Corpse Cold (Immortal Treachery Book 3) Read online

  Corpse Cold

  By

  Allan Batchelder

  ©2015, Allan Batchelder

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from its author, Allan Batchelder.

  Corpse Cold is a work of fiction. All of its characters are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements:

  Gillian Avery Batchelder

  Jeffrey Reid

  Shay Roberts

  Kim Sieminskie-Uyyek

  Rodney Sherwood

  And everyone who contributed to my GoFundMe campaign!

  I would like to dedicate this book to my teachers – even those I hated – and to my students – even those who hated me.

  ~ ONE ~

  Sometimes, evil is like dust in a home. This is not to trivialize evil, but instead to acknowledge and understand its ubiquity. In spite of our best efforts, it finds its way in – on the sole of a boot, on a draft; it hides and collects in the places we take for granted or seldom look. And it is impossible to eradicate or even deny.

  Omeyo struggled to determine just when it was he’d let it into his own life. It wasn’t a question of faulty recollection – he possessed perfect memory; his confusion was more due to the fact that he’d committed or accepted so many unforgiveable acts that he wasn’t sure which had been his undoing, which had been the one that tipped the scales forever against him. He sighed. It hardly mattered. Once he’d signed on with the End-of-All-Things, he’d lost all hope of redemption.

  He’d been offered an unexpected second chance when Tarmun Vykers -- the Reaper –slaughtered the End-of-All-Things on the battlefield. But Omeyo had become so inured to servitude that he thought only of how he might curry favor down the road and, thus, had spared not a moment’s thought to his own freedom.

  He regretted that now; oh, how he regretted it.

  He cast a weary eye in the direction of the child he’d helped become the End’s next incarnation. The boy – if one could call him that – stood just outside the cave, mumbling something brutish to his ever-present Svarren companions, the two inbred beasts Omeyo secretly thought of as “Tooth and Nail”. What their actual names were, he neither knew nor cared. He wished them both dead and soon.

  As if he could read the man’s thoughts, the boy called out “What are you up to, old man?”

  “Nothing, Master,” Omeyo responded. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Something you can do? Get off your ass and gather more firewood. There’s never enough.”

  Omeyo got off his ass. He was well past counting the indignities he’d suffered in the child’s service; they hardly registered anymore. Lugging himself off into the tree line, he stole a final glance at the boy and his bodyguards. You’d never know to look at the child that he was barely four years old. The creature that lived within him had accelerated his growth so much that he looked on the verge of his first beard, though his face, all his features, gave the impression of a waxen image set too close to a fire, so that he lacked definition or finish, as if he’d been pulled from the womb before he’d been fully developed. Grown, he was. And yet, he was little more than a toddler. And yet, again, he was impossibly ancient.

  And impossibly mad.

  How else to explain the boy’s fitful memory of where and what he’d been? Of course, it didn’t speak well of Omeyo’s sanity that he’d been serving the creature all these years. And now there was no escape. When he’d rescued the End’s brains and heart from the battlefield, he’d imagined the resurrected sorcerer would thank him, reward him even. What he’d gotten instead was more servitude, wretched servitude.

  Gods, the trees were full of Svarren shit!

  *****

  Vykers, In Lunessfor

  The young woman ran with an energy, a zeal that only prey understood or possessed. She’d made the mistake of wandering into the South Shore district after dark; she’d been marked, and now was pursued by one of the district’s most frightening gangs, a foul alliance of rapists, murderers and thieves. It was a mistake that would likely produce fatal results…but not for this woman, who was more than she seemed.

  In his new body, Tarmun Vykers may have been slighter-of-frame than those who followed him, but no one alive knew of more ways to kill a man. It was true that this new body could not sustain as much damage as his normal one. It was also true that if Vykers allowed this body to die, he’d probably die with it and never recover his former self.

  Vykers put on a burst of speed and raced for an alley that opened up to his left. In South Shore, there was no safety to be found on the main streets at night and, thus, no point in avoiding the alleys and breezeways, either. In addition to lack of size and muscle, the Reaper suffered from a second disadvantage, in that he was relatively unfamiliar with the city of Lunessfor outside the Queen’s castle (and even inside, he was mostly ignorant of the areas beyond his one-time sick-room). Vykers wasn’t sure where this or any alley might take him, but he was certain those chasing him knew. Spying a pile of refuse, he quickly ducked down behind it and made himself as small as possible – a talent he’d never before possessed.

  In moments, he heard his pursuers draw near. They weren’t speaking to one another, but made no special effort to conceal their footsteps. Without looking, Vykers knew there were more than five of them – too many to handle in a pitched fight, in his current form. He figured his best move was to pick them off one-by-one, as he continued to lead them through the warren of South Shore. Quietly as possible, he drew the small dagger he kept at his belt. When one of the gang ventured near, Vykers lashed out with his blade, severing the tendons behind the man’s right knee, and then dashed off down the alley, whilst his victim howled in agony.

  One down.

  But now those remaining were more committed to catching him than ever before. Once they realized what had happened and where their quarry had gone, they stormed after Vykers with renewed vigor.

  “You’ll bleed for that one, little bitch!” one of them yelled out.

  Careening down the alley, the Reaper noticed a hole in the side of a building, too small for his pursuers, but perfect for his new, smaller physique. Without a moment to spare, he pulled himself inside, just as the gang arrived.

  “Get ‘er, get ‘er, get ‘er!” someone shouted.

  Hands groped into the darkness after Vykers, but he sent them away with a solid kick. At a cry from his pursuer, another of the men suggested, “Stab ‘er with your pig sticker, first. That’ll slow ‘er down!”

  “Patience!” a new voice countered. “I ain’t tupping no corpse! Let’s some of us go ‘round t’other side, and some wait here.”

  All Vykers heard was “tupping.” He’d done some horrible things in his time, but never had he contemplated raping anyone; never had he been the target of such contemplation. His gorge rose at the idea, and he determined to make his pursuers’ deaths all the more painful.

  First, he had to get away from the sword being thrust at him from behind. Clambering further into the building, Vykers found himself in a close, dark space – considerably darker, in fact, than it had been outside in the street, which might work to his advantage. The place reeked of rat urine, human sweat and…something else, something vaguely familiar.

  It occurred to him he was probably not alone in the darkness. “Whoever you are,” he whispered in his still unfamiliar new voice, “You’d best stay hidden. There’s trouble comi
n’ and soon.”

  “D’you need a hand?” a younger voice responded.

  “How many are you?”

  “Just me.”

  “Like I said, you’d best stay out of it. The two of us ain’t enough for what’s comin’.”

  A noise of heavy footsteps sounded somewhere in the building.

  “There another way out of here?” Vykers asked his invisible companion.

  “Just the door ‘n the hole. What’re you gonna do?”

  Vykers chuckled. He’d meant to scoff at the coming threat, but it came out like nervous laughter. Damn this new body! “I guess we’ll find out,” he finally said.

  The footsteps stopped within spitting range, and a loud thump reverberated through the little room.

  “Door’s locked,” the hidden child said.

  “I figured. Stay back.”

  The latch protested a moment and then, in an explosion of sound, a blast of fresher air and feeble light flooded into the space, which turned out to be a storage closet of sorts. Large, hulking shadows lurked in the doorway, the shapes of Vykers’ would-be assailants, letting their eyes adjust to the gloom. It was a pause they could ill afford, as Vykers dove between their legs, slashing at their ankles and calves with his knife as he went. They bent low, either in attempt to grab him or in response to their injuries, and the Reaper had to kick his way free.

  “Oooh,” one of them wailed, “I’m gonna enjoy putting a blade in her!”

  On his feet at last, Vykers dodged off into the darkened building, looking for suitable spots to stage an ambush or, alternatively, an exterior door or window through which to escape. Nothing presented itself. Too soon, the men at his back recovered from Vykers’ attack and resumed the chase. Coming to a corner, Vykers ducked behind it and threw himself flat against the wall, hoping to stick his knife in the first neck he saw.

  Instead, he heard menacing laughter. “No, you don’t, little piece. One sneak attack’s quite enough. Ain’t it, lads?”

  “Swear to Mahnus, I’ll gut the bitch!” someone responded.

  “When we’ve had our way with ‘er,” someone else cautioned.

  “To hells with that! She makes me bleed, I make her bleed.”

  While the men argued about the order of their planned atrocities, Vykers backed away from the corner, continuing to search the gloom for any advantage or avenue of escape. He again became aware of an oddly familiar odor and suddenly understood where he was: an abandoned charnel house – a fitting place for murder, so long as he wasn’t the one dyin’.

  More menacing laughter. “I don’t blame ye fer hidin’, but it’s all fer naught, ye know. My boys in the street’ll ‘ave come ‘round by now and got ye surrounded.”

  Vykers risked a look over his shoulder and, indeed, heard the noise of men bungling blindly towards him in the dark. A black space in the middle of the wall, opposite, suggested a doorway. Short of other options, the Reaper ran towards it, grateful for the light-footedness of his new body, if nothing else. Before the men hunting him realized what had happened, he’d successfully escaped into a different room. Out in the hall, the gang’s leader continued to cajole and reason with his prey, still unaware she’d fled.

  The Reaper focused on the new room, which proved to be the darkest of any he’d visited so far. The smell of death was strongest here, too, though it was of death long past. On a hunch, Vykers got down on his hands and knees and crept forward. After a few feet, the air seemed to get thicker, heavier. Extending a hand as carefully as possible, he was not surprised when his fingers closed around an old bone – a thigh bone, he reckoned. He was momentarily transported back to his first meeting with Arune, his former Shaper. And then he was angry all over again.

  In the hall, he could hear the men coming from both directions.

  Exploring further, he realized he faced an enormous mountain of bones. Why hadn’t they been burned like everything else? Perhaps there had been too many dead for one little oven. Or maybe those who’d worked here had succumbed to the same diseases that brought them business. These questions aside, it was clear that there’d be no back door out of this room.

  “What’s that, there? Another room?”

  Vykers never backed down from a fight, but Vykers had never been a woman before, either. Like a rat, he scurried into and under the bones. He was sure the gang heard him, but they’d have a hard time getting their hands on him.

  “She’s here!”

  Vykers dug for the back wall, slithering on his belly like a desperate lizard, jabbed in the ribs by ribs, smacked on the skull by skulls.

  “Let’s ‘ave some light!” another voice declared.

  Vykers heard the telltale snick of steel on flint. Soon, a flickering glow worked its way through the bones.

  “Endless hells, would you look at that? There must be a thousand dead in here!”

  “More!”

  “It ain’t the dead ‘uns we’s worried about. It’s that girl!”

  “Yes, but how do we get at ‘er?”

  “Well,” said a voice Vykers had come to perceive as the leader’s, “there’s a number o’ things we might try: we can wait ‘er out…”

  The gang voiced its disapproval of that plan.

  “Or we could burn ‘er out…”

  That got no better response.

  “We could dig ‘er out…or we could herd ‘er out.”

  “What?” one of the others asked, “Like an animal?”

  “Just,” the leader replied. “What we do is, we start stabbing our swords into this pile, as we work our way to the back wall. Might have to dig down a piece, but we’ll get ‘er. She don’t wanna get skewered, she’s gonna have to come out.”

  It wasn’t the worst plan Vykers had ever heard, much to his chagrin. But if they got close enough, he’d let ‘em know about it. He still had his knife and a much better view of his tormentors than they had of him. He suspected, too, that they’d find wading through the bones more challenging than they imagined.

  In no time, he heard those bones crunching or clacking as they were trod upon or pushed aside. Some at the top of the pile cascaded down towards the bottom.

  “Watch out you don’t bury yerselves while yer at it!” the leader warned.

  The man on Vykers’ left was making the most progress. He pushed forward with great violence and thrust his sword into the pile at unpredictable intervals. Vykers had to take him down first, in order to slow the others’ advance. Initially, he tried to move silently, but it soon became evident that he could never be heard over the noise raised by those hunting him. With stealth no longer a concern, the Reaper dragged himself to within a few feet of his target’s position. The next time the man stuck a foot into the pile, Vykers would…

  Something crashed past on his right. The fuckers were firing arrows into the pile! That was a problem he hadn’t anticipated. He doubted they could hit him; in truth, he’d have been amazed if they could even see him. Still, things being as they were, he could hardly afford to get overconfident. He wriggled his way back into the depths of the mound, away from the man he’d nearly ambushed and towards, he hoped, greater cover. His central problem remained, however: he was surrounded, outnumbered and effectively cornered. The only thing keeping him alive at the moment was the dead, whose bones presented a forbidding barricade.

  “Little mousie, in the brambles,” the gang’s leader sang out, “won’t ye come out fer tea?”

  The weight of the bones was beginning to wear on Vykers, another sign that his time was running out. In now-tedious routine, he wished he had his former body, his real body. He’d have burst from his hiding place like fury incarnate and made worms’ meat of his antagonists. There wouldn’t have been enough left of their bones to throw on the pile. But that was before Arune’s treachery, before Vykers had been cast into the body of a girl. Now, he was like to die in that body.

  Without thought, without reason, he decided to run for it. He’d planned to erupt from the pile, catchin
g his foes off guard, and bolt from the room, but, again, he no longer had the strength or mass to bust through so easily. After considerable struggle, he managed to poke his head out, only to find that he was not dealing with four men, as he’d hoped, or even five, but seven. He was certain he’d taken at least one of them out. Where had the others come from? It hardly mattered. He could see well enough that he was fucked.

  “There she is!” the man nearest him hollered.

  In an instant, six of the seven were scrambling up and through the mound in Vykers’ direction. Only the leader stood aloof, holding a torch in one hand and pointing with the other.

  And then Vykers heard a crunch, and the quality and direction of light in the room changed drastically. He risked a look back at the leader and saw the man down on his knees, his right arm and shoulder gone, as black blood spewed from his torso in a geyser. The torch had fallen to the floor, where it sputtered on the edge of a growing pool of the stuff. Vykers searched out the other six men and understood that they’d seen what he’d seen, too, and had lost all confidence in their chosen course. The Reaper snapped his eyes back to the leader. In the shadows behind the doomed man, a larger figure raised a boot and kicked the leader’s corpse over onto the torch, dousing the light.

  Two of the men who’d but moments ago been chasing Vykers now shrieked like frightened children. The bones tumbled and rattled. A cacophony of grunts, cries and ringing steel ensued. There was a series of heavy thuds and the smell of fresh blood and bile grew heavy in the air. Vykers held his breath, straining to glean what he might from the chaos. At last, a crypt-like silence fell on the room. Still, Vykers waited. It might be a trap. Minutes passed, and a torch blossomed to life, held in the hand of a lone figure. The fellow was big – bigger than Vykers had been in his normal body – and covered in scars. Half his face was gone, as well. The brute looked down at his feet, where the bodies and body parts of the gang were now scattered, and then he looked over in Vykers’ direction.

  “You’re safe now,” he rumbled. “You can come out or stay put, as you like.”