Give generously of your blood. Carve the force of life from your own flesh, bequeath it willingly to those in need... and you shall be rewarded tenfold for your kindness.
- The Book of Necromancy
Cray plucked the sword from the body of the first man, and the dagger from that of the second. He handed the first to Dazi and the second to Setka.
"What's this?" Setka said.
"Weapons more suited to battle than those daggers of yours. You were lucky these men weren't armored - anything more than boiled leather and it would be your blades that broke instead of their skin."
Dazi took the weapon with bad grace. "You would make brigands of us?"
"I would make living men out of you. These weapons are ugly enough, but they're iron, and that makes them your best choice, for the time."
"My word," Setka said, showing the dagger to his masked eyes. "Such strange times these are."
"Apt to get stranger, no doubt."
Cray paused as he passed by the body of his third man. The discarded morning star winked at him in the red sunlight.
For the enemies of God...?
But no. The mace was good steel, but it was heavy and unwieldy, and Cray had not used one for many years. Between the axe and the sword, he had the tools he needed to deal death to any man or fiend who crossed their path.
He kicked the mace from the road and walked on.
The sun grew hellishly hot as the day neared noon, as if to compensate for its absence over the past days. Cray's breastplate was soon burning to the touch, and the Fees sweated and stumbled in their black cloaks. Dazi grumbled, but never too loudly when Cray walked close.
They came upon the trade road as the setting sun was shooting blinding light into their watering eyes. The vastness of the shield became apparent to their left; to their right, a crumbling section of the great sluice. And ahead, the trade road, wide enough for a hundred horses to walk abreast - and empty enough for the same.
The earth crunched beneath Cray's boots as he stepped to the middle of the road, hands on his hips. He turned into the sun, looking west, then put it at his back and looked east. His shadow was cast fully a hundred yards before him.
"Well?" Dazi said.
Cray shrugged. His face registered nothing - not sadness or anger, relief or puzzlement - though he felt all of these and more.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing and no-one. We'd found a ghost town - and now we've found a ghost road."
"I should be happier, if I were you," Dazi said. "Any soul we are apt to meet on this road will wish us nothing but ill."
"Perhaps. In any case, we carry on."
Dazi glanced at the brilliant sun. "Night will fall within the hour."
Cray scoffed. "And? We sought the road in darkness; we can follow it in the same. You said yourself that walking this road is madness - well, then, let us spend as little time upon it as possible."
The sun fell, and the kind moon revealed herself. The air grew cool, then cold; Setka shivered as his lungs filled with frost. He pointed his beak at the sky, mesmerized by the moon's light, wishing for nothing else but to recline in the crook of her arm.
Soon the world was too cold, and the travelers too weary, for them to carry on. They found a gap in the hills that lined the trade road and made camp. Cray wouldn't allow a fire, so they gathered their cloaks about them and shivered, pressing morsels of hard biscuit and cold cured meat into their mouths.
Cray's face was dour; Setka marked it, and waited for Dazi to retire before rising from his seat and settling down closer to his Stoorish friend.
"What do you make of it?" he asked.
"Merchants," said Cray.
"Hmm?"
"Merchants. Squatters. Beggars, pilgrims. If not lords, then common folk. If not caravanners, then peddlers. But there are none - not any of them. Not a plaguebearing soul. I knew that this part of the world had gone sour; but I did not know the blight had cut so deeply already. The hour is later than I knew."
"What of it?" Setka said.
"What of it! Dazi was right; you will not find what you seek in Jysene. You will not find it anywhere. You may as well head south, or east - or north, and let the fiends do for you what man is too cowardly to do himself."
Setka brushed his hands of his last biscuit and reached into his coat. He drew out his bloodletting dagger.
"Shall I draw blood from you, then?" he said. "Cut down the stream of your wrist and let your life spill out on the ground. I sense many bones nearby; I'm sure I could conjure something formidable with your fiery Stoorish blood. If you no longer have any use for it..." and he reached out both hands, one gently grasping at Cray's arm, the other holding the hooked dagger aloft.
Cray drew back. "Cease your foolishness," he said.
"You said that man was too cowardly to do it himself. So, being your friend, I offered to carve in your stead. How is that foolishness?"
"I was not talking about myself," Cray said, pulling his cloak over his arm as if to shield it from Setka's kindness.
"Ah! Then it is only us feeble men of Fees who should throw our lives away? You insult me, Cray. I may dress in black, but my blood is as red as yours, and my heart beats in earnest. My desire for life is as desperate as yours. If I am to spend the rest of my days creeping in darkness, then so be it; but I will not cut them short."
Time enough passed for Setka to hide his dagger before Cray said, "I beg your pardon, Setka of Fees."
Setka waved the words away, not wasting any of his own. He glanced up at the moon, willing her light to fill and warm him.
"Do you have it?" Cray asked softly.
Setka searched his face for a long moment. "These ten years," he said.
"And Dazi, as well?"
"He would never tell me, and I have not seen his face for some time... but yes, I believe so. And worse than I."
Cray said nothing. His eyes were hard as flint. They stared down the trade road, as if willing the horizon to draw closer.
Setka, curious to the last, said, "And you?"
Cray's lack of an answer was answer enough.
"Remarkable," Setka said, almost too softly to be heard.
"My bones ache," Cray said. "My head throbs. My heart flutters. I wake every morning knowing that this will be the day I see the plague writ upon my face. But it never is."
"Your very unmarking marks you, Cray of Stooria. Perhaps it is a sign."
Cray's face didn't change. "Perhaps," he said.
A few hours later, they found that the trade road was not completely deserted, after all. A lone jack-wolf, bone-thin and ragged of breath, came upon their camp in the dead of night. Cray smelled it before he heard it, and sensed it before he smelled it. His eyes, only half-shut from the start, came wide open, and he groped for his weapon.
For beasts... THE AXE!
It was hardly a beast. It watched them balefully from the middle of the road, the moon granting it a shadow that was scarce thinner than the wolf itself. Charcoal-black fur was mottled and ribs showed plainly through patches of raw skin. Cray could tell that the beast was as desperate and as close to death as any could be; even as he hefted the axe and rose to his feet, it considered him, pacing and growling low under its breath. Finally it plunged, snapping, at his neck. Cray stepped, swung - the axe came around and clouted the creature across the muzzle. Its jaw was knocked loose and its neck snapped like a dry branch.
Only then, with the echoes of the shattered neck leaping into the dark sky, did Dazi and Setka come awake.
"What? What's this?" Dazi said.
Cray nudged the animal with his boot. "A braver creature than the men of Tranton. It did him little service."
"Ah!" Setka said. "What a sorry sight."
"I've seen sorrier, and far more worthy of pity," Dazi said. "Come, let's toss it away before it draws fiends to us."
Setka's heart, as it so often did, formed a thought of fire and impulse, and his mind, as it so often did, allowed itself to be subdued. He pulled back the left sleeve of his coat, then sent his right hand seeking for his dagger.
"Oh, fool!" Dazi said, but Setka ignored him. He drew the crooked dagger out from his coat, held it loosely as an artist would a brush, then traced a pattern of looping cuts across his arm. The blade glinted and flashed in the moonlight; soon it looked as though Setka's arm was wrapped in coils of red thread. Beads of fresh blood gathered like pearls along a necklace string.
Dazi watched in condemnation; Cray watched in impassiveness.
Once his draw was sufficient, Setka flicked his arm out toward the dead jack-wolf. Droplets of blood sprayed, struck, hissed and bubbled as if the body was caught with fever. They soaked into the wolf's fur and burrowed into its flesh. A moment later, a gust of rank, wheezing air escaped from its lungs, and its eyes fluttered open. It rose to its feet, shakily at first, then with growing confidence. Its breath still rattled, and its legs trembled with palsy, but its eyes were open and bright.
Setka extended the arm that had given life to the wolf. Obediently, it limped forward and licked at his hand, pink tongue lashing out clumsily and dribbling spit onto the ground.
Setka tittered. "You only had to go and break its jaw."
"A waste of blood if ever I saw one," Dazi said.
Setka withdrew his arm, and the wolf collapsed to the ground, panting. Delicately he unwrapped then re-wrapped the black bindings, concealing the wounds he had just inflicted upon himself.
"I think not," he said. "For if my tongue does not deceive me, we will soon have worse than men and wolves to contend with."
As soon as he spoke, Cray smelled and tasted what the westerly wind was now carrying into their small camp. A bite of metal on the tongue, a sting of decay that struck deep within the nostrils... an aroma of blood and death that insinuated itself into each of the senses in turn. He ground his teeth and his eyes glowed with hatred.
Fiends!