People seemed to be moving more quickly, the further west they rode, and there were more panicked expressions upon people’s faces.
Fulcrom tried to peer further ahead but the forest was too thick to make anything out. His frustration grew. Fulcrom began to worry that leading the refugees through a vast clearing in the forest had been a mistake. He had hoped it would provide cover from two sides, wood for campfires and potential food. He forced his guilt from his mind: he could not possibly know what he was dealing with.
Panicked faces became more distressed; there were piercing screams in the distance, then — through the darkness — Fulcrom could discern glowing forms.
‘Oh fuck, no. .’ he breathed. ‘What now?’
They had reached the fringe of the convoy. Jamur soldiers, perhaps a hundred in all, as well as citizen militia who had picked up arms, had formed a line of defence stretching perhaps a hundred feet from one side of the clearing to the other. Along the fringes of the trees, archers were firing into the open.
As Fulcrom approached, he could see beyond them stood blue-white glowing forms, exactly like ghosts, and they were brandishing swords. They did not wear military armour: in fact, they seemed to be sinewy muscle and tendon, as if stripped of skin. Their faces, too, were featureless. Only their swords seemed reaclass="underline" huge curved blades that shimmered in their own light.
Two Jamur soldiers were suddenly carried back through the lines, their arms bloodied and blistered. One man was unconscious, the other screamed, his face creased in agony. He shouted, ‘It’s fucking burning me, it burns, get it off!’ before being taken to one side where his screams became whimpers.
Fulcrom scanned the crowd of soldiers and civilians for Lan: there she was, on the far left, much to Fulcrom’s relief, hauling two people out of the combat zone to safety. It was then that Fulcrom noticed the dead bodies — civilian casualties — that lay around.
So many of them. . this time we’re surely finished.
A burst of soldiers moved forward, shields locking behind to protect the next row. From his horse, Fulcrom watched the men move to engage the spectres in combat. The ghost-warriors seemed undisciplined; they fought like feral savages, though for the most part the soldiers were holding them off. Yet more of the ghosts came from behind, twenty, forty, maybe more flooding into view. Fulcrom could not see the sky-city, could not see where these things were coming from.
‘Frater Mercury,’ Fulcrom called across. ‘Please, help us. What do you suggest we should do? Do you know how to stop this?’
The god-like figure remained inert, merely observing the scene. He gave no sign of having heard Fulcrom’s questions, but instead he nudged his horse in a tight arc and behind the thin line of Jamur soldiers.
The soldiers moved back and locked their shields again and, from their flanks, archers released another wave of arrows. None of them connected with their targets; the arrows merely passed straight through and struck into the earth beyond.
Frater Mercury emerged onto the field of combat and rode out into the centre. Fulcrom heard commands for the Jamur soldiers to hold their position and for the archers to cease firing. After Frater Mercury pulled his horse to a stop, the scene fell eerily silent. The ghost-warriors ceased their movements across the clearing then began to confer with each other, their movements oddly fluid. More of them came in from behind, brightening the night with their glow. They seemed to swarm, ooze and drift rather than make coherent progress, but soon they began moving towards Frater Mercury, slower than before and more cautious.
Frater Mercury stared at the approaching figures and began wailing in a bass tone, almost melodic at first, then something far harsher.
The spirit figures paused on the spot and their glow faded to something duller. When Frater Mercury ceased his noise they became more obviously animalistic and less supernatural. The god-like man held up a hand and Fulcrom watched in awe as a sword whipped from the grasp of one of the Jamur soldiers and travelled — through the air — towards his outstretched hand. He snatched it firmly, dismounted from his horse and advanced on foot towards the former ghosts, who were now cowering like frightened children at his approach. He held up his other hand and another blade emerged through the air and landed in his palm with little effort.
Fulcrom now struggled to understand the action, but he saw Frater Mercury lurch forward and bury one blade into the chest of an enemy. As the sword connected, the creature began to redden at the point of impact, and burst into flame. Screaming horrifically, it lurched back and forth, burning from within, before retreating off into the distance. Several others of its kind began to follow and, with their backs turned, Frater Mercury threw another blade like a spear: it connected with one of them, creating yet more flames and high-pitched screams. Again, he held his hands aloft, like a prophet, and — again — he seemed to haul more swords from the clutches of a nearby soldier. One by one, Frater Mercury warded off the remainder of the ghosts until the last of them scrambled, alight, along the periphery of the forest.
Satisfied his work was done, he slowly walked back to his horse, without acknowledgement of the events or his actions, mounted the mare and nudged her in a slow arc around the row of shocked soldiers and back towards the east.
It was the dignified thing to do, Fulcrom thought, to light a pyre for the fallen.
Fifty-three people in total had been found dead, the vast majority of them with burns or weird abrasions from physical contact with the ghost-warriors. Those who had survived were in agony and many remained unconscious long afterwards.
As Fulcrom was on his way back towards the chain of refugees, he thought he caught sight of Lan crouching by a body at the edge of the forest. When he came closer he noticed she was shivering and in tears. The body resting on the damp earth beside her was one he knew all too well.
Tane. .
He took a deep breath and bent down beside them.
‘Is he unconscious or is he. .?’ Fulcrom asked, gesturing to Tane’s body.
Because of the late hour and Tane’s dark uniform, Fulcrom struggled to make out how much blood the werecat had lost, but the open wound below his right ribcage was enough to tell Fulcrom what he needed to know. He placed a hand on her shoulder.
‘Yes, he’s dead,’ was all Lan could manage.
They rose together.
‘We hadn’t always got on,’ she breathed, ‘but I had very few people I could rely on in this world. It shouldn’t have happened to him. .’
Fulcrom didn’t say anything. He had found Tane frustrating to work with, but very effective — if a little too brutal — at helping to reduce crime in Villjamur. But he felt a fatherly attachment to him, and was deeply saddened.
‘Did you see what happened to him?’
‘He had pulled a dozen or so individuals from the path of those white things,’ Lan said, her arms still around Fulcrom. ‘He’d managed to find a blade and was trying to attack them when one of them must have caught him. I was the other side of the clearing when I heard his scream, but couldn’t reach him quickly enough because of the combat and all the soldiers. It was only when the fighting moved on that I could find his body. So I brought it to the side and let him pass away quietly. He was so silent at the end — he just couldn’t say a word. It seemed so unnatural.’
The pyre was a hasty affair. What wood could be gathered from the damp forest floor was piled haphazardly and all the bodies wrapped in any rags that people could spare. Smoke plumes drifted back in the direction of Villjamur, downwind, carrying with them the rancid smell of the burning dead. Fulcrom had tried to approach Frater Mercury about doing something perhaps to bring Tane back to life, but his requests were stubbornly ignored and the god-man simply walked away. Instead, Tane’s body would join the others.