The Road to Death

5

Walking through Metrol as night fell over its silent streets was like wandering through a mausoleum, only the bodies still lay out in the open rather than encased safely and respectfully away in their graves. The riders, with Xalt loping along behind, had yet to enter any of the buildings in the place, but Kandler was sure that the mayhem inside was if anything worse than that without.

Parts of the city seemed almost untouched, apart from all the bodies, almost as if everyone in them had simply fallen asleep and was trapped in an eternal dream. Some moments, Kandler felt that a simple spell would cause the people to climb to their feet and resume their interrupted lives as if nothing had ever happened.

Other parts of the city, though, looked as if they’d been trampled by a pack of iron-booted giants. Buildings lay toppled against each other like felled trees in a forest of cut stone and treated timbers. Stacks of cobblestones crunched up out of streets as if the land itself had tried to vomit upward in the aftermath of the horror. Large, deep holes occupied what had once been thriving neighborhoods.

“This must have been a magnificent city,” Xalt said as he trotted alongside Kandler’s horse.

“It was,” the justicar nodded, then shook his head in a mixture of wrath and despair. “The crime committed here …” He couldn’t finish the thought, much less the sentence.

“Better find a place to hole up for the night,” Burch said.

Kandler glanced at his old friend and saw the hairs on the backs of the shifter’s arms standing on end. He could sense that something was wrong here. He might not be able to give voice to his concerns, but they were tangible even so.

“True,” Sallah said. “We could run into scavengers or worse.”

“We could take them,” Brendis said. The young knight was healthy again finally. He seemed embarrassed by how badly he’d been hurt, now determined to show through false bravado that he would never be laid so low again. “How many of them could there be?”

Kandler knew that Brendis was deluding himself, but he decided not to do anything about it. If the young knight needed to believe he was invulnerable to get through the coming days, he wasn’t about to disagree with him. False bravado was better than nothing at all.

Sallah, though, wouldn’t let the younger knight get away with it. “We are not here to do battle with the ghosts of Metrol,” she said. “We are passing through as quickly as possible on our way to rescue Esprë. Keep your focus.”

“Yes, Lady Sallah,” Brendis replied. Although Kandler didn’t turn around to look at the young man’s face, he could hear the tension in his voice.

Kandler looked up at the sky overhead. Although the Mournland’s ever-present mists still smothered the place, the rushing in of the dusk almost made it possible to ignore the mysterious overcast, as if it were little more than the thick cloud cover of a wintry day. Kandler had spent many a night in Metrol under just such a sky, wishing for a glimpse of even one of the moons that danced through the heavens on a clear night. Now, though, the break in the clouds he longed for—a sign of an encroaching spring—might never come.

Off in the distance, an unearthly howl broke the eerie silence that engulfed the city.

“By the Silver Flame,” Brendis said, his voice quivering, “what was that?”

Kandler craned his neck around to where the sound had come from off behind them. The vacant buildings lining the wide street stared back at him blankly, their doors and windows void of life. He shot a look at Burch, but the shifter just shrugged.

“No animal I ever heard,” Burch said, sniffing at the air. “Nothing but death around here.”

The horses whickered nervously. Kandler kicked his along a little faster. “Let’s keep moving,” he said. “Whatever that was, I’d rather it didn’t catch up with us.”

“Indeed,” Sallah said, making the sign of the Flame by touching her forehead and drawing her fingers down to touch her heart with a flourish.

The horses’ hooves on the cobblestone street rang like a dozen crude bells, drowning out any sounds for a moment. Kandler remembered Metrol as a city always filled with noises, even in the dead of night, and the way the clatter of the hooves echoed along the street made him wonder if they could be heard anywhere in the city.

Something loosed another howl into the night, this time from somewhere off to the left.

Xalt, who had been trotting alongside the horses, slid to a halt. “It sounds like a wolf being turned inside out,” he said.

Kandler tried to ignore the image that leaped into his head. “Just keep moving,” he said. “We stay in one spot, they’ll get us for sure.”

“Do you know what’s making that noise?” Sallah said. “If so, don’t keep it to yourself. We must know whatever it is we face.”

Kandler frowned. “It’s the reason I haven’t been back to Metrol before.”

“Other than the whole of the Mournland between it and Mardakine,” Burch said.

“Other than that,” Kandler agreed, “but mostly it’s the ghostbeasts.”

The justicar reached down and pulled Xalt up to sit behind him. The horse was too scared by the noises to protest. The two riders would be too heavy for the beast to carry for long, but Kandler suspected it soon wouldn’t matter.

“What are these?” Sallah asked Kandler as he spurred his horse forward to lead the others ahead.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe no one does. Some say they’re the ghosts of the dead of Metrol. Others think they’re the remnants of whatever it was that murdered Cyre. They might be something else.”

“Less talk, more speed,” Burch said.

The shifter had naturally taken up the rearguard as the line of three horses trotted through the vacant city. As if to punctuate his words, a wail like the sound of a bear in mourning ripped through the night behind them. It was so loud it seemed like it echoed off the clouds, which now seemed so low that someone might be able to reach up and touch them from the top of Metrol’s highest towers.

These stone structures were nothing like the network of spires that covered Kandler’s hometown of Sharn, the legendary City of Towers, but their proximity to the blanket of mists made them seem as if they held up the sky.

The tallest of the towers—the Prime Pillar, as Kandler remembered—stabbed out of the cityscape before the riders as they cantered down from higher ground toward the docks on the Cyre River, the wide track of water that separated what had once been Cyre from the lands beyond. When Kandler had lived here, he had used the Pillar as a navigational point any time he’d gone wandering throughout the city. As long as he could see the Pillar, he always knew roughly where he was.

Another howl—more of a wail than a growl—erupted from just ahead and to the right. Kandler scanned the rooftops for any sign of whatever had made the noise.

There, silhouetted against the dark, blotted sky, something raced along the rooftops, trying to match the riders’ speed but failing. Kandler struggled to get a good look at it, but it was impossible. It was only outlines of strange shapes flickering in and out of view.

When the riders reached an intersection, Kandler plunged straight through it. As he did, he looked back to see the creature leap across the gap in the rooftops, and he finally saw it whole.

The thing’s arms and legs—two of each—splayed out as it crossed the space, framed for a moment between the two rooftops. It was shaped like a human, with a head, limbs, and torso all in the right places, but no person Kandler had ever seen looked so strange. He could see its grayish bones and muscles right through its skin, as if it were some strange golem made of random bits of flesh wrapped together in liquid glass. Strangest of all, the thing’s entire body—perhaps its translucent skin, maybe its spoiled-meat interior—glowed with an unearthly light.

The creature’s gray-green eyes, something akin to the color of the Mournland’s grass, fixed on Kandler with an unholy rage. As the thing landed on the next rooftop, continuing its relentless pursuit, it unleashed another wailing growl. The horse beneath Kandler’s legs bolted at the sound, bursting into a full-out gallop in a desperate effort to leave the horrible thing far behind.