The Glauerdoom Moor Page 7

  Esmerelda led them across numerous rope bridges and planks set between the buildings on stilts and the trees. They went up and down in the dark until the girl stopped cold.

  “My house is gone,” she said with a whimper.

  “Are you sure? It’s awful dark out here,” offered Hatch.

  “It was right here.”

  A remnant of a rope bridge hung down from the deck they now stood on and into open space; there was only a single stilt standing in the water, albeit a little crooked.

  “Esmerelda?” asked a new voice.

  They turned to see an old woman.

  “Gran?” questioned Esmerelda. She ran and gave the old woman a hug. “Where is Mommy and Daddy?”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Gran. “A storm swept away your parents’ home a fortnight ago. They didn’t make it.”

  Esmerelda started crying and clung to the old woman.

  Gran looked at Hatch and Sai. “Did you find her in the Moor?”

  “We did,” said Sai.

  “It was a witch’s curse that took her parents. I can look after her now. Thank you.” Tears welled up in her eyes as well, and she turned and led Esmerelda into her cottage.

  Hatch and Sai were left standing alone in the dark. “Do you see now how important our mission is? This goes beyond just finding the princess, this is about cleansing a land dominated by vicious evil beings.”

  Sai grunted, “Yes, but I need some sleep.”

  ***

  The loud blast from a horn shook Sai from her deep dreams. She almost fell out of her narrow bed. The trumpet sounded again.

  “If this is someone’s idea of a joke, they are gonna pay,” she growled as she slipped a robe over her shoulders and went to the window.

  A trio of small fat witches sat in a rowboat in the center of the waterway. They were cloaked and gray, but long green noses peeked out from their hoods, and they were cackling amongst themselves as one blasted the trumpet again. Sai saw the witch’s cheeks expand like bloated flesh, then release as the rotten instrument shattered the early morning silence like breaking glass.

  “Hear us, oh Stilt Town! You have done yourselves a grave misfortune by taking what is ours!”

  Sai glanced at the other windows. She thought she could see a few folk peeking from behind their blinds, curtains, and shutters, but no one dared face the witches openly, not even these three plump ones far below in a rowboat.

  “We demand that you return the child apprentice to us! As well as those murderous interlopers that robbed us! AND,” she emphasized, “a full year’s tithe worth of grains and foodstuffs for our larder.”

  Sai couldn’t actually hear anyone, but her gut told her there was a collective gasp at these demands. Such harsh taxes would surely break these people.

  “Bring them out and give them to us or suffer the consequences!” They cackled again.

  Sai threw open her window and shouted, “The heck they will! I’ll give as good to you as I did your foul sisters!”

  The witches were shocked, but quickly their faces returned to a cruel malevolence.

  Sai then noticed that Hatch and Von Wilding had thrown open their window as well to meet the threat eye to eye. Marie looked out her window too, her long golden braids catching the wind.

  “You think you can stop us, you traitorous daughter of the Nether?”

  Sai frowned, grumbled, and ported down to the witches’ rowboat amidst them. The witches were shocked and leaned back in surprise as Sai punched a hole in the bottom of the rowboat with her daggers. She blinked away just as they regained enough composure to try and snatch at her.

  The rowboat spouted murky water from the center bottom as if from a blowhole. The witches cried out as they were suddenly ankle deep. They stood up and snarled aloud and cast a spell to try and patch the hole.

  “This isn’t the end. We’ll be back!”

  An arrow sunk into one of the hags, down to the fletching. She tumbled back into the boat, and the hole spouted more water.

  “With one less!” cried Hatch. “Begone!”

  Marie looked to Hatch and nodded grimly. The two witches rowed away with a wretched muttering between them.

  “We better discuss our options,” said Hatch.

  Marie added, “I’ll gather the townsfolk. They need to hear this too.”

  The party met on the floor of Marie’s, joined by a throng of townsfolk. Voices of dissent flooded their ears.

  “You shouldn’t have done that!”

  “We will be ruined!”

  “They’ll come for us all now.”

  “We should hand these folks and the witch girl over now!”

  “String ‘em up!”

  Sai, Hatch, and Von Wilding prepared for the worst, looking with suspicion at the townsfolk’s weary faces.

  “No!” yelled Marie. She stood on top of her bar, glaring at everyone assembled there. “We won’t! The time has come for us to fight back. We ought not be paying any tithe to the witches and their dark lord. We built this town from the mud, we’ve raised our children here, and I’ll be fish food before I just roll over and let them strip it away from us again. I say we fight!” She held aloft a rolling pin and swung it about as if it were a sword.

  The crowd murmured, none too sure about what to do.

  “Listen to me!” called Hatch. “The witches think you will give up; let us surprise them and trap them. If we work together we can beat them. Trust me.”

  “Trust you? Who are you?” asked a long-faced townie.

  “I am Hatch! The royal warden of King Jasper the Third.”

  “Never heard of you.”

  “Shut up, Weasel,” shot back Marie. “These folks are heroes, here to do some good in our rotten part of the world. We must stand by them and fight! Or we will have no future!”

  Some folk cried out in support of Marie and her daring words, but others were not so easily swayed.

  “You don’t understand the forces they can bring to bear against us. They have terrible powers and monsters. The Shamble Priests animate the very dead to walk and assault us.”

  “Aye, they do,” cried another. “I’ve seen them, big bloated things that can explode in gore and offal.”

  “There’s much worse than that, I’ll wager,” added another.

  “And how would giving up make it any better?” argued Marie. “Peter Murkwood, you lost all your cows on Dry Island to the zombies. You aren’t getting them back. Tory Snailskin, you lost your father and your daughters to the witches, must you hand over your sons too? Wilum Pike, are you willing to give up your home and family? We must fight.”

  The crowd murmured, but the sentiment grew. They would fight.

  “Show us what to do,” someone said.

  “Follow me,” said Hatch.

  Chapter 10: Battle

  They gathered every conceivable weapon they could, from shovels, hoes, and pickaxes, to hatchets, crude, old bows of yew, and rusted swords moldering in their grandfathers’ closets. Some were armed only with wide, old paddles and nets for swamp fish. Hatch gave basic thrusting and chopping training to those capable of wielding such weapons, while Von Wilding led a party of others to build some makeshift defenses. They roped great logs and rigged them to swing when ready. Sturdy constructs were made to defend archers on the rope bridges and balconies. Some of the lower planks were set to break at the first sign of the attack so that the enemies might fall into a pile of harsh debris. They all knew this was a matter of life and death, and Hatch told them there could be no quarter given or expected.

  Sai took it upon herself to be the lookout and watch in every conceivable direction for the coming attack. She kept a continual vigil, circling far around the town, porting from treetop to treetop. It was more tiring than she expected, but she guessed she would be just as exhausted if she were helping Von Wilding build the defenses. She’d refused to train anyone; she fought in her own style, and she doubted
that any of the backwoods yokels could learn her subtle craft.

  Sai had circled the town in an ever-growing spiral more than five times when twilight fell. That’s when she heard it. A horrendous crashing through the brambles and swamp below. Something was coming. It sounded like a whole army was tramping through the muck and crushing any of the small shrubs and trees beneath their feet. The cracking of branches reminded Sai of bones snapping.

  She ported to lower branches to see who these foes were.

  A huddled mass came through the reeds: gaunt bodies with mangled limbs atop ragged torsos, and slack-jawed faces with dead, blank eyes that were white like spider eggs.

  Sai shuddered. She had heard of zombies before, but never seen one, let alone a troop of them before. The sight was ghastly. They each looked terribly different, and yet, the same. None of them noticed her up in the tree, but they were heading straight to Stilt Town. Mindless as they appeared, they knew where they were going.

  Among the shambling creatures, Sai spotted a bizarre figure. He was different; he wore a top hat with a small skull riding on the front of the brim. A few feathers were also on the side giving him a magical fetish-like appearance vaguely similar to what had been hanging in the trees near Wildflower’s. His face was painted to look like a death’s head, a skull . . . at least, Sai thought it was painted. He wore black and white striped pants and a dirty maroon jacket. He carried a skull in his hand like a lantern, for a weird green glowed from the eye sockets and open mouth, lighting his path with a dreadful gleam.

  Behind him trudged a throng of especially fat zombies, and the stink of them wafted up to Sai’s hiding place, making her gag.

  Their curious master heard her and looked about, but he did not look up. After a tense moment, he continued following his disgusting horde.

  This is terrible. She hoped that being up on stilts and above water would be a strong enough defense against the zombies. She ported back toward Stilt Town as fast as she could.

  She heard a ruckus before she could see the town. Voices shouted, and bizarre zapping sounds flashed in time with faint hints of light like fireworks dancing through the trees as Sai approached.

  The Witches are already attacking from the opposite direction! A few flew about on broomsticks zapping at the townsfolk with their wands while others were in boats attacking from the Moor below. Some were cloaked in maroon and looked almost skeletal. Sai knew these to be Dust Mages, and she was wary of their dark arts.

  “Hatch! Zombies are coming from the east!” shouted Sai once she found him. He held a bow but was unable to use it as he huddled behind a shield to deflect the witches’ blasts.

  “We are already nearly overwhelmed,” he said. “I haven’t even been able to shoot back at them yet. I thought you were supposed to be keeping watch!”

  “I was, and I found out we have a horde of zombies coming!” she shouted.

  “They’ll have to wait. I have my hands full already!”

  Sai was angry, but she took it out on the nearest witch: porting to the back of her broom and yanking the hag off, sending her plunging into the Moor below. It so surprised the witch that she barely had time to scream.

  “Thanks,” called Hatch as he finally loosed an arrow, knocking the skull from a Dust Mage, whose cold blast missed, and instead sent icicles rippling down a rope bridge.

  Von Wilding was intently watching a boat with two Dust Mages as they fired their terrible cold blasts at the town, freezing the humid swamp air into great blocks of ice, crushing townsfolk and smashing through homes. But Von Wilding cut a line, and suddenly a huge log swung down and crashed into the rowboat, smashing it to kindling and the mages along with it. A cry of joy went up from the townsfolk. But just as things looked to be in their favor, the very balcony Sai was standing shook mightily.

  Down in the water, two of the huge fat zombies were pushing back and forth on one of the stilts, shaking the whole building. The mindless things looked like they were in a reversed tug-of-war, each trying to give the post to the other. Then it broke. The whole building tipped for a moment, giving Sai just enough time to grab a man who stood frozen, yank him back to another connecting plank, and then away again as the building toppled and fell, crushing the two zombies.

  “Looks like they took care of themselves,” said Sai in relief.

  “Maybe, but that was my house,” said the man.

  “Eh, sorry.”

  Witches were still flying about zapping lightning strikes. More zombies were wading into the waters surrounding the town; even when they disappeared because the water was over their heads, Sai could see the ripples of movement where they walked unseen on the bottom, looking for somewhere they could climb up into Stilt Town.

  She heard Von Wilding shout in triumph again and guessed his traps must have crushed another foe. Hatch was still loosing arrows and the townsfolk were too, even throwing whatever they could at zombies below. She saw an old woman and a little child push a couch off a balcony to land on top of a zombie, making its tongue and eyes bug out. Men with pitchforks and paddles were holding off a squad of zombies that had reached the lowest level of Stilt Town. She rushed to help them.

  In a blink she was in the throng, cutting aside the repulsive host of rotting bodies with her twin daggers, slicing fingers and hands that clawed viciously. But still the horde came on, heedless of their destroyed and wounded comrades. They raged with drooling mouths and clung tenaciously to the stilts in any attempt to reach the living flesh above. Men drew back and away beside Sai. She wasn’t sure if they were giving up or had fallen; zombies were grasping hold of people and dragging them down to their doom in the murky waters. Other zombies were biting them. The zombies renewed their attack and Sai felt alone for half a moment, until she saw Marie beside her, battering away at the zombies with a large cast iron pan.

  “It knocks their heads off, good as anything,” she quipped before sending a green jaw flying.

  The two of them pushed forward and knocked the last few zombies from their position. Sai and her unexpected partner enjoyed a quick breather but heard screams from behind. Zombies had scaled other stilts and were on the lower level of rope bridges and planks.

  Witches still flew about freely, sending their terrible curses below, but Sai noticed there were fewer of them. Hatch and the other archers were doing some good there. Von Wilding’s corner of Stilt Town was the hardest hit, with a dense swarm of zombies in his region. Sai went to assist him.

  “Wait,” said Marie, “If we leave this spot open, they will climb up here again and we’ll be attacked from another direction.”

  “But he needs help.”

  “He does, but for the greater good, we have to defend this corner.”

  Especially fat zombies were milling about in the swamp below them, not even close to climbing the stilts yet, but Von Wilding was beset by a howling horde of the monsters.

  “I have to help him. I’ll be right back,” said Sai. She blinked away before Marie could argue and was soon beside Von Wilding, cutting and slashing away at the monsters.

  They pushed the foe back and knocked many off the planks to splat against one another.

  “I have to get back to where Marie is, before more come that way.”

  Von Wilding nodded, saying, “You mean over there? I don’t see her.”

  Sai looked, and a great fat zombie was standing where Marie had been on the rope bridge just a moment ago.

  “Oh no.”

  She ported as swift as she could, but upon almost reaching the corner of the town, a fat zombie suddenly exploded, splattering green gore in every direction like a bomb. The smell was enough to knock a man down. Another one clambered over the side of the deck. Is it staring at me? It almost looked like it had a smile on its face, but zombies don’t smile, do they? Sai was sure she heard malevolent laughter.

  The grotesque zombie took a few quick steps toward her.

  Sai had her daggers out, ready to plu
nge into the horrific mass, when someone called her name.

  “Sai! Take cover!”

  It’s Marie! But where is she and what is she doing?

  A huge black pot flew from the window above, slapping the fat zombie and causing it to burst like a balloon. Horrendous smelly green ooze flew in all directions.

  “It only works on the fat ones—trust me—I’ve done this more than once.”

  In an instant, Sai was up in the room with Marie. “I’m sorry, I thought they got you for a second there.”

  “They nearly did, but I ran up the back step. Now we’ve got worse than pudgy zombies though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those rotten Shamble Priests is what!”

  Marie pointed to the top hat-wearing, skull-faced priest that Sai had seen earlier. He laughed at the carnage he was causing.

  Sai then realized why Marie was horrified. The Shamble Priest wove his dark magics over the corpse of a dead townie, and despite being covered in blackened scorch marks from a witch’s lightning blast, and having fallen off an upper roof, he jerked upright—a zombie powered by sheer evil.

  “He was my friend, and now he’s my enemy!” snarled Marie. “I’m not gonna let it happen to any more of my people!”

  “I’m with you,” said Sai firmly.

  “Wait—,” said Marie just as Sai ported away.

  She stood hip-deep in the murky water right behind the Shamble Priest. Her daggers lanced out like a serpent’s strike but something hit her—hard—and then she was flying away from the Shamble Priest. What happened?

  Then she was underwater. She choked on the foul green and rose up, spitting out a mouthful.

  The ugliest thing she had ever seen, this side of the three-headed Ettin, stood before her. He looked like a zombie but was at least three times the usual size, and had other things grafted onto his massive purplish frame. He had stiches crisscrossing his body, demarcating where different bodies had been sewn together. Here and there slabs of metal protruded, but the strangest thing, besides his eerie cold eyes, was the massive hand of a giant bolted to his arm. It was terrible to behold, and he was charging at Sai.