Pool of Radiance (34 page)

Looking at the fence now, Tarl wondered how he and the others could ever have thought it was part of the city fortress. “We were country clerics from Vaasa,” he whispered. “Just a dozen country clerics from Vaasa.”

Shal looked at him questioningly, but Tarl didn’t explain. Instead, he squeezed her hand once and then lifted his hammer and shield high before they walked tentatively through the gate. His hammer glowed, and he could feel his holy symbol heavy and cool against his chest as they entered. To look at Valhingen Graveyard today, it could be a park. Asters and black-eyed Susans waved their brightly colored blooms above the tall grasses that grew untended over the gravestones. Purple bougainvillea and other less showy vines covered the handful of mausoleums interspersed here and there within the confines of the walls. Though less than three weeks had passed since Tarl had last stood on these grounds, he saw no sign of his brothers. He said a silent prayer for each of them, hoping that their spirits had managed to escape this place before their bodies were savaged by crude flesh-eaters.

Ren was nowhere in sight, but Shal and Tarl didn’t have to go far before they realized that Ren’s stealth did not get him across the graveyard unnoticed. Through a swath of parted grasses, they could see scattered skeleton bones forming a veritable pathway along the fence-line of the graveyard.

They followed the fragments, each hoping secretly that Ren had dealt successfully with all the skeletal warriors remaining in that portion of the graveyard. The path of bones was replaced at one point by a path of decayed body parts, the gruesome fragments of several zombies. The pall over the place was palpable, and despite their silent mantras and meditations, both Tarl and Shal were strung taut as catgut on a fiddle, waiting for something to happen.

Tarl took each step as though it meant his life, striving for silence even though he was sure his medallion and magical hammer couldn’t go unnoticed in this place of death Shal followed suit, her Wand of Wonder raised before her. Cerulean was equally tense, stepping with the fluid, silent movements of a cat.

Tarl couldn’t help but think the vampire was taunting him with his silence, luring him and Shal ever closer to the heart of the graveyard before he unleashed every miserable creature under his control. One more step, he was sure, and the place would be alive with zombies, wraiths, and specters. The joke would be on him. He could picture the naked vampire, his bloodless skin draped over his emaciated frame. He could hear his skin-prickling voice, coaxing him closer. His sick, hateful laughter pounded against Tarl’s ears. No! Tarl raised one hand for Shal and Cerulean to stop. He could not let his fears or the silent persuasion of his foe get to him. He needed to pause a moment before going forward. Inhale the power of Tyr. Exhale the fear of Valhingen Graveyard. Inhale. Exhale. He touched his holy symbol and took another silent step, then another.

The tension shattered as a mutilated zombie bolted from the grass, sending clods of sod flying toward them. Instantly, responding completely on instinct, Tarl whipped his hammer hand forward with the full tension of a tightly wound spring packed behind it, decapitating the pitiful creature with the sheer force of his swing. A faint squeak came from Shal as she started at the sudden movement, and Cerulean’s entire coat jiggled for an instant as a jolt of fear charged through his body.

All three hesitated for a moment before going on. Tarl was once again caught up in the sensation that the horrors of the graveyard were being held back, stored up until he, Shal, Cerulean, and Ren, wherever he was, reached the point of no return—literally. Tarl prayed once more to Tyr and pushed ahead as before, moving with painstaking caution. Tarl approached the remnants of a wall that had long since turned to rubble. There were no more bones and no more dismembered body parts to follow. He could only assume that Ren had kept going in the same direction. He stepped gingerly onto the rubble and climbed over the wall as deftly and as quietly as he was able.

Shal and Cerulean were right behind him. It’ll be difficult for me to do this without slipping. Cerulean warned. Shal reached back to lead the big horse across, but it was she who slipped on the loose limestone fragments, sliding from the top of the rubble pile to the bottom, where her foot collided with the side of a granite mausoleum. Immediately the wooden door was flung open, slamming against the wall, and three horrible apparitions burst from the doorway.

“Wights!” yelled Tarl, charging forward to come to Shal’s defense.

Shal had never seen such creatures. Their long hair bristled with filth. Their faces were wild, like men turned beasts, with gaping canine mouths and glaring nocturnal eyes. Their arms were elongated, like an ape’s, and their gnarled hands bore claws long enough to inflict lethal damage. The wights separated right away, forcing Tarl and Shal and Cerulean to fight them one on one.

Tarl raised his shield against the wight nearest him. Talonlike claws flailed over and under his shield, and he found it all but impossible to get in a clean swing with his hammer. As fast as he was able to, he returned his hammer to his belt, smashed ahead with his shield, and did his best to splash holy water over the creature. It shrieked in pain and backed away, its flesh burning, but Tarl had not managed to hit any vital area, and much of the precious water went to waste. The creature charged again, and Tarl hurriedly uttered the words of a spell to raise the dead, the only thing he knew of that would stop a wight.

Shal backed up hurriedly, trying to keep enough distance between herself and the nearest wight so that she could utter an arcane command to activate the Wand of Wonder. As awkward as the creature appeared to be in the daylight, its big nocturnal eyes obviously pained by the sunlight, it charged forward, snarling and slavering and lashing out constantly with its yellow-taloned hands.

Just as the wight came near striking distance, Shal finished the incantation for the wand. Instantly flowers sprouted where the wight’s claws had been—clean, white daisies with buttery yellow centers.

The wight swiped at Shal with its hands, fully expecting to rake her eyes from her face with one stroke and her bowels from her abdomen with the next. Instead daisies lightly brushed Shal’s face and stomach, and the creature recoiled in horror. Shal might actually have laughed if it were not for the wight’s furious response. Without wasting another second, it rushed at Shal with its great maw open like a mad dog. Shal couldn’t move out of its way fast enough. She just barely had time to blurt a command to activate the Wand of Wonder again. Immediately, so fast that Shal didn’t even see it happen, the wight’s flesh vanished, and its skeleton crashed against her body. The impact sent her sprawling backward, and she scrambled frantically to get out from under the pile of bones, but the skeleton wasn’t animated; the wight was no longer.

Cerulean was glowing purple with fury and magic. Three times he reared and stomped on the grotesque creature in front of him, and three times it managed to claw the flesh of his forelegs as his hooves came down. The magical nature of his attack protected Cerulean from the wight’s life-sapping force but not from the pain of the wounds.

Each time the wight’s claws combed Cerulean’s flesh, blood ran freely, and at the same time, brilliant violet sparks flew, singeing the wight and causing it to cry out in a ghastly screech. It wasn’t until Cerulean reared for the fourth time that he caught the wight square on the head and smashed the creature’s brains into the ground.

Tarl’s spell worked instantly. The spirit of the dead, trapped in the wight, burst from the creature’s chest like a great puff of steam. The spirit was free at last, and the wight’s hideous body crumpled in front of Tarl like a discarded shirt.

The three would have preferred to take a minute or two to recover. Tarl might even have had the opportunity to notice the blood trickling down Cerulean’s legs and do something about it. But the moment of silence following their small victory was broken by the muffled sound of shouts and chants. The voices were eerie, distant, and inhuman, painful and chilling to listen to. They also seemed to have no source. There were no people, no humanoids, no undead visible. Cerulean’s ears pricked up, and the horse whinnied and stepped forward past the vault that had concealed the wights. He stopped in front of a small wooden stake that marked a fairly large open area, when his coat began to glow again, this time a soft amethyst.

A trapdoor, Cerulean advised Shal, marked by Ren’s blood. I can smell it.

“No!” Shal gasped the word.

It’s fresh, Cerulean assured her. Very fresh. He may yet be alive.

“What is it?” whispered Tarl.

Shal could see the blood herself as she got closer, and she pointed it out to Tarl. “Ren’s down there, underground.”

There was no more to say. Carefully they removed the sod and canvas, which hid a narrow wooden stairway. The stairs were steep, almost ladderlike, and they led down into darkness. With no coaxing from Shal, Cerulean entered the Cloth of Many Pockets. Tarl clasped his holy symbol and started down the stairs. He whispered a prayer as he descended, a selfish wish that the bottom of the stairs would be unguarded. He met no guards. Yet, even had any been present, he wouldn’t have been able to see them, for he was in total darkness. He reached up to help Shal through the entry, and then they stood together in the blackness. Shal didn’t want to reveal their presence by using her light wand if she didn’t have to, so they waited for their eyes to adjust and find some source of light, however small.

They were guided only by the sound of voices, the same strange chanting and shouting they had heard from above, but it was much closer now. A door, the only one they came upon in the dark, opened to a huge underground cavern. There seemed to be precious little light there, as well, but Tarl and Shal could make out figures—scores of them—in the dim, blue, twilightlike rays of light that barely illuminated the room.

The rays were fractured as they were blocked by zombies, absorbed by the blackness of the wraiths, captured and held in the eerie cloudlike presences of the specters, or fragmented by the bones of skeletons. The effect was the surreal look of a nightmare of the kind in which the haunted dreamer runs and runs through bluish mists and suddenly plummets to terrified wakefulness. Smells of mildew, dust, decay, and death made the dank underground air almost unbreathable, and the devilish chanting of the scores of undead set Shal’s and Tarl’s teeth on edge.

Suddenly a murmur started rippling from the back of the room, quickly spreading to the front. Creatures began to stir and then turned around in waves, causing the bizarre cold, blue light to fracture in new directions, revealing the undead in the cavern in even more horrible detail. Nausea clutched Tarl’s stomach, and he was overwhelmed by unadulterated terror. He knew that Shal’s presence, let alone his own, could not be a secret to these creatures.

Suddenly the light shifted again as the roomful of graveyard horrors shifted and parted, leaving an aisle between the two human intruders and the front of the room. At the far end of the aisle stood the vampire. Tarl sensed as much as saw him. “Very goooood,” Tarl heard the creature say, and its spooky, condescending voice made his flesh crawl. The vampire lifted the source of the blue light high into the air. Tarl knew before he ever saw it that it was the holy Hammer of Tyr, but its power and its light had been subverted. Half the hammer radiated blackness, while the blue light that remained was barely a reminder of what it once had been. Tarl shuddered as another wave of nausea and fear passed through his body.

The vampire turned toward Tarl and Shal but didn’t acknowledge them in any way. He merely twisted the hammer so its dim light shone on the space directly in front of himself. Shal’s gut twisted with the hammer when she saw the figure illuminated by the light.

“Ren!” The name choked in Shal’s throat as she saw her friend, prostrate before the gruesome creature of Tarl’s nightmares. Even from where she and Tarl stood at the opposite end of the room, they could tell that Ren’s clothing and armor were in tatters and that his blood was spilling on the ground.

“Welcoooome, huuumans,” said the vampire, and then he laughed the sick, uncontrolled cackle of a maniac amused by his own unthinkable deeds. An uncountable number of bony fingers suddenly began prodding Tarl and Shal, nudging and pushing them forward. Tarl fought the gut-wrenching sensation that there was no way out of this pit now that they were inside. He tried desperately to concentrate on the sacred hammer, tried to visualize how and when he could snatch it from the hands of the blasphemous creature at the front of the room.

When more skeletal fingers touched Shal, she incanted the words to a spell and began touching every bony hand, wrist, or arm with which she could make contact. Electricity surged from her hands, splintering and shattering every skeletal arm she grabbed, and she charged forward, trying to reach Ren. Before the skeletons could regroup, she cast another spell, and frigid wind blasted through the room as sheet upon sheet of sleet showered down on almost half of the room. The undead caught in the storm were blinded by it, and Shal could hear the age-old elbows and hips of countless skeletons shattering as they lost their footing and slipped on the ice-coated limestone. Zombies and wraiths shrieked and swore as well, as they, too, slipped and fell on the treacherous coating of ice.

Shal plunged forward through a break in the bodies and was almost to Ren when dozens more undead stepped over their fallen counterparts and pressed closer to her and to Tarl, who had followed close behind. The skeletons were no longer prodding and poking gently. Now swords and other weapons glimmered in the dull light.

Tarl lashed out with his hammer, slamming at every creature within his reach, trying to create an opening so he and Shal could get through. When he managed to find some room to spare, he raised his holy symbol. “Leave us, undead vermin!” he shouted. “In the name of Tyr, leave us!” A blue light flashed. Creatures that looked at it dropped to the ground, screaming.