The Undead didn’t need food or shelter, nor did they get physically tired or truly need sleep, but they still stored stuff and played morosely at being the living. Thus, the buildings inside those rough city walls were still intact; they’d been roughly maintained, if not lovingly; and if they bore more than a few marks of distant fires and hacking axes here and there, well, given what we’d been told that wasn’t much of a surprise.
As normal, the pagoda, which once was probably the home of the most learned person in the town, had been taken over by the army for its superior visibility, and there were skeletal guards out on the upper walkways even now.
There was a Deathpit in the center of the town, and contrary to all the other scarred markings of imploded portals, including yet another columned white stone building fallen into its manifested basement, there was a shrine built around this one. The shrine was a bit macabre, with carved emblems of bone, half-remembered faces painfully etched into them, cameos and jewelry hanging here and there, and even broken weapons and armor set around it respectfully, remembering those who had fallen here and while fleeing.
It was nearly as big as the one in Cragstone had been, but absent the bones of those later slaughtered by the Killer Drudge.
The fallen basement had been turned into a mortuary. The place had been excavated out with unliving strength and patience, niches carved into the walls, and the bones of all the living who had died afterwards had been carefully, even lovingly interred within them by those doomed to never have such places for themselves.
Lao Li had silently shown us to both places before taking us to the chief, bowing before each as he did so. A rapidly-growing crowd of rotting corpses and skeletons had followed us as we went to each place, confused as to our presence, but held at bay by the word and actions of Lao Li, who had a strange new status swirling about him now that compelled his former equals to obey him.
Recognition as a Noble Fool had done things for him.
At the shrine, Kris had glared at the mélange of merged dead, the psychic torment swirling with the spitting energies still coming from the remains of whatever had held the blue Death Crystal, and just sighed.
Before all their dead gazes, she drew Quaver, and the two solemn notes rang out from the Blade as it was covered in unwhite flames more real than anything else in existence to the undead. She stepped forward to place Quaver’s edge on the first bones of that pit, and before their eyes, drew a Burning unwhite circle of vivic flame around the pit, step by solemn step.
The gathered undead moaned softly as the misting flames licked at the ossified bones, and the torment in the air began to change.
When she was done, she waited calmly there as the vivic flames stole across the entire pit. The unnatural energies, the merged bones, and the embedded blue crystals all began to Burn and fall to white dust, accompanied by the gentlest of patters, scarcely louder than the creaking of bones and stretched dead flesh as all of the undead watched it with her.
She didn’t move as the pit Burned down, and the sun began to color in the east. When naught was left of that pit but a bright white stain that would fade with Renewal, she turned to face the watching undead.
Pretty much the whole unliving population about the city had gathered at that point, able to see what was happening right through each other’s shadowy existences as the vivic fires did their thing. The swirl of tormented souls and the energies that bound them were all gone, released, and they were at peace.
A peace these undead did not know.
She turned to face them, hundreds of undead staring at her, and the bared Sword that promised that peace to them.
“I have been told that you are all fools, that you died as fools, and you live as fools once again, many of you taking up a duty in death that you avoided in life, all to save the lives and futures of those you did not know.” Quaver lifted slowly, droning deeply, solemnly. “If that is how you died, then take a knee and receive the salute of a knight and noble of Ispar, for I name you Noble Fools, and nobles deserve their recognition.”
There was a creak and a rattle and hollow sighs, and then the undead began to kneel, going down to one knee. At first one or two, then a wave like the rolling of the seashore, sweeping across them and leaving them down on one knee, like the knights most of them had never been, only seen in tales and pageantry off in the distance.
Quaver extended over them solemnly, ringing, the most real thing in existence, force-swirls wrapping around her, alive and bound to her will, illuminating her. “This I promise you. I will return to you, and when I come, it will be with the living that you protected and gave your lives for. They will take up your places, and with this Blade, you may rest your bones and finally earn the sleep you desire.
“There is an ending to your own pain and torment. Noble Fools, I thank you all.”
And for the second time that day, the Salute of the Rose was performed in honor of dead men and women who, for the most part, had been born from the lowest Classes, and died without name or recognition, doing what had to be done at the time it had to be done.
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“Well, that’s not something y’see every day.”
I looked over as a living man stepped through the spellbound kneeling undead and swung up into the cabin of the Wagon beside me.
He was average height, about the same as my own, dark-haired and with a ruddy complexion from skin that didn’t like the sun, full-bearded black hair that was going a distinguished gray. He was dressed in dark studded leathers I recognized as gromnie hide, with a longsword hung on his back, a mace strapped to his thigh, and a couple long, heavy knives attached here and there. He had an all-weather hooded cloak on of grays and browns, which he managed with the adroitness of long, long use.
“Ah, so there was an attaché in residence, or you were just passing through catching up with a cousin?” I asked archly, refusing to be taken by surprise.
His dark eyes considered me in turn, looking me up and down. “I haven’t heard a new Gharu’n accent for a good fifteen years. Ye must be fresh from a Portal. Are more people coming through again?” he asked hopefully.
“No. As a matter of fact, we might be among the very last.” He stared at me, then closed his eyes and looked away as something died inside him. “That said, that means that pretty much everyone who disappeared through a Portal for the last fifteen years before us died, as the Portals still existed back home, and still took people.”
He exhaled softly. “Aye, we thought that might be happening, but we didn’t have the strength to secure the newbie arrival sites at all. Where, if I might ask, did ye come in?”
“Holtburg. The thrungus and the olthoi were likely eating them.”
“Och, the bugs...” He shook his heads once, old, deep anger radiating across them and gone as it was digested and controlled. “Your names?” he asked gruffly, his eyes tracking Kris’ elegant and mesmerizing salute helplessly.
“A gentleman introduces himself first,” I responded calmly, amused as he fell into her sword dance and failed to respond for a good minute as she executed it.
The ripple spreading across the undead as she finished shook him out of his reverie.
“Rise and bow to accept her Salute, Fools,” I told them softly, but all of them heard, and they rattled to their feet, Noble Fools all, and roughly, even awkwardly bowed to accept the Salute from an Imperial Princess.
“To your duties,” Princess Kristie ordered them, Quaver sliding home behind her. The milling undead turned away and streamed back to wherever and whatever they had been doing, leaving Lao Li, another undead man with rather more flesh left to him and a better-preserved cut of leathers, this living man, and myself behind.
With the area clear, my guest swung out of the Wagon, and I did the same on the opposite side. Clearing his throat, he walked up on the other side of the undead man there, who was staring at Princess Kristie with an intent but unsettled expression in his remaining black eye. “Yer Ladyship, I be Mikal McMikal of the Clan McMikal, everyone calls me the Mick. Allow me to introduce ye to me late, great-uncle Rober MacNaill, who be the leader and chieftain of these undead ye so rapturously performed for.”
He had a pretty cheeky smile. It dropped after I stepped forward and spoke.
“I am Devra a-Ryinthi, called Ryin, scholar and magos, Freeman McMikal. This is Her Imperial Highness, Princess Kristie of the House of Briggs, second daughter of the Emperor and Empress of Ispar.”
His jaw fell slowly at the ring of Truth in my words, and he swallowed automatically as he realized he had been rather insultingly informal and forward in his choice of words.
“That brute is Emperor of Ispar now?” the undead chief blurted out in open astonishment.
“Ho, we’re cousins three times removed. My mother is of the MacShaunessey’s of Hausser’s End, her grandmother Shalice was a McMikal.” Princess Kristie flung her black hair back proudly, and the Mick almost fell down in relief at her friendly tone. “And yes, Rober MacNaill, my father is that Commander Briggs, now Emperor and Hammer of Ispar and all of its seas, so mind that attitude that drew you to the not-so-free seas and sent you running here afore my mother could take your head.”
If an undead corpse could swallow, he would have. “Aye, aye, Princess, Your Highness,” the former pirate almost fell down in his haste to say, carefully gloved hands raised in a placating manner. “Emperor! How did he manage to claim that throne?” the dead man asked despite himself.
“About fifteen years ago, the Viamontians decided it would be good to do a hard push and finally eradicate any Aluvian resistance in their lands. My mother and my father had retired to raise a family in the high country, and they, in turn, decided that they’d had enough of blues trying to tell them what to do.
“They came down out of the hills, crushed the Viamontian army, followed it back to Celdon, annihilated most of the remainder, took the Aluvian army and a whole mess of volunteers, crushed the satrap in Gharu’n, chased them all the way to Roulea, took the imperial capital, and then led a crusade into Viamont, where they butchered the entire royal family, about eighty percent of the Viamontian nobility, and scorched half the country black,” she stated in a clipped voice.
“That ended about ten years ago. They were elected Emperor and Empress by acclaim, and are doing a fair job of it,” I added after she finished, leaning on Crown and watching the living and undead listeners carefully.
The Mick was a little wide-eyed. “The last we heard is that there was an army whelming to drive the blues from Aluvian soil, and then naught, until the Fall came upon us. That was nigh on twenty years ago, now...”
Kris and I shared a look. “The Viamontians set up a great magic ceremony tapping into the Portals, hoping to bring back the Viamontian army that had chased the Bellenesse through a Portal, perhaps with new allies, to fight my parents,” Kris stated. “My parents disrupted the Ritual severely, to the point where most of those participating died and it obliterated the Imperial Palace in Roulea.
“That may or may not have been the trigger for whatever happened to you, although the scale and breadth of what happened here is far, far beyond what even the Viamontians were capable of pulling off... and time seems to be moving at a different pace here, compared to the other side of the Portals.”
“Aye, that much we knew,” the Mick said softly. “Never solid, sometimes two years to one, sometimes six months, but tending to the longer. Ten years since then back home, is it?”