Down Among the Dead Men (Forest Kingdom Novels) (5 page)

Demons came boiling out of the darkness, throwing themselves at the barricades in a silent, murderous frenzy. MacNeil stood his ground and swung his sword double-handed, the long blade biting deep into demon flesh. Foul-smelling blood flew thickly through the air, and his footing grew slippery. His arm and back muscles screamed in agony, but still he fought, his sword rising and falling again and again. He started to whimper, and bit his lips until the blood came to keep from crying out. The demons burst through the barricades, and he was forced to retreat. He fell back, fighting every step of the way, and all around him the town’s defenders were pulled down and slaughtered. Their screams lasted a long time. MacNeil swung his sword with failing arms, and the demons came at him from all sides.

No. No,
this isn’t how it was. The long night broke, the dawn came, and the demons and the darkness retreated. King’s Deep was saved, and I survived. I remember! I was there! This isn’t how it was!

The demons swarmed over him and pulled him down, and there was only the blood and the darkness.

A low wind murmured across the deserted moor, and moonlight shone silver on the early morning mists. The sun would be up in less than an hour, and still Jessica Flint stood alone in the old graveyard. She pulled her cloak tightly about her, and vowed that once she got back to her nice warm barracks nothing short of a declaration of war would get her out on night duty again. She also vowed to do something extremely unpleasant to the sergeant who’d volunteered her for this duty.

Flint looked about her, but apart from the graveyard the open moor stretched away in every direction, all silver and shadows in the half moon’s light. Half a mile away, over the down-curving horizon, lay the small village of Castle Mills, to whom the graveyard belonged. It was on the villagers’ behalf that Flint was freezing her butt off on the moor at this unearthly hour of the morning. Six months before, they’d caught a rapist and murderer attacking his latest victim. The villagers dragged him out onto the street and hanged him on the spot, amid general celebration. Rather than pollute their graveyard, they threw the body into a peat bog out on the moor. One month later the dead man dug his way out of the mire and made his way back to the village. He killed four women with his bare hands before the villagers banded together and drove him off with flaring torches. He returned to the peat bog and disappeared beneath the mud. But the next month he rose again, and every month after that. The villagers learned to patrol their streets as soon as the sun went down, and the lich turned his attentions to the local graveyard, which comfort he’d been denied. He dug up graves, smashed coffins, and violated the bodies. The villagers sent to the guards for help, and Flint was the unlucky one.

She glanced at the oil-soaked torch standing unlit beside a tombstone. She didn’t dare light it before the lich appeared, for fear of frightening him off. In order for it to be effective, she’d have to use the torch at very close range.

Flint frowned and rested her hand on the pommel of the sword at her side. She’d never fought a lich before. Fire was the usual defense, but by all accounts the lich had proved too elusive for that, so far. Maybe if she hacked him into small pieces first… . She shrugged and looked around her.

It wasn’t much of a graveyard. Just a wide patch of uneven earth, with a dozen weatherbeaten headstones and a scattering of sagging wooden crosses. It smelled pretty bad too. Flint doubted if the people of Castle Mills had even heard of embalming.

A faint noise caught her attention, and she spun around, sword in hand. The peat bog where the murderer’s body had been dumped lay less than a hundred yards away, its dark, wet surface gleaming coldly in the moonlight. Flint licked her dry lips, and then froze where she stood as a claw-like hand thrust up through the mire. Mud dripped from the bony fingers as they flexed jerkily. The hand rose slowly out of the mire, followed by a long, crooked arm and a bony head. Flint snapped out of her daze, and drawing flint and steel from her pocket, she lit the torch she’d brought with her. For a moment she thought it had got too damp to catch, but the oil-soaked head finally burst into flames, and she turned back to face the peat bog with the flaring torch in one hand and her sword in the other. The mire’s surface parted reluctantly with a long sucking sound, and the dead man pulled himself out into the night air. He stood wavering on the edge of the bog, and slowly turned his head to look at Flint. His skin was stained and shrunken, but had been mostly preserved by his time in the bog. The eyes were gone, eaten away by decay, but Flint somehow knew that he could still see her. The lich wore a series of filthy tatters that might once have been clothes, held together by muck and foulness. Mud dripped steadily from him as he started forward, heading for Flint.

All right
, thought Flint.
This is where I earn my pay
.

She stepped forward to meet the lich, holding the torch up high. Moonlight shimmered brightly on the curved blade of her scimitar as she held it out before her. The lich walked unsteadily toward her, his bony fingers clenching and unclenching spasmodically. Flint waited until the last possible moment, and then cut at the lich with her sword. The dead man swayed aside horribly quickly, and the blade whistled through empty air. Flint quickly recovered her balance and jumped backward, but the lich’s hand shot out and fastened onto her left wrist. The bony fingers sank deep into her flesh, and blood ran down her hand, but she wouldn’t drop the torch. Flint swung her sword down in a short, brutal arc and cut through the lich’s wrist. She fell backward, the dead hand still clutching her wrist, and landed awkwardly. Somehow she still managed to hang onto the torch and her sword.

The lich stopped and looked at the stump of his wrist. No blood spurted from the severed arm, though bone fragments showed clearly in the moonlight. Flint stealthily drew her feet under her and shook the dead hand free from her wrist. Cut off the head and then the legs, and the thing would be helpless. Burn the remnants to ashes with the torch, and the lich would never trouble the villagers again. All it took was a steady nerve and a steady hand.

She scrambled quickly to her feet, and then tripped on the uneven ground. She fell heavily, jarring the breath from her lungs, and dropped both her sword and the torch. The flame flickered and went out. Flint struggled to her knees, gasping for breath, and reached for her sword. The lich got there first.
No. That’s not right
.

The lich picked up the sword with its remaining hand and hefted it thoughtfully. The eyeless face turned slowly to grin at Flint. She scrambled frantically backward.

No! That isn’t the way it happened! I heat the lich!

The walking dead man loomed over her, huge and dark and awful. Moonlight gleamed on the sword as he lifted it above his head, and then the blade came flashing down and blood ran darkly on the moonlit ground. The sword rose and fell, rose and fell… .

Giles Dancer walked down a long stone passage that had no beginning and no end. Torches burned on the walls to either side of him, but made little impression on the darkness that filled the passage like a living thing. The Dancer walked through the corridors of Castle Lancing with his sword in his hand, searching for the werewolf.

The shapeshifter was as cunning as it was deadly, and it had taken the Dancer some time to work out which of the baron’s guests was the werewolf, but now he knew. The creature couldn’t be far ahead of him. He padded softly down the narrow corridor, his calm, cold eyes searching the gloom for any trace of his prey. It seemed to him that he’d been searching for the werewolf for a long time, but the Dancer was patient. He knew he’d find it eventually, and then he would kill it.

He walked on down the passage, and a slight frown creased his forehead. He hadn’t known Castle Lancing was this big. Surely he should have got somewhere by now. And there was something about this case he ought to remember; he was sure of it, but he couldn’t quite place what it was. A sudden sound caught his attention, and he stopped where he was and listened carefully. The sound came again: a low, coughing growl, not far away. The Dancer smiled. This should be interesting. He’d never killed a werewolf before. He hoped the creature would put up a good fight; it had been a long time since anyone had been able to challenge his skill. Man or beast, sorcerer or shapeshifter, it made no difference to him. He was a Blademaster, and he was unbeatable. He moved slowly forward, listening carefully all the way, but there was only the silence and the shadows. And then he rounded a corner in the passage, and the werewolf came out of the darkness to meet him.

It was tall, well over seven feet in height, its shaggy head brushing the roof of the corridor. Its thick fur was matted with sweat and blood, and it smelled rank, like a filthy butcher’s shop. The close-set eyes were yellow as urine, and its wide, grinning mouth was full of heavy pointed teeth. The werewolf snarled at the Dancer, and ropy saliva fell from its mouth. The two of them stood looking at each other for a long moment, and then the Dancer smiled and hefted his sword lightly. The werewolf howled and threw itself at the Dancer’s throat. He sidestepped easily, and his sword cut into and out of the werewolf’s stomach in a single fluid movement. The creature howled again and spun around to claw the Dancer, the horrid wound in its gut healing even as it moved. The Dancer slipped the silver dagger out of the top of his boot and drove it between the werewolf’s ribs with a practiced twist of the wrist. The creature screamed in a human voice and fell limply to the stone floor. Its blood was as red as any human’s. The Dancer stepped carefully back out of range, and watched calmly as the werewolf’s panting breath slowed and stopped.

And as he watched, the creature’s shape blurred and changed, the fur and fangs and claws slowly melting away, until there before him on the floor lay Jessica Flint, with his knife in her heart.

The witch called Constance stood in the reception hall. A cold wind was blowing from nowhere, and the shadows were too dark. Four men were tying nooses and throwing the ropes over the supporting beam above them. They paid the witch no attention as they worked, and though their mouths were smiling, their eyes were puzzled and confused.

The first man to finish took a chair from beside the wall and positioned it carefully under the noose he’d arranged. He stood on the chair, slipped the noose around his neck, and then waited patiently while the others did the same. Finally all four men were standing on chairs with nooses around their necks. They pulled the nooses tight, and without looking at each other, one by one they stepped off the chairs. They hung unmoving from the roof beam, slowly strangling. Their hands hung freely at their sides as they choked.

Constance stepped around them, giving their twitching feet a wide berth, and ran into the main corridor that led off from the reception hall. A guard was hacking a trader to pieces as he tried to crawl away. A lengthy trail of blood on the corridor floor showed how long the trader had been crawling. Neither the guard nor the trader noticed Constance at all. She walked on through the fort, and everywhere she went it was the same: scenes of madness and murder and grotesque suicide. One man sat in a corner and stabbed himself repeatedly in the gut until his arm became too weak to wield the knife. A woman drowned her two children in a hip bath, and then sat them both in her lap and sang them lullabies. Two men duelled fiercely with axes, hacking at each other again and again with no thought of defending themselves. They gave and took terrible wounds, but would not fall. Blood flew in the freezing air and steamed in wide puddles on the floor. All through the fort it was the same; men, women, and children died horribly for no reason that Constance could see or understand. Their eyes were not sane. It was very cold in the fort, and darkness gathered around the shrinking pools of light.

Above and beyond all the madness and death Constance could hear a continual dull thudding, like a great bass drumbeat that went on and on. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and it was a long time before Constance realized she was listening to the beating of a giant heart, immeasurably far away.

She came at last to the dining hall, where hundreds of men and women and children sat at dinner. She entered the hall warily, but still no one knew that she was there. She moved over to the nearest table, and her face twisted with disgust as she saw what they were eating. The meat on the platters was raw and bloody, and maggots writhed in it, twisting and wriggling as they squirmed out onto the table. Lengths of purple intestines hung over the edges of the table, twitching and dripping, and bowls were full of bird’s heads, the dark little eyes alive and knowing. The witch looked away and realized for the first time that the man sitting before her at the table was dead. His throat had been cut, twice. Blood had run down his neck and soaked into his shirtfront. He smiled politely at Constance and offered her a wineglass. It was full to the brim with blood.

Constance backed quickly away as she realized he could see her, and one by one all the guests turned to look at her. They were all dead. Some had been stabbed, some had been burned. Some had died easily, while others had been all but hacked apart. Four carried their necks at a stiff angle to show the livid rope marks on their throats. Constance shook her head dazedly, pressed her lips together, and tried not to scream. And then, one by one, the gathering of the dead raised their arms and pointed behind her. Constance turned slowly, unwillingly. Whatever it was they wanted her to see, she knew she didn’t want to see it. But still she turned, and a scream rose in her throat as she saw MacNeil, Flint, and the Dancer hanging on the wall behind her. They’d been pinned to the stonework by dozens of long-bladed knives. Their dangling feet were a good six inches off the ground, and from the amount of blood that had pooled on the floor beneath them, they’d been a long time dying.

Constance whimpered faintly. There was a series of scuffing noises behind her, and she turned back to find the dead rising unhurriedly to their feet. They advanced slowly on her, each carrying a long-bladed knife. Constance started to back away and slammed up against the closed door. She frantically pulled the handle, but the door wouldn’t open. She spun around, and the knives were very close. Constance screamed.