The boy's wounds were grave. He might survive the day, but without the medicines only Inza knew how to concoct, his wounds were all but certain to fester. Moving him would be tantamount to torture. But to delay, even for a few hours, might mean losing their raunie forever. Without her, the Wanderers would have to disband. The men would be outcasts, stray dogs in a society that valued the pack above all.
"Thank you for all you've given and done, Brother," Nikolas whispered to Katan. He kissed the boy on each cheek and then thrust his short sword between the youth's ribs. Katan died instantly. The zombies watched it all with patient, passionless gazes, as if they expected the boy to rise up and join their ranks.
"Shall I build a pyre?" Piotr asked, "or should we have the monsters do it?"
"Neither," Alexi said. "We break camp now. There is no time to build a fire hot enough to burn the bodies."
Piotr shook his head emphatically. "I will not leave my Greta to the crows," he said. "This is not our way."
Alexi clapped a hand on the younger man's shoulder. "Much we have done today is not our way, Brother." He stared sadly at Katan's corpse, at Nikolas, who lingered over the friend he had murdered.
"What good are all these sacrifices if we lose ourselves?" Piotr asked. "What are we fighting so hard to save?" He walked to the corpse of his beautiful Greta. With a short sword he found on the ground, he began to scrape the beginnings of a grave.
Alexi sighed raggedly. "Dig a grave," he told the zombies. "Make it deep enough and wide enough to hold all the Vistani you killed." He called to Piotr. "Let them do it. Come help me sift through the splinters of the raunie's vardo. We need to find her strongbox."
By the time the zombies finished with their work and the corpses had been laid to rest, the sky had clouded over. A light rain fell upon the three men as they looked upon the shallow grave. Alexi said a few brief words in Patterna, commending the fallen Vistani to their ancestors and wishing them fair travels beyond the Mists.
"Now you are no longer bound to any lands. Now you are free," he finished quietly. The silence that followed was marred only by the hollow spatter of rain on the zombies' armor.
Only a short while after the Vistani left the clearing, bound for Nedragaard Keep with their shuffling guardians, a figure separated from the trees. His colorless clothes seemed to match the bleak, rain-sodden day, yet his spirits were bright as he approached the grave.
"A thousand pardons for the indignity I am about to inflict upon you," the Bloody Cobbler said in all sincerity to the figures piled beneath the mounded earth. "It would have been much simpler for everyone had they left you where you fell. Still, this is all in a good cause."
He raised his arms in much the same fashion as Lord Soth had earlier. "Up and out of there," the Cobbler ordered. "I summon you up, and you must obey."
Whistling an ancient traveling song once popular among the Knights of Solamnia, he turned his back on the shuddering, churning grave mound and walked to a fallen log. There he rested a book-like leather case the same pale color as his clothes.
The Cobbler glanced back once, just in time to see the first fingers claw at the dismal daylight. He smiled and let the case fall open. Carefully, he began to unpack the tools of his trade.
Thirteen
Ganelon looked down at the severed ear in his hand. Slowly, he brought the piece of rotting flesh to his lips and whispered into it. The effect was instantaneous. Bratu and the other lunatics, even his beloved Helain, hurried from where they had strayed across the hillside. They huddled together at his feet and looked up at him expectantly.
Beyond the cowering madmen, at the foot of the hill, lay their destination. The Invidians who lived in this part of the Border's Edge Mountains referred to the huge field as Malocchio's Dream Garden. How appropriate, mused Ganelon, that it should be so dismal and twisted.
A low wall of rough-hewn stone surrounded a riot of misshapen greenery. Emerald tendrils, almost like veins, crept from the garden through gaps in the wall. They did not seem intent on escaping the place, but shoring up the stones to keep trespassers out. From the looks of things, the garden had few enough of those.
The greenery was horribly overgrown, the paths choked with weeds. There seemed to be no clear pattern to the beds. They ranged in size from smaller than a child to larger than one of the massive carts used to haul salt at the mine. Some were bunched together, others isolated. The only thing they had in common was the sort of plant crouched upon each: a large, thorn-snarled rose bush with flowers the crimson of freshly spilled blood. Together the blooms formed a blanket of red that resembled a gaping wound slashed into the Invidian countryside.
The semblance was chillingly appropriate. The garden was located upon the site of a massacre, the spot where Malocchio Aderre himself had slaughtered an entire caravan of Vistani. As it was Malocchio's ambition that all Vistani be similarly butchered, so the field had been tagged his "Dream Garden." It was no less a monument to madness than the Whispering Beast's hedge maze. Ganelon hoped that the congruence would work in his favor as he readied his ragged band of lunatics to begin their perilous work within.
"Go to the garden wall and wait," Ganelon said to the two dozen or so soldiers in his mad army.
A few evinced some small comprehension. Most just stared at him blankly. He sighed and repeated the order into the ear the Beast had given him. They immediately turned to the task.
Ganelon wondered what they heard when he spoke to them, if the voice was his own or if the Beast's gruesome present gave it a sinister sound. From what the Beast had said about Helain, she couldn't hear the commands at all. She only aped the others, her guilty conscience goading her to take on their punishments and fears as her own.
It pained Ganelon to see his beloved so distanced from the person he knew her to be. Still, hints of her former self shone through now and then. When the lunatics were at their most manic, she would go suddenly calm. They whirled and capered about; she remained still. The breeze of their passing would stir her red locks and billow her torn, soiled nightdress. Through it all she stood unmoving, letting them swirl harmlessly around her like wasps swarming a gravestone.
He watched her now as she walked atop the low stone wall. She turned, as if she could feel his longing eyes upon her. No spark of recognition lit her face as she returned his gaze. Ganelon finally looked away. She was lost to him.
With a heavy heart, the young man focused again on the task at hand and took a quick accounting of his wards. Most had reached the wall. Once there, they took up their usual crazed behavior.
One woman, whose name Ganelon had forgotten, walked with direction and determination for short spans, only to stop suddenly. All sign of intelligence fled her thin face until, just as suddenly, she would pluck at her hair until she came away with precisely eight long strands. Tossing them over her shoulder, she would turn sharply and repeat the routine. A few more repetitions, and she ended up close to where she'd started.
Some lunatics wept openly, others sat on the ground and rocked back and forth. Only Bratu ventured into the garden. He wandered aimlessly among the maze of plants, slapping at his ruined ears and pointing at the beds. It was a gesture many of the others, still perched atop the low wall, soon copied. They were obviously frightened by something in the garden, something hidden from Ganelon's view by the weeds and the wall.
Ganelon hobbled down to the garden. As he wrestled his braced leg over the wall, he noticed that the roses' fragrance was twined with some other, more ominous odor. It was pungent and earthy, the smell of old rot. At first he suspected the black blight spider-webbed across many of the plants. A closer inspection of the nearest rose bush revealed the actual source of the smell.