Cobweb Empire (9 page)

“I am ready . . .” said
Claere Liguon, closing her eyes.

And with her other hand, Percy reached out
and drew her fingers toward the sentinel shadow—

All at once, from everywhere around them
came a terrible crashing noise.

Percy started. The overflowing ocean of
darkness in her mind instantly receded, while that
deep
unspeakable place
slammed shut. With a cry of alarm she dropped
the Infanta’s hand, and spun about. They both stared as the
campsite filled with new riders, and there were foot soldiers
coming from all directions—down from the top of the hillock and
around from the road—and there was the neighing of horses, battle
cries and hoarse yells of men-at-arms.

The next few seconds were absolute
chaos.

“Oh God!” uttered Claere Liguon, forgetting
herself, forgetting everything that
almost
happened.

The Chidair soldiers had been peacefully
eating when the attack came, but they were impeccably trained to
react within seconds.

As three mounted knights in full armor came
bearing down upon them from the top of the rise, and at least half
a dozen soldiers on foot rushed in from every direction, the black
knight—who had been seated near the fire and drinking from a mug
with the others—sprung up like lightning, casting his mug aside,
and grabbed his nearby sword from the bundle at his feet.

“To arms!” he cried, and the men-at-arms
reacted swiftly, and steel was drawn from scabbards everywhere.

They clashed in seconds.

The stranger foot soldiers, dressed in poor
motley rags and wearing no noticeable military colors, sought to
overpower, but the Chidair soldiers struck back fiercely. And, in
moments, enemy limbs were hacked off by the better-trained Chidair,
while the strangers wallowed on the ground.

The first of the three knights, disguised by
a dull battered helm and lowered visor, brandishing a heavy flanged
mace, made directly for Lord Beltain Chidair, recognizing him as
the leader—but it was a grave mistake.

Beltain leapt forward, despite his imperfect
physical condition. And before the attacking knight could bring
down his mace, he found himself pulled out of his saddle and onto
the ground, grappled down by the black knight, while his mount ran
wild. The two of them rolled, then Beltain was up first, and
pounded at him from above with his gauntled fist and the flat of
his great sword, then the pommel, in a thunder stroke—Percy noted
in those wild instants of hyperawareness—as though even in this
instance he wanted to grant a modicum of mercy.

“Surrender, or lose your limbs!” Beltain
cried hoarsely.

But the knight underneath him made no
answer.

And soon it became obvious something else
was not quite right.

For one thing, there was no
blood. . . . By this time in such a skirmish, the
snow would have been painted bright red. Instead, there was
nothing.

Indeed, as the Chidair men defended
themselves, their enemy did not bleed, and instead, they themselves
soon received gashes and cuts that discolored the snow.

The other two knights, seeing how easily
their comrade was felled, suddenly turned around, and retreated,
their horses laboriously riding up the same hillock they had
descended moments ago—all in silence.

The foot soldiers however were not so easily
driven off.

The girls were screaming. Marie cowered near
the cart while Niosta and Lizabette dove directly underneath it.
The Chidair soldiers offered them some protection and stood their
ground, defending the general area of the campsite and their own
horses.

“A sword! Someone, give me a sword,
now!
” Vlau Fiomarre exclaimed a few feet away, as abruptly
from behind the hedge another three drably clad attackers surfaced
and made directly for the Infanta and Percy.

Percy whirled around, and blinked, seeing
double again, just as she had minutes ago. Because instead of three
man-shapes, she saw
six
.

Three men and, flanking them, their three
death-shadows.

And then, as Percy glanced around the entire
clearing, she realized that not a single one of their attackers was
one of the living.

They were all
undead
.

“Beware! They are not alive, My Lord!
Dead!
They are all dead, all of them!” she cried in the
direction of the black knight, and he paused for an instant in his
struggle and glanced at her.

But Percy had turned away already, facing
the grisly carved-up face of a mortally wounded dead man inches
away, as he came for her with a long ugly hunting knife. Up-close,
the side of his skull was split open and old clotted blood had
dried like rust over his matted straw-hair. His eyes were glazed,
fixed in their frozen sockets, no longer quite human.

Before Vlau Fiomarre had an instant to
react, tearing off a large branch for the closest weapon at hand
and running toward them, the dead man reached for
her. . . .

Percy put her hand up in an involuntary
defensive gesture. But the moment her fingertips felt the pressure
of the dead man’s chest, the roiling darkness in her mind was back,
with a snap—a churning winter storm. Without pausing to think, she
reached for the shadow at his side, feeling its billowing ghostly
shape attaining tangible resilience . . . and she
pulled
with her mind, fiercely, in pure furious
instinct.

The shadow of death collapsed into a vapor
funnel, and was sucked into the dead man’s flesh.

He fell instantly, fingers losing the grip
on the knife. His body was an empty shell before it hit the
ground.

Percy stood above him, breathing deeply, her
head ringing with the cathedral tolling of bells.

But there was no time to stop and
consider.

There were two more men coming, and the
Infanta was right behind her, defenseless. . . .

Vlau had reached her in two strides, and he
engaged the first of the attackers, feinting with the thick branch
in one hand, and then striking with his fist.

The second man was Percy’s.

Rather, he did not know it yet. Because he
lunged at her, with a dull roar of creaking bellows that was his
voice. Instead of moving away, Percy took him in her embrace, and
with her left hand she grabbed his shadow.

It took less than a second. She
pulled
the two together, and again, the man’s entirely
lifeless body collapsed at her feet.

Breathing harshly, Percy then turned to
Vlau’s attacker. And while he was distracted with the marquis, she
touched the dead man from the back—lightly this time, not even
requiring a close embrace—and at the same time she took his shadow
of death, as though it were an obstreperous child, in one furious
hand, and she jerked it into the body, shoving it
inside
and
feeling it dissolve.

The third man fell with a sigh of broken
bellows, growing quiet and eternal.

“Who
are
you?”

Vlau Fiomarre stood at her side, looking in
dark wonder.

Percy took one side step, staggering,
because in that moment she felt herself abysmally drained of all
energy, and so terribly cold. “I am—” she began, then again went
silent, because vertigo made the whole world spin in a carousel of
winter sky and snow and black shrubbery. It occurred to her that it
was such an odd thing that she could barely remain upright.

Meanwhile, Claere Liguon was in the same
spot where she had been left, motionless, observing Percy’s every
move with her great stilled eyes. “No . . .” she
whispered, the moment Percy’s weary gaze rested on her. “Now that I
saw you do it, I don’t think I can die—just yet.”

“Oh, good . . .” Percy heard
herself speak through a curtain of rising white noise in her
temples, the sound of rushing blood. “Because I don’t think I can
do it yet again now, Highness . . .” she managed to
utter, then inhaled several times deeply to keep herself from
fainting.

The fighting behind them in the campsite had
drawn to a close. Now that they knew what they were dealing with,
the Chidair soldiers had overpowered the dead, by crudely divesting
them of limbs, or using netting. The few that still remained
upright were tied together and questioned by the black knight.

“Who are you? Who sent you to attack us?” he
spoke, looming above them like an angel of death.

A few of the dead men grinned back silently.
Others stared with vacant frozen eyes.

Beltain Chidair removed the helmet from the
silent fallen knight and revealed a dead man with an old head wound
that had damaged his face and jaw and apparently vocal chords,
which explained his inability to respond during the fight. And now
the dead knight merely rolled his eyes in pointless anger and made
gurgling sounds from his slit throat. He was of no use.

“Speak, or I will start cutting off your
limbs one by one,” pronounced Beltain wearily to the other
prisoners. “You will spend eternity, or however much time we have
left to us, as rotting stumps.
Headless
rotting stumps.”

Despite her own unnatural exhaustion, Percy
made her way toward them. “My Lord,” she said, raising her voice
for effect. “If you like, I can simply put them all to rest.” She
was on her last strength; she was bluffing, but no one else had to
know.

Beltain glanced at her, and even in her
exhaustion Percy felt an alarming inner lurch of emotion upon
meeting his clear-eyed gaze.

He frowned, for a moment misunderstanding
her intent, and then Vlau Fiomarre approached, and said, “Just
now—Three men lie stone-dead, over there . . .”

“What?
Oh.
” And Beltain
understood.

Everyone was glancing in the direction where
three corpses were sprawled near the edge of the shrubbery. The
Chidair soldiers knew, but their attackers had no notion of what
awaited them, of what had just happened to three of their
comrades.

“You,” said Beltain to one of the undead.
“You still have functional eyes, and you can turn your neck, can
you not? Stop grinning, look yonder, and tell me what you see.”

For a moment the dead man did nothing. And
then he craned his head slowly.

And he
saw
.

Something terrible came over his pale
lifeless face. “They are really
dead?
But—how?” he managed
to say, his lungs creaking.

“How? Death has a Champion, that’s how.
Death himself might be a lazy bastard shirking his Duty, but
apparently there is still a way for us to die in this world.”
Beltain drew closer, to stare at the dead man with a gaze of blue
steel. “Would you like to meet your Maker now? Make your choice,
man. You can either remain in this mortal world as you are, or we
send you directly to Hell. Rather,
she
sends you directly to
Hell while I watch. Oh, but Hell can wait—first, I’ll cut off a few
of your fingers and then your arms. Then, I’ll go a bit lower. So,
what will it be?”

The man spoke. He told them that the undead
have been gathering from all parts and heading north, flamed by a
rumor that the Duke of Chidair, known as Hoarfrost, was welcoming
them all with open arms. It was good to ride under the banner of
the Blue Duke, one of their own.

“Then why did you attack us, you fools?”
Beltain said. “Did you not see our colors? We are Chidair.”

“Yes, but you are still living,” the dead
soldier replied, his fixed eyes unblinking. “We no longer ride
together with your kind.”

“Why the hell not?”

In answer, the man paused, and his jaw moved
in a strange unnatural rictus, neither a grin nor a baring of the
teeth. “War,” he said. “War is coming.”

Chapter
5

D
uke Ian Chidair,
called Hoarfrost, strode through the long dark hallway on an upper
story of the Chidair Keep, slamming his beefy fist against the
antique, blackened wooden doors that he passed, until the timbers
sagged under each blow, and pulling down tapestries of his
ancestors.

“No son! No son of mine! I
will . . . find him . . . and kill
him!” he roared, taking ragged mechanical breaths between every few
words, for his lungs were dead, and his heart had long since ceased
beating and was frozen cold like a cut of meat.

“I have no son!” ranted Hoarfrost. “He is
dead to me, and when I find his carcass, I will make him deader
yet! First, I will break his neck, then dismember him for betraying
me!”

The Duke was a giant of a man—or rather, he
had once been a man, and now was but a giant
thing
, an
undead monster shaped like a man, with a barrel chest and a wildly
tangled briar-thicket of frozen dark hair and beard, covered with
leaves and twigs and bits of lake sludge. All this foul matter had
adhered to his body when he had fallen through the ice during the
battle on top of frozen Lake Merlait, right after he had received
his mortal wound.

Because it had happened on that same day
when Death stopped, the Duke suffered the horror of having to die
yet not die, drown yet not drown, wade underwater and then break
through the ice when he reached the shore, emerging a lifeless and
yet animated corpse. And the dirt and mud had since permeated him,
soaked into his hair and clothing, his blood-drenched hauberk and
chain mail, and the pale blue surcoat with the heraldic emblem of
his house—none of which he ever removed since the day of the battle
and his body’s death.

It was whispered all through the Keep that
the Duke was mad. None but a madman would rise up against his liege
the Queen of Lethe, and ultimately the Liguon Emperor of the Realm,
and take it upon himself to terrorize the countryside. He and his
equally dead soldiers, fallen in the battle, rode on endless
day-and-night patrols. They were out hunting all the young women
who were obeying the Royal Decree of the land and traveling north
in search of Death’s Keep to become Cobweb Brides.