“Keeping people out?” Briar asked.
I frowned. I could feel the ward, but there was too much assaulting my senses. I couldn’t isolate it enough to dissect what it did. Which meant I needed to get farther from Briar . . . and closer to whatever was growling in the clearing.
I really didn’t want to do that.
“Well?” Briar asked, sounding impatient.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said between clenched teeth. “I’m having trouble separating it from all the magic you’re carrying.”
The smile she flashed me had a lot of teeth but wasn’t exactly friendly. “Then you stay here and work on it. I’ll run my own tests.”
She pulled several charms as well as a spellchecker wand out of her pockets and crept forward. The farther she crept away, the easier it became to distinguish the signatures of her magics from the ward surrounding the clearing. I could have cracked my shields and looked at the actual magic, but with all the grave essence pouring out of the clearing, I didn’t want to give it a single chink in my shields to try to bust through. It didn’t help that my own wyrd ability was battering the inside of the shields, just as anxious to get out as the grave was to get in. So I focused on my ability to sense magic, feeling out the ward.
Wards were specialized magic. Recognizing that something was warded was easy, but figuring out exactly what a ward was designed to do . . . That was much trickier. Most spells were easy to distinguish, kind of like a rose is instantly identifiable and very different from a daisy. But wards were individual while also being only a slight variation from one to another. Figuring out exactly what a ward would do when tripped was about as simple as searching for one particular daisy in an acre of daisies. I was a decent sensitive, but I wasn’t that good.
“It will definitely warn whoever cast it when someone crosses the perimeter,” I said, creeping up to where Briar crouched just outside the edge of the ward. “But I don’t think crossing it will trigger any aggressive magical attacks.” At least not by the ward. We still didn’t know exactly what was beyond it. Through the brush I could make out several very large shapes moving in the clearing, but we couldn’t get close enough to get a good look without crossing the ward.
Briar nodded, gazing down at the tools in her palm. “I’m picking up a lot of magic, but nothing is popping as malicious.” She pocketed the charms. “So I guess it’s time to go in there.”
I blinked at her. “Did you not hear when I said the person who cast the ward will definitely know when we cross it? Because that part of the spell I can clearly sense.”
“Which is perfect. I don’t have to hunt someone who comes to me.” Briar flashed another one of those toothy but not pleasant smiles, and then lifting her crossbow, she stepped into the ward.
I felt the sizzle of magic as the ward reacted to her presence, but whatever else the ward did, it didn’t stop her from creeping forward to the edge of the clearing. I stared after her, unsure what to do. Briar made up my mind for me.
“Craft, get over here,” she hissed in a loud whisper without ever turning away from whatever was in the clearing.
I sighed, tightened my grip on the dagger, and stepped into the ward. Briar hadn’t even paused as she passed through it, but the magic in it tugged at me, forming not a solid wall, but certainly resistance that I had to push through. It felt like when I passed through a cemetery gate, which raised the question, was the ward meant to keep dead things inside, or soul collectors out?
I was neither. As a planeweaver, I was a nexus in which the planes merged, including the land of the dead and the crystal-like plane the collectors inhabited, so I could feel the resistance of the wards, but they didn’t stop me. The sick feeling twisting in my gut squeezed tighter, though.
It took several moments for my eyes to adjust to the light, and once they did, I almost wished they hadn’t. The clearing wasn’t that large, only about the size of an Olympic swimming pool, but the creatures inside made it look even smaller.
There were four—no, five—creatures milling about the clearing. All were different sizes, different species. Most I couldn’t have named. All were dead.
The largest was slightly bigger than a horse, and shaped similarly except that instead of hooves he had leathery splayed toes with massive talons at the ends of his legs and scales instead of fur. He also had two large buzzards sitting on his back, dipping their beaks into a massive wound in his side through which I could clearly see white rib bone. The creature whipped its head around, gnashing at the buzzards with needle-pointed teeth. They fluttered their wings, backing away, but the second the creature turned, the bolder vulture dipped his head into the wound again, dragging out a long gray string of intestines. I looked away, my gorge rising.
The smallest creature was about the size of a German shepherd, but it was covered with feathers and had a snout that ended in a beak the color of fresh blood. It dragged one of its back legs behind it as it prowled the edge of the clearing. For a moment, its cloudy eyes fell on the spot where Briar and I crouched, and I tensed, lifting my dagger. But its gaze slid on past us, and the creature kept walking.
Briar’s charms. Okay, now I was thankful she kept them on more or less all the time, and that I could hide inside them as well.
The three creatures between the two extremes in size were more identifiable. One was a large black bear who’d lost so much fur and flesh on its face that skull was visible in several spots. The next was a gray wolf, who looked almost normal aside from clouded-over eyes. The last was built like a jungle cat with wings. Patches of fur still remained on parts of his body, but much of his flesh looked like a festering blister, glistening and raw. The wings had fared slightly better, though while most of the blue-tinged feathers were accounted for, they looked dirty and bent.
Bones and half-decayed carcasses littered the clearing, but those at least were still. True dead. Then there were the ghosts. So many ghosts. Not human ghosts, though. They were animal ghosts. From small mice and shrews to rabbits and even a few foxes, the ghosts scurried around the clearing, avoiding the walking dead creatures. I couldn’t imagine why the ghosts weren’t scattering, why they would gather in large groups in a clearing, until I considered the ward. It had felt like passing through a cemetery gate. In the same way, it must have kept the dead trapped in the clearing—both the walking dead and the ghosts.
Most of the walking dead ignored the ghosts, but as I watched, the largest dead creature’s head shot downward, vicious teeth closing around the ghost of a small hare. The creature tilted its head back and swallowed the small ghost in a single movement.