The Walkers from the Crypt (2 page)

“Is this a mortal wound?” For once, Arcil actually sounded worried.

“It will be.” Elyana answered.

Stelan frowned. “There’s that little village just the other side of the border.”

She shook her head. “If we lead the Galtans there, they’ll level the place.”

“They have that old healer,” Stelan reminded her.

She had not forgotten, for the woman had once saved a very badly wounded Stelan from a deep spear thrust.

“She’s the only one I know of anywhere nearby,” Stelan finished.

“We can hold off the Galtans if they come,” Arcil said confidently.

“I’m not sure we can, Arcil.” Stelan cast a glance back to Vallyn and Mirelle. The girl looked back at them, clearly more concerned now than she had been during the attack, for the young man was shivering even under the cloak she had cast over him.

Arcil’s brows furrowed. “Surely they can’t be this desperate for the granddaughter of, of what—some minor noble? Why so much effort?”

The Galtans were a little mad in any case, and likely to track down any who escaped their warped sense of justice with extreme prejudice, but Elyana didn’t think that was why they were out in such force.

It was as if Stelan read her thoughts. “They’re after us, now. Your lightning blast cooked at least one Gray Gardener there near the gate, and, Abadar forgive me, I lost track of how many guardsmen I felled on the gallop out.”

Security around the bastille had been tighter than Elyana’s initial reconnaissance had led them to believe.

“Stelan’s right,” she said, and saw Arcil’s expression sour at that. “It’s revenge. Prestige. They wish to make an example of us.”

“Supposing that you are correct,” the wizard said, “what are we to do?”

Stelan frowned thoughtfully.

“I have a thought.” Elyana pointed southeast to the dark outline of the woods that encroached upon the plain only a few miles out. “You can ride with Vallyn for the border. One horse. I’ll take the rest of us south, into the Verduran Forest, and draw the Galtans after. We can lose them there.”

“Absolutely not,” Stelan told her. In answer to her probing look, he continued. “We were asked to free the girl. I cannot condone a detour into the forest when she is so very close to freedom. Our first duty is to her.”

“What about Vallyn?” Elyana asked.

Stelan’s frown deepened in consideration.

“You’re thinking we have to lose one or the other, but my plan can save them both.”

“It is a decent suggestion,” Stelan admitted, “but you are lighter, and swifter. You should take Vallyn.”

Arcil laughed shortly. “Elyana’s three times the woodsman you are. Woodswoman. What have you. Her plan makes better sense than yours, and you know it. She’ll run rings around a troupe of cityborn Galtans and lead us to safety after they’re hopelessly lost.”

“And what of you, and the girl?”

“We’ll be fine,” Elyana said. “We’ll ride out with four horses with tracks so obvious they can’t be missed.”

“All the better, so they don’t use magic to track us,” Arcil said.

Stelan did not waste much longer making his decision. He stepped over as if to explain the matter to Vallyn, but the young man was already sleeping.

“What’s going to happen?” Mirelle asked, looking back and forth between them.

Elyana spoke up. “We’re going to give the Galtans an obvious track to pursue us, while Stelan’s going to take Vallyn to a healer on our swiftest mount.”

“Don’t worry,” Arcil said. He smiled in an awkward semblance of comfort, and ended up looking sly instead. “Elyana will lose them in the forest, and we’ll ride safely away.”

Elyana was pleased to note the girl’s courage. Mirelle did not voice her worries, she merely nodded. “Will Vallyn be all right?”

“I will see to it,” Stelan said.

He cast off his armor and extra gear while Elyana helped Mirelle strip Vallyn of all equipment but his lute. Stelan then climbed into the saddle and beckoned for Elyana and Arcil to hand up the bard, which they did.

The young man mumbled feebly at them before settling against Stelan’s chest. The knight sat grim and statue-straight in the saddle. “May Abadar protect you,” he said. He then locked eyes with Elyana. Stelan had never been comfortable with public displays of affection between them more prominent than handholding, and his long look was warning and farewell and an expression of deepest love all in one. After a moment he kicked his stallion into a start downslope, moving swiftly to a gallop. He passed the screen of flame and then darted southwest.

Elyana did her best to rub out the tracks, though she grew increasingly concerned about the Galtans. The grass was not dry enough beyond the rise to maintain the blaze, and without any real wind, the fire was dying. When Arcil, watching from the height of the hill, announced that he saw riders, she knew it was past time to leave. The wizard had notoriously bad eyesight.

She leapt into the saddle of her palomino gelding and urged the others to hurry. “Run them hard the whole of the way,” she instructed. “And spread out. We want to show them as many clear tracks as possible.”

“Have no fear,” Arcil told her. Mirelle only dipped her head in acknowledgment. Elyana watched them ride off toward the dark bulk of the woods, leading Vallyn’s riderless horse. She followed, halting only a hundred feet out to look back from a small rise. Already the hill where they’d made their stand seemed smaller. Beyond the long trail of dead hounds, feathered with arrow shafts, was a clump of blackened bodies. As unsettling as that was, she was even less pleased by the count of figures on the horizon. They rode at a trot, a swath of them numbering four dozen or more, the dust cloud kicked up by their travel stained red by the lowering sun. She hoped she had not oversold her prowess.

She clicked her tongue, and her horse shot down the slope and after the others, toward whatever the forest might bring.

“I don’t care for it at all.” Arcil had swung down from his horse to contemplate some glyphs carved into a stone pylon thrust into the ground beside an oak tree. It was tilted a few degrees off vertical, and pitted with age. Overhead, the leafy canopy was so thick it seemed twilight had already fallen.

Elyana was eager to keep moving; she meant to lose the Galtans only after she’d led them deeper into the woods, but she hadn’t reckoned on them pressing so close. Perhaps the sight of their quarry fleeing before them on the plain had excited them, for they were now crashing through the brush a few bowshots behind with almost reckless intensity. Yet her voice did not betray her concern. “What do they say?”

“This is old, and marks a boundary. A warding, perhaps?” Arcil brushed at some moss with two fingers to better view one of the glyphs.

“A warding for what?” Mirelle asked. She glanced over her shoulder, apparently more focused on the noises of their pursers. Her horse shifted uneasily beneath her, stirring the leaves with its hooves.

“These are more initials than words,” Arcil said hesitantly. “I’m not certain I can correctly infer the meaning.”

He sounded as if he knew something and did not wish to say it. “Speak, Arcil. We’ve no time to waste.”

He glanced up at her and then brushed fingers over the three uppermost glyphs. “I think this means ‘the walkers.’” He stood, frowning, and brushed leaves and dirt from his pants. He passed close to Elyana, speaking softly as he glanced up. “Walkers from the crypt.”

“What was that?” Mirelle asked, straining forward, her face screwed up with worry.

“We’re in this together,” Elyana said to Arcil. “You might as well tell her what you’re thinking.”

Arcil climbed back into his saddle, sighing a little. “I think we’re heading toward an old burial ground. We’re being warned away. It’s likely some local superstition.”

“Looks like we’ll find out.” Elyana started forward. She planned to keep moving south, into the woods. Come nightfall, she’d use her better vision and skills to cut west from the forest. She doubted even the best-trained Galtan woodsmen could keep up with them in darkness. More troubling was what a Galtan necromancer could do with a whole graveyard beneath his feet. Hopefully his selection of spells would be as limited as Arcil’s after a full day of work. Surely it had been no easy feat to send so many hounds against them, even if he were a caster of great power.

She guided her charges on, ignoring the occasional grunt or low oath from behind her. The humans didn’t always notice the branches she ducked.

Occasional gaps in the forest canopy allowed wide shafts of evening light to stream in, but far from reassuring, the muted illumination served only to emphasize the greater darkness around them. There was a silence here. The bird calls had diminished.

“I don’t like this place,” Mirelle announced quietly.

“Do not worry, my dear,” Arcil told her. “Do not worry.”

He sounded less soothing than patronizing.

They continued a gradual decent, and then, suddenly, arrived at what Elyana first took as the forest’s edge, though she knew intellectually that the Verduran Forest stretched south for hundreds of miles. Slipping from her horse, she advanced to find instead that they had arrived at the edge of a small, crescent-shaped valley mysteriously bereft of trees. Within it were scattered the bones of a small city. Long-shattered stone walls stood out from the gnarled bushes. Paving stones showed gray here and there beneath the undergrowth and detritus. A few buildings were intact, notably a tower near the center, but most were fallen in, and all of the roofs had collapsed long ago.

The abandoned city felt even more desolate than the surrounding woods, and she thought first to skirt it, then reasoned that she could use the place to better confuse their pursuit. She even briefly considered wearing away their numbers from the defensible positions at hand.

They wound deep into the ruins, Elyana leading the way, and the silence here was so deep the sounds of the Galtan mob were quickly lost to her behind crumbling walls marred by thick vines . The sun sank lower, and twilight came on at last. Elyana had been raised by humans and was well acquainted with their instinctive fear of the dark. Still, she was surprised to hear the soft but clear concern in Arcil’s voice.

“Elyana.”

She looked back at him, saw him paused at a turn down a winding, cobbled road angling for the tower. Mirelle had paused beside him.

“What is it?” she called back.

“Something… someone… waved for me to follow.”

There was no time for hesitation. Not hearing the Galtans made her more concerned about their position. If they reached the valley before her team cleared it…

Yet it was unlike Arcil to sound so indecisive. Or troubled. “A Galtan?” she asked.

“Arcil may not be as suave as he thinks he is, but he’s a good man to have in a fight.”

“I think it may have been a ghost,” Arcil admitted.

“You’re sure you saw it?” Elyana asked.

“I am not entirely sure, no,” he said, sounding a little defensive. “I saw something from the corner of my eye, and when I turned to look directly, it was gone.”

Elyana frowned. Arcil was not especially prone to flights of fancy, but a more urgent threat loomed. “Let’s press on,” Elyana said. Reluctantly, she noted a new chill in the air and their mounts’ ears swiveling nervously to catch no sounds but their own.

As they passed beneath the dark silhouette of the tower, Elyana herself glimpsed a figure standing in the gap between two craggy walls. It had the semblance a man, garbed in a white robe and motioning them onward, but before she could properly focus, it vanished.

At that same moment, from somewhere far behind came a masculine scream and a cacophony of shouting and clashing arms. The Galtans?

“What’s happening?” Mirelle gasped.

Elyana pulled her horse around, but before she could locate a vantage point to investigate the distant struggle, a shadowy figure lurched up from the darkness on their right. The horses shied, laying back their ears, and Mirelle stifled a scream.

It lacked a head. Behind it, striding out from the yawning maw of a ruined building, were a half-dozen helmed figures in broken armor. There limbs were nothing but bone.

Elyana cursed. “Time to go!” Her horse was eager to race ahead, and Mirelle and Arcil followed. They quickly outdistanced the dead, but as Elyana continued down the street, more dark figures shambled out of the darkness.

“This does not seem to be Galtan necromancy,” Arcil shouted up to her.

He was right. Although she supposed that some Galtan soldier might have shouted because he was frightened by the horrific power wielded by one of their mages, the sounds of battle had been unmistakable. The Galtans were fighting these corpses. More likely this was what the markers had been set to warn visitors away from.

“We ride, fast as we dare,” she said. “Out of this valley. Follow me.”

She darted down a winding side street, urging her horse to leap over something she took for rubbish in the middle of the street until it rose up, waving a notched sword. She pulled back instead and her animal reared, striking the thing with its front hooves. The dead warrior was flung backward, shedding bones as it flew through the air. It struck the street with a muffled clatter and did not rise.

Other shapes were slipping from the ruins. Some strode confidently, bearing weapons. Other shambled. A few were completely intact, but most were missing limbs, or even heads. And all advanced toward them.

She came to a halt and the others drew up near her. “I’ve few grand spells left, Elyana,” Arcil said soberly.

“Then we shall cut a swathe.” She drew her blade, a comforting weight in her hand.

“We cannot hope to destroy enough of them,” Arcil said, gesturing around at the gloom alive with shambling movements. “What about the ghost?”

Elyana considered the overwhelming number of foes. “What about the ghost?”

“Suppose it meant to guide us to safety? It was the only one of these that did not attack.”

True enough, but that didn’t mean it intended no harm. However, there had been a tower nearby, which at least had the benefit of being a more defensible point. It had appeared intact, and was much closer than the crumbling walls that marked the city’s edge. “Ride for the tower,” she commanded. Her horse reared again as she turned it.