Chapter Text
It was the boy that saw the dead first. He had been far from the town, at the base of the mountain path. A new scheme of planting sharp burrs in the main road had occurred to him. Then he could lurk back in the trees to see the horses throw their riders. He was keeping off the path, just in case someone from the town came past and reported back to his mother what he’d been up to. He realised later that this simple decision probably saved his life.
There they were, assembling, waiting. Tall robed figures with eyes empty of light. Hunched half-corpses, all jutting bone and teeth constantly chewing. Reeking wagons that rattled and creaked. And further back, something large that writhed and shuffled, something with too many limbs.
The boy’s eyes were wide for those few moments, all his ideas undone of what was possible in this world, what was real and what belonged to the realm of story. Then he was scrambling back up the path to the town, too out of breath to scream.
In the town’s tiny garrison, Captain Willow was reclining in his chair, out of his armour, trying to carve a pipe. The boy coming through the door made him slip, his knife flicking into the surface of the table. He could feel his face beginning to set in anger. The boy was enough to do that to him most days.
‘The dead!’ said the boy, whose name was Nathaniel. ‘The dead are here!’
Across the room there was an audible sigh from Drugen, one of the two dwarven riflemen assigned to the garrison. ‘That’s a good one, son,’ he said. ‘Might’ve worked better if you’d started there, rather than building up to it.’
‘No,’ said Nathaniel. His face was red and he was taking huge breaths. ‘No, it’s true! They’re here, you’ve got to believe me.’
‘We believed you the first time,’ said Drugen. ‘Trolls. Then it was ogres. Then ghosts.’
‘The trolls were real!’ said Nathaniel.
‘Never saw hide nor hair of them, though, did we?’ said Drugen. ‘Must’ve been those invisible trolls we keep hearing about, hey Captain?’
Willow was silent. The rumours of the undead plague were starting to reach even their isolated community. Most of the townsfolk regarded them as either outright lies, or else something so far from their daily life that they need not give any thought to it. Willow himself was not sure. Sometimes late into the night, he talked to Laria, the elven sorceress assigned to the squad, and the tales she told of magic and the twisted ends it could be turned to were enough to give him nightmares for weeks after. But the boy lied. The boy lied as easily as he breathed.
‘Wait,’ said Willow. He went out into their tiny yard, a narrow patch of dirt hemmed in on two sides by garrison walls, one by the sheer rock face of the mountain, and on the fourth by a wooden gate that led to an alley that cut behind a row of other town buildings, leading all the way to the forest.
The two footmen under his command, Atterton and Sidney, were sparring lazily, their movements sluggish and heavy. At Willow’s gesture, they halted.
‘Get your armour on,’ he said. ‘That boy said there’s undead at the base of the pass. Check it out and report back.’
‘That little shit?’ said Atterton. ‘Why are we even bothering, Captain?’
‘Yeah, remember that time we spent running around in the forest after them trolls?’ said Sidney. ‘I fell in that hole in the tree roots. I’m still getting the mud out of the cracks of my armour.’
Atterton laughed. ‘That was pretty funny. I’ve changed my mind, let’s go. Maybe we can find another hole for you to fall into.’ He strode past Willow and into the garrison. Sidney threw down his wooden sword and spat.
‘That kid needs a beating or three to keep him in line,’ he said. ‘With respect, sir, this is a waste of time.’
‘Maybe,’ said Willow. ‘But if he’s wrong, all you’ve done is walk down the hill and back up again. If he’s right—’
‘Undead, in this backwater?’
Willow just stared at him.
‘Yeah, I’m going,’ said Sidney, and he went.
Willow stood for a moment in the yard, enjoying the open air and the quiet. A bird called out, somewhere far above him. He sighed and re-entered the garrison, where Atterton and Sidney were strapping their armour on. The boy had made himself scarce. Drugen was cleaning his rifle.
‘Cleared off quick-sharp,’ he said. ‘Soon as your back was turned.’
More likely to get out of range of the footmen’s anger, Willow thought. He sat down and resumed carving his pipe. Amid much grumbling, Atterton and Sidney left out the door onto the street, heading down to investigate. For a while the only sounds in the garrison were Willow’s knife slowly shaving the wood, and the clink of Drugen messing around in the internal workings of his rifle. The others were all absent: Laria and Reldin, the other rifleman, were on guard duty at the mine, and Browning, the knight, was off-duty and most likely in the tavern. Eventually Drugen stood up and made a show of stretching. Willow waited for what was coming.
‘Might check on the orc,’ said Drugen.
‘He won’t have gone anywhere,’ said Willow.
‘For my own peace of mind then.’
Willow shrugged and didn’t look up. The only way out of their tiny jail cell was through the room they were both currently sitting in, but both Willow and Drugen already knew that. Capturing an orc was the most exciting thing to have happened since Willow was posted to the town, and going by how often the townsfolk talked about it, the most exciting thing they’d seen in years. A squad was supposed to come and transfer the orc somewhere, a larger prison, but there had been no sign of them. They were late now, Willow noted, by over a week.
‘Key’s on the hook,’ he said. He heard the jingle of Drugen taking the key off the hook, the scratching as it went in the lock, and then the thump of the jail door closing behind him. Inside, the room was split in half by ceiling to floor metal bars. Even the huge muscles of the orc couldn’t crack through those, Willow was pretty sure.
The day dragged on. Drugen came out of the jail and resumed cleaning his rifle. Browning came in, clearly slightly drunk, and him and Drugen swapped for guard duty at the mine. Laria and Reldin came in, relieved, and had their afternoon meal with Willow. The captain took the orc’s meal into him. Neither of them spoke, though their eyes met for a brief moment. He couldn’t read the emotion contained there. He left and absorbed himself in pointless tasks around the garrison, straightening and tidying things that did not need straightening or tidying. And still Atterton and Sidney did not return.
Doubt and guilt churning in his gut, Willow gestured Laria and Reldin up, going for his own armour and sword. In brief words he filled them in on what had happened. It was long past the time when the two footmen ought to have come in through the door, cursing the boy and tearing their armour off before heading to the tavern.
The town itself was in the shape of an L, one path sloping at first gradually and then steeply down off the mountain, the other path ending at the pocket of forest that, as far as anybody knew, was a plateau that went nowhere. The mine rested at the corner of the L. As the trio went past it, Willow quietly informed Browning and Drugen of what they were doing, instructing them to remain at their posts.
Browning belched. ‘That boy can’t help himself,’ he said. ‘Sidney probably just got his arse stuck in a hole again.’
Drugen grinned, but the grim expression on their captain’s face kept any of them from laughing. Willow turned away, and Laria and Reldin followed. No doubt some of the townsfolk had overheard and the word of possible undead was already spreading through the town. It couldn’t be helped, thought Willow. The downside of such a quiet posting was the inability to do the smallest of actions without it being common knowledge within the hour. Him keeping mostly to himself only made the talk of him grow ever more detached from the real.
They trod past the houses built up to where the ground became too impractically steep to sink foundations into. Then a careful downwards trek to the base of the mountain, where the slightest stumble might send you a good part of the way down in a single fall. Many an injury had been caused in the past by an incautious or new traveller doing just that.
‘You getting any reports we’re not, Captain?’ asked Reldin, once they were out of earshot of the town. ‘Tavern rumours sound mostly like shit, as regular.’
Willow shook his head. ‘Nothing solid,’ he said. ‘Pieces from all over. Nobody has the big picture. Second-hand and third-hand reports. Not a lot better than what you’d get in the tavern.’
‘But what do you think?’ asked Laria. She was stringing her bow as they went. When she’d arrived under Willow’s command, all she had with her was the ratty robe she’d been wearing and her knowledge of a handful of spells. Willow had taken one look at her and set about getting her some basic boiled leather armour, along with extra martial training. She could use a sword passably well, but archery was where he had focussed her talents. Making the best of the limited resources he was given by the higher-ups.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Willow. ‘The common word is the dead walking. We’re losing touch with towns in out-of-the-way places.’
‘Huh. Like us,’ said Reldin.
‘What would the dead want with our little town?’ asked Laria.
‘All we’ve got is the mine,’ said Reldin.
Willow held up a hand for silence. A slight bend in the path was about to bring the crossroads at the base of the mountain into view, where the route to the town headed off from the main road. He led them off the path, into the thin trees that cushioned it from the hard face of the mountain itself.
Again they descended, slower and quieter. When he first heard the noise, Willow dropped into a low crouch and felt more than heard the others do the same behind him. Clinging to tree roots, he lowered himself gingerly further down the hill. More than one noise now, he could tell, all of them unfamiliar. Like teeth trying to gnash their way through his helmet, echoing inside his skull, louder and louder.
He parted the branches of a bush and saw what the boy had. The waiting dead. He heard Laria’s intake of breath and Reldin’s whispered curse from behind him, confirming these creatures were no trick of his brain. Corpses that still stood and walked and massed like an army. Robed figures surrounding something that blazed with sickly green light. As Willow watched, the light formed into the outline of a building.
‘Necromancers,’ breathed Laria. Willow looked where she was pointing, saw the shambling figures, still living perhaps but with more similarity to the dead that surrounded them.
‘And that looks like a siege engine,’ whispered Reldin. A kind of wagon loaded with yet more corpses, the flies around it thick and dark.
‘Back,’ hissed Willow. ‘Very quietly.’
Atterton and Sidney, headed down here with no idea that they needed caution, would have been seen by the dead straight away. Maybe their corpses already shambled among the others. Maybe they had been torn to pieces beyond what even a necromancer could revive.
Each movement calculated to be as silent as possible, Willow, Laria, and Reldin near-climbed their way back up through the trees. They rejoined the path once they were out of sight of the undead forces. They stood in silence on the slope for a time, breathing heavily.
‘Even the dead need iron,’ said Reldin. ‘Those wagons, they—’
‘Move,’ said Willow, and he started shooting up the hill, bent so low as to almost be on all fours. The others soon started after him. The town had to know, had to prepare. Soon, the dead would start the ascent. Soon, the dead would be at the edge of the town, growing their army by bloody violence and dark magic. Willow’s blood thumped in his head, his breaths coming ragged and fast. The town had to know. Soon, the siege of their home would begin.