By the time the zombies finished with their work and the corpses had been laid to rest, the sky had clouded over. A light rain fell upon the three men as they looked upon the shallow grave. Alexi said a few brief words in Patterna, commending the fallen Vistani to their ancestors and wishing them fair travels beyond the Mists.
'Now you are no longer bound to any lands. Now you are free,' he finished quietly. The silence that followed was marred only by the hollow spatter of rain on the zombies' armor.
Only a short while after the Vistani left the clearing, bound for Nedragaard Keep with their shuffling guardians, a figure separated from the trees. His colorless clothes seemed to match the bleak, rain-sodden day, yet his spirits were bright as he approached the grave.
'A thousand pardons for the indignity I am about to inflict upon you,' the Bloody Cobbler said in all sincerity to the figures piled beneath the mounded earth. 'It would have been much simpler for everyone had they left you where you fell. Still, this is all in a good cause.'
He raised his arms in much the same fashion as Lord Soth had earlier. 'Up and out of there,' the Cobbler ordered. 'I summon you up, and you must obey.'
Whistling an ancient traveling song once popular among the Knights of Solamnia, he turned his back on the shuddering, churning grave mound and walked to a fallen log. There he rested a book-like leather case the same pale color as his clothes.
The Cobbler glanced back once, just in time to see the first fingers claw at the dismal daylight. He smiled and let the case fall open. Carefully, he began to unpack the tools of his trade.
Thirteen
Ganelon looked down at the severed ear in his hand. Slowly, he brought the piece of rotting flesh to his lips and whispered into it. The effect was instantaneous. Bratu and the other lunatics, even his beloved Helain, hurried from where they had strayed across the hillside. They huddled together at his feet and looked up at him expectantly.
Beyond the cowering madmen, at the foot of the hill, lay their destination. The Invidians who lived in this part of the Border's Edge Mountains referred to the huge field as Malocchio's Dream Garden. How appropriate, mused Ganelon, that it should be so dismal and twisted.
A low wall of rough-hewn stone surrounded a riot of misshapen greenery. Emerald tendrils, almost like veins, crept from the garden through gaps in the wall. They did not seem intent on escaping the place, but shoring up the stones to keep trespassers out. From the looks of things, the garden had few enough of those.
The greenery was horribly overgrown, the paths choked with weeds. There seemed to be no clear pattern to the beds. They ranged in size from smaller than a child to larger than one of the massive carts used to haul salt at the mine. Some were bunched together, others isolated. The only thing they had in common was the sort of plant crouched upon each: a large, thorn-snarled rose bush with flowers the crimson of freshly spilled blood. Together the blooms formed a blanket of red that resembled a gaping wound slashed into the Invidian countryside.
The semblance was chillingly appropriate. The garden was located upon the site of a massacre, the spot where Malocchio Aderre himself had slaughtered an entire caravan of Vistani. As it was Malocchio's ambition that all Vistani be similarly butchered, so the field had been tagged his 'Dream Garden.' It was no less a monument to madness than the Whispering Beast's hedge maze. Ganelon hoped that the congruence would work in his favor as he readied his ragged band of lunatics to begin their perilous work within.
'Go to the garden wall and wait,' Ganelon said to the two dozen or so soldiers in his mad army.
A few evinced some small comprehension. Most just stared at him blankly. He sighed and repeated the order into the ear the Beast had given him. They immediately turned to the task.
Ganelon wondered what they heard when he spoke to them, if the voice was his own or if the Beast's gruesome present gave it a sinister sound. From what the Beast had said about Helain, she couldn't hear the commands at all. She only aped the others, her guilty conscience goading her to take on their punishments and fears as her own.
It pained Ganelon to see his beloved so distanced from the person he knew her to be. Still, hints of her former self shone through now and then. When the lunatics were at their most manic, she would go suddenly calm. They whirled and capered about; she remained still. The breeze of their passing would stir her red locks and billow her torn, soiled nightdress. Through it all she stood unmoving, letting them swirl harmlessly around her like wasps swarming a gravestone.
He watched her now as she walked atop the low stone wall. She turned, as if she could feel his longing eyes upon her. No spark of recognition lit her face as she returned his gaze. Ganelon finally looked away. She was lost to him.
With a heavy heart, the young man focused again on the task at hand and took a quick accounting of his wards. Most had reached the wall. Once there, they took up their usual crazed behavior.
One woman, whose name Ganelon had forgotten, walked with direction and determination for short spans, only to stop suddenly. All sign of intelligence fled her thin face until, just as suddenly, she would pluck at her hair until she came away with precisely eight long strands. Tossing them over her shoulder, she would turn sharply and repeat the routine. A few more repetitions, and she ended up close to where she'd started.
Some lunatics wept openly, others sat on the ground and rocked back and forth. Only Bratu ventured into the garden. He wandered aimlessly among the maze of plants, slapping at his ruined ears and pointing at the beds. It was a gesture many of the others, still perched atop the low wall, soon copied. They were obviously frightened by something in the garden, something hidden from Ganelon's view by the weeds and the wall.
Ganelon hobbled down to the garden. As he wrestled his braced leg over the wall, he noticed that the roses' fragrance was twined with some other, more ominous odor. It was pungent and earthy, the smell of old rot. At first he suspected the black blight spider-webbed across many of the plants. A closer inspection of the nearest rose bush revealed the actual source of the smell.
The bases of the rose bushes were thick and woody, completely denuded of leaves. They resembled nothing so much as human bones, a trait that allowed them to blend seamlessly with the old skeletons from which they grew.
That was the thing that had so alarmed Bratu and the others. Each of the rose bushes was rooted in a corpse. Malocchio had left the butchered Vistani where they fell, then planted his victory garden amongst the dead. Some of the bodies were partially buried. Some lay atop the dark loam. The branches so resembled bleached bones that the remains were invisible from a distance.
As he walked the weed-choked paths Ganelon realized that some of the corpses were newer than others. They still retained some scraps of desiccated flesh or some tatter of clothing. Around a few of the beds lay coins and small trinkets, even a rusting knife or two. The remains of failed thieves, no doubt, he guessed.
The thought made Ganelon stop dead in his tracks. He peered more closely at one of the bushes. Through the mold-flecked leaves, he could make out wicked greenish-yellow thorns running along the stems and branches. Ribbons of mummified flesh dangled from some of the spikes. Others were dark with old blood.
An insight blazed across his mind: Those aren't thorns. They're teeth. These are corpse roses.
The intuition's clarity stunned Ganelon. He wondered briefly at its origin, but left that problem for another time. The information it had imparted was indisputable. They were all in terrible danger.
'Don't touch the roses,' he said into the severed ear. 'Stay on that side of the wall!' He directed Bratu to join the others. The Vistana was reluctant to leave the garden, as if he could sense that these poor souls were his people. Eventually, Ganelon took him by the hand and forced him over the wall.
His charges out of harm's way for the moment, Ganelon returned to his examination of the corpse roses. There was no way around it; without the roses, the Beast would not cure Helain. Cautiously he plucked one of the flowers. The stem shuddered and oozed blood as red as the bloom but did not lash out at him. So long as Bratu and the others could harvest the roses carefully, they'd be all right.
He walked back to the wall, giving the bushes as wide a berth as possible. Through the Beast's charm, he gathered the madmen who had strayed from the wall. That none of them had ventured into the garden, as he had ordered earlier, gave Ganelon some small hope as he outlined his orders to them. If he was precise enough in his instructions, they might survive this ordeal.
