1THE FLIGHT
“Crypts?”
Aelis’s own voice rebounded against the stone walls of the crumbling watchtower. It echoed even more loudly in her mind. Hurriedly, she threw her gear into her rucksack as she tried to process what that might mean. Doors all over Mahlgren like the one before her, with its blood bowl fastened into a skull with the jaw wide open, swinging open to reveal row after row of animated skeleton soldiers. Barracks-crypts emptying, releasing who knew what kind of spectral or corporeal undead mayhem into the wilderness, and more importantly, onto the farms, villages, and orc bands scattered throughout it.
These thoughts gave Aelis a burst of energy that could only be born of fear. She tightened her belt, lashed her stick to her pack, and ran.
In retrospect, she should’ve rested and then set off at a vigorous but manageable pace.
Aelis quashed her growing panic. She did not let herself try to count how many sites Duvhalin had marked for her on the map that led her here. She set out exactly on the trail she’d left, pumping her legs. For the first hour, she maintained a good pace. Certainly she’d eaten up a few miles at least.
But the exertions of the day had been the equal of many of her hardest days training at the Lyceum. And while Lavanalla and Bardun Jacques were perfectly capable of making a student feel like the threat of imminent death was real, it never truly had been.
Aelis was learning, quickly, that the heat of combat was a very different thing from any kind of training. The energy that had bloomed in her when the crypt’s watch-spells had delivered their chilling message quickly dissolved.
The result was that an hour or so after setting out, her legs growing increasingly leaden, Aelis kicked one foot into the back of the other with a misstep and catapulted herself forward onto the muddy, foul-smelling ground.
“Onoma’s frigid tits, I’m glad no one was around to see that,” Aelis said around a mouthful of cold, brittle grass.
She pulled herself into a sitting position, yanked the walking stick Tun had made her from its lashings, and used it to lever herself to her feet. Aelis sighed as her feet took her weight; her right ankle protested. It wasn’t badly hurt, but she’d kicked it hard when she went down, and an ache was settling in. She had a lingering suspicion that walking on it all the way back to Lone Pine wasn’t going to do her any favors.
There also isn’t any other way to get there, so start walking. Make a brace tonight.
So, shifting her stick to her right hand and matching every swing to her left foot, Aelis began walking—much more sensibly—south by southeast.
She made it another hour before the combination of the cold, the oncoming dark, and the ache settling into her ankle forced her to a halt.
A rising wind whipped her hair across her face, and she found herself wondering, not for the first time, why anyone lived this far north. And it’s not even properly winter yet, she reminded herself. She was able to crest a small hill, thick with pine trees, and secure herself some shelter from the worst of the wind. With teeth gritted, Aelis remained on her feet as she dug a firepit and cleared it of needles.
“Setting the entire forest ablaze might slow down any oncoming dead,” she murmured. “But thinking like an Invoker is not going to get me anywhere.”
When she had a small and properly contained fire lit, she dug out her lantern and anatomist’s bag and set them on her lap. Gingerly, she eased her right foot up into her lap and began probing the ankle.
“Not broken,” she muttered. But it hurt, and it had stiffened, and it was going to hurt more after a few hours’ rest.
“Nothing for it but a brace.” Other options floated across the surface of her thoughts, half formed. She shoved them away before they turned coherent. There wasn’t time, not here: not for alchemy, not for a serious crafting of a brace, not for any more significant Necromantic interventions. She briefly wondered if she could Enchant herself into simply not feeling the pain, but the anatomist in her knew that would lead to far worse damage in the long run. Pain was a warning, and a teacher.
Aelis pulled some cloth strips and some pieces of flat, stiff steel from her travel medical case. With the cloth she quickly bound the steel splints to either side of the sore parts of her ankle, her trained anatomist’s fingers tying quick, secure knots. Then she wound more cloth around the initial strips, till her ankle was tightly bound and the steel pressed cold against her skin through her stockings.
“It’ll do.” Aelis dug deep into whatever reserves of energy she had left for one final ward; Bayard’s Wakefulness. She was only able to extend it in a ring that barely went beyond herself and her fire, but if anything larger than a small dog crossed the space as she slept, it would wake her.
A bear would probably have the time to eat me before I woke, she thought, but before she could summon the will to argue with herself, she had already drifted off.
* * *
Aelis’s dreams were troubled. There were skeletons with points of all-too-bright fire in their eyes wielding swords that hadn’t rusted away. There was Maurenia fighting them with her until the half-elf’s own enormous green eyes had turned to ice-blue flame and the flesh over her cheeks sloughed away.
There were other animated corpses, driven by more than magical power, but by some inner force, like the one Aelis had put down at her Necromancer’s test. She imagined she saw Archmagister Duvhalin looming over the shapeless battlefield, as if she were a game piece and he the player.
There were others in the battle, if that is what it was; the Dobrusz brothers, Otto, Elmo, even Pips. It wasn’t quite a nightmare. Aelis had never been given to those; even in her dreams her power exerted control over her surroundings. But this treaded close.
Aelis woke startled. She had felt nothing and seen nothing to indicate that her Wakefulness had tripped. The sky was lightening, but only just.
With half a mind to look around her camp for tracks—animal or otherwise—she levered herself to her feet. Then Aelis imagined Tun’s disapproving glare if she voiced such a thought.
“As if I’d know what to look for anyway,” she muttered as she gathered her gear and shoveled dirt over her already-dead fire. When it came to the heavens, however, she did know. The sun wasn’t visible over the treeline, but the green moon was a sliver high in the sky. Still probably an hour till dawn, she thought. Nothing for it but to get walking.
* * *
The next three days were much the same, only colder. Though Aelis already wore the heaviest garments she had—and had slipped on what extra she had packed—she wished she had at least one more coat or another scarf to wrap over her ears and head. Or a horn of fire, or a brick set before a fire wrapped in a blanket and slipped into her pocket.
Copyright © 2024 by Daniel M. Ford
