“It’s that fuckin’ Soultaker,” snarled the lead soldier, a burly fellow with a balding head and a protruding gut. “He’s probably still in here somewhere, so look sharp, ya bunch of whoresons!”
I took a good long look at the soldiers as they filed in, their flaming torches illuminating the gloomy space in hues of yellow, red, and orange. Their dead friends seemed to have been a scouting party; there were at least a dozen soldiers in here now. A few of them were bending down to examine the shrivelled corpses of their fallen comrades, staring at the withered husks with a mixture of fear and wrath on their grubby, stubble-thick faces.
I glanced across the crypt and noticed a jeweled urn perched on top of a tall plinth, perfectly illuminated by a nearby soldier. As an experienced diver, I’d seen this trap many times before; it was a setup only an amateur would fall for, and it was perfect for what I was about to do.
I stepped out from behind the plinth and walked to the center of the chamber. The soldiers stared at me for a few moments with their heavy jaws slack with disbelief, a look that quickly morphed into fiery rage.
“Welcome to the party, lads,” I said with a cheeky grin on my face as I had my dagger perform a lazy dance for them in my right hand. “Your friends over there got here a little early… but they had a great time, as you can see.”
“You piece of shit!” bellowed the lead soldier, drawing his longsword. “We’ll have your head on a spike at Rollar’s camp before the day is out, and I’ll be the first to shit down your throat! Get him, boys!”
I chuckled as the rest of the soldiers drew their weapons and charged at me with a savage roar. Then I spun on my heels and flung a throwing star at the jeweled urn. My aim was as perfect as always, and the projectile knocked the urn off the plinth. As soon as it did, I dropped to the floor, flattening my body against the stone, and with a pneumatic hiss, the trap I had just set off abruptly blasted a volley of poison darts across the room.
The charging soldiers screamed out in agony and dropped their weapons as the steel points, tainted with a fast-acting poison, whistled over me and pierced their leather armor before driving themselves deep into their flesh.
Meanwhile, my throwing star had bounced back off the urn and up into the air. Without hesitating for a second, I jumped to my feet with an acrobat’s agility and caught it before charging into the midst of the floundering soldiers.
The poison was already shooting through their veins and messing up their coordination, causing them to stumble like drunks, froth at the mouth, and swing their swords with clumsy, inaccurate hacks. They’d all be dead within minutes, but I wanted their souls before the poison stole those prizes from under my nose.
The lead soldier was almost pathetically easy to kill. Drooling and swaying on his legs, he launched the weakest thrust I’d ever had to dodge. He was so slow, a blind swordsman could have evaded the attack. I stepped past the man’s blade, half turning as I did, and slammed Grave Oath into his heart. His eyes bulged from their sockets with sudden agony, and as I removed the blade and his soul, his chunky body deflated rapidly, like a wineskin I’d just stuck a pin into.
As his corpse dropped to the floor, I sucked my stomach in, arched my spine, and spun on my heel, deftly evading a spear thrust from another soldier. In my movement, I grabbed the spear haft and yanked, jerking the soldier forcefully forward onto the point of my dagger, which plunged through his right eye and into his brain. He was dead before his body hit the ground, and Grave Oath had claimed another soul.
I was about to deal with the next of the stumbling soldiers when Isu’s voice suddenly entered my mind. It was a weird sensation; it was as if she was talking inside my brain, yet at the same time as if there were a thousand invisible clones of her filling the room around me, echoing every word she uttered.
“You have power over Death, Vance,” she whispered. “Use it; use the dead soldiers against their living comrades.”
As soon as she said this, a strange tingling like potent static electricity blasted out from my heart, rippled through the nerves and muscles of my arms, and pooled in my fingertips, where it crackled with an almost ferocious urgency. As if Isu herself was guiding my hands, I pointed at two of the fallen soldiers I had killed earlier and heard myself whispering a command in an arcane language I’d never heard. I knew the words I uttered meant “rise again, and serve me,” but I had no idea how I knew this. One of the unexpected perks of having a heart touched by Death, I guessed.
The corpses of the soldiers exploded, the shriveled flesh bursting in tattered plumes of dull crimson and purple. And from these unholy explosions of soul-drained meat, congealed blood, and withered innards, living skeletons rose.
For a few seconds, both myself and the poisoned soldiers froze and stared in awe. Then all the hells broke loose. One wouldn’t expect a skeleton to move very quickly, given the lack of muscle, sinews, and other connective tissue, but these were fast. And strong, probably way stronger than they had been inside their flesh suits.
Utterly fearless, they stormed into the midst of the soldiers. One skeleton, finding itself between
