Faithful Servants (3 page)

Now it was Salim’s turn to grunt. Grave robbing from a church of Pharasma was bold, if not outright suicidal. “And his creatures. You’ve seen them?”

“Not personally. But the villagers who cart out his provisions or used to work in his house speak of moans, and shambling forms, and the stench of death.”

Salim nodded. “And you’d send a mob of villagers to handle things?”

The priest bristled. “Not alone! I would offer what magics I have, and my son would lead them!”

“Ah yes, your son.” Salim turned to the would-be warrior. “Show me your hands, boy.”

Confused, Percinov did as he was told, holding them palms out. Salim nodded.

“That’s a fine suit of armor, boy. It’ll serve you well one day. But not yet.”

“Now wait just a minute—!” the priest began.

Salim silenced him with a raised finger. “Calluses.”

“Pardon?”

“You may know penance, Father, but I know war. And the calluses on this boy’s hands are from chopping wood, not a sword hilt. The pattern’s all wrong.” He glanced back at Percinov. “You can put your hands down now, boy.”

Percinov did. His father glowered. “The boy will be fine,” the old priest growled. “Any wounds he suffers, I’ll heal. And his pain will buy credit with the Goddess.”

As it happened, Salim knew precisely how little credit such suffering earned. Yet he set that sentiment aside and decided to test out a suspicion that had been building.

“And what would the boy’s mother think if he were killed?” he asked.

“Don’t you talk about his mother!” Tiny drops of spit flew from the priest’s lips to land halfway across the table. “Serafina is with the Lady now, assisting in the judgment of souls. We should all be so fortunate.”

“But, Da—” Percinov began.

“Shut up, Percy!”

The priest put his head in hands. For a moment, no one said anything. At last, the priest looked up, his lined face appearing older than ever.

“What do you propose?” he asked.

Salim slipped through the pools of shadow cast by branches and shrubs, trusting to his robes to break up his outline and make him invisible. Around him, the sounds of the night creatures were sporadic and tense. Expectant.

Connell slid along beside him, still wearing his peasant disguise. Salim had to give him credit—the eidolon was surprisingly graceful. Ahead, the manor house stood huge and whitewashed at the end of the drive, its windows cavernous and dark save for three in an upper corner, which glowed with dim red light.

As welcome as the shadows were in hiding their approach, Salim would have preferred to come during daylight. Yet he had wasted too much time trying to convince Father Adibold that Salim and Connell would do better alone than with his assistance.

It was utterly stupid. The priest’s little mob of peasants would likely scatter at the first sign of a walking corpse, and those who stayed would be slaughtered. Worse, if this Lord Mirosoy had advanced to making ghouls, then every farmhand who fell would rise again shortly to add to his army.

The old priest and his son might have been more useful—the man claimed to have some magic yet, and the boy’s armor was solid. Yet Salim had seen enough in the priest’s eyes to know that it wasn’t worth it. For all that Adibold talked of the Pharasmin Penitence, that hopeless splinter sect of ascetics and self-deniers, it wasn’t religious fervor that made Adibold cut himself, or so eagerly throw himself and his only son into harm’s way. It was grief for his dead wife. Perhaps even a desire to join her early.

Salim understood that all too well. But the boy still had plenty of years left, and suicidal warriors were a liability.

In frustration, Salim had even attempted telling the old priest part of the truth: that Lord Mirosoy wasn’t acting of his own accord, but rather had been enchanted by a cursed magic item.

The priest would have none of it. “I’ve seen souls corrupted by a shiny coin, or a bit of bare thigh. The nature of the temptation is unimportant.”

At last, once it became clear that even the prospect of killing a potentially innocent man wasn’t enough to dissuade the priest—”sorting good from evil is the Lady’s job, not ours”—Salim had given in and agreed to join them in their attack at dawn.

Which is why he and Connell were out here in the dark, with the sun still hours below the horizon.

Salim caught the eidolon’s eye and nodded. The eidolon had given him the layout of the house, and they’d decided on the servants’ entrance around the side rather than the grand double doors that faced the drive. It was time to break with the road and circle left.

Something shot out from the brush near Salim’s feet.

Without thinking—because in combat, acting was always faster than thinking—Salim drew his sword and slammed it down, pinning the scurrying shape to the earth. The creature squeaked once and expired.

“Mouse,” he whispered, and withdrew his blade, rodent still clinging to its tip. He started to scrape it off against his boot, then stopped.

The thing’s ribcage was hollowed out, the flesh rotted away from tiny bones. Salim’s sword had spitted it neatly, yet its back legs still kicked feebly.

Another tiny form catapulted itself from the bushes. Before Salim could move, Connell leaped, springing forward with the grace of a cat and coming up an the undead rat in his hands. The eidolon popped it into his mouth, bones crunching, then looked back at Salim and smiled.

Perhaps the eidolon would be more useful than Salim had expected. Connell swallowed and asked, “Scouts?”

Salim nodded. It seemed Mirosoy wasn’t totally without defenses. He slipped the twice-expired mouse from his blade and ground it under his boot heel before continuing on.

The servants’ entrance was unguarded. From the tree line, it was a solid hundred feet of open lawn to the steps up to the back porch, and then the door. Salim covered it at a run, body bent almost double, sword under his robes to avoid reflecting the moonlight. Connell paced him. At the door, they paused for a moment, listening. When nothing revealed itself, Salim nodded to Connell and thumbed the latch.

Beyond lay a long hall, its wood-paneled walls lit only by the feeble shaft of moonlight from the open door, quickly disappearing into utter black.

Salim smelled it first—the charnel stench of putrefaction. He thrust out an arm to stop Connell, but the eager eidolon had already bounded into the corridor.

A hand reached from the darkness.

Salim moved. There was no time to let his eyes adjust, so he closed them and let his ears and nose guide him past the struggling eidolon, deeper into the dark.

Something rose up in front of him, grave-wet and stinking, and he brought his sword out and down, feeling it cleave through cheese-soft flesh. The thing gave a sigh and fell heavily into him, knocking him back into the wall and what felt like a tall table or stool. His free hand closed on a smooth, heavy object, and he brought it down hard on the thing in front of him, then spun to skewer a new attacker to his right. Back toward the entrance, Connell shouted something.

They were stuck. Salim might be able to keep this up indefinitely, but there was no telling about the eidolon, and they needed to move fast if they wanted to retain the element of surprise. Gritting his teeth, Salim reached out and touched the goddess.

It was only a second, but it was enough. The Lady of Graves flowed through him in a black rush, as grotesque and violating in its own way as the creature putrefying on his feet. The energy passed through him and into the blade of his sword, and cold steel flared with ghostly incandescence, lighting the hallway.

There were only three zombies, all dressed in the rotting finery that had probably once been the best clothes the little town could offer. Two lay at Salim’s feet, his sword having severed the fragile magic that kept them animated. Down the hall, Connell struggled with the third. The eidolon had dropped his disguise, and the long neck of his true form snaked around the back of the zombie’s futilely chomping head, wrapping it like a boa constrictor. Long jaws locked around the undead creature’s skull. There was a twist and a pop, and the last corpse dropped to the floor and lay still.

Salim looked down at his off hand. The object he held was a stone bust of a young man, handsome in a vaguely arrogant and pupilless sort of way. He held it out toward the eidolon. “Your boss?”

Connell nodded.

Salim let the stone drop onto the corpse it had clubbed, then wiped his sword on the tattered linen shirt. He gestured down the hall.

“You know the house,” he said, “but don’t leave my side unless I tell you to. Are we clear?”

Connell bobbed his head in what appeared to be genuine contrition and led the way deeper into the house.

The manor was a shell. Though the pair passed several well-appointed sitting rooms, with plush armchairs and walls of bookshelves or big bay windows overlooking the moonlit grounds, the layer of dust at the entrance to each argued that no one had bothered with them in some time. Connell avoided the showy front half of the house, with its hangings and sculptures like the one Salim had appreciated, and instead led them through a series of narrow, more utilitarian corridors and staircases. Salim kept the light from the sword carefully banked and focused by a fold in his cloak, yet nothing stirred in the dead house. If it weren’t for the slight but ever-present scent of decay, Salim might have thought the place a summer home, packed away for storage while the lord was away.

At last they came to a door whose bottom edge was limned with the same red light they’d seen from the road. The eidolon’s barely existent lips moved, and after a second Salim realized Connell was attempting to mouth the word “workshop.” Salim nodded, and the eidolon turned the knob. The door swung open.

The room was large, the kind other lords might put to use as a ballroom or formal dining room for parties. The huge set of windows they’d observed earlier cast moonlight on the hardwood floor, yet this illumination was overpowered by red lights that floated like swamp fire at the room’s far end. The glow from these flying lanterns was soft, and cast a flattering glow over the guests. No doubt that generous lighting would have kindled more than one midnight romance among the figures standing in a knot on the dance floor. Except that the guests were dead.

As one, the corpses turned to observe the newcomers. These, too, were still dressed in their funeral finery, some in the clothes of peasants and merchants, others in simple shrouds marked with the symbol of Pharasma. There was no pattern to their features—young and old, male and female all stood with the awkward stances or constricted limbs of rigor mortis. A few had clearly been magically preserved for their funerals, and even now were only beginning to show the first signs of decomposition. Others were little more than fleshy skeletons, their bones tied crudely together with twine where tendons had fallen away.

Behind them all, a man stood in the center of the lights, obscured from the chest down by a long dining table repurposed as a workbench. Stacks of books and bubbling alembics cluttered every surface, along with stranger implements and silvery surgical tools with whose use Salim was thankfully unfamiliar. Though the man’s face was the same as that on the stone head in the servants’ hall, this version was older, and so drawn and haggard as to resemble his zombie subjects. Above the face, a black crown of long thorns and vertical spikes pierced and pricked at his brow, holding back long, dark hair.

Lord Mirosoy looked up from the book he’d been studying, yet his face barely registered the newcomers’ presence. With one finger still marking his place in the text, he flicked his hand toward his uninvited guests.

“Lord Mirosoy appears to have embarked on some

significant life changes of late.”

“Kill them,” he said, and went back to reading.

The undead convocation shuffled forward.

Connell growled—a deep, resonant rumble in surprising contrast to his usual excited tenor. Three-fingered talons flexed.

“No,” Salim said, and put a hand on the eidolon’s shoulder.

Connell looked at him in puzzlement, but Salim simply squeezed once and then released him. He stepped forward and drew his sword.

The eidolon might be better in a fight than he let on, but that wasn’t the point. Salim had seen enough to tell that these people were no ghouls, no vampire spawn or vengeful wraiths. These were just farmers, their corpses denied the slow transition into the same dirt they worked, forced to walk again at the whim of some spoiled lord.

This wasn’t a fight. Nor even an execution.

It was a funeral rite.

The zombies approached, and Salim flowed like a river to meet them.

The undead fought silently, and Salim did the same, the only sounds the swirl of his robes and the wine-glass ring of steel sliding free of flesh, punctuated by the thumps of corpses hitting the floor. They moved to surround him, and he let them, whirling like a dervish, blade kissing them lightly in the only blessing he knew how to give.

Rest, he thought as a child’s body slid from his sword, crumpling to the fouled floor. Rest.

And then he stood alone. Around him, the hardwood was covered with bodies, splayed once more in the posture of death that, while undignified, was so much more than they’d had a moment before. He looked down at the corpses and wished them well.

At last they had Mirosoy’s attention. The lord looked at them as if dazed, struggling to understand the mess of bodies staining his ballroom floor. “Who are you?” he asked.

“It’s me, Master!” The eidolon’s voice was the whining, eager tone of a dog hoping to regain its master’s good graces. “I’ve come back to help you! Please don’t be angry!”

Mirosoy ignored his creation, instead focusing on the dark-eyed man moving toward him, sword drawn. The lord’s voice didn’t waver. “And you?”

“Just a friend,” Salim said. “One who’s come to do you a favor.”

His sword lashed out.

“No!” Connell’s scream was grief bordering on pain. The eidolon leaped for Salim’s back, talons outstretched, but it was already too late. Salim’s upward slash carved a shining arc toward Mirosoy’s face.