Sunset of Lantonne (32 page)

A creak ahead of him made Therec look up.

The pedestrian door closest to him drifted open and revealed a pale-skinned creature that shuffled on all fours, hissing through broken teeth when it saw Therec. Pale eyes narrowed and glared at him, but the creature beckoned him into the city, clenching its jaw angrily as it did so.

“A ghoul as the doorman,” Therec said to himself, shaking his head as he took several tentative steps toward the door while watching the zombies atop the walls as he did. “This is not what I was hoping for.”

The ghoul snarled at him again, seemingly as dismayed by the arrangement as Therec was. Its hand on the door trembled, its broken fingertips scraping against the wooden door in what appeared to be barely-controlled frustration.

Therec inched closer to the city entrance, but the undead watching him from above did not move. As he moved into the area where the rocks could be dropped onto him, he quickly jogged toward the door, clearing the distance without incident. Doing so, he had to ignore the increased growling of the ghoul with each step he took.

Once Therec had gotten under the edge of the wall and felt more comfortable with his predicament, he returned his attention to the ghoul. The undead fidgeted, baring its teeth, and then waved him inside again.

“Can you speak, old one?” he asked the ghoul, hoping to ease its anger toward the living as he made his way past the doorway. “May I have your name, if you can still give it?”

Hissing loudly, the ghoul opened its mouth to reveal the withered black stump that had been its tongue. After it had shown the reason for its lack of speech, the ghoul slammed the door shut behind Therec. It threw a bar down across the door, then dropped back onto all fours and wandered away from Therec toward the middle of the city.

Inside the walls of Altis, hundreds of buildings of all shapes and heights packed the street he stood on. Some appeared to be shops and restaurants, while others were clearly homes of some sort. Nearly all of the buildings were dark and quiet, with broken shutters, half-closed doors, and blown dirt covering the entries. The place appeared to have been deserted for months.

The street itself led for quite some distance ahead of Therec. It intersected other cross-streets, then changed direction slightly, leading toward some kind of open area that was too far for Therec to make out clearly in the dark. The whole place could have been a tomb for as much noise as he could hear within those towering walls.

Looking back toward the walls, Therec could see hundreds of zombies standing on all parts of the walls’ battlements, waiting silently for an invasion that might never come. They would wait like that for centuries in the absence of any new orders. Even if the war ended, likely those creatures would stand guard until the city had crumbled to dust.

Beneath the battlements, the large portcullis and the reinforced door he had entered through were only barely visible in the dim light even standing only a few feet inside. The wood of the door was marred by hundreds of claw marks and stained a dark brown from blood that lined many of the scratches.

Therec stepped back up to the door he had come through. Tracing the gouges in the wood with his gloved fingertips, Therec wondered how a whole city could have fallen from the inside. There had been no damage on the outside, telling him that the sole source of the overthrow of the city had happened from within. Likely, that meant that the necromancers—Turessian or otherwise—had worked with the local government. If he had to guess, the ruler of Altis was who was now directing creatures like the ghoul to lead him deeper into the city.

That thought brought Therec back to the buildings around him. There was still not a sound beyond the scuffling of the ghoul hurrying away from him. Even with nightfall, there were no torches or lanterns anywhere that he could see. From the entrance all the way to the edge of his vision, there were no lights whatsoever. The city was as dead as the ghoul and the gouges in the wood were likely made by the last living people within the walls, other than the Turessian that Therec wanted dearly to meet.

Giving the entrance a last longing glance, Therec set off after the ghoul that had nearly disappeared into the dark ahead of him. The creature was going out of its way to stay at the edge of his sight, forcing him to run to keep up with it and not be left behind in the dark city.

The run through the streets after the lumbering pale-skinned creature gave Therec little time to further evaluate his surroundings. What little he did gather told him that the city had no signs of attack anywhere he could see, further convincing him that whatever had allowed the undead to take control of the city had been without any outward battle. The blood at the entry was the only indication anyone had opposed their takeover.

The ghoul soon led Therec down another street that connected to the wider one they had taken from the edge of the city. This new street passed through far nicer homes than the last and the paving stones were in better shape than on the previous. In the chill dark, the difference between districts was subtle, but even Therec could see it. These homes were finer than anything Turessi had ever possessed and would have drawn Therec’s attention in another time, when he had more opportunity to explore without near-certain death.

Though the street wound through the city, Therec could immediately see that it led toward a single tower not far from the center of Altis. Unlike anything but the outer walls, this tower was heavily reinforced and appeared built to withstand sustained fire from siege weaponry. The smooth, sheer walls towered far above the nearby buildings, but even at a distance in the dark sky, Therec could make out the faint waver of the magic that shielded the stones against attacks. Had he ordered Lantonne’s golems or trebuchets this far into the mountains, they would have done practically nothing to that tower. It had been crafted well enough that he doubted any creature could scale it and it would take hours to cause any real damage to the stones.

Almost as soon as Therec came around the first curve in the street, two more ghouls joined the first, never so much as looking back at him. Somewhere behind him, he heard the pattering of more creatures running along in pursuit, but when he looked back, he could not see anything on the dark street.

Several minutes of the rapid pace brought Therec to a large clearing in the middle of the city, not far from the foot of the tower. There, thousands of dead stood in neat lines, staring blankly at the ground. The entire central plaza of the city was packed with rows of the creatures, surrounding a makeshift gallows that stood between himself and the tower.

The dead in the plaza likely accounted for every man, woman, and child in Altis from what he could see. Their tattered and bloodstained clothing told of many stations in life, ranging from corpses that looked to him to be serving women from taverns, all the way to one zombie near the front that wore remnants of a flowing cloak and fine clothing that marked him as some form of nobility in life.

For a brief moment, Therec thought the ghouls might have brought him to the plaza in some morbid desire to have him walk under his own power to the gallows they would hang him on. But the ghouls passed by the gallows without a glance, and he pushed on through the zombies, trying not to lose sight of the ones leading him.

As Therec began to walk around the gallows, trying to avoid disturbing too many of the zombies that surrounded him in the process, a choked and gurgling sound drew his attention up to the raised platform where the condemned would have been taken to die. Atop the gallows, two bodies hung from frayed and aging ropes. Both corpses swayed, their limbs still flailing as they thrashed about, trying to free themselves.

Therec paused where he was, watching the bodies for more information about who they were and why they might have been hung in the public square. He had no intention of interfering with the rule of law in the city, but he wanted to know any possible details in case it became important to himself or Dorus later.

The corpses thrashed harder, spinning themselves about, giving Therec more of a view of them as they spun.

Clothing of fine materials still covered the bodies, though it had rotted to the point that Therec could not even guess at the style anymore. Jewelry still adorned the remains and a crown lay near the front of the platform, having been forgotten where it fell. With a little more study, Therec realized that the bodies were a man and a woman, both decayed almost to the point of being skeletal. Rotted or not, both bodies still swung by their necks even as they hissed and kicked, trying to attack anything that moved in their vicinity.

“Not the plan I would expect you hoped for, duke,” mused Therec, bowing slightly toward the male corpse. “Lantonne will be interested to hear that your undead army is no longer your own.”

A distant snarl snapped Therec’s attention back toward the tower where the three ghouls had stopped and were hopping up and down, trying to get his attention.

Therec made his way out of the plaza as quickly as he could, soon reaching the ghouls and the massive doors inset with bars of iron to reinforce them. As with the tower walls, Therec immediately picked up the shimmer of magic on the doors, appearing not unlike the shifting of air over hot metal. Whoever maintained the magic of this place, they had kept it fresh, unlike the spells lingering over parts of Lantonne.

At Therec’s approach, two of the ghouls pushed open the doors and stepped aside. The third ran off. Having nowhere else to go, Therec advanced into the tower, trying not to jump when the doors were slammed shut behind him, cutting off the only light in the tower’s entryway.

“So good of you to join me,” a man’s voice nearby called out, and Therec heard light footsteps moving to the middle of the hall in front of him. “You do not disappoint, heir of Turess.”

“Show yourself. We do not hide from one another when death comes to call.”

Soft chuckling unnerved Therec, and the voice replied, “The rules have changed greatly from the last time I sought teaching among our elders. I apologize for my rudeness.”

Brilliant light flared to life in the hall, blinding Therec momentarily. When he could see again, the same robed Turessian man he had seen in Lantonne stood before him, his hand held high, glowing with magical light. The brilliant unflickering light illuminated dust-covered furnishings that had once been ornate but now appeared to have fallen into disuse. Hallways branched off from where he stood to either side and also led farther into the keep.

“I assure you, Therec, I did not invite you here to kill you without discussion. I wanted to talk and felt that I would not be welcome in Lantonne after the warning I delivered so recently. I would have preferred neutral ground, but I doubted you would come at my call. This city was a mystery you could not ignore, so I was forced to draw you here.”

Therec looked around in the hallway, finding that a pair of armored corpses stood to either side of the doorway, still enough that he had not noticed them until he stared at them. Had he not been expecting danger, the lowered visors of the corpses could have been easily mistaken for poorly maintained decorative suits.

“You did not invite me,” Therec told the man. He felt out his ties to his magic, hearing the voices of the dead begin their whispers. He would need that power if things went badly. “I came to find out why you attacked us.”

“That was an invitation,” replied the man, grinning. “I let you live. That is about as polite as I can be these days, I’m afraid.”

“Then tell me why am I here,” asked Therec, reaching out to touch the nearest of the undead sentries. Therec gave a slight tug on his magic, making his hand tingle with magic granted to him by the long-dead just before contacting the armored suit. At his touch, the body inside the armor crackled as though abruptly drying, then fell apart. The armor collapsed to the ground with a deafening clatter.

The second suit’s helmet slowly turned to stare at him but made no movement in his direction other than to place its gloved hand on the hilt of an ancient sword at its hip.

Lips curling very slightly, the other Turessian turned and walked farther into the keep, taking his light with him. Within seconds, the entry room dropped into inky darkness around Therec, making the edges of his robes blend in with everything else as shadows deepened.

The last thing he could see as the room went black was the remaining guard taking a step toward him. Aside from its footsteps on the bare stone floor, additional sounds of movement from either side let him know something was coming at him quickly, hugging the edge of the departing light.