Joseph Lewis: Wren the Fox Witch

Duvec stew, sarma wraps, pilaf rice, and lamb kebabs.

The names amused her, but the smells soon had her mouth watering and when they stepped inside the little beer hall down by the water, a warm fog of roasted beef and alcoholic sauces wrapped around her senses and led her blissfully to her seat.

“Should we tell them?” Wren asked quietly. “Should we tell these people what we saw out there?”

“Not yet,” Omar said. “Let’s get a sense of the place first, and see what we see.”

They ate in near silence, surrounded by unmarried fishermen and sailors who had no one to feed them, or no home to go home to, or more money than sense. The fire crackled merrily, the men talked quietly, and as her stomach grew fuller, Wren felt a lovely warm blanket wrapped around her belly and beer-addled brain. She leaned back in her seat and stared at the fire, and wondered what her friends in Ysland were doing that night.

A soft thump fell upon the door, and a few men glanced up, but the door did not open.

The door thumped again, a bit harder and sharper, and the iron handle rattled against the frame. The man behind the bar, a slender whip of a fellow with a small black mustache, sighed and came around the bar, and opened the door, saying, “It’s not locked. You just…”

Wren looked up from the fire to see why the man had not finished his sentence, and she saw a dark figure standing just outside in the road. Then she heard the blood dripping on the ground, and she saw the barkeep slump to the floor. A bloody sword entered the room, followed by a one-armed man with an uneven gait.

“Leif!” Omar stood up, knocking his chair over.

Wren stood up beside him as the sudden flush of adrenaline brought her senses back into focus. Leif was standing just inside the door, his sword raised, but it was not the Leif Blackmane that she remembered. This man was pale beyond life, as white as new-fallen snow, but his face and hand were patched and veined in blue and black, and icy crystals glistened around his eyes and in his long black hair. He looked at her, and then he looked at the fire in the hearth, and he shuffled back out into the road, disappearing into the shadows.

Two men knelt by the dead barkeep, one sidled over to the abandoned bar, and the rest were half-rising from their seats with grim looks on their faces and supper knives in their fists.

“Everyone, stay here,” Omar said, his hand wrapped tightly around the grip of his seireiken. “Wren, hurry.”

They jogged out the door into the road where a light snow was falling quietly on the seaside town, and they spotted Leif walking stiffly away down the road toward the water. Wren followed Omar as he drew his bright sword and suddenly the narrow lane was as bright as noon in summer, and the one-armed man turned to face them.

Wren gasped.

He’s dead.

Leif’s throat was gone, his Adam’s apple torn out, leaving a ragged circle of blackened flesh between his collarbones and his jaw. The skin of his right cheek had also been ripped away to reveal his crooked teeth and black-veined gums in a permanent grinning rictus. His mouth moved, and a guttural moaning and grunting echoed out of the hole where his throat should have been.

Omar raised his sword, but Wren raised her hand a little faster and hurled a wall of swirling white aether at the walking corpse. Leif staggered back, tripped, and fell on the icy stone walkway that led down into the water where a dozen small fishing boats rested on the beach.

“What’s going on?” Wren asked softly as they both edged forward. “I know he’s not alive, but how did he turn into one of them? It has to be another soul-plague.”

“It could be.” Omar nodded. “But I have another theory.”

The half-frozen remains of Leif Blackmane slowly rose to his feet, the broad Yslander sword still in his hand. He pointed the blade at them, grunting from his chest. Another sound caught her attention, and Wren glanced back up the lane to see the beer hall patrons standing in the road, staring down at her. But then they turned and pointed to something else in the opposite direction, something Wren couldn’t see. “I think we have a problem.”

“Hardly,” Omar said. “He can barely walk properly. He’s no threat to us, even with that oversized pig sticker.” The Aegyptian marched forward and slashed the Yslander sword aside. The blazing heat of the seireiken burned through the northern steel, and the pointed end of Leif’s sword flew off into the darkness to clatter on the pebbled beach.

“I don’t mean him,” Wren said, still peering up the lane at the men.

“One problem at a time, please.” Omar twirled his bright sword lightly at his side and slipped it back into its scabbard, dousing its light. He paused to set his feet, bend his knees, straighten his back, and rest his palm on the butt of his seireiken. Leif threw down his broken sword and growled from the hole in his neck, and then lurched forward, reached out with his one clutching, grasping hand.

Omar drew his sword.

The light flashed again, bright as day, and just as quickly vanished back into its clay-lined sheathe. Wren blinked to clear her eyes. The harsh glare of the seireiken was always too much for her sensitive fox eyes, and it left bright orange and blue afterimages writhing across her vision. But when she could see again, she saw Leif lying still on the ground, his head resting beside his arm. The severed neck smoked faintly in the darkness.

Omar gestured to the body. “There, you see? A flawless draw. Wherever Leif’s miserable soul is now, it isn’t in my blade.”

“My compliments to your samurai instructor,” Wren said, remembering the ghost of the warrior she had met once when Omar had allowed her to hold his seireiken. It was the shade of the samurai, Ito Daisuke, who guided Omar’s hand in combat. “But we have another problem.” She pointed back up the lane to the men and the shambling shadows beyond them.

“Ah.” Omar nodded. “Good. You go help them. I’m going to take a look at our dead friend here and see if I can figure out why he didn’t stay dead in Targoviste.”

She stared at him. “Me? Alone?”

He merely waved her away as he knelt beside the corpse.

Frowning, Wren unwound her sling from her wrist and jogged up the lane toward the half dozen men standing just outside the beer hall. Some of them still clutched their glasses in their hands, and none of them had any weapons. She said, “Everyone, get back inside! It isn’t safe here.”

But they merely shrugged and set their glasses down on the ledge of the nearest window. One of them muttered, “We know.”

The sailors and fishers yanked up a few loose bricks from the roadbed, and one man cracked a long icicle from the roof of the beer hall, and one man simply rolled up his sleeves.

Wren glanced from one grim face to another as she set a small round stone in her sling. “You’ve seen them before? You know about them?”

The man with the icicle nodded. “The first ones wandered into town about two months ago. Don’t worry, girl. We’ll send them back where they came from.”

Wren looked up the road again and saw nearly twenty of the blue men and women drawing near. They moved too stiffly to run, but they were trotting and jogging at a fair pace, their clumsy feet crunching on the snow and ice.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Wren asked the men. “Do you know what caused it?”

“Naw, never seen anything like this before,” an old sailor muttered. “But once you see one varcolac or strigoi, you’ve seen them all. Demons. Skinwalkers. Blood-drinkers. Flesh-eaters. Sinners in league with the devil, every one of them. But that’s country folk, for you. Always burying their dead, and doing it wrong to boot. And here’s the fruit of their foolishness. The walking dead.”