a wailing shudder and she crumpled to the ground and began to bawl.
Phen looked at Oarly and the dwarf just shrugged and started down the trail he had come from in the first place.
“I’m going after the boat,” he called back over his shoulder.
Phen reflected on what the girl had said. A memory of priests dancing around a hole in the earth in a Westland castle garden while demons and worse things crawled forth into the world came to him. “Were these men around the hole wearing red robes?”
“How did you know?” she asked with enough surprise in her voice to stifle her crying.
“One of those red-robed priests turned me into this.” He gestured at his marble-colored body.
“Oh.” She looked more closely at him. He tried not to be embarrassed as she took him in. When he was transformed he’d been wearing a hooded mage’s robe. Now it was stone like the rest of him. It was impossible to see where his garments ended and he began. He hoped she didn’t ask him how he went to the bathroom, because he didn’t. He was relieved when she smiled politely at him.
“Are you sure it was an island?” Phen asked with growing concern.
“Yes.” She heaved out a sigh. “Though seen from high above. I was in the sky.” She looked as if she expected him not to believe her, but he just nodded.
“Borina, most likely,” Phen reasoned. “The priests of Kraw helped the Dragon Queen summon forth Gerard- uh… the Dark Lord or whatever you want to call it. Can you remember anything else?”
“I remember trees that weren’t aflame, but were on fire.”
Phen grunted and scratched at his hardened chin. He’d recently heard a similar description of trees from someone, but he couldn’t remember who.
“If we can get out of here, we will escort you to the High King. He will know what to do.”
Phen stood and looked toward the southwest, where many, many miles away the island of Borina sat with a few other little atolls. “If those red-robed fools have opened up another gateway there’s no telling what has crawled up into the world.”
He stood there for a long moment, contemplating, then he turned back to the elven girl. “I can tell that your shoulder was magically healed. Do you remember any-” His voice trailed away. She was curled up into herself, lying like a babe and sleeping.
Phen sat down, closed his eyes, and sought out his familiar, Spike. The lyna cat responded to his magical probing quickly. Through their link Phen had the lyna seek out Captain Biggs at the helm of the Royal Seawander. They had established a few signals with the captain before leaving the ship. There was nothing that would explain to the captain that they were hundreds of miles southwest of the Serpent’s Eye at the edge of the Leif Greyn River Delta, but he could let them know they were alive.
After having Spike pester him long enough, the captain realized what was happening. “Where are they?” Biggs asked the lyna excitedly. He looked haggard. No doubt they had been searching since the storm passed. Phen knew the captain of Queen Willa’s royal vessel wouldn’t want to return to tell the High King that he’d lost two of the realm’s greatest heroes on a lark.
Phen felt for the man. He and Oarly had more or less bribed him into this. Now that he had Captain Biggs’s attention, he thought about how he could say what he wanted to say through his familiar. He got the captain to follow the lyna down into the Royal Compartment where Phen and Oarly were quartered. There was a map of the southern coast spread out on the booth table. Spike hopped up onto it and began trying to unroll it further westward. The captain watched stupidly for a moment, but after Spike pushed a paperweight off the table Biggs suddenly got it and helped the strange animal unfurl the rest of the parchment.
Phen had to struggle to see through Spike’s eyes in the dimly lit cabin, but he managed to make out the coastline on the map. He had Spike indicate the marshland west of O’Dakahn, the area labeled Leif Greyn Delta.
“You drifted past O’Dakahn, then?” Biggs asked.
Spike paused and nodded his quill-covered feline head.
Phen tried to be more creative and had Spike trace the shape of the letters S M O K E, but that only served to confuse the exhausted-looking captain. Finally, Spike, on his own, darted up to the unlit lantern and began thumping on it with his tail. A few minutes later Biggs finally said he understood that they would light a fire for him to use to locate them. He said he felt stupid talking out loud to the little feline, but he did it anyway.
Biggs told the lyna that it would be midmorning before he could get the ship that far west. Phen wished he could talk back to the captain through Spike, but that just wasn’t possible.
Sometime later the grunting, huffing sound of Oarly’s return came to Phen’s ears. He stood to see what all the commotion was about. Oarly had dragged the dinghy the entire quarter mile across the grass by himself.
“What did you do that for?” Phen asked him.
“So we’ll have a way to leave this blasted lizard den, boy!”
“You should have said that’s what you intended to do, Oarly,” Phen said matter-of-factly. “Captain Biggs is on his way. I imagine they will row the cargo skiff right up to our fire.”
“Bah,” Oarly plopped down and scowled.
Chapter 8
“Are the instances related?” King Mikahl asked the Lion Lord.
The great wolves and Borg had left Dreen the day before. They were headed to Castlemont to try and spread some hope for the people there. The giant admitted that he was supposed to spy on the breed giants of Lokar for his king, as well. The joyful reunion was over and Mikahl was now in a private council chamber dealing with the current issues of the realm.
“It’s hard to say,” Lord Gregory answered. “The men in Southport were on one of Glendar’s three ships. They admitted as much, but they deserted when Glendar’s ship sank. They came to Westland to look after their families. The odd connection is that they said the ship sank off of the Valleyan Coast near Crags, but the more obvious commonality is that all of them, especially the two skeletons the Valleyan fishermen netted, should be dead, but aren’t.”
The room was silent for a while. High King Mikahl, Lord Gregory, Cresson the castle mage, and General Escott were sitting around an oak table in the modest room. The small chamber was annexed from Dreen’s throne room. They all agreed that a matter such as this one should be discussed in private. There was no reason to alarm the people with tales of walking dead men, even if they were true.
They’d just learned that a few weeks earlier a fisherman from the Valleyan village of Crags caught up two human skeletons in his nets. The skeletons had writhed and twisted and tried to get free of the tangle of ropes, but the quick deckhands worked swiftly enough to secure them. The skeletons were now in an iron cage. The fisherman captain mounted the cage on a horsedrawn wagon and was now dragging the spectacle from town to town making a fortune in copper pieces from the common folk. Queen Rosa’s mother, who still ruled over Seaward, had sent the scroll.
It said that the captain was there in Seaward City, saying that one of the skeletons was actually that of King Glendar.
The other incident was a little more disturbing. Outside of Westland’s main trade center, Southport, two other men who had fought with Glendar and Pael were alive when they shouldn’t be. They had been working the lumber trade, felling trees that would be shipped to the builders of Salazar. A miscut caused a towering pine to come crashing down on them. One man’s ribcage was crushed; the other had a branch speared completely through his guts. The incident happened days ago, yet both men were still speaking and alert. Even as their dead flesh was beginning to rot and fall away, they weren’t dying as they should be.
“Pael’s entire army was undead by the time he reached Xwarda,” Mikahl said. “I suppose some of the men, those on the ships who weren’t dead yet, had already been spelled to become as such.”
“So then we have three hundred of these- these things, running around?” General Escott asked, with more than a little alarm showing in his voice.
“One of the ships sank, so the number is more likely nearer two hundred,” said King Mikahl.
