Brey snorted. “He’s smart,” she said, raising her arms. They were still bound by the silver shackles. “I don’t know where he got these things, but I can’t do anything with them on. I can’t bend the bars, change shape, or anything.”
“He’s also powerful, behind that friendly face,” said Mordan, “or that’s what he wants us to think—I can’t decide which.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Brey.
“He didn’t try to intimidate us,” Tarrel interjected. “He wants us to think he doesn’t need to. I was wondering about that myself.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Still,” said Tarrel, “we learned a few things from him.”
“He told us a few things,” countered Brey. “We don’t know if they’re true or not.”
“They’re plausible, at least,” said Mordan. “The Lancers were clearly sent on some secret mission when they dropped off the record—why shouldn’t they have been assigned to this Unit 61?”
“Which somehow corrupts them, severs contact with the Ministry, and goes renegade?” asked Tarrel. “I don’t know.”
“Whether it’s true or not,” Brey put in, “I’m sure that’s the story they’ll tell if the truth ever comes out. Even in Thrane, we’ve heard of plausible deniability.”
“It puts us in an interesting position, though,” Mordan reflected. “If the Ministry decides to cover the thing up, we’d be very inconvenient to have around.”
Brey looked up sharply. “Did you hear that?”
Sitting astride his undead steed, Dravuliel watched the lancers disembark from the ship. She hovered just a few feet above the ground, with a loading-ramp lowered. The horsemen formed up by a small wood as the ship rose back into the air, quickly becoming lost against the night sky.
“Take your position, Captain,” he said to their leader, “and wait for my signal.”
The rider dipped his lance in acknowledgment and galloped away with his troops following him in ranks of three. Dravuliel watched them go, permitting himself a moment of satisfaction. They were fine troops, and their skeletal mounts were almost as fast as the prized Valenar horses, but completely tireless like their riders. They would have served Karrnath well if the War had continued. Now, they would serve him. He struck his heels against his mount’s exposed ribs and galloped off after them.
It was less than an hour’s ride to the fort. The necromancer dismounted half a mile away, hiding his steed in a small copse. He pulled an amulet from his robe—a piece of red gold worked onto the demon-faced symbol of the Blood of Vol—and cast a spell on himself. Then, keeping to the shadows, he approached the fort. The zombies on the parapets appeared not to notice him, which was good—but the spell did not hide him from the eyes of the living.
He quickly reached an area of deep shadows at the foot of a tower. He could sense that he was close to his goal. Hanging the unholy symbol of Vol around his neck, he knelt for a few moments in muttered prayer. Had anyone been watching, they would have seen him fade like the memory of a dream, becoming pale and translucent until he was barely visible. The prayer complete, he turned to face the base of the tower and walked right through it.
Within a few minutes he had found the barracks where the off-duty zombies were kept. Like the sentinels on the parapet, they did not react when he appeared through the wall. He dropped the spell with a word, and they turned to face him as he raised the gold demon-mask in front of him, but they made no move to attack.
“Go outside,” he said softly. One of the zombies opened the door, and the others filed out into the passage. Within a few minutes, almost a score of zombies were assembled.
“Now,” said the necromancer, “seek out and destroy all the other zombies in the fort. If anyone tries to stop you, kill them.”
Sergeant Dorn hated night duty. He hated zombies, he hated Fort Zombie, and above all he hated that the War was over.
He had always dreamed of being a bone knight like his father, and he spent his boyhood sharpening his weapon skills and studying with old Father Brand. When his acceptance letter came from the Order’s training school at Atur, it was the happiest day of his life. Then, two weeks before he graduated, the War ended.
He’d pushed hard for a posting to Fort Bones, hoping to see action against the Valenar elves on the Talenta Plains, but they’d sent him here instead, to take charge of zombie units being moved to and from the frontier. They said that after a month or two you didn’t notice the smell any more, but Sergeant Dorn did. It clung to him even when he was out of uniform. Skeletons didn’t have that smell.
He heard a scuffling behind the door. It was probably rats—tempted by the smell, they would sometimes try to eat what they saw as dead meat, and the zombies would stamp them to a pulp. He was taken completely by surprise when the door flew open and zombies started pouring out.
