The Temple of Heart and Bone (4 page)

His family heard his screams,
followed by the breaking of his lantern as it hit the floor. Minutes passed,
and no more sounds came from their cellar. The merchant’s wife pushed her
children behind her and started backing toward the stairs leading up to their
bedrooms. A new sound drifted slowly from the cellar, a low rustling, and an
occasional crackle. The family stared at the door leading down to the cellar,
freezing stock still as they noticed the smoke beginning to seep through the
edges of the frame. The merchant’s little daughter screamed at the sight before
her mother could cover her mouth. Seconds later they heard the slow fall of
footsteps. They were not the heavy steps of the father. The door opened into
the cellar and a hot wind rose to extinguish the mother’s candle, sinking the
room in blackness. Red and orange light blossomed from the cellar, silhouetting
the skeletal form on the stairs, turning its bones an inky black even as it
reached out its arms.

The scene was played out in a
dozen homes, each varying only in execution. The results were an orgy of
slaughter as death reached out to claim more for its own. As the hours passed,
fires began to erupt all over the stone corpse of Æostemark. The flames grew so
bright that they scorched the low clouds, turning them a ruddy orange.

The fighting in the soldier’s
barracks was over. The merchants of Æostemark were dead. The maddened citizens
lie still in the rubble, their faces showing none of the peace of final rest.
The Necromancer sent out his mind to search the city, and nowhere within its
borders did he feel any unaccounted living. He rejoiced at the first triumph of
his new “Imperial Army.” Unleashing his powers once more, he called out to the
newly slain.

The barracks door opened as the
sergeant led his men into the night. Fear no longer showed on their faces,
their blood no longer raced through their veins. The merchant who had died over
his window pried his throat loose and rose for his door. The smoldering
wreckage of the large merchant ignored his family as they joined him in leaving
their flaming home. Silent searchers crawled up from the rubble once more and
stumbled toward the center of town.

Troseth approached his Master,
concern clearly showing on his face.

“My Lord,” he began, “the dead
are too many for this square. Perhaps we should find another area in which to
stage.”

“You are quite right, Troseth,”
the Necromancer replied, “The dead
are
too many for this square. As we
speak, the majority are staging around the city as they filter in from the
fields and countryside. These here are but a few, those from the city itself.
The city, however, is fallen, and no longer needed.” He opened his mouth as if
to issue Troseth an order, then shook his head. “Never mind, dear boy, I’ll
handle it. Fall your men and our caravan out of town, Captain. Æostemark is a
memory.” Troseth looked questioningly at his Master for a moment, then quickly
spun to issue orders. The Necromancer had lifted his head, and the undead
legion gathered in the square began to file out of the city. Of their number,
several began to pull burning wood from the fires of the night. Carrying the
wood like torches, they walked through the city igniting all that had remained
unspoiled.

By the time the last of the
gruesome company had left, Æostemark was engulfed in a firestorm. Great waves
of flame rolled through the city, pushed on by gusts of hot air. The living
among them, the cavalry and black-robed minions, even the Necromancer himself,
pulled back away from the city, the heat becoming scorching, unbearable. The
dead, those closest to the city, stood stock still, unaware or unaffected by
the seething air around them. Those with tattered remains of clothing or flesh
smoked and smoldered in the heat. The recently dead cooked in their own fluids,
smoking and dripping onto the ground on which they stood. The garrison at the
border post watched from the walls of their small redoubt as the city of
Æostemark burned in its funeral pyre. They never noticed the detachment of
skeletal cavalry approaching from the shadows. Within a few hours, they had
joined their comrades as members of the new Imperial Army.

Troseth, shielding his face from
the heat, looked out over the gathering dead. The number from the city was
insignificant compared to what had been staging in the surrounding fields.
Horses stood in order along with men and beasts of burden. It seemed to Troseth
as if a great wire army had been bent into the countryside by some overly-bored
cooper. The figures were there, there was no denying, but they were thin and
hollow, the night sky showing clearly through their forms. Looking out around
the fields he saw streams of bodies pouring into the area. Columns of
unspeaking corpses scraped dust into the air with unshod feet. More dead
animals, horses, oxen, and creatures he could not recognize without meat and
hide, shuffled in alongside the men. Troseth wondered if they were aware of
each other, or even, for that matter, themselves.

He mounted his horse and rode to
a line that was leading almost directly from the west. He began to look more
closely at the once human forms marching silently past, listening to the dry
unison of their footfalls. He looked into the bones, his mind searching for the
difference between what had once been men and once women. After several
comparisons, he was certain he could distinguish the difference between the
two. He was amazed at the number that had once been women. His mind reeled at
the idea of just how many had died in the invasion and the following seven
years. He wondered just what he had attached himself to, and he wondered if she
was among them. Would he recognize her as simple structure? Would he want to?

Poson had promised him what he
wanted, even though she had been, and remained, lost. He wondered what kind of
promise could lead from what he now saw to his vision of happiness. Did
anything of self remain with these… these beings?

He rode out along the line
following it back into the west. He looked for its end, for the last former
person bringing up the end of the line. After an hour, he gave up and started
to ride back east, back to the gathering and his Master.

This, he told himself, was the
Harvest. He looked out over the sea of creatures bleached white in the moon’s
remaining light. This, he thought, was a bitter, frightening fruit. He shook
his head to clear it of such thoughts. He reached into his memory and clung to
Poson’s promise. These people were already dead, and he was certain he hadn’t
killed all of them. If this was the price for his pleasure, so be it. He was
certain any one of them would have done the same to him. Except her, perhaps,
and he rode back to his Master, troubled in his own mind.

It
took fully two and one-half days for the dead to stop their migration to the
fields around Æostemark. The plains were littered with shambling, rotting
corpses, called to the smoldering beacon of the twice-dead city. The
Necromancer spent most of his time in his red and gold wagon, occasionally
coming forth to size up the fruits of his labor.

Troseth rode amongst the ranks of
the dead, searching faces, postures, hoping for some sign that he alone could
read. The chill and revulsion of mingling with death gnawed at him. He was
certain that the bottom of his stomach had become one vast hole where
everything good had drained from his system. The stench of the more recently
dead caught in his throat, refusing to allow even his own saliva to pass. He
stifled the urge to gag and choke, and it took much of his will to keep down
whatever food he could eat.

When he grew too tired to search,
or when darkness made it less practical, he would return to the camp and try to
relax among his living troopers. He heard their whispers, their wondering as to
his comings and goings. He never answered their curiosity. He thought it good
for his men to find him mysterious, even eccentric. Eccentric, he thought,
probably so, and nodded to himself. He also watched to see how they were
dealing with their new “allies.”

His men were brave soldiers. Each
was an experienced warrior, hand selected for this mission. They had been
chosen for their bravery, chosen for their skill, chosen because of their proven
loyalty. Each of them, however, was faced with something for which no sergeant
or captain, no battle or training had prepared them. Only in their nightmares
had they seen anything like what they were witnessing. Only in their deepest
fears had those who had fallen beside them, fallen by their own hands, risen to
take ranks with them. In that initial experience, some of them had almost
broken. He knew then that he had made good choices. Certainly, they had lost
some control of bodily functions. Some had shaken, some had vomited, others
lost temporary control over bowels or bladder, but none had broken. Their minds
hadn’t broken, their lines hadn’t broken.

He was certain they still shared the
same chill, the same revulsion that he felt, but they didn’t talk to him about
it. That was proper. He, of course, shared none of his feelings with them. It
was crucial to maintaining the mystique, the illusion that he was the source of
their hope and power.

He watched them on his returns,
each of them eager to find ways to prove to him their first-encounter fears
were under control. As he took rest in his blankets or light meals of stale and
foul tasting rations, he watched his men walk in the nearer ranks of the dead.
They would circle a figure, talking to it, tentatively touching it. If the
figure didn’t respond, they would push it slightly, and watch it regain its
balance. On one occasion, they tugged at an arm just a little too hard, and it
came away from the dead torso. The men, like errant children who’d just broken
a window, stared at each other and the arm for mere seconds before the man who
held it, dropped it, and they all bolted. Troseth chuckled softly to himself at
the sight. Before he set out for his next search, however, he asked his men not
to disassemble any more of their “comrades.” They looked at each other
sheepishly, and said, “Of course, Captain.”

Troseth, in his searching,
finally had to admit to himself that if he were to find what he was looking
for, it would only be by sheer luck. There were uncounted thousands standing,
decaying in ranks around Æostemark. He wondered how they knew to stand in rank
and file, attributing it, finally, to the power of his Master. He shook his
head in wonder at that power. There were just so many. Bones of the tall mixed
with what were most likely children. There had been a great many children, the
number shocking him at first, just as he had been surprised by the number of
women. The skeletal children, however, seemed to end at a certain point. He had
seen no infants or toddlers, unsure of how he’d react were he to see a skeletal
creature crawling into rank on tiny hands and knees. He’d heard a woman once
say that children were born with soft bones. Maybe that made the difference.
Maybe the Master had set some limits on his grave robbing, just as he had set
some order in the ranks. Troseth shook his head at his musings. What insane
propositions rose to the mind, and what, he wondered, made them more sane
simply because they could be real?

Though he was now able to
distinguish between the bones of a man and the bones of a woman, most of the
bones carried little else with them. There were, of course, the more recently
dead. He looked these over as closely as the others. There were corpses which
still had flesh clinging to their bones, not knowing it was time to rot off, or
not yet eaten by creatures large or small. Some of these still bore their
burial clothes, or the clothes in which they’d been murdered. They were also
the hardest for Troseth to encounter.

The skeletal figures were bones,
animated, granted, but dry, for the most part, bones. The corpses still bearing
flesh were stained with colors that sent the primal parts of his mind into
hysterics. Bloated and rotting, these beings showed secrets that the living
were not meant to know.

Troseth’s thoughts turned to his
own mortality when faced with those wretched bodies. This, he knew, was a stage
of his existence. No matter what glory he found in this life, this was
something that he, himself, would become. Looking at them, he wondered, what
had their lives mattered? What glories or infamies may have surrounded these…
people? What, if anything, mattered to them now?

He shook his head trying to clear
those thoughts just as a dog might shake to rid itself of water. He had to
believe that something, anything mattered to them. More importantly, he had to
believe that one among them, that
she
among them had retained some part
of her self.

Poson had told him that the dead
could be raised. Poson had told him that they could retain a sense of self, and
could even be restored to flesh, and some semblance of “life.” It was hard to
fight off thoughts of mortality in wave after wave of death, but Troseth had to
hope, had to continue. Otherwise, he thought, he was just as much an empty
shell as the thousands surrounding him.

On the second night, the midnight
after the ceremony, Troseth returned to the area where his men had been staged.
One of the black-robed minions of the Master arrived with a summons. Making
himself as presentable as he could, he followed the messenger back to the red
and gold wagon. Troseth waited outside as the messenger went in to announce his
presence.

“Our Lord will see you now,” the
messenger told Troseth, exiting the wagon.

“Thank you,” Troseth replied and
entered.

Troseth had never before been in
his Master’s wagon. He was surprised at the size and luxury of the interior.
Light and heat were provided in the autumnal night by four braziers mounted to
the floor, one in each corner. Leather bound chairs and divans were spread
about the cabin, as was a desk, and an area that Troseth could only guess was
for some sort of ritual. One part of the wagon was obviously meant to be a
sleeping place for the old man, another was curtained off entirely. The floor
and walls were varnished a deep and shiny color, and objects of gold and silver
littered the interior. Some sort of incense burned in the air. Troseth was
uncertain if it was for some mystical purpose or simply to give his Master a
more palatable air to breathe.

The Necromancer, himself, was not
to be seen, and Troseth suspected he might be behind the partitioning curtain.
Time passed slowly in the wagon. Troseth stood at attention, waiting. Time continued
to pass, and concern began to intrude itself on his thoughts. Like a schoolboy
waiting for a scolding, he was certain he had done something wrong.

“Good morning, Captain,” the old
man finally spoke from behind his curtain.

“Good morning, my Lord,” Troseth
replied.

“How are your men holding up?”

“Very well, my Lord. After their
first encounter, they are becoming accustomed to their new allies.”

“Excellent, Captain, excellent.
And how are you doing?”

“Fine, my Lord,” Troseth replied.
The old man had never, not even once, inquired as to his health or welfare, and
his concern deepened.

“Outstanding, Captain.”

The Necromancer pushed back the
curtain to his partition showing an easel holding a charcoal drawing. Troseth
focused on his Master, but let his eyes dart once to the picture. It was a
sketch of a city, a magnificent city unlike any Troseth had seen in his
lifetime. Some of the features, he thought, looked familiar, but he tried to
focus his mind on his Master.

“It is a hobby of mine,” the old
man said, indicating the drawing, “from my earliest youth I had a talent for
drawing things.”

“It’s amazing, my Lord,” Troseth
offered.

“Is it now?” the old man asked.
“It was, you know, it was indeed. This was the capital city of the Empire. Not
the entire city, mind you, just the Arcane Quarter.” He pointed to a few
buildings in the image. “These… these were the buildings where Imperial mages
studied their art, where secrets were passed down and rituals repeated.” The
old man looked into the image as if he could see old friends walking down the
avenue. He sighed once, and looked back at Troseth, who, for his part, was
surprised by his Master’s seeming intimacy. He relaxed slightly, and the old
man smiled.

Intense, shooting pain filled
Troseth, twisting his innards and forcing him to scream against his will. He
felt as if he had swallowed burning snakes, and his bones seemed to light on
fire beneath his skin. His body slammed into the floor, shuddering violently,
and tears ran from his eyes while mucous and saliva poured from his nose and
mouth. Pain blanked out all thought from his mind. White, white was all he
perceived amongst the pain, and he felt consciousness slipping for a moment,
before, somehow, it was rooted in place. Then, as swiftly as it started, the pain
was gone, entirely.

Lying on the floor, aware of the
fluids flowing from his face, almost certain he had soiled himself completely,
he looked up at the smiling old man. He saw a hunger in those ancient eyes, and
a slight, twisting gesture of the wrinkled hand. The pain returned anew, more
intensely than before. He forgot who he was and where he was, all was white and
pain. His head slammed repeatedly into the floor, trying, perhaps, to render
itself unconscious.  Again, the pain stopped, and the old man was no
longer smiling.

“You killed one of my servants,
whelp, and in doing so, you severed my connection to Poson. Why?” He punctuated
the question with an intense burst of pain in Troseth. The pain, however, did not
end this time, but merely receded like a flame lowering to simmer.

“My Lord,” Troseth spat out
hurriedly, “Poson… Poson warned me to watch the animal. He warned me, my Lord.”
The words were shoved out of his mouth between gasps. The pain returned anew,
and the thought of words melted from his mind.

“Poson warned you, did he,” the
Necromancer mused, “what did he warn you of?” Realizing his words had not sunk
through his servant’s pain, he gestured and Troseth’s writhing lessened. “I
said, ‘what did he warn you of?’”

“My, my—” Troseth gulped at the
air, trying to find fuel for his words, “my Lord,” he continued. “Poson told me
that the beast might try to prevent your sacred ceremony, that if you weakened,
the beast might fall upon you and,” he winced struggling to speak, “slaughter
you.” Troseth collapsed back on the ground, trying to prepare himself for the
next dose of pain. The Necromancer ignored him for a moment, considering the
young soldier’s words. He let his eyes fall on the young man, noticing the fear
and expectation. Angered at the natural presumption, he returned the pain to
Troseth’s body as he again considered what he had heard. As an afterthought,
the old man released the strictures against the captain’s consciousness. Within
a few minutes, Troseth had beaten himself unconscious, and the Necromancer was
free to think in peace.

“So,” the old man said to the
unconscious captain on the floor, “he told you the beast would attack me, did
he? But why? That cat was our link, the only way for one of us to watch the
other, to know of one another’s actions…” There must have been something Poson
didn’t want him to know, but what, he wondered.

He dismissed defense as a reason
from the moment he heard it. The great cat, and its sibling with Poson, had
served the old man since before the fall of the Empire. He seriously doubted
that the cats were capable of treachery. He also doubted the goodwill of Poson,
who had never fully explained why he had reawakened the old man in the first
place.

The Necromancer looked at the
still body on the floor. The captain, he thought, may or may not have
understood what he had done. He may have believed what Poson had told him, or
he may have been part and parcel to some other scheme. Killing him now would be
no chore. The captain could even continue to serve in the new Imperial Army.

Killing him, however, would
provide the old man with no answers, and he hated to waste opportunities. The
pain he’d inflicted on the young soldier should do no permanent damage, and the
boy would be out and sifting through the ranks of the dead in almost no time at
all. He was not entirely sure why the boy, as he thought of Troseth, conducted
his daily excursions, though the old man had watched him closely as he did. He
was looking for someone; that was certain. An old comrade, family, did it
really matter? Though it would do no permanent harm, the pain should serve as a
fair warning, and help the boy to stay in line.