only a slight chime of warning in his voice.
'I understand,' Mor said with a sigh. 'Listen. There is a crypt standing in a graveyard outside the city. It is less than a furlong from the walls. Within there some have heard horrific sounds, and I fear that there may be fel beasts raising the dead inside. Will you go there and cleanse the crypt? There is a font chapel within the graveyard itself, and while it may not give you enough knowledge of the city, it should be enough power for you to draw on to complete your task.'
'And if I cleanse the crypt, you will allow me access to the chapels within the walls of your city?'
The captain nodded.
'Very well then,' D'Arden said with a nod. 'I will cleanse your graveyard.'
“Excellent,” Mor said, standing. D’Arden did the same. “When can you begin?”
The Arbiter gritted his teeth. “I will begin immediately.”
**
He’d left his horse happily munching away in the stable. The crypt lay only a short way out of town, and there was no point in dragging the great beast into a graveyard full of the wakened dead.
Dawn had come as he made his way to the crypt, creeping over the horizon with its tendrils of light but bringing no warmth to the frozen landscape. If the Deadmoon had caused the land to look sparse and unfriendly in the darkness of the night, the sun’s light did little to help it. Dead trees stood like stark skeletons against the slowly lightening sky, with no hint of leaves remaining in their branches. The stench of decay was strong, and it was easy to tell when he passed by the trees that they were rotting from the core. The corruption here was strong, and it would take a long time for the region to recover once the evil here was stamped out completely.
Men are ridiculous, he mused. If that idiot captain had simply allowed me to access the font, I could have been on the trail of the demon by now. If I’d slain the demon, the graveyard would have ceased to be a problem.
There was a low, cold mist hanging over the graveyard as he approached. The stones stood stiffly from the ground, most unmarked. Only the richest could buy a grave alone, and those were clearly separated in a gated area a few hundred feet from the common graves. The rising sun cast long shadows across the mounds and gave the entire scene a reddish cast.
He stopped and listened for a moment. There were no sounds here. No birds sat in the dead trees – they would have fled long ago. The fel beasts would be hiding, keeping out of the sunlight that was deadly to them.
Across the low rising field was a small stone chapel, and beside it sat a massive mausoleum. He fixed his eyes on the chapel and began striding toward it.
When he reached the great wooden door, he noticed that it had fallen slightly ajar. The hinges were rusted and failing. He shook his head disdainfully. The power contained inside each and every one of these chapels was both precious and extremely dangerous. It was likely that the demon had something to do with the shape that this door was in. Blue light was leaking out all around the edges of the door.
It was dangerous to not have the font contained fully. It was no wonder that the dead were walking in this graveyard. The mere amount of light that seeped out from behind this door would have released enough manna into the ground that could easily have wakened the dead.
Fitting his fingers into one of the cracks around the doorway, he grasped tightly and pulled hard. With less effort than he had imagined, the door came away in his hands, letting the blue energy of the manna within wash over him.
A normal person would have begun screaming immediately from the pain of the horrific mutations that would have started taking over his flesh. Pure manna energy was dangerous, deadly in fact, to naked flesh and those who were not properly attuned.
D’Arden simply felt warm.
Stepping past the ruined threshold, he gazed at the crystalline formation that jutted up sharply from the broken ground. Clear and glowing with blue light, the crystal's energy fountained forth from the center, falling down like mist and light and rolling across the ground. Most would be blinded by now, unable to truly see and appreciate the patterns. He turned to watch the flow as it went across the ground slowly, leisurely, and disappeared into the crypt.
Something was actively funneling the manna. This was more dangerous than he’d realized.
He knelt down near the bubbling energy and thrust his hands into the glow so that they disappeared. He stiffened, never quite used to the feeling of being flooded with the land’s life force. Thoughts, feelings, words flowed through his mind in a muddled mess, faster than he could think, faster than he could process. He felt himself being pulled into an infinite blue sea, and he resisted that call, resisted the urge to let himself be swallowed completely by the world.
He clamped his jaw down to keep from screaming as his consciousness touched the corruption. This was small, nothing in comparison to what he knew he would feel when searching the manna in the city, but still it was pure, unbridled agony. It was everything he could do to keep from being absorbed into the stream as the pain weakened his resolve.
The corruption was centered in the crypt. There were no walking dead in the graveyard because there was a catacomb beneath the mausoleum that housed all of them during the day, so that they would not be dissolved by the light of the rising sun.
There was some kind of malevolent intelligence at work here, but it was not the demon from the city, not the prey he’d been sent after.
With a cry, he pulled his hands from the font. Gasping for air, he slowly rose to his feet. The corruption was not strong here, but he could understand why the captain was concerned. Gazing out over the rows of graves, he noticed that there was no recently disturbed earth, no fresh burial mounds anywhere in sight. He wondered for a moment just what the city had been doing with their dead.
Perhaps it was best that he’d been sent here first. An intelligent guiding of the manna meant one of two things: either the corruption had grown so strong that it had embodied a corpse with a mockery of intelligence, or there was a lesser demon here, orchestrating its own tiny kingdom beneath the soil of sanctified ground.
Which it was, he would have to find out.
He stepped out of the tiny stone chapel and turned to face the doorway once more. With this amount of manna leaking out it could wreak havoc as far away as the city proper. He would have to do something to seal the chapel until he could have it fixed properly.
D’Arden took a few steps backward and closed his eyes. Holding up his arms, he summoned the manna to his fists. The energy diverted from its slow path to the crypt to gather around him, to focus on the two points to which he directed his mind. He felt it building, and he made a few slow movements of his arms, gathering in more of the manna and building it in his center, enhancing his own power in a way that normal men could only dream of doing.
As he felt the energy reach a peak, he thrust his arms forward, propelling the energy away from his body and towards the open doorway of the chapel. With his mind, he constructed a solid wall of energy where the door had stood, shaping it and hewing it from the rawness of the manna.
When once more he opened his eyes, there was a wall of solid blackness between him and the energy of the font that allowed no ray of light, no drop of energy to escape. The manna still flowed across the ground towards the crypt – there was no way that he could cut off a directed flow – but at least no more of the unsuspecting dead would be rousted from their eternal sleep.
That would do for now.
He drew the crystalline blade from his back, and it came free from its specially-designed scabbard with a low rasp. He turned towards the crypt and began a slow stride across the dead, packed earth.
The door of the mausoleum was tightly sealed. No wonder, he thought, with so many creatures which would be instantly returned to their state of death if they were caught in the sunlight.
He could only hope that some would be so destroyed when he forced the door open.
Tactics similar to those that had removed the obstacles at the blocked entrance to the font chapel proved
