Age of the Undead, page 5
part #1 of Zombicide Black Plague Series
“The head or the heart!” Helchen admonished the man. The zombie had turned to attack him, leaving itself exposed to her mace. She bludgeoned it from behind, cracking its skull. There was a spurt of stagnant blood and brains as she ripped the flanges free. The runner sagged to the ground, its animation broken. “Hit them anywhere else and you only slow them down.”
“Take your own advice,” the thief said, suddenly darting past Helchen. She turned to see the zombie whose leg she’d broken scurrying toward her on all fours. The looter brought his sword down as though it were an axe and split the creature’s head in two.
Helchen gave the rogue a brief nod of gratitude. It was all the thanks she could show, for now the other zombies were upon them. She broke the arm of one, crushed the face of another, but there were too many to take more precise aim. The thief’s swings were even more hurried than her own. Their efforts were, at best, only delaying the moment when they’d be overwhelmed.
“There’s too many of them,” Helchen cursed as a zombie tried to claw through her brigandine. The reinforced leather resisted its fingers, but she wondered how much protection it would provide when the monster tried to gnaw its way to her flesh. It wasn’t so much the thought of death that disturbed her, but the idea of being infected and rising again as one of the undead. There was a fate to send terror through her veins.
•••
Suddenly, the runner was knocked away from her. It stumbled back, one arm snapped by a tremendous impact. The man who’d struck the creature didn’t move to press his attack but brought his heavy kite shield swinging wide to collide with another of the undead that was assailing Helchen. The monster was sent sprawling, a broken rib jutting from its ragged clothes. A third zombie went down as the man’s longsword sheared away the side of its head.
Helchen guessed that the swordsman must be Alaric, the confederate the looter had called out to, but she was surprised to see such a man in company with a thief. There was a strength to his face that was hard to reconcile with a slinking criminal, and a fearlessness in his eyes that was impressive even to a witch hunter. Moreover, he was arrayed in the heavy armor and surcoat of a knight. Of course, it was possible he’d stolen them, but the ease with which he bore their weight bespoke a warrior long accustomed to wearing such a burden.
“Bones of Belieth!” the warrior cursed, as one of the runners he’d thrown down leaped up and lunged at him. He brought his shield up to hold back its flailing claws. “You might have warned that these ones were so spry, Gaiseric!”
The other man, whom the warrior called Gaiseric, hewed the arm from a zombie that was attacking him. A kick sent the mangled creature stumbling. “I thought knights already knew everything!” The thief dodged the zombie’s remaining arm and came at it from its crippled side. His sword jabbed into the monster’s face, splitting its jaw as the steel dug into its brain.
“The lady here advises striking for the head or the heart,” Gaiseric added as he pulled his weapon free from the inert corpse.
Helchen finished the creature with the broken rib, cracking its skull with her mace. “To destroy them, you must destroy the nexus points for the magic that animates them.” She didn’t know if either of them had the learning to understand, but she’d found that even an unintelligible explanation could spur someone into obedience. Witch hunters often had to recruit men-at-arms and peasants when finally confronting their quarry. They didn’t need to understand either, only do what they were told to do.
The only zombie remaining in the vicinity was the one trying to claw its way to the warrior. The knight drove his opponent to the ground with his shield. While it was pinned to the earth, he smashed its skull with his armored boot. After the third stomp, the creature was lifeless. “Sound instructions,” he said as he turned and looked Helchen over. His expression remained stern, and she saw a wariness creep into his eyes. “I won’t ask how you know such things. It’s obvious you belong to the Order of Witch Hunters.”
Helchen gave him a thin smile as she cleansed the clotted gore from her mace. “I should expect such disdain from a peasant, but not from a knight. Not from someone tasked with defending the kingdom.” There was just a hint of temper at the edge of her voice.
“The enemies I fight are real, not phantoms of an over-zealous imagination,” the knight countered. “I’ve seen for myself how you fanatics operate.”
“It is better that a hundred innocent suffer than the seed of evil be allowed to take root,” Helchen retorted, quoting a favorite injunction of her captain in the Order. She gestured with her mace at the destruction all around them. “This is what comes from being permissive, of being so concerned about innocence that corruption is left unchecked!” She kicked the severed head of a zombie and sent it bouncing towards the barn. “This was my brother’s farm. All the family I had left in this world.” Her eyes blazed as she looked up at the knight. “You dare say my Order went too far? Had we gone still further, these people wouldn’t be dead!”
Sheepishly, Gaiseric stepped between the two. “Much as I’d be amused to watch you two fight, I think we’ve bigger concerns.” Having gained their attention, he pointed to the field. A lumbering mob of zombies was trudging down the path. Stalks of wheat waved and fell as more walkers marched through them. “These might not be fast, but I don’t think that’ll matter when there’s a lot of them.”
Helchen kept her steely gaze on the knight for a moment. “Your squire has more sense than you do. Get out of here while you can.”
The knight shook his head. “He’s not my squire. Gaiseric was a prisoner in my father’s dungeons.” He tapped the coat of arms on his chest. “I’m Alaric von Mertz.”
“Helchen Anders,” the witch hunter said, trying to make it sound as impressive as the name of a baron’s son.
“I don’t think this is the place or the time for introductions,” Gaiseric snapped. The thief was rapidly backing away and casting covetous eyes on the road leading past the farm.
“Take his suggestion and get moving,” Helchen told Alaric. She hooked her mace and started to reload her crossbow.
“And what do you intend to do?” Alaric asked. He noticed her glance up at the barn and its loft. “That’s foolish,” he growled. “What do you think you’ll accomplish?”
Helchen bristled at his tone. “I’ll defend my brother’s farm and destroy every zombie…”
“Look around you,” Alaric said. “There’s nothing left here to protect. Nothing to defend.” His tone changed, and his gaze softened. “Believe me, I know. My home was destroyed by these things. I had to strike down a thing that had once been my father. I know you want to fight, to feel like you’re doing something, but this isn’t the way to do it.”
The story gave Helchen pause. She’d been ready to argue with the knight, but the horror of his story was at least the equal of her own. It managed to pierce the admixture of anger and self-reproach that smoldered inside her. The conviction, the certainty that had gripped her, wasn’t so absolute as it had been just a moment before.
Gaiseric dashed back to them and waved his hands. “How about this? We can talk over all of this someplace else. We find a safe place, somewhere that I’m not counting twenty-four… no, twenty-six, zombies walking straight toward us? Doesn’t that sound like a good idea? Then, if you still want to, you can come back here or the castle or anywhere else.”
“It does no good to kill zombies,” Alaric said, adding his own force to the argument. “To really accomplish something, you have to strike at the ones who caused all this.”
The knight’s words broke through Helchen’s resolve. “What do you mean?” she demanded.
Alaric nodded at the thief. “Let’s first follow Gaiseric’s lead. Find ourselves someplace we can talk without scores of undead dogging our heels.”
Chapter Four
The winged reptile hopped from one beam to another in the old, ruined mill. It struggled to find just the right spot, one that would both give it a nice place to bask in while likewise serving the needs of its master. When his familiar was flying, Hulmul was able to smoothly adjust his senses and place them in harmony with Malicious, but when it kept hopping about, he found the abrupt shifts disorienting.
Stay still, the wizard sent the imperative to the reptile. Malicious was only a little bigger than a crow, but Hulmul had conjured demons that were less ornery. It crooked its lizard-like head back on its thin neck and flicked its tongue – a natural enough habit for a reptile, but the familiar had learned it was a derogatory gesture among humans and adapted itself accordingly. If its lips weren’t rigid and scaly, it would have blown a raspberry for good measure.
Fine, have it your way. Hulmul pulled his mustache in frustration. It was poor form for a wizard to tolerate defiance from his familiar, but in the current situation he just didn’t have the luxury to invest time and energy in curbing the reptile’s willfulness. He needed to hear what was going on in the mill.
Malicious settled down, fanning its wings so it could draw the most warmth it could from the sun. The reptile was a bit higher up in the mill than Hulmul would have liked. From such a distance, he knew the familiar’s own senses were very keen. Tapping into them, however, would be to limit himself to the creature’s perception. He still remembered the awful moment when he discovered that Malicious could interpret only three numbers: one, two, and lots.
For the sake of understanding what he was hearing as well as seeing, Hulmul employed his own senses. Rather than observing the mill with Malicious’s eyes and ears, he observed through them. His own myopic vision rendered the people sitting down around the millstone indistinct blurs and he had to strain to hear what they were saying. The alternative would have brought them into sharp – if monochrome – relief but limited their speech to unintelligible noise mingled with the few spoken words Malicious understood.
“… were supposed to stop this invasion in the south.” The words came from the taller of the three occupants of the mill, a man Hulmul had heard addressed as Alaric. “The army rode out to keep the zombies from overrunning the province.”
“It was already too late for that.” This was spoken by the woman, Helchen. From the first, Hulmul had taken a dislike to her. Her next words explained that instinctive uneasiness. “The witch hunters have long hunted necromancers hidden throughout the realm. We simply failed to appreciate how many there were. While your army rode out to fight, the enemy already within the kingdom set to work, raising their own battalions from every graveyard and charnel house.” Hulmul shivered to hear the intensity that filled her voice. “I was with Captain Dietrich at the monastery of St. Olgerd when the catacombs below burst and all the monks who’d died of the gray pox last winter came swarming into the temple. We tried to stop them… but there were just too many.”
“So you went to your brother’s farm?” Alaric asked. “Someplace you felt you could still do some good.”
“I was too late,” Helchen snarled. She threw a chip of the millstone she’d picked up and sent it clattering off among the mill’s debris. “Zombies had already been there and killed everyone.” She made a helpless motion with her arms. “This is more than a local outbreak of sorcery. It’s an arcane plague that’s rolling across the entire province.”
Hulmul indulged in a bitter smile. He doubted the witch hunter knew the half of it. Though his mind was peering through the senses of his familiar, his body was hiding inside a haystack and surrounded by a hastily conjured protective circle – of questionable efficacy, he had to concede – because in every direction, for leagues around, there wasn’t a hamlet or homestead that hadn’t been overwhelmed by the undead. Wherever he sent Malicious flying, there was only death and destruction.
“The more reason why we must hasten to Singerva,” Gaiseric, the last of the trio, said. “Whatever the plight of the countryside, the zombies won’t find a town like Singerva so easy to conquer.”
It had been the name of the town that first attracted Hulmul to these travelers and caused him to divert Malicious so that the reptile could learn more about them. He was interested in Singerva for his own reasons, but it might just be that these three could be useful to him.
“St. Olgerd’s monastery was an easily defended site, but we were powerless to stop the zombies,” Helchen told the thief. “There’s only so much fighting someone can do. There comes a breaking point even for the most determined.”
Gaiseric shook his head and waved aside Helchen’s objection. “Captain Dietrich had only a few witch hunters. The rest of your ‘fighters’ were nothing but monks and peasants. Singerva is a thriving town with guards and soldiers, hundreds of them!”
“Marshal Konreid had hundreds of soldiers too,” Alaric pointed out, his voice hollowed by regret. “We couldn’t stop the zombies.”
“That was in an open field,” Gaiseric said. “The soldiers in Singerva have walls and battlements, defensible positions from which they can strike down the zombies at their leisure.” He smiled as he warmed to the subject. “I’ve heard the town withstood four sieges during the War of the Three Kings. You think a bunch of mindless undead can accomplish what catapults and sappers couldn’t? I tell you, we’ll be safe once we get inside Singerva.”
Alaric inspected the pommel of his sword, running his fingers about the coat of arms depicted there. “I only care about the resources Singerva can provide,” he said, his tone as sharp as his blade. “There’s a debt I owe Brunon Gogol, and every hour I’m delayed is a dishonor I can scarce endure.”
The discussion faded away and they began eating food Gaiseric and Alaric had scavenged from Helchen’s brother’s farm. As soon as they were finished, they set out again. Hulmul withdrew much of his awareness from Malicious, simply directing the familiar to follow them. It was enough to register things now with the limited comprehension of the animal. He needed to keep his focus on himself at the moment.
Hulmul carefully gathered up the polished bones and etched stones that formed the points of his protective circle. A sweep of his left hand cleared away the essential salts that made the design itself. Taking up his staff, the wizard used it to poke a hole in the side of the haystack. He put his eye to the opening and peeked out. He’d much have preferred to have Malicious check that there were no zombies around, but the familiar had other duties.
After a minute of seeing nothing more fearsome than a mongrel dog picking at a horse carcass lying in the road, Hulmul decided it was safe enough to emerge from hiding. He turned in the direction he sensed Malicious and those it was following. They would have to head east to reach Singerva. Taking that into consideration, the wizard calculated a point at which he could overtake them.
“Not that I’m eager for the society of a witch hunter,” he grumbled to himself. “But I’m less keen on keeping company with the undead. If I run into trouble, I’d feel better knowing there were people nearby who could help.”
When trouble came, however, it wasn’t the wizard who walked into it. For two hours, Hulmul trekked across fields and pastures, every step drawing him nearer to that point when he’d intercept Alaric and his companions. He dallied when he got too close, still wary of Helchen. He considered that he could hang back and just let Malicious keep tabs on them.
That was when the reptile noted movement in the bushes on either side of the road. Malicious was a bad judge of color and useless with numbers, but it was alert for even the slightest motion. What it saw now was far more than the rustle of wind or the scurry of rodents.
Hulmul ducked behind a broken wall that edged up onto the road and poured more of his awareness into his familiar. At his urging, Malicious flew lower and took a closer look. There were people ducked behind the bushes, obviously lying in wait for the trio on the road. Hulmul saw several men who gripped cudgels and staves. A few others had bows with arrows nocked.
Ambush! Alaric and the others were walking into a trap.
Get away, Hulmul commanded Malicious, directing the winged reptile to the branches of a nearby chestnut tree. It wouldn’t do to have a stray arrow hit his familiar. Any hurt dealt to the creature would be felt by its master. Indeed, any fatal wound had a good chance of killing the wizard as well as the animal.
Still, there remained the problem of what to do. Hulmul was intent on reaching Singerva and he’d rather not do so alone. So far, Alaric’s group were the only people he’d found going to the town. Indeed, except for a few panicked farmers, they were the only people he’d seen alive in the past three days.
Through Malicious’s watching eyes, the wizard saw the lurking men waiting as their prey drew near. Hulmul was about to have his familiar shriek in warning, but at that moment Helchen noticed movement in the bushes.
“Draw arms!” she shouted, snapping up the crossbow looped over her shoulder. Alaric and Gaiseric had their swords bared in a flash and fell in to either side of the witch hunter.
From both sides of the road, a dozen men and women sprang into view. The fact that their adversaries were living people rather than zombies surprised the travelers. That instant of hesitation was all it took for the ambushers to surround them.
“You’ll be dropping your weapons,” a scar-faced man ordered, hefting a blacksmith’s hammer.
A bowman dressed in the soiled ruin of a crier’s livery took aim at Helchen. “You might get off one shot, but I promise you won’t manage a second.”
Neither Helchen nor Alaric showed a hint of submission. It was Gaiseric who lowered his sword and made appeasing gestures with his hands. “Now let’s just all take a step back and try to keep things in perspective,” he said. “You’ve got the advantage in numbers, but even if what you say is right and my friend here can only shoot one of you, do you really want to gamble on being the unlucky one?” He jabbed his thumb at Helchen. “In case you didn’t notice, she’s a witch hunter, so you attack her you’re not just putting your lives at risk, but your souls too.”
