A Clash of Shadows (24 page)

The demon corpses who had been coming at her now got into a fight with the rising revenants. The fury and power of the demons met the durability of the dead and Katja couldn’t immediately tell which counted for more.

More corpses were rising around them and Arvar was getting to his feet. Katja stepped up to him and slashed him in the right leg. The man gave a cry and the leg buckled. A corpse of a long-bearded man who had been heading at her got a grip on her right arm before she could react.

Katja pulled against it and moved the sword to her right hand before thinking about what she was doing. The maimed grip was weak and hideously painful, but she managed to slash the man across the hamstring and fell him.

Her weariness and pain enabled him to drag her down with him as he went down, but she managed to roll away from him before he got her again.

She saw revenants wherever she looked. They were surrounded. Arvar knew it as well as she and tried desperately to rise on his left leg up against a wall. Their eyes met a moment.

“They have more right to punish you than I,” she said and then attacked the revenants. The arm reaching for her from the right was no match for the sword and the one on the left didn’t get a good grip before she made it out of the circle.

Arvar had no memorable rebuttal. He just screamed as the revenants closed in on him.

Some of them chased after Katja. She heard their footsteps as she ran on exhausted legs to the village outskirts. The aura of the walking dead was not as potent and noticeable as of those demons she had encountered, but this close she easily sensed unnatural power within them.

She finally turned on her heel as she was almost to the treeline, a few metres from the road north. Four revenants were coming at her. Behind them she saw that the flames of the two houses had spread to at least two more and illuminated the battle.

The demons hammered the revenants with rocks, sticks, shovels, knives and bare fists. The corpses had difficulty overcoming their strength and frenzy, but the demons also had trouble damaging them and were themselves less durable. Katja had also culled their numbers somewhat. Katja saw a demon hold a revenant down and cave its skull in with repeated blows. She also saw three revenants with terrible wounds tackle a demon and simply bite it to death.

It was a battle of monsters. Soulless risen ones against the demons of the Brotherhood. The Silent War had turned an innocent village into a nightmare.

Katja felt a knot in her stomach as she readied the sword against the people she had danced with. Should she fight them or just flee? Where was the Death Lord at this point?

Some entity suddenly appeared and beheaded a revenant. She beheaded the next one while they were still reacting and then dodged a counterattack. It was Serdra.

Katja felt her heart lurch and she attacked the corpses herself. She slashed one of them in the head and brought it down and Serdra easily slew the fourth one. Katja cut her opponent’s hand off as it lay there and Serdra took the other one. The woman then seized it by the hair, lifted the head off the ground and struck it off.

“Serdra,” Katja said in a raw voice. She wanted to say something better. Or embrace. But she could tell from her mentor that the fight wasn’t won yet.

“I came for the horses,” the woman said curtly and without emotion and sheathed her sword. She walked briskly part her student and along the road. Katja followed.

“The horses?”

“Are you bleeding out?” Serdra asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you must fight. The Night Hand was cunning. They took the sarcophagus off the cart after some distance and carried it as one man led the cart in another direction. I followed the tracks and let myself be led astray.”

“Do they mean to carry it all the way out of the forest?”

“You remember the narrow fjord that penetrates deep inland, just to the east. They’ve sailed in along it and landed there with the wagon. I just missed them after they headed off again.”

Katja had sheathed her weapon and was trying to bandage her finger with a piece of her shirt.

“But they did lose several people in the forest fighting,” Serdra said. Katja examined her more closely and saw she bore marks of combat. “Rowing back will be slow going. We can possibly beat them to the mouth. If we hurry and exhaust the horses.”

“Then...” Katja sighed and tried to gather her vigour. The battle passion was wearing off and being replaced with pains she had been able to ignore in the heat of the moment. “Then we will.”

“Indeed. I meant to alternate the horses, but we will do better together.”

The horses were not happy once they found them, but at least they had gotten some rest. Getting them back on the road was a fight and it took harshness to get them going northward. But it worked.

The ride was difficult. Katja’s muscles began to stiffen after all the strain and she started to feel every blow and cut she had received. She clenched her teeth and tried to suppress the pain. It made it a bit easier for her to drive the horse so harshly. The sarcophagus was more important than the well-being of two horses and they showed no mercy. They had to carry them to the coast, no longer.

The journey went by in a haze of fatigue, pain and fear and Katja had ever more trouble maintaining focus. The mind wanted to fade out away from the haze.

Finally they exited the forest and arrived on the main road. The distance east to the bridge was short and they dismounted as soon as they saw it. They didn’t even bother tying the horses. They immediately collapsed on the ground anyway.

They jogged to the bridge and Katja looked south the moment she felt planks beneath her soles. The narrow fjord snaked off into the darkness of the forest. There was no ship in sight and Katja could drop down on the bridge.

“Too late... or too early?” she asked weakly.

“Too early,” Serdra said and leaned on the rail. “I feel the abyss approach.”

Katja didn’t need to ask anything else. She knew what her mentor meant. She herself sensed nothing right now, whether that was due to fatigue or lack of experience. But she remembered the sensation. She would recognize it a hundred years from now.

A hole in world
, she thought.
A thirsty hole.

“Don’t let your muscles stiffen,” Serdra warned her and Katja pushed herself up.

The bridge was rather long but not that tall. The pillars were far enough apart in the middle for a small ship to slip under if the mast were taken down. And then the Inner Sea would take it.

Katja walked to the north side and looked out on the black ocean. Where would the Night Hand go if they made good their escape? Along the channel and onto the open sea? Or would they sail back north and somehow smuggle their master north? Or to some completely different harbour to confuse enemies?

She gave up and shook her head. It made no difference. There would be nothing they could do about it.

Am I ready to die?
she suddenly thought as she stretched her muscles and prepared for this night’s final battle.
Can I throw myself on a sword if it means stopping the Death Lord?

She tried telling herself that her hands were shaking due to exhaustion.

“They are coming,” Serdra said in a half-whisper. Katja looked at her mentor. She had never seen the woman so focused. She immediately saw how Serdra would have answered the question and somehow she felt better than ever how far apart they were.

She began to feel the abyss again.

They knelt and peered carefully over the rail. The ship appeared out of the darkness, first as a small light burning on board and then they saw the ship itself. It was perhaps slightly smaller than the one that had carried them over the Inner Sea and the mast lay in the keel. She saw four oars in the water and soon heard groans and sounds of effort. The journey hadn’t been easy for them. Perhaps that would tip even the scales.

They knelt into total cover as the ship grew nearer and crawled to the north side. Katja heard an emotionless but steady voice shout instructions for the delicate task of sailing between the pillars. She let herself hope that the Night Hand would make a mistake and a collision would end the flight.

But the ship slid on and Katja felt the abyss move beneath her.

Serdar swung herself over the rail and let herself hang there a moment. Katja followed her lead and felt her arms shake at the strain.

There is no going back
, she thought.

The ship’s stem appeared beneath their feet.

“Now,” Serdra whispered and they let go simultaneously.

The planks smacked into Katja’s soles and the blow led up into the knees. They buckled a moment, which was all the time Katja had to take in the situation. The one in the stem shouted and managed to take one step back before Serdra broke his throat with her fist and sent him overboard.

The four men who had been rowing let go of the oars and drew weapons as the two of them raised their swords. The other three, who had stood by the sarcophagus in the cargo hold, were already braced for a fight. One of them was the Acolyte, with his slashed, emotionless face.

“Protect the master!” shouted the Acolyte and advanced with his sword.

Katja and Serdra attacked in step with all the strength they had left. Everything happened so fast in the weary daze through which Katja experienced the world.

She slashed and slashed and did all she could to maintain momentum; to force the men back and get to the sarcophagus. Serdra struck a man in the head and Katja wounded a man and then the second. The Acolyte met Serdra and fought much like she.

Another man threw himself at the woman with an axe. She cut him down and he didn’t even try to defend himself, but the interruption enabled the Acolyte to slash her torso.

The tide snatched the ship out onto the Inner Sea and the fight was halted a moment as everyone fought the rocking.

The Acolyte attacked Serdra, but the woman parried and slashed at his legs. Katja didn’t see how serious the wound was but the man did fall backwards in the rocking. Katja cut off a hand and then pushed the man overboard. His comrade managed to give her a weak blow to the side. She retaliated with a slash to his unarmoured torso. The man fell.

The other two who still stood attacked Serdra in place of their leader. Serdra defended with an attack and accepted minor wounds to drive them back and an instant later she cut a man in the neck. The other one was able to parry her sword and tried to push back but Katja stepped to them and chopped him in the head.

The abyss suddenly washed over her, as if the ship had taken in a wave. The combat fog she had sank into suddenly evaporated and she couldn’t help looking towards the sarcophagus.

There, in the lamp’s soft light, one could see something man-shaped floating above the sarcophagus. Something pale and translucent and terrible. The antithesis of the world. The antithesis of life.

This was a Death Lord and Katja again felt terribly small.

“The master!” came the reverential shout of the man whom Katja had slashed in the torso.

The spirit floated to them in an instant and reached for Serdra. The woman lit the Sentinel Flame in the nick of time. The Flame burned with as much force as Katja had ever seen Serdra employ and the Death Lord’s spirit stopped a moment a metre away.

Katja felt she sensed some emotion in the spirit’s mien. She couldn’t hazard a guess as to what it was.

The shape stretched out something that was probably an arm and plunged through the Sentinel Flame. A deep, hollow howl echoed through Katja’s mind and white sparks came off the rune Serdra had lit in the air. The woman groaned with effort and perhaps pain and the Flame illuminated the ship and the surrounding ocean.

Then the Flame vanished as Serdra lost it and she stumbled backwards. The Death Lord reached for her. The immaterial limb went through the woman’s torso without causing any visible wound, but Serdra screamed. Katja had never heard that before.

The sound finally pushed her into action and she sped to this terrible foe with the sword raised. She tried to summon the Sentinel Flame from within herself.

The Death Lord ceased the attack on Serdra as it saw Katja approach. Serdra fell down limply and Katja heard a heavy blow from somewhere. She gave it no thought. She could focus on nothing besides this horror which contaminated the world merely by stirring in its sleep.

She found a smidgeon of strength and pushed it out into the sword. The blade lit up and she struck at the Death Lord. The entity retreated, enough for the attack to miss and retaliated.

Katja didn’t understand the situation but sensed her demise in the Death Lord’s touch and evaded the half-visible hand which tried to strike her.

Another heavy thud could be heard and another.

The Flame lit just behind the phantom. Katja glanced to the side just long enough to see her mentor had sat up and held her empty hand out to the Death Lord. She then lit a second Flame in front of it and trapped the monster.

“NOW!” she shouted and grimaced as the Death Lord pressed on the Flame in front of him.

Katja leapt through the air with the sword above her head; the sword burning with the energy in her soul, given to her to defend the world. The sword and the energy hit the trapped Death Lord in unison and Katja felt some sort of cold backlash go through her.