Day and night, Vincent maintained his vigil. His senses became inured to the sick-room reek and blind to the horror of the sores and boils. It was harder to deafen himself to Mircalla’s pained gasps. Sometimes he would berate himself for being selfish, for greedily trying to possess every last moment of life she had left. Sometimes he would hear her cry out and wonder if he should do something to speed her passing. Then he would look down into her eyes and see that same light in her eyes. Even at the price of such pain, she was determined to have every last moment she could with him.

  When the end finally came, Vincent tried to deny it. For long hours, he continued to hold Mircalla’s hand, feeling the last warmth drain out of the lifeless flesh. It was only when he heard someone pounding at the door of his hovel that he finally stirred from beside her deathbed.

  Vincent felt his heart turn cold with fear as he opened the door. In the midst of his despair over Mircalla, he’d been too distraught to worry about the consequences of his grief. Now, the forester had a very vivid reminder of the obligations he’d cast aside. Standing outside his hovel, draped in armour as black as night itself, was the Nachtsheer sergeant, Andreas.

  The soldier’s expression was stern as he stared down at Vincent. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, ready to rip it from its scabbard on the slightest provocation. Andreas wrinkled his nose as the sick-house stink of Vincent’s hovel drifted out into the street. It was a stench the Ostlander had smelled many times before, a diseased reek he couldn’t fail to recognise.

  Vincent braced himself, certain that his duplicity had been discovered. In that moment, his only regret was the knowledge that Mircalla’s body would be carted away to the fires of the plague pit. That he would suffer the same fate, possibly without the mercy of being dead first, seemed almost trivial to him beside the horrible image of the flames consuming his wife’s cold flesh.

  For an instant Andreas glowered at him, then the soldier’s grip on his sword relaxed. ‘The Nachtsheer has missed you these past five days,’ Andreas said, his voice a low growl.

  ‘Five days?’ Vincent blinked. Somehow it didn’t seem that it had taken so long for Mircalla to die.

  ‘I’ve come to tell you that your services will no longer be needed,’ Andreas continued. ‘You are released.’

  Again, Vincent felt confused by the soldier’s words. ‘Cneaz Vaclav needs me to guide the Nachtsheer,’ he said, though his tone lacked the display of emotion that might make the statement a protest.

  ‘Cneaz Vaclav needs no one now,’ Andreas said. ‘The plague took him last night.’ His face twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Even if it hadn’t, there is no one left to carry out his orders. My men are either dead or deserted. I knew when I was sent here that Wartenhof would be the end of us.’

  He reached up, pulling away the scarf wrapped about his neck. Vincent recoiled when he saw the black marks on Andreas’s throat.

  ‘When?’ was all Vincent could think to say.

  ‘Yesterday,’ the soldier answered. ‘Almost the same time the cneaz was drawing his last breath.’ Andreas stiffened, turned a haunted face to the forester. ‘I will be staying at the tavern. When the pain gets too great I have a good knife of Nordland steel. My passing will go easier if you will make a promise to me.’

  ‘If it is in my power.’

  Andreas nodded, accepting Vincent’s tenuous commitment. ‘I want you to take my corpse to the pit. Burn me. Better the fire than…’ He waved his hand in a helpless gesture. ‘They come back, you know. Not just some of them like in the beginning. All of them. Things from a nightmare. The undead.’ Suddenly his hand was clenched tight about Vincent’s shoulder. ‘I won’t come back like that. Put me in the fire! Promise me!’

  Vincent twisted under the soldier’s grip, his body shuddering in revulsion. Somehow the same man who had held the diseased fingers of Mircalla for days now cringed from the infected touch of Andreas. Fear is never the slave of logic.

  ‘I will. I will!’ Vincent vowed, squirming free from Andreas. The scarred Ostlander stepped away from the door, ostentatiously replacing the scarf around his neck.

  ‘The tavern,’ he reminded Vincent. Andreas pointed at the room behind the forester. ‘If she’s gone already, you’d better burn her too,’ he warned. He frowned when he saw Vincent shake his head. ‘She’ll come back if you don’t. But it won’t be your wife; it’ll be some monster wearing her flesh.’

  ‘Thank you for your advice,’ Vincent said, his voice cold as a razor.

  Andreas shrugged. ‘Don’t get yourself killed until you’ve burned my corpse,’ he said. ‘The tavern. Don’t forget.’

  Vincent did forget. There were so many other things that occupied him in the days afterward that a promise extracted from him by a man he had feared and hated was far from his foremost thoughts.

  Wartenhof was dying. There was no one to gather the bodies, to mark the places of infection, to toll the bell in the shrine of Morr and no one to usher the spirits of the dead into the netherworld. In the first days, the wailing of the bereaved, the moans of the afflicted were the only sounds rising from the stricken town. When Vincent stirred from his hovel in search of food, there was no one on the streets, only the stray dogs who nibbled at the unburied corpses scattered about. At first the curs were timid and easily frightened away, but with each day the mongrels became bolder. Where they had once retreated from the forester, they now stood their ground, snapping and snarling with bared fangs as they crouched over their hideous fodder.

  Food was scarce before the plague, but now it took only a little searching to find enough to sustain himself. Every hovel and hut had its hidden cache of grain and seed, secreted away in defiance of Cneaz Vaclav and his decrees. Though never enough to feed an entire household through the winter, it was more than sufficient to sustain a single man.

  Rarely did Vincent encounter anyone on these scavenging expeditions. But there were times and experiences that Vincent knew he could never forget.

  The wattle-and-daub hovel that belonged to Petru, one of Wartenhof’s farmers, seemed to Vincent like any of the other abandoned structures. He couldn’t say when Petru had been taken, though he did remember visiting the place with the Nachtsheer to collect the body of his son. The white cross was chalked up on the door which swung open in the wind. Vincent knew that with the wild dogs prowling the streets, no inhabited building would leave its door unbarred. With this wisdom in hand, he descended upon the hut to see if Petru had left anything behind.

  As he stole through the open door, Vincent came within an inch of losing his life. From the darkness there was a flash of steel. The forester darted back as sharpened metal whistled past his face. His hand fell to the grip of his hatchet, a tool that had served him well against marauding wolves and panthers.

  It was, of course, no such animal that wielded cold steel. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw his attacker standing defiantly in the centre of the room, shoulders hunched, hand locked about the splintered grip of a meat cleaver. There was a feral, vicious gleam in the eyes that glared at Vincent. Even a starving wolf had never looked so bestial to the forester.

  The hideous situation was compounded by Vincent’s recognition of the man. He was, or had been, a swineherd named Razvan. Even as he stared at the half-crazed savage, it was hard for him to credit the evidence of his eyes. Razvan had been an exuberant, cheerful neighbour. How many times had Vincent watched children clustered about him in the town square, listening with fascination as he regaled them with some old Fennone legend or some new fable of his own concoction? How often had he swapped lies with the man over mugs of ale in Lucian’s tavern?

  There was no recognition in Razvan’s fierce stare, only violent challenge. Keeping a grip on the hatchet tucked in his belt, Vincent retreated back into the street, content to leave the madman to whatever plunder he’d found. The lesson, however, wasn’t lost on the forester. Before entering another structure, he would check the earth around it for signs of life. Never again would he assume a place unoccupied, no matter how desolate and forlorn.

  And he would start bearing a sword as well as a hatchet.

  Prowling through the shambles that had been Ghenadie’s mercantile, Vincent again found himself far from alone. There had been tracks outside the big half-timber building – as soon as the threat of Nachtsheer patrols was gone those who still lived in Wartenhof had descended upon the mercantile to steal supplies. The looters were gone, however – they had fled the town or else succumbed to the plague themselves. The only trace of them beyond their tracks was the corpse of a farmer with half his head caved-in; a victim of some disagreement among the vultures.

  Vincent didn’t have much hope that the scavengers had left anything, but there was always the chance that they might have overlooked something. It transpired that they had.

  In one of the rooms of the mercantile’s upper floor, Vincent discovered the pale, wasted frame of Tereza. Even a few weeks ago, Ghenadie’s wife had been the beauty of Wartenhof. Now it was an emaciated, near lifeless thing that lay stretched upon the enormous fur-trimmed bed. Vincent wouldn’t have recognised her except for the emerald band around her finger and her long golden hair. He wouldn’t have realised she was still alive if not for the trembling hand that rose from the bed and pointed at him.

  There was too much desperate emotion in that gesture for Vincent to confuse it with the vacant, horrible action of the undead. When he looked at Tereza’s face, there was entreaty in her eyes, not the ghastly emptiness of a zombie.

  He started to approach her, but the woman gave a violent shake of her hand, warning him back. He could see the splotches blemishing her delicate skin. She warned him back and when he had retreated a few paces, she made a stabbing motion with her finger. When Vincent gave her a questioning look, she repeated the gesture, raising her sickly body from the pillows as she jabbed her finger at the wall behind him.

  Meekly, Vincent turned and tried to see what the sick woman was pointing to. After a moment’s confusion, he drew aside the heavy tapestry fastened to the wall. Tereza’s pointing hand became more emphatic, waving him towards the floor. He crouched down, almost flattening himself along the boards. Even with his nose a few inches from the wall he would have missed the hidden catch without Tereza’s guidance. A deft turn of the almost invisible hook and a secret panel opened in the wall.

  From the sickbed, Tereza uttered a relieved gasp. Vincent looked back to see her slump back in the pillows, her arm dropping and dangling limply along the side of the bed. The relieved gasp collapsed into a death rattle, the woman finally conceding her long fight against the plague. It seemed she had lingered only to impart the knowledge of Ghenadie’s secret hiding place. With the task done there was nothing left to hold her to the mortal plane.

  Vincent reached into the hiding place, dragging out a large bronze coffer. It took three blows from his hatchet to smash open the lock. When he did, and when he let his eyes fall onto the contents of the coffer, a bitter laugh rose from his throat.

  The coffer was filled with coins. Gold and silver, the treasure of Ghenadie skimmed from the produce of Wartenhof, stolen before it could reach the hands of Cneaz Vaclav. It was more wealth than any man in the town could have hoped to see, enough to buy Wartenhof ten times over. Ghenadie must have spent decades amassing such a fortune without alerting Vaclav to his larceny. But, then, Ghenadie had been a crafty man well suited to sharp dealings and daring ventures.

  Vincent ran his hand through the coins, feeling their weight as they poured through his fingers. He glanced back at the bed and the plague-marked corpse of Tereza. Treasure hadn’t helped her or her husband. Death was a force that respected neither wealth nor breeding. Death struck down rich and poor, noble and peasant, with equal disdain. There was no bribing the heralds of Morr, no paying away the claws of plague.

  The forester left the coffer where it lay. Gold and silver! These were useless things. Could a man eat them? Could a man burn them for heat? Could he drink them? Vincent would have happily traded the entire coffer for a few ounces of venison and a bag of beans.

  As he left the mercantile, Vincent wondered if some other scavenger would find the treasure. Perhaps some soul would use the money to escape Wartenhof and buy his way to a land where the plague was unknown. He wished such an adventurer the grace of Shallya and the luck of Ranald.

  He wished he could escape Wartenhof, but he knew he could never leave the town. The ties that bound him to his home were too terrible to escape.

  Two days after she died, Mircalla’s body stirred. The obscene echo of life poured back into her, causing her eyes to open, her mouth to move, her muscles to flex. Vincent had waited beside her deathbed to see if his wife would share the monstrous fate that had stolen upon so many of Wartenhof’s dead. He thought he had prepared himself for such a ghastly eventuality, but when it came he could only shudder and cringe in terror.

  He almost died then. Vincent appreciated that fact even as he cowered against the wall of his hovel, unable to do anything but gawk at Mircalla’s ghoulish resurrection. Dead hands groped towards him with clawed fingers, jaws snapped in grisly menace. Had she been able, Mircalla would have killed him and he would have been helpless to stop her.

  Foresight saved Vincent. Before the unclean simulacrum of life settled into his wife’s corpse, he’d taken the precaution of lashing her down to the bed. As he took the precaution, he’d tried to tell himself it wasn’t needed, that Mircalla would remain at peace. He would justify his decision to spare her the fires of the plague pit.

  It was a long time before Vincent was able to rouse himself from his grief and horror, to tear his eyes away from the thing thrashing about in its bindings. He reached for the hatchet at his belt. How many times had he played the scene out in his fears? The undead husk of Mircalla and the abominable duty he must perform!

  His fingers tightened about the hatchet and he moved away from the wall and approached the bed. As he raised the axe to bring the blade chopping down into the prisoned thing, Vincent’s resolve faltered. For all the horror of it, for all his understanding that what was tied down on the bed wasn’t his wife, it still looked like her. It was her flesh it wore. What if he were wrong, what if there were some remnant of her identity locked away inside that dead flesh?

  Stricken with doubt, Vincent let the hatchet fall to the floor. He retreated from the bound zombie, escaping out into the silent streets of Wartenhof. Later, perhaps, he would have the strength to return, to do what he knew he must do, but for now he could only flee. He would find some other place to give him shelter, some refuge away from the empty eyes of the woman he had loved.

  It was dark when Vincent abandoned his home to the ghastly echo of his wife. The image of Mircalla staring at him with that lifeless gaze, the sound of her thrashing in her bonds, these were memories that tortured him anew with each step he took, a physical agony that turned his blood cold and his stomach sick. He felt that he must scream or go mad.

  He had actually stopped in the middle of the street, had started to sob when some sixth sense warned him to be silent. Instinctively, Vincent turned to the source of his unease. At first it was difficult to make out the shape in the shadow of a peasant hut. When he did, he wished the sight had remained indistinct. What he saw was a feral dog and the corpse of a plague victim. The corpse was horrible with the marks of the disease, made still more hideous by the depredation wrought by the dog. Great bites disfigured its limbs; its left cheek was a twist of gnawed flesh, its belly eaten out clear down to the spine.

  Yet for all the damage inflicted upon it, the corpse moved! It raked its decayed hands through the gory mush of the slaughter dog, mindlessly strewing the street with the animal’s organs. There was a terrifying deliberation in the zombie’s savagery, a thoroughness of hate that needed no mentality to guide it. The unreasoning enmity of the dead for the living.

  For a moment, Vincent hesitated, lost in the horror of what he was seeing. Then he felt himself gripped by a profound loathing – a disgust for this ravening abomination. Was it not enough that the plague had decimated Wartenhof? Must the town suffer the further misery of these loathsome fiends?

  Snarling the names of Taal and Rhya, the gods of forest and meadow, Vincent drew the sword from his belt and rushed at the zombie. The creature was just turning away from its dismemberment of the dog when the cold steel slashed across its neck. The mushy flesh parted almost to the bone, leaving the head to flop obscenely against its shoulder, dangling by a flap of skin.

  Vincent called upon his gods again as the mutilated zombie staggered towards him. A second chopping blow sent the rotten head rolling along the ground and the corrupt body pitched over, its vile vitality extinguished.

  The forester gazed upon the twice-slain corpse, feeling his fury mounting with each breath he drew into his body. Again and again he brought his sword down into the rank flesh, butchering the zombie beyond anything recognisably human. With each blow, Vincent thought of Mircalla tied down to the bed, his Mircalla, who was now a thing such as this. As he hacked apart the undead, he tried to ignore the shame buried inside him, guilt that he wasn’t strong enough to do the same for his wife.

  Panting from his exertion, his clothes stained with the decayed filth from the zombie’s rotten veins, Vincent recoiled from the carcass, disgusted not only at the corrupt nature of the thing he had destroyed, but also at his own bestial viciousness. He thought of Razvan, the cheerful storyteller who had descended to a state of brute madness. Was that same horrible gleam in his eye now? Did his face curl into that mask of primitive savagery? With a cry of revulsion he fled from the zombie he had destroyed. His retreat was a futile effort. It wasn’t the monster in the street he feared, but the one that might be growing inside his own mind.

 

1 2 3 4