving Felix and the men nearest to the dolmen.
‘Look again,’ he advised, even as he receded.
Just as the wizard spoke, the moon-shadows beneath the capstone began to stir. Once more the eerie howls echoed, and as the wind began to blow they were joined by a sort of sinister laughter.
Clanking and shuffling and the hard grinding of stone against stone accompanied the movement beneath the dolmen. A figure crept up from beneath, as if spawned from the fetid earth. It reached out with pale hands until it emerged fully from the grave, standing before them in a display of evil majesty.
The wight was massive. He wore finely-crafted armour of an archaic sort, the antiquated gear of an ancient barbarian warlord. His breastplate was age-tarnished bronze, the edges and the faded inlay infested with green verdigris. His black-iron pauldrons and gauntlets had been dulled by centuries of dust. A mail undercoat fell to his knees, the links rusted out in places leaving gaping holes.
His great, old helmet was crowned with a single spike and a pair of ragged eagle’s wings. Beneath the visor his haunted eyes gleamed bright crimson, stark against his cadaverous, decayed face. He wielded a massive broadsword, the flat of the blade inscribed with black runes that pulsed with dark magic.
‘That is no mere watcher,’ Felix whispered.
Draeder was already a pace behind him.
‘No doubt the warrior-king interred beneath this grave,’ he said. ‘Raised from death and bound to this place long ago by the black hand of Skethris himself.’
The undead warrior king still retained a shadow of his human form. What remained of his skin was desiccated and discoloured. Swathes of his bare, dry flesh were the greenish-grey shade of a corpse, which other places bulged with black and purple splotches where congealed blood had settled and hardened long ago.
‘Welcome travellers,’ the wight said, its deep thundering voice making the ground tremble again. ‘It has been so long since anyone has come. So long indeed that I’ve nearly forgotten the pleasures of company.’
Felix looked to Erhard. He raised his hands in a gesture of peace.
‘We come with no ill will,’ Felix said. ‘We wish only to pass.’
The wight laughed.
‘Why, that is the very pleasure I have so missed,’ the wight replied. ‘Killing those who wish to pass this way.’
Felix lowered his hands. They all lifted their swords. Draeder, standing further from the menacing figure, looked up and centred his eye on the full moon, rising behind the hill itself.
‘The rite must be employed now, while the light shines down. The glows of the Chaos moon will show us the way. I’ll require time to recite the entire incantation.’
‘It does not appear we have much!’ Erhard shouted.
‘You do not need to defeat the wight, merely hold him while I perform the rite that will open the portal,’ Draeder said.
‘That’ll be harder than it looks,’ Felix said. ‘And it doesn’t look easy.’
Felix charged at the undead warrior-king, slashing at him with an expert cut from his blade. The wight merely brushed it aside with little effort, and Felix was forced to quickly duck down from the return blow of the wight’s great rune-blade. Even then, he was nearly cut in two by the undead warrior’s next swipe, two blows rendered faster than any living man could have placed one. The enchanted sword sliced across his jerkin but luckily did not go any deeper. He whirled, and cut through the arm of the un-living guardian, but the strike seemed to have no effect against the hulking, unfeeling attacker.
As the warrior-king swung around, his ardour undiminished, Felix dodged yet another slash of the massive broadsword. This time he leaped up the moment the blade was past him, and he plunged his own sword directly into the wight’s throat. The blade penetrated and came right back out, pulling with it nothing more than foul-smelling dust.
The wight simply cackled, returning the favour with another blow that Felix only barely managed to block. The sheer force of it sent him tumbling.
Erhard raced into the fray just as Felix fell however. He struck back at the wight, cutting across his rusted mail and severing his rotted leather belt. Yet none of his attacks weakened the guardian either. In moments he too was thrown aside, landing in a heap beside the dolmen itself.
‘This
is madness!’ Torsten exclaimed, his eyes wide with a kind of panicked terror that bordered on insanity. ‘We can’t defeat such an enemy!’
Strang grabbed his brother by the collar, yanking him back to a measure of sense.
‘Then we die here, brother,’ the one-eyed man growled.
The encouragement held them all together as they backed up, keeping close as they fought off every new attack from the undead warrior-king. Felix looked back to Draeder, ministering with his Amethyst scythe.
The wizard stood before the dolmen, reciting a long and complex chant, lifting and gesturing with his staff as if trying to focus for the magic he was attempting to channel. But for all his incantations and summoning, nothing appeared to happen.
Only a moment later, Strang met with disaster.
The veteran warrior stabbed at the wight and struck it dead on in the chest, but found his blade lodged in the old armour and dry flesh of his attacker. He struggled to pry it loose, but a defenceless moment was all that the undead warrior required. The shambling monstrosity reached over Strang’s trapped sword, slashed his great blade through his throat and tore his head from his neck in a fountain of blood.
Torsten shrieked as he watched his brother die, felled by as horrible an end as could be imagined. He shivered and wailed, swinging his blade wildly as a mad frenzy finally overcame him, erasing all reason and sense.
The wight laughed with a deep, maddened chortle, somehow enlivened by the pain and the suffering he inflicted. Torsten leaped at him, raising his sword high, but the wight merely caught with his bare hand, wresting the blade from his grasp. His own massive rune sword whirled in a terrible arc, slicing down upon Torsten. It cleaved clear through his cloak and mail, splitting his neck from his shoulder in a bloody, vicious gash that opened up half his chest.
Felix and Erhard hurried backward, the powerful wight still bearing down as he cast the young soldier’s mangled body aside. They fell in beside Draeder, standing before the dolmen in confusion, puzzling over the failure of his rite to accomplish anything.
Into the Valley of Death Page 6
