T Lain: The Living Dead

As he rose, something metal smacked him on the forehead. A familiar silk rope and a supposedly collapsible grappling hook, still folded, hung in the air before him, dangling down from the lip of the cart.

The bard grasped the line and clambered up the smooth iron to join his friends, careful not to let the lute hanging at his hip scratch against the wall of the giant cargo mover and trying to remember where he’d left that rope.

Hound-Eye was in mid-sentence as Devis dropped with a clang and a boom to the bottom of the iron cart, “—don’t you just zap us down there? Why the he—” The halfling eyed the giggling Nialma and continued, “Why are we in a giant cart, for—er—pity’s sake? You’re a goddess, ain’t ya?”

“We are here to preserve this vessel,” Zalyn said with a voice that betrayed very little of her real self. “The magic of the song is still required to grant us focus and allow me to suffuse dead Silatham.” She turned to Devis without explaining the last. “It is time. We remember our obligation. This vessel did not know that we always watch over her. We do not need to be ‘coaxed.’ But we do love music, and we require inspiration.” Devis felt himself melt before the goddess-Zalyn, and fumbled for the scroll pouch that held Gunnivan’s ballad.

“Thankth, Zthalynth.”

Devis blinked and worked his jaw, sticking out his bleeding tongue. “Oh tho! Youth’e goth tho be kithing thee. How ab I thuppothed thoo thig the thog? Thith ith thust thuthig geat!”

“What did he say?” Nialma asked.

“ Nothig. Nothig,” Devis snapped. “Oh, Tharlaghn abthidthes!

Then the frantic bard snapped up straight. “Wai, pothionth! Tthalynth, you hab the watht pothionth.”

Zalyn—or Ehlonna?—stepped to Devis in a flash and waved a hand in front of his chin. Devis looked down at the pint-sized elf.

“ Hinual faenya,” boomed a voice that filled the tunnel.

He felt warmth on his tongue and popped his mouth open. The injury was gone. At the same time, a desire to sing flooded through him, more powerful than any emotion he’d ever felt. Music surged up from his heart as Devis sang, and it flowed through his fingers into the lute as he played. He didn’t know the words or the melody, yet as each note formed—no, as he formed each note and sang each word—it was perfect.

Zalyn took up the song, but she wasn’t Zalyn. The shrunken, poisoned body of the elf was filled with Ehlonna and her voice was strong, youthful, and beautiful. Together their voices overflowed the rail cart that somehow seemed pitiably small now, they flooded the tunnel and rushed up the levitation shaft to the tiny, beleaguered house where Devis’s friends fought for their lives against undead monsters.

He was awash in the sensation of wanting only to protect ten precious souls. He was connected to every one of them, feeling their terror, anger, resolve, and hope. Most of all he felt Zalyn, dying Zalyn, struggling to sustain her life against a black cloud of poison spreading through her exhausted, weakened body.

And there was one more…a distant, unfamiliar, but smiling heart Devis knew could only belong to Favrid.

Then through the song Devis felt the stirring of a new presence. It was far above them. Not human or elf, but animal and plant. Silatham was returning to life. The athel wood still felt the horror of the walking dead. But now the city itself would fight back and aid the trio high above Devis’s head. Their courage blended with the courage of the goddess, who was so much more than just a spirit inside Zalyn. She suffused Silatham itself.

The wightlings that blighted Silatham sizzled and burned wherever they touched the enchanted wood. Any outside the enclosing walls simply dropped to the ground, lifeless at last. Those inside were trapped by Ehlonna and burned by her indignation.

But then Devis’s concentration on the flowing music was snapped by a deafening bellow from Clayn, far above him. Bodies and pieces of bodies of rats and zombies and wightlings plunged down through the chute above them.

A few twitching zombie parts and numerous rats landed in the cart, but Soveliss chopped and Hound-Eye smashed them into harmless chunks. Devis promptly slipped on the slickened floor and fell hard onto his back with a crunch. Desperately he pushed his back up the side of the cart and reached for the lute. He found it in two pieces, still connected by the strings. The bard couldn’t know it, but he held the instrument exactly as he had held Mialee’s body.

He stared at it, for the first time in his life so shocked he was unable to speak.

Zalyn spoke. “Devis, you did not need the song of Gunnivan. Your own muse gifted you with a voice that can charm a god all on its own.” The elf-goddess’s glowing features bunched into a gnomish grin, and she laughed. “It was not the lute! You did it! The power of Silatham is refocused. The athel trees are restored and Ehlonna is strong in the Silath wood once more.”

Devis grinned incredulously. “You’re seriously telling me I could have done that any time? Why didn’t we just do it earlier?” he asked the cleric. Everyone in the cart looked at Zalyn.

“The day this would work wasn’t my idea, it was hers,” the elf replied. Then the glowing tones of the goddess flowed over Zalyn’s voice and added, “But this is only one of the tasks we must see through. Those above are still in peril.”

“Hey, goddess lady,” Hound-Eye said, pounding a wightling rat into goo, “you think we might get a move on?”

Silently Zalyn waved her hand, and they started rolling slowly down the tunnel.

A booming voice echoed down the passage, shouting out a long string of Elvish curses. The voice was unmistakably Clayn’s.

“Oh, no,” Mialee whispered, looking up. Soveliss shouted his grandson’s name.

“Soveliss?” the voice answered. “Where are you? They toppled me into the shaft. The other two, they’re not warriors! Silatham lives, but the man and his wife will never drive back that horde by themselves.”

A scream hammered down the shaft, the scream of an elf.

“Darji,” Soveliss said to the raven, “can you fly back up the chute?”

The little bird chirped, “Of course!”

“Please find out what you can.”

The ranger scowled as another scream fell around their ears. Devis saw Nialma look up for a moment, then the girl resumed her humming, swinging her arms in a dance step that only children know. Darji took off up the cavernous levitation tube.

They picked up speed as the heavy, iron cart rolled down the tracks of the mine tunnel.

The cart bumped across a rough section of track, and they all tumbled into a pile in the rear of the iron box. Mialee pushed Devis off her with a grunt.

“Devis,” Mialee said, her aphasia gone at last. “Stay where you are, I’m going to stand on your back.”

“Wait, I can just—” Devis began, but Mialee was already climbing off the floor of the accelerating cart.

She nearly fell over backward as the cart picked up speed, but she caught the very lip of the top and heaved herself up to the edge.

A bowshot behind them, a shouting, cursing elf was coming to rest on the ground. Mialee could tell that he was shouting something at the bird fluttering around his head, but the grinding of the iron wheels drowned out the words. Darji spiraled around the elf then flew like a shot back in Mialee’s direction.

She heard three grunts of exertion from her left and watched as Soveliss kicked and vaulted up from the floor of the rocking, bounding cart to land on his feet next to her. The man’s balance was uncanny.

“Terrible view,” Soveliss muttered, then shouted down the tunnel at the man who was his last, tenuous link to the past. “Clayn! Stay there, we’ll come back for you!”