Dawn breaks over the city by the time they reach the gates. Berend is usually good at keeping track of time, always waking right before his watch is due to start, but the night seems to have passed by in just a few hours. He doesn’t like it.
Isabel is half a step ahead of him. Though she stops once more at the gate to make sure he’s following, she says nothing. She may have been weeping, silent and stone-faced, but it’s too dark still for Berend to tell.
We are in trouble.
Berend doesn’t want to have to be the reasonable one between the pair of them. His hands still itch as he pictures wrapping them around Arden Geray’s ghostly neck. It feels satisfying in his imagination, even though he’s aware that dead spirits don’t work that way. Failing that, he wants to go straight to the university hospital and shake Lucian Warder awake, his injuries be damned. Isabel is supposed to be preventing him from doing that, at least until she’s explained how best to not get himself killed in the process.
Isabel turns to the door. Darkness has fallen over the chapel, and a black abyss stretches between her and where the constable, presumably, is trying to get in. The church is haunted. Maybe the incongruousness of a ghost on holy ground will delay the authorities’ realization of the fact, but the signs are obvious.
The knock of a heavy fist sounds again. Geray gets up and floats through the black, his form disappearing like a breath on a cold day. A howl of agony shakes the chapel.
There’s no way they can’t hear this. Isabel shelters her candle, the only light remaining in the church, with both hands. Her fingers ache with cold.
Geray reappears, accompanied by a chorus of distant screams, both animal and human. “They’re going to knock down your door if you don’t answer,” he says. “They have a battering ram and everything.”
Isabel wakes with a start and sees nothing. It’s grown dark, which means she’s slept much longer than she planned, and she’s not entirely sure what day it is now. The translucent form of Arden Geray hovers beside her narrow bed, the sockets of his eyes as dark as the night outside.
For however many blissful, oblivious hours she was asleep, she had forgotten about him. She groans and pushes herself up. “What are you talking about?”
“A spirit,” he says, enunciating carefully as though he is speaking to a child. “It’s just arrived and it’s none too pleased. What are you going to do about it, Sentinel?”
Berend has fought the undead before. It’s a hazard of the job—battlefields are home to a near-limitless supply of bodies, as well as the angry spirits to make them walk again, bent on mindless destruction. The Sons were always too expensive to call in ahead of the Sentinels, but more recently, Berend has had the opportunity to see plenty of walking corpses face to face.
He draws his sword. He wishes he had a couple of pikemen, with long winged spears to hold the relentless advance of the undead at bay while he removes their rotting limbs. It isn’t a permanent solution, leaving their trunks on the ground to writhe and gnash their teeth at anyone who comes close, but it’s good enough until the church shows up to perform their rites.
What Berend does have is a Sentinel.
He glances over his shoulder. “Any way you could turn them off? We have a professor to rescue.”
“That’s…not how it works,” she says, a bemused look crossing her face. “The energy that animates them is probably coming from the house, so I’d have to seal it off—”
Before she can finish, one of the corpses swings at Berend. Its jagged nails are thick and caked with dirt, passing within inches of his face as he jumps back. He aims for the shoulder and brings his sword down into the mouldering flesh.
It’s relatively fresh, as far as reanimated bodies go, and it takes all of Berend’s strength to sever its arm. The limb falls to the ground and spasms in the mud, its aimless, mindless will no less for having been removed.
Just as he thinks that he only has seven limbs left before these things can’t follow him into the house or endanger the people of this district, he sees two more figures shamble out of the shadows. They stagger and stumble into the street’s dim, foggy light—they are also corpses, and they’re in worse shape than the first two. One is missing the upper left quadrant of its skull, and there is nothing but wet darkness inside the broken shell.
Berend puts both hands on his sword and takes a cautious step away from the house, lining up the shambling figures in view of his good eye. They turn to him, their eyes clouded with decay, their mouths open to show broken teeth, and they reach for him with hands that smell of rot. There are chains hanging from their wrists and dangling from iron collars around their necks.
How nice, for Geray to have them here to welcome us.
The first corpse lunges for him again with its remaining arm. He brings the sword up into a guard, and the skeletal hand catches the blade and tries to pull it from him.
It almost succeeds before its thumb is severed at the joint. Berend can’t help but shudder. The undead feel no pain, and have no desire for anything, not even the preservation of their own bodies. The air fills with a raspy, voiceless sound, rather like a death rattle, as decaying lungs struggle to express the senseless, heedless rage some angry spirit has imbued into the body.
Isabel steps up into Berend’s blind spot—he can only tell where she is by the silver glint of her sword, catching the light of the street lamp at the corner. It darts forward, followed by her black-sleeved arm, and slashes the second corpse across its chest. The wound lights up, bright as flame, for a fraction of a second. Berend can smell burning flesh.
There is an enchantment of some sort on her sword. Her next strike severs and cauterizes an arm, but it doesn’t stop the corpse from lurching toward her, its mouth open to bite and its remaining fingers stretched out to rend.
It’s nothing like the stories, where Sentinels could banish the undead with a word, but having another blade in play gives Berend the chance to back up and ready a swing. He avoids another swipe of a skeletal hand and brings his sword down on the corpse’s knee. It scrapes against bone as it cuts through, sending a sickening vibration into his arms.
The corpse falls to the ground. With one leg and what remains of its arm, it pulls itself along the ground, reaching for Berend’s ankles. He moves carefully—even downed, the thing is preternaturally strong—and places the point of his sword onto the shoulder joint of the remaining arm. He drops his weight into the blade, and the arm comes off with a crunch.
Now for the last leg. He aims for just below the hip, so that nothing will remain to propel the torso forward. The flesh here is spongy, but the bone is still strong, and when Berend tries to remove his blade, it is stuck. The thing curls up, air hissing through its rotting teeth, and the sword nearly wrenches from Berend’s hand.
Another corpse, the one with the broken skull, grabs Berend by the arm. Its grip tightens down with crushing force, sending pain like lightning into his hand. His fingers loosen, slipping down the hilt, as the corpse in which the sword is still embedded thrashes on the ground.
One more motion of the writhing torso wrenches the sword from Berend’s grasp. The other corpse yanks on his arm, and his shoulder aches from the strain—is it strong enough to pull his arm from its joint? Experience tells him yes, that as long as the dead flesh and the magic animating it hold, it will keep going until either nothing of him or nothing of it remains.
He leaves the sword where it is, wobbling erratically, and reaches for his pistol. Pain makes his aim unsteady, but at this range, it doesn’t matter. He puts the barrel to the corpse’s chest, among the rotting rags that remain of this poor bastard’s clothes, and pulls the trigger.
The shot is deafening. It leaves a high-pitched whine in Berend’s ears, and the powder flash burns a bright spot into his vision. The corpse staggers backward, and its grip loosens enough for Berend to slip out.
Silver flashes through the ragged hole in the dead thing. Isabel’s sword, bright as the afterimage of the flash, severs first one arm and then the other. The corpse overbalances, dropping to its knees, and she makes quick work of its legs.
It is with no small degree of envy that Berend finally wrenches his sword free. He would like to have a blade that cuts through the undead without resistance. There are several scars he carries, deep ones that took some time to heal, that might have been avoided if he’d had a weapon like that on the ghost-ridden fields beyond the eastern border.
Another brief exchange of blades and bony arms, and the corpses lie in a writhing mass on the pavement, hissing and clacking their broken teeth. They no longer resemble anything human.
“Well done, Sentinel,” Berend says. He sheathes his sword and holsters his pistol. “I don’t suppose you’d lend me some of that enchantment on your blade, would you?”
She ignores him, rummaging in her pockets. Her brief search produces a piece of chalk, and she bends down a short distance from the dead mass.
“What are you doing?” asks Berend.
“They’re being animated by something inside the house,” she says without looking up. With a practiced hand, she begins inscribing a circle around the bodies, just out of reach of the groping, severed hands. “I need to cut them off from the source.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Berend says. He turns to the house. It’s a modest two-story home, but it seems to loom over him in the darkness, the windows black.
Isabel continues drawing. “We can’t leave them like this. It’s too dangerous.”
Why is she stalling? “We don’t have time,” Berend repeats. “Warder’s in there. We have to get him out before he ends up as one of these things.”
As if in response, the corpse with the broken skull snaps its teeth at Isabel’s drawing hand. She pulls back, moving around it to complete her circle. “This is a task for a party of high-ranking clerics, Mr. Horst, or maybe an entire detachment of Sentinels. There will be more than walking corpses in there.”
“You’ve said that before.” Berend rubs at the upper edge of his eyepatch, where the scar has begun to itch. “And here we are—no clerics, no more Sentinels, just you and me and the professor who is likely the only one who knows what broke Mikhail’s soul.”
Isabel winces at that. “You could be a little more quiet.”
At a lower volume, Berend continues, “You can come with me, or you can stay out here. I’m going in.”
As soon as he says it, he realizes: I’m going to die, aren’t I?
He shakes his head to banish the thought. He could handle the walking dead. How much worse could Geray have?
Berend’s mind travels, unbidden, back to the Belisia estate. Much like that house, this one stares down at him with windows like empty eye sockets. The door is only a short walk away.
He is going to do this—for Mikhail, who was still his sworn brother even after all these years, and for the girl in the manor, and for himself, because Berend doesn’t break his promises. He leaves Isabel in the alley and approaches the door.
It looks ordinary enough; sturdy and plain, with iron nails holding oaken boards in place, and an iron lock of middling quality. There are no visible symbols carved into it, or painted in blood, but Berend supposes that would cause suspicion. Even now, he finds the house difficult to look at. It is as though it holds no interest, and his eyes slide to the left and right no matter how hard he tries to focus. The effect is growing stronger the longer he stands here on the stoop.
There’s nothing for it. He takes one step back, lines himself up, and kicks in the door.
Pain lances from his heel all the way to the joint of his hip. The lock is broken, and the door swings inward, the iron fittings hanging from splintered pieces, but it offered more resistance than he expected. He flexes his toes inside his boot—nothing seems broken.
A gust of wind rushes down the street, tugging at his hair and his clothing and whispering through the open door. Then there is silence. The dead pieces have stopped moving, and their horrible mockery of breath and life has stilled.
The unmistakable scratch of a match being lit disturbs the quiet. Berend turns around to see Isabel touch the flame to her black candle. She stands up, smooths her skirts, and carries the light around the circle she had drawn and up to the broken door.
“Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” she asks.
Berend shakes his head. “I’m afraid not.”
She sighs, nods, and holds the candle up to eye level. “All right, then. Stay behind me and keep your hand on my shoulder. That way, we’ll be able to find each other no matter what illusions there might be inside.”
“You’re coming with me?”
“Yes. You’d have no chance of survival without my help.”
“Better be careful, Sentinel,” Berend says with half a grin. “If I didn’t know any better, I would think you actually cared about me.”
“Hmm. We may still die,” she tells him. “Are you ready?”
He draws his sword with one hand and places the other on Isabel’s shoulder. Her coat is coarse and scratchy, and beneath it, he can feel the sharp angle of her collarbone.
She gives the door a push. It creaks in protest as it opens into yawning blackness, and one of the lock’s metal fittings falls to the ground with a heavy thump. The air within is wet and stagnant, and it stirs gently, like a shallow, labored breath.
As Berend crosses the threshold, he thinks that the house may be alive—or that it might have been given false life, like the bodies outside, by some terrible ritual of blood and bone. The flame of Isabel’s candle shivers, and its halo expands and contracts as the malevolent darkness presses against it.
From somewhere within, there is the sound of footsteps.
The city is an inky, purplish blue, as though someone has poured expensive dye over Berend’s vision. The color obscures the lines of the buildings and dims the street lamps even as it provides its own eerie light. Through it runs the wake of Geray’s magic: bright green threads that dart through the air, swimming after their creator.
Geray is moving fast, much faster than he should be, dragging Warder and his device. He’s still ahead of Berend as he crosses into the university’s grounds.
I hate magic, Berend decides, as he turns a corner and a wave of dizziness nearly knocks him down. He hates Geray’s illusions and his diabolical speed, and he hates whatever Isabel did to him to make him able to see it.
Berend breathes in the stale, dusty air, ignoring the pervasive scent of decay. His neck aches. He’s a big man, and a proficient fighter; there’s never been an occasion when someone has managed to get their hands around his throat, but he is certain that’s what he felt in that blasted room. If he recalls it, he can still feel the individual fingers squeezing, pressing into his windpipe. He hopes he’ll never have to experience that again.
There is his pistol, his trusty friend through more fights than he can count, lying in the dust on the parlor floor. Berend doesn’t want to leave it behind, for its sentimental value and the fear of what new absurdities might lie upstairs.
Lucian is already frantically scribbling in his book, a rough approximation of the young woman taking form under his pen. He balances the lantern on the top of his case and rummages in his satchel, producing a glass thermometer wrapped in a handkerchief.
“Was that the ghost?” asks Berend. With one last look around the stable, and no movement apparent in the body of the horse, he shuts both doors and places the wooden plank across the metal brackets on the outside.
“Not sure.” Lucian gives the thermometer a shake and frowns at it in the dim lamplight before wrapping it back up and returning it to his bag. “I’ll have to take a few more readings. What did you find in there?”
To place the box in which Mikhail’s corpse currently resides into the temple’s extensive graveyard, Berend will have to pay one hundred silver pennies.
He is informed of this by Father Reeves, the priest in charge of funerary services, a tall man with a shaved head and an aquiline nose. He is paternally comforting and coldly distant, often at the same time, and it’s an unsettling effect. Long brown fingers make notes with a quill in a yellowing ledger.
We all end up as numbers. Berend hands over the money. It’s most of what he has. He’ll need more if he’s going to continue sleeping in a bed until his next job.
Space Whales Press 