The King's Blood (46 page)

The priest stopped his waving and held the sword in front of him like a pike, hoping the demon would simply impale itself and save him the trouble.
 

All three looked at the old woman stumbling nearly naked in the cold and then incredulously at the mad priest. "Friend of yours?" Aldrin asked, grabbing Kynton's sword arm but unable to break the tight grip of fear.

"That's Mrs. Warters. I changed her filthy sheets for a month and all she'd do is kick my backside."

"I think I like her already," Ciara mumbled, enjoying the sight of the cocksure cut down to size.

"She hung on far past her allotted time, they gave her last rites three times over just to be sure," Kynton was babbling, inching back as the woman stumbled after him. "It took two of us to lay her body out."

"What are you getting at?" Ciara asked, looking back over her shoulder at the dot that was now more of a menacing line.

"She's dead!" Kynton squeaked as the previously very deceased Mrs. Warters' head lolled back. An eternal stare bored into the soul of the man who tossed her bones to the hard world.

"What? What do you mean she's dead? She's moving!" Aldrin shouted back at him, trying harder to get his weapon back.

"I know dead. I spent over half my life learning dead. That's dead!" Kynton shouted back at the prince.

As a horde, the group backed up slowly, away from the dead woman inching towards them. Ciara's shoe caught a rock as she grabbed the priest's shoulder for leverage and hissed, "You don't burn your dead?!"

But Kynton wasn't about to accept the blame for this walking corpse, "Ashes requires fuel, vultures are free. I'd rather eat than humor some bitch in a diaphanous gown in the sky."

"Maybe she just got better," Aldrin added unhelpfully, his eyes blinking rapidly to make up for the corpse's endless gaze.

Kynton rolled his eyes and in the process glanced towards Isa, "Ha. Ask your witch. She looks downright terrified of the thing."

And sure enough, Isa's eyes were so wide they filled half her face, her hair giving her a half a foot in height. Ciara glanced from the witch to the corpse before spinning to face their first concern, that black dot in the fog.

The dot was gone, only fog answered back through the city of the dead. "Shit," she mumbled under her breath. Turning back to face the old woman whose limp arms, which once hung like a rag doll's, seemed to be stitching the nerves back together the nearer she drew. A hand shuddered against gravity, momentarily rising, before flopping back.
 

Kynton's heel smashed into the only remaining wall of the Temple of Dhager. The others touched their dead end tepidly, fingers hoping to find some magical doorway through stone (as if it were possible). The priest waved his sword at the corpse, which took an actual step, gaining more motor skills with each passing second.
 

Ciara gripped her dagger and asked, "Anyone got any idea how to rekill a corpse?"

Sprinting along the temple's roof beams, the black dot became more man sized as it somersaulted over the edge and landed behind Old Lady Warters. The corpse didn't bother to turn; its dead stare yards past as a sword glittered through the mist and sliced through rotting neck meat. Her head rolled with the momentum, crashing to a stop at the foot of a nameless demigod, the eyelids still open.

The man stood slowly, inspecting his surprisingly clean sword. The long dead didn't tend to bleed much. He turned to the group and smiled his familiar crescent moon, "Nightingale, and boy king. I see you've discovered a new friend."

"I wondered how long it'd take for you to show, Taban," Ciara said failing to hide a note of warmth in her voice. At this point, she'd have welcomed the Emperor himself if he'd been able to deal with the walking corpse.

The assassin raised his arms in a large shrug, "You are forcing me to earn my bread this month. Could you not avoid kidnapping, death, and," he sniffed at the priest, "religion for just one month?"

Aldrin glared at the addition who'd saved his life so much it was becoming rather obscene. He was about to open his mouth and say something rather petty that the prism of his teenage mind turned witty when a jerking motion caught his eye. Even with the head lolling about under the ennui of Teve the Utter Disappointment To His Parents, the body remained standing and began to adjust to its new center of gravity. Kynton shrieked as the headless neck twisted about as if something were still attached and the corpse took a step forwards.

Taban looked at his sword momentarily, but if losing the head didn't stop this monster there was a good chance he'd be hacking for hours until it was dust. "I'm out of ideas," the assassin admitted.

"Run?" Ciara asked.

"Run," Aldrin agreed and for the first time addressed the assassin as if he were something other than a very deadly fly in the ointment, "I assume you know the way out."

Taban smiled again, "A running tour of the dead city, and it's not even my naming day."

Without waiting for a groan, the assassin knocked into the still shuffling corpse, sending it bouncing into a wall and beat feet towards the real north, not that fake north all the moss pretended to grow towards. Kynton pushed past Ciara and Isa and ran after the black man, displaying the true sense of chivalry trained into someone of his station.

Aldrin looked over at Ciara, her dagger arm was drooping as she fought against her failing body for just one more burst of adrenaline. He took her free hand and, smiling grimly, pulled her after the assassin. The witch stood still, watching the corpse's twitching fingers rising towards her. She tried to breathe, but the oxygen was overpowered by the magic seeping from the still walking corpse's pores.
 

"Isa, come on!" the prince's voice called, breaking her free from the spell. Snarling, she batted away the headless woman's arm and kicked the corpse in the knees, sending it flying backwards over broken ruins where it landed like a turtle on its back.

The witch ran on, never looking back at the thirty other bodies beginning to move in the mist.

Shoes better suited to a life of quiet contemplation, healing, and sanitation ripped to their final clinging shreds, exposing tender feet to the frozen rocks of the crumbling city. Kynton's comparably easy life of rising at dawn, scrubbing down blood, vomit, bile and other odious excretions of the human body from surfaces it shouldn't logically be able to reach, then breaking for lunch, prepared him poorly for his new found days of fleeing in terror from things that should remain in the ground.

The plump witch, on the other hand, moved her stocky legs at such speeds it was difficult for the priest to keep her in sight. She'd long since surpassed him and was rounding on the black man who dropped from the sky. It must be magic. To move that much mass so quickly had to be breaking at least a few laws.

Beside him remained only the boy prince and his servant? Concubine? Slave? Kynton hadn't seen that dusky of skin in his very sheltered life and was uncertain what one did with a Dunner girl. Maybe she told really enticing stories.

The boy's hand clung to hers like a wealthy man staring down the dark tunnel of answering for his numerous life choices upon the deathbed. Kynton still sported a few scars on his knuckles from one particularly despicable War Lord who liked to use his servant's heads as cobblestones and never trimmed his nails.
 

"How much more running do we need to do?" the priest wheezed, his breath fighting through the growing chilly air. The further they moved from the heart of the dead city, the more winter roared back. Even the Lady of Ice didn't like playing in Putras.

The corpse defiler didn't hear his ragged plea, continuing his maddening rush out of danger. Or perhaps leading him onto it. Kynton's plans, well more like an idea -- half risen and with too much salt -- seemed to be crashing into a spectacular failure before him. A prince had seemed a smart ally at the time, but he may have waited for the next if he'd known running would be involved.

The city that provided the backdrop for the moment his life went terribly wrong began to recede into the background. It became less crumbled buildings and half torn walls as they rushed from the center and more a tossed brick or handful of road hidden amongst the forest floor. Naked trees stood where once lived entire subdivisions of people very concerned with their neighbor's decision to put a statue of the goddess of debauchery on his front lawn. Pissing off a god was less of a concern to the decreasing property values and the wrath of the HOA.

Kynton scrambled through bracken clawing its way across an old sign that proudly called this section of land "Elm Creek Colony," despite the fact there were neither elms nor creeks anywhere to be found. He glanced back to the prince, who paused as his darkie slowed, her feet catching on the stones.

"Cia?" his small voice mumbled before her knees caught under her and she stumbled to the ground.

"Stop!" Aldrin called out to the witch and assassin, days ahead of them now, as he crumbled under the added weight of a girl mid-faint.

Kynton walked carefully over to them, broken twigs digging into his exposed feet. With the prince's floundering assistance, Ciara lay across the forest floor like a princess waiting for a kiss to wake her up. If you ignore the fact she was dressed in tattered rags, the remnants of snow littered the ground instead of wildflowers, and perspiration slicked her forehead. The priest pushed the boy back, placing his frozen hands against her forehead.

"Yah!" Kynton shrieked as numb digits reacted to a burning fever. Yanking his hand away, he shook it, trying to reach a livable equilibrium.
 

"What? What are you doing? Stop doing things!" Aldrin insisted, unused to a healing touch that didn't include a shave and a haircut.

The forest, the boy chattering beside him, even the sound of approaching footsteps all vanished as Kynton's mind switched from reckless vagabond to a priest of Hospar. His fingers lifted her eyelids, checking the membranes for lack of air. A more prepared hand lay across the forehead to catalog fever, dangerous but not yet deadly. It was when his head moved to her chest, an ear placed upon her sternum, that the prince pushed the priest out of a sense of chivalry so stupid only a bunch of men in tin cans could come up with it.

Kynton landed hard onto an old stump, the bark's edge tearing a hole in his robes. The haze of diagnosis broken, he staggered to his knees and poked Aldrin in his sternum, not to check for a pulse. "What are you doing?"

"I could ask the same of you, you pervert," the boy stuttered.

Kynton rolled his eyes dramatically. This was why the Order insisted any visitors remain outside, preferably beyond the city gates. The locals could get testy about such things. And he hadn't even pricked her finger to test the consistency of her blood yet. That one always went over real well when the townies were in a vampire mood.

The assassin appeared with the witch in tow, her chest heaving mightily in exertion, reminding Kynton of all the things he had to make up for. Taban glanced towards the girl lying strewn across the ground and grabbed the priest by the collar, "What have you done?"

Kynton was only an inch or so shorter than the man, but struggled as his feet left the ground,
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"Why does everyone accuse me? I haven't done a thing."

The witch's own icy fingers approached the girl's head but never quite touched it, "It's a fever."
 

The assassin glared upon the priest's struggling face, air becoming a growing necessity as the leathered fist clenched upon his windpipe. He released his grip, sending Kynton back to the ground who'd been expecting a much longer fall.

Coughing through the burning in his throat, the priest commented, "Amaranthine fever, to be precise. There was a rash of it a few months back." He looked around at the faces, stony with worry. "Get it. A rash..." his allies remained unimpressed. "Churls," he muttered to himself.

"How do you combat it?" the prince asked measuredly, looking like he was about to steal the assassin's sword and go to town on Kynton's liver.

"Search their body for loose change and dig a shallow grave, usually," he muttered under his breath. "I mean, um," an addlepated mind flipped past old scrolls, a few lectures he doodled through, and one very loud reprimanding session. "Get the fever reduced as quickly as possible, keep the subject fed with a light broth, and pray. A lot?"

"Isa?" Aldrin asked the witch, turning from Kynton who threw up his hands. Why even bother asking if no one was going to take his professional advice?
 

The witch's pale eyes betrayed a quell of concern. She'd seen this fever sweep through entire villages; it left little in its wake. "We need to steel ourselves," the witch said evenly, "protection is key against this disease. There are herbs that will..." her voice trailed off as the prince glared.

"How can you help, Ciara?" It was probably the waning light bouncing across the flailing mists but the Prince's low growl struck the chord of 'I will gut you if you do not give me the correct answer,' upon each of their spines.