William King - Shadowblood

“Do you want to come with us or not?”

The man shook his head and the others seemed to take their cue from him. “With all due respect no, noble Terrarch. We have no desire to go West to Talorea.”

“Then we shall bid you good-day,” said Sardec.

“Be careful if you are heading into the Black Hills, sir. The dead are very numerous there and very savage, or so I have heard.”

“Thank you for the warning. We shall keep our eyes open.”

In the distance a bird sang. The sun peered through the clouds. Flowers bloomed and their scent filled the air. Sardec studied the land around him. It was lovely in its way, abandoned farmhouses set in the shadow of the rugged hills. It came to him then that this was not really the end of the world. Even if every sentient being in it died, plants would still grow, animals would still roam the woods. It would be a world empty of people but it would not die.

He felt more cheerful now. They had found what might prove to be a cure for the plague. If they could get that back to Talorea, they would all be heroes. He found that did not matter quite so much to him now as it once would have. Once he had lived for the idea of fame and glory. The events of the past few months had shown him quite how foolish that was. There were more important things to him now. Rena would live. The children would live. The surviving soldiers would live. He cared about these things. They were important to him. Far more important than the prospect of fame.

Another thought struck him. Rena noticed it and said, “What is it? What are you thinking?”

“It just occurred to me that the plague only affects human beings. It doesn’t affect plants or any other animal as far as I can tell. I was wondering why that was.”

She looked thoughtful and a little embarrassed as a person will when they are out of their depth. “I don’t know why that would be. I don’t know anything about magic. I don’t know anything about medicine.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “I find the older I get the less I know. It just interests me. I think you might have hit the nail on the head though. I think a combination of magic and medicine is at work here. I think someone designed this plague, created it to affect only human beings. And I think that that was a very wicked thing to do.”

“Who would do that?”

“I would like to say someone who was mad, someone with no sense of right or wrong, but I suspect it was done by someone with too much of a sense that they were right, with the certainty of it in fact. And I suspect it was done by a Terrarch like me.”

“If they did that, they were nothing like you.” She sounded very certain of that and he wanted to believe her.

A piercing whistle cut through the air. Weasel waved and pointed at the surrounding hills and Sardec saw immediately what was wrong. There were figures, human figures, moving along the brow of the hill paralleling them. He suspected that they were not really humans at all. He took the spyglass from his pocket and trained it on them. The figures leapt into view.

At first they looked like a crowd of ordinary people, but he could see that their clothes were tattered and rotten as was their flesh. It looked like they had found the dead people or rather the dead had found them.

He hoped the monsters had not seen them but was disappointed in this when they began to shamble down the hillside in pursuit of his small command. They came on slowly but inexorably, far too many to fight in this open ground. Fear seized Sardec’s heart. He gave the order for them all to run. The Barbarian seized up Lorraine. Pteor tugged his wife along. Toadface grabbed Alan by the hand and the whole small party fled along the mountain paths.

From the very first Rik did not like Askander. It had the air of a trap. It stank of dark sorcery, and the powerful nexus of energy swirling in the sky above the Imperial Palace was all too visible to his increasingly sensitive eyes.

He did not get the thrill he had always previously felt from arriving in a new city. He did not know the narrow streets of the human areas or the broad wide roads where the nobles dwelled. He felt vulnerable and alone despite his growing confidence in his new powers. The Empress’s secret police had a well-founded reputation for efficiency and he doubted that they had become any less so with a servant of the Shadow in charge.

He had practised speaking in the local dialect with Tamara and he thought he sounded passable but he knew there were many ways a native might be able to detect him as a counterfeit. It was just another way in which he was vulnerable.

Their first problem was to find a place to stay. According to Tamara, all Innkeepers were required to register their guests and report them to the secret police. A group of unknown nobles from out of town would attract too much scrutiny. And there was no way they could quarter themselves in her family mansion or with at the homes of any family friends. Doubtless all those places would be under close observation. They could be too easily exposed or betrayed.

According to her there were rough districts with empty houses but if a group of Terrarchs were spotted in those areas it would attract attention. They could disguise themselves as much as they liked but Asea and Tamara were still conspicuously Terrarchs.

They had discussed what to do in the approach to the city, and in the end had decided to abandon the coach and risk the abandoned houses. Tamara and Asea were muffled in padded jackets to make their outlines more like those of humans. Asea wore a high collared greatcoat and a broad-brimmed hat. Her hair was chopped short and her face smudged with soot and dirt. No one looking at her would think of the proud lady of the First.

Rik was surprised to see that she was in high spirits, taking the whole business in good parts, as if she were playing some game. She did not seem frightened at all, but then he had always known what a good actor she was.

Conspicuous as Rik felt, no one seemed to pay them undue attention as they made their way through the streets. Everyone seemed too wrapped up in their own fears and thoughts. All of the people looked hungry and wretched, not at all like the inhabitants of the capital of a nation that was conquering the world. The effects of the plague were being felt even here, and the hunger had come from a bad harvest.

Rik had no idea what became of the dead but he saw none of them wandering the street. Perhaps they were rounded up to join the army, or perhaps something else happened to them, or possibly some potent sorcery kept them from rising but he doubted that. There were too many horror-haunted faces all around. Something strange and dark and terrible was happening.

He could smell the salt tang of the sea now, and the air held that trace of moisture that he always associated with the coast. They trotted along beside a canal. Things floated in it, and green scum coated the water’s surface.

Sometimes he saw a drifting corpse, and that triggered those strange other memories that came from the Quan. He found himself feeling the urge to dive into the waters and swim bonelessly out to sea, and had to force himself to remember that he did not have the alien demon’s trick of being able to breathe water as well as air.

Other memories stirred within him, of drowning men and women killed while still in the water, and he had to force himself to face down fears that were not his own but yet were still part of him. It seemed the presence of the sea had brought back the submerged memories of the voices with redoubled force.

It was dark by the time Tamara had led them to the run down area by the docks, old buildings of wood and brick with smashed doors and boarded windows and a smell of rot about them. It took several attempts to find ones that were not already occupied by humans.