T Lain - The Living Dead

“Will it pass?” asked Devis.

Mialee nodded agreement for the question, trying not to baffle anyone further.

“Certainly,” Zalyn offered, “but without knowing how large a dose she received, I cannot say how long it will take. There must have still been some of the potion in her mouth when Ehlonna granted me the power to bring her back from the beyond. Perhaps it was a half dose, a quarter dose, or—”

“Or maybe we’re stuck with a wizard who can’t cast spells,” Hound-Eye growled. “I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but we need her.”

Mialee regarded the halfling with an arched brow.

Hound-Eye blushed, scowled, and added, “Well, don’t we? We need the girl to fight those things. I never heard a mage burn a zombie with ‘turnip wagon potato’.”

Turning from the discussion, Mialee listened closely to the sounds outside and thought she heard low voices—no clear words, but a cacophony of moans, groans, and guttural growls. Mialee noted for the first time that the few windows in the small room were boarded up, in a hurry from the look of it. The sounds she heard were not all animals. A low chorus of moaning, rasping voices growled in mockery of the lilting sounds of elves. These were elves with nothing to say but “urrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

Mialee placed a hand on the wand and felt her fingertips brush the comforting weight of her spellbook. She slapped her forehead. Of course! She couldn’t’ speak, but she might not be illiterate. But the special pages of the spellbook were made for spells. To scribble notes to her friends in it would be a terrible waste. She waved her hands at the others. With frantic gestures, she indicated she needed something to write on, and pulled out her dipless quill from the book pouch.

“I think she wants parchment,” Diir said.

“There must be something, Soveliss,” the other armored elf said, and moved to rummage through a desk that was pushed against a second door.

Mialee took the time then to peer at the other occupants of the room who had not yet said a word. One, a bald, scholarly elf in expensive-looking but gore-spattered robes, huddled next to the fire and regarded everyone with nervous eyes. Crouched beside him was an elf woman holding a very young elf child—perhaps no older than seven years—on her hip. The family, for that’s exactly what they appeared to be, was less filthy than everyone else present, including Mialee, but still looked like they’d been through hell These people were terrified and in no mood for conversation. The bald man looked like he trusted no one and meant to keep his family as far from the others as he could in the tiny space.

“Banana?” she asked, pointing at Diir.

As she was beginning to expect, the others were baffled. She walked to Diir and positioned herself between her ally and the other elf. She jabbed her finger at the man rummaging through the desk while she flapped her other hand like a bird beak next to her mouth. “Ba. Na. Na.”

“I think she wants to know why Clayn referred to me as ‘Soveliss’,” Diir jumped in. Mialee marveled at his wordiness. “Elder,” Diir said to Zalyn, “perhaps you could explain?”

Mialee sighed. Everyone she knew had gone insane. Diir was calling the hyperactive little gnome “Elder,” and was referring to himself as “Soveliss.” Mialee considered Zalyn and her new, scholarly speech pattern. The little gnome returned her look with one of apology and tucked a lock of hair behind one pointed ear.

Mialee closed her eyes, put a palm to her temple and wished for the hundredth time that elves could sleep. She was getting a headache.

The elf called Clayn turned and pressed a few torn scraps of paper, already partially covered in elf-script, into her hand.

“Tornado honeybee, alacrity,” Mialee thanked the ranger and took up the quill.

Her nimble fingers scrawled a few words on the paper. Mialee felt a wash of relief when she saw she could read them, and they made sense. Devis read the words aloud, reading over her shoulder. Apparently this pernicious magic Hound-Eye had given her didn’t affect her fingers. She tried to remember how many spells she could cast without speaking, but there were only a few. A few was better than none.

“ ‘Where am I?’ ” the bard read.” ‘How did I come back? Elder? Soveliss?’ ” As Mialee scribbled rapidly, the bard added,” ‘Are those zombies outside?’”

Devis regarded Mialee with a third of his practiced, lopsided grin. “Oh, the easy stuff.”

The elf woman gave him an irritated but gentle shove. She wasn’t going to write the fact down for all to read, but Mialee found Devis’s steady presence strangely comforting, even if the bard couldn’t understand her when she talked and wouldn’t take this seriously.

Zalyn turned to Clayn. “Clayn, how much time do I have?”

The ranger put an eye to a small gap in the boards over one window for a few seconds. He counted silently. When the elf turned back to Zalyn, he said darkly, “I estimate an hour, maybe two. They have already drawn closer. The turning cannot last much longer. I hope Ehlonna is prepared to grant us a reprieve one more time.”

“I’ll ask her,” the gnome said, smiling, and Mialee realized the little cleric was giving orders. “Please keep an eye on them and alert me as soon as they breach the divine protections. The temple is lost, but Ehlonna’s chosen make their own places of worship,” Zalyn told the elf, who resumed his lookout at the boarded window.

The little gnome fingered the holy symbol around her neck absently. Mialee blinked. Zalyn no longer wore the crescent of Corellon Larethian. The over-sized medallion the cleric now wore bore a carving that depicted a rearing unicorn beneath branching boughs—the symbol of Ehlonna, goddess of the wood.

“It appears we have been given a gift of time,” Zalyn said. “While we wait for your voice to recover, Mialee, perhaps it’s time I revealed to you who I really am, what you’re doing here, and why we risked returning you to life in this place. First, I should tell you that I have been the sole occupant of the temple of the Protector—actually an ancient temple of Ehlonna, our sacred Mother—for nearly a hundred years. There are no brothers or high clerics. I brought you back.”

The gnome muttered an arcane spell, Mialee noted, then suddenly bent and aged before Mialee’s eyes. She had become the withered, tiny crone from the Silver Goblet. Mialee could see now that the stinky little “prophet” was in fact an ancient, shriveled elf. The question was, which was the illusion—the gnome, or the crone?

Mialee’s eye grew wide. “Saddlebag, albino,” said the elf woman, forgetting to write. “Saddlebag.”

Cavadrec’s tattered,purple robes billowed behind the tall wight as he stalked down the corridor. The angry howls and horrible cries of a thousand different undead animals echoed deep underground. Hooked claws swiped at the fast-moving wight as he passed through the cages.

The wight hoped to save this part of his plan for the end, but recent events convinced Cavadrec that the time for this scheme to be unleashed was now. His pets would easily keep the only real threat to himself—that damned sword, Mor-Hakar, and the elf who wielded it—from reaching this lair before Cavadrec could drain the fool Favrid and complete his spell of dominion. While he found it extremely doubtful that the elf alone could actually kill Cavadrec, the wight meant to take no chances. If the elf could not be destroyed, he could at least be prevented from finding Cavadrec until it was too late, either to stop Cavadrec or save himself.

At that hour, Cavadrec would drink the blood of Favrid and complete the holy incantations revealed to him by Nerull a thousand years ago. The reborn corpses of every living thing that had ever died violently in the shadow of Morsilath—human or animal, dwarf, halfling, or elf—would rise and walk the earth. Every last one of them would be at Cavadrec’s command. They would spread over the world like a plague.