8. Leoric
Chapter 8
Leoric
T he old wooden chair by my window creaked as I settled myself in, taking a load off my weary feet. I rubbed my fists against my eyes, fighting the siren call of sleep. It was warm in the cottage, a fragrant fire crackling in the hearth. On any other night, I would be stationed out on my porch, watching the graveyard gates for signs of the undead.
But tonight was different. Tonight, he was out there, too.
I raked my fingers through my hair in frustration, eyelids heavy from exhaustion, muscles even heavier from all the exertion. Bloody stupid Orphium and his mischief, costing me an entire door. Fortunately, it hadn’t cost much of the wood that Riggs and Redginald had carted over to build a temporary replacement, a makeshift barrier between my home and the chill of the night.
“Between me and the fae nuisance on my front lawn,” I grumbled .
I probably couldn’t have slept if I’d tried. The glow pouring out of Orphium’s caravan burned so brightly, almost as if the sun itself had decided to take residence in Barrowdeep. I might have preferred the sun for a neighbor, in fact. The sun didn’t try to sneak glances through my window from its aggressively illuminated cabin. The sun didn’t practice illusions and pointlessly noisy magical spells at this ungodly hour.
Orphium was only making good on his promise, after all, wearing away at my sanity by behaving as annoyingly as possible. Or by misbehaving, rather. He was so clever, too, moving that intelligent carriage of his all the way out to the graveyard where none of the other townsfolk could hear him.
Father Whiston came the closest, taking residence in his chapel, but the man slept like a rock. Maybe a clean conscience granted him the tranquility of deep and uninterrupted sleep. Most nights, at least, when fae shenanigans and graveyard ghouls didn’t give him good reason to jump right out of bed.
But no such luck for me. This was all part of Orphium’s plan, wasn’t it? Singling me out, making me look the fool, the madman of Barrowdeep. First the coins he’d magically forged out of fool’s gold, and now this decidedly unneighborly ruckus, a cacophonous concert meant for an audience of one.
I rummaged through my pockets, locating both Orphium’s counterfeit coin and the far more valuable one I’d dug up in the graveyard. The funny-looking one had clearly been patterned after the genuine article, the copied images of a raven and a dragon rendered as if by the unpracticed hand of a toddler.
What was so special about this thing in the first place? Why did Orphium want it so badly? I tossed it in the air a few times, watching it glimmer as it spun between its two faces. If nothing else, it might fetch a pretty penny from the right buyer.
I chuckled to myself, amused by the prospect of selling a coin for yet more coins. I happened to glance out the window just then, only to find Orphium doing the same from within his cabin. If looks could kill. I brought his precious coin to my lips, pressing a kiss against the raven side.
How lucky that we had two panes of glass and an entire lawn between us. Orphium looked about ready to bite my face off. He turned away from his caravan’s window. A dull bang rattled the boards of my new door just as a flash of bright pink lit up the inside of Orphium’s cabin.
Excellent. We could do this all night. He didn’t realize he was doing me a favor, keeping me awake and alert as I watched over the graves. Very immature, how his only answer was to make an even greater commotion. At least I knew that I’d intimidated him enough to keep him off my doorstep and out of my house.
Far too dangerous to have him nearby, for far too many reasons. For one — and no, contrary to Whiston’s assumptions, this didn’t come down to human-fae prejudice — I still didn’t trust unfamiliar magic. What did we humans know about the fae, really? How much of what I’d read in books was actually based in fact? Even back home, my tutors could never speak on the subject with any conviction.
All I knew was that Orphium was very deadly, indeed. Too pretty and charismatic for his own good. As much as he annoyed me, I couldn’t deny how his suggestive asides and quiet compliments still brought me tiny thrills of excitement. Even the more unpleasant things he had to say made me laugh from the utter audacity.
He was bold, and bright, and when he stepped too close I could smell the sweetness on his skin, the fragrance of rain and grass in his hair. A poisonous flower. Admiring himself in the mirror, he’d been standing too close to my personal effects — the chest where I kept my sparse belongings, the little bed where I slept.
A slip of my arm, the slightest change in trajectory, and I would have thrown him onto the bed instead of straight out the door. The bed, where everything was warm, and soft, and safe.
The bed.
I snorted and sputtered as I awakened, nearly falling off my chair. I wiped away the drool on my chin. Gods, had I really dozed off? For how long? And what was that racket coming from outside? No more of the magicked pops and bangs coming from Orphium’s Infernal Emporium, all of it replaced by a dreadful, familiar series of sounds.
Snarling. Groaning. The telltale scratch of gnarled talons, the snapping jaws of something that had once been human.
Ghouls .
I sprang to my feet, my chair clattering to the floor. My hands trembling, I reached for my shovel, waiting patiently where I’d left it leaning against the wall. And there was that other sound I hadn’t noticed from before, a sound that should have woken me up, as annoying and obnoxious as it was.
“Shovel man! Leoric! Help me!”
And that was how I knew this was serious. As if Orphium would ever admit to needing a human’s help. I sprinted for the door and slammed it open with my shoulder, my momentum dashed as I took stock of the chaos on my front yard.
Orphium, the poor, glittering fool, was standing on his caravan’s roof, kicking at the groping hands and ragged claws of the hungry dead. From afar, I might have mistaken him for a jester, dressed in all his courtly motley, dancing with a stupid grin on his face.
But Orphium wasn’t smiling, not even a little bit. He frowned when he caught sight of me and shook his fist in the air, bloodied dagger in hand.
“Well? What are you waiting for? Come and help me, already.”
I cocked an eyebrow and smirked. Wherever Orphium truly came from, whichever of the fae courts — was he truly so accustomed to barking commands and ordering others around like this? One would think that a member of the Dawning Court would know one or two things about the value of sweetness in words. Flies, honey, vinegar, and all that.
He yelped when one ghoul’s fingers nearly grazed his ankle, coming far too close for comfort .
“Leoric!”
I cupped a hand over one side of my mouth, calling out over the gibbering undead horde. A small one, actually, perhaps only about six or seven of them.
“Ask nicely, Orphium, and I might even consider giving you a hand.”
Once again the ghoul nearest to his feet lunged, swiping treacherously close to the side of his boot. The dagger in Orphium’s grasp flashed as he sliced it through the air, a clean crescent. The ghoul’s hand went flying, landing with a wet, horrible splat near my feet. It dug its ragged fingers into the earth, beginning the slow, laborious crawl back to its owner.
“Very impressive,” I called out. “Looks like you have all the hands you need.”
“Leoric, this isn’t funny!”
Interesting how the ghouls ignored me, either scraping at the cabin’s roof or slamming at its sides with their fists, rocking the caravan back and forth. I kicked the severed hand away, a little too pleased with myself. I liked to think that I had a reputation among their kind, the man with the shovel. Comparing notes with Father Whiston, some of it seemed to ring true. The ghouls remembered, even the dead ones.
“Shovel man!” Orphium screamed.
Again none of the ghouls paid me any mind, even when I sauntered a few steps closer. One of them, however, had finally noticed that the caravan’s empty seat where a driver might be posted would make for a very good place to boost up onto the roof.
“Look out now, Orphium. That one just learned how to climb your carriage, and it’s still got both its hands, too.”
“If I get out of here alive, Leoric, I swear — ”
“What’s the magic word?”
Orphium sneered at me, his teeth clenched.
“Explodia!”
A globe of glowing magenta shot out of his hand, a translucent bubble of light. It burst with a bang and a shower of sparks over the ghouls. They covered their eyes in fright, moaning and cowering — but went right back to harassing the caravan when they realized Orphium’s magic couldn’t do them any harm.
“Wrong magic word, Orphium.” He gloated so much about fighting off the undead on the road with his magic, not to mention the caravan, too. Didn’t he say he could make it move at will? It was how he’d relocated it from the town plaza in the first place. “Would you care to try again?”
The smartest of the ghouls emitted a hoarse, rattling sound from its ruined throat, hauling itself perilously close to the top of the cabin. It was laughing. Orphium shrieked.
“Help me, Leoric! Please!”
There it was. Well, since he’d asked so nicely — I slashed my shovel in an arc as I approached the horde. Dishonorable, perhaps, to attack someone from behind, but these creatures were no longer human, so twisted and corrupted by the ghouling plague that they’d been reduced to slavering, walking corpses.
I caught one in the back, striking deep into its spinal column. It fell backward, its already brittle body collapsing like a decaying tree. If you hacked at all the weak spots, these things could be a little less deadly. The fact that they were mainly focused on the screaming fae man in the colorful clothing bolstered my confidence, too. A distracted foe could soon be a headless one.
My shovel’s blade sank into the fallen ghoul’s head, severing it at the neck, killing it instantly. The others finally acknowledged the threat that I posed, frothing and growling as they turned upon me — with the exception of the one that was already on the roof, crawling toward a terrified Orphium.
I wielded my shovel in both hands, charging the ghouls and ramming my way through. I expected to earn slashes and strikes at my leather armor, but by some miracle I only received glancing blows. Lucky. I dashed toward the front of the carriage, planted my foot on the driver’s seat, then pulled myself up to the roof.
This ghoul, though smart enough to climb toward its prey, still hadn’t noticed my presence. Very lucky, indeed. Like an executioner, as if wielding an axe in place of a shovel, I brought my weapon of choice down. The shovel’s edge bit deep into the back of the ghoul’s neck.
I kicked its head away, its stringy clumps of hair streaming as it flew. Gore spilled from the opening in its headless body. Orphium shoved the fallen ghoul off the roof, glowering at me, angrier than ever.
“About time you arrived. You did that on purpose. And be careful with that thing! You’re scuffing my caravan’s finish.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you joking right now? I just saved your life and here you are, moaning and whinging about your glorified cart. Why didn’t you just order it to come to life and crush them all?”
“It has a name, thank you very much.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And the reason is — well, Wagon is exhausted. I can only ask it to exert so much energy in a day.”
“Great. Wonderful. So this inanimate object you’ve bragged so much about needs a good night’s rest. Meanwhile, here we are, stuck on the roof with these things baying for our blood.”
The ghouls scratched and scraped at the wagon, falling in line for the driver’s seat, at last acknowledging that it was the only way to reach the two walking, talking lumps of meat still arguing on the roof.
Orphium shoved me in the shoulder. “If you’d given me that coin, then we wouldn’t be here in the first place!”
This nonsense again. I shoved him back. “Why? Is that what your precious coin does? Ward off the undead? Doesn’t seem to be bloody working.”
He gritted his teeth, raking frustrated fingers through his hair. “Don’t you know anything? The coin, it brings luck. Whether for good or for ill. You made it through those monsters without a scratch. Don’t you see?”
I did see, at last. They were only minor bursts of good fortune, so subtle that I would have passed them off as coincidence if I hadn’t noticed my unusual luck for myself.
But now it would appear that my luck had run out. I wobbled on my feet as the ghouls rocked the caravan back and forth. More snarling came from the graveyard — reinforcements? Recruits? Orphium fell against me, into the crook of my arm as the caravan swayed with increasing momentum. He glared hard in my face, but his hands spoke the truth of his terror, his fingers winding into the cloth of my shirt, hugging tight around my waist.
“Orphium,” I muttered. “Let me fight.”
“I’m going to fall,” he gasped. “I’m going to die here, and it’s all your fault.”
Below us, the ghouls frothed and battered and growled, nearly a dozen of them now. I gripped my shovel, prepared to slay the next rotting beast that dared clamber up onto the roof.
A voice rose above the ruckus, steely with authority, booming like thunder.
“Back, abominations. You shall not snuff out the flame of life. Vahtalla sees through your darkness. The gaze of the Unblinking purifies you. By sky and star, by the light of divinity: return to ashes!”
All at once the ghouls screamed in pain and in terror, their eyes bursting with blue fire, their skulls ablaze in Vahtalla’s flames. Cults and religions rose and fell through the long ages of Aidun. Pantheons were worshipped and forgotten, some deities so ancient it was best to think them dead. But these gods still answered prayers.
Chains rattled and fragrant smoke filled the air as Father Whiston whirled his censer above his head, his holy implement deadlier than a flail, delivering a lethal dose of divine magic. Exactly as the priest commanded, the ghouls burned into piles of azure ash, blowing away in the night breeze in swirls of bluish cinders.
“Get off me,” Orphium said, pushing me away.
I scowled. The nerve of him. “You clung to me first, remember? Holding me as close as a lover. You and your tricks. You and your games. Was it worth it, Orphium of the Dawning Court?”
Father Whiston cleared his throat. “Enough of the bickering, gentlemen. Come down from the roof.”
We did as we were told — sheepishly, and not without exchanging a few last digs. But the priest wasn’t having any of it, clearly woken from slumber, his eyes dark, his hair in disarray.
“I know it’s late, but we should all sit down for a discussion. This affects us all, but especially you, Orphium, and your ability to stay in Barrowdeep.”
Orphium gulped.