The Dread: The Fallen Kings Cycle: Book Two (18 page)

“Whatever they’re using isn’t magic,” Fallon said as she strained to see. “It’s alchemy, and I wish our man Wivvers had invented it first!”

Behind them in the camp that stretched as far as the eye could see, something caught Tris’s attention. He stared into the night, unsure of what had alerted his mage sense to trouble. He caught a glimpse of shadow, followed by a man’s hoarse scream. “Come on,” Tris said, already starting down the ladder to the ground. “We’ve got trouble.”

The night was cold enough for Tris to see his breath, and a haze of campfire hung over the camp. The scream had roused the camp, and all the soldiers who had not been called for positions near the shoreline stirred from their fires and tents to see what was going on.

More shadows caught Tris’s attention. Moving fast, they swept in from the edges of the camp, shrieking as they came. The shadows shifted form as they moved, becoming the silhouettes of nightmarish beasts, with sharp fangs and long, pointed claws. The shadows swept across—through—two soldiers, and the men cried out in agony and then fell to the ground.

“
Dimonns
,” Tris breathed, readying his magic. He
reached for Nexus, and as he drew the sword, runes along its blade burst into fire and the blade itself glowed.

Fallon leveled a barrage of blue-white mage lightning toward a swath of darkness that was heading toward them. Tris gathered his magic and stretched out his left hand, willing power out into the night. A glowing, translucent warding snapped into place, covering Fallon and himself. In the distance, Tris heard shouting and saw flashes of mage lightning, assuring him that more of the battle mages recognized this threat from the rear.

The shadows poured over their warding like black oil, shrieking and battering against the energy. Beyond the warding, Tris could hear the shouts of soldiers, and he saw torches blaze as the fighters realized that they confronted a supernatural enemy. In the distance, along the far edge of the camp, Tris heard more commotion and the sound of running footsteps.

“Something else is coming in from the Eastern edge of camp,” Tris said, leveling another blast of mage lightning at the shadows that swarmed over their warding, blasting them clear.

“Somehow, the wardings around the camp have been breached,” Fallon replied, using her magic to blast at the shadows that were flying low and swiftly across the camp. “The
dimonns
shouldn’t have been able to penetrate.”

“We can’t keep picking them off one by one. There are too many. But I have an idea. On the count of three, we drop the shielding, and instead of blasting the
dimonns
individually, we send out a sheet of lightning across the camp, over the heads of the men.”

“If that doesn’t work, we’ll be too drained to be much good for a while.”

“We can’t maintain the power to keep up the wardings and send lightning surges all night,” Tris countered. “And the men out there don’t have any wardings at all. I’m counting on the other mages to join their power when they see what’s happening.”

“Start counting.”

On the third count, Tris let the wardings fall and concentrated his magic along Nexus’s blade. The sword glowed white with power, its fiery runes blindingly bright. Tris held the sword over his head as the power thrummed through him, his own magic and Fallon’s combined, finding focus in Nexus’s blade and release in the lightning that exploded from the sword’s point.

Instead of streaking across the night, the lightning formed a blue-white canopy, crackling with power just over the heads of the soldiers. The observation tower Tris and Fallon had just deserted burst into flame.
Dimonns
shrieked and winked out of existence as the canopy lanced through them. Other
dimonns
, caught below the canopy, became easy targets for the battle mages that did not send their fire aloft. The night smelled of sulfur and of burning flesh. In the distance, Tris could hear the sound of fighting. The air around them was charged so thoroughly with the lightning’s energy that Tris felt his hair rise. Within minutes, the last of the
dimonn
attackers fled or vanished. Tris and Fallon warily dropped their defenses.

“Head for the rear. Whatever’s over there wasn’t affected like the
dimonns
.”

Tris lowered Nexus but did not sheath it. The sword no longer glowed, and its runes were the same dull gray as the rest of the blade, but Tris could sense the sword’s power awaiting his command.

By now, the battle at the shoreline bathed the night in flame. “Sweet Chenne,” Tris murmured as he and Fallon neared the action. The smell of rotting flesh and decay hung heavy in the night air. All along the eastern border of the camp, soldiers battled a gray line of attackers streaming from the nearby underbrush. Ragged figures shambled toward the soldiers, showing no fear of the swords and battle axes, or of the scythes and pikes. Even the glow of the firelight could not warm the pallor of the attackers’ faces as they surged forward. Swords swung through the air, severing limbs, but the attackers continued their silent press, undaunted. Only fire caused them to change their course, when a soldier thrust a burning torch close enough to illuminate the rotting features of the invaders.

“
Ashtenerath
?” Fallon murmured.

Tris shook his head. “Too emotionless.
Ashtenerath
are driven wild by pain and fear. They’re alive, at least when they attack, although the magic that drives them kills them soon enough. No,” he said. “These are corpses. Stolen bodies.”

“The work of a summoner?”

“More like a puppeteer. They aren’t even armed.” Tris’s features darkened in anger. “They were called from their graves to be a distraction, not a real threat. The souls are elsewhere. This desecration must end.”

Tris spoke a word of power and brought his hands together at chest height and then swept them to the sides, palms down. Like marionettes with severed strings, the corpses halted and then fell to the ground, still.

A cheer went up from the soldiers as they realized that their enemy was defeated. Tris dropped to one knee next to the nearest corpse and let his open palm hover over its
decaying rib cage. “Just a shell,” he murmured to Fallon, who remained standing, alert for danger. “The soul is long gone.” He stood and looked over the corner of the camp where the fight had been. Hundreds of corpses littered the ground, felled in midstride.

“Someone’s been planning this,” Tris said, his voice tight with anger. “These aren’t soldiers. It’s not like at Lochlanimar, when Curane’s mages animated our war dead against us. Someone’s been raiding tombs, civilian graves, and gathering them for a strike like this.”

“Could there be more?”

Tris shrugged. He looked into the distance, into the scrubby vegetation and thin trees that stretched behind the camp to the horizon. He could sense no glimmer of magic, no indication that more animated corpses waited, hidden, for another strike. “It’s possible. Even though it doesn’t take the same kind of power to animate corpses as it does to actually force a soul back into a dead body, it still required a substantial amount of power to move that many bodies at once.”

Fallon nodded and began to wander toward the edge of the camp. “Look here.” She pointed toward the ground and used her magic to allow the spelled boundary of the camp to glow dimly. “I’m guessing that while our attention was on the attack from the harbor, whoever controlled the corpses attacked the wardings. That’s what allowed both the corpses and the
dimonns
into the camp.”

Just then, a young man in a lieutenant’s uniform walked up and saluted Tris, snapping to attention. “Your Majesty, sir. What would you have us do with the bodies of the… things… that attacked us?”

Tris looked out over the ruin the attack had made of the
southern corner of the camp. “Once it’s daylight, shovel them beyond the edge of camp and burn the bodies, so they can’t be disturbed again. That should be enough to keep disease down.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tris walked a few steps to where a soldier lay dead on the ground. This was a fresh kill, not one of the long-dead. The man lay in a pool of blood where the claws of a
dimonn
had torn his chest open. Again, Tris knelt and let his hand hover over the corpse. When he stood, he said nothing.

“You look troubled,” Fallon observed.

Tris took a deep breath. “It’s not the usual
dimonn
kill. I want to check the others, see if it’s the same for them. Usually,
dimonns
are content with blood. After a
dimonn
attack, the souls are freed at death to take their rest in the Lady or remain near the place of death.”

“And tonight?”

Tris turned and met Fallon’s gaze. “The souls are missing.”

The northern horizon was lit with an unnatural glow, as if the bay itself were on fire. The sounds of bombardment had ended, and Tris could see the outlines of the massive catapults and trebuchets standing idle. Cautiously, he and Fallon worked their way forward, until they could see that the flames still burning were from ships in the harbor stranded on sandbars. Sandbars that had not existed just a few candlemarks before, raised by the Margolan mages.

Tris spotted Soterius at the center of a knot of soldiers, giving orders and dispatching the men in every direction. Fallon headed in another direction to seek out the mages
most involved with the waterfront battle. Soterius looked up as Tris walked closer.

“Thank the Goddess you’re here; it makes the reporting easier.”

“What happened?”

Soterius’s face was soot-streaked, and his uniform was stained with dirt and blood. “We had a good plan, driving the ships in where we could hit them with the catapults and stranding them on the sandbars. Unfortunately, they had a good plan, too.”

“Which was?”

“Fire. I’m sure they would have used it sooner or later without our attack, but it was obviously something they’d been saving for the right moment. We didn’t trap all of their ships, so Goddess help us if the rest of them have the same capability. As soon as they were close enough for our missiles to hit them, they retaliated with fire.”

“From what Fallon and I could see, it didn’t act like regular fire, but it wasn’t magic, either.”

Soterius shook his head and gestured with a sickened expression down the blackened beach. Charred bodies littered the ground, and the dirt was scorched from the waterline halfway back to the camp. “The mages might say it wasn’t magic, but it wasn’t normal fire; you’re right. Senne says he’s heard legends of such a thing, from the traders who venture into the far west, to the Harran Sea and beyond.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “We’ve already got Wivvers trying to figure it out. It burned on the surface of the ocean, and dousing it with water only spread it farther. Wind scattered it but didn’t put it out. The only way to stop the damned fire was with dirt, and so the land mages brought a rain of dirt down on us and that worked.”

“They set their own ships on fire?”

“No. That was our doing. Between the mages and the catapult crews, we were able to give them a taste of their own poison. The good news is that the new sandbars and the wrecks should make it that much harder for them to invade, at least here. The bad news is that quite a few of their ships weren’t touched, either by the catapults or the sandbars. The Sentinels tell us that there are fewer ships at the mouth of the bay than there were this morning. We don’t think they’ve gone home,” he said, meeting Tris’s gaze. “We think they’re moving down the coast, to make another strike, maybe a landing.”

Soterius paused for a moment, taking in Tris’s appearance. “You don’t look like you’ve been watching from a safe vantage point. What did I miss?”

Tris exhaled tiredly. “
Dimonns
. Soul thieves. Animated corpses. I don’t know whether the mages on the ships were coordinating with collaborators on the ground behind us, or whether it was just a coincidence. Maybe they meant to strike from the rear, and it just happened that our attack made it a two-front battle.”

“Soul thieves?”

Soterius listened with a grim expression as Tris explained. “Is this the same as your hollowed ghosts?”

“Similar, but not quite the same. Hollowing a ghost leaves consciousness behind. The spirit goes mad with the pain of having its soul wrenched away, making it violent, like
ashtenerath
. There was no consciousness left behind with these dead. The soul is gone.”

“Were all the battle dead soul-stolen?”

Tris shook his head. “No. We had only a couple of dozen casualties—it could have been far worse. Of that,
just a handful were soul-stolen. But it’s troubling, on several accounts. First, if the souls have been… kidnapped, for lack of a better word, then the dead aren’t free to pass over to the Lady. They’re imprisoned, against their will. It reminds me too much of the kind of blood magic that the Obsidian King used. I don’t like the possibilities this raises. It takes a summoner to wrest a soul loose and imprison it. We haven’t seen the ‘dark summoner’ Cam warned us about, but I’d say this proves there’s merit to the rumor. The question is: What does he want with the souls?” He managed a bitter smile. “I don’t think I’ll like the answer.”

H
old the line!” Cam’s voice was a hoarse roar. The foot soldiers set their pikes and held their swords at the ready, while behind them, heavily armored cavalry awaited the order to strike.