Elemental (14 page)

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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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I wonder if the Violet Dog has come back to claim its victims
, she thought, then shook her head and sighed. There
were
no Violet Dogs. Even if they
had
ever existed, it had been so long ago that there was only doubt and myth about their existence now, not fact. She had read books, yes, and heard occasional rumors of them when she came out into the world to mourn, and once she had met a woman in Pavisse who claimed to know where one was buried. But the woman had died soon after from Plague, and the Mourner had left Pavisse several days later exhausted from mourning so many thousands of dead.
She had forgotten the woman's mention of the Violet Dogs, until now.
The Mourner turned and looked at the tavern. It was the only building with an open door. She would not feel right forcing her way into any of the homes, dead though their owners were. As she approached the tavern entrance, she avoided looking at the front of the door. Inside there would be food and drink and somewhere to rest, and she did not need foolish superstition to trouble her while she decided what to do next.
The villagers were dead, and to chant down their troubled wraiths, first she had to find them.
As she tried to pull the jammed door closed behind her, the Mourner heard the man shouting from elsewhere in the village: “It will make you one of them as well, Mourner!”
 
 
The stench of rotwine permeated the tavern. Beneath that lay the memory of a million conversations, all of Noreela's history—true and not so true—discussed here over food and drink, while all the time the land wore down, dragging its people with it.
The Mourner leaned against the bar, exhausted. A clay mug toppled to the floor and shattered. She held her breath and listened for a reaction. None came, not even the sound of a startled rat scurrying for cover.
“The graveyard is empty,” the Mourner said. Living in such solitude at the Temple of Lament meant that she was used to her own company, and talking to herself made her feel less alone. It could also give life to places never meant to fall silent. “Something dug up the recently dead and took them away. The naked madman … though he looks almost dead himself. Frostbite. Disease. And where or what is the hollow field?” She leaned over the bar and found an unopened bottle of rotwine. She hated the vile drink, but right now she needed something to wet her dry insides. She was unused to fear, and the attack had shaken her more than she cared to admit.
She popped the cork and drank, wincing at the taste but welcoming the warmth that spread quickly through her body. Even the sound of her swallowing seemed loud.
“And the Violet Dogs,” she said. But she spoke no more, because their name seemed to hang in the atmosphere of this place, giving a ghost to the myth.
The Mourner busied herself finding food. There was a stew in a huge pan in the tavern's kitchens, but it had developed a surface mold that puffed a haze of spores as she leaned in to sniff. She found a few sour
apples, however, and a loaf of bread that was just edible after she had removed its hardened crusts. She sat at a table in the corner of the tavern, ate and drank, and before long her vision started fluttering between the tavern, and somewhere else.
The tavern: wood oiled black by spilled ale, bar polished smooth by decades of patrons, the air heavy and still and possessed of a ghostly shine from snow reflecting through the two small windows.
Somewhere else: a large open plain leading down to the sea, a collection of timber dwellings huddled in a small valley, and in the distant port a forest of tall masts sailing in.
Here, and there. Present, and past. The Mourner's head nodded forward, and though she fought against it she could not prevent sleep from taking her away.
 
 
There is panic in the village. A rider had come from the port, spreading news of invaders from the sea, though he quickly rode on before anyone could glean more sense from him. So the villagers stand at the western approach and stare down at the port, where flames sprout in several places and smoke rises into the still autumn air, and the shapes rushing outward are too fast to be the town's fleeing inhabitants.
In the port, a hundred strange ships bob at anchor.
We should leave, someone says.
We can't leave, this is our home and we should fight, comes the reply.
I'm scared, a child says, and the adults realize too late where their duties lie.
The red tide swarms up the shallow hillsides from the port, screeching and yelling, wailing and crying out words that no one here understands. Their legs are long and muscled, arms thin and spindly, bare torsos red with tattoos or spilled blood, and their heads are doglike with teeth as long as a man's finger. They stand twice the height of any villager. They are incredibly fast. And their intent is obvious.
The first Violet Dog reaches the village and buries an ax in a woman's
face. The other villagers are fleeing now, some of them taking up puny weapons against the attackers, and even as the last of them is killed, so the woman with the axed head rises from the ground and sets off with a shambling gait toward the east. She is dead, but somehow she finds the breath to scream.
 
 
The Mourner sprang awake. A scream had stirred her, and she wondered whether it was her own.
She rubbed at her temples to try and work the dregs of the nightmare from her mind. She had many dreams and almost always recalled them, but as she came around this one scattered away, and she was happy to let it go.
Violet Dogs
, she thought.
I read about them once, that's why the dream was so vivid
. She frowned, feeling the dream dissipate into a background sense of death gone wrong.
And the madman thought I
was
one
.
The bottle of rotwine lay spilled on the table, contents still glugging from the broken neck. The remains of her second apple had turned brown. The light from outside had faded, but she could tell by its stillness that it was still snowing heavily. She stood and went to the door, ready to open it and see whether anything had changed.
They'll be there,
she thought,
the dead, standing in the street and staring at me, and before them will be the sick naked man, dead now but still much, much better.
“Out of my damn head!” the Mourner said. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, holding her hands by her sides and bowing her head. The dream had faded, but its impression remained.
She opened the door. Snow fell thick, already obscuring her footprints to and fro across the track. She wondered what other strange trails were also hidden beneath earlier falls. There was no sign of the man, and no dead villagers stood rooted in the deepening snow. Wherever they were, their wraiths still needed chanting down.
The Mourner left the tavern and pulled the door closed behind her. It
was colder than it had been, the snow deeper, and the only sound was the crunching of snow underfoot.
She started searching before even realizing the choice she had made. She could have easily returned to the Temple of Lament in Long Marrakash, but in doing so she would be abandoning the lost dead of Kinead. Few people were ever ready to die.
The Mourner guessed that they must be somewhere in the fields beyond the village. There were not many buildings large enough to hide them all together, and if she closed her eyes and tried to hear their wraiths, there was only the usual background mutter. Nothing new. Fresh wraiths remained very close to their former flesh, and she would have to find one to help the other. So she headed south, planning on circling the village. She kept a wary eye open for the madman.
Her first circle of the village revealed no hints of where the dead had been taken. The snow had lessened slightly, and though that meant she could see further in the fading light, the fresh fall still made the going difficult. Her feet were cold, and she stopped every few hundred steps to sit and rub some warmth back into her toes. No fresh footprints crossed her path.
She moved out a few hundred paces and started a second circle, and she was a quarter-way around when she entered a small copse of trees. She slowed, then stopped, because something was wrong.
The Mourner closed her eyes and listened for wraiths. Nothing. Her own labored breaths sounded unreasonably loud, and trying to slow her breathing made it louder. She looked behind her. Nobody followed. Yet she was being observed. It was the same sensation she'd had when the naked man fled, an idea that she was the center of something's attention, the focus of all its thought.
“Being foolish now,” she said. She walked on. “Just that poor dying man, spouting his madness while the disease eats him from the inside out. That's all. There's nothing else out here.” She continued, muttering words of comfort and considering how she could barricade the tavern door that evening.
And then the Mourner found the hollow field. She emerged from a copse of trees, pushing her way through a dense wall of undergrowth that had taken on the weight of snow and ice, and the land vanished before her. She stepped back into the embrace of vegetation, suddenly grateful for its spiky touch through her heavy robe. Though bare of leaves it was alive. Before here, in the hollow in the ground, nothing lived.
It was larger than a single field, perhaps two thousand steps across, and surrounded by trees and bushes heavy with snow. Its sides sloped down toward its center, maybe three hundred paces lower than where she now stood. They were formed of smooth, bare rock. Nothing grew down there, and when the snow landed it instantly melted away, forming small streams that trickled down toward the black throat at the hollow's base. A cave? A hole? The Mourner did not know, and she felt no inclination to find out. The village dead needed her. And there was the fear. Because the madman had mentioned this hollow field in the same breath as a Violet Dog, and the Mourner could still remember that woman in Pavisse raging that she knew where one of those mythical creatures was buried.
She turned her back on that place and started pushing back through the trees, her sense of direction subsumed by the simple need to be going
away
from the hollow field. A while later, still surrounded by trees, she heard the first sounds of the dead in her mind.
 
 
The Mourner came to a stop with the sweat of fear trickling down her sides.
The wraiths of the dead were crying. They were very quiet, but knowing they were there seemed to make them easier to hear. She closed her eyes and welcomed them in, showing them that she had a song to chant them down. Even then they barely calmed. They raged and whirled in her mind. There were many of them, and they were mad and frightened. Usually the dead feared nothing.
The Mourner started forward, pushing through the trees that grew close together, stepping high to avoid her clothing becoming entangled in the spiky shrubs around their trunks.
Violet Dogs
, she thought, those creatures still on her mind.
They're a myth. Living-dead invaders from somewhere out of the land. There are stories, but no proof. Rough dreams for adults mourning the world gone bad. Nightmares for children, threatened with the Violet Dogs to make them behave
. She moved toward the moaning dead, wondering what she would find.
When she parted the final overhanging branches she saw the field, its strange crop, and the naked man dragging himself from one planted corpse to another.
 
 
“There's no such thing as a Violet Dog,” the Mourner said.
The man seemed to be ignoring her. He was tending his grotesque crop, still naked and crawling from one dead villager to the next. His skin was purple with the rot of disease. The sword had vanished.
There were over a hundred corpses planted across the field. They were fixed to heavy sticks thrust down into the ground, tied by their burial clothes or wrapped around with rope. Most heads bowed down, though a couple had tilted back to stare at the sky with hollowed eye-sockets. Some of the bodies—those that looked as though they had never been buried—bore terrible wounds to their faces and necks.
The Mourner's head was filled with the awful muttering and moaning of their wraiths, though the field itself was silent but for the constant crawl of the madman.
The field was all but bare of snow. The muck was churned up, and puddles of brown water filled dips in the frozen ground. He must have dragged the bodies here one by one, digging them out of their fresh graves and hauling them through the village and the small forest to this dreadful place. Though subsequent snowfalls had covered the drag trails through Kinead, here the snow did not have a chance, because the man
never stopped moving. He reached the planted feet of one corpse, ran his rough hands up the dead woman's legs, shook to make sure she was secure, and then moved on to the next.
The Mourner closed her eyes and listened to the wraiths. Still attached, still waiting to be chanted down to peace, they were being tormented by this man's unnatural intent.

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