Siltrein (5)

The streets of Siltrein, thick with fog, no different from any other day.

Out at the edge of it, on the quiet road before the gate that led outside, Lilian was standing.

“I’ll be waiting.”

“…”

“Don’t go getting yourself hurt for nothing.”
“I won’t.”
“You’ll be back by tomorrow, right?”
“Yes. It’s only a single night, so it wouldn’t be a bad thing to rest up in the room while I’m gone.”
“I’ll see to myself.”

Lilian answered brusquely, in a tone with no regard whatsoever for how much it left me fretting.

Siltrein is a city of ghosts. There would be nobody in it who could lay a hand on Lilian. I repeated that to myself and pushed the worry that kept trying to surface back down, deep inside.

Before long the sound of the great gate in the wall grinding open rang through the street.

“The gate’s open!”

The soldier up on the wall shouted down to hurry me along, and I walked up to the half-opened gate.

The country outside was not much different from Siltrein. Fog over everything, a chill in the air, and not a sound.

“I’ll be back.”

I stepped out into it, past Siltrein. Behind me I heard the massive gate begin to move again. I walked on until the city wall was out of sight. The wet earth dragged at my plate boots, and the damp air came through my helm with the smell of iron on it.

How long had I walked?

By the time it seemed far enough.

I spoke quietly.

“Pormel.”

Pormel had been circling somewhere nearby, and at my call it gave a small cry.

Not being able to call on Lilian did not mean I had to run about on my own two feet. Alone, simply finding a skeleton knight wandering the plain would have eaten days, and that was hardly the only means I had. I had already pinned down the thing’s whereabouts through Pormel.

— Grrrrrk.

Pormel lowered itself and I climbed into the saddle. At its pace, half a day was enough to carry me to the plain where the skeleton knight was.

“Let’s go.”

The ground shoved away beneath us and pressure bore down across my whole body. Pormel broke into a rough run and drove forward, splitting the fog. Fast enough that if Lilian had been riding behind me she would have screamed. It let out a satisfied cry at a sense of speed it had not felt in a long while.

I gripped the reins and fixed my eyes ahead. If I could manage it, I meant to be back in Siltrein before the day was out.

A hill, neither high nor low, that looked down over the plain.

Pormel stopped there, and I got down from the saddle and checked what lay below. The skeleton horse carrying the skeleton knight was walking slowly across the grassland.

Met head-on, a skeleton knight is a considerably troublesome beast.

Undead that wield the weapon-craft of their living days exactly as they wielded it, with brute strength past anything human.

So I meant to end it in one stroke if I could. I started down the slope of the hill. The fog was thick, but not so thick that I could not make the thing out.

A rusted spear, and a longsword at its waist. Armed like any ordinary knight, it sat its skeleton horse with the spear shaft hanging low and stared steadily at me.

It stood where it was, and I walked slowly forward.

Then my sword sliding free of its scabbard.

And in the same instant the skeleton horse kicking off the ground.

— CRACK!

Pormel came in from the flank and chewed the skeleton knight, horse and all.

I was the bait, Pormel the ambush. A simple plan, but the result of it was anything but simple.

The skeleton horse was cut through at the waist and smashed apart where it stood, and its rider, which had managed to react in that split instant, lost its right shoulder. I was on it before it could do anything else.

— CLANG!

It threw down the spear shaft, drew its sword and caught my blade, but one arm was not enough to absorb the whole shock. From that broken stance I knocked the sword aside and kicked its lower body, more a shove than a kick. Its pelvis shattered, and it went sprawling in an ugly heap.

The fight had started with the opponent already half killed. Naturally nothing like a proper contest was ever going to come of it.

A knight of the dead and a wandering knight. The method had neither honor in it nor pride, not enough of either to call the thing a duel between two knights, but there was nobody there fit to protest.

Through the gaps in the fallen thing’s rusted helm I could see its eyes flashing. It could not curse the unfairness of the fight and it could not spit at me, so all that was left to it was to glare, with as much hostility as it could pack into the look.

I held its stare, stamped down on its neckbone in one motion, snapped it, and took the head off.

That should be the commission done.

The skeleton knight’s head.

I put it in the sack I had brought and hung it from Pormel. The whole fight had taken barely five minutes. If I just turned back now, I would see Lilian before the sky went fully dark.

I gathered up everything there was to gather, and just as I was swinging up onto Pormel’s back.

A smell stabbed at my nose.

The smell of burning sulfur.

And the smell of thick tar.

I whipped around, but by then it was already too late.

“…Damn.”

Out of the remains of the skeleton knight, headless and short a shoulder, a black liquid was welling and clinging to the bones.

A revenant, a wraith come back out of hell.

An undead rises again only at abysmal odds, still holding the grudge it carried in life. Strike one of those down unjustly, and it becomes a revenant at odds rarer still. Form and strength vary with the kind of undead it was, but one thing never varies: they rise wrapped in black liquid welled up out of the abyss and in burning sulfur-fire.

Bad luck, and far too much of it.

Heat came rolling over me, strong enough to blow every scrap of fog in the area away in an instant.

A skeleton knight revenant. Plainly among the handful of strongest opponents I had ever fought.

However slight the odds, I should have made certain of the cleanup. I had hurried it half-heartedly, and that had brought about the worst situation there was.

The thing stood up again. Where its right arm and its head should have been, in place of anything organic, sat a power that wavered like hellfire.

“Pormel, fall back.”

The words were barely out of me before the revenant vanished from sight. I had not looked away, not for an instant. And yet it moved, and I lost the movement.

I swung my sword on instinct. And in the same moment there was light.

The world drowned in a light I could not believe, then went black like a candle snuffed by the wind. Before I had time to register that my optic nerves had burned away in that brief span, a terrible splitting pain forced its way into my chest.

The revenant’s sword had run me through.

In the pitch-black I reached out and caught hold of its arm. A strange smell of burning meat was coming off my whole body; I paid it no mind and brought my sword down.

— VWOOOSH!

Nothing came back up the blade. The revenant must have let go of its sword and pulled back.

Before long the armor would melt through entirely and badly restrict how I could move. I was the one who needed this settled fast.

I took hold of the grip to pull its sword out of my chest.

No. I tried to.

I felt something punch through my heart. Belatedly, the skeleton knight’s spear came to mind.

“Khuk!”

I dropped to my knees and vomited blood. There was no strength left anywhere in my body.

The revenant gave no reaction at all. That lasted only a moment; soon I heard feet tread the earth a few times.

And then the sword in my chest was slowly drawn out.

The sword did not come free all at once. The thing was plainly mocking me.

Which was no different from saying its guard was down.

Light spreading back into the dark, the optic nerves that had burned wholly away regenerating.

The revenant had its sword raised high, and in the gap that opened between it and the rusted breastplate, a black core came into my sight. There was nothing left to wait and see. I drove my sword in that instant.

— SCRRRK!

A strong recoil came back through my hands, and the sword wedged into the core made a noise like something scraping glass.

Dropping to my knees, vomiting blood and all, had been a kind of trick.

To buy the instant it took for the optic nerves to regenerate, and to draw the revenant into lowering its guard.

Thick tar ran down from its cracked core like blood. Being that close to it burned my optic nerves away again, but with the sword already driven in I had no need of sight. I pushed the sword deeper, and the core shattered before the revenant managed so much as a thrash.

The contest had been decided in a single moment, and what it left me was the burning that rushed in once the heat blanketing the area was gone.

“Haah…”

I stripped off the half-melted armor. The heat a revenant gives off burns a body all over from nothing more than coming near it. The burns would regenerate without trouble; the helm was the problem. Melted clean through and welded into my skin, it was obstructing every bit of regeneration above my neck. I could force it off if it came to that, but that would take a considerably complicated process.

After thinking it over a moment, I called in Pormel, which had kept its distance.

— Krrrk.

Going back bare-faced could put me in an awkward position, but I could hardly go back like this either.

If it will not come off, break it.

“I’m going to lie down here. Step on my head.”

I waited until I was sure Pormel was coming close, then lay down flat on the ground. Its bewilderment came through to me, but surely having its help was better than doing it myself?

In the end the skeleton knight gave up its head and took mine along with it. The situation would have drawn a hollow laugh out of me on its own, but I did not actually laugh.

Because Pormel’s enormous foot came down on my head.

Siltrein, thick with fog as it always is.

The day had broken and the afternoon was well on, but the fog that hemmed in the view blocked even the sunlight, and the sky stayed dark.

By the time I had dealt with the revenant and my head had grown back it was already deep into the night. With Pormel’s stamina to think of I had ended up resting the night through, and only now had I arrived in Siltrein.

I dragged my tired body along in armor as tired as the body it covered, and looked up at the top of Siltrein’s wall.

“Y-you there! Are you in one piece?”

“The armor is a little scorched, that’s all. Won’t you open the gate now?”
“R-right. Wait just a moment.”

The guard who had leaned out over the wall drew back, and before long the closed gate opened.

“Didn’t notice the first time I saw you. Are you from some other kingdom?”
“That’s right. I’ve come from far away.”
“Huh… That’s a curious place, then. Never heard of a region where cross-split eyes are the local mark.”
“How much news do you suppose reaches as far as Erbern? The world is too wide to know all of it from here.”

Perhaps because Erbern is an isolated region to begin with, there were sidelong glances but no looks of open contempt.

That aside, I could not help quickening my pace. Sack still in hand, I never so much as thought of the drinking house and went straight to the room.

Whether Lilian was all right, whether something had happened.

I climbed the stairs and stood before the door.

Without even knowing why I was tense.

After a short, deep breath, I opened the door.