The Wizard and the Warlord (The Wardstone Trilogy Book Three) (18 page)

Sholt laughed out loud this time, but not mockingly. “I think you’ve got it, General,” he said. “It’s not necessary for you to understand. We can start by trying it on the two who are still…” He steepled his fingers in front of his chest searching for the word he wanted. “…lingering,” he finished.

“If it works on them, those two will just die?”

“Correct.”

“Without pain, I hope,” Spyra mumbled. “They were afraid to cooperate when they were falling apart. I’ve fought in the trenches and seen the most grievous of wounds. I’ve seen them days after they were inflicted, but I don’t think anything has ever gotten to me like seeing those two rot away before my eyes.” He stood and indicated the door that led out to the street. “Both of them want to pass on, Master Wizard. When they could still speak, they told me so.”

“Then I think we should oblige them.” Sholt’s expression was grave. “I observed them for a while yesterday. I hope I didn’t offend them. It’s hard to think of them as once being human and alive in their current state.”

“I understand,” Spyra said as they exited the apartment into the cobbled street.

They were in the most prestigious section of Southport. The autumn evening was chill, and the light fog left a slick sheen on everything so that the flickering of the many lantern flames danced on a million reflective surfaces. The street was relatively empty; only a few people could be seen moving about the city. A couple spoke quietly above them from a balcony as Spyra and Sholt passed by. A lute playing a lighthearted melody could be heard in the distance.

“It makes me feel like a monster to keep them in a cell,” Spyra said as they neared the constable’s office.

As far as cells go it was far from your typical rock square with steel-barred doors. The constable’s office, in this part of Southport, was clean and well kept. The cells were used primarily for drunken merchants, or noble folk who became a temporary threat to themselves or those around them. The occasional thief or murderer had occupied one of the large, furnished chambers. But not often.

When they entered the constable’s office, which was connected to the prison by a long hallway, the stench of rotted flesh hit them like a hammer blow.

“Hold on, my lord,” the constable called from across the street. “I had to take a breather. It fargin stinks so badly in there I can hardly stand it.”

Spyra noticed that the sign over the establishment the constable was leaving read,
The Axe Master’s Lodge
. It was a private drinkery for the many merchants who’d made their gold off of the lumbering industry, one way or another. He could see that the constable had had more than a few sips of stout by the man’s gait as he closed the distance between them. With two rotting dead men who weren’t quite dead in the rooms inside, who could blame him?

“You’ll be getting rid of them soon,” the constable said as he opened the door for the other two.

“Very soon,” Spyra assured him. “As a matter of fact, why don’t you go round up a man or two and a wagon to haul them out to the gravediggers.”

“With pleasure, my lord,” the constable replied and then scurried off.

The two undead men were in their shared cell. The one with the crushed ribcage was lying in a thick, congealed pool of muck on the bed. The other sat in a chair with his skull laid across his folded, nearly skeletal, arms at the small table in the middle of the cell.

“The master wizard here has come to help you pass on,” Spyra said awkwardly. “He will remove the enchantment on you so that Pael’s evil taint won’t follow you to the grave.”

The one at the table stood, stumbled, and then caught himself. A piece of loose yellow-green stuff splatted on the floor below him, and a half-dozen maggots fell out of his eye and nose holes as he began pointing and trying to speak from a ruined throat. He stopped after a moment and slumped back down in defeat.

“Can you write?” Master Sholt asked. Suddenly the skull rose up and nodded affirmatively.

Just as suddenly, an ink pot, a quill, and a curling piece of parchment appeared on the table before the rotting corpse. It was slow and awkward, but eventually the thing began to scribble out what he wanted to say. After a few long moments, during which Spyra thought he might vomit from the thick smell of the place, the undead man stood and brought the page over to the bars.

Sholt took it and read aloud.

“
Kill us. Kill us so he will stop calling us to him.
What?” Sholt asked. “Who’s calling you, and where do they want you to go?”

The undead man reached out, took the parchment, and went back to the table. Already a clean piece of paper awaited him. Seeing it, he let the first fall to the floor. He leaned over, wrote a few words, and gave the new page to Sholt.

The Warlord is calling us. He wants us to go that way. Please make me die.

Sholt looked up and saw where the man was pointing.

“That’s east,” Spyra observed. Oraphel and Southport were the only two places immediately east, he thought. Beyond that there were only the marsh lands, but beyond the marshes was Dakahn.

The undead man pulled his finger across where his throat had once been and glared with empty sockets at the master wizard. It was the unmistakable sign of a man slicing his neck. In this case, it was an undead thing begging for true death.

Sholt nodded his understanding. “You must leave us now, general,” he said. “Outside the building, preferably.”

Spyra left and went across the road to the Axe Master’s Lodge. Hopefully, as a lord of the realm, he could get a drink in the private establishment. He needed one.

***

Sholt emptied a pouch of silvery dust on the floor and then poured a flask of virgin water onto it. He chanted the words to a spell, and a bright, crackling lavender flame flared from the pile. Smoke divided into two equal wavering streams and made its way through the bars. For a long while nothing else happened, then suddenly the fire faded and both of the bodies collapsed. Sholt cast another spell and was relieved to learn that Pael’s taint lingered here no longer.

His spell-weary mind was racing with the implications of what the undead had written, but he tried not to think of them. He left the constable’s office and went straight across the way to join Spyra. If they wouldn’t serve him, he decided that he would cast a charm spell on them all. They didn’t so much as question Lord Spyra or Sholt. They seemed to know what the men were about. In fact, the barman sat a full flagon of his most potent brandy wine in front of each of them and then went about his business.

***

After shaking off his initial shock, Commander Lyle charged his destrier at the nearest robed skeletons. It was dark but a pair of torches had been kept aflame on the wagon, so there was some visibility, but not much.

His horse reared up and lashed out with its powerful hooves. The skeleton had apparently expected a different sort of attack, like a sword swing or a passing stab. It was caught off guard when the destrier didn’t charge past him. The first hoof went into its ribcage, and when the horse came down it crushed the whole skeleton to the ground. The other hoof struck the skull and shattered it with a splintering pop.

Sergeant Tolbar called out a couple of orders after seeing his commander engage the unnerving enemy. Soon, the sound of steel on steel, and steel on bone, rang out. Some of the skeletons had loose-fitting shirts of mail under their cloaks; others had old leather pieces, unmatched and ill-fitting, strapped to their tissueless frames. Most of them had short swords that they seemed to wield effectively, but a few of them had deadly crossbows.

It appeared that maybe twenty of the skeletons were ringed around the group, but with only two torches and a ground full of long, dancing shadows, it was hard to tell.

Petar, following the sergeant's order, spurred his horse and formed up with a few other men around the wagon cage. The two kingdom men on the bench fired their crossbows, reloaded, and fired again as quickly as they could. They didn’t know that they were doing absolutely no damage to the undead. The bolts went right through, or rattled away, deflected by the bony forms of their targets.

A man screamed as an enemy crossbow bolt caught him in the neck. Hot blood sprayed from the wound in pulses.

Suddenly, the light from another torch flared. The man who ignited it threw it up and out from the wagon in a flickering arc that lit up the whole area as it passed through.

Commander Lyle saw that there were only a dozen or so of the skeleton warriors close at hand. A larger number of robed figures appeared to be further out from the group, but he couldn’t trust his eyes. He fought stroke for stroke with one of the things. Finally, the skeleton jabbed its sword into Lyle’s horse, running its bloody blade right up to the hilt. As Lyle tried to dismount without getting crushed, he saw the same skeleton pick up another sword, and thrust it into Sergeant Tolbar’s back. It left the blade inside the man and then ran away into the darkness.

Sergeant Tolbar screamed out in pain and valiantly fought the thing before him. He didn’t last long, though. A moment later he slumped out of the saddle and was hacked to death before he hit the ground.

Out of nowhere, a deep, rumbling roar erupted just as the sound of galloping hoof beats came from behind them. Commander Lyle darted his eyes around, searching for the source of the sound. To his shock, he found it when a dark four-legged thing as big as a horse darted into the light and leapt on a pair of his men. Its wicked maw found one man and its bulky weight carried the other and both horses to the ground in a writhing heap. The man who wasn’t in the creature’s mouth began screaming in pain and fear. Lyle could see that one of his legs was bent at a grotesque angle and partly pinned under a motionless horse.

The thing, whatever it was, and the other man, were already gone.

Lyle took a bolt to the side then. Having caught in his chain mail, the arrow only grazed him. He stumbled out of the way just as a handful of riders passed through the torch light, howling and screaming, and hammering their shields like wild men.

Another torch went spinning through the air, revealing a handful of city guardsmen from Weir. Their horses were terrified as the riders went waving their swords around among the undead.

At the edge of the light, both Petar and Commander Lyle saw the retreating group of skeletal men and the large, hairy back of the creature that was dragging their man’s torso away with it.

“Run me through,” Sergeant Tolbar yelled through clenched teeth from the ground. His body was a ruin lying in the middle of the torchlit scene. How he was still alive was beyond reasoning. “Kill me, man. Come on, do it,” he begged the stupefied man looking down at him.

Petar climbed from his horse and ran to the sergeant. A glance told him that the wounds were fatal. He didn’t hesitate when he pushed his blade tip through Tolbar’s throat, but he did mumble a prayer.

“Well met, Lieutenant,” Commander Lyle said gruffly to the only man he recognized.

“I couldn’t stay around Weir after what happened,” the wiry man said, pulling on his long mustache. His expression was tense and confused as he glanced around the bloody body-strewn road. “But by the gods, Commander, it looks like I might have done better there than out here with you.”

One of the men sitting on the wagon fell forward into the horses. The horses mistook it for the command to go and started ahead. They stopped after only a few feet when the wagon wheel wouldn’t roll over a man’s arrow-ridden corpse.

“I think they were after their friends,” Commander Lyle said with a sigh of frustration. “They’re gone.”

The lieutenant rode around to the far side of the wagon and looked around. “Maybe,” he said as he gracefully leapt from his horse and bent down to retrieve something from the ground. “They killed the fisherman.” He stood back up holding the leather satchel that had been strapped around the fisherman's shoulder.

The lieutenant reached inside it and pulled out a golden crown encrusted with enough jewels to buy a castle.

“Maybe that really was Glendar’s skeleton, Commander,” the lieutenant said, seeing the Westland lion head etched into the circlet’s front-plate.

He led his horse back around to the other side of the wagon cage and passed it up to the commander.

“It has to be authentic,” Lyle said, more to himself than to anybody. The magnificent craftsmanship and the large, glittering emeralds in the piece were definitely fit for a king.

“Eight men dead, Commander,” Petar reported. It didn’t appear that the skeletons were coming back. “There are two wounded, but not grievously.”

“Thank you, Petar,” Lyle said. “See to them.” He put the crown in the saddlebag of a riderless horse and studied the scene.

“I think our orders dictate that we chase them down,” Lyle reasoned aloud. “Set up a perimeter watch and make a bonfire. In the morning we’ll bury the dead.” He turned to the former lieutenant and the men he’d brought with him. “Will you be joining us?”

“I do believe it best. We’ve lost our old employment,” the lieutenant said. “My name is Mordon Garret, and we are at your service.”

Corva wanted to be mad at Dostin for slowing him down, but he couldn’t. The monk was as determined as he was to catch up with Telgra. Dostin hadn’t asked for food, or rest, and he didn’t complain when Corva pressed them on through the passes well after dark. Sometimes Dostin pushed the elf. King Jarrek had given them each a horse, and a pack horse for them to share. Corva didn’t ride, though. He loped alongside Dostin’s mount and gave the horses a run for it. Ironically, it was Corva’s haste that caused them to pass right by the quest party encampment in the night.

Both Corva and Dostin saw the bonfire, and the guards. The overloaded wagons looked like they were part of a trade caravan. A single loud snoring, like that of a huge ox or maybe a stud bull, cut through the night. By dawn it was too far behind them to even wonder about. They had no idea that Telgra was coming through the pass toward northern Wildermont. When Corva and Dostin left King Jarrek three days ago, it was assumed she was waiting for them at the red castle in Dreen.