Joseph Lewis: Wren the Fox Witch

Wren stared at the man.

Buried wrong?

Wren wanted to ask him more, but there was no time. The twenty corpses in the lane were less than a hundred paces away and moving faster than before. She hurled her first stone, smashing in a blue woman’s knee and sending her sprawling on the ground, with two others falling over her.

“That’s no good,” the old sailor said, his voice rising above the groaning of the corpses. “You’ve got to bash in the heads!” And the men charged forward, swinging their bricks at their enemies’ faces. Skull after frozen skull cracked and caved and shattered, and the walking dead began to fall. If a man lost his brick, he would resort to grabbing one of the blue corpses, hurling it to the ground, and stomping its head with his heavy boots. And as the bodies piled up, the men shuffled back, leaving the frozen limbs as a barrier across the lane. Still the other corpses came.

Wren locked eyes with one of them, a dead woman maybe thirty winters old with ice shining in her ragged hair, a swath of glistening blue flesh on one side of her face and a desiccated patch of black skin on the other side. Her blue eye had frozen solid, no longer able to blink or move, and the woman had to turn her head stiffly to see. Her black eye was lost in the shadows on her face.

Nine hells! Thora!

The dead Yslander woman staggered over the fallen bodies, her clawing black fingers reaching out for Wren, and between her blue lips a tiny black tongue poked out of her mouth, a tongue shriveled and dried as a dead twig, and just as useless. The only sounds that came from her mouth were unintelligible moans, terrible gasping moans that dragged on and on between thin, wheezy breaths.

Wren blinked, suddenly realizing that the townsmen were all busy with the other corpses and there was no one between her and Thora. She loaded her sling from the small pouch of stones on her belt, and then Wren hurled a shot at the blue and black face before her. The black side of Thora’s face crunched inward as the stone glanced off, but the corpse merely stumbled as it charged at the girl.

Woden, if I die here I’ll never talk to you again, you lazy excuse for a god!

Wren thrust her hand out and shoved the aether forward, blasting the dead woman and everyone else in the road with a rolling tide of white mist. Thora flew back onto the other bodies, and all of the men were thrown forward onto the last few walking dead. But the men kept their footing, and were soon bashing and kicking the remaining corpses into silent oblivion.

But the blue and black corpse from Ysland was still moving, still struggling to sit up, still reaching out with her cold black fingers. With a lump in her throat and a few hot tears in the corners of her eyes, Wren darted forward, grabbed one of the bricks from the ground, and smashed the corpse in the face. Thora collapsed and lay still.

Wren backed away, leaving the brick were it had fallen so it would cover the face at least a little bit. The sailors and fishers all backed away from the bodies with her, all huffing and sweating and muttering to themselves. But they were all alive, and all unharmed except for a few scrapes and bruises.

When the pounding in her chest had faded, Wren said, “Will they rise again?”

“Naw.” The old sailor shook his head. “Not with the heads all bashed in. There, watch.” He pointed at the bodies.

Wren turned to look, and through the drifting aether she saw the pale shades of the dead men and women stand up out of their bodies, glance around blankly, and then fade into the darkness. Thora too emerged from her corpse and hesitated, gazing at Wren with wide, sad eyes, and then she vanished.

They’re gone. Their souls are all gone now. It’s over.

“See?” the sailor said. “Right as rain now.”

“But what’s causing it?” Wren asked.

The sailor shrugged. “Pacts with the devil? Some sort of curse? Who knows?” And the men headed back down the lane to the little beer hall overlooking the harbor.

Wren followed them. “And the bodies?”

“We’ll burn them tomorrow. No sense trying now. It’s too cold, and they’re all frozen,” the old sailor said as he went back inside.

Wren lingered in the street, alone in the dark, listening to the wind whistling around the roofs and chimneys, listening to the gentle rocking of the fishing boats just a stone’s throw away on the dark waves. Omar sauntered slowly up the lane from the water’s edge and stood beside her. “I have a theory.”

“They barely even care,” Wren said, still staring at the sea. “They fought a band of dead people in the street, bashed in people’s faces with bricks, and they just went back to their drinks like nothing happened.”

Omar grinned. “Some people adjust to awful things better than others.”

“What sort of people?”

“People who are used to awful things happening to them.”

Wren nodded slowly.

“This is Vlachia,” Omar said. “It’s a cold, hard place. In times of war, the princes fight with Raska and Rus and Hellas for scraps of gold, a handful of women, or a herd of cattle. Nothing more. In times of peace, the governors fight with each other for even less. But the farmers do fairly well, and the fishers do fairly well. The wine here is excellent. And when the wine isn’t enough to warm their bones, there is always the Church of Constantia to soothe their souls.”

“Church? You mean the gods?”

“Not gods. God. Singular.”

“Oh.” Wren pouted. “What’s his name?”

“God. Just, God.”

“If you only have one god, does that mean he doesn’t have a family?”

Omar sighed. “According to the Constantian and Roman Churches, he does. But they’re wrong about that, of course. The Mazdan Temple has the truth of it.”

“Oh.”

So many things to learn still.

Wren wrapped her sling around her wrist. “What’s your theory?”

“Hm?”

“About the walking dead,” she prodded. “You said you had a theory.”

“Oh, that.” Omar nodded. “Well, you know that when most people die, their souls just rest there in their bodies or their ashes, just sort of sleeping. And even if they do wake up, it takes some effort and some aether for them to move about as ghosts.”

“Right.”

“And your aether-craft allows you to use the aether to move anything with a soul.”

“Right.”

“So it works both ways,” Omar said. “You can use the aether to move a ghost, and a ghost can move the aether too.”

“But aether is just a mist. It can’t move anything at all. It just makes images of dead people.”

“Ah.” Omar smiled mysteriously. “But what if the aether wasn’t a mist? It evaporates in the sunlight, in the heat, but it also thickens in the dark and the cold. What if the aether froze solid? What if the aether in a corpse’s dead blood froze solid?”

Wren’s eyes widened. “Then the ghost could move the frozen aether crystals, they could move their own dead body like a puppet!” She recoiled. “Ew!”

“Ew indeed, little one, ew indeed.” Omar nodded sagely. “These corpses are buried in the permafrost, their bodies well-preserved in the cold, their blood frozen solid within hours of dying. And then, when their souls wake up, instead of just carrying their faces and voices out into the aether mist, they take their own dead bodies with them out into the world.”

Wren shuddered. “So they might not even realize they’re dead?”

“Oh, I think they do. After all, they all have to dig and crawl their way out of their own graves. Imagine falling asleep in your own bed, and then waking up in your own grave, digging up through the frozen earth, and staggering up into a graveyard on frozen, dead legs, looking down at your own frostbitten and desiccated fingers, unable to speak with your shriveled up tongue. It’s enough to drive you mad, don’t you think? And the fresh ones, like Leif, might even think they’re still alive, just wounded or sick.”