What Remains of Heroes (17 page)

Karnag allowed himself to be pulled away from the merchant’s stall by Fencress as Drenj and Paddyn frantically gathered handfuls of the spilled coins and what few horses they could. A dead guardsman lay near the stall, his guts cut open. Bells clanged as the city’s alarm sounded, and Karnag caught sight of several red-sashed soldiers scrambling toward the stockyards.

They pulled their horses hurriedly through the city’s gate, its guardsman whimpering and holding up his hands as they passed. Screams of terror sounded from behind them.

Fencress yelled at the men to mount the horses bareback, to worry about the tack for the beasts later. “Get clear of this place, now!”

Karnag did so in a daze, his movements slow and dreamlike. The wicked smile did not leave his face.

They rode hard and came to a clearing half a league south of Raven’s Roost and dismounted their steeds. No one said a word as they fitted their horses with bits, bridles and saddles.

“A warning would have been a nice thing,” said Fencress, her face displaying her usual bemusement but her eyes something else. “We have little left of our supplies.”

Karnag shrugged. “We’re bound to cross refugees on the road.”

“Simple criminals, then?” said Paddyn, spitting through the hole left by his missing tooth. “Is that what we’ve become?”

Karnag gave him a black look. “Did you ever think of yourself as something more?”

They were quiet and climbed astride their horses once more. Karnag turned and regarded the road behind them, shadowed by leafy trees and gently rising toward Raven’s Roost. The alarm bells could still be heard, faint and distant. On the road, perhaps three hundred yards away, was a lone, green-cloaked rider.

“A guard?” asked Fencress. “Perhaps a friend of the merchant?”

Karnag shrugged and turned his horse slowly about. He straightened in the saddle and breathed deeply. He fingered the hilts of his blades, each in turn.
No matter.
Let them
come
.

Shivering, Karnag pulled his moth-eaten blanket to his chin and rolled over to face the dead remains of the campfire. His teeth chattered and his body trembled as though he stood upon the snow-laden highlands of his youth. Yet, it was a warm night, and his companions rested peacefully in their bedrolls nearby.

He rubbed at his neck, and his hand came away slick with sweat. He wondered for an instant whether he’d fallen ill, but then thought of the horse trader, his corpse broken and awash in blood. And then were those words—those of the Lector—threading through his thoughts.
No
.
I fight with something else
entirely
.

He squeezed shut his eyes and searched again for that place within him. He slowed his breathing and disregarded the chill in his bones, settling deep within himself. He sought that center, that focus he’d drawn upon just before the killing. It had seemed a sense of utter certainty, a willful embrace of death and all its cold consequences. It had seemed then so familiar, like something he’d known he’d held within all along, but had never been fully able to touch. It had seemed like his very soul.

He searched, but within were only the words. The maddening words whose meaning was utterly incomprehensible. Over and over again they came, at first as soft as a lover’s whisper but growing steadily louder.
“Necrista traellus a abridalusi Yrghul y ogo alliata. Illienne cradus e Warduren renden e sallem orn argo
apocha.”

He opened his eyes and smacked his head, as though he could knock the words from his skull. His eyes found the stars above and he breathed deeply the night air. He took in the world around him, the heavy boughs of the old trees, the groaning sound they made as the wind moved through them. The faint rustle of leaves. He pulled in all the perceptions he could discern, but still, through and over it all, the words resounded.

They grew louder still.
“Necrista traellus a abridalusi Yrghul y ogo alliata. Illienne cradus e Warduren renden e sallem orn argo apocha.”
He could not pull his thoughts from their utterance, and could not bend his mind to think of other things.

Soon, they were like a thunderclap, as loud and forceful as the most violent storm. He tossed aside his blanket and pressed himself upright. It seemed as though the whole forest shook with the noise, yet his companions slept soundly still.

The words were heard by him alone.

Louder and louder they came, until all other thought was drummed from his mind. His vision went to blackness and his head rang.
“Necrista traellus a abridalusi Yrghul y ogo alliata. Illienne cradus e Warduren renden e sallem orn argo
apocha.
”

His head seemed ready to split with the reverberation. He reeled with agony, squeezing his hands to his skull in hopes of keeping it whole.

“No!” he roared. He fell back to the ground, writhing in his struggle to force the sounds from his head.

“Karnag?” called someone, the sound distant and drowned by the words roaring through his mind.

“No!” he screamed again, gnashing his teeth and cracking his jaw.

After a time he rose, defiant.

No
.

And then there it was. The feeling. It began deep within him, in his very center. Faintly at first, but growing ever more intense.

The chill fled his form and the shivers subsided. He felt within him a warmth, a strength, a conviction. A truth. The feel of it invigorated, and he surrendered to it and reveled in it. His heart became a cauldron, spreading white-hot fire through his limbs.

I am the predator, the taker of lives
.
I am the executioner and decider of fates
.
I shall not succumb to the will of
another
.

The words of the Lector diminished and grew silent.

I have become their
master.

12

The Deep Shadows

L
annick shifted uncomfortably
in his straw cot. Every last bit of him hurt, and he’d been unable to eat for days. Horus had been kind enough to deliver the occasional bottle of wine, but even that did nothing to remedy his aches, much less his profound despair.

What pains can I bear, when even the wine fails to dull
them?

Ever since his encounter with General Fane his sleep had been fitful, as it was this night. He lay with eyes open, watching the barred portal of his door, the thin moonlight streaming from his window, and the deep shadows pooled in the corners of his cell.

He knew they were coming.

General Fane was right: the Necrists would torture him for as long as he could endure, until at last he was broken and revealed to them everything. He would be forced to surrender the identities of all the Variden, the Vigilant Ones. They were the surviving disciples of Valis, one of the seven banished Sentinels, and he would betray them all.

He thought of the lacquered box he’d left in his quarters, and how foolish he’d been to leave it there. It was his Coda, the bracelet of black iron given to him when he’d taken the oaths of the Variden—the same bracelet Alisa had worn when she’d come to visit him. The Codas had been gifted to the order by the Sentinel Valis, and were the key to their power and survival. All the Variden wore them, for the Codas sealed their secrets, and preserved knowledge upon the death of the body. Without it, Lannick would stand naked before the sorcerous inquisitions of his enemies.

He shifted again in his cot. He would not sleep this night, he knew. The memories of his old life, of his countless failures, were growing too tangible. When his family was murdered he’d disappeared. He’d abandoned his order, buried the symbols of his affiliation and spent his time sulking in taverns. He’d drank and drank, desperately trying to wash away all regrets. At last, he became lost. Lost to his enemies, his order, and himself.

But here, in prison, his past had found him once again.

He kicked aside his blanket. He felt unsteady, plagued by the vague dizziness of insomnia. His eyes trailed again to the door, waiting for it to open.
Waiting for death
.

He knew the Necrists would not come for him during the day, bound as they were to darkness. But if he could avoid them for but one more day, then perhaps there was some narrow chance. Perhaps Alisa would come to rescue him as she’d promised. He pulled himself from his cot and shuffled to the cell’s arrow-loop window. The sky was dead black, still a long while before dawn.

As they had for several nights, his thoughts focused on his meeting with Alisa. It seemed now a lifetime ago she’d visited him.
“I will return for you
,” she’d said.

Could she save me?
It was the memory of those words that kept alive the frail fire of hope within him.
Perhaps only the hope of a hopeless fool, but hope
nonetheless
.

If she could come for him before the Necrists, he could grasp a chance at safety, at survival. He could recover his Coda, rejoin his order, and redeem himself. His life could regain the purpose it had been so long without.

He knelt before the window and pressed his head against the wall’s wet stones. His eyes burned with tears.

Sweet Illienne the Light Eternal, let the sun
rise!

“
Lannick
.”

The word was softly spoken, just barely more than a whisper. Lannick drifted from the throes of a rare slumber. His ears perked for a moment, but there came no other sound. He pulled his blanket to his shoulders and shifted in his cot.

“
Lannick
.”

A woman’s voice. He turned in his cot and cracked open his eyes. The cell was dark and empty. He looked to the window and saw the sky had shifted from black to a deep purple. Dawn would come soon. He looked to the barred portal in his door, but all was lost in shadow.

Do I dream?

And then he saw it. In the shadows near the foot of his cot there was a deeper, darker blackness. It seemed less a thing than the
absence
of a thing—a void, a nothingness, a rip in the world.

Terror seized him and Lannick retreated until he was pressed firmly against the wall.
I have nowhere to run
. “Help me!” he croaked. His voice was hoarse and the pain in his jaw made the words difficult to shape.

There was a pale glow from the center of the void and the sound of shuffling movement. Something was emerging from blackness. The void shifted spasmodically and expanded, growing to consume the whole of the cell between the cot and the door.

“
Lannick
.”

A tall figure emerged from the blackness, thin and elegant and cloaked from head to toe in what seemed a black veil. Behind it came three squat shapes, each half the size of a man, shambling and misshapen.

“Help me!” Lannick shouted more loudly, but it was still little more than a moan, unlikely to draw the attention of the guards. He huddled in the cell’s corner and pressed harder against the wall, madly hoping the stone would swallow him whole.

The tall figure glided gracefully to within an arm’s reach of Lannick, and with slender hands parted the veil to reveal a face so ghostly pale it seemed almost luminescent. It was a face delicately featured, a woman’s face that would have been beautiful but for the thick, barbed stitch extending from hairline to chin, splitting it precisely in half.

I know this face!
It was stretched and pitted as compared to when he’d last seen it years before, and its hue was now the white pallor of death, but…

Dead
gods!

“Lannick,” the woman said. “I hope this face pleases you.” She smiled, causing the stitch to buckle and twist grotesquely. “General Fane was kind enough to reveal to us the location of your wife’s grave.”

Dead gods! What horrors must I
suffer?

She gestured to the three abominations behind her. “And the graves of your children.”

Lannick sobbed and shrieked in revulsion as the ghastly malformations grinned at him, their faces sick perversions of his children’s. They came at him and pulled with gnarled hands, grabbing him by his ankles and dragging him through the dark rift and into the cold netherworld beyond. They giggled all the while.

Let me die!

Ahead of them walked the tall Necrist, leading them into the blackness. “We have found the flesh
remembers
,” she said. “You must have provided some amusement to your children.”

Lannick choked on his tears and gnashed his teeth.
Sweet Illienne, damned be the day I forsook you! Forgive me!

The abominations chuckled and babbled like babies.

The Necrist turned her head, displaying an unnatural smile. “It must be heartwarming for you to lay eyes upon them again. Touching how the flesh remembers such emotions…” Just then she stopped and barked strange words in a guttural tongue.

The abominations skittered to Lannick’s sides and lifted him, pressing him upward and restraining his arms. Lannick wrenched about in the chilling blackness surrounding him, but he could not break free. As he struggled, the Necrist came to stand over him, her face mere inches from his own.

“No,” Lannick wept, vainly trying to look away from the warped but still familiar face.

The Necrist’s smile broadened, becoming an expression almost feral, a wide swath of yellow teeth and purplish gums. The face was so familiar, yet so awfully monstrous. “Your wife’s skin carried memories as well.” She bent close, the skin venting a putrid odor of decay, and then she pressed against him.

Lannick squeezed shut his eyes and wept and wailed, so terrible was the feel of that cold face against his own.
Sweet Illienne, no!

He shuddered with sobs as the Necrist smothered his mouth with a lingering kiss.

Lannick rubbed tears from his eyes and choked down a sob, determined to hold dear his sanity.
Such madness!
Then he sobbed again and wiped at his mouth with a tear-wetted hand, desperately trying to wash away a stain he felt certain was there.

They dragged him onward through the netherworld, and Lannick had no idea how far or how long the journey had been. All about him was an endless blackness of shifting shadows, and the only sensation of movement was the cold chill flowing beneath him. The horrors he’d endured made the journey seem ponderous in length, but as his wits gathered he realized he’d been gone from his cell only briefly.

I will not be so easily broken
, he vowed, rising to his elbows. He studied the shadows upon shadows lining the unearthly tunnel.
A shadowpath
, he remembered. It was said the Necrists could move unseen among contiguous shadows, accessing the furrows in the world’s substance forged ages ago by the dark god Yrghul. Yrghul, the Lord of Nightmares, had used the shadowpaths as a means to corrupt the dreams of humankind. His disciples, the Necrists, used them to travel in ways invisible.

Dead gods, where are they taking
me?

Lannick struggled to peer ahead through eyes rheumy with drying tears. He tried to avert the backward gazes of the misshapen dwarfs, and struggled to shut his ears to their macabre, mimicked sounds.
Shodafayn
—shadow men—the navigators of the shadowpaths. They leered at him over their knobby shoulders, chortling and drooling with sick, stolen faces.

Suddenly the Necrist halted, wheeled about and shouted harshly at the Shodafayn. One of them ambled crookedly to her side and held its hands outward, pleading. The Necrist spoke in angry tones, pointing at the creature and gesturing at the path ahead. There, before them, the shadows were dissipating, retreating from a pinpoint of light.

Something’s
amiss
.

The Necrist growled and waved a hand. The Shodafayn responded by rushing toward the light source, now the size of the keyhole. It squatted close to the light, hands upon its hips and muttering as it inspected the anomaly.

At last the misshapen thing turned and spoke, its tone apologetic. The Necrist huffed and nodded curtly in reply. The Shodafayn’s brethren shuffled to its side.

The three abominations gathered together and whispered. Gradually their murmurs assumed the measured cadence of a chant, and the words the intonations of sorcery. They turned toward the break in the darkness and set about prodding and tugging at its edges with their knotty hands, moving with surprising dexterity. The light expanded as they pulled, and grew to cast a frail illumination into the blackness of the shadowpath. It shimmered and shifted, and what lay beyond was distorted as though seen through a thick pane of stained glass.

Within moments the rift was as wide as several men. The Necrist barked a brusque command, causing the Shodafayn to scurry from the light and return to Lannick. They grabbed him again at the ankles and dragged him swiftly, closer and closer to the flickering breach.