The Ghost King (23 page)

With a glance to the east, toward Carradoon, and a quick prayer for her children, Danica went hunting.

* * * * *

The blood on Ginance’s face told Cadderly that his concern that some beasts hid within Spirit Soaring had been prudent.

“The catacombs crawl with the creatures,” the woman explained. “We’re clearing them room by room, crypt by crypt.”

“Methodically,” Cadderly observed.

Ginance nodded. “We leave no openings behind us. We will not be flanked.”

Cadderly was glad to hear the confirmation, the reminder that the priests who had come to the call of Spirit Soaring over the last years were intelligent
and studious. They were disciples of Deneir and of Gond, after all, two gods who demanded intelligence and reason as the cornerstones of faith.

Ginance held up her light tube, a combination of magic and mechanics using an unending spell of light and a tube of coated material to create a perpetual bulls-eye lantern. Every priest at Spirit Soaring had one, and with implements such as those, they could chase the darkness out of the deepest recesses.

“Leave nothing behind you,” Cadderly said, and with a nod, Ginance took her leave.

Cadderly paced his small room, angry at his own inactivity, at the responsibilities that held him there. He should be with Danica, he told himself. But he shook that notion aside, knowing well that his wife could travel more swiftly, more stealthily, and more safely by herself. Then he thought he should be clearing the library with Ginance.

“No,” he decided.

His place wasn’t in the catacombs, but neither was it in his private quarters. He needed time to recuperate and mentally reset both his determination and his sense of calm before going back into the realm of the spiritual in his search to find Deneir.

No, not to find him, he realized, for he knew where his god had gone. Into the
Metatext
.

Perhaps for all time.

It fell on Cadderly to sort it out, and in doing so, to try to unravel the strange alterations of the divine spells that had come to him unbidden. But not just then.

Cadderly strapped on his weapon belt and refilled his dart bandolier before looping it over his shoulder and across his chest. He considered his spindle-disks, a pair of hard, fist-sized semicircular plates bound by a small rod, around which were wrapped the finest of elven cords. Cadderly could send the disks spinning to the end of their three-foot length and back again at great speed, and could alter the angle easily to strike like a snake at any foe. He wasn’t certain how much effect the weapon might have on the malleable flesh of the strange invaders, but he put the weapons in his belt pouch anyway.

He started toward the door, passing the wall mirror as he went, and there he paused and considered himself and his purpose, and the most important duty before him, that of leadership.

He looked fine in his white shirt and brown breeches, but he decided those weren’t enough, especially since he looked very much like a young man, as young as his own children. With a smile, the not-so-young priest went to his wardrobe and took out his layered light blue traveling cloak and looped it over his shoulders. Then came his hat, also light blue, wide-brimmed and with a red band bearing the candle-over-eye emblem of Deneir set in gold on the front. A smooth walking stick, its top carved into the likeness of a ram’s head, completed the look, and Cadderly took a moment to pause before the mirror again, and to reflect.

He looked so much like the young man who had first discovered the truth of his faith.

What a journey it had been! What adventure! In constructing Spirit Soaring, Cadderly had been forced into a moment of ultimate sacrifice. The creation magic had aged him, swiftly, continually, and greatly, to the point where all around him, even his beloved Danica, had thought he would surely perish for the effort. At the completion of the magnificent structure, Cadderly was prepared to die, and seemed about to. But that had been no more than a trial by Deneir, and the same magic that had wearied him then reinvigorated him after, reversing his aging to the strange point where he appeared and felt like a man of twenty once again, full of the strength and energy of youth, but with the wisdom of a weathered veteran more than twice his apparent age.

And he was being called again to the struggle, but Cadderly feared the implications were greater to the wider world even than the advent of the chaos curse.

He looked at himself in the mirror carefully, at the Chosen of Deneir, ready for battle and ready to reason his way through chaos.

In Spirit Soaring, Cadderly gained confidence. His god would not desert him, and he was surrounded by loyal friends and mighty allies.

Danica would find their children.

Spirit Soaring would prevail and they would lead the way to whatever might come when the time of magical turbulence sorted out. He had to believe that.

And he had to make sure that everyone around him knew that he believed it.

Cadderly went down to the main audience hall of the first floor and left the large double doors open wide, awaiting the return of the scouts.

He didn’t have to wait for long. As Cadderly entered the hall under the arch from the stairwell, the first group of returning scouts stumbled into Spirit Soaring’s front doors—half the group, at least. Four members had been left dead on the field.

Cadderly had barely taken his seat when a pair of his Deneirrath priests entered, flanking a young and burly visiting priest—surrounding and supporting him, with one trying to bandage the man’s ripped and burned shield arm.

“They were everywhere,” the scout explained to Cadderly. “We were attacked less than half a league from here. A wizard tried a fireball, but it blew up short and smoked my arm. A priest tried to heal me on the field, but his spell caused an injury instead—to himself. His whole chest burst open, and … bah, we can’t depend on any magic now!”

Cadderly nodded grimly through the recounting. “I saw the fight from my balcony, I believe. To the east …?”

“North,” the priest scout corrected. “North and west.”

Those words stung Cadderly, for the fireball he had witnessed was opposite that direction. The priest’s claim that “they were everywhere” reverberated in Cadderly’s thoughts, and he tried hard to tell himself that his children were safe in Carradoon.

“Without reliable magic, our struggle will be more difficult,” Cadderly said.

“Worse than you think,” said one of the Spirit Soaring escorts, and he looked to the scout to elaborate.

“Four of our nine were slain,” the man said. “But they didn’t stay dead.”

“Resurrection?” Cadderly asked.

“Undead,” the man explained. “They got back up and started fighting again—this time against the rest of us.”

“There was a priest or a wizard among the monsters’ ranks?”

The man shrugged. “They fell, they died, they got back up.”

Cadderly started to respond but bit it short, his eyes going wide. In the fight at Spirit Soaring the night before, at least fifteen men and women had been killed, and had been laid in a side room on the first level of the catacombs.

Cadderly leaped from his chair, alarm evident on his face.

“What is it?” the priest scout asked.

“Come along, all three,” he said, scrambling toward the back of the room. He veered to a side door to corridors that would allow him to navigate the maze of the great library more quickly.

* * * * *

Danica picked her way carefully but quickly along the trail, staying just to the side of the swath of devastation. It ran anywhere from five to ten long strides across, with broken trees and torn turf along its center, as if some great creature had ambled through. She saw only patches of deadness along the edges—not complete decay as she found in the middle of the trail, but spotty areas where sections of trees seemingly had simply died—along both sides.

The monk was loath to walk across that swath, or even enter the area of deepest decay, but when she saw a print on an open patch of ground, she knew that she had to learn more. She held her breath as she approached, for she recognized it as a footprint indeed, a giant footprint, four-toed and with great claws, the impression of a dragon’s foot.

Danica knelt low and inspected the area, taking particular interest in the grass. Not all of it was dead on the trail, but the nearer to the footprints, the more profound the devastation. She stood up and looked around at the standing trees along the sides, and envisioned a dragon walking through, crushing down any trees or shrubs in its path, occasionally flexing its wings, perhaps, which would have put them in contact with the bordering trees.

She focused on the dead patches of those trees, so stark in contrast with the vibrancy of the forest itself. Had the mere touch of the beast’s wings killed them?

She looked again at the footprint, and at the profound absence of life in the vegetation immediately surrounding it.

A dragon, but a dragon that killed so profoundly with a mere touch?

Danica swallowed hard, realizing that the hunched, fleshy crawlers might be the least of their problems.

T
hey’re less likely to take comfort in his dwarf heritage if they think him an idiot,” Hanaleisa explained to Temberle, who was more than a little upset at the whispers he was hearing among the ranks of the Carradden refugees.

Temberle had insisted that Pikel, the only dwarf in the group and the only one who seemed able to conjure magical light in the otherwise lightless tunnels, would lead them through the dark. Though a few had expressed incredulity at the notion of following the inarticulate, green-bearded dwarf, none had openly disagreed. How could they, after all, when Pikel had undeniably been the hero of the last fight, freezing the water and allowing a retreat from certain disaster?

But that was yesterday, and the march of the last few hours had been a series of starts and stops, of backtracking and the growing certainty that they were lost. They had encountered no walking dead, at least, but that seemed cold comfort in those dank and dirty caves, crawling through tunnels and openings that had even the children on all fours, and with crawly bugs scurrying all around them.

“They’re scared,” Temberle whispered back. “They’d be complaining no matter who took the lead.”

“Because we’re lost.” As she spoke, Hanaleisa nodded her chin at Pikel, who stood up front, lighted shillelagh tucked under his stumped arm while
he scratched at his thick green beard with his good hand. The strange-looking dwarf stared at a trio of tunnels branching out before him, obviously without a clue.

“How could we
not
be lost?” Temberle asked. “Has anyone been through here, ever?”

Hanaleisa conceded that point with a shrug, but pulled her brother along as she moved to join the dwarf and Rorick, who stood by Pikel’s side, leaning on a staff someone had given him to aid his movement with his torn ankle.

“Do you know where we are, Uncle Pikel?” Hanaleisa asked as she approached.

The dwarf looked at her and shrugged.

“Do you know where Carradoon is? Which direction?”

Without even thinking about it, obviously sure of his answer, Pikel pointed back the way they had come, and to the right, what Hanaleisa took to be southeast.

“He’s trying to get us higher into the mountains before finding a way out of the tunnels,” Rorick explained.

“No,” Temberle was quick to reply, and both Rorick and Pikel looked at him curiously.

“Eh?” said the dwarf.

“We have to get out of the tunnels,” Temberle explained. “Now.”

“Uh-uh,” Pikel disagreed, and he grabbed up his cudgel and held both of his arms out before him, mimicking a zombie to accentuate his point.

“Certainly we’re far enough from Carradoon to escape that madness,” said Temberle.

“Uh-uh.”

“We’re not that far,” Rorick explained. “The tunnels are winding back and forth. If we came out on a high bluff, Carradoon would still be in sight.”

“I do not disagree,” said Temberle.

“But we have to get out of the tunnels as soon as possible,” Hanaleisa added. “Dragging a gravely wounded man through these narrow and dirty spaces is sure to be the end of him.”

“And going above ground is likely to be the end of all of us,” Rorick shot back.

Hanaleisa and Temberle exchanged knowing looks. Watching the dead
rise and come against them had profoundly unnerved Rorick, and certainly, the older twins shared that disgust and terror.

Hanaleisa walked over and draped her arm across Pikel’s shoulders. “Get us in sight of the open air, at least,” she whispered to him. “These close quarters and the unending darkness is playing on the nerves of all.”

Pikel reiterated his zombie posture.

“I know, I know,” Hanaleisa said. “I don’t want to go out and face those things again, either. But we’re not dwarves, Uncle Pikel. We can’t stay down here forever.”

Pikel leaned on his cudgel and gave a great, heaving sigh. He tucked the club under his stump and stuck a finger in his mouth, slurping about for a moment before pulling it forth with a hollow popping sound. He closed his eyes and began to chant as he held the wet finger up before him, magically sensitizing himself to the current of air.