Sunset of Lantonne (15 page)

“Is someone there?” Therec wheezed, though his voice cracked. His throat felt as though he had swallowed at least a fistful of dirt.

“Shut your damned mouth, necromancer,” came Arlind’s voice as the dwarven woman leaned over him. “Have the decency to stay dead. You’re making me wish I had the guts to step on your throat myself.”

Touching a wet rag to his forehead—which stung as though he had open gashes there—Arlind frowned and shook her head. “Started to think I was rid of you,” she muttered, giving him a small smile to let him know she was not entirely serious. “You’re one of the lucky ones. Most of the men didn’t come back. Barely got my own ass out of there.”

Turning to peer at the place where he lay, Therec realized he was lying in some kind of storage room with stone walls. Around him, every inch of the floor had been swept hastily and bodies of the injured now lay on straw or the bare floor, most groaning, though some he could tell were already dead. Much of the floor was coated with dried blood that smelled strongly enough to cover the now-faint scent of old grain.

“Where are we?” Therec managed to croak out.

“Store room on the first floor of the keep. We didn’t want to take the wounded any farther than we had to. Most didn’t even make it even to the outer city. I think your heart stopped at least twice, but didn’t stay that way long enough for me to call for a parade.”

Wincing and tucking an arm to his chest as his ribs throbbed painfully, Therec forced himself to sit up. He quickly shoved away Arlind’s attempts to keep him down, biting back the pain that was beginning to flare up all over his body.

“You’re in no damned shape to stand,” she warned, backing away after giving up on trying to make him lie still. “Might bleed out if you get up…then again, go ahead and get up.”

Scowling back at her, Therec shook his head. “Pain is a lie the body tells us that the mind can overcome,” he told her, trying to call forth the meager healing magic at his own disposal. That only made his head throb more and he gave up for the moment. “Nothing is broken. I will live through the day.”

“Almost everything was broken. I practically put you back together from parts. Some of the others weren’t as lucky. I caught you just in time. If you’d slipped a little farther, we’d be dragging your remains to the tower’s resurrection circle. They’re so backed up now, I doubt half those people can be saved. Luckily, some dumb soldier told me your kind don’t expect to get brought back, so you were on the short list to rot down here.”

Therec studied her face, searching for any sign she was over exaggerating in hopes of earning a debt from him. He saw none and decided she was telling the truth. “Why save a necromancer?” he asked softly. “You could have looked the other way and no one would have been the wiser. I know you hate my kind, so why let me live?”

Arlind snorted and looked around at the wounded in the room, some of whom Therec could now see were being tended to by other healers and common doctors. She made as if to spit, but stopped and instead answered, “I would know if I let someone die when I could prevent it,” she finally answered gruffly. “Besides, necromancers can heal if they want to…I need all the help I can get. I’m putting your ass to work.”

Bowing as best he could through the pain, Therec gave the woman a smile.

“You have my gratitude, Arlind. I’m certain you have my wife’s as well.”

Looking genuinely uncomfortable, Arlind stomped her foot and gestured around the room. “Get to work, necromancer,” she told him abruptly. “I see one walking corpse and I’ll have you run through, got it?”

Grinning, Therec stood unsteadily, then went to the nearest soldier. The man’s shoulder was crushed and he appeared to have lost a large amount of blood.

Taking a knee at the man’s side, Therec pushed aside his own pain and focused on the faint voices that whispered in the back of his mind. The dead came at his calling, disappointed that he wished to prevent a spirit from passing into their realm, but they allowed his magic to come anyway.

A rush of energy poured through Therec’s hand into the soldier. Beneath his fingers, he could feel the torn skin mending and the shoulder shift abruptly back into place. In seconds, the man gasped and began breathing more easily.

“See,” Arlind called after him as she headed to the next man, “that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

*

By evening, Therec was out on the walls, leaning on the stone battlements as he watched the north. From that direction, a near-constant train of wagons entered the city gates, bearing the wounded and dead. Past the wagons, the quarry seemed to endlessly belch black smoke with no visible fire.

In Turessi, Therec would have been expected to meet wagons such as those to raise the fallen whose bodies were not too badly ravaged or those that could be repaired. If the dead could not be mended sufficiently, it was his duty to destroy them utterly and speak on their behalf to their survivors. Here, he found himself going out of his way to avoid the caravan, out of fear of how he would be treated simply for being near the bodies of the fallen.

Idly, he traced the tattoos on his cheekbones. They were meant to be a mark of station and a statement that he was a learned man, but here they were a liability, making the commoners outright fear him and the highborn take a step back when he approached. He had done nothing to harm these people, but they looked at him with disgust just the same. After the day’s losses, the fear they felt would be far worse.

“How many?” he asked aloud, having heard the faint scrape of a soft boot on the stone floor of the battlements.

Stepping up alongside Therec, Kinet leaned on the stone wall too. “I gave up counting at two hundred,” Kinet answered grimly, watching the wagons coming in. “We probably lost twice that in the outer city. The tunnel went right under a housing district. I’m guessing the death toll will pass a thousand. Injuries could be up over many times that.”

Therec shook his head in dismay. “My people have been warring with one another and those who enter our lands for almost two thousand years,” he told Kinet, turning his back on the city so he would not have to watch the caravan of death. “Never have I seen a single battle go this badly. A thousand souls lost in less than ten minutes…no army could have ever dreamed of that kind of destruction.”

“Well, there is some good news.”

Therec stared at the man in disbelief. “What can possibly qualify as good news, when the mortal memory of that many people has been lost?”

“We got them.”

Staring at the man did little to prod him into explaining, so Therec finally asked, “You got who?”

“The Altisian commanders,” explained Kinet, smiling grimly. “Fifty living soldiers out there through the whole thing, probably commanding the undead. Our scouts—those that survived—reported seeing the Altisians climbing one of our war golems. They did something to it to make it explode like that.”

“How many of those fifty did you capture?”

“All the leaders, plus most of their troops. Probably thirty or so in total. I know a few died during the explosion and a few cowards got away, but the majority are in our cells.”

“I know you don’t want to hear me say this,” Therec began, “but I could not possibly control more than a handful of those undead, and I have trained since I was able to walk. Those fifty soldiers must all have incredible training if they were guiding the army.”

“That’s what Arlind said, too. We’re treating them all as enemy troops and possible necromancers…no offense.”

Nodding, knowing that arguing was of little use, Therec asked, “Can I see them?”

“The prisoners?”

“Yes. If they’re powerful enough to raise that kind of army, I want to know what I am up against. The king does want my advice in this war and I cannot very well give it without knowing their capabilities.”

Kinet screwed up his face in annoyance, but nodded. “Come on, then.”

The older wizard led Therec off the walls and into the keep proper. They walked for a long time, heading steadily down until Therec was sure that they were well beneath the ground. As they went, the ornate furnishings of the keep gradually gave way to simpler servants’ quarters and then to bare stone halls that echoed eerily.

Soon, Kinet came to a stop in a dimly-lit section of hall, just past a group of heavily-armed soldiers who were standing guard.

“Every cell past here has someone we’ve captured,” Kinet explained. “I have no desire to see them. If I do, I’ll want to burn them all. I lost a lot of people I knew out there.”

Walking on alone, Therec came to the first set of doors, one on each side of the hallway. He checked one, then the other, finding several human men slumped against the walls inside. None of them so much as looked up, though Therec did note that the tattered remains of their clothing appeared Altisian in make. The men all had the look of soldiers rather than scholars. These were no necromancers.

Frowning, Therec continued on, seeing much the same in each cell. A few elven and human men came to the bars of the cells to plead for their lives, but Therec mostly ignored them. Several had the look of wizards, though every one of them flinched and backed away from the door when they saw his face—likely the tattoos. Any necromancer would know of the Turessians and would likely have been overjoyed to see him, given their situation.

Therec’s dismay grew with each cell, as there was no one that gave him the feel or even vague likelihood of being a necromancer. Humans, elves, halflings, an orc, and even a few wildlings were imprisoned here, but they all appeared to be commoners or soldiers. These people had not commanded a single undead, let alone a legion.

Stopping at the last cell, Therec realized it was the first he had seen with women in it. Knowing the dislike the southern lands had for letting women engage in warfare, this caught his attention. Leaning close to the grating set into the heavy door, Therec studied the two women inside.

One woman, wearing a mud-stained dress and sandals, lay on her back. She was clearly unconscious, with blood matting the side of her head and a greenish hue to her skin that hinted at illness. Therec studied the elven girl’s face a while, finally recognizing her as the girl he had confronted near the quarry and earlier on the wagon into town. She was certainly not Altisian, and after watching her try to fight, he knew she was no necromancer…and likely not very well-trained in any form of magic.

The other woman made Therec even more annoyed. Vine-wrapped and clearly green-skinned, the fae-kin servant girl had been the topic of a conversation with Kinet all too recently. She stared up at Therec through the bars with angry green eyes, accusing him.

“Dalania, I believe you said?” he asked. “How did you come to be here?”

Glaring all the more, the woman pulled a piece of paper from a section of vines and leaves along her side. “You got me my papers and supposed freedom,” she practically spat as she crumpled up the paper and threw it at the door. “They arrested me before I got past the quarry, claiming that I was an Altisian spy and my citizenship is revoked. Kinet’s orders, they say.”

Therec glanced back up the hall to where Kinet stood talking with the guards. “You were told you would walk free under the laws set forth by your king and so you will,” Therec told her, placing a hand on the door. “Please stay away from the door.”

Instead of moving farther from the door, Dalania shifted to shield the other woman.

Therec called to the lost spirits, hearing the rush of whispers as they brought magic with them. This he brought together into strands he felt more than saw, the fibers of invisible energy tangling deeply into the wood and metal of the door. Once he felt the magic settle into the door under his hand, he flung his hand away, releasing the magic as he did so.

With a crack that echoed through the hallway, the door shattered, sending wood and metal flying in all directions.

Cries of alarm down the hall warned Therec that the guards were none too happy with what he had done, even before he could see them through the cloud of dust that filled the hall. Blind while the dust settled, he still felt the fae-kin woman attempt to push past him and he reached out, catching her by the elbow.