The Ivory Star

Chapter 27

In the city of ghosts moved three black wraiths. In complete silence they passed ramshackle hovels that lay empty as starving bellies, doors hanging ajar like hungry mouths. They passed empty shops, empty inns, empty stables. Thick gray clouds and a cold clammy mist draped the sprawling city of Arnath like an unfeeling hand. A perpetual gloom infiltrated crack and crevice, street and alley, as if in unclean communion with the blight that had fallen over this once-great city. Not a soul walked the streets. The door that did not hang open were barred, windows boarded shut. Filth and refuse littered the streets and gutters.

The Eagle Knights had hidden their mounts a few leagues from the city in a burned-out abandoned barn, approached the city under cover of night. The sun was now invisible behind the thick layers of warmth-sucking mist and fog as the three men made their way through the city. Eric was stunned at the difference between the two cities they had visited. While Tejun had been corrupt and decadent, Arnath was a city of the dead and dying, choked and strangled by the thing that resided here. It straddled the listless Black River as it flowed toward the southern ocean. The houses on both sides of the river lay sullen and gray, ancient and decaying, forgotten by the all but the dead. The muddy Black River flowed southeastward, cutting through the city like a wide, blunt saw, moving so slowly its surface was hardly broken by a ripple, as if all life had abandoned it as well.

The city's architecture was a patchwork of styles and techniques, melding at the edges. One section was ancient but sturdy stone buildings, lived in by generations of tenants. Another section was of thatch-roof wooden shacks hastily built on ancient foundations. And all were empty. The city was over a thousand years old, and wore its age like an anvil around its neck.

Because of the fog, the Eagle Knights could smell the corpses long before they could see them. They happened into a miasma of charnel stench such as they had never experienced before, even though their stomachs heaved in protest, they forced themselves to investigate the source. It did not take long to find the mound; they merely followed their noses. What they found they would have nightmares about for the rest of their lives. The mound of bodies was horrible enough in itself, but the horror mounted the closer they looked. The other side and the top of the mound were lost in the fog. Thousands of dead. Tens of thousands. And their bodies told their tales. All of them in various stages of rot, the ones nearest the bottom nearly dissolved into purplish-green sacks of bone-speared putrescence. The further up the pile, the corpses grew less and less decayed, and the flesh that still remained showed brutal emaciation, hides stretched taut over protuberant ribs and shoulders and skulls, empty eye sockets picked clean by rooks and staring into nothing, raw wounds on their ankles and wrists, strips of flesh torn from their knobby backs crisscrossed by blood-crusted welts. Here and there, shiny black birds hopped from one limb to the next about their charnel feast, growing fat upon the flesh of the dead. And worst of all, Eric noticed that further up the pile, at least ten feet from the ground, several arms and legs had been hacked from the bodies by sharp instruments, and he shuddered to think where they could have gone, because that meant that someone would have had to climb the mound to hack loose their meal ...

He spun, and with a convulsive heave emptied his belly onto the flagstoned street. Rivulets of juice seeping out from the depths of the mound. A fresh heave clenched him before he could flee, stopping against the wall of dead hovel, the horror behind him hidden by the fog.

Capian's voice came at his shoulder, thick and clenched tight with an effort of will. "Come, let's be away from here quickly."

Eric nodded, and the three of them circled away from the ghastly mound, leaving it in the misty grayness behind them.

Occasionally they would see a run-down shack with a feeble light visible around the cracks of a poorly fitting door. Eric could feel the utter despair and hunger bordering on madness of those within these houses, and knew that approaching them would not be wise, because in the madness of hunger, something sinister had taken root, and was growing within these people like a mold. The exact something that had left so many corpses missing the meatiest limbs.