The temple door was open. The trio of robed men ran inside, calling for their Master. Lee stopped outside and turned back, searching for Sergeant West and Cakes in the chaos, fountains of light and smoke and the silent, glowing dead, hopping and freezing, blurring as they darted forward.
Around the fire, two of the three men who’d killed themselves rose, their bodies stiff, their arms stretched out. The third rose a moment later as the first vibrations shook the world. The priests unable to choose were falling now, fed upon by their dead brothers. Lee held his metal tray out to the grisly scene, blocking it from view.
Lee heard Cakes before he saw him, cursing more than Lee had ever heard anyone curse, taunting the gangshi. Lee saw how far away from the church they were and felt his chest go tight. It was too far.
The sarge fired his revolver into the crowd of gangshi, trying to cover Cakes as the private threw more grenades, but the bullets did nothing. The gangshi were too close and there were too many of them and Cakes was retreating too slowly. Lee opened his mouth to cry a warning but then there was a blur of green light and it was too late.
“I got this one, Sarge!” Cakes shrieked and stepped into the creature, popping rings on the M15s in his arms. He reached out and grabbed a second dead man, his grenades spilling to the ground.
Sergeant West turned and ran for the temple, his face a mask of hard-jawed determination, his eyes anguished. Behind him, Cakes screamed, enveloped by white light. Smoke billowed over the gangshi, the clearing, the world.
Two of the priests tried to close the door but Lee kicked at them, brandished the cheap knife he’d picked up, and then West was pushing through, knocking one of the priests to the ground.
Lee turned and looked at the church, finally. It was a single room, bare except for some rolled mats. It was cold and smelled of decay. At the far end, an old man was lying on the floor, lamps burning by his head and feet. The priests hurried to him, casting frightened looks back at West and Lee. There were only three of them now.
“Is that their master?” West said, starting after them. Lee had to run to keep up. Behind them, the door was crashed off its hinges. A gangshi stood in the jagged frame, white, choking smoke pouring in all around its stiff body.
The priests called for their master to wake, whining voices full of fear. When they saw West and Lee approaching, West holding his revolver, all three of them stood.
“I protect the master with my life!” one of them shouted, and they all ran at West. He shot the first one in the chest but the others crashed into him, all of them collapsing in a tangle of limbs. The revolver went off again.
The building shook as another gangshi thundered through the wall. It was one of the dead priests. Fresh blood oozed from its glowing neck, its head hanging. It hopped forward and was halfway to where the sergeant struggled. Behind it, a third gangshi hopped inside through the ragged hole, a very old and rotten one.
Lee knelt by the old man, the mad master. He didn’t look special or important. His eyes were open, staring at the air, but he was alive, Lee could see the rise and fall of his chest.
“This has to stop now,” Lee said, and drove the cheap knife into the man’s wrinkled neck, deep, pushing as hard as he could.
The Master made a choking sound in his throat. Awareness flooded back into his eyes, and he looked at Lee, who saw depths of madness in his tired old face; suffering and loss and despair twisted into something dark and consuming. When he pulled out the knife, blood poured onto the dirt floor.
The three gangshi inside the church crumpled, suddenly boneless. For a moment there was a sound in the air like the fluttering of wings, but perhaps it was only the last, spluttering hisses of the white phosphorous burning itself to death outside.
The sergeant held his revolver by the barrel and hit the last struggling priest in the head with the gun’s grip. The man groaned and fell away, holding his skull.
West sat up and looked around, taking in the scene. The fallen gangshi. The dead master. The bloody knife in Lee’s hands.
“Good,” he said, and nodded. “Good deal. You okay?”
Lee started to say yes but then shook his head. It was terrible, the thing he’d done, but he wasn’t sorry. The man’s blood was still warm on his hands and he was glad that he’d killed him, he wished he could kill him again, for making the dead walk. He tried never to think of it but the idea that his own family might not be at rest haunted him. Sometimes, it was all he could do not to think about it.
“I don’t know how to feel,” Lee said.
The sergeant looked at him for a long time. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, it’s like that sometimes. Let’s get out of here, what do you say?”
Lee nodded. The church was cold, the air heavy with blood and smoke and maybe ghosts.
The ground outside was littered with corpses. The gangshi had lost their glow, were only dead now, heaps of skin and bones and clothes. They passed what was left of Cakes and then Burtoni, but the sarge didn’t look at them, and told Lee not to look, either. He said they were good guys, and his voice broke a little.
Lee thought they might talk on the long walk back to where the MASH had been, but neither of them did. As they came down out of the woods, the sky opened up over them, clear and beautiful, and they walked on in silence, occasionally slowing to look at the stars, to breathe in the air.
OF STORMS AND FLAME
Tim Marquitz & J.M. Martin
AD 955
Island of Frei, Norway
Fog suffocated the light.
Bard clung to his axe as a drowning man to driftwood. His fingers throbbed, pinpricks of fire erupting across his skin as the numbness crept in, no mercy in its arctic crawl. The blood of his enemies – the Austmann who’d met them on the field of Rastarkalv – dripped from his hands. The gore dulled the shimmer of his blade, its cloying wetness magnifying the chill, but the tang of Eiriksønnene’s defeat infiltrated the frigid air. Bard had followed his young king, Harald Greycloak, into battle, and now he wondered if he would soon see Greycloak’s father, King Erik the Bloodax, in the halls of Valhöll.
They had been routed by Haakon’s forces, especially his circle of detestable witches, the spastic, chanting völur. And though Bard had slew many warriors and his limbs ached from the doing, a swirling mass of unnatural grayness now washed over him, clawed at his throat, and he held his breath for fear of its dark magic befouling his lungs.
Witchery, this was. The product of an invoked galdr. And Bard went to one knee, clenching his teeth against the mist. But it caressed his defiant lips, a foul lover, perilous in its kiss. He knew it would not be long before he would drink it in, and he feared the fog would obscure his lifeless body. Would his spirit make it to the Golden Halls? Or had the Norns of old another fate in store for him? Even if he did somehow find his way to a warrior’s afterlife, how could the Allfather accept an offering as poor as this?
Death had thus far left Bard unscathed. Even as armies clashed amid the witches’ fiery galdrar, and Haakon’s beasts, summoned from the very depths of Hel, tore flesh from the bones of his brothers-and sisters-in-arms, Bard knew there was no honor in such an end – to merely slip away into the cold silence, unremembered by the gods.