T Lain: The Bloody Eye

A second priest was smashing and cleaving against a ring of eight undead creatures, so the girl ran to relieve him. Again she buried her sword in the back of a zombie. The rotting flesh tore away as she used all of her strength to force the sword through the body. With difficult back-and-forth strokes she sawed the rusty blade sideways into corrupted organs. Trying to hold her breath against the stench, she worked the sword in the fetid corpse like a strong old woman churning butter.

By now, Yddith was beginning to feel despair. Doubert’s hammer rarely missed, but his two remaining acolytes were sorely pressed. The young man near Yddith was holding up with her help, but the third was swamped beneath an onrushing wave of skeletons despite the celestial hounds fighting by his side. Doubert hollered for them to gather round him and as one, they fought their way through the press until their backs were against a stout wall.

They might still have saved themselves had not Doubert stepped forward into the arc of a zombie’s sword. As he crumbled, the last priest leaped across the growing pile of bones to smash Doubert’s attacker into oblivion. He twisted slightly, shifting the hammer in his hands just enough to follow through and obliterate an oncoming skeleton in one graceful motion. Then, seeing no foes close enough to reach immediately, he knelt to call healing forth upon Doubert.

There was no time to take his attention away from the enemy, but he did it in a desperate bid to save his spiritual leader. He did not see the zombie approaching from behind. Doubert’s eyes were closed in pain. Only Yddith could see the danger and she had an idea. She tried her magic trick again, pointing her finger at a skull still spinning on the ground from Doubert’s fierce blow. Yddith mimicked the incantation used by the traveling sorceress those many months before. The skull was considerably easier to lift than the log had been the night before. She raised the skull high above the oncoming zombie and dropped it on the thing’s near-empty head.

She heard the crunch as the two skulls connected, but knew immediately that the improvised weapon was just too light to cause any damage. It bounced off the intended victim and fell harmlessly aside onto the kneeling priest’s back.

Fortunately, though she failed to stop the zombie, she still saved the cleric’s life. When the skull struck his back, his reaction was automatic. The cleric spun around with his hammer arcing in a deadly half-circle. The zombie burst and fell in two pieces.

New hope flooded into Yddith as the priest once again kneeled to apply healing to Doubert. But his solemn prayer to Pelor was echoed by breathy, indistinct syllables being uttered by the zombie thespian standing on the rude stage. The foul words were incomprehensible to Yddith, but she could feel their power sapping her will. She shook off their unnatural effect, but the young priest seemed to fall into torpor as the hideous rhyme droned on. His prayer turned to a mumble, then he slowly picked up the cadence and slurred tonality of the rhyme.

Yddith screamed at the priest as she watched the unthinkable happening. The same man who had risked his young life to reach Doubert’s stricken form, who had paused in the midst of a life and death struggle of his own in order to save his superior, numbly raised his hammer and performed a coup de grâce on his colleague, mentor, and friend. Bits of bone and flesh splattered the sacred armor of both priests. The gore-dripping hammer rose and fell a second time, and Yddith gagged at the monstrous sight. Wide-eyed with horror, she backed into an alley and out of sight as she tried to chase from her mind the awful memory of Doubert’s ruined face, but the continuing sound of the hammer rising and falling nailed the nightmare vision before her with each repeated blow.

Careening down the alley, Yddith heard the young priest’s scream as the skeletal bard released him from the spell. His tormented gaze fell on Doubert for only a moment, just long enough for him to realize what he had done before the surrounding skeletons fell on him with sword and nail. Yddith heard them chop and tear him into unrecognizable meat.

At the same time, she noticed, moving ahead of her in the alley, the bodies of townspeople who had tried to flee during the desperate battle with the undead. They were on their feet, bearing ghastly, mortal wounds, and moving toward her. Something touched her arm. Yddith smelled decay as she turned to face her abductor. She fainted into his fetid arms when she recognized Orthor, undead Orthor, picking her up and carrying her toward the stage.

Yddith awoke chained to a rock on the stage. She looked up into the eye of the zombie thespian. She saw him place a glowing emerald necklace around her neck. She dimly heard him spout lines from the play that identified him as Gruumsh incarnate. The couplets indicated that the necklace was an infernal wedding gift from this inhabitant of the underworld. She stiffened in abject terror as her vision focused on the bloodstained tip of a silver dagger mere inches from her left eye. Blessed unconsciousness carried her away from the horror and the pain and kept her from hearing the cries of her friends and neighbors as all fell victim to the same bizarre sacrifice.

The stalker moved silently. He was nearly invisible as he traveled parallel to the slavers. His gray skin blended into the rocks as effectively as a gargoyle hiding atop a castle tower. Krusk sniffed involuntarily as the familiar orc scent wafted its way unwelcome into his nostrils. The orc stench mixed with porcine spoor made Krusk glad that he was moving faster than the slave train. His memories and his hatred could not be so easily left behind.

Krusk considered himself human. Most humans considered him an animal, at best, a monster at worst. Orcs considered him a traitor. To them, he was a weak-willed, inferior traitor to a race that esteemed strength, power, and the sadistic use of both. Krusk was neither weak nor sadistic, neither human nor orc. He was a half-orc, tolerated by some but hated by most. A child of rape who adored his human mother, Krusk developed into a warrior of strength and confidence because he saw the price his mother paid to express her love for him.

Ostracized by family and alleged friends, Vanisa had never let Krusk doubt that he was loved. Though she lived deep in the woods far from any social contact besides each other, Vanisa had managed to teach Krusk to read, to think, and to value the ideals of human culture even when the humans failed to live up to those ideals, as they so often did. As Krusk grew and showed more of the legendary strength of his father’s race, he left his home in the woods, knowing that he could protect his mother only by separating himself from her. Eventually, bereft and wounded, Krusk was rescued by Captain Tahrain. The career soldier welcomed Krusk into his unit, nursed him back to health, and trained him in the use of weapons and the fine points of tactics. Since Tahrain’s death, Krusk had honed those lessons in a thousand mercenary jobs and adventures.

Today, Krusk was no one’s mercenary. This task was one of his own choosing. He’d crossed the trail of this group of orcs hours earlier, and they were leaving the unmistakable signs of an orc slave caravan. Following the trail, Krusk encountered many human corpses dumped at the sides of the road. Most of them were either very old or very young. They were the slow, the sick, the weak who could not keep up. Instead of simply killing them, the orcs crippled or maimed them, then left them to die alone of their wounds. If the orcs had known they were being pursued, their cruel knives would have cut with more precision to prolong the lives of the dying. Civilized pursuers, the weakest of the weak in the eyes of the orcs, would tend to the wounded and fall behind. Krusk was glad that everyone he’d found was dead already, sparing him the distasteful choice between leaving someone to linger in pain or ending his life with a merciful sweep of his blade. In either case, he would not slow down.