Booming explosive sounds that were not thunder had shaken the windows of the orchestra house. The glow of the palace fire filled the sky with a false dawn. The musicians had stopped playing. Cory and Sebastian looked at each other.
"What was that?" Sebastian asked as if Cory would have an answer.
The rain battered the windows for several moments and then everyone seemed to decide home was the best place to be.
When Cory and Sebastian eventually escaped the orchestra house and reached the once lush palace lawn the collapse of the main hall greeted them. A breathless, weeping voice behind them spoke.
"They're all dead. All of them. And the dead... are walking."
Cory turned around first.
Suki, Mrs Samshaw's assistant, eyes red, face pale and tear streaked.
"It... it... was Pragius, only different. He..." She swallowed not knowing how to make the words come out.
The rain hissed into clouds of steam as it fell on the flames.
"He killed the king, just grabbed him by the throat. It was like all the flesh drained out of him."
Sebastian looked at her like she was an infected wound, his lips curled in revulsion.
"You're not making any sense. What do you mean ALL dead and walking. The king killed? By Pragius?"
Suki started again. The conversation she heard as she came through the door, the moment she saw the thing that was Pragius turn to kill the king when she dropped the tray and ran from the palace. Right up until now when she came out of her hiding place in the bushes by the burning lodge.
"Pragius using magic," Sebastian ranted "a burnt walking skeleton with a crown, a cloak and a book. Turning everyone into the walking dead. Impossible. How? It can't be."
"Where is the captain of the guard, why isn't he here?" Cory demanded.
"He... he was in the palace, with the rest of them. I was serving at the annual dinner for the commanders and captains."
"Oh..." the word that came next was normally used by soldiers in the tavern.
Cory hunted the burning palace with his eyes as if guidance he needed was there in the fire somewhere.
"Oh God..." he said looking skywards with the rain forcing him to close his eyes. He stood for many short breaths, thoughts as tumultuous as the waters in a waterfall plunge pool, still searching for guidance, an answer.
One answer came to mind.
"Where are you going?" Sebastian's eyes were wide.
"To get help from the castle."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Get what guards you can together. Get them guarding road junctions and bridges."
"I don't know how to command soldiers, you're the general."
"Me?"
"You were training for it and in case you hadn't noticed... Cory... the next nearest thing Valendo had to a general just burnt in the fire before getting up following... our brother. I CAN'T DO THIS!"
Pain and anger fuelled his voice and the soldier's tavern word came again from Cory's mouth, then he yelled.
"WELL WHY DON'T YOU JUST GO TO CHURCH... AND PRAY THEN."
Stumbling, then running from the palace, Cory slipped in the mud that was once a lawn.
*
Sunny's hooves beat the ground, rain still falling. Water, tears or maybe both streaming out of Cory's eyes.
There were few things Cory kept in the castle, just things his grandfather had given him. Like the letter.
This, the horse under him and the cloths on his back were the only things in the world he had left.
The letter lay open on the table in Garon's old office. Cory worked with a knife to loosen and remove a stone in the wall. Taking the key he found there he unlocked the long narrow chest under the box bench beneath the window.
Reading the letter again he took from the chest another key and a smooth brown cubic stone set with a second smaller green stone. He walked through the castle and up the south west tower, conquered so many times and yet the door at the top had always remained an enigma. Unlike the other wooden doors in the castle, this door was just like the one at the base of the castle that gave access out to the rope bridge leading to the waterfall. It was cold, almost black and made of iron. The key unlocked it and he entered expectantly surveying the room. Engraved on the floor was a circle as wide as he was tall with four lines radiating out from a socket to the edge. The segments were filled with small multi-coloured pieces of tile. He put the stone in the socket and stepped backwards out of the circle.
Nothing happened.
As instructed by the letter, Cory left the room locking it behind him feeling none the wiser.
Back at the chest in his grandfather's office he lifted out something long wrapped in an oiled leather cover. Lying flat in the bottom of the chest were a number of old books. This wasn't a time for reading so he removed the oiled leather cover and saw something he had only ever seen in the painting on the wall in the castle's great hall. The painting of his grandfather in battle with the Ripper. It was the sword with the jewel eye.
There was a note curled round the hilt.
"Be strong, don't give up," Cory read aloud.
"Well grandfather, I bet you didn't have the walking dead led by my brother in mind when you wrote this."
Pulling the note out of the way Cory grasped the sword's hilt and the world around him vanished.
*
Mounted on a wall in a castle on Green Island far to the south, a jewel in the hilt of a sword like the one Cory had just grasped lit up like the opening of a lizard's eye.
*
In a hall lit by a coal fire in a castle on the cliff overlooking Bytper far to the north, a third sword like the one Cory had just grasped opened its yellow eye.
A gloved hand lifted the sword and a face was bathed in the light of the eye-like jewel. King Klonag toyed with something hidden under his clothing.
A smile spread over his face as he spoke.
"Interesting."
*
Cory's vision cleared.
A bright grey sky. No sun, no moon, no stars and no clouds.
The ground, black shining rock. No grass, no trees, no plants and no soil.
He looked up into a pair of yellow glowing lizard eyes. There was a wide grinning mouth filled with short pointed teeth. For hair, fat strands of grey flesh like rats tails hanging down to its shoulders. One shoulder connected to a long thin muscular arm covered in dark grey scales. At the end of the arm a long fingered hand tipped with white finger nails. The hand had an iron grip on Cory's wrist just as he was gripping the creature's wrist.
The creature's grin widened and it said something, the sounds twisting and curling. Whatever it said it repeated because the rhythm was the same except this time Cory understood perfectly.
A voice with a background hiss.
"You... are not strong enough for this."
It ran. It ran like a hurricane blows and Cory's feet left the ground with his wrist still in the creatures grip. There had been no wind before but now the air rushed past so fast Cory struggled to draw breath. The world about him was a grey and black blur.
The hurricane rushed past his ears, ears increasingly in pain. They were going up. His ears gave out a pop and the pain eased.
The wind stopped and Cory's knees crashed to the ground. Looking up, he saw the creature still grinning and did not appear to be tiring after its sprint.
They were on the tip of a mountain and Cory still fought for breath. In the distance the black ground dropped away at a cliff into a grey dead flat sea.
"You are not strong enough for this."
Cory looked forward this time as the hurricane began again. At least now the world about him ceased to be a blur, but what was before him was behind him almost before he could arrange what he saw in his thoughts. There was nothing he could do about plummeting off that cliff, though they didn't so much plummet as fly down from it onto the grey sea. Could this creature run on water? Was it even water? Looking behind there were no ripples as they passed.
They came to an abrupt halt on a small black island. Cory tried to get his feet under him.
"You are not strong enough for this."
Cory was far over the edge of rational reason. A life time's worth of madness was packed into the last few hours. His mind was well into the realms of anger and defiance.
"Stoooop......... saaaying........ thaaat."
His words were lost in the hurricane.
The grey seascape flashed back to black landscape and the world continued to blur.
They stopped again.
'Isn't this where I started?' Cory thought. That was a mistake, taking the time to think.
"You are not strong enough for this."
It almost sounded like a question.
The hurricane returned and that word the soldiers use in the tavern escaped from Cory's mouth.
Ears in pain, popping again. On the tip of the mountain. No mistakes this time. Just enough space. Cory planted his feet on the ground, gripped the creature's wrist with his other hand and hauled back with all his strength and yelled;
"I AM STRONG ENOUGH FOR THIS!"
The yell burst out of his grandfather's office and echoed around Dendra Castle.
*
It was the middle of the night. The thunder and lightning had passed but the rain still fell like an ocean dropping from the sky. Steam continued to hiss and belch above the burning palace.
Sebastian had returned to the lawn. It seemed to be where people gathered for some kind of guidance. Sebastian wondered where he would find his.
Cory, exhausted, slid off Sunny's saddle and stumbled up to Sebastian.
"Well?" asked Sebastian.
Cory left out of his report anything about the yellow eyed lizard creature. Sebastian threw his hands in the air.
"Magnificent... Superb... A completed floor mosaic and a magic sword. How is that going to help?"
This was new. Condescension and irony from Sebastian. The words stabbed Cory in the heart.
He had no anger left in him. He just stood there, cold, sword in hand, the tip resting on the ground.
The rain poured over his eyebrows and into his eyes.
[End of chapter.]
[Quick fact: I still grieve for what just happened to Pragius... and I wrote it in the spring of 2013.]