In the southeast of the Coastland, the winds are cold and the land is barren. Maybe not as barren as the Badland, but frozen and unforgiving enough that few people live there. Most who do live there enjoy their peace and solitude. Yutka Mori was not one of those people. He trudged happily through knee deep snow toward his latest adventure. Happily might be an exaggeration. His feet ached, and he couldn’t feel his hands. But the mystery waiting for him was exciting nonetheless. He wiggled his fingers around the grip of his long staff to reinvigorate them. It was weighted on one end to double as a mace if he should need it.
The sun was getting low by the time he reached the little village known as Kataphuego. He stopped for a moment to rest, leaning against a waist high stone wall that seemed more for decoration than anything. He watched his breath cloud in front of him and slowly stood up straight.
“You’ve finally arrived,” a feminine voice exclaimed. The words were in the common tongue, Imperatur, but they were heavily accented. “It is not safe at night. Inside! Inside!”
Yutka turned to the woman calling out to him. She was a dwarf, and tiny even by dwarf standards. She was at least two feet shorter than him and built like a twig. Her red hair whipped about her face in the freezing wind as she waved her hands in the air to get his attention. Yutka crossed the rutted thoroughfare that passed for a street. He replied to her in Osen, the most common dwarf language: “We can speak your language if you prefer. I am Yutka. I received word of a mysterious disease.”
“Bless you, sir,” she replied, also speaking the dwarfen tongue. “I’m the one who called, but we have to go inside. It isn’t safe at night.”
“Lead the way,” Yutka said, gesturing for her to proceed. He followed her into a little stone house. He only had to duck a little to get through the doorway. Fortunately the ceiling was about a foot over his head. The rooms were plenty wide. Despite the example of the dainty woman in front of him, dwarf men tended to be just as wide as earthens like himself.
IThe young woman shut the door behind them. Instantly the fire in the stone hearth nearby began to soothe his frozen joints. She looked young, like an earthen woman in her twenties. She might be around that age or she might be twice that, closer to his own. “I’m Chloe,” she said, “of Clan Vasilis. Thank you for coming to help us.”
“Mori Yutka,” he replied, taking her hand gently and giving her a graceful nod.
Chloe the Vasilis led him to a back room. The house was lit with candles, strategically placed to make the light consistent and to avoid being extinguished when the door was opened. She took him to a bedroom where he found another young woman who looked similar to Chloe. “This is my sister Asthenes,” Chloe told him.
Asthenes seemed to be sleeping restlessly. Yutka knelt beside her tiny bed and inspected her pale skin closely. “Your letter said she was refusing to eat. Was she uninterested or unable?”
“Wouldn’t even try,” Chloe replied.
“I suppose very little of your diet involves plants or mushrooms this time of year,” Yutka mused.
“Right,” Chloe agreed.
Yutka slipped his snow-covered cloak off and said, “I’d better get to work. Tell me about all her symptoms from the beginning as if you had never written to me.”
“Of course,” Chloe replied. She took his cloak and carried it out of the room. She returned quickly and watched for a moment as he poked Asthenes’s throat and began inspecting her scalp just beneath her hairline. “It’s been two weeks since the first signs of illness,” Chloe began.
***
Yutka woke up slowly. At first he didn’t know why. The room was dark except for a sliver of light creeping beneath the door. He reached into his bag for a firestarter. The old wooden chair he sat in creaked as he shifted his weight. He took a candle from the night stand beside Asthenes’s bed and squeezed the X-shaped device to create a spark and light the candle. He put the candle back on the table and looked around the small room.
The bed was empty. The covers had been tossed aside carelessly but not forcefully. Yutka was suddenly wide awake. He inspected the room one more time with the knowledge that Asthenes had moved. This time he saw her vague silhouette in the corner of the room, just out of reach of the candlelight. He stood slowly.
“Asthenes?” he said gently. “Are you feeling better?”
She didn’t say anything. As his eyes adjusted, Yutka saw that she was running her fingers over the stones in the wall as if she didn’t quite understand what they were. “Asthenes,” he said a little more forcefully.
She stopped feeling the wall. Then her head began to turn. It was only her head. From the shoulders down, her soft sleeping gown didn’t move. Yutka wasn’t horrified at first, because he couldn’t wrap his head around what he was seeing. When her head completed half a rotation and she glared at him with glowing yellow eyes, he thought his heart was going to jump from his chest.
She backed toward him, mouth lolling open to issue a stuttering, breathy groan. Yutka stumbled backward and knocked over the candle. It sputtered harmlessly on the stone floor. He ran for the door as the little dwarf twisted her body with each step to catch up with the direction of her head. The door was only partially open when they fell through and slammed into the stone wall across the hall. In the candlelight of the hallway, he could see that her previously pale skin had taken on an odd blotchy texture. Her eyes, still rimmed with dark circles, were wide and wild.
She scratched at him viciously, but he managed to grab her tiny wrists before she could get to his face. Despite her size, she had the strength of both a dwarf and a maniac. She snarled at him, her face inches from his own. The stench was unbearable. Yutka realized then that she wasn’t maniacal, she was dead.
“Get out!” a woman screamed in Osen. “Get away from him!”
Chloe splashed them both with a vial of liquid. To Yutka it seemed to be lukewarm water, but Asthenes screamed. It sounded like at least two, maybe three people screaming at the same time. She rolled off of Yutka and barreled past Chloe. Yutka heard a loud crash as she slammed herself into the heavy front door and unhinged it.
By the time Yutka found his feet, Chloe was slumped against the wall and sobbing with her hands over her face. “What is going on?” Yutka demanded.
“I didn’t know it could happen like that,” Chloe answered between sobs. “She’s one of them now.”
Yutka gently took hold of her wrists and pulled her hands from her face. “What is she?” He asked.
Chloe shook her head. Tears streamed down her pretty face. “I don’t know. People come back. They die, and they come back, but they’re different. I didn’t know it could happen so fast.”
Yutka released her hands and hugged her, pressing her head to his chest gently. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
He returned to the entrance of the house and retrieved his cloak and his weighted staff. The door had been destroyed, and the icy wind was scattering powdered snow across the threshold. “Do you have more blessed water?” he asked.
Chloe entered the room with a large jar. It was full of water and plugged with a cork. Yutka took it from her and put it in his travel bag. “I’ll be back soon. I’m sorry about your sister, but find peace in that she’s not undead. There’s a necromancer nearby to cause a transformation like that. I’m going to follow the thing that took your sister and find the necromancer.”
He pulled a foot long torch from his bag and squeezed the tongs of his firestarter to ignite the tip. Then he stepped into the cold night and left Chloe to lock herself in a back room and wait. Yutka now understood what had happened to Asthenes. There was nothing he could have done for her by the time he learned of her condition, but she had still been his patient for a few hours, and the thought that someone had done that deliberately infuriated him.
He trudged through the snow with his weighted staff in one hand and the torch in the other. The sky was clear and the wind was cold but gentle, leaving clear tracks of the creature that had been Asthenes. He wasn’t surprised when the tracks took him outside the village. He was even less surprised when they led him to an isolated cave nearby.
The torchlight didn’t reach very far, but Yutka could make out the silhouette of two figures waiting for him outside the cave. As he marched closer he saw they were not dwarves from the village, but earthen men like himself, probably Coastlanders. Both were clearly dead, glaring at him with dull, glowing eyes. The figures spread out to either side of him. Yutka waited patiently. They closed in at the same time, but their movements were slow and lurching.
Yutka closed the distance to his left. The animated corpse didn’t react or change course. Yutka jabbed it in the belly with the torch. The creature issued a horrific scream like an enraged animal. It tried to swat at him, but the fire worked quickly. The creature’s stunted mobility was even further halted.
Yutka turned to the other creature. It had come close, but Yutka wasn’t pressed for time to react. He swung the staff, smashing the bulbous weighted end into the creature’s head. The sound was sickening. The dead thing’s face imploded and it dropped to the snow.
He turned back to the first dead thing and saw it fall face first into the snow. The flames sputtered and smoke began to billow from the dead flesh. Yutka pressed on into the cave. It was warm inside, unnaturally so. The tunnel branched off into a few corridors, but only one was emitting a faint glow. Yutka followed that one.
He could hear more dead things wailing and snarling. Their demented voices echoed off of the walls of the cave and traveled down all the corridors, making it impossible to tell where they were coming from. Yutka pushed on. He suspected the light would hold the key to silencing them.
The passage opened into a large room, and Yutka found a horrific contraption resting on a ledge on the far wall. It was probably about four feet across and seemed to be fashioned from bones. A basket sat suspended within the bone frame, and the basket was overflowing with blood-soaked viscera. Somehow the entire structure glowed like a powerful lamp.
An extremely tall man stood on the floor of the cave beneath the device on the chest high ridge. His red hair and bushy sideburns matched his long, thick robe. As Yutka entered the room, the man raised a long, thin sword where he could see it. Then the man said, “Who are you, and why are you barging into my home?”
Yutka tossed his torch aside and took up his staff in both hands. The torch lay on the stone floor and continued to burn, barely making an impression against the light of the magic structure filling the room. “I’m a physician,” he said. “You’ve stolen the remains of my patient.”
The necromancer scoffed. He said, “You couldn’t begin to comprehend the work I’ve done here. I think I’ll let you experience it first hand.”
Dozens of dead things approached from the tunnel behind Yutka. They filed through the narrow opening two by two, but Yutka ignored them. He targeted the necromancer. He swung his staff horizontally, but the thin blade brushed aside the blow. The necromancer used that momentum to twirl his sword around for an attack. Yutka ducked beneath it and jabbed the staff into the man’s belly through his red robe. He grunted and backed up, but he slashed wildly, keeping Yutka at a distance. Yutka jabbed with the staff again, striking the man in the chest and shoving him against the stoney ledge. He dropped his sword and clutched his bruised torso, but the dead things were close.
Yutka tossed his staff onto the ledge then jumped after it. He clawed at the stoney ground and kicked his boots against the uneven surface of the wall. He thought even five years ago, it might not have taken any effort, but it strained every muscle in his body to yank his legs over the wall just as the first of the dead things reached him. He rolled out of reach as their rotting gray fingers groped along the top of the ledge.
The necromancer’s voice was strained, but he had recovered enough to shout, “Stop!”
Yutka picked up his staff and began mercilessly clubbing the structure of bone and light. The room dimmed as the jagged arch began to fall apart. The dead things began to screech just like the creature he had burned outside. The basket of guts fell to the rocky ground. Yutka kicked it, splattering blood and entrails over the cave walls. Then he yanked the jar of blessed water from his bag and slammed it into the ground. The jar shattered, and the water splashed all over the busted totem. The wailing stopped and in the dim light of his fallen torch, he could see the dead things dropping to the cave floor.
The necromancer had climbed the ledge in a more hospitable section. He screamed at the top of his voice. The sound echoed off the walls in a deafening cacophony. He charged at Yutka with his sword raised high. Their weapons cast long, ominous shadows in the glow of the fire below them.
Yutka reached out with the butt of his long staff and jabbed the necromancer again. He stumbled backward and screamed in rage. When he charged forward furiously, Yutka swung the round end of the staff and smashed him in the ribs. The necromancer doubled over, still screeching in rage. He tried to stab Yutka with the sharp point of his sword, but Yutka stepped to the side while swinging the staff again. The weighted end struck the necromancer just behind the ear with a crack that was both sharp and wet at the same time.The necromancer stood up straight and stiff, and his sword clattered along the floor of the cave. He didn’t try to break his fall when he tipped over and went face first to the ground five feet below. He landed between two of the fallen dead things and lay there just as motionless as his abominations.
Yutka climbed down from the ledge and retrieved his torch. It wasn’t as powerful as it had been, but it still provided enough light to examine the dead things. He checked them meticulously one by one until he found the remains of Asthenes the Vasilis. With the totem destroyed, she was only a motionless corpse. He leaned his staff against the wall and lifted the tiny body to his shoulder. He would return the remains to her sister, then he would help the dwarf villagers sort out the mess left by the necromancer he had just killed. He examined the necromancer’s body to make sure there were no tricks at play. Then he carried the dwarf woman into the cold night.