T Lain - The Living Dead

Hound-Eye blinked and backed down.

Zalyn relented. “You are not to blame for the death of Tent City, halfling, but neither are we. Nor do I blame you for the deaths of any rangers, and I think the others accept that as well. We have all been pawns of circumstance.” Hound-Eye reddened, and turned from the rest of them as he began to shake. Zalyn placed a hand on the little man’s fur-covered shoulder, whispered a soft prayer, and magically calmed the halfling. As he turned to crouch on the floor, however, Mialee saw that his face was covered in wet tears, though his jaw was clenched. The halfling loudly blew his nose on his sleeve.

“Hound-Eye has a very good point, friends, and is wise,” Zalyn continued. “No, most elves do not require magical power to pass into the beyond. Wights are vile horrors created from luckless innocents, but not close to the threat posed by the Buried One.

“Those who choose to follow the divine callings of the clergy usually focus our studies in two or three specific fields of specialty. This ideology varies from believer to believer, but is as common as it is pragmatic. I’m not saying I have laurels from the ‘school of Good’ or a ‘doctorate of herbology.’ I specialize, as does the Buried One.

“His first calling is obvious,” said Zalyn.

“Death,” said Devis.

“Needlepoint,” said Mialee. She meant to say “Necromancy.”

“Of course. But more perniciously, he uses and even inhabits animals,” Zalyn said. “He’s obsessed with taking all of Ehlonna’s children away from her, and knows that for every creature he corrupts with the living death, the more difficulty Ehlonna has regaining her strength. He still is a blight on her soul.”

“We noticed,” Hound-Eye said. They’d all become intimately familiar with undead fauna.

“Surprised he hasn’t made zombie trees,” Devis cracked.

“Before he fell under Nerull’s sway, animals and their ways were Cava’s primary focus, not trees, mercifully. He mastered methods of moving his consciousness from animal body to elf body and back again. He can split himself into a group of individuals, act as a collective organism or a group of independents, yet retain a powerful, fully conscious presence within a primary body. He turned that power against us, and it made him all the more difficult to destroy. In fact, the body he wore when we confined him beneath Morsilath was the seventh elf-form he had stolen, that we knew of.

“He knew of the existence of the Mor-Hakar, learned of it from his foul spies, but did not reckon your peculiar situation, Soveliss. The attack on your family was part of Cavadrec’s effort to capture the weapon before it could be used against him.

“Favrid and I managed to retrieve little Clayn’s body before the wolves could, er, consume it,” Zalyn gulped, “and I was able to bring him back from the beyond. Not quite as I did with you, Mialee. I have learned much in the intervening years. The boy was weak, but he survived, and has grown to into a strong ranger.” Clayn looked at the floor.

“Favrid always believed in redundant protection,” Zalyn added with a smirk, “and Cavadrec believed in the permanence and inevitable power of death. Favrid and I underestimated the Buried One, and we must hope he underestimates us as well.”

Pell, the elf whose home this was, spoke for the first time. The man’s voice was strident and inflected with something that told the elf woman he would welcome death himself if not for the presence of his family.

“Animals. That’s what happened to us. The village was overrun with rats, a swarm of them. They came out all at once. Everyone they bit became a…I don’t know what.” Pell’s soulless lack of emotion reminded Mialee of a clay golem. “I’ve seen wights, we all have. The rats, they didn’t make people into wights. They’re worse, they’re rotten corpses. They eat anything, including each other. It’s something slow. A wight kills you, you become a wight. This . . . you watch someone rot before your eyes. They just leave, and you’re left with…you’re left ...” The robed man trailed off and he pulled his thirimin and remaining child close. It was apparent what happened to those bitten by the undead rodents, and equally apparent Pell had seen it happen to his own progeny.

Zalyn frowned. “His creations have certain powers of both wight and zombie—semi-intelligent ‘wightlings,’ if you will. It’s what Favrid called them,” Zalyn said. “Like wights, the Buried One’s minions can convert a living being into creatures like themselves, but wights must completely kill the living thing to do so. Cavadrec concocted a necromantic technique that causes eventual conversion from a single bite. The victim need not die. However, the effect does take time. Minutes in the worst cases, hours in others.”

“The rats went for the Rangers first, while they slept,” Clayn said. “They took the barracks completely by surprise. My men and I, and maybe three or four other units, were in the field on patrol or we would have been caught, too. As it is, I am the last ranger in Silatham that I know of.” He glanced at Soveliss. “Until now.”

Devis turned back to Zalyn, puzzled. “You said you buried this guy, Cadavrink or whoever, in an elf body. But that was no elf we fought on the road. It was a wight. At least, it looked like a wight, but it was far more powerful than any other I’ve heard of.”

“Yes, it is something we feared, but never believed Cavadrec would be mad enough to try. I know not how, but he inhabits a wight body. This is unexpected, and complicates matters even more. Favrid, I think, somehow held out a small belief that when the Buried One finally saw his destruction staring him in the face, our old friend Cava would return to us. But Cava, it appears, is completely gone, having joined the ranks of the undead. I believe he means never to breathe air again. That is why my thirimin is captive now.”

Mialee scribbled and handed a note to Devis. “He expected to find either a living elfin a fresh body or an old elfin an old body,” the bard read, and added on his own, “but he got jumped by a Cavadnik in a wight body.”

Responding to some distant sound only he heard, Clayn turned and pressed his eyes to the slit in the boarded window.

“Elder, I think—”

That was all he managed to say before a fat, oily, hollow-eyed rat wriggled through the crack and scrambled atop the man’s golden helm.

Then rats were streaming into the room from every conceivable crevice. Little Nialma, Pell’s daughter, screamed. Smoking wightling rodents wriggled around the open flames in the fireplace, forcing Pell’s terrified family to stumble to the center of the room. His wife Delia nearly collided with Clayn, who flung the helm off with his left hand and brandished a long sword in the other. Soveliss had both swords out even faster, and he skewered the rat and Clayn’s helmet with the Mor-Hakar. Devis scrambled to his feet, knocking his lute to the floor with an atonal clamor of strings as he struggled to free his sword. Hound-Eye nailed a rat to the floor with his pick. Mialee plucked the wand from her belt in a heartbeat. She dared not risk speaking a spell, but she could mentally invoke the missiles in the wand. With her right hand, she drew her rapier and batted at another chittering rodent. Zalyn, as near as Mialee could tell, was doing absolutely nothing but standing like a statue.

Slow, insistent thuds resounded through the little room’s weird acoustics. Mialee thought it sounded like a dozen drunks trying to open a tavern after closing time. Several of the boards nailed haphazardly over the round windows snapped, and gray, ragged, half-rotten arms clawed the air inside their sanctuary.

Mialee gritted her teeth, kicking a hollow-eyed rat off her boot with a snarl. The last living people in Silatham tensed for the inevitable intrusion of the walking dead. She held the wand overhead and sent a small missile blast into an unseen body at the end of one of the grasping hands. A scream and flash of flame outside the window testified that she hit her mark.