Shadow Blizzard

8 Playing Tag With The Dead

The sixth level is the deepest limit for men. Even during the centuries when the evil of the ogres’ bones and the evil of the bird-bears had awoken and roamed freely around the Palaces of Bone, it was a rare human being who was bold enough to descend below the sixth level.

There were rumors of crazy men who wandered even as deep as the twelfth level, but no one had ever seen the lunatics alive afterward.

The Sector of Heroes, located on the sixth level, was the only proof of a human presence at this depth. For some reason, neither the elves nor the orcs had ever been in any hurry to bury anyone at this level, and men jumped in to exploit this oversight by the older races. When the Firstborn and the elves moved out of Hrad Spein, the Palaces of Bone were left entirely in the custody of men, and they immediately started “planting” the empty sector with their most prestigious corpses (prestigious during their lives, that is).

For five and a half centuries they put coffins and tombs in the Sector of Heroes. Only great and famous people were granted the honor of being buried in the sixth level: generals, warriors who had distinguished themselves in battle, the higher nobility, kings.

Then they started putting everybody down there indiscriminately and in the end the sector was so crammed full with bones that some people even started thinking they ought to clean out the old graves and put new corpses in instead of the old ones. But then they got too lazy to take the bodies down there, and the burials continued on the upper levels. There was only one human burial site below the sixth level—Grok’s grave, which was where I happened to be headed.

Men only realized why the elves and the orcs had not been in any hurry to bury their dead in the Sector of Heroes when the evil awoke in Hrad Spein. For some reason this was the level affected most palpably by the Breath of the Abyss—the ominous name given by the big brains of the Order to whatever it was that had risen up from the levels without names and was playing games with the dead.

For no obvious reason, old bones that had been lying in their coffins for centuries suddenly started growing new flesh and then wandering about. Eventually there were more living dead in the Sector of Heroes than cockroaches in a dirty kitchen.

At least they didn’t come out onto the surface, they just stayed in one place as if they were glued there, feeding on the emanations of evil rising up from the depths. But those in the Order used to say that what was happening on the sixth level was mere child’s play, and what was rising from the depths wasn’t the Breath of the Abyss at all, but merely its distant echo. Unlike a certain Hallas (who starts trembling in fury at the very mention of the word “Order”), I am inclined to trust the magicians of the Order, in the same way as I trust manuscripts in the Royal Library. And to judge from all of this, there could be some very, very nasty things waiting for me, problems I wouldn’t be able to solve that easily.

I started trembling nervously, and tried to reassure myself with the thought that I only had to tramp across the sixth level for a pitiful three hours, and that was nothing at all in comparison with the fourth level, where I’d lost heaps of time. And the idea that Lafresa and her group would have to walk through the entire sector from start to finish gave me hope and warmed my heart—I hoped my enemies would run into an entire regiment of dead men, so that they could learn for themselves how I felt when I was wandering around the Forbidden Territory.

I walked very carefully, almost as carefully as at the beginning of my visit to the Palaces of Bone. I kept stopping and listening to the oppressive silence. It was dark here, with twenty or thirty paces between every hissing magical torch, and the torches barely kept the darkness at bay. There was plenty of shadow and murk, places where I could hide (I knew how to do that) and where others could hide, too (I hoped that they didn’t know how). In any case, I darted through the lighted areas, shuddering at the prospect of falling into the tenacious embrace of a dead man.

Reddish granite walls, low ceilings (sometimes I almost had to double over as I walked along), narrow passages, an abundance of coffins that looked no different from the vaults on the first and second levels. After about forty minutes of nonstop walking, the narrow, barely lit corridors started alternating with gigantic (but also poorly lit) halls.

Sometimes the silence was broken by the sound of falling drops of water. There was a smell hovering in the air.… It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, let’s just say it wasn’t very encouraging. Mustiness, old sweat, and a very faint aroma of rotten meat.

I came across the first “bad” coffin after I’d just checked for the hundredth time to make sure I had the light crystals and vials of cat’s saliva in my bag. There was a jagged gaping hole in the stone lid, big enough for a man to climb through—whether he happened to be alive or dead.

I recoiled from the coffin and looked around. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary—if the corpse had decided to take a stroll before his eternal rest, he must have gone quite a long way.

The farther I went, the worse things got. Soon in every hall I could count from one to a dozen smashed coffins alongside the intact tombs.

I ran into my first dead person quite unexpectedly. (Isn’t that always the way?) I simply failed to notice her in the semidarkness of the hall—the corpse was a woman, and she was lying facedown, dressed in beautifully preserved, antique clothes.

The ash-colored skin of her hands was pocked with the ulcers of the earliest stages of decomposition, her long and once-beautiful hair was tangled and matted. This lady didn’t smell like a corpse at all. She had been buried here quite a long time ago, and there ought to have been nothing left of her but bones, and certainly not any flesh almost untouched by time. These were the kind of jokes that Kronk-a-Mor played.

She started coming toward me clumsily and I had time to gather my wits. First of all I jumped well out of reach of her hands, then I took a small glass pea with cat’s saliva in it out of my bag and tossed it at the dead woman’s feet. Everyone knows the dead who turn into zombies can’t tolerate sunlight or cat’s saliva.

The wheezing corpse collapsed on the floor. The saliva had destroyed the magic of the Kronk-a-Mor that was holding it in this world. Now the flesh came away from the bones in huge slabs and melted, giving off a horrifying stench. It broke down almost exactly the same way a lump of sugar melts when it’s thrown into hot water. The sight of instantaneous decomposition and the smell that filled the hall was sickening. I covered my nose and mouth with the sleeve of my jacket and turned away. When I recovered a bit and looked to see what had happened to the corpse, all I saw were separate fragments of bones and a clump of hair, floating in a puddle of what had once been a human being. The bones were gradually dissolving away, as if someone had poured an entire barrel of acid over the dead woman.

I walked out of the hall, upset that the stench had eaten deep into my clothes and I’d never be able to wash it out. I stopped in the next corridor and did something I should have done much sooner—I changed the ordinary bolts in my crossbow for one fire bolt and one ice bolt.

Alas and alack, my encounters with the walking dead were only just beginning. A little farther along the corridor I met another one. I heard him moaning and wheezing long before I could see his dark, clumsy silhouette. I quickly stepped back, away from the torch, and hid behind one of the stone tombs, clutching a light crystal in my hand. The zombie shuffled past without noticing me and turned into one of the side corridors. I waited for a minute before carrying on, to make quite sure I wouldn’t run into the shambling corpse again.

There was a quite incredible number of walking dead. In some halls I came across up to twenty corpses in various stages of decay. Some shuffled from corner to corner like the dwarves’ wind-up toys, others stood without moving. The whole stinking, wheezing, croaking, growling mass was a hideous sight.

The rest of my journey was like a game of hide-and-seek. I hid and they tried to find me. Or rather, they wandered about without—fortunately for me—even suspecting who they should be looking for and where to find him. The worst places were the narrow corridors, when a half-rotten corpse blocked my way. I had to go back in the opposite direction and pray that I wouldn’t run into another shambler at the other end of the corridor.

But apart from the narrow corridors, there was another place where the danger was very great—halls that were too well lit. It wasn’t all that easy to slip through those unnoticed. Some sharp-eyed stinker was always likely to notice me. So far Sagot had been kind, but things couldn’t go on like that forever. The laws of universal meanness always apply in the end.

Just what I was expecting to happen, did happen. I was noticed twice and they tried to eat me. The first time I simply ran into the dead man, mistaking him in the semidarkness for some kind of fanciful statue that someone had left beside the coffins. By the time I realized he wasn’t a statue, it was too late. I’d been spotted. The foul creature came shuffling toward me, holding out its grappling-hook hands. The bones were sticking out of the dead man’s body, and the rotted muscles could barely shift. I was amazed that he could walk at all.

“Where do you think you’re dashing off to?” I laughed and was gone.

The corpse decided to join in the race, but fell hopelessly behind in the web of corridors and ended up with nothing for all his pains. Hah! If anyone wanted to catch Harold, he had to be a bit quicker on his feet than that!

Then I was spotted in a hall with coffins attached directly to the walls. It was my own foolish carelessness—I tried to slip past a torch and, naturally, a chunk of rotting flesh wandering about took a fancy to dining on my liver, even though the corpse concerned had no lower jaw at all. I was almost nabbed before I knew what was happening. The lad was still fresh, too—he looked as if he’d only died yesterday. I had to run for it and plant an ice bolt in my pursuer’s chest.

He froze instantly, but the melodic ringing sound brought all the corpses in the neighborhood running; that is, all six and a half of them (including the upper half of a corpse that moved about on its hands). Naturally, they were delighted to discover the unexpected arrival of my own humble personage, and I had to use two light crystals and one vial of cat’s saliva to calm them down and get them to understand that molesting peaceful passersby led to unpleasant consequences. I had to withdraw from that hall with unseemly haste.

The sheer number of coffins and tombs set my head spinning. The cramped corridors had been left behind, now there were just spacious halls with identical columns and narrow stairways.

Unfortunately, all the stairways led up, not down, so I took no notice of them. Hiding from the dead was easier now—I just hid behind a column, and I was invisible. Sometimes zombies crept past only two paces away from me and still didn’t notice anything. Fortunately for me, the walking clothes-hangers’ noses could only smell one thing—and that one thing was blood.

After that there were empty halls, as if the walking dead had all suddenly decided to disappear. I was in high spirits as I walked through a huge area of underground burial chambers without meeting anyone.

Then came more narrow corridors with low ceilings. Sometimes wandering lights, each about the size of a man’s fist, flew slowly and majestically between the gloomy columns and the gray stone tombs. All this was very inconvenient for me, since it was getting harder and harder to hide from the walking dead, who had appeared again, and I had to use up my precious crystals and crossbow bolts.

Usually, when one of the creatures noticed me I simply ran away from the clumsy, stupid monster, but I couldn’t always manage it. One of the corpses pursued me for twenty minutes, drawing others after him. Eventually, when I had a string of fourteen of these creatures in various stages of decomposition chasing after me, reason triumphed and I sacrificed a precious crystal to finish off my jolly companions.

Just after I’d finished off my string of pursuers and clambered up onto a crossbeam to let a nimble zombie pass by below me, the floor shuddered and swayed, and the walls started shivering. The column I was clinging to struggled to stay upright and fine cracks ran across it. A few coffins from right up under the ceiling tumbled down onto the floor and split open, flinging the remains of the dead across the hall. Even the water in the canal rose up in waves and splashed onto the bank. Then I heard a muffled rumble in the distance and the sudden earthquake subsided.

I looked up anxiously at the ceiling. The gods be praised, it hadn’t collapsed and I wasn’t buried under massive lumps of stone. And thanks be to Sagot, I hadn’t been walking along the wall, or one of the coffins could easily have flattened me.

I walked on cautiously, gazing in amazement at the destruction caused by the earthquake. In one hall twenty columns had collapsed and I could easily have broken a leg as I scrambled across the rubble of shattered coffins, overturned gravestones, and collapsed bridges over canals. I had three more halls to get through before I reached the stairway.

Well, of course, in the last hall but one, there was a nice surprise waiting for me in the form of sixty or more corpses! How had they all managed to squeeze in there?

They were lined up like soldiers, as if they were waiting for orders. I quickly dodged back into the darkness of the corridor before these hostilely inclined individuals could notice me. We-ell now … It would be hard for a mosquito to slip past a gathering like that, let alone a man. I put a second light bolt into the empty slot of the crossbow and walked out into the hall.

Surprisingly enough, they took absolutely no notice of me. Every last one of the walking dead was gazing in the opposite direction. What could be holding their attention?

Overcome by a sudden insane urge to play the hero, I blurted out loud enough for the entire hall to hear, “Can I please have your attention just for a moment?”

The sound of my own voice was frightening. The frozen sea of the dead stirred into movement, wheezing in excitement. One of them turned round, then another, then another ten, another twenty, until the entire hall was looking at me. Faces eaten away by the leprosy of decay, skin that was tinged yellow, black, gray, or green … ulcers and holes. Some had no nose, some had no eyes. Some had lost a jaw or an entire arm. White bones gleamed through the decomposing flesh and gray scraps of what had once been burial clothes. Skulls grinned at me and hissed, they reached their hands out.… Then, as if a command had been given, the sea of corpses started moving toward me. I shot the first bolt straight into the crowd. Light, groans, stench …

The second time I fired at the ceiling, and the light poured down on the zombies like genuine sunshine. Then I flung two vials of cat’s saliva and beat a hasty retreat to get as far away as possible from the hall, speedily loading the crossbow with two new bolts as I went.

I came back. The smell was so bad, I almost died. The floor was a seething gurgling mess of melting flesh and disintegrating bones. Of all the corpses who had been in the hall only five were showing any feeble signs of life (blasphemous as that might sound). The creatures were still twitching and wheezing. Without wasting any time, I shot another light bolt at the ceiling and withdrew into the corridor again.

I loitered out there for a good twenty minutes, waiting for the stench in the hall to ease off a bit. To be quite honest, I felt too disgusted to walk through the thin soup that had recently been human flesh. But there was nothing to be done; I had to walk through it. I asked Sagot to give me strength, tore off a piece of the lining of my jacket, wrapped it round my face, and walked through the hall.

A winding, crooked corridor, eight steps down, a corridor, a turn, a corridor. A hall.

“May you all rot in the darkness!” I yelled.

There was no more stairway to the seventh level.

If I’d walked faster, I could have got here before that fateful earthquake. But now it was too late. The jolt that hit the Sector of Heroes had collapsed the columns holding up the ceiling, and now my way was blocked by a massive heap of stone blocks and small debris. The dust hadn’t settled yet, but the stairway had been blocked off securely by the rock pile, and it would take years to shift it.

What could I do? As Kli-Kli liked to say in situations like this—drop your pants and run. The dust swirling in the hall made it hard to breathe, and I had to go back out. I sat down under a torch and studied the maps and papers for the hundred thousand millionth time.

The results of my research were not encouraging. This stairway was the only one in the Sector of Heroes, and in order to get down now, I’d have to go back to the spot where I first entered the sixth level. And from there … From there I’d have to tramp such a huge distance that it was easier just to lay down and die. The Sector of Heroes is a pretty large place, and I was sure to meet plenty of the walking dead before I could reach a stairway. And I didn’t have unlimited supplies of crystals and magic bolts—they were already running out.

I was desperately tired, but sleeping there would have been suicidal. So I had to walk on a bit farther while I still had the strength, and then we’d see whether I could get some sleep or not.…

I lost my way in the tangled network of winding corridors and halls in the Sector of Heroes. I walked on and on and on, and after three hours of walking and a brief doze on a tomb up on the “second story,” I still hadn’t come across a single rotten zombie. It was as if they’d never existed. But the shattered tombs suggested that wasn’t really true, so I stayed on the alert until I reached the “quiet” area (that is, where the coffins were still intact and there was no stink of corpses). But that was a big mistake—I mean letting my guard down like that. And my punishment came swiftly, with a perverse sense of humor.

Something leapt out of the darkness at me. It was so agile that I barely managed to dodge to one side, but the taloned hand missed me and caught the bag with the magical bits and pieces hanging on my right side … the strap holding it on my belt snapped.

All my magical supplies, crossbow bolts, and everything else that was important and useful fell to the floor. There was no time to pick them up—thank Sagot, at least I was still alive! While the corpse (and it was a corpse, only a very agile one) mauled my things, I leaped back and fired an ice bolt into him.

There was a tinkling sound, an icy-cold blast knocked me off my feet, and heavenly bells started chiming in my ears. When I got up, the sight presented to my eyes was an entire brigade of corpses jostling together on the spot where my broken bag was lying. The vile creatures came straight for me.

They moved much faster than ordinary zombies—in fact, they moved every bit as fast as living men. But I had no time to think about that. There was no way I was going to get the bag back, so I fired the second bolt into the crowd, slung the crossbow behind my back, and ran. Right now I had to save my own life—I could cry over the lost bag later.

I’d never have believed that desiccated and mummified bodies could have so much pep in them. I dived into side corridors and hurtled across halls, trying to lose my pursuers, but none of it did any good. They stuck with me all the way, and that lent me wings, but, I must admit, I was starting to feel tired. Eventually I found myself in a dark vestibule, shrank back against the wall, took my knife out, and prepared for the inevitable.

They didn’t notice me. A dozen dead men went rushing past and, without thinking twice about it, I ran back in the opposite direction. I turned into the tangle of narrow corridors, trying to confuse the pursuit and at the same time get back to the hall where I’d left my bag. With no weapons, maps, food, or other supplies, I was a dead man for sure. It didn’t work, though—the sound of wheezing breath told me the lads were on my trail again.

I cursed and ran. What else could I do? I wasn’t ready to take on the corpses with nothing but a knife.

The corridor started turning smoothly to the right. I ran on, past the opening of a passage even narrower than this one. I ran. Turned. Ran. Turned. Ran … and came face-to-face with a crowd of creatures just like the ones running after me. There was a moment’s confusion—they were as surprised as I was by this unexpected encounter.

Recovering my wits an instant before they did, I swung round and went dashing back toward the first posse. The second group also set off in pursuit, and I could hear them wheezing and croaking behind me. I stepped up the pace until I was running as fast as I could possibly go—I had to reach the intersection before the hunt ahead of me. Dark angular figures, barely visible in the light of the solitary torch, appeared right in my path.

But I made it in time. I reached the opening of the other corridor a split second before they did. The bony grappling-hook hands grabbed at the empty air as I ducked into the passage, and then the second brigade of zombies went crashing into the first. In the scramble that followed, I managed to beat it with my skin still intact.

More wheezing behind my back. Those lads were sticking to me like leeches! Forward. Left. Forward. Left. Right. Right. Right. Forward. Jump over a canal. Forward. Forward. Right. Forward. Left. Round a coffin lying in the way. Forward. Left. Dead end. Back. Right. Forward. Right. Left.

I flew out into a corridor and gazed in bewilderment at the backs of a crowd of zombies. The same ones who had been galloping after me less than fifteen minutes ago. They were standing, sniffing at the air. Then one of the corpses turned round and “looked” at me with the black hollows of his eye sockets.…

I was running. Again. I went flying into a hall with just a few of the ordinary walking dead shambling about. One shuffled toward me and blocked my path. I smashed straight into him at top speed. A foul stench in my nostrils. We both fell. I did a forward roll and jumped back up, cursing the ugly brute for getting in my way.

I heard wheezing behind me. All I could do was run.

So I ran.