A Thief in the Night

chapter Thirty-six

“Do you hear any more of them?” Mörget asked, when they’d all had a chance to catch their breath.

Croy shook his head and went back to tending Cythera’s hands. She clenched and opened them stiffly as if they pained her greatly, letting out a little gasp with each motion. The skin under the tattoos was red and irritated. He blew on them and then rubbed them briskly, surprised to find them still ice cold.

She favored him with a smile. “They’re already warming up again.”

“I hate to see you suffer, even for a moment,” Croy said, and delighted in the way her face lit up. “Tell me—how did you do that? I thought you knew only a few simple magics, but you worked a little miracle there.”

She shrugged her slim shoulders. “It occurred to me that a revenant is, in essence, a walking curse. There is no curse I cannot absorb with my gift.” She laughed, a little. “It was worth the attempt, anyway. I did not expect it would hurt so much, though. I could feel the thing’s hatred when I touched it. It despises all life—wants nothing but to destroy us and all our kind. They would never have stopped if we hadn’t fought them off. That kind of retributive magic is dangerous stuff.”

“Will you be all right?”

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against his chest. “I think so. But Croy, this worries me. The kind of magic I felt there—it’s not natural.”

“There can be nothing natural about the dead coming back to life,” Mörget said. “Death is my mother, and I know her ways. I’ve looked into the eyes of many men as they perished, and—”

“Please,” Cythera said, interrupting him. “Let me finish. The magic I touched wasn’t human magic. Not witchcraft, or sorcery.”

Croy frowned. “But isn’t that to be expected? They’re revenants. We all know the old stories about such. It takes no spell to call forth a revenant. When a man—or an elf, presumably—dies as the cause of gross injustice, sometimes his soul refuses to depart this world. It reinvests its mortal form, and though it cannot stop the inevitable decay of the flesh, it can grant some semblance of life, for just long enough to claim vengeance.”

Cythera nodded. “Aye, we know the story. Yet I always thought it was just that. A story. It occurred to me the first time I heard it that if every man who ever died by foul play came back as a revenant, the world would be choked with them by now. No, I don’t think those were simple spirits of justice we faced. Or rather, it was not the circumstances of their death that brought them back. I’m certain that magic had some part in it. But that only raises another question. Who cast the spell?”

“Questions that perhaps will be answered in the fullness of time,” Croy said.

“But perhaps we’ve gained one answer,” Malden pointed out. “We know someone tended the trap we found at the first doorway. Now we know who it was.”

“Are you sure?” Slag asked. “They didn’t seem like the mechanical types, if you ask me.”

“I’m certain,” Malden said. “We knew there was something active down here. Something that wished us ill. Now we’ve found it, and overcome it. We should find no more resistance after this, I think.”

Croy wished he shared the thief’s optimism. “I’m just glad we all survived, and that we’re safe. We can rest now, I think, and—”

He stopped speaking then, because he could have sworn he heard something.

Something moving, out in the dark.

Again.

“There. And there,” Slag said. The dwarf pointed outward, into the darkness. He turned about on one heel and pointed in another direction. “And over there. More of them.”

Croy froze in place and tried not to breathe. He listened, hard. In a moment there was no denying it. More revenants were approaching.

A vast horde of them.

Croy could hear their clumsy feet slapping against the cobblestones, their weapons dragging behind them. The occasional scream of a tortured soul split the dark. Long before he could see them, he could hear them.

And then the first of them came into the light. Some were mutilated beyond recognition, with limbs hanging by shreds of muscle, or missing entire body parts. Some wore armor that had already been hacked to bits centuries ago. Others wore no armor at all, but only robes and cloaks and tunics that had rotted away to bare threads.

Their faces were twisted, grotesque, withered to parody. A clot of greasy hair spilled down over an empty eye socket. A pointed ear gnawed on by rats stuck up from an otherwise bare skull. Noses were missing or had decayed to pustulant blobs of flesh. Teeth stuck out of battered jaws in random directions. Time and death had not been kind to the army that now approached.

That army did not care about its appearance. Croy felt like he knew their inner thoughts: they had only one goal, one desire, which was long-frustrated revenge. Their ancient enemy, the humans (and one hated dwarf, betrayer of their people) had come into their resting place and disturbed the silence. The intruders must be destroyed.

How long had they been down here, lying motionless on the cold cobbles, waiting for the chance to enact their terrible rage? How many years had passed since they died here—abandoned, starving, with no light even to show them each other’s faces?

The dark air around Croy seemed to pulsate with their hatred. As if it were a demon itself, ready to swallow them all as soon as their light flickered out. Of course, the revenants would get them first.

There were hundreds of revenants. Perhaps thousands. In the dim light there was no way to count them all.

And no chance, whatsoever, of standing against them.

Croy looked down at Ghostcutter in his hand. It was a good weapon, and had served him well more times than he could count. Yet he knew it was no match for an undead army.

“We need to get out of here,” Malden said. The thief held Acidtongue like a talisman, like it would protect him somehow. It dripped its caustic bounty to fall, hissing and useless, on the cobbles.

Mörget studied the serried ranks before them, then turned to face Cythera. “You,” he said. “Witch! Do something.”

She shook her head. “I’m no witch. I’m just a witch’s daughter. I know a few simple tricks, but—”

“Then try them now!” Mörget commanded.

Cythera scowled at him. Then she vanished into thin air.

“Ah,” the barbarian said. “Not what I had in mind.”

Croy sighed. They had come so far. There was no denying they were outmatched now, though.

“Mörget,” he said, “I think it’s time to retreat.”

“There’s no such word in my language,” the barbarian told him. Then he shrugged. “Luckily we are speaking yours. But where shall we go?”

“We’ll hack a path through them, get back to the barricade room. Find any way we can to slow them down, then leave. Reseal the Vincularium. Find some other way to slay your demon, at some later date.”

“A meritorious plan. I see no error in it, save one.”

Croy frowned. “You don’t think we can carve our way through them?”

“Not all of them.”

Croy nodded. He’d thought of that himself. But he could hardly surrender. The revenants would not take them prisoner. They would offer no quarter, no matter how hard the fight went for them. They would slay him and his companions without remorse and then return to their graves and sleep a righteous sleep. “We have to at least try. Better to die trying to save one’s life than lay down weapons and commit suicide.”

“Oh, I heartily agree,” Mörget said. He dropped his axe to clatter on the floor. Croy stared at the weapon, then back at the barbarian. “Fear not, little knight. I’m merely freeing up my hands.” He drew Dawnbringer then, the length of iron singing as it pulled free of its scabbard. “I need my best tool for this task.”