22

  Out on the freezing and windy south shore, near dark of the moon:

  Alfea folded her delicate wings to squeeze through a crack at the rear of the sea cave. The beach entrance was blocked by seething dark ice. Worse, the stuff was spreading in lightning-like jags, releasing acidic motes that sickened Honey, Katina and all of mortals, making them shiver and cough. That marauding dragon was gone, but the creature had left a foul plague behind in its wake.

  Squaring her shoulders, Alfea led the way up and out, helping the others over a heap of loose scree and into a narrow, steep-walled ravine. Maybe six feet across, the cleft had been painted with hand-stencils and pictures of mighty leviathans, picked out in ochre and white.

  “This way,” Alfea whispered. She could hear noises, sounds of scratching and shifting, of tentative stumbles, from the direction of town. The wind stank of blood and decay. “Don’t let that black ice touch you. Wait. Something’s happening… I’ll make a light,” added the air-sprite.

  Her cupped, rosy glow joined Katina’s, allowing Lana and Jillian to see, and driving off some of that bitter chill. The mortals didn’t look well, with dark blotches and spots of blood flecking their skin.

  Alfea pretended not to notice, while poking around through her faerie pockets for an energy drink. Just a level one potion, but she pulled the small flask out anyway, dosing everyone there but herself.

  “To keep you going,” she said to the shivering women, and glory, they needed it.

  The ravine took them down to the beach by way of a long, slanting stone ramp. Back on shore, Alfea saw Lady Alyanara, Lords Keldaran and Lerendar, the paladins and another mortal (this one dark-skinned and pregnant). They were gathered around three people who lay on the windswept shore, pallid and motionless.

  Bubbling ice had spread like a stain between the high cliff and crashing grey waves. It covered the deeply-scored landscape and invaded the sea, except where the elves held it back with their magic. Katina gasped, staggering forward, for one of the fallen was Meliara, her elvish half-sister. The others were Vikran and Melly’s mortal husband, young Villem.

  “Mel! Melly!” she cried, lurching past Alfea.

  Keldaran caught the distraught, red-haired nursemaid.

  “Hush, Katie. Calm yourself. Melly and Vill are alive, and Sister Constant is doing her best to keep them that way. Pray, if you will and if you know any gods, but do not distract her.”

  He hadn’t mentioned Vikran, who lay crumpled beside the golden-haired elf and her human life-mate, utterly drained and pierced through with daggers of ice. The old cleric’s hands were stretched out as if in blessing, but his flesh was stone-hard, covered in blotches and small, bloody pits.

  Alfea made the sign against evil. That spreading black ice wasn’t simply a dragon’s weapon. It was some kind of deadly-cold blight, slaying all that it touched.

  Sister Constant murmured and gestured with a glowing holy symbol, calling on Oberyn’s light. Meanwhile, Brother Humble stalked in a circle, warding her and the elves. He was armed with a big, single-spiked club and his own mighty faith, setting wards that were instant death to the creatures of darkness. The massive orc waved Alfea, Lana and Jillian inside of that blessed space, but Honey and Skipper had already rushed through his glimmering barrier.

  Brother Humble bent to scoop up the girl, patting her back with a jingle and clatter of armor. The half-elven child was already burning with fever. Drops of her blood smeared Humble’s chainmail and golden tabard.

  “Vikran?” she pleaded, looking into the orc’s deep-red eyes.

  “Gone, Sweetling," said Humble, quietly. "He perished defending my brother-in-Oberyn and Lady Meliara, who could not fight because of the baby within. Shh… Enough. Vikran stands before the Lord of the Dawn, now. Bravely, child, that he may give good report of your courage,” rumbled the orc.

  Honey tried very hard not to cry, but… what would they do without Vikran? Who would care for Low Town’s worst and least wanted? How could his light be put out, like Mama and Da’s?

  Beside the orc and the sniffling girl, Alfea added her blessing to Sister Constant’s, helping the paladin fight for three lives. She would have done more… there were still energy drinks and sweets in her pockets… but something was moving, high on the cliff.

  Alfea, Keldaran and Lerendar stepped to the edge of Humble’s warding circle, craning their heads to look upward. Alyanara levitated slightly, to see over the taller others. Not just zig-zagging plague ice was up there, but people and animals. All of the unburned dead shuffled numbly out to the precipice and then tumbled right over, falling to crash in a broken-limbed heap, oozing chips of frozen dark blood. A gusty wind brought their stench to the elves and mortals below: death, blood, illness and terror.

  “Drek,” muttered Keldaran. “That monster’s not just undead, it controls and raises them. We’re in for a fight. Horse: to arms, son.”

  “Aye, that. Right here, Dad,” replied Lerendar, summoning armor and weapons in a bright, flaring clash.

  The muscular blond kissed Bea’s forehead, transferring manna and blessings.

  “Protection,” he said to her, holding tight and then pushing the woman deeper into their ward circle. “Stay safe, Bee. I love you.”

  “No you don’t, Renny! Not again! I’m going with you this time!” snapped his wife, dark eyes blazing with fury and love.

  She’d found a few bitter herbs in the town and on shore: storm-wrack, fever mint and castaway’s chew. With a drop of godly ichor mixed in, enough to make a defensive gel that she spread on herself and the fighters. The stuff glowed and sank in, flooding their bloodstreams, filling their mouths with the strong taste of desperate courage and will to survive.

  Ally dumped most of the herbs, roots and flowers she had in her faerie pockets on Bea, nearly smothering the worried mother-to-be.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Make more,” Ally told Beatriz. “We are going to need all you can give us.”

  Lerendar’s wife would have argued, but Alyanara had placed a compulsion onto that innocent-seeming request. Bea would have to stay safely inside, like it or not, for Lerendar’s sake. Then, there was no time for any more talk.

  The dead were not stopped by a hundred-foot drop, or by stoven-in ribs or smashed heads. They rose again anyhow, dull-eyed and awful, compelled to attack by their master’s will. Others rose from the sea, clambering out of Freisborg’s drowned fishing boats to wade through the surf. Pale and bloated, torn by lobsters and fish, they lurched ashore and hurled themselves at the living.

  That mob of corpses closed in on the elves and paladins, surrounding them. Alfea summoned her shining white spear, calling it forth from the pocket she shared with… with…

  “Van!” gasped the air-sprite, as her full memory came roaring back. “Valerian! Dearest, where are you?!”

  Lady Outlander’s spell broke at last, leaving them stuck on the mainland in terrible danger, but no longer wondering why.

  “Drive them back,” ordered Alyanara, rising further into the air on a swirl of bright petals. “I shall strike at the force that empowers them.”

  After that, it was down to fierce, dirty battle, against a foe that kept right on coming, down to the infants and pets and livestock of Freisborg. Eerily silent, they were. Blank, unfeeling, and all but unstoppable.

  Alfea thrust and slashed at those lumbering, clutching townsfolk. She aimed for their eyes or to bash off their broken heads, ducking icy-cold fingers and snapping teeth. Some were armed with the tools that they’d carried in life: hammers and scythes, nets and fileting knives. One small boy had only his ball and a sagging, stuffed toy. Dead goats and a milk cow stampeded aimlessly, eyes rolled back to their whites.

  Alfea gasped, but she could not pity or try to save anyone, not even the frozen young woman still clutching a wee, rigid babe to her breast. That crackling and hissing dark ice spread from the swarming bodies, rocketing outward as if to consume the whole mainland and Father Ocean’s great sea, which gave up its dead in a shambling horde.

  Alyanara shone like a star overhead, crying out words of fierce, empyrean magic. As she chanted her spell, the last fragile sliver of moon crept out of sight, seeming to slink down into the rapidly freezing ocean.

  Lerendar stumbled and gasped as three figures burst out of him, already armed and burning to fight. Alfea saw a shining sea-elven prince, a grinning, coin-flipping rogue and someone who faded from sight like a pale, drifting mist. She had no time to stare, though, because an undead fisherman cast his soggy net at her, tangling Alfea’s spear in the knotted cords.

  He was armed with a hooked wooden pike, which lashed out to tear one of Alfea’s butterfly wings nearly off. Pain and deathly cold flared through the delicate membrane and into her back. Alfea screamed as she wrenched her spear free of that crusted net. First cocking back, she buried her lance in the fisherman's broken chest, piercing his silent heart. Then Skipper raced up, barking and snarling, to leap on the hollow-eyed corpse.

  No longer a friendly, black-and-white mutt, the dog had turned himself into a savage warg with a taste for well-seasoned flesh. Skipper bit off the fisherman’s head and swallowed it whole, then crouched to feed on the twitching remains. Couldn’t devour it all, because Lerendar was down on one knee under a crowd of biting and scratching dead mortals. Keldaran fought hard to reach his son, but he was knee-deep in water, drenched in spilt gore and surrounded by quivering body parts. Dropping his own defense, the elf-lord used magic to carve a path to his son. He wasn’t alone. Howling, the warg-dog leapt in as well, scattering undead bodies in every direction.

  Alyanara interrupted her chant to burst down on top of the mob, laying wildly around her with MacStabbish.

  “Get… off… my…grandson!” she snarled, slashing with blind, clumsy rage, hardly recalling her husband’s fighting lessons. Then, “Good dog! Good boy, Skipper! Bite heads!”

  Brother Humble could not leave the ward-circle without breaking its magic, but he could summon a Bow of Smiting and shoot, grunting prayers and orcish curses with equal fervor.

  “Gash krast min sharv! Forgive me, Lord of the Dawn! I call down Your holy and blessed drekking groft might!”

  He’d dropped Honey, who fished out her glass-and-leather-thong knife, then charged out into the fight after Skipper. The half-elven girl burned with fever. Her skin tore with each sudden movement, leaking droplets of sluggish blood, but she fought like a hero, met hallway by Skipper and a swift, grinning Rogue.

  “Milady,” said the trickster, invoking Chezzik and Luck. “May I claim this dance?”

  He was an elf, and his near presence strengthened the girl, who nodded up at him.

  “Let’s get ‘em!” she cried, turning to fight at the smiling elf’s side.

  And if a silent, invisible ranger cast mist and concealment over her friends, who could have sensed that magic, or the scores of times that she blocked a descending club or a blade? Not Elmaris or Honey. Not Lerendar, either.

  Things might have gone badly, even so. But thank all the gods that Freisborg was not a large town…

  That the ocean finally ran out of drowned sailors…

  That Ally’s chant was completed at last by Prince Andorin, high in the air and strumming a dulcimer. At his final verse, the remaining undead went utterly limp, dropping like puppets with torn-away strings. Silence descended, except for harsh breathing, rolling surf and the wind.

  The elves and paladins looked around, as even the plague-ice retreated (a little). After several hammering heartbeats of nothing but distant lightning and spray, they lowered their weapons. Ally counted heads once again, searching for all of her loved ones and friends, in case the undead might have dragged someone off. All present, though. All still alive, but for Vikran.

  The night was far spent by the time that they saw to their wounded, and burned all the dead. Brother Humble lifted his head to howl at the sky as he placed the cleric onto a separate driftwood pyre. Honey held the torch, standing between Villem and Nadia. Before she plunged that burning brand into Vikran’s pyre, the girl looked up at the sorrowing Paladins.

  “I’m gonna join you,” she whispered, scrubbing her eyes with an upraised shoulder. “Soon as we’re back home in Karellon, and Genna says yes, I’m gonna go t’ the Needle and become a knight of Oberyn.”

  Nobody laughed at her. Instead, Brother Humble nodded, then lifted her up, so Honey could place her torch… where she thought it would hurt the least. Far from the cleric’s gentle, ice-ravaged face.

  “Vikran,” she wept, as firelight shone on her weapons and tear-streaks. “I won’t be forgettin’ you, never. I’m gonna be Sister Vick, and I’ll go back someday ter take care o’ the Constellate House, I promise.”

  As the piled driftwood began to burn, Brother Humble joined Andorin, Villem and Nadia in the Dawn Hymn. He was a knight of Oberyn, not a wild orc of the hills. He would not promise vengeance and blood… aloud. But inside of his fierce, broken heart, Vorbol the orc swore to rain death on the cause of this pain. To bring his curse home to…

  “The dragon,” said Keldaran, ignoring his own slashes and bites to heal Jillian, Lana and Bek. “That monster has raised an undead army, and it is casting this drekt plague- ice. We must find and destroy the creature, before the stuff spreads any further.”

  Ally turned from comforting Melly, whose babe was only a spark inside of her, now, nearly snuffed out by the dragon’s dark magic.

  “I shall summon a gate,” said the lovely demi-goddess, flaring with sudden rose light. “Mother grant that we arrive in time to stop that fiend, before it does any more harm. I sense that the dragon has flown north to attack our loved ones.” Question was, how far north, and where, in all of that vast, empty mainland?

  Alyanara stood up, weary and sick at heart, but very much still in the fight. She, too, honored Vikran, raising a hand to cover his funeral pyre in a tornado of blossoms. Orange flames consumed all, rising to blot out the Seam and the stars. At last, the dead were no more, carried off to whatever awaited them.

  As the embers were fading, wetted by wind-borne spray, Alyanara gathered the others.

  “Come,” she said to them. “Each of you take hold of a mortal. Skipper, good boy. Smaller, please. Manna is scarce where the ice blocks its passage, and my gate must cross space and time, both.”

  She placed a hand on the warg’s skull head, earning a rasping lick and a spiky tail-wag.

  “Go to your lord, Skipper,” urged the she-elf. “Seek, boy. Find Galadin.”

  The big warg-dog’s red eyes burned even brighter. He barked, sounding like plain, foolish Skipper. Alyanara locked onto the dog’s sense for her lord, then blended it into her spell. Light flared, and all at once there was nobody left on the icy-cold beach but the smoldering dead.