Кейт Новак - Finder's Bane

Jas turned from the bluff and strode back to the campsite.

“You want to shout your question again?” the winged woman growled softly, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “I don’t think they heard you back at the Flaming Tower.”

“Where is he?” Joel hissed.

“He walked down into the brush,” she answered, tossing her head in the direction of the bushes they’d crawled through to reach the top of the bluff.

“You know he was thinking of trying to lead Bear off our track. How could you let him leave? How could you be so selfish?” he demanded accusingly.

“It was just a call of nature,” Jas said, exasperated with the bard’s anxiety. “He went down there only a few minutes ago. If he had been gone much longer, I would have wakened you.”

Joel huffed. He snatched up his sword and tied it to his belt. “I’m going to check on him,” he said to the paladin. “You better stay with Jas.”

The young bard scrambled downhill through the brush, fighting the urge to shout out for the old priest, praying he was still nearby.

At the base of the hill was a tiny clearing that not too long ago must have been a pond. Cattails swayed about the edges, but the center was solid ground covered with meadow grass. Jedidiah stood in the center of the clearing. Joel sighed with relief, but then he was left to wonder what Jedidiah was up to.

The old priest had stripped to the waist; his shirt and tunic and cloak lay to one side of the clearing. Light flashed from something in his hands. Jedidiah held the object up over his head with both hands. It appeared to be a huge multifaceted yellow gemstone, with a jagged bottom, as if it had been broken from a larger piece. The light from the gem grew, not brighter but larger, turning the meadow grass to a soft golden color.

Jedidiah, too, turned golden. In the light, the priest didn’t appear so old. Joel could see the muscles in his arms and chest were not only tense but also well-toned, like those of a much younger man, and his face didn’t appear quite so wrinkled.

Jedidiah uttered some words Joel couldn’t quite catch, then sang a scale, up and down the notes, over and over again. Steam began pouring from the old priest’s body. Then Joel realized the steam had a radiance of its own. Blue light was seeping out of Jedidiah’s body. The blue light curled upward, drawn into the yellow stone just as the haze from Walinda’s dead followers had been drawn into the statue of Iyachtu Xvim.

Finally Jedidiah ceased singing. He spoke one more word, and the steaming blue light stopped pouring from his body. In another few moments all of it was sucked into the yellow stone. Jedidiah lowered the stone to his chest. The illusion of youth vanished. His face was wrinkled, his muscles sagging, perhaps even more than before. He staggered and fell to one knee.

Joel rushed forward and took the old man’s arm to help him rise. Jedidiah looked up, startled, but when he recognized the young bard, he grinned sheepishly. “I’ll be fine in a moment,” the old man said, grasping the younger man’s arm with two thin, bony hands.

“What did you do, Jedidiah?” Joel asked. “What is that stone?”

“Just a little sleight of hand,” the priest said, allowing Joel to pull him up. “Dark stalkers, transformed hunters like Bear, can only sense living power. So I siphoned a little of it off into this,” Jedidiah explained, holding up the stone. “A little gift from Finder.”

“It looked like you siphoned a lot of it off,” Joel argued. He scooped up the priest’s shirt and handed it to him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

Jedidiah nodded, pulling on his shirt, then taking his tunic from the young bard.

Just then Joel heard Holly scream. From the bluff overhead came the sounds of metal striking against metal and shouts of the paladin and the winged woman.

An icy fist gripped Joel’s heart, and he recalled Holly’s vision. Cursing himself for a fool, he raced back through the brush, shouting for Jedidiah to follow.

The climb up to the bluff in the dark seemed endless to Joel, knowing something threatened his friends. He was puffing by the time he cleared the brush. He pulled the sword from his belt.

Holly must have built up the fire in his absence, for the campsite was illuminated by leaping flames. The paladin and Jas both stood with their backs to the fire, peering out into the darkness. They were both bleeding from small cuts on their arms and faces. Dark shapes lay vanquished at their feet, but many more surrounded them. Joel could see only their silhouettes in the firelight, and he was unable to tell whether the shapes were men or beasts.

The bard gave a shout to distract the creatures. Suddenly a dark form loomed up on his left. Remembering Bear, Joel reacted instinctively, stabbing hard and fast.

His blade sunk deep into the creature’s chest. For all the resistance Joel felt, the body might have been an old weathered sack. The blade made a sound like an axe driven into rotten wood. Joel yanked his weapon back, and a taloned hand lashed at his face but missed. Then the creature fell at Joel’s feet, nothing more than a collection of ancient, shattered bones encased in sun-dried flesh.

It was a zombie, Joel realized, and the creatures surrounding Holly and Jas were zombies and skeletons. The firelight glinted on blackened bones and yellowish flesh as the undead creatures rallied for another attack. More of the creatures were pulling themselves out of the ground.

Joel remembered Holly’s story that Lord Randal’s ancestor and his entourage had died here. If the origin of the undead occurred to the paladin, she did not let it affect how she fought. She decapitated one walking corpse with a clean swing, which ended in the chest of a second zombie. She ducked the sluggish blow of a third monster, then reversed the arc of her blade, driving it into her attacker’s skull.

Jas was holding her own by half leaping, half flying up, then coming down on the skeletons with a kicking attack. The ancient bones cracked and crumbled to the ground.

Despite their successes, both women had received wounds, and it was obvious they were tiring. Yet the undead continued to rise from the ground.

Joel fought his way toward the fire. A skeletal hand hanging from a tattered muscle tore a gash across his cheek just beneath his eye. It took one blow to send the creature’s bones back to the earth, but the cut on his face continued to burn like fire. Another zombie was armed with an ancient, rusty sword, which shattered into a hundred fragments when Joel struck it with his younger blade.

“Where did they come from?” Joel shouted. Such creatures did not just rise from the earth of their own volition.

“I can’t tell,” Holly replied. “They seem to be trying to drive us off the edge of the bluff. Where’s Jedidiah?”

“Not far behind me,” Joel answered.

“Already here,” boomed the voice of the elderly priest from the darkness just beyond the campfire’s light. He began a familiar-sounding chant that sounded more like a drumbeat than a song. A reddish haze surrounded him.

The zombies and skeletons turned to face Jedidiah, the remains of their bodies twitching in rhythm with the priest’s chant.

Joel’s worry that the creatures would do his mentor harm was soon dispelled. One by one, the skeletons saluted the old priest with a raised hand, then crumbled to dust. The closest zombies slumped in place, their animating energy gone. The zombies farthest from the old priest sank back into the earth, pulling rocks and dirt back over their retreating forms.

Jas smashed at a few of these even as they fled. Then she sank to the ground, exhausted.

The radiance about Jedidiah subsided as the last of the undead disappeared. He looked at Joel with surprise. “Why didn’t you try quelling the undead with a chant?” he asked.