Storm of the Dead - Lisa Smedman [101]
Gindrol and Talzir, meanwhile, played their parts to perfection. Shuffling, nervous, they refused to meet the "Crone's" eyes. On cue, the boat rocked, as if an invisible person were stepping into it. Kвras stared in that direction. "Ah. Lost his nerve, did he?"
Gindrol bent to scoop up the sack, but Kвras stamped a foot down on it. He pretended to open the strongbox. The illusionary lid sprang open, and he looked inside. The voidstone was a dark, fist-sized hollow at the center of the box. With a satisfied nod, he pretended to close the missing lid.
He removed his foot from the sack. "Go," he ordered the other two.
Cringing, they retrieved the sack and scrambled back to the boat.
All part of the act.
It was lost on the undead, of course. The animated corpses that surrounded Kвras hadn't the intelligence to understand the subtle scene the three Nightshadows had just played out. But the quth-maren that stepped out of a nearby doorway did. Tall and gaunt, made up of nothing more than oozing muscle stitched rudely over bone, it stared at Kвras with eyes that wept blood. As Kвras met its stare, panic welled inside him. He felt if he were drowning, thrashing about in panic, going under in a sea of blood.
Masked Lord, he pleaded fiercely, strengthen me.
The panic dissipated, leaving only a nervous bead of sweat that trickled down the small of Kвras's back. He glared at the animated dead who clustered around him, fawning for his attention. "Clear a path for me," he ordered.
The quth-maren nodded. It waved a hand, and the plague-killed drow standing on the dock folded to the ground, lifeless once more. Then it gave a hacking cough, deep in its chest. A wad of blood-tinged mucous shot from its mouth and landed on the stomach of a corpse that had Iain down immediately in front of Kвras. The acidic spit sizzled, burning clean through the body, down to the stone beneath.
The quth-maren gave a gurgling chuckle and padded up the dock, leaving bloody footprints in its wake.
Behind Kвras, Gindrol and Talzir pulled away from the dock. The splashes of their oars were rapidly lost amid the clattering of the skulls overhead and the wails of the ghosts that flitted above.
Kвras forced his shoulders erect and followed the quth-maren with a haughty, confident step. They walked through the ruined city. Everywhere Kвras looked lay plague victims, preserved by fell magic. They rose at his approach, bowing in subservience to the Crone he appeared to be. Some plucked at his cloak with blistered fingers; he shrugged them away imperiously.
Movement down a side street caught his eye. He glanced in that direction and saw a monstrous hound nearly four times his height, made up of a seething mass of bodies, with teeth made from broken femurs. It sniffed at the dead, selected one, and closed its teeth around it. Lifting the corpse into the air, the monstrous hound shook its head, scattering chunks of flesh left and right. It paused in this gruesome task to stare back at Kвras, blood dribbling from its mouth like drool.
Kвras averted his eyes and walked on. All around him, however, were equally horrific sights. Ghouls scuttled like crabs across the corpses, snapping off choice pieces and sucking on them. Specters drifted in and out of walls, leaving a rime of frost in their wake. Finger-sized gravecrawlers wriggled into the nostrils and ears of the bodies that lay on the ground, gradually calcifying the dead.
Kвras had seen it all before. Just as they had then, his guts churned in horror. He'd thought himself ready. It had been five years since the fall of Maerimydra, after all. Five years since he'd escaped from the horror of a city conquered both from without, by the army of Kurgoth Hellspawn, and from within, by the traitorous priestesses of House T'sarran.
You survived then, he told himself sternly. You'll survive now.
But his thoughts kept turning traitorously back to that time. To all the near misses, the almost-fatal mistakes.