Lusam: The Dragon Mage Wars Book Three (35 page)

“How many undead could I kill before each knife becomes saturated?” Neala asked, sounding a lot more upbeat than she had only a few moments ago.

“I’m not sure. I would guess ten or twelve, but there is no way to know for sure until we test them in battle,” Lusam replied.

“Well, that’s a damn sight better than what I can do right now,” Neala replied grinning at Lusam. Then she began to frown a little. “I do have one question, though.”

“What’s that?” Lusam asked.

“You just said all living creatures have magic within them, so what happens if I touch them?”

“Hmm, good point. I hadn’t thought of that. But the answer is, you would saturate them with your own magical power reserves. They wouldn’t be able to take enough from you to kill you, but you would render your own knives useless. Fortunately, the charms I’ve already placed on your knives keep them sharp and free from corrosion, so I guess you’ll just have to avoid the temptation to take them out and play with them from now on,” Lusam said smiling at her.

“Very funny… but seriously, how can I even hold them without making them useless?” she asked looking a little confused.

“Oh, that’s not a problem, I will only enchant the blade, not the whole knife. And as long as they don’t make direct contact with your skin, they will be fine. Just remember, they need to penetrate the undead’s clothing to be effective too,” Lusam replied.

“Great! How long will it take you to do?” Neala asked enthusiastically.

“I can do it right now if you pass me them,” Lusam replied, nodding towards her knives. Neala unbuckled her knife belt and handed it to Lusam, who took each knife out in turn, and placed them on the deck in front of him. He picked up the first knife and concentrated hard on the enchantment he wished to imbue the knife with. First he would have to rearrange the centre of the blade to act as a small storage device for the magical power, then imbue the actual blade with a magical power draining spell. He tried several variations—testing each one on himself—before finding the best combination of enchantments. He repeated the enchantments on the remaining knives, but not before Alexia noticed what he was doing, and came over to investigate.

Lusam found himself repeating much of the conversation he had just had with Neala, and unsurprisingly, discovered that he suddenly had a request to enchant a second pair of knives for Alexia. He didn’t mind really, and when he thought about it, it made a lot of sense to also enchant Alexia’s weapons. After all, bows were great for long range combat, but of little use at all in a close quarter hand-to-hand battle. Alexia thanked Lusam for her knives, then returned quietly to her game with Renn, leaving Lusam and Neala alone once more. Lusam was grateful for this, because Neala seemed a lot happier now, and snuggled into him as they sat in the corner of the deck together, holding hands, and whispering sweet nothings to each other.

It had been five days since the strange men in black robes had descended on Rebekah and Kayden’s village. They themselves hadn’t stayed long, but the terror and devastation they had left behind was terrible. They had killed everyone they found that first day, and Rebekah and Kayden were forced to listen to their screams and pleas from within their hiding place, powerless to do anything about it.

Rebekah could not understand what the men were saying, even when they had been close enough to hear them clearly. They spoke in a strange language Rebekah had never heard before, and their laughter at her own villagers’ suffering was almost more than she could bear. She witnessed the killing of dozens of her friends and kin through the small openings in the grate, unable, or unwilling to look away from their suffering as they died horrible deaths. The strange men left them all where they fell for what seemed like a very long time to Rebekah, some still burning, and others horribly mutilated from what they had done to them.

She witnessed incredible balls of flame appearing in the hands of the strange men, before they threw them with inhuman force towards her fellow villagers. From others came what looked like bolts of lightning, or some simply raised their arms, and Rebekah watched as people she knew began to sail through the sky, only to return to earth with a sickening crunch moments later. They rained down the same balls of fire upon many of the buildings in her village, and many were completely destroyed by the flames. If it had not been for the fact that they’d had a heavy rainstorm shortly after the men left her village, Rebekah felt sure that the village would have been completely destroyed by the spreading fire.

By far the strangest thing that Rebekah witnessed that first day, was the men in black robes making the dead people come back to life again—except, they were no longer alive somehow. The people she had once known, now dead in the streets, were twisted and burned beyond all recognition. But it didn’t seem to matter to the strange men, they chanted some strange words over and over, and made them move again. Some had legs and arms so badly damaged that they could barely move, others were so burned that they no longer even looked like people.

After the strange men brought them back to life, they all went to the centre of the village and just stood there, not moving, like horribly twisted and burned statues. As time went by, more and more joined them, until it looked like her whole village had gathered in the same spot. Desperately, she scanned the forms for any sign of her mother, but it was almost impossible to recognise anyone amongst the crowd. She could not be sure, but she didn’t think her mother was among them, and that gave her a small amount of hope that she had somehow escaped the men before the killing had begun.

It seemed that once the men had finished with their grisly task of making the dead bodies live again, they too gathered in the centre of the village. There was some kind of order given by one of the men, and soon after, they all began to leave the village in single file. At first, none of the villagers followed, but once the last man had joined the back of the line, the first of the villagers also set off in single file after them. Rebekah watched, praying to Deas that they would
all
leave, so she and Kayden could emerge from their hiding place and find their mother. But moments later, her hopes were dashed. All of the badly injured villagers were left behind, and after several more minutes, they began to wander aimlessly up and down the streets, as if searching for something. That was two days ago.

The sun had gone down over an hour ago, and it was beginning to get cold again inside the room where Rebekah and Kayden were still hiding. During the day the sun warmed the room to a comfortable temperature, but by night the grate cover acted like a chimney, evacuating all the heat from within the small room quite rapidly through all of the holes. Rebekah knew that she desperately needed to leave the small wood-drying room to find food and water, but there had always been at least one of the undead villagers nearby most of the time. She tried to open the door they had found inside the room, but it was firmly bolted from the other side, so she watched the streets from her firewood platform, waiting for an opportunity to exit the grate unseen.

“I’m hungry and thirsty, Bekah,” Kayden said weakly from the shadows. Neither of them had eaten anything much in the last two days, and now they were both very hungry indeed. Luckily, Rebekah had saved the remains of their lunch in her dress pocket from the first day on the docks, which they had managed to ration out over the last two days, but now they were completely out of food. It had also rained quite heavily during the first two days, and Rebekah had managed to peel off a length of bark from a piece of firewood and used it to collect water for them both. She had pushed the length of bark through one of the holes in the grate, and as the rain fell, it collected in the curved bark and ran back towards them, supplying them with an almost constant trickle of clean drinking water. Unfortunately, there had been no way to store the water, and now that the rain had stopped, they were also beginning to dehydrate too.

“I know you are, Kayden, I’m sorry,” Rebekah replied quietly, still watching for an opportunity to leave their hiding place unseen. “Kay, I need you to listen to me carefully. Do you understand?” Rebekah said in her most serious big sister voice. Kayden had already stood up and moved to where his big sister was peering down at him from her platform. She could just about make him out, as the moonlight trickled in through the multitude of gaps around the grate. He nodded his head, and waited for her to continue.

“I have to go outside…” she began to say, but was cut short by her little brother’s whine of a reply.

“No, Bekah! I don’t want you to go. Those… things will get you. Please don’t go. Please,” he pleaded with her, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“I have to, Kay. We need food and water. We’ll get sick if I don’t go fetch us something soon,” she replied, climbing down from the platform to hug her little brother.

“No, Bekah, please don’t go out there… please. I won’t say I’m hungry again, I promise,” he said, sobbing between breaths. Rebekah hugged him tightly as he cried and sobbed into her dress.

“Kayden, listen to me,” Rebekah said, kneeling down to his level and brushing away his tears with her thumbs. “I promise I’ll be alright. I’ve been watching those things out there for a long time now, and they don’t seem to move very fast. I saw one of farmer Tarquin’s pigs loose in the street today, down by the village well. A few of those things tried to catch it, but it was way too fast for them. Their legs don’t seem to work like they should. Maybe that’s why those men left them behind, and only took the ones that weren’t damaged.”

“But, I’m scared, Bekah. I don’t want to be here all alone in the dark. I want to come with you,” Kayden sobbed, grabbing hold of his big sister in a bear hug and not letting go.

“No, Kay, you can’t come with me. But, I do need you to do a
very
important job for me here while I’m gone. Do you think you could do that for me?” Rebekah said, disengaging herself from the bear hug, and pushing Kayden out to arms length so she could look into his teary eyes. He nodded mutely at his big sister, and continued to sob quietly while she explained what she needed him to do.

“When I go outside, I need you to lock the grate behind me, then I need you to stay up there on the wood pile and watch for me coming back. When you see me coming, I need you to unlock the grate quickly so I can get back inside, before any of those things out there see me. Do you understand Kay?”

Kayden nodded at his big sister, as he wiped his nose with his sleeve, leaving what his big sister had always called ‘
a slug trail
’ behind. Normally she would have berated him for it, but here, now, it seemed such a trivial a thing to do.

“You see, I knew you could be a big boy and help me do this,” Rebekah said, kissing her little brother on the top of his head, and causing him to smile at her words of praise. Rebekah returned to the platform of firewood and resumed her lookout, waiting for an opportunity to present itself for her to leave the grate unseen. It took a while, but eventually she spotted an opening. As long as the undead villager at the end of the street didn’t turn back in her direction, she felt sure she could make it to the cover of the barn on the opposite side of the street without being seen.

“Kayden, get ready. I’ll be back soon. Make sure you watch for me, you hear?” Rebekah whispered loudly.

“Okay, Bekah,” Kayden replied, getting ready to take his sister’s place on the firewood platform. Rebekah quietly slid the bolts open on the grate lid and gently lifted off the cover, being careful not to clang it on the rim as she did so. She then quickly climbed out of the hole and onto the street above, replacing the grate cover with great care, so as not to make a sound. She was about to remind Kayden to relock the cover, but she heard the bolts slide into place before she had to. With one last check up and down the street, she lifted her dress and ran for the safety of the large barn opposite.

By the time she had reached the barn a short distance away, her heart was beating so hard and fast that she feared the creatures outside would hear it for sure. Leaning with her back against the wall she tried to steady her breathing, while at the same time taking in the once familiar surrounding of the large barn. What she saw made her first gasp out loud, then gag, as she tried hard not to throw up at the grisly sight before her. Where there were once pens full of healthy animals, now there were only the mutilated remains of disembowelled carcases, crawling with maggots and flies. The smell was overpowering, and it took all of her self control not to vomit at the sight or smell of what was in front of her.

It took Rebekah a few moments to steel herself against the grisly sight and smell, and then she reminded herself why she had chosen to come here in the first place. She knew there was no way she could approach the village well down the street without being seen, let alone use it to draw any water. The only other source of water that she knew about was inside this barn, and often when she had frequented the barn in the past, she had also seen many types of root vegetables being stored there, ready to feed the animals. She only hoped that there were still some here now. It was difficult to see inside the barn, as the only light was from the moonlight outside which filtered in through the loose fitting wall boards of the structure—creating a strange striped pattern on the barn floor.