The Shield of Weeping Ghosts

Chapter Seventeen

They marched through the unbroken snow atop the west wall, the second of the three guard towers in sight. Thaena led the way with Duras close at her side. Bastun struggled to keep pace but found it increasingly difficult to maintain his focus. He kept close watch on the durthan, wondering if she had cast some spell upon him. Maintaining the width of the wall between them, he guided his steps by the battlements. His head ached as he eyed Anilya, who seemed not to notice him at all. As his fingers brushed the pommel of the Breath he felt an uncanny assurance that the durthan had little to do with what was occurring.

The air shimmered with movement, rippling harmlessly through Thaena and Duras, past Anilya and Syrolf. The strange wave flowed along the wall, ancient images manifesting as they had before. Nar soldiers battled silently against the Shield's defenders, making Bastun a lone witness to the muted past. Quiet screams stretched tight dying faces lit with ghostly light. He flinched and drew back as phantom swords and spears were thrust through him, finding their targets elsewhere in that other time, though his skin itched at the contact.

He kept moving as if nothing were amiss, though he could not deny the sudden urge to dash ahead of the group. His headache became a piercing stab, and he gasped as a foreign compulsion warred with his will. An absent-minded touch upon the Breath became a white-knuckled grip as he resisted the strange command to escape his captors and reach the northwest tower-the tower of the Word.

The need consumed him, ignoring all reason or caution. Stumbling forward, his legs buckled and he fell in the snow. Strange words escaped his lips, a language unspoken for centuries, but unmistakably a dialect of the Nar tongue. He muttered and spit as the others formed a circle around him.

A blade slid from its scabbard, and Anilya crossed her arms defensively.

"Get up, exile!" Syrolf said, shoving his boot into Bastun's ribs.

He tried to rise, squinting through the chaos of ghosts that surrounded him. Duras appeared and placed a hand on his shoulder. The contact seemed to ground him briefly in the present. His muttering stopped and he rose to one knee.

"What's wrong, Bastun? Are you hurt?" Duras said, his voice strident and clear in the silence of the violent images.

"Get him to his feet!" Thaena yelled. "We cannot stop here!"

He felt himself being lifted, though by whom he wasn't sure. Spirits struggled all around them, stabbing and slashing, reliving their ancient battle. He groaned, trying to find his balance, unsure of his footing.

"He spoke like the language of the Creel!" Syrolf proclaimed, drawing closer with his sword.

The ghosts paused in their fighting, turning as one toward the center of the wall where a black aura of magic pulsed. Thaena turned as well, then Duras. Syrolf walked past them, his eyes widening as shadows coalesced out of thin air.

Pain subsiding, Bastun released his grip on the Breath, the bond it had forged between himself and the past fading, his last sight being of the child at the center of the swirling darkness on the wall.

"They can see it… her… them…" he whispered, drawing a curious glance from Duras. "The children in the stone…"

In the thrashing shadows stood the eldest girl of the child spirits, her hair waving as before, tossed in some strange watery current. Thaena strode forward, her hands tracing the intricate motions of a spell. Duras cursed and shoved Bastun against the battlements as he rushed to stand at the ethran's side.

The wall hummed beneath his palms, vibrating with power, and he pushed himself away.

"Wait!" he cried. "Stop!"

Thaena glanced at him, fury in her eyes as the glow of magic faded from her hands. Flailing chains whipped around the girl in shadow as her head tilted, her weight slowly shifting forward.

"No," Bastun muttered in fear and stepped forward.

A familiar hand gripped his shoulder roughly, stopping him from getting any closer to the ethran. Turning, he spun his staff into the center of Syrolfs chest. The warrior stumbled backward but recovered quickly. He advanced on the vremyonni even as the shadows erupted in a chorus of pained and angry voices.

Thaena and Duras fell back from the darkness as the wall shook with a terrible impact. No one moved as the snow's surface shifted, conforming to the cracks of damage beneath. Anilya and her men were the first to begin retreating from the growing rift. Thaena followed suit as the wall began to crumble before their eyes. With a curse Syrolf fell in step behind the ethran and the fang.

Bastun froze in place, staring into the shadows as if he might communicate with them, plead with them to trust him. The remnant of some horrible memory flitted through his thoughts, a recollection not his own, but somehow imparted to him through the Breath.

Duras grabbed his arm and pulled.

"Run, Bastun! The wall won't stand much longer!"

Shrugging him off, the vremyonni held onto the battlements for balance. Snow just paces in front of him slid away and fell. Duras grabbed him again, hauling him back toward the tower.

"Come!"

Bastun hesitated only a moment before relenting. He fled the pursuing darkness. Somewhere in its midst was the little one, the innocent. Whatever influence she had over the others was gone, and he feared for her as the other ghosts succumbed to madness.

"She's not your sister," he mumbled, but he couldn't let go of the concern he had for the suffering spirit. "She's something else. Can't remember…"

Stone gave way beneath him and he slipped. He stopped as Duras's grip on his robes left him swinging over the edge. Pulled back onto solid ground, he nodded to his old friend and the pair ran for the tower door.

The tremors had slowed, but the shadows continued to flow toward them. Ducking inside, they found the tower mostly empty save for the last few members of the fang, who were descending through a trap door. Duras led the way, and Bastun kept watch on the spirits whose howls and whispers echoed as they entered the chamber, eclipsing the entrance.

Backing down the stairs, Bastun brought spells to mind, considering one after the other as he thought of a way to stop the maddened ghosts. Duras's footfalls could be heard below, joined by the shouted orders of Thaena and Anilya. Swords and axes cracked against old wood, creating an escape. Passing a small window, Bastun paused to observe the destruction of the wall.

Thaena meant to cross it, he realized. The ethran's intentions of reaching the northwest tower were as determined as the spirits' intention to stop them. Looking back to the stairs, the shadows crawled closer and grew louder in their pursuit. Thaena would never make it in time.

Steeling himself, he stopped, flexing his hand and steadying his thoughts.

"You want this?" he yelled at the shadows, pulling his cloak aside and revealing the Breath. They hissed in answer. "I give it to you! Take it!"

He gripped the handle and drew the blade from his belt, brandishing the weapon at the crowded darkness. Keening wails erupted from the mass, their chainlike tendrils drawing back into the stone. His vision once again was thrust into scenes of the past. Pain lanced through his skull. It was stronger now. The link forged by the Breath between himself and the Shield's history filled his ears with the sounds of soldiers shouting orders and boots pounding down the stairs. Ghostly warriors streamed past him like a cold wind raising gooseflesh on his arms and neck. The shadows became a blurry double image, existing in both the present and the past.

"Are they repeating the past," he whispered, "or are we?"

The Breath blurred as well, trailing behind itself as he continued down the stairs. A ghostly arm followed his own, wielding the artifacts counterpart in the haunting reenactment.

The blade itself is haunted, he thought, growing stronger the closer we get, the farther we run…

Mystified, he caught his own reflection in a sheet of ice along the wall. There, superimposed over his mask, lay the face of a stranger. An older man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing dark blue robes, regarded him with a look of mystified surprise.

Too shocked to examine the spirit, he turned and ran, following in the footsteps of the Shield's defenders, caught up in their battle as surely as if he were one of them. He suspected that somehow he might be one of them, the hem of his robes trailing a translucent edge as he neared a pale light below.

Tumbling into a room crowded with the images, he reached through them as if they were cobwebs. The nentyarch's soldiers appeared among them, and the battle continued. The shadowy children still approached from behind, but they would not near the Breath. The mass of shadows fell in among the ghostly fray, dispersing and joining with the persistent vision. They devoured without prejudice, enveloping defender and attacker alike, losing themselves in the ancient siege.

The strain of witnessing past and present pressed on Bastun's mind, increasing the pain behind his eyes. He moved toward the door, squinting through the spirits' flesh toward solid reality, trying to stay focused. A Nar blade slashed toward his throat, and reflexively he pulled back, returning the strike as he thrust the Breath into the phantom soldier. He gasped as the soldier attempted to parry the blow, his sword passing through the Breath with a shimmer of faint light.

Bastun stumbled toward the doorway in shock, staring as the soldier was impaled on a pike from behind. He retreated outside. The ground became uneven beneath him, and he fell against a wall of broken stone and rubble. He replaced the Breath in his belt, sighing in relief as the scenes faded and the present reasserted itself in his mind.

"He saw me," he said in disbelief, repeating the phrase over and over as he turned to assess the climb before him. Pulling himself higher, he found Duras waiting for him several feet up.

"Take my hand," the warrior said, leaning over the edge of the ruined pile the wall had become.

Accepting the offer, Bastun reached the top and stood beside the warrior, still breathless and wide-eyed from the experience. The others made their way to the second guard tower far ahead of the pair. Thaena stood by, staring after them as they climbed over the fallen wall. The fang set their swords and axes to work again, beating at a frozen door in the base of the tower. Syrolf looked little pleased that Bastun had survived, and he sneered before shouting at the berserkers to quicken their strokes.

As Duras and Bastun reached them, the group was entering the tower. Thaena greeted them with a nod and turned away.

Inside, Bastun noted the first few steps of an old staircase ascending from the dust and rubble of what remained of the tower's interior. Anilya's men set to work on a second door, presumably leading through the interior of the next stretch of the western wall.

"We'll take as few chances as possible atop the wall from here on," Anilya said as Duras approached her. "We can use the inner wall to reach the last guard tower and ascend from there to-"

"That's presuming we don't need wings there as well," Bastun said as he studied the ruined floors above them. He smiled beneath his mask. Staring back toward the last tower, across the. field of rubble now being overcome by settling mists, he wondered at that face in the ice. Though slivers of fear and the strange chill of the past's touch remained with him, the scholar in him could not help but be fascinated by what he'd witnessed.

Thaena did not reply, turning away to watch the progress of digging the door free of the ice and stone. Bastun shook his head, cursing the timing and promising himself to record all that he remembered in his own journal when given the time. The thought gave him pause and he reflected on the expectation that he would survive the night. Though well-grounded in what could occur if what he suspected was true, he was surprised by the stubborn presence of hope in the back of his mind.

"What happened back there on the wall, Bastun? When you fell?" Duras asked, his voice bringing the vremyonni from his thoughts. "I thought I heard you say something about your sister."

There was an odd gravity in Duras's voice. It banished his fascination with the far past and brought him fully back into the present. He found he couldn't meet his old friend's gaze, and he looked instead to the floor. Sitting in his gut like a meal gone bad was the memory of Duras and Thaena's embrace. He did not yet feel any compulsion to share his thoughts, nor did he trust the voice that would carry those thoughts. The only other to whom he might have confided was dead and buried, Master Keffrass's grave not yet even cold in his memory. "It doesn't matter now. I-"

The sound of cracking wood stopped him in mid-sentence, and he turned as the last few splinters of the door fell inward to reveal the coal black darkness of the inner wall.

The scent of stale air-and something else, familiar yet indefinable-drew him toward the doorway, even as the sellswords fell back, expressions of shock crossing their faces. Several of the fang glanced inside as well, then looked away and whispered prayers to the Three as they marked themselves with runes of warding.

Bastun studied these reactions as he walked through the group. Thaena blinked slowly and turned her back on the door. Anilya crossed her arms, tilting her head smugly. Nearing the cleared threshold, torchlight flickered into the high open space as if unwilling to disturb the grim peace within. Unflinching, Bastun summoned his own light, holding his staff forward as he entered and descended the first few steps of a short stairway to observe the macabre scene that had so affected his companions.

Bodies. Hundreds of corpses, frozen in the armor in which they died. Some still impaled on the weapons that took their lives, others sprawled on top of one another with no apparent injury save the layers of ice that coated them. He sighed angrily, looking from one body to the next. Nar soldier and Shield defender alike shared the same lack of peace, their only grave a length of stone wall sealed by a simple door.

"They left them here," he whispered, and he looked sidelong at the others. Bereft of any kind of proper burial, he suspected each one of the dead still fought through the last hours of their life, had indeed seen them killing one another through the strange eyes of the Breath. Why had the wychlaren not buried them when they first explored the Shield?

The gaze he finally found was no longer the face of an old friend, no longer the hope of anything except an escape from his own past and the homeland where it was forged. What he saw was only the mask of a wychlaren.

Taking up his staff, lighting the way, he turned and made his way down into the makeshift graveyard. The grasping arms of the dead, illuminated by his passing, seemed to plead for release. Cautiously Duras followed, leading the others.

There was no argument that Bastun went in first, as all expected the dead to rise at any moment and put an end to their cursed journey through the Shield.

Thaena stood in stunned silence as the fang filed past her through the door and into the wall. The berserkers wore looks of trepidation as they descended the steps and eyed the frozen bodies. Anilya stood by while her remaining ten sellswords followed behind the Ice Wolves and then entered herself with nary a word to the ethran.

Though she observed quietly, noting their passing, Thaena did not move for several moments. Their torches bobbed and swayed through the darkness, revealing ever more of the horrors her sisters had, for some reason, chosen to leave sealed away inside the wall. They had no doubt debated the subject since setting the Shield as an outpost. Rivalries among her superiors had obviously delayed any proposed action.

She walked among those long dead, glancing upon frozen faces, and felt the shame of her sisterhood laid upon her shoulders. Anger quickly followed shame, that she should endure the accusing stare of Bastun for the indiscretions of a handful of hathrans. Likely the bodies required more than simple burial or burning-or perhaps the spirits of the city were considered the greater threat. The Shield's ghosts had been pacified for several years while the streets of Shandaular flooded with the souls of restless dead. She found reasoning enough for her sisters in the magnitude of the scene, but could not escape the accusing eyes of the vremyonni. Bastun had looked upon her with a secret in his stare, something far beyond the knowledge of unburied soldiers in the depths of an old castle wall.

With a whispered word she amplified her sight. She searched for traces of the Weave, hidden or dormant magic, spells of necromancy or dark sorcery. No specific dweomer of any sort presented itself, though a strange aura permeated everything she saw. It throbbed and glowed with a dull light that she found unnerving. The effect appeared to be a constant throughout the Shield, like the background residue of some ancient working that refused to fade away.

Ahead of her, past the flickering torches of the fang, one light remained steady and strong. Bastun strode confidently among the bodies, pausing occasionally to study some insignia or ancient blade. Duras followed in the vremyonni's footsteps, and she regretted the silence that had grown between them. Her guardian seemed determined to trust in Bastun for reasons she felt were more self-serving than mere loyalty to old friendship. The secret Duras had kept for so long threatened to blind him, and Thaena worried that she might lose him if he did not unburden himself soon.

She slowed, allowing the nearest torch to leave her behind several strides.

"This is no time for confessions," she whispered and turned in a slow circle, searching the bodies, observing their faces and states of death. "Bastun's secret is what matters now."

"I agree."

She spun and raised her hands, a spell rising to her lips before noting the dark mask of the durthan appearing through the shadows. Lowering her hands, though keeping the spell in mind, she was astonished by the durthans stealth. Magic could keep one hidden in darkness and hide the sound of one's footsteps, but Thaena would have seen such tricks like a beacon against the Shield's muted aura.

"And what do you intend to do?" Thaena asked.

"I presume the same as you," Anilya replied and walked past her toward the body of an older man leaning against the wall. The ice had kept the man in relatively good condition. The durthan knelt close, studying the soldier's well-made armor and the area around his throat. "To discover what happened here-what might happen again if the vremyonni truly has turned against his homeland."

Thaena approached the corpse and looked it over. Anilya had chosen well. With his fine armor, the man appeared an officer of some sort and was among the many physically uninjured. Details of Shandaular's destruction were sketchy at best, and deeper secrets were known only to the hathrans and vremyonni. She needed to know at least some of what Bastun knew about the Shield, though she dreaded the method of gleaning that information.

"He will do," Thaena said softly and knelt beside the durthan. Looking back toward the fang she added, "Wait a moment longer. They already believe this place to be smordanya. There is no reason to feed their superstition with this."

"As you wish," Anilya said, "but it does not change the fact that they may be correct."

They sat in silence as the glow of torches drew farther away, leaving them in darkness. Thaena heard the durthan's robes rustling, and she reached out, touching Anilya's arm.

"No," she said. "I will do this."

Receiving no answer, she let her fingertips rest on the hand of the frozen soldier as she whispered the incantation that would give voice to his remains. Time disappeared as she carefully intoned the ritual which was, to the wychlaren, a sacred magic that she felt obliged to cast herself. Her eyes widened in the dark as she chanted, feeling the last words slip past her lips with a quiet shudder. The hand she touched flinched.

Drawing back, she stared into the place where the body's face would be, and she shivered as two points of light appeared in its eyes. There was no spirit or soul summoned by the casting, only a reflection of who this soldier was and what he knew. A wheezing breath scratched its way out of a long-unused throat.

"Who disturbs this one?" the voice said in a hoarse whisper.

"We do," Thaena answered, though she was taken aback by a question from a corpse that should have little sense of itself. "There are questions that demand answers."

"I pray this one's answers please you, and quickly."

Thaena felt a shiver run down her spine and was thankful for the darkness that blinded her from all'but the bright eyes that stared into nothing.

"For what reason did you come to the Shield?" she asked, deciding to begin simply.

"By order of the prince we came, through burning Shandaular and fallen portal, to capture the Shield and keep it whole."

"Of what value is the Shield without city and portal?"

"We do not know," it replied, then paused, its wheezing breath tortured and deep. "This one does not question orders. Though there are rumors…"

"Tell us," she commanded, eager to have her answers and end the spell.

"Secret eyes, a traitor to his king, lead us to a hidden place, a powerful secret-some call it the Word and the Breath. Ambition our prince has for his father's throne. A new master the prince seeks. Our priests speak of it in hushed voices, but we hear"-the scratchy breath quickened as if fearful, the bright eyes rolled in their sockets-"the kiss of Levistus."

"You fear this? What is the Word and the Breath?"

"Let it be! Let it be!" he exclaimed, "We saw… watched as children marched… sons and daughters of nobles… took the gates in screaming shadows. They burned and bore madness… forged the path for our army. We know the sorcery that awaits those who displease our prince. Let it be…"

"How did you die here?" Anilya asked, and Thaena resisted the compulsion to hush the durthan. Direct questions as to a spirit's death could disturb the spell, draw forth nonsensical answers or pained ravings, but she too wished to hear his answer.

"Only white… waves of cold and tearing magic… unhallowed beasts and heavy night. Dead, we lay in the quiet… listening as the hound came… feasting upon one then the other… howling and baying. No peace. Trapped until sundown… rooted in stone by cursed magic. We still fight for our prince… over and over…"

"Serevan Crell? He is your prince?" she asked, but the voice kept on, lost in its own unending death.

"Shadows of the children… still playing in the walls…"

Bastun's spirits, she thought, and looked around as if she felt the shadows even now crawling near to twist her emotions into fury again.

"They torment us… boil our cold blood in battle… until our prince returns… to find his Breath."

"He is raving," Anilya whispered. "There's nothing here for us."

Thaena ignored the durthan, piecing together the fragmented narrative with what Bastun had already told her about Serevan Crell. The vremyonni's knowledge of the Shield seemed accurate, which made his omission of the Breath and the Word more suspect than she was content to leave be. The spirit's voice continued to mutter and ramble as she determined what should be done.

"End it!" said Anilya. "He cannot-"

The sound of cracking ice in the distance cut off the durthan.

Thaena's eyes widened, looking ahead, searching the dark for some disturbance. She was rewarded by the sound of a faint whimper, like a pained dog. Unseen claws scratched at stone in that black distance between she and her fang. Standing, she made to end her spell when the body's voice stopped her cold.

"Ghosts of wild warriors and strange peoples… witches in masks… asking questions… now you." The bright eyes faded away after its cryptic rant was finished. She struggled to recall a spell of light even as a low, thundering growl echoed through the tall corridor of the Shield's wall.