Interlude II: The Conductor of Nightmares

  The currents shifted. The cold, dark ocean in which he drifted pulsed with a new rhythm. A tide was gathering, a vast, hungry wave, and he was both its source and its instrument.

  Sight, borrowed and fractured, filtered through his suspended consciousness. He saw through the eyes of the Bone-Singers, shamans whose wills were now pliant things. He saw through the vacant, glowing sockets of the dead, their decaying forms moving amidst the goblin ranks.

  An army. A tide of chittering bodies, weapons glinting dully in the perpetual twilight that accompanied their march. Thousands upon thousands, a living carpet of malice. And amongst them, the heavy, earth-shaking tread of the Drinkers-of-Fear, their scaled hides like mobile fortresses, their tree-trunk maces lusting to shatter foes. Eyes devoid of true sentience surveyed the blighted landscape they traversed.

  Their eagerness for slaughter was a raw, bestial energy that resonated with the darker whispers within his own fractured mind. It was intoxicating. He was commanding with … a resonance. A deep thrum pulsed from the core of his being, aligning the disparate wills of the horde in a symphony of annihilation.

  His mind, or what remained of it, journeyed with them, disembodied, sweeping over the blighted land. Over the K’thrall marshes, fouled and trampled, the intricate reed-dwellings smashed, the waters stained. Over lifeless tundra, where even the hardy lichen recoil from the passage of their horde. A straight brutal path carved through any obstacle, towards… a destination.

  A fortress of stone. Woodhall.

  And within that fortress… disturbances. Dissonant notes in the grand, silent symphony he was meant to orchestre.

  One was an echo of the Earth’s First Song, a deep, resonant power that should have been dormant, now… stirred.

  One, an iron lament, a song of forgotten thresholds, held by a fading ember of old defiance. The other… ah, the other was a curious, intricate melody of chained potential, a power vast and sleeping, carried by one who was… an anomaly. A giant’s seed, somehow alive in a world that had forgotten them.

  The Entity felt them. And it craved their silence, their absorption.

  He could feel the ether around the fortress stretched taut, vibrating with fear and anticipation.

  Something… else. A presence. Amused? Detached? Ancient, certainly, powerful, but inscrutable. A stray thread in the tapestry, watching, perhaps even… toying. Playing like a cat with a string.

  The cold deepened within him. All would be drawn into unity. His own fading will, a forgotten melody, muffled against the overwhelming, crushing chord of Solitude. The tide was too strong. The nightmare was too vast. And he, the Bound Sleeper, was its unwilling conductor.

  * * *

  The first horn blast rang. It curdled the air with a drawn-out moan echoing from the northern hills to the stones of Woodhall. It was answered by another, then a third, a chorus of doom heralding the arrival of the invading force.

  Deep in the dungeons, Artholan swore under his breath, a most un-mage-like expletive. "Confound it all! No discernible progress! The resonant pathways are stubbornly inert! The Keepers’ matrix is… shielded. Or simply unresponsive to standard methodologies. All my carefully developed theorems… useless!" He glared at the silent stone Keepers as if he blamed them personally for his failure.

  "The time for scholarly contemplation is over, it seems," the Elf said languidly, despite the urging of ominous horns. "Our place is now on the walls." They exchanged a look with Marta and Sabine. "Stay here. Stay safe. If the Keepers are to awaken, it will be in their own time, in response to a need, not at the bidding of impatient sorcery." With that, Artholan and Ruthiel reluctantly ascended from the gloom of the dungeons, leaving the two women alone with the six colossal, silent guardians.

  On the battlements, the atmosphere was taut as a drawn bowstring. Ronigren stood beside Shield-Captain Eghel with his eyes fixed on the northern horizon. Gregan, resting his axe on his shoulder, spat on the stone walkway and muttered a grim jest about the quality of goblin horn-playing. Snik, now positioned where he could observe and offer tactical advice, trembled visibly, his golden eyes wide with a familiar terror.

  Slowly, the enemy came into full view.

  It was a tide, a monstrous, undulating sea. Goblins formed the bulk of it, their cruel banners held aloft, their guttural war cries a rising, terrifying wave. Interspersed amongst them were the Stone-Skin Drinkers-of-Fear, their scaled hides and massive maces a promise of brutal, crushing power. Goblin shamans, the Bone-Singers Snik had named, moved within the ranks, their chants adding a discordant, magical thrum to the din.

  But it was another element of the horde that sent a fresh wave of sickness and horror through the Argrenian defenders.

  Amongst the goblins and giants, shambling with an unnatural, jerky gait, were… humans. Or what had once been humans. Their flesh was grey and decaying, their eyes hollow sockets burning with a sickly off-white light. They wore the tattered remnants of peasant clothing, or even the corroded, mismatched armor of long-dead soldiers. The dead-walkers. Undead.

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  A horrified murmur ran along the battlements. "By the gods… they raise our own dead against us!" a young soldier near Ronigren hissed, his face paling.

  While the main horde advanced with ponderous inevitability, smaller, swifter groups of goblins began to probe the outskirts of Woodhall – the small cluster of homes, workshops, and stables that lay outside the main fortress walls.

  The inner bailey had become a temporary refuge for the terrified townsfolk of Woodhall’s outer settlement and the latest wave of refugees who had staggered in from places like Crickleleaf. Masillius directed people to sheltered areas, distributed what meager rations were available, and offered gruff words of reassurance that he likely didn't feel himself. Myanaa, her willow circlet a small spot of green amidst the fear, tended to the wounded and ill amongst the new arrivals.

  From the walls, Ronigren watched as small bands of Woodhall’s most experienced rangers and light infantry, under Eghel’s orders, engaged in daring ambushes on the advancing goblin skirmishers in the outer town. They used narrow alleys and familiar buildings to their advantage, harassing the enemy’s flanks, loosing arrows from hidden positions, then melting back towards the safety of the main gates before they could be overwhelmed. It was a brave, desperate delaying tactic, designed to bloody the enemy’s nose and buy a few more precious moments for the fortress to brace itself.

  The first true clashes echoed up to the battlements – the shriek of goblin arrows, the defiant war cries of Argrenian soldiers, the sickening thud of mace on shield, the screams of the dying.

  The tide of nightmares lapped at the shores of Woodhall. The air tasted of blood and dark sorcery. Ronigren gripped the hilt of his sword and fixed his gaze on the monstrous army rolling towards them, time stretching painfully long his every breath.

  "The walls are our greatest strength," Shield-Captain Eghel’s voice rumbled amidst the rising din of the approaching horde. "But they are also our greatest liability if breached. Sir Ronigren, you will command the breach reserve." He gestured at them: a company of fifty hardened spearmen, ten of the Iron Lance’s dismounted troopers, as well as the steadfast Gregan, all held in readiness in the main bailey. "Watch the walls. Watch the gates. If any section falters, you are the plug in the dam. You hold the line, whatever the cost."

  Ronigren nodded. He could see the anxiety on the battlements as some of the greener archers, unnerved by the sheer scale of the approaching enemy, loosed arrows prematurely, their shafts falling harmlessly short. He muttered a curse under his breath.

  "Hold your fire!" Eghel’s voice boomed across the fortress. "Hold until they are in the killing ground! Make every shot count!" The discipline of the veteran Iron Lance archers held. The younger soldiers, shamed into obedience, lowered their bows.

  Even as the main horde advanced, reports streamed in from runners. Goblin skirmishers were fanning out, trying to encircle them, to cut off the southern road to Glencross and seize the high ground of the Whisperwind Hills. Eghel countered, dispatching his own small, swift units of scouts and light infantry to contest every vantage point, to harass the enemy’s supply lines. The countryside for leagues around was becoming a deadly chessboard of skirmishes and ambushes.

  "I'm no use on a wall, Sir Ronigren," Finn said. "My place is out there. I can see their dispositions, sabotage their siege engines before they reach the gates, pick off their shamans."

  Ronigren grimaced. "It's too dangerous, Finn. A man alone…"

  "A man alone is a ghost they won't see coming," Finn countered, a rare, thin smile touching his lips. He slipped on the snowfox bracers Falazar had gifted him. "Don't worry, Sir Knight. I’m harder to catch than smoke." Before Ronigren could argue further, Finn had scaled a section of the wall away from the main gate, lowered himself on a rope, and vanished into the twilight landscape.

  * * *

  The world was a storm of scents and sounds. The damp earth, the sharp tang of pine, the foul, musky odor of the goblin horde, and beneath it all, the cloying stench of death and unhallowed magic.

  The bracers felt… strange. Good strange. The ground seemed softer under his feet, his own footsteps impossibly silent. Light as a snowfox, Falazar had said. The old man wasn’t wrong.

  He moved through the brush and shadow at the edge of the Whisperwind Hills, a ghost in the gloaming. Below him the main goblin army sprawled in a crawling mass. But his target was a smaller group, a procession hauling one of the dreaded rams towards the fortress. He had a clear visual now – twenty goblins, straining at the ropes, chanting in a rhythmic grunt of effort. And walking beside the ram, a Bone-Singer, one of the shamans, its bone staff pulsing with a sickly light.

  That’s the one. Take out the shepherd, and the sheep scatter.

  He circled, silent, downwind. The wind carried their stench, masking his own. He found a rocky outcrop that offered a clear line of sight. He nocked an arrow, one of his own carefully crafted bodkin points, designed to punch through leather and bone. He drew the string, the bow creaking softly. He slowed his breathing, becoming one with the stone, the shadow, the waiting stillness.

  The shaman paused, raising its staff to gesture at the goblins hauling the ram, barking a command. The perfect moment. The world narrowed to the space between his eye, the arrow, and the shaman’s exposed, scrawny neck.

  He was about to release when a flicker of movement to his left caught his eye. A sudden intrusion into his focused world.

  Sauntering out from behind a gorse bush, as if on an evening stroll, was Monty. The black cat. He moved with an unhurried insolent grace, at ease amidst the clamor of the approaching battle. He paused, sat down, and began to groom a front paw, his yellow eyes blinking slowly as they met Finn’s astonished gaze. The cat seemed to be looking through him with an inscrutable amusement.

  His concentration shattered. What in all the hells was this housecat doing here? His breath hitched, a fraction of a second’s hesitation. It was enough. The shaman, perhaps sensing the shift in the wind or a flicker of light, turned its head. Finn’s arrow, released a moment too late, flew true, but instead of the neck, it struck the shaman’s bony shoulder pauldron, skittering off with a sharp crack.

  The shaman shrieked, a sound of pain and fury, its head snapping around, its glowing eyes trying to pinpoint the source of the attack. Goblins screeched, dropping the ram’s ropes and raising their crude shields, turning his perfect ambush into a chaotic hornet’s nest.

  Cursing under his breath, Finn melted back into the shadows, his chance lost. The bracers made his retreat swift and silent, but his mind reeled. He glanced back. The cat, Monty, was gone, as if he had never been there. Only the enraged shrieks of the goblins and their wounded shaman remained.

  A ghost they won’t see coming, he had boasted. But it seemed even ghosts had to contend with the whims of a sauntering black cat.