Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

“Who are you?” Nightingale fought against a despair that buffeted him like a cold wind. “Oh, for the love of God, what do you monsters want?”

““Who am I? Just one of the hungry ones. One of the unforgiving.” It sat down again, making the wheelchair creak. “What do we want? Not to go quietly, as you would have us go — to disappear into the shadows of nonexistence and leave the rest of you to enjoy the light and warmth.” The thing lifted its knotted hands — Edward’s hands, as they had seemed such a short time ago — in a greedy gesture of seizure. “As you said, this is a war. We want what you have.” It laughed, and for the first time the voice sounded nothing at all like his godfather’s familiar tones. “And we are going take it from you. All of you.”

“I don’t think so. Because if you need bodies to survive here, then those bodies can be taken back from you…” And even as Nightingale spoke his gun flashed and roared and the thing in his godfather’s shape staggered and fell back against the wheelchair cushions, chin on chest. A moment later the so-familiar face came up again. Smiling.

“Jenkins,” it said. “If you would be so kind…”

Something knocked the gun from Nightingale’s hand and then an arm like an iron bar slammed against his neck. He fought but it was like being held by a full-grown gorilla. His struggles only allowed him to slide around enough in his captor’s grip to see Jenkins’ blank eyes and the huge hole in the side of the caretaker’s head crusted with bits of bone and dried tissue.

“I lied about giving him the night off,” said the pseudo-Edward. “The living get impatient, but my colleague who inhabits him now was perfectly willing to stand in the dark until I needed him.” Now Arvedson’s body stood again, brushing at its clothes; the hole Nightingale’s gunshot had made in its shirt was bloodless. “Bullets are a poor weapon against the risen dead, Nightingale,” it pointed out with no little satisfaction. “You could burn the body, I suppose, or literally pulverize it, and there would be nothing left for us to inhabit. But of course, you will not get the chance to tell anyone about that.”

“Bastards!” He struggled helplessly against the Jenkins-thing’s grip. “Even if you kill me, there are hundreds more like me out there. They’ll stop you!”

“We will meet them all, I’m sure,” said his godfather’s body. “You will introduce us — or at least the new resident of your corpse will. And one by one, we will remove them. The dead will live, with all the power of age and riches and secrecy, and the rest of your kind will be our uncomprehending cattle, left alive only to breed more bodies for us. Your driver was right, Mr. Nightingale — the storm door really is open now. And no power on this earth can shut it.”

Nightingale tried to say something else then, shout some last words of defiance, but the pressure on his neck was crushingly strong and the lights of the world — the lamp, the headlights passing in the street below, even the storm-shrouded stars beyond the window — had begun leaching away into utter darkness.

His last sight was of the cold, hungry things that had been hiding behind that darkness, hiding and waiting and hating the living for so long, as they hurried toward him to feed.

People in the village had been whispering for days about the two vagabonds in Squire’s Wood, but the boy Tobias was the first to speak to them.

Tobias was a somewhat wayward lad, and the fact that he should have been grazing his father’s sheep on the hill above the forest at that hour more or less assured the sheep in question would be wandering along the shady edges of the wood instead, with Tobias wandering right behind them.

It was not until he saw a drift of smoke twining like a gray scarf through the trees that the boy remembered that strangers had been seen in the wood. He felt a moment of fear: why would anyone live out of doors in the cold nights and flurries of autumn rain if they were God-fearing folk? Only robbers and dangerous madmen dwelt under the unsheltered sky. Everyone knew that. If he had been a fraction less headstrong, Tobias would have turned around then and hurried back to the hillside, perhaps even remembering to take his father’s sheep with him, but there was a part of him, a strong part, that hated not knowing things worse than anything. It was the part that had once caused him to pull the leg off a frog, just to find out what it would do. (It did very little, and died soon after with what Tobias felt guiltily certain was an accusatory look in its bulging eyes.) It was also the reason he had dented his father’s best scythe when he had used it to try to cut down a tree, and why he had dumped the contents of his mother’s precious sewing basket all over the ground — a search for knowledge that ended with Tobias spending all afternoon in the fading light on his hands and knees, locating every last needle and pin he had spilled. Once this rebel voice had even led him several miles out of the village, on a quest for the town of Eader’s Church, which he had heard was so big that the streets actually had names. His father and two other men had caught up to him an hour after sunset as he sat exhausted and hungry by the side of the road. He had got a whipping for it, of course, but for young Tobias whippings were part of the cost of doing business.

So now, instead of turning and leaving the woods and its perilous inhabitants behind (for the sake of his father’s livestock if nothing else) he followed the trail of smoke back to its source, a small cookfire in a clearing. A small man with a ratlike face was tending the flames, his wrinkles made so deep and dark by grime he looked like an apple-doll. His large companion, who sat on a stone beside the fire and did not look up even when Tobias stepped on a twig and made the little man jump, was so odd to look at that the boy could not help shivering. The large man’s head was shaved, albeit poorly in some places, and the skull beneath the skin bulged in places that it should not. His bony jaw hung slack, the tongue visible in the space between top and bottom teeth, and although he did not seem blind, the eyes in the deep sockets were dull as dirty stones.

If the big man was paying no attention, the little man was. He stared at Tobias like a dog trying to decide whether to bark or run.

“Your wood’s too wet,” the boy told him.

“What?”

“You’ll get mostly smoke and little fire from that. Do you want smoke?”

The small man frowned, but in dismay, not anger. “I want to cook this fish.” He had the sound of a southerner, the words stretched and misshapen. Tobias wondered why they couldn’t learn to speak properly.

He squinted at the man’s supper with the eye of an experienced angler. “It’s small.”

“It’s better than starving,” the man pointed out.

“Well, then, I’ll show you.” Tobias quickly found enough dry wood to rebuild the fire and within a short time the little man was cooking the fish over it on a long stick. His large companion still had not moved or spoken, had not even seemed to notice the newcomer in their camp.

“Thanks for your kindness,” the small man said. “I am Feliks. We are new to this.”

“My name’s Tobias,” the boy said, basking in the glow of his own helpfulness. “What does that mean, new?”

“We have been living somewhere there was food.” Feliks shrugged. “The food ran out.”

Tobias stared at the other man, who still gazed at nothing, only the slow movement of his chest behind his dark, travel-worn robe showing that he was something other than a statue. “What’s his name?”

Feliks hesitated for a moment. “Eli.” He said it in the southern way, the last syllable rising like a shorebird’s cry — Eh-lee. “He was my master, but he…something happened to him. He lost his wits.”