City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [43]
Malum nodded. ‘Then what happened?’
‘Deeb looked dead. He shouldn’t have been able to move. His neck was broken and his head was hanging at an angle. His eyes was closed, too. The things to one side of him were really decayed. They looked like melted men with their skin peeling off. The three of them came towards us and that’s when we legged it back here and didn’t stop. We could hear them men laughing at us as we left the boneyard.’
Everyone waited for Malum’s next words to fill the painful silence, but no one made eye contact.
He had heard about these sorts of situations before, but they tended to amount to just rumours, fanciful stories designed to intimidate others, yet he’d recently heard about something similar happening on Jokull, with dead people walking across the tundra, but that was too far away to concern him.
Knowing what it was likely to have been, he eventually declared, ‘Cultist necromancers. That’s what they sound like. In the boneyard, raising the dead, killing one of our gang members.’
‘What shall we do?’ asked the skinny youth, hunching his shoulders, retreating into himself. ‘Could go back again, see if they return?’
Malum stood up, stretched his legs. ‘The Bloods, we’re family remember. If one of us goes down, I go down with him. We respect and support each other. But dealing with necromancers, well . . . that’s something way out of what we normally have to contend with.’
None of them would be equipped to fight people like that. He had a pact with a few cultists, a deal arranged to make their lives more comfortable in exchange for a little help, but he didn’t think that they were worth wasting on a power his own guys wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Necromancers were rare even in the weird and fucked-up world of cultists. His decision now would be to do nothing, but he would promote these youths up a level for at least trying to fight off a necromancer to help their already dead friend.
ELEVEN
‘Lady Rika, you want to say a little prayer, or something?’ Randur muttered. ‘Might make the snow stop.’
He gazed out across the treeless plain, at a stolen glimpse of sunlight – at skies turning the colour of a rusted sword, providing the only distraction from the same bleakness they had travelled through for so long now. Pterodettes circled terns that circled pterodettes in avoidance manoeuvres. In such vast open skies there was nowhere to hide.
‘From the sound of your voice,’ Rika said, ‘I assume you are having some fun at my expense, Randur.’ Her black cloak rippled in the breeze, revealing an ornate medallion attached to the robe underneath, a reminder of the wealth she and her sister were once used to.
‘Not much, if I’m honest,’ Randur replied, catching a wry smile from Denlin.
Randur leaned on his sword as they sheltered from the constant snow under the porch of an old farmhouse. The building hadn’t been lived in for years, but it was somewhere. Psychologically, points like this were essential havens on their map. Thirty days now, and most of them spent icy wet. Thirty days on the run from Villjamur.
They were fugitives, no less; he’d stolen these girls from certain death and angered an entire empire in the process, and to say he was now feeling paranoid was an understatement. On a rickety boat that lurched and lunged amid choppy waters, they’d skimmed north along the coast of Jokull, under nothing but empty skies and sea spray. They avoided ice sheets near Kullrún, then travelled south with mordantly cold winds chasing behind them, before landing with more luck than skill on the east coast of Folke the previous night.
Yet they were barely at the halfway point of their route. Villiren, a city located at the end of the next island north, was their target destination – though it seemed a world away.
Still, at least we’re out of the fucking freezing water.
Folke: Randur’s homeland. He knew it well, so was aware of the dangers to be encountered anywhere away from the major towns. Looking out across a snow-blasted landscape, with nothing ahead but biting wind, with only a