Homecoming - Day 4

Corwin’s mind raced with all the thoughts a novice pilot’s brain immediately latches onto and won’t let go of when faced with an unknown ship in the middle of nowhere approaching quickly. He had visions of being boarded by a heavily armed pirate crew and spaced, or having his ship blown out from under him before he had a chance to do anything about it. The Night Star was in bad enough shape that he half-expected the latter to happen even without help from an outside force, so he quickly found himself fighting down the urge to panic.

A quick inspection turned up no sign of what he was looking for. No great shock, he thought. If a quick inspection was all it took to uncover smuggling compartments, they’d be worthless.

“I told you,” his portable display read. “There were no hidden compartments detected.”

“I wouldn’t expect them to,” he said.

A more careful inspection showed exactly what he’d hoped to find, based on his study of the ship class’ history; a series of tiny physical latches all down a rounded corner bulkhead’s edge. The physical nature of the latches made electronic detection impossible, there being no electronics to detect, and the latches themselves were so fine they looked like nothing so much as random scratches from collisions with cargo being loaded and unloaded.

You’d never find them if you didn’t know where to look, and these days not many did. There were precious few law enforcement types around who’d ever seen one of these in operation; Corwin himself would never have known without his access to the archives of the Tau Ceti Institute of Galactic History.

The panel popped open after a few moments of manipulation, but stuck. With a grunt fueled by intense relief, he shoved it open with an ear-rending shriek of protest from the rusty metal.

“Gotcha,” he said, partly to the compartment hatch and partly to Aru.

A sensor package mounted on Aru’s large chassis swiveled toward the compartment. The text updated moments later. “That compartment may not be safe.”

“What’d your scan pick up?”

“Very little. It needs a full diagnostic inspection. The total lack of electronic feedback systems leaves me little I can tell you. It’s literally just a hole in the wall. It may not be environmentally sealed. A hull breach could be fatal, and if the inner door isn’t air tight, it would not have to be a breach of the compartment itself.”

“So I’m probably okay as long as we maintain our air?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“But that’s what’s going to matter if our visitors are hostile.”

The bot had little he could say to that.

“Speaking of our visitors—”

“Their trajectory and speed are both changing. It’s too early to say with certainty, but—”

“But they could be angling in for boarding maneuvers.”

“Yes.”

“Is there any extra air on board?”

“Some, but it’s for emergency use.”

Corwin stared blankly at the tablet for a moment. “Aru, what do you think this is?”

“… of course. Forward storage compartment.”

He wasted no time in sprinting for the forward compartment. “How long until they intercept?”

“Since I don’t know that that’s what they intend to do, I can’t say precisely. If they continue as they are now, no more than 20 standard minutes.”

Homecoming - Day 3

“I’ve confirmed another vessel in the area. Initial analysis suggests it is moving in our direction.”

“Keep an eye on it, Aru.” The odds of running into another ship after a week of travel were … well, Corwin couldn’t have said for sure, but they were astronomical. Even at the slow speeds they were enduring, they’d still covered considerable distance from Haruna’s system.

He pulled on a mask; the cargo bay had been low on Aru’s priority repair list, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way that there was nothing to breathe back there. The bot had ensured everything was sealed, but that wouldn’t be much help if weak spots had broken into new breaches since they’d gotten underway.

He flipped on the cargo bay’s lighting and opened the hatch. It looked much like it had on Haruna’s surface, if somewhat better lit than he remembered; a large, cavernous space, still dim even with the lighting, and empty save for a few scrounged parts Aru had loaded and the bot’s repair chassis. The arrangement of the bay’s bulkheads had stuck in his head, though, and he made his way over the deck to a particular area, avoiding loose or missing access panels and exposed wiring as he went.

“Trajectory confirmed. Vessel is approaching at high speed and slowing for interception.”

Corwin’s heart sank. He’d better have been right about this ship.

Homecoming - Day 2

Corwin sat, head in hands, pulling his hair. “Argh!” he grunted, sitting up straighter. “Aru, this is a disaster. Dana’s going to kill me. I might have been better off staying on Haruna.”

“You’d have died on Haruna.”

“Yeah, well, it would probably have been less painful than facing Dana is going to be. Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t have a choice, did I? Of course I didn’t,” he answered himself before the little bot could display a response. “I needed to get off Haruna to survive, and to get off Haruna, I needed the ship.”

“I feel I should point out that we have had this exact conversation before. Several times, in fact,” the bot commented.

“And we’ll probably have it many more times before this sluggish bucket of bolts gets us anywhere civilized,” Corwin said. “I just haven’t decided whether to be frustrated with or grateful for how slow the trip is.”

“I suggest frustration,” the bot sent back. “I’m picking up active sensors reflecting off our hull.”

He frowned, mouth twisting as he considered the possibilities. “Keep track of them. Keep me up to date on what’s happening.” Could be a patrol, which was fine. Maybe better than fine. They might be able to help speed his ship up a bit, help finish some of the most critical repairs they desperately needed. But there were darker possibilities, ones he’d rather not contemplate. He pushed himself up from the console and grabbed a com tablet so Aru could communicate with him wherever he went in the ship.

“Switching to console, Aru. I’m going to check over the ship again, see if we missed anything.”

“My inventory of the ship is complete.”

“Your inventory doesn’t include hiding places in case this takes a bad turn.”

“If you say so.”

Ordinarily Corwin would be happy to defer to Aru on matters like this; the bot had been over every cubic centimeter of the vessel with a variety of maintenance units back on Haruna trying to get it to fly, after all. But Corwin had chosen the old rust-bucket for a reason. It was an antique, and antiques were his passion and his specialty.

The Night Star, as someone previously had named her, was a good 345 years old or so at his best estimate. She was a cargo freighter, smallish by today’s standards, and a very popular design of her time. Ships like her had sailed the space ways ferrying cargos, legitimate and otherwise, for well over a dozen decades before their popularity began to wain. For a time, they’d had quite the reputation as a smuggler’s best friend.

They were all but unknown now, but Corwin had recognized the design pretty quickly once he got a good look at her, and had chosen her without hesitation. Corwin had chosen the ship for her age, not for her reputation as a smuggler’s ship, but if he was right about her, Night Star might just save his life even in her sad current state.

Homecoming - Day 1

“Aru, tell me something. Why did I accept this job again?” Corwin asked his tiny mechanical co-pilot. The Autonomous Remote Unit Waste Disposal robot was his sole companion on the antique wreck of a ship they were flying. Lacking any sort of capacity for vocal communication, it instead sent a text reply to his console display.

“To pay off your debt to Ms. Sobol,” the text helpfully read.

“Ahh, right, thanks for that cheery thought.”

Madeline Sobol had been head of civilian security on the junk yard world of Haruna, a hostile wasteland of a planet with no food, no potable water, and no human inhabitants. Aru had, like all other robots on the planet, been programmed to offer what assistance it was capable of offering to humans stranded and in life-threatening danger. Luckily for Corwin, Aru had controlled a variety of chassis, one of which had been instrumental in getting him to a wrecked ship containing food. Maybe more importantly, it had equipment for communications with the people in orbit.

They were almost a week out from Haruna now, in a ship that Aru’s maintenance chassis had been able to repair barely enough to be space-worthy.

The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 12

Sorcha lead them for several days, seeing signs where none of the rest of them, not even Rich, could see anything at all. “How are you following her?” Brandon asked her at one point. She grinned.

“I’m not. I could, but it’s much easier to follow our fallen necromancer instead. You see these bare patches?”

She indicated empty patches of earth. They did suggest a pattern, now that she drew his attention to it. It was nothing so obvious as a clear footprint, but it was roughly that size, and there was another further up, and another, and …

“You see it now,” she said. “Life has been removed from these patches. They mark the passage of those returned unnaturally from the grave.”

“I think I do, yeah,” he said. Even knowing, it was hard to spot. They just looked like bare patches of earth. “I would have expected blackened grass and something more …”

“Something more evil-looking?” she supplied. “That stuff is dramatic and all, and looks impressive in movies, sure, but that’s not how it really works. It’s almost a shame. I’m sure it’d be terrible for the environment, but it’d sure make tracking them easier. Which, when you think about it, is probably why they make sure the magic doesn’t make it that easy to track them!”

“Who designed the magic?” Lena asked.

“That much actually is rather similar to the way it’s depicted in many books and films. Over many thousands of generations, people observed and investigated how the natural world worked, and picked apart the secrets of making it do things the ancients would never have thought possible. It’s a lot like science, actually, only it follows the natural world down other paths.”

Lena frowned and looked like she had something to say, but bit her lip in thought. “So it’s basically science that our people haven’t discovered yet?” Brandon asked. Off on the far side of the group, Rich looked startled at the question, but then he too got a thoughtful look on his face.

Sorcha just grinned. “Yes and no. I suppose so. My people have found some ways to actually break rules that science can’t, so while a lot of what we call magic could be better termed science in your book, some of it truly is unnatural. That’s what we’re dealing with here.” Her face sobered up abruptly. “Necromancy is deep into the unnatural side of magic, and is a highly-restricted art. Whoever our young necromancer is, he fell the instant he started down this path.”

“So he fell because he broke the rules,” Lena said. “Myra was always a bit vague about what exactly it is to ‘fall,’ she’d always just tell me to do what she said and that if I did that, I wouldn’t have to worry about falling.”

“That sounds like bad advice, given what we’ve seen since then,” Rich said.

Sorcha scowled. “Yeah, not the best way to sum it up I’ve ever heard. Basically you Fall when you act in ways that run counter to the Call. It’s more complex than this, but you’re generally pretty safe if you think of it as ‘don’t act in a villainous manner.’”

“Really? That seems so …”

“I know, it’s not all that much better than Myra’s instructions were, I suppose, though at least it gives you a meaningful direction for your behavior. But the Call is a magic that was enacted thousands of years ago, and you’re used to thinking in terms of science, and logic, and computers. This is a whole different world. It’s a lot to get used to, but you’d never have been called if you weren’t capable of it.”

“If you have to be capable of it, why do people like this necromancer end up falling?”

“Because there’s a difference between being capable of something and actually doing it,” the guide said with a sad note in her voice.

The conversation died down after that. They followed the bare patches of ground onward for almost two and a half days. “The problem with this sort of trail,” Rich opined, “is that it’s very difficult to tell how far behind we are.”

“Were you using this method to track him before?” Brendan asked. Richard had told them he’d arrived in the village on the trail of the same necromancer Myra had been after, though the guide had, of course, been much faster than he was.

“No, I was forced to rely on more conventional means. It’s not the necromancer leaving these … prints,” he explained. “It’s his zombies. The magic that keeps them animated destroys and absorbs life from the ground they walk on to sustain itself.”

“So I guess we shouldn’t let them touch us?”

“Well, that’s always a good policy,” he said seriously, “but the magic won’t destroy and absorb you, if that’s what you mean. It’d be too dangerous even for most necromancers to create creatures like that. If the zombies are going to kill you, it’ll be more directly, or by infection.

”A few hours later, the sun still reasonably high in the sky, the trail suddenly veered away from road. Sorcha consulted a map she’d secreted away in her small pack. “Looks like he took a shortcut across this line of hills, she said, indicating on the map where the road jogged around a small line of hills as it passed through the mountains. “The city is still a ways off on the other side.”

“He probably figured it would either save him time or keep him away from other travelers.” They pressed onward, and as they did, Brendan felt a faint stirring of déjà vu. He found himself looking around the forest expectantly, unsure of what he was expecting to find.

“I don’t like this,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Don’t like what?” Lena asked. “I don’t see anything yet.”

“We are on the trail of a fallen Necromancer,” Rich commented dryly. “I can’t say that I especially like that much myself.”

They walked onward, Brendan’s reservations and sense of déjà vu growing. As they hiked up the side of the hills, the forest thickened, the sun slowly sank, and it got harder and harder to see, but still he couldn’t escape the feeling he’d been here before, or somewhere like it.

The trail lead to an impossibly thick stand of trees, and suddenly recollection snapped into his mind. They stood before a ring of trees almost identical to the ones he’d seen when he was Called, in his dream back in the familiar world.

The resemblance was uncanny, but also twisted. These trees were grey and lifeless, where the trees of his dream had been alive and teeming with life all around them. He looked up, and through the darkness the branches above were skeletal and bare, looking like nothing so much as long, grasping hands. He could almost see them bending down to—

“Hey, you okay?” Sorcha shook him by the shoulder.

“Yeah … yeah, sorry, I was …” He shook his head to clear it. The trees were still there, still lifeless, still grey, but they were inert, just dead trees, no longer grasping hands waiting for them.

“You were what?”

“I have a really bad feeling about this place.”

Sorcha nodded slowly; the others looked around and not one spoke against him. “Something is off,” she said. “Stay close, stay together. There’s something not right here. Don’t split up.”

They gathered around close, Sorcha leading, and approached the entrance to the ring. It was eerie just how much it resembled the tree ring he remembered from his dream. Faint red light awaited them in the clearing within.

Sorcha touched the wood as they passed through the arched opening. Brendan did likewise, finding it brittle and dry, almost ready to crumble. He took his fingers away with a shudder. There were no bugs, nothing alive to be seen.

Inside was worse. The ground was bare, like the spots that made up the trail they’d followed. He’d never really realized how alive bare earth looked until he saw dead bare earth to contrast with it.

The clearing wasn’t empty, however. Inside were several crumpled forms. Lena gasped, staring at one of them; a woman. “It’s Myra,” she said quietly. Brendan didn’t think anyone would be able to raise their voice in this place.

She looked like she’d died minutes ago, the anger and determination on her face still clear. Her features were red, looking blood-stained by the light.

That faint red light was stronger near her; it came from one of the other crumpled forms, a younger looking man, strongly built, face frozen in an expression of agony. He clutched a small gem between two fingers; it seemed to be the source of the light.

Brendan looked around at the other crumpled forms. They must have been the man’s zombie minions, he assumed; they certainly looked like they could have shambled off the set of a Romero movie.

Sorcha stared at the scene numbly, expression unreadable. “Carefully,” she said, “we need to get closer to them. Slowly. Something is terribly wrong here.”

They moved as a unit. Sorcha took Brendan’s hand on one side and Rich’s on the other; they linked up together as they got closer. He wasn’t sure what purpose it served, but it did make him feel a little better.

“Necromancy feeds on life-force,” Sorcha said softly. “The closer ours are to one another, the more closely connected, the stronger we are, the harder we are to feed on.”

The necromancer’s body lay near the center of the clearing, casting huge shadows where it blocked the light of the gem. The group approached cautiously, Sorcha leading the way. “I’m going to need a hand free again in a moment,” she said to them. “Keep a hold of me when we’re within reach, up at my shoulders. Don’t let go.”

They didn’t get the chance. They took one more cautious step just beyond reach of the Necromancer’s body when the gem in his hands began to pulse with a sickening internal light. Pain flared through Brendan’s head and he cried out; all four of them collapsed in a ring where they stood. It was all he could do not to throw up.

Someone let loose the most horrifying cry of rage and pain he’d ever heard, and it took him a moment to realize the female voice he was hearing was neither Sorcha’s nor Lena’s.

Myra was staggering to her feet, clutching her head, screaming loud enough to wake the dead; a thing that was actually happening, some part of Brendan’s brain said to him way too dispassionately.

“Don’t let go!” Sorcha yelled, her voice strangled by pain. Lena was crushing his hand with far more strength than he’d have guessed she possessed; she was like a vice. He didn’t know what state Rich was in, and couldn’t make himself look.

Myra stumbled out of view, and it was then he realized he couldn’t see the necromancer’s body at all. The red light began to fade, and the pain in his head eased, leaving a sickening weakness where it had resided. He struggled for what felt like several minutes until he got to his knees, still gripping Sorcha’s and Lena’s hands in his.

They were alone in the clearing; them, and the still-broken, still unmoving bodies of the necromancer’s former zombies. He could still hear Myra’s screams echoing from far away, but of the necromancer himself, there was no sign.

The last of the red light faded and died, leaving them in near-complete darkness. Sorcha let go of his hand, and gradually his eyes adjusted; some light from the twilight outside did make it down from the opening in the trees above.

He felt like he’d been flattened, like all the energy had been sucked out of him, like a sponge wrung dry. It took him a few minutes to find his voice. “What … the hell … was that?” he asked, finally.

The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 11

Lena just looked at the barkeep matter-of-factly in agreement, but Brendan wanted to hear more about the monsters. “Monsters?” He injected a note of fear into his voice that, quite frankly, he did not have to fake. “What sort of monsters?” He felt the start of a nervous sweat forming on his brow.

“Don’t rightly know,” the barkeep said, lowering his voice a touch. “Clem over there,” he indicated a rotund man deep in his cups, “claimed to hear ‘em a couple of times, groanin’ and moanin’ for men’s souls. Shep swears up and down that something scratched up his door one night a couple weeks back.” He piped down, staring at the bar as though unsure whether to go on.

“Then there’s the graveyard.” He looked supremely uncomfortable. “Don’t know that I should be goin on about this to outsiders,” he said, hunching his shoulders in a bit. “You seem decent enough though, and you’ve certainly paid more ‘n your share for the beer tonight. There were some … incidents over at the grave yard a couple weeks back. Right around the time Clem and Shep and a few others started tellin’ their stories.”

He discarded the rag, which was finally starting to look like it had actually been used, and grabbed a fresh one, cleaning a group of dirty mugs that had accumulated over the past few hours. “Most people know better ‘n to believe the stories of those gents, no disrespect intended to ‘em. But you know how it is when a fellow drinks maybe a little more than is strictly good for him.

“Of course,” Brandon agreed, drinking again. “I’ve been known to indulge from time to time,” he said with a meaningful glance at the mug, which the barkeep refilled with a knowing chuckle. Lena shot a glance at him that he couldn’t quite read.

“I’ve no doubt of that,” the barkeep smiled briefly, then resumed his cleaning. “And so I’m sure you know how muddled one can get in the head at times, and why some folk might not be inclined to take a fellow at his word when he complains of monsters in the night. Why, I once got a little deeper into my cups than maybe good sense would allow for, and I’ll be damned if I couldn’t have sworn that a fallen log wasn’t a forest beast out to eat my legs right out from under me. Spirits do warm the heart, but they also muddle the eyes, am I right?”

“You most certainly are,” Brendan agreed. “So these monsters, they were just the muddled eyes and ears of men who maybe let their drinking get a little out of hand?”

“At first I believed it to be so,” the man said seriously, then leaned in closer. “Least-wise until ‘ol Clint went missing. He was a right regular here, never missed a night. Place ain’t been the same since he vanished,” he said wistfully, casting a glance at an empty bar stool that looked rather well-worn.

“He wasn’t always as careful to never miss payin’ his tab, but he always came through on it in the end, till this last time, least-aways,” he said. “Nobody knows fer sure what happened to ‘im, and if that Myra ever found out, she sure didn’t beat down my door to tell me, nor anyone else round these parts.”

“So they were real, then? The monsters?”

“Well …” the barkeep shifted uncomfortably. “If you mean did I ever actually see ‘em myself … well, no,” he admitted. “But Clint wasn’t the only one to go missing. Nobody’s seen young Ryan since he left one night a week and a half ago. He wasn’t even so drunk that last night that you’d have thought there’d be a problem. Maybe a lil unsteady on his feet, but nothin’ so bad as all that, right? But his missus said he never made it home; never saw him again, nor did the rest of us.”

“S’true, all ‘o it,” said a voice next to Lena. They turned and saw one of the regulars had wandered over for a refill. “Ryan was eated up by the dead’uns.”

“Dead’uns,” the barkeep scoffed. “Was monsters, not dead’uns.”

“Don’ you listen to this guy, ‘e just repeatsh all the nonshense th’ drunks ‘ere spill over the bar all night,” the obviously drunk man cautioned them. “Was dead’uns sure as thish mug is full. Thish mug …” He eyed the mug, then blearily peered into it. Frowning, he tipped it until a single drop splashed onto the bar, much to the barkeep’s annoyance.

“Monsters,” the barkeep said.

“Wasn’ no monstersh,” the man said, setting the mug back on the bar with exaggerated care. “Monstersh dun’ groan and moan like these things did. ‘Eard ‘em I did, oushide me window, wanderin’ about the gra’eyard. Thash why all them gravesh were turned up i’the mornin’, the dead’uns had to dig ‘emselves out in the night.”

“Sounds like zombies to me,” Brandon said to Lena, who nodded back. He’d seen plenty of scenarios like it in books, movies and games. The thought of it happening in reality not so far away in the same town he was in made his skin crawl.

“Zombish? ‘Aven’t heard ‘em called that in yearsh,” the man said, perking up at their acceptance of his story, “but yar, that’sh them.”

“You’re all crazy,” the barkeep insisted. “I’m tellin’ you, it was no zombies, it was monsters. ‘Ad to be. Dead’uns don’t have no control over themselves, see, and everyone who disappeared was right around this area, tween ‘ere and the graveyard. If it were really dead’uns, they’d ‘ave killed the whole town by now, wouldn’t they?”

“Bah, I knowsh what I ‘eard, an’ it wash dead’uns fer shure. I bet ‘twas that lady wot wash pokin’ round that done it.”

“You know I don’t got much love for th’ Ilthem Saeri,” the barkeep said, “but that just don’t make much sense, Mal! It’d all been over for days by the time she poked ‘er nose around here.”

Brandon saw that they’d attracted quite a crowd of onlookers by this point, with people standing around, drinking, listening to the drunk Mal and the barkeep arguing. Nobody seemed to be paying them any attention anymore, which suited him just fine. There was muttering and murmuring as various groups started their own debates on the issue of monsters vs. zombies.

“What are these other monsters you were talking about?” he asked the barkeep.

The barkeep looked at him as though he’d gone mad. “You know, monsters! Everyone knows monsters,” he said, rather unhelpfully. “Big, hairy ‘n fast, eyes glow at night, teeth as big as a finger and sharper than knives.” The barkeep turned back to the argument.

He caught Lena’s eye and nodded toward the stairs. She nodded in response, and they quietly paid their tab and headed up. “What did you make of all that?” he asked.

“It was fascinating. You seemed very familiar with the subject matter; have you encountered zombies before? What sort of monsters are they referring to?” She seemed genuinely curious. He guessed she didn’t watch a lot of monster movies.

“Never outside of a movie theatre,” he explained. “I am a bit of a zombie film aficionado though. I’m not sure what to make of the other monsters they referred to. Maybe werewolves? They didn’t say anything about people turning into monsters, but it would sort of fit with the disappearances, maybe. Feels like a stretch though.”

“I’m a little out of my depth in all this,” Lena said apologetically. “I was never much of a horror fan. A little sci-fi is about as close as I got before I got here.”

“You’re into sci-fi? That’s—” he stopped himself. Not the time, he thought. “Cool, we’ll have to compare notes sometime. For now, I guess—”

“Yes, we should get some sleep and be ready to fill Sorcha in when she returns,” Lena said, suppressing a yawn. “I’m about ready to fall down right here.”

Brandon felt about the same, he realized. “Me too. Good night,” he said, unlocking the door he’d been told was his.

“Good night,” she said, and watched him as he vanished into his room. He closed his door behind him, and was out like a light before he’d even had a chance to undress.

<>

The next morning the four of them gathered around a table in the largely empty common room over breakfast. Sorcha had been out most of the night, but claimed she was fine; “I don’t need a lot of sleep,” she explained.

“Myra was definitely on a the trail of a necromancer raising zombies. And not a particularly skilled necromancer, either,” she sniffed disdainfully. “He’s sloppy, even sloppier than you might imagine for someone who works in zombies. It’s been weeks, and his signs were still painfully obvious.”

“That fits well with what we learned last night,” Lena agreed, and she related the debate they’d begun. Rich and Sorcha listened with half of their attention each, the other half absorbed by the platter of bacon and eggs and fresh-baked bread that the barkeep brought over to them.

The stories were told by the time breakfast was consumed. “We’ll have to head out immediately,” Sorcha announced when they were done. “In fact we probably shouldn’t have waited to finish breakfast,” she added, licking the last crumbs of bacon from her fingertips. “Myra will be difficult to catch if we let her get too far ahead of us, and she has quite a head-start already. She’ll have followed our wayward necromancer, but his trail will end when she catches and deals with him, which she has certainly already done.”

“And once his trail no longer points to hers …” Rich added.

“She’s going to be tough to track down,” Sorcha agreed. “Even for me.”

“If he’s raising zombies,” Lena thought out loud, “then it seems to me that he’ll have to go to where there’s a ready supply of bodies, won’t he? Are there any larger cities in the area?”

Sorcha and Rich exchanged a glance, eyebrows raised in appreciation. “You’re absolutely correct, Lena,” Sorcha said. “He is in fact headed for the nearest big city. It will have taken him some time to get there; zombies are notoriously slow, and he’ll have had to travel by night to avoid attracting unwelcome attention.”

“And it’s possible he wouldn’t have made it all the way to the city at all, if Myra caught him en-route,” Rich added. “She doesn’t deal well with fallen Heroes.”

“You know her?” Brendan asked, surprised. They all seemed surprised, even Sorcha, given the look on her face.

“Yes, we’ve crossed paths,” he confirmed, face soured by the thought. “She gives your people a bad name, Sorcha, I’m sorry to say. Not a prime specimen. Not entirely her fault though, from what I’ve heard.”

“What exactly have you heard?” Sorcha asked, her face caught between anger and surprise.

“She takes her duty as guide extremely seriously,” he began. “But she has had poor luck in the past. Several of her students have fallen, and she seems to take it as a personal failing on her part that it happened. She hunts down the fallen like it’s an insult that they exist at all, and she … well … the stories of what happens when she catches them gave me nightmares for a month.”

Sorcha looked a little pale. “It sounds almost like she has fallen herself,” she said.

“I didn’t want to say as much,” Rich admitted, “but the thought has occurred to me.”

Sorcha stood. “We don’t have time to waste,” she said abruptly, face grim. “We have to get moving.”

They gathered what little they’d brought with them and left the tavern after settling up, and started out on the road once again. They’d just left the village behind and were headed deeper into the mountains when Sorcha spoke up.

“It’s not unheard of for one of the Ilthem Saeri to fall,” she said, voice quiet. “But it’s damn close. I’m going to find her,” she said, voice hard, “and get to the bottom of this.”

“What exactly is it to fall?” Lena asked. “Myra was very … well, vague, on the subject.”

“She would be,” Rich said. “The few times I met her, she really didn’t like talking about it at all.”

“It’s like a Jedi falling to the dark side,” Sorcha said shortly.

Lena’s eyes lit up with understanding. “They’re corrupted by their power then?”

Lena managed a chuckle. “Well, it’s not as external a power as the Force is, it’s more of an internal corruption of the personality, but sort of, yes. We see it as a failing of our guidance, allowing someone who was Called to go down the wrong path.”

“And so you take it personally when it happens,” Brendan said, “and this Myra takes it way more personally than she should?”

“That sums it up pretty well,” Sorcha confirmed. “And from the sounds of it, that has become the source of her own personal fall.”