Suggested Listening

Calenda felt ambivalent about the combination of lack of fatigue and the desire to express frustration via bodily functions which no longer came natural to her. She made herself sigh, but found it disappointed her. Weeks ago, she would have found some alone time to work out or take a nap, but those no longer offered the reprieve they once did, either.

"Ell, pile the destroyed zombies and tainted corpses you can't control in the far corner. Then have your controlled dead help take corpses up to the gate. Lemia, would you please go help the captives, use our Silmid cover names, and imply we have more members on our team without actually saying who they are." She smiled as a deliciously evil thought came to mind. "And, while you're at it, mention an Inquisitor. Drop the word 'dominator'."

"A what?"

"Mind control mage. Nobody likes to talk about them, but they do exist." Lemia started walking to the gate. "Ell, come with me while your 'dolls' do all the work. Have the goblins grab some bows and meet us at the gate."

Calenda and Elruin took position atop the wall, with their pair of goblins at the gate and a small group of the dead behind them. Scratch followed, for lack of anything better to do and an interest in playing the role of political foil.

"There they are." "The leaders." "We made a bargain." "Knew humans couldn't be trusted." "Were we fools?" "So disappointing." Thanks to the power of the sarite barrier, damaged though it was, the morks had to communicate via standard vocalization, rather than the magic they had used before. As such, the seven of them could be seen from above.

They moved as one, circling around each other and only speaking when their mouths were hidden from view, so they could retain the illusion that all and none were speaking. As tricks went, it was no less disturbing than when they were using the forests to hide themselves, but Elruin took comfort in knowing they were on the safe side of the magical wall.

Morks chastising her about honesty? "But I recall no agreement one way or the other, when it comes to your puppies." From an objective standpoint, an outside observer would probably take the morks' side in this scenario. They were, after all, seeking to get their children back, while she was an undead abomination made even more horrifying by her ability to circumvent many of the so-called 'absolute facts' about the undead. "That said, we have no interest in keeping your children away from you."

"Yet you stand there." "On the wall." "With our children." "We hear their cries." "Bandits slain." "We smell the blood."

"Because we found human captives here as well. We can't open the gates, until we get a promise from you. That said, I think we can make a new deal that benefits us both. But first an oath that so long as you're willing to leave in peace, we'll return your offspring. The rest, is us offering a little more in exchange for an arrangement I think will benefit us both."

"We're listening." "Speak your plan." "But give us our children." "And the other two." "Right, we heard only three." "Should be five." "Where are they?"

Cali looked over her shoulder into the camp. "We haven't seen any others. They must have been taken elsewhere." She hesitated to admit they took one alive, but at this point it wasn't much of a secret. "I'll be certain to ask our prisoner about it."

"Good." "Make him suffer." "Make him scream." "Give him to us alive."

"They're lying," Scratch whispered in her ear. "They know there's only three pups, they're trying to play on your sympathies."

"No promises." She had wondered, herself, but her form of Truthsaying didn't work well on anything other than humans. "He knows a great deal that I want to know." More to the point, he knew too much about the strategies used in the assault. Every one of their team earned the death sentence twenty times over this day, especially Elruin. The irony was that at this point she and Scratch would be considered the least guilty of the team, for they were already dead and thus their actions were the necromancer's fault.

Soon, the gates opened, and two morks came through. Flanked by four armored zombies on either side of the gate, the pair of morks kept looking around in all directions, no doubt sizing up the defenses within the fort. There was no reliable method to determine how powerful beings were by looking at them, even with magical senses, but the piles of dead sent their own message.

They rushed to the cage, the moment they caught sight of the pups, yipping and growling in their own language, unintelligible to human ears.

Cali moved to open the cage, but the larger mork turned his head and bit down on the metal bars of the cage. With some effort and twisting, the metal of the cage warped and snapped out of their base, providing space for the pups, already larger than most adult dogs, to go free. Elruin wanted to give the fuzzy creatures hugs, but knew she had to settle for watching.

Still alert, the pair of morks took to either side of their young, and guided them to the exit. Soon, they walked out, and the undead soldiers marched out behind them, taking position on the other side of the gate alongside the newly minted Mister Clackybones II. Elruin sang her corpses to the nearest patch of forest, well out of sight.

"Okay, I organized the survivors as best I could," Lemia said. "One of the women was the daughter of a caravan leader, closest thing we've got to someone who knows what they're doing. Ketak's drafted the men, putting them in armor. They don't seem to realize she's a woman, and it'll be easier for all of us if they don't find out. She says none of them are worth a damn in a fight, but as long as they look like soldiers, we'll be fine."

"It's something," Calenda said. "The morks are happy enough, for now. I'll be doing more negotiations once they've talked to their children, made certain we did nothing to harm them.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Still going through with feeding them the corpses?"

"Don't see what other option we have," Cali said. "We can't take the corpses with us, we barely have carts enough for the living, and no matter what direction we head, it's going to take a week to get this many ordinary people to any form of civilization. More if there are any delays, and with civilians there are always delays."

"We can get there faster on Mister Clackybones the Second," Elruin said. She knew little or nothing about politics or caravans, but she knew her new warhorse could run much faster than the donkeys and their wagons. "He can outrun anything in the wilderness."

"Ell, I'm pretty sure that your new 'horsey' is a girl," Lemia said. "I mean, I think it is, I'm not an expert on horses, but it's shorter than a male should be."

"No, you're right," Cali said. "I saw her when she still had some flesh attached, definitely a female."

"Okay, we can still take her, right?" Elruin accepted the wisdom of her adult companions without hesitation. "Mister Clackybones says she'll run as fast as she can for me, I bet I can get to Sonhome by nightfall. Then we can bury her when we get close to the city, like I did Mister Clackybones the First."

Cali smiled at the little girl who failed to understand their point entirely, and decided not to address the idea that the mindless horse could say anything. When it came to Elruin, this wasn't too unusual. "It is true, she can outrun anything I've ever seen. I don't want to risk you out there alone."

"You can come with me!" Ell said. "Mister Clackybones is strong enough to carry both of us."

"Ell, before we do that, we all need to take a night to recover," Lemia said. She held up a small bag with a sarite crystal, one too dangerous for any of them to use thanks to the corruption leaking from it. It was a potent shard, to be sure, but its ability to bolster alertness, stealth, and spying magic came at the price of driving the user mad with paranoia. "Do me a huge favor and set up the alchemy equipment. We can use this to make Cali's weapon, and perhaps a gift for Mister Clackybones, too, so we'll need you to charge the water."

"Okay!" Elruin marched toward their temporary camp.

"Your adoptive sister is a helpful one, isn't she?"

"Yeah, she's a good kid." Cali watched Elruin walk away. She worried about the girl who had gone through so much, then imprinted on her so thoroughly. She couldn't imagine the horrors that might have been if someone less disciplined had provided a sense of family to the necromancer, and all the dangers which that entailed. "I worry about her."

"Don't worry," Lemia said. "We'll stop Claron before he touches her."

"Right." At the moment, Claron wasn't the danger Cali was worried about. "I'm going to go back to negotiation, maybe get our cart inside before the morks eat our donkeys. Keep an eye on 'Rin' while I'm away."

"So now I'm a babysitter?" Lemia smirked. "I guess it's an upgrade, since with you gone that means she's your heir, right?"

Cali made herself chuckle, to entertain the humor. "Not quite. You see, I never got married or had children, which means I had no claim to hand down. Any title she may have been able to claim died with me."

"Oh, well, then if all of this falls through I still got my hair dresser career on the side. Speaking of, you need a touch-up." Lemia reached out, and touched Cali's black hair. With a single brush of her fingers, the black came off on Lemia's fingers. "When Elruin blasted you, it cooked the dyes. Would have cooked everything else, too."

"When I get back, then," Cali said. A quick burst of strength took her to the top of the fortress wall, and then she hopped over to the other side. With her new weapon and armor, she felt confident enough that she could escape from the morks while the other undead soldiers helped fight them off. Besides, she could threaten that Elruin would use her magic to render all the food inedible and turn their dead against them. They didn't know the limits of her necromancy.

"Making friends, I see," Scratch slipped out of his hiding place in the soil.

"Confirming for myself something I think you've known for some time," Lemia crossed her arms and looked down at the ghostly figure. "I just don't get it."

"If you're fishing for explanations, I'm afraid I've got none to offer."

"I meant, I don't get why I'm the one you don't trust," Lemia said. "You met Ketak for less than a full minute, and then you were all too eager to reveal yourself and show off your art project to her. Is it because you think she's hot? Were you a dwarf when you were alive?"

"If you must know, it's because she's a fanatic," Scratch said. "We all are. We have goals so important that we will sacrifice our lives, and our afterlives, if that's what it takes. I understand Calenda, who chose to die rather than accept slavery no matter how gilded her chains would be. Ketak's revenge, too, I know it, and I know how to harness it. You're the anomaly, because you value nothing higher than your own survival. That makes you the weak link."

"Which makes them ever-so-easy to manipulate, is what you're implying. We both know that's bullshit, fanatics can't be controlled for long." Lemia kept watching the ghost for some tell, aside that he stopped joking whenever she got close to anything important. "I notice you left one name out when discussing motives."

"And I shall continue infuriating you with lack of information about me until the day you die."

"Not you, you've proven your 'fanaticism', not that I consider it a reason to trust you." Lemia turned to follow Elruin's wake. "I was thinking of Elruin. That girl is many things, but fanatic she is not. Which means you don't think her motives matter, for reasons I've yet to decipher."

"Is that what you're hung up on? Elruin doesn't need the same motivations for me to trust her. She's a necromancer, that's all that I require."

"I noticed, and one day, I'll figure out why." Scratch was wrong about her, she had goals beyond survival. What she wanted, more than anything in this or any other world, was answers. One day, she would have them. For now, she needed to help the key to those answers build a present for her sister.