The Warden

Chapter 20

Clouds came over the horizon and killed the gilded effect. None stood. No laughter came. Only grey death surrounded him.

Clasping his hands, Masis strode out fixed on helping however he could. His body went to the exertion with a will while his mind remained dormant. The roughness of the stones and the moldy stench of the mortar imprinted on his senses as he removed rock after rock, searching for those that might have survived their sudden fall. He removed body after body. Some feeble survivors clung to him as he aided them to the benches under the pavilion. None who worked with him or clasped at him for support protested his presence. None seemed to care while hoisting corpses that he was their failed hero. Their failed Night Slayer. They just worked. They piled the dead and shuttled the shivering survivors to a seat.

Masis and another man finally came upon Ekkehart's remains. The man who had wanted to use Masis, wanted him to slay every nightling that threatened the colony, threatened him, lay there dead, his mouth locked open in a perpetual shriek. A fly landed on his nose and crawled to his shadow mark before it took wing again. Not a twitch of life. Grabbing under his knees while the other man grasped beneath his arms, Masis and he hauled Ekkehart's body to the ever growing pile just beyond the ruined remains of a lean-to. The pile stood downwind of the colony.

By the time Wilo stood overhead, they had finished their work. Sweat rolled down each person's forehead, each body was ripe with its own odor. Some thirty souls who had survived gathered near the mass of bodies, their marks standing out darkly under the sun. Masis' companion worker approached and carried a torch, its flames streaking in the direction of the balefire with the wind, hungry to be about its work. He rambled up to Masis and offered him his burden.

"Do it." His voice betrayed no anger nor did his eyes. Masis had to bear this burden. "You might want to say somethin'."

Masis accepted the torch, his hand hesitating only briefly. It did not waver while in his grip. The wind kept gusting over the heap of bodies, so it carried Masis' words over it as a benediction, a soft layer of sentiment to send them on their way.

"They were all good people," he said, his words quavering with his eyes. "Their only crime was to have survived...to have survived an encounter with a night wight, to have been marked for death and left to rot in this prison. May they find peace in the Grand Palaces Beyond."

Those behind Masis mumbled their assent.

Masis stepped forward and thrust the torch into a hollow amongst the limbs. The flames slowly spread, first catching on the clothing then turned carnivorous and seared into the flesh.

All present stepped back. While the wind carried most of the smell away, the bitter reek of hair and flesh still reached Masis. The smoke, heavy and greasy, creeped along the ground as the wind drove it on its way, never rising far from the earth as though their Shadow marks still bore them down and imprisoned them in the Beyond.

Most stood for a respectful period by the pyre. But after a time most began to filter away. First a few. Then in groups of three or four. They went until only Masis remained.

He stood there as the fire did its work, the wind tousling his hair as his mother once had. His arms hung at his sides. Tears, long since dried, had left trails in the film of dirt covering his face. None had seen his face, but he had cried. No sobs wracked his body. No sound escaped his mouth. But he had wept. The sheer number of deaths pulled the tears from his eyes.

Masis had never gotten to visit his ancestral mausoleum, an ancient oak, where his family had been laid to rest, before he left Hyrbn. When he was a boy, his family had gone to that imposing edifice to visit the graves of ancestors long past. Candles always had burned in small alcoves set in the walls. His father had shown him where the family would one day be interred, several outcroppings that would be magicked closed when filled, their names neatly magicked into each.