Drafted Into Darkness, Page 3

being stripped away. He screamed in denial, unseen and unheard in the astral plane.

  In court, the magistrate didn’t even bother reading the charges.

  “Have you anything to say in your defense, wretch?” he asked disdainfully.

  “It wasn’t my fault! Heavy rains flooded the river, and the current undercut the road. The wagon’s wheels were six feet from the edge when the bank collapsed,” Igon protested, unnoticed by ordinary men who couldn’t attune their senses to other dimensions.

  “Mercy, lord!” Beltz Bela gobbled hysterically, as he’d been coached by Zaharo.

  “Cease your prattle!” snapped the magistrate. He opened a ledger that Herauts handed him. “I see that your negligence caused the destruction of thirty barrels of fine Tuscan wine, imported at great expense.”

  “Liar!” Igon roared, invisible and mute to worldly ears. “The wagon would have collapsed under the weight of thirty barrels, and the six barrels it did carry held local swill that was almost turned to vinegar.”

  “I’m sorry, please…” Beltz Bela whimpered.

  “I sentence you to twelve years indenture to pay for the property you destroyed. Your conduct has branded you a flight risk, and shall see you wearing a collar, so that honest men will know your status.”

  Igon remembered his resolution of only two days ago. Hours later, after seeing his body shackled to a post in one of Herauts’ stables, he confronted Zaharo over the matter.

  “Before I met you, I swore I’d die before I let myself become a slave!” he grated furiously.

  “Then you were an idiot!” Zaharo snapped back. “All you’ve sacrificed is your vanity. Why should you care for the opinions of shopkeepers and laborers? What are they, and what were you, but sheep being sheared? Serve me well and you can grow into something greater!”

  “Shall I grow into a toothless old man who lives in a cave?” Igon sneered.

  “Fool! I will change my fortune when I fulfill my part of our bargain.”

  “How’s that?” asked Igon, but Zaharo refused to explain.

  In the following weeks they learned much about Herauts. They knew where the merchant lived, and how the rooms in his house were arranged. They discovered he had no wife or children, but had a mistress. He also negotiated to marry the youngest daughter of a Moorish official, and planned to convert to Islam.

  The conspirators also found out how many guards Herauts employed, and where they were posted at night. Astral observers uncovered the location of the guards’ homes. They learned where Herauts hid his money, and Igon began to guess what Zaharo had hinted at.

  After two weeks of gathering information the old man had a plan. Without fanfare or hesitation, he put it in motion. Watching him, Igon wondered how many times he’d committed murder, for he was plainly a practiced killer.

  First, his slow, shuffling pace brought him to the cramped quarters of one of Herauts’ bodyguards. The guard, an apish bruiser called Gorka, slept at midnight. Zaharo used a simple spell to slide the dead bolt open and enter the apartment. His arts let him to see in the dark and easily make his way to Gorka’s bed. The casual way he drove an icepick into the sleeping man’s eye socket showed an expertise that could have only come with repetition.

  Zaharo’s servants waited for the murdered man’s essence on the astral plane. Igon watched fascinated as the hungry spirits surrounded and began to feed on the confused and terrified soul. Instinctively Gorka fled deeper into the astral plane, seeking the mysterious destination that attracted the souls of the dead. He receded beyond Igon’s perceptions, still pursued by a horde of ravenous shades.

  “He’ll never make it,” the old man cackled. “You’re seeing the reason people want a priest around when they die.”

  Igon couldn’t see the final outcome, but when Zaharo’s servants returned, they were stronger, more robust. He felt stirrings of guilt, but squashed the sentiment when he remembered Gorka was one of the guards who’d helped enslave him. Instead he exulted in the obliteration of the brute’s soul.

  Gorka’s passage also weakened the astral barrier. The effect made it easier for Zaharo to bring another wraith into the material plane.

  “Come forth, Gorri Otso,” Zaharo cajoled another of his favorites. Gorri Otso entered Gorka’s body. The icepick had wrought only selective damage on Gorka’s brain. With help from Zaharo, the spirit compensated for the injuries and got the body’s heart and lungs back into operation. Gorri Otso possessed a fully functional husk.

  Less than a quarter hour later, Gorri Otso carried Zaharo quickly through the dark streets. They entered a second rented room and killed again. Yet another malevolent spirit possessed the body. Igon, still trailing along on the astral plane felt a savage appreciation that Zaharo had extended his vengeance to both of Herauts’ men who’d beaten him through the streets.

  Unimpeded by the darkness, Zaharo and his entourage arrived at the compound where Igon’s own body, still possessed by Beltz Bela, sat confined in an empty stall. Aside from the wagons and livestock, the building held nothing of value. The stable hand assigned to watch the place didn’t expect any trouble, especially from Herauts’ own bodyguards. Gorri Otso clubbed the man unconscious. Zaharo knelt creakily and repeated his lethal technique with the ice pick.

  “Now you may serve me while wearing your own flesh.”

  Zaharo commanded Beltz Bela into the stable hand’s body, and guided Igon back into his own worldly mass.

  Igon’s elation at reclaiming his material form was harshly dampened by the return of physical sensation. Beltz Bela knew the basics of how to move in a human body, but he couldn’t perform complex tasks such as driving a wagon. Herauts, who’d looked forward to intimidating his other teamsters by forcing them to work alongside an enslaved former peer, interpreted the sudden inability as defiance. Predictably, he’d punished the disobedient slave. Igon’s nerves transmitted the effects of weeks of reprisal. He was hungry, thirsty and he stank. The iron slave collar had chafed the skin of his neck raw. His back and shoulders burned from repeated floggings.

  Zaharo manipulated Igon’s pain into renewed hatred and desire for revenge.

  “It is time to meet my half of our bargain, are you ready for your vengeance?”

  “I’m ready to watch that bastard to suffer!”

  They moved surely through the pitch black alley behind Herauts’ house. Zaharo used his spell to unlock the back door, and Igon sprang through the entry. He grabbed the surprised guard by the throat and the wrist of his sword arm, and held him for Beltz Bela to kill with a knife through the heart. Igon armed himself with the fallen man’s weapon.

  The guard at the front of the house managed to draw his sword and defend himself. For all the strength of their possessed bodies, Beltz Bela, Gorri Otso and the third spirit knew nothing of swordplay. Herauts’ man whipped his blade through the throat of the second possessed body guard. The entity inhabiting that form slipped back into the astral plane as it lost its living physical shell.

  However, the action distracted the guard long enough for Igon to stab him in the back. Zaharo’s dispossessed minion joined the waiting swarm of spirits that attacked the victim’s soul.

  Remarkably, the scuffling failed to awaken Herauts. He still slept when Beltz Bela and Gorri Otso each grabbed him by an arm and pressed him deeply into his mattress, startling him rudely awake.

  “What do you want…” was all Herauts could say before Zaharo jammed a piece of cloth into his mouth.

  “I am here to fulfill a bargain,” said Zaharo. “Do you want to explain it to him, Igon?”

  Igon bared his teeth in a wolf’s grin, widened the grin when Herauts’ eyes grew round with recognition and fear.

  “It’s like this,” he drawled. “You used your connections to make me a slave. Now, I am going to use my connections to make you regret ever crossing me.”

  “Bring him down to the front entrance,” ordered Zaharo.

 
Igon grabbed Herauts by the ankles and helped Gorri Otso and Beltz Bela manhandle their captive down the stairs. Heraut’s fear became terror when he saw the corpses, and he thrashed in panic as he was pushed prone beside his dead employees.

  The passage of souls once again made it easier to open a pattern of tiny openings between the planes. The swarm of wraiths on the astral side of the barrier hovered close by. Under Zaharo’s guidance the entities extended their powers through the rifts, and into the material plane. It was their otherworldly powers, almost as much their hunger for human souls, which made trafficking with such spirits a taboo punishable by death. Alien energies, strange beyond human ken, manifested and focused on mortal flesh.

  Herauts convulsed with agony as his form changed. Igon, Gorri Otso and Beltz Bela could barely hang on to the struggling and mutating physique. Bones bent and deformed, becoming longer or shorter. Muscle, gristle and nerve tissue dissolved and reformed. Transforming the skull without impinging on the brain was a challenge, but Zaharo knew his craft. Herauts retained his identity and appreciated the full horror of his metamorphosis.

  He squealed in porcine dismay.

  “Don’t be so sad,” Igon said with mock sympathy. “Most people already thought you were a pig!”

  The former wagon driver wanted to savor the moment, but work needed to be done. The smallish hog that still thought of itself as a man was securely trussed, all