5. Five
five
It was chaos within minutes.
The Dread King of Brightmere, long suspected to be a necromancer – however he had procured that vile magic in the first place – had raised not only the bodies from the bog but also the countless bones Erqis and his warriors had just left behind.
They were pincered by the dead.
The soldiers, far too few, drew their blades, forming into as tight a circle as possible on the uneven terrain. As close together as they were, the fog seemed to thicken until each one could see little more than the soldier beside them.
Something moved within that fog, too close for comfort. Qavor's blade flashed. A head fell into the mud at Erqis’ feet, the haggard maw still moving; one of the bodies that had been submerged in the bog, he thought, with the leathery skin stretched tight over its cheeks and thin, wet strands of hair sprouting unevenly from the grotesquely preserved scalp.
"Fuck," he breathed, and Qavor hissed, his blade sinking into the chest of the decapitated body at their feet.
It did nothing but make the walking cadaver squirm, try its hardest to follow its master's command. Fingers, sharpened bones covered with the same tight leather, fell just short of scraping at Erqis’ ankles.
And more were coming.
They could hear more of them than they could see, the bodies lumbering through the rubble, through the wet, twisted undergrowth. Mud sucked at their feet the same way it had at the soldiers’ but these horrors did not tire, while exhaustion was a threatening line of black on the horizon for the living trapped here.
"Hack off their limbs!" Erqis commanded, gripping his own blade tighter. Despite the horror of it, there was a thrum of excitement in his chest, the warring emotions kicking his pulse into a frenzy.
"Burn them already!" Qavor barked at his side, yanking his sword back and slashing another bog body in half. It fell, but dragged itself onwards with just its arms, trailing blackened intestines.
"It’s too wet! Wouldn’t be any use." There was nothing that Erqis would have liked more than to send an inferno raging across their foes, but he knew that even his flames would not catch. Especially with how sluggish his flames had been whenever he had tried to summon them in recent weeks. Adding in the wet, heavy air, he’d exhaust himself too fast.
By the dozen, the reanimated cadavers fell to their blades, yet there seemed to be no shortage of them. Just how many people rested here, waiting to be thrown at invaders? The bones in the village had already been numerous.
Who knew how many slept within the bog's depths?
Through the fog, every now and then, Erqis could see flashes of green. "Bastard isn't coming any closer."
"Why would he?" Qavor grunted, his boot planted in the ribcage of a wriggling corpse. "He just has to wear us out." The soldiers had found a rhythm, half of them holding off the dry ones from the village, the other half pressing forward – although they still avoided the black water’s edge for the horrors they knew lived there. "And then he can add us to his army."
The man beside Qavor quailed at that idea, a single breath of being unfocused – but it was enough. One bog body wrapped its arms around his neck, broken teeth tearing the flesh from his cheek, and before either of them could react, he was being dragged away.
His screams turned to gurgles, futile splashes. Then sudden silence.
"If we make it out of this," Qavor stated, ramming his blade repeatedly into the skull of the corpse he was still pinning down. It did nothing to stop the hands scrabbling at his leg. "I'm going to fucking kill you."
"Noted."
There was no end to them. Another of his men was dragged down and buried under disassembled, reaching arms and whatever body parts were still attached to them. Blood sprayed in a wide arc, and when he rose again a faint, green glow had filmed over his eyes. The ruin of his throat was still fresh, but it didn't matter anymore.
The drowned soldier was ambling his way back to them as well.
The horror of seeing their companions turned became panic, and it spread through the soldiers like wildfire. Their shouts grew louder and more frantic, their movements sloppy, and Qavor's barked commands went unheard.
One by one, they were being picked off.
And still, more undead were coming.
"Qav," Erqis panted, side-stepping a man he knew, had shared ale with in Breakshore just days ago, and was now holding him at arm's length with his sword between them the best he could. "The lich has to die."
"We can't cross the bog."
"It's the only way. We can't keep this up." If he used his magic now, in these conditions, he'd be depleted in no time. "Use the bow. I'll distract him."
Qavor's shout sounded strangely muffled behind him as Erqis darted off, dodging the grasping fingers. He just had to get far enough around the bog's edge to draw the Dread King's attention away from any position Qavor would take, but between the mists and the uneven path this was proving to be… Erqis couldn't tell anymore how long it had been. He couldn't see the ambling cadavers early enough to dodge all of them, and at one point he sank knee-deep into the marsh.
They were upon him far quicker than he anticipated, somehow moving faster than they had before.
Smoke curled in the back of his throat – this would have to be far enough away. Cold, hard fingers cupped the sides of his head, yanked Erqis’ face up to meet the horror that was one of the dead. The eye sockets were long empty and crumbled, the teeth browned and seeming unusually large in the absence of lips, withered away untold years past. It brought its terrible face down as if in a lover's kiss.
Erqis breathed a broad stream of fire right into that nightmare of a face. Against all odds the flames caught immediately, spreading over the leathery skin. Erqis leaned back, using his other leg to kick the engulfed body away; it staggered into another, and the fire spread hungrily.
Not too wet, after all. Something in these marshes made these things exquisitely flammable.
Erqis stumbled away from the bog's treacherous edge. More bodies were engulfed, some by proximity to those already on fire, some by his own breath. He could hear his men shouting – but also a thin wail that rose from hundreds of long-dried throats, the first sound these hideous things had made, as if the magic animating them had finally recognised the true threat.
And turned its attention to him .
"Shit."
Gods below, those things could be fast when they wanted to be. He backed up further, more confident with the firmer ground of the forest under his heels, and torched the next wave.
Already, he was tasting ash. When he'd taken the vast farmlands of Sersina and Helorn in the south last summer, his flames had charred entire settlements built from stone, relentless for hours before he'd had to rest. Now, his sawing breath burned in his chest.
Erqis dodged where he could, but space was quickly becoming a rarity. He had enough magic for one more wall of flame but that was it. He would be trapped in the circle of his flames-
The bodies fell. The sudden silence was broken by a terrible howl, a storm wind rushing through and nearly taking him off his feet, but the bodies… the bodies lay still.
Erqis sat heavily, dropping his head into his hands.
They picked their way across the bog carefully, leaving the bodies where they had fallen. Nothing reached for them and the only sounds, once again, were their breath and their boots in the muck.
Qavor's arrow had struck true, no doubt aided by his storm magic.
On a small island of firm ground lay the Dread King of Brightmere, gasping around the arrow buried through his throat. It had punched through so thoroughly that the tip and half of the wrist-thick shaft had sunk into the peaty soil underneath him.
The Dread King was very much not what Erqis had expected. The man was tall, but not excessively so, and while he must have been muscular in his youth, judging by the breadth of his shoulders under the black leather armour he wore, age had turned him wiry. His hair was pure white beneath the splattering of blood and muck. Lying on the ground at his feet like this, the so-called Dread King didn't inspire much dread at all.
"Your Majesty." Erqis greeted him pleasantly enough despite the anger burning in his chest, squatting down beside him, elbows on his knees. He had lost far too many soldiers to those undead fucks, and days of unpleasant travel had only sharpening his ire. "You're not the most gracious host, are you?"
The elderly king glared at him, but aside from gurgling he had no way of answering. That he hadn't choked on his own blood already was a miracle.
"I wish I could offer you the same deal I made with the queens of Helorn and Sersina, but unfortunately… well, all of this is unsettling the good people of Malvea." He swept his arm wide. "And for Malvea to thrive, you must be extinguished. But don't worry. Whoever is left after the fray is welcome to join my empire. Well. If they're alive, that is. I'm not taking in your abominations."
Green flickered around the arrow's shaft. A tendril of it drifted into the air, untethered like faint smoke, before Erqis stabbed the long, curved blade of the dagger he kept at his hip through the lich's right eye – then the left, deep enough to sink the blade to the hilt.
The magic dispersed.
Erqis wiped his dagger on the dead man's chest. "Ah. We should have asked him for directions to the fortress."
Qavor ran a hand over his face. "Gods below, Erqis."
"We should toss him in the bog," one of the soldiers suggested. "Make sure he's not just playing dead."
"That is a very good point." A couple of the men went back to the village for bricks and returned unmolested; Erqis tied them to the king's arms and legs himself, and then the body was heaved into the brackish water.
Weighed down by the bricks of one of his own villages, the Dread King of Brightmere sank into the bog he had chosen for his last stand, leaving behind nothing but uncomfortable silence…
And a fortress, ripe for a siege, somewhere in this miserable place.