‘Y’what?’ Apium demanded.
‘Draugr. Undead. A purportedly mythical creature. Well, that’s what it looks like anyway. Give it a while longer and I suspect they’ll be back to life, in some sort of manner. So we might want to make sure they’re finished off properly, commander.’
Even as soon as he spoke, one of the bodies began twitching, the fingers moving gently and impossibly. With a sigh, Brynd stepped quickly to the carriage and pulled out one of the larger axes. Over the next few moments he hacked away at the reviving corpses with relentless brutality, grunting as he hauled the metal blade down on them again and again, releasing his frustration in the process, and Apium soon joined in the frenzy with another axe till the camp was carpeted with bone and smashed heads. They then gathered the individual fragments together away from camp, and Brynd fervently hoped there was no way that they could resurrect themselves from that destruction.
‘Now,’ Brynd demanded, with disgust on realizing he was covered in small chunks of flesh, ‘could you tell me about these draugr, lieutenant. Please.’
Nelum had this scholarly way about him when he was explaining, always had done for the years Brynd had known him, and the act in itself was a comfort now, the return to business-as-usual. He began casually, pacing around in slow strides. ‘A few volumes of collected folklore report sightings of undead, mainly on islands like Maour and Varltung. Ascribed to distant mythology, mainly. So you certainly wouldn’t expect to encounter them in this day and age, or for many centuries past. From the accounts I’ve read in bestiaries of the Archipelago, they’re last reported about as far back as the Máthema civilization. That means myths of sixty thousand years.’
‘Yes, but what exactly are they?’ Brynd interrupted impatiently.
‘Exactly what I said: the undead. Corpses that in some way become animated again. Normally, their bodies have to be disposed of in certain ways, so I’m guessing and hoping your little dissection would have covered the requirements rather effectively.’
‘So what are they doing here on Jokull?’ Apium broke in. ‘How did they ever get on the Empire’s home island? With something as sinister as that coming ashore, you’d think some of the coastal guards would have noticed, eh.’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, captain,’ Nelum admitted. ‘I wouldn’t say that they’d feel constrained by water, though. Perhaps they didn’t arrive, and were here to begin with.’
‘It can only be cultist work,’ Brynd said firmly. ‘You remember that figure we saw at Dalúk, captain?’
‘Bohr’s balls,’ Apium gasped.
‘Eloquently put, captain,’ Nelum said. ‘But I don’t see how – and I don’t see why.’
‘How? They’ve found some relic that’ll do the job. But why? I can’t answer that.’ Apium sighed. ‘Well, so much for a quiet night.’
Nelum frowned. ‘I can’t understand what they’re doing out here, and why they’re attacking us. It’s as if they attacked on some primitive instinct.’
‘They’re even frightening off gheels,’ Brynd observed. ‘And that’s saying something. All this blood and not one gheel in sight.’
‘Commander,’ Lupus hissed.
Brynd stepped alongside him, peering out into the darkness. ‘What is it, Lupus?’
‘Over there, about fifty paces. Looks like Wing Commander Vish.’ The private was pointing to the north, beyond the fringe of the copse, at a silhouette with wings protruding over its back.
‘Keep me covered, private,’ Brynd whispered, then stepped forward to meet the garuda. As Vish came closer, Brynd could see that he was dragging his left leg along with both hands. One of his wings hung out raggedly to the side.
Flesh had been removed in chunks from his torso as if devoured, and his feathers were slick and heavy with blood. Brynd kept the sabre in his hand as he supported the garuda along until they were back in the glow of the campfire. There, they eased him to the ground and wrapped him in strips of cloth torn from a cloak to serve as bandages. Finally, Brynd used some of his medical powders to knock the garuda unconscious so he wouldn’t feel so much pain, and Nelum helped him stitch the wounds together.
I should’ve been more prepared. What the hell is happening here?
The wing commander bled to death during the night, his story untold.
Brynd took solace in the fact that he passed away without pain. No one else had slept at all through the night, and they burned his body the instant the sun rose. As they rode off across the sparsely forested sections of tundra they looked back to see a thin stream of smoke carrying the garuda’s soul away. The cold air was sharp against the dried sweat on Brynd’s brow. It was, at least, enough to remind him that he himself was still alive.
NINE
Investigator Jeryd stepped into his chambers, bleary-eyed. The sun had been up for a short while, not that you could see it yet. His head was mostly clear – an impressive feat considering the amount of whisky he’d imbibed. He never let it get too far and always knew when to stop. He’d seen too much of what happened to the lives of alcoholics to prevent the same from happening to him. No, if you drank all the time, that meant you wanted to use it to control your life, as if that was the only solution, and Jeryd was not looking for control, merely one night of escape. Two hundred years of it had taught him that you could never control the world around you.
He slumped into his fine wooden chair with a grunt, and for a brief moment contemplated giving up his career. How had things come to this? His tail felt stiff, his body ached. As he rested his head in his hands he was staring directly at an envelope on his desk until it came into focus.
Marysa’s handwriting.
Fumbling with eagerness, he tore open the letter.
He read it anxiously.
She wanted to meet him for dinner at the end of the week at one of their favourite bistros.
He tossed the letter on the desk, reclined back in his chair. So she wanted to meet him? That was a start. The Bistro Júula was where he had first taken her for dinner immediately after they had been married in a Jorsalir church. A dimly lit place, with wooden floors, patient staff, and crammed with large potted ferns that gave each table a degree of privacy.
He heard the bell tower strike thirteen: midday already, and he was meant to be meeting Tryst to look more closely at the body of Councillor Ghuda.
Jeryd swore at the horse that splashed an icy puddle onto his breeches. Tryst, a good armspan away, stared at Jeryd in faint amusement as the offending carriage proceeded into the distance.
The iren across the road was packed. Cold in the shade of a nest of architectural monstrosities, dozens of stalls lined the cobbled streets edging this trading centre of the city, not far from the Council Atrium. The investigator’s hands were clasped behind his back as he glanced casually at the arrays of food imported in from the surrounding agricultural communities where cultists had been treating crops to help yields survive the bad weather.
Noticing a display of several pots, vases, ornaments, he made a mental note to investigate some of the antique shops further away in the city’s expensive iren district during his lunch hour. Maybe he could find an interesting object for Marysa, something to impress her when they met for dinner. Moving on, he guided Tryst up a spiral passageway leading to the next level of the city.
Along some of these higher roads they encountered some huge flies that must have just swarmed in, their wings a handspan wide. They were feeding near the stables of the chancellor’s horses. They made a rather pleasant drone, and in a mildly disgusted way, he admired them. Usually they were harmless enough, occurring in twos or threes, the pterodettes keeping their numbers in check. It was not known if these giant insects had some collective consciousness, but he remembered investigating an odd incident last year, where a two-bit stage cultist used some of these creatures in his routine, to aid with his levitation. One night the insects picked him up, led him to a window, then promptly dropped him to his death. No one in the audience seemed to care that much at the time.