Witches of Kregen (22 page)

“What’s to do?”

“No idea. Marion wants me over by that tree.”

We all walked across, passing campfires where some of the lads were brewing up or roasting slices of meat. Most were flat on their backs, spark out after the battle. A group from the various duty squadrons followed. The night breeze cooled our flushed cheeks. The stars glittered with that particular brightness of Kregen. The silence was acute. There was no long low and dreadful moaning from the scene of battle.

Under the tree, Sushi Vannerlan, her apron stained black-red, stood with Marion. The Jikai Vuvushis were camped nearby, and they were as tired as the men.

“Hai, Marion. What is it?”

She gripped Sushi’s arm. I looked at the two women, surprised. Just past the gnarled tree lay an ancient burial ground where for generations the dead of the town of Stocrosmot had been laid to rest. I thought of the cemetery outside Falkerium and other towns and cities.

“Sushi?”

“Majister—” She swallowed and started over. “Majister — the wounded and the dead — they are — strange—”

Turko said, “When you’re dead you’re dead.”

“Not,” said Seg, “in some places of Kregen.”

Just then the breeze blew chill, colder than it should be on such a night.

A low rippling movement across the ground beyond the tree took all my attention. Could it be? Why not? I had seen the dead walk when I’d been down the Moder. Kao is one of the many Kregish names for death, and the kaotim, the undead, specters, zombies, call them what you will, these are well known over Kregen.

Were the dead walking?

“May Erthyr the Bow keep us now!” said Seg in a hard, tight voice. He unlimbered his great Lohvian longbow.

“By Morro the Muscle!” said Turko. “It is true!”

A voice at our backs, strong, unperturbed: “Ngrangi is with us, for the Maiden with the Many Smiles floats alone in the sky.” Inch, not a single strand of his brave yellow hair exposed to the fuzzy pink moonlight of the Maiden with the Many Smiles, joined us. He carried sword and shield and was armored.

I took the Krozair longsword off my back. I said to Delia: “You had best—”

And she said, “At your side, fambly.”

So we stood, a little group of comrades, with our kampeons, and watched as the ground rose up before us.

Dead men and women, people just slain in the battle and others long dead, moved toward us. The pink moonlight caught on armor and weapon, glinted fuzzy rose. Skeletons, mummies, men and women apparently full-fleshed and filled with blood, advanced upon us.

“Csitra the Witch of Loh has planned this well! How do we slay men already slain!” The voice was lost in the night.

So we gripped our weapons and arrayed ourselves as the grisly horde bore on.

Abruptly, with a shriek as of sundering metal, the mob of kaotim rushed upon us and we puny mortals were at hand strokes with the crazed hordes of the Undead of Kregen.

Chapter twenty

Undead of Kregen

No nightmares trouble me over that horrid fight with the Undead. The poor creatures were husks only, shells, their spirits already wandering the Ice Floes of Sicce, seeking the sunny uplands beyond. Bundles of bone, swathings of rotten cloth, stained with the dirt of the years, many of them simply rushed in with clawed fingers seeking to rip us to pieces.

These already dead we could deal with. The recently slain posed a tougher problem, for in their ghastly resurrection they snatched up sword or spear, pushed helmet straight, and wearing what armor they had worn in life plunged screeching upon us.

I say we could deal with the dead. At first this did not appear to be the case.

“They are dead!” screamed that same voice at my back. “How can we kill dead men?”

Without looking back, I shouted: “Take that man into custody. Shut his damnfool mouth!”

Then I really shouted, really let my old foretop-hailing voice belt out.

“They are dead therefore half our work is already done! Chop ’em! Cut their legs off! Sunder them into pieces! And, my friends, go with Opaz for this night’s work.”

Seg said: “You’re right, my old dom. But, first — just one...”

A marvel with a bow, Seg Segutorio... He loosed and his aim, unerring, sent the rose-fletched shaft directly into the backbone of a prancing skeleton leading on the grisly mob. Bits of vertebrae sprayed. The skeleton’s top half fell, arms scarecrow-wide, bone bright. But the lower half, the pelvis and the legs, continued to run on toward us.

“If,” said Seg, “it’s like that...” He thrust the longbow away and drew his drexer. “It’s leg-chopping time.”

Milsi was back at the camp, and for the moment Seg had no fears for her. I had fears for Delia. By Zair! I was terrified for her. Yet she stood at my side, lithe and limber, sword poised, and she had possessed herself of a drexer in place of the rapier. She wore no Claw. The enormous shadow over me that was Korero the Shield would have to be spoken to; but he knew, as Turko the Shield had known before him.

“Aye, Dray, aye. Rest easy.”

“To you, then, Korero—”

“Aye.”

More shafts flitted from our ranks into the howling shambles running on; they did little damage. We were poised, braced, as the contents of the local graveyard crashed into us.

By Makki Grodno’s dangling right eyeball and dripping left armpit! Csitra had gone too far with this latest curse. As we fought I could feel not red roaring anger but cold impatient venom.

The superb Krozair brand sliced around in a whirl of roseate steely light, shattered bones, went on and no stain of blood marred that blade. We chopped the skeletons as we might chop firewood.

Do not ask me how skeletons may be wired up so that they run and fight and their lower jaws clack in a ghastly grin against their upper teeth, let alone how they may be animated. Grotesque angular dancers, limbs flinging about in abandon, bony and thin, they tried to bite and claw even as we chopped them down.

The skeletons were bad enough. The corpses dead long enough to begin decomposing were far worse. For all his macabre dancing parody, a skeleton is clean in a way a rotting corpse is not. Far, far worse to glimpse a row of exposed teeth, a jaw, a naked eyeball, a vine-net of veins, than just a bald skull, a long bony arm! Stinking, the corpses poured down on us. They were falling to pieces even as they charged.

Seg slashed a foul thing of rags and bony fingers away and said, “Even Skort the Clawsang wouldn’t give these things the time of day.”

“Your back, Seg!”

He dodged, slashed, and a skull toppled. He and I and Turko and Inch fought there in the front rank. Useless for my guard corps to rage and protest and try to shove up. In this horrendous conflict we all must play our part.

Skeletons, rotting corpses — they were bad. But the worst, by far and away the worst, rushed charging at us with wild war cries. Some of my lads cried out in horror.

Through the din, distinctly, I heard one anguished scream: “It is Vango, my brother, Vango!”

The voice of Nath na Kochwold: “Vango seeks the sunny uplands, Deldar Vangwin! This is not your brother! This is evil from the pits — chop, Deld Vangwin, chop as you value your life!”

So we fought our own dead comrades.

Ghastly, horrible, and pathetic, yes, it was all these things. Also, the fight could have seen us all trooping down to the Ice Floes of Sicce by regiment, all wailing dolorously for the Gray Ones.

Poor Nath na Kochwold had to see his brumbytes fighting dead pikemen. Swords in live hands clashed against shields clutched in dead, and swords in bloodless fists smashed against shields in the grip of the living. Useless to thrust. Useless to try anything except great hewing strokes that swept the dead away into bundles that mewed and tried to scrabble along, drawing legless torsos by bare hands.

And, in all this horror — where were Khe-Hi-Bjanching and Ling-Li-Lwingling?

Others in that great fight shared those fraught doubts, and Delia said: “They will be here soon. They just have to be!”

Fascinating to see how my lads formed their ring about Delia. No skeleton penetrated that devoted circle of bronze and steel. Of course, Delia was mightily put out and kept advancing to take her share, and the ring would move and shift and so encircle her again. I approved. By Zair! If my Delia did not survive — well, the Star Lords could look for another tool, that was for sure.

A churgur from the new regiment, First Emperor’s Life Churgurs, staggered back with a stux embedded in his neck. He fell. Immediately a comrade stepped up to take his place and front the gibbering horrors. I saw the dead man sprawled on the ground. I saw his right hand relax to let the sword fall away, I saw that hand turn inward, lift and fasten on the javelin. The fist ripped the stux free in a gush of blood. The man threw the stux down, picked up his sword, stood up, turned, hurled himself full at his comrades of a moment ago!

A long Saxon-pattern axe swirled. The churgur fell in two pieces, still with blood enough to stain across the trampled ground. Targon the Tapster finished him off by chopping his legs away. Inch’s great axe flashed in that deadly circle as he cleared the zombies from his front, and I noticed the swathing mass of bandages about his hair fallen away so that strands of his yellow braids showed.

Poor Inch! He would have to expiate this taboo after the battle — if he were still here and not suffocating in some Herrelldrin Hell.

Many the macabre scenes enacted that night. My lads were tired from the day’s battle and now they were forced to struggle in another and far more hideous conflict. No. Far better to pass over that ghastly time and record that, on a sudden, all the skeletons and decomposing corpses and bodies of our dead comrades and enemies fell.

They collapsed and the sound of bones clanking down rang like carillons.

“Thank Opaz!”

The Wizard and the Witch of Loh stepped from the small two-place flier. Their faces were strained. They looked grave.

“As quickly as we could, Dray,” Khe-Hi told me. “But the power of the uhu Phunik grows remarkably.”

“Nine Curses,” I said. The piece of cloth in my hand wiped up and down the blade of the Krozair longsword. “Nine. There will be more to come.”

Delia started to say something, changed her mind, went on cleaning her sword.

If I interpolate here that we cleaned our own weapons, this was true most of the time. Now it gave us something to cling onto as we digested the latest information in our struggle with Csitra and Phunik.

Counting the cost of that miserable fight was a melancholy affair. We’d lost good men and women. The dead — the pieces of the dead — were duly buried and appropriate ceremonies held and words spoken. But the memories weighed heavily upon us.

When I made inquiries concerning the man who had spoken so ill at the beginning, calling out that we could not slay men already dead, the escort wheeled up Hikdar Ortyg Voman. I was astonished.

He looked in a terrible state. Sushi Vannerlan had been badly wounded and it was feared for her life. This had unnerved him, clearly. Yet...

“Well, Hikdar. What have you to say?”

“Nothing, majister. I know only that Sushi is near death and I am frantic—”

“Yes. You have my sympathy. But you called out when the fight began. You did not act as I expected.”

Miserable he was, his uniform torn and bloodied, mud over his knees, all his handsome good looks shrunken away.

“I do not recall—”

“You don’t remember?”

“No, majister.”

Delia said: “Khe-Hi?”

“Yes, yes, it would fit.” Khe-Hi turned to me there in the Headquarters tent with the escort holding onto Voman, more to keep him upright than to restrain him. “I was not in Vondium at the time of the first werewolf outbreaks. But—”

I nodded, sick with the revelation. “Hikdar Ortyg Voman turned up late at Marion’s party, after the werewolf struck. And now Csitra spies on us again—”

Hikdar Ortyg Voman said: “Dray Prescot, you are a stubborn man! Is there nothing in all this world or the other world that will move you?”

I said, “You know the answer to that, Csitra.”

“My uhu grows impatient.”

“What other world do you mean?” I did not think she referred to Earth but to the mystic other dimension in which so much of the traffic of these Witches and Wizards of Loh was carried on.

“A world open to me and not to you. But I would have you share much of what I can offer — will you not visit me in the Coup Blag? Phunik can be—”

Instead of blurting out: “Phunik can be hanged!” I said, “You released Wenerl the Lightfoot from his thralldom to you when his usefulness had gone. Will you now release this man?”

Staring into Voman’s eyes and seeing only human eyes regarding me blankly, I wondered for a fleeting moment if he could feel or understand what was going on through his brain. Far away south in Pandahem, in the Coup Blag, this woman, this Witch of Loh, and her malignant brat planned to make over the world in the way they wanted. But so, of course, did I.

Voman stood unseeing, supported by his escort. The others in the tent, comrades all, watched silently. I tried again.

“You know I would think better of you, Csitra, if—”

“Perhaps that is not enough, Dray Prescot!”

“Then you condemn this man to death.”

“Which means nothing to me.”

“Therein lies the barrier.”

What the Star Lords had told me, what Delia and I had discussed, all tended to the same answer. It would not be easy and it would not be pretty, but, by Zair! I could see precious little else to do.

I said: “You are proving an obstacle to my own plans, Csitra. You are an inconvenience. Maybe Phunik will grow into powers greater than yours or his father’s. Maybe he will fall down a great pit and impale himself on spikes. Should I care about that?”

“You would not dare to ask me to choose between you!”

“Not dare, Csitra, care.”

“Visit me. Come to see me. You know what I can offer you in the Coup Blag.”

I knew that all right, by Krun, I knew that!

“Maybe I will visit you. Will you release this man?”

“If I do, do I have your promise?”