The aether mist around the dead woman was shifting, gliding, and flowing. And then a dim figure rose up from the body, the figure of an old woman identical to the one lying dismembered in the road. The ghost looked around herself, blinked, then turned to leave and simply faded away into the darkness. On the other side of the ring of bodies, Wren saw the shades of two men rise up and vanish.
“Omar? What’s going on?” she asked.
Her mentor waved his sword at the others. “Get back.”
Leif and Thora withdrew to the far side of the bodies.
Omar knelt down and picked up a severed hand. “Look at this.”
Wren winced and stayed where she was. “Thanks. I’ve seen dead bodies before.”
“Yes, and now you’re going to look at this one.” He tossed the hand to her.
Frowning, she held the hand up daintily by one finger to inspect it. The skin was pale blue and veined in violet and black. The nails were black and chipped. The knuckles were black and scraped raw. She was about to drop it when it caught the light from Omar’s sword and the dead skin glistened with a strange blue glow. “What am I looking at?”
“Aether,” Omar said, standing up. “Frozen aether in the skin, and in the blood.”
“Aether can’t freeze in a person’s body,” she said, dropping the severed hand.
“No, but it can freeze in the ice, or the icy ground. Permafrost.” Omar walked around the dead bodies, sweeping his bright sword over them. “It’s everywhere. Aether crystals. Frozen inside them.”
“But how? People can’t get that cold.” Wren wiped her hand on her black skirt.
“They can if they’re dead and buried.” Omar looked up at the scowling pair on the far side of the road. “Where did they come from?”
“Everywhere, nowhere. I don’t know,” Leif said.
Almost as one, Wren and Thora and Leif all turned to look down the lane where they saw two more bluish people walking toward them. The strangers moved quickly, thumping forward at a jog, but they were unsteady on their feet, weaving drunkenly, colliding with each other every few steps.
The three fox-eared Yslanders turned at the sound of other bare feet on the snowy roads. Left, then right. North, then east.
“More?” Omar asked.
Wren nodded. “A lot more.”
Chapter 2. Doors
Wren clutched her laden sling as she ran. When a drooping blue face loomed out of the shadows, she hurled a stone at it, and ran on without looking to see what she had struck. She heard Leif and Thora panting along behind her, and every now and then she heard Leif hack one of the walking corpses to pieces along the way, but she never turned to look back.
Woden, whatever you’re playing at, it isn’t funny!
Omar led the way, veering around corners and down narrow alleys and across wide open market squares painted white and blue by the soft moonlight. The old Vlachian city moaned quietly with the wind pressing on the frozen walls and shaking the loose shutters, and breaking off chunks of snow from the eaves. But the homes and the streets were all empty.
Except for the dead.
Glistening blue bodies stumbled out of every doorway, their feet moving quickly but unevenly, their hands grasping clumsily, their frozen black eyes staring blindly at nothing and everything, their shriveled black tongues choking and gasping.
Omar’s blazing seireiken lit the way, transforming the four running souls into a pocket of daylight racing through the streets of Targoviste. Wren tried not to look straight at the sun-steel sword, but every few moments it would swing up into her line of sight and leave a blinding after-image seared into her vision. As they ran, Wren noticed that the houses were taller. Two stories, then three stories. Glass-paned windows reflected the starlight, and wrought iron balconies hung overhead, dripping with long icicles.
“We’re nearly there,” Omar yelled.
“Where?” Leif yelled back.
“The castle!”
Up ahead, Wren saw the imposing walls of the castle rising above the street. It was nothing like the black stone castle of Rekavik back in Ysland. This was a building of pale bricks carefully shaped and mortared together into a proud and beautiful palace with arching windows and perfectly matched turrets capped in tiled roofs.
On one side she saw a tower, and she noted how different it was from the filthy hovel she had lived in for seventeen years in Denveller. This tower was a perfect cylinder crowned in sharp crenellations, with arched glass windows on every floor. Hers had been a leaning pile of stones under a rotting thatch roof, a single doorway she had filled with stones from the inside, and a single window she had covered with iron bars at night.
“Won’t we just be trapped in there?” Wren asked.
“Better than being trapped out here,” Omar answered.
They ran through the open gates into a paved courtyard, and then up the wide steps and through the gaping doorway of the first building they saw.
“There aren’t any doors!” Thora pointed at the entrance, where the rusty hinges stood empty.
“Here they come.” Leif strode back out to the steps. A dozen of the blue-skinned corpses rushed into the courtyard, moaning and gurgling and crashing into each other, with dozens more hurrying up the road behind them.
Omar touched Wren’s shoulder and gestured politely at the oncoming dead people. “Wren, if you please.”
“It won’t work on the dead, will it?”
“If they still have souls, it will.”
Wren nodded and pushed Leif aside. The aether lay across the ground in shifting, sliding waves of silent white vapor, and when the young girl raised her hands, the aether rose with them as high as she could reach. A moment later the running dead crashed into the wall and fell back, stumbling and falling over each other, clawing at each others’ black and blue and white skin, and groaning as they tumbled to the ground.
With a frown and a wince, Wren tried to shove the aether forward, to push the bodies back across the courtyard. But the writhing corpses lay too thick and heavy on the ground, and the aether merely rippled through them, tossing back several limp arms and legs, and making a few bodies near the rear stagger and topple over backward.
“Come on, keep moving,” Omar barked.
They ran back through the foyer and up a tall, curving stair that circled an ancient, rusting chandelier. On the second floor, Omar turned left and Wren followed him, but immediately heard feet pounding on stairs, and she turned to see Leif and Thora continuing up to the third floor.
“Wait, what are you doing?” she asked. “We need to stay together.”
Omar grasped her arm. “No, we don’t. Let them go.”
Frowning, Wren dashed after Omar down the hall.
I know, I know. Leif’s a killer, and Thora, well, she’d probably be a killer too if the situation ever came up. But there are only four of us and a hundred of those… things.
Omar shoved open a door, and another, and then a third. “Here!” They ran inside and closed the door behind them. It was a large bedroom and in the center of it was the largest bed Wren had ever seen. A huge rotting mattress lay on the wooden platform with four massive wooden columns in each corner to support the steepled wooden roof, from which hung tattered, moth-eaten curtains.
Omar ran to one side, grabbed hold of a large chest of drawers next to the wall, and shoved. The tiny wooden legs screeched across the bare floor, until two of them snapped off. Together, they wrestled the bureau in front of the door, and then stood panting in the shadows.
In the quiet, they heard thumping and grunting and distorted echoes from the hall outside and from the
