They both nodded.
“And, in any event,” he reminded them, “we’d better be back well before dawn.”
Mia looked at the horizon. “But where do we look for them?” she asked.
“We follow the road, of course,” he answered. “If they’ve got it blocked north, then it’s got to lead where they don’t want anyone going.”
They hadn’t flown on long before Mia said, “There’s a slight fog of some kind. You can see all right, but it’s like a thin, dark film over everything.”
“That’s been there since we entered this vile land,” Marge responded. “It’s just that you hadn’t had anything to contrast it with before. Now it’s getting more dense.”
“What is it?” Mia asked, curious.
“It is evil,” Marge told her. “It is the cloak of pure evil.” The Kauri felt no heat or cold, but Mia still felt a very real chill go through her. “It seems to come from the northwest,” she noted.
“Yes,” Joe agreed. “From Hypboreya.”
They passed over some military roadblocks, Joe noting that all the guards were Bentar. Clearly, if you got this far, you weren’t just going to be turned around with a warning. If you were lucky, the creatures from the dark side of faerie would kill you.
Beyond the roadblocks they flew low to the ground, hoping to avoid any faster and more efficient flying sentinels. Marge, who had all the experience in this sort of thing, took the lead, as the road and ground rose sharply in a series of switchbacks leading up the side of the great plateau. On a tiny ledge, Marge settled and the other two joined her.
“Well,” she said, “there it is.”
Below them were possibly the darkest forces in the service of Hypboreya, lined up as if for inspection, more immobile than any such armed force could possibly be. An army of the living dead.
“They look in a lot better shape than that crew Sugasto had around him the last time I had a run-in with him,” Marge commented.
“Those were reanimated corpses,” Joe reminded her. “Their value is as much psychological as anything, as you proved. Even a Kauri can kick their face in. I would doubt if they could handle the reanimation without a real expert sorcerer in the immediate neighborhood to keep them moving and direct their every action. These people below us are corpses, in a way, but they’re not dead. These are people whose souls he’s stolen and got bottled up somewhere, but whose bodies keep on. No souls, but with the rest of their brains keeping their bodies going, maybe even some of their skills, just no way to use them. They don’t think, but they can obey even complex commands.”
Mia was appalled. “There are thousands of them! Both men and women, too! Even children in some of those brigades! How monstrous!”
Joe nodded. “That’s why they’re so confident. They can probably send small numbers of these, mixed by age and sex, into various parts of Marquewood and maybe beyond. They’d have to be fed, of course, but they wouldn’t care what they ate. And, for whatever reason, their masters could send them anywhere, to do just about anything. There, Mia, is the step below slaves, doing whatever they’re told, knowing nothing, feeling nothing.”
“It’s the sickest thing I ever saw!” Marge commented. “It’s turning people into—robots. Machines.”
“Will they do that to their whole army?” Mia asked, sickened. “Those boys…”
“No, I doubt it,” Joe reassured her. “For one thing, a power like this is unique. The power to do this is also the power to pull the swaps. If you had that kind of power, would you let all your underlings know it? Who would you trust? Even Sugasto has to sleep sometime, have guards, servants. How would he know who to trust? Uh-uh. The Master of Dead would die himself before he’d let that secret out to anybody.”
“Except the Dark Baron,” Marge reminded him. “Remember, Boquillas pulled that trick, too, back on Earth.”
“Yeah, but only with help. He has no real power of his own, remember. I don’t know if Sugasto told him, or if he simply figured it out after seeing it done. He’s that smart. And, remember, he had a way so that even Dacaro, who was working the thing for him, couldn’t figure it out himself, and Ruddygore said the Baron purged his mind of the mechanism to prevent it getting out. So, it’s Sugasto. That means our Master of the Dead did all that handiwork himself down there. Others can control and work them, of course, but only he can make a zombie.”
“That’s what your old body is or was like then,” Marge noted.
He nodded. “But he’ll need more than animation, more than programming, and more than just a good actor to pull off his scheme. The government knew we weren’t coming back and was glad to get rid of us, I think. They couldn’t oppose our return, but they’d assassinate both if they had the slightest suspicion they were being had.”
“But what are they doing here!” Mia asked him.
Joe pointed to a small compound just beyond the lines of zombies. “There. That’s the reason. This whole force is a bodyguard for whoever’s in there. Dollars to doughnuts that’s Sugasto in there with his commanders, and that the vast majority of these poor people were created on the spot, maybe over the last couple of days.”
“Then those crates near the building there—see them?” Mia pointed. “They are commercial wine crates—but there is not much wine grown in Valisandra. Even I know that.”
Marge gave a slight gasp. “That’s because those bottles have no wine in them. They’re the souls of these people!”
“We must do something,” Mia said. “We can’t just leave these poor people like this.”
“Go to fairy sight,” Marge told them. “Just concentrate and keep looking.”
They did, and slowly a complex of huge multicolored strings, crisscrossing and knotting this way and that, formed like a bubble over the whole compound, including the crates. It was the largest, most complex protective spell even Marge could remember.
“We’d never get past that,” she said firmly. “Even if we managed to evade the zombies, the Bentar, and whatever else is prowling about, there is just no way. We’d trigger something, get caught, and wind up in little bottles ourselves.” The Kauri sighed in frustration. “Short of somebody like Ruddygore, the only one who might break in there would be Macore. He even broke into Ruddygore’s vaults, remember.”
“Macore, I’m afraid, is more likely down with the dead,” Joe told her. “He passed through this region a couple of weeks ago. The innkeeper at the border remembered him.”
“It’s not much of a solution, in any event, I guess,” Marge said. “If we smashed the bottles, we’d liberate the souls but that would just allow them to pass on. The only way to restore them would be to* catch each one of them and stick the bottle down his or her throat, the way Ruddygore did with you. The trouble with that is, like Ruddygore, we’d have no way of knowing who was who, and the zombie we were trying to save would be trying to kill us for it. No, face it, it’s back to back and belly to belly at the zombie jamboree and we got to run.”
“Huh?”
“You’re too young. Zombie Jamboree: The Song That Killed Calypso by Lord Invader and his Three Penetrators. Never mind. It’s just my grave sense of humor coming up in a hopeless situation.”
“Look!” Mia cried in an excited whisper. “Someone’s coming out of the meeting place!”
Several figures, in fact. The distance was far enough that even with the Kauris’ super nightsight and eaglelike telescopic vision it was hard to make them out.
“The big guy in black’s got to be Sugasto, the old Master of the Dead himself!” Marge told them. “The others are probably his aides and military leaders—but who’s that long-haired sexy broad with him? I can’t quite get a fix on her.”