The Bloody Eye

3

Yddith felt safe with the four priests of Pelor beside her. The first time they were attacked by the skeletons, she'd gasped in panic, but Pere' Doubert changed all that. He faced the five skeletal soldiers and fiercely castigated them in Pelor's name. Three of them immediately shattered into dust, eerily dispersing in the wind. As though providing violent counterpoint, she watched the maces and warhammers of the other clerics accomplish the same result at a slower pace, pulverizing the remaining skeletons into a similar, moldy grist.

She was surprised when Pere' Doubert believed her story without question, immediately recognizing the description of the undead caravan and calling it the "Black Carnival." Doubert fed Yddith and gathered three brothers to make the journey back to Pergue with them. Only a few miles from Pergue, they were ambushed, but they fought their way through. Then, attacks came more frequently as the five neared the town. With the forest so crowded with undead, Pere' Doubert ordered his colleagues to quit calling on the power of Pelor to turn or destroy the skeletons. He reasoned that the abominations were so thick that if the quartet of warrior clerics attempted to turn them all, they risked trying Pelor's patience and using up his benevolence before reaching their goal. And Pere' Doubert well knew that they would need all of Pelor's benevolence when they reached the town and confronted the Black Carnival.

By sunset, the small group was on the outskirts of Pergue. They moved as silently as possible to a copse of trees with a relatively clear view of the town square. Quietly, they watched with a morbid curiosity as zombies and skeletons pushed wagons together to form a stage. They observed with horror as the foul, moldy fiends dragged unwilling victims to the town square, building a captive audience in every sense. Gradually the stage was illumined with the same sanguine glow as that surrounding the wagons on the previous night.

As darkness fell, the performance began. A hideous, pockmarked female zombie played the title role in the most famous forbidden play ever, The Maiden's Blush.

Doubert whispered an explanation to Yddith, "Our priests banned this play over a century ago because it celebrates the worst of the old ways: human sacrifice and sadism."

Yddith found herself becoming increasingly uncomfortable as the play progressed, especially during a scene in which a priest of Gruumsh disguises himself as a druid in order to seduce the maiden.

"The priest," intoned Doubert in hushed tones, "believed that if the maiden conceived during the exact moment of the solstice, she would bear the avatar of Gruumsh."

The faux druid spouted blasphemous aphorisms and capered lewdly, clumsily, across the stage. As the play progressed, the maiden was caught up in a succession of lusty dances and ritual tortures. Yddith winced as the lash tore bits of fetid flesh from the maiden's back and flung them dripping across the stage or into the audience.

"The torture was necessary," Pere' Doubert gently explained, "to get Gruumsh aroused enough to pay attention to the ritual." The priest paused solemnly. "I'd hate to believe that suffering was the only way to get my god's attention."

Suddenly, Pere' Doubert could restrain himself no more. As a chorus of skeletal dancers gyrated with lurid, suggestive motions, the priests made their move. Casting Pelor's daylight upon his sun symbol, Doubert rushed into the midst of the crowd with a glow like a miniature sun shining from his chest.

"In the name of Pelor," he shouted, "stop this foul production!"

Yddith smiled with grim satisfaction as she watched half a dozen skeletons in the chorus and the guard shatter into calcium mist as the light from Doubert's holy symbol played across them. The three other priests of Pelor emulated Doubert's action and Yddith's confidence soared as she watched more than a dozen skeleton sentries and zombie guards rush away from the square, routed as surely as the orcs at the Battle of Couredon.

Yddith knew better than to wade into the fray with the four clerics, but she couldn't stand idle, either. With all of the furtiveness of a thief or assassin, she managed to slink closer behind the statue of St. Cuthbert. There, she watched and waited for her opportunity.

"They're like lice!" shouted Doubert. "Kill one and the rest keep biting!"

He proclaimed aloud the goodness of Pelor once again, but it seemed that no matter how many skeletons collapsed or stumbled away, more closed in from the gloom beyond Doubert's light. His long-handled hammer smashed them as they came on, until suddenly the brazen cleric found himself facing three onrushing skeletons at once. Yddith watched Doubert shatter I he weapon arm of the first to come within reach, but the second stepped up behind the cleric and sliced a rusty short sword through the armor guarding the cleric's shoulder.

The barmaid racked her memory for a useful trick to turn against the undead. Maces and hammers could hardly miss as shambling, fleshless things closed in four rings around the four clerics.

A fierce backhand brought Yddith into the battle. A swipe from one of the younger clerics knocked a skeletal arm from its shoulder and sent it spinning toward the statue of St. Cuthbert. The rusted, notched weapon that clattered into the dust with the rattling bones seemed like a gift from Pelor to Yddith. She scrambled forward on her knees and grabbed the hilt. Mouthing a quiet prayer, she retreated again into the shadows and waited till a zombie shambled by. As swiftly and smoothly as a trained assassin, Yddith plunged the sword into the zombie's back. All her weight pushed it downward, slicing through rotted ribs. The zombie crumbled into a heap at her feet.

"Not bad for an amateur," she mumbled to herself.

She looked up just in time to see one of the priests trying to dislodge his weapon from the shattered cranium of a brainless foe. As the priest struggled, an axe-wielding zombie stepped behind him. Even as Yddith plunged her sword into another zombie, its axe sliced sideways between the priest's ribs as neatly as an executioner's stroke with a freshly sharpened blade. The human tried to turn defensively, but stumbled and barely managed to stay on his knees. As he tottered, Yddith sliced off the zombie's axe arm, but she could plainly see that it was too late for the young priest of Pelor. Moments later he was torn apart by grasping, bony claws.

A second priest was smashing and cleaving against a ring of eight undead creatures, so the girl ran to relieve him. Again she buried her sword in the back of a zombie. The rotting flesh tore away as she used all of her strength to force the sword through the body. With difficult back-and-forth strokes she sawed the rusty blade sideways into corrupted organs. Trying to hold her breath against the stench, she worked the sword in the fetid corpse like a strong old woman churning butter.

By now, Yddith was beginning to feel despair. Doubert's hammer rarely missed, but his two remaining acolytes were sorely pressed. The young man near Yddith was holding up with her help, but the third was swamped beneath an onrushing wave of skeletons despite the celestial hounds fighting by his side. Doubert hollered for them to gather round him and as one, they fought their way through the press until their backs were against a stout wall.

They might still have saved themselves had not Doubert stepped forward into the arc of a zombie's sword. As he crumbled, the last priest leaped across the growing pile of bones to smash Doubert's attacker into oblivion. He twisted slightly, shifting the hammer in his hands just enough to follow through and obliterate an oncoming skeleton in one graceful motion. Then, seeing no foes close enough to reach immediately, he knelt to call healing forth upon Doubert.

There was no time to take his attention away from the enemy, but he did it in a desperate bid to save his spiritual leader. He did not see the zombie approaching from behind. Doubert's eyes were closed in pain. Only Yddith could see the danger and she had an idea. She tried her magic trick again, pointing her finger at a skull still spinning on the ground from Doubert's fierce blow. Yddith mimicked the incantation used by the traveling sorceress those many months before. The skull was considerably easier to lift than the log had been the night before. She raised the skull high above the oncoming zombie and dropped it on the thing's near-empty head.

She heard the crunch as the two skulls connected, but knew immediately that the improvised weapon was just too light to cause any damage. It bounced off the intended victim and fell harmlessly aside onto the kneeling priest's back.

Fortunately, though she failed to stop the zombie, she still saved the cleric's life. When the skull struck his back, his reaction was automatic. The cleric spun around with his hammer arcing in a deadly half-circle. The zombie burst and fell in two pieces.

New hope flooded into Yddith as the priest once again kneeled to apply healing to Doubert. But his solemn prayer to Pelor was echoed by breathy, indistinct syllables being uttered by the zombie thespian standing on the rude stage. The foul words were incomprehensible to Yddith, but she could feel their power sapping her will. She shook off their unnatural effect, but the young priest seemed to fall into torpor as the hideous rhyme droned on. His prayer turned to a mumble, then he slowly picked up the cadence and slurred tonality of the rhyme.

Yddith screamed at the priest as she watched the unthinkable happening. The same man who had risked his young life to reach Doubert's stricken form, who had paused in the midst of a life and death struggle of his own in order to save his superior, numbly raised his hammer and performed a coup de grace on his colleague, mentor, and friend. Bits of bone and flesh splattered the sacred armor of both priests. The gore-dripping hammer rose and fell a second time, and Yddith gagged at the monstrous sight. Wide-eyed with horror, she backed into an alley and out of sight as she tried to chase from her mind the awful memory of Doubert's ruined face, but the continuing sound of the hammer rising and falling nailed the nightmare vision before her with each repeated blow.

Careening down the alley, Yddith heard the young priest's scream as the skeletal bard released him from the spell. His tormented gaze fell on Doubert for only a moment, just long enough for him to realize what he had done before the surrounding skeletons fell on him with sword and nail. Yddith heard them chop and tear him into unrecognizable meat.

At the same time, she noticed, moving ahead of her in the alley, the bodies of townspeople who had tried to flee during the desperate battle with the undead. They were on their feet, bearing ghastly, mortal wounds, and moving toward her. Something touched her arm. Yddith smelled decay as she turned to face her abductor. She fainted into his fetid arms when she recognized Orthor, undead Orthor, picking her up and carrying her toward the stage.

Yddith awoke chained to a rock on the stage. She looked up into the eye of the zombie thespian. She saw him place a glowing emerald necklace around her neck. She dimly heard him spout lines from the play that identified him as Gruumsh incarnate. The couplets indicated that the necklace was an infernal wedding gift from this inhabitant of the underworld. She stiffened in abject terror as her vision focused on the bloodstained tip of a silver dagger mere inches from her left eye. Blessed unconsciousness carried her away from the horror and the pain and kept her from hearing the cries of her friends and neighbors as all fell victim to the same bizarre sacrifice.