In retrospect, the whole thing was a really, exceptionally, wonderfully bad idea. Had she expected the Edgemonters’ gratitude when their dead comrades stumbled to their posts the next evening, groaning from tongueless mouths? At the same time, though, it was such a brilliant idea—simple, and so logical. Battle dead would not return much to the soil, but their corpses had enough strength left to fight for Edgemont. These revenant watchmen might not speak, and would be slower on the uptake than the living variety, but no wound could deter them, and the fiercest Craft would slide through their shambling corpses with no noticeable effect.
Nothing came from nothing, of course. The business of disinternment was strict. A dead body contained a certain amount of order. Locomotion required most of it, simple sensory perception much of the rest, and there wasn’t a great deal left over for cognition. Laymen rarely understood. It wasn’t like a Craftswoman could bring a person back to life unchanged and chose not to.
She drew the bent, sharp moonbeam that was her work knife from its place of concealment within the glyph over her heart, held it up to soak in starlight, and went to work on the twist of spirit and matter most folk still called man even after it had been dead for some time.
A revenant didn’t require a will of its own, or at least not so robust a will as most humans thought they possessed. Slice! Or complex emotions, though those were more fundamental to the human animal and thus harder to pry free; she made her knife’s edge jagged to saw them out, then fine and scalpel-sharp to excise the troublesome bits. Leave a fragment of self-preservation, and the seething rage left over from the last moments of the subject’s life. There’s almost always rage, Professor Denovo had explained patiently, time and again. Sometimes you have to dig for it, but it’s there nonetheless. And buried beneath the detritus of thousands of years of civilization lay that most basic human power of identification: these are my people. Those others, well, those are food.
Textbook.
Tara gloried in the work. As her knife sang through dead flesh, she felt years of torment and the waking dream of Edgemont fade away. This was real, the acid-sharp scent of welded nerves, the soulstuff flowing through her hands, the corpses’ spasms as she worked her Craft upon them. Forgetting this, she had forgotten a piece of herself. She was complete again.
Which she couldn’t exactly explain to the torch-bearing mob.
Her cry when the Raiders’ curse struck must have tipped them off, or else the darkness that spread across the village as she twisted starfire and moonlight through the warp and weft of her mind to bring a mockery of life to the dead. Maybe it had been the thunder of reanimation, as of a tombstone falling from a gruesome height.
Also, she had cackled as the corpses woke beneath her: a full-throated belly laugh, a laugh to make the earth shake. Good form required a guffaw at death’s expense, though Professor Denovo always recommended his students practice discretion, perhaps for cases like this one.
“Raiders!” cried the front-most Edgemonter, a middle-aged wheat farmer with a round potbelly and the improbably heroic name of Roland DuChamp. Tara had settled his grandfather’s will for him a month before. He was mad now with the fury of a man confronting something he cannot understand. “Back for blood!”
It didn’t help that shadows still clung to Tara, shielding her from their sight. What the Edgemonters saw across the graveyard was monster more than woman, wreathed in starfire and night-made-flesh, save where her school glyphs glowed through in purest silver.
The townsfolk raised their weapons and advanced uneasily.
Tara put away her knife and extended her hands, trying to look friendly, or at least less threatening. She didn’t banish the shadows, though. Her return had been awkward enough for Mother and Father without bringing a torch-wielding mob down upon them. “I’m not here to hurt anyone.”
The corpses, of course, chose that moment to sit up, growl with unearthly voices, and clumsily brandish weapons in their skeletal hands.
The mob screamed. The corpses groaned. And streaking through the darkness came the five remaining watchmen of Edgemont, the power of their office drawn about them. Halos of white light surrounded the watch, granting them spectral armor and the strength of ten men. Tara backed away farther, glancing about for an avenue of escape.
The eldest watchman, Thom Baker, raised his spear and called out, “Stand, Raider!”
Three of his comrades fell upon her revenants and wrestled them down. Tara had done her work well; recognizing their friends, the corpses put up little resistance. The odds stood at two to one against her, and, as her father knew, she was no warrior.
At this stage, dropping her cloak of darkness and trying to explain might not have done any good. They had caught her raising the dead. Perhaps she was not Tara Abernathy after all, but something wearing Tara’s skin. They would cut off her head and move on to her family, make sure of the lot of them in one stroke. Justice would be swift, in the name of the Gods, fallen though most of them might be.
Tara was in trouble. The members of this mob were in no mood to discuss the valuable contribution her Craft could make to their lives. In their murmurs of anger and fear, she heard her doom.
A wind blew from the north, bearing cold and death.
Lightning split the clear night sky. Storm clouds boiled up from nothing, and torch-fires flickered and quailed. The glow from the watchmen’s armor dimmed, and Tara saw their true forms beneath: Thom Baker’s double chin and two-day stubble, Ned Thorpe’s freckles.
Thunder rolled and a woman appeared, hovering three feet above the ground, long white scarf flaring in the fierce breeze. She wore a dark, severe suit, with narrow white vertical stripes as if drawn by a fine brush. Her skin was pale, her hair iron gray, her eyes open black pits.
Her smile, on the other hand, was inviting. Even welcoming.
“You are about to attack my assistant,” she said in a voice that was soft, but carried, “who is helping your community for no fee but the satisfaction of working for the public good.”
Thom Baker tried to say something, but she interrupted him with a look.
“We are required elsewhere. Keep the zombies. You may need them.”
This time, Thom managed to form words: “Who are you?”
“Ah,” the floating woman said. She held out a hand. Between her first two fingers she clutched a small white rectangle of paper, a business card identical to the one in Tara’s pocket. Thom accepted the card gingerly as if it were coated in poison, and examined it with confusion. He had never seen paper before that was not in a schoolbook or a ledger.
“My name,” the woman continued, “is Elayne Kevarian. I am a partner in the firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao.” Tara heard the Edgemonters’ feet shuffle in the silence that ensued. The corpses moaned again. “Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any trouble with your new allies.”
“Allies?” Thom looked down at the revenants. “What are we supposed to do with them?”
“Keep them away from water,” she said. “They melt.”
Another gust of wind came, and Tara felt herself borne up on wings of night—up, and away.
They were ten miles outside of Edgemont when Ms. Kevarian addressed Tara for the first time that evening. “That was a nasty bit of incompetence, Ms. Abernathy. If we are to work together, I trust you will be more circumspect in the future.”
“You’re offering me a job.”
“Of course,” Ms. Kevarian said with a bemused smile. “Would you rather I return you to your fellow man?”
She looked back at the vanishing village lights, and shook her head. “Whatever you’re asking me to do, it has to be better than that.”